 |
 |
|
|
|
|
The worst thing I could say about Dublin is that visually, it is probably the EU's least impressive capitalProbably, because I have yet to visit Helsinki. And Luxemburg is certainly in the running.. But I really don't mind the lack of eye candy; I suspect it is because Dubliners have never been materialists. In any case, the labors of its favorite sons are much more impressive than a monument or two. Anyone can build a monument.
This may explain the relative unease that has greeted the latest "modern" monument in Dublin — a 120-meter high metal spike, in a renovated part of town, that the locals have yet to fully adopt. It is a piece of public architecture tailor-made for deconstruction. It is tall, and strong, yet it seems the planners were unsure how much of a statement it should make. The spike has a brushed-metal sheen, and in the typical overcast skies it all but disappears. It projects ambivalence, above all else, but this may be apt: The go-go 90s and all this talk about the Celtic Tiger are a notable departure from the traditional image the Irish have of themselves. They are not yet comfortable in the role of EU wunderkind, because it is a success measured by criteria such as GDP growth and per capita income, not the traditional criteria Ireland excels at: per capita great writers; net cultural exports.
Dubliners autoanalyse themselves, of course, and rather articulately so:
"The Irish are the blacks of Europe, Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, and the North Siders are the blacks of Dublin ... so say it loud -- I'm black and I'm proud!"
So says Jimmy in the 1991 film The Commitments. The prosperity of the intervening decade must have softened this self-image somewhat. I remembered Jimmy's line while watching the East German nostalgia comedy Good Bye Lenin! at the excellent Irish Film Center,The center is in Dublin's Temple Bar, as in the neighborhood, not the bar. I'm sure many more New Yorkers have been confused. and it struck me that recent Irish experience must have more in common with that of the Eastern Europeans. Newfound wealth, spread unevenly, is worn uneasily, with much fretting about maintaining an identity forged amid privationGood Bye Lenin!, while funny enough, could have benefited from a thicker slathering of British comic timing. The film is primarily a cathartic exercise for ex-East Germans, though, with us as incidental audience. My main peeve: Using the musical score from AmÈlie to heighten the emotional appeal is merely distracting. Get your own score, I say..
Dublin is now among the world's most expensive cities. In the eurozone, it ranks second only to Milan; in the EU, it is fourth after London and Copenhagen. 21st in the world, it climbed from 73rd last year. Take a moment, then, to permanently sever the connection you have in your mind between the words "Ireland" and "cheap".
Despite the material successes in Ireland's recent history, the Irish above all remain geniuses at intangibles — dance, music, but especially the narrative form. Take a great English writer, and there's a good chance he's Irish. Shaw, Joyce, Wilde, Yeats, Swift, Beckett, Trollope, Heaney, and many others... For a nation of under 5 million, that amounts to punching way above its weight.
The following is perhaps a stretch, and I am too new to Ireland to back it up, so I would appreciate constructive criticism/flamings, butI'm off to Dingle peninsula tomorrow for 5 days of hiking, so it is entirely possible my first exposure the West coast demolishes the basic premise of this post.: my hunch is that the deft hand with which the Irish handle a yarn is a skill passed on from Celtic times, where culture's core revolved around great mythic sagas. Christianity, when it reached Irish shores, also took on a reverence for ancient texts. My theory, then, is that in traditional Irish culture the narrative takes precedence over the visual. And when the Irish have excelled at visual arts — when they illuminated those monkish tomes — it was done in the service of a narrative. The end result: More great writers than painters. Dublin as a feast for the mind, rather than the eyes.
Wolfowitz today provided new justifications for the war in Iraq:
I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you're not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you're going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country.
It's a statement worth pondering, for we finally have a senior US administration official openly proposing a new doctrine to replace the old criteria for what constitutes a just cause for war. Previously, a just cause involved a retaliation in case of attack, or — more controversially — when the evidence of an impending attack was overwhelming — say, Hitler massing his armies on your border and handing you an ultimatum. Wolfowitz has now widened the definition of self defense to include acting on reasonable expectations of an attack. In other words, a preemptive attack can be a legitimate defense even if you are just reasonably sure you are in danger of being attacked.
But what qualifies as "reasonably sure"? Who gets to decide? And what if the information proves false, after the fact? Tony Blair in his speech to Congress answered that last point: It seems that this doctrine would apply only to failed states, where being wrong still means you are doing good merely by alleviating the yoke of a brutal dictatorship. You should only act when it's a win-win situation, in other words. (I would like to hear Wolfowitz echo that sentiment.)
All this is fair enough, and I might even sign up if a definition for "reasonably sure" was drafted and the UN Security Council got the final say. In fact, such a process was set in motion, with Powell acting as prosecutor, if you will, but the "jury" of 15 nations indicated it would veto war for the time being — and the jury would have been right, after the fact.
It turns out that the jury was not convinced by the quality of the circumstancial evidence presented by the prosecution. The rest of the world was not reasonably sure Iraq was a threat to its neighbors or the US. And it was right, after the fact. Wolfowitz's redefinition of a just cause for war is sound, but he and his neocon pals did not themselves take it to heart when they decided to act as judge, jury and executioner.
But here ends my lenient interpretation of Wolfowitz's words. Just some reminders: Six months ago there was no murky intelligence. There was incontrovertible proof, to be shared with us after the fact. Instead, we now know that six months ago, the administration on at least one occasion made the case for war citing intelligence that it knew wasn't murky at all, but clearly false. Leaving such misinformation in the State of the Union simply because it was plausibly attributable to the UK is not the behavior of an administration carefully weighing evidence as it ponders war as a last resort.
On a side note, is the Bush administration vindicated if it made up WMD evidence, embellished such evidence or inadvertently used false intelligence to go to war, but then, quite separately from the "intelligence" it had, it found WMDs? It may sound trite, but I think it is a fascinating philosophical question. Could you argue that the US had knowledge of WMDs in this case?
An analogy: I see a picture of Saddam Hussein writing with his left hand. I conclude he is left-handed. In fact, the picture I saw had been flipped using Photoshop — he was actually holding the pen in his right hand. However, he is left-handed, it just so happened that in the picture he was holding the pen in his right hand. Or this one: I tell everyone Matthew Rose cheats at Scrabble, not because I know he does but because I want to sully his reputation. Then it turns out he does cheat at Scrabble. Did I know that? Did I lie?
What would an advertisement for the HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey look like? Perhaps the copy would read something like
:
Triggers routine analysis to help prevent component failure. ... Designed to sense when any of up to six system components exceeds a safe threshold. The server will inform the system administrator who can calmly replace the component up to 48 hours before the projected point of failure.
But that's actually IBM's new advertising campaign, for their eServer xSeries, found in today's Economist. Calmly? Like this? —
HAL: Just a moment. Just a moment. I've just picked up a fault in the AE 35 unit. It's going to go 100 percent failure in 72 hours.All system administrators know how this eventually ends:
BOWMAN: It's still within operational limits right now?
HAL: yes, and it will stay that way until it fails.
BOWMAN: Would you say that we have a reliable 72 hours until failure?
HAL: Yes, that's a completely reliable figure.
BOWMAN: Well, I suppose we'll have to bring it in...
BOWMAN: Open the pod bay doors HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry Dave, Im afraid I can't do that.
...
HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose any more. Good bye.
Would sys admins really steer their CTO towards the purchase of such a machine? Of course they would. And notice the shape and color of the machine shown on the ad. How... monolith-like. There is no doubt IBM is finally recognizing HAL as its prodigal son, some 25 years after the company withdrew permission for the use of its logo in the film when it became clear the computer in question was a paranoid schizophrenic. IBM thus joins the ranks of Mercedes, which co-opted the Janis Joplin song Mercedes Benz for a car commercial a few years back.
...And the innocent days of blogging are over. Over the past few months I've deleted exactly two nutcase comments off my blog, both virulently antisemitic and adding nothing to the argument at hand (hey, this is my free speech zone, not yours), but at the very least they were personal, the work of individuals exercising their demented minds.
Yesterday, this comment appeared on my blog: "You are not the only one." It came from a (no doubt) fake hotmail address with a link, not to a blog or a home page, but to a website selling US and Canadian zip codes for download, an obvious marketing scheme cum sales pyramid replete with spelling mistakes and worthless merchandise.
As a tactic, there could have been worse blogspam comments than "You are not the only one." Blog posts are typically opinionated, so such a rejoinder would not usually stand out, and bloggers, who tend to revel in reciprocity, will likely click through to see who was kind enough to comment.
I wondered what to call the meshing of these two great internet memes. I searched Google for "blogspam", and sure enough, 135 pages already carry this newest web term. It's inevitable, perhaps, but also sad; blog comments are opportunities for strangers to reach strangers, much as bulk emails are, but whereas we have spent a few years building defenses against spam, blog readers (including me) are still wide-eyed innocents, ready to click through on comments in the anticipation of surfing to exciting new places. I'm sure spammers will find blogspam a particularly lush pasture for clickthroughs, though I doubt they will get much sales from bloggers and their readers, who are arguably the savviest, most spam-hating subgroup on the internet.
Thankfully, there are technical solutions to stopping blogspam completely. Unlike email, commenting involves an opportunity for the server to engage in feedback with the submitter. This should allow the server to determine if the submitter is human; some techniques are discussed here. So we will have to wait for the Movable Type plugin, or eventually pay for some kind of filtering technology, but while I can secure my blog, I will still be subjected to blogspam when I visit other, less sophisticated blogs.
Die, spammers, die.
My experiences in Ireland so far have come to revolve around two major themes: Battling the great Irish bandwidth famineThis famine is at least partly responsible for the recent dearth of posts, though it appears to be nearly at an end; more about this in a coming post., and discovering the inverse relationship between cost and worth in Ireland.
Felix and Michelle bore the brunt of this latter realization when they visited for a week. It was with them that I witnessed the more galling aspects of the Irish tourism industry. We paid 7 euros each for a tour of the old Jameson distillery, for which we were shown a video that involved a lot of Irish water, then shown around an indoor whiskey themepark by Jenny, a Quebecois student guide whose cheery delivery could not quite mask her disdain for us.
We paid 7.50 euro each for a gander at the Book of Kells at Tritinity College Library. At that price, you get a MoMa's worth of art elsewhere. Here, you get to navigate a multimedia warren of fun facts about monks before you are let into a dark room which may or may not be showing you a page of the book in question ó it could very well have been the curator's copy of Dubliners.
In the Oscar Wilde family home, a tour costs exactly 2.54 euros. For that price, we were herded into the study, where we were subject to a cruel and unusual video seemingly edited by Lenny from Memento. After multiple pans of every conceivable object in the house, including the tastfully appointed carpark, there was absolutely no need to actually see the house.
By the end of their stay, we got an inkling that perhaps we should avoid paying exhibits. After a long walk along the cliffs above St. Kevin's cell at Glendalough, we visited the remarkable monastic village, at no charge. But it was after Felix and Michelle left that I found the cultural gems in Dublin, and they were all free.
The Chester Beatty Library is an ideal museum. Focused, well-curated, bite-sized, and with some serious money thrown at it. It contains a massive collection of books and manuscripts bequeathed by an Irish-American millionaire, which the curators use to illustrate the history of writing, illustration and printing. It's fitting that the museum should be in Ireland; it echoes the role Irish monks performed when they collected and preserved ancient texts.
Then there is the modern wing of the National Gallery of Ireland, an annex with Mondrian-inspired architecture (well, OK, minus the colors &mdash monochrome Mondrian) that houses the remarkably fresh and new-to-me work of contemporary Irish painters. By now, I have become sufficiently leery of paying for exhibits that when I was offered the opportunity to pay 10 euros for a special exhibit by a Swiss painter that sounded as inspiring as, well, Swiss art, I avoided it. I don't regret it yet.
Christopher Hitchens has written a review of SAIS Professor Patrick McCarthy's latest book, Language, Politics, and Writing: Stolentelling in Western Europe, and it is an embarrassment to the genre. It reads superficially as the verbal (and by now proverbial) skewering one expects of Hitchens, but in this particular case it is his critique, not the book, that ought to be shooed off the stage peremptorilyNot having read this particular book of McCarthy's, I am not in a position to judge it; I can only judge Hitchens's methodology in attempting to review it. On the basis of past exposure to McCarthy's ideas and the typical clarity of his exposition, however, I would be very surprised to find this book not up to par..
Hitchens's modus operandi, alas, is to elevate several grammatical misdemeanors by McCarthy — such as his use of "hopefully" instead of "it is to be hoped" — to the level of such offense that we are meant to mistrust the arguments they frame. It's not quite an ad hominem attack, but it constitutes a logical fallacy nonetheless; let's call it an ad eminem attack (in honor of someone truly grammatically challenged who nevertheless has something relevant to say). Elsewere, Hitchens attacks McCarthy's spelling as a proxy for his ideas — we'll call this an ad homonym attack.
But what is truly gratifying is to see Hitchens commit the very same types of errors for which he reproaches McCarthy. For example, he casts the first stone when he writes that
... it's not undue nitpicking to notice the repeated misspelling of important names—Salman Rushdie, Jesse Owens, and Brian Friel—even though some of these must be blamed on cretinous copyediting.
In which case it is not undue nitpicking to notice Hitchens referring to Francois Mitterand, not Mitterrand, and Sartre's Les Tempes Modernes, instead of Les Temps Modernes. For such a short piece of writing, that's a far worse batting average than McCarthy's. If such errors are meant to be an indictment of the quality of one's arguments, so be it. If they are not, Hitchens's broadsides are pointless filler; a waste of my time, were I not having so much fun penning this riposte.
To see where such an approach to criticism can lead you, we can apply Hitchens's stringent criteria for intelligibility to his own writing:
I was once as happy as anyone to sit with McCarthy and to discuss Gramsci's Prison Notebooks or the ambiguities of Sartre's Les Tempes Modernes. I still enjoy these pursuits, though they occasionally strike me now as comparable to well-conducted tours of Atlantis. Perhaps that's why the cultivated guides have such a marked tendency to gurgle, as they make their appointed rounds.So which is it — is he or is he not happy to discuss Gramsci and Sartre? The defensive word "occasionally" must have been inserted in a moment of unease, as Hitchens would say. The last sentence of this passage hovers on the verge of gibberish — why on earth would a guide to Sartre and Gramsci gurgle? Actually, there is one way in which this sentence can make sense, but it would confirm that Hitchens has the emotional intelligence of a drunk. Lawyers: Clearly, when I say Hitchens has the emotional intelligence of a drunk, I am not implying that he is a drunk, merely that he has the emotional intelligence of one. Similarly, If I were to say that Hitchens has the sense of humor of a Mormon, I would not be implying that he is a Mormon.If you've met McCarthy, you'll know he has a heavy speech impediment, the result of a motor neuron disease. Hitchens seems to find in this suitable material for a cheap joke. If I am wrong, then he is far more careless in his choice of words than we give him credit for. I wonder which fault Hitchens would rather own up to.
Actually, I don't.
In fact, I am left wondering whether there isn't something pathological to Hitchens's motivations. He himself clearly thinks he acts out of an allegiance to honesty and intellectual rigor for which he will gladly sacrifice friendships. But in this review, he merely comes across as someone in desperate need to be cleverer than thou. This is not so easy with McCarthy, who is probably the cleverest man I've met. This must have rankled Hitchens.
The result is that Hitchens raises so many pointless quibbles, all so easily refuted, that the refutations themselves run the risk of boring you. Here are just a few:
Wouldn't now — with Umberto Bossi in political alignment with Silvio Berlusconi — be the ideal moment to revisit Gramsci's concept of Italy as two nations, southern and northern? McCarthy repeatedly passes up such cross-references, and one can't but suspect that this is because they might interfere with a settled attitude.
No. The ideal moment to revisit Gramsci on such matters was in 1994, when Bossi and Berlusconi first entered into political alignment. And McCarthy covered it then. Trust me, I was there. Then there is this remarkable passage:
[W]hile discussing the divorce scandal that ruined the career of Charles Stuart Parnell, so stirred James Joyce, and so greatly retarded the cause of Irish nationalism, [McCarthy] calls it "arguably Ireland's Dreyfus case." This assertion is plainly ridiculous, as well as anachronistic. Parnell was dead before the Dreyfus case occurred and was never tried for anything himself. The only possible analogy is the lamentable fact that in both "cases" (in my opinion as well as that of McCarthy), the Roman Catholic hierarchy committed itself on the wrong side. The defensive word ìarguablyî must have been inserted in a moment of unease.
So he agrees with McCarthy, then; he just took a lot longer to reach the same conclusion, and had to think aloud to get there. Hitchens really needs to find himself an easier target; may I suggest some recent speeches by George Bush?
I've finally read How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill, and as I expected, it contains a number of big ideas. Among them:
The Irish were the first people to be Christianized without also being RomanizedSt. Patrick, circa 450 A.D.. Celtic traditions were not jettisoned when Christianity was adopted, and this resulted in a rather pragmatic approach to religion — for example, the Irish pioneered the concept of being able to confess privately and repeatedly for the same sin. In Romanized Christianity, confession until then had been public, and forgiveness granted only once. It used to be two strikes and you're out of the Church, excommunicated, set to burn in hell for all eternity. To the Irish, this was rather harsh: "We're all sinners, all the time," was the official excuse, though it more likely had to do with Celts being a lot looser sexually than those prudish Romans. It's thanks to the Irish, then, that heaven isn't emptyI'm sure there's an Irish joke to be made from this historical nugget.
How about: "An Irishman goes to confession: 'Forgive me father, for I have not sinned.'".
But their main contribution to civilization was the preservation of Roman and Greek texts amid the collapse of the Roman empire. The Irish had replaced the Christian tradition of martyrdom with that of "green martyrs," or monks, whose own recent Celtic roots made them receptive to pagan literature. These monks set about collecting and copying such manuscripts — without censorship — in their remote Irish monasteries, while the barbarians thoroughly brutalized the continent.
These copyists acted as meme-promoters, keeping classical ideas alive until they could once again be let loose on a critical mass of fertile minds in the next renaissance. This is how the memes at the foundation of modern western thought skirted extinction — our knowledge of Plato comes to us through the ages via a thin but sinewy thread that extends through Ireland. Eventually, the Irish monks re-evangelized the continent, and made sure to take the classics with them. By the time the Vikings were raiding monasteries on Ireland, the texts were being kept safe by Irish monks as far afield as Italy.
And while copying was their main task, these monks could not help but populate the margins with annotations, comments, approval or mockery. Cahill writes (in 1995) about what might have motivated them:
[The monks] did not see themselves as drones. Rather, they engaged the text they were working on, tried to comprehend it after their fashion, and, if possible, add to it, even improve on it. In this dazzling new culture, a book was not an isolated document on a dusty shelf; book truly spoke to book, and writer to scribe, and scribe to reader, from one generation to the next. These books were, as we would say in today's jargon, open, interfacing, and intertextual — glorious literary smorgasbords in which the scribe often tried to include a bit of everything, from every era, language, and style known to him.
That was, effectively, blogging, circa 700 A.D.
Of course, today, we bloggers have been relieved of the task of manually copying the memes we deem worthy of promotion (and disparagement); the cost of copying information is now negligibleIt is even more efficient merely to refer to the texts in question with a link (although at the risk of the link going bad).. Blogs are the new marginalia, our annotated lives, riffs on our cultural and political patrimony (like this post), asides on the political drama of the day, knowing winks at perpetuity...
To illustrate the similarity: Here is a magnificent journal entry, disguised as a poem in the margin of a 9th century manuscript on Virgil in a Swiss monastery:
I and Pangur Ban my catHere is the original old Irish, together with a literal translation. The text on the right is copied from here.
'Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.
Better far than praise of men
'Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill-will,
He too plies his simple skill.
'Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.
Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.
'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.
When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!
So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.
Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.
Now that, surely, rivals Lileks on a good day. Cahill furnishes other examples — here is one monk's opinion of a Celtic epic:
I who have copied down this story, or more accurately fantasy, do not credit the details of the story, or fantasy. Some things in it are devilish lies, and some are poetical figments, some seem possible and others not; some are for the enjoyment of idiots."
He could just as well have been writing on Bush's reasons for invading Iraq, no? One final example:
"Sad it is, little parti-colored white book, for a day will surely come when someone will say over your page: 'the hand that wrote this is no more.'"
Amen; his work was important; it is still read and treasured; and it's a good omen for today's blogs.
It was inevitable that I eventually tried RyanairI wrote this post a few days ago, but have been unable to secure unfettered internet access since arriving in Ireland. Consumer broadband in Ireland is very new; cable broadband was introduced to Dublin a few days ago. I'm ready to bribe or kill someone to feed my 1-megabit habit. . They've been proclaiming the second coming of aviation all over Christendom, and although their fares seemed to good to be true, I have always been for quantity over quality when it comes to flying. As I am summering in Ireland this year, the perfect opportunity presented itself; how fitting it would be to fly to Dublin on Ireland's latest contribution to the cause of European civilization, I thoughtThis post is an homage to Felix's penchant for blogging his suffering on airline flights. It also gives me something to do while waiting for my connecting flight..
How do they do it? I got an early hint as I boarded a Ryanair bus from central Stockholm to Skavsta airport, a hangar in a field 80 minutes to the south. Inside the terminal, a queue of third world proportions awaited me as two employees proceded to check in an entire 737. At the end of that queue I was told, first, that no, I could not check in my luggage here and expect to pick it up in Dublin, I would have to pick it up off a carousel in Prestwick, Scotland, and then check myself in again for my connecting flight to Dublin. Second, I was 13 kg over my luggage limit of 15kg. Never mind that I had dragged the same accoutrements all over Europe over the past year without hassle on BA. Never mind that a laptop, sturdy walking boots and the odd book are enough to put you halfway to their limit. I had to pay an extra $100 if I wanted to take my luggage with me.
Oof. That pretty much erased any price advantage they had over the competition, and suddenly, my eye had become a lot more critical. At that price, let's see how they stack up. Terminal: crap. Miles? Are you kidding? Window or aisle? No, it's the Afro-Russian boarding method, where your ticket gets you a mandate to storm the plane for the best seats. In the event, the dash was over tarmac through a good 150m of steady rain.
This free-for-all has one advantage that I thought of too late; it's an evident incentive to chat up pretty women early, whom, it is hoped, you will invite to share your row of seats during the flight. In that sense it is a refreshing change from all that Lutheran predestination about whom one sits next to on traditional airlines. For once, it is not left up to the gods, who always conspire to have you sit next to bloated businessmen from Basingstoke rather than models from Milan.
Except that the models from Milan do not as a rule fly to Prestwick.
On Ryanair, you pay for your inflight food. This is fine by me; it minimizes waste, etc... But I did not expect, upon a request for a coke and a tuna sandwich, to be handed a can the size of a thimble and a triangle of bread that contained tuna safe for vegetarians ("It contains mayonnaise," the air hostess stewardess flight attendant cabin crew member warned me.). For $10.
At Prestwick, I waited for my luggage in a sputnik-green terminal straight out of those books of boring postcards you see in museum shoppesAgain, no internet access so no handy link to Amazon. How did I survive before 1995?, then dragged it to the Ryanair check-in counter. Same luggage. Same weight. No problem this time.
"Have these bags been in your possession at all times since you packed them?"
"No."
"No?!"
"No, I gave them to Ryanair. I just got them back."
By the time I got onto my second Ryanair flight, however, I was mellowing. Obviously I was not their target customer. Around me sat pensioners visiting grandchildren and students upgrading from bus travel. Ryanair is a bus with wings, not a budget airline. From this perspective, it's a perfectly reasonable proposition. Just don't carry too many books to Ireland.