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ENHANCED READER FoRMAt

Big Brothers
ThoughT ConTrol AT KoCh IndusTrIes
Mark aMes & Mike elk

the PeoPles BuDget

the eDitors

THE EVANGELICAL ADOPTION CRUSADE

kathryN Joyce

eURoPeS RiSiNG iSLAMoPhoBiA

Paul hockeNos
MAY 9, 2011 TheNATioN.coM

A MAnuel PuIg reVIVAl

Natasha WiMMer

The Nation.

May 9, 2011

Letters
the Libya iNterveNtioN
the eDitorS gary youNge

AT SCHOOL WITH OBAMAS SISTER

SaSha abramSky

TAKING AIm AT The PeNTAGoN BUDGeT

robert DreyfuSS
APRIL 11, 2011 TheNATIoN.com

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Libya?

Visalia, Calif.

SONDHEIMS FOLLIES
DaviD Schiff

In The Libya Intervention [April 11] you compare the NATO activity in Libya with the Iraq War. But the Iraq War was entered on a whim of the Dubya Dimwit administration, which justified its actions with a suite of blatant lies. A more appropriate comparison would be with the 1991 Gulf War, where we used military force to halt mass atrocities by armies of criminals acting out the petulant rage of a self-obsessed dictator. I dont question our intervening in Libya, but I do question our competence. I fear we will be less successful in dealing with Qaddafi than with Saddam. Dennis Anthony
New York City

into building, maintaining and decommissioning it at the end of its life. This is known as energy balance. A wind farm or solar panel in the wrong place can fail this criterion if a large infrastructure is required to distribute the energy, or if geographic considerations result in the need for heroic civil engineering. Where are energy balance studies? John Bell

The Lies of Old Men

William Mitchell, in Beyond Austerity [April 4], debunks neoliberal economic myths used to justify destructive government policies. It is courageous for a professional economist to do so. He writes, The analogy between national and household budgets is falsegovernment can spend more than its revenue because it creates currency. Mitchell concludes, however, that government budget deficits are needed to fund increased public spending to directly target job creation. If the government can print all the currency it needs, why should there be a budget deficit? When the government prints and directly spends legal tender, it competes with private banks, which also create money. Banks charge interest on their new money, which vanishes when the loan is repaid. Newly printed and spent government money is free of debt and permanently increases the money supply. When targeted jobs build interstates and bridges, or a high-speed rail system, they do not compete for resources with home builders or automobile manufacturers. Infrastructure construction and maintenance is uniquely a government responsibility, and paying for it with debt-free new currency will promote private investment and economic growth. Dennis Kucinich will reintroduce the National Employment Emergency Defense Act, which authorizes debt-free money creation and spending by the government (continued on page 26)
Beaverton, Ore.

I objected strongly to the Iraq invasion, but I felt proud to hear my president say that America had chosen to intervene in Libya because of who we are. I call that restoring our moral standing. Anna Theofilopoulou
Tulsa, Okla.

When I read the Wall Street Journal I know I will find soundly researched, reasonably objective news stories, but if I turn to the editorial pages (which I never do) reason and objectivity will be replaced by an ideology worthy of the Middle Ages. Sadly, I find The Nation to be equally praiseworthy, and guiltywith the opposite ideology. An example is your stance on Libya. Not all military interventions are equal. Kosovo cannot be equated with Iraq. Brad Byers

Be Sure Green Is Green

Amen to Mark Hertsgaards final comment in Obama Nukes [April 11]: Lets make sure that [alternative energy] is truly green. There are a lot of wolves in sheeps clothing out there. Something green must return more energy than went
Beverly, Mass.

letters@thenation.com

The Nation.
since 1865

The Peoples Budget

In poll after poll Americans consistently list the economy and joblessness as the most important problems facing this country, far ahead of the deficit. Solid majorities of
media. And it was snidely dismissed by Americans also oppose cuts to Medicare pundits like the Washington Posts Dana and Medicaid, Social Security, Planned Milbank, who didnt say much about its Parenthood, the EPA, healthcare and policies but seemed to have a beef with education. Indeed, according to a Washthe word people because it reminds ington Post/ABC News poll, the only him of China. aspect of President Obamas deficit reThat is a shame, because the duction plan that enjoys strong support is his proposal to raise E D I T O R I A L Peoples Budget is exactly the kind of common-sense economic taxes on the rich. And yet the agenda our president should be advocatdebate in Washington seems to be taking. Instead, hes taking to the road to ing place in an alternate universeone sell his deficit reduction plan to voters in defined by Representative Paul Ryans Nevada and California. Those states also radical and mean scheme to eviscerate happen to be the epicenter of our jobs crithe government on one end, and by sis; more than one in five residents there President Obamas plan to shrink it by dont have enough work, the highest rates one of the largest annual spending cuts in the nation. In Nevada, one in every in history on the other. Neither is a thirty-five homes is in foreclosure, also progressiveor popularoption, but the highest rate in the nation. California is too few inside the Beltway seem to be facing a record budget shortfall of at least listening to the people they were elected $25 billion, forcing schools, parks, lito represent. braries and even police and fire departFortunately, the eighty-three members ments to shut down. Nothing coming of the Congressional Progressive Caucus out of official Washingtonnot Obamas (CPC) are. On April 14, they introduced austerity-lite deficit plan and certainly not a Peoples Budget as an alternative to Ryans slashonomicsdoes a thing to alPresident Obamas center-right and Repleviate these catastrophes. resentative Ryans far-right proposals. The But the solutions are out there, and Peoples Budget is exactly what a robust they are creative and serious. They can populist agenda should look like. It probe found in the CPCs Peoples Budget; tects the social safety net, promotes a in the inspiring work of US Uncut, the progressive tax policy, reintroduces a pubdirect-action group, seeded in the pages lic option for healthcare and makes sigof The Nation, that targets corporate tax nificant cuts to the Pentagon by bringing dodgers and thus shifts the debate away our troops home from Iraq and Afghanifrom its narrow-minded focus on spendstan. It makes millionaires, billionaires ing cuts toward finding new sources of and corporations pay their fair share while revenue; in the astute writings of Keynesprotecting the poor and middle class. ian economists who cant seem to get a Plus, it actually generates a budget surplus job at the White House; and in the streets by 2021, according to CPC co-chair Repof Wisconsin and Ohio, where workers resentative Ral Grijalva. have risen up to protect their right to But even though the CPC is the largorganize and to demand a better deal. If est Democratic caucus in Congress, its only Washington would put its ear to the Peoples Budget was ignored by estabground and listen. lishment Democrats and the mainstream

Inside
2

Letters Editorials & Comment

Michelle GoldberG

3 The Peoples Budget 4 Policing Pregnancy 5 Noted 6 Teachers Arent the Enemy

Pedro NoGuera and Michelle FiNe

Columns
6 Deadline Poet Memo to a Wall Street highflier
calviN trilliN

9 The Liberal Media how low can the Post Go?

eric alterMaN

10 Beneath the Radar the royal Wedding is a class act

Gary youNGe

Articles
11 The Adoption Commandment declaring a global orphan crisis, uS evangelicals actwith unintended results.
KathryN Joyce

17 Big Brothers: Thought Control at Koch thanks to Citizens United, Koch industries employees were told whom to vote for.
MarK aMeS and MiKe elK

20 China Rethinks Nuclear Power the worlds second-largest economy is emerging as a pacesetter in solar and wind.
lucia GreeN-WeiSKel

22 Europes Rising Islamophobia What makes it so lethal is that it has broad appealfrom the far left to the far right.
Paul hocKeNoS

Books & the Arts

27 Puig: Betrayed by Rita Hayworth The Buenos Aires Affair Heartbreak Tango
NataSha WiMMer

31 Dyer: otherwise Known as the human condition: Selected essays and reviews
Scott SherMaN

33 Confession (PoeM)
allaN PeterSoN

35 Lesser: Music for Silenced voices: Shostakovich and his Fifteen Quartets
Michael odoNNell
cover illuStratioN by MirKo ilic, deSiGN by MiltoN GlaSer iNcorPorated; illuStratioNS by lloyd Miller VOLUME 292, NUMBER 19, MAy 9, 2011 ThE DIgITAL VERsION Of ThIs IssUE Is AVAILABLE TO ALL sUBsCRIBERs APRIL 21 AT ThENATION.COM

The Nation.

May 9, 2011

The Nation.
EDITOR & PUBLIshER: Katrina vanden Heuvel PREsIDENT: Teresa Stack MANAgINg EDITOR: Roane Carey LITERARy EDITOR: John Palattella EXECUTIVE EDITORs: Betsy Reed, Richard Kim (online) sENIOR EDITOR: Richard Lingeman (on leave) WEB EDITOR: Emily Douglas COPy ChIEf: Judith Long AssOCIATE LITERARy EDITOR: Miriam Markowitz COPy EDITOR: Mark Sorkin AssIsTANT COPy EDITOR: Dave Baker COPy AssOCIATE: Lisa Vandepaer WEB EDITORIAL PRODUCER: Francis Reynolds REsEARCh DIRECTOR/AssIsTANT EDITOR: Kate Murphy AssIsTANT TO ThE EDITOR: Barbara Stewart INTERNs: Jed Bickman, Lisa Boscov-Ellen, Carmel DeAmicis, Kevin Gosztola,

Policing Pregnancy
Utah prosecutors and conservative politicians are determined to lock up the young woman known in court filings as J.M.S. for the crime of trying to end her pregnancy. Her grim journey through the legal system began in 2009, when she was 17 and pregnant by a convicted felon named Brandon Gale, who is currently facing charges of using her and another underage girl to make pornography. J.M.S. lived in a house COMMENT without electricity or running water in a remote part of Utah. Even if she could have obtained the required parental consent and scraped together money for an abortion and a couple of nights in a hotel to comply with Utahs twenty-four-hour waiting period, simply getting to the nearest clinic posed an enormous challenge. Salt Lake City is more than a three-hour drive from her town, twice that in bad weather, when snow makes the mountain passes treacherous. There is no public transportation, and she didnt have a drivers license. And so, according to prosecutors, in May 2009, in her third trimester and desperate, J.M.S. paid a stranger $150 to beat her in the hope of inducing a miscarriage. The assault failed to end her pregnancy, but that didnt stop police from charging her with criminal solicitation of murder. The juvenile court judge who heard her case, however, tossed it out on the grounds that her actions were legal under the states definition of abortion. Local abortion opponents were outraged that J.M.S. had been freed. It revealed an extreme weakness in the law, that a pregnant woman could do anything she wanted to doit did not matter how grotesque or brutalall the way up until the date of birth to kill her unborn child, said Carl Wimmer, a state representative. He led a successful campaign to amend Utahs abortion law so that as of last year, women who end their pregnancies outside the medical system can be prosecuted as killers. We will be the only state in the nation that will do what were attempting to do here: hold a woman accountable for killing her unborn child, Wimmer told the Salt Lake Tribune. Hes wrong. In recent years, women in several states have faced arrest and imprisonment for the crime of ending their pregnancies, or merely attempting to do so. For decades now, feminists have warned about a postRoe v. Wade world in which women are locked up for having abortions. Antiabortion activists dismiss such fears as propaganda. The pro-life position has always been that women are victimized by abortion, says the Priests for Life website, which has a page of sample letters to the editor meant to refute claims that abortion bans could lead to women being prosecuted. In fact, we have repeatedly rejected the suggestion that women should be put in jail, much less executed. But as abortion rights weaken and fetuses are endowed with a separate legal identity, women are being put in jail. One of the most high-profile such cases is that of Bei Bei Shuai, who is, as of this writing, being held without bail in

Rachel Heise Bolten, Erica Hellerstein, Sara Jerving, Molly OToole, Ryan M. Rafaty (Washington), Riddhi Shah
WAshINgTON: EDITOR: Christopher Hayes; CORREsPONDENT: John Nichols; REPORTER:

George Zornick

NATIONAL AffAIRs CORREsPONDENT: William Greider COLUMNIsTs: Eric Alterman, Alexander Cockburn, Melissa Harris-Perry, Naomi Klein,

Katha Pollitt, Patricia J. Williams, Gary Younge

Sherrill; Defense, Michael T. Klare; Environment, Mark Hertsgaard; Films, Stuart Klawans; Legal Affairs, David Cole; National Security, Jeremy Scahill; Net Movement, Ari Melber; Peace and Disarmament, Jonathan Schell; Poetry, Jordan Davis; Sex, JoAnn Wypijewski; Sports, Dave Zirin; United Nations, Barbara Crossette; Deadline Poet, Calvin Trillin
CONTRIBUTINg EDITORs: Kai Bird, Robert L. Borosage, Stephen F. Cohen, Marc Cooper,

DEPARTMENTs: Architecture, Jane Holtz Kay; Art, Barry Schwabsky; Corporations, Robert

Arthur C. Danto, Mike Davis, Slavenka Drakulic, Robert Dreyfuss, Susan Faludi, Thomas Ferguson, Doug Henwood, Max Holland, Michael Moore, Christian Parenti, Richard Pollak, Joel Rogers, Karen Rothmyer, Robert Scheer, Herman Schwartz, Bruce Shapiro, Edward Sorel, Gore Vidal, Jon Wiener, Amy Wilentz, Art Winslow

CONTRIBUTINg WRITERs: Ari Berman, William Deresiewicz, Liza Featherstone, Dana Goldstein, Bob Moser, Eyal Press, Scott Sherman BUREAUs: London, Maria Margaronis, D.D. Guttenplan; Southern Africa, Mark Gevisser EDITORIAL BOARD: Deepak Bhargava, Norman Birnbaum, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard

Falk, Frances FitzGerald, Eric Foner, Philip Green, Lani Guinier, Tom Hayden, Tony Kushner, Elinor Langer, Deborah W. Meier, Toni Morrison, Walter Mosley, Victor Navasky, Pedro Antonio Noguera, Richard Parker, Michael Pertschuk, Elizabeth Pochoda, Marcus G. Raskin, Kristina Rizga, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, David Weir, Roger Wilkins

AssOCIATE PUBLIshER, sPECIAL PROJECTs/WEBsITE: Peter Rothberg AssOCIATE PUBLIshER, DEVELOPMENT/AssOCIATEs: Peggy Randall VICE PREsIDENT, ADVERTIsINg: Ellen Bollinger ADVERTIsINg MANAgER: Amanda Hale VICE PREsIDENT, CIRCULATION: Arthur Stupar CIRCULATION MANAgER: Michelle OKeefe CIRCULATION fULfILLMENT MANAgER: Katelyn Belyus VICE PREsIDENT, PRODUCTION/MARKETINg sERVICEs: Omar Rubio PRODUCER/WEB COPy EDITOR: Sandy McCroskey PRODUCTION COORDINATOR: Jos Chicas NATION AssOCIATEs DIRECTOR: Joliange Wright NATION AssOCIATEs AssIsTANT: Loren Lynch PUBLICITy AND syNDICATION DIRECTOR: Gennady Kolker EDUCATION/COMMUNICATIONs COORDINATOR: Habiba Alcindor DIRECTOR Of DIgITAL PRODUCTs: Kellye Rogers WEB PRODUCER: Joshua Leeman TEChNOLOgy MANAgER: Jason Brown CONTROLLER: Mary van Valkenburg AssIsTANT TO VICTOR NAVAsKy: Mary Taylor Schilling DATA ENTRy/MAIL COORDINATOR: John Holtz AssIsTANT TO ThE PREsIDENT: Kathleen Thomas RECEPTIONIsT/BUsINEss AssIsTANT: Sarah Arnold ADVERTIsINg AssIsTANT: Kit Gross ACADEMIC LIAIsON: Charles Bittner PUBLIshER EMERITUs: Victor Navasky LETTERs TO ThE EDITOR: E-mail to letters@thenation.com (300-word limit). Letters are subject to
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INTERNET: Selections from the current issue become available Thursday night at www.thenation.com.

May 9, 2011

The Nation.

Indianapolis. Shuai, 34, was nearing the end of her pregnancy when she learned that her boyfriend, the babys father, with whom she co-owned a restaurant, was married to another woman and was returning to his first family. After attempting to kill herself by eating rat poison, she was found by friends and taken to a hospital. After several days, doctors performed a C-section, delivering her baby girl prematurely. At first, they were optimistic that Shuai and her baby would make a full recovery. But the baby had cerebral bleeding and died a few days later in her mothers arms. Shuai spent the next month in the psychiatric ward on suicide watch. Shortly after her release, she was charged with murder and attempted feticide, or fetal homicide, and has been locked up for more than a month, with little access to psychiatric care. In court shes sitting there in an orange jumpsuit with handcuffs, says her attorney, Linda Pence. Its the most unfair, inhumane thing that Ive witnessed. Shocking as this case is, its not unique. In 2009 in South Carolina, 22-year-old Jessica Clyburn, eight months pregnant, tried to kill herself by jumping out a fifth-story window. She survived, but her fetus didnt, and she was charged with homicide (she pleaded guilty to manslaughter). Last year in Iowa, Christine Taylor, a pregnant 22-year-old mother of two, was arrested for attempted feticide after falling

down the stairs. Taylor, who said shed tripped after a distressing phone conversation with her estranged husband, went to the hospital to make sure her fetus was OK. While there, she confided to a nurse that shed considered an abortion and was anxious about raising three children alone. Believing that Taylor had purposely thrown herself down the stairs, the nurse called over a doctor, who questioned her further. Police were summoned, and Taylor was arrested. The charges were dismissed only when prosecutors discovered that Taylor was in her second trimester, not her third, when criminal penalties could apply. This notion that the criminal laws can be used to address the relationship between a pregnant woman and her fetus, its definitely on the rise, says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, a staff attorney with the ACLUs Reproductive Freedom Project. Whether the antiabortion movement intended such prosecutions, antiabortion legislation helps make them possible. Throughout the past few decades, abortion foes have worked steadily to endow fetuses with rights separate from those of mothers, aiming to undermine the logic of Roe v. Wade. In as many areas as we can, we want to put on the books that the embryo is a person, Samuel Casey, former executive director of the Christian Legal Society, told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. That sets the stage for a jurist to acknowledge that human beings at any stage of development deserve protectioneven

Noted.
BRAVO, ERIC! The Nation extends heartiest congratulations to editorial board member Eric foner, whose book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery has received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for History. Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University. The Fiery Trial also received the Lincoln Prize and the Bancroft Prize this year. Intended to be both less and more than another biography, The Fiery Trial follows the development of Lincolns changing views on slavery and emancipation throughout his life, illuminating his position in the broad context of the antislavery movement. WhATs ThE BEsT PROTEsT sONg?
Dorian Lynskeys comprehensive new book 33 Revolutions Per Minute details the history of the protest song in America and around the world. Its a bracing and informative survey, even if youre familiar with the topic, and it happily set us at The Nation to thinking about our favorite protest songs. Please visit thenation.com/whats-best-protest-song-ever

to tell us what you consider your all-time favorite protest song. There are far too many to single out just one, but were nonetheless looking for nominations and will publish a survey of readers choices, with videos.

BP OIL sPILL, PART 2? It has been one year since the Deepwater horizon drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven workers and flooding the surrounding sea with more than 200 million gallons of oil in possibly the worst environmental disaster in American history. Confusion reigned while oil gushed from the damaged rig, as engineers tried to stop the flow with everything from a giant underwater dome to thousands of golf balls. But there was one thing nearly everybody agreed on stronger regulation of offshore drilling was needed. A year later, however, one of the fundamental engineering failures that created the gulf oil spill is still in place. On the Deepwater Horizon rig, a blowout preventer should have kept oil from spilling into the ocean after the initial explosion, but it failed. A government-

backed forensic study released in March found that the failure was not an aberration but likely the product of a basic design flaw. One critical part of the blowout preventer shear rams, a pair of blades designed to cut through pipe and seal off an oil well in an emergencyfunctioned properly but failed to seal the well completely. Last year the Senate killed a bill requiring a second set of shear rams. The Bureau of Offshore Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, which issues offshore drilling permits, has also declined to require a second pair of shear rams. When confronted with the continuing blowout preventer problems, BOEMRE director Michael Bromwich said, No one in our agency, and certainly not me, has ever suggested that these are failsafe devices. The Interior Department is examining improvements to the shear systems, and Representative Ed Markey has called for a similar examination. Its possible the safety measures will be strengthenedbut if another leak occurs in the meantime, the government will once again be left scrambling for golf balls. GeorGe ZorNicK

The Nation.

May 9, 2011

protection that would trump a womans interest in terminating a pregnancy. One of the most effective ways of doing this has been through feticide laws, which exist in at least thirty-eight states, as well as at the federal level. Often these laws are introduced in the wake of a high-profile crime against a pregnant woman. The Unborn Victims of Violence Act, for example, which George W. Bush signed in 2004, was called Laci and Conners Law, after Laci Peterson, killed by her husband when she was eight months pregnant. Presented as a means of protecting women from violence, these laws seem designed to make feminists who oppose them appear callous and hypocritical. Who, after all, could object to punishing someone for harming a woman and her wanted pregnancy? But time and again, such laws are used to prosecute pregnant women. The initial targets, says Lynn Paltrow, founder of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, were women who had used drugs during pregnancy. There are a number of women whove been convicted or pled guilty based on the fact that they went to term or tried to go to term in spite of a drug problem, she says. Now, a new wave of cases is taking the underlying logic of fetal protection laws still further. What were seeing is an unadulterated, undisguised version of whats been building for years, says Paltrow. Indiana strengthened its feticide law in 2009, prescribing prison sentences of up to twenty years for anyone who intentionally kills a fetus outside the context of a legal abortion. The sole reason the feticide law was enacted was because of third-party attacks against pregnant women, says Pence. Now theyre turning it against the woman. In Utah, meanwhile, prosecutors arent letting up on J.M.S. They appealed the dismissal of her case to the State Supreme Court, which heard arguments in April. Because the law has since been changed, this isnt a question of clarifying statutes or setting precedentsits about punishing one girl. Whatever the ruling, concedes Assistant Attorney General

Christopher Ballard, its practical application will only be in this case. J.M.S., he acknowledges, is a victimized young woman. Shes a troubled young woman. So why go after her? She committed a crime when she paid someone to beat her unborn child to death, and she deserves whatever ramifications come from committing that crime, he says. If abortion is understood as murder, this is what justice looks like. Michelle GoldberG
Michelle Goldberg is the author of The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World and Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism.

Teachers Arent the Enemy

Public school teachers and their unions
are under a sustained assault that is still unfolding. In 2010 Michelle Rhee, former Washington, DC, schools chancellor, announced the creation of a multimillion-dollar lobbying organization for the explicit purpose of undermining teachers unions. She has charged that bad teachers are the primary cause of the problems that beset Americas schools. New York Mayor MiCOMMENT chael Bloomberg has asserted that effective teachers need no experience. Romanticizing the young, energetic, passionate (read: cheap) teacher, he has made eliminating seniority preferences in layoffs (aka, last in, first outor LIFO) his pet cause (it has been stymied for the time being by the state legislature). New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has slashed school aid by $1.2 billion while refusing to comply with a courtmandated formula for school funding equity. He has become a right-wing hero by demonizing teachers, lambasting unions, challenging tenure rights and introducing a crude teacherevaluation process based on student test scores. Christie is also pushing what he calls a final solution$360 million in tax credits for a tuition voucher system that would permit any child in New Jersey go to any school, public or private, and would include state subsidies for some students already attending parochial schools and yeshivas. Its hard to think of another field in which experience is considered a liability and those who know the least about the nuts and bolts of an enterprise are embraced as experts. The attack has diverse roots, and comes not only from Republicans. Groups like Democrats for Education Reform have dedicated substantial resources to undermining teachers unions. With Race to the Top, the Obama administration has put its weight behind a reform agenda featuring charter schools, which employ mostly nonunion labor, as its centerpiece. A disturbing bipartisan consensus is emerging that favors a market model for public schools that would abandon Americas historic commitment to providing education to all children as a civil right. This model would make opportunities available largely to those motivated and able to leave local schools; treat parents as consumers and children as dispos-

Calvin Trillin, Deadline Poet

Memo to a Wall street highflier
After Widespread Reckless Banking, Dearth of Prosecutions Subhead in the New York Times

Its more than likely that you caused this wreck By schemes like selling what you knew was dreck. And ordinary folks have paid the cost: Their homes are gone, their livelihoods are lost. But friends on high have guaranteed the onus Is not on you. Relax. Pick up your bonus.

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The Nation.

May 9, 2011

able commodities that can be judged by their test scores; and unravel collective bargaining agreements so that experienced teachers can be replaced with fungible itinerant workers who have little training, less experience and no long-term commitment to the profession. In this atmosphere of hostility to public schools and teachers, it has become nearly impossible to have a rational discussion among educators, parents, advocates, youth and policy-makers about what should be done. Honest analyses suggest that removing ineffective teachers is an excessively slow and arduous process, though unions are often blamed when administrators have failed to document problems systematically. Likewise, the LIFO system for layoffs does need reform because it contributes to high turnover in the most disadvantaged schools. These schools are the hardest to staff, and in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, many veteran teachers have found ways to avoid being assigned to such schools. But candid conversations about how to solve these problems are extraordinarily difficult when any comment critical of unions is likely to be used as a weapon by the right. None of the reforms on the table address the inequality and opportunity gaps that plague our schools. Raging debates over LIFO, seniority, teacher evaluation and test-based school closings do little to improve schools and much to distract from the real challenges. Moreover, because current reforms have been designed to promote school choice and weaken the @ unions, they have been exacerbating the challenges rather than fixing them.

and mobilizing with parents against school closings. In Milwaukee, longtime education activist Bob Peterson, editor of Rethinking Schools, is running for union president. Peterson worked with a broad array of local activists to defeat mayoral control of the schools and co-founded an educator/ parent task force on responsible assessment. And in California, the California Teachers Association sponsored the Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA), which has targeted funding toward reducing class size, hiring more counselors and providing professional development for teachers focused on the sharing of best practices. Schools that have enjoyed QEIA support have shown marked student improvements, particularly for low-income young people of color and English as a second language learners. This activism will culminate in a national Save Our Schools March in Washington on July 30. We can begin to feel the rumble of solidarity, with parents, teachers, labor and youth taking back what is rightfully theirspublic schools and democratic public education.
Pedro NoGuera aNd Michelle FiNe

Pedro Noguera is the Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education at New York University. Michelle Fine is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at City University of New York.

@
Listen to executive editor Betsy Reeds interview with Kathryn Joyce about her piece in this weeks issue on the new evangelical adoption movement. It has been a year since the worst environmental disaster in US history. In Deepwater Horizon 2.0? Why It Can Happen Again, new blogger George Zornick argues that offshore drilling still lacks crucial safety regulation. Whats the best protest song ever? Tell us on our Community page. Well publish a survey of read@ @ ers top choices online. Watch Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC discuss how the GOP gets it wrong on the deficit. On Tax Day, you paid your taxesbut many of Americas most profitable corporations did not. Check out our slide show: 7 Corporate Tax Evaders. On The Breakdown: How Does the US Campaign Finance System Compare With the Rest of the Worlds? Christopher Hayes talks with political @ scientist Thomas Ferguson to find out. Watch Mark Hertsgaard on Democracy Now! arguing that ignoring climate change is a crime.

ut teachers unions and their allies are fighting back. @ Trade unionists, civil rights activists and educators have rallied with the Wisconsin protesters and put Governor Scott Walker on the defensive. To have the greatest impact, the unions must find a way to mobilize parents, young people and communities. Without their support, teachers will not succeed in countering these assaults. Getting that support will not be easy, because it requires educators to ac- @ knowledge that the school status quo is untenable and to join labor rights to educational justice. In a small but growing number of school districts, teachers and their unions are taking the lead rather than waiting for policy-makers to act. At Columbus High School in the Bronx, teachers are working with students and parents to resist the districts efforts to close the school by addressing the causes of student failure. In the South Bronx, parents, labor, educators and community organizers, united as CC9, have designed a strategy to reverse teacher turnover by providing new teachers @ with support from veteran lead teachers. In Chicago, Karen Lewis, of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), is presiding over the Chicago Teachers Union with a platform to reverse Renaissance 2010, a program to close many schools serving poor children of the South Side and timed to coincide with the demolition of housing projects pushing great numbers of poor people out of the city. CORE is focused on much more than salaries and benefits. It is challenging the use of high-stakes testing to punish students, teachers and schools, organizing for greater equity in school finances

May 9, 2011

The Nation.

Eric Alterman
How Low Can the Post Go?
In Ken Aulettas sterling New Yorker profile of Rupert Murdochs new BFF, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thompson, he makes
a startling observation: the reason Murdoch was able to put his man in the job without triggering any of the provisions of the sale designed to protect the papers integrity and independence was that the previous editor, Marcus Brauchli, who resigned under pressure but accepted a large severance, did not object to his removal. Thus, Murdoch was able to circumvent the restrictions of the Independent board. Given that, as Scott Sherman reported in Columbia Journalism Review, Brauchli himself played a major role in drafting the editorial independence agreement that established the special committee, one might almost suggest a plot. (Brauchlis payout for going quietly, Sherman writes, was $6.4 million.) Barely ninety days later, having proved his value as a company man, Brauchli emerged as publisher Katherine Weymouths surprise choice to run the Washington Post. Among his first acts as editor were to shutter the papers bureaus in New York, Chicago and LA, and eliminate the papers stand-alone business and book review sections. These unpopular decisions, however, were soon overshadowed by the role he played in one of the most humiliating episodes in the Posts recent history: the effort to peddle the papers influence to big-money interests through the creation of a series of salons at Weymouths home, co-hosted by Brauchli. Priced up to $250,000, they were advertised to industry lobbyists as a means to spend an evening with the right people [who] can alter the debate. When the story broke, a clearly embarrassed editor went into bunker mode, but the papers ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, wrote that Brauchli said he never saw the flier and would not have approved it, and quoted him saying, I had no idea. Brauchli next told Howard Kurtz, then of the Post, that he was appalled by the offer because it suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase. Unfortunately for Brauchli, Charles Pelton, the executive designated to be thrown under the bus for this appalling attack on the papers integrity, proved unwilling to lie down and die for the cause. He hired a lawyer, who forced the paper to reveal the truth. Brauchli eventually admitted in a letter to Pelton that he knew that the salon dinners were being promoted as off the record. That fact was never hidden from me by you or anyone else. All of the aboveancient history in newspaper timeis worth recalling in light of another, more recent ethical controversy in which the Post is embroiled. The salons were clearly a desperate measure to try to shore up the finances of a newspaper that lost a combined $357 million in 200809 and continues to hemorrhage not only readers but also many of its most talented reporters and editors. Today the Post is dependent for its survival on the profits of its Kaplan Higher Education subsidiary, which provides more than 60 percent of its revenue, derived from some extremely shady business practices designed to entrap low-income peopleespecially veteransinto enrolling in degree programs that they cannot afford and from which they will likely get little benefit. But heres the kicker: this business model relies on the federal student loan program to put up the tuition payments without too many questions asked. These underregulated government programs, in other words, are subsidizing the publication of the Washington Post in its role as government watchdog. In the meantime, the paper editorializes against new government regulation, and the owner of its parent company lobbies legislators in person for the same cause. The Post in general and Brauchli in particular have received a great deal of criticism for their handling of this issue, and they gave a response of sorts recently by publishing an extremely critical examination, by Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang, of Kaplan and the lucrative industry of forprofit higher education. The article did not appear to pull any punches with regard to dirty business practices at Kaplanall of them now ended, according to spokesmenor the degree to which the money-losing newspaper has grown dependent on the profits generated by the $2.9 billion in annual revenue Kaplan now enjoys. What it did ignore, however, is the role the Post has played in fighting the Obama administrations attempt to regulate the kind of abuses that appeared to be rampant at Kaplan and in the industry at large. It also included no critical comment regarding the extensive involvement of Post Company president and CEO Donald Graham in lobbying Congress to reject these regulations. True, the editorial in which the Post inveighed against these regulations did mention a relationship to Kaplan, but it did not even hint at the fact that Kaplans nefariously obtained profits have kept the Post in business. Nor has the paper ever faced up to the issues raised by Grahams lobbying campaign. Imagine youre a senator lobbied by the chairman of the Washington Post Company on a matter relating to his personal profit. Whatever the disclaimers, might you imagine that future coverage in the paper could be influenced by whether you go along with the guy? Before he bought the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch was willing to write off as much as $70 million a year to publish the crappy tabloid New York Post, largely because it gave him an instrument with which to punish and reward politicians and business associates on behalf of his business interests. Sadly, Katherine Weymouth, Marcus Brauchli and Donald Graham appear willing to risk giving the rest of us the impression they would do the same with the far more important, influential and justly respected Washington Post. However cloudy the financial future of this once-great newspaper, such shameless shenanigans can hardly be the best way to save what remains of it. n

10

The Nation.

May 9, 2011

Gary Younge
The Royal Wedding Is a Class Act
Before a lunch of pigs feet and pickled eggs in Montgomery, Alabama, I was asked to bless the table. The request had come
after my hostesss passionate plea to put more God in the schools and her praise for Britain, where an established church ensured that everybody got some kind of religious education. I didnt have the heart to tell her that although those lessons were compulsory, they were also considered something of a joke and that I now consider myself a lapsed agnostic (I used to not know, but then I just stopped caring), so I smiled and nodded. But when the call for a blessing received no response my cover was blown. I dont know how, I told her. Treating me as an object of extreme pity, she said, If thats all school prayer taught you, smart as you are, then I guess we can do without it. There are some things about British life that bear translation to Americans. How the National Health Service works and (to right-wingers) why it is so popular; how a game like cricket can last five days and stop for tea; and the relationship of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to the United Kingdomthese are no more obvious in the United States than the appeal of American football and the Second Amendment is to the British. But the one thing I thought Id never have to explain is why the monarchy is a bad idea. That, after all, is the whole point of everything the United States claims to be about. The New World. The American Revolution. The end of inherited entitlement. The home of reinvention, class fluidity and social mobility. The myths that underpin this countrys founding credo, for liberals and conservatives (albeit in different ways), are all informed by the overthrow of monarchy. Thats why the president is called Mr. Presidentfor all the trappings of office and power, hes supposed to have the same title as everybody else. So when Americans fawn over the forthcoming royal wedding, paying it more attention and apparently regarding it with more reverence than they would the nuptials of a presidents daughter, Im compelled to do a double take. When liberals and leftists ask me what I think of Prince William marrying Kate Middleton, I assume they are asking about the huge sums of public money being spent at a time of swingeing cuts or the volumes of ink spilled about her dress and the guest list while revolutions upend regions and economies implode. If I discover that what they really mean is, what do I think of him marrying a commoner and do I think it will last, my eyes roll and my blood pressure rises. Dont get me wrong. As much as I think about them at all, which is rarely, I wish William and Kate well as a couple. As one of a select few who subscribe to both The Nation and People, Im not precious. I dont let my politics get in the way of my trash interest. But what Americans consume as a celebrity wedding is something far more insidious: it is an affair of state. Its been almost 250 years since Americans last had to debate the question of the monarchy seriously, so it should be no surprise that some would be a little rusty. Heres a refresher. Having a royal family establishes inherited privilege at the heart of your system of government and embeds patronage at the center of your politics. Our upper chamber is still the House of Lords. People pay taxes to Her Majestys Revenue; if you win an election, you become Her Majestys Government; if you go to court, you face not the people but the Crown. All of this is of course primarily symbolic. The trouble is, its symbolic of something quite terriblethe notion that our head of state gains the position not by merit or election but by birth. In Britain, no matter how aspirant a parent is, nobody buys their kid a T-shirt that boasts Next King of England because the job is never up for grabs. If this were a mere anachronismthe performance of tradition and the exercise of heritagethen one might argue that it doesnt matter. But its not. The British class system has proved to be incredibly robust. More than half the cabinet went to private schoolthree went to Eton, as did Princes William and Harry, their maternal uncle and their grandfather. Meanwhile, most studies show that social mobility in Britain has stalled over the past two decades. Republicanism is by no means a majority view in the United Kingdom. Opposition to the monarchy there rarely tops 18 percent and support for it never dips below 70 percent. British people like the idea. Americans, I assumed, knew better. But whatever the patriotic mythology when it comes to power, the United States also seems to draw from a tiny gene puddle. Until recently George Bush, Richard Daley and Martin Luther King Jr. all had not only the same names but the same positions as did their fathers. Jimmy Hoffa still runs the Teamsters; a Landrieu is back in the mayors office in New Orleans. This hereditary reflex within the political class mirrors the increasingly sclerotic nature of social class in general. More than 40 percent of Americans born in the bottom quintile of earners will remain there as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States and in the United Kingdom remains mired at levels below those in most of Western Europe and Canada. With real wages stagnating and prices rising, many Americans feel they are going backward. But theres no need to go all the way back to 1775. So when the bells are chiming and the bride blushing, lets wish the individuals well and the institution ill. The royals are a class act. And that is precisely the problem. n

The Nation.

by KATHRYN JOYCE

Declaring a global orphan crisis, US evangelicals ride to the rescuewith unintended results.

Juntunen acknowledges that many adoption experts find his proposals nave, particularly in a year that witnessed scandals in Haiti, Nepal and most recently Ethiopia, where widespread irregularities and trafficking allegations may slow the once-booming program to a crawl. He met a chilly reception recently at the Adoption Policy Conference at New York Law School when he spoke alongside State Department officials. But Juntunen insists that his ideas for increasing adoption constitute a social movement, akin to the civil rights movement, and that the force of a growing adoption culture will help them prevail. In this expectation, he may be right. In Arizona, Juntunen was speaking with Dan Cruver, head of Together for Adoption, a key coalition in a growing evangelical adoption movement. The event was the first of the organizations new house conferences: small-scale meet-ups bolstering an active national movement that promotes Christians adopting as a way to address a worldwide orphan crisis they say encompasses hundreds of millions of children. Its a message Cruver also emphasizes in his book Reclaiming Adoptionone in a growing list of titles about orphan theology, which teaches that adoption mirrors Christian salvation, plays an essential role in antiabortion

n late March Craig Juntunen told a group of Christian adoption advocates assembled at a Chandler, Arizona, home about his plans to increase international adoptions fivefold. Just over a year before, the world had been riveted by the saga of Laura Silsby, the American missionary arrested while trying to transport Haitian children across the Dominican border. But the lessons of that scandal seemed far from Juntunens mind as he described his crusade to create a culture of adoption by simplifying adoptions labyrinthine ethical complexities to their emotional core. Juntunen, a former pro football quarterback and the adoptive father of three Haitian children, has emerged as a somewhat rogue figure in the adoption world since he recently founded an unorthodox nonprofit, Both Ends Burning. He has commissioned a documentary about desperate orphans in teeming institutions, Wrongfully Detained, and proposed a clearinghouse model that will raise the number of children adopted into US families to more than 50,000 per year.

politics and is a means of fulfilling the Great Commission, the biblical mandate that Christians spread the gospel. Yet while Cruver and his colleagues have inspired thousands of Christians to enter the arduous and expensive process of international adoption, the adoption industry is on a steep decline after years of ethical problems and tightening regulations around the world. Since the mid-90s, eighty-three countries have ratified the Hague convention regulating international adoption. By 2010 there were 12,000 such adoptions in the United States (including 1,100 exceptional humanitarian parole cases from post-earthquake Haiti)almost half those at the peak in 2004. If evangelicals heed Cruvers call en masse, it could mean not just a radical change in who raises the worlds children but a powerful clash between rapidly falling supply and sharply inflating demand. doption has long been the province of religious and secular agencies, but in the past two years evangelical advocacy has skyrocketed. In 2009 Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of the 2009 book Adopted for Life, shepherded through a Southern Baptist Church (SBC) resolution calling on all 16 million members of the denomination to become involved in adoption or orphan care. Last year at least five evangelical adoption conferences were held, and between 1,000 and 2,000 churches participated in an Orphan Sunday event in November. And in February, the mammoth evangelical adoption agency Bethany Christian Services announced that its adoption placements had increased 13 percent since 2009, in large part because of the mobilization of churches. We expect adoptions will continue to rise as new movements within the Christian community raise awareness and aid for the global orphan crisis, Bethany CEO Bill Blacquiere said. One result has been the creation of rainbow congregations across the country, like the congregation Moore helps pastor in Louisville, Highview Baptist. An active adoption ministry has brought 140 adopted children into the congregation in the

photo: ReuteRs/eliana aponte; aRt: jos chicas

The Adop ion Commandment

12

The Nation.

May 9, 2011

past five years. These children dont recognize the flags of their home countries, Moore proudly noted at a 2010 conference, but they can all sing Jesus Loves Me. fter the Haiti earthquake, the evangelical adoption movement sprang into action. Next to longstanding religious relief orphanages, upstart evangelical missions appeared. Some flung themselves into adversarial activism, decrying international aid organizations like UNICEF for obstructing the speedy adoption of Haitian children. In the United States, evangelicals and sympathetic politicians led the charge for expanded, expedited international adoption for what they had claimed before the earthquake was the countrys 400,000 or more orphansa figure repeated widely, despite a UNICEF clarification that likely only 50,000 children had lost both parents. (Identifying which children fit this description is a matter of painstaking investigation.)

Adoption has become a way for conservative evangelicals to reclaim the social gospel message from liberal churches.
Senator Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat and staunch adoption advocate, argued ferociously to expand a humanitarian parole program that expedites adoptions in progress: Either UNICEF is going to change or have a very difficult time getting support from the US Congress, she told the Associated Press. Others used the emotional language of rescue; a Mormon mission president said he had negotiated the release of sixtysix children bound for Salt Lake City homes. But what most people will remember about adoption in Haiti is the saga of Laura Silsby and nine other Southern Baptists who were jailed after trying to transport thirty-three orphans most solicited from living familiesto an unbuilt orphanage in the Dominican Republic, to await prospective evangelical adopters. Throughout the scandal the group members maintained they were simply ten Christians who obeyed Gods calling.

ilsbys claims to divine guidance attracted scorn from the mediaone outlet accused her of baby-snatching for Jesusbut her language resonates with nowcommonplace Christian adoption rhetoric. The movement cuts across evangelical distinctions, with the Southern Baptists taking a doctrinal lead; charismatic prayer warrior Lou Engle, co-founder of TheCall, praying for the most outrageous adoption movement to be released through the church; and Rick Warren declaring that members of his Saddleback Church will adopt 500 children in three years. Individual ministries abound, like Orphans Ransom, which

Kathryn Joyce is the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement. She is working on a book about adoption ethics and religion for PublicAffairs. Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

helps evangelicals pay international adoption fees that can range from $20,000 to $63,000. Churches report a contagious adoption culture in which even small congregations have adopted dozens of children in just a few years. Movement leaders say this viral effect is key to building the movement. Get as many people in the church to adopt, and adopt as many kids as you can, said one speaker at the 2010 Adopting for Life Conference, noting the particular power of a pastors example. Following that advice, in June the SBC joined with Bethany Christian Services to begin subsidizing Southern Baptist pastors adoption costs. Observers from adoption lobby groups mention two watershed moments for the movement: Warrens entrance into the orphan care field in 2005 and President Bushs decision in 2008 to name Jedd Medefind, a former Republican staffer in the California legislature, as head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Medefind is now the affable president of Christian Alliance for Orphans, a coalition of eighty Christian groups, and Warrens church is helping to set up an adoption program in Rwanda. It was kind of a perfect storm, reflects Tom DiFilipo, president of the Joint Council on International Childrens Services (JCICS), an influential secular adoption advocacy group that has sought to partner with the evangelical movement. We hit that moment when a movement really starts to ramp up and get the attention of the public. The movements influence was on display in September in a closed-door meeting with UNICEFfrequently cast as antiadoption for raising ethical concerns about adopting from disaster- or poverty-stricken nationsleveraged by six key evangelical adoption groups in an effort to find common ground. As a way for conservative evangelicals to reclaim the social gospel message from liberal churches, adoption is a perfect storm, too, seemingly defining antiabortion activism as more truly prolifeor whole life, as one Bethany staffer coined itwhile providing a new opportunity, as recent orphan theology texts explain, to spread the gospel. In Reclaiming Adoption, Cruver bluntly declares, The ultimate purpose of human adoption by Christians, therefore, is not to give orphans parents, as important as that is. It is to place them in a Christian home that they might be positioned to receive the gospel. In person, Russell Moore denies that invoking the Great Commission means adoption is a vehicle for evangelism. But in Adopting for Life, he calls adoption evangelistic to the core, since Christian adoptive parents are committing to years of gospel proclamation. Likewise, although Medefind dismisses the idea of proselytizing through adoption, the Alliance membership agreement envisions every orphan experiencing Gods unfailing love and knowing Jesus as Savior. Followers appear to have taken the message at face value. Last winter, in the wake of the earthquake, the Rev. Tom Benz announced his plan to airlift 50 to 150 [Haitian] orphans to a place called BridgeStone, a 140-acre retreat center owned by his Alabama church. Benz, a jolly pastor who runs an evangelical summer program for Ukrainian orphans next to the Black

erhaps more so than in any other discipline, philosophy is best understood as a great conversation held across hundreds of years. All philosophersand we are all philosophers or their followershave the same eternal questions. What is the nature of the world? What can we know about it? How should we behave? How should we govern ourselves and each other? Socrates and Nietzsche wanted to answer these questions. Aristotle and Hegel wanted answers to these questions. Scientists and artists want answers to these questions. These lectures return to abiding issues confronted by each new age and thinker. They are more than a collection of the thoughts of various geniuses; they link their concerns across centuries, making their debates a part of our own. Professor Daniel N. Robinson focuses on the Long Debate about the nature of self and self identity; the authority of experience and the authority of science; the right form of life, just in case you have the right theory of human nature. On what philosophical precepts does the rule of law depend? What are the philosophical justifications for respect of the individual? What legal and moral implications arise from the claim of our autonomy? On what basis, philosophically, did we ever come to regard ourselves as outside the order of nature? In the nature of things there are no final answers, but some are better than others. A life-long student of these issues, Professor Robinson is a Philosophy Faculty Member at Oxford University and a distinguished Research Professor, Emeritus, at Georgetown University. He has published well over a dozen books on a remarkable range of subjects, including the connection between his two specialties, philosophy and psychology, and aesthetics, politics, and human nature. Professor Robinsons course takes you into the exciting world of ideas. Customers agree: Professor Robinson explains multiple disciplines like no one since Aristotle. His scope is awesome. A professors professor. About The Great Courses We review hundreds of top-rated professors from Americas best colleges and universities each year. From this extraordinary group we choose only those rated highest by panels of our customers. Fewer than 10% of these world-class scholarteachers are selected to make The Great Courses . Weve been doing this since 1990, producing more than 3,000 hours of material in modern and ancient history, philosophy, literature, fine arts, the sciences, and mathematics for intelligent, engaged, adult lifelong learners. If a course is ever less than
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Aristotle

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14

The Nation.

May 9, 2011

Sea, explained that the Haiti program would host children for ninety days, during which volunteers would teach them English, immerse them in the gospel and incubate adoptions with local church families. Benz originally planned the program for Ukrainian orphans, but once he announced his Haiti plans, he says, he was overwhelmed by volunteer support and donations. Miles of new plumbing and electrical wire were laid for the centers twentytwo cabins, and construction began on three permanent staff lodges (one for Benzs family), almost all with donated materials and labor. Benz was optimistic that he could wrangle the system, with the help of a friend with State Department connections, by representing his plan as a foreign studies program. Its not like were taking the kids permanently, he said. Were taking them for ninety days, and then theyre going back. Reminded of the adoption mission, Benz chuckled. Well, thats absolutely part of our agenda, but you know, thats not the thing were going to emphasize to the Haitian government! Over the spring and summer of 2010, months wore on and passports for the Haitian children were not forthcom-

Evangelical ministries claim that there are as many as 210 million orphans worldwide, but that number paints an inaccurate picture.
ing. The only progress made was on the BridgeStone estate. After months of delays, a September fundraising missive asked donors for continued patience as Benz sought to bring children out of darkness and suffering into faith and life in Jesus Christ. Shortly thereafter, Benzs Haiti blog came down, and he sent an announcement of the retreat centers pending open house for the launch of its adoption program for Ukrainian children. By March it had resulted in eight adoptions that, Benz promised, would help the children grow into mighty men and women of faith. or many adoption reformers, the Silsby affair changed the script for how adoption is discussed. Karen Moline, a board member of the watchdog group Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform, says Silsby put a face to the worst part of what international adoption can be, which is entitlement, meaning American parents sense of entitlement to developing nations children. Susie Krabacher, an American and devout Christian, is director of Mercy and Sharing, a Haitian orphanage founded in 1994 to care for severely disabled, abandoned children, which does not perform adoptions. She says there is enormous economic pressure on Haitian parents to relinquish children. Many orphanages in Haiti provide for children whose parents cant afford to feed them but who remain involved and visit often. But Haiti also has a history of unethical adoption programs. Post-earthquake, Krabacher says, they have become the biggest money-making operation in Haiti. Indeed, many orphanages, mindful of high international adoption fees, tell struggling par-

ents that they should give up one of their children. The financial desperation in Haiti is so intense and the coercion so pervasive, Krabacher says, that the vast majority of Mercy and Sharings 181 employees would have to look at the option of giving up a child if they didnt have a job. This gets at the central problem in how most evangelical adoption ministries define the scope of the worldwide orphan crisis. As with the misleading estimates of Haitian orphans, the global numbers most frequently mentionedranging from 132 million to 210 millionpaint an inaccurate picture, willfully misconstruing UNICEF tallies of developing nations vulnerable children, a category that includes children who have lost only one parent or who live with extended family. Susan Bissell, UNICEFs chief of child protection, says no good estimate exists of the number of orphans worldwide, but a 2004 UNICEF report calculated that there were at least 16 million children worldwide who had lost both parents. There are not 145 million kids out there waiting for someone in America to adopt them, says Paul Myhill, president of the evangelical orphan ministry World Orphans, which he calls a black sheep in his field for its prioritization of in-country orphan care over adoption. Its unfair to bat these statistics around without using all the qualifiers. But those numbers have their effect. In July, Bethany Christian Services announced that three of the largest Christian-based adoption agencies, including itself, were seeing record numbers of adoptions. Bethany attributes the increase to the evangelical adoption movement as well as the crisis in Haiti, which inspired nearly 20,000 inquiries from across the United States, even though Haiti, post-quake, was quickly closed for new adoptions. Agencies like Bethany explained that they easily redirected this outpouring of enthusiasm to more open markets, like Ethiopia. The problem is that Ethiopia, which last year was poised to become the worlds top sending country, is beset by numerous ethical scandals. In 2009 and 2010, investigations by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and CBS News found evidence that Christian World Adoptiona US agency whose slogan is God is in control of our agency and your adoptionhad recruited and allegedly even bought children from intact families, some of whom didnt understand the permanency of adoption. (CWA claimed that these cases were misunderstandings and charged that it was being persecuted for its Christian beliefs.) In January the State Department hosted a conference call to discuss ethical difficulties surrounding Ethiopias adoption program. Just weeks later came the announcement that the license for Minnesotabased Christian agency Better Future Adoption Services had been revoked by the Ethiopian government over accusations of child trafficking. And in March, Ethiopias government announced it was cutting the rate of new adoptions by 90 percent. Just after the Haiti earthquake, the Christian Alliance for Orphans advertised that its sixth-annual summit would produce a long-term response for Haitis orphans. By late April 2010, when nearly 1,200 Christians gathered for the summit at a megachurch outside Minneapolis, organizers had to contend with the shadow Silsby had cast. Even Moore worried that the

May 9, 2011

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scandal would give a black eye to the orphan-care movement. Were killing ourselves with these ethical lapses, says Chuck Johnson, president of the secular adoption lobby group the National Council for Adoption (NCFA). I think Christians are the worst at this sometimes, about the ends justifying the means. I will do anything to save this one childs life; I will falsify a visa application if I have to. In early 2010, Johnson told me, NCFA held an online ethics seminar that drew roughly twenty-five representatives from religious and secular adoption agencies. As part of the webinar, NCFA took a blind poll of participants responses to various ethical situations. Either through ignorance or a willingness to bend the rules, 2030 percent of agency representatives gave answers that were tantamount to committing visa fraud or other serious violations. Youll hear people saying, Im following Gods law, not mans laws, Johnson says. Brian Luwis, founder of the evangelical agency America World Adoption and a Christian Alliance board member, says ardent adoptive parents can wreak havoc for those coming after them. I call them adoption crazies, he says. Theyre such strong advocates, theyll do things in desperation to have a child they think is theirs. Some are really unlawful, falsifying an adoption or something like that. Many wont get caught, but once you get caught, what have you done to the system? Its not hard to imagine how movement rhetoric that casts international adoption as emergency rescue and spiritual battle could inspire a willingness to use any means necessary. There are indications that such rule-bending occurs at the top levels of government. Blogging about the 2010 Adoption Policy Conference in New York for The Huffington Post, sociologist Philip Cohen reported a troubling statement made by Whitney Reitz, an official at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)the Homeland Security agency that oversees the entry of international adoptees. Reitz, who is credited with crafting last years humanitarian parole program for Haitian children, told the crowd, The idea was to help the kids. And if we overlooked Hague, I dont think Im going to apologize. Chris Rhatigan, a USCIS spokesman, explains that the comment was made during a closed-door session not meant to be open to the media and in the context of a devastating natural disaster, where very extraordinary measures were taken. Our main goal at the time was to save those children, says Rhatigan. I think they did everything they possibly could.

espite the Silsby affair, the Haiti earthquake helped accelerate the rise of the evangelical adoption movement, and increased its influence. At the Christian Alliance summit, JCICSs DiFilipo implored the audience to advocate for less restrictive adoption policies, pointing to the drop in international adoptions from nearly 23,000 in 2004 to a projected 7,000 by 2012. These numbers underlie a feeling among adoption advocates that even though demand is increasing, international adoption is under siege. The days of a large sending country are over, Johnson has said. The decrease is often attributed to the closure of Guatemala and the slowdown in China. DiFilipo says the threat is far

broader, with eight or nine countries functionally suspending intercountry adoption within the past three yearssomething he attributes to institutional bias against international adoption rather than documented ethical lapses. As the numbers have dropped, the adoption industry has constricted, with the closure or merger of 25 percent of US agencies since 2000. The shuttering of Guatemala in 2008what Luwis called the gravy train for many agencieswas a major factor. JCICS felt the squeeze too. In an internal 2009 document, the organization described financial shortages that forced it to halve expenses and staff in recent years. In the last few years, a bunch of top placing agencies in the US met together kind of clandestinely, recalls Luwis. To me it was a saving our rear meeting. I take no salary. But for some of the others, this is their livelihood. They place thousands of kids; this is the way theyve done it, theyre not going to change. Even as adoption numbers decrease, advocates maintain substantial bipartisan support. A key ally is Senator Landrieu, a founding member of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute and sponsor of numerous pieces of pro-adoption legislationmany in collaboration with hard-right senators. Landrieu was scheduled to address the Christian Alliance summit but was waylaid by the BP oil spill. In her place spoke fellow Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, another advocate who has made common cause with right-wing senators like Sam Brownback and James Inhofe. Klobuchar told me how, as part of the first senatorial delegation to Haiti, she urged President Ren Prval to revise the countrys adoption and parental rights policies. In a September letter to the State Department, she interceded for US families whose pending adoptions from Nepal were halted after indications that the countrys newly reopened program was again processing trafficked children. Its an illustration of how temporary were the lessons from Haiti, and how common the underlying problems its scandals exposed. Congresss slant is that international adoption is good, so lets get those kids out, says Moline of Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform. They dont understand what the business aspect of it really means, and they must answer to their constituents demands. One of the most significant recent initiatives on Capitol Hill is the Families for Orphans Act, drafted by the Families for Orphans Coalition, whose executive committee includes DiFilipo, Luwis and Johnson. The bill, which Landrieus office will reintroduce this year, would create a special State Department office to oversee adoptions and offercritics say conditiondevelopmental aid to countries that help obtain permanent parental care for orphans, including through international adoption. In an op-ed published in the Washington Examiner in March 2010, co-sponsors Landrieu and Inhofe dangled the promise that the office could facilitate the placement of tens of thousands more Haitian children with US families. Juntunen of Both Ends Burning believes the chokepoint created as newly mobilized evangelicals enter the tightening adoption market will spark outrage that will transform the systemcutting red tape, and possibly needed safeguards, along the way. Weve created this culture of adoption, and

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now more and more people want to participate and are left frustrated because theyre denied the opportunity to pursue what they want to pursue, Juntunen told me. Well, thats where social movements happen. I think that this culture of adoption will be the force, the catalyst, for change. And the pressure wont be coming just from evangelicals. In June, Together for Adoption and other evangelical leaders will meet with Juntunen and his network of secular adoption advocates to discuss ways to reverse the international adoption freefall. After a year of headlines concerning improperly adopted children, from Haiti to Nepal to Ethiopia, evangelical advo-

cates admit that the system is troubled, but they insist that expanding international adoption is necessary and, if done right, beautiful. Theres always going to need to be tremendous vigilance that compassionate intentions lead to compassionate outcomes, says the Christian Alliances Medefind. But if youre not willing to deal with complexity, it would be wise to stay away from efforts to address the worlds needs. Despite the altruistic motives of many evangelical adopters, the size and wealth of their movement is likely to tip the balance of a system that already responds too blithely to the moral and humanitarian concerns raised by poor countries and all too readily to Western demand. n

Big Brothers: Thought Control at Koch

Thanks to Citizens United, thousands of Koch Industries employees were told whom to vote for.
by MarK aMeS anD MiKe eLK

n the eve of the November midterm elections, Koch Industries sent an urgent letter to most of its 50,000 employees advising them on whom to vote for and warning them about the dire consequences to their families, their jobs and their country should they choose to vote otherwise. The Nation obtained the Koch Industries election packet for Washington State which included a cover letter from its president and COO, David Robertson; a list of Koch-endorsed state and federal candidates; and an issue of the company newsletter, Discovery, full of alarmist right-wing propaganda. Legal experts interviewed for this story called the blatant corporate politicking highly unusual, although no longer skirting the edge of legality, thanks to last years Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which granted free speech rights to corporations. Before Citizens United, federal election law allowed a company like Koch Industries to talk to officers and shareholders about whom to vote for, but not to talk with employees about whom to vote for, explains Paul M. Secunda, associate professor of law at Marquette University. But according to Secunda, who recently wrote in The Yale Law Journal Online about the effects of Citizens United on political coercion in the workplace, the decision knocked down those regulations. Now, companies like Koch Industries are free to send out newsletters persuading their employees how to vote. They can even intimidate their employees into voting for their candidates. Secunda
lloyd milleR

Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion and co-author of The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia, is a founding editor of The eXiled Online (exiledonline.com). Mike Elk is a labor journalist and third-generation union organizer based in Washington, DC.

adds, Its a very troubling situation. The Kochs were major supporters of the Citizens United case; they were also chief sponsors of the Tea Party and major backers of the anti-Obamacare campaign. Through their network of libertarian think tanks and policy institutes, they have been major drivers of unionbusting campaigns in Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere. This sort of election propaganda seems like a new development, says UCLA law professor Katherine Stone, who specializes in labor law and who reviewed the Koch Industries election packet for The Nation. Until Citizens United, this sort of political propaganda was probably not permitted. But after the Citizens United decision, I can imagine itll be a lot more common, with restrictions on corporations now lifted. The election packet starts with a letter from Robertson dated October 4, 2010. It read: As Koch company employees, we have a lot at stake in the upcoming election. Each of us is likely to be affected by the outcome on Nov. 2. That is why, for the first time ever, we are mailing our newest edition of Discovery and several other helpful items to the home address of every U.S. employee [emphasis added]. For most Koch employees, the helpful items included a list of Koch-approved candidates, which was presented on a separate page labeled Elect to Prosper. A brief introduction to the list reads: The following candidates in your state are supported by Koch companies and KOCHPAC, the political action committee for Koch companies. We believe these candidates will best advance policies supporting economic freedom. What the Kochs mean by economic freedom is explained on the next page. As the mailer makes clear, Koch Industries tailored its election propaganda to the state level, rather than focusing on national elections. Of the nineteen candidates that Koch Industries recommended in its Washington State

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list, sixteen were Republicans. The three Democratic candidates approved by the Kochs included two members of the Roadkill Caucus, Washingtons version of the conservative Blue Dogs. Only two of the nineteen races on the list were for national office, and in both cases Koch Industries backed Tea Party friendly Republicans: Dino Rossi, an antilabor candidate, who lost to incumbent Democratic Senator Patty Murray; and Jaime Herrera-Beutler, who ran in the Republican primary as a moderate, but who came out recently as a Tea Party radical, much to her constituencys surprise. After guiding employees on how they should vote, the mailer devoted the rest of the material to the sort of indoctrination one would expect from an old John Birch Society pamphlet (the Koch Brothers father, Fred Koch, was a founding member of the JBS). It offers an apocalyptic vision of the companys free-market struggle for liberty against the totalitarian forces of European Union bureaucrats and deficit-spending statists. The newsletter begins with an unsigned editorial preaching familiar Tea Party themes, repackaged as Koch Industry corporate philosophy:
For more than 40 years, Koch Industries has openly and consistently supported the principles of economic freedom and market-based policies. Unfortunately, these values and principled point of view are now being strongly opposed by many politicians (and their media allies) who favor everincreasing government.... Even worse, recent government actions are threatening to bankrupt the country.... And the facts are that the overwhelming majority of the American people will be much worse off if government overspending is allowed to bankrupt the country.

employees. Kochs essay sets out to rank the best and worst US presidents in terms of their economic policies. Charles who with his brother David is worth $44 billion, putting them fifth on the 2010 Forbes 400 listwarns his readers that his history lesson may surprise them. And to his credit, Koch doesnt disappoint. Koch glorifies Warren G. Harding and his successor Calvin Coolidge for producing one of the most prosperous [eras] in U.S. history. Koch explains that what made Harding great was his insistence on cutting taxes, reducing the national debt and cutting the federal budget, all policies that Congressional Republicans are proposing in todays budget negotiations. What made Harding so great, in other words, is what made radical Republican candidates so great in November 2010. Kochs pick for worst president is Herbert Hoover, whom he accuses of undermining economic freedom and thus precipitating the Great Depression. Under Hoover, he writes, federal spending roughly doubled and personal income tax rates jumped from 25 percent to 63 percent. He raised corporate taxes, too, and doubled the estate tax. Hoover also pressured business leaders to keep wages artificially high, contributing to massive unemployment. According to most historians, the Harding and Coolidge administrations free-market romp was one of the key factors that led to the Great Depression. Their time in office was marked by obscene corruption, racial violence, unionbusting, feudal wealth inequalities and, shortly thereafter, the total collapse of the American economy. egal experts say that this kind of corporate-sponsored propagandizing has been almost unheard-of in America since the passage of New Dealera laws like the National Labor Relations Act, which codified restrictions on political activism and pressure in the workplace. NYU law professor Samuel Estreicher, director of the Center for Labor and Employment Law, told The Nation in an e-mail interview that such overt politicking to employees is still rare. I am not aware of it happening with many employers, he wrote. According to UCLAs Stone, although Citizens United frees Koch Industries and other corporations to propagandize their employees with their political preferences, the same doesnt hold true for unionsat least not in the workplace. If a union wanted to hand out political materials in the workplace not directly relevant to the workers interestssuch as providing a list of candidates to support in the electionsthe employer has the right to ban that material, says Stone. They could even prohibit its distribution on lunch breaks or after shifts, because by law its the companys private property. Stone points to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1915, Coppage v. Kansas, which protected employers right to draw up contracts forbidding employees from joining unions. Justice William Days dissent in that case pointed out that if the state was ready to enforce the employers contractual bans on union activity, then it was opening the way for the state to enforce employers legal right to control their employees political and ideological activities:

Further into the company newsletter is an article headlined Whats a Business to Do? It portrays corporate titans like the Kochs as freedom-fighting underdogs, modernday Sakharovs and Mandelas targeted for repression by Big Government statists: Citizens who are openly critical of the European Union bureaucracy in Brussels or the out-ofcontrol government of the United States are being shouted down by politicians, government officials and their media and other allies. In this scenario, Big Government wants to muzzle the Kochs before they can spread their message to the people. That message comes down to preaching the benefits of lower wages:
If the government insists that someone should be paid $50 per hour in wages and benefits, but that person only creates $30 worth of value, no one will prosper for long. Anything that undermines the mobility of labor, such as policies that make it more expensive and difficult to change where people are employed, also increases unemployment. Similar policies that distort the labor marketsuch as minimum wage laws and mandated benefitscontribute to unemployment.

Easily the strangest and most disturbing article of all comes from the head of Koch Industries himself, Charles Koch, who offers an election-season history lesson to his

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Would it be beyond a legitimate exercise of the police power to provide that an employee should not be required to agree, as a condition of employment, to forgo affiliation with a particular political party, or the support of a particular candidate for office? It seems to me that these questions answer themselves.

With Citizens United, it seems, the country is heading back to the days of court-enforced corporatocracy. Already, workers at a Koch subsidiary in Portland, Oregon, are complaining about being subjected to political and ideological propaganda. Employees at Georgia-Pacific warehouses in Portland say the company encourages them to read Charles Kochs The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the Worlds Largest Private Company and to attend ideological seminars in which Koch management preaches their bosses market-based management philosophy. Travis McKinney, an employee at a Portland Georgia-Pacific distribution center, says, They drill into your head things like The 10 Guiding Principles of Koch Industries. They even stamp the ten principles on your time card. McKinney, a fourth-generation employee of GeorgiaPacific, says relations have sharply deteriorated since Koch Industries bought the company in late 2005. He and fel-

low employees at three Georgia-Pacific distribution centers are locked in a yearlong contract battle with the new Koch Industries management. Workers there, members of the Inlandboatmens Union of the Pacific (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) recently voted unanimously to reject managements contract and voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike if management continues to try to impose cuts in benefits and job security in the new contracts. Political propagandizing is a heated issue in Oregon, which passed SB-519 in the summer of 2009, a bill placing restrictions on corporations ability to coerce employees to attend political meetings and vote the way the corporation tells them to vote. In late December 2009just before SB-519 was to go into effect the US Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit with Associated Oregon Industries to block the bill from becoming law. A similar bill in Wisconsin was struck down in November in a federal court. However, the Chambers lawsuit in Oregon was thrown out in May 2010 by US District Court Judge Michael Mosman on procedural grounds, leaving open the possibility that it could still be struck down. In the meantime, workers across the country should start preparing for a future workplace environment in which political proselytizing is the new normal. n

China rethinks nuclear Power

The worlds second-largest economy is emerging as a pacesetter in solar and wind technology.
by LuCia Green-WeiSKeL
n the wake of the partial meltdown of nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant in Japan, China announced it would shelve plans for vast expansion of its nuclear power capacity, at least temporarily, until more stringent safety checks are performed. Construction will eventually resume, but with a potentially scaled-back role for nuclear power and with solar and wind energy picking up some of the slack. If nuclear remains a small fraction of Chinas total energy mix (just 2 percent today, compared with Americas 20 percent), and Beijing looks to solar and wind for future energy growth in the era of climate change, the boost to those industries could make renewables cost-competitive with fossil fuels much earlier than previously projected. The announcement marked a significant policy change. As recently as January, after reporting a breakthrough in nuclear fuel reprocessing technology, China reaffirmed its commitment
Lucia Green-Weiskel is a project manager of the climate change program at the Beijing-based Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation. She lives in New York.

to an expansion of its nuclear energy capacity that would be greater than that of all other countries combined. Construction began on twenty-seven reactors, adding to the existing thirteen. Another fifty-two were planned. Just days after the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan, China passed into law its Twelfth Five Year Plan, which will serve as the countrys economic blueprint until 2015. The primary theme of the plan is sustainable development, with a high priority on securing nonfossil fuel energy sources. New policies include reducing carbon intensity by 17 percent by 2015. That means manufacturing entities would need to emit at least 17 percent less carbon in 2015 than they emitted in 2010 for the same amount of economic output. The plan also mandates ambitious energy-cutting targets, implementation of market mechanisms like cap and trade, and generation of 11.4 percent of total energy from nonfossil fuels by 2015, up from the current 8 percent. Pre-Fukushima, a sizable portion of that 11.4 percent was to come from nuclear sources. That target is being reconsidered. The planners of the worlds second-largest economy are facing a labyrinth of competing constraints. China is the worlds largest
lloyd milleR

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user of energy, at a time of global shortages and high fossil fuel prices. The ruling party feels compelled to seek continued rapid economic growth in order to employ its people and maintain the image of a country steadily marching toward industrial modernizationlest the party lose its legitimacy and risk a Cairo-style uprising. So China must try to expand economic development, but not its greenhouse gas footprint. Thats like driving from New York to Boston and then figuring out how to use the same amount of gas to get from Boston to California. To achieve this, China will have to wring more energy from sources like wind and solar. And that is in fact the plan. The countrys National Energy Administration said in March that energy from solar sources may double over the next five years, from five to ten gigawatts. Even if it doesnt reduce the role of nuclear energy, China is emerging as a pacesetter in solar and wind technology. It currently produces half the worlds solar panels; in the city of Rizhao, population 3 million, 99 percent of homes have solar hot-water heaters. Last year China reportedly installed three times as much wind-power capacity as the United States, and the pace is expected to increase in the next decade. Even if China were to implement its most ambitious nuclear plan, total energy from that sector in 2020 would be about a third of projected wind output. Without nuclear expansion, wind and solar will need to make up the difference. Renewable energy authorities have indicated they are optimistic about their ability to meet expanded demand.

here are good reasons for China to shelve its nuclear industry for good even without the lesson of Fukushima. Although it is less earthquake prone than Japan, China is not immune to a temblor-triggered disaster. In May 2008 a massive quake, 7.9 on the Richter scale, hit Sichuan province, where many nuclear warheads as well as several reactors and two plutonium plants were located. No significant damage to the nuclear facilities was reported, but there is no guarantee the outcome will always be so fortuitous. After all, before Fukushima three of the largest nuclear accidents in historyLucens in Switzerland in 1969, Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986were not caused by seismic activity. Like all nuclear facilities, Chinas plants are vulnerable to human and mechanical error as well as terrorist attack. And many of the newer plants are in densely populated areas, so fallout from a meltdown could cause massive suffering. Another drawback of nuclear energy is the vast amount of water required to generate steam and to cool spent fuel rods. Chinas energy sector, like that of many other countries, competes with agriculture for water, which is in scarce supply the country has suffered major droughts in the past decade, with some rivers running dry. The problem became so serious that in 2002 Beijing launched the giant South-to-North Water Transfer Project, costing approximately $62 billion and displacing hundreds of thousands of people who lived along its routes. Worries about food security and grain prices have already led China to express concern about biofuels. Food shortages could result in vastly increased imports, which would drive up global prices. And, as with all other countries that rely on nuclear power, China hasnt solved the

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problem of storing ever-growing quantities of nuclear waste. There is no question that China will find it difficult to restrict nuclear energy. It is the type of project the government is best at: large-scale infrastructure requiring extensive government investment and oversight. On the surface, nuclear appears to be a quick fix to two of the most pressing problems facing Beijing: air pollution and the need to become less dependent on foreign energy sources. For this reason, most analysts say growth in nuclear power is inevitable. The biggest obstacle to a nuclear-free China may be the industry itself. The country has a powerful nuclear interest group that is not likely to yield quietly to restrictions, and the intermingling of business interests and politics strengthens nuclear advocates in China and the United States. In January President Hu Jintao met with Barack Obama in Washington at a state summit, which generated $45 billion in business between the two countries, with many of the projects advancing nuclear and clean coal interests. Chinas State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation (SNPTC) walked away with a $5.3 billion deal with US-based Westinghouse, which will provide development, service and maintenance on its AP1000 nuclear technology in Zhejiang and Shandong provinces. With its pockets full of cash and the prospect of new deals to come, the nuclear lobby didnt skip a beat in responding to Beijings post-Fukushima freeze. Representatives from the China National Nuclear Corporation issued a statement that its nuclear safety standards were higher than the world average. The government is split on the issue. Xie Zhenhua, who led the Chinese negotiating team at the UN climate talks in Cancn last year and is vice chair of the National Development and Reform Commission, the countrys most powerful agency, denied there would be any slowdown in the expansion of nuclear power. But Premier Wen Jiabao said Chinas long- and medium-

term nuclear plans would be adjusted and improved. A month before the meltdowns in Fukushima, a top official from the Energy Research Institute of the NDRC said nuclear targets were too aggressive and could put too much pressure on the industry, resulting in compromised safety. But Tian Shujia, who works in nuclear safety at Chinas Ministry of Environmental Protection, defended the industry. The safety of Chinas nuclear power facilities is guaranteed and China will not abandon its nuclear power plan for fear of slight risks, he said. Those who watch China closely know there are reasons to doubt the governments commitment to public safety. The reflexive cover-up of the deaths of several workers at one of the Olympic sites in the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games came under international scrutiny. And concern for safety has not slowed Chinas coal industry, which in 2004 accounted for over 35 percent of the worlds production and 80 percent of global coal-miningrelated deaths. As of this writing, the government has no plans to implement new nuclear safety measures. Even so, it is possible that one consequence of the horrific meltdown in Japan will be Chinas accelerated development of clean and safe energy. With its huge economy, driven by central planning and aggressive government investment, China is the only country building a green-technology industry on a scale that could bring down global prices of solar panels and wind turbines, making them affordable in the developing world. This should be a key part of the global strategy to keep emissions under 350 parts per million, the maximum threshold recommended by climate scientists. For this to happen, solar and wind energy must become cost-competitive not only with nuclear but with fossil fuels. Given Chinas size and unique role as world manufacturer and exporter, it is fair to say that it is the best hope for giving solar and wind energy that boost. As China goes, so goes the rest of the world. n

europes rising islamophobia

What makes it so lethal is that it has broad appealfrom the far left to the far right.
by PauL HOCKenOS

ith inspiring scenes of the Arab Spring on television for months, one might have expected images of democratic revolutions to punch a hole in the crude anti-Muslim stereotypes of Europes Islamophobes, those politicians and intellectuals who swear that Islam is totalitarian to its core. And if this alone didnt dispel clichs of a monolithic, violent religion, then surely the vox pop of diaspora Egyptians, Tunisians and others on the nightly newsuniversity students, women who head NGOs and children alongside their native French or German peerswould have demonstrated the diversity and integration of Muslim Europeans, something study after study documents.

Berlin

Paul Hockenos is a writer living in Berlin.

To the contrary, in recent elections Islamophobes like Frances right-wing National Front and the anti-EU True Finn Party racked up their best numbers ever, the latest strides in a surging movement that is recasting the political landscape of Western Europe. These elements have every reason to thank mainstream politicians, who, in the hope of exploiting the phenomenon for their own gain, have paved the way for the far right. In April, for example, Frances ridiculous burqa ban went into effect with overwhelming popular support, while EU leaders pushed the panic button over Tunisian refugees landing in Italy and Malta, turning the image of peaceful revolutionaries across the Mediterranean into one of an impoverished mob besieging Fortress Europe. What makes anti-Muslim racism so lethal is that unlike populisms of the past, Islamophobia has broad appeal across

May 9, 2011

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the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right and irrespective of class or educational level. Where it manifests itself in electoral parties, such as in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and now even Sweden and Finland, its advocates fare much better than old-school far-right parties ever did, with their vulgar anti-Semitism and expansionist fantasies. There is nevertheless plenty of overlap with the extreme right, which inscribes anti-Islam thinking prominently in its manifestos and is thriving on the new discourse; never before have so many of its representatives been so close to the levers of power in so many Western European countries. Islamophobia is solidly mainstream; there is no politically correct taboo against it, as there is with overt racism or other strains of xenophobia. In fact, some of Europes highest-profile Islamophobes justify their attacks on Islam and Europes Muslims in the name of womens and gay rights. Conservative, liberal and even leftist parties tap into it, partly out of opportunism and partly out of conviction. Invoking secularism and Enlightenment values, some centrists and leftists propagate a cultural racism that instead of using skin color imputes immutable characteristics to cultures and assigns them a hierarchy, with Western civilization at the top. This is Islamophobia, which functions just as racism does, and serves the purposes of those who have long sought to stem immigration, keep Turkey out of the European Union and secure a white Christian Europe. ot every European country has anti-Muslim parties as successful as two of Islamophobias poster boys, the Dutch Freedom Party and the Danish Peoples Party, both of which put the clash of cultures and the Islamic menace at the center of their programs. Yet these cases are instructive, because they represent a new generation of the European right, and the conditions of their rise exist across Western Europe. Surveys and opinion polls, for example, indicate that anti-Muslim sentiment in Holland and Denmark is about the same as in most other Western European countries. In one recent study, between 34 and 37 percent of French, Dutch, Portuguese and Danes say they have a negative opinion of Muslims. In Germany the figure is 59 percent. The Dutch Freedom Party is a one-man outfit led by 47-yearold Geert Wilders, immediately recognizable by his wavy mane of platinum-blond hair. Since October the party has been an unofficial partner in the center-right governing coalition (it has no cabinet seats, but it can dictate terms to a minority government that ultimately needs its votes). In the Netherlands, previously renowned for its tolerance, Wilderss party more than doubled its numbers last year, to 16 percent of the electorate, on a platform to stop the Islamization of the Netherlands. The party pledged to halt immigration from Muslim countries, to tax women wearing headscarves and to ban the Koran as well as the construction of mosques. Wilders blames the easygoing model of Dutch multiculturalism for exposing the Netherlands

to Islam, and thus for undermining the very tolerance it navely extended to Muslim peoples. Over the past two years he has consistently polled as one of the countrys most popular politicians, despite being put on trial on charges of inciting hatred against Muslims (the case is ongoing). As for the Danish Peoples Party, it has worked hand-in-hand with the countrys center-right government since 2001. The partyone leading MP likens the hijab to the swastikatook 15 percent of the vote in the 2009 European Parliament elections and is now Denmarks third-biggest party. Its guiding light, Pia Kjaersgaard, originally belonged to one of Denmarks establishment parties, as Wilders did in the Netherlands. Unlike the old right, with its blood-and-soil chauvinism and antiSemitism, new rightists like Kjaersgaard couch their nationalism as a defense of Western civilization and even Judeo-Christian values. One of her quotes: Not in their wildest imagination would anyone [in 1900] have imagined that large parts of Copenhagen and other Danish towns would be populated by people who are at a lower stage of civilization, with their own primitive and cruel customs like honor killings, forced marriages, halal slaughtering, and blood-feuds. This is exactly what is happening now. [They] have come to a Denmark that left the dark ages hundreds of years ago. In both countries the governments have caved in to Islamophobes by dramatically tightening immigration requirements for non-Westerners. The once proudly open-minded Denmark now has the strictest such laws in Europe. Im certain that soon many other countries will copy us, boasted the Peoples Party after the November passage of a law it co-wrote. The opposition Social Democrats, though fiercely split on the issue, ended up backing the bill as well. Their rationale: to stop forced marriages and protect ethnic minority women from family pressure, as if immigration restrictions would accomplish either. All such talk from centrist parties does is perpetuate prejudices: in this case, that forced marriage is the rule in Muslim European families, which is simply not true. The Netherlands and Denmark, like most of Western Europe, have significant numbers of foreign-born immigrants and second-generation inhabitants from Arabic or majorityMuslim countries. (Many have Turkish backgrounds andas with many Bosnians, Moroccans and Iraqismay or may not practice Islam. But thanks to the new discourse, which conflates ethnicity with religion, theyre all called Muslims.) These communities make up 5 and 4 percent of their populations, respectively (3.2 percent is the European Union average), and have a positive birthrate, in contrast with sagging demographics across almost all of traditionally Christian Europe, a trend that has Islamophobes sounding the alarm bells. It is also the case though the root causes are hotly disputedthat segments of these minorities are poorly integrated, unemployment among them is higher than the national average and 1 to 2 percent hold radical views. Even in EU countries that dont have growing anti-Muslim
lloyd milleR

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parties, Islamophobic sentiment is potent. In Germany, for example, one survey after another attests to widening hostility directed at the Muslim population and Islam in general. One recent study showed 58 percent of Germans in favor of restricting religious freedom for Muslims. This included more than 75 percent of those in eastern Germany, where the Muslim population is negligible. Thirty-seven percent of Germans feel the Federal Republic would be better off without Islam. The surveys underscore the steady rise of these sentiments since 2004, with a significant jump from 2009 to 2010. They also show that while attitudes are particularly strong in traditional right-wing milieus, they have also become more pronounced in the middle and upper classes and among Germans with higher education. They also reveal that anti-Muslim feelings are far stronger than homophobia, classic racism, sexism or anti-Semitismthe latter long the measure for illiberal thinking in Germany. This mainstreaming of Islamophobia would have been inconceivable without the post-9/11 anti-Muslim discourse in European media; Islamophobic websites like Germanys Brgerbewegung Pax Europa and Politically Incorrect have tens of thousands of visitors a day. In large part the trail was blazed

In large part the Islamophobic trail was blazed by intellectuals, a surprising number of whom had roots in progressive politics.
by intellectuals, a surprising number of whom had roots in progressive politics. Hugely influential was the late Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, whose bestselling books insisted that Islam is a thoroughly violent and totalitarian creed striving for world domination. The former antifascist partisan and left-wing journalist once likened the Koran to Hitlers Mein Kampf. Others include French writer and activist Bernard-Henri Levy (the veil is an invitation to rape), British novelist and former New Statesman editor Martin Amis, Dutch intellectual and Labor Party member Paul Scheffer, and in Germany such figures as Ralph Giordano, Necla Kelek, Alice Schwarzer and Henryk Broder, all leftists or former leftists of one stripe or another. Schwarzer, for example, is the mother of Germanys feminist movement, and with her flagship quarterly EMMA she has fought for womens liberation since the early 1970s. She denounces Islam as misogynistic and misanthropic, accusing itand those who defend itof betraying the universality of human rights. For her, and for many other critics of Islam, tolerating the religion means tolerating forced marriages, honor killings, burqas, female genital mutilation and polygamy. Schwarzer now argues for measures that conservatives and the far right have pursued for decades. In the past it was coalitions comprising liberal intellectuals, feminists and Christian churches that waged fierce opposition to such legislation. Where the new right parties arent surging, centrist politicians take on much of the anti-Muslim baggage. It wasnt, for example, right-wingers who passed the burqa bans in France and Belgium but liberal and mainstream conservative parties,

backed by the left. In France, some Socialists and Communists joined President Nicolas Sarkozys ruling party in voting for the recent ban of the full veil in public, a law proposed by a Communist mayor from southern France (the Greens abstained, fearful of the repercussions of a no vote). Polls showed 80 percent of French voters in favor of the ban. In contrast to the conservative parties thinly veiled racism, the lefts anti-Muslim reaction is an anticlerical stance, a kind of dogmatic secularism that sees religion as nothing more than the opiate of the masses. Its inability to grasp that Islam is a source of identity for many European Muslims and, more important, to debunk racist Islamophobia plays straight into the hands of political foes, including the churches (which come off as benevolent compared with en vogue caricatures of Islam). By branding Islam as something qualitatively different from and much more dangerous than other religions, the left helps to stigmatize it furtherand lets Christianity off the hook. As John Mullen of Frances radical left-wing Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste explains, The majority of the left in France believe that the hijab is an assault on womens rights. This position quickly moves into the prejudice that Muslim women in France are more oppressed than non-Muslim women, that the experience of women in, say, Saudi Arabia is merely an extreme case of an oppression which is inherent in Islam. He and other NPA activists protested the partys reluctance to allow Ilham Moussad, a secular, Frenchborn, prochoice feminist, to run as a candidate because she wears a headscarf. Twelve eventually quit. Says Mullen: Muslim and Arab men are then presented as the major source of womens oppression and contrasted with the progressive white values of Republican France. So opposition to religious practices on the basis of progressive values can easily turn into a thinly disguised form of racism. n Germany the issue burst into the political sphere only last year, with the publication of Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Does Away With Itself), by Thilo Sarrazin, a Social Democrat, an economist on the board of Germanys Central Bank and a former Berlin councilman. In it he argues that Muslims are unwilling and unable to integrate; that Muslim immigrants sponge off the welfare systems; that because of their higher birthrate they will soon outnumber indigenous Germans; and that immigration (from the wrong parts of the world) undermines Germanys cultural identity and national character. He writes, I dont want the country of my grandchildren and great grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin. Unlike much of the cultural antiMuslim sentiment in the media, Sarrazins book explicitly mixes race into the blend, arguing that Muslim genes are somehow inferior to German ones. Though Sarrazins book certainly wasnt the first anti-Muslim tract published in Germany, it was the first by a mainstream politician. It unexpectedly surged to the top of the bestseller list, where it remains today. While controversy over the book

May 9, 2011

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forced him to leave the Central Bank, it made the sullen, grayhaired economist Germanys favorite talk-show guest and a multimillionaire. Fortunately, Sarrazin is not a movement leader and has no ambition to start his own party. An explicitly anti-Muslim right-wing movement, Pro Deutschland, has emerged recently, but it has yet to kindle broad-based enthusiasm, perhaps because the established parties are soaking up its potential. The Sarrazin affair illustrated just how deep-seated Islamophobia has become in Germany. At first, the countrys leading politicians responded by roundly condemning the author. But once polls emerged showing that every partys constituency believed that Sarrazin gets some things right, many critics backed off. The Social Democrats balked at expelling him (an investigation is under way), and party members as esteemed as former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, one of the fathers of the Federal Republic, praised Sarrazins candor. Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Christian Democrat, said the multiculturalism experiment has failed, and the leader of Bavarias Christian Social Union said it was high time to stop immigration from alien cultures. Although Germanys Left Party condemned the Sarrazin theses, one poll showed that 29 percent of the partys voters would be sympathetic to a Sarrazin-led party, the highest result of all the parties (Left Party voters are overwhelmingly eastern German, secular and consider themselves socialists). Critically, Germanys political elite is divided over the issues posed by Islam and Muslims. Almost every partywith the exception of the Greens, whose members poll lowest for

Islamophobiahas prominent representatives who are hostile to Islam as well as those who speak out for tolerance. For example, Germanys president, Christian Democrat Christian Wulff, underscored in a major address this year that Islam now too is part of Germany, an enormous step forward in making the countrys 4 million Muslims feel at home. And Merkel has made great strides in modernizing the Christian Democrats, including the initiation of the Islam Conference, a forum for dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims. But conservatives have long fought for tighter immigration laws and still defend the idea of a Christian Europe, for example in their adamant opposition to Turkish EU membership. For some, anti-Muslim sentiment is a perfect way to dress up bigotry in liberal clothing. Now conservatives call for limiting immigration because of Islams antipathy to gay rights and feminismwhich they now claim to support, in contrast with backward Muslims! Islamophobia is an enormous boon to these forces, supplying them with an ostensibly politically correct rationale for their goals as well as access to previously unreachable voters. Although Islamophobia is gaining ground at a disturbing clip, there are voices of reason among the political elites and civil society. They rightly emphasize that there is no monolithic Islam as suchit is preposterous, for example, to throw Iranborn political refugees with university degrees into the same pot as 1960s-era Anatolian guest workers, even though both are Muslim. And reducing all of Islam to its most radical factions only serves demagogues and obstructs integration. They

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point out that Islam is remarkably heterogeneous and dynamic, and includes an emergent European Islam that blends religion with modernity. Moreover, Europes integration of immigrants is actually far more successful than critics portray it, with their images of parallel societies and sinister ghettos. A number of recent studies in Germany unequivocally refute anti-Islam clichs. They show, for example, that the vast majority of Muslims dont see Islam as a political ideology and dont define themselves foremost through religion but through social standing, regional origin and profession. Only about 7 percent are deeply religious and adhere to patriarchal traditions; these tend to live in ethnic enclaves, unlike their co-religionists. In Germany 98 percent of Muslims choose their own partners. Eighty-four percent believe in separation of church and state. The new studies corroborate other research showing that most of Europes 53 million Muslims (16 million in the EU) have lifestyles and concerns a lot like those of non-Muslim Europeans. The birthrate of successive generations of German Turks, for example, is approaching that of other Germans. Muslim groups have welcomed initiatives, like Germanys Islam Conference, to bring Islam and European Muslims into the mainstream, as well as other positive steps to overcome the discrimination that, in part, accounts for European Muslims marginalization and lands many of them at the bottom rung of the social ladder. Europes left in particular should be in a better position to critique Islamophobic discourse. This means a rethinking of knee-jerk laicism in light of new phenomena such as the desire of many women from Muslim backgrounds to wear a headscarf for reasons of ethnic or religious pride. Or, if the left is to insist on radical secularism, then it should apply the same critique to all religions. Why, for example, is Islam to blame when

ethnic Turkish kids perform poorly in German schools, but not Catholicism when Italian migrants flunk out (which they do, in higher numbers than kids with Turkish backgrounds)? In the same vein, the rationale for exceptional behavior such as honor killings should be sought in the patriarchal traditions of certain countries rather than in Islam itself. Cultural racism, which legitimizes right-wing goals, is a complex phenomenon to decode, but it is the task of progressive forces to do it. Policies like Switzerlands ban on minaret construction (approved by 58 percent of voters in 2009) and veil prohibitions in France, Belgium and parts of Germany violate basic rights. Increasingly derogatory popular attitudes toward Islam and Muslims translate into workplace and schoolyard discrimination, which only increases tensions. Moreover, the mainstreaming of bigotry has created a new right and revived the old one: Austrias Freedom Party, the Flemish Vlaams Blok and Frances National Front have renewed their fortunes by adopting Islamophobia. In last falls Vienna elections, the Jrg Haiderless Freedom Party nearly doubled its 2005 result, capturing 27 percent of the vote. Polls actually show the National Fronts new leader, Marine Le Pen, running ahead of Sarkozy for the 2012 presidential vote. Of all the specters haunting Europe, none are as potentor potentially disruptive to democracyas Islamophobia. Though the economic crisis and budget slashing across the continent have certainly fueled anti-Muslim discourse, they are not chiefly to blame for Islamophobia. The goals and jingoistic assumptions at the core of the rights agenda are essentially unchanged from the 1980s. The difference is that the left and liberals have largely capitulated, unable to address the issue of Islam and the n Muslims among us in a constructive way.

Letters
(continued from page 2) (see kucinich.house.gov/UploadedFiles/ NEED_ACT.pdf). Robert W. Zimmerer
Zacatecas, Mexico

William Mitchell claims that progressive economists with some well-known exceptions (Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and William Greider) now advocate fiscal constraint rather than increasing overall deficit spending. Stiglitz and Krugman are impeccable neoclassical economists who apparently believe in the special case argument for massive Keynesian-style deficits during downturns. Otherwise, they are in basic accord with the general laissezfaire consensus of mainstream economics, which generally stands apart from the zany ideas of the Chicago School monetarists and rational expectationists, the supplysiders and libertarians driving the current wave of government-smashing austerity policies. Greider is a journalist.

There are, however, a few thousand professionally trained economists who have earned the term progressiveoften known as radical, institutionalists, post-Keynesian, neo-Marxist or Marxist economists. None of these practitioners are advocating fiscal constraint at present. Furthermore, most of these progressive economists would question Mitchells standard-issue Keynesian solutions, since while Japan has been running large deficits sincethe early 1990s, as Mitchell champions, it has also languished in a morass of deflation and stagnation. James Martn Cypher Universidad Autnoma de Zacatecas I have no argument with William Mitchells logic; its his argumentative skills that need repair. After a long historical introduction, Mitchell lists five so-called neoliberal lies. He then proceeds to clarify the lies by repeating them in more or less comMadison, Va.

monsensical terms, pounding them even more clearly into his readers minds. Those lies have curb appeal. If they are to be refuted, the language must be equally appealing. As Mitchell points out, the public has been hornswoggled by smooth-talking blue-eyed devils on Fox and other media outlets. If he had simply stated that demand is a function of money in consumers pockets and supply is a function of demand, turning supply-side economics on its numskull head, he could have proceeded to destroy the neoliberal lies in plain, organized words instead of deluging his readers with opaque jargon. Franklin Lonzo Dixon Jr.

Correction
Katha Pollitts May 2 Subject to Debate column said that Planned Parenthood received $317 million in Title X funding. Actually, Title X received $317 million in 2010, part of which went to PP.

Books & the Arts.

The Cursi Affair
by NATAshA Wimmer

anuel Puig occupies a curious place in Latin American literature. Chronologically, he should be a member of the Boom generation, but hes rarely included in the usual catalog of Boom writers (Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes). This is not because he was less prominent, though since the 1980s his reputation has faded a little. His novelsespecially Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976)were internationally acclaimed and widely read. He was a genuinely popular writer while at the same time a radical innovator, with a subversive take on sexual and domestic affairs. Kiss of the Spider Woman was notorious for its frank depiction of a love affair between two prisoners; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968) and Heartbreak Tango (1969), his first two novels, are kitschy tributes to the Argentina of his youth; his third, The Buenos Aires Affair (1973), is a frothy, Freudian noir. From the perspective of some critics, the trouble with Puig wasnt that he wrote about homosexuals and housewives. It was that he didnt write about them seriously. His protagonists werent so much persecuted heroes or twisted victims (though they were that, too) as they were creatures of sentimentand, often, figures of fun. What disqualified Puig (implicitly) as a member of the Boom was his lack of gravitas, both in fiction and in life. In a New York Times review of Suzanne Jill Levines highly entertaining and essential biography, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (2000), Vargas Llosa writes disapprovingly about what he sees as Puigs lack of dedication to the world of books: Of all the writers I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig (193290). He never talked about authors or books, and when a literary topic came up in conversation he would look bored and change the subject. As Francisco Goldman points out in his excellent introduction to Heartbreak Tango, one of three Puig novels recently reissued by Dalkey Archive, this was unfair and ungenerous. Of all the writers of the Boom,
Natasha Wimmer is the translator of Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives, 2666 and, most recently, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches (19982003).

Manuel Puig

Vargas Llosa might have been expected to understand and appreciate Puig, because he too has occasionally embraced what might be called the literature of cursi. Cursi is possibly my favorite word in Spanish, and one of the most difficult to translate. Depending on the context, it might mean sentimental or prissy or precious or affected. It is the polar opposite of macho, which is the more familiar strain (at least abroad) of Spanish and Latin American culture. And yet cursi has a substantial history in Spanish-language fiction and poetry. The nineteenth century was its heyday, with novels like the tragic idyll Mara by the Colombian writer Jorge Isaacs and verse by the arch-cursi Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bcquer. Not coincidentally, Puig refers to Isaacs and Bcquer in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and The Buenos Aires Affair, respectively, the other two novels republished by Dalkey Archive. The literature of cursi blossomed again in the twentieth century, with Puigs novels and work by writers like Alfredo Bryce Echenique, the delicious Jaime Bayly (as yet untranslated; for those who read Spanish, Yo amo a mi mami is the one to start with) andyesVargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, most felicitously, but also the more recent The Bad Girl).

Betrayed by rita hayworth

By Manuel Puig. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Introduction by Alan Cheuse. Dalkey Archive. 222 pp. Paper $13.95.

heartbreak Tango

By Manuel Puig. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Introduction by Francisco Goldman. Dalkey Archive. 224 pp. Paper $13.95.

The Buenos Aires Affair

By Manuel Puig. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Introduction by Scott Esposito. Dalkey Archive. 240 pp. Paper $13.95.

As Levines biography demonstrates, Vargas Llosas claim that Puig was uninterested in literature is untrue. As a boy in General Villegas, a backwater town on the Argentine pampa, Puig read the European novelists of alienation then in vogue (Hesse, Huxley, Sartre, etc.); while writing his first novel, he immersed himself in Argentine literature (much of which he characterized as pretentious crap) and the Modernist Hispanic poets. His literary ambitions are plain in his elaborately structured novels;

private collection

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May 9, 2011

the books are not, as Vargas Llosa claimed, light literature [with] no other purpose than to entertain. And yet there is something to Vargas Llosas assertion that Puig didnt care about literature. He never relished reading in the way that he relished the movies. As Levine describes his library in later life, the onlybooks he collected were biographies of producers and actressesand most of the shelf space in the apartment was devoted to his growing videoteca. Puig learned to love the movies at the theater in General Villegas, which he visited almost every evening with his mother. The movies he saw were the classics of the 1930s and 40s, especially the melodramas; his favorite actresses were Luise Rainer, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Greer Garson. He didnt like Rita Hayworth at first, finding her beautiful, but not trustworthy, according to Levine. But later he learned to appreciate her, and even to identify with her, torn as she was between Hollywood and her Hispanic roots. For the rest of his life, he would view everything through the filter of the celluloid screen. Its hard to overstate how thoroughly his life was suffused with the lore of classic Hollywood. Acquaintances were assigned actress alter egos (Puig was Sally, after Sally Bowles from Cabaret, and laternaturallyRita); arguments over performances could ruin old friendships (he was allowed to berate his ladies, but no one else could, Levine writes). His novels are drenched in references to films, and they make constant use of movie-script pacing, Hollywood stagesetting and cinematic imagery. Until he was 30, Puig planned to make a career for himself in the movies as a director or screenwriter. He won a scholarship to study film in Rome, but he was discouraged by the crushing dominance of neorealist filmmaking. Still, he didnt give up. For years he labored over screenplays, translating subtitles and taking odd jobs to make a living. Though his film career eventually fizzled, his sojourn in Rome was the beginning of a globe-trotting existence that would take him to London and then to New York, where he found a day job that suited him nicely: as an Air France desk clerk at Idlewild, where he could chat with starlets and rack up free flights. Air travel was as glamorous as the movies in those days, but the job would eventually provide the literary establishment with another excuse to sneer at Puig. Somehow, nothing could seem further from the center of the Boom than a small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. Sometime in 1962, one of the screenplays Puig was working on turned into a novel.

The catalyst was a voicethat of Puigs aunt, gossiping in the laundry room. The words just kept coming until they had filled nearly thirty pages. By the second day it was clearly a novel. I needed to explain my childhood and why I was in Rome, thirty years old, without a career, without money and discovering that the vocation of my lifemovieshad been a mistake. This was the genesis of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, which is the most autobiographical of Puigs novels. It found its first champions in France, where the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy helped get it published; but it encountered more hurdles in Argentina, where it appeared to little fanfare in 1968. Heartbreak Tango, however, was a bestseller there, and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth soon followed suit. The Buenos Aires Affair came out three years later, in 1973, but was censored on the eve of military dictatorship in Argentina.

ne day, while writing this review, I was distracted in a caf by a conversation about a woman engaged to be married. I dont know much about him, said one gossiper about the womans fianc, but what I do know is all bad. Maybe happiness isnt her main priority, replied the other. Shed rather have nice things. She knows that shes making a mistake, but she doesnt care. Before five minutes had gone by, a novel (even a Puig novel!) was taking shape. For many peopleand certainly for Puig as a boy in small-town Argentinathe first and most absorbing form of storytelling is gossip: tales (almost always told by women) about romances and breakups, scandals and humiliations. There is an endless fascination in parsing other peoples lives, comparing them to ours, rendering judgment and imagining how our own lives might be judged. In Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Puig captures the human inclination to peer and weigh and compare, while taking advantage of that same inclination in his readers. The novel revolves around Toto Casals, the pampered son of a relatively prosperous family in a town like General Villegas, but it is told mostly in the voices of those around him: Totos nursemaid, Felisa; his mother, Mita; his cousin Tet; and his piano teacher, Herminia, among others. By narrating in the form of conversations, letters and monologues, Puig turns the reader into an eavesdropper, a recipient of confidences. The novel shows an instinctive sympathy for those who are playing a part or searching for the proper trappings for the lives they hope to lead. Nearly all the characters shift back and forth between reality and a

fantasy existence that unspools simultaneously, playing out on an inner screen. This fantasy existence may be just a notch above reality (Delia, a penny-pinching Casals family friend, visualizes cannelloni stuffed with expensive really expensive meat) or dizzyingly Hollywoodesque (9-year-old Toto fantasizes about life with a friends handsome uncle and Luise Rainer in a cabin in a snowy forest). Esther, one of Totos schoolmates, bitterly abandons dreams of jazz clubs and mink muffs for a more utilitarian Peronist vision of becoming a little lady doctor. Despite all the fantasies (or as a result of them), a recurring theme is resignation. Character after character comes to terms with a disappointing fate, as Puig was coming to terms with the failure of his movie career. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth is perhaps Puigs most lyrical novel, with its series of interior monologues. Because Puigs writing (here and elsewhere) relies so heavily on voice, it presents serious difficulties for the translator. Puig recognized as much when he had to deal with the translation of Kiss of the Spider Woman into English: The kitsch aspect of Molinas voice doesnt come out in direct translation, it has to be completely re-created. Theres so much to rethink in English it gives me mental cramps. For his first three novels, he worked closely with Levine, who does an exemplary job (it helps that she and Puig share a gleeful love of wordplay and innuendo). Still, theres no denying that the literature of cursi, light and delicate as a souffl and just as sensitive to jiggling, suffers more in translation than more ponderous fiction. One of the first sections of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth takes the form of a one-sided telephone conversation, in which the reader must guess at what her interlocutor is saying. This is a typical Puig device, in which he uses his natural talent for ventriloquism to draw us in while artfully deploying a series of ellipses to keep us guessing. Theres something flirtatious about this technique, and it isnt surprising to learn that he arrived at it through insecurity. As Levine explains in the biography, Puig was afraid that he would make mistakes or sound silly if he wrote in a standard third person, so he channeled his writing through the voices of the people he knew growing up, writing in voice-over, as he put it. Especially early in his career, he seems to have been uncomfortably conscious of playing the role of author, as if it were just another fantasy existence he was trying on for size. Heartbreak Tango is also elaborately structured, this time in episodes, like a radio serial, though they may be styled as letters, police reports or conversations. All of this

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scaffolding supports a tale of unrequited loveor several of them, all centered on an unworthy love object: lazy, shallow Juan Carlos Etchepare, who is slowly wasting away from tuberculosis. Juan Carloss most sincere pursuer is Nen Fernndez de Massa, a packer at the general store. She is interesting by virtue of her sheer ordinariness, which Puig conveys with poignance and delicacy. His moment-by-moment chronicle of her thoughts is perfectly banal, and yet it absorbs us in the same way that we are absorbed by our own thoughts. What elevates Nen is the intensity of her longing for Juan Carlos, which persists for ten years after their unhappy parting. When she receives news of his death, she begins a correspondence with his mother, confiding

Love is a dramatic mainstay of Puigs work, but its gravitational force is companionship.
in her all the disappointments of married life (because Nen, in the end, settles for a man she doesnt love). Throughout his fiction, Puig is fascinated by the divide between those who pair off and embark on a life of domesticity and those who choose (or are fated) to remain alone. Nen is perhaps his most fully imagined exemplar of the domestic life, the path Puig never chose, though he did fret about ending up an old maid. Nen aside, the other characters in Heartbreak Tango are somewhat cartoonish: consumptive layabout Juan Carlos; his broadshouldered working-class friend Pancho; spiteful spinster Mabel; wide-assed, mulish maid Fanny. Cartoonish is a complicated label to apply to Puig, because his real-life persona was even more extravagant than his fictional creations. One of the lessons to be learned from reading Puig is that gushy sentiment can also be genuine sentiment, and that currents of real longing can be hidden behind showy displays of emotion. Then again, sometimes a performance is just that. Kitschy posturing gives way to real poignance in a late chapter, when Mabel comes to visit Nen in Buenos Aires. Both women were once in love with Juan Carlos; Nen is now married with two small children and Mabel is engaged. Nen lives in an ordinary middle-class apartment and her children are a bit homely, by Nens own admission. Mabel has settled for marriage to a man she doesnt care about in order to escape spinsterhood. Puig ends the chapter with a crude joke, making a mockery

of Nens adoration of Juan Carlos; but her love nonetheless burns pure in the novel, not spoiled by her marriage of convenience but rather enshrined and gradually replaced by a more ordinary love of family. Loveand particularly love in the form of longingis a dramatic mainstay of Puigs fiction, but the gravitational force of his novels is companionship. Even when Mabel and Nen are trading barbs couched in the form of polite conversation (With profound satisfaction Nen confirmed that they were talking from one humbug to another), the reader settles happily into their comfortable back-and-forth. Conversation is the most convincing representation of affection in the novels. Their most memorable scenes are all scenes of conversation: the lengthy prison exchanges between Molina, a homosexual convicted on morals charges, and Valentn, a leftist revolutionary, in Kiss of the Spider Woman; the gently bitchy back-andforth between two elderly sisters in Puigs last novel, Tropical Night Falling; the conversation at the start of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth around Totos grandmothers table.

f Heartbreak Tango is a study of domestic life, The Buenos Aires Affair is an exploration of the fate of loners. Gladys Hebe DOnofrio, a complex-ridden 35-year-old sculptor living with her mother, becomes involved with Leo Druscovich, an art critic afflicted by outbursts of sadistic rage. Each characters story is presented in the form of a case study, punctuated by new iterations of Puigs familiar devices: interviews, phone conversations, newspaper excerpts. Vargas Llosa judges this to be the best of Puigs novels, and it is especially polished and structurally complex. It is also Puigs most intellectually ambitious novel, with its explorations of politics (Peronism) and psychology (Freudianism). Theres a scene from the novel that gives a good sense of Puigs particular brand of audacity. In it, Gladys masturbates while running through a fifteen-page series of fantasies from visions of a bricklayer moonlighting as a nude model to images of a janitor hauling boxescomplete with running footnotes on her progress toward orgasm (Gladys again introduces a finger into her sex organ). Scenes of men masturbating have plenty of comic currency, but scenes of women masturbating are still rare, even nearly forty years after the publication of The Buenos Aires Affair. Here and elsewhere, Puig has a knack for demurely courting scandal. His success at

this has to do with his blend of sentimentalism and clinical detachment, which gives a prickly edge even to tame scenes. Leos story reads a bit like a Freudian primer: his inability to climax sexually except in situations where violence is threatened is explored at length. (Puig was very interested in psychoanalytic explanations of human behavior: a number of readers urged him to cut his lengthy scholarly footnotes to Kiss of the Spider Woman, but he was adamant about educating the public.) Gladys, too, is frustrated by a lack of sexual fulfillment. Puig details her less-than-satisfactory relations with six men in the United States (Gladys had sexual intercourse with six men in the following order), where she goes on scholarship; her romantic failures lead to a breakdown and subsequent return to Argentina. It doesnt help that shes attacked and loses an eye in the United States (her eye patch gives her a camp allure). Naturally, sadistic Leo and masochistic Gladys embark on a doomed romance. Puigs pseudo-scientific yet sympathetic portrayal of characters with marked vulnerabilities and pathologies finds an echo in novels by younger writers (notably Roberto Bolao, especially in Nazi Literature in the Americas, and David Foster Wallace, who was a confirmed admirer of Puig). Gladys and Leo are hardly likable characters, and their unpleasant quirks and failures are satisfyingly unromanticized. This doesnt mean that theyre exactly realistic. Gladys may be a thoroughly modern creation, as evidenced by her search for meaning in a series of emphatically untranscendent sexual encounters, but she also inhabits a Hollywood fantasy world, especially in the scenes set at the Argentine beach house from which Leo abducts her. Puigs rolling pan through spaces and rooms described like static stage sets give the novel a weird, unsettling air.

s Puig got older, his life revolved more and more around movies. In her biography, Levine amusingly chronicles his eager early adoption of the VCR. From his apartment in Brazil, where he moved in 1980, he set up a worldwide network of friends (his esclavitas, or little slaves) willing to record televised movies for him. Often, he accepted speaking gigs only because they coincided with video conventions. His videoteca, while extensive, was far from archival quality: he liked to fill every cassette completely, frequently recording two movies and part of a third on one tape. These assiduously collected films were viewed at his apartment, where he presided over a cine club for family and friends.

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At some point in my reading of Puig, I began to wonder what these movies looked like to him. Clearly he saw the artifice and appreciated it as such, but his beloved Hollywood productions were also more real to him than life itself. They werent realistic, but at the same time they contained moments (Hedy Lamarr adjusting her hat, for example) that encapsulated a reality more intense than anything one could possibly experience in daily life. Movies werent a model for living. They were too perfect for that. The only way for a human to approach their heightened reality was to talk about them, and the purest form of talking about them was simply to retell them. Its no accident that Kiss of the Spider Woman, which is almost entirely a series of retellings of movies (real and invented) is alsoparadoxicallyPuigs most realistic novel. Those Hollywood movies were fundamentally cursi, of course. Actresses flounced and glared and tossed their hair. Actors smoldered and cursed and bantered. Puig borrowed from their ranks to assemble a giddy MGM lineup of Boom writers for

his friend the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Cortzar was Hedy Lamarr (Beautiful but icy and remote); Fuentes was Ava Gardner (Glamour surrounds her but can she act?); Garca Mrquez was Liz Taylor (Beautiful face but such short legs); Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams (Oh so disciplined (and boring)). He included himself, as Julie Christie: A great actress, but since she has found the right man for her (Warren Beatty) she doesnt act anymore. Her luck in love matters is the envy of all the other MGM stars. This fluff has bite, and the same can be said about Puigs novels. The cursi literature of Latin America (with Manuel as one of its matriarchs) will strike readers whove only read the more familiar contemporary Latin American classics as bracingly new but also familiareven homey. Its strangeness lies in the details of life as lived by others who greatly resemble ourselves but whose assumptions (personal and cultural) are ever so slightly different. It is as startling as a conversation overheard that at once confirms and adjusts our perception of ourselves. n

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The idler

by scoTT shermAN
otherwise Known as the human condition
Selected Essays and Reviews.
By Geoff Dyer. Graywolf. 421 pp. Paper $18.

n 1978, when Geoff Dyer was 20, he read William Hazlitts essay My First Acquaintance With Poets and was entranced by an autobiographical passage: So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. On the spot Dyer decided to become a professional scribbler. He kept that promise to himself, and since 1986 he has published novels, travelogues and essay collections, but also wide-ranging volumes on jazz, photography, World War I and John Berger. Dyer, who was born in England, adopted Hazlitts tendency to loiter, as well as his conception of literary freedom. (Hazlitts blazingly acerbic language did not leave an impression.) Indeed, its freedom that defines Dyers professional identityfreedom to write what he pleases, freedom to trespass on literary genres, freedom to ridicule academia, freedom to travel the world. Open a Dyer book and you will see him wandering through Paris with a joint in one hand and a desirable woman in the other; enjoying himself on the beaches of Mexico and Thailand; reading
Scott Sherman is a Nation contributing writer.

a book on the waterfront of New Orleans; strolling through the Pushkin Museum in search of works by Gauguin; or taking the bus to Francos Valley of the Fallen near Madrid. To read his work is to step into a parallel universe of art, literature, jazz, friendship and sex, all of which are set against a backdrop of bohemia, squalor and existential distress. Its a formula that has won Dyer a cult following and plaudits from peers: his recent novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009) carried blurbs from the likes of Zadie Smith, William Boyd and Jan Morris. Dyer knows that he has managed a rare feat on Grub Street: in an age of academic specialization and journalistic decay, he has earned a living by the poise and productivity of his pen. As I grew older I came increasingly to feel that my working life should be virtually synonymous with living my life as I wanted, irrespective of whether I was doing any work, he declared in the introduction

www.thenation.com /subscription-services

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to his 1999 essay collection Anglo-English Attitudes. Effectively, as my American publisher put it, I had found a way of being paid for leading my life. I liked that a lot, naturally. But freedom entails risks; one wonders if Dyerwhose literary persona is an uneasy synthesis of idler and intellectualhas ranged too widely and written too much. Of his dozen books, only one is first-rate; a handful of the rest are worthy of the bookshelf. Dyer is extremely gifted, but he is also a writer in search of his ideal subject. It is not Geoff Dyer, contrary to what Dyer might think.

yers first book, a study of John Berger called Ways of Telling, was published by Pluto Press in 1986. (It has never appeared in the United States.) In this dense and airless bookdull is how its author has since described itDyer moves chronologically through each phase of Bergers life and career, summarizing and assessing his works, placing them in their historical and intellectual contexts and launching counterstrikes against Bergers detractors. Ways of Telling is a tribute to Bergerthe hope of this book, Dyer writes in the preface, is that he may be seen not as an exception but as a modelbut Berger never comes to life on the page, as he does so effectively in Adam Hochschilds Mother Jones profile from 1981. Visiting Berger at his eighteenth-century farmhouse in the French Alps, Hochschild observed, It has cold running water only; across the driveway is a two-hole outhouse with snow drifting through cracks in the walls. Ways of Telling is full of insightful passages, and Dyers account of the British art scene in the 1950s is admirably comprehensive. But the book has the whiff of the library and the left-wing bookshop: its the work of a young Oxford-trained writer calling attention to his intellectual grooming. A typical sentence reads: T.J. Clarks books on Courbet are definitive in a way that none of Bergers could be. Other passages are incoherent: Literary taste is nurtured, in general, in the English faculties of institutes of higher education. The aesthetic consensus that results is, ultimately, given the social function of these institutions, ideologically informed. Still, Dyer backed into a fruitful subject. John Berger has always been a compelling and neglected figure, and anyone with a serious interest in Berger will eventually have to consult Ways of Telling. The book, it seems, served a salutary function in Dyers career. From Bergerwho has devoted his life to Marxist-oriented art and cultural criticism, as well as fiction, reportage, personal essays

and screenplaysDyer gained a very expansive sense of form, an unwillingness to dwell in a single genre. (From his immersion in Bergers shelf of books, Dyer may also have learned the virtues of laughter, the absence of which mars Bergers work.) Dyers ties to Berger have remained strong: in 2001 he edited Bergers Selected Essays, to which he contributed a stirring introduction. In 1989 Dyer published his first novel The Colour of Memory, a chronicle of bohemian life in Brixton in the 80s. The themes are familiar and the writing is mostly mundane (I caught a cold and passed it on to someone else. I went out; I stayed in.) But one facet of the novel, beneath the principal narrative line, catches the eye and the ear. Dyer appreciates jazz, and writes about it with flair: The clean, intelligent emotion of Jan Garbareks tenor filled the room. Audible landscapes formed and re-formed themselves around us. Morning music, mist melting in the sun. Dyer ended up taking stock of his talent as a music writer and finding a form for it: in 1991 Jonathan Cape published what is still his most vibrant workBut Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. (An American edition appeared from North Point Press in 1996.) It consists of seven atmospheric vignettes concerning major figures in jazz, including Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Lester Young, Ben Webster and Art Pepper; other giants, including Coleman Hawkins, make fleeting appearances. Sewn into the narrative is a silver thread about Duke Ellington traveling the country by car: Duke had said many times that the road was his home and if that was true then this car was his hearth. The book artfully combines fiction and nonfiction: some of the events described took placefor instance, the assault on Chet Baker in 1966but the material has been transmuted by Dyers imaginative interpretation of old black-and-white photographs, court transcripts, archive footage and clippings from the New York Herald Tribune. As a rule, he writes in the preface, assume that whats here has been invented or altered rather than quoted. Throughout, my purpose was to present the musicians not as they were but as they appear to me. The various threads form a seamless whole. A substantial imaginative leap separates Ways of Telling from But Beautiful. The quasiacademic language of the Berger book is gone; Dyers prose in But Beautiful is akin to a musical instrument: it has the swirl, beauty, flexibility and range of a tenor saxophone as blown by one of the masters. (Keith Jarrett, in a blurb for But Beautiful, compared the book to a great solo.) The section on

Lester Young unfolds in a dingy Broadway hotel, where the ailing Young is subsisting on Chinese food and booze: When they jammed together Hawk tried everything he knew to cut him but he never managed it. In Kansas in 34 they played right through the morning, Hawk stripped down to his singlet, trying to blow him down with that big hurricane tenor, and Lester slumped in a chair with that faraway look in his eyes, his tone still light as a breeze after eight hours playing. The pair of them wore out pianists until there was no one left and Hawk walked off the stand, threw his horn in the back of his car, and gunned it all the way to St. Louis for that nights gig. This is how Dyer begins his section on Mingus: America was a gale blowing constantly in his face. By America he meant White America and by White America he meant anything about America he didnt like. The wind hit him harder than it did small men; they thought America was a breeze but he heard it rage, even when branches were still and the American flag hung down the side of buildings like a starspangled scarfeven then he could hear it rage. His response was to rant back, to rush at it with all the intensity that he felt it rushing at him, two juggernauts hurtling toward each other on a road the size of a continent. Here is Monk strolling in Manhattan, gazing over the Hudson: As he looked out across the river a smear of yellow-brown light welled up over the skyline like paint squeezed from a tube. For a few minutes the sky was a blaze of dirty yellow until the light faded and oil-spill clouds sagged again over New Jersey. He thought about heading back to the apartment but stayed on in the sad twilight and watched dark boats crawl over the water, the grief of gulls breaking over them. But Beautiful is not flawless. Because Dyer has a better command of diction than of narrative, some of the chapters feel shapeless and made me yearn for A.B. Spellmans Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966), an insiders nonfiction account, which, among many other virtues, has a brisk narrative pace. Dyer is acutely aware of the ways American racism

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marked the lives of his subjects, but sometimes his treatment of race is too abrupt and heavy-handed. On other occasions, Dyer pushes his deft ventriloquism too far, as in this passage describing Mingus in his wheelchair: Even talking was becoming difficult. His tongue lay in his mouth like an old mans dick. These are minor imperfections. But Beautiful is powerfully concise: Booze, junk, prison. It wasnt that jazz musicians died young, they just got older quicker. There are intriguing musical insights: Mingus wasnt like Miles, who heard the music and then simply transferred it from his head to the instruments. Mingus didnt hear music until he was making it. But above all there is the kind of emotional power and lyricism often associated with the writing of the late Whitney Balliett, whose jazz criticism graced The New Yorker for four decades. The apex of But Beautiful is a snapshot of Art Pepper in his prison cell at San Quentin, unfurling a blues on his alto saxophone while his mind expands with visions of the debauchery for which he was renowned. Peppers solo has an entrancing effect on his cellmate, Egg, who is snugly ensconced on the top bunk. Its a vignette of great resonance and beauty.

uthors routinely reinvent themselves. When Norman Mailer published his swaggering collection Advertisements for Myself in 1959, few would have expected him, twenty years later, to win a Pulitzer Prize for a thousand-page true life novel about Gary Gilmore. Mailers audacious gamble paid off artistically. If youve read Dyers books in chronological order including his lean, modest essay on World War I, The Missing of the Somme (1994)its hard not to be baffled by the identity he assumed in Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence (1997). The denizen of libraries and left-wing bookshops had reinvented himself as a slacker: I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing. But slackers are not generally inclined to write learned treatises on John Berger or ransack jazz archives, as Dyer did in the research for But Beautiful, a book that features epigraphs from Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch. Out of Sheer Rage has a simple conceit. For years, Dyer tells us, he aspired to write a sober academic study of Lawrence; lassitude prevented him from doing so. What he wrote is a book about trying to write a book about Lawrencea shaggy tract on boredom, inertia, despair, missed opportu-

nities, stressful obligations and dead ends, among other afflictions. In Dyers hands, the rules of biography are inverted: on a visit to Sicily, where Lawrence lived in the early 1920s, Dyer encountered an old woman who knew Lawrence, but he neglected to ask her any questions (she was old and tired and I was too respectful); instead of energetically following Lawrences footsteps through Mexico, he lounged on the nude beach of Zipolite in Oaxaca. Out of Sheer Ragewhich his publisher identified as a memoiremerged from Dyers dissatisfaction with the standard conventions of travel writing and literary biography. (He scoffs at state-of-the-fart theorists who churn out papers with titles like Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence.) Dyer was hardly alone in his displeasure with those genres: Janet Malcolm harbored her own set of concerns about the biographical treatment of Sylvia Plath, and in 1994 she produced a startling work of criticism and literary journalism, The Silent Woman, about the moral and ethical pitfalls of the biographical enterprise, and about the sadism and reductionism of journalism. Certainly there are some valuable passages in Rageincluding some fine pages on Lawrences conception of freedom and a moving evocation of his final months, in addition to a few funny gagsbut one cant escape the sense that Out of Sheer Rage, which helped to cement Dyers reputation on these shores, is vastly overrated. It has a sprawling narrative architecture that cannot be hidden beneath (or justified by) a slacker

pose. Its prose is verbose, a defect aggravated by its frequently rancid tone (I hate children and I hate parents of children). What explains Out of Sheer Rages cult popularity? Surely there are finer books on procrastination and the hazards of the literary enterprise. (See Martin Amiss The Information or Jonathan Rabans For Love and Money.) When Out of Sheer Rage was published, memoirs were in vogue: a first-person account of wrestling with D.H. Lawrence may have appealed to highbrow sensibilities bored by run-of-the-mill accounts (real or invented) of incest, divorce, substance abuse and alcoholism. The author holds little back: the book contains too much Dyer and not enough Lawrence. We learn about Dyers athletes foot, his bad knee, his aching back and his eczema; his deep desire to live in San Francisco and his disgust for the residents of Oxford; and his in-flight sexual fantasies (Often in planes I find myself thinking of having sex with the flight attendant: pushing my hand up between her legs as she walks past, fucking in the toilet: standard in-flight porno stuff). In such passages the slacker becomes a buffoon. Theres no better example than the scene in which Dyer and his girlfriend throw down their towels on the beach in Zipolite: I moved around in front of Laura who was dozing, one knee raised up, legs slightly apart so that I could see her cunt. After a few moments I became lost in the pleasure of looking at her breasts, her legs, her stomach, her cunt. My prick stirred into life. I spat in my hand and rubbed saliva over the head of my prick.

confession
I read the chemistry so I think of my windows as thick syrup and I do see a whole world stuck to them so I believe it Somehow twenty pelicans just now escaped with their shadows but the oaks and palmettos are struggling wildly to get loose If they cant do it with a thousand hands how could we with two Our predicament had been holding two things true at the same time It was worse actually We knew truth between them and did nothing
ALLAn Peterson

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f were being utterly frank, Dyer wrote in 1999, there were times when it was only the prospect of one day being able to publish my journalism that kept me writing proper books: do a few more novels, I reasoned, and maybe my obscurity will be sufficiently lessened to permit publication of the book I really care about, a collection of my bits and pieces. Thats a just admission: Dyers novels, including The Colour of Memory, do feel halfhearted in their texture and structure. The Search (1993) is a weird detective story seemingly written under the influence of Chandler, Coetzee and Calvino. Dyers most enjoyable novel, in which melancholy and humor achieve a fine balance, is Paris Trance: A Romance (1998), which brings to life two young expatriate couples adrift in France; pack it for the long flight to Charles de Gaulle. Dyers most recent novel is the overpraised Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the first half of which is a lethargic account of the Venice Biennale, related by a hack; in the second half, an expat writer hanging out in Varanasi undertakes a journey from anxiety to a kind of transcendence; in the final pages he is wearing a dhoti and bathing in the Ganges. As one expects from Dyer, there are some ingenious and witty passages. But his India is a thick stack of clichs (there was shit everywhere. Every kind of shit). For a realistic and affecting account of Varanasi, read Pankaj Mishras novel The Romantics (2000). If Dyers four novels are collectively unsatisfying, the same is mostly true of his travel writing. In 2003 he published Yoga for People Who Cant Be Bothered to Do It, a collection of forgettable dispatches from Cambodia, Paris, New Orleans, Detroit and Miami, some of which originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, Modern Painters and Feed. Colin Thubron or Neal Ascherson he is not: Taxi drivers urged us to go to the killing fields, he writes in the Cambodia chapter, but we were too hot and tiredthe heat meant we were tired all the timeand had no desire to see piles of skulls, and so, whenever possible, we retired to the breezy familiarity of the Foreign Correspondents Club. Platitudes fall like dead leaves: If you are happy, being alone in a hotel, on expenses, drinking beer, and watching porno is close to bliss; but if you are lonely and unloved it is utterly soul-destroying. Like But Beautiful, Yoga elides the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction; but the results are much less satisfying. In the preface Dyer notes, Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head. To

position his travel book between genres is obviously Dyers prerogative. But readers pay a price: we are denied the authorial responsibility of nonfiction and possibly the unbridled imagination of fiction. Yoga has a half-finished feel: it seems to be one of his proper books, a bridge to what he really cares abouthis miscellaneous journalism, his bits and pieces. The appearance of such a collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, indicates that the author is doing what he most enjoys. Happily for the reader, the idler has been supplanted, this time around, by the critic and close reader. The book contains sections on art, writing and music, as well as some personal essays. Many of the pieces first appeared in London newspapers, and they are too brief to be effective in book form. One exception is Dyers review of Denis Johnsons Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), where his skills as a book reviewer and critic take flight: Johnson is all over the place, and he is an artist of strange diligence. It is as if his skewed relationship to the sentencenot really knowing what one is and yet knowing exactly what to do with itoperates, here, at the level of structure. Tree of Smoke is as excessive and messy as Moby Dick. Anything further removed from the tucked-up, hospital corners school of British fiction is hard to imagine. Its a big, dirty, unmade bed of a book, and once you settle in youre in no hurry to get out. The strongest pieceson F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rebecca West, the Goncourt brothers and recent books and movies about Iraq and Afghanistanare the ones where Dyer has the space to stretch his legs, burnish his prose and spin a web of connections. In his essay on the photographer William Gedney he writes: Gedney was fascinated by the history of his [Brooklyn] street and spent long hours in the local library, excavating its past, transcribing quotations, and pasting newspaper accounts of significant events of the streets history into what he designated his Myrtle Avenue Notebooks. Whitmanwhose grave Gedney photographedhad also lived on the avenue for a while, and the paper he had edited for several years, the Eagle, boasted that this first paved and graded street in the area was the pride of the old-time Brooklynite. That was in 1882; by 1939 Henry Miller considered it a street not of sorrow, for sor-

row would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness. Dyer has a gift for excavating magnificent quotes from other writers, but its a gift that frequently serves to overshadow his own paragraphs. Consider how hard it would be to improve upon these lines, which he discovered in Rebecca Wests Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. West had encountered a student interested in writing a thesis about her: I explained that I was a writer wholly unsuitable for her purpose: that the bulk of my writing was scattered through American and English periodicals; that I had never used my writing to make a continuous disclosure of my own personality to others, but to discover for my own edification what I knew about various subjects which I found to be important to me; and that in consequence I had written a novel about London to find out why I loved it. Certain readers may be charmed by Dyers essay on his quest for the perfect doughnut and the ideal cup of coffee: Finding Grand Central Station was easy enough, but finding Orens Daily Roast within the vast station complex was extremely difficult. Eventually I found it, saw it, saw a line of people queuing up, saw that although it was essentially just a stall, they did indeed stock Doughnut Plant doughnuts but that only one vanilla doughnut remained. I joined the queue. If anyone had taken the last doughnut I would have pleaded with her and put my caseIf you knew what I have been through this morning Near the end of the collection is an essay titled Readers Block, wherein Dyer confesses, I find it increasingly difficult to read. This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that. Admirers of his literary criticism may mourn that disclosure; but I hope it inspires Dyer to immerse himself again in the world of music and musicians, preferably jazz musicians. In his hands, a book about Charles Mingus and White America would be fascinating. So would a biography of Don Cherrywhom Dyer calls his guiding spirit, and whose photograph is pinned above his writing desk, or a history of West Coast jazz, from Art Pepper to Charlie Haden. The research could be undertaken in San Francisco, n where the doughnuts arent half bad.

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Dmitri shostakovich (left) with his first wife, nina Varzar, and friend Ivan sollertinsky, 1932

shostakovichs Ambivalence

by michAel oDoNNell
Shostakovich to protest the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 but ultimately realized that the shackled genius would never agree.) Shostakovich shocked his friends by formally joining the party in 1960well after survival demanded itthereby becoming an establishment figure mistrusted by the next generation of composers. Many Russian liberals never forgave him for signing a 1973 petition denouncing the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. One of Shostakovichs friends remembered him saying, Id sign anything even if they hand it to me upside-down. All I want is to be left alone. Shostakovich signedhe always signed not because he was a recluse or a genius who couldnt be bothered with politics but because he hadnt the constitution to fight back. Racked throughout his life by illnesstuberculosis, lung cancer, polio and Lou Gehrigs diseasehe was a wretched bag of nerves; contemporaneous accounts have him twitching, sweating and incessantly drumming his fingers. The fragile composer lived much of his life in a state of panicked desperation. He occasionally rebuffed the party in small ways, exerting his influence to help friends on the wrong side of an official or called up for service. Yet he ultimately chose subversion rather than resistance. He was a survivor, not a martyr, and when he mocked totalitarianism

mitri Shostakovich was a coward. Or at least the great Soviet composer admitted as much to friends. The resulting shame reverberates through his music, sounding notes of terror, humiliation and despair. When in 1948 Communist Party apparatchiks denounced his compositions as formalist and inaccessible to the common worker, he made a public confession, saying his music suffered from many failures and serious setbacks and pledging, I will accept critical instruction. He occasionally composed inanely patriotic songs and, some say, symphonies to placate his censors. Although he kept a picture of the Russian expatriate Igor Stravinsky under glass on his desk, Shostakovich yielded to party pressure and denounced his Modernist music, a moment he would later describe as the worst of his life. Some of his closest friends made different choices during the middle years of the dark Soviet century. The cellist and humanist Mstislav Rostropovich defied the party and risked everything by sheltering Aleksandr Solzhenitsyna mighty figure of resistance whom Shostakovich let down more than once. (The novelist considered enlisting
Michael ODonnell is a lawyer in Chicago whose writing has appeared in Bookforum and Washington Monthly.

music for silenced Voices

By Wendy Lesser. Yale. 350 pp. $28.

Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets.

he did so in the safe company of friends or in sarcastic passages of music, like the perverted military march played by dissonant trumpets in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. His motives and loyalties remain cloudy, if not quite enigmatic. The finale of the same piece features one of Shostakovichs most famous concessions: a last-minute switch to the major key to send the concertgoers out on a note of Soviet triumphalism. Born in St. Petersburg in 1906, Shostakovich was the great red hope, the Soviet Unions first homegrown composer, or so the apparatchiks liked to boast when they werent terrorizing him. Shortly after the 1948 denunciationShostakovichs secondStalin telephoned and asked him to represent the USSR on a cultural junket to the United States. Stalin claimed to know nothing of the blacklisting that had been ruining Shostakovichs life. Like many others who lived through Stalins purges and terror, Shostakovich always carried a toothbrush and change of underwear in case he was packed off to the gulag. But this never happened: he was too valuable an instrument of

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May 9, 2011

propaganda. After he composed the Seventh Symphony (Leningrad), an anthem of Soviet resistance to Nazism during World War II, Shostakovich became a national hero whose photo was splashed across the cover of Time. In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross describes how Russians first heard the symphony during the siege of 1942 under the most dramatic circumstances imaginable: The score was flown in by military aircraft in June, and a severely depleted Leningrad Radio Orchestra began learning it. After a mere fifteen musicians showed up for the initial rehearsal, the commanding general ordered all competent musicians to report from the front lines. The players would break from the rehearsals to return to their duties, which sometimes included the digging of mass graves for victims of the siege. Three members of the orchestra died of starvation before the premiere took place. An array of loudspeakers then broadcast the Leningrad into the silence of no-mans-land. Never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony became a tactical strike against German morale. This from a composer who switched his radio from the BBC to Radio Moscow before turning it off, in case the party came snooping.

with hurricane winds rather than simple lifes breath, favoring unity and cohesion over complexity and compromise. There is little heroic exaggeration in Wendy Lessers Music for Silenced Voices. An editor and a nonmusician, Lesser has written a sensitive biography that explores Shostakovich through his string quartets rather than his better-known symphonies. It joins more comprehensive studies by Fay and Elizabeth Wilson, but less as a contribution to Shostakovich scholarship than as a generous reflection on his life and chamber music. Lesser too discusses the composers moral ambivalence, describing his decision to keep his head down rather than to stand up and fight as a choice most of us would make under similar circumstances. That assessment carries the uncomfortable ring of truth, but Lesser is compelled to offer a second line of defense, an artists responsibility toward his work: Shostakovich already, at the age of thirty, knew himself to be a significantly original composer; he knew, in other words, that he was capable of producing valuable, lasting work that was unlike anyone elses. This knowledge entailed certain obligations (one might even call them ethical obligations), and one of these was that he try as hard as possible to keep writing music. It would have been pretentious and morally dubious of him to have used this argument in self-defense, and he never did so, but I am invoking it on his behalf. Its a fraught business, retroactively blessing morally dubious actions with a rationale that could not decently be claimed by the actor at the time. This process elides the actors true reasons and justifies his deeds with the ingeniousness of hindsight. It would be obscene to reach for a hand in time of death and persecution only to find the hand withheld in favor of art. If the argument truly explains Shostakovichs behavior, it is solipsism personified. If every composer who thinks he is the next Mozart forgoes his basic duties to his fellow man so that he can keep working, the road to perdition will be paved with grace notes.

ot surprisingly, most discussions of Shostakovichs music invoke the political strands of his life, which are intertwined like the braids of a noose. It is at once impossible to understand his compositions independent of his lifelong persecution and dangerously tempting to let biography drown out the music. The playbill for a Chicago Symphony Orchestra performance I recently attended claimed, plausibly, that Shostakovichs Fifth Symphony is perhaps the best-known work of art born from the marriage of politics and music. Yet some Shostakovich boosters have taken the connection too far. In 1979, four years after Shostakovichs death from lung cancer, the Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov published Testimony, which purported to be the composers dictated memoirs. The controversial book recast Shostakovichs life and work into an implausibly pervasive antiSoviet narrative in which every note was an act of secret nose-thumbing. The books authenticity has been fatally refuted by Shostakovichs biographer Laurel Fay. Unwilling to accept the composers perceived moral failures, Volkov attempted to resuscitate him

n addition to confronting Shostakovichs politics, Lesser delves deeply into the music. She contends that his fifteen symphonies were so heavily scrutinized by the party and the public that he saved his most honest and personal music for the string quartet, a format that rarely attracted big premieres. Chamber musicians share this view, and although their preferences are

predictable, scholars have reached the same conclusion. (Wilson, who otherwise devotes little of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered to the quartets, writes that the final three are arguably the summit of his achievement, and that the composer used the quartet as a vehicle for self-discovery and private confession.) With the exception of the Eighth and Fourteenth, Lesser shows mistrust and even a little disdain for Shostakovichs variously heartfelt and hypocritical symphonies. Her enthusiasm for the quartets is infectious and her skepticism about the symphonies understandable, but in the end she overreaches. Lesser observes of Shostakovich that anxiety may well be the strongest feeling his music conveys. That is a plausible judgment of the quartets; the better-known symphonies overwhelmingly express tragedy. Like the symphonies, the quartets are uneven. Some are models of clarity. The Second, with its assertive melodies and passionate finale; the Sixth, an unusually light and tuneful work for Shostakovich; the tragic Eighth, long (and mistakenly) interpreted as a suicide note; and the spare, mournful Fifteenth are major contributions to twentieth-century music. Though they do not warrant Lessers repeated comparisons of Shostakovich to Beethoven (or to Shakespeare), they are profound, complex and strikingly original works that reward each new listening. That the quartets contain Shostakovichs most personal and intimate music does not necessarily mean they are his best works. The pages of a diary can be intensely personal, but they do not always cohere or illuminate. One of the triumphs of Beethovens late quartets is that they are both introspective and universalno mean feat in any art form. By contrast, some of Shostakovichs middle and later quartetsespecially the Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenthare all but unlistenable in their relentless fury and obsession with death. The Thirteentha work of profound despairis the musical equivalent of a man shrieking all his fears into an empty room. Many of the quartets contain at least one frantic movement crowded with relentlessly unmelodic music and harsh bowing played at double forte. Such works reveal a side of the composer that is uncompromising to the point of indulgence. True to her project, Lesser defends all fifteen, but she also properly concedes some weaknesses. Here, for instance, is her description of the Tenths unlovely second movement: [Its] loud, fierce opening comes as quite a jolt after the delicate close of the first movement. From this sudden start,

May 9, 2011

The Nation.

37

the music just keeps getting louder and fiercer. A series of braying chords (which can sound like either a donkeys hee-haw or a trains double whistle, depending on which instrument plays them) represents the most extreme version of what the composer does throughout this section, assaulting our ears with purposely unmelodic noises. Part of the problem lies in the scale of the string quartet, which is in some ways poorly suited to Shostakovichs compositional style. His symphonies also contain bursts of frenzylike the famous scherzo of the Tenth, an orchestral showpiece that conjures up all the wrath of Stalin. But a symphony orchestraparticularly the very large orchestra demanded by Shostakovichs musicsoftens the harsh effect of the strings. In his string quartets, by contrast, all the scraping pierces through, producing bare, ugly noises that grate on the ear. The quartet also makes no allowance for two of Shostakovichs strengths: his writing for percussion and brass. If Shostakovichs quartets reveal the inner mind of a tragic man, his symphonies capture the tragedy of a nation and an era. Something

in the writing suggests that he considered the song cycle called From Jewish Poetry and symphonies his public legacy. In them he was provocatively set his Thirteenth Symphony more disciplined with melody and resisted the to Yevgeny Yevtushenkos poem Babi Yar, gimmick of the false note, which deflates which deplores Russian anti-Semitism. Afraid every melodic expectation in the quartets. of the consequences, the conductor Yevgeny Lesser explains that his music is filled with Mravinsky refused to premiere it, as he had moments where a seemingly stable melody done with Shostakovichs other symphonies. begins and then breaks down into dissonance, Most profoundly, the Tenth Symphony or where our expectations have been set up to which Wilson rightly calls Shostakovichs hear a particular turn of phrase and instead we central masterpieceis a passionate, deepget something very slightly off from that. In ly moving ode to the horrors of oppression, the quartets this device is overused, becom- completed in the months following Stalins ing a contrarian tic: Shostakovich careens death in 1953. If Shostakovich was not brave repeatedly from beautiful music to brutal ug- enough to write it while Stalin lived, he was liness. The Fourteenth is a perfect example. brilliant enough to render musically the caIt begins with the cello and then the violin tastrophe of Stalinism after the dictator died. carrying a lovely, dancelike melody whose That is a modest form of courage but a major structure and rhythm persist, but each time in form of genius. slightly more grotesque form until once more Yet in the end the music must stand or fall we are staring at a six-foot hole in the ground. on its own. Does the Eighth Symphony porThis is not to say that the hacks were right, tray the tragedy of the Battle of Stalingrad, the and that all of the composers music should tragedy of all waror the human tragedy ithave been accessible and easily whistled. But self? It does not matter. Shostakovichs legacy surely there could have been some whistling? will depend on whether we keep returning to Unlike the symphonies, the quartets are his music, supplying our own narratives and largely apolitical. Shostakovich took his big- hearing whatever the music stirs in us. With gest risks in larger forms, including dramatic many of the symphonies andas Lesser valuworks. A lifelong philo-Semite in a viru- ably reminds usmany of the quartets, we lently anti-Semitic society, he composed a will keep listening. 1:15 PM Page 1 n 1103.023 - Limberger 2.25x3.5 ad:Layout 1 3/16/11

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Books & the Arts.

The Cursi Affair
by NATAshA Wimmer

anuel Puig occupies a curious place in Latin American literature. Chronologically, he should be a member of the Boom generation, but hes rarely included in the usual catalog of Boom writers (Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes). This is not because he was less prominent, though since the 1980s his reputation has faded a little. His novelsespecially Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976)were internationally acclaimed and widely read. He was a genuinely popular writer while at the same time a radical innovator, with a subversive take on sexual and domestic affairs. Kiss of the Spider Woman was notorious for its frank depiction of a love affair between two prisoners; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968) and Heartbreak Tango (1969), his first two novels, are kitschy tributes to the Argentina of his youth; his third, The Buenos Aires Affair (1973), is a frothy, Freudian noir. From the perspective of some critics, the trouble with Puig wasnt that he wrote about homosexuals and housewives. It was that he didnt write about them seriously. His protagonists werent so much persecuted heroes or twisted victims (though they were that, too) as they were creatures of sentimentand, often, figures of fun. What disqualified Puig (implicitly) as a member of the Boom was his lack of gravitas, both in fiction and in life. In a New York Times review of Suzanne Jill Levines highly entertaining and essential biography, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (2000), Vargas Llosa writes disapprovingly about what he sees as Puigs lack of dedication to the world of books: Of all the writers I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig (193290). He never talked about authors or books, and when a literary topic came up in conversation he would look bored and change the subject. As Francisco Goldman points out in his excellent introduction to Heartbreak Tango, one of three Puig novels recently reissued by Dalkey Archive, this was unfair and ungenerous. Of all the writers of the Boom,
Natasha Wimmer is the translator of Roberto Bolaos The Savage Detectives, 2666 and, most recently, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches (19982003).

Manuel Puig

Vargas Llosa might have been expected to understand and appreciate Puig, because he too has occasionally embraced what might be called the literature of cursi. Cursi is possibly my favorite word in Spanish, and one of the most difficult to translate. Depending on the context, it might mean sentimental or prissy or precious or affected. It is the polar opposite of macho, which is the more familiar strain (at least abroad) of Spanish and Latin American culture. And yet cursi has a substantial history in Spanish-language fiction and poetry. The nineteenth century was its heyday, with novels like the tragic idyll Mara by the Colombian writer Jorge Isaacs and verse by the arch-cursi Spanish poet Gustavo Adolfo Bcquer. Not coincidentally, Puig refers to Isaacs and Bcquer in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth and The Buenos Aires Affair, respectively, the other two novels republished by Dalkey Archive. The literature of cursi blossomed again in the twentieth century, with Puigs novels and work by writers like Alfredo Bryce Echenique, the delicious Jaime Bayly (as yet untranslated; for those who read Spanish, Yo amo a mi mami is the one to start with) andyesVargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, most felicitously, but also the more recent The Bad Girl).

Betrayed by rita hayworth

By Manuel Puig. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Introduction by Alan Cheuse. Dalkey Archive. 222 pp. Paper $13.95.

heartbreak Tango

By Manuel Puig. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Introduction by Francisco Goldman. Dalkey Archive. 224 pp. Paper $13.95.

The Buenos Aires Affair

By Manuel Puig. Translated by Suzanne Jill Levine. Introduction by Scott Esposito. Dalkey Archive. 240 pp. Paper $13.95.

As Levines biography demonstrates, Vargas Llosas claim that Puig was uninterested in literature is untrue. As a boy in General Villegas, a backwater town on the Argentine pampa, Puig read the European novelists of alienation then in vogue (Hesse, Huxley, Sartre, etc.); while writing his first novel, he immersed himself in Argentine literature (much of which he characterized as pretentious crap) and the Modernist Hispanic poets. His literary ambitions are plain in his elaborately structured novels;

private collection

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May 9, 2011

the books are not, as Vargas Llosa claimed, light literature [with] no other purpose than to entertain. And yet there is something to Vargas Llosas assertion that Puig didnt care about literature. He never relished reading in the way that he relished the movies. As Levine describes his library in later life, the onlybooks he collected were biographies of producers and actressesand most of the shelf space in the apartment was devoted to his growing videoteca. Puig learned to love the movies at the theater in General Villegas, which he visited almost every evening with his mother. The movies he saw were the classics of the 1930s and 40s, especially the melodramas; his favorite actresses were Luise Rainer, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Greer Garson. He didnt like Rita Hayworth at first, finding her beautiful, but not trustworthy, according to Levine. But later he learned to appreciate her, and even to identify with her, torn as she was between Hollywood and her Hispanic roots. For the rest of his life, he would view everything through the filter of the celluloid screen. Its hard to overstate how thoroughly his life was suffused with the lore of classic Hollywood. Acquaintances were assigned actress alter egos (Puig was Sally, after Sally Bowles from Cabaret, and laternaturallyRita); arguments over performances could ruin old friendships (he was allowed to berate his ladies, but no one else could, Levine writes). His novels are drenched in references to films, and they make constant use of movie-script pacing, Hollywood stagesetting and cinematic imagery. Until he was 30, Puig planned to make a career for himself in the movies as a director or screenwriter. He won a scholarship to study film in Rome, but he was discouraged by the crushing dominance of neorealist filmmaking. Still, he didnt give up. For years he labored over screenplays, translating subtitles and taking odd jobs to make a living. Though his film career eventually fizzled, his sojourn in Rome was the beginning of a globe-trotting existence that would take him to London and then to New York, where he found a day job that suited him nicely: as an Air France desk clerk at Idlewild, where he could chat with starlets and rack up free flights. Air travel was as glamorous as the movies in those days, but the job would eventually provide the literary establishment with another excuse to sneer at Puig. Somehow, nothing could seem further from the center of the Boom than a small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens. Sometime in 1962, one of the screenplays Puig was working on turned into a novel.

The catalyst was a voicethat of Puigs aunt, gossiping in the laundry room. The words just kept coming until they had filled nearly thirty pages. By the second day it was clearly a novel. I needed to explain my childhood and why I was in Rome, thirty years old, without a career, without money and discovering that the vocation of my lifemovieshad been a mistake. This was the genesis of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, which is the most autobiographical of Puigs novels. It found its first champions in France, where the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy helped get it published; but it encountered more hurdles in Argentina, where it appeared to little fanfare in 1968. Heartbreak Tango, however, was a bestseller there, and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth soon followed suit. The Buenos Aires Affair came out three years later, in 1973, but was censored on the eve of military dictatorship in Argentina.

ne day, while writing this review, I was distracted in a caf by a conversation about a woman engaged to be married. I dont know much about him, said one gossiper about the womans fianc, but what I do know is all bad. Maybe happiness isnt her main priority, replied the other. Shed rather have nice things. She knows that shes making a mistake, but she doesnt care. Before five minutes had gone by, a novel (even a Puig novel!) was taking shape. For many peopleand certainly for Puig as a boy in small-town Argentinathe first and most absorbing form of storytelling is gossip: tales (almost always told by women) about romances and breakups, scandals and humiliations. There is an endless fascination in parsing other peoples lives, comparing them to ours, rendering judgment and imagining how our own lives might be judged. In Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Puig captures the human inclination to peer and weigh and compare, while taking advantage of that same inclination in his readers. The novel revolves around Toto Casals, the pampered son of a relatively prosperous family in a town like General Villegas, but it is told mostly in the voices of those around him: Totos nursemaid, Felisa; his mother, Mita; his cousin Tet; and his piano teacher, Herminia, among others. By narrating in the form of conversations, letters and monologues, Puig turns the reader into an eavesdropper, a recipient of confidences. The novel shows an instinctive sympathy for those who are playing a part or searching for the proper trappings for the lives they hope to lead. Nearly all the characters shift back and forth between reality and a

fantasy existence that unspools simultaneously, playing out on an inner screen. This fantasy existence may be just a notch above reality (Delia, a penny-pinching Casals family friend, visualizes cannelloni stuffed with expensive really expensive meat) or dizzyingly Hollywoodesque (9-year-old Toto fantasizes about life with a friends handsome uncle and Luise Rainer in a cabin in a snowy forest). Esther, one of Totos schoolmates, bitterly abandons dreams of jazz clubs and mink muffs for a more utilitarian Peronist vision of becoming a little lady doctor. Despite all the fantasies (or as a result of them), a recurring theme is resignation. Character after character comes to terms with a disappointing fate, as Puig was coming to terms with the failure of his movie career. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth is perhaps Puigs most lyrical novel, with its series of interior monologues. Because Puigs writing (here and elsewhere) relies so heavily on voice, it presents serious difficulties for the translator. Puig recognized as much when he had to deal with the translation of Kiss of the Spider Woman into English: The kitsch aspect of Molinas voice doesnt come out in direct translation, it has to be completely re-created. Theres so much to rethink in English it gives me mental cramps. For his first three novels, he worked closely with Levine, who does an exemplary job (it helps that she and Puig share a gleeful love of wordplay and innuendo). Still, theres no denying that the literature of cursi, light and delicate as a souffl and just as sensitive to jiggling, suffers more in translation than more ponderous fiction. One of the first sections of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth takes the form of a one-sided telephone conversation, in which the reader must guess at what her interlocutor is saying. This is a typical Puig device, in which he uses his natural talent for ventriloquism to draw us in while artfully deploying a series of ellipses to keep us guessing. Theres something flirtatious about this technique, and it isnt surprising to learn that he arrived at it through insecurity. As Levine explains in the biography, Puig was afraid that he would make mistakes or sound silly if he wrote in a standard third person, so he channeled his writing through the voices of the people he knew growing up, writing in voice-over, as he put it. Especially early in his career, he seems to have been uncomfortably conscious of playing the role of author, as if it were just another fantasy existence he was trying on for size. Heartbreak Tango is also elaborately structured, this time in episodes, like a radio serial, though they may be styled as letters, police reports or conversations. All of this

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scaffolding supports a tale of unrequited loveor several of them, all centered on an unworthy love object: lazy, shallow Juan Carlos Etchepare, who is slowly wasting away from tuberculosis. Juan Carloss most sincere pursuer is Nen Fernndez de Massa, a packer at the general store. She is interesting by virtue of her sheer ordinariness, which Puig conveys with poignance and delicacy. His moment-by-moment chronicle of her thoughts is perfectly banal, and yet it absorbs us in the same way that we are absorbed by our own thoughts. What elevates Nen is the intensity of her longing for Juan Carlos, which persists for ten years after their unhappy parting. When she receives news of his death, she begins a correspondence with his mother, confiding

Love is a dramatic mainstay of Puigs work, but its gravitational force is companionship.
in her all the disappointments of married life (because Nen, in the end, settles for a man she doesnt love). Throughout his fiction, Puig is fascinated by the divide between those who pair off and embark on a life of domesticity and those who choose (or are fated) to remain alone. Nen is perhaps his most fully imagined exemplar of the domestic life, the path Puig never chose, though he did fret about ending up an old maid. Nen aside, the other characters in Heartbreak Tango are somewhat cartoonish: consumptive layabout Juan Carlos; his broadshouldered working-class friend Pancho; spiteful spinster Mabel; wide-assed, mulish maid Fanny. Cartoonish is a complicated label to apply to Puig, because his real-life persona was even more extravagant than his fictional creations. One of the lessons to be learned from reading Puig is that gushy sentiment can also be genuine sentiment, and that currents of real longing can be hidden behind showy displays of emotion. Then again, sometimes a performance is just that. Kitschy posturing gives way to real poignance in a late chapter, when Mabel comes to visit Nen in Buenos Aires. Both women were once in love with Juan Carlos; Nen is now married with two small children and Mabel is engaged. Nen lives in an ordinary middle-class apartment and her children are a bit homely, by Nens own admission. Mabel has settled for marriage to a man she doesnt care about in order to escape spinsterhood. Puig ends the chapter with a crude joke, making a mockery

of Nens adoration of Juan Carlos; but her love nonetheless burns pure in the novel, not spoiled by her marriage of convenience but rather enshrined and gradually replaced by a more ordinary love of family. Loveand particularly love in the form of longingis a dramatic mainstay of Puigs fiction, but the gravitational force of his novels is companionship. Even when Mabel and Nen are trading barbs couched in the form of polite conversation (With profound satisfaction Nen confirmed that they were talking from one humbug to another), the reader settles happily into their comfortable back-and-forth. Conversation is the most convincing representation of affection in the novels. Their most memorable scenes are all scenes of conversation: the lengthy prison exchanges between Molina, a homosexual convicted on morals charges, and Valentn, a leftist revolutionary, in Kiss of the Spider Woman; the gently bitchy back-andforth between two elderly sisters in Puigs last novel, Tropical Night Falling; the conversation at the start of Betrayed by Rita Hayworth around Totos grandmothers table.

f Heartbreak Tango is a study of domestic life, The Buenos Aires Affair is an exploration of the fate of loners. Gladys Hebe DOnofrio, a complex-ridden 35-year-old sculptor living with her mother, becomes involved with Leo Druscovich, an art critic afflicted by outbursts of sadistic rage. Each characters story is presented in the form of a case study, punctuated by new iterations of Puigs familiar devices: interviews, phone conversations, newspaper excerpts. Vargas Llosa judges this to be the best of Puigs novels, and it is especially polished and structurally complex. It is also Puigs most intellectually ambitious novel, with its explorations of politics (Peronism) and psychology (Freudianism). Theres a scene from the novel that gives a good sense of Puigs particular brand of audacity. In it, Gladys masturbates while running through a fifteen-page series of fantasies from visions of a bricklayer moonlighting as a nude model to images of a janitor hauling boxescomplete with running footnotes on her progress toward orgasm (Gladys again introduces a finger into her sex organ). Scenes of men masturbating have plenty of comic currency, but scenes of women masturbating are still rare, even nearly forty years after the publication of The Buenos Aires Affair. Here and elsewhere, Puig has a knack for demurely courting scandal. His success at

this has to do with his blend of sentimentalism and clinical detachment, which gives a prickly edge even to tame scenes. Leos story reads a bit like a Freudian primer: his inability to climax sexually except in situations where violence is threatened is explored at length. (Puig was very interested in psychoanalytic explanations of human behavior: a number of readers urged him to cut his lengthy scholarly footnotes to Kiss of the Spider Woman, but he was adamant about educating the public.) Gladys, too, is frustrated by a lack of sexual fulfillment. Puig details her less-than-satisfactory relations with six men in the United States (Gladys had sexual intercourse with six men in the following order), where she goes on scholarship; her romantic failures lead to a breakdown and subsequent return to Argentina. It doesnt help that shes attacked and loses an eye in the United States (her eye patch gives her a camp allure). Naturally, sadistic Leo and masochistic Gladys embark on a doomed romance. Puigs pseudo-scientific yet sympathetic portrayal of characters with marked vulnerabilities and pathologies finds an echo in novels by younger writers (notably Roberto Bolao, especially in Nazi Literature in the Americas, and David Foster Wallace, who was a confirmed admirer of Puig). Gladys and Leo are hardly likable characters, and their unpleasant quirks and failures are satisfyingly unromanticized. This doesnt mean that theyre exactly realistic. Gladys may be a thoroughly modern creation, as evidenced by her search for meaning in a series of emphatically untranscendent sexual encounters, but she also inhabits a Hollywood fantasy world, especially in the scenes set at the Argentine beach house from which Leo abducts her. Puigs rolling pan through spaces and rooms described like static stage sets give the novel a weird, unsettling air.

s Puig got older, his life revolved more and more around movies. In her biography, Levine amusingly chronicles his eager early adoption of the VCR. From his apartment in Brazil, where he moved in 1980, he set up a worldwide network of friends (his esclavitas, or little slaves) willing to record televised movies for him. Often, he accepted speaking gigs only because they coincided with video conventions. His videoteca, while extensive, was far from archival quality: he liked to fill every cassette completely, frequently recording two movies and part of a third on one tape. These assiduously collected films were viewed at his apartment, where he presided over a cine club for family and friends.

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At some point in my reading of Puig, I began to wonder what these movies looked like to him. Clearly he saw the artifice and appreciated it as such, but his beloved Hollywood productions were also more real to him than life itself. They werent realistic, but at the same time they contained moments (Hedy Lamarr adjusting her hat, for example) that encapsulated a reality more intense than anything one could possibly experience in daily life. Movies werent a model for living. They were too perfect for that. The only way for a human to approach their heightened reality was to talk about them, and the purest form of talking about them was simply to retell them. Its no accident that Kiss of the Spider Woman, which is almost entirely a series of retellings of movies (real and invented) is alsoparadoxicallyPuigs most realistic novel. Those Hollywood movies were fundamentally cursi, of course. Actresses flounced and glared and tossed their hair. Actors smoldered and cursed and bantered. Puig borrowed from their ranks to assemble a giddy MGM lineup of Boom writers for

his friend the Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Cortzar was Hedy Lamarr (Beautiful but icy and remote); Fuentes was Ava Gardner (Glamour surrounds her but can she act?); Garca Mrquez was Liz Taylor (Beautiful face but such short legs); Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams (Oh so disciplined (and boring)). He included himself, as Julie Christie: A great actress, but since she has found the right man for her (Warren Beatty) she doesnt act anymore. Her luck in love matters is the envy of all the other MGM stars. This fluff has bite, and the same can be said about Puigs novels. The cursi literature of Latin America (with Manuel as one of its matriarchs) will strike readers whove only read the more familiar contemporary Latin American classics as bracingly new but also familiareven homey. Its strangeness lies in the details of life as lived by others who greatly resemble ourselves but whose assumptions (personal and cultural) are ever so slightly different. It is as startling as a conversation overheard that at once confirms and adjusts our perception of ourselves. n

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The idler

by scoTT shermAN
otherwise Known as the human condition
Selected Essays and Reviews.
By Geoff Dyer. Graywolf. 421 pp. Paper $18.

n 1978, when Geoff Dyer was 20, he read William Hazlitts essay My First Acquaintance With Poets and was entranced by an autobiographical passage: So I have loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. On the spot Dyer decided to become a professional scribbler. He kept that promise to himself, and since 1986 he has published novels, travelogues and essay collections, but also wide-ranging volumes on jazz, photography, World War I and John Berger. Dyer, who was born in England, adopted Hazlitts tendency to loiter, as well as his conception of literary freedom. (Hazlitts blazingly acerbic language did not leave an impression.) Indeed, its freedom that defines Dyers professional identityfreedom to write what he pleases, freedom to trespass on literary genres, freedom to ridicule academia, freedom to travel the world. Open a Dyer book and you will see him wandering through Paris with a joint in one hand and a desirable woman in the other; enjoying himself on the beaches of Mexico and Thailand; reading
Scott Sherman is a Nation contributing writer.

a book on the waterfront of New Orleans; strolling through the Pushkin Museum in search of works by Gauguin; or taking the bus to Francos Valley of the Fallen near Madrid. To read his work is to step into a parallel universe of art, literature, jazz, friendship and sex, all of which are set against a backdrop of bohemia, squalor and existential distress. Its a formula that has won Dyer a cult following and plaudits from peers: his recent novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009) carried blurbs from the likes of Zadie Smith, William Boyd and Jan Morris. Dyer knows that he has managed a rare feat on Grub Street: in an age of academic specialization and journalistic decay, he has earned a living by the poise and productivity of his pen. As I grew older I came increasingly to feel that my working life should be virtually synonymous with living my life as I wanted, irrespective of whether I was doing any work, he declared in the introduction

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to his 1999 essay collection Anglo-English Attitudes. Effectively, as my American publisher put it, I had found a way of being paid for leading my life. I liked that a lot, naturally. But freedom entails risks; one wonders if Dyerwhose literary persona is an uneasy synthesis of idler and intellectualhas ranged too widely and written too much. Of his dozen books, only one is first-rate; a handful of the rest are worthy of the bookshelf. Dyer is extremely gifted, but he is also a writer in search of his ideal subject. It is not Geoff Dyer, contrary to what Dyer might think.

yers first book, a study of John Berger called Ways of Telling, was published by Pluto Press in 1986. (It has never appeared in the United States.) In this dense and airless bookdull is how its author has since described itDyer moves chronologically through each phase of Bergers life and career, summarizing and assessing his works, placing them in their historical and intellectual contexts and launching counterstrikes against Bergers detractors. Ways of Telling is a tribute to Bergerthe hope of this book, Dyer writes in the preface, is that he may be seen not as an exception but as a modelbut Berger never comes to life on the page, as he does so effectively in Adam Hochschilds Mother Jones profile from 1981. Visiting Berger at his eighteenth-century farmhouse in the French Alps, Hochschild observed, It has cold running water only; across the driveway is a two-hole outhouse with snow drifting through cracks in the walls. Ways of Telling is full of insightful passages, and Dyers account of the British art scene in the 1950s is admirably comprehensive. But the book has the whiff of the library and the left-wing bookshop: its the work of a young Oxford-trained writer calling attention to his intellectual grooming. A typical sentence reads: T.J. Clarks books on Courbet are definitive in a way that none of Bergers could be. Other passages are incoherent: Literary taste is nurtured, in general, in the English faculties of institutes of higher education. The aesthetic consensus that results is, ultimately, given the social function of these institutions, ideologically informed. Still, Dyer backed into a fruitful subject. John Berger has always been a compelling and neglected figure, and anyone with a serious interest in Berger will eventually have to consult Ways of Telling. The book, it seems, served a salutary function in Dyers career. From Bergerwho has devoted his life to Marxist-oriented art and cultural criticism, as well as fiction, reportage, personal essays

and screenplaysDyer gained a very expansive sense of form, an unwillingness to dwell in a single genre. (From his immersion in Bergers shelf of books, Dyer may also have learned the virtues of laughter, the absence of which mars Bergers work.) Dyers ties to Berger have remained strong: in 2001 he edited Bergers Selected Essays, to which he contributed a stirring introduction. In 1989 Dyer published his first novel The Colour of Memory, a chronicle of bohemian life in Brixton in the 80s. The themes are familiar and the writing is mostly mundane (I caught a cold and passed it on to someone else. I went out; I stayed in.) But one facet of the novel, beneath the principal narrative line, catches the eye and the ear. Dyer appreciates jazz, and writes about it with flair: The clean, intelligent emotion of Jan Garbareks tenor filled the room. Audible landscapes formed and re-formed themselves around us. Morning music, mist melting in the sun. Dyer ended up taking stock of his talent as a music writer and finding a form for it: in 1991 Jonathan Cape published what is still his most vibrant workBut Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. (An American edition appeared from North Point Press in 1996.) It consists of seven atmospheric vignettes concerning major figures in jazz, including Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Lester Young, Ben Webster and Art Pepper; other giants, including Coleman Hawkins, make fleeting appearances. Sewn into the narrative is a silver thread about Duke Ellington traveling the country by car: Duke had said many times that the road was his home and if that was true then this car was his hearth. The book artfully combines fiction and nonfiction: some of the events described took placefor instance, the assault on Chet Baker in 1966but the material has been transmuted by Dyers imaginative interpretation of old black-and-white photographs, court transcripts, archive footage and clippings from the New York Herald Tribune. As a rule, he writes in the preface, assume that whats here has been invented or altered rather than quoted. Throughout, my purpose was to present the musicians not as they were but as they appear to me. The various threads form a seamless whole. A substantial imaginative leap separates Ways of Telling from But Beautiful. The quasiacademic language of the Berger book is gone; Dyers prose in But Beautiful is akin to a musical instrument: it has the swirl, beauty, flexibility and range of a tenor saxophone as blown by one of the masters. (Keith Jarrett, in a blurb for But Beautiful, compared the book to a great solo.) The section on

Lester Young unfolds in a dingy Broadway hotel, where the ailing Young is subsisting on Chinese food and booze: When they jammed together Hawk tried everything he knew to cut him but he never managed it. In Kansas in 34 they played right through the morning, Hawk stripped down to his singlet, trying to blow him down with that big hurricane tenor, and Lester slumped in a chair with that faraway look in his eyes, his tone still light as a breeze after eight hours playing. The pair of them wore out pianists until there was no one left and Hawk walked off the stand, threw his horn in the back of his car, and gunned it all the way to St. Louis for that nights gig. This is how Dyer begins his section on Mingus: America was a gale blowing constantly in his face. By America he meant White America and by White America he meant anything about America he didnt like. The wind hit him harder than it did small men; they thought America was a breeze but he heard it rage, even when branches were still and the American flag hung down the side of buildings like a starspangled scarfeven then he could hear it rage. His response was to rant back, to rush at it with all the intensity that he felt it rushing at him, two juggernauts hurtling toward each other on a road the size of a continent. Here is Monk strolling in Manhattan, gazing over the Hudson: As he looked out across the river a smear of yellow-brown light welled up over the skyline like paint squeezed from a tube. For a few minutes the sky was a blaze of dirty yellow until the light faded and oil-spill clouds sagged again over New Jersey. He thought about heading back to the apartment but stayed on in the sad twilight and watched dark boats crawl over the water, the grief of gulls breaking over them. But Beautiful is not flawless. Because Dyer has a better command of diction than of narrative, some of the chapters feel shapeless and made me yearn for A.B. Spellmans Four Lives in the Bebop Business (1966), an insiders nonfiction account, which, among many other virtues, has a brisk narrative pace. Dyer is acutely aware of the ways American racism

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marked the lives of his subjects, but sometimes his treatment of race is too abrupt and heavy-handed. On other occasions, Dyer pushes his deft ventriloquism too far, as in this passage describing Mingus in his wheelchair: Even talking was becoming difficult. His tongue lay in his mouth like an old mans dick. These are minor imperfections. But Beautiful is powerfully concise: Booze, junk, prison. It wasnt that jazz musicians died young, they just got older quicker. There are intriguing musical insights: Mingus wasnt like Miles, who heard the music and then simply transferred it from his head to the instruments. Mingus didnt hear music until he was making it. But above all there is the kind of emotional power and lyricism often associated with the writing of the late Whitney Balliett, whose jazz criticism graced The New Yorker for four decades. The apex of But Beautiful is a snapshot of Art Pepper in his prison cell at San Quentin, unfurling a blues on his alto saxophone while his mind expands with visions of the debauchery for which he was renowned. Peppers solo has an entrancing effect on his cellmate, Egg, who is snugly ensconced on the top bunk. Its a vignette of great resonance and beauty.

uthors routinely reinvent themselves. When Norman Mailer published his swaggering collection Advertisements for Myself in 1959, few would have expected him, twenty years later, to win a Pulitzer Prize for a thousand-page true life novel about Gary Gilmore. Mailers audacious gamble paid off artistically. If youve read Dyers books in chronological order including his lean, modest essay on World War I, The Missing of the Somme (1994)its hard not to be baffled by the identity he assumed in Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence (1997). The denizen of libraries and left-wing bookshops had reinvented himself as a slacker: I do everything badly, sloppily, to get it over with so that I can get on to the next thing that I will do badly and sloppily so that I can then do nothing. But slackers are not generally inclined to write learned treatises on John Berger or ransack jazz archives, as Dyer did in the research for But Beautiful, a book that features epigraphs from Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch. Out of Sheer Rage has a simple conceit. For years, Dyer tells us, he aspired to write a sober academic study of Lawrence; lassitude prevented him from doing so. What he wrote is a book about trying to write a book about Lawrencea shaggy tract on boredom, inertia, despair, missed opportu-

nities, stressful obligations and dead ends, among other afflictions. In Dyers hands, the rules of biography are inverted: on a visit to Sicily, where Lawrence lived in the early 1920s, Dyer encountered an old woman who knew Lawrence, but he neglected to ask her any questions (she was old and tired and I was too respectful); instead of energetically following Lawrences footsteps through Mexico, he lounged on the nude beach of Zipolite in Oaxaca. Out of Sheer Ragewhich his publisher identified as a memoiremerged from Dyers dissatisfaction with the standard conventions of travel writing and literary biography. (He scoffs at state-of-the-fart theorists who churn out papers with titles like Alternatives to Logocentrism in D.H. Lawrence.) Dyer was hardly alone in his displeasure with those genres: Janet Malcolm harbored her own set of concerns about the biographical treatment of Sylvia Plath, and in 1994 she produced a startling work of criticism and literary journalism, The Silent Woman, about the moral and ethical pitfalls of the biographical enterprise, and about the sadism and reductionism of journalism. Certainly there are some valuable passages in Rageincluding some fine pages on Lawrences conception of freedom and a moving evocation of his final months, in addition to a few funny gagsbut one cant escape the sense that Out of Sheer Rage, which helped to cement Dyers reputation on these shores, is vastly overrated. It has a sprawling narrative architecture that cannot be hidden beneath (or justified by) a slacker

pose. Its prose is verbose, a defect aggravated by its frequently rancid tone (I hate children and I hate parents of children). What explains Out of Sheer Rages cult popularity? Surely there are finer books on procrastination and the hazards of the literary enterprise. (See Martin Amiss The Information or Jonathan Rabans For Love and Money.) When Out of Sheer Rage was published, memoirs were in vogue: a first-person account of wrestling with D.H. Lawrence may have appealed to highbrow sensibilities bored by run-of-the-mill accounts (real or invented) of incest, divorce, substance abuse and alcoholism. The author holds little back: the book contains too much Dyer and not enough Lawrence. We learn about Dyers athletes foot, his bad knee, his aching back and his eczema; his deep desire to live in San Francisco and his disgust for the residents of Oxford; and his in-flight sexual fantasies (Often in planes I find myself thinking of having sex with the flight attendant: pushing my hand up between her legs as she walks past, fucking in the toilet: standard in-flight porno stuff). In such passages the slacker becomes a buffoon. Theres no better example than the scene in which Dyer and his girlfriend throw down their towels on the beach in Zipolite: I moved around in front of Laura who was dozing, one knee raised up, legs slightly apart so that I could see her cunt. After a few moments I became lost in the pleasure of looking at her breasts, her legs, her stomach, her cunt. My prick stirred into life. I spat in my hand and rubbed saliva over the head of my prick.

confession
I read the chemistry so I think of my windows as thick syrup and I do see a whole world stuck to them so I believe it Somehow twenty pelicans just now escaped with their shadows but the oaks and palmettos are struggling wildly to get loose If they cant do it with a thousand hands how could we with two Our predicament had been holding two things true at the same time It was worse actually We knew truth between them and did nothing
ALLAn Peterson

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f were being utterly frank, Dyer wrote in 1999, there were times when it was only the prospect of one day being able to publish my journalism that kept me writing proper books: do a few more novels, I reasoned, and maybe my obscurity will be sufficiently lessened to permit publication of the book I really care about, a collection of my bits and pieces. Thats a just admission: Dyers novels, including The Colour of Memory, do feel halfhearted in their texture and structure. The Search (1993) is a weird detective story seemingly written under the influence of Chandler, Coetzee and Calvino. Dyers most enjoyable novel, in which melancholy and humor achieve a fine balance, is Paris Trance: A Romance (1998), which brings to life two young expatriate couples adrift in France; pack it for the long flight to Charles de Gaulle. Dyers most recent novel is the overpraised Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the first half of which is a lethargic account of the Venice Biennale, related by a hack; in the second half, an expat writer hanging out in Varanasi undertakes a journey from anxiety to a kind of transcendence; in the final pages he is wearing a dhoti and bathing in the Ganges. As one expects from Dyer, there are some ingenious and witty passages. But his India is a thick stack of clichs (there was shit everywhere. Every kind of shit). For a realistic and affecting account of Varanasi, read Pankaj Mishras novel The Romantics (2000). If Dyers four novels are collectively unsatisfying, the same is mostly true of his travel writing. In 2003 he published Yoga for People Who Cant Be Bothered to Do It, a collection of forgettable dispatches from Cambodia, Paris, New Orleans, Detroit and Miami, some of which originally appeared in The Threepenny Review, Modern Painters and Feed. Colin Thubron or Neal Ascherson he is not: Taxi drivers urged us to go to the killing fields, he writes in the Cambodia chapter, but we were too hot and tiredthe heat meant we were tired all the timeand had no desire to see piles of skulls, and so, whenever possible, we retired to the breezy familiarity of the Foreign Correspondents Club. Platitudes fall like dead leaves: If you are happy, being alone in a hotel, on expenses, drinking beer, and watching porno is close to bliss; but if you are lonely and unloved it is utterly soul-destroying. Like But Beautiful, Yoga elides the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction; but the results are much less satisfying. In the preface Dyer notes, Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head. To

position his travel book between genres is obviously Dyers prerogative. But readers pay a price: we are denied the authorial responsibility of nonfiction and possibly the unbridled imagination of fiction. Yoga has a half-finished feel: it seems to be one of his proper books, a bridge to what he really cares abouthis miscellaneous journalism, his bits and pieces. The appearance of such a collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, indicates that the author is doing what he most enjoys. Happily for the reader, the idler has been supplanted, this time around, by the critic and close reader. The book contains sections on art, writing and music, as well as some personal essays. Many of the pieces first appeared in London newspapers, and they are too brief to be effective in book form. One exception is Dyers review of Denis Johnsons Vietnam novel, Tree of Smoke (2007), where his skills as a book reviewer and critic take flight: Johnson is all over the place, and he is an artist of strange diligence. It is as if his skewed relationship to the sentencenot really knowing what one is and yet knowing exactly what to do with itoperates, here, at the level of structure. Tree of Smoke is as excessive and messy as Moby Dick. Anything further removed from the tucked-up, hospital corners school of British fiction is hard to imagine. Its a big, dirty, unmade bed of a book, and once you settle in youre in no hurry to get out. The strongest pieceson F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rebecca West, the Goncourt brothers and recent books and movies about Iraq and Afghanistanare the ones where Dyer has the space to stretch his legs, burnish his prose and spin a web of connections. In his essay on the photographer William Gedney he writes: Gedney was fascinated by the history of his [Brooklyn] street and spent long hours in the local library, excavating its past, transcribing quotations, and pasting newspaper accounts of significant events of the streets history into what he designated his Myrtle Avenue Notebooks. Whitmanwhose grave Gedney photographedhad also lived on the avenue for a while, and the paper he had edited for several years, the Eagle, boasted that this first paved and graded street in the area was the pride of the old-time Brooklynite. That was in 1882; by 1939 Henry Miller considered it a street not of sorrow, for sor-

row would be human and recognizable, but of sheer emptiness. Dyer has a gift for excavating magnificent quotes from other writers, but its a gift that frequently serves to overshadow his own paragraphs. Consider how hard it would be to improve upon these lines, which he discovered in Rebecca Wests Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. West had encountered a student interested in writing a thesis about her: I explained that I was a writer wholly unsuitable for her purpose: that the bulk of my writing was scattered through American and English periodicals; that I had never used my writing to make a continuous disclosure of my own personality to others, but to discover for my own edification what I knew about various subjects which I found to be important to me; and that in consequence I had written a novel about London to find out why I loved it. Certain readers may be charmed by Dyers essay on his quest for the perfect doughnut and the ideal cup of coffee: Finding Grand Central Station was easy enough, but finding Orens Daily Roast within the vast station complex was extremely difficult. Eventually I found it, saw it, saw a line of people queuing up, saw that although it was essentially just a stall, they did indeed stock Doughnut Plant doughnuts but that only one vanilla doughnut remained. I joined the queue. If anyone had taken the last doughnut I would have pleaded with her and put my caseIf you knew what I have been through this morning Near the end of the collection is an essay titled Readers Block, wherein Dyer confesses, I find it increasingly difficult to read. This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that. Admirers of his literary criticism may mourn that disclosure; but I hope it inspires Dyer to immerse himself again in the world of music and musicians, preferably jazz musicians. In his hands, a book about Charles Mingus and White America would be fascinating. So would a biography of Don Cherrywhom Dyer calls his guiding spirit, and whose photograph is pinned above his writing desk, or a history of West Coast jazz, from Art Pepper to Charlie Haden. The research could be undertaken in San Francisco, n where the doughnuts arent half bad.

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Dmitri shostakovich (left) with his first wife, nina Varzar, and friend Ivan sollertinsky, 1932

shostakovichs Ambivalence

by michAel oDoNNell
Shostakovich to protest the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 but ultimately realized that the shackled genius would never agree.) Shostakovich shocked his friends by formally joining the party in 1960well after survival demanded itthereby becoming an establishment figure mistrusted by the next generation of composers. Many Russian liberals never forgave him for signing a 1973 petition denouncing the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. One of Shostakovichs friends remembered him saying, Id sign anything even if they hand it to me upside-down. All I want is to be left alone. Shostakovich signedhe always signed not because he was a recluse or a genius who couldnt be bothered with politics but because he hadnt the constitution to fight back. Racked throughout his life by illnesstuberculosis, lung cancer, polio and Lou Gehrigs diseasehe was a wretched bag of nerves; contemporaneous accounts have him twitching, sweating and incessantly drumming his fingers. The fragile composer lived much of his life in a state of panicked desperation. He occasionally rebuffed the party in small ways, exerting his influence to help friends on the wrong side of an official or called up for service. Yet he ultimately chose subversion rather than resistance. He was a survivor, not a martyr, and when he mocked totalitarianism

mitri Shostakovich was a coward. Or at least the great Soviet composer admitted as much to friends. The resulting shame reverberates through his music, sounding notes of terror, humiliation and despair. When in 1948 Communist Party apparatchiks denounced his compositions as formalist and inaccessible to the common worker, he made a public confession, saying his music suffered from many failures and serious setbacks and pledging, I will accept critical instruction. He occasionally composed inanely patriotic songs and, some say, symphonies to placate his censors. Although he kept a picture of the Russian expatriate Igor Stravinsky under glass on his desk, Shostakovich yielded to party pressure and denounced his Modernist music, a moment he would later describe as the worst of his life. Some of his closest friends made different choices during the middle years of the dark Soviet century. The cellist and humanist Mstislav Rostropovich defied the party and risked everything by sheltering Aleksandr Solzhenitsyna mighty figure of resistance whom Shostakovich let down more than once. (The novelist considered enlisting
Michael ODonnell is a lawyer in Chicago whose writing has appeared in Bookforum and Washington Monthly.

music for silenced Voices

By Wendy Lesser. Yale. 350 pp. $28.

Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets.

he did so in the safe company of friends or in sarcastic passages of music, like the perverted military march played by dissonant trumpets in the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. His motives and loyalties remain cloudy, if not quite enigmatic. The finale of the same piece features one of Shostakovichs most famous concessions: a last-minute switch to the major key to send the concertgoers out on a note of Soviet triumphalism. Born in St. Petersburg in 1906, Shostakovich was the great red hope, the Soviet Unions first homegrown composer, or so the apparatchiks liked to boast when they werent terrorizing him. Shortly after the 1948 denunciationShostakovichs secondStalin telephoned and asked him to represent the USSR on a cultural junket to the United States. Stalin claimed to know nothing of the blacklisting that had been ruining Shostakovichs life. Like many others who lived through Stalins purges and terror, Shostakovich always carried a toothbrush and change of underwear in case he was packed off to the gulag. But this never happened: he was too valuable an instrument of

yale University press/University of bristol

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May 9, 2011

propaganda. After he composed the Seventh Symphony (Leningrad), an anthem of Soviet resistance to Nazism during World War II, Shostakovich became a national hero whose photo was splashed across the cover of Time. In The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross describes how Russians first heard the symphony during the siege of 1942 under the most dramatic circumstances imaginable: The score was flown in by military aircraft in June, and a severely depleted Leningrad Radio Orchestra began learning it. After a mere fifteen musicians showed up for the initial rehearsal, the commanding general ordered all competent musicians to report from the front lines. The players would break from the rehearsals to return to their duties, which sometimes included the digging of mass graves for victims of the siege. Three members of the orchestra died of starvation before the premiere took place. An array of loudspeakers then broadcast the Leningrad into the silence of no-mans-land. Never in history had a musical composition entered the thick of battle in quite this way: the symphony became a tactical strike against German morale. This from a composer who switched his radio from the BBC to Radio Moscow before turning it off, in case the party came snooping.

with hurricane winds rather than simple lifes breath, favoring unity and cohesion over complexity and compromise. There is little heroic exaggeration in Wendy Lessers Music for Silenced Voices. An editor and a nonmusician, Lesser has written a sensitive biography that explores Shostakovich through his string quartets rather than his better-known symphonies. It joins more comprehensive studies by Fay and Elizabeth Wilson, but less as a contribution to Shostakovich scholarship than as a generous reflection on his life and chamber music. Lesser too discusses the composers moral ambivalence, describing his decision to keep his head down rather than to stand up and fight as a choice most of us would make under similar circumstances. That assessment carries the uncomfortable ring of truth, but Lesser is compelled to offer a second line of defense, an artists responsibility toward his work: Shostakovich already, at the age of thirty, knew himself to be a significantly original composer; he knew, in other words, that he was capable of producing valuable, lasting work that was unlike anyone elses. This knowledge entailed certain obligations (one might even call them ethical obligations), and one of these was that he try as hard as possible to keep writing music. It would have been pretentious and morally dubious of him to have used this argument in self-defense, and he never did so, but I am invoking it on his behalf. Its a fraught business, retroactively blessing morally dubious actions with a rationale that could not decently be claimed by the actor at the time. This process elides the actors true reasons and justifies his deeds with the ingeniousness of hindsight. It would be obscene to reach for a hand in time of death and persecution only to find the hand withheld in favor of art. If the argument truly explains Shostakovichs behavior, it is solipsism personified. If every composer who thinks he is the next Mozart forgoes his basic duties to his fellow man so that he can keep working, the road to perdition will be paved with grace notes.

ot surprisingly, most discussions of Shostakovichs music invoke the political strands of his life, which are intertwined like the braids of a noose. It is at once impossible to understand his compositions independent of his lifelong persecution and dangerously tempting to let biography drown out the music. The playbill for a Chicago Symphony Orchestra performance I recently attended claimed, plausibly, that Shostakovichs Fifth Symphony is perhaps the best-known work of art born from the marriage of politics and music. Yet some Shostakovich boosters have taken the connection too far. In 1979, four years after Shostakovichs death from lung cancer, the Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov published Testimony, which purported to be the composers dictated memoirs. The controversial book recast Shostakovichs life and work into an implausibly pervasive antiSoviet narrative in which every note was an act of secret nose-thumbing. The books authenticity has been fatally refuted by Shostakovichs biographer Laurel Fay. Unwilling to accept the composers perceived moral failures, Volkov attempted to resuscitate him

n addition to confronting Shostakovichs politics, Lesser delves deeply into the music. She contends that his fifteen symphonies were so heavily scrutinized by the party and the public that he saved his most honest and personal music for the string quartet, a format that rarely attracted big premieres. Chamber musicians share this view, and although their preferences are

predictable, scholars have reached the same conclusion. (Wilson, who otherwise devotes little of Shostakovich: A Life Remembered to the quartets, writes that the final three are arguably the summit of his achievement, and that the composer used the quartet as a vehicle for self-discovery and private confession.) With the exception of the Eighth and Fourteenth, Lesser shows mistrust and even a little disdain for Shostakovichs variously heartfelt and hypocritical symphonies. Her enthusiasm for the quartets is infectious and her skepticism about the symphonies understandable, but in the end she overreaches. Lesser observes of Shostakovich that anxiety may well be the strongest feeling his music conveys. That is a plausible judgment of the quartets; the better-known symphonies overwhelmingly express tragedy. Like the symphonies, the quartets are uneven. Some are models of clarity. The Second, with its assertive melodies and passionate finale; the Sixth, an unusually light and tuneful work for Shostakovich; the tragic Eighth, long (and mistakenly) interpreted as a suicide note; and the spare, mournful Fifteenth are major contributions to twentieth-century music. Though they do not warrant Lessers repeated comparisons of Shostakovich to Beethoven (or to Shakespeare), they are profound, complex and strikingly original works that reward each new listening. That the quartets contain Shostakovichs most personal and intimate music does not necessarily mean they are his best works. The pages of a diary can be intensely personal, but they do not always cohere or illuminate. One of the triumphs of Beethovens late quartets is that they are both introspective and universalno mean feat in any art form. By contrast, some of Shostakovichs middle and later quartetsespecially the Eleventh, Twelfth and Thirteenthare all but unlistenable in their relentless fury and obsession with death. The Thirteentha work of profound despairis the musical equivalent of a man shrieking all his fears into an empty room. Many of the quartets contain at least one frantic movement crowded with relentlessly unmelodic music and harsh bowing played at double forte. Such works reveal a side of the composer that is uncompromising to the point of indulgence. True to her project, Lesser defends all fifteen, but she also properly concedes some weaknesses. Here, for instance, is her description of the Tenths unlovely second movement: [Its] loud, fierce opening comes as quite a jolt after the delicate close of the first movement. From this sudden start,

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The Nation.

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the music just keeps getting louder and fiercer. A series of braying chords (which can sound like either a donkeys hee-haw or a trains double whistle, depending on which instrument plays them) represents the most extreme version of what the composer does throughout this section, assaulting our ears with purposely unmelodic noises. Part of the problem lies in the scale of the string quartet, which is in some ways poorly suited to Shostakovichs compositional style. His symphonies also contain bursts of frenzylike the famous scherzo of the Tenth, an orchestral showpiece that conjures up all the wrath of Stalin. But a symphony orchestraparticularly the very large orchestra demanded by Shostakovichs musicsoftens the harsh effect of the strings. In his string quartets, by contrast, all the scraping pierces through, producing bare, ugly noises that grate on the ear. The quartet also makes no allowance for two of Shostakovichs strengths: his writing for percussion and brass. If Shostakovichs quartets reveal the inner mind of a tragic man, his symphonies capture the tragedy of a nation and an era. Something

in the writing suggests that he considered the song cycle called From Jewish Poetry and symphonies his public legacy. In them he was provocatively set his Thirteenth Symphony more disciplined with melody and resisted the to Yevgeny Yevtushenkos poem Babi Yar, gimmick of the false note, which deflates which deplores Russian anti-Semitism. Afraid every melodic expectation in the quartets. of the consequences, the conductor Yevgeny Lesser explains that his music is filled with Mravinsky refused to premiere it, as he had moments where a seemingly stable melody done with Shostakovichs other symphonies. begins and then breaks down into dissonance, Most profoundly, the Tenth Symphony or where our expectations have been set up to which Wilson rightly calls Shostakovichs hear a particular turn of phrase and instead we central masterpieceis a passionate, deepget something very slightly off from that. In ly moving ode to the horrors of oppression, the quartets this device is overused, becom- completed in the months following Stalins ing a contrarian tic: Shostakovich careens death in 1953. If Shostakovich was not brave repeatedly from beautiful music to brutal ug- enough to write it while Stalin lived, he was liness. The Fourteenth is a perfect example. brilliant enough to render musically the caIt begins with the cello and then the violin tastrophe of Stalinism after the dictator died. carrying a lovely, dancelike melody whose That is a modest form of courage but a major structure and rhythm persist, but each time in form of genius. slightly more grotesque form until once more Yet in the end the music must stand or fall we are staring at a six-foot hole in the ground. on its own. Does the Eighth Symphony porThis is not to say that the hacks were right, tray the tragedy of the Battle of Stalingrad, the and that all of the composers music should tragedy of all waror the human tragedy ithave been accessible and easily whistled. But self? It does not matter. Shostakovichs legacy surely there could have been some whistling? will depend on whether we keep returning to Unlike the symphonies, the quartets are his music, supplying our own narratives and largely apolitical. Shostakovich took his big- hearing whatever the music stirs in us. With gest risks in larger forms, including dramatic many of the symphonies andas Lesser valuworks. A lifelong philo-Semite in a viru- ably reminds usmany of the quartets, we lently anti-Semitic society, he composed a will keep listening. 1:15 PM Page 1 n 1103.023 - Limberger 2.25x3.5 ad:Layout 1 3/16/11

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