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John Cotter on Gore Vidal | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review

In literature as in life, there is something to be said for indeterminacy, poetical ambiguity, and the aching, open synapses of incomplete ideas. But the essays of Gore Vidal are a break from all that, a weather station in the Alps. When the air is clear, you can see across borders; when it’s cloudy, chats by the fireside agitate and charm.

Atypically for a critic of the 20th century, Gore Vidal does not subordinate his perceptions to any school or ideology. This is why he can be trusted. For models, he looks to the worldly, progressive belletrists of the late 19th and early 20th century: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams. Note the absence of their immediate predecessors: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson. Vidal is not a romantic—his mind is empirical. Though he reads with a sympathetic eye, his judgments are sonorous with authority.

Though he often writes of politics, he is a critic and a satirist rather than a pundit, and much of even this work comes by way of book reviewing.

via www.openlettersmonthly.com  via www.gorevidalpages.com

John Cotter's look at the essays of Gore Vidal for the 5-year anniversary of Open Letter Monthly.

In literature as in life, there is something to be said for indeterminacy, poetical ambiguity, and the aching, open synapses of incomplete ideas. But the essays of Gore Vidal are a break from all that, a weather station in the Alps. When the air is clear, you can see across borders; when it’s cloudy, chats by the fireside agitate and charm.

Atypically for a critic of the 20th century, Gore Vidal does not subordinate his perceptions to any school or ideology. This is why he can be trusted. For models, he looks to the worldly, progressive belletrists of the late 19th and early 20th century: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams. Note the absence of their immediate predecessors: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson. Vidal is not a romantic—his mind is empirical. Though he reads with a sympathetic eye, his judgments are sonorous with authority.

Though he often writes of politics, he is a critic and a satirist rather than a pundit, and much of even this work comes by way of book reviewing.

via www.openlettersmonthly.com  via www.gorevidalpages.com

The Bull about the Bully Pulpit - George Edwards and the Powerless Presidential Bully Pulpit : The New Yorker

When you’re running for President, giving a good speech helps you achieve your goals. When you are President, giving a good speech can prevent you from achieving them.

via www.newyorker.com

Ezra Klein wrote an interesting piece in The New Yorker, "The Unpersuaded," about the work of George Edwards, the director of the Center for Presidential Studies, at Texas A. & M. University, outlining a strong argument that presidents--even those considered good communicators--have far less power to persuade with public speeches than many Americans realize.

Consider the following about presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Franklin Roosevelt:

Between his first inauguration, in January, 1993, and his first midterm election, in November, 1994, [Clinton] travelled to nearly two hundred cities and towns, and made more than two hundred appearances, to sell his Presidency, his legislative initiatives (notably his health-care bill), and his party. But his poll numbers fell, the health-care bill failed, and, in the next election, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives for the first time in more than forty years. Yet Clinton never gave up on the idea that all he needed was a few more speeches, or a slightly better message. “I’ve got to . . . spend more time communicating with the American people,” the President said in a 1994 interview. Edwards notes, “It seems never to have occurred to him or his staff that his basic strategy may have been inherently flawed.”
.....
Reagan succeeded in passing major provisions of his agenda, such as the 1981 tax cuts, but, Edwards wrote, “surveys of public opinion have found that support for regulatory programs and spending on health care, welfare, urban problems, education, environmental protection and aid to minorities”—all programs that the President opposed—“increased rather than decreased during Reagan’s tenure.” Meanwhile, “support for increased defense expenditures was decidedly lower at the end of his administration than at the beginning.” In other words, people were less persuaded by Reagan when he left office than they were when he took office.
.....
[P]olitical scientists Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell...found that [FDR's fireside chats] fostered “less than a 1 percentage point increase” in his approval rating. His more traditional speeches didn’t do any better. He was unable to persuade Americans to enter the Second World War, for example, until Pearl Harbor.

In fact, Edwards' evidence suggest that many presidents achieve their policy goals most efficiently without publicly advocating for them. For a president to publicly address a policy goal, according to Edwards, is often to solidify partisan opposition against it. But it can also strengthen support  among the president's own party. Presidents' public persuasion attempts often have a politicizing effect--whether they like it or not.

Edwards:

“Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line of presidents who have not been able to transform the political landscape through their efforts at persuasion. When he succeeded in achieving major change, it was by mobilizing those predisposed to support him and driving legislation through Congress on a party-line vote.”

Of course, this is not to say that presidential attempts to persuade cannot effect the rhetorical landscape. Jeffery L. Bineham, a rhetoric professor at St. Cloud State University, notes in a letter to the editor of The New Yorker that "death tax," "wars" on poverty, drugs, terror, and mottos like "government is not the solution but the problem," are all examples of presidential speech entering the political lexicon.

Book Review: 'Power, Inc.' by David Rothkopf - Businessweek

 

Romesh Ratnesar summarizes David Rothkopf's new book, Power, Inc.: companies more than governments now rule the world. This is not without varying degrees of benefit among nation states and individuals. Certainly corporations adapt more adeptly and quickly than do governments to changing circumstances. Corporations are vital. But, the situation described in Power, Inc. is not without negative consequences, too, that various nations are addressing differently. (Photo: Kristine Church and the Engelbrekt statue, Main Square, Falun, Sweden, original home of Stora Kopparberg ("Great Copper Mountain," now Stora Enso, post-merger, and based in Finland.))

From the review:

Rothkopf’s lament is not that multinationals like Stora [arguably the oldest continuously operating corporation in the world] have grown so strong, but that the world’s governments have failed to keep pace. The most eye-popping sections of Power, Inc. detail how decolonization, globalization, and financial deregulation have subverted the prerogatives states have traditionally reserved for themselves—like controlling their own currencies, regulating companies operating inside their borders, and providing a basic safety net for their citizens. Rothkopf asserts that as many as 160 of the 192 United Nations member countries are little more than “semi-states,” a “faded version of what a state used to be or was supposed to be.” Meanwhile, the world’s richest country, the U.S., has allowed deep-pocketed, well-connected “supercitizens” to distort the political process in ways that undermine the public interest.

What can be done? Rothkopf argues that the financial crisis has precipitated a “reckoning” that is causing much of the world to abandon America’s laissez-faire approach to economic policy. He identifies various “competing capitalisms” that are “growing faster,” “competing more tenaciously,” and “combating inequality more effectively” than the U.S.; all of these alternatives also call for a more robust government role in the economy. Still, whether the successor to the American model comes from China or Sweden or Singapore, it’s difficult to see the balance of power tilting away from global corporations any time soon. Rothkopf asks former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin whether, in the wake of the 2008 meltdown, large financial institutions should have been broken up. “Don’t you see?” Rubin replies. “Too big to fail isn’t a problem with the system. It is the system.”

via www.businessweek.com

Dragon Eggs

 

Adam Gopnik's, "The Dragon's Egg," in the A Critic At Large section of The New Yorker, makes some observations about "High fantasy for young adults."

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist, fights that never happened, all set against the sort of medieval background that Mark Twain thought he had discredited with “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”What did Tolkien do to this stale stuff to make it so potent?

By stale stuff, Gopnik means Tolkien's sources of inspiration, mainly Northern European myths, such as Beowulf (in Anglo-Saxon) and the Elder Edda (in Old Norse).

It’s true that [Tolkien's] fantasies are uniquely “thought through”: every creature has its own origin story, script, or grammar; nothing is gratuitous. But even more compelling was his arranged marriage between...big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book. The story told by “The Lord of the Rings” is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.

Great, as if hearing "Kill the Wabbit!" during Wagner wasn't bad enough. Now, it'll be Elmer, Bugs, and the gang from Toad Hall.

Gopnik:

Modernist ambiguity, or realist emotional ambivalence, is unknown to Tolkien.
.....
What substitutes for psychology in Tolkien and [followers of his formula] is...an overwhelming sense of history and, with it, a sense of loss.

Gopnik speculates that kids read these stories as mythologies (unbenownst to them, probably). Kids are draw into The Lord of the Rings, Eragon, and even those books that aren't necessarily high fantasy or "Tol-clones" (not a term Gopnik uses), such as the Twilight series, not by the story but by "the symbols and their slow unfolding." It's a drama with domestic touches set in a grand fictional history. Which, I would argue, is more or less what the old myths themselves are--the "real myths," if you will--except not as readable, too foreign in their purposes grounded in perpetuating tribal identities: tales told too long ago--before English, widespread literacy, or the emergance of the novel--to an audience too unlike us despite what we see in the ancient myths of characteristics common to humanity throughout history, the realities of love, hate, self-interest, betrayal, sacrifice, fear, misunderstanding, competition, jealousy, pride, sacrifice, and wonder. Would the old myths born of pre-modern times have any currency today at all if not for modern fantasies that reinvent, repackage, and repurpose them, but in doing so also further the understanding of readers--many of them adolescents or young adults--that there is always in every moment of life, be it your life, another's, a people's, a place's, an institution's, or an idea's--a living historical context.

From Gopnik's conclusion:

One might mock—one does mock—the mastery of what is, after all, mere mock history. But the fantasy readers’ learned habit of thinking historically is an acquisition as profound in its way as the old novelistic training in thinking about life as a series of moral lessons. Becoming an adult means learning a huge body of lore as much as it means learning to know right from wrong. We mostly learn that lore in the form of conventions.... Learning in symbolic form that the past can be mastered is as important as learning in dramatic form that your choices resonate; being brought up to speed is as important as being brought up to grade. Fantasy fiction tells you that history is available, that the past counts. As the boring old professor knew, the backstory is the biggest one of all.

Treasures of the Bodleian - exhibition is open

The Bodleian Libraries’ autumn exhibition ‘Treasures of the Bodleian’ [opened] to the public [on] Friday 30 September.... The exhibition will feature a selection of the Bodleian’s rarest, most important and most evocative items – from ancient papyri to medieval oriental manuscripts to twentieth-century printed books and ephemera.

via www.medievalists.net

There are great video presentations on the website. A mobile app will be launched in October.

Astounding treasures here, including:

"Bakhshali manuscript – first evidence of the concept of zero, represented by a round dot;"
"William Shakespeare, First Folio, 1623;"
"Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Dead Youth’, 1917, handwritten draft;"
"Letter from an Egyptian boy to his father, 2nd or 3rd century AD: a petulant schoolboy called Theon complains to his father for leaving him behind."

A bit closer to today's time, here's J. R. R. Tolkien's watercolor, "Conversation with Smaug," in which he depicts one of the episodes in The Hobbit. 

Below is a video introduction in which--beginning at 1min.: 41seconds--a few of the items are shown with commentary.

More on the exhibition:

The exhibits are arranged into broad themes: the classical heritage; mapping the world; the sacred word; the animal and plant kingdoms; works of the imagination; the sciences of observation and calculation; historical moments in time.

The ‘Treasures of the Bodleian’ exhibition looks towards the new permanent exhibitions gallery in the Weston Library which will open in 2015. Members of the public can give their thoughts on which of the library’s treasures should be put on permanent display in the new building. Visitors to the exhibitions are also invited to take part in the debate on what makes a particular book, manuscript or relic – out of a collection of nine million – a treasure? They can offer their own views when visiting the exhibition, or via the website.

 

Happy Hobbit Day!

Will you indulge old Gaffer’s Home Brew?

While it isn’t Bilbo’s 111th birthday, it is a special day for fans of Tolkien as Frodo and Bilbo are said to both have been born today, by Shire Reckoning of course.

Add to that the fact that "The Hobbit" was first published this week in 1937 and you’ve got the makings for a party of special magnificence! Tolkien fan groups have parties planned at which books are discussed and movies are watched. Cookies, honey cakes and even Lembas (Elven waybread) are among some of the Middle-earth themed snacks that can be found at these gatherings.

"Lord of the Rings" cosplayers and casual fans alike can indulge their “inner Hobbit” by going barefoot to celebrate.

“Hobbit Day” has been observed for over 30 years and with the films in production, the event will only surely grow as the upcoming "Hobbit" films near completion.

Do you have any plans to celebrate?

via geekout.blogs.cnn.com

"Just My Type," the Doves typeface, and NPR's interview with Simon Garfield

The typeface:

"Doves, like the bird, is a fleeting type," Garfield says. The typeface was designed in 1900 by T.J. Cobden Sanderson, who was "a real aesthete. He thought he could invent the perfect, most beautiful type," Garfield explains. (You can see a page from the 1903 Doves Press Bible here.)

Sanderson formed a publishing house that printed using Doves type, but after a terrible falling out, Sanderson decided that he did not want his publishing partner to be able to use the font after he died. "So he took all the letters that had ever been made with Doves and he took them to Westminster Bridge over the [River] Thames and threw them in," Garfield says.

... don't get any ideas, Comic Sans haters.

Great little 4+ min. interview on NPR.

From Garfield's book:

Typefaces are now 560 years old. So when a Brit called Matthew Carter constructed Verdana and Georgia for the digital age in the 1990s, what could he possibly have been doing to an A and a B that had never been done before? And how did an American friend of his make the typeface, which eased Barack Obama into the presidency? And what exactly makes a font presidential or American, or British, French, German, Swiss, or Jewish? These are arcane mysteries, and it is the job of this book to get to the heart of them.

But we should first take a walk around Brooklyn and Manhattan, and look about us. We live at a time where we have never had such an engaging choice of fonts from which to design an alluring storefront or sell a product. Despite global branding, the trend is towards originality. Helvetica dominates.... But the variety remains.... Nothing says Woody Allen's New York like the condensed Windsor typeface he employs for his screen credits, particularly when used white on black (and so what if it was originally manufactured at a foundry in Sheffield, England). The solid Gotham typeface so favoured by Obama's campaign team is stealthily threatening to become the principal US homegrown rival to Helvetica, such is its stout reliability (with no evidence of a midterm slide).

(The above-referenced image of the 1903 Doves Press Bible. Click to enlarge.)

The Year of Mervyn Peake. And "The History of Titus Groan" begins on Radio 4

How to do justice to the short life and abundant creative work of Mervyn Peake, writer, illustrator, artist, and poet? It is his centenary year. (His career was cut short by early onset of Parkinson's Disease; he died in 1968.) Tolkien could almost be dismissed as but a popularizer of Norse and Germanic tales that he merely impressively reworked into stilted Edwardian English--a caboose behind the Wagnerian engine, too--compared to the originality of Peake's fantasy, his three Gormenghast books, chronicling in lush English the life and times of Titus Groan, 77th Earl of Gormenghast.*

They are a fantasy work--of which there were to be more than three books, and which Peake thought of as the Titus books, not the Gormenghast books--in which magical spells aren't needed because the magic's in the telling, the humanity, the threads of Dickensian grotesquery--characters (like Steerpike, Swelter, Chief Chef of Gormenghast, and Gertrude, Countess of Groan) and incidents improbable but somehow just shy of impossible--woven throughout and beaded with flecks of subtle humor and fantastic imagery, such as Fuchia's attic, the Tower of Flints, and Gormenghast itself.

Peake was much more than his Gormenghast creation. He was the child of missionaries and born in China; he was a war artist, a portrait painter, a poet, a father and husband, a proud resident of Sark island.

Tribute is paid to Peake in The Guardian by British writers, Michael Moorcock, A.L. Kennedy, Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL, and China Miéville (who I am a great admirer of).

The BBC produced a television adaptation of Gormenghast in 2000, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Steerpike, the tale's anti-hero; it was broadcast by PBS in the US, and PBS's Gormenghast webpages has a good bio and bibliography page, "Who Was Mervyn Peake?" 

There is an exhibition of Peake illustrations at the British Library through mid-September 2011, and an exhibition at the Christ Beetles gallery through mid-August 2011.

Some centenary year items via MervynPeake.org and the Peake blog:

The first part of the new six-part radio adaptation by Brian Sibley, The History of Titus Groan, is available on BBC Radio 4.... More here, on Jeremy Mortimer's blog.

Fergus Fleming in the Literary Review.

The Guardian has a collection of blogs. Join the debate online.

David Blackburn writes in The Spectator.

The Irish Times.

A Sark-related comment by Matthew Bell in The Independent.

Under a Canvas Sky in Zaman.

*To be fair to Tolkien, he was, as was Peake, more than a writer of fantastical fiction: he was a philologist and scholar in his own right; and a Peake-Tolkein comparison is a forced one, as Peake was not inspired by philology or mythology at all. And it might be noted that Tolkein was less an imitator of Wagner as an opponent of Wagner's interpretations of the Germanic myths. But Tolkien looms large, and comparisons are made frequently to him relative to nearly any writer of nearly anything reviewers place in the increasingly unhelpfully broad category of "fantasy"--a term so nearly useless as to include the sea of "Tol-clone" imitations of Tolkien--of which Peake certainly was not--but also the writing of China Miéville and Michael Moorcock or even H. P. Lovecraft.

When personal integrity is not enough - Herta Müller (with Gabriel Liiceanu, discussing language and dissidence)

Herta Müller:

[E]verything each one of us does we do differently, because we have no other option. You can test that with writers because their job is to write things down – and this is something you can see for yourself and discuss. In the case of other people, things and ideas do not get expressed on the outside so we can't see them. That's the difference. I have met so many sensitive people in all walks of life, doing all sorts of jobs, and I have never thought that I am capable of seeing something which these people who do not write cannot. 
.....
I have said this before: I do not possess a superior understanding of the world. In fact, I do not possess any understanding of this world, let alone a superior one. I do not understand the world. I do not understand. That is why I write, because I do not understand.... Nothing justifies the degradation of another, nothing justifies someone wanting to look at a zoo, to stand in front of a cage and think "I am more sensitive and have an extraordinary mind and I watch the common people to see how they behave." I haven't a clue. I belong among those in the cage, I am not standing outside the bars watching. I don't even understand what I have done. When I was in Romania [during the Ceausescu regime], if I started every night to think about what had happened during the day, I couldn't get my head round it. I couldn't even afford to think within a wider time span. The exact, tiny things which kept accumulating were enough for me. I couldn't think. I had to cope, and this absorbed everything I could come up with in my head. I think literature too is a way of searching.... We are all a mystery, even in our own body: we do not know how long we will live, which body organs will fail us, when our mind will go. So this is enough. That is why it was so tragic, because alongside all these existential problems, which automatically concern us all, the dictatorship introduced the political surveillance that you had to fight against. I didn't understand a thing. That's why I keep trying to ask myself: what happened back then? All I have understood is that freedom is important.

via www.eurozine.com

A very interesting interview with Herta Müller the novelist and Nobel laureate. She has publicly criticized Romanian intellectuals for their passivity during the Ceausescu regime; she defends her stance that, as adeptly summarized by Eurozine, "the preservation of personal intellectual integrity alone was inadequate as a form of political resistance."

Hat-tip with a flourish to 3quarksdaily.

David Brooks

Brooks, though a 49-year-old Canadian-born, suburban New York-raised, Chicago university-educated and now so much of a stellar New York Times columnist that the White House sometimes rings him to ask what he's planning to write about, is deeply Anglophilic.

via www.guardian.co.uk

‎"Think Yiddish, act British."

David Brooks: political communitarian....

Brooks hails British rather than French Enlightenment thinkers as the guys who really understood what makes the social animal tick. While Voltaire, Condorcet and Descartes used reason to confront superstition and feudalism, thinkers across the Channel – Brooks cites Burke, Hume and Adam Smith – thought it unwise to trust reason. 
.....
Most success stories stress academic ability, IQ, hard work, he argues. Brooks rather stresses non-cognitive skills, which, he writes, is "the catch-all category for hidden qualities that can't be easily measured, but which in real life lead to happiness and fulfilment."
.....
Brooks thinks his book, written with the US in mind, speaks to British problems. He quotes the jeremiads of self-styled Red Tory Phillip Blond about Britain having become a bipolar nation in which a bureaucratic, centralised state presides over a fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry. "I get to where Blond is by arguing that there have been two individualist revolutions. Conservatives embraced the individualism of the market and reacted furiously if the state impinged on individual economic choice." Brooks writes that one consequence of this is chains such as Walmart closing local shops, destroying networks of community those shops created.