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By Nathan Bierma


Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

October 2003

This Week:

TIMELINE: SEPTEMBER 2003

The problem with regret, William O'Rourke once noted, is that "it lacks immediacy." You can only have it after the fact, when it's too late to change what you're regretting. Indeed, if only second thoughts could be first thoughts, we kept thinking in September—as President Bush asked Congress for the money and the U.N. for the allied help he once figured he wouldn't need to rebuild Iraq; as a California appeals court second-guessed the state's ability to hold October's recall election (which was then third-guessed and reinstated); as candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger apologized for his behavior toward women on movie sets; as Democrats seemed lukewarm about their current lot of presidential contenders and rallied around a new one, Wesley Clark; as the Nigerian woman who had been sentenced to stoning for adultery was cleared; as Rush Limbaugh made a racist comment on ESPN. Childhood buddies Simon and Garfunkel had second thoughts about their personal differences and announced their first joint tour in twenty years. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wished it could take back a published ad congratulating Dan Reeves on his 200th career victory, which it approved with Reeves' Falcons ahead 17-0 in the first half. They lost 33-31.

September was a month of mourning: as the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks was observed; as esteemed Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh was stabbed to death; as Yetunde Price, the half-sibling of the tennis-playing Williams sisters, was shot and killed; as Indiana governor Frank O'Bannon and sitcom star John Ritter died suddenly; as a Disneyland roller coaster crashed and killed a rider; as Hurricane Isabel devastated the East Coast. And it was a month of wonder. Paraplegic Keegan Reilly climbed Mount Fuji. The world's oldest known person, Kamato Hongo, turned 116. Toyota rolled out it first-ever self-parking car. As planned, the Galileo satellite retired itself by crashing into Jupiter. Archaeologists found fossils of a buffalo-sized rodent in Venezuela. A man accidentally found his long-lost brother after buying a cookie jar from him on eBay. The Cubs and Red Sox made the playoffs together for just the second time since playing each other in the 1918 World Series.

George Plimpton, founder of The Paris Review and briefly a boxer and NFL quarterback, who died last month at his Manhattan townhouse at age 76, was "a serious man of serious accomplishments who just happened to have more fun than a van full of jugglers and clowns," wrote the New Yorker. Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, who made Triumph of the Will for Adolf Hitler, died at 101. As John F. Kennedy's interpreter, Robert Lochner coached the president as he practiced saying "Ich bin ein Berliner." Physicist Edward Teller was known as the father of the hydrogen bomb. Athea Gibson, who learned to play tennis on the sidewalks of Harlem, was the first African American woman to win Wimbledon. Edward Said was a literary critic and Palestinian nationalist. Rand Brooks played Scarlett O'Hara's first husband in Gone With The Wind. Legendary director Elia Kazan, who produced Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway and On the Waterfront and East of Eden in Hollywood, was said to have discovered Marlon Brando and James Dean. With his unforgettable baritone and black outfits, Johnny Cash chronicled the despair of the down-and-out, and hinted at the hope of faith.

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times:

America's internal compass has historically pointed westward. But out in New Mexico, where thunderstorms can be seen for miles and eternity feels like a next-door neighbor, history has traveled on a northward road. It is El Camino Real, the Royal Road, once the footpath of Indians and officially blazed in the 16th century by Spanish conquistadors—a hellish 1,800-mile trail extending from civilization in Mexico City to the wild, remote reaches of the "tierra nueva" north of Santa Fe. … Twenty-two years before the Mayflower, the road carried European colonists to what is now the United States. … In New Mexico, much of the Camino's route is through spare, forbidding terrain, where dust devils whirl up out of nowhere like smoke without a campfire. … Today, there is much news percolating along El Camino Real: some time in the next two years, depending on money, the new $6 million, 20,000-square-foot Camino Real International Heritage Center, now nearing completion, is set to open near Socorro, N.M. The Camino has been designated a National Historic Trail by Congress … Summary*

BORNUUR, Mongolia — A single-lane dirt road winds through rolling hills, past a herd of wild horses, past flocks of sheep, and past white felt gers, the traditional homes of nomads of the steppes. Then the road crests a bluff and the view jumps forward by centuries: the blue walls of a new $75 million Canadian-owned gold mine. The Cameco Corporation's Boroo mine has advanced the farthest of a dozen foreign mining projects in Mongolia—its mill is expected to start pouring gold bars by December. … For most of the 20th century, Mongolia, a landlocked expanse of Asian prairie and desert twice the size of Texas, was trapped and isolated—a Communist buffer state wedged between the Soviet Union and China with little economic development and less contact with the rest of the world. Now a mining boom is beginning, fueled by a free-market economy, investor-friendly mining laws, new mineral discoveries, and the rapidly spreading realization that Mongolia can become China's Canada: a close-at-hand supplier of raw materials to the world. Summary*

TOKYO — Like Natsuko Namba, a growing number of Japanese consumers, young and old, suffer from brand fatigue. One can still find many people sporting Hermès scarves, Prada handbags and Rolex watches, but many others here are starting to turn away from the excess that these and other luxury goods have come to represent. In doing so, they contradict the common belief that Japan's appetite for such goods is bottomless. In fact, since 1996, sales of luxury goods here have declined by more than one third, to 1.2 trillion yen ($10.8 billion) … Total sales have fallen in five of the last six years and are expected to dip another 4.4 percent in 2003. The trend is sending ripples through the $55 billion global market for luxury goods. When their purchases abroad are included as well, the Japanese buy about 40 percent of the world's high-end handbags, shoes, watches and other items … Summary*

WEEKLY DIGEST

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  • It's still not clear who did what and how badly the law was broken when White House sources reportedly exposed the wife of Joseph Wilson (an ambassador under Bush Sr. and a campaign contributor to Bush Jr.) to a syndicated columnist as a CIA operative. But everything is plain as day in the conservative media, says Peter Beinart in The New Republic. "The assumptions—the White House did nothing wrong, its critics are disreputable partisans—are there from the outset," he writes. The arguments that follow—that there was no political motive (there was, Beinart says), that Wilson's wife was not currently undercover (it doesn't matter), and that Wilson should have sought a lower profile, given his wife's work (he shouldn't be accountable for the White House's illegal leaks)—are more muddled and equally dubious, Beinart writes. Full story* The piece is instructive about the particulars of the case, but it is more useful as a snapshot of why politics inhibit sound analysis; readers and writers of partisan media will believe what they're predisposed to believe when new events arise. Beinart is the rare commentator with no cemented loyalties to restrain him from credible criticism (I linked earlier to him criticizing civil rights leaders for their recent absence in Alabama, and last week he ripped Democratic presidential candidates for their vague and evasive statements about Iraq). And he is careful to show that Wilson and many of his supporters are Republicans.
  • As long as we're talking about people's inclinations toward insularity, we may as well state the obvious: we care about diversity much less than we say we do. So wrote David Brooks last month in one of his last regular essays for the Atlantic Monthly before becoming a New York Times columnist. Does anyone believe there exists "a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon"? The exodus of middle-class black families from predominantly black neighborhoods in the city to uniformly black suburbs is just one illustration of people's propensity to form (and stay in) cohesive groups, Brooks says (or does it show that white suburbs are unfriendly to the black middle class?). Maybe we should stop raising our expectations about how diverse we can be, Brooks says. "Sure, Augusta National should probably admit women, and university sociology departments should probably hire a conservative or two. It would be nice if all neighborhoods had a good mixture of ethnicities. But human nature being what it is, most places and institutions are going to remain culturally homogeneous." Brooks' pursuit of irony comes dangerously close to being creepy and Klan-like at points, but he closes his piece with a good point: "It's probably better to think about diverse lives, not diverse institutions. Human beings, if they are to live well, will have to move through a series of institutions and environments, which may be individually homogeneous but, taken together, will offer diverse experiences." Full story
-Brooks in the NYT: Hummers, Harleys, and the packaging of hip*
  • If you want to succeed as a businesswoman, one thing you shouldn't do without is a trusty set of golf clubs. Networking among businesswomen on the golf course is becoming more common, says the Boston Globe (which, absent any handy statistics of the phenomenon, is heavily anecdotal). ''It's an important part of socializing and networking within the sphere of business,'' says one female executive. Full story Just one question: is the rise of golf-playing corporate women a mark of social progress, since they are penetrating the former fortress of white male elites, or not, since they (especially in Massachusetts) are becoming a rather insular elite themselves? (See the above David Brooks essay again.)
  • Never mind a booming drive on the first tee. Jerdone McGhee accomplished a feat for the ages back in 1992, skipping a stone 38 times on one throw, the most on record. An oil field engineer, McGhee has completed a study of his true passion, a soon-to-be-published book on the physics of stone skipping. In it, he pontificates on stone shape and texture, having guest lectured at MIT about the mathematics of the act. Discover magazine reports on his research, and features a graph of one physicists' stone skipping equation, which involves pi and two square root symbols. Full story
  • One you've finished a voluminous research paper or dissertation, your task has only begun. Oh, those dastardly endnotes, says Pulitzer Prize winning author Louis Menand in the New Yorker. "Annotation may seem a mindless and mechanical task," he writes in a lively essay about a numbing subject, greeting the new edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (see this item in earlier weblog). "In fact, it calls both for superb fine-motor skills and for adherence to the most exiguous formal demands." That's ibid with a period and italics. It's Cambridge, Mass., for Harvard University Press; for Cambridge University Press, it's just Cambridge. Menand throws in a few welcome complaints about the woes of Microsoft Word, and eventually waxes philosophical: "There is, if not a right way, a best way to do every single thing … Relativism is fine for the big moral questions, where we can never know for sure; but in arbitrary realms like form and usage even small doses of relativism are lethal." Full story
  • Surveying the pointy pyramids at Giza in Egypt is usually done with some ambivalence: yes, they're magnificent, but imagine the suffering of the slaves who labored on them. But a cover story of Harvard Magazine this summer describes the findings of historian Mark Lehner, who, after years of tedious digging at Giza, has concluded that the pyramid builders were a well-fed, if not wealthy, working class, and labored not under oppression as much as a sense of social obligation (the ancient equivalent, he says, of a massive Amish barn-raising). Lehner's excavation of the builders' communities (including the discovery of Egypt's oldest bakery), paired with other historians' research of temple registries, suggests that builders comprised rotating groups of some social standing. The more he and others learn about the complexity of Ancient Egypt's social organization, the less its government seems totalitarian. "Perhaps," says Harvard, "the Old Kingdom's pharaohs did indeed preside over something more like a nation than a fiefdom." The history of Lehner's studies, complimented with colorful pictures and graphs, is in the full story.

Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.

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