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

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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

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Copyright The Boston Globe

AUTUMN AND a new academic year are upon us, which means that selective colleges are engaged in the annual ritual of singing the praises of their new freshman classes.

Surf the websites of such institutions and you will find press releases boasting that they have increased their black and Hispanic enrollments, admitted bumper crops of National Merit scholars or became the destination of choice for hordes of high school valedictorians. Many are bragging about the large share of applicants they rejected, as a way of conveying to the world just how popular and selective they are.

What they almost never say is that many of the applicants who were rejected were far more qualified than those accepted. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, it was not the black and Hispanic beneficiaries of affirmative action, but the rich white kids with cash and connections who elbowed most of the worthier applicants aside.

Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.

Five years ago, two researchers working for the Educational Testing Service, Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, took the academic profiles of students admitted into 146 colleges in the top two tiers of Barron’s college guide and matched them up against the institutions’ advertised requirements in terms of high school grade point average, SAT or ACT scores, letters of recommendation, and records of involvement in extracurricular activities. White students who failed to make the grade on all counts were nearly twice as prevalent on such campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their ethnicity or race.

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Posted at 12:35 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: September 28, 2007

SHANGHAI: The unfolding civil crisis in Myanmar is precisely the kind of test that China’s image as an emerging global power will increasingly face in coming years, as Beijing’s economic reach and international influence steadily grow.

The question people in this region and in capitals around the world will be asking is beyond the well-worn official rhetoric: What kind of power does China really aspire to be?

Is it a slick free rider on an international system whose workings have done so much to favor its emergence, hiding behind a platitude-based foreign policy while allowing others to do the world’s heavy lifting?

Has it placed a bet on America’s inevitable decline and settled on Deng Xiaoping’s advice about concealing one’s strengths until the time when all the pieces of its national reconstruction effort have fallen into place, and it can openly aspire to what it forswears today: hegemony?

Or is it a nation in the midst of a subtle but momentous transition toward a more traditional sense of great power rights and responsibilities?

Tenable arguments and counter-arguments for all of the above exist today, and the best answer may be that no one knows, not even the Chinese themselves.

What is certain is that the unrest in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is not any ordinary crisis for China. It is a special case whose resolution will tell us a lot about where China’s head is right now.

Beijing doesn’t advertise such things, least of all to its own citizens, but the Burmese regime and North Korea are among the closest things that China has to real allies in the world today.

In reality, the word ally doesn’t do justice to the complex relationship with the Burmese generals. Ties between the two countries are more akin to the vassal-patron relations that China traditionally sought to maintain all along its vast perimeter.

In truth, China is not the only country the Burmese crisis puts on the spot. France has tremendous oil interests in Myanmar, and how its influence will be used and what kinds of sacrifices a Paris under new leadership is willing to make in the name of principles like human rights remains an open question.

Democratic India would like to vie with China for influence in Myanmar and has so far taken an ostrich-like approach to the crisis, as if believing that looking the other way will make it cease to exist. The world, meanwhile, waits for a more democratic ethos to manifest itself in India’s foreign policy.

The United States, too, very quick to announce new sanctions, seems to have reached an impasse in its foreign policy, where reflexive invocation of punitive measures, together with Washington’s exhausting preoccupation with conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, may have resulted in diminishing returns.

Still, for China the Burmese crisis conjures especially difficult questions, all the more because, unlike its Western counterparts, the country is fashioning a new identity for itself on the world stage, not merely managing one.

There are signs that Beijing had already recently begun edging in tiny, carefully measured steps away from its longtime mantra of non-interference in other countries. It must be said that the policy has always only been selectively applied, but in the ever-more-demanding interest of its own image as a global player, China has recently found ways to apply pressure on countries like North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe so as not to be on the wrong side of history, or at least of global opinion.

Cases like these were fairly clear-cut, though, and in most instances, Beijing’s moves were subtle; nothing like the bully pulpit tactics long favored in the West, and without dramatic results to show, either.

Myanmar is not testing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, like North Korea, and it is not situated on a faraway continent, where China has no colonial baggage, like Sudan and Zimbabwe.

What it is, in point of fact, is what’s most important. Myanmar is a highly repressive state that has been run into the ground by incompetent leaders who have been partially enabled by China. It is, moreover, a country whose people are now risking their lives peacefully for freedom.

This must very nearly be something like a bad dream for Beijing’s foreign policy establishment. One gets a hint of confirmation of this from the way the Burmese crisis has been covered in the Chinese press. The official People’s Daily carried nothing Friday from Myanmar beyond statements of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

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Posted at 12:09 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe

Asked if his second half was more Ortiz-like than his first, when his numbers were down, Ortiz said: “In this game, it’s never enough. I’m happy with my season, but people say I’ve been struggling. Who knows, you put three guys in our lineup with my numbers, and there might be 20 games between us and the Yankees.”

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Posted at 11:42 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe

IMAGINE CARRYING AROUND an entire research library on an iPod. Such a feat suddenly seemed feasible as of earlier this month, with the news that IBM physicist Stuart Parkin is close to perfecting an advance called “magnetic random access memory,” or MRAM, which will enable us to store exponentially more data on the tiniest of hard drives.

Parkin’s development, which should reach consumers within a few years, is the latest installment in our eternal quest to preserve and supplement the human memory, which has taken us from the cuneiform slab to the cassette tape to the Ginkgo biloba tablet washed down with the day’s first cup of coffee.

As digital-storage capacities reach seemingly boundless proportions, however, some thinkers are becoming nervous about the unintended consequences of memory technology. Certainly Google’s enormous reserves of user information, stored in dozens of secretive data centers across the world, and the literally photographic memory of the Internet Archive, which preserves billions of defunct Web pages for posterity, are enough to leave anyone rattled. New forms of memory are permanent and accessible from anywhere. As their reach grows, scholars are asking if now - perhaps for the first time in human history - we need to find ways to forget.

“We used to have a system in which we forgot things easily and had to invest energy in remembering,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “Now we’re switching to a system in which we remember everything and have to invest energy in order to forget. That’s an enormous transformation.”

Jorge Luis Borges envisioned the risks of perfect memory in his famous story “Funes the Memorious,” about a man gifted with unlimited recall, and paralyzed by it. Perhaps not even Borges, however, could have imagined our present capacity to accumulate and preserve memory in digital form - or the powerful impact it is already having on individual lives, as temporary indiscretions become part of the permanent record. “What you do online is potentially there forever,” says Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “Delete if you want; ask Google to take down that one unflattering photo - but it’s still saved, archived, somewhere.”

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Posted at 11:14 PM · Comments (0)

A brief excerpt.
Copyright The New York Times

Many press accounts of the march have a tone of amazement. Scenes like those in Jena, the stories seemed to imply, belonged in the 1960s, not the 21st century. The headline on the New York Times report, “Protest in Louisiana Case Echoes the Civil Rights Era,” was fairly typical.

But the reality is that things haven’t changed nearly as much as people think. Racial tension, especially in the South, has never gone away, and has never stopped being important. And race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics.

Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,” with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races.

And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

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Posted at 7:17 PM · Comments (0)

I confess I haven’t finished this yet. Indeed I have only recently begun (it’s 614 pages). But this book bursts out of the gate with some of the most muscular and memorable prose I’ve encountered in recent fiction.
It’s the death of JFK, the horror of the Vietnam war, no, the horror of random violence.
The hype surrounding this book is warranted. More about it once I’ve finished. Meanwhile, Tree of Smoke is very highly recommended.

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Posted at 10:18 AM · Comments (0)

Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
Published: September 21, 2007

SHANGHAI: The entire world may not have sat up and taken notice in the last week, and that is probably just fine with China, which has just made a major move into central Africa.

With its agreement to lend $5 billion to Congo, what might have often looked like a grab-bag approach to the African continent by a country with only sporadic involvement there has finally taken on a distinct outline.

It turns out that China, which since the time of Deng Xiaoping has discouraged talk about its rise or its might, has a blueprint for Africa, and with the Congo deal, what we are witnessing is the shift of the Chinese embrace into high gear.

What will $5 billion buy? Quite a lot, should all of the projects in the announced deal materialize. Imagine Western Europe without practicable roads or functioning trains and you will begin to get a sense of Congo and its realities.

For half of the year, when the rains are heavy, the grandly named Route Nationale 1, which follows a path of about 260 kilometers, or 160 miles, between the capital, Kinshasa, and the country’s sole ocean port, Matadi, cannot be said to connect the two cities.

Trucks sink up to their cabin doors in mud and must wait for weeks to be winched out. Mind you, this is arguably the most important road in the country.

Add to the lack of infrastructure an equatorial climate in which tropical diseases proliferate and thrive, and no education system worthy of name, forcing children by the millions to grow up without proper schools.

It is a dark picture, made all the more dire for the persistence of a low-grade civil war affecting large swaths of the country.

The $5 billion that China is plunking down promises a great leap forward for Congo, and this begins with about 3,200 kilometers of new rail lines and an equivalent amount of new roads. The money will also pay for 31 hospitals and 145 smaller health care centers, along with two large new universities and 5,000 new government housing units.

The Chinese promise not to dilly-dally, too. Most of this will be accomplished in a mere 36 months, they say, and I for one believe them, having seen the pace of change even in the most remote Chinese backwaters. If war or political upheaval doesn’t get in the way, Congo stands to experience more progress in 36 months than it has in 47 years of independence from Belgium, or as a colony of Brussels for that matter.

The Chinese move is impressive on many levels, none more so than the fact of the immense vacuum in Africa they are moving to fill, and there are few characteristics more distinctive of an emerging superpower than filling vacuums.

When Laurent Kabila overthrow Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997, American companies like Bechtel rushed up blueprints for Congo’s reconstruction, anticipating huge civil engineering deals.

No country is more richly endowed in minerals, and the world’s mining giants, too, flew executives in on private jets, hoping to win big contracts. More war intervened, though, and all of this came to naught, leaving Congo’s 65 million people mired in poverty, with little real development ever since.

China now has its eyes on the same prize: the world’s richest assortment of minerals, from copper to cobalt to uranium to diamonds and gold and on and on, but its game plan reflects a truly Chinese perspective on the world.

The new roads and rails are meant not merely to revive Congo’s prospects. Nor are they simply intended to facilitate extraction, as much as that remains part of the plan. China is redrawing the economic map in central and southern Africa, linking the copper zone of the south with the port at Matadi, and redirecting other portions of the country’s huge mineral potential to Chinese-built networks in Zambia and Angola.

In doing so, it is largely avoiding South Africa, a potential but now badly outstripped competitor that is perhaps seen as too deeply involved with the West.

It must be said that China has chosen a daunting proving ground for its long-held ideas about engagement with the developing world, which could be summed up as “it’s the economy, stupid.” It is not merely for lack of good faith that the West has nearly abandoned this part of the world, despite its immense riches. History has shown this to be an extremely hard place to build lasting, productive enterprises.

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Posted at 12:30 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Three provocative books on male sexuality recently published by university presses provide a good barometer of the current state of campus gender studies. A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women’s-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on. These books reflect that broader perspective and also display a more liberal attitude toward pornography, which was assailed in the 1980s by religious and cultural conservatives oddly allied with crusading feminists. By the 90s, pornography was legitimized as a field of study by gay male academics as well as an insurgent wing of sex-positive feminism. However, despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men — or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness.

In Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid, Lisa Jean Moore, an associate professor of sociology and women’s studies at the State University of New York College at Purchase, examines how the definition and meaning of sperm has changed depending on period and point of view. This book has, hands down, one of the most arresting first sentences I’ve ever seen: “It has been called sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman’s relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard, squirt, goo, spunk, splooge, love juice, man cream, and la leche.” What mesmerizing vernacular poetry!

At her best, Moore has a frank, breezy manner that may be partly due to her practical experience outside academe: She was president of the board of the nonprofit Sperm Bank of California and also worked at a national sex-information switchboard. One chapter is based on her interviews over a five-year period with prostitutes in San Francisco. She also cites her personal history as a lesbian who has borne two daughters conceived by artificial insemination with donor sperm. Sperm Counts comes with its own marginalia: When the pages are flipped, a cartoon spermatozoon seems to race up and around the text.

Semen, Moore states, is “a mixture of prostaglandin, fructose, and fatty acids.” Sperm constitutes only 2 to 5 percent of the average ejaculate, which contains between 200 million and 500 million sperm cells and is propelled by the penis at 10 miles per hour. The unofficial distance record for ejaculate is 18 feet, 9 inches, achieved by one Horst Schultz, who also holds the record for greatest height (12 feet, 4 inches). Moore remarks that semen’s scent is sometimes compared to “bleach, household cleanser, or swimming pool water.” Hence the marketing of Semenex ($54.95 for 30 servings), a drink that promises to sweeten the taste of semen for practitioners of oral sex.

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Copyright The Boston Herald

(Yes, I’m a RedSox fan.)

TORONTO - The Dalai Lama is coming to town about a month too late.

The spiritual leader from Tibet, who echoes such teachings as, “Feelings of anger, bitterness, and hate are negative… . They are of no use,” will be arriving at Rogers Centre on Oct. 30.

Judging by the mood in the Red Sox [team stats] clubhouse after their 6-1 loss to the Blue Jays, and the panic that has ensued throughout New England, the team and its fans sure could have used His Holiness last night.

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Posted at 2:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New Yorker

Fifty miles north of Frankfurt lies the small German town of Solms. Turn off the main thoroughfare and you find yourself driving down tranquil suburban streets, with detached houses set back from the road, and, on a warm morning in late August, not a soul in sight. Nobody does bourgeois solidity like the Germans: you can imagine coming here for coffee and cakes with your aunt, but that would be the limit of excitement. By the time you reach Oskar-Barnack-Strasse, the town has almost petered out; just before the railway line, however, there is a clutch of industrial buildings, with a red dot on the sign outside. As far as fanfare is concerned, that’s about it. But here is the place to go, if you want to find the most beautiful mechanical objects in the world.

Many people would disagree. Bugatti fans, for instance, would direct your attention to the Type 57 Atlantic, the only car I know that appears to have been designed by masseuses. Personally, I would consider it a privilege to die at the wheel of a Lamborghini Miura—not difficult, when you’re nudging a hundred and seventy m.p.h. and waving at passersby. But automobiles need gas, whereas the truest mechanisms run on nothing but themselves. What is required is a machine constructed with such skill that it renders every user—from the pro to the banana-fingered fumbler—more skillful as a result. We need it to refine and lubricate, rather than block or coarsen, our means of engagement with the world: we want to look not just at it, however admiringly, but through it. In that case, we need a Leica.

There have been Leica cameras since 1925, when the Leica I was introduced at a trade fair in Leipzig. From then on, as the camera has evolved over eight decades, generations of users have turned to it in their hour of need, or their millisecond of inspiration. Aleksandr Rodchenko, André Kertész, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Robert Frank, William Klein, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Sebastião Salgado: these are some of the major-league names that are associated with the Leica brand—or, in the case of Cartier-Bresson, stuck to it with everlasting glue.

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A very brief excerpt. Copyright The Nation

A few weeks after the revelation from the secret police archives, Kapuscinski’s final book, Travels With Herodotus, was published in the United States. Unlike Grass, the Polish author did not take this late-life opportunity to explain himself directly. Instead, he wrote an odd sort of memoir, recounting his early years as a journalist and revisiting many of the events that he described in his early works, this time with a focus on quieter moments between the bursts of gunfire. Against these memories, Kapuscinski juxtaposes long passages from Herodotus’ The Histories, a classic volume he describes as a constant companion. The implication is obvious enough: that the ancient Greek writer—the first historical figure “to realize the world’s essential multiplicity,” he says—is a stand-in for Kapuscinski himself.

This rather grandiose device allows Kapuscinski to write a veiled apologia, responding to the most persistent criticisms of his journalism: that he engaged in racist stereotyping, was factually sloppy and probably made things up. Herodotus, he writes, “did not, after all, spend his time sitting in archives, and did not produce an academic text, as scholars for centuries after him did, but strove to find out, learn, and portray how history comes into being every day, how people create it, why its course often runs contrary to their efforts and expectations.” If he made generalizations, he came by them honestly, through ceaseless travel, drawing his conclusions from observation, chance encounters and oral testimony. Kapuscinski says Herodotus relied on the wisdom of “ubiquitous guardians of memory” and cites as an example the West African griot, a wandering bard who tells tales of “what happened there once upon a time, what accidents, events, and marvels occurred. And whether what he says is the truth or not, no one can say, and it’s best not to look too closely.”

Once, when asked to name his style of literature, Kapuscinski used the Latin phrase silva rerum: “the forest of things.” His life was a dense bramble of intense and fleeting experiences, and it seems they were not acquired without cost. In Kapuscinski’s telling, Herodotus is a rootless wanderer, capable of empathy that “is sincere, but superficial.” In The Soccer War, he described his existence as a reporter similarly:

Pack the suitcase. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: typewriter (Hermes Baby), passport (SA 323273), ticket, airport, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, take off, unfasten seat-belt, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, fasten seat-belt, descent, circling, landing, earth, unfasten seat-belts, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, waiting, fatigue, life.

Kapuscinski is an extremely personal writer, yet his literary persona is elusive, always vanishing just shy of the moment of true revelation. He wrote about every place he went, but to assemble these accounts into a biographical narrative, a reader must jump around from chapter to chapter and book to book. It was not Kapuscinski’s way to tell the story straight. He wrote fairly little about his early life, at least in his main body of work. (There are apparently quite a few of his books that have yet to be translated from Polish.) Kapuscinski was 7 years old in 1939, when Germany and the Soviet Union carved up Poland, and his hometown, now part of Belarus, fell on Stalin’s side of the bargain. In his book Imperium, he describes how the NKVD marched into town and leveled its church with cannon fire. “A person who lived through a great war is different from someone who never lived through any war,” Kapuscinski writes elsewhere. “They are two different species of human beings. They will never find a common language.”

The search for words, and their ultimate failure, is a recurring Kapuscinski theme. In Travels With Herodotus, he writes of his unquenchable desire as a young man simply “to cross the border.” A committed Communist, he joined the staff of a youth newspaper at 23 and quickly became such a journalistic star—based on an investigative report into lousy working conditions at a steel factory—that he was offered a rare overseas posting, to India. With his faltering English, the young Pole was lost there. “I understood that every distinct geographic universe has its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language,” he writes. But even after he learned to speak, Kapuscinski was still confused, and he wondered whether his mind “was too fully imbued with rationalism and materialism to be able to identify with and grasp a culture as saturated with spirituality and metaphysics as Hinduism.” Later, he visited China, where there was a new language, and a new set of misunderstandings. Then he moved on to Africa, the place he’d love best.

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Posted at 7:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
By Howard W. French
Published: September 14, 2007

TOKYO: With the exception of weeks like this one, when what appears to be the almost congenital ineptitude of its political class puts it back in the headlines, this country has spent the last two decades as something of an empty suit - but with deep pockets.

Somehow, Japan, the incipient world beater of the 1980s, had come to be regarded as the major country that casts the smallest shadow. If prizes were given out for such things, it would have been in the running if there were a title for the world’s leading cipher nation.

Yes, the Koizumi years were a quasi-exception, but for all the wrong reasons. The man was not half the reformer a press eager for a different Japanese story line for once made him out to be. And to the end, he compiled a record of gratuitous insults and futility in relations with China, once, now and forever Japan’s most important neighbor.

But the economy grew again and relations with the United States - security relations in particular - deepened, and so a country that had seemed like it was burrowing itself into a hole made a Groundhog Day-like reappearance, prompting lots of headlines proclaiming things like, “Japan is back.”

The backdrop against which this dubious profile is inevitably compared has been the impressive rise of China. For years now, that country has been treated by the press, and indeed is increasingly regarded by many of its own citizens, as an irresistible juggernaut, a new world power whose rise recognizes no obstacles and suffers few limits.

There is nothing like a return to this vibrant city after a long absence to realize that a pretty big corrective is in order. The impressions of Japanese wealth and success resonate all the deeper coming from Shanghai, as I did. Shanghai unabashedly wears its ambitions on its sleeve, with its spiky Oriental Pearl television tower, and a magnetic levitation train, and a new World Financial Center building that is racing toward completion.

A recent billboard advertisement for a new, high-end luxury development on Nanjing Road, the city’s premier boulevard, captured the boom-era zeitgeist perfectly. Triumphantly immodest, it proclaimed Shanghai the center of the world.

As a former longtime resident of Tokyo, I was unprepared for this city’s stunning riposte as I rode the express train in from the airport and headed directly to dinner with friends in the center of town. The rendezvous was on the 35th floor of the Maru Building, one of countless recent towering complexes in the city that marry luxury with a patented smug understatement.

The city sparkled and glowed in every direction through floor-to-ceiling windows, while far down below our table, Tokyo Station, its tracks bathed in soft white light, pulsed with the arrival and departure of bullet trains.

What’s the big deal, one might ask? The point, which really came together for me as I set out from my hotel in the new Shiodome district the next morning, is that Japan is not “back” at all. It never really went away.

A 15-minute walk from where I once worked, Shiodome was unrecognizable to me, so densely has it been built up, and built up well. Once a rank afterthought tucked behind Shimbashi, a slightly seedy salaryman’s watering hole and transit point, Shiodome today is a shiny and pothole-free world of seamless underground connections between one magnificent development after another, and with what strikes me as the world’s greatest and best run mass transit system.

The overwhelming impression here, and in one district after another, where Tokyo just keeps getting better, is of an immensely rich country that has appeared to disappear since its own raging boom years mostly because it has quietly gone about its business, applying the same kind of meticulous approach long ago made famous by its industries, of relentless small improvements to quality of life.

One doesn’t wish to be naïve about Japan. This is not, as most Japanese would be the first to admit, a society without faults. Inequality, for one, appears to be making steady inroads. An aging crisis looms. Insularity is, as ever, a problem. And tinkering almost by definition is the opposite of grand purpose, and it sometimes lends something of a rudderless feeling to life here.

The lesson for China in the Japanese experience, meanwhile, is not merely the oft-cited rule of gravity, which pulled Japan, as it has pulled every other country, back to earth after years of off-the-charts growth. Yes, this will happen to China too, although no one knows when or how brutal the re-entry will be.

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Posted at 1:54 AM · Comments (0)

… Newspaper writing on Darfur has sketched a pornography of violence. It seems fascinated by and fixated on the gory details, describing the worst of the atrocities in gruesome detail and chronicling the rise in the number of them. The implication is that the motivation of the perpetrators lies in biology (‘race’) and, if not that, certainly in ‘culture’. This voyeuristic approach accompanies a moralistic discourse whose effect is both to obscure the politics of the violence and position the reader as a virtuous, not just a concerned observer.

Journalism gives us a simple moral world, where a group of perpetrators face a group of victims, but where neither history nor motivation is thinkable because both are outside history and context. Even when newspapers highlight violence as a social phenomenon, they fail to understand the forces that shape the agency of the perpetrator. Instead, they look for a clear and uncomplicated moral that describes the victim as untainted and the perpetrator as simply evil. Where yesterday’s victims are today’s perpetrators, where victims have turned perpetrators, this attempt to find an African replay of the Holocaust not only does not work but also has perverse consequences. Whatever its analytical weaknesses, the depoliticisation of violence has given its proponents distinct political advantages.

The conflict in Darfur is highly politicised, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign’s constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: ‘Arabs’ are trying to eliminate ‘Africans’. But both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of ‘Arab’. Locally, ‘Arab’ was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become ‘Arab’ over time. This process, known as Arabisation, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharisation in Ethiopia and Swahilisation on the East African coast. The third meaning of ‘Arab’ was ‘privileged and exclusive’; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabisation with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent.

‘African’, in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an ‘African’ was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – ‘African’ as Bantu and ‘African’ as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign’s characterisation of the violence as ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticisation, naturalisation and, ultimately, demonisation of the notion ‘Arab’, as against ‘African’, has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign….

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Posted at 3:04 PM · Comments (0)

Today’s boom times in China are interesting in their own right, as economic booms always are. By chance and by design, I have lived in the middle of several of them: the Texas oil boom of the mid-1970s, Japan’s all-around boom of the late ’80s, and the Seattle and Bay Area Internet bubble of the late ’90s. Inside the boom zone, people don’t spend much time thinking about how the good times began, or asking how long the boom can last. Everyone, everywhere, takes their own prosperity as a sign of cleverness, wise planning, and hard work…

… Yes, what is happening in Macau should be of intense interest to casino operators everywhere, and to the financiers and suppliers who thrive off the world’s gambling industry, and to those compiling information on how Chinese people use their new wealth. But in repeated visits to Macau, I found it far more interesting than I would have guessed from most of the gambling-boom stories.

It is interesting in a lowbrow way, because of Macau’s ineradicable seediness. Look in one direction, and you see a new five-star hotel. Turn 90 degrees, and you see an alley down which Indiana Jones might run, pursued by gangsters, or where Sydney Greenstreet might totter out from a smoky den. But this same small locale is also deeply interesting in highbrow ways. The fate of modern Macau will be determined in part by the same political and ideological struggles that are determining so many other aspects of China’s rise.

Click to read more

Posted at 12:17 AM · Comments (0)

“I try to imagine watching this match without seeing the ball going back and forth — seeing only the two men’s contrapuntal motion. One thing is instantly clear. Federer masters his opponent’s inertia. It’s as if Roddick is a weight on the end of a string and Federer is swinging him back and forth until he lets the string go and sends Roddick, who is playing at the top of his game, flat-footed into the far corners.”

Posted at 10:02 AM · Comments (0)

Letter from China
Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Howard W. French
Published: September 7, 2007

SHANGHAI: The most underrated aspect of vacation is without a doubt its end. Returning to work and especially returning to a foreign country where one works has at least one precious element, however, and that is clarity.

Except for one’s first arrival in a country, when all is new and hopefully exciting, no moment rivals the vacation’s end for perceptiveness. Unlike stumbling into a country fresh for the first time, the returning vacationer also has a store of experiences, a baseline that gives his observations valuable context and keeps them honest.

I was returning from the foothills of the Virginian Blue Ridge Mountains, where corn and soybeans (for China) grow, where crickets chirp and cows moo and horses seem more common than people.

The shock of the new for me came as I stepped out late in the afternoon on my first day back in China to encounter busy foot traffic just beyond my front door. Mine is one of the smallest and most relaxed Shanghai streets, but even the routine experience of walking around the corner and hailing a cab was a bracing reminder of what I knew well but easily put out of mind, that I was back in one of the world’s biggest and most densely packed cities, and a lot farther away from Virginia than the mere tally of frequent flier miles would suggest.

My next shock came the following day when I left my office for lunch at the usual time and found that three of my regular spots these last few years had all closed. These were places where, as a steady customer, I had established a reassuring coziness, where they knew my name, or at least my face, and treated me with what felt like more consideration than a random walk-in.
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Under glare of publicity, Myanmar softens tactics

There had been nary a word about the impending closures or relocations when I left town three weeks earlier. Not a hint.

Finally taking a seat, 20 minutes later, now on my fourth restaurant, I reflected on one of the most common features of life in China’s great cities: the profound impermanence of things. I had thought about this plenty before, but usually it was in terms of other people’s lives, like the working-class residents of the grandly shabby old Shanghai neighborhoods who are being relocated en masse to distant, half-built suburbs. They are making way for an ever newer city, packed with skyscrapers and stripped of the organic feel of real neighborhoods.

I have spent much of my spare time photographing these kinds of neighborhoods these last few years, often just before the bulldozer arrived. The closed restaurants were my bulldozers, and the shock of impermanence and the disorientation that it brings, on this day, was all mine.

Some comfort could be found, though, in idle little interstices of the next couple of days, and it came not from within but from watching how Shanghai people themselves cope with so much hectic and constant change.

So much of journalism, and none more than foreign correspondence, consists of training a critical eye on one’s subject, of plumbing its faults. The return from vacation is as good an opportunity as any, though, to appreciate what works, and to savor the charms.

I was reminded of this as I peered out my office window to notice in the distance the near-completed profile of a new contender among the world’s tallest buildings. Could it be possible? It would appear that the top 15 percent or so of the building, still braced in red scaffolding, took shape during my brief absence.

Just then, in the middle distance as if on cue a flock of pigeons wheeled into the late afternoon light, released by their keeper from a low-rise home tucked invisibly amid the crowding towers. It’s a sight I’ve seen every day here, as true as clockwork, but today it was more than that. It was a statement of endurance of the spirit, and of almost defiant attachment to things that are not trendy and commercial, and above all not new.

This side of Shanghai winked at me a few more times, before the jet lag had worn off and the routines taken hold. There was the small shop-keeping family that sets up its dinner table on the sidewalk a few feet from a busy intersection and enjoys an early evening meal al fresco in the late summer air.

There were the grillers of chestnuts with their wheeled carts who made their seasonal appearance, lending an appealing fragrance to the evening breeze. There was the recorded announcement played by the man who rides his bicycle through the neighborhood each evening to remind people to put the garbage out. I am sure it will begin annoying me in a few weeks, when the sound becomes just another layer in this city’s often overwhelming din, but today it still had charm.

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Posted at 10:48 AM · Comments (0)

From a delightful article in the Boston Globe about Jim Robinson, a Boston Red Sox scout who found Clay Buchholz, the author of a no-hitter the other day.

Robinson, 38, has three boys, ranging in age from 4 to 9; his wife, Shauna, works full-time in their adopted hometown of Fort Worth, and like many couples of a certain age, he frets about the hours he spends away from home. With his territory as big as it is, Robinson estimates he puts 35,000-37,000 miles a year on the Volvo.

His idea of a good day scouting was the time McLeod flew down to meet him in Houston, they drove three hours north to see Buchholz pitch in a junior college game for Angelina College in Lufkin at noon, then turned around and made the three-hour drive back to see another top prospect, Stephen Marek (now in the Angels system), pitch that night in Houston.

The hours, the miles, the separations, they are all forgotten on nights like last Saturday, when Robinson switched on the TV in his living room and saw Buchholz making history in Fenway Park. Shauna was in the other room. He told her what was happening around the seventh inning, “but I told her to stay there, I didn’t want her to mess up the karma.”

Click to read more

Posted at 11:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

JAKARTA, Indonesia — After hearing about dangerous Chinese products
elsewhere, Indonesia this summer began testing popular Chinese-made
items on its own store shelves. What it found has added to the list of
horrors: mercury-laced makeup that turns skin black, dried fruit spiked
with industrial chemicals, carcinogenic children’s candy.

The Chinese government called up in August saying it had a possible
solution. Husniah Rubiana Thamrin Akib, head of Indonesia’s top food and
drug safety agency, was pleased and welcomed her counterparts to her office.

Days after the Philippines announced in July its concerns that White
Rabbit candy produced in China was contaminated with formaldehyde, the
Chinese government enacted a recall of banana chips from the Philippines.

But according to Husniah, the Chinese suggested Indonesia lower its
safety standards. Husniah said she was “very upset and very surprised.”
“I said to them, ‘I respect your standards for your country. I hope you
respect ours,’ ” Husniah said.

In dealing with product safety complaints from the United States, China
has sought to convince a concerned American public that it has reformed
and is doing all it can to ensure the safety of its products. But its
dealings with other, less-developed countries or those in vulnerable
political positions are a different story, according to Husniah and
officials in the Philippines and Malaysia.

Indonesian officials accuse China of pushing shoddy products and
inferior standards on poor countries that have no choice but to depend
on it for cheap goods, aid and investment. They say that China, in
closed-door meetings, has refused to share basic information, attempted
to horse-trade by insisting on discussing disparate issues as part of a
single negotiation and all but threatened retaliatory trade actions. The
Chinese respond that their products have been the victim of unfair trade
actions.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 10:12 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

JAKARTA, Indonesia — After hearing about dangerous Chinese products
elsewhere, Indonesia this summer began testing popular Chinese-made
items on its own store shelves. What it found has added to the list of
horrors: mercury-laced makeup that turns skin black, dried fruit spiked
with industrial chemicals, carcinogenic children’s candy.

The Chinese government called up in August saying it had a possible
solution. Husniah Rubiana Thamrin Akib, head of Indonesia’s top food and
drug safety agency, was pleased and welcomed her counterparts to her office.

Days after the Philippines announced in July its concerns that White
Rabbit candy produced in China was contaminated with formaldehyde, the
Chinese government enacted a recall of banana chips from the Philippines.

But according to Husniah, the Chinese suggested Indonesia lower its
safety standards. Husniah said she was “very upset and very surprised.”
“I said to them, ‘I respect your standards for your country. I hope you
respect ours,’ ” Husniah said.

In dealing with product safety complaints from the United States, China
has sought to convince a concerned American public that it has reformed
and is doing all it can to ensure the safety of its products. But its
dealings with other, less-developed countries or those in vulnerable
political positions are a different story, according to Husniah and
officials in the Philippines and Malaysia.

Indonesian officials accuse China of pushing shoddy products and
inferior standards on poor countries that have no choice but to depend
on it for cheap goods, aid and investment. They say that China, in
closed-door meetings, has refused to share basic information, attempted
to horse-trade by insisting on discussing disparate issues as part of a
single negotiation and all but threatened retaliatory trade actions. The
Chinese respond that their products have been the victim of unfair trade
actions.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 10:46 PM · Comments (0)

This where I’m from.

Copyright The Richmond TIMES-DISPATCH

BARBOURSVILLE At first appearance, this little farming community about 70 miles west of Richmond looks like a standard crossroads country town planted in the middle of nowhere.

But Barboursville — at its core a community of only a few hundred people — is a surprisingly eclectic place, full of rich history, culture and fine arts. You just have to look for it.

The village — as some residents call Barboursville — is at the crossroads of U.S. 33 and state Route 20 in Orange County, about a 75-minute drive from downtown Richmond.

A newcomer traveling west from Richmond or north from Charlottesville might first spy D’s Market right at the intersection of those roads. D’s is kind of a modern landmark. Every day a few hundred people pull into D’s to gas up and try store owner Joseph Valade’s deli sandwiches and ice cream.

“It’s a good location. It’s easy to see,” he said of the store, which he named after his wife.

But that’s not the case with Barboursville’s fine arts and reputation as a wine-making center for Virginia.

“If you just drive by here, you won’t see anything. But if you stop and ask, you’ll be impressed,” Valade said.

In fact, there are three wineries within a 2-mile radius of Barboursville — Burnley Vineyards & Daniel Cellars, Barboursville Vineyards and Horton Vineyards. Barboursville Vineyards offers fine dining at its Palladio Restaurant and, for the historically inclined, the ruins of a famous house.

All three vineyards offer wine tasting and beautiful vistas.

…

The Barboursville ruins are the community’s most famous landmark.

The house, designed by Thomas Jefferson for his friend James Barbour, took eight years to build, starting in 1814. It was gutted by fire on Christmas Day 1884. Debi Stubbs, who trained as a historian and now works at Barboursville Vineyards, said it’s believed that candles on a Christmas tree caught some curtains on fire, leading to the destruction of the house, whose brick ruins and stone columns still stand.

James Barbour was a governor of and a U.S. senator from Virginia. His legacy included sponsoring laws against imprisonment for debt as well as a state anti-dueling law. He is buried nearby at the brick-enclosed family graveyard with his wife and children.

Barbour is probably Barboursville’s second-most-famous historical personage. Zachary Taylor, the country’s 12th president, was born near Barboursville in 1784.

Stubbs, who has lived in Barboursville for 16 years, said: “It’s a lovely little community. It’s just a unique place to live. You have all this art and quality you usually find in larger cities.”

Some of the art can be found a stone’s throw from D’s Market, on what used to be Main Street. This is the real old heart of Barboursville — a tiny downtown where once stood two hotels, a couple of livery stations, two general stores and a train depot.

Though freight trains rumble by frequently even now, the depot was knocked down in the 1970s after passenger service for Barboursville stopped.

“Barboursville grew up in the 1880s with the railroad,” said Fred Nichols, an artist who with his wife, Beth, runs the Frederick Nichols Studio and the Nichols Gallery Annex. The gallery has dozens of Nichols’ silk-screen prints, watercolors and oil paintings.

The Annex — housed in the old Barboursville hotel — features exhibitions by Southern artists and is curated by Beth Nichols. “Its heyday was the 1920s and 1930s. Barboursville sort of died here with the end of the depot,” Fred Nichols said.

A sign on the front door of Nichols Studio says something about the pace of life here now. It reads: “Barboursville is a quiet, sleepy village. So sometimes we forget to open the gallery.”

His studio is in what used to be Williams’ General Store. When the general store was in business, it had a butcher shop in the back. Beth Nichols said people reputedly “came all the way from Richmond to buy sausage here,” or sometimes to stay at the hotels to breathe in the fresh country air.

It was here at the railroad that farmers loaded up goods to be taken to Richmond, or residents hired horse-drawn carriages from one of the two livery stables to voyage west over to Ruckersville or even the Shenandoah Valley.

…

There’s more than just the Nichols Gallery. Sun’s Traces Gallery, which features pottery and other crafts, is right up the street from them.

The Four County Players, billed as central Virginia’s longest-running community theater, has its headquarters at a large building adjacent to the tiny Barboursville Community Park.

It’s bucolic and quiet here.

“This is the last unspoiled spot,” said Fred Nichols, who has lived here with his wife for about 30 years.

But some of the older residents might disagree.

Eighty-year-old E.C. Mundy was born in Barboursville and attended what used to be James Barbour High School.

He remembers back to the’30s and’40s when there was a feed store, a drugstore, hotels and even an ice plant. Everybody farmed.

“We had a whole lot of stuff here when all the trains used to stop,” said Mundy, who thinks too many outsiders have moved into the area. “I hate the way it is right now. People migrating in here changed it so much. You used to know everybody.

“It’s not Barboursville like it used to be, not at all,” he said. “Nothing will ever be as good as it had been.” Contact Carlos Santos at (804) 295-9542 or csantos@timesdispatch.com.

Posted at 5:18 AM · Comments (0)

This where I’m from.

Copyright The Richmond TIMES-DISPATCH

BARBOURSVILLE At first appearance, this little farming community about 70 miles west of Richmond looks like a standard crossroads country town planted in the middle of nowhere.

But Barboursville — at its core a community of only a few hundred people — is a surprisingly eclectic place, full of rich history, culture and fine arts. You just have to look for it.

The village — as some residents call Barboursville — is at the crossroads of U.S. 33 and state Route 20 in Orange County, about a 75-minute drive from downtown Richmond.

A newcomer traveling west from Richmond or north from Charlottesville might first spy D’s Market right at the intersection of those roads. D’s is kind of a modern landmark. Every day a few hundred people pull into D’s to gas up and try store owner Joseph Valade’s deli sandwiches and ice cream.

“It’s a good location. It’s easy to see,” he said of the store, which he named after his wife.

But that’s not the case with Barboursville’s fine arts and reputation as a wine-making center for Virginia.

“If you just drive by here, you won’t see anything. But if you stop and ask, you’ll be impressed,” Valade said.

In fact, there are three wineries within a 2-mile radius of Barboursville — Burnley Vineyards & Daniel Cellars, Barboursville Vineyards and Horton Vineyards. Barboursville Vineyards offers fine dining at its Palladio Restaurant and, for the historically inclined, the ruins of a famous house.

All three vineyards offer wine tasting and beautiful vistas.

…

The Barboursville ruins are the community’s most famous landmark.

The house, designed by Thomas Jefferson for his friend James Barbour, took eight years to build, starting in 1814. It was gutted by fire on Christmas Day 1884. Debi Stubbs, who trained as a historian and now works at Barboursville Vineyards, said it’s believed that candles on a Christmas tree caught some curtains on fire, leading to the destruction of the house, whose brick ruins and stone columns still stand.

James Barbour was a governor of and a U.S. senator from Virginia. His legacy included sponsoring laws against imprisonment for debt as well as a state anti-dueling law. He is buried nearby at the brick-enclosed family graveyard with his wife and children.

Barbour is probably Barboursville’s second-most-famous historical personage. Zachary Taylor, the country’s 12th president, was born near Barboursville in 1784.

Stubbs, who has lived in Barboursville for 16 years, said: “It’s a lovely little community. It’s just a unique place to live. You have all this art and quality you usually find in larger cities.”

Some of the art can be found a stone’s throw from D’s Market, on what used to be Main Street. This is the real old heart of Barboursville — a tiny downtown where once stood two hotels, a couple of livery stations, two general stores and a train depot.

Though freight trains rumble by frequently even now, the depot was knocked down in the 1970s after passenger service for Barboursville stopped.

“Barboursville grew up in the 1880s with the railroad,” said Fred Nichols, an artist who with his wife, Beth, runs the Frederick Nichols Studio and the Nichols Gallery Annex. The gallery has dozens of Nichols’ silk-screen prints, watercolors and oil paintings.

The Annex — housed in the old Barboursville hotel — features exhibitions by Southern artists and is curated by Beth Nichols. “Its heyday was the 1920s and 1930s. Barboursville sort of died here with the end of the depot,” Fred Nichols said.

A sign on the front door of Nichols Studio says something about the pace of life here now. It reads: “Barboursville is a quiet, sleepy village. So sometimes we forget to open the gallery.”

His studio is in what used to be Williams’ General Store. When the general store was in business, it had a butcher shop in the back. Beth Nichols said people reputedly “came all the way from Richmond to buy sausage here,” or sometimes to stay at the hotels to breathe in the fresh country air.

It was here at the railroad that farmers loaded up goods to be taken to Richmond, or residents hired horse-drawn carriages from one of the two livery stables to voyage west over to Ruckersville or even the Shenandoah Valley.

…

There’s more than just the Nichols Gallery. Sun’s Traces Gallery, which features pottery and other crafts, is right up the street from them.

The Four County Players, billed as central Virginia’s longest-running community theater, has its headquarters at a large building adjacent to the tiny Barboursville Community Park.

It’s bucolic and quiet here.

“This is the last unspoiled spot,” said Fred Nichols, who has lived here with his wife for about 30 years.

But some of the older residents might disagree.

Eighty-year-old E.C. Mundy was born in Barboursville and attended what used to be James Barbour High School.

He remembers back to the’30s and’40s when there was a feed store, a drugstore, hotels and even an ice plant. Everybody farmed.

“We had a whole lot of stuff here when all the trains used to stop,” said Mundy, who thinks too many outsiders have moved into the area. “I hate the way it is right now. People migrating in here changed it so much. You used to know everybody.

“It’s not Barboursville like it used to be, not at all,” he said. “Nothing will ever be as good as it had been.” Contact Carlos Santos at (804) 295-9542 or csantos@timesdispatch.com.

Posted at 5:18 AM · Comments (0)

This where I’m from.

Copyright The Richmond TIMES-DISPATCH

BARBOURSVILLE At first appearance, this little farming community about 70 miles west of Richmond looks like a standard crossroads country town planted in the middle of nowhere.

But Barboursville — at its core a community of only a few hundred people — is a surprisingly eclectic place, full of rich history, culture and fine arts. You just have to look for it.

The village — as some residents call Barboursville — is at the crossroads of U.S. 33 and state Route 20 in Orange County, about a 75-minute drive from downtown Richmond.

A newcomer traveling west from Richmond or north from Charlottesville might first spy D’s Market right at the intersection of those roads. D’s is kind of a modern landmark. Every day a few hundred people pull into D’s to gas up and try store owner Joseph Valade’s deli sandwiches and ice cream.

“It’s a good location. It’s easy to see,” he said of the store, which he named after his wife.

But that’s not the case with Barboursville’s fine arts and reputation as a wine-making center for Virginia.

“If you just drive by here, you won’t see anything. But if you stop and ask, you’ll be impressed,” Valade said.

In fact, there are three wineries within a 2-mile radius of Barboursville — Burnley Vineyards & Daniel Cellars, Barboursville Vineyards and Horton Vineyards. Barboursville Vineyards offers fine dining at its Palladio Restaurant and, for the historically inclined, the ruins of a famous house.

All three vineyards offer wine tasting and beautiful vistas.

…

The Barboursville ruins are the community’s most famous landmark.

The house, designed by Thomas Jefferson for his friend James Barbour, took eight years to build, starting in 1814. It was gutted by fire on Christmas Day 1884. Debi Stubbs, who trained as a historian and now works at Barboursville Vineyards, said it’s believed that candles on a Christmas tree caught some curtains on fire, leading to the destruction of the house, whose brick ruins and stone columns still stand.

James Barbour was a governor of and a U.S. senator from Virginia. His legacy included sponsoring laws against imprisonment for debt as well as a state anti-dueling law. He is buried nearby at the brick-enclosed family graveyard with his wife and children.

Barbour is probably Barboursville’s second-most-famous historical personage. Zachary Taylor, the country’s 12th president, was born near Barboursville in 1784.

Stubbs, who has lived in Barboursville for 16 years, said: “It’s a lovely little community. It’s just a unique place to live. You have all this art and quality you usually find in larger cities.”

Some of the art can be found a stone’s throw from D’s Market, on what used to be Main Street. This is the real old heart of Barboursville — a tiny downtown where once stood two hotels, a couple of livery stations, two general stores and a train depot.

Though freight trains rumble by frequently even now, the depot was knocked down in the 1970s after passenger service for Barboursville stopped.

“Barboursville grew up in the 1880s with the railroad,” said Fred Nichols, an artist who with his wife, Beth, runs the Frederick Nichols Studio and the Nichols Gallery Annex. The gallery has dozens of Nichols’ silk-screen prints, watercolors and oil paintings.

The Annex — housed in the old Barboursville hotel — features exhibitions by Southern artists and is curated by Beth Nichols. “Its heyday was the 1920s and 1930s. Barboursville sort of died here with the end of the depot,” Fred Nichols said.

A sign on the front door of Nichols Studio says something about the pace of life here now. It reads: “Barboursville is a quiet, sleepy village. So sometimes we forget to open the gallery.”

His studio is in what used to be Williams’ General Store. When the general store was in business, it had a butcher shop in the back. Beth Nichols said people reputedly “came all the way from Richmond to buy sausage here,” or sometimes to stay at the hotels to breathe in the fresh country air.

It was here at the railroad that farmers loaded up goods to be taken to Richmond, or residents hired horse-drawn carriages from one of the two livery stables to voyage west over to Ruckersville or even the Shenandoah Valley.

…

There’s more than just the Nichols Gallery. Sun’s Traces Gallery, which features pottery and other crafts, is right up the street from them.

The Four County Players, billed as central Virginia’s longest-running community theater, has its headquarters at a large building adjacent to the tiny Barboursville Community Park.

It’s bucolic and quiet here.

“This is the last unspoiled spot,” said Fred Nichols, who has lived here with his wife for about 30 years.

But some of the older residents might disagree.

Eighty-year-old E.C. Mundy was born in Barboursville and attended what used to be James Barbour High School.

He remembers back to the’30s and’40s when there was a feed store, a drugstore, hotels and even an ice plant. Everybody farmed.

“We had a whole lot of stuff here when all the trains used to stop,” said Mundy, who thinks too many outsiders have moved into the area. “I hate the way it is right now. People migrating in here changed it so much. You used to know everybody.

“It’s not Barboursville like it used to be, not at all,” he said. “Nothing will ever be as good as it had been.” Contact Carlos Santos at (804) 295-9542 or csantos@timesdispatch.com.

Posted at 5:18 AM · Comments (0)

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