The Coming of Couric

The embarrassing, horrendously expensive hype surrounding Katie Couric's ascension to the role of meaningless figurehead of a large corporation leaves you feeling CBS doesn't feel very confident about this woman. Couric is actually an excellent interviewer, pursuing points other blank faced news-heads allow to evaporate. But her breaking, squawky-metallic voice and nervous energy isn't going to sit well over the long run. I think the bright Ann Curry, with a fine speaking voice and a simple beauty should have been CBS' choice for a comfortable-to-watch news reader.

CBS will be replacing a mature, genial Bob Schieffer, a guy who was a quick-replace after the skidoo given Dan Rather — and unexpectedly hit gold, Schieffer was very popular and raised the ratings — with a woman whose speaking voice would have the same effect on Kramer as Mary Hart's abrasive shout: Kramer would have an epileptic fit listening to Couric.

To Refuse to Condemn and Refuse to Celebrate

Here is a really terrific article about short stories. The reason it is so good is that the author (William Boyd) is a writer rather than a theorist. His insights into Checkhov's greatness are illuminating — it is like having an expert guide along on a trail you thought you knew.

…Updike has said: “More closely than my novels … these efforts of a few thousand words each hold my life's incidents, predicaments, crises, joys.”

Angus Wilson observed that, “Short stories and plays go together in my mind. You take a point in time and develop it from there; there is no room for development backwards.” All things to all writers, then: the quotidian epiphanic moment, the submerged autobiography, a question of structure and direction…

Because anyone involved in the arts is intensely analytical — pragmatically analytical — Boyd takes a shot with his own classifications:

1 The event-plot story … distinguish[es] Chekhov's stories from everything that preceded him. Up until Chekhov, all short stories, virtually without exception, were event-plot ones. In these stories the skeleton of plot is all important, the narrative is shaped, classically, to have a beginning, middle and end. The revolution that Chekhov set in train - and which reverberates still today - was not to abandon plot, but to make the plot of his stories like the plot of our lives: random, mysterious, run-of-the-mill, abrupt, chaotic, fiercely cruel, meaningless.

2 The Chekhovian story Chekhov is the father of the modern short story and his influence is still massive and everywhere…What is the essence of the Chekhovian short story? Chekhov wrote to a friend that, “It was time writers, especially those who are artists, recognised that there is no making out anything in this world.” I would say that the Chekhovian point of view is to look at life in all its banality and all its tragic comedy and refuse to make a judgment. To refuse to condemn and refuse to celebrate…[Chekhov's] famous retort when he was asked to define life. “You ask me what is life? That is like asking: what is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot and that's all there is to it.”

3 The 'Modernist' story I choose this title to introduce the other giant presence in the modern short story - Ernest Hemingway. I use the term to convey the idea of obscurity and deliberate difficulty. Hemingway's most obvious revolutionary contribution to the short story was his style: pared down, laconic, unafraid to repeat the most common adjectives rather than reach for a synonym. But his other great donation was a purposeful opacity…somehow Hemingway invests this story and the others with all the covert complexities of an obscure modernist poem. You know there are hidden meanings here and it is the inaccessibility of the subtext that makes the story so memorable. Wilful obscurity in the short story works: over the length of a novel it can be very tiresome. This idea of modernist obscurity overlaps with the next category.

4 The cryptic/ludic story Here the story presents its baffling surface more overtly as a kind of challenge to the reader - Borges and Vladimir Nabokov spring immediately to mind. In these stories there is a meaning to be discovered and deciphered…dig deep and you will discover more, is the implied message. Try harder and you'll be rewarded: the reader is on his mettle. One of the great cryptic short story writers is Rudyard Kipling, something of an unacknowledged genius of “suppressed narration”, as it is sometimes known…

5 The mini-novel story…something of a hybrid - half novel, half short story - trying to achieve in a few dozen pages what the novel achieves in a few hundred: a large cast of characters, lots of realistic detail…All the matter of a Victorian three-decker is somehow compressed into its 50 or so pages. These stories tend to be very long, almost becoming novellas, but their ambition is clear. They eschew ellipsis and allusion for an aggregation of solid fact, as if the story wants to say, “See: you don't need 400 pages to paint a portrait of society.”

6 The poetic/mythic story…riffs on inner space and the long prose-poems…This is the short story-quasi-poem and it can range from stream-of-consciousness to the impenetrably gnomic.

7 The biographical story…the short story deliberately borrowing and replicating the properties of non-fiction: of history, of reportage, of the memoir. Borges's stories play with this technique regularly. The overweening love of footnotes and bibliographical annotation in younger contemporary American writers is a similar example of the genre (or to be more precise, they represent a hybrid of the modernist story and the biographical). Another variation is to introduce the fictive into the lives of real people…to capture the strengths of fiction and the non-fictional account simultaneously.

Because I have quoted so extensively, here is a plug for the guy, a book I haven't read, but you can tell from the piece that this is a smart talented writer:

Fascination by William Boyd

Conjectures and Proofs

This New Yorker article surveys the personalities involved in the proof of the Poincaré Conjecture. In this case, a shy, somewhat enigmatic mathematician, Grigory Perelman, living in the hinterlands, solves an important puzzle but doesn't present the proof in a conventional way and rejects the Fields Medal — the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. It is very frustrating reading about this great mathematician's passivity, and that is elevated to irritation when you read about another mathematician named Yau, whose vaunting ambitions turn him into a bad guy, poisoned by his drive for acclaim, when all he had to do was rest on his laurels — because Shing-Tung Yau himself is an estimable figure. Human frailties intrude in even the most abstract of human endeavors.

Conan

I listened to Charlie Rose's interview with Conan O'Brien last night. I don't think I've ever done more than smile watching O'Brien, but I've always liked him. The one hour interview with fame-sniffer Rose didn't change my mind. O'Brien exudes a positive, sunny quality, which is at odds with what seems to be the default: the cynical, depressed-behind-the-scenes angst of the clown. I'd like to know what his parents fed him — he comes across as a genuinely happy guy, if not happy-go-lucky — at peace with himself.

He said he always worked very hard at school, that it was a real effort. His dad was a doctor, and if I caught it correctly, taught at Harvard. I think Conan once dated Lisa Kudrow; he went to Harvard himself, did easy time, immediately impressing his fellow students and quickly found himself editing the Lampoon. This guy has a convivial gift. He had not found what he really wanted to do until then; once he found comedy and performance, he knew it was for him; it was easy and, he said, he loved everything about performing. This funny looking guy, who said his hair looks like a cake, comes across as someone who would be a great friend, a great pal to hang out with, without affectation or agenda. I hadn't heard before, but he will be taking over from Leno in 2009, and will be hosting some TV awards show (probably the Emmys) coming up. Nice guys do finish first sometimes. Go Conan.

The Geometrical and the Vitalistic

From a 1989 NYRB article about Mozart by Joseph Kerman — speaking about the early music movement, but also, about a lot more:

It is certainly true that both historical performance and “traditional” performance tended toward the impersonal, the objective, and what T.E. Hulme called the “geometrical,” as opposed to the “vitalistic” in nineteenth-century art. Indeed the original impetus behind the early music movement was the revulsion against romantic emotionality endemic to early-twentieth-century modernism…Hulme (… admired “the dry hardness which you get in the classics”). .. Stravinsky is a key figure, with his astringent music of the neoclassical period, his influential polemics against musical expression in the Harvard lectures…the ideal was to find poetry in geometry…

Stravinsky's suspicion of freedom of expression derives from the idea that depersonalization is an antidote to the horrors caused by two world wars — Stravinsky wanted feeling to “submit” to intellect:

What is important for the lucid ordering of the work - for its crystallization - is that all Dionysian elements which set the imagination of the artist in motion and make the lifespan ripe must be properly subjugated before they intoxicate us, and must finally be made to submit to the laws: Apollo demands it.

Kofi Speaks

Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the failed UN chief, reflexively weighs in about Israel: Israel is in “flagrant violation” of a poorly crafted peace accord for trying to prevent weapons from being delivered to terrorists who had been raining missiles on their cities. The only thing that jolts Annan into semi-sentience is Israel — and you won't be hearing anything complementary. Hezbollah said they would disarm, but now have said they won't, and because no one else is going to do it for them, Israel has to risk life and limb to protect life and limb. Kofi doesn't say, we will have to look into Israel's claims, for the Kofi is a knee-jerk parrot of terrorist logic. Kofi doesn't condemn the gang that took over Lebanon for now not disarming. Kofi doesn't condemn France for its hypocrisy in affecting involvement, but when it comes down to it, committing all of 200 troops, a whole 50 of whom have arrived. Nothing like a leader who thinks about stuff.

The Winner

It actually turned out right. The public voted for the best dancer on So You Think You Can Dance. Benji Scwhimmer did indeed project a feeling of the Kelly/Astaire era, as judge Nigel said — even Benji's face is out of another time. Benji is a great dancer, with fantastic extension and an explosive energy. The praise from the judges made you smile, because it felt genuine, and it was accurate — finally, the judges weren't playing to the audience.

Martha Nichols could have won on pure sex appeal — she was eliminated early on, but just about glowed. Heidi Groskreutz was an amazing performer, as was Allison Holker — for pure athleticism she could have taken it all. Much of the choreography had a gymnastic, Michael Jackson robo feel to it — these are urbanhard, mechanical times, and the pop culture reflects it.

It was a great show, wonderfully produced and photographed.

Fighting Symptoms

At the Language Log the writer considers Islamo-Fascism:

“Fascism” is not a bad term to pick for the kind of nightmare that would probably result if a global Islamic caliphate were to be established by the sort of Waziristan cave denizens who issue taped messages encouraging disaffected young Pakistanis in Britain to go out and blow themselves and a few hundred passengers to pieces on a train or a plane to glorify Allah. (Yes, I despise this corrupt cult of mass slaughter and theocratic bigotry. Did you think I would be all latte-sipping gooey-relativist about it?)

David Brooks gives up in this piece. He feels that the toxicity in many cultures (noted many times in this weblog) is not remediable by outside forces. Deriving some of his reasoning from a foreign aid worker named Lawrence Harrison, who wrote a book, Brooks writes:

… Moynihan’s greatest observations: “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

… cultural change can’t be imposed from the outside, except in rare circumstances. It has to be led by people who recognize and accept responsibility for their own culture’s problems and selectively reinterpret their own traditions to encourage modernization…cultural change is measured in centuries, not decades, and … cultures are separated from one another by veils of complexity and difference…. it is also foolish to think we can address the root causes of their toxic desires. We’ll just have to fight the symptoms of a disease we can neither cure nor understand.

Dark times we live in. Hezbollah applauded by the Lebanese who were used as shields by a terrorist gang. That very self-same gang sanctified by the UN as equal to a nation whose borders were violated, its citizens kidnapped. Iran and Syria claiming victory by supporting terror. Israel questioning itself and Iraq falling apart. Bring on the clowns…

Melted Into Air

The patches of sleep that punctuate a life, which ends with a long sleep, doesn't seem to have given any rest to John Updike in this uneasy meditation on death. Mulling over the last years, last words, of great writers, Updike seems, in his twilight, to be trying to come to terms. It is a thoughtful, worthy piece, by a fine writer.

Here are Shakespeare's moving, resonant parting words, placed on the lips of Prospero:

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous
palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

The Truth As Reported

Someday Charles Johnson will win a journalism award — if things go as they should. Johnson has long been courageously reporting, citing real sources, shedding light on what the media avoids, for fear of offense, or from some dubious ideological dysfunction. Johnson caught the under-the-radar fools at Reuters at their game — doctoring photos, publishing propaganda.

You can be certain there won't be a more general circumspection at Reuter's about their long history of distortions and failures after this — they think they have resolved the problem. This is an endemic problem — news organizations use stringers who manipulate the media as conduits. The stringers are hired because the world from which they report is toxic and a Western reporter would be in jeopardy just being on the scene — but that toxicity, the context, is never fully expressed in the article; the media become tools, cluelessly broadcasting the propaganda; the news organizations are too mediocre, too lazy, to actually edit the material — to examine raw footage and verbiage with intelligence or fairness.

Charles Johnson:

…Johnson's skepticism of, if not outright hostility toward, the mainstream news media…In Johnson's view, the news media haven't adequately sounded the alarm about threats to Western societies posed by radical Islamic groups…”My main take is that political correctness has kept a lot of the hard truth from being spread by the mainstream media,” says Johnson…

“The vast, vast majority of Muslims want to get along and live a comfortable life just like everyone else,” he says. “But the mainstream media shies away from showing the public the real face of Islamic extremism. They don't want to offend. And they are influenced by some strong advocacy groups that are funded by Middle Eastern countries, which are actively engaging with the mainstream media to promote a point of view.”

Although there is the expected emphasis on “conservative” in this article, in reality, Johnson is just telling the truth, which doesn't have an ideology.

Funny

The news has been so depressing I've tried to find things to divert — funny things.

Two commercials that make me laugh are the Snickers commercial where a guy in a suit, with a guitar, sings a plaintive ditty to a guy at a desk eating a Snickers bar, with hilarious relish; this guy, who has been drafted as a one-man audience, looks at the guitar player incredulously, and then begins singing along. It is inexplicably laugh out loud funny.

The other is the Da-iry commercials for milk. They are so well directed, the readings dead on. Fully visualized — more benignly amusing than hilarious.

Blessedly, we just received from our Netflix queue the DVD's of all of last season's Larry David. Season 5 was just released on August 1. The shows are clearly getting better. We are into the third episode and although David is still channeling some of Seinfeld, he is shuffling things enough to make it feel original. The Seinfeld shows were so well structured that David's own show, pre-structured, but fully improvised in its dialog, has an all over the place feel — as it develops the story threads do reveal however. The problem is that the actors are being thrown on their improvisational skills to provide interaction, resulting in repetitive dialog and characters that don't evolve. Actors are performers, not writers. The Netflix sleeve describes David as a “tactless but self-deprecating comedian'. They nailed it. Of all the Seinfeld crew, David is the only one who has been able to find his way to a successful, funny show. It makes you realize how large a contribution he must have made to the success of Seinfeld.

Suggestions For Eternal Lodgings

The setup: The house and garden section of a newspaper runs a critical story about a cult favorite 1950's housebuilder (Eichler houses).

The outcome: The spirit of the age intrudes, in all its fury.

The editor was so shocked she wrote a funny column about the response to the article:

The following epithets — pathetic, spoiled, whiny, ignorant, peasant, pampered, self-centered, garbage, sophomoric, juvenile, snide, stupid, rude, moron, idiot, offensive, bum and the other b-word — were hurled at both the writer and editor. Allusions to bodily functions and suggestions for where we should spend eternity were not uncommon… “With articles like this, the continued decline of this newspaper to complete garbage seems inevitable…”

She concludes:

We welcome feedback, pro and con, on the articles and photos we print, but I hope readers will remember it's the Home&Garden section. In the greater scheme of things, the topics we cover aren't paramount… “Eichlers are houses. Period. They ain't splinters from the Cross.”

As animals, we are both cats and dogs. We are independent, roam our private realms, keep our own counsel, detached and often predatory; but we are also gregarious pack animals, given to manias of accreted feelings when triggered by our fellow hounds. Tocqueville said Americans are particularly prone to consensus, but it isn't just Americans that are sensitive to group-think. The above linked article presents more barking dogs than skulking cats, with the internet, this genius invention, raising the din exponentially. Over trivia.

Control, For the Rest of Us

The great diversion of our time: gadgets. They give a feeling of control in an out of control, uncontrollable world.

The techno-lust object of the moment is a scanner that has been receiving non-stop praise from both reviewers and users. It's a scanner which can turn your office/household paperless in the blink of an eye. It produces PDFs and you get a $300 program, Acrobat, for free. Some of the comments I read online were actually funny. One guy said he used to have things he had to scan and say, “I've got to scan that sometime”. Now, he says, he stands at the mailbox hoping a bill will come in so he can scan it.

For the Mac:
Fujitsu SCANSNAP FI-5110EOXM

For the PC (looks similar, think it may be a newer version, faster — but not for the Mac):
Scansnap S500

May as well also mention: I've become a big fan of AppleCare — Apple's excellent protection plan for their computers. I just had a latch repaired on an old Powerbook and the process was very well implemented, and fast. Apple scores again.

This iCurve Laptop Stand seems to be used by everyone — a MacWorld editor said he uses it, among many others. It looks precarious, but it must be solid or there wouldn't be so many recommendations. It is really designed as a laptop stand to be used along with a separate keyboard.

And it is overkill, let's face it, but this Dymo LabelWriter DUO is the first printer that allows Mac users to use internet postage — a convenience. It's the top of the line of the three Dymo printers that provide this feature.

Well, that's it from here at Consumer Central @ jollydays @ paintedmatter.com.

Understanding Iraq

For comprehensive understanding of the journey of the Muslim world you go to Bernard Lewis, but If there is an expert on Iraq itself, it is Fouad Ajami. If he is being interviewed I always stop and listen — I feel he knows the subject and is trying to honorably parse the terrain. It doesn't hurt that Ajami is a Lebanese Shiite and respected by all the players. In these times of ideological simplicity, nuanced understanding is practically revolutionary. This excellent, balanced NYT review of Ajami's book, as well as that of another by an equally thoughtful author — the son of John Kenneth Galbraith — who is an expert on the Kurdish predicament, is well worth a look.

[Ajami's] core argument is that the trouble we are seeing in Iraq results from the profound unwillingness of Sunni Arabs in Iraq and elsewhere to accept the rise to power of Shiites in what is, after all, their own country. Shiite Arabs have long been second-class citizens, repressed and kept from political power even where, as in Iraq, they are a numerical majority…Shiite leaders have begun fitfully to come to terms with what it means to exercise secular political power in the name of a group that is, after all, a religious denomination. [Ajami] describes a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — one of the first such accounts to appear in English — and is impressed by the leader’s light touch when it comes to politics.

Osvaldo and Fidel

My best friend in high school was Osvaldo Marti. Osvaldo's family had come to New York because they weren't big fans of Cuba at the time. Osvaldo said Castro “couldn't be worse” than Batista — a violent dictator who ran an incompetent, corrupt government. Osvaldo said his father had been in an accident in Cuba — a public bus had injured his father's leg and the Cuban government refused to pay any compensation.

Now Castro seems finally to be falling from the scene — 47 years later — no doubt to the benefit of the Cuban people; centralization and nationalization don't work; it would be sad if Castro's absolutist control lives on after he is gone. Remarkable that this Communist dictator lasted so long after the fall of the Soviet Union. Castro's reign didn't result in his land prospering; a living example of Isaiah Berlin's reminder that any absolute idea eventually becomes oppressive, whether good or bad in its original intentions.