Words Fail Me

Damn the New York Times! They just made my work harder.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Politics

I don't get it. Less than a week after Barack Obama's candid speech about race, both Hillary Clinton and John McCain have been caught in ... misstatements. (I'm not being candid, either.) Hillary claims she "misspoke" when she talked about being under sniper fire in Bosnia -- after videotape shows her sauntering across the tarmac with Chelsea to accept some flowers from a little girl. And McCain blames a slip of the tongue for his assertion that Iran is training Al-Qaida insurgents -- even though video shows that his tongue slipped at least four times.

What's going on here? Have these guys never heard of YouTube? It led me to imagine this scenario:

A conference room with two tables set up with computers. Both monitors are displaying the home page for YouTube. Barack Obama enters, and ushers Hillary Clinton and John McCain to the chairs in front of the computers.

Obama: Hillary, John, thanks for coming. I know how busy you are, but I really felt we needed to have this session.

McCain: Not a problem. I'm not doing anything much but watching you guys slug it out.

Clinton: Thank you, Barack.

Obama: The reason I asked you here, is that I think the campaign has gone off track. We're not getting our messages across about the issues. We're spending too much time apologizing for misspeaking.

Clinton: Right. You and your "typical white person." (She giggles.)

Obama: (Irritably.) Not quite what I had in mind, Hillary. You see, I don't think you're aware of what an influence YouTube is having on politics.

Clinton: YouTube? Oh, right. Chelsea showed me the scary hamster.

McCain: Hamster? I had to eat one of those when I was a P.O.W. in Iran.

Obama: Vietnam.

McCain: Pardon?

Obama: You were a P.O.W. in Vietnam, John. Not Iran.

McCain: If you say so. Maybe I misspoke.

Obama: Well, that's the point. Every time you or Hillary or I say something, millions of people go to YouTube and check it out to see if we're lying. Everything we say or do in public winds up there. And so does everything our friends and supporters say and do.

Hillary: Everything? (She turns to the computer with interest.)

Obama: Yes, including Rev. Wright's sermons. That's how they got me in trouble.

McCain: (Chuckles.) Really got your tail in a crack there, didn't you, son? Imagine I'll get some mileage out of that this fall.

Clinton: He wasn't my pastor. You'll be running against me.

Obama: Oh, lay off it, Hillary. Anyway, I thought you might want to know about this YouTube thing. I mean, it's really important: It helped Jim Webb defeat George Allen after the "macaca" incident.

Clinton: So you say everything's on here? How do I check up on Bill?

McCain: I want to see the scary hamster.

Speak the Speech, I Pray Thee...

Interesting. According to this quiz, I'm from the Northeast.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The South
The Midland
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Words of Wisdom

"Immediate rest is the best remedy for a bad idea insisting to be blogged."

--James Wolcott

What I Meant to Say Was ...

I was doing some research online this week... Okay, I was Googling my own name. Like you haven't done that. Anyway, I ran across some quotations from one of my reviews in a very unexpected place: a couple of Web sites devoted to "intelligent design."

Now, I happen to think that the intelligent-design argument is hokum, an attempt to undermine the credibility of what seems to me perfectly credible: the scientific evidence for human evolution. I'm certainly no scientist, but it seems to me perfectly evident that evolution is established science and that human beings, being biological creatures, are as subject to evolutionary process as any other biological creatures.

What continually amazes me is that perfectly sane people, here in America, seem to have doubts about evolution -- at least according to pollsters (whose scientific methods I don't entirely trust).

This is the review, written some time ago for the Mercury News, that the intelligent-design hucksters seized upon. The key passages that they quoted from it are highlighted:

THE FIRST HUMAN: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors
By Ann Gibbons
Anchor, 336 pp., $14.95 paperback

According to a Gallup poll taken in 2004, 45 percent of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago." More than 50 years after the Scopes trial, and 135 years after Darwin published "The Descent of Man," lots of people still find it hard to believe in human evolution.

But though the fuss over "intelligent design" and other anti-evolutionary arguments has made a lot of headlines lately, it barely surfaces in Ann Gibbons' colorful and readable book about the search for human origins. In "The First Human," Gibbons, who reports on human evolution for Science magazine, gives a lucid account of the science involved in finding fossils, establishing how old they are, and ascertaining whether they in fact belong to the ancestors of humankind. She also shows how difficult and sometimes dangerous the work of hunting for 7 million-year-old fossils can be. And that, like most humans, anthropologists are subject to such emotions as ambition and jealousy, especially when they're Indiana Jonesing for the next big find.

Not even the most charismatic anthropologist swashbuckles like Harrison Ford, but some of them do have touches of glamour. "With his complex character and dark humor he could have sprung from a Hemingway novel," Gibbons says of Tim White, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. In 1993 White and his team were flown from San Francisco to Ethiopia in billionaire Gordon Getty's private jet, because Getty's wife, Ann, was studying anthropology at UC-Berkeley and was a field worker in the expedition.

But White is also a no-nonsense type who likes to demonstrate the harsh reality of fossil-hunting for lecture audiences. He tells them that to re-create the conditions in the Afar rift of Ethiopia, he would have to heat the auditorium to 100 degrees, "blow in dust and sand, and bring in two dump trucks filled with scorpions, snakes, and malarial mosquitoes." In the course of his research, White has contracted malaria, Gibbons reports, as well as giardia, dysentery, hepatitis and pneumonia.

White is not the only fossil-hunter who has suffered. Richard Leakey lost both legs when he crashed his plane in Kenya, and field workers have been killed by bandits and warring tribes. Teams are often threatened by the volatile politics of post-colonial Africa, where virtually all field research into human ancestry is conducted. One researcher was expelled from Ethiopia because of suspicions that he was working for the CIA. During the political turmoil of the 1980s, all fossil research in Ethiopia was halted by the country's government for eight years.

And sometimes competing research teams are a threat to one another. Leakey virtually sewed up paleontology research in Kenya by cutting a deal with the government, and rival researcher Martin Pickford was arrested when he tried to make an end run around that arrangement. But Pickford could be equally protective of what he considered to be his turf. He once charged a Yale University team with raiding and corrupting a fossil site he laid claim to. When a Yale researcher returned to the site, she was met by a man who challenged the validity of her permits and added to the intimidation by flashing a gun tucked into his waistband.

These tensions and turf wars arise because the rewards for discoveries – foundation grants, academic tenure, awards, prizes and public acclaim – have escalated since Donald Johanson's celebrated discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, a 3.1 million-year-old hominid popularly known as "Lucy," in 1974. Lucy's reign as the oldest known human ancestor lasted for nearly 20 years. Then in 1992 a team including White and Japanese paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa discovered Ardipithecus ramidus, which has been dated at 4.4 million years old, and a string of other discoveries followed over the next decade. The latest of them, by Michel Brunet in Chad in 2002, potentially pushes back known human ancestry to 6 or 7 million years ago.

Nothing that old is in good shape, of course. We're not talking about complete skeletons but about teeth, the occasional jawbone or skull or thighbone, sometimes on the verge of crumbling into chalky dust. But in every case there's just enough to convince researchers, and their peers that review their research, that a hominid, and not an ancestor of an ape, has been found. But usually there's also little enough to provoke ongoing controversy.

Which is why the layperson asks, as a journalist did at a symposium that brought together some of the eminent discoverers: "Why do you scientists always argue about your fossils? Why don't you share the fossils?" Gibbons points out that one reason is that the fossils don't belong to the researchers, they're "the priceless property of the nations where they were found." But she also explains that consensus would be hard to reach even if the hominid scraps were gathered in one place. "Together, the fossils collected in the 1990s and early 2000s would cover a large desk and would represent a few dozen individuals at least," she notes. But too many pieces are still missing from the puzzle – including fossils of the ancestors of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas – to allow for a clear picture of the evolutionary lineage.

So in the end, "The First Human" is a bit like a detective story without a conclusion, or like a detective story that puts Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, V.I. Warshawski, Easy Rawlins and Gil Grissom all in the same room, gives them a handful of clues, and lets them argue endlessly about the solution. The characters in Gibbons' book are almost as colorful and cantankerous as those fictional sleuths. Science writing is rarely this entertaining.

_____________________

It's easy to see what the intelligent designers are up to: snatching from the context of the review sentences that suggest anthropologists are scrabbling and competitive types, some of whom are not very nice, and that their evidence doesn't amount to much.

Okay, granted that that's sort of what I meant, it was hardly my intent to undermine their credibility. On the contrary, I meant to admire the persistence and the diligence with which anthropologists conduct their work, their ability to discern evolutionary change from fossils that most laypersons would casually crush under their feet. And that although tempers flare, grudges are held, and important finds are not readily shared, those are human failings, not signs that the science is fundamentally flawed.

Anyone who knows scientists, or academics of any stripe, knows that they can be petty and jealous people. But the truth will out, and the truth, as I see it, is that human evolution is a well-established fact, and that intelligent design is just an ad hoc, unscientific theory cooked up by ideologues whose earlier theory, "creationism," has imploded.

But the real lesson learned here is that I need to be more careful about tone in my reviews.

Murder Most French

The following review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

MURDER IN THE RUE DE PARADIS
By Cara Black
Soho, 312 pp. $24

Cara Black loves Paris when it sizzles.

Of course, as the readers of her seven previous novels about quirky-chic private eye Aimée Leduc already know, Black just plain loves Paris.

In her latest, “Murder in the Rue de Paradis,” it’s the sweltering August of 1995, the month in which every Parisian who can deserts the city, leaving it to the tourists and those who can’t flee. Aimée is one of those who can’t – she has work to do. And then her old boyfriend, investigative journalist Yves Robert, turns up. Against her better judgment she sleeps with him, and to her astonishment he proposes marriage.

But in the morning he’s gone. Permanently. His body is found in the rue de Paradis. His throat has been slit, with a distinctive curling flourish at one end of the incision.

The police are no help: They arrest a suspect who dies in custody, but Aimée is certain that when Yves left their bed it wasn’t for an assignation with the junkie street hustler the cops had arrested. Still, the police are happy to consider the case closed, given that the force has more than it can handle with a series of bombings linked to an Islamist terrorist group.

Aimée’s attempt to find out who killed Yves will get her involved with Kurdish nationalists, their Turkish opponents and a sinister Iranian hit-woman. Aimée gets shot at, dislocates her shoulder, nearly winds up with her own throat slit, and breaks a heel on her Manolo Blahniks.

Black, who lives in San Francisco when she isn’t seeking out the pith and marrow of Paris, creates strong characters: Aimée is sort of a cross between Juliette Binoche and Angelina Jolie playing Lara Croft; her assistant, the dapper four-foot-tall René Friant, tries (and invariably fails) to keep her out of trouble. And there’s a memorable villain in the assassin Nadira, whose efficiency and ingenuity are matched by her fanaticism.

Black also crafts a well-shaped plot. Readers who are knowledgeable about the conventions of murder mysteries may spot Yves’ killer early on, but Black introduces enough ingenious fake-outs and red herrings to keep us off-balance. And even if you guess who did it, the question is why – although there Black cheats a little, having withheld the evidence that might have enabled Aimée (and the reader) to figure things out sooner.

But where Black really shines is at creating atmosphere. Her pages are alive with particulars – the sights, sounds, smells, geography, topography and history of the quartier of Paris where the novel is set. She makes the multicultural neighborhoods of the tenth arrondissement three-dimensional, providing more than just a backdrop; they serve as a framework for action, of which there is plenty.

And even better, Black makes the setting thematically relevant. For example, while seeking to understand the conflicts between Turks and Kurds and Sunni and Shi‘a that may have had something to do with Yves’ murder, Aimée is taken blindfolded to the hiding place of an exiled Turkish novelist, the object of a fatwa. After he explains who the various parties to the conflict are, she is guided from his hiding place by an elderly Jewish man. Again blindfolded and swathed in a chador, she can perceive only “the pungent smell of sandalwood incense and what sounded like muffled Hindi coming from somewhere in the hallway.”

When they pause in the old man’s apartment so she can remove the blindfold and the chador, she sees a wall filled with old photographs: “Black-and-white snapshots from the forties. … Now she noticed the yellow stars on the men’s lapels and the women’s sweaters, the uniformed Wehrmacht soldier to the side.

“Her throat caught. ‘They worked in the quartier?’

“ ‘At Lévitan, next door. And at Bassano and Austerlitz, the other labor camps on the Left Bank.’

“ ‘Labor camps? I had no idea.’

“ ‘Few do. Under L’Opération Meuble, the Boches took skilled workers from internment camps: jewelers to repair clocks, artisans to restore furniture and musical instruments, women couturiers to bleach and press linens – you name it – all looted from Jewish déportés apartments.’ ”

Leaving his apartment, Aimée “kept to the shadows and turned right into rue du Château d’Eau. The streetlight illuminated a building plaque. Jean Cazard and Pierre Chatenet, both eighteen years old and members of the Red Cross, shot by Germans, August 14, 1944. Just days before the Liberation. There were fresh lilacs in a vase fastened to the plaque. She shivered and hastened her steps. The past clung to these cobblestones and buildings as if it were just yesterday.”

Other times, other ethnic and political conflicts leading to injustice and murder. Black deftly makes the history of the city resonate with the contemporary conflicts that swarm around her characters. And by doing so, she lifts her novel out of the narrower confines of the genre in which it resides. “Murder in the Rue de Paradis” is a page-turner, but some of its pages invite you to linger and reflect.

The Thin Line

Obama's comments today about his respect for the Rev. Wright and love of his own white grandmother, despite their racial attitudes, reminded me of something I wrote in a review reprinted in this post:

I know these men [Mississippi sheriffs shown in a photograph], or the men like them who were my neighbors, my uncles, my friends' fathers and our Sunday school teachers and scoutmasters. When I was growing up in Mississippi, they would say such appalling things about black people that even to remember 40 or 50 years later causes my gorge to rise. Yet I also know that when they weren't spewing racist filth, they could be men one could respect and even love. It was as if, in the lives of these men, a tributary of human feeling had been dammed, grown stagnant and polluted, and its foulness had seeped out and corrupted a mainstream that should have run clear.

I think lots of people, especially white Southerners of a certain generation, know this feeling -- of affection and respect for someone with whom you disagree deeply and painfully on particulars, usually concerning race. It was thrilling to hear something similar articulated so well today by a candidate for president. Whether the sound-bite-obsessed media can comprehend and accurately report the subtlety of what Obama had to say is another question.

Update: Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson do an excellent job of analyzing and commenting on this particular section of the speech.

The Speech

Does anything else really need to be said?

Oops

Why is it that newspapers are better edited than books?

No, seriously. As a reviewer, I’m constantly startled by the typos, misspellings, grammatical anomalies and downright factual errors that creep into books – the kind of errors that would get most newspaper copy editors, at least on the better newspapers, beaten about the head and ears with their stylebooks. (Or would have before newspapers started laying off their copy editors.)

Now, I read most of the books I review in bound galley form, usually marked with caveats like “Do not quote for publication before checking final bound edition.” But when I do check, I often find that the errors I’ve circled haven’t been corrected. Sometimes I even e-mail the errors I’ve found to the publishers.

As an example of what I’m talking about, take the review of Artists in Exile from the Houston Chronicle below. I was delighted to see that in the printed version, some editor had taken the trouble to add an umlaut to the name of Max Ophuls – i.e., Ophüls. The truth is, I had omitted the umlaut because Ophuls himself dropped it while he was working in Hollywood. (That’s why it doesn’t show up in the blog entry, which was copied from my original manuscript, not from the Chronicle.) But some hard-working editor, struggling under a daily newspaper’s deadline, actually took the time to check the name and make the change.

Now, look at the book itself. In it, the author refers to the character “Professor Unraut” in the film “Das blaue Engel.” More than once. In fact, the film is Der blaue Engel, which was based on the Henrich Mann novel Professor Unrat. The character’s name in the film is Prof. Immanuel Rath, a teacher whose pupils call him “Prof. Unrat” – in German, Unrat means “trash.” As far as I can tell, there’s no such word as “Unraut” in German.

In the first draft of my review, I pointed out these errors, but I decided that they were picayune. It’s an excellent book, and although the mistakes bothered me, they detract in only minor ways from its excellence. But when you see mistakes in a book that you catch easily, you wonder if there are mistakes that you didn’t catch.

Anyway, an eagle-eyed newspaper copy editor noted that Ophuls was missing his umlaut. Which only makes me wonder if books are subjected to less stringent editing.

Wally's World

This review ran today in the Mercury News:

WALLACE STEGNER AND THE AMERICAN WEST
By Philip L. Fradkin
Knopf, 369 pp., $27.50

Sturdy and fact-packed, Philip L. Fradkin’s “Wallace Stegner and the American West” will satisfy anyone who wants to know what Stegner did and when and where he did it. Those who want to know why and sometimes how may find themselves frustrated.

Fradkin lives near Point Reyes, has been an environmental reporter for the Los Angeles Times and an editor for Audubon magazine, and is the author of numerous books about the American West, including “A River No More: The Colorado River and the West.” So it’s not surprising that the best parts of his biography are the ones about Stegner as conservationist.

Stegner was acutely aware of the central problem of the American West: “the aridity that breeds sparseness and the denial of that condition, which leads to overdevelopment.” In his book “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” he examined the causes and the consequences of the exploitation of the West. As Fradkin summarizes it, “Myth, which was supported by western politicians, said there was water for everyone and every use. Science … said, Wait a minute. Let’s determine how much water there really is and what it can support. … In the end, Science was defeated by Myth.”

“Stegner could not deal with the second western constant – the first being aridity and the second rapid change,” Fradkin writes. “Change would alienate Stegner from his native place.” Los Altos Hills, where he had built his home during his early years at Stanford, changed from a rural retreat to a prime location for the mansions of Silicon Valley multimillionaires. So Stegner “decided he would seek his final resting place, his angle of repose, in Vermont.” In New England, Stegner believed he had found the respect for the land, the tradition and the sense of community that had vanished from – or never existed in – California.

Fradkin is a great admirer of Stegner, whom he sometimes refers to as "Wally." But while Fradkin does a good job of depicting Stegner the conservationist, he stumbles in his treatment of Stegner the writer and teacher. Of Stegner’s works of fiction, the only one that Fradkin deals with in any great detail is the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angle of Repose.” The novel is based on the life of Mary Hallock Foote, a writer of the late 19th and early 20th century who was married to a mining engineer. Foote’s heirs gave Stegner permission to use as much of her private papers and letters as he desired, and he borrowed heavily from Foote’s writing, sometimes with only minor changes. But when the book appeared, the family was shocked by some of his alterations in Mary’s life story, and when critics and scholars examined Stegner’s sources, there were charges of plagiarism – countered by the defense that Stegner had only creatively adapted a source that he had acknowledged, albeit vaguely. Fradkin does an excellent job of exploring the plagiarism controversy, coming down on Stegner’s side, while admitting that Stegner could have been more candid with both Foote’s descendants and his readers.

Fradkin also deals with the cavalier dismissal of “Angle of Repose” by the country’s most powerful book section, the New York Times Book Review. John Leonard, then the editor of the book review, called the novel “another in a long, apparently endless, line of Pulitzer disappointments: Forthright, yes; and morally uplifting; and middlebrow.” Yet Fradkin does little to demonstrate that the novel, or indeed any of Stegner’s novels, deserves more to be taken more seriously than Leonard did.

Comfortable in amassing the details of Stegner’s life and exploring his work as a conservationist, Fradkin seems ill at ease in discussing Stegner’s fiction, which also makes for a rather tedious account of Stegner as teacher. He tells us that Stegner’s students “constitute a virtual hall of fame of American letters (Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, and Scott Turow, to name just a few).” But that’s a “hall of fame” that apparently contains no African-Americans, Latinos or women, and to most readers will sound like a rather thin sampling of contemporary American writers. And while Fradkin quotes one former student after another praising Stegner’s “teaching technique,” no one seems to be able to come up with any particulars about what made him such a good teacher.

Stegner could be, one gathers, a bit of a porcupine, erecting his quills against even the presence of an enemy. Fradkin tells us of his fights with David Brower, the “Archdruid” whose ouster from the Sierra Club Stegner supported, and with his Stanford colleagues Yvor Winters and Albert Guérard. Eleven years after he left Stanford, Stegner’s enmity toward Guérard led him, in 1982, to threaten to take his name off the Stegner Fellowships because of the appointment of Gilbert Sorrentino – whom Stegner called “a coterie writer of minimum distinction” – as a creative writing teacher. Stegner backed down on the threat, but subsequently decided to donate his papers to the University of Utah instead of to Stanford. Stegner’s behavior reminds one of the observation that the reason academic politics are so bitter is that the stakes are so low.

But Fradkin mostly downplays this prickly, even irrational side of the man. Though he says Stegner’s son, Page, told him he didn’t want “another hagiography,” the book seems over-discreet. There is little, for example, about Stegner’s relationship with his son, except for Page’s period of rebellion in adolescence and the time an angry Stegner chased Page with a scythe. And there’s even less about Mary Stegner, his wife, who suffered from various ailments (she may have been a hypochondriac) but who outlived him. As for Stegner’s own family background, we learn that he was a “mamma’s boy,” and that he hated his ne’er-do-well father so much that, 40 years after George Stegner died in a rather lurid murder-suicide, “Stegner vowed he would never buy a tombstone for his father’s grave.” But Fradkin doesn’t use these details to give us insight into the man Stegner became or the books he wrote.

At best, what Fradkin has given us is a partial portrait of the man and the writer, set inside a fuller portrait of Stegner’s relationship to the lands he loved and defended – lands for which he mourned when he saw them transformed by a civilization unprepared to cope with their harsh demands.