Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright The American Scholar

Censorship in China is a powerful field of force; it affects anyone who gets close to it. Four years ago, I signed five book contracts with a Shanghai publisher who planned to bring out four volumes of my fiction and a collection of my poems. The editor in charge of the project told me that he couldn’t possibly consider publishing two of my novels, The Crazed and War Trash, owing to the sensitive subject matter. The former touches on the Tiananmen tragedy, and the latter deals with the Korean War. I was supposed to select the poems and translate them into Chinese for the volume of poetry. As I began thinking about what poems to include, I couldn’t help but censor myself, knowing intuitively which ones might not get through the censorship. It was disheartening to realize I would have to exclude the stronger poems if the volume could ever see print in China. As a result, I couldn’t embark on the translation wholeheartedly. To date, I haven’t translated a single poem, though the deadline was May 2005.

The publisher publicly announced time and again that these five books would come out soon, sometime in late 2005, according to the contracts. But that spring, the first in the series, my collection of short stories, Under the Red Flag, was sent to the Shanghai censorship office—the Bureau of Press and Publications—and the book was shot down. So the whole project was stonewalled. A year later, I heard that the publisher had decided to abandon the project. In the meantime, numerous official newspapers spread the word that my books had no market value in China.

The office that Chinese writers, artists, and journalists dread and hate most is the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. In addition to its propaganda work within the party, this department, through its numerous bureaus, also supervises the country’s newspapers, publishing houses, radio and TV stations, movie industry, and the Internet. Except for the Military Commission, no department in the Party Central Committee wields more power than this office, which forms the core of the party’s leadership. Its absolute authority had gone unchallenged in the past, though even the Communists themselves understand the sinister role it has played. Luo Ruiqing, who was the first to head the Propaganda Department after the Communists came to power, once admitted: “To let the media serve politics means to tell lies, to deceive the above and delude the below, to defile public opinions, and to create nonsensical news.”

In recent years, however, the authority of the Propaganda Department has been challenged from time to time. To many Chinese, one of the brave figures in this regard is Jiao Guobiao, formerly a professor of journalism at Peking University, who in March 2004 posted on the Internet a long article titled “Fight Against the Party’s Propaganda Department.” Jiao condemns the office and its entire system as “the main blockage in the development of Chinese civilization,” and as “the protector of the evil and the corrupt.” He lists 14 illnesses the department has suffered, among which are its betrayal of the original communist ideal and its perpetuation of a Cold War mentality (to wit, stoking hostility toward the United States). He suggests that the department be dissolved, since no civilized country in the world has such an office. Jiao was not “disciplined” immediately, but later when he was on a short visit to the United States, Peking University claimed that he had “voluntarily quit” his teaching position.

Another challenger of the authority of the Propaganda Department is the writer Zhang Yihe. In early 2007, Wu Shulin, a senior official from the department, declared at a meeting that eight books published in 2006 must be banned. Most of the books are nonfiction and unveil some seedy sides of contemporary Chinese history. Among the banned titles was Zhang’s book Past Stories of Peking Opera Stars, which describes the vicissitudes of eight master opera singers, especially their sufferings and ruination after 1949, when the Communists seized China. When Wu Shulin issued the ban, he gave no explanation beyond “because the book was written by that person.” Zhang’s previous two books had also been banned. But she couldn’t stomach it this time and wrote a public letter demanding an apology from Wu Shulin and calling on the Propaganda Department to rescind the ban. In an interview, she said she would defend her book with her life. Zhang’s action caused a stir and was supported by the public. She tried to file a lawsuit against the Propaganda Department for violating her citizen’s rights of publication and free speech. Of course, no court dared to accept such a case. However, the public uproar deterred Wu Shulin, who kept a low profile and was apologetic in private, saying he had just followed instructions from above. Nevertheless, the ban has remained in place, and Zhang’s book is no longer available on the mainland.

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Posted at 6:41 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Los Angeles Times

…Part of what makes this year’s race so volatile — and so absorbing — is the range of archetypes it has mobilized. Sen. John McCain is relatively familiar. He is the leathery man of the West, of exactly the sort who has entranced the Republican Party for almost half a century now. It is the role that Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush played before him.

McCain himself invokes Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Rider who, despite his New York origins, ranched in South Dakota and hunted throughout the West. Those who admire McCain tend to believe that it was men of this sort — rugged individualists, plain-spoken, straight-talking, self-sufficient men at home in nature (not in our effete cities) — who settled the West on their own. The myth discounts the immense role of the federal government in conquering the natives, seeing that the railroads were built, adjudicating disputes, arranging for water. No matter: Print the legend. In this image of the Old West, history belongs to the man who takes charge, the warrior in command who knows how to shoot and how to lead others to shoot as well.

To McCain’s incarnation of this powerful archetype has been added the sidekick Sarah Palin. Palin mobilizes a powerful and unusual — powerful partly because it is unusual — supplementary combination of myths. She is Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter who foolhardy men underestimate at their peril even if she has a penchant for tall tales. But Palin is also Wonder Woman, the super-heroine whose exploits and attractions appeal to both sexes. And she is Aimee Semple McPherson, the onetime revivalist and moralist of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. In the imagination of her followers, Palin is some combination of Glamour, Outdoor Life, Playboy and DC Comics.

If the Republican ticket harmonizes with deep mythic currents, the Democrats this year are pioneering, and a bit scrambled, in their mythic significance. Obama is the quintessential outsider — a “sojourner,” the New York Times’ David Brooks has called him. He hails from exotic Hawaii, alien Indonesia, elegant Harvard and down-and-dirty Chicago, all at the same time. To his devotees, he is part city-slicker, part man of the world; to his enemies, precisely this combination makes him suspect. Like the Lone Ranger, he rides into town to serve a community in need, but in a surprising twist, this Lone Ranger is closer to the color of Tonto.

Mythically, therefore, Obama is elusive, Protean, a shape-shifter who, when not beloved, arouses suspicion. Perhaps he is that object of envy and derision, a “celebrity,” as the McCain campaign suggested, but he’s also an egghead. He’s the professor — but one who can sink the shot from beyond the three-point circle. He too has a sidekick, but, if you judge by their resumes, it is as if Robin has chosen Batman. One thing is clear: He is not a man of the ranch. Personifying a welter of archetypes, he thrills some, confounds others and jams circuits. Some people ask, “Who is this guy?”…

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Posted at 3:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

… Some of the passionately feminist critics of Palin who attacked her personally deserved some of the backlash they received. But circumstances have changed since Palin was introduced as just a hockey mom with lipstick — what a difference a financial crisis makes — and a more complicated picture has emerged.

As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.

Yes, she recently met and turned several heads of state as the United Nations General Assembly convened in New York. She was gracious, charming and disarming. Men swooned. Pakistan’s president wanted to hug her. (Perhaps Osama bin Laden is dying to meet her?)

And, yes, she has common sense, something we value. And she’s had executive experience as a mayor and a governor, though of relatively small constituencies (about 6,000 and 680,000, respectively).

Finally, Palin’s narrative is fun, inspiring and all-American in that frontier way we seem to admire. When Palin first emerged as John McCain’s running mate, I confess I was delighted. She was the antithesis and nemesis of the hirsute, Birkenstock-wearing sisterhood — a refreshing feminist of a different order who personified the modern successful working mother.

Palin didn’t make a mess cracking the glass ceiling. She simply glided through it.

It was fun while it lasted.

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League…

Posted at 1:33 PM · Comments (0)

Short, brilliant and packed with punch. This is a tightly wound novella that offers a foreigner’s perception of the US in the affluent 1950s, think Henry Miller’s Air-conditioned Nightmare in the form of a polar, or crime novel.

Posted at 10:35 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Star
Milk scare stems from problematic ‘normal’ China, while the ‘abnormal’ China is a show-time success
Sep 21, 2008 04:30 AM

BEIJING–They can win 51 gold medals.

They can stage the best opening ceremonies in the history of the Olympic Games. And this week they’ll even catapult astronauts into space to conduct the country’s first-ever spacewalk.

So why can’t the Chinese government safeguard baby formula for the nation’s infants?

“Because there are actually two Chinas,” explains Li Datong, a leading commentator and one of China’s most incisive social critics.

The first is a kind of show-time China, a totalitarian state that can mobilize the nation’s might and money to execute time-limited events for national prestige: the Olympics for example – or this week’s spacewalk.

Li calls it, “the abnormal China.”

“Then there is the other China,” he says, “the one the majority of us live in.

“Call it ‘the normal China.’ This one is full of problems and is a more complicated matter …”

“Normal” China was on sad display last week, as the government grappled with an ever-exploding milk crisis. It started with one company’s baby formula contaminated with melamine – a chemical used to make plastics and glue – and by week’s end had spread to the nation’s overall milk supply.

When the government’s quality inspection chief Li Changjiang went out of his way to assure the world the milk served to athletes at the Olympics and Paralympics was safe, and even passed through “special scanning procedures,” Chinese netizens exploded with rage.

“Give melamine to ourselves, but give safety to our guests,” cried one.

“Send the good milk abroad, leave ourselves tragedy,” wrote another.

Beijing lawyer Zhou Ze even publicly called for Li Changjiang’s resignation.

If Li were to be removed, he wouldn’t be the first high-profile official to fall. Last year, former Food and Drug Administration chief Zheng Xiaoyu was executed after taking bribes from pharmaceutical companies to allow them to market untested, deadly medicines.

Christopher Hughes, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, says he believes Chinese officials “spared no cost” in ensuring foreigners’ food and milk were safe during the Olympics.

“And the conclusion being drawn by many (Chinese) on the Internet, is that their government cares more about protecting foreigners and their own international image than it does about saving the lives of Chinese babies.”

Why can’t China guarantee safe milk for its babies?

There is a complex of reasons, says Hughes: “systemic corruption, bureaucratic inefficiencies and the lack of a strong civil society of non-governmental organizations and a free press.”

The government that we have assumed to be in total control – controlling the media, organized worship, even grey-haired grannies wanting to demonstrate – might not be in as much control as we thought.

From the outset, in what seemed like some bizarre parallel universe, rather than alert Chinese parents as soon as possible to potentially life-saving information about the melamine contamination, baby formula producer Sanlu and various levels of government tried to shut down information.

The initial information blackout was a scandal of its own.

One Chinese journalist, however, dared to challenge it, and that made a difference.

Jiang Guangzhou, writing a blog on the Chinese website Tianya.cn, was frustrated by reports citing babies with kidney stones thought to be caused by a baby formula from “a certain company.”

On Sept. 11, after investigating the matter, Jiang named Sanlu – a company with 50 years in the business and 18 per cent of China’s baby formula market. Sanlu started the day with outraged denials. By midnight it issued a recall.

And the news started to circulate.

Chinese journalists say the government’s Central Propaganda Department, however, issued orders that Chinese media not send their own reporters to further investigate the story; early reports of the scandal – including Jiang Guangzhou’s – were deleted from websites; and editors were told to only use reports from the state’s tightly controlled Xinhua News Agency.

The government wanted what it always has on what it deems to be a “sensitive” story, one that might trigger upheaval: total control.

Shockingly, on a day last week when the number of babies suffering kidney stones after drinking the tainted formula rocketed from 1,250 to nearly 6,250, state broadcaster CCTV reported on it – but only as the fourth item on the main evening newscast.

Since then the government has stopped releasing figures.

Exactly how many children are now ill as a result of bad baby formula is unknown.

And the embarrassing fact that New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark also emerged as a key whistle-blower in the Chinese tragedy has been kept out of China’s mainstream media.

Clark had ordered her ambassador in Beijing around Sept. 9 to contact China’s central government with news she had learned from Sanlu’s minority New Zealand partner that the baby formula was contaminated.

Most Chinese still know nothing of her role.

In the past 48 hours, however, the central government has shifted into action. The Ministry of Health ordered all provinces and major cities to set up 24-hour hot lines for anxious consumers.

And government agencies have been told to monitor markets for supply disruptions and price-gouging in the sales of powdered milk – a staple in rural China.

State-run newspapers and state-controlled TV also ran lists of milk products that have been cleared of violations and deemed to be safe.

Those measures should help the government gain back some of the credibility it lost in its early bungling of the crisis.

But the lack of a broadly vigorous, independent media remains a key part of China’s current problems, says Hughes. So is the lack of pressure groups.

An independent media has a key watchdog role to play in revealing shortcomings in any system.

“No matter how many regulations are put in place and organizations created to monitor food safety,” says Hughes, “it’s impossible to effectively monitor a large and complex modern society without the scrutiny of pressure groups and the media.

“A centralized, authoritarian system is simply not able to do all the work,” he says.

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Posted at 10:32 PM · Comments (0)

Anon

CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS PROPOSAL

Dear Mr. American,

Good day and compliments.

I am HENRI PAULSON, the Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America, and the personal financial adviser to GEORGE W. BUSH (the eldest son of the former dictator of America, GENERAL GEORGE HUSSEIN WALKER BUSH).

This letter will definitely come to you as a huge surprise, but I implore you to take the time to go through it carefully as the decision you make will go off a long way to determine the future and continued existence of the entire members of my country.

It is with deep sense of purpose and utmost sincerity that I have the privilege to write you this letter knowing full well how you will feel as regards to receiving a mail from somebody you have not met or seen before. There is no need to fear, I got your address from a Wall Street business directory which lends credence to my humble belief. I also assure you of my honesty and trustworthiness. I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

During the last Military Regime here in America, the Government officials set up companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over-invoiced in various ministries. My country has had great crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of US$800,000,000,000.00 (eight hundred billion US dollars) in cash for safe-keeping. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be of most profitable for you.

I am working with the honourable MR. PHIL GRAMM, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As Senator, you may know him as leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s.

This is a matter of great urgence. We need a immediate blank cheque. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because as civil servants we are constantly under surveillance by Democratic members of Congress, the media, and the American public. My family lawyer, MR. RICK DAVIS, advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope to commence the transfer latest seven (7) banking days from the date of the receipt of the following information: all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. This way we will use your country’s name to apply for payment in your name. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds. That’s all. Let me know what you think about this.

We are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transaction.

May Allah show you mercy as you do so?

Your faithfully,

Dr. Minister of Treasury Paulson

Posted at 1:02 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Big Money

For years, the Republican Party has preached the virtues of the “ownership society.” Americans should own their own homes, goes the songbook; they should own stocks; they should take ownership of social benefits like heath care; they should approach their lives as if they are in charge rather than look for dependency-inducing welfare programs.

It’s a compelling vision—and it has completely collapsed. The only important ownership that the Bush administration is peddling today is government ownership of the country’s financial institutions. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson—the former CEO of Goldman Sachs—announced an unprecedented plan to salvage the largest banks in America. Just days after declaring that a bailout of Lehman Brothers would constitute an unacceptable moral hazard, a Republican administration has decided that the only way to keep the American economy alive is to have the federal government take the reins of some of the largest financial institutions in the world.

There is a term in political philosophy to describe a government takeover of a critical industry: That term is socialism. The government is telling us that capital and credit markets cannot, for several reasons, solve the current crisis on their own—only the federal government and its massive taxpayer base have the authority and the resources to solve it. That is state socialism: the philosophy preached by the founders of the Second International, by the radical wing of the American labor movement, through the formation of the Soviet Union and its satellites, and now by Henry Paulson…

…Focusing on ironies and hypocrisy is fun, but Paulson’s socialist prescription actually provides a rare opportunity to advance the state of American political and economic debate. During the Cold War, socialism became an especially unsavory idea because it was linked to the countries that pointed missiles at us. This was less the case in Europe, where democratic socialism grew to become the norm, with sometimes rocky but mostly successful results (you don’t see the Spanish having to take over their banking sector, at least not yet). Paulson’s relatively untainted socialism offers America a genuine Nixon-goes-to-China moment, a chance to have a more honest, less demonizing conversation about where, when, and how government intervention in the economy is effective and desirable…

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Posted at 5:20 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Snippets of a brilliant piece by Brent Staples:

… The term “uppity” was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.

Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye — and argued with them about things that mattered — were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible…

… Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.

These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.

Posted at 4:50 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
Several snippets:

Five years ago I gave up the full-time writing life and became the kind of domesticated writer known as a professor. I was not shot with a tranquilizer gun, tagged and shipped off to a university. I underwent this conversion more or less of my own free will, drawn by the lure of health insurance, salary and security. The changes in me have been gradual, barely noticeable most of the time, except when I catch myself using, as I did the other day, words like “pedagogy” and “collegial.” Though I sometimes chafe at my collar, just as often I appreciate the miracle of the job. A typical creative-writing professor has four months of summer vacation; teaches passionate young people a subject they actually want to learn about (and often enjoy); carries a light two-class load per term that is the envy of professors in other departments; and gains both a sense of belonging and ego satisfaction as a pillar — even a star — of a small, intense community of writers and readers. Furthermore, in a time when it is increasingly difficult for literary writers to support themselves through their writing, professorships provide an attractive alternative to working as a bookstore clerk, carpenter’s helper or busboy. The benefits have proved appealing enough to draw thousands of writers into the university fold, and while a couple of generations ago it might have been a surprise to find a writer who taught at a college, now it’s a surprise to find one who doesn’t…

…Writers who have been lucky enough to land these gigs are inclined to talk — when we aren’t grumbling — about their good fortune in sensible language, citing all that is sane, healthy, balanced and economically viable about their jobs. But another question is discussed less. What exactly does all this teaching do to our writing? And what, if anything, does it mean for a country to have a tenured literature?…

…For most of us, the options aren’t teaching or writing all day in a barn but teaching or working at the Dairy Queen. It’s not just a question of success or even genius, but temperament and discipline. Young writers think all they need is time, but give them that time and watch them implode. After all, there’s something basically insane about sitting at a desk and talking to yourself all day, and there’s a reason that writers are second only to medical students in instances of hypochondria. In isolation, our minds turn on us pretty quickly. I have two writer friends, successful novelists who could afford not to teach, who insist that rather than detract from their writing, their lives as professors are what allow them to write, and that given more free time, they would crumble. The job provides a safety net above the abyss of facing the difficulty of creating every day, making an irrational thing feel more rational…

…Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don’t forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching. There is a deep pleasure in sharing the things that you have labored to learn in solitude. It’s inspiring work — rewarding, interactive, human work so different from what we do at our desks — and it turns out that writers, many of us natural entertainers, often do it quite well…

…While the effect of teaching on writing may be a matter of debate, its effect on reading is undeniable. That is because there are only so many hours in the day, and those hours are used up reading our students’ work, which is, by definition, apprentice writing. Energy is finite while college students seemingly are not, and after teaching for a while you begin to feel as if you are in a “Star Trek” episode, lost on a strange planet made up of a thousand pods of need, all of them beaming out at you, sucking your energy, and all of them, invariably, asking you to read something. Since the reading life feeds the writing life, since we are what we eat, this can wear you down, to say the least…

…I don’t know how long I can survive in captivity. For the time being I will continue to throw myself into teaching and try to take Stegner’s advice about the summers, while hoping my job doesn’t get in the way of my work…

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Posted at 10:34 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright United Press International

Feb. 14, 2009

CHICAGO, Feb. 14 (UPI) — A U.S. researcher says the sweet first kisses of courtship may provide important information on mating to both men and women.

Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said for men the kisses appear to provide data on a woman’s estrogen level, The Daily Mail reported. That would let them know where the woman is in the fertility cycle.

“Men like sloppier kisses,” she said.

Women, on the other hand, may be getting unconscious information on whether a potential partner has an immune system different from theirs. Marrying someone with complementary immunity could lead to healthier offspring with a broad range of disease resistance.

Fisher reported on her research at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.

“I think that is just the beginning of what we are going to find out,” she said. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. We are going to find many other mechanisms we unconsciously use to size up a person’s biological traits.”

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Posted at 3:35 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
A snippet from a review of Annette Gordon-Reed’s new book about the Hemings family:

As Ms. Gordon-Reed spoke about how profoundly strange life in Monticello must have been, a large monitor played a short history of slavery in New York City.

Sally Hemings’s father was John Wayles, a slave owner and the father of Jefferson’s wife, Martha. After his death, all the Hemingses eventually came to Monticello.

It is almost impossible to put ourselves in their places, Ms. Gordon-Reed said. As she writes of James Hemings in her book, “A man is born into a society that allows his half-sister and her husband to hold him as a slave.” Does he grieve when Martha dies, she asks, or when her child — his niece — is buried? Did he and his brother resent the fact that the man who controlled their lives inherited the fortune that — as John Wayles’s sons — would have been theirs had they been born free white men? And what did Jefferson, who gave his enslaved servants a relative amount of freedom and sometimes considered himself a friend, suppose of their feelings?

“The connections between these two men are so divorced from anything resembling what could be recognized today as ‘normal’ human relations that they can be recovered only in the imagination and, even then, only with great difficulty,” she writes of James Hemings and Jefferson.

And then there is Sally, light-skinned and beautiful, who apparently bore a remarkable resemblance to her dead half-sister.

Ms. Gordon-Reed tries to understand why the pregnant Sally Hemings made the decision to return with Jefferson to Virginia from Paris, where the law declared her a free person and where there was a community of free Africans.

She suggests that an insecure existence in a foreign country, away from her family, would be a frightening prospect for a pregnant teenager. Jefferson promised to free their children in exchange for her coming back to Virginia; she would have a home and a powerful protector.

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Posted at 12:15 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

A snippet. This item consists of the words of the editor, Gerald Howard, at Random House.

I have vivid memories of David from our too short years as author and editor—all sorts of triumphs and crises. His letters to me, usually explaining, why, yes, Mr. Howard, I understand exactly why you are suggesting that I try to do this to my book, and I am sure you are completely right, Mr. Howard, but you see I … (there then followed three pages of insanely closely argued reasons why he could not do it, worthy of the virtuoso practitioner of analytical philosophy that he was) were all typed (not word-processed) single-space without a typo or correction. They went on, big surprise, for pages and pages and were the product of a mind firing on more neural cylinders than any I encountered before or since. I have wondered endlessly what it might be like in there, inside David’s mind. Clearly there was terror as well as exaltation. Lost in the fun house? I know this: We have lost the most original and profound (and, not to forget, the funniest) American writer born after 1950.

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Posted at 7:59 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Onion

September 11, 2008
Onion Sports
BEIJING—After numerous protests and accusations of foul play from Paralympic athletes, especially those participating in judo, basketball, and tennis, the International Olympic Committee announced Tuesday they would investigate claims that many members of the Chinese female Paralympic team have full sets of functioning arms and legs.
“After reviewing the scores of U.S. volleyball’s 25-0/25-0/25-0 three-set loss to the Chinese women, we were already considering an inquiry. But what confirmed it was how they looked on the podium together, all smiling, waving both hands, and standing on both legs,” IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies told reporters, adding that having arms and legs, especially in the Paralympics, offers a significant competitive advantage. “Unfortunately, because official documentation provided by our Chinese hosts does state that their female Paralympians lack arms and legs, there is very little chance of anything resulting from the investigation.”

Thus far the Chinese women have won gold, silver, and bronze in every single event except for swimming, in which American female Paralympian Michelle Phelps has won a record 36 gold medals.

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Posted at 11:09 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Tim Wise
A snippet…

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you’ll “kick their fuckin’ ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend five different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance because “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be immediately disqualified from holding office—since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t added until the 1950s—while if you’re black and believe in reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school, requires it), you are a dangerous and mushy liberal who isn’t fit to safeguard American institutions.

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Posted at 9:58 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal
A snippet:

The domestic agenda of the next president is shrinking. Nobody, anywhere, knows how much of a financial burden the federal government has taken on in the past few weeks, but the cost of bailing out Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and American International Group Inc. — to say nothing of the potential cost of riding to the rescue of American auto makers, which looks increasingly likely — could conceivably run into the hundreds of billions.

The government’s cost for bailouts ultimately may turn out to be less onerous than some of today’s darker projections, depending on how markets evolve, of course. But no matter. Whoever is putting together a new economic plan for a new administration in January won’t dare to base it on a rosy scenario.

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Posted at 9:46 PM · Comments (0)

This is a snippet from a very interesting and energetically researched web site that’s among the best ways I’ve found to follow the vicissitudes of the presidential campaign. See the link below:

McCain’s other problem is that Sarah Palin may no longer be an asset to the ticket; in fact, she may be a liability. Averaging the candidates’ favorability scores across four recent polls — as one should always try and do when looking at favorability numbers since they can vary greatly depending on question wording — Palin now has the worst net scores among the four principals in the race:

“Palin’s average favorability score is now a +7 — about 10 points behind Joe Biden’s numbers. Perhaps more importantly, these numbers are 10-15 points behind where Palin’s numbers were just a week or so ago. If voters come in not knowing very much about a candidate — and the more they see of the candidate, the less they like of the candidate — this is a major concern.”

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Copyright FiveThirtyEight

Posted at 3:01 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve wasted a lot of money on technical guides to computer technology and cameras over the years. So when I came across strong recommendations for this book online I was initially skeptical. I took chance on it, mostly because I was moving this summer, and would be setting up a new home office, including my digital photo lab and print shop.
To cut to the chase, I started reading this book last week, and have scarcely wanted to put it down. It’s that well done, not only very well written for this kind of book, but it has taught me a lot about the wrinkles and arcania of what photographers often call post-production, and I thought I was already pretty well versed.
Very highly recommended.

Posted at 3:28 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

Thomas Jefferson’s contradictions have long baffled historians. His clarion assertion of human equality in the Declaration of Independence became the battle cry of the abolitionist movement. Yet he lived on the fruits of slave labor and never risked political capital (or his own comfort) to oppose the institution of slavery. He regarded blacks as odorous, intellectually inferior and incapable of creating art. Yet, as Annette Gordon-Reed convincingly argues in this monumental and original book, he cohabited for more than 30 years with an African American woman with whom he conceived seven children.

Liberating the woman known to Jefferson’s smirking enemies as “dusky Sally” from the lumber room of scandal and legend, Gordon-Reed leads her into the daylight of a country where slaves and masters met on intimate terms. In so doing, Gordon-Reed also shines an uncompromisingly fresh but not unsympathetic light on the most elusive of the Founding Fathers.

In Sally Hemings’s day, Gordon-Reed writes, she was “the most well-known enslaved person in America.” Her connection to Jefferson was brutally exposed and mocked by his political opponents during his first presidency, while black churchmen in the early republic preached sermons on her “family situation.” The publicity was sufficiently embarrassing that Jefferson’s partisans and descendants crafted a sanitized and sexless version of life at Monticello that continued until our own day. Although controversy persists, recent DNA research has caused most historians to accept Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’s children.

Gordon-Reed first probed the Jefferson-Hemings relationship in her 1997 book “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.” Now she deepens and widens her view to encompass the entire sprawling Hemings clan as actors on the stage of history. Members of the Hemings family came to Monticello as part of the inheritance of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles. They were the offspring of Martha’s father and his enslaved concubine Elizabeth Hemings, and thus Martha’s own siblings. (In a different society, they would never have been Jefferson’s slaves at all and would instead have shared in the inheritance that Martha acquired from her father’s estate; the same could later be said of Jefferson’s own mixed-race children.) Gordon-Reed’s exploration of the lives of other members of the Hemings family — most notably Sally’s mother, Elizabeth, and her brothers, Robert and James, who served as valets to Jefferson — is also exhaustive and fascinating in its own right. But Sally is the most compelling figure.

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Posted at 7:25 PM · Comments (0)

An excerpt.

…Mr. Theroux, 67, has just written his 43rd book, the melodiously titled “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,” published last month. In it, he follows poignantly in his own footsteps, retracing — to the extent permitted by political conditions on the ground — the journey he undertook in 1973, which resulted in his peerless, and much-imitated, “The Great Railway Bazaar.”

“Can you imagine, I did that journey back then with no credit cards. I didn’t get an Amex card until the early ’80s. I didn’t have credit. I traveled from London to Tokyo and back just with cash.

“In Iran, in 1973, if you had blue jeans and a watch, people would follow you down the street, saying ‘Please, sir, sell me your watch, sell me your jeans.’ In Mashhad, I sold a pair of jeans for $15, quite a lot of money, because they were real American blue jeans and everyone wanted American blue jeans. It was cool. Hippies would go, and bring three or four pairs and sell them in Iran, in Afghanistan.” All this, he observes, was “pre China and India making clothes. The price of clothes has gone down in the world. Clothes are cheaper everywhere. No one’s naked any more.”

Mr. Theroux is territorial. When I ask him why he undertook his latest journey — expecting him to talk about the need to observe how places had changed — he responds by saying, “I really didn’t want somebody else taking my trip. A lot of travel writers hang their stories on my peg. But I’m still in the business, so it’s something I should be doing.”

And how much has Asia transformed since the last time he traversed the place aboard an iron rooster? “Some places haven’t changed much — Burma, for instance. I still call it that … Burma. And the places that have changed radically — like India — were hard to understand. It was hard, hard, to understand where India’s going. The people there are lost in the change. Bangalore, for one, and a lot of other parts of India can’t keep pace with the change. They can’t build roads fast enough, airports fast enough … It’s as though they’re all having a nervous breakdown

“But I love traveling in India,” Mr. Theroux continues, “because Indians are approachable. If I were traveling in the U.S. and asked people some of the questions I ask in India, I’d get a very dusty answer. People would say ‘Who are you?’ ‘You work for the government?’ When you’re in India, you can ask, ‘Where do you live, what do you do, how much do you earn, how many children do you have?’ It’s the accessible poor. You can do that in Southeast Asia, too. But in America you can’t. Try asking those questions in Jackson, Mississippi.”

The U.S., Mr. Theroux declares, “is the hardest country in the world for anyone to write about. If I were asked to write a book about America, I wouldn’t know where to begin. Maybe you’d need to move into some part of Arkansas, the way [the anthropologist Bronislaw] Malinowski did with the Trobriand Islanders. You’d go in, and make a plan, and by degrees get acquainted with people. And then you’d probably be able to write. I think Western, industrialized societies create a kind of paranoia, a suspicion of government, a suspicion of strangers.”

Did Mr. Theroux find suspicion of strangers in any country on his latest journey? What about Japan? “Hmm … let me think,” he responds, playing with his chin. “Japan doesn’t have suspicion of strangers. They just have an utter lack of interest. They have a settled sense of themselves as an advanced culture, a sense that other people aren’t doing things right. They think their food is best, their way of living is best. They lack space, but in all other ways they feel they’ve got it figured out.”

But then I detect a gleam in his eye — a gleam of mischief, bordering, deliciously, on malice. “Singapore,” he says, stressing the “pore” and raising visions of muggy, tropical discomfort. “Singapore is an example of a place where people are self-conscious in the presence of foreigners, because they feel that you’re going to criticize them for having accommodated themselves to their government and this way of living.

“It’s like a gated community. You go in definitely feeling (a) that you don’t belong there, (b) that they’re not particularly interested in your staying there, and (c) that they’re very, very defensive. They feel they have to explain why they’ve settled for Singapore. And do you know, the sex trade there is booming, but their boast is, ‘These aren’t Singapore girls … they’re Burmese, they’re Vietnamese, they’re Filipina … but not us!’”

I remark, here, that there’s an awful lot of sex in his latest book. “Sexual inquiry,” Mr. Theroux retorts, swiftly correcting me. “Yes there is, because my theory is that if you go to a place and see how people are relating sexually — at porno shops, clubs, brothels — you have a very good idea of how men treat women in that society, of the lives of women … what the childhoods of people are like … of the levels of their fantasies and freedoms. It’s a key, almost, to human behavior.”

We talk about the places he could not revisit: Iran, because he was denied a visa; Afghanistan, because of the war; and Pakistan. I remind him of something he wrote in “The Great Railway Bazaar,” a dog-eared copy of which I have brought to our dinner: “Peshawar is a pretty town. I would gladly move there, settle down on a verandah, and grow old watching sunsets in the Khyber Pass.” Mr. Theroux looks forlorn, as if hurt by the vanishing of a world and its ways. “I couldn’t go to Pakistan. I decided that it was not safe for me, as an American. Now there’s a place I would have felt suspicion as a stranger, a foreigner. Peshawar … it’s more like the Peshawar of Kipling now.” …

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Posted at 9:52 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve been away from the site for an unusually long period of time, in large part because I’ve been so busy with the relocation to New York, and the switch to my new job at Columbia. Things are settling down though, and nicely. All of the rhythms of life have changed abruptly for me, but the teaching has been very enjoyable so far, and as I get a few of the remaining wrinkles worked out, I’ll begin to busy myself with a lot of new writing assignments, some of which are in progress already, and some big new photography projects, as well.
I’ve managed to begin some interesting new work with the camera here already, and only look for the momentum to gather.
Mini-announcement, I am looking for models to work with to further the nude portraiture work that can be found on my howardwfrench.net photography site. If any visitor here is interested, please contact me directly.
Eventually, I hope to do a redesign of this site. In the meantime, I plan a lot more diary entries, more in a blogging vein.
Stay tuned!

Posted at 9:39 PM · Comments (0)

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