Underbelly

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2022-08-12T15:09:00.001-07:00

Jack Ayer
Professor Emeritus-Law
UC Davis

Shakespeare's Plays: a ranking

2017-06-16T13:16:00.002-07:00

Revived from the dead so I can cross post this with my Facebook page:

Tyler Cowen offers his ranking of Shakespeare plays. I take the bait. Not quite a ranking; there are a number of plays that I think are really interesting but not exactly "good."

The canon

King Lear

“Your majesty, there is no second.”

Antony and Cleopatra

Vastly underrated, perhaps because it has no redeeming social value.

But I never saw a good production.

The Henriad as a set.

Cowen got that one right. Whole greater than the sum of its parts. I learned that from Peter Saccio.

Hamlet

Not a great play exactly, but a loose collection of a dozen or more heart-stopping scenes. He tells us all he learned in the first half of his career. Not his fault that other people made some of it into cliches.

Macbeth

Probably not as good as its reputation, but only because its reputation is so strong. With which contrast:

Richard III

Early attempt at the same material.

Matched Set: One underrated, one over.

The Tempest

The best single speech in the canon but uneven as a whole.

Winter’s Tale

Drop dead wonderful poetry, in some ways better than The Tempest

Two that are weak only by comparison

Julius Caesar

Newcomers assume it’s about Caesar. But no; it’s about Brutus.

Coriolanus

Can be wonderful in performance.

Charming

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The most unreservedly charming.

As You Like It

Second most unreservedly charming.

Much Ado About Nothing

Charming in its own way. A personal favorite. Can be wonderful in performance.

Comedy of Errors

Thin, but can be excellent in performance.

The Seductive Power of Overblown Poetry

Richard II

Romeo and Juliet

Loves Labour’s Lost

Shakespeare the playwright criticizes Shakespeare of the Sonnets

Interesting to think about, especially in the context of other Shakespeare plays

Measure for Measure

The fashionable play of the moment Interesting, but flawed.

Twelfth Night

He’s trying to find his way.

Troilus and Cressida

Plenty to chew on here, but off-putting.

Pericles

Cymbeline

Watch Shakespeare experiment with the “romance” form (he’ll get it right elsewhere)

His material gets out of his control:

Taming of the Shrew

Merchant of Venice

He needs cardboard stock characters, can’t bring himself to do it.

Timon of Athens

Perhaps better understood as a co-authorship.

Misunderstood

Merry Wives of Windsor

Treat it as poetry, it’s Meh. Treat it as farce, it’s just fine.

Kind of Meh

King John

But I saw a pretty good performance once.

All’s Well That Ends Well

Ditto.

Two Gentleman of Verona

He’s a beginner, feeling his way.

Titus Andronicus

Ditto.

Henry VIII

He’s getting tired.

Did I overlook anything?

Update: yes, I overlooked Othello (HT Taxmom). Perhaps because I can't figure out quite what to do with it. I used to love it, kind of lost interest in it lately. Maybe because I later discovered the Verdi opera version, which is even better.

Guest Contributor

2016-11-12T07:16:00.001-08:00

Change but a few words and one has a very contemporary document, setting
and cycle:

"Thirteen years ago we National Socialists were mocked and derided—today
our opponents’ laughter has turned to tears! A faithful community of people
has arisen which will gradually overcome the prejudices of class madness
and the arrogance of rank. A faithful community of people which is resolved
to take up the fight for the preservation of our race, not because it is
made up of Bavarians or Prussians or men from Württemberg or Saxony; not
because they are Catholics or Protestants, workers or civil servants,
bourgeois or salaried workers, etc., but because all of them are Germans.

"Within this feeling of inseparable solidarity, mutual respect has grown,
and from this respect has come an understanding, and from this
understanding the tremendous power which moves us all. We National
Socialists thus march into every election with the single commitment that
we will, the following day, once more take up our work for the inner
reorganization of our body politic. For we are not fighting merely for the
mandates or the ministerial posts, but rather for the German individual,
whom we wish to and shall join together once more to inseparably share a
single common destiny.

"The Almighty, Who has allowed us in the past to rise from seven men to
thirteen million in thirteen years, will further allow these thirteen
million to once become a German Volk. It is in this Volk that we believe,
for this Volk we fight; and if necessary, it is to this Volk that we are
willing, as the thousands of comrades before us, to commit ourselves body
and soul.

"If the nation does its duty, then the day will come which restores to us:
one Reich in honor and freedom—work and bread!"

A.H. 15.vii.1932

On 12 November 2016 at 01:32, Steven Schussed <realityschuster@comcast.net>
wrote:

Test again.

2016-11-12T05:27:00.002-08:00

Test

2016-11-12T05:20:00.003-08:00

xxx

The New Republican Party

2016-08-25T01:35:00.001-07:00

From FB: Bruce Bartlett and others are forecasting the demise of the Republican Party. In the sense intended, I think they are right but they might want to expand their imaginative universe. I think we might well emerge with a new Republican Party and its de facto leader will be Hillary Clinton.

To clarify--I can't blame her for taking on board all the Republican castaways in the current storm. But the more she does so, the more you can see that this is her comfort zone. I'm not sure she understands this sea change herself. But after four years, she and we may both have forgotten that this was not always what her leadership was all about.

There is the inconvenient question of what to do with "the base"--the army of ordinary Democrats still trying to persuade themselves that they have a chance of accomplishing some kind of progressive program. But isn't that always the problem with major parties? The toffs make the rules and set the agenda. The residual issue is how much they have to give away to keep the rabble on board.

Head-Banging Through the Weeds

2016-08-21T14:13:00.002-07:00

It's head-banging time. I have at hand a book that makes me crazy because it is so full of promise and comes so close and--okay, let me explain.

The title is We Are Better Than This, subtitled "How the Government Should be Spending Our Money." The author is Edward D. Kleinbard and so far as I can tell, it would be hard to find anyone better qualified for the job he tackles. He is now a professor (USC) but he spent his prime as chief of staff for the US Congress'' joint committee on taxation, which has long enjoyed (and I think still enjoys) a rep as "the nonpartisan tax resource to Congress." And he certainly gets off on the right foot with me. "This book argues," he writes, "that the strand of contemporary American political thought that defines itself through the hatred of taxation is narcissistic, self-pleading, wrapped in a flimsy sheaf of economic lingo." He makes a subordinate point that is equally enticing: "instead of focusing on what government might usefully do ... we obsess over the taxing side of things and igloo;e the purposes to which those tax revenues are applied."

Oh, preach it, brother, even if you are preaching to the choir. I can't wait to turn the page.

But but but. But I wouldn't suggest for a moment that he goes nowhere with his promise. In fact he goes quite away with some stuff you might expect him to be good at: in-the-weeds marshaling of data about US government spending. More: he collects instructive comparisons with other "similar" countries. I suppose a critic could say "you can Google all that stuff," and maybe you can, but there are still some codgers who enjoy seeing it pulled together and presented in a book.

But then--well; then the book tends to sprawl all over the map into a number of only loosely related topics, some of which he handles well, some not so. He has a very good account of government-as-social-insurer, for example--a topic which which he seems to feel comfortable. He's got some useful things to say about government as investor--the idea that (contra the popular conception) government dollars can produce more than private dollars. But here, coverage is more patchy: okay on conventional infrastructure, so-so on the productive capacity of education spending. Beyond that, surprisingly little: next to no attention to DARPA and the NIH and other government programs whose task seems to be to expend pubic dollars so others can reap private benefits.

And branching out--further into a book that seemed intent on talking about spending, he offers long chapters on topics that come suspiciously close to tax policy-is government too big? Are taxes too high (perhaps you can guess the answer to those)? There is even a chapter headed "A Field Guide to False Fiscal Crises"--interesting enough in itself, but pretty far afield from what seemed to be his central topic. And to top it off, he offers (tentatively and haltingly) an effort to present a big-picture justification for who might call left social-democratic pubic spending in general.

Maybe you can see what the trouble is. I think he tried to do too much. The dedicatory inscription goes "to my father, who delayed my entry into academia by 30 years--just long enough for me to have something useful to say." Wryly clever and undoubtedly sincere, but it gives the game away. At last liberated from the cares of his day job, Kleinbard upended his briefcase (downloaded his cloud drive?) full of insights, fragments, talking points and undertook to weave them all together into a big-picture overview of the whole world of tax-and-spend. It's a noble intention and as I say, the hell of it is, he is part way there. I'm now recalling the old canard about how"I'm writing you a long letter because I didn't have time to write a shorter." He would have done better for himself and us if he had written just half a book.

Fn.: And while we are at it, where was his "editor"--I use the term loosely at the distinguished university-sounding press that published it? Isn't it (or wasn't it?) precisely the job of editor to be the dutch uncle and to tell the author to cut it down to size?

Our Generosity and the Second Louis Conn Fight

2016-08-20T10:18:00.000-07:00

We gave a few bucks to a favorite nonprofit a while back; I filed the receipt with every intention to forget about it until tax time. But a couple of days ago, among the usual welter of unsolicited catalogs, the mail brought an envelope with the donee logo. I figured it was another solicitation but no; it turned out to be a thank you note for our princely munificence in the recent past--and just to show their sincerity, a small gift. And sure enough, a shake and a tumble and out came--

Hey wait, what is this, a coaster? A coaster a sphere of cork with the donee logo? This is a thank-you?

I mean don't misunderstand: I certainly wasn't expecting a Porsch 911, Really, I wasn't expecting any gift at all but--well, put it this way. I'm not particularly good at the ordinary cues and clues of social intercourse but isn't there a point at which the "gift" is so trifling that it moves the index over to "insult?" Am I to be grateful for a token that probably cost about one fortieth of the price of a first-class stamp? Would't a greater show of gratitude have been no gift at all?

Small memory, in 1946, my dad sold some advertising linked to the second Louis-Conn fight. I've just about totally forgotten the fight itself. But somebody in my dad's operation must have been giving gifts also because I have vivid memories from my childhood of Louis-Conn coasters. Same size and shape, even the same material. Except not just one. We had dozens of them, and they hung around for years--I assume he got to carry home the leftovers, I hope not in lieu of a commission. Come to think of it, if I scratched around in the storage shed, I might find a Louis-Conn coaster out there still. Good: I could match it with the new acquisition and the Missus and I could share the enjoyment of a delicious beverage, basking in self-congratulation at our well-rewarded generosity.

Mad Men and the Donut Hole

2016-08-20T09:46:00.002-07:00

Clive James, in his continuing self-proclaimed farewell tour to life and art, says farewell to Mad Men. And as it happened, so, just this week, did we. I'll let Clive speak for himself (some kind of confusing paywall but persist) For me: yeh, well, the last few episodes seemed to run out of steam, as almost always happens with this sort of thing. They repeated themselves; they picked up possible plot lines you knew they were going to have to abandon. And then, the finale, everybody (not just Clive James) has to have a finale.

I won't get tedious with a lot of stuff that others have probably said before and better, but here is a glaring difficulty that I don't think has received much attention so far. Don Draper, the center of the action. Pleasant, affable, cold eyed dissembler, thief of the life of another, one who inflicts casual collateral damage on almost any within range.

But we forgive him because he's Michelangelo, he's Balzac, Svengali, he's a cool quiet 'Enry 'Iggins, the one who can be depended upon to make lemonade out of moldy old peach pits.

The whole show hangs on this premise and you have to believe if you want it to make any sense at all and sure, I pretty much signed on. But I kept recalling that nothing--nothing--in the script actually showed me that Don was a genius, advertising or otherwise. I just had to count on the fact that everyone kept telling me so--that, and his capacity for casual mayhem. In the end, he's to the Svengali, he's the hole in the donut. But rest assured Give him 20 minutes of silence around a boardroom table while everyone else is tearing their hair out, he'll come up with a way to market donut holes, too. Now go read Clive, he never lets us down.

The Real Hillary Scandal

2016-08-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

From FB, on which see infra.

You want accountability? Okay, I'll give you accountability. It's been twenty years--/twenty years/, give or take, that the dragon lady, aka next President of the United States, has been under the telescope, periscope, microscope of her predators for, oh, I'm not sure I can remember--Whitewater, troopergate, something about commodities trading, up through emailgate and Benghazibenghazibenghazi.

And what have they come up with? The answer is nothing. Nada. Zero. Bubkas. Zilch. Zilch unless you count the see of afflatus about "countless crimes," or unless you consider the guy under the Trump hat back on my home turf who denies that he said she should be assassinated when what he really said was that she should be courttmartialed and executed.

People, really! Is this the best you can do? There are people eligible to vote who weren't even alive when the first little anti-Hill magpie popped out of his shell.Has anybody totted up how much money has been poured down this particular rathole? Honestly, they just don't make witch hunts like the used to.

[I said "twenty years." I have no idea what went on in Arkansas back before they came onto the national scene. And for all I know, she pinched her roommate's Mars bar back at Wellesley. No statute of limitations on that one, is there?]

Irony watch: I speak as one who was never that enthusiastic about Hillary in the first place.

Fn.: one of my Facebook commentators apparently missed the irony here--thought I was really mad that she wasn't in prison. That's not my point at all. I do think the charges are mostly bogus. I also think she is a mediocre politician and part of the mediocrity is that she has never learned how to defang her critics. I'm told it is because she is a women and the knuckedraggers are unfair to her. Both those statements are true but irrelevant. The real successes are the ones that are good at defanging critics. Which includes (a) ones you like where the charges are bogus (Roosevelt); (b) the ones you dislike where the charges are bogus (Nixon--the slush fund was a phony and he defanged it magnificently); the ones you dislike where the charges are true or mostly true (Reagan and Thatcher).

The FBI Caves

2016-08-18T10:43:00.002-07:00

So the FBI caves. I think this is a big deal with implications far beyond the immediate kerfuffle. Back in the Pleistocene when I went to law school, I was taught that the one non reviewable decision was the decision not to prosecute. It's a rule that his never been completely immune to criticism: we can all think of cases where a prosecutor seems to have buried a contentious case without any obligation to explain himself to the world or anybody. But mostly I'd say it has worked pretty well. The thinking seems to be that prosecutors must have some freedom of motion, and that in general, a mistake in deciding not to prosecute is just nowhere near as harmful or invasive than a mistake in deciding to go forward.

Lately I think we've heard more criticism of the no-prosecute rule, particularly in the realm of "sex cases"--rape or abuse
. I suspect that most prosecutors think that cases of this sort are just rough to prosecute, too easy to lose--and that losses may defeat the whole purpose of the enterprise. And I haven't any doubt that there are some prosecutors who think these cases just aren't that-all important anyway.

Whatever. What's sure is that we are hearing a progressively louder chorus of complaint from victims and their advocates that their concerns just aren't being taken seriously enough--and that one path to reform would be to compel the prosecutor to explain or justify his no-prosecute decision.

If I were a lawyer likely to get embroiled in this kind of controversy, I'd be opening a new file on the FBI decision to turn over. Either yea or nay, I'll be needing to bone up on all the arguments so I will be ready as the issue evolves.

Only Hurts when I Laugh

2016-08-18T10:43:00.000-07:00

On the street leading over to the gym I pass (from memory): renal care, dialysis, prompt care, convalescent hospital, veterans' mental health and outpatient services, children's health, pain therapy, clinical lab, allergist, internist, cancer care.

I think I may have missed some. Lester Thurow the economist used to say we can't get rich taking out each others' appendix. His attitude strikes me as a failure of imagination.

The Chancellor

2016-08-10T15:45:00.003-07:00

Okay, so that's over.

I'm in the peanut gallery, so no more than a malign observer, but here's s lightly edited version of an email I sent to a friend back east.

Oh, it's been a running sore for a couple of years, ever since that pepper spray business. Of course the chancellor didn't personally pull the lever on the canister but she never seemed to get on top of the story, never came across as understanding that it was real (my stars, was it really five years ago?). At long last, it has turned into a war of the press releases. The University President says:

... numerous instances where Chancellor Katehi was not candid, either with me, the press, or the public, that she exercised poor judgment, and violated multiple University policies...

And the Chancellor (or, her highly skilled lawyer) gets to say:

CLEARED OF ALLEGATIONS OF NEPOTISM, CONFLICTS, FINANCIAL

MISMANAGEMENT OR PERSONAL GAIN IN UC INVESTIGATION,

You could say it is a Hillary problem. The chancellor apparently not guilty of any felony but she has a colossally tin ear and she's greedy. I mean, board of directors of a text book company? Why wasn't that prohibited? And paying to scrub Google? How rookie is that?

OTOH, at least some of the opposition to her came from people who just thought it would be fun to destroy a chancellor.

I think she is unmarketable outside Davis now so Davis is stuck with her (i.e., as a faculty member . Also her husband and her son and her DiL--four nice paycheck with bennies).

FWIW I think the president winds up with a bit of mud on her shirtwaist too. I believe she had/has been hoping to join the Clinton administration . She is probably not completely out of the running, but good managers don't let this kind of problem happen in the first place.

Ex Cons, Nutso Right Wingers, Partakers of Crystal Meth

2016-08-09T19:51:00.001-07:00

[Repurposed from FB.]

I note the existence of a literary or cultural genre. Probably been around for a while, I'm just late getting to the party. The subject is the bleak and disordered life of those in the vast interior heartland. High desert is probably best, Vegas best of all. Cast of characters heavy on ex cons, nutso right wingers, partakers of crystal meth. I'm thinking of movies like 'Melvin and Howard,' TV shows like 'Fargo,' or 'Reno 911!' (now that one was funny). The topic lends itself to lo-o-ong form journalism, where dreary shapelessness is almost a virtue--this one is a particularly noteworthy exemplar, effective precisely because it isn't very good (Hanna Rosin's 'Murder by Craigslist,' by contrast, was top notch). I read (or watch) this stuff. I'm not certain what the appeal is but I suppose it is a kind of porn for aging academics who live in their head (guilty, your honor). I do, however, believe I can identify the inaugural artifact--patient A on the blasted-waste circuit. That would be 'The Executioner's Song,' Norman Mailer's nonfiction novel about the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, i never actually finished 'Executioner's Song,' but that's okay: I suspect maybe it never does end but just wanders on and on and on... Life's like that.

Can There be a "Nation" without a "Constitution?"

2016-08-08T16:06:00.003-07:00

Caution, I pretty much blew this one off without critical scrutiny or even rereading. Hope it makes some sense. I will, at a minimum, certify that I was t least stone sober, except for caffiene.

I suppose the kewl kids would sneer at my innocence but hey, the kewl kids don't read me anyway. So, for all the non-kewl out there somewhere, a question: can there be a nation without a constitution?

Allow me to explain. I was reading something the other night that mentioned a nation that "did not have a constitution." In context, I think I understood what the author meant. He was writing about 19C Century European revolutionaries who carried round pieces of paper with the words "human rights" in bold letters. The kind of thing a public spirited citizen might wave at a Trump rally.

But is this definition sufficient, or even necessary? We all know (of) nations whose "piece of paper" are a form of light entertainment (if in bad taste), having little or nothing to do with how the nation is governed. Perhaps more tellingly, we Americans have grown up making uneasy jokes about Britain as a nation where they don't write their constitution down--a nation without a piece of paper, but still with a constitution.

We have never felt clear about just exactly this can mean, but for purposes of comparison, consider this example: must a language have a grammar? On first thought, we can all remember grammar books, just as we might remember Miss Gooch (Sister Gooch?) with her ruler in the seventh grade, beating the rules into our impervious little skulls. So, yes. Language, grammar book, grammar. Think a little harder, though, and we notice something important. Languages have grammar long before there are language books. AS grammar is a set of conventions that define the language. The language is what the grammar is. The written grammar--ah, that most often comes later. Or perhaps, not at all.

So, a grammar tells us how the language is constituted, written or otherwise. And can't we now apply the same point to the nation? The nation must be constituted somehow--else it wouldn't be a nation. Am I right, or am I right? And aren't there plenty of "constituted" nations that (like the Brits) do not have a "written constitution," but who are still nations (in the sense that they are "constituted") anyway? Isn't it true that they have to have some sort of "constitution" (written or not)--else they wouldn't be nations at all?

I can think of at least one reason why it is so easy to miss this point. That is: we tend to think of both "language" and "constitution" as imposed from the top, by some authority. Think the French Academy. Or, sure, think the Supreme Court. But both languages and "constitutions" can bubble up from below. Matter of fact, as a half-relevant aside, I think this helps explain why Noam Chomsky the student of linguistics is also a professed anarchist. He certainly understands that languages can bubble up from below. And he seems to think something the same about the larger social framework.

I can think of another objection, perhaps more important, though I don't quite know how to deal with it. That is: when those 19C hotheads talked about "constitution" and "rights," they meant, specifically, some sort of framework that would impose imitations on "the government"--that would allow a kind of "private" space where the king's writ did not run. And their belief was you weren't going to get this kind of protection without a piece of paper If that is the point, then I guess it is at least coherent, even attractive. But you are still left with the question of how you define the "nation" aside which those protections operate.

Quick final note: I blur the distinction between "nation" and "state." Maybe I'll deal that one later.

Might-have-beens: A Self-Assessment

2016-08-07T16:43:00.002-07:00

I seem to be sifting the detritus of an only moderately well spent career. I'm remembering my first big break, when Norm Isaacs gave me a job in the City Room at the old Louisville Times in the spring of 1960. In retrospect, I am surprised he took a chance on me but he didn't have a big budget and the skill threshold was not that-all high. I don't remember what I said in the interview but here is what I would say if I had a chance for a do-over.

I want this job because you are a great platform. You've got the resources to support good work and it looks like you have the disposition to put them behind stuff that you think is good. I'd like to use that kind of opportunity to make things better for us both.

There is a lot I need to learn about the reporting trade and I hope to develop and improve as I go forward. For the moment, my goal concerns the public use of money: budgets, taxation, public spending. I want to be a policy wonk.

I'm young and green and not well trained but I am a quick and motivated learner. I'd love to have a chance to put these talent into play. I hope you'll give me the scope.

--

I did get the job, of course, and loved it, and learned a lot, although nothing like the sophisticated program I set for myself in retrospect. They did offer a great platform and they did give me some scope and I am eternally in their debt. But when I left journalism at the age of 28, I figured I had plateaued out, would never have a chance to learn or do anything more sophisticated than what i had done already. This was perhaps a common attitude for the time but in retrospect, it was an utter failure of imagination. I don't regret the careerI did undertake thereafter--not at all-but I marvel at the opportunities I so blithely set aside in doing so.

Of course, all this is absurdly hypothetical. Norm is dead, the Times is dead; most of the people I worked with (and they were an amazingly talented bunch) are long gone. And I am feeling a bit woozy myself. But in retrospect, it chills me to recall--when he asked me "why do you want this job?" I probably answered with something along the lines of "duh."

Reconsidering Ike: A Thought Experiment

2016-08-04T17:03:00.002-07:00

I came of political age (I will not say "maturity) during the Eisenhower administration. Instructed by Herblock, I thought of him as an amiable doofus with a pretty good golf handicap. Time and the great scholarship of Fred Greenstein have taught me different. The doofus part was largely an act, a cover. Meanwhile, I wonder how anybody could have thought the the man who commanded the winning armies in one of the most successful wars in human history should be dismissed so liability. I've come round to the point of saying (with a glint of wry irony) the Ike was really the best president of my adulthood. He was, after all, a champion of stability and good order at home. And the man who sent the troops into Little Rock. And the one who warned us against the military-industrial complex.

And yet, and yet. He tolerated McCarthy for far too long. He tolerated John Foster Dulles until the day (Dulles) died. He gave us George Humphries, "Engine Charlie" Wilson and Ezra Taft Benson. Is that really the best we can do?

Well, he certainly wasn't perfect. But on the "tolerate" thing. I think it is fair to say that one essential quality in a great general is that he knows how to pick his fights: he wants to battle on his chosen turf, and on his own terms. Isn't it fair to say that with McCarthy, at least--yes, he did not move early, and he seemed at times almost not to notice the mischief the great ruffian was causing. But what if he had injected himself earlier? Would he have, in fact, succeeded--or could it be that he would have damaged himself, while leaving McCarthy even stronger than he had been before. With Dulles, I suppose the case is harder. Ike seemed to acquiesce in a good deal of the foreign interventionism--Iran, Guatemala--that looks so misguided today. At the same time, one always had the sense that Dulles' most unsettling excesses were Dulles freelancing, with little or no support from the less excitable chief executive down he street. Civil rights--complicated again, I think. When he sent in the troops, I think the general view was the he was far more offended by the affront to federal authority than he was by the plight of black students. Yet I don't think it is fair to call Ike racist in any modern sense. His flaw was more that he simply didn't get it: he had known (seemingly) happy Pullman porters, officer's club waiters and such like, and he didn't understand why their fellows weren't willing to settle for their place. A failure of imagination, surely--and a failure of imagination can be a failure. But it is not the same as active racial hostility.

And yet, and yet. I'm very far from totally convinced of my own case. I do think there is a lot to respect in his domestic record (and admire in his war record). I wish he had done more, or done it better. I suppose in the end I fall back on the first principle of modern politics: the job of every Republican president is to make the last guy look good. By that standard, I think he looks pretty good indeed.

How Cervantes Became Cervantes (Hint: It Took Most of a Lifetime)

2016-08-04T15:13:00.002-07:00

A quick shoutout for .s delightful for William Egginton's new book about Cervantes. It's a sort of a biography but it's better described as an account of how Cervantes became Cervantes (hint: it took most of a lifetime) and, more precisely, what is so distinctive about him, why we think of him as the man who invented fiction. The takeaway is that Cervantes shows us characters from the inside and the outside so we can share their inner life while observing it. Egginton credits the insight in part to the aufhor's work in the theatre and I am thinking (though Cervantes almost certainly did not know of) William Shakespeare's more or less simultaneous career. Example, Rosalind in As You Like it--a girl dressed up as a boy telling a hearer what she would think if she were a girl (closely similar stunt in Twelfth Night, only doubled).

A particularly elegant instance is has handling of Cervantes tradition of the great narrative epics--in particular the work of Tasso and Ariosto. Egginton recalls the scene where Don Quixote sees a cloud and thinks it is an advancing hostile army. There are two clouds, remarks his realist companion Sancho. Oh, goody, says the knight, we are surrounded. Whereupon the knight describes the armies in lapidary detail--what they wear, what they carry. Egginton's points out how the descriptions are almost an exact copy of his great narrative predecessors--with a difference. That is: Tasso and Ariosto are telling us what the armies looked like. Cervantes is showing us what this half-mad observer thinks they look like. Appearance and reality, objectivity and subjective consciousness.

I love it, with one minor qualification. Specifically, Ariosto is the eternal ironist. He tells you the story as if true but all the time he is nudging you in the ribs as if to say "you don't really believe this, do you?" But no matter. Cervantes figures out how to take that unreality and make it part of the story.

2016-07-30T12:06:00.001-07:00

[Repurposed from FB].

Walking the streets of Shakespeareville [sc. Ashland, Oregon] I'm thinking: there is a lot of money sloshing around this town. No, silly, not aggravated-felony Wall Street money but nice comfy 100-500k UMC money for people who do not have to budget for their lattes. My guess is that many of these folks will vote for Hillary although they have not ripped the Bernie sticker off the Prius. They are earnestly, sincerely concerned about the plight of the dispossessed and they really think we should Do Something About it. But the fact is, when they go to dinner (with a nice glass of wine) they can pretty much set their concerns aside.

Hot baths. Simone Weil says that almost all of human life takes place far from hot baths. These people are mostly close to hot baths.

--"Presque toute la vie humaine s'est toujours passée loin des bains chauds."

-Weil, L'Iliade ou le poème de la force.

Thought Experiment

2016-07-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

[Repurposed form FB].

Though early, it is tempting to speculate on what the structure of the Republican party will look like in the aftermath of the election. Here's a scenario:

1--Trump loses badly, but not catastrophically (yes, I know--everyone has been wrong on this one before).

2--The insulted and the injured will overflow with rage in their conviction that they have been cheated (cf. "stab in the back," Weimar Germany, post-1918).

3--They will coalesce into a new party uniting racists, exclusionists, evangelicals and--oh yes, those who see their lives as in calamitous decline. It is not at all clear that Donald Trump will be their leader, or even want to be. Maybe Ted Cruz.

4--Distinct from the insulted and the injured will be a much smaller rump of the great and the good--those who have built their career on dangling shiny baubles before the eyes of the lesser mortals to distract them while the danglers scooped up tax cuts and related goodies. Also known as "which way are my people going so I can run out and front and lead them?" It is even less obvious who the leader is here. The Bushes are too old and boring. Romney is too boring. Paul Ryan is, well, boring. But it may not matter much; at the moment, there simply won't be very many of them.

5--And the Democrats, don't they have the same problem? To an extent, yes, but for the moment they will be too busy choosing garments for the inauguration ball and (if they are smart) trying to stifle their gloating.

Could be worse; could be the other guy wins.

Social Trusts and the Shadow of Kershaw's History

2016-07-19T12:30:00.003-07:00

The topic for the moment is social trust, with a side order of ethnic animosity. I'm inspired by Roger Scruton's admirable essay in Prospect where he defines social trust:

[S]ocial trust—the sense that we are bound to each other by a shared loyalty, and that we will stand by each other in emergencies. Social trust comes from shared language, shared customs, instinctive law-abidingness, procedures for resolving disputes and grievances, public spirit and the ability of the people to change their own government by a process that is transparent to them all.

I'm a huge fan of social trust, perhaps due to the fact I grew up in a place where nobody has bars on the windows and if you dropped your wallet in the parking lot, you could be pretty sure somebody would return it to you be evening. We had one cop. He was part time and if you got into mischief, I think he would have just called your mother. It's the kind of thing you get (or we think you get) in Scandinavia, maybe Switzerland and New Zealand, possibly parts of Canada.

But my attitude was not always so benign, In truth I found the home place boring and was desperate to cut myself loose. I dreamt of getting to Damon Runyon's New York (I never got there, perhaps because it did not exist). In adulthood' I've had the good luck to sojourn in a lot of places but I've often said that my vacation of choice would be Izmir in 1912 before the expulsion of the Greeks and the murder of the Armenians. Which is to say, I like social trust but I also like "diversity"--a word whose modern meaning did not, in my youth, so much as exist.

But thar's the problem, isn't it? "[S]hared language, shared customs." Really? Do we need shared language, shared customs? Put othe other way round, can we build social trust without them? I must say, I certainly hope so. I want a woworld where we can have it both ways. And this is where Ian Kershaw comes in, via his splendid history of inter alia, the restructuring of Europe in the aftermath of World War I.

You can see where this is going. Retrieve your old history notes from your mental storage-bank and you'll recall how the post-War period experienced (a) an efflorescence of creative nationalism; plus (b) a wave of venomous hostility to anything perceived as outside the particular nationalist model.

The famous Wilsonian program of self-determination turned into a cruel hoax. Italians grabbed Germans. Germans inflicted themselves Czechs. Romanians got Hungarians and Hungary got Slovaks. Russians, no thanks to President Wilson, gained and kept just about everybody in sight. And nobody understood the Balkans (as usual). Indeed, the places that accomplished most by way of establishing ethnic homogeneity were those in which it was done by brute strength--think Greece and Turkey. Some of these restructuring stood the test of time better than others.

Some of these new orderings proved durable--Italy still has its Germans today. Others lasted a long time. But remember what happened in the Balkans in the 90s. No, don't remember it, the whole fiasco is just too unpleasant.

I don't mean this to be the end of the story. I certainly don't want it to be. But it does seem that establishing social trust across cultural boundaries is a challenge enough to daunt the best of us. I'll try to think about it some more, but meanwhile, will somebody turn off the damn TV? (Bleak joke. We don't have TV, which means we are safe from the GOP convention).

Still Getting in the Swing

2016-07-16T15:38:00.001-07:00

Wrote about 4/5 of a lovely post just now on "social trust," but it seems to have disappeared. If you got it, know that it is incomplete . Technical problems. My desktop is down and I am trying to compose on my IPad mini which is about like trying to skate on one foot, I think I'll just leave it until Mon when, I hope, I get my computer and thereby my life back.

Kershaw Takes the Long View

2016-07-15T20:32:00.001-07:00

I read Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler some years ago with pleasure and profit. Now at the urging of the Missus I am rooting around in To Hell and Back, his big-picture history of the 20th Century, particularly the early chapters on the runup to and the aftermath of World War I. It's a somewhat mind-bending experience in that I studied this stuff with some avidity in college 55 years ago (I was a late starter). I loved it then and I'm surprised that I remember specific bits and pieces that seem to have stuck with me down through the years (also the entertaining showmanship of Jim Sutton at the U of Louisville as he flourished his deck of 5x7 note cards in a dauntless effort to keep his night students awake).

But what gives me a bit of the yim yams is how different it looks from the vantage of great age. Or rather, I suppose "yim yams" is too strong. There is no radical discontinuity. I'm still the same person. I didn't bring much to the table back then (did someone mutter "callow?"). I've got a lifetime to measure it against now. In a way, I suppose you might say the same is true of Kershaw. He's a bit younger than I but still, he's got a lifetime of experience to draw on. At least as to Germany (which is pretty much the center of his story so far) he has pretty much earned the right what he damn pleases.

One perhaps trivial point on which I'm specially appreciative: he gives lots of casualty figures, both for wars and for battles, More satisfying still, he breaks down the general category into the specifics of dead and wounded. Numbers are important here: it's good to get a sense of just how awful (in the strict sense) all this was.

Related point: to the best of my recollection, in my youth we passes pretty lightly over the Russian Civil War. I don't think I ever grasped that it was actually more costly in human terms (for the Russians) than the great war itself. And the Kronstadt Rebellion, where the revolution turned on, as it were, its own. Trotsky said he would have them "shot like partridges" and proved as good as his words.

Another, perhaps larger, point: the radical reorganization of society as a whole with a dozen or so new nations, all of the, "democracies" of a sort. And actually not such a bad sort. Maybe only Czechoslovskia got its sea legs but for so many, it was an inspiring new departure. In any event--I've got other things I want to get to, but I think I'll have to stick with Kershaw--I'm dying to know how it works out.

Another Test

2016-07-15T19:52:00.003-07:00

Xxx

Testing an IFTTT Link

2016-07-15T13:45:00.003-07:00

Testing an ITTT Link.