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I'm very sad to record the death of Dina Rabinovitch. Dina was a friend of Adèle's and mine, and our thoughts are with Anthony and the rest of her family today. Dina wrote about her illness in Take Off Your Party Dress. She contributed these two pieces to normblog.
Update: See now here.
Greg Stekelman is a writer and illustrator. He was born in 1975 and lives where he has always lived, in north London. He is best known for his website The Man Who Fell Asleep. His tube gossip, a weekly catalogue of things overheard on the London Underground, is printed each week in Time Out London. In 2006 his first novel, A Year in the Life of TheManWhoFellAsleep, was published. A fantastical, surreal, introspective mock diary, it received a warm critical reception. Greg writes, below, about the struggle to come up with books that have made the most impression on him.
Greg Stekelman on the difficulty of naming important books
Surveying the lists of books in Norm's Writer's Choice series I found myself breaking into a sweat. My god! People have chosen important books. Political books. Classics. All those books that I'm supposed to have read but never got round to. And these people are proper celebrities too! They've been on Newsnight and The Culture Show. I felt a pressing urge to raise my game, or at the very least buy a new pair of glasses. After all, I write as a man with a collection of 25 Charlie Brown books (total cost: £4 from a charity shop).
I have spent the last few days thinking about the books that have made the most impression on me, and it's been a struggle. To find a book that really changed my life, that made me dream and swoon and obsess, I have to go back about 25 years to before my adolescence. And that made me think about books and the role of literature. Over the last 20 years, I've read hundreds of books, and some of them have thrilled me, some of them have stimulated me intellectually and some of them have sent me to sleep. But not one single one has really stayed in my memory as a whole; unlike the books I read when I was 11 or 12. As I pursued my quest to find a novel that was both grown-up and important to me, I realized just how little impact most books have had on me. There have been a few books that have left me in a spin for a couple of days (The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, Money by Martin Amis, American Tabloid by James Ellroy, Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut), but if someone actually asked me to summarize those books, I'd have to shrug and say that I don't really remember most of the details. There have been many parts of books that have had an impact on me: lines or passages or chapters or scenes, but very few novels as a whole have stayed with me. And here's the key point: if you asked me to name the central character in most of the books I've read as an adult, I couldn't do it.
Maybe protagonists aren't important in adult books. Maybe the story as a whole is more vital than any specific character. Maybe it is style, or themes, or language that gets a book praised and lauded and featured on The South Bank Show. But for me, language or style was never enough to make me love a book. Heroes are what made me love a book. Heroes are what get children obsessed and queuing outside Borders at midnight, dressed as goblins or aliens. And adult fiction rarely deals in heroes; it generally deals with flawed individuals inhabiting flawed worlds. Every single detective novel I've read in the last 10 years has featured a dysfunctional, self-loathing sleuth.
When I read books as a child, I would desperately wish to be the central character, to have special powers, to be unique, magical, to be a hero. As an adult, I read adult books with a sense of detachment, involved in the plot but never really committing to the central protagonist. I observe them with one eye only, never sure if they are credible or merely ciphers. I suspect that writers of adult fiction see protagonists less as heroes and more as messengers, as symbols of struggle and decay. I doubt Will Self worries about killing his central characters as much as J.K. Rowling does.
So much serious literature has washed over me, leaving shrugs and weak smiles and tempered admiration. Last month I read Erasure by Percival Everett, which was an enjoyable enough read, but I couldn't tell you the protagonist's name - and yet I can still vividly remember Will Stanton, the central character of a series of fantasy books written by Susan Cooper that I read in the 1980s.
I still have a copy of The Dark is Rising, the best book in the series (and soon to be a major motion picture), which I probably read about 50 times over the course of my adolescence - the pages are falling out and the cover has shrivelled like a salted slug but I can't get rid of it. I sought refuge in that book for many years. On my 11th birthday I woke up excitedly hoping that I had acquired magical powers, just as Will did on his 11th birthday in the opening chapters of The Dark is Rising. I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised to find that by the end of the day I still had no superhuman powers. Despite this set-back, I continued to read and re-read the books, along with Ursula le Guin, Alan Garner and more, before weaning myself on to Marvel comics and then eventually, in my late teens, abandoning fantasy for proper, adult literature. I was at university by this stage, where there is no room for wizards, only cheap beer and indie nights.
The Dark is Rising books aren't that remarkable as literature. They are well-crafted, well-written, but essentially generic, borrowing from Arthurian legend, C.S. Lewis and a host of other fantasy writers. They are excellent books for dreaming, unsettled 11-year-olds but I suspect I'd find it difficult to read them nowadays. And there's the problem: the teenage me wants a hero who will whisk me away to a faraway land where men are men and women are women and elves are elves, but the adult me finds himself reading books where troubled individuals wander through grey, anonymous cities, lost, confused, banal and angry - something that reflects life as I now know it. So I'm stuck somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, half-heartedly saying goodbye to heroes, but unable or unwilling to truly embrace the world of serious literature.
That's not to say that I don't enjoy reading proper books. I do. I can re-read For Esme, with Love and Squalor over and over again. I love James Ellroy and think Irvine Welsh captures male self-loathing brilliantly. I enjoy the playfulness of Borges and the alienation of Kafka. I loved Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and am enjoying working my way through Murakami. But none of these novels makes me feel as thrilled and excited and totally transported as the books I read as a kid. I suppose that's the price of growing up: a compromised world where heroes are replaced by symbols and metaphor.
[All the pieces that have appeared to date in this series, with the links to them, are listed here, here and here.]
Orlando Figes talks about a turning point in his research career:
I started writing my dissertation on an obscure, Jewish, radical neo-Hegelian whom no one had ever heard of. It was Norman [Stone] who suggested I change direction. He told me that if you've got problems with a girlfriend or you are fighting off a hangover - both of which he knew a lot about - then you don't want to be battling with Hegel every day. He advised me to stick to something practical, such as the Russian peasants, where you could count the numbers.
It happened last night - the final episode. More than one person has asked me what I think did indeed happen there at the end. I mean, is Tony Soprano about to get blatted, as he sits eating with his family? Or not get blatted? Or what?
I have to say I have no interest in this question, possible visual hints and allusions to a famous scene in The Godfather notwithstanding. The makers of the series chose to leave it open, and open is where I'm happy to leave it too. I'm glad to see that David Chase endorses this view. Not that I'd have listened to him had he said they meant for us to think Tony was about to meet his end. Even if that's what they'd intended us to think, they don't have final authority over what the episode means. The ending is open, and that's that.
1. I notice that the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (dated November/December 2007) carries a devastating review of Mearsheimer and Walt's 'Israel Lobby' manifesto by Walter Russell Mead. Mead's critique is rendered especially devastating by the fact that he bends over backward to give M&W the benefit of the doubt in many ways, accepts that their aims and agenda are entirely well-intentioned (even when such an assessment seems a little strained and implausible), and recognizes when they have tried to address issues that really do need to be addressed (but addressed more intelligently and less tendentiously).
As I have noted in the past (here, for example), many defences of Mearsheimer and Walt's 'Israel Lobby' manifesto, both in their original 2006 article and in the new book-length version, try to shift the ground by reframing M&W's position in a way that jettisons their most central and incendiary claims and makes their arguments sound more plausible and common-sensical than they actually are. Then, in effect, these writers defend the work that they would have liked to see M&W write - a sober, accurate, intellectually careful, and solidly argued critique of US policies toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict - rather than the shoddy, irresponsible, tendentious, and pernicious piece of work that M&W actually wrote. But defences of this sort necessarily involve a certain amount of pretence and prevarication, including attempts to bowdlerize M&W's arguments and to either ignore or skim over their more outrageous and indefensible claims (for example, blaming the Iraq war on American Jews who support Israel).
Other reviewers have been honest enough to say that they wish that M&W, or someone else, had written the kind of serious critical analysis they wanted to see - but that M&W's actual manifesto doesn't fit the bill. (Some early examples were disappointed reviews of the original article by Adam Shatz and Michelle Goldberg back in 2006; a good recent example is the somewhat appalled critique of M&W's book by the long-time Peace Now activist Leonard Fein.)
Mead's review has the virtue of addressing M&W's actual arguments, rather than pretending that they simply consist of a sober critique of AIPAC. (For some other useful critiques, see here.)
2. In addition, Mead has something brief but illuminating to say about a related set of issues.
Lately there has been a lot of foolish talk suggesting that any voices that try to be critical of Israel, or of US policies toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, are stifled or suppressed in American academic and intellectual life. (Some people even try to suggest that this is true in western European countries like Britain, but that notion fails the most basic laugh test.) With respect to the academy in particular, even some normally sensible people seem to have swallowed, or at least half-swallowed, the notion that undue interference by 'Zionists' (real or alleged) poses a major threat to academic freedom in the US. What is actually involved, in too many cases, is an effort to discredit or intimidate people who seek to criticize anti-Zionism (that is, the demonization of Israel and its supporters) or anti-Semitism too vigorously.
Like many propaganda campaigns, this one has tended to seize on a few incidents and anecdotes, some legitimately worrisome and others more or less fanciful, and to inflate them out of proportion. These include the denial of tenure to Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University (which may indeed have some genuinely troubling aspects, as Norm and others have pointed out, despite the fact that Finkelstein himself is, in my possibly fallible opinion, an obnoxious, abusive, and poisonous academic charlatan) and the truly idiotic decision by St Thomas University to cancel an appearance by Desmond Tutu for fear he might offend some Jews (a decision that has since been rescinded, not unlike the recent reversal of an even more egregious decision by the administration of Leeds University in Britain to cancel a talk by Matthias Küntzel about the history of anti-Semitism in the Middle East on the grounds that it might offend some Muslims). At the more purely ridiculous end of the spectrum are attempts to pretend that criticisms of M&W are somehow illegitimate and amount to 'muzzling' them.
There are certainly a great many real threats to academic freedom and to freedom of expression more generally, in the US and elsewhere. (What else is new? Consider, for example, the perennial campaigns in Britain to institute blacklists of Israeli academics.) Some supporters of Israel undoubtedly do their best to be part of the problem, and when they do they should be criticized and resisted. But to suggest that supporters of Israel are a major source of threats to academic freedom - perhaps even among the most dangerous - is either silly or deliberately tendentious. As Mead points out, to find such a picture plausible requires wilfully ignoring the larger context of ideological cross-pressures in academic and intellectual life.
This artificial anti-Zionist panic also ignores a wider problem that really does pose a threat to academic freedom and to freedom of expression more generally - the growing acceptance of a seductive but unfortunate notion that everyone has a right not to be offended. This point should be obvious, but apparently it isn't, and Mead makes it quite trenchantly.
One problem is that Mearsheimer and Walt decontextualize the activity of Jews and their allies. Attempts by pro-Zionist students and pressure groups to challenge university decisions to grant tenure or otherwise reward professors deemed too pro-Arab are portrayed as yet another sign of the long reach and dangerous power of the octopus. In fact, these efforts are part of a much broader, and deeply deplorable, trend in American education, by which every ethnic, religious, and sexual group seeks to define the bounds of acceptable discourse. African Americans, Native Americans, feminists, lesbian, gay, and transgendered persons - organizations purporting to represent these groups and many others have done their best to drive speakers, professors, and textbooks with the "wrong" views out of the academy. Zionists have actually come relatively late to this particular pander fest, and they are notable chiefly for their relatively weak performance in the perverse drive to block free speech on campus.As one illustrative example from DePaul University, Prof. Finkelstein's former employer, there is the well-known case of Thomas Klocek - who, to quote Wikipedia's succinct and accurate description, 'is a former adjunct professor at DePaul University fired for arguing with Muslim and Palestinian students [about Israel] outside the classroom.' (Of course, some might argue that adjunct faculty ipso facto have no rights to academic freedom. But on the other hand, for those who claim that the real danger of alleged Zionist intimidation is the 'chilling effect' it has on free expression in academia and in public discourse more generally, such details should be immaterial... so perhaps those people would like to sign this petition on Klocek's behalf?)
Another example, having no direct connection to the Arab-Israeli conflict, was the recent successful campaign to rescind Larry Summers's invitation to address the UC Regents. Trivial stuff... but just as trivial as the decision by the Polish consulate in NYC to cancel a lecture by Tony Judt. Neither of these gentlemen has exactly been muzzled... though, on the other hand, it is clear in retrospect that Summers's criticism of extremist anti-Zionists was one of the factors that led him to eventually lose his job as President of Harvard.
Overall, what unites such cases is that, for academic administrators and others, fear of controversy plays a bigger role in decisions of this sort than substantive biases. The response of academics and intellectuals to such reflexes, and to well-meaning ideologies that reinforce them by implying that everyone has a right not to be offended, should be a principled and consistent defence of academic freedom and freedom of expression - not the selective demonization of people who have the temerity to criticize anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism. (Jeff Weintraub)
Some time back I posted a piece on a song by Lucinda Williams, 'Those Three Days'. I was struck by a particular line in it which I took as expressing 'the foreverness of love when it happens'. An essay by Charles Taylor which treats the theme in a more serious and extended way, as part of an argument about 'the need for eternity', is an excellent antidote to the view of religion as merely immature, a refusal to face the rationally-based facts of the world.
Taylor writes about the way relationships of love are so significant in people's lives that the knowledge of their finitude is itself invasive of how much they can mean to them; 'they seem', he says, 'to demand eternity':
A deep love already exists against the vicissitudes of life, tying together past and present in spite of the disruptions and dispersals of quarrels, distractions, misunderstandings, resentments. By its very nature it participates in gathered time. And so death can seem a defeat, the ultimate dispersal that remains ungathered.Generalizing from this, Taylor sees death as qualifying all joy and threatening its meaning. In the face of the knowledge of death, 'something important is lost'.
It's in the light of this perception that he rejects as shallow what he calls the view of religion as a 'childish attitude that takes its wishes for reality'. That doesn't mean, he says, that a faith perspective is true. But it shows that 'the yearning for eternity' is not just some trivial impulse, easy to overcome.
His sense of the depth of the impulse, of the tragic dimension of human existence in the face of inevitable and, for everyone, impending final loss makes refreshing reading set against some of the louder atheist certitudes about the emptiness of religion.
Is this a thoughtful dresser?
A thoughtful dresser is elegant from head to toe and money has nothing to do with it.Is this a thoughtful dresser?
Thankfully my husband is a thoughtful dresser and is always willing to let me dress him up for a vintage event, even though he doesn't normally wear vintage clothes. My problem is my brother!Is this a thoughtful dresser?
Bill Strickland is tall, trim, limber, and a thoughtful dresser. He has a great knack for advocacy on behalf of others. He is also a perpetual-motion machine, a marvel of willpower, persistence, and energy.Is this a thoughtful dresser?
Melissa Dooley... is a classy, fashionable and thoughtful dresser year-round... Dooley admits to a very large gym budget and prefers comfort over style when it comes to library-couture.Is this a thoughtful dresser?
A colleague of mine came into the office the other day looking exhausted and pale. Usually a thoughtful dresser, on this day she wasn't wearing makeup and her hair looked unkempt. She started to talk to me about some official matter and I just had to stop her and ask what was wrong.Is this a thoughtful dresser?
Now I like to consider myself a thoughtful dresser. Thoughtful, because I feel generally humiliated by my physical appearance and spend a lot of time brooding over how I can camouflage my body so nobody realises how bad it looks.Is this a thoughtful dresser?
It's almost like a lot of places don't want you to be a critical consumer and thoughtful dresser - they just want to rush you and for you to [be] mindless about the shopping experience.Is this a thoughtful dresser?
We are now proud to offer you some exclusive and not-so-exclusive accessories for the truly stylish and thoughtful dresser.Is this a thoughtful dresser? Don't ask me. Ask The Thoughtful Dresser. It's Linda Grant 'thinking about clothes, books and other matters' - and 'because you can't have depths without surfaces'.
This report could be from The Onion but isn't:
When Nomatter Tagarira, a spirit medium, claimed that she could conjure refined diesel out of a rock by striking it with her staff, ministers in Robert Mugabe's Government believed that they might have found the solution to Zimbabwe’s perennial fuel shortage.It turns out - would you believe? - that Ms Tagarira was having them on. Now she's in custody, 'awaiting trial on charges of fraud'. How she fooled the people she fooled is explained here.After witnessing her apparently miraculous gift they gave her five billion Zimbabwean dollars in cash (worth £1.7 million at the start of the year but now worth one seven-hundredth of that) in return for the fuel. Ms Tagarira was also given a farm, said to have been seized from its white owner during Mr Mugabe's lawless land grab, as well as food and services that included a round-the-clock armed guard on the rock in the district of Chinhoyi 60 miles (100km) from Harare, the capital.
Suppose Al Gore were to become president of the United States of America, where would he stand amongst his predecessors in the table for the Presidential Body Mass Index? See for yourself. Could be the voters would think he was too big. (Thanks: Damian.)
Dave's asking, so I'm telling. What he's asking for are 'offences against the established order'. Of language, that is. One that I particularly dislike is 'between' followed by 'to' - as in 'between 1977 to 1984'.
