Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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July 22, 2012The PersiansQuite a few years ago I published a book which was translated into German, and did a lecture tour of that country, speaking and showing a film at the Amerika Häuser in half a dozen cities. These libraries, which also had galleries and lecture halls, were operated by the United States Information Service from the late 1940s until 2006; the one in Berlin was closed, but taken over and reopened by local friends of America.
In each city someone was detailed to look after me, and there was always interesting conversation. A woman in Berlin told me stories about looking after Mickey Spillane. In another city, I forget which one, I was shown to my hotel (so I wouldn't get lost) by a woman who was a frequent visitor to Iran. She was fascinated by the place. "The Persians are liars," she said. "They've been famous for thousands of years for being liars. They tell you what they think you want to hear and then go and do as they please."
In this weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal there is a review by Sohrab Ahmari of a new book called The Iranian Nuclear Crisis, by Seyed Hossein Mousavian. The author is a former Iranian nuclear negotiator; his book of over 600 pages chronicles the talks with the Iranians over the past decade. The reviewer writes:
Early in the book, Mr. Mousavian recounts a 2010 meeting between the emir of Qatar and Sen. John Kerry. The emir tells the American: "Based on 30 years of experience with the Iranians, they will give you 100 words. Trust only one of the 100." Mr. Mousavian presents the scene as evidence of Sunni-Arab leaders like the emir poisoning relations between the West and the Islamic Republic. But readers would do well to keep the emir's advice in mind as they approach the author's own many thousands of words.
He continues:
Mr. Mousavian, for example, rarely admits Iran's multiple breaches of nonproliferation statues. (And when he does, he blames "administrative problems," "bureaucratic passivity," "technical ambiguities" and the like.) Readers could be forgiven if they came away with the impression that when Iran does comply with nonproliferation laws, the country is doing a favor for the West and must be rewarded with concessions on other fronts.
Mousavian was the Iranian ambassador to Germany in 1992, when four Iranian dissidents were gunned down in a Berlin restaurant; the Germans convicted an Iranian intelligence officer and three Lebanese henchmen. Mousavian had dismissed the charges as a "joke". He soon left Germany. In this book he defends the diplomatic charades of the pre-Ahmadinejad years, which were abandoned when they had become too obvious, even though he himself was briefly jailed in 2007. And so on, and so forth. He pretends that the hostage-taking of Hezbollah in the 1980s was the religious gangsters acting independently, while the American intelligence services intercepted communications showing unequivocally that Hezbollah were sponsored by Tehran: the hostage-taking stopped only when it too became counter-productive.
The remarkable thing is that Mr. Mousavian is now a research scholar at Princeton University. What the hell is that about?
July 22, 2012This time it really is a Brave New World, folks.
This week BoSacks, the media blog, had an item about the sales of eBooks compared to those of printed books. Earlier, someone was quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying that sales of eBooks had already surpassed those of printed books, but it turned out that the statistic applied only to hardbacks, and perhaps only a subset of those.
Anyway I emailed Bob Sacks, saying that I had downloaded 21 novels by George Gissing for 98 cents, most of them unavailable in print, and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a 1,000-page 16th-century classic, also for 98 cents, and wondering how these sales can be counted. He wrote back saying that we don't really have any statistics. We are at the beginning of all this, and nobody knows what's going on. We're in Dodge City.
Newspapers like the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle are subscribing to Journatic, a service that provides local news. The problem is that the local news items can be written far away, even overseas, by people who have never set foot in either city. This may save money, but it will require a tough-minded experienced journalist in house to keep an eye on it. The Tribune has brought back Randy Weisman as a consultant, one of the tough-minded experienced journalists they earlier let go to save money.
The commentary of course is about "The Tribune, once a great newspaper," and so on, but in fact newspapers as we have known them are disappearing. Many papers are using material they get from blogging members of the public, because it's free. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of the best-known papers in the country, is published only three days a week now. Here in the Lehigh Valley, the Morning Call is not delivered to my home on Monday or Tuesday, and is hard to find in the supermarket on those days because they don't print many copies. The Sunday advertising and other supplements including the funnies are delivered on Saturday, and the Sunday paper is very thin; it's only a matter of time until they abandon the Sunday edition.
For generations the record companies complained that jazz and classical music didn't sell. (Did they give away records and record players to school and libraries? Did they sponsor radio programs featuring their own releases? They did not.) Now any kid can create a pop record in his bedroom on his laptop and market it online, and we are awash in a sea of trash. When I was a kid in Kenosha there was nothing but "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" on the radio; now by means of the Internet I am swapping old out-of-print records, and broadcasts of material that my favorite artists never had a chance to record commercially, so I have what I always wanted: more good music than time to listen to it all. As I write I am listening to a 3-LP set of the orchestral music of Debussy by Désiré-Émile Inghelbrecht (1880-1965), a conductor I never even heard of until now, and it's absolute magic. But nobody is paying for any of this stuff, and the greatest orchestras in the world do not even have recording contracts.
The news, the arts, the future of nations and of the planet… the world as we have known it is disappearing. Either we will each develop our own bullshit detectors, or we will not.