Category Archives: Books

Take your towel to lunch today

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See? There it is...

Do you know where your towel is?

You should. And you do — if you’re a hoopy frood. After all, a towel is so useful:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Mine is on the back seat of my car, all wadded up with a bunch of other junk. But I know where it is. Because today is Towel Day.

I don’t see any scheduled events here in SC. But Burl, there’s a guy who’s inviting people to join him for Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters at sunset in Waikiki. So we know where you’ll be…

Slight delay in the end of the world

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A couple of quick pop-culture references, and Kathryn will be grateful that neither is to “The Godfather” (don’t worry, fans, I’m sure I’ll get back to the Corleones soon enough). The first is that I’m feeling sort of like Billy Jack…

I want you to know… that I try. When Jean and the kids at the school tell me that I’m supposed to control my tendency to be a wiseacre, and be passive and respectful of other people’s beliefs like they are, I try. I really try. Though when I see this guy… who should know to keep quiet after this weekend… and I see him speaking up again, and getting quoted, and I think of the number of months that we’re probably going to have to keep hearing about it… I just go BERSERK!

I’m referring, of course, to the news that this Harold Camping guy is saying, Oops, the Rapture’s gonna come in October now.

The second cultural reference is more obscure. It’s to The Dirty Dozen. No, not the movie, but the (much superior) E.M. Nathanson novel on which it was based. The novel is so little-remembered that I had trouble finding a full preview of it on Google Books to check my quote. But near the end of the book, when Samson Posey, a Ute Indian, tries to perform a Sun Dance to get the weather to clear over Normandy, and one of the other 11 guys starts making fun of him, suggesting he’s doing a rain dance by mistake, an Army chaplain standing nearby says “Don’t mock him, fellow! Whatever your beliefs — if you have any — do not mock him!”

Which I’ve always thought was a pretty good thought to live by. (Look, if you want a blog that quotes Shakespeare, there are plenty of them out there.) A lot of people believe a lot of unlikely things. In this case, we have some people believing something that is directly refuted by the Bible. Which is inexplicable. OK, so Camping isn’t a biblical literalist. Cool. But we’re talking about a quote attributed to Jesus Christ himself saying No one knows the day or the hour…

But I try, I really try, not to make fun. You’ll note that I did not do so last week.

But this guy is really, really trying my patience, and my resolve to be tolerant and respectful…

More on The Filter Bubble

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If you were interested in this post back here, you might want to check out this review of Eli Pariser’s book, The Filter Bubble. An excerpt:

… Personalization is meant to make Internet users happy: It shows them information that mathematical calculations indicate is more likely than generalized content to be of interest. Google’s personalized search results track dozens of variables to deliver the links that a user is predicted to be most likely to click on. As a result, Google users click on more of the results that they get. That’s good for Google, good for its advertisers, good for other websites and presumably good for the user.

But Mr. Pariser worries that there’s a dark downside to giving people their own custom version of the Internet. “Personalization isn’t just shaping what we buy,” he writes. “Thirty-six percent of Americans under thirty get their news through social networking sites.” As we become increasingly dependent on the Internet for our view of the world, and as the Internet becomes more and more fine-tuned to show us only what we like, the would-be information superhighway risks becoming a land of cul-de-sacs, with each of its users living in an individualized bubble created by automated filters—of which the user is barely aware.

To Mr. Pariser, these well-intended filters pose a serious threat to democracy by undermining political debate. If partisans on either side of the issues seem uninterested in the opposition’s thinking nowadays, wait until Google’s helpful sorters really step up their game….

If you read the book, let me know how it comes out. The review said was strong on identifying a problem, not so hot on solutions. Which I wouldn’t blame on Pariser. No one else knows the answer, either.

Trotsky, and other Reds In Name Only

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The Old Man in Mexico with some American comrades.

Something about our finding and killing bin Laden in his home after all these years got me to thinking about Leon Trotsky.

Yeah, I know — not the same thing at all. We’re not the USSR, and President Obama isn’t Stalin. And people knew Trotsky was in Mexico, and he wasn’t killed by Spetznaz commandos (and I think it would kind of anachronistic if he had been).

But still, it made me think of him. The mind sometimes makes strange leaps.

Trotsky wasn’t far from my mind because a while back, I started reading a recent biography about his Mexico years. I had been attracted to it by a review in the WSJ, and asked for it and got it for my birthday or something last year. I had been really curious about the story of a top icon of the Russian Revolution living south of our border, and largely supported by American Trotskyists.

But after the first few chapters, and reading all about the soap opera with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and ALL the propaganda from Moscow and from Trotsky himself over the show trials and so forth, I got bogged down.

And the thing that wore me down the most, that frankly bored me to tears, was all the long-distance ideological arm-wrestling. You know how I have little patience with ideologues. There were all these titanic arguments going back and forth between the Trotskyites and the Stalinists about who was the REAL commie, each side working so hard to delegitimize the other (with the stakes being life or death for Trotsky), essentially accusing each other of being RINOs — Reds In Name Only.

And I just couldn’t care about any of them. I mean, talk about pointless. Trotsky was as ruthless as they come, while Stalin was one of the great monsters of the century. And it was pathetic that leftists in this country would actually take up the cudgels to defend or make excuses for either of them. The arguments over doctrine — stupid, irrelevant points of doctrine argued heatedly among people who, ironically given what they believed in, were on the wrong side of history — were particularly tedious.

At some point, I need to get back to the book and see how the guy with the ice ax got in and did the deed. But I haven’t been able to make myself do so yet…

Some nice writing; that’s all I’m saying

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I don’t know whether Joe Roman can write, but Katherine Mangu-Ward certainly can.

I generally like reading the book reviews in the WSJ (which run every day but Saturday on the paper’s THIRD opinion page), but Ms. Mangu-Ward’s review of Mr. Roman’s book Listed particularly grabbed me.

My favorite part was the first two sentences of her lede, which I highlight:

Wolves are notoriously slow to hire lobbyists. Lichen doubly so. It’s no surprise, then, that the Endangered Species Act is a law written by humans and used for human ends. Ever since the act’s 1973 debut, supporters and opponents have accused each other of playing politics with the fates of nearly extinct plants and animals. To be fair, both sides are usually right. In “Listed,” conservation biologist Joe Roman recounts the uses and abuses of a well-intentioned but all-too-human law.

The very next sentence was nice, too:

The difficulty of getting off the list of endangered species ranks right up there with unsubscribing from the Pottery Barn catalog.

I was also partial to this part:

Wolves are the exception: Yesterday, President Barack Obama swiftly and unceremoniously booted the wolves of the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes off the list. Humans have strong feelings about wolves—probably because, as predators, they have been one of our major rivals for ungulate calories over the millennia—and government officials are no exception.

I mean, apart from ending the first and last sentences with “exception,” which I just now noticed.

Yeah, I know — it’s very WSJ to run a piece casting doubt on the value of such gummint meddlin’ as the Endangered Species Act. But I’m just saying it was well-written. I always appreciate that, whatever the writer may be trying to say…

She mostly seemed to like the book except at the end, which causes her writing to take on a sharper edge:

But the book takes an abrupt turn in its final pages. Mr. Roman offers a plan “to make extinction as unacceptable as slavery and child labor” and lists nine steps—he says he drew them up with biologist Paul R. Ehrlich and others. Mr. Ehrlich is most famous for predicting, in “The Population Bomb” (1968), that overpopulation would cause mass starvation. It is his cold voice, not Mr. Roman’s friendly one, that leaps off the page: “Stabilizing the human population, even humanely reducing it, will improve the lives of people and wildlife.” How the world’s population will be “humanely” reduced isn’t explained.

Anyway, I probably won’t ever get around to the book, but I enjoyed the review. I don’t say nice things about what other people do enough, so I thought I’d say this.

And now for something completely different: Some Holy Week Ezra Pound

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Today there was a review in The Wall Street Journal of a book compiling letters that poet Ezra Pound wrote to his parents, which I read with some interest.

I don’t really know all that much about Pound. I remember something about him boxing with Ernest Hemingway, I recall that he was sort of a godfather to some of the young expatriates of that generation, and the fact that he took an EXTREME wrong turn when he came to support Fascism.

But my horror at his politics doesn’t keep me from appreciating an interesting piece of writing, any more than I dismiss Lindbergh’s achievement as an aviator because of his political sympathies.

And not being an English major or anything, I’m only familiar with one thing about his work. My uncle had this anthology of English literature lying about at the family home in Bennettsville, and I read this poem by Pound in it, back in my college days. And it’s always stuck with me as one of the most distinctive and iconoclastic portraits of Jesus I’ve ever read, even more so than Anthony Burgess’ version. Aside from the words, I like the rhythm of it; it’s almost like a sea chanty or something. I tend to like things that cause me to think a little harder and question my assumptions about someone, especially someone as important as Jesus. Even when it comes from a fascist.

This being Holy Week, I thought I’d share it:

Ballad of the Goodly Fere

Ha’ we lost the goodliest fere o’ all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O’ ships and the open sea.

When they came wi’ a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
“First let these go!” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Or I’ll see ye damned,” says he.

Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
“Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?” says he.

Oh we drank his “Hale” in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o’ men was he.

I ha’ seen him drive a hundred men
Wi’ a bundle o’ cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.

They’ll no’ get him a’ in a book I think
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.

If they think they ha’ snared our Goodly Fere
They are fools to the last degree.
“I’ll go to the feast,” quo’ our Goodly Fere,
“Though I go to the gallows tree.”

“Ye ha’ seen me heal the lame and blind,
And wake the dead,” says he,
“Ye shall see one thing to master all:
‘Tis how a brave man dies on the tree.”

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.

He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.

I ha’ seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o’ Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi’ his eyes like the grey o’ the sea,

Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret
Wi’ twey words spoke’ suddently.

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea,
If they think they ha’ slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.

I ha’ seen him eat o’ the honey-comb
Sin’ they nailed him to the tree.

Standing up for civilization, harrumph

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Ever since the WSJ added a third daily opinion page (when they followed the rest of the industry and went to narrower pages to save newsprint), at about the same time we were cutting back on pages at The State in my desperate bid to get through bad times without cutting people (see how well that worked out?), I have…

Wait. I got lost in the multiple parentheticals… oh, yeah… ever since then, I’ve been hooked on the daily book review that runs all the way down the right-hand side of that page, Mondays through Fridays. For the first time in I don’t know when, I go into Barnes & Noble and am well familiar with pretty much everything on the “new arrival” shelves. And I’ve always got a list of books I want when Father’s Day, my birthday and Christmas roll around. To the point that I’m backed up on reading, and so intimidated by the stack of new books that I avoid the issue by rereading the Aubrey/Maturin series instead (I’m now on my fifth time through The Fortune of War).

But here’s another one I might have to request and add to the shelf, reviewed in today’s paper:

Among academics, the word “civilization” has long had a sinister ring to it, carrying associations of elitism and luxury. Worse, it is linked to imperialism, having provided Europeans with the justification for their far-flung conquests in centuries past—and, these days, for endless self-flagellation.

With “In Search of Civilization,” John Armstrong, the resident philosopher at the Melbourne Business School in Australia, sets out to restore the reputation of a word that, to him, represents something infinitely precious and life-sustaining, a source of strength and inspiration. The great civilizations, he says, provide “a community of maturity in which across the ages individuals try to help each other cope with the demands of mortality.”

As he makes clear, his purpose is not to provide a history of various civilizations or to update Samuel Huntington’s seminal 1996 book on the post-Cold War world, “The Clash of Civilizations,” though he cites Huntington’s conclusion that today’s real conflict is between civilization and barbarism. Mr. Armstrong wishes to convey what the idea means to him personally…

Indeed. Too bloody right. The real conflict — at home and abroad, is between civilization and barbarism. And it so often seems that civilization is losing, especially on the domestic front. And most especially in our politics, increasingly defined by mutually exclusive factions screaming pointlessly at each other.

I mean, what’s the world coming to when a guy who is supposedly all dedicated to having a civil blog starts using modifiers like “bloody?” I ask you…

Anyway, the book sounds interesting, and possibly edifying. I like the ending. After lamenting the state of the humanities in academia, the review concludes:

Our artists, too, have failed: The author sees Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and their ilk as representatives of a decadent cultural elite that insists on provocation and newness as the only criteria for judging art. “Mockery, irony and archness,” Mr. Armstrong says, “is not what we need.” What is needed is hope and confidence. The treasures are all there to be rediscovered, if only we would bother.

Indeed, again. And harrumph, say I.

You’ve got to be kidding me

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Just saw this — significantly, while I saw it on thestate.com, it’s being reported out of The Associated Press’ New York office — and I’m thoroughly boggled yet again:

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is writing memoir

By HILLEL ITALIE – AP National Writer

NEW YORK — Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has been busy trying to close her state’s $700 million budget gap, but she has found time for a more personal project, jotting down thoughts and memories during quiet moments in the early morning, late at night and on weekends.

She is writing a memoir.

“I will tell you that since the election it was amazing the number of people of people who wanted to know my story, about the challenges of growing up and the challenges of running for office and what got me through it,” the 39-year-old Republican, the nation’s youngest governor, told The Associated Press during a recent telephone interview….

Note that last bit: “the nation’s youngest governor.”

Indeed. She hasn’t done anything yet, and she’s writing a memoir!?!?!? Of what?!?!? I’ve known her for years, and nothing worth writing a book about has happened during that time. Maybe there’s a lot of fascinating stuff that happened before then, that I haven’t heard about — or heard her say over and over again on the stump. (You know the drill: “I’m the daughter of…,” etc.)

Of course, you know why she’s doing this, and why it’s being revealed through a national medium. For the same reason Mike Huckabee is doing a book tour, and Sarah Palin before him.

I hate even to write the words, but she thinks she’s presidential timber. There’s one thing that DOES set her apart, of course, and would be worth exploring in the book: She holds the record among SC governors for having her head turned by White House hubris. Our last four governors (each of them with less justification than his precedessor) all harbored presidential ambitions. But they, at least, waited until the got elected governor before contemplating such things. Not our Nikki. In her mind, she had already skipped over the whole being-governor thing about six months, and started looking beyond it, before she was elected.

I don’t know how much more of this I can stand. Remember my post the other day, listing three examples illustrating how “Our young governor’s presumption apparently knows no bounds?” Well, add this to the list.

A memoir. Sheesh.

Get ready to read a book, y’all — One Book

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Belinda Gergel called me — and 150 or so other people — a week or two ago and asked me to be part of the effort to get Columbia to read a book together.

She called me because I’d been there before. Way back at the end of the last century, I read something about the Seattle librarian who came up with this idea to get everybody in the city to read a book together. The idea caught on, and other cities started doing thesame. I asked why not Columbia as well (or did I ask why not South Carolina? I forget, and can’t find my columns about it)? The idea appealed to my communitarianism. I’m all about reading, and books, and ideas, and when I’m reading a book I like to talk about it, and I could think of few things cooler than reading a really good book, and wanting to talk about it, and then having the satisfaction of everybody else I ran into having read it, too. Y’all are familiar with my frustration that it’s hard to find anyone other than Mike Fitts who is as into the Aubrey/Maturin universe as I am — Tolkien fanatics have their support groups, but what about those of us who want to read O’Brian over and over? Confession here — I’m now progressing (if one can call such “Groundhog Day” repetition progress) through my fifth reading of Desolation Island. Anyone want to talk about the charms of Mrs. Wogan, or the horror of seeing the Waakzaamheid go down with all hands in the Roaring Forties? Anyone? Anyone? That’s what I thought.

But I digress, as usual.

Claudia Brinson and I, with the help of some nice folks over at the SC Arts Commission, then launched an effort to get everyone to read Fahrenheit 451. My choice, of course. And it was moderately successful — I spoke to some book clubs that joined in the effort. Then we were going to do it again, but we couldn’t agree on a book (the committee wanted to go in one direction, I wanted to go in another), and it just sort of petered out.

But now Belinda, and the Richland County Public Library, are launching the effort on a grander scale. The above picture is from a reception at the library Thursday night, where Belinda addressed the core group she had assembled so she could send us out as book missionaries. We got buttons to wear and everything (I still have a bag full of buttons with the numbers “451” in flames, which I ran across when I was cleaning out my office at The State.) The reception was nice, although I didn’t see any beer. Just wine. Belinda urged us to enjoy ourselves but to be in by 2 a.m. That got a good laugh, as everyone imagined this bookish crowd running riot in the streets into the wee hours.

Here’s some info Belinda sent out after the reception:

What is One Book, One Columbia?

The City of Columbia and Richland County Public Library (RCPL) have joined forces to launch their first citywide reading adventure, One Book, One Columbia, and all residents of Columbia and Richland County are invited to read the book between April 1 and May 15 then share their experiences with friends and neighbors. Numerous discussions and programs centered around the book will take place during the reading period.

What book has been selected?

The first selection for this annual occurrence is Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years by AmyHill Hearth, Elizabeth Delany and Sarah Delany. This best-selling book tells the story of two remarkable sisters, career trailblazers, who charted their own path in the world, guided by the strength they gained from faith and family. The incredible stories of “Queen Bess” and “Sweet Sadie,” as they were known to their family, were captured by one-time Columbia resident and author Amy Hill Hearth. Upon its publication in 1993, The New York Times said of Having Our Say: “The Delany sisters were taught to participate in history, not just witness it, and they have the wit to shape their history with style… they make each memory vivid…they are literature’s living kin.”

How can I participate?

Read the book

The book is available at RCPL locations, or is available for purchase at Barnes and Noble and other retailers.

Talk to your family, friends, and neighbors about the book

Get your friends and family in on the act! An important aspect of the One Book experience is talking about what you read with others. Be on the lookout for residents wearing a One Book, One Columbia button around town – these Reading Advocates will definitely be ready to talk Having Our Say!

Participate in a One Book, One Columbia book club or event

RCPL will have special One Book, One Columbia book club meetings and events throughout April and early May at their branches. Other community organizations are getting creative with their plans: discussions, art, historic tours, and activities for kids are just a few of the ways the community has embraced the One Book, One Columbia effort. Visit www.myrcpl.com/onebook for full details.

Get connected

Visit the One Book, One Columbia page on Facebook and “like” to get all of the latest news.

I invite all of y’all to get involved, especially if you’re in a book club or something.

Now, before you say, “But that book doesn’t interest me,” allow me to be brutally honest, or perversely contrarian, or whatever: I wouldn’t have picked this book, either. It’s the kind that most modern book-clubby people would pick. It’s definitely the kind Belinda would pick — hey, it’s the kind of book Belinda would write. But it’s not exactly the first thing I’d grab off the shelf.

How should I put this? There’s a cultural divide here, perhaps effectively symbolized by the fact that there was wine at the reception, but no beer. I’m not saying that to be critical, far from it. I’m just… well, I’ll get to my point in a minute. I’m just saying, different strokes and all that.

This is related to the trouble we had coming up with a second book back when I tried to start a movement like this. I wanted to read another book like the Bradbury one. I wanted something else from the modern canon, the kinds of books that were required reading when I was in high school: 1984, The Sun Also Rises, Brave New World, Crime and Punishment if we wanted to get heavy, Catch-22, Steppenwolf, Stranger in a Strange Land, or if we wanted to be more modern, High Fidelity. I definitely would have been up for Huck Finn. The rest of the committee wanted … something by a contemporary author, someone one could invite to come speak and participate, preferably Southern, probably a woman. Hey, I was willing to read a book by a woman — but the committee rejected To Kill a Mockingbird, probably because they thought it too obvious or trite or whatever.

Thing is, there aren’t many books by living authors that interest me enough to want to read them with a group and discuss them. And I’ve also got this thing of wanting to read books I like over and over. (How about that Mrs. Wogan, huh? Anyone?) But there’s also the problem that I’m not that interested in the kinds of books that book clubs read. The last time I knew of a book club reading a book I wanted to read (aside from the Bradbury book, and I instigated that), it was James Fallows’ Breaking The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, which I had reviewed in the paper and a Heathwood book club asked me to address them about. That was 1996. Mostly, book clubs want to read, well, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother or some such.

This book that Columbia is going to read isn’t exactly that, but it isn’t exactly the sort of thing I usually read, either. It’s… social history, judging it by its cover. I’m an old-school Great Men Fighting Wars kind of history buff, and that’s what I tend to read when I read nonfiction.

Which is why — and this is where I come to my point (remember, I promised I would) — it’s probably a good idea for me to read this book. And why you probably should, too. Broaden our horizons.

Also, I’ve promised I would. I’ve been wearing the button and everything. I’d best go get a copy. I’ll keep you posted — and we can discuss it. Which will be cool.

The kind of biographies I USUALLY read...

Who are your Top Five Presidents?

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Salon is SO predictable. For President’s Day, they post a piece posing the question, “Who’s the worst president of them all?” And of course, since that site is totally in the grip of Bush Derangement Syndrome (still), it boils down to a choice between George W. Bush and someone else. In this case, Buchanan.

Of course, being Salon, that’s why they ran it. But you know where they would go before you clicked on the link, right? So partisan. So parochial. So lacking in historical perspective.

Yawn.

Me, I’m not interested in a worst, or a worst list, because that just doesn’t seem in the spirit of Presidents’ Day, which is about celebrating rather than tearing down. So, who are your Top Five, All Time, Desert-Island presidents?

Oh, and if you include Barack Obama, which to me would be the flip side of picking W. as the worst, as if you can’t think outside your own 21st century chauvinism, I’ll just quote Barry at you:

Couldn’t you make it any more obvious than that? What about the Beatles? What about the Rolling Stones? What about…Beethoven? Track one side one of the Fifth Symphony?…

(You sort of have to know Barry to get that. And if you don’t, I definitely recommend that you read High Fidelity, which is where I got this mania for Top Five Lists. The movie’s fine, but read the book.)

My own list is a little shaky, but I’ll just throw some out there to get this started:

  1. Abraham Lincoln — The guy who held us together at the fulcrum of our history, and did it with heroic force of will and epic strength of character while at the same time maintaining his own instinctive humility. He seemed at times to stand alone, politically, in his insistence on holding the nation together (and thank God he did). No one outdoes him in rising above finger-in-the-wind politics to embody leadership; only Washington and FDR come close. That brooding statue at the memorial is the visual evocation of what I’m talking about, which is what makes it so iconic. Of course, if you’re of pacifist tendencies, you have to note that no one person in our history was more singlehandedly responsible for the shedding of more American blood — without his force of will, the nation likely wouldn’t have stayed the course that long. But then, you have to ask yourself, was it worth it? Unfortunately, we’re still fighting over that in SC.
  2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt — Again, almost superhuman leadership through crises of such scope and sweep that they stagger the mind. Argue all you want about the effectiveness of the New Deal, I think it was this cripple’s ebullient refusal to be a cripple, or let his country wallow in its troubles, that pulled us through the Depression more than anything. As for the Second World War — the nation was right to feel panicky when he died just before we’d finished winning it; his leadership was that critical on an abstract, spiritual level. The fact that we went ahead and won it quickly is a testament to what he’d already done, but also, it should be said, proof that the nation’s greatness and strength exceeds that of one man, however great the man. You could say that anybody who was president through those crises would be deemed great after they ended successfully. But I would say the nation was very fortunate to have this particular man at that time. And the people of this country knew it, which is why they elected him four times.
  3. John Adams — OK, he’s not necessarily the greatest AS president (in fact, that was one of the low points of his career), and sure, there’s that business where he let the more partisan Federalists maneuver him into the Alien and Sedition Acts. It’s just that, if you take his whole life — and his whole adult life pretty much was devoted to getting this country started, being the most eloquent advocate for independence, getting backing from abroad (the French, the Dutch) for the revolution, suggesting Washington to head the Continental Army, (and suggesting Jefferson do the final writing on the Declaration), and on and on — it’s hard to imagine one guy contributing so much to a new country. But he did. I guess I’m putting him on here as a sort of Lifetime Achievement Award.
  4. George Washington — Back when I was in college, it wasn’t fashionable to emphasize Washington as much as some of the other Founders. You know, because he was so obvious, it was uncool. (We were like Barry, in other words.) I tended to focus on the idea guys — Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton. But over time, I’ve come to understand better the importance of his leadership — both in terms of being an inspirational leader that the country could rally around (something he cultivated consciously, which would make some dismiss him, but I think he saw what the country needed and provided it), and in terms of his self-effacing refusal to become a king or a facsimile of one. In other words, my understanding and appreciation has progressed beyond the cherry-tree myth.
  5. Theodore Roosevelt — I used to think that Teddy was on Mount Rushmore for the same reason that people tend to put W. and Obama on their best and worst lists (depending on their inclinations): He was the president at the time, so they put him up there. But having read the first book in Edmund Morris’ trilogy (I need to get to the second; it’s sitting on my bookshelf waiting), I’m far more convinced of the role he played in transitioning the nation from what had been since 1776 and taking it to what it would be in the 20th century. His building up of the Navy would have been enough to get him on a Top Ten list. But then you look at his Progressive initiatives, his passion for reform, and that takes you much further. A lot of detractors would dismiss his imperialism, but I think that’s another sort of temporal chauvinism — applying today’s standards to a man of another time. I would look at the positive side of that — he saw the importance of the United States taking its place alongside the “Great Nations of Europe,” and saw aggressive posture as essential to that. In other words, you can take his “Bully!” a couple of ways. But in my book, as you know, I think the world is better off with the United States in the leading role, rather than some of those “Great Nations,” as they were then. And I worry about a future time when a nation that would never, ever produce a TR is in that role. Roosevelt personified American vigor, optimism, innovation and industry, making him a sort of archetype, an embodiment of the nation at that point in history — much the way JFK did later.

Wow. Barry would really be dismissive of MY list. It’s like, Mount Rushmore minus Jefferson, plus two. But I can’t help it; the “name” presidents do tend to be among the best, if you’re honest about it. (And I was going to put Jefferson on there, crediting him for the Louisiana Purchase and dealing with the Barbary Pirates — both flying in the face of his own ideology, and I love it when politicians rise above their party lines — but I wanted the other five on there more.

Go ahead, argue with me.

Stand in the place where you live

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Strong misgivings: Yossarian and the chaplain.

For the longest time, I didn’t have a quotation on my Facebook profile. This didn’t seem right. I’m all about words. I’m all about pithy expressions of one’s world view, yadda, yadda. (Although I fear that now that I no longer have the discipline of writing a weekly column, I’ve gotten somewhat lazy about it, hence the “yadda, yadda.”)

Loads of other people — people who were not overly thoughtful students of rhetoric, judging by the quotations they chose — had multiple quotations. They had all sorts of things they wanted to say — or rather, things they wanted to let other people say for them.

But the thing is, I like so MANY things that I read — one of my problems in reading books is that, as I read them, I follow people around reading great passages aloud to them (and a well-written book will have at least one such passage per page), which is why people avoid me when I’m reading books — that the idea of singling out one, or two, or even 10 such quotes just seemed too restrictive. I thought, What is that good that I’m willing to have it almost as a personal epitaph? People will see that and think this sums me up. What quotation is there that I like that much?

It would need to be semi-original (obviously, if it were entirely original, it wouldn’t be a quotation). It couldn’t be trite. I couldn’t have seen anyone else use it. It needed to say something I believe. And it needed to be something that has truly stuck with me over time, as opposed to, say, the funniest recent thing I’ve read on Twitter.

So one day it struck me that I should post this:

“I wouldn’t want to live without strong misgivings. Right, Chaplain?”
— Yossarian, in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22

So I did.

And for the longest time, that stood alone, and I was satisfied to let it do so. I liked it on a number of levels. For instance, in a day when our politics are dominated by people who are SO DAMNED SURE they’re right and other people are wrong, it had a certain countercultural UnParty flavor to it. At the same time, it’s not an existential statement of doubt — the fact that he’s saying it to a chaplain, one who certainly believes in God (although in an unorthodox way, being an Anabaptist), anchors it in belief, but still expresses the idea that one should always be willing to question one’s assumptions.

It also said something I wanted others to know about me. Because I tend to argue whatever position I’m arguing rather tenaciously, even vociferously, people tend to think I’m inflexible. They’re wrong about this. I can usually think of all the reasons I might be wrong just as readily as they can, perhaps even more readily. (After all, one of the main steps in building an argument is imagining all the objections to it.) For instance, take our arguments over the Iraq War, or the debates I have with libertarians. My interlocutors think I’m a bloodthirsty war lover, and a rigid authoritarian. But I’m not, not really. I have a tendency to argue very insistently with your more radical libertarians because I think they go overboard, and that I have to pull REALLY HARD in the other direction to achieve any balance. And on the subject of the war, well… when you reach the conclusion that military action is necessary, and that action is initiated, I feel VERY strongly that you have to see it through, and that the time for debating whether to initiate it is long past. At least, that’s the way I saw the Iraq situation. That doesn’t mean I didn’t think there were viable arguments against it in the first place — I was just unpersuaded by them.

I suppose I could go on and on about why I like the quotation, but that’s not what this post is about.

This post is about the fact that I thought that quote was sort of lonesome, so I added another today:

“Stand in the place where you live.”
— R.E.M.

And here’s why I picked this one.

I’ve always had a beef with people who constantly tear down the place where they live. You know, the whiners who always want to be someplace else. The people who seem to think that if it’s local, it’s no good. These people are destructive. They’re not good neighbors to have.

You know that I’m a born critic, and I’m constantly expressing dissatisfaction with aspects of Columbia, or South Carolina. But I do it from a love of my home, and from a determination to make it better. If there’s something you don’t like about your home, you should be trying with all your might to make it better.

To me, this is a fundamental moral obligation. And like most true believers, I can find Scripture to back it up. Remember the passage that Nathan Ballentine came up with to encourage me when I got laid off? It was Jeremiah 29:11:

For I know well the plans I have in mind for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare, not for woe! plans to give you a future full of hope.

Well, when I looked that up, I found that I liked what preceded that just as much, the passage in which the prophet told the people not to whine about being in exile, but to affirmatively embrace the place where they were, and get on with life in it:

Thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I exiled from Jerusalem to Babylon:
Build houses to dwell in; plant gardens, and eat their fruits.
Take wives and beget sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters husbands, so that they may bear sons and daughters. There you must increase in number, not decrease.
Promote the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you; pray for it to the LORD, for upon its welfare depends your own.

Let’s repeat that last:

Promote the welfare of the city to which I have exiled you; pray for it to the LORD, for upon its welfare depends your own.

Amen, I say unto you. Stand in the place where you live.

Dick Winters is gone, and I never did shake his hand…

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Dick Winters has died. “Captain Winters,” I think of him as, from the time when he commanded Easy Company of the 506th PIR,101st Airborne Division — although on D-Day, the day on which his actions should have earned the Congressional Medal of Honor, he was still a lieutenant, and by the time the company had captured Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest he was a major, and battalion commander.

Yes, the guy who was the main character in “Band of Brothers.”

He was a peaceful, modest man who, when war was thrust upon him and the rest of the world, discovered talents and personal resources that would otherwise likely have gone unsuspected. The video clips above and below, with actor Damien Lewis in the role of Winters, perfectly illustrates the qualities that Stephen Ambrose described in the book that inspired the series: Mainly, an uncanny coolness under fire, and certain, unhesitating knowledge of exactly what to do in a given situation — knowledge which he quickly and effectively communicated to his men in real time, with a minimum of fuss. The video clips show how Winters led a tiny remnant of Easy Company (of which he was only acting commander, since the CO was missing, later found to be dead) to take several well-defended, entrenched guns trained on Utah Beach — saving untold numbers of GIs — with only a couple of casualties among his own men. This was on his very first day in combat. The action is used today at West Point as an illustration of how to take a fixed position.

This guy has long been associated in my mind with the definition of the word, “hero.”

In later years, when he was interviewed in old age about the things that happened in 1944-45, you could still see the manner of man he was. His manner was that of a man you’d be confident to follow, a man you’d want to follow if you had to go to war, while at the same time being perfectly modest and soft-spoken about it. And on this link you’ll see what some of his men thought of him.

As I wrote about him last year:

Over the last few years I had occasion to visit central Pennsylvania multiple times, while my daughter was attending a ballet school up there. Almost every time I went there, I thought about going over to Hershey to try to talk to Dick Winters, the legendary commander of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. He was the leader — one of several leaders, but the one everyone remembers as the best — of the company immortalized in Stephen Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers, and the HBO series of the same name (the best series ever made for television).

But I never did. As much as I wanted just to meet him, to shake his hand once, I never did. And there’s a reason for that. A little while ago, I was reminded of that reason. The History Channel showed a special about D-Day, and one of the narrators was Winters, speaking on camera about 60 years after the events. He spoke in that calm, understated way he’s always had about his heroics that day — he should have received the Medal of Honor for taking out those 105mm pieces aimed at Utah Beach, but an arbitrary cap of one per division had been place on them, so he “only” received the Distinguished Service Cross.

Then, he got a little choked up about what he did that night, having been up for two days, and fighting since midnight. He got down on his knees and thanked God for getting him through that day. Then he promised that, if only he could get home again, he would find a quiet place to live, and live out the rest of his life in peace.

I figure a guy who’s done what he did — that day and during the months after, through the fighting around Bastogne and beyond into Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest itself — deserved to get his wish. He should be left in peace, and not bothered by me or anyone else.

So I’ve never tried to interview him.

Well, I never did impose upon him to get that handshake, even though I’ve been to his general neighborhood again since I wrote that. And that causes me now a mixture of satisfaction and regret.

I found “Championship Vinyl” (and you can’t prove I didn’t)

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See where it says "shop to let"? And do you see any window-shoppers?

Well, I told you I would find the former site of “Championship Vinyl,” the record shop in High Fidelity, and I did. And no one (except maybe Nick Hornby) can tell me I’m wrong.

It satisfies the criteria:

  1. It’s in Holloway.
  2. It’s just off the Seven Sisters Road.
  3. It’s in a location that guarantees the “minimum of window-shoppers” — in other words, the only customers are those geeky young males who go out of their way to seek the place out.
  4. I was looking for a vacant space, on the theory that since the book was published 15 years ago, and since Rob was trending toward changing his life for the better toward the end, that he would have moved on from running the store, or moved it to a better location, or something by now. I mean, he and Laura would have some kids by now. Any road, this is a good theory for me to have to explain that it’s not actually there, since, you know, it never really existed.

I made up that last criterion, but the first three are in the book.

So, you ladies are wondering — just how patient is my wife, to go along to places like this? Well, she didn’t. This was the one thing I did

Unfortunately, the souvenir shop wasn't open. I had wanted one of those scarves...

on my own. Today was the day we were leaving London for Oxford, and she just wanted to get up and get ready. So I got up before she did, hopped the Jubilee line down to Green Park and got on the Picadilly way out to Islington, to Holloway Road, and hiked over to Seven Sisters.

Then, after “finding” Championship Vinyl (it was the first street off Seven Sisters with some actual commercial fronts off the main road) on Hornsey Road, I walked back east until I got to Arsenal Stadium, the scene of other Hornby tales. At Arsenal, at least, I wasn’t the only geek taking pictures of the stadium — but the others were English football fans. One guy was having his wife take his picture there while she tried to keep the kids in order.

After I found the Arsenal Tube station (this required asking directions four times, twice from people who did not speak English), I rode back to our stop, and left Swiss Cottage station with sadness. I really, really love the Underground. (There’s no other way I could have gone all the way to Islington in a city this crowded and done all that walking about and gotten back in less than two hours.)

When I got back, J had packed for both of us, and we took a taxi to Victoria Coach Station for the ride to Oxford. Come to think of it, she really is enormously patient with me…

Oh, and if you wonder why I would want to do this… well, you just have to read High Fidelity. The movie was great, but the novel was much better.

Or maybe THIS is it, a couple of doors down. I can see how experts could in good faith disagree...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Tourist

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Sitting in the Detroit airport, thinking about our eventual destination…

Maybe I’m not, as friends and family seem to think, Jethro. But I am an … idiosyncratic sort of tourist.

Sure, I want to see the usual things in and around London – the Tower, the Bridge, maybe Stonehenge when we get out of town. My granddaughter wants to see Mme. Tussaud’s. I will also reluctantly accompany her onto The Eye, even though the smallest carnival Ferris Wheels give me the fantods.

But I hope she and my wife will indulge me on a few somewhat more oblique digressions.

My notion of what to see Over There is heavily influenced by fiction. This means that I want to see places where people who never actually existed didn’t actually do the things that I read about. That means some of these sights aren’t much to look at, while some are entirely imaginary. But I want to see where they would be if they did exist. Hard to explain.

I’m not entirely alone in this. Some of the more esoteric (I thought) sights have been sought out by other fiction geeks ahead of me – which will save me time in “finding” them. Others are a bit more problematic.

Some examples:

  • The one that causes the most eyebrow-raising when I mention it (so I’ve stopped mentioning it) is Championship Vinyl. You know, the record shop in High Fidelity. Yes, I know it’s not real. But I want to find where it would be if it did exist. Fortunately, Nick Hornby supplies some good clues (“We’re in a quiet street in Holloway, carefully placed to attract the b are minimum of window-shoppers…” near Seven Sisters Road…). When I find the perfect location, I suspect it will be a vacant storefront or some such. Nevertheless, I’ll take a picture to prove I “found” it. And if I don’t find a likely location, I’ll console myself by heading over a few blocks to Arsenal Stadium (Fever Pitch).
  • I had thought no one else would ever think of this one, but I was wrong (link): I want to see the path in Hampstead Heath (just a few blocks from our hotel) where Gen. Vladimir was assassinated by Karla’s people at the start of Smiley’s People. Maybe I could even find the fork in the tree where George found the tattered packet of Gauloises with the crucial negative in it. If so, I’ll get a picture of that, too.
  • Of course, there’s always Smiley’s flat, and I know the actual address.
  • I’ll go see the new MI6 HQ, which le Carre called “the River House” in The Night Manager. But what I really want to see is The Circus. Fortunately, others have identified it as being this building. And it’s near some great book shops, so my wife might not mind this detour too much.
  • The Islington highway exit where Arthur Dent was dropped off when he returned to Earth at the start of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
  • Tea at Fortnum’s. OK so this is a typical tourist thing. But here’s my reason for wanting to do it: When Percy Alleline confronts Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, accusing him of consorting with “defector” Rikki Tarr, a long stream of things run through Guillam’s head in an instant (one of the best passages of that sort I’ve read outside Dostoevsky). But what he says is, “Sure, Chief. Rikki and I have tea at Fortnum’s every afternoon.” Like a couple of scalphunter tough guys would do that. His facetiousness saves him. Anyway, that’s what got me interested in having tea at Fortnum’s: I want to do something that two people who never existed didn’t even do in fiction. Also, I think my wife will enjoy it.
  • Finally, I’d really love to find some landmarks for the Aubrey/Maturin novels, but I know that after all this time it will be hard to find places that look just as they did in the early 19th century. For instance, can I find anything that looks like the Grapes, in the liberties of the Savoy? Or, is the old Admiralty building still in use, where Jack and other officers paced the First Lord’s waiting room, hoping for a ship? We’ll see…

So you see, I’ll be busy.

But you know what I want to do the most? Find and experience things I never even thought of, things I didn’t plan. The places and things I’ll just run across and be delighted by – those are the greatest rewards of travel, I find.

Don’t you?

Oprah helps out another struggling writer

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Got an ad from Barnes & Noble via email saying, “Just Announced!… Oprah’s Latest Book Club Pick.”

Turns out it was something called A Tale of Two Cities by one Charles Dickens. I’m glad Oprah decided to help the guy out. He deserves a wider audience. I see he’s from London. Maybe I’ll look him up when I’m there at the end of the month, give him a little publicity on the blog.

This reminds me of two things:

  1. I still haven’t read that book. I’ve started a couple of times, but didn’t get into it, which my eldest daughter finds incredible, since it’s one of her faves. Maybe I should try again, after I get done reading Tony Blair’s book. I’m in a sweat to finish Tony’s, you know, in case I run into him over there. What if I I ran into him at Starbucks or something (hey, it’s a small country), and he asked what I thought of his book and I hadn’t read it? What a proper flat I should look. (And yes, I know my British slang needs updating. It’s not even up to Dickens’ era, being stuck in about 1810.)
  2. I read an interesting book review this morning, about a book titled The Other Dickens, a tale of Charles’ wife and how beastly he was to her. Which, of course, also reminded me of how I hadn’t read A Tale of Two Cities.

About that review, in the WSJ — I was struck by this bit of criticism:

There is a rather significant moment in 1849 when he insists on chloroform at the birth of Henry Dickens. A tender gesture aimed at sparing his wife pain? Ms. Nayder has other ideas: “a victory of male medical expertise over natural forces,” she decides, in which such “victory” is “compromised by the method through which it is achieved: the dissociation of mind from her body . . . and her consequent objectification.” This is sharply put, but you have a feeling that Dickens’s omitting to send out for anesthetics would have been equally culpable.

The bit about “objectification” gestures at another of Ms. Nayder’s contexts, which is her determination to give Catherine not so much a life of her own as one acceptable to the ukases of 21st-century academe. Nobody in “The Other Dickens”—remember that this is the age of Gladstone and Disraeli—does anything that is merely idiosyncratic: Having been “disempowered,” they perform “transgressive acts” that may or may not leave them in a state of “valorization.”

In other words, the author was somehow ideologically incapable of reaching the conclusion that maybe, just maybe, Dickens was, as an individual person, simply a jerk.

This got me to wondering about something else, after having watched “Frida” last night and being immersed in arguments among Mexican communists back in the 1930s: Which is more given to silly, pompous jargon — feminism or Marxism. Discuss.

Fiction tries to describe a strange new truth

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Sure, he wove a tangled web out there in the cold, but in a way things were more straightforward for le Carré's Alec Leamas.

I really value my Wall Street Journal. Every day, it reminds me what a well-run, thoughtful newspaper that still has some resources to work with can do. And in spite of its staid, conservative reputation, it manages to do some really interesting, creative things.

Graham Greene, creator of Our Man in Havana, would have had just the right touch.

Today, we see what happened when the editors got this idea: With WikiLeaks creating a reality that no novel ever imagined, what would three spy novelists have to say about this strange new world? What does spy fiction look like in a world without secrets?

I devoured it, as I am a fan of spy fiction. And while I am not a reader of any of the three writers they chose (Alex Carr, Joseph Finder and Alex Berenson), they rose well to the occasion of having to write on a newspaper deadline. Sure, they lacked the mastery of the language of John le Carré, and the dry wit of Len Deighton. And none of them have the touch of the late Graham Greene, whose sense of the absurd (think Our Man in Havana, to which le Carré paid tribute in The Tailor of Panama) would fit so well the perversity of Julian Assange et al.

But as I say, they did fine, each taking a different approach. Alex Carr did the best job of portraying the human cost of trashing security, with a U.S. intelligence officer anxiously racing to warn her Afghan source that he has been compromised by WikiLeaks’ callous disregard for his young life.

Those of you who still fail to get, on a gut level, what is wrong with what Wikileaks does should read that one if none of the others.

Joseph Finder had the most complete, in the literary sense, tale, managing to be fairly clever and tell a full story with a twist at the end, and do it all in just over 1,000 words — the length of one of my columns when I was with The State.

Alex Berenson sets a scene pretty well in his piece, but doesn’t resolve anything. It’s a mere snapshot smack in the middle of a story. I still enjoyed reading it.

Yes, it’s fiction, but fiction can communicate truths that journalism cannot. Most of what helps us understand our world, really get it, is in the mortar that lies between the solid fact-bricks that journalism provides. That mortar consists of subjective impressions, emotions, unspoken thoughts — things only an omniscient observer (something that only exists in fiction) can provide.

If you can read those three pieces — I’m never sure what people who don’t subscribe can and can’t read on that site — please do.

What would Len Deighton's Harry Palmer do?

That wonderful, marvelous Adam Smith

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I said something about “Adam Smith sermonizing” in The Wall Street Journal back on this post.

Speak of the devil, I just happened to read a book review in that paper this morning about the book, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (I am not making this title up), By Nicholas Phillipson.

Talk about your gushing. The reviewer writes, breathily,

Even his appearance is a mystery. The only contemporary likenesses of him are two small, carved medallions. We know Adam Smith as we know the ancients, in colorless stone.

It is a measure of Nicholas Phillipson’s gifts as a writer that he has, from this unpromising material, produced a fascinating book. Mr. Phillipson is the world’s leading historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. His “Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life” animates Smith’s prosaic personal history with an account of the eventful times through which he lived and the revolutionary ideas that inspired him. Adam Smith finally has the biography that he deserves, and it could not be more timely.

Smith’s fame, of course, was made by the “Wealth of Nations.” The book appeared in 1776, a good year in the annals of human liberty. Its teachings are so fundamental to modern economics that familiarity often dulls our appreciation of its brilliance.

Smith constructed his masterpiece on a few ingenious insights into the workings of a commercial economy….

He’s so wonderful, but so unknowable! His ways are so far above our ways, and his thoughts so far above our thoughts, that we know him only through colorless stone! Quick, a paper bag — I’m hyperventilating…

Of course, I must admit, I haven’t read Wealth of Nations. For two centuries and more, I’ve been holding out for the movie version. Maybe it’s all that and more. But at the moment I’m giving myself a break from nonfiction to reread O’Brian’s The Wine-Dark Sea, which of course actually is wonderful. (Speaking of the movie, I watched “Master and Commander” last night on Blu-Ray. If only someone would undertake to make a separate film on each book in the Aubrey/Maturin canon! As soon as it came out on Netflix, you wouldn’t see me for a year…)

After that, I’m going to read the books I got for my birthday, starting with Tony Blair’s new political autobio. Then there’s Woodward’s Obama’s War. Only then will I allow myself the pleasure of reading the latest Arkady Renko mystery, Three Stations.

Then, before I read Adam Smith, I will go back and finish Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, which I set aside to read Bob Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed, back-to-back. Then, sometime after Trotsky, I’ll go read Adam Smith — right after I poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick. Twice. Colorless stone, indeed.

Did Janette pen “world’s haughtiest e-mail?”

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Many of you know Janette Turner Hospital, the novelist who for years has run the “Caught in the Creative Act” seminar at USC.

Yesterday, a reader called my attention to a piece over at Gawker, but when I got there I didn’t read the thing I was being directed to, because I got distracted by this item claiming that the Australian writer had written the “world’s haughtiest e-mail” back to her former students here in Colatown:

Janette Turner Hospital is the author of Orpheus Lost and other books, and a professor at Columbia. She sent MFA students at her old school, the University of South Carolina, the following note about their inferiority. It is amazing.

Hospital sent this note to all of the MFA students on the University of South Carolina listserv. More than one of them forwarded it to us. “We’re all enraged,” one MFA grad from USC tells us. “She is nuts!” says another. Indeed. What’s your favorite part? The personal revelations? The breathtaking undertone of insult towards those in South Carolina? Her special pet name for the Upper West Side? This is fertile ground…

After that build-up, I actually found the e-mail to be not quite as bad as advertised. After all, she says nothing BAD about USC, she just … gushes… to a rather odd extent about NYC. But she would not be the first to have her head turned a bit by the tall buildings, or the Starbucks on every corner. I’m rather fond of the city myself — as a place to visit. Follow the link and see what you think. Or if you’re too lazy to click, here’s an excerpt:

As for news from this very different MFA planet, I’m in seventh heaven teaching here, and not only because I have Orhan Pamuk (whom I hope to bring to USC for Caught in the Creative Act), Oliver Sacks, Simon Schama, Richard Howard, Margo Jefferson, etc., etc., as colleagues, though that is obviously part of it.

My students also live and move and write in seventh heaven and in a fever of creative excitement. Columbia’s MFA is rigorous and competitive but students don’t just have publication as a goal – they take that for granted, since about half the graduating class has a book published or a publishing contract in hand by graduation – so they have their sights set on Pulitzers.

This program is huge, the largest in the country. It’s a 3-year degree, with 300 students enrolled at a given time. Each year, 100 are admitted (in fiction, poetry, nonfiction) with fiction by far the largest segment. But 600+ apply, so the 100 who get in are the cream of the cream…

And then there are all the peripheral pleasures of living on Manhattan: we’ve seen the Matisse exhibition at MOMA, have tickets for the opening of Don Pasquale at the Met Opera, have tickets to see Al Pacino on stage as Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, etc etc. Plus I’m just 15 minutes walking distance from Columbia and from all the sidewalk bistros on Broadway, and 3 minutes from Central Park where we join the joggers every morning. This is Cloud Nine living on the Upper West Side (which is known to my agent and my Norton editor, who live in Greenwich Village, as “Upstate Manhattan.” ) We love it.

What do you think? I mean, I’m glad Janette’s having a good time, and maybe she’s a bit carried away. But I guess I’m too used to the excessive rhetoric of political e-mails to be too appalled.

Or maybe my self-esteem as a South Carolinian has been so battered by the attention we’ve garnered because of the Confederate flag, Mark Sanford, Alvin Greene and Nikki Haley that I’m too numb to be insulted further.

Oh, in case you’re wondering if I’m giving her a break unduly — Ms. Hospital is an acquaintance, but we don’t know each other well. A couple of years back when Salman Rushdie was in town for her program, she asked me to moderate a panel discussion in connection with his appearance (which was flattering, but a little scary, since I hadn’t read any of his books), and I met Mr. Rushdie at a reception afterward. That’s about all I can think of to disclose.

RFK son leads board to settle score with Ayers; good for him

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Normally I’m not one to applaud people using positions of trust to settle personal scores, but even if that’s what you call this, in this case I’m all cheers for the Kennedys:

When retiring University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Bill Ayers co-wrote a book in 1973, it was dedicated in part to Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin.

That came back to haunt Ayers on Thursday when the U. of I. board, now chaired by Kennedy’s son, considered his request for emeritus status. It was denied in a unanimous vote.

Before the vote, an emotional Chris Kennedy spoke out against granting the status to Ayers.

“I intend to vote against conferring the honorific title of our university to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father,” he said.

“There can be no place in a democracy to celebrate political assassinations or to honor those who do so.”

Later, Kennedy told the Chicago Sun-Times he and the board have not seen any signs of remorse from Ayers in the nearly 40 years since the dedication.

“There’s no evidence in any of his interviews or conversations that he regrets any of those actions — that’s a better question for him,” he told the Sun-Times…

There was a lot of back-and-forth about Ayers back during the 2008 election, you will recall. The thing I like about this personal action by Chris Kennedy is that it serves a public purpose, and of course the public good was what RFK’s memory should be about.

The public good served is that we are made to face clearly what a blackguard Ayers was, and still is (since he’s never expressed regret about what he did back in the day).

So in that sense, this isn’t personal, it’s strictly business. By the way, the “Godfather” reference here is not strictly gratuitous. Mario Puzo wrote another book called The Fourth K, which was about a latter-day member of the Kennedy family who wages unrestricted war on terrorism after his daughter is murdered by terrorists. (The whole “business-vs.-personal” theme was a big one for Puzo. He was fascinated by the idea of powerful men using their power for very personal purposes.)

In this case, Chris Kennedy found a much more gentle way to settle a family account. And good for him. And good for the board, which redeemed this act beyond the realm of personal vengeance by acting unanimously, on principle. This is the way retribution should be conducted, by the full community.