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"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." -- Howard Zinn, 1922-2010.

"It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to." -- J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010. [The Onion mourns.]

"You're not an actor if you're just a person that fits into a cute costume. You're a prop." -- Zelda Rubenstein, 1933-2010.

Forsooth, 'tis an admirable piece of work. By way of Return of the Reluctant, sojourn for awhile with Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, by one Adam Bertocci. Naught is bespoiled here, Knave.

Gray. Ash gray. The sky was ash gray, and the air was heavy. Yes, the air tasted like rust and the tang of remorse. And the ground, it crunched like gravel under a boot, tho' all the boots were long gone -- they had marched on into that last blinding sunset, without remorse and without complaint. Soon it will be black, deepest black, like charcoal or the souls of thieves or the eyes of dead men in their shallow graves, stinking of rot and putrefaction.

And so the Man sighed. For it was Thanksgiving, a good time to repent. To forgive, even, and be forgiven. (But, no, ye will not be forgiven, not in this lifetime, nor the next.) And so the Man sighed again. And with that sigh that carried a whiff of the Old West and better, simpler times when Men were Men and were good with their hands and knew the old tongues, he leaned to his Sister (for it was Thanksgiving) and said, wearily, "Ok, The Fantastic Mr. Fox was pretty solid. Let's go hit up The Road." And so they went, into that ash gray, charcoal black in-between, where violent men prowl and shriek and beg for forgiveness (it will not come), and the good dreams cough up their last.

Or something like that. I wouldn't say Cormac McCarthy is a bad writer, because he quite obviously isn't. (Tho' Salon's Stephanie Zacharek does seem to have his number.) But his voice, and his penchant for wallowing in He-Man pretension, definitely don't speak to me, and my enjoyment of the Coens' No Country for Old Men notwithstanding, I tend to find his books significantly overpraised. I've heard people call Blood Meridian the best American novel since Moby Dick. But, personally, I found it overwrought and tedious, and I put it down in boredom after 150 pages of meticulously detailed vignettes involving blood spatter, entrails, scalps and the like. (Of course, your mileage may vary.)

That was also my sense going into John Hillcoat's adaptation of McCarthy's The Road. As post-apocalyptic sci-fi goes, I thought the book was a solid foray into the genre, and I thought it a well-done, if very depressing, beach read. But I was a bit surprised to find it heralded thereafter as a Big Important Book, when, to my mind, it didn't seem any more or less deserving of acclaim than, say, On the Beach or Alas, Babylon or The Death of Grass or The Stand or (probably my fave of the bunch) A Canticle for Leibowitz. As I said here, "I thought The Road was post-apocalyptic sci-fi for people who normally condescend to the genre, and thus haven't read/seen very much of it."

If I've gone on at length here about my thoughts about the book rather than John Hillcoat's movie, it's because Hillcoat's film version felt more than most adaptations like its source material, with all of its strengths and weaknesses. The Road is not as moody, evocative, and weirdly twisted as Hillcoat's The Proposition, a movie I caught on Netflix and for several weeks thereafter felt like I had dreamed. But it does set a strong and consistent tone, even if that tone is one of grim, monochromatic despair. And, while it's hard not to conjure visions of Aragorn of the Dunedain when a scruffy Viggo Mortensen leads a small child 'round the wilderness, he's pretty good in the part, and it's hard to think of very many other actors who could have pulled it off as well. (Although Guy Pearce makes his case as a contender for the role, late in this film.)

If you haven't read the book, basically it is the near future -- let's say 2013, after John Cusack and co. have dipped out on their arks -- the End has come and gone, and the tattered remnants of mankind have been cast back into the primeval wild. Through this bleak and battered valley of the shadow walks a Man (Hobo Viggo) and his Child (Kodi Smit-McPhee, also quite good.) Unlike so many other of the remaining survivors, they forego cannibalism and scrounge to survive, with the Man remembering the good old days and the Boy sweetly, perhaps mercifully, oblivious of life before the Fall. And so, bereft of the Woman (Charlize Theron) in their life -- she took the quick ticket out -- they traverse south, hoping that a new, better life might await them somewhere along the coast.

And that's about it, really. Our father and son run into various HBO all-stars along the way (Garrett Dillahunt of Deadwood is still a skeez, and, even amid the ruins of human civilization, Omar comin'! (Michael Williams)). And they encounter Robert Duvall, who damn near walks away with the film in a jaw-droppingly good cameo. For my part, the movie conjured up a few new questions for me (why isn't anybody using bicycles?) to go along with the ones I still carried from the book (why would you ever leave that bomb shelter?) But, it's basically The Road, filmed. For better or worse, it has that's book's melancholy soul, its occasional moments of horror, and its grim sense of inevitability and cynicism about the last days of Man.

Now, I personally happen to think there'd be a bit more banding together and ad-hoc families created a la Zombieland and, I hate to say it, 2012, than the blistering, relentless pessimism in evidence here. But I suppose McCarthy would just argue I'm flinching in the face of God's indifference to our plight. Eh, we'll manage. You may think Man has no sense of decency, sir, but don't worry -- It's alright, baby, it's alright.

"Come the twilight of the year, the deathless 'Nutcracker' begins its march across American stages, bearing tidings of comfort and joy. Oh, goody. Yet to those of us who despair of its pervading tweeness and wish ballet had something better to do at this time of year than endlessly reminisce like a sweet, whiskery auntie, it bears some bad news, too. 'The Nutcracker's' stranglehold is all but squeezing ballet dry."

In the WP, Sarah Kaufman rails against the tyranny of the Nutcracker. With all due respect to my ballerina sis, if I never see Clara and her wooden soldier again at this point, it'll be soon enough. Swan Lake is always grand...The Nutcracker, not so much.

"I thought of Jim not as my dopplegänger, exactly -- that would have been ridiculous. But we were the same age, came from similar backgrounds (his old man was a saloon keeper; mine, a cop), and had something of the same spoiled altar boy's worldview, and we both worshipped at the dual shrines of the Roundball and the Word."

In Slate, editor Gerald Howard remembers the late Jim Carroll, best known as author of The Basketball Diaries and the album Catholic Boy. "Tall, slim, athletic, pale, and spectral as many ex-junkies are, Jim was a vivid presence in any setting. He was a classic and now vanishing New York type: the smart (and smartass) Irish kid with style, street savvy, and whatever the Gaelic word for chutzpah is."

"A GCHQ historian, who would not give his name for security reasons, said: 'JRR Tolkien is known the world over for his novels, but his involvement with the war effort may take a few people by surprise.'" By way of Ed Rants, it seems J.R.R. Tolkien was briefly trained in the art of code-breaking at the Government Codes and Cypher School (GCCS), and was even approached to partake in the Council of Turing in the fields of Bletchley, where presumably his linguistic skills would help in deciphering the Black Speech of the Enemy.

John, son of Arthur, however, took the hobbit's route...this time. "While he didn't sign up as was probably intended, he did complete three days' training and was 'keen' to do more. Why he failed to join remains a mystery. There is no paperwork suggesting a motive, so we can only assume that he wanted to concentrate on his writing career.'' Perhaps he feared the seductive power of the Palantír, or perhaps he simply had had enough of war.

"All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority, whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State, and no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police. We must love one another or die." W.H. Auden's "September 1, 1939" turns 70.

Via BDL, and seen where "ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages," a.k.a. Twitter.

"Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America's seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes--to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave...In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkner's prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness."

By way of Dangerous Meta, The Economist's Tom Shone considers the artistic merits of novelists sobering up. "The radiance of late Carver is so marked as to make you wonder how much the imperturbable gloom of late Faulkner, or the unyielding nihilism of late Beckett -- like the cramped black canvases with which Rothko ended his career -- were dictated by their creators' vision, and how much they were simply symptoms of late-stage alcoholism. This suspicion is open to the counter-charge: this contentment and bliss is all very well, but readers may simply prefer the earlier, messed-up work."

They gave us those nice bright colors, they gave us the greens of summers: By way of Dangerous Meta and to commemorate the recent discontinuing of the famous film, Fortune offers up twenty Kodachrome images from its extensive photo archives, including shots by Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, and William Vandivert. The one above, by W. Eugene Smith, dates to 1957.

"Somewhere in literary-character hell, John Galt is spending an eternity getting beat down by Tom Joad & his pick handle." Ah, Ayn Rand...come for the vaguely kinky sex, stay for the self-serving, thoroughly reprehensible philosophy. Salon's Andrew Leonard asks if the recent economic downturn has discredited Rand's Objectivism once and for all, prompting -- as you might expect -- a war in the comments section between the true believers and the gleeful cynics.

Among the many funny comments, this one, reposted from here: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

"Hollywood doesn't trust smart material. If you show them a really smart script. I actually had a studio head read that script and say: 'Wow, that's the best and smartest script that I've read since running this studio but I can't possibly greenlight it.' I asked why and he says 'How am I going to get 13-year-olds to show up at the theater?'" Perhaps a bit self-servingly, screenwriter-director Frank Darabont discusses the studio problems he's had in adapting Fahrenheit 451. "The movie was basically too smart for this person, too metaphorical, etc., etc. It's a bit of a battle you've got to fight."

In the interview, Darabont also talks about another forthcoming King adaptation he's working on (my personal favorite King story): The Long Walk. "I'll be making it, I'm sure, even more cheaply than 'The Mist' because I don't want to blow the material out of proportion. It's such a very simple, weird, almost art film-like approach to telling a story. So let's do it honestly, let's do it that way. Let's not turn it into "The Running Man." So we'll make it down and dirty and cheap and hopefully good."

"I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards. I only twice remember even being seriously angry with a Spaniard, and on each occasion, when I look back, I believe I was in the wrong myself. They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century. It is this that makes one hope that in Spain even Fascism may take a comparatively loose and bearable form. Few Spaniards possess the damnable efficiency and consistency that a modern totalitarian state needs."

Apparently, Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson is now set to make a film version of Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell's autobiographical account of the Spanish Civil War. "The film will highlight the relationship between Orwell and Georges Kopp, the charismatic commander of the brigade. Colin Firth and Kevin Spacey are attached to star as Orwell and Kopp." Hmm. That relationship isn't what I remember taking away from the (excellent) book, and that casting actually sounds pretty terrible to me. (For Orwell, I'd go with someone like Paddy Considine. For Kopp, I'd go with someone who isn't Kevin Spacey.) But let's see how it goes.

"Cohen has explored the theme of love as an all-consuming flame, both destructive and creative, from the outset of his career -- a painting of St. Bernadette in flames appears on the back cover of his first album -- and that tortured ambiguity flickered throughout the evening. 'If he was fire, then she must be wood,' Cohen sang in 'Joan of Arc,' but the old ladies' man himself has always been dry wood, burning up, consumed by the same flame, dying endlessly. Cohen is a battered philosopher of eros, and the beauty and horror of much of his poetry derives from his alternately exhausted and triumphant response to the demigod of sex."

Rumors of the Death of a Ladies' Man have been greatly exaggerated: From the bookmarks, and based on the current tour that's recently been immortalized on the very listenable Live in London, Salon's Gary Kamiya sings the praises of one of his idols, Leonard Cohen. "'Looks like freedom but it feels like death/ It's something in between, I guess,' Cohen sings in 'Closing Time.' That knife edge, that balancing act between the intolerable and the redemptive, is where Cohen lives, both in his work and in his performances. He is a fearless explorer of darknesses of all kinds, mostly erotic and romantic, but also, and increasingly, political and spiritual. For Cohen, without darkness there is no light -- a credo summed up in his song 'Anthem,' with its exquisite chorus 'Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.'"

"'As much as I like his work, I liked him 10 times better,' said Macomb-based author Tracy Knight. 'He had this playful relationship with the universe. He was just a pleasure to be around.'" By way of Blivet and Genehack, Philip José Farmer, 1918-2009.

"It would be insulting to the genre and its readers, as well as fundamentally untrue, to say that Moore reinvented comics. Moore loved comics, in all their overheated melodrama and violence and passion and romance, and simply wanted them to fulfill their potential. He wanted comics to be better written (and more beautifully drawn; he has consistently brought out the best in his artists), to be more alive to the outside world and to other forms of culture, to be less imprisoned by the emotional ghetto of pre-adolescence." On the precipice of Watchmen, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir sings the praises of Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing.

As for Watchmen itself, the early reviews for Zack Snyder's adaptation are coming in pretty poor, unfortunately. Still, I remain cautiously optimistic that, with expectations suitably lowered, there'll be some things to like about Snyder's version. For one, a lot of the worst reviews of the film wallow in exactly the type of insecure, i'm-too-cultured-for-funny-books douchebaggery I just noted in my review of A Christmas Tale. (See, for example, Anthony Lane's spoilerish New Yorker review, whose good points -- for example, that Snyder's film revels in the same fetishizing of power that Moore was trying to subvert -- are buried beneath his puerile sneering at both the author and fanboys in general. ("'Watchmen,' like 'V for Vendetta,' harbors ambitions of political satire, and, to be fair, it should meet the needs of any leering nineteen-year-old who believes that America is ruled by the military-industrial complex, and whose deepest fear -- deeper even than that of meeting a woman who requests intelligent conversation -- is that the Warren Commission may have been right all along.") Even for him and The New Yorker, which famously whined of The Matrix that we should all be reading Cheever instead, this review is a new low.

For another, and as I've said here many times before, Snyder isn't my preferred choice of director for this project either. But, heck, even a stopped watch is right twice a day. So, here's hoping there's something salvageable from this long-awaited adaptation...I'll know when the clock strikes midnight tomorrow.

"'We now know that not only are the mountains the size of the European Alps, but they also have similar peaks and valleys,' says Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist with the British Antarctic Survey. 'This adds even more mystery about how the vast East Antarctic ice sheet formed.'" Arctic Dreams, Antarctic nightmares...Also by way of a GSSM friend (who noted the Lovecraft angle), researchers explore the origins of the Gamburtsev mountain range, beneath the Antarctic ice. Don't we have enough problems right now without intrepid scientists accidentally awakening the Old Ones at Kadath in the Cold Waste?

"Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings." John Updike, 1932-2009.

Get yer agitprop on: By way of DCoE (and with a tip of the hat to Shepherd Fairey), Paste Magazine gives you the chance to make your own "Obamacon" posters. I could waste a lot of time with this.

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape -- the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009.

"I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night."

Defiant and almost combative about the cinematic merits of Australia ("A lot of the film scientists don't get it"), director Baz Luhrmann announces he's moving right ahead on a new film version of The Great Gatsby. "If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money,' they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time they'd be willing to...People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and 'The Great Gatsby' can provide that explanation.'"

"Lemmings do not engage in suicidal dives off cliffs when migrating. They will, however, occasionally, and unintentionally fall off cliffs when venturing into unknown territory...The misconception is due largely to the Disney film White Wilderness, which shot many of the migration scenes (also staged by using multiple shots of different groups of lemmings) on a large, snow-covered turntable in a studio. Photographers later pushed the lemmings off a cliff."

LMG points the way to an interesting list of common misconceptions over at Wikipedia. "The Inuit do not have a large number of words for snow. One Eskimo-Aleut language studied had four unrelated root words...By comparison, English has many unrelated root words for snow as well: snow, sleet, powder, flurry, drift, avalanche and blizzard."

"'Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s "Moby Dick,"' Cooper said. 'This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story." Breaking news from the Department of Bad Ideas: Universal has signed Timur Bekmanbetov of Night Watch and Wanted to "reimagine" Moby Dick for the 21st century. I guess I may be sorta looking forward to the POV angry-whale-cam.

"DFW was a favorite of mine, and often I turned to his brilliant work to recalibrate my sense of challenging writing: the intelligent, the unexpected, the hilarious, the exasperating. Wallace’s stuff didn’t always work, but it was the real stuff." To what base uses we may return, Horatio: As broke during my SC sojourn, Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace chose, for whatever reason, to take arms against his sea of troubles this past week, and by opposing end them. (1962-2008.) I can't say his voice ever really spoke to me -- in fact, much like the output of Paul Thomas Anderson in the film world, I often found his essays wrongheaded and his sprawling, self-referential style actively irritating -- but that doesn't mean his loss isn't tragic and depressing, and all the more so for being avoidable.

Ed Champion, much more of a DFW fan than I, has compiled a worthy list of authors' remembrances of the man and his work.

Another happy fanboy moment this morning (See, I don't only go gaga for character actors and Youtube starlets): While setting up shop for the final day here, I happened to notice author Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, The Yiddish Policemen's Union) taking a quick peek into the confines of our bloggerverse. (He's set to sign books at The Tattered Cover, the very quality bookstore next door, in a bit.)

At any rate, Chabon seemed like a very friendly fellow, and he entertained my sudden barrage of fanboy film adaptation questions without complaint. (We didn't get to talk comics, alas, but then again I didn't want to eat up all of his exploring time.) Regarding Kavalier & Klay, Chabon said that there's no real truth to the Jude Law-Ben Stiller rumors that were circulating awhile back, and that the Stephen Daldry-directed version Chabon himself spoke of a few years ago, like the Sydney Pollack attempt before that, is now sadly moldering away in Development Hell. As for Yiddish, Chabon -- who seemed really delighted that the Coens have grabbed the project -- said they were writing it now (so, in other words, A Serious Man will definitely come first.) No word on casting yet, although I'm willing to bet dollars-to-donuts Frances McDormand is on the short list for Bina.

In any case, Chabon seemed like great people, and it was a real kick to chat him up for a few minutes. (And, unlike a lot of the recognizable folks who've come through lately, there was no entourage of "boundary mavens" to negotiate with.)

"'It's tangible, the misery and hopelessness and the bleakness,' Mortensen says. 'It gives you much more to work with if you're filming in that world instead of a green screen.' Well, they know where they're going, but they don't know where they've been...USA Today scores the first official still from John Hillcoat's take on The Road, with Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Michael K. Williams, and Garret Dillahunt. I found McCarthy's book decent enough but considerably overpraised -- As with mainstream critics' overheated embrace of Pan's Labyrinth, I thought The Road was post-apocalyptic sci-fi for people who normally condescend to the genre, and thus haven't read/seen very much of it. And, more than most McCarthy, I found the style seriously grating after while: "The Man, ashen-faced, sifted through the ash-gray ash. The Child whimpered. His mouth tasted like ash."

All that being said, I really like the cast they've put together here, and, given The Proposition, John Hillcoat sounds like an intriguing choice for this. So, count me in.

"Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking." Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008.

"What I have wanted most to do...is to make political writing into an art." By way of Return of the Reluctant, it seems George Orwell's diary entries will be posted online in blog form beginning August 9, seventy years after he initially wrote them. Welcome to the political blogosphere, George! (And good luck breaking into the TNR-Politico-Atlantic-TPM mutual-regard society.)

"Like other broad-minded and big-hearted works of American culture from the first half of the 20th century -- H.L. Mencken's American Language, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy of novels, the Federal Writers' Project American Guide series, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music -- Names on the Land reflects a glorious union of two primal forces in the American mind. On one hand, Americanism: the inclination toward the large-scale and industrial, toward manifest destiny and the farthest shore...On the other, Americana: the craving for the local and the lo-fi, for the inward heart of things, for the handcrafted and the homemade." In Slate, Matt Weiland sings the praises of George Rippey Stewart's Names on the Land.

In the trailer bin, assassin-prodigy James McAvoy foregoes the doldrums of cubicle life for quality time with Angelina Jolie in the new domestic trailer for Timur Bekmambetov's Wanted, a.k.a. this summer's big dumb Matrix-y action flick (and, mind you, I don't mean that perjoratively in the slightest.) And director Alex Gibney of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Taxi to the Dark Side takes on the Good Doctor in the new trailer for Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. Not sure if the latter will make it to this area, but I'm looking forward to it.

"Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. 'I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,' said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. 'He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless "philosophy" he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.'" In the NYT, Rachel Donadio looks at relationships undone by differing book tastes (and, along the way, quotes a college friend of mine, Christian Lorentzen.)

Funnily enough, my last serious relationship, lo, 18 months ago now, didn't end because of book taste, but -- like Laura Miller above -- I always considered the Ayn Rand citation on her Friendster profile an ominous red flag (and, in the clear light of retrospect, I was absolutely correct in this regard.) In the relationship before that, things started out ok, and then, eight or nine months in, we daringly ventured to trade lists of recommended books. At first, all was well: She seemed to dig All the King's Men, and I finally got around to reading Moby Dick (I liked it, but also found most of it the longest...Atlantic piece...ever...) But we got on shakier ground when I didn't cotton at all to her favorite tome, Thomas Wolfe's Look, Homeward Angel. (If you've never read it, here's the short version: I, the protagonist, am more brilliant and tortured than absolutely everybody here in fake-Asheville, NC, and thus noone will ever understand me. After 500 pages of complaining about it, I will leave, and seek my fortune elsewhere.) Meanwhile, she was so embarrassed to be seen with Dan Simmons' Hyperion -- a book I don't love, but thought might make a good intro to decent sci-fi yarns for someone with highbrow sensibilities, what with all the Chaucer and Keats nods therein -- that she'd hide it from people on the train. Whether all this brought about or hastened the end, I know not...but it surely didn't help. The point being, be wary, young lovers: The book collection can be a minefield, as the Donadio essay attests.

"Historians and novelists are kin, in other words, but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes. The literary genre that became known as 'the novel' was born in the eighteenth century. History, the empirical sort based on archival research and practiced in universities, anyway, was born at much the same time. Its novelty is not as often remembered, though, not least because it wasn’t called 'novel.' In a way, history is the anti-novel, the novel’s twin, though which is Cain and which is Abel depends on your point of view." By way of The Late Adopter, historian Jill Lepore surveys the origins of -- and often-thorny relation between -- history and the novel.

"Sir John Gielgud admired Mr. Scofield’s stillness and sense of mystery, describing him as 'a sphinx with a secret.' Peter Hall, who directed Mr. Scofield’s acclaimed Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s 'Amadeus' in London in 1979, said that as a young man Mr. Scofield brought 'a sulfurous passion, an entirely new note' to the stage, and that there was always a tremendous tension beneath the surface, 'like a volcano erupting.'" Paul Scofield, 1922-2008.

"The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy."

In the WP, author Michael Chabon makes his case for Obama, and argues we should vote against fear. "Thus in the name of preserving hope do we disdain it. That is how a phobocracy maintains its grip on power. To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant."

"'All doubts about the identity of the Mona Lisa have been eliminated by a discovery by Dr. Armin Schlechter,' a manuscript expert, the library said in a statement on Monday...'There is no reason for any lingering doubts that this is another woman,' Leipzig University art historian Frank Zoellner told German radio. 'One could even say that books written about all this in the past few years were unnecessary, had we known.'"

After studying notes scribbled in a 1503 book, German art historians argue they've definitively pinned down the identity of the Mona Lisa. "Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the 16th-century painting...[the notes] confirm once and for all that Lisa del Giocondo was indeed the model for one of the most famous portraits in the world." [Via Daily Dish.]

When I first saw the trailer for Joe Wright's version of Ian McEwan's Atonement, I figured I'd probably give it a pass -- It had that staid period piece look to it that screams inert Oscar bait (see also The English Patient), and seemed far too dry and conventional to do justice to Ian McEwan's powerful, absorbing novel. But, having sat through it several more times, I got Dario Marianelli's pensive piano-and-typewriter score stuck in my head, and when the reviews came back significantly better than I expected (and, indeed, the film garnered 7 Globe nominations this morning), I figured I'd give it a go. And the verdict...well, it comes out somewhere in-between. Atonement is solid enough entertainment of the Merchant-Ivory sort, and it features break-out performances by The Last King of Scotland's James McAvoy (that whooshing sound you hear is all of Ewan MacGregor's old scripts getting remailed) and newcomer Romola Garai. But, although occasionally you can see director Joe Wright try to stick his head under the water, the movie sadly just skims along the surface of McEwan's book. And as an adaptation of said book, it must be considered a failure.

Now, admittedly, there's a pretty tough degree of difficulty here. I hesitate to think any book is inherently unfilmable -- just this month we've had two excellent adaptations in No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly -- but McEwan's dense tome, with its rich inner worlds, abrupt shifts in time, and philosophical musings on the power and moral dangers of writing and imagination, comes pretty darn close. Regardless, Atonement the film never plumbs the depths that McEwan's novel does, a fact that unfortunately becomes more and more unmistakable as the movie progresses. By the end, all the crisp British diction and sweeping long-takes can't disguise the fact that Atonement, however pretty, never captures the book's mordant pulse.

To the story: Atonement begins at an edenic English manor on one of the hottest days of 1935, where an ambitious, headstrong 12-year-old girl named Briony Tallis (Saoirse Roman, a find) has just completed her first full-length play, The Trials of Arabella. (Like many aspiring writers, myself included, Ms. Tallis just loves her some descriptive adjectives.) Young Briony is unsuccessfully trying to convince her bored cousins, visiting on account of a hush-hush impending divorce, to take her magnum opus seriously, when she sees something unexpected. Outside her window, Robbie the housekeeper's son (McAvoy) appears to be ogling Briony's soaking wet, nearly-naked sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley) with amusement and maybe even something darker...what's the word? As Briony tries to piece it together, we discover Cecilia and Robbie are Oxford classmates, although (by Cecilia's design as well as by class distinctions) they travel in rather different circles. Yet, something flickers between them, and Robbie, while mustering up the nerve to express his affection, types out several different drafts of a love note in his nearby cottage...one of which, composed as a bit of a joke, gets right to the point. (It uses the c-word, and alone gives the film an R-rating. Gasp!) Well, you can then guess which version of the letter mistakenly gets delivered, and by Briony no less, who takes it upon herself to examine it first. Her pre-adolescent confusion mounting, Briony is now seriously distressed by Robbie, on whom she once had a barely understood crush. And when further events that hot summer evening eventually take a turn towards tragedy, she -- knowing full well now that he's a sex maniac -- mounts a false accusation against him, one that changes irrevocably the lives of Robbie, Cecilia -- and Briony -- forever.

Wright's Atonement does alright by most of this, the first act of McEwan's book. He cleverly uses the Rashomon device of showing us the same scene several times, and always from Briony's limited perspective first. But, while Roman seems a gifted and composed actress for her age, the film never really gets across the crucially important fact about Briony: her constant flights of fancy. (It's not my movie, of course, but I kept thinking what Atonement needed here is something like what Peter Jackson does in Heavenly Creatures, a brief dramatization of her inner fantasy world.) This becomes a constant problem in the film, particularly as it moves on to the fields of Dunkirk and the hospitals of London just before the Blitz -- the movie never does a particularly good job of getting into its characters' heads. As a result, it shows us what happens in the book, but it barely conveys why these events are important or meaningful for our story.

One of the most egregious example of this is an extremely long shot of the chaos at Dunkirk, rivaling the similar extended takes in Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men last year: Wounded and dog-tired, Robbie and his two soldier mates wander around the beach, seeing all manner of wartime horror and tomfoolery. But, as it lingers on and on, the shot feels more and more like a stunt, completely dissociated from the tale we've theoretically been following. I guess it'd probably play great in a WWII epic that's actually about Dunkirk, but the important action at that moment for our story is happening within Robbie. Perhaps Wright was trying to make a similar point about film with that exasperating stunt-take as McEwan ultimately does about writing...but, if so, I missed it. (There are other, subtler moments where he comes closer, tho' -- I quite liked Nurse Briony's red curtain (stage) entrance to her conversation with the French soldier.)

This inherent flaw of Wright's Atonement -- its inability to depict the characters' interior lives -- reaches its nadir in the final moments of the film, when it almost completely botches the final reveal. I won't give away what happens here, other than to say that, as Matt Zoller Seitz points out, what was a quietly devastating confession to the reader in the book now -- because it is voiced in public -- instead plays like a tacked-on mea culpa that offers a twist-ending, a saccharine moral, and a few moments of cinema apotheosis, all wrapped up in a Hollywood bow. (Again, not my movie, but having this reveal explained in voiceover over images of the character's last, lonely days, a la TLJ in No Country, would've made a lot more sense.) In a way, Atonement makes exactly the same misstep as Weitz's Golden Compass: The very last images of the movie are pitched right at the Titanic demographic (and I don't mean that as a sneer -- I loved Titanic.) But they completely sidestep the inherent darkness of McEwan's ending, and even let the character in question off the hook. Atonement, in McEwan's world, was never so neat, or easy to come by.

Timed to release with The Golden Compass this Friday, the trailer for Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is now online. Liam Neeson and the kids are back again (if a little older), while replacing Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy, and Ray Winstone in the support department are Ben Barnes (of Stardust), Warwick Davis, and Peter Dinklage (of The Station Agent.)

"Zemeckis took the oldest and most important text of our ur-language, and turned it into a 3-D Disneyland ride so cheesy he should have called it 'Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean.'...But the 'Beowulf' travesty is especially glaring, because of the obvious contrast with another work that mined the same ancient field: J.R.R. Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings.'" Taking issue with the "plastic entertainment' that is Zemeckis' Beowulf much more than I did, Salon's Gary Kamiya movingly explains what Tolkien understood about the poem, and how it informed his own work. "Tolkien's brilliant essay can be seen as a ringing defense not just of 'Beowulf,' but of the work he was soon to embark on, another great tower composed of ancient stones. And the themes of lateness, of heroic loss, being caught between one age and another (his world is not called 'Middle-earth' for nothing), are the deepest and most sublime parts of his own epic."

America. Land of the free, home of the obese illiterates? "We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life." An extremely frightening new study by the National Endowment for the Arts finds that, despite the best efforts of the First Lady (which I applaud) over the past seven years, Americans increasingly can't read so good. "The NEA reports that in 2006, 15-to-24-year-olds spent just 7 to 10 minutes a day voluntarily reading anything at all. It also notes that between 1992 and 2003, the percentage of college graduates who tested as 'proficient in reading prose' declined from 40 percent to 31 percent."

Uh, what?! How can over two-thirds of college graduates not be able to read "proficiently"? This is the type of dire news that demands a Sputnik-level response from our political leaders. “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both, as James Madison put it in 1822. "[A] people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives" Or, see Thomas Paine: "[I]t is monarchical and aristocratical government only that requires ignorance for its support," and that's what we'll be getting (more of) if this troubling trend continues. Not to get all progressive up in here, but education and citizenship are the lifeblood of the republic. Without them, the whole experiment falls apart.

Viggo Mortensen as Edgar Allan Poe? Quite possibly. Apparently Mortensen is thinking of signing on for the Sylvester Stallone-helmed biopic, "although he wants some slight revisions in the script." Maybe take out that Ivan Drago sequence.

"But even those who hailed absinthe saw unsettling shadows. Wilde explained: 'After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.'" In the NYT, critic Edward Rothstein sings the praises and surveys the notoriety of "the green muse," absinthe, which is apparently making a legal comeback both here and in the EU. "Absinthe was the premier bohemian drink, as inseparable from the avant-garde of mid-19th-century Paris as was scorn the bourgeoisie. It played the role well; absinthe helped overturn that bourgeois world with seductive visions of another."

"Later the young soldier, by now out of uniform, approached me on the street and introduced himself as a writer. His name, he said, was Mailer. He had just seen my play ['All My Sons']. 'I could write a play like that,' he said. It was so obtusely flat an assertion that I began to laugh, but he was completely serious and indeed would make intermittent attempts to write plays in the many years that lay ahead." Norman Mailer, 1923-2007. To be honest, Mailer's writing never much appealed to me, and his public persona less so. But, if nothing else, he proved how far sheer, undiluted ambition can take you in this world. (Remembrances.)

"'Oh, my god,' Rowling, 42, concluded with a laugh, 'the fan fiction.'" So, as you probably heard, in a moment of retroactive characterization (a la Elisabeth Röhm on Law and Order), J.K. Rowling revealed that Albus Dumbledore is gay. Well, ok then. "A spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall added: 'It's great that JK has said this. It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster.'" And if nothing else, the news should make the witchcraft yahoos that much more livid.

"This man has advanced Communist views, and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings. He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours." Big Brother was watching him: Ralph Luker of Cliopatria points the way to the recently-released UK Security Service files on George Orwell (as well as those on folk music archivist Alan Lomax and others.) "[W]hile his left-wing views attracted the Service's attention, no action was taken against him. It is clear, however, that he continued to arouse suspicions, particularly with the police, that he might be a Communist. The file reveals that the Service took action to counter these views."

Even more Comic-Con riches: A new, extended, walk-you-through-the-plot trailer for The Golden Compass is now online, and it looks...well, to be honest, it looks pretty darn good! Big ups to the art direction and casting people -- Iorek (the polar bear), the daemons (particularly Miss Coulter's twisted golden monkey), and the main players (Lyra, Lord Asriel, Mrs. Coulter, Lee Scoresby) all look note-perfect.

For those others who were looking for more information from the epilogue of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling offered her take on what happened to the surviving characters in a recent online chat. For example [spoilers], "Harry Potter...was named head of the Auror Department under the new wizarding government headed by his friend and ally, Kingsley Shacklebolt." (She also reveals the fate of Ginny, Ron, Hermione, George, and Luna.) Well, ok then...but why, exactly, wasn't this squeezed somewhere in those last few pages? I'd have taken this info over some of the interminable shenanigans in the English countryside.

Naturally, like most of the wizarding world, I spent Saturday deeply ensconced in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling's long-awaited final installment of the tale of the Boy Who Lived. And the verdict? Well, I enjoyed it, and I appreciate the degree of difficulty Rowling faced in closing this much-beloved tale. But, I'll go ahead and put a word in for the muggle-hearted: It was easily my least favorite in the series (Put another way, it was the first book in seven where I started flipping forward every so often to see how much I had left, and the first where I found myself thinking the movie would assuredly be better than the book.) For obvious reasons, the rest of the discussion will involve spoiler-vision, so click the space below to highlight (and don't click anything if you don't want to know the end) [Update: Spoiler-vision turned off, now that the book has been out for awhile]:

* First off, I very much agree with this Laura Miller Salon review: I thought the book sorely missed the presence and the rhythms of Hogwarts. I get that Harry, Ron, and Hermione might have to break out of their safety zone to prosecute the war on You-Know-Who, but in all honesty, I didn't find the wandering around the English countryside nearly as engaging as all the boarding school shenanigans that have marked the series in the past.

* The action scenes. I've complained as recently as my Order of the Phoenix film review that Rowling's action sequences tend to be kinda clunky. Well, as befitting the last book in a seven-tome saga, there's a lot of action in here, from escapes from the Ministry, Godric's Hollow, Luna Lovegood's house, and Gringotts to the final, climactic Battle of Hogwarts. And, most of it, in my humble opinion, didn't really jump off the page. In a way, Hallows felt more like a screenplay treatment than a book, and, as I said, I expect the inevitable movie will make more of these myriad escape and battle scenes.

* The "homages." Yes, all fantasy is derivative, often intentionally so. (As every fanboy and fangirl knows, Tolkien, Lewis, Lucas, and others all deliberately hearken back to collective myths in their writings and films.) Still, there was a lot in Deathly Hallows that felt lifted, from the very One-Ringish locket (As my sister wryly noted, it was "Share the load" all over again.") to Harry's Aslan-like sacrifice in the final battle, from the Sword in the Lake to Ma Weasley paraphrasing Ripley's most memorable catchphrase from Aliens. Each time, it was pretty distracting.

* The fifth element is love? Ok, it's been obvious it's going this way for awhile now, but I still found it rather irritating. But that assuredly speaks worse of me than it does the books. Let's move on.

* The deaths. As it turns out, my guesses about where this was all going turned out to be pretty on the money. (I've long been of the school that Snape was deep undercover, and -- while I always thought Harry would end up losing his magic when he lost his horcrux/scar -- my basic contention that he'd end up all grown up and outside the magical world of Hogwarts was somewhat substantiated by the epilogue.) But the deaths here...well, to be honest, they felt pretty arbitrary to me, as if Rowling wanted it both ways. None of the major characters (except Snape and Voldemort, both givens) ended up on the other side of the veil (even if Ron seemed a goner after leaving in a huff, and Hagrid's been a one-trick-pony for at least five books now.) But Rowling pretty remorselessly cuts a swath through her supporting characters, including offing Hedwig, Mad-Eye, Lupin, Tonks, Colin Creevy, some random Muggle Studies prof, and, most shockingly for most, I'd guess, Fred Weasley. In short, all of these deaths seemed to me the equivalent of Haldir kicking the bucket in Lord of the Rings...a way of bringing the high stakes of death into the equation without it actually affecting any of the major characters. (Ok, Fred may be a Theoden level loss, but it's a toss-up.) In short, the lack of major deaths, especially when compared to the catastrophic losses among the second tier, makes Hallows seem at once painless and bloodthirsty.

Not to miss the forest for the trees, I didn't hate Deathly Hallows, and would still, without a doubt, number the series as a whole as a masterful work of children's fantasy. (I'm not about to recant The Leaky Cauldron at this late date.) I do find myself wishing Harry's final year at Hogwarts had taken a somewhat different direction. but it'd have been hard in any case for the seventh book to live up to the mighty expectations before it (although I actually found David Chase's infamous Sopranos non-ending to be a more satisfying piece of pop culture closure.) Still, the surviving characters of Deathly Hallows -- and especially J.K. Rowling -- have more than earned a happy retirement. So, so long, y'all, and here's hoping future Gryffindors are up to snuff.

"I am also still convinced that voters originally liked George W. Bush's inarticulacy: At least he didn't sound quite as smooth, and ultimately meaningless, as everyone else. Only with time did his natural-born inability to speak English begin to produce infuriating phrases of truly unique pointlessness." Slate's Anne Appelbaum surveys the sad state of political rhetoric in this country, concluding that, while "the brightest new hope for the English language is Barack Obama," "[n]o good writer, however eloquent, can possibly survive a two-year presidential campaign." I have to agree, it is pretty bad out there. The main problem, and it's no secret, is that most speeches today prize concepts over imagery. Read classic nineteenth-century political speeches today -- Lincoln's Second Inaugural, say, or Bryan's Cross of Gold -- and they're flush with vivid imagery and extended metaphors. But, be it due to video killing the oratory star, the need for shorter, quicker, soundbites, or just a general fuzziness about the basic principles undergirding contemporary legislation, most speeches today languish in abstraction and platitudes. (The work of former Dubya speechwriter Michael Gerson is a notable exception in this regard.)

"Solidarity is not discovered by reflection, but created. It is created by increasing our senstivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginialize people different from ourselves by thinking, 'They do not feel as WE would,' or 'There must always be suffering, so why not let THEM suffer?'" Richard Rorty, 1931-2007.

Elijah Wood as Iggy Pop? Um, I'm not sure I see it. But, in more intriguing entertainment news, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan MacGregor will team up for Othello on the London stage, as Othello and Iago respectively. That'd be great to see.

"Sexual tension is at the heart of Hopper's Room in New York, a scenario we peer at through an open window. Home from work, the man reads the sports page. Dressed to go out, the woman plays a single note on the piano, knowing it will annoy him. Their faces are almost as featureless as the blank sheet of music on the piano. Separated by the abstract expanse of the tall brown door, they are literally out of touch. But look a little closer at that fleshy pink armchair...Doesn't that pink chair look unsettlingly like a huge hand, a jutting thumb and curled fingers, ready to clutch the unsuspecting man from behind and give him a shake? Is this the woman's fantasy?"

Mount Holyoke English professor Christopher Benfey surveys "Edward Hopper's secret world" for Slate, commenting at length on a painting whose iconography I've been shamelessly pilfering for years here, at the personal site, and elsewhere. Interesting...I always felt the picture captured a state of anomie and self-inflicted loneliness more than it did sexual tension -- It's a furtive through-the-window look at two people crammed into a tiny little room in New York basically ignoring each other. Or, more to the point, the man at left, caught up in the newspaper (news, not sports!) is so distracted by the world at large that he's shut out his neglected lover at the piano: In his attention to distant events, he's missing out on the beautiful things in his own life. But, hmm, that chair...

"But reading Mansfield has real value for understanding the dominant right-wing movement in this country. Because he is an academic, and a quite intelligent one, he makes intellectually honest arguments, by which I mean that he does not disguise what he thinks in politically palatable slogans, but instead really describes the actual premises on which political beliefs are based. And that is Mansfield's value; he is a clear and honest embodiment of what the Bush movement is." Glenn Greenwald eviscerates Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield after the latter pens an op-ed for the WSJ entitled "The Case for the Strong Executive -- Under some circumstances, the Rule of Law must yield to the need for Energy." See the problem in that title? It kinda jumps out at you.

"Morgan's grasp of Nixon's place in American culture is confirmed near the play's end, when Reston endorses an opinion that one seldom hears in routine journalistic commentary but that I believe is undoubtedly true: Nixon was never rehabilitated. He never came back. Despite the pomp and fine words at his funeral, his name remained a synonym for presidential corruption and crime, and the '-gate' suffix attached to scandals ever since certified Watergate's cultural importance" Rutgers professor and author of Nixon's Shadow David Greenberg reviews Frost/Nixon for Slate.

No, Mayra Daemon, as in Mayra the Hare, because I'm apparently "modest, humble, spontaneous, inquisitive, and solitary." (Well, they got the solitary part right.) Discover your daemon at the official Golden Compass movie site, which does a decent job of trying to explain the basics of Philip Pullman's world to non-readers. (And, sorry, Mayra m'dear, but I've already got a power animal...no hard feelings.)

The 2007 Pulitzers are announced: Cormac McCarthy wins the fiction prize for The Road; Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 takes non-fiction; Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff win the history prize for The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, and Debby Applegate's biography The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher wins in that category. Congrats to all.

As noted here last September, Christopher Tolkien has completed one of his father's earliest works, The Children of Hurin, for publication -- It comes out tomorrow. "Already told in fragmentary form in 'The Silmarillion,' which appeared in 1977, the new book is darker than 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings,' for which Tolkien is best known...The story is set long before 'The Lord of the Rings' in a part of Middle-earth that was drowned before Hobbits ever appeared, and tells the tragic tale of Turin and his sister Nienor who are cursed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord."

Update: "I came away from 'The Children of Hurin' with a renewed appreciation for the fact that Tolkien's overarching narrative is much more ambiguous in tone than is generally noticed...What sits in the foreground is that persistent Tolkienian sense that good and evil are locked in an unresolved Manichaean struggle with amorphous boundaries, and that the world is a place of sadness and loss, whose human inhabitants are most often the agents of their own destruction." Salon's Andrew O'Hehir favorably reviews Tolkien's dark new tome.

Her name is Yoshimi, she's got a black belt in karaoke...Two choice links via Webgoddess. I thought for sure this was a Slings and Arrows-type April Fool's joke at first, but no: The Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is coming to Broadway. "There's the real world and then there's this fantastical world. This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It's almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that." And, weirder still, it's apparently being written by Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing and Sports Night.

And, also via Kris, my old site The Leaky Cauldron has posted the cover art for the final Potter installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which you can see at right. Clean, simple, I like it.

"Faust's interpretation helps explain the way the US responded to the 9-11 terrorist attacks with a war on Iraq. 'Even a war against an enemy who had no relationship to September 11's terrorist acts would do,' she notes. People supported war not just because of the rational arguments offered by the White House, but also 'because the nation required the sense of meaning, intention, and goal-directedness, the lure of efficacy that war promises.' It was especially necessary to restore a sense of control after the terrorism of 9-11 had 'obliterated' it. The US, she concludes, 'needed the sense of agency that operates within the structure of narrative provided by war.'" In the pages of The Nation, Jon Wiener evaluates new Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust's work on war mania.

10,000 Men of Harvard...and one woman leading the charge: According to the Crimson, author and historian Drew Gilpin Faust is set to become Larry Summers' replacement as president of Harvard, and the first female president of dear alma mater in 371 years. She's already an improvement on Summers just by showing up.

"It's hard to imagine what freshmen think when they wander into Professor Banzai's lecture hall. Weller reports that he loses a lot of students after the first class. 'They thought they were going to get the easy A from old RoboCop,' he says with a laugh." Peter Weller, Ph.D. (pending) (By way of Quiddity.)

"These examples help bring a crucial issue of plagiarism into focus. Behind the talk of originality lurks another preoccupation, less plainly voiced: a concern about the just distribution of labor." After reading Richard Posner's Little Book of Plagiarism, Slate's Meghan O'Rourke ruminates on the ethics of stealing someone's words. (Also seen at -- shamelessly plagiarized from? -- The Late Adopter.)

Old news now, but it happened while on the track: Harry Potter's final chapter gets a title: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

"Said's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is counterproductive. It may have swelled the ranks of subaltern studies programs and provided grist for numerous postcolonial studies Ph.D. theses, but that doesn't make his argument correct. In the end, bad books are just bad books, and when they are canonized for instrumental reasons, the result is a coarsening of thought and an ever-widening and unhealthy divide between the academy and mainstream culture." In his review of Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, Salon's Gary Kamiya rails against the canonical status of Edward Said's Orientalism. "Said's radically skeptical position...was so abstract and chameleonic that it was impossible to disprove it, since it constantly dissolved (and hid behind) a multitude of deconstructive readings." At the risk of seeming relentlessly pre-mo, I also tend to get irritated with arguments that rely on the immutability and inescapability of an all-powerful, trans-historical discourse. But at least, unlike too many of his advocates, Said's work is relatively clear and readable. When it comes to a lot of post-colonial writing, I wonder: Is it that the subaltern cannot speak, or that nobody can hear him/her over all the jargon-riddled shouting?

"But if the list is for real, it's evidence of presidential dereliction of duty, and perhaps an outright threat to national security. Two books a week is an uphill battle for a graduate student whose responsibilities don't even include showering. For a president, who lives at work, reading and comprehending two serious books a month takes a Herculean effort." (Hey, I shower!...um, most days.) Slate's Bruce Reed discusses Dubya's newfound love for books, suggesting that his recent reading contest with Karl Rove is part of the reason why things have gone so astray of late for this president. Well, call me old-fashioned, but -- My Pet Goat notwithstanding -- I'd usually rather see Dubya with his nose in a good book than see him make any more lousy world-threatening decisions. Besides. Dubya dug himself in this hole long before 2006...some healthy book learnin' might've done him right earlier in his tenure. Hey, at the very least, he might've locked down that whole pesky Shia-Sunni thing.

So, my sister, her boyfriend, and I went to check out The Times They Are A-Changin', the new Twyla Tharp-choreographed reimagining of famous Bob Dylan songs, last Thursday (with, as a star-gazing aside, some heavy-hitters in attendance: Annie Leibowitz sat directly in front of me, and Tharp herself sat directly behind. Yes, I'm a celebrity hound.) And the verdict? Well, first let me say, that -- some early dabbling in community-theater notwithstanding -- I'm really not much of a musical guy. I tend to find the American Idol-ish histrionics of Broadway singing really distracting, and particularly when the song in question is something like "Masters of War." Nor have I seen Moving Out, Mamma Mia!, Ring of Fire, Almost Heaven or any of the other "Broadway Karaoke" shows that currently seem to be the rage, so I can't really compare it to any of the others -- I was really more interested to see some intriguing interpretations of Dylan than I was to partake in a group sing-a-long (which, thankfully, Times is not.) With all that said, I found Times to be...kinda hit-or-miss. While some of the visions here do their source material justice in memorable fashion, others fall flat or just seem ill-conceived. And, while the circus acrobatics on display are amazingly well-performed and at times mesmerizing, too many numbers slip into the same dark carnival-of-the-absurd pattern. The cast works hard, but surely, when you get down to it, there is more to Dylan's oeuvre than just aggro carny folk.

To its credit, Times samples songs from across Dylan's career, from the hoary ("The Times They-Are A Changin'," "Blowing in the Wind") to the obscure ("Man Gave Names to All the Animals," "Please, Mrs. Henry"), through the lean years ("I Believe in You," "Dignity") and up to the recent critical revival ("Not Dark Yet," "Summer Days.") Set in a traveling circus run by the vicious, heavy-handed Captain Ahrab (Thom Sesma) -- a character from one of Dylan's great American fables,"Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," not included -- the play basically centers around a love triangle among Ahrab, his son Coyote (Michael Arden), and the lady Cleo (Lisa Brescia), one of the circus performers. Through their story -- and the larger tale of a power struggle over the circus -- are refracted these thirty or so Dylan tunes, strung togther in haphazard but decently compelling fashion.

I'd like to say there's a formula for when a song works and when it doesn't, but it doesn't go over like that. One of the two best numbers, "Simple Twist of Fate" (the only cut from Blood on the Tracks here), is played basically straight. Alone in spotlight, Ahrab sings wistfully in the foreground (as seen at left) while the younger couple cavorts behind him, a haunting memory. "He woke up, the room was bare. He didn't see her anywhere. He told himself he didn't care, pushed the window open wide. Felt an emptiness inside, to which he just could not relate." The bleak, melancholic staging matches the song perfectly, and Ahrab/Sesma channels both its poetry and its pain.

But, in the other most successful number, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (a song I can usually take or leave), Tharp & co. have taken a tune that's ostensibly about a drug deal and just ran with it. Now, it's a gripping, Bergmanesque dance of death, with one of the sadder clowns (Charlie Neshyba-Hodges) holding center stage as the ensemble circles around him in black, recalling the doomed pilgrims of The Seventh Seal. Obviously, Tharp isn't the first to read "Tambourine Man" as a disquisition on mortality. ("I'm ready to go anywhere, I'm ready for to fade...into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it.") Nevertheless, the staging both feels innovative and cuts close to the bone of the song in surprising fashion.

There are other good moments scattered throughout the show, although few that hold their power over the course of an entire track: For example, a contortionist writhes horribly on a hospital bed during the "Dr. Filth" passage of "Desolation Row," flashlights whirl and twirl (held by people brandishing them vaguely like tusken raiders) during "Knocking on Heaven's Door", the cast memorably get their drink on for "Please, Mrs. Henry," and one clown reenacts Dylan's "Subterranean" signage during the latter half of "Like a Rolling Stone."

But, when a song's off, it's pretty off. The most obvious offenders are "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Blowing in the Wind," and arguably "Lay, Lady, Lay," all of which are performed in a deadly earnest Broadway patter that just stop the show dead. (This is particularly unfortunate in the case of the first one, since that's how the show begins.) But, there are other problems. The bizarre welcome-to-the-carnival-of-beasties routine works well for "Desolation Row" (since, after all, "The circus is in town") and maybe even for other rousing numbers such as "Like a Rolling Stone." But, it's overdone -- in "Highway 61 Revisited," "Everything is Broken," "Gotta Serve Somebody," "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" -- to the point that the musical numbers become indistinguishable. ("Masters of War" also falls somewhat into this pattern -- I liked it better than most, but was reminded more of ABT's splendid recent revival of "The Green Table," which captured the same sentiment better.)

And, sometimes, in my humble opinion, the attempted interpretation falls flat on its face. I thought turning "Not Dark Yet," Dylan's gloomy but resigned rumination on death around the corner, into a rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light completely misses the point of the song, which is that he's given up and given in to the coming darkness. ("I've been down on the bottom of a world full of lies. I ain't looking for nothing in anyone's eyes.")

Most egregious in this regard is what's been done to "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." Perhaps because it remains such a personal song -- a song about two people rather than a generation -- I'd say it's aged much better than almost all of the other hugely popular early-Dylan standards ("Blowing in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.") In fact, I might go so far as to say that "Don't Think Twice" may just be the quintessential Dylan break-up song in a career full of them (although now that I write that...Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks...ok, never mind. That's too bold a statement.) At any rate, here, all the complexity of competing emotions that drives the track -- "I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind, you could have done better but I don't mind, you just kinda wasted my precious time" -- is wasted, as it's become, inexplicably, a number sung by a woman to her overly eager dog. (Although I will concede that the canine in question -- I believe it was Jason McDole -- was convincingly and creepily Berkeley-like.)

In sum, A Times They Are A-Changin' is at times engaging, and may be worth catching if you have a hankering for the carnivalesque, if you're a Dylan completist, or if you have a higher tolerance for showtune renditions than I do. But, as an exploration of Dylanalia, I found the show too narrowly circumscribed within its three-ring circus, and ultimately unsatisfying. (Then again, in the play's defense, I didn't think much of Masked and Anonymous either, so perhaps I'm just ornery about such things.)

Unfortunately, the reviews of Stephen Zaillan's All the King's Men, the second half of my Friday morning double-feature, are basically correct. The film just doesn't work...Indeed, it's even a bit of a stinker. I've never seen the 1949 John Ireland/Broderick Crawford version, so I can't tell you how it compares to that particular Oscar-winner. But, a few ghostly wisps of Penn Warren's prose notwithstanding, this 2006 take on the novel is, as I feared in a post one year ago today, both hopelessly miscast and remarkably pedestrian. Straining mightily for solemnity throughout its run, this Men feels leaden from the start and fails to capture the sprawling grandeur of the novel (which, I guess, some literary critics hate. I for one love the book -- it's one of my all-time favorites, and not just for the failed historian digression.) If you've never read All the King's Men, trust me -- you'll want to stay away from this flick. (If you have, well, you probably want to stay away too.)

Loosely based on the life of Louisiana's Huey Long, All the King's Men follows the trajectory of one Willie Stark (Sean Penn, way off), an earthy and ambitious backcountry politician with big city hungers and national dreams. (Consider him the Tommy Carcetti of his day.) In the midst of running a doomed gubernatorial campaign -- designed by political insiders Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini) and Sadie Burke (Patricia Clarkson) to split the hick vote and thus elect the favored candidate of the powers-that-be -- Starr finds his populist voice and manages to capture the State House on a platform of less corporate graft and more roads, schools, and libraries for the people. But, once in office, the lure of power aggravates Stark's more misanthropic tendencies, and (though this film barely explains how) the new governor begins to enact his redistributive policies with increasingly little regard for democratic niceties.

Along for the ride is our embittered narrator, Jack Burden (Jude Law, also way off but, surprisingly, closer to the mark than Penn). A slumming scion of Louisiana's elite turned disaffected journalist (and functioning alcoholic), Burden, who relishes playing the world-weary observer, becomes Stark's right-hand man despite himself. But, involvement, like, power, carries its own price. Soon, to accommodate Stark's growing political appetites, Burden finds he must not only reenter but betray the past he thought he'd earlier burned away, whether it be by digging up dirt on his magisterial godfather, Judge Irwin (Anthony Hopkins, on autopilot), convincing his best friend (Mark Ruffalo, zombielike) to sign up under Stark's employ, or allowing his youthful sweetheart (Kate Winslet, strangely bad) to herself come under Stark's thrall.

To the film's credit, the movie attempts to spend as much time on Burden's arc as it does on Stark's, as it should. But the two halves of the tale seem almost wholly separate here -- Stark disappears for the middle third, when Burden's backstory takes center stage. And that's just the start of what's wrong here -- Simply put, everything just seems off. Penn is wholly unbelievable (and virtually inscrutable) as Stark, Law doesn't serve much better as Burden. Other actors (Hopkins, Ruffalo) seem bored, others still (Gandolfini, Clarkson) are given too little to do. Accents are consistently mangled throughout. James Horner's score is intrusive to say the least. Plot details are consistently elided over to the point of the story barely making sense (Why, for example, is Stark being impeached? One gets no clue in this version.) And Zaillan's hamhanded directing stops the movie dead all too many times (the most egregious case being in the final moments, with the Louisiana seal -- you'll see what I mean.) Even the period is off: The novel takes place during the Depression, but for reasons that never become apparent we begin our tale here in 1954. If it ain't broke, people...

The sole redeeming grace of this version of All the King's Men are the occasional literary flourishes from the book, which are usually given by Jude Law in voiceover. Only in these brief moments, and only imperfectly, can we sense the endless jiggers of whiskey, the cedary scent of spanish moss, the lingering sweat and grinding despair that characterize Penn Warren's novel. Whether it be Willie's path to power or Jack's remembrances, All the King's Men is about more than just a political rise and fall. As befitting its author's role in the southern agrarian literary movement, curdling at the novel's heart is a lament for the days of yore and a futile raging against the inexorable indignities of time. The past passes: It marks us forever and can neither be escaped nor reclaimed as it was -- it can only be confronted and accepted. "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud." Zaillan's film version does make a meaningful attempt to capture these crucial elements of the book, but, alas, like Willie himself, its reach far exceeds its grasp.

By way of a former member of the program here, Christopher Tolkien announces that, after thirty years of work, he's completed and is publishing an unfinished 1918 J.R.R. Tolkien manuscript entitled The Children of Hurin.

Two recent history-minded links courtesy of the NYT: National Review's Richard Brookhiser evaluates the marginalia of John Adams, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg examines the recent revival of Munich among the Bushies (as does the WP's Eugene Robinson.)

He can turn and walk away or he can fire the gun...Having eluded the press and apparently entering his existential period, Dubya totes around Camus's The Stranger in Crawford. Update: Slate's John Dickerson has more.

"In the end, disappointment was Hofstadter's great overarching theme, which may partly explain why, as Brown points out, 'there is no Hofstadter school' today. His account of the American past was finally tragic, and tragedy lies outside the comfortable boundaries of American thought." NYT Book Review editor (and bane of Ed Rants) Sam Tanenhaus takes a look at David Brown's new biography of Richard Hofstadter.

"When you thought it had to be over, that your nerves couldn't stand any more, that was when Matheson turned on the afterburners. He wouldn't quit. He was relentless. The baroque intonations of Lovecraft, the perfervid prose of the pulps, the sexual innuendoes, were all absent. You were faced with so much pure drive that only rereadings showed Matheson's wit, cleverness, and control." By way of Ed Rants, Stephen King pays tribute to Richard Matheson's I am Legend, soon to be a Will Smith/Johnny Depp movie near you.

"Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers." Using doubled passages on Homeland Security as a newspeg, the NYT delves into the somewhat sordid world of history textbook writing. Hmmm. From my experience, what the Times reports is true, but it's not true of every book. I've done quite a bit of work revising supplementals for various history textbooks during my grad school tenure, and, at least for the ones I've worked on, the updates and revisions have come right from the top down, from the author or authors on the book's cover.

"Quick answers (as of this date): Golem: yes. Antarctica: yes. Gay love story: yes. Ruins of World's Fair: no. Long Island: no. Orson Welles: no. Salvador Dali: yes. Loving reference to Betty and Veronica: no. Stan Lee: no." Author Michael Chabon blogs in to say, among other things, that Natalie Portman is likely Rosa in the forthcoming film version of Kavalier & Klay, to be directed by Stephen Daldry.

The needle of the Golden Compass takes another spin...Anand Tucker is out and Chris Weitz is back in as director of His Dark Materials.

Hmmm, why do I always feel like the Met is missing something? Wait, that's it...fine art needs more robots! Ah, that's much better.
(By way of Quiddity.)

The new trailer for Stephen Zaillan's star-studded take on All the King's Men premieres online. I remain conflicted -- James Gandolfini looks just about dead-on as Tiny Duffy (and should be fun to watch as the anti-Tony Soprano), and, tho's she not really in this clip, I love Patricia Clarkson as Sadie. But Jude Law and Sean Penn still feel wrong, wrong, wrong to me (particularly when Penn/Stark's on the stump.) And I still kinda hate the blatantly Oscar-bait-ish ad campaign on display here, what with the distracting orchestral sweep and all the actorly kudos. But, we'll see...I'll definitely be in the theater day one.

Walden Media announces its film plans for the rest of the Narnia books: Apparently, they're taking a page from PJ's LotR and shooting Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair back to back, with the next installment (Caspian) due out Xmas 2008.

"Ginsberg once called the poem 'an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified.' So it has been." Slate's Stephen Burt ruminates on the fiftieth anniversary of Allan Ginsberg's Howl.

And hundreds of fifth-graders in day-glo hats lamented...The Smithsonian American History Museum will be closed for two years as of Labor Day, to allow for interior renovations and a new display for the Star Spangled Banner. And in vaguely related news (and as noted previously here), the Post looks into the plan by the CIA, Air Force and others to file away some records...forever. (2nd link via Cliopatria.)

The forthcoming film version of All the King's Men, which disappeared like the ghost of Cass Mastern last fall, gets a new release date: September 22, 2006. Tell it to the Judge.

"'Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq,' Buckley said...'If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam...It's important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure.'''
By way of Cliopatria, National Review founder and Firing Line wit William F. Buckley discusses Dubya's failings, his own problems with neoconservatism -- "The neoconservative hubris, which sort of assigns to America some kind of geo-strategic responsibility for maximizing democracy, overstretches the resources of a free country." -- and the presidents of his lifetime. "'[Bill Clinton] is the most gifted politician of, certainly my time,' Buckley said. 'He generates a kind of a vibrant goodwill with a capacity for mischief which is very, very American.'"

As spotted in the new Money magazine (p. 100), my sister Gillian and her longtime boyfriend Ethan are featured in ABT's ad campaign for their upcoming Spring season at the Met -- Tickets are on sale now.

Congrats to DC friend Franklin Foer, who was recently named to replace Peter Beinart at TNR. My advice to him would be much the same as Jack Shafer's: "The New Republic needs revival, but Foer can't hope to revive it by pleasing [owner Marty] Peretz." With a long and illustrious history ranging back to Herbert Croly and Walters Lippmann and Weyl, TNR should be a flagship of progressivism, and so much more than just the "Joe Lieberman Weekly." Godspeed, Frank.

With another no-confidence vote on the way, Larry Summers announces his resignation as president of Harvard, effective at the end of the school year. Between running Cornel out of town and arguing women can't do science, Summers long ago lost any truck with me. He was an embarrassment to the University, and it's past time for him to go.

A quick book bash: I wasn't going to write about Philip Roth's The Plot against America, which I read a few weeks ago, until seeing C.S.A tonight crystallized my problems with it. I should say up front that I run hot and cold on Roth -- I quite liked Portnoy and American Pastoral, but kinda loathed Goodbye, Columbus. And, while The Plot Against America is getting good reviews all around, I had a strongly adverse reaction to it. For those of you who haven't heard anything about it, Plot describes an alternate USA in which famed aviator and rabid isolationist Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR in 1940, makes peace with Hitler, and begins a pogrom of sorts against Jewish-Americans, forcibly enrolling Jewish children (including the narrator's brother) in Americanization programs and, eventually, attempting to relocate Jewish families to the Midwest. As per Roth's usual m.o., the tale is told from the perspective of a Newark family trying to find their way -- not very successfully -- amid the deteriorating events.

As alternate histories go, it's a great idea for a book, and I was really looking forward to seeing what Roth did with it. But, unlike CSA, which clearly showed an attentiveness to both what happened and what might have happened, Roth here has written an alternate history without seeming to give a whit about the history. In short, I found the book stunningly, almost narcissisticly, myopic. One gets the sense from reading Plot that the rift beween Jews and Gentiles in America was not only the most significant but the only ethnic or cultural schism in FDR's America. This is not to say anti-semitism wasn't rampant and widespread at the time -- Of course it was, as attested by Father Coughlin, Breckinridge Long, and Lindbergh himself, who -- in a speech that tarnished his reputation much more than Roth lets on -- blamed support for the war on the "large ownership and influence [of Jews] in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government." But, in The Plot Against America, no one else seems to even exist besides Jews and (White) Gentiles -- To take the two most notable examples, there's no mention of the fact that Africans-Americans were being lynched in staggering numbers in this period (the only lynching mentioned is that of Leo Frank), or that we actually did intern Japanese-Americans during the war. (As a point of contrast, C.S.A.'s central thesis is about slavery, but it moves beyond white-black relations to explore, or at least reference, the place of Asians, Latinos, and gay Americans in the new Confederate system.)

This isn't about tokenism -- it's about doing justice to the people and the history of the period you're writing about. And, frankly, the history in The Plot Against America strains credulity time and time again. I'll skip over the final twist so as not to give it away, and because it's so ridiculously implausible that Roth couldn't have intended for us to take it seriously. But, even despite that, Lindbergh's popularity -- and the public's taste for isolationism -- by 1940 seem significantly overstated throughout. (To take one example, there is no way that the Solid Democratic South would up and vote GOP that year -- With the Civil War only recently out of living memory, the Dems could've run a wet paper bag in the South, so long as it wasn't of the party of Lincoln and didn't threaten to upset the Jim Crow racial order. That didn't even begin to change until Strom in '48.) And, while Walter Winchell plays a large role here in calling out the Nazi-American pact and resulting Jewish pogrom, he seems to be the only public figure in America doing so. Where's everyone else? It doesn't make sense.

Finally (and I'll admit, this really ticked me off), Plot basically commits a character assassination of progressive/isolationist Burton Wheeler of Montana, who here appears as Lindbergh's Vice-President (or, more to the point, his Cheney -- I'm assuming that's what Roth was getting at.) At a certain point in Plot, we're supposed to believe that Wheeler -- a guy who refused to prosecute alleged dissenters as Montana Attorney General during the hysteria of WWI, helped lead the investigation into the government corruption of Teapot Dome, and turned on FDR because he thought court-packing was an unconstitutional powergrab -- is going to, out-of-the-blue, declare martial law and start rounding people up? That makes zero sense, and is, in effect, a slander on a real historical figure. Roth is obviously one of America's most gifted writers -- but, lordy, I thought The Plot Against America needed more research, more attention to historical nuance, and more sense that injustice and suffering in this country has often run along more than one axis of discrimination.

"Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns - like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly - high above it - an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight! This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I'd never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing a voice of God." A very happy 250th birthday to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. (And, just to be fair to that patron saint of mediocrity, Salieri turns 256 in August.)

With The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe still raking it in, the next Narnia movie, Prince Caspian, moves forward. Apparently, all four Pevensies are on board and shooting will begin this autumn. "If we don't make it now we'll never be able to, because [the kids]'ll be too old." (Via WebGoddess.)

"If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing." Scientist, inventor, philanthropist, statesman, diplomat, epigrammist, satirist, exemplar, and a bon vivant and ladies' man to boot...If George Washington is the Father of our Country, then he's definitely our Favorite Uncle: Ben Franklin turns 300. Happy birthday!

"When we think about the authoritarian world that Orwell painted, the catchphrases are one thing, but when you read the book again, the specifics and relevance for now are stunning." Apparently, Tim Robbins is thinking of bringing 1984 to the screen (again). Hmmm...I dunno. I enjoy Bob Roberts and Dead Man Walking, but thought Embedded was way over the top. And it'd be really hard to make a better or more faithful adaptation than the Michael Radford version with John Hurt and Richard Burton.

"Foner's field of special expertise is what might be called without exaggeration the crucible of American freedom: the Civil War, the emancipation of the slaves and the ambiguous, myth-shrouded period that followed known as Reconstruction. He never puts it this directly, either in this new, somewhat compressed popular history or in his 1988 magnum opus, 'Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877,' but he sees Reconstruction, with all its contradictions and unrealized possibilities, as the key to all of American history." Salon's Andrew O'Hehir takes a gander at Eric Foner's latest book, Forever Free.

I'm a bit behind on this one: Lisa Halliday, an old friend from college and Let's Go days, recently had her short story, Stump Louie, published in the Paris Review. Congrats!

"'I do think Harvard Square, unless something drastic is done, is dying.'" With the imminent closing of yet another landmark, the Brattle Theater (The Tasty, the original Coop, and the Bow & Arrow had all disappeared within a year of my graduation (1997), and recently Wordsworth Books and Briggs & Briggs have joined them), the AP takes a moment to lament the commercialization of Harvard Square.

"The message in The Lord of the Rings is, in a way, that the struggle to destroy the evil also destroys the good. The very effort to mobilize against the evil unalterably changes what you're trying to defend. So at the very end of that trilogy, the heroes -- Frodo the Hobbit, Gandalf and Elrond -- sail away. They can't live in this world that they've created, because it's so different from what they started out to defend. It's a metaphor; Abraham Lincoln didn't sail away, he was killed, but the world after the Civil War was not Lincoln's America anymore." By way of a friend in the program, Columbia's Eric Foner picks his five most personally influential books, and guess what made the list...

By way of Cliopatria, the folks at Crooked Timber have held another online sci-fi symposium akin to their earlier one on China Mieville's Iron Council. This time the subject is Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and the respondents include John Quiggin, Maria Farrell, Belle Waring, John Holbo, Henry Farrell, and -- finally -- Susanna Clarke.

"Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they're always wrong." Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a somber and compelling character study of the eponymous author, during the six years he spent in Kansas researching his renowned "non-fiction novel" of true crime, In Cold Blood. It's a slow-moving film, but a memorable one. I don't think I'd want to sit through it again anytime soon, but I do expect it'll be on the short list for Best Actor nods come awards time.

To be honest, I have no memory or sense at all of Truman Capote, so I can only assume that Hoffman's performance here, with his fey, lilting voice and precise, carefully-constructed mannerisms, is of a piece with the real author. Regardless, Hoffman's Capote cuts a complex and striking figure that's hard to take your eyes from -- He's at once vainglorious and needy, extroverted and remote, compassionate and manipulative, convivial and detestable. Intrigued by a newsclipping of four brutal 1959 murders, he and childhood friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) venture to the stark landscape of Holcolmb, Kansas, to investigate. Capote soon realizes that that story of the murders could make for a new kind of novel. But, as he comes to befriend the killers -- most notably Perry Edward Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) -- he also discovers that the problem with writing a non-fiction novel is that the characters have lives of their own, and events may not follow the path you necessarily intend.

This is Hoffman's film through-and-through, and, like I said (sorry, David Strathairn), I expect that he'll be a tough act to beat come awards season. Still, Capote is also anchored by a strong sense of place and by many fine supporting performances -- most notably Collins and Keener -- but also Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban, and The Wire's Amy Ryan. Strangely enough, Capote also bookends nicely with last week's Jarhead, and crystallizes some of my problems with that film. While we were supposed to feel for Pvt. Swofford's predicament that he's gone to war and (sniff) can't actually kill anybody, this film shows the devastating emotional consequences of a not-unrelated predicament -- Capote can't finish his work of genius until "the story ends," so to speak. And, as Hoffman emphatically illustrates by the end of this powerful film, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones."

On my sister's advice, I went to go see Ballets Russes yesterday evening at the Film Forum, and she was right: It's a stunning film, one that I'd even recommend to people who have little-to-no interest in ballet. Like the best documentaries -- and this is the best I've seen in some time -- Ballets Russes transcends its immediate topic to capture larger and more ephemeral truths. The movie not only brings to life a bygone era in the arts and helps to explain the current popularity of ballet in the US and around the world -- it also powerfully reflects on both the inexorable passing of time and the timelessness of dance, its magical capacity to wash away years and overcome human frailty. Like a perfectly executed ensemble piece, Ballets Russes can take your breath away.

After a brief introduction to the dancers of the Ballets Russes, who reconvene in New Orleans in 2000, the documentary shifts to 1929, with the death of renowned ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev and the formation of the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, a successor company to Diaghilev's famed troupe. Briefly artistic-directed by a young George Balanchine (who'll show up again in the story, after a stint training elephants at the circus) and headlined by a trio of newly-discovered Russian "baby ballerinas," the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo soon splits into rival companies -- one headed by dancer-choreographer Leonide Massine, the other manned by financial backer Colonel Wassily de Basil. After wrangling over ballerinas and staffing their respective companies with ringers from other ensembles, the two Ballets Russes duel over London audiences and US contracts, until the exigencies of World War II force both to travel West. There, they attempt to stave off financial collapse by spreading the ballet meme (via steam train and Hollywood song-and-dance) across the New World.

The story of the Ballets Russes is told not only through an impressive amount of archival dance footage (which loses none of its forcefulness despite the occasional grainy stock), but also via interviews with the surviving dancers of the rival troupes, and herein lies the documentary's considerable dramatic heft. Every single one of the many interviewees -- which include Alicia Markova, Maria Tallchief, and Frederic Franklin (who still appears in ABT's "Swan Lake" well into his nineties) -- comes off as a vivacious, multifaceted personality with tales to tell, and it's extraordinary to watch them shake off the years when speaking of their experiences or dancing. Former ballerina (and coquettish heartbreaker) Nathalie Krassovska -- who, like several of the participants, passed away since the film was finished -- lights up like a little girl when she shows off her dance studio. Later, she and George Zoritch (in his prime at right, now an eighty-something gym rat in Tuscon, AZ) attempt a pas de deux from Giselle, and, although it's clearly a physical struggle, it's endearing to watch them rejoice in their old, shared language.

And the same goes for many other participants in the film, who have spread across the globe in a ballet diaspora since the collapse of the company in 1962. Aged, wizened faces break into impish grins when an old memory surfaces, and, when these former stars show off a dance flourish to their students, it's exhilarating to see their enthusiasm, and the flashes of grace that accompany it. In all honesty, I'd like to have heard more about the original Ballet Russes here (Diaghilev's outfit), and the film loses focus somewhat in the fifties and sixties. (More of a general sense of history would've been nice, too -- The Depression isn't mentioned, Hitler and WWII seem to show up out of the blue, and, other than a fascinating aside involving black dancer Raven Wilkinson's travails with the KKK during one of the Ballet Russes' southern swings, there's very little outside context here.) Nevertheless, Ballets Russes is an amazing documentary and an impressive testament to the idea that, while dancers come and go, the dance is forever, and to embrace it as a calling is a life well lived.

"'I promised,' she says, 'that from now on I would write only for the Lord.' It's the most startling public turnaround since Bob Dylan's 'Slow Train Coming'." Goth-lit-queen Anne Rice has been born again, and it doesn't involve coffins or blood transfusions. Indeed, she's now apparently halfway through a trilogy on the life of Christ, "the ultimate supernatural hero... the ultimate immortal of them all"...but she notes it won't be like Left Behind.

By the way, since people often ask me about it, and since I've been working on grant writing of late anyway, I've written up and html'ized a brief executive summary of my dissertation project. As always, subject to change...particularly the title. (Left-of-the-Colon probably isn't the best place for a The The pun.)

"What's going on? Google has become the new ground zero for the 'other' culture war. Not the one between Ralph Reed and Timothy Leary, but the war between Silicon Valley and Hollywood; California's cultural civil war. At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control." University of Virginia Law professor Tim Wu surveys the controversy over Google Print, and makes a cautious plea for writers and academics to get behind the project.

Hidden over at the official FX Nip/Tuck site (click on the Sony lounge button at the bottom of the screen) are a number of new trailers for upcoming big-ticket films, including Freedomland (with Samuel Jackson, Julianne Moore, Edie Falco, and The Wire's Clarke Peters) and Memoirs of a Geisha (with Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li and Ken Watanabe.) Both, particularly the latter, look impressive.

Less impressive, unfortunately, is the trailer for one of my most eagerly awaited films of the year, All the King's Men. To be fair, I have very high hopes for this flick. All the King's Men is far and away my favorite "Great American Novel" for many reasons. (To name just one, anyone thinking of going anywhere near a history graduate degree should peruse Jack Burden's trying experience at State University first.) Whatsmore, it's being brought to the screen (again) through the efforts of my old boss, who's got, you might say, a good handle on the source material.

But this trailer misses the punch of the book and, frankly, plays like not much more than warmed-over Oscar bait. Ok, no biggie, it's just a trailer. But more worrying, Jude Law and Sean Penn, both excellent actors, seem miscast. As the passage cited above attests, Burden is by no means a fresh-faced kid when he enters Willie's circle -- he's been around the block a few times, fallen in and out of love and lust, gotten kicked around when he's down, and taken refuge more than once in the smothering arms of the Great Sleep. There's a sadness and a resignation about him that's just not gonna shake...Think Gabriel Byrne in Miller's Crossing. But, here, Jude Law looks entirely too wide-eyed, beaming, and innocent -- in a word, too pretty -- to do justice to the part. As for Penn...well, he just seems off to me, particularly considering how perfect Sadie (Patricia Clarkson) and Tiny Duffy (James Gandolfini) look. But, well, perhaps I'll get used to him. (The Stantons -- Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo -- are neither here nor there, but I'm getting a bad feeling about Anthony Hopkins, who's been known to phone it in, as Judge Irwin.)

"What is needed now is a framework for an international crime of terrorism...Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists...The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism." Via Breaching the Web, author Douglas Burgess makes an intriguing case in Legal Affairs for using long-standing anti-piracy laws to fight terrorism. Definitely worth a read, and not only because I have pirates-on-the-brain after finishing the literary (and highly-condensable) exploits of Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds earlier this week.)

Welcome to the layer cake, son. The new trailer for Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist is out, with our first looks at Fagin (Ben Kingsley) and Bill Sykes (Jamie Foreman).

"Forgive me, he had it coming...so beardy and so old." By way of LinkMachineGo, the Guardian accepts rewrites of the climactic moment of Half-Blood Prince in the style of various famous authors. Some of these are really funny. [Massive book spoilers, obviously]

By way of Cliopatria, What book are you? Sixty-four different choices, and they aren't as readily guessable as in most online quizzes. As it turns out, I'm "Watership Down...Though many think of you as a bit young, even childish, you're actually incredibly deep and complex. You show people the need to rethink their assumptions, and confront them on everything from how they think to where they build their houses. You might be one of the greatest people of all time. You'd be recognized as such if you weren't always talking about talking rabbits." Ah, rabbits.

On the eve of the Half-Blood Prince, letters are unearthed in which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, decries the Harry Potter books. "It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity in the soul, before it can grow properly." Well, if the future pope could handle the Hitler Youth, I think most kids' eternal souls should be able to weather the Harry Potter tomes just fine.

"The academy never wholly embraced Foote (who, for his part, never considered himself a professional historian or a military expert). Some historians complained that Foote didn't pay enough attention to the political and economic factors behind the war. Others were offended that he'd dare to write history without footnotes. Looking back, was it merely a case of Northern empiricism scorning Southern charm?" New Yorker editor Field Maloney assesses the historical contribution of -- and controversy over -- the late Shelby Foote.

"Gillian Murphy, who danced Sylvia on Friday, looked as if she were born to dance this role. Her natural, bold attack and imposing presence make her the perfect Sylvia." Gill's star turn in ABT's revival of Sylvia (which I caught at the Met on Friday) opens to stellar reviews. In addition, Gill is profiled in this month's Pointe Magazine. (Unfortunately, the text is unavailable online, although the pics are here.)

By way of a colleague in the program, conservative rag Human Events lists their choices for the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th & 20th Centuries (because remember, folks -- reading & thinking are dangerous.) The usual rogues' gallery -- Marx, Hitler, Mao -- are up front, as you might expect, but then things get kooky. Including Darwin is medieval enough, but Betty Friedan and Rachel Carson? You must be joking. (Well, at least it's good to see the right-wing fringe still running scared from progressives like John Dewey and Herbert Croly.)

Two links of note courtesy of other fine blogs: LinkMachineGo points the way to online scans of Dave Sim's Cerebus notebooks, and Fresh Hell discovers Lost reconceived as an Infocom game. I only caught the first episode, but perhaps the mystery creature is a lurking grue...?

"How can we fix us? The fights, the silence . . . I know! Let's get a puppy!" A hearty congrats to Joel Derfner, who's both a friend from college and the brother/roommate of a good friend here at Columbia, on the publication of his recent book, Gay Haiku (a project which originated on his blog...assuredly a better way to make this hobby pay than the Kottke route.)

By way of Ed Rants, American Rhetoric presents the "100 most significant American political speeches of the 20th century," many of which are available as downloadable mp3s.

"Why should his name be sounded more than yours? Write them, yours is as fair; Sound them, Yours doth become the tongue as well." Why? Well, cause he's a full-fledged movie star, that's why. Still, despite having a bit of a muttering problem at times, Denzel acquits himself "honorably" as Brutus in Julius Caesar, which I saw last night at the Belasco Theatre. Set in a half-post-apocalyptic, half-Depression-era Rome that evokes anything from Masked & Anonymous to Black Hawk Down, this version of Shakespeare's classic is innovatively staged and well-worth seeing, but, unfortunately, it also suffers from a stylistic dissonance that hinders the play at its most crucial moments.

The central problem with this production is the clash of acting methods. Many of the actors -- and particularly Denzel -- underplay their roles to the extreme. In fact, in delivery if not in diction, Denzel's naturalistic Brutus is only a step or two from most of his other performances, be it Glory, Devil in a Blue Dress, or The Manchurian Candidate. That would be fine, if everyone else was on the same page, and a lot of the other actors are. Jack Willis (at left) deadpans Casca like Cypher from The Matrix, and Patrick Page steals his one major scene (in which he convinces Caesar to report to the Senate on the Ides of March) by portraying Decius Brutus as the worst kind of unctuous DC aide, complete with a leather executive folder in tow and a flatterer's simper plastered on his face.

Unfortunately, some of the other actors didn't get the memo. Bill Sadler's Caesar is prone to acts of grandstanding, but that's acceptable -- he's Caesar, after all, and bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus. No, the main offender is Colm Feore as Cassius, who plays the lean, hungry Machiavel in full "Master Thespian" mode -- at times he's hammier here than he was in Riddick. I'll admit, I may be being a bit hard on Feore, as Cassius has always been one of my favorite Shakespearean characters (well, until he gets all weepy and high-maintenance in the second half of the play.) And Feore's performance might be fine for a different cast of Caesar...but here, he's just off. If this is Denzel's Julius Caesar, as everything seems to suggest, Feore's portrayal of Cassius should have mirrored Denzel's low-key, understated Brutus. Instead, Feore is overplaying to the hilt, and the contrast is jarring in every scene the two central plotters share.

The Denzel-disconnect causes problems elsewhere, too, notably in the crucial Act III funeral speeches. Eamonn Walker makes a fine Mark Antony throughout, but he just doesn't have the star wattage or natural charisma of Denzel Washington. As a result, Antony's manipulative eulogy -- the critical hinge moment of the play -- seems slightly tepid and uninvolving compared to Brutus' earlier rousing oratory. It's possible that I'm just ruined by the James Mason-Marlon Brando version, as there does seem to be some precedent in the play for this take: "I am no orator, as Brutus is...I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, to stir men's blood." Still, I think there's a dramatic problem if Brutus' oration is more of a showstopper than Antony's. If anything, it seems here that their roles should have been reversed.

Still, despite these grievances, Julius Caesar is a satisfying production for the most part, with some particularly nice visual flourishes throughout. The Escape from New York, Berlin-bunker look of the set seems strange at first, but gains potency as the play darkens -- in the "Cinna the poet" mob scene, for example. (Speaking of which, between this and Sith, it's been a bad week for republics.) And I particularly liked the look of the Senate, even if it was somewhat reminiscent of Liev Schrieber's EXCOMM war room in the Henry V revival two years ago. (With that in mind, the play gets off a great Homeland Security gag, as the various conspirators have to figure out a way around the Senate metal detector.)

The war scenes of the final acts are also surprisingly kinetic, with Roman forces garbed in guerilla green or black weaving through the hollowed-out set and spouting commands in verse. In fact, while I guess this shouldn't be a shock given the subject matter, this production of Julius Caesar is also quite grisly -- they don't skimp on the blood and gore, and Sadler's corpse is frozen in a horrifying Ring-like rictus scream during the Antony speech. (Strangely, this produced nary a shudder in the crowd, while the mere sight of Caesar's bare posterior earlier on sent the audience into a paroxysm of shocked gasps -- the MPAA has screwed up this country something fierce.)

So, in sum, Julius Caesar is a worthy production that makes for a good evening out, but it's got some issues that keep it from being an all-time classic version of the play. The fault, dear readers, is not in its stars, but in its supporting cast, that they are underlings. In the end, a more balanced production, with either more or less star power, would have probably worked out better.

Apparently, David Gordon Green's forthcoming film adaptation of John Kennedy O'Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is no more. This version, co-scripted by Stephen Soderbergh and set to star Will Ferrell, Drew Barrymore, Mos Def, Lily Tomlin, and Olympia Dukakis, was axed (according to Green) because "it didn't cater to a lot of the cliches or conditioning of contemporary American studio sensibilities."

"'We run into this all the time in the archive business,' said Vicky Risner, who is in charge of acquisitions for the music division of the Library of Congress. 'People deny they're going to die.'" The NYT delves into the collapse of a will-less archive, in this case the prodigious collection on black dance amassed by the late Joe Nash.

"If a book is conceived with only historiography in mind -- with academic disciplinary debates and research agendas dictating the focus and the form -- it's unlikely to succeed in the public realm. If it's conceived without historiography in mind, it's unlikely to succeed as scholarship. So, how do we develop what we might call a Goldilocks approach to historiography?" In a very intriguing two-part article for Slate, David Greenberg of Rutgers University makes the case for historians breaking out of the Ivory Tower.

My friends and colleagues here have heard me rant about this on many opportunities -- For all the talk of transnationalism and blurring borders in the field right now, the border between academia and popular history remains rigorously guarded by historians who too often equate accessibility with poor scholarship and second-rate thinking. On many occasions, we've been told by visiting scholars -- including some very big names -- that, for better or worse, we're fated to do "history-professor history" that will have "no effect" on how Americans see their past.

In short, I find this line of thinking very disquieting. Frankly, writing American history tomes that only a rarefied community of scholars will "get" seems to me a rather sad way to spend a life in the discipline. Whatsmore, it's no accident that right-wing interpretations of the past, be they neo-con or free-market fundamentalism, for example, tend to gain a wider currency in today's political climate than left-wing ones do. It's partly because academics on the right seem to have less qualm about popularizing their ideas for a mass audience (and they've got more institutions to disseminate them, but that's another story.)

I find something profoundly irritating about scholars who claim that "ordinary people" will never understand their ideas, and then go on to complain about the nation's right-wing drift. While it may be hubris to think that any one scholar's work will make all that much of a difference, it's still a worthier goal, to my mind, than composing a work of great theoretical insight that's completely inscrutable to all but those academic elites similarly ordained in the historical arts.

In between film projects, the Coen Brothers and Charlie Kaufman have teamed up for Carter Burwell's Theater of the New Ear, a pair of radio plays recently performed at London's Royal Festival Hall. The cast includes Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Marcia Gay Harden, and Philip Seymour Hoffman for the Coen's "Sawbones," and Meryl Streep, Hope Davis, and Peter Dinklage (taking time off from Lassie, I presume) in Kaufman's "Hope Leaves the Theater." (These apparently were also performed in Brooklyn two weeks ago, but tickets were hard to come by.)

B.K. DeLong of Brainstream reports that The Leaky Cauldron, the Harry Potter-themed blog I started at the old Geocities site years and years ago, has not only been deemed J.K. Rowling's favorite fan site, but is also on the short list of press invites to Rowling's home once the Half-Blood Prince arrives. A hearty congrats to the Cauldron team!

What did I have to do with this? Less than nothing, really -- the site just kinda sat there until B.K. took it over and turned it into the flagship Potter fan site. But I did find this news another interesting reflection of just how much Internet-time's passed since GitM first got off the ground (the second in two days.) I'm old, Gandalf. I may not look it, but I feel it...

A couple of NYT book reviews of local interest: Columbia's Eric Foner peruses the first transcribed volume of the LBJ tapes, Johann Hari reviews Irresistible Empire by Columbia historian Victoria de Grazia, and college friend Nell Freudenberger takes a gander at Stewart O'Nan's The Good Wife.

Neglected to mention this earlier...but last week, I caught Roundabout's Twelve Angry Men revival at the American Airlines theatre. As with Streetcar, my basis for comparison is fuzzy -- I saw the Henry Fonda film years and years ago. Nevertheless, I'd say this version does justice to the material, and is well worth seeing if you get the chance.

Unlike the star-studded HBO version, this 12 Angry Men works as a great showcase for underappreciated character actors. The most famous face is probably the ubiquitous James Rebhorn as Juror #4, although #7's John Pankow (a.k.a. Paul Reiser's brother on Mad About You) and Broadway veteran Tom Aldredge (Clooney's boss in Intolerable Cruelty) as #9 may also elicit a stir of recognition. To a man, this cast performs admirably, with each actor getting his moment in the sun.

Alas, if the show has a weak link, it may well be Boyd Gaines as Juror #8 (the Fonda role.) In a way, it's not Gaines' fault - but the fact that he looks like a cross between Fonda and Jimmy Stewart invites comparisons that redound against him, particularly as it seems at times that he's actually doing a Fonda impression. [Robert Foxworth (formerly of Falcon Crest), does better in the less-iconic Lee J. Cobb role (#3) -- if anything, he reminded me of Darren McGavin.] Still, this is a quibble. In general, 12 Angry Men is an engaging night out (and good mental prep for my own jury duty in a few weeks.)

By the way, I'm on the Roundabout Theatre mailing list, but if any readers out there know the mailer discount codes for The Glass Menagerie, Hurlyburly, Glengarry Glen Ross, and/or particularly Denzel's Julius Caesar, the information would be much appreciated. :)

In case you missed the Kramervision version last week, the first trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is now officially online.

"That he was born is just one of the many undeniable facts about the life of the late Douglas Adams --author, humorist, raconteur, speaker, and thinker (although it should be noted that, on at least one parallel Earth, Mr. Adams was born a spring-toed lemur with a predilection for grassy fields and the works of Byron -- a poetic lemur whose work was not terribly springy)." With two days to go until Hitchhiker's -- you have picked out a towel by now, right? -- IGN assembles a worthy cast of Adamsian roustabouts -- including Terry Jones, Neil Gaiman, Michael Nesmith, and Stephen Fry -- to offer their remembrances. (Unfortunately, Graham Chapman could not be reached for comment.)

Regarding yesterday's strike memo hullabaloo, we found out today on good authority that Provost Brinkley did not write the memo, that it in no way respects his views, and that none of the punitive measures listed therein have a snowball's chance in Hell of being enacted under this administration. Obviously, in a perfect world, the provost wouldn't have initialed this internal memo at all, but this information definitely accords better with my sense of what's going on and with my measure of the man.

As many of y'all know, despite being a PhD student here at Columbia, I very rarely post about the newsmaking disputes that occasionally roil our campus. (Does it reflect badly on my academic gravitas that I spend more time at GitM discussing national politics, movie trailers, and online Mike Tyson's Punch-Out knockoffs than ideological dust-ups closer to home? Well, so be it.)

That being said, two links of note. First, in the Financial Times, Ian Buruma -- with the aid of one of my colleagues, Moshik Temkin -- offers what I thought was one of the more sober-minded summaries I've read of the recent MEALAC controversy at Columbia. As he puts it, "racism exists, but not all Israeli policies towards Palestinians, however harsh, are inspired by racism. And...not all criticism of Israeli policies is the result of anti-Jewish prejudice. Yet these are the terms in which modern political debates are increasingly couched.."

Second, regarding the recent one-week graduate student strike on campus (which I voted against, due to concerns not unlike the ones I held last year, but respected by not crossing the picket and reviewing paper drafts from home), The Nation's Jennifer Washburn offers a write-up which connects the two buzz issues of unionization and academic freedom and includes an unearthed internal memo, signed by provost (and my dissertation advisor) Alan Brinkley, which suggests possible punitive measures to prevent future strikes.

I've already written about this at length on the (no longer) internal grad-student-historian listserv, and don't really feel like getting into it in depth again here. Suffice to say that, while the document does seem uncharacteristic of Prof. Brinkley (as an aside, it reads like it was written by a member of his staff, although obviously it still carries his imprimatur), I am neither surprised nor all that dismayed by this memo. In the face of our continued strike actions, it seems perfectly appropriate to me for the administration -- and the university provost, for that matter -- to brainstorm both positive and punitive ways to mitigate future disruptions. All this means is that, come the next strike, it may well be time for the rubber to hit the road, and for graduate students who believe in unionization to make real financial sacrifices for our beliefs, as strikers in any other line of work are forced to do. (Of course, given that none of these proposed measures appear to have been enacted this time around, perhaps not.)

In fact, I think there's actually a silver lining here for pro-union graduate students. For one, I expect this memo will do more to galvanize the movement than all of last week's ill-conceived strike. For another, perhaps a heightened sense of what a strike actually constitutes might encourage more out-of-the-box thinking and political calculation by union leadership, rather than the "strike-only, strike-first" ideology that afflicts the upper echelons of our organization at the moment. To use an analogy I'm kinda fond of (for obvious reasons), the only way to get to Mars is by spaceship, but you don't send it before it's good and ready. Right now, our Mission Control keeps hitting the launch button before we've plotted a trajectory or even built the darned thing.

Update: I've since been informed in a personal e-mail that I'm both a "Brinkley apologist" (because I clearly don't share the vitriol of the Palpatine Unmasked contingent) and a "scab." (Shouldn't have looked at those drafts, I guess...) You see, this is exactly why I post about Arthur Dent here much more than I do Columbia inside-baseball. Which reminds me, that Frusion Punch-Out link was via Usr/Bin/Grl.

Two intriguing links from today's Cliopatria: First, Inside Higher Ed's Scott Lemee surveys the hubbub surrounding an apparent Holocaust-related hoax perpetrated by Kavalier & Klay author Michael Chabon. And, elsewhere, What's the Matter With Kansas author Thomas Frank tries to figure out what's the matter with liberals, and concludes we play far too easily into the "out-of-touch elitist" stereotype.

"I always saw the possibilities there. She has the most wonderful technique: strong jumps, beautiful turns, lovely line. There's something very honest about Gillian, and she's so smart. You can feed in the information and she processes it all for herself. She doesn't look like someone trying to be anyone else." The LA Times's Susan Reiter profiles my sister Gill for the Sunday edition, which I took the liberty of reposting at her official site. "Having had her eyes unwaveringly on the prize since she was 11, Murphy brings a healthy sense of perspective and clarity to what being a dancer means. 'The first time I put pointe shoes on, I was certain. I've been on a mission, in terms of wanting to dance and to be the best dancer I can be. At a certain point in a dancer's career, it becomes a mission to look out for the art form as well, to concern yourself with the present and future of ballet.'
" (Pointed out by The Late Adopter.)

The AICN gang get their hands on (and quickly disavow) a Kramervision look at the first Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe trailer. It's a bit Lemony Snicket-meets-LotR, and unless you're a fan of the books I'd skip this Shakicam boot and wait until an official version leaks...but, otherwise, this is looking pretty solid, particularly Tilda Swinton.

Alexa de los Reyes, an old artist friend from college days, has recently revamped her website, Lexrey.com, and it's well worth a look, particularly if you're in the market for a personalized painting, portrait, or mural. (I'm kinda fond of the pool series, myself.)

New Line and LotR producer Mark Ordesky hire scribe Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, The Quiet American) to pen the screenplay for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. How this fellow, barely a novitiate in the Magickal Arts, (or for that matter anyone but the esteemed and learned Mr. Norrell) could do this remarkable tome justice is quite beyond me.

Last night, my sister and I went to go see the most recent revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, with Natasha Richardson as Blanche and John C. Reilly as Stanley. And, while I don't claim to be an expert by any means -- At the risk of looking like a rube, I'll admit I went in with only vague impressions of the Brando-Leigh version, which I found had been interpolated, embarrassingly enough, with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof -- I quite enjoyed it.

At turns willowy and brittle, Richardson's Blanche DuBois has, as Michael Stipe once put it, that "knowing with a wink that we expect from Southern women." A pampered schemer whose delicate flower act obscures the grim realizations borne of an all-too-tragic life, Blanche is a fading memory of the Old South -- She seems lost without a mint julep in hand and completely out-of-place in rough-and-tumble post-war New Orleans. I expect Richardson's take on the role is probably slightly less sympathetic than in some other versions -- no one deserves Blanche's horrible fate; nevertheless, Richardson's DuBois, so insufferable at times in the early going, does an exemplary job in Act 1 of proving Benjamin Franklin's adage that "fish and visitors stink after three days."

For his part, John C. Reilly is also memorable as the vindictive, animalistic Stanley (although nobody would argue, except perhaps Stanley himself, that this iteration of Kowalski has any of Brando's physical magnetism.) Reilly's Stanley is a hard-living working-class schlub who becomes increasingly more dangerous as the "Every Man a King" prerogatives he expects of domestic life are affronted by Blanche's continued presence. Most of the time, he sits coiled like a snake, bottle in hand...but, when the moment strikes, Reilly lashes out with a feral fury that's all the more frightening for being unexpected (he's definitely not the type of guy you want in your poker game.) And, when Stanley finally gains the upper hand on his unwanted houseguest, his predatory instincts take hold in brutal and remorseless fashion.

At any rate, a good show. I can't compare it to earlier iterations of Tennessee Williams' play, but I can say that Richardson, Reilly, and the rest of the cast at the very least do Streetcar justice.

R.I.P. Saul Bellow 1915-2005.

"This was the most unkindest cut of all; For when the noble Caesar saw him stab, Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,
Quite vanquished him: then burst his mighty heart." Denzel Washington's Broadway turn as Brutus open to solid reviews. Between this Julius Caesar revival and Twelve Angry Men and Hurlyburly and the Richardson-Reilly Streetcar, among others, there are a lot of plays in town right now I wouldn't mind catching at some point.

"Remove Allen from the scene of the contemporary romantic comedy and you get either Hugh Grant's hollow trysting or Ethan Hawke's pretentious babbling. (Actually, without Allen's precedent, Hawke probably wouldn't be allowed to babble.)" In the new N+1, Christian Lorentzen (a friend of mine from college days) writes on Melinda, Woody Allen's castration anxiety, and Melinda.

"Even before he had established himself as a delineator of New York places, the artist had already pinpointed a New York state of mind. That state is not so much 'loneliness,' as the maudlin cliche about him would have it, but a tougher and more unsparing isolation that touches on the traps of modern urban existence, one in which individuals must become inured to life's insults and injuries." Art critic Avis Berman previews her new book on Edward Hopper's New York for the Sunday Times.

An event of note last night here at Columbia's Miller Theater: Music critic Greil Marcus, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, and Oxford poetry scholar Christopher Ricks came together to contemplate Dylania old and new. Marcus began by speaking on the many lives of "Masters of War," including Dylan's Gulf War I Grammy performance and the recent "Coalition of the Willing" episode at a Boulder, Colorado high school. Wilentz followed by discussing Dylan's debts of gratitude (and debt to history) in the recent Chronicles. And Ricks punned his way through a priceless disquisition on Blonde on Blonde and the differences among poetry, prose, and song, finishing his remarks with a defense of "Just Like a Woman," which apparently has been deemed misogynistic in certain academic corners. (I asked the panel about the mixed reception to Masked & Anonymous, and Wilentz & Marcus in particular praised it as an underrated film...I'll probably have to see it again at some point.)

All in all, it was quite an interesting evening of Dylanology, although I must admit, I was a bit put off by some of Ricks' comments in the Q&A session -- He called "Masters of War" (and, for that matter, "The Death of Emmett Till") self-absorbed and overly tendentious songs, which I think there's a good deal of truth to, but then proceeded to castigate the audience for indulging its generally anti-Bush sentiment (via some mild chuckling) during Marcus' Coalition of the Willing anecdote. Ricks began by deploring knee-jerk political responses in either direction as a typically American (and occasionally Dylanian) vice...ok, fine, that's a criticism we've all heard before. "Fist fighting is here to stay,
It's just the old American way." But Ricks then went on to bemoan the tribulations faced by his poor right-wing friends in Massachusetts, who thought -- correctly, in Ricks' view -- that "John Kerry didn't deserve the presidency." (As you might expect, this gave the smattering of right-leaning folk amid the audience a chance to clap vociferously and to indulge anew the currently-popular fallacy that they're an oppressed minority.)

Yes, unfortunately, the decline of civility in debate and the "MacNeill-Lehrerization" of every issue into two opposite and irreconcilable poles are lamentable repercussions of the way politics is practiced today, as Jon Stewart famously noted on Crossfire several months ago. (Or, as Bob once put it, "Lies that life is black and white spoke from my skull...Ah, but I was so much older then,
I'm younger than that now.") But that doesn't mean that Americans' opinions of the war in Iraq aren't well-thought out and hard-won. Ricks treated the issue as basically six-one, half-dozen-the-other, that to voice an opinion about the Iraq War is somehow irresponsible and -- worse -- uncouth. (Whatsmore, I had no idea what anybody's politics were until Ricks began complaining about the presumed incivility in the room, at which point the audience immediately bifurcated into lefties and righties.) In sum, incivility is a serious problem, sure. But, for that matter, so is war.

The Q&A aside, though, the evening made for an eloquent appreciation of the many gifts of Bob Dylan, gifts further illuminated by the warmth and regard with which Marcus, Wilentz and Ricks held these songs to the light and uncovered some of their fragile tendrils of meaning and allusion. And if nothing else, the conference made for an excellent excuse to go home and delve into Bob's back pages for the remainder of the evening, and listen to old songs with new ears.

"[B]y writing his autobiography himself, the madcap Central European actor Klaus Kinski produced the most brutally honest book about the motion picture industry ever. Here is a typical passage: 'No outsider can imagine the stupidity, blustering, hysteria, authoritarianism and paralyzing boredom of shooting a flick for Billy Wilder.' No ghostwriter would ever have written a passage like that, because ghostwriters are by nature timid, diplomatic, gun-shy." Um, really? In the Sunday NYT Book Review, author Joe Queenan complains about the burgeoning ghostwriting industry. I think he needs to meet more ghostwriters.

"Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music cry 'Caesar!' Speak. Caesar is turn'd to hear. Beware the ides of March." Be careful out there today, y'all.

"It was only a matter of time before this kind of thinking spread to history. Politics has always colored the ways that people interpret the past, but The Politically Incorrect Guide politicizes history in a new way, reducing all scholarly inquiry to a mere stance in the culture wars."

Slate's resident historian David Greenberg tears apart Thomas Woods' enormously popular conservative hatchet-job of US history, and pins the blame for its ilk on a Faustian bargain made by right-wing intellectuals: "Conservatives who believe in open intellectual pursuit understandably blanch at the popularity of a book like this. The problem, however, isn't a lone piece of agitprop but a cynical alliance that conservative intellectuals forged with those who hold their ideals of scholarship in contempt. It's not surprising that the anti-intellectual currents they've aligned themselves with are proving too powerful for them to control."

The various covers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, due out July 16th, are released. (You've probably already figured it out, but that's Dumbledore on the left.) Kinda staid, but ok...it's what's inside that counts.

Mark over at Nofeblog has collected some of the more compelling eulogies of Hunter S. Thompson, including ones by cartoonist Ralph Steadman and colleagues Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam.

In a perfect world, I'd write up book reviews here on GitM with the consistency and length of my movie posts. (Then again, in a perfect world, I'd also be able to dunk a basketball.) But, time being a factor, here instead are some short thoughts on non-history books recently consumed.

Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds: "Working alone, living within the cramped confines of the pod, Sylveste spent weeks learning how to jump-start the lighthugger's crippled repair systems...When the recuperative processes were in swing he was able to sleep, finally -- not daring to believe that he would actually succeed. And in those dreams, Sylveste gradually became aware of a momentous, paralysing truth...before he regained consciousness, something had happened. Something had reached into his mind and spoken to him. But the message that was imparted to him was so brutally alien that Sylveste could not put it into human terms. He had stepped into Revelation Space."

I'd heard a lot of good things from sci-fi aficionados I trust about the Revelation Space arc of Alastair Reynolds, who holds a PhD in astronomy and clearly knows his stuff. In fact, one of the strengths of Revelation is in how Reynolds grounds what amounts to a sci-fi space opera in hard science ideas. For example, I don't think I'm giving too much away to say that the book offers a hypothetical answer to Fermi's Paradox, or that Hawking's singularity theories play a significant role in the denouement. Of course, some scientific quandaries, such as the ability for ships to move at or around lightspeed, are left unexplained (it's apparently been figured out by a shadowy, mysterious group known as the Conjoiners.) But, even those flights of fancy carry the touch of realism, as indicated by the time disparities throughout the book -- Often, a character will get locked away in jail or have some other ugly incident befall him or her, and then fifteen years will pass in the space of a few paragraphs (or at least fifteen years relative to the prisoner -- the time is shorter on the ship en route.)

These clever ideas notwithstanding, however, I found Reynolds' writing style a bit dense and unwieldy at times. All in all, I ended up enjoying Revelation Space, but it was also a bit of a slog. In fact, I ended up putting it down for several weeks. There are four books (and counting) in the series, and I've heard they get better as they go along...but still, I've been putting off delving into #2, the prequel Chasm City, until I've got more time on my hands.

Children of God, Mary Doria Russell: "It was absurd in hindsight -- the very idea that a handful of humans might have been able to do everything right the first time. Even the closest of friends can misunderstand one another, he reminded himself. First contact -- by definition -- takes place in a state of radical ignorance, where nothing is known about the ecology, biology, languages, culture, and economy of the Other. On Rakhat, that ignorance proved catastrophic. You couldn't have known, Vincenzo Giuliani thought, hearing his own pacing, but remembering Emilio's. It wasn't your fault. Tell that to the dead, Emilio would have answered."

As y'all may or may not remember, I highly recommended Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow last fall, and have only now gotten around to reading the sequel, in which both Father Emilio Sandoz, sole survivor of the ill-fated Jesuit expedition, and the planet of Rakhat grapple with the consequences of the abortive, abysmal First Contact described in Book One. An anthropology PhD (I promise, I read sci-fi by non-PhDs too -- this back-to-back was a fluke), Russell has constructed a clever and refreshing science fiction tale here that seems very far removed from most standard forays in the genre. I preferred Sparrow to Children -- in fact, in some ways I think the resolution of the latter book detracts from the power of the first -- but they're both well worth-reading and readily accessible to people who get easily aggravated by the usual sci-fi literary tropes.

I will admit that at times I felt that Russell's characters all spoke with the same voice -- they all have the same wry intelligence and self-deprecating humor, and they tend to react in similar ways when pushed to the wall. But, it's a forgivable lapse, and besides, given that this is the type of mistake made by newer authors, the tendency may well be rectified in her newest, just-published book, A Thread of Grace (No more sci-fi for now -- Grace is a work of historical fiction set in WWII Italy.)

The Prestige, Christopher Priest: "First let me in a manner of speaking show you my hands, palms forward, fingers splayed, and I will say to you (and mark this well): 'Every word in this notebook that describes my life and work is true, honestly meant and accurate in detail.'...Already, without writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent. I have misdirected you with the talk of truth, objective records and motives. I have omitted the significant information, and now you are looking in the wrong place."

After finishing up Batman Begins, Memento's Chris Nolan will apparently be making this film, and it should be a doozy. Tales of turn-of-the-century prestidigitators have perhaps been somewhat overdone in recent lit -- At times, The Prestige reminded me of both Glen David Gold's Carter Beats the Devil and the first "Houdini" half of Kavalier & Klay. Nevertheless, The Prestige, the sordid tale of two dueling stage magicians and their respective covenants with electrical pioneer Nikola Tesla, is a quick fantasy read that's well worth picking up. Even if you figure out where it's all going, and I'd say I guessed most of it about halfway through, the ending still has a Five Star level Twilight Zone-creepiness to it. All in all, with an eerie climax you're not going to shake off lightly, The Prestige is a grim and captivating conjuration -- read it before seeing the movie.

The Battle of Brazil, Jack Mathews: "Gilliam's Brazil is a cautionary tale about the loss of passion in a bureaucratic society where people passively go along to get along. It's his metaphor for the lives we now lead, overly dependent as we are on structure, materialism, and dubious technology. There isn't a futuristic element to it, other than the likelihood that the future holds more of the same. The love story between the daydreaming bureaucrat Sam Lowry and the cynical truck driver Jill Layton is the major sub-text. The dominant theme is that only through fantasy can we escape the reality of our own lives."

I actually don't quite agree with Jack Mathew's take above on the film...there's a lot more going on in Brazil than just Organization Man angst. [I tossed this out for my college paper almost a decade ago, but at some point I'd like to write a much-longer post around here that does Brazil (and, for that matter, Amadeus, Miller's Crossing, and several other of my Top Ten films) justice.] At any rate, you can get most of the information in The Battle of Brazil -- which chronicles the attempts by Universal flunky Sid Sheinberg to either squash or re-edit the film -- out of the companion documentary on the 3-disc Criterion set (which also includes the Sheinberg "Love conquers all" edit.) But, for fans of Terry Gilliam's magnum opus (as well as people interested in studio realpolitik), there are a lot of fun anecdotes and vignettes to be had -- For example, Rupert Everett or Tom Cruise as possible Sam Lowrys, DeNiro's Method Acting Tuttle to everyone's annoyance, and Gilliam's point-for-point evisceration of several negative reviews of the film (including ones by Rex Reed, Roger Ebert, and the inimitable Pauline Kael.) This version of the book also contains the full screenplay (by Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, the latter of whom plays Sam's office neighbor Harry Lime.) Again, a quick read, and interesting in its own right as a tale of Hollywood inside baseball. But, of course, unlike The Prestige, see the movie before you read the book.

The Shawl, Cynthia Ozick: "She looked into Magda's face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shawl's windings. The face, very round, a pocket mirror of a face: but it was not Rosa's bleak complexion, dark like cholera, it was another kind of face altogether, eyes blue as hair, smooth feathers of hair nearly as yellow as the Star sewn into Rosa's coat. You could think she was one of their babies."

I'll be the first to admit that when it comes to evaluating serious and prize-winning short fiction like Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, I tend to feel slightly out of my depth. (But being uninformed about matters has never stopped me from commenting before, so why worry about it now?) At any rate, the question of how to address and make sense of insensible atrocities is one pondered by both fiction writers and historians. And, while I was moved and impressed by some of Ozick's paragraphs or imagery at times, altogether, I don't think these two stories squared that elusive circle very well.

At the risk of spoiling it for you [Seriously, stop reading if you don't want to know the end], the very brief first story in The Shawl, set inside a concentration camp, basically involves a mother's reaction to watching her baby get thrown onto an electric fence. (The longer and better second tale picks up with the same mother, now a semi-sane Holocaust "survivor" in retiree-land Florida, thirty years later.) This first story is obviously shocking and repugnant, and perhaps as a way of approximating a small sliver of the unknowable horror of the Holocaust, it may even be a success. But, to be honest, I found it more exploitative than anything else -- the central incident of the tale happens so quickly and with so little context that it reminded me of what David Edelstein (and others) noted of the egregious 21 Grams: "it doesn't take insight or artistry to shake up an audience with dead kids. It just takes a certain kind of ruthlessness."

To be fair, perhaps my problems with The Shawl are faults of the genre. After all, if there's any murdering of innocents to be done in a short story, it has to be done rather quickly, or else we're getting into novella territory. Still, I found Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War a much more harrowing and successful survivor's tale read of late, partly because it reflects at length on the questions of writing and remembering, but also because it had more room to breathe, more lulls between the horrific episodes, and, to my mind, more character development.

American Pastoral, Philip Roth: "He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach -- that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from one and one's history...He whose natural nobility was to be exactly what he seemed to be has taken in far too much suffering to be naively whole again...Stoically he suppresses his horror. He learns to live behind a mask. A lifetime experiment in endurance. A performance over a ruin. Swede Levov lives a double life."

A few years ago a good friend of mine let me her copy of Goodbye, Columbus as an introduction to the world of Philip Roth and...well, not to put too fine a point on it, I didn't like it. (My impressions of the book are blurry now, but I remember thinking that not only could I not empathize with the main character, I actively disliked him, from his relishing his 1-on-1 basketball victories over his girlfriend's little sister to his endless passive-aggressive pushing on the diaphragm issue. In retrospect, I guess that was probably the point.) So, when another good friend offered me her copy of American Pastoral, I was mildly hesitant.

Yet, I found Swede Levov's fall from American grace vastly preferable to my first Roth experience, so much so that I aim to throw a few more of his books in the hopper at some point in the near future. (Looking back, it was probably a bad call to judge a writer of Roth's stature and prolificness by only his first work anyway, however well-reviewed.) At times, I did think the "Americanness" aspect of the Swede's arc was a tad overdone -- for example, in the Johnny Appleseed segues, or the hinge point of the story being 1968. And perhaps the symbolism was occasionally just a little too cute (e.g. Miss New Jersey becoming a breeder of cows, or the dinner party incident that closes the book.) But, all in all, Pastoral turned out to be quite a powerful treatise on the charred smell emanating from all too many postwar American dreams, as well as a haunting case study of one man trying to keep it together once the wheels come off. (By the way, I'm open to suggestions for the next stop on the Roth train. Portnoy? I Married a Communist?)

Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens: "The three great subjects of the twentieth century were imperialism, fascism and Stalinism...Most of the intellectual class were fatally compromised by accomodation with one or other of these man-made structures of inhumanity, and some by more than one...[But after his experience as a budding imperialist functionary in India] Orwell was in a stronger position to feel viscerally as well as intellectually about the modernist empires of Nazism and Stalinism. Among many other things, of which an educated sympathy for victims and especially racial victims was only one, he had grown sensitive to intellectual hypocrisy and was well-tuned to pick up the invariably creepy noises which it gives off. He was already an old India hand, in other words, when it came to detecting corrupt or euphemistic excuses for undeserved and unchecked power."

I'm sure I'm not the only person out there who looks at Christopher Hitchens these days and laments a great writer and once-formidable man of the Left now -- seemingly irrevocably -- gone to seed. Still, Orwell being high in my personal pantheon of writers, I thought I'd give his extended essay Why Orwell Matters a look-see. The result is intriguing not only for what it tells us about Orwell, but also in understanding and humanizing this most recent incarnation of Hitchens. Throughout the book, Hitchens applauds Orwell's enviable foresight and his "power of facing" unpleasant truths so often obscured to others by ideology or wishful thinking. As the passage above suggests, with the exception of severely understating the future role of the US in world affairs (and his occasional and unfortunate lapses into homophobia), Hitchens argues, Orwell got all the big questions of the 20th century right. He anticipated the demise of imperialism and -- unlike many of his contemporaries on the Left -- was as stringent an opponent of Stalinist totalitarianism as he was of Nazism.

Hitchens is correct in noting all of these remarkable insights and legacies of our man Orwell. (As an aside, Hitchens' theory that Orwell could probably have gotten lifesaving treatment for his tuberculosis here in America is really just too depressing to contemplate.) Still, I don't think it's going too far to suggest that Hitchens is also trying to use Orwell as a paragon of independent thinking in order to justify his own recent cheerleading for the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

I don't know how Orwell would come down on the Iraq war. Who can know for sure? On one hand, as Hitchens would immediately point out, Orwell was no friend to tyrants. He put his own life on the line to defend Republican Spain, and -- like most clear-headed people -- wouldn't shed a tear to see a two-bit sadistic despot like Saddam dispatched to the dustbin of history. On the other hand, Orwell clearly had a well-developed suspicion of imperialist enterprises, particularly those cloaked in the language of freedom and good intentions. If nothing else, I feel pretty confident Orwell would have lambasted the corruption of political rhetoric -- and outright lies -- that characterized our entry into this current conflict. I'm sure Hitchens is right to suggest that Orwell would rally against the inhuman ideology of terrorist fundamentalism, as he did against the nefarious -isms of his day. But that doesn't mean Orwell -- or Hitchens, for that matter -- should be so sanguine in backing our current policy in Iraq. One does not necessarily flow from the other.

"Of Dylan's many achievements, the most fundamental was his hitching together of the folk-lyric tradition and Western modernism, connecting them at the point where their expressive ambiguities met...Dylan did not do this to prove a point; he was naturally omnivorous, and he intuited the connection without worrying about pedigree." Sent to me by All About George, Luc Sante surveys recent Dylan literature for the NY Review of Books. Speaking of which, tickets for Bob's upcoming five-night stand at the Beacon Theatre go on sale this morning at 10am. In a perfect world, I'd go to all of 'em (while catching a matinee of Hitchhiker's on that Friday, April 29.) But, financial constraints being what they are, I'll probably settle on either 2 or 3 shows. We'll see.

"And that, I think, was the handle---that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting---on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark---the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."


R.I.P. Hunter S. Thompson 1937-2005. Oh, no...this is terrible news. Yes, his writing had been inconsistent in recent years, but Thompson at his take-no-prisoners best was a brilliant, lacerating voice that pierced through the platitudes and hypocrisy of so much of this world. This final succumbing to the Fear and Loathing, especially at this dark political hour when we need him most, is too, too tragic.

I had several links to catch up on after my trip, but frankly right now my heart isn't in it. Godspeed, HST.

Having already exposed Chuck Palahniuk as a (gasp!) hack, Laura Miller, Salon's guardian of the literary citadel, now aims to dethrone H.P. Lovecraft (and neither Cthulu nor a number of readers are pleased). C'mon now...is that really necessary? It's not as if Lovecraft is some endlessly promoted sacred cow of the literati -- he's just an early 20th-century spinner of pulp yarns with some cachet among the fanboy nation, one with some very Cronenberg-like hang-ups and a better flair than most at evoking unfathomable dread. What with all the goofy adjectives and leaps of hyperbole, Lovecraft is obviously an easy caricature -- so why bother? Miller seems to be something of a Tolkienite and generally sympathetic to fantasy writing, so her hit here is all the more surprising. Frankly, I'd find her criticism more scintillating if she didn't resort to shooting fish in a barrel.

As the Bushies warm up the teleprompter, the Washington Post attempts to explain why most inaugural addresses are boring, Chris Suellentrop surveys some of the lousier efforts over the years (with help from this Library of Congress exhibit), and David Greenberg looks back at the last great one (Kennedy, 1961). Somehow, I have a sneaking suspicion that Dubya's evocation tomorrow of "The Ownership Society" isn't going to make the A-list.

Seen and taken from Cliopatria, Crooked Timber holds an online symposium on China Mieville and Iron Council, which includes informed essays by John Holbo, Belle Waring, Henry Farrell, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, John Quiggen, and most notably, Mieville himself. I haven't gotten through all of these yet, but there's some really good stuff here, including Mieville's nuanced analysis of the great Tolkien-Moorcock divide in fantasy writing. (I for one think that, when it comes J.R.R.T., Moorcock is full of it, as is Phillip Pullman.) Of Mieville's books, I most enjoyed Perdido Street Station and most admired The Scar. Iron Council was a good read in fine phantasmagoric Mieville form, but I ultimately thought it was too self-conscious in its historical agenda -- At times I felt I was reading J. Anthony Lukas's Big Trouble by way of Mervyn Peake. I appreciate what Mieville was trying to do...I just don't think he quite pulled it off.

By way of Cliopatria, Google announces an agreement to digitize the holdings of many of the world's great libraries, including those of Harvard, Oxford, Michigan, Stanford, and the NYPL. My, that should be enormously useful for researchers the world over once they get it up and running. That noise you heard in the background was millions of historians' frequent flier miles suddenly crying out in terror and then suddenly silenced.

"It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past. The sorrow of the battlefield could not normally be pinpointed to one particular event, or even one person. If you focused on any one event it would soon become a tearing pain. It was especially important, therefore, to avoid if possible focusing on the dead."

A quick literary shout-out: Hard to read and harder to put down, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War, which I read on my plane ride back from Norfolk, is arguably the best anti/war novel I've read in over a decade. (I'll always have a soft spot for Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, but the surrealism and absurdity of those two seem a world apart from the brutality of Ninh's book.) Graphic and harrowing to the last, Sorrow tells the story of Kien, a North Vietnamese soldier full of youth and promise in the heady days of 1964. Unlike virtually everyone he knows, however, Kien actually manages to survive the Vietnam War to its conclusion in 1975, only to discover that peace remains an elusive ideal, and memory a cruel mistress.

A kindred spirit to All Quiet on the Western Front, Ninh's book doesn't pull any punches -- There are dark moments and harsh visions herein that will remain with me for some time to come. Still, it's a very powerful book, and one worth reading if you have the strength for it.

The cast for All the King's Men fills out, with Patricia Clarkson replacing Meryl Streep as Sadie, Anthony Hopkins taking on Judge Irwin, and James Gandolfini portraying Tiny Duffy, Willie's most grotesque sycophant. Hmmm...I like Clarkson as Sadie, but Hopkins screams stunt casting, and (as with Streep earlier) I'm not sure Gandolfini makes sense given that Sean Penn's playing Willie. I'd love to see a well-done remake of All the King's Men, one of my favorite novels, but I fear this project may fast be veering into Cold Mountain "Miramax All-Stars" territory.

Feeling oh-so-oppressed as usual, student conservatives at Berkeley decry the 7-1 Dem-to-GOP ratio among Humanities and Social Science profs nationwide. Tsk, tsk...they say it like it's such a bad thing. Well, if you'd prefer that we lefties work elsewhere than academia -- say, in government -- y'all know how to vote next time.

And, speaking of people screaming down the Murphometer, what the hell got into Philip Pullman? "The Lord of the Rings is not a serious book because it does not say anything interesting, or new, or truthful about the human condition,' he told [author Jeanette] Winterson in an interview in the December issue of Harpers & Queen." Hmm...really? Coulda fooled me. But, then again, I guess people have just found truth, meaning, and solace in Tolkien's trilogy for fifty years now because it has elves and wizards and dragons and stuff. Look, LotR may not be Pullman's cup of tea -- Lord knows, the last book of His Dark Materials certainly wasn't mine, what with all its Milton-wannabe sermonizing and anti-Narnia heavy-handedness -- but I see no real need to badmouth Tolkien so emphatically (and indefensibly.) Pullman was probably just trying to gain some indy cred with the fantasy-dismissive Booker prize types, but from here his remarks just come off as sour grapes. I really liked The Golden Compass, but, come on now...What a prat.

Meryl Streep is apparently off the All the King's Men remake. To be honest, if Sean Penn is Willie and Jude Law is Jack, I don't think she made much sense as Sadie anyway. Ellen Barkin, perhaps?

Some choice words on moral values and politics, courtesy of Bob Dylan's Chronicles (my current read):

"Clausewitz's book seemed outdated, but there's a lot in it that's real, and you can understand a lot about conventional life and the pressures of environment by reading it. When he claims that politics has taken the place of morality and politics is brute force, he's not playing. You have to believe it. You do exactly as you're told, whoever you are. Knuckle under or you're dead. Don't give me any of that jazz about hope or nonsense about righteousness. Don't give me that dance that God is with us, or that God supports us. Let's get down to brass tacks. There isn't any moral order. You can forget that. Morality has nothing in common with politics. It's not there to transgress. It's either high ground or low ground. This is the way the world is and nothing's gonna change it. It's a crazy, mixed up world and you have to look it right in the eye. Clausewitz in some ways is a prophet. Without realizing it, some of the stuff in his book can shape your ideas. If you think you're a dreamer, you can read this stuff and realize you're not even capable of dreaming. Dreaming is dangerous. Reading Clausewitz makes you take your own thoughts a little less seriously." (Chronicles, p. 45)

Well, I must confess, when I had first heard that Mrs. Clarke's new tome, detailing the illustrious and somewhat murky history of those wily English magicians Strange & Norrell, may rival Tolkien and Peake in its depth and prodigiousness, I could not refrain from shewing my surprize to the other guests at last month's gala ball for the Historians-in-Training, an offense which may work to keep me off the social rolls for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, in spite of this inadvertent affront to polite academic society, I immediately alighted to the booksellers of Mr. Barnes & Mr. Noble to procure a copy of this well-received book, arguably the most important work on matters of European prestidigitation since Strange's own The History and Practice of English Magic. (No disrespect to M. Segundus intended. I find his works on magic very illuminating, but they're entirely too theoretical for my taste.)

And the verdict? Well, those hardy and deluded souls suggesting Mr. Tolkien's work of years past has now been surpassed should aspire to do more reading of the fantastical sort. Nevertheless, Mrs. Clarke's work is a delightful and compulsively readable fantasy-of-manners that, as others have noted, effortlessly blends the genre milieu of Mrs. Rowling with the authorial voice of the nineteenth century British novel. Her sketches of those enigmatic souls Mssrs. Norrell & Strange, as well as such Dickensian personae as Mssrs. Childermass, Drawlight, Lascelles, and Pole, are for the most part convincing, as are her disquisitions on such otherwise notable figures as Lords Wellington and Byron.

Mrs. Clarke's work is particularly successful in capturing the peculiarly English quality of Strange & Norrell's history. Indeed, from the chilly, funereal melancholy that pervades the Faerie court of Lost-Hope to the circuitous rituals of courtship that have always defined our Atlantic brethren, the book headily invokes those days soon after the Napoleonic Wars when the thaumaturgic spirit of the Raven King reawoke throughout the villages, fields, copses, and moors of John Bull. In this emphasis and intertwining of magic and national character, I was often reminded of American Gods by Mr. Gaiman, who has heretofore expressed great admiration for Mrs. Clarke's project. (Speaking of which, as a student of the former Colonies, I do wish Mrs. Clarke had taken more seriously the considerable contributions to the Magickal Arts made by Americans at this historical moment, but perhaps that is a matter left to scholars of our own Republic.)

Despite this lapse, however, Mrs. Clarke's timely chronicle more than lives up to the high bar we've come to expect from Cantabridgian historians of magic. I highly recommend this treatise to those of you even remotely curious about the British magical renaissance of two centuries ago, and particularly if you want your understanding of the subject unsullied by the forthcoming film from New Line Cinema. (In that regard, perhaps Mssrs. Holm and Bettany can be prevailed upon to depict Norrell & Strange respectively...)

J.K. Rowling hints that at least one more character will die in the final two Potter tomes...I presume she's not referring to Voldemort.

"'Chronicles: Volume One' leaves much to be said in future installments, and much good reason to look forward to them." Ex-film critic Janet Maslin peruses Dylan's "flabbergasting" Chronicles for the NYT. Update: Along related lines, Salon compiles a list of First Dylan meetings.

"The redemptive power of suffering is, in my experience at least, vastly overrated." Over this past weekend, I finally got the chance to read Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, and, while it becomes a dark journey indeed for Emilio Sandoz, our Jesuit protagonist, over the course of the novel, I heartily recommend it. In fact, it's probably the best science-fiction book I've read since Perdido Street Station (although Russell's book is much less phantasmagoric than Mieville's more fantasy-tinged stuff.)

A former paleo-anthropologist and academic jack-of-all-trades, Russell has retold the standard First Contact type of story here with a blend of straight-up hard sci-fi, Columbian commentary, and devastating ruminations on the price of faith and the laws of unintended consequences. While the story here seemed self-contained, I'm now rather looking forward to picking up her sequel, Children of God (although the reading queue is pretty backed up right now.) At any rate, if you like your sci-fi literate, intelligent, and ultimately somewhat nightmarish, think about checking out The Sparrow. Update: You can read the first chapter here. Also, if you haven't read The Sparrow, stay out of the comments, where the end of the book is being discussed.

It seems Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, and Mark Ruffalo may be joining Sean Penn (Willie Stark) and Jude Law (Jack Burden) in the forthcoming remake of All the King's Men. Streep is apparently set to play Sadie, Willie's long-suffering right-hand woman, which must make Winslet and Ruffalo Anne and Adam Stanton respectively.

"A few years earlier Ronnie Gilbert, one of The Weavers, had introduced me at one of the Newport Folk Festivals saying, 'And here he is...take him, you know him, he's yours.' I had failed to sense the ominous forebodings in the introduction. Elvis had never even been introduced like that. 'Take him, he's yours!' What a crazy thing to say! Screw that. As far as I knew, I didn't belong to anybody then or now." On the eve of Chronicles, his long-awaited first volume of memoirs, the freewheelin' Bob Dylan sits down with Newsweek and offers up a choice excerpt on the price of fame (which reveals why Self-Portrait is pretty lousy.) It sounds like he's elided over some of his more interesting periods for now (Blood on the Tracks, the Christian years), but this should still be quite a fascinating read.

Much recent news on fantasy-fiction-to-film projects has materialized of late: Christopher Nolan preps for The Prestige post-Batman, WETA readies Prince Caspian as the second film in the Narnia series (after The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe), and director Chris Weitz discusses his adaptation of His Dark Materials.

Also online today is our first look at Roman Polanski's Oliver Twist. Hard to tell much from these few shots, but the kid -- Barney Clark -- looks just about perfect.

"When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he was struck by Americans' conviction that 'they are the only religious, enlightened, and free people,' and 'form a species apart from the rest of the human race.' Yet American independence was proclaimed by men anxious to demonstrate 'a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.'...[I]t is our task to insist that the study of [American] history should transcend boundaries rather than reinforcing or reproducing them." Eric Foner, in a wide-ranging 2003 essay recently posted on HNN, contemplates the direction of American history after 9/11.

"Simple, plain Clarence! I do love thee so, That I will shortly send thy soul to heaven." It appears that, while Ian McKellen has been traipsing about Middle Earth, a hobbit-sized thespian has captured one of his signature roles: The Station Agent's Peter Dinklage talks about his forthcoming Richard III at the Public Theater. I'd very much like to check this out.

Along the lines of the Washington Monthly forum posted last Friday, The Guardian asks a number of American writers -- among them Paul Auster, Norman Mailer,and Richard Ford -- for their thoughts on a second Bush term, and it ain't pretty. (As you may have seen elsewhere, Mailer has birddogged a choice Goering quote which I won't re-post here for fear of invoking Godwin's Law.)

"Democracy matters are frightening in our time precisely because the three dominant dogmas of free-market fundamentalism, aggressive militarism, and escalating authoritarianism are snuffing out the democratic impulses that are so vital for the deepening and spread of democracy in the world. In short, we are experiencing the sad American imperial devouring of American democracy." By way of Rebecca's Pocket and DangerousMeta, Princeton philosopher (and Matrix Elder) Cornel West weighs in on the dangers of Dubyaism.

"The problem of theory was never the philosophy it drew on but the absence of a public forum to criticize it, expand it for intelligent adults, and correct it. The return of the linking intellectuals -- adept in philosophical thought but not beholden to the academy -- could restore a heritage of speaking to the public about the professors, and, more importantly, could get the professors speaking honestly and intelligibly to us." Mark Greif, an old college friend of mine, discusses the Death of Theory in The American Prospect. Compared to most other academic disciplines, American historians seem to have side-stepped the worst excesses of echo-chamber theorizing...but it can seem a different world not all that far away.

"Although parts of the book are dull, the memoir as a whole is a rewarding and revealing portrait of an endlessly fascinating man. Those who write histories of Clinton and his time -- as many people, of course, will do -- will find this memoir an essential starting point." Also in the new Prospect (which, I know, is getting a lot of links today), Alan Brinkley takes a gander at Clinton's My Life.

"Now every meathead who ever blew a whistle has a lesson about that next corporate takeover, keeping your marriage healthy, or your relationship with God. They won a game. You'll win the game of life." Friend and colleague Jeremy Derfner reviews coach actualization lit for Slate.

In Harry Potter casting, Ralph Fiennes is cast as Voldemort for Goblet of Fire. Ok, I guess...but to be honest, I expected someone older. Terence Stamp, perhaps?

In true Civ 3 fashion, USA Today ranks the most and least literate US cities. "Yuppie magnets" Minneapolis, Seattle, and Pittsburgh are at the top of the list, with Texas and California rounding out most of the bottom slots...score one for the South.

Hey Jude, don't make it bad...Apparently Jude Law's been cast in All the King's Men as Jack Burden (the narrator), with Sean Penn in line for Willie Stark (the Huey Long character.) I generally like Law ok, but to be honest, he ain't at all what I pictured for Burden, who's been pretty well broken by life by the time the story starts. Well, we'll see...hopefully this won't turn out to be Cold Mountain II.

Also from Comicon, Touchstone previews the Hitchhiker's Guide teaser. Alas, this is just a write-up...but hopefully it'll hit the web soon. Update: Don't panic...it's here.

Drop the Kong...it's looking increasingly likely that Time Warner will beat out Sony in acquiring MGM, meaning that New Line Cinema would finally secure the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. (!) Also in development on the mythical front right now is a version of The Odyssey more family (and Gods) oriented than the recent Troy...No word on if Sean Bean will reprise Odysseus.

Common Errors in English, found on Kingfresh. I think I might just put this site on my syllabi from now on.

J.K. Rowling lets slip the Book VI title, and it's Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Well, that's a strange one.

The mystery of the grassy knoll has finally been solved, and the second shooter was...John Wilkes Booth?! For the first time in an age, I took advantage of the New York theater scene last night and caught the much-heralded revival of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins at the Roundabout Theatre, which chronicles the inner demons of Mssrs. Booth, Oswald, Hinckley, and assorted other murderers and would-be-murderers of presidents. All in all, I'd say I enjoyed it, although it took a musical number or two for me to warm to the material (some never made the leap -- the guy next to me left outraged.) And there's some memorable performances here, particularly Denis O'Hare as Charles Guiteau (Garfield's assassin) and Michael Cerveris as Booth.

Still, the basic (and ahistorical) message of the play -- that all assassins, whatever their surface motives, are just looking for a little happiness, a little love, and a little fame -- was encapsulated much more succinctly by Peter Gabriel's excellent "Family Snapshot" two decades ago. And, while I like that song and admire what this play was trying to be, this "everybody needs a hug" thesis is too reductively simplistic. Notwithstanding freak shows like Hinckley, assassination is by its very definition a political act, as is distressingly obvious to all of us given recent events in the Middle East. Sure, a lot of assassins are flat-out crazies...Hinckley, Mark David Chapman, Sirhan Sirhan. But others -- Booth, Guitreau, Leon "McKinley" Czolgosz, James Earl Ray, Brutus -- had a political agenda in mind that can't be explained solely by "bad reviews" or a lack of affection as a child (which is perhaps why the Sondheim play ignores the Stalwart v. Halfbreed internecine strife propelling Guiteau to his foul deed.)

Still, if you can stomach the subject matter, Assassins is a moderately engaging fever dream rumination on American loneliness and presidential murder, replete with a sinister carnival barker and Moebius strip leaps in and out of historic continuity. Perhaps the most resonant effect in the play is that of the other assassins -- eerie, floating, voiceless heads underlit to resemble Capt. Howdy in The Exorcist -- watching their colleagues from the mists of History, or from the grave. Misery loves company, and from Cassius on, assassins just adore a conspiracy.

"You are able to take an idea and give it form: the idea that Harlem has hands, feet are flaming, lips are cracked and country, hail hammers and skies crack poems." In a burst of NY Times Dylanania, Jonathan Lethem reviews Dylan's Vision of Sin, the new tome of poetry criticism by acclaimed Oxford Professor Christopher Ricks, while Lucinda Williams pays her own respects to Robert Zimmerman. And, elsewhere in the music-themed Book Review this week, Time politico and Primary Colors author Joe Klein proclaims his fondness for Wilco.

Via a friend and colleague in the program, Alan Brinkley examines the demise of the old-boy-network in Ivy League admissions for The New Republic.

"Sweet steel! Come forth from out your sheath, And glist'ning, speak your powers; Rip up the organs of my breath, And draw my blood in showers!" Historians learn more about Abraham Lincoln's Reznor period with the discovery of his long-rumored suicide poem, published in 1838 (when Abe was 29.)

"WHO THE H*#&! ARE YOU AND WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO MUCK AROUND WITH THIS TREASURED PIECE OF LITERATURE, YOU AMERICAN HOLLYWOOD HACK? Ah. Good one. Yes, I can see why a lot of people might be wondering this..." Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick talks about his contribution to the forthcoming Hitchhiker's Guide film.

Will Chris Weitz of American Pie direct His Dark Materials? This sounds like a terrible idea at first...then again, I thought he and brother Paul Weitz did a solid job with About a Boy. Well, hopefully they won't throw out the Tom Stoppard script too quickly...

So, with the first slew of summer tentpole movies still over a week away (and, aside from Troy and possibly Spidey 2 and Azkhaban, it looks like a remarkably poor crop this year...Exhibit A: Van Helsing), I went over to check out My Architect: A Sons' Journey at the Lincoln Cinemas last night. The documentary follows writer-director Nathaniel Kahn's attempt to understand and come to terms with the life and work of his deceased prodigal father, Louis Kahn, who, besides being one of the more renowned architects of the postwar period, also kept up three different families and died anonymously and deeply in debt in a Penn Station bathroom in 1974. Mostly haunting, occasionally saccharine, My Architect succeeds inasmuch as it explores the mysteries of the father, but fails whenever it wallows in the emotional insecurities of the son.

The advertising copy for My Architect quotes a New York Magazine review deeming it a "Citizen Kane-like meditation," and at its best moments the film does suggest comparison with that 1941 classic. Inveterate romantic, spiritual nomad, ill-tempered workaholic, and a scarred and often-anxious thinker obsessed with issues of permanence and legacy, Louis I. Kahn is a man of many, many layers, and much of the resonance of My Architect comes from seeing his friends, admirers, lovers, and enemies grapple with their still-powerful memories of him, twenty-five years after his death. The film might have benefited from a more dispassionate analysis of Kahn's work -- certainly not all of his buildings are masterpieces (the film does say as much about a U-Penn medical complex), and I thought his plans for redesigning downtown Philadelphia were particularly ill-conceived. (I'm all for reducing automobile traffic in urban areas, but it seems strange and off-kilter to commemorate the cradle of the republic with the type of primitivist ziggurat Kahn seemed to specialize in.) Still, one can hardly fault Kahn for erring on the side of eulogy when remembering his father in film.

What one can fault Kahn for, however, is the amount of time spent in My Architect on his own personal Oprah-esque mission of emotional acceptance. Particularly in the second hour, the movie takes long detours away from the architect's portfolio to examine Nate's relationship with his half-sisters or his cloudy memories of his dad's hands. And, while I'm sure this is all very important to Nate Kahn, it's frankly not very interesting to the viewer. In fact, I thought after a while that Kahn's persistent presence -- perhaps even mooning -- in every interview or location detracted from our understanding and appreciation of his subject. For example, it's hard to contemplate how Louis Kahn's failure to build a synagogue in Jerusalem may have impacted the man when we have to sit through Nate cutely dropping his yarmulke over and over again.

Still, to be fair, this gripe, while a significant one, doesn't kill the movie by any means. If it comes to your town, My Architect is well worth seeing as a study of one man's struggle to achieve some kind of permanence during and despite a transient life, and how memories, like buildings, can both last forever and fall into disrepair.

"In the summer of 1937, broke, in debt and trying desperately to dry out, F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, where he joined the legions of jerks with Underwoods..." The University of South Carolina acquire the papers of Fitzgerald's late Hollywood years, which disclose that the author of Gatsby actually struggled to make the Great American Movie, to no avail.

"One of the most ambitious literary projects of the last 25 years came to an end this March and you probably don't even know its name: Cerebus. It's a comic-book series about a talking aardvark, whose creator seems to have slowly gone insane somewhere over the course of its 6,000 pages. But it is also something of a masterpiece." By way of LinkMachineGo (and something I missed when it was published last month), the Village Voice says goodbye to Cerebus. I read the last issue a few weeks ago and thought the series ended, as expected given Sim's preoccupations lately, with a colossal thud. Still, when Cerebus was good, it was really, really good. Congrats on 300.

Via All About George, A.O. Scott applies Stanley Cavell to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I'm a big Cavell fan...in fact, his reading of Emersonian perfectionism figured heavily in (and, with Michael Sandel's work, helped inspire) my political philosophy list last week. Can't wait to see how Cities of Words turned out, and how close it dovetails with his old Moral Perfectionism course at Harvard.

"Pullman has looked around at this broken universe of ours, in its naturalistic tatters, and has indicated, like Satan pointing to the place on which Pandemonium will rise, the site of our truest contemporary narratives of the Fall: in the lives, in the bodies and souls, of our children." Michael Chabon belatedly reviews the His Dark Materials trilogy for the NY Review of Books.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. By way of my sis-in-law Lotta, the Hamlet text adventure game. How cool is this? I look forward to playing it through once I finish up my freelance work. Here's a tip...don't jump out of Ophelia's window. Update: Ok, I got distracted and went ahead and beat the game. It's pretty clever, except for one really dumb and annoying puzzle that involves screaming a word in a theater. I used the hint to beat it...and the author basically admits that he intended it that way. Oh well, other than that one hiccup, it's great text-adventure fun.

Two recent items of interest from Salon: Steven Hart explores the Christian feuds and friendship of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, while Michelle Goldberg examines the rise of the right's worst nightmare, MoveOn.org.

By way of Scrubbles, the Greatest Album Covers that never were, including Kurt Vonnegut's Phish cover.

After several notable historians question the case in the NY Times, Tim Noah of Slate revisits the plagiarism allegations surrounding Doris Kearns Goodwin. I must say, it still looks pretty ugly, although I am curious to read her forthcoming Lincoln book.

Via Quiddity, academics fret about attractive professors garnering better student evaluations. Well, beauty is power in any endeavor these days...so I'd be surprised if academia were any different. Still, after three hours of lecture a week over the course of a term, I'd think many students' evaluations would bypass professorial sex appeal in favor of the more central question: Was the class interesting?

Quicksilver, the first tome in Neal Stephenson's new trilogy, has just been released to decent reviews. I may just have to take a break from orals reading and procure a copy...fortunately, Stephenson's Baroque Cycle seems to be set in Colonial America, so I might even be able to rationalize such a digression.

George W. Bush pens a poem to Laura. It's not exactly Profiles in Courage, is it?

Upon the publication of Lucky Girls, author-to-be Curtis Sittenfeld evaluates the Nell Freudenberger backlash for Salon. I knew Nell decently well in college and, although I haven't read her full book yet (I just ordered it, and expect to attend the reading tonight), I suspect Sittenfeld is right in noting (however snarkily) that the literary grousing in certain circles has more to do with frightful envy than with Nell's ostensible luck. Whether or not she fell into good fortune with the New Yorker story, it's pretty clear to all who meet her that Nell is not only smart and talented but also remarkably down-to-earth, and I very sincerely doubt she would have escaped notice for long. In sum, she earned her big break, and most of those who'd think otherwise are just trafficking in sour grapes.

Update: The Complete Review, cited in the Sittenfeld piece (and this entry) as backlash central (and an otherwise compelling source of literary info, as far as I can tell), responds to the Freudenberger furor, in part by complaining about my "typically American sense of entitlement." (Continentals, it seems, appreciate much better the formative value of laboring away in penury and obscurity for years - no silver platters for them!) I don't particularly want to get in a flame war with another site about something as unoffending as Nell's success -- why begrudge her this moment? Nevertheless, two points:

1) The Saloon claims they must continue to harp on Freudenberger because the hits and search-requests demand it, which anyone who keeps a weblog knows is disingenuous. If site content was dictated by search requests, I'd be posting essays on "Sex Machines" and "WTC Ghosts" every week.

2) I think the Saloon does clarify their position to where there's an inkling of point to be had: "The big issue we've had, from the first, with Freudenberger, and the reason we've harped on her case so is that she got a fat contract (two, actually, one from Ecco/HarperCollins and one from Picador UK) without having written practically anything." The doling out of literary contracts is clearly an important state-of-the-industry issue that deserves coverage and note by journals like the Saloon. But, again, arguing that Nell isn't receiving undue condemnation from the Saloon and other outlets because she's "pretty and went to Harvard" is also disingenuous. After all, I don't see the Saloon publishing fake dialogues entitled, "Whoa Jon Foer!," and critiquing his back-of-the-book sartorial sense. (Full Disclosure: Jon's brother Frank is a friend and former colleague of mine, and I personally wouldn't hold Foer's success against him either - there's that sense of entitlement again.) In sum, the Saloon can argue good intentions all the live-long day, but it's pretty clear from the levels of snark exhibited in their Freudenberger posts that the site's opprobium for her reflects less wholesome motives than dispassionate, just-the-facts-ma'am coverage of the literary scene. Schadenfreudenberger, perhaps?

Salon's Laura Miller lays the hurt on Chuck Palahniuk. I'll concede that his books all have the same (over-stylized) voice and can get repetitive and tiresome after awhile, but I don't think he's as bad as all that...more like trashy pleasure reading for the misanthropically-inclined. I'll take him over most light fiction any day of the week...In fact, I just picked up Lullaby for the flight home.

John Updike reviews the flood of new Emerson literature emerging in the wake of the Sage of Concord's bicentennial. Perhaps now would be a good time to revise my paper on Herbert Croly and Emersonian perfectionism while the getting's good.

No king of England if not of France. Alas, the NY Times didn't think much of Henry V in the park. I caught it a few weeks ago and enjoyed it better than this reviewer, for sure. Given recent events, I do wish they'd turned up the satire a notch ("We doubt not of a fair and lucky war," as the posters proclaim) and Bronson Pinchot's Balki-esque schtick as Pistol seemed wildly out of place. But all in all, I thought the show made for a lively summer evening. And as a fan of the McKellen Richard III, I enjoyed the WWI motif Liev Schreiber & co. were aiming for.

The Boston Globe examines the rise of the academic star system, the ensuing university rat race, and how they both affect those scholars who actually do the teaching. Sadly, as you might expect, it means even less money to go around for the bulk of PhDs.

"Democracy, more than any other political system, depends on a modicum of honesty. Ultimately, it is much at the mercy of a leader who has never been embarrassed by himself." Norman Mailer weighs in on the Iraq War, Weaponsgate, and Dubya's aircraft carrier stunt.

Via LinkMachineGo, NinthArt checks in with Dave Sim as he enters the stretch run of Cerebus. Every so often I pick up an issue at Forbidden Planet and find it, sadly, to be just as inscrutable as this column suggests.

Another great link from Quiddity (If you're not reading her, you really should) - Modern Celebrities in Art, such as Lord Leighton's Portman here. The Rodin Tom Waits scares me.

So after a marathon reading session over the past day or so, I've finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (and now back to your regularly scheduled history tomes.) All in all, I found it another solid and compulsively readable Hogwarts adventure, although I did have some quibbles which I listed over at Max's site. When's Book VI coming out?

"Like actors, however, humanities graduate students have to realize that — except for a few jackpot cases — there is no market for their product. When you choose a career path with no market, you have to love it enough to do it for free." Breaching the Web passes along a rude awakening for the academy-minded. Statistics like these are always a bit disappointing...still, I think a PhD can be helpful in other career tracks besides academia, and particularly in a field like History or English that lends itself to a lot of overlap with the "real" world. The numbers are grim, but most fellow graduate students I encounter seem to know the score.

"His anger, let us go so far as to say, was precious to him. He had lived his way into it - in Burma and Paris and London and on the road to Wigan pier, and in Spain, being shot at, and eventually wounded, by fascists - he had invested blood, pain and hard labour to earn his anger, and was as attached to it as any capitalist to his capital." The Guardian excerpts Thomas Pynchon's forthcoming intro to 1984. (Via Random Walks.)

By way of LinkMachineGo and Lots of Co., Phillip Pullman announces he's bringing back Lyra (of the His Dark Materials trilogy) for a short story and follow-up novel. No word on the Ratner-Mendes film reports of a few days ago.

Two random and unrelated links for your perusal - First, What NYC Subway are you? (Via Fair Play and Substantial Justice.) Despite wanting to be the A-C-E or 1-9, since those are the ones I use, I kept getting the J-M-Z...Sigh.) Second, the Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus, which offers a spinning and strangely captivating wordweb for each entry you choose. It's neat (syn.: peachy, keen, interesting, boffo...)

A Texas Tech biology professor gets in hot war for refusing to recommend creationists for medical school. And as you might expect, the Ashcroft Justice Department stepped in. Pretty pathetic, really...I can't believe this case will go anywhere. However you feel about creationism, we're not talking about grades here - we're talking about recs. A professor is well within his or her rights to refuse a recommendation to anyone he or she so desires. If Prof. Dini here thinks creationism and faith healing make lousy prerequisites for med school, then so be it...get a rec from the bible-thumping biology professor down the hall. And, as for the Justice Dept...well, if another student was denied a rec because she believed in the efficacy of bloodletting, would the Justice Department be getting involved? I doubt it. But somehow Ashcroft still finds time enough outside of spreading panic and buying duct tape futures to prosecute his theocratic agenda. Sad, sad, sad.

Misread misanthrope or principled truthteller? Louis Menand and Leon Wieseltier battle over the legacy of George Orwell. Only recently in my readings (in Menand's Metaphysical Club and James Livingston's Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy) have I encountered this notion that the pragmatism of the Progressives (such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, and John Dewey) eventually leads to the same moral relativist conclusions as post-structuralism (in fact, Livingston argues that much of the postmodern devotion to figures like Foucault and Derrida is mainly a reflection of the European indifference to, if not ignorance of, American scholarship - James and Dewey came to the same philosophic conclusions decades earlier.) And, indeed, Herbert Croly's 1909 The Promise of American Life, considered the bible of the Progressive moment, attacks abolitionism for much the same reasons as Louis Menand - that it was dangerous and destructive in its reliance upon absolute moral certainty. (Sadly, to say the progressives had a moral blind spot when it came to America's racial dilemma is an understatement.) But, then again, the "prophetic pragmatism" of Cornel West is cleary infused with a moral sense that is based on certain underlying truths. ("Like Foucault, prophetic pragmatists criticize and resist forms of subjection, as well as types of economic exploitation, state repression, and bureaucratic domination. But these critiques and resistances, unlike his, are unashamedly guided by moral ideals of creative democracy and individuality.") So, I'd say that, while I fall somewhere between Menand and Wieseltier on the subject of Orwell, and while I usually find Wieseltier to be a pompous ass (his own attack on Cornel West comes to mind), in the end I side with those who say keep the aspidistra flying. To paraphrase Orwell, all truths may in fact be equal, but some truths are more equal than others. It may involve some intellectual doublethink, but one can recognize that a truth may have some basis in subjectivity and still hold it - and fight for it - with conviction.

Salon checks in with Dr. Gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson, on the eve of a new memoir, Kingdom of Fear.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix finally gets a release date - June 21, 2003 - and it's even longer than Goblet, weighing in at 768 pages. Bet the bean-counters at AOL-TW are salivating...that means two more movies.

Today J.R.R. Tolkien reaches the age of Bilbo's big birthday bash, 111. Be sure to toast the professor at 9pm local time. (In other birthday news, a very happy birthday to my brother Thad yesterday.)

Via a friend of mine in the program, Professors Eric Foner (with whom I've taken two classes) and Glenda Gilmore offer a rebuttal to Daniel Pipes' recent list of academics who hate America. An article like this really doesn't deserve a response but, simply put, Pipes is a moron. Reading any chapter of Foner's recent Story of American Freedom -- or any of his other books for that matter -- belies Pipes' ridiculous and dangerous charge of anti-Americanism. And finding fault with Dubya's wag-the-dog Freudian fiasco in Iraq, a soon-to-be-military excursion that has already run roughshod over our Constitution, hardly speaks ill of anyone's patriotism.

If anything, it's egregiously anti-American for Pipes to earmark academics who should be constrained from the "outside." A quote the Daniel Pipes of this world ought to consider: In the words of Cornel West, "To understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America – this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it."

Nick Hornby delves into a spate of recent graphic novels for the NYT Book Review. (Via Random Walks.)

In the same vein as the Brin piece linked to the other day, Tomb of Horrors and Lake Effect (he's back!) have pointed to Epic Pooh, another Tolkien-bashing article, this time by Michael Moorcock. Obviously, I disagree with a lot of what Moorcock has to say here, although I did find the Pratchett quote a bit eerie. ("Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin.") It's irrefutable that much of Tolkien's writing is infused by a near-Luddite paranoia about the industrial order and a backwards-looking regret for a lost Golden Age. And yes, our beloved Oxford don is a bit of a snob - both the Cockney speech of the orcs and the often-limited imagination of Samwise attest to that. But it's fatuous to compare Tolkien's pre-industrial nostalgia to that of bored Bournemouth vacationers (and a bit hypocritical to accuse Tolkien of fostering anti-humanist Thatcherism while continually bagging on commuters who enjoy reading "addictive cabbage"...who's the elitist here?) Considering both his youth in Birmingham and his experience in WWI, Tolkien's loathing of modernity was to my mind hard-earned and deeply felt.

As for evil being "never really defined" in Tolkien's book, I emphatically disagree. It seems clear that evil is defined by the will to, and temptation of, power. Both Brin and Moorcock argue that Tolkien never gives Sauron's POV about matters, that evil is one-dimensional. That's garbage. Evil is manifested throughout the trilogy not as a state of being but as a choice made, by Saruman deciding the world would be better if he were in charge, by Boromir attempting to harness the power of the ring as a weapon, by Frodo learning the seduction of domination through the taming of Smeagol. As such, in Tolkien's trilogy, all good characters are capable of evil...Frodo, Galadriel, Gandalf (yes, even the "white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us,"), and most evil characters (Sauron, Saruman, the Nazgul) were once good. (This duality is most obviously and explicitly represented by the tortured Smeagol/Gollum.) Thus, Tolkien's representation of evil in the Lord of the Rings is much more nuanced and complex than either Brin or Moorcock suggest. It is a complexity that belies Moorcock's charge of "infantilism."


Also, it should be noted that Tolkien's backward-looking elitism is tempered somewhat by a forward-looking faith in pluralism. As emphasized in the films, multilateralism becomes a necessity in Middle Earth. Men, elves, dwarves, hobbits, ents...all have to come together and work together to have any chance of countering the threat of Mordor. Indeed, as Brin noted, Tolkien himself declared the aristocratic Elves' fleeing to the West to be "selfish." Southrons and Easterlings notwithstanding, Tolkien's writings argue passionately for a pluralism more at home in the modern age than any previous.


I'm not going to deal with Moorcock's attempted dismantling of other authors here...of his other targets I'll confess a fondness for Richard Adams Watership Down, but I was never much into the Narnia books. That being said, I quite liked David Brin's Uplift War series, and people I trust tell me that the film version of The Postman was a horrible translation of a quite-good novel. So when Brin has something to say about Tolkien's writing, I'll give him his due. But Michael Moorcock?! Are you kidding me? As a teenager, when I would devour all the science-fiction and fantasy books I could get my hands on ("addictive cabbage" and otherwise), I read the first couple of Elric books...not to put too fine a point on it, I thought they were pretty lousy. (And even then, it was clear Moorcock had an axe to grind with Tolkien.) I'll get my brooding and platitudinous Goth melodrama from Anne Rice, thank you very much. I say, I say, give me Elrod the Albino over the "Stormbringer" any day. Update: Perhaps Moorcock would prefer a different author for the Rings trilogy? (Some of these are hilarious.)

In a bizarre revelation that sent her screaming down the Murphometer, Diane Keaton loves clowns. I mean, c'mon now, anybody with any sense knows that clowns are pure evil. (Via Quiddity.)

Slate answers Harvey "C-" Mansfield on the subject of grade inflation. I agree with the former, as noted here (2/7).

Is Stephen King hanging it up? Like everyone else, I'll believe it when I see it.

The Washington Post checks in with Cornel West upon his move to Princeton. (Via Random Walks.) Sure enough, Larry Summers comes off as a jackass. As I've said over here, West was easily one of the most committed professors to undergraduate life on campus. To accuse him of playing hooky because he has a number of high-profile side projects is both unfair and untrue. All I know is I hope someday I'm both respected and culturally relevant enough as an academic to appear in the Matrix sequels (or their fanboy equivalents.)

J.R.R. Tolkien's Oxford, interactive. Also, those well-to-do folks out there looking for a more substantive piece of Middle Earth's history should go here. (On a related note, how great is it to finally have Fellowship legitimately on DVD? No more "Property of New Line blah blah blah" scrolling over the best parts.)

Are Harvard and Princeton hurting Afro-Am scholarship in their contest over Henry Louis Gates and Cornel West? Hmmm...I don't really buy it. In my opinion, virtually all the academic disciplines are star-driven with regard to employment. And, while Diaspora Studies may indeed be the most interesting locus of scholarship in this field right now, Gates and West are performing an equally important function in their roles as public intellectuals...a role all too many academics have forsaken. In related news, assorted neocons have used the Summers fracas to blacklist Cornel West. Just like good little orthodoxy-craving neocons to flee at the sound of intelligent opposition, no?

The jihad furor at Harvard's graduation dies down. (The speaker, a fellow with a knack for creating controversy, will undoubtedly go far.) This weekend is also my 5-year reunion up in Cambridge, but I'm bagging it (as are most of my closest friends from the old school.) Maybe I'll make the tenth.

His Dark Materials author Phillip Pullman rips into C.S. Lewis. (Via LinkMachineGo.) Pullman's got a point, but to my mind his trilogy grew a lot more ponderous and a lot less fun once the whole Republic of Heaven angle became the central thrust of the story (somewhere in the first third of The Subtle Knife.)

Stephen King remembers Stephen Jay Gould.