P.G. Wodehouse, Tax Evader

Everyone loves P.G. Wodehouse -- his books were so good that Punch once remarked that he was "exhausting the superlatives of the critics." Even as you read this, I am enjoying Right Ho, Jeeves, which I received on CD as a present.

But did you know that Wodehouse had a big dispute over payment of U.S. taxes that went all the way to the Supreme Court? It's true. I'm editing a case from volume 337 of the U.S. Reports, and, flipping through it to get to the case I'm interested in, I happened across Commissioner v. Wodehouse, 337 U.S. 369 (1949).

Wodehouse sold the U.S. serial and book rights to some of his works. He claimed that the resulting income was from the sale of property, and that the U.S. did not, at the time, tax nonresident aliens on such income. The IRS claimed that the income was from royalties on a U.S. copyright, which was taxed.

Wodehouse lost, 5-3 (with one Justice recused). Frankly, he had a pretty decent argument. Without going into all the details, prior to 1936 U.S. law clearly would have taxed Wodehouse's income, but in that year Congress changed the law to relieve aliens of tax on slaes of property, but to increase the tax imposed on aliens for "dividends, rents, salaries, wages, premiums, annuities, compensations, remunerations, emoluments, or other fixed or determinable annual or periodical gains, profits, and income" from sources within the U.S. and required that the tax be withheld at the source.

The Court majority relied less on the new statutory language and more on its understanding of Congress's overall goal, which, in the Court's view, was to limit the tax on nonresident aliens to that which was readily collectible, while increasing the rate to make the change roughly revenue neutral. Money given for the use of copyrights, the Court thought, was readily accessible and a long-established source of revenue, and the Court discerned no congressional intent to change its taxablility.

Nothing ever changes in statutory interpretation. There are always disputes between those who want to parse each word Congress enacts and those who would rather enforce Congress's overall gestalt. Sorry, P.G., but Bertie and Uncle Fred will just have to pony up some of the ready.

Catching Up

Sorry, faithful readers, for the long delay. I was away -- in India.

A few thoughts about my time away:

* On the first day of my trip, India-themed Slumdog Millionaire won the Best Picture Oscar. As I've mentioned before, that was a good picture, but the love interest was not compelling. Let's face it, Jamal spends the whole time mooning after a woman he barely knows. So I liked it but I wouldn't put it quite in the "best picture" category.

* While we're talking about the film, there was an indignant article in the Hindustan Times criticizing the film for its "'factually incorrect' portrayal of foreigners’ shoes being stolen at Taj Mahal, and touts harassing tourists." Having now traveled to the Taj Mahal and many other tourists sites in India, I can certify that (a) no one ever tampered with my shoes, even though I had to leave them at the door many times, but (b) boy, was I harassed by touts. I had a marvelous time and I recommend India to others, but you definitely have to be prepared to have unwanted products and services thrust upon you aggressively many times each day.

* I worked my way through several India-themed books: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake by the same author, George Orwell's Burmese Days (set in the period when Burma was part of India), and Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. All quite good but very sad. I presume happy things happen in Indian literature sometimes. But not in these books. I recommend any of them, but reading them all in a row was rather depressing. Don't try that at home.

* I visited Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, and Varanasi. Highlights of the trip included the Presidential gardens in Delhi (magnificent, but only open in February), the Taj Mahal in Agra(however high your expectations are, it will exceed them), the Jantar Mantar in Jaipur (it looks like a bizarre, abstract sculpture garden, but it's actually an 18th-century astronomical observatory), the Fort in Jodhpur, the palace in Udaipur, and a sunrise boat trip on the Ganges in Varanasi.

Back to business.

Back from Break

I've just returned from Cancun (it was lovely, thank you). Sorry to leave you contentless for a week, faithful readers, but even bloggers need a break sometimes.

There's so much to catch up on -- Al Franken about to become the certified winner of the Minnesota Senate election, Rod Blagojevich appointing a Senator for Illinois, the withdrawal of an Obama cabinet pick -- but just being back from vacation, today I get to write about books. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

David Lodge, author of humorous novels, mostly about professors (something I always enjoy), has the characters in one of his books play a game called "humiliation," in which the players each name a classic work of literature that they haven't read, and the winner is the one whose admission is the most humiliating. Well, I've missed a good chance to win, because until I went on vacation last week, I had never read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Boy, that was great. It's not one of those once-great classics that now seems turgid and boring. And it doesn't even take a long time to get going. The oustanding writing leaps out at you practically from the first page.

It's true that the main action of the story might be different if the book were written today. Somehow I don't think current writers would hold up Atticus Finch as the great hero because he was a white man who worked to achieve justice for a black man. Today Finch would be black himself, and the story would be about black self-empowerment rather than about the one, great white man who worked for racial justice.

But the book is still fabulous for its portrait of rural Southern life, in a community where everyone knows everyone else, where each family stands for something particular, and where your worth is measured by how long your family has lived on the same plot of land. It's a fascinating cultural tapestry.

My other read last week, coincidentally, also deals with a great white man helping another community, and also presenting fascinating insights into a different culture, only this was Three Cups of Tea, the true tale of Greg Mortenson, who got lost on his way down from K2 in Pakistan, was saved when he wandered into a rural village, and ended up dedicating his life to building schools for rural Pakistani villages that don't have any. Not as well written as To Kill a Mockingbird (well, that's a pretty tough standard), but definitely worth reading. If you've ever wondered what difference one person (you, for example) could make by really dedicating your life to a cause, this book will show you. Also fascinating for its story of how Mortenson succeeded in achieving his goals by adapting his work to the local culture. If the U.S. government, say, tasked itself with building schools in rural Pakistan, I think it would almost surely fail, because it would try to do everything the all-American way and wouldn't be sensitive to cultural differences. Mortenson makes some important changes from Pakistani traditions -- most notably, his schools are for all children, including girls, and they also are a sharp contrast to religious madrassas -- but he works through local people and local culture and provides schools that can be culturally accepted by Pakistanis.

So two great books for you, faithful readers. Back to regular business tomorrow.

Literary Dilemma

A lot going on in the news today, but the piece that most caught my attention was this article in Slate about the choice faced by Dmitri Nabakov, son of novelist Vladimir Nabakov: whether to publish his father's last, hitherto-unpublished manuscript, or to destroy it -- as his father wished.

I think it depends mainly on why his father wanted it destroyed. There seem to be various possibilities. But let me just focus on one, which is at least suggested by some of the linked article: Nabakov senior wanted the manuscript destroyed because he didn't regard it as good enough to constitute a finished, publishable work.

If that's the reason, I say burn it. Just imagine what would happen if the manuscript got published. Nabakov devotees everywhere would turn to it with tremendous expectation and probably be disappointed. No harm, you say? I think there is harm: in my experience, reading an inferior work is not only disappointing in itself but can retroactively diminish the pleasure of reading the same author's good works.

Consider The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies, published shortly before his death. It's a disappointing mishmash -- it reads as though Davies was hauling out all his pet literary devices one last time, but didn't know what to do with them any more. It's all tricks and no substance. Having read it, one sees more clearly the influence of the same tricks in Davies's previous, excellent novels, and the pleasure of having read them is somewhat diminished.

Obviously, I don't know anything about the quality of Nabakov's unpublished manuscript, but I think it's appropriate for authors to want the public to know them only by their good works, not the ones they never finished, either because they just didn't get around to it or because they abandoned them as inferior. So if (note the if) the reason Nabakov didn't want this manuscript published was his feeling that it wasn't up to snuff, I say snuff it.

My only hesitation is that this rule would probably have denied us the opportunity to read Franz Kafka's The Trial, which Kafka desired to send to the fire and which was saved only by his literary executor Max Brod's decision not to respect Kafka's wishes. But at least Brod explained that he had told Kafka in advance that he wouldn't burn works that Kafka left in his care, and also that Brod thought the works in question (also including The Castle) were in fact Kafka's best.

So perhaps Dmitri should temper the rule a little by reaching his own, independent judgment about the quality of the unpublished manuscript. If it's the master's final masterpiece, maybe that would be grounds for disregarding the master's wishes. But given that the whole thing apparently amounts to only thirty manuscript pages, I have a suscipion that it's probably not Nabakov's greatest work, but something more like an idea that he never really pursued. We're all better off not reading it.

Latest Crazy Idea to be Taken Seriously

A certain Giovanni Maria Pala, of Italy, claims that if you draw a musical score across Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and put musical notes on the bread loaves and the hands of the disciples and read the result from right to left, you get a composition that Leonardo secretly worked into the painting. This has gotten a lot of press coverage for something so obviously, well, dotty.

Let me be honest here -- I haven't read a word of Pala's book. The news story claims he has some extrinsic evidence that the painting encodes a musical composition. Maybe he does. Maybe the whole thing is as true as, let's say, gospel.

But boy, I have my suspicions. My guess is that if you draw a score across any painting and choose your own rules about where the score goes and what items count as notes and whether you get to read left to right or right to left, you can come up with a pleasing tune. Heck, years ago researchers started making music by assigning notes to DNA strands (the DNA elements are named C, T, A, and G, so three of them are musical notes already, and if I recall correctly the researchers substituted B-flat for T), and it sounded pretty good.

My guess is that this is up there with the Bible Code -- a ludicrous attempt to claim that hidden messages were encoded into the Bible if you only chose the right starting point and read every nth letter, with the research getting to choose the starting point and the value of n, of course.

If anyone reads Pala's book and finds it persuasive, please let me know. But I'm not holding my breath.

Dumbledore Comes Out

Stop the presses -- it turns out the rumors are true, Albus Dumbledore is gay. He was in love with his great rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated in a duel years ago.

Fans have long suspected something was up with Dumbledore's sexuality, because there's no reference to a wife or even girlfriend in his past. But wait a minute . . . there's no spouse in the picture for any of the Hogwarts professors. Snape, McGonagall, Flitwick, Trelawney, Sprout -- why are none of them married? They all spend their Christmas at Hogwarts. Even Gilderoy Lockhart, the hearthrob of middle-aged witches everywhere, doesn't seem to have so much as a girlfriend. And you never hear about the spouse of any of the lesser professor characters or the other staff -- Vector, Binns (OK, he's a ghost), Grubbly-Plank, Hooch, Pomfrey the nurse, Filch the caretaker. All single. Hagrid's the only one who so much as goes out on a date, and of course he's not exactly a professor.

On behalf of professors of the world, I object to this slanderous portayal of professors! We have love interests too, you know. Did J.K. Rowling have a bad experience with her professors at school? Is she settling some old scores?

The Terror Presidency's Lawyer

Just finished The Terror Presidency, the new book by my old friend and classmate Jack Goldsmith. I recommend it -- it's not the tell-all you might wish for, but it's a pretty interesting tell-some. Jack does his best job in explaining the competing pressures the administration is under: on the one hand, those charged with protecting the country are terrified of the next terrorist attack and urgently want to be aggressive in taking every step that might block it, but on the other hand, they face pressure to be prudent and cautious lest they take actions that some later administration, independent prosecutor, or international tribunal might view as criminal. And to top it off, the laws telling them what they can and cannot do are complex and ambiguous. My distaste for the administration's hubris is certainly not erased, but I have a better understanding of the pressures they face.

Those Darned Wizards

Just one thought about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (not a spoiler, don't worry, this is something that was already clear from previous books in the series):

Wizards (and witches) can make some pretty incredible, stunningly dangerous spells come out of their wands. The spells can stun you, cause you horrible pain, make your body swell up, make you do the spellcaster's bidding, slice parts of your body off, or, of course, kill you.

But -- they can't aim themselves.

Apparently the magical community has spent centuries perfecting what the spells do, but never seems to have given a moment's thought to improving the spells' ability to hit their targets. No, they just wave their wands in the general direction of the target and hope for the best. The spell itself apparently appears as a bolt of visible light (green light, if it's the death spell), which zooms toward the target, but not so fast that the target can't see the spell and twist out of the way.

Didn't it ever occur to these folks that if they can make a bolt of light come out of a hickory stick and kill someone or overpower his mind, they might want to equip that light with just a tiny bit more intelligence and have it follow the target as the target tries to run away? It must take a fair bit of mental capacity for a bolt of light to take over someone's brain; surely it could sense where the brain is and follow it? At least give it some heat-seeking desires.

Sheesh. Even we Muggles realized a long time ago that it's no use having a great missile if the missile doesn't hit its target. A couple of heat-seeking servomechanisms help a lot. You'd think somebody might have worked out a magical equivalent.

And if not, could they at least send the students out for target practice once in a while? That skill seems sadly missing from the Hogwarts curriculum.

Excellent Vacation

I'm back from the outer banks. What a great time. Gorgeous beach. Fabulous beachfront house. Perfect weather. Wonderful girlfriend.

I took a break from work, of course, but also a break from news, from e-mail, from blogging, from Internet surfing, from caffeine, from care, worry, and distraction. Who needs them? At work I check the headlines every hour, and my e-mail multiple times per hour, and for what? It's an obsession I would be embarrassed to admit to if it weren't so common (check out David Cole's recent piece in the WaPo). We should all relax a bit and work as though we were on vacation and just didn't have instant Internet access at all time.

Oh, I'm sure I'll be back into keeping up with every twist and turn of the news soon enough, but it was nice to be free of them for a week.

Mostly I sat on the beach and read. I read so much for work that it's difficult to read for pleasure during the term, so vacation is a time to read voraciously. I can recommend Wizard of the Crow, the latest from exiled Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. For an author whose best known work is called Petals of Blood, it's quite a departure -- much more humorous than upsetting. It takes a while to get going, but I was quite absorbed by about halfway. I also read Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, which I found in my library and realied I'd never read. Obviously not literature, but not bad for its genre. Certainly beats Grisham's stuff any day.

Also went swimming and hit a few golf balls. But mostly it was beach, beach, beach.

And I am embarrassed to admit this, but I took pleasure in noting that, even though the weather really couldn't have been more perfect all week -- absolutely cloudless skies and temperatures in the low to mid 80s -- it clouded over considerably on the day I left, and heavy rain is forecast for today and tomorrow because of tropical storm Barry. Why does that sort of thing make one happy?