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Monday, May 12, 2008

Bruce Springsteen Performs Two Complete LP's at Rare Theater Show

Bruce Springsteen Performs Complete "Born To Run" & "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" at Rare Theater Show



It's unclear exactly what motivated Bruce Springsteen to perform his Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born to Run albums in sequence last night at New Jersey's Count Basie Theater. Maybe it was the fact that fans bid a minimum of $1,000 for tickets (the proceeds of which went towards refurbishing the theater) and he wanted to give them something special. Maybe it was because the last time he played a theater with the E Street Band in 1980 these songs were all relatively new. Maybe the recent death of founding E Street Band organist Danny Federici has made him reflect on the group's early days. Maybe after a strenuous eight-month arena tour he was ready for something different. Regardless, the nearly three-hour marathon concert — entirely composed of songs from the 1970s — was the most powerful Springsteen show I've ever seen.

With the exception of the Darkness track "Factory," all the songs on those two seminal albums are in regular rotation on his set list — but you'd have to attend about 15 concerts to hear all of them. The two albums have been at the core of nearly every E Street Band concert ever since they were released, particularly since the group reformed nine years ago. Hearing them in sequence for the first time ever on a stage made them even more moving. The despair of "Racing in the Street" was perfectly followed by the hope of "The Promised Land." Born to Run was even more carefully sequenced at the time to give the feel of twenty-four hours in a swampy Jersey day. The title track always feels victorious when played at the end of a long arena show, with the house lights on and fans holding their beers high. When played in a small, dark theater right after "Backstreets," the desperation and restlessness seeped through every word.

Patti Scialfa — who helped organize the fundraiser — gave a speech before the show about the importance of saving historic theaters. NBC newscaster (and Jersey boy) Brian Williams introduced the band with tales of hanging out at the Stone Pony as a teenager hoping Bruce would show up. New Jersey Governor John Corzine sat in the front row, where he endured some jeers from fans about state taxes. Considering the ticket price, the crowd was obviously more upscale than a typical arena show. Surprisingly, they stood most of the night and seemed nearly as into it as your typical crowd at Giants Stadium. The event raised over $3 million to restore the delipidated Count Basie theater to its original 1920s glory. Proving nothing will please everyone, some schmuck still screamed "Rosalita!" throughout the night.

The four-piece Max Weinberg 7 horn section joined the already bulging nine-piece E Street Band on a handful of songs, leaving nearly every inch of the stage packed. Their presence made "10th Avenue Freeze-Out" one of the night's highlights — and Mark Pender did an excellent job re-creating Randy Brecker's trumpet intro to "Meeting Across the River." Even with the help of an occasional horn section, Clarence Clemons was forced to work harder than he has in years and clearly deserves the MVP award for the evening. Since the 1970s, Springsteen's music has utilized the saxophone less and less, which has let the 66-year-old Clemons take a rest on his Big Man throne during large portions of the show on this tour. Last night he had few opportunities to rest, particularly during the Born to Run section of the show — which all built towards his epic "Jungeland" solo. He passed the test with flying colors and seemed to be having a blast all night.

As Bruce let out the final moans of "Jungeland," the audience didn't know what song was coming next for the first time of the night. Keeping with the 1970s theme, the group played a rollicking version of the Born To Run outtake "So Young and in Love" before launching into a ten-plus minute "Kitty's Back" featuring solos from nearly everyone on the stage. "Who's she with?" Bruce screamed at the end before diving right into "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)." A cover of "Raise Your Hand" — a Bruce live favorite from the Seventies — closed out the night. For the first time in memory there were no encore, but nobody seemed to mind.




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"Alan Lomax & Authenticity Blues"

"Alan Lomax  Authenticity Blues"


The Grammy Awards, which endure as one of American popular culture's more shameless celebrations of artifice, infantilism, and evanescence, will occasionally make a grand gesture in the name of authenticity, adulthood, or posterity by honoring an esteemed old-timer who hasn't sold any records since anyone can remember. In 1997, Pete Seeger, age seventy-seven, won this semi-annual Compensation and Distraction Award for what was then his most recent CD, titled Pete—a collection of plaintive moral and political parables much like the dozens and dozens of albums that he had been recording for more than fifty years. I was in the press horde at the Grammys that year, and I spent some time with Seeger backstage at Madison Square Garden as he waited for his allocated time on stage. For nearly an hour, he stood straight-backed, looking disarmingly natty in a tuxedo, greeting well-wishers and watching the event on a closed-circuit TV monitor. There were performances by Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow, and the Smashing Pumpkins. After hearing them all, Seeger said: "I wonder what the music experts of the 1930s would have thought if you had told them that the greatest influence on the popular music of this century would be some unknown black prisoners and field workers."

Six decades earlier, American popular music was certainly different from the earthy, rough-edged, blues-based sounds of rock-era artists such as Clapton and his contemporaries. In the age of Tin Pan Alley, most popular music was jazzy and sounded urban, and it endeavored to project an aura of sophistication. It was music created by professionals to reflect and to exploit the social aspirations of a people striving to recover from (or at least to forget) the Depression. Being jazz-oriented, much of the music of the time was to a large degree black music, or a white imitation thereof—more specifically, a citified black music drawn from the urban experience of African Americans who had moved north in the Great Migration. Many of the artists whose songs made the Hit Parade in 1937—the vocalists Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell, the songwriters Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer—may have come from working-class immigrant stock (Crosby) and may have been Midwesterners (Boswell, Porter) or Southerners (Mercer), but owing to the lithe swing of the tunes, the singers' nonchalant crooning, and the sleek orchestral arrangements, everyone sounded like an urbane Manhattanite. The contemporaneous music of Negroes laboring in prison or incarcerated in fieldwork—the blues of artists such as Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter, who had been an inmate at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana) and Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield, who had been a farm laborer in Mississippi)—was not wholly unknown in the 1930s. It had innumerable practitioners and admirers within the culture of poor, rural, Southern blacks. Owing to its provenance, however, this music was largely unheard or unrecognized within the white musical establishment of the time. By the end of the 1950s, the blues would emerge as a permeating influence on American popular music. One generation after another, American young people raised in prosperity would turn to rock 'n' roll and its various incarnations (folk-rock, country-rock, punk, grunge, alt-rock, and the rest), all elementally indebted to the blues and to its aesthetic of raw, unaffected veracity. In the rock era, singers and songwriters (most artists now taking on both roles, as blues musicians always tended to do) may be from England (Clapton) or a middle-class neighborhood in Missouri (Crow), but they all seem to want to sound like old black prisoners and fieldworkers.

American popular music not only changed styles, it jumped traditions, abandoning the formal and the schooled for the informal and the vernacular. It became more like non-literate music—like folk music. How or through whom? A creditable school of thought attributes much of this transformation to the folklorist, author, performer, and entrepreneur Alan Lomax, the man who "discovered" and first recorded Leadbelly and Muddy Waters. Seeger, writing in 1958, said that "he is more responsible than any other single individual for the whole revival of interest in American folk music." Brian Eno, the English art-rock composer, has gone further, writing (in 1993, in a blurb for Lomax's book The Land Where the Blues Began) that "without Lomax, it's possible that there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet Underground." Newsweek has instructed its readers that "if not for Lomax, few people would have heard `Tom Dooley' or `Goodnight Irene,' and Bob Zimmerman might be singing `Feelings' at Holiday Inns around Hibbing, Minnesota."

Lomax, who was otherwise disposed against popular opinion, would surely have agreed. He was a fearsome advocate of artists in whom he believed, and he himself needed no other champion. He wrote and edited nine major books (three with his father and mentor, the early-twentieth-century folklorist John A. Lomax) during his eighty-seven years, and most of them are about Alan Lomax. The Land Where the Blues Began begins where everything seemed to begin for Lomax—with Lomax. The opening paragraph alone contains thirteen references to the author, who aligns himself with his subjects as a noble, homespun victim of bias and elitism. ("Even after being snubbed, lectured, arrested, and once or twice shot at, I still persist in plunging straight for the bottom where the songs live.") His songbooks have aggrandizing accounts of Lomax's Homeric song searches, followed by lyrics and music inevitably "arranged and adapted" by Lomax (with his father, in many cases). And now, a year after his death, a new Lomax miscellany, Alan Lomax: Selected Writings, 1934-1997, edited and well annotated by the respected folk-music historian Ronald D. Cohen, fits neatly in the literature of Alan Lomax vainglory.

In an autobiographical section of the book, "Saga of a Folksong Hunter," Lomax muses that future scholars may see the twentieth century as "the age of the golden ear, when, for a time, a passionate aural curiosity overshadowed the ability to create music." In other words, those who merely composed and performed music were less important than appreciative listeners such as Lomax. If so, then what was the reason for such passionate curiosity? Prospectors, after a few big strikes, used to suffer the same delusion: that the gold was in them rather than in the stones. Lomax was born into folklore. He was only eighteen when he made his first field recordings of rural folksingers, accompanying his father, a folksong scholar then sixty-five years old, in the summer of 1933. The first piece of Lomax's in this volume is his account of that trip, "Sinful Songs of the Southern Negro." It is a boyish narrative, infused with the thrill of discovery, blithely arrogant, ignorant of the exoticism tainting its enthusiasms, adolescent in its obsession with the salacious—and so demeaning to its subjects, many of whom considered themselves above the bawdy material that Lomax prodded them to sing. They expressed their offense to him, but futilely. "We is all 'ligious men an' don' sing anything but sperchils, except maybe a few hollers now an' den when we got 'bout forty rods o' de devil in us," one singer told Lomax, who pressed to hear those "hollers" another time. Undaunted, Lomax soon located a more promising subject, Henry Truvillion, but found him "most disappointing" in his reticence to sing the unsavory tunes Lomax wanted. "We thought that if we could carry Henry off some Saturday night to a place where he could sit and talk out of sight of his wife or her callers, we should be able to get a marvelous store of songs and stories from him. This spring we intend to do just that."

Over the years, Lomax would always see folklore as "pure adventure" and something heroic. As he said at the Midcentury International Folklore Conference at Indiana University in 1950, in an address transcribed in Selected Writings, folklorists "rescue materials from oblivion" and "are making a better present and preparing for some sort of juster future for all people." By 1937, when Lomax was scarcely twenty-one, he was serving as director of the Archive of American Folk-Song at the Library of Congress. American culture was rising in prominence, elevating with it an interest in our native identity. As Lomax remarks in an interview edited into an article for this book, "The developing concern about what our own American culture was actually like, about who we were as people, peaked at this time. And the search for American folk roots was part of this."

Lomax saw the music of the rural underclass as the unfiltered essence of the American ideal—"an expression of its democratic, interracial, international character ... a function of its inchoate and turbulent many-sided development," he wrote in 1941. Already a zealous archeologist of America's living folk culture, Lomax became its omnipresent spokesman and promoter, hosting radio programs, staging concerts, publishing songbooks, and producing records. Under Lomax, the Library of Congress amassed an archive of some twenty thousand pieces of American folk music, and the books of songs that Lomax collected (with his father and on his own) became fixtures on parlor spinets, in grade-school music classes, and in summer camps everywhere. Lomax remains best known and most esteemed for his work assembling and disseminating American folk music, which occupied him from the late 1930s until the 1950s (when he moved to London, expanding his research into the folk music of other societies).

Lomax was so close to the roots of our musical culture that he saw nothing higher. "Of all ... creations, which culture is the most valuable?" Lomax asked. "And by this I do not mean culture with a capital `C'—that body of art which critics have selected out of the literate traditions of Western Europe—but rather the total accumulation of man's fantasy and wisdom ... that still persist in full vitality in the folk and primitive places of our planet." More bluntly, he stated outright elsewhere that "folklore has a staying power unrivaled by even the greatest of cultivated art." However spirited his talk about "democratic and equalitarian beliefs," Lomax had no interest in challenging the idea of a hierarchy within the arts; he wanted only to alter the rankings, with his own preferences at the top. Lomax's patronage was exclusionary. He reveled in his position as the Maecenas of rural America—"The role of the folklorist is that of the advocate of the folk," he said, and he defended his constituency with fervor. Seeing a kind of Rousseauian purity in the ascetic lives of the impoverished country folk whom he encountered in his field research, Lomax (who grew up in Texas, where his father was teaching college) characterized their lore as intrinsically virtuous, as an expression of "the beautiful and the good." "In folklore ... you get a general ethical tone," he observed, "a kind of rudimentary humanistic approach to life ... a very deep sense of values." Even in the South, where the folk culture of rural whites was steeped in racism, Lomax argued, "Jim Crow prejudice has been inoperative in folklore."

By extension, Lomax tended to demonize what he perceived as forces in opposition to those of his favored rural South: the North, the city, technology, business, "sophistication"—and jazz, being a sophisticated music associated with Northern cities. Lomax did write a biography of Jelly Roll Morton, who considered himself the inventor of jazz, but he dismissed most jazz as a corruption of folk music. In his preface to the 1993 edition of that book, moreover, Lomax added a bizarre rant against Harlem and its reputation as a black cultural center—"New York's Harlem, which so often has taken all the credit for black cultural innovations.... [And] where the carriers of the great tradition were few, where big bands with horn sections were replacing the lacy counterpoint of New Orleans." Why did his sympathies for the disenfranchised preclude the urban underclass? In Lomax's account, the Mason-Dixon line is a moral and aesthetic barrier, and folk poetry could never come from the city street.

Wheeling his sound-recording gear around Negro quarters of the segregated South, Lomax never realized how far he was from familiar ground. His writings show that his understanding of black culture was critically flawed, and that his attitudes toward African Americans were discomforting, no matter how virtuous he may have held his motives to be. His descriptions of his hosts and their environments are tainted with an air of superior bemusement ("A billowing Negro matron in a beautiful red turban and her husband, a toothless cotton-headed old fellow with a mouthful of snuff"), and his manner of re-creating dialogue is straight out of an Uncle Remus story: "I'll sing dat song right easy foh you, ef you want me!" and "Dat's a sho'-God song!"

Lomax seemed to think that he was extending compliments when he was oozing noble-savage condescension, praising Leadbelly's musical skill as "natural" and describing black faith as a "primitive" Christianity. In his songbook American Ballads, Lomax wrote that "modern education prove[d] disastrous to the Negro's folk singing, destroying much of the quaint, innate beauty of the songs." When a Negro inmate at Tennessee State Prison expressed a hope that the recording he made would help him gain his freedom, Lomax said he found the prisoner's dream "pathetic beyond tears."

His conception of the African American musical tradition was no more enlightened. In preparing the words and the music that he collected for publication in songbooks, Lomax was frustrated to find the verses to some songs he recorded Negroes singing to be "jumbled" and "disconnected." Storylines changed in the middle of songs, characters appeared and disappeared without explanation, the point of view shifted. The songs were not linear narratives, adhering to familiar story patterns. They were more like mixed-up puzzle pieces or collages of imagery that played off one another in unexpected ways. Lomax's response was to edit and to re-organize the lyrics, taking one verse from one singer's version of a song and one from another's, fashioning a composite that was conventionally lucid, all in the name of "coherence." In the process, he stripped off a layer of the songs' black identity—their way of provoking feeling through juxtaposition and mystery, an African American tradition—and replaced it with a sleek white gloss.

Lomax made some contributions of great merit; he was not all bad. He took blues seriously at a time when few whites in the cultural establishment gave it much thought. Through his field research and his advocacy of the music, exposure and opportunity came to blues and folk artists (such as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Sun House, and Aunt Molly Jackson) who had enjoyed limited regional recognition or none at all. Would they have surfaced without Lomax? Perhaps. Isn't the blues something that cannot be denied? Absolutely. But so is the historical record. However things might have gone hypothetically, the way they happened was that Lomax introduced the world at large to several of the most original and influential blues and folk musicians in American history.

Though his Library of Congress recordings and his songbooks, Lomax imparted institutional legitimacy upon a minority music and helped to bring it to a broader public. One could argue that the formal documentation of any folk materials kills them: by definition, a folk song is supposed to be orally transmitted and unfixed—there should be no "correct," official version. If so, one could counter, the traduction—no, the violence—that Lomax committed was justifiable. Not long ago James Taylor gave a nationally televised concert from a theater in New York, and he sang a powerful traditional tune called "Wasn't That a Mighty Flood," mentioning on the air that he had learned it from a performance by the veteran blues singer Eric von Schmidt. I asked von Schmidt where he had learned it, and he said he discovered it in the late 1940s, when he and a friend had driven from his native Connecticut to the Library of Congress in a pilgrimage to hear the Lomax recordings. There they found the song, sung a cappella "as a prison kind of spiritual" by a singer whom von Schmidt recalls as Sin-Killer Griffin.

As an early proponent of ethnomusicology, moreover, Lomax was forward-minded in his interest in the relationship between music, gender, and sexual mores. (Although Lomax was engaged in aspects of musicology and ethnomusicology, at points deeply, he kept his distance from academia, declining numerous offers of university posts.) Ultimately, though, Lomax's self-interest and sense of proprietorship poisoned his legacy. While he thought of the last century as his era ("the age of the golden ear"), he was really a nineteenth-century figure—a domestic colonialist who mistook "discovery" for creation and advocacy for ownership.

The details of Lomax's association with Leadbelly are a case study in exploitative paternalism. Lomax first encountered Huddie Ledbetter in 1933, during one of his song-collecting ventures with his father. As the younger Lomax recalled in Selected Writings, "Leadbelly called himself `de king of de twelve-string guitar players ob de world.' He wasn't modest, but he was right. From him we got our richest store of folk songs, over a hundred new songs that Leadbelly had heard since his childhood in Morningsport, Louisiana, and had varied to fit his own singing and playing style." Leadbelly, incarcerated at the time, "begged us to help him get out of prison," Lomax wrote. In their benevolence, the Lomaxes assented. When the newly freed musician heard that his benefactors were heading to New York, he "begged to accompany us," Lomax continued.

Working with his father and later on his own, Alan Lomax oversaw Leadbelly's career, setting up concerts, nightclub engagements, and recording sessions. Lomax also had that rich store of Leadbelly's songs published, with his own name (and in many cases his father's name, too) listed as a co-composer on more than three dozen of the works, ensuring that Lomax (and his heirs) would earn as much in royalties as the musician who brought him the songs. These swindled compositions included "Rock Island Line" and "Goodnight, Irene," the latter of which, in its recording by the Weavers in 1950, was the number-one hit single on the pop-music charts for thirteen weeks and sold two million copies. Lomax liked this classic show-business grift of "cutting in" on song royalties, an old favorite of powerful business managers (such as Irving Mills, who put his name on the credits of dozens of early Duke Ellington works) and singers (including Elvis Presley, acting under the direction of his overseer Colonel Tom Parker). He liked it so much that his name appears next to those of Leadbelly, Memphis Slim, Vera Hall, and others on the copyrights of nearly one hundred compositions, including "Tom Dooley" and "This Train."

In this, the so-called "Year of the Blues," Lomax endures as an influence of multiple dimensions. The earthy, unadorned music that he loved pervades our society. (How would American industry sell its cars, its snacks, and its drinks without the electric guitar music in its commercials?) Yet variations on the Lomax model of cultural imperialism continue—indeed, they have gone global, with American record producers and music promoters (and musicians such as Paul Simon, David Byrne, and Ry Cooder) scouring the world for worthy musical discoveries whose "authenticity" might also happen to save their own careers. Alan Lomax deserves recognition, even gratitude; but so does my paperboy, and that doesn't make him the author of the stuff.



From The New Republic: (June 16, 2003) By David Hajdu


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"Woody Guthrie: Folk Hero"

"Woody Guthrie: Folk Hero"



The folksinger Arlo Guthrie likes to tell a story about his father, the legendary Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967, at the age of fifty-five. When he was a toddler, Arlo says, Guthrie gave him a Gibson acoustic guitar for his birthday. Several years later, when the boy was old enough to hold it, Guthrie sat him down in the back yard of their house — they lived in Howard Beach, Queens — and taught him all the words to "This Land Is Your Land," a song that most people likely think they know in full. The lyrics had been written in anger, as a response to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which Woody Guthrie deplored as treacle. In addition to the familiar stanzas ("As I went walking that ribbon of highway," and so on), Guthrie had composed a couple of others, including this:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple By the Relief Office I saw my people — As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if God Blessed America for me.
"He wanted me to know what he originally wrote, so it wouldn't be forgotten," Arlo Guthrie has explained.

Like the defiant, vaguely socialistic original words to his best-known song, much of what Woody Guthrie was and did during his lifetime has been forgotten, supplanted by the stuff of nostalgic sentiment. "This Land Is Your Land," purged of its earthy contrarianism, shows up with "God Bless America" on albums of patriotic music and in concerts by pops orchestras that accompany the fireworks on the Fourth of July, and its author's face has been put on a United States postage stamp. Woody Guthrie, a contradictory man who vexed his family and his closest friends as much as he challenged the authorities — "I can't stand him when he's around," Pete Seeger, his friend and also a bandmate for a time, once said, "but I miss him when he's gone" — scarcely registers as a creature of human dimension. In the popular imagination, where he endures, more than half a century after his creative prime as a writer and singer, Guthrie seems more like Gypsy Davy, Rocky Mountain Slim, and other colorful folk heroes of the songs he sang. He functions as the embodiment of gritty American authenticity, the plainspoken voice of a romanticized heartland.

Guthrie was never really so authentic, as Ed Cray shows in "Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie" (Norton; $29.95), a work of tempered debunking that is the first notable Guthrie biography since Joe Klein's "Woody Guthrie: A Life," which started unravelling the lore in 1980. The Klein book, fans of classic rock will recall, was the beneficiary of a sweet plug on Bruce Springsteen's 1986 boxed set of live recordings; in a halting, Okie-inflected voice, Springsteen complimented "this fella named Joe Klein," before moving into an acoustic-guitar version of "This Land Is Your Land." Springsteen was then in the process of molting his leather jacket and his urban ambitions to become a Guthrie-style troubadour of the mythic hinterland, a change that signified his maturation within the rock world.

John Steinbeck — "the Woody Guthrie of American authors," as he has been called — revered his musical compatriot in polemical realism. In his introduction to "Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People," a book of Depression-era folk tunes compiled by the folklorist and activist Alan Lomax, Steinbeck praised Guthrie's music for capturing "the American spirit," and noted, "He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people."

Guthrie's people were in fact the upper-middle-class American elite. His father, Charley Guthrie, was a prosperous real-estate speculator and aspiring politician (a conservative Democrat and vehement anti-Communist) in Okemah, Oklahoma, a boomtown in the oil territory of the newly annexed state; at one time, he and his wife, Nora, owned as many as thirty rental properties, and they were the first people in town to purchase an automobile. Their third child, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, was born on July 14, 1912, twelve days after that year's Democratic Presidential Convention, and named for the freshly nominated candidate. "Papa... swapped and traded, bought and sold, got bigger, spread out, and made more money," Woody Guthrie recalled accurately in his often fanciful memoir, "Bound for Glory." "We all liked the prettiest and best things in the store windows, and anything in the store was [ours] just for the signing."

The hard times of the early nineteen-twenties devastated the Guthries, claiming the family's property and the children's buying privileges. Unpersuaded by his parents' faith in capitalism, Guthrie eventually fell sway to the socialist utopianism that was attracting the attention of intellectuals, the young, the poor, and other disillusioned or idealistic Americans during the late nineteen-twenties and early thirties. He was a convert to disenfranchisement and always advocated the underprivileged with a proselyte's zeal.

"Woody Guthrie," like "Bob Dylan" and "Springsteen," was essentially a self-invention made for the electronic media: after a few years of scrounging, singing for change, and passing himself off as a seer and a faith healer, Guthrie made his name doing a comedic hillbilly act on Los Angeles radio in 1937. He had moved to the city in the mid-thirties, a time when outlandishly hokey cowboy singers were a novelty craze — a way for the music and movie industries simultaneously to exploit and ridicule rural culture for the pleasure of the urban audience. Cray describes a Los Angeles "awash in country-hillbilly-cowboy-western music," with radio stations broadcasting the likes of the Stuart Hamblen Gang, the Covered Wagon Jubilee, the Beverly Hillbillies, the Saddle Pals, the Bronco Busters, the Saddle Tramps, and the Sons of the Pioneers. Woody Guthrie rode the marketplace like a saddle-sore poke on a long-tailed dogie (or some such), crooning cowboy songs with his cousin Oklahoma (Jake Guthrie) and a cowgirl, Lefty Lou (his friend Maxine Crissman), playing the spoons, spinning tall tales, and reciting what he called his "cornpone philosophy" in a theatrical Okie drawl that he employed to disarming effect for the rest of his life.

Guthrie's inchoate socialist leanings grew into a deep commitment to the labor movement and to the social and political adventurism of the American Communist Party. (Guthrie never joined the Party — his independence was such that he "was not affiliated with anything," according to his sister Mary Jo; he did follow the Party line, however, down to belittling Roosevelt as a warmonger during the period of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, and he wrote a column called "Woody Sez," in hillbilly dialect, for the C.P.U.S.A. organs People's World and Daily Worker.) The first of Guthrie's three wives, Mary, lamented his politicization as "his downfall as an entertainer," and she had a point: the more he focussed on rousing the masses, the less he pleased the crowd. Guthrie's modest popular following diminished; at the same time, through politics, he found his voice.

"I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky," Guthrie wrote in "Bound for Glory," "but at first it was funny songs of what's all wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in the country was thinking."

In a letter to Alan Lomax quoted (with its creative grammar and spelling) by Klein, Guthrie expanded on this thought:

A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it, or it could be whose hungry and where their mouth is, or whose out of work and where the job is or whose broke and where the money is or whose carrying a gun and where the peace is — that's folk lore and folks made it up because they seen that the politicians couldn't find nothing to fix or nobody to feed or give a job of work.
Indeed, folk music has traditionally served as an outlet for native discontent, often expressed in coded language (the boll weevil stands in for field hands, the farmer's son is the government). Still, there is a great difference between the folk songs that circulated in Woody Guthrie's day and the music he wrote; that is, the very fact that he wrote it. Folk music (including country, blues, and other vernacular styles) was supposed to be anonymous — a collective art passed along orally from singer to singer, generation to generation, sometimes culture to culture. From the vantage point of today, when kids with their first guitars start writing songs before they learn to play other tunes, it is difficult to process how exceptional it was for a folk artist such as Woody Guthrie to have created a vast repertoire of deeply idiosyncratic works. (Many Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood songwriters of the thirties and earlier were as skilled and prolific as Guthrie, but they were working in a different vein, writing to order for professional singers.) Guthrie brought the authorial imperative to vernacular music in America.

Guthrie, like many American musicians, was immeasurably indebted to black music. In an unpublished manuscript quoted by Cray, he recalled that one of his earliest childhood memories was of hearing a "Negro minstrel jazzy band blowing and tooting and pounding drums up and down our street," a sound that inspired him to "sing out the first song I ever made up by my own self." At the age of thirteen, he discovered the blues; according to what Guthrie told Lomax in an interview for the Library of Congress (released on a three-CD set in 1989), he studied a "big ol' colored boy" shining shoes in front of a barbershop and singing what Guthrie found to be "undoubtedly the lonesomest music I ever run on to in my life." Each experience informs one of the two main categories of Guthrie's songs. His light tunes (many of them, such as "Car Song" and "Jiggy Jiggy Bum," written expressly for children) have a free, joyful, improvised feeling; his ballads of hard life have the impenitent rawness of Mississippi Delta blues, along with the blues' harmonic structure (three chords, tonic, subdominant, and dominant) and, in many cases, the blues' metre:

Down in Texas, my gal fainted in the rain
Down in Texas, my gal fainted in the rain
Had to throw a bucket of sand in her face
Just to bring her back again.
The Popular Front saw artistic refinement as a mark of bourgeois elitism, and so did Guthrie. "Woody believed in simplicity like people in the Bible Belt believe in their scripture," Guthrie's schoolmate Matt Jennings tells Cray. Guthrie seemed to think of musical complexity as corrupt, and he wrote most of his songs with just a few chords, in the key of G. (He would slide a capo up the neck of his guitar to change keys, much as his nemesis Irving Berlin, who could play only in F-sharp, used a special mechanism built into his piano to transpose his songs.) Guthrie's melodies, many of which were adapted from traditional sources, are as basic and memorable as schoolyard chants, and the words are just as biting. (The music to the opening phrase of "This Land Is Your Land" simply follows the first four notes of the major scale, making the tune a model exercise for beginning musicians.) His lyrics, similarly, seek to convey a guileless cleverness and intensity — a pridefully untrained intelligence. Grammar and syntax give way, rhymes miss, and accents fall awkwardly, all contributing to the songs' effect of unadorned veracity, as in "The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done," one of Guthrie's many tunes about the Grand Coulee Dam:
I clumb the rocky canyon where the Columbia River rolls,
Seen the salmon leaping the rapids and the falls.
The big Grand Coulee Dam in the State of Washington
Is just about the biggest thing that man has ever done.
Once Hitler ventured into the Soviet Union and Stalin joined forces with the Allied powers, Guthrie became patriotic; he supported the United States' involvement in the Second World War and pasted a hand-painted sign onto the front of his guitar: "This Machine Kills Fascists." He kept it there after the war, in reference to another target: the cultural power brokers who, in his view, oppressed folk artists by rewarding sleek professionalism. Guthrie, now living in New York, challenged the commercial aesthetic of the pre-rock era through a performance style that was not merely plaintive, like that of countless singing cowboys in the movies, but almost combatively anti-musical. In the dozens of recordings that he made between 1940 and 1952 (many of which have been reissued by Smithsonian Folkways in conscientiously engineered and annotated CDs), his singing and playing are jarring: his voice bone-gray, dry and stiff, and indifferent to pitch; his guitar work spare and ragged, and frequently out of tune. Aesthetically, Guthrie was less a socialist than an anarchist, contemptuous of the prevailing rules and standards.

For all his advocacy of the common man, Guthrie sought to be recognized as someone exceptional. Agnes (Sis) Cunningham, his sometime bandmate (along with Seeger, Bess Hawes, Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, and others) in the Almanac Singers, the leftist vocal group of the forties, told me a few years ago that Guthrie was "determined to become a legend in his own time." (Cray quotes Hawes as saying that Guthrie was "desperate" to become "a big, important person.") After all, he did not call his autobiography "Bound for Obscurity," and the book is dense with folksy anecdotes that dramatize his innate superiority to government officials, businesspeople, other authority figures, and most of his friends. "Bound for Glory" captures Guthrie vividly; he was fearsomely gifted and ambitious, and also egalitarian — a most uncommon man.

Woody Guthrie succeeded in becoming a legend in the last years of his life, as young people of the postwar era, seeking their own cultural identity, veered away from the coolly sophisticated, urbane pop on their parents' hi-fis in favor of more idiomatic music grounded in rural America — folk, country, the blues, and their hybrid, rock and roll. Students by the thousands massed in Washington Square Park each week to strum along to "This Land Is Your Land," and to look for Woody Guthrie, the exemplar of the folkie ideal. He was unable to take active part in his newfound idolhood, however. Debilitated by Huntington's disease, a degenerative disorder of the nervous system, Guthrie became a tragic figure to his young acolytes: an American original cut down before his time, seemingly gone mad (wildly erratic behavior being a symptom of the disease) — a living amalgam of Hank Williams and Friedrich Nietzsche. When the nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in New York from Minnesota in January of 1961, he told his friends that he was going to meet his god, Woody. "He's the greatest holiest godliest one in the world," Dylan said of Guthrie around that time — a "genius genius genius genius."

Reflecting on the period later, Dylan explained, "Woody turned me on romantically.... What drew me to [him] was that, hearing his voice, I could tell he was very lonesome, very alone, and very lost out in his time. That's why I dug him. Like a suicidal case or something. It was like an adolescent thing — when you need somebody to latch onto, you reach out and latch onto them."

With today's rock and pop feeling homogeneous, and with hip-hop now twenty years old, popular music is ripe for something new. Whatever comes will surely be something that challenges the complacency of the mainstream; something from disreputable sources; something critical of the status quo, harsh, simple, seemingly anti-musical, and doable without formal training — that is to say, something much in the vein of what Woody Guthrie did. If few nineteen-year-olds today think of latching onto Guthrie, his spirit may be closer than they know.

From The New Yorker: (March 29, 2004)

By David Hajdu




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"The Spirit of the Spirit"

"The Spirit of the Spirit"

The Spirit Archives
Will Eisner
DC Comics, Volume One, 240 pp., $49.95; Volume Two, 218 pp., $49.95; Volume Three, 218 pp., $49.95; Volume Four, 224 pp., $49.95

Outer Space Spirit: 1952
by Will Eisner, Jules Feiffer, and Wally Wood
Kitchen Sink Press(out of print)

A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 183 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Life on Another Planet
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 136 pp., $12.95 (paper)

New York: The Big City
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 144 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 170 pp., $14.95 (paper)

The Building
Will Eisner
Kitchen Sink Press/Bench Press, 88 pp., $25.00; DC Comics, $12.95 (paper)

Invisible People
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 117 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Minor Miracles
Will Eisner
DC Comics, 110 pp., $29.95; $12.95 (paper)

Family Matter
Will Eisner
Kitchen Sink Press/Bench Press, 76 pp., $24.95; DC Comics, $15.95 (paper)

Will Eisner Reader: Seven Graphic Stories by a Comics Master Kitchen Sink Press/Bench Press,88 pp., $9.95 (paper)

1.
The pages of most comic books are battlefields for hypertrophied mutants and space aliens raging gaudy supernatural war. This has been the case for generations now, the norm in a junk-entertainment genre whose elemental function has always been to commodify the testosterone delirium of male adolescence. To scan the racks of a comics shop like, say, Jim Hanley's Universe in midtown Manhattan is to be assaulted by costumed mercenaries such as Darkchylde and Hellboy in stories like "Seed of Destruction." Look closely, and you may recognize some of the old heroes — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Fantastic Four, and their superfriends — still fighting in increasingly pumped- and sexed-up transmutations. Poke around the middle of the store, and you'll find a mix of subgenres: reprints of vintage comics; the arty (and often raw) "comix" indebted to the underground movement of the 1960s; and Japanese titles based on the hyperactive animé cartoons. If you make it to the back of the last aisle on the far right, alongside the wall where the T-shirts are hanging, you'll find a display of hard and paperback covers startling for their incongruity, with images of Jewish immigrants in the Bronx of the Depression years, slumped old men, ranting neighbors, a squabbling family.... You're in the Will Eisner section, where the comics medium becomes something naturalistic, wry, introspective, and literate — that is, in the comics universe, something truly otherworldly.

Eisner, who started writing and drawing comic books straight from high school in 1936, is one of the original inventors of the form, although that fact alone hardly confers much distinction. The fledgling comics business was a sweatshop trade for creative hopefuls too inexperienced, too socially ill-equipped, or, more often, too minimally talented for the established avenues of hackdom, the pulps and commercial art. Mostly shoot-'em-ups maladroitly adapted from crime and adventure magazines, the first comic books were sexless pornography for kids, incompetently scripted and drawn. The medium changed a great deal in the years hence, of course; today's comics are drawn and written with sleek proficiency. That the form grew more significantly to become, at its best, something intelligent with rewards for grown-ups, testifies to Eisner's contributions. Among comics professionals and enthusiasts, Eisner, now eighty-four, is revered as more than a charter elder of the ultimate boy's club, but as a model of seriousness, ambition, and achievement. "I find it difficult to argue that Eisner is not the single person most responsible for giving comics their brains," comics writer Alan Moore has said. The author of the first literate comic book, The Spirit (1940-1952), two texts on the theory and practice of his discipline, and more than a dozen "graphic novels" over the past twenty-three years, Eisner is not merely the recipient of innumerable illustration and comics-art awards (including the National Cartoonists Society's "Best Artist," four times). The most prestigious honor in comics is named for him: the plaque bestowed each year upon one of his progeny is the Eisner.

Unsatisfied, Eisner still works obsessively, creating reflective and somber autobiographical works while tending the preservation of his legacy through a new series of hardbound reprints of his most popular creation, the Spirit comics. He drives every morning from the home he shares with his wife, Ann, in southeastern Florida to the studio he keeps about a mile away, and he puts in eight to ten hours, six days a week. "I've been trying to prove what the medium can do my whole life," Eisner said recently. "If I thought my point had been made, I don't know what I'd do."

The fact that he has spent his whole life working in comics, striving to advance the medium from within, probably undermines Eisner's prospects for recognition outside the insular society of comics buffs. Raised in the tenements of the Bronx, Eisner has surely learned the rule of every ghetto, literal or aesthetic: Anyone can come in, few can get out. It was one thing for gallery artists such as Lichtenstein and Warhol to draw upon the style of the comics as a resource; it has been quite another for comics specialists to try elevating both their medium and the way it is perceived. (In jazz, a kindred American popular art form, indigenous creators suffered from a parallel imbalance when orchestral composers such as Stravinsky and Milhaud were praised in high-brow circles for employing "jazzy" touches in their concert works while the jazz masterworks that served as their inspiration were going ignored or dismissed as low-class entertainment.) Eisner recalls being invited, along with several other comics artists, including Harvey Kurtzman and Joe Kubert, to attend the opening of a Pop Art show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1974. "At first, I thought, 'Oh boy! This is great! We're finally being invited into the arena,'" he recalled. "Then I realized we were brought in for novelty value — the weird guys who do those crazy comic books." He cringed from the wound more than thirty years later.

As Eisner remembers things today, he already had lofty visions for the comics form when he created the Spirit after several years of generating now-forgotten comic-book features such as "Muss 'Em Up Donovan" (a series about a vicious law enforcer, a proto-Dirty Harry) for various publishers. The Spirit is an independent detective who has no superpowers and wears no costume (aside from a token mask Eisner treated as a blue skin graft around the eyes). "I had long been convinced that I was involved with a medium that had real 'literary potential,'" he wrote in the introduction to the first volume of The Spirit Archives, each of which reproduces six months of Spirit stories (on good paper but in slightly reduced scale and with computer-generated colors that lack the texture and accidental vibrancy of the cheaply printed, off-register originals). What gave him such faith in a medium so disreputable and juvenile, he can't recall. From the earliest episodes of the Spirit, however, Eisner's aspirations are clear. The characters are memorable and human, including the Spirit (despite his name). The stories are intimate fables about desperation, loss, and human folly, developed from gestural crime situations; the pacing, graceful; and the drawing, naturalistically bravura.

The Spirit had the benefit of special provenance. When the character appeared in 1940 (two years after Superman and a few months after Batman), a hitherto-unchallenged hierarchical divide separated the two forms of comics — the decades-old, enormously popular newspaper strips and the just-sprouting comic books. The one-panel daily and expanded Sunday color strips produced by the major press syndicates were presumed to be read by the whole family and, accordingly, were designed for adults as well as children; comic books, despite having the space to tell more complex stories, were distributed by candy-store wholesalers and generally treated as another unhealthy confection for kids. The Spirit was born in neither domain; Eisner developed him under commission to create a comic book that would be distributed in Sunday newspapers, where it would reach readers of every age. Eisner wrote the feature "up," for the adults. The childhood fantasy of magically transforming into a grown-up — Shazam! — was a staple of comic books; with the first issue of The Spirit, delivered on June 2, 1940, the medium itself matured instantaneously.

There was never much to the premise of the Spirit character: private detective Denny Colt is taken for dead, although he's really alive, and he encounters (as often by accident as by intent) miscellaneous troublemakers (typically, exotics such as spies and smugglers or vampy women smitten with him). That's it-no parents from outer space, no wizards or genies, no incantations, no kit of gadgets and weapons. The Spirit never behaves spookily, and no one in the stories seems to think he's supernatural; he gets punched and kissed, and he bruises and kisses back. The idea of the Spirit is a positioning statement of objection to comic-book ideas, brazenly cursory, a mark of contempt for the gimmickry passing for characterization in the comics of the era.

There was not much crime in the Spirit stories, either — at least not after the first couple of years, when the series reached its maturity. Much as Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock used trash sources as excuses to explore emotional terrain, Eisner tended to focus on psychological themes such as loneliness, betrayal, and despair against a translucent scrim of cops-and-robbers doings. In "Two Lives," for instance, Eisner interweaves the stories of unrelated captives, an incarcerated hood and a milquetoast fellow trapped in a bad marriage; they both escape, are mistaken for each other, and are returned to the wrong prison. There was surely little else in that Sunday's newspaper-and certainly nothing in the comics-so cynical about matrimony. In "The Desert Island," the Spirit and a femme fatale named Sand find themselves stranded in paradise, although the Spirit is delirious with fever the whole time, sexually frustrating a woman who had tried to do him in countless times before. Before long, Eisner was dispensing with the pretense of crime situations — and with the Spirit himself. In some of the most poetically imaginative stories in Eisner's work (or, for that matter, in all of comics), the Spirit scarcely appears in his own comic book. Instead, we meet a nobody named Gerhard Schnobble on the day he discovers he has the power to fly, or we find Adolf Hitler on a secret reconnaissance mission, roaming the subways and hobo jungles of New York (in a twist on Death Takes a Holiday).

Both Schnobble and Hitler find enlightenment in Eisner's hands, but suffer ignobly for it in the last panel. Schnobble, reveling in his uniqueness among men, is accidentally hit by a gunshot meant for the Spirit and falls to his death before anyone saw what he could do. Hitler, converted to egalitarian niceness by his exposure to America, decides to give a speech reversing all his policies, but is assassinated by a warmongering lieutenant. Eisner's world often seems a bleak, even godless one, not so much part of an irrational or existential universe as a worse one, rigged in the devil's favor.

Like Welles and Hitchcock, again, Eisner has always been fascinated by form, and he began experimenting with the architecture of his medium in the same period as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Lifeboat. (Comparisons with film, comic books' moneyed cousin, are irresistible and dominate the serious writing on comics, especially the Spirit.[1]) One Spirit story was told from the point of view of a murderer, all the images rendered in the ovals of the killer's eyes. Another one took place in the "real time" of the ten minutes Eisner calculated it would take to read it. The text for another was all rhyming verse. Another had no text at all but unfolded in pantomime. One meta-episode included scenes of Eisner as both author of the tale at hand and a key part of it. Boundlessly imaginative and fearsomely ambitious-yet, still, "a comic-book man"-Eisner seemed to be trying to push out the boundaries of the comics form, as if he were one of his own characters, another misunderstood victim of a cruel system, struggling to escape.

Much of the Spirit series was explicitly autobiographical, foreshadowing the highly personal "graphic novels" Eisner would begin writing in the late 1970s. The setting was Eisner's native New York, at first cited by name as Manhattan, then left vague (under pressure from a syndicator fearful of alienating readers elsewhere, according to Eisner), and later generically labeled as Central City. There was no centrality in the mise en scène, however; in its architecture, weather, population, and culture, the home of the Spirit was strictly Old World Northeast urban — more specifically, lower- middle-class ethnic. Like Eisner in his youth (before the success of the Spirit enabled him to move with his parents from the Bronx to Riverside Drive), the people he drew lived in tenements near elevated tracks, ate ice-cream cones, and rode the subway to work. They had strong features and wore heavy clothes that could use a pressing. Jules Feiffer, who was one of Eisner's assistants early in his career, has written that he grew up presuming the Spirit was Jewish (despite the former Denny Colt's Irish-sounding first name), and I see his point. The character is "different" and held in suspicion by those outside his circle of compatriots. Yet I grew up presuming the Spirit was Hungarian, like everyone in my neighborhood. He's resourceful, smart, independent, and strong, as we thought of ourselves. Both views are correct, of course: the Spirit is the fantasy self-image of every outsider, a force of superior cool, strolling immunely through a landscape of malevolent "normalcy."

With newspaper circulation declining under competition from television and with Sunday papers dropping the Spirit insert to cut costs, Eisner abandoned it in 1952. He would say he had lost interest in the project anyway, and the last Spirit stories — a series of loopy outer-space adventures farmed out to freelancers — are unnerving proof that he had. Eisner, who had employed artists and writers to help him during his World War II military service, relinquished much of the work on these episodes to Jules Feiffer, who wrote the scripts and plotted them in rough sketches, and Wally Wood, a brilliant young draftsman who had distinguished himself doing intricate science-fiction drawings for William M. Gaines's Entertaining Comics (EC) shop.[2] The final story of the Spirit has him zooming around outer space, leading a crew of unsavory ex-convicts on a journey to the moon.

Eisner's creative attention was already elsewhere. In the years following his wartime service, Eisner had continued taking on work for the army as a civilian contractor, writing and drawing instructional comics for military publications. He found himself attracted to the notion of comics as an educational tool, which he saw as a way to experiment further with the form and to continue making comics with some seriousness of purpose. The work was also lucrative; the Eisners had two children. Wholly disinclined to work in mainstream comic books, a genre that had matured little since his days on "Muss 'Em Up Donovan," Eisner shifted his focus to educational work, most of it for the armed services. He stayed at it for twenty-six years.

His publishers today tend to discourage inquiry into this period, the longest stretch of sustained effort in Eisner's lifetime. Why mention work such as the special issue of PS: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly that Eisner prepared on the subject of "The Army's Brand New Equipment Record System and Procedures"? What point is there in knowing that the illustrations in A Pictorial Arsenal of American Combat Weapons were rendered by a comics genius? Eisner, who veers to the left politically, professes enormous pride in his work for the military. "I never demonstrated how to kill," he stresses. "To me, the commercial comics industry was a wasteland. I have always had a conviction that the comics medium is capable of anything. I saw an opportunity to show that comics could be an effective teaching tool as well as an art form."

A good soldier, he accomplished his mission — and went no further. Because the enthusiasm for Eisner among comics collectors is both great and indiscriminate, his educational/military arcana shows up often on eBay, where I bought a few copies of PS magazine published in 1962 and 1968. They're disorienting, with page after page of distinctively Eisnerian art — clever spot illustrations, masterfully composed comics panels, luxurious double-page illustrations-put to use in explaining matters such as how to repair a radio antenna or jump-start a tank. A blonde vamp straight out of a Spirit episode appears every now and then to make a pronouncement, and the effect of word-picture association makes everything she utters seem like a double-entendre. On one page, she murmurs, "Weather makes a difference in performance." (Hubba hubba!) To see all that Will Eisner effort put to such perfunctory and haphazard use is maddening.

2.
Plenty of American lives do indeed have second acts; third acts are unusual. Had Will Eisner died at age sixty in 1977, his reputation as a comic-book pioneer would have been secure. The World Encyclopedia of Comics[3] would still have praised the Spirit as "the historical bridge between the comic book and the newspaper strip" and proclaimed that "Eisner's influence on the art and development of the comic book has been tremendous and lasting." New readers would have discovered the Spirit through reprints of the original stories, which the comics artist and historian Denis Kitchen began publishing through his Kitchen Sink Press in 1972. Eisner's name would have taken a duly prominent place in comics history, somewhere between those of George Herriman and Charles Schultz, and his decades of creative exile under government contract would seem a curious footnote, like Windsor McCay's final years as a vaudeville attraction. But his most serious work, his "graphic novels" and other late-period books of integrated drawings and text, would never have set yet another standard for comic books.

Invited to sign autographs at a collectors' convention in the mid-1970s, Eisner was startled to see the transformation comics had undergone while he had been drawing instructions for fixing shafted injection pumps. The generation raised on Eisner's Spirit, Harvey Kurtzman's anarchic Mad, and the relatively sophisticated EC Comics work of Wally Wood, Al Feldstein, and a few others, had grown up and created underground "comix." One of the few literally comical offshoots of the Sixties counterculture, the stories by Robert Crumb (Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, etc.) and Gilbert Shelton (The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) that Eisner discovered were ragged, uneven, explicit in their portrayal of sex and drugs, and self-consciously primitive or retro; but they were experimental and not for kids.

Eisner, who had become prosperous enough to start declining commissions for military and educational art, shifted his attention again. He devoted most of a year to creating a book consisting of four related stories told in a free adaptation of the comics style, published in 1978 as A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (subtitled "A Graphic Novel by Will Eisner"). In sheer seriousness of intent and subtlety of execution, it was to underground comix what the Spirit was to Superman.

Set in the Depression-era Bronx shtetl of Eisner's youth, the four tales are tragic memory plays about Jewish immigrant life. Frimme Hersh, the protagonist of the first and longest story, makes a pact with God and feels betrayed when his cherished daughter dies. In the second tale, a vainglorious young street singer submits to a love-starved old diva for alcohol money. In the third, a pedophilic superintendent is undone by a little girl who's scarcely pure herself. And, finally, vacationers tangle with their social aspirations at a Catskills resort.

The characters pepper their talk with Yiddish, and they look like working people — toilworn and thick from too much cheap food — rather than the posed anatomy models on most comics pages. In its concern with the struggle between God and man, its faith in demons, and its echoes of Yiddish folklore, the book clearly suggests the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose short story "Joy" has the same core motif as Eisner's title story. Yet Eisner never read Singer until the early Nineties, when an admirer pointed out the parallels in their work and gave him a copy of Love in Exile, a collection of Singer's autobiographical writings.

Visually, A Contract with God marked the beginning of a dramatic change in Eisner's approach. In the Spirit years, Eisner employed his virtuosity to dazzling effect with kaleidoscopic "splash pages," German Expressionist-style perspectives, and spectacularly detailed backgrounds (for which he sometimes called upon the help of an architectural draftsman). Now he made no effort to dazzle. Forsaking color for stark black pen and ink, Eisner began to use a spare, allusory visual language to match the poetically ambiguous narrative content of the stories. He learned to evoke a cityscape with a few strokes implying a skyline or suggest a tenement room with the outline of a window frame. In turn, the eye focused on the characters and the speech in the word balloons on the emotional realm.

Like Ingmar Bergman late in his life, Will Eisner gave up film for the theater. He has taken a couple of years to write each of his recent books, working alone in Florida, and they have grown progressively more intimate and subtle. With one exception (Life on Another Planet, which is not a star-trotting adventure but a look at how a mere hint that we might not be alone can unleash earthly paranoia), all of Eisner's graphic novels and story collections are works of memory, most of them centered around the Bronx of his upbringing (New York: The Big City, Dropsie Avenue: The Neighborhood, The Building, Invisible People, Minor Miracles), others dealing with his later life. We see one or two characters at a time in an abstracted setting, as if on a stage set, and we watch as they betray their brothers, seduce their antagonists, die of heartache, and occasionally find love or solace.

Who are these books for? What would one of the teenager boys roaming the aisles of a comics shop think if he picked up Minor Miracles and flipped through the first story, in which disreputable Amos borrows money from his responsible brother Irving to open a furniture shop and drives him to ruin, or Family Matter, wherein wheelchair-bound Ben sits silently as his children gather on his ninetieth birthday to fight over his estate? The answer, no doubt, is the same one Chuck Jones, the auteur of the Warner Bros. cartoon stable, gave when he was asked whom he made his films for: children or adults? Jones said neither; he made them for himself.

For the cover of the Will Eisner Reader, the author made a watercolor painting of an old man in Bermuda shorts, gazing in awe at a young boy blithely constructing a mammoth building complex out of sand. The man looks very much like Eisner himself, long-faced, wide in the middle, and arch-backed from too many years at the drawing board. But the kid is doing what Eisner has done, using the stuff of child's play to make something improbably grand.

Notes
[1] Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes (Dial, 1965): "Eisner's world seemed more real than the world of other comic book men because it looked that much more like a movie.... The further films dug into the black fantasies of a depression generation the more they were labelled realism. Eisner retooled this mythic realism to his own uses."

[2] Eisner acknowledged Feiffer and Wood in introductory text and credited the stories as "produced by Will Eisner Productions."

[3] Edited by Maurice Horn (Avon, 1977).


By David Hajdu
From The New York Review of Books:
(June 21, 2001)




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"God Only Knows" about Brian Wilson's "Smile"

"God Only Knows" about Brian Wilson's "Smile"

No masterpiece is so great as a lost one — a symphony unfinished, a painting painted over, a novel shredded or suppressed. Largely or wholly unheard, unseen, or unread, such a work derives its life, as most objects of legend do, from scraps of generative evidence and the accretion of romantic speculation about them, and it takes its lasting if ethereal form in the creative imagination of the public. The lost masterpiece is the only artwork that is perfect, the fulfillment of all our artistic dreams, because it exists primarily or solely within them.

Incomplete or perished works have loomed as large as (or larger than) extant creations since the Renaissance, when Michelangelo's greatest achievement was thought to be not the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, nor the Pieta, but his painting of the Battle of Cascina — an unfinished work already mythologized during the sixteenth century. (Cellini wrote of the Cascina painting that "nothing survives of ancient or of modern art which touches the same lofty point of excellence.... He never rose half-way to the same pitch of power.") In our own time, the salvage departments of the arts have only expanded to accommodate ever more forms and new claims. Yes, Orson Welles did well enough with Citizen Kane; but might he have contributed something comparable in the field of non-fiction film had he finished his documentary It's All True in 1942? (Welles, the Buddha of the Coulda, left a rich legacy of aborted or sabotaged masterworks, from The Magnificent Ambersons through Chimes at Midnight and Touch of Evil to the countless scripts he claimed to have written and discarded.) Did Bruno Schulz really have the Great Jewish Novel in his unread Messiah, or were the accounts of his writing it the greater fiction? How many unpublished manuscripts did the NKVD steal from Isaac Babel's apartment? What if the Reaper had not defeated Duke Ellington in his race to complete his epic jazz opera, Queenie Pie?

Such questions are sometimes best left unanswered, as Joseph Mitchell found when he discovered the unseemly truth about Joe Gould's once glorified but never finished (because it had scarcely been started) "Oral History of Our Time." Harold Brodkey, who dined well for some thirty years on the reputation of a novel always in progress, could have learned from Gould and left bad enough unpublished. To rephrase the words of the rummy newspaperman in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when the facts spoil the legend, don't print anything.

In 1967, Brian Wilson, the principal composer and producer for the Beach Boys, cut short work on an album for the band first titled Dumb Angel and re-named Smile, which would promptly and henceforth be regarded as the lost masterpiece of rock. One was due. Rock and roll, then about fourteen years old, was approaching the end of a pop-music style's usual life cycle, with its original audience entering adulthood. It had to change (as swing music had, transmuting into bebop, for the previous generation) or give way to something new. Rock musicians, emboldened by an emerging school of serious-minded rock critics, grew progressively adventurous, and their records became more conspicuously artful — more complex and sophisticated, but idiosyncratically so, drawing upon the ability of recording technology to conjure the volatile multiformity of the drug experience.

In May 1966, the Beach Boys had released Pet Sounds, the group's resourceful venture into sonic experimentation and lyrical introspection, which Paul McCartney, duly provoked, would call "the album of all time." Three months later, the Beatles issued Revolver, the eclectic forerunner to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (and its superior, song for song, for all Sgt. Pepper's invention). With Smile, Wilson would later explain, he set out to surpass everything that he and his bandmates and the Beatles and every other rock musician had ever done. He said he wanted to make the greatest album in rock history, "a teenage symphony to God." The cultural economy had entered an inflationary stage.

Looking back after thirty-seven years, knowing as we do that some rock musicians of the late 1960s and 1970s lost their way in the fantastical land of pointy hats and the London Symphony Orchestra, we may be quick to dismiss grand aspirations such as Wilson's as misplaced for a pop artist. We saw punk come along in the 1970s and yank rock and roll back into the garage, where it sounded primal and true again. But ever since then, we — critics, especially — have tried to keep the music locked there, effectively containing it in an orthodoxy as formal and rigid as that of chamber music or bluegrass. No wonder so many rock bands sound dull today; imprisonment deadens. In the face of countless new bands of neo-punks replicating the thrashing of their parents' era like karaoke, who wouldn't find relief in one with the true nerve to try writing a teenage symphony to anybody? Therein we might find the same exuberant naivete, freshness, and restless fumbling that gave both Smile and early punk their power.

Smile was impossibly ambitious and unwieldy, but it was not pretentious — at least not in its original incarnation, and decidedly not in its music. (The nonsensical smugness of the lyrics contributed by Van Dyke Parks is another matter.) Smile was sincerely, perhaps naively, over-reaching, but it didn't ring false. In fact, the music that Wilson conceived and recorded in 1966 and the beginning of 1967 endures as a testament to postwar popular music's capacity to resist conformity, and defy category, and indulge the personal, and alienate the masses. Although most of the Smile sessions that Wilson produced for the Beach Boys have yet to be released officially, dubs have circulated in high-quality, annotated bootlegs for decades, and they almost justify the music's reputation.

The tracks are consistently inventive and varied, and most of them are lovely. Some are well known from versions released on official Beach Boys records over the years, such as "Good Vibrations," a marvel by any standard, so durable that it survives Parks's clunky alternate lyrics ("I — I love the colorful clothes she wears/And she's already workin' on my brain/I — I only looked in her eyes/But I picked up something I just can't explain"); "Heroes and Villains," a daring collage of tonal effects and shifting tempos; "Surf's Up," a majestic piece of music, despite Parks's cold, obtuse lyrics ("columnated ruins domino!"); and "Vegetables" (or "VegaTables"), a delightfully goofy riff about healthy food, one early recording of which had a rhythm track of Wilson and Paul McCartney munching on celery and carrots in tempo. Other tracks from the early sessions have yet to be issued officially as they were originally recorded, including "Do You Dig Worms" (aka "Do You Like Worms" and "Roll Plymouth Rock"), a tuneful echo of Stephen Foster; "Child Is the Father to the Man," a charming little thing (its title drawn from Wordsworth) built in layers of syncopated lines; and "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" ("Fire"), a cartoonish instrumental. There are more, and most are fascinating; still, the original sessions remain just that: sessions, experiments unfinished. (Some of the key recordings have no lead vocal tracks, and others stop abruptly, without resolution.)

Wilson, in his prime during the time of Pet Sounds and Smile, was a composer and producer whose very aesthetic was based on a melding of the two roles. He made records rather than absolute music. As he told an interviewer in 1967, "Spector started the whole thing. He was the first one to use the studio. But I've gone beyond him now." Actually, the otherwise contemptible Mitch Miller preceded Phil Spector in employing studio technology and sound effects (a cracking bullwhip, honking geese) to create an aural sphere wholly distinct from that of live performance for the pop-music audience, and avant-gardists such as Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage outdid them both conceptually. Still, Wilson, like Spector, the Beatles, and others prominent in 1960s rock, used the studio as a compositional instrument, and an unfinished recording of a piece was, for Wilson, a piece unfinished.

Wilson's reasons for abandoning Smile have never been clear. Indeed, the open questions about the project's collapse have contributed mightily to Smile's legend: it has a mysterious death narrative. By some accounts, the other Beach Boys — Wilson's brothers Carl and Dennis, their cousin Mike Love, and their childhood buddy Al Jardine — felt uncomfortable with the material, especially the lyrics, and drove Parks to quit prematurely, leaving the composer without a collaborator to whom he could relate. "He's a genius, to say the least," Wilson has said of Parks. (One wonders what is the most Wilson would say of him.) "With amphetamines pushing a freight train of ideas through our brains," Wilson has said elsewhere, "Van Dyke and I enjoyed a compatibility that was inspiring."

Wilson, who has said that he wrote much of the music on hashish as well as amphetamines, has blamed the drugs for undermining Smile, or at least its market potential. "I thought [Smile] was too weird," he recently told The New York Times. "I thought it was too druggie-influenced, I thought the audience wouldn't get it." But cynics have speculated that Wilson and the band pulled Smile as a tactic to negotiate for higher royalties from Capitol Records. Others have suspected that Wilson broke down under the strain of reaching too far beyond his grasp.

Word spread that Wilson had suffered a nervous breakdown — a plausible prospect, considering his history of mental illness; he had long suffered from depression and had been prone to erratic behavior, problems no doubt exacerbated by his hardy recreational drug intake. Around the time of Smile, Wilson had an enormous sandbox constructed in his living room to house his grand piano so that he could wiggle his toes in the sand for inspiration, and when a building across the street from the recording studio burned down a few days after the sessions for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," Wilson blamed the song, which he believed to have telekinetic powers.

To evade inquiries about the record's status, Wilson would claim that he had destroyed the tapes. This, conflated with reports of the building fire and widespread talk of Wilson's psychosis, would provide the tragic climax of the Smile myth: the mad genius burns his masterpiece in an oblational pyre. Subsequent unearthing and dissemination of the tapes in the bootleg underground would give the recordings an aura of sacred texts, while Wilson's reclusiveness and volatility would feed the hoariest adolescent notions about the duality of insanity and inspiration. Brian Wilson, enshrined by his fans as the pop Nietzsche, would never again attempt anything nearly so ambitious as Smile, which no one in the rock audience could legally hear.

I had an uncle who gave me dating advice when I was single. "When a girl stops her train of thought and says, `Oh, never mind,'" he told me, "leave it alone — don't ask what she was going to say. You don't want to know." The rule applies to both genders and transcends courting, I have learned, and I thought of it when I heard last year that Brian Wilson had had a sudden change of heart about Smile.

With his brothers Carl and Dennis dead, and with Mike Love toting around a tribute band under the Beach Boys name, Wilson has in recent years been performing and recording as a solo artist. His mental health has stabilized, by all accounts. After a successful tour of the Pet Sounds music — with the Wondermints, a California power-pop band, covering for his old bandmates — Wilson was encouraged to follow up with live performances of Pet Sounds' intended successor, Smile, and he assented. Wilson, then in his early sixties, re-united with Van Dyke Parks, a year his senior, to make something of the pieces that they had left scattered in 1967. "There are intimations of mortality here, intimations about the end of [Wilson's] performing cycle," explained Parks in a recent interview. "I get the impression that Brian knew he was running out of time."

In concert appearances, members of Wilson's troupe hold him by the arms and guide him to and from the chair he sits in when he sings. To prepare Smile for presentation, many of the same colleagues provided the composer with essential musical support. Darian Sahanaja, keyboardist for the Wondermints, scored musical passages to connect the disparate bits of Smile material, and he smoothed out the endings of pieces and their tempos to give the myriad bits cohesion. Parks, a composer and arranger in his own right — he wrote the scores for the Jack Nicholson movies Goin' South and The Two Jakes — also contributed ideas to complete the elements of Smile and organize them as a coherent unit. In addition, Parks brought in quite a few lyrics not in the original recordings, perhaps reconstructed from memory or old notes, perhaps newly written.

Despite Wilson's fanciful description of the project, it was never a symphony any more than it was an expression of teenage identity or a message to God. (Only "Good Vibrations" evokes the adolescent experience; and just one piece, the lush wordless opener "Our Prayer," is overtly connected to faith, although one could arguably call just about any composition a kind of sacred communication.) The Smile archaeologists who have been generating the bootlegs, fanzines, e-mail lists, and scrapbooks on the subject (including a 299-page paperback collection of news clips and miscellany, Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!, edited by the "Smile historian" Domenic Priore) largely agree that the original record was to be packaged as a relatively conventional collection of discrete songs, along with one suite to be called "The Elements." (Around 1980, one of several times Wilson revisited Smile for possible completion and release, he talked about wanting to organize all the tunes in three sections.)

The version prepared for concert performances and adapted for CD, by contrast, is something more advanced and elaborate: a three-movement work of components arranged to flow as of a piece; themes recur, as in formal music — almost always in the new interstitial segments and orchestral flourishes that are the result of recent collaborating by Wilson, Sahanaja, and Parks. The work seems reverse-engineered to fulfill not only the historical promise of the original but also the larger myth that has grown around it. The CD is a compelling argument for Smile's singularity as a masterwork of long-form pop; but it cannot be mistaken for evidence of it.

Unlike the early Beach Boys records that made Wilson's outsized reputation, the new version of Smile is essentially a performance piece documented on CD, rather than a work inextricable from the recording medium. The basic tracks were taped in segments over five days' time, with all the musicians, including those in the sizable horn and string sections as well as the rock players, performing live together in the studio. In 1966, Wilson and the Boys spent six months to make the ninety hours of tape that provided the three minutes and thirty-five seconds of "Good Vibrations." The mise-en-scene of the new Smile is the concert hall, not the studio; and so the CD denies Smile the essence of Wilson's aesthetic.

The biggest problem with Brian Wilson Presents Smile is the absence of the group for which the music was composed. "The thing is," Wilson explained in an interview in 1966, "I write and think in terms of what the Beach Boys can do." Smile was conceived for and geared to their voices — the exquisite blend of their literally related vocal instruments, the muscular grace of Carl Wilson's lead singing, and Mike Love's contrapuntal bite. The Wondermints, who are highly proficient musicians, do not have the personality of the Beach Boys; they have a personality of their own, a snarky one that gives their CDs of original material an ironic kick, but they keep it in check here. What they are doing on Smile — superbly — is mimicry, which is a difficult job, but something intrinsically devoid of the veracity and the individuality that made the Beach Boys wonderful. Brian Wilson was never the best singer in the group, and he is trying to carry all the lead vocals some four decades after his prime. His voice, a game old soldier too weak for duty, trudges through the new Smile, struggling to stay in key, swallowing words.

For all the hazards inherent in the task, artists such as Wilson certainly have the prerogative to return to old work years after the fact. Hell, they're the artists, and it is their work. If Manet could go into people's houses and repaint sold canvases, an aging Beach Boy can re-record "Heroes and Villains." But another question remains: does a different person have the right to take up another artist's incomplete work and attempt to finish it or to restore it? That is closer to the point with Smile.

Brian Wilson is a vastly different man today than he was when he left the music unfinished. We all change over time, though rarely as much as Wilson has as an artist. A few months ago, he released the most recent of his solo CDs, Gettin' in Over My Head, an assemblage of new recordings so bland, formulaic, and corny that they are irreconcilable with the work of the man who set out to create Smile years ago. They were done by someone else, and that person is clearly not functioning on the same creative level as Wilson was in 1966. It is no wonder that Wilson relied upon colleagues to help bring Smile to the stage and now to CD. What they did is well meant, but it is also at once indistinctive and excessive, like the scene of Turandot added by another composer after Puccini's death.

Toscanini famously dropped his baton when he reached the last bar that Puccini wrote. We could do something roughly comparable and listen only to the original Smile recordings — if a legitimate record company would release them. In the meantime, we have only Brian Wilson Presents Smile. Brian Wilson's Smile, masterpiece or not, is still lost.

(October 15, 2004)

By David Hajdu





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Edward Said's Shadowy Legacy

Edward Said's Shadowy Legacy



Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate


So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely "speaking truth to power".

It is unlikely that the two books under review, both of which present damning criticisms of Said's book at length and in detail, will change anything. Daniel Martin Varisco is a professor of anthropology who has specialized in Yemeni agriculture. It is perhaps because of this that he takes exception to Said's "textualism" and his consequent neglect of anthropology, sociology and psychology. Varisco has a multitude of other charges to bring against Orientalism and he is able to draw on an astonishingly long list of witnesses for the prosecution, including Sadiq Jalal al-'Azm, Bryan Turner, Malcolm Kerr, Ziauddin Sardar, Bernard Lewis, Nadim al-Bitar, Victor Brombert, Ernest Gellner, Jane Miller, John Sweetman, John Mackenzie and many others. But the chief concern of Varisco, who hovers over Orientalism's text like a hawk, is to expose Said's rhetorical tricks. For example, Varisco quotes a passage in which Said sought to distinguish between latent and manifest Orientalism, before continuing as follows:

"Before teasing out the meaning of this passage, it is important to look at Said's rhetorical style. Beyond the working definitions outlined at the start, this distinction here is what he "really" means, the heart of the matter. Notice how this passage sidesteps a totalizing sense by qualifying "unconscious" with "almost", "found" with "almost exclusively", and "unanimity, stability, and durability" with "more or less". This trope of the adverbial caveat dangled like catnip before the reader allows Said to speak in round numbers, so to speak, rather than giving what might be called a statistical, and thus potentially falsifiable, sense to his argument. As a result, any exceptions pointed out by a critic are pre-mitigated. The caveats appear to flow from cautious scholarship, but the latent intent is that of a polemicist."

Elsewhere, Varisco notes how "a dogmatic assertion at one moment is softened in the next". This is a kind of rhetorical giving and taking away.

Then there is Said's use of pejorative vocabulary. Varisco, following the scholar of comparative literature Brombert, wonders why Said describes the grand nineteenth-century Orientalist Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy as having "ransacked the Oriental archives". What licence has Said for the use of "ransacked" here? What about "read", "consulted", or "examined" instead? Again: "Another dimension of Said's dismissal of difference is guilt by association, a tendency to cite a litany of all-alike Orientalists". He was a specialist in producing "laundry lists" of ill-assorted but allegedly villainous Orientalists which damned some individuals by association with others.

But there are worse things than rhetorical tricksiness. Tampering with quotations is one of them. According to Said, Gustave Flaubert wrote "Inscriptions and birddroppings are the only two things in Egypt that give any indication of life", which would be damning if true. But, in the original French, what he wrote was "les inscriptions et les merdes d'oiseaux, voilà les deux seules choses sur les ruines d'Égypte qui indiquent la vie", which is unexceptionable. (Since Flaubert's diary and letters from Egypt were not intended for publication, Said's decision to characterize him as an archetypal Orientalist travel writer is also questionable.) Varisco further demonstrates how Said systematically misrepresented the political scientist P. J. Vatikiotis by furtively dropping individual words and whole paragraphs from his purported quotation from an essay by Vatikiotis on revolutions in the Middle East. Said seems to have been blind to irony (in, for example, Mansfield Park) and indifferent to humour. Although he listed Mark Twain as one of the leading Orientalist travel writers of the nineteenth century, Said's reading of Twain's The Innocents Abroad seems careless, or he would surely have noticed that it was intended as a satire on textual Orientalism.

Similarly, Said was utterly oblivious to the humour and stylishness of Alexander Kinglake's Eothen. Kinglake had enough money to travel to amuse himself. But Said's Orientalists are a classless lot. That is silly. It is impossible to browse through the early proceedings of the Royal Asiatic Society or the Société Asiatique without recognizing that nineteenth-century Orientalism was presided over by aristocrats and that for the most part the research was done by men with private incomes. Varisco is alert to issues concerning class and money. William Beckford's novel Vathek was unmistakably the work of an extremely wealthy man. Similarly, with regard to the Orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, his elite family connections allowed him to travel extensively and to collect the Oriental props he used in his paintings.

Said's pro-Palestinian stance, as well as his assault on various traditional academic values and procedures, have made his books targets for criticism from right-wingers and supporters of Zionism. But in an endnote, Varisco states that his own position here is similar to that of his fellow anthropologist Michael Gilsenan, "who admires Said's courage as an advocate for Palestinian rights without feeling a need to defend Said's arguments about Oriental studies or anthropology". With respect to Said's bête noire, Bernard Lewis, a leading historian of Islam and an emeritus professor at Princeton University, Varisco notes that "apologists against Islam frequently use careless comments in the Lewis corpus to buttress their polemic. Ibn Warraq, for example, repeatedly cites Lewis". Also, according to Varisco: "One of the most egregious attacks on the character and work of Edward Said is Martin Kramer's loosely constructed Ivory Towers on Sand, in which Orientalism is blamed for unleashing a revolution that 'has crippled Middle Eastern studies to this day'". Varisco concludes that "Kramer's unseemly creed would be laughable were it not for the favourable reception it received from the neocon clique that engineered the wars against Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein's Iraq". (Kramer is a close ally of Lewis.) "Good historians are also capable of making good puns", according to Varisco.

Varisco's are pretty excruciating. His punning, of course, starts with the subtitle of Reading Orientalism: Said and the unsaid. And consider the following: "the catachresis has been let out of the bag"; "women authors are token for granted"; "voy[ag]eurs; mal[e]odorous prose"; "in terms of intellectual history, his interdisciplinary rigor borders on the mortis". He also follows the ugly American academic fashion for using "critique" as a verb. (Even as a noun, does critique have more meaning than criticism? The Chambers Dictionary suggests not.) Varisco's book is long and closely argued, and it is impossible adequately to summarize its many points of contention in a review. Its discursive endnotes practically amount to a second book. If there is a serious criticism to be made, it is that the structure of Reading Orientalism seems almost as invertebrate as that of Orientalism. But Varisco's book makes for exhilarating reading, comparable to the supremely efficient, if brief, hatchet job carried out on Said's Representations of the Intellectual in Stefan Collini's Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006).

Ibn Warraq is the pseudonym of a former Muslim and the author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and Leaving Islam. Since the penalty for apostasy is death, he is wise to write under a pseudonym. He is less concerned than Varisco with Said's rhetorical sleight of hand, though he does point out quite a few examples of it. He is more interested in Said's numerous factual errors. Defending the West is more diffuse than Reading Orientalism, since Orientalism has provoked Ibn Warraq to defend Western culture, rationality and objectivity from the assaults of Said and others. In the first part of his book Ibn Warraq combines a broad history of Western culture with a detailed attack on Edward Said. Particular attention is paid to the heritage of Greek rationality, Christian values in seventeenth-century Orientalism, and the history of Orientalism in India. In the second half of the book he discusses Orientalism in painting, sculpture, literature and music.

Ibn Warraq shows how, lacking a background in history, Said was as ignorant of the chronology and geography of the Arab conquests, as he was of those of the British and French empires. Said was obsessed with sexual readings of apparently innocent texts. He managed to find an erotic subtext in Vatikiotis's slightly dull article on revolutions. Alphonse de Lamartine does not travel in the Middle East, but he "penetrates" it. In discussing Kipling's Kim, Ibn Warraq remarks that "Said has the irritating habit of claiming to know how the 'Indian reader' will react to the novel. I am an Indian reader, and do not read it as Said's ideal Indian reader does, and I shall quote other Indian readers who do not either". Ibn Warraq finds Said's characterization of Thomas Carlyle and John Henry Newman as "liberal culture heroes" quite absurd.

Said had a problem with languages. For example, when discussing the writings of Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel, he was mysteriously determined to deny that Sanskrit, Persian, German and Greek all belonged to the same broad group of languages – a sort of club to which Arabic could not belong. Ibn Warraq, in discussing Said's attitude to Orientalists, remarks that he was "particularly jealous of their mastery of languages". German scholars dominated Arabic, Hebrew and Sanskrit studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet Said avoided any substantial discussion of their work. Some critics have argued that this was because the pre-eminence of German Orientalists did not fit his thesis about the interdependence of Orientalism and imperialism in the Middle East, but others have suggested that it was because his German was not very good. Varisco has noted how Said mistranslates Goethe's famous line "Gottes ist der Orient!" as "God is the Orient". He has also spotted that Nerval's "La mer d'Ionie" was mistranslated as "the Ionian sky". Ibn Warraq is unhappy with Said's English, specifically with his misuse of the adverb "literally" and his confusion of scatology with eschatology. Other critics have wondered about Said's Arabic.

And so on. Ibn Warraq's bill of indictment is as lengthy and detailed as Varisco's, but it is, I think, less balanced, particularly when he turns to attack the Muslim world for its alleged dislike of knowledge for its own sake, its incapacity for self-criticism, its suspicion of Orientalists and its apparent failure to take an interest in Europe until modern times. By contrast, the history and cultural values of the West are extolled at length. The praise of the West is as relentless as the belittlement of Islam. As a Westerner and an Orientalist, I find myself somewhat embarrassed to be defended in such uncompromising terms. "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?" When discussing the fourteenth-century Dominican Ricoldo of Monte Croce's statement that the Koran was only put together after Muhammad's death, Ibn Warraq comments this is "a startlingly modern idea associated with the theories of John Wansbrough". On the contrary, orthodox Muslims have always believed that the Koran was compiled after the Prophet's death. Ibn Warraq exaggerates somewhat the intellectual independence of such institutions as the medieval University of Paris. In 1277, Étienne Tempier, Chancellor of the University, issued a condemnation of and ban on the teaching of 219 propositions, including ones by Aristotle, Averroes and Aquinas. It is true that until recent centuries Muslims tended not to be interested in Europe, but they were very interested in India and Africa. Moreover, in In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic travel writing in the seventeenth century (2003), Nabil Matar has suggested that there was more Muslim interest in Europe than has been hitherto thought. Ibn Warraq hates the niceness of Western liberals and humanists, which reminds me of W. C. Fields's insight, "Anybody who hates children and dogs can't be all bad".

Moreover, Ibn Warraq has a remarkably wide knowledge of Indian history, Classical literature and art history. Knowledge of the latter serves him well when he turns his attention to an ally of Said, Linda Nochlin, the author of a brief and under-researched but influential article "The Imaginary Orient", which appeared in Art in America in 1983. In this article she attacked the Orientalist paintings of Gérôme and others. According to Nochlin, we have to understand those paintings in terms "of the particular power structure in which these works came into being".

Gérôme's "Snake Charmer" was, according to Nochlin "a visual document of nineteenth-century colonialist ideology". But why Gérôme should have wanted to produce such a document is not clear. Moreover, the painting is set in Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The picture was completed in around 1883, when neither France nor Britain had any colonies in the Middle East, except for a British coaling station at Aden. Nochlin condemned the background of the painting for its "ferociously detailed tiled wall", but what is wrong with detail? Nochlin disliked the licked finish of Gérôme's painting, but that seems to be merely a matter of subjective taste on her part. According to a note in Nochlin's article, "Edward Said has pointed out to me in conversation that most of the so-called writing on the back wall of the 'Snake Charmer' is in fact unreadable". To which Ibn Warraq responds that the wall bears a clearly legible quotation from the Koran's Sura of the Cow in thuluth script. (Hence, perhaps, doubts about Said's Arabic.)

More generally, according to Nochlin, "one of the defining features of Orientalist painting is its dependence for its very existence on a presence that is always an absence: the Western colonial or touristic presence". But Ibn Warraq has no difficulty at all in demonstrating that Gérôme and plenty of other French artists did paintings of Napoleon in Egypt. To which one might add that other French painters, notably Horace Vernet, portrayed the progress of the French Army in Algeria. Holman Hunt put a European in a stovepipe hat in the background of "The Lantern Maker's Courtship". John Frederick Lewis's magnificent "A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai, 1842" is dominated by the figure of Viscount Castlereagh. David Roberts's painting of Karnak features Western tourists. Walter Charles Horsley painted Western visitors in al-Azhar. John Frederick Lewis painted himself and his wife in Eastern costumes in Cairene interiors. Richard Dadd painted Sir Thomas Phillips in the Middle East. Lucien-Lévy Dhurmer painted Pierre Loti in Constantinople. Vassily Vershchagin painted the British in India. The absent presence turns out to be no such thing.

Though Nochlin has attracted plenty of earlier criticism from, among others, John Mackenzie and Gerald Ackerman, the issues she raised are still live ones. Last month there was a conference at the Courtauld Institute in London, "Framing the Other: 30 Years After Orientalism". The titles of the papers given suggest that Nochlin has at least some disciples in Britain. According to the organizers,

"the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism comes as a suitable opportunity to consider again the Western vision of the Orient. For Said, developing the foucauldian concept of power/knowledge, the West produced and codified knowledge that justified relationships of power, an argument he developed further in Culture and Imperialism (1993). In the current climate of conflicts and the disastrous effects of the West's new 'crusade' (or 'war on terror'), Said's central question 'how can we know and respect the Other' becomes more and more pressing."

Said died in 2003, and it is thirty years since he launched his assault on Western culture. Things may have moved on since then. As a last resort, some of Said's nervous apologists have suggested this, hoping, perhaps, to fend off further criticism of his inconsistent methodology and shaky grasp of facts. But still his shadow hangs heavy over The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting, the catalogue of an exhibition which is due to open at Tate Britain in June. According to the foreword to that catalogue, "the issues identified in Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism (1978) and since fiercely debated, are omnipresent".


Daniel Martin Varisco
READING ORIENTALISM
Said and the unsaid
512pp. University of Washington Press. $90; distributed in the UK by Combined Academic Publishers. £54.
978 0 295 98758 3

Ibn Warraq
DEFENDING THE WEST
A critique of Edward Said's Orientalism
556pp. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. $29.95; distributed in the UK by Lavis.
978 1 59102 484 2



Robert Irwin's For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their enemies was published in 2006. His book on the Alhambra appeared in 2004 and his most recent novel, Satan Wants Me, in 1999. He is the Middle East editor of the TLS.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3885948.ece


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Sunday, May 11, 2008

Republicans forced to turn to their nemesis: John McCain

Republicans forced to turn to their nemesis: John McCain




The Republican political establishment is looking to the devil to deliver them, the man many have depicted as the incarnation of evil: John McCain.

Republicans in the U.S. Congress are petrified about a November debacle, a fear stoked on May 3, when they lost their second straight special election in a district held by Republicans.

The party's fundamental situation is terrible: Republicans are saddled with an enormously unpopular president, a war, a troubled economy and a Democratic opposition that's being energized by important constituent groups.

"The generics are as bad as anytime since I have been here," said Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican and one of the most politically astute members of Congress in either party. Davis, a 14-year veteran, is retiring this year, frustrated with his party's long-term prospects.

In a delicious irony, the one bright spot is McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. A few months ago, McCain spoke to the party's caucus in the House of Representatives and said that he would campaign in any district where he was wanted and stay out of any where he would be a liability.

"I don't know of anyone that doesn't want him in," said Representative Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican who is also retiring.

This is turning history on its head. Not long ago, the independent-minded McCain was vilified by his party's leaders.

Tom DeLay - the former Republican majority leader who was once the most powerful official the House had had in years - complained that McCain "has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of." Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert once suggested that McCain, a decorated prisoner of war in Vietnam, didn't understand sacrifice.

This year, Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi said the thought of a McCain presidency "sends a cold chill down my spine." His former Mississippi colleague, Trent Lott, has endorsed McCain; eight years earlier, Lott's comments about the Arizona lawmaker were unprintable.

The czar of conservative talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, said earlier this year that a McCain nomination would "destroy" Republicans: "He has stabbed his own party in the back I can't tell you how many times."

There is a situational element to these attitudes; McCain is fine when he's useful to them.

Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, facing an uphill re-election struggle in 2006, brought his old enemy into the state and tried to bask in his popularity. After Santorum was defeated, he reverted to form and trashed McCain.

Similarly, the epiphany that many Republican officeholders have recently had about McCain is about their own fate: They're scared. Charlie Cook and Stu Rothenberg are the twin towers of Washington election-watchers; much of the conventional wisdom in this town originates with them.

As of today, they both see the Democrats adding 5 to 10 seats to their House majority and gaining 3 to 6 Senate seats this November; that may be conservative.

With few other reeds, embattled Republicans see McCain as a lifeboat. They know voters don't like President George W. Bush or being in bed with sleazy special interests. That's the identity of the national party.

Few Republican lawmakers are viewed as more independent from Bush than is McCain - the two men really don't like each other - nor has there been any greater champion of ethics in politics than the 71-year-old senator.

McCain also provides cover on issues that plague the Republican image: the party's immigration bashing and its insensitivity to environmental concerns, especially climate change.

The odds, however, are that Republicans are deluding themselves - or at least exaggerating McCain's coattails.

In addition to the unfavorable political environment, Democrats have won the important initial rounds in House and Senate races. In the House, they have recruited several dozen potentially solid challengers; the Republicans' candidate-recruitment efforts, by their admission, have been disappointing.

In rating the current competitive House seats - about 1 in 10 - both Cook and Rothenberg see 50 percent more Republican-held seats at risk.

There's a similar pattern in the Senate. More than a half-dozen strong Democratic candidates are competing for Republican-held seats in states from Maine to New Mexico. As of today, there's possibly one vulnerable Democratic incumbent, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and that may be a stretch.

Moreover, the Democratic campaign chairmen, Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Senator Charles Schumer of New York, have run circles around the opposition.

At the end of the first quarter, the two Democratic campaign committees had $82.1 million in the bank - over three times more than the $24.5 million held by Republicans. In two-thirds of the most competitive House contests, the Democrats have more money.

"The money advantage is so overwhelming the Democrats are getting parity in what should be Republican districts," Davis said.

In an effort to placate the party base, McCain has trimmed his sails and, perversely if unintentionally, looked more like a Bush Republican.

"McCain comes across to some as a different kind of Republican," Van Hollen said. "Yet he has fallen in line with the Bush agenda on the fundamental issues: the war and the economy."

The economy is the party's real potential vulnerable spot, since it's an issue of pervasive concern to voters, even more than Iraq. McCain has little interest in the subject, and a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll shows that Americans give both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the Democratic candidates, higher marks than McCain on the economy.

Still, embattled Republican candidates won't have to drain time and energy explaining away their presidential candidate. From Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut to Robin Hayes of North Carolina, they can run with the head of the ticket.

Their only task will be to explain all those awful anti-McCain diatribes from Republicans.

By Albert R. Hunt Bloomberg News

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Fatima's Swedish Tarte with Rhubarb and Strawberry

Fatima's Swedish Tarte with Rhubarb and Strawberry


Thanks to Fatima for her lovely Swedish Rhubarb and Strawberry Tarte. I'm sure many diets will fall to this excellent recipe. Enjoy, bustill









"Hi! It has been a lovely day here in Sweden with the sun shining and now a beautiful sunset over the lake. So I decided to make a Swedish tarte with rhubarb and strawberry.

For 8 -10 persons

Oven 225 degrees

500g rhubarb peel and cut in small pieces
500g strawberrys cut into halves
2 tablespoons potato flour
2 deciliters of sugar
1 vanilla if you like.

Carefully mix together.



Now you make the dough:

300 g. melt butter
1 deciliter sugar
flour( not sure how much) (Google if you must, bustill)

Mix the melted butter with the sugar and flour until you have a homogeneous dough (not too hard or not too liquid).

Now take a mold and pour in the fruit mixture then you crumble the dough on the top of the fruit.
Leave it in the oven for about 45 - 60 min. or until you get a nice color.

Serve with vanilla sauce (homemade is the best) or vanilla ice cream.

This Tarte is almost like a crumble pie but not as dry.

Good luck!

Bye Bye !

Fatima"


The quote of the day is:

There is only one way to lose weight: eat as much as you want of everything you don't like.(Alec Guinness)




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Book lifts lid on Max Schreck, star of eerie first Dracula film

Book lifts lid on Max Schreck, star of eerie first Dracula film

Max Schreck, The vampire who was an actor, according to Adonis Kyrou in "Le Surrealisme au Cinema". When does film become reality? bustill



BERLIN - The first screen portrayal of Dracula was so eerie, some critics asked whether the actor himself could be a vampire. But since his death, little has been done to resurrect Max Schreck's reputation -- until now.

Schreck is best remembered for playing the cadaverous vampire Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror," the first, unauthorized cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula."

The rest of his career has been largely forgotten -- unjustly, in the view of German author Stefan Eickhoff, who has written what he says is the first biography of Schreck.

"Whoever hopes to discover a vampire will be disappointed, but they will find an actor of real skill and versatility," said Eickhoff. "Yet he himself remains somewhat shrouded in mystery."

"Nosferatu" failed to make its lead a star, but achieved such cult status that some film scholars speculated his name -- Schreck means "fear" or "fright" in German -- was a pseudonym.

In 1953, Greek-born critic Adonis Kyrou mischievously asked in his book "Le Surrealisme au Cinema" whether the actor was a vampire. The idea caught hold and later inspired a film.

Despite years of research, Eickhoff found there were virtually no anecdotes featuring Schreck, nor any references to him in the memoirs of the many people he had worked with.

Instead, Eickhoff's biography provides a detailed chronicle of the career of Schreck, a civil servant's son who appeared in around 800 stage and screen roles. Glimpses into the man behind the actor's mask remain few and far between.

Only in death does Schreck's character begin to come alive. The most revealing descriptions of the Berliner come from tributes paid to Schreck after he died suddenly in 1936.

Eickhoff's biography, "Max Schreck -- Gespenstertheater" (Ghost theatre) is due to be published later this year.

LONER

Contemporaries remembered Schreck, who was married but had no children, as a loyal, conscientious loner with an offbeat sense of humor and a talent for playing the grotesque.

One recalled how he lived in "a remote and strange world" and would spend hours walking through dense, dark forests.

"Nosferatu" helped propel Murnau to a brief but successful Hollywood career, but Schreck faded from the limelight.

The haunting film, which critics later saw as a metaphor for the collective trauma Germany suffered after defeat in World War One, changed the names of Bram Stoker's characters because the filmmakers failed to get permission to adapt his novel.

After the release, Stoker's widow sued the production company for breach of copyright, and won a court order to have all prints of the film destroyed. Since it had already been distributed worldwide, this ultimately proved impossible.

Over time, "Nosferatu" became seen internationally as a landmark of early German film and the horror genre -- while Schreck's other work has languished in relative obscurity.

Schreck died of heart failure aged 56, and was buried in an unmarked grave near Berlin, where he was born in 1879.

In the years that followed, his name has lived on in filmlore, thanks to the undying appeal of his most famous role.

In the 1992 sequel "Batman Returns," Christopher Walken plays a villain called Max Shreck, while in 2000, E. Elias Merhige's movie "Shadow of the Vampire" cast Willem Dafoe as Schreck the real-life bloodsucker hired to star in "Nosferatu."

Unlike Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, stars of later Dracula adaptations, Schreck never reprised the role and spent most of his subsequent film career in small, non-horror parts.

But as an actor, he was the equal of both, said Eickhoff.

"Their Draculas were refined creatures, whereas Schreck's was a more ancient, nightmarish vision," he said. "In a way, he resembled Lee a bit in that he tested himself in the most varied of roles. And funnily enough, both of them sang too."


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Barbet Schroeder sympathises with the Devil for Terror’s Advocate

Barbet Schroeder sympathises with the Devil for Terror's Advocate





The French lawyer Jacques Verges, a professional thorn in the side of many official bodies


The French director Barbet Schroeder has always been interested in the faces of evil. This fascination was behind his revealing documentary about Idi Amin in 1974 and the 1990 feature film Reversal of Fortune, which won Jeremy Irons an Oscar for his creepy performance as Claus von Bülow, accused of the attempted murder of his wife, found guilty and then aquitted on appeal. Schroeder's latest exploration of an ethically dubious life is Terror's Advocate, a tricky, perceptive documentary portrait of the French lawyer Jacques Vergès, which, thanks to Vergès's colourful sympathies and affiliations, also plays out as a history of modern terrorism.

Vergès made his name defending the FLN, the organisation whose violent campaign for Algerian independence was dramatised in Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. A vocal supporter of the cause, Vergès even went on to marry one of the guerrillas, the beautiful, enigmatic extremist Djamila Bouhired. Vergès continued to court controversy, defending a shady roster of names including Carlos the Jackal, the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Slobodan Milosevic and leading figures in the Khmer Rouge, among many, many others. Once asked if he would defend Hitler, Vergès famously replied that he would even defend George Bush, but only if he would plead guilty.

Most intriguing, though, in this life spent as a professional thorn in the side of everyone from human rights supporters to the French Government to the Israeli state, is that Vergès disappeared – completely – from 1970 to 1978 and has never offered any explanation of where he was or what he was doing.

Schroeder is in good spirits when I meet him. He's nursing a bottle of rather fine red wine. Politely, he offers me a glass, but seems more than capable of tackling it by himself. So, what drew him to the enigmatic, infuriating Vergès? "I was always interested in him throughout my life," he says. "I was for the independence of the Algerian people when I was 16. I supported them and I was following what he was doing for them. Then when I saw the way he evolved in life, I was most interested. I'm always interested by complex, strange and perverse people."

Vergès was born in Thailand, the son of a French diplomat father and a Vietnamese mother, and grew up on the French colonial outpost island of Réunion. He has a twin brother who still lives there. But Vergès' family and personal life are barely touched upon in the film. "I didn't go into that. That's why it is not a movie about Vergès himself. He has so many sides, so many cases that he has defended. I concentrated on the history of terrorism. I realised that this is the angle. It's a unique opportunity: use him as a thread and follow all his clients and cases and that's how you discover situations that are totally amazing."

During the making of the film Schroeder unearthed information that was potentially damaging to Vergès' reputation and to his legal career (now in his eighties, he continues to practise law). There were East German Stasi documents suggesting that, rather than being just a legal representative for Carlos the Jackal, Vergès had in fact a rather more hands-on involvement with his radical causes.

The film also airs theories about what Vergès was doing during the missing years. "He was not a lawyer during those seven years," says Schroeder. "It's very difficult to disappear in the modern world except if you disappear into a world which is a secret world. If you disappear into an organisation whose members are risking their life every minute if anything is known. And obviously, he mentioned in the movie that he had a codename . . ."

But Schroeder's film refrains from judging its subject. In fact the director is in some ways harder on the audience than he is on Vergès. "I am as perverse as him. I invite the audience to say: 'Yes, this thing of Algeria is beautiful. This he did right. Of course they were using bombs and it was the birth of blind terrorism, but it looks like it was in some way justified because while some people call them terrorists, others call them freedom fighters.' And the minute that the audience has accepted that, I start turning the screws on them. 'OK you have accepted that; when are you going to say stop when I show you other possibilities of blind terrorism?' Once you have accepted that step, you are in big trouble. And the movie puts you in that trouble. It's very vicious."

Schroeder has a fiction film-maker's appreciation of the extraordinary drama of his subject's life and brings the language of the feature film to the documentary, approaching it as a thriller, with an atmospheric score and progressive, suspenseful revelations about the character of the charming, amusing and dangerously manipulative Vergès.

But how much can you ever know about a man who so skilfully manipulates information to his advantage? Schroeder pauses. "I know two or three things. I know that he is very brave. I know, obviously, that he is very intelligent. I know that he isn't really interested in money."

He chuckles affectionately as he talks about the lawyer's loathing for human rights organisations. "He's so brilliant that sometimes he even wins against Amnesty International. I don't think in terms of good or evil but I think if there is one organisation that represents the good in this world it is Amnesty International. And the idea of someone getting at them is pretty scary."

But what most impresses the director is Vergès' response to the film itself. Initially, he was damning, saying that it was very sad that so much intelligence was devoted to such a movie, and threatening that Schroeder would be hearing from him soon. "Obviously he was not happy. Then – he's brilliant – the chess player in him calculates. Now his new way of talking about the movie is that it is an absolute masterpiece – because of his own participation."

Terror's Advocate is on limited release from May 16 2008

May 8, 2008

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article3887387.ec


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Analysis: Could Clinton land the VP nomination? By Carl Bernstein


Analysis: Could Clinton land the VP nomination?
By Carl Bernstein

I've got no idea what would be more amusing, an Obama-Clinton ticket or an Obama-Marion Barry ticket. Where will Clinton find the appropriate crow to dine on so she can accept the Vice-Presidential slot? Where would she hide Bill? Obama's almost better off with Dick "The Angel of Death" Cheney as running mate on this. At least he knows where he stands. bustill



  • Carl Bernstein writes that Clinton's campaign wants to step down without "surrender"
  • Clinton will most likely push for vice presidential spot, Bernstein says
  • Campaign could have many kinds of "landing," he writes
  • Bernstein says questions remain about Clinton's blue-collar appeal



(CNN) -- Friends and close associates of both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are now convinced that, assuming she loses the race for the presidential nomination, she is probably going to fight to be the vice presidential nominee on an Obama-for-president ticket.

Carl Bernstein writes that Hillary Clinton's campaign recognizes that it faces an uphill battle.

Clinton "is trying to figure out how to land the plane without looking like surrender," a prominent figure in the Obama camp said Friday. This means, in all likelihood, bringing her campaign to a close in the next few weeks and trying to leverage her way onto an Obama ticket from a position of maximum strength, said several knowledgeable sources.

A person close to her, with whom her campaign staff has counseled at various points, said this week, "I think the following will happen: Obama will be in a position where the party declares him the nominee by the first week in June. She'll still be fighting with everybody -- the Rules Committee, the party leaders -- and arguing, 'I'm winning these key states; I've got almost half the delegates. I have a whole constituency he hasn't reached. I've got real differences on approach to how we win this election, and I'm going to press the hell out of this guy. ... Relief for the middle class, universal health care, etc.; I'm Ms. Blue Collar, and I'm going to press my fight, because he can't win without my being on the ticket.' "

Another major Democratic Party figure agreed: "It's not going to be a quiet exit. ... Obama has got a terrible situation. He marches to a different drummer. He won't want to take her on the ticket. But he might have to, even though the idea of Vice President Hillary with Bill in the background at the White House is not something -- especially after what [the Clintons] have thrown at him that he relishes. I believe she'll go for it."

However, several important Democrats aligned with Obama predicted that he -- and Michelle Obama -- will vigorously resist any Clinton effort to get on the ticket. Rather, Obama is more likely to try to convince Clinton to either stay in the Senate or accept another position in an Obama administration, should he win the presidency.

Several Clinton associates say there is still a ray of hope among some in her campaign: that a "catastrophic" revelation about Obama might make it possible for her to win the presidential nomination. But barring that, Hillary and Bill Clinton recognize that her candidacy is being abandoned and rejected by superdelegates whom she once expected to win over and that, even if she were to win the popular vote in combined primary states, she will almost certainly be denied the nomination.

In theory, the landing of Campaign Clinton by the end of the primaries -- in early June at the latest, without the prospect of a convention struggle -- would be good news from Obama's point of view and even from the perspective of close Clinton friends and associates who revere their candidate and worry about the legacy of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

However, from the perspective of both campaign camps, there is serious concern about the kind of landing she's aiming for and the precarious task of bringing her plane down, especially if she decides to seek the vice presidential nomination. There could be a number of different landings:

• Smooth and skillful, doing the Obama candidacy no further damage and perhaps restoring to relative health the legacy of and regard for Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party.

• Explosive, setting down after the enemy has been carpet-bombed (an "October surprise in May"), something the Obama campaign believes may be less and less likely to come from his Democratic opponent because of the dangers to the party and the Clintons' reputation. Yet the Clinton campaign's search for damaging information and its hope that such information exists continues, according to knowledgeable sources. Strategist Harold Ickes, her premier tactical counselor, warned on the eve of the North Carolina and Indiana that Obama could be vulnerable to an "October surprise" by the McCain campaign.

• Missing the runway and destroying the Democratic village, as even her advocates outside her immediate campaign apparat fear could happen if the Clinton campaign continues to pursue a harshly negative course.

• Just bumpy and scary enough to shake the Obama campaign one last time and get her into the hangar as the vice presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket. Increasingly, this is what people in Obama's corner and those who know her well are becoming convinced she will try to do. Part of this assumption is based on her determination to roll up the biggest numbers possible in West Virginia and Kentucky, and Bill Clinton's argument that she may still win a majority of popular votes in non-caucus states.

Meanwhile, some of the Clintons' longtime friends and political counselors are intent on trying to talk her down calmly -- something almost like a family intervention -- to get her concede the Democratic presidential race when the appropriate time comes, in such a way as to heal some of the wounds to the party and to both candidates but allow her to make her best case for the vice presidency.

Almost no one I have spoken to who knows her well doubts that, as she reconciles to the likelihood that her presidential campaign is falling short, she will probably seek the vice presidential spot. One reason: Contrary to common belief, she doesn't look forward to going back to the Senate, they say. Many Democratic senators believe that she would not have an easy time winning an election for majority leader; the tenor and tactics of her presidential campaign have alienated some of her Democratic colleagues in the Senate.

Far more than as one of 100 senators, she could accomplish much of her lifelong social and political agenda as vice president and, if Obama is not elected, could make a better argument that she should be the party's next nominee for president.

One other factor now plays a bigger role in the vice presidential question than on the night of her defeat in North Carolina and her narrow win in the Indiana primary: her unequivocal assertion the following day that she has more support among white working-class voters than Obama has.

In an interview with USA Today, she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

It is difficult to overstate the negative effect this remark has had on superdelegates, party leaders and her Democratic colleagues in both houses of Congress. "That's not a way to land the plane," one of her key supporters said. "If you were a superdelegate, you'd say, 'We have to shut this down right away.' "

But others worried that her words were calculated, that by venturing into such risky, rhetorical territory about race, she might put Obama under increased pressure to take her on the ticket before more damage and loss of support from her working-class base is felt.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, an old Clinton friend, said Friday that she had made a major mistake in suggesting "that hardworking Americans are white people."

"This statement has got to be dealt with by Hillary Clinton, and Hillary Clinton alone," he said on MSNBC's "Hardball."
"The sooner she does that," she said, "the sooner her ship is going to start sailing in a better direction."

May 11, 2008 -- Updated 0443 GMT (1243 HKT)
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/10/bernstein.clinton/index.html


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Saturday, May 10, 2008

Paris on the Anniversary of the 1968 Protests

Paris on the Anniversary of the 1968 Protests

France puts great stock in anniversaries. On your Paris map, you'll find streets named "8 Mai 1945" and "4 Septembre" and squares called "8 Novembre 1942," "18 Juin 1940," "19 Mars 1962," and, most recently, "Place du 8 Février 1962" — this one so christened last year on the anniversary of a protest for peace in Algeria. Flags come out, like the mammoth Tricouleur under the Arc de Triomphe for today's Victory Day; newspapers groan under weighty ruminations; officials don sashes.

May is especially good for this. Not only is the weather perfect, but it has the holiday perennials May Day and Victory Day. This year, the entire month is also the anniversary of the wave of French protests and strikes during the student uprisings in 1968.

May 6 also was President Nicolas Sarkozy's first anniversary in office. There is a curious symmetry to the two commemorations.

The May '68 commemorations are being led by gray-haired boomers nursing an intense nostalgia for a spring of uprising against almost everything. Mr. Sarkozy was swept into office promising a "rupture" with all the entrenched habits of his land: stifling labor rules, endless holidays, soaring taxes, paternalistic and bloated bureaucracy.

But he placed the blame not on the "establishment," as those long-ago protesters did, but on those who assailed it in 1968 (when he was 13). One of Mr. Sarkozy's fiercest campaign speeches a year ago was an attack on May 1968 and "its leftist heirs" for a continuing crisis of "morality, authority, work and national identity."

At that time, he enjoyed a popularity rating of 65 percent. Today, it's down to 32 percent, the lowest of any president in 50 years. Leftist French students are demonstrating again — against change.

Not surprisingly, May '68 and Mr. Sarkozy's first year are being treated quite differently. The 40-year anniversary has released a torrent of '60s soul-searching and kitsch. Bookstores are packed with titles about the protests.

The staid Le Monde has been carrying a daily reprint of its front page of 40 years ago. The Place de la Sorbonne, the main square of the ancient university that's witnessed many a tear-gassed student, features an exhibit of classic black-and-white scenes of barricades, riot police and running students.

Oh, and food! Scope, the weekly supplement to Figaro, this week offered a list of restaurants located at the epicenter of May '68 that are still there. Better yet, the chocolatier Patrick Roger on Boulevard St. Germain is offering a paving stone — the protesters' weapon of choice in 1968 — of pure chocolate praliné. It costs 49 euros (about $75!) and comes in a display-case gift box.

Mr. Sarkozy's first year is hardly a source of celebration. His problem has not been an absence of activity. The president has generated a barrage of proposed reforms on taxes, social programs, education, overtime, pensions and foreign policies. Nor has it been a lack of excitement. No president has figured as frequently in the glossy magazines, mostly in connection with his soap-opera rejection by one stunning wife followed a few weeks later by his (third) marriage to another. But don't blame the new Mrs. Sarkozy for his continuing slide. She has actually gone over quite well with the French.

So what is the problem? In part, the global financial crisis has negated whatever benefits Mr. Sarkozy's policies might have produced. More damaging, his frenetic activity, bursts of pique and confused private life have made him seem amateurish. He is perceived to act without priorities or plans, to chase after publicity and bling, to insult subordinates, and to back down or pout when he meets resistance.

Yet in this season of anniversaries, Mr. Sarkozy may take heart by looking just a bit beyond May 1968 to June 1968. One of the most ardent slogans of May had been "Adieu, de Gaulle," but instead of leaving, that grand president called new elections for June. His party won handily, workers returned to work, students stopped demonstrating and police retook the Sorbonne.

I passed through Paris that July, and all I found of the uprising were stumps of felled trees in the Latin Quarter.


Published: May 10, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/opinion/10sat4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


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Friday, May 9, 2008


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David Brooks: The Conservative Revival

David Brooks: The Conservative Revival




For years, American and British politics were in sync. Reagan came in roughly the same time as Thatcher, and Clinton's Third Way approach mirrored Blair's. But the British conservatives never had a Gingrich revolution in the 1990s or the Bush victories thereafter. They got their losing in early, and, in the wilderness, they rethought modern conservatism while their American counterparts were clinging to power.

Today, British conservatives are on the way up, while American conservatives are on the way down. British conservatives have moved beyond Thatcherism, while American conservatives pine for another Reagan. The British Conservative Party enjoyed a series of stunning victories in local elections last week, while polls show American voters thoroughly rejecting the Republican brand.

The flow of ideas has changed direction. It used to be that American conservatives shaped British political thinking. Now the influence is going the other way.

The British conservative renovation begins with this insight: The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, "the whole way we live our lives."

That means, first, moving beyond the Thatcherite tendency to put economics first. As Oliver Letwin, one of the leading Tory strategists put it: "Politics, once econo-centric, must now become socio-centric." David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader, makes it clear that his primary focus is sociological. Last year he declared: "The great challenge of the 1970s and 1980s was economic revival. The great challenge in this decade and the next is social revival." In another speech, he argued: "We used to stand for the individual. We still do. But individual freedoms count for little if society is disintegrating. Now we stand for the family, for the neighborhood — in a word, for society."

This has led to a lot of talk about community, relationships, civic engagement and social responsibility. Danny Kruger, a special adviser to Cameron, wrote a much-discussed pamphlet, "On Fraternity." These conservatives are not trying to improve the souls of citizens. They're trying to use government to foster dense social bonds.

They want voters to think of the Tories as the party of society while Labor is the party of the state. They want the country to see the Tories as the party of decentralized organic networks and the Laborites as the party of top-down mechanistic control.

As such, the Conservative Party has spent a lot of time thinking about how government should connect with citizens. Basically, everything should be smaller, decentralized and interactive. They want a greater variety of schools, with local and parental control. They want to reverse the trend toward big central hospitals. Health care, Cameron says, is as much about regular long-term care as major surgery, and patients should have the power to construct relationships with caretakers, pharmacists and local facilities.

Cameron also believes government should help social entrepreneurs scale up their activities without burdening them with excessive oversight.

This focus means that Conservatives talk not only about war and G.D.P., but also the softer stuff. There's been more emphasis on environmental issues, civility, assimilation and the moral climate. Cameron has spent an enormous amount of time talking about marriage, families and children.

Some of his ideas would not sit well with American conservatives. He wants to create 4,200 more health visitors, who would come into the homes of new parents and help them manage day-to-day stress. But he also talks about rewriting the tax code to make it more family friendly, making child care more accessible, and making the streets safer.

Some of this is famously gauzy, and Cameron is often disdained as a mere charmer. But politically it works. The Tory modernization project has produced stunning support in London, the southern suburbs, the Welsh heartlands and the ailing north. It's not only that voters are tired of Labor. The Conservatives have successfully "decontaminated" their brand. They're offering something in tune with the times.

Cameron describes a new global movement, with rising center-right parties in Sweden, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, California and New York (he admires Schwarzenegger and Bloomberg). American conservatives won't simply import this model. But there's a lot to learn from it. The only question is whether Republicans will learn those lessons sooner, or whether they will learn them later, after a decade or so in the wilderness.

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 9, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/opinion/09brooks.html?hp


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Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?

Wine's Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head?
THE mind of the wine consumer is a woolly place, packed with odd and arcane information fascinating to few. Like the pants pocket of a 7-year-old boy, it's full of bits of string, bottle caps and shiny rocks collected while making the daily rounds of wine shops, restaurants, periodicals and the wine-soaked back alleys of the Internet. It's harmless stuff, really, except to those within earshot when a wine lover finds it necessary to elaborate on the nose, legs and body of a new infatuation.
Yet in recent months American wine drinkers have taken their turn as pop culture's punching bags. In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money.

One of the studies was devised by Robin Goldstein, a food writer, to try to isolate consumers from outside influence so they could simply judge wine by what's in the glass. He had 500 volunteers sample and rate 540 unidentified wines priced from $1.50 to $150 a bottle. The results are described in a new book, "The Wine Trials," to be published this month by Fearless Critic Media.

The book wraps the results in a discussion of marketing manipulations and statistical validity, but a brief article in the April 7 issue of Newsweek magazine, naturally, seized on the book's populist triumphs: a $10 bottle of bubbly from Washington state outscored Dom Pérignon, which sells for $150 a bottle, while Two-Buck Chuck, the cheap Charles Shaw California cabernet sauvignon, topped a $55 bottle of Napa Valley cabernet.

"Their results might rattle a few wine snobs, but the average oenophile can rejoice: 100 wines under $15 consistently outperformed their upscale cousins," the article exulted.

Two caveats are in order here. First, it turns out that the results of the tastings are more nuanced than the Newsweek article let on. In fact, the book shows that what appeals to novice wine drinkers is significantly different from what appeals to wine experts, which the book defines as those who have had some sort of training or professional experience with wine. The experts, by the way, preferred the Dom Pérignon.

Second, there is, of course, no such thing as the "average oenophile," as Newsweek put it. Most people in the wine trade understand that consumers have any number of reasons for their buying decisions, whatever their psychological and financial state. Some are reassured by easy-to-understand labels with friendly animals. Others want only naturally produced wines or bottles with a modest carbon footprint. Some are status-seekers and score-chasers, while others are contrarians, or only drink red wine.

But assuming for the moment that it's true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

"Forget those blurbs about bouquets, body and berries," one newspaper account crowed. "A meticulous new study found that the more people think a wine cost, the more they like it. And the less they think it cost, the less they like it."

Big surprise. Sommeliers all over know that the hardest wine to sell in a restaurant is the cheapest bottle on the list. "Yeah, clients don't want to be embarrassed in front of a date, so they don't order the cheapest wines," said Fred Dexheimer, the wine director of the BLT restaurant group. The fact is, the correlation between price and quality is so powerful that it affects not just our perception of wine but of all consumer goods.

"It's not just about wine, it's about everything!" said Prof. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book "Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions" (HarperCollins, $25.95), which examines how people make all sorts of real life decisions. Regardless of the situation, Professor Ariely found, suggestion has a powerful effect on perception and belief.

In one experiment, volunteers who received mild electric shocks were given placebo pills to relieve the pain. They were told that the pills cost either 10 cents or $2.50. The participants believed that both kinds of pills helped relieve pain, but the seemingly more expensive pills had a much greater effect.

"If you expect not to get something as good, lo and behold, it's not as good," Professor Ariely said. "We think of it as an objective reality. We don't see how much is created by our mind."

Even so, wine drinkers tend to be the punch line. People are unlikely to be ridiculed for buying $300 jeans that are washed, bleached and beaten over rocks instead of $60 jeans that will last a decade. But wine buyers who prefer the $20 bottle over a $10 bottle? All that stuff about aromas and complexity? Forget it!

Are wine consumers really easily manipulated victims, the flip side of the stereotype of wine drinkers as pretentious snobs? What have they done to be singled out from other consumers who might equally be portrayed as knuckling under to hype and salesmanship, like connoisseurs of clothes, handbags or shoes, car aficionados or golf fanatics, food or film lovers?

The answer rests, I think, both in the insecure and uncomfortable attitudes that Americans hold toward wine and in the difficulty of bringing some sort of objective and universal criteria to the fleeting and obscure realms of aroma, taste and texture.

The consumption of wine has been growing steadily in the United States rising to 283 million cases in 2006 from almost 189 million cases in 1993, according to the Adams Wine Handbook, which tracks consumption.

Yet drinking more hasn't made Americans more comfortable with wine. People with little interest in wine tend to see it as somehow foreign and threatening. Even among the curious, fears abound, of being embarrassed or appearing unsophisticated, of choosing the wrong wine, or of liking the wrong one. Every year books come out purporting to help the winephobic avoid embarrassment, impress their bosses or learn shortcuts to wine knowledge. But I sense no decrease in the number of people whose questions to me are prefaced by a sheepish, "I don't know anything about wine, though I really should."

Meanwhile, consumers face an impenetrable swamp of winespeak: Wine Spectator recently evaluated one Argentine red as, "Dark and rich, with lots of fig bread, mocha, ganache, prune and loam notes. Stays fine-grained on the finish, with lingering sage and toast hints."

To hack through it all, consumers embrace scores, an easy shorthand that unfortunately requires that every wine be judged on the same seemingly objective scale, regardless of the subjective nature of taste. Anybody can understand that a wine rated 90 beats an 89, right?

Yet the rating system has bred an attitude toward wine that ignores context, which is perhaps more important a consideration to the enjoyment of wine than anything else. The proverbial little red wine, so delicious in a Tuscan village with your sweetie, never tastes the same back home in New Jersey. Meanwhile, the big California cabernet, which you enjoyed so much with your work buddies at a steakhouse, ties tucked between buttons, doesn't have that triumphant lift with a bowl of spaghetti.

This is one problem with trying to judge wine in the sort of clinical vacuum sought by studies like the one in "The Wine Trials." In the end, I don't think you can ever eliminate context. The trick is to distinguish between the harmful or disingenuous — the marketing come-ons, the point chasing, what the guy next to you thinks — from the beneficial: the food, the company, the environment. Even in a blind tasting situation, wine is evaluated in the company of other wines, which is a different sort of context but a context nonetheless. Perhaps they've chosen the best wines to be sipped and spat out, but not the best wines for dinner.

Ultimately, context may be the most underrated aspect of enjoying wine. Tyler Colman, a wine writer and blogger (drvino.com), whose first book, "Wine Politics," will shortly be published by the University of California Press, has a second book coming out this fall, "A Year of Wine" (Simon & Schuster), that focuses on context.

"The mood and the food and the context really matters," he said. "It's the neglected pairing."

Just as understanding when to dress up and when to dress down is intuitive for many people, so, too, does it become instinctive over time for wine lovers to know which is the proper bottle to open. But that requires experience of many different wines. Eventually the novelty of great wines, or expensive wines, can wear off.

"Sometimes a great Beaujolais is a better choice than La Tâche," said Nathan Vandergrift, a statistical researcher at the University of California at Irvine, who has seen the wine business as a retailer, an importer and distributor, and most recently as a blogger at the Vulgar Little Monkey Translucency Report. Mr. Vandergrift has had plenty of Beaujolais, and a fair amount of La Tâche, one of the most highly sought wines in the world.

Would that we all could achieve that sense of freedom and zen-like serenity, where we've had our fill of all else and can simply choose the right wine because it's the right wine.

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Pentagon Drops Post in Pakistan for Top General

Pentagon Drops Post in Pakistan for Top General

WASHINGTON — When the Pentagon announced in March that Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military's aim to put a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood appeared before Congress in 2005 to discuss the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But nearly two months later, the military has quietly canceled the assignment of General Hood, a 33-year Army veteran who was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During General Hood's command from 2004 to 2006, military authorities force-fed with tubes detainees who were engaging in hunger strikes at the Guantánamo prison, a step they justified as necessary to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide to protest their indefinite confinement. Also during General Hood's tenure, reports that an American guard may have desecrated a Koran stirred wide protests in the Islamic world.

The decision to withdraw General Hood's assignment has not been announced, but it appears to reflect the widening shadow that the military prison at Guantánamo is casting over American foreign policy. While the United States considers Pakistan a close ally in its counterterrorism efforts, the accounts by Pakistanis who have returned to Pakistan after being held at Guantánamo Bay have added to anti-American sentiment in the country.

Several leading Pakistani military and foreign affairs commentators denounced General Hood's selection in recent weeks, calling on their new government to block his appointment. In interviews this week, American military officials said they had reluctantly concluded that General Hood's effectiveness could be seriously hindered, and that his personal safety might even be at risk if he were to take up the post.

About 65 detainees at Guantánamo Bay have been repatriated to Pakistan, according to Cmdr. Pauline Storum, a military spokeswoman.

It is not clear whether Pakistan's new government requested that the appointment be canceled. But on Thursday, a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, Mohammed Sadiq, told reporters that the government was "fully cognizant of the public sentiments and sensitivities regarding the reported transfer of General Hood to Islamabad," and he added, "We hope to address this matter of public interest in the best possible manner."

Asked about the withdrawal of the appointment, an American military spokesman sought Thursday to put the best face on an awkward situation. "General Hood is being considered for a different, equally important job in the Centcom headquarters," said Capt. James Graybeal, chief spokesman for the United States Central Command, which oversees military affairs in Pakistan.

General Hood did not return e-mail messages or a telephone call to his office on Thursday.

General Hood, who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf war and in Kosovo, had been expected to become chief of a division of the United States Embassy in Islamabad known as the Office of the Defense Representative to Pakistan. The office has about two dozen people and oversees military relations with Pakistan, including training and equipment.

Until a few years ago, a colonel typically directed the office. But in a sign of Pakistan's strategic importance in the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the job was upgraded to that of a two-star general. The current head of the office, Maj. Gen. James R. Helmly, had been scheduled to leave at the end of May. No replacement for General Hood has been named.

Two senior Defense Department officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue involves personnel decisions, expressed chagrin that General Hood's selection had not been evaluated more carefully.

Under General Hood's command, and after consultations with senior Pentagon officials, American guards at Guantánamo Bay used forceful methods in dealing during 2006 with detainees who engaged in hunger strikes. They strapped them into "restraint chairs," sometimes for more than two hours at a time, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward.

General Hood, who took command of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay in March 2004, shortly before the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq broke, sought to put a more human face on it. He was credited by lawyers for the prisoners and human rights groups with having improved the treatment of detainees, and it was soon after he took over that some of the most severe interrogation methods were curtailed.

But he also had to deal with the fallout of a report in Newsweek asserting that a military inquiry was expected to find that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at the detention center. The magazine later retracted the article, but the military inquiry concluded that a soldier had inadvertently splashed urine on a Koran. The magazine's original assertion led to riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan that left at least 17 people dead.

Criticism of General Hood in the Pakistani news media was unrelenting after the Pentagon announced on March 13 that he would take over the post.

"Guantánamo Bay itself has become a symbol of injustice, torture and abuse of Islam, and sending a commanding officer from there to Islamabad begs the question: What is the message coming out of the Pentagon for Pakistanis by this insensitive act?" Shireen M. Mazari, director general of the Institute of Strategic Studies, a research group in Islamabad financed by Pakistan's foreign office, wrote on March 20 in The News, one of the largest English-language newspapers in Pakistan.

Dr. Mazari added, "Equally important, given that host governments always have a choice of refusing a nominee — and many Western countries have exercised that right in the diplomatic nominees of the Pakistan government — why has the Pakistan government chosen to silently accept what the U.S. military dishes out, with no thought to the sensitivities of its own people?"

 
Published: May 9, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/world/asia/09general.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin



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Petition for the Release of Cuban Political Prisioners

Petition for the Release of Cuban Political Prisioners

You know, there are political prisoners all over the world, like the activists of the Red Brigades in Europe. In my opinion this whole question of political prisoners is greatly exaggerated.
Fidel Castro

http://www.cubaverdad.net/cuba_prison_system.htm

http://www.peticioncuba.org/

http://www.peticioncuba.org/resources.php?l=

Help us spread the word! Join our group on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=14121632182

The Cuban Government is currently holding more than 220 political prisoners according to Amnesty International, the Cuban Committee for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Reporters Without Borders. These prisoners are illegally held in prison according to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Cuba has signed and recognizes. Despite signing these documents, Cuba continues to suppress freedom of expression by outlawing peaceful advocacy for human rights and democratic reforms. In defiance of the universally-recognized rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly, Cuban activists are systematically targeted for persecution.

Click here to sign the petition for the release of Cuba's political prisoners

Current number of signatures: 3358

Let the world know how you feel about Cuba's human rights situation



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Clandestine workers step forward in French protests

Clandestine workers step forward in French protests

NEUILLY-SUR-SEINE, France: The Café La Jatte is in many ways a typical Parisian eatery. It has a menu full of culinary promise, a sumptuous wine list and a handful of illegal African immigrants working in the kitchen.

It also has a rather atypical former customer: President Nicolas Sarkozy, known for his tough stance on illegal immigration, was a regular when he was mayor of this leafy western suburb until 2002.

Café La Jatte has become a symbol for an unusually public campaign by clandestine employees in France demanding work permits. Recent kitchen strikes here and at other restaurants have mushroomed into a broader protest movement touching several sectors and spreading fast outside of Paris.

Since April 25, when France's largest labor union, the CGT, filed a request to legalize 900 restaurant employees, construction workers and cleaners, hundreds more have lined up to join the initiative.

The movement has highlighted an uneasy dilemma facing France and other Western governments: The hard line on immigration that helped leaders like Sarkozy to get elected is increasingly at odds with economic realities.
For the first time, the demands of France's illegal workers are backed by a growing number of their employers. Construction and cleaning companies say they cannot get enough legal workers to fill the available jobs. The employers' federation of the restaurant and hotel business has called for the legalization of 50,000 workers in that field alone. And Konex, a technology cabling firm, has rallied dozens of employers to form a lobby dedicated to the matter.

"This is a problem of political hypocrisy," said Gilles Caussade, one of the two owners of Café La Jatte, as he glanced from his restaurant's sprawling outdoor terrace to the apartment building where Sarkozy used to live.

"The economic needs are real," he said. "Manpower is no longer assured by those who are born in the country, and these are jobs that they do not want to do."

Every time Caussade advertises a job in the paper, only Africans and Sri Lankans respond, he said. The 10 Malians now working in Café La Jatte's kitchen have all been there at least two years - one of them, who started as a dishwasher and is now a cook, since 1994.

Employed on work permits borrowed from friends and relatives, they have been earning standard industry wages and paying taxes like regular employees.

"That's the irony," Caussade said. "They are completely part of the system and yet, officially, they don't exist."

Caussade said he had not known that his employees were illegal and had been caught by surprise when his staff started a five-day strike on April 19.

But their battle has become his, he said, recounting how he personally took their applications for work permits to the police.

"Now I just have to learn their real names," Caussade quipped. "Baba is no longer Baba, he is Abdouramane. Samba becomes Moussa."

Caussade is no exception. At a recent conference organized by the human resources departments of some of France's biggest companies, executives urged the government to make it easier for immigrants to get work permits. Sylvie Brunet, head of human resources at ONET, a company in Marseille that provides cleaning services, said her business could not function without ample immigrant labor.

"Even French high school dropouts don't want the jobs we offer," she said. Stéphane Vallet of Bouygues, the construction company, concurred.

The French Immigration Ministry estimates that there are 200,000 to 400,000 undocumented immigrants in France; reports in the French press suggest that as many as three out of four of them are working.

But as employers lobby for the legalization of their workers, the police continue to round them up for expulsion, often targeting train stations in the early morning and late evening, when cleaners and builders commute.

The issue is a headache for Sarkozy, who has ordered police chiefs across France to fulfill a strict deportation quota of 26,000 this year but who has also promised to help business alleviate labor shortages.

In a high-profile television interview on April 24, Sarkozy defended his policies and accused company bosses employing illegal immigrants of being "hypocrites."

"Don't tell me, whether you are the boss of a small company or not, that you have to find yourself a poor illegal worker when there are, among the immigrants who we do welcome and who do have papers, 22 percent unemployed," Sarkozy said, without elaborating on the statistic.

The fact that employers have increasingly found themselves the target of criticism may be one reason they appear to be more sympathetic to the current campaign.

The movement has been gathering momentum with isolated strikes since July 2007, when Immigration Minister Brice Hortefeux issued a decree obligating employers to verify the legality of their workers with the police. Since then, two further sets of guidelines have been issued, opening the door to legalizing some staff in specific regions and sectors.

This has raised hope among workers at a time when surging food prices have often made families in the immigrants' home countries even more dependent on their remittances.

The government has ruled out legalization on a mass scale, saying that only a few hundred of those who have applied for papers in the current movement will get papers, on a case-by-case basis.

Critics said that only adds to the confusion and that it could result in ad hoc decisions by prefectures, the regional police authorities charged with authorizing migrants to work.

"Going case by case is not a policy; it is like saying to the prefectures, 'Work it out yourself,' " said Laurent Giovanonni, secretary general of Cimade, a nongovernmental organization that works in the detention centers where migrants without papers are held.

In the case of the Café La Jatte workers, there has been some progress. As of Wednesday, 7 of the 10 La Jatte illegals had received three-month work permits; the other three hope to get such papers on Friday.

"This has changed our lives," Abdouramane Sarr, the 42-year-old dishwasher-turned-cook, said Thursday in the steaming restaurant kitchen. No longer afraid of police controls, he is planning his first trip to Mali in 10 years.

But at Passion Traiteur, an upscale caterer in the nearby suburb of Colombes, 3 of 20 striking workers have been ordered to leave the country.

And the movement is spreading.

On Wednesday, illegal workers occupied the premises of Adecco and Triangle, two job-placement companies in Creteil, southeast of Paris. In Nanterre, west of Paris, a dozen workers are on hunger strike.

Meanwhile, a march of illegal workers that started in Lille several weeks ago will arrive in Paris on Saturday, when the abolition of slavery will be commemorated.

One of the more colorful protests is taking place in central Paris, where a few hundred mostly African workers have been occupying a union building for a week.

Anzoumane Sissoko, a Malian organizer of the protest, said that in his 15 years in France he had seen clandestine workers come out of the shadows sporadically, but never to this extent and with such self-confidence.

"There is something different about this time," said Sissoko, himself illegal until last year. "People really think something could change for them."



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Wednesday, May 7, 2008

The mad worlds of Thomas Middleton

The mad worlds of Thomas Middleton

Sexing the language, languaging the sex, doubting all truth, mastering all dramatic modes: enough of a case for Middleton?

Two years ago, Declan Donnellan, director of the theatre company Cheek by Jowl, had the inspired idea of staging a double bill of Twelfth Night and The Changeling. A steward in love with the lady of the house: play it as comedy and you have Shakespeare, as tragedy you have Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you", says Malvolio: and he is when he returns as De Flores. Donnellan and his actors brilliantly showed that the potential for De Flores's seduction/rape and murder (performed during the act of sex) of Beatrice-Joanna is already there in Malvolio when he breaks the seal, impressed with the symbolic figure of Lucrece, of Olivia's letter and gets a view of "her very C's, her U's 'n her T's".

For more than a generation, The Changeling has been regarded as the finest collaborative drama of the Jacobean era. Donnellan's revelatory pairing showed that its power comes not least from Middleton and Rowley's ability to take a Shakespearean theme and twist it in new and startling ways. Together with the long-acknowledged role of Middleton in developing the witchcraft scenes of Macbeth, the more recent discovery of his apparent hand in the surviving text of Measure for Measure, and the decisive demonstration of his co-authorship of Timon of Athens, this suggests that Middleton had claims to be Shakespeare's true successor in the theatre. Why, then, did Shakespeare end his career writing three collaborations with another dramatist, John Fletcher? Why didn't the King's Men turn to Middleton when they needed a new principal dramatist after Shakespeare's departure? And why were Middleton's plays so conspicuously absent from the theatrical repertoire between the 1660s and the 1960s, notwithstanding the advocacy on his behalf of such great critic-poets as A. C. Swinburne and T. S. Eliot?

In the summer of 1984, having co-edited the complete works of Shakespeare before reaching the age of thirty, Gary Taylor sat in the Bodleian Library, read all of Middleton and had an epiphany:

"Sometimes quietly moved to tears, sometimes unable to contain my laughter . . . I thought, again and again, why was I never told to read this? . . . Why have I never seen this performed? . . . why have I never been introduced to this Dickensian, Dostoevskian riot of life? Vindice, DeFlores, and Beatrice Joanna I'd encountered in college, but what about Allwit and all the rest? Lucifer, Candido, Quomodo, Sir Bounteous Progress, Dampit, Pieboard, Tailby, Weatherwise, Pompey Doodle, Captain Ager, Plumporridge, Simplicity, Simon, George, Lepet, the Yorkshire Husband, the Black Knight and Fat Bishop and White Queen's Pawn, the Tyrant, the Lady, the Young Queen, the Duchess of Milan, Mistress Low-water, Mill, Valeria, Hecate and Madge Owl, Livia and Bianca and Isabella – where have you people been all my life?"

He vowed to right the wrong of the centuries' neglect, to give Middleton the Collected Works he deserved, serving him as John Heminge and Henry Condell had served Shakespeare in the First Folio. He set about assembling a team of nearly seventy scholars and parcelling out Middleton's sixty surviving works. We have had to wait more than two decades, but the labour has now come to fruition with a Collected Works of over 2,000 double-column pages and a Companion of 1,000 more (also double-column).

The design is based on that of the Oxford Shakespeare, with the welcome difference that glossarial and explanatory notes are included at the foot of each page. The introductions to each work are also fuller than the perfunctory statements in the Oxford Shakespeare, making The Collected Works a much more usable volume for students. Or at least those few wealthy and conscientious students who can afford the £85 price. For scholars, though, there is the same disadvantage as with the Oxford Shakespeare: to find out in which lines and with what justification the texts are amended, to read the evidence for decisions regarding dating, authorship and so forth, one has to pay another £100 for the Companion.

The first page of Taylor's general introduction has four paragraphs, in which four claims are made for Middleton's greatness. First, that he and Shakespeare are the only two dramatists of the English Renaissance to have created acknowledged masterpieces in all four genres of comedy, tragedy, history and tragicomedy. Thomas Heywood, Philip Massinger and John Marston are judged not to have succeeded. Second, that Middleton is "the Hogarth of the pen", a phrase taken from a review of the first collected edition of his works, which was published in 1840. This is a graphic way of saying that he was the age's great sketcher of early modern London low life, a challenge to the two Thomases, Nashe and Dekker.

Third claim: that he "sexed language, and languaged sex, more comprehensively than any other writer in English". Middleton must be acknowledged as our great bard of incest, pimping, transvestism, stalking, sexual blackmail, castration, priestly sexual abuse, marital rape, impotence, masochism, necrophilia, paedophilia, fornication, masturbation and "lesbianation". I still have not quite grasped exactly how the latter is distinct from mere lesbianism. "He invoked 'back door' sex, male and female, more often than any of his contemporaries", writes Taylor, straight-faced.

After this, it is a relief to move on to the fourth claim: that Middleton's baroque, chiaroscuro dramatic world is the literary equivalent of Caravaggio, whose "torn, furrow-browed Doubting Thomas, caught red-handed in that electric moment when scepticism thrusts its finger into faith, could be doubting Thomas Middleton's Captain Ager or Vindice or Timon". There are problems with the late Margot Heinemann's argument that Middleton wrote from the point of view of an anti-court civic sensibility with strong Puritan leanings, but that is hardly sufficient to align him with a Roman painter who reeks of the Counter-Reformation. Probably Taylor's association is merely rhetorical: the name Caravaggio is shorthand for daring proto-modernity and intense individualization of character, and it is with these qualities that Taylor wishes to associate Middleton.

Having spent the past few months working slowly through The Collected Works, I am not so sure. For one thing, the edition includes a huge and neglected body of occasional work – masques, civic entertainments, triumphs, satirical pamphlets, moral tales in verse, mock-almanacs and more. This Middleton is so deeply grounded in his historical moment and social context that he cannot speak across the centuries with the directness of a stage play, a lyric poem, or a Caravaggio canvas. A dip into, say, The Black Book will reveal that Middleton could indeed write prose of a vitality to match that of Nashe and Dekker:

"I thumped downstairs with my cow-heel, embraced Mistress Silver-pin and betook me to my bill-men, when, in a twinkling before them all, I leapt out of master constable's nightgown into an usurer's fusty furred jacket, whereat the watchmen staggered and all their bills fell down in a swoon, when I walked close by them, laughing and coughing like a rotten-lunged usurer to see what Italian faces they all made when they missed their constable and saw the black gown of his office lie full in a puddle."

There are riches here for cultural and social historians, chroniclers of the profession of writing and the early modern book trade, but it is not enough to prise modern readers away from the anatomy of desire in the sonnets of Shakespeare or the elegies of Donne. As city comedy (Middleton's forte) is the one conspicuous absence from the Shakespearean dramatic oeuvre, so lyric poetry and romantic comedy (Shakespeare's signatures) are the two conspicuous absences from Middleton's more varied body of work. Of the ephemeral verse gathered here for the first time, the only outstanding poem is a touching four-line epitaph "On the death of that great master in his art and quality, painting and playing: Richard Burbage":

Astronomers and star-gazers this year
Write but of four eclipses; five appear,
Death interposing Burbage – and their staying
Hath made a visible eclipse of playing.

The claim as to Middleton's modernity must stand or fall on the quality of his twenty-seven or so surviving plays. There are, however, immediate problems with both the use of the word "his" and the pinning down of the number of plays. Middleton's career was very different from Shakespeare's. Between the formation of the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594 and the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, Shakespeare wrote nearly twenty plays for his company, without any collaboration. Middleton, by contrast, was a freelancer throughout his twenty-year career in the theatre, from The Phoenix, a "disguised duke" play comparable to Measure for Measure, performed before the new King early in 1604, to A Game at Chess, the political drama of 1624 that proved the era's greatest succès de scandale, landed him in prison and brought the curtain down on his theatre writing. He was also a collaborator throughout his career, beginning under the tutelage of Thomas Dekker, then, following Dekker's imprisonment for debt in 1612, writing in partnership with the comic actor William Rowley. At different times, he co-wrote with, or adapted existing plays by, several other dramatists, including Shakespeare and Webster.

The scholarly tour de force in this edition is Taylor's account of the manuscripts and printed texts of A Game at Chess, "the most complicated editorial problem in the entire corpus of early modern English drama, and one of the most complicated in English literature". This could have formed a 500-page monograph in itself. As a broader contribution to scholarship, the greatest achievement of the edition is its stabilization of the Middleton canon, its consummation of more than thirty years' work on the attribution of early modern plays. In the 1970s, the Australian David Lake and the New Zealander Macdonald P. Jackson independently published books on the question of Middletonian authorship. They came by different, but equally persuasive, methods to remarkably similar conclusions, many of which have, thanks to confirmatory studies by Taylor's team and others, come as close to settled facts as we are likely to get in this contentious field. There were two main conclusions. First, that Middleton was unquestionably the author of two of the greatest tragedies of the age: The Revenger's Tragedy (long associated with Cyril Tourneur, solely on the grounds of the similarity of its title to his Atheist's Tragedy) and the play with "no name inscribed" that the Master of the Revels called "This second Maiden's tragedy". The other big story was that Middleton wrote about one-third of "Shakespeare's" Timon of Athens.

Persuasive stylometric studies and an array of other evidence gathered in the Middleton Companion, notably in a magisterial essay by Jackson, "Early Modern Authorship: Canons and chronologies", now provide a number of other conclusions, the implications of which should keep graduate students busy for a generation: Middleton was Dekker's junior partner in The Honest Whore Part One, but Dekker wrote Part Two alone; The Bloody Banquet is mostly Dekker's, but they were equal partners in The Roaring Girl; Middleton was sole author of The Puritan, which was falsely attributed to "W. S." when first printed (and on that basis included in the Shakespeare Third Folio); The Spanish Gypsy seems to be a revision by John Ford of an earlier script by Middleton and Rowley with some input by Dekker; The Family of Love, an intriguing satire on the "familist" sect, long attributed to Middleton, is in fact by the pirate-poet Lording Barry; and so on.

Taylor wants to have it both ways. On the one hand, Middleton is lauded as "our other Shakespeare", the only dramatist to excel in every genre – a claim that elevates his only surviving historical drama, Hengist King of Kent; or, The Mayor of Queenborough, to a status that it cannot really carry, despite the best endeavours of Grace Ioppolo in the exceptionally well-edited text that she contributes to the edition. On the other hand, Middleton is the great collaborative genius, the counterweight to Shakespeare. In terms of theatrical excellence, his best solo-written city comedies seem to me to be Michaelmas Term, A Trick To Catch the Old One (given especially sympathetic treatment by Valerie Wayne), the well-known Chaste Maid in Cheapside and the underrated Your Five Gallants. But there is little to put between them and his best comic collaborations with Rowley, A Fair Quarrel and The Old Law; or, a new way to please you (the euthanasia comedy which was played so effectively at the RSC a few years ago). The evidence of the new edition suggests that "Middleton and Rowley" ought to replace "Beaumont and Fletcher" as the most celebrated collaborative team of the age, but it is not clear to me how the "and Rowley" part of the equation fits with the image of Middleton as "our other Shakespeare".

Middleton was a great accommodator. Shakespeare, one suspects, was a difficult writing partner, and his emergence into solo authorship seems to have been bound up with the animosity he provoked in the "university wits" such as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, whose plays he may have worked over.

The idea of a partnership with Middleton seems to have emerged in the early Jacobean era, when Shakespeare was slowly retreating from the London theatre world, spending more and more time at home in Stratford, perhaps because of the plague outbreaks in the city, perhaps because of some scandal or disappointment that may be alluded to in the Sonnets. But, for whatever reason, the partnership didn't work out: Timon of Athens was a one-off and there is no evidence of it having achieved any success on stage. Only after Shakespeare's departure was Middleton allowed to reshape Macbeth and (to a more debatable degree) Measure for Measure.

In the early Jacobean years, Shakespeare also worked with George Wilkins. Taylor's team lack their usual confidence in this case. A Yorkshire Tragedy: one of the four-plays-in-one called All's One was entered in the Stationers Register in May 1608 and published soon after as having been written by "William Shakespeare". Lake and Jackson both ascribed it to Middleton, though the long opening scene is in a different, and perhaps more Shakespearean, style. The murder of two young children and wounding of his wife by Walter Calverley, the heir to the manor of Pudsey in Yorkshire, inspired not only this taut domestic tragedy, but also George Wilkins's best play, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage. Stanley Wells provides a characteristically theatre-friendly text of A Yorkshire Tragedy – which deserves to be high on the RSC revival list – but he is unable to unravel its complicated relationship with Wilkins's play, or to provide new evidence about who wrote the three lost (presumably one-act) plays that made up All's One (Shakespeare, Wilkins and another?).

Taylor proposes two main reasons why Middleton's plays have not had the continuous theatrical afterlife of Shakespeare's. One is that they were considered too salacious. Reading the new Collected Works certainly opens your eyes to colourful sexual practices and more-than-Shakespeareanly inventive bawdy wordplay – though Taylor's team of editors are distinctly patchy in the degree to which they plunder Gordon Williams's magnificent three-volume compendium of filth, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature. But Middleton's plays could have been adapted to the more refined taste of later ages, as Shakespeare's were, so this cannot be the true explanation.

There is more weight in Taylor's second hypothesis: that Middleton suffered because his plays were not collected in his lifetime or soon after his death in 1627. The existence of Folio collected works gave a peculiar advantage to Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and the Beaumont and Fletcher team. The counter argument to this would be that the plays of John Lyly and John Marston did appear in collected editions in the early 1630s, but they have been just as neglected as Middleton's. Conversely, Philip Massinger's plays were not collected, but A New Way To Pay Old Debts was revived in the Restoration and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more frequently than most of Shakespeare's comedies.

That play was actually Massinger's reworking – indeed, displacement – of Middleton's best comedy, A Trick To Catch the Old One. A New Way remained in the repertoire because Massinger's monstrous comic invention Sir Giles Overreach was almost as funny as Sir John Falstaff, a part that every star actor wanted to play. And this must be the true explanation: just as Middleton was a collaborative author and a writer of prodigious variety, just as his main purpose was to animate panoramic worlds, bustling cities, competitive law courts, corrupt royal courts, so his scripts tend to be ensemble pieces. Learning from Jonson and Marston, he created comedies that were beautifully oiled theatrical machines. He did not specialize in star vehicles, characters that take on a life of their own in the manner of Sir John and Sir Giles. His most rewarding parts are Iagos rather than Othellos: not poets who soar beyond their worlds, but entrenched master plotters such as De Flores in The Changeling and the Lady Livia in Women Beware Women. Taylor asks of Middleton's characters "Where have you people been all my life?". The answer to the question of why they have not been alive on the English stage throughout the centuries is apparent from the names in that list of his: Dampit and Plumporridge and Simplicity and Weatherwise are more in the mould of Jonsonian humours than Shakespearean individuals. They are not "people" in quite the same sense as Shakespeare's characters.

Consider the young women of comedy. Middleton offers wonderful scenarios: there is Moll Yellowhammer, the Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in love with a poor gallant but betrothed by paternal will to Sir Walter Whorehound, a philandering knight eager for her dowry; there is Jane Russell in A Fair Quarrel, courted by another young gallant whom her father deems insufficiently wealthy and getting herself pregnant following a clandestine handfasting; or another Jane, a courtesan passed off as a wealthy widow in A Trick To Catch the Old One; or Mistress Harebrain, who disguises herself as a succubus in order to torment her sexually possessive husband in A Mad World, My Masters. All would be a delight to watch on stage, and one fervently hopes that the new edition will prompt many a revival; but what these creations lack are those moments of self-discovery that characterize the Shakespearean romantic heroines that have rewarded actresses for three-and-a-half centuries. Thus Jane in A Trick To Catch the Old One:

Why, what would you wish me do, sir?
I must not overthrow my state for love.
We have too many precedents for that.
From thousands of our wealthy, undone
widows
One may derive some wit. I do confess
I loved your nephew. Nay, I did affect him,
Against the mind and liking of my friends,
Believed his promises, lay here in hope
Of flattered living and the boast of lands.
Coming to touch his wealth and state, indeed
It appears dross. I find him not the man:
Imperfect, mean, scarce furnished of his needs.
In words, fair lordships; in performance,
hovels.
Can any woman love the thing that is not?

Beautifully done, but there is never quite enough writing of this sort to fire the actress accustomed to playing Rosalind or Viola or Beatrice or Portia or Isabella.

Where Middleton does offer more than Shakespeare is in his older women's parts. They were his speciality. "He knew the rage, Madness of women crossed", observed a fellow dramatist in a dedicatory poem. Women Beware Women was registered for publication along with other female-focused plays attributed to Middleton, such as No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's; More Dissemblers Besides Women; and the lost Puritan Maid, Modest Wife and Wanton Widow. This last title nicely sums up the conventional image of a woman's life in the period: before marriage she was expected to be chaste and during it she was supposed to be submissive; once widowed she had more freedom. A widow even had a degree of financial autonomy that set her apart from daughters and wives, who in law were chattels belonging to their fathers and husbands. Widows, by contrast, could carry on their husband's business. The legal fiction was that they were just minding the shop until they remarried, but the reality was that they often controlled their own affairs for the rest of their lives. So, for instance, it was a woman, a printer's widow, Elizabeth Allde, who published several of the most popular plays of the age.

The widow, then, was the joker in the pack, the wild card who was not obliged to play by the sexual and social rules. There is a bit of fear and a bit of envy, as well as sneaking admiration, in the male writer's image of her as both wealthy and wanton. Whereas the conventional female character in the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is defined by her choice of present or prospective marriage partner, the twice-widowed Livia in Women Beware Women is a free agent. She acts instead of being acted on; she delights in setting a plot. She has the same kind of boldness as Iago or the Edmund of King Lear has. Middleton was unquestionably the great dramatist of widowhood.

His other great female parts, along with Beatrice-Joanna in The Changeling, are the Lady and the Wife in the play that is his Othello. The Master of the Revels, George Buc, referred to it as "this second maiden's tragedy", merely because he had recently licensed Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy. The late Julia Briggs aptly renames it The Lady's Tragedy, extols its virtues in an introduction that offers the best piece of writing in the entire two volumes, and edits a fascinating parallel-text edition (though it is a little confusing to read) of the sole surviving manuscript, with and without the cuts and alterations imposed by Buc's censorship and in the subsequent rehearsal process. This is a tragedy to treasure and to stage.

No one is going to question that the Middleton project is a monumental work of scholarship, but it does betray its times. Given the huge political controversy surrounding the portrayal of the Spanish in A Game at Chess, one of the first essays to which readers of the Companion will want to turn is that on censorship. What they will find is an essay arguing at great length that

"The metaphor of castration foregrounds not the literal status of censorship but its (dis)figurative status; that is, castration figures an originary (and paradoxically productive) lack rather than the loss of an originary plenitude . . . . what looks like defetishism (multiple, small differences constituting a clitoral criticism opposed to the single, big difference of a phallic criticism) from another perspective looks like fetishism masquerading as its opposite."

There is nothing wrong in old-fashioned criticism per se: Swinburne's writings on Middleton remain well worth reading a hundred years on. But this kind of thing is so old-fashioned, so locked in the critical indulgence of the late twentieth century, that it makes the work seem dated even as it comes fresh from the press.

The late-twentieth-century historical moment is also apparent in the editorial apparatus. That was the age of multiple texts and deconstructive editing, when the pseudonymous bibliographic theorist Random Cloud was arguing that no two copies of any early modern book were the same as each other, that textual instability was the primary condition of early modern print culture, and so forth. Various features of the edition try to give a sense of this: most strikingly, and irritatingly, running-heads are rendered into a state of perpetual flux (thus "THE PVRITAINE WIDDOW" on one page, "THE WIDDOW of Watling-Streete" on the next, "The Puritaine Widdow" the next, ad nauseam). Taylor wants the volume to be the Middleton First Folio, but, whereas Heminge and Condell attempted to impose uniformity on the Shakespeare canon, Taylor and his team attempt to bestow variety on the Middletonian, in accordance with both their amply demonstrated belief in their author's plenitude and their own postmodern sensibilities.

The decision may, however, prove counter-productive: will this self-consciously postmodern Middleton Folio have the impact it deserves in the absence of a pre-modern, or just a plain modern one? Taylor could, with the assistance of a co-editor and a few graduate students, have dashed out a modern-spelling edition of Middleton's complete plays in five years, winning his hero a more prominent place both in the college classroom and on the classical stage. He would probably have finished that in about 1993, the year of the World Wide Web. He would then have seen that the internet's hypertext facility provided the perfect medium for a deconstructive edition with full scholarly bells and whistles. By the mid-1990s, the Arden Shakespeare team had developed an electronic edition that made it possible to move onscreen between modern-spelling texts, facsimiles of original quartos, editorial variants, commentary notes, sources and part-books for individual roles. This is what is now needed for Middleton. It is good news that Gary Taylor's principal co-editor, John Lavagnino, is a computer expert and that they are even now at work on an electronic edition (the initial website accompanying the print edition is perfunctory in the extreme). Thomas Middleton has been monumentalized in print at the very moment when print is ceasing to be our primary medium of literary immortalization. He might just have missed the boat again.

Thomas Middleton
THE COLLECTED WORKS
Edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino
2,018pp. Oxford University Press. £85 (US $170).
978 0 19 818569 7

Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, editors
THOMAS MIDDLETON AND EARLY MODERN TEXTUAL CULTURE
A companion to the collected works
1,184pp. Oxford University Press. £100 (US $200).
978 0 19 818570 3.
Two-volume set. £150 (US $299.95).
978 0 19 922588 0



Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature at the University of Warwick. His books include The Genius of Shakespeare, 1997.



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David Jones: the Poet’s Place and the Sleeping Lord

David Jones: the Poet's Place and the Sleeping Lord


by Brad N. Haas




 

      The poet in our current time is complacent, maintaining an air of respectability or is the creator of outrageous manifestos -- in either case is benign. In times past poets were leaders and creators of reality; they were respected and entrusted with the keeping of cultural inheritance. Somehow this has changed, and poets now are non-entities for the most part; sure, they are politely applauded by small audiences, they sell a few volumes; they put their private lives on display to make others feel human. But this is all 'culture', a word which now seems to mean, not the whole of society, but entertainment for the few -- dividends received for living in a 'civilized' society. Furthermore, poets generally believe that they are effective, believe they make an impact on society; and who is responsible for this misconception is a great mystery -- some influence outside the poetic community, or worse yet, the poets themselves -- an important question that will not be answered here. This, for us, is the important fact: the poet has somehow been marginalized, and there is no sense that our society would die without the presence of poetry or poets. Perhaps this is the gravest sign of cultural coma.

 

     Better than most poets of this century, David Jones (1895-1974) understands the predicament of poets. He does not claim to have solutions, but does make observations which are informed and seldom reductive. His work blends anxiety and hope -- anxiety over the seeming steady decline of civilization, and hope in cultural, even spiritual, redemption. Jones realizes that the poet's place in society is minimal, yet despite this realization holds the post of poet as if it is the thread of societal fabric, and succeeds in creating a functioning modern mythology.

 

     It might be possible to paraphrase David Jones's conception of the role of the poet in society, but impossible to do a better job than he does himself. Like Pound and Zukofsky, Jones is his own best explicator:

 

I am in no sense a scholar, but an artist, and it is paramount for any artist that he should use whatever happens to be to hand. For artists depend on the immediate and the contactual and their apperception must have a 'now-ness' about it. But, in our present megalopolitan technocracy the artist must still remain a 'rememberer' (part of the official bardic function in earlier phases of society). But in the totally changed and rapidly changing circumstances of today this ancient function takes on a peculiar significance. For now the artist becomes, willy-nilly, a sort of Boethius, who has been nicknamed 'the Bridge', because he carried forward into an altogether metamorphosed world certain of the fading oracles which had sustained antiquity. My view is that all artists, whether they know it or not, whether they would repudiate the notion or not, are in fact 'showers forth' of things which tend to be impoverished, or misconceived, or altogether lost or wilfully set aside in the preoccupations of our present intense technological phase, but which, none the less, belong to man.

     So that when asked to what end does my work proceed I can do no more than answer in the most tentative and hesitant fashion imaginable, thus: Perhaps it is in the maintenance of some sort of single plank in some sort of bridge.

     [David Jones, in a statement to the Bollingen Foundation, 1959] (DG 1978 17)

 

Jones is a poet of conservation and redemption. The office of poet, to his mind, is that of 'rememberer'. But what is Jones intent on remembering? What is a bridge (or in his case a plank) to the past needed for? The statement above seems to suggest this: our current civilization has problems, problems which we are not able to clearly understand, let alone remedy. Jones sees possible explanations, if not solutions, in the juxtaposition of the present and the past. But, as he has said, the present has been disconnected from the past, and therefore from the elements of the past which would plaster some of the current fissures. The question then, for David Jones as a poet, is how to make the past valid for the present. A few statements from 'On the Difficulties of One Writer of Welsh Affinities Whose Language is English' (circa 1952) might elucidate the complexity of this task:

 

All works, whether of written poetry or of the visual arts, but especially of written poetry, depend to some extent upon the images used being drawn from the deposits of a common tradition, by virtue of which their validity is to be recognized by reader or beholder. True, the beauty of form and line can be appreciated without this common background, but, especially in the case of written poetry, if the allusions are outside the comprehension of the reader or listener, clearly a sense of what is said is immeasurably blunted. [...] It is the materia that presents the main difficulty. But it is precisely from the deep materia, with the asides and allusions and implications deriving from a virtually lost tradition, that the poet may wish to draw. [...] When I write these names in my work I try to make them come naturally, because by accident I've for long been interested in what they signify in English translations of Welsh stuff, but I realize that they mean virtually nothing to the reader. That is why I thought it necessary to append all those notes to In Parenthesis and The Anathemata. But I'm becoming more and more doubtful as to the validity of this way of carrying on. It's not just names or being able to pronounce them: it involves a whole complex of associations. So far classical allusions and biblical ones and (in my case) liturgical ones still more or less work, but only more or less, because the whole of the past, as far as I can make out, is down the drain. The civilizational change in which we live has occasioned this. For a writer who relies on this materia for his stuff this is a bit of a facer. People think one is being deliberately obscure or affected, but the fact is that one 'thinks' in those obsolete or becoming obsolete terms. This all sounds as though I thought that poetry could not be written (in English or Welsh or double Dutch or what will you) without this reference back. I don't think that at all; I mean only that for me it gets difficult if people don't know what Aphrodite, let alone Rhiannon, signifies. (DG 1978 30-34)

 

This was written some forty-five years ago, when one might have assumed that the reader of poetry would know classical, biblical, and liturgical allusions. How prophetic it seems today when one cannot assume anything of the reader except ignorance -- this is not laying blame on individuals or institutions or ideologies -- merely confirming what David Jones foresaw. The discontinuance of tradition and the loss of common cultural denominators have certainly not helped Jones's situation, which is one of popular neglect. It is interesting that he knows this will happen, yet persists in his writing. But popularity is not his main goal; Jones is more concerned with making his work cohere in spite of the resistance to his project caused by the 'civilizational' problems.

 

     Jones attempts cohesion by layering images, each with its own cultural associations, so that the result is a multi-dimensional expression. The density of his poetry is due to this process; much like Finnegans Wake, Jones's poetry 'shows forth' several things at once. As an example of this process we will investigate the image of the sleeping lord.

 

     The concept of the sleeping hero, common among many cultures, is a belief that some great leader will come again to help a culture or a nation when it is in need. For example, British legend says King Arthur will return to save the British people should they be in peril. Christ himself is a type of sleeping lord, a messiah who will return and purge the world of evil. Furthermore, the sleeping lord, upon his return, will usher in a new 'golden age', very similar to his previous mythical reign (i.e. Christian paradise is similar in conception to the Garden of Eden). Jones utilizes the sleeping lord image in every volume of his poetry.

     In Parenthesis (1937) is its own work. After that, however, everything that Jones writes is conceived as a whole, even though Jones cleaved bits to be published separately. While used to a different effect, the sleeping lord image in In Parenthesis provides a fine backdrop for its use in Jones's later work. In Parenthesis is a narrative of soldiers travelling to and fighting at the front during WWI. More than that, it is the story of sacrifice, of scapegoats that must die to cleanse society. For any scapegoat to be effective it must be proven worthy and pure. Throughout In Parenthesis Jones evokes 'noble' images from the past. Page 51 describes soldiers sleeping at the front in WWI:

 

his mess-mates sleeping like long-barrow sleepers, their

dark arms at reach.

Spell-sleepers, thrown about anyhow under the night.

And this one's bright brow turned against your boot leather,

tranquil as a fer sidhe sleeper, under fairy tumuli, fair as

Mac Og sleeping. (IP 1961 51)

 

The note on this passage reads in part:

 

In this passage I had in mind the persistent Celtic theme of armed sleepers under the mounds, whether they be the fer sidhe or the great Mac Og of Ireland, or Arthur sleeping in Craig-u-Ddinas or in Avalon or among the Eildons in Roxburghshire; or Owen of the Red Hand, or the Sleepers of Cumberland. Plutarch says of our islands: 'An Island in which Cronos is imprisoned with Briareus keeping guard over him as he sleeps; for as they put it, sleep is the bond of Cronos. They add that around him are many deities, his henchmen and attendants'. (IP 1961 198-99)

Cronos, Arthur and his knights, Mac Og, and Owen of the Red Hand are juxtaposed with the common soldiers. As Britons, the soldiers are descendants of these typical heros, and as such are noble and worthy of sacrifice. Further, they are coming to the aid of their island in a time of crisis, and in doing so perform the act of sleeping lords. This particular passage counterpoints the sleeping soldiers, their 'dark arms' or rifles nearby, with any number of mythical figures associated with the 'sleeping lord' as mentioned in the note.

 

     The sleeping lords mentioned in the notation of In Parenthesis are found again in Jones's next book, The Anathemata (1952):

 

All the efficacious asylums

in Wallia vel in Marchia Walliae,

                    ogofau of, that cavern for

                    Cronos, Owain, Arthur. (A 1952 55)

 

The notes translate 'in Wallia vel in Marchia Walliae' as 'in Wales or in the March of Wales' and 'ogofau' as 'caves.' These caves in Wales are the 'efficacious asylums' of Cronos, Owain, and Arthur, who 'have been assimilated into this tradition of a sleeping hero who shall come again' (A 1952 54n.). 'Efficacious' is a key word, meaning 'capable of producing a desirable effect'; in this case there seems to be hope placed in the sleeping lord, but hope of what? What is the 'desired effect'; what is the task of the sleeping lord?

 

     To answer this we must look at two poems: 'The Hunt' and 'The Sleeping Lord'. These two poems are in fact fragments of a larger work that Jones was never able to finish, published posthumously as The Roman Quarry (1981). Jones separated these fragments from the larger work and published them in a book titled The Sleeping Lord and other fragments (1974). In both The Roman Quarry and The Sleeping Lord volumes, 'The Hunt' is placed just before 'The Sleeping Lord'. As a preface, 'The Hunt' may provide some reason why the lord is sleeping in the first place.

 

     'The Hunt', as Jones describes in a note to the text, is "based on the native Welsh early medieval prose-tale, 'Culhwch ac Olwen', in which the predominant theme becomes the great hunt across the whole of southern Wales of the boar Trwyth by all the war-bands of the Island led by Arthur" (SL 1974 69). This particular tale is exemplary of Jones's interests. It is one of a group known as The Mabinogion, the only surviving version of Welsh myth. 'Culhwch ac Olwen' is, as T.W. Rolleston put it, "the only genuine Welsh Arthurian story we possess" (Rolleston 1986 343). Jones is half Welsh and half English; his Welsh heritage is of utmost importance, as is the reconciling of his two halves. The reconciliation is to be achieved by some figure who is held in common by both the English and the Welsh. In this instance, it is Arthur: "What makes the Arthurian thing important to the Welsh is that there is no other tradition at all equally the common property of all the inhabitants of Britain (at all events those south of the Antonine Wall), and the Welsh, however separatist by historical, racial and geographical accidents, are devoted to the unity of this island" (E&A 1959 216). The selection of this tale is then of extreme importance: it is the vital link, as the 'only genuine Welsh Arthurian story', that connects the Welsh to the English; it is a 'cultural deposit', as Jones would say, a common denominator that may be forgotten, but is still valid for those who 'remember'.

 

     In 'The Hunt', with a careful choice of words, and a certain amount of ambiguity, Jones is able to show us several things at once. As Jones says in the note, the war-bands of the island, led by Arthur, are hunting the boar Twrch Trwyth to retrieve (as one of the feats to win Olwen as a wife for Culhwch) a comb resting between his ears. Although the tale is of the quest for Olwen by Culhwch, the hunting of Twrch Trwyth is the climactic focus. Though Jones has told us what he is describing, there are times when a figure other than Arthur emerges:

 

                              and ruby petal-points counter

the countless points of his wounds

          and from his lifted cranium where the priced tresses dragged

with sweat stray his straight brow-furrows under the twisted

diadem

                              to the numbered bones

of his scarred feet [...]

                              he rode

with the trophies of the woods

                              upon him

who rode

                              for the healing of the woods

and because of the hog. [...]

                              the speckled lord of Prydain

in his twice-embroidered coat

                              the bleeding man in green

and if through the trellis of green

                              and between the rents of the needlework

the whiteness of his body shone

                              so did his dark wounds glisten. (SL 1974 67-68)

 

The 'ruby petal-points' are drops of blood seeping from 'the countless points of his wounds'; the 'twisted diadem' is reminiscent of the crown of thorns, the 'scarred feet' marred by nails. 'Wounds glisten' through the holes in his garments. And he rides with these 'trophies of the woods upon him ... for the healing of the woods / and because of the hog.' Arthur seems more saintly than usual, most god-like; he is as much Christ as he is Arthur. "Whatever tangle of myth is in this obscure material it is evident that here as in the romances, and as historical figure, Arthur is the conveyer of order, even to the confines of chaos; he is redeemer, in the strict sense of the word" (E&A 1959 237).

 

     What chaos is Arthur ordering? In 'The Hunt', and perhaps in the Culhwch tale itself, the actual chaos is the boar Trwyth, who leads Arthur on a chase across the south of Wales, to do, as Charles Squire has put it, "all the harm he could there" (Squire 1975 352). Jones has labeled 'The Hunt' an "incomplete attempt" (SL 1974 69n.), and in it we do not see the harm caused by Trwyth. But in the poem following it, 'The Sleeping Lord', there is record of the boar's damage:

 

It is the Boar Trwyth

                              that has pierced through

the stout-fibred living wood

                              that bears the sacral bough of gold.

 

          It is the hog that has ravaged the fair onnen and the hornbeam and the Queen of the Woods. It is the hog that has tusk-riven the tendoned roots of the trees of the llwyn whereby are the tallest with the least levelled low and lie up-so-down. (SL 1974 89-90)

 

By the end of the hunt, the lord has not slain the boar, but has driven him off for the meantime, at a cost: the land is laid 'waste'; it has been badly damaged. Furthermore, the lord is spent -- he is ready for sleep. He has kept chaos at bay, but now leaves the depleted land to fend for itself: 'The Hunt' ends and 'The Sleeping Lord' begins, ushering in a period of nighttime. As the night grows darker, and memory of the sleeping lord becomes confused in layers of time and words, conviction that the lord will return reverts to hopeful inquiry.

 

And is his bed wide

                              is his bed deep on the folded strata

is his bed long

                              where is his bed and

                              where has he lain him. (SL 1974 70-71)

'The Sleeping Lord' works as an extended metaphor. The resting place of the lord is described in terms of geography -- he seems to be resting on the land:

Is the tump by Honddu

                              his lifted bolster?

                              does a gritstone outcrop

incommode him?

                              does a deep syncline

                              sag beneath him?

or does his dinted thorax rest

                              where the contorted heights

                              themselves rest

on a lateral pressured anticline?

Does his russet-hued mattress

                              does his rug of shaly grey

ease at all for his royal dorsals

                              for faulted under-bedding. (SL 1974 71-72)

 

After the initial description of his resting place the poem introduces three characters -- the 'henchmen' of the sleeping lord, as mentioned in the note from In Parenthesis. The three attendants in 'The Sleeping Lord' are the 'Foot-Holder', the 'Candle Bearer', and the 'Priest of the Household'. Jones tells us, in a note to an earlier version of the poem, "The office of foot-holder was to hold in his lap and to keep warm the king's feet when he sat at meat in the hall, and to keep the king from mishap during the mead-drinking" (RQ 1981 28). The foot-holder is needed when the lord is in a state of sedation, especially when the lord is drunk -- in other words, not able to care for himself, let alone anything else (one thinks of the unfortunate fights as a result of drinking mead in Beowulf). Indeed, the poem suggests the foot-holder not only attends, but protects his lord:

 

In what deep vale

                              does this fidell official

ward this lord's Achilles' heel? (SL 1974 72)

 

The allusion to the fatal flaw, the Achilles heel, complicates the image: the sleeping lord has the strength to redeem the land, yet must himself, despite the great power he supposedly possesses, be protected at some menial position.

 

     It is the Candle-Bearer's office to protect the flame of the candle, to bring light wherever his lord might be. He is seen to "be standing / to hold and ward /against the rising valley-wynt [wind] / his iron-spiked guttering light" (SL 1974 74). His job becomes more difficult as "the wind-gusts do not slacken / but buffet stronger and more chill / as the dusk deepens" (ibid). And it becomes more difficult still: "Over the whole terrain / and the denizens of the terrain / the darking pall falls / and the chill wind rises higher" (SL 1974 75). We picture the candle-bearer struggling to shield the flame. Jones chooses words with negative connotations; the flame is 'guttering', burning low or flickering, not steady. The winds 'buffet', attack the flame, and the wind is not only strong, but 'chill'. As the wind grows, so does the night; the 'dusk deepens', then the 'darking pall falls'. A pall is a covering for a coffin, often purple or black. It can also mean a covering that obscures, or a gloomy atmosphere. It is all the more important, in this dark, obscuring, gloomy atmosphere that the candle remain lit -- it is the sole source of light, small as it is, combatting total darkness.

 

     It is the priest's function to serve as spiritual guide, to remember the source of salvation: Mary and her Son, Christ:

 

... his main concern was with Yr Efengyl Lan [The Holy Gospel] and he liked to dwell on the thought that the word efengyl (owing, he supposed, to the kiss given at that part of the Oblation called the pax) could, in the tongue of his countrymen, mean a kiss. For what, after all, is the Hagion Evangelion if not the salutation or kiss of the eternally begotten Logos? And how could that salutation have been possible but for the pliancy of Mary & her fiat mihi? Which is why Irenaeus had written that this puella, Mair Wenfydedig [Blessed Mary], was 'constituted the cause of our salvation'. (SL 1974 83)

 

But the thoughts of this priest wander further:

 

And when he considered the four-fold account in the books of the quattor evangelia [four books of the Holy Gospel] he thought what are these if not a kind of Pedair Cainc y Mabinogi sanctaidd [a sacred version of the four branches of the Mabinogi]? in that they proclaim the true mabinogi of the Maban [man-child] the Pantocrator and of the veritable mother of anxiety, the Rhiannon who is indeed the ever glorious Theotokos yet Queen of Sorrows and gladius pierced -- what better, he thinks, than that this four-fold marvel-tale should be called The Tale of the Kiss of the Son of Mair [Mary]? (SL 1974 84)

 

Just as we have seen Jones use Arthur as a link between the Welsh and the English (both as cultures and as the two halves of his lineage), the Priest of the Household is able to show a bond between the secular and the sacred mythologies that inform Jones and his surrounding culture: the so-called Mabinogion (more correctly, the Four Branches of the Mabinogi) has four branches, as there are four gospels in the New Testament. Further, the translation of 'mabinogi' is often 'tales of the youth' since the meaning of 'maban', the diminutive of 'mab' (man), is 'son' or 'youth' (Gantz 1976 31). It has been suggested that the life of the Welsh character Pryderi, which now forms one branch, was the tale -- thus the Four Branches would have been, at one time, the story of Pryderi as the Four Gospels are the story of Jesus. Jones is obviously familiar with this, at least in part, referring to the 'true mabinogi of the Maban', or the 'tales of the youth of the Son of Man [Christ]'. The parallel is even more convincing if we know that Pryderi is the son of Rhiannon. Rhiannon was caused great sorrow due to the loss of her son, who was kidnapped, eventually to return and become the lord of Dyfed, the southwestern kingdom of Wales. Mary and Rhiannon are mothers of kings and redeemers; Jesus and Pryderi are sons and redeemers whose stories are told in four parts each. In this comparison there is hope, for to complete the pattern Christ must return, as Pryderi already has, once again to be lord. The Priest then is not only the spiritual guide; in forging these comparisons he 'brings forth' the promise that the sleeping lord will return.

 

     The three attendants of the sleeping lord fulfill their offices: the Foot-Holder protects from 'mishap'; the Candle-bearer protects his tiny light against total darkness; the Priest of the Household preserves the memory of hope. Without any one of these all would fall into chaos. As agents of the sleeping lord, they are the slender host keeping the fragile structures intact until the lord wakes. We see how close things are to falling apart, yet we also sense that this force, however small, is faithful; but it also begs the question: how strong can faith be?

 

     The three attendants dealt with, the poem returns to meditating on the sleeping lord. The beginning of the poem presents questions as to where the lord is sleeping: "And is his bed wide / is his bed deep on the folded strata"? But by the end of the poem a gradual shift occurs:

 

Do the small black horses

                                        grass on the hunch of his shoulders?

are the hills his couch

                                        or is he the couchant hills?

Are the slumbering valleys

                                        him in slumber

                                        are the still undulations

the still limbs of him sleeping?

Is the configuration of the land

                                        the furrowed body of the lord

are the scarred ridges

                                        his dented greaves

do the trickling gullies

                                        yet drain his hog-wounds?

Does the land wait the sleeping lord

                                        or is the wasted land

that very lord who sleeps? (SL 1974 96)

 

The land itself, once seen as a possible bed, is now possibly the sleeping lord himself: "are the hills his couch / or is he the couchant hills?" When the question is asked, "do the trickling gullies / yet drain his hog-wounds?", it is wondered, 'How long is his recuperation? When, if ever, will he be able to defend against chaos and restore order?' And if the sleeping lord is the 'wasted' land, how can the land in need of redemption redeem itself?

 

     The romanticism of the poems is tempered with pessimism: Jones wants to be hopeful, but the modern era, for Jones, seems intent to reject redemption. In a large fragment, 'The Roman Quarry', a Roman legionary reflecting on his own time prophesies ours: "O man, this is but a beginning -- we, who reckon we suffer so late in urbs-time, who come late in time, when times have gone to the bad, are but at the initiation days of megalopolitan time -- Caesar is but a pallid prototype of what shall be, and what is shall pale for what is to come" (RQ 1981 42). This statement forces the consideration of the inherent flaws and gradual decay of Imperial Rome -- wasted and unable redeem itself; likewise, in 'The Sleeping Lord', we see our own situation, but cannot foresee our fate -- are we a second Rome? or will the sleeping lord wake? By ending 'The Sleeping Lord' in a series of questions, Jones avoids commitment to a view of the future -- he becomes, not a prophet, but a poet of possibilities.

 

     Elizabeth Ward, in her study David Jones: Mythmaker (finding its place here as the only in-depth work on Jones that is ultimately negative) makes this observation: "... I have stressed the almost Manichean simplicity of David Jones's ideological convictions, arguing that the vaunted obscurity of his poetry, bristling as it is with syntactic and allusive difficulty, is more accidental than substantial, disguising an inner transparency of meaning..." (Ward 1983 206). Ward has written a well-researched and compellingly argued book, but has read the evidence in a way that does not coincide with my reading of Jones. She sees Jones's diction as hollow artifice, unnecessarily complex ornament for the relatively elementary under-thoughts. What Ward calls 'vaunted obscurity' and 'allusive difficulty' and 'accidental' I would call 'universal' and 'substantial'. Jones does start with elementary ideas, not in the sense of 'easy', but in the sense of 'essential'. He then builds layer upon layer an edifice of words which is able, if the reader is knowledgeable enough, to encompass the complexities of the situation, make the connections between cultures and times. Where Ward wants to see the complex made simple, Jones shows the seemingly simple in all its complexity. Look again at the reference to the sleeping lord from The Anathemata:

 

All the efficacious asylums

in Wallia vel in Marchia Walliae,

                    ogofau of, that cavern for

                    Cronos, Owain, Arthur. (A 1952 55)

 

In this one small section Jones is able to connect three cultures: Imperial Roman (Cronos, Saturn to the Romans, god of the golden age), pagan Welsh (Owain), and Anglo-Christian (Arthur). All three cultures are bonded in a uniform desire, to redeem the land and re-institute order. As he said of his entire corpus, "I have this feeling of wanting to include 'everything'; 'the whole' in such works as I have tried to make [...] I mean the entirety of totality in a little place or space" (LTF 1980 80-1). Hopefully this paper, in its focus on a single albeit seminal image, has shown Jones's ability to do this.

 

     And yet, it seems futile to judge Jones by any standard other than his own. In 'The Myth of Arthur' (1942) Jones defines true myth:

 

To conserve, to develop, to bring together, to make significant for the present what the past holds, without dilution or any deleting, but rather by understanding and transubstantiating the material, this is the function of genuine myth, neither pedantic nor popularizing, not indifferent to scholarship, nor antiquarian, but saying always: 'of these thou hast given me have I lost none'. (E&A 1959 243)

The density of Jones's work, his attention to detail, never letting a connection disappear, is wholly admirable. It is true that he never 'popularized' his myth, but can anything worthwhile be popularized without some dilution? And though he deals with the ancient past, he is in no way 'antiquarian'; how could he be, someone who is so concerned 'to make significant for the present what the past holds'? He utilizes the mythic material in its own context, yet also lifts it and places it in the context of the modern age, and the symbols are shown to be relevant for both times. Perhaps the most accurate description of Jones's accomplishment is his own statement on James Joyce in the essay, 'The Dying Gaul':

 

[James Joyce is] the most creative literary genius of this century, using English as the lingua franca of a megalopolitan civilization, [who has] developed an art-form showing an essential Celticity as intricate, complex, flexible, exact and abstract as anything from the visual arts of La Tene or Kells or from the aural intricacies of medieval Welsh metric, an art-form in which the Celtic demands with regard to place, site, identity, are a hundred-fold fulfilled. (DG 1978 58)

 

To praise the strengths of Joyce -- Celtic intricacy, complexity, universality, ties to culture and place -- is to acknowledge the strengths of Jones. If one were to point to differences, it may be that Jones better understood the 'civilizational situation' in which he found himself; yet 'knowing' in no way guarantees, and may even impinge upon, the 'making' of sublime art.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary

(A 1952)          Jones, David. The Anathemata. London: Faber, 1952. Reprinted,

                         with corrections, 1955.

(DG 1978)        ____________ The Dying Gaul and other writings. London: Faber,

                         1978.

(E&A 1959)      ____________ Epoch and Artist. London: Faber, 1959.

(IP 1961)          ____________ In Parenthesis. New York: Chilmark Press, 1961.

                         (originally printed 1937 by Faber).

(LTF 1980)       ____________ Letters to a friend. Swansea: Triskele Books, 1980.

(RQ 1981)         ____________ The Roman quarry, and other sequences. New York:

                          Sheep Meadow Press, c1981.

(SL 1974)         ____________ The Sleeping Lord and other Fragments. London:

                         Faber, 1974.

Secondary

(Gantz 1976)          Gantz, Jeffrey, trans. The Mabinogion. London: Penguin,                                  1976.

(Rolleston 1986)     Rolleston, T.W. Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race. New

                                 York: Schocken Books, 1986. (reprint of the 1911 edition).

(Squire 1975)          Squire, Charles. Celtic Myth and Legend. Hollywood, CA:

                                 Newcastle Publishing Co., 1975. (reprint of 1905 edition,

                                 under the title, The Mythology of the British Isles).

(Ward 1983)            Ward, Elizabeth. David Jones: Mythmaker. Manchester:

                                 Manchester University Press, 1983.

 

http://www.flashpointmag.com/davidjon.htm




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W. H. Auden: Adam as a Welshman

W. H. Auden: Adam as a Welshman




 
The New York Review of Books: Volume 1, Number 1 · February 1, 1963



An excellent review by Auden to inaugurate the first issue of The New York Review of Books. A classic article about a classic poem. bustill


Anathemata by David Jones

 

Chilmark Press


Anathemata might be described as an epic about the two Adams. Perhaps it may help the reader to approach what is, frankly, a very difficult poem, if he will imagine, as he reads it, that he is sitting in a Roman Catholic church while Mass is being celebrated. What is going on at the altar starts a train of thoughts and memories, his mind goes wool-gathering, and he forgets where he is, until some sound or sight recalls him to a consciousness of where he is; this in its turn starts a new train of thought, and so on. What the priest is doing in the middle of the twentieth century—he does it every day in exactly the same manner, and for many centuries it has always and everywhere been repeated thus—he does in anamnesis of something which only happened once, and will never happen again.

during the reign of the Emperor

Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar

voted the tribune's powers for the

first time twenty-five years since; his fourth term consul

nine years gone.

 

In Jerusalem

 

Under the fifth procurator of Judea

in the third or fourth severe April

of the ten, sharp Aprils of his office.

On Ariel mountain


The "creatures" of the rite are bread and wine, the existence of which presuppose both a nonhuman nature which produces wheat and grapes, and a human culture which by thought and labor is able to convert these natural products into human artifacts. With these symbolic signs he reenacts or represents the sacrifice on the cross of Christ, the Second Adam, for the redemption of the First Adam, that is to say, all mankind, whether dead, living or unborn. As a person who can say "I," every human being, however he may be classifiable biologically and culturally, is unique—no one like him has ever existed before or will again—and, in consequence, every human being is Adam, an incarnation of all mankind. This unique "I" can never be the topic of speech; we can only communicate with each other about objects and events of this or that class. Yet, whenever a man's speech is authentic, the way in which he speaks of such objects and events is uniquely his so that, in order to understand him, we have to translate what he says into our own unique speech, which, like his, consists, one might say, exclusively of Proper Nouns.


The difficulty of such translation which is implicit in all personal communication, above all in poetry, is manifest in Anathemata in an unusually severe way. It would be interesting to make a critical comparison of Mr. David Jones and M. St. John Perse, whose poems are also epics about the First Adam (though not about the Second). If, and this is a big If, the reader has an absolute command of the French language, M. St. John Perse's poetry seems much easier to grasp because it contains no Proper Nouns. Particularity and concreteness are there in plenty, but it is largely a particularity of action and function; one thinks of the long catalogs of curious human occupations, prefaced by the rubric "he who." But these human actions do not occur in any particular place or time; in M. St. John Perse's poetic universe there are neither calendars nor atlases. In Mr. Jones' poetic universe, on the other hand, Proper Nouns (all foreign words partake of the nature of Proper Nouns), calendars, and atlases are the most conspicuous features, and one must admit that without the copious notes which Mr. Jones provides, it is unlikely that anyone except the author would be able fully to understand the poem. I myself have read it many times since it first appeared ten years ago and there are still many passages which I do not "get." In his defense, however, one must point out that M. St. John Perse's picture of humanity is necessarily, by its timelessness and placelessness, lacking in a sense of human motive and purpose; his Adam has no history, and it is Adam's history in which Mr. Jones is most interested.

The Adam of Anathemata is a man old enough to have fought in the First World War, a Catholic convert, interested in the arts (Mr. Jones is a painter as well as a writer), archaeology, mythology, and liturgics, to whom as a child Malory and the Mabinogian obviously meant much, and on whose writing the most clearly distinguished influence has been James Joyce. The self he has inherited from his parents and ancestors is a member of a number of concentric and overlapping classes, to each of which the various sections of his poem are, roughly speaking, dedicated.

Thus the Opening section, "Rite and Fore-Time," is mainly concerned with himself as a member of the human species, Earth's "adaptable, rational, elect and plucked-out otherling" who probably first appeared during the Tertiary Period:

Before the drift was over the lime-face.

Sometime between the final and the penultimate débâcle. (Already Arcturus deploys his reconnoitering

chills in greater strength: soon his last Putsch on any scale.)

Before this all but proto-historic transmogrification of the

land-face.

Just before they rigged the half-lit stage for dim-eyed Clio to step

with some small confidence the measures of her brief and lachrymal pavan.

and can be distinguished from his nearest co-laterals by certain characteristics such as speech, the use of tools, and sacred cults.

"Middle-Sea and Lear-sea" is concerned with himself as a Western European who is what he is because of certain historical events peculiar to Western Europe, such as the civilization of Crete and the Doric Invasions,

One thousand two hundred years since the Dorian jarls

rolled up the map of Arcady and the transmontane storm- groups

fractured the archaic pattern   From the tomb of the strife-years the

new-born shapes begin already to look uncommonly like the brats of

mother Europa.We begin already to discern our own.

Are the proto-forms already ours?

Is that the West-wind on our cheek-bones?

 

But it's early—very grey and early in our morning and most

irradiance is yet reflected from far-side Our sea, the Nile

moon still shines on the Hittite creatures and Crete still

shows the Argives how.

and, of course, the establishment of the Roman Empire, which brought the whole Mediterranean area under one rule.

at the intersected place he caused our sacred commerce to be. Why

yes—west he took himself off, on the base-line he traced and named when he traced it: decumanus. West-turn from his kardo I saw him go, over his right transversus. From to rear of him I discerned his marcher's lurch—I'd breath to see that.West-star, hers and all! brighting the hooped turn of his scapular-plates enough

to show his pelvic sway and the hunch on his robber's

shoulders. Though he was of the Clarissimi his aquila over

me was robbery

'T's a great robbery—is empire.

Then he is an inhabitant of the British Isles and a Londoner of Welsh stock whose culture and language would not be what they are but for the peculiar history of Britain, which was not Romanised until after the beginning of the Christian era and then never completely, and where the original Celtic population was driven into the Welsh mountains or submerged under successive waves of Teutonic invaders, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans.

From the fora

to the forests.

Out from gens Romulum

   into the Weal-kin

dinas-man gone aethwlad

cives gone wold-men

from Lindum to London

bridges broken down.

There is a great deal of imagery in the poem derived from ships and seafaring. It was seafaring merchants in search of tin who first brought the remote island of Britain to the attention of the civilized Mediterranean. Britain was destined to become a great maritime power and London one of the great ports of the world. It is only natural, therefore, that such a seafaring people should use nautical imagery as symbols for the historical adventure of mankind. As Mr. Jones says in one of his notes:

What is pleaded in the Mass is precisely the argosy or voyage of the Redeemer, consisting of his entire sufferings and his death, his conquest of hades, his resurrection and his return in triumph to heaven. It is this that is offered to the Trinity on behalf of us argonauts and of the whole argosy of mankind, and, in some sense, of all sentient being, and, perhaps, of insentient too.

Of the communication problems which this kind of poetry presents, Mr. Jones is very well aware and he has stated them in his preface much better than I could.

The poet may feel something with regard to Penda the Mercian and nothing with regard to Darius the Mede. In itself that is a limitation, it might be regarded as a disproportion; no matter, there is no help—he must work within the limits of his love. There must be no mugging-up, no "ought to know" or "try to feel"; for only what is actually loved and known can be seen sub specie aeternitati. The nurse herself is adamant about this: she is indifferent to what the poet may wish to feel, she cares only for what he in fact feels.

The words "May they rest in peace" and the words "Whosoever will" might by some feat of artistry, be so juxtaposed within a context as not only to translate the words "Requiescat in pace" and "Quicunque vult," but to evoke the exact historic over-tones and under-tones of those Latin words. But should some writer find himself unable by whatever ingenuity of formal arrangement or of contextual allusion to achieve this identity of content and identity of evocation, while changing the language, then he would have no alternative but to use the original form…. It is not a question of "translation" or even of "finding an equivalent word." It is something much more complex. "Tsar" will mean one thing and "Caesar" another to the end of time.

The artist deals wholly in signs. His signs must be valid, that is, valid for him and, normally, for the culture that has made him. But there is a time factor affecting these signs. If a requisite now-ness is not present, the sign, valid in itself, is apt to suffer a kind of invalidation. This presents most complicated problems to the artist working outside a reasonably static culture-phase…. It may be that the kind of thing I have been trying to make is no longer makeable in the kind of way in which I have tried to make it.

It is certainly true that no reader is going to be able to make Mr. Jones's "now-ness" his own without taking a great deal of trouble and many rereadings of Anathemata, and, if he says: "I'm sorry, Mr. Jones is asking too much. I have neither the time nor the patience which he seems to expect me to bring to his poem," I do not know what argument one could use to convince him otherwise. I can only state my personal experience, namely, that I have found the time and trouble I have taken with Anathemata infinitely rewarding.

 

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13747

 






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Social Density: Facebook Can Be Fun, But It's Also Useful

Facebook Can Be Fun, But It's Also Useful


Mathew Ingram argues that Facebook is about fun, and that it's not that hard to turn a profit on a platform that's oriented around fun and games. He's certainly right that fun and business aren't incompatible, but I think it's a mistake to discount how useful it can be. In my experience the most useful features are not the add-on applications but the basic features built into Facebook itself. These features aren't as glamorous, but I think they're enough to ensure Facebook won't prove to be a fad like Friendster did

First there's Facebook's groups feature. Twenty years ago, people who wanted to organize to achieve a common goal—whether it was supporting a political candidate, protesting a company's bad customer service, or finding other fans of a favorite TV show—frequently didn't have a cost-effective way to do it. The phone and email were just too cumbersome and expensive. Even ten years ago, group formation required setting up a website or creating a mailing list, something that still required a non-trivial amount of work and often had limited functionality. In contrast, groups on Facebook are incredibly easy to create and maintain and they have a ton of useful features. The modest improvements in ease of use aren't amazing from a technical perspective, but they've made a big difference in peoples' ability to quickly form groups and find people with shared interests or goals.

Second, the photos feature on Facebook is incredibly useful. Of course, sites like Flickr have done photo sharing for years. But having its photo application embedded in a broader social network gives Facebook key advantages that its competitors can't match. If my friends have Flickr accounts, I don't know about it, but I can easily see which of my friends have Facebook pictures. The pre-existing social network also allows Facebook users to mark themselves or their friends in photos, which causes them to show up in their friends' photo albums.

Finally, I've been noticing that Facebook is beginning to displace Evite as the preferred vehicle for party invitations among my friends. This is another case where having a pre-existing social network is a huge advantage. With Facebook, I can create my guest list simply by running through the list of friends and checking the ones I want to invite. With Evite, in contrast, I have to dig up the email addresses of all the people I want to invite. And many people are already visiting Facebook regularly, so it's less annoying to RSVP there than on a site that only does party invitations. Adding an invitation feature to a site people already use creates a lot less friction than asking them to sign up for a totally separate invitations site.

All of which illustrates a point Clay Shirky has made: really interesting social changes are the result not of new technology, per se, but of social density: a networking site that 90 percent of your friends use is vastly more useful than a site that 10 percent of your friends use. Very little of Facebook's functionality is new from a technical perspective, but Facebook (and MySpace) are the first sites to reach a point where almost everyone in certain social groups use them. And that fact dramatically increases their value. I don't know if Facebook is worth $15 billion, but it's certainly not a flash in the pan, and its appeal isn't limited to Scrabulous.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080505/2104341037.shtml?referer=sphere_related_content


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Social networking applications pose risks

Social networking applications pose risks


  • Users downloading applications allow developers to see information
  • Agreement allows companies to "know who I am and access my information"
  • Fraud investigator: It's like carrying a social security card in you back pocket
  • Friends can also grant access to information like profile photos

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- Sarah Brown is unusually cautious when it comes to social networking.

art.adrienne.felt.ap.jpg

Student Adrienne Felt created her own Facebook application to see what information companies could access.

The college sophomore doesn't have a MySpace page and, while she's on Facebook, she does everything she can to keep her page as private as she can.

"I don't want to have to worry about all the different online scandals and problems," says Brown, an education major at St. Joseph College in Connecticut. She'd like to control her personal information and keep it out of the hands of identity thieves or snooping future employers. "It's just common sense."

It sounds like her info is locked down and airtight. But is it?

Turns out, even the privacy-conscious Sarah Browns of the world freely hand over personal information to perfect strangers. They do so every time they download and install what's known as an "application," one of thousands of mini-programs on a growing number of social networking sites that are designed by third-party developers for anything from games and sports teams to trivia quizzes and virtual gifts.

Brown, for instance, has installed applications on her Facebook page for Boston Bruins fans and another that allows her to post "bumper stickers" on her own page and those of her friends. It's a core way to communicate on social networking sites, which allow friends to create pages about themselves and post photos and details about their lives and interests.

People often think Facebook profiles and sometimes MySpace pages, if they're set as private, are only available to friends or specific groups, such as a university, workplace, or even a city.

But that's not true if they use applications. On Facebook, for instance, applications can only be downloaded if a user checks a box allowing its developers to "know who I am and access my information," which means everything on a profile, except contact info. Given little thought, agreeing to the terms has become a matter of routine for the nearly 70 million Facebook users worldwide who use applications to spruce up their pages and to flirt, play and bond with friends online.

News Corp.'s MySpace, which has about 117 million unique visitors each month, recently added an applications platform, giving developers access to the profiles of anyone who downloads them. Unlike Facebook, though, MySpace users don't have to include their names on their profiles.

So what do these third-parties do with the information? Sometimes, they use it to connect users with similar interests. Sometimes, they use it to target ads, based on demographics such as gender and age (something Facebook and MySpace also do).

Facebook and MySpace say they hold application developers to strict standards -- and boot them if they don't comply. They also point out that some information, such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers, aren't made available.

But experts who track online security issues think there's too much personal information flying around out there, with few guarantees that it's safe. They also think social networkers have little understanding where their information goes and how it's used -- and as a result, have a false sense of security.

"I suspect that there's a whole lot of clicking without a lot of thinking," says Mary Madden, a senior research specialist at the Pew Internet & American Life Project who studies privacy issues. "So much of this sharing happens in a way that users don't see the consequences. It's kind of a big, black hole."

Part of the risk stems from Facebook applications being created by anyone, some of them tech-related companies and others individuals with know-how. And they could be anywhere in the world, as is Jayant Agarwalla, co-founder of Facebook's popular Scrabulous application, a takeoff on the game Scrabble.

Reached by e-mail, he says Scrabulous does use demographic information to target ads that show up as a person plays the game. But Agarwalla, who's based in India, stresses that that information is provided in "real time" and not stored. "In my humble opinion, users have nothing to worry about," he says.

Some would argue that it's much like trusting an online vendor with your credit card information.

Still, it's an honor system, says Adrienne Felt, a computer science major at the University of Virginia. A Facebook user herself, she decided to research the site's applications and even created her own so she could see how it worked.

Most of the developers Felt polled said they either didn't need or use the information available to them and, if they did, accessed it only for advertising purposes.

But, in the end, Felt says there's really nothing stopping them from matching profile information with public records. It also could be sold or stolen. And all of that could lead to serious matters such as identity theft.

"People seem to have this idea that, when you put something on the Internet, there should be some privacy model out there -- that there's somebody out there that's enforcing good manners. But that's not true," Felt says.

Last year, Facebook users revolted when the company started using a tool called Beacon, which tracked its users' purchases and actions at dozens of Web sites and then broadcast the data on the pages of the users' friends.

Beacon has since been scaled back.

By comparison, the issue of personal information going to application developers, both on Facebook and now MySpace, has remained relatively quiet.

Jonathan Gaugler, a 26-year-old New Yorker, is one who finds targeted ads on his Facebook page a bit too invasive.

"Getting married? Do your registry here!" read one recent ad that showed up. Another on his fiancee's page was advertising for egg donors for fertility clinics.

"Creepy," Gaugler says.

He keeps his Facebook activity to a minimum as a result -- and rarely downloads an application because he doesn't want to be further targeted.

But many others are much less cautious, seeing the risk of social networking "as low and the reward as high," says Patricia Sanchez Abril, an assistant professor at the University of Miami's business school who studies privacy law.

"It is the chosen mode of communication of everyone they know. So if you're not in it, you're just not in the loop," she says. "There's a lot of peer pressure."

What they don't realize, she adds, is that there is little legal backup if their information is used in a way they didn't intend.

"This is an area that's completely unregulated. Yes, there are contracts. But if the receiving end doesn't abide by the contract, you're still out of luck," Abril says.

And applications, she notes, are only one worry when it comes to online threats.

A social networker's friends can, for instance, give access to personal information or photos in a profile. That happened to the call girl involved in the recent sex scandal with former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

Researchers at Indiana University also published a study last year showing how they "scraped" information from students' social network profiles. Posing as people's friends, they then used the information to fool the students into providing their university ID and password on a bogus external Web site.

Whether the profile is private or not, users should limit the information they post, said Tom Jagatic, one of the researchers and now a senior information technology consultant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's good advice, says Jeremy Miller, a fraud investigator based in Nashville, Tennessee, but he wonders how many will heed it. He uses MySpace and sees people who routinely list everything from their income to phone numbers on their profiles -- and don't even bother to make their profiles private.

"It's kind of a status symbol, so privacy takes a back seat," says Miller, who works for Kroll Inc., a risk management consulting firm. "It's much like people saying you shouldn't carry your Social Security card around in your wallet.

"But a lot of people still do it."





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Tuesday, May 6, 2008

100 Years In Iraq: The Price of the Surge

100 Years In Iraq:The Price of the Surge





From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008

 

Summary:  The Bush administration's new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely -- by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

STEVEN SIMON is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he served on the National Security Council in positions including Senior Director for Transnational Threats.


In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new approach to the war in Iraq. At the time, sectarian and insurgent violence appeared to be spiraling out of control, and Democrats in Washington -- newly in control of both houses of Congress -- were demanding that the administration start winding down the war. Bush knew he needed to change course, but he refused to, as he put it, "give up the goal of winning." So rather than acquiesce to calls for withdrawal, he decided to ramp up U.S. efforts. With a "surge" in troops, a new emphasis on counterinsurgency strategy, and new commanders overseeing that strategy, Bush declared, the deteriorating situation could be turned around.

More than a year on, a growing conventional wisdom holds that the surge has paid off handsomely. U.S. casualties are down significantly from their peak in mid-2007, the level of violence in Iraq is lower than at any point since 2005, and Baghdad seems the safest it has been since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime five years ago. Some backers of the surge even argue that the Iraqi civil war is over and that victory on Washington's terms is in sight -- so long as the United States has the will to see its current efforts through to their conclusion.

Unfortunately, such claims misconstrue the causes of the recent fall in violence and, more important, ignore a fatal flaw in the strategy. The surge has changed the situation not by itself but only in conjunction with several other developments: the grim successes of ethnic cleansing, the tactical quiescence of the Shiite militias, and a series of deals between U.S. forces and Sunni tribes that constitute a new bottom-up approach to pacifying Iraq. The problem is that this strategy to reduce violence is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state. If anything, it has made such an outcome less likely, by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni Arab tribes and pitting them against the central government and against one another. In other words, the recent short-term gains have come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.

Despite the current lull in violence, Washington needs to shift from a unilateral bottom-up surge strategy to a policy that promotes, rather than undermines, Iraq's cohesion. That means establishing an effective multilateral process to spur top-down political reconciliation among the major Iraqi factions. And that, in turn, means stating firmly and clearly that most U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Iraq within two or three years. Otherwise, a strategy adopted for near-term advantage by a frustrated administration will only increase the likelihood of long-term debacle.

THE SURGE'S FALSE START

After the February 2006 bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, the White House started to become increasingly concerned that there were too few U.S. troops in Iraq. A network of retired army officers led by Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, had been pushing from the outside for an increase in forces, and Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) kept up a drumbeat of criticism of what they saw as a lackluster military effort. The November 2006 congressional elections, which handed the House and the Senate to the Democrats, added to the sense that a new strategy was needed. In a December 2006 memo, Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, somewhat gingerly noted that the United States might "need to fill the current four-brigade gap in Baghdad with coalition forces if reliable Iraqi forces are not identified."

On December 13, 2006, Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon to persuade them to allocate more troops to Iraq. It was not an easy sell. U.S. ground forces are not configured to fight such a long war, and the repeated deployment of the same active-duty and Reserve units had taken a toll. The reenlistment rate of young captains, for example, had fallen to an unprecedented low; about half of the West Point classes of 2000 and 2001 had decided against an army career. The pace of unit rotations and the tempo of operations had also taken their toll on equipment, which was wearing out at nine times the normal rate, faster than it could be replaced. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff made clear his concern about the army being stretched too thin. A shortfall of 10,000 company-grade officers meant that the Reserve units would have to rob both people and materiel from other units. Meanwhile, the mounting expense of the war was crowding out the procurement of new combat systems for the navy and the air force, and there was a growing risk that the military might find itself without the capacity to meet other strategic challenges, whether from Afghanistan, Iran, or elsewhere.

Bush tried to allay these worries, pledging to, among other things, increase the size of the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps and boost defense spending. But the Joint Chiefs also conditioned their reluctant support of the surge on a promise from the president to hold Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's feet to the fire on political reconciliation. So when Bush unveiled his surge strategy in January 2007 (the deployment of an additional 21,500 troops, through September, with the initial military objective of restoring order to Baghdad), the stated purpose was to ensure that "the [Iraqi] government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas. Most of Iraq's Sunni and Shia want to live together in peace -- and reducing the violence in Baghdad will help make reconciliation possible." Bush quoted Maliki's promise that the Baghdad security plan would "not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of their sectarian or political affiliation."

Even then, however, the administration was already starting to doubt Maliki's competence and willingness to pursue reconciliation, the principal determinant of long-term stability in Iraq. Two months earlier, Hadley had visited Iraq to assess the prospects for a cross-sectarian political rapprochement and come away unsure of Maliki's stance. "Do we and Prime Minister Maliki," Hadley had wondered in his December 2006 memo, "share the same vision for Iraq? If so, is he able to curb those who seek Shia hegemony or the reassertion of Sunni power? The answers to these questions are key in determining whether we have the right strategy in Iraq." Hadley proposed several ways to test Maliki's intentions and bolster his resolve, including initiatives to rejigger parliamentary support to free Maliki from his Shiite base linked to Muqtada al-Sadr and enable him to take conciliatory steps toward the Sunnis. The United States, however, lacked the influence necessary to put this approach into practice. Before long, events in Iraq revealed the answers to Hadley's questions: in both cases, a resounding no.

The deployment of the five new brigades proceeded more or less as planned, but from the start there was little headway made toward the broader goals of the surge, particularly reconciliation, as measured by the Iraqi government's inability to meet key benchmarks. The Constitutional Review Committee, which was charged with redressing Sunni grievances, made little progress, and there was no progress on de-Baathification reform, amnesty, provincial elections, or the implementation of oil legislation. The Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front had walked away from Maliki's cabinet, and Bush's reportedly regular calls to Maliki urging him to mobilize his government were ineffective. The Iraqi committees created to support the Baghdad security plan were left unfilled, and the three Iraqi brigades needed to help implement it arrived late and understrength. Diplomatic efforts to get Iraq's neighbors involved fizzled.

FROM TOP DOWN TO BOTTOM UP

The president's hopes for the top-down political efforts that were supposed to accompany the surge quickly faded. As a substitute, however, a new bottom-up strategy was embraced. Bush had observed in his January surge speech that the Sunnis were challenging al Qaeda's presence in Iraq, and a February 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq recommended "deputizing, resourcing, and working more directly with neighborhood watch groups and establishing grievance committees -- to help mend frayed relationships between tribal and religious groups, which have been mobilized into communal warfare over the past three years." A few months later, the president signaled a formal shift in strategy in a speech at the Naval War College: "To evaluate how life is improving for the Iraqis, we cannot look at the country only from the top down. We need to go beyond the Green Zone and look at Iraq from bottom up. This is where political reconciliation matters the most, because it is where ordinary Iraqis are deciding whether to support new Iraq or to sit on the fence, uncertain about the country's future." What the president was proposing was a shift in the U.S. approach to counterinsurgency. Now, the United States would work to exploit a grass-roots anti-al Qaeda movement already under way by taking the pressure off the insurgents who had begun to point their weapons at the jihadists and funneling money to tribal leaders. In theory, this would help dismantle the jihadist infrastructure and create islands of stability that would eventually join up like "oil spots."

After the U.S. invasion, the Sunni groups that would go on to make up the insurgency arrived at a marriage of convenience with the foreign and local jihadists who made up al Qaeda in Iraq. The two shared a common goal: to reverse the triumph of the Shiites and restore the Sunnis to their lost position of power. For the Sunni insurgents, the presence of foreign jihadists also helped divert the attention of U.S. forces. Up to a point, therefore, al Qaeda's excesses -- such as its attempt to impose strict Wahhabi-style rule by banning music and satellite dishes and compelling women to cover themselves entirely -- were to be tolerated.

But for al Qaeda, the link with the insurgents was supposed to serve two additional purposes that went well beyond the shared goal of chipping away at Shiite predominance -- and ultimately went against the interests of the Iraqi Sunnis themselves. The first was to establish an al Qaeda-dominated ministate as a base for carrying out jihad against enemies outside of Iraq. (The November 2005 attack against three Western tourist hotels in Amman, Jordan, allegedly ordered by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was a harbinger of this wider strategy.) The second was to seize a leading position within the insurgency and thereby block a power-sharing arrangement between Baghdad and the Sunni nationalists, an arrangement that would entail the selling out of al Qaeda by the Sunnis.

The Iraqi Sunnis' enthusiasm for the alliance waned as al Qaeda increasingly attempted to assert its leadership. In October 2006, al Qaeda declared the formation of an Islamic state in Iraq, demanding that Sunni insurgent leaders pledge allegiance to the new (and many believed fictional) jihadist commander Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, whose name was supposed to signify an authentically Iraqi origin. To the nationalist insurgents, accepting the declaration of a separate state and ceding leadership to al Qaeda made little sense. Doing so would have fueled the process of decentralization, emboldened those Kurds and Shiites who sought their own fiefdoms, and, crucially, further distanced the Sunnis from eventual access to Iraq's potentially massive oil revenues. Moreover, despite the spectacular successes that had been attributed to al Qaeda, it was the nationalist Sunnis who provided the backbone of the insurgency and had done most of the killing and dying.

Some tribes had also grown increasingly resentful of al Qaeda's efforts to seize control of resources. The Albu Risha tribe, for example, had lost control over portions of the road from Baghdad to Amman, undermining its ability to raise revenue by taxing or extorting traders and travelers. When the Albu Rishas' leaders protested, the chieftain, Sheik Bazi al-Rishawi, was killed along with one of his sons, and two more of his sons were abducted. In response, Rishawi's fourth son, Sheik Abdul Sattar, assembled a small group of tribal figures (with the help of funds from the local U.S. military commander) under the banner of the Anbar Salvation Council to roll back al Qaeda's influence. The bodies of al Qaeda personnel soon began turning up in alleyways.

This strategic schism might have been papered over had the jihadists not overreacted to the opposition of other insurgent groups. In 2007, there was a wave of sensational killings of Sunni leaders by al Qaeda, including Abdul Sattar (who had met with President Bush two weeks before his death). The assassinations of Sunni leaders warranted retaliation under the prevailing tribal code, opening the door to more systematic cooperation between the tribes and U.S. forces. In the wake of Abdul Sattar's death, a Sunni leader complained that al Qaeda's assassinations had "left resistance groups with two options: either to fight al Qaeda and negotiate with the Americans or fight the Americans and join the Islamic State of Iraq, which divides Iraq. Both options are bitter." After their defeat in the battle of Baghdad -- thanks to the entrenched power of Sadr's Shiite Mahdi Army and the arrival of additional U.S. troops -- the Iraqi Sunnis went decisively with the first option, marking the start of the Sunni Awakening groups. The United States, for its part, had its own incentive to cooperate with the insurgents: June 2007, with 126 troop deaths, was the second-worst month for the U.S. military in Iraq, and General David Petraeus, the U.S. ground commander, was facing pressure to reduce casualties quickly. The most efficient way to do so was to strike deals with the newly pliable insurgents.

The deals were mediated by tribal leaders and consisted of payments of $360 per month per combatant in exchange for allegiance and cooperation. Initially referred to by the United States as "concerned local citizens," the former insurgents are now known as the Sons of Iraq. The total number across Iraq is estimated at over 90,000. Although the insurgents turned allies generally come well armed, at least one unit leader, Abu al-Abd, commander of the Islamic Army in Iraq, who controls Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, has said that he receives weapons as well as logistical support from U.S. units. His arrangement is probably typical. In November 2007, he agreed to a three-month pact, open to extension.

This strategy has combined with other developments -- especially the fact that so much ethnic cleansing has already occurred and that violence in civil wars tends to ebb and flow, as the contending sides work to consolidate gains and replenish losses -- to bring about the current drop in violence. The Sunni sheiks, meanwhile, are getting rich from the surge. The United States has budgeted $150 million to pay Sunni tribal groups this year, and the sheiks take as much as 20 percent of every payment to a former insurgent -- which means that commanding 200 fighters can be worth well over a hundred thousand dollars a year for a tribal chief. Although Washington hopes that Baghdad will eventually integrate most former insurgents into the Iraqi state security services, there are reasons to worry that the Sunni chiefs will not willingly give up what has become an extremely lucrative arrangement.

TRIBAL REALITIES

The surge may have brought transitory successes -- although if the spate of attacks in February is any indication, the decrease in violence may already be over -- but it has done so by stoking the three forces that have traditionally threatened the stability of Middle Eastern states: tribalism, warlordism, and sectarianism. States that have failed to control these forces have ultimately become ungovernable, and this is the fate for which the surge is preparing Iraq. A strategy intended to reduce casualties in the short term will ineluctably weaken the prospects for Iraq's cohesion over the long run.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, ruling powers in the Middle East have slowly and haltingly labored to bring tribal populations into the fold, with mixed success. Where tribes and tribalism have remained powerful, the state has remained weak. The Ottomans attempted forced sedentarization of the tribes, weakening tribal authorities by disrupting settlement patterns and replacing tribal sheiks with smaller cadres of favored leaders who became conduits for patronage. The colonial powers after World War I faced a different problem: the threat of nationalist urban elites opposed to foreign rule. In an effort to counter defiant urban leaders, they empowered rural tribes on the periphery. In Iraq, the British armed the tribes so that the sheiks could maintain order in the countryside and balance the capabilities of the nominal local governments operating under League of Nations mandates. Thus, the tribal system that Ottoman rule sought to dismantle was revitalized by British imperial policy, and the power of the nominal Iraqi government was systematically vitiated. In 1933, Iraq's King Faisal lamented, "In this kingdom, there are more than 100,000 rifles, whereas the government has only 15,000."

The tribes lost some power over the subsequent decades. This was in part a result of increasing direct British involvement in activities such as law enforcement, land tenure, and water distribution and in part a result of urbanization: as Iraqis moved from the country to the city, their affiliations shifted from the tribe to urban institutions -- principally the trade union and the mosque -- even as they held on to tribal symbols. When the Baathists took power in 1968, they explicitly rejected "religious sectarianism, racism, and tribalism ... the remnants of colonialism." The tribes, in their minds, were inevitable rivals of a centralizing state. But after taking control in a coup in 1979, Saddam leaned on his own Sunni tribal networks to staff his security services, army leadership, and bureaucracy, while suppressing other tribal life. He tried to rein in tribes by dispersing Baathist apparatchiks throughout the hinterland, but he nonetheless came to rely on the tribal system as a whole to make up for the shortcomings of the state as times became harder.

During the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam used Shiite tribes to defend regions near the Iranian border, and elsewhere tribal leaders regained some of their traditional authority as the war forced the redeployment of Baathist officials to the front. Amid the hardships created by the conflict, the flow of resources from the center shrank, leading to greater self-reliance in tribal areas and the renewed importance of tribal leaders. The Gulf War, and the grinding international sanctions that followed, accelerated these trends. In 1996, a high council of tribal chiefs was established and was granted political privilege, weapons, and land. Selected tribal leaders were allowed to enrich themselves by any means, fair or foul, and in return they were expected to defend the regime. Saddam, in effect, fostered a process of retribalization in Iraq.

Iraq's Arab neighbors, particularly Jordan and Saudi Arabia, provide a counterexample. They won enduring stability by corralling the tribes through a combination of reward and punishment. In Transjordan, King Abdullah I and the British -- helped by famine and the effects of the Great Depression -- confronted recalcitrant tribes militarily and then secured their allegiance with a steady flow of resources from the emerging state. More recently, Jordan's Hashemite monarchy has preserved the tribes' loyalty by guaranteeing them prestigious positions in the government and the military and by playing them off against the Palestinians. In Saudi Arabia, the al Saud dynasty consolidated its state by subduing the tribal challenge of rebellious Ikhwan and then endowing them with status and a military role. Strategic marriages between the al Saud family and the tribes cemented these ties. Although such efforts occasionally faltered, the thrust of the policy was always clear: to subordinate the tribes to the state.

Now, U.S. strategy is violating this principle by fostering the retribalization of Iraq all over again. In other countries in the region, such as Yemen, the result of allowing tribes to contest state authority is clear: a dysfunctional country prone to bouts of serious internecine violence. Such violence can also cross borders, especially if neighboring states are willing to use the tribes as their own agents. Pakistan provides a particularly ominous example of this dysfunctionality: its failure to absorb its Pashtun population has threatened the viability of the Pakistani state. The continued nurturing of tribalism in Iraq, in a way that sustains tribes in opposition to the central government rather than folding them into it, will bring about an Iraqi state that suffers from the same instability and violence as Yemen and Pakistan.

U.S. officials in Iraq have taken note of how the current U.S. approach has exacerbated the dangers of tribalism. Last month, a senior U.S. military adviser conceded, "We're not thinking through the impact of abetting further corruption and perpetuating tribal power." In December, a U.S. diplomat warned, "The absence of government in a lot of areas has allowed others to move in, whether militias or others." The net effect has been a splintering of the country rather than the creation of a unified nationalist Sunni front that, having regained its confidence, would be prepared to deal constructively with Baghdad.

THE CRUMBLING CENTER

The growth of warlordism is another consequence of the surge. By empowering the tribes and other networks without regulating their relationship to the state, the United States has enabled them to compete with one another for local control and what is mostly criminal revenue. It is worth noting that warlordism is not just a creeping Sunni phenomenon. Kurdish and Shiite criminals have been equally adept at exploiting the current security situation to their advantage. Indeed, warlordism appears even to be altering the sectarian divide. In Najaf, where gang warfare has erupted on more than one occasion, supporters of Sadr's Mahdi Army are engaged in street battles with members of the Badr Organization, even though both are Shiite groups.

Last December, a committee of British MPs charged with examining the security situation in Basra as British forces began to draw down concluded that warlords and criminal gangs had all but taken over the city. "Although the reduction in attacks on UK forces can only be welcome," the committee's report noted, "this alone cannot be a measure of success. The initial goal of UK forces in South Eastern Iraq was to establish the security necessary for the development of representative political institutions and for economic reconstruction. . . . This goal remains unfulfilled."

The United States' bottom-up strategy is also worsening sectarianism. For many Sunnis, reconciliation means restoration -- not inclusion in power-sharing arrangements but regaining control of the state. Instead of discouraging this mindset, the evolution of the surge into a bottom-up operation has validated it, fostering the impression that Washington has at last recognized that its strategic interests lie with the Sunnis. As the Sunnis see it, the current U.S. strategy is a policy of organizing, arming, and training them to challenge Shiite supremacy.

The Shiites and the Kurds naturally have sharply different notions of what reconciliation means. For the Kurds, reconciliation means respect for their claims to autonomy as well as for their potential territorial gains. The Shiites have tended to emphasize the need for justice before reconciliation, which, as they see it, requires that they be compensated for their suffering under previous regimes (not only Saddam's). This, in their mind, necessitates the subordination of Iraq's Sunni population to the Shiite community. Some Shiite leaders have defied such thinking -- Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani most prominently -- but Sadr has made clear that he will use violence to secure Shiite hegemony, and Maliki's government has shown no willingness to be pried away from Sadr and like-minded Shiites. Indeed, in postconflict situations, reconciliation often founders on the unwillingness of victims to surrender their claims to justice.

Some Sunnis have started to recognize that the United States has no intention of restoring their supremacy. The realization that civilian jobs and vocational training is all that is in store for the 80 percent of the former insurgents who are blocked from membership in the Iraqi army (Shiite leaders want to dominate the army in order to use it as their own instrument of control) has eroded Sunni cooperation with U.S. forces. As one volunteer told a reporter, "The Sunnis were always the leaders of the country. Is it reasonable that they are turned into service workers and garbage collectors? . . . We had not anticipated this from the American forces. Of course we will not accept that." One response has been to head back to al Qaeda. An Awakening commander in the Diyala provincial capital of Baqubah, which has never been fully pacified, said in February, "Now there is no cooperation with the Americans. . . . We have stopped fighting al Qaeda." This was doubtless an exaggeration, but one that pointed to the hard truth that for many Sunnis, Shiite rule remains unacceptable. When former Sunni insurgents no longer believe that Washington will restore them to dominance, their current U.S. paymasters will once again be their targets.

Given the current trajectory, significant Sunni segments of the postsurge Iraqi state will continue to be funded by the United States, but they will remain beyond the control of either Baghdad or Washington. They will also be in a position to establish ties with neighboring countries. All of this may well accelerate the centrifugal forces unleashed by the bottom-up strategy. When it withdraws from Iraq, the United States will be leaving a country more divided than the one it invaded -- thanks to a strategy that has systematically nourished domestic rivalries in order to maintain an illusory short-term stability.

This could mean that Iraq will remain essentially unreconstructed. The authority of the state would plummet, and the United States' ability to influence events, already limited, would become even weaker. Iraq would become a running sore, and successive crises within the country and on its borders would distract Washington from other priorities and sap its ability to normalize relations with Iran. For the Iraqis, safety, security, and economic advancement would remain uncertain. Those who could leave would. Stability would become an ever-receding prospect.

One plausible consequence of this turmoil would be the emergence of a U.S.-trained and U.S.-equipped Iraqi army, increasingly open to former officers of Saddam's military, as a powerful force in Iraqi politics. The professionalism and esprit de corps of the army is already on the rise. Officers who see themselves as having to navigate a maelstrom of unregulated militias, weak and irresponsible government officials, tribes emboldened and then embittered by their U.S. connections, and overbearing but uneven U.S. assertions of control could turn inward, as they did under the British and under Saddam. They might adopt a posture of superiority to politicians, impatience with upstart tribal leaders, and passive-aggressiveness toward their U.S. patrons and then sideline the civilian government and take control of the state. This result might be less disastrous than complete long-term breakdown: to the degree that Iraq needs a mediating military presence to sustain a fragile peace, this role might ultimately be better served by a military with its own corporate identity rather than by U.S. troops. But still, the United States would be confronted by a strong, centralized state ruled by a military junta that would resemble the Baathist regime Washington overthrew in 2003. Rather than an anarchic situation, the United States would face potentially aggressive nationalism and a regime unsympathetic to U.S. regional priorities.

RESPONSIBLE RETREAT

At this stage, the United States has no good option in Iraq. But the drawbacks and dangers of the current bottom-up approach demand a change of course. The only alternative is a return to a top-down strategy. To be more effective this time around, Washington must return to the kind of diplomacy that the Bush administration has largely neglected. Even with 160,000 troops in Iraq, Washington lacks the leverage on its own to push the Maliki government to take meaningful steps to accommodate Sunni concerns and thereby empower Sunni moderates. (The legislative package and the de-Baathification reform law passed earlier this year were seriously flawed and did more to spur the Sunnis' anxieties than redress their grievances.) What the United States could not do unilaterally, it must try to do with others, including neighboring countries, European allies, and the United Nations (UN).

In order to attain that kind of cooperation, Washington must make a public commitment to a phased withdrawal. Cooperation from surrounding countries and European partners is unlikely to be forthcoming without a corresponding U.S. readiness to cede a degree of the dubious control it now has over events in Iraq. Currently, the dominant U.S. presence in Iraq allows the rest of the world to avoid responsibility for stability in and around Iraq even as everyone realizes the stakes involved. A plan to draw down U.S. forces would therefore contribute to the success of a larger diplomatic strategy, prompting Middle Eastern states, European governments, and the UN to be more constructive and proactive in working to salvage stability in the Persian Gulf.

The point, therefore, is not to focus on the precise speed and choreography of a troop withdrawal. Rather, what is necessary is to make clear that the United States intends to withdraw. Should the Bush administration suspend the currently programmed withdrawals of the surge force, it would send precisely the opposite message. President Bush, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and General Petraeus have all signaled their interest in halting any further drawdowns after the last surge brigade has come home this summer. Petraeus, who has already begun to lay out his case in interviews, argues that "the key is to hang on to what you've got." The president has suggested that he is unwilling to withdraw additional troops until after the Iraqi provincial elections -- which, although originally scheduled for October, could very well be delayed. It is therefore possible that the next U.S. president will have to decide what to do with approximately 140,000 troops, a considerably larger number than most observers assumed would still be on the ground in Iraq at the end of 2008. (Some consideration will also have to be given to the problem of removing 56,000 contractors and facilitating the departure of a segment of the 30,000-50,000 Iraqi and foreign workers supporting the U.S. presence.)

Given that the laws of physics are as relevant to troop redeployments as are the laws of strategy and politics, the higher baseline bequeathed by Bush would mean a longer timeline for withdrawal. As of last summer, there were 1,900 tanks and other armored vehicles, 43,000 trucks, and 700 aircraft in Iraq. Equipment is scattered over 70 bases throughout the country, along with 38 major supply depots, 18 fuel-storage centers, and 10 ammunition dumps. According to the conservative rule of thumb used by military logisticians, the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps could move a brigade per month from the Iraqi theater. Moving the 15 brigades likely to be in Iraq in January 2009 would require up to 10,000 truck trips through potentially hostile zones within Iraq.

Although fixating on an exact timetable for withdrawal might be unhelpful at this juncture, a new administration should begin to draw down deliberately and in phases as soon as its internal deliberations are complete and the process has been coordinated with Baghdad. These steps could take months, as the new team conducts its policy-review process; military planners plot safe and efficient withdrawal routes; congressional consultations are carried out; conclusions are reached about where the forces being drawn down should be redeployed; planners determine the size, roles, and missions of the residual force; and the numerous dependencies created by the occupation and the surge are gradually shed. Once under way, however, a drawdown of most of the troops now in Iraq could be completed within two years. The redeployment might proceed more quickly if U.S. public support for the war collapsed, the Iraqi government demanded a swifter withdrawal, or the political situation in Iraq settled down; alternatively, the process might take more time if U.S. forces were under attack, an atrocity claiming the lives of many Americans occurred, or a responsible, reconciliation-minded Iraqi government and a concerned international community sought a slower drawdown.

RECONCILIATION FROM ABOVE

Announcing a withdrawal will entail certain risks. Aware that U.S. forces will finally be departing, Iraqi factions might begin to prepare for a new round of fighting. The Sunnis, aware of their vulnerabilities to attack by militant Shiite forces without the United States to protect them, might resuscitate their alliance with al Qaeda. The government in Baghdad might be concerned about its own exposure to attack in the absence of a U.S. shield and proceed to forge tighter links with Tehran or encourage greater activism by the Mahdi Army. It is all the more vital, therefore, that the drawdown take place as part of a comprehensive diplomatic strategy designed to limit these risks. The interval between a decision to withdraw and the removal of the bulk of U.S. forces should provide the space in which the UN can convene a multilateral organization to foster a reconciliation process in Iraq.

There is much that can be done to revitalize a top-down approach to reconciliation if it is under UN auspices and led by a credible special envoy. First, the international community should be energized to help Iraq move forward on provincial elections, which would test the popularity of the new Sunni leaders who have emerged during the surge and lash them up to Baghdad. This would have the added benefit of isolating the radical federalists from the majority of Shiites, who would prefer to live in a united Iraq. A UN envoy would have a better chance of brokering a deal on the distribution of provincial and federal powers, the issue that led to the veto of the provincial election law, than would Washington. In a multilateral setting that is not conspicuously stage-managed by the United States, regional states, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, could play a pivotal role in this process. Although Tehran's cooperation is inevitably hostage to its broader relations with Washington, UN sponsorship of this effort might provide the leaders of Iran with the cover they need to act in their own interest. The Saudis, for their part, would like to see the UN involved and are prepared to use their influence and money to impel the parties in Iraq toward reconciliation.

Second, an institutionalized multilateral group of concerned states should mobilize the broader international community to assist with the care, feeding, and permanent housing of the millions of refugees and internally displaced Iraqis who have not been able to get to the United States or Europe. This is essential, since refugee camps and squatter settlements are incubators of radicalism and radiate violence. The longer these populations remain unmoored and cut off from education, employment, and access to adequate social services and health care, the harder it will be to resettle them permanently, whether in Iraq or elsewhere.

Third, before a new and more intense phase of the civil war begins, there should be a multilateral process put in place to prod Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states to finance investment projects that provide real employment in Iraq. Furthermore, Iraq's neighbors, including Iran, should be pressing the Iraqi government to bring far more Sunni Awakening volunteers into the regular Iraqi army and, crucially, into the provincial police forces funded by the central government. The latter step would reinforce the positive effects of the provincial elections and the emergence of politically legitimate local leaders. The current commitment to enlist 20 percent of the Awakening's members is far too small to have an impact.

Finally, the tribes feeding off the surge must be weaned from U.S. assistance and linked firmly to Baghdad as their source of support. Intertwining the tribes with Baghdad in this way, as the Iraq specialist Charles Tripp has noted, would yield something very much like the imperial protectorates in the Middle East of the first half of the twentieth century. The "club of patrons" in the capital would dole out goods to tribes through favored conduits. At this juncture, the U.S. military is performing the role of the patrons -- creating an unhealthy dependency and driving a dangerous wedge between the tribes and the state. Through coordinated action by the UN sponsors of the multilateral process, the government in Baghdad, and U.S. commanders on the ground, payment responsibilities will have to be transferred from the U.S. military to Iraqi government representatives.

There is no guarantee that the old way of giving tribes a taste of the lash followed by a dollop of state largess -- the model that successfully integrated tribes in Jordan and Saudi Arabia in the twentieth century -- can be successfully applied to a divided Iraq today. Iraq is heterogeneous, unlike Jordan or Saudi Arabia, where the state and the tribes shared a religious heritage. Furthermore, overestimating Iranian or Saudi influence on Iraqi politics and the willingness of the UN Security Council to plunge into the existing morass is all too easy. In any event, it will be a slow and hazardous undertaking. Many things have to happen more or less simultaneously in a carefully coordinated chain of actions. Washington has to announce that it will begin withdrawing the bulk of its forces. The UN secretary-general, with the backing of the Security Council, must select a special envoy. A contact group of key states must be formed under UN sponsorship. Priorities and milestones will need to be set for the distribution of resources within Iraq, the recruitment of Sunnis to the army, provincial elections, foreign investment, dealing with refugees, and development assistance. Crucially, the phasing of the troop drawdown will have to mesh with this diplomatic process but not hinge on its ultimate success. This course is risky and possibly futile. Yet it is still a better bet than a fashionable, short-term fix divorced from any larger political vision for Iraq and the Middle East.

 

STEVEN SIMON is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1999, he served on the National Security Council in positions including Senior Director for Transnational Threats.

 

 

 

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20080501faessay87305-p0/steven-simon/the-price-of-the-surge.html





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The Rescue of John Steinbeck

The Rescue of John Steinbeck

By Robert Gottlieb

Travels with Charley and Later Novels, 1947–1962: The Wayward Bus / Burning Bright / Sweet Thursday / The Winter of Our Discontent / Travels with Charley in Search of America
by John Steinbeck

Library of America, 990 pp., $40.00

The extraordinary thing about John Steinbeck is how good he can be when so much of the time he's so bad. There are talented writers who grow into their full maturity and then decline, slowly or precipitously. But that isn't Steinbeck. You can divide his work up into coherent periods, but there's no coherent trajectory of quality.

The publication of the fourth (and, blessedly, final) volume of his fiction by the Library of America makes it easy to track the entire writing career, apart from some journalism and the two weakest of his novels: his first—a puerile potboiler, Cup of Gold (pirates!)—and the late The Short Reign of Pippin IV, a limp, petulant social satire. In fact, just about everything he wrote is in print, not only in these four volumes[*] but in handsome Penguin paperbacks, which sell well over a million copies a year, with Of Mice and Men accounting for more than half of them. (It's short, it's easy to follow, and it's full of feeling—a perfect assignment for junior high school readers.) Two other short books are assigned to younger kids: the affecting Red Pony stories (why are so many horse books so sad?) and a faux-primitive parable, The Pearl, that makes The Old Man and the Sea read like Flaubert. The Grapes of WrathEast of Eden, which a few years ago had a tsunami moment when Oprah "picked" it. (No doubt the Elia Kazan movie featuring James Dean attracts readers—little do they suspect that it tackles only the final segment of the novel.) also sells well, of course, and so does


So if all of Steinbeck is in print forty years after his death (in 1968), and despite the force-feeding of hundreds of thousands of school kids with his work—and official canonization by the Library of America—why is he so decisively off the literary map? Other than Brad Leithauser, who in 1989 published a perceptive fiftieth-anniversary homage to The Grapes of Wrath, who in America considers him seriously today, apart from a handful of Steinbeck academics and some local enthusiasts in Monterey?

Nor is dismissal of his work by the literary establishment anything new. When to everyone's surprise, including his own, he won the 1962 Nobel Prize, the reaction was startlingly hostile. "Without detracting in the least from Mr. Steinbeck's accomplishments," ran a New York Times editorial, "we think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ...whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age." And on the eve of the award ceremony in Stockholm, Arthur Mizener, again in the Times, questioned why the Nobel committee would reward a writer whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophizing." It's a question difficult to answer. (Steinbeck himself had doubts. When asked by a reporter whether he believed he deserved the prize, he responded, "Frankly, no.")

This philosophizing—his compulsion to hector us with heavy-handed opinions and ideas—remains one of the chief obstacles to reading Steinbeck with pleasure today. Like so many other writers of his time, he's disgusted with capitalism, yet he's not really a revolutionary—he comes across more as a disaffected adolescent, dishing out a kind of callow cynicism. Although he's constantly laying down the moral law and grappling with the larger issues, he's not an abstract thinker or theorist. Instead, he's got a chip on his soul—a suspicion of formal education, a resentment of authority and institutions. (It's that resentment which undoubtedly kept him from joining the Party, even at the peak of his radicalism in the Thirties.) In other words, he has the ardor and sincerity—and the confused notions—typical of so many intelligent autodidacts.


His rebelliousness doesn't seem to have been triggered by reaction to a constricting upbringing. The Steinbecks were genteel middle-class, although John's low-key father suffered the failure of his modest business in Salinas. Mrs. Steinbeck was a cultured schoolteacher who came from a large Irish clan, the Hamiltons, whom John would later dramatize—and romanticize—in East of Eden. When his parents grew old and ill, he looked after them devotedly, but his family situation doesn't appear to have imposed greatly on his psychic life. In fact, although he had many male friends to whom he was unswervingly loyal, a wide assortment of girls, and a handful of encouraging and influential teachers, individuals don't seem to have meant as much to him as The People—or as animals. You could say, in fact, that he tended to regard human beings primarily as a species of animal: there to be studied.

The young John actually was an autodidact of sorts. He sporadically attended Stanford, dropping in on it for a term or two of courses, retreating, returning, never graduating. He wasn't denied an education, he chose to educate himself. In his early twenties he spent two fierce winters in almost total isolation, alone with his dogs, his books, and his typewriter, caretaking a summer house on Lake Tahoe. Big, burly, and awkward, he was an imposing physical presence, and he did long stretches of physical labor to support himself. He came close to starving during a miserable sojourn in New York when he was twenty-four, working as a laborer on the construction of Madison Square Garden and failing as a reporter for a New York paper. Through all of this he never doubted his vocation as a writer. And he wasn't shy about what he wrote. When friends, girls, former teachers weren't being bombarded with his early stories and sketches, they were held prisoner as he read aloud to them for hours at a time.

Early in 1930, just short of twenty-eight, he married bright, capable Carol Henning. They more or less lived on love—his parents were able to give him a bare-bones place to live and an allowance of $50 a month. Food was basic, possessions spare. But their happy-go-lucky penury didn't last long. Steinbeck's fumbling apprenticeship and erratic early publishing career were over by the early 1930s, when he began attracting critical appreciation and a readership.

The earliest books are hard to take, straining for meaning and literary effect. His third published work, To a God Unknown (1933), reveals many of his worst qualities. Its protagonist, Joseph Wayne, leads his family of farmers from desiccated New Eng-land to lush California, where his empathic relationship with the land eventually explodes into what we, if not Steinbeck, recognize as a feverish psychopathology:

He stamped his feet into the soft earth. Then the exultance grew to be a sharp pain of desire that ran through his body in a hot river.... His fingers gripped the wet grass and tore it out, and gripped again. His thighs beat heavily on the earth.... For a moment the land had been his wife.

(He arrived at this febrile style mainly on his own—Jack London, among others, had more influence on him than D.H. Lawrence, the more obvious source.)

There's a vast disparity in tone and content between this overwrought literary exercise and his next novel (and first best-seller), Tortilla Flat (1935), that rompy account of salt-of-the-earth down-and-outers in Monterey. They drink, they brawl, they fornicate, they steal—oh, those happy simple paisanos! And what about their dialogue? Danny: "I looked for thee, dearest of little angelic friends, for see, I have here two steaks from God's own pig, and a sack of sweet white bread. Share my bounty, Pilon, little dumpling."

But through all this "undiluted cuteness," as Alfred Kazin called it in On Native Grounds (1942), Steinbeck's lifelong themes begin to emerge, first among them the idea of community. Danny's house, we're told in a preface, "was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights of it." They're innocents, and they're all for one and one for all. Most important, they're "clean of commercialism, free of the complicated systems of American business." Far better to be a bum with a heart of gold than a solid citizen.

By the mid-1930s the crucial events of Steinbeck's youth were behind him. He was married. His parents had died. He was a name to be reckoned with. And he'd met the man who would prove to be the most important friend of his life—Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist in Monterey, who for eighteen years, even after John moved east and until Ed's untimely death in 1948, would be his philosophical and moral touchstone. Ricketts appears and reappears in Steinbeck's work in various inspirational guises, an idealized figure, a counterbalance to all the demonized figures—the greedy, the small-minded, the hypocritical—at whom Steinbeck endlessly rails. He also is the central figure in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), a chronicle of a Ricketts-led marine biology expedition to Mexico that Steinbeck introduced with a moving and perceptive tribute to his late mentor. The Log shows Steinbeck at his best—he's active, he's outdoors, he's focused on the natural world, and of course he's with Ricketts. The prose is uncluttered and unfancy, the observation acute. Tellingly, although Carol was along for the ride, her presence is unacknowledged in Steinbeck's account: it's all guys on his Sea of Cortez.


In 1934 Steinbeck befriended several labor organizers and was immediately engrossed by their stories of the cotton workers' strike of the previous year. Within months he began work on In Dubious Battle (1936). The California of To a God Unknown and Tortilla Flat was a convenience—a place he knew and could plunder for material. The plight of the dispossessed and the exploitation of the poor during the Depression years was a calling, a crusade, that led to his finest work.

In Dubious Battle centers on Jim, an alienated and angry young loner who joins the Party in San Francisco. The strike begins: vigilantes, scabs, gunfire. Jim is wounded, and grows more and more fanatical. "I'm stronger than anything in the world, because I'm going in a straight line." The straight line leads to his being killed.

The style of In Dubious Battle is radically new. Description, action, dialogue are straightforward and gritty. Still, Steinbeck can't resist injecting an idealized guru figure into this realistic world—a kind of fellow-traveling doctor who lends the strikers a hand. "Doc": "Man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates itself." Jim: "We don't hate ourselves, we hate the invested capital that keeps us down." One suspects that this is what the endless bull sessions between Steinbeck and Ricketts must have sounded like. Even so, In Dubious Battle is an impressive step forward.

The second of Steinbeck's populist novels, Of Mice and Men (1937), is written in the same direct and effective manner. It begins, as so many Steinbeck novels do, with a loving evocation of its natural setting:

A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green.... On the valley side the water is lined with trees—willows fresh and green with every spring.

And he loves his central characters, too, the pair of itinerant ranch hands—"bindlestiffs"—named George and Lennie. George is the smart one, the leader; Lennie is the massive semi-idiot, worshiping George, dreaming of the little bit of land they might one day own, and—his most powerful fantasy—the rabbits he might one day be able to tend and caress.

We know that this isn't going to happen, and on some level George knows it too, but he needs to believe in it as strongly as Lennie does: it's the illusion they live by. And then, catastrophe. Yes, the pathos is laid on thick; yes, everything is foreshadowed and manipulated. (Edmund Wilson called it "contrived with almost too much cleverness.") But Steinbeck's sympathy for these decent, forlorn men is so intense that it carries us along with it. Uninfected by moralizing, ingeniously if stagily constructed, and credibly populated, Of Mice and Men—far from Steinbeck's most ambitious book—is the closest he came to a fully satisfying work of art.

It also provided his entrée to the world of Broadway. The play version—cannily crafted by George S. Kaufmann—was not only a hit but won the New York Drama Critics award. Alas, this easy success encouraged what was to become a lifelong infatuation with, and failure in, the theater, a form essentially alien to Steinbeck's talents. His finest work is almost always reportorial.


Although he didn't (as was frequently misreported) go to Oklahoma to observe the migrant Okies as they set out on their hegira to the West, he did spend weeks with them in California—on the road, in their camps. At first he was working as a journalist to air their desperate situation, but quickly he realized that here was the material for the major novel he felt ready to write.

The motor of The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is Steinbeck's compassion for—his ready identification with—these people. Yet even here, his characters are somehow generalized, more real as a group force than as individuals. Ma Joad is too good to be true. ("Her hazel eyes seemed to have experienced all possible tragedy and to have mounted pain and suffering like steps into a high calm and a superhuman understanding.") Tom is the strong, basically virtuous young man trapped by fate and history. Rose of Sharon (that name!) is more a symptom than a real young woman. This is the crucial flaw in Steinbeck's fiction, pinpointed by both Kazin and Wilson in the early 1940s and even more glaring in the light of what was to come. As Kazin put it, "Steinbeck's people are always on the verge of becoming human, but never do." Wilson:

The characters of The Grapes of Wrath are animated and put through their paces rather than brought to life.... It is as if human sentiments and speeches had been assigned to a flock of lemmings on their way to throw themselves into the sea.

Still, The Grapes of Wrath is unquestionably a major achievement. The question is, is it a good book? Steinbeck drove himself to write it in a mere five months, but it was already all worked out in his head, as we learn in Working Days, the fascinating journal of its composition that remained unpublished until 1999. The chapters alternate between straightforward, powerful storytelling and authorial commentary, just as the dialogue alternates between sharply observed speech and preposterous hot air. How can the writer who reports a dying old woman saying "I'm jus' pain covered with skin" also have his Ed Ricketts– substitute, the itinerant preacher Casy, spout things like "Listen to people a-talkin', an' purty soon I hear the way folks are feelin'.... I hear 'em an' feel 'em; an' they're beating their wings like a bird in a attic"?

In the chapters of commentary the migrants are seen as bugs, as ants. Early on, there's an extended description of a land turtle crawling along—indomitable, symbolic. Mechanized farming has broken the bond between man and the earth: "Tractors don't love the land." And then there's the Manself:

Fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foun-dation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe.

The Grapes of Wrath is a vertiginous conjunction of sweeping, irresistible narrative and highfalutin theorizing. That readers in 1939 tolerated the latter is testimony to the power of the former—and to the readiness of America to be affected by the terrible story of the Joads. With the book's overwhelming success—it was the best-selling novel of the year, won the Pulitzer Prize, etc.—and the further impact of John Ford's impressive film version, which appeared in movie houses only months after the book's publication, Steinbeck graduated from being an admired young writer to worldwide acceptance as a major figure in American literature.

We can see in hindsight that with The Grapes of Wrath, the most significant arc of Steinbeck's career came to an end—the impassioned reporting of large-scale human tragedy, the Zola-esque attacks on injustice. Indeed, an entire cultural era was coming to an end: the populism that broadly ranged from Waiting for Lefty to early Frank Capra movies and documentaries like The Plow That Broke the Plains. At the close of The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad, on the lam, slips away into the dark to join the good fight for The People. A year or two later, with the war upon us, he would have been heading for the nearest draft board.


Meanwhile, Steinbeck's life was disintegrating. He was depleted, resentful of attacks from the left and the right, aggrieved by the negative response of critics like Wilson and Kazin, and facing the fact that his marriage was coming to an end. Carol had been a real collaborator, serving as a sounding board and editor, coming up with the titles for Of Mice and Men (from Robert Burns) and The Grapes of Wrath (from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"). But now she was feeling trapped and unfulfilled. And he had embarked on a passionate affair with an aspiring band-singer, "Gwyn" Conger, that would lead to another failed marriage. The war came to his rescue, giving him the subject of his next novel, The Moon Is Down (1942), as well as an excuse to get out of America and the doldrums (leaving Gwyn resentfully behind) by hiring himself out as a war correspondent.

The Moon Is Down is set in a small town in one of the German-occupied countries—presumably Norway, though unnamed. The occupying soldiers are not all bad, the locals are not all good, and the book was angrily attacked for comforting the enemy by, among others, James Thurber! But its real flaws are not political. It's a play masquerading as a novel (Steinbeck thought he was inventing a new art-form—the narrative play), and it's excruciatingly creaky and stagy. It's also unbearably preachy. As the noble mayor of the town is led off to be executed, we're treated to Socrates' final speech from the Apology.

On the other hand, his war reportage is fresh and strong—England under the blitz, North Africa, Italy. Steinbeck was several times in the heat of battle, most dangerously at Salerno. He's the kind of reporter who turns events into human-interest stories and creates "characters," but his eye is keen and persuasive. You can tell that he's still happier looking outward than inward, and more at ease as a man among men—or boy among boys—then in more emotionally challenging relationships. (Although he had a busy sexual life and was married three times, Steinbeck was never at ease with his female characters: they tend to be either saints or whores—and sometimes both—or they're symbolic, except for those who are pure evil.)

You see his ease as a journalist again in the Russian Journal he published in 1948, after spending six weeks with the photographer Robert Capa exploring the postwar Soviet Union. Capa serves the same function here as the poodle will in Travels with Charley—he's chum, ally, and comic relief. Steinbeck understands the telling detail, as when his hosts in Stalingrad troop into his hotel to show him with pride "a red velvet shield, covered with a lace of gold filigree from the King of Ethiopia" and "a tablecloth with the embroidered names of fifteen hundred women in a small British town." This is more appealing stuff than anything in his two most recent novels.

In these, he's clearly scrambling for material. Cannery Row (1945) is a dip back into Tortilla Flat, "born out of homesickness," as he acknowledged—homesickness not only for Monterey but for Ed Ricketts, who is sanctified as "Doc." The Wayward Bus (1947) presents a bunch of disparate characters artificially thrown together under difficult circumstances—The Bridge of San Luis Rey with a bus instead of a bridge. It's not only artificial, it's sour and unconvincing, its people specimens Steinbeck has collected and studied the way he helped Ed collect and study marine animals.

Meanwhile, he was turning over in his mind the novel that "may be my swan song, but...certainly will be the largest and most important work I have or maybe will do." East of Eden (1952) was intended both to tell the epic story of the Salinas valley and to stage the eternal struggle between good and evil in terms of the original family: Adam and Eve and their two sons.


It's a perplexing book—melodramatic, self-indulgent, even trashy; yet at last you feel you're reading a real novel rather than fictionalized reportage—a novel with strong characters, large-scale story development, a central idea holding it together. And in the first-person passages, which lovingly reimagine his mother's family, the Hamiltons, he was able to move beyond the impersonality of his earlier work.

The fulcrum of the book is the tragic story of the fictional Trasks: Adam, the good man; Cathy (Eve), his evil wife; Adam's brother, Charles; and a second pair of brothers, Adam's sons, Cal and Aron (Cain and Abel, in case you missed the connection). To an impressive degree Steinbeck succeeds in turning this ambitious metaphor into a moving human drama, and it can be gripping when it isn't maddening. Alas, it's disfigured by the most intrusive of all his guru figures, who stains the narrative with his relentless wisdom. This is Lee, Adam's Chinese "houseboy," who discards his faux pidgin in order to say profound things in impeccable English (he's been to college and, as a hobby, translates classic Chinese poetry into English). It's Lee who introduces to Adam (and to us) the ultimate message of East of Eden and the heart of Steinbeck's philosophy: the Hebrew concept of timshel, which Lee happens to have picked up from a learned old rabbi. Timshel, we're told, means "Thou mayest"; in other words, thou hast a choice. "I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed—because 'Thou mayest.'" And he can cook, too!

On the positive side, Steinbeck's descriptive style is by now highly fluent and convincing. How surely, for instance, he evokes the town's brothels:

They seemed very small, and they tried to efface themselves in outside neglect, and the wild overgrown front yards tried to hide them from the street. Remember how the shades were always drawn with little lines of yellow light around their edges? You could hear only a murmur from within. Then the front door would open to admit a country boy, and you'd hear laughter and perhaps the soft sentimental tone of an open-face piano with a piece of toilet chain across the strings, and then the door would close it off again.

In East of Eden the reporter Steinbeck is often effectively at the service of the novelist Steinbeck. Yes, the book is highly overheated, its fervid drama uninflected by humor or irony, but it's hard to forget.

The personal aspects of Eden are painful to relate. By the late 1940s, Steinbeck's second marriage had shattered. (Domestic life and giving birth to two boys, Thom and John, had kept Gwyn from the "creative" life she felt entitled to.) Late one night in 1948, Ed Ricketts's car was struck by a train. "The greatest man in the world is dying," Steinbeck told his pal Na-thaniel Benchley. In despair he rushed to Monterey—arriving too late to see his friend alive—and, as Jackson J. Benson puts it in his monumen-tal biography, John Steinbeck, Writer (1984),

With that sense of timing that only someone with show-business experience could have developed, Gwyn confronted John upon his return from California and told him that she wanted a divorce.

She also told him that she hadn't loved him for years and had been abundantly unfaithful to him. Benson circles around the real point—the Steinbeck family was up in arms to keep it quiet—but Gwyn also tortured John with the "confession" that he was not the father of their second son.

In his book The Other Side of Eden (2001), the younger John dismisses this notion as preposterous, and indeed father and son were far too physically alike for it to be true. Gwyn was lying to hurt her husband. But Steinbeck had no way of knowing that at the time, and the hatred he came to feel for her saturates East of Eden. Adam Trask's wife, the sadistic, murderous, brothel-keeper Cathy (later Kate), torments him with the story that their twin boys are actually the sons of Adam's brother, Charles.

Young John's book is a horrifying portrait of dysfunction, his father alternately overprotective and indifferent, his mother alcoholic and violent. On his sixteenth birthday, he tells us, she became so drunkenly abusive that he threw a TV set out of the twelfth-story window of her apartment and then "punched her in the mouth as hard as I could, and hammered at her body for God knows how long." Therapist: "Why didn't you go to your father for protection after you beat your mother?" Young John:

I'd already given up thinking he would protect me from her insanity. He was into his Great Writer Bubble, so it wasn't like having a dad around, but instead having the Great Writer present. By the age of thirteen, I realized my father was an asshole.

Nevertheless, in interviews over the years both sons spoke affectionately and admiringly of their father, if not of his fathering.


Steinbeck was only fifty when East of Eden was published, but very little of merit was to follow. Most disappointing to him was the failure of his years-long struggle to retell his beloved Morte d'Arthur for contemporary readers. (To get closer to the source he transplanted himself and his third wife, Elaine, to Arthur country for a year.) This effort was never completed and is of little value except as a reminder of Steinbeck's lifelong romance with the nobility of individual heroic effort. (His favorite book was Don Quixote.)

As had happened after The Grapes of Wrath, after East of Eden he was a writer without a subject, by now decisively cut off from his roots. For his first forty years, his worldview had been dominated by California, and when he abandoned it, he was deracinated. Hemingway, you feel, never looked back; Faulkner never left home. Steinbeck did leave home, choosing to live in New York, but he remained at heart a small-town guy, an outdoorsman, a fisherman, a handyman, not an urban sophisticate. His life in the big city was populated by well-known New-Yorkers-about-town: Abe Burrows, John O'Hara, Fred Allen, the Benchleys, Burgess Meredith, the Frank Loessers. When Joshua Logan invited him to a party for Princess Margaret, he told Elaine, "That's not the way I live." But it was the way he lived.

Still, he could never have written about Manhattan. What eventually gave him a new fictional world was the old whaling port of Sag Harbor on Long Island, in which he and Elaine (a happy marriage at last!) settled down for much of his final fifteen years—a kind of Monterey with a down-East accent. He could slop around, gossip with the locals, enjoy the waterfront—and observe. The result was his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which, although hardly a masterpiece, was Steinbeck's best work since East of Eden.

This book is not only a geographical and sociological world away from everything that preceded it, it's also a new kind of novel for Steinbeck—a novel of moral crisis, told entirely in the first person, very much in the spirit if not the tone of East Coast novelists like his friend John O'Hara, James Gould Cozzens, John P. Marquand, Hamilton Basso (The View from Pompey's Head), and Sloan Wilson (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit). Its protagonist, who presents himself as a decent man and law-abiding citizen, is confronted with temptation and succumbs, almost committing a serious crime and betraying both his employer and a childhood friend—in effect, everything he believes in. At the end, he's a demoralized man, forced to acknowledge to himself exactly what he has become.

The Winter of Our Discontent, however, is not only about a personal crisis but about a greater one as well:

Readers seeking to identify the fictional people and places here described would do better to inspect their own communities and search their own hearts, for this book is about a large part of America today.

Steinbeck had found his last big subject—the moral deterioration of the times. The Winter of Our Discontent pits honest work against new, get-rich-quick money; decency against slickness and trickiness. Ethan Hawley's moments of weakness and the dishonesty of his adolescent son, reflecting the contemporary Charles Van Doren scandal, are deliberately projected as symptoms of a national collapse.


It's not, then, by accident that Steinbeck's last ambitious project is called Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962). On his cross-continent trip in the camper he's named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse, he finds the old-fashioned virtues of independence and community more or less vanished. Everyone's on the move: "You got roots you sit and starve," a woman living in a mobile home tells him. In Monterey, his fantasy paradise, he's faced with the painful truth that "Doc," "Danny," and the Round Table of good-natured bums and big-hearted whores no longer exist—if they ever did. The horrible racism he encounters in New Orleans when a group of white women—"The Cheerleaders"—scream obscene and violent words at a tiny black girl being ushered into a newly desegregated school propels him back home, sickened for his country.

Steinbeck's heart, as always, is in the right place, but there's something artificial about Charley: many of the encounters he reports sound like pure inventions. His son John put it bluntly: "Thom and I are convinced that he never talked to any of those people.... He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit."

During the Sixties he had become a kind of cultural ambassador for the United States, close to people like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Dag Hammarsjköld. He had always been less radical than people thought he was—the outrage over injustice and poverty in The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle was personal, not ideological. He was, in fact, a liberal, middle-of-the-road Democrat—passionate about FDR, an ardent campaigner for Adlai Stevenson, and eventually close to Lyndon Johnson, whom he liked and vigorously supported, particularly on the Vietnam War.

This position did nothing to improve his standing with intellectuals, but it was sincere. He believed the Viet Cong were murderers, despised the draft-card burners back home, and admired the American troops he encountered as a war reporter on a trip to Southeast Asia in 1966, only two years before his death. Young John was in Vietnam, and Stein-beck managed to get himself helicoptered to an exposed hill outpost where John was fighting. In a surreal moment, the mutually antagonistic father and son found themselves under fire together. The son was to write, "I saw my father behind some sandbags overlooking my position with his M-60 at the ready.... I mean, who, in God's name, was producing this movie?"

Steinbeck's final work years were spent on journalism, and his subject was almost inevitably America. A collection of think pieces and nostalgia called America and Americans (1966) reveals him at his most characteristic. He's moralizing, he's didactic, he's searching for big answers to big questions. He's generous and vulnerable and touchy. And he's more and more dismayed by what he sees around him: "I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security—out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism." You could say that by the end he had evolved into a kind of minor and irrelevant prophet, both disillusioned and irredeemably optimistic.

And he's become that unfashionable and embarrassing thing, a patriot. "I believe," he wrote at the end of his life,

that out of the whole body of our past, out of our differences, our quarrels, our many interests and directions, something has emerged that is itself unique in the world: America—complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.

Somewhere along the way, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" had turned into "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."

Notes

[*] The first three volumes are The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings, 1936–1941; Novels and Stories, 1932– 1937; and Novels, 1942–1952.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21264



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The Magical Painting of Poussin

The Magical Painting of Poussin


le pietre istesse e l'ombre di quel loco

spirano spirti d'amoroso foco



By Andrew Butterfield


Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, February 12–May 11, 2008.



Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pierre Rosenberg and Keith Christiansen.

Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 414 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper)

1.

Nicolas Poussin has been studied and celebrated for more than three hundred years, and yet "Poussin and Nature," now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first show dedicated to his work as a landscape painter. It is a ravishingly beautiful exhibition, and one that attempts to renew our understanding of the artist. Today, as in the seventeenth century, Poussin is best known for narrative scenes from classical literature and religious history, idealizing images in which noble figures are posed like ancient statues. In few of his pictures do the settings, rather than the figures, predominate, and only about thirty of his two hundred or so paintings are generally called landscapes. Nonetheless, the thesis of the show is that the landscape pictures represent his most deeply personal meditations on the character and meaning of life and art.

To put forth this claim the curators of the show begin by rejecting a line of interpretation common in much recent scholarship on Poussin. Since Ernst Gombrich's celebrated article on the painter's Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, published in 1944, it has been popular to see Poussin as a person of nearly boundless erudition who used his paintings for displays of learning, often through abstruse references that would have been unclear to all but his most learned associates. In the view of the authors of the exhibition catalog, this tendency has not only threatened to turn a great artist into a dull pedant, it has also opened up the pictures to a wild array of fanciful interpretations. "One sometimes wonders," writes Willibald Sauerländer in his brilliant essay in the catalog, "if the hidden secrets...of these pictures were really invented by the artist or are rather the creation of all-too-erudite art historians."


To be sure, Poussin's friends admired his deep knowledge of classical art and literature, but they also praised his pictures for being "without obscurity"—to quote the words of André Félibien, the painter's student and biographer. Rather than searching for the key to Poussin's art in arcane writings, the authors of the catalog advise that we see his pictures in relation to the texts he loved best, those of Ovid, Virgil, and the Bible.

It has been common of late to regard Poussin as a kind of abstract philosopher. As presented in the exhibition, he comes across instead as an inspired poet. And like great poetry what his pictures demand—and what they reward—is serious engagement. The catalog asks that we look at the paintings as Poussin meant them to be viewed, slowly, deliberatively, and with unbroken concentration. Pierre Rosenberg, the former director of the Louvre and the principal force behind the show, writes:

Since the triumph of Impressionism, we have lost the habit of taking time to study paintings. We look at them in the same way we leaf through a book, which is to say, distractedly. It is important, then, to learn to stand before Poussin's works for a long time, to relearn how to take one's time—that time to which Poussin paid so much attention.... He wanted the time one might spend reading and absorbing a text and in understanding its significance or its message to be spent contemplating his paintings, with the same complete attention, the same concentration, the same reflection, the same emotional engagement.

The promise is that if you will look, you will find that Poussin's landscapes are magical paintings of unforgettable affective power.

2.

Nicolas Poussin was born in 1594 in Les Andelys, a small town in Normandy. Although we know little about his upbringing and early career, he is said to have come from a noble but impoverished family and to have studied Latin in his youth, training that was to have great influence in his art. He became a painter sometime around 1612, and shortly thereafter moved to Paris, where he had some success but won scant distinction. His fortunes only significantly improved in 1622 when he came to the attention of Giambattista Marino, the celebrated Italian poet then at the Tuscan court of Marie de Medici. Marino recognized and encouraged Poussin's genius and arranged for the painter to move to Rome in 1624.

Poussin's first years in the Eternal City were very difficult; he was poor, and gravely sick with venereal disease, an illness that affected him for the rest of his life. Poussin's extraordinary gift for inspiring friendship aided him in overcoming the crisis. One friend, Jacques Dughet, a cook, nursed him back to health, and another, Cassiano dal Pozzo, a preeminent antiquarian in Rome, helped him to gain patrons and win commissions. In 1627 Poussin finished for Cardinal Francesco Barberini a pair of large history paintings, The Destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem and The Death of Germanicus, and from then on Poussin's reputation as one of the leading artists in Rome was secured.

The common path to honor for a painter at that time was to concentrate on prestigious commissions for public settings, such as altarpieces and large paintings for the walls and ceilings of churches and palaces. Although he painted an important altarpiece for St. Peter's, The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus, in 1628, Poussin rejected this course, and chose instead to make chiefly small and medium-scaled paintings and to do so mostly for a tight circle of learned friends who fervently admired his work.


The show opens with paintings from Poussin's early years in Rome. All the pictures in this section are scenes from classical myth and literature, and many seem to be set in Arcadia, an imaginary place of love and song celebrated by Virgil and other ancient writers. In these paintings the landscape elements are chiefly in the background, and yet their lustrous beauty is fundamental to establishing their dreamy mood. Ever since their creation, it has been recognized that Poussin made these early pictures in emulation of Titian, specifically of the Venetian painter's three great canvases Bacchus and Ariadne, The Bacchanal of the Andrians, and The Worship of Venus, which were then in the Aldobrandini collection in Rome. Poussin was inspired by the golden light, the intense color, and the active brushwork of Titian's paintings.

Perhaps even more importantly, he saw in the Venetian's works a model of what he wanted to accomplish as a learned and poetic painter. Titian based two of his bacchanal canvases on the descriptions of ancient paintings that Philostratus wrote in Images, a book from the early third century AD. This Greek text was precious testimony to the appearance of classical painting, which had since been nearly entirely destroyed: other than the decorative details from frescoes in Nero's Roman villa, the Domus Aurea, just a handful of substantial fragments were then known. Poussin was intimately familiar with Blaise de Vigenère's French translation of Philostratus, and all through his career he consulted this book and, like Titian, made paintings after Philostratus' descriptions.

Poussin took an intense interest in recreating the appearance of ancient paintings. To this end he often based his figures on classical sculpture and included evocations of the few remaining fragments of Roman landscape painting. He strove, too, for perfect accuracy in depicting the details of classical and early Christian costume, ritual, comportment, and architecture. This required considerable antiquarian research, frequently in consultation with Cassiano dal Pozzo and others. Yet it is important to see in this activity not only a desire for scientific exactitude; it also has the poignancy of reaching for an unattainable ideal. The artist Peter Paul Rubens, who was another friend of Cassiano dal Pozzo, wrote in 1637 that the "examples of the ancient painters can now be followed only in the imagination"—they were elusive like phantoms in a dream. Presumably for Poussin too the desire to recreate ancient painting had something of the character of fantasy.

Titian's bacchanals were also one of the first important responses in the visual arts to the new vogue for pastoral literature that had begun with the publication of Jacopo Sannazaro's Arcadia in 1504. The pastoral, with its celebration of an ideal life of bucolic ease, love, and poetry in the mythic Golden Age, was still immensely fashionable during Poussin's lifetime, inspiring works by Cervantes, Marino, Shakespeare, Milton, and many others. More than any other visual artist since Titian in the early sixteenth century, Poussin combined the antiquarian dream of recapturing classical painting with the yearning for the mythic Golden Age in order to make serious art of real emotional intensity.

In these early paintings Poussin depicts nearly all the figures in attitudes of reverie or longing. Some are shown in states of moody contemplation or poetic musing; for instance, the nymph at the center of Landscape with a Nymph and Sleeping Satyr seems to be dreaming, while Midas in Midas at the Source of the River Pactolus looks lost in thought. In other paintings, such as Venus Anointing the Dead Adonis, the yearning takes on an elegiac cast; and in still other pictures, Poussin concentrates on erotic desire. This is especially true of Venus (or a Nymph) Spied On by Satyrs, where the satyrs lust for a beautiful nude who, with her head back, her eyes closed, and her hand touching her mons veneris, is shown enrapt in sexual fantasy. Poussin's focus on the varieties of longing and dreaming is almost unparalleled in Renaissance and early Baroque art. By contrast, for example, Titian's bacchanals are images of robust action, not of mental and physical desire.

In these early pictures Poussin makes the landscape elements seem to smolder with intense ardor. He achieved this effect by applying the upper layers of paint in relatively thin and rough brush strokes that allowed the red-brown ground layer of paint to show through, giving the entire image a warm and sensual glow. In European poetry the tradition of describing nature with amorous metaphors was an ancient one going back all the way to the Homeric hymns. This tradition was still very much alive in literature at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in no small part owing to the popularity of the pastoral. For instance, borrowing imagery from Ovid, Milton in his poem L'Allegro in the 1630s could write:

The frolick Wind that breathes the Spring,

Zephir with Aurora playing,

As he met her once a Maying,

There on Beds of Violets blew,

And fresh-blown Roses washt in dew,

Fill'd her with thee a daughter fair...

Poussin was extremely familiar with this tradition thanks to his friendship with Marino, whose poem L'Adone is a rich repository of the same vein of imagery. The artist read the book with the author, even making illustrations of it at his request, and Marino and Poussin also discussed how to translate the power of poetic language into the visual forms of painting. In L'Adone Marino wrote descriptive passages such as "Even the stones and the shadows of the place/sigh breaths of amorous fire."[1] In his early mythic landscapes Poussin sought to capture the same sense of pathos and inspiration as is conveyed by lush and elevated writing of this kind.

3.

In the early 1630s Poussin moved away from making small mythological canvases in a Titianesque style and began concentrating instead on producing larger narrative pictures of events in classical and early Christian history. In some of the pictures of these years the landscape elements have relatively less force, and the exhibition at the Metropolitan only displays three paintings made between 1635 and the end of the 1640s. It was in 1648 that Poussin began to concentrate on landscape painting and from then until his death in 1665 it remained a chief preoccupation.

The landscapes he made in these years have been recognized as a sublime achievement ever since their creation. Already in the seventeenth century they were cited as the supreme examples of a new "heroic" style of depicting the world. In nearly every regard they differ visually from the early mythological pictures. They are much larger in size, typically several times bigger than the pictures from the first years in Rome, and the figures are on a smaller scale relative to the setting, so that the depiction of the landscape becomes paramount. In tone and color as well they mark a striking contrast with the earlier paintings: rather than reds and browns as before, now cool blues and greens dominate, so that many of the late images are soothing to behold.

The biggest difference of all is in the depth of field. In the early pictures, the viewer's attention tends to be directed almost exclusively to the immediate foreground; the landscape elements beyond this area are of dis-tinctly secondary importance, like a beautiful backdrop behind actors on a stage. In the later pictures, on the other hand, there is a continuity of space that runs from the very front edge of the painting all the way into the farthest distance. Often, as in Landscape with Diogenes, Poussin paints a path that starts at the entrance to the picture and wanders into the background, so that the viewer can imagine walking into the image. Furthermore, within each section of the painting from the front to the back, Poussin carefully provides a series of clues indicating the relative placement of objects—people, trees, hills, bushes, buildings, and so on—thus making the recession of the space all the more distinct and easy to read.

Poussin is able to foster the impression of a vista so deep that the space even seems to continue over the horizon and out the back of the picture. He does this by showing the light of the sun, which itself has already set, streaking up and into the visual array from beyond the hills in the far distance. He thus makes it clear that the sky extends past the limits of what we can see, just as in the natural world.

The extraordinary amplitude of the world and sky in Poussin's paintings was commented upon by his contemporaries. Félibien, for example, remarked that the early mythological pictures were set in a "delicious place"; writing of the later landscapes, he instead praised their illusion of a "vast field." The deep magnitude and the measured clarity of the space in these paintings are fundamental for the sense they give that one is looking into some kind of ideal world. In a letter in 1665 Poussin compared the elements of painting to the golden bough carried by Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid. He does not elaborate on his comment, and perhaps it is only a suggestive coincidence, but in Book VI of the epic the golden bough serves as a magical aid that helps Aeneas reach the Elysian Fields. Virgil writes of the skies of that heavenly place: "What largesse of bright air, clothing the vales in dazzling/ Light, is here!"[2] No description better fits the effect of the light and space in Poussin's late landscapes.


Since the time he made these pictures it has been noted that they seem to unite precise observation of the surface details of the world with a profound sense of its underlying structures. In his biography of Poussin, Félibien reports that the artist would go out into the countryside to sketch "the most beautiful effects of Nature." But then he immediately adds that Poussin was not content only to know "the things of the senses," nor to base his art on the examples of great masters of the past, but also studied theory, optics, and geometry, as a means of correcting the data of appearances. It is the resulting combination of naturalism and vision of the ideal that has won praise from generations of critics, beginning with Roger de Piles in the seventeenth century. No one is more elegant in describing this accomplishment of Poussin than William Hazlitt, who in his 1824 essay on the artist famously stated:

To give us nature, such as we see it, is well and deserving of praise; to give us nature, such as we have never seen, but have often wished to see it, is better, and deserving of higher praise. He who can show the world in its first naked glory, with the hues of fancy spread over it, or in its high and palmy state, with the gravity of history stamped on the proud monuments of vanished empire,—who, by his "so potent art," can recall time past, transport us to distant places, and join the regions of imagination (a new conquest) to those of reality,—who shows us not only what nature is, but what she has been, and is capable of,—he who does this, and does it with simplicity, with truth, and grandeur, is lord of nature and her powers; and his mind is universal, and his art the master-art!

The late landscapes are images of heavenly beauty, and yet many historians today believe that they were born of Poussin's disgust for the evils of the earth. Certainly, his letters of these years are filled with bitter and angry comments about