Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

• home
• diary
• writings
• sounds
• snippets
• reading table
• photos

A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

Buy from Amazon

Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The Forward

December 23, 2005
Whenever a film is adapted from a favorite novel, serious readers of fiction are prone to say, “Yeah, but the book is better.” True partisans of the written page are always in conflict with those who like their stories cinematically revealed, projected onto wide screens that illuminate the darkness and pierce the quiet with Dolby Surround sound. The magic of movies, for so many in our increasingly visual society, is a far more stimulating and efficient storytelling experience than the labor intensity of reading.

I’ve had to think about this recently because one of my novels, “Second Hand Smoke,” is being developed into an independent feature film, and I was asked to co-write the screenplay. I had never written dialogue that was naked of narrative, and so I learned a good deal about what goes into a screenplay and what has to be taken out of a novel in adapting it into a film.

While certain novelists have successfully written screenplays from their own books — John Irving received an Academy Award for his adaptation of “The Cider House Rules”; Vladimir Nabokov wrote the screenplay for his “Lolita”; Robert Stone co-wrote “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” which was adapted from his novel, “Dog Soldiers,” and E.L. Doctorow lifted his fictional Rosenbergs from the page and brought them to the screen in “Daniel” (from “The Book of Daniel”) — I’m not sure that there is, generally, a great advantage to having the author of the novel become part of the filmmaking team. After all, the novelist may know the story best, but perhaps he or she knows it too well.

Those who maintain that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery have obviously never been imitated; any ego boost is offset by the nervous laughter from having all those tics, gestures and intonations exaggerated to the point of caricature. The same is true with a film adaptation. Giving art a second life sometimes creates more of a mutant than a clone. This explains the natural impulse to preserve the story in its original form. Any adaptation results in something new, and thereby false when compared with the original.

Yet, the film version may offer its own virtues. Indeed, many films have outshone the books that inspired them. “The Godfather” and “Gone With the Wind” come to mind. The fact is, novels and films are entirely different storytelling experiences. When it comes to making a movie based on a book — or ultimately watching that movie — being too invested in the integrity of the novel is probably a bad idea.

A film adaptation that is deemed “faithful” to the novel is not necessarily a compliment. The most successful adaptations have actually been adulterous: Liberties are taken; all kinds of cheating ensues. The artistic license enables great leaps of improvisation. There are redesigned endings, compressed time periods and newly invented characters, and often an entirely different storytelling mechanism. Anyone who read “The English Patient” before having seen the Academy Award-winning movie remembers shaking his head, imagining how in the world Michael Ondaatje’s superbly interior novel could ever sparkle so majestically on the silver screen.

But what films sacrifice in the small window of opportunity of a movie screen they make up in artfulness. Montage effects, slow motion, split screens, close-ups and superimposed images create visual moments that aren’t easily described in prose and are even more difficult to re-imagine as a reader. These filmic devices may be manipulative, but they are often emotionally effective.

Films require dispensing with many secondary characters that fit nicely within a novel but tend to overcrowd a movie. Sometimes several minor characters of a novel are consolidated to form one great “character actor” for a film. Other times, filmmakers change the geography of the novel — as in the short film “Bartleby,” based on Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” in which New York was replaced by Los Angeles. The novels of Charles Dickens have undergone all sorts of reworkings, some bearing only a tenuous connection to the original story. “Great Expectations,” for instance, was recently adapted into a late 20th-century tale with characters renamed and foggy London entirely lifted and replaced by the clear skies of Florida.

As Chekhov famously once instructed, if there is a gun in Act I, it needs to be fired in Act II, and the same holds true with films (though the aphorism is tweaked slightly to also make sure that a gun is never inserted into a scene unless it makes a loud noise). Certain things have to happen at various markers of a movie, otherwise audiences, expecting such contrivances, will simply walk out.

Yet, in novels, all kinds of props are abandoned on the page. Not everything needs to be resolved, not every loose end must be tied up for the novel to be satisfying. Ambiguity is tolerated much more readily; the impulse toward linearity — the beginning, middle and end of a story — is almost nonexistent in modern fiction.

It is for this reason that Franz Kafka has never received a cinematically successful treatment of his fiction, even though he has been arguably the most important literary figure of the past century. Magical realism doesn’t translate well into films. Similarly, dark psychological complexity is not particularly well suited to cinema, which is why Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels have not been successfully adapted, either. A strong interior narrative voice simply doesn’t come across in film — even if one allows for voiceovers.

With all these obstacles and risks, you can see why starting from scratch with an original screenplay makes sense. Other than studio executives, no one has any great expectations because no one is guarding the central text, hovering nervously and breathing down the screenwriter’s back.

Ultimately, feature films cannot replicate the experience of reading, nor can everything about a novel end up being adapted — nor should it be. Filmmaking is about compromise and concession. It’s a miracle they don’t toss the book right out the window.

With a novel, the author forms an implicit partnership with his audience. He provides the story and its voice, but the reader adds the visuals. The power of a novel’s description is often tempered by sketchy details. Much is left out in order to leave something to the imagination. The reader is free to conjure the characters in his own way, to picture how they look, because the mind’s eye has a way of assembling an image that is quite different from how a character might appear on screen. In the end, the novelist surrenders his book to his readers. Thereafter it becomes theirs, and his proprietary interest ceases.

Movies, by contrast, are more controlled; the director calls the shots, and the camera focuses the point of view. The eyes of the audience are being drawn in a certain direction, but not necessarily from left to right. Which is, after all, what central casting looks for in a reader.

Thane Rosenbaum is the author of the novels “The Golems of Gotham” (HarperCollins, 2002) and “Second Hand Smoke” (St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

Posted at 10:23 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2005

SHANGHAI There are two trains running in East Asia, each fueled by hollow rhetoric and propelled by dangerous, self-deluding myths. Each of these locomotives heeds only its own signal, and the danger grows by the season that, if there is no coordination, a huge wreck might one day ensue.

The two trains are, of course, China and Japan. The former, long decrepit, its wheels rusted by decades of Communist mismanagement of the economy, has lately worked up a huge head of steam. China surprised the world by announcing it had “discovered” previously unaccounted-for economic production equivalent to the output of entire countries, say, Austria, for example. Whoops: “Off the tracks! We’re coming through!”

The other country, Japan, a longtime economic superstar, had been in the doldrums for over a decade, a victim of high costs, excessive regulation and a slow-to-adapt mentality in a fast-changing world. Japan is enjoying something of a revival, at least in a near-term economic sense, and today, the country’s conservative leadership is feeling its oats, evidently in no mood to play second fiddle to an accelerating China.

Competition exists between these two countries on many levels, as do animosities both recent and old. Strangest and most worrisome of all, though, is the jockeying in the realm of global image and perception.

Leaders in Beijing are keenly aware that any nation so large and moving so fast as China is liable to frighten others. Their oddly archaic strategy for putting the world at ease, like an old Maoist public morals campaign replete with stiff slogans and blazing banners refashioned for external consumption, is to shout from every rooftop that China is, has been and always will be a peaceful nation. Perhaps if it is repeated enough, the naïve hope seems to be, people will become convinced.

Japan is, of course, the original peaceful power, its U.S.-written Constitution literally forbidding the country to engage in war, or to even have an army. Japan is more eager than ever today to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council, and its campaign rests on the country’s history since 1945 not only of peace, but of encouraging peace and development throughout the world, mostly through generous financial aid.

The problem with each country’s campaign is that it is undermined by the very actions of the government that authored it. This has been increasingly clear for months now as tensions between Japan and China have risen, and never more so than in recent days amid the static that passes for diplomatic dialogue across the narrow swath of the Pacific that separates them.

On successive days last week Beijing and Tokyo made important sallies in their global image war. China first issued a 32-page white paper whose one big thought was that its rise - although that word itself was carefully avoided - was a threat to no one. “China’s road of peaceful development is a brand-new one for mankind in the pursuit of civilization and progress,” it claimed fulsomely.

The very next day, Japan’s recently named foreign minister, Taro Aso, gave two speeches in which he discussed China, calling that country a “considerable threat,” in what amounted to a remarkable departure for Japanese diplomacy.

Whether China’s rapid growth should be seen primarily as a threat or as an opportunity, Aso got a couple of things right. “If Japan’s self-defense budget grows by 10 percent every year, wouldn’t China see it as a threat?” he asked. “Of course it would.”

Complaining that China has refused to meet with Junichiro Koizumi, who has angered Beijing by visiting Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine five times as prime minister, Aso also correctly said, “Nothing proceeds unless we have an opportunity to talk.”

If Japan’s foreign minister had left it at that, he might have scored some points for his country. But other remarks by the politician - a man whose oratory about Japan’s emperor system and supposed mono-ethnic makeup almost smacks of 1930s militarism - betrayed his unhealthy platform. Dismissing anger in China and other countries over visits to Yasukuni, where 14 leading war criminals are enshrined along with two million other Japanese veterans, Aso said that “it is extremely difficult to have the same kind of understanding of history.”

The problem, of course, is not such imagined difficulty. Rather, it is the fact that Aso and many others among the conservative politicians who dominate the scene in Japan have never shown much sign of even trying. Even today, even while issuing pro forma apologies, they pretend that Japan’s prosperity was won by the sacrifice of its marauding soldiers.

Because peace in East Asia is of immense importance to mankind, it is important to cut through the baloney of the region’s two pre-eminent powers before there is a collision. Japan will never get the respect it otherwise deserves on the world stage until it can generate a presentable consensus view of the events of the last century, one that recognizes Japanese aggression and atrocities for what they were. There’s not enough money in the world to change this fact.

China will never convince others that it is an unthreatening power as long as it cannot forge normal relations with Japan, including regular political dialogue at the highest levels. Beijing must learn to let Japan’s offensive behavior be Japan’s problem.

Neither country can be considered much of a force for peace in the world until it is more of a force for peace in its home region. The tissue of intraregional cooperation is thicker in parts of Africa than it is in East Asia. How is it that three of the world’s biggest economies, including South Korea - all neighbors - haven’t even begun talking about community? How is it, too, that there is no security framework linking them?

This brings one to the question of traffic cop, a role traditionally played in these parts by the United States. There are signs that some in Washington seek to pump up Japan as a counterweight to China, nudging Tokyo away from its pacifist Constitution and roping it into antimissile programs and the like.

A good traffic cop uses all of his signals, and American influence with Japan must be used as a spur to overcoming its history and engaging its neighbor. Without that, defense cooperation alone will not be enough to avert a wreck.

Posted at 10:02 AM · Comments (1)

12/16/2005

Copyright The Asahi Shimbun

In February 1972, at the height of the Cold War, U.S. President Richard Nixon surprised the world by visiting China.

In “The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow,” edited by William Burr, the following exchange is recorded between Nixon and Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

Mao: I like rightists. People say you are rightists, that the Republican Party is to the right … . I am comparatively happy when these people on the right come into power.

Nixon: I think the important thing to note is that in America, at least this time, those on the right can do what those on the left talk about.

The gap between Nixon, an out-and-out right-winger known for his firm anti-communist stand, and the Chinese Communist Party seemed so wide that no one thought it could be bridged.

In fact, that is all the more why Nixon was able to take the bold step of visiting a country like China that suppressed its domestic opposition.

The conversation shows both leaders were well aware of the dynamics of hawkish diplomacy.

What made me remember the exchange is a story I heard about the Cabinet reshuffle on Oct. 31. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who made Shinzo Abe chief Cabinet secretary and Taro Aso foreign minister, is said to have told Aso: “Sometimes, hawks do better at foreign policy.”

Koizumi was referring not to Nixon’s China visit, but rather the conclusion of the Japan-China Peace and Friendship Treaty by the Cabinet of Takeo Fukuda.

Perhaps Koizumi wanted to say that Fukuda, a hawk, was able to accomplish what the dovish Prime Minister Takeo Miki had failed to do, despite all his eagerness. So-called hawk

“I have always been known as a so-called hawk,” Fukuda told me when I interviewed him in August 1988, which marked the 10th anniversary of the signing of the treaty. “As far as China is concerned, the pro-Chinese are doves and the pro-Taiwanese are hawks. But I had a feeling that history was about to change.”

Listening to a tape of the interview after all these years, I heard Fukuda’s familiar voice repeatedly stress how times were changing.

Fukuda took over the faction formerly led by former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, who stuck to an anti-communist policy and maintained close ties with Taiwan. As I mentioned in October, it was Fukuda who, as foreign minister of the Cabinet of Eisaku Sato, supported Taiwan’s membership in the United Nations to the very end.

Who would have thought back then that he would later come to take the lead in concluding the Japan-China peace treaty?

From the time he became prime minister, Fukuda felt it was up to him to make a decision, and that he was the only one who could bring the treaty to fruition. Taking advantage of his past ties with Taiwan, he succeeded in winning over the support of pro-Taiwanese lawmakers within the Liberal Democratic Party. The intra-party tactics he used shared something in common with Nixon’s surprise Chinese visit.

Yet by no means did the Fukuda administration take a hawkish stance in dealing with foreign affairs. In fact, Foreign Minister Sunao Sonoda, who took the lead in negotiating with China, was very pro-Chinese. In this regard, the Fukuda administration is different from Koizumi’s.

As prime minister, Fukuda advocated “omnidirectional diplomacy,” under the slogan of “making friends with all countries,” in an attempt to rid his administration of its hawkish image. When he toured Southeast Asia in 1977, Fukuda announced the “Fukuda doctrine,” comprising the three basic principles of “peace,” “heart-to-heart relationships” and “equality.” His diplomacy helped ease the region’s smoldering anti-Japanese sentiment.

As for the Japan-China peace treaty, he invited Deng Xiaoping, who at that time was deputy premier of China, to the ceremony to exchange the instruments of ratification. He also arranged for a historic meeting between Deng and Emperor Showa to further encourage the friendly atmosphere.

This is the man Koizumi calls an effective disciple of hawkish diplomacy. Yet Koizumi himself appears unconcerned even as Japan’s relations with China and South Korea remain as cool as ever, and repeatedly sings the praises of good Japan-U.S. relations.

Fukuda must be rolling over in his grave. Contrast with Koizumi

If Koizumi has a carefully designed plan, I want him to show it. One of the strengths of hawkish politicians is their ability, when needed, to make tough decisions and take firm stances in defiance of public opposition. There must be something Koizumi can do.

For example, why not complete the normalization of diplomatic relations with North Korea, a process that remains half-finished? On second thought, maybe he should first think more seriously about how to break the deadlock in relations with China and South Korea.

It is too late to stop visiting Yasukuni Shrine, but if Koizumi is prepared to build a new national facility to honor the war dead to replace Yasukuni, what better time than now, with his own Cabinet?

Incidentally, Yasuo Fukuda, a former chief Cabinet secretary of the Koizumi Cabinet and Takeo Fukuda’s oldest son, has joined the nonpartisan group of lawmakers recently established to gauge the merits of such a new national war memorial.

In an address to the Diet in May, Fukuda reproved the administration for allowing Japan-China relations to become “abnormal.”

This was his way of remonstrating Koizumi-brand diplomacy, and its obsession with Yasukuni visits.

Abe, on the other hand, has always strongly supported the prime minister’s Yasukuni visits, and opposes a new facility.

Abe is Kishi’s grandson and the second son of Shintaro Abe, who was appointed chief Cabinet secretary of the Fukuda Cabinet. In the Koizumi Cabinet, Abe also served as deputy chief Cabinet secretary under Fukuda fils. Their relationship is thus a complicated one.

If the Takeo Fukuda Cabinet was both “hawkish” and “omnidirectional” at the same time, Abe seems to have inherited the mantle of the first and Fukuda the latter.

In the reshuffle, though, Koizumi gave the seemingly hawkish Abe a key Cabinet post.

What does this appointment mean? If it really does indicate a strategy of Koizumi’s to switch policy directions, the move is indeed intriguing.

The Japan-China peace treaty took effect Oct. 23, 1978, with Deng Xiao-ping present in Tokyo. The occasion turned over a new leaf in Japan-China relations, and things improved rapidly from that point on.

But few people know that it was just six days before, on Oct. 17, that Yasukuni Shrine secretly enshrined Class-A war criminals together with the war dead, an act that would give root to decades of controversy.

I don’t know when Fukuda heard about Yasukuni’s decision, but it certainly is quite a coincidence.

* * *

The author heads The Asahi Shimbun’s editorial board.(IHT/Asahi: December 16,2005)

Posted at 11:38 PM · Comments (0)

December 27, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

CAPE COAST, Ghana - For centuries, Africans walked through the infamous “door of no return” at Cape Coast castle directly into slave ships, never to set foot in their homelands again. These days, the portal of this massive fort so central to one of history’s greatest crimes has a new name, hung on a sign leading back in from the roaring Atlantic Ocean: “The door of return.”
Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image
Michael Kamber for The New York Times

A former slave-trade fort in Cape Coast, Ghana, is a popular destination for African-American tourists.gift to return after Christmas; this
Readers
Forum: African Politics

Enlarge This Image
Michael Kamber for The New York Times

A tour guide describing the conditions once faced by captives before they were shipped as slaves from the Elmina Castle fort in Ghana.

Ghana, through whose ports millions of Africans passed on their way to plantations in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, wants its descendants to come back.

Taking Israel as its model, Ghana hopes to persuade the descendants of enslaved Africans to think of Africa as their homeland - to visit, invest, send their children to be educated and even retire here.

“We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home,” J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, the tourism minister, said on a recent day. “We hope we can help bring the African family back together again.”

In many ways it is a quixotic goal. Ghana is doing well by West African standards - with steady economic growth, a stable, democratic government and broad support from the West, making it a favored place for wealthy countries to give aid.

But it remains a very poor, struggling country where a third of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, life expectancy tops out at 59 and basic services like electricity and water are sometimes scarce.

Nevertheless, thousands of African-Americans already live here at least part of the year, said Valerie Papaya Mann, president of the African American Association of Ghana.

To encourage still more to come, or at least visit, Ghana plans to offer a special lifetime visa for members of the diaspora and will relax citizenship requirements so that descendants of slaves can receive Ghanaian passports. The government is also starting an advertising campaign to persuade Ghanaians to treat African-Americans more like long-lost relatives than as rich tourists. That is harder than it sounds.

Many African-Americans who visit Africa are unsettled to find that Africans treat them - even refer to them - the same way as white tourists. The term “obruni,” or “white foreigner,” is applied regardless of skin color.

To African-Americans who come here seeking their roots, the term is a sign of the chasm between Africans and African-Americans. Though they share a legacy, they experience it entirely differently.

“It is a shock for any black person to be called white,” said Ms. Mann, who moved here two years ago. “But it is really tough to hear it when you come with your heart to seek your roots in Africa.”

The advertising campaign urges Ghanaians to drop “obruni” in favor of “akwaaba anyemi,” a slightly awkward phrase fashioned from two tribal languages meaning “welcome, sister or brother.” As part of the effort to reconnect with the diaspora, Ghana plans to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. DuBois and others it calls modern-day Josephs, after the biblical figure who rose from slavery to save his people.

The government plans to hold a huge event in 2007 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the end of the trans-Atlantic trade by Britain and the 50th anniversary of Ghana’s independence. The ceremonies will include traditional African burial rituals for the millions who died as a result of slavery.

Estimates of the trade vary widely. The most reliable suggest that between 12 million and 25 million people living in the vast lands between present-day Senegal and Angola were caught up, and as many as half died en route to the Americas.

Some perished on the long march from the inland villages where they were captured to seaports. Others died in the dungeons of slave castles and forts, where they were sometimes kept for months, until enough were gathered to pack the hold of a ship. Still others died in the middle passage, the longest leg of the triangular journey between Europe, Africa and the Americas. Of the estimated 11 million who crossed the sea, most went to South America and the Caribbean. About 500,000 are believed to have ended up in the United States.

The mass deportations and the divisions the slave trade wrought are wounds from which Africa still struggles to recover.

Ghana was the first sub-Saharan African nation to shake off its colonial rulers, winning its independence from Britain in 1957. Its founding father, Kwame Nkrumah, attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, and saw in African-Americans a key to developing the new nation.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 10:53 PM · Comments (0)

These are brave, inspired vocals, singing on a ledge, high up, with no net below, guided by a rich life of experience and a ton of art. Nature Boy, Avec le Temps and Should’ve Been, in particular, are profoundly beautiful. Wish I could say it better.

Posted at 12:36 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2005

HONG KONG Headlines about China’s advance have been coming thick and fast this past week. The economy is 17 percent bigger than previously estimated. It is about to surpass every country in Europe except Germany and still growing at 9 percent. China’s information technology exports have surpassed those of the United States. It now exports more cars than it imports. Beijing seems almost embarrassed by all this good news and published a document emphasizing that its “peaceful rise” is no threat to anyone.

But before we all get overwhelmed by China’s great leaps forward, let’s put them in context.

First, big upward revisions of the official economic estimates are hardly surprising given that in terms of “purchasing power parity,” an alternative way of measuring economies, China’s per capita gross domestic product was already about $5,700, or more than four times the more often cited 2004 level of $1,230.

On both measures China’s GDP is roughly double India’s. As China (and India) develop, one can expect the official GDP to grow very rapidly but the gap between it and the purchasing power parity estimate to narrow. There will also be rapid growth because there still seems to be undercounting of China’s services sector, which at 33 percent of the total is very low by any standard, suggesting that statistical methods have not yet caught up with the changes in the economic and social structure.

The bigger GDP numbers have both good and bad implications for China. On the positive side, investment and foreign trade are both relatively smaller. The level of overinvestment may not be quite as massive as the investment ratio of 45 percent of GDP in previous data suggested. Nor is the nation as vulnerable to setbacks in foreign trade, which are quite possible because of resentment at China’s surpluses.

On the negative side, the new numbers, taken in conjunction with the purchasing power parity ones, suggest that income distribution is even worse than already assumed. The already advanced cities and regions with their industrial and export bases are now seeing the growth of high valued-added services. The divides are increasing both between rural and urban areas and between regions. China’s income distribution is now more akin to the wealth divides in Latin America, which continue to stifle that region’s growth, than its East Asian neighbors, which vie with Scandinavia for income equality.

The implication is that China is going to have to focus far more resources, through tax and spending policies, on reducing those gaps in the interests of social harmony and reversing the environmental damage done by years of growth at any price.

As for the export successes, they should not be as troubling for China’s developed country rivals as the raw numbers imply. The IT exports are largely the output of foreign companies, particularly from Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Indeed, China’s willingness to attract foreign investment to catch up with its neighbors may be effective in the short run but hinder the development of local know-how. When Japan and South Korea were at a similar stage, they bought foreign technology but mostly kept foreign companies at arm’s length.

The car exports success seems to owe more to excess capacity at home, plus the implicit subsidies of low-cost credit to state-owned companies through the banking system, than to any very obvious comparative advantage or superior manufacturing technology. They are mostly low-quality vehicles sold into low-end markets.

This is not to disparage China’s achievements, merely to emphasize that it remains unclear whether it really is following the path of Japan and South Korea - or is heading down the Stalinist road of massive but low productivity investment-led growth and excessive military spending, which crowds out consumption.

The other possibility is the past Brazilian example where investment-led growth spearheaded by the state was inefficient and income distribution too skewed to spur growth led by mass consumption. The Soviet Union and Brazil were both successful for many years in achieving high growth and narrowing the gap with the most developed nations of Western Europe and North America but never managed the breakthrough to advanced status.

So the jury will remain out for some time as to whether China can get to the top table economically, as Japan and South Korea have done. The rise may indeed be peaceful, and full of bumps.

The military issue is of a different caliber. As with the Soviet Union, size matters, particularly when you are also the sole East Asian possessor of nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. It is no wonder that Japan is worried, particularly at a time when America’s global position is being eroded.

Japan’s legitimate concern is reflected in its recently announced willingness to spend upward of $1 billion on joining the U.S. missile shield. But that makes Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s diplomatically disastrous visits to the Yasukuni Shrine all the less defensible.

Posted at 9:44 PM · Comments (0)

December 23rd, 2005 Copyright The Village Voice

First Choice Movie Club

“You know, I don’t tell the Beaver everything,” whispered Jean-Paul Sartre to Michelle Vian three years before his death. The Beaver was Simone de Beauvoir. The name was not a term of abuse. Sartre, born 100 years ago, had good reason not to tell the Beaver everything. There was much that was better left unsaid.

Though Sartre indeed did not tell the Beaver everything, the reader of Hazel Rowley’s new book T?te-?-T?te: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (Harper Collins) might wish that he had told her a bit less. Much of what he told her, and she him, had to do with love?or something like it. n a manner not unlike that crystallized centuries earlier, Sartre and de Beauvoir formed dangerous liaisons with the innocents around them. They lifted them up and let them fall for their amusement?or something like it.

Philosophers are supposed to see the world with clear eyes; with clear philosophical eyes, we can note that Sartre was a troll. He was five feet tall. Neither handsome nor dashing, nearly blind in one eye, and scornful of even the most basic conventions of bourgeois dental hygiene (mossy is a word that comes easily to mind). And yet he got girls like he was in the Beatles. As strange to the American mind as escargot is the French custom of beautiful young woman finding brilliant older men attractive merely for being brilliant?and then sleeping with them!

In October 1945 Sartre gave a lecture entitled “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” The answer was no, and the crowd went nuts. A Parisian newspaper described the scene: “A young woman with radiant blue eyes drinks in Sartre’s every word. Another collapses in adoration before him: she has just fainted!” (Even after death, “the small man,” as his friends called him, would make others fall at his feet. Twenty thousand mourners attended his funeral in 1980 and in the crush a cameraman fell, before the Beaver’s terrified gaze, into the philosopher’s grave.) Existentialism did not become a humanism, but it did become a way to get girls. If we are truly free and every moment is contingent, why not share your essence with my existence? Helping Sartre pull the strings of his desire was de Beauvoir. Rowley’s book highlights various, and in some cases rather vile, machinations of the philosopher king and his philosopher queen with the young entourage at their feet. The tales of their amorous intrigues make disturbing and disappointing reading.

As everyone knows, t?te-?-t?te is French for “head to head” and means “face to face.” Rowley’s T?te-?-T?te is as much “head to head” as “face to face.” Sartre failed the agr?gation, the hyper-competitive national examination one must pass to teach in the French school system, the first time he took it. Studying with de Beauvoir, he passed it the second time around?and did so with flying colors. Only one student seems to have performed better that year?de Beauvoir herself. The future author of The Second Sex didn’t, however, receive the first prize?that went to Sartre. The two brilliant young students became closer and closer. They told one another their most painful memories and their most hopeful dreams, what they thought of Leibniz’s metaphysics and of the smell of rain. The relationship that developed between the two was tender and rich. It was also competitive and cruel.

As T?te-?-T?te shows, in his numerous affairs Sartre showed a strong preference for beautiful rather than smart women. The 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal is said to have expressed intense annoyance one day when someone in his presence chanced to say, “I just saw a beautiful woman.” He was not interested in beautiful women, beautiful men, or people talking about either. He was interested in the life of the mind, and he didn’t see what the body had to do with it. Like Sartre, Pascal was blessed with stunning rhetorical resources. He realized that he had the greatest trouble preventing himself from enjoying the effects of his hypnotic verbal power. And so he did what any good Jansenist would do: He had a girdle affixed with iron spikes made for him and when he would receive visits would wear it under his clothes. When he caught himself becoming too pleased by his own entrancing eloquence, he would cross his arms tightly against his thin body and press until the vanity subsided.

Descartes is the author of the most famous sentence in French philosophy: Cogito ergo sum. Pascal is the author of the second most famous one: La vraie philosophie se moque de la philosophie, “true philosophy cares nothing for philosophy.” Whether that is true, it seems to care nothing for beautiful women or biography.

While traveling from East to West Friesland in 1621, the then 26-year-old Descartes defied and confounded a band of sailors bent on murdering him for his money. Are we to understand the cogito differently in the light cast by such an anecdote? And what should Pascal’s mortification of the flesh or Sartre’s indulgences of it matter to philosophy? They change our vision of the man. We admire a man who overcomes pirates?with the force of reason! We hold in uneasy awe a man capable of pursuing vanity into the deepest recesses of his clothing and person. And we hold even a great and courageous man responsible for shabby deceptions and contraceptions (despite his assurances, Michelle Vian became pregnant the first time the two slept together?and yes, he told the Beaver). But are we to understand the being that is or the nothingness that is not any differently as a result?

Hegel had a clever way of dealing with historical personages he didn’t know what to make of?he made history responsible for them. Such figures as the terrific and terrible Napoleon were “world-historical” individuals who, though they seem to be wreaking relentless havoc and creating unjustifiable chaos, are actually, unbeknownst to them, advancing the interests of history. They are pawns in its slow game. French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu said that he made his intellectual way by trying to do and say the opposite of what Sartre did and said?all the while admiring him intensely. Bourdieu credited Sartre with enshrining the “myth of the intellectual” (Bourdieu wrote a book called Homo Academicus where he gave taxonomic specifications). As the phrase indicates, it is only a myth. Thinkers were for Bourdieu always deeply entrenched in history, and the world of the mind and the world of the body were never, he claimed, far apart. And yet, he added, this “myth of the intellectual,” which no one so well as Sartre embodied and embedded, was “one of the ruses of historical reason,” one of the means by which Hegel’s history progresses.

Phrased morecrudely, what do beautiful women, iron spikes, and pirates have to do with “true philosophy”? Everything and nothing seems the only philosophical answer. Nothing because philosophy is about the essential and not the accidental, about the life of the mind and the rules of reason. Everything because philosophy is also the discipline whose task is the life truly led?and that is a life, for good or ill, with spiked girdles, high-seas adventure, and beautiful women.

Leland de la Durantaye is an assistant professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University.

Posted at 3:16 PM · Comments (0)

This classic on Southeast Asia has been sitting on my shelf for a long time. Just read it (XMas 2005) on the eve of a trip to Laos. It’s a bit dated, inevitably, but the history is clear and solid and the reporting is too.

Posted at 3:03 PM · Comments (0)

The chapters on the Axial Age and the final chapter, The Great Western Transformation, relating myth and religion to modern literature, are fantastic. This is a slim volumn that covers a great deal of ground, often brilliantly.

Posted at 3:01 PM · Comments (0)

In a period of less than three weeks, three elementary school-age girls were recently murdered in different areas of Japan. The nature of the crimes guaranteed extensive coverage, but their occurrence in quick succession stretched the resources of the news media beyond its normal capabilities.

Moreover, the incidents occurred at a time when the press is looking at a possible curtailment of its news-gathering options with regard to exactly this kind of crime.

Since last April, when the government passed a basic law to help crime victims, discussions have been continuing with regard to specifics. One recommendation is for police to withhold the names of victims of crimes and serious accidents from the press in light of complaints from victims’ families, who say tat reporters violate their right to privacy in order to get statements. The Cabinet will supposedly look at the matter this month.

The reaction from the news media has been strong and unanimous. The Japan Newspaper Association has said that such alaw would greatly damage the freedom of the press. All the major newspapers and broadcasters insist that it should be left up to them to decide whether or not to use names of victims in news reports. In an editorial published in October, the Mainichi Shimbun admitted that “some media” turned victims’ families into “secondary victims” through intrusive coverage, but that hiding the names of victims would, on balance, be a mistake.

By “some media,” the Mainichi is obviously referring to tabloid TV and weekly magazines, but in the thick of news-gathering, the mainstream press can be just as inconsiderate. In a Dec. 8 article, the Asahi Shimbun described the media free for all following the Nov. 22 murder of a 7-year-old girl in Hiroshima Prefecture. Within hours, about two dozen reporters had descended on the neighborhood where the body was found and were questioning residents. The local police quickly distributed instructions asking them not to “interfere” with the victim’s family, relatives, or neighbors, and not to take pictures of the girl’s school.

In cases like these, the local police act as a liaison between victims’ families and the media. In the Hiroshima case, representatives of 16 media companies agreed to be “moderate” in their coverage after they received the police instructions. But at the funeral several days later, the father of the girl refused to provide a written statement and a photo to the media, and the police later changed his mind, warning that if he didn’t appease the press in some way, “the demand for coverage would just increase.”

After the murdered body of a 7-year-old Tochigi Prefecture girl was discovered Dec. 2, the police asked the media to exercise “self-restraint,” and at first the press agreed. However, during a meeting of parents at the victim’s elementary school, a group of reporters entered the grounds to talk to them. In order to keep the press at bay, the principal had to promise to hold daily news conferences at 5 p.m. in front of the school gate. About 100 reporters and cameramen who covered the funeral kept their distance, albeit with telephoto lenses. One TV reporter described it as “chaos.”

All this supposedly because the public has a right to know. But what exactly is it we want to know? And what do we actually get? In the Tochigi case, reporters went to an apple orchard that the little girl had recently visited. Is the orchard owner’s sketchy impression of her vital to our understanding of the case? Why do we need to know so much about the victim’s background? To increase our sympathy for the family and intensify our rage toward the killer?

Reporters are required by their editors to gain as much information as possible for sensational news stories, and the quest for quantity overpowers any considerations of quality. Air time and column inches must be filled. Brutal murders are considered ratings-boosters and magazine-sellers. As long as the content is related it doesn’t have to be relevant.

The media’s self-serving mantra about the public’s “right to know” masks its laziness. None of their complaints about the recommendation to withhold victims’ names hold up under scrutiny. Both the Mainichi and the Asahi ran editorials saying the same thing, that such a law would undermine the media’s job of keeping the police in line, because without names the press wouldn’t be able to check the veracity of their statements.

But the mainstream press only reports what the police give them anyway through the kisha (press) clubs. Journalists can acquire information from many sources, but the major media rely completely on officials. What newspapers and broadcasters are really worried about — should the police withhold the names of victims — is that they will actually have to go out and dig up those names themselves, which means every reporter for himself; in other words, competition.

The real question is: Why do they need those names and what do they do with them? A backlash started last spring when some of the families of people killed in the Amagasakitrain accident asked the police not to release the names of their loved ones to the media. It’s a common practice for the media to air or print such names, though no one has ever explained why it’s necessary. Like reporting those murdered girls’ hopesand dreams or their families’ pain, it adds nothing to our understanding of the tragedies. It’s just more data.

In an ideal media world, reporters would use their conscience and professionalism when deciding whether or not to report certain elements of a story, but mostly they use convenience and unexamined protocol. “Reporting actual names is a principle of journalism,” said a media professor in a recent Asahi editorial. That’s true if what you are doing is real journalism.

What we get is more like dictation.

The Japan Times: Dec. 18, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 12:46 PM · Comments (0)

From The Real Thing, by Taj Mahal, as aptly named album as you’re likely to find.
The exuberance in the harmonica playing and vocals will grab you.

“I’m going to move up to the country and paint my mailbox blue…
I’m leaving LA baby, Mama don’t you know that smog has got me down…
Come here baby, Mama let Daddy take you by the hand.
If you’ll be my woman, I’ll be your city born country man!”

Also not to be missed: “Big Kneed Gal”:

“She’s my baby, she’s my sweetie, she’s my lover, she’s my pal. Now you know I’m just c-r-a-z-y about that woman. She’s my big-kneed gal.”

Posted at 5:46 PM · Comments (0)

http://www.afriterra.org/MapImages/index.html

This is the name of a map, one of many fantastic historic documents made available online at Africaterra, a free cartographic library.

Posted at 2:47 PM · Comments (0)

Japan’s population has started shrinking for the first time this year, health ministry data showed Thursday, presenting the government with pressing challenges on the social and economic front, including ensuring provision of social security services and securing the labor force.

The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry’s annual survey estimates the balance of domestic births of Japanese against deaths in 2005 to be minus 10,000, marking the first natural decline since the government first began compiling the data in 1899.

Even on an aggregate population basis, including foreign residents, the balance is projected to be minus 4,000 in 2005, registering a fall one year earlier than projected by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, which had predicted a decline after 2006.

Japan joins Germany and Italy in the ranks of countries where a declin in population has already set in.

The government responded to the data by resolving to reinforce measures to deal with the falling birthrate.

“The government and the ruling parties think of measures to counter the falling birthrate as extremey important … and are willing to further reinforce them,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe told a news conference.

The institute attributed the decline to a rise in deaths because of flu and stalled growth in the number of babies born from mothers in their 30s — the children of baby boomers.

However, final data due out next September may result in a positive figure because differences between these two types of data typically range from several thousand to up to 10,000, a ministry official said.

The annual estimate is chiefly based on preliminary data up to October.

The number of births, which has continually been declining since the 1970s, marked a record low 1,067,000 in 2005, 44,000 fewer than in 2004, according to the annual estimate.

The number of deaths rose by 48,000 from 2004 to 1,077,000, marking the third straight year with more than 1 million deaths, with many elderly people dying of flu between January and March, the figures show.

Japan’s population, based on census, is estimated to have been 127,687,000 as of Oct. 1, 2004, according to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry.

The ministry’s statistics show Japan’s population was about 43 million in 1899, the first year data were compiled. It surpassed 100 million in 1970.

The population institute projected in 2002 that the balance of births and deaths would be 20,000 in 2005 and minus 23,000 in 2006. The aggregate population as of Oct. 1 will peak in 2006 and a long-term decline will set in thereafter with the population to drop to around 100,600,000 in 2050, the institute projects.

The government will need to address expected declines in the labor force and the nation’s economic output as well as increases in social security costs.

With society aging and women bearing fewer children, social security costs will likely grow heavier in future generations. This will increase pressure on the government to secure revenue by raising social security charges or the consumption tax.

The Japan Times: Dec. 23, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 6:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New Yorker

This is an extract from a David Remnick piece that appeared in The New Yorker on Nov. 7, 2005.

One of the forbidden lights of Russian literature during the Soviet era was Vladimir Nabokov. None of his books, not the early Russian-language novels written in France and Germany or the later works, written in English when he lived in the United States and Switzerland, were approved by the authorities. He was considered dangerously “anti-Soviet” and banned outright. Even his translation of “Eugene Onegin”-with its three accompanying volumes of commentary (notes so Nabokovian, so joyful, intricate, and erudite, that they seem like the apparatus to one of his novels, like the “commentary” of “Pale Fire”)-even this was impossible to find in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union except in illegal, smuggled editions.

Pevear and Volokhonsky told me that they considered Nabokov’s “Onegin” one of the great triumphs of translation, even though it is nothing like their own work. Nabokov, who regarded “The Gift” and “Lolita” as his best novels, thought that his “Onegin” was perhaps the most important project of his life and, at the same time, like all translation, innately futile. In 1955, just as he was setting out on the project, he published a poem in this magazine on the impossibility, the insult, of translation:

What is translation? On a platter A poet’s pale and glaring head, A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, And profanation of the dead. The parasites you were so hard on Are pardoned if I have your pardon, O Pushkin, for my stratagem. I travelled down your secret stem, And reached the root, and fed upon it; Then, in a language newly learned, I grew another stalk and turned Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet, Into my honest roadside prose- All thorn, but cousin to your rose.

The poem, which is written in Pushkin’s signature stanza form-fourteen lines, a hundred and eighteen syllables in iambic tetrameter, with a regular scheme of feminine and masculine rhymes-is both tribute and apology, to Russian and to Pushkin.

Nabokov worked on “Onegin” for nearly a decade. His intention, as he makes clear in the introduction, is not to provide a traditional “poetic” rendering, a pleasurable English “Onegin,” like Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s, James Falen’s, or Charles Johnston’s noble attempts. Such efforts, he felt, had necessarily ended in failure. Not long before publishing his own “Onegin,” Nabokov took to the pages of The New York Review of Books and, like the lepidopterist he was, picked the wings off a translation by Walter Arndt-which, to his rage, went on to win the Bollingen Prize. Nabokov could not bear Arndt’s “Germanisms,” his freewheeling sacrifice of semantic accuracy for rhythmic “beauty.” Of all the sins of a translator, he would later write, “The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days.”

For his part, Nabokov intended to provide the reader with a literal-minded “crib, a pony,” as he once told an interviewer. “And to the fidelity of transposal I have sacrificed everything: elegance, euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar.” He had no hope for “Onegin” as an English poem. His purpose was singular and clear. Just as Dante wrote the Divine Comedy to move a reader toward Scripture (or so he said), Nabokov wrote his translation to inspire his reader to know the poem in Russian:

It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin’s language and go through EO again without this crib. In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all “general ideas” (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.

Despite the stubbornly eccentric and unlovely texture of Nabokov’s “Onegin,” the work was generally well reviewed, especially by those who understood and accepted his intention and did not go looking for an English poem. The most notable exception was Edmund Wilson, who decided in July, 1965, to wage battle against the translation in the pages of The New York Review.

Since 1940, just after Nabokov’s arrival in the United States, Wilson and Nabokov enjoyed a warm friendship, a constant Dear Volodya-Dear Bunny correspondence full of mutual instruction, jocular competition, oneupmanship, and traded enthusiasms. They were well matched: both were self-confident, supremely intelligent, and well trained in the art of polemics. Wilson had been extraordinarily kind to Nabokov, making introductions for him that led to teaching jobs, a Guggenheim fellowship, contracts with book publishers, and publication in The New Yorker and The New Republic. And yet there was an uncommon, almost frightening honesty in the relationship. Wilson did not hesitate to tell Nabokov that he did not like “Bend Sinister,” “Lolita,” “Ada,” and other major works. (He never bothered to read “The Gift.”) Nabokov, despite his debts to Wilson, treated him, especially on Russian matters, with a breezy condescension: “Dear Bunny, I am going to steal an hour from Gogol and thrash out this matter of Russian versification, because you are as wrong as can be.” Wilson was bemused by many of Nabokov’s literary judgments, his disdain for Mann’s “asinine” “Death in Venice,” Pasternak’s “vilely written” “Dr. Zhivago,” Faulkner’s “corncobby chronicles”-anything that smacked of journalese, local color, big ideas, or political propaganda. And yet, for a quarter century, despite any friction or jealousies, the friendship seemed to thrive on its directness. “I like you very much,” Nabokov told Wilson in 1945, to which Wilson replied, “Our conversations have been among the few consolations of my literary life through these last years-when my old friends have been dying, petering out or getting more and more neurotic.” In the end, however, the relationship could not survive Wilson’s attack on Nabokov’s “Onegin.” The assault was too fierce, too presumptuous, and Nabokov’s amour propre was never quite restored.

Despite his imperfect, book-learned Russian, Wilson betrayed no doubt that he was capable of taking on Nabokov. In the course of his career, he learned several languages in order to “work up” his projects: Russian and German to write on Marx and Lenin in “To the Finland Station,” Hebrew for “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” Hungarian to read Endre Ady and other poets. He was especially earnest about his Russian, consulting grammars, Dahl’s dictionary (a more antiquarian sort of Russian O.E.D.), and, quite often, his emigre friend.

When it came to Russian literature, the correspondence between Nabokov and Wilson was rather like that between an amused, patient teacher and an eager, overreaching student. Wilson’s publication of “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” in The New York Review of Books, was an assault from the back of the class:

This production, though in certain ways valuable, is something of a disappointment; and the reviewer, though a personal friend of Mr. Nabokov-for whom he feels a warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation-and an admirer of much of his work, does not propose to mask his disappointment. Since Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of introducing any job of this kind which he undertakes by an announcement that he is unique and incomparable and that everybody else who has attempted it is an oaf and an ignoramus, incompetent as a linguist and scholar, usually with the implication that he is also a low-class person and a ridiculous personality, Nabokov ought not to complain if the reviewer, though trying not to imitate his bad literary manners, does not hesitate to underline his weaknesses.

Wilson not only disapproved of Nabokov’s “bald and awkward language”; he also discerned in his friend a desire to “torture both the reader and himself” by “flattening out” Pushkin. In “The Wound and the Bow,” Wilson found the key to imaginative art in the injuries and humiliations suffered by a writer in his youth-in Nabokov’s case, the humiliation of being stripped of his homeland, of being forced to wander the world far from his home and his language. Nabokov’s revenge, he feels, is “sado-masochistic,” and it expresses itself in an infuriating perversion of Pushkin:

Aside from this desire to suffer and make suffer-so important an element in his fiction-the only characteristic Nabokov trait that one recognizes in this uneven and sometimes banal translation is the addiction to rare and unfamiliar words, which, in view of his declared intention to stick so close to the text that his version may be used as a trot, are entirely inappropriate here… . He gives us, for example, rememorating, producement, curvate, habitude, rummers, familistic, gloam, dit, shippon and scrab.

In all, Wilson accused Nabokov of “actual errors in English,” an “unnecessarily clumsy style,” “vulgar” phrases, immodesty, inaccurate transliteration, a “lack of common sense,” a “tedious and interminable appendix,” a poor grasp of Russian prosody, an “overdone” commentary that suffers from “information which is generally quite useless,” and-“to try to get all my negatives out of the way”-“serious failures” of interpretation. The particulars take up the bulk of Wilson’s attack, though he closes with some lapidary tribute to Nabokov’s mini-essays on Pushkin’s period, cohort, and influences.

After reading Wilson’s piece at home in Montreux, Nabokov cabled the co-editor of the Review, Barbara Epstein, in New York: “Please reserve space in next issue for my thunder.” If Wilson saw his essay as simply an elaboration of an ongoing game, his target did not. Nabokov, whose sense of humor was so supreme on the page, was not at all amused, and his counterattacks, published in Encounter and The New York Review, filleted Wilson personally as well as in the philological particulars:

As Mr. Wilson so justly proclaims in the beginning of “The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov,” we are indeed old friends. I fully share “the warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation” that he says he feels for me. In the 1940s, during my first decade in America, he was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Eugene Onegin aloud, he started to do this with great gusto, garbling every second word and turning Pushkin’s iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches.

Like an admiral commanding a flotilla that his underfunded opponent cannot hope to match, Nabokov lords his superior command of Russian language and prosody over his opponent. After a while, his methodical counterattack seems unfair:

In translating slushat’ shum morskoy (Eight:IV:11) I chose the archaic and poetic transitive turn “to listen the sound of the sea” because the relevant passage has in Pushkin a stylized archaic tone. Mr. Wilson may not care for this turn-I do not much care for it either-but it is silly of him to assume that I lapsed into a naive Russianism not being really aware that, as he tells me, “in English you have to listen to something.” First, it is Mr. Wilson who is not aware that there exists an analogous construction in Russian, prislushivat’sya k zvuku, “to listen close to the sound”-which, of course, makes nonsense of the exclusive Russianism imagined by him, and secondly, had he happened to leaf through a certain canto of Don Juan, written in the year Pushkin was beginning his poem, or a certain Ode to Memory, written when Pushkin’s poem was being finished, my learned friend would have concluded that Byron (“Listening debates not very wise or witty”) and Tennyson (“Listening the lordly music”) must have had quite as much Russian blood as Pushkin and I.

Wilson never relented in his argument that Nabokov’s translation was nearly unreadable as a poem (and here he was right), but, with time, he seemed to regret the affair. On rereading his original article, Wilson admitted that he had sounded “more damaging” than he had intended. But it was too late. The correspondence with Nabokov, once so robust and warm, now dwindled and ceased. Wilson felt the loss acutely. There were a few last desul-tory letters in the years left to them, but Nabokov could never fully forgive the “Onegin” affair and other slights, including a wounding passage about his wife, Vera, in Wilson’s memoir “Upstate.” A quarter century of intense friendship ended. In a letter to the Times Book Review in November, 1971, Nabokov wrote, “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins.” Wilson died in June, 1972. Pevear and Volokhonsky may be the premier Russian-to-English translators of the era. They are certainly the most versatile and industrious and the only such team in which one member, Richard Pevear, does not really speak the language. Pevear told me that he has not even spent much time in Russia-just one three-week trip to St. Petersburg to meet his wife’s old friends and family.

Posted at 4:10 PM · Comments (0)

Dec 20th 2005
Copyright The Economist

NESTLING in a valley near Aix-en-Provence, Plan de Campagne is a familiar French landscape. A strip of garish hoardings on stalks reaches into the distance. Le Plan Bowling, a 30-alley indoor centre, squats near the El Rancho Tex-Mex grill, a clay-coloured mock hacienda, complete with cactuses and sombreros. Two McDonald’s fast-food joints rival Buffalo Grill, where poulet Kentucky and assiette Texane are served under a red roof topped with giant white buffalo horns. All this is ringed by vast parking lots, crammed with gas-guzzling 4X4s. Welcome to France, cradle of anti-Americanism.

Beyond the Romanesque churches and lavender fields of the tourist trail, France is changing. Slowly, its way of life is beginning to resemble that of the country it loves to hate. Over four-fifths of the French now live in towns or suburbs—more than in America. Less than 4% of the French workforce is in farming. French intellectuals and editorialists may still philosophise in smoke-filled cafés, but their countrymen flock to Hollywood films and devour American brands. American culinary sins—fast food, TV-dinners—are on the rise in the land of gastronomy, and with them child obesity. Yet the more that ordinary French people embrace such American ways, the more the elite seems fixated with an anti-Americanism that runs far deeper than just differences over Iraq. What is it about the French and America?
Advertisement Click Here!

France has no monopoly on anti-Americanism. But no other country gets such scorn from Americans for harbouring the sentiment. France’s defiance over Iraq explains much of this today. But that disagreement swelled into an exchange of insults because it drew from a deeper well of American assumptions about the French—their unreliability, ingratitude, superciliousness—that are in turn inspired by the force of French anti-Americanism.

French anti-Americanism is unlike other European varieties, because it prevails not only on the political left but on the right too. Anti-Americanism in Spain used to be a largely right-wing phenomenon, and the tradition is venerable among right-wing writers in Britain. But only in France has it inspired the most potent strain of right-of-centre politics for nearly half a century. President Jacques Chirac derives most of his support from this tradition, whose champion is still Charles de Gaulle, the president who converted France’s dollar reserves into gold and, in 1966, defiantly pulled France out of NATO’s military command.

Some, such as Philippe Roger, the author of “L’Ennemi Américain”, detect an undercurrent of anti-Americanism going back to the denigration of pre-revolutionary America by French thinkers in the 18th century. It reappeared, often as cultural snobbery, in the 19th century, and hardened into contempt in the 20th, most virulently among communists, as American industrial might grew. A rash of publications during the 1920s and 1930s—“L’Abomination Américaine” (1930), “Le Cancer Américain” (1931)—railed against the inhumanity of American life. “Out with the Yankees!” wrote one pamphleteer. “Out with the people and their products, their methods and their lessons, their dances and their jazz! Let them take back their Fords and their chewing gum.” The sentiment has found an echo, especially in the columns of France’s national newspapers, ever since. The durability of anti-Americanism prompted Jack Straw, Britain’s foreign minister, to call it an ancient French “neurosis”.

Scratch the surface of the denunciations from on high, however, and French anti-Americanism is not quite what it seems. First, because it is an elite doctrine that is often not shared by ordinary people. Second, because it is used by the political class more as a scapegoat for its own troubles than as a reasoned response to real threats. And, third, because it implies that the French clash with America out of antipathy. The real reason is rivalry, tinged with jealousy.

“It is an article of faith among American intellectuals”, wrote Thomas Frank, the author of “What’s the matter with Kansas?”, “that countries such as France resist Hollywood films because they are snobs, dedicated to bringing ‘culture’—in the form of arty, disjointed films—to the masses.” Certainly, French intellectuals cherish low-plot, high-art films, and the French Ministry of Culture leads a guerrilla war to defend such works from a vulgar American invasion. But what do French people actually watch?
Getty Images From France with love

In the first 11 months of 2005, the top film was “Star Wars: Episode 3”. The all-time top box-office film in France is another American blockbuster, “Titanic”. On the small screen, French versions of American reality television and confessional talk-shows clog up the schedules, spawning the term la télé poubelle. French teenagers download American rap to their iPods. In 2004, the person most searched for on Google France was Britney Spears.

The more American brands flaunt their origins, the better they seem to do. In Carrefour at Montesson, a giant out-of-town hypermarket west of Paris, the bakery shelves are stacked with “Harry’s American Sandwich” bread, a sliced product that has taken the land of the baguette by storm. In the nearby McDonald’s, Le road to America menu tempted customers not so long ago with Le New York burger and Le Texas. Such is the success in France of McDonald’s, a chain that is struggling elsewhere, that its boss was promoted to reinvigorate the brand across Europe.
Existentialism on the rocks

The French seduction by Americana is not new. The French fell for American jazz in the 1920s and 1930s, welcoming black American musicians who saw France as a haven from the racism at home. Josephine Baker became a music-hall star in Paris. Sidney Bechet lived his last years there. Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong were mobbed when they toured France. American writers, too, from Richard Wright to Henry Miller, made a home in Paris, finding a reception and stimulation that eluded them at home. Sartre and de Beauvoir adored America’s jazz, its novels, its films and its whisky.

Of course, a taste for American brands or popular culture does not necessarily mean a taste for America, its citizens or leaders. Consumption patterns are no guide to affinity, argues Mr Roger: American brands are popular in the Arab world, after all. Yet even the evidence for popular anti-Americanism is ambivalent.

For sure, 85% of the French disapprove of George Bush’s international policies, according to the latest German Marshall Fund transatlantic survey, compared with 72% of all Europeans and 62% of the British. Mr Bush’s French supporters are a silent minority: just 11% would have voted for him, said one poll before the 2004 presidential election. And today’s America—God-fearing, fixated by terrorism, militaristic—is not the Europhile America of old that a nostalgic France often yearns for.

Yet the French do not seem to generalise this dislike. In one 2004 poll, 72% of the French had a favourable view of Americans, more even than in Britain (62%) or Spain (47%). Some 68% of those questioned in another poll the same year said that what unites France and America was more important than what separates them. During the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings in 2004, politicians were frosty, but the people at large showed an outpouring of gratitude to American veterans.

Even in the 1950s, as anti-Americanism raged on the left, ordinary French people did not express hostility to America. Between 1952 and 1957, according to Michel Winock, a French historian, polls found the French on average unequivocally favourable to America. Today America still draws the French. Young French bankers, cooks and students head for New York or California. Even French politicians cannot resist the allure. On the left, Laurent Fabius snapped up a short summer job lecturing at the University of Chicago in 2003 and again in 2004. On the right, Nicolas Sarkozy, who found an hour to entertain Tom Cruise at his ministry in Paris, told a New York audience that “The dream of French families is that their children go to American universities.” Even Mr Chirac has fond memories of a summer at Harvard. He may rail about American cultural imperialism, but could not resist inviting Steven Spielberg to the Elysée Palace to award him the légion d’honneur. So much for French disdain for the new world.

In truth, the allergy to America was always a rather intermittent complaint.
When we recall the fervent anti-Americanism of the left in the 1950s and of the right in the 1960s, we can’t help but be struck by the transformation of attitudes and sensibilities that have opened the door to American mass and high culture. The transformation of attitudes has even resulted in general support for American foreign policies. Survey data show that while France manifested the strongest hostility towards the United States in the post-war period, it is now probably the least hostile of the European countries.

This was Ezra Suleiman, a political scientist at Princeton and astute observer of France, writing some 20 years ago. It is easy to forget that Ronald Reagan’s America was widely admired by François Mitterrand’s France. Even the French elite does not always feel compelled to stir up anti-Americanism.

Consider the revolutionary period, which Patrice Higonnet, a Harvard historian, calls the “mythological age” of mutual admiration. French and Americans, intoxicated by modern ideas about liberty, swapped theory, gunpowder and manpower. The Marquis de Lafayette, who was made an American officer and helped to defeat the British at the battle of Yorktown in 1781, was a shared hero. Tom Paine, an American by adoption, was granted French citizenship for his contribution to revolutionary thinking. Benjamin Franklin was adored in the salons of Paris, and Thomas Jefferson was invited to sit in the National Assembly during the writing of the French constitution.

For sure, anti-American feelings later stirred in France. French radicals were disappointed at the timidity of America’s revolution. Yet French fascination with the young republic survived. Disenchantment was followed by renewed admiration. Lafayette spent nearly 13 months in the United States as a guest of various Americans in 1824-25, before being sent home in a government frigate with a gift of $200,000 and the ownership of a small town. In 1886, President Grover Cleveland unveiled a gift from the French: a statue dedicated to “Liberty Enlightening the World”.
It’s a diversion

What prompted all this to change into 20th-and 21st-century anti-Americanism? Explanations include a clash of commercial interests, as American economic might grew and French clout declined; changing views of common foreign threats; and the two countries’ relative balance of power. To these might be added a French sense of insecurity. Anti-Americanism intensifies at times of French uncertainty. It has often flared after French military humiliation—1917, 1940, 1962—or instability at home. Striking positions of independence from America is a way for France to project power when it feels emasculated, something de Gaulle well understood after the American liberation of France.

Today’s concern about decline is another such moment. Sure enough, a favourite posture among the French political class is proclaiming the need to build up Europe to counterbalance the United States. Despite a recent thaw in Franco-American relations, President Chirac, in the best Gaullist tradition, continues to call for a “multi-polar world”. On the left, the Socialist Party campaigned for the European constitution with the slogan “Strong in the face of the United States”.

Or consider the use of the term “l’Américain” by French politicians to discredit rivals. Michel Rocard, a Socialist prime minister in the 1980s, was undermined by the label. Today, Mr Sarkozy’s rivals on the right pin it on him. The epithet is potent because many current French phobias—capitalism, globalisation, liberalism—are associated with America.

Indeed, Jean-François Revel, author of “L’Obsession anti-Américaine”, argues that French anti-Americanism, particularly in the media, often flourishes at the expense of self-examination. The French delight in exposing American poverty, racism and ghetto life, he pointed out well before the country’s recent riots proved his point, when at home a tenth of the workforce is out of work and young French Muslims are isolated in suburban tower blocks. America, he argues, “serves to console us about our own failures by sustaining the myth that things are even worse there—and that what is going wrong for us comes from them.”

Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, kicked up a stir among the French during the stand-off over Iraq when he declared that “France is becoming our enemy.” But is it really hostile to America?

America is, after all, one of the few western countries with which France has never been to war. Even de Gaulle supported America during the Cuban missile crisis, and reminded a joint session of Congress of the two countries’ history of shared values. The country that supposedly scorns American capitalism has spawned global companies that feed the American army (Sodexho), fit tyres on American cars (Michelin) and put the gloss on American lips (L’Oréal). In many ways, France and America clash so often not because they are so irreconcilably different, but because they are so alike.

The modern French and American polities may have evolved quite differently, notably where the role of the state is concerned, but both emerged as highly codified, anti-clerical, secular republics. Both—unlike the dissembling English—can articulate unapologetically what their country stands for. Born of revolutions, America and France each established republics inspired by Enlightenment thinking, and based on freedom and individual rights. Within the same year, 1789, both the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights were drafted.

Above all, each nation believed in the universalism of its model—the Americans stressing liberty, the French civilisation—and shared an ambition to spread it abroad. The conviction among the French elite that France represents an alternative to the American way runs deep. It forms part of the national mythology that has helped to shore up French pride. And it explains why the French so readily pick on America at times of self-doubt.

Just listen to Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, who came to embody anti-American defiance. “What an honour to be French,” he wrote in a recent book, “loyal to a…responsibility to bestow a conscience, a soul upon our Earth. Our democracy was built upon the affirmation of universal values,” he adds, and France’s destiny is to enact “our universal and humanist dream”.

Such florid romanticism may provoke derision on the other side of the Atlantic, never mind how closely it parallels Mr Bush’s belief in his duty to spread freedom. But the basic point is keenly felt among the French governing class. It echoes de Gaulle’s “certain idea” of France, “dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny”, 50 years ago. This competitive instinct explains why anti-Americanism was the natural flipside to de Gaulle’s effort in the 1960s to turn Europe into a French-led superpower.

As with de Gaulle, so with his inheritors. Romantic rivalry inspires Mr Chirac’s determination to create a “multi-polar” world, and his resistance to Mr Bush’s doctrine of unilateral pre-emption. It explains France’s desire to keep its own spheres of influence, whether in Africa or the Arab world. And, incidentally, it explains France’s eagerness to see off others whom it considers to be encroaching on its domain, notably the British, whose first attempts to join the European common market were vetoed by de Gaulle.

Moreover, defying the might of America is a form of muscular self-affirmation, to be contrasted with the unmanly British tendency to jump when American fingers click. To be pro-American for long would emasculate. After all, what is France for if not to represent an elegant, pleasurable alternative to the American way, even if it does so as most of the country munches its burgers and goggles at its trashy television?

Posted at 3:38 PM · Comments (0)

Sunday December 11, 2005
Copyright The Observer

Kidney patients who need a transplant in Britain are being targeted by a medical group offering them new organs taken from executed Chinese prisoners.

The horrifying trade in human organs has been revealed by British surgeons who say patients are being tempted abroad, but may not fully understand the dangers or the human suffering behind the transplant operation.

It is thought that as many as 10 British patients may have gone to China this year to receive a new kidney, at a cost of £23,000. One UK patient was believed to be recovering this weekend at a hospital in southern China following such a transplant.

Article continues
The internet company transplantsinternational.com makes it clear that the organs are from prisoners who are about to be executed. The prisoners apparently give their consent and are told that their families will receive money for the ‘donation’.

Under the heading ‘Where do kidneys come from?’, the company states: ‘A cadaveric kidney comes from a dead person and in the majority of cases in China, the dead people are prisoners, which allows for us to know at least two weeks ahead of time when the kidney will be ready.’

It also makes clear that before the death, blood samples are taken from prisoners to ensure they will be the perfect match for their Western beneficiaries.

‘All donors are screened to prevent any disease transmission and the prisoners consent to organ donation. Unlike in some Western countries, the prisoners can receive money for their organs.’

Dr Peter Andrews, a consultant nephrologist from St Helier Hospital in Surrey, said: ‘In the past 18 months we’ve had at least five patients say they are considering this. Five years ago, it would have been unheard of.’

Another doctor, Professor Stephen Wigmore, head of transplantation surgery at University Hospital Birmingham Trust, said that recently one of his patients had gone some way towards preparing for a liver transplant in China, before deciding against it.

Doctors in Oxford, Nottingham and Sussex have reported similar cases, according to Hospital Doctor magazine.

Prof Nadey Hakim, head of transplantation surgery at Imperial College London, said: ‘It is so disgusting it is hard to know how any doctor can take part in this trade.

‘Of course people become desperate for a new kidney - but do they realise what this trade is like? I first heard about it a few years ago from a Chinese doctor and I couldn’t believe it. Would anyone want to receive an organ from someone who died in this way?’

Hakim also has worries about other kinds of transplants carried out in China. ‘We know that they have done around 10 arm transplants so far, and I was told that these donors are also prisoners. It raises many difficult ethical issues.’

The kidney transplants are carried out at the Southern Hospital in Guangzhou by Dr Lixing Yu, who has performed thousands of kidney transplants over the past 30 years.

According to the website, he specialises in research on the long-term survival of patients and has received more than 19 national awards for his work.

Earlier this month, China broke its silence on the issue to admit that organs of executed prisoners were sold to foreigners for transplantation. Huang Jiefu, the deputy prime minister, admitted that the practice is widespread, but said they wanted to tighten the rules.

‘We want to push for regulations on organ transplants to standardise the management of the supply of organs from executed prisoners and tidy up the medical market,’ Mr Huang told Caijing magazine.

Posted at 12:29 PM · Comments (0)

http://www.jda.go.jp/JMSDF/info/event/cm_p/16cm.html

This must be seen to be appreciated.

Posted at 12:08 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Reuters

BOUAKE, Ivory Coast (Reuters) - Charles Gnahore was panicking: his dilapidated moped had run out of gasoline and he was due in the studio to present the evening news.
After some frenetic bargaining to get fuel on credit from a nearby vendor, the 26-year-old made it to the small concrete building that serves as a studio in Ivory Coast’s rebel-held town of Bouake. He was just in time.
“The news has started late a couple of times before when I’ve had a puncture,” he said, scrambling to put on a jacket and tie as he sprinted to sit in front of the camera, with a crinkled map of Ivory Coast behind him.
Such minor contretemps are a regular feature of life at TV Our Homeland (TVNP), a station run on a shoestring by rebels holding the northern half of the former French colony since 2002 when they tried and failed to oust President Laurent Gbagbo, triggering a civil war.
After a few weeks of fighting, the conflict settled into a debilitating cycle of brief bursts of violence, followed by tense calm. Once a regional economic powerhouse, Ivory Coast became a place synonymous with instability, although there has been little all-out fighting for many months.
The rebels set up the television station — originally called Tele Mutin, or Rebel TV — to explain who they were and why they had taken up arms in the world’s top cocoa producer.
“We realized at the start of the crisis that the media was also a war weapon,” said Aboude Coulibaly, TVNP’s director and a member of the New Forces, as the rebels are now known.
MEDIA WAR
Television and radio are major opinion-shapers in Ivory Coast where over half of people are illiterate. As in many African countries, seizing the state broadcaster is seen as an early prerequisite of any serious coup attempt.
Just weeks into the war, the rebels had created a Web site to push their cause.
They say they started fighting to end discrimination against mainly Muslim northerners, who have long complained of being treated like second-class citizens by the southern authorities.
Gbagbo’s supporters say the insurgency was simply a grab for power and wealth, funded by foreign powers.
The government has also used the media to rally supporters and the authorities have been accused of turning state media into hate media, using it to whip up xenophobia and anger.
State broadcaster RTI went off the air in the north at the start of the fighting as thousands of people from southern-based tribes fled the rebel-held areas.
Northerners can now tune into the state service by tweaking their aerials but many have little time for an institution they see as simply an extension of Gbagbo’s ruling party.
TVNP uses the ageing camcorders, VCRs and video editing machines RTI left behind — but it’s not ideal.
“Sometimes we have to stop filming to charge the batteries or when we run out of space on our tapes, we rewind them and record over the non-essential parts,” said cameraman Issa Fleppy, a lanky 27-year-old in a T-shirt with an image of Che Guevara.
NEED TO KNOW
TVNP’s 30 volunteers produce rudimentary programs on cookery, health, culture and religion. They also film a children’s show and run movies, mainly using bootleg copies.
Volunteers are given a meagre 1,500 CFA franc ($2.72) bonus each month, meaning many rely on family and friends for money.
“I wanted to help with (the rebels’) struggle but I also do it for the love of the job, otherwise I would be in the south finishing my studies,” said Fleppy, who plans to change his marketing course to study TV production.
The token sums charged for advertisements — usually promoting the local betting agency, coach company and night clubs — are often distributed among workers.
“We don’t always have advertising but (when we do) we use the money to buy supplies and give bonuses to the volunteers,” said director Coulibaly, adding that the station’s running costs amounted to around 2.5 million CFA francs per month.
Rebels run a shadow economy, funded mainly by payments made by cargo hauliers for passage through the rebel zone. The region is a smuggler’s paradise where everything from clandestine cotton to malaria pills are traded.
TVNP may be run on a shoestring but Gnahore has become a bit of a local star.
“Often when I get into a taxi they let me go for free,” he said after the news show, delivered in a style he copied from French TV presenters to project more gravitas.
Gnahore and Fleppy said they were not afraid to ask the rebels awkward questions during interviews.
“Several times I have said to the New Forces, ‘What you’ve just done is wrong’,” said Fleppy. “It didn’t cause problems.”
Others would tell a different tale in a land where freedom of the press has been one of the casualties of war.
In the south, reporters and newspaper offices have been attacked, often by members of pro-Gbagbo youth groups. In the north, journalists, sometimes southerners, have also been beaten and some have received death threats.
Rebel leaders and fighters regularly tip TVNP’s newsreader after an interview — a practice that was once accidentally caught on camera to the dismay of some viewers.
While many in Bouake say they are glad to have a minimal local news service, not everyone is a fan of TVNP.
“What are they on about now?” said a waiter impatiently in an empty fast-food restaurant, as an announcement about lost keys was read out.
REUTERS
Reut08:00 12-21-05

Posted at 10:12 AM · Comments (0)