I suggest that the President take up baking. Here is why: It seems like a simple thing to do--you decide what you want to make, you collect the ingredients you need, you get out your pans and blender and measuring devices, and you just follow the less-than-rocket-science level of difficulty directions. But it isn't simple at all. The recipe is written in a kind of code that requires experience to decipher. If you can't decipher it, you will screw up -- not a lot, maybe just one small step of the process. But in baking, that's all it takes to make a mess of the project.
So baking is humbling. It's a one-strike-you're-out kind of enterprise, a zero tolerance for error domain. And humility in the face of challenge is a healthy thing. It counsels caution, patience, attention to detail and appreciation for the known masters of the trade, from whom one may learn a great deal, if one knows how.
As a rule of observation, I'd say that the President, like most people, is humble about some things and not others. With a politician, however, it's hard to tell, because politicians, for good reason, have to be concerned about their optic -- how they appear. if they appear too cocksure (in America, at least), people don't like that. We're still Jeffersonian at heart in many ways. On the other hand, if they seem too uncertain or, worse, in a malaise, the American people like that even less. They want leaders who lead. So in trying to strike the right balance, a politician has to always second-guess what the public traffic will bear, and this makes it hard for any of us to know the real feel within a man like Barack Obama, or George Bush, or Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan, and so on.
I think the President is humble about a lot, because it follows from his appreciation, so evident in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, of Reinhold Niebuhr. It shows in other ways, too--particularly his inclination to analysis, to hard work, when it comes to dealing with public policy problems. People who are not humble in that way, like George W. Bush, trust their gut and think that's enough. You do have to trust your gut, but that's NOT enough. President Obama is not apparently humble about other things; sometimes he seems to strut his intelligence -- but again, that could be just optic management. I don't know the man, so I don't know the answer--and that's the only way, I think, anyone can know it.
Anyway, baking helps a person find the balance between self-confidence and humility, because even very good cooks, like me, can be terrible bakers, like me. Once every so many years, I try to bake something, and pretty much fail. Not fail abjectly, but fail all the same in getting whatever it is--strudel, a pie crust, a jelly roll, and so on--to some out like it's supposed to come out. I tried again this morning -- a 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake recipe from Joy of Cooking. Because I did not clean off the blender whirrers well enough before trying to whip the egg whites into soft peaks, the cake did not rise properly. That's just one little detail, and the recipe does not remind one to do this, either. But screwing up one little detail is all it takes to mess up a process requiring, oh, about 15 or 20 steps. Maybe more.
Same goes for public policy. If you're trying to do something even halfway hard, and most big things we want to do are way more than halfway hard, all you have to do is mess up one thing -- have one duck not in its row -- and the implementation will either not go as intended, or will fail outright. Say, a war. Say a war in Iraq. Or even a war in Afghanistan. Obviously, one thing all recipes have is enough steps to get you to a successful conclusion. It doesn't say "Mission Accomplished" anywhere in Joy of Cooking, as far as I know, and I've read pretty much the whole thing over the years. Nor does it mention "Phase IV." But, pretty clearly, before you can consider any policy a success, you have to define what the thing is supposed to look like in the end. No baker ever won praise for making it through three-quarters or even seven-eighths of a recipe. No policymaker should either.
The next time a President goes though a 94-day review trying to respond to a resource request from a commanding general, or goes about making strategy for a change in a proper way, it would be a good idea to try the 1-2-3-4 Yellow Cake recipe some evening in the White House kitchen. You can learn a lot from screwing up a cake. Really; even if you can roast a duck.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Groundhog's Day: Prepare Now!
Groundhog's Day is coming soon -- February 2 -- and it's not too early to start getting ready. This important day now transcends the doings of Punxsutawney Phil up there in Pennsylvania; it has become a day of truly national, nay, global significance. This is, of course, because of the global warming scare. If we cannot trust the IPCC anymore, what with its predicting the melting of the Himalayan glaciers and other absurdities--and we can't--then we're going to have to make do with a groundhog or two (or three, or four....Lord knows there are a mess of `em.)
As it happens, the science of Groundhog's Day is deeply grounded. As you make preparations for the American, or Pennsylvanian, tradition of Groundhog's Day, know for a certainty that it did not just fall out of the sky. It has a history that, apparently, few Americans today know anything about. So I'll just tell you a little of it.
It turns out that, as with so many American folk traditions, Groundhog's Day goes back to the Old Country, otherwise known for practical purposes as Europe, but really meaning most of the time Britain. February 2 is a significant date in the Church calendar (at least in the Anglican calendar, if not also the Catholic one): It's called Candlemas day, which is, according to Church tradition, the day of Jesus' christening.
Now, if you're about to object that there could not have been such a Christening before there was such a thing as Christianity, just save your breath. Logic will get you nowhere when it comes to a religious hierarchy determined to smooth out all the rumpled linens of historical reality, projecting a narrative backwards to accommodate the needs of the present. Happens all the time.
Here is how the British Almanac of 1828, an original copy of which I have open before me at my desk, at page 10, describes the matter, and you will see right away the connection between Candlemas and Groundhog's Day:
"If Candlemas day be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight;
But if Candlemas day be clouds and rain
Winter is gone and will not come again."
In other words, if Phil sees his shadow ("fair and bright" as the poem has it), we're in for it; if not ("clouds and rain"), then not.
As the quote shows, many days we today in America rarely take heed of were believed to be predictive of this and that. We have no secular American equivalent for St. Vincent's Day, let alone the conversion of St. Paul. For some reason, however, Candlemas day, translated into Groundhog's Day, with a substitution, I guess, of Phil for Divine intercession, has stayed with us. Go figure.
It is also worth noting that the authors of the British Almanac for the year 1828, while scoring the superstitions of olden days, retained rather more far-fetched notions than they themselves understood. There is a section of the book in which medical advice is tendered season by season, month by month. A lot of it is common sense born of experience, but the advice about bleeding and leeches, well, that has not stood the test of time and the advance of medical science. They probably complained about its cost even then.
Happy Groundhog's Day!!
As it happens, the science of Groundhog's Day is deeply grounded. As you make preparations for the American, or Pennsylvanian, tradition of Groundhog's Day, know for a certainty that it did not just fall out of the sky. It has a history that, apparently, few Americans today know anything about. So I'll just tell you a little of it.
It turns out that, as with so many American folk traditions, Groundhog's Day goes back to the Old Country, otherwise known for practical purposes as Europe, but really meaning most of the time Britain. February 2 is a significant date in the Church calendar (at least in the Anglican calendar, if not also the Catholic one): It's called Candlemas day, which is, according to Church tradition, the day of Jesus' christening.
Now, if you're about to object that there could not have been such a Christening before there was such a thing as Christianity, just save your breath. Logic will get you nowhere when it comes to a religious hierarchy determined to smooth out all the rumpled linens of historical reality, projecting a narrative backwards to accommodate the needs of the present. Happens all the time.
Here is how the British Almanac of 1828, an original copy of which I have open before me at my desk, at page 10, describes the matter, and you will see right away the connection between Candlemas and Groundhog's Day:
Our ancestors had a great many ridiculous notions about the possibility of prognosticating the future condition of the weather, from the state of the atmosphere on certain festival days. The festival of the Circumcision (January 1) was thus supposed to afford evidence of the weather to be expected in the coming year. For St. Vincent's Day (January 22) . . . . The Conversion of St. Paul (January 25) was . . . . Candlemas day (February 2) supplied another of these irrational inferences from the weather of one day to that of a distance period:
"If Candlemas day be fair and bright
Winter will have another flight;
But if Candlemas day be clouds and rain
Winter is gone and will not come again."
In other words, if Phil sees his shadow ("fair and bright" as the poem has it), we're in for it; if not ("clouds and rain"), then not.
As the quote shows, many days we today in America rarely take heed of were believed to be predictive of this and that. We have no secular American equivalent for St. Vincent's Day, let alone the conversion of St. Paul. For some reason, however, Candlemas day, translated into Groundhog's Day, with a substitution, I guess, of Phil for Divine intercession, has stayed with us. Go figure.
It is also worth noting that the authors of the British Almanac for the year 1828, while scoring the superstitions of olden days, retained rather more far-fetched notions than they themselves understood. There is a section of the book in which medical advice is tendered season by season, month by month. A lot of it is common sense born of experience, but the advice about bleeding and leeches, well, that has not stood the test of time and the advance of medical science. They probably complained about its cost even then.
Happy Groundhog's Day!!
Monday, January 25, 2010
All Made Up and Everywhere on the Go
Perhaps it’s just me, but does anyone else notice ever more women applying make-up on trains, subways and buses? And does anyone else find this rude?
Why rude? We all know that urban dwellers must get used to the anonymity of crowds or else go a little batty. That means learning to ignore whole classes of behavior (people talking to their shoes, for example) and behavior in ways one would never think to behave in other circumstances. We observe an implicit contract in crowds whereby I’m not rude in failing to say hello to the people I pass each day walking between Dupont Circle and Rhode Island Avenue, and they aren’t rude not to say hello to me. It’s quite enough that we’ve reached a stage in social evolution where we no longer assume all strangers to be threats—real progress, the anthropologists tell us, as human affairs go.
But the acquired ability to mutually ignore one another in crowded settings only works because it’s non-discriminatory: We could care less about each other equally. When a woman dons make-up in a subway car, however, she says, in effect: “I care what some others think about my looks, and so take some trouble to make myself attractive, but you’re not among those I care about. Indeed, I care so little that I think nothing of making you an involuntary witness to a preparation designed for the benefit of others.” That’s discriminatory, therefore rude.
Of course, the proliferation of public make-up artists pales besides the most egregious current form of public rudeness: cell phone chatter breaking out in confined spaces. But this isn’t arguable: There is broad, though obviously not yet universal, agreement about not inflicting half a cell phone conversation on innocent bystanders (or bysitters, if you’re fortunate enough to get a seat) who are trying to read, work a sudoku puzzle or decide what to do about lunch. The cell phone crisis probably explains why, when I’ve expressed consternation over female make-up artists acting out in public, some have brusquely dismissed my complaint.
“What do you care?” says my reality-check of a wife, who never applies make-up in public (and rarely does so in private, for that matter). “You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and what difference does it make compared to that horrible man on the bus yakking all the time on his cell phone about his damned show dogs?” (There is such a horrible man, it’s true.)
But, I tell her, one form of rudeness does not excuse another. I’m not just picking on women either. If I saw a man intently styling his hair on a subway car, I’d think the same thing. If I saw a fellow pull out tools to give himself a manicure on the bus, I’d move as far from him as possible. If I saw a dude click on an electric razor to trim his mustache on an airplane, I’d probably lock myself in the little excuse for a toilet they have in economy class and stay there until we landed.
None of this ever happens, however. I’ve never seen a guy do any of these things. We men may surreptitiously inspect a nostril now and again while we’re out and about, or maybe scratch something. But the closest we, here in Washington at least, ever come to putting on make-up in public is a rapid sun-screen slather on our nose and neck around the swimming pool, or maybe while watching the Washington Nationals baseball club from the bleachers during a day game.
As with any form of rudeness, women applying make-up in public spaces comes in different degrees of offense. There are three such degrees.
By far the most common violation concerns lipstick. In a standard third-degree offense, a woman will open her purse, pull out a shiny cylindrical harquebus and a small compact, flip open the mirror on the compact and set to painting. This operation is mostly unexceptional, except at the end when the woman will usually sit back a bit from the mirror, lift her head ever so slightly, mash her lips together and then seem to pucker up and gently kiss the air in front of her. All the while she is peering into the little mirror as if saying to herself, urging hope to vanquish uncertainty, “Oh, you gorgeous dame, you.”
I suppose this maneuver is supposed to even out the lipstick at the top of the lips and at the corners of the mouth. But it looks slightly balmy, as any mildly lascivious self-regarding pantomime is bound to do.
As a rule, a lipstick artist can finish her work in only two or three minutes. Get caught up in some book and you miss the whole thing. But if you don’t miss it, this is rude—though it can also be mildly entertaining, depending on the woman, if your taste runs to John Waters films.
Beyond mere lipstick is the application of powder and sometimes rouge. The compact comes out again, but so does a flat round pad about the size of a silver dollar pancake that the woman uses to apply some powdery substance to, as best I can tell, every skin surface she can locate from the neck up. The act itself resembles auto-massage, and the expression on the transgressor’s face—especially as the application of the substance in question requires the soft closing of the eyes as the pad approaches them—is unmistakably sensual. With lipstick application thrown in, a second-degree powder violation can exceed four or even five minutes in duration. So this is very rude.
The first-degree offense is the full make-up monty. Beyond lipstick and powder it entails eye shadow, eye-liner, mascara applied on the eyelashes with a kooky-looking little brush and—yes, I once actually saw this on Amtrak (more of which below)—eyebrow plucking! On the train I have also seen women painting their fingernails; the odor is enough to melt the icing off your breakfast Danish.
The full make-up monty can take up to and sometimes beyond fifteen minutes on a serious commute, during which time a determined make-up woman manages to pretend that no one else is anywhere near her. It is, of course, very, very rude.
Aside from its duration, the rudeness of public make-up offenses varies with propinquity to the transgressor. If I’m sitting right next to a make-up artist on a train or bus, that feels much ruder than if the offender is three seats away on the other side of the aisle. But what happened last month on a train from Washington to New York was by far the most egregious episode I have ever encountered: a full make-up monty at 19 inches and closing.
I boarded the 10:10 headed for Penn Station, and was alone until a young woman—no wedding ring, probably on the not-yet side of thirty years—sat down next to me at the BWI airport stop. Then, somewhere north of Baltimore, she began her make-up session, a rare full monty lacking only the pungency of fingernail polish. Her order of battle was impressive, as was her gear. She hauled out a black leather make-up kit larger than a construction worker’s lunchbox, inside of which was a colorfully diverse collection of frankly I-don’t-know-what. The inside top of the kit contained an inset mirror, so both her hands were free to work.
And work she did, whipping out one specialized tool after another. She was serious yet graceful as her art unfurled, all the way into and out of Philadelphia. And then—the coup d’grace—she plucked her eyebrows. Not a lot of them, mind you, but any is altogether too many at close quarters on Amtrak.
I didn’t say a word. I wanted to, but then I might have been rude. (What would John Waters have done?) By the time she finished we were nearly in New Jersey. She left the train at Newark.
The point? Just this: If you are a woman who paints and puckers in public spaces, please consider that putting on make-up is all of a part with dressing, and so ought to remain a private matter from start to finish. You wouldn’t think of putting on your blouse or your stockings in a subway car or a bus, would you? So why your lipstick or mascara?
There was a time when the only women who painted themselves in public did it on street corners and in bars. It was considered a naughtily sexy thing to do, which was in fact closely related to its most common actual purpose. But at least it had a purpose. The purpose of public making-up now seems to be no purpose at all, except perhaps to save time in mostly absentminded fits of multi-tasking. We all sympathize: It’s always been hard to be a working woman, it’s not gotten any easier and time is the most precious gift of all. Still…..
The postmodern variety of generic rudeness started, I suspect, with the abomination of call-waiting, which encouraged one human exchange to be blithely interrupted by the mere prospect of another. But that’s another story. For now, just a plaint to all you make-up offenders out there: Please don’t paint and powder in public. Consider that this is a case, perhaps, where beauty is in the eye of the non-beholder.
Why rude? We all know that urban dwellers must get used to the anonymity of crowds or else go a little batty. That means learning to ignore whole classes of behavior (people talking to their shoes, for example) and behavior in ways one would never think to behave in other circumstances. We observe an implicit contract in crowds whereby I’m not rude in failing to say hello to the people I pass each day walking between Dupont Circle and Rhode Island Avenue, and they aren’t rude not to say hello to me. It’s quite enough that we’ve reached a stage in social evolution where we no longer assume all strangers to be threats—real progress, the anthropologists tell us, as human affairs go.
But the acquired ability to mutually ignore one another in crowded settings only works because it’s non-discriminatory: We could care less about each other equally. When a woman dons make-up in a subway car, however, she says, in effect: “I care what some others think about my looks, and so take some trouble to make myself attractive, but you’re not among those I care about. Indeed, I care so little that I think nothing of making you an involuntary witness to a preparation designed for the benefit of others.” That’s discriminatory, therefore rude.
Of course, the proliferation of public make-up artists pales besides the most egregious current form of public rudeness: cell phone chatter breaking out in confined spaces. But this isn’t arguable: There is broad, though obviously not yet universal, agreement about not inflicting half a cell phone conversation on innocent bystanders (or bysitters, if you’re fortunate enough to get a seat) who are trying to read, work a sudoku puzzle or decide what to do about lunch. The cell phone crisis probably explains why, when I’ve expressed consternation over female make-up artists acting out in public, some have brusquely dismissed my complaint.
“What do you care?” says my reality-check of a wife, who never applies make-up in public (and rarely does so in private, for that matter). “You don’t know them, they don’t know you, and what difference does it make compared to that horrible man on the bus yakking all the time on his cell phone about his damned show dogs?” (There is such a horrible man, it’s true.)
But, I tell her, one form of rudeness does not excuse another. I’m not just picking on women either. If I saw a man intently styling his hair on a subway car, I’d think the same thing. If I saw a fellow pull out tools to give himself a manicure on the bus, I’d move as far from him as possible. If I saw a dude click on an electric razor to trim his mustache on an airplane, I’d probably lock myself in the little excuse for a toilet they have in economy class and stay there until we landed.
None of this ever happens, however. I’ve never seen a guy do any of these things. We men may surreptitiously inspect a nostril now and again while we’re out and about, or maybe scratch something. But the closest we, here in Washington at least, ever come to putting on make-up in public is a rapid sun-screen slather on our nose and neck around the swimming pool, or maybe while watching the Washington Nationals baseball club from the bleachers during a day game.
As with any form of rudeness, women applying make-up in public spaces comes in different degrees of offense. There are three such degrees.
By far the most common violation concerns lipstick. In a standard third-degree offense, a woman will open her purse, pull out a shiny cylindrical harquebus and a small compact, flip open the mirror on the compact and set to painting. This operation is mostly unexceptional, except at the end when the woman will usually sit back a bit from the mirror, lift her head ever so slightly, mash her lips together and then seem to pucker up and gently kiss the air in front of her. All the while she is peering into the little mirror as if saying to herself, urging hope to vanquish uncertainty, “Oh, you gorgeous dame, you.”
I suppose this maneuver is supposed to even out the lipstick at the top of the lips and at the corners of the mouth. But it looks slightly balmy, as any mildly lascivious self-regarding pantomime is bound to do.
As a rule, a lipstick artist can finish her work in only two or three minutes. Get caught up in some book and you miss the whole thing. But if you don’t miss it, this is rude—though it can also be mildly entertaining, depending on the woman, if your taste runs to John Waters films.
Beyond mere lipstick is the application of powder and sometimes rouge. The compact comes out again, but so does a flat round pad about the size of a silver dollar pancake that the woman uses to apply some powdery substance to, as best I can tell, every skin surface she can locate from the neck up. The act itself resembles auto-massage, and the expression on the transgressor’s face—especially as the application of the substance in question requires the soft closing of the eyes as the pad approaches them—is unmistakably sensual. With lipstick application thrown in, a second-degree powder violation can exceed four or even five minutes in duration. So this is very rude.
The first-degree offense is the full make-up monty. Beyond lipstick and powder it entails eye shadow, eye-liner, mascara applied on the eyelashes with a kooky-looking little brush and—yes, I once actually saw this on Amtrak (more of which below)—eyebrow plucking! On the train I have also seen women painting their fingernails; the odor is enough to melt the icing off your breakfast Danish.
The full make-up monty can take up to and sometimes beyond fifteen minutes on a serious commute, during which time a determined make-up woman manages to pretend that no one else is anywhere near her. It is, of course, very, very rude.
Aside from its duration, the rudeness of public make-up offenses varies with propinquity to the transgressor. If I’m sitting right next to a make-up artist on a train or bus, that feels much ruder than if the offender is three seats away on the other side of the aisle. But what happened last month on a train from Washington to New York was by far the most egregious episode I have ever encountered: a full make-up monty at 19 inches and closing.
I boarded the 10:10 headed for Penn Station, and was alone until a young woman—no wedding ring, probably on the not-yet side of thirty years—sat down next to me at the BWI airport stop. Then, somewhere north of Baltimore, she began her make-up session, a rare full monty lacking only the pungency of fingernail polish. Her order of battle was impressive, as was her gear. She hauled out a black leather make-up kit larger than a construction worker’s lunchbox, inside of which was a colorfully diverse collection of frankly I-don’t-know-what. The inside top of the kit contained an inset mirror, so both her hands were free to work.
And work she did, whipping out one specialized tool after another. She was serious yet graceful as her art unfurled, all the way into and out of Philadelphia. And then—the coup d’grace—she plucked her eyebrows. Not a lot of them, mind you, but any is altogether too many at close quarters on Amtrak.
I didn’t say a word. I wanted to, but then I might have been rude. (What would John Waters have done?) By the time she finished we were nearly in New Jersey. She left the train at Newark.
The point? Just this: If you are a woman who paints and puckers in public spaces, please consider that putting on make-up is all of a part with dressing, and so ought to remain a private matter from start to finish. You wouldn’t think of putting on your blouse or your stockings in a subway car or a bus, would you? So why your lipstick or mascara?
There was a time when the only women who painted themselves in public did it on street corners and in bars. It was considered a naughtily sexy thing to do, which was in fact closely related to its most common actual purpose. But at least it had a purpose. The purpose of public making-up now seems to be no purpose at all, except perhaps to save time in mostly absentminded fits of multi-tasking. We all sympathize: It’s always been hard to be a working woman, it’s not gotten any easier and time is the most precious gift of all. Still…..
The postmodern variety of generic rudeness started, I suspect, with the abomination of call-waiting, which encouraged one human exchange to be blithely interrupted by the mere prospect of another. But that’s another story. For now, just a plaint to all you make-up offenders out there: Please don’t paint and powder in public. Consider that this is a case, perhaps, where beauty is in the eye of the non-beholder.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Avatar
I was blown away by D. Cameron's "Avatar", as most everyone has been. I was so wowified by the kinetic art that dominates the movie that it took days for it to dawn on me what a lousy and even offensive movie it is. As to the technological dimension, I am sure that this movie will become a cultural icon. Its "distance" in technological progress from "Star Wars" and "Jurassic Park" is about as far, in a far shorter time expanse, as the distance from "Star Wars" back to "Fantasia."
But here is the essence, at least as it seems to me: The movie depicts humanity as technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate; but that is a statement which just happens to perfectly fit the film, too, rendering it an unintended parody of itself.
The film is, as I have said, technologically precocious and genuinely a form of kinetic art--much, much better, I would say, than those silly mooey-eyed mass-produced little girls and kitties and doggies of the 1970s to which the depiction of the natives in the film has been compared. But it is intellectually mediocre. The vocabulary in the dialogue reaches maybe to an 8th grade level; it contains no wit and has no literary center. The plot is banal; it's just a war film, essentially Cowboys and Indians in space. (The natives fight with bows and arrows, you know.) Pretty much nothing happens that isn't telegraphed, sledgehammer-like, at least ten minutes beforehand.
And morally, the movie is close to if not flatly degenerate. The fact that a white guy, a crippled U.S. Marine no less, has to be the one to save the noble savages, who are depicted as a cross between Gandhi and the Cherokee, is sort of offensive. The natives thus come off like eight foot tall blue pets, who can talk. Neat. But all they do as a collective is strut and chant; they seem to have inter-generational responsibility thrust upon them from the inner mystique of planet Pandora, but they do nothing obvious to exercise or earn it. It short, they are depicted as morally conscious but without moral agency, which is kind of absurd. (It sort of reminds me of our recent discussions about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, where our guys high and low seem to consult with everyone about what to do except the Afghans.)
I am tempted to suggest that the movie is an unwitting parody of itself for a reason: It is an early 21st century commercial American artifact. In other words, if America today as a civilization is itself technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate in this advanced stage of the Third Plutocracy of the United States, then how could we expect its high-financed entertainment products to reflect anything different?
Darn, there I've gone and given in to temptation again.
But here is the essence, at least as it seems to me: The movie depicts humanity as technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate; but that is a statement which just happens to perfectly fit the film, too, rendering it an unintended parody of itself.
The film is, as I have said, technologically precocious and genuinely a form of kinetic art--much, much better, I would say, than those silly mooey-eyed mass-produced little girls and kitties and doggies of the 1970s to which the depiction of the natives in the film has been compared. But it is intellectually mediocre. The vocabulary in the dialogue reaches maybe to an 8th grade level; it contains no wit and has no literary center. The plot is banal; it's just a war film, essentially Cowboys and Indians in space. (The natives fight with bows and arrows, you know.) Pretty much nothing happens that isn't telegraphed, sledgehammer-like, at least ten minutes beforehand.
And morally, the movie is close to if not flatly degenerate. The fact that a white guy, a crippled U.S. Marine no less, has to be the one to save the noble savages, who are depicted as a cross between Gandhi and the Cherokee, is sort of offensive. The natives thus come off like eight foot tall blue pets, who can talk. Neat. But all they do as a collective is strut and chant; they seem to have inter-generational responsibility thrust upon them from the inner mystique of planet Pandora, but they do nothing obvious to exercise or earn it. It short, they are depicted as morally conscious but without moral agency, which is kind of absurd. (It sort of reminds me of our recent discussions about counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, where our guys high and low seem to consult with everyone about what to do except the Afghans.)
I am tempted to suggest that the movie is an unwitting parody of itself for a reason: It is an early 21st century commercial American artifact. In other words, if America today as a civilization is itself technologically precocious, intellectually mediocre and morally degenerate in this advanced stage of the Third Plutocracy of the United States, then how could we expect its high-financed entertainment products to reflect anything different?
Darn, there I've gone and given in to temptation again.
Friday, December 25, 2009
The Precautionary Principle, Ignored Again
An item in Wednesday's paper caught my eye. I mean the Washington Post, and I mean p. A17 of December 23's paper. It's an AP-signed piece entitled "U.S. wants farmers to use coal waste." The piece describes an EPA/Ag Dept. idea that, on the face of it, looks completely insane, a full-frontal violation of the precautionary principle. The government, starting back in the Bush Administration, wants farmers to spread something called FGD gypsum on their fields. This product is what happens when coal scrubbers work; it's the residue from the process. The residue contains trace amounts of arsenic, mercury and lead, but the EPA assures us it's safe.
Right.
Into my head rushes the memory of the geniuses who said it was safe to feed animal by-products to herbivores, like cows. What did we get? Mad Cow disease. I remember pthalitomide (or however you spell it). That was supposed to be safe, too. I remember no one thinking that massive amounts of plastic in the environment was anything to be concerned about, even microwaving veggies under plastic wrap, with all those long polymers falling into the food by the millions. Now some of us at least know better.
There is a common denominator to all these disasters and many more. Actually, it is a compound common denominator: a lack of scientific imagination and knowledge coupled with the fact that someone stands to gain financially from doing the wrong thing in ignoring the precautionary principle. The right question to ask here in this new example is, as always, Cui bono? Who stands to gain here?
Unfortunately, the AP article does not really help us understand this. There is zero investigative journalism involved here. Read the article; you'll be as frustrated as always, waiting for the real news behind the headline.....and never getting it. The article doesn't say what "encourage farmers" means. Do farmers have to pay for the substance, or not? How much, and who sets the price? Who gets the money? How much does it cost to dispose of this crap otherwise, and who pays for that? The article doesn't say. All we can infer is that, since there is something called an American Coal Ash Association, "a utility industry group", there is money moving somewhere that we citizens cannot see.
The EPA proposes to regulate for the first time coal wastes. No doubt Congress will eventually have some oversight responsibilities here, perhaps even some legislative prerogatives. You know what that means: graft, payola, outright crime and lying as Congressmen desperately seek campaign funds to make and buy the TV ads that have become the toxins of our political system. If we expect to prevent the creation of yet another source of plutocratic corruption in our political system, we have to first get to the bottom of this FGD gypsum caper. The Associated Press hasn't.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with this idea. Maybe it really is safe. Maybe it's even economical. OK, well explain it to me. Prove it to me. Show me the data. I dare you.
Right.
Into my head rushes the memory of the geniuses who said it was safe to feed animal by-products to herbivores, like cows. What did we get? Mad Cow disease. I remember pthalitomide (or however you spell it). That was supposed to be safe, too. I remember no one thinking that massive amounts of plastic in the environment was anything to be concerned about, even microwaving veggies under plastic wrap, with all those long polymers falling into the food by the millions. Now some of us at least know better.
There is a common denominator to all these disasters and many more. Actually, it is a compound common denominator: a lack of scientific imagination and knowledge coupled with the fact that someone stands to gain financially from doing the wrong thing in ignoring the precautionary principle. The right question to ask here in this new example is, as always, Cui bono? Who stands to gain here?
Unfortunately, the AP article does not really help us understand this. There is zero investigative journalism involved here. Read the article; you'll be as frustrated as always, waiting for the real news behind the headline.....and never getting it. The article doesn't say what "encourage farmers" means. Do farmers have to pay for the substance, or not? How much, and who sets the price? Who gets the money? How much does it cost to dispose of this crap otherwise, and who pays for that? The article doesn't say. All we can infer is that, since there is something called an American Coal Ash Association, "a utility industry group", there is money moving somewhere that we citizens cannot see.
The EPA proposes to regulate for the first time coal wastes. No doubt Congress will eventually have some oversight responsibilities here, perhaps even some legislative prerogatives. You know what that means: graft, payola, outright crime and lying as Congressmen desperately seek campaign funds to make and buy the TV ads that have become the toxins of our political system. If we expect to prevent the creation of yet another source of plutocratic corruption in our political system, we have to first get to the bottom of this FGD gypsum caper. The Associated Press hasn't.
Maybe there's nothing wrong with this idea. Maybe it really is safe. Maybe it's even economical. OK, well explain it to me. Prove it to me. Show me the data. I dare you.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Some Literary Notes
Just a few selected comments on this weekend's newspaper reading, as it were.
First, in the NYT "Week in Review" section for December 13, on page 2 under the headline "Our Decade of Deluded Thinking," an unsigned comment makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall in 1953 owing mainly to the intrigues of U.S. intelligence. That's of course right, and the same can be rightly said about Allende in Chile in the early 1970s. It's nice to see this in the NYT, and it may come in handy one day when the common reverse view shows up there, as it certainly will. But the piece starts, "It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error,. . ." Oh yes they are: They are more than often so; they are almost invariably so. Thus Auguste Comte: "Intellectual confusion is at the bottom of every historical crisis." Score one for Comte; the NYT is wrong. And last, at the bottom of the second paragraph, Francis Fukuyama is once again, for the umpteenth time, vulgarized into holding the view, twenty years ago, of the very modernization theorists with whom he has always disagreed--that all modernization is of a piece and leads to Westernization. That's not what he meant by the phrase "end of history", but it's his own fault for using a philosophical concept and ever expecting that most people, journalists certainly not excepted, would ever understand what he meant. If a typical Washington-beat journalists ever sits down and actually reads Hegal, I am sure the world will suddenly come to an end. But I am not worried about that happening
Second, Joshua Kurlantzick, in the "Outlook" section of the Washington Post, same day, front page, under the title "A Nobel Winner who went wrong on rights", takes the President to task for deemphasizing democracy and human rights. He contrasts the Nobel speech, the best speech by far the Preisdent has given while in office, with the Administration's prior policy choices, as best he can make them out. The Administration is right; Kurlantzick, and all the other people who like to wear human rights on their sleeves--and who have no understanding at all of Samuel Huntington's "democracy paradox"--are wrong. The best way to advance human rights and democracy is slowly, steadily, in the context of other dimensions of policy, and with full understanding of the opportunities and limits afforded by political culture. It is not by sounding like the mother-in-law of the world. And it is not by presuming the ridiculous argument that realism and its interests--like preventive mass violence, preserving civil and interstate order and the principles that order enables to become reality, and so forth--have no moral implcations. The President was channeling Reinhold Niehbur in Oslo. He could do a lot worse, and Kurlantzick should do some reading.
Third, Ed Begley's new book, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (Yale), reviewed in this week's New York Times Book Review, p. 30, carries a thesis that sounds very much overstated but that is, in any case, not original: that the sins of the French government against Dreyfus resembled the "crimes" of the George W. Bush Administration. I can prove it isn't original. Just read the TAI essay by the historian Paul Schroeder, "Mirror, Mirror on the War," Spring 2006--that's more than three years ago. I commissioned that essay, and while I do not agree with parts of it (and did not at the time, either), I think it's a brilliant essay. I wonder if Begley's book is as good. Naturally, I also wonder, but cannot expect to ever find out, where he got his idea.
First, in the NYT "Week in Review" section for December 13, on page 2 under the headline "Our Decade of Deluded Thinking," an unsigned comment makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall in 1953 owing mainly to the intrigues of U.S. intelligence. That's of course right, and the same can be rightly said about Allende in Chile in the early 1970s. It's nice to see this in the NYT, and it may come in handy one day when the common reverse view shows up there, as it certainly will. But the piece starts, "It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error,. . ." Oh yes they are: They are more than often so; they are almost invariably so. Thus Auguste Comte: "Intellectual confusion is at the bottom of every historical crisis." Score one for Comte; the NYT is wrong. And last, at the bottom of the second paragraph, Francis Fukuyama is once again, for the umpteenth time, vulgarized into holding the view, twenty years ago, of the very modernization theorists with whom he has always disagreed--that all modernization is of a piece and leads to Westernization. That's not what he meant by the phrase "end of history", but it's his own fault for using a philosophical concept and ever expecting that most people, journalists certainly not excepted, would ever understand what he meant. If a typical Washington-beat journalists ever sits down and actually reads Hegal, I am sure the world will suddenly come to an end. But I am not worried about that happening
Second, Joshua Kurlantzick, in the "Outlook" section of the Washington Post, same day, front page, under the title "A Nobel Winner who went wrong on rights", takes the President to task for deemphasizing democracy and human rights. He contrasts the Nobel speech, the best speech by far the Preisdent has given while in office, with the Administration's prior policy choices, as best he can make them out. The Administration is right; Kurlantzick, and all the other people who like to wear human rights on their sleeves--and who have no understanding at all of Samuel Huntington's "democracy paradox"--are wrong. The best way to advance human rights and democracy is slowly, steadily, in the context of other dimensions of policy, and with full understanding of the opportunities and limits afforded by political culture. It is not by sounding like the mother-in-law of the world. And it is not by presuming the ridiculous argument that realism and its interests--like preventive mass violence, preserving civil and interstate order and the principles that order enables to become reality, and so forth--have no moral implcations. The President was channeling Reinhold Niehbur in Oslo. He could do a lot worse, and Kurlantzick should do some reading.
Third, Ed Begley's new book, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (Yale), reviewed in this week's New York Times Book Review, p. 30, carries a thesis that sounds very much overstated but that is, in any case, not original: that the sins of the French government against Dreyfus resembled the "crimes" of the George W. Bush Administration. I can prove it isn't original. Just read the TAI essay by the historian Paul Schroeder, "Mirror, Mirror on the War," Spring 2006--that's more than three years ago. I commissioned that essay, and while I do not agree with parts of it (and did not at the time, either), I think it's a brilliant essay. I wonder if Begley's book is as good. Naturally, I also wonder, but cannot expect to ever find out, where he got his idea.
Just an Accident
I tell all my students, whenever I am fortunate enough to have some, that they need a fiction reading habit. I won't go here into the reasons I give this advice, but an excellent example of one such reason--fortuity, and the accidental inspiration it sometimes produces--came upon me unawares recently. I will now tell you about it, distressing though this particular episode of fortuity happened to be.
I am a big A. S. Byatt fan. I think she is probably the finest living English-language prose stylist. I love reading her even when I don't manage to care much about her characters, which happens from time to time. Since I can read faster than she can write and publish (unlike some bloggers I know, who can actually write faster than I can read), the appearance of a new book by A.S. Byatt works as the opposite of what I call a petty subversion of everyday life. It is, therefore, something of a petty, or more than petty, boon to everyday life. I look forward to these, and the latest is The Children's Story, which my wife, Lord love her, gave me as a gift some weeks ago.
I don't want to ruin the book for those now reading it or who intend to read it, but it is curious how the petty subversions and the petty boons of everyday life have a way of intersecting. The petty, or not so petty, subversion of everyday life bothering me lately is the utter tanking of my book, Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Nearly Everything. The book came out in September (from John Wiley & Sons), with back-jacket praise from Les Gelb, Itamar Rabinovich, Michael Mandelbaum, Peter Berger, Joe Joffe, and Robert D. Kaplan. I heard unsolicited praise for the book from Dov Zakheim, Aaron Miller, Eliot Cohen and others. So I know it is a good book; all these people are not just being polite. Everyone who see it takes an interest in it -- the publisher did a fine cover. Yet it has gotten zero reviews. No newspaper will publish a op-ed related to it. Sales are terrible. I have been to three bookfests trying to hawk it, and given a series of other talks and radio interviews as well--small time stuff, to be sure--and I have found that nothing works, and so I give up. The ratio of time invested to benefit extracted is appalling. I'd rather stay home and read novels (or wait to be drawn back to my Gibson F-4).
Now, of course, the book is about exaggerations about the Jews, of which there are a lot (of exaggerations that, is, not Jews). So when I immerse myself in something where I can detect no trace of Jewcentricity, I am rather delighted these days. Having written a book about exaggeration, in which I myself very carefully did not exaggerate, took a psychic toll on me. I am therefore a little bit sick of thinking about the Jews just now--all of the Jews, some of the Jews, and any one of the Jews, including myself. What better way to heal that sickness than to get absorbed into a wonderful novel that is, to be precise about it, Judenrein! A.S. Byatt to the rescue, to my rescue, in any case.
The Children's Story begins, in Britain of course, in 1895 and ends in 1918. It is not just a story about specific children, the Wellwood children and their friends in this case. It is about a cultural phenomenon as well, wherein some upper-class British and other European do-gooders and assorted confused radicals elevated the idea of childhood as a metaphor for cleansing the human race from the degradations associated with industrial civilization. We humans need be simpler and more childlike, was the general idea, more natural and unadorned with the artificial; so we write stories like Peter Pan, swim naked and c0-ed in forest streams (there's a bit of that in the book) and otherwise indulge in fantasies and pretend to love new arts & crafts styles like Jungenstil to express, knowingly and not, that longing for the child-likely authentic.
This impulse is anything but child-like and simple as it plays out in the book, of course. It turns out, for example, that some of the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood are not exactly the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood. Many of the men in the book are real rounders, some of them sweet and almost forgivable, others quite monstrous and hurtful. But Olive has had a fling herself, back before 1895 in Munich, and one of the children in the house, Dorothy, we learn is not in fact the daughter of Humphrey, whom Dorothy had always believed was her real father until a disturbing whiskey-fueled incident and a subsequent confession revealed otherwise.
Now, without either boring you or entirely ruining the story for those who want to read (or finish) the book, let me simply say that Dorothy's real father is a German artist named Anselm Stern, from Munich. He appears early in the book, in the Wellwood's garden at a midsummer eve's party, but we do not know then about Olive and Anselm Stern's brief intimate history. We also do not yet know about Wolfgang and Leon, Anselm Stern's two sons with his German wife, who are, of course, Dorothy's half-brothers.
Now Dorothy, of all the children in the Wellwood household, is serious as a student and resolves at a tender young age to become a medical doctor and surgeon, at a time when that was no easy course of ambition for a female. She succeeds, and we readers are most glad for her. Her friend and (she thought) her cousin on her father's side, Griselda, is the most beautiful woman of the younger set in the book; they are confidantes. So it goes, on and on, in Britain and in Paris and in Munich, and the story is fine fun as the narrative weaves and wobbles its focus on a large clutch of main characters. And then, for me, Byatt ruins everything in the last few pages of a 675-page novel. She crashes the petty boon into the petty subversion, and makes a complete hash of everything. How?
Well, after having mentioned Jews only once in some 670 pages--a passing remark about a Boer War-era financial scandal in the City involving the Montagu family having frothed up some mild anti-Semitism--she suddely reveals that Anselm Stern is a Jew. She reveals this in the context of a discussion of the hair-raising goings on in Bavaria near the end of World War I, telling the reader in brief the wild but true tale of Kurt Eisner, Gerhard Landauer, and Erich Muhlsem--all of whom were Jews. And now we see it: Dorothy, the only kid of the whole lot to become a professional success, a doctor no less, is half Jewish. Griselda, the beauty, falls in love with her half-brother Wolfgang--a Jew. Everyone else either commits suicide, gets killed in the war, or in some other way melts out of the story. Damn you, Byatt! Damn you.
So I finish the book, with some sense of unease, naturally. I have been Jewcentricized, most unwillingly. But you know how it goes: Those of us who must always be reading some kind of fiction cannot survive long after finishing one novel without starting another. Otherwise we end up weeping for the death of the fantasy we have just completed, and it doesn't matter if the book has a happy ending, more or less, or a sad one, less or more. The key is that it's over and reality rushes back in, filling up more cognitive space than I wish to relinquish.
So I ask my wife, "What else is there around here to read, that I have not already read and failed to completely forget (because you see, if I have read something and managed to completely forget it, why would I want to read it again?)?" And then I see and remark about this little paperback (little compared to the hardback copy of The Children's Story) by Laurie E. King called The Beekeeper's Apprentice. "Oh, that," she says. That's just a little light summer stuff I picked up, in the summer of course, that I did not get far with. Something about Sherlock Holmes, as I recall."
So I pick up The Beekeeper's Apprentice and start into it, and I am delighted. It is preposterous by design: the author nicely pretends to be the charmed recipient of an old truck within which is there is an old manuscript written by a woman named Mary Russell, born January 1900, and the manuscript is about her "real" encounters with the real Sherlock Holmes. This is pretty rich, since Watson writes of Holmes according to Conan Doyle. So here we have King on Russell off to the side of Watson and Doyle, all about Holmes. Watson is real as amanuensis to Holmes, but he is fiction within Doyle; and now Doyle is real within Russell, but Russell is fiction within King. Isn't this fun? We get so involved, momentarily, trying to figure out what is fictional and fanciful and what is not that we forget that, layered though the authorship seems to be, it is all fictional and fanciful.
King does not write with the grace or intricacy of Byatt, but some novels don't need either to keep me happy, at least for a while. There is the lovely coincidence that where Byatt leaves off chronologically, 1918, King picks up with but modest overlap, in 1917. Some themes about women and society and the war's impact on Britain's class stratification overlap nicely, too, and entirely by accident as far as my eyes are concerned. And most important by far, there are, I say to myself, going to be no Jews sneaking around in this silly little summer book.
Ta-dum...... On page 16--just page 16, mind you--it turns out that Mary (named for Magdalene and not the virgin, we're told a few pages earlier) not only has one Jewish parent, but reads and writes Hebrew! Holmes deduces this, you see, from the shape of the ink-smudges on Mary's left thumb and second finger. Had I not been on a fairly crowded Metro car when I read this, I might have thrown the book--Dorothy Parker-style--against the nearest wall. Damn, damn, damn!
I know it's all just an accident, a minor irritating accident. I know it's not aimed at me, this mocking episode of fortuity. It's not kismet, and it's not mystical. But damn, damn, damn it is annoying.
I am a big A. S. Byatt fan. I think she is probably the finest living English-language prose stylist. I love reading her even when I don't manage to care much about her characters, which happens from time to time. Since I can read faster than she can write and publish (unlike some bloggers I know, who can actually write faster than I can read), the appearance of a new book by A.S. Byatt works as the opposite of what I call a petty subversion of everyday life. It is, therefore, something of a petty, or more than petty, boon to everyday life. I look forward to these, and the latest is The Children's Story, which my wife, Lord love her, gave me as a gift some weeks ago.
I don't want to ruin the book for those now reading it or who intend to read it, but it is curious how the petty subversions and the petty boons of everyday life have a way of intersecting. The petty, or not so petty, subversion of everyday life bothering me lately is the utter tanking of my book, Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Nearly Everything. The book came out in September (from John Wiley & Sons), with back-jacket praise from Les Gelb, Itamar Rabinovich, Michael Mandelbaum, Peter Berger, Joe Joffe, and Robert D. Kaplan. I heard unsolicited praise for the book from Dov Zakheim, Aaron Miller, Eliot Cohen and others. So I know it is a good book; all these people are not just being polite. Everyone who see it takes an interest in it -- the publisher did a fine cover. Yet it has gotten zero reviews. No newspaper will publish a op-ed related to it. Sales are terrible. I have been to three bookfests trying to hawk it, and given a series of other talks and radio interviews as well--small time stuff, to be sure--and I have found that nothing works, and so I give up. The ratio of time invested to benefit extracted is appalling. I'd rather stay home and read novels (or wait to be drawn back to my Gibson F-4).
Now, of course, the book is about exaggerations about the Jews, of which there are a lot (of exaggerations that, is, not Jews). So when I immerse myself in something where I can detect no trace of Jewcentricity, I am rather delighted these days. Having written a book about exaggeration, in which I myself very carefully did not exaggerate, took a psychic toll on me. I am therefore a little bit sick of thinking about the Jews just now--all of the Jews, some of the Jews, and any one of the Jews, including myself. What better way to heal that sickness than to get absorbed into a wonderful novel that is, to be precise about it, Judenrein! A.S. Byatt to the rescue, to my rescue, in any case.
The Children's Story begins, in Britain of course, in 1895 and ends in 1918. It is not just a story about specific children, the Wellwood children and their friends in this case. It is about a cultural phenomenon as well, wherein some upper-class British and other European do-gooders and assorted confused radicals elevated the idea of childhood as a metaphor for cleansing the human race from the degradations associated with industrial civilization. We humans need be simpler and more childlike, was the general idea, more natural and unadorned with the artificial; so we write stories like Peter Pan, swim naked and c0-ed in forest streams (there's a bit of that in the book) and otherwise indulge in fantasies and pretend to love new arts & crafts styles like Jungenstil to express, knowingly and not, that longing for the child-likely authentic.
This impulse is anything but child-like and simple as it plays out in the book, of course. It turns out, for example, that some of the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood are not exactly the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood. Many of the men in the book are real rounders, some of them sweet and almost forgivable, others quite monstrous and hurtful. But Olive has had a fling herself, back before 1895 in Munich, and one of the children in the house, Dorothy, we learn is not in fact the daughter of Humphrey, whom Dorothy had always believed was her real father until a disturbing whiskey-fueled incident and a subsequent confession revealed otherwise.
Now, without either boring you or entirely ruining the story for those who want to read (or finish) the book, let me simply say that Dorothy's real father is a German artist named Anselm Stern, from Munich. He appears early in the book, in the Wellwood's garden at a midsummer eve's party, but we do not know then about Olive and Anselm Stern's brief intimate history. We also do not yet know about Wolfgang and Leon, Anselm Stern's two sons with his German wife, who are, of course, Dorothy's half-brothers.
Now Dorothy, of all the children in the Wellwood household, is serious as a student and resolves at a tender young age to become a medical doctor and surgeon, at a time when that was no easy course of ambition for a female. She succeeds, and we readers are most glad for her. Her friend and (she thought) her cousin on her father's side, Griselda, is the most beautiful woman of the younger set in the book; they are confidantes. So it goes, on and on, in Britain and in Paris and in Munich, and the story is fine fun as the narrative weaves and wobbles its focus on a large clutch of main characters. And then, for me, Byatt ruins everything in the last few pages of a 675-page novel. She crashes the petty boon into the petty subversion, and makes a complete hash of everything. How?
Well, after having mentioned Jews only once in some 670 pages--a passing remark about a Boer War-era financial scandal in the City involving the Montagu family having frothed up some mild anti-Semitism--she suddely reveals that Anselm Stern is a Jew. She reveals this in the context of a discussion of the hair-raising goings on in Bavaria near the end of World War I, telling the reader in brief the wild but true tale of Kurt Eisner, Gerhard Landauer, and Erich Muhlsem--all of whom were Jews. And now we see it: Dorothy, the only kid of the whole lot to become a professional success, a doctor no less, is half Jewish. Griselda, the beauty, falls in love with her half-brother Wolfgang--a Jew. Everyone else either commits suicide, gets killed in the war, or in some other way melts out of the story. Damn you, Byatt! Damn you.
So I finish the book, with some sense of unease, naturally. I have been Jewcentricized, most unwillingly. But you know how it goes: Those of us who must always be reading some kind of fiction cannot survive long after finishing one novel without starting another. Otherwise we end up weeping for the death of the fantasy we have just completed, and it doesn't matter if the book has a happy ending, more or less, or a sad one, less or more. The key is that it's over and reality rushes back in, filling up more cognitive space than I wish to relinquish.
So I ask my wife, "What else is there around here to read, that I have not already read and failed to completely forget (because you see, if I have read something and managed to completely forget it, why would I want to read it again?)?" And then I see and remark about this little paperback (little compared to the hardback copy of The Children's Story) by Laurie E. King called The Beekeeper's Apprentice. "Oh, that," she says. That's just a little light summer stuff I picked up, in the summer of course, that I did not get far with. Something about Sherlock Holmes, as I recall."
So I pick up The Beekeeper's Apprentice and start into it, and I am delighted. It is preposterous by design: the author nicely pretends to be the charmed recipient of an old truck within which is there is an old manuscript written by a woman named Mary Russell, born January 1900, and the manuscript is about her "real" encounters with the real Sherlock Holmes. This is pretty rich, since Watson writes of Holmes according to Conan Doyle. So here we have King on Russell off to the side of Watson and Doyle, all about Holmes. Watson is real as amanuensis to Holmes, but he is fiction within Doyle; and now Doyle is real within Russell, but Russell is fiction within King. Isn't this fun? We get so involved, momentarily, trying to figure out what is fictional and fanciful and what is not that we forget that, layered though the authorship seems to be, it is all fictional and fanciful.
King does not write with the grace or intricacy of Byatt, but some novels don't need either to keep me happy, at least for a while. There is the lovely coincidence that where Byatt leaves off chronologically, 1918, King picks up with but modest overlap, in 1917. Some themes about women and society and the war's impact on Britain's class stratification overlap nicely, too, and entirely by accident as far as my eyes are concerned. And most important by far, there are, I say to myself, going to be no Jews sneaking around in this silly little summer book.
Ta-dum...... On page 16--just page 16, mind you--it turns out that Mary (named for Magdalene and not the virgin, we're told a few pages earlier) not only has one Jewish parent, but reads and writes Hebrew! Holmes deduces this, you see, from the shape of the ink-smudges on Mary's left thumb and second finger. Had I not been on a fairly crowded Metro car when I read this, I might have thrown the book--Dorothy Parker-style--against the nearest wall. Damn, damn, damn!
I know it's all just an accident, a minor irritating accident. I know it's not aimed at me, this mocking episode of fortuity. It's not kismet, and it's not mystical. But damn, damn, damn it is annoying.
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