Everybody is talking about the rude obit of Katherine Graham crafted by some anonymous minion of Scaife's Pittsburg rag. The best part of the National Post article, by Mark Steyn, is this (first a quote from the Pittsburg article, then Steyn's comments):
"She married Felix Frankfurter's brilliant law clerk, Philip Graham, who took over running The Post, which her father purchased at a bankruptcy sale. Graham built the paper but became estranged from Kay. She had him committed to a mental hospital, and he was clearly intending divorce when she signed him out and took him for a weekend outing during which he was found shot. His death was ruled a suicide. Within 48 hours, she declared herself the publisher."
That's the stuff! As the Tribune-Review's chap has it, Mrs. G got her philandering spouse banged up in the nuthouse and then arranged a weekend pass with a one-way ticket. "His death was ruled a suicide." Lovely touch that. Is it really possible Katharine Graham offed her hubby? Who cares? To those who think the worst problem with the American press is its awful stultifying homogeneity, the Tribune-Review's deranged perverseness is to be cherished. Give that man a Pulitzer!"
Unfortunately, he ruins the mood by getting to his point, which is that Katie Graham was soft on Clinton - a rather ridiculous charge, as anybody who read the Post during the dismal impeachment days knows. Or at least, it is ridiculous as Steyn couches it. If Steyn's problem with the Post that they did not harp continually on Clinton's willingness to bomb Sudan for petty political gain, certainly an impeachable offense in my book, then I would have been all with him - but no, Steyn thinks that Monica =Watergate. The delusions of the right have no end.
On the other hand, give The Spectator, definitely a rightwing magazine, a prize for a really scathing obituary by a Andrew Gimson. He starts off with a killer lede: "Helmut Kohl has buried many bodies in his time, and now he has buried his wife Hannelore." He manages to stuff into the first graf an jibe at Kohl's arranging the funeral in a Roman Catholic church for a supposed protestant suicide, and then ends on this wonderfully abrasive note:
"The German media had already, almost without exception, swallowed Mr Kohl�s explanation for her death, which was that she was suffering from such an agonising allergy to light that for the last 15 months she had only been able to leave the house under cover of darkness."
Subsequently, Grimson shows that Hannelore Kohl's curious condition might have had less to do with the heliophobia, and more to do with his husband's "companion/secretary," Juliane Weber.
Basic subtext is the fat guy strangling his wife, then unctuously conducting her obsequies in a cathedral stuffed vest to wurst with Deutschland's best and brightest, in a tableau right out of Georg Grosz. Probably took his chippie out for funeral meats, afterwards. Much more topical than Philip Graham's suicide, right? I wasn't expecting such a bracing little tale from the Spectator, of all places.
Back in June, when Roland Dumas was sentenced to a pittance punishment, I got up a head of steam and wrote my friend MB an e-mail which read:
I don't know if you have been following L'affaire ELF, but the sentences came out today, and Dumas got basically six months. That is so outrageous I can barely believe it. The french elites definitely protect each other - to an alarming and disgusting extent. Even in the USA, not a standard by any means, the secretary of Defense being on the take would have brought a sentence of at least 5 years or more. I don't remember how much John Mitchell got, but I think it was something like that.
It did get me thinking, however, about Dumas' old patron, Mitterand, and whether he was, possibly, the worst Western leader since 1945. I think Nixon has to have that honor, but Mitterand is a close second. His system of traditional corruption - you know, it was through ELF that M.'s government basically fronted money to Kohl - his gutting of socialism, so that it is impossible to know, nowadays, if you are a voter, whether a vote for the socialist or the conservative will result in more conservative politcies - his dirty-ness in Africa, especially Rwanda - his intellectual filthiness, starting with his collaborationist past - hmm, yeah, right after Nixon. Even Thatcher and Reagan weren't as bad as old M. Really, if Europe takes a lunge towards fascism again - as is possible with Berlusconi - it will be because of the seeds left by the eighties - the sort of triangle of corruption, Andreotti/Craxi -- Mitterand -- Kohl.
Ah, as Rimbaud used to say,
Mon triste coeur bave � la poupe.
And then, still not finished with the subject, I wrote:
I am still steaming over the Dumas trial. Finally I've been able to read most of the net newspapers about it - and one of the things which does make me, well, sad, is how it was reported in Liberation. Which used to be a lefty, investigative paper. It seems to me that their reporting, here, was pretty establishment. Something has gone out of Libe - they are too interested in being cool, nowadays. They'd rather report on some goddamn trend in French pop music than on who is giving who money under the table.
I guess the thing that amazes me most is that Dumas' ex-mistress got a tougher sentence than he did. That makes no sense to me - her job, as procuress for ELF, would not exist except for the fact that she was indeed able to procur for ELF, via Dumas. She was just an instrument.
But anyway, what really amazes me is that a thug like Dumas still has his influence in the PS - and more, that Jospin is doing his best to stifle the few legislators who are willing to go after the elite crooks, including Chirac. The NYT quoted the mayor of Paris as saying that if they made arrests for all the corruption, they'd "empty" the political field.
My god, what a system.
Well, I might have been too harsh on Libe.
Anyway, the point of the post today, people, is that the tie between the financing of the CDP in Germany, Mitterand, and ELF, still has not become totally clear. Maybe poor Frau Kohl knew too much. Reach me for comments at the Editor
Tuesday, July 31, 2001
Monday, July 30, 2001
Yesterday I promised the story of the Mirror spies. This comes from The Mirror, a history by Sabine Melchior-Bonnet. She found it in a nineteenth century historian, Elphege Fremy.
The seventeenth century Venitian Republic was, as is well known, wealthy due, in part, to its monopoly on fine glasswork, and in particular its fine mirrors. The craftsmen who produced those mirrors were recipients of the hundred techniques handed down through two centuries that made Venice's mirrors the clearest, largest, and most expensive in Europe. The French, under Louis XIV, were jealous - especially Louis' financial minister, Colbert. Colbert decided to have the French ambassador to Venice entice a certain number of mirror masters to Paris, where the government could sponsor a factory. Being an early mercantilist, Colbert was firmly persuaded that the flow of wealth out of France for these mirrors was depleting the national economy.
But there was a problem. The Venitians kept a close watch on their mirror makers. They had laws forbidding them from emigrating, and when these laws were violated the Venitians had a very efficient spy-system to enforce the wrath of the Republic on its erring workmen. Well, somehow the French ambassador was able to round up and dispatch to Colbert in Paris a number of mirrormakers, and so a factory was set up - the Royal Company of Glass and Mirrors, the ancestor of the famous St. Gobain works. But then the Venitians struck. Two mirrormasters died mysteriously, in 1667; the whole set of the mirrormakers were continuously provoked in the streets, and kept getting into brawls; and worst of all, they were lonely. Colbert promised to get their wives out of Venice, but the Venitian spy service actually substituted letters, purportedly from the wives, in response to Colbert's request, the upshot of which was the wives wanted their husbands back home. Meanwhile, the mirror works kept losing money, and mirror smugglers started operating on the South coast of France, bringing in the more expensive Venitian mirrors to undercut the native product.
Somehow, this history naturally lends itself to metaphor. Angleton, the crazy head of CounterIntelligence I wrote about yesterday, once called Counterintelligence a "wilderness of mirrors." Someday I think I will write a story about these mirrormakers and their dark shadows, the spies. It would make a nice little historical mystery, don't you think?
Whatever you think, send me an e-mail. The Editor
The seventeenth century Venitian Republic was, as is well known, wealthy due, in part, to its monopoly on fine glasswork, and in particular its fine mirrors. The craftsmen who produced those mirrors were recipients of the hundred techniques handed down through two centuries that made Venice's mirrors the clearest, largest, and most expensive in Europe. The French, under Louis XIV, were jealous - especially Louis' financial minister, Colbert. Colbert decided to have the French ambassador to Venice entice a certain number of mirror masters to Paris, where the government could sponsor a factory. Being an early mercantilist, Colbert was firmly persuaded that the flow of wealth out of France for these mirrors was depleting the national economy.
But there was a problem. The Venitians kept a close watch on their mirror makers. They had laws forbidding them from emigrating, and when these laws were violated the Venitians had a very efficient spy-system to enforce the wrath of the Republic on its erring workmen. Well, somehow the French ambassador was able to round up and dispatch to Colbert in Paris a number of mirrormakers, and so a factory was set up - the Royal Company of Glass and Mirrors, the ancestor of the famous St. Gobain works. But then the Venitians struck. Two mirrormasters died mysteriously, in 1667; the whole set of the mirrormakers were continuously provoked in the streets, and kept getting into brawls; and worst of all, they were lonely. Colbert promised to get their wives out of Venice, but the Venitian spy service actually substituted letters, purportedly from the wives, in response to Colbert's request, the upshot of which was the wives wanted their husbands back home. Meanwhile, the mirror works kept losing money, and mirror smugglers started operating on the South coast of France, bringing in the more expensive Venitian mirrors to undercut the native product.
Somehow, this history naturally lends itself to metaphor. Angleton, the crazy head of CounterIntelligence I wrote about yesterday, once called Counterintelligence a "wilderness of mirrors." Someday I think I will write a story about these mirrormakers and their dark shadows, the spies. It would make a nice little historical mystery, don't you think?
Whatever you think, send me an e-mail. The Editor
Today's motto, which is startlingly pertinent to the weblog form, is from Jules Renard. Here's the quote:
Le plus artiste ne sera pas de s'atteler � quelque gros oeuvre, comme la fabrication d'un roman, par exemple o� l'esprit tout entier devra se plier aux exigences d'un sujet absorbant qu'il s'est impos� ; mais le plus artiste sera d'�crire, par petits bonds, sur cent sujets qui surgiront � l'improviste, d'�mietter pour ainsi dire sa pens�e. De la sorte, rien n'est forc�. Tout a le charme du non voulu, du naturel. On ne provoque pas : on attend.
Let's see, the translation goes roughly: What becomes the artist most isn't going to come out of harnessing oneself to some huge work, like the fabrication of a novel, where the spirit bows to the exigencies of a wholly absorbing subject it has imposed on itself; instead, it will come from writing, by little jumps, on a hundred subjects which spontaneously emerge - to crumble into palpable bits, so to speak, one's bright ideas. Nothing is forced, this way, and everything has the improvisational charm of the natural, of what isn't willed. One doesn't provoke - one awaits."
As you can see, even when the French is simple, the translation is tortured. "Improvisational charm", for instance, is obviously not there, and yet the preceding sentence, with its "a l'improviste", has an on tiptoes lightness which I was determined to pull into the translation, in spite of the leaden footing of my "spontaneously emerge." The point is that Renard saw his journal as the ultimate expression of his peculiar genius, and he was right. Supposedly Becket was inspired to his most pared down passages by reading the Journal.
I'm not that kind of writer - my pared down passages, under revision, have a magical tendency to branch out, to luxuriate - but I like the hundred hops, the bouncing ball brain.
Le plus artiste ne sera pas de s'atteler � quelque gros oeuvre, comme la fabrication d'un roman, par exemple o� l'esprit tout entier devra se plier aux exigences d'un sujet absorbant qu'il s'est impos� ; mais le plus artiste sera d'�crire, par petits bonds, sur cent sujets qui surgiront � l'improviste, d'�mietter pour ainsi dire sa pens�e. De la sorte, rien n'est forc�. Tout a le charme du non voulu, du naturel. On ne provoque pas : on attend.
Let's see, the translation goes roughly: What becomes the artist most isn't going to come out of harnessing oneself to some huge work, like the fabrication of a novel, where the spirit bows to the exigencies of a wholly absorbing subject it has imposed on itself; instead, it will come from writing, by little jumps, on a hundred subjects which spontaneously emerge - to crumble into palpable bits, so to speak, one's bright ideas. Nothing is forced, this way, and everything has the improvisational charm of the natural, of what isn't willed. One doesn't provoke - one awaits."
As you can see, even when the French is simple, the translation is tortured. "Improvisational charm", for instance, is obviously not there, and yet the preceding sentence, with its "a l'improviste", has an on tiptoes lightness which I was determined to pull into the translation, in spite of the leaden footing of my "spontaneously emerge." The point is that Renard saw his journal as the ultimate expression of his peculiar genius, and he was right. Supposedly Becket was inspired to his most pared down passages by reading the Journal.
I'm not that kind of writer - my pared down passages, under revision, have a magical tendency to branch out, to luxuriate - but I like the hundred hops, the bouncing ball brain.
Sunday, July 29, 2001
Hey, read the first post today first. Then this.
Secrets to Spies.
As I said in an earlier post, lately I have been working on a review of Body of Secrets for the Austin Chronicle. Now, my usual way of reviewing a book like this is to spend a lot of time researching matters extraneous to it � looking for an angle. I spend a lot of time in the library. In the real world, meanwhile, the Hanssen case has been in the news, a little memento mori from the Cold War era, for which our president is so nostalgic that he has decided to give us the 1980s redivivus if he can.
Although I am fascinated with spying, I�m not unduly impressed by it. Intelligence had a tremendous impact on the behavior of the Allies in World War II � to name just two instances, the Sorge ring in Tokyo was crucial to the timing of Stalin�s resistance to Hitler in 1942, and the by now well known story of the breaking of the Enigma code obviously gave the Britain and the US a tremendous advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic � for the fictional record of which, I recommend Cryptonomicon. But it isn�t clear that a fighting war with the peculiar attributes inherent in the German political structure is a very good guide to the cold war fought between the US and Russia. Two great features of the intelligence war in our time seem plain: one, American intelligence, both human and sigint, have been repeatedly and massively penetrated and exposed. Not only by the line going back from Hanssen to Philby, but by such disasters as the abandonment of tremendous caches of military and cryptological information by the NSA, at the end of the Vietnam war.
And the second fact is � it hasn�t mattered.
When the damage caused by such as Hanssen is assessed in the press, we are almost always told about agents betrayed, or codes handed over. In other words, the Intelligence community bears the brunt of losses caused by betrayals in their midst. But there is a closed circle here � because if the intelligence agency exists primarily to protect American interests, in practice they seem merely to protect their own interest. Their interest is disguised as merely analysis � it is something the CIA and the NSA like to say a lot, that they merely analyze. But of course that isn�t true � it is in the nature of intelligence organizations to distort the nature of the enemy by concentrating on the enemy�s intelligence. It is a subfight, in other words, within a larger fight; and that larger struggle soon starts to reflect the smaller one in the minds of intelligence officers. This famously happened with James Jesus Angleton, the mad head of CI in the fifties and sixties . His mind wholly ossified around his own perception of a worldwide communist conspiracy, to the extent that he thought that the Sino-Russian spit was faked. In other words, he thought the Russians were staging history to fool the CIA � or, finally, to fool one alcoholic bureaucrat, J.J. Angleton. Intelligence solipsism can�t go any further. .
While the CIA was fighting their battle as if it was the war, the real grassroots war was fought and finished. One day, the spies looked up and lo! The West, the good old Free Peoples of the West, to use the boilerplate of Cold War presidents, won! It came as a shocking surprise.
In the end, it didn�t matter that Aldrich sold the KGB the names of CIA sources in the Kremlin. It didn�t even matter that the Russians could read our encryption. The keepers of the secrets were keeping secrets, in the end, not from the enemy, but from the people they are supposed to be responsible to, however dimly the line of responsibility is traced. They were keeping secret what they had done in Chile, Argentina, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, and a host of other countries where they have been in cahoots with killers, thieves, rapists, and other forms of freedom fighter.
Over the last fifty years, however, the importance of the intelligence community in our history really doesn�t have to do with the Russians � it has to do with the ideological function of these organizations. If you read a bunch of spy books, you�ll soon become familiar with what that ideology is about � loyalty. That loyalty is identified with a certain brand of anti-communism that gradually became less ecumenical about accepting, say, anti-communist leftists. It gradually settled into the recognizable mold of American conservativism. Why does that ideology have a right wing taint? Probably there are a number of sociological reasons � the same reasons that would enable you to predict a leftish tilt in academia. Insular groups maintain themselves by filtering non-conformists out � they develop rituals for doing that, and sometimes the filtering process becomes the very center of the group, the thing it is about. The cosa nostra � the our thing. It is a contingent fact why, exactly, the filtering process is attached to a particular ideology � an accident depending not on the structure of the institution, but on the history of the personnel within it. Although these places always have that same stale reek, you know?
Tomorrow I�m going to switch to mirrors and spies, an Italian story.
Secrets to Spies.
As I said in an earlier post, lately I have been working on a review of Body of Secrets for the Austin Chronicle. Now, my usual way of reviewing a book like this is to spend a lot of time researching matters extraneous to it � looking for an angle. I spend a lot of time in the library. In the real world, meanwhile, the Hanssen case has been in the news, a little memento mori from the Cold War era, for which our president is so nostalgic that he has decided to give us the 1980s redivivus if he can.
Although I am fascinated with spying, I�m not unduly impressed by it. Intelligence had a tremendous impact on the behavior of the Allies in World War II � to name just two instances, the Sorge ring in Tokyo was crucial to the timing of Stalin�s resistance to Hitler in 1942, and the by now well known story of the breaking of the Enigma code obviously gave the Britain and the US a tremendous advantage in the Battle of the Atlantic � for the fictional record of which, I recommend Cryptonomicon. But it isn�t clear that a fighting war with the peculiar attributes inherent in the German political structure is a very good guide to the cold war fought between the US and Russia. Two great features of the intelligence war in our time seem plain: one, American intelligence, both human and sigint, have been repeatedly and massively penetrated and exposed. Not only by the line going back from Hanssen to Philby, but by such disasters as the abandonment of tremendous caches of military and cryptological information by the NSA, at the end of the Vietnam war.
And the second fact is � it hasn�t mattered.
When the damage caused by such as Hanssen is assessed in the press, we are almost always told about agents betrayed, or codes handed over. In other words, the Intelligence community bears the brunt of losses caused by betrayals in their midst. But there is a closed circle here � because if the intelligence agency exists primarily to protect American interests, in practice they seem merely to protect their own interest. Their interest is disguised as merely analysis � it is something the CIA and the NSA like to say a lot, that they merely analyze. But of course that isn�t true � it is in the nature of intelligence organizations to distort the nature of the enemy by concentrating on the enemy�s intelligence. It is a subfight, in other words, within a larger fight; and that larger struggle soon starts to reflect the smaller one in the minds of intelligence officers. This famously happened with James Jesus Angleton, the mad head of CI in the fifties and sixties . His mind wholly ossified around his own perception of a worldwide communist conspiracy, to the extent that he thought that the Sino-Russian spit was faked. In other words, he thought the Russians were staging history to fool the CIA � or, finally, to fool one alcoholic bureaucrat, J.J. Angleton. Intelligence solipsism can�t go any further. .
While the CIA was fighting their battle as if it was the war, the real grassroots war was fought and finished. One day, the spies looked up and lo! The West, the good old Free Peoples of the West, to use the boilerplate of Cold War presidents, won! It came as a shocking surprise.
In the end, it didn�t matter that Aldrich sold the KGB the names of CIA sources in the Kremlin. It didn�t even matter that the Russians could read our encryption. The keepers of the secrets were keeping secrets, in the end, not from the enemy, but from the people they are supposed to be responsible to, however dimly the line of responsibility is traced. They were keeping secret what they had done in Chile, Argentina, Pakistan, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa, and a host of other countries where they have been in cahoots with killers, thieves, rapists, and other forms of freedom fighter.
Over the last fifty years, however, the importance of the intelligence community in our history really doesn�t have to do with the Russians � it has to do with the ideological function of these organizations. If you read a bunch of spy books, you�ll soon become familiar with what that ideology is about � loyalty. That loyalty is identified with a certain brand of anti-communism that gradually became less ecumenical about accepting, say, anti-communist leftists. It gradually settled into the recognizable mold of American conservativism. Why does that ideology have a right wing taint? Probably there are a number of sociological reasons � the same reasons that would enable you to predict a leftish tilt in academia. Insular groups maintain themselves by filtering non-conformists out � they develop rituals for doing that, and sometimes the filtering process becomes the very center of the group, the thing it is about. The cosa nostra � the our thing. It is a contingent fact why, exactly, the filtering process is attached to a particular ideology � an accident depending not on the structure of the institution, but on the history of the personnel within it. Although these places always have that same stale reek, you know?
Tomorrow I�m going to switch to mirrors and spies, an Italian story.
In one of his essays, Louis Marin speaks of a certain book of traps, written by a 16th century Venetian. What an evocative title that is! Traps, spies and secrets have always fascinated me. The secret itself has not, for some reason, been a large topic in philosophy, even though it is certainly a conceptually involuted trope.
Secrets come in two types � first order secrets in which the content of the secret is secret, while the form (that is, that there is a secret there) is not; and second order secrets in which both the content and the form are secret.
This rough division doesn�t really give us the essence of secrets, but it is a start. Obviously, not all instances of ignorance are instances of secrecy: that I went to highschool in Clarkston, Georgia, might not be known to my reader, but I am not �keeping� it a secret, nor would the reader presume that my high schooling was a secret, unless there was some contextual reason for thinking that this information was being deliberately suppressed. If, however, I was the killer of President Kennedy, that would be a secret. In the later case, my game plan would be to keep not only the act I�d committed a secret � I would keep it a secret that I had a secret.
You might think this is a trivial distinction, but actually, it is the distinction that informs the relationship between secrecy and political power. We know, for instance, that the CIA holds back information from American citizens � we know that they have secrets. The peculiar status of the CIA depends on our knowing that they know what we don�t know � in much the same way that the Minister D., in the Purloined Letter, holds sway over the Queen because she knows that he possesses a letter that she doesn�t want the king to know about. The queen�s secret, then, is a second order secret, while D.�s is a first order secret. Second order secrets are often such as to make their possessor vulnerable, while first order secrets are often of the type to make their possessor powerful. This generalization obviously has some very important exceptions, but when it comes, at least, to Intelligence agencies in the U.S., it holds true.
In fact I once wrote a little spy novel � scattered, alas, with the rest of my ms., in some box or other in somebody�s closet � in which the premise was that the real US Intelligence agency was the asphalt testing division of the US Department of Highways and Transportation, while the CIA and the NSA were shells. That was a sort of joke. It is funny because, of course, we think of the CIA, etc., as powerful, and even romantic, because we know they operate in secret, whereas asphalt testing has no James Bond-ian resonance. But if we didn�t know that we don�t know about them, we wouldn�t think of them as powerful � and that would definitely be felt as a diminishment of power within the agency.
Secrets come in two types � first order secrets in which the content of the secret is secret, while the form (that is, that there is a secret there) is not; and second order secrets in which both the content and the form are secret.
This rough division doesn�t really give us the essence of secrets, but it is a start. Obviously, not all instances of ignorance are instances of secrecy: that I went to highschool in Clarkston, Georgia, might not be known to my reader, but I am not �keeping� it a secret, nor would the reader presume that my high schooling was a secret, unless there was some contextual reason for thinking that this information was being deliberately suppressed. If, however, I was the killer of President Kennedy, that would be a secret. In the later case, my game plan would be to keep not only the act I�d committed a secret � I would keep it a secret that I had a secret.
You might think this is a trivial distinction, but actually, it is the distinction that informs the relationship between secrecy and political power. We know, for instance, that the CIA holds back information from American citizens � we know that they have secrets. The peculiar status of the CIA depends on our knowing that they know what we don�t know � in much the same way that the Minister D., in the Purloined Letter, holds sway over the Queen because she knows that he possesses a letter that she doesn�t want the king to know about. The queen�s secret, then, is a second order secret, while D.�s is a first order secret. Second order secrets are often such as to make their possessor vulnerable, while first order secrets are often of the type to make their possessor powerful. This generalization obviously has some very important exceptions, but when it comes, at least, to Intelligence agencies in the U.S., it holds true.
In fact I once wrote a little spy novel � scattered, alas, with the rest of my ms., in some box or other in somebody�s closet � in which the premise was that the real US Intelligence agency was the asphalt testing division of the US Department of Highways and Transportation, while the CIA and the NSA were shells. That was a sort of joke. It is funny because, of course, we think of the CIA, etc., as powerful, and even romantic, because we know they operate in secret, whereas asphalt testing has no James Bond-ian resonance. But if we didn�t know that we don�t know about them, we wouldn�t think of them as powerful � and that would definitely be felt as a diminishment of power within the agency.
Saturday, July 28, 2001
A little info link - the association for the study of dreams has an interesting page devoted to dreams in film. See what you think.
Dream Videophile by Deirdre Barrett - Association for the Study of Dreams
Dream Videophile by Deirdre Barrett - Association for the Study of Dreams
Friday, July 27, 2001
Today's article to get upset about - and what else is the newspaper for? has to be this one:
Panel Tones Down Report on Fuel Economy Increases
Apparently, in the current Bushsphere, panels have to be supersensitive to corporate need and greed. When the Times leaked the story that the Panel on Energy efficiency in Automobiles might actually recommend measures to bring about better fuel economy in the next 4 to 6 years, the panel was "contacted" by concerned automakers. You know how concerned those automakers can get. And hey presto - the measures now have a different time window - just a little nudge. Just 6 to 10 years. Sounds like what happened in the early nineties with the California Air Resources Board, which battled the big three about emissions and lost - but the auto companies are acutely aware that they can't simply crush an emission standard, since that would not look good. Instead, you move the time frame up - it is sort of like Zeno's paradox of the tortoise and the hare.
The hare, here, is a real clean air standard. Let the tortoise represent the auto companies. And let father time be represented by a bunch of greedy s.o.b.'s otherwise known as congressmen, senators, and the president of the united states. The tortoise, in this revised version of the paradox, bribes father time with millions of dollars, and father time obliges by issuing a time edict that makes the hare hop faster and move forward slower. Isn't that a wonderful fairy tale, kids? And it is true.
Ah, and as to the members of the panel who are showing such concern, such touching concern, for the automakers, here's the quote:
"E. William Colglazier, the executive officer of the National Academy of Sciences, said he was confident that the committee would resist all such pressures. Environmentalists have complained that the panel has many engineers linked to the auto industry and no consumer advocates, but Mr. Colglazier said the panel needed technical expertise and was balanced."
The need for technical expertise is important. You have to have that expertise to explain why Ford, for example, needs bigger and heavier platforms to sell bigger and more monstrous SUVs. Sympathetic heads nod on the panel, and everybody goes out for a cigar and a scotch. Shucks, it is a shame, a damned shame, that technologies that were developed, say, ten years ago, using carbon fiber body parts, can't be used to lighten the chassis of these monsters, if they must be produced at all - because, gosh darn it, Detroit just doesn't want to do that. The thing to do when pesky innovators come up with these crazy ideas for reducing car weight and getting better gas mileage is to call upon mysterious technical difficulties, requiring technical expertise by people whose expertise is in designing heavy body, gas guzzling vehicles - and so you see the problem. Now go to sleep.
Here's a nice link for more information about SUVs.
And, as always, I'm the Editor.
Panel Tones Down Report on Fuel Economy Increases
Apparently, in the current Bushsphere, panels have to be supersensitive to corporate need and greed. When the Times leaked the story that the Panel on Energy efficiency in Automobiles might actually recommend measures to bring about better fuel economy in the next 4 to 6 years, the panel was "contacted" by concerned automakers. You know how concerned those automakers can get. And hey presto - the measures now have a different time window - just a little nudge. Just 6 to 10 years. Sounds like what happened in the early nineties with the California Air Resources Board, which battled the big three about emissions and lost - but the auto companies are acutely aware that they can't simply crush an emission standard, since that would not look good. Instead, you move the time frame up - it is sort of like Zeno's paradox of the tortoise and the hare.
The hare, here, is a real clean air standard. Let the tortoise represent the auto companies. And let father time be represented by a bunch of greedy s.o.b.'s otherwise known as congressmen, senators, and the president of the united states. The tortoise, in this revised version of the paradox, bribes father time with millions of dollars, and father time obliges by issuing a time edict that makes the hare hop faster and move forward slower. Isn't that a wonderful fairy tale, kids? And it is true.
Ah, and as to the members of the panel who are showing such concern, such touching concern, for the automakers, here's the quote:
"E. William Colglazier, the executive officer of the National Academy of Sciences, said he was confident that the committee would resist all such pressures. Environmentalists have complained that the panel has many engineers linked to the auto industry and no consumer advocates, but Mr. Colglazier said the panel needed technical expertise and was balanced."
The need for technical expertise is important. You have to have that expertise to explain why Ford, for example, needs bigger and heavier platforms to sell bigger and more monstrous SUVs. Sympathetic heads nod on the panel, and everybody goes out for a cigar and a scotch. Shucks, it is a shame, a damned shame, that technologies that were developed, say, ten years ago, using carbon fiber body parts, can't be used to lighten the chassis of these monsters, if they must be produced at all - because, gosh darn it, Detroit just doesn't want to do that. The thing to do when pesky innovators come up with these crazy ideas for reducing car weight and getting better gas mileage is to call upon mysterious technical difficulties, requiring technical expertise by people whose expertise is in designing heavy body, gas guzzling vehicles - and so you see the problem. Now go to sleep.
Here's a nice link for more information about SUVs.
And, as always, I'm the Editor.
Wednesday, July 25, 2001
Ah, since I started the day with a book review, let's go on to the topic of criticism in general, shall we?
I went to get my usual dose of media news at Poynter org and was pointed to this article, by a Sean Glennon.
Valley Advocate | Arts. Now, Mr. Glennon is not a heavyweight, but his article does reveal a very American response to the word critic. Critics seem to open some obscure anti-intellectual toxin in the American body. The idea that one's whole job is criticizing - with the implication that one can do better, and the evident disdain for really doing so - goes against both the native pragmatism and that boosterism which is a thread running all the way back to colonial times.
Mr. Glennon has structured his article on a series of denials - by which I mean denials in the psychoanalytic sense. A denial is embedding an assertion in a grammatical negation - a "not... but." As in, "Not that I am saying you are a liar, but you do have a problem with the truth." This advances propositions behind an ostensible denial that one is advancing a proposition. Of course, the "not...but" structure is not to be taken as the only way denial works - but it is at the core of denial, and one can reduce most denials to sentences of that form. In Mr. Glennon's case, the series of denials goes something like this:
-Not that I read the critics, but here's what the critics are like.
-Not that I care about the critics, but really they should be forced to be reporters before they are critics.
-Not that I think we should have critics.
This kind of logical series is, classically, coordinate with a certain kind of resentment.
We begin, then, with Mr. Glennon denying, first, that he is ever influenced by film reviews:
... I almost never read reviews of movies I haven't already seen. I just don't find most film criticism particularly helpful when I'm trying to decide whether to see a movie.
That's a fair enough position. But, having made it clear that he is not very acquainted with film criticism, he has no problem going on to tell us about film criticism. He tells us his opinion of film criticism without reflecting on the fact that he has just proclaimed his ignorance of film criticism, which, presumably, should undermine his credit with his readers. That is, if they believed his account. It is one of the odd but compelling features of resentment that statements made under the sign of this intellectual mood are not to be taken at face value. We aren't, in other words, to believe Mr. Glennon is as innocent of film reviews as he claims. This rhetorical game of making claims that the speaker presumes the hearer won't quite believe has a name - demagogery. Editors usually block that kind of thing when it comes to, say, a consumer report about cars, or a business story. But when it comes to the arts, editors don't really care. This is an odd but telling fact about newspaper life.
To get back to Mr. Glennon. In the paragraph succeeding his preliminary denial of any concern for or persuasion by film critics, he goes on to analyze the types of film critics - revealing that he does, indeed, read film reviews. This presents us with a conundrum. If he doesn't read critics before he sees films, presumably he reads these critics after he sees films. But why would he do this? It goes against the normal way of treating film reviews, which is to read them not only for the opinion of the film reviewer, but as a guide to what movie one is going to see. It is a very common phenomenon: you are with some friends, you want to see a movie, and somebody pulls out a supplement from a newspaper and starts reading out bits from selected film reviews, and somebody else vets the movies - I don't want to see that, I want to see this, etc. Mr. Glennon is immune to this middle class ritual. But he is also, apparently, secretly obsessed with film critics, since after he sees a film, he collates the reviews from newspapers and magazines to the extent that he has even developed a typology of film reviewers. Otherwise, how would he know enough about them to make the following generalizations?
"What I end up reading most of the time is the work of "critics" who aren't really critics at all -- the ones who don't seem to understand the difference between a review and a plot synopsis. Then there are the dry, tedious, self-aggrandizing, academic essays tendered by critics who think of themselves as "writers" rather than journalists (people who regard the word "reporter" as a slur), and whose main interest seems to be showing off their knowledge of film. And, most infuriating of all, there are those breathless, fawning and utterly shallow raves about movies that almost invariably turn out to be just more of the Hollywood same. "
Notice that critics attracts the scornful quotation marks. Really, to be a critic, in Mr. Glennon's estimation, is something secondary, and vaguely disgusting. The quotation marks, here, prolong the logic of denial. And then there is the positing of the critic and the reporter - both are given scare quotes, but it is interesting that the "critic" lends the scare quotes to the "reporter" - which in a sense negates the effect of the scare quotes. Two negatives, after all, make a positive.
This is all leading up to Mr. Glennon's proposal:
"At the very least, I propose that no one should be allowed to work as a film critic who hasn't logged at least three years as an actual, honest-to-god reporter. Not only would that serve to weed out the bulk of the "writers," the glamour critics and the not-actually-a-critic critics, but it would ensure that the people writing about film have some real-world perspective. Spend a couple years covering fatal shootings and city hall shenanigans and it becomes hard to forget that most movies aren't actually all that important."
At this point the logic of denial breaks down - or perhaps it would be better to say that the revenge of logic on the demagogue is to undermine his point. Because surely Mr. Glennon's admiration for reporters isn't premised on the fact that they make hard subjective decisions about which stories are important and which ones aren't. Or does Mr. Glennon think that reporters who are dealing with some story they think is unimportant - say the shooting death of some vague poor person - should research and write about that event carelessly? Actually, as anybody who has read a regular local paper can attest, this is how the news is reported - with a bias towards the powerful, and an incredible carelessness towards inconvenient facts, if they concern the "unimportant."
I went to get my usual dose of media news at Poynter org and was pointed to this article, by a Sean Glennon.
Valley Advocate | Arts. Now, Mr. Glennon is not a heavyweight, but his article does reveal a very American response to the word critic. Critics seem to open some obscure anti-intellectual toxin in the American body. The idea that one's whole job is criticizing - with the implication that one can do better, and the evident disdain for really doing so - goes against both the native pragmatism and that boosterism which is a thread running all the way back to colonial times.
Mr. Glennon has structured his article on a series of denials - by which I mean denials in the psychoanalytic sense. A denial is embedding an assertion in a grammatical negation - a "not... but." As in, "Not that I am saying you are a liar, but you do have a problem with the truth." This advances propositions behind an ostensible denial that one is advancing a proposition. Of course, the "not...but" structure is not to be taken as the only way denial works - but it is at the core of denial, and one can reduce most denials to sentences of that form. In Mr. Glennon's case, the series of denials goes something like this:
-Not that I read the critics, but here's what the critics are like.
-Not that I care about the critics, but really they should be forced to be reporters before they are critics.
-Not that I think we should have critics.
This kind of logical series is, classically, coordinate with a certain kind of resentment.
We begin, then, with Mr. Glennon denying, first, that he is ever influenced by film reviews:
... I almost never read reviews of movies I haven't already seen. I just don't find most film criticism particularly helpful when I'm trying to decide whether to see a movie.
That's a fair enough position. But, having made it clear that he is not very acquainted with film criticism, he has no problem going on to tell us about film criticism. He tells us his opinion of film criticism without reflecting on the fact that he has just proclaimed his ignorance of film criticism, which, presumably, should undermine his credit with his readers. That is, if they believed his account. It is one of the odd but compelling features of resentment that statements made under the sign of this intellectual mood are not to be taken at face value. We aren't, in other words, to believe Mr. Glennon is as innocent of film reviews as he claims. This rhetorical game of making claims that the speaker presumes the hearer won't quite believe has a name - demagogery. Editors usually block that kind of thing when it comes to, say, a consumer report about cars, or a business story. But when it comes to the arts, editors don't really care. This is an odd but telling fact about newspaper life.
To get back to Mr. Glennon. In the paragraph succeeding his preliminary denial of any concern for or persuasion by film critics, he goes on to analyze the types of film critics - revealing that he does, indeed, read film reviews. This presents us with a conundrum. If he doesn't read critics before he sees films, presumably he reads these critics after he sees films. But why would he do this? It goes against the normal way of treating film reviews, which is to read them not only for the opinion of the film reviewer, but as a guide to what movie one is going to see. It is a very common phenomenon: you are with some friends, you want to see a movie, and somebody pulls out a supplement from a newspaper and starts reading out bits from selected film reviews, and somebody else vets the movies - I don't want to see that, I want to see this, etc. Mr. Glennon is immune to this middle class ritual. But he is also, apparently, secretly obsessed with film critics, since after he sees a film, he collates the reviews from newspapers and magazines to the extent that he has even developed a typology of film reviewers. Otherwise, how would he know enough about them to make the following generalizations?
"What I end up reading most of the time is the work of "critics" who aren't really critics at all -- the ones who don't seem to understand the difference between a review and a plot synopsis. Then there are the dry, tedious, self-aggrandizing, academic essays tendered by critics who think of themselves as "writers" rather than journalists (people who regard the word "reporter" as a slur), and whose main interest seems to be showing off their knowledge of film. And, most infuriating of all, there are those breathless, fawning and utterly shallow raves about movies that almost invariably turn out to be just more of the Hollywood same. "
Notice that critics attracts the scornful quotation marks. Really, to be a critic, in Mr. Glennon's estimation, is something secondary, and vaguely disgusting. The quotation marks, here, prolong the logic of denial. And then there is the positing of the critic and the reporter - both are given scare quotes, but it is interesting that the "critic" lends the scare quotes to the "reporter" - which in a sense negates the effect of the scare quotes. Two negatives, after all, make a positive.
This is all leading up to Mr. Glennon's proposal:
"At the very least, I propose that no one should be allowed to work as a film critic who hasn't logged at least three years as an actual, honest-to-god reporter. Not only would that serve to weed out the bulk of the "writers," the glamour critics and the not-actually-a-critic critics, but it would ensure that the people writing about film have some real-world perspective. Spend a couple years covering fatal shootings and city hall shenanigans and it becomes hard to forget that most movies aren't actually all that important."
At this point the logic of denial breaks down - or perhaps it would be better to say that the revenge of logic on the demagogue is to undermine his point. Because surely Mr. Glennon's admiration for reporters isn't premised on the fact that they make hard subjective decisions about which stories are important and which ones aren't. Or does Mr. Glennon think that reporters who are dealing with some story they think is unimportant - say the shooting death of some vague poor person - should research and write about that event carelessly? Actually, as anybody who has read a regular local paper can attest, this is how the news is reported - with a bias towards the powerful, and an incredible carelessness towards inconvenient facts, if they concern the "unimportant."
From the "Where does Richard Bernstein come from?" department.
Bernstein and Janet Maslin have always puzzled me. Why are they reviewing books for the Times? And why do they chose the books they chose to review for the Times? Bernstein writes as if he had somehow got lost in a wool sweater on some small New England campus in 1958. In today's book review is a pretty typical example: Bernstein discovers - ta da! the police procedural. Let's see, this genre has been around how long? Since the sixties? Here's the quote: Bringing the Real Police to a Police Procedural Procedural � it sounds like something that might happen to you in your dentist's office rather than in your book club, but never mind
Bernstein and Janet Maslin have always puzzled me. Why are they reviewing books for the Times? And why do they chose the books they chose to review for the Times? Bernstein writes as if he had somehow got lost in a wool sweater on some small New England campus in 1958. In today's book review is a pretty typical example: Bernstein discovers - ta da! the police procedural. Let's see, this genre has been around how long? Since the sixties? Here's the quote: Bringing the Real Police to a Police Procedural Procedural � it sounds like something that might happen to you in your dentist's office rather than in your book club, but never mind
Monday, July 23, 2001
Genoa's over. Some of my friends might wonder why I have spent so much time on the jockeying of the Tories in these posts. One reason is because - I wonder if I've said this before? - the remaining left in the Anglo world (the US and the UK) has almost completely died out. Being a leftist in Britain, now, is like being a monarchist in Paris in 1840. It gives you a unique point of view (witness Balzac), but it is a point of view sharpened by the impossibility of the political success of one's views. In the UK, right now, there is only one real ideology - Thatcherism. As Hegel once said, or perhaps didn't, the first time around in history is tragedy, the second time is farce. Tony Blair is the farcical Thatcher - Thatcherism absorbed in a cup of cocoa to make it go down better. But it is still a rabid ideology. Here's what Mr. Blair said about the police in Genoa:
'To criticise the Italian police and the Italian authorities for working to make sure the security of the summit is right is, to me, to turn the world upside down,' Blair said yesterday.
'Of course, it is a tragedy that someone has lost their life. But it's very difficult for the police when they are faced with people throwing petrol bombs and using extreme forms of violence.'
The only thing the police can do, in the face of such violence, is, I suppose, go raid the hq of the non-violent organizers of the protests. And, while they are about it, club some heads. Even Mayor Daley was more sensitive to the situation, in 68.
And this is the man who is the head of the so-called Labor party.
It has fallen to the socialist parties in Europe to play the undertaker for socialism. This has been their role since the Mitterand days - it didn't start with Tony Blair. It is just coming to its comic and shameful end with him, as he privatizes the rest of the transport system and cracks down on civil rights. Of course, anybody with any sense can predict that the transport system will eventually have to be re-nationalized, or junked altogether in favor of the American system - which is to have no system. When that time comes, don't be surprised if it is a conservative government that does the nationalizing - just as it might well be conservative Republicans from the West Coast that bring a halt to privatizing power.
But enough of that. Yesterday I read Sven Lindqvist's History of Bombing. I read it because I am writing a review of Body of Secrets and Suspect Identities for the Austin Chronicle, and I am researching. Also, I read it because I'm procrastinating writing up this profile article I have to finish pretty soon. The important thing is, I read it, and found it, in a grisly way, quite fascinating. I went to two reviews of it, one in the Financial Times, and both of them said essentially the same thing: the problem with the book was that it made our boming morally equivalent to their bombing.
Which comes down to saying this: it isn't as bad to burn the flesh off of a four year old German girl, or to boil out her eyes, or to crush her ribs and skull, or to let her die in a burning building, as it is to burn the flesh off an English or American girl. It's odd - Lindqvist is attacked for moral relativism, for not distinguishing between one side and the other, when the moral relativists are actually those who can distinguish one use of a petrol bomb from another, one slaugher of civilians from another.
Ah, but there is more to say about this book. Maybe I'll get to it in another post.
Write me at Editor
'To criticise the Italian police and the Italian authorities for working to make sure the security of the summit is right is, to me, to turn the world upside down,' Blair said yesterday.
'Of course, it is a tragedy that someone has lost their life. But it's very difficult for the police when they are faced with people throwing petrol bombs and using extreme forms of violence.'
The only thing the police can do, in the face of such violence, is, I suppose, go raid the hq of the non-violent organizers of the protests. And, while they are about it, club some heads. Even Mayor Daley was more sensitive to the situation, in 68.
And this is the man who is the head of the so-called Labor party.
It has fallen to the socialist parties in Europe to play the undertaker for socialism. This has been their role since the Mitterand days - it didn't start with Tony Blair. It is just coming to its comic and shameful end with him, as he privatizes the rest of the transport system and cracks down on civil rights. Of course, anybody with any sense can predict that the transport system will eventually have to be re-nationalized, or junked altogether in favor of the American system - which is to have no system. When that time comes, don't be surprised if it is a conservative government that does the nationalizing - just as it might well be conservative Republicans from the West Coast that bring a halt to privatizing power.
But enough of that. Yesterday I read Sven Lindqvist's History of Bombing. I read it because I am writing a review of Body of Secrets and Suspect Identities for the Austin Chronicle, and I am researching. Also, I read it because I'm procrastinating writing up this profile article I have to finish pretty soon. The important thing is, I read it, and found it, in a grisly way, quite fascinating. I went to two reviews of it, one in the Financial Times, and both of them said essentially the same thing: the problem with the book was that it made our boming morally equivalent to their bombing.
Which comes down to saying this: it isn't as bad to burn the flesh off of a four year old German girl, or to boil out her eyes, or to crush her ribs and skull, or to let her die in a burning building, as it is to burn the flesh off an English or American girl. It's odd - Lindqvist is attacked for moral relativism, for not distinguishing between one side and the other, when the moral relativists are actually those who can distinguish one use of a petrol bomb from another, one slaugher of civilians from another.
Ah, but there is more to say about this book. Maybe I'll get to it in another post.
Write me at Editor
Sunday, July 22, 2001
Enough and more than enough about Trollope. For at least the time being.
Sometimes the NYT makes me despair for the souls of its editors - for instance, the coverage of the G8 conference. Did you notice that the Times was the only major paper in the world to put the number of protestors at 50,000? Even the Italian police estimated 100,000 - Le Monde put the number at 150 - 200 thou. Washington Post settled for the 100. The Times, however, has always been protective of globalization, and the editors must have decided that 100 thousand people, not to mention 200 thou, was unseemly. So they downed the number. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't take off another zero - what the hell, why not have 5,000 people, mostly anarchists, making whoopee in the streets of Columbus' home town.
On the other hand - I always read the Times. Today, the article of note is on coal, in the Magazine. How Coal Got Its Glow Back. The article should make us send letters to our congressmen - or e-mails - in support of the current EPA regulation of CO2 emissions.
The article ignored completely the people who mine coal, talking instead to industry spinmeisters and environmentalists. This isn't a-typical - the labor aspect of business is routinely ignored in articles of this sort. It is one of those silent omissions that is countenanced, too often, by environmentalists, who should make it a point to tell journalists to talk to workers. A lot of times, they are going to hear a fairly un-environmental message from the guys and gals on the ground, but too bad. In the end the environmental issues should be folded into the issue of economic justice - of who bears the social cost of business activity - but I think there's a lot of working class suspicion that really, the people who are going to bear all the costs are the ones who always bear the cost - the employees. IF this isn't addressed, environmentalism just becomes complicit in the corporate mentality. It isn't as if the NYT Mag article is an exception - too many times, journalism splits the world into a dialogue between two groups the journalist can identify with - college educated environmentos, on the one hand, and executives, on the other - whcih leads to a lot of anger on the part of working people. What they see is that they are simply dropped from the process. Justifiably they ask, why is this guy from Greenpeace or whereever talking like I don't even exist? It is as if the work was being done by nobody. This is especially disconcerting in an article on coal mining, of all things - for in no other industry has the war between labor and management been so fiercely fought, so close to a real war.
Sometimes the NYT makes me despair for the souls of its editors - for instance, the coverage of the G8 conference. Did you notice that the Times was the only major paper in the world to put the number of protestors at 50,000? Even the Italian police estimated 100,000 - Le Monde put the number at 150 - 200 thou. Washington Post settled for the 100. The Times, however, has always been protective of globalization, and the editors must have decided that 100 thousand people, not to mention 200 thou, was unseemly. So they downed the number. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't take off another zero - what the hell, why not have 5,000 people, mostly anarchists, making whoopee in the streets of Columbus' home town.
On the other hand - I always read the Times. Today, the article of note is on coal, in the Magazine. How Coal Got Its Glow Back. The article should make us send letters to our congressmen - or e-mails - in support of the current EPA regulation of CO2 emissions.
The article ignored completely the people who mine coal, talking instead to industry spinmeisters and environmentalists. This isn't a-typical - the labor aspect of business is routinely ignored in articles of this sort. It is one of those silent omissions that is countenanced, too often, by environmentalists, who should make it a point to tell journalists to talk to workers. A lot of times, they are going to hear a fairly un-environmental message from the guys and gals on the ground, but too bad. In the end the environmental issues should be folded into the issue of economic justice - of who bears the social cost of business activity - but I think there's a lot of working class suspicion that really, the people who are going to bear all the costs are the ones who always bear the cost - the employees. IF this isn't addressed, environmentalism just becomes complicit in the corporate mentality. It isn't as if the NYT Mag article is an exception - too many times, journalism splits the world into a dialogue between two groups the journalist can identify with - college educated environmentos, on the one hand, and executives, on the other - whcih leads to a lot of anger on the part of working people. What they see is that they are simply dropped from the process. Justifiably they ask, why is this guy from Greenpeace or whereever talking like I don't even exist? It is as if the work was being done by nobody. This is especially disconcerting in an article on coal mining, of all things - for in no other industry has the war between labor and management been so fiercely fought, so close to a real war.
Saturday, July 21, 2001
Yesterday�s post about Trollope�s The Prime Minister ended just as I was about to get into the first chapter � the marvelous first chapter. Anyone who doubts Trollope�s artistry should read the first chapter of this novel, which has the clean unswerving course and direction of a well aimed pistol shot. He begins the chapter with one of those authorial interventions that fascinate my friend Sarah, the woman I mentioned in yesterday�s post. Her dissertation, in fact, is an attempt to get at these moments in the classic 19th century novel and look at what they really do. The authorial intervention, according to Sarah, who I hope won�t be mad if I borrow one broad feature from her upcoming diss, finds itself most at home in the generalization. At least in Trollope, this is certainly true. He love these authorial asides. It is no use ignoring them, because they are a very real part of the text's structure. But we should ask - how can we talk about them?
First, let's recognize that these generalizations are modeled on that most political rhetorical form, advice. They fall into topics common to what Kant called prudence - hedged truths about society, sex, age, or status. This is an old tradition, running through sermons and moral essays (going all the way back to Seneca), and reiterating the truths of egotism. French moralistes, like La Rouchefaucauld, turned this into the maxim. And the maxim, in turn, was systematized by the ideologues - I mean, the ideologues proper, in the French Revolution, Tracy Destutte and the like.
Because our tendency is to think, oh, here�s the author, a real being, interfering in his story, which consists of made up beings doing made up things, we have trouble reconciling these moments, on a theoretic level, with the basic premise of fiction � that it be fictional. That's why Victorian fiction sometimes seems so moralistic to us. On a reading level, however, we don�t have this problem. That�s because stories don�t emerge in self-selected contexts � reading a novel, I don�t myself become novelistic. The reader, unconsciously, recognizes the maxim as a passage between the reader�s world and the fiction�s world. The generalization, in other words, is, on one side, a reader�s ritual, and gives us those kinds of truths native to ritual � performative truths. On the other side, for the fictional character, the maxim is fate, and the authorial intervention always has a slight whiff of destiny. This, incidentally, should remind us that the mythic root of Kant's counsels of prudence is found in the oracle. In fact, if we see this textual mode as originally home in the essay, and migrating to the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, we should think a little bit about the importance of oracles for the ancient essayists - Plutarch, Cicero, and Seneca. What distinguished them as essayists, rather than philosophers, was their fascination with fate - with the irrational arrangement of the life of rational beings. Stendhal, who was very consciously close to the ideologues, picks up this thread in La Chartreuse de Parme.
So here's one way to think about these moments of authorial presence. In them, fate speaks. If our fates could, in fact, speak, they would speak in just these kinds of generalizations. We would, then, understand our luck.
Well, we don�t, and neither do fictional characters, who never hear what their authors have to say.
But Trollope does not make heavy going of the oracular mode. He simply paints a picture of Ferdinand Lopez which tells us he is ineffably foreign, that his origins are mysterious, and that gentlemen, according to Samuel Johnson, are distinguished in one thing above all others � that their origins are never mysterious. Ferdinand Lopez is no gentleman, then. Trollope takes, at least consciously, the normal position of the privileged class with regard to gentlemen � they are the summit of English civilization, the vital difference between the Anglo-Saxon race and all lesser breeds without the law. A man with the name Ferdinand is, of course, going to be especially suspect. King Ferdinand was a notoriously Machiavellian ruler, much disliked by Whig historians.
So we have a moral sketch of Lopez, and then we see him going into the City by an almost hidden, dark route, to the office of a vulgar man vaguely connected with finance, Sextus Parker. We are never told Parker is a moneylender � we assume he is a jobber, a man who makes his money work in many different and hard to pin down ways. Perhaps an unsightly man, perhaps an unethical man, but certainly a necessary man. Lopez pops the question to him right away:
�Then he [Lopez] continued without changing his voice or the nature of his eye. 'I'll tell you what I want
you to do now. I want your name to this bill for three months.'
Sexty Parker opened his mouth and his eyes, and took the bit of paper that was tendered to him. It was a promissory note for 750 pounds, which, if signed by him, would at the end of the specified period make him liable for that sum were it not otherwise paid.�
Notice that sum, that beautiful sum. A thousand pounds would have been too much � Parker would never have gone for it. Five hundred pounds would be too little � our sense of Lopez� largeness would have been dampened. But 750 is just right. It is the kind of sum that inevitably turns up in political scandals, which never seem to be about really large sums � how much did Spiro Agnew take, something like 10,000 dollars? No, they are always those awkward, intermediate sums � and Trollope has that down. It is that 750 pounds which makes us trust him.
Oh well, I�m probably boring those of you who haven�t read, and don�t care for, Trollope.
Write me at Editor.
First, let's recognize that these generalizations are modeled on that most political rhetorical form, advice. They fall into topics common to what Kant called prudence - hedged truths about society, sex, age, or status. This is an old tradition, running through sermons and moral essays (going all the way back to Seneca), and reiterating the truths of egotism. French moralistes, like La Rouchefaucauld, turned this into the maxim. And the maxim, in turn, was systematized by the ideologues - I mean, the ideologues proper, in the French Revolution, Tracy Destutte and the like.
Because our tendency is to think, oh, here�s the author, a real being, interfering in his story, which consists of made up beings doing made up things, we have trouble reconciling these moments, on a theoretic level, with the basic premise of fiction � that it be fictional. That's why Victorian fiction sometimes seems so moralistic to us. On a reading level, however, we don�t have this problem. That�s because stories don�t emerge in self-selected contexts � reading a novel, I don�t myself become novelistic. The reader, unconsciously, recognizes the maxim as a passage between the reader�s world and the fiction�s world. The generalization, in other words, is, on one side, a reader�s ritual, and gives us those kinds of truths native to ritual � performative truths. On the other side, for the fictional character, the maxim is fate, and the authorial intervention always has a slight whiff of destiny. This, incidentally, should remind us that the mythic root of Kant's counsels of prudence is found in the oracle. In fact, if we see this textual mode as originally home in the essay, and migrating to the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, we should think a little bit about the importance of oracles for the ancient essayists - Plutarch, Cicero, and Seneca. What distinguished them as essayists, rather than philosophers, was their fascination with fate - with the irrational arrangement of the life of rational beings. Stendhal, who was very consciously close to the ideologues, picks up this thread in La Chartreuse de Parme.
So here's one way to think about these moments of authorial presence. In them, fate speaks. If our fates could, in fact, speak, they would speak in just these kinds of generalizations. We would, then, understand our luck.
Well, we don�t, and neither do fictional characters, who never hear what their authors have to say.
But Trollope does not make heavy going of the oracular mode. He simply paints a picture of Ferdinand Lopez which tells us he is ineffably foreign, that his origins are mysterious, and that gentlemen, according to Samuel Johnson, are distinguished in one thing above all others � that their origins are never mysterious. Ferdinand Lopez is no gentleman, then. Trollope takes, at least consciously, the normal position of the privileged class with regard to gentlemen � they are the summit of English civilization, the vital difference between the Anglo-Saxon race and all lesser breeds without the law. A man with the name Ferdinand is, of course, going to be especially suspect. King Ferdinand was a notoriously Machiavellian ruler, much disliked by Whig historians.
So we have a moral sketch of Lopez, and then we see him going into the City by an almost hidden, dark route, to the office of a vulgar man vaguely connected with finance, Sextus Parker. We are never told Parker is a moneylender � we assume he is a jobber, a man who makes his money work in many different and hard to pin down ways. Perhaps an unsightly man, perhaps an unethical man, but certainly a necessary man. Lopez pops the question to him right away:
�Then he [Lopez] continued without changing his voice or the nature of his eye. 'I'll tell you what I want
you to do now. I want your name to this bill for three months.'
Sexty Parker opened his mouth and his eyes, and took the bit of paper that was tendered to him. It was a promissory note for 750 pounds, which, if signed by him, would at the end of the specified period make him liable for that sum were it not otherwise paid.�
Notice that sum, that beautiful sum. A thousand pounds would have been too much � Parker would never have gone for it. Five hundred pounds would be too little � our sense of Lopez� largeness would have been dampened. But 750 is just right. It is the kind of sum that inevitably turns up in political scandals, which never seem to be about really large sums � how much did Spiro Agnew take, something like 10,000 dollars? No, they are always those awkward, intermediate sums � and Trollope has that down. It is that 750 pounds which makes us trust him.
Oh well, I�m probably boring those of you who haven�t read, and don�t care for, Trollope.
Write me at Editor.
Terrible, violence at Genoa - displayed, of course, by the G8 leaders, whose meetings are taking on more and more the air of some ghostly collocation called up by Metternich. That these paladins of globalization on capitalism's terms refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the protesters, and that for the most part, in the US, the police lines are backed by the media lines, has a familiar feel to it - it's the US in Vietnam, 1966. Here's a link to Lib�ration - L'information avec l'AFP, which has the most articles.
Friday, July 20, 2001
So when Ferdinand Lopez borrows 750 pounds from Sextus Parker, I get a pleasurable tingle of anticipation. The race has begun. And I know that this is a magical race, in which the runner who chooses to enter it will lose his skin. There are races like that in Greek myths � the suitors who raced for Atalanta�s hand, for instance. I think it was Atalanta � I must look this up. These suitors had to confront a great pyramid of skulls when they came to ask for her hand � all the suitors who had lost.
Trollope, as I said before, is a great favorite of mine. I keep urging him on my friend, Sarah Raff, who is doing a dissertation on Jane Austen. I always connect those two writers � they are both, it seems to me, supremely insular. But so far, Sarah has resisted Trollope, and I have wondered why. Am I wrong about their similarity? More in my next post. Write me at Editor.
Trollope, as I said before, is a great favorite of mine. I keep urging him on my friend, Sarah Raff, who is doing a dissertation on Jane Austen. I always connect those two writers � they are both, it seems to me, supremely insular. But so far, Sarah has resisted Trollope, and I have wondered why. Am I wrong about their similarity? More in my next post. Write me at Editor.
The Prime Minister begins with borrowed money. A lot of the great 19th century novels begin with borrowed money � La Peau de Chagrin and Crime and Punishment come immediately to mind. In La Peau de Chagrin, Raphael is first seen losing all his money gambling - but he is gambling because he has come to the end of his rope. He can't think of any other way to pay off his creditors. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is not only mad enough to think that God is dead, but has just that little extra micron of lunacy that convinces him he can fight Mammon � which he does by hacking up an old money lender. But as every reader knows, Mammon, in the form of borrowed money, always wins.
What is it about borrowed money that encodes a narrative pattern so at home in the 19th century? Well, think about how Marx describes money in terms of dead capital and living capital. The dead and living metaphor isn�t his � it is a commonplace of the time. To animate capital � to use your money - was to make it earn interest. But money, as we all know, is actually dead. It is a coin, or a bill. In the French Revolution it was the terrible assignat. So to animate money is to animate a dead thing, or, even more frightening, a dead troupe � and of course we know how rich that trope is with gothic anxiety. That way lies Frankenstein and Dracula. After all, these novels are appearing in a society that is witnessing the long, prolonged death of feudal culture. And that death, though keenly felt, is not clearly understood. When the fundamental concepts native to peasant Europe are suddenly either in disrepute or void, you get a historic moment in which the metaphors betray a basic confusion of the founding binary opposition of life and death. This confusion had, before, only been dreamt of � now the dream seemed to walk abroad, not a pleasant thought. Once the dead things come alive, they have to do what the live things do, only with a more thought out purpose. They have to reproduce themselves, in other words. So we get the common complaint that the dead feed off the living, and in Dracula we get the combination of feeding and reproduction � it becomes one act. This is a nightmare model of power, but it is a different nightmare depending on the level of power one actually holds (or believes one holds) in society. So for the landed aristocracy, which, contrary to the schematic of classroom historians, did survive the French Revolution, and in fact managed the great latifundia of Pomeria and Galicia in Central Europe, and intermarried with the haut bourgeoisie in England and France, and ground down the wealth of peasants in Southern Italy, this particular nightmare was identical to the Industrial Revolution. The conservative romantics, from Chauteaubriand to Ruskin, saw in the factory only the shadow of death, and in the factory worker the products of death, automatons all.
But Trollope, though influenced by that current, was more deeply tied to another sector of privilege � the merchant/professional class. These people, while heirs to the folkloric archetypes of feudal Europe, were halfway committed to the new economic order. So yes, they wanted to maintain that structure which put the outsider, the slave, the criminal, under the ban of social death. But they had also a sneaking liking � and more, a need � for the energy of the upstart, the tycoon, the mover and shaker mysteriously arisen from out of the depths. Frankenstein could, after all, really be the new Prometheus � a myth viewed with particular fondness by both Balzac, Napoleon and Marx.
So naturally the figuration of the second, social death � death-in-life and life-in-death � will have a different aesthetic footing and effect for this set; a set from which most of the great European novelists came.
Another thing to notice is that borrowed money ticks. There�s a race (as in running a race, not races of mankind race) element here � a race against the clock. Because the law of borrowed money is you have to pay it back, and you have to pay back the money owed for having it (which mounts, the longer you have it) and you have to live at the same time. So, metaphorically, the man who borrows money is on a run. Raskolnikov couldn�t solve that problem with an axe. Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (the most interest- battered character in all literature, all dick and empty pockets) couldn�t solve it with his intricate maneuvers, his superabundance of paper. Interestingly, Jules Verne extracted the element of the race and made it the template for a certain type of novel, the novel as contest � Around the world in 80 days, etc. (and remember, that novel begins with a bet).
What is it about borrowed money that encodes a narrative pattern so at home in the 19th century? Well, think about how Marx describes money in terms of dead capital and living capital. The dead and living metaphor isn�t his � it is a commonplace of the time. To animate capital � to use your money - was to make it earn interest. But money, as we all know, is actually dead. It is a coin, or a bill. In the French Revolution it was the terrible assignat. So to animate money is to animate a dead thing, or, even more frightening, a dead troupe � and of course we know how rich that trope is with gothic anxiety. That way lies Frankenstein and Dracula. After all, these novels are appearing in a society that is witnessing the long, prolonged death of feudal culture. And that death, though keenly felt, is not clearly understood. When the fundamental concepts native to peasant Europe are suddenly either in disrepute or void, you get a historic moment in which the metaphors betray a basic confusion of the founding binary opposition of life and death. This confusion had, before, only been dreamt of � now the dream seemed to walk abroad, not a pleasant thought. Once the dead things come alive, they have to do what the live things do, only with a more thought out purpose. They have to reproduce themselves, in other words. So we get the common complaint that the dead feed off the living, and in Dracula we get the combination of feeding and reproduction � it becomes one act. This is a nightmare model of power, but it is a different nightmare depending on the level of power one actually holds (or believes one holds) in society. So for the landed aristocracy, which, contrary to the schematic of classroom historians, did survive the French Revolution, and in fact managed the great latifundia of Pomeria and Galicia in Central Europe, and intermarried with the haut bourgeoisie in England and France, and ground down the wealth of peasants in Southern Italy, this particular nightmare was identical to the Industrial Revolution. The conservative romantics, from Chauteaubriand to Ruskin, saw in the factory only the shadow of death, and in the factory worker the products of death, automatons all.
But Trollope, though influenced by that current, was more deeply tied to another sector of privilege � the merchant/professional class. These people, while heirs to the folkloric archetypes of feudal Europe, were halfway committed to the new economic order. So yes, they wanted to maintain that structure which put the outsider, the slave, the criminal, under the ban of social death. But they had also a sneaking liking � and more, a need � for the energy of the upstart, the tycoon, the mover and shaker mysteriously arisen from out of the depths. Frankenstein could, after all, really be the new Prometheus � a myth viewed with particular fondness by both Balzac, Napoleon and Marx.
So naturally the figuration of the second, social death � death-in-life and life-in-death � will have a different aesthetic footing and effect for this set; a set from which most of the great European novelists came.
Another thing to notice is that borrowed money ticks. There�s a race (as in running a race, not races of mankind race) element here � a race against the clock. Because the law of borrowed money is you have to pay it back, and you have to pay back the money owed for having it (which mounts, the longer you have it) and you have to live at the same time. So, metaphorically, the man who borrows money is on a run. Raskolnikov couldn�t solve that problem with an axe. Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette (the most interest- battered character in all literature, all dick and empty pockets) couldn�t solve it with his intricate maneuvers, his superabundance of paper. Interestingly, Jules Verne extracted the element of the race and made it the template for a certain type of novel, the novel as contest � Around the world in 80 days, etc. (and remember, that novel begins with a bet).
The British, that was going to be the topic of this post. I've been watching the battle of the Tory pretenders - not that I fully understand it. The party seems to operate on the survivor principle - put four or five Tory leaders who hate each other together, have them whisper about which one of them is gay, which a Jew, and which one is in the pocket of the French, and then unleash the hatred of the backbenchers, in the form of a vote, to decide who gets to lead the party into its next major defeat. Read about it in the
Spectator. The surprise defeat so far is of Michael Portillo - a loyal Thatcher-ite who got too wobbly for the grande dame. Really, Thatcher is an odious figure, one of the great disasters of modern times. But I do like the way her pronouncements always seem like they are outtakes from the movie, The Ruling Class. Apparently she has taken to calling Portillo "the Spaniard" - can't you just hear it? Which is why I was reminded of the Ruling Class - the way the Gurney paterfamilias pronounces the word "foreigner."
All of this Tory foolery, with the trial of Archer in the background, was on my mind yesterday when I started Trollope's The Prime Minister (by the way - I'm reading the book on-line, but the on-line version is badly transcribed. Usually Gutenberg, which is the version everybody steals, does a pretty good job of proofing their e-texts, but in this case they fell down on the job). So far, my acquaintance with Trollope has been with the Barsetshire novels. This summer has been so driven by my need to read and review and make money that I've had very little time to read for ... the reasons I usually read. Joy, I guess. Well, the first two chapters of the Prime Minister are as sharp as anything I've read by Trollope - and wierdly apposite, given that Trollope is presenting a character named Lopez who is mixing among bluebloods with the disadvantage of having no "ancestry." The book begins with Lopez getting a loan and having a lunch - in fact, the perfect beginning for a British scandal. And perfectly done. I'll get into that in my next post. E-mail comments to: Roger
Spectator. The surprise defeat so far is of Michael Portillo - a loyal Thatcher-ite who got too wobbly for the grande dame. Really, Thatcher is an odious figure, one of the great disasters of modern times. But I do like the way her pronouncements always seem like they are outtakes from the movie, The Ruling Class. Apparently she has taken to calling Portillo "the Spaniard" - can't you just hear it? Which is why I was reminded of the Ruling Class - the way the Gurney paterfamilias pronounces the word "foreigner."
All of this Tory foolery, with the trial of Archer in the background, was on my mind yesterday when I started Trollope's The Prime Minister (by the way - I'm reading the book on-line, but the on-line version is badly transcribed. Usually Gutenberg, which is the version everybody steals, does a pretty good job of proofing their e-texts, but in this case they fell down on the job). So far, my acquaintance with Trollope has been with the Barsetshire novels. This summer has been so driven by my need to read and review and make money that I've had very little time to read for ... the reasons I usually read. Joy, I guess. Well, the first two chapters of the Prime Minister are as sharp as anything I've read by Trollope - and wierdly apposite, given that Trollope is presenting a character named Lopez who is mixing among bluebloods with the disadvantage of having no "ancestry." The book begins with Lopez getting a loan and having a lunch - in fact, the perfect beginning for a British scandal. And perfectly done. I'll get into that in my next post. E-mail comments to: Roger
Thursday, July 19, 2001
The British. I'm going to post tomorrow, but I went today to the Guardian and was rather shocked that Jeffrey Archer is going to prison.Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Political chancer with lots of fizz Notice that none of the conservative bluebloods have the guts to stand up for him, except for John Major. Hey, I think Archer's politics are contemptible, and his wonking around with the press - his lying in court to extract libel money from the tabloids - is, obviously, the kind of thing you must deal with by extracting some comparably ruinous sum from Archer. But why send the guy to prison? Not that I think he deserves some special immunity from the cell - I believe that most imprisoned folk, from drug users to forgers to drug dealers, would be better dealt with outside of prison. The monstrous machinery of the penal system does little good to the people inside it, doesn't compensate the people they have damaged outside it, and serves mainly as a monument to the state's own fatuous sense of power. In fact, it is people like Archer who are always urging that people be sent to prison, which is why I am directing this comment at his comeuppance. The guy committed 'perverse' acts with a prostitute, and then made her life miserable when she revealed this. Well, that was bad. By all accounts, the first trial was a farce, and if anybody is really to suffer for it, it should be the judge who presided as a sort of caricature of John Bull stupidity over the proceedings.
Now of course Archer is receiving the vials of press indignation - a mass outpouring of moral harumphing that is truly indicative of a class that seems to have long memories of tutors equipped with canes keeping order in Latin class. Give him a whack, pull down his breeches. Well, do, but send him off to jail for four years?
What is truly sad, however, is that so few of the people who so ostentatiously palled around with him stick with him in adversity. Like, say, Dean Acheson stood by good old Alger Hiss.
Now of course Archer is receiving the vials of press indignation - a mass outpouring of moral harumphing that is truly indicative of a class that seems to have long memories of tutors equipped with canes keeping order in Latin class. Give him a whack, pull down his breeches. Well, do, but send him off to jail for four years?
What is truly sad, however, is that so few of the people who so ostentatiously palled around with him stick with him in adversity. Like, say, Dean Acheson stood by good old Alger Hiss.
There�s an interview in Salon with Joe Queenan, who is one of those people, like James Wolcott, who has a reputation for fierceness that is belied by his actual work � these are strictly Wizard of Oz lions, with claws that tear not, and teeth that do not bite, nor mangle the oh so tender flesh.
That said, Queenan does throw a stone against the �Greatest Generation� garbage. That�s nice � I don�t really understand the current wave of delayed gratitude for Victory over Berlin, except as a ploy to re-invest the war movie with audience interest. Nobody, really, is going to pay to see too many movies about our brave bombers in Serbia, right?
Still, this generational patronizing is not only insulting, but betrays a severely limited historical scope. Well, that such as Tom Brokaw exhibit severely limited historical scope, or none at all, perhaps goes without saying, but the promotion of this G.G. trope through book reviews, and the elevation of conservative historians like Stephen Ambrose, makes me want to put myself athwart the tide and yell stop. What, after all, about the generation of 1789? Or how about the 1620s generation � you know, Blaise Pascal and that lot? At least intellectually, surely civilization peaked about 1670. It has been downhill ever since.
Now, it isn�t that I am wholly without admiration and even nostalgia for the post World War II order � although I could do without the military industrial complex, McCarthyism, and the manic building of missiles. But I am definitely sentimental about Truman�s tax policies � it makes me all old fashioned inside, taxing the rich at about 60-70 percent of their incomes. Plus the encouragement to unionism, another feature of the trente annees glorieuses, as the French call the Keynsian era � roughly from about 1945 to 1975. But spare me the generational talk. It is the supreme historical pseudo-category � spawned by the conservative philosopher/sociologist, Wilhelm Dilthey, for those of you out there curious about the genealogy of this nonsense (the link is broadly about Dilthey, and is, yes, in German), and given its resonance by those who insist that a commonality of knowledge about the hit songs of 1964 is the most important thing about 1964. This is not only a trivial pursuits-like foreshortening of history, but of personal experience, too � slipping the death mask of the eternal over the ephemeral so that we can�t even look into the mirror of our lives without the knowing rictus of pop culture staring back at us.
That said, Queenan does throw a stone against the �Greatest Generation� garbage. That�s nice � I don�t really understand the current wave of delayed gratitude for Victory over Berlin, except as a ploy to re-invest the war movie with audience interest. Nobody, really, is going to pay to see too many movies about our brave bombers in Serbia, right?
Still, this generational patronizing is not only insulting, but betrays a severely limited historical scope. Well, that such as Tom Brokaw exhibit severely limited historical scope, or none at all, perhaps goes without saying, but the promotion of this G.G. trope through book reviews, and the elevation of conservative historians like Stephen Ambrose, makes me want to put myself athwart the tide and yell stop. What, after all, about the generation of 1789? Or how about the 1620s generation � you know, Blaise Pascal and that lot? At least intellectually, surely civilization peaked about 1670. It has been downhill ever since.
Now, it isn�t that I am wholly without admiration and even nostalgia for the post World War II order � although I could do without the military industrial complex, McCarthyism, and the manic building of missiles. But I am definitely sentimental about Truman�s tax policies � it makes me all old fashioned inside, taxing the rich at about 60-70 percent of their incomes. Plus the encouragement to unionism, another feature of the trente annees glorieuses, as the French call the Keynsian era � roughly from about 1945 to 1975. But spare me the generational talk. It is the supreme historical pseudo-category � spawned by the conservative philosopher/sociologist, Wilhelm Dilthey, for those of you out there curious about the genealogy of this nonsense (the link is broadly about Dilthey, and is, yes, in German), and given its resonance by those who insist that a commonality of knowledge about the hit songs of 1964 is the most important thing about 1964. This is not only a trivial pursuits-like foreshortening of history, but of personal experience, too � slipping the death mask of the eternal over the ephemeral so that we can�t even look into the mirror of our lives without the knowing rictus of pop culture staring back at us.
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
Tuesday, July 17, 2001
Here's a nice site about the FBI -
TRAC: FBI Site - Comprehensive, independent, and nonpartisan information about FBI. I don't know about you, but the crime that fascinates me even more Chandra Levy's abduction by minions of the evil Condit � oops, I�m just speculating, really no need to get out your libel lawyers - is the continuing saga of Whitey Bolger, the eminence coupable of South Boston, who is being chased using the usual Keystone Cops method by an FBI that has every reason not to want him caught. Bolger, for those of you who haven�t read BLACK MASS, had the Boston FBI pretty much on his salary in the 80s. And if recent stories are true, the Boston office has always had a chummy relationship with certain gangster types in the Boston area � they even, obligingly, hid evidence to frame a guy for murder in the 60s, because the faux perp was a great cut-out for the real perp, who was being protected as an �informer.� See Boston Herald's coverage in particular - . I know, it is a Murdoch-y paper, but I do love the classic tabloid crime coverage - Weegee in Boston style.
One of the great myths of the FBI, abetted by movies and television, was that of an incorruptible national police force. There�s a historic background to that myth. In the late twenties, the FBI evolved out of the very corrupt Bureau of Investigation. There's a nice little summary of the history at CCrime Library. Prohibition gave the then Bureau of Information an impetus to corruption that was not present when Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, was rousting anarchists - rousting them, in fact, right out of their constitutionally guaranteed rights. Politicals are notoriously an impoverished lot. But practicing the raid, the employment of informers, the agent provocateur, on the anarchists provided wonderful exercises in policework that could be applied on rum-runners and bootleggers - and it was. Under Harding, however, these tools were simply potential - the Bureau of Investigation was apparently on the cutting edge, seeing in the suddenly enlarged pool of �criminal� behavior a definite source of graft.
When Harding's corrupt cronies were exposed, an interesting thing happened - instead of questioning the definition of drinking as a crime, the press presented the issue as one of honest law enforcement versus corruption. Honest law enforcement is thus quietly separated from the laws it enforces, even if they are inherently dishonest. This binary opposition has carried over to this day.
In fact, there's no reason to suppose that the FBI is any less corrupt than any other large police organization. The unappealing fact that Hoover refused to even recognize that the Mafia existed up until the 60s, and his well known dislike for messing with it, have always been attributed to some quirk in his character, even though Hoover's sex life and penchant for gambling are now pretty well established facts about his life, and excellent handles for either subtle forms of bribery or blackmail.
TRAC: FBI Site - Comprehensive, independent, and nonpartisan information about FBI. I don't know about you, but the crime that fascinates me even more Chandra Levy's abduction by minions of the evil Condit � oops, I�m just speculating, really no need to get out your libel lawyers - is the continuing saga of Whitey Bolger, the eminence coupable of South Boston, who is being chased using the usual Keystone Cops method by an FBI that has every reason not to want him caught. Bolger, for those of you who haven�t read BLACK MASS, had the Boston FBI pretty much on his salary in the 80s. And if recent stories are true, the Boston office has always had a chummy relationship with certain gangster types in the Boston area � they even, obligingly, hid evidence to frame a guy for murder in the 60s, because the faux perp was a great cut-out for the real perp, who was being protected as an �informer.� See Boston Herald's coverage in particular - . I know, it is a Murdoch-y paper, but I do love the classic tabloid crime coverage - Weegee in Boston style.
One of the great myths of the FBI, abetted by movies and television, was that of an incorruptible national police force. There�s a historic background to that myth. In the late twenties, the FBI evolved out of the very corrupt Bureau of Investigation. There's a nice little summary of the history at CCrime Library. Prohibition gave the then Bureau of Information an impetus to corruption that was not present when Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson's attorney general, was rousting anarchists - rousting them, in fact, right out of their constitutionally guaranteed rights. Politicals are notoriously an impoverished lot. But practicing the raid, the employment of informers, the agent provocateur, on the anarchists provided wonderful exercises in policework that could be applied on rum-runners and bootleggers - and it was. Under Harding, however, these tools were simply potential - the Bureau of Investigation was apparently on the cutting edge, seeing in the suddenly enlarged pool of �criminal� behavior a definite source of graft.
When Harding's corrupt cronies were exposed, an interesting thing happened - instead of questioning the definition of drinking as a crime, the press presented the issue as one of honest law enforcement versus corruption. Honest law enforcement is thus quietly separated from the laws it enforces, even if they are inherently dishonest. This binary opposition has carried over to this day.
In fact, there's no reason to suppose that the FBI is any less corrupt than any other large police organization. The unappealing fact that Hoover refused to even recognize that the Mafia existed up until the 60s, and his well known dislike for messing with it, have always been attributed to some quirk in his character, even though Hoover's sex life and penchant for gambling are now pretty well established facts about his life, and excellent handles for either subtle forms of bribery or blackmail.
Monday, July 16, 2001
Yesterday the LA Times had a very interesting book section devoted to the Spanish Civil War. I love the LA Times Sunday book section. Even when it is weak, it displays an editorial personality absent from the NY Times Sunday book section.
Of particular note are the two essays by Bernard Knox and Christopher Hitchens. Knox writes as an old veteran of the International brigades, and would no doubt be jeered at as a dupe by the New Republic crowd. Hitchens has a nice piece on Orwell, prompted by a collection of Orwell�s pieces on the Civil War � which, of course, Orwell fought in. By accident, Orwell was able to experience the hunting down of the POUM, Andres Nin�s party � for which Serge tried, vainly, to get Trotsky to speak up � and which was defeated partly because Nin was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Stalinists. I�ve always thought Neruda�s part in these events was particularly dirty. Last year I read a biography of the photographer, Tina Modotti, and I was surprised to discover that she and her husband, a Soviet agent, played a part in this business � in fact, her husband might have been one of Nin�s torturers.
But I�m getting off topic � what is nice about Hitchens� piece is that he touches on a tension in his own perception of his intellectual forebears by contrasting Orwell and Auden. This is nice, since Hitchens too often lets Orwell off all the hooks. I admire Orwell, but there is a distinct streak in him of Puritanism � in a sense, it is this streak that made him such a bad prophet. Over and over again in the forties, Orwell took the lesson of the thirties to be that hedonistic societies had no chance against societies with strong anhedonistic ideologies � like fascism and communism. There had to be more steel in the liberal mix, in other words, for the democracies to survive. That lesson, though, was precisely wrong. An argument can be made that it was just the disgust with steel, its obsolescence as a motivation for collective action, that eventually undid the Soviet Union. The Russians wanted stuff. While the hedonistic West experienced, after Orwell, an explosion of hedonism. Orwell was very uncomfortable with that kind of thing, which is one reason he mistrusted the U.S. � there�s a very (unintentionally) funny essay Orwell wrote in the forties about American fashion magazines, which filled him with despair and disgust. That austerity was naturally not going to respond to Auden�s sensibility.
Finally, the lead review, of Radosh et. al.�s edition of documents relating to the Spanish Civil War culled from the Soviet Military Archives, is by Stanley Payne. Payne seems to bring a conservative p.o.v. to his reading of Radosh�s work � the point of which seems to be something like: the model of the Stalinist takeover of governments in Eastern Europe was developed in the 30s in Spain; projecting from that takeover, the better course was that Franco win, as he did. I think that the first thesis is partly true, and that the conclusion is nonsense. Payne thinks
Calendar Live - For Whom the Bell Tolls
The truth is that each of the Spanish leftist parties desired its own form of "People's Republic" or all-left republic, with all conservative political and economic interests liquidated. This was the root cause of the Civil War.
That, of course, is nonsense, like saying that the �root cause� of the American Civil war was Northern industrialism or something. It sets up the idea that Franco�s aggression, his invasion of the Republic, was some surface cause � some negligible event. It also divorces the Spanish Civil War from the history of Spain, a history in which, for the most part, the right had ruled � from the end of the Napoleonic wars all the way up to the early thirties. And that rule had been marked by the most ignorant, anti-semitic, anti-labor clericalism � by the wholesale oppression of unions, anarchists, and regionalists � and by the insufferable maneuvers of a dying ruling class to maintain an economically disastrous colonial system, with a swollen military. What Payne and Radosh are doing, actually, is quietly reviving the appeasement view of the thirties � it is a view that ignores the Nazi recognition that Franco was an ideological ally, and, further, surreptitiously, urges the Oswald Mosley line of 20th century history � if only Chamberlain had allied with Hitler and driven back the red menace. If only the democracies hadn�t provoked the fascists with that distressing pact with Poland. Of course, Payne would probably protest that this is not what he meant at all, but historic judgment doesn�t necessarily work better backwards � it works by having some notion of what the imminent effect of one�s judgments are. Orwell had it right � the failure of the democracies to support the Republic was vicious, stupid, and ultimately counter-productive.
Of particular note are the two essays by Bernard Knox and Christopher Hitchens. Knox writes as an old veteran of the International brigades, and would no doubt be jeered at as a dupe by the New Republic crowd. Hitchens has a nice piece on Orwell, prompted by a collection of Orwell�s pieces on the Civil War � which, of course, Orwell fought in. By accident, Orwell was able to experience the hunting down of the POUM, Andres Nin�s party � for which Serge tried, vainly, to get Trotsky to speak up � and which was defeated partly because Nin was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Stalinists. I�ve always thought Neruda�s part in these events was particularly dirty. Last year I read a biography of the photographer, Tina Modotti, and I was surprised to discover that she and her husband, a Soviet agent, played a part in this business � in fact, her husband might have been one of Nin�s torturers.
But I�m getting off topic � what is nice about Hitchens� piece is that he touches on a tension in his own perception of his intellectual forebears by contrasting Orwell and Auden. This is nice, since Hitchens too often lets Orwell off all the hooks. I admire Orwell, but there is a distinct streak in him of Puritanism � in a sense, it is this streak that made him such a bad prophet. Over and over again in the forties, Orwell took the lesson of the thirties to be that hedonistic societies had no chance against societies with strong anhedonistic ideologies � like fascism and communism. There had to be more steel in the liberal mix, in other words, for the democracies to survive. That lesson, though, was precisely wrong. An argument can be made that it was just the disgust with steel, its obsolescence as a motivation for collective action, that eventually undid the Soviet Union. The Russians wanted stuff. While the hedonistic West experienced, after Orwell, an explosion of hedonism. Orwell was very uncomfortable with that kind of thing, which is one reason he mistrusted the U.S. � there�s a very (unintentionally) funny essay Orwell wrote in the forties about American fashion magazines, which filled him with despair and disgust. That austerity was naturally not going to respond to Auden�s sensibility.
Finally, the lead review, of Radosh et. al.�s edition of documents relating to the Spanish Civil War culled from the Soviet Military Archives, is by Stanley Payne. Payne seems to bring a conservative p.o.v. to his reading of Radosh�s work � the point of which seems to be something like: the model of the Stalinist takeover of governments in Eastern Europe was developed in the 30s in Spain; projecting from that takeover, the better course was that Franco win, as he did. I think that the first thesis is partly true, and that the conclusion is nonsense. Payne thinks
Calendar Live - For Whom the Bell Tolls
The truth is that each of the Spanish leftist parties desired its own form of "People's Republic" or all-left republic, with all conservative political and economic interests liquidated. This was the root cause of the Civil War.
That, of course, is nonsense, like saying that the �root cause� of the American Civil war was Northern industrialism or something. It sets up the idea that Franco�s aggression, his invasion of the Republic, was some surface cause � some negligible event. It also divorces the Spanish Civil War from the history of Spain, a history in which, for the most part, the right had ruled � from the end of the Napoleonic wars all the way up to the early thirties. And that rule had been marked by the most ignorant, anti-semitic, anti-labor clericalism � by the wholesale oppression of unions, anarchists, and regionalists � and by the insufferable maneuvers of a dying ruling class to maintain an economically disastrous colonial system, with a swollen military. What Payne and Radosh are doing, actually, is quietly reviving the appeasement view of the thirties � it is a view that ignores the Nazi recognition that Franco was an ideological ally, and, further, surreptitiously, urges the Oswald Mosley line of 20th century history � if only Chamberlain had allied with Hitler and driven back the red menace. If only the democracies hadn�t provoked the fascists with that distressing pact with Poland. Of course, Payne would probably protest that this is not what he meant at all, but historic judgment doesn�t necessarily work better backwards � it works by having some notion of what the imminent effect of one�s judgments are. Orwell had it right � the failure of the democracies to support the Republic was vicious, stupid, and ultimately counter-productive.
Sunday, July 15, 2001
Wow - I just posted a long bit, and the blogger ate it. I don't really understand that. Nor am I pleased.
Okay. Since it was a long and funny, or so I thought, diary piece - I'll just have to swallow the insult to my creativity and start again, right? Which is the really stupid thing about computers - when something misfunctions and you lose something of value, it is a real confrontation with absense - it isn't like losing something which is retained, somewhere, in the system, it is more like dying.
Okay. Since it was a long and funny, or so I thought, diary piece - I'll just have to swallow the insult to my creativity and start again, right? Which is the really stupid thing about computers - when something misfunctions and you lose something of value, it is a real confrontation with absense - it isn't like losing something which is retained, somewhere, in the system, it is more like dying.
Saturday, July 14, 2001
Where was I?
At some point this week I want to comment on the Meyer article in the Atlantic Monthly (alas, not on-line at www.theatlantic.com). This article was referenced by the PW booksellers e-mail I get every day, so I went to check out what Meyer had to say in his "passionate" response to pretentious writing. I haven't finished it, but the section on Delillo comes straight out of Bruce Bawer's take on Delillo in the New Criteria ten years ago, and even then it was pretty much crap. At least, however, one can respect Bawer as a reader (for a recent article by Bawer, check out Salon's book section, http://www.salon.com/books, for /2001/06/28/) I suspect that since the Atlantic's editorship was taken over by Michael Kelly, we might be seeing more articles arguing, as Myer's does, for a basically conservative aesthetic.
But more on that later, as I say.
At some point this week I want to comment on the Meyer article in the Atlantic Monthly (alas, not on-line at www.theatlantic.com). This article was referenced by the PW booksellers e-mail I get every day, so I went to check out what Meyer had to say in his "passionate" response to pretentious writing. I haven't finished it, but the section on Delillo comes straight out of Bruce Bawer's take on Delillo in the New Criteria ten years ago, and even then it was pretty much crap. At least, however, one can respect Bawer as a reader (for a recent article by Bawer, check out Salon's book section, http://www.salon.com/books, for /2001/06/28/) I suspect that since the Atlantic's editorship was taken over by Michael Kelly, we might be seeing more articles arguing, as Myer's does, for a basically conservative aesthetic.
But more on that later, as I say.
Thursday, July 12, 2001
Ah, as I wait for my lunch to warm up in the oven, I can do my log for the day.
As you'll remember, I signed off last with the promise that I would tell the long saga of my writing career, such as it is - truly, a cinescopic story. But today I am going to diverge from that fascinating subject and address Andrew Sullivan and the Giant PharmaCos. - which is not a children's story by Roald Dahl, but a little conflict of interest snare Mr. Sullivan has entangled himself in. You can go to Poynter.org - Jim Romenesko's Media News and see the links there, as well as my brilliant little letter.
To see A.S. defending the drug companies, you can go to Slate - dialogues dated 01-04-09.
Now, aside from the conflict of interest question, I've always wanted to have my say about Sullivan's position on this issue, which reflects a contradiction in the conservativism I've seen in many other conservative thinkers. So I'll have it here.
Here's the deal. Conservatives will often say, about something like the price of drugs, that the choice is between the Government and private enterprise. Slicing the discourse up neatly like this, however, isn't quite right. Because at the heart of Sullivan's position is an unanalyzed but powerful dependence on the State by the drug companies. By pretending they are rivals, the issue of monopoly power is masked.
For what is it, essentially, that pharmaceutical giants do? The patent pharmaceuticals. They might develop them, or they might not, but the end process is to patent them. This means that they apply to have monopoly control over a certain product. And their success depends on the state taking up arms for them - by, essentially, allowing them to forbid other companies from manufacturing and selling a particular drug for a particular season.
Adam Smith cast a pretty cold eye on monopolies, even when celebrating free enterprise. Here's a quote from Wealth of Nations:
"A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate. The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got."
The Andrew Sullivans of the world are essentially arguing that there is a flaw in the system of competition. Whereas they believe competition for, say, electricity is a good thing, they are in effect saying that the state should nurse businesses by granting them a preliminary season of non-competitiveness - so they can get a fair return on their investments.
Notice the word "fair" here. If I were to argue, for instance, that companies should be forbidden to fire employees because it is unfair - if I were to argue, in other words, that employees be granted monopolies to their positions - conservatives would buzz like angry hornets. And their argument, after you peel off the rhetoric about freedom, would be that employing people at high rates of pay which aren't determined by competition in the labor market hurts the rest of us by upping prices. Apparently they are willing to concede that hurt in the case of intellectual property, however - perhaps because they have more invested in the concept of intellectual property.
But beyond the motives of unconscious self-interest, there is something else going on here - a sort of automatic servility before power. Although conservatives are quick to pounce on liberals for worshipping the nanny state, the genuflection before big corporations is, of course, of the same family of response: the awe of the clerk before his master.
I should say this, right away: I'm no libertarian. I do, however, have great respect for the empirical and logical arguments for competition, even if I think there are other social factors which lead me to support socializing power, healthcare, etc. I have no respect, however, for the argument of a "fair return." There's no empirical data that links a higher profit, due to monopoly, to more innovation. If there were, in fact, it would knock all the other conservative arguments on the head. When Penicillin was invented - I mean, after Fleming had diddled away his experiments with it, and it was taken up again at Oxford - the scientists who made it DIDN'T PATENT IT. Why? Because at that time, quaintly enough, it was considered unethical. If you read James Le Fanu's wonderfully cranky book, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (and Le Fanu seems to be conservative), the picture of modern medical innovation he draws has nothing to do with BigPharma making tons of profit on drugs they are magically spewing out.
So let me end this spiel on this note: hey, it isn't that we want the State to get into drug dispensing - but to relax its interventions on behalf of big Pharmaceutical companies. Let those generics in there, let BigPharma compete, limit, severely, the term of state-granted monopoly. As Adam Smith once didn't say, let a thousand flowers bloom.
As you'll remember, I signed off last with the promise that I would tell the long saga of my writing career, such as it is - truly, a cinescopic story. But today I am going to diverge from that fascinating subject and address Andrew Sullivan and the Giant PharmaCos. - which is not a children's story by Roald Dahl, but a little conflict of interest snare Mr. Sullivan has entangled himself in. You can go to Poynter.org - Jim Romenesko's Media News and see the links there, as well as my brilliant little letter.
To see A.S. defending the drug companies, you can go to Slate - dialogues dated 01-04-09.
Now, aside from the conflict of interest question, I've always wanted to have my say about Sullivan's position on this issue, which reflects a contradiction in the conservativism I've seen in many other conservative thinkers. So I'll have it here.
Here's the deal. Conservatives will often say, about something like the price of drugs, that the choice is between the Government and private enterprise. Slicing the discourse up neatly like this, however, isn't quite right. Because at the heart of Sullivan's position is an unanalyzed but powerful dependence on the State by the drug companies. By pretending they are rivals, the issue of monopoly power is masked.
For what is it, essentially, that pharmaceutical giants do? The patent pharmaceuticals. They might develop them, or they might not, but the end process is to patent them. This means that they apply to have monopoly control over a certain product. And their success depends on the state taking up arms for them - by, essentially, allowing them to forbid other companies from manufacturing and selling a particular drug for a particular season.
Adam Smith cast a pretty cold eye on monopolies, even when celebrating free enterprise. Here's a quote from Wealth of Nations:
"A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate. The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got."
The Andrew Sullivans of the world are essentially arguing that there is a flaw in the system of competition. Whereas they believe competition for, say, electricity is a good thing, they are in effect saying that the state should nurse businesses by granting them a preliminary season of non-competitiveness - so they can get a fair return on their investments.
Notice the word "fair" here. If I were to argue, for instance, that companies should be forbidden to fire employees because it is unfair - if I were to argue, in other words, that employees be granted monopolies to their positions - conservatives would buzz like angry hornets. And their argument, after you peel off the rhetoric about freedom, would be that employing people at high rates of pay which aren't determined by competition in the labor market hurts the rest of us by upping prices. Apparently they are willing to concede that hurt in the case of intellectual property, however - perhaps because they have more invested in the concept of intellectual property.
But beyond the motives of unconscious self-interest, there is something else going on here - a sort of automatic servility before power. Although conservatives are quick to pounce on liberals for worshipping the nanny state, the genuflection before big corporations is, of course, of the same family of response: the awe of the clerk before his master.
I should say this, right away: I'm no libertarian. I do, however, have great respect for the empirical and logical arguments for competition, even if I think there are other social factors which lead me to support socializing power, healthcare, etc. I have no respect, however, for the argument of a "fair return." There's no empirical data that links a higher profit, due to monopoly, to more innovation. If there were, in fact, it would knock all the other conservative arguments on the head. When Penicillin was invented - I mean, after Fleming had diddled away his experiments with it, and it was taken up again at Oxford - the scientists who made it DIDN'T PATENT IT. Why? Because at that time, quaintly enough, it was considered unethical. If you read James Le Fanu's wonderfully cranky book, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (and Le Fanu seems to be conservative), the picture of modern medical innovation he draws has nothing to do with BigPharma making tons of profit on drugs they are magically spewing out.
So let me end this spiel on this note: hey, it isn't that we want the State to get into drug dispensing - but to relax its interventions on behalf of big Pharmaceutical companies. Let those generics in there, let BigPharma compete, limit, severely, the term of state-granted monopoly. As Adam Smith once didn't say, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Wednesday, July 11, 2001
New post. Good.
Now the writing deal. I'm thinking a lot about the writing deal.
Two things happened today.
One, I'm writing reviews for this business site. I'm writing reviews of business books. I used to do that for the Kurson's zine, Greenmagazine - and pause for a moment in memory, please. And I am a regular autodidact when it comes to economics. We are the worst kind of cranks, the Henry Georges, the Hobsons - but hell, it isn't like economics is really a science. I could - in fact I will - post away about the ways in which economics is moved by motives that are more Glasperlenspiel than profit and loss, but that is neither here nor there. I was talking about working for this site that shall be nameless, for this editor who shall be nameless. It looked like a great gig - I got a message while I was down in Mexico, this January, that M. was going to be editing this site. It was for some consulting firm or something, and M. wanted to use a review I'd already done for Green, and she wanted me to do reviews for her, and I thought, they are coming to me now.
This is what you want to happen, when you freelance. You want the e-mail or the phonecall that says, hey, we want you to write such and such for us, and damn, you will do it. A study of bloodsplatter for a hockey magazine, get intimate with your margarine, who cares? Just do the piece. However, I must admit I am stuck up. I don't just do content. I don't just get intimate with the margarine. I have my views, and I put them in my work. That is me, that's how I write.
Well, from the beginning I discovered that M. was more theoretically interested in doing these business book reviews than in reality. This didn't surprise me. So she tossed me some topics, but she never sent me any real galleys to review. In order to do this, and make my cool hundred a review, I had to go out and find some books.
I do, I go out and find some books. But nothing seems to happen. A couple of reviews are published, and then I find this book, I do the review, and I get editorial feedback two months ago, and then nothing. Then it is up again, and I think okay, minor changes - no, I'm sent a draft with all these editorial comments that I thought we had already gone over. By this time, of course, the book is fading in my head - how many books have I reviewed, ten? - maybe ten since the first draft of this thing. And remember, this is for one hundred dollars, I'm not working in the New Yorker zone. Okay, lately my motto is, if it pays, do it - just bend over and do it. So I send in another draft. And then, today, what do I get - another editorial revision, these with what I consider to be pretty ignorant comments. Like M. spent three minutes reading this thing. What I'm describing here should be familiar to any freelancer - it is that dreaded thing, the editorial process with no direction. I mean, if M. doesn't like my writing in general, fine - let's just part. But that she expects me to swallow these comments and do something about them - well, I blew my top. Wrote a nasty, farewell e-mail about the whole thing. This pumped me up. I left this morning, did some research, came back around five, and couldn't wait to see if she had replied. She did - she was amazingly polite about the whole thing. Still, this is one of those incidents that remind me why I want to get something, anything, stable.
Ah, I've written that up in one big rush and still haven't even given you, who read me - haven't given you any picture of why I write, or who I am, or where I come from. And that was what I was planning to do. But it will have to be the next post.
Now the writing deal. I'm thinking a lot about the writing deal.
Two things happened today.
One, I'm writing reviews for this business site. I'm writing reviews of business books. I used to do that for the Kurson's zine, Greenmagazine - and pause for a moment in memory, please. And I am a regular autodidact when it comes to economics. We are the worst kind of cranks, the Henry Georges, the Hobsons - but hell, it isn't like economics is really a science. I could - in fact I will - post away about the ways in which economics is moved by motives that are more Glasperlenspiel than profit and loss, but that is neither here nor there. I was talking about working for this site that shall be nameless, for this editor who shall be nameless. It looked like a great gig - I got a message while I was down in Mexico, this January, that M. was going to be editing this site. It was for some consulting firm or something, and M. wanted to use a review I'd already done for Green, and she wanted me to do reviews for her, and I thought, they are coming to me now.
This is what you want to happen, when you freelance. You want the e-mail or the phonecall that says, hey, we want you to write such and such for us, and damn, you will do it. A study of bloodsplatter for a hockey magazine, get intimate with your margarine, who cares? Just do the piece. However, I must admit I am stuck up. I don't just do content. I don't just get intimate with the margarine. I have my views, and I put them in my work. That is me, that's how I write.
Well, from the beginning I discovered that M. was more theoretically interested in doing these business book reviews than in reality. This didn't surprise me. So she tossed me some topics, but she never sent me any real galleys to review. In order to do this, and make my cool hundred a review, I had to go out and find some books.
I do, I go out and find some books. But nothing seems to happen. A couple of reviews are published, and then I find this book, I do the review, and I get editorial feedback two months ago, and then nothing. Then it is up again, and I think okay, minor changes - no, I'm sent a draft with all these editorial comments that I thought we had already gone over. By this time, of course, the book is fading in my head - how many books have I reviewed, ten? - maybe ten since the first draft of this thing. And remember, this is for one hundred dollars, I'm not working in the New Yorker zone. Okay, lately my motto is, if it pays, do it - just bend over and do it. So I send in another draft. And then, today, what do I get - another editorial revision, these with what I consider to be pretty ignorant comments. Like M. spent three minutes reading this thing. What I'm describing here should be familiar to any freelancer - it is that dreaded thing, the editorial process with no direction. I mean, if M. doesn't like my writing in general, fine - let's just part. But that she expects me to swallow these comments and do something about them - well, I blew my top. Wrote a nasty, farewell e-mail about the whole thing. This pumped me up. I left this morning, did some research, came back around five, and couldn't wait to see if she had replied. She did - she was amazingly polite about the whole thing. Still, this is one of those incidents that remind me why I want to get something, anything, stable.
Ah, I've written that up in one big rush and still haven't even given you, who read me - haven't given you any picture of why I write, or who I am, or where I come from. And that was what I was planning to do. But it will have to be the next post.
That was last night's entry. Not exactly portentious - not exactly "stately, plump Buck Mulligan," huh? I'm tempted to change it, but I guess the deal here will be to pour out the spontaneous expression of my heart, and let the devil take the hindmost. Okay, if this is going to work, that is going to have to be a parameter. cool.
When I said I was a writer, I meant that is how I make my living. Mainly, I do book reviews. In the last couple weeks, I have done a piece about the new Robert Mitchum bio, for Kamera, a review coming out in this week's New York Observer, and, let's see, I did this interview of Carol Muske-Dukes recently for Publisher's Weekly.
But I want to delve more deeply into "being a writer." I'm going to do that in my next entry.
When I said I was a writer, I meant that is how I make my living. Mainly, I do book reviews. In the last couple weeks, I have done a piece about the new Robert Mitchum bio, for Kamera, a review coming out in this week's New York Observer, and, let's see, I did this interview of Carol Muske-Dukes recently for Publisher's Weekly.
But I want to delve more deeply into "being a writer." I'm going to do that in my next entry.
Tuesday, July 10, 2001
I've wanted to do this logging bit for a while. And so here I am, doing it - although this is just the inane beginning, so that I can post this and see what it looks like. But here is the deal. I'm a freelance writer - a breed of Yahoo known for spitefulness, poverty, and the fits of self-pity unheard of outside the fat ringed minds of D.C. politicians. And so that is what I intend to display, here. My spots.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
