Bookishness

Californicated by the Right?

2009-11-08T22:58:00.000-08:00

If Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

Bugged

2009-11-08T12:21:00.000-08:00

It's not the flu, swine or otherwise. I know from flu. I think it's a head cold, but whatever it is, it has me slugging around the house in my robe and pajamas in the middle of the day. Fie on it.

Publish or Perish

2009-11-07T11:13:00.000-08:00

According to this article, everybody's about to be an author.

Friday Cat-Blogging

2009-11-06T23:31:00.001-08:00

Simon and Nicky

Stewart Does Beck (And How!)

2009-11-06T10:09:00.000-08:00

A must-see:

The 11/3 Project

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Sibilant Rivalry

2009-11-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

How do cats hiss? It's a very strange sound, sort of sibilant and guttural at the same time.

I ask this because Simon's home and Nicky's pissed off about it. After three days of mewing at every window, making us think that he was missing his brother, the first thing Nicky does when Simon comes back is hiss at him. It seems that he doesn't smell right.

Maggie heard Simon outside last night, and went out with the laser pointer -- their favorite toy: they can chase the lightning bug without stop. He ran off when he saw her, but she sat down on the walk and coaxed him back. He has lost weight, but seems otherwise okay.

A Little Knot-Music

2009-11-05T10:58:00.000-08:00

The following review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle (just below Jon Carroll):

NOCTURNES: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Knopf, 240 pp., $25

Dry without being arid, lean without being starved, the stories in Kazuo Ishiguro's new collection are studies in disjunction. They're full of characters in a state of disconnectedness – miscommunicating, misjudging, mistaking one another's motivations and intent. The trick here is that Ishiguro exploits this state of things for neither pathos nor farce, but for a funny-touching blend of the two.

Four of the five stories are narrated by musicians. A Polish-born guitarist in Venice tells of being hired by a famous American pop singer to serenade the singer's wife. An aspiring singer-songwriter escapes to the country to try to compose, but finds no peace there. A jazz saxophonist has plastic surgery because his career has been stymied by his looks -- his manager tells him he's “dull, loser ugly.” Another saxophonist tells the story of the relationship between a cellist and a mysterious woman who becomes his mentor.

The one story that doesn't feature musicians is also the most wildly varied in tone. “Come Rain or Come Shine” still hinges on the power of music – as the title's allusion to the Harold Arlen-Johnny Mercer standard suggests. In the story, Ray, a middle-aged man who teaches English on the continent, comes to England to visit his old university friends, Charlie and Emily. The reunion is not a happy one: Charlie and Emily not only berate Ray for not making more of his life, but also embroil him in their own marital tensions, which are like something out of Pinter or Albee.

And then the story turns into situation comedy. Charlie leaves on a business trip and, while Emily is at work, Ray discovers that she has called him “the Prince of Whiners” in her diary. He angrily mutilates the book, but when remorse sets in he calls Charlie to ask what he should do about the diary. Charlie concocts a far-fetched scheme to to trash the apartment and blame the mutilation on a dog owned by some of their friends. The story moves from agitato to scherzando, and by the time it ends it has changed mood again, to andante. The healing agent, at least between Ray and Emily, is music.

Music hath charms. Indeed, it's the almost the only real agglutinating force in the lives of these characters, all of whom are – or feel themselves to be -- outsiders. Janeck, the narrator of the opening story, “Crooner,” was raised in Poland before the fall of communism, and now plays guitar in a café orchestra on the Piazza San Marco in Venice. “Anywhere else,” he tells us, “being a guitar player would go in a guy's favour. But here? A guitar! The café managers get uneasy. It looks too modern, the tourists won't like it.” He's also at a disadvantage because of “the small matter of my not being Italian, never mind Venetian,” but as long as he keeps his mouth shut he can get work because “they need a guitar – something soft, but amplified, thumping out the chords from the back.” He is delighted to meet the crooner, whose black-market records Janeck's mother used to play, and thrilled when the man engages him as an accompanist for the serenade, a romantic gesture that turns out not to be exactly what Janeck is expecting.

Ishiguro knows something about musicians and about feeling like an outsider: Born in Nagasaki, he moved with his family to England when he was five years old. As a teenager, he aspired to be a songwriter like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and at 19 he hitchhiked with his guitar around California and the West. (The guitar was stolen in San Francisco.) But the characters in Nocturnes are no more (or less) autobiographical than the emotionally atrophied butler in The Remains of the Day or the doomed clones of Never Let Me Go.

What gives Ishiguro's fiction its peculiar quality is the sense of things held in suspension, of situations and relationships never quite fated to work out the way they should, rather like unresolved chords in a musical composition. These stories are often quite funny, predicated as they are on odd behavior, misinterpreted actions and false conclusions. But laughter depends on the release of tension, and Ishiguro's skillful avoidance of the expected resolution and his sly refusal to give us a full release of the tension produces a laughter with a melancholy, nervous edge.

2009-11-04T11:19:00.000-08:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates on bigotry and gay marriage.

Conservatives pride themselves on their skepticism, and generally dismiss liberals as soft-headed Utopians. But in so many ways, political conservatism is Utopianism for the powerful. It isn't broadly skeptical of human nature, so much as it's broadly skeptical of people its agents don't particularly like. Hence the sense that Americans are intrinsically "good people," that this country "is the best nation that ever existed in history," that the South is home to "the greatest people that have ever trod the earth," and that the murder of four little girls in Birmingham was the work of a "Communist" or "crazed Negro," which had "set back the cause of white people."

Hence the notion that those voting against gay marriage, are not actually, in the main, motivated by bigotry, but a belief in tradition and family. But very few people would actually ever describe themselves as bigots. We think we know so much about ourselves. This is a country--like many countries--which is deeply riven by ethnic bias, and gender discrimination. And yet we don't seem to know any of the agents of that discrimination.

Excuses, Excuses

2009-11-04T09:59:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the absence, but I've been (a) on a deadline, and (b) searching for Simon (above), who beat it out the door on Sunday night and hasn't been persuaded to come home yet. He's been reported to the authorities (the people who put the microchip in him), and we've posted fliers around the neighborhood. Last night, we saw him, but he hasn't yielded to blandishments. His brother, Nicky, wanders around the house yowling for him. Cats are stubborn people.

Otherwise, pissed off about Maine, glad to see the wingnuts thwarted in New York.

They'd Rather Be Right

2009-10-31T20:59:00.000-07:00

Frank Rich on the special election in New York state.

The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama. The movement’s undisputed leaders, Palin and Beck, neither of whom have what Palin once called the “actual responsibilities” of public office, would gladly see the Republican Party die on the cross of right-wing ideological purity. Over the short term, at least, their wish could come true.

Just Say Yes?

2009-10-31T19:55:00.000-07:00

Jacob Weisberg foresees an end to prohibition.

Within 10 years, it seems a reasonable guess that Americans will travel freely to Cuba, that all states will recognize gay unions, and that few will retain criminal penalties for marijuana use by individuals. Whether or not Democrats retain control of Congress, whether or not Obama is re-elected, and whether they happen sooner or later than expected, these reforms are inevitable—not because politics has changed but because society has.

Oh, Fox!

2009-10-30T15:57:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart does Fox as only he can:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

The Necessity of Passion

2009-10-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates on journalism and blogging.

Incredible journalism is like incredible baby-making--it starts with passion. The guy combing through the city budgets because it's his job, isn't the same as the guy combing through them because it keeps him up at night, because he thinks about it when he shouldn't be. Institutions support that passion--but they don't create it. When my old Howard buddy was killed by the cops, it was all I could think about, and it was all I wanted to write about. And I did it almost for free, because it helped me sleep at night. I was burning to get it down. I deeply suspect that the bloggers you love, and the reporters you love, are similarly on fire inside.

What I'm Listening To

2009-10-27T23:18:00.000-07:00

George Gershwin, Porgy and Bess. Willard White (Porgy); Cynthia Haymon (Bess); Harolyn Blackwell (Clara); Damon Evans (Sporting Life); Bruce Hubbard (Jake); Cynthia Clarey (Serena); Marietta Simpson (Maria); Gregg Baker (Crown). Glyndebourne Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, conduced by Simon Rattle.

I'll never give up my fondness for the old Leontyne Price-William Warfield highlights album -- on which Price not only sings Bess's arias but also Clara's "Summertime" and Serena's "My Man's Gone Now" -- but this complete version is undeniably one of the great opera recordings. The cast is superb and the choral and orchestral work outstanding, but the real genius lies in Simon Rattle's conducting. Seriously, if you don't own this one, you should. (The video below is from a made-for-TV version available on DVD, with Haymon and White, conducted by Rattle.)

Outfoxing Fox?

2009-10-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

John Scalzi on why the Obama administration's attack on Fox News is a smart strategy.

The White House says Fox News is not a real news organization and is the propaganda arm of the GOP, Fox News throws a very public shit fit about it, which gives it higher ratings and an impetus to skew even more to the right in its presentation, and go out of its way to criticize Obama even further. Meanwhile the noise is all covered by multiple other news outlets, which in aggregate reach a much larger audience, which show Fox News anchors and personalities in the middle of ideological conniptions, confirming to the general population the proposition that, indeed, Fox News is more interested in politics than news, and reinforcing the impression that Fox News and the GOP are reading off the same page. Which makes the GOP look unreasonable in an era in which its popularity isn’t, shall we say, spectacular to begin with.

Folding the Newspapers

2009-10-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum forecasts the demise of newspapers.

A few years ago I was on a panel discussion and the moderator asked us all how long newspapers distributed on newsprint would last in the United States. My guess was 20 years: that is, the last newspaper in the country would shut its doors in 2025. That's now looking pretty optimistic: a lot of people these days seem to think that 2012 is more like it, and today's news won't do anything to change their minds. At the same time, there are various ways you can look at that 10% drop, and one of them is simply that the recession has condensed several years of decline into a single year. A $500 newspaper subscription is a prime candidate to get sliced out of the family budget when times are tough and news can be found everywhere.

What a Friend We Have in Cheeses

2009-10-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

What I'm Watching

2009-10-24T23:36:00.000-07:00

Revolutionary Road

Sometimes it's hard to put your finger on exactly why a film doesn't work for you. Here's a well-acted, skillfully designed movie that doesn't make the impact it should, given all the talent on display. It seems disjointed, as if pieces of the plot and keys to the characters are missing. There's no faulting the performances. DiCaprio's boyishness is just right for Frank, who hasn't yet figured out what it is to be a man. And Winslet delivers April's comparative maturity with her accustomed brilliance. To its credit, the film doesn't devolve into a look-how-far-we've-come commentary on the fifties -- it doesn't put the era down, the way "Mad Men" sometimes condescends to the era in which it's set. Frank and April are acutely aware of the social and emotional limitations of the age in which they're living, but they haven't figured out how to rise above them. I'm currently reading the novel, which has all the depth and all the connective tissue that the film lacks, but more on that later. And all that said, one should be grateful for a movie that exhibits such raw power as this scene, which earned Michael Shannon an Oscar nomination:

When Is News Not News?

2009-10-23T23:39:00.000-07:00

Rachel Maddow explains what's wrong with Fox News's claim to be just another news channel.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What I'm Listening To

2009-10-23T21:40:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes. Jon Vickers (Peter Grimes); Heather Harper (Ellen Orford); Jonathan Summers (Balstrode); Elizabeth Bainbridge (Auntie); Forbes Robinson (Swallow); Patricia Payne (Mrs. Sedley). Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Colin Davis.

I can't help thinking of this as Britten's greatest opera, though really what I'm thinking of is the breathtaking power of Jon Vickers' singing and acting. I've never heard the recording with Peter Pears, for whom the role was written, though I'm told that there are those who prefer Pears's interpretation, including the composer, who is said to have walked out on Vickers's performance. But no tenor that I know of had a greater control of dynamics than Vickers, who could sing with both hushed intensity and clarion brilliance. For me, he's the definitive Tristan and Siegmund and Florestan -- and Grimes. This recording, incidentally, has no libretto, but that's no real handicap -- you can find one online here.

Obama Is Nixon? Get Real!

2009-10-22T23:01:00.000-07:00

Joe Conason puts the Obama-Nixon comparison in perspective.

Over the past few days, that false comparison has been made by Ken Rudin, the political director of National Public Radio, who called the Obama White House "Nixonesque"; by Karl Rove, who played a bit role in the Watergate saga as a Young Republican dirty trickster; and by Ruth Marcus, who likened Obama to both Nixon and his attack dog Vice President Spiro Agnew in the Washington Post -- a place where ignorance of the true history of the Nixon era is inexcusable.
But ignorance is epidemic on Capitol Hill and in the capital's newsrooms, so let's say this very simply: Nothing that Obama or any of his aides has done or said remotely resembles the war on the press waged by the Nixon White House until Watergate ended that administration's assaults on the Constitution. Nobody has sent Joe Biden out to question the patriotism of reporters and columnists who criticize the president, as Agnew did repeatedly. And nobody has tried to intimidate the media with obscene threats and tax audits, in the Mafia style of Nixon's aides.

Fox Noise

2009-10-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

Everything you need to know about Fox News in five minutes.

What I'm Reading

2009-10-22T14:13:00.000-07:00

Ambrose Bierce's Write It Right: The Celebrated Cynic's Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers, by Jan Freeman

As I've said before, I make it a policy not to review books by friends of mine, or even people I know. But that doesn't stop me from recommending, very highly, this delightfully annotated reprint of a usage guide published a century ago by Ambrose Bierce, perhaps best known today as the author of The Devil's Dictionary.

I met Jan Freeman -- oh, god, has it been thirty years ago? -- when I went to work for Inc. magazine, which was then located in Boston. We bonded quickly over our shared dismay at the editorial product we were ostensibly hired to make better. (Neither of us ever got much support at that.) What I learned pretty quickly was that Jan was a terrific editor and an immensely knowledgeable student of the English language. She was, for example, the first person to disabuse me of the notion that none always takes a singular verb.

Jan was not appreciated at Inc., and she took the earliest opportunity -- the birth of her daughter -- to get out of there. (I got booted out a year or so later.) She went to the Boston Globe, where she was an editor on the Sunday magazine, and now writes a weekly column, "The Word," for the newspaper. Her column is a delightfully unstuffy survey of the way people say things; it is grounded in a realization that some ways of saying things are better than others, but it's never snobbily prescriptive. It deserves all the attention and adulation that William Safire's language column for the New York Times Magazine used to get -- though actually it deserves them more.

Now Jan has published a book that is partly a reprint of Bierce's diatribes against what he saw as substandard diction and grammar, but is mostly a level-headed and revealing commentary on language cranks, past and present. As Jan points out in her introduction, the hunger for guidance on language had been whetted in the 18th century and was ravenous by the end of the 19th. The anxiety for correctness was particularly intense among the upwardly mobile of an America moving out of its frontier years. Slang, neologisms, and Americanisms were frowned upon, and "by the later 19th century many educated Americans worried that their native locutions were less refined than whatever the Brits were saying." So language snobs became gurus.

We're still anxious, of course. And we still have no lack of people willing to make pronouncements on the rightness and wrongness of what we write and say. But as Jan says, when she started writing her own usage column she "began to learn how many of the rules we take as gospel are actually quite recent, or are based on misunderstandings, or are simply the fossilized remains of a casual opinion delivered centuries ago." Bierce was a self-appointed language authority, who saw no harm in ratifying his prejudices into law. But "the most striking fact about Write It Right is how many of its 441 cautions are obsolete. ... And nobody is campaigning to bring back the good old days when fix was a slovenly word, reliable was ill-formed, and pants was vulgar. ... Could it be that by the year 2109, most Americans will feel just as distant from our current quarrels over decimate, epicenter, and enormity? Of course it could."

Still, Jan has a lot of fun exposing how obsolete Bierce's cautions are. Take that slovenly fix, for example. (Bierce's proscriptions are boldface, Jan's comments on them lightface.)

Fix. This is, in America, a word-of-all-work, most frequently meaning repair, or prepare. Do not so use it.

... This is just loony. As MWDEU [Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994)] points out, fix has fewer different senses than take, set, do, or run, and nobody calls these words slatternly. Fix for "repair" or "prepare" (a meal, a drink) dates to the 1760s; the OED's first example is "A number of hands came to fix our whale-boats." The verb may never be elegant, but it is standard American, and it's spreading. These days even British newspapers occasionally refer to "fixing" a BMW or the world economy.

Sometimes Bierce is the only person who has ever been known to object to a usage.

Even for Exact. "An even dozen."

The idiom "even dozen" is the relic of a use of even -- to denote round, rather than fractional, numbers -- that dates to the 17th century; Bierce is apparently the only critic who considers it a misuse. "Even dozen" may have survived because it contrasts with the still earlier "baker's dozen," or maybe just because we like the sound of it. As for the mild redundancy, peevologists need to learn that in language, that's a feature, not a bug.

Sometimes one supposed abuse has taken the place of another.

Graduated for Was Graduated.

The verb to graduate was in transition a century ago; the older passive, "Joe was graduated from college," was being supplanted by "Joe graduated from college." ("To graduate college," without the preposition, was not yet on the horizon.) ... [But] the Biercian orthodoxy was stoutly defended into the 1980s. And then, of course, along came "Joe graduated college" to scandalize traditionalists. The goalposts have moved, but the contest goes on.

Bierce usually tries to find a reason for his prejudices, and frequently fails.

It for So. "Going into the lion's cage is dangerous; you should not do it." Do so is the better expression, as a rule, for the word it is a pronoun, meaning a thing, or object, and therefore incapable of being done. Colloquially we may say do it, or do this, or do that, but in serious written discourse greater precision is desirable, and is better obtained, in most cases, by the use of the adverb.

"Do so" is not really more precise than "do it," but it is more formal; it probably sounds even more elevated to contemporary Americans than it did to Bierce. There's a reason Nike didn't adopt the slogan "Just do so!"

A supermarket I go to in Palo Alto has a sign over its express lane: "Twelve items or fewer." This is the kind of thing Palo Altans will insist on. So did Bierce:

Less for Fewer. "The regiment had less than five hundred men." Less relates to quantity, fewer, to number.

Bierce, like many usage writers of his time and later, signs on to a "rule" that had not been enunciated (or observed) until the 18th century..... In fact, as MWDEU notes, less had been used of countables since King Alfred the Great did it in 888, writing (in Old English) "with less words or with more." But ... in the 20th century it became a serious shibboleth.
...
In practice, less is more often used than fewer when the number is thought of as a limit: A frying pan is "nine inches or less in diameter," for instance, because you aren't measuring in one-inch increments, just stating a maximum size. The same is true for Bierce's regiment: "Less than five hundred men," like "160 characters or less" for a text message, states an upper limit on a collection of countables; the countability isn't the point. It's a testament to our fondness for recreational nitpicking that so many of us think the less-vs.-fewer distinction is both rigid and important.

I could go on quoting, but you get the point. This is a book for anybody who is fascinated by language and what we do with it.

What's Wrong With the Democratic Party?

2009-10-22T11:18:00.000-07:00

Matt Taibbi views with alarm.

[T]he Democratic Party as currently constituted is more afraid of losing the financial support of Wall Street and the health insurance industry and the pharmaceutical industry than it is of losing progressive voters. In fact, I think I’ve put that wrong, because it implies that the Democratic Party pushes the agenda of industry insiders out of fear. That is a misread of the situation, I think.
I think they prefer those people to their voters. I think they feel more comfortable with them. I heard a story recently from a Democratic Party operative who tells me that certain members of one of the president’s cabinet departments only got wind of how hard it is out there for ordinary people to pay their bills when they invited in a major corporation to give them a presentation about their financial outlook for the holiday season — and through that report found out that this company’s prospective customers were spending less because large numbers of them had been laid off, or had huge medical bills, or had maxed out their credit, and so on.

Letters from customers, survey answers and such, were read to the cabinet group. And they were shocked. This is how they find out about the economic reality of this country — accidentally, from a major campaign contributor! That’s how out of touch these people are.

He Just Keeps Getting Better

2009-10-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

Yet another reason to love Al Franken.

The hearing was on bankruptcies caused by medical bills.

Kerry Burns, a witness on the panel, testified that her son was treated for cystic fibrosis before he died while she fell into debt. "The collection calls were unrelenting, upwards of 30 calls a day," she said.

As part of the bankruptcy filing process, Burns has to undergo credit counseling, where she was asked how she could have avoided bankruptcy. She called the course "humiliating" and "a slap in the face," and to this day has not successfully filed for bankruptcy because she had not filled out the forms.

While [Sen. Sheldon] Whitehouse was quick to express his outrage at the process she was required to undergo, after watching her son die, [Sen. Jeff] Sessions appeared more accepting.

"When the government starts to regulate anything, including health care, you have rules," Sessions answered.
...

When Diana Furchtgott-Roth from the Hudson Institute attacked everything from the public option to the health bill that passed out of the Senate Finance Committee last week, Whitehouse remarked that she "veered across three lanes of traffic."

"Did you actually read the bill that is the subject of today's hearing?" he asked.

When Whitehouse asked her about the issue she had failed to focus on -- bankruptcy -- Furchtgott-Roth replied simply that the current system does a good job.

"Did it do a good job for Ms. Burns?" Whitehouse rebutted, visibly frustrated. Furchtgott-Roth simply replied that Burns had been in a bad situation.