Politics and Prose bookstore on a Sunday afternoon

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!

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.

Jack Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency - Instapundit Podcast Interview

I have just finished Jack Goldsmith's very, very compelling new book, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration. More to follow on the book, but I strongly recommend Jack's podcast interview on the Glenn and Helen Show over at Instapundit, here.

I regard the book as must reading for anyone trying to understand the Bush administration and the war on terror; I think it will be one of the few "insider" books that will be around as a permanent record of the Bush administration. It is a deceptively easy read - Jack turns out to have a genuine talent for narrative and wears his immense legal erudition lightly - rare among law professors, and I include myself in that - but underlying the narrative is a strong analytic core that is not, as Glenn Reynolds points out, exactly what the media coverage of the book suggests.

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.

What I'm reading, an irregular series ...

As you can tell, I am dodging work for a couple of hours this afternoon and idly posting ... I have my UN manuscript to complete (it is very far along, I'm delighted to say, although less sure about its readability), and a Simpsons Movie review for the TLS to complete. In theory, writing the Simpsons review should be a break from the harder work of writing the UN manuscript, but unfortunately, as my Simpsons review has - gulp, ultimate sin of a review of a summer comedy - got somewhat serious, it has got harder to finish. But here's what I am reading these days:

The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, by Stephen Holmes. I finished this a few days ago, then read Peter Berkowitz's review in Policy Review, here, "Vulgarizing the War Debate."

If anything, I think Peter is too nice about this book. In an earlier post on this blog, I remarked on my experience over the last year and a half of being a panelist at academic conferences in which the principal and largely unchallenged assumption was that terrorism was not really the issue, an overblown American response was; terrorism, according to one academic panelist, in a phrase I have made my own (by way of dispute, however), is merely a "second order" problem. Marty Lederman, in a comment on that post, said that he hangs out with a lot of critics of the administration but has never heard such sentiments. Well, perhaps we mean different things by such labels - but a couple of further commentators to that post weighed in with several examples of "terrorism is a second order problem" thinking. One is the recent (late 2006) Foreign Affairs article by political scientist John Mueller,"Is there still a terrorist threat?" and answering no. Indeed, answering that there never really was one as such, it was all overblown and mostly imagined.

To this canon we must add Professor Holmes' Matador's Cape. Let me be honest, I've never been a fan of Holmes's work - yes, of course, leading political theorist, all that, but the hatchet job he did in his 1993 The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism on thinkers ranging from Christopher Lasch to Roberto Unger was so egregious that I've never been able to take him seriously again. All wit, all the time; serious, accurate readings of his targets, something else again.

(It was also Peter Berkowitz, by the way, who most precisely and comprehensively revealed the level of selective quotation, contrived misreadings of key texts, etc., that made up the 1993 book, here - something that I don't suppose improved Peter's tenure prospects in Harvard's government department - although Peter liked somewhat more Holmes' later Passions and Constraints (1995), here. However, the one who had the most reason to be angered by the misreadings was, for my money, Unger who, however, has long tended to take such attacks in stride.)

My objections to the Matador book are essentially a somewhat more indignant version of Peter's. Holmes switches arguments as it suits him, depending on the target, with little attention to the intellectual inconsistencies - and worse, inconsistencies implied for actual policy - and an insouciant attitude that the real issue is not out there, it is in here; the issue is not terrorism, it is (the excesses of, the inherent illiberalism of) counterterrorism.

Capital Ideas Evolving, by Peter L. Bernstein. A decade ago I reviewed Bernstein's superb Against the Gods: The story of risk in the TLS, here. But Bernstein, that rare combination of a scholar-writer-practical investment banker (the one other outstanding example I can think of is James MacDonald, author of the wonderful A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy), had actually begun his writing on finance theory and history with a 1970s book on the new financial theories entering the capital markets - the theories of efficient markets, options pricing models, etc. This new book offers a new perspective on those theories and their successors, both as an intellectual matter and a practical matter in the markets. I have just started it, and am greatly enjoying it. Students - but not just students, by any means - I think, would get a great deal from this book. One of my criticisms of how economics is taught is not just its widely commented abstraction - the number of law students I teach who have had multiple classes in undergraduate economics where they drew many supply-demand curves but have not the faintest idea what any of it means in the real world, well, they are legion - but also its determined ahistoricism. To conceive of economics as having a genuine intellectual history is, apparently, to deprive it of claims to Truth and Science (analytic philosophy long had precisely such an attitude toward intellectual history). More when ... I have actually read the book.

Model Behavior, by Jay McInerney. A well known and justly very well regarded international law professor - which is to say, a serious intellectual who is the real deal, even when, as is frequently the case, we disagree - dropped me a note to say that he had read a book I had commented on earlier, AA Gill's Starcrossed, and rather enjoyed it. Hooray! But I'll let him remain nameless because my wife started into the book, and told me that I could talk all I wanted about Gill's take on Antigone and his infectious enthusiasm for poetry, about the book's wry insight into the nature of celebrity, fame, and money - at the end of the day this book was just another in the genre of male fantasy novels about models-actresses who take up relationships with men for whom in real life one can't possibly imagine it happening. Chick lit for guys, I think she put it. Well. Errr. Hmm. Surely not. Couldn't possibly be.

There being no good response to that, at least by a middle aged academic who can't afford a midlife crisis, let me instead offer another in the "chick lit for guys" category - Model Behavior by that now-out-of-fashion bad boy of lit, Jay McInerney. I found it by complete accident - our home bookshelves are crowded with books that somehow arrived, wound up there, drifted in with the spring pollen, somehow took up residence, even though I've never read or even noticed them. This was one of them - I noticed it while we were eating picnic style in front of a video a couple of weeks ago. I had no idea what it was. It's okay but not great; I read it all the way through mostly to find out if "they" got back together. And when that's the reason you're reading a novel - what did Jean-Marie call it? Chick lit for guys? Never.

Airplane reading on the long flights to and from Chile: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Book of the Dead, being the latest in the Special Agent Pendergrast series, and Lee Child, Bad Luck and Trouble, being the latest Jack Reacher novel. There are others, but I'll only embarrass myself further.

(There are two authors who require separate, serious discussions. One is Tod Lindberg and his new The Political Teachings of Jesus, and the other is Francisco Goldman, his new nonfiction account of the murder of Bishop Gerardi in Guatemala, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, but also his whole fiction canon. They are both old and dear friends.)

Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the market, and ecological scarcity

One side comment to the posts below celebrating the centenary of Robert Heinlein's birth. A number of the articles pointed to his The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as a pivotal text in the libertarian movement (broad libertarianism, not merely its narrow electoral party). This is of course correct. A number of these essays likewise correctly point to the free market ideas of that novel - in particular, There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Does it bear pointing out, however, that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ultimately revolves around the failure of market mechanisms? That the revolution that the Professor urges is necessary not on account of markets but on account of a much more fundamental, deeply Malthusian ecological crisis? I read the thing a couple of years back, for the first time since childhood - out loud to my daughter, no less. What caught my attention especially was the Professor arguing that not only could Luna not afford to ship grain to Earth at a "fair" price - because of the increasing scarcity of water on the Moon, it could not afford to so at any price. Grain shipments in effect shipped fantastically scarce Lunar water to Earth, and it could not be shipped the other way. There could only be a short term market in grain=water. Mike confirmed the worst in a series of computer projections.

The central political premise of the book, in other words, the fact which above all argued for violent and bloody revolution, was an ecological premise, a premise of ecological scarcity, not the market as such. This is hardly to denigrate the book's market oriented libertarianism, but the central political fact, at least as far as the Professor was concerned, was not in order to promote a market but in order to end one that would end in ecological catastrophe. Which was, by the way, surely a reason why so many of my radical environmentalist friends of the 70s and early 80s - Amory and Hunter Lovins, for example - were fans of the book.

Update: Wtanksley in the comments makes a good point:

Free market and ecological preservation/conservation are not contradictory. Historically, the worst abuses of the environment have taken place in dictatorships of one stripe or another. When the people who profit or lose from the use of a resource own and control the resource, they tend to shepherd its use.

In the book, the environmental disaster was caused by a government that owned all the property, set all the laws, and ruled all the people without consent. That's pretty much the extreme version of communistic socialism.

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!

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.

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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.)

Happy birthday to the late, great Robert Heinlein on the 100 year anniversary of his birth

Of course there have been many, many tributes to Robert Heinlein in the past few days in the blogosphere. He was a staple of my childhood reading - Have Spacesuit Will Travel and Podkayne of Mars and The Star Beast and Rocket Ship Galileo and The Rolling Stones among the children's books, and the great Waldo story. Methuselah's Children, Orphans of the Sky (later the basis of an album that I'm embarrassed to say I still listen to, mostly on account of the Jorma Kaukonen and Jerry Garcia guitars, Blows Against the Empire, by the early Starship, and nominated for a Hugo Award) and the whole The Green Hills of Earth stories. The adult books - well, Glory Road made a lasting impression, and the great, great The Mooon Is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, Farnham's Freehold, and of course Stranger in a Strange Land. I more or less dropped out of sci-fi at around that point, and never got into the post-Stranger literature. I took up Blaise Cendrars, Stendhal, dead French poets and German writers like Bertolt Brecht and Gunter Grass.

But the Heinlein book that has had the most lasting impression on our family, curiously, is the 1950s classic Cold War thriller, The Puppet Masters. My daughter somehow latched onto it in the fourth and fifth grade as we were leaving for sabbatical in Spain. It became her security blanket, on the plane, going alone into a local Spanish speaking school in Sevilla, all the unfamiliar and scary situations involved in moving for most of a year to a strange place and strange language and strange school. She must have read it twenty or more times; I read it aloud to her at least three. She idolized Mary in the book. It - she - really was a comfort to her.

(Renee hates the movie, from the late 1990s with Donald Sutherland (I didn't mind it, though I think it was badly cast, except that Sutherland makes a wonderful Old Man) because it upsets her internal vision of the characters.)

(ps. Poking around the web, I discovered this lovely review essay by Sir Adam Roberts, the great laws of war and international law and politics scholar at Oxford, responding to criticisms of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, on the occasion of the books re-release after many years in the UK.)

(pps. Wikipedia has an excellent set of links on Heinlein, his wife Virginia, and summaries and discussions of many of his novels. Start here.)

(ppps. And this excellent piece from the Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2007, open link, here, praising Heinlein's liberatarianism, by Taylor Dinerman.)

(pppps. Also this piece by John J. Miller, a longer version of which appeared in the National Review.)

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

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.

Logic and learning to write an expository argument

My fourteen year old daughter is, as befits a DC child (I suppose), interested in politics. At the dinner table the other night, we were talking about some issue or other, and I asked what her view was and why. I was surprised to find that rather than formulate an argument and a position, she talked about metaphors.

I was surprised, because, unless you thought of a metaphor as something like an argument from analogy, metaphor was not really a way of forming an argument toward a conclusion. So we started talking about different kinds of issues, and I was increasingly perplexed to realize that she automatically reached for categories of analysis that she had learned in her English classes appropriate to analyzing literature - metaphor, mostly - as the categories of argumentation.

I have been thinking about that ever since, going over her curriculum up through the 8th grade a bit, and have realized that nowhere in her school curriculum does anyone teach, in any subject, the basics of logical argument. This is true of her school, National Cathedral School for Girls, but it is equally true of the school she will attend next year, Sidwell Friends, and I am pretty certain this is true of all the public and private schools around.

Consider the forms of analytics found in her different classes:

In English, they learn the figures of literature, metaphor, simile, and so on. The effect, at least through high school, is that they do not learn to form an argument to a conclusion - instead, they learn to identify devices in literature - a wholly different enterprise, and one which depends for its subject not so much on argumentation as the ability to apperceive a usage. (Leave aside the fact that they have done very little actual writing over the course of the last two years at her school.) The idealized subject matter itself is about the analysis of novels and poetry and the occasional Shakespeare play.

Strikingly, too - I draw on a very interesting Althouse post - they read in these classes no nonfiction, no essays or nonfiction prose - and that seems to continue all the way through high school. This is a curious omission - because, so far as I know, learning to write is partly the imitation of a "voice" - and the discovery of one's own voice - and, for me at least, and everyone else I know of who writes, the discovery of that voice comes from reading nonfiction and identifying with a certain voice. I have a pretty good sense of who those voices were in my adolescence - essays by Albert Camus, the marvelous Aldous Huxley preface to the second edition of Brave New World, Orwell. I could hear their voices in my head. I don't think that would have happened had I limited my reading to fiction, poetry and plays. In other classes, the nonfiction, such as it is, consists of textbooks written by curriculum committees having in mind the requirements of the states of Texas and California - there is a voice(s), but not one to imitate.

In history and social sciences - my daughter has just completed a genuinely marvelous American government class that would have taxed many college students. I mean, a spectacular class with a spectacular teacher. Tell me another 8th grade class in the country that could give a paragraph explaining Youngstown along with 30 or so other major Supreme Court cases? Nonetheless, despite an admirable emphasis on original documents, starting with the Constitution, the class did not teach the basics of logical argumentation - premises to conclusions. It sort of took it for granted, and went ahead with college level substance and material.

Science at my kid's school was, again, excellent, an inspiring teacher and fabulous curriculum in earth sciences. It taught a certain form of argument, but all of it was what you would expect and want in a physical sciences class - argument in the inductive scientific sense, the formation and testing of hypotheses. Great stuff, essential stuff - my kid knows the difference between a dependent and independent variable. But the form and circumstances of argument are all scientifically inductive - not deductive, premise to conclusion.

Math. Well, in one sense it is teaching deductive argumentation, particularly in geometry - but in a form so specialized and so technique oriented that it doesn't travel to other subjects. In any case, even geometry has moved away from formal proof to techniques that - very sensibly - start to provide the basis for calculus.

The result is that my daughter does not have a clue how to do something that is basic and essential to intellectual work in every field - offer a proposed conclusion and derive it from premises. It is crucial to reading any serious nonfiction work in pretty much any field - and yet is not something learned by reading stories with an eye out for the identification of literary tropes. And deductive logic, too, is critical to much of economics.

Long and short of this is, I have convinced my (more or less willing) kid to take some lessons in logic this summer. There doesn't seem to be a class at the local universities, but I've found one of the math teachers willing to do it - not a lot of sessions, but enough to get started on both basic Aristotlean logic, verbal logic of syllogism and fallacies, on the one hand, and very, very basic symbolic logic aimed finally at computer languages on other, and having a clue as to why term logic is finally inadequate.

The problem is finding a book that is basic and slow enough for a kid who is verbally gifted, does okay with math but has to approach it very systematically - I am thinking about the old Kalish & Montague, second edition that has more problem sets and more explanation of the problem sets. It seems to move more slowly than the coomputer science oriented texts. Any suggestions welcome. In the course ten or twelve sessions, I'd be happy if my daughter learned the verbal basics of premises, conclusions, validity, truth, soundness, etc., and how to look for and identify them in a written text, and the very basics of the idea of symbolization - not, and, or, if, if and only if. Not even get to truth tables.

(Update: Kalish and Montague just arrived, and it seems like a good place to begin. The preface says that it is about teaching a skill, and is not aimed at presenting the fundamental debates underlying logical systems. And it moves more slowly than the more current texts. However, for a junior high schooler, it still moves too fast - I think the tutor can work with it, but needs to come up with a lot of extra problem sets - and realistically, just getting through verbal, natural language fallacies, syllogism, and then symbolization in chapters 1 and 2 is still too much.)

Put another way, the school curriculum seems as though students were equipped for argument with Aristotle's poetics - but not with his logic. Certainly he would have been surprised.

Happy mother's day

We are off to see The Tempest at the Folger Theater here in DC, which is perhaps an odd choice of play for mother's day, seeing as how Miranda is a conspicuously motherless child.

***
Excellent production at the Folger, really lovely.

As I sat watching, I thought about how I might stage it. I realize every conceivably goofy rendering of Shakespeare has been done, and done to death ... still, I wondered about perhaps a cyberpunk, neuromanceresque version of The Tempest, in which Ariel sits above the stage as a techno-nerd girl-geek playing at videogames, surrounded by monitors and keyboards and techno-cyber-gizmos, but also pizza boxes and Pepsi and Doritos, pulling all the strings at Prospero's command ("You can't stop the signal, no one can stop the signal."). All the humming and singing and songs done with synthesizers from her work station.

As for Caliban, the prototypical monstor is wired up as a sort of cyber monster/Frankenstein, his head shaved and marked off in grids and electrodes fastened and unfastened to his brain, ordered about by Prospero with a control pad strapped to his wrist. And the visions that Ariel gives to the Duke, et al., all done with holograms. Give a new twist on the dream and great globe and insubstantiality riffs. The Tempest as neural net?

I said Caliban as monster/Frankenstein. Yes, but also as something resembling Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, in both appearance and physicality, played by someone very wiry and young. Or for a notably prurient possibility, with provocation appeal and many, many YouTube possibilities, perhaps a very skinny girl with shaved head, wearing only a Gollum-style loincloth ... okay, okay, I hear you, too distracting.

Any possibilities here? Probably already been done, actually, and I'm just chanelling it.

Mark Drumbl's new book, Atrocity, Punishment, and International Criminal Law

Kevin Jon Heller, over here at Opinio Juris, has a capsule summary of a new book that I look forward to reading, Mark Drumbl's Atrocity, Punishment, and International Criminal Law, out from Cambridge UP. Professor Drumbl is someone for whom I have considerable respect, and I am quite certain this book merits close attention. From Opinio Juris:

The book defends two interrelated claims: (1) there is a fundamental difference between the “extraordinary” crimes that are punished at the international level (genocide, crimes against humanity, etc.) and the “ordinary” crimes that are punished at the domestic level (murder, rape, etc.); but (2) international law nevertheless assumes that extraordinary crimes can be effectively prosecuted through the same institutional structures used for ordinary crimes. As Mark writes, "[i]nternational criminal justice largely is operationalized through criminal tribunals. Courtrooms have gained ascendancy through adversarial third-party adjudication, conducted in judicialized settings, and premised on a construction of the individual as the central unit of action." Mark rejects this “liberal-legal” model of international criminal law; in his view –- and this is the central thesis of his book –- "the preference for criminalization has prompted a shortfall with regard to the consideration and deployment of other legal, regulatory, and transformative mechanisms in the quest for justice," such as truth commissions, legislative reparations, and (what will no doubt be the most controversial aspect of the book) collective civil sanctions.

Mark knows that I do not agree with everything in the book. That said, Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law is a must-read for all international law scholars and practitioners. International criminal tribunals have reproduced almost virally over the past two decades, from the ICTY to the ICC to the various hybrid courts. It is thus critical to question, as Mark does, whether those institutions are capable of fulfilling their central purpose –- putting an end to impunity. Such skepticism is largely absent from international law debates. I hope that Mark's book will make it less so.

Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain - my late night reading

For the past week, my late night reading has been Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond (FSG 2006). It is wonderfully entertaining - thesis is that Ian Fleming's novels provided an essential palliative to 50s and early 60s Britain as it faced one humiliation after another following its heroic victory in the Second World War. It is more a cultural history of Britain through a certain period - the period, from my own standpoint, of most of my British friends, who are old enough to have been growing up as children in exactly this period - than a book about Bond, the Bond movies, or even Bond as cultural icon. It is using Bond as a lens on the period rather than Bond as Bond or even Bond as cultural artifact. Winder says a lot about Bond and the Bond books and early movies, and his readings are wonderfully quirky. But it is his take on Britain itself during this period that actually engages me. I understand my British friends who were children during that period a little better for it - I think, anway.

For one thing, I guess I knew - reading, for example, Tony Judt's wonderful Postwar - that postwar 50s Britain was really, really poor. Poor, and not rebuilt with the vigor and speed of Germany. The contrast Winder makes with the United States is striking. Say what one does about the 50s in America - I was born in 1956 and wasn't conscious of any of this - it was a time of tremendous optimism and growth, people having babies everywhere because they had a confidence about the future, the growth of the suburbs, all that. That was apparently not the state of Britain at all - grimy, decayed, destroyed, poor, straitened, Winder has a nearly limitless set of adjectives to describe this world of hopelessness and the irony of victory.

The curious part is that Winder does not have an original political thought in his head - the main point is that Britain was both doomed to this unhappiness and deserved it as the price for its wicked centuries of empire. The vultures come home to roost. Britain's pain is the price - far too cheap, according to Winder - of having been the self-confident Victorian imperialist. His thesis is entirely a conventional whine - or whinge? - about the wickedness of British imperialism and how Bond is supposed to make the British feel better about being on the receiving end of humiliation as things fall apart after the War. I'm not British, I am not especially anglophile, but there is something entirely goofy, if politically correct, about Winder's sense of historic and cosmic justice. The world which got the East India Company going is not the world of Indian independence, and it doesn't help in the present very much at all - not from the standpoint of social justice today or thinking through present problems - to adopt a sort of transhistorical sense of judgment about how things came to be from centuries ago. It just multiplies the problems of historical injustice to the point of complete paralysis, because everyone got fucked by someone in the past, and trying to fix it all guarantees either permanent war or permanent paralysis. This is not to say one doesn't try to address injustice in the present - along with economic growth for the living, political stability, and a lot of other things - but Winder is smitten in the most conventional PC way with ancient wrongs and rights.

Still, it must be said that for an utterly conventional political thinker of the whining, guilty, self-abasing, apologizing variety, put in the service of everyone else's resentments which are finally Winder's own - well, he manages to put this in prose and expression at a level so far above the common academic herd that it is, for all the vacuity of the political ideas, genuinely a pleasure to read. He manages to make one laugh aloud with pointless political correctness, anti-imperialism, anti-god-knows-what - rather than at it, which is much the normal formulation. He's a terrific writer even devoid of political ideas; he is rescued by the acuity of his cultural observations and his highly original readings of Bond. I never thought I would find myself laughing aloud in a book of this sort, which, in academic hands, ordinarily runs to ressentiment.

Or to put all this another way. I'm not sure I've ever read a book that is quite so cheerily and wittily self-loathing. Self-loathing about oneself, one's country, one's political culture, one's fellow citizens. There is a lot of self-loathing about, of course, but almost never does it come so cheerfully dressed. So much so that it almost - almost, but finally not quite - makes me wonder if Winder actually believes it.

(ps., May 10, 2007. Winder's book has inspired me to pick up an ancient - dating back the 1960s - paperback copy of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I have no idea where it came from - I hope we didn't pay to have it moved from NY to DC ten years ago. I don't recall if Winder mentions it - I'm sure he does - but I can't remember the last time, outside of old-fashioned children's books, where I saw quite so many exclamation points! Every other sentence on some pages seems to have an exclamation point! It seems peculiar because the suave, competent, quiet Bond does not seem like the kind of person to think in sentences ending in exclamation points! But he does!)

(pps, May 10. Once, a couple of years ago, I took my daughter with me on a speaking trip to the LSE - we did tea at the Ritz, the Tower, all the good stuff. At the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the band struck up the themes to James Bond. I think of this today because Gerard Baker, writing about the Queen's visit to the US this week, noted that along with Rule Brittania, the band at the embassy party struck up the Bond theme as well. The man who saved Britain, indeed?)

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Update, August 9, 2007. Here, by the way, is what Mark Steyn had to say about this book in the WSJ:

Contemplating the cover of The Man Who Saved Britain – Sean Connery, wearing a tuxedo and a sadistic smile, caressing his cheek with his Walther PPK, as a nubile underclad Sixties dolly bird somewhere down at crotch height nuzzles against his upper thigh…

Where was I? Oh, yes. Bond, James Bond. Contemplating the cover of The Man Who Saved Britain, you’re struck by the apparent ingenuity of Simon Winder’s concept: it is weird, when you think about it, that the great enduring iconic figure of the Cold War, the very embodiment of the espionage profession, should be a Brit. The country was, after all, pretty peripheral in the vanquishing of Communism, and indeed at the height of the Soviet threat was lapsing into a grim Brezhnevite decay of its own. And even the dolly birds were more honored in the breach: if Kim Philby and co are anything to go by, Her Majesty’s Secret Service inclined more toward Plenty O’Toole than Pussy Galore.

And yet, if one were to say the words “secret agent” to almost anyone within range of western popular culture this last half-century, he or she would conjure a suave Englishman (mostly played by Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Australians) ordering martinis and shagging his way around the world on behalf of a nation all but shagged out. President Bush implicitly endorsed this curious pre-eminence in his notorious 16 words from the 2003 State of the Union:
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Well, of course. And how would they learn that? The CIA, with the unlimited resources of the hyperpower, sent in Joseph C Wilson IV to sip mint tea in Niger with retired bureaucrats for a few days: Double-oh-IV, licensed to kill time. London no doubt dispatched Bond to break into the presidential palace and run around the basement laboratory shooting huge numbers of extras in aluminum-foil catsuits, while still finding ten minutes for a vigorous encounter with some appealingly dusky West African totty (007 was always an equal-opportunity sex fiend; long before it was fashionable, he was usually game for a little affirmative action…

Where was I? Oh, yes. Bond, James Bond. Simon Winder’s thesis is that 007 is both a reflection of and an escape from imperial decline: “I want to convey, perhaps in an overdrawn form, some of the ways in which Britain has changed – and by following James Bond show some of a vanished world which he in various ways pulled together.”

Sounds fun, and Winder would seem the ideal chap to do it. A few years back, he compiled a lovely anthology called My Name’s Bond… rounding up Ian Fleming’s best soundbites from the 007 novels. There are an awful lot of them, not least from Casino Royale:

‘A dry Martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
'Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?’
‘Certainly, monsieur.’ The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

Unlike Bond's critics, who get ever more irked with his rituals. My Name’s Bond… is one of those small perfect books I love to take on long flights. Winder is a Fleming fan and he has an eye for those moments of pure stylistic pleasure the novels offer. It’s in attempting to advance from annotated arcana to an argument that Winder’s new book comes a cropper. He begins in the dark at the dawn of the Roger Moore imperium: “I am ten years old, sitting in a suburban English cinema. On the screen a man with a large chin and black roll-neck sweater pushes through jungle foliage… A white woman has been tied to a post and a black man dressed in animal skins is laughing crazily and wielding a massive poisonous snake… The man with the large chin starts shooting the black people…”

The fan of My Name’s Bond… suddenly seems a lot more sheepish about the whole business. He can’t even get through a list of the movies without collapsing in embarrassment: “The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979)… I’m sorry. I just can’t go on it’s all so terrible. They’re roughly the same, come out at irregular intervals and tend to have the word Die in the title.”

Oh, dear. And this is before Mr Winder has even got stuck into his big picture: the violence and racism and ugliness of the British Empire. Though he refers to “a sort of paroxysm of national self-loathing”, he would appear to be the principal evidence of it. And even then you vaguely suspect that he’s faking it. There are, broadly speaking, three reactions to Bond: those who dislike him; those who love him; and those who love him but feel obliged to deplore all the frightful imperialism, racism, alcoholism, chain smoking, snobbery, profoundly unsafe sex, etc.

Winder elects to join this last category, which makes the book a glummer read than it ought to be, a kind of Doctor No But... British audiences have never had any difficulty reconciling 007’s luster with their more general eclipse: The opening of The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bond skis off a cliff and opens his Union Jack parachute, is offered and understood as a kind of semi-parodic flag-waving. In the Roger Moore era, the film-makers took to ending the movie with a scene in which the Queen or Mrs Thatcher or some such would be waiting to congratulate Bond via satellite link only to be confronted by the old legover maestro doing the horizontal mambo with Holly Goodhead as an excuse for a final double-entendre. “What’s Bond doing?” “I think,” explains Q, looking at the radar rather than at Roger, “he’s attempting re-entry, sir.” Or: “Just keeping the British end up, sir.” Or a dozen others, as Roger Moore rogered more.

With the best will in the world, one can’t divine a lot of imperial self-doubt in this oeuvre. And Winder, demonstrating the peculiar snobberies of the minor public schoolboy (if you’ll forgive a touch more snobbery), allows his obsessions to lead him astray – as in his assertion that these tales of Brit derring-do were viewed in America as “comedies of self-delusion”. Oh, really? So it’s not the babes and the gadgets and the car chases? Just the huge market for post-imperial “comedies of self-delusion”. Who knew?

Poor old Winder. A genial gentleman publisher of the patrician left, he seems to have missed the central feature of Bond’s character: his cool. Winder is not cool; he is over-heated to the point of rhetorical meltdown: his nation’s history is “despicable”, “repulsive”, “revolting and mad”, “sickening”, “nauseating”, “nauseating and absurd”… One feels that, instead of this shrill overkill, he might have taken a lesson from Blofeld et al and expressed his loathing with an amused contempt – “I’m afraid you’re beginning to bore me, Mr Bond” – before lowering him into the piranha tank. There are some useful insights here – the observation that Ken Adam’s Bond sets are so good that real location scenes such as the Vegas hotels of Diamonds Are Forever look wan by comparison. But otherwise, generalizing ever more wildly and hysterically, Winder manages to miss all his targets – Fleming, Bond and the British Empire. He seems an amiable self-deprecating cove, but so’s Hugh Grant, and I wouldn’t fancy his chances trying to beat up Daniel Craig.

The Wall Street Journal, November 24th 2006

What I'm reading, a highly irregular series of posts

(Bleg note: can someone more expert in Blogger than I explain why, when I use bullets or insert a picture, the text gets all squinched up and how to stop/fix it? Thanks.)

Here is what is on my reading list, including my work desk and my night table:

• The Physics of the Buffyverse, by Jennifer Ouellete. Popular science in pop culture. I got this from the Lindbergs as part of extraordinarily thoughtful birthday package that included very good dark chocolate and cello music by Grieg. I thought it might be suitable as a way of introducing my daughter to basic concepts in things like physics - but reading it, you more or less have to have had basic science already in order to understand it. But I find it an amusing review of things I once studied and have more or less forgotten - entropic states, photons, etc.

• The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond, by Simon Winder. Cultural criticism of a witty and entertaining sort about the nature of Britain, British culture, in the 1950s and 60s seen through the Bond and Ian Fleming lens - I just started reading this, but won't finish it for a while because the Easter Bunny actually gave this to Uncle Jack.

• Belligerent Reprisals, by Frits Kalshoven. The classic work on this specialized topic of the laws of war from the early 1970s. I read it once long ago, have consulted it many times since, but decided that it would be helpful to my work on proportionality in the law of war to reread it whole. It appears from Amazon that it has been rereleased, although at the usual dismaying price. Highly recommended! as the great Larry Solum would say.

• Jack Reacher novels, by the thriller writer Lee Child. Pure escape. Very late night.

• If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Joffe Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond. The classic regulatory treatise on incentives. First came to scholarly attention in the Harrison Ford film Air Force One, the scene in which the President, being held hostage, explains to his daughter why giving into to terrorist demands is a fool's game - "If you give a mouse a cookie," he says, and she knows the rest. I have mentioned this book in a couple of talks on counterterrorism, when the question of being nice to the rest of the world so they won't hate us and will like us and stop trying to kill us inevitably comes up - I suggest that if you tell people in the wide world that you really, really, really want them to like us and won't you please just tell us what we can do so you'll like us, it is pretty near certain the bar will get set higher and higher on the likeability front and what you have to do to get there. American students of a certain age have often heard of the book, non-Americans not. However, one perceptive student at my talk at the NYU law school human rights colloquium last month said, on hearing my description, "Why, that's a near perfect fable for neoconservatism!" Quite.

• The Economics of Microfinance, by Beatriz Armendariz de Aghuion and Jonathan Morduch. This is quite simply the best book on microfinance I have read in a long time - and I read a lot of them, most recently in preparation for a TLS essay on the subject. Coupled with that I recommend The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal, edited by David Trubek and Alvaro Santos - I do not agree with its fundamental policy framework, but I am very sympathetic to the idea that you have to take in sophisticated critiques that come from outside your own - in my case, essentially neoliberal - frame. This is an intellectually extraordinarily well done instance of that. I have repeatedly reread the all the essays - by my old and dear friend Scott Newton (I last saw him, I think, in Almaty in the mid 1990s when he came banging on my door out of the blue while I was returning from Tajikistan, perhaps, and he told me about a solo backpacking expedition across Death Valley in the dead of winter), my old friends and teachers Duncan Kennedy and David Kennedy. I take very seriously Frank Fukuyama's complaint that the center right has not developed a serious position on international economic development, and I don't think you can develop one without really understanding this kind of critique and the history from which it comes.

• United Nations stuff - lots of it that I am working my way through for purposes of finishing up and revising my UN book manuscripts.

• Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape, by Brian Hayes. Actually, I just finished this - and what a great book! I learned more about everything, well, infrastructural, than you can imagine. Well written, informative, great photos. Great book. It's kind of a guy-book - not really, but that was certainly my wife and daughter's reaction - and since I don't follow sports and was indifferent to March Madness, this was my Manly Alternative.

• Strength Training Anatomy and Women's Strength Training Anatomy, by Frederic Delavier. Fifty one year old middle age guy trying to get back in shape ... hmm. These books help a lot to understand exercises and weight machines and all that in the gym. They have the most amazingly detailed drawings of the muscles to show what is worked by what exercise. The women's is helpful even for men because it is essentially a much more detailed book on lower body exercises.

My WSJ review of the writings of Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt

I first discovered the writings of the Swiss playwright and novelist Friedrich Durrenmatt in ninth grade high school German class, reading first The Visit of the Old Lady and later The Physicists. I loved the tragi-comic irony of Durrenmatt's 1950s and 60s plays, and in later years I read his novels off and on. I've read his work since 1970; Durrenmatt has largely since disappeared here in the US and in the English language. (Actually, it has seemed to me that he might have been eclipsed somewhat even in Switzerland - I gave a lecture a couple of years ago in Switzerland, French-speaking part, to be sure, and made a point of quoting Durrenmatt, but so far as I could tell, my lawyer audience did not seem to have a clue who I was talking about.)

So it was a pleasure when the Wall Street Journal book review called, at Christopher Caldwell's lovely suggestion, to ask if I would like to review a new University of Chicago Press three volume selection of Durrenmatt's plays, fiction, and essays. It came out today, Saturday/Sunday, October 21-22, 2006, in the Pursuits section of the Journal, here (subscriber link). (The University of Chicago Press has set up a website on Durrenmatt, here - it's very good, worth a visit to find out more about this major post-war European writer.)

Mixed in with the discussion of Durrenmatt's aesthetics, I also make a comment about Swiss neutrality, and then the concept of "humanitarian neutrality" (I first took up this topic of humanitarian neutrality in an academic article, here). That brief comment in the review is this:

But of course Swiss neutrality has a powerful moral logic of its own, exemplified by the humanitarian efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Humanitarianism, in short, may require neutrality as a condition of its very existence. But that hardly means that neutrality is the highest virtue, the most admirable moral position, in conditions of conflict.

While neutrality may make humanitarianism possible, it will always be a derivative virtue in a world containing evil, a deliberate and knowing suspension of moral judgment for the sake of moral good, such as the relief of suffering. But if evil is not to triumph, we cannot all be neutral. Someone must fight for what is right: If there is to be a Red Cross, there must also be a Churchill. The Swiss sensibility can be reluctant to acknowledge this imperative, and sometimes has been known to accept a lofty moral relativism as the highest good of all. Dürrenmatt himself was not entirely immune to this way of thinking.

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(Update: Dean notes below in comments that I said Cambridge UP, not Chicago, in the original post. Apologies, brain on hold, was actually staring at the three volumes on my desk as I mis-blogged yesterday. Corrected in original post, and thanks Dean.)

The dancer upstairs

This upcoming week is the last week of class for my NCS course on ethics and war. Tod Lindberg, editor of the Hoover Institution's Policy Review, will be coming to speak on relations between Europe and the United States.

The other days, we will be watching a film on urban terrorism and guerrilla warfare, The dancer upstairs. It is from the British writer Nicholas Shakespeare's novel, directed by John Malkovitch. It tells the story of a lowly Peruvian lawyer turned police detective during the ferocious war of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and the Tupac Amaru urban guerrillas against the corrupt and authoritarian governments in Peru through the 198os. This detective, through sheer hard work and determination, succeeds in tracking down the leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzman (Ezekiel in the book and film). The film was, I think, underrated by critics and audiences - Malkovitch did an excellent job with a small budget, and the detective, played by Javier Bardem, is stunning in his lowkey realism. The film is better than the book; it has all the best aspects of a Graham Greene thriller - the moral passion play, a small man trapped in a bad situation, a doomed love.

I was in Peru, a Mormon missionary in the Andean highlands, in the late 1970s as Guzman, I now realize, was first emerging from the shadows and Shining Path was beginning its first armed atrocities in the mountains. I was in Huanuco at the time, which is on the eastern slope of the Andes, where the rivers lead down into the centers of the drug trade. Guzman was a prototypical Maoist revolutionary - in his dreams closest to the Khmer Rouge, really - a Peruvian provincial who managed to get some education in the heated philosophical circles in Paris, came away with an ideology of blood and redemption wrapped in a kind of marxist language. In his case, it was weirder than that - as a philosophy professor up in a remote university, no more than a high school at best, given the preparation of his pupils, he somehow latched onto Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as his revolutionary document. Can one imagine a less political work of philosophy? But it became the little red book for his followers - I remember photos that at the time I couldn't take seriously, of senderistas bearing aloft the Critique of Pure Reason in the street of some highland town, like the Bible in the procession into Mass. Many tens of thousands of dead later, it no longer seemed funny.

The dancer upstairs runs the Sendero Luminoso guerrillas together with the urban terrorist Tupac Amarus, who operated out of the utterly wretched Lima slums where I started my missionary work - Comas, for example, without water, power, much of anything. (And yet I was just back in Peru a year or so ago, and went to visit Comas - it has emerged as a solid working class, with sections of genuinely middle class, suburb of Lima.) In fact, they were not all one organization and operated in many ways very differently, reflecting differences in rural and urban terror. The key to all this in the novel and film is that the lawyer-turned-detective comes from an Indian town, speaks Quechua, and recognizes his home village in a sendero video.

The terrorist guerrillas, urban and rural, were finally smashed by a combination of a ruthless counterinsurgency campaign by the Peruvian security forces, including both police and military. It killed vast numbers of people. So did the guerrillas - the terrorist forces had a strong idea of purification, Khmer Rouge style, and alienated many Indians in the mountains with its policies cutting off the arms of mayors and other village leaders. It would be accurate to say that the authoritarian, sinister Fujimori government came in with a strong mandate to do whatever it took to defeat the rebels, and it did. But in this case, solid detective work tracked down the sendero leader, Guzman, and given the fanaticism around his person, it dealt a critical blow to sendero.

The aftermath has been difficult. The Fujimori government defeated the guerrilla terrorists; at the same time it demonstrated levels of authoritarianism and corruption that reached new lows even in Peru. (The most important writer on all of this - Sendero, Fujimori, the whole package - is the Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti - as courageous as he is a good writer and reporter - parts of whose writing appeared in the New Republic and elsewhere - he is now back in Peru, after many years in exile.) It's not quite over, however. Guzman won a new trial following holdings by the Interamerican Court of Human Rights that his military trial in secret was procedurally improper - a new civilian trial sort of got started, in a bumbling way, amid indications that this was a fantastically bad idea, when one saw the reports of it being simply a meeting ground for old comrades who still harbor the same dreams of Khmer Rouge style power.

And then, of course, there is that cause celebre of the looney American and European left, Laurie Berenson, whose harboring of guerrillas bent on much death and destruction would have earned her a minimum life sentence in the United States, yet only got 15 or 20 in Peru, but who is regarded as a hero in less discerning quarters in the First World. Or at least, so the line goes, the process was unfair even if she was working with the guerrillas - she shouldn't have been tried by a military court. But she was retried by a civilian court, sentenced again, and finally, thank goodness, the Interamerican Court of Human Rights, no doubt seeing that it would have unleashed political chaos in Peru to have ruled otherwise (Berenson's American supporters often seem unaware that she is universally hated in Peru - the only folks who like her there are the remaining terrorists, dreaming of another chance at power), just a few weeks ago ruled that the civilian trial was procedurally adequate and did not overturn it. The chances of a sendero resurgence are far from negligible.

I care about this film for my class on war and ethics because it illustrates, first of all, the pressures of civil war, and the special pressures of urban terrorism. And then, the question of what the differences are between policework and soldiers' work. It does so in a setting in which the clinching move is made by solid detectivework, not by soldiers. And yet, even in Peru, the police were overwhelmed - there was no way to overcome sendero in the countryside without a complete mobilization of the Peruvian military, notwithstanding the extent of its abuses. It required a combination of police and military force to prevail.

But the differences between this experience, within a single society, within a single country, and the US global war on terrorism, are more instructive than the similarities. Of course, intelligence is the key - which is what the police really provided in the Peru of the film. But police work and even intelligence work is completely inadequate in a situation such the US war on terror - none of that matters, that is, if the terrorists have safe haven. If they have safe haven in third countries, then all the good intelligence and policework avails nothing. What makes the war on terror actual war is not the willingness to use weapons and soldiers of war against terrorists - occasionally even the Clinton administration was willing to do that. No, what makes it war is not the willingness to fight terrorists, but instead, the willingness to attack and bring down regimes and states that harbor terrorists. That is what the Clinton administration could never have fathomed, and the same would have been true with a Kerry administration.

Of course, the whole Clinton administration view that it was all policework, a matter of collecting evidence and arresting people and charging them in court - that is all nonsense in the war on terror. Of course one will need to do a lot of policework, arrest people, try them, and so on -especially in the big cities of Europe. Likewise one will have to gather vast amounts of intelligence. But it is only half a policy. Unfortunately, in the view of Kerry and his people, policework was the whole policy, the whole terror thing was nothing more than crime; fortunately, this was, pretty evidently, not the view of the American people in the election.