The moral imagination

Jonathan Derbyshire interviews David Bromwich for Prospect. It is a very good interview in its own right, but I also like reading these pieces that haven't been media-ified - this is the texture of actual conversation with a complex and interesting mind, not just the cleaned-up pull-quote version!

Rival schools of empire

At the Nation, Sam Moyn on David Bromwich's Burkeanism.

Sedimentalism

At the LRB, Ferdinand Mount on David Bromwich's Edmund Burke (subscription only):

If politics is a science, then it is a kind of geology. As J.W. Burrow puts it, ‘the common law is not a creation of heroic judges but the slow, anonymous sedimentation of immemorial custom; the constitution is no gift but the continuous self-defining public activity of the nation.’ Burke is a sedimentalist, just as he is, in a non-pejorative sense, a sentimentalist. The sentiments of the people, himself included, are political facts accreted over time, which cannot be ignored or easily overridden in the interests of abstract principles, however desirable. The thought experiment so beloved of philosophers from Hobbes and Locke to John Rawls, of men in the state of nature coming together to conclude a social contract, would have seemed to Burke a sophistical fantasy. Burke foreshadows the 19th century in seeing everything – law, morality, solidarity – as historically evolved, the outcome of experience rather than design.

Deuces wild

Phillip Dyess-Nugent on Django Unchained and David Bromwich on Spielberg's Lincoln.

Closing tabs (strangulation edition)

I have always had a preference for writing in coffee-shops as opposed to libraries; I like the buzz of background noise, I find it soothing and mildly stimulating and it makes it much easier for me to concentrate than when I'm in an environment that's totally silent. The same thing goes for city living: New York makes me feel comfortable and able to concentrate because there's this constant mid-level surrounding buzz, whereas Cayman presents difficulties for me due to smotherationally high levels of quiet.

Alas, I have spent the whole week on the verge of total meltdown, or really at times in actual meltdown mode (thus relative broadcast silence, as I prefer not to blog when I am mildly hysterical!), but will take advantage of a moment of relative inner calm to close a few tabs and report on some minor light reading.

(Ottawa worries continue to be overwhelming, and I regretfully observe that really I think I will need to go back there again in August to help with various bits and pieces of next-stage planning: I had hoped to have a spell of weeks in one place with no travel, but on the other hand the "no-travel" preference is at odds with the "urban environment" one, so perhaps there is a silver lining....)

(Note to future self: don't sublet New York apartment in future for more than a month, unless absolutely locked in on irresistible year-long out-of-town sabbatical opportunity i.e. residential fellowship! Over the summer, and especially when I'm going to be away quite a bit anyway, the dollars are the great temptation; it is my best way of getting my finances annually back into whack, as my NYC rent is a bit more than half my monthly take-home salary and I can't really afford it. However, two months is clearly too long to be without access to city life!)

Fascinating piece about an exhibit on Wittgenstein and photography that explores the relationship between photographic composites and the philosopher's idea of a 'family resemblance'. (Via Marjorie Perloff.)

Evan Goldstein profiles Wayne Koestenbaum for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the occasion of the publication of Wayne's new book Humiliation (hmmm, very copious and weird collection of Amazon reviews for a book that has not yet been published!). I am much looking forward to this book, I am a huge fan of Wayne's (really he is one of my couple most important literary and intellectual role models!). (Link courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull.)

(Side note: I had dinner earlier this spring, after Stefan Collini's talk at the humanities center, with sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, whose late husband Robert K. Merton was the person who actually coined the term role model!)

At the NYRB, David Bromwich on Obama's distaste for politics. (DB is of course another one of my role models, in this case perhaps a more impossibly aspirational one!)

Sophia Hollander profiles academic and bestselling novelist Mary Bly for the Wall Street Journal. (Via Bookforum.)

Two good links via Marginal Revolution this morning: How much would it cost to attend Hogwarts?; parrots have individual 'names' in the wild.

Sasscer Hill's Full Mortality does indeed call to mind Dick Francis in its rich and full bringing-to-life of appealing racing settings, but the voice isn't as compelling to me, and it is no discredit to Hill's writing abilities (it speaks more to my own state of mind, and to recent excesses in the way of light reading!) that this was the book, last weekend, that induced a fit of absolute self-disgust at the lack of any nutritional value in much recent literary fare, and a resolve to seek more things out to read that do not simply bathe my brain in cheap serotonin.

That did not stop me from then reading one of the worst novels I've read in a long time (a bargain purchase at Chapters in Ottawa). Then I was truly self-disgusted!

I have read two other books (both nonfiction) that deserve posts of their own, about which more anon. But the hours loom long, and light reading remains necessary; I thoroughly enjoyed Karen Marie Moning's Darkfever, which has some of the appurtenances of trashiness and is not perhaps up to the standard of Seanan McGuire's Toby Daye books but is really very good with regard to any reasonable set of expectations (I have downloaded the next one, and I would evaluate the series as being enjoyable and smart on a level with Charlaine Harris's books, which I also like quite a bit).

Somehow I had never read Connie Willis's Lincoln's Dreams, though I think I've read almost all of her other novels, so that was an excellent way of whiling away an hour or two, and we are also watching an episode or two most nights of the extremely appealing Fringe, often with a chaser of Black Books.

BOMH proceeds in fits and starts; I had a very good work day on Wednesday, yesterday not so much, but this morning I got a decent hour and a half in early and will hope to have another session on it this afternoon.

Finally, I am completely mesmerized by Gillian Welch's latest album The Harrow and the Harvest. There are two songs on it that I like as much (by which I mean to say am absolutely fixated on and can't stop listening to) as any songs I have ever heard in my entire life: "The Way That It Goes" and "Tennessee". Buy the album!

Bicycle sweets

Wayne Koestenbaum on shame and humiliation. (Courtesy of Dave Lull!)

David Bromwich on Obama's mental bookkeeping.

Dinner last night was infinitely better than the play! I was curious to see this production of Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning; I read it (I think from the Friends Free Library) as a teenager, as part of a general interest in the Eliot-Auden-London-in-the-1940s sort of nexus of stuff, but had not really thought of it as viable for contemporary staging. And it is not! The actors were doing a stalwart job, and the theater at 46 Walker Street is a lovely little place, but the play is pretty dreadful: pastichey, longwinded, clever locally in ways that do not at all contribute to one's enjoyment of the THREE-HOUR whole!

So we weren't out of there till 11pm, and had to stop in at a bunch of places before we could find a restaurant whose kitchen was still open - we were very happy to find Cercle Rouge very much still open. It is an attractive and welcoming space, with very pleasant staff, but I also note that the food is much better than it needs to be. They had a lot of off-menu specials: I had the fluke ceviche to start (interestingly quite different from Aureole's last week - that was an obvious crowd-pleaser, definitely delicious and with avocado and citrus, but this one was much more unusual and striking, and the fish was lovely: in long thin slices, with thinly sliced radish layered between them and red peppercorns and an unusual light vinaigrette), G. had a rabbit-and-pork pate that looked very good too (the sort that is baked in a crust), and then we both had the Dover sole, which was (as the waiter had promised) exquisite. Two special desserts were on offer as well as the regular menu, and I simply had to order the bicycle-themed Paris-Brest, described by the waiter as the performance-enhancing drug of the early stage cyclists!

The great game

It is far from the usual Light Reading fare, but I cannot resist the opportunity to link to two major pieces published this week by my dissertation advisor David Bromwich. In general, I have been extraordinarily lucky in my teachers; but perhaps I learned more from David Bromwich than from almost anybody else, not just in terms of an abiding obsession with the writings of Edmund Burke but by virtue of a language for talking about the connections between thought and intellectual temperament and character that I rely upon very heavily in daily life.

The first is at the LRB, on Obama's delusion ("His way of thinking is close to the spirit of that Enlightenment reasonableness which supposes a right course of action can never be described so as to be understood and not assented to"). The second is this NYRB review of Taylor Branch's Clinton book:

Maybe Clinton in his final year in office spoke more easily; in any case, the narrative has a sharper focus now, and the anecdotes fall into a characteristic rhythm:

The president was eating a bowl of bran in January. He said Bob Squier, the campaign consultant, never had a colonoscopy in his life. They diagnosed him six months ago, and he died today at sixty-five. The end comes on quickly if you don't catch it early. "I always eat bran when a friend dies of colon cancer," Clinton said.

Inquisitions

At the NYRB, David Bromwich has a wonderfully Burkean piece about Dick Cheney (note, especially, his use of the units of the sentence and paragraph, as well as the style of thought):

Never before, in the history of the United States, has there been an ideological camp so fully formed and equipped to extend itself as neoconservatism in the year 1999. It was, and remains, a sect that has some of the properties of a party. There are mentors now in the generation of the fathers as well as the grandfathers, summer internships for young enthusiasts, semiofficial platforms of programmed reactions to breaking news. But to grasp their collective character, one must think of a party that does not run for office at election time. They can therefore evade responsibility for botched policies and the leaders who promote those policies. Donald Rumsfeld had his first and warmest partisans among the neoconservatives, but they were also the first, with the solitary apparent exception of Cheney, to identify him as a scapegoat for the Iraq war and to call for his firing when the insurgency tore the country apart in 2006.

With the peculiar tightness of its loyalties and the convenience of its immunities, neoconservatism in the United States now has something of the consistency of an alternative culture. Its success in penetrating the mainstream culture is evident in the pundit shows on most of the networks and cable TV, and in the columns of The Washington Post and The New York Times. In the years between 1983 and 1986, and again, more potently, in 2001–2006, the neoconservatives went far to dislocate the boundaries of respectable opinion in America. The idea that wars are to be avoided except in cases of self-defense suffered an eclipse from which it has not yet returned, largely owing to the persistence of respected opinion makers in urging the spread of freedom and markets by force of arms. More particularly, and to confine ourselves to recent events, the nomination of Samuel Alito and the drafting and legitimation of the "surge" strategy by Retired General Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan of the AEI could not have succeeded as they did without the early and organized advocacy of the neoconservative camp.

How did they get so close to Dick Cheney? The answer lies in the fact that Cheney has an inquisitive mind, but from the accidents of his career and placement, he was for a long time a thinker deprived of intellectual society. Neoconservatism, as it developed in the 1980s, came to have its own heroes (Robert Bork), its canon of revered texts (Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind), and a set of prejudices delivered in a reasonable tone: hostile to individual liberty, appreciative of modern technology, friendly to religion as a guide to morals and an engine of state power. It was, to repeat, a substitute culture of satisfying density. The AEI along with journals like Commentary and, more recently, The Weekly Standard offer, for those who take the full course, a total environment, an idiom of managerial-intellectual judgment that blends the rapidity of journalism with the weightier pretensions of an academy.

I take this opportunity to note that David (who was one of my dissertation advisors, and a huge & ongoing influence in my intellectual life) is giving the Irving Howe Memorial Lecture this Tuesday at 6:30pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; his subject is "What Shakespeare's Heroes Learn."