The Blog Without A Name
So, it's been a while. I've been organizing one conference (CLS), attending a second (the Algonkianist one), and I might just be organizing myself to submit an abstract for a third (BLS) -- it's been a busy two weeks. The briefest of updates: reading (in no particular order)
The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 by Steven Runciman, a really excellent monograph on that subject;
Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English, by Andrew Radford, more or less so I can know what textbook to use when I end up needing to teach Chomskyan Minimalism myself;
Texas Republic [sic], by William R. Hogan, a quirky little book about a brief (and quirky) period in Texas history. Hopefully more to come in the form of reviews soon.
One of my Very Bad Habits is that whenever I get nervous or stressed or depressed, I tend to try to obliterate those feelings by walking over to Powell's (the best used-bookstore on the planet, for your information) and buying up books on history or classical literature or linguistic theory or 'exotic' languages or what have you. They give me a feeling that somehow I'm taking part in some grand drama, something really profound, the real implications of which we are only just beginning to understand.
Today, however, was not one of those days; today I took the opposite route, by walking over to the
Oriental Institute to see the newly opened Assyriological gallery at the Museum there. In the same way that books open up new vistas of the imagination, there's something transfixing about being in the present of profoundly ancient artefacts. The oldest stone tool with the residue of human blood on it? They have that. A giant
winged bull from the Assyrian capital at Khorsabad that stands over 15 feet high and twenty feet long weighing 40 tons? They have one of those. A prism recounting the victories of Sargon II? They have one of those, too. Friezes of lions from the famed
Ishtar Gate in Babylon? They have
two of those. Simply being in the presence of objects like this, objects that are so old and so remote that they make all of western civilization seem trite and ephemeral in comparison, can give one a certain sense of perspective about one's own life. Try it some day, if ever you find yourself in Chicago (or near an analogous sanctuary); you might like it.
Only afterwards did I get books at Powell's.
ON THE NIGHTSTAND
How to Rule the World: A Handbook for the Aspiring Dictator, by André de Guillaume (Chicago Review Press 2003). This is an essential for everyone who either wants to be a dictator (as the book says), or revel in the kakology of dictatorship. It's a treasure-trove of witty cynicism, such as:
"There are few minds to which tyrrany is not delightful" (Samuel Johnson)
"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat." (John Lehman)
"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment by the corrupt few." (George Bernard Shaw).
"Fortune is a woman, and if she is to be submissive, it is necessary to beat and coerce her." (Niccolò Machiavelli)
"Greater love hath no man than this, to lay down his friends for his life." (Jeremy Thorpe, British Liberal Party leader in the 1970s)
It tells you everything, from qualities of a good leader, to careers likely to lead to power, to liquidating your opposition, to bleeding the country dry for your personal enjoyment, to making it big in the publishing industry, to being the head of a major world religion! That may sound like a lot, but power can come in many forms. The end point is always power, raw and unadulterated:
"Power has a pretty poor image in today's world of bleeding hearts and political correctness. Some say power should be shared, that too much power in one person's hands is a bad thing, and that power goes to people's heads, but only people without power say these things, while people who have power know that nothing happens without it. You are nothing without power, and your fortunes will blow with the wind, with power you are a force that can change the world."
ON THE SCREEN
Madadayo (1993 by Akira Kurosawa). It would be hard to overstate the silent serenity that one takes away from seeing this film. This was Kurosawa's last film, done at the age of 83, when his eyesight was failing and he was increasingly unable to handle the everyday requirements of cinematic directing. As such, it is not surprising he made of the film a kind of ode on the twilight years in one's life, in a semiautobiographical fashion.
The actual plot of the film is relatively calm and uneventful. It centers around the character of Hyakken Uchida, a professor of German and Japanese literature in Tokyo during the Second World War. At the age of 60, in 1943, he decides to retire from teaching to concentrate on writing. The rest of the movie relates the comings and goings in his daily life in retirement: moving into the "burglar-proof" house, its destruction during the fire-bombing of Tokyo, living the life of an ascetic in post-war Japan, his students building him a new house, acquiring and losing his beloved cat Nora, and, most frequently, being feted on his birthdays by his adoring students. All these events are superficially quite trivial in themselves: I mean, who really cares that much about an orange and white Tabby?
In Kurosawa's hands, though, these events become metaphors about man's attempt to deal with the successes and tragedies present in everyday life, and in what things we ultimately place our true value. For when The Professor is lamenting the loss of his cat Nora, he recalls the old Japanese myth about the Harvest God and the
Hare of Inaba and proclaims each and every person who'd tried helped him to find Nora or sent him words of condolence as the Harvest God, thus invoking the humanism and existentialism that runs throughout Kurosawa's movies. Characteristically, Kurosawa also likes to show off some: from the party where we hear about how much The Professor contributed to the success of one actor's production of Goethe's
Faust (playing Faust's love Margarethe), to the recounting of one (for Westerners obscure) Heian-era poet's dealings with war and the destruction of his livlihood, to the sublime western Baroque music that wraps up the movie. But even though Kurosawa makes these comparisons with literature and art explicit or semi-explict, they are always plausible: Uchida is, afterall, a former professor of literature talking with his students. But beyond plausibility, they are always set up in contrast to the very humane and usually unsophisticated banter he carries on with his former students. Perhaps the most touching point in the film is the one point at the end when we learn the true meaning of the Japanese word
madadayo ("not yet") in the context of a child's game of hide-and-seek. The message is clear: we find ultimate satisfaction and happiness in the kinds of simple relationships we develop from childhood, with our family and friends, and not in external acquisitions of knowledge and material goods that we make over the decades.
Madadayo is a fitting and poignant end to Kurosawa's career.
One of the ironies of the Bush administration is that though variously called "conservative" or "reactionary" by many segments of the press, in many ways he is much more of a revolutionary, in the neutral sense of that term. Take the latest developments in his Cuba-policy (
"Bush will Kuba demokratisieren"). While all Presidents since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion under Kennedy have been content to let Castro stew in his own juices, Bush unprecedentedly is actually taking steps to achieve "concrete proposals" for change on the Carribean island. This is entirely consistent for Bush: he has been more than happy to extend the powers of government in all spheres of action, both domestically and internationally, from the obscenely large budget deficit to the detention camps in Guantanamo to, most spectacularly, the war in Iraq. But how, then, does that square with the moniker "conservative"? The answer, of course, is that it doesn't, because all of these are distinct departures from recent politics and even of hallowed traditions. For those of us skeptical of the unlimited expansion of state powers in whatever sphere, Bush's policies pose a distinct threat.
Two troubling news articles recently. The first (
"Polish troops find four French missiles in Iraq") was rumored of in the months immediately preceding the war, but it was always easy for the French to deny it and for reasonably skeptical people (i.e., those who were willing to doubt the claims of both extremes in the debate) to think that this kind of thing was being manufactured by pro-war lobbies. Now, both of those positions are more difficult to maintain.
The second, which is actually related to the first, concerns the UN. For those of us (like me) who support the UN's possible legitimizing role, it would be a lot more helpful if they were not also almost irredeemably
venal, corrupt and incompetent. It also doesn't help that absolutely everyone involved is a using the UN in their own narrowly defined self-interest: take this
interview with President Putin. He implies that it is somehow the Iraqi people who care about the UN's legitimacy, and that if the US doesn't get that as a cover for its occupation, Very Bad Things could happen.
In fact, the Iraqi people don't give a rat's ass about the UN's putative legitimacy, because their notion of identity and sovereignty does not extend further than the nationstate, if that (they are like most Americans, Russians and Chinese in this regard). The legitimacy that Putin really cares about (and the one that actually makes diplomacy a lot easier even if we argue about whether it's necessary) governs the relations between Great Powers like Russia, China, the EU and so forth. These facts -- both France's hypocritic sale of arms despite UN sanctions and the naive comments of Russia's president -- pose a problem for one-worlders and idealists: the institutions that would be ideal for governing international conflicts will simply breakdown until there is common, tacit agreement that things simply could not work otherwise. This is already the case within large states like the US, France, the UK and so forth, and is beginning to be the case for regions like Europe. But until such notions become, and remain, common to all humanity, no international organization will ever be anything more than the instrument of locally defined exercises in power.
