Quotulatiousness

February 3, 2015

A biography of Joss Whedon

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In City Journal, Benjamin Plotinsky talks about a new biography of the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Serenity, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer premiered in March 1997. The show’s name suggested either camp or children’s programming, which was probably why the network had wanted to call it simply Slayer. But Whedon insisted on the full name, Pascale writes. “As he explained, each word was crucial to understanding the show: ‘One of them is funny, one is scary, one of them is action.’” It wasn’t the last time that Whedon would make a questionable marketing decision. To this day, plenty of people who correctly point to The Sopranos and The Wire as high points of turn-of-the-century television don’t realize that Buffy, despite its name, was one of the most impressive products of that impressive period, which is to say, one of the best TV shows ever made.

The show wasn’t simply about a superpowered high schooler whose calling was to fight demons and periodically save the world. It was an allegory for American adolescence. The monsters and apocalypses represented — seldom so obviously as to induce cringes — many of the problems that teenagers routinely confront, and they forced the heroine to face problems that the rest of us must face sometimes, too: unpopularity, abandonment, fear, misery, loneliness, helplessness. Sometimes Buffy prevailed through simple self-reliance; more often, through the help of her friends, a group of smart misfits who distinguished themselves from others in their high school — and simultaneously endeared themselves to viewers everywhere — by speaking a clever, grammar-mangling patois that fans soon dubbed Buffyspeak. (“Punishing yourself like this is pointless,” Buffy’s mentor tells her early in the show’s second season. “It’s entirely pointy,” she retorts.) The wit of the dialogue balanced the pain of the plots, as Whedon put his characters through the emotional wringer with a perceptiveness seldom matched on the small screen — or the big.

Buffy ended in 2003, but Whedon was already running other projects and would continue to pilot more, most of them in science fiction or fantasy. They included a number of TV shows (Angel, Dollhouse, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) and movies (Serenity, The Cabin in the Woods, Much Ado About Nothing), as well as an innovative, self-produced miniseries, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, distributed online. Deserving special mention is Firefly, a hugely promising TV series that mixed country-Western and sci-fi plots while showcasing Whedon’s trademarks: clever dialogue, perceptive psychology, and a motley crew of outsiders. The Fox network canceled Firefly after just 14 episodes, citing low viewership, which Pascale blames chiefly on Fox’s poor advertising for the show. Whedon may have deserved some of the blame, too. Firefly opened with a contemplative, almost dismal theme song, composed by Whedon himself, that captured the series’ spirit nicely but almost certainly put off many first-time viewers. Perhaps Whedon was once again insisting on artistic integrity at the price of practical success.

Until 2012, it seemed likely that Whedon’s name would be permanently associated with Buffy. That year, however, the best of the recent crop of comic-book flicks — The Avengers, written and directed by Whedon — became the third-highest-grossing movie of all time. Who better to helm a movie about a team of smart, squabbling mavericks who ultimately unite to save the world than the creator of Buffy and Firefly? The movie was classic Whedon: well paced, clever, and laced with dialogue at once witty and psychologically revealing. He’s currently working on a sequel, which will hit theaters this May.

Pascale’s book is carefully researched and documented, and it gives the reader a good idea of Whedon’s personality, thought process, and creative approach — no small feat for a narrative that, for the most part, must introduce its topics in chronological order. Pascale quotes Whedon often, and his insight about his own work makes the book a pleasure to read. After a conversation with composer Stephen Sondheim — who tells him, “I will always write about yearning” — Whedon starts wondering what his own chief motivation is. “Helplessness was what I realized was sort of the basic thing,” Whedon says. He varies the idea slightly in another context: “We, all of us, are alone in our own minds. … Loneliness and aloneness — which are different things — are very much, I would say, [among the] main things I focus on in my work.” Even The Avengers, Whedon says, is “a film about lonely people, because I’m making it, and my pony only does one trick.”

October 24, 2014

A new biography of Lincoln

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Myron Magnet is quite enthusiastic about Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser:

Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject’s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser’s compact, profound, and utterly absorbing new life of Abraham Lincoln, Founders’ Son, leaps straight to the heart of the matter. With searchlight intensity, it dazzlingly illuminates the great president’s evolving views of slavery and the extraordinary speeches in which he unfolded that vision, molding the American mind on the central conflict in American history and resolving, at heroic and tragic cost to the nation and himself, the contradiction that the Founding Fathers themselves could not resolve.

[…]

Lincoln did not start out an abolitionist. As early as 1837, he showed ambivalence on the subject. When the Illinois legislature voted to condemn abolition societies as unnecessarily provocative that year, legislator Lincoln and a colleague voted yes but entered a protest, declaring for the record “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” Even so, as a campaigner for Whig candidate William Henry Harrison in the election of 1840, Lincoln, in a debate with Martin Van Buren supporter Stephen Douglas, “was not above slyly trafficking in prejudice,” Brookhiser notes, attacking Van Buren for supporting voting rights for New York State’s free blacks. But as his congressional term drew to an end in 1849, he proposed (unsuccessfully) a plan for ending slavery in the District of Columbia, and the next year, when the three-decade-long era of trying to find a compromise on the issue of slavery came to a climax with the Compromise of 1850, Lincoln knew that the choice between slavery and abolition was inevitable for the nation—and he knew that he would stand against slavery. “When the time comes my mind is made up,” he told a friend, “for I believe the slavery question can never be successfully compromised.”

The time came soon enough, with the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. In effect, the act repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which, in admitting Missouri as a slave state, had barred slavery from the rest of the Louisiana Territory lying north of the 36° 30’ parallel. By the terms of the new act, however, settlers pouring into the vast, hitherto empty territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which mostly lay north of the 1820 line, could choose whether to admit or bar slavery by “popular sovereignty,” the term used by Democratic senate leader Stephen Douglas, who boasted of having “passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself. . . . I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy.”

Though what we call the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred in their Illinois senatorial contest of 1858, the “six years from 1854 to 1860 were one long Lincoln-Douglas debate,” writes Brookhiser, as Douglas went around the state defending the act and an indignant Lincoln pursued him, rebutting his emollient arguments in a string of immortal speeches. In Peoria in October 1854, Lincoln condemned Douglas for reopening an already scabbed-over wound. “Every inch of territory we owned already had a definite settlement of the slavery question,” he observed; but thanks to Douglas, “here we are in the midst of a new slavery agitation.” Douglas wants the people of the territories to decide? Fine. But who the people are “depends on whether a Negro is not or is a man.” If he is, then isn’t it “a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?” When a white man “governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government — that is despotism.”

Lincoln appealed to the authority of his beloved Founding Fathers — a subject Brookhiser, biographer of several of them, knows better than most. These great men found slavery already existing in the colonies, and to forge a new nation that the slave states would agree to join, they had to accept the evil out of necessity, not principle. They clearly knew that it was wrong, as is evident in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, by which the Continental Congress strove to prevent slavery’s spread to unsettled territories; in the Declaration of Independence—“the sheet anchor of American republicanism,” said Lincoln, “that teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’” including blacks, who are emphatically men; and in the Constitution itself, which accepted slavery so reluctantly that it wouldn’t even name it, Lincoln noted, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.” So let’s not go beyond where the Founders felt themselves forced to go. Let’s not metastasize slavery further.

July 9, 2014

Justin Raimondo reviews new biography of the Koch family

Filed under: Books, Business, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:46

The archvillains of capitalism, Charles and David Koch, are the subjects of a recent book by Mother Jones writer Daniel Schulman. Justin Raimondo reviews Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.

According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Koch brothers are responsible for global warming and much else that’s wrong with the world. This is part of a strategy to demonize Charles and David Koch — the principals behind the country’s largest privately-held company — and make them the issue come Election Day. There’s a big problem with this strategy, however: a recent poll shows that most of Reid’s own constituents haven’t the slightest idea who the Brothers Koch are.

Daniel Schulman’s much anticipated book, the first biography of the Koch family, may help voters bridge the knowledge gap — but Democrats are going to be disappointed if they think it will help their smear campaign. Indeed, it is likely to do the opposite. It’s hard to write a biography of someone you hate, and Schulman, a writer for Mother Jones, clearly came to admire his subjects.

The story starts with Fred Koch, a son of Dutch immigrants who settled in the “poor but plucky” town of Quanah, east of the Texas panhandle. Ambitious, single-minded, and tough as nails, Fred made his fortune helping Joe Stalin extract oil from the Russian steppes — learning in the process that the rosy picture of a “workers’ paradise” drawn by the likes of Walter Durante was the exact opposite of the truth.

Driven to seek overseas markets by an onslaught of patent-infringement lawsuits from a Rockefeller-connected oil consortium, Fred Koch arrived in Russia in 1930 and “found it a land of hunger, misery, and terror,” as he would later recall. When he left that autumn, his Soviet minder — who had spent the whole time capitalist-baiting him — bid adieu with this warning: “I’ll see you in the United States sooner than you think.” What Fred had seen in Stalin’s Russia set him on a course that landed him in the ranks of the John Birch Society.

Robert Welch, the society’s founder, recruited him early on: Fred was at the 1958 meeting where Welch first laid out his plan to fight the Communist menace and roll back the New Deal. The John Birch Society was a hybrid of Old Right libertarian economics and the McCarthyite paranoia of the 1950s, and Fred — by this time a tycoon — relentlessly lectured his four sons on the evils of collectivism and the value of hard work. He had no intention of raising a brood of “country-club bums” who would coast along on the family fortune. The 1950s were almost over before he bought the kids a television, and even then they had little time to watch it.

June 26, 2014

The second volume of Patterson’s biography of Robert Heinlein

Filed under: Books, History, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:43

RAH by Patterson Volume 2In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reviews the second (and final) volume of William Patterson’s Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century.

Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988) possessed an astonishing gift for fast-paced narrative, an exceptionally engaging voice and a willingness to boldly go where no writer had gone before. In “— All You Zombies—” a transgendered time traveler impregnates his younger self and thus becomes his own father and mother. The protagonist of Tunnel in the Sky is black, and the action contains hints of interracial sex, not the usual thing in a 1955 young adult book. While Starship Troopers (1959) championed the military virtues of service and sacrifice, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) became a bible for the flower generation, blurring sex and religion and launching the vogue word “grok.”

Heinlein’s finest work in the short story was produced in the late 1930s and early ’40s, mainly for the legendary editor of Astounding, John W. Campbell. But by 1948, when this volume opens, “The Roads Must Roll,” “By His Bootstraps, “Gulf” and “Requiem” are behind him. The onetime pulp writer has broken into the Saturday Evening Post and Boy’s Life, married his third (and last) wife, Virginia, and settled in Colorado Springs, where he designs and builds a state-of-the-art automated house. Apart from his occasional involvement with Hollywood, as in scripting Destination Moon, he will devote the rest of his career mainly to novels.

[…]

Like his fascinating but long-winded first volume, the second half of Patterson’s biography is difficult to judge fairly. Packed with facts both trivial and significant, relying heavily on the possibly skewed memories of the author’s widow, and utterly reverent throughout, volume two emphasizes Heinlein the husband, traveler, independent businessman and political activist. Above all, the book celebrates the intense civilization of two that Heinlein and his wife created. There is almost nothing in the way of literary comment or criticism.

Though Heinlein can do no wrong in his biographer’s eyes, if you use yours to look in Patterson’s voluminous endnotes, you will occasionally find confirmation that the writer could be casually cruel as well as admirably generous, at once true to his beliefs and unpleasantly narrow-minded and inflexible about them. Today we would call Heinlein’s convictions libertarian, his personal philosophy grounded in absolute freedom, individual responsibility and an almost religiously inflected patriotism. Heinlein could thus be a confirmed nudist and member of several Sunshine Clubs as well as a grass-roots Barry Goldwater Republican.

For the record, I loved this volume even more than I loved the first one. But Dirda’s comments are fair: Patterson worked hard to present Heinlein in as positive a light as possible, so it’s not unreasonable to suspect that the great man’s character quirks could make him difficult and awkward to deal with at times (to be kind). In the last post, I talked about the adolescent Heinlein as being “probably a pretty toxic individual” and that aspect of his character can still be discerned in the recounting of his later years.

April 19, 2014

Orwell and equality

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Bruno Waterfield reviews a recent “intellectual biography” by Robert Colls, George Orwell: English Rebel:

Orwell, or rather Blair, was of the British upper class, but he could clearly see that human equality was a fact. It transcended class and nationality, and was palpable even in the briefest of encounters between people. It was the ‘crystal spirit’ that had bought a young Italian, and Orwell, to fight for democracy in Spain, just as it was the same human quality that made life in a slum unbearable. Equality for Orwell was not a merely a measure or a statistic; it was a quality that all living humans have, a resistance to fate even at its most blind.

These two encounters also reveal a man with a deep belief in the character and qualities of living humans, something that Robert Colls understands in his excellent ‘intellectual biography’ of Orwell. No book about Orwell can be perfect; the man was too contradictory, too contrarian and too bloody minded to be an easy study. But Colls (with some limitations) really gets it. Orwell refused ideology in a century defined by it, and that was his strength and brilliance. Setting out his stall, Colls, a professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, puts his finger on why Orwell despised ideology as a ‘form of abstract knowledge which, in order to support a particular tendency or regime, has to distort the world and usually does so by drawing off, or separating out, ideas from experience. Ideology, in Orwell’s eyes, could never afford to get too close to the lives of the people. The more abstract the idea and the language that that expressed it, the more ideological the work and vice versa’, he writes at the book’s beginning.

‘[Orwell] knew that if he was saying something so abstract that it could not be understood or falsified, then he was not saying anything that mattered’, Colls continues. ‘He staked his reputation on being true to the world as it was, and his great fear of intellectuals stemmed from what he saw as their propensity for abstraction and deracination – abstraction in their thinking and deracination in their lives. Orwell’s politics, therefore, were no more and no less than intense encounters turned into writings he hoped would be truthful and important. Like Gramsci, he believed that telling the truth was a revolutionary act. But without the encounters he had no politics and without the politics he felt he had nothing to say.’

Orwell was on a collision course with the intelligentsia to which he, as a rebel and a modernist radical, instinctively belonged, but which, due to its embrace of social engineering, the state and Stalinism, he was starting to oppose. His dissidence appears early in The Road to Wigan Pier where, as Colls wisely remarks, ‘Socialism emerges not as the solution but the problem, and the unemployed and exploited emerge not as a problem but the solution’. Colls paraphrases Orwell: ‘The battle of the classes… will not be won in the abstract, or in some future state, but in the present, in how people actually are and what they actually think of each other.’ Orwell despised the ‘Europeanised’ intellectual British Left because they had become wilfully displaced and removed, uprooted from the lived life of their country. Even worse, the deracinated intellectuals, divorced from the majority, wanted to refashion the people in their image. In the world of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Fabian socialism, gaining political power also meant using the state to engineer the people, through eugenics and public health.

[…]

Orwell returned to Britain in time for the beginning of the Second World War. Apart from taking up the cudgels on behalf of the truth in Spain, without which the historical record would have been badly damaged by the falsifiers, he was not immune to much of the confusion that plagued the left in the run up to hostilities. Should socialists refuse to take sides in a conflict between imperialist powers? Should socialists sabotage the war efforts and oppose rearmament in the face of the threat from Nazi Germany? George Orwell was as confused as anyone else and his writings of 1939 and early 1940 are full of the turmoil and contradictions of the day.

But then in 1940, Orwell took another one of his leaps away from the lines and orthodoxies of leftish ideology which had led many intellectuals into pacifism or the defeatism of toeing the Stalinist line on the Soviet Union’s 1939 pact with the Nazis. In a way, Orwell’s experiences in Wigan and Barcelona, prepared the ground. In the Second World War, he would side with the British people, and an imperfect British state, because Britain’s political and wider culture reflected a way of living better than the fascism or Stalinist communism preferred by many of the intelligentsia. He reserved and exercised his right to criticise British imperialism, which he continued to attack throughout the war and his life. Again, his instincts were right or, at the very least, less wrong than most on the left. Instead of abstract ideology, distorted and twisted to suit either a Marxism that was synonymous with Stalinist tyranny, or the elitist social engineering of the Fabians, Orwell advocated a patriotic defence of a way of life that could not be trusted to intellectuals or, by implication, the state.

December 12, 2013

Heinlein’s biographer talks to the Cato Institute Book Forum, 2010

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Uploaded on 10 Jun 2011

Featuring the author William H. Patterson, Jr., Editor and publisher, The Heinlein Journal; moderated by David Boaz, Executive Vice President, Cato Institute.

Robert A. Heinlein is regarded by many as the greatest science fiction writer of the 20th century. He is the author of more than 30 novels, including Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the libertarian classic The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. According to biographer William H. Patterson Jr., Heinlein’s writings “galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank; the counterculture; the libertarian movement; and the commercial space movement.” This authorized biography, reviewed enthusiastically by Michael Dirda in the Washington Post, is the first of two volumes, covering Heinlein’s early ambition to become an admiral, his left-wing politics, and his first novels. Heinlein later became strongly libertarian.

October 3, 2013

QotD: Biographies of Abraham Lincoln

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

… Lincoln is yet to be got vividly between the covers of a book. The Nicolay-Hay work is quite impossible; it is not a biography, but simply a huge storehouse of biographical raw materials; whoever can read it can also read the official Records of the Rebellion. All the other standard lives of old Abe — for instance, those of Lamon, Herndon and Weil, Stoddard, Morse and Miss Tarbell — fail still worse; when they are not grossly preachy and disingenuous they are trivial. So far as I can make out, no genuinely scientific study of the man has ever been attempted. The amazing conflict of testimony about him remains a conflict; the most elemental facts are yet to be established; he grows vaguer and more fabulous as year follows year. One would think that, by this time, the question of his religious views (to take one example) ought to be settled, but apparently it is not, for no longer than a year ago there came a reverend author Dr. William E. Barton, with a whole volume upon the subject, and I was as much in the dark after reading it as I had been before I opened it. All previous biographers, it appeared by this author’s evidence, had either dodged the problem, or lied. The official doctrine, in this as in other departments, is obviously quite unsound. One hears in the Sunday-schools that Abe was an austere and pious fellow, constantly taking the name of God in whispers, just as one reads in the school history-books that he was a shining idealist, holding all his vast powers by the magic of an inner and ineffable virtue. Imagine a man getting on in American politics, interesting and enchanting the boobery, sawing off the horns of other politicians, elbowing his way through primaries and conventions, by the magic of virtue! As well talk of fetching the mob by hawking exact and arctic justice! Abe, in fact, must have been a fellow highly skilled at the great democratic art of gum-shoeing. I like to think of him as one who defeated such politicians as Stanton, Douglas and Sumner with their own weapons — deftly leading them into ambuscades, boldly pulling their noses, magnificently ham-stringing and horn-swoggling them — in brief, as a politician of extraordinary talents, who loved the game for its own sake, and had the measure of the crowd. His official portraits, both in prose and in daguerreotype, show him wearing the mien of a man about to be hanged; one never sees him smiling. Nevertheless, one hears that, until he emerged from Illinois, they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche.

But, as I say, it is hopeless to look for the real man in the biographies of him: they are all full of distortion, chiefly pious and sentimental. The defect runs through the whole of American political biography, and even through the whole of American history.

H.L. Mencken, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy”, Prejudices, part 2, 1920.

February 12, 2013

Calvin Coolidge — The Great Refrainer

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

Amity Shlaes has written a new biography on President Calvin Coolidge, reviewed here by Gene Healy:

If there was ever a time when the president could simply preside, it has long passed. As early as the Eisenhower era, political scientist Clinton Rossiter observed that the public had come to see the federal chief executive as “a combination of scoutmaster, Delphic oracle, hero of the silver screen, and father of the multitudes.” Under the pressure of public demands, the office had accrued a host of responsibilities over and above its constitutional ones: “World Leader,” “Protector of the Peace,” “Chief Legislator,” “Manager of Prosperity,” “Voice of the People,” and more.

To that daunting portfolio add “Feeler-in-Chief,” a term coined in all earnestness by The New York Times‘s Maureen Dowd in 2010 while lashing out at Barack Obama for being insufficiently emotive about the BP oil spill. Obama, she wrote, had “resisted fulfilling a signal part of his job: being a prism in moments of fear and pride, reflecting what Americans feel so they know he gets it.”

Poor MoDo would have kicked the cat in sheer frustration if confronted by the implacable, inscrutable Calvin Coolidge, whose reaction to the job’s more unreasonable demands was a Bartleby-like “I prefer not to.”

[. . .]

Here was “a rare kind of hero: a minimalist president,” Shlaes argues. And though history remembers “Silent Cal” mostly for his reticence and frequent napping, Shlaes reminds us that “inaction betrays strength.” In politics, it’s often easier to “do something,” however unwise, than it is to hold firm: “Coolidge is our great refrainer.”

Alas, after Coolidge‘s elegant introduction, the sledding gets much tougher. Long stretches of this 456-page tome read like an info-dump from Shlaes’s clearly formidable research files. Like the hardscrabble farmers of Plymouth Notch, you need to set your jaw grimly and persevere through a long winter of sentences that should have been left on the cutting room floor, like: “Coolidge met with [Budget Director Herbert] Lord six times and reduced a tariff on paintbrush handles by half, his second cut that year, the other a reduction in duty on live bob quail.” Shlaes should have followed the example of her famously taciturn subject, who in his 1915 opening address as president of the Massachusetts Senate delivered a crisp little homily of 44 words, ending in “above all things, be brief.”

Still, the level of detail she provides inspires reflection on the vast gulf between today’s GOP and the grand party of old. Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge cut taxes and shrank spending. They were pro-peace and anti-wiretapping. They embraced “normalcy” instead of stoking fear. And — go figure — they were also popular. Today’s Republicans could profit from studying their example.

August 30, 2012

General A.G.L. McNaughton and the First Canadian Army

Filed under: Books, Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

Randall Wakelam reviews a new biography of Lieutenant-General A.G.L. McNaughton, the first commander of Canada’s major field formation in World War 2:

Lieutenant-General A.G.L. ‘Andy’ McNaughton was one of the key staff gunners in the Canadian Corps in the Great War and went on to be Chief of the General Staff in Ottawa from 1930 to 1935. From 1935 to 1939 he established and led the National Research Council. He was recalled to active service in 1939 and took 1st Canadian Division overseas. Once there he would spend four years building the Canadian field force first to corps and then army level. Relieved of army command in late 1943, he was for a short while Minister of National Defence and in the postwar years continued to serve Canada as the Canadian co-chair of the Canada-US Permanent Joint Board on Defence. Not a bad record of public service, but he is most remembered for his apparent failures as general officer commanding-in-chief (GOC-in-C), First Canadian Army.

[. . .]

Previous portraits show McNaughton to be a general who argued vehemently against breaking up his force for errant missions and, who at the same time, was a failure in field exercises. He has also been seen as an inflexible man who could not get on with his military or political seniors. Historians of no less repute than C.P. Stacey, Jack English and Jack Granatstein have created that portrait for Andy.

[. . .]

Rickard has gone well beyond what we have to now generally accepted as the tragic character that was Andy McNaughton. He has drawn from an impressive range or primary sources in building a case for, if not accepting McNaughton as a viable, but unlucky commander, then one whose flaws are now better understood in comparison of those of his peers. While not all will agree with Rickard’s assessment of McNaughton it could be argued that such disagreement is born in large part because of the complex nature of high command and the management of armies and national forces in coalition warfare – what might be termed Clausewitzian fog and friction both on the battlefield and in the meeting rooms, and with more than a pinch of ambiguity added when it comes to strategic-level discussions and decisions. Such has been the case recently for Canadian politicians and commanders in Afghanistan and the Mediterranean; both they and students of Canadian history will enjoy John Rickard’s fresh and refreshing study of Andy.

April 18, 2012

Summing up the career of Hunter S. Thompson, graphically

Filed under: Books, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

At BoingBoing, Mark Frauenfelder reviews Gonzo: A Graphic Biography of Hunter S. Thompson by Will Bingley and Anthony Hope-Smith:

180 pages isn’t much room to examine a life in minute detail. Instead, Bingley tells a story (as if it were written, quite convincingly, by Thompson himself) of Thompson’s frantic search to find meaning in the turbulent era he lived in. Bingley’s story is about a passionate, rebellious genius who sprinted too fast at the beginning of a long-distance race, collapsed early, and spent his remaining decades burnt-out, crawling bewilderedly.

The book’s forward, written by Thompson’s longtime editor, Alan Rinzler, is especially revealing. Rinzler believes that Thompson could have been the “heavyweight champion of American letters,” but his self-destructive behavior, which got worse with each passing year, ruined that opportunity.

[. . .]

After Lono, says Rinzler, “Hunter’s substance abuse, writer’s block and brief attention span were increasing exponentially. He’s slip out to see his dealer and come back so tanked he couldn’t think straight.” Thompson’s work became a series of “repetitious, mediocre, regurgitated articles and books and collections he allowed to be issued and reissued over the last 30 years of his life.”

The Curse of Lono was the last book by Thompson I read, but I don’t doubt Rinzler’s assessment of the quality of Thompson’s books that followed. (Thompson’s awful “Hey Rube!” columns for an ESPN website were enough to keep me uninterested in his newer books). But his earlier work, especially Hell’s Angels, is so good that I will always admire Thompson as a heavyweight contender who showed a very promising start.

I eagerly read much of Thompson’s early work (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, The Great Shark Hunt, Hell’s Angels, and The Curse of Lono) in the early-to-mid 80’s, but tapered off soon after that. Several years ago, I picked up a remaindered copy of Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness Modern History from the Sports Desk and it was the literary equivalent of Rome after too many Goth and Vandal sackings: you could still see some great bits and pieces, but everything else had been broken, burned, hacked, and slashed.

September 13, 2011

She was “the only good girl in Hollywood”

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

Robert Fulford reviews a new biography of Myrna Loy:

The making of The Thin Man forms the centrepiece of Emily W. Leider’s well-researched and shrewdly conceived biography, Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood (University of California Press), out at the end of this month.

MGM produced The Thin Man on a B-movie budget but made a fortune and then turned out five sequels. (At the moment a remake is said to be in preparation, with Johnny Depp as Nick.)

That first film was the great event of Loy’s career. During half a century in movies she co-starred with Cary Grant, Clark Gable and many others, but she made her reputation in the part of Nora Charles, opposite Powell.

[. . .]

The Thin Man began as a novel by Dashiell Hammett, himself a private eye in his pre-literary life. He based the characters on his own decades-long affair with Lillian Hellman, the eminent playwright. Hellman was renowned as a fire-breathing dragon when angry and Hammett was notoriously a morose drunk. We are to understand that Nick and Nora were not precisely modelled on Dash and Lillian.

[. . .]

Loy and Powell got along well as professionals but, despite their fans’ wishes, were romantic only on the set. Powell went for blonds, notably Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow. Loy had four marriages, each of them ending in divorce, none of them lasting as long as the 13 years Nick and Nora kept turning up on the movie screens.

A line attributed to the great John Ford, who directed Loy in The Black Watch and Arrowsmith, provides Leider with the subtitle of her book. Ford called Loy “the only good girl in Hollywood.” In the argot of the day, Ford had “a yen for her.” He may have been teasing her as a response to rejection. Leider says he meant she was not a habitual bed-hopper, like other girls. Apparently she boasted that she never ran off with her leading man, though with both Leslie Howard and Tyrone Power she was tempted.

Hammett’s book came out just after Prohibition ended (in Roosevelt’s first year, 1933), when to drink liquor was to strike a blow for liberty. Many blows are struck in The Thin Man. Nick and Nora are major martini drinkers and proud of it. Nora keeps up with Nick; when she meets him in a bar and he confesses to having five martinis already, she tells the bartender to set up a row of five for her. At one point she complains about Nick “sneaking off, getting drunk … without me.”

The Thin Man movies are among my all-time favourites.

April 4, 2011

No wonder India does not want this Gandhi biography to be published

Filed under: Books, History, India, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:00

Based on this Wall Street Journal review, it’s far from being another hagiography:

Joseph Lelyveld has written a ­generally admiring book about ­Mohandas Gandhi, the man credited with leading India to independence from Britain in 1947. Yet “Great Soul” also obligingly gives readers more than enough information to discern that he was a sexual weirdo, a political incompetent and a fanatical faddist — one who was often downright cruel to those around him. Gandhi was therefore the archetypal 20th-century progressive ­intellectual, professing his love for ­mankind as a concept while actually ­despising people as individuals.

The strongest objection raised in the Indian debate appears to have been the suggestion that Gandhi was bisexual:

Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi’s organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. “Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom,” he wrote to Kallenbach. “The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed.” For some ­reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were “a constant reminder” of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might ­relate to the enemas Gandhi gave ­himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about “how completely you have taken ­possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance.” Gandhi nicknamed himself “Upper House” and Kallenbach “Lower House,” and he made Lower House promise not to “look lustfully upon any woman.” The two then pledged “more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.”

August 16, 2010

Cory Doctorow on the new Robert Heinlein biography

Filed under: History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:33

RAH by PattersonI finished reading the first volume last night, and I can’t wait for volume two. Cory Doctorow summarizes John Clute’s review with his own observations (Clute compared Heinlein’s work to Doctorow’s):

Heinlein was notoriously recalcitrant about his early life and the two wives he was married to before his epic marriage to Virginia Heinlein. He repeatedly burned correspondence and other writings that related to that period. Clute suggests that this is partly driven by Heinlein’s desire to be Robert A Heinlein, titan of the field, without having to cope with his youthful embarrassments. It’s a good bet — lots of the stuff that drives young people to write science fiction also makes them a pain in the ass to be around until they work some of the kinks out of their system (I wholeheartedly include myself in this generalization).

It’s interesting to see his own growth, from his early priggishness (he was nicknamed “the boy general” as a plebe at the Naval Academy) which undoubtedly was not helped by his health issues and tendency to stammer. He was in the shadow of his older brother Rex Ivar for most of his youth, even following him to the Academy three two years later. Rex Ivar was the favourite child in the family and Robert never seemed to be able to do as well in his parents’ eyes as the older boy.

Robert Heinlein was probably a pretty toxic individual as a teenager, based on the evidence Patterson presents — it’s pretty clear even after most of the information was sanitized by Heinlein’s third wife Virginia. Patterson never met Heinlein, and by the time he took on the biography, most of the people who knew Heinlein were fading from the scene. I think he did a very good job with the information available to him, but the biography definitely improves after the Academy years.

Patterson also puts forward a pretty comprehensive case for the idea that Heinlein’s fiction generally conveys Heinlein’s own political beliefs. This is widely acknowledged among Heinlein fans, save for a few who seem distressed by the idea that the blatant racism and sexism (especially in the earlier works) are the true beliefs of the writer at the time of writing and would prefer to believe that Heinlein didn’t write himself into his works. I got into a pretty heated debate with one such person at the Heinlein panel at the 2007 Comicon, who maintained the absurd position that Heinlein’s views could never be divined by reading his fiction — after all, his characters espouse all manner of contradictory beliefs! (To which I replied: “Yes, but the convincing arguments are always for the same set of beliefs, and the characters who challenge those beliefs are beaten in the argument.”) Not that I fault Heinlein for this — it’s an honorable tradition in SF and the mainstream of literature, and I find Heinlein’s beliefs to be nuanced and complex, anything but the reactionary caricature with which he is often dismissed.

It should be no surprise to anyone over 30 that Robert Heinlein’s political and philosophical views changed over his lifetime. This is discussed in some depth in the book, frequently from Heinlein’s own letters to friends at various points. He lost his religious views very early on (if he ever really had them, other than for conforming to familial expectations), and after leaving the Navy he was deeply involved in Upton Sinclair’s EPIC movement.

His belief in world government must have been hard to sustain, given that he had a great deal of experience of the political process, both in Kansas City during the Pendergast years, and in California with EPIC. Corruption, dirty dealing, and backroom bargaining were the way things got done, and it would be hard to believe that things would be better with a single world-wide government.

What seems to have gotten him involved in EPIC was his first-hand experience of poverty and seeing the plight of the “Okies” who’d come to California after the dust bowl wiped out so many farms in the central states. There were not enough jobs for them, even displacing the Mexican migrant labourers, and they were ineligible for state assistance until after they’d been in California for a year. Sinclair appeared to be the only politician with any plan other than oppressing the Okies enough to force them to move on.

May 14, 2010

Remembering Henri le Grande

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

France is still fond of King Henri IV, who was assassinated 400 years ago:

“If we were to measure his approval ratings now, what result would we get?” wondered Nouvel Observateur magazine in a special report this week. “100% happy? 200%? At any rate a figure to make the late greats turn pale — even more so the not-so-greats who are still alive.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the subtext implied, would do well to watch and learn.

During his reign from 1589 to 1610, Henri le Grand was credited with turning a country torn apart by the wars of religion into a newly confident land where Catholics and Protestants were forced to tolerate, if not like, each other.

He converted from Calvinism to the faith of the vast majority of his subjects, but did not neglect the country’s long-persecuted Hugenot minority. In 1598, 26 years after thousands of people who had gathered for his wedding day died in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre, he declared the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed Protestants freedom of worship.

[. . .]

Aside from his political achievements, it is the amorous escapades of the “Green Gallant” which continue to titillate modern-day fans. Married twice but unimpeded by vows of fidelity, Henri had numerous affairs and flings. This week Francois Caviglioli, a journalist, summed him up by referring to a contemporary Italian bon vivant: “Henri seemed to be the Rocco Siffredi of the 16th century. A porn star who was said to never wash.”

Judging by the tributes being paid to him now, Henri IV seems to be working his magic from beyond the grave. Such was the impact of his reign — and the shock of his untimely death — that he has become a martyr who is viewed almost as the personification of good leadership.

A few years ago, I tried to find a good biography of Henri, but there didn’t appear to be anything currently in print (in English). For such an iconic leader, he is not well known outside France . . .

March 1, 2010

Christopher Hitchens’ retrospective on the life of Alexander Haig

Filed under: Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

Christopher Hitchens does not come to praise (a would-be) Caesar, but to bury him . . . good and deep:

“Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do,” I once wrote. “And I think he is a homicidal buffoon.” I did not then realize that this view of mine was at least partly shared by so many senior figures on the American right.

When I moved to Washington in the very early years of Ronald Reagan’s tenure, I was pretty sure that Haig, then secretary of state, was delusional (and not even in a good way). What I would not have believed then was what has become apparent since — that his boss, Ronald Reagan, often felt the same way.

And this is the nice part of the biography. Go read the whole thing.

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