From an email by an editor at one of the top American university presses: “quality does not work well here as an economic argument for a book, even if bad quality works against.”
Parse that.

All you have to do is click here.
(But watch out for Dr. Damocles Severe!)

January 17: The Miami Herald has an excellent op-ed piece reflecting on the post-disaster situation in Haiti, by Dr Paul Farmer.

NYT again: this time, Maureen Dowd, the allegedly liberal columnist.

Even as some kind of political shorthand, it ought to be a finger-wagging no-no in a democracy to hold the president to the standard of the “strong father” of us all. “Eternal Father, strong to save.” “Stalin, the Little Father of the nations.” Let's get it right. The president is a public servant elected for a term of years to perform various tasks on behalf of the nation. If you chide him for failing to be the “strong father,” pretty soon you're going to expect him to have infallible foreknowledge of each and every dastardly terrorist plot-- ouch, I just trod onto the electrified astroturf of David Brooks's synthetically conservative column.

Just back from an unnecessarily bad pic, Albert Schweitzer, ein Leben für Afrika. Unnecessarily bad because, if you wanted to wax sentimental and push the viewer around, the Schweitzer story is packed with tear-jerker opportunities, but this script-writer saw fit to add in a pointless CIA conspiracy plot and turn Schweitzer's wife and daughter into whining, incapable, embittered suburban ditzes. I thought it might open a window into the soul of present-day Germany, etc., but it left me wondering why there are European directors who aspire to the subtlety of Mexican telenovela. Distribution will probably protect you from this turkey. In its defense: the score includes a few bars of Bach.

A friend just sent me a link to the NYT's report on the recent gathering of the Christian right in NYC. I have to say it renewed the sick feeling in the stomach which permanently accompanies my residency in the US. I realized what a bliss it is to have the chance to spend an intellectually comfortable time in a European population among whom not even the dullest and least educated believe that the world was created in seven days. Not to be confronted with the discourse on the unnaturalness of homosexuality, the badness of sex outside marital bonds, the prohibition of abortion and stem-cell research felt like a breath of fresh air, like being in a normal, contemporary world. This NYT article struck me as a sinister welcome back from an enlightened world to the dark, nightmarish caves, where all knowledge about the condition of humanity brought to us by enormous efforts of science and development of social consciousness has to be abandoned again. To have to start arguing the basic case for the Enlightenment from scratch feels like intellectual rape: incredibly boring, annoying, painful. Robert P. George, the Princeton professor, makes the Christian Right's cause even more sinister because in his case it can't be blamed on ignorance. His is the pure joy of the pursuit of human unhappiness, reminding me of the eerie pastor and his house from Bergman's Fanny and Alexander. I have encountered only one German Christian fundamentalist, and he was a researcher on the Georgia Tech campus, a miserable creature who had to go to Georgia, US to find the audience that eluded him in his praise-worthy home country.

-- the contemporary equivalent to Walter Benjamin's “Unpacking My Library.” But I don't have time to do it, much less to talk about it, and how could I hope to rival Walt's eloquence:

When last month I read in Le Monde about the meeting of European leaders to discuss charter flights which would deport refugees from the EU, I couldn't help thinking of this piece of public art celebrating in Berlin 20 years of the fall of the Berlin wall. Under the auspices of the Academy of Arts in Berlin, the Greek artist Kalliopi Lemos erected in front of the Brandenburg Gate a monument made from 11 authentic Turkish boats which once carried illegal immigrants from the East to the West. Some of the boats broke apart, sank, and later floated ashore on the Greek coast where the artist collected them. When I first saw the artwork, I was stunned by what I thought was an indication of a new openness of the European sensibility regarding immigration. During the time I spent in Berlin, 1991-2000, illegal immigration represented the worst possible crime in the European mind. But alas, Le Monde's news made me aware that artistic and political public spaces don't coincide and the lessons of history, though they provide material for art, remain unlearned.