Sundays with Stendhal 5 (delayed)

The canons of political correctness of France of 1830:

So long as you did not speak lightly of God, or of the clergy, or of the King, or of the men in power, or of the artists patronised by the court, or of anything established; so long as you did not say anything good of Berenger, or of the opposition press, or of Voltaire, or of Rousseau, or of anything that allowed itself the liberty of a little freedom of speech; so long, above all, as you did not talk politics, you could freely discuss anything you pleased.

There is no income of a hundred thousand crowns, no blue riband that can prevail against a drawing-room so constituted. The smallest living idea seemed an outrage. Despite good tone, perfect manners, the desire to be agreeable, boredom was written on every brow. the young men who came to pay their respects, afraid to speak of anythng that might lead to their being suspected of thinking, afraid to reveal some forbidden reading, became silent after a few elegantly phrased sentences on Rossini and the weather.

(The Red and the Black, Part II, Chapter 34, "The Hotel de La Mole.")

Recommended - Malise Ruthven's NYRB review essay on books on Islam

I finished reading today Malise Ruthven's excellent review essay in the New York Review of Books on books on Islam, particularly Islam and war and just war. Very fine essay. I have read one of the books in his review, Olivier Roy's new book, Secularism Confronts Islam, and thought it also well worth reading, although I think Roy uses "multiculturalism" in a way that is not exactly what it means in American or UK ideology (more on that later). I look forward especially to reading the books on Islam and war. The review essay itself is elegant as Ruthven's essays always are. Highly recommended. Here at the NYRB.

(Update. How to embarrass yourself! I've been reading Ruthven's essays in the TLS for years and never realized Malise is a man's name. Thank you Scott in the comments, and I've corrected it above.)

Sundays with Stendhal 4.5 (special midweek edition)

Professor Erik Jensen, Case Western, has posted a much discussed essay on SSRN, here, addressing that vital question of the law professor dress code or dress non-code. It has elicited some comment among the law professoriat, including this rather decisive thumbs-down from Professor Stephen Bainbridge, UCLA, here, and a more agnostic referral over to the apparently even worse dressing among philosophers by Professor Larry Solum, Illinois, here. And Althouse, here.

Well. I am afraid that I live a few blocks from my law school, often ride my bike, almost always walk back and forth between my campus and office a couple of times each day ... and when I'm not teaching class, I do indeed frequently show up in shorts and a T-shirt. In the classroom, I usually wear nice denim and a button down shirt or a polo shirt. I have tried experimenting this year with a sports coat to see if the students are somehow more respectful of my age and experience - well, they are still basically surfing the internet, so answer is no. My dean once told me years ago, only partly tongue in cheek, that I had singlehandedly lowered dress standards at the law school. It is often hot and muggy in DC - today it is over 80 degrees on October 22, though the humidity is low - especially if you grew up with the humidities on the West Coast that are currently contributing to the burn-down of southern California, and rather than scruffy, I regard myself as environmentally correct by walking and biking to school. So there. Of course, even if I didn't have environmental virtue to fall back on, I'm sure I would do exactly the same thing anyway.

But as to the question of neckties ... well, I was reminded of this passage from The Red and the Black. Julien has been on a secret mission for his employer, the Marquis de La Mole, to London, and is on his way back via Strasbourg, when he runs into his old friend, the Russian Prince Korasoff - I will post bits of their charming conversation over time, but for the moment, a special midweek Stendhal post - per neckties, which began their sartorial existence as cravats:

"Come into this shop," the Prince said, "look at that charming black cravat; you would say it was made by John Anderson of Burlington Street; do me the pleasure of buying it, and throwing right away that dreadful black rope which you have round your neck."

***

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years. They have now reached the days of Louis XV.

(The Red and the Black, part II, Chapter 54, Strasbourg.)

(The last quoted bit about the Russians is, naturally, directed at the Volokhs - all of them! Even the ungenetically-linked co-Conspirators!)

ps. I fully understand Althouse's and Jensen's Tom Wolfe description:

[H]e had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of this gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old...

Quite right and likely applies to me, ossified seven year old. And yet, when it comes to some level of comfort ... I just can't seem to much care. Probably I have a certain circuit loose - my older brother the neuropsychiatrist points out that a sign of senility and dementia, and depression, is lack of attention to personal appearance, a loss of vital interaction with the world and an awareness of how the world sees you. But the fact is, I was never able to write a comprehensible word in a suit, back in law practice - all of it waited, or a whole lot of it waited, until I got home and was able to change into something comfortable and get out of the suit and actually write. I have no idea why.

Althouse mentions comfort in a suit. I pulled down Hollander's two superb books on fashion, Seeing Through Clothes and Sex and Suits. Hollander talks about how suits look great and are comfortable and all that. Hmm. Possibly if you not an overweight middle age guy with a paunchy stomach. They do indeed make you look better than a lot of other clothing, true. But I don't find them comfortable.

However, more interesting to me is that suits, and semi formal, uniform clothing for men homogenize in a different way - they make younger men look older and older men look younger. They equalize the underdevelopment of youth and the coming decrepitude of age, in each case by covering them up with the same standard uniform, and therefore convey a certain equality of power across generations.

The New York Times's reporting on France

My French friend, who doubtless would prefer not to be named, finds the coverage of France by the New York Times insipid and infuriating. "Does the Times think we are children?" he asked me (I paraphrase from memory) back at the time of the election. "America's leading newspaper seems unaware there are serious issues of economics, politics, state policy, and all its Paris correspondent thinks about is making cliched comparisons between France and the United States about women, divorce, affairs by politicians. Does she know anything else? New York liberals think we are Disneyland. At least American conservatives want to talk about real things."

I was flattered that the "conservatives" he meant included me. I am highly francophilic, although I can't speak French - I have taken enough classes in order to be able to read Stendhal, Char, Cendrars, and Camus in the original with a dictionary, but that's more or less it - and this friend tells me that I am not so much a conservative as the American cognate of a center-right Gaullist, which is also highly flattering and in its way very astute. He describes himself as a center-left Gaullist - but what matters, he says, is the Gaullist part. French Gaullists and American Gaullists clash, he says, because what they share is that neither one is in the least bit apologetic for speaking for the interests of his country and, more importantly, its honor. He adds, still annoyed, that the "best way America and France could immediately improve relations would be for the Times to replace Elaine Sciolino with someone who understood more finance and less fashion." Banish her, he said, to where she really belongs, in the "Style section and Travel."

I doubt he has yet seen today's Week in Review in the Times, in which Sciolino has a major front page story on - the reform of the French economy? Non. The impending strike and its consequences? Non. Olivier Roy's new book on Islam and French secularism? Non. It is, instead, yet more cultural trivialities about Sarkozy and divorce - always the same shtick - the sophistication of the French versus the vulgarity and prudishness of the Americans. "L'Amour Has Little to Do With l'Etat." We might add that "L'Times's Coverage Has Little to Do with L'Real Issues of France But That L'Times Doesn't Seem to L'Notice or L'Care." The justification at the offices of the Times, I suppose, is that it has calculated, probably correctly, that this blather is what its Manhattan readership, and its cognates across American cities, want to read over Sunday brunch.

So when I quote Stendhal in the post below, "I crave leave to slander France," well, it's not me I'm talking about. I rarely jump onto the criticize-the-Times bandwagon; I have many close friends there, now and in the past (and, anyway, at some point I will think its stock price, even sans voting rights, will be low enough to warrant buying). When the Times wants to do something serious on Western Europe, it can always call on Christopher Caldwell or David Rieff, over at the NYT Magazine. But I thought my French friend should have some voice on what he regards as the thoughtless liberal American slander of France.

(Thanks, Glenn, for the Instalanche and welcome Instapunditeers!)

(ps. Continuing the Times's preference for trivialities regarding France, today's Week in Review, Sunday, November 4, 2007, has an article by someone or other on names of children in France. It mentions immigration issues and names, and tries to glue on something of weighty social significance of class and identity, but as the article itself says, there is a "lighter side" to French baby names, and the essay gives a good thousand words to it.)

Sundays with Stendhal 4

(From On Love, Chapter 42.)

I crave leave to slander France a little more.

(On my reason for this quotation, being in fact highly francophilic myself, see the above post.)

Sundays with Stendhal 2

After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and to uphold everything, even by martyrdom. It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this respect by the most boorish peasants. They had good reasons for not having the air of thinkers.

(The Red and the Black, Part One, Chapter 26, "The World, or What the Rich Lack")

Julien Sorel - an appreciation of Maurice Leiter's poem on Brian Leiter's blog

By happenstance, I ran across the following poem by Maurice Leiter, Julian Sorel, posted as the Friday poem on Brian Leiter's blog, here. The last bit of the poem is this:

It's a good story and if I told it
Then I'm glad I told it
Let someone more detached
Provide a fitting commentary

I felt too close to Julian
To judge him
Certainly not in public

Well, it's rare that anyone captures part of my feeling for The Red and the Black so well. I've never told the story to a class. But for several years, when on vacation and hiking in the Eastern Sierras, part of my obligation while hiking was to tell a story that would keep kid Renee's mind of her feet. Rules were simple - as long as we kept moving, I had to keep telling the story; if we stopped, I stopped. This tended to slow me down and speed Renee up.

One year I told Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, which she eventually read and has largely memorized. Another year I told a story from a book I only vaguely recollected from my childhood, Trouble at Timpetil (which my wife eventually found and got for Renee and me). And one year I told the Red and the Black. We hiked about ten miles that day, and spent about seven or eight hours on the trail - out of South Lake, up Bishop Pass trail, detour to the Chocolate Lakes, nestled below The Inconsolable Mountains. Renee was entranced by the story of Julien and Mathilde. Curiously, though, she has never read the novel itself. I still read the novel - I was even reading it last night, because I thought I might take a quote from the chapter called, Another Danton? But then I got distracted by the lovely chapter wherein Mathilde says (you see, it's sitting right here on my desk),

"Whatever are you dreaming of, Sir?" There was a note of intimacy in her question, and she had come back running and was quite out of breath in her eagerness to be with him. Julien was tired of self suppression. In a moment of pride, he told her frankly what he was thinking.

So as you can tell, I am entirely with Maurice Leiter in saying "I felt too close to judge Julian/ Certainly not in public." Quite.

The email said ...

"Professor Anderson, really, any excuse to put up pictures of Dominique Sanda ..."

Well, yes. Of course.

***
(PS. Let me bring up this comment into the post. I think, per Anon's comment, that had I met, or even seen, Dominique Sanda even once in the early 1980s - before, of course, Aryeh Neier introduced my beloved Jean-Marie and me - I would not have been able to concentrate for the rest of the decade.)

Anonymous said...
It's not bragging, really, but during one stay in Paris, about 20 years ago (everything seems to be 20 years ago) I met with this lady three times on the same day. Of course, I was the only one of the two to notice...Is my comment excuse enough for another photo ? By the way, I am writing you from Spain. ¡Bravo! for your article in LIBROS.

Okay, I am on the lookout for another photo of Sanda, from about the same period of late 70s-early 80s.

Also, you can never, ever go wrong on this blog praising my efforts in Spanish, such as they are, and especially my Fukuyama piece in the the Revista de Libros, even if it was Luis Gago's (really, really superb) translation, not mine.

***
Someone else dropped me a note asking, as a kind of reference point, what I thought some of the really good movies are - given that I don't take movies seriously as a source of Truth or Beauty or, god knows, Politics.

(Thinking about movies and politics. I'm never quite sure how to respond, given the exquisitely calibrated and easily offended sensibilities of many of my law students, what to say when one of them, in a class on international business transactions or something, proceeds to cite, say, that 2006 film Lord of War as a primer on the weapons trade. And really and sincerely means it. Actually, that one is easy; I used to be the director of HRW's arms division, and spent lots and lots of time looking at light weapons and small arms global trade, so I have politically correct credentials to suggest that the film doesn't quite get it right. Or that recent movie on the blood diamonds trade - actually, the HRW work touched on that too. Anyway, I would say that the current generation of students has absorbed into their beings great strides forward in not getting their politics from movies, especially compared to my boomer generation - my daughter's generation is one step even further along, thinking quite correctly that if it is silly to get one's politics from actors and musicians, well, equally so from teachers and professors, especially if they teach in the humanities - but still not strides quite great enough.)

Well. I'll put up a post one of these days with a list of Truly Excellent movies. In the meantime, think sex, violence, sci-fi.

The Rene Char photo that is on my Bibliotheque National centenary exhibit poster

Am I the only person in the US to have a framed poster of Rene Char on the wall?

(By the way, there is a useful short, straightforward biography and discussion of Char's key works at enotes, here.)

Diario: Winding up teaching in Santiago, Chile and coming home to DC

My finance seminar at the University of Chile law school wound up on Friday night, and it was time to get started home. It would have been perfect to stay the weekend and ski, if only I were a skier. But I also have a full writing schedule awaiting me at home, things that need to get completed at least in draft before classes begin again in August, so it is time to get back to DC. Saturday was a beautiful morning in Santiago - blue skies and not the smog that had been hanging over the city, as is only too normal in the winter. Then it started to pour rain. It rained hard and cold all afternoon. Finally, in the late afternoon it all cleared up, gloriously, with fresh snow very low on the hills and a beautiful sunset. (And if I hadn't managed to bust my camera, I would have pics to post.)

I try not to get too crazy doing tourist purchases - we have just been in London and Paris, with a certain amount of discretionary spending by my wife at Agnes B and Claudia Pierlot (?). Anyway, here in Chile I have limited things to some lapislazuli earrings and chains for wife and daughter. And I found some posters this morning at the Information Center that Jean-Marie might want to use in her classroom - tourist posters of Patagonia.

***

Jean-Marie asked me to be on the lookout for the tourist posters. Thinking it over, though, sitting in the Havana coffeeshop - open wi-fi - on Avenida Providencia, if I were decorating her classroom in an all boys school, St Alban's, I would skip the tourist posters and instead go after moderately sexy advertising posters with girls not-quite-decently-dressed saying important things in Spanish. It's probably a fine line between being sexy enough to make foreign language interesting and romantic, and merely distracting. I myself think it better to err on the side of sexy distraction - but then, unlike my wife, I don't have to teach the past subjunctive to hormonally-charged adolescent males.

On the subject of gender and foreign language study, I saw several large college semester abroad-study Spanish groups in Santiago in the past couple of days. I'm not sure I would pick Santiago as a place to learn Spanish, for the same reason I would not pick Sevilla - Santiago is a lovely city, and very safe as Latin American capitals go, with very, very wonderful people. On the other hand, Chileans, like Andalucians, speak very rapidly and swallow not just terminal syllables, but whole paragraphs. My students were very nice about carefully pronouncing things when speaking with me, but I was amazed at how difficult it was for me to understand people on the street and in shops - same problem as I had in Sevilla - enough to make me doubt that I understood the language, until we went to Madrid and it was a completely different story. Anyway - I noticed that the college semester abroad programs seemed to run about 75-80% women. Very few men. Why is that? Jean-Marie and I have repeatedly noticed this in Europe, too. As Jean-Marie said back then, she more or less expected this in France, because judging by Renee's schools, French is regarded as the language for girls who have trust funds and plan to study art history. But we don't see the guys in these programs anywhere we go. Where are the guys?

***

Next door to my hotel in Santiago is a very fine bookshop, La feria del libro chileno, I think it is called. Harry Potter? Well, this and seemingly every other bookshop in Santiago has Harry Potter in the window - stacks and stacks of them - in English, all 800 pages of it, I might add. It's a testament to reading power in a foreign language here in Chile. At several of the bookstores today there are Harry Potter look-alikes, with cape and glasses and wands. Very cool. I thought of this on seeing Instapundit's posts about reviews of Harry Potter. But I'm not one of the Harry Potter fans, alas; I've thought the whole thing derivative in extreme from the beginning, and a not very interesting pastiche. Fantasy writers often seem to think it enough to be able to invent a complete alternative world; there is more to literature than that, no es asi?

This morning I walked up to the Pablo Neruda house museum over near Bellavista here in Santiago. I have mixed views on Neruda. I have always loved the 20 poemas de amor. But I've never taken the political poetry seriously - even when I was genuinely on the left, I never took political poetry seriously. I tried, heaven knows, with Brecht and lots of others, but I guess I'm a rationalist in politics - in the sense of thinking it really must be about arguments, rationality and experience, not appeals to emotions.

***

I know this runs contrary to my general idolizing of Rene Char on this blog - Jean-Marie and Renee gave me a framed poster of Char from the Bibliotheque National exhibition in Paris on the centenary of Char's birth this summer, and seeing the exhibition was one of the high points of the June trip to Europe. (Am I possibly the only person in the whole US with a framed portrait of Rene Char on the wall? And possibly one of the very few even in France?) But for all that, in fact I don't take Char's concrete politics - as a communist or as anything else - politics as policy, as policies - very seriously when expressed in his poetry. A certain sensibility, yes; but an argument - the kinds of propositional arguments that, say, Brecht seemed to think were implicit in his poetry as well as plays - no. I have always been acutely aware, on the contrary, even back in the day when I was still over on the left, even as a teenager, of something that Stendhal said about romantic love in his eponymous essay On Love - the way in which it could sweep you along through the power of emotion alone into thinking you had discovered great sublime truths and that those emotions translated to true propositions. However, he added drily, one could achieve exactly the same effect, the same feeling of transcendental certainty, for pretty much any cause - merely by listening to great Italian opera or stirring martial music. And anyway, for all my deep and abiding respect and love of Char's wartime writings, he is something of a romantic about war.

That leaves the rest of Neruda's work - the stuff that is neither the romantic love poetry nor the agit-prop. It has powerful images, absolutely. I am rather less certain I find that those works hang together to create a whole thing and not merely a collection of images. Borges (according to that new memoir by his friend, reviewed in the TLS a couple of weeks ago, here, it is an open link, hooray!) rather cattily thought that one might easily delete whole sections of Neruda's works and Neruda himself would not notice that the sections were missing. That's mean but something about it seems right.

It may also be that I am put off by the effort, by Neruda himself and by his memorialists, to present the Heroic Man of Letters and Literature. This was the stance of all of them, Neruda, Char, Camus, Cendrars, pretty much everyone, the women included, writing was power and power was masculine (yet not, never Stendhal, strikingly). The period when literature was more self-consciously masculine, all those photos of Writers Writing, a distinctly masculine projection of power which has, however, largely come to an end. Meanwhile I, and quite possibly you, dear reader, have shifted in our sense of the power of literature along with the age and demoted it. I, like those of our age (and I don't mean this ironically) believe less in the redemptive power of literature than the redemptive power of economics and social science. I don't believe in the latter, economics and social science, very much, true - but, look, would I really consider John Updike's novel Terrorist: A Novel, to be very helpful in understanding, well, you know, terrorism? Of course not. Of course, the response might be, naturally not, but that is merely because Updike is out of his depth here. What about, instead, a novel about the rise of a jihadist and jihadist sensibility in, say, Hamburg or London by someone closer to the community, wouldn't that be better, and indeed better than what the also socially remote social scientists have to say about jihad, if the purpose is to understand its sensibility?

***

I used to think so, yet increasingly have doubts. Not because I think the social scientists necessarily have much to offer, but because I have grave doubts about what is to be learned from literature about society and even sensibility beyond the writer him- or herself. But the shift away from the heroic writer to the eminently practical social scientist can also be understand in a much longer intellectual historical context, and it is surely a large part of my unease. It is, in this sense, the shift from the heroic virtues chronicled by Walter Scott to the bourgeois and commercial, distinctly unheroic, virtues of, say, the Scottish enlightenment - the time of Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, pragmatists all (see the marvelous essay on this very subject by Marvin B. Becker, The Emergence of Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century: A privileged moment in the history of England, Scotland, and France (Indiana UP 1994).) It is the very long term cultural and social shift although, I suppose one might argue, as the faddish newspaper discussion of the so-called "New Victorians" and "YAWNS" suggests, it has a current cognate: the rising generation, by contrast to its baby boomer predecessors, today starts from and doesn't merely finish with distinctly pragmatic, not heroic, values. Still - rewinding to Neruda - I have an abiding fondness for the 20 poemas, and an abiding nostalgia for a song version of Poema XX sung by the Peruvian Tania Libertad, a 78 single from the 1970s whose flip side was the also very lovely Cancion para una sola voz, a piece which I have gradually learned to play on cello.

(That's what I thought in the Havana cafe on Avenida La Providencia in Santiago, after leaving the Neruda museum. I've now boarded the plane back to the US, where I have papers to grade, things to write, and my wife and daughter to see.)

(PS. I'm home. And exhausted. It's a long plane ride.)

(PPS. This was my imitation of a Spectator-style "Diary" column. Hmm.)

Mark Steyn on multiculturalism in Britain and the July 7 bombings

From the several columns Mark Steyn wrote two years ago in London's Daily Telegraph following the July 7 London bombings, or, against multiculturalism:

It has been sobering this past week watching some of my "woollier" colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is "multiculturalism". Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, "Tradition! Tradition!" Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.

So, if Islamist extremism is the genie you're trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn't help to have smashed the bottle. As the death of the Eurofanatic Ted Heath reminds us, in modern Britain even a "conservative" prime minister thinks nothing of obliterating ancient counties and imposing on the populace fantasy jurisdictions - "Avon", "Clwyd" and (my personal favourite in its evocative neo-Stalinism) "Central Region" - and an alien regulatory regime imported from the failed polities of Europe. The 7/7 murderers are described as "Yorkshiremen", but, of course, there is no Yorkshire: Ted abolished that, too.

Sir Edward's successor, Mr Blair, said on the day of the bombing that terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job - from hunting to Europeanisation. Could you reliably say what aspects of "our way of life" Britain's ruling class, whether pseudo-Labour like Mr Blair or pseudo-Conservative like Sir Ted, wish to preserve? The Notting Hill Carnival? Not enough, alas.

Consider the Bishop of Lichfield, who at Evensong, on the night of the bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants: "Just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths." It's not so much the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the broader message it conveys: we're the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we'll apologise to you. That's why in Britain the Anglican Church is in a death-spiral and Islam is the fastest-growing religion. There's no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. And as the Church goes so goes the state: why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity?

It was the Prime Minister's wife, you'll recall, who last year won a famous court victory for Shabina Begum, as a result of which schools across the land must now permit students to wear the full "jilbab" - ie, Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. Ms Booth hailed this as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry". It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of Miss Begum's Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Nor, incidentally, is Miss Begum "preserving" any identity: she's of Bangladeshi origin, and her adolescent adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabisation of South Asian (and African and European) Islam that's at the root of so many problems. It's no more part of her inherited identity than my five-year- old dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume, to which at a casual glance it's not dissimilar.

Is it "bigoted" to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society? Is it "prejudiced" to suggest that in Britain a Muslim woman ought to reach the same sartorial compromise as, say, a female doctor in Bahrain? Apparently so, according to Cherie Booth.

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

But among all these many examples of the multiculti mainstream ushering the extremists from the dark fringe to the centre of western life, there is surely no more emblematic example than that of Shabina Begum, whose victory over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both the wife of the Prime Minister who pledges to defend "our way of life" and of Hizb ut Tahir, a group which (according to the German Interior Minister) "supports violence as a means to realise political goals" such as a worldwide caliphate and (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people". What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for Cherie Booth or the Guardian?

Oh, well. Back to business as usual. In yesterday's Independent, Dave Brown had a cartoon showing Bush and Blair as terrorists boarding the Tube to Baghdad. Ha-ha. The other day in Thailand, where 800 folks have been killed by Islamists since the start of the year, two Laotian farm workers were beheaded. I suppose that's Bush and Blair's fault, too.

I'd like to think my "woolly liberal" colleague Vicki Woods and the woolly sorta-conservative Boris Johnson represent the majority. If they do, you've got a sporting chance. But in the end Cherie Booth and Dave Brown and the Bishop of Lichfield will get you killed. Best of British, old thing.

Two years later, some observers are hoping that things have shifted in Britain. Senior political figures in Britain have spoken out against full female Muslim coverage garb of precisely the kind in which feminist human rights lawyer Cherie Blair discovered such a smashing victory. Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis - two liberals whose antipathy towards the political orthodoxy of multiculturalism is not in question - have written columns expressing the hope that Jack Straw's position, despite it being widely reviled in Britain itself, represents the hope of a new policy in Britain.

Well, I should like to believe that as much as Hitchens and Amis, but I think it is hoping against hope. I had a conversation with a friend in London a couple of weeks ago, and I remarked to him that knowledgeable friends in Paris view London as the capital of Islamist terrorism, the feeder from Pakistan, and the incubator of terrorism in its deadly combination of liberal protections for terrorism's ideological support groups and multicultural refusal to address an ideology that proposes to use liberalism to dispose of itself. My London friend assured me that the July 7 bombings had been a wakeup call, no more business as usual. Two weeks after my family and I have left London, the attempted car bombings a few blocks from our hotel in Piccadilly. The New York Times, on little evidence except its own wishful narrative, assures us that the doctors involved had been radicalized by the Iraq war: blame it on Bush and Blair.

Steyn remarked in a column back at the time of the New Jersey terror plot that every terrorist plot looks ridiculous if caught in the planning stages. The terrorists look like idiots for thinking they could succeed. Alas, it all looks very different if they do succeed. Had the 9-11 plotters been caught midway through the planning, what would our collective public response have been? God, what morons for thinking they could hijack not just one but four planes and use them as human-filled missiles against the largest buildings in New York. In the event, who were the morons? The most frightening thing about the most recent UK events is how extraordinarily close even some fairly amateur terrorists got to succeeding - concrete barriers at the airport, and someone thankfully observant in Piccadilly. But they got nearly all the way to home plate and were stopped by the frailest of last-stage tactical defenses, not by any kind of coherent counterterrorism strategy. Where were the vaunted domestic intelligence services? Might the mighty strictures of multiculturalism made surveillance rather more difficult than it should have been?

Meanwhile, the strictures of multiculturalism in the United States - the insistence that despite the obvious facts of where Islamist violence incubates, counterterrorism measures can take no account of that fact - lead to a copying of the dumbest of UK measures, the penchant for putting surveillance cameras everywhere. To record the carnage. To indulge the foolish idea that counterterrorism can and should consist of after-the-fact criminal justice, which is all that a video camera recording the action can hope to do, when posted on every possible location in a large city. It can't help you prevent terrorism - it merely announces that you don't intend to try to stop it in advance, but to go after people by sifting through the rubble and body parts afterwards.

Welcome to the world of on-defense, not offense, counterterrorism. If your counterterrorism policy is defensive, domestic, and essentially at-home, then be prepared either for a massive, general invasion of privacy in order to try and catch terrorists after the fact. And it still won't be effective, because the assumption of criminal law is deterrence through after the fact punishment. What does it mean if your terrorists are not deterrable?

Books on Paris

I've had occasion to read a bunch of books on Paris over the last couple of years as the family has been able to stop through on various trips to Europe. The usual travel guides, high brow travel essays, low brow shopping guides, high-low shopping guides, history books, accounts of the city of Paris - published in English over the last couple of years. They include all the ones you usually see on the bookshelves, such as Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon or the just-out Maribeth Clemente, The Riches of Paris: A Shopping and Touring Guide or Sarah Turnbull, Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris. (Clemente's shopping guide is actually helpful, my wife tells me - my shopping in Paris is more or less limited to books on Rene Char and expensive chocolate. Gopnik's best seller is quite amazing in just how geographically limited it is in Paris - as though, living on the Rue Bac, he had set out a mere 10 square blocks of the Upper East Side in Manhattan starting at Fifth Avenue and the Park and then had written an entire book on New York located there.)

Among the historical accounts of Paris are Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, Leonard Pitt, Walks Through Lost Paris, Jacques Yonnet, Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City, and Andrew Hussey, Paris: The Secret History. Each of these histories of the city is really quite excellent, but my favorite is Hussey's, which I read on this latest trip - the book lies somewhere in the category of higher journalism and lay (but impeccably researched, so far as I can tell) history. Hussey has a deep knowledge of the city, and its place in the history of France and Europe - the book is almost a miniature history of France in Europe. I strongly recommend it for anyone spending any time in Paris or just curious about the history of France.

There are also more specialized books that have also taught me a considerable amount - William Wiser, The Twlight Years: Paris in the 1930s, for example, which explores the last years of the Third Republic (and also caused me to finally understand just how entirely marginal to the intellectual and artistic life of Paris all those romantic American artist-expats really were, as it describes their homeward drift as Europe fell apart). (I'm leaving aside general books on French politics or works by French politicians, such as Dominique de Villepin's The Shark and the Seagull.)

Rene Char back in the Paris bookstores

Rene Char seems to be back in intellectual favor in France, after what seemed to be a long period of decline after his death in the late 1980s. The National Library is doing an exhibition on the centenary of his birth, and new reprintings of his books are back in the bookstores, which was not true even a year ago. I picked up some works that I did not already have, and a couple of cheap school edition copies of his Leaves of Hypnos.

Paris

Just arrived in Paris, ready to fall over from exhaustion - row 47 of 48 on the plane, crying babies and a girl scout troop on excursion. The kids chattered incessantly so no sleep. It's hot here today in Paris but not overwhelmingly so.

For all that, the meetings in DC went well - discussions on national security and civil liberties. Very glad I went.

There is now a Starbuck's at the foot of the Rue Moffetard (sp?). Otherwise things pretty much the same here in the Place d'Italie.

24 hours in DC, then back to Paris

This is somewhat mad, I agree, a twenty four hour detour from London to DC and back to Paris. I have been teaching in my law school's Europe program this summer, just having spent a very lovely week in London. The students in this year's program are excellent, attentive despite the obvious distractions of London. I'm here with my wife, daughter, and our niece, a student at BYU who has just announced her engagement. We've done some plays, some museums, all the usual tourist stuff.

In addition, my younger brother is a seventh or so year associate in tax and private equity in London at Debevoise and Plimpton, and we have had a rare chance to hang out with him and his filmmaker wife, in between her filmmaking (and filmmaking money raising trips) to her native Hong Kong. We spent a nice evening at their Islington apartment eating Kit's fabulous duck, a marvelous chocolate-pear tart and listening to the trubo-charged folk-rock of their ukelele band, in which Kit plays one of eight ukeleles and John plays fretless bass guitar and also serves as producer and mixer and recording engineer. The band has been playing weddings and some arts festivals. If you think that ukeleles are just these little twangy things - like I did - you - we - are greatly misinformed.

I also had a chance to have coffee with Anthony Dworkin, an old friend and editor of the Crimes of War Project website. I was legal editor of the original Crimes of War book, under the general editors Roy Gutman and David Rieff, and Anthony, a journalist and writer who has gradually emerged as a leading expert in these areas, is bringing out a second edition of that book in August 2007. A lot has changed - the important areas of emphasis have changed - of course since the first edition in 1998. If you have the first edition, you need the second edition, and if you haven't seen it at all, you should check it out at the end of the summer - it is one of the most handsome books in the area, well written and expertly edited, and with fabulous illustration and design. Anthony is one of the smartest writers in the general area of security, laws of war, etc., and I hope that he puts all the work he has done over the past decade into a book on the general question of American policy and international law.

Alas, John Ryle was in Sudan this week, not London, and Philip Bobbitt was traveling someplace else too.

Meanwhile, I am actually in DC as I write this, not London. Family went on to Paris, and the students went on to Brussels, where I am not teaching. I have returned to DC for a meeting with folks from the Hoover Institution on counterterrorism policy. I then get on a plane and return to Paris tonight, in time to teach on Tuesday. Crazy schedule, yes, but I thought the meeting was a very important one for my work and writing. In Paris - besides the usual tourist things - I plan to go on a special search for French chocolate, admire in the bookstores first editions I can't afford of Blaise Cendrars and Rene Char, and see the exhibit at the National Library on the centenary of the birth of Rene Char. And purchase another copy in French of Leaves of Hypnos, which has somehow disappeared.

On the airplane back to DC, I read and finished a really funny, viciously sweet, British novel by the London writer AA Gill, Starcrossed. It is explicitly a rewrite - a very, very explicit rewrite - of that sappy 90s Julia Roberts-Hugh Grant romantic comedy, Notting Hill, complete with the American superstar Lee Montana ("rear of the year in fourteen countries, darling") and a London bookshop clerk and aspiring poet, John Dart. It is sexually punchy - I'd love to give it to my fourteen year old to show her that I can like chick-lit if done properly (well, in some alternate universe, maybe), but the sex is too lurid and nasty for her, or at least for Daddy to give to her, although not as much so as in AA Gill's also wonderful earlier London comedy of manners, Sap Rising. It's vicious and tellingly bitchy in many of its asides and social observations; Gill is an expert, so far as I can tell as a non-English outsider, at English comedy of manners. Yet in the end, though, despite all Gill's efforts, and the efforts of the reviewers, to show that he is a nasty prick and misanthropic, even misogynist novelist (this novel did win the bad sex award, and with good reason), he is a romantic, indeed a sentimentalist, who can't resist a sweet and happy ending - think The Red and the Black as farce with a happy, Hollywood ending to the battles between Julian and Mathilde. I thought it was both hysterically funny as well as rather wise on the question of romance and celebrity. I was actually moved, to my own surprise, by the way in which Gill wrapped the last third of the novel into a sort of take on Antigone, and ended the book with a speech by the Chorus - maybe it was just too long a plane ride, but I found myself thinking back to that fabulous production of Oedipus Rex at the ART at Harvard a couple of years ago that I saw by accident on a free evening passing through Cambridge MA in 2004. (Ms. Montana is in London because she has rather unwisely decided to show the world that she can do serious, RSC theatre, even cast as Antigone, with interesting results.) I was also taken with the fact that, against considerable odds, Gill himself is still quite in love with the idea of poetry, even contemporary poetry, and literature as actually revelatory of something in the human condition. Anyway, I liked it (interesting - I find myself saying that rather defensively), whereas Notting Hill made me cringe with embarrassment, it was so sappy.

(The earlier book, Sap Rising, elicited squeals of delight in some quarters and howls of protest in others, which made for a remarkable set of jacket reviewer quotes. The Guardian: "Do not buy this book." Evening Standard: "He writes so brilliantly." AN Wilson: "Extremely badly written, hideously and unamusingly obscene." Marie Claire: "A clever, sexy story." New Statesman: "Frightful pile of garbage." ... Well, perhaps the TLS got it exactly right: "This is a dirty book.")

Okay. Off to my meeting and then back to Paris.

(Ps so here's more about Gill, from a Guardian interview, here.)

La Marseillaise is stuck in my head!

After listening to the YouTube video of the crowd singing La Marseillaise in Paris at the celebration of Sarkozy's victory, it is now stuck in my head. I have been humming it all day long. I even played it on my cello when I should have been playing Buxtehude. What to do?! I listened to the San Francisco acid rock album by the Jefferson Starship, Blows Against the Empire at the gym, but even the Jerry Garcia lead, sample here on Starship, was no match for La Marseillaise.

(Per request of commenter, I've linked above to one of the several YouTube videos.)

The Singing Professor, or, To the Barricades!

A play in indefinite acts.

Scene: Dinner, lovely DC spring evening, family - Jean-Marie, Ken, Renee, Uncle Jack - eating on the screened in porch. Twilight. All is peaceful with the world.

Jean-Marie (brightly): The salmon is great.

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: Renee got a 97% on her earth science test.

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: She did okay on the math test.

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: But she got a C on the passive voice Latin test

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: And she'll probably be thrown out of school.

Ken: humming distractedly

Jean-Marie: Tuition just went up to $250,000 a year. No senior got into college. And Renee's 8th grade ethics class has been mobilized as part of the National Guard and is being sent to do community service in Ira - will you stop humming that damn song! This isn't Casablanca!

Curtain, followed by terrible commotion off-stage. Unclear whether Act II will be played. Stay tuned.

***
The salmon is a variant of a recipe seen on the Rachel Ray show on the food channel, featuring salmon baked in a mixture of half cup rum, a tablespoon or so of mayonnaise, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar splash, splash of molassas, a couple of tablespoons of yellow Thai curry sauce, much garlic and much ginger, both best fresh. Cover salmon with sauce top and bottom. Very hot oven - 425 degrees F, about twenty minutes for a pound of salmon. It's Rachel Ray - which is to say, Not Low Cal.

C'est l'identite de la France, c'est l'histoire de la France

La déclaration de Nicolas Sarkozy

lefigaro.fr
Dimanche 6 mai, 20h30, salle Gaveau (Paris).

Nicolas Sarkozy s'adresse à ses partisans pour la première fois depuis son élection. Il confesse son "immense émotion".

"Mes chers compatriotes. En m'adressant à vous ce soir et en ce moment qui est, chacun le comprend, exceptionnel dans la vie d'un homme, je ressens une immense, une sincère et profonde émotion. J'éprouve depuis mon plus jeune âge la fierté indicible d'appartenir à une grande, à une vieille, à une belle nation, la France. J'aime la France comme on aime un être cher qui m'a tout donné, maintenant c'est à mon tour de rendre à la France ce que la France m'a donné.

Ce soir, ma pensée va aux millions de Français qui aujourd'hui m'ont témoigné leur confiance. Je veux leur dire qu'ils m'ont fait le plus grand honneur qui soit, à mes yeux, en me jugeant digne de présider aux destinées de la France. Ma pensée va à tout ceux qui m'ont accompagné dans cette campagne. Je veux leur dire ma gratitude, je veux leur dire mon affection. Je veux le dire d'abord à ma famille, je veux le dire à mes amis, je veux le dire mes partisans, je veux le dire à tout ceux qui m'ont soutenu.

Et ma pensée va à Mme Royal. Je veux lui dire que j'ai du respect pour elle et pour ses idées dans lesquelles tant de Français se sont reconnus. Respecter Mme Royal, c'est respecter les millions de Français qui ont voté pour elle.

Le président de la République doit aimer tous les Français. Ma pensée va donc à tous les Français qui n'ont pas voté pour moi. Je veux leur dire que par delà le combat politique, par delà les divergences d'opinion, il n'y a pour moi qu'une seule France. Je veux leur dire que je serai le président de tous les Français, que je parlerai pour chacun d'entre eux. Je veux leur dire que ce soir, ce n'est pas la victoire d'une France contre une autre. Il n'y a pour moi ce soir qu'une seule victoire: celle de la démocratie, celle des valeurs qui nous unissent, celle de l'idéal qui nous rassemble.

Ma priorité sera de tout mettre en oeuvre pour que les Français aient toujours envie de se parler, de se comprendre, de travailler ensemble. Le peuple français s'est exprimé. Il a choisi de rompre. De rompre avec les idées les habitudes et les comportements du passé. Je vais donc réhabiliter le travail, l'autorité, la morale, le respect. Je vais remettre à l'honneur la nation et l'identité nationale, je vais rendre aux Français la fierté de la France, je vais en finir avec la repentance qui est une forme de haine de soi et la concurrence des mémoires qui nourrit la haine des autres.

Le peuple français a choisi le changement. Ce changement je le mettrai en oeuvre parce que c'est le mandat que j'ai reçu du peuple et parce que la France en a besoin. Mais je le ferai avec tous les Français. Je le ferai dans un esprit d'union et dans un esprit de fraternité, je le ferai sans que personne n'ait le sentiment d'être exclu, d'être laissé pour compte. Je le ferai avec la volonté que chacun puisse trouver sa place dans notre République, que chacun s'y sente reconnu, s'y sente respecté dans sa dignité de citoyen et dans sa dignité d'homme. Tous ceux que la vie a blessés, ceux que la vie a usés doivent savoir qu'ils ne seront pas abandonnés qu'ils seront aidés, qu'ils seront secourus. Ceux qui ont le sentiment que quoi qu'ils fassent, ils ne pourront pas s'en sortir, doivent être sûrs qu'ils ne seront pas laissés de côté et qu'ils auront les mêmes chances que les autres.

J'appelle tous les Français par delà leur parti, leurs croyances, leurs origines à s'unir à moi pour que la France se remettre en mouvement. J'appelle chacun à ne pas se laisser enfermer dans l'intolérance et dans le sectarisme, mais à s'ouvrir aux autres, à ceux qui ont des idées différentes, à ceux qui ont d'autres convictions.

Je veux lancer un appel à nos partenaires européens auxquels notre destin est profondément lié pour leur dire que toute ma vie j'ai été européen, que je crois profondément, que je crois sincèrement en la construction européenne et que ce soir, la France est de retour en Europe. Je conjure nos partenaires européens d'entendre la voix des peuples qui veulent être protégés. Je conjure nos partenaires européens de ne pas restés sourds à la colère des peuples qui perçoivent l'Union européenne, non comme une protection, mais comme le cheval de Troie de toutes les menaces que portent en elles les transformations du monde.

Je veux lancer un appel à nos amis américains pour leur dire qu'ils peuvent compter sur notre amitié renforcée dans les tragédies de l'histoire que nous avons affrontées ensemble. Je veux leur dire que la France sera toujours à leurs côtés quand ils auront besoin d'elle mais je veux leur dire aussi que l'amitié, c'est accepter que ses amis puissent penser différemment. Et qu'une grande nation, comme les Etats Unis a le devoir de ne pas faire obstacle à la lutte contre le réchauffement climatique, mais au contraire de prendre la tête de ce combat, parce que ce qui est en jeu, c'est le sort de l'humanité toute entière. La France fera de ce combat son premier combat.

Je veux lancer un appel à tous les peuples de la Méditerranée pour leur dire que c'est en Méditerranée que tout va se jouer, qu'il nous faut surmonter toutes les haines pour laisser la place à un grand rêve de paix et à un grand rêve de civilisation. Je veux leur dire que le temps est venu de bâtir ensemble une Union méditerranéenne qui sera un trait d'union entre l'Europe et l'Afrique. Ce qui a été fait pour l'union de l'Europe, il y a 60 ans, nous allons le faire aujourd'hui pour l'union de la Méditerranée.

Je veux lancer un appel à tous les Africains, un appel fraternel pour dire à l'Afrique que nous voulons l'aider à vaincre la maladie, à vaincre la famine, à vaincre la pauvreté, à vivre en paix. Je veux leur dire que nous allons décider ensemble d'une politique d'immigration maîtrisée et d'une politique de développement ambitieuse.

Je veux lancer un appel à tous ceux qui dans le monde croient aux valeurs de la tolérance, de la liberté, de la démocratie, de l'humanisme, à tous ceux qui sont persécutés par les tyrannies et les dictatures. Je veux dire à tous les enfants à travers le monde, à toutes les femmes martyrisées dans le monde, je veux leur dire que la fierté, le devoir de la France sera d'être à leurs côtés.

La France sera aux côtés des infirmières libyennes (bulgares, ndlr) enfermées depuis huit ans, la France n'abandonnera pas Ingrid Betancourt, la France n'abandonnera pas les femmes qu'on condamne à la burqa, la France n'abandonnera pas les femmes qui n'ont pas la liberté. La France sera du côté des opprimés du monde. C'est le message de la France, c'est l'identité de la France, c'est l'histoire de la France.

Mes chers compatriotes, nous allons écrire ensemble une nouvelle page de notre histoire. Cette page de notre histoire, mes chers compatriotes, je suis sûr qu'elle sera grande, qu'elle sera belle. Et du fond du coeur, je veux vous le dire, avec la sincérité la plus totale qui est la mienne au moment où je vous parle: Vive la République et vive la France".

(Update, Volokh Conspiracy has some translation, plus a YouTube link to the crowd singing La Marsellaise. VC notes that the second to last paragraph, in italics, was added in the delivered version. Actually, I like this YouTube version better.)

(I also just want to note for the record that I was honored a few weeks ago to be contacted by a researcher in France looking for a rare English translation of the wartime poetry of the great French poet, Rene Char. The English translation, Leaves of Hypnos, translated by the poet Cid Corman, appeared in 1973, but has long been out of print. I was pleased to be able to supply the translations from my copy of the book for an English language version of a DVD from the ministry of culture on Char's poetry. And to think she contacted me because she had noticed a post about Rene Char on this blog!)

(While I am at it, I recommend this article in Commentary by Michael Gurfinkiel, "Can France Be Saved?", here. And I recommend anything written by that fine, extraordinarily smart French political commentator, Dominique Moisi, even when - or better said, especially when - I disagree with him. Writing in the Guardian, here, on the Sarkozy election.)