First Proof

It was that or Madonna

Robert Cottrell — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 06:15:23 +0000

My colleague G, a Londoner resident for some years in New York, tells of a party here recently at which he was making small talk with a fellow guest who quickly divined his English origins:

"Where are you from?", she asked

"London", he replied.

"Oh! What part?"

"Belsize Park."

"My daughter lives in Belsize Park."

"How nice. What is her name?"

"Gwyneth Paltrow."

Brahms and Kindle

Robert Cottrell — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 06:39:20 +0000

Bernard Holland's recent piece for the New York Times, on Kenneth Hamilton's "A Golden Age", fulfils the conditions of the perfect book review: an offbeat but evidently fascinating book; a lively discussion of its merits; and relevant additional material from the reviewer.

Hamilton proposes "a detailed reflection on concert behavior in the 19th and early 20th centuries"â€”applause, bravos, programming, performers' etiquette etc.

Among the new-to-me elements:

(1) Audience participation was taken for granted in the 1840s. The pianist
Alexander Dreyschock was criticized for playing â€œso loud that it made
it difficult for the ladies to talk,â€ Mr. Hamilton writes ...

(2) When Chopin played his E minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw in 1830, other
pieces were inserted between the first two movements. Perhaps the most
celebrated such interruption was at the 1806 premiere of Beethovenâ€™s
Violin Concerto in Vienna, where the soloist thrilled listeners by
playing his violin upside down and on one string ...

(3) Liszt, Anton Rubinstein and virtuosos like them would have been offended had listeners not clapped between movements ...

The last of those points cheers me. When I dozily joined a scattered round of between-movements clapping at a concert by the Tokyo String Quartet a few years back, I received the sort of look from my neighbour usually reserved for a partner who bids badly at bridge.

Holland quotes (it is not clear whether from Hamilton) a wonderful comment from an unnamed critic on Brahmsâ€™s playing of his own B flat Piano Concerto. â€œBrahms did not play
the right notes,â€ the critic wrote, â€œbut he played like a man who knew what the
right notes were.â€

And that brings me, by this circuitous route, to my Kindle, which arrived yesterday. This fiddly little gadget does not strike all the right notes. But it has been designed by people who clearly do know what the right notes are, that need to be struck, if e-books are to take off.

On balance my confidence is reinforced. This is indeed the beginning of the end of the physical book. And I say that even though I have a long list of grumbles about the Kindle in its 1.0 version.

Among the teething troubles: it feels more plasticky than robust; its operating behaviour is downright neurotic (I've so far logged five resets in 36 hours, maddening when the reset button is buried beneath the back cover); the slip case is clumsy and badly-fitting; there is no backlight; the display is more black-on-grey than black-on-white; and there are too few books and very few newspapers available as yet from Amazon for downloading.

And yet, and yet, the basic elements of the strategy are right. We are all buying the thing, creating the big market which the Kindle needs. The display is good enough to read without fatigue. The "whispernet" wireless delivery system works implausibly well.

I can forgive much for the pleasure of downloading a literary novel for $9.99, and reading it easily for long stretches throughout the day; or for getting "Le Monde" in full text at the moment of publicationâ€”and on a 14-day free trial.

I have bought; I am sold. I know already that I will want the Kindle 2.0 and the Kindle 3.0. C'est plus fort que moi. And I trust that by Kindle 3.0 all the glitches will be fixed. I'm a convert: a physical book is something to buy when you can't get a download to your Kindle.

Secretary Albright and President Bartlet

Robert Cottrell — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:48:06 +0000

Just back from Barnes and Noble in Union Square, where Madeleine Albright was promoting her new book, "Memo to the President-Elect". She spoke well for 20 minutes, starting with an obligatory funny storyâ€”this one about flying off to China, when a Bosnian-born guard at Chicago airport recognised her in the queue for security at departure, told her she was a legend in Bosnia, and insisted on a photograph. The line of passengers behind grew restive.

"What was that all about?", asked a lady behind, when Ms Albright rejoined the queue.

"I used to be secretary of state", said Ms Albright.

"Of Bosnia?" replied the lady.

I enjoyed Ms Albright's argument that diplomacy was best compared, not to chess, but to billiards. You shoot a ball into a bunch of other balls and hope that the knock-on effects work out in your favour. But at least some of the knock-on effects will always be unintended and unforeseenâ€”as Pakistan now is the unintended consequence of Western policy in Afghanistan.

The new book is half an explanation of how the national-security and foreign-policy apparatus works in Washington, DC, half a primer on the big issues likely to face the new president next year. Ms Albright suggests that newly elected leaders are often surprisingly ignorant of the mechanics of power, and from my own more limited experience I have to agree.

I remember discovering to my surprise (and delight) a few years ago that "The West Wing" was widely studied by political leaders in post-communist central Europe as a primer in liberal democracy. I met a policy adviser to a Hungarian prime minister who insisted in particular on the wisdom of a "West Wing" episode in which President Bartlet wanted a cure for cancer as his legacy. That was indeed what voters wanted, said my Hungarian interlocutor: a vision that swept them off their feet, not incremental reform that tried their patience.

....

I thought also of "The West Wing" last week when I came away from David Mamet's new play, "November", about a crude and unpopular American president (no, you guess) in his last weeks of office. It has a slow start, picks up speed and confidence for a marvellous middle hour, then collapses into a silly-slapstick conclusion. Terrible plot, lifted by some wonderful linesâ€”the president says, of a prospective bribe: "I want a number so high that even a dog can't hear it."

"November" is opportunistic rather than profoundâ€”which makes it less useful, as a study in power and corruption, than the real-life politics that it seeks to ridicule. And, by attempting to depict life in the Oval Office with any measure of truth (even poetic truth), it demands a comparison with "The West Wing" from which it comes off poorly. Happpily, "November" is less than two hours long, and Nathan Lane is terrific as the president. Recommended in this production, but the play would not survive a lesser actor.

Don't try this in London

Robert Cottrell — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 21:52:20 +0000

In an article headlined "Ann Romney Steps to Fore to Soften Spouse's Image", in this morning's Wall Street Journal, I see a reminder of the sometimes treacherous gaps between American English and English English:

"Mitt is so very polished and professional in his demeanor. I think
it's a little scary for some people," said Carole McCurley, a
65-year-old mother of three from Missouri Valley, Iowa, who is
undecided but leaning toward Mr. Romney. "I found [Ann Romney] refreshingly,
delightfully common."

And it truly does appear that no insult was intended.

In praise of Sydney Wolfe Cohen

Robert Cottrell — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:48:21 +0000

I have, in fact, made two new-year resolutions. One, as foreshadowed yesterday, is to learn some Spanish in the hope of getting a hair's breadth closer to an understanding of Mexico, my new favourite country. The other is to make the acquaintance of Sydney Wolfe Cohen, who contributedâ€”notwithstanding a vast correspondence on the subject of Philip Pullmanâ€”our most memorable comment of 2007, in reply to Enid Stubin's brilliant sketch of life at "Sydney Wolfe Cohen Associates, the pre-eminent indexing service in New York City". It was a comment that managed to be both politely grouchy and quietly pleased. Here is a sample:

The associates that Enid Stubin writes about with measured admiration
were the best and the brightest people that I could lure into indexing,
many of them continuing in the trade for more than 20 years. Indexers usually work at home, make their own hours, and return their work on the promised day. Schedules are often tight, and we all dance to the beat of the publisherâ€™s drum. But we do indexing because it agrees with our noncorporate personalities, makes use of everything we have ever learned, and gives us a sense that we are contributing to the order of the universe, such as it is. Of course, we also like the idea of being paid to read books.

I often think, when I read the letters page of a magazine or newspaper, that the best writers out there are the readers. We are lucky, at More Intelligent Life, in having writersâ€”such as Enidâ€”so dazzling that I can still give them the edge. But comments, in almost every case, have been an almost equal joy. Readers, commenters, and writers, at the start of this new year, I take off my hat to you. Last year was such a pleasure that I can scarcely believe we were only in business for three months of it. May our first full year together bring four times the fun.

Religion and the use of masks

Robert Cottrell — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 22:29:21 +0000

I spent the evening of Christmas day watching small children play with giant balloons on the main town square of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, and realised belatedly what a colossal free gift the ease of visiting Mexico represents for residents of the United States. A stupid thing to say, I know, but until these past few days I had no sense of Mexico's inspiring vastness. It has, for me, exactly the right degree of dÃ©paysement: a foreign language I can just about navigate in print; tropical fruit and decent coffee; mountains; and music everywhere. My new year's resolution tonight will be to learn some Spanish.

On boxing day I was in a local museum marvelling at photographs of rural Oaxaca, all fairly modern, but which might have been taken at any time inâ€”ooohâ€”the past three hundred years or so, subject to the availability of a camera. Market scenes, hunting, weddings, men in animal masks. These pictures were by Ariel Mendoza BaÃ±os, a new name to me, and they delighted me more, I think, than any paintings could have done short of a show by Matisse.

The best photographers are doubtless geniuses, just as the best painters are. But it is easier to be a satisfying photographer than a satisfying painter: there is much more agreement on what constitutes a very good photograph, and there is more scope for letting the subject do the work.

In this case, it was the religious and ritualistic photographs that transfixed me. Why do pantheistic and animalistic rellgions always look so much more fun? It can only be the masks. Nobody wearing a stylised leopard's head can look entirely serious, at least in a photograph, however fierce they may think themselves. If anyone has it in mind to start a new Christian sect, I recommend the general use of grotesque masks as an attractive and distinctive feature.

POSTSCRIPT â€” I had just published this, when I came across another (and much better) theory for what makes some religions fun, in Nicholas Shakespeare's biography of Bruce Chatwinâ€”a momentous book, of which more when I have finished it. The subject of the passage is a Belgian anthropologist called Pierre Verger:

Initiated into the voodoo priesthood in Dahomey, he was a "babalao" or father of secrets. He was cynical, and what he liked about African and Brazilian religions was that morally they were cynical too. Their witchcraft was based on malice, which he saw as corresponding to his deeply morose view of human nature while at the same time giving rein to a sensuous delight in the world.

A meeting with the local leopard

Robert Cottrell — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:07:15 +0000

Jonathan Ledgard, my friend and Economist colleague in Nairobi, a prince among men and a contributor to these pages, sends me an end-of-year e-mail from which I hope he will forgive my quoting. It is too good not to share:

Another year almost chalked up. Strange to be here on the Equator,
under a blazing sun, and watching my three year old son, Hamish,
standing under a palm tree in the garden and singing along with an early Sinatra take of Jingle-Bells. Life is good. Our St. Bernard survived a meeting with the local leopard. I survived Somalia and have been scribbling, scribbling on the next novel.

At such moments, I feel hopelessly provincial.

What do Mormons believe?

Robert Cottrell — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:16:02 +0000

I thought I was unusually ignorant, in America, for knowing almost nothing about Mormonism: but if Mike Huckabee, who has devoted much of his life to the professional pursuit of religion, knows nothing much about Mormonism either, then there is a bigger information failure to be corrected.

I have, in fact, been trying for several weeks to find somebody willing to write a feature about "what Mormons believe", mainly to answer my own desire for information on that point. So far I have failed. I do hear, however, that The Economist has one cooking. I hope that is correct, and I await it keenly.

I see Mitt Romney is trying to rebrand the churchâ€”getting Jesus into the headline, as it wereâ€”by saying that "Mormonism" is a sort of nickname, and that he would much rather have it called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That may indeed make it sound a touch more user-friendly to other Christians (and should that "other Christians" be just "Christians"? I am as clueless as Mike Huckabee here).

But to me that smacks of an unworthy defensiveness. The practical details of any religion are going to sound pretty fantastical, frankly, unless you believe in them. Is the archangel Moroni really any more improbable a figure than the archangel Gabriel? Is the revelation of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith any more implausible than the revelation of the Ten Commandments to Moses? Is "sacred underwear" any odder an aide-memoire than rosary beads? We become habituated to the elements of our better-known religions. I find it salutary to be surprised by a new variant every once in a while.

Jobs of today

Robert Cottrell — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 18:58:57 +0000

From the weddings section of today's New York Times:

The bridegroom, also 38, works in Austin, where he is a writer of internal memos for Apple, Inc. He graduated from Vassar and received a master's degree in anthropology from the University of Texas.

"T" is for "typo"

Robert Cottrell — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 15:37:47 +0000

Tim de Lisle, the deputy editor of Intelligent Life magazine, has pointed out to me that there was, until this morning (I fixed it just now), a typo in the standfirst to our Philip Pullman interview online.

What should have been a "thought" in the first sentence lost a "t" and appeared as a "though". Nothing surprising there: typos that don't get picked up by spellcheckers have a much better survival rate than those that do.

What surprises me now is that the piece was read by at least 45,000 people here on our site, attracted a comet's tail of comments, and yet Tim was the first to point out the typoâ€”alerted by the author of the original piece. Was the author the first to notice it, or the first to mind?

I assume we read less fixedly online, because the screen is harsher on our eyes (at least until our Kindles arrive); and that this helps us to skate over typos. I also guess that readers (other than authors) mind typos less online, unless mistakes are so intrusive as to destroy sense.

I would go on to guess that readers mind less, because they're sympathetic to the greater degree of improvisation that goes with small-scale online publishing; or (my approach, I think) they are more tolerant because they know mistakes can be fixed easily at any time, now or later. In absolute terms, they matter less.

But for whatever reason, context has a huge effect. A typo like that in the print edition of Intelligent Life would have been the cause of long faces all round.

Over lunch on Fridayâ€”Emily Bobrow and I took Enid Stubin to the Morgan Library dining room, but the dining room was overbooked, so we ended up in the cafÃ©â€”Emily cited the story of an internationally famous violinist who had busked for a lark in the New York subway, and found that nobody had paid him any special attention.

We thought this was a pretty striking story at the time, and it led us into a discussion of how much of our supposed tastes are really affectations, and how we don't know the good stuff until it is put before us in a gallery window with a fat price tag, or on the stage at Carnegie Hall. But on reflection I'm not so sure.

Part of that "affectation" argument is undoubtedly true. I'm pretty sure high-end audio must be wasted on 99% of buyers, who beyond a certain age are highly unlikely to have any hearing left up in the ethereal ranges that high-end audio reaches. Blind tastings of wine are notorious for producing ratings wildly different from those implied by the prices of the bottles and the grandeur of the labels.

But our sensitivities surely change with context and expectation. Whatever part of our sensibility we need to enjoy great classical music, we don't need to have it switched on when we take the subway to work. Whatever part of our sensibility demands perfection in typesetting, we don't have it switched on when we read online. Why should we? Imagine how exhausting life would get, if we responded to every subway busker with the intensity reserved for a $115 concert at Carnegie Hall.

But imagine now the busking experiment in reverse: you take an average subway busker and put him or her on stage at Carnegie Hall. With a few exceptions, I do believe the audience would pretty soon lose patience.

Enough: this is fast becoming a very roundabout reflection on a missing "t"â€”probably one of the longer outpourings provoked by the absence of a single letter, since Georges Perec wrote a whole novel ("La Disparition") without using the letter "e". We shall struggle at More Intelligent Life to maintain the standards of a concert at Carnegie Hall. But you will forgive us if, from time to time, we give you Joshua Bell playing in the New York subway.