Deborah Eisenberg reads from Skylark, a Hungarian novel recently republished by NYRB Classics, and talks with Sasha Weiss about why it’s one of the most perfect novels she’s encountered.
Known for his large-scale photographs of dilapidated buildings in places like Cuba, Russia, and Times Square, Andrew Moore has now turned his attention to Detroit. These images are from his new collection, Detroit Disassembled, published by Damiani and the Akron Art Museum, where an exhibition of his work will be on view from June 5 to October 10.
Moore’s photographs present a devastating scene of urban deterioration, offering us glimpses into abandoned motor plants, train stations, theaters, schools, hotels, police stations, and office buildings, along with vistas of vacant houses and lots. All of the buildings are in deep states of decay: moss grows on the floor of an office at the former Ford Motor Company headquarters; thousands of books molder in the Public Schools Book Depository; an unseen person keeps a small fire going under a plastic shelter inside the trash-filled engine works room of the Dry Dock Company Complex. One of Moore’s photographs, showing an abandoned nursing home, appears in the April 29 issue of The New York Review, in Tony Judt’s essay “Ill Fares the Land.”
Another book on the same subject, The Ruins of Detroit, by the French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, will be published by Steidl this summer. Marchand and Meffre had already begun their project when they met Moore, whose earlier work they knew, and they urged him to photograph Detroit as well. As a result, there are now two distinctive takes on the decline of a once-powerful center of the US economy: while Moore’s book is slender, with an essay by the poet Philip Levine, Marchand and Meffre’s collection puts across a broader sociological analysis. Both books allow an astonishing amount of beauty to surface, whether in the fading traces of ornate architectural elements or in the rich colors of freshly sprouted vegetation.
Walking above the village of Mehrauli on Delhi’s southern perimeter, we pass a woman with a half-empty bottle of water—one of several we have already noticed since daybreak. Dressed immaculately in a brightly-colored sari, she emerges from behind a prickly bush on a tract of waste ground. If she were a man we might not have merited such discretion. India is about the only country in the world where you actually see human adults defecating. When traveling by road or rail you can be struck by the image of men squatting openly, impervious to the public gaze. The UN estimates that 600 million people—or 55 per cent of the Indian population—still defecate out of doors. The practice is clearly born of necessity in a crowded country where the development of public amenities has conspicuously failed to keep pace with economic and demographic growth.
Conspicuous defecation, however, is restricted to males. Female modesty—enjoined by Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism alongside age-old patriarchal codes—dictates that women may relieve themselves only after dark, or in the most secluded reaches of the forest, a practice that exposes them to violence or even snake bites. The consequences for women’s health can be devastating. Women of the poorest classes notoriously suffer from a range of urinary and bowel disorders born of taboos about pollution and other social constraints applied to the most basic and banal of bodily functions.
My companion and I are looking for the walls of Lal Kot—the oldest of Delhi’s seven cities, dating from the 10th century, before the first Muslim invasion. The three-kilometer walls enclose a space that has been largely abandoned to jungle. The cladding of irregular quartzite blocks has been cut so accurately that no mortar was needed to hold them together. Set high on a ridge overlooking the present-day city, Lal Kot is a magnificent outpost of a forgotten civilization—a worthy precursor to the great Delhi Sultanate that flourished during the centuries of Islamic rule, as well as to its grandiose successor, New Delhi, designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker barely two decades before Britain was forced to abandon its empire.
Lal Kot is far from the tourist trail. To reach it you have to cross a large rubbish dump, and negotiate the odiferous detritus—what used to be known as night soil—left by Mehrauli’s less favoured human residents. They sleep rough, in old tombs or in flimsy home-made shacks erected near the open sewers that intersect the area’s magnificent architectural monuments. In the absence of municipal services, refuse disposal is performed by long-haired pigs, which eat up every kind of organic matter, not excluding human and canine waste. (As Moses and Muhammad taught their followers, ham and bacon are best avoided in southern latitudes.)
The lack of sanitation is emblematic of India’s failure as an emerging economic giant to include most of its population in its achievements. India is now home to the fourth largest number of billionaires. According to Tim Sebastian, the former BBC journalist who chairs a forum in Doha, Qatar, for debate about social and political issues in the Middle East, some 60 million people in India—who make up the world’s most populous and most powerful middle class—now enjoy living standards higher than Britain and France. Yet the vast majority are excluded from India’s version of the American dream. As a former government minister Mani Shankar Ayar told Sebastian:
“We have a tiny elite that is obsessed with itself. If democracy doesn’t deliver for the rest—we could be heading for violence. We’re seeing a failure to bring 900 million people inside the system of entitlements. Without entitlements, you pick up the gun.”
A third of the country’s districts are now facing rural insurgencies spearheaded by the Maoist Naxalites. Is it not just a matter of time before violence spreads to major conurbations such as Delhi, home to 20 million people, many of them living on less than a dollar a day?
A visit to one of Delhi’s poorest quarters provides a glimmer of hope. The Nizamuddin district takes its name from the shrine of a holy man— Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya (1238-1325)—renowned for his religious inclusiveness, his commitment to the poor, his disdain for rulers, and a love of music and dance that set him apart from his more austere Muslim contemporaries. The shrine attracts visitors from all over the Islamic world, as well as non-Muslim devotees. It typifies the spiritual syncretism one finds in India, where the tombs of holy persons attract followers from all religions. Until recently this run-down area was crammed with rural migrants and pilgrims hoping to benefit spiritually from the Shaikh’s baraka (blessedness), or materially by taking odd-jobs serving other pilgrims.
With no serviceable toilets available for pilgrims, the ground beneath the pillars of the overhead metro railway that is now under construction (causing a huge disruption to Delhi’s burgeoning traffic) has become an open latrine, a magnet for flies and disease. Now the Aga Khan Foundation, in partnership with other NGOs and agencies, is rehabilitating the area in a major initiative with the municipal corporation of Delhi. Measures include the organized collection of refuse, the provision of public toilets managed by the community, where users are charged a small fee for cleaning and supervision, and the re-housing of squatters who had constructed precarious additions to the 14th-century baoli or stepwell—the water is reached by descending flights of steps—now being dredged and reconstituted using the latest radar technology.
The local government school in Nizamuddin has received a comprehensive make-over funded by the Aga Khan Foundation in collaboration with one of India’s oldest charities, the Sir Ratan Tata Trust. In addition to bright new classrooms, well-designed for children, a vital outcome of the project, the headmaster suggests, is the renovated toilet block with separate cubicles for girls and boys. In Delhi—as in rural Gujarat, where similar conditions prevail—school drop-out rates have been highest among girls. Purely cultural factors—such as the demands of mothers for domestic help—are partly responsible. But teachers and aid workers see the lack of toilets as the primary reason girls have not been attending school, since there is no private place where they can relieve themselves. A program for building school toilets in Gujarat I looked at several years ago has yielded not just improvements in family health and hygiene, but a marked increase in female school attendance. Fifteen of the girls who took part in the program—whereby the children themselves cleaned the toilets—were going on to higher education.
Since the introduction of the new toilets in the Nizamuddin school, female drop-out rates have declined dramatically: the ratio of girls to boys attending the school is now 55—45 percent. Living in London one takes the humble loo for granted. A fortnight in Delhi reveals its potential for kick-starting a social revolution.
The new production of Ambroise Thomas’s 1868 Hamlet—the first time the Met has staged the work since 1897—brings to New York a revival first performed fourteen years ago in Geneva. It is an opera that has met with a fair amount of derision over the years, chiefly for its laughable original ending in which Hamlet finishes off Claudius and mounts triumphantly to the throne of Denmark. (The Met production substitutes a cobbled-together and not especially satisfying alternative in which, following an unexpected intrusion of the Ghost into the graveyard scene, the prince more appropriately dies. Perhaps, since no one would mistake Thomas’s Hamlet for Shakespeare’s anyway, it would make more sense to restore the original happy ending.)
Overall it is a production of intermittent pleasures, chiefly musical. On opening night a boorish claque resoundingly booed the conducting of Louis Langrée, who to my ears had (despite a few ragged horn passages at the outset) capably and often beautifully sustained the tone of the work, with its firmly anchored balance between resounding choruses, full-bodied and neatly delimited vocal trios, duets, and solos, and the delicate lyrical passages that serve as preludes and entr’actes. The continuity of the whole is finally more important than any particular highlight; Thomas’s music, if rarely inspired, extends with complete control the prescribed variants of a single vein. The only moment when I was genuinely startled was at hearing an unexpected modern sound in the fifth act music of the gravediggers, as if a bar or two of Kurt Weill had leaked into the 1860s.
Any sense of deep dramatic involvement was evoked more by the work of the orchestra and the singers than by the staging of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser. The production design centered around some large moveable walls that bore a disturbing resemblance to the room partitions frequently deployed at convention hotels, and the use of theatrical space seemed quite limited, very much horizontal and elongated, with only limited employment of depth, the singers often reduced to figures cast against big dark empty backdrops. The more frenzied moments (Hamlet pouring blood-red wine over himself at the end of the play scene, or running madly against a wall) seemed inadequate attempts to wrench the opera into a style at odds with its music.
It is admittedly hard to imagine a body language consonant with the stately four-square architecture of Thomas’s music, a body language that would not seem impossibly stilted and grandiose, but here the direction at times had a desperate quality, as if things needed to be modernized or livened up so as to keep the opera running. In fact it moves along very well on its own sonic gears, even if its pace might strike some contemporary listeners as ponderous or needlessly protracted. I was myself very pleased to be borne along, however unsurprisingly, on its pleasant underpinnings.
Where the directors did bring things to life was in the more intimate confrontations of the piece, notably in the second-act trio of Claudius, Gertrude, and Hamlet. Here was an object lesson in how to transform Shakespearean tragedy into walloping domestic melodrama, with Jennifer Larmore the driving force in her intensified rendering of a fear-wracked Gertrude. In this scene, as again in Gertrude’s third-act duet with Hamlet, the opera is like a chamber play in the French nineteenth-century style; it was not surprising to learn that Alexandre Dumas had a hand in the adaptation on which the librettists based their work. Instead of opening out into immense metaphysical or political perspectives, Thomas’s Hamlet narrows at its best into vigorously sketched emotional face-offs. For a moment you could almost imagine you were watching an opera based on one of Claude Chabrol’s thrillers set among the modern French haute bourgeoisie (while remembering that Chabrol himself indulged in his own Hamlet variation, the long-lost 1962 Ophelia).
The production is very much built around Simon Keenlyside’s quite stirring performance, beautifully sung (his diction was so clear that the lyrics could be understood without difficulty) and acted with an emotional expressiveness that sometimes made the music seem more subtle and ambiguous than it actually is (even when his costumes seemed designed to cast him, a little distractingly, as a trenchcoated Bogart surrogate). Marlis Petersen (replacing, more or less at the last moment, Natalie Dessay, who had sung the role elsewhere with Keenlyside) did full justice to Ophelia, a role requiring a great deal of fine singing but not much dramatic effectiveness.
For me the evening belonged—along with Keenlyside and Petersen and Larmore—above all to the much-maligned Ambroise Thomas. His score, widely characterized as mediocre and overlong, is a piece of machinery, but it’s machinery cast in an idiom whose pleasures are solid and consistently diffused, a matter not of flashes of inspiration but of unwavering attention. It’s an idiom that might be called industrial lyricism, evoking a world of firmly, none too subtly defined intentions and equally firmly defined limits, in which emotions are permitted to pour without restraint through channels carefully and sturdily built for that purpose.
In that light Ophelia’s mad scene can properly be appreciated as the enactment of an operatic convention, an analogue rather than a description of madness, a licensed, carefully circumscribed transgression. Perhaps such a scene can only assume its full meaning when imagined taking place at the Paris Opera in 1868. A work like the Hamlet of Ambroise Thomas cannot really be updated. It speaks with utter confidence the language of its moment. As we listen to it we are inevitably listening backwards.
Nick Brandt has been photographing the wild animals of East Africa for the past ten years; these images are from his new collection, A Shadow Falls, out now from Abrams.
“My images are unashamedly idyllic and romantic, a kind of enchanted Africa,” Brandt has written. “They’re my elegy to a world that is steadily, tragically vanishing.” Brandt approaches his work in a manner unlike almost any other contemporary photographer of wildlife—not after the “dramatic single moment” of an animal in motion, he refuses to use a telephoto lens. Instead he prefers to get very close to his subjects, using a medium-format camera to photograph them “in the same way I would a human being, watching for the right ‘pose’ that hopefully will best capture his or her spirit.” In these portraits and panoramas we see elephants, zebras, giraffes, and other animals at rest, “in the state of being.” While there are no people in his photographs, Brandt’s introduction describes their impact on this parched landscape, where to provide water for their domesticated cattle, the Maasai depend on the same scarce resources that these wild animals need to survive.
A photograph from A Shadow Falls, showing a lioness feeding her cub, accompanies Tim Flannery’s review essay on animal behavior, “Getting to Know Them,” in the April 29 issue of The New York Review. For more about Brandt’s work, including his earlier collection, On This Earth, see www.nickbrandt.com.
In the early 1960s, I wrote an appreciative essay for The New Yorker about the science fiction of Arthur Clarke. Not long after I got a letter from Clarke written from Sri Lanka where he lived. He told me that he was coming to New York in a few weeks and wanted to meet me. When we met, I asked him the purpose of his visit. His answer totally astonished me. “I am working on the son of Dr. Strangelove,” is what he said. The film had just come out and the first time I saw it I was so impressed that I sat through it a second time. “Stanley,” he said referring to Kubrick, “is a remarkable man. You should meet him.”
I told Clarke that nothing would please me more. Much to my amazement, the next day Clarke called to say that I was expected that afternoon at Kubrick’s apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a movie mogul and had no idea what to expect. But as soon as Kubrick opened the door I felt an immediate kindred spirit. He looked and acted like every obsessive theoretical physicist I have ever known. His obsession at that moment was whether or not anything could go faster than the speed of light. I explained to him that according to the theory of relativity no information bearing signal could go faster. We conversed like that for about an hour when I looked at my watch and realized I had to go. “Why?” he asked, seeing no reason why a conversation that he was finding interesting should stop.
I told him I had a date with a chess hustler in Washington Square Park to play for money. Kubrick wanted the name. “Fred Duval” I said. Duval was a Haitian who claimed to be related to Francois Duvalier. I was absolutely positive that the name would mean nothing to Kubrick. His next remark nearly floored me. “Duval is a patzer,” is what he said. Unless you have been around chess players you cannot imagine what an insult this is. Moreover, Duval and I were playing just about even. What did that make me?
Kubrick explained that early in his career he too played chess for money in the park and that Duval was so weak that it was hardly worth playing him. I said that we should play some time and then left the apartment. I was quite sure that we would never play. I was wrong.
I wrote a Talk of the Town on my meeting with Kubrick, which he liked. I was thus emboldened to ask if I could write a full scale profile of him. He agreed but said that he was about to leave for London to begin production of what became 2001: A Space Odyssey. Still better, I thought: I could watch the making of the film. Our first meeting was at the Hotel Dorchester in London where he was temporarily living with his family. Kubrick brought out a chess set and beat me promptly. Then we played three more games and he beat me less promptly. But I won the fifth game!
Seizing the moment I told him that I had been hustling him and had deliberately lost the first four games. His response was that I was a patzer. All during the filming of 2001 we played chess whenever I was in London and every fifth game I did something unusual. Finally we reached the 25th game and it was agreed that this would decide the matter. Well into the game he made a move that I was sure was a loser. He even clutched his stomach to show how upset he was. But it was a trap and I was promptly clobbered. “You didn’t know I could act too,” he remarked.
The scene now shifts to the spring of 1972. I was spending the year at Oxford, and spent some Sundays with the Kubricks. Our interest again turned to chess but this time it was with the imminent match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Iceland. One Sunday, Kubrick and I watched Fischer’s interview with Mike Wallace for “60 Minutes.” It was around the time of Fischer’s birthday and Wallace had come with a cake. “I don’t like that kind of cake,” Fischer said graciously. Then he told Wallace how he had learned to play chess. His older sister had taught him the moves. He soon began beating her so he spotted her pieces. Then he said that that no longer worked so he began playing with himself—Fischer vs. Fischer. “Mostly I won,” he commented with no trace of humor.
I expected a pleasant summer in Oxford reading about the match but one morning in May the phone rang in my office. The man on the line identified himself as the features editor of Playboy. He informed me that Hugh Heffner was interested in chess and had read my New Yorker profile of Kubrick. They had decided that I was the perfect person to write about the Fischer-Spassky match for Playboy. They would pay all my expenses and I would even have the American grandmaster Larry Evans at my disposal. It sounded too good to be true and, indeed, I had a problem. My writing for the New Yorker was not going down that well with my academic colleagues and writing for Playboy would be the last straw. He said not to worry I could use an assumed name. So I agreed. (I chose “Jay Amber”—“Bernstein” being the German for “Amber.”)
Much has been written about the match and I will only add a few personal recollections. Fischer got there the fourth of July, having missed the first game entirely (which he lost by forfeit) because of some grievance or other; that actual match did not begin until the eleventh. Spassky showed up on time but there was no Fischer. Finally, Fischer showed up, and quickly made clear that he was much more concerned by illicit filming of the games than actually playing them. Indeed, after an incredibly bad move, he lost and was now down two-zip.
That was about as good as it got for Spassky. Once Fischer actually began to play it was clear that Spassky had no chance. Fischer was in another league. There was a room at the tournament where grandmasters met to watch. They would predict Fischer’s next move and, more often than not, he would do something none of them had anticipated. A remarkable group of writers including Arthur Koestler and Harold Schonberg, who had played chess with Fischer and was the music critic of The New York Times, also turned up. We gathered in the lobby of the Hotel Loftleider to exchange stories and to catch an occasional glimpse of Fischer as he went off for midnight bowling.
When the match ended Schonberg predicted that Fischer would never play another. At the time I thought that Schonberg was surely wrong, but he wasn’t. The only match he ever did play was in 1992 when he played Spassky again, this time in Yugoslavia. Fischer won but the experts detected a decline in his game. He was succeeded as world champion by Garry Kasparov, whose 1997 loss to the chess computer Deep Blue, had, in a sense, been predicted by Kubrick and Clarke decades earlier. In Kubrick’s 2001, before HAL 9000, the villainous computer, turns murderous, he roundly beats his human opponent, the astronaut Frank Poole, in a chess match.
For his part, Fischer spent the rest of his life a fugitive from both American and Japanese law. In 2005 he returned to Iceland, where he sought asylum. He was granted Icelandic citizenship and died in Reykjavik on January 17, 2008.
Trying to follow the impending British general election from afar, I’ve been reading The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley, chief political commentator for the Observer. Eight hundred pages long, and crammed with “inside” political gossip (or credible intelligence, if you prefer), it’s a book as hard to admire as it is to put down. Though the text is bespattered with authenticating footnotes (many say no more than “Conversation, Cabinet minister”), it reads like airport fiction. Its flawed (and credible) hero is Tony Blair, its cardboard villain Gordon Brown.
The End of the Party seems to have gone to the printers in November 2009. The plot of the book then appeared unassailable. David Cameron’s Conservatives’ lead over Labour in the polls stood at twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty points, pointing to Brown’s humiliation in the 2010 election (which will almost certainly take place on May 6). The commentariat had appointed Cameron as Britain’s next prime minister, and Gordon Brown and his party were yesterday’s men.
But for the last few months and weeks, the polls have been tightening. The Conservatives are still ahead (averaging out polls over the last twenty days, the useful site UK Polling Report puts the Conservatives at 38 percent, Labour at 31 percent, and the Liberal Democrats at 19 percent). Because the Lib Dems have 63 seats in the present parliament, it’s going to be a far tougher battle than was predicted a few months ago for either the Conservatives or Labour to gain an overall majority. There’s now much talk of a hung parliament and a minority government working in coalition with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.
There’s also talk—unthinkable when Rawnsley finished his gravedigging job for Brown’s corpse—of the no longer inconceivable possibility of a Labour victory. On March 25, Andy Beckett wrote a long and characteristically thoughtful piece in the Guardian titled “What Happens If Cameron Loses?”; on March 28, Matthew D’Ancona, the former editor of the Spectator, imagined Gordon Brown relishing his first morning after an election that returns him to Downing Street, while the Conservatives tear themselves apart in their search for David Cameron’s replacement.
The End of the Party begins in June 2001, at the start of Blair’s second term as prime minister, and ends with the closing ceremony at the Labour Party conference in Brighton on September 30 last year. The plot is a smooth tragic arc: the noble enterprise of New Labour, as it was conceived by the triumvirate of Blair, Brown, and Peter Mandelson in the early ’90s, is led to inevitable and “cataclysmic” defeat by the incompetence and odious character of Mr. Brown, whom Rawnsley represents as a jealous, secretive, foul-tempered, paranoid bully.
When attributing lines of dialogue to his characters, Rawnsley usually settles for the straightforward “X said,” but not in Brown’s case. Before each set of quote marks opens, we have to read, “Brown barked,” “Brown growled,” “Brown shouted,” “Brown yelled,” “Brown raged,” lest we forget the man’s an ogre. When Brown, as Chancellor, is resident at 11 Downing Street, and goes next door to visit Blair at No. 10, he doesn’t walk but “thunders” there. Such verbal abuse, inflicted by an author on a character, is liable to backfire, and, fifty pages into the book, Rawnsley had me rooting keenly for Gordon Brown. I’m in no position to judge what basis there is in fact for the multitude of allegations that Rawnsley makes against the prime minister, but many if not most of them sound like Blairite folklore and embellished hearsay, picked up from unnamed ministers, MPs, and civil servants.
Rawnsley’s portrait of Blair is often admiring, always forgiving and understanding. He writes about Blair’s most calamitous mistakes (not least his toadying to Bush as he dragged Britain into the Iraq war) with the solicitude of a Trollope following the progress of political heroes like Phineas Finn and Plantaganet Palliser. Where Blair lives in several dimensions in The End of the Party, Brown is flat on the page, an inert, repetitive cartoon whose sole function in the book is to scheme Blair’s downfall, then squander his precious legacy. Even Brown’s indisputable achievements, like his swift and decisive handling of the banking crisis, hailed by Paul Krugman in a Times column that began with the (unironic) question, “Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system?” are grudgingly acknowledged and belittled. It is typical of Rawnsley’s style and method that he devotes a sour paragraph to the Krugman column, telling us that (a) he himself told Brown about it over the phone and (b) Brown ordered his office to distribute this flattering piece of news to the media within the hour. So it turns into yet another story of Brown’s intolerable egotism—a quality by no means lacking in his author.
The recent polls hardly suggest a revival of enthusiasm for Brown and Labour; they seem more to reflect a nationwide puzzlement over what Cameron’s “modernised” Toryism actually means. At last year’s Conservative party conference, his own loyalists appeared baffled when Cameron said such un-Toryish things as “Vote blue, go green” and “You could sum up my priorities in just three letters: NHS.” When Tony Blair came back to the campaign trail on March 30, he derided Cameron’s slogan, “Time For A Change” as “the most vacuous in politics,” which it surely is.
For me, the oddest aspect of the current polls is the relatively poor performance of the Lib Dems, who, under their then leader, Charles Kennedy, took 22 percent of the vote in the 2005 election. Since then, they have escaped largely unscathed from the great “expenses scandal” of last year, orchestrated by the Telegraph (which had obtained a bootleg disk of every MP’s claims under the Additional Costs Allowance), and which caused a media-led wave of public contempt for politicians, especially Labour and Conservative ones. Why haven’t the Lib Dems benefitted from this? They have an articulate, personable, youngish leader (Nick Clegg is 43) and their Shadow Chancellor, Vince Cable, a professional economist, is widely admired across the country for his wit as well as for his grasp of fiscal policy. (Nearly everyone, including the studio audience, agreed that Cable handily won the first televised debate of the election.) On March 30, the Lib Dems unveiled their first election posters, advertising the Labservative party. Against a black background, the logos of the Tories and Labour, tree and rose, are merged; the party slogan is “For More of the Same.” Amusing as the posters are, I doubt if they’ll gain the Lib Dems many votes. Stuck at between 17 percent and 20 percent, they shouldn’t allow themselves to be seen as the jokers on the sidelines of a two-party election—although one new poll, published on April 1, and possibly an outlier, does suggest the Lib Dems may after all be on the rise.
Meanwhile Andrew Rawnsley, a jealous author, whose deterministic plot is now threatening to unravel, continues his assault on Brown’s character in his weekly columns for the Observer.
Andrew Rawnsley, The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour (Viking, 2010)
The rule that Catholic priests must be celibate is responsible for the crisis in the church. Now is the time to challenge that requirement. From the United States to Ireland to Germany, the widespread abuse of children and adolescents by Catholic priests has done enormous damage to the image of the church. It also reveals the depth of the crisis. In Germany Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg, speaking as chairman of the Conference of German Bishops, has made a public statement on behalf of the Church. His declaration that the cases of abuse were “heinous crimes”—together with the bishops’ statement of February 25, 2010, asking forgiveness from all the victims—are first steps toward dealing with the crisis. But much more must be done. Zollitsch’s statement, moreover, contains serious misrepresentations that need to be challenged.
Consider his first claim: sexual abuse by priests has nothing to do with celibacy. Objection! Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?
Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions. In fact, a glance at the New Testament shows that although Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone. Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2). According to 1 Timothy 3:2, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (not “of no wife”!).
During their ministry, Peter and the other apostles were married. For many centuries, married life was normal for bishops and presbyters and—outside the Roman Catholic Church—remains so today, at least for priests, in all the churches of Eastern rites united with the Holy See as well as in Orthodox Christianity. Rome’s rule of celibacy contradicts the gospel and ancient Catholic tradition. It should be abolished.
The second claim by Archbishop Zollitsch: it is “completely false” to trace the cases of abuse to defects in the structure of the church. Objection! The rule of celibacy did not exist during Christianity’s first millennium. Under the influence of monks (who lived in voluntary abstinence) it was instituted in the Western Church during the eleventh century, in particular by Pope Gregory VII, against the staunch opposition of the clergy in Italy and especially in Germany. Only three German bishops dared to promulgate the decree from Rome; thousands of priests protested it. In a petition at the time, the German clergy asked rhetorically whether the pope was “unfamiliar with the word of the Lord: ‘He that is able to receive it, let him receive it?’” (Matthew 19:12). In this, his only statement on the question, Jesus advocates voluntary abstinence.
Yet the rule of celibacy, together with papal absolutism and exaggerated clericalism, became one of the pillars of the “Roman system.” Unlike priests in the Eastern churches, the celibate clergy of the West remain completely separated from the laity, primarily by abstaining from marriage. They constitute a dominant social class of their own, fundamentally superior to ordinary Christians, but completely subordinate to the pope in Rome. The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests.
What would be the best way to attract more young people to the priesthood? Abolish the rule of celibacy, the root of the whole problem, and allow the ordination of women. The bishops know this and should have the courage to say it out loud. They would have the vast majority of Catholics behind them. All recent polls show that the laity favor allowing priests to marry.
Third claim: the bishops have assumed adequate responsibility for the problem. It is of course welcome news that serious measures are now being taken to educate Catholics about sexual abuse and prevent it in the future. But are not the bishops themselves to blame for decades of concealment and the frequent transfer of perpetrators to other parishes while keeping their deeds a closely-held secret? Should the former concealers now be solely entrusted with the task of enlightenment? Ought not independent commissions be installed?
Up to now, the bishops have not admitted any personal complicity. They have been able to protest that they were merely following directives from Rome. And it is a fact that in order to maintain absolute confidentiality, the secretive Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith assumed jurisdiction over all important cases of clerical sexual abuse. Between 1981 and 2005, those cases landed on the desk of the Congregation’s prefect, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. As late as May 18, 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger sent a formal letter concerning these serious offenses (“Epistula de delictis gravioribus”) to all bishops of the Catholic Church. The letter declared that cases of abuse had been placed under “papal secrecy” (“secretum Pontificium”), violation of which is punishable under canon law.
Doesn’t the church have the right to expect a “mea culpa” from the pope and his colleagues the bishops? As reparation for the abuse that has taken place, shouldn’t free and open discussion of the rule of celibacy, forbidden at the Second Vatican Council, now be allowed? The same frankness at long last being applied to the cases of abuse themselves must also be permitted in discussion of one of their essential structural causes: the rule of celibacy. The bishops need to muster the courage to urge this emphatically on Pope Benedict XVI.
—Translated by David Dollenmayer
New Yorkers currently have two large exhibitions with which to take the pulse of contemporary art, and neither shows the patient feeling altogether well. At the Whitney Biennial, this time around presenting many videos along with paintings, installations, and artists’ collaboratives performing music, the spirit is retiring, docile, and a little like spending an afternoon at some lackluster shows in Chelsea.
There are some veterans on hand—the minimalist sculptor Robert Grosvenor, the whizbang figurative painter George Condo, and James Casebere, who photographs tabletop models of buildings and interiors he first makes by hand; but they aren’t seen at their best. And while there are a number of engaging works, especially videos (which I will come back to), one takes in what feel like inevitable Biennial items: abstract paintings of a monkish austerity, a sofa upholstered with newspaper clippings about current politics, a photo display showing how alike Michael Jackson and Charles Baudelaire were (maybe you knew this already).
At the New Museum, on the other hand, which has been given over to “Skin Fruit,” the title of a selection of works from the collection of the Athens-based Dakis Joannou—he has been acquiring art since 1985—the message is raucous, almost assaultive. In the crowded and vivid show, which has been organized by the artist Jeff Koons (who has chosen one of his own works for inclusion), our chief impression is of large, sometimes overbearing, figurative sculptures. The scariest, Roberto Cuoghi’s Pazuzu, a takeoff on Assyrian art, is some twenty feet high. More specifically, Joannou’s collection tends to show the human body as a tarnished or humiliated survivor—and not in an abject spirit but with a certain glee. This is an exhibition where pieces such as Pawel Althamer’s Schedule of the Crucifix, a performance art reenactment of the Crucifixion, and David Altmejd’s The Giant, which gives us, in effect, Michelangelo’s David as it might appear after some futuristic cyclone, are right at home.
There are sweet surprises, particularly Christiana Soulou’s delicate pencil drawings of women, and we are given the chance to brush up on work by a number of by now well-known and esteemed figures, including Cindy Sherman, Charles Ray, Robert Gober, Chris Ofili, and Kiki Smith. But either their voices are lost in the din, or else their own feeling for the gruesome (in Sherman’s case), or for a kind of Gothic woe (in Smith’s case), or for showing innocuous items—like kitchen sinks—gone creepily wrong (in Gober’s case) blends in all too well with the show’s essentially Expressionistic, and overinsistent, way of saying “We are all damaged goods.”
Muted as the Whitney Biennial is (it could use some Expressionism), it offers a few pieces that made sharp impressions, if only because they presented artists I was unfamiliar with or, maybe more importantly, were occasionally funny, an element in short supply in Joannou’s choices.
Alex Hubbard’s Annotated Plans for an Evacuation, for example, a video of a fellow doing various inane things to a car, has a winning comic pointlessness. On a Ford outfitted with a sail-like board on its roof, he slathers the hubcaps with plaster, mucks up the windows, takes a drive, stops, tries to balance oil drums on the trunk, and the story is over. It is as if the silent film comedians, who also industriously went nowhere, and William Wegman, who, in his videos from the 1970s, might demonstrate how something didn’t work, were adding a crazed fellow traveler to their ranks.
In Marianne Vitale’s video Patron, in which the artist, speaking from a TV-size screen, harangues us about a movement called Neutralism, we are again unprepared for the comedy. Vitale is every high-flying drill sergeant, angry feminist, or despotic chef-owner in one; everything in her manner has the force of a demand or a threat except that what she is saying is amusingly nonsensical. Both her and Hubbard’s videos are punctuated with little edits along the way, which come across like twitches and make the pieces seem speedier, another plus.
Dawn Clements’s Mrs. Jessica Drummond’s (‘My Reputation,’ 1945), however, an awkwardly titled, wall-size ballpoint drawing based on a little-known 1940s Hollywood melodrama, is one of a few works that need extra time to be deciphered. Recreating, in jumpily discontinuous form, the different living room scenes in this “woman’s picture,” which she drew while watching the movie on TV, Clements makes space itself twist and stretch, shatter and regroup. We seem to see, following along, the way a memory or thought comes haltingly to life.
2010: The Whitney Biennial, an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, is on view through May 30. Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection, an exhibition at the New Museum, New York City, is on view through June 6.
A long time ago—less than a year ago in fact, but time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folksongs in which the hero spends a night with the Queen of Faerie and then returns to find that a hundred years have passed and all his friends are dead…. Where was I?
Oh yes. A long time ago, back in June of 2009, when we were planning the launch of The Year of the Flood and I was building a Web site for it. Why was I doing this building, rather than the publishers? Well, they had their own sites, and I wanted to do some non-publishing things on mine, such as raise awareness of rare-bird vulnerability and heighten Virtuous Coffee Consumption (Arabica, shade-grown, doesn’t kill birds) and blog the seven-country dramatic-and-musical book tour we were about to do. Anyway, the publishers were at that time hiding under rocks, as it was still the Great Financial Meltdown, not to mention the Horrid Tsunami of Electronic Book Transmission. “That sounds wonderful, Margaret,” they said, with the queasy encouragement shown by those on the shore waving goodbye to someone who’s about to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel.
Oops! I shouldn’t have said that. Which is typical of “social media”: you’re always saying things you shouldn’t have said. But it’s like the days of Hammurabi, and those of the patriarch Isaac in the book of Genesis, come to think of it: once decrees and blessings have made it out of the mouth—or, now, in the 21st century, out of the ends of the fingers and past the Send button—you can’t take them back.
Anyway, there I was, back in 2009, building the site, with the aid of the jolly retainers over at Scott Thornley + Company. They were plying me with oatmeal cookies, showing me wonderful pictures, and telling me what to do. “You have to have a Twitter feed on your Web site,” they said. “A what?” I said, innocent as an egg unboiled. To paraphrase Wordsworth: What should I know of Twitter? I’d barely even heard of it. I thought it was for kiddies.
But nothing ventured, no brain drained. I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account. My first problem was that there were already two Margaret Atwoods on Twitter, one of them with my picture. This grew; I gave commands; then all other Margaret Atwoods stopped together. I like to think they were sent to a nunnery, but in any case they disappeared. The Twitterpolice had got them. I felt a bit guilty.
I was told I needed “followers.” These were people who would sign on to receive my messages, or “tweets,” whatever those might turn out to be. I hummed a few bars from “Mockingbird Hill”—Tra-la-la, twittly-deedee—and sacrificed some of my hair at the crossroads, invoking Hermes the Communicator. He duly appeared in the form of media guru McLean Greaves, who loosed his carrier pigeons to four of his hundreds of Twitterbuddies; and with their aid, I soon had a few thousand people I didn’t know sending me messages like “OMG! Is it really you?” “I love it when old ladies blog,” one early follower remarked.
One follower led to another, quite literally. The numbers snowballed in an alarming way, as I scrambled to keep up with the growing horde. Soon there were 32,000—no, wait, 33,000—no, 33,500… And before you could say LMAO (“Laughing My Ass Off,” as one Twitterpal informed me), I was sucked into the Twittersphere like Alice down the rabbit hole. And here I am.
The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It’s something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam?
But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I’m well pleased with my followers—I have a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They’re a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it’s immediately forthcoming: thanks to them, I learned how to make a Twitpic photo appear as if by magic, and how to shorten a URL using bit.ly or tinyurl. They’ve sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.) Some of them have appeared at tour events bearing small packages of organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee. I’ve even had a special badge made by a follower, just for me: “The ‘call me a visionary, because I do a pretty convincing science dystopia’ badge.” It looks like this:
They’re sharp: make a typo and they’re on it like a shot, and they tease without mercy. However, if you set them a verbal challenge, a frisson sweeps through them. They did very well with definitions for “dold socks”—one of my typos—and “Thnax,” another one. And they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that “Own the podium” was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested “A podium might be nice.” Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: “A podium! For me?” “Rent the podium, see if we like it.” “Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?” I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!
They raise funds for charity via things like Twestival, they solicit donations for catastrophe victims, they send word of upcoming events, they exchange titles of books they like. Once in a while they’re naughty: I did get word of a fellow who’d made a key safe by hollowing out one of my books. (Big yuks from his pals, one of whom ratted him out to me and even sent a pic.) But after I threatened to put the Purple Cross-eyed Zozzle Curse on him, he assured me that no disrespect was intended. (He was forgiven.)
So what’s it all about, this Twitter? Is it signaling, like telegraphs? Is it Zen poetry? Is it jokes scribbled on the washroom wall? Is it John Hearts Mary carved on a tree? Let’s just say it’s communication, and communication is something human beings like to do.
How long will I go on doing this? I’m asked. Well, now. I can’t rightly say. How long—in no more than 140 characters—is “long”?
Rome is under siege these days. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, always willing to assume the role of martyr, continues to claim that everyone is out to get him: the Communists, pinko magistrates (called “red togas” in Roman parlance), and the Left in general. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, responding to the sudden torrent of sexual abuse allegations against the priesthood, says that everyone is out to get the Church and the Pope. Everywhere this spring, the open city seems to be sprouting new street barriers, or permanent guard posts, or at least a vanload of police.
Last summer, Berlusconi’s Roman residence, Palazzo Grazioli, was a party pavilion as porous to willing women as the White House proved to have been recently to the interloping Salahis. Now, however, the building looks more and more like the blinkered, bunkered US Embassy on the Via Veneto. The piazza behind Palazzo Grazioli used to be a parking lot, but recently the Prime Minister’s henchmen have set up a bulwark of concrete planters as if a car bomber were about to take aim (when the local traffic is mostly on foot, and consists of culture vultures bound for the glorious Doria Pamphilj Gallery next door, customers for the local library, and high school students from the nearby Liceo Visconti). The palazzo has always fronted on a bus stop—but this putative man of the people has kindly put an end to that public service. (The man has his own official residence, Palazzo Chigi, and there is no earthly reason that he has to live in this particular downtown palazzo; he just does, and expects the Eternal City to rearrange accordingly.)
The guardians at the Prime Ministerial gate once scolded me for standing with my back to Palazzo Grazioli and telling students about the fifteenth-century structure it faces, perhaps because that building, Palazzo Venezia, once housed the headquarters of Benito Mussolini—did they suspect that I might have been drawing parallels? To this date, fortunately, the Carabinieri at the back entrance have yet to apprehend me for pointing out the ancient Egyptian cat on a rearward cornice, a relic of the ancient temple to Isis that stood on this site.
That shrine was built almost two thousand years ago by another resident of Rome who knew that everyone was out to get him: the Emperor Domitian, a man so paranoid that he faced the walls of his residence with mirror-like mica, and slept in a subterranean bedroom carved deep into the Palatine Hill—where he was slain by the Praetorian Guard in 96 AD. Paranoids, as we know, may have good reason to be afraid.
Pedophiles, meanwhile, as Cardinal Bertone and many of his colleagues have been observing with alacrity of late, crop up more frequently in the population at large than they do in Sancta Romana Ecclesia; ergo there is no pressing need at this particular moment to discuss longstanding Vatican policies like that of priestly celibacy. Saint Peter had a family, to be sure, but that was a very long time ago. Emperor Domitian was a mere babe in arms.
In fact, however, the Church’s pedophile scandal already began to generate a siege mentality here in Rome six years ago (if not much earlier, as recent revelations from Ireland, Germany, and the United States suggest), when the former Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, took up residence in Rome as titular cardinal of the ancient church of Santa Maria Maggiore after resigning from his position in the US, a step brought on by revelations of priestly abuse and his own reluctance to take action against it. The Cardinal’s new destination was no remote parish church; founded in the year 432, Santa Maria Maggiore was the first church dedicated in Rome to the Virgin Mary, and is one of the city’s four patriarchal basilicas—the most venerable and important of Rome’s four hundred-odd places of Christian worship.
Santa Maria Maggiore sits dramatically atop a spur of the Esquiline Hill, its curved apse enhanced by a Baroque cascade of steps that sweep up to its two back doors. In the 1970s, those doors stood open all day, every day, welcoming flocks of faithful pilgrims and tourists into the ancient sanctuary, where one priest even advertised hearing confessions in Esperanto. That feeling is long gone. Aluminum barriers have blocked the steps for years in fear that drunks might loll on them, proving that a blocked staircase creates a noticeable aura of decay far more effectively than a staircase full of motley humanity creates a public nuisance. The back doors of the basilica have been out of use for so long that one formerly open rear entrance has become a storage area for stacks of plastic chairs—right next to the tomb of the great artist Gianlorenzo Bernini and right beneath the fifth-century mosaics (fifth-century—the Roman Empire still existed!) that show the Three Kings in striped outfits as jaunty as any Swiss Guard’s.
The front of Santa Maria Maggiore has acquired a more permanent barrier, a metal fence installed by Cardinal Law to keep the beggars (and perhaps not only the beggars) away from the basilica’s doors; this is the only church in Rome where I have ever heard a priest yell, really yell, in a full-throated snarl, at a gypsy who must have tried to come within the fence. The atmosphere of Santa Maria Maggiore, once so full of joyous mystery, ranges from merely oppressive to downright nasty. Perpetual masses blare out from the seventeenth-century Pauline Chapel, and well they might, considering the burden of atonement the place now bears. My students and I were once rushed into the basilica’s gift shop as the basilica’s guards shut the doors behind us; when I asked what was happening, the answer was “Ci passa una messa”—“a Mass is passing.” In other words, as we were able to determine later, the cardinal formed part of the procession, and he wanted no disturbance.
Most cardinals walk around Rome freely, as Cardinal Ratzinger did, visibly, until his election as Pope. Cardinal Law clearly cannot walk in peace inside his own basilica. On the other hand, however acutely he may be suffering his own kind of imprisonment within Santa Maria Maggiore, that is no reason, for his sins, to transform a place designed to mimic Heaven on earth into a vision of Purgatory for everyone else. At the very least, there must be a closet somewhere in that vast building that can hold a stack of plastic chairs. And he might note that Prime Minster Berlusconi’s barriers all sprout palm trees. A little shrubbery on the ramparts helps to mask the brute reality of their presence. Now, however, with stories spreading about the abuse by priests, without effective Vatican intervention, of 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin and of choir boys in Germany, shrubbery may not be enough.
I have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project. My efforts to make what I write interesting seem pitiful. My hands are tied, I feel. I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. To these people I have been a kind of amanuensis: they have dictated their stories to me and I have retold them. They have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing for me now.
Memory is not a journalist’s tool. Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly. Memory does not narrate or render character. Memory has no regard for the reader. If an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious. He must not be afraid to invent. Above all he must invent himself. Like Rousseau, who wrote (at the beginning of his novelistic Confessions) that “I am not made like anyone I have ever been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence,” he must sustain, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, the illusion of his preternatural extraordinariness.
Since one of the occupational hazards of journalism is the atrophying (from disuse) of the journalist’s powers of invention, the journalist who sets out to write an autobiography has more of an uphill fight than other practitioners of the genre. When one’s work has been all but done—as mine has been for over a quarter of a century—by one brilliant self-inventive collaborator after another, it isn’t easy to suddenly find oneself alone in the room. It is particularly hard for someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn’t want to find herself alone in the room.
Another obstacle in the way of the journalist turned autobiographer is the pose of objectivity into which journalists habitually, almost mechanically, fall when they write. The “I” of journalism is a kind of ultra-reliable narrator and impossibly rational and disinterested person, whose relationship to the subject more often than not resembles the relationship of a judge pronouncing sentence on a guilty defendent. This “I” is unsuited to autobiography. Autobiography is an exercise in self-forgiveness. The observing “I” of autobiography tells the story of the observed “I” not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might. The older narrator looks back at his younger self with tenderness and pity, empathizing with its sorrows and allowing for its sins. I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. In what follows I will try to see myself less coldly, be less fearful of writing a puff piece. But it may be too late to change my spots.
Preposterously premature acclaim has posited the London-based Iraqi Zaha Hadid (who turns sixty next Halloween but has yet to produce a body of built work commensurate with her hyperbolic reputation) as the world’s foremost female architect. Instead, that designation rightfully belongs to Denise Scott Brown, a truly towering figure in the modern history of the building art.
Scott Brown, who is nearly two decades Hadid’s senior, was long dismissed as a junior partner in the Philadelphia firm she heads with her husband, Robert Venturi, or reviled as a jumped-up feminist shrew. However, as she approaches her eightieth birthday next year, she has been having an easier time of it. Though the couple’s sophisticated melding of high Mannerism and pop culture rubs many patrons the wrong way, their Sainsbury Wing (1985–1991) for London’s National Gallery—the brilliant site planning of which is largely attributable to Scott Brown—has worn well. It has become as integral a part of its venerable vicinity as such nearby landmarks as William Gibbs’s St. Martin’s in the Fields (1721–1726) and Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House (1619–1622).
Scott Brown recently saw the publication of Having Words, her provocative collection of writings from 1967 to 2009. Later this year, Bob and Denise, a documentary film produced by the couple’s only child, James Venturi, will be released. (Last year, the younger Venturi made a shorter feature, Saving Lieb House, which follows the removal of the eponymous seaside residence (1967–1969) designed by his parents from its original site on Long Beach Island, New Jersey to its new location in Glen Cove, New York, via a barge that memorably navigated the Atlantic coast, New York City’s waterways, and Long Island Sound.)
Scott Brown is now being honored with two exhibitions and symposia on what many consider her central contribution to contemporary architectural thought—Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the illustrated polemic she wrote with her husband and their late associate, Steven Izenour. In 1965, two years before Scott Brown and Venturi married, she visited the Nevada gambling resort for the first time and was mesmerized by the dazzling electronic signage of the Las Vegas Strip, not only as a manifestation of American Pop vitality but also as an inspiration for a high-style architectural response to transformations of urban forms and planning practices imposed by the burgeoning car culture.
Scott Brown returned to Glitter Gulch the following year and took Venturi with her. In 1968 they taught a research and studio course at Yale School of Architecture that served as the template for Learning from Las Vegas. That publication incited outrage from the outset among those who saw it as glorification of the roadside vernacular at its most crass and vulgar.
The controversy has never subsided. Mirthless neo-Marxists have decried the book’s non-judgmental premise as acquiescence to the rampant commercialization of the public realm by laissez-faire capitalism, while prissy New Urbanists are equally appalled by departures from traditional practices they hope to restore to town planning. But the lingering notoriety of Learning from Las Vegas has also led to the rediscovery of Venturi and Scott Brown by a younger generation thanks particularly to the advocacy of Rem Koolhaas, whose value-neutral worldview owes a huge debt to the couple’s work in general and this text in specific.
Now, an exhibition about the book and the research that went into it, “Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown,” has opened at the Pacific Design Center branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (where a panel discussion will be held on April 11). The show was on view at Yale earlier this year, along with another exhibition, “What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown”. This January, Yale held a three-day scholarly conference, Architecture After Las Vegas, organized by the Swiss architectural historian Stanislaus von Moos, author of the two-volume Venturi and Scott Brown catalogue raisonné.
One of the event’s most surprising revelations was that the first draft of the book was written by Venturi, even though the three authors collaborated closely on its content. For years it had been widely assumed that Scott Brown was principally responsible for Learning from Las Vegas. Several of the book’s hallmark concepts are certainly hers—especially the “duck,” which she defined as a building of willful sculptural effect diametrically opposed to the generic “decorated shed,” the “ugly and ordinary” prototype championed by her and her husband. For example, they see the boxy, vibrantly patterned Doge’s Palace in Venice as a paragon of the decorated shed, whereas its multi-domed next-door neighbor, St. Mark’s Basilica, qualifies as a duck.
Any doubts about Scott Brown’s credentials as a writer on a par with her surpassingly literate spouse—who wrote the classic Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)—are put to rest by Having Words. This physically modest paperback, not much larger than a Palm Pilot, is part of the AA Words series issued by the Architectural Association, the London alternative design academy where Scott Brown studied during the early Fifties.
“A Worm’s Eye View” (1984), her highly opinionated account of (inter alia) that city’s dynamic postwar architectural scene, is a valuable record of the creative ferment that made Britain a world center of innovative architectural thought, not least because of Alison and Peter Smithson, the husband-and-wife team who served as role models for the Venturis’ personal and professional partnership.
Along with a thoughtful post-Katrina disquisition on “What Should New Orleans Do?” (2005) the two most heartfelt essays in Having Words address Scott Brown’s struggle for recognition as a woman in her male-dominated profession. In 1967, she wrote “Planning the Powder Room,” her witty yet withering dissection of public restroom design for women. “There are some areas where, in the nature of our society, personal experience is impossible for the male architect, and feedback from the public unlikely,” she writes. “I have become convinced that the architect’s lack of personal experience and involvement in what he is planning constitutes a real problem here—the more so since I imagine he is unaware of it.”
She argues obliquely but forcefully that the conception of bathrooms and their fittings, which serve the most basic of functions—architectural as well as bodily—reflects the diminished status of women in public spaces. Anyone who has witnessed the disproportionately long lines outside men’s and women’s bathrooms at concert halls and theaters will understand why this topic provides such an apt metaphor for architectural misogyny.
More scathingly, “Sexism and the Star System” (1989) lays out Scott Brown’s account of the repeated indignities she has suffered even after her superior talent was established beyond question. Those who have deemed her a retributive whiner—something often maintained in the boy’s club atmosphere of the building profession’s innermost sanctums—are here refuted with a litany of slings and arrows far worse than had been imagined. She has certainly eased the way for a rising generation of women architects, among them Hadid, who will never know the trouble she’s seen. But Scott Brown nonetheless ends on this upbeat note. “I have been helped,” she writes,
by noticing that the scholars whose work we most respect, the clients whose projects intrigue us, and the patrons whose projects inspire us, have no problem in understanding my role. They are the sophisticates. Partly through them I gain heart and realize that, over the last twenty years, I have managed to do my work and, despite some sliding, to achieve my own self-respect.
“Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown” will be showing at the Pacific Design Center branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art in West Hollywood through June 20. Denise Scott Brown’s Having Words was published by the Architectural Association, London, 2009.
With the renewed interest in nuclear weapons I have been struck by how few people there still are who have seen one explode. There are a few survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and there are a small number who witnessed some of the above ground test explosions. But the last American above-ground test was in 1962 and the last above-ground test by any country was conducted by the Chinese in 1980. This means that the Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis—to say nothing of the Iranians and North Koreans—have never seen a nuclear explosion. In the main, this is a very good thing: the fallout from such a test is a real health hazard. But there is a downside. We have lost the experience of watching a nuclear explosion—perhaps the most powerful lesson about nuclear bombs there is.
In the spring of 1957, Kenneth Bainbridge, chairman of the physics department at Harvard, where I was finishing a two-year post-doctoral appointment, asked me if I would be interested in spending the summer at Los Alamos. I had no interest in working on nuclear weapons. But I had a great curiosity about Los Alamos, which was, at the time, a closed city surrounded by barbed wire. When I arrived I was assigned an office with Ken Johnson, who was also a Harvard postdoc. The weapons work seemed to be going on elsewhere; we were told nothing about it. I had an idea for a project in elementary particle physics but needed help to carry it out. Ken, who died a few years ago, was a very powerful mathematical physicist, so we worked on our problem.
My other activity was playing tennis on the Los Alamos cement courts. My partner was usually a senior physicist named Francis Low. Toward the end of August Francis said that he would not be available to play for the next week; he was going to Mercury, Nevada to watch some bomb tests, at the invitation of the head of the Theory Division, a Canadian named Carson Mark. I asked if there was any chance of my going too and on the morning of August 30, Francis, Carson, and I got into a light plane that flew from Los Alamos to Albuquerque and then by commercial airline to Las Vegas, which was about 65 miles from the test site.
My ignorance about how nuclear weapons actually worked was nearly total. I simply went where I was told to go, asking nothing. The plane was met by a government car that took us to a Las Vegas casino where we killed a couple of hours playing blackjack. Then we were driven to Mercury, an hour or so away, where we got a couple of hours of sleep. When Carson got us up it was still dark and quite chilly. He took us to a nearby meteorological station. Mercury had its own wind patterns, which were very important. If the fallout blew in the wrong direction it might irradiate Las Vegas. Then we went outside to a kind of concrete structure to await the test.
I recognized Al Peaslee, a Harvard graduate student, who had gone off to Los Alamos to work. Peaslee said that just after the explosion I should turn away for several seconds and put the smoked lenses I had been given over my eyes. He also said that I should expect the “shock wave.” I did not know what he meant. I learned from Peaslee that the bomb that was going to be tested was called “Smoky” and came from Edward Teller’s laboratory at Livermore. The Livermore devices were named after mountains while the Los Alamos bombs were named after scientists. That is all he told me.
In the distance I could see the tower, on top of which was the bomb. This tower was the tallest one that had ever been built for such a test, about two-thirds the height of the Empire State building. It had been deliberately placed in front of a bank of hills covered with Joshua Trees— so that the bomb’s effect on this kind of terrain could be studied. An alarm sounded and the countdown began. At zero there was an ungodly flash of light, which I could see reflected off the wall in front of me. I counted off a few seconds and turned around.
What I saw defies description. The photograph above gives some sense but not of the scale. At first there was no noise. Then came the shock wave that made a disagreeable click in my ears and finally the rolling thunder of the noise. The Joshua trees were aflame as if in some obscene pagan rite. The bomb had evaporated the tower. The fire ball rose and above it was a dark and very menacing radioactive column. It seemed to come towards us and I wondered if we should seek shelter. Above it was the mushroom cloud. We were all very silent when we returned to our bunkhouse for a little more sleep.
Sometime in mid-morning I heard the sound of helicopters. I recall saying to Carson without knowing the meaning, “They’re flying,” and his responding, “They’re flying and flying.” We had a bit of lunch and Carson took us on a visit around the site. The places where there had been explosions looked like the surface of the Moon, except that there were warning signs about the level of radioactivity. The first stop was at a five-hundred-foot tower where “Galileo,” a Los Alamos device, was being readied for the next morning’s test. There was an open lift that took us some feet below the platform on which Galileo had been placed. We had to climb a somewhat rickety ladder to get there. I remember looking down at the scrub desert somewhat anxiously until it occurred to me how ludicrous was this touch of acrophobia in comparison to approaching a bomb nearly as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
Carson did not explain where we were going next: a concrete building quite far away that was set in a bunker. He opened the door and inside on shelves were the interiors—the “pits”—of a vast array of nuclear weapons. Carson casually picked one off the shelf and handed it to me. It was about the size and weight of a bowling ball—a bowling ball made out of plutonium and, in this case, with an outer layer of beryllium. It was slightly warm to the touch from the radioactivity. In the middle of the room there was a table. On it was a pit and a man was gluing high explosives to the sphere. A woman was next to him knitting. It was an uncanny scene about which I understood little. The next morning we watched Galileo explode. This time I knew what to expect but the experience was still overwhelming. Then we returned to Los Alamos.
Over the years Francis, who died in 2007, said very little about our experiences watching these two explosions at Mercury, so I do not know how they affected him. I know how it affected me. I was never quite the same. I cannot think of nuclear weapons as an abstraction. I listen to debates on nuclear proliferation and wonder if these people really understand what they are debating.
But I set out to learn, as the data became unclassified, about just what I had seen. Here is what I found out. Operation Plumbbob was a series of twenty nine tests nearly all above ground. They had begun on May 28, 1957 with “Boltzmann” and ended on October 5 that year with “Morgan.” The series, which was the most extensive ever done at Mercury, put 58.3 million curies of radio-iodine into the atmosphere. One-thousandth of a curie is what would be used in a liver scan. The radioactivity went all over the United States, with clusters in places like Maine. It is estimated that these tests caused some 38,000 thyroid cancers leading to about 2,000 deaths. The health burden of these tests put enough pressure—despite the protests of people like Edward Teller—to bring a halt to them. The same information can be gathered from an underground test witnessed only by mechanical devices.
It took some years before I understood the significance of the helicopters we heard that morning. In 1957, it was the height of the Cold War. The possibility of a ground war in Europe with the Soviet Union was taken very seriously. It was expected that a confrontation with the Soviets would go nuclear so troops were being trained for this eventuality. There were thousands at Mercury: fifteen hundred of them had been assembled about thirteen kilometers from ground zero of Smoky. By 6 a.m. they had been transported by helicopter to ground zero itself. They had very poor radiation monitors. This was to accustom them to nuclear war. Of these fifteen hundred soldiers some got leukemia and died.
The speed and certainty with which the conventional wisdom in Washington flips can be a comical thing to watch. A mere forty-eight hours ago, Barack Obama was a struggling president, even a likely one-termer. Today, in the wake of the House’s narrow passage of the health-reform bill—which is to say, on the strength of a grand total of four votes, which if cast the other way would have ensured reform’s defeat—he’s suddenly once again a political mastermind and one of the most consequential presidents of the last half-century!
I don’t mean to minimize the importance of the passage of health reform. It is certainly historic—the largest piece of progressive domestic legislation to become law in an astounding 45 years (since Medicare). Obama did place an immense amount of political capital at risk in recent days, speaking personally with more than 90 Democratic House members and rallying them Saturday with a fine and even brave speech in which he called on them to set electoral calculations to the side and do the right thing. Nancy Pelosi, a target of Republican jibes for so many years chiefly because she happens to be from San Francisco, proved herself a skillful leader who is clearly respected across the breadth of her caucus. Against the combined forces of Tea Party rage and hundreds of corporate millions invested in killing the bill, securing its passage was a formidable accomplishment.
But just as liberal despair in recent months was short-sighted and overwrought, the liberal euphoria of today is similarly worth examining, for three reasons.
First, the passage of the bill into law marks a beginning rather than an end. The law’s most conspicuous elements—the creation of the exchanges, the subsidies for coverage, the full range of new regulations governing insurance companies—won’t take effect until 2014. Even when they take effect, myriad complex questions of implementation will need sorting out. Whether the exchanges really work will depend, for example, on the success of “risk adjustment” policies, so that the plans offered in the exchanges won’t vary too greatly in terms of what they charge and offer consumers. There will be dozens of such questions to be answered by future bureaucrats, and inevitably, there will be misjudgments and unforeseen difficulties. The passage of this bill merely starts a health-care debate that will continue, at varying levels of ferocity, for years.
Second, there is the matter of the political consequences of this bill—and the way it was passed— for other Democratic initiatives. It is natural to think that a crucial legislative victory will embolden the winners to push ever onward, aiming their mighty sword at fresh targets. Progressives will certainly hope that this will be the case—with regard to, say, financial reform, or climate change legislation, or immigration reform. It seems to me that there are more reasons to think the opposite will be the case. This battle was so epic that legislators, an extremely cautious class by nature, will be loath to step into another fight like it.
Congress may tackle financial reform this year, since the bill has already progressed fairly far through the Senate (the House passed its version last December). But it seems likely that senators will try to avoid any health-care-style donnybrook. Other legislation of consequence will be put on hold until after the mid-term elections, and depending on how they go, the Democrats may not have the numbers necessary to do anything else of importance.
Which leads into my third reason for caution, the Republican Party. The GOP was determined to make health care Obama’s “Waterloo,” as Republican Senator Jim DeMint put it last year. That failed. But the party shows no signs yet of changing its approach. Here is what Mitt Romney—who as governor of Massachusetts signed into a law a health-care bill that is quite similar in spirit and letter to the one Obama is about to sign, and that, despite budget problems, is working out rather well so far—had to say about Sunday night’s vote:
America has just witnessed an unconscionable abuse of power. President Obama has betrayed his oath to the nation—rather than bringing us together, ushering in a new kind of politics, and rising above raw partisanship, he has succumbed to the lowest denominator of incumbent power: justifying the means by extolling the ends. He promised better; we deserved better.
He calls his accomplishment “historic”—in this he is correct, although not for the reason he intends. Rather, it is an historic usurpation of the legislative process—he unleashed the nuclear option, enlisted not a single Republican vote in either chamber, bribed reluctant members of his own party, paid-off his union backers, scapegoated insurers, and justified his act with patently fraudulent accounting. What Barack Obama has ushered into the American political landscape is not good for our country; in the words of an ancient maxim, “what starts twisted, ends twisted.”
His health-care bill is unhealthy for America. It raises taxes, slashes the more private side of Medicare, installs price controls, and puts a new federal bureaucracy in charge of health care. It will create a new entitlement even as the ones we already have are bankrupt. For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.
The Republicans failed to block health care simply because the Democrats managed to get it through the Senate while they still had their super-majority of 60 votes. They no longer have that majority, and the near-term prospects of getting any Republicans to agree to work toward good-faith negotiation on anything seem remote (with the possible exception of climate change, on which South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham is supposedly committed to a solution; but on that issue, several Democrats, moderates and others from industrial states, are balking).
The broader partisan logjam will continue. This moment is very much worth savoring, but Obama was not the failure of last week’s conventional wisdom, and he is not the invincible conqueror of this week’s. The march remains a long one.
In “The Best Faces of the Enlightenment,” from the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Willibald Sauerländer writes about a new exhibition of the work of Jean-Antoine Houdon, whom he calls “the last and probably greatest French sculptor of the eighteenth century.” In his works—a selection of which can be seen in this slide show—the “panegyric rhetoric of the baroque” and the “flounces and wigs of the rococo” give way to “an unadorned naturalism.” “Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sensuous Sculpture” was organized by the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, Germany, and is on view at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France, until June 27. It includes nineteen works by Houdon (1741–1828); it also includes works by some of his most important contemporaries, including Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Augustin Pajou, and Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne.
Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.
The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (IvyGate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.
How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes the most of technical innovations—the possibility of constant contact with virtual communities by means of web sites and the premium placed on brevity by platforms such as Twitter with its limit of 140 characters per message. Yet blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet.
Here, for example, is a recent post on The Superficial:
RadarOnline reports “traditional marriage” crusader and former Miss California Carrie Prejean is living in sin with her fiancé Kyle Boller of the St. Louis Rams where they’re no doubt eating shellfish. BURN THEM!
And here is a typical entry from Le Gazetier cuirassé ou anecdotes scandaleuses de la cour de France (1771):
Mlle. Romans is soon to marry M. de Croismare, Governor of the Ecole Militaire, who will use six aides de camp to take his place in performing the conjugal service.
Short, scurrilous abuse proliferated in all sorts of communication systems: taunts scribbled on palazzi during the feuds of Renaissance Italy, ritual insult known as “playing the dozens” among African Americans, posters carried in demonstrations against despotic regimes, and graffiti on many occasions such as the uprising in Paris of May–June 1968 (one read “Voici la maison d’un affreux petit bourgeois”). When expertly mixed, provocation and pithiness could be dynamite—the verbal or written equivalent of Molotov cocktails.
This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.
To appreciate the importance of a pre-modern blog, consult a database such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online and download a newspaper from eighteenth-century London. It will have no headlines, no bylines, no clear distinction between news and ads, and no spatial articulation in the dense columns of type, aside from one crucial ingredient: the paragraph. Paragraphs were self-sufficient units of news. They had no connection with one another, because writers and readers had no concept of a news “story” as a narrative that would run for more than a few dozen words. News came in bite-sized bits, often “advices” of a sober nature—the arrival of a ship, the birth of an heir to a noble title—until the 1770s, when they became juicy. Pre-modern scandal sheets appeared, exploiting the recent discovery about the magnetic pull of news toward names. As editors of the Morning Post and the Morning Herald, two men of the cloth, the Reverend Henry Bate (known as “the Reverend Bruiser”) and the Reverend William Jackson (known as “Dr. Viper”) packed their paragraphs with gossip about the great, and this new kind of news sold like hotcakes. Much of it came from a bountiful source: the coffee house.
London coffee houses were nerve centers, where regulars picked up talk about the private lives of public figures. Some regulars reduced the talk to writing, always in the form of a paragraph, and turned their bulletins in to editors or editor-compositors who set them in type and aligned the typeset paragraphs in columns on the imposing stone, ready for printing as the “freshest advices.” Known as “paragraph men,” these early-modern reporters might get paid by the piece or they might supply copy in order to score points in the daily struggle to master public opinion. Some did it for their own pleasure—like many bloggers today.
The French café functioned in the same manner, but the French press was censored, and French-language journals printed outside France took great care to avoid offending French authorities. Gossipy news therefore circulated “under the cloak” in the form of short notes scribbled on scraps of paper that were carried around in pockets and passed from hand to hand. (Some of them still exist in the archives of the Bastille, because they were confiscated when the police frisked prisoners.) Although these bulletins usually contained only a few sentences, they were not called paragraphs. They were known as “anecdotes.”
Two to three hundred years ago, the term anecdote meant nearly the opposite of what it means today. Instead of representing a trivial incident or unreliable hearsay, as in the expression “anecdotal evidence,” it conveyed the notion of “secret history”—episodes concerning the private lives of important personages that had actually taken place but could not be published openly. According to contemporary dictionaries and Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the concept derived from Procopius, the Byzantine historian of the sixth century B.C.E., who wrote scandalous secret histories about the private lives of Justinian, Theodora, and Belisarius to accompany the politically correct narratives of his formal histories.
Procopius—no connection with the famous Parisian Café Procope—was recognized as the remote ancestor of another variety of early-modern blogger, the “nouvelliste.” Gossip mongers who worked oral circuits of communication were known as “nouvellistes de bouche.” When they reduced news to written anecdotes and strung the anecdotes together in manuscript “gazetins”, they graduated into the ranks of “nouvellistes à la main.” Here are some examples collected by the pamphleteer Pierre Manuel:
The prince de Conti was knocked out of commission by a girl known as the Little F…..He blames it on Guerin, his medical advisor.
The duc de … surprised his wife in the arms of his son’s tutor. She said to him with an impudence worthy of a courtier, “Why weren’t you there, Monsieur? When I don’t have my esquire, I take the arm of my lackey.”
These illegal newssheets proliferated everywhere in eighteenth-century France, owing to the demand for news, especially news of the saltiest variety. The police tried to repress them, but for every “nouvelliste” locked up in the Bastille, a half-dozen more took up the pen. Eventually, the police sought to gain control of this underground press by compiling their own manuscript gazettes—which eventually lost credence and were supplanted by still more “nouvelles à la main.”
Whether exchanged orally in a café, scribbled on a scrap of paper, or combined as paragraphs in a newssheet, anecdotes operated as the primary unit in a system of communication. Many of them found their way into print. They were picked up by famous writers like Voltaire, but more often they appeared in anonymous tracts known as “libelles.” The spiciest “libelles” —works such as Anecdotes sur Mme la comtesse du Barry and Vie privée de Louis XV—became bestsellers. If you read them carefully, you find that they contain a great many passages that were lifted from one another or from common underground gazettes. They were really collages pieced together from pre-existing material and whatever new items that were available—just like today’s blogs, which serve up compilations of tidbits collected from around the web. Instead of imagining this literature as a corpus of books written by distinct authors, you should think of it as a shifting repertory of anecdotes, which were endlessly rearranged as they passed from one form to another.
The anecdotes constituted the early-modern equivalent of a blogosphere, one laced with explosives; for on the eve of the Revolution, French readers were consuming as much smut about the private lives of the great as they were reading treatises about the abuse of power. In fact, the anecdotes and the political discourse reinforced each other. I would therefore argue that the early-modern blog played an important part in the collapse of the Old Regime and in the politics of the French Revolution. I must admit, however, that I am consigning this argument to a blog. Anyone who wants to see it developed at an appropriate length and with supporting evidence will have to read it as a book: The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon.
I don’t believe that history teaches lessons, at least not in a direct, easily applied manner, but it does raise questions. Are blogs disrupting traditional politics today just as “libelles” did in eighteenth-century France?
For someone like me who lives in New Hampshire, cold and snow are things I take in stride, the way I fancy the inhabitants of the tropics barely take notice of the hot muggy days they have there. It’s the howling wind that discombobulates me, the one a neighbor calls “Labrador Express,” conjuring up for me visions of the bleak landscape of that great peninsula in eastern Canada that once I surveyed in horror from a low-flying plane.
My house sits above a large frozen lake open to the wind, except for a few bare trees waving their branches as if beseeching the gods on my behalf. During the day, the howling wind gets competition from all the sounds in the house, but when night falls it can display all its nastiness to its heart’s content. If there’s a power failure, as there was for four days recently, and we are reduced to living by the wood stove in one room and depending on candles, oil lamps and flashlights to find our way around the cold, dark house, there’s no other sound for us to hear.
Since it’s hard to read very long by an oil lamp and even harder on the eyes with the help of a candle or two, we rarely stay up past eight o’clock. A flashlight in bed is a possibility, but no book can compete with a wind blowing across hundreds of miles of snow and then honing its madness to a high pitch on the loose gutter outside my bedroom window. At such moments, it is impossible not to take its howling personally. Most certainly, this wind is mocking me. It’s telling me you are nothing, nothing, nothing…
Just to show me what it means, it wants to tear my house down and carry me off out of bed for a whirl in the midnight sky before depositing me on our frozen lake, or perhaps further, somewhere closer to the North Pole where it has a rendezvous with some of its bedlamite pals. No wonder those who wax lyrical about the beauties of nature never mention this lunatic whom the ancients used to depict on old maps with swollen cheeks and hair and a beard spiked with ice to warn travelers into the far north what to expect.
According to the Eddur, the collection of old Norse poems, there was once no heaven above nor earth beneath, but only a bottomless deep. I believe it! If I remember correctly, they also talk about some kind of mist in between and even a warm breeze, but as far as I’m concerned, they got their creation story all wrong. There was a howling wind in the beginning and there’ll be a howling wind in the end. If you doubt me, look in the eyes of a cat or a dog on a night like that. They know it, and they don’t like it a bit. We don’t sleep a wink and they don’t either. “Thank God, spring is coming,” we say to each other in the dark. Yeah, sure, the eyes of our animals are telling us, but how are we going to get through this night?
In her review of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson’s first novel, Anthill, in the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Margaret Atwood encourages anyone interested in ants to “take a look at the daring eco-adventurer Mark Moffett’s spectacular new ant book, Adventures Among Ants.” Moffett—who studied evolutionary biology under Wilson—has been tracking ants for decades; his research has taken him all over the world, including as a photographer for National Geographic magazine, earning him the nickname “the Indiana Jones of entomology.” These photographs come from his book, which will be published by University of California Press in May.
“Ants are Earth’s most ubiquitous creatures,” Moffett writes. “A single hectare in the Amazon basin contains more ants than the entire human population of New York City, and that’s just counting the ants on the ground—twice as many live in the treetops.” His book includes marauder ants, army ants, weaver ants, slavemaker ants, leafcutter ants, and Argentine ants—the last of which have been hitchhiking from continent to continent to form supercolonies that threaten to conquer every other kind of ant. “Like a starfish that succeeds in prying open a clam through persistent application of pressure,” Moffett writes, “these ordinary-looking imperialists wear down nasty rivals and prey many times their weight in wars of attrition staged over hours, days, weeks, and even years.” According to Atwood, “This monoculture of ants is bad news,” for both the conquered ants and the landscape as we know it: as the Argentine ants expand their turf, they spread “their farmed aphids all over everything, including, very possibly, your rose bushes.” For more about Moffett’s discoveries, see adventuresamongants.com.
I say the rosary every day according to the church season, choosing one of the four sets of gospel “mysteries” (joyful, luminous, sorrowful, glorious) to reflect on
the life of Jesus. Since it is now Lent, I am saying the sorrowful mysteries, those that deal with the Passion and Death of Jesus. This year, two of the five mysteries have special meaning for me—the second and the third.
The second mystery is the scourging of Jesus. This was a prescribed part of Roman execution by crucifixion. The convict was stripped naked and beaten with rods. This was done to break his spirit, so there would be no undignified scuffle when the man was led to the execution site and affixed to the cross. It was to demean him ahead of time, to degrade his manhood, so he would be cowed and submissive when taken to his death.
The third mystery is the crowning of Jesus. This was not a prescribed part of the process. The Roman soldiers improvised a special humiliation for their prisoner, wrapping him with a mock-regal purple robe, giving him a fake scepter, and putting an “imperial” wreath of acanthus leaves on this head, to scoff at the idea of a “King of the Jews.” It was like the medieval installation of a buffoon as “Lord of Misrule.” Again, the aim was to take away any last scrap of dignity that might be left to Jesus.
Sound familiar? Our recent torture techniques seem directly linked to the treatment Jesus received. Our prisoners were stripped, subjected to head bangings and face slappings. This was not torture, according to torturologist John Yoo. It may have been painful but it did not inflict permanent damage—except to human dignity. And making prisoners wear women’s underwear on their faces, or smearing them with what they were told was menstrual blood, was breaking down their deepest ideas of worth in their own culture and their own pride. It was a derisive “crowning.”
I do not know what went through the minds of secular or non-Christian torturers. But Christian torturers might have reason to have tortured consciences themselves when or if they remember what Jesus said in the gospel of Matthew (25.31ff). Asked who will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he says those who comforted him in prison. Asked who will be excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven, he says those who would not comfort him in prison. His listeners ask, “When were you in prison, that we came to you or did not?” He answers: “Whatever you did to any of my brothers, even the lowliest (elackistoi), you did to me.” Christians should face this sobering fact: in their treatment of the lowliest of men, they were torturing Jesus, renewing what the Roman soldiers did to him.
