My TLS editor on writing - an editor's email to an author

Ben Wittes and I were on a panel on Thursday at the meetings of the American Society of International Law, called writing for the mass media.  Advice to law professors on how to place things in the mass media; I'm a bit of a fraud on that, as I don't really write that much for mass venues.  Ben, on the other hand, is a real journalist.  However, I did read to the audience the following email, received from my TLS editor in the midst of editing something years ago.  I keep a copy up on my wall, although I can't really say I am good about following it.  It's very good advice:

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Ken, you really think this is short?  May I enjoin you further on the virtues of concision.  There are too many long quotes from the book, for a start.  And I fear you risk partaking of the book's clearly leisurely pace and alleviatedly theoretical tone.  Unalleviatedly theoretical!  You!  Que pasa?

Maybe you haven't quite come down from your sojourn in the jungle of tenure-grabbing, publish-or-perish academic vanity publishing.  This is journalism, albeit the higher journalism. People don't have too much time.

The piece reads airlessly for the first half.  Look, there's nothing here that can't be said in half - no, a third - the space.

(Email to Ken, June 2001.)

Thanks to Instapundit for linking to my Jack Goldsmith review in the TLS

My thanks to Glenn Reynolds here at Instapundit for linking to my review in the Times Literary Supplement (London) of Jack Goldsmith's superb The Terror Presidency.  (You can get directly to my Goldsmith review here.)

One of the things I listened to closely while writing that review was the Instapundit podcast interview with Jack Goldsmith, which I highly recommend and which you can reach at this link.

Glenn, thanks as ever! 

(And if any Instapundit readers come here after visiting the TLS, let me just say that I regard the TLS as the finest literary review in the world.  It covers a breathtaking range of subjects, its discussion of literature is unsurpassed anywhere, and if you are a student or, really, anyone looking to hone your own essay and prose style, read the TLS for models on how to write.)

Bee Wilson on coffee in the TLS

The Times Literary Supplement this week has an absolutely marvelous cover article by Bee Wilson on coffee. Here at the TLS. Of course, the four volume work under review runs 350 UK pounds, so most of us will be limited to indulging ourselves in the review, not the actual work.

Finished a draft of my new TLS review essay

I have been going round and round on it for days, finally had a day with few other commitments, got up at 6 am and stayed at the computer at it, breaking for a meeting at school, then back again and just finished the draft at 10 pm. It has many problems, but the biggest problem is that it is 5,000 words where it can only be, max, 3000 and preferably 2500. Normally I would throw myself onto my editor and ask him to zap it, but he has some family things going on, and I have decided that blogging tends to make my writing weak and lazy - undisciplined - both in the sense of writing short little unargued blips, and in the sense of writing too long and not editing down. So I am going to do it myself. Just not tonight.

(Update. So, I have cut it down to just over 3500 words - not short enough yet, but I have to say it is a much stronger piece for the cutting. I have left in a couple of sentences of baroque complexity that would probably seem way over the top to most readers, but that's a deliberately aesthetic decision, not just lack of discipline. Maybe. I will rework it some more, cut it some more, and send it on Sunday night.)

Steve Wasserman on book reviews in newspapers

Steve Wasserman, who for years was the editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, has a fabulous cover essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, here, on the decline of book reviews in American newspapers. It is a superb essay, well worth reading.

I have a particular interest in book reviews - I like to write book reviews, have done so in various publications for many years, and take the whole enterprise seriously. Steve is one of a small handful of genuinely gifted and wonderful editors I have been privileged to work with - John Ryle at the TLS, Tod Lindberg at Policy Review, Scott Malcomson at the NYT magazine, Luis Gago as editor and translator at the Madrid Revista de Libros, and a number of editors in various departments at the TLS under Ferdinand Mount and Peter Stothard over the years being the others - and the LA Times Book Review was an amazing thing under his leadership. I'll have more to say about this when I am slightly less pressed; I wrote about book reviews here on this blog a while back. But read Steve's article.

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ps. Rereading with amusement Steve's account of the LAT editor's response to Steve prominently publishing a review of a new translation of The Charterhouse of Parma - "Stendhal, Steve? More dead, white European males?" or his decision to publish Octavio Paz on Sor Juana ... there are not a lot of book review editors at major newspapers, even when they existed, who would have the chutzpah to run a special section on ... dead classics - in translation. My own contribution to that was a major piece on the infamous Story of O. Here. Later, I wrote Steve a major review essay on pedagogies of reading, which was a very brave piece for someone, like Steve, who is a man of the left, and who was crossing a very large number of committed progressives by running a piece like that, like stepping into a minefield called "no child left behind" - true, the mayor of Los Angeles loved it and called me to say so, so did the state superintendent of schools, and so did the most important empirically based researcher in reading pedagogy in the United States (at NIH in Bethesda); Steve, however, got lots of hate mail for that one. Here.

And somewhere in there, Steve asked me to review a book about Mormonism - my childhood, long lapsed religion - in view of wanting to be fair, objective, not someone with an agenda one way or the other but an understanding of the religion and the culture - but knowing that his editor and publisher were both practicing Mormons and quite sensitive on the subject: not a moment, in other words, for the (very great) Christopher Hitchens. I think I did a fine job in that instance, thank you very much, something that was both personal and analytic. But Steve gave very shrewd editorial advice in shaping that piece to balance the personal parts and the parts that went to the whole culture and the book, advice that allowed that piece to work. Here.

So when I say that Steve is one of the great editors in America, I mean it, and that he knows in his CJR essay whereof he speaks.

Narcissism and self esteem, a small note

In the current, long overdue discussions over self-esteemism gone amok, it is worth bearing in mind that narcissism is not self-love as such. Narcissus was fascinated with himself, and that fascination arose in part because it was himself. But, as Jackson Lears pointed out years ago in an obituary essay on the late Christopher Lasch, narcissism is more precisely not self-love, but rather than inability to distinguish between self and world.

I long ago gave up altogether on Freud, but there are still insights that resonate, and one is that narcissism, because it is an inability to distinguish between self and world, is an infantile and infantilizing condition. Because it is the condition of the infant to be unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, between desire and world. The self esteem movement is infantilizing for exactly this reason; it erases the distinction between self and world and thrives on the confusion of the two.

But the real world intrudes, if only dimly, and produces this weird sense of fragility and mistrust and resentment of what authorities, starting with parents, tell you, because somewhere you sense that it can't be quite as easy as all that. I recall that the great philosopher of law and philosopher of literature and pyschoanlysis, Herbert Morris, for many decades at UCLA, and one of my great mentors, remarked to me that his favorite rock n roll song was "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

I wrote about this back in the mid-1990s, following Lasch's untimely death, here in the TLS, and here in the Columbia Law Review. I also wrote about it in a review of It Takes a Village, also in the TLS, and indirectly in a 2000 review essay in the Los Angeles Times Book Review on the pedagogy of reading, here, which caused great if brief consternation among private school parents in Los Angeles but got me congratulatory calls from the then mayor of Los Angeles and the then state superintendent of education in California. And much hate mail from the education schools. I touched a nerve in multiple directions.

But I think the most important article in the popular press today on this topic is this one from New York Magazine, widely noticed but no less important for it, here.

What would Bart do? And the Baroque violin music of Nicola Matteis

The Baroque violin music of Nicola Matteis (b Naples ?, d London? 1714? Although not much is known about his birth and death, don't feel too badly for him - he came from Italy, married a rich widow in London and retired wealthy from the music scene, which is why not so much is known) is mostly virtuosic and pretty, rather than deep and beautiful. Ornamental and diverting, not profound. On the other hand, the second movement of the suite in A major, Book IV, Nos. 1-11, the 2 minute long Andamento con divisione is so sweet without being overwhelming that it just stops me on the album until I've played it three or four times in a row. There's something about the ostinato in three - very hard to explain except that I can play it over and over. (The Arcadian Academy, on Harmonia Mundi, here.)

Meanwhile, I am sitting here on a Saturday morning deep in the midst of writing my TLS review essay of ... the Simpsons Movie. Knowing that I will be launching something that, although unlikely to encounter too many fanatics among the readers of the TLS, nonetheless will be likely scrutinized at some point by some hard core fan, so I have been online making sure the details are right.

My review is filled with plot spoilers, I'm afraid. Worse, I am committing the (venal) sin of doing a serious review of a fun and funny summer movie, a cartoon no less. I am pairing it with a review of my colleague Angela J. Davis's new, brilliant book on the overwheening power of prosecutors in America, Arbitrary Justice (Oxford UP 2007). I should have included this in my reading post, earlier, but didn't because I knew I'd be reviewing the book - this book is must-reading for anyone trying to understand what has gone so dreadfully wrong with street-level American justice. As regular readers of this blog know, as some sort of libertarian conservative, I am willing to defend many institutions and policies in America that progressives find indefensible - the war on terror, the war in Iraq, not infrequently the Bush administration - but the American criminal justice system is not one of them, and that fundamentally for the reasons Professor Davis says.

Combining the Simpsons and Professor Davis might turn out to be a bad idea, from the craft of review writing point of view - downmarketing Professor Davis's intellectual and legal policy tour de force while making the Simpson out to be more than it is. But while watching and laughing my way through the movie, I kept being struck by the thought: that T-shirt I used to see in the 90s, "What Would Bart Do?" (checking Google, I see you could get the slogan on a thong, too) today should be replaced with "What Would They Do To Bart?"

The latter not as cute and catchy as the former, granted. But in today's world of apparently unconstrained prosecutorial power, possibly more relevant. Godalmighty, what do you say about someone sentenced ten years for consensual oral sex with a fifteen year when he was seventeen and in high school in Georgia - finally, finally overturned by a judge after pretty much every other appeal had been exhausted - except that he was pursued by a crazed and unaccountable prosecutor? And then the butt swatting thirteen year old middle schoolers pursued by a mad, unaccountable, self-righteous prosecutor in Oregon on felony sexual assault charges designed to put the boys, as he said in interviews, on the sexual offenders register for child molesters and pedophiles for the rest of their lives. Life imitates a Simpsons cartoon - without necessarily the happy cartoon endings.

Q: What does the Simpsons Movie have to do with the TLS?

A: Nothing to speak of - except that I am writing the TLS review! Renee and I are about to go off and see it, my beloved wife Jean-Marie having bowed out. Also, if you are not a TLS subscriber, you should be ... go here.

(Update. Alas, the review I wrote of the Simpsons wound up mixing up, in all the wrong ways, the summer comedy movie review with a serious discussion of out of control prosecutors engaged in all sorts of stuff that would work well in a Simpsons episode but in fact is tragic in real life - the mad, wicked prosecutor in Oregon, for example, and his butt swatting sexual assault charges. It made for an illmixed review, unfortunately, and I agree with the TLS editor that it couldn't really run. Too bad, but the editor is right. I may run some bits of the review here, but it really wasn't ready for prime time publication, as it were. It's actually quit helpful to have editors who will tell you that, straight out.)

The TLS of July 20, 2007

It won't mean very much, I suppose, unless you subscribe or have easy access to a copy, but this week's TLS of July 20, 2007 is a very fine issue on many different matters. Claude Rawson's cover essay on wit in the 18th century is terrific. Likewise Adrian Tahourdin's review of Pierre Bayard's slightly scandalous argument that it is okay to opine on books we haven't read. (Let me add, however, as a sometime TLS reviewer, that I have never reviewed a book for the TLS or anywhere else that I haven't read cover to cover - on the other hand, I've never been a weekly reviewer, "reading" and cranking out something every few days - I have always had the luxury of taking my own sweet time. This has sometimes led to abuse of the privilege of time - and I admit I am late on a couple of things for TLS now - but I can say I've read everything I've reviewed.) And Justin Belplate's essay on Milan Kundera's The Curtain is also very thoughtful. It's a terrific issue.

Thinking about book reviews ... I once received an invitation, which very regrettably I wasn't able to follow up, to join a very special book club - one in which you discussed books of which you had read only the reviews, not the actual book itself. A stunningly good idea - and honest, too!

David Martin's TLS review of 'The Price of Peace'

David Martin, the eminent LSE professor (now emeritus), has an outstanding review of what appears to be an outstanding (I just ordered my copy) new book on just war theory - The Price of Peace: Just war in the twenty-first century (Cambridge paperback), eds. Charles Reed and David Ryall - in this week's TLS, June 29, 2007, No. 5439, p 24-25. As it's not online anywhere, I'm afraid you'll have to take my word for it.

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I'm moving this comment from the comments up to the main text to make it more visible in case anyone wants to respond to it. As I said above, I'm waiting for my copy of The Price of Peace to arrive, so I can't respond to what is said here about the book; I will do so once I've received and read it. But I have very considerable respect for David Martin's views, and I think the review an outstanding short essay - I'm very sorry it is not online, even for a fee (eventually it will show up in the TLS subscriber only archive). If anyone else wants to comment, by all means, and I will comment on the book once I've read it.

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I would be very interested in hearing others' comments on the review (which I've not seen) and the book (which I have). The book has some fresh faces, and also, usefully for critics, provides recent pieces by "just war" theorists who've helped bring just war theory into disrepute by appropriating it to support the war in Iraq: James T. Johnson, Jean Bethke Elshtain, George Weigel. Sorry, no Michael Novak or R.J. Neuhaus, but the family resemblances within this group are strong enough that the general picture emerges.

One feature of the picture is the trashing of in bello considerations. Others are its romantic attachment to "precision weapons" and the ongoing assault on the American bishops. Omitted from the book, unfortunately, is this group's disdain for the Peace of Westphalia, for the Catechism's worries about "modernorum destructionis mediorum potentia," among other topics.

They dislike Westphalia because it strengthened state sovereignty, which they generally view as merely a troublesome impediment to selective American efforts at regime change. They seldom tell us why Westphalia was desirable: it's as if one man's 30 Years War is another man's (or woman's) humanitarian intervention.

The book omits any reference to Ann Orford's work on humanitarian interventions. Jeffrey Sachs is nowhere to be found.

This does not mean there are not good contributions here. And it is a service to history, if not to the cause of peace, to include Elshtain, Weigel and Johnson. (That Johnson, a real expert on just war, should be as optimistic about "precision weapons" as he is, is damning testimony to the power of academic compartmentalization.)

I'm providing my address because I would be interested in feedback.

Dan Tompkins
Temple University
pericles@temple.edu

Despue de los neocons - my Fukuyama TLS essay in the June 2007 Madrid Revista de Libros

(Por si acaso alguien se interese en una traduccion de mi ensayo sobre el libro Despues de los neocons por Francis Fukuyama. El ensayo aparecio originalmente en el TLS, y esta traduccion en la Revista de Libros de Madrid, No 126, Junio 2007. Es una traduccion magnifica por Luis Gago de la Revista de Libros.)

(At SSRN, here.)

Congratulations to WCL graduates!

Today is graduation at Washington College of Law, American University, where I teach. I'm about to head over to the ceremony. My warmest congratulations to my students and all the WCL students graduating today, their parents and friends and family who have come to join them.

Summer for me consists of finishing some very overdue manuscripts - my UN reform short book manuscript, in particular. I'm also teaching in the WCL London-Paris-Brussels-Geneva program for a couple of weeks in June. I do the international economic law part, which takes place in London and Paris. Then in July I'll do another WCL international economic law short course, in Santiago, Chile, which I plan to do in Spanish, so wish me luck! Although in some ways, talking about finance in Spanish is easier than many more mundane subjects, because there are so many close cognates.

I also want to finish a couple of TLS reviews this summer, one on immigration, assimilation, and citizenship, and another on microfinance and international development finance. My American University International Law Review essay on neoconservatism, Goodbye to All That? has remarkably made the SSRN current top ten list for law articles - who would have thought there would be that much interest (and maybe there isn't, once actually downloaded - "downloaded," of course, does not mean "read"). I have a talk in essay form on (really an attack on) the "new liberal realism" coming out in the Fordham International Law Review soon, but that is complete. And my Fukuyama review from the TLS is coming out in June in the Madrid Revista de Libros, which makes me very, very happy and proud - I used to read the Revista back on sabbatical in Spain a couple of years ago sitting in the cafes of Sevilla (accomplishing much less academic work than originally planned, but that is the Seville-effect) and sometimes thought about contacting the editors to see if I could submit something, and via the TLS, here we are. Luis Gago at the Revista has done a translation that makes me sound so erudite and intelligent that - well, I blush.

So that's what I'm up to at this moment. Now to put on a coat and tie and head over the WCL and see my students and all the students march in and ... graduate! Congratulations!

Richard Hopton's History of Duelling reviewed by Jon Latimer in the TLS

I am eager to read this book, Richard Hopton, Pistols at Dawn: A History of Duelling (Portrait 2007, and it doesn't seem to be on Amazon US), particularly on account of the lovely review essay by Jon Latimer in the May 11, 2007 Times Literary Supplement. It is not online, but will eventually show up in the subscriber only archive.

Duelling interests me for a several reasons.

One is that my childhood sport was fencing - I read the Three Musketeers as a boy and discovered that the college town where I spent my cavity-prone years, Claremont, just outside Los Angeles, had in residence a world class fencer and fencing coach, Francis Zold, a Hungarian who had been on the Hungarian Olympic team before the Second World War. He had gone on to become a professor of intellectual property and copyright at the University of Budapest. He and his family fled Hungary in 1956, and settled in Claremont. Discovering that a specialist in Hungarian copyright law and whose English was so-s0 - although, like so many Hungarians, he was in fact a gifted linguist and was fluent in at least five languages - was not in great academic demand, he went back to coaching fencing at various southern California colleges, including Pomona College.

He also took on high school students in a local community club. He was one of the greatest teachers I have had in any field - others include the UCLA professors Rogers Albritton, Philippa Foot, Herbert Morris, and David Rapoport - and on account of spending all my time fencing, I didn't learn many other sports. At one point, he wanted me to come spend time in the afternoons with the Pomona College team; I was a freshman in high school, and this entailed asking permission of the fearsome head football coach and PE teacher, a huge bear of a man who would tell you to drop and do 50 pushups without thinking twice. I very shyly explained what my fencing coach had in mind - the football coach broke in and said, you are a student of Francis Zold? I said, yes, not sure what that meant. He said, Master Zold is one of the great coaches in this country, and whatever he wants, you do. Now get out and make sure you make him proud. Not being especially good, I didn't, although I tried hard.

Later on, when I finally got around to college at UCLA - I was 24 or 25 years old, I had spent several years working blue collar jobs in LA and a couple of years as a Mormon missionary in Peru - I joined the UCLA fencing squad. It didn't last long after I joined and was cut in a budgetary overhaul - however, I met some genuinely wonderful people there, in particular the LA television writer, Tim Maile, who is a successful writer of teen shows, including dreaming up the Lizzie McGuire Show. Also I received a UCLA letter and handsome leather letterman's jacket, which never failed to impress girls until they found out the sport involved.

All that by way of saying that fencers are often interested in subjects like duelling. I have a second, quite different reason for interest in the subject, however.

In Just and Unjust Wars, Michael Walzer raises the question of wars - fighting, killing - that are not unjust. He offers examples of aristocratic young men who fight each other as a grand game, by choice, perhaps as a rite of passage, and says that a death in such circumstances of choice and autonomy is not unjust. It is a very careful locution, because it qualifies the judgment in two ways. One is that although the death may not be contrary to justice, it might be contrary to other moral virtues and rules - such as not killing or being killed in what is merely a game - a Catholic theologian, for example, would surely reject the notion of "autonomy" here. That is to separate justice from other virtues. The second qualification, however, is that Walzer does not say that such a death is just - merely that it is not contrary to justice, which is a quite different thing.

Duelling, whether with swords or pistols, personalizes the game. It also puts honor, or some notion of it, ahead of justice and other virtues. It is, as the review notes, a practice that in Western societies has long been forbidden by authorities, especially in the military, apparently largely on grounds that it weakened the fighting ranks. At any rate, duelling is one of those social practices that tests the limits of how far we are willing to admit of autonomy.

I've been away ...

From blogging, but also from Washington DC. I was up in New York City for nearly a week, attending board meetings of the Open Society Institute's information program and media program, and the Media Development Loan Fund. Many corporate governance issues as well as substantive and programmatic issues. As anyone who has been involved with any large nonprofit knows, corporate governance issues at nonprofit institutions are at least as difficult and challenging as they are at for profit institutions, and perhaps - precisely because they lack the clean, clear incentives of a profit motivation - even more so.

But I got back in time to teach my last class of the term in my just war ethics course, and now I am trying to catch up on everything - which means, first and foremost, completing my UN reform book for the Hoover Institution. In addition, I have some long lost reviews for the TLS, one on immigration and the other on microfinance and development finance generally. I have a small essay to revise - remarks, really, even though I had to miss the conference and didn't get a chance to deliver them - from a conference on counterterrorism at Fordham Law School last fall. And finally - and I can't tell you how much pleasure this gives me - the Revista de Libros of Madrid, which is kind of the TLS/NYRB of Spain, is translating and publishing my TLS essay on Fukuyama and neoconservatism in its June issue. So I am going over the really marvelously elegant translation the editor sent me.

I am setting up two small Hoover discussion lunches in May - one the launch of Lee Feinstein's new Council on Foreign Relations report on responsibility to protect in Darfur and beyond, and a second on the idea of a national security or counterterrorism court.

I know there are professors out there who do many more speaking engagements than I, but during this spring term I've done a lot for me - three or four events at my own law school (WCL),the Stanley Foundation, OSI, UVA, NYU, NCS, the Hoover Institution, Bard College, and Wayne State. I've enjoyed it, in fact - people at all these institutions have been wonderfully hospitable. But now I need to do some more writing.

As long as I'm catching up on various things, I wanted to thank Matthew Waxman for taking time out of his busy schedule as Principal Deputy Director of Policy Planning at the State Department - I think he is perhaps now the Acting Director - to talk with my daughter Renee about realism, idealism, and the evolution of Secretary Rice's thinking in foreign policy for a paper Renee is doing at NCS. I must say that Matt has been through hell these past few years, fighting from inside the administration against Cheney's people - his was one of the first and strongest voices in favor of the Common Article Three standard for detainees, among numerous other reforms he sought. He fought hard to reform the entire detainee legal structure, eventually concluding that he couldn't stay in his Pentagon post after clashes with David Addington et al. for his pains. The irony, of course, is that Matt's views were those largely adopted in Hamdan, while those of the Cheney faction largely lost - a result that a moderately competent lawyer without the ideological blinders of Addington et al. and their reading of executive power would have realized from the get-go. The Addington faction will likely respond in the most petty way possible - by refusing, I would guess, to move Matt from principal deputy to director at Policy Planning although, especially at this stage of the presidential term, it is both deserved and obvious. Maybe I'll be wrong about that, but I doubt it.

And likewise thanks to Kori Schake for taking time to talk with Renee - Kori is a foreign and defense policy specialist formerly with the Pentagon and the NSC, now a Hoover fellow finishing a book and a professor at West Point. Anyway, I feel a little embarrassed reaching to the big guns to talk with an eighth grader about foreign policy, but Renee learned a lot more from her discussions with them than she ever did talking with me ...

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Other than expressing my sorrow and condolences, I don't really have anything wise or intelligent to add to the discussion of the Virginia Tech shootings.

Rosemary Richter on the United Nations in the TLS online

Many of the reviews in the Times Literary Supplement are not available online, not even to subscribers, although they eventually show up in the subscriber archive. I recommend subscribing to the TLS. It's expensive but worth it.

This essay by Rosemary Richter on the United Nations, reviewing Paul Kennedy's new history and assessment of the UN, Parliament of Man, is available publicly online at the TLS. Hooray. It is well worth reading. (Rosemary Richter, "What Use the UN?", here.) Richter is an editor at the London Times; I've made several critical comments in passing on this blog about Kennedy's book and maybe I'll review it somewhere, but Richter's review is really the conclusive take.

Conclusion from the review (my emphasis added, and it is a zinger):

The trouble with books that start from the premiss that the UN is unquestionably a force for the good is that they tend to wrap their theme in a bubble of conventional cant. Paul Kennedy makes many shrewd observations in The Parliament of Man, but the bubble remains, as he intends, intact.