• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
But hear the morning's injured weeping, and know why:
Cities and men have fallen; the will of the Unjust
Has never lost its power; still, all princes must
Employ the Fairly-Noble unifying Lie.
-- Auden, "In Time of War"
"Not even wrong" is how scientists dispense with bullshit and incoherence in their field. It's a riposte tantamount to telling a windy fool at a bar, "You may be right," and then walking away to finish your drink in peace. In the last five years Leo Strauss has had his legacy run through every lens of distortion and every mind given to feverish falsification -- a sad irony for the philosopher who thought that one of the greatest dangers to modern culture was "fanatical obscurantism."
Strauss' own untenderized prose, often believed to demonstrate how murky and sinister was the man behind it, is explicable by something much less sexy than his alleged adherence to lying with good intent: He was German. The sentences are long and difficult. Even in translation. Ask a German.
Now comes a fascinating look at the most misunderstood philosopher since Socrates by the very students -- "disciples" is a touch much -- he trained. The most notable of this bunch is Nathan Tarcov, a political science professor at (where else?) the University of Chicago. You should know three things about Tarcov. The first is that he was against the toppling of Saddam Hussein. The second is that he's uncovered some of the scant evidence of Strauss' well-guarded opinions on modern American politics; the old man having been quite mums throughout his career about anything other than the first shining city on a hill, Athens. Forget that he's credited, or blamed, with spawning a whole generation of Plato's Republicans.
As reported in an illuminating essay in the Chicago Reader:
[Tarcov] consulted Strauss�s executor, friend, and editor, Joseph Cropsey, who�d made a list of unarchived Strauss material. Only one title on the list appeared to address practical politics in some way. It was �The Re-education of Axis Countries Concerning the Jews,� a talk given at the New School in 1943, before World War II was even over. When Tarcov got his hands on the five-page manuscript, he found Strauss�s handwriting hard to decipher. But what he eventually decoded was as intriguing and surprising as �What Can We Learn?�
�I was certainly struck by how very skeptical he was for the prospects of establishing democracy in Germany,� Tarcov says. In �Re-education,� Strauss doubted that a just government in Germany could be constructed after the war, at least not if the effort were left to the Allies. �A form of government which is merely imposed by a victorious enemy will not last,� Strauss predicted. �Only Germans, only Germans who remained in Germany and shared all the misery of Nazi rule and of defeat, can do it. Only they will be able to speak a language understandable to post-Hitlerian Germany.�
Tarcov says Strauss�s skepticism surprised him�not only because Germany did manage to develop a democracy but because of the subject�s curious relevance to the debate over Strauss�s responsibility for Iraq. �He was wrong!� declares Tarcov.
So the eminence grise of the Defense Policy Review Board was a "realist"!
That is not to say, however, that there aren't threads binding Straussian thought to neoconservatism. What distinguishes neoconservatism from other political theories is its zero tolerance for moral relativism: the idea that, say, clipping a woman's genitals is fine when it conforms to an age-old tribal custom, or that genocide can be overlooked when it is perpetrated by someone who claims to be mounting a defensive campaign against imperialism.
Allan Bloom, one of Strauss' real disciples who popularized what'd he learned from his mentor in The Closing of the American Mind, said that one of the easiest ways of telling who the real headache would be in any Intro to Western Philosophy class would be to ask about the obligation of English civil servants to prevent the practice of sati in India. The one who replied, "But the English shouldn't never have been there in the first place!" was your man -- or woman, as was often, bizarrely, the case.
Another characteristic of neoconservatism is its militant opposition to the abolition of a priori or self-evident truths. By a priori or self-evident truths I don't mean "the insurgency is in its last throes," which wasn't even uttered by a genuine neocon. I mean, "all human beings wish to live free of tyranny."
And here I find I can't help referring to that other haunting specter of our current foreign policy debate... The third thing you need to know about Nathan Tarcov is that
[in] his office he�s hung pictures of many of the thinkers he studies and teaches�Machiavelli and Socrates, for example�and also the famous image of a Tiananmen Square protester facing down tanks. Trotsky, whom he admired as a teenager, is also on the wall. �I decided one shouldn�t abandon an old friend,� he explains.
Trotsky's greatest fear about the creeping Stalinization of the Central Committee in the 1920's was the spread of what he termed the "soul-uplifting lie." (This phrase was first put down in the inaugural tract of Trotskyism: The New Course.) Worse for the long-term degeneration of the revolution than collectivization or the New Economic Policy was the torrent of Potemkin nonsense denying "on-the-ground" realities of infrastructure and gross national product in the Soviet Union. Trotsky saw in this the germ that could ultimately destroy Communism.
The soul-uplifting lie sounds like the "noble lie," yet it had a distinctly Russian tincture since there are two words for "truth" in the language. These are pravda and istina: the former means metaphysical Truth, the latter means empirical fact. Pushkin, parodying the idiocy of some contemporary, apostrophized him by saying, "The pravda that uplifts is worth a thousand of your petty little istinas," and this is almost an exact prefiguration of what Stalin based his dictatorship on a hundred years hence.
When pravda is defined as the erasure of istina -- when, say, a national newspaper is named after it -- you have a society in which anything goes and all knowledge is subject to the caprice of the few. Or the one. The name we now give this system of unsystematic repression is totalitarianism, the resistance to which might be thought of as the common pinion that binds the ex-Trotskyist and Straussian wings of neoconservatism.
As Strauss himself put it in Natural Right and History, which I commend to anyone who suspects that Tim Robbins is not the nimblest interpreter of New School weltanschaunng:
According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e., ultimate principles have no other support than arbitrary and hence blind preferences. We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues--retail sanity and wholesale madness.
Where's the conspiracy or cabal-wrangling in here?
Not even Strauss' "epigones" (another favorite term of Trotskyist obloquy, by the way, when it was applied to Lenin's supposed heirs) would quibble with the idea that without presupposition and the defense of a universality of the known, history and its attendant subjects are negligible.
My defense of the Euston Manifesto and Nick Cohen is now up at Jewcy. This is the first publication in the U.S. - with the sorry exception of Dissent, that is - to address the depressing scandal of Johann Hari's review of What's Left. I'd appreciate any help in disseminating it. First two graphs below. Please read the essay at Jewcy and link from there:
First it was the sight of leftist organizations and middle class liberals marching in �peace� parades alongside Islamic thugs calling for the murder of apostates. Then there were the formerly progressive gazettes like The Nation and The Guardian championing corpse-mutilating theocrats like Muqtada al-Sadr and the suicide bombing �resistance� in Iraq. And the coup de grace: London�s Labor party mayor Ken Livingstone graciously welcoming Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a cleric who called for the murder of gays and Jews. Amidst this moral and ideological muddle, a group of graying British Marxists and ex-Communists huddled together in a London pub in May of 2005 and began crafting a manifesto for the 21st century left. Enough was enough.
For nearly a year the group � made up of bloggers like �Harry Hatchet� from Harry�s Place, and leftist academics like the Marxist political philosopher Norman Geras and the Democratiya editor Alan Johnson � met regularly to debate the past and future of progressive politics. In April 2006, the group unveiled a common statement of principles called the Euston Manifesto, named after the scruffy area where they assembled, and published it in the New Statesman and the Guardian�s Comment is Free blog. The manifesto was a seemingly uncontroversial document aiming to reassert classic liberal values: democracy over dictatorship, freedom of speech over censorship, and the need to advocate for the oppressed and the impoverished.
While Sullivan is taking a honeymoon from wondering about Weimarification of the US (and, you know, taking a honeymoon), here's a great standup routine on the troop withdrawal debate.
The comedian is Yoram Bauman, an economist who does this as a hobby. This is the first time I've seen him do a noneconomic schtick for a noneconomic audience; his delivery needs fine-tuning but the material is very good.
Roger Boylen's essay in Boston Review, which, like one of Nabokov's "blues," must now flutter off to find a new branch of distribution, never really surpasses his marvelous opening paragraph. Not that it has to:
When I was a boy in Geneva, sometime in the 1960s, a schoolmate of mine belonged to a society of junior lepidopterists. A couple of times a year, under the guidance of mature butterfly experts, he and his fellow enthusiasts went off to capture papillons in the alpine meadows above Montreux, at the opposite end of Lake Geneva. On one such expedition the guide was a stout, bald Russian gentleman in shorts and a parka who, despite being in his mid-60s, bounded ahead of the pack, brandishing his net and firing off exhortations and butterfly lore in accented but fluent English and French. When the hunt was over, he abruptly took his leave with a cheery �Au revoir, tout le monde.� His name I heard for the first time as, approximately, Monsieur Nabucco. He was, said my friend, one of the world�s leading experts on butterflies. He was also, he added in awe, the author of a really dirty book.
The rest are gosh-wow reflections on the art of writing as practiced by a Russian genius, who may have thought his stuff was "pat-ball" to Joyce's "champion game," but was nevertheless more pleasurable to read than the Irish dean of modernism. If Finnegan's Wake is daunting for the quadruple entendres of its every sentence, then consider Nabokov's simple-packaged gifts, what I call his easter eggs, or sly puns and allusions buried throughout his novels. For these treats alone, which you rarely catch the first time, do Nabokov's books bear re-reading.
One example from Lolita: "Is it because there is always delight in the semi-translucent mystery, the flowing charshaf through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling." Here an otherwise facile play with adjectives is given great power by the fact that the narrator of this scandalous book is a monster in love. Humbert Humbert would have the words melt in his mouth to form rivulets leading back to his dolorous and hazy Dolores Haze.
Though Nabokov's humor, especially in Lolita, could be just as easily aimed at himself: "I deplored the Mann Act as heading itself to a dreadful pun, the revenge that the Gods of Semantics take against tight-zippered Philistines."
Boylen's major point is that the author's preferred style was parody, not satire; quoting the old man himself: �Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.� Maybe so. But just Nabokov's abiding hatred of Freud -- that "Viennese witchdoctor" -- led him to render some of the most thrilling couch-trips in 20th century fiction, his hot disdain of the social novel or "message" writing was also, on occasion, a protest too many. Look at how well Nabokov captures the paranoia and bigotry of the First World War in Speak Memory, his memoir:
I next recall our sitting on our mother's bed, holding those lumpy stockings and doing our best to give the performance she has wanted to see; but we had so messed up the wrappings, so amateurish were our renderings of enthusiastic surprise (I can see my brother casting his eyes upward and exclaiming, in imitation of our new French governess, 'Ah, que c'est beau!'), that after observing us for a moment, our audience burst into tears. A decade passed. World War One started. A crowd of patriots and my uncle Ruke stoned the German Embassy. Peterburg was sunk to Petrograd again all rules of nomenclatorial priority. Beethoven turned out to be Dutch. The newsreels showed photogenic explosions, the spam of a cannon, Poincare in his leathern leggins, bleak puddles, the poor little Tsarevich in Circassian uniform with dagger and cartridges, his tall sisters so dowdily dressed, long railway trains crammed with troops.
"Russians beat Prussians" was the saying in the trenches of Stalingrad. But Nabokov loathed the kind of petty-mindedness that led to war and historical crisis. In The Gift, his best native language novel, he does satirize (because parody is too light a word) great Russian chauvinism as it was directed against Germans:
The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers -- unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist; but nonetheless he was seized with a trembling, and only the gloomy conductor with hunted eyes and a plaster on his finger, eternally and painfully seeking equilibrium and room to pass amidst the convulsive jolts of the car and the cattle-like crowding of standing passengers, seemed outwardly, if not a human being, then at least a poor relation to a human being. At the second stop a lean man in a short coat with a fox-fur collar, wearing a green hat and frayed spats, sat down in front of Fyodor. In settling down he bumped him with his knee and with the corner of a fat briefcase with a leather handle, and this trivial thing turned his irritation into a kind of pure fury, so that, staring fixedly at the sitter, reading his features, he instantly concentrated on his all his sinful hatred (for this poor, pitiful, expiring nation) and knew precisely why he hated him: for that low forehead, for those pale eyes; for Vollmilch and Extrastark, implying the lawful existence of the diluted and the artificial; for the Punchinello-like system of gestures (threatening children not as we do--with an upright finger, a standing reminder of Divine Judgment--but with a horizontal digit imitation a waving stick); for a love of fences, rows, mediocrity; for the cult of the office; for the fact that if you listen to his inner voice (or to any conversation on the street) you will inevitably hear figures, money; for the lavatory humor and crude laughter; for the fatness of the backsides of both sexes, even if the rest of the subject is not fat; for the lack of fastidiousness; for the visibility of cleanliness--the gleam of saucepan bottoms in the kitchen and the barbaric filth of the bathrooms; for the weakness for dirty little tricks, for taking pains with dirty tricks, for the abominable object stuck carefully on the railings of the public gardens; for someone else's live cat, pierced through with wire as revenge on a neighbor, and the wire cleverly twisted at one end; for cruelty in everything, self-satisfied, taken from granted; for the unexpected, rapturous helpfulness with which five passersby help you to pick up some dropped farthings; for.... Thus he threaded the points of his biased indictment, looking at the man who sat opposite him--until the latter took a copy of Vasiliev's newspaper from his pocket and coughed unconcernedly with a Russian intonation.
If that doesn't teach you a "lesson," I don't know what does.
For a White emigre living in Berlin in the 1920's, Nabokov evidenced an acute ear for every clanging syllable of Russian anti-Semitism, which he had a personal stake in combating since his beloved wife Vera was Jewish. Here is Fyodor, again in The Gift, describing the fat and venomous stepfather of his girlfriend Zina:
[In] the realm of philosophy he had studied the protocols of the Sages of Zion. He could discuss these two books for hours and it seemed that he had read nothing else in his life. He was generous with stories of judicial practice in the provinces and with Jewish anecdotes. Instead of "we had some champagne and set out" he expressed himself as follows: "We cracked a bottle of fizz--and hup." ...
"My better half," he said on another occasion, "was for twenty years the wife of a kike and got mixed up with a whole rabble of Jew in-laws. I had to expend quite a bit of effort to get rid of that stink. Zina [he alternately called his stepdaughter either this or Aida, depending on his mood], thank God, doesn't have anything specific--you should see her cousin, one of these fat little brunettes, you know, with a fuzzy upper lip. In fact, it has occurred to me that my Marianna, when she was Madam Mertz, might have had other interests--one can't help being drawn to on'e sown people, you know. Let her tell you herself how she suffocated in that atmosphere, what relatives she acquired--oh, my Gott--all gabbling at table and she puring out the tea. And to think that her mother was a lady-in-waiting of the Empress and that she herself had gone to the Smolny School for young ladies--and then she went and married a yid--to this very day she can't explain how it happened: he was right, she says, and she was stupid, they met in Nice, she eloped to Rome with him--in the open air, you know, it all looked different--well, but when afterwards the little clan closed upon her, she saw she was stuck."
In his memoir A Margin of Hope, the great Irving Howe named two key influences on his adolescent development into political radicalism: Marx and Shelley. Growing up in the working-class and ethnic Bronx of the 1930's, this was a fine pair on which to model one's outlook if boroughs and cities, not to mention kith and kin, felt too constricting. The romantic impulse to change the world arose as much from the brick-and-mortar ghettos of the new hemisphere as it did from the Lake District and Rhineland of the old. ("Arguing the World" was the title of the documentary made about Howe and his fellow contemporary intellectuals, who, for the sake of convenience, always had their geographic origin -- New York -- stamped, like an immigrant visa, on their permanent identities.)
The personal is the political but never quite as much as it is with firebrand antagonists of the status quo. Marx lived a yawning private life, but you can't scan his observations about the wife-swapping, adulterous bourgeois without recalling that, even as a catchpenny hack whiling away the hours in the British Museum, he still got around to humping the help.
Shelley's poetry was messianic and revolutionary; so was his boast (somewhat insincere, as it turns out), that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. But he wasn't quite the freedom fighter in his domestic routine and, as Adam Kirsch recounts in this New Yorker review of a new imaginative Shelley biography, the author of "Adonis" and "Ozymandias" rather envied the Catos and Caesars of the planet:
Throughout his adulthood, he considered himself a serious radical�even claiming, �I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science��whose purpose in life was to advance the cause of liberty in England and Europe. But he consistently displayed an indifference to reality which went deeper than his propaganda techniques. Shelley�s ineffectiveness as an agitator we could dismiss with a smile. But his political beliefs demonstrated the same contempt of consequence, the same elevation of pure motive over practical effects, the same lack of self-awareness. These qualities helped to make Shelley a genuinely illiberal thinker, whose politics verged at times on the totalitarian.
The essay that gave us the "acknowledged legislators" line appeared in a short-lived journal, edited by Byron and Leigh Hunt, called The Liberal. (It's since been revived in Britain as a highly engaging quarterly.) But of course, no conservative critic today can write about the radical litterateurs of the 19th century without seeing them, somewhat prosaically, as germinal totalitarians in the line of Stalin and Hitler and Mao. Yet Byron and Shelley only ever terrorized their own households and, not without good reason, public opinion. The beat Kirsch misses in the above paragraph is that Shelley's "contempt of consequence" -- most of all for his own behavior -- is precisely what made him incapable of anything other than a domestic tyranny. He lacked cunning and calculation. Though his self-involvement may have led him to become a lousy husband and a delinquent father, one can't quite envision him administering a Committee on Public Safety, or orchestrating a show trial. He was a frustrated man of action, a dilettante who probably resorted to poetry in the first place, and then made grandiose pronouncements about its possibilities, because he knew he'd never make a proper general or prime minister or king. He seems to have been hurt into poetry by his own practical limitations. (Compare this to the equally Romantic Benjamin Disraeli who wanted to be a writer, and was, but then realized his immortality lay in other realms.)
For good reason did Byron expire in Greece trying to fund a nationalist liberation army, all the while adopting an aristocratic hauteur about his efforts and aiming at martyrdom. It was the closest he ever came to making a sort of political difference he thundered about in his verse.
The ominous consistency of thought, said to be the hobgoblin of little minds and surely a necessary condition for dictatorship, was noticeably absent in the Romantics. Nor could they properly be described as "Manichean" for the simple fact that they declaimed the existence of God, but idolized his opposite, Satan -- if that isn't having it both ways, I don't know what is. Most of them also admired two wholly antithetical earthly figures, Napoleon and George Washington, the one the most radical counterrevolutionary, and the other the most conservative revolutionary. It was their Promethean natures that the poets loved. Ideology didn't enter into it.
My piece on the greater perils of the Estonian cyberwar is now up at Reason:
Last May, Estonia was invaded. Rather than tanks and aircraft, the medium of trespass was fiber optic cables�which is nearly as bad, for such a wired country. The "cyberwar," which was precipitated by the controversial relocation of a World War II monument in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, drew international headlines, mainly focused on the Clancy-esque gizmology behind it. "Distributed-denial-of-service" has now entered the lexicon not as a symptom of disaffected Baltic waiters, but as a means of bringing down a country with spam. NATO, which used to only contend with enemy garrisons and missile silos on European soil, now finds itself dispatching allied geek squads to protect against that 21st century species of automaton: the "botnet."
Darkness. Light � harm/evil � challenge � enemy � defeat and destroy. Eyes open � alerted. We�ve been a continent shielded by oceans. Carnage known only in Civil War. Foe: Political ideology, not a religion. Our view of the world��challenge we did not ask for in a world we did not make.� People turn to America. Much grief but many questions. Who is the enemy?
An update is needed on Bismarck's line about politics and sausages being two things whose creation should never be witnessed. These slightly poetic and heavily world-historical jottings constitute the early notes of George W. Bush's speechwriting team's State of the Union address for September 20, 2001. "Team" might actually be the most significant word to take away from above extract, which comes to us courtesy of former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully in an already classic piece in this month's Atlantic, titled "Present at the Creation." It's less Profiles in Courage Scully is concerned with and more the hubris of one Michael Gerson, another former wordsmith for the executive and, as we now know, not accidentally the most famous presidential speechwriter since Ted Sorenson.
Scully's essay is a partial critique of Gerson's new self-fellating memoir, Heroic Conservatism, in which the head hero is none other than Gerson himself. Known for his studious evangelicalism -- in Revenge of the Nerds terms, the Gilbert to Bush's Booger -- Gerson's greatest flourish, says a disgruntled ex-colleague, was not rhetorical but autobiographical:
[Gerson] allowed false assumptions, and also encouraged them. Among chummy reporters, he created a fictionalized, �Mike, we�re at war� version of presidential speechwriting, casting himself in a grand and solitary role. The narrative that Mike Gerson presented to the world is a story of extravagant falsehood. He has been held up for us in six years� worth of coddling profiles as the great, inspiring, and idealistic exception of the Bush White House. In reality, Mike�s conduct is just the most familiar and depressing of Washington stories�a history of self- seeking and media manipulation that is only more distasteful for being cast in such lofty terms.
The "Mike, we're at war" bit derives from Gerson's factitious addition of his own name to a famous bull-session statement made by President Bush shortly after the Twin Towers were incinerated. Gerson, like all good Beltway showmen, got in nice and cozy with Bob Woodward, who duly regurgitated his source's self-aggrandizing quotes without bothering to check them against other administration officials, most notably the speaker-in-chief.
Matthew Scully commands instant respect for being a meat-and-potatoes conservative who not too long ago published a meticulous and morally serious book about vegetarianism. (Christopher Hitchens reviewed Dominion in the Atlantic and said, "Scully shows a martyrlike patience in the face of [the militant taunters of animal rights activists], as befits a man who's had to hear innumerable jests about veal and spotted owls at carnivorous Republican fundraisers.") Anyway, it's clear he's been saving his carnivorous tendencies for a rather different cut of meat.
We all know that David Frum first suggested the phrase "axis of hatred," which later became more memorable and at least as provocative as any construction by Hannah Arendt. "Evil," though, was never the invention of Gerson, despite his best efforts to give the contrary impression. It was Scully's. Also unwarranted for Mike's clipfile are: "This conflict has begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour of our choosing;" "Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign;" "The war on terrorism will not be won on the defensive." If only there were someone in the Bush administration with so peacockish a desire to claim credit for the policies which followed from these high-flown phrases.
Minuting the finest hours is usually the work of presidential biographers long after their subjects have expired and years after poring through musty archives. What fun that so divided a White House with so unending a supply of defectors gives us the real story as the rough draft of history. It was a major point of all the moist profiles of Gerson that he liked to come up with Bush's best lines while sitting in a local Starbucks, beating back the "solitude of writing" with, presumably, calls for global democracy and Venti foam lattes. Here, at last, is the decaffeinated version:
My most vivid memory of Mike at Starbucks is one I have labored in vain to shake. We were working on a State of the Union address in John�s office when suddenly Mike was called away for an unspecified appointment, leaving us to �keep going.� We learned only later, from a chance conversation with his secretary, where he had gone, and it was a piece of Washington self-promotion for the ages: At the precise moment when the State of the Union address was being drafted at the White House by John and me, Mike was off pretending to craft the State of the Union in longhand for the benefit of a reporter.
The more I cut and paste from this hilarious hatchet job, the more I think the parallels to the Kennedy era are frighteningly apt. As a speechwriter, Ted Sorenson was a model of humility and self-abnegation, for which he must have exhibited martyrlike patience in the face of his grandstanding and reckless and feckless boss. With the Bush administration, we've got it backwards: It's the king who sits small, while the pudgy and pious court servant chews away at his ear and struts around the palace like he owns the joint.
My review of On Chesil Beach is up at the Weekly Standard:
If the male pursuit of sex suffers from a fatal impatience, I wonder how many women have actually been persuaded by Andrew Marvell's more farsighted and minatory argument:
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust . . .
Edward Mayhew, the protagonist of this burnished gem of a novel, has just been wed, in an England a few years shy of the sexual revolution, to Florence Ponting, a beautiful and cultured girl he met at a rally for nuclear disarmament. (The metaphysical poets never had the benefit of looming atomic armageddon to hasten their progress in the bedroom.) Man and wife are 23- and 22-year-old virgins, respectively, and despite the obvious associations with a prim and puritanical era about to be undone by the 1960s, theirs is not really a struggle against that coy mistress, time, but rather Florence's nonexistent libido. Her own echoing song, courtesy of her classical musical talent, is used as a mental distraction from the conjugal duty, which Edward eagerly yet anxiously anticipates. Indeed, his bride would like to preserve her virginity forever, or at least have it "lost" as quickly and perfunctorily as possible, with scarce encore performances.
This is a dilemma no poet in any age should ever have to face, which makes it especially satisfying that Ian McEwan's masterful prose is put to the task of describing an unconsummated marriage that's only a couple of hours old and already a complete failure.
The Dilettante's Guide to the Michael Vick Scandal
[Light blogging in August as I concentrate on journalism that'll pay for the trip the girlfriend, the new cocker spaniel and I took to Easthampton. Plus, I've been knee-deep in Johann Hari v. Nick Cohen. So I wrote a feuilleton about pooch-fighting and its discontents at Jewcy. Enjoy.]
Just how far has Michael Vick mania wended its way into even the least likely news outlets? Here�s Ben McGrath�s latest �Talk of the Town� for the New Yorker, about a dilapidated kennel for urban hunting dogs in uptown Manhattan: ��One guy approached us�he wanted to bring some pits,� Ross said, referring to pit bulls. �We try to steer clear of that. He might be Michael Vick-in� it.�
Chances are good that at some point this weekend, you�re going to wind up in a conversation about this gruesome man-causes-dog-to-bite-other-dog story. But how much more is there to say, other than �It�s wrong to kill dogs�? In the interest of keeping your dinner party conversations fresh, we�ve provided you with a list of alternative angles. Print them out, study them in the john, and hope everyone�s drunk enough not to take you terribly seriously when you trot out one of the following:
Does anybody in the Brooklyn pizza industry realize that price-fixing is a serious federal offense? Does the New York Times' David Gonzales, who wrote a David/Goliath business feature on Sunset Park, know it?
Some of Johnny�s competitors who signed the anti-Papa John�s petition are not taking the news any better. For years they worked in friendly rivalry, helping each other through tight spots.
�If we get short on cheese or tomatoes, we go to him or he comes to us,� said Gino Campese, the owner of Scotti�s Pizza. �When it�s time to raise prices, we get together. There�s room for everybody. But not for Papa John�s.�
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
My defense of the Euston Manifesto and Nick Cohen is now up at Jewcy. This is the first publication in the U.S. - with the sorry exception of Dissent, that is - to address the depressing scandal of Johann Hari's review of What's Left. I'd appreciate any help in disseminating it. First two graphs below. Please read the essay at Jewcy and link from there:
Roger Boylen's 
In his memoir A Margin of Hope, the great Irving Howe named two key influences on his adolescent development into political radicalism: Marx and Shelley. Growing up in the working-class and ethnic Bronx of the 1930's, this was a fine pair on which to model one's outlook if boroughs and cities, not to mention kith and kin, felt too constricting. The romantic impulse to change the world arose as much from the brick-and-mortar ghettos of the new hemisphere as it did from the Lake District and Rhineland of the old. ("Arguing the World" was the title of the documentary made about Howe and his fellow contemporary intellectuals, who, for the sake of convenience, always had their geographic origin -- New York -- stamped, like an immigrant visa, on their permanent identities.)
My review of On Chesil Beach is up at the Weekly Standard:
