Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 30, 2008
in Inside Prospect
. 0 Comments

In the April 2008 issue of Prospect, Gershom Gorenberg previewed the launch of a new “liberal” Israel lobby in America. The lobby has now launched, under the name “J Street“—describing itself as the “political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.” In a web exclusive for Prospect this week, Gideon Lichfield, Jerusalem correspondent for the Economist, describes the challenges the new organisation will face in the bearpit of US domestic politics.

We also have an extended interview with Duncan Fallowell, novelist, travel writer and regular Prospect contributor. Fallowell reveals his writing strategies, explains how he got to meet Andy Warhol at 30 minutes’s notice, and argues that he is the first travel writer who is not a wanker.

Prospect reads

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 30, 2008
in What we're reading
. 0 Comments

Tom Chatfield

I’ve been feeling in need of poetry this month. Certain books of poetry are fixed points of reference for me—writing of a nourishing density with the uncanny ability to expand in significance with every re-reading. Wordsworth’s The Prelude is one book I was astonished by on a first reading (I was an undergraduate, and had always assumed Wordsworth was a rather boring, desiccated Victorian; suddenly, here were these beating, living visions of hills and lakes; a young man striding across the Alps wrestling with his own mortality), and that has since become an emblem for me of absolute poetic seriousness.

Wordsworth never published The Prelude in his lifetime, yet revised it incessantly, producing some of the most sustained, unsentimental self-examinations that verse has ever seen. Poetry, when it’s great, crystallises fragments of the human condition; it is the highest pitch to which we can bring our impulses of beauty and comprehension. Wordsworth, striding across the hills he loved, gathering perfect blank verses in his head to be later committed to paper, had a humane, restless genius that has left me—again—in awe.

Mary Fitzgerald

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Yates has come back into vogue in recent years, and, for once, I’m very pleased I jumped on the bandwagon. It’s one of the most flawlessly crafted works of fiction I’ve read in years.

To outsiders, Frank and April Wheeler seem like the ideal 1950s suburban couple, but privately they both feel increasingly unfulfilled and trapped. They concoct a plan to escape their stultified lives, but it unravels with tragic inevitability. This is a quintessentially American tale of thwarted dreams and materialist pressures; prescient, in many ways, but also absolutely, vividly in its moment, and Yates has captured his characters’ inner torment with unique and terrifying precision.

David Goodhart

The most depressing thing I read last week was Ziauddin Sardar’s attack in the Guardian on the Quilliam Foundation—the new think tank set up by Ed Husain (author of The Islamist) to counter British Muslim extremism. Zia should be the poster boy for a modern, liberal British Islam—he is clever, articulate (in a blustery sort of way) and immersed in Islam, the history of science and leftist western politics. He could be our own Tariq Ramadan—although without the latter’s baggage and much more liberal. The Guardian piece illustrated why he is not.

Sardar dismissed the new foundation, without any evidence, as a “neocon” front uninterested in standing up for Islam within British society. He even described the foundation “as another attempt at the marginalisation” of British Muslims. This is conspiracy theory tosh. The Quilliam Foundation (to which I am connected in a very lowly adviser role) is a pretty broad-based organisation founded by former Islamists such as Husain and Maajid Nawaz (not, as Sardar wrongly says, jihadists). At worst, it will do no harm; at best, it might help a little to stem the tide of extremism and separatism in parts of the British Muslim world.

So what’s bugging Zia? I’m afraid this is the politics of vanity. Zia appears not to have been consulted about Quilliam, nor invited into its inner circles (although some of his friends and ideological soulmates were). This is a man with a hair-trigger sensitivity to slights from British ex-colonialists, and now it seems from fellow Muslims too. Between the lines, you can read a single thought, “But what about me, Zia Sardar; aren’t I more important than these Johnny-come-latelies?” (If Seumas Milne, the Guardian’s comment pages supremo, had been a better friend of Zia’s he probably would have spiked the piece—but Milne’s ineffable public-school Leninism has convinced him that radical Muslims are the new driving force of global revolution and so he is happy to devote acres of space to denouncing the Uncle Toms of Quilliam.)

Does this matter? Zia is a significant voice, with regular columns in the New Statesman and the Guardian and an important role at the new Equalities and Human Rights Commission. He could, and should, have a big influence over the creation of a liberal, modernised Islam—and yet thanks to his prickly sectarianism he has a far bigger following in Malaysia than in Britain. The Guardian article is a perfect example of why this is.

John Kelly

I’ve been reading Sheldon S Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. I’ve been interested in the paradox of “managed democracies” as a result of the time I spent in Turkey in the mid-1990s, a country where state-sanctioned mega-corporations explicitly and implictly control the economy, themselves sanctioned by the military, which in turn guarantees democracy, so long as the elite vote in the right way.

Wolin examines how democracy in the US has morphed into oligarchy and elitism, with the media as both pawn and manipulator. This is an important book about the dangers of imposing a warped model of an indistinct concept from 35,000 feet and the obscenity of promoting democracy through fear. “According to the liberal theory fashionable among academics, the ideal role of the generality of citizens in a democracy is to ‘deliberate.’ However appealing that ideal may seem, in the reality of the war between imperialism and terrorism the contemporary citizen, far from being invited to a discussion, is, as never before, being manipulated by ‘managed care’ and by the managers of fear.”

Wolin is a measured and thoughtful commentator, unlike swell-headed neocons who promote “inverted totalitarianism” as progressive liberalism. Perhaps they should be dropped from 35,000 feet to persuade reluctant populations that might is right and black is white. Undemocratic, admittedly, but it would make good CNN.

David Killen

Napoleon’s Master—A Life of Prince Talleyrand by David Lawday. On hearing of Talleyrand’s death, Count Metternich is said to have asked, “I wonder what he meant by that?” Thus setting the tone for posterity’s view of Talleyrand as calculating, cynical and amoral—and with a devil’s hoof of a club foot to complete the picture.

Lawday doesn’t pull any punches in this enjoyably written portrait. The ancien régime hauteur with which Talleyrand elevated himself above common standards and morality is shocking to a modern reader. But his belief in personal and press freedom, women’s emancipation, universal suffrage, free education and the need for a peaceful and united Europe brings him tantalisingly close to our own age.

He survived the most dangerous period in European history and somehow contrived to come out on top, capping his career by negotiating the peace with Britain that has endured to this day. The French tend to hero-worship an idealised memory of Napoleon, forgetting the destruction and misery he brought them. Talleyrand’s part in his downfall has ensured that his reputation is forever compromised by accusations of treachery.

We would do better to remember his advice to the emperor, that “any system which aims at taking freedom by open force to other peoples will only make that freedom hated and prevent its triumph.”

Susha Lee-Shothaman

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits is the debut novel of Laila Lalami, a prominent literary blogger. Lalami, a Moroccan, went to the US to study and published this book there, but the focus of her short—perhaps too short—novel is on contemporary Morocco. Four people risk their lives by illegally crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to enter Spain. The book starts with their boat trip and then divides into chapters describing their lives before and after; a shift in viewpoint keeps the structure from being too pat. Lalami is careful to give a cross-section of Moroccan society and only one of her characters (a battered wife) seems overfamiliar. She illustrates what people have to gain and lose by emigrating, and mocks romanticised western attitudes to her country without letting it off the hook for corruption and political repression. And she shows us what life is like in an Islamic country—that is, much the same as it is in any other.

Tom Nuttall

I’ve just polished off Alex Ross’s majestic account of 20th-century classical music, The Rest is Noise. The book has been hailed as one of the finest recent mainstream accounts of classical music in almost every review it’s received (only Stephen Everson in Prospect demurred), and it doesn’t need any further garlands from me. So I’ll just share this delightful anecdote about the master of avant-garde musical far-outery, John Cage:

“Back in 1950, [Cage's] “Lecture on Nothing”… began with the announcement ‘I am here and there is nothing to say,’ and the question period was derailed by Cage’s decision to respond to all queries with a set of six fixed answers, one of which was, ‘Please repeat the question… and again… and again…’ Cage’s Darmstadt lectures had episodes of coherence, but chance operations progressively took over, and by the third lecture he was lighting cigarettes at intervals specified by the I Ching.”

William Skidelsky

I’ve just finished Robert Harris’s The Ghost, which Erik Tarloff reviewed for us in November. It’s a thriller, set on Martha’s Vineyard, narrated by a ghostwriter working on the memoirs of an ex-prime minister who is, to all intents and purposes, Tony Blair. I feel somewhat torn about it. On the one hand, it is a classy piece of work: much better written than most thrillers, and properly gripping. On the other hand, it is just a thriller, and it succumbs to one of the genre’s more wearisome tropes—the unveiling of a dastardly plot of international dimensions which reveals the people we thought were our leaders to be mere puppets in the control of much greater forces… Why does the world posited by thriller writers so often resemble the world posited by conspiracy theorists? I always feel short-changed when a thriller makes this kind of leap, because I think, for the suspense to work, one has to believe that it just might all be true. And I’m afraid I don’t believe that the key to the Blair enigma is… Whoops, I almost said it. You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Intellects vast, cool and sexy

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 30, 2008
in In the news and Inside Prospect
. 2 Comments

If you weren’t put off by the slightly silly questions on More4 News’s feature about the Prospect/Foreign Policy top 100 global public intellectuals poll last night (which consisted largely of a reporter asking Prospect editor David Goodhart why we’d left off “influential” people like Jeremy Clarkson and Osama bin Laden; you can see the report by following a link on this page), then please take the opportunity to vote for your top five here if you haven’t done so already.

Voting has been brisk in the first week—around 7,000 ballots cast—and while voting patterns so far bear a fair resemblance to the results from the 2005 poll, there are a few surprises (as well as a few obvious national vote-rigging campaigns).

More4 News was mildly sniffy about Prospect’s intellectuals wheeze, comparing it to FHM’s top 100 sexiest women reader’s poll. And insofar as both publications have asked their readers to express a preference on a matter that their choice of reading material suggests they may have strong feelings about, the programme was right. The obvious next step, not suggested by the report, is for the two magazines to combine forces to find out who the world’s top 100 sexiest intellectuals are. This time, I imagine Chomsky might find the competition a bit tougher. Do feel free to leave your suggestions below.

A Staine on Guido’s reputation

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on April 30, 2008
in Elsewhere on the web and In the news
. 1 Comment

Guido Fawkes, aka Paul Staines, likes to think of himself as the scourge of Westminster; his blog is replete with examples of villainous or shameful behaviour by members of what Staines sees as the inherently corrupt members of Britain’s political classes. Today, however, Staines himself has become the story; the Independent’s Pandora diary reports that last week Staines found himself up in a magistrates’ court on drink-driving charges. It appears that Staines had over-indulged at a reception hosted by the free-market think tank the Adam Smith Institute, where, he says, “The booze is usually pretty good.”

Staines is no stranger to the sauce, as any visitor to his blog will soon learn. But Guido Fawkes, whose tireless cynicism and fierce plague-on-all-your-houses libertarian independence used to make his site one of the most entertaining and essential reads in the British political blogosphere, has in recent months become little more than an attack dog for the Tories, and has become far less interesting as a result. Might all that Margaux have dulled Guido’s instincts? Meanwhile, one of Guido’s main rivals for the most-read British political blog, politicalbetting.com, goes from strength to strength.

Funnily enough, as I write not a single commenter at Guido’s site has brought up the Independent story; this is not a group usually renowned for its reticence. It may simply tell us something about the lack of crossover between the Independent’s readership and the increasingly partisan Guido Fawkes’s constituency.

Bitter Democrats

Published
by
Will Daunt
on April 29, 2008
in United States
. 0 Comments

Three news stories concerning the Democratic nominations have left a “bitter” taste in my mouth. First, an aide to Michelle Obama was caught ushering young black students off the stage she was due to speak on in Pittsburgh, only to replace them with young white students. All campaigns employ such crowd control (Hillary Clinton’s camp will ensure that there is a distinct lack of grey hair sitting behind her in an attempt to widen her youth appeal), and Obama, who has won the majority of the black vote, was concerned about appearing too black to the predominantly white working classes of Pennsylvania. This does, of course, run against the grain of his campaign message that he can bring together the nation in a way Clinton cannot.

Similarly divisive is the story of Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski, an Obama delegate to the Democratic convention from Illinois who was forced to resign by the Obama team after telling some African-American children outside her house to stop playing in the trees “like monkeys”—a phrase that some claimed carried racist connotations. Concerned about negative press coverage, the campaign swooped on Ms Ramirez-Sliwinski in an attempt to pre-empt the media. Ironically, a negative news story was created anyway—in disgust at such an Orwellian attempt at censorship.

Of course, it was Obama’s own choice of words, in the so-called “bittergate” row, which has stirred up the most dust. Although his comments were badly worded, the overexcited cry from Clinton that this was a clear sign of Obama being “out of touch” smacked of desperation. Clearly, both sides are tired, and with fatigue will come more slip-ups and more ill-advised decisions. As Mary Fitzgerald has argued elsewhere on this site, the longer the Democratic campaign continues, the less airtime John McCain will receive and the more voter information the Democratic party gathers, which can only be good for the party. But the relationship between both camps and the media is becoming increasingly spiky, and one wonders just how much press the Democratic party receives will continue to be good press.

Mayoral hustings

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on April 29, 2008
in British politics
. 0 Comments

Few surprises to report from the final public showdown between the three London Mayoral candidates at Cadogan Hall last night.

The audience’s questions ran along largely predictable lines: crime, hospital closures, transport, and affordable housing, allowing the candidates to quote healthy chunks from their manifestos and knock eachother’s record on said issue. Accustomed as they are by now to sparring with one another, none of the candidates were short on quips (even the chronically wooden Paddick).

But the whole event was somewhat hamstrung by the demands of live broadcasting (and, it seemed, a TV crew who hadn’t got to grips with the basics of sound engineering). And every fifteen minutes the discussion was interrupted by an ad-break, killing the flow of the argument. While the audience fidgeted and Adam Boulton’s orange makeup was reapplied, the candidates cleared their throats and shuffled their papers, before firing up again the moment the cameras were turned on.

That said, the most illuminating moments also happened off-camera. As a warmup exercise, each were asked a few of non-mayoral questions, including which of the US presidential candidates they supported. Livingstone and Paddick both came our for Obama, while Boris who had previously supported Hillary, executed a (knowingly) self-serving volte-face, declaring he now supported Obama too, as the Illinois Senator (like Boris, of course) was the true candidate of “change” and “fresh leadership”.

Disappointingly, however, the best question of the night was never answered. One of the more astute members of the audience asked Boris, (born in New York, raised in Eton, MP in Oxfordfordshire) how “passionate” he was about London. Did he really care about London so much that, if he lost the election, he would accept a post as one of Livingstone’s advisors? The Mayor had earlier promised that if he won, the first thing he would do would be to telephone both of his “esteemed rivals” and offer them jobs. One can imagine Paddick taking him up on this, but not, perhaps, the Honorable Member for Henley-on-Thames.

Dispatches from the maths war

Published
by
Ian Benson
on April 29, 2008
in British politics, Science and technology and United States
. 0 Comments

In a piece for Prospect last year, I reported on developments on the US front of the “maths wars” (an ongoing conflict over how maths should be taught in schools) and suggested that these may have implications for the 40 per cent of children who leave British primary schools without adequate maths or English.

My report was based on the work of schools and children in the Stanford Tizard project. My fellow researchers and I are re-evaluating a math curriculum developed by the math educator Caleb Gattegno, the founder of the UK Association of Mathematics Teachers. For a time it seemed that Labour’s new regime would take the opportunity to replace our outmoded model of maths learning. In this article we look at what has gone wrong, why, and what we might yet do about it.

Continue reading ‘Dispatches from the maths war’

Memories of a doctorate

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on April 29, 2008
in Academia
. 2 Comments

An excellent piece in the Guardian today by Doron Shultziner on the state of graduate studies in Oxford has brought several sharp, recollective intakes of breath on my part. Shultziner outlines something desperately familiar to anyone who has studied as a graduate at Oxford in the last decade or so (I spent almost eight years there myself, doing my undergraduate degree and then a masters and doctorate): that the systems in place for supervision and for giving graduates a proper training in academic occupations like teaching and research are hugely variable and overstretched, and can leave many feeling profoundly isolated. As Shultziner begins:

About a year ago, two Oxford alumni published a critical review of their experience as graduate students at the University of Oxford. The former recipients of the prestigious Rhodes scholarship described “a frustrating academic experience” in an “outdated academic system” where advisers “spend more time avoiding emails than supervising students” and “where DPhil students struggle to have supervisors read their dissertations before submission, and poor supervision is the rule, not the exception”.

I feel especially torn because my own time in Oxford was, in so many ways, a joy and a privilege. As well as being the grateful recipient of financial support from my college, I found a supervisor and colleagues who helped me explore my field (20th century literature and philosophy) with a remarkable degree of freedom and flexibility. At the same time, the finest aspects of the system inexorably mingled with its worst: the flexibility and emphasis on individual relationships put huge pressure on contemporaries who didn’t get on with their supervisors, or who lacked direction or research experience; the often informal procedures associated with teaching and publishing left many feeling “out of the loop” and disillusioned with academia as a career choice; because everything was so personal and pressured, it could be difficult for those who were unhappy to do anything about their problems, even though structures of support theoretically existed. And there was a great deal of pressure on the notably limited resource of really good (i.e. willing and able to teach) supervisors.

I only rarely found myself hankering for the greater formality of a typical American graduate system during my time at Oxford. But this was not true of many other graduates I knew, who (especially in arts subjects) often seemed to feel confused and abandoned. For some, a high degree of freedom and independence ultimately proved an impetus to originality and self-reliance. But for others, the lingering suspicion that the system simply didn’t care about them enough, or contain enough checks and balances, was crushing. Graduates at Oxford are a privileged lot, and know they are. Most also burn with grateful ambition—a precious resource that no university should allow itself to squander.

Farewell Shusha Guppy

Published
by
Susha
on April 28, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

I was saddened to find out, somewhat belatedly, that Shusha Guppy passed away last month at the age of 72. Although possibly better known these days for being the mother of Darius Guppy, Shusha was a highly accomplished woman—she was among other things a singer and writer, as well as London editor of the literary journal The Paris Review for twenty years.

I actually discovered that Guppy had died while idly self-googling. Her first name is almost identical to mine, and this is also the reason that I originally heard about her. In the late 1980s, she published a memoir of her Persian childhood, The Blindfold Horse. The Guardian printed an interview with “Susha Guppy” and my father pointed it out to me. I was so excited to find someone else who shared my name, which is a rare occurrence, that I cut out the article to keep (I think I still have it somewhere). Then the next day the newspaper ran a correction, explaining her name was really “Shusha.” Well, that’s the Grauniad for you.

In the years since, I’ve had occasion to be reminded of Guppy. One of Prospect’s subscribers once mistook me for her and wrote to tell me how much he enjoyed my singing. Various members of the literati have asked me if my name is Iranian, which I attribute to her influence as most other people ask if it’s Japanese, because it’s only one letter away from sushi. (In fact, it’s a regional variant of the more popular Indian girl’s name Usha.) Ironically, I’ve now learned from the obituaries that Guppy’s original name was Shamsi—she adoped “Shusha” after moving to France. The “Guppy” came from marrying the writer and explorer Nicholas Guppy, an ancestor of whom discovered the fish.

Last year, A Girl in Paris, Guppy’s memoir of her student days at the Sorbonne, was republished. Prospect was invited to the launch and I considered going, yet I didn’t—I couldn’t plausibly claim to be a fan, and I had no reason to believe the linguistic near-coincidence would have meant anything to her. Now, of course, I wish that I had gone and had the chance to meet her. Instead, I’m going to make do with the next best thing and order a copy of her first, prize-winning book The Blindfold Horse. I think it’s about time that I read it.

How to ruin your children

Published
by
Tom Chatfield
on April 28, 2008
in Science and technology
. 3 Comments

A timely piece in the Times this weekend saw John Cornwell meeting with brain scientist Susan Greenfield to explore the thesis of her forthcoming book, The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century—namely, that electronic gaming and online culture are “creating a hedonistic, mindless generation.”

It’s timely because tomorrow sees the release of what’s almost certain to be the best-selling video game of the year, and also its most controversial: Grand Theft Auto IV, an 18-rated entertainment in which your avatar’s central task is to win cash and reputation in a parallel NYC by jacking cars, beating pimps, extorting money, etc.

My copy is on order, and I eagerly expect to be revelling in this world within 24 hours, as I have with all the previous GTAs (as notable and loved for their slick soundtracks and atmospheric visuals as for their nail-biting gameplay). But am I being turned into a dopamine-addicted zombie as I blast away? Am I going to get violent at work? Or, more pertinently, are young and impressionable others going to succumb even while my mature sensibility is merely titillated?

I think the answer to all these questions is a resounding no; partly because they’re rather silly questions to ask, at least in the form that many po-faced media commentators are posing them. The interactive worlds presented by electronic games are a profound and transforming experience, and something unprecendented in many ways. They have their dangers, which should not be underplayed; but we understand these dangers poorly, and often fail sufficiently to distinguish them from the better-known tribulations that television, cinema and print have bred (or, for that matter, from the rather more pressing social pathologies associated with poverty, lack of education and suchlike).

One important analogy does stand. Like these other media, electronic games have a complex, creative and highly sociable culture of their own; and, as ever, most analyses conducted from the outside are destined to be both simplistic and (more importantly) simply to look ridiculous to those on the inside whose intellects most need to be mobilized. I look forward to reading Greenfield’s book, and to engaging with the furore that’s sure to roll out along with GTA IV. But I suspect I’ll find myself looking elsewhere afterwards—probably into the online communities and forums devoted to games themselves—for discussions that get to grips with what the future has started to look like, and with what we should really be afraid of.