As catalogued by John Cartan. I know only a few of the books on the list, but anyone who lists Frederick Crews’ The Pooh Perplex, the one book about literary criticism to read if you’re reading only one, ought to be attended to. (Swiped from Ishbadiddle.)
Alan Reynolds in The Washington Times, via Radley Balko, through some complex blogging chain that I’m too lazy to reconstruct, makes this anti-war argument:
Those who claim to be certain Iraq has a formidable arsenal of fearsome weapons also express inexplicable confidence that those weapons pose no danger to U.S. troops. They declare that an invasion will be fast and easy. “I guarantee it will be over within 10 days,” says Mort Zuckerman of U.S.News. Such assurances that Iraq is a feeble military power contradict the rationale for war namely, the assertion that Iraq is in possession of terrifying weapons. Iraq may be a dangerous predator or an easy prey, but it cannot be both.
Radley labels this “the Hawkish Paradox.” Even if we grant the implicit (and obviously false) assumption that any “fearsome weapon” that could kill a lot of civilians could also kill a lot of well-prepared and equipped soldiers, Dovish Paradox would be equally apt. Doves may argue that he has these weapons and will use them against American soldiers if attacked, inflicting severe casualties, but not against American civilians, because he is a rational actor. Doves may argue equally that he doesn’t have these weapons and thus poses no threat to us. Neither of these positions is cogent, but neither is prima facie illogical. What doves may not do is argue both positions at once.
Same with hawks. Zuckerman is perfectly entitled to say the war will be over in 10 days provided Zuckerman does not simultaneously argue for Iraq’s fearsome arsenal. Reynolds notably fails to produce such a quote from Zuckerman, and even if he did it would indict only Zuckerman, not hawks in general. In reality there is no paradox here at all, for hawks or doves. The author merely illustrates the necessity of taking a view.
Radley calls this “maybe the best anti-war argument” I’ve seen yet, which makes me wonder what the bad ones are.
The girlfriend and I caught the Maysles brothers’ documentary Gimme Shelter on IFC the other night. It’s about the disastrous Rolling Stones show at Altamont in 1969, and it’s very good as those things go. There’s a lovely bit of moral catatonia from the Grateful Dead, who arrive to be informed that there have been scuffles and that Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin, trying to break up a fight, has managed to get himself knocked unconscious. “Oh bummer,” Jerry Garcia says. “Beating people up like that…that just doesn’t seem right,” Bob Weir adds.
But the most interesting part has to do with Meredith Hunter. You all remember Meredith Hunter, right? He’s the 18-year-old teenager who was set upon and stabbed to death by a bloodthirsty mob of Hell’s Angels, high on bad acid and the $500 worth of beer they were paid to provide security for the show. Hunter, the 60s martyr whose death marked the beginning of the end of Flower Power. Except that’s not what happened at all. In the movie Mick Jagger watches the crucial footage in slo-mo, and it is clear that Hunter rushes the stage and pulls a gun before any Hell’s Angel lays a hand on him. He may also fire a shot. There is a brief orange flash in the film but it is inconclusive, and eyewitness reports differ. What is absolutely clear is that Hunter started it; whether he should have been stabbed five times is of course another question. Yet to this day many accounts of Altamont, like this one or this one, don’t even mention the gun. Others claim Hunter pulled it in self-defense, which the movie clearly contradicts, or not at all. I confess that neither the girlfriend nor I knew the gun even existed, and I doubt we were the last two.
This description from Dick Carter, owner of the Altamont Speedway, jibes in every particular with what you see in Gimme Shelter:
Most of the books and articles about Altamont are filled with bull. Like the Hell’s Angels were the only security, and they were hired for $500 worth of beer. We had every off-duty police officer available and every security guard in Northern California there. There were about 17 Angels who came to the concert because they were in Oakland for a convention. Sam Cutler, the Stones’ manager, asked if the Angels would escort the Stones through the crowd on motorcycle and then sit around the stage during the show to protect the band. We had purchased $500 worth of beer for the bands, and Cutler told the Angels they could have some.
The Angels were blamed for the death of Meredith Hunter. But that kid was waving a gun and screaming that he was going to shoot Mick Jagger. One of the Angels jumped his back, after Hunter fired a shot at the stage, and stabbed him with a knife several times. The audience was going to tear Hunter limb from limb, but the Angels formed a circle around him and got him out of the crowd and into a bread truck where he could be moved to get medical attention. He died in the racetrack office, but the Angels tried to save him.
A few days later, the district attorney of Alameda called me and said that I was going to be blamed for the murder of Hunter, along with the Hell’s Angels and the Rolling Stones. I said, ‘For crying out loud, the kid had a gun, it was self-defense! You can see the gun on the film from the concert!’ The DA told me I needed to produce the gun. So I tracked down Sonny Barger [a prominent Angel] by calling every lawyer in the phone book. He said he would make some calls, that one of three Angels might still have the pistol. Later that day he called me and said, ‘We have the gun.’ So I called the attorney, Melvin Belli, who told me to bring it to him in a shoebox. The charges were dropped after that.
The three people besides Hunter who died at Altamont were not violent, merely stupid. Two were run over while sleeping, and one drowned in an irrigation ditch.
The Daily Dose, Letter from Gotham, Clay Waters and Dodgeblog (admittedly a borderline case) have all folded in the last two weeks it must be a trend, because that’s four examples, one more than Mickey Kaus says I need. I have enjoyed reading all of these people and am sorry to see them go. But enough about them! The important question is, if they’ve all found paying work, can I be far behind?
(Update: Letter from Gotham lasted two weeks, and then she couldn’t take it any more.)
A few color changes is all. I was bored. Tell me what you think.
Jane Galt expounds, on her lovely new site, Asymmetrical Information, which is not really that new, but gives me a chance to continue my roll of being last to mention stuff.
I was beaten to this by Allan and Elizabeth, in that order, but I don’t mind — really! — because the poem is very good, as undiscovered poems almost never are. The artist can generally be trusted to publish his best stuff. It was awfully sentimental of old Larkin not to have published this:
We met at the end of the party
When all the drinks were dead
And all the glasses dirty:
‘Have this that’s left’, you said.
We walked through the last of summer,
When shadows reached long and blue
Across days that were growing shorter:
You said: ‘There’s autumn too’.
Always for you what’s finished
Is nothing, and what survives
Cancels the failed, the famished,
As if we had fresh lives
From that night on, and just living
Could make me unaware
Of June, and the guests arriving,
And I not there.
Jim says all that one can say. But I digress.
Colby Cosh claims today that P.G. Wodehouse is a greater minor writer than Max Beerbohm, thereby betraying a profound misunderstanding of the principles of minor writerdom. Wodehouse was, to begin with, prolific, while Beerbohm tossed off the occasional slim volume in what he gave the impression was his spare time. The affectation of amateurism is indispensable to minor status. Advantage Beerbohm!
Beerbohm also maintained a sideline in caricature, although perhaps his true sideline was writing, one could never be sure. Wodehouse was a writer strictly. Advantage Beerbohm once again! Beerbohm, at Oxford, won the prize for Latin verse, an almost inconceivably minor activity even in 1890; Wodehouse spent his time at Dulwich (Dulwich!) at boxing and cricket. You make the call.
A Christmas Garland demonstrates Beerbohm’s mastery of parody, the most minor of all prose forms. (Henry James, whom Beerbohm parodied in “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” was once asked his opinion on some matter. He pointed out Beerbohm across the room and said, “Ask that young man. He is privy to all my innermost thoughts.”) And finally I put into evidence this description, from Zuleika Dobson, of the heroine:
Zuleika was not strictly beautiful. Her eyes were a trifle large, and their lashes longer than they need have been. An anarchy of small curls was her chevelure, a dark upland of misrule, every hair asserting its rights over a not discreditable brow. For the rest, her features were not at all original. They seemed to have been derived rather from a gallimaufry of familiar models. From Madame la Marquise de Saint-Ouen came the shapely tilt of her nose. The mouth was a mere replica of Cupid’s bow, lacquered scarlet and strung with the littlest pearls. No apple-tree, no wall of peaches, had not been robbed, nor any Tyrian rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson’s cheeks. Her neck was imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She had no waist to speak of.
If Wodehouse ever wrote anything so dainty, so perfectly structured yet seemingly offhanded, so thoroughly minor, then bring it on.
(Update: Good review, in The New Criterion, of the same biography that got Colby off on this to begin with.)
Mark Riebling takes Al Qaeda’s threats seriously. Warning: Based on actual research!