Horizon

"Upper Class"

There are billboards around town here advertising Virgin Atlantic Airways' new "Upper Class" luxury seating arrangement. My query being: in which past years of the last hundred, in which places, would the label "Upper Class" also have been a successful marketing ploy?

Defining Irony

Are the Crooked Timber people getting it right today?

Slow Down Harry

As Someone Who Never Understood What The Fuss Was All About In The First Place, I confess that the release of the latest Harry Potter movie leaves me somewhat cold. But I do wonder if the form that this screen adaptation has taken is inherently flawed. J.K. Rowling's not-so-little tale is - let's face it - a warmed-up version of the public school stories published in the Gem and Magnet over half a century ago, with a dash of magic added to intrigue today's kids (who are otherwise unlikely to get much excited about high tea and the old grey stones). Its success in printed form lies in its enormously convoluted plot and its exclusive mental atmosphere - complete with arcane facts and secret jargon - that allows children to fantasize about being part of an elaborately constructed alternative universe. But the movie versions squander this literary inheritance in favor of fancy special effects, which the producers seem to have mistakenly assumed are the attraction behind the stories; meanwhile the elephantine plots have to be mercilessly squeezed into 2-3 hour screen formats, making them unsatisfactory to hard-core fans and incomprehensible to casual Muggles like myself. Surely a long TV adaptation of the Potter books with cheaper sfx but much more attention to characterization and Rowling's more baroque points of detail would have been a better idea?

A Brief History of Bollocks

"It never fully answers the question of why, over 200 years after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, we have a prime minister who once covered himself in crap and screamed like a lunatic while surrounded by lizard symbols in Mexico to symbolise the pain of rebirth." Nor can I. But read it anyway.

Book club?

On vacation this past week I read Connolly's The Unquiet Grave and part of the Hollinger book, so did we want to resume conversation about either one?

About Hollinger, I'm up to mid-Chapter 4. He seems just to have chosen an elaborate way of pointing out that demographic labels, if used at all, shouldn't be treated as mutually exclusive. Is there more to it than I'm getting?

About the Connolly, dunno if Unquiet Grave is such a hot reading group selection after all. There are good items in it but it's also difficult, private, alternately pompous and self-hating, and loaded with dull bad advice about women and lemurs.

Any thoughts on either book?

Stormin' Normans

Medievalists take note: David Aaronovitch (yes, that David Aaronovitch) begins a new BBC Radio 4 series this week on the regime change of 1066 and its consequences for the English-speaking peoples. The episodes be probably be available for download via RealPlayer for a few weeks.

Bookshop Memories

I've had customers like this myself.

"There is Glamour in Trauma"

A hard-hitting New Republic article in which Ruth Franklin laments what she describes as the often narcissistic appropriation of historical tragedy by the descendents of victims.

"Not surprisingly, constructing one's identity according to a negative definition proves unproductive. In our memory-drenched culture, which celebrates lived experience with the fervor that was once reserved for divine revelation, the children of survivors, defined by their own "postness," cannot help but feel, well, secondary ..."

Chess vs. Literature?

In the conversation about Barbara Ehrenreich below, I responded to a poorly chosen rhetorical tactic of hers, and Alan A. built on my response, like this:

>If she were in the habit of arguing on the Internet
>she wouldn't have left that vulnerability.

This is more of a spin-off question, but do you think that the Internet's rapid-response capabilities will make traditional writers more cautious in what they say - and perhaps better writers as a result?

It's a good question Alan asks, and some of the possible answers make a good counterweight to the now-famous George Packer article criticizing the weblog form.

But I wonder if maybe it boils down to this:

There are all kinds of writing, and political debate is one of them. Internet argument provides great training in political debate. It encourages the habit of thinking through each comment as though it were a chess move, in terms of the likely opposition response.

But chess and literature aren't the same. Chess and political polemic aren't even the same. Too much attention to armoring a statement against possible responses cramps originality and can make thought less free. That's the kind of caution that, for example, makes upper-level political speeches so frequently dull.

Maybe belonging to a debating society is no more than useful preparation for speaking well in a more dignified frame?

That's not, however, to disparage all online discussion. To begin with, there are all kinds of weblogs, which is something that Mr. Packer may not have wasted enough time online to find out. There do seem to be places -- including, I hope, this one -- where it's possible to use conversation to tease out the meaning of something and not just to have an argument.

I dunno. What do others think?

Headcase

Was I the only one who thought the wave of mea culpas about Sunday's Doonesbury strip needed more explanation than the original offense?

It took me a little while to work out what was so allegedly awful about the strip's last panel. Perhaps it's because I lack Mr. Trudeau's hair shirt (or that of his syndicators' lawyers), but I'm still puzzled as to why a completely off-topic allusion to a commonplace metaphor should have aroused such passion. Assuming that it did, of course: what's notably absent in the news stories covering this blooper is evidence that anyone was actually offended. Perhaps it's time for a bipartisan moratorium on vaguely defined public outrages (and yes, that means you too, MB).

Blood and Soil

Fellow Pennsylvanians, choose your state dirt.

Ozymandias in Turkmenistan

I met a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings."
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Seafood Platter

Unlikely a topic as it may seem, I implore as many people as possible to read this alternately hilarious and fascinating article in the New Yorker on the world's giant squid hunters.

“It’ll probably be too rough out there for any fishing boats,” O’Shea shouted over the noise of the engine. “But we’re going to need to be careful of container ships. They can come up pretty fast.” It was now twilight, and he squinted at one of the buoys that marked a safe route through the channel.

“What color is that?” he asked me.

“It’s green,” I said. “Can’t you see it?”

“I’m not just deaf,” he said. “I’m color-blind.”

As we left the harbor, it began to rain, and the smooth channel gave way to swells. The boat leaped over the crests, its aluminum hull vibrating.

“A bit rough, ain’t it?” Conway said.

“She’s sturdier than she looks,” O’Shea said of the vessel. He glanced at the forward berth. “Underneath those cushions are the life jackets. You don’t need to wear them, but just so you know where they are ..."

Touch of Evil

Two provocative and perhaps infuriating books that nonetheless remind us of how complex and disturbing the attractions of National Socialism were.

Early and Often

Depending on your view of the political process, these suggestions will either appear grotesque or ingenious. (A few of them admittedly conjure up these sorts of images).

One initial thought, however - simplifying the ballot 'ain't necessarily going to draw in the voters. Britain has about as straightforward a franchise process as you could wish for, but electoral participation is going down too.

Eutopia

A useful multi-part analysis of the new European Union Constitution by the BBC.

Idiot Box

One more damned thing for parents to fret about.

Nice Gals Don't Do That

"A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté" ... Barbara "Separate Spheres" Ehrenreich employs Germaine Greer's time-worn schtick of presenting her private angst as a change in the Zeitgeist. (Registration required).

"Never thirsting, ever drinking..."

A few days back I had something on my own weblog about Cyril Connolly watching fish and wondered what the fish thought of Cyril Connolly, who in late middle age looked like this.

Joe Fineman, who some here may remember, suggests consulting Leigh Hunt's "The Fish, the Man, and the Spirit." Surreal stuff, and Hunt's dates are given as 1784-1859. Amazing how you can dig back before the Victorians and find all these modern-seeming forms of expression.

I wonder if those first stanzas could have inspired the shuddery fish riddle in "The Hobbit".

International Hollywood

According to David Kipen, the current quality (lack of quality, that is) of Hollywood films is due largely to its increased emphasis on playing to overseas markets. Seems that Hollywood movies now routinely make more money overseas than in America.

I have no doubt that the trend he examines is real, and that it has some effect on what movies get made (or, probably more to the point, what movies do not get made). But is it anything but a conceit to claim that the bad dialogue in the Batman or Matrix films is the result of pandering to an audience that will have to read subtitles?

Here, alas, is the virus laying waste to modern Hollywood movies. What do, say, the Batman and Matrix pictures have in common, besides banality? Just for openers, insipid, infrequent dialogue. Why take the trouble to bang out good lines?supposing one can?if they'll only be mistranslated for their real target markets, abroad? Both these movies could have been silents if they weren't so loud. They're overbearing, carelessly told, and gang-written into incomprehensibility.

Well, first of all, though I am the first to admit that The Matrix series has dialogue that is serviceable at best, and occassionaly a bit embarrassing ("Welcome to the desert of the real." (!)), I nevertheless cannot take any movie critic seriously who cannot perceive (or admit) the difference in quality between this trilogy and the (mostly) insulting Batman movies. The final line quoted above is itself careless and is as gang-written as the Matrix was.

That aside, was the Matrix designed for an international market? Infrequent dialogue is not that unusual in an action movie. How much more dialogue was there in The French Connection, not to mention the nearly silent Bullitt, to use examples from Kipen's favorite decade?

Kipen makes it clear that, for him, good movies are dialogue driven, and that the "auteur" in film is really the screenwriter. That's a fair position to take, but his prejudices have warped his analysis somewhat.

Postethnic America 1

At long last, here's the inaugural post of the Horizon Book Club. We're reading Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. I have already posted a brief description of the book here.

The second chapter, "Haley's Choice and the Ethno-Racial Pentagon" focuses mainly on the five ethno-racial categories currently used on the census and many other forms that collect demographic data.

The most interesting claim so far is that race, as the concept is used today, does not indicate biological or cultural difference. Rather, the designation of one group as a race is determined by the extent to which the group has been discriminated against by "Euro-Americans".

The way this system of classification works can be further illustrated by comparing the status of Latinos with that of Jewish Americans. Jews were once widely thought to constitute a race, but are no longer. This transformation did not result primarily from scientific advances in biology and physical anthropology. Rather, the prejudice against Jewish Americans within American historical experience is judged to be less severe and damaging than the prejudice against Latinos who, because of that greater perceived victimization, are now said to constitute a race. ...

Hence, the blocs of the pentagon get their integrity not from biology, nor even from culture, but from the dynamics of prejudice and oppression in U.S. History and from the need for political tools to overcome the legacy of that victimization.

If you accept this, and it sounds right to me, then it's little wonder that the categories of the pentagon so closely replicate the old racist theories that divided people mainly on skin color. The irony of an attempt to address and compensate for racism is that it leads us to adopt racist categories, regardless of whether they otherwise make any sense at all. Paradoxically, race has come to be defined by racism, and policies designed to further equality are led to invent categories that institutionalize discredited racist ideas.

The next implication: this may be a necessary way to define the problem in order to offset the effects of racism, but the pentagon is a terrible way to define what Hollinger calls "communities of descent", racial and cultural identities, since they are grounded in nothing other than current and historical prejudices of the dominant ethno-racial group.

The other main thread in this chapter is the malleability of racial categories. Hollinger uses the example of Alex Haley, the author of Roots, who chose to write about (and identify himself with) his African American ancestry rather than his Irish ancestry. Hollinger wants the prescriptive concept of identity in multiculturalism to give way to affiliation, which in many cases, at least, would be voluntary.

Again, the "ethno-racial" pentagon appears to be an essential part of multicultural thought on this issue. He observes, for instance, that a Cambodian could easily choose whether to identify himself as a Cambodian, but would find it much harder to refuse the classification of Asian American. In a "postethnic" America, he says, this would not be; Alex Haley could walk in the St. Patrick's Day parade and no one would think twice about it.

This is where I start to see problems. First of all, how exactly would such attitudes be changed? So far Hollinger doesn't say much about that. More importantly, Hollinger seems to see the pentagon as something adopted by multiculturalists as a political tool, and that it's therefore somehow responsible for Americans' attitude toward race today. But it seems clear to me that the pentagon is merely describing something which already exists. People still see race and ethnicity as largely a matter of skin color. How would abandoning it as a framework for multiculturalism improve the situation? Is Hollinger succumbing to the suspect assumption that the theories of academic multiculturalists have all that much to do with the reality of race in America?

That's not a rhetorical question. The chapter is dense and I don't feel like I've really absorbed all of it. Just how well does Hollinger establish the connection between the official categories of the pentagon, multicultural theory, and what is really happening in America today? And how do we get from here to the "postethnic". As far as I can tell, he hasn't really addressed these questions so far.

Nostalgia?

Here are two reviews, both favorable, of books whose mainspring seems to be nostalgia for an old idea of literary community: Adam Gopnik's Americans in Paris and Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting. There do still seem to be literary communities that meet in person -- for one there's the Chabon/Handler/Eggers/McSweeney's/Believer group. But what about writers who do their talking about writing on the Net? Is the example of the stationary-but-plugged-in lady in The Machine Stops supplanting the Hemingway model for the literary life?

The Little Corporal

A worthwhile review of Steven Englund's Napoleon: A Political Life:

"Napoleon locked up relatively few political opponents, and he remained genuinely popular for much of his rule. He was not a totalitarian so much as the last of the great Enlightened despots, with newly efficient systems of censorship and internal espionage. But to say, as Englund does, that Napoleon "only" faced resistance to his rule "under special conditions in Calabria, Spain, and the Tyrol" is rather like saying that Lyndon Johnson "only" faced resistance to his foreign policy in Vietnam. Spain in particular, as Napoleon himself acknowledged, was his empire's bleeding ulcer ... in desperation, he and his colleagues turned to increasingly cruel means of repression: forcing Spanish peasants into towns, taking and executing hostages, even wiping out whole villages in reprisal for attacks.

Napoleon succeeded because, embodying a modern novelistic sensibility, he managed to create a personal, intimate bond between mass politics and ordinary citizens. He put a human face on mass politics in a way that the French Revolutionaries, with their cold and high abstractions, had failed to do. As Madame de Staël justly remarked, "The only new proper noun to come out of the Revolution is Bonaparte." He did not rise above politics so much as incarnate politics, the state, and the nation in a personality with which ordinary French people could identify. Unfortunately, for all his state-building talent, he built his regime on police repression rather than democratic institutions, and he legitimized it through the promise of conquest rather than free elections and the guarantee of human rights. When his conquests finally faltered, his regime blew away like dust, and his country resumed the wild and violent dance of political instability that had begun in 1789 and would last until well into the late nineteenth century (with echoes in the twentieth). This makes Napoleon's story criminal. But, as Englund shows, the story is also tragic--all the more so because it comes across to modern readers as so intensely human."

Nil Points

There are a few things that non-Europeans need to know about the Eurovision Song Contest. One is that the most famous winner is Waterloo by ABBA in 1974. Another is that, Waterloo aside, the music is spectacularly, parodically, almost Platonically bad. Another is that the competition is taken amazingly seriously by continental Europeans. Another is that Israel is considered to be in Europe. Another is that the Portuguese entry once precipitated a revolution. And another is that the judging is universally recognized to be corrupt. "Someone has got to stop this. The European Broadcasting Union has to take a hand," said Britain's long-serving commentator Terry Wogan last night as Ukraine took the top spot under what were alleged to be highly dodgy circumstances. But were they as murky as all that? Certain forms of politically biased decision-making are a long-standing tradition of the contest; for years Greece has habitually voted its maximum 12 points for Cyprus, and vice versa, in the most shameless example of quid pro quo. And certainly if one looks at the 2004 scorecard then there are no shortage of suspicious judgments; Ukraine received 1st or 2nd place from Slavic neighbors or ethnically sympathetic cousins Belarus, Serbia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Russia, while runners-up Serbia grabbed high votes from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Russia, Slovenia and the Ukraine. But note: Ukraine also did well amongst the relatively disinterested coalition of Andorra, Israel, Iceland, Portugal and Sweden, while Serbia was rewarded by Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Clearly regional bloc voting is playing a part here, but it's not the only explanation for the Kievan triumph. Is the ugly truth for the once-mighty Anglophone nations that their songs simply suck?

"One of those glands the size of a pea..."

Sad comments in yesterday's SF Chron from the owner of a lefty bookstore who says his sales are down. For one thing, he finds people are going to mass-market booksellers for hard-swinging criticisms of the government that used to be available only in specialty stores like his. But then he also finds something that might be just as big a change, and possibly a worse one:

Sales of books on such subjects as health care, AIDS, genetic engineering and feminism have "dried up in the past year; it is as though people are at such an emotional pitch that they have no room for anything else. Cultural theory? Forget it.''

Whatever you may think of lefty bookstores per se, that's a sad sign of cultural flattening. It correlates with something written in 1940 by Cyril Connolly, who may or may not be a patron saint of this place but who anyway said some interesting stuff.

Michael Shelden's Friends of Promise says this:

"...Connolly regarded Horizon as his 'war work', and was defiant of philistine critics who dismissed the reading and writing of 'highbrow' literature as frivolous, escapist pursuits in a nation at war. In 'Comment' he insisted that whatever demands the war imposed on the country, it was vital for writers and artists to continue producing art in order 'to make our culture into something worth fighting for'. Art was a necessity, not a luxury, he argued, and could not simply be pushed aside until the war was over. 'Art occupies in society,' he wrote in 1940, 'the equivalent of one of those glands the size of a pea on which the proper functioning of the body depends, and whose removal is as easy as it is fatal.' At Horizon it was Connnolly's self-appointed duty to remind the country that the survival of its culture was threatened as much by philistines at home as by hostile armies overseas..."

Of course it's misleading to make direct comparisons between the present U.S. troubles and the much more dire 1940 UK experience. But, well, do we again have this problem of people feeling too badly wrung out by the daily news to maintain a serious cultural life that is not about current events?

Going Cellular

It's the bit about the shirt and the safety glasses that puzzles me.

Greek Ire

Thus spake the Oracle:

"The Iliad, you'll remember, boasts a very improbable plot: Helen—who was universally considered the most ravishing woman around—was married to Menelaus, the Spartan king, until Paris, a pretty boy from Troy, seduced her and carried her off. Menelaus, incensed, then launched his ships, set sail for Troy, and fought a bloody 10-year war to get her back."

What's so improbable about that? Bridget Jones (and its inspiration) are both a good deal more unlikely.

Trojan Fish

I am still chewing over this article by Stanley Fish from the February Chronicle of Higher Education. My current feeling is, more or less: "Yes, but ..."

Non-dogmatic comments would be appreciated to help me decide about this.

Manchester, Music, More Postmodernism

Just saw 24 Hour Party People. It's about Tony Wilson, who started Factory Records in the late 70s and recorded Joy Division and James and some other famous bands. It follows Wilson's career as club owner, record producer, and scenester from 1976 to the early 90s--long enough to watch everything come together and unravel again in a cocaine-induced blur.

Although I was very curious about this movie when it came out, I didn't see it because, first of all, it seemed to be all about Tony Wilson and not enough about Joy Division, and, secondly, people said it was too cute, with characters addressing the audience through the camera and that sort of thing.

As it turns out, the postmodern moments (Wilson turns to the camera at one point and announces that the second act is about to begin, or in another case comments on a scene just passed and explains its supposed symbolism) are just that: cute, sort of jokey, and, as in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, they don't disrupt the fiction as you'd expect them to. In fact, far from undermining or questioning his existence as a fictional character, they have the perfectly traditional effect of elaborating the character's extreme self-consciousness. Like most of the characters in 24 Hour Party People, Tony is, in his own mind, always performing for his audience.

This movie should follow the standard tragic arc, like Raging Bull or any number of other movies which portray a hero from the good, early days through decadence and ruin, but the arc is missing. In the first act, though everything is going well, no one seems really happy. All of the characters seem to be trying to escape their dreary lives and not really succeeding. The one great scene of the movie, in which Ian Curtis (the singer of Joy Division) hangs himself, perfectly captures this terrible malaise that overcomes him as he sits in front of the TV and realizes he has nowhere to go anymore.

So, though Wilson's life spins predictably out of control near the end, he doesn't have all that far to fall, and by the end of the film nothing has fundamentally changed. Far from being a defect, this gives 24 Hour Party People an unexpectedly realistic emotional tone. Whatever happens, the characters never get out of the predicament of being just who they are, no matter how pretentious they might be.

Encyclopedia Whatevica

This recent piece on the Wikipedia phenomenon made me wonder how successful in the long term popular open-access Internet projects are going to be. The amount of free information available via Wikipedia is astonishing - but so is the discovery of how easy it is to edit pages both constructively and mischievously. And the reliability of the contents is impossible to verify. Are the Wikipedia folks inevitably going to have to introduce more and more editorial controls to maintain quality and forestall trolls? Is the WWW common fated for enclosure?

Scouting For Boys

A timely reminder that, when he's not snide or hectoring, Christopher Hitchens can still be a pretty good writer.

"Boy, those French, they have a different word for everything!"

The A to Z of Cannes

"One Ring to Privilege Them All ..."

Whatever you think of them in real life, this faux DVD commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky for the Fellowship of the Ring extended edition is pretty funny.

(c/o Harry's Place).

ROBBIE on Godot, etc.

ROBBIE asked me to forward this for discussion:

Martha, on her blog, has this to say about quoting from lit:

'Was poking through Waiting for Godot this afternoon, avoiding a deadline and looking for something to quote at the current world news. Discovered, as usual, that really good writers are mainly unquotable. Any text that's part of a well-written whole is hard to take out of its original context. It may be applicable elsewhere, but it'll be hard to cut in a way that makes sense outside the original, because every word in the original will depend on every other word.'

I was highly surprised by this assertion. We may have stumbled here on yet another good reason to downgrade Beckett from his over-adulated position: his writing is so diffuse that Martha, searching for something to quote about a mad world full of death and error, can find nothing that can reach the universal outside of the text; indeed when I saw a production of Endgame in the West End recently I felt the play was rather measly for its great reputation. Certainly Shakespeare had seen and summarised Hamm and Clov's ninety minutes in a matter of lines, which might not be an argument against Beckett's play writing per se but is definitely an argument against his adulation. Almost any episode of Steptoe and Son, for example, is as good as Godot or Endgame: you get more jokes but the Beckettian world is there in aces as well, or rather there if you want to see it; if you don't see it, you get a laugh; with Beckett, if you don't see it, you don't get anything.

But getting back to Martha's comment. I found it surprising because to me, the quotability of something is a sure sign of quality, whether you reference it in writing, or read it as an epigraph--a well chosen epigraph sets a novel up well I think. Off the top of my head I think of the George Eliot quote at the start of Our Man in Havana: 'And the sad man is cock of all his jests.' or as a response to an event. Shakespeare comes out on top with this and the application of his words--outside their immediate context of his plays, such as to one's own experience or an event--is what makes his work so great and universal. Choose your own examples.

But What Have You Uploaded For Me Lately?

Anyone else recognize this symptom of creeping information dissatisfaction in themselves?

"Had you told me 15 years ago that by 2004 I could retrieve any one of 13 billion pages of free content—newspapers, all the great books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, catalogs, weather reports, political writings, hobby scribblings, diaries, pornography, owners manuals, learned exegeses, trivia, et al.—from an electric typewriter connected to a fancy phone line and a color television, I would have cried, "Amen!" But instead, I find myself sitting at my computer and grumbling because a few "facts" that I know to be true and need for this article can't be substantiated by a Google search or a Nexis prowl. The future has failed me!"

The Soviet Anne Frank?

An extraordinarily sad story.

So Much For the Killer Bees

Who needs disaster movies when we've got a real-life plague of cicadas on the way?

Not the Director's Cut

A fascinating excerpt from Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Anarchist in the Library. Is the digital manipulation of new media just a hacking fad, or does it offer up genuinely new creative possibilities in the same way that music sampling did a decade or two ago? Do authors of original material have the moral, if not always legal, right to protect their work from 'improvement'?

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Considering the recent Abu Ghraib scandal it might be a good time to revisit the classic prison experiment conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971. This site has a "slide show" which gives a fairly detailed narrative of the experiment.

About 25 college students who had passed a battery of psychological tests and a background check were randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a simulated prison. The idea was to run the experiment for two weeks, but it was ended after six days because some of the guards had become extremely sadistic. Interestingly, the only correlation Zimbardo could find between the preliminary test results and the behavior of the subjects was that prisoners with more authoritarian personalities seemed less affected by the abuse. The guards, who were given no instructions on how to run the prison, managed to develop a lot of the same techniques used in real prisons in the course of only a few days.

Shipshape

In his book The Hollywood History the World, George MacDonald Fraser (author of the Flashman series) writes of Hollywood's sword-and-sandal epics:

"There are few things audiences like better than a good persecution. The Children of Israel oppressed by the Philistines or bound in Egypt; the Early Christians martyred by the Caesars; the tyranny of Rome and pagan despots; the struggle for physical and spiritual liberty - these were common if not universal themes, and they were preached in ringing tones. Freedom is a simple, straightforward message, as every politician, demagogue, and film-maker knows who has employed its rousing phrases without examining too closely what freedom means. It is not simple at all, but historical film acknowledge that fact only rarely, as in the throwaway line in The Ten Commandments when Edward G. Robinson, the renagade slave master, is himself subjected to march discipline during the Exodus, and observes wryly: 'So now, my brother, we have new task-masters.'"

And he adds in a discussion of Quo Vadis (a film I have never been able to get through):

"My one cavil concerns the suggestion that Early Christianity was anti-slavery; Hollywood is always eager to suggest that its heroes, be they Christians, Jews, American colonists, or Elizabethan sea-dogs, were champions of universal liberty, and I am not aware that this is the historic truth. Slave-owners and slave-dealers were numerous among all of them."

It's a truism that American movie audiences will only root for a demotic hero who espouses (at least in theory) vaguely egalitarian principles of organizing life. So it was particularly interesting to see in the recent Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World the leading character "Lucky" Jack Aubrey, who the film makes clear is not a small-d democrat and who adheres to a strictly hierarchical vision of the good society. This ought not to be in the least surprising given that his character is an early nineteenth century ship captain: maritime life in the age of sail was based upon a rigidly understood system of ranks and privileges even stricter than that imposed contemporaneously on shore. But Hollywood finds it so difficult to imagine a sympathetic character without Jeffersonian values that Aubrey's predecessors on the cine-poop deck have almost always been clearly labelled as tyrants or rebels. Look at the limp handling of the HMS Bounty story over the years; Charles Laughton and Trevor Howard were brooding monsters apiece, and both pictures presented a travesty of the historical Captain Bligh, who cared deeply about the condition of his crew and whose faults were vacillation and bad judgment of character, not cruelty. Anthony Hopkins' take on Bligh was the only one that came close to authenticity, and it's interesting that his 1984 version of the story is unique in presenting Fletcher Christian in a less than wholly commendable light and in being decidely ambivalent about the mutiny itself. Aubrey is another break in the tradition, but unlike Hopkins' Bligh he is portrayed as being a successful, popular character to boot. I think Master and Commander must be the first film to show a naval flogging in which our sympathies are meant to lie (mostly) with the instigator of the punishment, not its recipient. (Lest the film seem too one-sided, I should mention that there's an intelligent dissenting viewpoint presented by Aubrey's surgeon, Stephen Maturin. Indeed, another of the film's interesting novelties is its suggestion that two people can have starkly contrasting visions of government and yet remain good friends).

The Show About Something (Brrrr) II

Reasons that Seinfeld was always better than Friends:

On Seinfeld, children were a sinister threat. Remember the ugly baby? The bubble boy? Almost without exception, the principals showed no interest at all in procreating: admittedly, Kramer once had a sustained panic attack when he found out his sperm count was low, but that was a passing fancy, nothing more; Elaine momentarily thought about having kids, but more as an act of contrariness than anything else. This aversion to children was another facet of the characters' limitless self-absorption, of course, but at least they correctly saw that reproduction would smash their current lifestyles beyond recognition. On Friends, babies were adorable accessories that had no impact on one's behavior at all. They could be dragged onto screen for a scene or two to be cooed at, then were neatly assigned to some anonymous universal childminding service, or simply abandoned. In the last episode Chandler and Monica walked out on their newborn twins (!) several times to go next door and demolish a table football set with heavy tools. What were their apartment walls built out of, titanium? And who the hell was looking after Emma (or whatever her name was) when Rachel and Ross were getting back together/busting up for the trillionth time?

To be continued ...

Vile Bodies

Here's ROBBIE's review of Stephen Fry's screen adaptation of Vile Bodies. I haven't seen the movie and so can't comment directly, but it does look as though the screenwriters have made some alarming changes to the final chapters.

"[Fry] has changed the title, to compensate for the American market, to Bright Young Things. It begins well, with a very busy party done in a exuberant, Scorsese-ish manner. It never really recovers its energy after that. The story follows Adam Fenwick Symes, an upper class twit moving around Mayfair through a succesion of parties and outrageous incidents.

On the page, Waugh's comic universe delights and outrages the reader. This could have been achieved in a film but, and this is by no means an axiom for adaptations, you have to do it Waugh's way and Fry does it Waugh's when it suits him, and then does it his own way, or his producer's way, when it suits him; the result sinks the film.

Instead of being relentlessly Waugh-like, the film starts trying to give Fenwick-Symes and his martini swilling, coke snorting friends a sort of emotional gravity more suited to the soaring strings of American television. When Agatha Runcible goes bonkers and is in a mental home, we are clearly supposed to feel sorry for her, but we don't, nor do we feel sorry for Miles Metroland being grassed up as a homosexual by his racing driver boyfriend and having 'to leave the country'. You have to be merciless in adapting Waugh--if you feel there is any point to adapting Waugh, which I don't. Most of the books are some kind of masterpieces and a masterpiece is something that's reached its final form. There are many exceptions to this of course and the producers of this film obviously believed that their multiplex punters cannot handle pure unadulterated Waugh, though I reckon they might. I heard on the net that there is a script being written of Brideshead where Julia and Ryder *stay together* at the end... They don't understand Waugh much eh?

Fry obviously has an agenda and wants to draw parallels with today. The relationship between the media and celebrities (the gossip column thread of the plot) and the media's irresponsibilty are clearly of especial interest to him; his sympathies firmly on the side of those being written about.

It's watchable but any Waugh fan's patience will fizzle out completely in the last ten or so minutes. Because Fry has altered the ending. The film and the its source are firmly based in in the London of the late 20s. What a surprise to find Adam Fenwick-Symes walking into Lottie's hotel and finding her guests gathered round the wireless listening to Chamberlain's broadcast announcing war with Germany.

Then much war stuff (nice turn from Jim Broadbent as the Major) with Fenwick-Symes coming back to blitzed London and being reunited with his silly bitch of a fiance and seeing off her once rich, now spiv husband. This coda is a ghastly miscalculation.

The saddest part of the whole production, for me, was seeing John Mills in it. At first I was pleased. I'm a fan of Millsy, as I call him. But his 40 seconds-long role had no dialogue; he merely sat in a party greedily snorting cocaine. As an image it spoke volumes to me."

Big Whoop?

The new anti fast-food documentary Super Size Me is now on release. I'm curious to see it, and I hope anyone that does will let us know what they think. But my first impressions are skeptical. Yes, people in the United States eat too much high-fat junk food. Yes, we should be critical of some of McDonald's marketing techniques, particularly those aimed at children. But Spurlock was deliberately consuming three large meals - 5,000 calories - a day. Eating 5,000 calories of anything is presumably not a good idea. Does this prove anything more than an irresponsible diet will make you fat and unhealthy?

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been running a Debunk the Junk project that parallels Spurlock's, with the intention of showing that a sensible McDonald's-based diet can be healthy, and even slimming. Haven't much more than browsed it - does it seem a fair response?

Connolly and Hemingway

From Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon, pp. 120-121:

"Just before the doodle bugs began to rain down on London, Connolly became friends with a writer whom even [Connolly's father] the major could admire -- Ernest Hemingway. Of all the writers Connolly knew, Hemingway might seem the least likely to find anything of value in Connolly's work or his life. When they first met in the late Twenties at Sylvia Beach's bookshop in Paris, they did not get on at all. But when Hemingway arrived in London in May 1944 as a war correspondent, Connolly quickly sought him out and volunteered to introduce him to literary friends at a party in Bedford Square. The party was a success, and the two men found themselves enjoying each other's company. It was an exciting time, just before the D-Day invasion, and perhaps the excitement of the moment made it easier for them to strike up a friendship; they drank together, and talked long into the night. Connolly invited Hemingway to write a 'Cuban Letter' for Horizon's 'Where Shall John Go?' but nothing came of the idea, even though Hemingway vaguely said that he would try. On another occasion Connolly took him to visit Emerald Cunard at the Dorchester. The burly, bearded Hemingway and the heavy-set, round-faced Connolly must have been a sight to behold as they entered the rarefied atmosphere of Lady Cunard's suite. According to one account, Hemingway did not try to ingratiate himself. When Lady Cunard asked him what he thought of Russia, he replied gruffly, 'There is the pro as well as the con about Russia. As with all these fucking countries.'

"Oddly enough, he became a great admirer of The Unquiet Grave. He read it when it first came out, and found its comments on angst fascinating. He also seems to have appreciated the difference between his personality and Connolly's. All the time that he was in London in May and June, he could not wait to jump into the thick of battle; yet he found Connolly's intellectual and emotional distance from the war intriguing and even admirable. In the late Forties he wrote what can only be called a fan letter, full of praise for The Unquiet Grave. It is touching in its way, and Connolly treasured it, coming as it did from a 'man of action.':

I always get involved in wars but I admired the way that you did not. It would be wrong for me not to fight but it was many times righter for you to do exactly as you did. I am no good at saying this sort of thing but I wanted you to know how strongly I felt it and to tell you how much the Palinurus book meant to me."

The Show About Something (Brrrr)

Reasons that Seinfeld was always better than Friends:

1. The economics of Friends made no sense. I know that New York's desultory scattering of rent controlled apartments makes the housing situation financially irrational, which IIRC explains Monica's relatively expansive place, but how did an unemployed actor keep up the payments next door? Ross can't be making all that much as a recently tenured academic. And I don't even know what to say about Phoebe, Friends' idea of a reformed bag lady. When George Costanza lost his job, he went to live with his parents. Elaine had a roommate she disliked in a skuzzy shoebox, at least for a while. It was clearly defined that Jerry's career was successful, and that he could probably have affored to get a better pad (but was too lazy to bother). Kramer's finances were a mystery, but then Seinfeld was at pains to point out the inner illogicality of Kramer's existence. And how come Chandler, who's been out of work for some time, is now putting down money on a swanky suburban home? Isn't it about time for an IRS audit of these slackers?
2. When Jerry and Co. went to the diner, the booths were sometimes taken and they had to sit on the bar stools. The couches were always, always available in Central Perk.

To be continued ...

"The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch."

So pronounced Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which, as I learned from this very good review, was appropriately published (in English) in 1984.

I've never been quite the admirer of this book that everyone expected me to be. It derails itself toward the end into an offhand, flat, almost fairytale style through which we are treated to a lame and systematically undermined tragedy (sounds cool, I admit, but it's not--regardless of how intentional it may have been). By the time the main characters grow old they have lost a lot of what made them characters in the first place, and eventually I could not shake an utter certainty that, for some reason, Kundera was filling up pages, trying to race to the end of the story out of some tired sense of narrative obligation.

Kundera is a very smart guy, and a good writer, but I've always thought that The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for all its good points, became famous for the wrong reasons. As Banville puts it:

Here was an avowedly "postmodern" novel in which the author withheld so many of the things we expect from a work of fiction, such as rounded characters - "It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived" - a tangible milieu, a well-paced plot, and in which there are extended passages of straightforward philosophical and political speculation, yet it became a worldwide bestseller, loved by the critics and the public alike.

A perfect example of the lightness of this novel. On the contrary, in at least the first half of the book the characters are indeed rounded and interesting, they do not float in a vaguely defined world (although certainly Kundera doesn't try very hard to help us define it), and there's nothing wrong with the plot. It's also in this part of the book that Kundera inserts his famous "postmodern" essays, comments on the characters in the voice of an omniscient author (himself), and offers the observation quoted above on the senselessness of inventing fictions to hide from the reader the fact that they are reading a book. (That's a question writers of fiction have been wrestling with for ever; the only thing that changes is how they choose to avoid answering it. In Kundera's case, the answer is just a shrug.)

And, in the first part of the novel, what is the result? These pomo trappings don't harm the sense of character or narrative at all. Certainly, when Kundera looks over his shoulder and tells you that his characters are fictions, his violation of "narrative decorum" could come as a shock. But does it really undermine his characters? Not for long; the characters (who, after all, aren't in on the joke), go along just as they have been, ignorant of their author's impish trick, and the readers, possessing brains that are phenomenally good at finding patterns in chaos (especially ones they are trained to look for), and, moreover, who knew all along that Kundera's characters were not real people but preferred to forget that fact, thanks very much, fall right back in line behind them.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is not really a postmodern novel overall, and what's more there's nothing essentially new in Kundera's shrug (or aesthetic postmodernism in general, but that's another post). But in spite of his posturings, the book, on the whole, manages to capture (and convincingly analyze) a side or two of human nature breathtakingly well, which is almost always the answer to critics who are so surprised when a novel they like gets popular.

Reading Group

One of the experiments we want to try out in Horizon is a regular reading group. It's often difficult to find someone to talk to about the book you've just read because, well, no-one else you know has read it. So we're going to try to come up with some good titles, classic or new, fiction or non-fiction, that merit discussion. As a starter, we've chosen David Hollinger's Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. It's a book I know almost nothing about, except that Alan H (who has gotten a couple of chapters into it) says it's good, or at least thought-provoking anyway. So if you're interested in taking part, see if you can buy, beg or steal a copy. We'll get kicked off when at least two of us have the blasted thing in our hands - my (used) copy is in the mail now ...

Smart Bombshell

File under So-Bizarre-It-Must-Be-True: am I the only person who didn't know that Forties screen siren Hedy Lamarr was also an amateur weapons inventor who co-authored an influential design for a radio-controlled smart bomb?

American Humor

Before it gets buried in the MSN archives and completely forgotten, let me post a link to what I thought was a particularly fine book review by Adam Kirsch of the 1931 classic American Humor and its triumvirate of stock national characters. Is the Yankee truly obsolete? Hasn't the minstrel tradition been reclaimed (subverted, perhaps) by the likes of Chris Rock and Bernie Mac?

Magnificent, but not Waugh

Having just read Vile Bodies for the first time and in the middle of a bit of pre-teaching prep on Waugh, I came across this 1954 Atlantic Monthly review of the writer by Charles Rolo. At one point, Rolo suggests that:

This core of tragic awareness gives to Waugh's comic vision the dimension of serious art. The paradox, in fact, is that when Waugh is being comic, he makes luminous the failures of his age, confronts us vividly with the desolating realities; and when he is being serious, he is liable to become trashy. For without the restraints of the ironic stance, his critical viewpoint reveals itself as bigoted and rancorous; his snobbery emerges as obsessive and disgusting; and his archaism involves him in all kinds of silliness.

Hmm. That might be case with Brideshead Revisited (which I confess I've never read in full), but is it fair of the subtler Sword of Honour trilogy (only the first volume of which had been published at the time of the review)?

Whig Misinterpretations

Christopher Orlet's Defense of Whig History over at Butterflies and Wheels is recommended reading for anyone interested in the problem (if problem it is) of historical presentism. There are several things I could say about this essay, not the least of which is that it could have done with a better proofreader. But the issue that concerns me right now is what I believe to be Orlet's mischaracterization of Herbert Butterfield's seminal book The Whig Interpretation of History. Orlet writes that:

The gist of Butterfield’s critique was that because modern moral and ethical standards are superior to those of the past, it is unreasonable to impose such standards on historical figures.

But that's not what Butterfield was saying at all. He summarizes his 'gist' in the memorable preface:

What is discussed is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.

He is not, pace Orlet, arguing for a sort of moral evolution which - because it raises us above the vices of earlier men - places an unfair burden upon the past; indeed, his book specifically rejects any such construction:

It is not the role of the historian to come to what might be called judgements of value. He may try to show how men came to differ in religion, but he can no more adjudicate between religions than he can adjudicate between systems of philosophy; and though he might show that one religion has been more favourable in its sociological consequences than another; though even – which is much more difficult – he might think he has shown that the one is bound to be better in its ultimate consequences through time – still it is not for him to beg the question of the assessment of material losses against what might be considered spiritual and eternal gains. His role is to describe; he stands impartial between Christian and Mohammedan; he is interested in neither one religion nor the other except as they are entangled in human lives.

Much more could be said about this. What do others think?

Studies in Failure

June's Atlantic Monthly includes a long-ish cover-story by Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the declining fortunes of Tony Blair. In the article Wheatcroft includes a maxim attributed to Enoch Powell that "all political careers end in failure". Is this true? ( I mean, do they fail in their own terms, regardless of whether one might happen to approve of those terms or not; do all lifetime projects ultimately disappoint?)

A cursory survey of the group I happen to know best, 20th Century British Prime Ministers, does seem to reinforce Powell's contention with just a few qualifications. Let's see:

SALISBURY: Yes (at his retirement was deeply disillusioned by the creeping democratization of political life).
BALFOUR: Yes (a failure as a Prime Minister and a party leader).
CAMPBELL-BANNERMAN: No (but a mediocrity).
ASQUITH: Yes (the Liberal Blair; great early promise frittered away, and saw his party destroyed in internicene squabbling).
LLOYD-GEORGE: Yes (rudely ejected from office; spent the next 20 years fruitlessly expecting to be asked back).
BONAR-LAW: Yes (died too soon to effect any change while PM).
BALDWIN: Maybe (an extraordinary survival record, but his peace policy was ultimately a failure).
MACDONALD: Yes (eternally reviled by his own party).
CHAMBERLAIN: Yes (peace in our time).
CHURCHILL: Yes (probably a controversial choice, but his lifelong goal - to halt and reverse the decline of the British Empire - was a doomed romantic folly).
ATTLEE: No (set the political agenda for the next 30 years, although the '45 government did peter out a bit ingloriously towards the end).
EDEN: Yes (A political lifetime spent waiting for Churchill to retire was immediately followed by Suez).
MACMILLAN: Maybe (great successes marred by the Profumo debacle).
HOME: Yes (totally out of his depth).
WILSON: Yes (great promise tarnished).
HEATH: Yes (as above, but the Tory version).
CALLAGHAN: Yes (Crisis? What Crisis?).
THATCHER: Maybe (implemented important structural changes in the British economy, but made no corresponding social reforms, had to give way constantly on Europe, and was tossed unceremoniously out of office).
MAJOR: Yes (no explanation required).
BLAIR: A work in progress, but the prospects aren't looking good.

How would American Presidents stand? And does this maxim simply reflect the fact that (as Orwell said) everyone's life can be seen as a series of failures?

What Are We?

In December 1939 Cyril Connolly first published Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, described by Paul Fussell in his 1988 book Wartime as "comprising finally 10,000 pages of exquisite poetry and prose and art reproductions, produced and read in the midst of the most discouraging and terrible destruction ... one of the high moments in the long history of British eccentricity." Our namesake blog is intended more as an affectionate and respectful nod to Connolly and his contributors than a serious attempt to emulate them, but we hope to create a thought-provoking site where people can discuss subjects similar to those treated in the original Horizon: history, literature, culture high and low, and whatever else comes to mind. This is very much intended to be a collaborative effort. If you are interested in becoming a Horizon poster, please contact me for more information.

Who Are We?

Alan Allport is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He is writing a dissertation on the experience of British homecoming veterans after the Second World War.

Martha Bridegam is a lawyer and freelance writer in San Francisco. She also posts at demisemiblog.

Ben Brumfield writes software for nonprofit organizations and lives in Austin, Texas.

Graeme Burk is a freelance writer based in Toronto. He publishes a weekly column at Gem, Geek or Rare Bug.

Bobby Farouk lives outside Burlington, VT. He publishes ninemile: the casual traveler's field guide.

Alan Hogue programs computers for a living and is co-editor of Vox Clamantis, a fitfully updated online zine.

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