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Bollettino I have never read a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth. LI's vast readership is astonishingly literate -- you all are out there devouring Alain Badiou's difficult essays on Dedekind's mathematical ontology and such, I know -- yet it is a good bet that none of you are familiar with the thrills of Rookwood, or the clever drama of Jack Sheppard. Is this because of the Courvoisier murder? Phillip Allingham provides a potted bio of Ainsworth on the Victoria Web site . It's an impressive 19th century life. As a boy, Ainsworth was inspired by the romances of Walter Scott, along with all of literary Europe and, to its misfortune (according to Mark Twain), the South. Ainsworth even knew Charles Lamb. He scored a big success with Rookwood, a historical that painted, among other things, a dashing highwayman, Dick Turpin. The money poured in, Ainsworth bought the appropriate gaudy pile, and then the wife dies. Beloved, of course, and young, of course, providing

Bollettino "The bodies of two U.S. soldiers missing for days were discovered early Saturday northwest of Baghdad, as the toll rises past 200 for Americans killed since war started in Iraq. News of their killings came amid a torrent of guerrilla-style attacks and sabotage that has marred U.S. efforts to re-establish order since Saddam Hussein's ouster. About a third of U.S. troops killed in the Iraqi conflict have died in attacks or accidents since major combat was declared over May 1." -- Washington Post And, to add to our casualties, this is the latest brilliant scheme from our resident representative in Bagdhad, Mr. Bremer: U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders. -- Washington Post From another graf: 'The most recent order to stop planning for

Bollettino " I come to Vienna to refresh my ambivalence," he said . The profile of Frederic Morton in the NYT this morning is a little gift for us. Morton is the type of person LI looks up to absolutely -- the type of person we have tried to be, alas for our well-being, since the age of 20. The Viennese intellectual, who sharpens his teeth by savaging the Viennese intellectual -- which is the way of Karl Kraus. Morton does seem less acerbic, less prone to bite, than such as Canetti or Musil. But that his books are being taken so seriously by Vienna says a lot about that place. Including why it isn't the Vienna of the Nervous Splendor that Morton writes about. Perhaps Thomas Bernhard was the last of those savages -- the ones who tore, with bleeding claws, at a splendor they found to be half criminal in its beginnings and half rotten in its endings. Sentiment and petty pilfering, leading up to the auto de fe of the Jews -- that was pretty much the Bernhardian v

Bollettino We quoted Oscar, for obvious reasons, yesterday. We want to get back to one of those quotes today -- this bit of repartee: "C--You are of opinion, I believe, that there is no such thing as an immoral book? W--Yes. C--May I take it that you think "The Priest and the Acolyte" was not immoral? W--It was worse; it was badly written." Now, we have been on mild kick about murder, and we've also been thinking of the peculiar immorality of public moralists. We were planning a post comparing William Bennett to Will Hays, the man who ran the Hays Office that censored films from the thirties to the sixties. However, Will Hays is a very hard man to pin down. The Hays office has often been studied. It was actually started in the twenties, and was a mask for the studios, who were currently going through a cycle of scandals -- most notably, the railroading of Fatty Arbuckle for the rape of Virginia Rappe, a thing he was never convicted of doing.

Bollettino We quoted Oscar, for obvious reasons, yesterday. We want to get back to one of those quotes today -- this bit of repartee: "C--You are of opinion, I believe, that there is no such thing as an immoral book? W--Yes. C--May I take it that you think "The Priest and the Acolyte" was not immoral? W--It was worse; it was badly written." Now, we have been on mild kick about murder, and we've also been thinking of the peculiar immorality of public moralists. We were planning a post comparing William Bennett to Will Hays, the man who ran the Hays Office that censored films from the thirties to the sixties. However, Will Hays is a very hard man to pin down. The Hays office has often been studied. It was actually started in the twenties, and was a mask for the studios, who were currently going through a cycle of scandals -- most notably, the railroading of Fatty Arbuckle for the rape of Virginia Rappe, a thing he was never convicted of doing.

Bollettino Casualty Report: Two American soldiers have been taken prisoner in Balad. A soldier was killed in an ambush in Najaf. And finally this, from the NYT: "In another report, a United States soldier was shot in the head while buying digital video discs at a shop in the Kazimiyah neighborhood of northwest Baghdad today, the shop owner and witnesses told Reuters. It was not clear from witnesses if the shot was fatal, the news agency said." The military has decided that this is not guerilla warfare -- this is just a 'spike." Well, we will see how long that euphemism lasts. The Irish times has an interesting report : "a truck full of Americans driving to Baghdad to phone their families ran over a bomb." The Irish have, shall we say, seen a bit of guerilla warfare. The Times report continues: "Attacks on the occupation forces in Iraq have escalated at such a rate in recent days that fresh reports have been coming in almost hourly."

Bollettino And finally, a sensible article about deflation . As we've said before, what is really happening is that the Fed and the Bush administration are pushing us into a seventies style situation: inflation plus high unemployment. Excellent little piece by Noam Scheiber, who seems to have a head on his shoulders. Greenspan is operating like Nixon's Burns. Pump up the economy, no matter what, for the big election. We don't think this is gonna work. And we think, given the deficit and the trade deficit, that we have parlayed ourselves into a disaster. Ending graf: The Fed's Open Market Committee cut short-term interest rates by an additional quarter-point when it met this week--even though the previous 1.25 percent rate was already at a 42-year low and Fed officials continue to insist the possibility of deflation is remote. The move was widely expected on Wall Street, if for no other reason than that Greenspan had foreshadowed it while addressing a meeting o

Bollettino On this day, of all days, it seems apposite to glance at Oscar Wilde's trial. The libel charge that Wilde foolishly brought against the Marqise of Queensbury concerned a typically misspelled note left at Wilde's club, accusing him not (in Scalia's terms) of having a homosexual agenda, but of being a posing Somdomite. Oddly enough, from newspaper accounts, at least, we don't hear of Scalia, Rehnquist of Thomas evoking Queensbury, but surely they should. The man is an emblem of their cause and mentality. Famously, the trial was as brilliant a performance as the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest. Alas, it was a fatal mistake on Wilde's part to think that an English court would appreciate a brilliant performance -- you might as well do juggling tricks for a herd of walruses. Everything went bad, and Wilde, as is well known, lost, only to be then condemned for being more than a posing Somdomite and thrust into prison. Here's one

Remora Perry Anderson's piece in the LRB -- Casuistries of Peace and War -- is good, straightforward Marxist analysis. Every piece of it is right -- it is just the whole thing that is wrong. Shall we start from the ending? "What conclusions follow? Simply this. Mewling about Blair's folly or Bush's crudity, is merely saving the furniture. Arguments about the impending war would do better to focus on the entire prior structure of the special treatment accorded to Iraq by the United Nations, rather than wrangle over the secondary issue of whether to continue strangling the country slowly or to put it out of its misery quickly." This, in dismissing the issues of the current peace movement in order to focus on attacking the underlying pattern. A politics depends, of course, on there being an underlying pattern. And so the piece is rife with the old images that evoke the real and the apparent, the veil and the God behind it, such as this graf which affirm

Bollettino Lately, for the prose of it, we've been reading Thomas De Quincey's essay on the Fine Art of Murder. That is one of the scarier real murder accounts -- up there, we think, with In Cold Blood. In Cold Blood was scary in part because, in that farmhouse in Kansas, we know that the head of the household made a crucial initial mistake that he couldn't get out of, and witnessed the murders of all he loved before he was killed, too -- which is about the worst thing that can happen to a person. George Orwell wrote a famous essay on the English Murder. In fact, murder is a rather unexplored theme in Orwell's work -- he wrote several essays about crime novels, a famous essay on execution, and in an examination of Auden's poetry on the Spanish Civil War -- examination in the sense that the floroscope lamp was turned on the patient and he was pronounced terminally ill -- there is this wonderful passage on these verses in Auden's "Spain": "

Bollettino Ah, LI wants a break from Iraq -- but Iraq apparently doesn't want to give LI a break. The latest marvel coming out of the Coalition authority is the backtracking on the military. After dissolving it, someone figured out that angry unemployed men with guns might be a bit of a danger out there on the range. To address this, the Coalition first thought that shooting a few protesters in Baghdad would do the trick. Well, for some reason that didn't seem to calm that legendary Iraqi passion -- they make such a fuss about their casualties, you know -- so then an adhoc measure was crafted to indefinitely pay half of the disbanded army. Which means, you'll be happy to know, that only 150,000 pissed off, armed men are ranging their own territory. Patrick Tyler in the NYT reported yesterday that Bremer's latest brainstorm is to create a very shrunken Iraqi army -- no air force, and a military strength of about 40,000. In a phrase that we wish we'd hear more

Bollettino It is Jessica Lynch's fate to be a poster-girl -- first for American heroism, then for the lies of the Pentagon, and now for the rightwing accusation that criticizing her "myth" is akin to hatin' America. While we were surfing rightwing blog sites, it occured to us that Jessica Lynch should properly be a poster girl for the ambiguity of the term "accident" in a combat zone. This blogger, Omnibus Bill , dramatizes the accident that sprained her spine and takes out his ire on various leftwingers. The leftwinger part we don't care about -- but we did find that the dramatization makes a simple point: we have no idea how the military classifies 'accident.' The papers regularly report a very high number of fatalities due to accidents in Iraq -- 41 to 51. Since one of LI's monomaniacal points for the last couple of weeks has been that the media is consistently underplaying our casualties in Iraq in order not to undermine our Comman

Bollettino Mark Fitz, AP's ace reporter, sent in a story we quoted Saturday about the exaggerated picture of violence in Iraq given by the news media. The media has also been all about the Sunni Crescent, contrasted with the peaceful Shi'ite south. So we should expect that it is the Shi'ite south where the casualties will eventually pile up. Casualty report this morning, from the Guardian: "The MOD statement said: "There have been two incidents today near Amara. We very much regret to confirm that in one incident, six British personnel have been killed. Arrangements are in hand to inform their next of kin." The NYT story carries a little more information about the two attacks, which look like battles. A helicopter was attacked, most of its crew was wounded. At the bottom of the story, it carries this info: "An American soldier was wounded, three Iraqis were killed and two were wounded in a firefight at a checkpoint in Ramadi today, the

Bollettino Casualty report today: At the bottom of a report on the blowing up of another oil pipeline near Hit, there was this tossoff: "Also near Hit, U.S. soldiers Saturday evening opened fire on a car that failed to stop at a checkpoint, killing one Iraqi and wounding another, said Kievenaar. The troops fired warning shots first, he said." Another oil pipeline going into Syria was blown up today. A report on the situation in Oil and Gas News is a bit more dire than what we are reading in the regular newspapers : "NICOSIA, June 23 -- Even as Iraq began loading its first oil for export in 3 months on Sunday, saboteurs blasted an Iraqi natural gas pipeline at Hit on Sunday and another oil pipeline early Monday near the border with Syria, raising more doubts about US-led efforts to get the country's petroleum industry back to full operation. "People are questioning if Iraq can sustain exports in the foreseeable future unless the security situati

Bollettino First, the casualties: A fuel pipeline exploded and caught fire west of Baghdad , a possible act of sabotage that sent flames high into the sky, as Iraq returned to world oil markets Sunday with its first crude oil exports since the U.S.-led invasion. Meanwhile, a grenade attack Sunday killed an American soldier and wounded another just outside the capital, the latest violence to plague U.S. forces, who have launched a large crackdown aimed at putting down persistent resistance." -- The NYT also reports that it is all the work of foreign agitators. That is, the Pentagon says it is all the result of foreign (by which they don't mean American -- Americans in Iraq are officially not considered foreigners) agitators. If it is good enough for the Pentagon, who have proven to be a fount of true stories over the last two months, it is true enough for the Times. There's no report, as there is in the excellent Asia Times, about the "Iraqi Resistance B