Cliopatria: A Group Blog
Aaron Bady (∞); Chris Bray (∞); Brett Holman (∞); Jonathan Jarrett (∞); Robert KC Johnson (∞); Rachel Leow (∞); Ralph E. Luker (∞); Scott McLemee (∞); Claire B. Potter (∞); Jonathan T. Reynolds (∞)
Joshua Nelson's performance was truly memorable. He was born and raised in a family of observant orthodox Jews. He grew up observing strict dietary laws and rabbinic practice. On shabbat, the family walked to synagogue and did not touch the light switches at home. They celebrated the Jewish holiday calendar. The only unusual practice was that Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, coincided with Passover and some authorities hold that there is biblical justification for that. But his family was also of African descent. There is no family memory of conversion to Judaism. He believes that in diaspora his ancestors migrated to west Africa and that their Judaism survived the transition to the New World.
But Nelson also grew up listening to the wondrous music of Mahalia Jackson and his voice bears a remarkable resemblance to hers. Now, I am a person who enjoyed music on a black platter. Some of them had big holes in the middle and some of them had small holes in the middle. I made a modest transition to tapes, but my conversion to CDs is far from complete. I own only two CDs, both of them being:"Mahalia Jackson: Gospels, Spirituals, & Hymns." As Tim Tyson says, no day is complete without some Mahalia Jackson. So, when I heard that a black male Jewish Mahalia Jackson was performing at Ebenezer tonight, it became the only thing I needed to hear.
The performance began with an excerpt from a film about Joshua Nelson, "The Keep on Walking: Joshua Nelson Jewish Gospel Singer". It set the scene very well and, when it ended, the choirs of two Jewish synagogues and two Afro-Baptist churches filled the front of Ebenezer's sanctuary. What followed was one of the most remarkable performances I've ever seen. Nelson began with one of Mahalia's classic numbers:"Let There Be Peace On Earth" and continued by interspersing traditional Jewish and gospel hymns. He does not sing gospel songs with any reference to the divinity of Jesus, but"The Lord's Prayer," for example, is good Judaism as it is good Christianity.
Joshua Nelson had his largely white audience on its feet and clapping with virtually every number:"Adon Olam,""Didn't It Rain,""It Don't Cost Much,""Joshua Fit The Battle,""What a Wonderful World,""Hinei Ma Tov," and"Oseh Shalom." (You can hear two brief clips here.) Had he been preaching, the Baptists would have said he was"walkin' the benches". Even so, he carried his song down the aisles and bid us join him. I didn't know the traditional Jewish songs, but I was clapping and singing at every opportunity and dancing in the aisles before it was over. And, now I'm the proud owner of three CDs. My new silver platter with a large hole in the middle is:"Joshua Nelson with the Jubilee Choir Live at the West Hartford Jewish Film Festival." It reproduces tonight's program, except for our closing:"We Shall Overcome." I cannot tell you all that it means to me. Some of us died with its words on our lips.
It can read the labels and the position of the book using its image processing and optical character recognition software," the professor said. Once the book is located, it has to grasp it and take it off the bookshelf, which is not a simple as it might seem. For this, the team had to develop special fingertips like a nails, with one nail longer than the other.
Professor Pobil said it was a"real possibility" that teams of robots could, in about five years' time, realistically perform searching and fetching tasks. They could even mill around doing their work at night, working on library inventories, or identifying missing books, or mapping libraries.
I don't see this impacting the role of the librarian but the work of hundreds of work-study students. My question is how will the OCR treat non-English text? And will this intervention of the AI give us newer ways of cataloguing and stacking? Like towers of books reaching skyhigh...
And as to my reference to Historians....
2. Take the algorithm that runs Google News which aggregates information without any human intervention.
+ 2. Add to it Amazon's A9 engine which has hundreds of thousands of books scanned.
= Wait patiently for the AI to improve for the next 5 years.
4. Voilá. A Historian Engine that can process through any set of academic data and spit out a rational, logical arrangement of facts and analysis. No?
Ok. I know I am reaching here but given that most mechanical jobs have or will soon be lost to robotic industry, how long before the Ivory Tower comes under seige? Do the publishing industry really needs a Ph.D. to come out with A Quick Guide to Irish History when a program can arrange the facts into a simple narrative?
We already have the AI to piss off republicans.
My wife and I just spent a couple of weeks visiting relatives. First a week in Oklahoma and then a week in the Dallas area. We camped in an old Best Western on Stemmons Freeway in Farmer’s Branch, an older suburb, just north of the LBJ Freeway (but well south of the President George Bush Freeway). By an odd freeway logic, it was a central location for visiting a number of friends and relatives.
Sue and I grew up in Dallas. (Or, more precisely, in the suburbs of Irving and University Park, respectively). Each time we visit, the contrast between the continuities and the changes is stunning.
That was true while growing up. In one of my high school English classes, we read Silas Marner. I remember the kinship I felt when he returned to the village of his youth and it was gone, wiped out by the Industrial Revolution. Only to Marner, the reason was not explicable. It was more like a natural disaster, a hurricane, maybe, or a “leaf storm” (a wonderful image of Gabriel Marquez that’s applicable here).
Like Marner, I did not understand the process around me as I grew up and dead-end streets were built through to new houses, new shopping centers grew out of old fields, and a nearby railroad track became the Dallas North Tollway. Nor was the pain that I sometimes felt particularly ecological or political. I was saddened when fields disappeared, but it was more a dislike of change itself than a concern that something beyond that field or that railroad was lost.
Now I enter the far north Dallas area rather like someone reading tree rings. I see how far out urbanity has spread. I note where the major streets of my youth have been extended farther and farther north.
An example of change. Sue and I visited our niece in one of these newer suburbs, Frisco. Frisco is an old town located on a north-south state highway that passes less than a block from where I grew up. In the early1970s, when I first saw Frisco, it had one gas station.
Statistics can tell the next part of the story. The Handbook of Texas lets us know that its population was roughly 1800 people in 1970, 3500 in 1980, and 6100 in 1990. The North Central Texas Council of Governments takes us to the present. The 2000 census found 34,000 people. The 2004 estimated population is 66,000. The projected population in 2010 is just over 112,000.
The scale of construction is astonishing: acres of fields, to foundations, to thousands of new houses with tall roofs, postage stamp yards, and trees that I pray will grow quickly. On the inside they are quite nice.
Karen, our niece, lives in one of those houses. She teaches psychology and is the varsity girl’s soccer coach in Allen Texas, about ten miles to the east. Her husband, Eric, has a job that actually requires him to enter the city of Dallas itself. That’s a long and chewy commute, made easier (though costly) by the extension of the Dallas North Tollway.
They have good lives, and they are happy. They know there is a fundamental absurdity to this expansion, but Karen (and I think Eric, too) grew up with this, just as I did, so it’s a natural absurdity, part of life. If they feel a twinge of sadness for fields lost, they did not mention it, and I did not think to ask.
I've been reading"Huck Finn" with my sophomores for over ten years and we've been mystified by the scene where Jim's face is painted blue to accompany the"sick Arab" sign. Recently, during a presentation on the Crusades, a slide was shown. An Arab with a blue face was contending with a crusader. Can you or anyone shed some light on whatever connection there may be here?On Friday, Brian Ulrich and Richard Morgan posed several possible explanations. Now, via e-mail, Juan Cole says:"... some Berbers in Morocco paint their faces blue in war. Twain would have known that. I don't know of any group in the Levant during the Crusades that would have."
So, I'm writing this review, and struggling with an evidentiary issue which my fellow bloggers and readers should enjoy thoroughly. The author supplements his other sources -- which include oral history interviews and questionnaires -- with fictional accounts by a participant in the events. Not a lot (three in three hundred pages), and the writing is clearly rooted in firsthand observations and experiences (and it's pretty straightforward fiction, too: no 'magical realism' or postmodern irrelevancies). There's no confusion: the fiction is clearly identified as such, though there's no evidence from the text that the author asked the writer to elaborate on the historicity or imaginativeness of the stories. But there's no qualification in the text, either: he doesn't say"this is fiction, so take it with a grain of salt"; rather, it is presented as a more honest and full account than the sometimes constrained interviews.
Is this a flaw? Is this an example of innovative and creative history writing that should be lauded? Is it different because this is a book largely based on direct testimony of the same people who wrote the fictionalized accounts?
Non Sequitur: Tim Burke followed up his critical comments on Michael Moore's Farenheit 9/11 with this wonderful meditation on the power of taking the high road:
Who brought Joe McCarthy down in the end? Not somebody playing “dirty”, down in the same gutter with McCarthy, but someone who waited for their moment and caught McCarthy in a decency trap, who revealed the man’s fundamental unfairness and viciousness in part by being scrupulously decent themselves. How did Archibald Cox defeat Richard Nixon? By walking the straight and narrow. Being decent and fair and meticulous isn’t intellectual wankery: it’s hardball.Yeah.
I’m shortly to write a survey text on the Cold War, which is why I picked up Schrecker’s book, expecting to find some fresh scholarly interpretations. Schrecker and her co-authors instead cite their specifically political motive in writing: they oppose the Bush administration’s foreign policy, and want to deny “Cold War triumphalists” (Anne Coulter and Condoleeza Rice seem particular targets) of an opportunity to justify Bush’s foreign policy by portraying the Cold War as an American “victory.” Indeed, Schrecker laments, “Outside of the left and a handful of academics, few even question the notion that America ‘won’ the Cold War” (p. 2). The guilty parties include “centrist” historians (this is a rare book in which “centrist” is used as an epithet) such as John Lewis Gaddis and David Kennedy.
The book opens with several rambling essays critiquing American diplomatic historians, intellectuals, and liberals for not resisting more forcefully the main currents of “triumphalist” thought (i.e., that the United States “won” the Cold War). The volume’s heart, however, comes in a “new” look at the Cold war’s origins and effects by Schrecker, Maurice Isserman, Carolyn Eisenberg, and Jessica Wang.
In a confused essay, Schrecker and Isserman alternatively rationalize or dismiss the significance of CPUSA spying for the Soviet Union. A “tiny minority” of the CPUSA membership, they note, was involved in spying (p. 160). (Of course, that number included much of the party’s leadership.) Most U.S. spies, they reason, “were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national borders,” whose Soviet spymasters “often had to go to elaborate lengths to draw even the most committed Communists into cooperation” (p. 166). What espionage occurred didn’t really matter anyway, since Schrecker and Immerman doubt that “the history of the world [would] really have been all that different between the 1930s and 1950s” if the CPUSA had behaved differently. Why, then, does a book on US foreign policy contain a chapter on figures whose authors claim had no impact? To counter the work of “Cold War triumphalists,” who use evidence of CPUSA spying to defend the anti-communist nature of U.S. foreign policy during the 1940s. Moreover, Schrecker and Isserman note conspiratorially, U.S. archives for this period “remain largely off-limits but are selectively opened to provide materials that celebrate its Cold War triumphs” (p. 169). What materials from US foreign policy between the 1930s and 1950s remain off limits 50 years after the fact the authors do not reveal.
The Eisenberg and Wang essays offer, if anything, even less convincing attempts to mold the past to serve the needs of the authors’ contemporary policy views. Eisenberg, disturbed that Condoleeza Rice has repeatedly praised Harry Truman’s success in resisting the Soviet blockade of Berlin, contends that (a) the blockade never really occurred, at least in a technical sense; or (b) if it did occur, it was the fault of the United States, for moving forward with plans for an independent West Germany. (Her essay never really decides which of these two arguments she ultimately wants to forward.) In Eisenberg’s retelling of events, Stalin was eager for a diplomatic settlement, as was the UN, but they were undermined by Truman’s “antipathy to compromise” (p. 177). Wang’s essay also celebrates the UN, which she contends symbolized the high point of a half-century of American internationalism, which Cold War “unilateralism” then abandoned. Wang is a practitioner of the “new political history” at UCLA—a department about which I’ve written previously; her essay suggests that the new political historians should stay with strictly social history topics. Her sources on internationalism reflect the state of historiographical debate circa 1970; the essay remarkably defines the period from 1935-1941 as part of an “internationalist” era, necessary to prove that the Cold War represented a “unilateralist” reaction against a previous policy of promoting peace.
The book finishes up with an essay by political scientist Corey Robin, who notes that in the days after the 9/11 attacks, “intellectuals, politicians, and pundits—not of the radical left [of course], but mainstream conservatives and liberals—breathed an almost audible sigh of relief, almost as if they welcomed the strikes as a deliverance” from the post-1980s crisis of confidence “that the United States could no longer define its mission in terms of the Soviet menace” (p. 277). (Perhaps I was living in a different country at that time.) Robin’s chief complaint, however, seems to be with the political effects of the attacks: “9/11,” he observes with frustration, “has confirmed what conservatives have been saying for years: The world is a dangerous place” (p. 285). Indeed, he fears that the United States “may well be entering one of those famed Machiavellian moments . . . when a republic opts for the grandeur and frisson of empire” (p. 295).
In the end, the Schrecker book is less an example of history distorted by authors’ political agendas (though, as Robin’s comments suggest, it certainly is that), but of the unoriginality inherent in much of what remains of the “revisionist” critique of the Cold War. Essays regularly cite William Appleman Williams’ insights—fresh, certainly, when the Wisconsin School was at its high point in the 1960s, but a bit dated now. Schrecker contends that even without the Cold War, the United States “would have promoted capitalism”—as if the argument that a capitalist country would promote capitalism is revelatory (p. 8). And in a view dismissed by nearly all recent work on Lenin but also common among 1960s revisionists, Schrecker suggests that while “ultimately they must be judged by their record and not their intentions, the early Bolsheviks themselves did not foresee the circumstances that would lead them to become architects of a new totalitarian order in the Soviet Union” (p. 161).
In her essay, Eisenberg complains about the “unwillingness of the mass media to incorporate diverse perspectives” like those in this book to its portrayal of U.S. foreign policy (p. 175). I don’t defend the media much, but in this case, I’m in their corner.
OK, that's just mildly embarrassing, even in a country full of superlative crime fiction writers.
But this is the kind of thing that makes me ashamed of my own country. The UK Independence Party shows that it means it when it talks about disrupting the European Parliament, by choosing as its representative on the committee for women's rights and gender equality a man whose view on maternity policy is"If you want to have a baby, you hand in your resignation and free up a job for another young lady." We can now expect the nomination to be opposed and Ukip to complain that they're being victimised, no doubt. The party is also proud to report that its MEPs tore up their ballot papers in protest at a"federalist" leader... (although you won't come away from that link much the wiser as to what the story's actually about, which is the election of the former Portuguese PM, Jose Durao Barroso, as the Parliament's president). The Independent thinks that they might be back-tracking on their pledge to 'wreck' the Parliament. Well, that's not what I'm seeing here.
We elected twelve of these people (we have a total of 78) as MEPs. It makes voting for Ralph Nader look almost mature in comparison.
The question is, might there be a connection between these two stories: between voting for Agatha Christie and voting for Ukip?
Michael Moore's hijacking of Ray Bradbury's cautionary dystopia is annoying, but I'm hoping that more people will take the opportunity to return to the original. My wife is rereading Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 as we speak. I'll get to it shortly, but, to my suprise, I don't have a print copy in the house. (My wife's copy is in electronic braille.) I have The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury and a whole lot of his other works, but apparently I read my parents' copy of Farenheit 451 growing up and it's still in Maryland.
Most of what Bradbury wrote (and still writes) really qualifies as fantasy, or just literature, rather than science fiction. But he packed enough into this 1953 book .... among the projections of the book my wife has noted are:
- The world hates America. The country is at war, but the slogans are primarily about spending money and enjoying ourselves.
- Dumbing down, of course, including more and more ways to honor and reward those who master trivia
- Separation of parent and child, starting with pervasive unnecessary caesarean births, and schooling beginning at earlier and earlier ages, both for the convenience of the parents as well as the detachment of the children from emotional bonds
- Increasingly sophisticated entertainment technology, including the Walkman and large-screen TV, which provides total immersion in the media experience. People engage in highly destructive and dangerous extreme sports, in this case high-speed driving in inappropriate circumstances.
- Homogenization of entertainment and literature by eliminating stories or images which give the slightest offense to anyone
- Voting based on TV appearance.
- Finally, two purely technological issues: biometric security and the 24-hour ATM
As far as his general projections of anti-intellectualism and social norms which stress the lowest common denominator?"Sure would be more fun to read this and laugh, 'Boy, he was an alarmist!'" she said. For myself, the apparent impossibility of entirely supressing ideas, texts, movements, even with the full weight of technology and social will, is a chillingly real thing when applied to terrorists and racists, etc., as well as a heartening one applied to our beloved humanistic tradition.
Go, read it for yourself, and see!
Eric Alterman recommends Randall Kennedy's"Schooling in Equality". It's a review for TNR of Richard Kluger's Simple Justice and Michael Klarman's From Jim Crow to Civil Rights. I haven't read Klarman yet, but Kluger's book is just amazingly good, given the fact that he published it 30 years ago, so soon after the history it covered. It's great to have a new edition of it.
Liberty and Power's David Beito and Charles Nuckolls have a very provocative article,"Wrong Song of the South: The Dangerous Fallacies of Confederate Multiculturalism" at Reason. It was an excellent argument when Beito first blogged about it and it's even better as an article. In an interesting way, it plays the identity politics of the Right against the identity politics of the Left to expose the bankruptcy of both.
Hot button social issues aren't particularly good markers of the American Left and the American Right. There are simply too many evangelical feminists, gay Christians and Jews, and conservative African Americans to make it work. In any case,"One Is Enough" in Sunday's New York Times, an article about Amy Richards' decision to abort two of her triplets, provoked some very interesting discussions. See: HugoSchwyzer and Unfogged. Richards' story reminded me of Hannah Arendt's phrase about"the banality of evil."
I recommend Garry Kasparov's moving tribute to Bobby Fischer in the Wall Street Journal. It's hard to imagine that we will prosecute Fischer. His inner demons are torture enough.
Finally, just for fun, Manan Ahmed recommends"Dale Peck Reviews His Day" by Jeremy Richards.
My former student scanned and bagged the objects as if she was running on a treadmill. She recognized me, and I tried to return her nervous smile. We each asked how the other was doing and said"good." I swiped my card, and she gave me a receipt. There were bored people all around, and the whole conversation was understood in a few embarrassed glances.
"Good to see you," I said, leaving."Yeah, you too, professor," she said, flatly. I saw her feigned cheerfulness droop a little as she turned to the next customer.
Benton reflects on what he told her when she came to him, a few years earlier, for professional advice:
I should have been looking out for her. She came to me for advice. I told her something like this:"A liberal-arts degree is the best preparation for life in general, but it helps if you also have some specific, marketable skills." I had persuaded myself that I knew what I was talking about. I supported and reinforced her choices. And my vanity was gratified by the thought that I was helping her.
Okay, that is scary. I could have written that paragraph verbatim a thousand times over. I'll quote his final section at length:
All I have is an instinctive belief in the value of a liberal education without regard to its practical use. I am increasingly sure that it is wrong to encourage students (and indirectly ourselves) to justify the work and expense of education as a prelude to lucrative career opportunities. Yet I know that when so many students undertake so much debt to go to college, the link between education and future income becomes unavoidable.
It seems inevitable, though we are not yet willing to admit it, that a liberal education is becoming a practical impossibility for most young people. Or liberal education earns the justified reputation of something undertaken at one's peril. Students know they have to make a living before they can appreciate Kierkegaard. They don't have time to question their beliefs; they are too busy getting their academic tickets punched.
I understand that outlook, but students do not seem to know that even the practical choice is fraught with as much risk as following one's heart. They seem unaware of how much their drive for"success" is a construction of consumerist pressures. Perhaps careerist choices carry even more risk, since you ultimately give up what you love for the sake of some opportunity that may not exist by the time you are ready to meet it.
Of course, this kind of pontification can only come from a position of privilege
But what can I offer to my students besides the general advice to follow their talents wherever they lead?"Follow your bliss" and"find your vocation." Those remarks seem as banal and unhelpful now as when they were uttered by the wiser advisers of my youth.
Most of my students at Pasadena City College are from working-class backgrounds. To put it bluntly, I am not. Most of my students are not white. I rather obviously am. Most of 'em are first-generation college graduates, while I am the son of two Berkeley Ph.Ds. My kind and fortunate parents paid for my college education; I never had a nickel's worth of student loans. I teach at a community college, but (and this is hard to write) I would have been deeply ashamed if I had"had" to attend such an institution out of high school. All too slowly, I am unlearning my snobbery, my elitism, and my privilege, but it is a work in progress. What from my own experience can I possibly offer to my students? As much as I want to be one, how can I be a satisfactory role model for them?
In the past decade, I have had maybe 70 or 80 students whom I have mentored. They have come to office hours and made special appointments, and they have come time and time again for career advice. Many want to become professors themselves someday. I offer the same sort of airy encouragements that Mr. Benton offered. Indeed, not a semester goes by that I don't actually say:"Study what you love; the money will follow." Though it has all the depth of a Hallmark card, my students nod their heads appreciatively, confident perhaps that if Dr. Hugo believes it is true, than so it must be. As I do in my teaching, I substitute outer enthusiasm for inner certainty. I can always muster the former. It's not that I lie to them about their abilities! Rather, I find that I deliberately misrepresent the difficulties of getting tenure-track jobs in higher education. It's easier to be relentlessly optimistic.
I do have a few former students teaching now at the college level. All are adjuncts so far, waiting and hoping for the appearance of a miraculous tenure-track job. But I've run into my share of former students at Target and elsewhere; they've graduated from four-year institutions, often with history degrees. I love running into my former students and hearing their stories. But I've seen -- or imagined that I have seen -- embarrassment in the eyes of several of them, as if they worry that somehow they have let me down by working at Starbucks fulltime rather than taking out still more loans to go and get a Ph.D. And I wonder, as Benton wonders, whether all of that encouragement and advice does any good.
Year in and year out, I tell my students that their lives will be better and richer because they know about Alexander, about Antony, about Arius the Heretic. They will be better citizens of the world because they know about Luther, Leibniz, and Lloyd-George. But I went straight from high school to college, and never worked for money while in school. When my classes were over for the day at Cal, I could wander over to Strawberry Glade and read a book and think about life; I could sit in coffee shops and pontificate my day away. My students race off from my classes to their jobs and their families. And then they come to me, asking me to mentor them! I am honored and flattered; it satisfies both my vanity and my longing to help. I am so grateful for the genuine close friendships I have formed with many students over the years. But so often, so often, I wonder: What good am I, what good are we historians, if we don't have more tangible, practible advice to offer?
films, especially noir, Hollywood comedies of the 30s, historical films, horror, the Coen brothers; reading, especially crime novels and historical fiction (and meetings of the two!), eighteenth-century novels (Defoe, Fielding, etc), some sci-fi; music: ska, punk, blues, funk, Ani di Franco; cooking, organic food and the fair trade movement; horses (some teenage things you never quite get over); learning Welsh, badly; shouting at the TV (it's what happens when you live on your own); wishing I had a cat.
We welcome Sharon Howard, Cliopatriarch of Wales. Well, actually, she's in charge of most of Europe until we get the rest of the hierarchy in place ...
So, like I said. I don't watch Fox News but after that night, I decided to give my $ 10 to Robert Greenwald and his exposé OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism. Yesterday, I went to my first MoveOn.org organized screening at someone's house. It was an odd experience but the crowd was really nice and diverse. After the movie, we made some chitchat about bringing down the Man. Ok, I kid. The docu itself was ok. It effectively used the Moody memo's to show how the brass sets the agenda for the"news" everyday and how the other media outlets parrot Fox ("You can't outfox Fox"). The last few minutes were dedicated to the concentration of media in the hands of a few companies (News Corp., Clear Channel etc). I would have liked to see THAT exposé.
Still, the fact that people got together on a sunday to see a middling documentary about a cable news channel tells me something is afoot in this great nation.
Of course, the question is: Would the European notion of"Early Modern" apply or even be relevant to south Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Japan or China? It's an important discussion. An excellent point of departure for the discussion is Amit Chauduri's"In the Waiting Room of History" in the London Review of Books. It's a review of Dipesh Chakrabarti's Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. This is not one of your 100 word reviews for Choice. Prepare to spend some time with it. We'll wait for you ...
Update: David Adesnik at Oxblog corrects his mistake, which is all you can ask and more than you get with a lot of other commentators.
How many historians have written a positive review of a book, only to be chased through two subsequent issues of the journal with accusations that he hadn't sufficiently damned the book in question? I had tweaked the ire of a couple of men who were known as"the three stooges" of King-assassination conspiracy theory to a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Dr. King. One of them said that my letter defending the review was"the most atrocious, false, irresponsible, libelous letter I have ever read in a journal of history." (Both links are subscriber only, but scroll down for a taste of the review and subsequent exchanges.) I had to know that what I was writing was accurate because they accused me of libel and one of my accusers was an attorney. They haven't sued me yet.
TNR's Dale Peck has made quite a name for himself by writing take-no-quarters, slash-and-burn reviews of recent American fiction. Peck's style led to a classic denunciation by the Philadelphia Inquirer's Carlin Romano in a panel discussion at Chicago's BookExpo America in June."Peck treats the publication of a book he doesn't like as a crime," said Romano,"and I'm sorry, but books aren't crimes." I heard Peck whining on NPR this past week that the book business is a vindictive one, that he doesn't have a publisher for his next novel, and that he's reforming. In the meantime, however, his wreckage is now compiled in a new book, Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction.
John Leonard reviews Hatchet Jobs for the New York Times and is suitably critical of Peck's reviewing. Toward the end of the review, Leonard suggests some"hard won" guidelines for responsible book reviewing:
First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom.John Leonard had fiction in mind when he laid out these guidelines, but they apply as well to non-fiction. Yes, I do think that one should slay a philistine if that's what it is, but attempting to make a name for one's self by slash-and-burn reviews betrays no love of good work.
Update: Derek Catsam recommends Daniel Mendelsohn in the NYRB on Peck.
No word yet on whether Katherine Harris will be making regular guest appearances at the exhibit.
It isn't true, as Leo Tolstoy said, that"All happy families are alike." Our recent travels were family visits, in three stages, and the contrasts between the three families were quite remarkable: Local, Blended/Chosen, Scattered.
Our first stop was St. Louis, where my wife's family is centered. Both her brothers' (financial professionals) families live in, more or less, the same neighborhood that they grew up in, though both also spent time elsewhere in college and after. Her parents live in a farmhouse in southeast Kansas, a few miles from the town that they grew up in, and visit St. Louis at least monthly, spending time with their children, grandkids and friends; coming up to see us during our visit was unusual only in that we were there. My father-in-law worked for the military, and now is semi-retired, doing similar work on a contract basis. My mother-in-law, after many years out of the job market, works as a church secretary, though she also has worked as a seamstress and a teacher's aide. My sisters-in-law work, too: dental office administration and elementary school social worker. Everyone in our generation is college-educated, with a few post-graduate degrees (from St. Louis institutions) thrown in. Two of the three marriages involved childhood sweethearts; the other started as a college relationship; all the in-laws live in St. Louis; no divorces. Lutherans, mostly, and also mostly Republicans.
Our next stop was Kansas City, where my son's godmothers live. Both are teachers near retirement (one has worked for the same school district for three decades, the other in adult education as long as I've known her), and they've been together over two decades. They recently moved, but only a few miles. One has children from a previous marriage, and the grandchildren (who live in an inventive but stable three-parent lesbian family) are loved by both; the two of them have also educated and mentored a wide variety of people some of whom, like my wife, consider them surrogate or additional parents in some form or another: our son is not their only godchild. Quakers, they've been active in a wide variety of peace and social justice movements and cultural organizations.
The last stage was in Maryland, where my NY-born parents live. My father is retiring this year from the defense contractor he's worked at for 35+ years; my mother, who dropped out of the job market until her youngest was in high school, worked as a magazine editor and writer/researcher and is now doing pretty well as a freelance writer/editor. My aunts -- a librarian, a social studies teacher and a nutritionist -- live in the Northeast, where they have lived their entire lives. We live in Hawai'i, my brother is doing a post-doc in London; my cousins live in Boston (moving to New Mexico shortly), NY (going to Yale shortly), Michigan (graduate school) and New Jersey (not going anywhere anytime soon, but she's the youngest), and their career paths currently include physical therapy assistant, web designer, engineer, and Jewish social agency junior executive. My surviving grandfather splits his time between the Long Island home and the Florida condo (which belonged to my other grandparents before they passed away). The last time my mother's side of the family got together like this was my grandmother's funeral a few years back, but it used to be an annual Thanksgiving tradition. Everyone in my parents' generation is college educated (my mother is the only one without a post-graduate degree of some sort), as is almost my entire generation. Both my Ph.D. brother and I met and married our spouses in graduate school; none of the other cousins are married yet; two divorces, both by the same person, but no blending. Jewish, mostly, including several in-marriage converts, and Democrats.
The three families have so little in common, except that they are our families. There are a few things, though, which I've noticed. There's lots of two-income families.... actually, all of them. There are ways in which these families fit certain cultural stereotypes -- highly educated, mobile Jews; stable midwestern Lutherans; social justice Quakers; dark and micro-brew beer v. lite beer (and home-brew) v. wine. There are lots of ways in which these people defy stereotypes, too: for example, the religious intermarriages in both families have mostly involved in-marriage, rather than conversion away from the family faith (the exception being the marriage which binds the families together, which is both an in- and out-marriage). As my wife notes, there are hardly any divorces (and no"why are they still married?" couples, either), which may explain the positive outlook with which we approach our tenth anniversary: Our wedding was on my grandparents' fifty-first anniversary, one of the sweetest things about a sweet day. She also noted that our parents are more similar to each other: the differences really come out in our generation.
What does it mean? I don't know. I'm sure these aren't the only three functional modes, but the fact that we have all of them in our family suggests that"preserving the American family" may be more complicated than it's proponents believe. Or, as my wife noted, perhaps it'll be easier, as it's a pretty robust institution to begin with.
But, as Richard Nixon used to say,"I'd like to say this about that": The hell it is! What bastardized, compromised, and emasculated notion of Christian discipleship are they preaching down there in Texas? What allows them to demean historic Christianity with such a claim? Have we fed the poor or given tax breaks to the rich? Have we turned the other cheek or made war on the children of G_d? Have we visited them in prison or imprisoned them? And, when we visited them in prison, have we comforted or debased them? Being a Christian nation probably is not on the nation's agenda and probably shouldn't be, but it could be a high and noble calling. It's just not one we've been up to lately.
On Nightline last night, in a montage of Senate debate on the Hetero-Only Amendment, some Senator was caught saying "We need to send a message to the courts that we control the culture of this country." I couldn't decide whether to fall down or laugh out loud, so I just sat there."Control the culture of this country"?!?
I looked it up [PDF]. It was Senator Sessions, from Alabama, and the full quote is:
I believe this body can make a difference. I believe we need to speak on this issue for several reasons. One is because we need to send a message to the courts that we control the culture of this country, we control how intimate relationships like marriage ought to be defined; that is, we the people, and not unelected, lifetime-appointed judges.The full version is almost as funny as the excerpt. Start with the now-conventional idiocy of railing against judicial activism, as if an independent and active judiciary were not a coequal branch of the government and essential to a healthy democracy. I said before:
"judicial activism" is a shibboleth, code for"decisions we don't like." Judges are required to interpret the law, when cases don't quite fit the clear language of the law, and they are required to mediate cases where rights are in conflict, and they are required to provide a check on legislative actions when those actions violate constitutional protections. That's not"activism"; that's doing their job. It's bad enough that we've got mandatory sentencing [Update: Not Anymore! at least not Federal] and immense prosecutorial discretion handcuffing judges: now there is this rhetorical attack on their fundamental checks and balances role.Then you compound it with hubris of epic proportions --"we control the culture of this country" -- and the conceit that the Senate is"we the people" instead of a millionaire lawyers club most of whom haven't cast more than a twentieth of their votes across party lines.
As my colleague so succinctly put it,"You'd think that the words would catch in their throats ..."
