one of the greatest (Irish) writers of the last fifty years, died at the end of March. That day was the day we discussed his novel, Amongst Women, in my course on Irish prose. Having not heard about his death, we noted that he was probably the greatest living Irish novelist.
He wrote a piece for Granta before he died. In it, he examines autobiographically one of the major preoccupations of his fictions: the Church and its role in Irish society. But this ostensibly provincial interest is, as is typical with McGahern, a spring-board for a larger discussion of the human condition. Check it out.
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Who is possibly one of the best writers at the Post and funny, too.
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Technorati Tags: Fox, Television, VandeHei, White, House, Press
The Hill's Alexander Bolton is reporting that House Majority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) is calling for a 'full and lengthy floor debate on the Iraq war'. Seventeen hours, even. Well! That's very inspiring but one has to wonder if the moment has passed. I suppose there's always time for pretending to do the nation's business, which may or may not included oversight of the executive branch and its ingenious policy decisions.
Or not. Apparently Congress will 'debate a resolution produced by the Republican-controlled House International Relations Committee'. The committee staff responsible for drafting such a resolution know nothing of it, which suggests the level of seriousness which Boeher is attaching to this proposal.
But really, the choice quote in Bolton's peice is from Steve Buyer, a Republican from Indiana: 'The House floor is reserved for productivity'. What a kidder!
God Bless America, and the black farce which is the running of our government.
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Technorati Tags: Iraq, Boehner, Hearing, Investigation, Hill,
I'm all for it. Patrick Fitzgerald gives an interview to his old high school newspaper (I ripped this off from Crooks and Liars).
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Technorati Tags: Patrick, Fitzgerald, Regis, High, School,
Jack Shafer in Slate has an article on this Viswanathan plagiarism scandal. He says what I said two days ago, which either means I'm supersmart or the captain of the obvious. Probably the latter.
'Viswanathan tells the New York Times that the 29 cited instances in which she lifted from another novelist's language for her novel were "unintentional and unconscious."
Please! Pinching one or two phrases from another book in the course of writing a 320-page novel might be accidental. But by the time a novelist does it 29 times, the effort is transparently intentional and conscious. Unless, of course, Viswanathan composed her entire novel during Ambien-induced sleep-writing episodes.'
But, of course, Shafer, being much smarter than I am, does a whole funny run-down of plagiarism, which you should read, because Slate is great. He does not, however, reckon with my 'influence' defense. His peice deals almost exclusively with plagiarism in academia, non-fiction, or journalism. Jack, what about fiction?
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Technorati Tags: Shafer, Slate, Viswanathan, plagiarism,
Filed under: Uncategorized
So, George Allen is (or was) a confederate flag fan, according to Taegan Goddard quoting The New Republic. That's not interesting because it's wholly unsurprising, and differs in no significant way from Bush's position in the flag in South Carolina during the 2000 election. It's interesting that Allen's response to the discovery of the photograph of him wearing a confederate flag pin on his collar expresses zero regret and suggests no fault. I'm not calling him a racist, just dense. I can do this because I'm from Georgia, where until three years ago the confederate flag was the, uh, motif of the state flag. But let's be serious. The point of interest here is Allen's response, which exposes a deeply incurious mind (remind anyone of anyone). He'll probably say it's a 'symbol' of the 'rebel' 'heritage' of the South. We've heard all that before. Concede it but why stop the analysis there? What kind of heritage does it symbolize, and what exactly were the rebels rebelling to defend? Everyone knows the answers to these questions, but someone should ask George Allen next time they see him.
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P.S. If George Allen becomes the president, I'm leaving the country. Again.
Technorati Tags: Allen, Confederate, Flag,
The New York Times has Steve Ross, publisher at Crown, rejecting Viswanathan's apology as 'disingenuous' and 'an act of literary identity theft'. Whatever that means. Usually this is called influence. The Times also alluded to possible disciplinary action by Harvard. Why? It's not a test. Clearly Viswanathan was being dishonest, not to mention unclever, but I think this hoopla is not a whole lot more than the result of the post-Frey apocalypse.
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Technorati Tags: Viswanathan, plagiarism, Harvard, Crown, New, York, Times,
Does David Gergen actually think that Tony Snow is going to 'go in and say, gentlemen, this isn't good. The press has a legitimate need here. We have got to give it to them'? I'd note in passing that Nicole Wallace is not a gentleman. I'd note in more than passing that there is no reason to assume that Snow is going to 'go in' there and do this, given his background. I'm not questioning his integrity, but he's a man loyal to a cause, and his cause in this instance it seems to me will be to make the press operation more efficient and less transparent in its mangling of the truth. It's the difference between Imperialism and Hegemony.
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Filed under: Great Moments in Public Domain Literature, Literary, Uncategorized
'He walked on. Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on the peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny I don't remember that. Hallstand too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up the letters. Drago's shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment. Brown brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and brushup. Wonder have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap in the paybox there got away James Stephens, they say. O'Brien.
Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. Agendath what is it? Now, my miss.
Enthusiast.
He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he peered through a chink up at the nextdoor windows. The king was in his countinghouse. Nobody.
Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize titbit: MATCHAM'S MASTERSTROKE. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers' Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds three.
Three pounds, thirteen and six.
Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. MATCHAM OFTEN THINKS OF THE MASTERSTROKE BY WHICH HE WON THE LAUGHING WITCH WHO NOW. Begins and ends morally. HAND IN HAND. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six.
Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story for some proverb. Which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she said dressing. Dislike dressing together. Nicked myself shaving. Biting her nether lip, hooking the placket of her skirt. Timing her. 9.l5. Did Roberts pay you yet? 9.20. What had Gretta Conroy on? 9.23. What possessed me to buy this comb? 9.24. I'm swelled after that cabbage. A speck of dust on the patent leather of her boot.
Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her stockinged calf. Morning after the bazaar dance when May's band played Ponchielli's dance of the hours. Explain that: morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then night hours. Washing her teeth. That was the first night. Her head dancing. Her fansticks clicking. Is that Boylan well off? He has money. Why? I noticed he had a good rich smell off his breath dancing. No use
humming then. Allude to it. Strange kind of music that last night. The mirror was in shadow. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into it. Lines in her eyes. It wouldn't pan out somehow.
Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then: black with daggers and eyemasks. Poetical idea: pink, then golden, then grey, then black. Still, true to life also. Day: then the night.
He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air.'
James Joyce. Ulysses (Chapter 4 – 'Calypso') Made available (fore free) through the good work of Project Gutenberg.
Look, if you're going to plagiarize someone else's novel in the creation of your own, just do it. It's art [see below]. Call it homage. Eliot was the greatest plagiarist. Or was it Joyce?
But seriously please do not steal crappy material from crappy novels and then embarrass yourself by insulting everyone with a pseudo-apology: 'accident'; 'unintentional error'. And for goodness sakes do not, whatever you do, purport a universal stupidity by expecting people to believe that you were 'surprised and upset' when discovering 'similarities' between your novel and the novel you copied. Psychobabbling with words like 'internalized' and 'unconscious' is pretty much never persuasive.
Apologies which consist of a failure to take responsibility are not apologies. They are nothing.
[Of course this is not art. I'm joking. But she could have at least tried to make an intelligent defense along these lines. She is at Harvard after all.]
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Technorati Tags: Viswanathan, plagiarist, harvard, plagiarize, random, house, little, brown
This Guy Jason Zengerle of The New Republic has a fairly hilarious piece out about Joe Lieberman’s opponent, Ned Lamont.
‘Let the record show that Ned Lamont does not consider Joe Lieberman a whiny-ass titty baby. Nor does he believe that Connecticut’s junior senator is a douchebag, an ass clown, or any of the other nasty names liberal bloggers have called Lieberman’.
Zengerle explores how Lamont, a mild-mannered media executive and political neophyte, has come ‘face-to-face with the radical fringe’ and consequently ‘has been feeling some pressure to stake out more extreme positions that those with which he’s comfortable’. But the major concern of the piece, I think, is the larger relationship between the Democratic Party and the potty-mouthed ‘online community’ which may or may not play a significant role in its political re-emergence. What seems clear is that the online community in Connecticut so fed up with Joe Lieberman’s moderate politics has, despite its unequivocally stated radicalism, found a way to support a very wealthy and, but for his position on Iraq, politically moderate alternative. Does this suggest that the radicalism of the Online Left is overstated, or that moderate Democratic candidates may have less difficulty negotiating the political minefield of vocal, angry constituents than one might expect? Could be just a Lieberman thing.
Technorati Tags: zengerle, lieberman, lamont, connecticut,
Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston College, has one of those must-read articles which is both entertaining and deeply insightful, even if the optimism which undergirds its major thesis is sadly misplaced. Wolfe, in the course of reviewing Francis Fukuyama’s autobiographical tell-all of his intellectual crimes and Bruce Bartlett’s excoriation of Bush’s betrayal of fundamental conservative principles, chronicles the ‘bad ideas upon which [Bush] built his administration’. That Iraq has proved such a catastrophic military disaster must, surely, discredit the intellectuals and the ideas behind its provenance, namely (since we’re naming names) the neoconservatives Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz (who it appears, feels so guilty about Iraq that he’s doing his best to do some good at the World Bank, if one is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, as I am. Richard Perle, not so much). As a result, Bush’s preventative war doctrine is in ‘shatters’, as is the entire concept of ‘hawkishness’, according to Wolfe. But preventative war remains in force as a national strategy (as if it weren’t always in force) and it seems that Iran is on the table for a possible if more frightening repeat of the whole Iraq war thing. And as Wolfe notes, ‘Just because ideas are bad does not mean they will disappear’. They haven’t. And they won’t, because for this president to make them disappear would be a really courageous thing to do. And if we know anything about President Bush, his courage is of the swaggering, schoolyard, I’m-bigger-than-you bullying sort and not the do-the-right-thing-even-if-its-tough sort.
Wolfe posits that Bush’s practical demonstration of the real-world effect of bad ideas will revivify, in future administrations of course, an interest in intellectual debate and create an environment in which ‘foreign and domestic policies will have to confront the real world around them, not the imaginary one bequeathed to them by their ideology’. What he fails to acknowledge is that all ideas are ideology, and even if men like Francis Fukuyama and Paul Wolfowitz have been wholly discredited, their ideas were a component of a larger failure in the apparatuses of the state to sort out the good from the bad. This is a structural problem. The neoconservative ideas which made the Iraq war conceivable prevailed because the men behind those ideas ran roughshod over the process, manipulating facts or creating their own when that seemed most efficient. This has been documented lucidly by Larry Wilkerson, Secretary Powell’s former chief-of-staff, here and here. There will always be good ideas, and there will always be bad ideas. To assert that good ideas (whatever they may be) will automatically prevail in the post-Bush world would depend on a profound complacency. The Iraq war proponents succeeded not because of the validity of their ideas, which had been marginal for decades, but because the entire national security apparatus failed in allowing itself to be crippled or evaded by the ideologically determined. Congress failed by refusing to consider seriously the implications of a war. The media failed for refusing to ask the right questions, the sort of questions they are asking now. And the public failed for refusing to pay attention, even when they were watching.
Neoconservative ideas were self-evidently bad from the start. A few people noticed this at the time. Now, thanks to much spilled blood, they have been demonstrated to be the empty theories of reckless intellectuals and technocrats who made very good use of a very dumb president. And yet, we’re having the debate again, about, as Jon Stewart put it, a four-letter Middle Eastern country that begins with I-R-A.
Assuming that we are in for ‘a golden age of intellectual inquiry’ due to the ‘pernicious consequences of Mr. Bush's bad ideas’ is assuming quite a lot. Until the system is reformulated to better test the hypotheses put before it, I’m sure we can continue to count on the bad ideas which are the hallmark of American government.
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Technorati Tags: wolfe, fukuyama, bartlett, bush, bad, ideas, iran, iraq
Carl Bernstein, that intrepid if often overlooked unveiler of Watergate, is calling for a full-scale Senate investigation of the Bush presidency. Such an investigation would, in Bernstein's imagination, enable the president and his people to answer whether or not
'lying, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of information have been a basic matter of policy—used to overwhelm dissent; to hide troublesome truths and inconvenient data from the press, public, and Congress; and to defend the president and his actions when he and they have gone awry or utterly failed.'
I bet I know the answer, when pressed, the president and his people might give. I bet you do, too. Bernstein knows the answer as well, which he forcefully outlines throughout his peice by lucidly documenting the often comical-only-if-they-weren't-so-dangerous missteps and misadventures of the Bush administration. He explicates the whole long and dirty list. Despite the asserted truths of systematic dissembling, Bernstein suggests that such an investigation must be bipartisan (good luck!) and not take as its point of departure analyses like those which form the central thesis of Bernstein's argument:
'It must not be a fishing expedition—and not only because the pond is so loaded with fish.'
If, as Bernstein argues, the pond is so loaded, what would be the point of an investigation? Presumably not, as he suggests, to ascertain the truth. The truth is known. The point would be rather a rather public and highly political dressing-down of the president and the machinations of his terminally upsetting government. Which is fine. I support that. But please, at least have the intellectual decency simply to admit that this is the goal rather than attempting to shroud it behind some noble, apolitical adventure through which the American system of government can 'acquit' itself.
Bernstein asks an important, if self-evident, question:
'Is incompetence an impeachable offense?'
The answer to which, he suggests, is not an obvious and resounding 'no' but one which can be determined by a 'proper fact-finding investigation' and 'public hearings conducted by a sober, distinguished committee of Congress'.
Is there such a thing? What sort of problems might arise from impeaching a president on the non-constitutionally listed grounds of 'incompetence', whatever that means? No doubt people like Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich in their heyday could have identified scores of incompetencies related to Clinton's running of the state.
Bernstein's essay is so vast and constitutes such a re-hashing of pretty much every clearly identifiable Bush boo-boo that it functionally amounts to a trial and supplants the need for the Senate to undertake such an endeavor. Bernstein concludes:
'The system has thus far failed during the presidency of George W. Bush—at incalculable cost in human lives, to the American political system, to undertaking an intelligent and effective war against terror, and to the standing of the United States in parts of the world where it previously had been held in the highest regard'.
The suggestion here really is asinine. It's asinine in its presumption that a sufficient number of Senate Republicans would be somehow persuaded that it is in their interests to investigate the President of the United States. And it's asinine in its total lack of subtlety. Initially I thought this article was a joke, but then I saw Bernstein on the boob tube as serious as can be.
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Filed under: Politics
The Washington Post is reporting today that the Secretary of Defense has finalized a 'campaign plan for the global war on terrorism'. Phew! Good to know that five years after the fact our government is getting its act together in a comprehensive and strategic way. There is something deeply comic about this peice of news, which is to say that it's comical because it isn't new at all. It's merely a beauracratic act of writing down what has likely been policy for a while.
Of course there is an expansion of military powers. According to the Post:
'in a subtle but important shift contained in a classified order last year, the Pentagon gained the leeway to inform — rather than gain the approval of — the U.S. ambassador before conducting military operations in a foreign country, according to several administration officials. "We do not need ambassador-level approval," said one defense official familiar with the order'
Very comforting. Part of a general trend toward removing the barriers to violent escalation. The plans naturally have identified the bad people. And in the event of an attack, it is now national policy to act hastily rather than think through the possible consequences of launching violent retaliation: the plans outline 'a menu of options for the military to retaliate quickly against specific terrorist groups, individuals or state sponsors depending on who is believed to be behind an attack', according to the Post.
Quickly. Believed to be. etc.
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Technorati Tags: rumsfeld, global, terrorism, war, washington, post
