The Reagan Buckley Knew: WFB's memoir and its alternative take

I seem to be unable to read this title as anything other than “The Reagan I Knew.” The Gipper, in the wake of the Iran/Contra scandal, famously proclaimed that, though his heart told him he hadn't approved arms sales to terrorists, his head told him he had. What Buckley’s head and heart told him over the years, I could not say, but The Reagan I Knew describes a politician who might as well be wearing a cape—he’s a strident, confident voice who all but saved democracy for the future, and to Buckley, anything less than our complete adulation is insulting. Heart, one; Head, zip.

It’s a personal memoir, at its heart. You might find astute political analysis in Buckley’s dredged-up columns from the 60’s when he runs through gubernatorial contests—that’s an example of WFB at his best. There are transcripts of Reagan’s appearances on Firing Line, and I got a kick out of eavesdropping over Buckley’s and Reagan’s debate over the surrender of the Panama Canal, and their conversations over Nixon, Ford and Carter.

But the material revealing what these men were really thinking is what’s really engrossing, to say nothing of infuriating. Take, for example, “A Self-Interrogation on the Size of the Government,” where Buckley attempts to explain away Reagan’s campaign promises to shrink government, given the fact that Reagan’s deficit rose from $79 billion to $153 billion. Buckley argues to himself, “It is a factor in democratic government that pressure is brought to bear to finance, by federal spending, projects that commend themselves to…some of the voters”:

[The] political power of the legislature was greater than the political power of the executive [when federal expenditures rise]. When the forces that ask for more spending prevail, their success depends in some measure on their power to move against the traditional American ethos [of self-subsistence]. Reagan always believed that people should earn their own living, and that a country should too, and that a country that does so is entitled to its national budget.

Read between the lines: The president has to resist the legislature, which is influenced by its constituency. Therefore, federal success is measured by its ability to resist majority votes, which will force them to go out and get a paper route to pay for their health care. I guess Buckley doped out the majority opinion during one of his intercontinental yacht-jaunts across the ocean and decided considering them further in political affairs was unnecessary. (That’s not a fair observation, I know. But I don’t care.)

There’s more of this kind of sentiment, and you don’t have to look all that hard. Buckley, unsurprisingly, does not have much to say about the Iran/Contra scandal except to quote a letter he wrote Reagan in 1988, urging him to issue pardons to Poindexter, North, et al. What’s particularly telling is when he raises the possibility of Reagan having to take the stand and testify: “In order to do this, you will be instrumental in exposing to public view the mechanisms by which the United States protects its vital interests. What the Left in America will do with this is absolutely unthinkable.”

Translation: We can't tell Joe Citizen about our support for sonsofbitches, because George McGovern will use it to win elections. Plus, Noam Chomsky will also use it to erect Chairman Mao statues all over the White House lawn.

The conduit between the two men is, by today’s terms, disturbing and unsettling: Reagan taking his cues from National Review, all but publicly acknowledging that it was Buckley and his ilk that created him, and nobody bothers to say a fucking word? What would happen if President Obama made a pet columnist out of Eric Alterman at The Nation or something? I don’t know what the Buckley/Reagan relationship says about the media and politics in the 80’s, but I’d like to think we've come farther than that today.

"A Shropshire Lad" Reread

Deceptively simplistic, this collection ranges along the varied experiences and nuances of life itself. Love, death, defeat, fleeting victory, eventual demise and a general feeling of transience, A.E. Housman reminds us continually that we are but a page in a book we can never see entirely. Housman's Shropshire, in all its pastoral idyllic beauty, never existed any more than Margaret Mitchell's romanticized South, or even Hardy's Wessex. No matter. His themes are universal and readily accessible to us all. Substitute Shropshire for wherever you hold your dearest childhood memories, and you've got your own "fields and men we know by heart." Your own youthful loves and devotions become Rose Harland, who "walked with a better man" while "stock still lies Fred, and sleeps." And even if you never served a day of military duty in your life, just the very act of getting up Monday morning to go to work is enough to give certain lines an alternative, dare I say preferable, flavor:

Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky-pavilioned land.

Housman is at his best, I think, when he touches on the universality of human suffering. The figures in his poetry sometimes clash, sometimes are victorious, very often are defeated and dark, and yet the countryside continues. One poem points out that the struggles that inflamed the Roman breast ("now ashes under Uricon") are still present in the Englishman's breast today, and doubtless will be in the souls of whoever is (un)lucky enough to be standing on the ashes of his own existence. "The tree of man was never quiet," he reprimands us. "Then 'twas the Roman, now tis I." It's a mistake to see all this as a downer. Rather, it gives the sense of solidarity--we're going through what many have gone through; we are not alone in our solitude. In fact, Housman effectively disarms this criticism in the penultimate poem, where in his alter ego of Terence, he is accused by a friend of "moping melancholy mad" with "the verse you make." Terence refutes this criticism with a reminder that there are more effective ways to prepare for what must be endured than by avoiding it:

Therefore, since the world has still
Much good, but much less good than ill,
And while the sun and moon endure
uck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
And train for ill and not for good.

Indeed, he follows his own advice. At the very end of the book, the "ashes" of the Roman he refers to earlier in the collection transcend into his own verse (this is how I see it, anyway). Our struggles are forgotten, yet since they're relived, they're always remembered, and so are we. In LXIII, he turns his advice (good advice, for the record) into "flowers" that he "hoed and trenched and weeded," giving some sense of the sheer efforts of creation:

And fields will yearly bear them
As light-leaved spring comes on,
And luckless lads will wear them
When I am dead and gone.

In Why Read? Mark Edmundson wrote that "vital options" for the individual quest for truth in art "may be found for this or that individual in painting, in music, in sculpture, in teh arts of furniture making or gardening. Thoreau felt he could derive a substantial wisdom by tending his bean field." Add to this Housman's invented countryside, set in opposition to (or perhaps even mirroring) a world of war, work, weariness and eventual defeat, and you've got your truth, and then some.

Meritocracy or "Meritocracy"?

I've never seen Christopher Hayes on MSNBC, but I did see him speak on meritocracies and his book about them in Chicago last summer, and immediately picked up Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. Hayes argues that America's meritocracy is flawed because it results in a new brand of elites who then proceed to create/maintain a system that guarantees the benefits of being in the elite to their own kith and kin. For example, parents concerned about getting their kids into elite schools in New York City spend thousands of dollars on test prep and other edges, leading to largely white institutions and a fairly skewed marketplace for upper crust education. Or, take the social distance between the poor and infirm population of New Orleans and the state's/government's inability to meet their needs after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina; yeah, some of them blindly elected to wait the storm out, but the vast majority of them were without a car, and without viable means of escape. Hayes argues that this tragedy is not possible without a meritocracy that demonizes the poor and alienates them from policy-makers, rendering them largely invisible in the sectors of society and government that are supposed to know them well enough to meet their needs and deal with their problems effectively. 

Hayes' discussion of the issues are validating for me, but not particularly revelatory. What's worthy of note is his redefinition of meritocracy as something that needs to be more or less reinvented if we're going to come up with a society that truly rewards innovation, intelligence and character. We can't expect equity of opportunity to continue when equity of outcome is ignored; we can't expect anything but another generation of oligarchs (his word) when "vertical distance" increases between the ones running the system and the ones living in it. See the financial crisis. See the blunders of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. See the corporatization of education "reform." Et cetera et cetera. Hackles will undoubtedly rise at the notion of "equality of outcome," but Hayes points out, correctly, in my view, that it's cheaper to do this than to clean up the results of an inequality of outcome. See the ruins of the Ninth Ward. See the rural sections of Iraq/Afghanistan and our current reputation there. See the racial divide in American students' performances in and out of school. Et cetera. 

Hopefully, this will be part of the discussion now. When Obama said (however clumsily) that American enterprise didn't take place in a vacuum, he was perfectly correct. Here's one way to qualify the issue.

The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk: A dumb book report

I didn't pick this book out of a hat. Kirk's tome has been praised by figures such as Richard Nixon (according to Ambrose's biography, he read it avidly and used it to shape his own thinking) and William F. Buckley. Just last month, John Kass wrote a column in which he mentioned glancing at his own "dog-eared copy" of it and bemoaning the fact that today's Republicans can't articulate their own conservative principles, thereby guaranteeing Obama another term.

It doesn't take more than ten or twenty pages of reading to realize that, were any Republican to espouse Kirk's talking points, they wouldn't be able to get elected dogcatcher. The Conservative Mind, a history of the philosophy and ideas of conservatism, plumbs the likes of Edmund Burke, John Adams, Toqueville, T.S. Eliot and a slew of other philosophers, writers and politicians (some of which I'd never heard of) whose scorn for what Toqueville termed "despotic democracy" comes out crystal-clear:

• Aristocracy (by his terms) is necessary in society;
• Social and economic class is unavoidable (so much for Rick Perry's disavowal of the idea)
• Not everyone's vote is equal, nor should it be;
• The proletariat cannot be treated the same way as society's elites, which makes public education a waste of time and money;
• We need a landed gentry with sufficient leisure to contemplate the heavy ideas and do the thinking for all of us, while we do the heavy work;
• The southern politicians (Calhoun among them) "knew" the dangers of freeing "the negro population";

And so on. It's pretty eyebrow-raising, to say the least. Were the Republicans to hitch their collective wagon to this star, Joe the Plumber never would have had the career he did, the Tea Party would be home watching t.v. and Bush would have hung his Harvard and Yale certificates on the door to the Oval Office.

Nevertheless, it's a fascinating walk through a solidified ideology's history of Western civilization. Kirk is nothing if not erudite, and his argument is compelling, if maddeningly predictable in places. Depending on whom you ask, Kirks' predictions of democratic tyranny and a ruling power pulling all our strings may have come to pass, if one accepts his terms and premises. But by those same terms and premises, most of us are too dumb to realize it anyway.

Griftopia: Manifesto for those struggling with the hangover of the financial crisis

Disclaimer: When it comes to money and the business world, I rank somewhere between a pacifier-sucking infant and college freshman stoned on paint fumes in terms of comprehension. Ask me about my financial portfolio and I'll just blink and stare at you. Talk to me about derivatives and I'll most likely suffer an acute case of diarrhea so I can run to the safety of the nearest bathroom. I try to keep these things in my head, I really do. But they leak out.

(Sorry--that was not an intentional reference to diarrhea.)

Still, when the Occupy Wall Street movement erupted, I found myself torn. On the one hand, roll my eyes though I might, it was hard to completely discount sneering cable pundits' reports of "lazy slacker deadbeats" or whatever the phrase was, antagonistic at the haves because they worked for what they had. On the other hand, memories of huge taxpayer-funded giveaways are fresh enough even in my mind to make myself wonder, "Well, why not occupy Wall Street?"

I mean, it's hardly a secret that federal bailouts have been doing on for decades, and from what I can tell, the beneficiaries keep reporting record profits. Didn't Reagan, that paragon of free markets, bail out the S&Ls in the eighties? Didn't he install high tariffs to protect American corporations against the Japanese?

And then there's Newt Gingrich, who, when Speaker of the House, presided over a district that got more federal subsidies than any other district in the U.S. outside the District of Columbia. For him to go on about the free market when the dividend returns were...oh god, excuse me. I have to go to the bathroom.

Well, clearly, I'm not the guy to listen to. But I think I found someone who is.

Matt Taibbi's book on the financial collapse and the egregious sins of banking and government that not only led up to it but actively encouraged it has made my list of Books I Have Read that Really Make Me Angry (see Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? and Joel Bakan's Childhood Under Siege for other examples). It's maddening to get a glimpse of what truly passes for power, as opposed to the four-year cyclic sideshow we call elections, and even more maddening when the truth is groaning with the weight of financial procedure and economic theory that even the author, with his accessible style and breakdown of the basics, admits is a bitch to unravel for the uninitiated.

Taibbi begins his book in September, 2008, when Sarah Palin accepted the Republican nomination for VP and when we were (unknown to the mainstream media) inches away from complete financial collapse. This is no accident, but it doesn't take long to realize that his axe to grind is nowhere near driving distance of partisan. Taibbi starts by arguing that the Tea Party encourages the anti-government-meddling attitude that fuels efforts to repeal acts like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act (which he argues is weak at best) while simultaneously waving a negligent hand at big-government bailouts of banks engaging in insane borrowing and speculative gambling that results in economic bubbles, inflated prices, artificial value and eventual busts that cost jobs and livelihoods.

He also points out that the Democrats are just as deep in the pockets of the banks for their elections, and that Obamacare is a huge giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies in a way completely anathema to the president's campaign promises. He ranges from the policies of the Fed under Alan Greenspan, to the mortgage and tech bubbles to the backdoor shenanigans of Goldman-Sachs, Bear Stearns and the other Banking Masters of the Universe. When his points are laced with jargon and technical language, he explains it, and he manages to keep a tone that swings between erudite and angry-guy-at-the-end-of-the-bar:

With the $13-plus trillion we are estimated to ultimately spend on the bailouts, we could not only have bought and paid off every single sub-prime mortgage in the country (that would only have cost $1.4 trillion), we could have paid off every remaining mortgage of any kind in this country--and still have had enough money left over to buy a new house for every American who does not already have one.

But we didn't do that, and we didn't spend the money on anything else useful, either. Why?...Because we're no good anymore at building bridges and highways or coming up with brilliant innovations in energy or medicine. We're shit now at finishing massive public works projects or launching brilliant fairy-tale public policy ventures like the moon landing...What are we good at? Robbing what's left.

With polemic like this, the devil, of course, is in the details, and I can't even hope to know where to begin. Banks pressured the government to raise limits on dollar-to-debt ratios? They ignored long-term risks, even at the expense of investors? They lied to investors? And to homeowners? They took trillions in federal bailouts and walked away rich as hell and scot-free? Rick Santelli is a tool of the finance industry and his Tea Party-creating rant was more full of bullshit than a cattle farm? Elections are a sham? Lousy homebuyers were encouraged and enabled by fake credit ratings? Honest homebuyers were swindled?

In the end, even as my head is spinning trying to keep it all straight, the essentials remain: we've not only been lied to about what's wrecking our markets. We're not even part of the equation.

Even to me, not all of this is exactly news, not in the light of the past year of alternative media. But having Taibbi to take you by the hand and walk you through the financial fundamentals is another matter. Yes, he's vulgar and loads his prose with invective (Greenspan is the "biggest asshole in the universe," for example, while Goldman Sachs guards dubious investment plans with "mid-level state employees with substandard salaries and profound cases of financial penis envy"). Yes, this gets in the way sometimes. But he's pretty persuasive, and I've found no serious rebuttals of his work, beyond the non-denial denials that tend to dog the best muckrakers when they're on to something.

Some other nuggets he dishes out: Mayor Richard Daley's giveaway of Chicago's parking meters to foreign companies (a growing trend that almost included the Pennsylvania Turnpike); the mortgage-backed securities scam; Goldman Sachs holding Texas pensions hostage in order to force the government to bail out AIG; the commodities bubble and how it spiked up oil prices despite politicians' claims about greedy SUV-guzzling Americans and the need for offshore drilling; Greenspan's Ayn Rand-fueled fuckups with the Fed; and pretty convincing glimpses of upper-echelon players like AIG's Win Neuger and his maniacal pursuit of short-term profits at the expense of long-term investors. There's more, but you get the idea: the scams abound, and while we're just figuring them out, these guys have moved on to five other scams by the time the earlier ones hit the press.

Critics argue that Taibbi offers no solutions to the mess. I disagree. Towards the end, he points out that, yes, the economic world is a complicated thing and it takes tremendous amounts of time to figure out the basics. But awareness is a first step, and once you're past that step, you're much less likely to get suckered in by the partisan rhetoric (i.e. drilling for oil in Alaska vs. buying a hybrid). My record of belief in the importance of the informed, responsible voter is pretty clear, and Taibbi shares it with no less zeal:

We still know very little about what really went on during (the past few years), who was calling whom, what bank was promised what... We need to know what the likes of (Henry) Paulson, (Timothy) Geithner and (Ben) Bernanke were doing those key stretches of 2008.

But we probably never will, because the country increasingly is forgetting that any of this took place. The ability of its citizens to lose focus so quickly and to be distracted by everything from Lebronamania to the immigration debate is part of what makes America so ripe for this type of corporate crime. We have voters who don't pay attention, a news media that either ignores key subjects or willfully misunderstands them, and a regulatory environment that bends easily to lobbying and campaign financing efforts.

Getting our heads out of the sand won't fix the problem overnight. But until we do, no solution is possible. So, at the very least, I'll be chugging the Pepto and poring over the business pages. That's one American down.

My Own Little Book and Film Club Discussion

Aaron and I found, coincidentally enough, that we'd seen the same movies and read the same books within a couple of days of each other. So, after rousing ourselves from our respective summer lethargy and hangovers, we met yesterday afternoon at a local coffeehouse to have a rousing, inspiring intellectual discussion of the works in question. (Note: for convenience's sake, I have assumed his middle initial begins with an "S".)

1 p.m.

GJL: Ugh.
ASS: Yeah. No more tequila shooters on Sunday nights.
GJL: So, that book?
ASS: What book?
GJL: You know, maybe we'd better do this tomorrow.

Twenty-four hours later...

GJL: So, I understand you finally finished The Average American Male, by Chad Kultgen?
ASS: Yeah. It was stupid.
GJL: I think so too. Although I did find a couple nuggets of humor towards the end--
ASS: No you didn't. It was totally worthless.
GJL: Well I really think that...
ASS: It sucked. Let's go back to the bar.

Two hours later...

GJL: What about that movie we both saw? You know...
ASS: Tree of Life?
GJL: That one. I thought it was a rollicking tour de force that is completely unparalleled in this summer's commercial- and merchandise-driven drool.
ASS: I too believe it to tower over all the Hollywood drivel saturating the local cinemas like a clogged public toilet.
GJL: Well then. There you go.
ASS: When did you see it?
GJL: I didn't.
ASS: Me neither.
GJL: Let's play pool.

Thirty minutes later...

ASS: So let me get this straight: You think Don DeLillo's novels are overrated hash--
GJL: Yep.
ASS: But you also believe that J.J. Abrams is underrated?
GJL: His filmic references are intuitive and insightful.
ASS: He doesn't do references. He rips off other movies. Because he's got all the cinematic imagination of a pile of rocks.
GJL: Well maybe you're a pile of rocks.
ASS: Also, you scratched off the eightball. I win. You owe me another twenty dollars.

Two minutes later...

ASS: Gumph! Gumph burmph!
GJL: Sorry Aaron, but I don't understand what you're saying. You'll have to take that eightball from out of your throat.
ASS: Ughm fumh!
GJL: Right. Guess that's hard to do with your arms broken and a pool cue up your ass. Well, I'm out of here. I'm going to go watch Super 8 again and take careful note of his homages to Steven Spielberg. What are you going to do?
ASS: Urrrrrm...
GJL: Bleed on the floor and pass out? Sounds great.

"Don DeLillo blows. Now how can I make him realize this? Hmm..."

Push, by Sapphire: A Review

Push is the stream-of-consciousness novel by Sapphire, poet and performer, that created such a ruckus when first published over a decade ago and which was turned into an acclaimed film, Precious, in 2009. It's the story of a young woman who...holy fuck, this book is disturbing.

Ok, let me start over:

Push tells the story of 16-year-old Clareece "Precious" Jones, who, at the novel's beginning, is pregnant with her father's child. She...I mean, seriously, her father's kid? That's messed up. Plus, get this--it's her father's second child by her. The first one? She had it at the age of twelve! And it's got Down's Syndrome. That is too much.

Okay, where was I? Precious lives with her abusive mother who...oh Christ, I forgot, the mom abuses her too! Sexually, physically, psychologically, you name it. It is totally off-putting. One minute the mom is all, "Make me some dinner!" and then she's clocking her in the head with a frying pan. God.

Right, right, the novel. Well, it's written in the form of Precious' thoughts, stream-of-consciousness, like I said, plus journal entries she writes for class. In these entries, she finds a new voice and a new freedom of being able to love herself and not see herself with the eyes of others...

Her parents? Good God, both of them? Plus she winds up getting AIDS from her father! Like Sapphire decided, "You know what, I don't think this kid is sympathetic enough for an emotive character. What else can I give her?" I'm surprised she didn't pop her into a time machine and dump her on the deck of the Titanic or something.

There are truly moving scenes in this novel, though. Like the extended hands of fellowship Precious finds in an alternative school. Kind of hard to keep those scenes in mind, though, when you remember Precious' account of her father climbing on top of her. Hoo. Man. I mean...boy. Did anyone see the movie? How'd they pull that one off?

Okay, so in closing, Push is an emotive, poetic dagger through the heart of the discerning reader. Precious becomes a Job for the twenty-first century, and as we see her spirit begin to take wings, we are reminded of the transience of life and love, and that both truly are precious for all the right reasons...gah, I can't get those abuse scenes out of my head. Messed. Up.

Fuck me, anybody got any weed? Need to shake this book off.

My Somewhat Ecclectic and Scattered "Best Of" List of 2010

Harlan Ellison once said any book you haven't read is a new book. I like that. I take comfort in that. It reminds me we're never really finished with the arts, since they can hardly finish with us. Hell, last month I leafed through an old Balzac novel I thought I'd absorbed a decade ago, only to discover I didn't remember two-thirds of it. Right now, I'm reading Robert Harris' novel The Ghost, which is what Roman Polanski filmed as The Ghost Writer, which I saw seven months ago, and I'm still turning pages like crazy since I can't remember the details of how it comes out. By this rationale, just think of how many books I have yet to really read. It's like being a kid all over again.

So, I'm in no position to rate "Best of" anything in 2010. I don't get out to the movies that often, I don't go to many concerts, and I'm too busy trying to ball through Balzac to try much contemporary fiction. I do have my moments, though. So, in no particular order, with the proper bibliobiographical notes following, I give you:

Music I Discovered/Rediscovered in 2010

The Cold War Kids. A friend loaned me their CD. I went to their concert. Got a free concert download. And I was hooked. An original sound altogether.

The XX. Again, same friend let me download their stuff, which led me to go out and buy it anyway. Oddly compelling rhythm; lyrics are bordering on poetic. I like it.

Arcade Fire's Suburbia. Caught my attention, maybe because of all the media hype I stumbled across.

Ed Harcourt's Lustre. Half the songs interbreed pop and soulful moodiness too much for my taste, but the other half really get in my brain and bounce around pleasantly. Saw him when he opened for James; his bassist totally eyed me up at the bar.

School of Fish's self-titled debut album of 1991 or 1992. Caught between the no man's land of eighties rock and the grunge movement, it blends pathos and detachment very well for my indifferent generation.

Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde. How did I miss "Visions of Joanna" all these years? How can you not get hooked on a song that captures in seven minutes ten years of feeling?

Pretty much anything by The Velvet Underground. How did I miss "What Goes On" all these years? How can you not get hooked on a song that captures in five minutes half an hour's worth of pensive thinking?

We Became Your Family When You Died, Bullets in Madison. How did they not put this out sooner? How can you not get hooked on an album that captures in ten songs...ah screw it, I've got nothing.

The Cult's "Embers." Now this is the Cult I remember.

Stuff I Read/Discovered in 2010

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell. The Times did a big piece on him over the summer and the description of this novel caught my eye: four or five separates stories spanning the South Seas in the seventeenth century, to near-contemporary Britain, to a Korean dystopia, to a postapocalyptic Hawaii, and then back again, right to the beginning. All stories are separate, but interconnected. Utterly spellbinding.

King Lear. This time, when I read it, I accompanied it with Ian McKellan's RSC performance on DVD. I can't get him out of my head any more when I read of Lear raging against the storm.

Last Poems, A.E. Housman. For whatever reason, his verses exploring the profound in the commonplace really resonated with me last winter. I think everyone should memorize the following:

We for a certainty are not the first

Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled

Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed

Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.

Ballistics, Billy Collins. I'd picked this book up five times since it came out in 2008, but when I finally finished it, I have to admire how he managed to make poetry so accessible, and still so worthy of reflection. He makes you want to see the world all over again.

Letters from Iceland, W.H. Auden. I was led to this book by one of his poems that appears in it; now I want to go visit Iceland. More to the point, I want to go visit the Iceland in the early twentieth century that Auden got to visit--I think I heard that now the country is broke or something?

Lamb and Fool by Christopher Moore. Drop-dead hysterical, especially Fool. It's like the novel Benny Hill and Kurt Vonnegut would have fathered together. Okay, not really, but pretty close.

The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane Ravitch. Required reading for anyone who wants an opinion on why American schools suck. Short on solutions, but long on data and analysis. Might correct some of the commonplace assumptions kicked about in Washington and Springfield these days.

Movies I Saw in 2010 Worth Mention

The Six Wives of Henry VIII, a miniseries produced by the BBC. Keith Mitchell starts as Henry Tudor did: young and lithe, full of energy and innocence. By the end he's morbidly obese, still great yet corrupt, enthralling yet repulsive. He pulls the act off like no one else I've seen (Jonathan Rhys Meyers is supposed to be in his forties? Please).

Henry IV Parts I and II, from Shakespeare's An Age of Kings (first aired back in the 50's on television). Sean Connery as Hotspur is enough in itself; the Falstaff/Hal interplay is probably the best-achieved chemistry I've ever seen on film.

I Am Love, starring Tilda Swinton. Not that I could tell by watching this, but she had to pull off Italian dialogue with a Russian accent. Story of a woman who either dives into or is thrust into an illicit affair with her son's best friend, only so much more than that.

Winter's Bone. A young woman living in the Appalachians and trying to hold on to her house and family plays detective to find out what happened to her crystal meth-dealing father. She has to go through a backwoods drug empire that would give Vito Corleone pause.

Inception. Not quite a movie I could go right back into and see all over again. But pretty close.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. Of course, the books are worth mention too, but the films did a superb job capturing the story, character and pacing of the Millenium Trilogy. Which begs the question as to why Hollywood feels we need an American version. Perhaps Americans are illiterate and can't be bothered with subtitles. Which brings me to...

Idiocracy. Not Mike Judge's greatest, but amusing. And I'd say a fairly accurate painting of where we're headed: once mediocrity becomes the norm, we tend to equate knowledge of civics with brilliance, or being able to tie one's own shoes with homespun wisdom and savvy. We might have a former president who's pretty good proof of this, but I'm not sure.

The King's Speech. If Colin Firth doesn't get an Oscar for his portrayal of George VI, struggling in equal measures with his duties as king and his speech impediment, I can't imagine who will get it instead. Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush are equally impressive.

True Grit and Black Swan I have not seen yet, but I suspect I'm going to really like. Haven't seen Waiting for Superman, but I'm sure I'd have a reaction to that as well. And fan of Aaron Sorkin that I am, I thought The Social Network was a bit overblown.

Okay, that's enough for this year. Bring on the next 365 days, and let's knock it off with the vampire stuff already, mkay?

Thomas Friedman's "We're Number 11!" Required reading for anyone invested in the debate over education.

Suggested Curriculum Revisions for the State of Texas

Recently, the state of Texas voted to rewrite their secondary education curriculum to make sure it reflected conservative, Christian values. Without question, the following passages need to be chopped, in order to ensure the continued moral development of our children. These passages are filthy and perverted. Strike them from the record. Now.

"Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea ravens."
--Moby Dick, Chapter 50

"It has ever since [I came to Boston] been a Pleasure to me to see good Workmen handle their Tools."
--The Autobiography of Ben Franklin, p 57

Quince: If that may be, then all is well. Pyramus, you begin.
Enter Puck, from Behind
--A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 1

A Rushed Review of Me and Shakespeare, a memoir by Herman Gollob

A lot of what Gollob has to say in this admittedly riveting memoir makes me want to punch him in his erudite, enthusiastic mouth. Basically, the book takes us into his golden years of retirement and his blossoming interest in All Things Shakespeare: reading the plays, studying the plays, teaching them, watching them and interpreting them. His interest becomes your own, if it isn't already, but for me, it's a bit too hard to stop being jealous/resentful of him long enough to roll around in his commentary and life story.

Gollob edited books for forty years, consorting with authors the likes of which I shall not see any time soon. He retired comfortably, and picked up a passion for Shakespeare after a staging of Hamlet. He dove into the texts, learned everything you could expect an autodidact to learn, and dove into teaching Shakespeare to an adult education class. He took trips to the Folgers Shakespeare Library in D.C. and got a day's pass to the Reading Room, where he uncovered a Whitman essay and incorporated it into a paper. He traveled to Oxford to study the Bard for three or four weeks. He put together a damn good argument concerning Shakespeare and Judaism. He talked to celebrities and professional playwrights, developing his sense of drama and waxing enthusiastic over what Shakespearian gems he's unearthed over the years. And he ends his memoir with plans to get an M.A. and teach as an adjunct, while still developing his own curriculum for the adult ed course and maybe even teaching how to perform the plays, a la Shakespeare Set Free from the Folgers. Nifty, Herman! How do you find the energy?

Oh how I envy this guy. (His memoir is full of tragedy, loss and striving, I should point out, but I will overlook all of this at the moment.) He fights (and wins) his school for a two-hour course over a three-week period with no bathroom breaks, and determines to limit discussion, arguing (rightly) that extended classroom banter does not yield material for those seeking to learn explicitly. He turns down a chance to teach Freshman Comp, arguing (idiotically) that forty years of book editing is just as painful as grading all those essays (oh really?). He downs pints of ale in London and wallows in history and literature every chance he gets. And every other sentence begins with a literary allusion. "As I stood there on the bridge, I found myself thinking of Psalm 43..." "As I watched Frank Sinatra chat up my wife, I found myself reflecting on what Feste had to say about youth in Twelfth Night." Go fly a kite, Gollob. And guess what? My Reading Room pass this summer will last me a month, not ust a day. Suck on it, Herr Professor.

Still, I have to give credit where credit is due. Gollob is passionate, informed and witty. His zest for Shakespeare is contagious--I'm not one to go in for Bardoloatry myself, but some of it does wind up rubbing off, even in spite of hardhearted jealousy over someone reveling in that elusive second act of American life, Fitzgerald notwithstanding. His 300+ book will get even the most devout Philistine running for a Shakespeare fest, or at the very least chasing down some of his gobbets and observations (I'm starting with his oft-quoted Shakespeare and the Jews myself--he cites the book at least two dozen times and it looks pretty interesting). If I can just get through the next thirty-five years of work without losing my sanity, maybe I can pull off what he manages...provided books haven't been replaced by mind-texts or something.

An Indian comic I found today while surfing the web on my iPhone while waiting for Kim to relinquish the laptop that is rightfully mine, so I can finish my own comic (which probably won't be as good, but still, it's the principle of the thing, you know, and besides, what's she doing that's so imp...)

[Rest of heading deleted due to extreme boringness--ed.]


Click on comic to read the whole thing. This guy is a riot. Makes me wish I were a gay Indian.

This week's book review:

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch

"Seasoned Argument--Needs to be Required Reading on Capitol Hill"

This week, the Chicago Tribune has been running a series of editorials calling for more vouchers, more teacher accountability, getting competitive, weeding out the bad teachers, giving kids a better chance at a good education, "dumping" failing schools, etc. Militaristic language. Take no prisoners. Seek and destroy. Etc. I should have seen all this coming years ago. I mean, it's no compliment to my intelligence that I had to have colleagues complain about Education Secretary Arnie Duncan for the past year now before I could truly share in their ire. "I mean, the guy ran the CTA!" a friend vented one day over lunch. "What were they thinking?"

"Well, he improved scheduling and budget issues," I intoned wisely, clutching that day's paper ("Duncan Named Ed Secretary: He Improved CTA Budgets and Schedules!" emblazoned on the front).

"Yeah, but if kids could be handled like a Metra line, we wouldn't have Head Start and Title I."

It is Duncan's sort of thinking about education, as per the Tribune's editorials, or John Stossel, or any number of well-meaning fools, that has aggravated me the most about public discussions concerning the profession that makes all other professions possible. "Dump" the crappy teachers (am I one of them? I don't think so, but then, I haven't yet seen my students' Prairie State averages compared with others'.) "Lose" the substandard schools (and do what? bring in outside experts? why not bring them in now? because we already did and the kids are still faililng?). In education, you gotta deliver, and if we were delivering, why, our kids would all be rocket scientists. You get a salary, don't you? For what, letting them fail? Get to work, pal. Some of us have "full time jobs" and we actually have to earn our living.

I know. I'm incredibly repressed. It makes me quite the hit at parties.

With this attitude, I picked up Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System, figuring it would soothe my troubled soul somewhat about how my profession has been maligned over the past few decades (it did) but also hoping it would give appropriate weight to the counter arguments mucking the problem up. Put it another way: What are the reformists doing right, what can we keep, and what do we need to ditch before it does further harm?

Ravitch's book doesn't read like a big "eff you!" to NCLB or anything, but that's because she was initially behind it. The lauded education historian trots out her thinking (briefly) early on about teacher and school accountability, the viability of school choice and the necessity for continued testing, but she's quick to point out what she saw wrong with it all. She's reliable. She's got no particular political agenda; she only wants what's best for schools, and by her way of thinking, the current rage about "school reform" will do but nothing to fix our beleaguered school system and educate our next generation.

Ravitch has plenty of hard evidence, and not all of it is conclusive, which she is the first to point out. She argues that, though the jury is still out concerning the effectiveness of vouchers and, to a lesser extent, charter schools, there's no conclusive evidence that they provide a better education, not when you look at test scores, attrition rates, selective enrollment practices and overall competence. "[Charter schools have:] demonstrated that youngsters from some of the toughest neighborhoods in the nation can succeed in a safe and structured environment, if they have supportive parents and are willing to work hard, spend long days in school, and comply with the school's expectations," she writes. "They can't throw out the kids who do not work hard or the kids who have many absences or the kids who are disrespectful or the kids whose parents are absent or inattentive. They have to find ways to educate even those students who do not want to be there. That's the dilemma of public education."

She labels No Child Left Behind, and Obama's current Race to the Top, as all stick, no carrot, quite rightly arguing that, if all we're out to do is "punish" bad teachers, shouldn't we be examining what these "punishments" will to do improve education for the students? (Not much, as it turns out, if anything). Teacher evaluations are notoriously spotty, based on a ridiculously small amount of time and an attempt to objectify something beyond the pale of subjectivity. In her discussion of teacher fallibility, I'm reminded of what Bill Maher said in a recent column: There are always going to be bad teachers. Even Yale has crappy teachers. They must--they gave us George Bush.

She even dissects philanthropists like Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation, calling them the "billionaire boys' clubs" and asserting that, even though these entrepreneurs are engaged in laudable and noble efforts, they are remarkably reluctant to keep educators in a position to police education. They prefer instead to rely on trends (smaller schools, for example) that, while not without merit, do not produce the immediate panacea they initially thought they would. For example, Gates at one point argued that a school full of teachers in the "top quartile" would "erase" the achievement gap between blacks and whites; an argument like that is like saying, well, why not fill the Chicago Police Department with Olympic triathletes with 180 IQs so we can erase crime?

Overall, Ravitch's point is to take down the "invisible hand" theory a peg or two in its applicability to education. She argues (and I tend to agree with her) that the principles of good business do not work as well with education. Tests are not nearly reliable enough an indicator of a child's education, to say nothing of a teacher's effectiveness (though we still need them as barometers, of course); reform, if it is to be successful, is a complex effort that will span years, without always showing tangible results. When doctors became judged on the well being of their patients, they stopped taking the terminally ill, the risky procedures, the patients who really needed care but weren't likely to pull through, because it would then reflect on the doctors' performance. The low-performers, likewise, or the delinquents, or the low-ability aren't likely to get top-notch teachers lining up to help them if those teachers are judged on their pupils' ability to get a 36 on their ACTs.

Ravitch has no tone of outrage or weariness, and she does not entirely scrap Milton Friedman. But in the end, her point is clear: You can't run a school like a Fortune 500 company. She calls for a content- and skills-based curriculum encompassing not just math and reading (those subjects most heavily tested), but one including science, the arts, literature, history, geography, civics, music. We've got to discard this inanity that it doesn't matter what you teach the kids as long as you teach them how to learn. That's crap, and the countries currently kicking our asses in education have never done it that way. Look at Finland: something like a 100 percent literacy rate, with across-the-board learning goals and a strong teacher's union. We can certainly do better as educators, but it doesn't all happen inside our classrooms.

Bravo, Professor Ravitch. Get the word out.

FURTHER READING:

Ravitch interviewed by Democracynow.org. Further history of the accountability movement and how she came to look at it the way she does now.

A Second Look at The Grapes of Wrath

Reread this book as part of Roselle's Banned Books Week and just could not put it down. You've undoubtedly heard of Steinbeck's epic story of the Joads, Oklahoma farmers turned out of the Midwest by the Great Dust Bowl who travel west to California to find work only to face prejudice, low wages, tyranny, starvation and, for some, death. The book won the Pulitzer in 1940 and was made into an acclaimed film starring Henry Fonda. The narrative is on the scale of Moby Dick (some lucky s.o.b. has probably already compared the two works--I'll get to it someday); the style is fluid and engrossing; the allusions abound. As Peter Lisca wrote in 1958, Grapes "was a phenomenon on the scale of a national event. It was publicly banned and burned by citizens, it was debated on national radio hook-ups; but above all, it was read."

Confession: Yes, I gave a copy of this book to Matt in 1999. Yes, I was advocating Marxism. Trust me when I tell you, I'd never read Marx or Lenin or Trotsky, and didn't know I was advocating Marxism. I only thought I was trying to open a pair of eyes to the stark realities of the world's evil: "Look, you dimwit, see what happened in those camps? See how a bunch of farmers starved next to fertile farmland? Acknowledge my wisdom on the subject, shit-for-brains!"

Well, that's over and done with. I have since paid the price for my deeply-held naivete and nascent socialism with many a booze-laced lecture on macroeconomic theory and history in many a Manhattan bar. I have been humbled. I have been given my own copies of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. And when teaching Grapes, or any other early-twentieth century work of literature, I always preface it with, "Take the politics with a grain of salt."

And yet, shifting away from my own sad story and Matt's desperate attempts to educate me, I think it's a mistake to write off Steinbeck as "socialist," and therefore "unreliable," "biased," or any of those icky, undesirable pejoratives currently applied to anyone on the left who argues for reform. Sure, Steinbeck was a socialist. He hobnobbed with Lincoln Steffens. He networked through Francis Whittaker. He was pro-union. He's not exactly subtle about this, either: Grapes of Wrath gets tiresome sometimes with his preaching the necessity of organization. (I don't mind preachiness, but I prefer when authors don't carry theirs out with a megaphone.)

No question about his political affiliations. But then, he also researched life in the Hoovervilles firsthand. He saw the strikebreaking. He witnessed the starvation, the deprivation, the cruelty. He saw the needs of the poor unacknowledged. If anything, according to most scholars across the ideological spectrum, he downplayed all of it in his novel. For example, in one of his articles on conditions in a migrant camp, he uses imagery and language that couldn't have gone easily past any editor of the time:

"There is more filth here. The tent is full of flies clinging to the apple box that is the dinner table, buzzing about the foul clothes of the children, particularly the baby, who has not been bathed nor cleaned for several days. This family has been on the road longer than the builder of the paper house. There is no toilet here, but there is a clump of willows nearby where human faeces lie exposed to the flies - the same flies that are in the tent."
--"Death in the Dust," available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/feb/02/johnsteinbeck.socialsciences.

And that's not even getting into the violence and murder against vagrants, organizers and the like. Economic theory and hard-core politics must be considered when contemplating Steinbeck's thesis, but such niceties would hardly register with the Joads. The causes of the Great Depression were complex. But what would that matter to a woman trying to keep the flies in the filth from the weeds off her baby? What would it matter to Ma Joad when she can't get Rose of Sharon milk? Or soap for her kids to keep clean? Finding a place for your family to sleep without drowning is also complex.

So, keeping the clangs of literary Historicism and New Criticism in mind, let me offer my own argument on how to read this book today: Steinbeck is telling us that the people are the answer. Yes, they may organize and form unions (I should point out that I'm a card-carrying member of the NEA myself). Yes, they may strike, they may agitate. But the farmers who come at all close to survival do so by banding together. When one is sick, others pitch in to help. When a child dies, a mountain of coins are left outside the mother's tent to bury her. When children play, they must cooperate with each other, or the game falls apart; when a job becomes available, workers must spread the word, even if it means their own wages and prospects will thin.

In short, we're to think of the group. There's no Orwellian Man Behind the Screen deciding how best to ration jobs, food and drinking water. The people are Big Brother. And I see little in the history of any oppression you can name to contradict the argument that, when the downtrodden function together, they tend to make out better.

Probably, implementing such a system of "be nice to each other" is pure fantasy. I don't believe so, but then, I didn't study political science. My doctor tells me I have to cut down on the red meat; I don't believe it will make me live any longer, but then I remember I didn't go to medical school. Whatever. I am an English teacher though, one who subscribes, however sheepishly, to the notion of Literature as Catharsis. As such, I'm fully capable of drawing a line in the sand between my ideals (things that may or may not be possible, but nevertheless must be strived towards) and reality (John Q. Citizen doesn't like being told he's stupid or oppressing the poor, especially when he's stupid and oppressing the poor, and votes). You cling to your ideals and acknowledge reality. But to scream, "Steinbeck is corrupting his readers!" or "Libelist! Red! Liar!" is reactionary, demagogic, and small-minded in the 21st century.

(Not that people are lining up to urinate on Grapes like they were when it first came out. But just stick your head in a town hall meeting these days and it doesn't take long to see a correlation.)

When asked in a recent intervew by Bill Maher for a new metaphor that would come in handy in today's world, Bill Moyers instantly replied, "We're all in the same boat." That's Steinbeck's novel in a nutshell. It was true then. It's true today. And any book that stumbles on the truth, from whatever direction, deserves our study and attention.

Fuck you, Mr. Chips.

Fuck you, Mr. Chips. And fuck your fucking life story.

You had it rough, I grant you. New, apple-cheeked, fresh-faced go-getter arriving at a new school, nervous about discipline. You gave a troublemaker 100 lines to copy after misbehaving, and then had no troubles after that. You bemoan the loss of the boys' friendship; it's the only part of the triumvirate of "respect, obedience and love" that you're missing? Fuck you.

You teach Latin grammar? Dead languages? With no standardized tests to worry about? Fuck you.

You get a hot new wife and she teaches you to be loved? And you're an overnight sensation? Fuck you.

You continue teaching, without worrying about administrators breathing down your neck concerning relevance, learning standards and the like? Fuck you.

You retire and live on school premises, with a woman to cook for you and look after you? Fuck you.

You come back as headmaster in reduced capacity? Fuck you.

You die happy? Fuck you.

You wouldn't last ten minutes in today's schools, Mr. Chips. Conjugate those verbs, asshole.

In honor of National Poetry Month, a work from William Carlos Williams:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

If I'm teaching juniors next year, I'm so assigning essays on this bad boy. They'll hate me. They'll call me "Wheelbarrow." Yeah.

i couldn't wait
to grade

your wheel barrow
essays

but i still shredded
them up

along with the white
chickens.

Lessons of the Masters by George Steiner

or

Mumblings of a Wannabe Pedant who Just Read Lessons of the Masters by George Steiner

I glommed onto this particular tome in a reference Alan Bennet made in an interview several years ago. A depressing amount of Steiner's arguments sailed harmlessly over my head; he uses allusions and casual references to Ovid, Schopenhauer, Nietzche et al with an ease I can only envy (at least, at this point).

Still, his monologue on the Teacher/Student relationship is worthy of consideration, especially in today's politically-charged pedagogical climate. In no particular order, going over this book in the only fashion I feel I could pull off worth a damn, I give you:

Ten Things I learned from this book

1. The transmission of knowledge is inherently erotic. I'm not sure how. Steiner argues that the student's intellectual submission before the Master is charged with eros, and to overlook this potential disaster/boon (witness Socrates and Alciabades, Abelard and Heloise, Plato and any boy with pecs...) is naive and limiting. I don't think current laws allow me to explore this matter any further. And Steiner, you'd better stay the hell away from my third hour.

2. A teacher can measure his success by his disciples' ultimate rejection of his tenets. "To teach greatly is to awaken doubts in the pupil, to train for dissent. It is to school the disciple for departure...A valid Master should, at the close, be alone." I buy that.

3. The study of the humanities is at odds with that of science and math. It's ridiculous to argue that we'd be bereft of radiation without Madame Curie, but we would not have the Sistine Chapel without Michaelangelo. I'd have to respectfully disagree here. Read Tom Stoppard: "What we lose to history will be picked up along the way...or rewritten in a completely different language. You should no more grieve the loss (of the books of Alexandria) than you should a shoelace lost on the sidewalk." (Paraphrased)

4. High school teachers suck. We have a "subconsciously vengeful mediocrity" and are "more or less amiable gravediggers" a la Yorrick. Hey, Steiner, no offense, but fuck off, all right? If you had any material on presentation besides lectures and q&a, I might be impressed.

5. We can thank Goethe for the eternal credo: "He who cannot, teaches." I'd cuss him out too, were he not already 176 years dead.

6. The charged relationship between Master and Disciple is dangerous (it can result in castration, like with Abelard and Heloise), a case of one-upmanship (Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler; Max Brod and Franz Kafka); it can seduce and destroy you (Mephistopholes and Faustus); it can kill you (Socrates); you can be good at it and still reviled (the strange, sad case of Georges Palante); yet all of these dizzying possibilities underscore the raw power, responsibility and rush (my new three R's of education) of the one profession without which there would be no other professions.

7. It is extremely difficult to figure a rate of exchange for sharing one's passions with students. At least, in the academic world.

8. Some teachers have had stringent requirements for their students, sometimes to their detriment (Pythagoras), sometimes beneficially so (Zen masters).

9. The fact that I need to reread this book (a third time, I might add) to even come close to absorbing it satisfactorally, is a testament to both my failures as a teacher, and my doggedness, which is one of my greatest assets as a teacher.

10. I have so got to read the following stories: "The Lesson of the Master," Henry James; "Of This Time, Of That Place" (author?); "The Lesson and the Secret" (author?); The Dying Animal, Philip Roth.

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Climbing the mountain that is Tolstoy

rating: 4 of 5 stars

Already, I'm hankering to reread this sucker. Twenty or so subplots: impossible to summarize here (for me, anyway). But I look at the book this way: Carl Sagan once wrote an essay arguing that looking at a grain of salt could open up answers to questions about the universe. That's what Tolstoy did here. He used Napoleon's conquest of Russia to examine questions that still resound today: How much can we actually control the events around us, how great are "great" men in history (not very, according to him, merely tools of history), and what motives ultimately benefit a person in the face of tragedy and upheaval?

Tolstoy makes it very clear in his afterword that he does not consider War and Peace a novel. Neither do I. I had to fight through some of his digressions about the war, the military actions and the nature of history. I understand why most critics wish to cut them (that's right, "most" critics, not just a few radicals), but once you junk the term "novel," you have to take the package deal. And if we're to move within the parameters of mimetic realism, there's just no way to cover this material in any other fashion. You have to have a wide array of characters, to prevent coincidence and fortuitousness from intruding, and you have to contrast what is said about the events (by Napoleon, Alexander, Kutozov, or whoever) with what is actually done (by the soldiers, the nobility, etc.).

A few notable observations:

--W&P seems to have a few things in common with Gone With the Wind. Not enough for a doctoral dissertation, alas, but both novels begin with a party and end with a declaration of future change, both revolve around spoiled upper-crust girls who learn their lessons the hard way (if they learn them at all), both deal with women struggling in less-than-ideal marriages. There's no Rhet Butler equivalent, but there's plenty of his edge in scenes like where Pierre flips out against Helene, or the old Count Marya's abuses of his daughter.


--Tolstoy is big on revelation presenting itself through the natural world. Pierre, Prince Andrei, and assorted others get their big wake-up call while dying in a battlefield looking up at the sky, or sitting on a horse looking up at the sky, or staring at an oak tree, or hunting a wolf. His metaphors and analogies, when not classical references, depend on farms and farm activity (sheep being fattened for slaughter, for example: the sheep don't know why it's happening, but other sheep can correlate them being taken away periodically with their fattening bellies). None of this is surprising, I suppose, given the fact that the novel was written smack dab in the middle of an Industrial Revolution that was just beginning to make its way to Russia, but the thing about motifs, obvious or not, you notice them.


--Some of these women are downright seductive to the reader. And that's saying something. Tolstoy's prose is hardly risque, even if his topics sometimes are, so when Helene works her charms at a party, or Natasha flirts with Anatole or Andrei, I can just sense some of Tolstoy's middle-brow readers (myself included) panting with enthusiasm. Why, I'm not sure. Maybe it's the party scenes, with their many and sundry rivalries masked beneath a veneer of civility, that has me looking for further cracks in the armor. Or maybe I'm conditioned by Anna Karenina to equate these settings with eventual sexual forays. Whatever. I'm not proud.


--As far as I'm concerned, Tolstoy would have done quite the job setting this book in Alexander the Great's reign, or the American Civil War, or wherever, for reasons I've already stated. But the great thing here is, even if you know nothing about the Napoleonic Wars, it doesn't matter. Tolstoy walks you through it. A lot of critics find his "lectures" pedantic and boring, and I'd agree that you have to be in the right mood to absorb them. But they're there. My translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (2007, Knopf Publishers)has over a hundred pages of footnotes, which, admittedly, I did not make full use of but which will benefit me in a second reading. Furthermore, I like how he characterizes Napoleon in scenes where he appears directly. He doesn't go out of his way to paint him as a scared little boy in scenes where he (Tolstoy) quite clearly would address him as such. But I can see him penning the scenes after the French retreat from Moscow with a dry smile on his face.


So, ultimately, I'm not about to claim expertise with W&P. It ate up the entire month of June for me, like I was having a Great Romance with it (I did cheat occasionally--I dipped into a few short story anthologies and a Michael Moorcock collection, God save me), and now I'm happy to turn to something less demanding.


But this is what Deep Reading is all about. I feel good. I feel like I've cleaned the house, paid my bills, gotten a complete physical and benchpressed eighty percent of my weight. I feel strong. I feel vindicated.

Next up: Henry James. Portrait of a Lady.

JACKSON, MI--So I'm about 400 pages into Gone With the Wind, and if anyone had ever told me I'd be this hooked on a Southern Romance/epic, I'd have laughed. It's tough to get past the way Mitchell describes the blacks (with all the "capering" and "gleaming teeth smiling in pleasure" I just about want to retch), but overall I can't put it down. Every time my aunt and uncle come into a room, I'm reading this damned book. Last night, for dinner, they fed me meatloaf made with sawdust, to see if I'd notice, and all I said was, "Can you believe Rhett ran off to join the army? What a turd."

Of course, while not reading or socializing, I'm doing work for the upcoming school year. And, as always, my mind keeps pushing it away, like a kid pushing away a plate of vegetables. So as I read this book, it occurs to me, What would the same story be like if told from the blacks' perspective? I could do what John Gardner did to Beowulf with his novel, Grendel. I could win the Pulitzer! I could be famous! Let me get right on it.

Scratch that. Already done: The Wind Done Gone was published in 2001. Back to work I go.

Things I didn't know about Nixon until finishing Ambrose's third volume of his biography:

--Nixon sold his New York townhouse in 1981 to the Syrian ambassador's office of the United Nations. A company involved with this arm of the UN was involved in selling uniforms to Romania, and uniforms and helicopters to Sadaam Hussein. Nixon may or may not have profited on these sales; as of 1991, Ambrose couldn't be sure.
--Nixon gave two speeches as per his resignation: one was on August 8, 1974, where he formally announced his resignation (without admitting any specific wrongdoing on his part), and one on August 9, to his family and staff, where he made his famous "deepest, darkest valley" comment. Apparently, his family and not a little of his staff was pissed that he'd arranged for the entire thing to be broadcast; in the speech itself, Nixon claimed the whole thing was not set up in advance.
--Oliver Stone must have used Ambrose's work more extensively than I thought. Of course, I suppose he could have gotten some of the dialogue directly from the tapes themselves ("Like the Germans...shoot[ing] down one villager until the rest talk" (sic)..."I really think that's what we're going to have to do..."), but other lines are from Ambrose's own observations: "Eight words back in 1972: 'I covered up. It was wrong. I'm sorry.'" Stone takes Ambrose's sentence and changes it to "I was wrong" and then delivers the line to Haldemann (played by James Woods).
--Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon more out of concern for his own administration and political future than out of worries about tearing the nation apart. I guess I should have figured that out on my own.
--Nixon spent time in W.C. Fields' former Bel Air home at a party. I think it might have been the same house Fields fell down a flight of stairs without spilling any of his drink (as per Carlotta Montijo's autobiography, admittedly problematic).

There's other stuff, but it escapes me at the moment. Volume three sticks in my head better than the others, probably because the last 100 pages covers 17 years and as a result can't be as in-depth; probably because this was the volume I was waiting for all along, with all the Watergage dirt and the resignation itself.