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a berlin blog |
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004 V.S. NightfallHere's a critical piece from the Manchester Guardian about V.S. Naipaul's lunge to the right in Indian politics, and about some historical mistakes in his Indian writings. I like to read Naipaul, but not because I always agree with him: I like anyone who makes a strong contrary case.Which means I can't understand Jessa Crispin's response to Naipaul's politicking (on Bookslut): "The question arises: How much should a reader allow an author's personal life and political leanings affect their reaction to the author's books? The sensible answer is, of course, it shouldn't affect the reader at all..." Why? If you read enough Naipaul you realize that his politics are not private or even beside the point. A coherent politics is part of what it means to be not just a writer, to him, but a man. "I have no guiding political idea," he says, which is healthy and right, but he's also spent a long career building a careful view of the world — of politics, religion, power, revolution. His sniffy Oxonian tendencies aren't just a style. They belong to every word, every observation. By all means hate him for that. But also notice how he delivers light and heat. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:56 PM Tuesday, March 30, 2004 Too Much of Nothing event!I'll be in L.A. to read from the novel on Saturday, April 10, at Skylight Books. Careful readers will notice that Skylight is only about ten blocks north of where Eric dies:1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles Saturday, April 10, 2004 7pm Brian at #62 With a Bullet has posted something about it; anyone else who can spread the word will be thanked from the bottom of my blog. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:56 PM Against All EnemiesI just read an excerpt from Richard Clarke's blockbuster about the Bush White House and Iraq. The book was nicely timed for campaign season, but in fact it's about two years late. Clarke needed to come out during the long, noisy run-up to war. Radio Free Mike readers might remember how we banged on the Laurie Mylroie theory that al-Qaeda fronted for Saddam in the first World Trade Center bombing. We were swayed by it, but not fully convinced; we wanted more liberal friends to admit the theory existed, since Mylroie's book about Saddam (A Study of Revenge, later retitled The War Against America), was obviously the most compact summary of the White House's assumptions. We wanted it read and criticized. The most frustrating part of the debate was that even well-read liberals in San Francisco just dismissed the whole notion of a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam, without even knowing there was a theory behind it. Now, the theory turned out to be wrong. Mylroie may well go down in history as a nutcase. But she was Paul Wolfowitz's nutcase, and Cheney's nutcase; she needed to be aired and whacked like a dirty sheet.Clarke gets right to the point: On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor -- Iraq must have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back. ... straight from Laurie Mylroie. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:31 AM Saturday, March 27, 2004 Location, Location, LocationHere's an addition to my anthology of fine paragraphs describing Southern California. The narrator of Wallace Stegner's story "Pop Goes the Alley Cat" describes an L.A. slum in the years after World War II. Parts of Mt. Washington still have this feel, but without (I think) the banana trees:The barrio was a double row of shacks tipping from a hilltop down a steep road clayily shining and deserted in the rain, every shack half buried under climbing roses, geraniums, big drooping seedheads of sunflowers, pepper and banana trees, and palms: a rural slum of the better kind, the poverty overlaid deceptively with flowers. Across the staggering row of mailboxes Prescott could see far away, over two misty hilltops and an obscured sweep of city, the Los Angeles Civic Center shining a moment in a watery gleam of sun. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:34 PM Thursday, March 25, 2004 Clarke AgonistesDaniel Drezner has a sober-minded summary of the Richard Clarke uproar. Conrad at the Gweilo Diaries adds a remark or two, though I wish he would learn to spell. The basic line is that Clarke makes a strong and credible critic; but the Bush administration can and should fight back by wearing out the argument that a war on terrorism is a war, dammit, not a criminal investigation, and that the larger project is to re-make the Middle East, starting with failed states like Iraq.This argument sounds weaker every day. I agree the war on terrorism is a war; I also know dictators, poverty, and madrassahs breed terrorists. But Clarke's most damaging point is that Iraq was the wrong war. Saddam had almost nothing to do with September 11, even less than I thought last year: He was just the easiest dictator for Bush to nab. That, um, falls short of great statesmanship. After Afghanistan, we should have moved on to the ugly problem of Saudi Arabia. It's a symptom of everything the White House tries to hide that one of its proud achievements since 2001 is that "Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are now [our] allies in the war on terror." Oh? If more people read about Pakistani and Saudi involvement in September 11, I think Stephen Hadley, second in command at the NSC, would not be so glib about the alliance on national TV. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 4:48 PM Wednesday, March 24, 2004 Indo Surf and LingoIn May I'll be in Indonesia, to research a novel. Survival hints, wave reports, help with the language, or contacts with anyone on Bali, Java, or Lombok are most welcome.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
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Tuesday, March 23, 2004 Air AmericaIt may be the name of a new liberal radio program, but for some of us Air America will always be the title of a bad Mel Gibson film — I mean, of a chopper and cargo-plane unit running CIA missions in Vietnam. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:11 PMSunday, March 21, 2004 Alien EndorsementsThis doesn't help a single damn thing:Four days before the election, Zapatero told Britain's Guardian newspaper, "I think Kerry will win. I want Kerry to win." But this might: Since the FCC crackdown on media "indecency" in the wake of Janet Jackson's Nipplegate incident, [Howard] Stern has transformed his morning variety show into a rabidly anti-Bush talk forum. Every weekday, he has been devoting hours of his broadcast (locally on WBCN-FM, 104.1 [in Boston]) to impassioned criticism of President Bush and support of Senator John Kerry. ... Harrison calls Stern's recent crusade "historic." "Anytime you have somebody suddenly igniting political interest with an audience who has the kind of loyalty factor Stern has, it could turn an election." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:29 PM Wednesday, March 17, 2004 Blow Me Up, Blow Me DownFor the kneejerk peanut gallery response to the Spanish elections, see Tim Blair; for a more thoughtful analysis, read Josh Marshall here and here.Of course it's loathsome that Al Qaeda swung the vote, toward the Socialists or in any direction. But only a few members of the conservative peanut gallery seem to grasp that small-minded lying by the Aznar (and Bush) governments might have undercut Spanish faith, and that lying to your own people is no way to run a democracy or a war on terrorism. If the Iraq coalition falls apart — which would be a disaster — the fault rests finally with Bush, who started with world support on September 12 and lied his way to a half-relevant war that left Al Qaeda in a position to blow up things in Spain. John Kerry, at least, can name the enemy. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:23 AM Sunday, March 14, 2004 Winds of Black DeathSullivan says "The Winds of Black Death," the promised almost-ready act of terrorism coming to the U.S. in the wake of Madrid, "sounds like a bio-terror strike."Or maybe a metal band. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:01 AM Friday, March 12, 2004 Paging Kira SalakBack in the day, Marc and I ran a magazine in Boston called Cruel World. An adventurous woman named Kira Salak, who'd already been to Malawi, alone, at age 20, wrote about the trip for our Travel Issue. This is how Kira looked just after we knew her, and how she looks on her semi-recent travel book, Four Corners: One Woman's Solo Journey Into the Heart of Papua New Guinea:
That's Kira on the right. She's the first woman in history to cross Papua by herself. The book says she made it back, but God help me if I can find her e-mail address. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:13 PM Thursday, March 11, 2004 Just Keeping His JobAn informed take from Asia Times on what George Tenet is up to these days.This Tuesday he claimed to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he was unaware until just last week that officials based in the Pentagon's policy office had given intelligence briefings directly to the White House [i.e., on Saddam's phantom links to Al-Qaeda]." Is it normal for the White House to hear formal intelligence from someone besides George Tenet? Senator Carl Levin asked. "I don't know. I've never been in the situation," Tenet replied, insisting, "I have to tell you, Senator, I'm the president's chief intelligence officer; I have the definitive view about these subjects." "I know you feel that way," Levin said, betraying a hint of sarcasm. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:49 PM New on the Blog RollJennifer Granick is my opionated left-leaning friend who works for Larry Lessig. The Gweilo Diaries is by a right-leaning Hong Kong blogger named Conrad who has intelligent things to say about the Indonesian government but seems to harbor a knee-jerk hatred of John Kerry. (If you don't think it's knee-jerk, compare Josh Marshall.) Conrad also points out that cunnilingus may cause cancer. Ruh-oh. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:39 AMBut manifestos should be angryGarrison Frost at The Aesthetic says (by e-mail) that he agrees "on nearly all points" with the angry-sounding manifesto I wrote in response to his amusing piece on the Los Angeles South Bay as a setting for literature. I figured as much. Not that he seemed miffed, but I should be clear that the anger wasn't aimed at him. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:37 AMWednesday, March 10, 2004 A Bit of GrayI know I'm the theater critic, but I can't outdo the Spalding Gray eulogies turning up on blogs worldwide. Marc can; he had Chinese food with the guy. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:26 AMSpeaking of constitutions,the new one in Iraq is a solid development. But al-Sistani's fiddling offers a pretty clear idea of who might end up in charge when the polls open. And a Shi'ite Iraq beside a Shi'ite Iran would form an interesting new bloc in the Middle East, one both Reagan and Clinton opposed. "Some analysts see the two countries forming an alliance that vies for regional dominance with pro-American Sunni-led regimes in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf," according to this AP story, which you should read. "But as support for Iran's mullahs dwindles, a democratic Iraq may wind up influencing Iran."Yes, that was the gamble last spring, wasn't it? But here's what curled my knickers: "There's even talk that Hezbollah has already been looking toward Shia leaders in Iraq and traveling to Iraq to visit the holy sites,'' [State Department spokesman Gregg Sullivan] said. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:18 AM John Perry Barlow was right,alas. Spalding Gray's body "was pulled out of the East River off Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on Sunday." We shared the same birthday. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 12:02 AMMonday, March 08, 2004 O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and DickensGarrison Frost at The Aesthetic has a witty thing about L.A.'s South Bay as a literary setting. He lives in Hermosa Beach, I think.He writes: "Sure, Leonard Wibberley raised a family here, Thomas Pynchon ate burritos in our crappiest Mexican restaurants and Charles Bukowski read aloud at local bars, but this isn't generally the kind of place that inspires great writers to pen masterpieces." True, true. Masterpieces are hard to come by. Frost imagines what Hemingway or Kafka or Jane Austen would have made of surfers and Gallerias and decaf mochas. Amusing. But here's the thing: A California surf town makes an ideal setting because it's not literary. If a beach-suburb novel doesn't sound like a "real" novel, that's the reason to write one. Paris, New York, and Prague have been covered. Frost was having fun, but I meet his attitude whenever I fly home. ("You wrote a novel set here? Why?") The idea is that L.A. suburbs are too gauche or mundane. Postwar Westchester County was also too mundane for words until Cheever painted its people and yards in The New Yorker. The opening to "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" reads like a direct challenge: I would not want to be one of those writers who begin each morning by exclaiming, "O Gogol, O Chekhov, O Thackeray and Dickens, what would you have made of a bomb shelter ornamented with four plaster-of-Paris ducks, a birdbath, and three composition gnomes with long beards and red mobcaps?" As I say, I wouldn't want to begin a day like this, but I often wonder what the dead would have done. But the shelter is as much a part of my landscape as the beech and horse-chestnut trees that grow on the ridge. Mundane Southern California isn't unknown to legendary authors, anyway. You can answer the jokey Frost list with a real one. Listen to Tennessee Williams, in a story called "The Mattress by the Tomato Patch": This resurrected day is a Saturday and all afternoon pairs of young lovers have wandered the streets of Santa Monica, searching for rooms to make love in. Each uniformed boy holds a small zipper bag and the sun-pinked-or-gilded arm of a pretty girl, and they seem to be moving in pools of translucent water. The girl waits at the foot of steps which the boy bounds up, at first eagerly, then anxiously, then with desperation, for Santa Monica is literally flooded with licensed and unlicensed couples in this summer of 1943. Faulkner, in "Golden Land": His mother lived in Glendale; it was the house which he had taken when he married and later bought, in which his son and daughter had been born -- a bungalow in a cul-de-sac of pepper trees and flowering shrubs and vines which the Japanese tended, backed into a barren foothill combed and curried into a cypress-and-marble cemetery dramatic as a stage set and topped by an electric sign in red bulbs which, in the San Fernando valley fog, glared in broad sourceless ruby as though just beyond the crest lay not heaven but hell. Tobias Wolff, in his Vietnam memoir, In Pharoah's Army: I got to Manhattan Beach just after sundown and surprised my father once again. He was in his bathrobe, about to pop some frozen horror into the oven. I told him to keep it on ice and let me stand him to dinner at the restaurant where we'd eaten the year before. He said he wasn't feeling exactly jake, thought he might be coming down with something, but after we had a few drinks he let himself be persuaded of the tonic potential of a night on the town. A poet never has to like a place in order to write it well. Derek Walcott, in "Summer Elegies": Nothing hurts as much as the word "California," the wincing light of Los Angeles. In unfinished Venice a fresco interrupted in its prophecy looks phonier than what it promised: gondolas, palazzos, its own Bridge of Sighs. It fades under its graffiti, a transferred paradise. Southern California may reject its poets, loathe its artists, infuse its own people with dreariness and self-mockery, and repel any sensitive, right-thinking person who cultivates even a crumb of good taste. But then good taste is the enemy of art; and no place on earth is unworthy of its own literature. The mistake is looking for dead forms among the surf shops and Slushee machines. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:41 PM Sunday, March 07, 2004 The Bleeps of FreedomMatt Welch throws a beautiful fit over Sandra Tsing Loh's firing from an NPR affiliate in Los Angeles. General Manager Ruth Seymor at KCRW cancelled "The Loh Life" for threatening the station's broadcast license with a single, un-bleeped "fuck":Free speech, and the climate that either nurtures or stifles it, is not a trivial thing. KCRW champions itself, pledge drive after annoying pledge drive, as the shining "alternative" to evil corporate radio and otherwise fettered expression. If Ruth Seymour is using topical fear of the FCC as a convenient excuse to fire someone, then she is doing tangible violence to most of the values her station claims to profess. If she really thinks a single inadvertent "fuck" can bring down a station, then A) she's more terrified than she should be, and B) she ought to get busy with firing the engineer, and perhaps herself. There are people who have reacted to this by saying "oh, well, Sandra Tsing Loh is annoying anyway," or "what does she expect! You can't be too careful nowadays." To which I say: Check what remains of your dried-out soul Didn't we just fight a war to bring free speech and other democratic notions to a faraway land? How come we're having such fearful, old-fashioned controversies over breasts and naughty words? Or is that a stupid question? posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:41 PM Saturday, March 06, 2004 BookcrossingMy novel's been "released into the wild" through a service called Bookcrossing, and commented on by strangers. Pretty cool. I apologize to the reader who couldn't get the Peter, Paul, and Mary version of "Too Much of Nothing" out of her (his?) head. I'm ignorant of that version of the song, believe it or not. Never heard it in my life. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:36 PMLanguage DriftThe Irish novelist John Banville once mused to an interviewer that America might be a healthy place for a writer to live, since English here changes so quickly. (No link; it was over 10 years ago.) I found a good example in yesterday's Houston Chronicle. This would have been incomprehensible to all English speakers in 1950, and most of them in 1990 — gibberish even compared to the future-slang Anthony Burgess invented for A Clockwork Orange:Viruses e-mailed to corporate addresses can trigger an alert to the sender from firewall-based antivirus software. Because most viruses that spread by e-mail falsify the sender's address, those alerts are more than useless. They can clog up e-mail servers and render inboxes unusable. It's not quite what Banville meant, though. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:15 AM Friday, March 05, 2004 The crux of the matterHere's a scanned-in copy of the Constitution that Oliver North signed for me. Marc points out that if we pulled the same stunt today — asking high-ranking criminals to sign Xeroxed Constitutions while they tour behind pompous memoirs — "we'd probably go broke on copying charges."
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
11:38 PM
Respectfully DisagreeingThe White House respectfully disagrees with a victims' group and a firefighters' union that say the Bush commercials invoking September 11 were manipulative and cheap. "My gut instinct after seeing that television ad was, this is a political party stepping on my brother's grave,'' says Rita Lasar, a 72-year-old woman who lost her much younger brother in the north tower. This uproar seems to have caught the White House by surprise, and I look forward to watching Bush discover a whole mess of issues this year to respectfully disagree with normal Americans on. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:22 PMThursday, March 04, 2004 Poetry SpamThe subject lines on my junk mail for herbal Viagra and mindblowing loan rates, lately, have been eloquent as a free-verse haiku:flatten aorta celestial cheetah sex slug edison lower your mortgage payments coralline logician posted by Michael Scott Moore | 10:09 AM Wednesday, March 03, 2004 In Another CountryBrian, who lives in Japan, blogs about the Ollie North protest Marc and I and a few other people mounted a while back. Marc and I now live in different cities, but Brian asks, "don't you sometimes feel like you're both together, but in an entirely different country?"Actually, no. Conventional wisdom says the nation has changed, but the tone of San Francisco, L.A., New York, Boston, and New Hampshire -- the parts of the U.S. I see regularly -- is honestly not that different. People are more aware of the Middle East; we all have some kind of opinion now. But I don't feel widespread paranoia, mindless patriotism, or willingness to spy on the next-door neighbors in case their gardener might turn out to be a Qaeda ringleader (if that's what Brian means). It's mainly the Bush administration that seems to live in another country. Washington itself seems to have moved offshore. Soon I imagine we'll read that the whole operation has quietly shifted headquarters to the Bahamas and no longer needs to abide by the Constitution. Which, frankly, will be OK with me. When that day comes we'll just hire a good law firm to sue the place for gross malfeasance and find a new capital city. Happily, John Kerry seems to grasp the Saudi part of this problem. He also has a good record of investigating extra-Constitutional affairs, like Ollie North's coke racket. But for now my enthusiasm is muted. Kerry tends to know a lot but do little. He's a smart but cautious careerist, who after that big malfeasance suit might find himself retired in the Bahamas with the rest of them. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:04 PM Tuesday, March 02, 2004 Two SoldiersHere's the first page of a terrific story by William Faulkner, which was adapted last year for a short film and won Sunday's most interesting Oscar:Me and Pete would go down to Old Man Killegrew's and listen to his radio. We would wait until after supper, after dark, and we would stand outside Old Man Killegrew's parlor window, and we could hear it because Old Man Killegrew's wife was deaf, and so he run the radio as loud as it would run, and so me and Pete could hear it plain as Old Man Killegrew's wife could, I reckon, even standing outside with the window closed. And that night I said, "What? Japanese? What's a pearl harbor?" and Pete said, "Hush." And so we stood there, it was cold, listening to the fellow in the radio talking, only I couldn't make no heads nor tails neither out of it. Then the fellow said that would be all for a while, and me and Pete walked back up the road to home, and Pete told me what it was. Because he was nigh twenty and he had done finished the Consolidated last June and he knowed a heap: about them Japanese dropping bombs on Pearl Harbor and that Pearl Harbor was across the water. "Across what water?" I said. "Across that Government reservoy up at Oxford?" "Naw," Pete said. "Across the big water. The Pacific Ocean." posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:53 PM | |
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