Over at _Inside Higher Ed_, “Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs__8 has some interesting reflections on Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, a late nineteenth century writer who got a lot of attention from literary scholars, including Henry Louis Gates, because she was identified as African-American, but now turns out to have been white. While there are some academic politics here that are worth exploring, Scott focuses on the more interesting aesthetic question: how it is that an author of very considerable mediocrity may become interesting because of her racial background. When Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was black, the relentless whiteness of her fictional characters was significant and important, but when she became white again, it turns out to be hundrum and uninformative, a rather banal product of the racial prejudices of its time.[1] Scott has some fun with the earnest efforts of literary theorists to read racial complexities into a text which simply doesn’t support them, contrasting Kelley-Hawkins with another, far more interesting-sounding African-American writer from the same period who does actually engage with the ironies and paradoxes of fluid racial identity. But even though the alchemy of race may not be able to produce gold from dross, the body of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins scholarship may still have some worth. We can consider it as an imaginative exercise, along the lines of the literary critics of Borges’ “Tlön”:http://aegis.ateneo.net/fted/tlontext.htm, who

bq. often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…

Re-imagining a dull white religious novelist of the late nineteenth century as a conflicted black woman is less ambitious, certainly, but still not entirely without merit.

fn1. Which, as Scott points out in his conclusion, are themselves worth studying, but surely not the same thing.

While doing some research a couple of weeks ago for a course I’m teaching, I came across this interesting Brookings Institution “book chapter”:http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/gs/cf/sourcebk01/InternetChap10.pdf of how US election law affects political activities on the Internet. Reading between the lines, it appears to me that the Federal Election Commission has been strenuously trying to avoid getting sucked into the quagmire of regulating political conduct on the Internet – but that it is, sooner or later, going to have to start engaging in rulemaking. Trevor Potter and Kirk L. Jowers, the authors of the chapter don’t really discuss how, or whether, election law should apply to blogs. There are some fascinating questions here for future regulation and lawmaking. Should there be disclosure requirements for blogs (like the two blogs “authored by paid advisers”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/08/politics/main659955.shtml to the Thune senatorial campaign in South Dakota) that are intimately linked to a political campaign? Should blogging that is expressly aimed at supporting the election of a particular candidate be treated as a political contribution, or as volunteer activity? Should the kinds of restriction that apply to coordination between 527s and political campaigns be extended to prominent political blogs?

I note that I’m not an expert in electoral law. Still, I feel fairly confident in making two predictions. First: that these activities _will_ be regulated. As political blogs become a more established part of the political landscape, they will increasingly be treated as another means of political expression, advocacy and fundraising – and the current regulatory regime will, one way or another, be extended to cover them. The only question is how the balance between free political speech and the need to regulate organized political activities is struck. Second, that whatever regulations are promulgated will prove awkward and uncomfortable for bloggers on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Bloggers have gotten used to operating in a relatively freewheeling environment – as they get absorbed into the existing political system, this is going to change.

Update: “Luis Villa”:http://tieguy.org/blog/ points in comments to this very interesting “take”:http://zonkette.blogspot.com/2005/02/fec-talk-tomorrow-abstract-in-progress.html on how the FEC _should_ evolve from Howard Dean’s former election coordinator, Zephyr Teachout.

Let me join the left-wing commentator chorus by saying that recent developments in Lebanon and Egypt make me hopeful, and also redound to the credit of Bush and his foreign policy team. (damn, I never thought I’d be writing that.) In the former case, events have been pretty much autochtonous, and out of Bush’s control. But who can doubt that the sight of Iraqis voting, even in their odd and anonymous election, has had an impact on Lebanese public opinion? (And yes, I concede that Bush jumped on the Iraq election bandwagon only after it lumbered past him, led by Sistani. Still, he jumped on.)

In the case of Egypt, there is every reason to be skeptical that Mubarak is cooking up some Algerian-style charade in the hopes of installing Gamal, and is only making these concessions to please the US. (See Abu Aarvark’s helpful round-up of Arab press responses to the move.) Even so, that means that the US has put enough actual pressure on him that he feels he needs to do some window-dressing, and that in itself is a huge step forward. I was always one who liked the sound of the Bush democracy-promotion speeches, but was convinced he wouldn’t back them up with any real pressure on US-friendly autocrats. I thought, “wow, he’s got a good speechwriter”, not “wow, I guess we’ll be giving that Niyazov guy any amount of trouble now.” So, count me happy to be somewhat wrong.

“Go read”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/02/how_social_secu.html. That’s all.

“Rep Sam Johnson (R – Texas)”:http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/003628.html, the other day:

bq. Speaking at a veterans’ celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas….Johnson said he told the president that night, “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ’em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.”

“Randy Newman”:http://laeren.zoggins.net/music/lyrics/lyrics-politicalscience.php, some years ago:

No one likes us
I don’t know why
We may not be perfect
But heaven knows we try
But all around even our old friends put us down
Let’s drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money
But are they grateful?
No they’re spiteful
And they’re hateful
They don’t respect us, so let’s surprise them
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them.

Maybe the GOP should hire Newman as a foreign policy consultant. Johnson’s decision to deliver the remarks in a church was a particularly nice touch. I wonder if he knows where the road to Damascus actually is.

Thoughts on the Oscars? I’ve got a few under the fold.
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As various people have noted, the “Observer has started a blog”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/ (or perhaps a “blog” ). Nick Cohen, darling of the pro-war lefties is, naturally, “one of the contributors”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/observer/archives/2005/02/26/so_this_is_blogging.html — and recommends his favourite blogs. Many of Cohen’s recent column’s have included fulminations against the “pseudo-left” , a term which designates those who take a different view to his own on such matters as Iraq and Sheikh Qaradawi. I’m always suspicious of people with the capacity the exhibit great moral indigation against imbeciles who are stupid or venal enough to espouse positions similar to those that they themselves have only just abandoned (John Gray is another good example). Unsporting it may be, but I’d like to take this opportunity to link to “one of Cohen’s columns on Afghanistan”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,582309,00.html (a war that, btw, I supported). The tone of outraged moral superiority is the same, but was, at that time, directed against different targets. Plus ça change ….

bq. To understand political power correctly and derive it from its proper source, we must consider what state all men are naturally in. It is a state in which men are perfectly free to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and themselves, in any way they like, without asking anyone else’s permission – all this subject only to limits set by the law of nature. It is also a state of equality, in which no-one has more power and authority than anyone else; because it is simply obvious that creatures of the same species and status, all born to all the same advantages of nature and to the use of the same abilities, should also be equal ·in other ways·, with no-one being subjected to or subordinate to anyone else, unless ·God·, the lord and master of them all, were to declare clearly and explicitly his wish that some one person be raised above the others and given an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

The latest of Jonathan Bennett’s “renderings of the classics of early modern philosophy”:http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/ into modern English is now out on the web: the “Second Treatise of Government”:http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/f_locke.html . In my experience it is a work that students find especially opaque in the original, much as I love the archaic language. (Sceptics might be interested to read “Bennett’s rationale”:http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/f_why.html for his project.)

Inside the top of the “Jones Soda”:http://www.jonessoda.com/ I just opened it says “Take Charge of Your Life and Decisions.” I’m wondering whether doing this is compatible with accepting advice from a soft-drink bottle.

Via Making Light, an amazing series of posts and threads from Chez Miscarriage. The most interesting one is the thread in which Chez solicits tales of “mother drive-by’s”, horrible, critical comments from other mothers on parenting. It will take ages to read them all, but I couldn’t turn away.

Some are truly, unforgiveably evil: “At the funeral for my 16 year old daughter who took her own life. My mother in law asked how we could have let Marrissa die.”

Or this:

“I was out and about with my then two year old Sara, who has Down Syndrome. A complete stranger asked me about her “condition”. I told him she had Down’s. He made some “tsk, tsk” noise and told me that I should have had an abortion, and how she would be a drain on society, and then walked off. My jaw was completely on the ground by that point and the tears were not far behind.”

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I’ve just finished Günter Grass’s “Crabwalk”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s “Natural History of Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.

There’s been “much blogospheric concern”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/02/14/thousands_of_neonazis_march_in_dresden.php recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the “Wilhelm Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KdF_Ship_Wilhelm_Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of “Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, “David Frankfurter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frankfurter .

One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.

I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.

Count me as a moderate supporter. It’s hard to talk about The Gates — the Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation in Central Park — without sounding pretentious. Like this: “Our memories of this experience are how the artwork changes us — perhaps the most powerful force of art, that the changes made are not in the site, but in us.” I can’t really say that I’m so different than I was a week ago. Sure, I guess they made me think, but that’s something I try to do anyway. The whole thing is just asking for parodies (this is my favorite) and mockery (like this).

But I like them. Let me just say, there are lots of ’em. There’s no location — on the ground, at least — where you can take in all of them, so there is always a sense that you’re only seeing a very small part of a much larger work — most of it stays out of reach. At the same time, each gate is made on a human scale and is not at all overwhelming. When the wind blows and creates a wave in one after another, the effect is quite beautiful. And together they highlight the different elevations of the park that wouldn’t be so obvious with out them — especially where one path passes on a bridge over another. They call attention to the topography of the park itself and not as much to themselves as you would expect given their construction site orange saffron color.

As my family walked through them, we stopped at a playground so my daughter could play on the swings. There were some young teenage boys hanging out there, smoking and trying to be cool. One of them asked if we knew where the art was supposed to be. My wife pointed to the gates and replied, “That’s it, all around.” They thought this was terribly funny, and one said: “I could do that in my bedroom.” To which the only possible reply was: “You must have some bedroom.”

In the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review (reproduced here), Justin Wolfers writes about a betting market on the Iraqi election turnout, run by the Irish betting exchange Tradesports. The bet turned on whether turnout would exceed 8 million and was roughly even money before voting began. The price of the contract rose sharply on early reports of turnouts over 70 per cent, then fell back again when to around even money when it became clear these reports had little basis. The final official turnout was about 8.4 million.

Readers will recall that something very similar happened in the US election when early exit polls favored Kerry. Modifying an old aphorism to say that “two striking observations constitute a stylised fact”, I think we can now say pretty safely that political betting markets display the wisdom of crowds who read blogs.
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The NYT has an “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/nyregion/26video.html?ex=1267160400&en=1d48bf539f85dc0e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland about Gary Brolsma, the “Numa Numa”:http://www.google.com/search?q=numa+numa guy. If you haven’t seen the video, “go watch it”:http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/numa.php and come back in a minute.

Now tell me what you think of the article’s summary of the story:

There was a time when embarrassing talents were a purely private matter … But with the Internet, humiliation – like everything else – has now gone public. … Here, then, is the cautionary tale of Gary Brolsma, 19, amateur videographer and guy from New Jersey, who made the grave mistake of placing on the Internet a brief clip of himself dancing along to a Romanian pop song. Even in the bathroom mirror, Mr. Brolsma’s performance could only be described as earnest but painful.

Utter bollocks. Mr Brolsma’s performance could only be described that way by someone with no capacity at all to recognize good comedy. The video is hilarious and, to anyone with eyes in their head, was supposed to be. It’s not earnest, it’s deadpan. I am sorry to say that Americans are renowned for their inability to grasp this distinction. Despite the article’s efforts to draw a parallel, it’s obviously a real performance, not a private bit of wish-fulfillment maliciously released into the wild like the “Star Wars Kid”:http://www.jedimaster.net/ video. The guy’s friends agree:

His friends say Mr. Brolsma has always had a creative side. He used to make satirical Prozac commercials on cassette tapes, for instance. He used to publish a newspaper with print so small you couldn’t read it with the naked eye. “He was always very out there – he’s always been ambitious,” said Frank Gallo, a former classmate. “And he’s a big guy, but he’s never been ashamed.” … “He’s been entertaining us for years.”

Sadly, the Times will not be diverted from its dumbass interpretation. It should come as no surprise that Brolsma “is distraught, embarrassed. His grandmother, Margaret Telkes, quoted him as saying, just the other day, ‘I want this to end.'” You would too, if you were getting shoehorned by the NYT into a “fat kid makes ass of self on internet” story:

The question remains why two million people would want to watch a doughy guy in glasses wave his arms around online to a Romanian pop song.

Because it’s funny, you gobshites! And it’s _meant_ to be! I’d bet that if Brolsma weren’t overweight, the Times wouldn’t have had as hard a time seeing this.