Monthly Archive for January, 2008

We the people

Published
by
Susha
on January 24, 2008
in Books
. 0 Comments

Browsing through the books recently arrived in the Prospect office, I picked up “How Fiction Works” by literary critic James Wood, which will be published next month. Wood starts his first chapter, Narrating, with a typically clear statement: “The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors. I can tell the story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps in the second person singular or in the first person plural, though successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed. And that is it.”

Which got me thinking. I’ve read quite a few stories in second person, but I find the style usually begins to grate after a while. It also never really seems apparent what the author is trying to achieve—an even closer identification with the reader than first person singular? A homage to Choose Your Own Adventure books? (While I’m on the topic, has anyone ever written a novel in the second person plural, which is a distinct form in some languages such as Spanish?)

But I’ve also read several novels in the past few years that have successfully—as far as I’m concerned—utilised the first person plural. Most recently, Joshua Ferris’s And Then We Came to the End, which rightly made it onto several “best books of 2007” lists, and is almost entirely written in the first person plural. Going back a few years, Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2004) is partly written in it, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides (1993) exclusively uses it. (There are others including, inevitably the great experimentalist William Faulkner.)

These novels work for me because the narrative device isn’t purely a gimmick. In Ferris’s novel “we” is the collective voice of the employees in a Chicago advertising agency, capturing the camaraderie of working life: “We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours. Then a day would pass in perfect harmony with our projects, our family members, and our coworkers, and we couldn’t believe we were getting paid for this.” The Virgin Suicides is narrated by a Greek chorus of men telling the story of five doomed sisters they knew during their teenage years—”We saw her only rarely, in the morning, fully dressed though the sun hadn’t come up, stepping out to snatch up the dewy milk cartons.” It’s a haunting book that derives its emotional impact from the first person plural, and probably wouldn’t work as a novel without it. Finally, and least essentially, Joy Fowler’s “we” stands for the members of a book group, “We suspected a hidden agenda, but who would put Jane Austen to an evil purpose?”; its use echoes the whimsical nature of the book as a whole.

Do any other options for narrating a story exist? Wood is emphatic: “Anything else probably will not much resemble narration; it may be closer to poetry, or prose-poetry.” Is he wrong?

Tennis gets interesting

Published
by
William Skidelsky
on January 24, 2008
in Sport
. 0 Comments

Thanks to the “Watch” feature on the BBC’s website, I’ve been catching some of the Australian Open tennis, which concludes this weekend. So far, it’s been an unusually engrossing tournament, because in both the men’s and women’s events, there have been strong signs that the current order is in the process of toppling. Over the last few years, both the men’s and the women’s games have been characterised by the dominance of an individual: in the men’s, Roger Federer, and in the women’s, Justine Henin. Federer’s dominance has been more total than Henin’s, of course, but people tend to forget just how much of a grip Henin has had on the women’s game: in the second half of last year, for example, she didn’t lose a single match. Below Federer and Henin have been a small group of other players—Nadal and Djokovic, Sharapova and the Williams sisters—who have looked capable of challenging their dominance, but only occasionally.

With this tournament, though, things are suddenly looking very different. Henin has already gone out—she was beaten in the quarter-finals by Sharapova. This is not all that remarkable in itself, but the manner of the defeat was—because Henin was absolutely thrashed, losing the second set to love (something that hasn’t happened to her for several years). The men’s event is shaping up even more interestingly. Federer is still in it (he plays Djokovic tomorrow in the semis) but he has looked far, far more vulnerable than he has looked in a grand slam event for years. He very nearly lost to the world’s no 49 Janko Tipsarevic in the third round, winning 10-8 in the fifth: this is something that doesn’t happen to Federer in the early rounds of grand slams. And in other games he has looked well below his best.

But the biggest story of all is the emergence of an entirely new star—Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France. Tsonga, you may remember, beat Andy Murray in the first round. Since then, he has progressed remorselessly, and just this morning beat Rafael Nadal, the number two seed, in straight sets in the first semi-final. I caught some of it, and it was quite simply one of the most extraordinary performances I’ve ever seen. Rafael wasn’t playing badly, but Tsonga overpowered him, serving ace after ace, swatting winners from the back of the court, getting back some extraordinary reactive volleys, and generally hardly missing a shot.

A year ago, Tsonga was ranked outside the world’s top hundred, and even now he is only ranked 38. This sort of instant explosion of brilliance doesn’t happen very often, and it raises interesting questions about the future of the men’s game. If Tsonga can sustain this sort of form—if he really is as good as he’s looking at the moment—there is no doubt that he can become the best in the world, and even one of the greatest of all time. But will he? Or will this prove to be just one of those once-in-a-lifetime streaks of form that sport witnesses every so often, and which in retrospect seem inexplicable?

The Oscars revisited—the trouble with stars

Published
by
David Herman
on January 23, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

Two films that didn’t fare too well in yesterday’s Oscar nominations were American Gangster, Ridley Scott’s terrific thriller about drugs dealing in late 1960s/early 1970s Harlem, and Charlie Wilson’s War, directed by Mike Nichols and written by Aaron Sorkin, a clever film about the twists and turns of US policy in Afghanistan during the end of the cold war.

What the films have in common is big names. Big name directors and big stars: Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe fight it out in Harlem, and Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman take on the Soviets. And this, the cynic might feel, is exactly their problem. American Gangster needed big names to make the kind of big film that would pull in the crowds, and Charlie Wilson needed big names to get made at all—a clever, wordy and very liberal critique of US foreign policy in Afghanistan won’t get made unless there’s a couple of stars at the top of the credits.

But that’s where the problems start because stars bring their own baggage. Denzel Washington has to be the nicest drug-dealing gangster since those nice guys in The Godfather. He doesn’t swear, he goes to church, he’s nice to his mother and to his wife and apart from the occasional shooting (and burning) he’s the kind of gangster you could take home to mom. He even dresses smartly. At the end (and don’t read this if you haven’t seen the film) he’s positively avuncular, with that cute, white-teethed smile and those granny glasses. Well, of course. He’s played by Denzel Washington. And Denzel doesn’t want to play some psychopathic thug out of Tarantino or the Coen brothers. Nor does his agent. After all, one day he’s going to play those cutesy black parts that Morgan Freeman plays now. So cue granny glasses and cute smile. Screw realism. That’s part of the film’s problem. The other is its sensitivity over the “n” word. Only Tarantino’s gangsters call anyone “nigger.” Can you imagine a film about a black gangster in New York, where the word “nigger” is used just once? Everyone tiptoes around race because we’re in the PC years, even though the film is set 30 years ago.

Continue reading ‘The Oscars revisited—the trouble with stars’

2008 Oscar nominations

Published
by
David Herman
on January 22, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

It’s hard to imagine a more high-testosterone group of films than this year’s shortlist for the Oscars. Big, violent films about men and madness dominate. Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood with Daniel Day-Lewis, the Coen brothers’ slaughterhouse No Country for Old Men and Michael Clayton, with Michael Clooney as a top New York law firm’s Mr Fix-It, have 22 nominations between them. Atonement has 7, but none for Keira Knightley or James McAvoy. Too much simpering and not enough blood and guts perhaps.

Look up There Will Be Blood on the Internet Movie Database and it offers these “keywords” for the film: “Beaten to Death/Oil/Shot in the Head…” For No Country for Old Men you get “Hospital/Blood/River/Gun Corpse” and for Michael Clayton, “Dark/Eavesdropper/Exploding Car…” That just about says it all. Throw in best actor nominations for Viggo Mortensen as a ruthless Russian hitman and Tommy Lee Jones as a war veteran in The Valley of Elah and you get the picture. Not a year for chick-flicks, rom-coms or art films (except for Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

The big losers were the big-budget adventure films. The Pirates of the Caribbean and The Golden Compass got virtually zilch. The other striking thing about the list is that none of these films were huge box-office winners. Pirates and Ratatouille were the only nominated films to gross big (over $150m). There’s no Titanic, Star Wars or ET among this lot. No Spielbergs or Scorseses either. And no Eastwood or Polanski. These directors are either young or new. Reitman, who directed Juno, Joe Wright, director of Atonement and PT Anderson were all born in the 1970s. Michael Clayton is Tony Gilroy’s first film as a director and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is Schnabel’s third. Only the Coen brothers are old hands, and they’re barely in their 50s. It feels like the changing of the guard.

Among the actors, three performances stand out. Philip Seymour Hoffman has had an extraordinary year. Nominated for his performance as the fast-talking CIA loose cannon in Charlie Wilson’s War, he could have been nominated for Savages or the desperate Andy Hanson in Sidney Lumet’s dark thriller, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Tilda Swinton has hit the mainstream with her portrayal of a ruthless corporate lawyer in Michael Clayton and Javier Bardem’s astonishing hitman psychopath in No Country for Old Men is unforgettable. As is his wig. And, what with Bardem and Hoffman’s hairpiece in Charlie Wilson’s War, there should surely be a new Oscar category: best wig.

Hackney’s kebabs

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on January 22, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 5 Comments

images2.jpgPoor old Hackney. Not only has the London borough becomes a byword for violent crime and social deprivation, not only was it branded Britain’s worst place to live by Channel 4 a couple of years ago, now even our home secretary says that she wouldn’t feel safe walking its streets by night.

I’ve lived in Hackney for the last six years, in a number of houses, and like most middle-class journalists who like to file ethnographic dispatches from their homes in the borough, I love it—the diversity, the nightlife, the entertainment, yadda yadda. And not once in that time have I been mugged, burgled, pickpocketed or stabbed. I’ve never known a place’s reputation be so out of kilter with the reality—at least as I’ve experienced it. But remarks like Jacqui Smith’s have nevertheless become so commonplace that I’ve given up taking offence on behalf of my adopted home borough.

No, what really stuck in the craw was the later “clarification” by one of Smith’s aides, which included the claim that Smith had recently bought a kebab—on her own!—on the streets of Peckham, another deprived London borough. Leaving aside the cringeworthy desperation of the comment—as well as the fact that the home secretary seems to be undermining her own government’s anti-obesity strategy—why has no one alerted the home secretary to the fact that Hackney’s kebabs are the finest in the capital, if not the country? The area’s large Turkish population has led to the rise of a number of superb kebab restaurants on and around Kingsland Road and Green Lanes, in any one of which the koftes or iskenders will knock a Peckham doner into a cocked hat. If only Ms Smith were brave enough to take to the mean streets of Hackney on her own, she might discover this for herself.

UPDATE 1: Dave Hill wonders if the Sunday Times has done Hackney a further disservice by misreporting crime figures

UPDATE 2: Join the Facebook group!

What you can’t see

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on January 21, 2008
in Arts and culture and Elsewhere on the web
. 0 Comments

From the wikipedia page on International Klein Blue—a deep blue hue invented and patented in 1960 by the French artist Yves Klein as part of his search for colours which could themselves represent artistic concepts:

International Klein Blue is outside the gamut of computer displays, and can therefore not be accurately portrayed on this page.

Which makes this website all the more enigmatic in its intent; and usefully reminds us that, sometimes, if you haven’t seen it in the flesh (so to speak), you haven’t seen it at all.

Of course, as the philosopher Thomas Metzinger observes in “The Representational Deep Structure of Phenomenal Experience,” even then you may not actually see it:

If we stay with the example of the famous colour International Klein Blue, for some nondualistic philosophers this would mean single molecules of Rhodopas, vinyl chloride, ethyl alcohol, and ethyl acetate (out of which the colour is made) themselves possess the colour of International Klein Blue. Other nondualistic philosophers would see themselves driven to the conclusion that a certain number of the nerve cells firing in our visual cortex while we are looking at one of Yves Klein’s monochrome pictures are in fact International Klein Blue. Of course this assumption is absurd in both cases.

Come to that, are you sure you’re even reading about it now?

Campaigning in Charleston

Published
by
Will Straw
on January 21, 2008
in United States
. 0 Comments

Much ink has been spilled the positive impact of democracy on growth, peace and wellbeing. Less has been written about the perverse incentives created by universal suffrage such as the desire of political activists to traipse wind-swept streets, knock on doors (only to have them slammed back in their faces) and open themselves up to various grades of verbal abuse. Collecting information on voters is the meat and potatoes of political campaigning, since it ensures that you can direct your propaganda at the undecideds as well as returning to those who have said they plan to back you on election day to make sure they turn their promise into a vote. The problem, however, is gathering the information.

Phone calls can help with pensioners and housewives (or househusbands) but many people are only at home in the evening—when telephone canvassers like to be at home too. Saturday afternoon door-knocking is therefore a tried and tested technique in both Britain and US. I was hoping that South Carolina’s combination of partisan registration process (so you know you’re only knocking on the doors of Democrats) and warmer temperatures would make the experience all the more pleasurable. Charlestonians, however, pride themselves on making you feel at home, and this weekend, a week before the Democratic primary, it absolutely poured.

No one can explain what makes some members of society actually enjoy knocking on strangers’ doors in the rain. But somehow if the company is good and you get a handful of voters who seriously engage, the experience is worthwhile. The real jackpot for me this weekend was in the Charleston suburb of Ladson. One woman came to the door with the slightly cynical expression that canvassers come to know so well. She revealed that she had switched from Clinton to Obama, and back to Clinton, and was now intrigued by Edwards’s message on poverty. We spoke, and she heard, our views on Clinton’s experience, and we said a traditional farewell through the passing of campaign literature. Out of the blue she called after us and asked how her daughter could become a Clinton volunteer. It turned out that she was the grand-niece of President Taft (1909-13) and had thoroughly enjoyed her own political education working on Nixon’s ‘68 campaign.  Despite her rich Republican heritage, she wanted her daughter to get the same experience with the Democrats. Americans really are crying out for a change.

This tragedy was brought to you by…

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on January 18, 2008
in Media
. 1 Comment

It’s a topic I’ve (obliquely) blogged on before, but it continues to astonish me that quite respectable websites can allow key-word-led advertising to become a kind of macabre, ironical commentary on their content.

Take the website of the Daily Mail—a responsible and respectable national newspaper with hundreds of thousands of users. Now, type in a couple of words to perform a search for any one of the habitual horrors that pass through the news: “dead horses,” perhaps, for the Mail’s excellent coverage of the hundreds of neglected animals recently found on a farm in Amersham; or “child killed” for the latest on still worse events. You’ll be presented with a comprehensive list of results, at the very top of which will be a prominent selection of “Sponsored links.” In the examples just given, these read:

1. Dead Horse at Amazon
Low prices on new & used music. Qualified orders over £15 ship free

2 The Horse is Dead
Fantastic low prices on CDs. Feed your passion on eBay

3 Dead Horse Point Poster
Find any dead horse point poster here. Huge poster selection.

and:

1 Accident Claims: Claim 100% Compensation
100% Compensation for Personal Injury. Enquire on …

2 Child Dead
Compare Prices before you buy.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with advertising on websites, or with using word recognition, or with sponsoring searches. But there is something disconcerting about a serious website regaling you with automated drivel of the most clunking, consumerist sort while you’re trying to find out what they have to say about the killing of innocent children or animals.

Open-source intelligence

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on January 18, 2008
in United States
. 1 Comment

Lawrence Wright’s epic profile of US intelligence supremo Mike McConnell in the New Yorker—not available online, unfortunately, but there’s an abstract here—is well worth trawling through. Wright is particularly skilful at reviving what can seem a very tired privacy vs security debate by taking us through the dilemmas faced by McConnell as a federal law seems to restrict his ability to eavesdrop on the conversations of the captors of three kidnapped soldiers in Iraq. McConnell tells Wright that he believes the laws governing surveillance by intelligence agencies are ill-suited to the age of hyper-communication, and are jeopardising the lives of Americas by placing overly restrictive limits on intelligence agents. (One of his cyber-security colleagues spells it out more bluntly to Wright: “We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”)

Yet McConnell, whose attitudes towards privacy concerns—essentially that they are overdone—seem to lean towards those of the old-fashioned, unreconstructed spymaster, has also overseen the adoption within the intelligence community of various online models to facilitate debate and discussion:

In 2006, the community adopted Intellipedia, a secure version of Wikipedia. Blogging is now permitted on internal servers, giving contrarian opinion a voice. There is a new “A-Space”—based on sites such as MySpace and Facebook—in which analysts post their current projects as a way of creating social networks.

Elsewhere, Wright tells us about wings of the intelligence agencies that trawl through thousands of foreign media and other open sources, looking for “early warnings” of things like epidemics that could have international implications. Open-source intelligence is a topic that we at Prospect have been fascinated by for a good while—though not yet one which we’ve written about in any detail. Of course, what Wright describes above is hardly “open-source” insofar as “Intellipedia” is kept secure and blogging allowed only on servers within the agencies. (And in the glory days of the cold war, technological innovations like these would probably have been invented rather than appropriated by intelligence agencies.) But it is nonetheless refreshing to see the US intelligence community open to novel systems that facilitate internal debate and dissent, and interesting to see how these developments play out in future US intelligence output.

There are already signs that this new, more open approach is bearing fruit. The December national intelligence estimate, which contrary to previous reports claimed that Iran had put its nuclear programme on ice back in 2003, was, according to McConnell, made subject to attack within the intelligence community before publication to test it for weaknesses, and therefore to ensure that the published version was as robust as possible.

UPDATE The New Yorker has now published the piece online. Thanks to Simon in the comments.

In memoriam Bobby Fischer

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on January 18, 2008
in Arts and culture and In the news
. 0 Comments

At the unexpectedly early age of 64, chess great Bobby Fischer has died. Fischer had been based in Iceland since 2005, before which he had spent years on the run and endured a brief spell in prison, as a result of his contravening the UN embargo on sporting interactions with Yugoslavia, where in 1992 he played (and won) a bizarre “revenge match of the century” against Boris Spassky.

It was a strange end to a strange life which took in paranoia and Holocaust denial in its later years, having begun with quite astonishing promise as the youngest US chess champion and grandmaster in history. It is, of course, for his 1972 world chess championship match against Spassky that Fischer will be most remembered; and aficionados can replay every move at leisure here (check out the Ruy Lopez, Closed, Breyer in the 10th). Back in 2004, Erik Tarloff reviewed David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s influential account of the match for Prospect; just last month, Tarloff returned to Fischer for us with an assessment of Daniel Johnson’s White king and red queen.

At the other end of the gaming spectrum, Richard Knerr, one of the inventors of the hula hoop, also died today at age of 82. Games fans may be interested to know that, technically, Knerr was really a “re-inventor” rather than an originator, in that hoops have been being pushed around for entertainment for over 3,000 years, and were being swung around the body in England as early as the 14th century. Chess, which appeared in its current form in the second half of the 15th century, is a mere stripling in comparison.