Idea Transcript
Cervantes
Month: January 2010 JANUARY 30, 2010 BY AB
Remembrance of Candy Bars Past How a wave of consolidation lay waste to regional treats like the Fig Pie and the Seven Up Bar In Merriam, Kan., the Russell Sifers Candy Company produces what must be the messiest candy bar in the United States. The Valomilk, first introduced in 1931, is a thin cup of chocolate filled with vanilla syrup. It is virtually impossible to eat without getting syrup on your face. For years, the bar came with its own cautionary slogan: “When it runs down your chin, you know it’s a Valomilk.”
(https://abluteau.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/candybar1.jpg) The Twin Bing, with a cherry-flavored nougat center, is still being made in Iowa. Farther north, in a low-slung factory in St. Joseph, Mo., the bright pink gobs rolling down the assembly line are the sweet centers of the Cherry Mash. They have been the flagship of the Chase Candy Company since they were introduced in 1918. A couple of miles east of downtown Nashville, the Standard Candy Company makes the GooGoo Cluster, a disc of caramel and marshmallow covered in milk chocolate, dappled with peanuts, then drenched in more chocolate. The GooGoo, which lays claim to being one of the oldest bars in America, is considered by most Southerners to be the official candy bar of Dixie. These companies are the face of what the candy industry in America used to be. Each city or region had its own factories, and people could actually see and smell the place where their favorite sweets were made. Coming from a particular town meant that you ate a particular kind of candy bar. Because there was no refrigeration to speak of, and transportation was expensive, confectioners often used local ingredients. If you lived in a region that produced cherries or walnuts, chances are those were in your candy bars. Regional candies are a dying breed. Today, there are perhaps a dozen such concerns left in America. The rest have been swallowed up, or put out of business, by the massive consolidation that has shaped the modern confectionery industry. Earlier this month, the British chocolate giant Cadbury agreed to a $19 billion buyout from Kraft, creating a mega-firm that projects $50 billion in annual sales. Thousands of candy bars have disappeared along the road to consolidation, including such recent delicacies as the peanut butter-and-chocolate pods known as Oompahs, the treacherously chewy Bit-o-Choc, the glorious, nougat-and-caramel-filled Milkshake, and the Bar None, an ingenious marriage of peanuts and wafers dipped in chocolate. Also gone (but not forgotten) is the curiously alluring Marathon Bar, a braided rope of chocolate and caramel whose wrapper featured a ruler on the back. __________
Sweet Survivors A sampling of candies still in production:
Mary Jane, a peanut-butter-flavored chewy candy
Valomilk, chocolate cups filled with liquid marshmallow
Abba-Zaba, taffy candy with peanut butter centers
Cherry Mash, peanuts and chocolate over a cherry fondant center
Idaho Spud, marshmallow center covered with dark chocolate and coconut sprinkles __________ Local products ranged from legendary to outright strange. There was the famous Seven Up, a St. Paul native that included seven different flavors; the nougat-puffed Minneapolis bar known as the Fat Emma and a creation known as the Vegetable Sandwich, which, regrettably, consisted of dehydrated cabbage, celery and peppers covered in chocolate. (The Vegetable Sandwich, whose label contained the bizarre boast “Will Not Constipate,” was introduced during the health craze of the ’20s and died, of natural causes, soon after.) Other bars included the Dipsy Doodle, the Coffee Dan, the Baby Lobster, the Prairie Schooner, the Fig Pie—the list goes on and on. Still, a handful of candy makers have resisted the corporate scythe and persevered. At Palmer Candy in Sioux City, Iowa, fleets of workers with ice cream scoops plop a lump of chocolateand-peanut hash around a cherry fondant to produce the unexpectedly addictive Twin Bing. Marty Palmer, the fifth generation of Palmers to run the company, has a framed calfskin pennant behind his desk, branded with the legend “Delicious Chocolates Sold Here.” It dates back to the turn of the century. “Back then, we delivered our candies as far as a horse-drawn wagon could go in a day,” Mr. Palmer said. “That was our distribution system. Our jobbers would go in to a dry goods store and peg one of these to the wall.” The Idaho Candy Company in Boise looks more like a museum than a production facility, littered with equipment dating back to the 1900s. It’s home to the Idaho Spud, a spongy, cocoaflavored marshmallow covered in dark chocolate and dusted with dried coconut. It is, shall we say, an acquired taste. All of these companies are acutely aware of how tenuous their businesses are. The consolidation of retail outlets has destroyed the network of mom-and-pop grocery stores that sold their products. And the giant chains that dominated the retail landscape, such as Wal-Mart, charge so-called “slotting fees”—a fee paid by the supplier for desirable shelf space—that are often prohibitive. There’s no danger of the small manufacturers being bought out by one of the Big Three—Hershey, Mars and Nestle—because the profits generated by their bars simply aren’t big enough. Their most loyal customers—the folks who had grown up eating their bars—are getting older. And they fret that their companies will eventually have to be shuttered, unless one of their children takes over. The diminishing presence of certain brands has created a whole new niche business for Web sites like Candydirect.com, a retailer of hard-to-find candies. The site’s message board is a testament to the fanaticism of candy lovers, all desperately seeking some candy from their youth, which they describe in detail. Here, you’ll find elegies to dear departed goodies such as Wacky Wafers, the Summit bar, the PB Max, Choco-Lite and the Reggie Bar. The era of the local candy factory dates back to an ambitious Pennsylvanian named Milton Hershey, a failed vendor of caramels, who recognized in the 1890s that chocolate bars were going to make someone a lot of money. Up until this point, most confectioners were local, storefront operations. The candy was cooked up in back, and sold in front. Hershey mass-produced his bars and chocolate “kisses” and sold them in grocery stores and pushcarts. Others followed suit. Before long, America’s major cities had their own candy factories, to go along with the local breweries and bakeries. Boston—for a time the nation’s capital of candy production—boasted an entire street dubbed “Confectioner’s Row,” along with half a dozen chocolate factories. On days when the breeze was blowing right, you could smell chocolate for miles. The Great Depression ushered in a golden age of candy bars. Back then, they were referred to as “nickel bars” and marketed as a cheap source of quick calories. This gave rise to bars such as the Club Sandwich and the infamous Chicken Dinner which featured a roasted chicken on its label (though, alas, no actual chicken in the bar). The late Ray Broekel, author of the “Great American Candy Bar Book” and as close as America comes to an official candy historian, estimated that, in the years between the World Wars, 30,000 different brands were introduced in the United States alone. It was this very glut that compelled the shrewdest minds in the industry to focus on building brand names and expanding market share. Hershey and his chief competitor Forrest Mars set about automating factories, establishing a national distribution system, stockpiling ingredients, buying up competitors and advertising. Over the past 70 years, the so-called Big Three have bought out virtually every competitor of any significance. They have also set their sights on emerging markets in the developing world. The Kraft purchase of Cadbury makes it, in essence, a Big Fourth.
(https://abluteau.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/candybars2.jpg) The consolidation has left behind some beloved confections. Consider the Caravelle, made by Peter Paul. The Caravelle was a sublime marriage of soft caramel and crisped rice, enrobed in a thick shell of milk chocolate. Imagine a 100 Grand bar—only 100 times better. Then the Caravelle disappeared. It was discontinued after Peter Paul merged with Cadbury Schweppes in 1978. A decade later, Hershey purchased Peter Paul. The only Peter Paul bars that survive today are the two most profitable, Mounds and Almond Joy. While it’s true that most regional companies have gone the way of the dinosaurs, the tradition lives on in places like Hayward, Calif. That’s where Susan Karl, president of Annabelle Candy, oversees the production of the Rocky Road, a gooey chocolate-and-marshmallow confection first made by her grandfather, Sam Altshuler, a Russian immigrant who founded the company 60 years ago. One of the nation’s oldest confectioners, the New England Confectionery Company, is still around, too. Necco is under different ownership these days, and the operation has moved to a new factory outside Boston, but it still produces its eponymous wafers, along with other beloved old brands such as Mary Janes, Clark Bars and the Sky Bar. Steve Almond is the author of “Candyfreak” and the forthcoming “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life.” __________ Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031093196328372.html (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031093196328372.html) Posted in Other JANUARY 30, 2010 BY AB
Crash Blossoms
(https://abluteau.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/crashblossoms.jpg) Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.” In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.” For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread. After I mentioned the coinage of “crash blossoms” on the linguistics blog Language Log, having been alerted to it by the veteran Baltimore Sun copy editor John E. McIntyre, new examples came flooding in. Linguists love this sort of thing, because the perils of ambiguity can reveal the limits of our ability to parse sentences correctly. Syntacticians often refer to the garden-path phenomenon, wherein a reader is led down one interpretive route before having to double back to the beginning of the sentence to get on the right track. One of my favorite crash blossoms is this gem from the Associated Press, first noted by the Yale linguistics professor Stephen R. Anderson last September: “McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers.” If you take “fries” as a verb instead of a noun, you’re left wondering why a fast-food chain is cooking up sacred vessels. Or consider this headline, spotted earlier this month by Rick Rubenstein on the Total Telecom Web site: “Google Fans Phone Expectations by Scheduling Android Event.” Here, if you read “fans” as a plural noun, then you might think “phone” is a verb, and you’ve been led down a path where Google devotees are calling in their hopes. Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact, the hallmarks of the crash blossom. Take this headline, often attributed to The Guardian: “British Left Waffles on Falklands.” In the correct reading, “left” is a noun and “waffles” is a verb, but it’s much more entertaining to reverse the two, conjuring the image of breakfast food hastily abandoned in the South Atlantic. Similarly, crossword enthusiasts laughed nervously at a May 2006 headline on AOL (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/aol/index.html?inline=nyt-org) News, “Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts.” After encountering enough crash blossoms, you start to realize that English is especially prone to such ambiguities. Since English is weakly inflected (meaning that words are seldom explicitly modified to indicate their grammatical roles), many words can easily function as either noun or verb. And it just so happens that plural nouns and third-person-singular present-tense verbs are marked with the exact same suffix, “-s.” In everyday spoken and written language, we can usually handle this sort of grammatical uncertainty because we have enough additional clues to make the right choices of interpretation. But headlines sweep away those little words — particularly articles, auxiliary verbs and forms of “to be” — robbing the reader of crucial context. If that A.P. headline had read “McDonald’s Fries Are the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers,” there would have been no crash blossom for our enjoyment. Headline writers have long been counseled to beware of ambiguity. “Ambiguous words often lead to ludicrous and puzzling headline statements,” Grant Milnor Hyde wrote in his 1915 manual, “Newspaper Editing.” “They can be avoided only by great care in the use of words with two meanings and especially words that may be used either as nouns or verbs.” More recently, in the 2003 book “Strategic Copy Editing,” the University of Oregon journalism professor John Russial offered this rule of thumb: “As the word count drops, the likelihood of ambiguity increases.” He advises copy editors to think twice about trimming the little words. The potential for unintended humor in “compressed” English isn’t restricted to headline writing; it goes back to the days of the telegraph. One clever (though possibly apocryphal) example once appeared in the pages of Time magazine: Cary Grant received a telegram from an editor inquiring, “HOW OLD CARY GRANT?” — to which he responded: “OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?” The omitted verb may have saved the sender a nickel, but the snappy comeback was worth far more. The space limitations of telegrams are echoed now in the terse messages of texting and Twitter. News headlines, however, are not so constrained these days, since many of them appear in online outlets rather than in print. (And many print headlines are supplanted online by more elastic “e-heads.”) But even when they are unfettered by narrow newspaper columns, headline writers still sweep away those little words as a matter of journalistic style. As long as there is such a thing as headlinese, we can count on crash blossoms continuing to blossom. Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of visualthesaurus.com (//visualthesaurus.com). ___________ Full article and photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html) Posted in On Language | Tagged January 31 2010 JANUARY 30, 2010 BY AB
How Exercising Keeps Your Cells Young
(https://abluteau.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/running11.jpg) Recently, scientists in Germany gathered several groups of men and women to look at their cells’ life spans. Some of them were young and sedentary, others middle-aged and sedentary. Two other groups were, to put it mildly, active. The first of these consisted of professional runners in their 20s, most of them on the national track-and-field team, training about 45 miles per week. The last were serious, middle-aged longtime runners, with an average age of 51 and a typical training regimen of 50 miles per week, putting those young 45-mile-per-week sluggards to shame. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/gretchen_reynolds/index.html) From the first, the scientists noted one aspect of their older runners. It ‘‘was striking,’’ recalls Dr. Christian Werner, an internal-medicine resident at Saarland University Clinic in Homburg, ‘‘to see in our study that many of the middle-aged athletes looked much younger than sedentary control subjects of the same age.’’ Even more striking was what was going on beneath those deceptively youthful surfaces. When the scientists examined white blood cells from each of their subjects, they found that the cells in both the active and slothful young adults had similar-size telomeres. Telomeres are tiny caps on the end of DNA strands — the discovery of their function won several scientists the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine. When cells divide and replicate these long strands of DNA, the telomere cap is snipped, a process that is believed to protect the rest of the DNA but leaves an increasingly abbreviated telomere. Eventually, if a cell’s telomeres become too short, the cell ‘‘either dies or enters a kind of suspended state,’’ says Stephen Roth, an associate professor of kinesiology at the University of Maryland who is studying exercise and telomeres. Most researchers now accept telomere length as a reliable marker of cell age. In general, the shorter the telomere, the functionally older and more tired the cell. It’s not surprising, then, that the young subjects’ telomeres were about the same length, whether they ran exhaustively or sat around all day. None of them had been on earth long enough for multiple cell divisions to have snipped away at their telomeres. The young never appreciate robust telomere length until they’ve lost it. When the researchers measured telomeres in the middle-aged subjects, however, the situation was quite different. The sedentary older subjects had telomeres that were on average 40 percent shorter than in the sedentary young subjects, suggesting that the older subjects’ cells were, like them, aging. The runners, on the other hand, had remarkably youthful telomeres, a bit shorter than those in the young runners, but only by about 10 percent. In general, telomere loss was reduced by approximately 75 percent in the aging runners. Or, to put it more succinctly, exercise, Dr. Werner says, ‘‘at the molecular level has an anti-aging effect.’’
There are plenty of reasons to exercise — in this column, I’ve pointed out more than a few — but the effect that regular activity may have on cellular aging could turn out to be the most profound. ‘‘It’s pretty exciting stuff,’’ says Thomas LaRocca, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who has just completed a new study echoing Werner’s findings. In Mr. LaRocca’s work, people were tested both for their V02max — or maximum aerobic capacity, a widely accepted measure of physical fitness — and their white blood cells’ telomere length. In subjects 55 to 72, a higher V02max correlated closely with longer telomeres. The fitter a person was in middle age or onward, the younger their cells. There are countless unanswered questions about how and why activity affects the DNA. For instance, Dr. Werner found that his older runners had more activity in their telomerase, a cellular enzyme thought to aid in lengthening and protecting telomeres. Exercise may be affecting telomerase activity and not telomeres directly. In addition, Stephen Roth has been measuring telomeres and telomerase activity in a wide variety of tissues in mice and has found, he says, the protective effects from exercise only in some tissues. Another question is whether we must run 50 miles a week to benefit. The answer ‘‘can only be speculative at the moment,’’ Dr. Werner says, although since he jogs much less than that, he probably joins the rest of us in hoping not. Given his and his colleagues’ data, ‘‘one could speculate,’’ he concludes, ‘‘that any form of intense exercise that is regularly performed over a long period of time’’ will improve ‘‘telomere biology,’’ meaning that with enough activity, each of us could outpace the passing years. Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times ___________ Full article and photo: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/phys-ed-how-exercising-keeps-your-cells-young/ (http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/phys-ed-how-exercising-keepsyour-cells-young/) Posted in Health JANUARY 30, 2010 BY AB
Another Inconvenient Truth Back last November. … Wow, that seems like a long time ago. Health care was passing. Jay Leno was popular. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. As I was saying, last November, the Justice Department announced that the terror trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would be held in Manhattan. Almost everyone in New York rallied around. This was seen as standing up to terrorism. “It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center, where so many New Yorkers were murdered,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Now everything’s flipped. The politicians are running for the hills, and the issue has been repackaged as standing up to traffic jams. “There are places that would be less expensive for the taxpayers and less disruptive,” said Bloomberg. And the Justice Department is backing down. The trial will happen somewhere else. People in Lower Manhattan will breathe a sigh of relief. But this feels very wrong. The Bloomberg rebellion fits right into the sour, us-first mood that’s settled over the country. It’s part of the same impulse that caused Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska to decree that a historic overhaul of the country’s messed-up health care system was not going to happen unless his home state got a special exemption from sharing the costs. Or the Not-in-My-Backyard uprising that followed President Obama’s attempt to move the Guantánamo prisoners into American maximum-security lockups. No matter how remote the prison, local politicians said that the danger was too great to bear. Both of Montana’s Democratic senators immediately decreed that their entire state was a no-go zone. Or the Republican race to the other side of the room any time the Obama administration proposes anything. Rudy Giuliani, who watched “in awe of our system” when terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui was convicted in a civilian court in Virginia, instantly attacked the plans for the Manhattan trial. Giuliani kept finding everything Obama did worse and worse until he finally flipped completely over the edge and claimed that there had been no terrorist attacks in the United States during the Bush administration. It’s all part of a cult of selfishness that decrees it’s fine to throw your body in front of any initiative, no matter how important, if resistance looks more profitable. The economy has a lot to do with this. So does Washington’s increasing confidence that Barack Obama can be rolled. We’re currently stuck in a place where people no longer feel as though they need to be part of the solution. Democrats are starting to join the Republicans’ call to toss out the Constitution and try suspected terrorists in military courts. Some of the same senators who gave you the endless health care bill obstructions have already signed on, saying federal trials are too expensive and too dangerous. Safety is always a concern, but Al Qaeda doesn’t operate like a season of “24.” Terrorists don’t generally strike when it’s most symbolic or best serves a story line. They do the things that happen to work out. So Barack Obama is inaugurated and the 9/11 anniversary passes in peace and quiet. Then a guy tries to explode his underwear while heading for the Detroit airport. New York’s sudden resistance certainly wasn’t about safety, even though Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent a whiny letter to the White House saying a trial in Manhattan could “add to the threat.” The problem was inconvenience. People were fine with having the trial here until the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, started describing his plans for permanently cordoning off a goodly chunk of Lower Manhattan. Businesses and residents hadn’t appreciated what a huge, life-disrupting inconvenience standing up to terror could be. And no one was applauding them for their potential sacrifice. If anything, they were regarded as saps for agreeing to go along with something that Montana found to be unacceptable risk. This is a change. The city experienced the worst of terrorism on 9/11, but we also saw the best of the country in the weeks that followed. People rushed in from everywhere — often at great inconvenience — to help. And for months afterward, you could not travel anywhere outside the state without having other Americans come up to you and ask if there was anything they could do. They wanted a task. A whole nation was hungering to be inconvenienced for the common good. And President Bush’s response was to give them a tax cut. Whatever muscles we used in cooperating have atrophied. Barack Obama ran for president promising to change that, and he hasn’t. Part of the fault is his. Sometimes at crucial moments, there seems to be no hands on the tiller. The Republicans are impossible. Many Democrats are both frightened and greedy. But figuring out how we got here is irrelevant. We need to get out. Gail Collins, New York Times __________ Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opinion/30collins.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opinion/30collins.html) Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion, Law JANUARY 30, 2010 BY AB
Lost in Translation President Obama’s State of the Union address soared — right over a familiar cliff. The president simply couldn’t seem to escape his professorial past, to convey his passion and convictions in the plain words of plain folks, and to breach the chasm between the People’s House and people’s houses. He’s still stuck on studious. He seems to believe that if he does a better job of explaining his aggressive agenda, then he’ll win hearts and minds. It’s an honorable ambition, but it’s foolhardy. People want clear goals, clearly defined and clearly (and concisely) conveyed. They’re suspicious of complexity. H.L. Mencken once famously opined, “No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” I take exception to that. But if you change “intelligence” to “attention span,” I agree wholeheartedly. Republicans know this well. Obama knows it not. Take the enormous health care bill for instance. The president overreached, pushing a convoluted bill with a convoluted message. The Republican response: “Just say no.” They countered with a series of crisp attacks that shrouded the bill in a fog of confusion. Now it’s in danger, and the public may well blame the Democrats. People don’t care as much about process as they do about results. According to a survey released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, only 1 person in 4 knew that 60 votes are needed in the Senate to break a filibuster and only 1 in 3 knew that no Senate Republicans voted for the health care bill. And, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey released this week, while slightly more Americans blamed Republicans than Democrats for the political impasse in Washington, the percentage of people with negative feelings about the Republicans was the same as it was for the Democrats. The message that voters take away is not nuanced: Democrats in control. Bill complicated. Republicans oppose. Politicians bicker. Progress stalls. Democrats failing. Obama has to accept that today’s information environment is broad and shallow, and we now communicate in headline phrases, acerbic humor and ad hominem attacks. Sad but true. We subsist on Twitter twaddle — a never-ending stream of ideas and idiocy, where emotions are rendered in anagrams and thoughts are amputated at 140 characters. The most trusted “newsman” may well be a comedian (Jon Stewart), and stars of the “most trusted news network” (Fox) may well be a comedian’s dream. The president must communicate within the environment he inhabits, not the one he envisions. The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, “Mr. President, we’re down here.” Charles M. Blow, New York Times __________ Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opinion/30blow.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opinion/30blow.html) Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics JANUARY 30, 2010 BY AB
The Pre-Postmodernist THE life of J. D. Salinger, which has just ended, is one of the strangest and saddest stories in recent literary history. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to let the disappointment of the second half of Mr. Salinger’s career — consisting of a long short story called “Hapworth 16, 1924” that reads as though he allowed the pain of hostile criticism to blunt the edge of self-criticism that every good writer must possess, followed by 45 years of living like a hermit in the New Hampshire woods — to overshadow the achievements of the first half. The corpus of his good work is very small, but it is classic. His was arguably the first truly original voice in American prose fiction after the generation of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Of course nothing is absolutely original in literature, and Mr. Salinger had his precursors, of whom Hemingway was one, and Mark Twain — from whose Huck Finn Hemingway said that all modern American literature came — another. From them he learned what you could do with simple, colloquial language and a naïve youthful narrator. But in “The Catcher in the Rye” Mr. Salinger applied their lessons in a new way to create a new kind of hero, Holden Caulfield, whose narrative voice struck a chord with millions of readers. The narrative is in a style the Russians call skaz, a nice word with echoes of jazz and scat in it, which uses the repetitions and redundancies of ordinary speech to produce an effect of sincerity and authenticity — and humor: “The thing is, most of the time when you’re coming pretty close to doing it with a girl … she keeps telling you to stop. The trouble with me is, I stop. Most guys don’t. I can’t help it. You never know whether they really want you to stop, or whether they’re just scared as hell, or whether they’re just telling you to stop so that if you do go through with it, the blame’ll be on you, not them. Anyway, I keep stopping. The trouble is, I get to feeling sorry for them. I mean most girls are so dumb and all. After you neck them for a while you can really watch them losing their brains. You take a girl when she really gets passionate, she just hasn’t any brains. I don’t know. They tell me to stop, so I stop.” It looks easy, but it isn’t. Nearly everybody loves “The Catcher in the Rye,” and most readers enjoy Mr. Salinger’s first collection of short stories, “Nine Stories.” But the work that followed, the four long short stories paired together in two successive books as “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” were less reader-friendly and provoked more critical comment, leading eventually to the retreat of the wounded author into solitude. This was as much the consequence of critical failure as of authorial arrogance. These books challenged conventional notions of fiction and conventional ways of reading as radically as the kind of novels that would later be called post-modernist, and a lot of critics didn’t “get it.” The saga of the Glass family is stylistically the antithesis of “Catcher” — highly literary, full of rhetorical tropes, narrative devices and asides to the reader — but there is also continuity between them. The literariness of the Glass stories is always domesticated by a colloquial informality. Most are narrated by Buddy, the writer in the family, who says at the outset of “Zooey” that “what I’m about to offer isn’t really a short story at all but a sort of prose home movie.” The nearest equivalent to this saga in earlier literature is perhaps the 18th-century antinovel “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,” by Laurence Sterne. There is the same minutely close observation of the social dynamics of family life, the same apparent disregard for conventional narrative structure, the same teasing hints that the fictional narrator is a persona for the real author, the same delicate balance of sentiment and irony, and the same humorous running commentary on the activities of writing and reading. How Shandean, for instance, is Buddy’s presentation to the reader in “Seymour” of “this unpretentious bouquet of very early-blooming parentheses: (((( )))). I suppose, most unflorally, I truly mean them to be taken, first off, as bow-legged — buckle-legged — omens of my state of mind and body at this writing.” Seymour Glass first appeared in one of the “Nine Stories,” “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” as a disturbed veteran of World War II (as Mr. Salinger himself was), who on vacation with his rather shallow wife, after a charmingly droll conversation with a little girl on the beach, shockingly shoots himself in the last paragraph. The late stories are all in some way about the attempts of Seymour’s surviving siblings to come to terms with this action. This often takes a religious direction, and presents the Glass family as a kind of spiritual elite, struggling against a tide of materialism and philistinism with the aid of Christian existentialism, Eastern mysticism and a select pantheon of great writers. This cultural and spiritual elitism got up the noses of many critics, but I think they overlooked the fact that Mr. Salinger was playing a kind of Shandean game with his readers. The more truth-telling and pseudo-historical the stories became in form (tending toward an apparently random, anecdotal structure, making elaborate play with letters and other documents as “evidence”), the less credible became the content (miraculous feats of learning, stigmata, prophetic glimpses, memories of previous incarnations, and so forth). But what were we asked to believe in: the reality of these things, or the possibility of them? Since it is fiction, surely the latter; to suppose it is the former is to lose half the pleasure of reading the books. David Lodge is the author, most recently, of the novel “Deaf Sentence.” __________ Full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opinion/30lodge.html (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/opinion/30lodge.html) Posted in Editorials and opinion, Literature | Tagged Salinger JANUARY 29, 2010 BY AB
Battling the Information Barbarians China often views the ideas of foreigners, from missionaries in the 17th century to 21st-century Internet entrepreneurs, as subversive imports. The tumultuous history behind the clash with Google.
A message of support for Google left outside the company’s Beijing office on Jan. 14. In 1661, Adam Schall, a Jesuit missionary from Germany and astronomer at the Chinese imperial court, fell victim to jealous mandarins, and was sentenced to death for teaching false astronomy and a superstitious faith. He was only just saved from being strangled, when a sudden thunderstorm convinced his judges that nature had spoken against their verdict. Father Schall died soon after. But the defensiveness of the mandarins, who saw his foreign ideas as a threat to their status, would be a recurring theme in Chinese relations with the outside world. So, is it true after all, what they say about clashing civilizations? It is tempting to see the official Chinese response to Hillary Clinton’s speech on Internet freedom in that light. Spurred by Google’s announcement that it might pull out of the Chinese market in protest over censorship, Mrs. Clinton talked about Internet freedom in terms of universal human rights. Her speech was promptly denounced in a Communist Party newspaper as “information imperialism.” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu claimed that China’s regulation of the Internet (banning references to Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwanese independence and so on) was in keeping with “national conditions and cultural traditions.” The claim of universality is indeed an important facet of American culture, rooted in the American Revolution and Protestant ethics. It is considered proper for a U.S. secretary of state to give voice to the ideal of universal human rights. Just so, a Chinese official sees it as his duty to assert the uniqueness, or even superiority, of Chinese culture. This was true of Confucian scholarofficials in the imperial past. It is still true today.
(https://abluteau.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/ink2.jpg) A thriving Internet cafe in China’s Anhui Province on Jan. 15. Thought control, in terms of imposing an official orthodoxy, is a very old tradition. The official glue that has long been applied to hold Chinese society together is a kind of state dogma, loosely known as Confucianism, which is moral as well as political, stressing obedience to authority. This is what officials like to call Chinese culture.
One can take a more cynical view, of course, and see culture as a mere fig leaf meant to hide the machinations of political power. The latest Chinese salvo against the U.S., blaming the Americans for instigating rebellion in Iran through the Internet, reveals that the current spat has a hard (and opportunistic) political core. And the assumption that Google, as a Chinese editorial put it, is a “political pawn” of the U.S. government, is a clear case of projection. In any case, instilling the belief that obedience to authority is not just a way to keep order, but an essential part of being Chinese, is highly convenient for those who wield authority, whether they be fathers of a family or rulers of the state. That is why in their efforts to promote democracy after World War I, Chinese intellectuals denounced Confucianism, with its rigid social hierarchy, as an outmoded orthodoxy which had to be eradicated. It was, as we know, not so much eradicated as replaced by a Communist orthodoxy after 1949. And when this orthodoxy began to lose its grip on the Chinese public after the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, Chinese officials struggled to find a new set of beliefs to justify their monopoly on power. The ideological hybrid that followed Maoism was “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,” a mixture of state capitalism with political authoritarianism. Later, Confucianism actually made a comeback of sorts. But the most common ideology since the early 1990s is a defensive nationalism, disseminated through museums, entertainment and school textbooks. All Chinese schoolchildren are indoctrinated with the idea that China was humiliated for centuries by foreign powers, and that support of the Communist state is the only way for China to regain its greatness and never be humiliated again. This is why foreign criticism of Chinese politics, or Chinese infringements of human rights, is denounced by government officials as an attack on Chinese culture, as an attempt to “denigrate China.” And Chinese who agree with these foreign criticisms are treated not just as dissidents but as traitors. The term “information imperialism” is clearly designed to evoke memories of the Opium Wars and other historical humiliations. Chinese are meant to feel that foreigners who talk about human rights are doing so only to bash China. This is not always entirely irrational. If Chinese chauvinism is defensive, American chauvinism can be offensive. The notion that the U.S. has the God-given right to impose its views about liberty and rights on other countries, sometimes backed by armed force, has provoked precisely the same reaction in many places as Napoleon’s wars for Liberty, Fraternity and Equality once did. No matter how fine the ideals, people resent it when they are pushed down their throats. Besides, the Chinese are not alone in mixing politics with morality. The history of Christian missions in Asia, or indeed Africa, cannot be neatly separated from imperialism; they were indeed often part of the same enterprise. Even scientific ideas, such as astronomy or medicine, which might be considered to be neutral, came with values that were anything but. The earliest missionaries in China, such as the great Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), introduced science as part of their aim to spread the Christian faith. In fact, there is an interesting parallel between those early Christian missions and our contemporary efforts to spread universal human rights, especially in regard to China. Ricci and his colleagues, as Jesuits, believed that the best way to influence the Chinese elite was to adapt to Chinese culture, to wear Chinese clothes, to speak in Confucian terminology, to “go native,” as it were. They were criticized by other Catholic orders, who saw this as a shameless betrayal of Christian principles. Only the true faith should be preached, with no compromises to heathen views. A very similar debate is going on today between those who believe that applying Western notions of human rights and democracy to China is counterproductive. Many a politician, businessman or media tycoon has argued that adapting to special Chinese conditions is surely more effective if one wishes to have any influence in China. The fact that this argument is usually self-serving does not make it necessarily wrong, but so far it has certainly not been proven right. Chinese human rights have not been noticeably advanced because of foreign compromises with Chinese illiberalism. The dilemma for the Chinese elites, ever since the early Christian missions, is the question of how to adopt useful Western ideas while keeping out the subversive ones. Intelligent Chinese knew perfectly well that much of Western knowledge (how to construct effective guns, say) was not only useful but essential as a way to make China strong enough to resist foreign aggression. But the tricky part for scholar-officials was how to use that knowledge without weakening their own position as guardians of Chinese culture. To mention just one example, greater knowledge of geography and other civilizations made it harder to maintain that China was the center of the world which should naturally be paid tribute to by barbarian states. In ancient times, foreign barbarians were ranked with the beasts. By the time Matteo Ricci, in 1602, showed the Chinese a world map (now on view at the Library of Congress), some foreigners were treated with more respect, but the old Sino-centric defensiveness had far from vanished. If the Middle Kingdom was no longer the perfect model of civilization, its traditional political arrangements became vulnerable to domestic challenge. One way of dealing with this problem was to separate “practical knowledge” from “essential” culture, or ti-yong in Chinese. Western technology was fine, as long as it didn’t interfere with Chinese morals and politics. In practice, however, this was not feasible. Political ideas came to China, along with science, economics, and Western religion. And they did help to undermine the old established order. One of these ideas was Marxism, but once Mao had unified China under his totalitarian regime, he managed for several decades to insulate the Chinese from notions that might undermine his power.
Once China opened up to the world for business again in the late 1970s, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the old problem of information control emerged once again. Deng and his technocrats wanted to have the benefit of modern economic and technological ideas, but, like the 19th century mandarins, they wished to ban thoughts which Deng called “spiritual pollution.” The kind of pollution he had in mind was partly cultural (sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll), but mainly political (human rights and democracy). Deng’s attempt, which was only partly successful, was made far more difficult by the invention of the Internet, the problems and possibilities of which were left for his successors to deal with. The Internet, which has boomed over the last few years, cannot be totally policed; there are simply too many ways to dodge the censors. But China, with its army of cyberspace policemen, has been remarkably effective at Internet control, by mixing intimidation with propaganda. The intimidation encourages self-censorship, and nationalist propaganda creates suspicion of foreign criticism. It is not hard to find well-educated Chinese who buy the line about “information imperialism.”
(https://abluteau.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/ink3.jpg) Google’s China headquarters. On the other hand, there are also plenty of Chinese who have applauded Google’s defiance of the authorities. When hackers, operating from China, targeted the Gmail addresses of Chinese human rights activists, Google decided that it would no longer help to police online information. As the Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it this week at Davos, where he repeated his criticism of Chinese censorship of the Internet: “We hope that will change and we can apply some pressure to make things better for the Chinese people.” Even as government spokesmen criticized the US for interfering in Chinese affairs, hundreds of Chinese Internet users laid flowers at Google offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. This is why it is too simplistic, and even noxious, to see the conflict over Internet freedom simply as a cultural clash. Those who would like to enjoy the same freedoms that people in democracies take for granted are Chinese too. The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom. Google has made its choice. It strikes me as the right choice, for not only will it encourage a healthy debate on freedom of information inside China, but it could serve as a model of behavior for companies operating in authoritarian countries. Even for enterprises aimed at maximizing profits, it might sometimes pay to burnish their image by being on the side of the angels. Ian Buruma is the Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His latest book, ‘The Taming the Gods,” will be published in March. __________ Full article and photos: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031263063242900.html (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031263063242900.html) Posted in History, Other, Politics Cervantes