Notes from reading
James Wolcott
Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor by Andrew Kirtzman
I wondered what had happened to Rudy Guiliani. I knew of the success of his 'broken window' policy for New York, but didn't really know anything more. A tragic story indeed, except that you don't really feel sorry for him. As Wolcott concludes: "it’s hard to feel sorry for a man so stupid, blind and indifferent to the damage he’s done".He made loads of money following 9/11 - despite the fact that "His performance on September 11 was a tapestry of inspired leadership and fatal mistakes". But "With great wealth comes great irresponsibility".
And then "Trump’s racist policies as an urban landlord and Giuliani’s racist pot-stirring as hizzoner were joined at the hip." But despite Giuliani’s support for Trump, Trump has done nothing help him now that he is down and out.
Letters
Sheona York, Colin Brewer, Ronald Brown, David Elstein, Jonathan Sawday, Gilbert O’Brien, Peter Rose, Matthew Corner, Stephen Bayley
Letters...
Bee Wilson
Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man by Paul Newman, edited by David RosenthalThe Last Movie Stars directed by Ethan Hawke
Here's a super brief take away from it. Paul Newman seems like a nice man following a difficult childhood, and his second marriage, to Joanne Woodward, was by all accounts warm and generous. He recognised that Joanne was a more talented actor than he was, and that it was unjust that he was the movie star. But what about his first marriage, to Jackie:
"Stephanie, his third child with Jackie, described it as ‘an unbearable story ... She was left with three kids under the age of five ... she wanted to be an actress and she had to watch my father and stepmother ride off into the sunset with Hollywood contracts.’"
What would feminists say?
Izzy Finkel
Short Cuts: In the Inflation Basket
The use of the cost of a 'basket' of good for measuring inflation. And"Unlike GDP growth or trade imbalances, inflation gets close to measuring something that people can feel. It is easy to forget this, because a market logic so often creeps in and addles the brains of those who follow it most closely: Larry Summers, against a background of tropical palm trees, pronounced that ‘there’s going to need to be increases in unemployment to contain inflation’; Andrew Bailey, against a backdrop of record corporate profits, urged restraint on pay and, leading by example, said he would forego any increase to his £575,000 remuneration. The best rubric for understanding inflation may be conflict – distributional conflict – Olivier Blanchard said recently. The basket can tell you a lot about inflation, but some wisdoms slip through the mesh."
Laleh Khalili
The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy by Philippe Sands
FFS, we've behaved abominably, even quite recently. Not just the Tories, but the Labour Party too (David Miliband gets special mention, and not in a good way).
How about this:
"The most frequent non-military visitors to the Chagos islands are affluent yacht owners who, for a fee paid to BIOT [British Indian Ocean Territory], can enjoy the glorious palm-fringed shores, have barbecues on the beach and swim in the azure lagoons. But in October 2022, when Tamil refugees fleeing Sri Lanka on rickety fishing boats got too close to Diego Garcia, they were escorted by British forces back to the open seas."
Neal Ascherson
On Tom Nairn
Tom Nairn, who died 21 January 2023 (aged 90)."In 1968 Tom was fired from Hornsey College of Art for taking part in a student occupation as a staff member. For the next 47 years this man, who was blatantly Scotland’s most significant political intellectual, with a long publications list and a hot international reputation, was boycotted. No British university dared offer him a permanent job."
Rosemary Hill
Where Light in Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse by Veronica della Dora
Hill thinks the book is rubbish. But iirc she's been like that in her reviews before. Not always the most generous of reviewers.
Emma Smith
Not at Home
What Shakespeare's Twelfth Night has to say about exile, the experience and treatment of refugees. But see also what Shakespeare has Thomas More say in the play of that name:alas, alas, say now the King,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers, would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking out in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth.
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, not that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be us’d thus? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers, would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking out in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth.
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, not that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be us’d thus? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
Emma Smith refers to it as "More's humdinger speech about migration and tolerance"!
Adam Shatz
Beyond Borders. Adolfo Kaminsky
Adolfo Kaminsky, who died 9 January 2023. What an absolutely incredible man this was! My idea of a saint.His particular skill was forging documents, and during the second world war, at very great personal risk, he saved thousands of lives. How about this:
"On one occasion, Penguin [a member of the resistance] told Kaminsky that a raid on Jewish homes in the Paris region was imminent, and they needed papers for three hundred Jewish children in three days. This meant nine hundred documents, and seemed impossible. But Kaminsky calculated that he could make thirty fake documents an hour and refused even to take a nap until they were done: if he slept for just an hour, he reckoned, thirty people would die."
But the thing is, after the war he continued to use his skills for all sorts of other causes, including "Algerian rebels [Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, FLN], insurgents in Latin America and Africa, anti-apartheid activists and opponents of the dictatorships in Greece, Spain and Portugal."
He forged documents "for the Haganah and its rivals in the Stern Gang, a terrorist militia led by Yitzhak Shamir" because he thought that by supporting their efforts "he was helping to create a ‘Jewish-Arab country liberated from England’" But
"Kaminsky was ‘mortified’ by the 1948 war and even more so by the creation of a Jewish state. ‘I almost fell into Zionism,’ he confessed to the radio journalist Laure Adler in 2020, but the coarse anti-Arab racism he witnessed on a visit to Israel after the war quickly disabused him. ‘I couldn’t stand the new state choosing religion and individualism,’ he recalls in his memoir. ‘It was all that I hated.’ He never regretted having helped Jews to immigrate, but turned down repeated offers of a medal from Israel and refused ever to set foot there again."
Joe Moran
Gen Z and Me
Not read this one yet...Gill Partington
Literature’s Elsewheres: The Necessity of Radical Literary Practices by Annette Gilbert Inventing the Alphabet: The Origin of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker
All sorts of weird and experiment books.Adam Mars-Jones
The Furrows by Namwali Serpell
Sounds like this would be a difficult novel to read!
"Never mind the book’s characters – how many times can its readers have the rug pulled from under them by the universe where they are spending their time and still want to stand up again?"
Thomas Meaney
At the Staatsgalerie: George Grosz
‘George Grosz’s caricatures are actually not satire but realistic reportage,’ Hannah Arendt wrote. ‘We know these types. They live all around us.’
Terry Eagleton
Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative by Peter Brooks
Eagleton seems to lean towards skepticism of "What Brooks glumly calls ‘the narrative takeover of reality’"This is a book I need to read for myself, since I've been saying all sorts of things that are probably quite ignorant about narrative in my other blog.
Natalie Shapero
Two Poems
Centimetre RulerI wanted to stop getting high but you know
what they say no sobriety...
Really Raining
Every time I’ve seen the moon, I’ve thought it was the Earth and I’m
somewhere else gazing at it, gauging whether I’ll make it
back someday. ...
Julian Bell
Cezanne
Not read this yet, but here's a picture from it.
Ian Pace
The Complete Songs of Hugo Wolf: Life, Letters, Lieder by Richard Stokes
"It wouldn’t be difficult to construct a history of 19th-century Germanic music that left out the name of Hugo Wolf entirely
[...]
Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works,... The musicologist Lawrence Kramer has compared him to Chopin, whose output was similarly dominated by a single medium. But Chopin’s piano music is a staple of the repertoire whereas Wolf’s songs, as Kramer points out, ‘are more often praised than sung’."
[...]
Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works,... The musicologist Lawrence Kramer has compared him to Chopin, whose output was similarly dominated by a single medium. But Chopin’s piano music is a staple of the repertoire whereas Wolf’s songs, as Kramer points out, ‘are more often praised than sung’."
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