I fixed a turkey breast done in the slow cooker, very tender and juicy, and a bunch of vegetables grilled. The almond creme cake from the expensive baker was a disaster, though, with the crust ladened with enough salt to make us all gag. Anyway, Jean-Marie took this with her macbook built in camera.
A note on ethics and war and just war theory. In class, we have been talking our way through Walzer's chapter on realism and his deservedly famous discussion of the Melian dialogue. The positions that can be disambiguated from that discussion as statements of realism are:
All that - plus some more - appears in Walzer, chapter 1. But I want to add something else, something that converts and amplifies the 'argument upon your safety' from a purely prudential argument into a moral one. It is that when the subject of all this is not a person, but a community, then obligations to see to the safety of that community become more than merely prudential. They become a moral requirement that entails prudential forms of action. The leaders of the community are, in effect, trustees and fiduciaries entrusted with the safety of the community. What they do as matters of prudence are also, and in the first place, acts of morality on behalf of the community for whom they act.
An individual, that is, might choose to take greater risks for himself or herself than he or she would feel entitled to have the community take. It is a familiar position for a fiduciary - you are obliged to act more prudently than you would for yourself alone, and in so doing you fulfil a moral duty to others that, with respect to yourself alone, would be merely prudential.
I have described this as "amplifying" the prudential 'argument upon your safety' because the trustee, as fiduciary, must be more cautious and more prudent because of moral obligations to the community. It amplifies in some circumstances the possibility of conflict, including preemptive and preventive war.
(For a real life example of this, see Jack Goldsmith's The Terror Presidency, a book premised in large part on the proposition that any US administration, keenly aware of its role as trustee of the safety of the American people, will believe it not just prudent but moral to do whatever it takes to ensure public safety. Many people argue that this prudence is misplaced and excessive, and risks other kinds of things, such as damage to the long term constitutional order. Goldsmith's observation is that it is not merely a sense of prudence - protecting ourselves - but morality - the president has the moral obligation to do whatever can prudently be done to keep the American people safe. In that sense, the moral obligation of a trustee serves as an amplifier of prudential action. See my TLS review of it, downloadable at SSRN, here.)
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(PS. Philip Bobbitt (I don't think he'd mind me identifying him), in an illuminating conversation (as they always are) with me today noted that this sentiment, the idea that what is prudence for an individual becomes a genuinely moral obligation for the ruler - and amplifies it - is part of Machiavelli's thought in The Prince. But it is not Machiavelli as caricatured, but part of his republican thought. Philip has a new short biography on Machiavellli and The Prince for a general audience coming out soon. Also, Philip's magnificent Terror and Consent will appear from Knopf on April 1 - don't miss it!
I should add, too, that this was a conversation with my daughter Renee, who has been studying Western intellectual traditions in her 9th grade Sidwell history class. Renee has the good fortune to have an outstanding teacher - scholar in her own right - who has the class reading Machiavelli, et al., in original selections. Renee remarked how much she loves listening to Philip talk about ideas, he is very clear, she says. Philip is remarkably patient in explaining these things, and Renee took away an important idea about Hegel today to use in her Marx paper.)
... and highly addictive. On the one hand, I find myself buying books that I actually do need but never quite got around to pushing the one click button because I was deterred by the shipping price, and trying to figure out the shipping options. Jean-Marie signed up for the flat rate prime program, and I do find myself clicking the button more. Truth is, though, I don't have time or interest in shopping in a store for anything this Christmas that I can buy online. When I look at the grocery section on Amazon and realize that cool coffee and chocolate and that kind of goo-gah can be bought and have delivered with no additional pain or expense - well, I'm going online for everything I possibly can this year.
So, happy thanksgiving to everyone. Low key this year - Jean-Marie, Renee, and I were all independently swamped this fall with various things, and so didn't do a lot of planning ahead. And then the water was scheduled to be turned off on Tuesday night and Wednesday ahead of Thanksgiving Day in order to fix the fire hydrant, which definitely put a damper in our desire either to entertain or even cook. Then DC agreed at the last minute to postpone the repairs - good repairs, of course, working fire hydrants are a very good thing - but by then it was too late to get very revv'd up. The menu at our house is ...
Breast of turkey, because I have more or less given up on whole turkeys, in a sauce of cinammon, nutmeg, allspice, cloves, garlic, ginger, a bunch of those spices - not my more usual herbes de provence thing - mixed with heart stopping plugra butter, almond oil, molassass, and fresh lemon juice, a little balsamic vinegar and a lot of brandy. Pearl onions, carrots, and prunes cooked with the turkey.
Green beans, prepared by Uncle Jack and cooked by Jean-Marie.
Mashed potatoes. Whisky mashed potatoes - the potatoes have been soaked in whisky, garlic, oilive oil, plugra butter, and salt. This is an Experiment By Ken. In fact, this whole meal I have shifted from wine to spirits for cooking. No one here drinks spirits - I don't drink at all, and Jean-Marie and Jack only wine - Renee ... hmmmmmmmmmmm, milk Store bought gravy, I'm afraid.
Roasted tomatoes and large brown mushrooms, drizzled with olive oil and salt, from me.
Squash, from Jean-Marie. Good for you? Well, not with the amount of butter she uses!
Cranberry sauce, homemade, Jean-Marie.
Cream corn using dried corn from somewhere in the Amish country.
Dessert, pumpkin, cherry, and pecan pie, all homemade butter crusts, from Jean-Marie. Pears soaked in brandy, fresh clementine juice, vanilla, almond oil, then roasted, and sprinkled with turbinado sugar.
(Notice there is no chocolate on the menu.)
Renee and five of her friends went out trick or treating. Renee came back with 23 (!?) pounds of candy. But she and her friends cleaned up because there did not seem to be many kids out in Spring Valley in upper NW DC this year. Don't know why - beautiful night, clear but not cold at all, actually one of the most beautiful days this year. Well, quite the hunter-gatherer of high fructose corn syrup and sugar.
I got back last night from Guatemala, where I was attending the MDLF media forum and also a board meeting. I want publicly to thank Jose Ruben Zamora, editor of El Periodico newspaper, and a longtime client of MDLF, for the extraordinary kindnesses he and his staff showed to all the participants in the media forum, who came from around the world to discuss conditions of independent journalism.
The last night of the conference, El Periodico hosted a wonderful reception, concert, and dinner in Antigua. An excellent string quartet, the Guatemalan Contemporary Quartet, played for the guests. They did some 19th century Guatemalan music, some contemporary pieces by the cellist in the group, and an 18th century classical piece. It was lovely, and then they followed that up by an unusual film, with them playing the soundtrack on the film, but then accompanying the soundtrack with additional tracks live on stage. The film covered a number of highland Guatemalan scenes, places I have been in the past but haven't seen in many years - Sacatepequez, for example. That was followed by a terrific dinner, in which I had very interesting conversations with journalists from Bolivia and Columbia. And I am pleased to say that they complimented me on my Spanish! - not the pronunciation, to be sure, but my "excelencia de expresion." Quite so, I'm sure.
I came back with gifts for the girls. Black jade earrings for Jean-Marie, and a large selection of magazines and newspapers in Spanish to use with her classes - she teaches high school boys at St Alban's in DC, so I figured she couldn't go wrong with sports and sex - Maxim in Spanish. A necklace for Renee, but I had spent so much money on her birthday - Daddy compensation for missing her 15th birthday last week - that I thought I really shouldn't. (The vintage designer dress from 1960 and the 1972 onesie - well, it okay, she doesn't really need college - I understood all of a sudden exactly what it must be like to be a divorced Dad trying to dump material love on a teenage kid.) And coffee - vast quantities of Antigua coffee and coffee from Jose Ruben's coffee farm. Even I, coffee novice, could taste how low acid and sweet it is. Roasted at a little place in Antigua, it is great.
The Media Development Loan Fund, whose board I chair, holds every other year a media forum, where our clients and some other invitees, including some funder organizations, some media people, etc., gather to discuss the conditions and directions and challenges for independent media around the world. This year we decided to hold it in Guatemala - because in part we would like to have a better and more visible presence in Latin America, and partly because our client in Guatemala, El Periodico newspaper, faces many political pressures and we thought it might contribute a little bit if it were known that it has friends outside of Guatemala. The country is undergoing enormous pressures from exploding common crime, and has a presidential election next week in which the billboards for one party say, "Confronting violence intelligently" and for the other party say, "Mano dura." The Salvardoran journalists who came here for the meeting told me that after having been carjacked on the Pan American highway last year, they thought they were lucky to be alive and preferred to take the 4 hour bus rather than the 2 1/2 hour car ride - if the highway gangs see Salvadoran license plates, they know there must be some money, they said. But although Guatemala is not easy to get to from Asia, Africa, or much of Europe, we have people here from all over. It is a humbling experience to be with people who manage to keep a media business going despite such enormous pressures from governments, gangs, mafia, competition, you name it.
The conference is being held in the safe and secure tourist town, Antigua, not far outside the capital, a beautiful mountain town in the shadow of the volcano. It is really lovely, always has been. We are staying at the Hotel Casa Santo Domingo, a former convent turned hotel. It is much more beautiful than one could hope for, really lovely. My wife Jean-Marie, who spent many years here in Guatemala, shook her head when I mentioned the hotel and said, well, it's not so much a business hotel as a honeymoon hotel. Well, that's fine by me, it has internet in the rooms, and it is lovely - wish she and Renee were here.
Renee turns 15 tomorrow (!), and her daddy is not at home for her birthday, for the first time in I can't remember -maybe always. I hope she has a lovely birthday, notwithstanding the biology test coming on top of her three other tests this week. I got her some gifts that I hope she likes - you might say that daddy overcompensated and decided to shower her with presents. For the first time, I understand what a divorced father must feel like who buys his daughter to make up for feeling guilty for not being there.
I feel like going to bed. It's past eleven pm, on a Wednesday night, I have to teach classes tomorrow morning, and anyway, I'm tired. But I am sitting here still working away because my kid is still slaving away down at her desk in the basement. I feel like there's something wrong with my quitting work before she does. Especially when she gets up earlier than I do. Call it my expression of solidarity. Actually, it's just guilt. Should I feel guilty about knocking off before she does?
Oh well, it has enabled me to make much more progress on my UN-US relations manuscript. And I'm about a thousand words into a short, just-the-facts review of Judge Posner's three books for Rowman and Littlefield on counterterrorism - I'm going to see if the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence would like to run it at 1200 words.
And here's the current draft table of contents for my very short UN essay book (25-30,000 words) in the same Rowman and Littlefield series as Judge Posner's (all very much subject to revision, as it's very possible I might change my mind about this whole structure and do something more conventional) (also, if someone could tell me the Latin for perpetual immobility, that would be useful):
Where I just spent, um, 160 dollars on books. Most of them were supersale books, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok. Now I am sitting in the coffeeshop, looking around at my fellow aging boomers, on our laptops, feeling very coffeehouse like. Anyone with any sense and the functional hips and knees would be outside on a bike on a day as nice as this. We feel so gentle, genteel, birkesnstoccky and ... old. We're all people, one way or another, in the "helping professions." We're practicing for our French class in one corner, and drafting a document for the senior nursing staff of the nursing facility, describing how we're going to reduce falls and mistaken meds rates, in another. We're virtuous and we drink expensive coffee, dress schlumpy and badly, but in an understated way. I've fallen into a David Brooks' comic sociology! Upstairs in the bookstore, the Utne Reader (God, it still exists?!) had a cover article on how baby boomers, as elders, can save the world ... again! I myself wasn't aware we had saved it the first time around.
I came to pick up some books for my kid's 15th birthday at the end of the month. I'm not quite sure why - her old school, by dint of so much busywork due the next morning, pretty much drove out of her any desire to read anything not absolutely required. She doesn't read, she watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer - my goodness, how we've fallen from a family that for many years really didn't watch TV or DVDs to one that can't get by without them; and, truth, truth, truth, I'm happy to accompany her, because reading is even less social with your offspring than watching Buffy. But she does tend to read teen girl angst novels once in a while, so I thought I'd get her a novel reviewed in the New York Times, Jenny Downham's Before I Die. Sixteen year old girl dying of leukemia, review said it was pretty funny, and even if it's not, it should have the requisite adolescent girl angst. It could be good. Anyway, it's teen rather than adult fiction, so can't be that demanding a read. Naturally it wasn't yet in bookstores, so I overcompensated and bought things for ... me!
Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms; Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It; Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories, Olivier Roy's new book on Islam in Europe, and so much more!
... of marriage. Today is Jean-Marie's and my sixteenth wedding anniversary. They have been sixteen very happy years, spanning our days in New York City and Washington DC. One of these days - well, one of these anniversaries - I'll post something about our wedding day. But for now, let me just say thanks, as Jean-Marie and I do every year at this time, to Aryeh and Yvette Neier for their extraordinary generosity all those many years ago in offering their home in the Village for the wedding ceremony. They served as something like informal godparents in the whole process. Special thanks to Yvette, among so many, many things, for securing the judge to perform the ceremony and an announcement in the Times above the fold. Aryeh, for his part, performed the invaluable service of introducing Jean-Marie and me in the first place and, as I now observe in retrospect, it was no accident.
... grilled and then finished with peaches and prunes roasted whole on the grill, the fruit then simmered in Cointreau, walnut oil, balsamic vinegar, orange juice, cinammon, chipotle, nutmeg, a little cacao, and a lot of vanilla, finally stirred over the pork. Jean-Marie fixed a corn, pepper, tomato salad, plus rice and home-made red beans. Dessert, an almond cake with fruit and whipped cream. Tod was out of town taking his daughter to a soccer tournament in North Carolina, but Tina and Molly came over, and our neighbors Mark and Dorothy. (ps Tod and Abbey made it after all, hooray.)
(Okay, this is essentially the same recipe that we served for dinner last Tuesday night, when we had a little party for Scott M., down from NYC, and Larry S., just arrived from Illinois. At that party, though, I also grilled wild salmon with herb de provence and fresh dill and cilantro; and made mashed potatoes to die for, literally, given the amount of butter and cream and garlic in olive oil and grilled roasted whole tomatoes chopped into the potatoes.)
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.
This exceedingly goofy thought arose out of listening to my daughter and her friend talk about where their names came from (grandmothers in each case). Well. If I had four daughters - and this is assuming that my wife had no say in the matter, meaning this is alternative universes, possible worlds stuff - I would name them:
Sarabande (Sara)
Chaconne (Chaca?)
Allemande (Allie)
Giga (Gigi)
Daughter and friend told me this was one of the worst child-naming schemes anyone on the whole planet had ever dreamed up. Quite possibly so. I'm going to take a break and practice the cello. It is almost 8:00 pm and still feels like a steambath outside in DC today. I couldn't even get myself to go to the gym, which was not good at all. Then I'll suggest to the girls and my wife that we watch something sort of scary ... the 1950s version of ... Village of the Damned.
(Update. Renee added later on ... and if you had a fifth girl, you'd probably want to name her ... Tarantella (Tara). Hmm ...)
Coffee. I've only taken up drinking coffee, decaf or regular, in the last year, a residual non-habit from my long lapsed days as Mormon. So I still have a lot to learn about making coffee. I have (had, that is) a medium size Bodum glass coffee press. This morning I put in a lot of coffee - having taken up this particular vice with particular gusto - and poured in hot but not boiling water. Filled it up to the top, saw that not all the coffee had mixed with the water, so I stirred it with a long spoon. I guess I must have tapped or something on the glass, but all of a sudden the glass broke, and coffee and grounds spewed across half the kitchen. A big mess to clean up; thank you Jean-Marie for helping. I'm thinking that although the water was at the correct temperature, I poured it in too fast, heating up the glass to quickly, stressing it. Then when I stirred with the spoon and probably tapped the glass from the inside - kaboom!
I think that as I get older I've started to prefer darker, more bitter flavors, like coffee (I know, it is supposed to be sweet in its own way, but not sweet like orange soda). I seem to like coffee very strong, so I let it steep a long time in the Bodum, which is possibly a mistake and makes it bitter, I'm not sure. I also like the coffee a little thick and muddy, so I grind the beans very fine. For some reason, when hot I don't especially like it black, but with some milk and even better, sugar (although one reason I decided to try coffee was that I thought it would be Slimming). Cold though, over ice, I like it best straight black and no milk or sugar. I even make my own espresso ice cubes!
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Movies. The video store in our neighborhood is closing, and I've been scooping up some used videos on sale - so has Jean-Marie. She picked up a lovely little French film that I haven't seen since it first came out when I was at UCLA, Eric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach. I wasn't sure my fourteen year old would like it - possibly too much sex - but in fact she really liked it. I think it is because Pauline, who is fifteen in the film, is the most down to earth, straightforward of the whole little ensemble.
We then tried a movie I remembered with extraordinarily fond memories from when it first came out in the early 1980s, another French art film, Voyage en Douce, with Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin as two women engaged in endlessly sexual fantasies as they drove around Provence looking for a summer house. I couldn't remember it all that well - just that I had worshipped it and saw it a bunch of times when it came out, in art movie houses in Santa Monica. I had two distinct and one indistinct memory of it - an indistinct memory of the gorgeous light and airy Provence countryside. But truth is, as a California kid who hadn't really traveled much, for me that mostly meant that it reminded me of California. It looked like home to me, not some exotic place.
The two distinct memories? Well, first off, Dominique Sanda, who sometimes seems to me the most beautiful woman I have ever seen - partly her looks, but also the extraordinary way she carries herself, her expressions. I hadn't forgotten that. And the second, the featured Beethoven piano bagatelle (op. 126) - a bagatelle that, after seeing the film (twice in quick succession) my older brother, now psychiatrist, but then research psych grad student and sometime actor, put down his usual violin, went back to the piano, and learned it, and could play it extraordinarily well for an amateur pianist. But in Mormon church services, which sometimes have someone, play an instrument or a song, as part of the worship but also as part of providing a place to perform in public - well, Richard several times performed that piece, and I kept thinking, hmm, what he associates with this piece is not exactly Jesus, it's Dominique Sanda with her clothes off. I've never forgotten the bagatelle, either.
Anyway, I had worries when I switched it on last night that I would be horribly embarrassed by a seventies movie throwback - after all, I can't stand art films these days, haven't been able to since - I don't know, more or less since I got married, why is that? - and that Jean-Marie would hate it since, although in theory she appreciates Good Cinema and Film-as-Art, in actual practice, on an individual, discrete basis she can't stand art films and always falls asleep. I had this fear that I would want to turn off the soundtrack and just stare at Sanda.
Well, in the event, Jean-Marie rather liked it, I still thought it was okay, but Renee found it all too embarrassing - not so overtly sexual, but still too much sex. So we switched over to ... Harrison Ford in Air Force One.
(I've stuck some photos of Sanda above - pictures from around the time of this film, 1980.)
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.)
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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.)
Which is, truth be told, very disconcerting if you just arrived as I did from mid-summer in DC. It has been a while since I've been in winter in the southern hemisphere. The snow capped mountains just above the city look entrancing but alas I won't have time to go up there on this trip.
I am one of those mood-light sensitive people, and winter drives me crazy in DC. I wish I were out West in the high desert with lots of sunshine even if it is cold. In the deep winter, I Have My Doubts that the sun will ever return. Heard of the Aztec New Fire Ceremony? Big worry about the sun not showing up, so sacrifice someone very, very special - rip the heart out and relight the fires. I have to admit that I am quite sympathetic to the whole concept, at least in the mid-winter blues and blahs.
The photos are just playing around with blogger and my new built in web cam - I will maybe delete them later, I look like, well, that too and like I just got off a 14 hour flight and no sleep.
... and it is driving Jean-Marie and Renee crazy, because I am (apparently) humming it absently mindedly continuously, including (apparently) during Mass today. I don't even like the film Moulin Rouge, old version or new. It is the Marianne Faithfull version that caught me - hadn't heard it since the 1980s - this is why iTunes is dangerous. It plays awfully nicely on cello, in any of three octaves - d minor, sliding, sliding, sliding all the way up to a very high A on the A string. I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff on cello or violin. Two or three cellos would be very, very cool with this. Okay, I wonder if I can make a trade with Renee ... she plays this on her cello with me, and I offer to play the bass line of her Buffy the Vampire Slayer The Musical, Once More With Feeling? Hmm.
I'm off tomorrow to Santiago, Chile, to teach international finance and business law for a week in WCL's Spanish language "magister" LL.M program, which is for students in Latin America and taught in Spanish, sometimes with translators and sometimes with Spanish speaking instructors. I'm doing something I hope is ambitious and not foolish, which is to do it in Spanish. I've spent a fair bit of time going over my materials and making sure I've got the vocabulary from a couple of Spanish language business and finance dictionaries. My accent is terrible, and my grammar not entirely royal academy. But I think on balance it is good enough at least to try and do it in Spanish and not have things intermediated by translation. Hope this doesn't turn out to be a big mistake.
Long plane ride to Chile in coach. So Jean-Marie and Renee got me, as a father's day gift, a new little MacBook - the smallest and cheapest and least powerful. I much prefer my desktop for working and writing, but the family laptop I had been using for the past four years - and which served us very well as a family computer in Sevilla - still works fine, but is too large to open on an airplane. What with shrinking seat distances, etc. It would be so great to be rich and travel business class. I might see travel in a very different light. Anyway, the little MacBook is very nice. One reason I went with Apple for the first time is that, even though more expensive, I just don't want to get involved with Windows Vista. Maybe we'll gradually just migrate all the family computers that direction, I don't know. But even this little cheap version is a cool machine.
Jean-Marie and I went and saw the new thriller Joshua this afternoon in Bethesda. Hmm. I don't myself see what the critics were all raving about. A thriller needs a resolution that consists of something more than the situation careening downwards out of control - hitting rock-bottom and then rolling the credits. That was the supercool twist of "thrillers" in the 1970s - they just end, like Picnic at Hanging Rock, for example, with no explanation and no resolution, ta-da. Or, in another genre of thriller, the remake of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers with Donald Sutherland - just when you're wondering how the clever filmmakers are going to pull the rabbit out of the bag - boom, it's over, there is no clever ending, just aliens take over the earth - big whoop. I can do that movie, for heaven's sake, and so can you. Joshua's writers and director don't seem to understand that being a thriller and simply being a depressing moving that heads downhill for a while and then just crashes and sits there, dead, and a "thriller" are not the same thing.
I got tired of cooking corn on the cob on the grill - even if I soaked it and partly steamed it first, and despite the blackened kernels looking pretty cool, it still came out dry. So, I have gone the other direction. I soaked the corn on the cob in a bottle of cheap white wine, for a few hours - not sure, actually, how much is absorbed that way. Then microwaved them in the wine until done. The corn came out moist and heavy with a mild winey scent and flavor to it. Instead of butter, I mixed coarse sea salt, olive oil, some benocal butter subsitute, fresh mashed garlic, black pepper, juice of two lemons, and zest of two lemons, as a dressing for the corn. Excellent.
Tomorrow, well I am grilling something very, very experimentally. The wife and daughter are highly dubious. The fresh salmon fillet, skin on, is marinating in a combo of strong espresso, unsweetened chocolate, cinammon, chiles, fresh squeezed clementine juice, garlic, and Cointreau liquer. If this doesn't go well, I suppose this may be my last blog post. But I have seen coffee as a marinade at least once or twice on the internet - although, to be sure, one can see many, many things on the internet of the "don't try this at home" category.
My last salmon, however, grilled and then served with a reduction sauce of amaretto, balsamic vinegar, cinammon, vanilla, orange juice, prunes ground up fine, and then good quality turbinado coarse raw cane sugar scattered on top, was a big success.
(Update. The coffee, chocolate, cinnamon, etc. salmon was interesting. I rinsed it off carefully - the coffee-chocolate marinade had absorbed into the salmon flesh - and got all the excess off the fish. I put some mild chili spices, salt, very standard spices on it and some olive oil, then baked it in the oven for a bit, flipped it over so it was skin up and finished it under the broiler. The salmon had a very distinctive taste. It was dark and almost but not quite smokey - I guess I'd say smokey without the "bite" of smokey. Almost bitter, but not quite bitter. I guess the word I want is "alkaline." Interestingly, Jean-Marie and Renee both liked it - specifically liked the taste of the marinated fish, not just the chili spices on the outside. But Jean-Marie rarely likes meats or fish cooked with fruits or sweet things - she prefers them sour, acrid, slightly bitter and dark. I don't think the flavor would have stood up all on its own - after the marinade, the fish still needed the chili spices. But it gave the fish a very specific, dark, almost bitter but not quite flavor. That was with a strong tasting fish, salmon - I'm not sure whether it would be a good thing or bad thing was a less flavored white fish to start.)
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