JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

When Tony Blair came to the U.S. to speak in favor of the Iraq war, I was relieved. There was a need for passionate affirmation in a public speech — the circumstances demanded it. Bush wasn’t up to it, although he tried. Blair’s speech had an eloquence and moral force that jumped right through the TV screen. The speech was very impressive, even stirring.

This review of a book examining the close relationship between England, under Blair’s stewardship, and our country, reveals the basis of the passion in Blair’s speech. Blair had a deep belief in what he was saying, derived from information he was receiving prior to 9/11:

But Mr. Riddell demonstrates that Mr. Blair’s commitment to Mr. Bush’s course on Iraq was based on more than a desire to maintain the special relationship: he firmly believed in the necessity to oust Saddam Hussein. And that belief was not new — it predated even the horrors of Sept.11. Its origins can be found in the intelligence briefings Mr. Blair received after he became prime minister, in 1997. They left a deep impression upon him — possibly because, as a novice to power, this kind of information was new to him.

…For Tony Blair, ousting Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do. Mr. Blair got very little in return for his steadfast support of American policy, but then he never expected he would. Decisively dealing with the threat was enough of a reward — even if doing so meant risking his political future. For Mr. Blair, a man who came to power often derided as a master of spin and as overreliant on polls and focus groups, the Iraq crisis marked him as the conviction politician he is.

It is unfortunate that Bush is not better at public speaking. In the face of the difficulties of building a nation in Iraq, our country will need enthusiastic cheerleading and inspiration. Sometimes a nation needs to be spoken to in terms of nobility and honor, not mere pragmatism. It is a long and difficult task ahead.

A vacuum created by a lack of positive assertion about the decency of our actions can be used to erode our honorable purpose by opponents of the war. We are doing the right thing in Iraq. We should be proud of it and proclaim it to the world instead of always playing defense. Polls still show solid support, evidence the issue speaks for itself to some extent. We need a spokesman for our actions that can rise to the occasion. Honorable deeds require noble words.

One of the more disturbing consequences of bigotry is that the persecuted will sometimes internalize the prejudice, adopting the disparaging portrayal as self-image, the distorted thinking as the truth.

In this vein, I present for your consideration one George Soros, refugee from the Nazis, billionaire, philanthropist, philosopher, humanitarian, paradigmatic self-hating Jew:

When asked about anti-Semitism in Europe, Soros, who is Jewish, said European anti-Semitism is the result of the policies of Israel and the United States.

“There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that,” Soros said…”If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish,” he said. “I can’t see how one could confront it directly.”

“I’m also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world,” said Soros, whose projects and funding have influenced governments and promoted various political causes around the world.

“As an unintended consequence of my actions,” he said, “I also contribute to that image.”

The billionaire financier said he, too, bears some responsibility for the new anti-Semitism, citing last month’s speech by Malaysia’s outgoing prime minister, Mahathir Mohammad, who said, “Jews rule the world by proxy.”

Soros “…can’t see how one could confront it directly.” Powerless, hopeless, without a single idea about how to counter anti-Semitism is George Soros – only tacit acquiescence to irrational demands rooted in bigotry will “diminish” the hate – although this same man has, his entire life, displayed cleverness in the financial markets and then enormous creativity in trying to effect positive social change across the globe. George Soros’ brain synapses just stop firing where Jew hating is concerned.

Soros said he has not given much to Jewish or Israel-related causes because Jews take care of their own, so that his financial clout is better directed elsewhere.

Right, George. Let other people provide help to Jews, while you help everyone but Jews. The only way to deal with thugs and bigots is to give them what they want and tell them what they want to hear.

Here is the article. (It really is a spectacle to witness the ingratiations being offered to Soros by his fellow Jews at the meeting described in this article. Okay, they are seeking funding and that is their job, but Soros’ comments should have been challenged forcefully.)

Reading Soros’ comments, you can’t help but feeling that this smart and decent man has been fighting off a powerful lifelong impulse to get down on his knees, and beg for forgiveness, for having been born.

Perfection

A friend of mine in New York ran a karate school. A native of Korea, his variant of karate had a particularly dance like, elegant feeling to it. He had a sign on the wall of his karate studio, hand written in large letters: “PERFECTION”.

Perfection and Thinking

There is something beautiful about the desire to find an underlying grid. The Platonic Ideal, the perfection of perfections. The search for a Theory of Everything in physics; the desire for precise, comprehensive answers to the bumpy questions.

It may be that, in the order of things, this is a human fallacy of assumption and arrogance. Maybe those grids that we find that do work are only of local utility; maybe there is no grid that will overlay things so they are completely right, explained, smoothly beautiful. Maybe Isaiah Berlin’s reminder that you had better not seek single solutions in free societies, or you will end up with a dictatorship of one kind or another, applies to everything. Welcome it all in, Berlin was saying, accept the ambiguities.

Perfection of Perception

This is the wisdom of art: you try something, look at it, think about it, come back to it, you try again, you sort through your judgments and presuppositions, you learn things and you change in the process. You achieve taste – real taste, hard won. It is a perfecting of our inner selves.

Small Perfections

A minor arena of such evolved taste is the printed book, perfectly designed, perfectly proportioned. Everyone who works with web pages or has formatted a document knows that there is a way to do it that looks good. That there is a way to do it, if you really take the time, that looks even better. We often are dismissive of this as cosmetic and shallow. So we leave it, saying: “what’s the difference, who has the time?”. But small perfections add up in a life.

That is what Jan Tschichold, the book design editor of Penguin Books, tried to do in designing books. He examined books to discover a canon of beauty of page design.

Tschichold spent many years examining mediaeval and Renaissance manuscripts and printed books to discover the underlying design “canon” governing the size of margins and the harmonious placement of text blocks. He measured countless books, and discovered that many of them used the extended proportion 2 : 3 : 4 : 6 for the size of their margins (inner, top, outer, and bottom). Furthermore, he discovered, if a page width to page height ratio of 2 : 3 was used, the type block was designed so that its height was the same as the width of the page. This “canon” of book design was used by Gutenberg, among others.

The beauty of the perfectly proportioned page. The beauty of geometry:

The revealing subtext of this article is the implicit admission that anti-Semitism is cynically used in the Arab world to evade responsibility for poverty and hopelessness having nothing to do with Jews or with Israel.

Mr. Chirac was moved to speak out by the latest attack on a Jewish site in France. Early on Saturday, a Jewish school building in Gagny, north of Paris, was destroyed in an arson attack.

Mr. Raffarin told reporters after the meeting that the government would earmark the equivalent of almost $8 billion for urban renewal in tough areas with heavy Muslim populations. He did not elaborate.

“He did not elaborate”. That’s good. Up until now, it has been easier for Arabs living in France to blame the Jews for their problems, and for the French to egg them on.

And, oh wait…

In an editorial Monday, the newspaper Le Monde acknowledged that the condemnation of Israeli policies by European political leaders “has lowered the borderline, evidently, which was already uncertain for some, between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.” But it also criticized an “increase, in the world and in France, of an ever more virulent Islamism,” which it said “no longer hesitates to make of the `Jews’ the cause of all the earth’s evils.”

Right, “evidently” you have been nurturing anti-Semitism there in France.

Who would believe it? You mean impoverished Arab communities were blaming the Jews for their problems? You mean hate for Israel was a cover for anti-Semitism?

Le Cirque du France, I am here to welcome you to planet earth.

The American Music Awards summed up what is wrong with popular culture. Instead of giving you a feel for contemporary music, it was more like a music industry trade show, where everything was joylessly, extravagantly, on display; individual pop franchises were being presented, each with its own music booth, without coherence.  It looked cynical, as though the producers thought the mere presence of the “stars” would be enough for the audience, which they must conceive to be as zoned out as they are.

Britney Spears’ robotic opening number summed it all up: everyone involved with the production was more interested in getting attention for what they had done than in presenting an exciting performance. From the blinking lights to the mindless distracting video playing behind her, from the zoom in/zoom out camera person to the cut out/cut back director, everyone was shouting: “look at me, look how exciting I am making this”. You could barely make out a song, if there was one, because the melody had been leached out as so much detritus. </p><p>The only thing missing at the American Music Awards was the energy and fun and sexiness of pop music.

[ via Denis Dutton ]

Well written article about the “Middle Mind”, a coined term meant to describe the lack of character, intellectual and moral, in current cultural thinking.

“What the Middle Mind does best,” White asserts, “is flatten distinctions. It turns culture into mush.” It’s a form of “management,” particularly of political beliefs.

It assumes its audience “doesn’t know anything.” It thrives on “the thoughtless and ephemeral enthusiasms it presents as culture.” It “doesn’t think.” Its motto could be, “Promise him anything, but give him TV.”

In our “Middle Mind” society, according to White, we lack authentic “thought,” because it’s either “prohibited,” or “presented in a fraudulent form,” or “quarantined to areas of national life where it is next to irrelevant.”

Instead of real thought, we get a “show-biz confidence game overseen by media moguls.” One consequence, he contends, is that we’ve become a “Done-Elsewhere-by-Somebody-Else-Culture.” We sign on to opinions and “narratives” instead of developing and thinking through our own.

The reviewer feels that the book under review itself falls into the errors it identifies. This happens so often in cultural criticism: initially the issues are refreshingly observed, real connections are made, but the effort to parse fails, the writer unable to explain or find true insight, the enterprise collapsing under the weight of its own ambition. So you are left with a stirring of the pot. Still, I like it when someone seeks to find a pattern, even if they, or anyone, can’t fully explain it. Insight is hard to come by, but it is still worth trying.

Our greatest writer about poetry, Helen Vendler, has written a book about Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Here are some excerpts:

[The Sonnets] deserve detailed and particular commentary because they comprise a virtual anthology of lyric possibility—in the poet’s choice of subgenres, in arrangements of words, in tone, in dramatic modeling of the inner life, in speech-acts.

The ethics of lyric writing lies in the accuracy of its representation of inner life, and in that alone.

The persistent wish to turn the sequence into a novel (or a drama) speaks to the interests of the sociopsychological critic, whose aim is less to inquire into the successful carrying-out of a literary project than to investigate the representation of gender relations…It does no good to act as if these lyrics were either a novel or a documentary of a lived life.

The ‘story’ of the Sonnets continues to fascinate readers, but lyric is both more and less than story…A coherent psychological account of the Sonnets is what the Sonnets exist to frustrate. They do not fully reward psychological criticism…any more than they do political criticism.

The true ‘actors’ in lyric are words, not ‘dramatic persons’ and the drama of any lyric is constituted by the successive entrances of new sets of words…Thus, the introduction of a new linguistic strategy is, in a sonnet, as interruptive and interesting as the entrance of a new character in a play.

A writer of Shakespeare’s seriousness writes from internal necessity—to do the best he can under his commission…and to perfect his art. What is the inner agenda of the Sonnets? What are their compositional motivations? What does a writer gain from working, over and over, in one subgenre? My brief answer is that Shakespeare learned to find strategies to enact feeling in form, feelings in forms, multiplying both to a superlative degree through 154 poems. No poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets.

I leave a record here of what one person has remarked so that others can compare their own noticings with mine. In such a way, we may advance our understanding of Shakespeare’s procedures as a working poet—that is, as a master of aesthetic strategy.

In 1996 Vendler wrote a piece for the NYRB in which, as an aside, she decried a recent decrease in NEH funding. (Vendler had served on an NEH Committee that gave awards.) I wrote to her saying that the NEH reinforced a relatively small cliquish group that awarded itself recursively, and that it was, in many ways, a failure in its stated enterprise because it reinforced this cliquishness by giving a new authority to the already applauded, some of whom were quite dubious in their achievement.

I went on to tell her that I felt individual artists, like myself, had little chance of winning such an award if someone well known didn’t take a liking – not the way to promote the arts. Institutionally the NEH has done a lot, and the arts do need subsidy. But I felt the NEH was a failure if its primary purpose was to support the individual artist, and I couldn’t understand how she could not realize that.

She wrote back saying that the poet A.R. Ammons shared my feelings and “maybe if I was an artist I would too.” A generous response from this brilliant critic.

The note itself was written on a postcard which had a reproduction on the front: a painting of figures involved in a wild scuffle. She joked “see verso for NEH Committee meeting.” Fighting for artists who really were good at these NEH meetings apparently involved a battle with possibly clueless fellow committee members. If such awards are to be given by the government, at least, in Vendler’s case, I would trust her judgment…

List of Vendler’s online articles

Great interview

I’ve heard John McWhorter, linguist and cultural critic, interviewed, and found him very impressive. How could you not find him impressive?

Self-taught in 12 languages – including Russian, Swedish, Swahili, Arabic and Hebrew, which he initially took up as a Philadelphia preschooler when he was 4 – he is a respected expert in Creole languages. (In his spare time, he is compiling the first written grammar of Saramaccan, a Creole language spoken by descendants of former slaves in Suriname.)

But I don’t agree with aspects of his argument in his new book:

As a linguist, he says, he knows that grammatical rules are arbitrary and that in casual conversation people have never abided by them. Rather, he argues, the fault lies with the collapse of the distinction between the written and the oral. Where formal, well-honed English was once de rigueur in public life, he argues, it has all but disappeared, supplanted by the indifferent cadences of speech and ultimately impairing our ability to think.

As the article makes clear, although McWhorter criticizes the colloquialization of language, he himself uses such language in his book. Sloppy thinking, which is what he is really trying to get at, I think, has little to do with the new freedoms in writing that have made newspapers and even scholarly articles easier to read.

Formality of speech, in a less obvious way, can hide sloppy thinking as well. With colloquial speech, you sense immediately the quality of the person. Colloquial speech is closer to a speaker’s personal rhythms and personality, it is revealing: if there is a perpetual fire drill going on in the interlocutor’s brain case, better to know it right away.

It is true that in some venues you do indeed want a formality of speech – a hoped for eloquence befitting serious circumstance; but the richness and energy in the language shouldn’t be mistaken for a dumbing down of discourse.

Here is the article

Nicholas Kristof wrote an interesting op-ed the other day. He said that the degree of animus expressed by the Democrats now, and the Republicans not long ago, reminded him of England of yesteryear, when the two parties had such hate for each other that nothing got done. He said it could happen here too.

I thought this letter to the Times was particularly good in suggesting some nuance:

Is it possible that the great and widening divide between left and right in this country…is, if not a creation of our media, at least nurtured into its present state by simplistic labeling?
States are not entirely red or blue, and people are not typically knee-jerk left- or right-wingers. There are Bush-hating anti-abortionists, tree-hugging war supporters, free-speech absolutists offended by popular culture, and even Republicans who think that Al Gore won.
People in the United States are full of nuances, but that is hard to convey and less immediately interesting than vitriol.
Joseph W. Thomas, South Bend, Ind.

As the letter writer says, the media polarizes. But he doesn’t emphasize enough that we label ourselves. The payoff is that we feel part of a group. The cost: the ability to fully examine the complexity of things, of which we are fully aware in quieter times. I don’t know what I’d say really if someone asked: “are you a conservative, or liberal, or libertarian, or…?”

Yes, is the answer. Tell me the issue, and I’ll be more specific…

I’ve been holding my breath, waiting for the protest marches to begin, since the recent revelation on Sixty Minutes of Arafat’s theft of 3 billion dollars from the Palestinian people.

I know that the people who protest on behalf of the Palestinian people, here, in Europe, worldwide, really sincerely care about the Palestinian people by expressing their hate for Israel and Jews, as Paul Krugman has explained to us. These caring people realize that 3 billion dollars, over the years, would have educated Palestinian children and given them a decent life and enabled the building of small and large businesses and a social infrastructure and top notch health care – producing a new generation ready to be a true democratic partner for peace with Israel.

I am holding my breath until the U.N., obsessed as it is with the welfare of the Palestinians – apparently to the exclusion of any other human beings (if they happen to be of the Jewish persuasion) – produces resolution after resolution condemning the thievery and stolen future of the Palestinian people by their beloved leader.

I am holding my breath waiting for the Nobel committee to rescind it’s “Peace” prize and issue a clear statement admitting their descent into self-parody.

I am holding my breath until the campus demonstrations start: the placards, the chanting – I know the deeply committed academic community will mount a massive campaign to divest, that is, demand return of contributions, from the Palestinian Authority, and of course, demand international intervention to remove Arafat. I know Oxford University will want to expel any Palestinian students as being representative of an unacceptable regime and explain that “it is nothing personal”.

I am holding my breath until the NYT begins its series: “The Palestinian Future: Portrait Of A Thief” with long in depth articles about the degree of the theft, the implementation of the crime, the greedy collaborators and knowing enablers, interviews, pictures. They may even have to pull some reporters from the security barrier to fully cover the true extent of the crime.

I’m holding my breath waiting for the in-house media investigations to begin, examining how this depravity was allowed to continue for years without giving it the attention it merits. I’m holding my breath waiting for Peter Jennings to ponderously intone: “Mr. Arafat appears to be a common criminal – ABC will have daily reports investigating the extent of his incredible decades long theft”.

I’m turning purple waiting.

Goodbye Funny Man

Art Carney died. He was a wonderful actor. He was a wonderful comic performer. The energy went up when he entered the scene. He had a baggy disheveled human quality that made you root for him. He was great in Harry and Tonto.

I remember there was a story in the press that the director Robert Altman was approached by the mean-spirited critic John Simon, who had written in a review that watching Carney made him “feel dirty”. Altman was so infuriated by that review that he said to Simon, “I don’t talk to people with yellow teeth” and walked away.

≡≡≡≡≡≡

Prediction

I think the resistance in Iraq is going to just collapse; just like that. I don’t think these murderers will be able to sustain their evil ways. One great success for our forces there and they’ll scatter to the special circle of hell reserved for these dead enders.

≡≡≡≡≡≡

Murder on the Bus

A terrible story: a young person, admired by all, shot on a bus by another teenager, on his way to an after school job:

Balboa High School student DeShawn Dawson died Saturday night at San Francisco General Hospital, according to the San Francisco medical examiner.

DeShawn, 15, was shot in the face Thursday afternoon while riding the 29 Sunset bus to his after-school job as a tutor at the San Francisco Boys and Girls Club.

Too many guns in the wrong hands.

Here is a photo of this young man