Rebel's Eyes

We Need 'Philosophy of Journalism' (by Carlin Romano, the Chronicle of Higher Education)

2009-11-18T00:42:00.000-08:00

Note to the Caption:Reporters in the New York Post city room in 1963 (Bettmann, Corbis)

November 15, 2009

By Carlin Romano

If you examine philosophy-department offerings around America, you'll find staple courses in "Philosophy of Law," "Philosophy of Art," "Philosophy of Science," "Philosophy of Religion," and a fair number of other areas that make up our world.

It makes sense. Philosophy, as the intellectual enterprise that in its noblest form inspects all areas of life and questions each practice's fundamental concepts and presumptions, should regularly look at all human activities broad and persistent enough not to be aberrations or idiosyncrasies. (The latter can be reserved for Independent Studies.)

Why, then, don't you find "Philosophy of Journalism" among those staple courses? Why does philosophy, the academic discipline charged to reflect the noblest intellectual enterprise, avoid the subject while departments teem with abstruse courses mainly of interest to the tenured professors who teach them?

A few related questions come to mind. Why, at a time of breakneck technological and social revolution in news and newsrooms, do deans and presidents permit ossified philosophy departments to abdicate their responsibility to cover the world by not thinking about the media? How can it be that journalism and philosophy, the two humanistic intellectual activities that most boldly (and some think obnoxiously) vaunt their primary devotion to truth, are barely on speaking terms?

The explanations require a sociology of both professional philosophy and journalism, too large a project for this space, but worth thumbnailing anyway.

Unlike politics or art, journalism, as a sophisticated public practice in the West involving more than routine sharing of information, developed mainly in the 18th century, long after the core concerns of philosophy as a taught subject (chiefly cosmological, theological, and epistemological) shaped the curriculum. Unlike science, journalism long carried (and still does for many) the association of superficial intellectual goods. That made linkage with it unappealing to professional philosophers, whose egos and identities are deeply connected to an image of themselves as intellectually superior to other professionals. (Scientists and mathematicians, of course, tend to both scare and attract them.)

Add to this the historic insularity and inflexibility of philosophy—the field remains less diverse and intellectually adventurous than any of the other humanities—and the recipe for philosophical ignoring of journalism and new media was practically complete.

Other factors—highly human ones—also kick in, reflecting mainstream American values. A vast and mutual reservoir of condescension exists between American journalists and philosophers. Many philosophers think of journalists as B or even C students (we're talking pre-grade-inflation here), people who have committed themselves to simplistic narratives of the world shorn of nuance and qualification, fond of every fallacy in the book, all made worse by the pompous, officious, in-your-face personality associated with reporters in the popular imagination (see, most recently, Russell Crowe in State of Play, or Robert Downey Jr. in The Soloist.)

Journalists, in turn, often regard philosophy professors (though not all humanists) as mannered figures, badly informed and out of touch on matters outside their academic competence, insufficiently quick-witted on their feet, irrelevant in their influence on the public, and ludicrously inefficient in their Anglophilic and pedantic diction ("I should now like to make the claim, ceteris paribus …"). This makes philosophers, among other things, impossible guests on talk shows and hopeless sources for quotation. Factor in the root disposition that renders each group what it is—the inclination of philosophers to focus in any situation on the operative ideas and concepts involved, and the imperative of journalists to cling close to concrete facts—and the perfect storm of antipathy between these populations can feel fairly primal.

As someone who has tried to live a life in both fields for 30 years, I find journalists understand this state of affairs better than philosophy professors do. The former note the scorn directed at them by the latter and largely laugh it off. The latter often falsely think they are held in higher regard by fellow professionals than is the case.

Both groups, I think, twist the screws into each other too reflexively. For every philosophy professor with an impressive, tactile understanding of current events and human affairs, there's a journalist whose reading in the great books forms a wise philosophical understanding of the world that surpasses that of most philosophy professors. With intellectuals, it's all case by case.

Still, broadly speaking, we need philosophers who understand how epistemology and the establishment of truth claims function in the real world outside seminars and journals—the role of recognized authorities, of decision, of conscious intersubjective setting of standards. And we need journalists who scrutinize and question not just government officials, PR releases, and leaked documents, but their own preconceptions about every aspect of their business. We need journalists who think about how many examples are required to assert a generalization, what the role of the press ought to be in the state, how the boundaries of words are fixed or indeterminate in Wittgensteinian ways, and how their daily practice does or does not resemble art or science.

When I began teaching my seminar "Philosophical Problems of Journalism" at Yale more than 25 years ago—I've taught it nearly 20 times since at institutions ranging from St. Petersburg State, in Russia, to the University of Pennsylvania—it expressed my own bent as a fanatical reader of newspapers and magazines with (I believed) a fact-based approach to life that naturally steered me to philosophy. It was precisely all that raw journalistic information, often contradictory, that I thought stirred me to reason in a philosophical way, asking further questions, noting counterexamples, seeing the implications of the uncertainty of one concept for the uncertainty of others.

So I constructed a basic course that examines journalism in the light of philosophical thinking in epistemology, political theory, ethics, and aesthetics, mixing philosophical and journalistic materials and vocabularies. In Part 1, we scrutinize "truth," "objectivity," and "fact." In Part 2, we explore how journalism might fit classic modern theories of the state, including that tradition from Locke to Rawls that largely ignores the "Fourth Estate." In Part 3, we ponder how what practitioners call "journalistic ethics" fits with broader moral theories such as utilitarianism. In Part 4, we investigate whether journalism can be art or science without overstepping its conceptual bounds. The guiding principle was a variant of Browning: One's reach should exceed one's grasp, or what's a syllabus for?

Having now seen students in those seminars become journalists or philosophy professors themselves, I feel one of my core beliefs has panned out. I've always insisted to the philosophy students that journalistic thinking enhances philosophical work by connecting it to a less artificial method of establishing truth claims than exists in philosophical literature. I've always stressed to journalism students that a philosophical angle of mind—strictness in relating evidence and argument to claims, respectful skepticism toward tradition and belief, sensitivity to tautology, synoptic judgment—makes one a better reporter. Judging by reports from the field, it appears to be true.

For myself, teaching the seminar never gets stale, because journalism and philosophy never get stale. The news remains new. Tough philosophical problems never go away, and must be confronted again and again. At one time, I imagined "Philosophy of Journalism" would flourish through natural causation, despite my own inability, as full-time literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years, to act as an academic Johnny Appleseed, planting the course like a senior professor through disciples and former doctoral students. It hasn't happened.

Might it still? I hope so. Some friends tell me the need is obviated by the huge growth in American academe of communications and media studies as a separate discipline, and the boom in journalism schools and programs. I disagree. Without doubt, as the annual meeting of the International Communication Association confirms, that field more than compensates in sheer volume for the lack of attention philosophy gives to journalism, new media, and implications of the Internet. Certainly it has produced thinkers, such as Manuel Castells, whose syncretic aspirations mirror those of philosophers. Yet, for the most part—a spirited subsociety of wonderful philosophy types notwithstanding—the attention remains chiefly empirical and "social sciencey" in style, too often belaboring and endlessly footnoting the obvious rather than challenging conventional wisdom.

We still need our colleges and universities to provide a more classical, full-bloodedly philosophical approach to journalism. If that's to happen, the welcome move by august universities and media-minded foundations to rethink and reshape journalism education must resist its own faddishness and lack of vision. Too many foundations and universities breathlessly fasten on the bells and whistles of new technology, as if tweets shall save us all, rather than attending to longstanding gaps in journalism education.

Every journalism student should be required to take a course in journalism history. It's essential for young journalists to understand how our peculiar institution developed, and that it is not a natural kind—it can be changed and reformed. Every journalism student should also be required to take a course in "Comparative Journalism," a flagrant lacuna in the field, to understand that the American model and its issues, which predominate in all American journalism programs, is not the world.

Most important, every journalism student should be required to take a course in "Philosophy of Journalism," to develop the intellectual instincts and reflexes that will make the approach to truth of both practices a permanent part of his or her intellectual makeup. Imagine a world in which every column about the Obama administration's battle with Fox News came with profound context about the large issues involved. A sweet, rather than tweet, thought.

There's a great history to be written of philosophers' engagement with journalism, from Hegel's citation of the daily newspaper as his morning prayer, to Ortega y Gasset's lessons from newspaper life, to Russell's widespread freelancing and the later Wittgenstein's instantiation of conceptual journalism as a philosophical method.

Universities and foundations could do their part to mine this rich tradition. Before directing more Knight and other grants to further repetitive Twitter and Internet "experiments," they should support a core intellectual curriculum in journalism studies that would make a far greater difference to future excellence in the field.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dancing Scruffy Cheek-to-Scruffy Cheek: Gay Tango by Maria Finn (ABC.com)

2009-10-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

Tango Evolves as Argentine Dance Floors Mix Gender Roles, But Not Genders

By MARIA FINN

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina -- May 1, 2008

In Buenos Aires, the tango starts with a gesture that is almost imperceptible to the untrained eye.

At traditional "milongas," as tango social dances are known, men do not approach women and ask them to dance. Rather, the Argentines sit across the room and make eye contact. If the woman does not avert her eyes, the man nods slightly. If the woman nods back, then he approaches her and they move to the floor.

That initial gesture is known as "el arte de cabeceo," or "the art of the nod." This ritual saves the man's dignity from public rejection, and it respects the vulnerability of a woman, as she can easily refuse and not feel obligated to dance with the man.

This is part four in ABCNews.com's 10-part special series on nightlife around the world. Click here every weekday through May 9, 2008 for the latest story.

This is only one ritual among many. Throughout the entire exchange, traditions determine where to place your hands, how many songs you dance together and strict gender roles are always present. Some dancers claim that the social codes inherent in the tango are necessary because the dance requires strangers to become so intimate with each other.

But there's a new kind of tango taking place. At the gay milonga, known as La Marshall, you'll find several kinds of couples dancing: women with women and a few mixed-gender couples but mostly men with men. Five o'clock-shadowed cheek to five o'clock-shadowed cheek, they execute their steps with precision and clear intent.

Tango in Buenos Aires is constantly refining and redefining itself. The tango began in the 1800s near the ports on the south side of the city. It evolved from the overlap of slaves brought from Africa, immigrant laborers from Europe, Cuban sailors, and women who arrived or were coerced into working the brothels. During the years the music and dance became less bawdy, as it shifted from whorehouses to high society. Experimental music by masters like Astor Piazzolla, who introduced jazz and classical elements to the tango, opened it up for further experimentation. In the past decade, nuevo tango, in which electronic music is mixed with Belle Epoch classics, has the younger generation in Buenos Aires dancing.

Two of the latest trends, gay and queer tango, are attracting dancers from across the world to Buenos Aires. Many trace gay tango back to one man: Augusto Balinzano, who tours internationally to teach gay tango. When he's in town, he teaches tango at Lugar Gay, a guesthouse exclusively for men in the neighborhood of San Telmo.

A professional tango dancer, he says that gay tango wasn't a deliberate movement; it just happened.

"One night I was dancing with a man," he says. "Then the next time another couple of gay men joined us. And so on. Now we have gay lessons and a gay milonga."

Indicative of major changes in Argentine society, the gay tango is something of a perfect storm that came about from an economic crisis, improved civil rights for homosexuals and a revival in tango's popularity.

The long-standing dictatorship in Argentina that lasted from 1976 to 1983 considered anything different to be subversive. Even following the fall of the dictatorship, though there were no actual laws directly discriminating against homosexuals. But there was an Edict Against Public Dancing, according to a report written by Sociologist Amy Lind and published by the North American Congress of Latin America in 1997. This edict pledged to "punish any proprietor who allows men to dance together."

Lind goes on to explain that individuals were arrested under these edicts, held by police for up to 30 days and fined.

In 2001, Argentina experienced an economic crisis when the peso devalued. To aid their recovery, the government tried to attract more tourists. And because it had become such an affordable trip prices were down by more than a third both straight and gay tourists realized they could eat steak, drink Malbec and dance the tango for a third the regular price. Even those who didn't go to Buenos Aires to learn tango would become smitten by the art form.

Civil rights for homosexuals gradually improved, and in 2002 Buenos Aires' City Council passed a measure recognizing same-sex civil unions and extending health insurance and pension rights to same-sex partners. Since then, the city has worked hard to attract gay visitors, creating a gay tourist map and presenting at gay travel symposiums.

As a result, Buenos Aires has become a very popular destination for gay travelers, and according to Hector Aguilar, an architectural historian who gives lectures for Lugar Gay, "It now rivals Rio as the gay destination in South America."

One gay man, who asked to remain anonymous, came to Buenos Aires from his hometown of Montreal for almost three months to escape the Canadian winter. "I heard about it at a gay travel convention, and realized that not only was it inexpensive, but there was a lot to do here," he says. "Mostly, I am working on my tango. There are more gay milongas starting, and even some of the straight ones are becoming open to same-sex couples."

Gay tango is the natural outcome of these social changes in Buenos Aires, and the city hosted the first Queer Tango Festival last year. It drew about 500 people from around the world, organizer Roxana Gargano said. Take note: This festival was not gay tango, but queer tango. Another evolution is occurring.

Ingrid Remmen, who is visiting Buenos Aires from Norway to study queer tango, explained the difference: "Gay tango is about sexuality, and queer tango is about opening up traditional tango so that women can lead men or other women."

A teacher of queer tango, and one of the founders of the Queer Tango Festival, Mariana Falcon decided to learn the man's part when, as she puts it, "I lost my tolerance for bad leaders. And even when the leaders are good, I don't want to wear high heels and short skirts and play that feminine stereotype. It's not who I am."

She found even gay tango a little restrictive, as while some same-gender couples danced together, ideas of the dominant leader and submissive follower were still in play.

Queer tango, as she envisions it, means that it doesn't matter if you're straight or gay; you have the opportunity to be who you are leader or follower regardless of your gender or sexual orientation.

Of course, many tango dancers will stick to the traditional way; much of the pleasure of the tango is not just the footwork, but the embrace is important as well and straight dancers tend to be more comfortable in this close proximity with the opposite sex.

Joe Wieder, a straight tango dancer from New York, believes that it's just easier for a man to lead a woman, because, as he put it, "In tango, size and sex do matter."

But queer tango in Buenos Aires is about more than just the dance.

"Tango reflects changes in society," she says. "The growing popularity of queer tango means that as a society we are becoming more open-minded. Straight or gay, when partners learn to interchange roles, both can access different types of power."

They can do this, she says, by shifting their embrace. Or, as queer tango becomes more familiar to people, the negotiating of follower and leader roles could happen by something as simple as a nod.

A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing (by Peter J. Doughhrty, The Chronicle of Higher Education)

2009-07-13T00:11:00.000-07:00

In 1948, the University of Illinois Press published Claude Shannon's brief and profoundly influential book The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon's work, which explained how words, sounds, and images could be converted into blips and sent electronically, presaged the digital revolution in communications.

Anyone not living under a rock knows that Shannon's idea has engulfed all forms of written thought, including every genre of scholarship. Ironically, the very institution that brought Shannon's technological tract to a broad audience, the university press, is now contending with the possible demise of the print book itself. Just as the researchers at Bell Labs helped to develop the very technologies that undermined the old phone company, so the editors and publishers who brought Shannon and his fellow theorists to print have effectively disrupted the traditional technology of books. Joseph Schumpeter had a phrase for it: "creative destruction."

And while university presses grapple with the economic and technological challenges now affecting how we publish our books — the subject of a thousand and one AAUP conference sessions, e-mail-list debates, and news articles — discussion of what we publish seems to have taken a back seat. And understandably so. Why obsess about content if books as we know them are about to become obsolete in favor of some yet-to-evolve form? Has creative destruction spelled the end of books?

I believe quite the opposite. Books — specifically scholarly titles published by university presses and other professional publishers — retain two distinct comparative advantages over other forms of communication in the idea bazaar:

First, books remain the most effective technology for organizing and presenting sustained arguments at a relatively general level of discourse and in familiar rhetorical forms — narrative, thematic, philosophical, and polemical — thereby helping to enrich and unify otherwise disparate intellectual conversations.

Second, university presses specialize in publishing books containing hard ideas. Hard ideas — whether cliometrics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, or symbolic interactionism — when they are also good ideas, carry powerful residual value in their originality and authority. Think of the University of Illinois Press and its Mathematical Theory of Communication, still in print today. Commercial publishers, except for those who produce scientific and technical books, generally don't traffic in hard ideas. They're too difficult to sell in scalable numbers and quickly. More free-form modes of communication (blogs, wikis, etc.) cannot do justice to hard ideas in their fullness. But we university presses luxuriate in hard ideas. We work the Hegel-Heidegger-Heisenberg circuit. As the Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters notes, even when university presses succeed in publishing so-called trade books (as in Charles Taylor's recent hit, A Secular Age), we do so because of the intellectual rigor contained in such books, not in spite of it.

Hard ideas define a culture — that of serious reading, an institution vital to democracy itself. In a recent article, Stephen L. Carter, Yale law professor and novelist, underscores "the importance of reading books that are difficult. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing — and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share." The challenge for university presses is to better turn our penchant for hard ideas to greater purpose.

University presses need to foment a content revival astride the delivery revolution, one that stimulates our connection to new intellectual trends, encompasses a broader conception of scholarship, and renews our commitment to the scholarly mission of the university. Such a revival in content would return us to our roots; roots revealed in Albert Einstein's The Meaning of Relativity, Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis, Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Beyond the Melting Pot, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory, and other classic works. Since our earliest days, our content has been our glory, and it will remain so in the future. But this requires a new and purposive round of brainstorming. We need to match the power of our book-making imaginations with emerging currents of scholarship, some emanating from corners of the university distant from our traditional turf in the humanities and social sciences — new genres, and new readerships.

This content revolution would proceed apace on parallel tracks, which I will touch on briefly, then in greater detail:

First, include on our lists more titles from the burgeoning professional disciplines: engineering, law, medicine, architecture, business, the graphic arts, and the information sciences. Those fields are driving the growth of our host universities while redefining the limits of culture in new and exciting ways.

Second, become much more purposeful and assertive in publishing books that define whole fields, including important advanced textbooks. University-press editors would add depth and ballast to their lists by looking for that next great advanced text in our traditional fields, such as social theory, comparative literature, or art history, as well as in emerging fields. That kind of publishing is often dismissed as cookie cutter, but it's not.

Third, publish more books for worldwide readerships. As the globalization of knowledge continues apace, American university presses are positioned to engage readers in ways unimagined a generation ago. By infusing our lists with titles of international interest, we can better exploit the technologies that bring the world closer to us.

Fourth, work more closely with departments and centers within our host universities to adapt their work — sponsored lecture series, etc. — into books, monograph series, and other such initiatives. We should be planning our future lists strategically within our host universities in order to maximize the relative strengths of press and campus alike.

Let's look more closely at these goals.

As noted above, the first key to a stronger and more vital university press is in the embrace of a broader array of fields, notably the professions, including medicine; engineering; computer, environmental, information, and management sciences; graphic design; and finance. The professions, for all the prestige of graduate institutions like the Wharton School or Harvard Medical School, are often seen as peripheral to the humanities-centered core mission of universities, and to the heavily humanities-oriented program of university presses. That disparity presents an identity problem for the modern university. The diversified research university's great growth areas exist largely outside the dialogue internal to the humanities and social sciences.

But that paradox offers an opportunity for university presses, because books function at least in part to humanize hard ideas, such as those that define professional knowledge. Not only do the professional fields yield important technical books, they provide university presses with the chance to publish broader books that convey important profession-specific knowledge to diverse, cross-disciplinary audiences. In other words, university presses, because of our position within the academic community, are uniquely positioned to help introduce professional knowledge into the larger intellectual discourse by publishing books that engage the historical, literary, and social dimensions of these fields. That effort has, in fact, already begun. For example, think of the influence of works such as Donald Mackenzie's An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (MIT Press, 2006), John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid's The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Henry Petroski's Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design (Princeton University Press, 2006), or James R. Beniger's The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard University Press, 1986). Each of those books introduced into the broader intellectual conversation powerfully important technical subjects to an impressive cross section of readers, removing the technical barbs and burnishing the transcendent human implications.

There are also ethical elements of professional subjects that need to be integrated into broader intellectual conversations. As Harold T. Shapiro, a former president of Princeton, notes in his book A Larger Sense of Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2005), "the most valuable part of education for any learned profession is that aspect that teaches future professionals to think, read, compare, discriminate, analyze, form judgments, and generally enhance their capacity to confront the ambiguities and enigmas of the human condition."

While naysayers may argue that publishing more books on the professions subverts the university press's historical commitment to the humanities and culture, one could counter that those professional fields are themselves coming to define culture. Think of the growing influence on society of fields such as telecommunications, financial engineering, and cognitive science, as well as the increasingly ubiquitous influence of statistics and applied mathematics in everyday communications. In fact, the electronic transition in scholarship itself is the product of applied science. These fields are foreign to most university presses, but the direction of scholarship suggests that they shouldn't be. In fact, they provide a great new opportunity for us to publish works that reflect the reality around us.

I am not suggesting that university presses should abandon or even reduce our commitment to traditional humanities fields. History, literature, art, politics, and philosophy form the core of university-press publishing, and always will. However, by integrating more technical subject matter into our publishing, we can add color and depth to our lists. The mere introduction of new ideas into the culture of university-press publishing would add vigor to our operations while inspiring in editors in the humanities and social sciences new exciting cross-disciplinary books. Books, better than any other literary form, can speak to the ever-widening chasms that define the modern, intellectually diverse research university. We should embrace the challenge.

Second, even as university-press publishers should diversify our disciplinary portfolios, so too should we strive more ambitiously to define entire fields by commissioning important new high-level textbooks and treatises. That kind of publishing used to be the proud purview of textbook publishers, but as a result of the nearly 30-year wave of consolidation that has marked college publishing, only a few such houses remain. Those publishers tend to concentrate their energies on producing mainstream undergraduate textbooks in repetitive shootouts for market share, leaving smaller yet intellectually vibrant fields open to new and innovative texts, treatises, and reference books.

University presses should seize the opportunity. Important advanced texts often turn out to be intellectual game changers, reviving and redirecting knowledge in older fields, synthesizing ideas in newer fields, and unifying scholarship across fields. Thus they serve eminently the mission of the university press. But as the author of a leading book on academic publishing observed in conversation with me, university-press editors tend to dismiss that kind of publishing as cookie cutter. A little history suggests it is anything but.

When I began my career at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the summer of 1972, I carried in my briefcase sales briefs for titles that would be regarded as excellent by any standard. Harcourt's college department published great works such as Noam Chomsky's Language and Mind, Walter Jackson Bate's Criticism: The Major Texts (1952), Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren's Modern Rhetoric (1949), Lewis A. Coser's Masters of Sociological Thought (1971), and Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity (1971). So did other college houses, as did the celebrated "crossover" houses of that day, Basic Books and the Free Press. If that's cookie cutter, please sign me up for some shares of Pepperidge Farm. There are superb and growing opportunities for university presses to engage in that kind of stylish textbook publishing and to do so both proudly and well.

Third, enlarging the globally relevant dimension of our lists not only provides a greater fulcrum for sales, but better connects us to the scholars, writers, and foreign publishers forming the next generation of research networks around the world. At Princeton, the percentage of business that comes from internationally attractive lists such as economics is as high as 40 percent of total sales, or about twice the average of most of our lists. Robust international lists also generate more translations. On a visit to Asia in 2007, I discovered that many of the booksellers there were aware of an important new book from our catalog, Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, even before its official publication dates. That is how immediate and tangible the global market has become. Without global content, university presses risk isolation from a growing community of readers and authors. After all, the numbers suggest the next John Hope Franklin or Joan Robinson is as likely to be sitting in a classroom in Delhi or Beijing as in Cambridge or Los Angeles.

Fourth, university presses should reinforce their strategic positions within their host universities by partnering with departments and committees on developing new books consonant with the scholarly initiatives afoot on campus. A simple example is the lecture series as book.

When I became an economics editor, I learned about the wonderful volumes drawn by Oxford University Press from the Clarendon Lectures delivered annually in Oxford by invited scholars. Those lectures served then — and continue to serve — as vital events drawing scholars and students alike together for several days of lecturing and discussion. They also serve as the basis for a manuscript that eventually gets published by Oxford and, in the case of the Clarendon volumes, read worldwide by economists and scholars in related fields. Those books include now-classic works such as Robert Shiller's Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society's Largest Economic Risks (1993). That is the kind of win-win arrangement that facilitates partnership between the university press and its host university.

Another is the university-sponsored book series. For example, think of the Princeton Annals of Mathematics series, supplying the world of math with cutting-edge monographic works for generations, or the Harvard East Asian Monographs series. University administrators should be aware of the enduring recognition that comes from the successful continuing publication of such series, and of the capacity of books to command attention in publications as wide-ranging as blogs, Web journals, newspaper columns, and magazines. If mathematics can emanate throughout the world from Princeton and its press, economics from Oxford and its press, and East Asian studies from Harvard and its press, why not engineering, environmental science, management, or public health from other presses? Such books are reviewed worldwide, providing a continuing stream of recognition for universities and presses alike.

Although we live in an era of disaggregated knowledge, I believe scholarly books will thrive. William Germano notes in his book Getting It Published that "the book is the form in which we scholars tell our stories to one another. ... Even when a publisher offers the choice of a physical or electronic edition of a work, or supplements a physical book with electronic ancillaries, or produces a physical book only on demand, it is the form of the book, that precious thought-skeleton, that holds a project together."

In effect, books remain valuable precisely because they are distinct from the other, more transitory, forms of scholarly communication. But university presses have to grasp the stinging nettle, jump-start a serious discussion about content, get strategic, invent projects. If university presses attempt to be more creative by introducing new subjects into our existing lists, the resultant hybrid vigor, to borrow a phrase from the biologists, will put us on a stronger course and renew the place of books in the world of ideas. For in the future, as in the past, we will be judged by the character of our content.

Peter J. Dougherty directs Princeton University Press.

How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci (by By W.A. Pannapacker)

2009-02-25T21:32:00.000-08:00

"Dimmi, dimmi se mai fu fatta cosa alcuna."

("Tell me, tell me if anything ever got done.")

— Attributed to Leonardo

On his deathbed, they say, Leonardo da Vinci regretted that he had left so much unfinished.

Leonardo had so many ideas; he was so ahead of his time. His notebooks were crammed with inventions: new kinds of clocks, a double-hulled ship, flying machines, military tanks, an odometer, the parachute, and a machine gun, to name just a few. If you wanted a new high-tech weapon, a gigantic bronze statue, or a method for moving a river, Leonardo could devise something that just might work.

But Leonardo rarely completed any of the great projects that he sketched in his notebooks. His groundbreaking research in human anatomy resulted in no publications — at least not in his lifetime. Not only did Leonardo fail to realize his potential as an engineer and a scientist, but he also spent his career hounded by creditors to whom he owed paintings and sculptures for which he had accepted payment but — for some reason — could not deliver, even when his deadline was extended by years. His surviving paintings amount to no more than 20, and five or six, including the "Mona Lisa," were still in his possession when he died. Apparently, he was still tinkering with them.

Nowadays, Leonardo might have been hired by a top research university, but it seems likely that he would have been denied tenure. He had lots of notes but relatively little to put in his portfolio.

Leonardo was the kind of person we have come to call a "genius." But he had trouble focusing for long periods on a single project. After he solved its conceptual problems, Leonardo lost interest until someone forced his hand. Even then, Leonardo often became a perfectionist about details that no one else could see, and the job just didn't get done.

A friar named Sabba di Castiglione said of Leonardo, "When he ought to have attended to painting in which no doubt he would have proved a new Appelles, he gave himself entirely to geometry, architecture, and anatomy." Leonardo worked on what interested him at the moment, cultivating his energies and insights, even when those activities were not directly related to his current commissions.

Leonardo, it seems, was a hopeless procrastinator. Or that's what we are supposed to believe, following the narrative started by his earliest biographer, Giorgio Vasari, and continued in the sermons of today's anti-procrastination therapists and motivational speakers. Leonardo, you see, was "afraid of success," so he never really gave his best effort. There was no chance of failure that way. Better to "self-sabotage" than to come up short.

Of course, the therapeutic interpretation of Leonardo — and, perhaps, of many of us in academe who emulate his pattern of seemingly nonproductive creativity — has a long history. Leonardo's reputation spread at exactly the right time for someone to become a symbol of this newly invented moral and psychological disorder: procrastination, a word that sounds just a little too much like what Victorian moralists used to call "self-abuse."

The unambiguously negative idea of procrastination seems unique to the Western world; that is, to Europeans and the places they have colonized in the last 500 years or so. It is a reflection of several historical processes in the years after the discovery of the New World: the Protestant Reformation, the spread of capitalist economics, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the middle classes, and the growth of the nation-state. As any etymologist will tell you, words are battlegrounds for contending historical processes, and dictionaries are among the best chronicles of those struggles.

The magisterial Oxford English Dictionary presents a wide range of connotations for "procrastinate," ranging from the innocuous "to postpone" to the more negative "to postpone irrationally, obstinately, and out of sinful laziness." The earliest instances of procrastination do not carry the moral sting of the later usages. To procrastinate simply meant to delay for one reason or another, as one might reasonably delay eating dinner because it is only 3 in the afternoon. For example, in 1632 someone described "That benefite of the procrastinating of my Life." In other words, sometimes delay is good; it is a good idea — in this case — to delay the arrival of death.

Somehow it is not surprising that the first notable shift in the moral weight of the term is found in relation to business and the building of empires. In his 1624 account, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles, Capt. John Smith — adventurer and founder of Jamestown — wrote of his gang of shiftless cavaliers, "Many such deuices [devices] they fained [feigned] to procrastinate the time." It was, no doubt, owing to this procrastination — not tyrannical leadership and impossible conditions — that Jamestown's early years were so unsuccessful. Eventually, Smith developed the policy of "He that will not worke shall not eate," since eating seems to be one of the few things about which one cannot procrastinate for long. It's a telling moment when procrastination becomes a crime against the state potentially punishable by death.

As time wore on, and the pace of life accelerated, the exhortations against procrastination in the English-speaking world rapidly became stronger. By 1893 we find someone not being accused of procrastination or warned against it, but accusing himself of the shameful vice: "I was too procrastinatingly lazy to expend even that amount of energy." The rhetoric of anti-procrastination — constructed by imperialists, religious zealots, and industrial capitalists — had become internalized. We no longer need to be told that to procrastinate is wrong. We know we are sinners and are ashamed. What can we do but work harder?

Like the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we live our lives with regret for what we have not done — or have done imperfectly — instead of taking satisfaction with what we have done, such as, in Coleridge's case, founding English Romanticism in his youth and producing, throughout his life, some of the best poetry and literary criticism ever composed, including his unfinished poem "Kubla Khan." But that was not enough; always, there was some magnum opus that Coleridge should have been writing, that made every smaller project seem like failure, and that led him to seek refuge from procrastinator's guilt in opium.

One thing about this dalliance with the OED is reassuring: If words emerge and evolve over time, it is possible to get behind them, to disconnect the relationship between "signifier" and "signified" so to speak. Since procrastination emerged from a specific historical context, it is not a universal and inescapable element of human experience. We can liberate ourselves from its gravitational pull of judgment, shame, and coercion. We can seize the term for ourselves and redefine it for our purposes. We can even make procrastination — like imagination — into something positive and maybe even essential for the productivity we value above all things.

In 1486, when Leonardo was still struggling with the Sforza horse, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola gave his famous "Oration on the Dignity of Man," encouraging artists to become divine creators in their own right. In this vision, God encourages Adam not to embrace human limitation but to lift himself upward into the realm of the angels.

It was this dream of human perfectibility that animated artists like Michelangelo, and, perhaps, forever rendered Leonardo unable to relinquish voluntarily any of his more serious artistic projects. As Vasari writes, "Leonardo, with his profound intelligence of art, commenced various undertakings, many of which he never completed, because it appeared to him that the hand could never give its due perfection to the object or purpose which he had in his thoughts, or beheld in his imagination." Through his many episodes of alleged procrastination, we see an artist who engages with the irresolvable conflict between unlimited aspiration and the acknowledgment of human limitation.

If Leonardo seemed endlessly distracted by his notebooks and experiments — instead of finishing the details of a painting he had already conceptualized — it was because he understood the fleeting quality of imagination: If you do not get an insight down on paper, and possibly develop it while your excitement lasts, then you are squandering the rarest and most unpredictable of your human capabilities, the very moments when one seems touched by the hand of God.

The principal evidence for that is, of course, Leonardo's notebooks. He kept those notebooks for at least 35 years, and more than 5,000 manuscript pages have survived — perhaps a third of the total — scattered in several archives and private collections. Leonardo's known writings would fill at least 20 volumes, but if one includes the lost materials, he probably wrote enough to fill a hundred.

Some of Leonardo's entries are short jottings; others are lengthy and elaborate. The notebooks give the impression of a mind always at work, even in the midst of ordinary affairs. He returned to some pages intermittently over many years, revising his thoughts and adding drawings and textual elaborations. Several compendiums have been compiled from his notebooks, but, like so many of us, Leonardo never used his voluminous private writings to produce a single published work.

For the most part, his notebooks — like the commonplace books that were kept by students in the Renaissance (Shakespeare's Hamlet had one, for example) — were a polymath's workshop: a place to try out ideas, to develop them over time, and to retain them until circumstances made them more immediately useful.

Leonardo's studies of how light strikes a sphere, for example, enable the continuous modeling of the "Mona Lisa" and "St. John the Baptist." His work in optics might have delayed a project, but his final achievements in painting depended on the experiments — physical and intellectual — that he documented in the notebooks. Far from being a distraction — like many of his contemporaries thought — they represent a lifetime of productive brainstorming, a private working out of the ideas on which his more public work depended. To criticize this work is to believe that what we call genius somehow emerges from the mind fully formed — like Athena from the head of Zeus — without considerable advance preparation. Vasari's quotation of Pope Leo X has rung down through the centuries as a classic indictment of Leonardo's procrastinatory behavior: "Alas! This man will do nothing at all, since he is thinking of the end before he has made a beginning."

If creative procrastination, selectively applied, prevented Leonardo from finishing a few commissions — of minor importance when one is struggling with the inner workings of the cosmos — then only someone who is a complete captive of the modern cult of productive mediocrity that pervades the workplace, particularly in academe, could fault him for it.

Productive mediocrity requires discipline of an ordinary kind. It is safe and threatens no one. Nothing will be changed by mediocrity; mediocrity is completely predictable. It doesn't make the powerful and self-satisfied feel insecure. It doesn't require freedom, because it doesn't do anything unexpected. Mediocrity is the opposite of what we call "genius." Mediocrity gets perfectly mundane things done on time. But genius is uncontrolled and uncontrollable. You cannot produce a work of genius according to a schedule or an outline. As Leonardo knew, it happens through random insights resulting from unforeseen combinations. Genius is inherently outside the realm of known disciplines and linear career paths. Mediocrity does exactly what it's told, like the docile factory workers envisioned by Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Like so many of us in academe, Leonardo was endlessly curious; he did not rely on received wisdom but insisted on going back to the sources, most important nature itself. Would he have achieved more if his focus had been narrower and more rigorously professional? Perhaps he might have completed more statues and altarpieces. He might have made more money. His contemporaries, such as Michelangelo, would have had fewer grounds for mocking him as an impractical eccentric. But we might not remember him now any more than we normally recall the more punctual work of dozens of other Florentine artists of his generation.

Perhaps Leonardo's greatest discovery was not the perfectibility of man but its opposite: He found that even the most profound thought combined with the most ferocious application cannot accomplish something absolutely true and beautiful. We cannot touch the face of God. But we can come close, and his work, imperfect as it may be, is one of the major demonstrations of heroic procrastination in Western history: the acceptance of our imperfection — and the refusal to accept anything less than striving for perfection anyway.

Leonardo is just one example of an individual whose meaning has been constructed, in part, to combat the vice of procrastination; namely, the natural desire to pursue what one finds most interesting and enjoyable rather than what one finds boring and repellent, simply because one's life must be at the service of some compelling interest — some established institutional practice — that is never clearly explained, lest it be challenged and rejected.

Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some practical end, a career rather than a calling. And so we complete research projects that no longer interest us and write books that no one will read; or we teach with indifference, dutifully boring our students, marking our time until retirement, and slowly forgetting why we entered the profession: because something excited us so much that we subordinated every other obligation to follow it.

If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.

W.A. Pannapacker is an associate professor of English at Hope College.

The Most Lavish Book Debut in History (and almost the book) (By Elisabetta Povoledo, the New York Times)

2008-06-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

Image Presentation

Michelangelo for Readers With Deep Pockets

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Published: May 31, 2008

BOLOGNA, Italy — The gala presentation of “Michelangelo: La Dotta Mano” (“Michelangelo: The Wise Hand”), a volume of photographs of this Renaissance master’s sculptures, may well have been the most lavish book debut in history.

With Piazza Maggiore, Bologna’s main square, as the backdrop, a short video depiction of the volume, which can be seen on www.fmronline.it, was followed on Thursday night by an hourlong spectacle that included dozens of costumed dancers, a string quartet playing from a stage suspended in midair, suckling pigs roasted over a pit, a fake snowfall and a foppishly dressed acrobat walking Spiderman-style up the facade of San Petronio, the city’s cathedral.

But then, this is no ordinary book, starting with its retail price of 100,000 euros, or around $155,000, at Friday’s exchange rate.

Included in the price of what its publishers are calling “the most beautiful book in the world” is a sleek black case, its own stand and a 500-year guarantee.

“This isn’t an appliance,” Marilena Ferrari, chairman of the book’s publisher, Gruppo FMR, told Bologna’s mayor and guests at the book’s official presentation in a grand salon in City Hall on Thursday morning. “That’s the amount of time we feel we can guarantee the materials we used to craft it.”

Using the high standards of the privately published books in the 19th century — an ideal known as the “book beautiful” — as a starting point, FMR sought expert artisans from various fields to create something Ms. Ferrari described as “a work of art in itself.”

Aurelio Amendola’s black-and-white photographs were printed on paper made exclusively for the project. There are detachable reproductions of Michelangelo drawings on handmade folios created according to centuries-old traditions. And then there’s the cover: a scale reproduction in marble of the “Madonna della Scala” (“Madonna of the Steps”), a bas-relief of the Virgin and Child sculptured by Michelangelo when he was still in his teens. The original is housed in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence.

It took two white-gloved attendants to lug around the 46.2-pound book at its City Hall debut.

The marble cover was the trickiest aspect of production.

“It was difficult to find the right depth,” said Nanni Tamar, the project’s production manager. Six sculptors of marble are working on the first 33 copies in a limited edition of 99. “We broke a lot of slabs along the way,” Mr. Tamar said.

This isn’t the most expensive book ever made. There are books incorporating precious metals or gemstones that increase the price, like that of the entrepreneur Roger Shashoua, whose memoir, “Dancing With the Bear,” according to its Web site, dancingwiththebear.com, comes in a diamond-encrusted “special oligarch” edition that ranges in price from $1 million to $6 million.

Luxury publishing in general seems to be on the upswing. “From my experience, it’s growing,” said Ovais Naqvi, chief executive of Gloria, a new luxury publisher that this year came out with a book about New York City that sells at $2,500 to $15,000.

“There are a certain amount of people who are testing how far the market can be pushed,” Mr. Naqvi said.

Because production of the Michelangelo book is so labor-intensive (Ms. Ferrari likened the process to a Renaissance workshop), aspiring buyers can expect a six-month wait, the same as for a Ferrari (the car), said Pietro Tomassini, FMR’s commercial director.

“We think it will sell out in a very short time,” he said. Customers in the United States, Europe and Russia have already reserved copies, he added, though he declined to say how many.

Cristiano Collari, the book specialist for Christie’s auction house in Milan, was a little taken aback by the price, which he said was comparable to that of good copies of rare ancient texts like the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” (1499), which he described as the “bibliophile’s prime fetish.” But even contemporary art books can turn out to be good investments, Mr. Collari said, though the market is always hard to predict.

For this first title in its “Book Wonderful” series — apart from a forthcoming book about Catherine de Medici, the rest are top secret — FMR chose to pay homage to Michelangelo and to time its publication to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the first painted stroke on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican, which took place in May 1508.

The question remains, who would pay so much for such a book?

Franco Negretto, a financial consultant here who was awed by Thursday night’s spectacle — “I’ve seen a lot of shows in this square, but this was one of the best” — said he’d been sold by FMR’s pitch, despite the price tag.

“I’ll do everything I can to buy it,” he said solemnly.

The on-line page designed for the book is one not to miss for sure.

Bertelsmann Appoints Outsider to Head Random House (by Motoko Rich and Mark Landler, the New York Times)

2008-05-26T20:21:00.000-07:00

By MOTOKO RICH and MARK LANDLER
Published: May 21, 2008

On the day that Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate, quelled weeks of speculation by announcing that Markus Dohle, head of the company’s printing unit, would take over as chief executive of Random House, industry executives were largely reserving judgment on what it would mean to have a relative outsider in charge of the world’s largest publisher of consumer books.

Mr. Dohle, 39, will succeed Peter W. Olson, Random House’s current chief executive, on June 1. Mr. Olson, 58, who led the publishing division for the last decade, is in negotiations for a senior faculty position at Harvard Business School, according to a person knowledgeable about his plans. Mr. Olson declined to comment.

The appointment of Mr. Dohle, one of the youngest people to lead Random House, is the first significant executive shake-up since Hartmut Ostrowski took over as chief executive of Bertelsmann in January. Mr. Ostrowski previously was chief of Arvato, the company’s printing and services division. In Mr. Dohle, head of Arvato’s print unit since 2006, Mr. Ostrowski clearly picked his own man.

Mr. Dohle, who is described as charming by those who know him, speaks fluent English and will move to New York this summer. He takes over a division with an author stable that includes Toni Morrison, Dan Brown, John Grisham and Salman Rushdie. Along with other important players in the industry, Random House has recently suffered a slowdown, despite best sellers like Mr. Grisham’s “Playing for Pizza” and “Women and Money” by Suze Orman.

Mr. Ostrowski acknowledged that Mr. Dohle, who has been with Bertelsmann since he graduated with a degree in economics and industrial engineering in 1994, did not have direct experience running a book publisher, although Arvato Print has many publishing clients.

Mr. Ostrowski said in an interview Tuesday that he could have appointed a traditional publisher to succeed Mr. Olson, but he said he wanted someone to bring a fresh perspective to the book division, which is steeped in tradition. “Markus is a proven entrepreneur within the organization,” Mr. Ostrowski said. He “has shown he has been able to turn a mature business into a growing business.”

Separately, Bertelsmann announced that Richard Sarnoff, the president of the company’s digital media investments group, had been appointed co-chairman of Bertelsmann Inc., where he would play a critical role in directing strategy in the United States.

In a memo to staff Tuesday, Mr. Ostrowski said that Mr. Olson was leaving “of his own initiative.”

Last fall, Mr. Olson was out of the office for two months with double pneumonia, contracted on a business trip to China. Mr. Ostrowski said that Mr. Olson had approached him about leaving in January. “From our perspective, it was not the right time to replace him,” Mr. Ostrowski said. “But we could accept that he wants to pursue other life plans.”

A senior Bertelsmann executive, however, said the factors behind Mr. Olson’s departure were more complex. This executive, speaking on condition of anonymity because it was an internal personnel issue, said that Mr. Olson’s split with the German management began last September, when he proposed dismissing Gail Rebuck, the chief executive of the Random House Group in Britain. This was vetoed by Mr. Ostrowski and Thomas Rabe, Bertelsmann’s chief financial officer.

Ms. Rebuck did not return a call seeking comment. Stuart Applebaum, a Random House spokesman, said: “I wouldn’t dignify it with a comment. I would just label it as gossip.”

With pressure mounting, the Bertelsmann executive said, Mr. Olson began to look for an exit strategy. He hired a lawyer to negotiate a severance package. The company agreed to a deal, but it left some hard feelings, according to this person.

Mr. Olson, a former banker and lawyer and a voracious reader, also had no direct experience in the publishing industry prior to 1992, when he took over as chief financial officer of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Group, a book division owned by Bertelsmann that was merged with Random House in 1998. Mr. Olson took over as chief executive and became the first American to join Bertelsmann's executive board in 2001.

Although Random House produced more than 4,000 best sellers in 19 countries during Mr. Olson’s tenure, he had a mixed reputation because he often showed a zealous focus on the bottom line. Yet last year, sales at Random House fell by 5.6 percent, and operating profits declined 4.9 percent.

Mr. Ostrowski said that one year’s results did not affect his thinking. “If someone has a proven record and he only misses his numbers once, you don’t get fired for that,” he said.

In a letter to employees, Mr. Ostrowski wrote, “Let me state very clearly: we want to see Random House grow.” He said in the interview that he wanted the entire company to achieve 4 percent organic growth in revenue each year.

According to a senior executive at Bertelsmann, the decision to change the leadership of Random House reached the uppermost levels of the company, which is controlled by the family of Reinhard Mohn. Liz Mohn, Mr. Mohn’s wife and a powerful influence, was consulted, according to the executive. She had sometimes tense relations with Mr. Olson, this executive said, and was a champion of Mr. Dohle. Gunter Thielen, chairman of Bertelsmann’s supervisory board, was also involved, the executive said.

The publishers and editors of Random House’s imprints, rarely shy about expressing their opinions, were uncharacteristically reserved about the appointment of Mr. Dohle. Several said they would take Mr. Ostrowski at face value when he said that Mr. Dohle would continue to give publishers independence. “There’s every indication that Markus Dohle is looking forward to doing that with a lot of energy and business experience,” said Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, whose authors include Danielle Steel and Dean Koontz.

Some publishers and agents outside Random House said it was not a good sign that someone without intimate knowledge of the book industry was taking over the venerable house.

But others said they were open-minded about Mr. Dohle, especially as he was young and might bring new ideas about digital initiatives and other matters. “I hope that this man will be a very strong competitor,” said Jane Friedman, chairman and chief executive of HarperCollins. “Time will tell.”

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82 (from vaious press sources)

2008-05-15T23:56:00.000-07:00

Robert Rauschenberg
October 22, 1925 — May 12, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died May 12, 2008. He was 82.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed Angora goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. They all became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he thereby helped to obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”

Note to the Capture: Robert Rauschenberg at his home and studio in Captiva, Fla., in 2005.(Tony Cenicola/The New York Times)

Rauschenberg Got a Lot From the City and Left a Lot Behind

Robert Rauschenberg, who died Monday at age 82, is part of the cultural mythos of postwar New York. He regularly exhibited new work here for more than 56 years, which must be some kind of record. It extended from his first solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951 to the debut of his 2007 “Runts” series at PaceWildenstein in Chelsea in January. Mr. Rauschenberg was there, amid throngs of admirers, for the opening.

Many of the materials for Mr. Rauschenberg’s found-object wizardry came directly from the sidewalks, gutters and trash bins of New York. Most of the images he used were lifted from its magazines and newspapers and mirrored the look and pulse of urban life. It is fitting that so much of his art made its way into the permanent collections of the city’s museums.

These works number more than 500. True, many are prints, but printmaking, mixed with other mediums, was perhaps the central strategy of his art, with found photographs (or his own) functioning as his signature brushstroke. His penchant for overlapping and clustering transparent images constituted an indelible style.

New York’s Rauschenbergs summarize his most influential innovations as well as his volcanic, sometimes compulsive productivity. There are examples of the multimedia hybrids he called combines and the transfer drawings that used solvent to fuse the mechanically reproduced and the handmade. And there are demonstrations of his distinctive seen-from-above spatial tilt, christened by the art historian Leo Steinberg “the flatbed picture plane.” It redefined pictorial space as radically as one-point perspective.

These works, and their credit lines, also say a thing or two about the collecting habits and histories of the museums themselves. Little-known fact: The Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim are co-owners of an early 1950s gold leaf Rauschenberg, bequeathed to them in 1974. Here’s what’s on view right now, as well as a sense of what’s in the vaults and what will be brought out of storage or rearranged to honor the artist in the coming weeks.

Museum of Modern Art

In New York, MoMA is Rauschenberg Central. It owns nearly 300 works, many of them prints, and usually has at least a dozen major efforts on view. The current ones include several recently acquired masterpieces from the 1950s that subvert the very concept of masterpiece. The homey proto-combine that is “Bed” uses real sheets, pillow and quilt as canvas and defines the flatbed picture plane as something you can sleep in. “Rebus” builds a narrative from seemingly nonsensical sequences of found images and abstract elements. “Factum II,” by being a near-copy of “Factum I” (in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), challenges the notion of the unique, inspired artistic touch.

Eight drawings from “Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno” (1959-60) are also on display. Mr. Rauschenberg’s first full-on exploration of the transfer technique, they recast Dante’s journey in shadowy contemporary terms. The compositional finesse of these works is writ large in “First Landing Jump,” a majestic 1961 combine painting that has one wheel — a car tire — planted firmly on the ground.

The Modern plans to mark Mr. Rauschenberg’s death by consolidating these and other works into a single gallery sometime next week.

Whitney Museum

of American Art

Like the Modern, the Whitney began collecting Rauschenbergs in the early 1960s; by now it owns nearly 60. Its first acquisition, in 1961, was “Summer Rental + 2,” a collage painting from 1960 and third in a series of four very similar works that loosely extend the conceit of the “Factum” pair. Ten years later Mr. Rauschenberg gave the museum “Yoicks,” from 1953, one of his most irresistibly exuberant works and one of his first to use fabric as a bold visual element. Green polka dots on yellow alternate with or succumb to slathered bands of red and yellow paint, paying irreverent homage to Abstract Expressionism while presaging works by Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Larry Poons and Joan Snyder.

“Yoicks” is often on view; it has been joined by the 1955 “Satellite,” a dense, almost claustrophobic combine painting with a stuffed pheasant patrolling its top edge, and “Blue Eagle,” another combine.

Guggenheim Museum of Art

None of the Guggenheim’s Rauschenbergs are on view right now, but the museum plans to mount a selection soon. Although there are only slightly more than 30, about half of which have been acquired since 1990, they form an idiosyncratic but often choice group.

To one extreme are several examples of the artist’s “Cardbird” multiples, the exacting, editioned trompe l’oeil-like copies of cardboard assemblages that seem antithetical to his interest in the cheap, the found and the improvised. To the other are slight but rare works given by Mr. Rauschenberg’s foundation around the time of his 1997 Guggenheim retrospective.

One is the appropriately titled “Untitled (Hotel Bilbao),” an early “Shirtboard” collage, made from materials gathered in North Africa, where Mr. Rauschenberg traveled with Cy Twombly in 1952. Another is a small untitled transfer drawing from 1952, made six years before Mr. Rauschenberg is thought to have taken up the technique, albeit without solvent. This puts a new chronological wrinkle in his pervasive interest in simple, direct, one-on-one printing processes and in basing his art on things found rather than made.

The Guggenheim also owns half of what must be considered an apotheosis of these interests, Mr. Rauschenberg’s 32-foot-long silkscreen painting “Barge.” Sadly for New Yorkers, it is currently on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao, which owns the other half.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met is a latecomer to the New York Rauschenberg sweepstakes. Although it owns more than 60 prints, it did not acquire anything bulkier until the combine painting “Winter Pool,” from 1959, entered the collection. This ever-startling work consists of two narrow but rather colorful canvases flanking an old wood ladder, suggestive of a weathered swimming dock. The arrangement warps space in several ways, creating a feeling of submersion while bringing an arctic slice of white wall into the picture.

The museum reeled in this work just in time for its opening of “Robert Rauschenberg Combines” in December 2005. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, that exhibition was among the greatest devoted to Mr. Rauschenberg’s work during his lifetime.

Art

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: May 16, 2008

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the 20th century, died on Monday night at his home on Captiva Island, Fla. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, said Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, the Manhattan gallery that represents Mr. Rauschenberg.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s work gave new meaning to sculpture. “Canyon,” for instance, consisted of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a painted panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism.

A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Mr. Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.

Building on the legacies of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell and others, he helped obscure the lines between painting and sculpture, painting and photography, photography and printmaking, sculpture and photography, sculpture and dance, sculpture and technology, technology and performance art — not to mention between art and life.

Mr. Rauschenberg was also instrumental in pushing American art onward from Abstract Expressionism, the dominant movement when he emerged, during the early 1950s. He became a transformative link between artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and those who came next, artists identified with Pop, Conceptualism, Happenings, Process Art and other new kinds of art in which he played a signal role.

No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Mr. Rauschenberg. Mr. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Mr. Rauschenberg, without sharing exactly the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture.

Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.” Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated.

“I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a St. Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky, small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations.

Conceived in his immense studio on the island of Captiva, off southwest Florida, these projects were of enormous size and ambition; for many years he worked on one that grew literally to exceed the length of its title, “The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece.” They generally did not live up to his earlier achievements. Even so, he maintained an equanimity toward the results. Protean productivity went along with risk, he felt, and risk sometimes meant failure.

The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she re-spells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can’t read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”

This attitude also inclined him, as the painter Jack Tworkov once said, “to see beyond what others have decided should be the limits of art.”

He “keeps asking the question — and it’s a terrific question philosophically, whether or not the results are great art,” Mr. Tworkov said, “and his asking it has influenced a whole generation of artists.”

A Wry, Respectful Departure

That generation was the one that broke from Pollock and company. Mr. Rauschenberg maintained a deep but mischievous respect for Abstract Expressionist heroes like de Kooning and Barnett Newman. Famously, he once painstakingly erased a drawing by de Kooning, an act both of destruction and devotion. Critics regarded the all-black paintings and all-red paintings he made in the early 1950s as spoofs of de Kooning and Pollock. The paintings had roiling, bubbled surfaces made from scraps of newspapers embedded in paint.

But these were just as much homages as they were parodies. De Kooning, himself a parodist, had incorporated bits of newspapers in pictures, and Pollock stuck cigarette butts to canvases.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s “Automobile Tire Print,” from the early 1950s — resulting from Cage’s driving an inked tire of a Model A Ford over 20 sheets of white paper — poked fun at Newman’s famous “zip” paintings.

At the same time, Mr. Rauschenberg was expanding on Newman’s art. The tire print transformed Newman’s zip — an abstract line against a monochrome backdrop with spiritual pretensions — into an artifact of everyday culture, which for Mr. Rauschenberg had its own transcendent dimension.

Mr. Rauschenberg frequently alluded to cars and spaceships, even incorporating real tires and bicycles into his art. This partly reflected his own restless, peripatetic imagination. The idea of movement was logically extended when he took up dance and performance.

There was, beneath this, a darkness to many of his works, notwithstanding their irreverence. “Bed” (1955) was gothic. The all-black paintings were solemn and shuttered. The red paintings looked charred, with strips of fabric akin to bandages, from which paint dripped like blood. “Interview” (1955), which resembled a cabinet or closet with a door, enclosing photos of bullfighters, a pinup, a Michelangelo nude, a fork and a softball, suggested some black-humored encoded erotic message.

There were many other images of downtrodden and lonely people, rapt in thought; pictures of ancient frescoes, out of focus as if half remembered; photographs of forlorn, neglected sites; bits and pieces of faraway places conveying a kind of nostalgia or remoteness. In bringing these things together, the art implied consolation.

Mr. Rauschenberg, who knew that not everybody found it easy to grasp the open-endedness of his work, once described to the writer Calvin Tomkins an encounter with a woman who had reacted skeptically to “Monogram” (1955-59) and “Bed” in his 1963 retrospective at the Jewish Museum, one of the events that secured Mr. Rauschenberg’s reputation: “To her, all my decisions seemed absolutely arbitrary — as though I could just as well have selected anything at all — and therefore there was no meaning, and that made it ugly.

“So I told her that if I were to describe the way she was dressed, it might sound very much like what she’d been saying. For instance, she had feathers on her head. And she had this enamel brooch with a picture of ‘The Blue Boy’ on it pinned to her breast. And around her neck she had on what she would call mink but what could also be described as the skin of a dead animal. Well, at first she was a little offended by this, I think, but then later she came back and said she was beginning to understand.”

Growing Up With Scraps

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg was born on Oct. 22, 1925, in Port Arthur, Tex., a small refinery town where “it was very easy to grow up without ever seeing a painting,” he said. (In adulthood he renamed himself Robert.) His grandfather, a doctor who emigrated from Germany, had settled in Texas and married a Cherokee. His father, Ernest, worked for a local utility company. The family lived so frugally that his mother, Dora, made him shirts out of scraps of fabric. Once she made herself a skirt out of the back of the suit that her younger brother was buried in. She didn’t want the material to go to waste.

For his high school graduation present, Mr. Rauschenberg wanted a ready-made shirt, his first. All this shaped his art eventually. A decade or so later he made history with his own assemblages of scraps and ready-mades: sculptures and music boxes made of packing crates, rocks and rope; and paintings like “Yoicks,” sewn from fabric strips. He loved making something out of nothing.

Mr. Rauschenberg studied pharmacology briefly at the University of Texas at Austin before he was drafted during World War II. He saw his first paintings at the Huntington Art Gallery in California while he was stationed in San Diego as a medical technician in the Navy Hospital Corps. It occurred to him that it was possible to become a painter.

He attended the Kansas City Art Institute on the G.I. Bill, traveled to Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian, where he met Susan Weil, a young painter from New York who was to enter Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Having read about and come to admire Josef Albers, then the head of fine arts at Black Mountain, Mr. Rauschenberg saved enough money to join her.

Mr. Albers was a disciplinarian and strict modernist who, shocked by his student, later disavowed ever even knowing Mr. Rauschenberg. He was, on the other hand, recalled by Mr. Rauschenberg as “a beautiful teacher and an impossible person.”

“He wasn’t easy to talk to, and I found his criticism so excruciating and so devastating that I never asked for it,” Mr. Rauschenberg added. “Years later, though, I’m still learning what he taught me.”

Among other things, he learned to maintain an open mind toward materials and new mediums, which Mr. Albers endorsed. Mr. Rauschenberg also gained a respect for the grid as an essential compositional organizing tool.

For a while, he moved between New York, where he studied at the Art Students League with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor, and Black Mountain. During the spring of 1950 he and Ms. Weil married. The marriage lasted two years, during which they had a son, Christopher, who survives him, along with Mr. Rauschenberg’s companion, Darryl Pottorf.

Being John Cage’s Guest

Mr. Rauschenberg experimented at the time with blueprint paper to produce silhouette negatives. The pictures were published in Life magazine in 1951; after that Mr. Rauschenberg was given his first solo show, at the influential Betty Parsons Gallery.

“Everyone was trying to give up European aesthetics,” he recalled, meaning Picasso, the Surrealists and Matisse. “That was the struggle, and it was reflected in the fear of collectors and critics. John Cage said that fear in life is the fear of change. If I may add to that: nothing can avoid changing. It’s the only thing you can count on. Because life doesn’t have any other possibility, everyone can be measured by his adaptability to change.”

Cage acquired a painting from the Betty Parsons show. Aside from that, Mr. Rauschenberg sold absolutely nothing. Grateful, he agreed to host Cage at his loft. As Mr. Rauschenberg liked to tell the story, the only place to sit was on a mattress. Cage started to itch. He called Mr. Rauschenberg afterward to tell him that his mattress must have bedbugs and that, since Cage was going away for a while, Mr. Rauschenberg could stay at his place. Mr. Rauschenberg accepted the offer. In return, he decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.

“We both thought, ‘Here was somebody crazier than I am,’ ” Mr. Rauschenberg recalled. In 1952 Mr. Rauschenberg switched to all-white paintings which were, in retrospect, spiritually akin to Cage’s famous silent piece of music, during which a pianist sits for 4 minutes and 33 seconds at the keyboard without making a sound. Mr. Rauschenberg’s paintings, like the music, in a sense became both Rorschachs and backdrops for ambient, random events, like passing shadows.

“I always thought of the white paintings as being not passive but very — well — hypersensitive,” he told an interviewer in 1963. “So that people could look at them and almost see how many people were in the room by the shadows cast, or what time of day it was.”

Kicking around Europe and North Africa with the artist Cy Twombly for a few months after that, Mr. Rauschenberg began to collect and assemble objects — bits of rope, stones, sticks, bones — which he showed to a dealer in Rome who exhibited them under the title “scatole contemplative,” or thought boxes. They were shown in Florence, where an outraged critic suggested that Mr. Rauschenberg toss them in the river. He thought that sounded like a good idea. So, saving a few scatole for himself and friends, he found a secluded spot on the Arno. “‘I took your advice,” he wrote to the critic.

Yet the scatole were crucial to his development, setting the stage for bigger, more elaborate assemblages, like ‘“Monogram.” Back in New York, Mr. Rauschenberg showed his all-black and all-white paintings, then his erased de Kooning, which de Kooning had given to him to erase, a gesture that Mr. Rauschenberg found astonishingly generous, all of which enhanced his reputation as the new enfant terrible of the art world.

Around that time he also met Mr. Johns, then unknown, who had a studio in the same building on Pearl Street where Mr. Rauschenberg had a loft. The intimacy of their relationship over the next years, a consuming subject for later biographers and historians, coincided with the production by the two of them of some of the most groundbreaking works of postwar art.

In Mr. Rauschenberg’s famous words, they gave each other “permission to do what we wanted.” Living together in a series of lofts in Lower Manhattan until the 1960s, they exchanged ideas and supported themselves designing window displays for Tiffany & Company and Bonwit Teller under the collaborative pseudonym Matson Jones.

Along with the combines like “Monogram” and “Canyon” (1959), Mr. Rauschenberg in that period developed a transfer drawing technique, dissolving printed images from newspapers and magazines with a solvent and then rubbing them onto paper with a pencil. The process, used for works like “34 Drawings for Dante’s Inferno,” created the impression of something fugitive, exquisite and secret. Perhaps there was an autobiographical and sensual aspect to this. It let him blend images on a surface to a kind of surreal effect, which became the basis for works he made throughout his later career, when he adapted the transfer method to canvas.

Instrumental in this technical evolution back then was Tatyana Grossman, who encouraged and guided him as he made prints at her workshop, Universal Limited Art Editions, on Long Island; he also began a long relationship with the Gemini G.E.L. workshop in Los Angeles, producing lithographs like the 1970 “Stoned Moon” series, with its references to the moon landing.

His association with theater and dance had already begun by the 1950s, when he began designing sets and costumes for Mr. Cunningham, Paul Taylor and Trisha Brown and for his own productions. In 1963 he choreographed “Pelican,” in which he performed on roller skates while wearing a parachute and helmet of his design to the accompaniment of a taped collage of sound. This fascination with collaboration and with mixing art and technologies dovetailed with yet another endeavor. With Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and others, he started Experiments in Art and Technology, a nonprofit foundation to foster joint projects by artists and scientists.

A World of Praise

In 1964 he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the United States representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as “the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.” He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Mr. Rauschenberg had, almost despite himself, become an institution.

Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997 and yet another at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.

When he wasn’t traveling in later years, he was on Captiva, living at first in a modest beach house and working out of a small studio. In time he became that Gulf Coast island’s biggest residential landowner while also maintaining a town house in Greenwich Village in New York. He acquired the land in Captiva by buying adjacent properties from elderly neighbors whom he let live rent-free in their houses, which he maintained for them. He accumulated 35 acres, 1,000 feet of beach front and nine houses and studios, including a 17,000-square-foot two-story studio overlooking a swimming pool. He owned almost all that remained of tropical jungle on the island.

After a stroke in 2002 that left his right side paralyzed, Mr. Rauschenberg learned to work more with his left hand and, with a troupe of assistants, remained prolific for several years in his giant studio.

“I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop,” he said in an interview there. “At the time that I am bored or understand — I use those words interchangeably — another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.”

He added: “Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.”

May 14, 2008
Dance

Rauschenberg and Dance, Partners for Life

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY

Something inherently theatrical about Robert Rauschenberg’s talent — always evident in his radical feeling for color, light, composition and new ingredients and juxtapositions —prompted him to his boldest and freshest conceptions when he worked onstage. From the early 1950s until 2007 he designed for dance. And in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he first came to fame, he was recurrently (at times constantly) occupied in dance theater.

When he won the international grand prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, he said he regarded the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as his biggest canvas. Although the remark offended some in Cunningham circles (primarily the composer John Cage, who seems to have felt it sounded too proprietorial), it was completely justified. At that time there was no better place to see the range of Mr. Rauschenberg’s inventiveness than the Cunningham repertory.

Mr. Rauschenberg wasn’t just the designer of most pieces Mr. Cunningham had choreographed in the previous 10 years; he was also a permanent colleague. He toured America and, in 1964, the world as stage manager to the Cunningham company, adjusting the lighting and costumes, making several of the dancers into his long-term friends, helping turn the itinerary of a dance company into a fulcrum of ideas.

In 1954 Mr. Rauschenberg was the first stage designer to follow the principle of artistic independence already established by Mr. Cunningham and Cage. All he needed to know was which dancer to design costumes for, and if Mr. Cunningham had any further specifications. So when Mr. Cunningham asked (in 1954) for décor around which the dancers could move, Mr. Rauschenberg placed a large red free-standing combine center stage in “Minutiae”; though the choreography has not survived, the décor is still used in some Cunningham Events.

Sometimes Mr. Cunningham gave not specifications but poetic clues. For example, for “Winterbranch” (1964) he said to Mr. Rauschenberg, “Think of the night as if it were day.” Mr. Rauschenberg’s response was to think of images like being caught in the headlights of a car, and he made all-black costumes and lighting that sometimes threw the stage into darkness while viewers were shielding their eyes from the light.

When Mr. Cunningham was experimenting with new definitions of stage space in “Summerspace” (1958), suggesting both that the stage was just a section of a vaster landscape and that the mood was that of a summer idyll, Mr. Rauschenberg responded with impressionistic pointillism. The costumes of the dancers matched the backdrop view in near camouflage, and the work evoked scenes by Monet and Seurat while also suggesting a wildlife documentary.

In “Crises” (1960) the dancers wore single-color all-over tights that glowed fiercely against the surrounding blackness. In such works Mr. Rauschenberg also became one of the all-time masters of theatrical lighting.

Mr. Rauschenberg had come to know the young Paul Taylor in 1953, while Mr. Taylor was a Cunningham dancer. When Mr. Taylor began to choreograph in the succeeding years, Mr. Rauschenberg was his designer; works like “Three Epitaphs” (1956, all-black costumes again) survive in Taylor repertory today. In the 1960s Mr. Rauschenberg was involved in the radical dance-theater experiments at and around Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village and was close to Cunningham-connected experimentalists like Carolyn Brown, Viola Farber and Steve Paxton; he even choreographed himself.

Mr. Rauschenberg’s full-time connection to the Cunningham company ended with its 1964 world tour. Though he and Cage had stimulated each other profoundly and were in many ways like-minded, their egos had clashed; Mr. Rauschenberg’s “my biggest canvas” remark sounded like colonization in a dance theater where the point was independence.

But others led him back to dance theater, nobody more beautifully than Trisha Brown. Her “Set and Reset” (1983) was an instant masterpiece, largely thanks to Mr. Rauschenberg’s astonishingly imaginative designs. Three screens simultaneously broadcast separate video collages in black and white (more than 20 years before a video component became the norm in new choreography), while the dancers rippled around the stage in part-translucent costumes marked with gray and black figures that resembled newsprint.

Mr. Rauschenberg and Mr. Cunningham did collaborate again — though collaboration may have always been too tight a word for the freedom they gave each other — on several pieces over the decades. The last of these was only last October, “XOVER”(pronounced “Crossover”), which had its premiere at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College. (It has yet to be seen in New York or most other cities.) The white costumes against a largely white backdrop recall the all-white paintings of 50 years before; the nonwhite parts of the backdrop, combining silk-screen photography and painting, connect isolated images (a bicycle, a fence, an industrial view) with beautiful color and details of light.

More glorious yet — the most marvelous Rauschenberg stage designs I have seen, and supremely theatrical — were what he made for Mr. Cunningham’s “Interscape” (2000). This work begins with a black-and-white curtain that is already a classic Rauschenberg collage of eclectic images: it proves translucent, and lighting allows the dancers to be seen warming up onstage.

When that curtain lifts, however, the backdrop is a full-color version of the same collage, so that we seem to have gone from a shadow realm to a new plane of more intense being, in which the main choreography occurs. Each costume was individual (Mr. Cunningham said he knew the dancers were happy from the noises he could hear them making as they returned from their fittings) and demonstrated Mr. Rauschenberg’s extraordinary feeling for color combinations. (One stinging green hangs in the memory.)

Impresarios have occasionally assembled programs that illustrate “Picasso and the Dance,” but Mr. Rauschenberg’s work for dance was far more prolific than Picasso’s, as a whole season could be presented to demonstrate. If only that could happen, its range of designs — from “Three Epitaphs” to “Summerspace,” from “Set and Reset” to “Interscape,” from “Crises” to “Glacial Decoy” (another Trisha Brown collaboration) — would easily establish his place in the forefront of architects of theater.

Obituary
Robert Rauschenberg
Pop art pioneer whose wide-ranging work evoked the spirit of the old frontier

Michael McNay
Tuesday May 13, 2008
guardian.co.uk

The American artist Robert Rauschenberg, a man of few words, made one famous statement. He said that his ambition was to fill the gap between art and life. Even these few words were not original. His friend John Cage had already said that this should be the aim of the modern artist. Similarly, Rauschenberg's art was not especially original; it could scarcely have existed without cubist collage and the work of Kurt Schwitters. And yet he created a body of unmistakably American work that threw down a challenge to the abstract expressionism of Pollock and de Kooning; work of a similar scale and ease, metropolitan art that evoked the spirit of the old frontier so dear to the late 20th century American public.

Rauschenberg, who has died aged 82, was born of mixed German and Cherokee descent in Port Arthur, Texas. He had a good war, "that is, practically no war at all" as a neuropsychiatric technician in naval hospitals in California. Like many Americans, he had never seen a real painting, and when he did in a California exhibition, he was none too impressed: Reynolds's portrait of Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse was, he remarked, "an enormous brown thing". But it was his first inkling that being an artist might constitute a career, and as he wasn't much good at anything else, when he was demobbed he signed up at the Kansas city art institute under the GI bill of rights.

From there he saved up to go to Paris but learned very little from the Académie Julian ("the criticism was once a week in French, and I didn't understand any French"), painted a few desultory cityscapes, fell in love with Sue Weil, a New York art student whom he was to marry, and joined her at Black Mountain college in North Carolina to study under Joseph Albers.

On the face of it, Albers's Bauhaus aesthetics were not ideal for the scruffy and undirected work that Rauschenberg was producing, but Rauschenberg needed and wanted the discipline, and it is possible to see in the delicate discrimination with which he placed the elements of his collages the influence of Albers's elegant control.

But it was Rauschenberg's fellow student, John Cage, who had the major influence on him. Cage's 4 min 33 sec, the work which starts when the pianist raises the lid of the piano and finishes, without him having played a note, four minutes and 33 seconds later, has its parallel in Rauschenberg's white paintings. Not White On White like Malevich earlier in the century, but white, so that its only surface interest would be the shadows of passers by falling upon it, just as Cage's work was a collage of sounds from outside the concert hall (and, presumably, coughs within).

From Black Mountain he went to New York, where he had his first show in 1951, at the Betty Parsons Gallery, the prime mover and shaker in Manhattan. It attracted withering reviews - "stylish doodles," said the New York Times - and no sales. About now, too, he used an eraser to bring a drawing by de Kooning back to the faint indentations that pencil had made on paper. This was construed as a radical attack by a younger painter on the values of the abstract expressionist, who were by now regarded as world leaders of the avant garde.

It was compared with Duchamp drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Leaving aside that de Kooning was hardly Leonardo, Rauschenberg's act was condoned by de Kooning, who, indeed, dug a drawing out of his portfoliofor that express purpose.

Undaunted by unpopularity, though he was never to make much money until he and Jasper Johns began to decorate the windows of Bonwit Teller and Tiffany under a joint pseudonym in the mid 50s, Rauschenberg pressed on with theatre designs for another Black Mountain friend, Merce Cunningham, and for Paul Taylor. Meanwhile, he developed his collages, reaching some kind of summation in 1955 when, apparently short of a surface to work on, he decided to paint the quilt on his own bed, hanging it vertically to do so. The quilt's pattern of orange squares was too dominating, so he added the pillow on top, splashed on some more paint, and, with some logic, called the resulting work Bed.

Simultaneously, he was developing his so-called combines, which were paintings with objects mounted on the surface, and his constructions, which were paintings with bigger objects mounted on the surface. Part of the New York legend is that these caused great consternation. It is hard, after Dada, to see how. When Monogram, his painted construction with an amiable stuffed angora goat encircled by a tyre, was exhibited in the Tate Gallery exhibition, Painting and Sculpture of a Decade 1954-64 (he had a one-man Whitechapel show the same year), it looked absolutely right, the subject of nice judgment, and totally unshocking. As well it might: it had taken Rauschenberg months to hit on the right arrangement. And by now he was regarded as one of the leading lights of New York art.

The contradictions mounted. No great thinker, Rauschenberg had instinctively allied himself with the post-Duchamp vanguard; a slosher of paint without much regard for the colour, he came to be an artist of fine discrimination; not much of a reader, he embarked on a series of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy (now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York), involving the silkscreened mass media images he was by now deploying in all his work combined with non-representational marks in paint or pencil.

Rauschenberg created the 38 Inferno drawings as a modern counterpoint to Dante and Virgil's journey through hell, replacing Dante's characters with his own heroes, American figures like Pollock and de Kooning. It is clear that non-representational are the key words. Even during his anti-Vietnam war period the serigraphed images did not amount to a political declaration. Their drama was inherent in the image itself, mediated by the other marks on the canvas; if a viewer wished to attribute political intent then that, one feels, was fine by Rauschenberg. He himself refrained from overt comment.

In the 1990s he embarked on a series of collaged images called Anagrams (collages after all amount to visual anagrams). They included political processions, buildings, sculpture, vegetables, table lamps, jetties, beach scenes, flags, posters from all parts of the world, the images recurring in different works and in different combinations. They still rely on a flattened cubist spatial structure but on a much larger scale and with light flooding the canvases and brush marks recalling American art of the heroic post-war days; recalling, in fact, his own heroic days, for despite an increasingly sure technique, these later works are quieter, blander even, than the assertive and clamorous combines of his early maturity.

As Rauschenberg found acclaim (including the grand prize at the Venice Biennale of 1964) and financial security, he never forgot the earlier struggles and in 1970 he helped to found Change, an organisation devoted to providing emergency funds for artists.

· Robert Rauschenberg, artist, born October 22 1925; died May 12 2008

Remembering Rauschenberg
Greatness and golden slippers.
By Jim Lewis
Posted Wednesday, May 14, 2008, at 6:57 PM ET

I once asked Robert Rauschenberg if he was afraid of dying. It was not as rude or unseemly a question as it might at first appear. At the time, he was elderly but in fine health; I had spent the previous three or four days visiting with him at the large but somehow modest compound he owned on Captiva Island, Fla., and in the course of our conversations, he'd spoken about his past and his work with unusual frankness and great wit.

Moreover, it seemed to me that he'd lived something very close to a perfect life. He'd been in on the origin of the great aesthetic movements of his time, and his place in history was pretty much guaranteed; he took enormous pleasure in making art and continued to make it long after many artists retire; he had traveled the world and made a great deal of money, much of which he donated to causes he believed in. To be sure, there were dark patches; for many years he was a ferocious alcoholic—he could put away a fifth of bourbon a day—but by the time I met him, he had put all that behind him, and he seemed to have mastered the eudaemonistic life. I was curious to know how he felt about leaving it, so I asked him.

He wasn't bothered by the question at all. He seemed to find it interesting, he had obviously thought about it before, and he reflected for a while before he answered. "There are moments in the day when I find it terrifying," he said at last. "I don't ever want to go. I don't have a sense of great reality about the next world." Then, referencing an old spiritual, he said, "My feet are too ugly to wear those golden slippers." He paused again. "I'm working on my fear of it," he continued. "And my fear is that after I'm gone, something interesting is going to happen, and I'm going to miss it."

Rauschenberg died Monday, at home in Captiva; I hope the terror left him before the time came. As for missing something interesting, he rarely did while he was alive, in large part because he was something interesting, and the world will miss him as much as he might miss the world. He was, quite simply, as charming and delightful as any man I've ever met. But he'll be remembered as a great artist, certainly one of the greatest of the last half-century.

He was one of those people—quick as a comedian, deft and knowing—who seem to be effortlessly inventive, spinning off ideas and techniques like droplets of water from a lawn sprinkler, and there is hardly an artist working today who doesn't owe him something. To Rauschenberg, almost anything could be art, and art could be almost anything; he crossed media and created new ones as often as other artists clean their brushes. Consider the following gesture, simple, ingenious, daring, and true: One day in 1953, when Rauschenberg was in his late 20s, he stopped by Willem de Kooning's studio with a request. At the time, de Kooning was emerging as one of the giants of Abstract Expressionism, and Rauschenberg admired him enormously. He asked the older artist if he could have a drawing, not to hang it on his wall but to make into another artwork: He intended, he made clear, to erase it. De Kooning, to his great credit, complied, and Rauschenberg spent the next few weeks and, according to legend, went through 15 erasers trying to get the marks off the paper (he never entirely succeeded; some ghost of the image remains).

Erased de Kooning was the first major work of Rauschenberg's career, and it showed many of the qualities for which he would eventually become known: a paradoxical originality (or perhaps an original paradoxicalness), energy, iconoclasm, unerring instinct. There have been a lot of artists who have used art to assault art's own verities, but few of them did so as gracefully and cheerfully as Rauschenberg. He was often joking, in a peculiar Zen-ish way that he shared with his friend John Cage, and he was almost always having fun, but he was never bullshitting.

It would take me another 10 pages to begin to describe everything else that Rauschenberg came up with: the combines (painter-ish, sculpture-ish assemblies of found materials), photo-transfer drawings, sets and costumes for Merce Cunningham's dance company, and the famous "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering" of 1966, a wildly experimental performance festival that Rauschenberg put together with an engineer from Bell Labs named Billy Kluver, and which, with only a little stretching, can be seen as a precursor of everything from video art to Nintendo's Wii.

Rauschenberg was wildly prolific; the drops from the sprinkler landed where they would. Even he couldn't keep track of them all. At one point I asked him how many artworks he'd made in his lifetime. "Maybe 3,000," he answered. "Maybe 5,000. Maybe many more." But if you were to challenge anyone with a reasonable grasp of 20^th-century art history to name some, I doubt they'd be able to come up with more than five or six. He was a very rare thing: the great artist who made few great artworks.

I don't think he would mind the characterization: He always preferred the process to the result, the inventiveness to the invention, the gesture to the meaning. There was a wall in one room of his house in Captiva where he kept his own collection of other people's artworks. It was almost all ephemera—little scraps of paper with passing marks made on them, mostly by his friends. But what friends and what ephemera: There was a small drawing by Cy Twombly, a round cardboard coaster from the Cedar Bar upon which de Kooning had doodled one night, and, loveliest of all, a sheet of lined school notebook paper that Jasper Johns had used to sketch an American flag, an early study for one of the greatest paintings of the 20^th century. ("Jasper never could draw a straight line freehand," Rauschenberg told me.) It was clear that he'd rather have had those fugitive pieces than their corresponding masterpieces. He thought of art not as a monument but as the record of a passing moment. I suspect he knew, too, how melancholy an idea that can be. That's the thing about moments: They pass. And now Rauschenberg has as well, and there's that much more to miss.

Jim Lewis is the author of three novels, most recently, The King Is Dead.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2191452/

PBS American Series featuring video

Classical music's twentieth-century tragedy (by Ian Bostridge, the Times)

2008-05-11T23:04:00.000-07:00

From The Times Literary Supplement
April 30, 2008
Classical music's twentieth-century tragedy
How music and politics combined to devastating effect in Germany and the USSR
Ian Bostridge

Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise tells the story of what happened to Western classical music in the twentieth century. We all know that the invention of recorded sound around 1900 made possible an extraordinary dissemination of the riches of the classical repertoire – largely composed for the rich and powerful – to the mass of ordinary people. On the gramophone, the radio, television and, subliminally and hence more powerfully, through the movies, the classical sound in all its variants (even the supposedly rebarbative confections of the Second Viennese School) has insinuated itself into the culture at large. Never before have so many people listened to, or liked, so-called classical music. Yet this extraordinary triumph has culminated in a malaise, a feeling, widespread in the musical profession and elsewhere, that classical music is in crisis and that things have never been so bad. Classical music feels abandoned, left behind as history has moved on, sulking in its tent as the real cultural action happens somewhere else.

Ross’s book – which, in a two-pronged attack, puts the history back into music and music back into history – offers many answers to this paradox. In a book packed full of well-chosen and depicted vignettes and anecdotes, two stand out.

In 1904, Richard Strauss, the “anarch of art” as one American critic described him, visited the United States. He was received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. He was invited onto the floor of the Senate. How comforting this is for us besieged elitists, who grasp at such contemporary straws as the opera-loving Gordon Brown succeeding the Fender Stratocaster-wielding Blair. Once upon a time, serious music was given its due. Music does of course still have a political platform, a bully pulpit even; but it is pop musicians now who are wooed by political leaders, and classical musicians, with a very few exceptions (Daniel Barenboim springs to mind), who inhabit the margins. Whether political leverage, or cultural influence, were really good for classical music – tempting as it is to want to see the best of art appreciated and deferred to – is another question.

Thirty-eight years after Strauss’s American apotheosis (and some years after his shameful but complex accommodation with the Nazi regime in Germany, masterfully unpicked by Ross), in the midst of the Great Patriotic War, the score of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the “Leningrad”, was flown into that besieged city by Soviet military aircraft. Musicians were recalled from more straightforwardly martial duties on the front line to perform it. German commanders planning to disrupt the performance found themselves pre-empted by “Operation Squall”, a Soviet diversionary manoeuvre. The symphony was relayed over loudspeakers into no man’s land. As Ross puts it, “never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony became a tactical strike against German morale”.

If we were to ask why, at the opening of the twentieth century, and through the horrors of its first five decades, classical music retained such importance, the answer would have to be: Germany. Classical music, music which was more than entertainment, music which demanded reverent attention, and which even made metaphysical claims, was written into the very DNA of German culture. The German question, the political and diplomatic issue of how the German nation fitted into the world, dominated international affairs in the century between the 1848 revolutions and the Second World War. This was reflected in the philosophical and cultural preoccupations of the European elites, rooted as they were in German philosophical conceits and German political anxieties. Hegelianism, Marxism, nationalism, Wagnerism – love them or hate them, they all came from Germany and they framed the terms of debate in philosophy, political theory and music. If Schopenhauer put music at the centre of his philosophy as the most important art, one which uniquely traced the movements of the noumenal will, Wagner responded with music that fascinated and horrified artists in all disciplines. When it came to the great contest of the 1914–18 war, German propagandists like Thomas Mann characterized it as a conflict between the Kultur of Germans and the Zivilisation of their French-led opponents; between, in musical terms, the deep, metaphysical character of the German tradition, and the superficial joie de vivre of the French.

The price paid for classical music’s proximity to power was heavy, and the central chapters of Ross’s book lay bare the moral somersaults composers turned, the degradation into which they sank. The cultural theory which the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had inherited from the nineteenth gave artists a dangerous potency, the all too useful capacity to become, in Stalin’s words, “engineers of human souls”. Stalin’s amateur interest in classical music – he reputedly owned ninety-three opera recordings, writing critical remarks on his record sleeves – did nothing to protect composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich from the cultural policy of a regime which saw no role for anything that smacked of autonomous art. Shostakovich’s output veered between the cryptic privacy of his chamber music, the crassness of his patriotic cantatas and songs, and the still-contested “irony” of the major public works. Ross’s analysis of the possibility of irony in music is at one and the same time sceptical and appreciative. “To talk about musical irony”, he writes, “we first have to agree what the music appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really saying. This is invariably difficult to do.” His concluding advice is that one should “stay alert to multiple levels of meaning”, making Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Fifth or even the supposedly propagandistic Seventh, “rich experience[s]”. The consequence of Ross’s superbly nuanced historical accounts of both Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s music is to send one back to the music with new ears.

In any aspirant totalitarian regime, cultural producers like musicians have to be overseen, goaded, persecuted and petted. Hitler’s Germany was different only in that a musical vision of politics was uniquely central to the nightmare that was played out in the Reich between 1933 and 1945. It wasn’t that music was too important not to be politicized, more that politics was music in another form; “Politics aspired to the condition of music, not vice versa”, as Ross puts it. The threatening rhetoric of Hitler’s coded language about the Jews from the Kroll Opera speech of 1939 on the eve of war, and the speeches from the period of the exterminations themselves, are drenched in Wagner, and Ross acutely picks out the references to Parsifal in the Führer’s tirades. Hitler’s very rise to power, his acquisition of the respectability which eased his accession, were eased by the musical culture he shared with the Wagner clan, which supported him from the early 1920s on, and whose fads and tastes – vegetarianism, animal rights, dabbling in Eastern mysticism – he enthusiastically adopted.

For Ross, the Nazi infatuation with music is the crux of his story. If nineteenth-century German politics and philosophy and musical endeavour made classical music unprecedentedly momentous, its implication in the near-annihilation of European civilization by the mid-century robbed it of moral authority, a collapse with which classical music still lives, sixty years on. As Ross points out, trivially but accurately, “when any self-respecting Hollywood archcriminal sets out to enslave mankind, he listens to a little classical music to get in the mood”.

It is Ross’s dissection of the career of Richard Strauss which most tellingly encapsulates classical music’s twentieth-century tragedy. The book opens with the Graz premiere of Salomé in 1906 (it had had its very first performance earlier the previous year in Dresden), conducted by the composer, and attended by Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg, Zemlinsky and Johann Strauss’s widow, but also very probably by a little-known Austrian teenager called Adolf Hitler. By the mid-1930s, Strauss is enthusiastically hailing the new regime: “Thank God, finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”. By 1942, he is, at once brave and pathetic, demanding entrance at Theresienstadt – “I am the composer Richard Strauss” – to try and rescue his Jewish daughter-in-law’s grandmother. By 1945, he is writing the profoundly disillusioned Metamorphosen and trying to trade on his American fame – “I am the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salomé” – to gain preferential treatment from the occupying American forces. As with Shostakovich, the moral and historical complexities lead one back to the music.

Ross’s broad historical argument, and his moral tale about music and power, occupy the central chapters of the book and inform much of the rest of it. His engagement with Stravinsky, Berg, Schoenberg, Sibelius and Britten is infectious; his accounts of New Deal arts policy, US Army sponsorship of Darmstadt Modernism, or 1960s interactions between art and pop music, are revelatory. As for the music itself, Alex Ross’s brave avoidance of musical notation and brilliant use of metaphorical and descriptive language, means that The Rest is Noise grapples with the actual stuff of music as few other books have done. And if you want to hear the sounds themselves, you can always go to his website at www.therestisnoise.com, and listen.

Alex Ross

THE REST IS NOISE

Listening to the twentieth century

624pp. Fourth Estate. £20.

978 1 84115 475 6

Ian Bostridge's numerous recordings include works by Schubert, Britten
and Handel.

The Lost Art of Writing About Art (by Eric Gibson, the Wall Street Journal)

2008-04-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Note to the Caption: Olaf Breuning’s installation, “The Army” (2008), is on view at the Park Avenue Armory. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times)

Note to the Caption: The installation for "Cheese" (2008), a multichannel video piece by Mika Rottenberg, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)

The Lost Art of Writing About Art

By ERIC GIBSON
April 18, 2008; Page W13

In certain circles, the Whitney Museum's Biennial exhibition of contemporary art is known as "the show everybody loves to hate." Usually the criticism comes in the form of negative reviews. But this year it's different, with the brickbats directed at the exhibition's accompanying commentary instead of the art itself. Texts written by the Whitney's curators and outside contributors are being widely (and accurately) dismissed as unalloyed gibberish.

What makes this complaint particularly significant is that it comes not from the public, whom the museum might privately dismiss as benighted philistines, but from insiders -- artists and critics who know their stuff and are generally well-disposed toward the museum and its efforts.

When the show opened last month, artist and critic Carol Diehl blogged about the "impenetrable prose from the Whitney Biennial." As examples, she offered "random quotes" about individual artists and their work taken from the exhibition's wall texts and catalog. Among the gems:

• ". . . invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial . . . inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion."

• "Bove's 'settings' draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings."

Ms. Diehl's complaint was quickly taken up by others. Richard Lacayo, on a Time magazine blog, likened reading the show's introductory wall text ("Many of the projects . . . explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange") to "being smacked in the face with a spitball." To combat such verbiage, he recommended banning five words long popular with critics that nonetheless say nothing: "interrogates," "problematizes," "references" (as a verb), "transgressive" and "inverts."

On his Modern Art Notes blog, Tyler Green dismissed the Whitney prose as an "embarrassment" and suggested that every candidate for a contemporary-art curatorship be required to pass a writing test. And an art blogger known only as C-Monster pleaded simply for "smart writing that is precise and unmuddled," adding plaintively: "Making it enjoyable to read wouldn't hurt."

Once upon a time, art writing was all those things. Critics of an earlier age, such as John Ruskin, had no problem making themselves understood, and they are still read today. The same is true of the great art historians of the postwar era, such as Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich. Panofsky, among whose books was the definitive study of Albrecht Dürer, was a supremely elegant prose stylist. Gombrich's 1950 survey, "The Story of Art," has sold six million copies and been translated into 23 languages. By the way, English was the second language for both men. And Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, wrote catalogs on topics ranging from Matisse to Surrealism that made the mysteries of modern art accessible to the American public.

It was Marcel Duchamp who unwittingly launched art criticism on its current path of willful obscurantism. His "Readymade" art -- mass-produced commercial objects (most famously a urinal) that the artist removed from everyday utilitarian contexts and displayed in a museum -- almost required this development.

Until Duchamp, criticism was aesthetically based. The critic talked about a painting's subject, the way the artist handled color, drawing, composition and the like. With Readymades, the object's appearance and beauty were no longer the issue -- indeed, they were irrelevant. What mattered was the idea behind the work -- the point the artist was trying to make. So art criticism moved from the realm of visual experience to that of philosophy. The writer no longer had to base his critical observations on a close scrutiny of the work of art. He could simply riff.

Conceptual art like Duchamp's took a while to catch on, but by the 1980s it had become mainstream. Around that time, academics and critics drove another nail into the coffin of accessible writing. They turned to areas outside of art and aesthetics -- disciplines such as linguistics and ideologies such as Marxism and feminism -- to interpret art.

From the late 19th century to just after World War II, writing about modern art was clear. It had to be. Critics from Émile Zola to Clement Greenberg were trying to explain new and strange art forms to a public that was often hostile to the avant-garde. To have a hope of making their case, these writers couldn't afford to obfuscate. Today, when curators and critics can count on a large audience willing to embrace new art simply because it is new, they don't have to try as hard.

Still, there is no excuse for a museum letting nonsense of the sort quoted above out in the open, particularly an institution whose mission includes educating the public. If the Whitney continues to snub this public -- its core audience -- by "explaining" art with incomprehensible drivel, it shouldn't be surprised if people decide to return the favor and walk away.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor. Write to Eric Gibson at eric.gibson@wsj.com

Note to the Caption:M K Guth’s “Ties of Protection and Safekeeping” (2007-8). (Ruby Washington/The New York Times)

Note to the Caption: Olaf Breuning’s installation, “The Army” (2008), is on view at the Park Avenue Armory. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times)

March 7, 2008
Art Review | Whitney Biennial 2008
Art’s Economic Indicator
By HOLLAND COTTER

News link

Whitney Biennial 2008 interactive feature

Advertisements for the 2008 Whitney Biennial promise a show that will tell us “where American art stands today,” although we basically already know. A lot of new art stands in the booths of international art fairs, where styles change fast, and one high-polish item instantly replaces another. The turnover is great for business, but it has made time-lag surveys like the biennial irrelevant as news.

Maybe this is changing with the iffy economy. Several fairs, including Pulse in London, have recently suspended operation. And this year we have a Whitney show that takes lowered expectations — lessness, slowness, ephemerality, failure (in the words of its young curators, Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin) — as its theme.

A biennial for a recession-bound time? That’s one impression it gives. With more than 80 artists, this is the smallest edition of the show in a while, and it feels that way, sparsely populated, even as it fills three floors and more of the museum and continues at the Park Avenue Armory, that moldering pile at 67th Street, with an ambitious program of performance art (through March 23).

Past biennials have had a festive, party-time air. The 2004 show was all bright, pop fizz; the one two years ago exuded a sexy, punk perfume. The 2008 edition is, by contrast, an unglamorous, even prosaic affair. The installation is plain and focused, with many artists given niches of their own. The catalog is modest in design, with a long, idea-filled essay by Ms. Momin, hard-working, but with hardly a stylistic grace note in sight. A lot of the art is like this too: uncharismatic surfaces, complicated back stories.

There are certainly dynamic elements. A saggy, elephantine black vinyl sculpture by the Los Angeles artist Rodney McMillian is one. Phoebe Washburn’s floral ecosystem is another. Spike Lee’s enthralling, appalling HBO film about Katrina-wrecked New Orleans is a third. In addition, certain armory performances — a 40-part vocal performance organized by Marina Rosenfeld; Kembra Pfahler and her group, the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black commandeering the Drill Hall — should make a splash.

But again, the overall tenor of the show is low-key, with work that seems to be in a transitional, questioning mode, art as conversation rather than as statement, testing this, trying that. Assemblage and collage are popular. Collaboration is common. So are down-market materials — plastic, plywood, plexiglass — and all kinds of found and recycled ingredients, otherwise known as trash.

Jedediah Caesar, one of the show’s 29 West Coast artists, encases studio refuse — wood scraps, disposable coffee cups, old socks — in blocks of resin for display. Charles Long makes spidery, Giacometti-esque sculptures — the shapes are based on traces of bird droppings — from plaster-covered debris. Cheyney Thompson cannibalizes his own gallery shows to make new work. With thread and a box of nails Ry Rocklen transforms an abandoned box spring into a bejeweled thing, iridescent if the light is right.

Devotees of painting will be on a near-starvation diet, with the work of only Joe Bradley, Mary Heilmann, Karen Kilimnik, Olivier Mosset and (maybe) Mr. Thompson to sustain them. Hard-line believers in art as visual pleasure will have, poor things, a bitter slog. But if the show is heedless of traditional beauty, it is also firm in its faith in artists as thinkers and makers rather than production-line workers meeting market demands.

Not so long ago, Whitney biennials were little more than edited recaps of gallery seasons. Much of the art in them had already been exhibited in galleries and commercially preapproved. By contrast, the Whitney commissioned the bulk of what appears in the 2008 biennial expressly for the occasion. If some artists failed to meet curatorial hopes, others seized the chance to push in new directions. Whatever the outcome, the demonstration of institutional faith was important. It means that, for better or worse, the new art in this show is genuinely new.

And new comes out of old. Almost every biennial includes a contingent of influential elders. This one does. Ms. Heilmann is one. Her pop-inflected, rigorously casual abstraction is a natural reference point for Ms. Kilimnik’s brushy historical fantasies, for Frances Stark’s free-associative collages, and for a very Heilmann-esque Rachel Harrison piece that includes a harlequin-patterned sculpture and the film “Pirates of the Caribbean” projected on the gallery wall. (Work by Ms. Harrison is also in the New Museum’s “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” a show that overlaps the biennial’s sensibility.)

The California Conceptualist John Baldessari — born in 1931 and deeply networked into the art world — generates another, even wider sphere of influence. His hybrid forms — not painting, not sculpture, not photography, but some of each — offer a permissive model for a lot of new art, from Mr. Bradley’s figure-shaped abstract paintings to Patrick Hill’s tie-dyed sculptures to a multimedia installation by Mika Tajima who, with Howie Chen, goes by the collaborative moniker New Humans.

Mr. Baldessari’s use of fragmented Hollywood film stills in his work has opened new paths for artists exploring narrative. And there’s a wealth of narrative in this biennial, much of it in film.

The video called “Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out” by Harry (Harriet) Dodge and Stanya Kahn, is a kind of lunatic’s tour of an abject and empty Los Angeles. Amy Granat and Drew Heitzler turn Goethe’s “Sorrows of Young Werther” into an Earth Art road trip. In a multichannel video piece called “Cheese,” with an elaborate, barnlike setting, Mika Rottenberg updates a 19th-century story of seven sisters who turned their freakishly long hair to enterprising ends.

And there’s a beautiful new film by Javier Téllez, produced by Creative Time, that dramatizes an old Indian parable about the uncertainties of perception. In the film the artist introduces six blind New Yorkers to a live elephant and records their impressions, derived through touch. The encounters take place in what looks like the open, empty plaza in front of a temple or church, though the building is actually the vacant Depression-era bathhouse of the McCarren Park swimming pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Architecture and design form a subcategory of motifs in the biennial, partly as a sendup of the luxe environments that much new art is destined to inhabit, but also in line with the show’s concern with transience and ruin. Alice Könitz’s faux-modernist furniture sculpture, Matthew Brannon’s wraparound graphics display, and Amanda Ross-Ho’s fiercely busy domestic ensembles all mine this critical vein.

But William Cordova’s “House That Frank Lloyd Wright Built 4 Fred Hampton and Mark Clark” makes a specific historical reference. An openwork maze of wood risers, it may look unfinished, but it’s as complete as it needs to be: its basic outline replicates the footprint of the Chicago apartment where two Black Panthers were ambushed and killed in a predawn police raid in 1969. Here the scene of a stealth attack is open for the world to see.

The passing of baldly political art from market fashion has been much noted during the past decade. But the 2008 Biennial is a political show, at least if you define politics, as Ms. Huldisch and Ms. Momin do, in terms of indirection, ambiguity; questions asked, not answered; truth that is and is not true.

An assemblage by Adler Guerrier impressionistically documents an explosion of racial violence that scarred Miami Beach, near his home, in 1968. While Mr. Guerrier attributes the piece to a fictional collective of African-American artists active around Miami at the time, the collective, like the piece itself, is entirely his invention.

Omer Fast weaves together sex, lies, and a civilian shooting in Iraq in a film-within-a-film based on actor-improvised memories. William E. Jones takes a very personal tack on the subject of civilian surveillance by recycling an old police video of illicit homosexual activity shot in an Ohio men’s room. The video dates from 1962, the year the artist, who is gay, was born, and the police sting triggered a wave of antigay sentiment in the town where he grew up.

There’s more: videos by Natalia Almada and Robert Fenz dramatize, in utterly different ways, the border politics of Mexican-United States immigration. One of the show’s largest pieces, “Divine Violence,” by Daniel Joseph Martinez, fills a substantial room with hundreds of gilded plaques carrying the names of what Mr. Martinez labels terrorist organizations, from Al Qaeda to tiny nationalist and religious groups.

Mr. Martinez, an extremely interesting artist, is making a return biennial appearance. He contributed metal museum-admission tags reading “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting to Be White” to the famously political biennial in 1993. (One of that show’s curators, Thelma Golden, now director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, is an adviser to the current exhibition, along with Bill Horrigan of the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University and Linda Norden, an independent curator.)

For a total immersion in the political and the personal, there’s nothing quite like Mr. Lee’s television film “When the Levees Broke,” which is on continuous view in the show, though for me Coco Fusco’s hourlong video “Operation Atropos” is almost as powerful. For this exercise in creative nonfiction, Ms. Fusco and six other women submitted to a “prisoner-of-war interrogation-resistance program” conducted by former United States military personnel. Technically, the whole program is a species of docudrama performance, a highly specialized endurance challenge. Even knowing that, the sight of men making women gradually break down under pressure is hair-raising, as is a follow-up scene of the women being briefed on how they can do the same to others.

The growing presence of women as military interrogators will be the subject of a live performance by Ms. Fusco at the armory, the ideal setting for it. And under the auspices of the nonprofit Art Production Fund, several other biennial artists have made site-specific works in the building’s outsize, baronial, wood-paneled halls.

In one Olaf Breuning has mustered a cute army of teapots with lava-lamp heads. Mario Ybarra Jr.’s “Scarface Museum,” composed entirely of memorabilia related to Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake of that 1932 gangster film, is in another. In a third M K Guth, an artist from Portland, Ore., invites visitors to participate in therapeutic hair-braiding sessions, the hair being fake, the psychological benefits presumably not.

Ms. Guth’s project has a sweet, New Agey expansiveness that is atypical for this year’s hermetic, uningratiating show. Ms. Pfahler and the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, with their teased wigs, low-budget props and friends-of-friends underground roots are firmly in the 2008 picture. Ms. Pfahler’s Biennial stint will include a seminar on an art movement she recently founded. Based on the idea of the attraction of abjection, it is called “Beautalism,” and a fair amount of what is in the Whitney show qualifies for inclusion.

'My Young Years': Rubinstein's Enchanting Prelude (by Jonathan Yardley, the Washington Post)

2008-04-21T20:15:00.000-07:00

Note to the Caption: The classical pianist wrote the memoir of his early life when he was in his 80s. (1967 Photo By Eddie Adams)

'My Young Years': Rubinstein's Enchanting Prelude

By JONATHAN YARDLEY
Saturday, April 19, 2008; Page C01

An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.

Midway through "My Young Years," his memoir of the first three decades of what turned out to be an exceptionally long life, the incomparable classical pianist Arthur Rubinstein recalls an anecdote about two cousins, one of them "the greatest Don Juan of his time," who became involved with the same beautiful woman but whose friendship managed to survive this rather extreme complication. Rubinstein tells the tale and then shrugs: "Even if it were only half-true, it was a good story."

That is exactly how I feel about "My Young Years." How much of it is true and how much mere invention no one now can say -- Rubinstein died a quarter-century ago at the age of 95, and all his contemporaries are long since gone -- but veracity in this case really matters less than the unflagging zest with which Rubinstein recalls those years between 1887, when he was born in Poland, and 1917, when his career as a concert pianist finally began to achieve the success that had been predicted for him since he was a boy. Published in 1973, and followed seven years later by the rather less interesting "My Many Years," "My Young Years" was an international bestseller. It now is out of print, a puzzling development when one considers that Rubinstein's recordings, especially of Chopin, continue to be played and admired.

Whatever the explanation for its disappearance from the bookstores, "My Young Years" remains a classic autobiography in the grand manner. Unlike the memoirs that now crowd the bookshelves, exercises in self-administered therapy in which narcissistic narrators of no apparent accomplishment whine ad nauseam about real or imagined angst, this is an exuberant account of what Rubinstein calls, in his brief foreword, "the struggles, the mistakes, the adventures, and . . . the miraculous beauty and happiness of my young years." His was a life lived to the full, with triumphs and disappointments galore, and by the time he reached his 80s and began to write this book, Rubinstein had such great stature that his story virtually commanded readers' attention.

It was written in English, one of several languages in which Rubinstein was fluent, and it is written remarkably well, with scarcely a trace of the diction of his native Polish or the other languages (Russian, German, French) he spoke during his youth. I first read it about 30 years ago -- my copy is the third printing of the 1973 paperback -- when I was in the midst of a Rubinstein binge, gobbling up his recordings of Chopin, his fellow Pole, one after the other. I make no claim to particular knowledge of classical music, but I was drawn then (as I am now) to the lyricism and abundant feeling of Rubinstein's Chopin, and I simply wanted to know more about the man who made the music. I was enchanted by the book then, and I remain enchanted by it today.

Rubinstein says, in the same foreword, "I have never kept a diary, and even if I had, it would have been lost with all the rest of my belongings in the two world wars. But, it is my good fortune to be endowed with an uncanny memory which allows me to trace my whole long life almost day by day." This is why the reader does well to approach the book with a certain amount of friendly skepticism, especially with regard to the author's accounts of his numerous youthful amours, but the overall impression it conveys is that veracity wins out over invention. No doubt the many conversations Rubinstein recalls fall considerably short of total accuracy, but they have the clear ring of truth, a sense that is heightened by Rubinstein's willingness to portray himself in an unflattering light when circumstances call for it and by the mixture of pride and self-deprecation with which he describes his formative years.

He was born in Lodz into a relatively prosperous family. His musical gifts became apparent when he was very young, and he was taken to Berlin to undergo the scrutiny of the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim, who "took it upon himself to direct my musical and cultural education," not as his teacher but as his mentor. At the outset, "one important stipulation that Professor Joachim made was that my mother had to promise not to exploit me as a child prodigy" and he "insisted that I should get a full education until I was artistically mature." Rubinstein seems to have been less a supervised student than an autodidact whose learning was scattershot, but he became a deeply cultured man with passionate opinions across a broad range of subjects.

He had more than a little bit of a lazy streak -- he had a "capacity to work well only if there was something special to work for, like a concert, or, later, my recordings" -- and it became a problem as his musical education proceeded. By the time he was well into his 20s he had begun to accumulate a reputation in Europe and had made his first tour of the United States, but his "repertoire needed expansion." He writes:

"Two major Beethoven sonatas, short pieces by Brahms and Schumann, and the great B minor Sonata of Chopin were added to it in less than two weeks. As before, and as would prove true for many years after, the processes of my means of approach to the music at hand were made up of a peculiar combination: a clear conception of the structure of a composition and complete empathy with the composer's intentions were always within my reach, but because of my lazy habits, I would neglect to pay attention to detail and to a finished and articulate performance of difficult passages that I hated to practice. I used to put the whole weight on the inner message of the music."

Doubtless his laziness was aided and abetted by his sheer precocity. The piano came so naturally and easily to him that he could get by with half an effort where lesser performers would have had to practice endlessly and still would have come up short. He also, notwithstanding all the depth of his love for music, had a somewhat cynical attitude toward audiences: "I learned . . . that a loud, smashing performance, even the worst from a musical standpoint, will always get an enthusiastic reception by the uninitiated, unmusical part of the audience, and I exploited this knowledge, I admit it with shame, in many concerts to come." Beyond that, he was as much a born playboy as a born pianist. He began having affairs, mostly with older women, when he was barely out of short pants, and he was always good for a party, a game of pool or poker, a boisterous conversation into the smallest hours of the morning.

Not to mince words, he could be childish and irresponsible. He was "totally devoid of a sense of economy -- a failure that has proved fatal for most of my life" -- and seems to have felt a deep sense of entitlement where other people's money was concerned. Sometime early in the 20th century (he is not great about supplying dates), while still a teenager, he found himself down and out in Paris, living "the excruciating life of someone constantly short of money, constantly in debt," a period that "was typical of my life for many years, consisting as it did of the discrepancy between the daily struggle for survival and the frequent escapes into [the] most refined luxuries," escapes that were made possible by friends, of whom he had many, and by music lovers eager to be in his company.

He could be totally shameless. Once he persuaded a friend to tide him over with a large amount of money. When the friend agreed, Rubinstein immediately proposed that they blow it all on a trip to Paris, London and other stops on the glitterati trail, which is exactly what they did. He doesn't really seem to have been spoiled -- by the time he was in his teens, he was pretty much estranged from his family -- but was merely willful and self-indulgent. There are moments when one wants to wring his neck, but the candor with which he confesses his youthful misadventures is so free and unaffected that these moments soon pass. Obviously he was immensely likable. He had many friends who were, or would become, famous in musical and artistic circles -- Pablo Casals, Fyodor Chaliapin, Karol Szymanowski, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Diaghilev -- but his accounts of these friendships never sound like mere name-dropping. These simply were the circles in which he traveled.

Much of his time in those early years was spent in the salons of the wealthy, the titled and the privileged. Hanging around with these sublimely boring people doesn't seem to have bothered him -- after all, they brought a fair amount of money his way -- but one of his best stories is at their expense. The great Polish pianist and patriot Ignace Jan Paderewski was asked to perform privately for an English duchess. He "demanded a very large sum of money which was readily granted." Then "he received a letter from the Duchess: 'Dear Maestro, accept my regrets for not inviting you to the dinner. As a professional artist, you will be more at ease in a nice room where you can rest before the concert. Yours, etc.' " Paderewski replied: "Dear Duchess: thanks for your letter. As you so kindly inform me that I am not obliged to be present at your dinner, I shall be satisfied with half of my fee. Yours, etc."

There are many other delicious stories in this book's nearly 500 pages. There is also a pervasive sense of the lost world of pre-World War I Europe, "the long era of the easy, peaceful intercourse between nations, of gracious living, of good taste, of good manners, of prosperity," a world that, with the war's onset, "was gone forever." Thus for all the happiness with which this book is imbued -- his "secret of happiness," Rubinstein writes, is, "Love life for better or for worse, without conditions" -- there is also an undercurrent of sadness, of grief not merely for the author's youth but for the world in which he lived it. All in all "My Young Years" is a lovely book, and it's a real pity that prospective readers must go hunting for it in used bookstores and libraries or buy it online.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address isyardleyj@washpost.com.

Out of Print (by Eric Alterman, the New Yorker)

2008-04-01T20:02:00.000-07:00

Caption: Arianna Huffington questions newspapers’“veneer of unassailable trustworthiness.”

The News Business
Out of Print
The death and life of the American newspaper.
by Eric Alterman March 31, 2008

The American newspaper has been around for approximately three hundred years. Benjamin Harris’s spirited Publick Occurrences, Both Forreign and Domestick managed just one issue, in 1690, before the Massachusetts authorities closed it down. Harris had suggested a politically incorrect hard line on Indian removal and shocked local sensibilities by reporting that the King of France had been taking liberties with the Prince’s wife.

It really was not until 1721, when the printer James Franklin launched the New England Courant, that any of Britain’s North American colonies saw what we might recognize today as a real newspaper. Franklin, Benjamin’s older brother, refused to adhere to customary licensing arrangements and constantly attacked the ruling powers of New England, thereby achieving both editorial independence and commercial success. He filled his paper with crusades (on everything from pirates to the power of Cotton and Increase Mather), literary essays by Addison and Steele, character sketches, and assorted philosophical ruminations.

Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.” Keller’s speech appeared on the Web site of its sponsor, the Guardian, under the headline “NOT DEAD YET.”

Perhaps not, but trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter. Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newspaper business have. The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Rather than compete in an era of merciless transformation, the families that owned the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal sold off the majority of their holdings. The New York Times Company has seen its stock decline by fifty-four per cent since the end of 2004, with much of the loss coming in the past year; in late February, an analyst at Deutsche Bank recommended that clients sell off their Times stock. The Washington Post Company has avoided a similar fate only by rebranding itself an “education and media company”; its testing and prep company, Kaplan, now brings in at least half the company’s revenue.

Until recently, newspapers were accustomed to operating as high-margin monopolies. To own the dominant, or only, newspaper in a mid-sized American city was, for many decades, a kind of license to print money. In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.” That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls “that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose” is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

Among the most significant aspects of the transition from “dead tree” newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of “news” itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.

In private conversation, reporters and editors concede that objectivity is an ideal, an unreachable horizon, but journalists belong to a remarkably thin-skinned fraternity, and few of them will publicly admit to betraying in print even a trace of bias. They discount the notion that their beliefs could interfere with their ability to report a story with perfect balance. As the venerable “dean” of the Washington press corps, David Broder, of the Post, puts it, “There just isn’t enough ideology in the average reporter to fill a thimble.”

Meanwhile, public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as quickly as the bottom line. A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago. “Less than one in five believe what they read in print,” the 2007 “State of the News Media” report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluded. “CNN is not really more trusted than Fox, or ABC than NBC. The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times.” Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and 9/11 conspiracy theories than believe in the notion of balanced—much less “objective”—mainstream news media. Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

No less challenging is the rapid transformation that has taken place in the public’s understanding of, and demand for, “news” itself. Rupert Murdoch, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in April, 2005—two years before his five-billion-dollar takeover of Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal—warned the industry’s top editors and publishers that the days when “news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know,” were over. No longer would people accept “a godlike figure from above” presenting the news as “gospel.” Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened. . . . And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”

One month after Murdoch’s speech, a thirty-one-year-old computer whiz, Jonah Peretti, and a former A.O.L. executive, Kenneth Lerer, joined the ubiquitous commentator-candidate-activist Arianna Huffington to launch a new Web site, which they called the Huffington Post. First envisaged as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post started out by aggregating political news and gossip; it also organized a group blog, with writers drawn largely from Huffington’s alarmingly vast array of friends and connections. Huffington had accumulated that network during years as a writer on topics from Greek philosophy to the life of Picasso, as the spouse of a wealthy Republican congressman in California, and now, after a divorce and an ideological conversion, as a Los Angeles-based liberal commentator and failed gubernatorial candidate.

Almost by accident, however, the owners of the Huffington Post had discovered a formula that capitalized on the problems confronting newspapers in the Internet era, and they are convinced that they are ready to reinvent the American newspaper. “Early on, we saw that the key to this enterprise was not aping Drudge,” Lerer recalls. “It was taking advantage of our community. And the key was to think of what we were doing through the community’s eyes.”

On the Huffington Post, Peretti explains, news is not something handed down from above but “a shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer.” Echoing Murdoch, he says that the Internet offers editors “immediate information” about which stories interest readers, provoke comments, are shared with friends, and generate the greatest number of Web searches. An Internet-based news site, Peretti contends, is therefore “alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink.”

Though Huffington has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone’s video camera or cell phone. The editors link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in. Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers—more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid. The over-all effect may appear chaotic and confusing, but, Lerer argues, “this new way of thinking about, and presenting, the news, is transforming news as much as CNN did thirty years ago.” Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

It’s an almost comically audacious ambition for an operation with only forty-six full-time employees—many of whom are barely old enough to rent a car. But, with about eleven million dollars at its disposal, the site is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually. What most impresses advertisers—and depresses newspaper-company executives—is the site’s growth numbers. In the past thirty days, thanks in large measure to the excitement of the Democratic primaries, the site’s “unique visitors”—that is, individual computers that clicked on one of its pages––jumped to more than eleven million, according to the company. And, according to estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is more popular than all but eight newspaper sites, rising from sixteenth place in December.

Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself.” If only in this respect, the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. It is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand posts from readers—posts that go off in their own directions and lead to arguments and conversations unrelated to the topic that inspired them. Occasionally, these comments present original perspectives and arguments, but many resemble the graffiti on a bathroom wall.

The notion that the Huffington Post is somehow going to compete with, much less displace, the best traditional newspapers is arguable on other grounds as well. The site’s original-reporting resources are minuscule. The site has no regular sports or book coverage, and its entertainment section is a trashy grab bag of unverified Internet gossip. And, while the Huffington Post has successfully positioned itself as the place where progressive politicians and Hollywood liberal luminaries post their anti-Bush Administration sentiments, many of the original blog posts that it publishes do not merit the effort of even a mouse click.

Additional oddities abound. Whereas a newspaper tends to stand by its story on the basis of an editorial process in which professional reporters and editors attempt to vet their sources and check their accuracy before publishing, the blogosphere relies on its readership—its community—for quality control. At the Huffington Post, Jonah Peretti explains, the editors “stand behind our front page” and do their best to insure that only trusted bloggers and reliable news sources are posted there. Most posts inside the site, however, go up before an editor sees them. Only if a post is deemed by a reader to be false, defamatory, or offensive does an editor get involved.

The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) “User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks,” Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”

This policy is hardly without its pitfalls. During the Hurricane Katrina crisis, the activist Randall Robinson referred, in a post, to reports from New Orleans that some people there were “eating corpses to survive.” When Arianna Huffington heard about the post, she got in touch with Robinson and found that he could not support his musings; she asked Robinson to post a retraction. The alacrity with which the correction took place was admirable, but it was not fast enough to prevent the false information from being repeated elsewhere.

The tensions between the leaders of the mainstream media and the challengers from the Web were presaged by one of the most instructive and heated intellectual debates of the American twentieth century.

Between 1920 and 1925, the young Walter Lippmann published three books investigating the theoretical relationship between democracy and the press, including “Public Opinion” (1922), which is credited with inspiring both the public-relations profession and the academic field of media studies. Lippmann identified a fundamental gap between what we naturally expect from democracy and what we know to be true about people. Democratic theory demands that citizens be knowledgeable about issues and familiar with the individuals put forward to lead them. And, while these assumptions may have been reasonable for the white, male, property-owning classes of James Franklin’s Colonial Boston, contemporary capitalist society had, in Lippmann’s view, grown too big and complex for crucial events to be mastered by the average citizen.

Journalism works well, Lippmann wrote, when “it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.” But where the situation is more complicated, “as for example, in the matter of the success of a policy, or the social conditions among a foreign people—that is to say, where the real answer is neither yes or no, but subtle, and a matter of balanced evidence,” journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.”

Lippmann likened the average American—or “outsider,” as he tellingly named him—to a “deaf spectator in the back row” at a sporting event: “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,” and “he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.” In a description that may strike a familiar chord with anyone who watches cable news or listens to talk radio today, Lippmann assumed a public that “is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted . . . and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict.” A committed élitist, Lippmann did not see why anyone should find these conclusions shocking. Average citizens are hardly expected to master particle physics or post-structuralism. Why should we expect them to understand the politics of Congress, much less that of the Middle East?

Lippmann’s preferred solution was, in essence, to junk democracy entirely. He justified this by arguing that the results were what mattered. Even “if there were a prospect” that people could become sufficiently well-informed to govern themselves wisely, he wrote, “it is extremely doubtful whether many of us would wish to be bothered.” In his first attempt to consider the issue, in “Liberty and the News” (1920), Lippmann suggested addressing the problem by raising the status of journalism to that of more respected professions. Two years later, in “Public Opinion,” he concluded that journalism could never solve the problem merely by “acting upon everybody for thirty minutes in twenty-four hours.” Instead, in one of the oddest formulations of his long career, Lippmann proposed the creation of “intelligence bureaus,” which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government’s actions without concerning themselves much with democratic preferences or public debate. Just what, if any, role the public would play in this process Lippmann never explained.

John Dewey termed “Public Opinion” “perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned,” and he spent much of the next five years countering it. The result, published in 1927, was an extremely tendentious, dense, yet important book, titled “The Public and Its Problems.” Dewey did not dispute Lippmann’s contention regarding journalism’s flaws or the public’s vulnerability to manipulation. But Dewey thought that Lippmann’s cure was worse than the disease. While Lippmann viewed public opinion as little more than the sum of the views of each individual, much like a poll, Dewey saw it more like a focus group. The foundation of democracy to Dewey was less information than conversation. Members of a democratic society needed to cultivate what the journalism scholar James W. Carey, in describing the debate, called “certain vital habits” of democracy—the ability to discuss, deliberate on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it toward consensus.

Dewey also criticized Lippmann’s trust in knowledge-based élites. “A class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests as to become a class with private interests and private knowledge,” he argued. “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”

Lippmann and Dewey devoted much of the rest of their lives to addressing the problems they had diagnosed, Lippmann as the archetypal insider pundit and Dewey as the prophet of democratic education. To the degree that posterity can be said to have declared a winner in this argument, the future turned out much closer to Lippmann’s ideal. Dewey’s confidence in democracy rested in significant measure on his “faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished.” But nothing in his voluminous writings gives the impression that he believed these conditions—which he defined expansively to include democratic schools, factories, voluntary associations, and, particularly, newspapers—were ever met in his lifetime. (Dewey died in 1952, at the age of ninety-two.)

The history of the American press demonstrates a tendency toward exactly the kind of professionalization for which Lippmann initially argued. When Lippmann was writing, many newspapers remained committed to the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press, in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news offerings accordingly. (Think of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton battling each other through their competing newspapers while serving in George Washington’s Cabinet.) The twentieth-century model, in which newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be the public interest, was, in Lippmann’s time, in its infancy.

As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected, in part owing to Lippmann’s example, top reporters, anchors, and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, Cabinet secretaries, and C.E.O.s they reported on. Just as naturally, these same reporters and editors sometimes came to identify with their subjects, rather than with their readers, as Dewey had predicted. Aside from biennial elections featuring smaller and smaller portions of the electorate, politics increasingly became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed—much as Lippmann had hoped and Dewey had feared. Beyond the publication of the occasional letter to the editor, the role of the reader was defined as purely passive.

The Lippmann model received its initial challenge from the political right. Many conservatives regarded the major networks, newspapers, and newsweeklies—the mainstream media—as liberal arbiters, incapable of covering without bias the civil-rights movement in the South or Barry Goldwater’s Presidential campaign. They responded by building think tanks and media outlets designed both to challenge and to bypass the mainstream media. The Reagan revolution, which brought conservatives to power in Washington, had its roots not only in the candidate’s personal appeal as a “great communicator” but in a decades-long campaign of ideological spadework undertaken in magazines such as William F. Buckley, Jr.,’s National Review and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary and in the pugnacious editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, edited for three decades by Robert Bartley. The rise of what has come to be known as the conservative “counter-establishment” and, later, of media phenomena such as Rush Limbaugh, on talk radio, and Bill O’Reilly, on cable television, can be viewed in terms of a Deweyan community attempting to seize the reins of democratic authority and information from a Lippmann-like élite.

A liberal version of the Deweyan community took longer to form, in part because it took liberals longer to find fault with the media. Until the late nineteen-seventies, many in the mainstream media did, in fact, exhibit the “liberal bias” with which conservatives continue to charge them, regarding their unquestioned belief both in a strong, activist government and in its moral responsibility to insure the expansion of rights to women and to ethnic and racial minorities. But a concerted effort to recruit pundits from the new conservative counter-establishment, coupled with investment by wealthy right-wing activists and businessmen in an interlocking web of counter-establishment think tanks, pressure groups, periodicals, radio stations, and television networks, operated as a kind of rightward gravitational pull on the mainstream’s reporting and helped to create a far more sympathetic context for conservative candidates than Goldwater supporters could have imagined.

Duncan Black, a former economics professor who writes a popular progressive blog under the name Atrios, explains that he, too, believed in what he calls “the myth of the liberal media.” He goes on, “But watching the press’s collective behavior during the Clinton impeachment saga, the Gore campaign, the post-9/11 era, the run-up to the Iraq war, and the Bush Administration’s absurd and dangerous claims of executive power rendered such a belief absurd. Sixty-five per cent of the American public disapproves of the Bush Administration, but that perspective, even now, has very little representation anywhere in the mainstream media.”

The birth of the liberal blogosphere, with its ability to bypass the big media institutions and conduct conversations within a like-minded community, represents a revival of the Deweyan challenge to our Lippmann-like understanding of what constitutes “news” and, in doing so, might seem to revive the philosopher’s notion of a genuinely democratic discourse. The Web provides a powerful platform that enables the creation of communities; distribution is frictionless, swift, and cheap. The old democratic model was a nation of New England towns filled with well-meaning, well-informed yeoman farmers. Thanks to the Web, we can all join in a Deweyan debate on Presidents, policies, and proposals. All that’s necessary is a decent Internet connection.

What put the Huffington Post on the map was a series of pieces during the summer and autumn of 2005, in which Arianna Huffington relentlessly attacked the military and foreign-affairs reporting of the Times’ Judith Miller. Huffington was fed by a steady stream of leaks and suggestions from Times editors and reporters, even though much of the newspaper world considered her journalistic credentials highly questionable.

The Huffington Post was hardly the first Web site to stumble on the technique of leveraging the knowledge of its readers to challenge the mainstream media narrative. For example, conservative bloggers at sites like Little Green Footballs took pleasure in helping to bring down Dan Rather after he broadcast dubious documents allegedly showing that George W. Bush had received special treatment during his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Long before the conservatives forced out Dan Rather, a liberal freelance journalist named Joshua Micah Marshall had begun a site, called Talking Points Memo, intended to take stories well beyond where mainstream newspapers had taken them, often by relying on the voluntary research and well-timed leaks of an avid readership. His site, begun during the 2000 Florida-recount controversy, ultimately spawned several related sites, which are collectively known as TPM Media, and which are financed through a combination of reader donations and advertising. In the admiring judgment of the Columbia Journalism Review, Talking Points Memo “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil,” a scandal that ultimately ended with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a George Polk Award for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger. Talking Points Memo also played a lead role in defeating the Bush Social Security plan and in highlighting Trent Lott’s praise for Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist Presidential campaign. Lott was eventually forced to step down as Senate Majority Leader.

According to Marshall, “the collaborative aspect” of his site “came about entirely by accident.” His original intention was merely to offer his readers “transparency,” so that his “strong viewpoint” would be distinguishable from the facts that he presented. Over time, however, he found that the enormous response that his work engendered offered access to “a huge amount of valuable information”––information that was not always available to mainstream reporters, who tended to deal largely with what Marshall terms “professional sources.” During the Katrina crisis, for example, Marshall discovered that some of his readers worked in the federal government’s climate-and-weather-tracking infrastructure. They provided him and the site with reliable reporting available nowhere else.

Marshall’s undeniable achievement notwithstanding, traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites. Operating on the basis of a Lippmann-like reverence for inside knowledge and contempt for those who lack it, many view these sites the way serious fiction authors might view the “novels” tapped out by Japanese commuters on their cell phones. Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

And it is true: no Web site spends anything remotely like what the best newspapers do on reporting. Even after the latest round of new cutbacks and buyouts are carried out, the Times will retain a core of more than twelve hundred newsroom employees, or approximately fifty times as many as the Huffington Post. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times maintain between eight hundred and nine hundred editorial employees each. The Times’ Baghdad bureau alone costs around three million dollars a year to maintain. And while the Huffington Post shares the benefit of these investments, it shoulders none of the costs.

Despite the many failures at newspapers, the vast majority of reporters and editors have devoted years, even decades, to understanding the subjects of their stories. It is hard to name any bloggers who can match the professional expertise, and the reporting, of, for example, the Post ’s Barton Gellman and Dana Priest, or the Times’ Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin.

In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,” contrasting that with the Times’ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ ” rather than mere “assertion.”

“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,” Arianna Huffington protested in a Huffington Post blog. Like most liberal bloggers, she takes exception to the assumption by so many traditional journalists that their work is superior to that of bloggers when it comes to ferreting out the truth. The ability of bloggers to find the flaws in the mainstream media’s reporting of the Iraq war “highlighted the absurdity of the knee jerk comparison of the relative credibility of the so-called MSM and the blogosphere,” she said, and went on, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers, and it became clear that new media sources could be trusted—and indeed are often much quicker at correcting mistakes than old media sources.”

But Huffington fails to address the parasitical relationship that virtually all Internet news sites and blog commentators enjoy with newspapers. The Huffington Post made a gesture in the direction of original reporting and professionalism last year when it hired Thomas Edsall, a forty-year veteran of the Washington Post and other papers, as its political editor. At the time he was approached by the Huffington Post, Edsall said, he felt that the Post had become “increasingly driven by fear—the fear of declining readership, the fear of losing advertisers, the fear of diminishing revenues, the fear of being swamped by the Internet, the fear of irrelevance. Fear drove the paper, from top to bottom, to corrupt the entire news operation.” Joining the Huffington Post, Edsall said, was akin to “getting out of jail,” and he has written, ever since, with a sense of liberation. But such examples are rare.

And so even if one agrees with all of Huffington’s jabs at the Times, and Edsall’s critique of the Washington Post, it is impossible not to wonder what will become of not just news but democracy itself, in a world in which we can no longer depend on newspapers to invest their unmatched resources and professional pride in helping the rest of us to learn, however imperfectly, what we need to know.

In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” a cartoon version of Dan Rather introduced a debate panel featuring “Ron Lehar, a print journalist from the Washington Post.” This inspired Bart’s nemesis Nelson to shout, “Haw haw! Your medium is dying!”

“Nelson!” Principal Skinner admonished the boy.

“But it is!” was the young man’s reply.

Nelson is right. Newspapers are dying; the evidence of diminishment in economic vitality, editorial quality, depth, personnel, and the over-all number of papers is everywhere. What this portends for the future is complicated. Three years ago, Rupert Murdoch warned newspaper editors, “Many of us have been remarkably, unaccountably complacent . . . quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp along.” Today, almost all serious newspapers are scrambling to adapt themselves to the technological and community-building opportunities offered by digital news delivery, including individual blogs, video reports, and “chat” opportunities for readers. Some, like the Times and the Post, will likely survive this moment of technological transformation in different form, cutting staff while increasing their depth and presence online. Others will seek to focus themselves locally. Newspaper editors now say that they “get it.” Yet traditional journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards on its Web site for all political news stories. Its public editor, Timothy J. McNulty, complained, not without reason, that “the boards were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.”

Arianna Huffington, for her part, believes that the online and the print newspaper model are beginning to converge: “As advertising dollars continue to move online—as they slowly but certainly are—HuffPost will be adding more and more reporting and the Times and Post model will continue with the kinds of reporting they do, but they’ll do more of it originally online.” She predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism—wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting of the kind that was responsible for the exposing of the Attorneys General firing scandal.” As for what may be lost in this transition, she is untroubled: “A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom—with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”

The survivors among the big newspapers will not be without support from the nonprofit sector. ProPublica, funded by the liberal billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler and headed by the former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, hopes to provide the mainstream media with the investigative reporting that so many have chosen to forgo. The Center for Independent Media, headed by David Bennahum, a former writer at Wired, recently hired Jefferson Morley, from the Washington Post, and Allison Silver, a former editor at both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, to oversee a Web site called the Washington Independent. It’s one of a family of news-blogging sites meant to pick up some of the slack left by declining staffs in local and Washington reporting, with the hope of expanding everywhere. But to imagine that philanthropy can fill all the gaps arising from journalistic cutbacks is wishful thinking.

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

The transformation will also engender serious losses. By providing what Bill Keller, of the Times, calls the “serendipitous encounters that are hard to replicate in the quicker, reader-driven format of a Web site”—a difference that he compares to that “between a clock and a calendar”—newspapers have helped to define the meaning of America to its citizens. To choose one date at random, on the morning of Monday, February 11th, I picked up the paper-and-ink New York Times on my doorstep, and, in addition to the stories one could have found anywhere—Obama defeating Clinton again and the Bush Administration’s decision to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees—the front page featured a unique combination of articles, stories that might disappear from our collective consciousness were there no longer any institution to generate and publish them. These included a report from Nairobi, by Jeffrey Gettleman, on the effect of Kenya’s ethnic violence on the country’s middle class; a dispatch from Doha, by Tamar Lewin, on the growth of American university campuses in Qatar; and, in a scoop that was featured on the Huffington Post’s politics page and excited much of the blogosphere that day, a story, by Michael R. Gordon, about the existence of a study by the RAND Corporation which offered a harsh critique of the Bush Administration’s performance in Iraq. The juxtaposition of these disparate topics forms both a baseline of knowledge for the paper’s readers and a picture of the world they inhabit. In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.

Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. “People do awful things to each other,” the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in “Night and Day,” Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. “But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of “the dark.” Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered. ♦

Anthony Minghella, 54, Director, Dies (the New York Times)

2008-03-18T22:25:00.000-07:00

Note to the Capture: Jude Law, right, with Mr. Minghella on the set of the 2006 film "Breaking and Entering." The director worked with Mr. Law on three films. Photo: Laurie Sparham/Weinstein Company
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March 19, 2008
Obituaries
Anthony Minghella, 54, Director, Dies
By DAVID CARR

Anthony Minghella, the British filmmaker who won an Academy Award for his direction of “The English Patient,” died Tuesday morning in London. He was 54.

The cause was complications of surgery he had a week ago to treat tonsil cancer, said Leslee Dart, his publicist.

The son of parents who made ice cream on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of England, Mr. Minghella used expansive tastes in literature and a deep visual vocabulary to make lush films with complicated themes that found both audiences and accolades. Mr. Minghella’s films, which also included “Breaking and Entering” (2006), “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999) and “Cold Mountain” (2003), used a careful eye for cultural and historical detail to explore ways in which the dynamics of class often pushed people into corners that they had to fight or scheme their way out of.

His gift for building fully realized worlds within worlds also found expression in opera. Mr. Minghella directed an acclaimed staging of “Madama Butterfly” in 2006, and he was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to direct and write the libretto for a new work by the composer Osvaldo Golijov that was scheduled for the 2011-12 season.

Mr. Minghella recently completed work on “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency,” an adaptation of an Alexander McCall Smith novel, which was filmed in Botswana, in southern Africa, for HBO and the BBC as the pilot of a series.

He worked as a writer and a director in both theater and television. Samuel Beckett was a particular fascination; Mr. Minghella organized a star-studded tribute to Beckett in 2006.

After his movie-directing debut in “Truly Madly Deeply,” a made-for-television production that was released theatrically in 1990, Mr. Minghella went on to adapt a number of novels for a series of well-reviewed films. In addition to winning the directing Oscar in 1997 for “The English Patient” — which garnered a total of nine Oscars, including best picture — Mr. Minghella also received an adapted-screenplay nomination. In 2000 his screenplay for “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was nominated as well.

That same year Mr. Minghella joined a fellow director, Sydney Pollack, to form Mirage, an independent production company that concluded a three-year first-look deal with the Weinstein Company earlier this month. They collaborated as producers on a number of films and worked on each other’s films as well.

“He was interested in the magic,” Mr. Pollack said. “Not fake magic, like hiding the ball under the cup, but real magic, the kind that occurs between people. Nowadays, everybody making movies wants to get the clothes off fast and the guns out quick, he was just the opposite. He was interested in the poetry, lavishing the viewer with story, and scope and richness. Look at what you got for your $12 ticket with Anthony.”

“There was a real authenticity to his work,” Mr. Pollack added. “He made movies about the world that we live in, where stuff happened that no one could have anticipated.”

Mr. Minghella recently stepped down from his position as chairman of the British Film Institute, an organization that promotes making films in Britain.

Anthony Minghella was born on Jan. 6, 1954, and grew up on the Isle of Wight, where his parents, immigrants from Italy, ran an ice cream factory. An outsider even in his native land, Mr. Minghella took on large historical issues in his work, like the human consequences of epic warfare in “Cold Mountain,” about a soldier’s journey across an American landscape battered by the Civil War. Closer to home, his film “Breaking and Entering” examined the interlocking lives of thieves and their victims in today’s London, a place where he believed immigrants are less assimilated than tolerated.

“But while we share the geographical space, we don’t share much else,” he said to The New York Times in 2006 in talking about the film, which was based on his first original screenplay since “Truly Madly Deeply.” “We’re not particularly well integrated. One of the curiosities can be the differences, rather than the similarities, between people walking down the street — differences in expectation and privilege, in wealth and opportunity. It’s not tension or aggression, but a kind of guarded indifference. We coexist rather than create communities.”

Mr. Minghella’s concern with seeing beyond roles assigned by hierarchy or education extended to the work itself.

“Anthony was the opposite of the prissy, hysterical director,” said Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. “He was calm and intelligent and persuasive, whether he was talking to a board member or a member of the stage crew.”

In what was viewed as a risky move at the time, Mr. Gelb chose Mr. Minghella to direct “Madama Butterfly,” which opened the Met’s 2006 season. Although Mr. Minghella was a trained pianist, he was an opera neophyte before the “Butterfly” production, which originated at the English National Opera in London.

“Everyone here had every reason to be suspicious of him because they knew his opera credentials were limited,” Mr. Gelb said. ”But he set the tone at the first rehearsal — he told the people in the production that he wanted them to read the text to him before they sang a note. The message was clear, that they were not only opera singers, but actors as well.”

The subsequent production, which included blended cinematic elements (a series of movable screens) along with creative stagecraft (Cio-Cio-San’s son was rendered as a puppet) pleased critics and audiences alike.

Mr. Minghella is survived by his wife, Carolyn Choa, who choreographed the “Butterfly” production; his son, Max; his daughter, Hannah; his parents, Eddie and Gloria Minghella; his brother, Dominic; and three sisters: Gioia, Loretta and Edana.

With a large, bald head, and a thick frame, Mr. Minghella had the physical affect of dockworker, but when he opened his mouth, it was clear he was an omnivorously literate person.

“I can’t think of a conversation that I had in the last five years that didn’t include a reference about what book he was reading,” said Scott Rudin, who produced a number of films with both Mr. Minghella and Mr. Pollack. “He was the first person to pick up the phone and talk about some amazing play he had seen in North London, and a few days later there would be a script on my desk.”

Mr. Pollack said the history of successful production collaborations between directors was so short as not worth measuring, but said that while he and Mr. Minghella often disagreed about particulars — “We fought plenty” — they had values in common.

“We both know what was junk and what was good,” Mr. Pollack said. “There were a lot of movies that we planned together and are now not going to be able to do. It’s sad for me, but it’s also too bad that people won’t see those movies.”

Just the Facts, Ma’Am (by Jill Lepore, the New Yorker)

2008-03-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

Note to the Illustration:
Modern history arose when the novel did, but novelists had their truths to claim.
illustration by Barry Blitt.

A Critic at Large
Just the Facts, Ma’Am
Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history.
by Jill Lepore March 24, 2008

What makes a book a history? In the eighteenth century, novelists called their books “histories,” smack on the title page. No one was more brash about this than Henry Fielding, who, in his 1749 “History of Tom Jones, a Foundling,” included a chapter called “Of Those Who Lawfully May, and of Those Who May Not Write Such Histories as This.” Fielding insisted that what flowed from his pen was “true history”; fiction was what historians wrote.

“I shall not look on myself as accountable to any Court of Critical Jurisdiction whatever: For as I am, in reality, the Founder of a new Province of Writing,” Fielding explained. Tom Jones’s claim to truth is different from Margaret Jones’s. Earlier this month, Jones, also known as Margaret Seltzer, tried to pass off a gangland bildungsroman as the story of her life. Pulped days after it was published, the book, titled “Love and Consequences,” is a fraud; “Tom Jones” is not. Fielding was playing; Seltzer was just lying.

But Fielding meant it when he said that “Tom Jones” was true, and there’s a sense in which he was right. History matters, but the best novels boast a kind of truth that even the best history books can never claim. And when history books are wrong they can be miserably, badly, ridiculously wrong, a point that wasn’t lost on Jane Austen, who, in 1791, when she was sixteen, wrote a brilliant parody of Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume, march-of-the-monarchs “History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Death of George II.” (Goldsmith, the author of the novel “The Vicar of Wakefield,” wrote history to keep out of debtors’ prison.) Austen called her parody “The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st, by a Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian.” It consisted of thirteen perfectly dunderheaded character sketches of crowned heads of England. Of Henry V, she wrote, “During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for.” Of the Duke of Somerset: “He was beheaded, of which he might with reason have been proud, had he known that such was the death of Mary Queen of Scotland; but as it was impossible that he should be conscious of what had never happened, it does not appear that he felt particularly delighted with the manner of it.” Of the allegation that Lady Jane Grey, Edward VI’s cousin, read Greek: “Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I believe she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain.” Once in a great while, Austen happened to bump into a fact or two, for which she apologized: “Truth being I think very excusable in an Historian.”

Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes. The literary genre that became known as “the novel” was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn’t called “novel.” In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel’s twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view.

Among the ancients, history was a literary art, as John Burrow illustrates in his fascinating compendium “A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century” (Knopf; $35). Invention was a hallmark of ancient history, which was filled with long, often purely fictitious speeches of great men. It was animated by rhetoric, not by evidence. Even well into the eighteenth century, not a few historians continued to understand themselves as artists, with license to invent. Eager not to be confused with antiquarians and mere chroniclers, even budding empiricists confessed a certain lack of fussiness about facts. In “Letters on the Study and Use of History” (1752), Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke condemned those who “store their minds with crude unruminated facts and sentences; and hope to supply, by bare memory, the want of imagination and judgment.”

The transformation of history into an empirical science began as early as the sixteenth century and became entrenched only in the nineteenth century. By the time the American Historical Association was founded, in 1884, the “cult of the fact” (as the intellectual historian Peter Novick has called it) had achieved ascendancy. Ever since, generations of historians have defined themselves by a set of standards that rest on the distinction between truth and invention, even when that has meant scorning everyone who came before them. Between 1834 and 1874, the American statesman and historian George Bancroft, much influenced by Sir Walter Scott, produced a ten-volume “History of the United States.” It is romantic and opinionated; it has a gritty voice and a passionate point of view. It’s a little . . . novel-ish. In the eighteen-seventies, one Young Turk suggested that a better title for it would be “The Psychological Autobiography of George Bancroft, As Illustrated by Incidents and Characters in the Annals of the United States.” A generation later, Bancroft’s monumental accomplishment looked even worse: now it was, as the Yale historian Charles McLean Andrews put it, “nothing less than a crime against historical truth.”

But is “historical truth” truer than fictional truth? The difference between history and poetry, Aristotle argued, is that “the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history.” Historians have turned this thinking on its head. History, not literature, is the serious stuff.

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, many historians worried that the seriousness of history, its very integrity as a discipline, was in danger of being destroyed by literary theorists who insisted on the constructedness, the fictionality, of all historical writing—who suggested that the past is nothing more than a story we tell about it. The field seemed to be tottering on the edge of an epistemological abyss: If history is fiction, if history is not true, what’s the use? (The panic has since died down, but it hasn’t died out. Donald Kagan, in his 2005 Jefferson lecture, “In Defense of History,” grumbled about the perils of “pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo.”) In 1990, Sir Geoffrey Elton called postmodern literary theory “the intellectual equivalent of crack.” The next year, the eminent American historian Gordon Wood, writing in The New York Review of Books, warned that if things were to keep on this way historians would soon “put themselves out of business.” Reviewing Simon Schama’s “Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)”—a history book in which Schama indulged in flights of fancy, fully disclosed as such—Wood wrote, “His violation of the conventions of history writing actually puts the integrity of the discipline of history at risk.” That review, along with twenty more (including one of a book of mine), appears in Wood’s new book, “The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History” (Penguin Press; $25.95); each review has an afterword, and in an introduction the author catalogues the failings of “unhistorical historians.”

Revisiting his review of “Dead Certainties,” Wood takes the trouble to reproach Schama again for having “forgotten that he was not Walter Scott or E. L. Doctorow,” and for ignoring “both the epistemological climate of the early 1990s and the devastating effects such a work by such a distinguished historian could have on the conventions of the discipline.” As Wood sees it, these conventions need protecting because their novelty—“They are scarcely more than a century old”—makes them fragile. But they’re sturdier than he thinks. Margaret Jones is accountable to a court of jurisdiction in a way that Tom Jones was not. Historians and critics, readers and writers, haven’t given up on truth. And postmodernism turns out to be a bit of a bugbear. It’s premodernism that’s got all the teeth.

In the eighteenth century, the boundary between history and fiction was different from what it is now. For one thing, plenty of people wrote both history books and novels, including Voltaire, Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Daniel Defoe, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Charles Brockden Brown. The century’s most influential historians, David Hume and Edward Gibbon, happen to have been particular fans of Fielding’s novels (and Fielding considered reading history essential preparation for writing novels). History books and novels alike aimed at seducing readers through plot and even suspense. “History, like tragedy, requires an exposition, a central action, and a dénouement,” Voltaire wrote in 1752. “My secret is to force the reader to wonder: Will Philip V ascend the throne?”

Eighteenth-century novels also pretended that they were true. Not only did they call themselves “histories”; they also often took the form of counterfeit historical documents, usually letters or journals—a form that was itself a parody of the conventions of historical writing. In the preface to “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe” (1719), Daniel Defoe insisted, “The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it.” But of course Defoe was not the editor of a journal kept by a man named Crusoe; there was no journal. Defoe made it up. What Defoe meant by this imposture, one critic wrote, “I know not; unless you would have us think, that the Manner of your telling a Lie will make it a Truth.”

It’s easy to think that Defoe was joking, as if Robinson Crusoe’s journal were as much a gimmick as Esquire’s “diary” of Heath Ledger, but Defoe, like Fielding, was making a (mostly) straight-faced epistemological argument. And less playful novelists did the same thing. Samuel Richardson insisted that he was merely the editor of Pamela’s letters, first published in England in 1740 as “Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded” (and published by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia two years later). This was a lie, but not a hoax; Richardson wanted his novels to be read with “Historical Faith,” since they contained, he believed, the truth of the possible, the truth of human nature. The first American novels weren’t published until the seventeen-eighties and nineties, but they cluttered their title pages with the same claims: “FOUNDED ON FACT”; “A Tale of Truth.”

What this implies is nicely illustrated by David Hume (who, in his lifetime, was better known as a historian than as a philosopher). In “Of the Study of History” (1741), Hume told a story about how the same book can be read as both history and fiction. A “young beauty” asked Hume to send her some novels; instead, he sent her some history books—Plutarch’s Lives—but told her they were novels, assuring her “that there was not a word of truth in them from beginning to end.” She read them avidly, at least “ ’till she came to the lives of ALEXANDER and CAESAR, whose names she had heard of by accident; and then returned me the book, with many reproaches for deceiving her.” As fiction, Plutarch’s Lives was delightful; as history, it was unbearable. Hume toyed with the opposite idea in “A Treatise of Human Nature” (1739-40): two books, one a history, and one a novel, might contain the same truth. “If one person sits down to read a book as a romance, and another as a true history,” he wrote, “they plainly receive the same ideas, and in the same order; nor does the incredulity of the one, and the belief of the other hinder them from putting the very same sense upon their author. His words produce the same ideas in both.”

If a history book can be read as if it were a novel, and if a reader can find the same truth in a history book and a novel, what, finally, is the difference between them? This is a difficult question, Hume admitted. Maybe it just feels different—more profound—to read what we believe to be true (an idea assented to) than what we believe to be false (a fancy): “An idea assented to feels different from a fictitious idea, that the fancy alone presents to us.”

But there’s more between them. A novel, as Defoe put it, is a “private History,” a history of private life. “I will tell you in three words what the book is,” Laurence Sterne wrote in “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,” published beginning in 1759. He was talking about Locke’s account of how the mind worked and, by extension, his own. “It is a history.—A history! of who? what? where? when? Don’t hurry yourself. —It is a history-book, Sir, (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind.” Fielding went farther. He called his writing “true history.” It is “our Business to relate Facts as they are,” Fielding told his reader, classing himself among historical writers who draw their materials not from records but from “the vast authentic Doomsday-Book of Nature.”

For Fielding, there are two kinds of historical writing: history based in fact (whose truth is founded in documentary evidence), and history based in fiction (whose truth is founded in human nature). Maybe—to take some license with Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1813)—these two manners of writing bear the same relationship to one another as Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham: “One has got all the truth, and the other all the appearance of it.” The question is: which is which?

“Dismiss me from the falsehood and impossibility of history, and deliver me over to the reality of romance,” the English writer William Godwin pleaded in “Of History and Romance,” in 1797. (Not for nothing had Godwin called his novel, written a few years earlier, “Things As They Are.”) There is not and never can be any such thing as true history, Godwin insisted: “Nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more unsatisfactory than the evidence of facts.” Every history is incomplete; every historian has a point of view; every historian relies on what is unreliable—documents written by people who were not under oath and cannot be cross-examined. (That is to say, even the best historian has a good deal in common with Jane Austen’s “Partial, Prejudiced & Ignorant Historian.”) Before his imperfect sources, the historian is powerless: “He must take what they choose to tell, the broken fragments, and the scattered ruins of evidence.” He could decide merely to reproduce his sources, to offer a list of facts: “But this is in reality no history. He that knows only on what day the Bastille was taken and on what spot Louis XVI perished, knows nothing.”

Fortunately, there is yet another kind of history, Godwin argued, “the noblest and most excellent species of history”: the novel, or romance. The novelist is the better historian—and especially better than the empirical historian—because he admits that he is partial, prejudiced, and ignorant, and because he has not forsaken passion: “The writer of romance is to be considered as the writer of real history; while he who was formerly called the historian, must be contented to step down into the place of his rival, with this disadvantage, that he is a romance writer, without the arduous, the enthusiastic and the sublime licence of imagination that belong to that species of composition.”

Godwin’s essay wasn’t published until the twentieth century, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Philadelphian Charles Brockden Brown put forth a look-alike argument in “The Difference Between History and Romance,” an essay published in The Monthly Magazine and American Review in April, 1800. (To be sure, Brown was very much influenced by Godwin. Carl Van Doren once wrote, “His novels all bear the marks of haste, immaturity, and Godwin.”) “History and romance are terms that have never been very clearly distinguished from each other,” Brown began. “It should seem that one dealt in fiction, and the other in truth; that one is a picture of the probable and certain, and the other a tissue of untruths; that one describes what might have happened, and what has actually happened, and the other what never had existence.” Yet these distinctions are not as helpful as they at first appear: history concerns facts, but, because these have to be arranged and explained, the historian “is a dealer, not in certainties, but probabilities, and is therefore a romancer.”

In an 1806 essay called “Historical Characters Are False Representations of Nature,” Brown suggested that the historian’s grossest deception is promoting the idea that only the great are good: “Popular prejudice assists the illusion, and because we are accustomed to behold public characters occupy a situation in life that few can experience, we are induced to believe that their capacities are more enlarged, their passions more refined, and, in a word, that nature has bestowed on them faculties denied to obscurer men.” But great characters are not superior to obscure men, who are, alas, condemned to obscurity by history itself. “If it were possible to read the histories of those who are doomed to have no historian, and to glance into domestic journals as well as into national archives,” Brown speculated, “we should then perceive the unjust prodigality of our sympathy to those few names, which eloquence has adorned with all the seduction of her graces.”

Fiction, in other words, can do what history doesn’t but should: it can tell the story of ordinary people. The eighteenth century’s fictive history (not to be confused with what we call “historical fiction”) is the history of private life; the history of what passes in a man’s own mind; true to the Book of Nature; and written in plain, simple style, exhibiting both judgment and invention. And it is the history of obscure men. Who are these obscure men? Well, a lot of them are women.

For every Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe, there were a dozen Clarissas, Pamelas, and Charlotte Temples. If eighteenth-century novels are history, they’re women’s history. And they were adored, above all, by women readers. “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity” was the revealing title of an essay published in England in 1797 and in Boston five years later. Everyone from preachers to politicians damned novels as corrupting of both public and private virtue and, above all, of women’s virtue. “Novels not only pollute the imaginations of young women,” one American magazine writer insisted in 1798; they give them “false ideas of life.”

What, pray, was the remedy for this grave social ill? Reading history. “There is nothing which I would recommend more earnestly to my female readers than the study of history,” Hume wrote in “Of the Study of History” (which is why he gave his lady friend Plutarch’s Lives, and told her it was a novel). But, on the whole, women were not particularly interested in reading history. Hume attributed this to the fair sex’s “aversion to matter of fact” and its “appetite for falsehood.” Men “allow us Poetry, Plays, and Romances,” Mary Astell wrote in 1705, “and when they would express a particular Esteem for a Woman’s Sense, they recommend History.” But why read it? “For tho’ it may be of Use to Men who govern Affairs, to know how their Fore-fathers Acted, yet what is this to us?” Much as writers of history tried to woo women readers, they made very little headway. Near the end of the century, Mary Wollstonecraft was left to ask of women: “Is it surprising that they find the reading of history a very dry task?” (After publishing her “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” in 1792, Wollstonecraft started writing a novel, “Maria; or, the Wrongs of Women,” to make sure that her arguments would reach women readers. Her husband, William Godwin, had it published in 1798, after she died, in childbirth.)

Women were not only not interested in history; they didn’t trust it. In “Northanger Abbey” (completed by 1803), Jane Austen’s comic heroine, who adores novels, confesses that she finds history both boring and impossible to credit: “It tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.” Austen saw fit to echo this exchange in “Persuasion” (1818). “All histories are against you,” Captain Harville insists, when Austen’s levelheaded heroine, Anne Elliot, argues that women are more constant than men. “But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men,” Harville guesses, and Anne agrees. “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story,” she observes, saying, “I will not allow books to prove any thing.”

By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men. (Women might write biography, or dabble in genealogy.) Eighteenth-century observers, in other words, understood the distinction between history and fiction not merely and maybe not even predominantly as a distinction between truth and invention but as a distinction between stories by, about, and of interest to men and stories by, about, and of interest to women. Women read novels, women wrote novels, women were the heroines of novels. Men read history, men wrote history, men were the heroes of history. (When men wrote novels, Godwin suggested, this was regarded as “a symptom of effeminacy.”)

As Burrow’s “A History of Histories” and Wood’s “Purpose of the Past” make clear, however, much of what distinguished eighteenth-century fiction from eighteenth-century history is now part of how academic historians write history. Most of the popular history books you’ll find in Barnes & Noble celebrate the public lives of famous men, but the history books that many academics have been writing for the past half century concern the private lives of ordinary people. (Memoirs constitute a related but distinct genre, chronicling the lives of both the famous and the not so famous, and borrowing from the conventions of history and of fiction. Fake memoirs, like Margaret Jones’s or Misha Defonesca’s, borrow from those genres, but without achieving the legitimacy of either.) “By the 1970s,” Wood writes, “this new social history of hitherto forgotten people had come to dominate academic history writing.” Maybe the topics that have seized professional historians’ attention—family history, social history, women’s history, cultural history, “microhistory”—constitute nothing more than an attempt to take back territory they forfeited to novelists in the eighteenth century. If so, historians have reclaimed from novelists nearly everything except the license to invent . . . and women readers. Today, publishers figure that men buy the great majority of popular history books; most fiction buyers are women.

Is “history at risk”? If women barely read it at all, and if men mostly read books with titles like “Guts and Guns,” it just might be. “A History of Histories” and “The Purpose of the Past” offer a useful reminder that history is a long and endlessly interesting argument, where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else. But, as for telling stories, maybe historians still have a few things to learn from novelists. Reading Jane Austen being I think very excusable in an Historian. ♦

My Invitation Isn't in the Mail (by Cathy Horyn, the New York Times)

2008-03-13T03:01:00.000-07:00

Notes to the caption: ENVELOPE PLEASE Fashion writers must be invited to a runway show.Dima Gavrysh/Associated Press

March 13, 2008
Critic’s Notebook
My Invitation Isn’t in the Mail
By CATHY HORYN

GIORGIO ARMANI does not want me at his fashion shows.

In a letter to my editor earlier this month, he cites my “unnecessarily sarcastic comments” about his friends and family in a review of his last couture show and notes that I have “rarely found positive remarks” to make about his ready-to-wear collections, and then surmises that I have “an embedded preconception.” He concludes: “Going forward therefore, I see no real merit in inviting Cathy Horyn to my women’s shows.”

The subject of banning journalists from fashion shows seems as quaint as the practice itself, neither a commendation to the industry nor a badge of honor to the critic. Indeed, fashion is the only creative field that attempts to bar the news media.

Drama and film critics are often baited and pressured by producers. When Frank Rich was the chief drama critic of The Times, the producer David Merrick tried, and failed, to place a pair of ads in the paper inviting pyromaniacs to the Times building. But those critics can always buy a ticket to a play or movie. A fashion writer must be invited to a runway show.

But of course that sounds ridiculous, as though I am wearing white gloves and a girdle to type on my I.B.M. ThinkPad. This is 2008. Two hours after a hot show like Prada or Balenciaga anyone, not just reporters, can pull up images on the Internet and post their opinions on blogs around the world. The wonder to me is not why a designer like Mr. Armani bans a journalist. Rather it is why he doesn’t use the power of digital technology to take his message directly to the public, effectively knocking out journalists who complain that his clothes are out of touch.

What being banned tells me is that fashion has entered a borderland between the old and the new. Practiced mainly by older designers, whose careers took flight in the 1980s, banning seems a reflexive action against a perceived threat to their power. After Hadley Freeman, the deputy fashion editor of The Guardian in London, gave an unflattering description of a Jean Paul Gaultier fur cape with flying carcass heads, in July 2006, she was informed by his press representative that she would be “banned for life.”

The ’80s was a creative period in fashion, the decade of nouveau-riche dressing and the invasion of the Japanese designers in Paris, but it was also an uncritical one. In the United States, except for a handful of writers, notably Kennedy Fraser of The New Yorker, there wasn’t much critical discussion of fashion. Women’s Wear Daily could be tough on designers, extracting loyalty and punishment with the glee of a small boy pulling the wings off a fly, and there was the paper’s famous feud with Geoffrey Beene.

More recently, Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor of The International Herald Tribune, has been temporarily banned by some houses (as was her predecessor, Hebe Dorsey, who took the matter lightly: She had her hair done and then wrote about it).

Until I got to The Times, in late 1998, I had written some fairly critical reviews and profiles of designers but had never been excluded from a show. The first designer to ban me was Helmut Lang — a perplexing turn, I felt, since one of Mr. Lang’s reasons for adopting New York as his home was that it is the news media center of the world. Later, there were bans from Carolina Herrera (recently lifted) and Dolce & Gabbana (still imposed).

I have no doubt, as Lynn Tesoro, a seasoned fashion publicist, says, that designers who take their works seriously also take harsh reviews personally. Yet it is clear to her that some designers don’t fully understand the different roles of the media — the magazine editors looking for beautiful clothes to photograph (and, with luck, an advertiser to satisfy in the process), the newspaper critic examining a creative change, and increasingly the amateur blogger. During the recent shows, Ms. Tesoro said, a client of hers complained about reader comments on a fashion blog, demanding to know how they could be controlled or excised.

Many consumers find Mr. Armani’s clothes very appealing, and certainly no one would bother denying that he had a huge impact on the way men and women looked in the ’80s and early ’90s. I loved attending his shows then. The half-lit beige amphitheater in his Milan palazzo, the knowing sense of taste, the glide of the models.

And if fashion writers might be suspect in appraising his influence, given the furriness of the prose and the amount he spends on advertising in magazines, there have been plenty of culture critics to explain it, not least the late Herbert Muschamp. In a dazzling review in this paper of the Armani exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2000, he identified an imaginative power that was equal to Cecil Beaton’s in the Ascot scene in “My Fair Lady.” But, as Muschamp pointed out, institutions like the Guggenheim, which was criticized for accepting perhaps as much as $15 million in donations from Mr. Armani, don’t do well when they import fashion-world values, like cronyism, delusion and sycophancy, into their decision-making process.

Well, fashion houses don’t do well with these values, either. On Feb. 17, when I learned in Milan that Mr. Armani was not inviting me to his fall 2008 women’s show, I ran into a number of my fashion sisters who darkly commiserated with me, as if we shared a secret. But just when did attending a fashion show cease to be a pleasure and become instead a chore? Or is the show and our almost compulsory attendance really about something else, about preserving distinct power bases in the face of their rapid erosion?

The system of inviting editors to see a new collection has been in place for decades and, despite the public access created by the Internet, has encouraged a kind of rigid caste system, with front-row chiefs, art directors, top photographers and, farther back, the stylists, junior editors and now bloggers.

It is not unusual to hear journalists complain that their seat assignment does not reflect their rank, or to hear a house publicist fret about it. Ms. Freeman of The Guardian said she and other British editors received a letter from Chanel apologizing that their seats at the recent show in Paris did not reflect the “hierarchical order” of the British contingent, which was apparently moved back a row or two to make room for some Chanel V.I.P.’s.

The pompous-sounding letter made Ms. Freeman laugh. “Aren’t we there to look at the clothes?” she asked rhetorically.

Yes — and no. If writers were there just to look at clothes and collect their thoughts for reviews and future articles, there would be no finicky emphasis on placement, as though we were guests at a private dinner party. And without the cozening emphasis on rank there would be no threat of demotion or outright banishment from the group. (Anyone who complains that fashion is like high school is quite correct.)

“The reason we go to fashion shows is to see other people and to see where they are in the industry based on where they are sitting,” Ms. Freeman said. “For shows that are so redolent of the ’80s, the only strength a designer has is his seating assignments.”

Marko Jenko, an art history student in Slovenia who is a regular on my blog, recently pointed out that perceptions are a form of public space, like the airwaves, and that designers can’t control them. Besides, Mr. Jenko said, Mr. Armani already profits handsomely from having his name blazed on television, billboards, in magazines, on scores of self-named products.

If the power of digital technology makes obsolete the practice of banning journalists, what remains of the old system but an empty seat? I can’t say yet whether I will write about Mr. Armani’s clothes by viewing them online. Frankly, I would be much more excited if he unburdened himself of the whole system, closed down the shows, stopped with the backstage stroking sessions, and went directly over the Internet to the public.

And if fashion writers don’t know what to do with themselves, if such a day ever comes, then that’s their problem.

Who Is Grady Harp? (by Garth Risk Hallberg, the Slate.com)

2008-01-29T19:29:00.000-08:00

culturebox
Who Is Grady Harp?
Amazon's Top Reviewers and the fate of the literary amateur.
By Garth Risk Hallberg
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 7:33 AM ET

Full disclosure: It was late at night, in a fit of furtive self-Googling, that I discovered the first Amazon customer review of my debut book of fiction. "Superb," wrote Grady Harp of Los Angeles. "Fascinating ... addictive." Not to mention "profound." Such extravagance should have aroused suspicion, but I was too busy basking in the glow of a five-star rave to worry about the finer points of Harp's style. Sure, he'd spelled my name wrong, but hadn't he also judged me "a sensitive observer of human foibles"? Only when I noticed the "Top 10 Reviewer" tag did I wonder whether Grady Harp was more than just a satisfied customer. After a brief e-mail exchange, my publicist confirmed that she'd solicited Grady Harp's review.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon's customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: "an intelligent and articulate conversation ... conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits," as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company's leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of "Web 2.0"—an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon's reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas—one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

On the surface, Grady Harp seems just the sort of enlightened consumer who might lead us out of Web 1.0's darkness. A 66-year-old gallerist, retired surgeon, and poet, he has reviewed over 3,500 books, CDs, and movies for Amazon. In turn, he has attained a kind of celebrity: a No. 7 ranking; a prominent profile on the Web site; and, apparently, a following. In the week after his endorsement of my work appeared, more than 100 readers clicked on a button that said, "I found this review helpful." His stated mission is to remain "ever on the lookout for the new and promising geniuses of tomorrow." At present, Dr. Harp's vigil runs to about 500,000 words—a critical corpus to rival Dr. Johnson's—and his reviews are clearly the product of a single, effusive sensibility. Jose Saramago's Blindness is "A Searing, Mesmerizing Journey" (five stars); The Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop's Dirty Little Drawings, "A Surprisingly Rich Treasure Trove" (five stars).

Such efforts have led a quorum of enthusiasts to hail Harp as a standard-bearer for literary amateurism. "Keep your pen hot, Grady!" one comments. Yet an equally energetic chorus of detractors carps that Harp's Amazon reviews are more self-interested than they might appear. The comment threads accompanying Harp postings devolve into litanies of accusation: GH engages in back-scratching; GH is unduly influenced by publishers; GH has failed to read the book under review.

My own research suggests that GH is no more or less credible than Amazon's other "celebrity reviewers." Harriet Klausner, No. 1 since the inception of the ranking system in 2000, has averaged 45 book reviews per week over the last five years—a pace that seems hard to credit, even from a professed speed-reader. Reviewer No. 3, Donald Mitchell, ceaselessly promotes "the 400 Year Project," which his profile identifies only as "a pro bono, noncommercial project to help the world make improvements at 20 times the normal rate." John "Gunny" Matlock, ranked No. 6 this spring, took a holiday from Amazon, according to Vick Mickunas of the Dayton Daily News, after allegations that 27 different writers had helped generate his reviews.

Absent the institutional standards that govern (however notionally) professional journalists, Web 2.0 stakes its credibility on the transparency of users' motives and their freedom from top-down interference. Amazon, for example, describes its Top Reviewers as "clear-eyed critics [who] provide their fellow shoppers with helpful, honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information." But beneath the just-us-folks rhetoric lurks an unresolved tension between transparency and opacity; in this respect, Amazon exemplifies the ambiguities of Web 2.0. The Top 10 List promises interactivity—"How do I become a Top Reviewer?"—yet Amazon guards its rankings algorithms closely. A spokeswoman for the company would explain only that a reviewer's standing is based on the number of votes labeling a review "helpful," rather than on the raw number of books reviewed by any one person. The Top Reviewers are those who give "the most trusted feedback," she told me, echoing the copy on the Web site.

As in any numbers game (tax returns, elections) opacity abets manipulation. Amazon's rankings establish a formal, public competition for power—or its online equivalent, recognition—wherein each competitor follows his own private sense of fair play. Or not. On the tongue-in-cheek Harriet Klausner Appreciation Society blog, I found allegations that Grady Harp's 92,000 "helpful votes" are the product of collusion—that Amazon reviewers often strike e-mail bargains to "yes" one another's reviews. Klausner herself told the New York Times in 2004 of a conspiracy to unseat her. Though Amazon officials assured me that they do their best to "weed out" loyalty votes when calculating the reviewer standings, recent software innovations seem to come down on the side of the weeds. A social-networking feature allows a reviewer to identify hundreds of other reviewers as "friends"; an RSS option lets them track his feedback in real-time. Certainly, Harp has been generous to his Amazon "friends," among whom are authors he has reviewed and others for whose self-published books he has provided jacket copy. ("A book that is well worth the attention of our weary state in America today."—Grady Harp, Amazon.com.) The watchdogs of HKAS point to Harp's staggering vote total—a tally surpassed only by Klausner's—as evidence that this generosity has been repaid.

Given Amazon's lack of greater transparency, it's hard to judge the merits of the vote-swapping claims. What is clear is the corruptibility of democracy, Web 2.0-style. Then again, from a shareholder's perspective, the fact that anyone cares may indicate the rankings' success. Qualitative research affirms that "books with more and better reviews sell better," according to Cornell sociologists Shay David and Dr. Trevor Pinch, co-authors of a 2006 analysis of online recommendation systems. To the extent that competitive energies drive Top Reviewers and their nemeses to generate content, and to spend time on and publicize Amazon.com, the chief beneficiary of misuse of Amazon's rankings system is Amazon itself.

This is not to say that a Top 10 ranking doesn't come with some sub rosa incentives for the reviewer. Free books, first and foremost; in an e-mail, Grady Harp told me he was "inundated with books from new writers and from publishers who know I love to read first works." This fall, when it invited select Top Reviewers to join its Vine program—an initiative, still in beta-testing, to generate content about new and prerelease products—Amazon extended the range of perks. "Vine Voices" like Mitchell and Harp can elect to receive items ranging from electronics to appliances to laundry soap. As long as they keep reviewing the products, Amazon's suppliers will keep sending them.

However, by refashioning Web 2.0 as a proprietary marketplace, Amazon's reviewer rankings subject enthusiasts like Grady Harp to the same pressures that confront the professionals they were supposed to replace. To keep writing, lest another reviewer usurp one's spot. To say something nice, in hopes that someone will say something nice about you. And to read for work, rather than for pleasure. "I have a tall stack of books staring at me," Harp wrote, in a wistful moment.

"At times this sense of obligation prevents me from having time to read the things I personally want to read—the works of McEwan, Toibin, Crace, White, Bolaño, Sebald ..."

Like celebrity bloggers and Wikipedia "Gnomes," then, the Top Amazon Reviewer heralds the arrival of a curious hybrid: part customer, part employee. This feels like a loss. But perhaps it means that in the coming age, every writer will be a salesman: up past dark, sifting through the data stream for evidence that somewhere, some honest soul is buying.

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family. He blogs, amateurishly, at The Millions.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2182002/

Two International Affairs directors dismissed - News

2008-01-24T00:38:00.000-08:00

Two International Affairs directors dismissed - News

A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well (by Anthony Tommasini, the New York Times)

2007-12-31T02:16:00.000-08:00

Illustrator: Koren Shadmi

Classical Music
A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI
Published: December 30, 2007

REPORTS about the diminishing relevance of classical music to new generations of Americans addled by pop culture keep coming. Yet in my experience classical music seems in the midst of an unmistakable rebound. Most of the concerts and operas I attended this year drew large, eager and appreciative audiences.

Consider this: On Dec. 15 the Metropolitan Opera’s first high-definition broadcast of the season, a Saturday matinee of Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette,” played on more than 600 movie screens around the world to 97,000 people, a new record for attendance in this bold Met venture. O.K., the total doesn’t match the millions who watch rock videos. For all her popularity, Anna Netrebko, who sang Juliette, is not Mariah Carey. But classical music always was and always will be of interest to relatively modest numbers of people.

In recent years a spate of articles and books have lamented classical music’s tenuous hold on the popular imagination and defended its richness, complexity and communicative power. I’m thinking especially of the book “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California Press, 2007) by Lawrence Kramer, a professor of English and music at Fordham University.

Just this month classical music emerged as pivotal to international relations. With the blessing of the State Department, the New York Philharmonic announced that it would present a concert in North Korea during its Asian tour in February. Some consider this plan an outrage that will allow a totalitarian regime to use the Philharmonic musicians as puppets for propaganda. Others see it as at least a chance to pry open a door and share Western culture with a closed society, which is pretty much my view.

Either way, implicit in this plan is the idea that classical music matters. It’s not a sports team or pop group that has been enlisted to begin a thaw with the government in Pyongyang. It’s the musicians of a premier American orchestra.

What effect might this concert have on an audience in a repressive society? To Professor Kramer, as he recently told The New York Times, classical music by definition “is addressed to someone who has a certain independence of mind.” It “almost posits for its audience a certain degree of Western identity, which includes that sense of individual capacity to think, to sense, to imagine.”

Classical music invites listeners to focus, to take in, to follow what is almost a narrative that unfolds over a relatively long period of time. Length itself is one of the genre’s defining elements. I do not contend that classical music is weightier than other types of music. Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony is no more profound than “Eleanor Rigby.” But it’s a whole lot longer.

Even a 10-minute Chopin ballade for piano, let alone Messiaen’s 75-minute “Turangalila Symphony,” tries to grapple with, activate and organize a relatively substantial span of time. Once you accept this element of classical music, the reasons for other aspects of the art form — the complexity of its musical language, the protocols of concertgoing — become self-evident.

Structure in classical music is the easiest element to describe yet the hardest to perceive. Too often writers of program notes take the easy way and simply lay out the road map of a piece: first this happens, then that happens, then the first thing returns in a modified form and so on. But perceiving these structures as a listener is another matter.

When I was around 13 and enthralled by Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, I didn’t have the vaguest notion of how sonata form worked or what a rondo was. That I grew so familiar with these big pieces, though, does not mean I grasped how they were organized. Still, I intuitively sensed that they were monumental in some way, for the great classical works seemed to have an inexplicable and inexorable sweep.

Years later, when I was an assistant professor at Emerson College in Boston, I inherited from my predecessor a music appreciation course called “Listening to Music.” Teaching that class was like missionary work. I tried to help students hear what seemed to me astounding similarities between, say, a song-and-dance from Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” and “America” from Bernstein’s “West Side Story.” I broke down symphony movements by Beethoven and Shostakovich into constituent parts. Quite a few students were openly resistant, others mildly curious; some were surprisingly engaged.

Once in a while someone would come back from a concert having had an epiphany, like one awestruck woman who had attended her first live symphonic concert: the New England Conservatory Orchestra at the acoustically splendid Jordan Hall playing Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” She had no idea that such viscerally powerful sounds existed.

More often than not, though, these epiphanies did not turn the students into devotees of classical music. Why not? My guess is that the pieces played were simply too long. Taking in a concert involves a major time commitment. You sit in silence for extended periods and pay attention to live performances that, however viscerally involving and sonically impressive, are visually unremarkable. Operas, of course, tend to be even longer. But opera is a total-immersion experience, with characters and costumes, like going to the theater.

In an essay in The New York Times in June, Professor Kramer called for classical music presenters to follow the lead of enterprising art museums, which have had much success in presenting new and old art in interactive, stimulating and demystifying ways. The museum experience encourages visitors to relax, to take in things at their own pace. You feel emboldened to follow your instincts, to move on from a painting that bores you, or linger at some intriguing, baffling work.

As Professor Kramer acknowledged, the analogy is limited. You cannot set your own pace while listening to a Schubert string quartet. A concert can offer pre-

performance talks, interactive video displays in the lobby and spoken comments by the performers onstage. But at some point the talking stops, the performance begins, and the audience is asked — expected really — to be quiet and pay attention.

Even so, the act of communal listening need not be reverential. And classical music has its “wow” factors too. What could be more entertaining than a dynamic performance of Prokofiev’s shamelessly theatrical Third Piano Concerto, with its monstrously difficult piano part? And if your mind wanders during “La Mer,” by Debussy, and you start focusing on the kinetic playing style of an attractive young violinist in the orchestra, then, as Professor Kramer suggests, just go with it.

Concert protocol demands that you stay put for the duration. Yet entering into that receptive state of mind can actually foster excitement over the music. Most young people in today’s interactive, amplified, high-tech world may not instinctively be enticed by the idea of sitting quietly and contemplating a long musical work in a natural acoustical setting. Yet I’ve taken young friends and other classical music neophytes to concerts over the years and been routinely struck by how absorbed they become during, say, a blazing account of Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” even while all around us older, restless concertgoers are fiddling in their seats and rustling the pages of their programs.

Creating an atmosphere conducive to listening does not mean that concert halls have to be stuffy. Dress codes of any kind should disappear. Go ahead and replace some rows of seats at Avery Fisher Hall with rugs and pillows to recline on, if it helps.

Much less drastic innovations have proved effective. Lincoln Center’s series A Little Night Music, at the intimate Kaplan Penthouse, for example, presents 60-minute programs beginning at 10:30 p.m. Only about 160 people can be accommodated. Patrons share small round cocktail tables and have free glasses of wine. In one program last summer the bookish British pianist Paul Lewis played a probing performance of Beethoven’s stormy, mystical Opus 111 Piano Sonata, followed by the exciting young cellist Alisa Weilerstein delivering an intense account of Kodaly’s brooding and volatile Sonata for Solo Cello. Here were two elusive and demanding works. And the audience was transfixed. I don’t recall a single throat-clearing.

But to claim a listener’s attention, a substantial classical piece must entice the dimension of human perception that responds to large structures and long metaphorical narratives. This, more than anything lofty about the music, accounts for the greater complexity, typically, of classical works in comparison with more popular styles of music.

Beethoven was a master musical architect. When his “Eroica” Symphony appeared in 1804, it was the longest work yet written in which virtually every phrase and rhythmic figure was derived from a small group of musical motifs. Beethoven made this colossal symphony, in four quite varied movements, seem organic and whole. Most listeners may discern this only subliminally. But they do.

One reason “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” stunned my generation at its 1967 release was that this Beatles album was not just a collection of songs but a whole composition. I remember sitting in my freshman dorm room with friends, listening to the entire album in silence. That was a new experience in rock. “Sgt. Pepper” pointed the way to longer total-

concept albums like Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” the big news in pop music today.

For the most part, though, rock and pop songs are relatively short lyrical statements. The classical genre that has most in common with the pop concert is the song recital. It makes no difference that the revered classical song repertory, from Schubert to Mahler, is rich with musically complex, often dark works. Because songs tend to be short, we perceive them as more approachable. This explains why, in a program at Weill Recital Hall three years ago, an appealing young baritone, Nathaniel Webster, segued so easily to an American group including songs by Purcell, Schumann and Wolf to American songs by Gershwin and Rufus Wainwright.

No one was better than Leonard Bernstein at drawing new listeners to classical music. When he presented his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic, he didn’t have music videos or PowerPoint, and didn’t need them. It was just our amazing Uncle Lenny explaining the content of a piece, conveying its character and revealing its secrets.

But when the explanations were over, Bernstein would turn to his young listeners and say, “Are you ready?” The time had come to settle down and focus as the orchestra performed the piece in question. Instilling audiences of all ages with the ability — and patience — to listen to something long was crucial to an appreciation of classical music. It still is.

My Time in the Indexing Trade (by Enid Stubin, moreintelligentlife.com)

2007-12-20T23:31:00.000-08:00

Hans Dekker/Flickr

MY TIME IN THE INDEXING TRADE
MEMORIES OF AN ANCIENT KINGDOM | December 19th 2007

The Sydney Wolfe Cohen index was a thing of beauty, crafted in a warren of rooms on lower Fifth Avenue. Enid Stubin joined this small colony of publishing souls in purgatory. She recalls her toils in Bartlebyland ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Somewhere between copy-editing and serving drinks at corporate Christmas parties lies my stint at Sydney Wolfe Cohen Associates, the pre-eminent indexing service in New York City. I take a certain pride in the excellence of SWC: of the making of books there is much chazzerai, but when Knopf or Cambridge or Simon and Schuster wanted to flog one in particular—shuttling the author onto "The Today Show" or Charlie Rose—the index was always contracted out to SWC.

Printed on 25-pound bond, tapped into crisp alignment, jacketed in heavyweight cardboard. The disk, neatly labelled, enveloped and centred, four extra-heavy rubber bands gartering the stack. There you have the Sydney Wolfe Cohen index. It is a thing of beauty.

Sydney himself was a dapper, beautifully-spoken man in his seventies, who looked like a more soigné version of the character actor Jack Gilford. Sydney bought his jackets at Paul Stuart and held avuncular court in a warren of rooms in an office building on lower Fifth Avenue. (Ben Katchor might have immortalised the site as the "Vutsdepoint".) Upon entering the hush of this small colony the first time, I recognised that I'd ambled into Bartlebyland, replete with airshaft-faced windows. But quiet was the point at SWC Associates: tones were muted and tempers tamped. This was true whether you worked in the library, where we toiled at a big square table surrounded by reference works (the internet seemed so tacky and unreliable then); the computer room, where "imputers" typed out the actual indexes (double-spaced, Courier font); the front room, where the bella figura ethos reigned; or the sanctum sanctorum, Sydney's office, where he rarely sat.

Sometimes, during a tricky job, Sydney would take one of us into his lair, set us up at a narrow console table, and spend a long morning and even longer afternoon in debate over an entry. Authors had things to say, sure, but we determined how easily a reader could navigate them in a 600-page biography: Henry Kissinger's dog Blackie was hand-fed hamburger and string beans by Kissinger's mother (pet, diet of, 113). We worked under constraints: 1,100 lines was a sizable index; 780 lines meant we'd have to slash away. Balance, too, was a concern: a half-column on the mistress and only four entries for the missus? Maybe not. (Prudence, exercising of, 243)

I never dreamed of becoming an indexer. Such skills belonged to Randy and Grady, outwardly placid but impish fellows of a puckish disposition. David and Fred were more serious, arriving about once a fortnight carrying several 1,000-count cartons of 4 x 6-inch index cards (their original function), or to pick up blank ones. More rarely we steeled ourselves for the arrival of L., the son of someone famous, who was a crack indexer and an amiable fellow, but who'd gotten into some trouble for making obscene phone calls and spent some time on Rikers. (Employees, abilities of, 63; criminal records of, 66)

Most specialised were the abilities of Laura, whose cookbook indices were masterpieces of anatomy. If you were paying $35 for a regional Italian cookbook and wished to whip up a zucchini, tomato and Swiss chard frittata, you'd find your recipe under "vegetables", "zucchini", "tomato", "Swiss chard", "eggs", and "buffet dishes." I understand that computer programs do that sort of thing now, but in the early 1990s, Laura did it. She was one of the reasons Marcella Hazan, Rick Bayless and Maida Heatter sold so many books: her indices led you to where you needed to be. Around the office, Laura used vanilla as her signature scent and looked fierce—I was careful not to antagonise her. She alone of the associates had a key and could come and go as she pleased. (Favouritism, evidence of, 34)

A day or two after an index was typed up, I'd be asked to proofread and proofcheck—to verify spelling and to confirm our accuracy against the book galleys. One could handily absorb an entire book in the process, which Sydney knew and hated. If you were reading, you weren't doing something more important to ensure the quality and elegance of his product. (Drudgery, enforcement of, 78)

Worse, should you have the temerity to look up, say, "tapenade" in an encyclopaedic Barbara Kafka tome (in search of a chic and inexpensive dinner-party appetizer, say), and get caught at the photocopy machine cannibalising from an SWC galley, Sydney would look pained. (Manuscripts, potential exploitation of, 43)

Everyone guzzled coffee, so anxieties about spills and stains loomed. And while associates could bring their lunch to work, one needed to abide by a set of unspoken rules. You learned them by indirection: for reasons of sensibility, tuna was verboten (a shame, as the version cranked out by the Fifth Avenue Epicure down the block was tasty), while chicken salad passed muster. Mustard was okay, but not ketchup; rosemary was well-regarded while garlic—ah, garlic was a problem. Of course, you could obviate these regulations by offering to fetch Sydney "something" from downstairs: if he accepted a half-pound of, say, roasted potatoes with garlic and rosemary, you could bring in a leftover lamb navarin and he wouldn't say a word. (Food, ambivalence toward, 138)

It was my unofficial job to tempt the boss with something fragrant enough to give everyone clemency for a mid-afternoon slice of pizza. I wasn't half-bad at convincing Sydney that ratatouille was not only nutrient-dense and low-caloric, but would also clear his system of cholesterol. Twice a year, when he was due for a physical check-up, he foreswore dairy and fats, and we all paid the price. Cranky and yearning, he'd follow you around with his eyes, his chin tilted up to catch a whiff of hummus on the air. "Hmm, that smells...nice," he'd intone wistfully. I genuinely feared for Grady's tomato and cucumber on whole-wheat pita. (Sandwiches of others, desire for, 139)

We all liked each other, or at least got along. If Sydney overheard us making plans to get together after work, he'd intervene. An impromptu date for Friday evening drinks turned into dinner at Portfolio, with Sydney presiding over the long table and none of us too sure about what to order, as he'd be picking up the tab. In this way he was much like Fezziwig: genial and generous, but nothing could happen without him. (Centrality, possible insistence on: amiable, 256)

I never thought of Sydney as lonely. In fact, my one effort to fix him up—with the mother of my old high-school flame, a beautiful, smart, funny and accomplished woman of roughly Sydney's age—went badly. "He looks exactly like Jack Gilford!" she exulted. The trouble may have been that she knew Jack Gilford—and that she played the violin in chamber groups, and was a practising therapist, and had portrayed Hedda Gabler in a Brooklyn College showcase production, among other things. "She's done everything I ever wanted to do," he said mournfully after their first date. He never called her again. (Women, attracted to, 119; attractiveness to, 116-18)

Sydney was the best in the business—if he knew it, who could blame him? Like another ne plus ultra, he referred to his professional nemesis as "Moriarty." I never learned whether such a figure existed or was merely a cardboard cut-out of Sydney's, the yin to his yang, the Eisenhower to his Stevenson. Talk of Sydney retiring, all of it from Sydney, sounded like so much static to me.

But attentive to the rush of the Reichenbach Falls, Beth contemplated a move: "What if we bought Sydney out? We'd have his name and the business; we could keep all the people here and maybe even get health insurance." I was dazzled by her ambition and brio, the visionary gleam of her plans. But then Beth finished her doctorate and moved west for a tenure-track job; Grady became the first curator of The Museum of Sex; Fred, freelancing, indexed Beth's book on Virginia Woolf. Neither gifted in the heavy-duty skills that editing demanded nor possessed of the patience for Sydney's mandarin gamesmanship, I was phased out. (Employees, relationship with: guarded, 141-42)

Perhaps a year later I got a phone call from Sydney asking if I was available to "do some work" on a new Wordsworth biography. Expecting a nostalgic welcome, I arrived to find instead a slender Barnard graduate student seated alongside him. Down the table sat a stack of proofs with a dog-eared index atop: Naomi Wolf's version of Weltanschauung. Wasn't I working on the Wordsworth? "Oh," Sydney sighed, slyly, "there's always another Wordsworth..." The sylph smiled too, a Gioconda smirk. Stung, I laboured for two grinding days on the postmodernofeminist manifesto and swore never to return. (Bait, switching of, 387)

I heard that Sydney retired to Chappaqua just before the Clintons showed up, a fact that must have pleased him not a little. I should really dress up and invite him to lunch at one of the Murray Hill Italian places he liked or somewhere posh in Grand Central. (Growing up, as revenge: best, 247) We could talk about the old days.

(Enid Stubin is assistant professor of English at Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, and writes a New York diary for The Reader magazine.)

A DRINKER'S GUIDE TO EASTERN EUROPE (by Edward Lucas, Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE)

2007-12-09T19:46:00.000-08:00

A DRINKER'S GUIDE TO EASTERN EUROPE
RULE ONE: AVOID THE FOOD | November 30th 2007

Bottle-scarred Economist correspondent Edward Lucas breakfasts on plum brandy, lunches on balsams and dines on bison-grass vodka, but draws the line at a side-dish of Hungarian lung stew ...

The ex-communist world has a deserved reputation as a culinary wasteland (see box, below right), but the drinks are something else. Travellers to Prague find that the "real" Budweiser from Ceske Budejovice (no relation to its rice-based American counterpart) makes even the national dish of dumplings in gravy go down without protest. Winemaking has been transformed since the Soviet era—when bottles had to be inspected for wasps and snails, the former merely a nuisance, the latter stomach-turning (at least for foreigners).

But the real treat is the hard stuff. Every country from the Baltic to the Black sea has a national tipple, usually served in both industrialised and home-made versions. In Romania, tuica (also spelled tzuika, tsuika, tsuica, or tzuica) is the traditional start to any meal. It is made with plums, and bears a startling resemblence to the sljivovica of neighbouring Serbia. Both drinks are part of a delightful family of fruit brandies popular from the far corners of the Balkans up to modern Poland (an area that bears a coincidental resemblance to the Ottoman empire in Europe at its height). For the adventurous, visnjevaca (sour cherry) dunjevaca (quince) and smokvovaca (fig) are well worth a try. You may find these in shops, but you are better off finding a peasant farmer somewhere in what used to be Yugoslavia.

Westerners may think that hard liquor is for after dinner, but these drinks are usually apertifs. To help you digest, the best drink in the region is Unicum. Anyone who likes Italy's Fernet Branca, or German's Underberg, will feel that they have graduated into elysium when they try it. The flavours are an intense mix of liquorice, ginger, coriander and cinnamon (that's guesswork: the recipe is secret). It brings tranquility to even the most overburdened stomach. Latvia's balsams is a close rival—and a neck ahead for those who like its flexibility. It has a stronger tinge of burnt oranges; Latvians put it in their coffee or in fruit salad. With Champagne (or any old sparkling wine) it creates a terrific cocktail.

Any offer of absinthe in eastern Europe, by contrast, should be shunned as firmly as any suggestion of a return to the planned economy or the one-party state.

Having accustomed your liver to the demands of life in "new Europe", it is time to move north. Poland and Russia tussle for the right to be the "real" home of vodka (an argument that the Swedes and Finns regard with bemused disdain: how can anybody take these Slavic squabbles seriously?). Having sorted out the national question, the serious drinker has to decide between vodkas made with different feedstuffs (barley, rye, wheat and so forth). The nasty stuff produced in western Europe is made from farm surplus products, disgracefully subsidised by the taxpayer. The cheapest of all is synthetic alcohol, produced in factories by a chemical process. If you think all vodka tastes the same, just try drinking a cheap one.

If your palate finds little difference amid the clear vodkas, you can ring the changes with the flavoured kind (for example with chili peppers, ginger, fruit, vanilla, chocolate or cinnamon). Best of all-in your correspondent's view-is Zubrowka, a Polish (or Belarussian) rye vodka flavoured with bison grass, a stalk of which can be found in the bottle.

Sadly, the scent of newly mown hay that makes Zubrowka so seductive comes from the presence (in tiny quantities) of coumarin, a toxin that can be legally used in perfumes, but is prohibited for use in foodstuffs in America. The version sold in America now is coumarin-free.

On the whole, though, the names of vodkas vary more than the contents. Lithuania used to have one called "Dar po viena" (roughly "Let's have another one"). Romania, astonishingly, has a vodka called "Stalinskaya"; Russia's favourite Stolichnaya (Capital) brand, disgracefully, uses Soviet kitsch in its advertisements, including pictures of the murderous founder of Soviet communism, Vladimir Lenin, who is described as a "visionary". That is something to discuss over a Zubrowka or six.

(Edward Lucas is deputy international editor, and correspondent for central and eastern Europe, at The Economist. His book, "The New Cold War—How the Kremlin menaces both Russia and the West", will be published in February 2008 by Bloomsbury in Britain, and Palgrave in America.)

Without a Writer, Is a Joke Still Funny? (by Alessandra Stanley, the New York Times)

2007-12-04T19:46:00.000-08:00

Note to the Capture: Carson Daly broadcasting on Monday on his late-night show on NBC.

The TV Watch

Without a Writer, Is a Joke Still Funny?

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: December 5, 2007

The problem is not that Carson Daly defied the writers’ strike and resumed taping his late-night show on NBC. It’s that Monday night’s show might as well have been a rerun.

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Writers Strike: Times Topics: Writers Guild of America Articles, multimedia and additional coverage.

Except for a sober preamble in which Mr. Daly explained his decision (“If I had not been back on air tonight,” he said, “75 members of my loyal staff and crew were going to get laid off”), the writer-free return of “Last Call With Carson Daly” was hardly noteworthy — a bland interview with the underwear model Karolina Kurkova and pop music by the Plain White T’s.

So while technically Mr. Daly is the first host of a late-night talk show to cross the picket line, the writers’ strike has barely been scratched.

And that’s because the only thing that is really missing from television since the strike began a month ago, and late-night shows, as well as some sitcoms and dramas, began running repeats, is topical humor: tart commentary on candidates’ latest foibles by David Letterman or Jay Leno, and the parodies and video satire perfected by “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “Saturday Night Live.” Mr. Daly doesn’t really do monologues or stand-up comedy; he’s a talent spotter and celebrity interviewer whose show happens to be seen at 1:30 a.m.

The timing of this black-humor blackout couldn’t be worse: If Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign falls in a forest of bizarre mayoral accounting practices, but nobody hears about it on late-night television, does it make a sound bite?

Ellen DeGeneres also defied the writers guild to resume her talk show almost immediately, saying that as the producer of a syndicated show, she had contractual obligations to local stations to provide content. While that decision enraged her peers (“We find it sad that Ellen spent an entire week crying and fighting for a dog that she gave away,” a statement by the Writers Guild East said, “yet she couldn’t even stand by writers for more than one day”), it didn’t change the balance, either. Ms. DeGeneres finds humor in everyday quirks — lint-in-the-dryer jokes and funny phone calls to elderly ladies in the Midwest — not in election campaigns or social policy. Monday’s show, which she opened with a riff about Christmas tree shopping, could have been taped a year ago, or 10.

Web sites like 23/6, TheOnion.com and YouTube are trying to bridge the gap, and many pieces are contributed by striking writers. Some of the material is apt and amusing: 23/6 (236.com) has a feature called “SwiftKids,” a parody of the Swiftboat ads that rattled Senator John Kerry’s campaign in 2004. (“Does baking cookies for me make my mom a bad person?” a little boy says sorrowfully. “Hillary Clinton thinks so.”) But that kind of humor, when spread across the Internet, seems sparse and small-cylinder. Even the best sites read more like blogs than like big network productions.

Don Imus returned to radio on Monday at what could have been an opportune time to fill some of the silence left by Conan O’Brien or Stephen Colbert. But while Mr. Imus used to be a heeded voice on politics, now he seems consumed by the politics of being Don Imus.

Mr. Imus, who was fired by CBS and MSNBC after his infamous slur about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, made his redemptive debut this week on WABC-AM. His tone on his first day was perforce somber and chastened, but even on the second, Mr. Imus seemed constricted, deferring to his new African-American cast members, Karith Foster and Tony Powell, to discuss Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Barack Obama.

Oddly enough, the closest thing to bold topical humor on network television is on “30 Rock,” which still has a few episodes filmed before the strike, and which has taken a marked turn toward impish send-ups of the Bush administration.

On one recent episode, Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) turns in a foreign neighbor whom she suspects of being a Muslim terrorist but is actually in training to be a contestant on “The Amazing Race.” On another, Jack (Alec Baldwin) intervenes to impose American values on an urban Little League team. The team pulls down a statue in the style of Iraqis toppling the statue of Saddam Hussein; in the background its field is draped with a red, white and blue banner that reads, “Fun Times Accomplished.” And, when things fall apart, Jack orders a “surge.”

Those episodes were filmed a while ago, and soon even “30 Rock” will go dark. Mr. Daly and Ms. DeGeneres crossed the picket line, but their return to live television doesn’t undermine the strike so much as enhance it.

Crime, Drugs, Welfare—and Other Good News (by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin, the Commentary Magazine)

2007-12-04T19:14:00.000-08:00

Crime, Drugs, Welfare—and Other Good News
by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin

December 2007

Fifteen years ago, a deep pessimism seemed to be stalking the American landscape. It arose from diverse quarters, took different forms, and cited a congeries of different symptoms—military, economic, social, cultural, and spiritual—in support of its dark diagnosis. For some, like the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, America’s commitments abroad—dubbed by Kennedy a species of “imperial overstretch”—were a sure harbinger of impending national decline. Others, like the leftist literary critic Alfred Kazin, saw a broad collapse of domestic morale, partially disguised by our “unparalleled technological power and scientific advance.” Echoing Kazin from the other side of the political spectrum, James W. Michaels, the editor of Forbes, introduced a symposium marking his magazine’s 75th anniversary by declaring the American condition to be a moral and cultural “mess”:

While the media natter about a need for economic change, these serious intellectuals [in the Forbes symposium] worry about our psyches. Can the human race stand prosperity? Is the American experiment in freedom and equal opportunity morally bankrupt? . . . It isn’t the economic system that needs fixing. . . . It’s our value system.

As for the social reality underlying this general feeling of decline, a number of conservative commentators, concentrating especially on the areas of crime, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy, undertook the task of quantifying and analyzing the available evidence. The most notable such effort was by William J. Bennett, who in March 1993 released a report entitled The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators.^*

Over the course of the preceding three decades, Bennett wrote, the United States had indeed experienced “substantial social regression.” About this, the data were unequivocal. Since 1960, there had been a more than 500-percent increase in violent crime; a more than 400-percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than 70 points in SAT scores. To Bennett, the conclusion was inescapable: “the forces of social decomposition [in America] are challenging—and in some instances overtaking—the forces of social composition.”

Could anything be done to halt the slide, or even turn it around? Few seemed to hold out much hope. “America’s worsening social pathologies,” according to the Heritage Foundation’s journal Policy Review in 1994, “have convinced many on both sides of the political aisle” that no end was in sight to the nation’s “deep cultural decline.” Robert H. Bork’s 1996 book Slouching Toward Gomorrah put this view most starkly. In his chapter on crime and welfare, Bork wrote:

These pathologies were easy to fall into and will be very difficult to climb out of. There is, in fact, no agreement about how to cure them. It may be, in fact, that a democratic nation will be unable to take the measures necessary, once we know what those measures are.

Summing up, Bork urged his readers to “take seriously the possibility that perhaps nothing will be done to reverse the direction of our culture, that the degeneracy we see about us will only become worse.”

But a strange thing happened on the way to Gomorrah. Just when it seemed as if the storm clouds were about to burst, they began to part. As if at once, things began to turn around. And now, a decade-and-a-half after these well-founded and unrelievedly dire warnings, improvements are visible in the vast majority of social indicators; in some areas, like crime and welfare, the progress has the dimensions of a sea-change. That this has happened should be a source of great encouragement; why it happened, and what we can learn from it, is a subject of no less importance.

_____________

In a number of key categories, the amount of ground gained or regained since the early 1990’s is truly stunning. Crime, especially, has plummeted. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the rates of both violent crime and property crime fell significantly between 1993 and 2005, reaching their lowest levels since 1973 (the first year for which such data are available). More recent figures from the FBI, which measures crime differently from the NCVS, show an unfortunate uptick in violent crime in the last two years—particularly in cities like Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Even so, however, the overall rate remains far below that of the mid-1990’s.

Teenage drug use, which moved relentlessly upward throughout the 1990’s, declined thereafter by an impressive 23 percent, and for a number of specific drugs it has fallen still lower. Thus, the use of ecstasy and LSD has dropped by over 50 percent, of methamphetamine by almost as much, and of steroids by over 20 percent.

Then there is welfare. Since the high-water mark of 1994, the national welfare caseload has declined by over 60 percent. Virtually every state in the union has reduced its caseload by at least a third, and some have achieved reductions of over 90 percent. Not only have the numbers of people on welfare plunged, but, in the wake of the 1996 welfare-reform bill, overall poverty, child poverty, black child poverty, and child hunger have all decreased, while employment figures for single mothers have risen.

Abortion, too, is down. After reaching a high of over 1.6 million in 1990, the number of abortions performed annually in the U.S. has dropped to fewer than 1.3 million, a level not seen since the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized the practice. The divorce rate, meanwhile, is now at its lowest level since 1970.

Educational scores are up. Earlier this year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that the nation’s fourth- and eighth-graders continue to improve steadily in math, and that fourth-grade reading achievement is similarly on the rise. Other findings show both fourth- and twelfth-graders scoring significantly higher in the field of U.S. history. Black and Hispanic students are also making broad gains, though significant gaps with whites persist. The high-school dropout rate, under 10 percent, is at a 30-year low, and the mean SAT score was 8 points higher in 2005 than in 1993, the year Bennett published his Index.

More generally, we are seeing important progress in critical areas of youth behavior. Since 1991 (a peak year), the birth rate for teenagers aged fifteen to nineteen has decreased by 35 percent. The number of high-school students who have reported ever having sexual intercourse has declined by more than 10 percent. Teen use of alcohol has also fallen sharply since 1996—anywhere from 10 to 35 percent, depending on the grade in school—and binge drinking has dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. The same is true of teens reporting that they smoke cigarettes daily.

John P. Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has summarized these across-the-board findings in one succinct sentence: “We have a broad set of behaviors by young people that are going in a healthy direction."

_____________

To be sure, we have not reached anything like nirvana. The gains made are not yet secure, and could easily be lost. Nor should it be forgotten that the improvements occurred after more than three decades of an almost uninterrupted freefall. Finally, the pathologies that still afflict us are serious, and evidently continue to be immune to the otherwise improving trend.

Thus, our popular culture remains, in many respects, a cesspool of violence and vulgarity. The “soft nihilism” and cultural relativism about which Allan Bloom wrote so powerfully in the late 1980’s are still with us, and at the same time many of our leading universities remain beholden to a radical leftist ideology. The yoking-together of these two syndromes may be even more widespread today than yesterday.

Perhaps most importantly, some of the most vital social indicators of all—those regarding the condition and strength of the American family—have so far refused to turn upward. Even as the teenage birth rate has fallen, out-of-wedlock births in general have reached an all-time high: 37 percent of all births in 2005. Over half of all marriages are now preceded by a period of unmarried cohabitation, and marriage rates themselves have declined by almost one-half since 1970.

In the life of any society, the place of the family is central. That fact alone makes these last statistics significant, and seriously complicates the picture of dramatic progress in other, related realms. Indeed, the two starkly divergent trends, taken side by side, should cause us to reconsider certain common assumptions concerning just how culture, behavior, family, and society interact, and how they change.

_____________

The most striking element of the overall picture continues to be the extraordinary turnaround in nearly every area apart from the family. The progress we have witnessed over the last 15 years is impressive, undeniable, and beyond what most people thought possible. There was, it is fair to say, essentially no one in the early 1990’s who predicted it. How, then, did it happen?

Obviously, no single explanation will suffice. Instead, long-overdue changes in government policy appear to have combined with a more or less simultaneous shift in public attitudes, with each sustaining and feeding the other. We may begin with the change in policy, for if the last fifteen years demonstrate anything, it is the enduring power of policy, properly understood, to influence culture.

The 1996 welfare-reform bill was the most dramatic and successful social innovation in decades, reversing 60 years of federal policy that had long since grown not just useless but positively counterproductive. In effect, the new law ended the legal entitlement to federally funded welfare benefits, imposing a five-year time limit on the receipt of such benefits and requiring a large percentage of current recipients to seek and obtain work.

When the bill was passed, there were dire predictions, mostly emanating from liberals, of an explosion of poverty and hunger. They were just as quickly refuted. State welfare rolls plummeted—and poverty, instead of rising, decreased. Welfare reform sent a message in bright neon lights: higher expectations will yield better results. Rather than giving up on the poor, the new policy assumed that the able-bodied were capable of working, expected them to work, and was rooted in a confident belief that, materially and otherwise, they would be better off for it. In each of these particulars, the policy makers proved correct. If, as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in the 1990’s, our old social policy had “succeeded in ‘demoralizing’ . . . society itself,” the new policy proved to be profoundly re-moralizing.

Crime rates, too, benefited from something of a policy revolution over the course of the 90’s. Applying methods and concepts developed by James Q. Wilson, George L. Kelling, and others, innovators like then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in New York City and his police chief William Bratton pursued a zero-tolerance approach to crime that quickly became a model for other cities and states. Incarceration rates rose, policing improved, crime data were processed faster, criminal patterns were identified more effectively—all of which furthered the twin goals of intervention and prevention. Similar gains were posted by programs like Philadelphia’s Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, in which an array of urban agencies, working together, drove down homicide rates in the most violent parts of the city by focusing on youths most at risk of killing or being killed.

The progress we have made against drug use appears in large part to be another product of a reformed government policy. By the late 1980’s, in the heyday of the crack epidemic, drugs had come to be regarded as our most serious domestic challenge, and formed the subject of President George H.W. Bush’s first prime-time address to the nation. Discarding the piecemeal approach of the past, which concentrated now on one, now on another point of the drug-use continuum, Bush forged an integrated approach, applying pressure on all fronts: law enforcement, prevention, treatment, interdiction, and education. A critical element in the campaign was a public-awareness effort centered on the explicitly moral argument that drug use degrades human character.

The consequences were swift in arriving. If, in the 1970’s, drug use had been widely seen as liberating and glamorous, by the late 1980’s it was coming to be perceived as both dangerous and dumb. During the Clinton presidency, the drug issue was allowed to fade from attention, but since then national policy has returned to its former levels of efficacy, and the statistics reflect the encouraging results.

In education, the emphasis placed by government at every level on testing, accountability, and transparency has unquestionably made a difference. Every state now applies statewide academic standards, which, though in many cases still not high enough, at least measure performance against identifiable benchmarks. While the details of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind program have been controversial, its general approach has come to be broadly accepted—and has produced results. In the meantime, the rise in charter schools and publicly funded school-choice programs, along with the advent of “virtual” education, has created many more options for American families.

_____________

As for the decrease in abortions, it seems to have been influenced less by policy than by the changing terms of public debate and, more importantly, by increasingly responsible attitudes among the young. Two decades ago, pro-life spokesmen changed their rhetorical tactics and began to choose their fights more carefully. The clear-cut issue of partial-birth abortion, although not settled legislatively until 2003, colored the abortion debate throughout much of the 1990’s, in the process creating greater sympathy for a moderately pro-life position. And the pro-abortion Left likewise softened its rhetoric, evidently reasoning that a more cautious approach, as encapsulated in Bill Clinton’s promise to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare,” was likelier to draw support. As a result, some of the more extreme arguments for unrestricted abortion rights slowly dropped by the wayside.

Other factors played a role as well, including the efforts of pro-life groups to assist women with unwanted pregnancies, the greater availability of birth control, and advances in our scientific understanding of fetal development. Contributing to the rethinking was the more widespread use of sonogram technology, which enables would-be parents to see the developing child and its human form at a very early stage. All in all, not only has the public discussion of abortion been profoundly transformed, but younger Americans seem to have moved the farthest—in September, a Harris poll found that Americans aged eighteen to thirty were the most likely of all age groups to oppose the practice. This trend seems likely to continue.

With the abortion issue, we have already moved from a change brought about in large part by government policy to one arising mainly through the (sometimes heated) give-and-take of public discussion and the slow, subterranean shifting of social attitudes. The same may be said of the drop in the divorce rate, which has been going on for a couple of decades now. This appears almost entirely attributable to the changed attitudes of well-educated Americans, whose views on the matter have grown decidedly less permissive.

How so? According to Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia, college-educated Americans have absorbed the message—from the media, religious institutions, civic organizations, and their own experience—that children do best when born to and raised by married parents. As a corollary, these educated Americans seem more and more willing to make the sacrifices necessary to stay married, for the sake of both their own welfare and that of their children.

Wilcox adduces two additional facts to round out the picture of a declining divorce rate. First, we now see very few teen marriages—a good thing not only for teenagers unprepared for the burdens of married life but for the institution of marriage altogether, since partners in their twenties or thirties are more likely to place a premium on stability. Second, marriage is much more selective. Because those marrying tend to have more income, more social skills, more of a stake in marriage, and more pro-marriage attitudes, they are less likely to divorce.

This is all to the good—as far as it goes. The downside is that it seems only to apply to those with higher levels of education. Among less educated Americans, divorce rates have not fallen at all. And here we confront once more the cluster of family-related issues where, as we have seen, the indicators remain stubbornly and perplexingly worrisome.

_____________

How to account for the anomalous absence of improvement or, more precisely, the acceleration of decline in the overall marriage rate, in rates of cohabitation without marriage, and in illegitimacy? And suppose that, in 1992, you had known that the picture in these crucial areas of family life would continue to be at least as dark in 2007, if not darker. Would you not also have predicted a similarly dismal profile in the related areas of crime, drug use, welfare, education, teen sexual activity, teen suicides, abortion, and poverty?

In fact, just that kind of linkage was behind many of the most dire forecasts of the 1990’s. In 1993, reviewing national figures on illegitimacy, then at just under 30 percent of all births (by 2005, as we have noted, they would reach 37 percent), the social scientist Charles Murray wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “every once in a while the sky really is falling.”

Murray is no inveterate pessimist. It was his creative approach to dependency, as set out in his 1984 book Losing Ground, that laid the intellectual groundwork for the dramatic successes in welfare policy; he is in many ways the father of the 1996 reform bill. Yet, along with many others, Murray believed that rising illegitimacy would lift with it a whole fleet of social pathologies. “Illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time,” he wrote, “more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, or homelessness because it drives everything else” (emphasis added).

Murray may well have been correct about the importance of illegitimacy. But he—and not he alone—seems to have been incorrect that it would drive everything else. Over the past fifteen years, on balance, the American family has indeed grown weaker—but almost every other social indicator has improved.

Murray’s dictum could still be borne out in the long run; in time, the explosion of illegitimacy might undo the signs of healthy cultural revival we have charted. Or it may be that the broad improvement in cultural attitudes will in time cast its benefits upon the family as well, helping to curb the seemingly inexorable growth of illegitimacy. Or neither of these may happen, and it may instead turn out that we have underestimated the degree to which improving social factors in other areas can compensate for the enduring damage caused to individuals in broken or never-formed families.

The point is that we do not know everything, and we cannot come to unequivocal conclusions about the future on the basis of the last fifteen years. No trend line runs consistently for long, and no rule is without exceptions. That does not mean, however, that we have learned nothing, or that no lasting lessons can be drawn from our experience.

_____________

For one thing, we clearly benefited in the last fifteen years from the fact that, for many years previous, a number of very acute observers were insisting on an honest assessment of where we were and how bad a place it was. This was the necessary first step toward any possible recovery. In time, and with strong leadership, the nation heeded their counsel, instituting wise public policies pursued with energy and resolution. Legislation was far from the only agent responsible for the progress we have seen, but it played a formative role. No small number of our cultural problems had been exacerbated by bad policy; better policy helped ameliorate them. Along the way, it also helped shape moral sentiments for the better.

We have also learned that progress can happen faster than many people thought possible. Despite the good case made by those who believe that diffidence, skepticism, and self-limitation are the prerequisites of sound policymaking, sometimes what is needed is a bold break with the past. There will always be unintended consequences, but even these need not always be for the worse, and the prospect of such unintended consequences should not paralyze us from taking action. Guided by a modest sense of possibility, and by realistic notions of the limits of politics, reform can succeed. Daniel P. Moynihan, right about many things, was wrong in predicting without qualification that the “horror” of welfare reform would bring “loathsome” consequences.

And we have learned the trap of fatalism. In the late 1990’s, Paul Weyrich, a founding leader of the “religious Right,” circulated a public letter declaring that America was “caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.” In the face of this descent into “something approaching barbarism,” Weyrich urged people of faith to adapt a “strategy of separation.” “We need,” he wrote, “some sort of quarantine.”

But no such separation or quarantine is possible; there is no safe harbor to which to retreat. Nor is one necessary. Problems that may seem intractable at one moment—violence and disorder, harmful and reckless conduct—can yield, and yield quickly, to the right policies and to a determined citizenry. Human problems, products of human failings, can be addressed at least in part by human ingenuity.

Culture itself, finally, exhibits an ebb and flow as surely as economies pass through cycles of ups and downs. In The Great Disruption (1999), Francis Fukuyama cited historical examples of societies undergoing periods of moral decline followed by periods of moral recovery. In our case, too, he argued, the aftermath of the cultural breakdown of the 1960’s had already triggered and was now giving way to a reassessment and recovery of social and moral norms. Such “re-norming” will not occur in every social class all at once; in some instances it may take hold in one stratum but not in another. That is partial progress, but progress nevertheless.

Despite persistent anomalies and backslidings, some species of cultural re-norming certainly seems to have been occurring in this country over the past decade-and-a-half, and it is fascinating to observe in whose hearts its effects have registered most strongly. In attitudes toward education, drugs, abortion, religion, marriage, and divorce, the current generation of teenagers and young adults appears in many respects to be more culturally conservative than its immediate predecessors. To any who may have written off American society as incorrigibly corrupt and adrift, these young people offer a powerful reminder of the boundless inner resources still at our disposal, and of our constantly surprising national resilience.

Forever Weird (by Joe Klein, the New York Times)

2007-11-20T22:07:00.000-08:00

Note to the campture: Hunter S. Thompson. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

November 18, 2007
Forever Weird
By JOE KLEIN

On July 2, 1974, I started work as deputy Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone magazine. My unlikely boss was Richard Goodwin, the former Kennedy speechwriter, who invited me to join him in temporary residence at Ethel Kennedy’s home in McLean, Va. (the owner was in Hyannis for the summer). On July 3, Hunter Thompson joined us. Much of what ensued that holiday weekend is lost in the mists of history and a fog of controlled substances. There were extensive conversations about the viability of renting a truck, filling it with rats and dumping them on the White House lawn. There was also an effort to remove all the Andy Williams songs from the Kennedy jukebox and replace them with Otis Redding. But mostly I remember having a marathon conversation with Hunter about books and writers, settling finally on Joseph Conrad’s exhortation in “Lord Jim”: “In the destructive element immerse!”

This was, no surprise, one of Hunter’s favorite lines, and it led him into an astonishingly candid assessment of his own career, which was then at its peak. He had published his two brilliant “Fear and Loathing” books, and he was worried about what came next. He didn’t want to become a dull parody of himself but feared he lacked the gumption to jump the gravy train. I asked if he’d ever thought about stowing the psychedelic pyrotechnics — his “gonzo” journalism — and sitting down and writing a serious, straight-ahead novel. Well, of course he had. But, he said, “Without that,” and he glanced over at the satchel in which he carried his array of vegetation and chemicals, “I’d have the brain of a second-rate accountant.”

Hunter Thompson was always much more, and sometimes a bit less, than the sum of his ribald public persona. In compiling this oral history, Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour could easily have succumbed to the same temptation that Hunter did: to celebrate the myth, to recount a numbing parade of hilarious, drug-addled Hunter stories, and to miss the man. Happily, they have produced a rigorous and honest piece of work. “Gonzo” is a wonderfully entertaining chronicle of Hunter’s wild ride, but it is also a detailed, painful account of his self-destructive immersions; the brutality he visited upon his wife, Sandy; and the anguish of a life that veered from inspired performance art to ruinous solipsism. It’s especially good to be reminded that Wenner, in addition to being a successful media mogul and perpetual gossip item, has been a journalist of real distinction, with the ability to find talented editors like Seymour, who, I assume, did most of the actual cutting and pasting to create the book’s unflagging pace from interviews with 112 sources, ranging from Jimmy Carter to Johnny Depp. It was Wenner’s patience and indulgence that enabled Thompson to produce his very best work; Wenner’s vision made Rolling Stone, in the early 1970s, one of the most exciting publications in American history.

Hunter Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky., in 1937 and, from adolescence on, seemed intent on becoming a classic American Literary Character, part of the outlaw slipstream that produced Whitman, Twain, Hemingway, Guthrie, Mailer and Kerouac. This might have been a staggeringly banal career choice — there’s a testosterone-addled, troublemaking puer aeternus spewing fountains of self-absorbed gush in every high school — but Thompson actually turned out to have a distinctly American genius for comic hyperbole. He was the son of an insurance salesman who died when Hunter was in high school and an alcoholic mother who didn’t have a prayer of controlling her wild child. He was antsy, violent, a lover of books and guns, a member of the prestigious Athenaeum Literary Association in Louisville and of a street gang of pranksters, most of whom were sons of prominent families. In his senior year of high school, Thompson was arrested with two others after one in his group stole a man’s wallet — this, after other scrapes with the law — and thrown in jail. Douglas Brinkley, Thompson’s literary executor, recalled: “Hunter wrote his mother these very philosophical letters from behind bars. ... The buddies that he was with ... were waltzing because they knew the judge, ... he was the poor kid on the other side of the railroad tracks with no dad. The game was fixed.” The judge gave Thompson a choice of prison or the military; he chose the Air Force. One senses that Hunter saw the experience mostly as grist for his legend. No doubt it helped solidify his politics, such as they were — a blithe populist libertarianism, unencumbered by doctrine.

Thompson’s chronological adolescence is dispatched in a few pages here, but his militant juvenility lasts the entire book. Even near the end of his life, he was terrorizing his neighbors in Aspen, Colo. The lawyer Gerry Goldstein remembers an episode involving another lawyer, John Van Ness, and later the actor Jack Nicholson: “First Hunter placed these defrosted elk hearts on John’s front doorstep, and then he started throwing these stones he’d collected onto the tin roof of John’s house and just listened as they rolled down. Then he shot off a couple of rounds from a 9-millimeter and started playing a continuous looped tape of pigs or rabbits being slaughtered — a godforsaken screeching, curdling sound. This poor little girl came to the window screaming. Apparently Van Ness was out of town and this teenage girl was house-sitting for them. From there, he proceeded to Nicholson’s house, where he engaged in the same folly.”

Thompson was able to get away with such nonsense, and with his flagrant drug use, because he had befriended the local sheriff, who had an elastic sense of justice when it came to literary perps. Indeed, about the only person in this book who successfully confronts Hunter about his behavior is — amazingly — Bill Clinton, a fellow not known for public confrontations. But at a meeting in Little Rock, just after Clinton was nominated in 1992, Thompson braces the president-to-be with a question about the Fourth Amendment and drug searches. “He leaned back and did one of these long windup Hunter kind of things where everybody is supposed to be amused by it all, and Clinton wasn’t going to have any of it,” Wenner recalls. “Clinton came back with this really tough, aggressive answer involving his brother Roger’s cocaine problem and how he had seen the horrors and destruction of drugs.”

The writer William Greider picks up the story: “Hunter got up from the table right after Clinton’s response. He just stopped asking questions. ... It was like the dream had been smashed, and what was the point of going on with this?”

The structural defect of oral history is that it is easy, given a life like Hunter’s, to lose track of the reason he was special in the first place: the inimitable, hilarious whoosh of words, the cascading skeins of hyperbolic invective that came so close to replicating the disoriented epiphanies of a drug trip. The authors occasionally lay in samples of Hunter’s writing, but not really his best stuff — although the rejection letter he donated to Rolling Stone to handle the hordes of would-be imitators does sing. “You worthless, acid-sucking piece of illiterate” you-know-what, it began. “Don’t ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again.”

“I never had any doubt that at some point he was going to commit suicide,” recalls his son, Juan. Old age is a difficult concept for a perpetual adolescent. Hemingway couldn’t handle it, and Hunter went out the same way, though more elegantly: with a pistol rather than a shotgun. His best work was pretty much complete by the time I met him, in July of 1974. Indeed, Nixon’s collapse that summer was so garish — the tearful “my mother was a saint” sayonara — that it beggared any acid fantasy that Hunter might have produced. Reality had gone gonzo. There was nothing left to do except to play his designated role as Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, wandering the campus lecture circuit, swindling would-be publishers, entombed in a mausoleum of celebrity he had created for himself.

Joe Klein is a columnist for Time magazine and the author, most recently, of “Politics Lost.”

GONZO
The Life of Hunter S. Thompson.
By Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour.
Illustrated. 467 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $28.99.

Publishers Seek to Mine Book Circles (by Joanne Kaufman, the New York Times)

2007-11-20T22:01:00.000-08:00

Note to the capture: Esther Bushell, of Old Greenwich, Conn., leads 10 book clubs and is courted by publishers. Alan S. Orling for the new york times

November 19, 2007
Publishers Seek to Mine Book Circles
By JOANNE KAUFMAN

In early June, at Book Club Expo, a gathering of reading group members and book lovers, the author Khaled Hosseini opened the first session with heartfelt thanks to the attendees.

“He said that ‘The Kite Runner’ wasn’t being read until book groups got hold of it,” recalled Ann Kent, who put together the event, which was held in San Jose, Calif. “He acknowledged their power in putting his book on the best-seller list and keeping it on the best-seller list. It was pretty profound.”

Profound or not, the message had resonance. Increasingly, authors and publishers are tipping their hats to the power of 8 or 10 or 12 women (and usually they are women) sitting around a dining room table, dissecting their particular book of the month, then spreading the word to their friends.

Along with “The Kite Runner,” the successes of “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,” “Water for Elephants,” “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Kabul Beauty School” have been credited to the early and continuing support of reading groups.

Film companies are trying to get in on the act, according to Russell Perreault, director of publicity at Vintage Books. “They’re asking us how to get clubs to read books before the movie version comes out,” he said.

Accordingly, Mr. Perreault sent reading group coordinators copies of the novels “Evening,” “Reservation Road” and “Atonement,” all Vintage titles adapted for the screen by Focus Features.

“By working so closely with the publisher, we have been able to spark interest from not only the avid moviegoers who seek out films of substance, but also the reading and discussion groups that are still very much a part of today’s marketplace,” said David Brooks, president of worldwide marketing at Focus Features.

Similarly, because of the tremendous success of “The Kite Runner” among book clubs, its publisher has spread the word to them that the movie is coming in December. The hope is “that they would support the movie as much as they had supported the book,” said Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group.

Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, said an increasingly potent sales pitch when debating the merits of a manuscript is whether “this would work for a book group.”

Five years ago, the topic might not have come up. Reading groups were still a bit of an untapped resource. When, for example, Ms. Kent was introducing Book Group Expo two and a half years ago, she asked publishers to serve as sponsors. “They said it sounded like a good idea and wished us well, but they weren’t having the ‘aha’ moment,” she said. For the meeting last June, however, Random House, Penguin and other houses got involved.

“You don’t see the whole picture when you start out,” said Elinor Lipman, a novelist. She was initially hesitant when her publisher urged her to visit book group gatherings near her home in suburban Boston. “You see it as seven women wanting me to come and talk about their book. It seemed local, not a phenomenon. I didn’t realize it was spreading like wildfire.”

When Esther Bushell, a former English teacher, began working as a reading group coordinator five years ago, she said, she had no interaction with publishers. But now, “there’s a lot of courting going on,” said Ms. Bushell, who is based in Old Greenwich, Conn., and leads 10 groups. “I receive daily packages of galleys. I’m solicited by publishers asking my opinion of upcoming books.”

Additionally, publishers have arranged for Ms. Bushell to take field trips to New York with one or another of her groups to meet the authors of some of the books they have discussed. “I’m already planning our spring visit to the city,” she said. “The publishers are very eager to accommodate me.”

All the wooing from publishers has made Ms. Bushell part of the marketing front line. “I’ve done a good job of promoting a couple of the books to my groups,” she said. “They all read ‘The Book Thief.’ They all read ‘The Shadow of the Wind.’ They all read ‘Snowflower and the Secret Fan.’”

Making reading groups aware of a book is, increasingly, an effort that takes place on the Internet. “Technology opens a lot of opportunities to connect with readers,” said Ellen Archer, publisher of Hyperion Books. “For the most part, author tours are not as successful as they used to be.”

Publishers are buying space on AuthorBuzz, a two-year-old Web site that helps writers promote their work. “We have 10 spots a month for our book club promotions, and we’re selling out three to four months in advance,” said M. J. Rose, a novelist and the founder of AuthorBuzz.

Some publishing houses, like Simon & Schuster and Ballantine, have set up dedicated Web sites where reading group members can arrange phone chats with authors, download discussion guides and podcasts, and take part in live Web events. Sometimes there are sweepstakes whose grand prize is a visit from the author.

Simon & Schuster has created 40 downloadable videos of authors, some of whom “directly acknowledge book groups and thank them for their support,” said Aimee Boyer, a Simon & Schuster senior marketing manager.

And the Bantam Dell Publishing Group plans to introduce in February a new imprint for women’s fiction, which will pump out books meant to appeal to reading groups — using the trade paperback format — and for the mass market in the smaller size.

“We want to get books on that circuit,” Barb Burg, a Bantam spokeswoman, said of the reading groups. “There’s not a publisher in town for which this isn’t a top priority.”

The Ugly Stick (by Richard B. Woodward, the Village Voice)

2007-11-13T20:04:00.000-08:00

Note to the Caption: Ah, love! Caricature by Bartolomeo Passerotti, 16th century
Private Collection of Peter Willi/Bridgeman Art Library

The Ugly Stick
Severed heads, devouring monsters, Marilyn Manson—Umberto Eco gazes at the grotesque
by Richard B. Woodward
November 6th, 2007 4:25 PM

Umberto Eco is 75 and has entered the autumnal stage of intellectual renown when publishers sell his books with his name rather than his actual writing. He is not yet the factory of anthologies that Harold Bloom has become. But like On Beauty, Eco's previous well-packaged venture into aesthetics, much of On Ugliness is a collection of quotes from writers— Aristotle, Dante, Milton, Kafka, Sartre—who are even bigger brands than he is.

As a historical survey of our responses to horror, this format is fine so long as you don't expect the semiotician-cum-novelist to spend much time analyzing these matters. The muddled relationships between ugliness and evil, physical and moral deformity, dread and mockery of ugliness he's content to leave muddled, pointing out simply their conjoined ancestry.

Eco starts off with a few promising insights. "Whereas all the synonyms for beautiful could be conceived as a reaction of disinterested appreciation," he points out, "almost all the synonyms for ugly contain a reaction of disgust, if not of violent repulsion, horror, or fear." Before pausing to wonder why ugliness rebounds in our gut, however, he is rushing us off to pull down another classical author from the library shelf.

The chapter "The Ugly, the Comic, and the Obscene" opens with a citation from Montaigne, who wondered why sex, a "natural, necessary, and legitimate act," should provoke shame and jokes. Next is Freud's dubious observation that the sight of genitals is always exciting, even if they are "nonetheless never considered beautiful." Eco then closes the section with a few paragraphs about Priapus, the minor Hellenistic deity with the major schlong who inspired laughter but was himself "not a happy god," according to antiquity.

The buried assumptions in these thoughts would be worth unpacking if Eco would spend time to rest before the next stop on his tour of civilization. And a Eurocentric tour it is: He includes virtually nothing here, text or image, that touches on the many examples of grotesque or terrifying figures in Japanese, Chinese, Indian-American, or African art—stunning omissions given that he also harps on the obvious point that ugliness is relative to period and place.

The pleasures of the book—and they are considerable—derive from listening to an aging scholar's discourse on a lifetime of reading. Eco has always been at heart a Latinist. The numerous medieval texts he unearths help argue his case that figures such as St. Bernard were more fascinated by monsters and other sinister avatars than they knew they should be. St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas made room for lots of individual ugliness as part of a more comprehensive divine plan.

The book's illustrations are less parochial than the text, running the gamut from an astonishing, almost sci-fi painting of the Temptations of Saint Anthony by Salvator Rosa in the 17th century to a snarling photo of Sam, winner of the Ugliest Dog in the World contest. Judith's beheading of Holophernes by Caravaggio shares a spread with a 2003 photo from the Liberian civil war of a man holding his enemy's severed skull. Nosferatu, E.T., Divine, and Marilyn Manson also find a home here.

Striking are the centuries of writers and artists who have violated norms, embraced distortion, and deliberately made work they hoped would force their contemporaries to shudder or puke. The Renaissance Mannerists, including Michelangelo, stretched classical ideals to the breaking point. The Romantics reveled in perverse logic ("I love spiders and nettles/Because we hate them," wrote Victor Hugo in 1856). Other French writers (Marquis de Sade, Octave Mirbeau, Georges Bataille) have contemplated evil as a kind of spiritual exercise, testing how much their minds—and readers—could tolerate.

Ezra Pound hailed a "cult of ugliness" as part of a modernist program. This echoed the Italian and Russian Futurist manifesto, entitled "Let Us Be Courageously Ugly," which stated that "our aim is to underline the great importance for art of harshness, dissonance, and pure primordial coarseness." The gay sensibility of camp is related to other forms of ironic (kitsch) or militant (punk) ugliness, and Eco at least acknowledges them, even if he isn't able to effectively separate them.

At times, he speculates that absolute ugliness may exist. The smell of excrement and the sight of putrefying flesh, he points out, are offensive across all cultures. If he had included the writings of evolutionary biologists, he might have told us why this could be so. That he shows no awareness of post-Darwinian science can mean only that he isn't serious about locating the sources of aesthetic feelings. Hegel suggested that ugliness was a "species" of beauty. I suspect Eco's latest effort was hatched as a sport of his earlier research, and although both books are handsome and kinky fun, in neither case does he appear to have overexerted himself.

All Souls (by Peter Schjeldahl, the New Yorker)

2007-10-31T02:51:00.001-07:00

Note to the Caputure: “Me and My Parrots” (“Yo y Mis Pericos”)/1941/Oil on canvas. © 2007 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av. Cinco de Mayo No. 2, Col. Centro, Del. Cuauhtémoc 06059, México, D.F.

The Art World
All Souls
The Frida Kahlo cult.
by Peter Schjeldahl November 5, 2007

There are so many ways to be interested in Frida Kahlo, who was born a hundred years ago and died forty-seven years later, in 1954, that simply to look at and judge her paintings, as paintings, may seem narrow-minded. No one need appreciate art to justify being a Kahlo fan or even a Kahlo cultist. (Why not? The world will have cults, and who better merits one?) In Mexico, Kahlo’s ubiquitous image has become the counter-Guadalupe, complementing the numinous Virgin as a deathless icon of Mexicanidad. Kahlo’s ascension, since the late nineteen-seventies, to feminist sainthood is ineluctable, though a mite strained. (Kahlo struggled not in common cause with women but, single-handedly, for herself.) And her pansexual charisma, shadowed by tales of ghastly physical and emotional suffering, makes her an avatar of liberty and guts. However, Kahlo’s eminence wobbles unless her work holds up. A retrospective at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, proves that it does, and then some. She made some iffy symbological pictures and a few perfectly awful ones—forgivably, given their service to her always imperilled morale—but her self-portraits cannot be overpraised. They are sui generis in art while collegial with great portraiture of every age. Kahlo is among the winnowed elect of twentieth-century painters who will never be absent for long from the mental museums of future artists.

She was born Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón in the house where she would die, in Coyoacán, then a prosperous suburb and later a district of Mexico City. She was the third child of a Hungarian-German immigrant photographer, who was an atheist Jew, and a pious mestiza from Oaxaca. Polio, at age six, withered her right leg and foot. She was among the rare girls admitted to the sterling National Preparatory School, in Mexico City, where she grew from an effervescent tomboy into a brilliant young woman, during the creative tumult of the nineteen-twenties. When she was eighteen, a bus crash left her with spinal and pelvic damage that would entail many surgeries, some of them probably unnecessary. (Was she masochistic? Anyone doomed to a lifetime of pain will find veins of sweetness in it.) While convalescing, she began to paint, depicting herself, in styles influenced by Renaissance and Mannerist masters, with the aid of a mirror set in the canopy of her bed. In 1928, she took up with Mexico’s chief artist, Diego Rivera, who was twenty years her senior. They married in 1929, divorced for a year in 1939, then remarried. They were the loves of each others’ lives, though with innumerable supplements. Their semi-public affairs (her amours included Leon Trotsky and numerous women); their dealings with famous figures in America and Europe, from John D. Rockefeller to Pablo Picasso; and their political adventures, as Communists subject to sectarian pushes and pulls, make Hayden Herrera’s hugely consequential biography, “Frida” (1983), a delirious read. (Herrera is a co-curator, with Elizabeth Carpenter, of the Walker show.) Kahlo died, probably of a complication of pneumonia, the last in a cascade of deteriorative maladies, a year after the opening of her first solo exhibition in Mexico.

Rivera often remarked, correctly, that Kahlo was a better painter than he was. Picasso confessed himself incapable “of painting a head like those of Frida Kahlo.” André Breton praised her art—with enthusiasm marked by condescension—as “a ribbon around a bomb.” In point of fact, the ribbons and other feminine adornments that she renders are, themselves, rhetorically explosive. Breton also claimed her as an exemplar of international Surrealism. Wrong again. At her best, she is a better artist than any of the Surrealists except Salvador Dali at his best, unless early Giorgio de Chirico may be deemed Surrealist before the letter. Besides, the avant-garde most germane to Kahlo’s development in the twenties is that of German Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which mined heightened realism for psychological drama. To this, she added fecund inspirations from Mexican pre-Columbian and folk art and Spanish-colonial and Creole portraiture. No swoons into the supposed unconscious—even most of her dream pictures are wide awake. She was terrific at still-lifes of fruit and flowers and at picturing animals—she intermittently maintained a menagerie of dogs, cats, parrots, and monkeys—all of which channel her consciousness. Kahlo’s self-portraits are about her gaze, as subject matter, technique, and content. They dramatize sheer attentiveness. They tell us exactly what it’s like to be Frida Kahlo, with, I believe, a superbly indifferent confidence that we will not understand. She confides, but she won’t plead. She makes eye contact not with the viewer but with herself—watching herself watch herself, in an extended but closed loop. T. S. Eliot articulated the truth, regarding all successful art, of a dissociation of “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” Make the man a woman, and Kahlo becomes singular for having engaged both parties at once—and only them. Looking at the pictures, you’re not there.

The meaning of Kahlo’s art comes across in reproductions, but not its full dynamic, which involves brooding subtleties of surface and color. The reproduced images are shiny and bright. The paintings are matte and grayish, drinking and withholding light. (Their display calls for intense illumination—that of the Mexican sun, say. They should not be hung on white walls, as they are at the Walker, where the contrast makes them look like holes in a snowbank.) The lovely, highly varied, blushing colors (even Kahlo’s browns and greens blush) don’t radiate. Fused with represented flesh, foliage, fabrics, and, yes, ribbons and jewelry, they turn their backs to us. The payoff of this reticence is an absorption in the artist’s touch. It’s easy to fantasize that Kahlo’s brushes were fingertips, able to mold her own more than familiar features in the dark. The tactility of certain self-portraits is, among other things, staggeringly sexy. In “Me and My Parrots” (1941), it combines with sharp tonal contrasts of warm color to convey invisible moistness, as of a summertime, full-body, delicate sweat. Elsewhere, the felt oneness of sight and touch stirs harrowing empathy, as in “The Broken Column” (1944). Kahlo’s nude body is split open to reveal a crumbling pillar, nails penetrating her flesh everywhere. Tears flow from her eyes, but her face is dispassionate, as always. Her pain is not her. It just won’t let her mind stray to anything else, for the moment. The work belongs to a category of images with which Kahlo confronted and endured episodes of agony, including heartbreak and rage. (Most piercing are laments of her disastrous pregnancies; she longed for children but physically could not bring a baby to term.) They aren’t great art, but they are moving testaments of a great artist.

Blisteringly scornful of self-importance—in a letter from Paris, in English, she lauded Marcel Duchamp as “the only one who has his feet on the earth, among all this bunch of coocoo lunatic sons of bitches of the surrealists”—Kahlo would surely raise her prodigious eyebrow to behold what has been made of her. But immortal fame rarely meshes with the temperament of those it befalls. It is about the wishes of others. In Kahlo’s case, the ways that she has been used by feminists, multiculturalists, bisexualists, and whatnot are readily defensible. Each catches the glint from one of her facets. Most of all, Kahlo is authentically a national treasure of Mexico, a country that her work expresses not merely as a culture but as a complete civilization, with profound roots in several pasts and with proper styles of modernity. She didn’t accomplish this by trying to, as Rivera did. She simply did it. For confirmation, visit her house, the Casa Azul, in Coyoacán, whose contents and décor are as vibrant with her presence as if she had just stepped outside. I should disclose that I’m nearly a Kahlo cultist, myself. Much that is hurt and disappointed in me feels momentarily allayed, and almost healed, when I am in the spell of her art. Like the serene Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini, with their hints of the coming Crucifixion, her self-portraits assure me of two things: first, that things are worse than I know, and, second, that they’re all right. ♦

Where do you stand in the new culture wars? (by Sarah Baxter, the Times)

2007-10-31T02:36:00.001-07:00

Note to the Capture: Apparently, Aleida Guevara, Che Guevara’s daughter was silenced in Tehran. Related news came from the infamous New York Post. Reference: Link

From The Sunday Times
October 21, 2007
Where do you stand in the new culture wars?

As the rise of Islamism challenges the old assumptions of left and right, new cultural fault lines are emerging. Take our quiz to see which side you are on

by Sarah Baxter

Where do you stand in the culture wars debate? Post your views in the feedback box at the bottom of this story

Take our culture wars quiz

A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America’s “earth-devouring ambitions” were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a “truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union”.

Che’s daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. “My father never mentioned God,” she said, to the consternation of the audience. “He never met God.” During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. “By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence,” the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.

After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the “supreme guide” of Guevara, was also a man of God. “The Soviet Union is gone,” he affirmed. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words.”

Don’t say you haven’t been warned, comrade, when you flirt with “revolutionary Islam” as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. But it is time, too, for Che to lose his secular halo. If he were still living, the chances are he would be another dictator like Castro, who has ruled Cuba with an iron fist for half a century but gets a pass from liberals because he provides a modest health service.

There used to be a clear dividing line between conservatives and liberals. It defined the culture wars of the late 20th century, which pitted reactionary fuddy-duddies against tolerant, enlightened types, who believed in equal rights for women, minorities and gays. That fault line is becoming as dated as the flower power of the 1960s.

By the time Terry Eagleton, a Marxist professor of literature – how quaint and old-fashioned that sounds – is laying into Martin Amis, the Mr Cool of British fiction, for remarks on Islam that supposedly make the son as racist as his father, Kingsley, “an antisemitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals”, it is obvious we are into a wholly different culture war, between phoney and real progressives.

Wasn’t one of Amis fils’s main complaints about Islamic militants that they were “antisemites, psychotic misogynists and homophobes”? Confused? You are not the only one.

My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women’s rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

It is no longer possible to tell at a glance which side people are on. My husband, a photographer, has long hair and wears T-shirts and cargo pants. We live in stuffy Washington, where almost everybody wears a suit and tie but secretly longs to be artistic and hip. On the school run, nice lawyers confide to him that they hate George Bush, despise the Iraq war and are not as reactionary as they look. They are completely thrown if he tells them he dislikes Islamo-fascism more than Bush, is glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein, supports Nato against the Taliban and thinks the Iranian mullahs should never be trusted with a nuclear bomb. He considers himself an antifascist who believes in the secular values of the Enlightenment and human rights. There is nothing radical about being tolerant of the intolerant, he says.

On the other side of the looking glass, jeans-clad leftists are horrified that one of their own could possibly have anything in common with the dreaded neocons. Christopher Hitchens is a rock star among atheists, most of whom oppose the Iraq war. Last weekend, he travelled to Wisconsin to receive an award from the Freedom from Religion conference for his book God Is Not Great.

“In my acceptance speech I upbraided the audience by saying I could easily have got the impression that they thought the only threat to our society came from the Christian Coalition and possibly the odd Israeli settler,” he says. “You would not have known from anything on sale, any T-shirt, any peaked cap, any book or pamphlet, that there was such a thing as Islamic fundamentalism.”

They didn’t like it. “I got the usual lame and bleating replies that, to the extent that if there was such a thing, it’s been created by us,” Hitchens says. One of the most indulgent forms of western narcissism is that everything is “all about me” – or, in this case, the West. Myopic liberals find it impossible to believe that radical Islam may have a dynamic of its own that threatens their values. “You cannot stand for multiculturalism if you represent a group that wants to kill all the Jews and Hindus. Shouldn’t that be obvious?” Hitchens asks. “Martin [Amis] was saying, ‘Look, there’s a real problem here’, and good for him.

“The name of the problem is religion, and there is only one religion that threatens us with this kind of thing . . . There is a reason people look askance at a mosque in their neighbourhood, and they are not mad or cruel or stupid or selfish or bigoted to worry about it.”

Nick Cohen, whose book What’s Left? has just been published in paperback, identifies progressives as antitotalitarian internationalists who subscribe to “some kind of universal values”, as he puts it.

“The left are like old-style Tory imperialists, who believe rights are all very well for western Europe but not for Johnny Foreigner, and that the liberation of women is essentially for white-skinned women, not brown-skinned women,” Cohen says.

A case in point is the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalia-born author of Infidel, who has received an astounding lack of support from liberals and the left. An article in Newsweek described her as a “bomb-thrower”, when it is Hirsi Ali who faces death threats from real bomb-throwers merely for speaking her mind and has had to rush back to the Netherlands because its government will no longer pay for her bodyguards while she is abroad.

Natasha Walter, reviewing her book in The Guardian, wrote blithely: “What sticks in the throats of many of her readers is not her feminism, but her antiIslamism” - as if the two could be separated. It was Hirsi Ali’s culture that led her to be genitally mutilated as a girl, and it was her Muslim former co-religionists who murdered her friend Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker. Why should she remain quiet?

Irshad Manji, the Canadian Muslim feminist, is about to become director of the new Moral Courage Project at New York University. “It’s about developing leaders who speak truth to power within their own community,” she says. “Ultimately it is about defeating self-censorship.

“Human beings are born equal but cultures are not,” she believes. “They are human-made and for the most part man-made. There is nothing sacred about cultures and nothing blasphemous about reforming them.”

When Amis said something a little more forceful along those lines at the Cheltenham literary festival, he set off a new firestorm. “Some societies are just more evolved than others,” he said. Then last week on Channel 4 News, he said: “I feel morally superior to Islamists.”

Note that he is not saying he feels morally superior to Islam - but to Islamists. Is it wrong to make such a judgment, when there is nothing immutable about culture and society?

Manji says: “I absolutely defend his right to believe that certain civilisations are superior to others,” but adds the important rider: “In contemporary times he may be right, but in the past Islam gave birth to the Renaissance.”

To my mind, Manji is a “moderate” Muslim, in that she still describes herself as a person of faith, but to many of her Islamic brethren, she is off the scale. Liberals have been too quick to accept as moderates Muslims who are nothing of the kind – except in comparison with the suicide bombers and theologians of Al-Qaeda.

“It’s not a waste of time to search for the moderate Muslim, because there is a civil war within Islam between people who do and don’t want to live under sharia,” says Hitchens, “but there are a lot of counterfeits who are being seized on in our cultural cringe moment.”

The chief cringers, he might have added, are the phoney liberals. The new culture war looks set to run and run.

Greenspan Shrugged (by Michael Kinsley, the New York Times)

2007-10-17T00:52:00.000-07:00

Note to the Illustration: Illustration by Joe Ciardiello

October 14, 2007
Greenspan Shrugged
By MICHAEL KINSLEY

So the suspense is over: Alan Greenspan is able to express himself in clear English prose. This is not entirely a compliment. For 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Greenspan was known for his inscrutable Congressional testimony. That joke had long become tired, and now he is exposed as a fraud. It seems from “The Age of Turbulence” that Greenspan enjoyed the obfuscation game: as a frank antipopulist, he thought and still thinks that an air of mystery around the Fed is a good thing.

Wait. It gets worse. Not only can Greenspan discourse lucidly on economic matters, but he has also written the most unexpectedly charming Washington insider memoir since Katharine Graham’s a decade ago. The books are very different. The charm of Graham’s was its frankness. The publisher of The Washington Post dished and dissed, starting with her mother. Greenspan is the soul of tact. Far too many people are labeled as his “friend.” Even the mildest criticism is prefaced by a statement of high regard and/or followed by an expression of regret. He doesn’t lay a glove on his mother.

The charm of Greenspan’s book is its self-portrait. The author may have put as much art into the self as into the portrait, but the result is one of the more interesting characters in the history of our democracy: a saxophone-playing math dweeb who became not just powerful but glamorous, while remaining a dweeb. He writes, in reference to one of his early published articles, “I declared, with all the enthusiasm of youth, ‘Since small business may act as a barometer of cyclical movements, a survey of both the immediate and long-term trends in small corporate manufacturing is of particular interest.’ ” You gotta love a guy whose idea of an important life lesson is: “I have always argued that an up-to-date set of the most detailed estimates for the latest available quarter is far more useful for forecasting accuracy than a more sophisticated model structure.” Words to live by.

Greenspan resists all opportunities to portray himself as cool. He races past his early career as a professional jazz sideman, noting hastily that his saxophone teacher paired him up with “a 15-year-old by the name of Stanley Getz,” and that the band he played with included the pop artist Larry Rivers as well as the future Nixon lawyer Leonard Garment and the future composer of the “theme music for M*A*S*H.” He dismisses all popular music since (and including) Elvis as “on the edge of noise.” (Note the characteristic qualification.) He dwells on his boyhood love of Morse code. He brags that while his fellow musicians were smoking pot, he was doing their income taxes. He declares unnecessarily that in the 1960s, “I didn’t relate to flower power,” adding with strange dignity: “I had the freedom not to participate, and I didn’t.”

Freedom. For this proud square, this eager conformist and joiner of the establishment, freedom is nevertheless the supreme value of his life. Freedom and, he would add, rationality. In the early 1950s he joined the inner circle of Ayn Rand, the author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” whose philosophy, known as Objectivism, was an extreme form of libertarianism that actually celebrated selfishness and greed. Many young brainiacs of dorkish tendencies go through an Ayn Rand period (her books are very popular at Microsoft). But Greenspan credits Rand as “a stabilizing force in my life” and was “a regular at the weekly gatherings at her apartment” through the early 1960s. She stood at his side when he was sworn in as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in 1974, and they “remained close until she died in 1982.”

Those weekly meetings sound like the famous “Beyond the Fringe” comedy routine about Bertrand Russell trying to “trap the then young, and somewhat beautiful, G. E. Moore into a logical falsehood by means of a cunning semantic subterfuge” involving apples in a basket. Before he met Rand, Greenspan was a logical positivist. He refused to accept the reality of anything that could not be verified by “significant empirical evidence.” His own existence, for example. Rand started calling him “the undertaker” and would ask friends, “Has the undertaker decided he exists yet?”

Rand, Greenspan explains deadpan, was “a devoted Aristotelian” and believed in “an objective reality that is separate from consciousness and capable of being known.” It is hard to imagine any other Washington power figure — one thinks of Henry Kissinger — raising the question of whether he exists in his own autobiography. (Penguin Press, the publisher that reportedly paid Greenspan $8.5 million for this book, must have thought he damn well better exist for that kind of money.)

As for an objective reality apart from consciousness — in this age of spin, the less said about that, the better. Greenspan ultimately concluded that these basic issues didn’t actually have to be settled before breakfast in order to make it through the day. Democracy implies disagreement, and “compromise on public issues is the price of civilization, not an abrogation of principle.” He credits Rand with broadening his outlook and making him more tolerant of new ideas — not qualities she is often associated with.

Rand’s inner circle was a cauldron of politics and sex, but Greenspan (he says) participated only in the former. He was married for less than a year to Joan Mitchell, whose best friend’s husband was Rand’s lover (got that?). Discreet as always, Greenspan says only that “I’d made an intellectual choice, not an emotional one.” He and Joan are “friends to this day.”

He also remains good friends with Barbara Walters, who took him up after he became C.E.A. chairman. Or at least they were friends until this book. Walters took him to parties and introduced him to the beautiful people. Greenspan comments, in a rare lapse of tact: “I usually thought the food was good but the conversation dull.” Soon he became one of the beautiful people himself. For years after Walters, Greenspan was seen around with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News. His intentions about marriage were as hard to fathom and as eagerly speculated upon as his intentions about interest rates. They finally wed in 1997.

Today, Greenspan and Mitchell are at the pinnacle of society in Washington and New York, invited everywhere and actually showing up more often than most people in their position would bother. Even in his 80s, Greenspan is a happy and energetic socializer. But he still gives every appearance of enjoying the food more than the company. He remains an unapologetic dweeb. His discussions of the high life in this book are perfunctory — except for one bizarre reference to “a cut-velvet burgundy and black Badgley Mischka” (it’s a dress) in which his wife looked especially fetching — while a discourse on the economics of the tin can brims with the excitement of discovery.

Although the “Alan Greenspan” of this book is a self-conscious creation of the author, even he may not realize how truly awful he is at telling a joke. “I am only half joking,” he says about what is at most a quarter of a joke about forbidding people who want to be president from becoming one. He says “only an economist could appreciate” a joke about the size of the Mobil Oil company compared with that of the federal government, which he then proceeds to demonstrate.

The hostesses who invite Greenspan to their dinner parties presumably have only the slightest clue of why he is, or was, or actually still is, so important, and the business executives who pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches don’t know much more. Television pundits bring vast mountains of expertise and wisdom to a discussion of the Iowa caucuses. But throw a cut in the discount rate at them and you can see fear in their eyes as they blather toward the next commercial.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board has always been a big deal. Greenspan’s predecessors include William McChesney Martin, whose sonorous name alone lent dignity to paper currency. And there was Arthur Burns, who cut exactly the right image with his omnipresent pipe, but who sold his soul to Richard Nixon by engineering a phony boom for the 1972 election. And then there was Paul Volcker, Greenspan’s immediate predecessor, also with a pipe and 10 or 11 feet tall to boot. But Greenspan owns the role of Fed chairman the way Zero Mostel owned the role of Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Milton Friedman deserves some of the credit. Greenspan became Fed chairman just as Friedman’s theory of monetarism — that the money supply determines the inflation rate — became more or less universally accepted, and just after we peered over the hyperinflation precipice and pulled back. Friedman actually believed that expansion of the money supply should be put on automatic pilot. He did not favor someone pulling levers and twisting dials like the man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz.” Nevertheless, Greenspan took the newfound importance of monetary policy, mixed in his number-crunching talents on the one hand and his social and business prestige on the other, topped it off with his soon-to-become-legendary mumbo jumbo at hearings, stirred the mixture, drank it and turned into a wizard.

Why did Guess What Greenspan Is Thinking become such a serious sport during his tenure at the Fed? Why can his word move markets even now? The answer to the second question is that people are nuts. The answer to the first is that Greenspan’s predictions about the economy may not have been better than anyone else’s — but he was in a position to do something about them. To put it in terms Greenspan the data lover might appreciate, his opinions as Fed chairman weren’t important as a view of the data: they were data.

Most of the bad publicity Greenspan has gotten since this book was published concerns the early years of the second Bush administration. That’s when Greenspan gave every appearance of endorsing the president’s grossly irresponsible tax-cut proposal. Greenspan said at the time that he was concerned about the danger of the huge surpluses that seemed to loom ahead for about five minutes. In the book he says he was “wrong to abandon my skepticism” about the reality of these surpluses and maintains that it’s not his fault if people missed the part about canceling the cuts if the surplus didn’t materialize. (“I can’t be in charge of people’s perceptions. I don’t function that way. I can’t function that way,” he quotes himself saying piously to Robert Rubin, a former Clinton Treasury secretary, who begged him not to support the cuts.)

This was an eccentric episode in several ways. According to his book, Greenspan — whose Senate confirmation hearing was the same day Nixon went on television to resign — dreamed that George W. Bush would be a reincarnation of Gerald Ford, whom he idealizes as the kind of man who could restore economic sanity to the nation through the combination of principled conservatism and bipartisan civility. Greenspan was deeply disappointed when this didn’t happen. He says that “behind the scenes” he begged Bush to veto a few spending measures and was told that the president was afraid of antagonizing Dennis Hastert, of all people. Never before or since has anyone expressed fear of this already-forgotten figure who, as House speaker, was just a front man for the authentically scary Tom DeLay. When Congress passed Bush’s tax cut in May 2001, Greenspan writes, “I knew how Cassandra must have felt.” It’s a self-serving analogy. When Cassandra warned you, you knew you’d been warned. She didn’t say, “I can’t be in charge of people’s perceptions.”

Although Greenspan was the best at inhabiting the role, the greatest Fed chairman of our time was Volcker. Greenspan would agree, I think. He writes of his immediate predecessor: “What he masterminded ... was arguably the most important change in economic policy in 50 years.” The Fed decided “that it would no longer try to fine-tune the economy by focusing on short-term interest rates; instead it would clamp down on the amount of money available to the economy.”

A wonderful thing about monetary policy is the way it disguises political or even moral decisions as theoretical or technical ones. You could describe what Volcker did as officially accepting the theory of monetarism, or as contracting the supply of M1. Whatever. But put bluntly, what he did was to purposely engineer the deepest decline since the Great Depression in order to wring inflation — and the expectation of future inflation — out of the economy. This set the stage for the generation of prosperity that Greenspan presided over.

Greenspan deserves enormous credit for staying the course. And yet — as he himself tells it in this book — he also helped Ronald Reagan in 1980 to demagogue economic policy as a way of attacking Jimmy Carter. He wrote a speech for Reagan blaming Carter for “one of the major economic contractions in the last 50 years.” Reagan changed that to “a new depression — the Carter depression.” Within a week, this had turned into: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his!” Greenspan says, “What attracted me to Reagan was the clarity of his conservatism.”

As Greenspan surely knows but doesn’t admit, Reagan achieved this appealing clarity by ignoring the “objective reality separate from consciousness” that Greenspan used to treasure. And Greenspan does the same. Early in Reagan’s administration, as a member of the president’s economic advisory board, he supported Reagan’s tax cuts “if spending was restrained” and if the Fed kept money tight. Volcker’s Fed continued to do its bit but Reagan, famously, did not, leading to enormous deficits. Greenspan says, “Congress shied away from the necessary restraints on spending.” But the data — those good old data — show that the budgets Reagan proposed were only slightly smaller than the budgets Congress eventually passed.

The data also show that George W. Bush has done a better job than Reagan did at controlling government spending. Spending has averaged 19.7 percent of G.D.P. during Bush’s first six years — Iraq war and all — while it was 22.4 percent during Reagan’s eight years. (If you assume a year’s lag between policy and result, it’s 22.3 percent.)

Half this book — the half that is getting no attention — isn’t memoir: it’s what Greenspan calls “detective stories”: just Alan riding the data wherever it takes him, having the time of his life, trying to solve all the world’s economic puzzles, like why it took so long for computers to affect productivity, why incomes are becoming more unequal and what to do about it, the energy crisis, immigration, entitlements and so on. Not all of this is wildly original, but there are great nuggets and aperçus. And it is all written in English and fully comprehensible.

Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time magazine.

Why Women Read More Than Men (by by Eric Weiner, NPR)

2007-09-09T21:01:00.000-07:00

Books
Why Women Read More Than Men

by Eric Weiner

NPR.org, September 5, 2007 · A couple of years ago, British author Ian McEwan conducted an admittedly unscientific experiment. He and his son waded into the lunch-time crowds at a London park and began handing out free books. Within a few minutes, they had given away 30 novels.

Nearly all of the takers were women, who were "eager and grateful" for the freebies while the men "frowned in suspicion, or distaste." The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan in The Guardian newspaper: "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

McEwan's prognosis is surely hyperbole, but only slightly. Surveys consistently find that women read more books than men, especially fiction. Explanations abound, from the biological differences between the male and female brains, to the way that boys and girls are introduced to reading at a young age.

One thing is certain: Americans—of either gender—are reading fewer books today than in the past. A poll released last month by The Associated Press and Ipsos, a market-research firm, found that the typical American read only four books last year, and one in four adults read no books at all.

A National Endowment for the Arts report found that only 57 percent of Americans had read a book in 2002 a four percentage-point drop in a decade. Book sales have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Among avid readers surveyed by the AP, the typical woman read nine books in a year, compared with only five for men. Women read more than men in all categories except for history and biography.

Hemingway as 'Chick-Lit'

When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain.

By this measure, "chick-lit" would have to include Hemingway and nearly every other novel, observes Lakshmi Chaudhry in the magazine In These Times. "Unlike the gods of the literary establishment who remain predominately male—both as writers and critics—their humble readers are overwhelmingly female."

Book groups consist almost entirely of women, and the spate of new literary blogs are also populated mainly by women. The Associated Press study stirred a small buzz among some of those bloggers.

"I've read at least 100 books in the past year. Seriously. Probably more like 150 to 200," a user named Phyllis wrote on the literary blog Trashionista. "My husband? I'm guessing zero, unless you count picture books and comic books he has read to the kids."

"We see it every time in our store," says Carla Cohen, owner of the Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. "Women head straight for the fiction section and men head for nonfiction."

"I know that we certainly have more women than men customers," concurs Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent bookstore in the Miami area. "But I don't have any wisdom about why that is."

Kaplan speculates that women may be buying books for men, but he concedes that could be simply wishful thinking.

It's All in Your Head

Theories attempting to explain the "fiction gap" abound. Cognitive psychologists have found that women are more empathetic than men, and possess a greater emotional range—traits that make fiction more appealing to them.

Some experts see the genesis of the "fiction gap" in early childhood. At a young age, girls can sit still for much longer periods of time than boys, says Louann Brizendine, author of The Female Brain.

"Girls have an easier time with reading or written work, and it's not a stretch to extrapolate [that] to adult life," Brizendine says. Indeed, adult women talk more in social settings and use more words than men, she says.

Another theory focuses on "mirror neurons." Located behind the eyebrows, these neurons are activated both when we initiate actions and when we watch those same actions in others. Mirror neurons explain why we recoil when seeing others in pain, or salivate when we see other people eating a gourmet meal. Neuroscientists believe that mirror neurons hold the biological key to empathy.

The research is still in its early stages, but some studies have found that women have more sensitive mirror neurons than men. That might explain why women are drawn to works of fiction, which by definition require the reader to empathize with characters.

"Reading requires incredible patience, and the ability to 'feel into' the characters. That is something women are both more interested in and also better at than men," says Brizendine.

Rekindling the Reading Magic

There are exceptions to the fiction gap. More boys than girls have read The Harry Potter series, according to its U.S. publisher, Scholastic. What's more, Harry Potter made more of an impact on boys' reading habits. Sixty-one percent agreed with the statement "I didn't read books for fun before reading Harry Potter," compared with 41 percent of girls.

For publishers and booksellers, that offers a ray of hope—not only that the fiction gap might not be so insurmountable after all, but also that another, more worrisome gap might also be closing: the age gap. Young people, in general, read less than older people, and that does not bode well for books and the people who love them.

"What all of us are wondering is what will happen with this new generation that doesn't read much," says bookstore owner Carla Cohen. "What happens when they grow up?"