Henry

_Iron Council_, like Mieville’s earlier novel _The Scar_ has a lot to say about betrayal. However, the most important betrayals of _Iron Council_ have less to do with personal deceit than the the more subtle treachery of political mythology; its ambiguous consequences and necessary faithlessness to the individuals whose struggle is mythologized. On the one hand, political myths hold out hope and inspire action, on the other, they don’t reflect the aspirations of the individuals whose actions gave rise to them. _Iron Council_ has at its heart an unresolved and unresolvable argument about the relationship between revolution, myth and history.

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Jim Henley says it in plain English.

bq. All together now: Saddam was worse! In terms of body count in Iraq this is true, though the man had a big head start on us, so we ought to be allowed a couple of decades to catch up. But what about the world ? Is it better? And are we? We have gone from a time in which the tyrant of an oil patch with a broken army and 23 million inhabitants practiced a tyranny which all decent people abhorred, to a time in which the largest and most powerful country in the history of mankind justifies torture and contemplates assassination teams – we should call them terror squads – as official policy. And the people who most consider our virtue unchallengeable are the quickest to publically avow our need to torture and murder.

Jacob Heilbrunn has a conversation with Daniel Bell in the LA Times, about the problems that both parties have with imposing any sorts of cultural limits on the free markets.

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CNN cancels Crossfire.

bq. Mr. Klein said the decisions to part company with Mr. Carlson and to end “Crossfire” were not specifically related, because he had decided to drop “Crossfire” regardless of whether Mr. Carlson wanted to stay on.

…

bq. Mr. Klein said he wanted to move CNN away from what he called “head-butting debate shows,” which have become the staple of much of all-news television in the prime-time hours, especially at the top-rated Fox News Channel.

….

bq. Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.”

bq. Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion.

Update: Giblets laments our great loss.

bq. So Giblets is sitting down in front of the library TV with a box of commandeered Cheezoids to enjoy the intellectual repaste that is CNN’s Crossfire when he sees a news item telling him that soon there will BE no Crossfire! Outrage, perfidy, treason! What will replace it? Coverage of actual news? Can you even CALL it “news” without whack-a-mole sound effects, cartoonish repetition of talking points and a prompted studio audience? Delirium, lunacy, madness!

Via Matt Cheney at the Mumpsimus, I learn that Guy Davenport has died. By coincidence, I’ve mentioned Davenport three times on this blog in the last week; he was one of the finest cultural and literary critics of our time. His essays cumulate into a long allusive conversation; digressive, enlightening, quietly humorous. You could warm your hands at them. He had a gift for finding the detail, the miniature axis on which the world turned for Kafka, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, for Picasso, for Louis Agassiz. From his essay, “On Reading” (collected in _The Hunter Gracchus_):

bq. Students often tell me that an author was ruined for them by a high-school English class; we all know what they mean. Shakespeare was almost closed to me by the world’s dullest teacher, and there are many writers whom I would probably enjoy reading except that they were recommended to me by suspect enthusiasts. I wish I knew how to rectify these aversions. I tell bright students, in conference, how I had to find certain authors on my own who were ruined for me by bad teachers or inept critics. Scott, Kipling, Wells will do to illustrate that only an idiot will take a critic’s word without seeing for oneself. I think I learned quite early that the judgments of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance. In truth, my education was a systematic misleading. Ruskin was dismissed as a dull, preacherly old fart who wrote purple prose. In a decent society the teacher who led me to believe this would be tried, found guilty, and hanged by the thumbs while being pelted with old eggs and cabbage stalks.

On this count, as on many others, Davenport was gloriously, radiantly, exuberantly innocent. He inspired you to read new books, and re-read old ones differently. He’ll be sorely missed.

The Washington Post finally gets around to reviewing Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World, but makes a blunder. The reviewer, Gregory Feeley, commends Stephenson for his anachronisms.

bq. Stephenson’s tongue-in-cheek verbal anachronisms can be witty, as when he manages circumstances so that a character can speak plausibly of a “Routine Upgrade” or name a private tavern the “Kit-Kat Clubb.”

But the Kit-Kat Club isn’t an anachronism; it was a real institution, and the epicenter of Whig debate in the early eighteenth century. That said, Feeley shouldn’t be chastized too harshly for his mistake. It’s exactly this collision between present and past, so that you really can’t tell the one from the other, that makes for the fun in “System of the World.” And indeed, Stephenson’s depiction of the Kit-Kat as a sort of elevated girly-bar may not be entirely true to history. To repeat myself

bq. Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In Quicksilver, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility.

The plot creaks, the characters are a little thin, and (as always) Stephenson isn’t very good at endings, but there’s still a zip and verve to the book. It’s ambitious, chaotic, and sometimes falls flat on its face but picks itself up again by virtue of its sheer exuberance. The combination of geek sensibility and economic history is difficult to resist.

Addendum: since I’m linking to the Amazon page for SotW in this review, I should say that I’ve earned approx $100 through the Amazon link in the last several days, which I have sent on to the Red Cross. Not as much as John (no terabyte drives alas, although I’m grateful to the person who bought several classic movies) . I’ve decided to make this into a permanent feature – all earnings from links from my posts will be donated to charity from here on in.

Across the way on his other blog, John Holbo passes some acute judgements on the perplexed relationship between the traditional domain of humanities departments (classic texts), and the claim of literary ‘theory’ (or, more precisely, some theorists) to turn everything into text, explain it, and assert imperium thereover. It’s a problem shared by other disciplines with imperialist ambitions – economics too has disputes between those who see its domain as traditional market activities, and those who see it as a universal science of choice under constraints. Meanwhile, Richard Byrne at the Chronicle documents how scholars at the MLA are considering abandoning the outer provinces; retreating from their grand ambitions, and linking teaching and scholarship more closely. Interestingly, this year’s President, Robert Scholes, seems to see the answer (if I’m understanding him rightly) as lying in a stronger assertion of disciplinary standards, returning to the ‘harder’ aspects of literature, and advocating what almost sound to be law-like propositions.

bq. “I can’t say just how long this will take,” he said. “But I do believe that this is happening. There is more interest in these things … grammar, rhetoric, and also logic. … There needs to be an overall recognition that what you say has to be reasonable. That it has to be answerable to certain disciplinary considerations. Within this discipline, you can only say x if y and z are in fact reasonable suppositions.”

Now I haven’t seen the speech, so I’m not exactly sure what he means by these statements. If this is just a call for higher standards and more consistent arguments that don’t do too much violence to to the text, of course I’m in favour. If it’s a call for something more than that – i.e. a more rigorous quasi-scientific literary theory, then I’m not at all convinced. If the desire of the humanities is to reconnect with the outside world, I imagine that they’d be better advised to follow the example of those critics who have maintained some general readership – Guy Davenport and Frank Kermode spring to mind, as (from an earlier era) does the poetry criticism of Randall Jarrell. As far as I can tell, quasi-scientific theories of literature (with a few exceptions, such as Propp’s work on folktales) have been a dead end. Trying to apply formal theories to literature (unless done in a playful, Oulipesque way) seems to me to be a very promising method for replacing one set of useless aridities with another. A renunciation of grand theorising, and a frank acknowledgement that criticism is an inherently subjective and partial enterprise seems to me to be a more fruitful direction (and, if I understand John Holbo rightly, what he too is advocating).

Update: attribution goof fixed.

David Eisenman informs me in a comment to a previous post that he and his colleagues have just put together a new edition of Guy Davenport’s novel, “Wo es war, soll ich werden,” which is 35% longer than the original published version. It’s handbound, in a signed edition of 100 copies and looks quite beautiful.

The perennial issue of mainstream media bias and the superiority of blogs is undergoing a minor revival in the right wing blogosphere at the moment, much of it centered on a column by Nick Coleman of the Star-Tribune, which has the temerity to take on PowerLine. Coleman’s effort to “fact-check” the factcheckers is rather weak, but his main point is hard to refute – it’s a bit rich for slavering right wing hacks to accuse the mainstream media of ideological bias and expect to get taken seriously. On which, see further Matt Welch’s entertaining takedown of Hugh Hewitt. There’s a curious sort of doublethink going on here, which culminates in a sort of dodge-the-responsibility two-step. On the one hand, bloggers like Glenn Reynolds respond to their critics by saying that they can’t cover everything, and that they’re not providing a news service, only opinions. On the other hand, they seem to believe that blogs should radically change or replace the mainstream media. Either of these statements is reasonable enough on its own,[1] but taken in conjunction, they’re pretty jarring. If you think that blogs should replace the mainstream media, then you should be prepared yourself to live up to some minimal standards of scrupulosity, intellectual honesty, and willingness to deal fairly with facts that are uncomfortable for your own ideological position. You should be prepared to live up yourself to the standards that you demand of others. Exercising the “shucks, I’m just a little old blogger” get-out clause is rank hypocrisy when you want the blogosphere to devour the New York Times whole. Funny that Reynolds et al. don’t see it that way.

Update: Glenn Reynolds responds to my post in a characteristically evasive fashion. He weirdly mischaracterizes my argument by saying that I conflate “InstaPundit with the blogosphere as a whole, by suggesting that my statement that InstaPundit is not a news service somehow means that the blogosphere isn’t up to news-gathering.” I don’t know where he gets that, but it allows him to duck the main point – whether bloggers like Reynolds are being hypocritical in criticizing other media for bias. Let me explain it again in plain, simple, English. Glenn Reynolds complains regularly about liberal bias in the media. He says that he doesn’t believe that blogs should replace big media, but that they should pressure big media to do a better job; I’ll accept his characterization of his own views, although he’s certainly given a different impression in the past. But even on this more limited definition, bloggers like Reynolds are being hypocritical – they don’t and won’t practice what they preach. If I understand his argument correctly (it’s somewhat unclear to me exactly what he’s saying), he seems to think that this is OK because the blogosphere is a big place, and that stories are going to come out no matter what (no blogger can block them). This is an abdication of responsibility, pure and simple, and it’s also factually incorrect. Blogs like Instapundit on the right and Atrios on the left, serve an important function as filters of news, both for other bloggers (who read the big bloggers disproportionately) and for outside readers (who tend to gravitate towards the big blogs that everyone has heard about). In a very important way, these blogs shape both the political blogosphere’s perception of itself, and outsiders’ perceptions of it (the blogs on the ‘long tail’ usually only come to prominence when one of the bigger blogs picks up on their story). Saying (if that’s what he’s saying) that he doesn’t have any responsibility for what he does or doesn’t post on, because others are going to pick up on important stories anyway, simply doesn’t cut it as an excuse.

Update 2: I come back from my New Years vacation to discover that Glenn Reynolds has responded again, in a further update which is not only evasive but dishonest. He attacks my credibility as a scholar, saying that “it really is going to make it hard for me to take Henry seriously as a scholar of the blogosphere, now that he’s written off half of it so unpleasantly.” That’s a very serious accusation to make – especially when it’s based on the entirely false claim that I’ve written off half (presumably the right half) of the blogosphere. If Reynolds had bothered to check, he’d have found that I’ve been similarly harsh when left wingers have engaged in hackishness. My objection is not to right wing views, or to right wing criticism of the media; it’s to criticism of the media from people like Reynolds who are partisan hacks, whether they come from the right or the left. Mark Kleiman has documented over time Reynolds’ resort to bizarre conspiracy theories, vicious slurs without evidence and unwarranted attacks on the patriotism of those who disagree with him (on this last I’m reminded of Dr. Johnson’s dictum that patriotism is the “last refuge of a scoundrel”). Kleiman concludes with regard to the Kerik scandal, that Reynolds “has no standing whatever to complain about anyone else’s journalistic ethics in this regard”: – I’d broaden that to say that he doesn’t have standing to complain about anyone else’s journalistic standards, period. Or, as Kleiman remarks even more pungently.

bq. Glenn thinks the “liberal media” are employing a “double standard.” Would someone send him a mirror for his birthday, please?

Again, Reynolds ducks the question of whether bloggers should have standards by repeating his hackneyed claim that the media don’t live up to theirs. All this criticism aside, Mr. Reynolds can rest assured that I will continue to take him very seriously as a sociological phenomenon.

In other news, Hugh Hewitt, blogger and author of “If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It ,” suggests that I should have admitted that I’d overwritten when I described certain partisan blogs as “slavering rightwing hacks.”

Finally, Jay Rosen makes some criticisms that I take a lot more seriously – I’m willing to accept that there’s a difference that I’ve elided between believing that blogs are ‘winning’ and the mainstream media are ‘losing,’ and the claim that blogs are going to take over the mainstream media (although I still contend that much of the rhetoric suggests the latter rather than the former).

fn1. Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with the first of these statements – but then I neither want nor expect blogs to replace mainstream news outlets; bloggers would make for lousy reporters.

I’ve just discovered a quite disgusting exercise in partisan pointscoring by Wizbang via our Technorati links, suggesting that because we (and other left blogs) haven’t had several posts each about the tsunami and its aftermath, liberals don’t care as much as conservatives about their fellow human beings. I’m not going to return the favour by claiming that this post shows us this or that about conservatives, because it doesn’t tell us anything whatsoever about conservatives as a collectivity. It does, however, speak volumes about the person who wrote this sorry excuse for a post.

NB – further attempts to play partisan football in the comments section will be deleted.

Like John, I’m going to be donating whatever’s in my Amazon Associates account already, plus whatever commission comes in from people buying over the next quarter (up to March 31). I’ll make the first payment, like John, after the weekend, to the American Red Cross, and will donate whatever comes in after that to a combination of the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres, and a charity dealing with long term reconstruction (suggestions gratefully received). I’d been thinking anyway of doing a round-up of books that I’d liked this year – a highly varied list of reading suggestions below. As John says, donate what you can directly – but if you want some holiday reading (and to give a little money to charity while you’re at it) use the links below.

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Susan Sontag is dead from leukaemia; the New York Times has an obituary here.

John DiIulio of ‘Mayberry Machiavellis’ fame has a short article on ‘Attacking “Sinful Inequalities”‘ in the current issue of Perspectives on Politics.

bq. Bible-believing Christians are supposed to heed the call to “be not afraid” of any worldly challenge. Whether you are a person of whatever faith or no faith, if you believe that inequality is a moral problem, and you are convinced that it is a real problem in America today, you should not be afraid to say so – and not be afraid to recommend whatever policies or programs you believe might make a real and lasting difference. In the post-1980 debate over inequality, at least as I have experienced it, it is liberals, not conservatives, who have normally lacked the courage of their true convictions, some for fear of being accused of favoring “big government” or having other thoughts out of season.

Spotted in Toronto, where I spent part of last weekend – while George Bush is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, Time Canada’s “Newsmaker of the Year” is Maher Arar. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition.