Gnostical Turpitude

Ronald Reagan, R.I.P.

As most of my readers are undoubtedly aware, former President Ronald Reagan died this weekend at the age of 93. He was my second least-favorite president since World War II and I think he was a disaster as our country's leader, but I've always had the impression that he meant well and had good intentions. That's more than you can say about other recent presidents.

My own memories of Reagan are fairly hazy. The 1981 attempt on Reagan's life is the first historical event I can remember (I turned five the next month); I'd been misbehaving that afternoon, if I recall correctly, and I was surprised to see just how shaken my mother was when she heard that Reagan had been shot. I can remember saying something along the lines of "Why are you so upset? I thought you didn't like him!", to which she replied, "I voted against him, but I didn't want him killed!" That's not a bad lesson in democracy (and basic human decency) for your average four-year-old... Three years later, I went to bed on election night convinced that Walter Mondale was going to be the next president of the U.S. (he sounded really confident when he appeared on the news, after all!), and was shocked the next morning to hear that Reagan had won again. I can remember Reagan's speech after the Challenger disaster in 1986, and I have a lot of memories of the 1988 election, but to me, Reagan will always be a distant, avuncular, and sometimes even sinister figure from my past.

What's the best way to remember a figure like this? There's a part of me (as my few long-term readers may remember) that delights in the nasty obituary. Hunter Thompson's 1994 obituary of Richard Nixon, for example, is a small masterpiece, and its opening paragraphs always make me smile:

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

Even bad presidents deserve a lot of respect, however, so I hope that no one rushes to give Reagan the Hunter S. Thompson treatment for another week or two. (I don't think I could ever bring myself to write a nasty tribute to Reagan--in part, perhaps, because I lack the courage of my convictions, and in part because my memories of Reagan are too hazy for me to bring much passion to the job.) Nevertheless, I still think that non-traditional tributes--both positive and negative--can help us remember the dead and honor their legacy.

Continue reading "Ronald Reagan, R.I.P."

Sunday link laziness

Since I'm too lazy to write anything substantive at the moment, here are some links to browse:

• In The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley reviews Gordon Wood's new book on the "americanization" of Benjamin Franklin (a "true-blue Englishman" who became an American icon.)
  
• According to one critic, the three most influential books in Italian literature were Dante's Divine Comedy, Manzoni's The Betrothed, and... Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio. Alison Lurie looks at Collodi's book in The New York Review.
  
• In The New York Times Sunday Magazine, two writers (among them the University of Chicago's Steven Levitt) describe the case of an economist who decided to sell bagels in office parks and ended up creating the perfect laboratory to study white-collar crime.
  
• Philip Pullman discusses the power of Prosper Merimee's Carmen in a new Guardian essay.
  
• What's the relationship between science and art? Harvey Blume discusses two different answers to this question in the Boston Globe ideas section.
  
• The Telegraph reviews two new books on Russian literature: Emma Gerstein's memoir of her dispute with the Mandelstams and Irma Kudrova's account of the death of Maria Tsvetaeva.
  
• Question of the day: was Richard Nixon drunk during the Yom Kippur War? The Smoking Gun has published a relevant document on the web...
  
• In another Telegraph article (found via Pullquote), Simon Sebag Montefiore describes Joseph Stalin's relationship with the Soviet movie industry: "Stalin loved movies, but he was much more than a movie-buff," Sebag Montefiore writes. "The new Communist Party archives in Moscow, and the recently opened personal papers of Stalin, reveal that he fancied himself a super-movie-producer/director/screenwriter as well as supreme censor, suggesting titles, ideas and stories, working on scripts and song lyrics, lecturing directors, coaching actors, ordering re-shoots and cuts and, finally, passing the movies for showing."
  
• In The New Yorker, Joshua Wolf Shenk looks at Abraham Lincoln's "suicide poem," and Ian Buruma discusses the "two minds" of Bernard Lewis.
  
• The New York Times describes the new soundtrack added to the first Harry Potter movie by a comicbook artist with a sense of humor. It sounds like a big improvement!
  
• Penguin Books has commissioned a study showing that men seen reading books in public are more attractive to the opposite sex. The company is also launching a contest in which men can win a thousand pounds if they're caught reading a specially selected Penguin title. Isn't the world a wonderful place?
  
• The Telegraph has begun excerpting a book about etymological myths. It's a fun read. (via Languagehat)
  

I'd especially recommend the article on Stalin if you want a fun read. It's full of fun gossipy details (though some rumors, like the claim that Stalin ordered the assassination of John Wayne, may well not be true): did you know that Stalin inherited the movie library of Joseph Goebbels after the war? The article isn't exactly brilliant scholarship (as others have noted), but details like this (and other yet to emerge from the archives) will make for a fascinating biography someday.

Later tonight or tomorrow I'll post my review of the new Harry Potter movie (short version: it's really good), but otherwise I think I'm done with blogging for the weekend.

Remembering D-Day and World War II

Two new articles out this weekend discuss popular perceptions of World War II, and I'd recommend both of them. The first piece, a Slate article by David Greenberg, argues that "World War II nostalgia has gone too far" and that D-Day plays too large a role in our understanding of the conflict:

Obviously, the invasion of Normandy was a crucial event in American history, worthy of commemoration. But so are many of the events of World War II, and it's worth asking why V-E Day, for example, or V-J Day, or for that matter the death of Franklin Roosevelt doesn't serve as the focus of our national remembrance. Why does D-Day prompt Tom Brokaw to hustle into a helicopter and report to us for three nights from the skies above Omaha Beach?

An answer to these questions begins with the realization that the D-Day enthusiasm, like all rituals of memory, says more about the present than it does about the past. For one thing, unilateralism is ascendant today, and the popular D-Day storyline glorifies the U.S. role above all: tens of thousands of average American boys dramatically storming the beaches of Normandy to open a second front against the German army, their success speeding Hitler's demise.

But this version neglects, among other small details, the importance of the Allies. It especially shortchanges the Soviet Union—no doubt a vestige of Cold War attitudes. For three years, after all, the Germans focused their efforts on their all-important Eastern front, and most military historians agree that the 1942-43 Battle of Stalingrad, not D-Day, was the real pivot point in the decline of Axis fortunes. (Meanwhile, the United States was pouring its energy into fighting Japan; as the critic Benjamin Schwarz has noted, the D-Day-centered narrative of World War II also unfairly slights the Pacific Theater.)

Besides overstating the centrality of the second front and neglecting the Allies' part, the current D-Day obsession also feeds off and perpetuates a romance with war and militarism. The tone of the recent coverage of D-Day (and World War II in general) has been surprisingly monochromatic, especially when compared to that of past eras. In the war's immediate aftermath, as the historian Gunter Bischof has noted, cultural and artistic treatments of the combat weren't all rosy. Novelists Norman Mailer, in The Naked and the Dead, and Joseph Heller, in Catch-22, showed that however noble the war's purpose, absurdities and moral conundrums abounded, and millions died needlessly. (Schwarz links to a 1946 Atlantic Monthly article that voiced similarly ambivalent feelings about the war.)

I'd recommend each of the articles that Greenberg links to, as well as this Cliopatria post by Tim Burke; I've touched on similar themes here, here, and here. I'm tempted to write more on the subject now, only I don't have a lot to add. One of the strengths of Greenberg's article, I thought, was that it provided a nice description of how Ronald Reagan helped shape popular memories of World War II--a fact I've never really considered before, even though I'm familiar with Reagan's speech on the anniversary of D-Day.

The second article is a New York Times "arts and ideas" piece about the reenactment of recent wars:

Civil War re-enactors are, of course, well known, having been famously portrayed as oddball history nuts in Tony Horwitz's book "Confederates in the Attic." But the re-enactment of battles from more recent wars like World War II and Vietnam, with some participants playing Nazis or Vietcong, has a different flavor. For real survivors, some whose memories are still raw, the safe historical distance collapses.

The events also raise troubling questions. Is this an acceptable representation of war or a parody? Many people would shudder at the thought of taking an M-16 and donning fatigues to go on a fake search-and-destroy mission to honor those who fought in Vietnam. And surely, joining a simulated German Panzer unit to roam the woods in a kübelwagen and shoot blanks is a far cry from more traditional ways of commemorating World War II.

I wished that the article had delved into some of these issues more deeply, but this is still a decent introduction to the issue for people who haven't, say, read Tony Horwitz's delightful book Confederates in the Attic.

Update: Kieran Healy has a Crooked Timber post looking at the number of New York Times stories since 1980 that mentioned D-Day.

Mendelsohn on Troy

Last month, when Wolfgang Petersen's disappointingly mediocre film epic Troy appeared in theaters, we were treated to a delightful spectacle: movie critics across the country did their best to pretend that they were experts in The Iliad, Homeric epic, and the mythology of the Trojan War. Call me cynical, but I expect that if you'd asked Roger Ebert about Ajax the Greater back in April, he'd have told you that it was a really good toilet-bowl cleaner; nonetheless, that didn't stop him from thundering that "Homer's estate should sue" the makers of the film for their desecration of a classic when he reviewed the movie in May.

It can be nice, then, to read a review of the movie by a critic who actually knows something about the ancient world. The current issue of The New York Review of Books features a late but entertaining review of Troy by Daniel Mendelsohn, a former lecturer in classics at Princeton; in his article, Mendelsohn does a nice job of mocking the movie's inanities without pedantically bashing anyone who'd dare depart from the classics in a movie about the Trojan War. Over the course of his review, Mendelsohn criticizes the mischaracterization of Homer by critics who liked the movie, provides a compelling argument about how the updating of the story destroyed the sense behind the action, and injects a tone of humor into the debate on the movie.

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English Etiquette and Japanese Tea

This week's Guardian education supplement features an intriguing little article on an unusual topic: a West London finishing school that offers courses in English manners for students from Japan. The most popular courses, it seems, discuss how the English drink their afternoon tea; a majority of the students are wives of Japanese businessmen who work in London, though some pupils fly to London from Tokyo just to take the class.

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History Links of the Day

I'm afraid that I'm really busy today with grading and writing, so unless inspiration unexpectedly strikes, I won't have anything original to contribute to this blog. Here are some nice history links, though:

• What does the biographer William Manchester have in common with Robert Ludlum and V.C. Andrews? He's expected to continue publishing from beyond the grave, it seems!
  
• How big a role did Abraham Lincoln play in the passage of the 13th Amendment? How did he shape the president's role as commander-in-chief? James McPherson discusses questions like these in his Nation review of several new books on Lincoln.
  
• Thought for the day: instead of being an all-American hero, Benjamin Franklin was "the least American and the most European of the nation's early leaders." That's the argument of a new book by Gordon Wood that's reviewed in Newsday.
  
• After giving us his own take on the passion, Mel Gibson has decided to produce a movie about a little-known historical personage: the ancient British queen Boudicca, who led a rebellion against the Romans in A.D. 60. (Not surprisingly, the movie will prominently feature blood, revenge, and lots of floggings.) (via HNN)
  

The Boudicca article includes a lot of fun details: I didn't know that Elizabeth I played a key role in the creation of the Boudicca legend, for example. Oddly enough, it seems that there are scripts floating around for four movies about everyone's favorite leader of the Iceni... I hope at least one of them is better than Troy!

The Eastern European Food Revolution

Over at Crescat Sententia, Will Baude links to a Tyler Cowen post commenting on the high quality of Polish cuisine. He notes that "Things have definitely changed since I was there about ten years ago. I do hope Cowen has steered clear of Polish pizza though, which probably hasn't changed, and probably still involves both ketchup and wonderbread. And no, I kid you not."

Will's post reminded me of a Chicago Tribune article I'd planned to discuss over the weekend:

Fifteen years after shaking off communism, Eastern Europe is engulfed in a food revolution, with people no longer content to shovel down only meat, boiled potatoes and stick-to-your-ribs dumplings.

From Bratislava to Budapest, eating habits and tastes are radically changing. It's a stark shift from 15 years ago, when classic spaghetti in Slovakia meant ketchup and shredded cheese atop overcooked noodles.

...

Under communism, vegetables such as broccoli or asparagus were virtually unknown. Today, nearly everything is available, and in quantities that would have been inconceivable during communism.

No more waiting in line to get the basics, or fresh pineapple or mandarin oranges for a special Christmas treat. These and other fruits can be bought year-round.

Tastes are fuller and more refined. Ethnic eateries have helped convince people that mixing meat with fruit isn't a crazy idea. Italian restaurants have shown that pizza shouldn't be a thick yeast cake topped with vegetables and ketchup.

Some things do change, it seems! Today's Washington Post, meanwhile, profiles Arkadii Novikov, "a Soviet cooking school graduate rejected for a job at Moscow's first McDonald's" who has become the food guru of Russia's oligarchs and the undisputed restaurant king of the new Moscow.

I'm fortunate in that all of my Russian travels took place after the fall of Communism; I ate the worst pizza I've ever tasted in Moscow's Sheremetevo airport, but at least it didn't have ketchup on it!

(There are moments, by the way, in which I think it would be fun to be a culinary historian: it's not the biggest historical sub-discipline, of course, but there has been some recent work in the field. If I'd wanted to make culinary history my main scholarly interest, however, I could have picked a country of study whose cuisine is tastier than Russia's!)

Diversions of the Day

I'm feeling too lazy to write anything substantive right now (well, on my blog, anyway), so here are some links:

• A Canadian academic is seeking the music that accompanied Shakespeare's plays. (via ArtsJournal)
  
• Who defeated the Spanish Armada: Sir Francis Drake, or the Turks?
  
• The Telegraph reviews The Italian Boy, Sarah Wise's account of the wonderful world of corpse-snatching.
  
• Scott McLemee reports on Michel Thaler's Le Train de Nulle Part (or The Train from Nowhere), a novel without verbs; his article was inspired by this piece from The Sydney Morning Herald.
  
• In New York Magazine, Clive Thompson describes a neat little art forgery scheme.
  
• The Boston Globe ideas section looks at the revival of Raphael Patai's 1973 book The Arab Mind in intelligence circles.
  
• A recent "improbable research" column in The Guardian looks at the Habsburg lip and other genetic deformities, discussing a topic that Susan wrote about back in February. (via the Improbable Research blog)
  
• What's the legacy of Mikhail Sholokhov, the Nobel-winning author of The Quiet Don? The Moscow Times investigates.
  
• Thought for the day: "I prefer Kerry's flaw to Gore's. Gore oversimplified things. Kerry overcomplicates them. The latter may be cowardly, but I don't think it's dishonest." From a discussion of political ads between Slate's Jacob Weisberg and Will Saletan.
  

Enjoy!

What George Lucas Could Learn from Peter Jackson

One of these days, when I have just a little more time, I plan to write an enormous blog entry detailing my assessment of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. I've already spent some time working on it, in fact: I bought the DVD of The Return of the King last Wednesday, and I've spent a handful of my spare moments since then watching the movie and jotting down my thoughts.

If there's one thing that regular readers of this blog know, however, it's that I'm a Tolkien addict--and that sometimes my thoughts on movies expand far beyond my audience's willingness to read them. I've decided, therefore, to begin my musings on Jackson's Lord of the Rings with a short initial entry, in which I'll discuss the lessons that George Lucas should take from Jackson's work. For now this entry will be a preview of the full review I'm working on, and when my main commentary is done, this post will be a sidebar to my primary argument.

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Analyzing The New Yorker

Today's New York Times features a fun article on a recent senior thesis by a Princeton engineering student who mathematically analyzed the fiction published in The New Yorker:

Ms. Milkman, who has a minor in American studies, read 442 stories printed in The New Yorker from Oct. 5, 1992, to Sept. 17, 2001, and built a substantial database. She then constructed a series of rococo mathematical tests to discern, among other things, whether certain fiction editors at the magazine had a specific impact on the type of fiction that was published, the sex of authors and the race of characters. The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies: one main conclusion was that male editors generally publish male authors who write about male characters who are supported by female characters.

The study's confirmation of the obvious left some wondering why Ms. Milkman, who graduates this morning from Princeton with high honors, went about constructing such an intricate wristwatch in order to tell the time, but others admire her pluck and willingness to cross disciplines in a way that wraps the left and right brain neatly into one project. Her adviser on the project, Prof. René Carmona, was thrilled by the concept and amazed by the resulting thesis.

Continue reading "Analyzing The New Yorker"

Terry Teachout on the Coen Brothers

One of the movies I saw back in March was The Ladykillers, a remake of the Alec Guiness classic by Joel and Ethan Coen. I didn't find the film especially memorable (my own commentary on this blog ended by describing it as "entertaining enough, occasionally quite amusing, but nothing special overall"; I get the sense that my reaction might have been more negative if I were more familiar with the original Ladykillers produced by the Ealing studio.

Tonight I read Terry Teachout's review of the movie in Crisis, one of the most delightfully scathing commentaries on a movie that I can remember reading. The first paragraph is worth quoting in full, and the second is a decent introduction to the review:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, except when you’re a critic. Sooner or later, there comes a time when you finally decide to give up on artists who've disappointed you repeatedly. I stopped bothering with Woody Allen, for instance, after Sweet and Lowdown (the only reason I went to see that one was because it was about a Django Reinhardt–like jazz musician), and now there is no possible circumstance not involving the exchange of large sums of money that could induce me to go see a new movie by him. I don't care what other critics say, or even what my moviegoing friends say: I just don't care anymore. Yes, I know it's well within the realm of theological possibility that Allen might someday be touched by grace and make a good movie, but if God doesn’t have better things to do, then I've got bigger things to worry about.

I made a similar decision about Joel and Ethan Coen after the most recent of their films that I reviewed for Crisis, O Brother, Where Art Thou? I’d liked some of their early work very much, Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing in particular, but as the outlines of their style and the narrow limitations of their interests became clearer over time, I realized that intermittent interest had turned to active dislike. The older I get, the more acutely aware I become of the passing of time, and the less of it I want to waste on experiencing works of art that irritate me. After O Brother, the thought of letting the Coen brothers hustle me two hours nearer to the grave with yet another of their arch films-about-film was simply too depressing to contemplate, so I skipped The Man Who Wasn’t There and Intolerable Cruelty and felt quite pleased with myself for having done so.

A long story made short: Teachout ended up watching The Ladykillers and didn't like it at all. If you read the review in full, you'll get a strong overall review complete with gems like this:

It’s revealing, I’m sure, that The Ladykillers, like O Brother, Where Art Thou? before it, makes extensive use of gospel music for parodistic purposes. Once again, the music itself is terrific, but the uses to which it is put are both ironic and quintessentially postmodern: We are clearly supposed to be amused by all those benighted believers rocking joyously in their pews, even though Dey Got Rhythm and we sorry white folk don’t. That’s how postmodernism works—it plays both sides of the street, winking in either direction. That’s how The Ladykillers works, too, and that’s why it’s the last “comedy” by Joel and Ethan Coen I ever plan to see. Whatever else nihilism is, it isn’t even slightly funny.

Teachout's review is an excellent example of what I look for in movie criticism. My view of the Coen brothers isn't the same as his: after all, I really enjoyed Intolerable Cruelty and had a mixed reaction to O Brother. (There were parts of O Brother that I really liked and parts that I really admired, but still other scenes fell flat; the result was a movie that I enjoyed overall, but that didn't seem fully compelling as a whole.) Even so, I really enjoyed Teachout's review: his biting style, clear knowledge of film, and strong opinions made it one of the more compelling reviews I've read in a long time.