Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Don’t believe the hype

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on October 23, 2007
in Foreign affairs and United States
. 0 Comments

After months of feverish anticipation (chiefly voiced in the Guardian’s Media supplement), Guardian America finally launched today – boasting an exclusive interview with Hilary Clinton and a whole section dedicated to the 2008 presidential elections.

In his welcome note, editor Michael Tomasky says the new site will represent ‘the liberal interest’ expressing its worldview of the world ‘a bit more openly than American newspapers do’, looking at the events of the day ‘from a slightly different angle than US papers, and focusing in on some matters that they might ignore’.

Tomasky also proudly points out that the Guardian already has five million unique visitors to its site per month. But this begs the question – why bother with a US edition at all? Do Americans really need their news re-ordered in ways that have been deemed more interesting to them (ie. with a story about Ireland moved up to the landing page)?

And in this is there not an implicit– and slightly patronising – assumption that Americans are no good at making news themselves, or have to be spoon-fed information people from other countries are perfectly capable of rooting out for themselves? Tomasky claims to not know what the Peterloo massacre was - ‘ but is sounds bad’. Is this, one wonders, deliberate dumbing down?

That the site will adhere to British English further calls into question who it’s really aimed at - is it going to be a barometer for what Americans are thinking, or for what British liberals think America should be thinking?

The counter-argument, of course, is that you can never have too much information, there is a chronic lack of foreign news coverage in the mainstream US media, and the site will be of interest not only to Americans, but those interested in American interests. Besides, it’s not as if you’d be hard pressed to find American products on the British web, TV and airwaves.

The Booker prize and book reviewers

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on October 23, 2007
in Books
. 1 Comment

A storm has been rocking the literary world over the past week as a result of Howard Davies’s speech at the Booker prize ceremony. Davies, this year’s chair of judges, used his speech to attack book reviewers and literary editors for lauding too many unworthy books and ignoring those of real quality. Not surprisingly, literary hacks went on the attack. The Observer’s Robert McCrum described Davies’s speech as “one of the most embarassing Booker speeches in living memory,” while Nicholas Lezard on the Guardian’s blog dismissed it on the grounds that Davies, a glorified bean counter, couldn’t possibly understand how the literary world works: “He probably took one look at all the monkey-suited guests at the tables in front of him and imagined he saw a large, self-congratulatory clique.”

I have some sympathy for what Davies said. He is basically right: a lot of very mediocre books get lavishly praised by reviewers. No doubt this has something to do, as Davies implied, with the incestuous nature of the literary world, with mutual back-scratching and so on. But I think the larger, and more interesting, problem has to do with standards. Standards are a prerequisite for any critical judgement. In order to declare something good, or bad, you have to have in your head some point of comparison—some ideal marker—against which the verdict “good” or “bad” applies. What, I wonder, is the standard most contemporary novel reviewers adopt? Of course, in an ideal world, it would be that of the classics. The new McEwan would be set against Henry James, and judged accordingly. But of course, that’s not the way it works. In most cases the new McEwan is set against, well, the last McEwan —or at best the new Philip Roth.

That’s the way the game works—and, I suspect, is the way it always has. As Lezard pointed out in his blog, George Orwell was complaining about the necessity of praising trash in his 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer.” And that, really, is the way it has to be, because if every book reviewer adopted the highest possible standards, then every novel bar only the very occasional exception would be trashed and reviewing would become a pointless exercise.

I suspect this is what outsiders like Davies often don’t get. They probably don’t read a great deal of contemporary fiction (except when they’re judging the Booker) and so, oddly enough, have higher standards than the average jobbing book reviewer. They then read generous reviews of books that clearly don’t compare well against the likes of Middlemarch, and misattribute their generosity to some kind of conspiracy. In fact, the biggest single factor in the problem Davies identifies is the downward pressure on standards exerted by the book reviewing process itself. As Martin Amis said in a similar but slightly different context, the problem here is “structural.”

The Mo Ibrahim prize

Published
by
ASH Smyth
on October 23, 2007
in Africa
. 1 Comment

Last year, Prospect broke the story that the Sudanese mobile phone entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim was to sponsor a prize for African leaders who improve the governance of their country. Every year, the winner will be awarded $500,000 for the subsequent ten years, followed by a lifetime pension worth $200,000 a year.

Yesterday, the first award went to Joaqium Chissano, former president of Mozambique. Chissano was a solid choice, and will have caused little surprise. Despite having been in power for 20 years—perhaps not quite the unambiguous signal to African leaders that commentators were expecting—the former president was an ideal candidate. During his time in office—1986 to 2005—he took his country from civil war to peace; instituted basic economic reforms; installed multiparty democracy; and merged the militias of the warring parties (RENAMO and FRELIMO) into a united armed forces.

Chissano’s trump card, though is that he handed over power, in February 2005, after a properly contested election, refusing to countenance the constitutional option of a third term. This is the “Mandela magic” that Dr Ibrahim is hoping will rapidly spread throughout the continent’s leaders.

Question marks remain over the prize. Yes, the winner can spend the money on whatever he likes. Yes, the cash could be stopped, should Chissano’s behaviour warrant it. No, the prize need not be awarded every year; if there were such a glut of candidates, it would never have been necessary. Yes, maybe the prize does paradoxically reinforce the “big man” archetype of African leadership. But it’s a start.

The prize will not cure all Africa’s ills, and nor is it trying to. But the founder of the prize is adamant that leadership is the place to start. In a ceremony marked by optimism, Ibrahim made sure to end on a high. Following the unveiling of the Mandela bronze in August, he warned Ken Livingstone, London had better watch out: we’re going to be needing a lot more grassy areas for statues of the next generation of African leaders.

The Jim Watson race row

Published
by
Philip Ball
on October 22, 2007
in Science and technology
. 3 Comments

Jim Watson seems to be genuinely taken aback by the furore his recent comments on race and IQ have aroused. He looks a little like the teenage delinquent who, after years of being a persistent neighbourhood pest, finds himself suddenly hauled in front of a court and threatened with being sent to a detention centre. Priding himself on being a social irritant, he never imagined anyone would deal with him seriously.

The truth is that there is more than metaphor in this image. Watson has throughout his career combined the intelligence of a first-rate scientist and the influence of a Nobel laureate with the emotional maturity of a spoilt schoolboy. There is nothing particularly remarkable about that – it is not hard to find examples of immaturity among public figures – but the scientific community seems to find it particularly difficult to accommodate such cases. For better or worse, there are plenty of niches for emotionally immature show-offs in politics and the media – the likes of Boris Johnson, Ann Widdecombe, Jeremy Clarkson and Ann Coulter all, in their own ways, manage it with aplomb. (It is not a trait unique to right-wingers, but somehow they seem to do it more memorably.) But although they can sometimes leave po-faced opponents spluttering, the silliness is usually too explicit to be mistaken for anything else.

Science, on the other hand, has tended to be blind to this facet of human variety, so that the likes of Watson come instead to be labelled “maverick” or “controversial,” which of course is precisely what they want. The scientific press tends to handle these figures with kid gloves, pronouncing gravely on the propriety of their “colourful” remarks, as though these are sober individuals who have made a bad error of judgement. Henry Porter was a little closer to the mark in the Observer, where he called Watson an “elderly loon”—the degree of ridicule is appropriate, except that Watson is no loon, and it has been a widespread mistake to imagine that his comments are a sign of senescence.

Continue reading ‘The Jim Watson race row’

The sound of music

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on October 22, 2007
in Arts and culture
. 1 Comment

Last week the New Yorker’s pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a mischievous article in which he argued that in the mid-1990s, white indie rock music “lost its soul” by turning its back on the black music influences that had been used to such powerful effect by acts like Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and the Clash. The result, he suggested, was a parade of bloodless bands producing formless, introspective music of increasingly limited appeal. Here he is describing a performance by Arcade Fire,  indie band du jour:

As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

[…] I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century? These are the volatile elements that launched rock and roll, in the nineteen-fifties, when Elvis Presley stole the world away from Pat Boone and moved popular music from the head to the hips.

Predictably, the piece caused a mini-storm in the music blogosphere. But more interesting than the merits or otherwise of the “musical miscegenation” case is something clearly illustrated by the above passage—the superiority of at least some American music journalism to its equivalent on this side of the Atlantic.

“Syncopated patterns,” “low registers,” “heavy African downbeat”—by focusing on the aural attributes of the music he discusses—the way it sounds—Frere-Jones is doing something that British music journalists all too often shy away from. As exhibit A, take this Tim Footman column from the Guardian’s Comment is Free site. Defending an incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness “review” of Radiohead’s new album by Paul Morley elsewhere on the Guardian site, Footman argues that it was Morley and his colleagues at the NME (Parsons, Burchill et al) that revolutionised British music journalism by focusing on the “truth” that “it’s not what pop music sounds like that’s important, it’s what it’s about, what it means.” And so was ushered in a “golden age” of “discursive, iconoclastic” music writing.

Footman does not overstate the influence of Morley and his pals; they are largely responsible for the self-absorbed witterings that pass for most music journalism in contemporary British newspapers and magazines. The idea that writing about music should involve at least some kind of description of what it sounds like is almost entirely absent these days, at least from pop music journalism; if you’re lucky enough to get a reference to instrumentation, rhythm, melody or arrangement, it’ll almost certainly be pressed into service as evidence for something about the artist’s attitude or values.

The better American writing, by contrast, understands the importance of the musical aesthetic, and that the qualities of great pop music transcend genre, attitude or fashion. By listening to, focusing on and writing about music qua music, Frere-Jones is carving out a niche for himself as one of the more incisive writers of his generation. Another example is his New Yorker colleague Alex Ross; despite being largely a classical music critic, Ross’s profile of Björk is one of the best musical portraits I’ve ever read, largely because it identifies what it is that makes the Icelandic singer such an interesting figure: not her fashion sense, or her eccentricity, or her “kookiness”—but her wide musical palate and and her ability to successfully combine avant-garde experimentation with traditional melody.

It’s not clear why there should be such divergence between British and American pop journalism—is it going too far to trace it back to the traditional concern in US journalism for facts before opinion?—but until our hacks learn to refocus on the sound of music, I’ll stick with the Yanks.

Measuring the world

Published
by
Susan Greenberg
on October 22, 2007
in Arts and culture, Books and History
. 0 Comments

The Prospect Reading Group met this month to discuss Measuring the World, by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. I wasn’t able to attend the meeting due to illness but a report was compiled by group member Caroline Ballinger, including observations from those present and a few of my own.

Measuring the World is an imagined account of the lives of two German scientific giants of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss, structured around a (real? potential?) meeting between the two men later in life. The book was a literary sensation in Germany itself, and had good reviews in the UK, including in this magazine. The book was chosen following a discussion by the reading group about whether there were novels coming out of Europe as ambitious as some noteworthy examples from the US, in asking the big questions and linking the private and public spheres.

Our reading group had an interesting but rather unenthusiastic discussion about the book: interesting because of the subject matter, but unenthusiastic because of doubts about the work as a piece of writing. The most important complaint was that Kehlmann fails to make the science come alive, so that it is difficult for non-scientists to grasp the significance of the breakthroughs made by these two men. There were also questions as to whether the narrative structure – in which alternating chapters follow the careers of each man – was entirely successful, and a sense that the Humboldt sections worked better than those on Gauss.

What holds it together is the author’s ironic humour and the vivid descriptions of Humboldt’s travels to South America, which had a ‘Heart of Darkness’ feeling at times. There is also an interest in the emotional detachment of the main characters, who take to extremes the championing of the scientific and rational over the emotional, and Humboldt’s obsessive attempts to impose order on a chaotic world. There is ambivalence here: Gauss’s son Eugen loves poetry, but is also susceptible to political romanticism which can lead to extremism. Kehlmann shows sly self-awareness when he has Gauss muttering darkly about the modern fancy for fictional stories about real people.

A darker side of Prussian emotional repression emerges in a scene towards the end of the book in which the leader of the Gymnastics movement, an early expression of militant German nationalism, delivers a rant on the nation’s humiliations. One imagines that for German readers, Kehlmann’s book offers a subtle, witty examination of what it is to be German. But he also offers a view on the vagaries of power from a wider slant. In the period in which the novel is set, the United States is a newly independent nation looking with concern at the antics of powerful Spain to its south. Thomas Jefferson queries Humboldt about Spanish rule: “If one had a great power for a neighbour, one could never have enough information.”

The LSO’s commanding assistant conductor

Published
by
Stephen Everson
on October 19, 2007
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

Daniel Harding was due to conduct the LSO in two concerts at the Barbican, each devoted to a single Czech composer: Dvořák and then Janáček. In the event illness kept him from the first of these (11th October) and his place was taken by the orchestra’s assistant conductor, Michal Dworzynski. The prospect of hearing Harding conduct Dvořák had been an intriguing one, since it was far from obvious how the musical personalities of conductor and composer would mesh (and in that respect at least, the Janáček evening seemed a much safer bet). In fact the main draw was the chance to hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Dvořák’s Piano Concerto. Aimard, of course, is best known as a hugely persuasive advocate of contemporary music, and for a long time he seemed to be invited to play little else. In recent years, however, he has been able to extend his concert repertoire to show that the keen musical imagination and secure technique that have enabled him to attract new audiences to Ligeti and Boulez also make him an exceptionally interesting interpreter of classical and romantic works. Just as there are many who would have remained cold to the musical avant-garde had they not been introduced to it by hearing Aimard, so there must be more than a few avant-gardistes he has now bought to Dvořák.

If few pianists have the Dvořák concerto in their repertoire, even fewer conductors do, and it would have been to Dworzynski’s credit that he was up to conducting it at short notice had the results been no more than competent. As it was, the performance was staggeringly good - indeed, in the same league as that of the eighth symphony which followed after the interval, and to say that is high praise indeed. I confess that I had not heard of Dworzynski before the announcement that he was to replace Harding, even though this is his second year in post, which he took up after winning the Donatella Flick conducting competition in October 2006. On the strength of this concert, at least, I will be more excited to hear the LSO under the baton of this Polish 28 year-old than under those of its various principle conductors.

Certainly the orchestra responded to him as I have heard them do to few others. Throughout their playing a combination of beauty, alertness, and flexibility that was really quite special. In the concerto, the affectionate clarity of Aimard’s playing was matched by that of the orchestra, all sections of which maintained a chamber-music attentiveness so that they could pick up on his inflections of phrasing. It was a performance of great concentration and also great spontaneity, and there are not many conductors who can achieve that when working with a soloist. It is difficult too to write about the performance of the eighth symphony without gushing. It was both unusually detailed and unusually well structured: so many phrases that can pass by without notice were phrased so as to make them alive and purposeful, but never in a way that distorted the structure of a movement as a whole. He was able to build and to relax tension by controlling articulation and sonority, without needing to resort to dynamics or changes of speed - so that when he did make use of these, the effect was overwhelming. When von Dohnányi retires from the Philharmonia next summer, London will not be replete with conductors who have this kind of understanding of the central symphonic repertoire, and we can only hope that the LSO will have the sense to make more frequent public use of their commanding assistant conductor.

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on October 18, 2007
in Inside Prospect
. 2 Comments

With a big Israel/Palestine summit in Annapolis, Maryland, planned for mid-November, and the US administration looking uncharacteristically willing to broker a new deal, hopes in some quarters are high that the middle east peace process could soon get back on track. But while the politicians talk, writes Jo-Ann Mort in a web exclusive for Prospect, businessmen on both sides of the divide are creating their own facts on the ground. Let us know what you think below.

Also this week: Christine Constable of the English Democrats replies to Jack Straw’s article in the October 2007 issue on “English votes for English laws.”

The blogging scholarship enigma

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on October 17, 2007
in Elsewhere on the web
. 2 Comments

In one of the first schemes of its kind, a shortlist of web-savvy American students have spent the last few months competing for a $10,000 blogging scholarship to help with tuition fees—just one part of a scheme conceived by the American philanthropist Daniel Kovach, whose Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation also offers cash awards to female and minority students, web designers, political bloggers and majors in library and information sciences.

It’s a project with a distinctly utopian tone: as the foundation’s website puts it, “those who freely express themselves are far more likely to find their true passions and connect with people.” But is it also too good to be true? A cynic might suggest that the advertising revenue Kovach stands to gain from entrants directing everyone they know towards him quite possibly outweighs the money he is giving away. And the fact that his site bristles with a bewildering variety of not-obviously-all-that-useful links to all things scholarship related could also give pause for thought.

The clincher, though, is an April article buried within CNN’s online Business 2.0 Magazine, which features Kovach as an example of the latest trend in internet revenue-gain: vacuuming up google links for ad revenue. This explains the bizarrely inclusive nature of his site’s listings: having discovered that people regularly search for scholarships for “twins,” “tall people,” and “left-handed people,” he added a section about each. “There are hardly any real scholarships,” Kovach explained, “but we’ll give the searcher any information they want.” In case you want to try it for yourself, here’s their quick how-to guide:

For $900, Kovach hired a designer to give the site a simple and authoritative look. He found freelancers on the Web to write items on topics from essay writing to sports scholarships. He mapped out what categories the site should include.

Each step of the way, Kovach milks trends big and small. He says he spends about 15 minutes a day culling education-related articles from Google News, scanning the headlines in search of anything that might help him stoke traffic.

“You have to sift through it all,” he says. “No one is going to hand you pieces of trend gold.” And he uses Google’s Keyword Tool and Wordtracker–services that show what phrases people are searching–to figure out which parts of his site to beef up.

So much for utopias.

One to watch

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on October 17, 2007
in United States
. 3 Comments

US Presidential hopeful Barack Obama may have taken a bruising from the well-oiled Clinton machine in both the polling and fundraising race of late, but he’s still winning the war on one front.

Despite a recent charm offensive from the smooth-talking Mr Clinton, whom Hilary has tasked with restoring America’s reputation abroad, it appears that fresh-faced Senator Obama is the overwhelming favourite among Americans living overseas. In the first half of this year, expatriate donations to the Obama campaign almost equalled the total given to all the other Democrat and Republican candidates put together.

And Americans living in Britain have contributed the most to his campaign—which is why London was an obvious place to send his wife Michelle to fundraise this week. The press were barred from the $23000-a-head dinner at the Landmark Hotel on Monday night (indeed one hapless Chicago Tribune reporter was forcibly ejected), but by all accounts she made quite an impression.

Mrs Clinton, it seems, is not the only one who has an asset in the form of a spouse.

While Michelle Obama does not command the same brand-recognition as a former President, there are many similarities between the Obamas and the Clintons as teams. Just as Bill contributes an important feelgood factor to the Clinton campaign (in contrast to Hilary, who is often perceived as cold); Michelle, a sharp, businesslike attorney, provides the perfect counterbalance to the more dreamy, emotive style of her husband.

Many pundits have looked at Clinton’s daunting 33 percentage point poll lead and formidable campaign warchest and written Mr. Obama off. But they would do well to look again—both at the crucial caucus of Iowa (where the gap between the candidates is a lot smaller), and indeed at Mrs Barack Obama.