The Blog of Andrew Ivers

Faulkner’s ‘Sanctuary’

This books starts off so strong – namely, everything that goes on at the Old Frenchman homestead; as much as the first third or even close to half of the text – then just turns into “Noir Cliches: The Novel.” Because it’s Faulkner, the cliches are mingled with that trademark grotesque, which is so powerful elsewhere – but here, most of the time, it just comes off as bizarre and tiresome. After a while, there’s just too much mediocrity here to take the work seriously as a whole. There’s also some weird stuff in here about blacks and women, which seems less and less likely to be justified the cheaper and more cliched the story gets. And don’t get me started about the strange attempts at pulp humor. Having said all of this, I do still plan to read “Requiem for a Nun,” which is something of a sequel, at some point. I’ve also just started “The Unvanquished,” and it’s reminding me why Faulkner is a genius. But “Sanctuary” gets a failing grade in my book ... bad Faulkner is really bad.

Gac Filipaj, janitor and scholar

So inspiring:

A refugee from war-torn Yugoslavia, he eked out a living working for the Ivy League school. But Sunday [May 13th] was payback time: The 52-year-old janitor donned a cap and gown to graduate with a bachelor's degree in classics.

As a Columbia employee, he didn't have to pay for the classes he took. His favorite subject was the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca, the janitor said during a break from his work at Lerner Hall, the student union building he cleans.

"I love Seneca's letters because they're written in the spirit in which I was educated in my family — not to look for fame and fortune, but to have a simple, honest, honorable life," he said.

His graduation with honors capped a dozen years of studies, including readings in ancient Latin and Greek.

Keaton lives!

 

I am so delighted by this little film. It was made my three high school juniors at my alma mater, where English and film teacher Mark Cummings has taught scores of overstimulated adolescents to revere the work of silent filmmaker and actor Buster Keaton (watch a sample of Keaton's breathtaking physical comedy here, and his brilliant deadpan here). For a student project, this is really something special. Above all, it pulls off the simplicity that any good silent comedy needs – especially in the repeated set-ups and escalating reactions. It also has some great physical gags in it; the window bit in paticular had me doubled over. Will Morris, who plays the eponymous substitue (the short mimics the silent-era style right down to its title), showcases some real potential here. What delights me most, though, is that a few teenagers with a little wit and talent were able to create a small work of art that's genuinely funnier than ninety percent of the crap currently masquerading as "humor" on the Internet. It gives me hope.

The film has been picked up by Cinema St. Louis, curator of the city's international film festival, for its local series in July. Congrats, fellas!

Tehran’s taunt

I assume that this story in Tuesday's New York Times, reported by Thomas Erdbrink from Iran's capital, ran on A8 because its claims rest on a single quoted source – an Iranian government adviser linked to the nuclear negotiating team. The claims – namely, that Tehran has outfoxed the West on its nuclear program – could be political braggadocio. The editors placing the article might also have meekly recalled Judith Miller's poorly sourced front-page misreporting for the Times in the months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But if this is what one of Ayatollah Khamenei's wonks tells the journal of record, you have to wonder if Washington, despite its optimism heading into next week's talks, has really mishandled the Iranian nuclear threat.

In continually pushing forward the nuclear activities — increasing enrichment and building a bunker mountain enrichment facility — Iran has in effect forced the West to accept a program it insists is for peaceful purposes. Iranians say their carefully crafted policy has helped move the goal posts in their favor by making enrichment a reality that the West has been unable to stop — and may now be willing, however grudgingly, to accept.

“Without violating any international laws or the nonproliferation treaty, we have managed to bypass the red lines the West created for us,” said Hamidreza Taraghi, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is close to the negotiating team.

The negotiations aside, I really hope more journalists dig into the "what's Iran really thinking" angle. On that, we need all the reporting we can get, although it's hard to imagine we'll see it anytime soon.

Ron Paul update

From the Post:

The Texas congressman has, by all reasonable reckoning, lost his bid to be the Republican presidential nominee. Lost it big. In the GOP’s 35 primary and caucus votes, Paul has won as many as President Obama. Zero.

But now, Paul is using an un­or­tho­dox tactic to add more delegates to the national convention this summer. In Nevada, Maine, Massachusetts and elsewhere, his supporters have flooded the party’s snoozy state conventions — and then elected themselves to delegate slots.

That’s prompted a question now transfixing the GOP: What does Paul want?

Paul still has little shot at the nomination. But, with these numbers, the perennial outsider could gain enough leverage to demand a speaking slot, or changes to the party platform at the convention, if GOP bosses fear that Paul’s unhappy fans could disrupt their big moment.

Iran’s ‘burned generation’

The New York Times reports on Tehran’s broken society:

Any solution to the nearly 10-year-old roller coaster of talks and threats over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, which the West suspects are military in nature but Tehran insists are peaceful, would be welcomed here. But experience has taught people like Mr. Mesgaran not to get their hopes up. Instead, he and many others of his generation have resigned themselves to making the best of a bad situation.

“I hope those talks will lead to something,” he said as boys wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses and girls carrying Louis Vuitton handbags lined up for his traditional sandwiches. “But I don’t have any influence on negotiations. All I can try is to build my own life.”

No Iranians have had their lives shaped so radically by the pressures over the country’s nuclear effort than those born in the years after the 1979 revolution.

Iran’s huge group of postrevolution young adults — 70 percent of the country’s population of 74 million is under 35 — calls itself the “burned generation,” because they feel they lost out on the natural evolution of life. While their parents managed to find jobs, marry and buy houses, this generation’s ambitions have been boxed in by the political decisions of Iran’s leaders and the foreign pressures that followed.

Mexico’s narco beat

Elizabeth Dickinson on the country’s murdered journalists:

The lack of freedom that has pushed Mexico so low boils down to one word: safety. Journalists are a target for many of the actors in the country's drug war who want to literally kill the news about their operation.

Organized criminals have not taken kindly to their moves being investigated; three journalists were killed this week, likely for their work reporting on drug trafficking networks. Reporters investigating military and police links to organized crimes have also been killed or beaten. Threats are nearly ubiquitous for any journalists on the drug beat.

But the news gets worse: Almost none of these journalists' murders are ever investigated, let alone solved. Mexico was recently ranked by the Committee to Protect Journalists as the 8th worst country in the world for impunity. Mexico is home to 15 unsolved murders of journalists—and in truth, journalists are just one class of victims whose deaths never receive a close look. Last summer, I reported that only one in 20 murders is even followed up.

No two Sudans are alike

Armin Rosen critiques the Obama administration's weird decision to hold them equally responsibile for the latest round of fighting:

The White House thought that the best way to diffuse the conflict was to publicly insist that the South Sudan had ceded the moral high ground. But what the American and international condemnations ignored was what came before the south’s incursion into Heglig: repeated military provocations by the north. Last summer, just weeks before the south officially became independent, the northern military entered and then leveled the disputed city of Abyei. On March 26, the northern air force began to attack disputed territories currently controlled by the south, and on April 9, the northern military began shelling Teshwin, a town near Heglig. This was not unusual—the northern government had bombed oil fields inside of South Sudan’s Unity State just three weeks earlier, and had even bombed a refugee camp in the state back in November. These bombings were accompanied by Khartoum distancing itself from the peace process: On March 26, northern president Omar al-Bashir cancelled an upcoming meeting with his southern counterpart, Salva Kiir, in the southern capital of Juba. And on April 7, the northern government announced plans to begin stripping southerners who fled to the present-day north Sudan during the country’s 22-year civil war of their Sudanese citizenship, abandoning an informal agreement reached just days earlier. Juba’s response to such aggression from its neighbor had been commendably restrained, though its patience has received little international recognition.

To be sure, South Sudan’s recent seizure of Heglig did nothing to ameliorate the conflict. But as an effort to put a halt to the north’s bombing campaign, and to prevent the north from settling the border issue through violent blackmail, it should have been given a chance to succeed. Instead, the Obama administration, Juba’s closest international ally, demanded that it withdraw, then strongly implied that Juba and Khartoum were equally culpable for the conflict. The result was predictable: South Sudan retreated, and the pace of the north’s bombing campaign subsequently increased. On Monday, northern jets bombed a marketplace in Bentiu, the capital of Unity State; on Tuesday, a newspaper in Juba reported that South Sudanese border towns near Heglig had come under renewed ground attack.

Is that really your idea of how to run a newspaper?

Bagehot offers an explanation of the British press:

Another milestone in the Sun’s political coverage does not seem to have earned a proprietorial rebuke. It happened in 1992, on the night that Britain was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The prime minister of the day, John Major, telephoned Mr MacKenzie to ask how the Sun would be covering the story. “Actually,” Mr MacKenzie replied, “I have a bucket of shit on my desk, prime minister, and I’m going to pour it all over you.” Asked if this tale was true during his own appearance at the Leveson Inquiry, Mr MacKenzie enthusiastically re-enacted it.

Mr Mackenzie’s cheerful thuggery is unusual, even in Fleet Street. But the fact that he talked to a prime minister that way and kept his job suggests that relations between the British press and politicians are pretty unusual. 

It’s Beijing this week, stupid

As President Obama caps off his surprise visit to Afghanistan today with a televised address from Kabul, somewhere in the back of his mind, he might be hoping that the higher-profile (but lukewarm) controversy of his AfPak policy will draw attention from the potential mess his secretary of state will be wading into at almost precisely the same time.

As the president speaks tonight, it's Wednesday morning in Beijing, where Hillary Clinton will spend the day preparing for this week's fourth annual Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the US and China ... while simultaneously negotiating the thorny subject of a fugitive Chinese human rights activist, Chen Guangcheng, who has reportedly been under US protection in Beijing after an incredible escape from house arrest last week. The Americans will try to walk that too-familiar line between principles and demands of state. That the Chinese leadership is in the midst of a major crisis only heightens the tension heading into the talks.

At World Affairs today, two writers have taken on these events for us: E. Sinclair reports from China, telling the soldier's story of Chen's escape and discussing what it could mean for this week's bilateral meeting; and Gordon Chang argues that the White House should put principles first and not be intimidated by puerile theatrics from Beijing. Read these both and you'll be well on your way to understanding how complicated Clinton's week will be.

Finally, a bit of background, for the record: Chen Guangcheng, 40, is a self-taught human rights lawyer. He was imprisoned in 2006 – most likely on trumped-up charges – after bringing a class-action suit in his home province on behalf of women forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations. After he served a 51-month sentence, he and his family were put under a procrustean and abusive house arrest – apparently indefinitely. Then, earlier this year, Chen, who is blind, began plotting the headline-grabbing escape that he and a ring of brave activists finally pulled off last week.

The latest news is that Chen is under US protection in the capital city but wants to remain in China. He has released a YouTube video calling on Premier Wen Jiabao to bring his abusers in the local authority to justice and end similar crimes.

Anticorruption reporter killed in Brazil

From the AP last week:

A crusading reporter who was shot and killed Monday night was probably singled out because of his work, colleagues said Tuesday. Décio Sá, a political reporter for the newspaper O Estado do Maranhão in northeastern Brazil, was at least the fourth journalist slain this year in Brazil. An editor at his newspaper said Mr. Sá had “a long list of enemies” as a reporter who wrote about local corruption.

Sá was shot at a restaurant in São Luís.

His death is part of an ongoing regional problem.

Syria update

Financial Times:

The peace plan for Syria introduced by UN special envoy Kofi Annan is failing, two senior Obama administration officials said yesterday, amid new signs that the US is considering alternative options for ending the violence there.

With new reports that government forces were attacking opposition areas as soon as UN monitors had left the area, the Obama administration officials said the Assad regime was not complying with the Annan plan and that violence had increased since it was introduced.

I want a linotype machine

So the other day I saw this picture on the Wikipedia page of the New York Herald:

It shows the Herald's composing room, with rows of linotype machines, in 1902. I decided it was time to actually figure out what a linotype machine is.

Well, the name, for a start, derives from this machine's breakthrough: the ability to set whole lines of type – a line-o'-type – with the use of a keyboard. This machine turns words into ink-able text by casting each line of type as a single lead piece. (The molten lead, at more than 500 degrees, is contained in the machine itself – think of that!) The lines are then separately arranged, one by one, into columns of text.

Anyway, after looking through a few videos, I found this, which is a little slow but explains (and shows) quite helpfully how this amazing and intricate invention works:

   

After watching this, I couldn't stop thinking about how long this machine served the publishing industry – how essential it was to so many great writers and publications. It was an industry standard for dailys and periodicals from the late 19th century until about 50 years ago. I think my favorite detail is the spacers that automatically justify each line. Well, that was my favorite until I got to the part about how the machine automatically re-sorts the matrices used to type each letter. I'm just bowled over by the genius and beauty of this machine. Props to our publishing predecessors. Also, I really want to have one of these in my home someday: how thrilling would it be to type up your words on a word processer roiling with molten lead?

Syria update

Via Michael Totten:

Barely 24 hours after Bashar al-Assad declared victory and pretended to agree to a ceasefire, the United States, along with dozens of other countries, is ramping up assistance to the so-called Free Syrian Army, starting with communications equipment and 100 million dollars for salaries.

Listening

 

Thanks to Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais for another great tune.

Lincoln and I would have gotten along

From Hitchens’s approving review of “Abraham Lincoln: A Life”:

Burlingame is not content, as so many historians are, merely to hint at Lincoln’s fondness for broad humor, but furnishes us with some actual examples, which are heavy on the side of scatology and flatulence.

The secret life of James Thurber

Krissy and Mindy both sent this along this week:

In 1958, a schoolboy named Robert Leifert wrote to the author and humourist, James Thurber, and asked for some assistance with a school project. Sadly for Robert (or luckily for Robert, depending on your viewpoint) it seems he caught Thurber on a bad day, and before long the youngster was the proud owner of the following delightfully grumpy response.

An excerpt:

When I was a baby goat I had to do my own research on projects, and I enjoyed doing it. I never wrote an author for his autograph or photograph in my life. Photographs are for movie actors to send to girls. Tell your teacher I said so, and please send me her name.

One of the things that discourage us writers is the fact that 90 per cent of you children write wholly, or partly, illiterate letters, carelessly typed. You yourself write "clarr" for "class" and that's a honey, Robert, since s is next to a, and r is on the line above.

I'm proud to be associated with such things in the minds of my friends. I think it's only a matter of time before I start parenting random children who interact with me in public and saying things like, "Where are your parents? I'd like a word with them."

And the award goes to ...

So there's this website called Dear Blank Please Blank. It's kind of a mix between meme-generator stupidity and PostSecret without the aid of an editor. But there is some wheat among the chaff. And Logan sent along a real winner yesterday:

Pure genius.

Pakistan etc

Some good recent reads: Steve Coll on Pakistan's military leadership, Mark Perry on Israel eyeing air bases in Azerbaijan, and Steve Hendricks on the regenerative powers of fasting. Also, this is as good a place as any for the long overdue mention of two new World Affairs bloggers: Elizabeth Dickinson, former Economist correspondent and Foreign Policy editor, who will be covering Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East for us; and journalist and author Michael Totten, who travels often in the Middle East and is currently filing from Tunisia. We're really excited to have both of them on the team - and in the pages of the journal in the near future. I should also mention that Armin Rosen recently gave us a fine dispatch on the tense situation brewing in the Sudans.

Mourning a lost phone

From a friend in Egypt:

don wanna sound shallow, but i m grieving on my mobile!!

I loved that pink blackberry, it was a gift from my dear brother, it witnessed my most glorious and saddest days ever!! it held the most imp msgs, emails and pics in my life :(

we had a special and intimate relationship :( it woke me up, reminded me wz everything, got me emails, hold my fav music, and took the best pic....

i wont never forget u sweetie :'(

screw u damn thief :@@@@@

I find this especially poignant in light of the item I mentioned yesterday about the Titanic salvage worker's notebook. This phone was undoubtedly, in its small way, a historical artifact, not to mention a personal touchstone.

The power of keeping a journal

Alexis Madrigal discusses the notebook of a Titanic salvage worker:

Crease was no poet and he did not attempt to elevate his language to match the task of describing the tragedy. He wrote plainly, recording the weather and the number of bodies they picked up and their need for more canvas in which to roll the bodies. His short entries are like woodcuts of the experience, describing the exact inverse of what must have been printed on his mind. He would forget the numbers and the weather, but he'd probably never forget the feeling of hoisting body after body from the sea for eleven and a half hours.

David meets Adorno

This is just really great:

Larry’s situation in Curb mirrors that from which Adorno produced Minima Moralia — a Jew in exile in Los Angeles — though Larry is escaping from Seinfeld, not the Nazis. To arrive at a politicized reading of Curb, Adorno nevertheless lends an ideal starting point. In his time, of course, Adorno found television abominable — a form entirely subsumed by the culture industry, the epitome of late capitalism. But in Adorno’s description of the “miser of our time,” Larry David can be easily recognized. He is a man who “considers nothing too expensive for himself, and everything for others … Every good deed is accompanied by an evident ‘Is it necessary?,’ ‘Do I have to?’ This type are most surely revealed by the haste with which they ‘avenge’ kindness received, unwilling to tolerate, in the chain of exchange acts whereby expenses are recovered, a single ‘missing link.’” For Larry, every gift, invitation, or gesture of apparent goodwill contains the implicit threat of a favor, chore, or obligation to be made in return. The conventions of his social world continually menace him, and the only way he sustains himself is by means of the logic of exchange.

March/April

Another odd-numbered month, another helping of ideas and debate … Walter Laqueur asks why so few commentators predicted downturns for Europe’s economy and the Arab Spring; Naoko Aoki explains why reform is unlikely under North Korea’s new Kim; Mary Kissel discusses the breakdown of economic reforms in Australia; Karsten Jung argues that NATO still has an important role in the age of ad hoc coalitions; Jordan Michael Smith profiles the Reaganesque turn of Canadian foreign policy; Samuel Tadros returns from observing elections in Egypt to offer a postmortem on the Islamists’ victory; Brandon Friedman reads the failed revolution in Bahrain as a major development toward Gulf state unity against Tehran; Alexander Motyl diagnoses just what kind of authoritarian state Vladimir Putin has created; Seth Cropsey and Arthur Milikh revisit the importance of Arthur Thayer Mahan’s naval strategy for Western stability; and more …

Speaking of wordsmithery

Behold the most Economisty of Economist obits:

On the staircase at the Special Forces Club he would identify each agent’s photograph, and retail their fate. His fund of behind-the-lines anecdote was precisely weighed and briskly told: of X, who crossed the Pyrenees on crutches; of Y, who ate plastic explosive in the dark, mistaking it for chocolate; of Z, whose fiddlings with a Morse key were unfortunately overheard by a German corporal in the next cell. Each ended with a terse, tight kicker: “They got him the next day.” “He never tried it again.” “She did not return.” And then the spasm of disgust or delight: “Hah!” His father, a formidable shot and a hater of wasps, once triumphantly cut one in half as it flew, with a carving knife. There was much of that in the son’s story-telling.

Their Whitney Houston take was another recent triumph.

Wordsmithery

Dr. Meyer weighs in on a recent World Affairs title:

"Facistoid Russia / Whither Putin's Brittle Realm?"

Whoever wrote it ... the head smacked of the Bible, The Economist and the Cold War — not a bad combo that.

This is actually the precise trifecta we strive for with every WA headline.

Thatcher counterpoint

From Peter Hitchens's cover story for the American Conservative:

With such people attacking her, it is hard not to rally to her side. But what about those of us who have an uncomfortable and growing suspicion that she was not as good as she is made out to have been? I am one of them. I still cannot resist the feeling that her reputation is not just inflated but damaging to the conservative cause.

The Maldives

When the Maldives were in the news a few weeks ago, I had one of those moments of anxiety when you realize how vast and complicated and almost unknowable this thing we call “the world” can seem sometimes. I spent about twenty minutes on Google Maps zooming in and out and trying to get a concept of this 1,200-island nation, which is located about 250 miles southwest of India. (Fewer than 200 of the islands are inhabited, and another 99 reserved for wealthy tourists.) I sat there, just wondering what my concept of the world would be if this were my home—a collection of small islands in the Indian Ocean, the largest of which is about five miles by two miles (the capital island, Malé, is less than half that size); a British protectorate until the mid-1960s and then, beginning in 1978, a thirty-year autocracy that calcified reactionary Islam into the social laws and political culture; a country whose very existence could change if sea levels rise but which has had little success, for a number of reasons, getting support on that issue from the international community … If nothing else, I gained a little more appreciation for the various democratically minded activists who still strive to improve their home – even after the relatively progressive President Mohamed Nasheed was run out of office in February by what many, including the deposed, regard as an old-guard coup. (Islamists weren't fond of Nasheed's liberal social attitude but it was his calls to investigate corruption and human rights abuses in the former regime that sealed his fate). According to a recent New Yorker column, the UN “has taken a hands-off policy, and the United States, China, and India have recognized the new government.” Meanwhile, the situation remains tense; on Wednesday, an Amnesty International report detailed brutal beatings and pepper-sprayings of women demonstrating against the country's new president.

El cine

Wrote the Latin Americanist on Oscar night:

2011 was a banner year for films from Latin America and included action flicks (Mexico’s Miss Bala), “gaucho westerns” (Argentina’s Aballay) and innovative thrillers (Uruguay’s The Silent House). Nonetheless, movies from the region where unfortunately overlooked when the Academy selected its finalists for Best Foreign Film.

So what better way to spur the annual movie catch-up binge than the enticement of foreign lands? This “Aballay” trailer is mesmerizing, with shades of the P.T. Anderson/Cohen Brothers neo-Western style (for lack of a better description). “Miss Bala,” which I believe is still wanting US distribution, sounds like a must-see as well:

Gerardo Naranjo’s first-rate art-house thriller tells the strange, seemingly impossible story of a Mexican beauty queen (Stephanie Sigman) who becomes the accidental pawn of a drug cartel. It’s an adventure story that could be called a contemporary picaresque if it weren’t so deadly serious, and might be called fantastical if it weren’t loosely based on a true story of a former Miss Hispanic America.

Revolution update

Financial Times comment editor Alec Russell reports from Cairo:

Maybe Romania’s wham-bam Christmas Revolution beguiled us all about the nature of revolutions – 10 days from the first protests to the execution of the tyrant. (Then again it wasn’t so much a revolution as an internal party putsch.) Great revolutions are more protracted affairs. There must have been months in Paris in the 1790s when it seemed little was happening.

It feels like that in Cairo. This is a city that is nervously awaiting the next convulsion. All the heady talk on chat shows of new political parties and freedoms seems as much form as substance. Beneath it all the “tectonic plates are shifting” says one liberal columnist. Unfortunately it is just not clear in which way.

Syria etc

I woke up today to a Morning Edition report about amateur journalists documenting atrocities in Homs, Syria. Then I hit the snooze and woke up a bit later to Steve Inskeep and David Ignatius having a really intense conversation about Iran and Israel. So I guess my point is: sometimes it is unsettling, albeit educational, to have NPR set as your alarm. And while I'm dumping links, here's Robert Kagan on Charlie Rose last night.