“Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak” plus 2 more |
- Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak
- Book review: 'The Conservative Assault on the Constitution' by Erwin Chemerinsky - Los Angeles Times
- Critics Notebook: Literature as a competitive sport - Los Angeles Times
| Oscar Wilde Cock-Cockery And Other Media Fictions - Anorak Posted: 24 Sep 2010 01:49 PM PDT
I'll drop William Hague, 49, a line about it after this. (Btw, I do wish The Sun's Kelvin MacKenzie would desist in his weekly persecution of Chris Myers, 25, Mr Hague's former room-mate driver and £30k pa SpAd. In a just world he'd be sharing a room with George Michael) Anyway, it appears I've returned in the nick of time. For today some letters Oscar Wilde wrote to a sexy young male magazine editor in the century before last have been flogged at auction for £33,900 - or nearly £24k more than expected. What spiced them up was the claim that in them Oscar, then about 33, propositioned the Court & Society Review editor – one Alsager Vian, 22 (never heard of him: his ghost must be relishing the posthumous fame). Alas the text of the five missives scarcely lives up to the billing. All of Oscar's letters these days read like Stephen Fry on Twitter – even an illiterate chimney sweep could expect a 'dearest'. 'Will be at home tomorrow afternoon – so glad if you come down for tea,' writes Oscar in one letter – not quite up there with: 'Come over and I'll lick your scrote'. Oscar was passive, incidentally. Oh, didn't you know? Most compromising is Oscar's, 'Come and dine at Pagani's in Portland Street on Friday – 7.30. No dress – just ourselves and a flask of Italian wine – afterwards we will smoke cigarettes and Talk over the Journalistic article – could we go to your rooms, I am so far off, and clubs are difficult to Talk in.' The 'No dress' injunction is not an invitation to turn up nude but merely a sartorial guide; and the preference for Alsager's rooms nothing more than a desire not to be overheard by other possibly commision-hungry hacks. 'I think your number [edition] is excellent, but as usual had to go to S. James' Street to get a copy. Even Grosvenor Place does not get the C&S. Till Thursday night! This is all wrong, isn't it … ' The playful last line is not some coded reference to an illegal sexual proposition but plainly to the unavailability of the magazine. This distinct lack of any sexual content whatsoever has not dissuaded the likes of the Independent and other serious publications from repeating the seller's PR line. I particularly like the Indy's Sept 16 headline: 'For sale: letters from a love-sick Wilde to the object of his affection.' Purest Sylvie Krin. The media too readily interpolates cock-cockery in otherwise bromantic relationships, as the Hague/Myers hotel sleepovers demonstrate. Why, as I write, rumours abound of a roaring musky affair between a famous footballer and a famous male TV personality. And as ever, as the unlikely trustee of cock-cunting integrity, I find myself saying, 'I don't believe it!' Posted: 24th, September 2010 | In: Key Posts, Madame Arcati Comments (11) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Book review: 'The Conservative Assault on the Constitution' by Erwin Chemerinsky - Los Angeles Times Posted: 05 Oct 2010 05:18 PM PDT Southern Californians with a taste for politics or public policy probably know Erwin Chemerinsky best as the reliably liberal voice in countless left-right radio and television debates about timely legal questions or as a key contributor to Los Angeles charter reform efforts. Far fewer will be familiar with his day job as an influential legal scholar — author of a widely used textbook on the Constitution and professor of that subject at USC, Duke and, most recently, UC Irvine's School of Law, where he is also founding dean. "The Conservative Assault on the Constitution" is his urgent, admirably lucid amalgam of both those roles, along with Chemerinsky's first-hand experience as an advocate arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court and a wide variety of lower appellate panels. He introduces his argument, in fact, with a nicely detailed anecdotal account of his appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Leandro Andrade, a man sentenced to life in prison under California's draconian three strikes statute for shoplifting videotapes worth $153. Despite Chemerinsky's advocacy, a court divided 5 to 4 upheld Andrade's conviction, making him the first man in U.S. history imprisoned for life for petty theft. By the author's reckoning, the process that produced the florid injustice of Lockyer vs. Andrade began in 1968, when Richard Nixon made criticism of the Warren Court a centerpiece of the successful presidential campaign that ultimately enabled him to name four Supreme Court justices. "Since 1968," Chemerinsky writes, "conservatives have sought to remake constitutional law and they largely have succeeded. They initially set out to overturn the decisions of the Warren Court, but soon began to aggressively pursue a vision of constitutional law that consistently favors government power over individual rights … and the interests of businesses over individual employees and consumers. Because decisions come one at a time over years and because the Court never overruled the Roe v. Wade abortion decision (though it came within one vote of doing so), it is easy to underestimate how successful the conservative assault on the Constitution has been." With that thesis as a starting point, Chemerinsky briskly moves from topic to topic in a clear but lawyerly fashion, building the evidence for his argument. Thus, there are chapters on the court's role in resegregating so many of the nation's schools, on the dramatic expansion of presidential powers, on the ongoing erosion of criminal defendants' rights, on denial of due process and the general diminution of individual liberties. Many of these chapters are enlivened by journalistic accounts of the author's first-hand experience participating in such consequential cases as Bush vs. Gore and the Texas Ten Commandments suit. Chemerinsky has a born teacher's gift for evoking context, which he does with particular effect when he explores the interplay of electoral politics and the contention over separation of church and state. The author strongly indicts the court's conservative majority for its decision in Bush vs. Gore because he believes the justices were wrong on the law — and not for their activism. To the contrary, Chemerinsky believes that our political conversation's false choice between judicial activism and neutral or "strict construction" judging has obscured the Supreme Court's authoritarian drift. The Constitution, he argues, requires interpretation — and has since the earliest days of the Republic, when the Framers still were engaged in national government — and interpretation is inherently an active process. "The difference between liberals and conservatives," he writes, "is not in their willingness to overrule precedent or in their degree of deference to popularly elected officials or to make momentous decisions affecting society. The divergence is entirely about when they want the court to do this and for what purpose. The other difference is in their rhetoric; conservatives continue to rail against judicial activism and profess judicial restraint even though they are every bit as willing to be activist as liberals." Chemerinsky argues that another of the fictions that needs to be dispelled involves the confirmation process for Supreme Court justices and the notion that it's somehow illicit to inquire into the nominees' ideological inclinations or views on Constitutional interpretation. It's not only a pious, rather convenient dodge, but a recently minted one. George Washington, for example, had a nominee for chief justice rejected on ideological grounds, and the practice was common throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th. The author points out that both conservative and liberal nominees recently have been all too willing to take refuge behind the prim new standard. In place of what Vice President Joe Biden has labeled legislative kabuki, Chemerinsky argues for vigorous questioning of nominees regarding their ideological views and approach to constitutional interpretation. Although it's clearly undesirable to have senators ask nominees how they might rule on pending cases, the author endorses what he calls the "elegant" suggestion by two Yale law professors that prospective justices be asked how they would have voted on previous cases and why. Such an approach wouldn't divorce the court from politics — nor Chemerinsky would argue could it — but it would inject a welcome note of honesty and roll back the clouds of pious obfuscation that surround so much of what the court majority really is about. To conclude his argument over why the conservative assault on the Constitution matters as deeply as it does, Chemerinsky talks about how the first assignment he gives his constitutional law students is to read the U.S. Constitution alongside the one adopted by the Soviet Union under Stalin. "My students," he writes, "are always surprised to see that the Soviet constitution has a far more elaborate statement of rights than the American Constitution. I also assign them to read a description of life in the gulags. I ask how can it be that a country with such detailed statements of rights in its constitution could have such horrible abuses. "The answer is that in the Soviet Union no court had the power to strike down any government action. Judicial review … is at the core of enforcing the Constitution and ensuring our freedom." In an election cycle awash in fictional, delusional and genuinely demented notions about the Constitution, Chemerinsky's book is a welcome dose of real history, clear thought and genuine respect for the rule of law as a humane covenant. timothy.rutten@latimes.com This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Critics Notebook: Literature as a competitive sport - Los Angeles Times Posted: 03 Oct 2010 09:45 PM PDT When the Nobel Prize in literature is announced Thursday, the choice may be — if the last two years are any indication — a confounding one. In 2008, the prize went to Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio, a French novelist concerned with colonization and its discontents, whose work was almost entirely unknown in the United States; last year's recipient was the German-Romanian Herta Müller, whose exquisitely rendered fictions are still largely unavailable here. On Friday, the British oddsmaker Ladbrokes installed Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer as a favorite for the 2010 Nobel, while also giving good odds on three other poets: Adam Zagajewski of Poland, Syria's Adonis and the Korean Ko Un. To some extent, all of this is just a smokescreen, since the Swedish Academy is notoriously unpredictable, but what it suggests is an opposing set of expectations, between the judges on the one hand and a more generalized group of readers on the other, about what the Nobel (or, for that matter, any literary award) is meant to do. Partly, of course, awards are a matter of money. "When a big prize is awarded to an author that is lesser known to our customers," writes Kerry Slattery, general manager of Los Feliz's Skylight Books, in an e-mail, "there is a big run on that author's books and sales are definitely greatly affected." As an example, she cites Paul Harding's "Tinkers," a first novel from tiny Bellevue Review Press, which won a 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Before the announcement, "Tinkers" had sold 7,000 copies. Afterward, the publisher could barely keep it in print. For 2009 National Book Award winner Colum McCann, the payoff was even bigger; his novel "Let the Great World Spin" has sold 350,000 copies. These issues come up every year around this time, because October is as close as the book world has to an awards season. Five days after the Nobel Prize is announced, the Man Booker Prize will be awarded in London; the next morning, at Flannery O'Connor's childhood home in Savannah, Ga., the finalists for the National Book Awards will be named. It's a lot of pomp and circumstance for a corner of the culture that seems increasingly uncertain of its role in contemporary society, where the slow, immersive satisfactions of reading are easily overwhelmed by the onslaught of the information stream. In such a landscape, readers look to awards for reassurance, as arbiters of whether a book or author is any good. Yet while that's understandable, it is, in its way, another kind of smokescreen, distracting us from the conversation about literature in favor of a more competitive frame. "There's a big difference between art and sports," notes Harold Augenbraum, who, as executive director of the National Book Foundation, oversees the National Book Awards. "In sports, teams go head-to-head against each other, and we see who wins. It's quantifiable. You can't do that with something as human as art." What Augenbraum is referring to is subjectivity, which resides at the heart of every awards process, for good or ill. Surely, it's an expression of subjectivity for the Swedish Academy to have focused, over the last few years, on European authors, a worldview made explicit in 2008 by former Permanent Secretary Horace Engdahl, who famously called American literature "too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe as the center of the literary world." But so too is the insistence that the Nobel ought to go to an American ( Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates seem to be the most likely candidates), as if it were our birthright to be recognized on the world's cultural stage. No, that's the thing about prizes: They're emblematic of those who bestow them, whether on the institutional level or in the jury room. In 2004, the National Book Awards were criticized for the New York-centric, small-bore nature of their fiction shortlist; of the five finalists, four were women from Manhattan, and only one had sold as many as 2,000 copies of her book. This hasn't happened again, but it's less a matter of conscious intention, Augenbraum suggests, than of a broader way of thinking about the award. "I don't see it as any sort of failure on the part of the judges," he says, "but I do think it's important to consider the finalists as a group. Now, when I give the charge to the judges, I urge them to think about the shortlist as a slate of five." That's a key distinction, between the finalists and the winners, and it offers a valuable lens through which to think about awards. Consider your own reading: Can you easily choose your favorite book of any given year? Probably not, because reading doesn't work like that. We admire different books at different times for different reasons, responding in a way that is as intuitive as it is intellectual, that is less about thinking, per se, than it is about a kind of touch. Judging is a similar process, in which a jury is asked to look at 200, or 2,000, books in a particular category, and sort them out according to a set of standards that is amorphous at best. What makes a good book? A moral vision? Well, sure, but what about William T. Vollmann, who won a 2005 National Book Award for his novel "Europe Central," which is, like much of the author's work, morally ambiguous, meant to shake us out of our complacency? Beautiful language? Absolutely, but what about DBC Pierre's 2003 Man Booker winner "Vernon God Little," which uses a clunky vernacular to get at its teenage protagonist's inner life? Both books beat out other, more conventionally beautiful finalists: E.L. Doctorow's "The March," in the case of Vollmann, and Monica Ali's "Brick Lane" and Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" for Pierre. Still, if this seems to indicate a certain flaw in the process, all those books are worthy of attention, which makes the goal of any award less to anoint a single champion than to establish a colloquy. david.ulin@latimes.com This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| You are subscribed to email updates from fictions - Bing News To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar