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Breast Bread

2008-03-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

A curious memento from today's New York Times:

On a flight from Paris to New York a year ago, [Michel Gondry] was served a piece of bread. And while it was most certainly the end of a baguette, he could see only one thing: the breast of his former girlfriend [...]
“I noticed that it had an unusual shape, and I started to eat it,” he said of the piece of bread. “And then it reminded me of her.”
So he took it home safe, and has kept it ever since, on a shelf.
“It’s a piece of bread,” he said. “I’m not going to cry over it. But there’s some sadness. It was a breakup that was never really explained. There wasn’t an argument.”
He does not really fetishize it, he said. But he can’t throw it out, either. Besides being an absurd yet tragic memento of his doomed flight on Air Love, it is also the most pure realization of Mr. Gondry’s double-duty approach to reality.

Monster Shopper

2006-02-16T16:20:00.000-08:00

In her latest Critical Shopper column in the New York Times, Alexandra Kuczynski, the obscenely wealthy daughter of the Wall Street banker and (despite his Franco-Polish descent and naturalized US citizenship) current prime minister of Peru, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, shrieks at the spot of uncleanliness diminishing her shopping pleasure at the SoHo Apple store.

After noting the absence of staff to wipe down with "antibacterial spray" the keyboards and mice ("gripped by grimy hands all day long"!), she continues in the eloquent literary style that has won her a prestigious column at the paper of record:

On my last visit I saw one young man sneeze voluminously into his hands, then type on the keyboard and grapple with the mouse. Yuck! Two seconds after he left the station, a woman and her child began to fiddle with the mouse and keyboard. Triple yuck!

Of course her disgust at the unhygienic displays of the young mother and child might have been slightly more affecting had she not, some paragraphs earlier, admitted to throwing an iPod Mini — "ear buds and all — into a garbage can on Fifth Avenue" in a fit of annoyance, thus polluting the city with the electronic device's toxic heavy metals without a second's compunction.

Her obsessive self-regard and narcissistic sense of entitlement have rarely been on better display.

China Dolls

2006-02-08T22:30:00.000-08:00

So how much of that 20-dollar Barbie doll "made in China" does China actually get? About 35 cents (or about three of her toes), according to an economist cited in this recent article.

Why? Because "often these days, 'Made in China' is actually 'Made by Someone Else' - by multinational companies from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States that are using China as the final assembly station in their vast global production networks" and who reap most of the profits.

"Analysts say this evolving global supply chain - which often tags goods at their final assembly stop - is increasingly out of step with global trade figures, which serve to inflate China into a bigger trade threat than it may actually be."

In other words, international sales that are being chalked up in China's favour (or disfavour, depending on your perspective) are actually being pocketed for the most part by American or other foreign companies.

"In a globalized world, bilateral trade figures are irrelevant," says the economist. "The trade balance between the U.S. and China is as irrelevant as the trade balance between New York and Minnesota."

Actually, not even cheap Chinese labour may save Barbie from her decline at the hands of the more popular and more ethnically diverse Bratz dolls. In a desperate move to revive slumping sales of the behind-the-times Barbie, Mattel has decided to revive her romance with Ken, who has undergone a makeover that includes a more manly jawline, a motorcycle jacket and cargo pants, and some attractive dabbling in Buddhism, reflecting perhaps his pseudo-Asian heritage.

Houellebecq on Parenting

2006-02-02T23:55:00.000-08:00

A recent biography of the French writer Michel Houellebecq confirmed what most readers probably already suspected, namely that much of his fictional work was taken directly from 'life'. The figure of the mother, in particular, has been singled out for especial abuse in his work. Like the appallingly negligent mother in Les Particules élémentaires, according to this article in the London Review of Books (via Arts & Letters Daily) Houellebecq’s mother “was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant lifestyle” (in the book she “joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys”).

As for Houllebecq’s father, well, he was dispensed with at the beginning of Plateforme:

Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.
As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker . . .’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not every day you have a death in the family.

Houellebecq himself was abandoned by his parents, “who set off across Africa in a 2CV five months after their son’s birth and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. Michel only saw his parents during the holidays. “‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a grave injustice had been done to me,’ he told one interviewer. ‘What I felt for them was mostly fear, as far as my father was concerned, and a clear disgust vis-à-vis my mother.’ ‘Until my death, I will remain an abandoned little child, howling from fear and cold, starved of caresses.’"

Indeed, Houellebecq condemns not only his parents but their generation of hippies and soixante-huitards for all manner of social disaster. In Atomised, the cult to which Bruno’s mother belongs turn from free love to ritual murder. In one of the most quoted passages from the book, Houllebecq writes: ‘Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.’

Given the monstrous injustice Houellebecq feels was commited against him by his parents, one might think he’d treat his own children a little better, in his books, if not in life. In life we learn that Houellebecq produced a child from a short early marriage. How sad, then, to read in his latest book, the following: ‘On the day of my son’s suicide, I made a tomato omelette . . . I had never loved that child: he was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father.’

Judging a Book ...

2006-01-29T23:25:00.000-08:00

On the backflap of the dustjacket to John Carey's new book What Good are the Arts? can be read the following brief biography:

John Carey is the Chief Book Reviewer for The Sunday Times (London). He has been at various points in his life a soldier, a television critic, a beekeeper, a bartender, and a professor of literature at Oxford.

He is also, evidently, an ass. The blurb alone was enough to convince me not to venture further. You can tell a lot about a book from its blurbs. Shameless boasting is not something that speaks well for a writer, particularly when he tries to mask it with fake humility. Indeed, there is something boastful about the way Carey allows himself to list even his humbler professions, namely beekeeper and bartender.

It reminded me of what is undoubtedly the best (or worst) example of obnoxious blurbing in recent times. That distinction belongs to Arthur Phillips, who had the following printed about himself on the dustjacket of his book Prague:

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. He lived in Budapest from 1990 to 1992 and now lives in Paris with his wife and son.

Gladiator Facts

2005-12-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

Among the other tidbits offered in this review of a new book about gladiators is the curious fact that Emperor Domitian once organized nighttime games in which female gladiators (gladiatrices?) fought dwarfs by torchlight.

The book, entitled The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport is by a professor of ancient history at the University of Amsterdam (named, rather curiously, Fik Meijer, a name that might be translated as "Fuck Better")

Other curious facts: Gladiators attended schools and belonged to unions, were fed a diet mostly of barley gruel (which earned them the nickname "barley-porridge-eaters"). Many committed suicide, few won freedom, and the Colosseum had no toilets. There was a taxonomy of gladiatorial types based on weapon and armor; a thraex (small shield, sword like a dagger), for example, was to be distinguished from a retiarius (shielded left arm, trident, net) .

Quote of the Day

2005-12-18T10:07:00.000-08:00

"One of the reasons that the word "communitarian" sounds so sickly and vapid--apart from the fact that it is sickly and vapid--is its inauthentic nostalgia. A sense of community and solidarity is either innate or it is nothing: If you have to call something a community these days ("the business community," "the Hispanic community," best and worst of all, "the intelligence community") then it almost certainly isn't one."

Christopher Hitchens in the Weekly Standard

Theroux on Africa

2005-12-16T11:48:00.000-08:00

That "Africa is fatally troubled and can be saved only by outside help - not to mention celebrities and charity concerts - is a destructive and misleading conceit," writes Paul Theroux in a much circulated but utterly self-regarding piece in the New York Times.

Ostensibly an attack on celebrity-led efforts to "save" Africa by more money, Theroux manages both to accuse and congratulate himself for his work there during the 1960s.

"Those of us who committed ourselves to being Peace Corps teachers in rural Malawi more than 40 years ago," he writes of himself, "are dismayed by what we see on our return visits and by all the news that has been reported recently from that unlucky, drought-stricken country. But we are more appalled by most of the proposed solutions." By proposed solutions he means not only massive monetary donations but also aid in the form of foreign doctors, nurses, and teachers of the kind that he himself was back in the day:

In the early and mid-1960's, we believed that Malawi would soon be self-sufficient in schoolteachers. And it would have been, except that rather than sending a limited wave of volunteers to train local instructors, for decades we kept on sending Peace Corps teachers. Malawians, who avoided teaching because the pay and status were low, came to depend on the American volunteers to teach in bush schools, while educated Malawians emigrated.

Volunteers like Theroux himself, in other words, prohibited or at any rate stunted the development of a native professoriat. But now we have pale-skinned Brad and Angelina "cuddling African children and lecturing the world on charity" while African leaders such as Bingu wa Mutharika inaugurate their regimes by the purchase of a fleet of Maybachs.

Theroux reserves the brunt of his attacks for the man known as Bono. The Irish rock star/humanitarian/wine snob "not only believes that he has the solution to Africa's ills, he is also shouting so loud that other people seem to trust his answers."

The problem, concludes Theroux, is that because Africa is "a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs, people who wish to convince the world of their worth." All this in a piece in which the writer himself, who showed his true colours in the Naipaul affair some years ago, tries to convince the world of his own moral superiority.

The Wrath of Roth

2005-12-16T08:14:00.000-08:00

A typically petulant Philip Roth accords an interview to a Danish journalist to promote his latest book in that country, and makes it a point not to smile, not even at the charming silly antics of the photographer.

"Do you ever smile at all?" asks the journalist.

"Yes," Roth responds, "when I'm hiding in the corner and no one sees it."

The interview proceeds in this way until the journalist, referring to the theme of ornery older men with nubile younger women found in Roth's books, brings up the scandal about a 68-year-old Danish author who was stripped of all honour after writing openly about a sexual relationship with an 18-year-old black girl in Haiti - the daughter of his servant.

Roth suddenly perks up, wanting to know every detail of the story, before pronouncing, expertly: "That author asked for it. Did he really write about how he had sex with the girl in his master bedroom? Yes, that's interesting. It turned political. If it was an affair with a 25-year-old student at the university in Port-au-Prince, it wouldn't have been a problem."

Such a quick and decisive assessment could only have come from a mind that has thought long and hard about the exact boundaries of sexual morality, about what one can and cannot get away with and the reasons why.

"You know," Roth reflects, " passion doesn't change with age, but you change - you become older. The thirst for women becomes more poignant. And there is a power in the pathos of sex that it didn't have before. The pathos of the female body becomes more insistent. The sexual passion is always deep, but it becomes deeper."

The interview concludes, appropriately, with a few reflections on death.

"Are you afraid of dying?" the interviewer asks.

Roth pauses. "Yes, I'm afraid. It's horrible... What else could I say? It's heartbreaking. It's unthinkable. It's incredible. Impossible."

What is he afraid of? "Oblivion. Of not being alive, quite simply, of not feeling life, not smelling it. But the difference between today and the fear of dying I had when I was 12, is that now I have a kind of resignation towards reality. It no longer feels like a great injustice that I have to die."

Canning the Pineapple

2005-12-12T09:11:00.000-08:00

Having inspected the enormous crockery filled with human body parts, after alighting on the lush, volcanic island of Guadaloupe in November of 1493, Columbus and his men spotted, then tasted, what must have seemed to their eyes an utterly fabulous object: a giant and grotesque fruit whose exterior was segmented like a pine cone but whose interior was rather apple-like, at least to the limited European taste of the time.

A new "biography" of the pine-apple by Fran Beauman, reviewed recently in the Times of London, reminds us again just how extraordinary this now rather common fruit actually is.

So unique was the first succulent bite that John Locke, in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” asserted the impossibility of knowing the “Relish” (and Platonic Idea) of the fruit before actually trying it empirically. Of course in the 1670s, the Pine-Apple was the “ultimate in inaccessible luxury fruit.” Once one got past its rebarbative exterior, with its "outrageous green spikes" that made it something of the rhinocerous of fruits, and exposed its brilliant yellow (and at that time greenish) meat, one could experience a terrific explosion of complex flavours, from "the most delicate in the Peach, the Strawberry, the Muscadine Grape and the Pippin” to "the Quince and the Melon."

It should come as no suprise therefore that the pineapple, that sacred monster of fruits, became a symbol of status amongst, for example, the English aristocracy:

Meanwhile, the pineapple itself began to be used as an ornament at the dinner table. Especially prized were English pineapples, grown with absurd labours in a hothouse “pinery”, an accessory to a country estate which, says Beauman, “every self-respecting aristocrat” aspired to possess. Beauman calculates that once all the costs of a pinery are considered – a stock of costly pineapple plants and pots and a glasshouse to contain them, a 40-foot stove to heat the glasshouse, a garden boy to tend the stove full-time – the expense of a single English-raised pineapple in the second half of the eighteenth century was about £80, or £5,000 in today’s money.

As the reviewer puts it, this is a "Tocquevillean book, regretting the decline in mystery that came with the mass production of pineapple, while at the same time recognizing the democratic benefits of commerce. " In Victorian times, the reviewer explains rather sniffily, the aspiring middle-class might have gone so far as to acquire pineapples for hire, often overripe from extended abuse, for special occasions "in order to appear grand, praying that no one would actually attempt to cut a slice."

By the 1850s, "costermongers sold pineapple by the piece – 'a taste of paradise for just a penny a slice.'" Canning and mass availability came soon after. And today, we hardly give this noble, primitive delicious fruit a second's thought.

The Sad Short Life of Van Tuong Nguyen

2005-12-02T23:26:00.000-08:00

On 12 December 2002 Van Tuong Nguyen, a 22 year-old Australian citizen of Vietnamese origin, was arrested at Singapore's Changi airport in transit from Cambodia to Australia after there was discovered upon his person 13.9 ounces of pure heroin. In March 2004 he was convicted under Singapore's strict "Misuse of Drugs Act," which carries a mandatory death sentence for anyone found guilty of trafficking in more than 15 grams of heroin. Nguyen was sentenced, as they say, to hang by the neck until dead.

Van and his identical twin brother, Khoa, were born on 17 August 1980 in a refugee camp in southern Thailand. Their mother, Kim, had just fled her native Vietnam in a makeshift boat. The boys' grandfather had worked for a French company and his brother for the Americans; both were imprisoned by the North Vietnamese after the Americans, in April 1975, shredded their documents and fled their embassy by air, as their South Vietnamese collaborators scaled the walls and leapt for the helicopters.

The birth was by caesarian, so Kim wasn't sure which son had been born first. Because Van was a little heavier at birth, she designated him the "older brother," a decision with weighty consequences, as it fell upon the "first-born" son to uphold the family name and assume the burden of responsibility.

Although Kim believed her infant sons were fated to spend their childhood amid the misery and squalor of the refugee camp, she was able to make her way to Australia with her boys on her back when they were six months old, eventually settling in Melbourne.

Annie Hawkins, a kindergarten teacher at St. Ignatius Kindergarten, where Van and Khoa were enrolled, remembered the four-year-olds as sad but inseparable boys, clinging to each other and speaking in Vietnamese. It was the first time they'd been separated from their mother. But despite their troubles, she said, they were "the most delightful little boys, full of energy and very loving - and very funny." Even at that age, moreover, Van took the role of protector and always ensured Khoa was happy and safe, a role that several teachers and friends down the year would confirm.

Kim remarried in 1989, but her new husband secretly beat the boys, something she discovered on her own, as the boys never told her. In high school, it became clearer that although the boys were identical, as someone put it, they were completely different. Van was a good student, well mannered and responsible, while Khoa had started to rebel, dabbling in drugs and alcohol and eventually graduating to heroin while running up $30,000 in debts. Khoa served time for drug-trafficking offences and was released from prison in July 2002.

It was to pay off Khoa's debts that Van agreed, in December of 2002, to carry the drugs from Cambodia to Australia via Singapore, his first trip outside of Australia since he'd arrived.

As Van sat in prison, the legal efforts to mitigate the sentence began to exhaust themselves. A fellow inmate, the man scheduled to hang before Van, described him as a "baby among hardened criminals."

The Singaporean government rejected all appeals by the Australian legal team that was working the Nguyen case, as well as by the diplomatic envoys of the Australian government. It was beginning to look like Van Truong Nguyen would die shortly on a noose. Kim and Khoa Nguyen flew to Singapore and made personal appeals.

In a particularly cruel twist, Singaporean laws forbid any physical contact between death row inmates and family members prior to execution for reason of the potentially "traumatising" effect such contact can have on the condemned. As the situation began to look hopeless, Kim Nguyen's efforts became focused on merely hugging her child, whom she had not touched in years, one last time before he died. The Singaporean prime minister, however, refused even this small request. Only when the Australian prime minister himself personally intervened did the Singaporean government agree to relax the restriction and allow Kim Nguyen to hold Van's hand. Nevertheless, a hug was out of the question.

On the day before the scheduled execution, Kim Nguyen reached her hand through a steel grille to touch the hand of her son for some moments. Later, she told a lawyer that she was allowed so much as to touch his face and hair, which she found to be "a great comfort." During their brief conversation, Van told her he was frightened to die, particularly at so young an age, but had come to accept his fate.

This morning at dawn, Van Truong Nguyen, clutching his rosary beads and reciting psalm 23 again and again, walked through the shadow of the valley of death to the gallows where he was hanged by the neck until he was dead.

Everything you always wanted to know about...

2005-11-27T21:44:00.000-08:00

...Franz Kafka, beginning with the the evening of 13 August 1912, when Kafka met Felice Bauer. A few days later, he composed, in a single, one might say fatal, night, his miniature masterpiece, "The Judgement," that perfect microcosm of what would come to be recognised as the "Kafkaesque" universe at large, analyzed rather nicely as follows:

the father figure who is both overpowering and dirty, the hollow rationality of the narrator, the juridical structures imposed on life, the dream logic of the plot, and last but not least, the flow of the story perpetually at odds with the hopes and expectations of the hero.

Nevertheless, Kafka wrote to Bauer in 1913: "Are you finding any meaning in 'The Judgment,' I mean some straightforward, coherent meaning that can be followed? I am not finding any and I am also unable to explain anything in it."

The summary and citation are from a newly translated and apparently excellent biography of Kafka by Reiner Stach, reviewed by Michael Dirda.

Meanwhile, in the months before he would see Bauer again, Kafka writes to her that "he lives for literature alone," in Dirda's summary, "that he is unsociable, fearful, sickly, unhealthily thin, self-pitying, obsessive, neurotic, without interest in children and probably incapable of sexual intercourse. He has nothing to offer her, except his devotion -- and he's not even sure about that, since it might interfere with his writing."

"Sex with you," as the character Pam says in Woody Allen's Everything you wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask), to cite the one usage of the adjective that does not make me cringe a little, "is really a Kafkaesque experience." Sex with Kafka, as readers of his biographies invariably discover, was much weirder perhaps. But who's asking?

Insult & Banality

2005-11-21T12:04:00.000-08:00

It seems that the latest film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice was given a different ending for its American audience, described by Alessandra Stanley as follows: "a swoony moonlit scene of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in dishabille, kissing and cooing in a post-coital clinch."

This final scene in the boudoir, responds a former head of the Jane Austen Society of North America eloquently, "insults the audience with its banality."

Taboos, not Tattoos

2005-11-21T11:41:00.000-08:00

Tattoos are a sign of civilization's end, says Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) who, while not quite advocating a legal proscription, still makes the aesthetic, psychological, and cultural case against them as follows:

First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.
Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.
And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

In sum, tattoos are tasteless, indulgent, and aggressive (if not quite criminal). Corresponding to these three familiar arguments are the three classic types that embody them: the philistine, the narcissist, and the lout, respectively, all of whom would appear to be in acendancy in the Western world today. Uncoincidentally, these are also Dalrymple's usual suspects for civilization's decline. How convenient that they're tattooed for identification.

The problem, as Dalrymple soon discovers when queried on the subject by a Dutch interlocutor, is that while his arguments may (or may not—I, like the Dutch, make no judgements of morality or value here) be aesthetically, intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and morally dispositive, the legal case is the only one that really matters, and only barely at that. For in the absence of any social or moral authority such as may have been provided by Church and Custom, all human activity is increasingly judged solely from the viewpoint of the Law, a state of affairs that outrages Dalrymple when his interviewer draws it to his attention:

But the correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.

If one cannot legislate morality, then morality, in the absence of any other authority, must go the way of other quaint beliefs, such as those in God and progress, and end up as mere superstition, which is where many assume it began life in the first place. To reconfer upon Superstition the full powers and authority of the Law, without actually making it written law, is the difficult task that lies before those who would try to reverse this trajectory of long moral decline.

What Dalrymple laments in fact is the absence of taboo, another word of Polynesian origin that has entered the Western lexicon by the hand of James Cook. If modern Western youth have appropriated for themselves the tribal body-adornment of primitive societies, they have ignored or discounted its religio-ritual context. In other words, they've freely adopted the profane while rejecting everything sacred.

What is lacking today is a universal source of awe and fear, whether this source be a monotheistic God or, what may amount to the same according to Georges Bataille, exposed female genitalia or other magical, pre-rationalist forces.

Until then, the droves of philistines, narcissists and louts will continue to uphold our new, or neo-primitivist, tradition of indulgence without limit, tattoos without taboos.

The Eternal Colonel

2005-11-15T19:01:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has spent some time in Asia can attest to the strange popularity in those lands, so far removed from the Kentucky pastures, of the restaurant chain known today as KFC. It is not, however, to the universal appeal of deep-fried battered chicken that I attribute the franchise's success, but to the universal appeal of its icon, Colonel Sanders himself, whose smiling, near life-size replica in plastic seems uncannily more at home in Asia than at home.

Of course we all resemble each other as we age—the hair turns white, eyes sag, ambitions fade, regardless of our race—culminating naturally in the greatest equalizer of all, death. But the Colonel's decidedly Asiatic cast cannot be chalked up to age alone. As some have remarked, he looks like a podgier (and yes, jollier) version of Ho Chi Minh—what Ho Chi Minh might have turned into had he been given a lifetime’s supply of counterrevolutionary fried chicken à la Kentuckienne.

I mention this by way of introduction to another curious fact concerning the Colonel which appears in this recent article about the much feared madrasas of Pakistan’s Nort-West Frontier Province. A Taliban-like regime has been imposed there by radical Islamist political parties, “banning the public performance of music and depictions of human form. The one exception to this, bizarrely, is the image of Colonel Sanders outside the new Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Peshawar. This was apparently because the Colonel was judged to be sporting a properly Islamic beard, and so was spared the iconoclasm imposed elsewhere.”

The enormity of such a decision becomes apparent when one stops to consider the kinds of icons that the Taliban could not spare; for example, the giant Bamiyan Buddhas that were carved out of a cliffside well over a thousand years ago, the only monuments of their kind, ordered destroyed by Mullah Mohammed Omar. Already defaced beyond recognition and amputated, the Buddhas resisted their destruction as anti-aircraft weapons exploded upon them, succumbing in the end only to massive quantities of dynamite.

Colonel Sanders, you might say, survived this fanatic destruction of false idols by just the hair on his chin. Perhaps when all the monuments of civilization lie in waste and ruins, today's KFC statuary in durable plastic will still stand smiling, no doubt in Asia.

Evolution of a Nobel Laureate

2005-11-13T00:20:00.000-08:00

In Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee told the story of a disgraced professor whose daughter is impregnated in the course of a gang-rape by three black assailants in South Africa. In Elizabeth Costello, he told the story of an Australian writer who delivers searing lectures on animal rights in which the production of meat is likened to industrial genocide. Now, in Slow Man, Coetzee tells the story of a lonely, crippled photographer who meets a woman named ... Elizabeth Costello.

"A cartoon version of this," writes John Lanchester in the NY Review of Books, "would be to say that Coetzee has moved from a concern about human beings to a concern about animal beings to a concern about fictional beings."

Thai-rade

2005-11-12T23:49:00.000-08:00

The G-6 nations, from a Thai point of view:

This is how we count the days. June: the Germans come to the Island - football cleats, big T-shirts, thick tongues - speaking like spitting. July: the Italians, the French, the British, the Americans. The Italians like pad thai, its affinity with spaghetti. They like light fabrics, sunglasses, leather sandals. The French like plump girls, rambutans, disco music, baring their breasts. The British are here to work on their pasty complexions, their penchant for hashish. Americans are the fattest, the stingiest of the bunch. They may pretend to like pad thai or grilled prawns or the occasional curry, but twice a week they need their culinary comforts, their hamburgers and their pizzas. They're also the worst drunks. Never get too close to a drunk American. August brings the Japanese. Stay close to them. Never underestimate the power of the yen. Everything's cheap with imperial monies in hand and they're too polite to bargain. By the end of August, when the monsoon starts to blow, they're all consorting, slapping each other's backs, slipping each other drugs, sleeping with each other, sipping their liquor under the pink lights of the Island's bars. By September they've all deserted, leaving the Island to the Aussies and the Chinese, who are so omnipresent one need not mention them at all. Ma says, "Pussy and elephants. That's all these people want."

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing

License and Senility

2005-11-09T22:06:00.000-08:00

The recent translation of Gabriel García Márquez's frankly titled Memoria de mis putas tristes has occasioned a few reviews, mildly disapproving for the most part, with one very admiring, by John Updike, and one very damning, by Adam Kirsch. From the shrill and sure tone of his writings one surmises that Kirsch is not many summers out of private school (a "Harvard '97" turns up next to his name, soon enough, when googled), and it is not insignificant, for reasons that in the next paragraph become clear, that Memoria should be most favorably judged by its maturest reviewer (Harvard '54) and utterly misjudged by its greenest. Both reviews are worth reading for that reason, even if neither gets it right.

The book's plot (and, indeed, problem) is summed up in its opening line. As Updike notes, García Márquez is "a master of the arresting first sentence":

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.
[El año de mis noventa años quise regalarme una noche de amor loco con una adolescente virgen.]

Arresting indeed, in every sense of the word (including, potentially, the cardiological and constabulary). If Kirsch never seems to recover from the shock of this typically Marquezian opening, both frank and fanciful at once like much of the author's magic realism (the 'magic,' as Kirsch puts it, "annuls the 'realism'..."), Updike appears weirdly unflapped, merely noting the proximity between the author's age and that of the narrator and adding that many of the details seem "lifted" from García Márquez's own life. He no doubt found unnecessary even to mention what Kirsch felt compelled to spell out, namely that "[t]he purchase of a child prostitute, if it were reported in a newspaper rather than imagined in a novel, is just the kind of exploitation most likely to enrage the very people who read Mr. Garcia Marquez," an exploitation that Kirsch feels equally compelled to denounce as "monstrous" and "pathetic."

The translation, however, by the much admired Edith Grossman, gives pause only for its clumsiness. There are a couple of words too many here ("wanted to give myself the gift of a night of..."), while a crucial equivocation in the expression "amor loco" goes entirely unregistered (Grossman's "wild love" captures the indelicacy of the proposition but admits none of its madness).

A better translation, therefore, more faithful and fluent at the same time, might have run: "The year of my nintieth birthday I wanted to award myself a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin."

Finally, still with regard to the translation, it is remarkable that no review has mentioned the trouble with its title, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. "Sad whores" evidently struck Grossman as either too harsh, since it includes the subjective sense of "sad" (corresponding to the Spanish tristes putas, as opposed to the objective putas tristes of the title) or too unpoetic—or both. García Márquez, at any rate, did not write putas melancólicas. Between sad and melancholy could not a more deserving word be found? Even Memories of My Unhappy Whores would have made for a happier, if not entirely felicitous, solution.

Many have attested to the quality of Grossman's translation, but given the not insignificant problems with both its title and its first sentence, which are surely two of the most, if not the two most, important lines of the work to be translated, one remains skeptical.

Pedalling the Moonlight Sonata

2005-11-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

Some years ago there appeared on my television screen a former centerfold model in an interview for an entertainment "news" segment. To demonstrate to the audience that she wasn't just another overstuffed bodice, I recall, she carefully lowered her intensely trained bottom onto a piano bench and proceeded to finger out the first few notes of a familiar piece, Beethoven's Opus 27 no. 2 in C-sharp minor, popularly known as the "Moonlight" Sonata.

This was particularly painful for me to witness because the Adagio of Opus 27 no. 2 happens to be one of the few works I can play on the piano, an instrument at which I am otherwise inept.

The segment convinced me of three things: one, anyone can play the Moonlight Sonata; two, few can play it well; and three, never to play it before an audience unless you're one of the few mentioned in number two (unless of course you're merely trying to demonstrate number one, and even then...)

The reason it's so difficult to play well, or expressively, is precisely because it's so easy to play technically, if one can allow such a distinction. In other words, the simpler the piece, the more latitude there will be in interpretation and feeling. In the case of the Moonlight Sonata this latitude in interpretation is most evident in the greatly various tempos and rhythms with which performers have chosen to play the work, from the glacially slow to the rather quick and bouncy.

The entire piece could be said to be nothing but feel and atmosphere, with no hummable melody, the right hand occupied almost entirely with its arpeggiated triplets, played now with a pulsating rhythm that lends the piece a forward momentum, now more evenly and repetitively, without apparent progress.

Yet another pressing difficulty in interpretation is its pedal work. The issue arises again in a review of a new biography of Beethoven by Edmond Morris in today's NY Times Book Review. According to Morris:

Beethoven directed that the first movement of his "Moonlight" Sonata should be played with "both pedals of the piano . . . held down nonstop." That isn't true. In fact, Morris goes on to quote the Italian phrase with which Beethoven inscribed his instructions for the pedals (Italian having been, back then, the lingua franca of European music), and, quite plainly, it mentions only one of the pedals, and even then is ambiguous about how often that pedal should be used.

What the reviewer fails to mention, however, is that the construction of pianos changed radically during Beethoven's lifetime and that modern instruments have a longer sustain time which makes the continuous application of the damper (or 'sustain') pedal not only unnecessary but undesirable. In the case of the Moonlight Sonata, however, the decay rate of unpedalled notes stands further retardation; otherwise one risks losing the sympathetic vibrations and ensuing harmonic play that occur with undampered strings.

One modern solution to this problem is the technique of "half-pedalling", whereby the pedal is only partially depressed. But on many pianos, such as the Steinway baby grand I used to dishonour with my playing, the pedal action is shallow enough to discourage such an apparently simple pedœuvre.

Further complicating the picture is the added direction by Beethoven that the whole piece be played "as delicately as possible," indeed pianissimo. How one is to achieve that on a modern piano with the dampers continuously disengaged is far from evident. Hence the experiment with double-pedalling, which produces a somewhat mysterious sound, both hushed and resonant.

It is a lot simpler at any rate for the hopeless amateur to keep both pedals pressed the entire time than to have to mind one's feet as well as one's fingers. I suspect the centerfold pianist felt the same, but then again, few in the audience would have been watching her feet. Or her fingers for that matter.

Of Mice and Men

2005-11-06T13:10:00.000-08:00

Robert Sapolsky's new book, Monkeyluv, contains this curious fact, cited in a review in today's NY Times Book Review, namely that there is "a parasite that infects the brains of rats without any effect on their behavior except that they lose their instinctual aversion to the smell of cats and, instead, are drawn to it. Needless to say, such absurdly obliging prey is quickly gobbled up: bad for the rat but great for the parasite, since it can only reproduce inside a cat host. The next generation hitches a ride out on the cat's feces, which are ingested by rats to start the cycle over again."

A quick google search (keywords: parasite rat brain cat feces) netted several articles on the topic, one of which began with the following statement : "Toxoplasma gondii is a heteroxenic coccidian parasite of felids with an unusually wide range of intermediate and paratenic hosts, including humans." Confused but intrigued, I read on: "...infected rats have higher activity levels, lower neophobia, reduced learning capacity and lowered level of avoidance of cat odour." In other words, they become hyperactive and thrill-seeking while demonstrating a fatal combination of stupidity and arrogance.

Naturally one wonders whether other paratenic hosts exhibit the same symptoms...

Wisest in the Land

2005-10-13T08:21:00.000-07:00

The Smoking Gun has published some of the personal correspondence between Harriet Miers and the president:

In a 1997 Hallmark greeting card (adorned with a photo of a dog), Miers sent along belated birthday wishes and noted that "You are the best governor ever--deserving of great respect!"

Although hand-written, the dash is rendered as two short strokes--the way it might appear typographically. The entire note is written with the curlicued flourishes and multiple exclamation-points of a giddy adolescent. The card ends with a couple of solecisms: "At least for thirty days--[sic] you are not younger than me [sic]."

Eating their Words

2005-10-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

Former food critic for the New York Times, William "Biff" Grimes reviews the new Sartre/Beauvoir biography today (already examined in a previous post)

As a book reviewer Grimes is not entirely incompetent; he holds a PhD in English from the University of Chicago for whatever that's worth (not much, in my book). As with his restaurant reviews, he manages to be both mildly intelligent and amusing on occasion. He describes Sartre, for example, as a "Hugh Hefner — without the bathrobe, but with a more highly evolved line of patter."

What interested me, however, was not his opinion of the book, nor his opinion of Sartre/Beauvoir for that matter, but the evolution of his position at the Times. When he gave up the restaurant gig, he was widely acknowledged to be at the top of his game. Where does one go from there? Apparently wherever one wants.

As cultural critic extraordinaire he had his pick of assignments, including the ridiculously self-indulgent. His first non-restaurant review at the Times was a review of a new Lamborghini valued at nearly $300,000. At the time, he gushed:

For decades I dreamed of getting my hands on a top-flight Euro sports car, the kind of precision-tuned mechanical marvel that gives out a throaty, animal roar when a toe tickles the accelerator.
It never happened - until a few weeks ago, when I lowered my now middle-aged frame, creaking and groaning, into a 2004 silver Lamborghini Murciélago.
There's no question that the Lambo qualified for a starring role in my personal fantasy.

So when a critic in mid-life crisis wants to take a break from the grueling schedule of having to dine out at some of the world's finest restaurants three times a week at the man's expense, what does he do? Why, he reviews books about French philosophers of course (after taking the Lambo out for a spin naturally).

Book reviews, frankly, require the least amount of effort or talent to write up at the Times. It's what you do when you want to start smelling the roses, or when you're put out to pasture. That is why former head film critic Janet Maslin, whose movie reviews were risibly uncritical, now writes rather dreadful book reviews on cruise control after being dumped unceremoniously from the movies desk. (The film critic falls somewhere between the restaurant and the book reviewer in the scheme of things; thus the critical hierarchy of activities, from most to least prestigious, runs: eating food, seeing movies, and reading books.)

Grimes replacement at the foodie desk, which is understandably the most coveted position at the paper, is Frank Bruni, former Rome bureau chief for the Times. In today's issue he reviews a Park Slope Italian eatery that specializes in baby meats and vegetables.

"Youth must be served," he notes archly, before quoting this bit of dialogue between his dinner companion and a server:

"Are the artichokes really, really young?"
The server didn't miss a beat. "They're mewling," he said.

Ah, when even the waiters are more literate than today's readers, no wonder the restaurant critic is infinitely more important than the book reviewer.

"Onanist Judge" May Grab Gavel Again

2005-09-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

If you're a judge who enjoys masturbating in open court, you might want to think about moving to liberal France, where such activities won't necessarily get you kicked off the bench.

Unlike Donald Thompson, the American judge facing up to 30 years in prison for "punishing" himself under his robes, Philippe Zamour, a French judge also caught in delicto flagrante, not only was judged "not responsible" for his actions, which are not disputed, but in theory could soon preside again in a French court.

A magistrate at the correctional court of Angoulême, Zamour was caught masturbating in full session in October 2003 and was suspended from duties at that time. Last week he went before a disciplinary hearing by a unique council overseeing the French judiciary known as the Conseil supérieur de la magistrature to determine if any sanctions would be imposed on him and to decide if he would be able to retain his position.

The charge of "sexual exhibition" against him had been dismissed in fact last January, when he was diagnosed as suffering from "schizophrenic dysthymic psychosis," a finding that absolved him from any criminal responsibility for his actions and thus prevented any disciplinary sanctions from being imposed by the council.

Since regional medical authorities had determined that Zamour, who in the meantime has been seen "shopping in his robes or imitating [the French Elvis] Johnny Hallyday," is able to work again on a part-time basis, the prospect of defendants going up before the "onanist judge," as he is known, may force the hand of French officials.

One report quotes a source as saying that the Ministry of Justice will probably refuse to nominate him for another jurisdiction while keeping him on the official payroll, effectively remunerating him to stay at home where he can hold court all by himself.

Purposelessly Driven Lives

2005-09-28T08:14:00.000-07:00

When the same self-help book, a cult favorite, figures prominently in two news stories on the same day, both involving multiple murderers, it ought to raise some eyebrows.

According to this report, the young mother who was extolled as a heroine last March when she persuaded her kidnapper to release her after reading passages from the Christian self-help guide The Purpose Driven Life has now admitted that she was a drug addict at the time and had given her kidnapper the crystalline methamphetamines she had on her during the ordeal.

Immediately embraced at the time by Christian evangelicals and social conservatives and held up as an example of the redemptive power of faith, Ashley Smith, already the recipient of $70,000 in rewards, is cashing in once again on her story with a new book from the same publishing unit that by no coincidence brought us The Purpose Driven Life.

Bearing the apparently modest but in fact grossly self-promoting title, Unlikely Angel, the book reveals that Smith not only handed the accused rapist/murderer Brian Nichols her stash of crystal meth — a drug that, because it stimulates the nervous system and lowers moral inhibitions, is associated with risky and perverse sexual acts — but she then "lifted up her tank top several inches to reveal a five-inch scar down the center of her torso — the aftermath of a car wreck caused by drug-induced psychosis," purportedly to warn him about the consequences of irresponsible drug use.

In a column last April that manages to be at once bitter and triumphalist, Ann Coulter wrote of the incident: "Smith could see God's hand in a multiple murderer holding her hostage. By showing him genuine Christian love, Smith turned Nichols from a beast to a brother in Christ. This phenomenon, utterly unknown to liberals, is what's known as a 'miracle.'" Apparently touched by the miraculous power of The Purpose Driven Life, Coulter concludes without her typical cynicism: "When the police arrived, Nichols surrendered without incident, an utterly transformed human being." Now we know what Smith actually showed him, what induced the so-called "miracle," and in what Nichols' apparent "transformation" consisted.

The second story is about an ex-employee at the Verla nail-polish factory in the Hudson Valley who returned to the premises and discharged bullets into the heads of the two owners and an office manager, before killing himself. He'd been fired after child pornography was discovered downloaded on his office computer. He'd also been previously arrested for "unlawful dealings with a child." Ann Coulter, to her credit this time, did not embrace this man. However, shortly before the multiple murders, he'd bought a copy of — wait for it — The Purpose Driven Life, a book that of course inculcates the idea that every action and event in the world is part of God's plan for us.

Wanted: Revolution

2005-09-26T23:48:00.000-07:00

And the award for country most in need of revolution goes to ... Swaziland.

According to this BBC report, the absolute monarch of the impoverished land that has the highest HIV rate in the world, approaching one in two, has selected his 13th wife, a 17-year-old girl who will now drop out of school to become his bride after travelling to South Africa to undergo the requisite HIV test.

By custom, she does not officially become his wife until he impregnates her.

King Mswati III, who rules by absolute fiat, was criticised some years ago when he declared a ban on all sexual relations for girls under 18 as his principle anti-AIDS policy and then violated it two months later by taking an underaged girl as his ninth wife, for which he fined himself one cow.

Having learned his lesson this time, the king recently lifted the openly ridiculed teen sex ban, which had affected nearly half the population in a country where life expectancy is under 35.

At 36, the Swazi monarch married his twelfth wife, aged 18, in June, less than three weeks after marrying his eleventh. He has 27 children.

Two-thirds of the immiserated Swazi population earn less than a dollar a day, and about one-third rely on food aid for survival, while the regime spends 100 million emalangeni ($16m) to refurbish palaces for the king's wives, each of whom also receives a BMW automobile at her disposal. Last year the king purchased a luxury Maybach for himself valued at half a million dollars.

Earlier this week, trade unions held a general strike to protest at a new constitution, which they said would entrench the king's powers...

Is it time to quietly change the locks at Versailles?

Just a Couple of Couples

2005-09-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's memoir about surviving her husband's sudden death, was published today in the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Nine months and five days ago, at approximately 9 o'clock on the evening of December 30, 2003, my husband, John Gregory Dunne, appeared to (or did) experience, at the table where he and I had just sat down to dinner in the living room of our apartment in New York, a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death.

At the time, their only child, Quintana, lay unconscious in an intensive-care unit fighting for her own life after a severe case of pneumonia and septic shock. The night of Dunne's death, the couple had gone to see her in a nearby hospital. Just a few weeks ago, as the book was being readied for market, Quintana passed away, having never fully recovered from the ailment that beset her at the time of her father's death.

Didion's grief is overwhelming, as one can not imagine. The excerpts make for difficult reading in more than one sense, and their extra-therapeutic value is not immediately evident. What does one make, for example, of the following paragraph about Didion's consent to have her husband's body autopsied?:

I knew exactly what occurred, the chest open like a chicken in a butcher's case, the face peeled down, the scale on which the organs are weighed. I had seen homicide detectives avert their eyes from an autopsy in progress. I still wanted one. I needed to know how and why and when it had happened. In fact I wanted to be in the room when they did it …

What Didion seems to offer is an anatomy of grief, from its precise physical symptoms—tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, need for sighing..."—to the repeated psychic shock, for example, of having to remember every morning upon waking why again one is alone. They may not have been Sartre and Beauvoir, but both Didion and Dunne were writers of some repute, and their life together is weaved by the words they shared, including these words of Gerard Manley Hopkins which seem both to intensify and to assuage her pain: I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

And speaking of Sartre and Beauvoir, even they were no Sartre and Beauvoir, as one is reminded again and again in reading Louis Menand's recent review in the New Yorker of the latest book on the topic, Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Himself an “agressively” ugly man, as Menand is not the first to spell out, Sartre preferred the company of women. Moreover, he preferred pretty women, whatever their other qualities (or lack thereof), to ugly ones. Perhaps one might have expected otherwise from someone who seemed to devote himself to the life of the mind. But the body, too, offers food for thought, just as thoughts, in turn can be peddled like flesh and indeed for flesh. (Sartre famously said that the primary motive behind his philosophical project was to seduce women.)

One cannot begin to understand his Existentialism, at any rate, without first grasping the fact that his is the philosophy of an essentially—and necessarily—ugly man. That might sound like reproof and reduction; it is neither. Ugliness, as one should not fail to see, is profound.

Menand pauses but a second to consider Sartre’s ugliness, summarized entirely in one line:

Sartre was about five feet tall, and he had lost almost all the sight in his right eye when he was three; he dressed in oversized clothes, with no sense of fashion; his skin and teeth suggested an indifference to hygiene.

One could put it even more baldly: Sartre was short, walleyed, ill-dressed, mal-odored and yellow-teethed. It is an indication of the banality of the author’s observations on this score that he describes Sartre’s physical repulsiveness simply as a thing to be overcome, or ignored, as if Sartre seduced women despite his ugliness rather than in spite of it. Sartre had a wandering eye, as they say, because he literally had a wandering eye (il est louche parce qu’il louche, in French). Somewhat less banal is the observation that not only would Sartre have been far less adept at the art of seduction, had he cut a handsomer figure, but his philosophy couldn't have possibly made out as well, since intellectual bedazzlement was precisely the art he'd developed, by his own admission, to seduce women.

Sartre’s pursuit of pretty girls was part and parcel, origin and end, of a philosophy that championed freedom over necessity, existence over essence; the kind of free existence, for example, that would allow one to escape the essential condition—if not the condemnation–of a congenital ugliness. His “preference,” however, could not have exercised in Beauvoir, whose intellect (unlike her ego) might have surprassed even that of Sartre, a little pain, and her probings in that regard are both personal and philosophical, as she begins to detect here the deep fissures in a grand system of self-rationalisation.

The contradictions between freedom and faith ultimately proved fatal for Existentialism, as it nearly did for their personal relationship; and nowhere was Sartre’s own bad faith more in evidence than in the famous “pact” he made with Beauvoir, a pact that was effectively sexual license disguised as metaphysical freedom. Theirs was an “essential” love, cooed Sartre, as opposed to the “contingent” affairs that became their apparent obsession and existence. Thus they were able to deceive each other while remaining true to one another; to be unfaithful, in other words, in good faith. That this arrangement survived such internal contradictions is a mystery that no books other than their own can explain.

Menand takes some relish in describing the quasi-incestuous pairings that united Beauvoir, and the young female students she seduced and then abandoned, to Sartre. Perhaps she was “excited by the affront to conventional standards of domesticity that Sartre’s arrangement posed,” even if she knew it to be a bit of a sham. Menand drives in the point, obvious by now, that the contingent love affairs were not incidental to their relationship but the very “stuff and substance of their ‘marriage’” and that “the pact was just the traditional sexist arrangement—in which the man sleeps around and the woman nobly ‘accepts’ the situation—on philosophical stilts.” He concludes, easily, that "Sartre was the classic womanizer, and Beauvoir was the classic enabler.” That is saying too much and too little, but it seems to be the final word for now on their half-century affair.

If what started out as an affront to conventions of domesticity ended in the banality of a bad marriage, in the case of Sartre and Beauvoir, the conventions of domesticity take on an exalted, even philosophical significance in the case of Dunne and Didion. Like the contemplation of meaninglessness, grief forces one to ever greater perspectives in a diminishingly futile search for solace. Even a child knows the experience of loss in this sense, in its absence of meaning. In the most striking passage of the excerpt, Didion writes:

As a child I thought a great deal about meaninglessness, which seemed at the time the most prominent negative feature on the horizon. After a few years of failing to find meaning in the more commonly recommended venues I learned that I could find it in geology, so I did. This in turn enabled me to find meaning in the Episcopal litany, most acutely in the words "as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end," which I interpreted as a literal description of the constant changing of the earth, the unending erosion of the shores and mountains, the inexorable shifting of the geological structures that could throw up mountains and islands and could just as reliably take them away. I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying, abruptly revealed evidence of the scheme in action. That the scheme could destroy the works of man might be a personal regret but remained, in the larger picture I had come to recognize, a matter of abiding indifference. No eye was on the sparrow. No one was watching me. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

Forty years of marriage however produce their own geological monument, a heap from which all the banalities and conventions of domesticity can be glimpsed at once as if from eternity. There is no final word here, just the many daily words that in their small way constitute a life together :

Later, after I married and had a child, I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albóndigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, were the words that came to mind then. These fragments mattered to me. I believed in them. That I could find meaning in the intensely personal nature of my life as a wife and mother did not seem inconsistent with finding meaning in the vast indifference of geology and the test shots; the two systems existed for me on parallel tracks that occasionally converged, notably during earthquakes.

Pornopera

2005-09-23T21:26:00.000-07:00

Although pornography is not something one normally associates with either opera or the Swiss, it somehow comes as no shock that a Swiss opera production has thought fit to put a porn actor in Wagner, somebody one does associate after all with obscenity.

The Grand Théâtre de Genève under the direction of Olivier Py has hired the adult film actor known as HPG to perform in their production of Tannhäuser, his erect penis in full view of the elegant opera-adoring public.

He appears during the brief scene in the first act depicting the Rape of Europa as the Chorus of Sirens sing: "Approach the land,/where, in the arms of torrid love (glühender Liebe),/let blissful warmth/content your desires." In the role of the garlanded white bull, the porn actor appears on stage naked and aroused as he carries Europa away.

Asked why he needed to hire a porn actor for the short role, Py replied impishly, "Only a professional could guarantee there would be no mishaps every night."

Golden Elixirs?

2005-09-22T09:26:00.000-07:00

One assumes that the cures for the afflictions of our times—cancer, AIDS, depression—will be concocted in a pharmaceutical laboratory somewhere in Switzerland, or perhaps New Jersey, by a process that will soon involve genetic manipulation. Pharmacogenetics is quite simply the future of medicine. Not only will drugs one day be individually tailored to a patient's precise genetic make-up, but they will effectively target an individual's pathogens, while minimizing the toxic side effects of today's more powerful remedies, which can affect different people in widely various ways.

The BBC reports however that personalised medicines have been "over-hyped (sic)" and are still many years, perhaps decades, away. It was assumed that with the sequencing of the human genome, the production of bespoke drugs would soon develop, but that assessment appears now grossly overestimated.

What the report fails to mention, however, is that there may already exist a perfectly individualised remedy, one that has existed in fact since the birth of humankind, costs nothing to produce, and is immediately available to even the most wretched soul in this world. Imagine a magical potion containing the very antibodies, hormones, enzymes, and nutrients that your own body produces in its own defence and for its self-preservation. What is this magical, priceless, natural potion? It's your own pee.

Auto-urotherapy, or Amaroli in ancient Ayurvedic practice, consists of nothing more than drinking your own urine (preferably in its richest commixture first thing in the morning), and it is being re-examined in many quarters today. At least one study by an ostensible MD advocates oral auto-urotherapy as a treatment for cancer patients. Since the antibodies contained in urine are produced by one's own immune system in reaction to present antigens, a more perfect remedy, in theory, could not by man be made. Go ahead, get a taste of your own medicine. Or not.

Which brings us to this. According to this BBC report, scientists have been suggesting that lemon juice not only could act as a cheap and effective means of birth control but more importantly could help prevent the spread of AIDS in developing countries. Laboratory tests have shown that lemon juice, because of its high acidity, is very effective in immobilising human sperm as well as killing the AIDS virus and could thus be an alternative to costly HIV-drugs in developing countries where even a condom can be prohibitively expensive. The practice of using lemon juice as a douche-style contraceptive is widely known in Southeast Asia and was even employed in medieval Europe. Casanova, for example, was said to have used lemon halves as a cervical cap and natural spermicide, although one wonders how he might have gone about introducing such a thing.

Another report suggests that use of this cheap and natural solution is being opposed by pharmaceutical concerns that have poured millions into the research of high-tech vaginal HIV blockers. Lemon juice is not only dirt cheap, after all, it cannot be patented.

So two magically natural, virtually free yellow potions that may turn out to be the most effective remedies against the scourges of our time. Or not.

The 100-Minute Bible and 10-Second Genesis

2005-09-21T09:25:00.000-07:00

From the land that brought us the Digested Read, an English vicar announced today the publication of a 57-page Bible "designed to be read in 100 (or fewer) minutes by people who haven't the time or inclination to read the whole book." The anticipated best-seller will presumably be marketed to the rapidly expanding class of subliterates and ill-educated but also to the corporate elite who demand executive summaries for just the right spiritual bulletpoint.

"We have sacrificed poetry to clarity," the author of the ultra-condensed holy book said. His publisher at the appropriately named 100-Minute Press added that it was written in such a way as to encourage page-turning "but without resorting to literary gimmicks."

Literary gimmicks? Isn't the entire project one big literary gimmick? But then again, why not resort to literary gimmicks if your only goal is to get the uninclined to digest the good news. What better mnemonic device, after all, than such literary gimmicks as popular rhyme and meter?

One could imagine, for example, a Bible composed entirely of limericks, to be chanted again and again and so committed to memory. It might begin as follows:

There once was a God who from nowhere
Made Heaven and Earth and all out there;
From Adam, here's Eve;
"Fruit eaten? Now leave!"
And hence the travail that we all bear.

"Call me crazy...

2005-09-20T02:10:00.000-07:00

...but I just made a killing!"

It is said that the wartime hero, in executing acts that in civilized society would be considered abhorrent, criminal and murderous, is the peacetime psychopath. But now the peacetime pychopath is none other than today's market mogul.

The Times of London reports on a recent study that concludes that the brain-damaged and emotionally impaired, or rather those unimpaired by emotions or intact brains, make better gamblers and thus take better financial decisions.

The study was conducted on a group of 41 people of "normal IQ," 15 of whom "had suffered lesions on the areas of the brain that affect emotions," presumably the amygdala. Subjected to a simple investment game, the "functioning psychopaths (sic)" significantly outperformed those who were disadvantaged by an undamaged brain or otherwise inconvenienced by human emotions.

Added one of the researchers: "Many CEOs and many top lawyers might also share this trait."

Not Half-Assed: A Defense of the Semicolon

2005-09-19T09:09:00.000-07:00

"The semicolon," an editor at The Washington Post once wrote in a misguided guide to good writing, "is an ugly bastard, and I try to avoid it," period. Perhaps he was misled by its name, which—comprised of the diminishing prefix semi- and the unfortunately denominated colon (a combination to which our title makes candid reference)—is rather ugly.

A recent article (via Arts & Letters Daily) explores the origins and issues of this strange prejudice, largely American, against our favorite punctuation mark. Falling somewhere between the comma and the period, the semicolon is rarely mandated, almost always discretionary; its employment a matter more of nuance than of necessity. This may render it superfluous, in the eyes of some, but its adept usage for that reason has become a subtle measure by which to distinguish the more or less literate, say, from the merely alphabetic.

If the semicolon really were an ugly bastard in any case its injunction in the field of journalism would not be as pressing, to employ a useful analogy, as the injunction against sexual harassment in the work place. That such a rule is not only in place but carefully observed signals that the semicolon is, to the contrary, a rather sexy bastard and requires preservation from the paws of the unscrupulous and miseducated.

"The most common abuse of the semicolon, at least in journalism," explains Michael Kinsley, the former editor of the New Republic (where he instituted the injunction against semicolons), "is to imply a relationship between two statements without having to make clear what that relationship is." Yes, precisely. But what is exceptionable in news writing can be exceptional in other contexts.

The most popular French writer of our day, Michel Houellebecq, has proclaimed that he has no literary style other than "to make harmless statements the juxtaposition of which produces an absurd effect." He singles out this sentence in particular from The Elementary Particles: "He could no longer remember his last erection; he waited for the storm." And this one:

L’éternité de l’enfance est une éternité brève, mais il ne le sait pas encore ; le paysage défile.
[The eternity of childhood is a brief eternity, but he does not know it yet; the landscape rolls on.]

"In those situations," comments Houellebecq, "I notice I often use the semicolon. I say 'absurdity' only out of politeness actually; I would prefer that this be seen as poetry."

As at least one critic points out, Kafka's absurd juxtaposition in his journal entry of 2 August 1914 is the model here: "Germany declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon." (Of course this minimalist 'style,' the critic notes, can quickly descend into the merely ridiculous, of the type: "I get hard; it rains.")

In Houellebecq's latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, one finds this sentence: "Life begins at the age of fifty, it's true; except that it ends at forty." Absurd, certainly; but not entirely ridiculous. I refer not to the statement itself but its structure. What it presents is the contradiction of dialectic, competing and cancelling views, articulated at the balancing point-virgule. Not only is the semicolon among the most literary of punctuation marks, it is perhaps the most philosophical; its very existence a poke in the face of self-satisfied Truth.

In its embrace of nuance and ambiguity the semicolon may appear precious and fey; "pretentious, even poncy." In a word, European. Today's world, we are told, requires muscular, emphatic language, unencumbered by such complications. Yet however in disfavor it may be at the moment, the semicolon will never disappear. Indeed it will only gain in allure as it becomes more and more popularly despised and goes unrecognized as anything more than a winking smiley amongst the cretinously stupid youth.

Bono Vivant

2005-09-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

It appears that when U2 superstar Bono is not unloading bags of millet and barley for the wretched of Africa, he likes to suck down oysters, rip into chunks of bloody meat and wash it all down with bottles of wine the price of which could have nourished a starving child for a year or more.

Describing a lunch with the U2 singer at the New York City bistro, Balthazar, James Traub writes in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine that the aspiring Messiah "ordered half a dozen oysters, the filet mignon and a half-bottle — and then, sometime later, another half-bottle — of a Clos de Vougeot."

At another steak dinner described in the article, which is generally hagiographic in tone, the following transpires:

Bono had started with a glass of white wine, but when I said I was drinking red, he switched over and ordered a bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. U2's manager, Paul McGuinness, is a wine nut, and Bono caught the bug from him. Bono has unabashedly bourgeois tastes, and he spends his money on the kinds of things most of us would spend our money on if we had as much as he does — a family-size Maserati, a house on the Riviera, a charming hotel in Dublin, great food and wine. I was raving about the Brunello, which was many stations above the norm for me. Bono was less impressed, but he didn't want to dampen my enthusiasm. "It is," he said, after some consideration, "a not immodestly great wine."

So in addition to being a pop star, "brother of the oppressed, Christian visionary, ironic trickster, devoted husband and father," Bono also likes to affect the mannerisms of a sniffy wine snob. That he delivered his witheringly superior judgement in pink oversize sunglasses and in an "Irish publican brogue," Traub helpfully informs the reader, renders the act "endearing" in his eyes rather than simply insufferable.