Aliens come to Earth. They refuse to communicate with humans, arguing that the most advanced life form on the planet is the multinational corporation (corporation = bodies, etc.), since it effectively operates at an inhuman scale and has humans serving it (and does not, as the humans imagine, serve them--this another sign to the aliens that the humans don't get it). The aliens, who have the capacity to destroy the Earth, therefore force the Earth into a new governmental system and self-awareness in which multinationals "become" the evolutionary successor to the human species.

This post is about what’s made this post so hard to write – not in an emotionally wrenching sense, but a practical one.

One of the implications of living in an increasingly connected world – the commonplace experience, for instance, of reading not just your local paper in the morning, but a collection of news from sources around the world – is that being out of touch makes more of a difference than ever.

Spending a week or so without reliable access to the internet, television or even radio news (the local NPR station goes in more for music than talk) has indeed been an experience of disconnection. It’s been a busy time under any circumstances, but even so there is a way in which the dimensions of daily life seem to have pulled in a little bit by virtue of being so out of touch.

It seems like an overly simple, mechanistic way to think about it, but it’s as if there’s just less in my brain than there usually is. The approaching football season, something I would usually follow with an unnecessary degree of care, is a vague and distant thing. As I ponder a replacement for my apparently deceased wireless router, I’m horrified to realize that I’ve not read a computer hardware review or looked at an online sale circular for longer than I can remember.

Most pressingly, today, however, preparing to write a printculure post there was no week’s worth of news to mentally sift through. I realize that I have no idea what’s happening, or how it’s being covered. This part of disconnection has reminded me of a student’s query in a class some years ago. I was encouraging them to take more interest in the current events of the world after class discussion revealed that no one in class was aware of some event of importance. As I was winding up my pontification a student raised his hand and asked why it really mattered if they knew anything about what was going on. His position was something along the lines of: “OK, so you know about all this stuff but you can’t change anything, so it doesn’t matter.”

Surely a testament to my commanding presence in the classroom, this challenge has stuck with me and, as I noted above, returned with some urgency in the last week. The very practical aggravation of disconnection urges me to wait until I’m blissfully reconnected next week to answer the question of why knowing what’s happening matters.

(Sneak preview: part of the answer occurred to me when I heard this happen on the radio in the car.)

If you read this entry last week, you’ve (possibly) been looking forward to printculture’s take on Canada, our dear neighbor to the north. This entry will likely disappoint. We spent less than 24 hours there and most of that in the car. We had such a narrow window of time before we had to meet up with the movers and all of our stuff, that my mental and physical energies were directed entirely toward getting in and out of Canada with maximum efficiency. Not, as I’d hoped before the benefit of hindsight, on assessing some important cultural differences and dutifully reporting them.

Here, then, are some scattered impressions.

Our trip led us east from Milwaukee, more or less along the 42nd parallel. At the Canadian border the officer asked only whether we were bringing any firearms along. Casting a weary eye at the dog in the back seat (and deciding not to wade into that sea of paperwork), he waved us through.

Over the border, Canada immediately and graciously met our expectations. Somewhere just beyond Port Huron we saw some kids load hockey sticks into a mini-van and one of the Canadians we spoke to actually finished her sentences with “eh,” though she might have been putting on a show for the tourists. Niagara Falls retained enough of its 1950’s glamour to fit my mental picture – formed as that was by hazy memory and a kitschy souvenir serving tray minted sometime mid-century. Even more impressive, the city managed to do so in spite of the Disneyesque movie-tie-in thrill rides and the Wolfgang Puck chain restaurant.

On re-entry to the U.S. we somehow selected the slowest lane and the most thorough border guard. As cars in neighboring lanes sped through, ours idled. Normally this wouldn’t have presented anything more than boredom, but this time we were smuggling a much-admired house plant for which no “live plant import certificate” had been secured, and we were starting to get nervous. I imagined the questioning going badly, separate cells, a lone rosemary waiting on the tarmac, the bomb squad moving in, and...

But the American border guard – maybe sensing our tension and guilt – questioned us only, though at length, about … our relationship. Yes, our relationship. The discomfort this line of questioning prompts when family asks when we’ll get married, or why we’re not married, is nothing compared to that initiated by an officer of the U.S. government, at the U.S. border, an officer with the power to deny re-entry. “Seven years and you still haven’t married? What’s wrong with her?”

So maybe that’s it: the important cultural difference between us and the Canadians. They’re afraid of Americans bringing guns into Canada, Americans are afraid of unwed couples, and no one is concerned about the very real threat of international culinary herb smuggling.

I’m about 100 pages from the end of De Kooning: An American Master, the biography I’ve been reading for the past few weeks. It’s still a gripping read, even though there’s inevitably some repetition of themes and the writing occasionally gets carried away by its own dramatic flourishes, especially when the authors pause to describe de Kooning’s paintings in detail. Instead of trying to do a grand summation of the book, I want to relate two memorable anecdotes from the book’s second half that evoke, for me, the pathos of de Kooning’s long and conflicted career that I expect will linger long after I return the book to the public library (a day or so late). After the modest success of his big black and white abstractions in the late 1940s and the praise garnered by his major abstract work, Excavation in 1950 (you can see the copyrighted image here), de Kooning turned back to the figure, much to the chagrin of the formidable art critic Clement Greenberg, who believed the future of great modern art lay in pure abstraction. It was a risky and unexpected move on the painter’s part—people expected him to build on his recent success and continue in the mode of Excavation. But, as the authors tell it, de Kooning was never one to bow to external pressures, to take the expected route. What’s interesting is that this contrarian streak wasn’t enough to carry him through and allow him to boldly articulate his own vision. He began work on what would become his series of Woman paintings, “reopen[ing] his attack on half-buried problems, both formal and emotional.” But he had great difficulty with his new project, working and reworking the same canvas for years, with no sign of completion. Again, de Kooning’s life seems defined not by a maverick confidence that ignores others because he’s sure of what he’s doing, but by a searching struggle and deep ambivalence. Early on in this struggle with Woman, we are told, de Kooning saw a retrospective at MoMA of the painter Chaim Soutine, who painted people, landscapes, and animal carcasses alike with a thick impasto and in lurid colors. Perhaps it is just a bit of imaginative reconstruction on the authors’ part when they suggest that de Kooning’s encounter with this little-known European artist (also poor, also an “outsider”) came at just the right time to “give de Kooning the fortitude to make art that disappointed taste and stood outside the fashion of the time.” But I liked it anyway, as a story of inspiration and influence. That is, it seemed to highlight not just the anxiety, but the necessity of influence for creativity.

The anecdote also resonated with me, because I had encountered Soutine’s work for the first time in Paris years ago, and in reading of de Kooning’s experience, I felt like I could share in his enthusiasm, and understand—even though I’m not a painter—why Soutine’s canvases might have excited him. The story said something to me about aesthetic experience, and how important it is, for artists and for the rest of us alike, that it be shared, that you’re able to say, “yes, me too!” “yes, I know!” I remember the experience of seeing Soutine very clearly because of such a sharing. We were at the l’Orangerie to see Monet’s waterlilies, but around the rotunda upstairs was a group of paintings that looked unfamiliar. My future husband and I walked around in opposite directions to take a look. When we met up again, we realized we had been similarly impressed by the distinctively visceral brushstroke, the expressive colors and contortions of form, though I think what we actually said was, “Wow.” and “Yeah, wow.” The “discovery” of Soutine was more memorable because we had separately come to the same conclusion. Back to de Kooning: Even with Soutine’s example, it would take de Kooning almost 3 years to complete his series of six Woman paintings. But when he did, he was vindicated; in 1953, “the art world thronged to the opening of the Women show at the Sidney Janis Gallery” and MoMA came knocking. The second anecdote, then, takes place in the afterglow of this success—simultaneously sudden and long overdue (de Kooning was almost 50)—when a young, admiring artist named Robert Rauschenberg paid a visit to de Kooning’s studio with a bottle of whiskey and a bold request. He had come to ask de Kooning for a drawing so that he could erase it. (Okay, here, anxiety of influence would apply!) I had learned of Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning (and his other important early work, Bed) probably in the same art history course where I’d first seen all the other de Koonings, but I never knew the circumstances of how the work had come (not) to be. It’s not simply de Kooning’s granting of this request, but the way he did it that makes the story: Stevens and Swan write: After telling Rauschenberg, “I know what you’re doing,” de Kooning proceeded to go through his portfolios of drawings slowly and methodically: If the episode marks a triumph for the younger artist—the Erased de Kooning established Rauschenberg as an important figure in the emerging Pop Art movement—it’s suffused with an ironic mournfulness for de Kooning: Yet, this moment with Rauschenberg is no less a shared aesthetic experience than de Kooning’s recognition of himself in Soutine. And maybe it’s this sense of the shared, intimate understanding that he felt Rauschenberg had betrayed, for the public wouldn’t know the extent of de Kooning’s collaboration in the erasure of his own hand. (References in cyberspace to Erased de Kooning as an example of all that’s wrong with post-modern art do get the details wrong—one believes Rauschenberg asked his “buddy” for the drawing, another thinks he bought it.) In any case, these anecdotes seem to underscore the existential conundrum (if I can use such fancy terms) of being an artist—of never being alone even when one is essentially alone in the struggle with one’s work. This may be just another way of naming the conundrum of “originality,” which Erased de Kooning most emphatically does “in the joking language of Dada.” Still, the details of the stories provide the emotional flesh and bones to abstractions. De Kooning’s canvases seem richer in the context of Soutine’s and vice versa. Erased de Kooning is now much more than an irreverent and witty gesture aimed at the art establishment. Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning in 1953, but de Kooning himself continued working for the next 30+ years, creating new work well into his 80s, even as dementia began to set in. If most things came late to him (even his alcoholism emerged only in middle age), if he was never as prolific as other artists, it turned out, nevertheless, that time was on his side.

As something of a sports fan –the secret is out—I’ve been struck over the past week by the frequency with which a number of the suicide bombers in what are now being called the 7/7 attacks in London have been referred to, with surprise, as sports-loving. One was a talented soccer player. One studied Sports Science at Leeds Metropolitan University, specializing in cricket. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour reported with a tone of astonishment that one of the suspects had been on a rafting trip in Scotland just a few weeks before (!!!). The implication of the remarks has been that these athletic interests, indeed talents, would seem to be marks of an unshakable normalcy, a full integration into British culture and values. What could be more English than cricket?

While this is hardly my area of expertise, I do know there is a body of critical literature on the colonial appropriation of cricket and its complex cultural meanings, for example: C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary, an interesting chapter in Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large --and then there’s the international hit über-Bollywood production Lagaan, in which a group of Indian villagers, their backs to the wall, accept a wager and master the game to win three years with no taxes. The Great Game indeed. While the colonial legacy is far less direct –one might say this is the empire of cultural imperialism writing back—American team sports have also become increasingly internationalized. Just a little over a half century after Jackie Robinson broke, as they say, the color barrier in baseball, the three star players of last year’s NBA champion San Antonio Spurs were from the Virgin Islands (Tim Duncan), Argentina (Manu Ginobili), and, for goodness sake, France (Tony Parker).

What strikes me as potentially interesting about all this is the various ways in which particular sports have, or appear to have (I’m not sure the distinction is important here), strong links to national identity. At the limit, once could say that sports are a significant component of the imagined community famously formulated by Benedict Anderson, like a national anthem (sung at baseball games, of course) or a national holiday (which the Superbowl has become). The internationalization of previously national sports would then suggest a change in this function –the formation of a different kind of imaginary community, very much caught up with national ones, of course, but by no means synonymous. American universalism makes this possible in a particular way. Anecdotally, my experience has been that French Olympic coverage is mostly about French athletes, however poorly they fair and however obscure the event, whereas American Olympic coverage is mostly about Americans, of course, but also about all the winners of whatever nation, who become, through the universal value of their Excellence, confirmations of the truth of American values. Consider, by contrast, the reception of Lance Armstrong in France.

I suspect that if some of the London bombers had been highly skilled at ice hockey or drag-racing, this would not have seemed a relevant fact. In any event, it is clear that people want to understand what happened, and understandably so; but these efforts to understand seem almost fatally mired in outmoded notions of national culture, which manifest themselves in terms of normalcy and deviancy that clearly are no longer appropriate, if they ever were. The Terrorist should be an introvert, a bearded junky mainlining the Koran in the inner chamber of some madarassah, not a strapping lad playing cricket in the light of day. Not someone whose father owns a fish-and-chips shop.

In his early Infancy and History, Giorgio Agamben, drawing on the work of Claude Levi-Strauss writes that “while rites transform events into structures, play transforms structures into events.” In other words, ritual tries to close the gap between the mythic past and the present by uniting through a consistent form, while play shuffles forms around and invents new ones, redefining or largely ignoring the present’s relationship to the past. Sport today perhaps more obviously assumes the form of a ritual, compulsively transforming events into myths through instant replay. Play, writes Agamben, “tends to break the connection between past and present, and to break down and crumble the whole structure into events,” a definition that to me, today, sadly, sounds like nothing so much as terrorism.

More thoughts on responsibility, this time at the personal level.

A friend of mine wrote last week to ask about the tension in my entry about Lance Armstrong between my attraction to a Nietzschean take on the real and my critique of the Calvinist version of it, which tends to look a lot like social Darwinism. I had written:

This friend of mine responded:

When I was writing it I was acutely aware of both the faith I have in the Nietzschean critique and of the degree to which inequality of starting position over time (nature or nurture, and not just at birth but through the entire developmental phase (extending perhaps to 25)) sustains the Calvinist fantasy.

I am not sure how to resolve the contradiction between those things, quite honestly--I'm really stuck right at that spot. Yes, my identification with Armstrong is strong precisely there where he refuses to apologize for his success, and yes, I do think that America's larger-than-proportionate share of the West's total power/assets has to do with a general cultural willingness to make Nietzschean grabs at the brass ring (and damn the natives!) rather than just luck. But the one is in relation to a bike race with equal starting conditions (minus the doping, if it exists) and the other in relation to a world whose complexities make Calvinism (a shorthand of course) a pretty terrible explanatory or ethical model.

The larger problem is I suppose how one deals with the power one's received at the macro level through no choice of one's own (i.e., whiteness, maleness, the fact of never being sexually abused, Americanness, class, other genetic factors in happiness, intelligence, and the like) in relation to one's life at the micro level, where the will can make itself felt. Again, Calvinism not the answer; I think what my argument comes up against here is that it looks, or can be made to look, too much like Nietzsche, or Nietzsche too much like it.

That is, it seems to me that one of the struggles one must engage with--and one engages with even when one isn't paying attention--has to do with the notion of "responsibility." I imagine that most people raised in the Judeo-Christian West are familiar with a sense of "responsibility to. It's what I take the Parable of the Talents to be about--a notion of being responsible to your gifts, which you can discharge by using them well and wisely. But here I am thinking of a much simpler form of responsibility, in which you agree to hold someone (sometimes yourself) or something responsible for what has happened to you. It's a truism that most people will consider themselves responsible for their successes, and others responsible for their failures, and of course neither one of them is always quite true--the list of factors, macro and micro, that intervene at every moment at which we might assign responsibility are too complex to boil down to something like "it was me" or "it was my circumstance."

I wonder--I really wonder, and will continue to think about this over the next couple months--whether a notion of ethical responsibility can be grounded solely on those things within the limits of a personal control, but remain contextualized (affected not in its action, but in its interpretation) by broader, macro-level issues. The questions here are: how much responsibility does any one bear for their life? And: how much responsibilty should any one bear for their life?

The crime is not in being born on third base, but in thinking you've hit the triple. That said, in the road home--longer in life than in baseball, since it is the road to one's own death--the decisions made step-by-step are, for the one involved, full of decision and choice that is real enough. Somewhere in Tristam Shandy, Sterne writes that the pain suffered by the working class is nothing next to a single bruise on the leg of a bluestocking. He's making a relative claim; the question is, how to recognize the bluestocking's pain as real--how to respect that pain--while remaining sensitive to the broader pain-context in which it occurs. Likewise for the bluestocking's successes and failures. And the reminder that one might mitigate the pain simply by telling the bluestocking about the working class proves only that we're dealing here with a complex and interesting system.

Monday's post is going to have to do with the notion of responsiblity as it pertains to individual success. As I was writing I found I had something to say, too, about the relation of collective and personal responsibility. Consider an instance where micro- and macro-level responsibility are clearly dissociated: the relation between individual Americans and the torture and war committed by American soldiers in Iraq. At some level, of course, I had nothing to do with it, voted against the folks who went to war, and so on. At another, as a citizen of the U.S. I am the legitimate partial subject of demands by Iraqis for reparations--which implies that I am in some way responsible for them.

The larger context in which one must consider this has to do with the nature of national sovereignty, the degree to which being a citizen makes one subject to decisions one disagrees with. In his first Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln, putting all his eloquence to the task of convincing the South not to secede, said:

The key here is that a "majority...is the only true soverign of a free people." I think we often pretend, in this democracy, that our government "by the people" entails no sacrifice of personal political will. But the people are not sovereign: the majority, governed by certain conditions, is, and by staying and not revolting, the people consent to that sovereignty.

This explains why, for the past few years, I have so often felt, and felt so strongly, a lack of control--of sovereignty--over my own political expression: the majority was, with its guns and bombs and hoods, speaking with my voice.

Correspondent Amanda Gradisek responds to "Terrorism's schadenfreude" with some thoughts about sports, nationalist rivalry, and terrorism.

This of course makes me think of Lance Armstrong, who wins the Tour de France because he works harder, etc etc. I wonder what we will do when American is no longer "number one." Fortunately we have a recent preview: the 1980s, when everyone thought that Japan was going to rule the economic roost, warn us that nationalist paranoia will express itself in both cultural (Rising Sun) and physical (the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982) forms. This time, it will of course be China. Or should I say THE China?

The producers of The Simpsons chose “Springfield” as the name of our favorite family’s home town because it’s a very popular city name in the US. (One count has it at 53 Springfields in 34 states, which seems crazy, but who knows.)

The vague and ultimately impossible location of the Simpson’s particular Springfield is of course a running gag that’s stretched the length of the show, highlighted perhaps by the apparently off-handed revelation that the Simpsons were from northern Kentucky in the “Behind the Laughter” episode. (The credits’ listing of Wereno T Fromky gave viewers a clue that the gag was still running.)

The Anytown, USA vagueness of the Simpsons’ Springfield is (as with so many elements of the show) simultaneously part of its appeal and its playful tweak of sitcom conventions. As I move cross-country to start living in one of those 53 real-world Springfields -- and to live there on a street that’s a Terrace (though sadly not Evergreen Terrace) -- I’m eager to believe that I’ll have a special claim to the show and that my future writings for printculture will be born of the very seat of American culture.

After eagerly reading up on the subject, we’re in Canada as you read this. What mysteries await in the province of Ontario, that land where North meets South? What of the mighty Falls of Niagara or its equally mighty gift shops? Printculture is there and the story follows next week.

(A note on the timing of this post - while thoughts on Canada will have to wait, here's a traveller's note for our readers - there are no rooms, I repeat NO rooms, available in the hotels of South Bend, Indiana because of a huge baton twirling competition. And there's no in-room internet in the Elkhart, Indiana Knights Inn, though there's plenty of strangely appealing 70's decor.)

Though I’m making slow and steady progress, I haven’t finished the de Kooning biography, so the follow-up to last week’s entry will have to wait. This week, two recent headlines that caught my eye: “Poor writing costs taxpayers millions” and “Students Say High Schools Let Them Down.” The first one, an AP article appearing in Businessweek a few weeks ago, came to my attention through the weekly NCTE (The National Council of Teachers of English) newsletter, which gets delivered to my inbox. It opens with this eye-catching lede:

This is according to a report just put out by the National Commission on Writing documenting the importance of writing skills in the public sector through a survey of human resource directors responsible for almost 2.7 million state government employees. The second article appeared in this past weekend’s New York Times Education section, and also opens with news from a recent large-scale survey: Although the high school students weren’t being asked about writing instruction in particular, the two stories seem to represent a tidy cause-and-effect scenario: underserved students limping through college or entering the workforce directly and wreaking havoc with their garbled syntax and illogical constructions. The dismal state of education in the U.S. is not a new tragedy, but what these reports underscore is how atomistic and mechanical a view of education our country has, and how crippling that is. Maybe that’s no surprise either, given the obsession with testing rather than teaching. (I’m willing to bet that the new SAT essay test will do little to make my job teaching college writing any easier.) In reading these headlines, then, perhaps what depresses me more than the news that bad writing is bad business, or that kids are disappointed by crappy schools is that these “duh!” conclusions are registered as “surprises” that could only be arrived at after surveys of a significant-enough number of people. Big numbers have always impressed Americans, especially when they’re measuring money. So, odds are that the education problem pitched as a fiscal problem would garner more attention (if such news gets any widespread attention at all), but the more revealing, and to me, more poignant, information comes in the Times article about the high school student survey. Here’s the reaction of the chairman of the National Governor’s Association, which conducted the survey: This surprise that students might actually crave intellectual stimulation bespeaks not just the scourge of low expectations, but a deeper ideological blindness (even from an education advocate who “has made high school reform his priority”). It’s a blindness to what high school students’ relationship with school or learning might be or could be, beyond an antagonistic one. It reveals a severely limited understanding of why students say they “hate school”—the survey reveals that “school work too hard” is not a major reason for dropping out of school, and that “the greatest percentage of those who are leaving, 36 percent, said they were "not learning anything," while 24 percent said, "I hate my school." Later in the article, we get this comment: Interesting? Again, what I find interesting is this mild surprise that the students themselves actually noticed they weren’t learning anything or being asked to learn anything. The survey reveals far more about the misconceptions about the culture of school than about the students’ experiences that it’s supposed to measure. It’s as if it has never occurred to these adults that the sullen, bored, school-hating teenagers we’re all supposed to be familiar with might be that way because they’re responding to an environment, not because they’re teenagers. Teaching where I do, I get the students who succeeded, often spectacularly, in high school, and most of them probably come in feeling their schools did do a good job preparing them for college. So, it falls on me to break it to many of them how much they have yet to learn, and how effort alone cannot earn them that “A.” The sense of betrayal can be terribly painful, and I understand, even if I don’t like it, that it’s easier for them to blame the messenger (the writing requirement is a useless burden, the writing courses all give bad—i.e. less inflated—grades to everyone just ‘cause) than to reconsider past assessments of their work and their worth. If even the “best” students are, more often than not, underprepared and underchallenged, it’s not that surprising, is it, that states are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on remedial writing instruction, “sometimes sending workers to $400-per-employee classes”? Actually, that last figure does raise an eyebrow. Maybe I need to find a new line of work. On second thought, $221 million might seem like a lot of money, $400-a-head classes might seem extravagant; but what does it cost to give a high school student a solid education for four years, and really prepare them for college, work, and life? In that light, the states are getting a real cut-rate bargain. In general, you get what you pay for.

I will withhold from the printculture public a rant about the Rove affair and some pointless reflections on a Japanese television show in which the host tries to guess where exactly his guest’s nipples are (he makes marks on photos of them while the co-hostess pokes around on the guest).

Instead I’ll just share a few unfinished thoughts on S L Kim’s blog “Shhh!” from a few weeks back. The piece offers some reflections on manners and civility in public spaces, taking as its point of departure some noisy upper-middle class white folks in a museum. I would have been similarly annoyed, but I couldn’t help but think that if those being loud were, for example, a group of African-American teenagers, that instead of thinking “Man is that annoying . . . but maybe I shouldn’t be uptight” my reaction might have been “Maybe I shouldn’t be uptight . . . but that is annoying.” The difference suggests that maybe I should be more tolerant of loud white people, but it also suggests a kind of racism. So, while I fully share S L Kim’s annoyance about people being loud in museums, I also had a more complicated reaction, because in Japan I often feel I’m being loud even when I’m silent.

The excesses of Japanese manners –it is a bad description, of course, but it is difficult not to experience them as excesses— are well-known, but its quite a different matter to be bodily involved. When do you bow and when will that be inappropriate? How close to stand? When is it rude to look someone in the eyes and when is it rude not to? All this business about different customs is charming folklore, until you find yourself in a situation where at any moment, because of something you might not even know you're doing, you are making a scene, annoying the people around you.

Before my departure a good friend teased me about the possibility that I would forget English or acquire Japanese mannerisms, expressing a great deal of skepticism toward those who, after having spent a year abroad, say, describe themselves as disoriented after returning to their own culture despite a lifetime of acculturation. No doubt there are plenty of people who affect a British accent after three days in London, but I think the difficulties of re-adjustment are legitimate. If one found oneself in a culture where it was rude start walking with the right foot instead of the left, surely after a certain number of incidents it would become habit to start with the left –and it would take some concentration to break that habit after returning home. This is less a matter of affectation than infection (in a non-pejorative sense). I’m tempted to say something like “Culture is not what you know but who you are,” but this sounds too identitarian. What one is is not a permanent thing, of course, and the changes can hurt, like learning to hold a bow, shaping your mouth into new positions, or sitting on a hard floor with your feet under you, if you’re not used to it. This is Anthropology 101, I suppose, but I still find that most discussions of culture approach it in terms of knowledge and representation, whereas I’m suggesting that it’s more like a kind of physical conditioning, making things instinctual and even involuntary. Like language, there’s just too much to know, so you have somehow to learn and indeed become more than you can know.

In a round-about way this led me to thoughts of Malcom in the Middle. In the episode “Poker,” Malcom’s father Hal is invited to a poker party at the house of his neighbor and best friend, Abe. Hal has long desired to be invited into this inner circle, to have his friendship confirmed. Hal is as white as they come. Abe is African-American, and when Hal arrives at the party he discovers that all the other players are as well. Old-poker buddies, they are boisterous and familiar with one another, using idioms and ritual gestures Hal can’t understand, laughing when he doesn’t, and seemingly having a little fun at his expense. Hal’s comfort level shrinks even faster than his pile of chips. But in the end the joke is on the viewer. As Hal’s frustration mounts he confronts the group: “You’re all ganging up on me because you’re all, you’re all . . .” Abe shouts: “Say it!” Hal: “You’re all upper management and I’m not!”

The episode deliberately tricks us into thinking Hal is uncomfortable because of race, but really it’s about class. Hal’s friend is as outraged at this accusation as he would have been if the scene had gone as we were led to suspect. Words fly and they decide to play a head-to-head game for the pot, at which Hal boasts “I will own you!” A horrible silence hangs in the air, but before he can correct himself Hal is told: “Just deal!” Well, maybe race does enter into the picture a little.

Beyond its simply being very funny to me, what I found so endearing about this scene was the way it locates Hal’s vulnerability in a place that is well-prepared by the character’s background (he’s a man whose life has not met his expectations), but that is surprising in context, but not just in context. So much of comedy comes from poking around in areas we are uncomfortable with, but class is rarely approached directly. What I found so effective about the scene, then, was that it tapped various kinds of visceral discomfort in surprising and, although the word is terribly overused, even subversive ways. Such visceral discomfort at those things that we don’t know but can’t help but feel and usually experience as objective physical facts (You are standing too close! You are too loud! You smell funny!) is a complex indicator of our own physical conditioning, our own cultural belonging --of things we've learned but maybe don't know yet.

The other day I saw someone wearing a shirt that said, "I hate Michigan so much, I'd root for France to beat them." Ahh, France. Where would American nationalism be without you?

The left-wing blogs have been full of criticism of various Fox News types for measuring possible benefits of the London bombings. But Brit Hume and his buddies would be surprised, I think, to find an ally in Pierre Assouline, who blogs about literature for Le Monde. I've put the translations between the originals:

I honestly don't have too much to say about this, or rather, I don't think that much I can say will be new. A few things, though, just to make sure they're clear:

1. What you see here is exactly what will allow the terrorists to "win." Contrast this sort of reaction--which is of a piece, I think, with the American ones that take 9/11 as an occasion to build fences along the southwestern border, to deny visas to foreigh students, and the like--to London mayor Ken Livingstone's insistence that the terrorists will not destroy the city''s openness (a statement not without its problems, to be sure, as E Wesp pointed out a couple weeks ago).

2. The hostility to multiculturalism should remind everyone that hostility to forms of cosmopolitan culture is not a unique property of the American right. The notion that "multiculturalism" is a specifically British idea might, however, surprise a few Americans who imagine that the pressure to miscegenate comes from the continent and those under its influence. The notion of Anglo-American "multiculturalism" you see here is to some extent the historico-cultural residue of the mutual intertwining of the UK and the US, much of which has to do with a relation to otherness and diversity built up through a colonial experience that turned out quite differently (and was run quite differently) than the continental ones of France, Belgium, Holland, Spain, or Portugal. Differently, mind you, not necessarily better, then, though I like the Anglo-American residue now.

3. A couple years ago my department rebuilt its undergraduate curriculum. Among other things, the committee got rid of the Chaucer and Milton requirements. Apparently there was some discussion about also dropping the Shakespeare requirement. My favorite colleague managed to convince the committee not to do so (I may be making his role more decisive than it was, but it's how I like to imagine it) simply by pointing out that dropping Shakespeare had, at other universities, produced a huge public outcry against the university, the department, the loss of standards and of the canon, etc. etc. Indeed my own undergraduate institution, when it dropped its Shakespeare requirement back in 1993 or 1994, was the subject of articles and editorials in the Washington Post and New York Times.

Shakespeare is of course fantastic, but it nonetheless continues to astonish me how important his name has become over the past 100 years or so as a figure for the "loss" of forms of culture. These forms are, to be sure, protean: Shakespeare always means "tradition," but what "tradition" means changes--now something like an immigrant-free national culture, now intellectual standards, now literature itself (as against "culture"), now Britishness, now history... Shakespeare is always what some "we" is about to lose. Chaucer and Milton on the other hand, elicit a collective shrug from the politicians and the public.

4. The name "Shakespeare" is why, finally, Pierre Assouline, writing a blog about literary affairs, manages to say something about the London bombings. By drawing a line from the "loss of Shakespeare" to multiculturalism to terrorism, Assouline puts together one of the more compelling equations of our time. The violence the equation does to difference (the difference between terrorism and the loss of Shakespeare, for instance) is clear. I do not equate that violence with the violence of blowing up people, at least not today and not for me right now. Though unequal, it nonetheless seems to me responsive.

Jake Adam York, a subject of the mighty Congressman Tom Tancredo, writes in response to E Wesp's Friday post:

Responding to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff’s discussion of immigration reform last Wednesday, Congressman Tom Tancredo had this to say:

Rep. Tancredo leads the Immigration Reform Caucus in the House, a group that apparently hangs its hat on the idea of stepped up enforcement of existing immigration restrictions. He was a fan of the Minutemen if that gives you your bearings.

A little familiarity with Rep. Tancredo makes his resistance to Chertoff’s plan not surprising in the least. But there’s something compelling in the way he expresses it in this comment to the LA Times.
First off, prefacing his position with the complaint that his opponents are “annoying” is comical and a little endearing. It seems unusual that politicians take this tone with reporters – that of a sibling bedeviled by a little brother or sister who keeps repeating everything they say (“Stop that!” “Stop that!” “You’re so annoying” “You’re so annoying”).

Fittingly most of Tancredo’s annoyance is actually with his opponents’ use of language and with the general complication in which language doesn’t just mean what it says.

As it turns out, language is a real point of interest for Tancredo. An urgent headline on his Congressional home page announces: Tancredo calls out the BBC for its ridiculous refusal to label the London jihadists as ‘terrorists.’ Here’s his “calling out”:

He doesn’t just call the BBC out, he does so because they wouldn’t “call out” the terrorists. Sadly, though, I have to wonder if, had the BBC not decided to substitute “bomber” for “terrorist” early in their coverage, an annoyed Rep. Tancredo would have posted something lamenting that even though the BBC was using the right word, they didn’t mean it in the right way.

Brilliantly, Tancredo ends his observations about the failure of the left to use the right words with this charming bit of sarcasm:

So the guy who gets annoyed when people take his rhetoric turns around and nabs “cesspool of degenerate infidels” from the terrorists who the BBC won’t name. On top of that, the irony surrounding its usage is such that Tancredo can simultaneously tip off his audience that these are not his hyperbolic characterizations while at the same time suggesting that he basically agrees that Hollywood is a degenerate cesspool. Tom Tancredo, wordsmith.

Returning to the original quote, all of this is a way of noting that Tancredo’s lament – “They use the right words, they just don't do the right thing” – basically describes the nature of political speech. As C Bush wrote in April

The rhetorical palette of politics is, to be sure, a restricted one; so much so that one wonders if the shady reputation of political speech is in part simply the result of trying to cram too much meaning into too few words.

 
From time to time, depending on the route we take, my friend and I pass this place on walks with our dog.
 
It makes us laugh. The sign proclaims precisely the creative design that the blocky, aluminum-sided monolith denies. It’s as if the building has been mislabeled. An example of the failed performative utterance.

I’m nearly half way through the 600+ page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of 20th-century Dutch-born American painter Willem de Kooning, written by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan and published last year. Apparently, the project took over 10 years to complete, and you can see why: the authors seem to have scoured the archives for both published and unpublished sources; and, as well as consulting the existing interviews in print and on film, they also conducted dozens of interviews of their own over the years with de Kooning’s family, friends, acquaintances, critics, and other surviving members of the New York art scene from the ‘30s to the ‘80s. The book is exhaustively documented. Such thoroughness might seem horrendously tedious—obsession with the arcana of a famous person’s life is a necessary but not sufficient trait of the biographer, but too often, that trait seems to be all there is, and the reader is awash in trivialities. This is what some of us in the writing program call a “data dump,” where the writer is not so much writing as listing information without story, facts without meaning or relevance. The other potential pitfall is that, in broad strokes, we find in de Kooning’s life all the romantic clichés of the Great Artist (gendered male): a volatile mix of torment and tenacity, plenty of women, enough booze to cause trouble, and a bohemian rootlessness so ripe for idealization. Add to that the immigrant’s tale—stowing away on a ship and arriving in America with little but ambition—and the chances for an epically hackneyed story of genius’s triumph over circumstances are quite good. Happily, there’s no data dumping in the de Kooning bio, and it’s not in the recognizable broad strokes that the interest and drama of his life lie. The authors manage, instead, to infuse life into the known clichés by shaping the innumerable details into a compelling narrative of a man embedded in circumstance, powerfully influenced by the particular people and events in his life and struggling for decades to resolve these myriad, often contrary, influences and impulses into an artistic identity of his own. Because art became the defining reality of de Kooning’s life, became a means of imagining a life apart from his impoverished and emotionally difficult childhood in Rotterdam, the narrative makes it impossible to separate the personal from the aesthetic unfolding. Woman I 1950-52 Even as well into the book as I am, I’m still surprised that I’m enjoying it so much. I can’t remember the last time I read, much less finished, a biography. Memoirs, a few; biographies, no. I wasn’t particularly a fan of de Kooning, either; I’d learned of his most famous works (like his Woman series) in college art history courses, and understood him to be a major figure of modern art, notable for never having given up the figural, even at the height of abstract expressionism’s reign. But I didn’t know (or remember) much else. When I saw the big hardcover tome at the public library, I didn’t even know it’d won a Pulitzer, though I think I must have heard of the book’s existence from somewhere. But what drew me in, and made me actually check it out, were the opening pages of the brief introduction, which begins with de Kooning’s arrival in America—Newport News, VA, to be precise—in 1926 at the age of 22. After a telling anecdote about de Kooning’s first impressions, the authors write: Pretty good, I thought: they’re aware of the narrative conventions at their disposal and are using them self-consciously, with an eye toward the wider historical and cultural contexts. After detailing the ways in which certain features of de Kooning’s life “suited an art world then being transformed by fashion and international attention,” the authors go on to write: This latter, private de Kooning is no less a figuration, no less filtered through certain prevailing myths about the artist. Yet, this acknowledgment doesn’t prevent the authors from pursuing a multi-faceted portrait of their subject that takes a clear position on how we should understand the person and his work. On the next page, they lay out their general take on de Kooning that guides the rest of the book: The combination of details particular to de Kooning’s life and bold pronouncements about his place in the pantheon of twentieth-century art made me want to read on, to learn not just about his rise to fame, but about where he started and how he got to where he did. The great achievement of the book is how the authors are able to give us the texture of de Kooning’s everyday life, and then to show how those everyday occurrences had later reverberations, opening doors of opportunity or closing them off. We learn, for example, that his poor nutrition and lack of good healthcare as a child led to dental problems from which de Kooning suffered throughout his life. Or, how he survives the Depression years by working as a designer for the A.S. Beck shoe company, made possible by the commercial art training he’d received in Holland, but at a crucial juncture, gives up the stability of the job to devote himself fully to his art. Or, how when he is at his most penniless, in the late 40s, he and fellow artist Franz Kline forego expensive oil paints, and buy black and white household enamel paints by the gallon, producing the now famous black and white abstractions that, after 20 years as a New York artist, started getting him noticed by the key critics of the day. These are the things you don’t get in any official précis or capsule summary of de Kooning’s career, some of which you can find here, here, and here (you can also see a good sampling of his work at these sites). What strikes me most in looking at these brief summaries after reading the biography is how the compilation of key facts—the highlights reel version of an artist’s life—makes everything seem so inevitable, as if each event followed logically from the one before, as if de Kooning willed the arc of his life’s story with clear-eyed purpose from the very beginning. What Stevens and Swan give us, on the other hand, is the feeling of the precariousness of de Kooning’s life—by setting the scene in great detail, by venturing psychological explanations without over-determining everything, by resisting too many proleptic intrusions, they enable the reader to reflect on how de Kooning might have experienced the particular crises and daily rhythms of his life. The consistent theme of struggle both with himself and with his external circumstances, the mental blocks and anxieties about the quality of his work against the backdrop of unglamorous poverty and relative obscurity, though mitigated by good friends and a vibrant downtown world of ideas, provides the stuff of real suspense and emotional truth. That there was little in the beginning to predict future greatness, and much along the way to deter or derail it, is surprising, delightfully ironic, and deeply moving all at the same time. Like all good historical narratives, this biography doesn’t give us the past as a record of faits accomplis, but allows us to imagine the life as lived—uncharted and unpredictable, like some Surrealist production born of accident and ardor. More next week, after I finish the book.

Based on this blog and last week’s, readers might get the impression that I’ve done little in Japan but watch television. Not true! But somehow the range of experiences I’ve had in the wider world have seemed largely predictable –not to me at the moment I’m experiencing them, of course, but the interest of reporting them seems minimal. I’m guessing most readers would not be surprised to learn that some of the major intersections in Tokyo are very crowded, that fruit in department stores can be expensive, or even that I saw a monk checking his e-mail at an internet café.

This last item belongs to a particularly tired but nonetheless probably important genre: “a land of contradictions,” as my guidebook reports. Shinto shrines and golf courses! Avant-garde theater and the tea ceremony! Even –really—“neon signs written in Japanese ideograms”! Sigh. One might imagine a similar report on America. Genome projects and creationism! Rodeos and Italian opera! The Commander in Chief of the most advanced army in the world plays cowboy!

The problem, with respect to Japan, is, of course, not that there’s nothing new to see or to say, but that I haven’t yet found my way clear of the thick and tangled web of clichés and conventions waiting for me when I try to formulate those “new” things – a bit like trying to write a love letter. One wants to convey the uniqueness of one’s experience but discovers that not only does the available language seem to minimize that uniqueness but that, horror of horrors, it even seems to suggest that the experience and the feelings aren’t terribly unique.

Perhaps this situation can be addressed, can begin to be addressed, by a turning to little details whose larger meaning isn’t immediately apparent. Even the genre of “Those crazy Japanese!” retains at least a sense of wonder and confusion that isn’t immediately resolved into, say, “tradition and modernity,” or “the Japanese way.”

And so on to a few of the things I’ve been struck by on Japan’s airwaves –or, more precisely, on the digital video feed. One thing was a great commercial featuring the AFLAC duck surrounded by women in Chinese dress. At the culmination of the ad he opens a magic box, disappears in a puff of smoke, and appears in a new realm with a white, Chinese-style beard. (Apologies if the ad is also running state-side). For those interested in further researching cross-cultural fusions of such obvious importance, check out the site japander.com, which features extensive links to Western (largely American) celebrities in Japanese commercials. As you might suspect, the actual commercials are far less interesting than even the fact of them.

Then there was the show that featured four guys playing a game of air hockey. I mean air hockey! On television! That’s crazy! Oh wait, did I mention that one of the guys is wearing a lobster suit? As the whole cosplay phenomenon suggests, the frequency, and the meaning of wearing costumes is quite different in Japan than in the US. I don’t yet have a theory of why the hosts of one quiz show dress in Planet of the Apes costumes, but I’ll write a book about it when I do. Aping Culture? Hello, book contract!

One of the more interesting pop cultural phenomena I’ve seen is the hype leading up to the release of the latest Star Wars movie. The earlier movies (dubbed) are being run on television and so have given me a chance to check out how they handle some of the translation issues, in a number of different senses. What to do with C3PO’s Englishness? He just has a comical, vaguely feminine voice that doesn’t evoke an alternate nationality, as far as I can tell. Han’s voice is deeper and manlier; Leah’s seems to me more mannered and marked as feminine. And since Yoda’s trademark syntax is supposed to be partly modeled on the subject-object-verb word order of Japanese, would he –please!-- put his verbs at the beginning of his sentences? If only! But watching Yoda, with his stringy white facial hair and his knotted walking stick, teach his young disciple about the Force made clear that the Japanese –well, “Japanese”—influence was already there all along: in Darth Vader’s samurai helmet, maybe in Leah’s early hairstyles, certainly in the name and dress of Obi-wan Kenobi, the first character we meet in the films who is a jedi –a term taken from the Japanese jidaigeki (‘period drama” –generally featuring samurai during the Tokugawa era). (Thanks to Wikipedia for that last bit).

One of the things Yoda teaches me, then, is that not everything gets re-reversed in translation and, related to this, a lot of what’s interesting about experiencing other cultures at our historical moment is the difference of similarities. This, I think, is why so many travel writers are impressed by the sameness of other cultures –consider the photo essay in The New York Times a few months ago showing Chinese people using –cell phones!!! The character of these impressions generally leaves something to be desired, but they do register, in their mild astonishment and disappointment, the increasing interconnectedness (not flatness!) of the contemporary world.

I’ll be watching some Japanese baseball over the next few weeks before leaving for China. I wonder if they’ll have tea?

Without resorting to polls or research, I can’t be sure of this, of course, but I have acquired of late a general sense that the political winds in this country are changing. Perhaps it’s because of columns like Eliot Cohen’s in The Washington Post over the weekend—one of the surprises of which was, as Atrios pointed out, that it seems like the best reason for not going to war in Iraq is turning out to have been, for many non-fundamentalist conservatives, that the people in charge weren’t competent to deal with life after the invasion. (And so they can rescue the general principle--that it was right to go to war--from the fact of its incredibly shoddy execution.)

Of course at some level my sense that things are changing may simply reflect a growing optimism in me. I last felt this a week or so before last year’s presidential election, and we know how that turned out.

Adam Schenck writes in about "Live Strong and Prosper":

I tried to pay attention to this letter, but was distracted by the fact that I'm afraid another young white woman will be kidnapped.

Version 1: Indiscriminate killing

London Mayor Ken Livingstone:

This view, fortunately because it would mean hopelessness, is unsupportable. It is of course true that the means are as Livingstone describes them – it certainly doesn’t seem to have mattered which people were on the trains or buses. But confusing means and ends so that terrorism is seen only as psychopathic murder will make long-term resistance to terrorism impossible.

Version 2: The bombings as retaliation for England’s role in Iraq and Afghanistan

This is, of course, the explicit position stated in the unverified but widely publicized claim of responsibility by The Secret Organization of al-Qaeda in Europe.

As well, it is the position taken (predictably, his critics would probably like noted) and widely reported by outspoken anti-war MP George Galloway.

Late yesterday this same prospect was offered to Condoleezza Rice in an interview with the BBC’s Jonathan Beale:

This is the explanation offered by the senior diplomat of the United States for why we would be wrong to see the London bombings as retribution for English participation in American wars abroad. Based on this we are to conclude, as Rice does, that “there's no separate peace to be made with terrorists. The terrorists are after our way of life and we have to defeat them. There is no other way to deal with them than through strength.”

(I suppose it’s worth noting that the flaws of her argument don’t necessarily make the position she takes wrong. But the familiarity of the rhetoric here does kind of make one worry that this is the best they’ve got. In any event ...)

Rice’s proof that there’s no link between American military involvement in the Middle East and terrorism: “[T]hey've been doing this now for a couple of decades and for a while the world, going all the way back to Beirut and going back to the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 or the attacks on American Embassies in 1998, this has been going on for a while.”

What would Beirut have to do with fueling anti-American resentment in the Middle East?
What was Simon Reeve talking about in his book on the 1993 World Trade Center bombings when he reflected that “The US nearly paid the ultimate price for its friendship with Israel”?
Why would bin Laden choose the American embassies to bomb?

Not very convincing examples in that they'd work as well or better as examples of why political action does in fact draw the attention of terrorists.

Even in the event of no attacks, the claim of “no separate peace” can never be actively disproven inasmuch as an attack could happen at any time. So, noting that Canada, Germany and France have not faced the kinds of attacks that have been faced by England and Spain isn’t exactly proof of anything.

But, to pronounce confidently that there is no relationship between approaches to terrorism and the likelihood of terrorist attack can’t be proven either. And a surface look at least would suggest that there is not even countervailing circumstantial evidence that would make one prefer that position.

Version 3

The greater participation of Western nations in a military-backed political restructuring of the Middle East might make a US/Iraq-style strategy more plausible both politically (creating a broad international front against political opposition to such occupations) and militarily (providing more troops to make those occupations run more smoothly). The catch is that participation does make each participating country more likely to be the victim of terrorism as retaliation.

In other words, if the US were going it alone there might well be more terrorism in the world (I mean terrorism as a general quotient here – the capacity of terrorists to cause harm), and a greater percentage of that terrorism would be aimed at the US and its interests. To whatever extent this is true nations participating in the global war on terror are effectively increasing their exposure in an asymmetrical way relative to the US. They aid in the reduction of terrorist capability against anyone while at the same time raising their own profile as targets. The US, already a target stands to gain disproportionately from both the reduction in total terrorism and the broader distribution of targets.

All of that said, where do we go from here? Where does the UK go? Italy? The US? As Paul Reynolds’ cogent analysis for the BBC suggests, there are no easy answers at this point for Britain. The situation for the US is possibly even more complicated, or at least it is reasonable to think that the response of global terrorism to changes in US policy will be even more gradual and/or inscrutable than Reynolds lays out.

Actions to this point have made disengagement from Iraq effectively impossible for the United States, if not for others. As K Klingensmith noted yesterday, it’s the nature of that engagement that will determine the outcome of our presence there. Condoleezza Rice’s observation that “we're dealing with a region of the world, the Middle East, that is not normal” is, I must say, awfully close to the opposite of the thoughtful recognition hoped for in yesterday’s post. The death of 50 people in London yesterday, and 29 in Iraq illustrate the stakes of moving beyond a strategy of simply trading punches and charges of barbarity.

Like many of you, I suppose, I woke today to news of terrorist bombings in London and have spent the morning reading the news from there. As the day progresses the death toll rises and the attacks look even worse now than they did in the shock of the first news.

Earlier, Tony Blair made a statement before leaving the G8 summit for London. He said:

The term “barbaric” must resonate. More than any of the other words in Blair’s statement it has been pulled by news organizations for headlines: “Blair Condemns ‘Barbaric’ Attack,” “Blair Calls Terror Attacks ‘Barbaric,’” “Blair: Attacks ‘Particularly Barbaric,’” and so on.

It resonates also, at least for me this morning, not for the irony in this instance that it was the early British who were among any of a number of northern tribes who sacked Rome and were called Barbarians, but for the damage done in more recent centuries by the kind of thinking that divides the world into barbaric and civilized cultures.

Blair, I assume, is using barbaric in what is perhaps its most common usage, the one that denotes terrifying acts of brutality, those of a “wild, rude, uncivilized person” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest use the OED provides suggests another meaning, however, and one that may be useful to keep in mind if we hope to reach a time possibly after terrorism or a time after this time when terrorism is met with other violent acts in retaliation. And if such progress is impossible, then maybe a time when we simply understand better. A line from John Wycliffe’s 1388 translation of The Bible, found in 1 Corinthians xiv, reads:

In this usage, one and the other are equally barbaric. Barbaric is any language one doesn’t speak, any language one doesn’t understand.

I do not mean to suggest that we (and by “we” I mean most every person in the world) learn to speak the language of terrorism, or that Tony Blair isn’t accurate in calling today’s attacks in London barbaric in the sense that they are brutal and terrifying. Rather, the memory of barbaric as shared non-understanding may be more useful than the idea of barbaric as savage, that is, if what we want is a less brutal time.

I spent the holiday weekend in the Berkshires with my mom. The visit included a trip to the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, MA, where the current special exhibition is of Jacques-Louis David, court painter to Napoleon, among other things. It was a lovely show, but the place was crowded, and I found myself inordinately irritated by one group of particularly loud museum-goers. There were two couples--white, middle-aged (late 40s, early 50s), comfortably middle-class, as far as I could tell--but the two women were the most vocal and conspicuous of the group. As they moved from room to room, they talked loudly about the paintings and the information provided in the wall labels: “Wha-at?” “I thought it said ‘divorced and married’ but it’s ‘divorced and remarried!’” They called to each other from across the room, and generally chattered non-stop, exclaiming and extolling, and occasionally laughing and squealing like schoolchildren. At one point, the louder of the two women stood alone in front of a large painting, shaking her head and snapping her gum in emphatic admiration; then she said to no one in particular (maybe to the painting itself), “Uh! So fantastic!” before she moved on to catch up with her friends. In the small echo-y rooms of the exhibit, the noise was hard to ignore. If I hadn’t been so annoyed, I would have found the performances comical. Given my mother’s unwired, Internet-free home, I had plenty of time to mull over what might otherwise have been a fleeting experience. Why was I so annoyed? On the one hand, I recognized the problem as a clash of different senses of social etiquette. Perhaps it was snobbish of me to want everyone else around me to conform to my sense of good behavior in museums. Why shouldn’t these people enjoy the art in their own way—enthusiastically and vocally? They clearly saw nothing wrong with their behavior; they were having a good time, sharing their aesthetic experience with each other (and everyone around them). On the other hand, and in my defense, I couldn’t help but feel intruded upon by their behavior; consuming all the oxygen in the shared public space, they were interfering with my ability to enjoy the art. What would Jeremy Bentham say? It’s not that I think museums are sanctified spaces where art must be silently revered. In fact, my complaint has less to do with the specific context of a museum, or other high-culture spaces, and more to do with public spaces in general. I find loud conversations (on cell phones or not) on planes or trains or other confined public spaces equally bothersome and inconsiderate. What astounds me, and to be honest, offends my sensibilities, is the noisemakers’ seeming obliviousness to their effect on others. If they are genuinely oblivious, I’d call that a competence problem—shouldn’t they have learned by now to be a bit more socially aware? But if their obliviousness is a function of their bloated sense of privilege and entitlement, then it seems a barely disguised form of aggression, commandeering an audience and a space that’s not theirs to take. In Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, historian John Kasson surveys the ways in which the new urban spaces of industrialized America created new anxieties about class identity and social status and new codes of behavior by which middle class subjects governed themselves in both public and private realms. In the chapter on bodily management in public, Kasson talks about the pressures to regulate “all the little gestures of bodily adjustment and self-engrossment”; to be overly concerned with oneself in public (especially with gestures drawing attention to one’s bodily functions—coughing, scratching, etc.) is a no-no, as is an “overinvolvement in the affairs of others” (staring, for example). He writes, “Forms of self-involvement that obtruded upon the attention of others aroused special ire [in etiquette book authors]—irrepressible noisemaking, for instance.” Yes, exactly. Many of these unwritten codes of conduct are still with us, and more often than not, those who do not conform to these codes seem to do so with some knowledge of the proprieties they’re flouting. In the case of my museum companions, their noisemaking seemed a self-engrossment not focused on their physical bodies, but on their own social personae—as great lovers of art, as performers of art appreciation. For a long time now, I’ve been fascinated by the world of manners, the codified social rituals and habits that produce what Lionel Trilling dubbed the “hum and buzz of social implication.” Though the two are not synonymous, nor interchangeable, manners are always tied up with the question of morals. If manners constitute a “semiotics of everyday life,” to use Kasson’s phrase, they are meant to be read with a moral message in mind (what kind of person spits in public?!). Perhaps my visceral reaction to the noisy people merely demonstrates how thoroughly I have been socialized by a specific set of bourgeois norms, habituated to certain bodily and emotional controls that I have internalized to the point of their seeming to be immutable moral laws: it’s common sense not to talk so loudly that the entire train compartment can hear about your personal problems, and if you still insist on yakking away, that’s just rude. Accusations of rudeness, of a breach of manners, are ultimately moral judgments—that you don’t know better is a character flaw. In confronting my inner curmudgeon, I recognize the dangerous implications of such moral judgments, especially when they get tied, as they so often do, to assumptions about race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, etc. etc. At the same time, if reading another’s morals in his or her manners can sometimes bring out the worst in people, there’s another way in which a concern with manners can be implicated in a broadminded concern for the ethics of social life: how should we live together in this crowded world? How should we treat our neighbors and strangers? If the Bush administration had better manners at the cocktail parties of international affairs, would we be better off right now? I’m not saying I had any such lofty reflections at the museum. Just that if we scratch the surface of manners, and think beyond enforcing or breaking certain social codes, we very quickly get to bigger questions about what it means to be social or selfish. Or selfishly social, as the case may be.

In thinking about a blog for my first days in Japan I realized there were two obvious traps I wanted to avoid, first the pseudo-profundity and generalizations that come from first impressions and second, the genre of “those cuh-razy Japanese!” That being said, I have to share one little slice of Japanese pop culture I encountered early on.

Japanese television is notoriously bad and I’ve seen some things it is hard to resist finding ridiculous, but my attention was really grabbed when I came across the image of a row of dogs on an indoor tennis court, each sitting on a circle marked with a large paw print and accompanied by a man in a black body suit, hood and all, like ninja. Before each dog was a grill on which was being grilled a whole fish. The contest required the dogs simply to make no movements despite the beautifully grill-marked temptation before them. The winner was an adorable, young black lab, whose owner cried when the dog won. Other skill tests followed, including pushing a cart while standing on hind legs, with a plate of noodles mounted at the front of the cart as the “carrot.” This sequence included shots of the dogs training with wheelchairs and baby carriages.

This serious part of the show, so to speak, was broken up by comedic interludes, including a math contest between a dog and a child (with an instant replay of the dog barking four times for “2 x 2”!), and a tuxedoed man mixing a “cocktail” for a woman and a dog seated at a bar (the dog drinks only when appropriate). At one point the action cut to a panel of what I took to be celebrity judges, seated before a background of fairly enormous yellow, green, and pink plastic flames.

So: those crazy Japanese! But from jetlag and the malaise of early alienation I’ve also tuned in to a different kind of crazy, in the form of CNN International. My “favorite” moment so far came during a different kind of contest, one in which the news anchor moderated a debate between two women taking the respective sides of prosecutor and defender in some in-the-news legal cases. While discussing the possible role of one of the teenage boys being questioned in the on-going missing persons case in Aruba, the “prosecutor” came up with this gem: “You can’t jump to the conclusion that he didn’t do anything wrong!” I won’t go into their speculations on what the recently arrested suspect in the Idaho missing persons case –a registered sex offender—may or may not have done to the children he seems to have kidnapped.

A lot of the fun of cross-cultural observation comes from observing the ways in which people take seriously things that don’t seem very important to the observer. It’s less fun to watch the ways in which people trivialize things that are important. Part of belonging to a culture is, if not loving, then feeling implicated in its idiocies, in all the ways in which it spends its time, money, and emotional and intellectual energy on things that are not in any obvious sense worthwhile pursuits. Best in Show and Lost in Translation–two movies that seem to me definitive of, in a loose sort of way, for better or worse, a certain generation—both deal with the touchy liminal areas between self-seriousness and self-irony, the ways in which shampooing dogs or cocking a smile for a whiskey commercial are both so funny and so lonely. The deep affection viewers feel for Christopher Guest’s comedies is a reflection of the obviously sincere affection he feels for the absurd people who populate the funny little subcultures he mockuments. Lost in Translation is a trickier case, but I think the ultimate success of the movie –if it works for you—is tied to the extent to which Bill Murray stops experiencing the cultural difference of Japan as just an intensified enactment of his own alienation and learns to laugh with, instead of hollowly at, Japan, even if, perhaps even because, they might be laughing about different things.

A lot of what I think printculture has been about (and if you are visiting for the first time, please roam about a bit) is taking seriously the seemingly trivial, both in a spirit of generosity toward others and as a way of acknowledging our involvement in and indeed indebtedness to it. Perhaps this is a kind of response to the trivialization of the important: the dog (and pony) shows, celebrity judges, and bad karaoke of the current news environment.

Lance Armstrong is going to win the Tour de France again this year, making millions of Europeans angry.

That's partly because lots of people will resent a winner (I never really liked Michael Jordan), but also because sports figures almost always function as national allegories (a fact everyone remembers with some pleasure every four years at the World Cup, when the efficient Germans, the tough Englishmen, the creative Brazilians, and the athletically gifted but undisciplined Cameroonians (oh, tragedy!) work out the world's semi-conscious version of the cultural genome project on a series of soccer fields). And Armstrong is as American as they come, a fact which, given the general (and justified) anger at the United States about in the world today, means that his victory will feel to many bicycling fans like a win for a set of cultural values that they are not only hostile to but afraid of.

In Armstrong's case those values have a lot to do with winning, labor, and modesty. I'm not sure that it's absolutely true that Armstrong works harder than other people, but the coverage in the United States absolutely pushes that line, and it's clear that he believes it. This means that for him his wins are the product of his labor and his alone; the uncomfortable corollary of such a position is that anyone who loses just didn't work as hard as Armstrong did. Where modesty comes in is that Armstrong doesn't seem to believe in protecting other people from his belief.

If you understand this, you understand why Armstrong's victories in the Tour, which have been by and large by enormous margins of time, are so offensive to so many people: they appear to sustain the Calvinst, American idea that people who work harder deserve more, and its uglier corollary, that people who have more have worked harder and therefore deserve it.

(The stupid blindness of such a system is, of course, that it assigns moral value to material success, rendering things like social class invisible. Molly Ivins' quip about George W. Bush--that he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple--aptly captures where such a system can have devastating social consequences. And that's on the top end--when it comes to the politics of welfare or socialized medicine, things get a lot nastier. Sometime ask a large group of people what percentage of the U.S. budget is spent on "welfare"; you'll get guesses ranging from 10 to 30 percent, when of course the real number is not only in the low single digits but is also fairly complicated. Anyway. Back to Armstrong.)

You understand why, then, so many Europeans would like to believe that Armstrong uses performance-enhancing drugs: it would ground his success in cheating, thereby depriving him of the moral ground for feeling unashamed for what he's accomplished. (You see the same thing happening with Barry Bonds, who is, incidentally, another athlete who refuses to apologize for his success.) Unfortunately, despite years of scheduled and random drug tests (including one on the first day of this year's Tour), no one has found enough evidence to make the case stick.

My understanding of the structure of this form of cultural desire comes with help from the Nietzsche of the Genealogy of Morals book. There, Nietzsche insists that the invention of morality occurs as a way for the weak to acquire power without acquiring strength; face-to-face with the strong, the weak invent morality in order to make the strong feel guilty for being powerful. The power the weak acquire by convincing the strong to distribute their power (either by sharing it, or by limiting its use) is disguised as non-power, as a theological or natual ground to which the (ab)use of power does violence.

Ironically, Nietzsche's major example of this structure was Western Christianity, the very same complex of ideologies that produces the Calvinist relation to labor and success that has become one of the identifying features of contemporary Americanness. In a world where Americans work, on average, 25.13 hours of work per week per working-age (i.e. 15-64 year-old) person, and the French work 17.95 hours per working-age person--that is, only 70 percent of what Americans do--such a feature acquires an explanatory power that reaches well beyond the ability of a single person to keep winning bike races.

The larger race is, in such a scenario, the race for national supremacy, which is of course not without venal fantasies of its very own. What's interesting about the current moment is, however, that if the United States is "losing," it's not really because of a general European resistance to US power of the type Nietzsche described, but rather because of two major forms of the direct ("strong") exercise of power: the violent insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, on one hand, and the growing strength of China, whose ownership of trillions of dollars of US Treasury bonds gives it an immense amount of potential leverage over the American economy.

None of that will matter over the next three weeks, of course, during which Armstrong will cement his status as the greatest Tour rider ever, just before he retires. More than any human I've ever seen, Armstrong is driven not simply to win but to crush the spirit of his competitors, and his victory in the Tour's first stage on Saturday did just that. My sense is that he wants to win this Tour by such a margin that his shadow will extend over next year's race, which will only be won by someone else at Armstrong's sufferance. You heard it here first: the 2007 Tour will be won by Armstrong's ghost, its figure a nice measure of his inhuman devotion to winning.

What works in bicycling does not work especially well in global politics, as our president is finding out to his chagrin. When the stakes and the rules do not limit so severely the form and place of competition, it may not be quite as clear what or how you're supposed to do when you work. And there are lots of other people out there, it turns out, willing to work as hard as you, or harder, often because they have so much more than you to lose.

My most personal encounter with the power of bureaucracy involved a identity-theft/fraud dispute with our local phone company. Applying for phone service at a new address, I was told that I owed them $1,800 for phone equipment I supposedly purchased at an address I’d never visited. (I checked it out later, though – it was a mostly abandoned little office building above a row of closed shops.)

I’ll leave out most of the agonizing details, but here’s one highlight (this is from memory, but it’s a memory seared into my brain – you’ll see why):

Nothing recalls that mind-bending experience like watching White House press briefings with Scott McClellan. There’s plenty of room to criticize the way the American press has covered the war in Iraq from the beginning up until today – but my only real criticism of them regarding those press briefings is generally that they show up at all.

Occasionally someone will give a good go at extracting rationality out of the Press Secretary: