Bollettino



My favorite murder



Everyone has one. The Black Dahlia. The JFK assassination. Mine is undoubtedly the strange and lonely death of an Italian banker, Roberto Calvi. The man led the Banco Ambrosiano, a bank that was used by the Vatican, and unknown others, to shuffle money around. The bank collapsed in 83, missing 1.3 billion dollars -- a larger sum in 83 than now, but still not chump change.





Calvi was by all accounts a colorless little man. But in Italy in 1983, there were a lot of .... convergences, let us call them. In 1980, the worst act of terrorism in Italian history had occured, with the blowing up of the Bologna train station. That act was masterminded by a man with a long record of rightwing militancy, Stefano delle Chiaie, who was plugged in to the rightwing network that had tentacles worldwide: Franco's Spain, Argentina, and Chili in particular. The same cultural milieu that now circulates around Berlosconi was, in 83, entangled in a Masonic lodge, P-2, and various military organizations. Traversing this subculture was strong links to the Mafia, with its ties to the Christian Democrats in the South.



Calvi's connection to Lucio Gelli, a major figure on the right who was an associate of delle Chiaie, has always been fascinating. Gelli is a sinister figure, implicated in crimes world wide -- weather death squads in Argentina in the 70s, or the attempt to create an 'atmosphere of confusion" in Italy, preliminary to a military coup. How to finance such things? One way is to have a friendly bank or two at hand. This is Nick Tosches' country of secret handshakes writ large (Tosches, by the way, wrote a book about Michele Sindona, a bigger Italian banker/crook than Calvi -- and Calvi's mentor in some respects).



Conspiracy breeds conspiracy theory, which in turn becomes paranoid in the face of the six degrees of separation that supposedly lies between me and thee. But what if the six degrees are motivated? What if it is only one degree? What if money really is an invention of the devil? Calvi's case makes these thoughts hard to dismiss. Even a hardened spy novelist would hesitate to end a character the way Calvi ended -- suspended on a rope under Blackfriar's bridge in London, bricks in his pocket, his briefcase vanished, and a police department (in Thatcher's England) less than eager for scandal, judging the whole thing a suicide. The current spate of stories and indictments in Italy lay the blame for Calvi's death at the feet of the mafia. But in Italian politics -- where crime openly masquerades as state power, vide Berlusconi's recent passage of a blanket amnesty for himself and his cronies -- every accusation must be refracted through the motives of the accusers. In Calvi's case, the strongest motivation is the church's, which has been trying to wash the bloody stain away for twenty years.



Here's a site that delves into the death lovingly, if not too wisely:





"Calvi had been missing from Italy for one week when a mail-room clerk of the Daily Express, walking to his job on Fleet Street, saw a man suspended from a scaffold under the Blackfriars Bridge. He was hanging by the neck, his feet dragging by the flow of the Thames. He had been dead for five or six hours. After the River Police got him down, a detective noted that the dead man's cuffs and pockets were bulging with chunks of bricks and stones. A body search turned up, among other things, the equivalent of $15,000 in cash and a clumsily altered Italian passport in the name of Gian Roberto Calvini, age sixty-two. These and many other details, but particularly the name of the bridge and the bricks and stones, would take on a sinister pall."



Here's Katz's explanation of that pall:



"The circumstances of Calvi's end � notably his suspension beneath the Blackfriars Bridge and the bricks and stones on his body � were being read in Italy as the signature of the P2, of which he was a card-carrying member. The bizarre rituals of the lodge included the wearing of black robes and the use of the word "friar" in addressing of one another. And what are bricks and stones if not the substance of masonry? In initiation ceremonies the new member was sometimes told that betrayal of the P2's secrets would mean death by hanging and the washing of his corpse by the tides. Calvi, under recent questioning by Italian magistrates, had already revealed some of his own P2 activities, and lately he had been threatening to strip the layers further."



Here's the Guardian story:



"But in October 2002, a Mafia supergrass told police that Calvi had been murdered by the mob for stealing funds they had handed to him to launder. The supergrass accused a convicted Mafioso, Pippo Calo, of ordering the hit. The Italian inquiry agreed, announcing in July that it believed Calvi had been killed by mobsters who had made his murder look like a Masonic ritual. The need to punish and permanently silence Calvi, who had knowledge of Mafia money-laundering, was the main motive for the killing, the inquiry said "



The Guardian doesn't mention Calvi's good friend, Bishop Paul Marcinkus, who haled from Cicero, Illinois, and whose involvement with several Vatican financial scandals has been the subject of several books. Cicero, Illinois was, of course, Al Capone's town -- and it has an enduring reputation as a mobbed up place. This French site has the delirious scoop on the Cosa Nostra-Vatican connection -- and extends its accusations up to the present, claiming, on the basis of an Italian prosecutor's compilation of repenti testimony, that the Archbishop of Barcelona, no less ... well, here's the French:

"...on ne s'�tonnera pas du bien fond� des accusations de magistrats de Torre Anunziata (province de Naples) qui, gr�ce � des t�moignages de repentis recoup�s par des indices mat�rielles et des �coutes t�l�phoniques, mettent en cause en 1995 le cardinal Ricardo Maria Carles, archev�que de Barcelone, dans un trafic d'armes, de pierres pr�cieuses et, surtout, de coca�ne qui profiterait � la Mafia italienne. L'int�ress� a �videmment d�menti, ainsi que le ministre de l'int�rieur espagnol et le porte parole de l'Opus De�."



Yes, Calvi's murder is our favorite unsolved crime. Long may it trouble the consciences of the right wing Euro-underworld.

Bollettino



"I distinctly remember an incident at Boston University�one of those you always remember�when the psychology department chair called me into his office one day, closed the door, sat me down, and proceeded to dress me down for doing palm reading, for taking people�s money under false pretenses, that there was nothing to this paranormal stuff, etc. I sat there listening to him and after he calmed down I said, �would you like me to read your palm?� So he stuck his hand out and I did a reading on him. Then I left. Two weeks later he called me back into his office, shut the door, sat me down, stuck his hand out, and said �tell me more�! This really showed me how powerful this stuff can be.



"And in another one of those unforgettable incidents, the late Stanley Jaks convinced me to do a palm reading on someone and tell them the exact opposite of what I would normally say. So I did this. If I thought I saw in this woman�s palm that she had heart trouble at age 5, for example, I said, �well, you have a very strong heart,� that sort of thing. In this particular case, though, it was really spooky, because she just sat there poker faced. Usually I get a lot of feedback from the subject. In fact, I depend on the feedback, and this woman was giving me nothing. It was weird. I thought I bombed. But it turns out the reason she was so quiet was because she was stunned. She told me it was the most impressive reading she had ever had. So I did this with a couple more clients, and I suddenly realized that whatever was going on had nothing to do with what I said but with the presentation itself. This was one of the reasons I went into psychology�I wanted to find out how it was that people, including myself, could be so easily deceived --

Interview with Ray Hyman





One of the great myths in America is that you can't con a con. Of course you can. Usually they come pre-conned, believing at least half of their own lines.Ray Hyman is a psychologist who has done a lot of work on what is known as the "Barnum" or "Forer" effect. Forer was a pychologist who gave a personality test to his students in the forties, and returned an analysis to each student that was copied out of an astrology magazine. He then had the students rate the accuracy of the analysis. It rated accurate to extremely precise with a large majority of the students. (Personally, we think that Forer did not explore one aspect of this: the assymetry between authority figure and student. It has long struck us, from experience with students, even very smart students, that they carry a firm belief in the one to one nature of their relationship with their professor. That this isn't so -- that a professor deals with hundreds of students -- says something profound about the legitimation of authority, we think. But we will close this parenthesis with just this small note).



We liked Hyman's anecdote about reversing his palm readings because, in a large sense, that is precisely the M.O. of the Bush administration. Again, this isn't to say that Bush doesn't believe every word that comes from his mouth -- he does. He is, alas, the most gullible man elected to the presidency since Harding. Maybe more than Harding. But gullibility has an odd relationship to the deceits involved in confidence games. As Hyman says, he became a believer in his own palmistry powers, in spite of his skepticism about religion and irrational belief systems. The experiment of inverting his responses cured him of his palm reading beliefs -- but a similar pattern of using equal and opposite reasoning to legitimate projects, which has been endemic among the Bushies, seems to have had no such therapeutic effect.Take the recent blogger meme that started with a report about John Pilger's tv show on the Iraq war. Pilger, an industrious left leaning British journalist, found two creamy little CNN interviews from the pre 9/11 period. Both Rice and Powell were caught on camera bragging about how the US policy of sanctions and vigilance had denied Saddam H. the capacity to make or deploy weapons of mass destruction. Rice even, commonsensically, pointed to Saddam's inability to retake the Northern section of his own country. This obvious geo-political fact got somehow lost in the shuffle as he became enemy no. 1 last January. The palm reader reverses the reading. Suddenly, Saddam packs an awful punch, threatening to pulverize us in 48 hours -- a story that Tony Blair has gratuituously stuck to. Or take the current status of our occupation. Palm reading one: look at all the good things that are happening in Iraq! Right on time and on target, too. 3,000 projects in Kirkuk alone! Palm reading two, however, is that inexplicably, there's a hold-up on the turning over the power to the natives project. In fact, it will take +87 billion more dollars. Plus extended National Guard deployments. Plus you can't take seriously the proposal by the French that Iraqis should take at least symbolic control of the "Coalition Authority" -- even though that was the original Defense Department plan. And so it goes, from taxes to deficits to the war on terror. Of course, the right wing intelligentsia turns on a dime as this stuff comes down. They have various excuses. The justification for the war didn't depend on anything like a threat, for instance (thus extending the meaning of pre-emptive to a subjective extreme that wholly depends on the whim of the powerful). But Bush does not strike the observer as possessing even this minimal intellectual distance. Rather, this is a man whose gullibility is ironclad. This is a man who believes that fact must correspond to what he desires -- even if his desires get expressed in two equal and opposite claims. Like the victims of the alchemist in Jonson's play of that name, he has the ability to generate excuses for those inconsistencies that press upon him.



Further along in his interview, Hyman confesses that disabusing the victims of various spiritual scams bears a price. He quotes a student who told him that Hyman's course was entirely convincing, and "I hate your guts." It is tricky, negotiating the emotional rage that comes with enlightenment; this is what the Bushies count on. They shouldn't count on it too much, though. After the 87 billion dollar speech, even the most credulous are starting to wonder what happened. And as the odds start kicking in, they are going to be wondering a lot more. We have bet the house on the most unlikely combination of events in Iraq, and in our economy. We are just starting to pay the price for that bit of faith-based fervor.

Bollettino



Without a certain sordidness in his surroundings he was never quite comfortable, never quite himself -- Arthur Symons



My fate



The August Contemporary Review comes loaded with a nice little essay entitled "The vanishing man of letters" by Richard Whittington-Egan.



A name like that seems to go with the topic, doesn't it? The essay is full of little anecdotes about my predecessors in the line of turning a little learning into quick copy -- the milquetoast reviewers, essayists, and tepid novelists that drenched innumerable reviews and weeklies and monthlies with the ink of their deadline enthusiasms; who suffered in bed-sits, endured impossible infatuations, and died drowned, or by their own hands, or rusticated into fabulous antiquity. There's nothing worse than a peculiar kind of disease that strikes the well read -- a certain chronic bookishness. It slowly supplants the very soul, making every word ring with tinny tintinabulations of reference.



My favorite among these awesome mummies is Arthur Symonds. Now, somehow, I thought Symonds was gay. But according to Whittington-Egan, he was straight. Or at least so we can judge his sexuality when he existed on this planet. He traversed other ones during his life:





"Surely the most significant Man of Letters to emerge from the ranks of what is generally regarded as the lesser fin-de-siecle crowd was Arthur Symons (1865-1945), whose pioneering, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) was to prove seminal, introducing French Symbolisme to English literary culture, and, incidentally, introducing also the poetry of Laforgue to T.S. Eliot, which, he was later to confess, 'affected the course of my life'.



The son of a West country Wesleyan Methodist minister, Symons was a precocious youth, self-educated in English and French literature, who, joining the newly-founded Browning Society in 1881, when he was sixteen, came to the attention of the Society's co-founder, Dr. Frederick James Furnivall, who invited him to write Introductions to Venus and Adonis, and other works for the Shakespeare Quartos Facsimiles series, which he was then in process of editing. So impressed was Furnivall that he suggested to Symons that he should write a primer on Browning. An Introduction to the Study of Browning, Symons' first book, was duly published in 1886. Its author was just twenty-one. He was to become the complete Man of Letters--poet, critic of the seven arts, editor, essayist, translator, short story and travel writer, and Herrick of the music-halls. Unlike so many of his contemporaries--Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Hubert Crackanthorpe, Ernest Dowson, and Lionel Johnson--Symons did not die young, but he suffered a life-dimming tragedy--the Man of Letters gone to madness. It came upon him in Italy, in the city of Venice, where, in September 1908, he and his wife, Rhoda, were staying at a Palazzo that gave on to the Grand Canal. For some weeks presignatory intimations of insanity had been whispering in his ear and distorting his conceptions of his visions and envisionings. He heard, too, amplified by his mania, the awful sounds of the lunatics in the asylum on the island of St. Clemente. On September 26th, a Saturday, what he described as 'the thunderbolt from hell' fell on him. Leaving Rhoda behind in Venice, he journeyed alone to Bologna, where he took a room for himself at the Grand Hotel Brun. And there the shrieking wind of madness suddenly rose to smite him with all-piercing force. Staggering through the alien streets, he lost all consciousness of himself in a vortex, a whirling maelstrom, of hideous and terrifying hallucinatory images and imaginings. Rhoda arrived. He raved and raged and cursed, and, refusing to return with her to London, sped off, alone again, to Ferrara. It was in a cafe there that, mistaken by two Bersiglieri for a crazed vagrant, he was carried off to Ferrara's ducal Palazzo Vecchio, thrown into a dungeon cell, where, manacled hand and foot, he was left, with neither food nor drink, in darkness and in terror, to struggle with the grimacing faces of his clamouring hallucinations. Rescued through the good offices of the Italian Ambassador, he was returned safely to England, where he was certified insane, and spent long months in Brooke House, an asylum in Upper Clapton Road. But the gods relented. In April 1910, Symons, more or less restored, and, having been wrongly diagnosed at the National Hospital, Queen Square, rejoined his wife at Island Cottage, their country home at Wittersham, in Kent. One of the last photographs of him shows him in his seventeenth-century timbered cottage, resting on a sofa beside the massive open fire chimney corner. Inevitable book in hand, he somehow seems the template of all Men of Letters rolled into one; a Bookman still obstinately reading on the edge of eternity. He was to live on there for another 36 years, outliving Rhoda by eight years. Like many another Man of Letters, the fret and fume of his days in literary London left far behind him, he spent his last years in the wood-smoke calm of a green corner of the English countryside, and found his final bed in the cool, evening shadow of a quiet country churchyard."



Huh. Symons himself has described the death of a man of letters better than this. If you look around the Net, you can find scattered bits of the man -- the essay by Eliot in Sacred Woods, Symons essay on Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, etc -- but the most heartfelt piece I've found is his essay on Ernest Dowson. Dowson is one of those poets who, as Symons admits, just lacked that last bit of genius, and so is remembered now for being mentioned by better poets and writers -- for being Yeats' friend, and being associated with the Yellow Book. However, what do you expect from fame? The afterlife is as full of dying reputations as Austerlitz was full of wounded soldiers. You are rediscovered by an academic looking for tenure, or you are rediscovered because you liked to fuck men. Or you are not rediscovered at all.



In any case, this is Dowson's death:





Latterly, until the last year of his life, he lived almost entirely in Paris, Brittany, and Normandy. Never robust, and always reckless with himself, his health had been steadily getting worse for some years, and when he came back to London he looked, as indeed he was, a dying man. Morbidly shy, with a sensitive independence which shrank from any sort of obligation, he would not communicate with his relatives, who would gladly have helped him, or with any of the really large number of attached friends whom he had in London; and, as his disease weakened him more and more, he hid himself away in his miserable lodgings, refused to see a doctor, let himself half starve, and was found one day in a Bodega with only a few shillings in his pocket, and so weak as to be hardly able to walk, by a friend, himself in some difficulties, who immediately took him back to the bricklayer's cottage in a muddy outskirt of Catford, where he was himself living, and there generously looked after him for the last six weeks of his life.He did not realise that he was going to die; and was full of projects for the future, when the �600 which was to come to him from the sale of some property should have given him a fresh chance in the world; began to read Dickens, whom he had never read before, with singular zest; and, on the last day of his life, sat up talking eagerly till five in the morning. At the very moment of his death he did not know that he was dying. He tried to cough, could not cough, and the heart quietly stopped."



Somehow, that last sentence reminds me of how Wells described the death of the Invisible Man. It is the Cathedral style of English prose, and I, for one, love it.

Bollettino



Life under W.



A couple of weeks ago, the NYT reported that the nation's criminal CEO's and their multimillion dollar minions were really, really going to be prosecuted soon. Some day. As in, the forces of goodness are closing in.



Well, we knew it was a crock. Most Valuable fraudster Richard Scrushy, late of HealthSouth, was the man named as most likely to face a trial. Since then, though, Scrushy has shown with what contempt he takes the feeble efforts of the underfunded, bad faith Feds. The NYT reports, today, that his attorney told a House Panel to take this subpoena to testify and shove it. Meanwhile...







"Meanwhile in Alabama, where Mr. Scrushy lives and HealthSouth has its headquarters, Mr. Scrushy is maintaining a high profile.



Last month alone, he bought a $3 million yachting marina on the Alabama Gulf Coast; joined with Donald Watkins, one of his lawyers, to buy a Cessna jet; and sponsored a powerboat race in the Gulf, placing second piloting his $450,000 Skater motorboat Monopoly, which is painted like the board game with "Go" across the deck.



Some of Mr. Scrushy's legal foes say that he is being deliberately provocative. He and Mr. Watkins are "thumbing their noses at people pursuing him and his money," said Doug Jones, a former United States attorney in Birmingham who is representing shareholders suing to recover their losses on HealthSouth stock."



In the nineties, there was a lively discussion in centrist circles about "ending equality" -- as Mickey Kaus put it. The Clintons, arch policy wonks, loved the idea that liberalism could be redefined without the ideological baggage of equality. It meant that you could hobnob with the moneyed while training your liberal sensibilities on such things as the symbols of identity politics. Tony Blair is the last survivor, perhaps, of this mindset.



However, in a bust it is much harder to swallow the contradictions of a liberalism of unequal outcomes than it is in a boom. In fact, even hardcore inequalitarians pointed to the lowering of the poverty rate and the narrowing of the income gap (however miniscule) between the working class and the wealthy as a sign that Clinton's economic policies were sound.



There's an interesting discussion, here, of the economic groundwork that preceded the institution of progressive income tax. The idea, according to Martin Daunton, is a gloss on one of Adam Smith's precepts concerning "equality of sacrifice". The question that derives from Smith is how to count units. Is taking 5 dollars from a man earning 5,000 dollars the same as taking 5 dollars from a man earning 500,000? Interestingly, the terms of the debate were changed by the coming of marginal utility theory, which seemed to give a model for conceptualizing linear changes within a system -- or, in other words, giving us a sense of the variables that are subsumed by the thing sacrificed.



"Alfred Marshall's Principles stressed the marginal costs of producing another unit of output, and the marginal satisfaction to be derived from consuming it. In this approach, an additional pound did not produce the same satisfaction for someone in receipt of an income of �1,000 as for someone in receipt of an income of �100. The meaning of equality of sacrifice was more complicated than writers in the past had appreciated. Did equal sacrifice mean each taxpayer should surrender the same proportion of their total utility?



"That is, the aim should not be to take 10 per cent from all income levels (�5 from an income of �500 and �10 from an income of �1,000), but rather to extract the same proportion of happiness or satisfaction, which varied according to income. Or did it mean an equal marginal sacrifice in order to produce minimum disutility? By this definition, the aim was to calculate the additional satisfaction produced by the final increment of income, and to ensure that the rate of taxation on that income imposed the same loss of utility or satisfaction. Thus the final �10 of income for someone earning �500 might produce three times as much satisfaction as the final �10 for someone earning �1,000, so that the tax rate could be three times as high on the larger income with the same marginal disutility."



Ourselves, we find the theology of marginal utility cumbersome and ultimately unsatisfactory, here. But it is important to understand that this was the economics standing in the background during the first wave of progressive tax legislation. And that legislation, in turn, codified the idea that income was a variable that does not effect the social and political position of the income earner. In other words, the only principle that should count in supporting a scale of larger percentages of tax on income as we scale upward is to enforce Smith's equality of sacrifice. From an institutional economics viewpoint, however, this abstraction ignores the embedding effects of wealth -- that is, embedded wealth has a direct effect on the political system that decides questions not only of taxation, but of disbursement. The effects are manifold -- and none moreso than the effect on justice. There is no such thing as a graduated scale of legal services that would allow us to model an equality of sacrifice for legal agents. Those who earn 5,000 dollars simple won't be able to afford the lawyers available to those who earn 500,000 dollars. Since the judiciary is a point of direct contact between citizen and state, this is a much more important point for the state than, say, the same disparity that might be supposed for, say, transportation or clothing or shelter. Granting, for the moment, the liberal assumption that such things are best left to the sphere of the market, you have a special case when the market is determining quality of legal service.



Taunton provides an excellent little resume of how the cause of progressive taxation mirrored a change in economics theory:



"Economic ideas provided a large part of the meanings and vocabulary of political debate, and limited possible alternatives. The point is apparent in 1909, when opponents of Lloyd George's 'people's budget' turned to Alfred Marshall to supply them with intellectual authority - which was not forthcoming. He refused to denounce the budget as socialist, as a device to remove responsibility from individuals and pass it to the state. Instead, Marshall believed that cautious redistribution from poor to rich would be beneficial. 'For poverty crushes character: and though the earning of great wealth generally strengthens character, the spending of it by those who have not earned it, whether men or women, is not nearly an unmixed good.' In 1902 he asked, 'Is the share of the total price of products which goes to manual labour as large as is compatible with a wholesome and "free" state of society? Could we by taking thought get the work of our great captains of industry and financiers done with rather less of their present huge gains?'



One hundred years later, we see the massive effects of the embedding of advantage to the wealthy in a system that is effected to a great degree by the greater inputs of the wealthy. The Kaus's of the world could well counter that we are misconstruing those inputs -- that the system is only manipulable by inputs of cash, and that such cash could result from the aggregation of small sums. That is not completely untrue, but it is true for only a narrow range of government structures. This is something to come back to.

Bollettino



Combinations



So, on the same day that the Administration claimed that Iraq cannot raise and utilize its own army, or elect its own government, or make any decision not subject to the veto of a man who by all accounts lives in a well guarded, English speaking bubble, Mr. Bremer, the Adminstration "haled" the complete overhaul of the Iraqi economy. It is as if an American occupier were to hale some American Council's decision to nationalize all American industries. A bit of a change, eh?



Contradiction has become Bush's daily bread; his substitute for the politics of joy. Now, however, he is starting to choke on it.



The plan, apparently, is to make Iraq into a sort of Cato Institute wet dream. This has, of course, been in the works since before the war. But the question, to LI's mind, is not whether the plan is a good one or a bad one -- we think that it is inevitable that the state dominated economy of Iraq is in line for a hit. Tha't reality. No, the question is one of form. The question is: can Bremer top, for complete stupdity, his edict this spring to dissolve the Iraqi army, right away? That decision added four hundred thousand armed and pissed off men to the mix in the country. The decision yesterda, we think, is Bremer blunder number 2.



How stupid is it? Let us count the ways.



The low intensity warfare being waged by the Iraqi resistance lacks a fundamental reason for being. That is, beside the question of pure power. Insofar as the resistance is manned by Ba'ath diehards, it is self-limiting.



The Cato Institute policy is a gift from heaven to these people. They suddenly have an ideological goal. Blowing up an oil pipeline owned by the Iraqi government is, really, just a way of saying that the sabateurs want to control the Iraqi government. Blowing up an oil pipeline owned by Exxon, however, is a way of sending a much more attractive message: we are fighting for Iraq.



The new rules put a premium on the skills of Iraqi exiles. When foreign companies enter the country and bid on the stuff there, the intermediaries will almost surely be selected from the exile pool, which is better educated, and familiar with the inscrutable customs of foreign companies. Second huge gift to the resistance. The exile leadership in Iraq has faced, from the beginning, the charge that they are pawns of the Americans. This is just the kind of economic policy that will confirm that idea.



And then, of course, there is the overarching question of governance. If the Americans are so concerned that Iraq has a constitution before it has a government -- the ridiculous belief that some constitutional looking piece of paper will defend America's interests when our troops leave is among the more riotous of the neo-con superstitions -- then why are they so suddenly eager to allow a non-constitutional, non-elected government to, essentially, revolutionize the Iraqi economy?



For a preview of coming distractions, check out the LATimes article about the Iraqi response to the Council's NEP:



"BAGHDAD � In the marble-floored corporate offices of Al Hafidh General Trading Co., Waleed and Hani Hafidh vented the rage of many Iraqi businessmen Monday over the country's new wide-open foreign investment policy.



Puffing furiously on imported cigarettes, the brothers asserted that the economic reform package unveiled by Iraq's recently appointed finance minister in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday will destroy the country's small yet burgeoning private sector, create a permanent "world occupation" of its economy and render the Iraqi people "immigrants in their own land." "



As we've emphasized before, prediction is not the mark of good cultural commentary. Rather, what one wants is a clear sense of the combinations that are forming now, and some way of assessing their odds for the future. A week ago, we gave our own list of the five major combinations we see in the Iraq situation, and how we assessed the odds.



Here is a possible scenario that plugs into those combinations. Let's say the odds that the NEP angers Iraqis more than it entices businessmen from outside is really the case in the next couple of months. We would guess that the next Saddam tape (we used to be of the opinion that Saddam was dead -- but we think now, from the accumulation of tapes, that he is probably not) will probably contain some reference to selling out the country. Look for a heavy anti-semitic tone to come into those references too. Because the plan is both impossible to impose and ideologically rigid -- its imposition would certainly cost Iraqis jobs, at a minimum -- it will be both used as a confirmation that the occupation is a thinly disguised colonialism and used as a weapon to challenge the idea that things are going to get better for the average Iraqi. Because the NEP comes from an unelected council, it will be a mark against the council's legitimacy. And because the distrust engendered by the plan will actually give an ideological gloss to the resistance's acts of sabotage, it will heat up Rumsfeld's Spike -- indeed, we can call this the Spike war. This, of course, will lead the Bremer faction to further postpone Iraq's political autonomy. And so on and so forth. The combinations lead to further involvement in the country, rather than less.



This, we think, will be very bad for Bush. That is a good thing, since Bush needs to go. But it will also be very bad for the U.S. and Iraq. That is a very bad, immediate thing. If there were ever a time for an opposition to make a change in a potentially disastrous course, the time is now.



Time to fire the Defense Department crew. Replace them with people who have been, at least once in their lives, to a racetrack.

And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a

certain rich man brought forth plentifully:

And he thought within himself, saying, What shall I do,

because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?

And he said, This will I do: I will pull down my barns,

and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods.

And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid

up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and� be merry.

But God said unto him, Thou� fool, this night thy soul

shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou

hast provided? � Luke





Imagine ten archers, shooting at a target a mile wide and a mile high at a distance of three feet. And imagine them all missing. It would be easy to infer that they were all blind.



That�s the feeling LI sometimes gets with the ten Democratic presidential candidates. Here we have a presidency that has utterly failed. One that has amassed a five hundred billion dollar deficit on� nothing. One that has gotten us enmeshed in one war, in Iraq, that not only has nothing to do with our interests, but is actually harmful to them. Meanwhile, we have incompletely dealt with a group that really has physically attacked us � al Qaeda. By cautiously never pronouncing the name, Osama bin Laden, Bush attempts to exorcize the man. What is the result? In Morocco, Bali, Jakarta and Saudi Arabia the organization, or its allies, have attacked. The pretence that they are crippled makes sense only to people who cannot see what is in front of their nose. Here�s something in front of our noses: the people who hijacked the four planes three years ago did not have chemical weapons. They didn�t have Uzis. They used credit cards, airplane tickets, and hobby shop paraphernalia to wipe out three thousand lives. And so far, nothing that has happened tells us that this can�t happen again. Meanwhile, the Democrats act as if calling the President a �miserable failure� is some kind of logomachical triumph.



Well, it isn�t. The candidates are making promises, blithely, as though there weren�t a five hundred billion dollar deficit. As though the security alerts are all a joke. As though, in other words, we were all still living in 1999, except that we more frequently speak the phrase: �war on terrorism.� Without, of course, meaning it.



So let�s do a little scenario building. Let�s say that the phrase actually makes sense. Let�s say one of those bogus alerts isn�t bogus. Let�s say an attack happens, a mini 9/11.



Now, the last time that happened the market plummeted. It shed what, a trillion dollars worth of value? And while it temporarily regained ground, it drifted down again. To combat the inevitable downturn, the government, in 2002, threw an extra two hundred billion dollars into the system, in addition to the money already budgeted.



So � what is it going to do next time?

The next two hundred billion dollars is going to come out of our flesh. One of the odder spectacles of our time is watching the newspapers deal with the U.S.�s five hundred billion dollar deficit. They deal with it by assuring us that, as a portion of the GDP, this is nothing. Hasn�t Japan run an even bigger deficit? And Germany?



What they don�t say is that those two countries also run a trade surplus. The US hasn�t done that since the seventies. Counting the trade surplus, conservatively, at 350 billion dollars, we are already talking of an outflow of dollars of about 800 billion. If there is an attack, another two hundred billion would make more than a trillion. Now, it is true that the world�s investors are prone to periods of stupor in which they will invest huge sums in obvious death traps. The elevation of various dot coms is proof. But even the most inattentive investor is going to ask, sooner or later, what the US is doing to be floated on a trillion some dollars of debt.



Of course, of course, the account in trade is a little different from the money the US government borrows. There are caveats to adding the two figures together. But overconcentration on the caveats blurs the general picture, which is of a nation crazily careering, in an uncertain time, to the brink of financial disaster. With nobody in D.C. concerned about it; with the ten Dems pretending that they can ignore it and go on their Dem way, getting vaguely New Dealish about health care; and with the incompetent at the head of this enterprise still the odds on favorite in the next election. It makes no sense that the Dems do not make an issue of simple stewardship � of what you pass on to your successor. They should, and fast. The supposed �problem� the Dems have with national security should be flipped around: the problem with national security, right now, is the astonishingly vulnerable position Bush has gotten us into. As with all Bush initiatives, the bet is completely on the most unlikely set of combinations that will produce an optimal outcome. If the US were an investment fund in 1999, it would be as if we�d invested everything in the telecommunications industry. Not, retrospectively, the wisest of choices.

Bollettino



When is a genocide not a genocide? When it doesn't fit in with anti-communist history, that 's when. In the Wash Post there is a jokey little article about the continuing presence of Lenin -- Lenin the evil -- in the former Soviet Union. The focus is on the controversy over taking Lenin's statue down in Kyrgyzstan. The article ends with this carefree paragraph:



"Ibraimov said he always intended to put the statue back up elsewhere in deference to Lenin's role in freeing Kyrgyzstan from the last Russian czar, who oversaw a 1916 crackdown here that killed 120,000 Kyrgyz, roughly one-sixth of the population. "He saved us from dying off," Ibraimov said. "Our attitude toward Lenin is unique."



Quite a crackdown there, for a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church. Frankly, we'd never hear of Czar Nicholas doing this. But surely, with all the concentration on Lenin's complicity in the construction of the Gulag -- a complicity that is almost always retrospective, since the crime isn't so much in what happened under Lenin as what happened after Lenin that we can see would have happened under Lenin if he'd lived -- surely some footnote should include these 120,000. A splash, a drop in the bucket, of course, nothing to worry about. Still, where did this number come from?



We looked around the Internet, and found an account, wierdly enough, at a tourist agency site. Here are some of the salient grafs.



"In the summer of 1916, the Russian Empire ordered a call up of non-Russians in the colonies that comprised the Russian empire to help feed it's desperate war effort in Europe. The Imperial Decree of 26th June 1916 was transmitted to Pishpek via Tashkent. It was quite specific, the locals were not to be drafted as combatants, but for support actities such as food production and road building � thus freeing the soldiers on these duties for combat. The wording of the decree was unfortunate in that it apparently referred to �requisition� rather than �conscription� � implying that the dractees were considered as �objects� rather than as people."



...



"There were attempts by the local Khans to prevent or delay the implementation of the decree. Accoding to some sources, the first uprising was in Khojent on July 4th 1916 and the movement spread to other parts of Turkestan. On July 11th a mass protest took place in Tashken and the police fired shots into the crowd. The Russians arrested an additional group and summarily executing thirty-five people. The Russian settlers, who had been brought into Tashkent some thirty to forty years earlier, began looting, apparently at the instigation of the Russian police."



...



"A Cossack army led by General Aninekov was sent from Vernoe (Almaty), and others from Ferghana and Tashkent and other regions of the far flung empire, to crush the rebellion. Even prisoners of war, who were being held in Russian POW camps in Central Asia, were recruited by the Russian generals as mercenaries with regular pay. The vigilantes and the army were given free reign and a the result was a serious of massive reprisals � slaughtering flocks, burning down Kyrgyz villages, killing men women and children, (and according to eyewitnesses, massacred even babies in the cradle) and hundreds of people were arrested. It is said that the trials in Pishpek were so disorganized that the authorities lost track of the people that had been executed..More Russian settlers were brought in to occupy confiscated Central Asian land and homes. Contemporary reports estimated that between 25 June 1916 and October of 1917, some one and one half million Central Asians were killed by the Russian forces and settlers, with the Russian casualties numbering around three thousand. Out of an estimated total population of 768,000 Kyrgyz, some 120,000 were killed in the fighting and the aftermath � according to one source, over 41% of the Kyrgyz population from the North of the country were killed. � and another 120,000 fled across the border to China, (referred to as �The Great Escape�) many dying en route in the snows, of hunger, or as the victims of bandits. There is a mountain pass called Ashu Surk � �the Pass of Bones� � which got it�s name from the number that died here in their attempted flight. The Aaly Tokombaev Museum in Bishkek has an exhibition dedicated to the exodus of many Kyrgyz to China in 1916 following the uprising. At least half of the Central Asian livestock was destroyed."



This is the lost liberal Russia lamented by Nabokov. This is the state of play ante Lenin. Hmm. Wonder if Annie Applebaum's recent history of the Gulag even mentions this, uh, regretable attempt on the part of a revanchiste backwards people to hinder the wonders of Western Civilization.

Bollettino



When Chalabi and Chirac are singing the same song, you know something has gone seriously haywire.



This administration, packed with Straussians who are so proud of their lack of a sense of irony -- that horrid thing, irony, which many a conservative commentator in the post-9/11 dysphoria proclaimed to be DOA -- has now produced a situation that generates a world historical irony every newscycle. That Chirac has reverted to the timetable that Donald Rumsfeld was using back in May -- back in the cheery days when the plan was that the US footprint would dwindle to 30,000 in Iraq by September, with the rest, one supposes, liberating Damascus or Teheran - does not seem to be admired as much as it should be.



In a more just world, Chirac would be languishing in prison, convicted on various corruption charges. We don't live in a more just world, which is of course why we have irony in the first place. In the Spring, when France was opposing Bush's war, the internationale of anti-war forces overlooked Chirac's history and embraced him. It was an odd moment, paralleled by the oddity of the pro-war forces embracing Chalabi, who also, in a more just world, would be languishing in a cell next to various Enron execs. Perhaps even then it was inevitable that the two old crooks would converge. This NYT op-ed about the Chalabi delusion that suffused the Pentagon doesn't tell us anything we don't already know -- and is, besides, another round in the endless war between State and Defense -- but it does give us the backstory on Bremer's most outrageous mistake, the dissolution of the Iraqi army. At the time, LI pointed out that this was a nearly insane move. Now we know that it was a homage to Chalabi.





It's obvious, in broad terms, that the French are right. The idea that Iraq is going to be the stage for the simulacra of the American Revolution makes a weird kind of aesthetic sense for an administration that contains the likes of Ashcroft -- the kind of guy whose spiritual consanguinity with those Confederate re-enactors who spend quality time stressing their butternut uniforms in front of the mirror in the garage has been well documented. However, it makes no kind of sense otherwise. It is a measure of the rootlessness of American conservativism, at this time, that Bremer's constitution-ophilia is being allowed to pass without comment -- surely it is a just target for the loftiest kind of Burkean scorn. As the Council said this week, only Iraqis can secure Iraq -- similarly, only Iraqis can govern Iraq. Constitutions are for the burning. If Bremer really believes that a constitution is going to be a bulwark of American interest when Americans leave Iraq, he surely needs to de-tox.



That said, the tactic of obstructing the U.S. at the U.N. is not going to lead to Iraqis governing Iraq. It is often said, with militant indignation by rightwingers, that Chirac doesn't care about Iraq (and then it is said that the left doesn't care about Iraq). This is true. Although the professional vice of the French, the vice of their Frenchness, is to think of themselves as bringing enlightenment to the world, the French foreign office disregards morality in favor of short term self interest almost every time. It is the Normalian reflex. These people were literally swaddled in the collected papers of Raymond Aron. That is what they are about. The whole culture of diplomacy in France is about realism. Unfortunately, the Chiracian approach isn't realism -- it is nihilism.



However, it should be said that there is a counter-truth: Bush and the nationalist constituency he has assiduously nurtured could also care less about Iraq. Or, rather, their concern is evangelical. They care only about an Iraq that is reborn, in the Christian sense. Renouncing its past -- its sinful Iraqness -- and being baptized in the holy water of free enterprise, democracy (the election of an American friendly government), and oil flow. This care is worse than non-care, since dunking a whole (Moslem) country into the fount and baptising it in the name of Jesus Christ is, well, not a good idea. For one thing, the country will kick and scream. For another thing, there's something unctuous and creepy about this care -- something that smells like a cult. Or like that Mormon project of baptizing dead Jews through some spooky ritual, thus reclaiming Israel. It is very much the same mentality. Only by renouncing family and friends can Iraq truly enjoy our care. And in the cheerful way of evangelicals, once the rituals are out of the way, the question is: what's to eat? Or, in the case of Iraq: how can we make as much money as possible out of this sucker?



That is not going to work. That is not working. That will not work.



What Chirac could do that would be helpful (although not decisive -- the UN really is secondary in re Iraq) is to press for a speeded up schedule that isn't wholly indigestible to the Americans. One that would simply bypass the absurd constitution now, and if you are very good, aftewards we'll play "election"-- which is the mentality of the Bremer Palace. This is just the kind of thing the Iraqi Mussolini, Chalabi, would go for too. At the moment, his greed is a factor for good. That moment will pass. But it should be recognized, right now, for what it is, right now.



Not that LI thinks that any of this is going to happen; that any misplay is not going to be fumbled through, and exaggerated, by the krewe of clowns that run this country, and reported on seriously by the embedded krewe of clowns that bring us the news.

Bollettino



For reasons I've noted before (abject poverty and systematic non-payment of Roger), I am about to lose my AOL account. My new mailing address is: rogerwgathman@yahoo.com. I think I've caught everybody who needs to know this, but if I haven't -- well, if you send me an email and it bounces back, this is the reason why.



Similarly, I'll be losing my phone service some time next week. Anybody who wants or needs to call me should be advised to do it before then.



In the words of Lou Lou Lou Reed -- "I'm going out/on the dirty avenue."

Bollettino



Car ce sont les conqu�tes qu'on est menac� de subir qui font

horreur ; celles qu'on accomplit sont toujours bonnes et belles. -- Simone Weil



Fishing the internet is one of the addicting sports. For those of you up to the French, I'd strongly recommend the Jean Marie Trembley's fantastic collection at the Universite of Quebec, Les Classiques des sciences sociales. They've just added Weil's Ecrits on history and politics, which includes the famous -- or to some people, infamous -- essay on Hitlerism and Rome. I've been reading it. Simone Weil used to mean a lot to me -- but I gradually turned against her. In fact, I view her with a bit of dread.



She was a woman whose response to oppression was practically somatic. She had a strong case of Christ envy, which, I imagine, ever her death by starvation did nothing to assuage. It isn't often noted that Weil fascinated Georges Bataille, whose readers come from a very different pool than the pious, Maritain like Catholics who took over Weil in the 50s. Bataille wrote about her, in that scabrous Bataille way, in one of his novels, le bleu de ciel -- she was the model for Lazare. Suleiman, in an essay on Bataille's 1930s writings that appeared in Critical Inquiry, mentions that Bataille was fascinated with Weil's filthiness. In the thirties, Weil was filled with the messianic mission of the proletariat, so she planned out the stages of her crucifixion, first as a factory worker, then as a volunteer in Spain on the Loyalist side -- not as a fighter, but as a health worker. Weil did share the most important thing with Jesus -- a complete lack of humor. The lack of a sense of humor is a pretty rare thing, actually. And it is an active thing -- it burns a hole in the self, and it continues that dark work until the self becomes a hole. Bataille, of all people, knew this -- and it is hard to believe that he didn't envy Weil this gift. Suleiman's retelling of this section of Bleu de ciel is nicely done:



"Lazare, yet another French Marxist invellectual in Barcelona, is a young woman who simultaneously fascinates and repels Troppman [the protagonist] because of her political passion and authority -- and also becuse he finds her sexually unattractive, an ugly "dirty" virgin in contrast to the beautiful, exciting Dirty...



Troppmann's association of the workers with Lazare evokes a crucial earlier scene that occurred while he was still in Paris. Just before falling ill but already in a feverish state, Troppmann visits Lazare in her apartment, which she shares with her stepfather, a professor of philosophy. THe discussion centers on what Melou, the stepfatehr, calls the :"anguishing dilemma" confronting intellectuals once they have admitted :the collapse of socialist hopes": "Should we isolate ourselves in silence? Or should we, on the contrary, join the workers in their last acts of resistance, tuhus accepting an implacable and fruitless death?" Troppmann, in a state of shock, feels unable to respond. Finally, he asks Lazare to show him the toilet, where he proceeds to "piss for a long time" and tries to vomit by shoving two fingers down his throat."



Bataille's genius consisted in knowing the conceptual value of a good piss -- its argumentative weight. He joins a select group in knowing this -- Johnson kicking a stone in refutation of Berkeley, and a few Daoists. The idea that the carrier of every concept must be in language -- a formal system -- is the presupposition of every philosophy, and (at least this is Bataille's interpretation of Nietzsche) at the base of every form of nihilism -- the last, devastating stroke that divides the human from the animal.



Which is why Weil is so important, read as a sort of dialogue partner of Bataille. Because Weil definitely wanted to produce that last, devastating stroke. There is no logical one direction of nihilism -- it penetrates like a stain in all directions. Weil, however, saw the continuity of one of those directions: the uprooting of a whole people. Her writing about hitlerism, especially when France was occupied and Weil herself, by Hitlerian definition a Jew, was threatened with imminent death, is luminous with her complete hatred of power. It is only by maintaining herself at that level, in that position, that Weil could see, clearly, how much the pattern of Western culture was mirrored in the Hitlerian project. Far from being barbaric, Hitler was -- Weil thought -- a pure product of civilization, civilization reduced to its essential process: the destruction of the other, to be followed by the destruction of the self. Since the second stage of the program paralleled Weil's own desire -- since she could see, that is, how she could become a Nazi -- she could also diagnose it. Sentiment, for the philosopher, has a diagnostic value that can be replaced by nothing else.



Well... we could go on with this. How did we get here? Oh yes, recommending the social science site. Go to it, gentle reader.

Bollettino



Ledger of a writer.



What a fabulous month. At the beginning of the month, I was informed by two New York papers for whom I had written reviews that appeared in the first week of August, who had me write them to deadlines by mid July, that they wouldn't be paying me until the last week of September. Now a friend, who offered me money to do some research for her, has pretty much told me that she is sending me a check -- through the post office of the country that she lives in -- that will reach me by the end of October, or November, or December. I made a grandiose gesture, and told her to forget it. But it really isn't that grandiose: who knows what address I will have when the wayward check hits my box? The torment of waiting for it overshadows the amount itself. I have offered to pay (with an I.O.U.) for her not to send the check.



So: zero dollars has landed in my account, and I made zero in August. I am facing a bills of about 550 dollars. Oh, and that money they take at the store when you try to buy bread. And the month is half over. This is only the icing on this comedy. There is also the pathetic twenty to thirty jobs I have applied for, with a cover letter that has increased in specificity of what I'd do even as I know that all of that servility is being wasted on the indifference of a waste basket. No: I did get the stray post card, one from the Bar Association of Austin, the other from some legal firm, both informing me that my application was under consideration. Well, of course the only consideration it was really getting was by the guy at the dump, directing the garbage truck it was in to this or that site. If Walt Whitman embodied America, LI is embodying the cursed part of Bush's America, the non-dividended, the luckless, the unskilled and the doomed. We have contemplated, with teeth grinding envy, those who are wheeled about in wheel chairs; those who enter or exit prison; those from broken families -- in fact all who call down upon them, for one reason or another, the intervention of one of the thousand points of light. But the truth is, LI doesn't even know how to steal. That just isn't going to happen. So we went to the grocery store and used the credit portion of the debit card, knowing that there was no money there. Why should there be? But we don't intend to starve to death quite yet.



It's good to record this, in spite of my friend D.'s protests whenever I write one of my lamentations. There is a value to waving your fist in the face of an absent deity -- or the all too present spirits that haunt this economy. I wander through this landscape with all the contemporary marks of Cain -- the inability not to appear sweaty (the mark of the pedestrian); in the clothes I have worn out from five to ten years of use, and can't afford to replace (the mark of the ragpicker); with my decaying teeth (the mark of the Lombrosian idiot); and of course the pathetic inability to disguise my age -- 46 -- and my evident criminal record -- I have been a freelance writer, for God's sakes (the mark of the turd).



Solomon, in Proverbs, claims the dog returns to his vomit -- which, if true, indicates that I do not bear, at least, the mark of the dog. If, oh glorious if, I can snag a counter postion, a sales position (outside), a research position (do you have allergies? are you alcoholic? are you a diabetic man between the ages of 25 -39?), a general labor position (no drunks need apply), I will not return, I will never return, to the torments of being a "freelancer" -- and if you see my byline in, say, the San Francisco Chronicle again, may my tongue be torn out! and all that jazz. Seriously, I think I have really witnessed the end of a certain cultural pattern in America. Ginsberg thought he had seen the best minds in his generation go mad. LI doesn't have a generation. If I had one, I would piss on it with all my might.



I was going to write -- call me Ishmael. As if I, too, had witnessed a great wreck. But this is a small and private wreck. My life keeps reminding me of Titular Counselor Marmelodov's, in Crime and Punishment. Here is how my precursor introduced himself to Raskolnikov:



"Honoured sir," he began almost with solemnity, "poverty is not a vice, that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself. Hence the pot-house! Honoured sir, a month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a beating, and my wife is a very different matter from me!



Do you understand? Allow me to ask you another question out of simple curiosity: have you ever spent a night on a hay barge, on the Neva?"



A question which, lately, I have to physically hold myself back from asking random strangers.



Addendum: I have idly been figuring out the economic consequences of my disastrous decision, in 1999, to become a full time writer. Using as a base my last full time job, I'd estimate I've lost about 30, 000 dollars over the last four years. But the dollar loss is just the tip of the iceberg. From 98 to about the middle of 2000, I wrote for about ten publications. On average, the job would schedule like this: a deadline for the piece would be set, I'd meet it, it would be published one or two weeks afterwards, and three weeks later I would be paid. Maybe 25 percent of the time, I'd be paid late. A small, lefty magazine like In These Times, for instance, would try to stretch a payment out for four months. A newspaper like the Wall Street Journal would usually stretch the deadline to publication date, but would otherwise be timely.



After mid 2000, I wrote for maybe 10 other publications. Many of the publications in the 99-2000 period went under. After 9/11, a clear pattern emerged. Deadlines would spread apart from publication dates by almost a week more than the previous average. And even generous payers -- National Post -- would 'accidentally" lose my invoice about 40 percent of the time. Meanwhile, the float -- the three weeks after publication date before I would be paid -- turned into a five week float.



So, here's the picture. Just to stay current with what he made in 2000, a freelancer would have to have almost twice the client base. And even then, given the raised percentage of 'lost" invoices, and the extra week added to the payment schedule, it is unclear that he would be able to forecast his income for a month. That is, although bill schedules remained steady -- rent, phone, electricity, etc. -- payment varied so widely that there was no guarantee, at any time during the last two years, that those payments could be met.



I imagine the same thing happened to blacksmiths and saddlemakers when the horse was replaced by the car. The written culture exploded during the Internet bubble -- writers were all over the place, with more outlets than ever -- but it was the fever before the death. To be an indenpendent writer now, you must have at least $50,000 you can fall back on. You must be able to fall back on it for at least five years. And at the end of that time, if you have not placed in some major market -- say, the NYT - you should definitely pack it in. Even if you have, you will be poorer than anybody you know with your level of education. But if you haven't, you will be radically poor -- third world poor. I myself can't, at the present time, respond to certain want ads in the paper. Why? Because to pay the two dollars in bus fare is beyond me. This might be a temporary condition -- who knows, tomorrow a place that has owed me money for three months, really, might actually pay me -- but it is a chronic condition.



I smile, nowadays, when I see those popular directories, Writers Publishing Guide 2003 or whatever. They list magazines and newspapers with little dollar signs next to them to signify that they pay. But one question they never ask is: when do they pay? It doesn't really matter anymore if it is Dow Jones or Times Mirror -- they will probably pay late at least forty percent of the time. One time in three they will pay radically late -- like months late.

The upshot is: writing has become like polo. It is a sport for the idle rich.



Writer beware!

Letter



My friend T. has responded to my posts about reviewing.

Here are some of the juicy bits.



"I wasn�t going to do this. I had a plan. I left work and was going to get home a hellofalot earlier than my usual; I was not going to log on, jack in, read or research or write�no, I was going to drink beer and watch the Giants-Cowboys game, or a Steve McQueen movie and drift off to sleep earlier than is my usual�.but, no, not to be�I�d rather respond to your post regarding the book review.







I will not disturb your account of the track of the book review unto nullity implicated in the fate of magazines and newspapers; I will accept it wholly as a report from a front that I have no interest in visiting. As for your account of the experience of finding books becoming a nullity in its absorption by academia, I will confirm that report as a fellow traveler. The quotes from Copperfield, MB and Middlemarch brought me great pause and teary eyes; thank you.







From your post, I thought a bit about my encounters with books as a reader, as a finder of books, as a dilettante and contrarian, as one with no obligations but my pleasure of texts. Nevertheless, I read book reviews and mostly think them shit; think of most reviewers as morons who either never exactly know what they want to be, or, alternatively, morons who are in fact quite what they thought themselves to be, but they are not readers of books. Here�s the issue: for fiction, there is a nexus of the book reviewed, the reviewer�s take on it and other similar books; comparison and superlative made necessary; there are in such reviews the author�s previous books or earlier book, or books of a certain similar style, manner or genre, and then there is this one, the one reviewed and whether and how it is as good or not as good. Then there is non-fiction: there is the book reviewed, the reviewer�s take on it, and the subject matter of the book reviewed; comparison and superlative are as necessary to this manner of review: how and why the methodology or source or credentials of the reviewed author are either acceptable or no. In each case, the reader of the review has no place whatsoever except as a potential consumer of the book reviewed; that this reader is given an endorsement or not; that a cookbook might as easily be reviewed as a novel, that a collection of letters might be as easily and as similarly be reviewed as a self-help book; that a book of philosophy might be as easily reviewed as a biography of a philosopher.







The reviewer, it seems to me, if he aspire to art (which he never will or cannot, which you cover in your post), must invoke Tolstoy: the commonality and sharing of emotion; he must invoke Deleuze (and therefore Clem Greenberg): that art medium joined to feeling.



So I though a bit about book reviewing, the (lost art of) finding books, and libraries and ideal readers (not the technical sense, here), and then, inevitably and naturally enough for me to Borges and Barthes and Derrida and Eco; thoughts of their libraries, to their �reviews� (Derrida as a reviewer of Plato and Austin; what about Leibniz�s �review� of the I Ching; aw hell, I can�t afford these indulgences!); and thoughts that our dear Nietzsche probably had as scant a library as any.





Have you ever read any of Borges� book reviews? I went and found and reread them in the Viking edition of his selected non-fictions (selected from his writings in El Hogar Magazine (1936-1939)). Much formulae (references of the number of pages of a book, grand introductionary sentences regarding books and writers, each writ large, to Chesterton, etc and usw), and much �Borges�, but there is evidence of that extraordinary capacity to consider the general, the specific and one�s problematic place in such considerations; some are damned lovely; here are three, in their entirety:



William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!

I know of two kinds of writers [as an abrupt aside: someone sent me a quote from Woody Allen this morning: there are two kinds of people: the ones who say there are two kinds of people, and the ones who don�t]: those whose central preoccupation is verbal technique, and those for whom it is human acts and passions. The former tend to be dismissed and �Byzantine� or praised as �pure artists.� The later, more fortunately, receive the laudatory epithets �profound,� �human,� or �profoundly human,� and the flattering vituperation �savage.� The former is Swindburne or Mallarm�; the late, C�line or Theodore Dreiser. Certain exceptional cases display the virtues and joys of both categories. Victor Hugo remarked that Shakespeare contained G?ngora; we might also observe that he contained Dostoyevsky� Among the great novelists, Joseph Conrad was perhaps the last who was interested both in the techniques of the novel and in the fates and personalities of his characters. The last, that is, until the tremendous impact of Faulkner.



Faulkner likes to expound the novel through his characters. This method is not entirely original � Robert Browning�s The Ring and the Book (1868) details the same crime ten times, through ten voices and ten souls � but Faulkner infuses if with an intensity that is almost intolerable. There is an infinite decomposition, an infinite and black carnality, in this book. The theatre is the state of Mississippi: the heroes, men disintegrating from envy, alcohol, loneliness, and the erosions of hate.



Absalom! Absalom! is comparable to The Sound and the Fury. I know no higher praise.







The Literary Life: Oliver Gogarty

Toward the end of the civil war in Ireland, the poet Oliver Gogarty was imprisoned by some Ulster men in a huge house on the banks of the Barrow, in County Kildare. He knows that at dawn he would be shot. Under some pretext, he went into the garden and threw himself into the glacial waters. The night grew large with gunshots. Swimming under the black water exploding with bullets, he promised the river that he would give it two swans if it allowed him to reach the other bank. The god of the river heard him and saved him, and the poet later fulfilled his pledge.







An English Version of the Oldest Song in the World

Around 1916, I decided to devote myself to the study of Oriental literatures. Working with enthusiasm and credulity through the English version of certain Chinese philosopher, I came across this memorable passage: � A man condemned to death doesn�t care that he is standing at the edge of a precipice, for he has already renounced life.� Here the translator attached an asterisk, and his note informed me that this interpretation was preferable to that of a rival Sinologist, who had translated the passage thus: �The servants destroy the works of art, so that they will not have to judge their beauties and defects.� Then, like Paolo and Francesca, I read no more. A mysterious skepticism had slipped into my soul.



Each time fate brings me before a �literal version� of some masterpiece of Chinese or Arabian literature, I remember that sorry incident. Now I recall it again, reading the translations that Arthur Waley has just published of the Shih Ching, or The Book of Songs. These songs are of a popular nature, and it is believed they were composed by Chinese soldiers or peasants in the seventh or eighth century B.C. Here are some of the translations of a few of them [�]

Bollettino



"Ala and his friends - in the local patois - are 'capsilun': the capsule people, part of a drug culture that, in Iraq, has its very roots in violent criminality. Their drugs of choice - Artane, valium and other hypnotics, and powerful anti-epileptics like clonazepam - were the drugs of choice in Abu Ghraib prison, smuggled in by families or sold to inmates by corrupt doctors". -- The Guardian

And thus runs a story in the Guardian about hopped up Baghdadi bandits. Capsilun is too good a term to reserve for those who rely on an all too physical pharamacopeia to get them through the night -- how about those, in D.C., who are drugged on power, arrogance and ignorance? Much worse drugs, all the way around. The Washington Post this Sunday is full of their bellowing.



Not that the Post is against their bellowing. One must always remember that Iraq was D.C.'s war, and D.C. is a Republican establishment town. The Washington Post was in the forefront of the half brightest and second best that afflicted the country with this war; it was the WP that gave its seal of approval to the Jessica Lynch myth, and to the various ridiculous versions of the weapons of mass destruction (I think that it is still not clear, to the great mass of Americans, that on the day we attacked Saddam, almost a quarter of his country was not only free of his influence, but had been for almost ten years. How is that for an imminent threat? A country that dare not even attack its seceding upper half); the WP has a bloodthirsty editorial page that has calmed down, somewhat, since the summer's debacle in Iraq. The big shift, however, has been with the dwindling liberal contingent on the paper, who can be relied on to talk about how we have to now take up the fight. The new liberal meme is to proclaim both America's moral responsibilitiy to Iraq and to dismiss the idea that Iraq could, at present, raise its own army or security -- of course, these would be riddled with minions of evil. Far better for those essential functions to fall on the minions of good, ie the US forces. Until, in the year 2020, the only people signing up to join Iraq's armed forces are thoughtful readers of John Rawls and Hilary Clinton.



The head Defense Department capsilun is Donald Rumsfeld, who has still not been questioned about how much of the 87 billion dollars we are potentially committing to Iraq is earmarked to restore the structures that were looted in the first, heady days of the liberation, while the Americans benignly looked on. The WP has noticed that some people are after Rumsfeld's scalp. It goes through the Rolodex, stopping heavily at former Army secretary White -- I mean, aren't all issues in America about the far right versus the less far right? But we really loved the end of the article, which was a big kiss for D.C. thinking:



"The view among many in the administration, Congress and military interviewed for this article was that Iraq likely would simmer down in the coming months and that security conditions would improve, in part, they said, because of the extraordinary efforts by the 122,000 troops deployed there. "





Simmering down, eh? Like a classroom of unruly kids. Or a big silly stew. This is the kind of non-thinking that the D.C. Bush crowd does so well -- it poses the question, are you for the 122,000 hard working troops in Iraq, or aren't you? Instead of the question, what the hell is "simmer down" supposed to mean? The extraordinary efforts of the troops -- who are being put out on an extraordinary limb by the extraordinary mindset of the Defense Department -- have little, really, to do with whether Iraq simmers down. On the weekend after the Fallujah massacre, one would expect a little more ... perspecuity from the makers and promoters of this unnecessary war. Apparently, the mental sloth of the supply-sider has spread from Bush's economic advisors to the military advisors. Just as tax cuts bring about unexplained and magical rises in tax revenues, so does straining the ability of an undermanned force in pursuit of an ignorant policy that expresses no intelligible goal bring about a general simmering down of the great Iraqi soup.



At LI, we think that soup, unsimmered, is going to spill all over our laps. That is, if we have the current crew of incompetents around mismanaging things for the next six months. But if we do, no doubt the WP will still be firing off just such probing articles.

Bollettino



Readers should go to Business Week for several articles that gingerly sift through the budget debacle. Trying to be fair to the White House, the writers put in some mush mouth disclaimers about how the US could "carry" a deficit equivalent to 5% of the GDP indefinitely. Yes, we could, but if the experience of the 90s showed us anything, it is that we are better off not. It is true that a smoker can still do two packs even after they yank out one of his lungs, but it isn't, I hear, recommended. Of course, these kinds of things are always wrapped around comparisons with long term corporate debts. The argument -- the sound argument -- is that any large organization needs to borrow to maintain and expand its infrastructure. That seems right to me. But there really is no corporate parallel that fits what Bush has done. The production of this debt load is not derived from any sane project -- it is actually coming on top of the refusal to finance forseeable future liabilities. When a corporation borrows heavily to give its top managers raises, and tries to disguise the loans on top of it, what do you have? Even Tyco avoided peculation on that scale.



My favorite of the BW articles this week is the one that describes the magic trick/pick pocketing act that is being performed before our very eyes with Bush's famous 87 billion -- and by the way, don't you love that 7? Not 8, and not 6. Of course, we know that it will really be closer to 100 -- a round number -- billion, if that.



Howard Gleckman points out that the 87 bil isn't going to be inked into the Fed budget:



"Said the Office of Management & Budget on Sept. 4: "Only within such a fiscal environment can we encourage increased economic growth and a return to a balanced budget." Expect veto threats and perhaps even veiled warnings of a government shutdown if that $784.7 billion spending cap isn't met.



There's just one problem. While Bush and Congress are fighting over every dollar, they're going to pretend the $87 billion in Iraq money doesn't count as part of the discretionary budget ceiling, even though every thing else the Pentagon does is included.



This is an accounting gimmick that would shame even Enron. "We will hold down spending," Bush and GOP leaders on Capitol Hill will say. But next to that boast will be a little imaginary asterisk that says, "For everything, that is, but Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a fistful of trust funds, and the war in Iraq." In truth, the government will spend more than $1.3 trillion next year -- close to twice the discretionay-spending target -- on stuff that doesn't count in Washington's debates over fiscal responsibility."



Now, you ask, how can they do that? The simple answer is: raw abuse of power.



"Watch for Bush to claim by the end the year that he held discretionary outlays to a 4% hike, even though spending will go up by close to 15%. The White House and Congress will just pretend it didn't happen.



And how will Uncle Sam pay for all these extra burdens? With real money that Treasury will have to borrow, creating real debt that your kids will be paying off for the rest of their lives."



Rumsfeld compares the war to the occupation of post-war Germany. The left compares Bush to Hitler or Mussolini. LI wants to introduce a different parallel (watch this meme sink, kiddies): this is Bush's equivalent of Versailles. Instead of a complex of palaces, our bewildered POTUS is setting up a 'theater of terrorism." Louis XIV never thought of that one -- he did pay for theatrical entertainments, but he was not a big thinker: he merely hired Racine and Moliere and the like. Kafka had a clearer instinct for the kind of big project Bush is pushing. Hence the Oklahoma Nature theater that comes at the end of Amerika. But even Kafka never imagined one country using a whole other country to set up a theater of terrorism. Is that a grand gesture or what? It's not hard to figure out why the natives don't like it -- they aren't civilized like we are. Otherwise, they'd be appreciative of our administration's artistic sensibilities. What an idea, after all: using their real flesh and blood for our adventure movie. Yee-haw!

Bollettino



This week the arts and letters website has been highlighting articles about the extinct art of book reviewing. This Poets and Writers article treads the same ground Clive James covered in the Sunday NYT. Same references - the Believer, Heidi J., Dale Peck - and the same dull stirring about the non-question: should reviewers diss the books they don't like?



Books, here, means solely fiction.



Myself, I have been a valiant reviewer of fiction for five years now. I am trying to end my association with that game - I haven't reviewed more than three books in the past two months. I am willing to do almost anything other than continue working as a freelance reviewer. Yesterday, in fact, yours truly went to Pacesetters, an employment agency that is geared towards the mentally disturbed and the perpetual on the move. It consists of a cavernous building located next to the downtown police station, and the joint is peppered with helpful signs advising that drug takers will be arrested, that backpack carriers won't be allowed to carry backpacks to job sites, and that there were police on duty on the premises. A hopeful kind of place.



It struck me as a distinct social and economic advance from freelancing.



But to get to the point. Book reviews used to be read. Macaulay and Bagehot, to name only two Victorian sages, produced classic essays in the form of book reviews. In the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson, among others, wrote book reviews that are still read. But over the last twenty years, as newspapers and magazines have been absorbed into an entertainment industry that is ferociously conscious of ROI, book reviews have been neglected. Monotony - and book reviews are generally tedious beyond belief, much more tedious than movie reviews - has naturally led to a fall off of readership. This takes place against a background in which the newspaper industry has been cutting its own throat -becoming a cheap guide to other venues of entertainment. It will never be cheap enough. This is a death spiral. As the newspaper reader is herded towards ever more cretinizing forms of Hollywood fantasy, the reader naturally loses the reading talent, or will to read. That will certainly includes newspapers. By their very structure, newspapers require a certain talent in reading. This seems to go over the heads of the owners of newspapers. That a newspaper is a thing to read, rather than a billboard to put advertisements in, is not a truth admitted in the boardrooms of Gannet or Cox. The reader, that mythical bearer of cultural goods, has fled to academia. The site of reading is now the classroom. This doesn't signify the death of literature, but it does signify a regression to the pre-modern era of reading and writing. The modernist impulse, which from the philosophes to the modernists depended on a network of independent readers and writers, is petering out. Independence was always a high wire act. Academia was never set up to foster it, and doesn't. But as the air is taken out of that cultural space, the newspaper, which was a creation of the modernist era, is dying. While most editors could care less about the book review section (for good reason), its corruption is a symptom - an ineradicable black spot, signalling the corruption and death to come.



If we look back upon the 19th century novel, one thing stands out: the site of reading - of finding the book, and then finding the next book - is not the classroom. The classroom has almost wholly taken over the educated readers ideal of the place of reading. When Book stores encourage reading by encouraging reading groups, the groups almost invariably become like classrooms. The classroom ethos is also mirrored in the standard book review, which is composed of two parts: plot and theme. The art of the novel is almost skipped - in the classroom, the subteties of art makes for bad tests. Much easier to ask for an essay (in five hundred words or less) about the theme of War and Peace than to ask for an essay about the construction of Prince Andrei as a character. Classrooms elicit themes the way factories produce cars. Libraries, if the witness of nineteenth century writers is any testimony, created complex day dreams. That day dreams could become political and social realities was the message of the two great events of the early nineteenth century: the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon.



I'll write more about this on some later post.



Here are three citations from three different 19th century writers, selected at random.



I believe I should have been almost stupefied but for one circumstance.It was this. My father had left a small collection of books in alittle room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined myown) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From thatblessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, HumphreyClinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas,and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond thatplace and time, - they, and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales ofthe Genii, - and did me no harm; for whatever harm was in some ofthem was not there for me; I knew nothing of it. It is astonishingto me now, how I found time, in the midst of my porings andblunderings over heavier themes, to read those books as I did.

-- David Cooperfield



For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years ofage, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.



Through Walter Scott, later on, she fell in love with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guard-rooms and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching acavalier with white plume galloping on his black horse from thedistant fields. At this time she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan ofArc, Heloise, Agnes Sorel, the beautiful Ferroniere, and ClemenceIsaure stood out to her like comets in the dark immensity of heaven...

Madame Bovary



"What did Missy want with more books? What must you be bringing her more books for?" "They amuse her, sir. She is very fond of reading." "A little too fond," said Mr Featherstone, captiously. "She was for reading when she sat with me. But I put a stop to that. She's got the newspaper to read out loud. That's enough for one day, I should think. I can't abide to see her reading to herself.

Middlemarch

Bollettino



I must, I must stop writing about the War.



One last post -- and then, no mas. Not for this week. Sanity, I crave sanity...



All right. Let's do a review. The war was supposed to bring some benefits. There would be costs, there would be benefits. Now we have a better picture of both, and we have a sense of how -- from the American perspective -- they are defined. One of the great benefits of the war was the bringing down of Saddam H. The cost, in human lives and in dollars, hasn't yet been toted up -- on the Iraqi side it may never be -- but as of today we have some feel for it.



So, the Bush administration has defined the ultimate benefit in Iraq in terms of several abstractions and one pre-war claim. The pre-war claim is that Iraqi oil will pay for the war and the American contribution to Iraq. In other words, we are spending about 150-200 billion dollars on Iraq, but we will receive that money back. The abstractions can be boiled down to: a democratic, American friendly country. Like Iran under the Shah, only with elections.



Given these baselines, we can come up with combinations of possible outcomes, assign them probabilities, and ask which one will give us both 1) the greatest benefit and 2) the best odds.



I can think of five basic combinations.



1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars, with interest, in a timely matter.



2. American troops withdraw. The government that is left behind is less friendly to America than Kuwait, but more friendly than Iran. It is, however, stable, and has certain democratic aspects. The 200 billion dollars is not paid back.



3. American troops leave. The American friendly democracy that is left behind tries to repay the American debt, causing a nation wide rebellion. It is overthrown by a government that is hostile to America.



4. American troops leave. Iraq is riven with conflict. The 200 billion dollars is gone. The conflict lasts for a long time, is destabilizing, and no side in it is openly pro-American.



5. American troops don't leave, but have to stay indefinitely, due to conflict. Another 100 billion dollars is spent on Iraq, but the nation is riven with conflict. Casualties mount. No stability, no democracy, and increasing harm to American forces.



One can argue that there are innumerable subsets. There are. But I imagine each one simply enriches the detail of one or another item on this list.



The problem with the Bush solution is simple. It bets everything on 1. Myself, I think one has about the same chance as Dennis Kucinich has of being the next US president.



The second option is much more possible. But humans drive their own history -- it will definitely be made impossible the more Bush bets on 1. The other three options are progressively worse for American interests. And for Iraq.



So, rationally, for our 150-200 billion dollars -- money we are not going to see again -- I'd say the reasonable thing to do is to take 2 as a scenario and try to improve it. That means ... well, it means handing power over to the Iraqi cabinet, and letting Bremer tell rotary clubs in Indiana all about his splendid plan for an Iraqi constitution. It means getting real about the money -- this money isn't coming back. It means letting the Iraqis decide what kind of economy they want -- from the contractors they hire to repair oil wells to the market system they are comfortable with. Of course, the "Iraqis" don't operate in isolation. But we should certainly not get into a situation in which there is a puppet Iraqi elite that simply obeys Americans, and thus abruptly abridges its shelf life. The commentary I've read about Iraq is truly odd -- it is as if nobody even thinks about what happens when the Americans withdraw. The Americans are not going to enforce a permanent solution to the Iraq problem -- period. The arguments are all about the chaos that will ensue if we withdraw right now, and how we have to do this, and how we have to do that... But by the force of things (ah, Lucretian phrase!) the Iraqis are the ones who will be there when the Americans are long gone. The american exit strategy better be shaped with that reality in mind.

Bollettino



Here's what we said before the war, on March 14th. It seems relevant, in the light of W.'s speech.



"Given this, here is the primer for the upcoming catastrophe:

1. Occupation is not peace. The media has defined the war as having a beginning -- when Bush declares it -- and an end -- when Saddam Hussein is dissolved. Now, the beginning, as we all know by now, has not been clear. In fact, it is unclear what Bush will declare, if we are actually engaged in warlike hostilities now, and who will be responsible for the war -- as in, you know, the marquis. Is it the UN vs. Saddam, the U.S. vs Saddam, or the Coalition of the Willing vs. Saddam? Similarily, the dissolution of Saddam ends only one phase of the war. The next phase, if the post-Saddam history of Northern Iraq is relevant, begins with squabbling between hostile factions that soon escalates into shooting. Plus, of course, with a soldiery strung out in Iraq and no central authority besides that army, the terrain and disposition of forces is ideally suited for suicide bombers.

2.You can't give what you take. As we've pointed out before, Paul Wolfowitz has testified that we intend to pay for the war with Iraq's money. At the same time, we intend to reconstruct Iraq. Those are mutually cancelling propositions. This is when the lesson of Afghanistan kicks in. There is no constituency in this country willing to see a transfer of about one hundred billion dollars to Iraq. And if the economy continues to suck, the pressure will be overwhelming to subsidize this war with the spoils.

3.A democratic government won't last if its strips the country of its wealth. Stripping, here, is pretty direct. We aren't talking fancy Swiss bank accounts. We are talking oil money going out in ways that everybody sees. If this is the American strategy, be prepared for a guerilla war.

4 The current civil society in Northern Iraq is endangered by American adventurism. Northern Iraq, and the Kurds, have become the stuff of propaganda lately. That there was no outpouring of admiration for their civil ways before 9/11 had a simple cause: for the first five years of the No Fly Zone, Kurdish factions killed each other. They also gave shelter to the PKK, a guerrilla group in Turkey that was as dirty as they come. This isn't to say that Northern Iraq hasn't made progress -- they have. They've done it in the way that progress is made -- it is a grassroots effort, and it takes security, money, and time. If the U.S. expects to 'integrate' Northern Iraq, by force, into its idea of Iraq, all of that progress will be undone.

The NPR interviewed Gordon Adams about the cost of the war a while back. Gordon Adams is some defense analyst. Here is his comment: "In Gulf War I, we paid $60 billion to fight the war. Our allies gave us back all but about $10 billion of that money. So it was--you know, Gulf War I was subsidized. Gulf War II will not be subsidized."

Bollettino




We were going to do a little thoughtful post about reviewing  -- which, the god of coincidence being a faithful reader of this stream of fluff, is made easier by a hook: Clive James' op ed in the Sunday NYT.








"Over the course of literary history some legitimately destructive reviews have been altogether too enjoyable for both writer and reader. Attacking bad books, these reviews were useful acts in defense of civilization. They also left the authors of the books in the position of prisoners buried to the neck in a Roman arena as the champion charioteer, with swords mounted on his hubcaps, demonstrated his mastery of the giant slalom. How civilized is it to tee off on the exposed ineptitude of the helpless?





"Back in the early 19th century, the dim but industrious poet Robert Montgomery had grown dangerously used to extravagant praise, until a new book of his poems was given to the great historian and mighty reviewer Lord Macaulay. The results set all England laughing and Montgomery on the road to oblivion, where he still is, his fate at Macaulay's hands being his only remaining claim to fame. Montgomery's high style was asking to be brought low and Macaulay no doubt told himself that he was only doing his duty by putting in the boot. Montgomery had a line about a river meandering level with its fount. Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount wouldn't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay made it funny; he had exposed Montgomery as a writer who couldn't see what was in front of him."





Clive James' piece is occasioned by the now distant racket that was made in May, on the appearane of Heidi Julavits' piece, in the Believer, entitled "The Snarky, Dumbed-Down World of Book Reviewing." Since we have made almost all our money in the past year book reviewing, you would think we'd have commented in a more timely fashion about what couldn't have been more relevant to us. However, at the time we were in a constant state of sweat over Iraq, and theories of bookreviewing just didn't urge our commentating instincts. However, James' piece did send us back to Julavits. Not to her essay, so much, but to the interview in the NYObs, which was, to the detriment of the moral betterment of book reviewers everywhere, so much more fun to read.



During the course of the interview, Ms. Julavits (to use Observerspeak) morphed into a rather bizarre semblence of Jerry Lundegaard, the car salesman character in Fargo. Or at least linguistically. For instance: in her article, Ms. Julavits apparently attacked one Sam Sifton, whose review of some novel in the New York Times attracted her attention on account of its untoward snarkiness.Now this Sifton, according to the Observer, is not entirely unknown to Ms. Julavits. In fact, he was the best man at her inauspicious wedding to her first husband, who has, in another magazine, recollected in detail the vices that drove his bride from the house and from the marriage. Here is the interviewer presses Ms. Julavits on this unhappy topic:



At the mention of her personal connection to Mr. Sifton, Ms. Julavits darkened. "Unfortunately, Sam is someone whom I really, really, really like," she said, sitting up in her chair. "So if it�s not dispassionate, I guess it�s that I read that review, and I was just so upset the whole time I was reading it�and then when I saw who wrote it, it was devastating, because I respect him immensely."Ms. Julavits didn�t see her attack on Mr. Sifton as personal, but she admitted that the connections were a bit odd. "It�s definitely bizarre," she said, "but Dave Eggers is friends with Sam and whatever, so it�s all�everybody knows everybody in one way or another."



It is hard to read this without thinking of William Macy's worried face -- Macy is the guy who played Lundegaard -- and thinking of what he'd do with these lines. They are golden, these lines. Especially "Sam is someone whom I really really really like..." Ms. Julavits' way of speaking -- the Midwestern nice that wraps around a rubber dagger, or at least a bad review of a bad review -- has that Lundegaard twitchiness, that discontent. The interview includes a citation of Ms. Julavits really pouring on the harshness, taking on the negative reception accorded to Rick Moody's The Black Veil. The "cautionary underlying message" she found in Mr. Moody�s bad press�most famously, a blistering attack by Dale Peck in The New Republic�was this: "If you try to be overly ambitious and fail, you will get the heck spanked out of you. You will be mocked."





Jaa, gettin' the heck spanked out of you. It happened two years ago, over to Lake Crane I think it was, you remember Marge, when the danged dog ate the snowplow tires...





Well, our own thoughts about reviewing have not been crystalized by Julavits. Rather, we've been thinking of the malign influence  of Pauline Kael. We've been thinking of resentment. We've been thinking of how the site where literature is processed -- chosen, read, discussed -- has changed over the last century from the library to the  classroom. We've been thinking of crowds. Our next post will take some of this up. Or it won't