a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Sunday, November 30, 2003 Bird is the WordI just updated and embellished my last post on German critics and coolness. Meanwhile, Marc Levy goes absolutely fucking nuts over the Presidential turkey pardon. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:12 AMThursday, November 27, 2003 Das ist ja cool! 2Last week I mentioned a German review of the novel. The writer, like I said, gets a number of things wrong. The crucial thing has to do with the Zohar's three-part model of the soul (nefesh, ruach, neshamah), which is very interesting to my dead narrator. The German critic, being German, writes that the model "might remind one of [Freudian] psychoanalysis and the id, ego, and super-ego — although the reader should not make the same mistake as the author [of making this parallel], which he apologizes for in an afterword."Id, ego, and super-ego are delightful toys for German lit students but they have nothing to do with my novel. All I apologize for in the afterword is bending ideas from the Zohar to my own purposes. Freud had nothing to do with it. In fact I went fleeing from Freud to the Zohar because "id, ego, and super-ego" were too crusted with cliché. Nefesh, ruach, and neshamah seemed new to me; they also paralleled Hindu models of Atman and Brahman that fascinated Emerson (who has more than a little to do with my book). Anyway. German critics also have a thing for "coolness" as a motive in modern fiction; they take it seriously. (Americans more or less invented the notion of cool, so American critics tend to be embarrassed by it and dismiss it as a foible with no place in literature.) So here's a translation of the most thoughtful and interesting paragraph by my German reader, Tobias Else: "Moore distinguishes himself from his pop-literary contemporaries in this sense: Coolness and sang-froid exist in his novel, but not in the foreground. The big city is the story's backdrop, not its point, much less a dark mystery. Sections of the novel even consist of warm, emotionally-engaged storytelling. No social 'scene' or class is described; the 'scene' is just part of the whole influence on a growing individual ... It's not just movies, music, friends, society, and parents which build us into good or evil people, but also our own selves." Richtig! posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:42 AM Saturday, November 22, 2003 CheneyJosh Marshall's right; this New Republic piece about Dick Cheney really is illuminating. (Franklin Foer, one of the writers, is Jonathan Safran Foer's older brother.) Steve at Golgonooza wanted to know why Bush "really started this war"; a hard look at Cheney essentially answers that question. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:51 AMWednesday, November 19, 2003 ProgressScientists still have no idea why we sleep, according to an Australian paper. (Thanks to Brian at My.Bicycle.) But they have learned this:"Researchers once thought that a prolonged lack of sleep produced mental illness. They now know that this is not the case, though waking subjects up every few minutes, early studies showed, made them cranky." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:30 AM Monday, November 17, 2003 Wolfowitz, Bloom, Bellow, BotsfordEvery so often I get a journal in the mail from Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford called News from the Republic of Letters. I'm a huge Bellow fan, and I wrote for Botsford once in Boston while he edited Bostonia. Their elderly mandarinism bugs me sometimes — I don't have any hope that Botsford would like my novel — but I respect both men as writers and thinkers. In their defunct journal Noble Savage they were among the first people to publish Thomas Pynchon. Now they're "a pair of utopian codgers," according to Bellow, who don't disagree in spirit with the neoconservatism associated with Allan Bloom and his Chicago friends. I think of them as the bohemian wing of the Bloom-style conservatives, or at least that's how Bellow styles himself in Ravelstein, his roman à clef about Bloom.Okay. Paul Wolfowitz was a student of Bloom's at Chicago. He makes an appearance (by phone) in Ravelstein. This little cameo belongs to his legend. The Economist has mentioned it; so have certain neocon hawks — as if getting noticed by a great American novelist added to his Washington cachet. So it was nice to read in the latest Republic of Letters about a fissure between those free-thinking utopian codgers and Wolfowitz as a Washington figure. Botsford writes, in his pungent, ever-sniffy column, "Pierre Bayle's Notebook": "Of course I am as much horrified by the latest load of bright young (and middle-aged) men who seem to be hi-jacking my own (as well as another) country. To show you how primitive is my sense of politics, I have only to reveal my two means of judgment. With certain misdemeanors I advocate exile rather than punishment. O.J., Bill Clinton and countless CEOs should be packed aboard a jumbo and flown to some remote land with golf courses and beaches and an amiable climate to frolic for the rest of their natural lives. We don't need their kind here. "Of course, if they had any sense of shame they would long ago have left themselves. For Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company, my test is even simpler: I don't want people in politics whom I would not invite to dinner." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:03 PM Saddam-Osama RevisitedAndrew Sullivan breaks down evidence from a leaked Senate memo that the Baghdad-Qaeda link was real. He's right; it's a huge story if the CIA research is true. My own feeling is that someone in Washington would have released these details a long time ago — say, in January? When Powell made his case to the U.N.? — if the CIA sources were solid. But we'll see.UPDATE: Josh Marshall, as usual, elaborates. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:00 PM Thursday, November 13, 2003 Das ist ja coolOut of nowhere, Too Much of Nothing gets a thorough review in German. I'll put up a translation soon. The writer gets a couple of major things wrong, but there's a sharp paragraph about pop culture and "coolness," which these days are big topics for German critics. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:13 PMMonday, November 10, 2003 Fish in a barrelJosh Marshall defends himself just fine against Andrew Sullivan's nonsense about the word "imminent," but I have one thing to add. Sullivan steers off course when he writes:"The strongest argument of the anti-war crowd is that we now know that the WMD threat from Saddam was much less than almost everyone (including most of them) believed. They're right - at least from the evidence so far. But that doesn't resolve the question of what we should have done before the war, when we had limited knowledge and information. Josh implies we should have risked it, and kept Saddam in power, with fingers crossed." No, no, no. The damning point is that Bush had good intelligence, but chose not to use it. Marshall and I were reluctant hawks before the war for separate reasons: He thought Saddam was a nuclear threat, I worried about Al Qaeda. It seems we both had bad intel, what with our low security clearances and all. Bush didn't. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:28 AM Land Wars in AsiaToday I went to a neoconservative-toned talk in San Francisco put on by the World Without War Council, where my wife used to work. I got to sit in as a member of the liberal media. One point everyone seemed to agree on was that NPR, The New Yorker, and The New York Times were major opinion-factories where journalists took for granted that projection of American power was just a bad idea. Anti-American liberals, in other words. I pointed out that The New Yorker itself was a projection of American power; most of its writers were probably not anti-American or plain dumb enough to think otherwise. (Susan Sontag may be an exception.) Anyway, around Radio Free Mike we like the word "liberal" and know how to use it: We think the U.S. is fundamentally a great liberal democracy that can do old-fashioned liberal good when its power is wisely used.I mean, point taken -- you do hear a lot of smug assumptions on NPR, etc. One is that U.S. military power amounts to an immoral capitalist juggernaut, and the big lesson from Vietnam under this idea is that we should butt out, in all cases, period. To me that's a cliché. The real lesson of Vietnam is that we shouldn't fight a land war in Asia to prop up a corrupt and failing regime. We were right to resist Communism, wrong to think Vietnam was winnable (from the 1940s on! Daniel Ellsberg makes this point forcefully in Secrets. Impossible to read that book and think of this dumb Instapundit post as anything but naîve.) Not just Asia: My novel touches on the mess in Nicaragua, which went bad for the same reason. The Sandinistas were no good, but they'd won an election, and their Contra enemies had no base of support beyond the CIA. The difference between those disasters and Iraq is that this time we opposed the corrupt and failing regime. Good! Only now there's no regime. So we need to make sure that whatever rises in Saddam's place will not be weak or corrupt. A good place to start might be honesty. But Bush and his apologists have not been honest, much less wise, and until that pattern changes the forecast for a credible new government will be dismal. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:27 AM Friday, November 07, 2003 "Imminent threat"Josh Marshall neatly slices up the argument that Bush and other hawks never meant to imply that the nasty-weapons threat from Saddam was "imminent." (The hawks tiptoed around that word, but there were slips. They used, for example, other words.) The Radio Free Mike take is here. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:32 PMWednesday, November 05, 2003 Selfless, liberal, radicalSince the start of the Iraq war we've heard all kinds of things about Bush from his defenders, including that the invasion was a liberal and radical act (Tom Friedman), not to mention risky and selfless, in the sense that Bush was staking his whole presidency on success (Andrew Sullivan). It was sober, gutsy, necessary. From the president himself we hear that America will pilot a grim and steady forward course until we've finished the job. Great! Right? I mean, a free and democratic Iraq. That's what I want too, even if I don't vote Republican. Count me out of that idiot tribe of Democrats who in their hearts seem to love Saddam Hussein — so eloquently cut down last week by an angry Roger Simon ("Haven't they seen the videotapes of Baathists chopping their own countrymens' heads off and pushing them off roofs? Haven't they seen the unmarked graves of children? What’s going on with these people?") — wherever those idiots might in fact be.Look, we all know Saddam's evil; we're all glad he's out of power. I was even, reluctantly, in favor of the war. The sticking point is Bush's honesty. Our failure to find those nasty weapons proves that the war could have waited until we'd cajoled and flattered the Germans (if not the French) and a few wealthier members of the U.N. into joining the dogpile on Saddam. But that would have meant waiting at least six or eight months, past the hot summer, until the end of Ramadan in December — which is bad timing for a presidential victory in 2004. So our big hurry was Bush's election cycle. And now some people (even some neocons, after all those warnings against an "exit strategy") want to speed up Iraqi police and military training for the same reason. (Read the whole thing.) Everyone knows Iraqis in uniform are a sign of progress; but Fareed Zakaria writes that if those uniforms amount to a hurried-up exit strategy to let Bush declare victory by mid-2004, leaving Iraq with ragged, ineffectual soldiers and cops, all the shining things Bush promised from this war will end in stinking wreckage. Andrew Sullivan was right: Bush did stake his presidency on Iraq. But he's not facing that risk like a man. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:33 AM Monday, November 03, 2003 Electronic WhistlestopSenator John Edwards is guest-blogging this week over at Larry Lessig's site. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:40 PMJust to be clearI am not running for mayor of San Francisco. (Link may expire.) posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:46 PMCalaveras Beach, O.C.?My good friend Steve Cahn seems to think my fictional surf town resembles Newport Beach these days, more than any L.A. beach city. He may be right. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:38 PMSunday, November 02, 2003 La Día de los Muertos!The Day of the Dead is an important one around Radio Free Mike, for obvious reasons. This whole site is decorated with icons from a font called Posada, after the Mexican artist who drew most of the skeleton art associated with the Day of the Dead. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:01 PMAlter EgoHere's another site called Radio Free Mike that really does play music, like a radio station. Our editor has been meaning to move the site you're staring at into low-level broadcasting, with sound files of certain speeches and interviews (which he still plans to do Any Day Now); but for now you can listen to Mike Edey's eclectic music stream. As of this post the last ten songs have included stuff by the Foo Fighters, Baz Luhrmann, and ZZ Top. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:49 PM | |
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