In honor of the great John Updike, I post his rules on how to review books. This comes from the introduction to his Picked Up Pieces, his second collection of prose. Since this blog is part literary, I think it apropos that we take heed of Updike's advice:
"1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants' revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author "in his place," making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end."
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Lessons from The New Deal
It is one thing to have reservations about some of the details of President Obama's stimulus bill. It is quite another thing to be opposed to governmental stimulus spending. Keynesian economics works.
The Republicans' Fatal Misreading of FDR -- and How It Would Worsen The Depression
by Michael Steele from The New Republic
Comments
The Arctic wind of a depression is colder with each passing week. There's still an air of unreality: can dole queues really swell and economies really shutter like they did in the history books? Is there a way out? It is here, in the falling darkness, that the differences between the main political parties - too narrow for too long - are becoming plain.
There is a deep disagreement between the Democrats and the Republicans about what governments can and should do now. To understand this, we need to look at a seemingly esoteric debate between the parties about what happened in the last global depression. There are two contradictory stories about how the Great Depression ended. They provide dramatically different road maps for 2009 - so it's essential to figure out which is right. The winning side will determine your chances of losing your job and your home.
The dominant story in the public mind is of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's success. It goes like this. Like Obama, FDR comes to power with the American economy haemorrhaging jobs. He believed that, if private industry is withering, the government has to take up the slack by large public spending programmes. He set millions to work preserving green spaces and rebuilding the country's infrastructure. He thought it was necessary to borrow and spend in the short term to prevent complete and more costly collapse later. Use government to counter the economic cycle, rather than leaving us all to drift out to sea on it.
This is Barack Obama's story too, as they launch their own fiscal stimuli. His favoured analogy is of jump-starting a failing car, rather than let it whimper to a halt on the road.
But at the height of Reaganism, a small number of right-wing economists began to tell a different story about that time. They argued that the American people had been wrong: the New Deal actually made the Depression worse. By borrowing and spending so much, the government created a climate of uncertainty. This made investors hold on to their money - prolonging the despair. It didn't restore private investment, it "crowded it out". So in a depression, all government can do is cut back its own spending and wait for the business cycle to recover. The only effective way for government to hurry this along is a monetary stimulus: altering interest rates and the quantity of money in the economy in an attempt to increase demand.
This is increasingly the Republican view, promoted hard by conservative commentators like George Will. At the core of this case is a stark fact: unemployment was still at 13 per cent in 1937.
Which is true? The reality of FDR's rule is more complex than either story admits - but the lessons vindicate one set of principles resoundingly.
It's almost forgotten now, but FDR ran for election promising a balanced budget and big spending cuts. By the time he assumed the Presidency, however, public protests against the economic collapse were so huge that he was forced to change course and launch his public spending push. The result? Unemployment began to slide down from its 25 per cent peak.
But then, in 1936, FDR wobbled. He listened to the people making the fiscally conservative case and slashed spending. Unemployment rose again - producing the spike in unemployment that people like Osborne now perversely cite as evidence that the New Deal didn't work. But the reality stands. When FDR spent, unemployment fell. When FDR cut back, unemployment rose.
Yet perhaps the clincher is the answer to a bigger question: how did the Great Depression end?
It didn't stop with the conservative suggestion: slashed spending, slashed debt and slashed government activity. It ended with precisely the opposite: the vast fiscal stimulus of the Second World War. The government sent debt soaring to its highest levels in US history (until today) in order to spend more than ever before. It set up the longest boom in US history.
This is our choice now. Obama will have to be pressured hard to make their stimuli much bigger, and to focus less on propping up old corporations and more on building a new low-carbon economy. He will make many mistakes. But, as FDR put it, "Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference".
The Republicans' Fatal Misreading of FDR -- and How It Would Worsen The Depression
by Michael Steele from The New Republic
Comments
The Arctic wind of a depression is colder with each passing week. There's still an air of unreality: can dole queues really swell and economies really shutter like they did in the history books? Is there a way out? It is here, in the falling darkness, that the differences between the main political parties - too narrow for too long - are becoming plain.
There is a deep disagreement between the Democrats and the Republicans about what governments can and should do now. To understand this, we need to look at a seemingly esoteric debate between the parties about what happened in the last global depression. There are two contradictory stories about how the Great Depression ended. They provide dramatically different road maps for 2009 - so it's essential to figure out which is right. The winning side will determine your chances of losing your job and your home.
The dominant story in the public mind is of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's success. It goes like this. Like Obama, FDR comes to power with the American economy haemorrhaging jobs. He believed that, if private industry is withering, the government has to take up the slack by large public spending programmes. He set millions to work preserving green spaces and rebuilding the country's infrastructure. He thought it was necessary to borrow and spend in the short term to prevent complete and more costly collapse later. Use government to counter the economic cycle, rather than leaving us all to drift out to sea on it.
This is Barack Obama's story too, as they launch their own fiscal stimuli. His favoured analogy is of jump-starting a failing car, rather than let it whimper to a halt on the road.
But at the height of Reaganism, a small number of right-wing economists began to tell a different story about that time. They argued that the American people had been wrong: the New Deal actually made the Depression worse. By borrowing and spending so much, the government created a climate of uncertainty. This made investors hold on to their money - prolonging the despair. It didn't restore private investment, it "crowded it out". So in a depression, all government can do is cut back its own spending and wait for the business cycle to recover. The only effective way for government to hurry this along is a monetary stimulus: altering interest rates and the quantity of money in the economy in an attempt to increase demand.
This is increasingly the Republican view, promoted hard by conservative commentators like George Will. At the core of this case is a stark fact: unemployment was still at 13 per cent in 1937.
Which is true? The reality of FDR's rule is more complex than either story admits - but the lessons vindicate one set of principles resoundingly.
It's almost forgotten now, but FDR ran for election promising a balanced budget and big spending cuts. By the time he assumed the Presidency, however, public protests against the economic collapse were so huge that he was forced to change course and launch his public spending push. The result? Unemployment began to slide down from its 25 per cent peak.
But then, in 1936, FDR wobbled. He listened to the people making the fiscally conservative case and slashed spending. Unemployment rose again - producing the spike in unemployment that people like Osborne now perversely cite as evidence that the New Deal didn't work. But the reality stands. When FDR spent, unemployment fell. When FDR cut back, unemployment rose.
Yet perhaps the clincher is the answer to a bigger question: how did the Great Depression end?
It didn't stop with the conservative suggestion: slashed spending, slashed debt and slashed government activity. It ended with precisely the opposite: the vast fiscal stimulus of the Second World War. The government sent debt soaring to its highest levels in US history (until today) in order to spend more than ever before. It set up the longest boom in US history.
This is our choice now. Obama will have to be pressured hard to make their stimuli much bigger, and to focus less on propping up old corporations and more on building a new low-carbon economy. He will make many mistakes. But, as FDR put it, "Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference".
A Defense of the word "Liberal"
Alan Wolfe is not defending liberalism here, which needs no defense, he is merely defending the continuing use of the word "liberal" as opposed to say, "progressive." I agree completely.
29.01.2009
In Defense of "Liberal"
Alan Wolfe is a TNR contributing editor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
When John McWhorter tells us liberals, today on TNR.com, to give up our fixation with the term, it is not clear if he is speaking as a linguist, a political pundit, or, increasingly fashionable these days, both. In any case, I could not disagree more.
Words change their meaning, as McWhorter rightly points out; one of my favorites is the persistent use of the term "condescend" in Jane Austen, where it is clearly meant as a compliment. But words do not change their meaning through acts of God. Their meanings change because we change them. This, I dare say, is precisely why McWhorter took to this site to make his argument. He was not merely announcing that the old meaning of liberal is now passé; he was urging that we treat it as passé.
A libertarian like F. A. von Hayek once wrote that he was not a conservative. I do not think that those to the left of George Bush and Karl Rove should say that they are not liberals. Liberal is a good word because the values it embodies--the very ones cited by Tim Ash, whose reflections on the term prompted McWhorter's piece--are good values. As I say in my own effort to deal with these issues, The Future of Liberalism (officially published next Tuesday), we do not study the "conservative arts" and we do not call Western polities "conservative democracies." Liberals are people who are generous of temperament, committed to fairness, and believers in such substantive goals as autonomy and equality. No other term captures that range of meanings. Progressive--a term frequently urged as a substitute for liberalism, including by McWhorter himself--is dreadful by comparison; it assumes a straight road from there to here to the future, when, as the liberal Kant pointed out and the liberal Isaiah Berlin seconded, out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing could be fashioned.
The application of the word liberal to politics derives from the first decade or two of the nineteenth century when Spanish reformers were searching for an alternative to Napoleonic rule. McWhorter says that we should not be bound by the way terms have been used in the past because conditions change. Some do. Some do not. The ideas that we ought to be free from the capricious rule of tyrants, that we have the power to shape the world in which we live, that we insist on the primacy of rights, that in recognizing our own flaws we should be tolerant of others--these are the stuff of permanent things. Letting go the term that made them part of our consciousness would be a terrible mistake.
--Alan Wolfe
Posted: Thursday
29.01.2009
In Defense of "Liberal"
Alan Wolfe is a TNR contributing editor and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
When John McWhorter tells us liberals, today on TNR.com, to give up our fixation with the term, it is not clear if he is speaking as a linguist, a political pundit, or, increasingly fashionable these days, both. In any case, I could not disagree more.
Words change their meaning, as McWhorter rightly points out; one of my favorites is the persistent use of the term "condescend" in Jane Austen, where it is clearly meant as a compliment. But words do not change their meaning through acts of God. Their meanings change because we change them. This, I dare say, is precisely why McWhorter took to this site to make his argument. He was not merely announcing that the old meaning of liberal is now passé; he was urging that we treat it as passé.
A libertarian like F. A. von Hayek once wrote that he was not a conservative. I do not think that those to the left of George Bush and Karl Rove should say that they are not liberals. Liberal is a good word because the values it embodies--the very ones cited by Tim Ash, whose reflections on the term prompted McWhorter's piece--are good values. As I say in my own effort to deal with these issues, The Future of Liberalism (officially published next Tuesday), we do not study the "conservative arts" and we do not call Western polities "conservative democracies." Liberals are people who are generous of temperament, committed to fairness, and believers in such substantive goals as autonomy and equality. No other term captures that range of meanings. Progressive--a term frequently urged as a substitute for liberalism, including by McWhorter himself--is dreadful by comparison; it assumes a straight road from there to here to the future, when, as the liberal Kant pointed out and the liberal Isaiah Berlin seconded, out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing could be fashioned.
The application of the word liberal to politics derives from the first decade or two of the nineteenth century when Spanish reformers were searching for an alternative to Napoleonic rule. McWhorter says that we should not be bound by the way terms have been used in the past because conditions change. Some do. Some do not. The ideas that we ought to be free from the capricious rule of tyrants, that we have the power to shape the world in which we live, that we insist on the primacy of rights, that in recognizing our own flaws we should be tolerant of others--these are the stuff of permanent things. Letting go the term that made them part of our consciousness would be a terrible mistake.
--Alan Wolfe
Posted: Thursday
Lincoln Says
"I cannot read generally. I never read textbooks, for I have no particular motive to drive and whip me to it. I don't and can't remember such reading."
-Abraham Lincon from The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln edited by Bob Blaisdell
-Abraham Lincon from The Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln edited by Bob Blaisdell
Revolutionary Road - The Movie (2)
Upon reflection let me make a few more comments.
The 50's are caricatured as a decade monochromatic sameness and dullness. In the movie we see hoards of men going to work in the same looking suits and the same looking hats. This is a bit overdone. There was much more going on in the 50's that conformity. After all, the modern civil rights movement started with Montgomery and Little Rock. We had the beginning of rock and roll. And many other things.
The tragedy of the story is finally April Wheeler. She is the one trapped, with aspirations that cannot be fulfilled, trapped in a decade before women had the choices they have today. Everyone suffers at the end because of her desperation. I have no sympathy for Frank. What a klutz.
The 50's are caricatured as a decade monochromatic sameness and dullness. In the movie we see hoards of men going to work in the same looking suits and the same looking hats. This is a bit overdone. There was much more going on in the 50's that conformity. After all, the modern civil rights movement started with Montgomery and Little Rock. We had the beginning of rock and roll. And many other things.
The tragedy of the story is finally April Wheeler. She is the one trapped, with aspirations that cannot be fulfilled, trapped in a decade before women had the choices they have today. Everyone suffers at the end because of her desperation. I have no sympathy for Frank. What a klutz.
The Increasingly Marginalized Republican Party
Even Sen. Mitch McConnell says that the Republican Party is becoming increasingly marginalized as a regional party. What he doesn't say, of course, is that the party is marginalized in the Confederate South. Republicans are slow learners, to their detriment.
Permalink
January 29, 2009
McConnell warns of grim GOP future
McConnell painted a dismal picture of the state of his party.
(CNN) – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell painted a downright dismal view of the state of his party Thursday afternoon, telling Republican National Committee members the GOP is in grave danger of being marginalized to a regional party.
"We’re all concerned about the fact that the very wealthy and the very poor, the most and least educated, and a majority of minority voters, seem to have more or less stopped paying attention to us," the Kentucky Republican said on the second day of the four-day gathering.
"And we should be concerned that, as a result of all this, the Republican Party seems to be slipping into a position of being more of a regional party than a national one.
"In politics there's a name for a regional party, it's called a minority party," said McConnell.
The sobering remarks came one day before the 168 members of the RNC are set to elect a chairman tasked with steering the party out of its beleaguered status, and win back some of the voting blocs virtually abandoned the party last November, including minority and younger voters.
Permalink
January 29, 2009
McConnell warns of grim GOP future
McConnell painted a dismal picture of the state of his party.
(CNN) – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell painted a downright dismal view of the state of his party Thursday afternoon, telling Republican National Committee members the GOP is in grave danger of being marginalized to a regional party.
"We’re all concerned about the fact that the very wealthy and the very poor, the most and least educated, and a majority of minority voters, seem to have more or less stopped paying attention to us," the Kentucky Republican said on the second day of the four-day gathering.
"And we should be concerned that, as a result of all this, the Republican Party seems to be slipping into a position of being more of a regional party than a national one.
"In politics there's a name for a regional party, it's called a minority party," said McConnell.
The sobering remarks came one day before the 168 members of the RNC are set to elect a chairman tasked with steering the party out of its beleaguered status, and win back some of the voting blocs virtually abandoned the party last November, including minority and younger voters.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Revolutionary Road - The Movie
First a warning. Do not see this movie if you are depressed for it will only make your situation worse. The movie, which follows the novel which I did read, is a complete downer. It's dark, and there is no upside. Having read the book, I knew the ending, but still it was depressing leaving the theatre.
Yes, it does follow the book closely, which I always like if I've read the book.
The only quarrel I have is that I find it hard to see Leonardo DiCaprio as a 50's fellow. He seems out of place in 1955. The rest of the casting is fine. Kate Winslet give an Oscar-worthy peformance.
I suspect the material reflects the life of Richard Yates, who probably never fit into the conventional life. The Wheelers think they are better than their surroundings, and from the beginning think they should a better life than the suburban life of the 50's. What that better life is is never spelled out in either the book or the movie. What exactly were they looking for? The other comment I would make is that they apparently took no great pleasure in their children. I suspect that Richard Yate didn't either.
As I left the theatre at Patton Creek, I heard a man behind me say, "That's the most depressing thing I've ever seen."
Well, yes, but the acting is great and powerful and I would recommend it if you're in a good mood. Do not chance if you are not in a good mood!
Yes, it does follow the book closely, which I always like if I've read the book.
The only quarrel I have is that I find it hard to see Leonardo DiCaprio as a 50's fellow. He seems out of place in 1955. The rest of the casting is fine. Kate Winslet give an Oscar-worthy peformance.
I suspect the material reflects the life of Richard Yates, who probably never fit into the conventional life. The Wheelers think they are better than their surroundings, and from the beginning think they should a better life than the suburban life of the 50's. What that better life is is never spelled out in either the book or the movie. What exactly were they looking for? The other comment I would make is that they apparently took no great pleasure in their children. I suspect that Richard Yate didn't either.
As I left the theatre at Patton Creek, I heard a man behind me say, "That's the most depressing thing I've ever seen."
Well, yes, but the acting is great and powerful and I would recommend it if you're in a good mood. Do not chance if you are not in a good mood!
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