Bollettino

My brother was in Florida on a quick a/c job – go in, clean the units, go out, 25 bucks per. He took it basically for the trip, and enjoyed himself the way my brother enjoys himself – taking photos of everything. Well, that and the occasional bar with his ever bar-trending partner on the job. Anyway, he told me, he went to an alligator “preserve” somewhere south of Jacksonville, paid his 5 bucks at the gate, and found a rather fetid place, the air alive with the odor of alligator shit, and to entertain the kiddies a man giving lectures on the savage alligator while bugging some poor chosen specimen. The man got the gator to yawn, fed the creature, scared some kids, and my bro, getting bored with an operation that was, basically, throw a fence around a wallow and charge people to enter, left.

The best thing in today’s Times is Natalie Angier’s article about the whole family of crocodilia.

Angier is a cute writer. Cute journalism is usually lousy writing, and Angier has her detractors from the science side – among them, the redoubtable Helen Cronin -- but I like reading her.

“To the casual observer, an adult alligator afloat in an algae-dappled pond, its six-foot body motionless save for the sporadic darting of its devilish amber eyes, might conjure up any number of images, none of them fuzzy-wuzzy. A souvenir dinosaur. A log with teeth. A handbag waiting to happen.”

The handbag, of course, is a stand-up set-up, three beats. I’m rather partial to three beat material myself. The more important things in the article are:

a. the discovery that the Alligator possesses a sort of proprioceptive sense: “ … the mysterious little bumps found around the jaws of some crocodile species and across the entire bodies of others, which naturalists had long observed but never before understood, are sensory organs exquisitely suited to the demands of a semisubmerged ambush predator.
The pigmented nodules encase bundles of nerve fibers that respond to the slightest disturbance in surface water and thus allow a crocodile to detect the signature of a potential meal - an approaching fish, a bathing heron, a luckless fawn enjoying its last lick of water.”
b. the discovery that Nile crocs are actually two species;
and c., the construction of a family tree including crocs and birds that is part of the continuing revolution in classification effected by cladistics and chromosomal research.
“Crocodiles also hark back to another cast of beloved goliaths, the real ones called dinosaurs. The resemblance is not circumstantial. Through recent taxonomic analysis, scientists have concluded that dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds should be classified together on one branch of the great polylimbed Sequoia of Life.
"Crocodiles really are the closest things we have to living dinosaurs," said Dr. Thorbjarnarson. They are also much more like birds than they are like snakes, iguanas or other reptiles. For example, whereas most snakes and lizards have hearts with only three chambers, and a consequent mixing of oxygen-rich and oxygen-depleted blood supplies, crocodiles and birds have a similarly elaborate cardiac layout, in which four chambers and valves keep oxygenated and unoxygenated blood flows separate. (Mammals independently evolved a four-chambered heart.) That capacity lends the animals significant metabolic flexibility and improves the performance of their brains.”

Bollettino

A recent article in Psychiatry by Felix Strumwasser has an unexpected resonance in this election year. It begins:

“Using puppets, they showed children the following scenario: One puppet, Maxi, puts some chocolate in a box and goes out to play. While he is out, and unknown to him, his puppet mother takes the chocolate out of the box and puts it in the cupboard. The children were then asked where Maxi would look for his chocolate when he comes back into the house. Older children (usually five years and older) answered correctly that Maxi would look in the box (where he had put the chocolate and falsely believes that it still is). But the threeand four-year-oUt answered that he would look in the cupboard (where they know that the chocolate actually is).
-Suzanne Cunningham (2000), describing experiments by Wimmer and Perner (1983) on false beliefs

"THE preceding description of an experiment on children is just one of many that illustrates how the human mind is developing. By 3 years old, children have surpassed the "language" abilities of our nearest living relatives, the great apes, in particular, chimpanzees.”

This about targets the age level to which the Bush campaign would prefer to reduce its supporters. A puppet named Maxi takes a whole lot of weapons from a puppet named Flopsy. Flopsy keeps it a secret from Mommy in order to keep it a secret from Maxi. Silly Maxi! Where would you look for the weapons, boys and girls? In the hands of the insurgents that are killing all the funny stuffed puppets around Flopsy? No. The correct answer is: You would look for them up your ass! Then you’d say a funny thing about the puppet that criticized you. He used the word global! He used the word sensitive! he must be a secret homosexual French puppet.

Although the media, in their quest to be as subservient as possible to Rove’s strategy of making Bush seem inevitable (a tried and true method by which the national security states in many Latin American countries have tamped down dissent and extended their vampiric reigns) have pulled out fuzzy poll stat after poll stat to make it look like Bush is making vast inroads on the ever incompetent opponent (Judi Wilgoren at the NYT has become a past master of the factoid in this respect), LI was struck by a factoid in Kerry’s favor that slipped out via the LA Times: college educated white males, a demographic Bush owned last election, are leaning to Kerry:
“Strikingly, Bush leads Kerry in the poll among lower- and middle-income white voters, but trails his rival among whites earning at least $100,000 per year.

Bush also runs best among voters without college degrees, whereas Kerry leads not only among college-educated women (a traditional Democratic constituency), but among college-educated men — usually one of the electorate's most reliably Republican groups in the electorate.”

Could it be that economic interest is being trumped by pure shame? After all, infantilization to the degree that Bush demands from his supporters is, above all things, shaming. It is shameful, for instance, to believe that Bush had nothing to do with the deficits, but should be credited with the tax cuts. It is shameful to believe that, after two inquiries by the U.S. government, there were WMD in Iraq (although, as LI likes to point out, WMD is a totally bogus category of armament, allowing Western arms manufacturers to sell with impunity to whoever has the money to buy their wares). Here is the official explanation of why the Bush people kept secret the amount of weaponry that the American military has let slip into the hands of the enemy it is fighting (an issue that LI highlighted continually back in October, 03): they didn’t want to reveal this information to the enemy. To believe that requires a regression to that golden age when animals and humans communicated, and Mommy couldn’t hide the chocolate from Maxi. No sir..

“Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein." In this case, a very little child indeed. But what things can be found in the kingdom, once entered! Every day, excuses to injure other little children in the Middle East without consequence and for their own good; the bliss of obeying the divine injunction, to those who have it shall be given, to the extent of 600 to 800 billion bucks; the bliss of borrowing unsupportable sums from the heathen Chinese, in order to support the worst of compromises between the Grover Norquists and the New Deal entrenchment of the middle class ever conceived.

Oh well. LI voted today, and – a first – we used the straight ticket option. Not that it will do too much good in our district, one of those that Tom Delay stole from Austin. This pretty Democratic city now has been so cookie cut that barely a fifth of the population will enjoy an ideologically compatible congressman. I’m to be represented by some Republican idiot named Smith, apparently. We all can’t wait.

Bollettino

It is easy to think that our present Bush is the worst Bush who has ever ruled over us. The citizens of Rome, whenever Nero committed some new jape, no doubt cast their eyes back longingly to the good old days of Caligula. Whenever we find out about Bush’s newest low – from the vacations of August, 2001, while the hijackers were asking directions to the nearest airport, to the Spring of 2002, when political intervention cut off the main American chance to deal a stunning military blow to Al Qaeda, to the mass thefts on behalf of the greediest and worst that are bankrupting the state, to, of course, the web of war crimes and lies that compose the entirety of his current foreign policy – we are tempted to sigh, as many liberals do, that this is the worst president of our lifetime.

Yesterday, we picked up a real crime book – Blue Thunder: how the mafia owned and finally murdered Cigarette boat king Donald Aronow, by Thomas Burdick. The book was written in the late eighties. There are amusing period touches – at one point, a DEA agent explains how they spot drug dealers at Julio Iglesias concerts: who else brings a portable phone to a concert? Indeed. Aronow was a Miami business and sportsman, famous in motorboat circles both for the designs of his boats and the records he set racing them. In 1984, he impressed his good friend, Vice President George Bush, by taking him around Miami bay in a prototype speedboat that Bush enjoyed so enormously that, in his (bizarre) position as head of a South Florida drug task force, he recommended ordering grosses of them for the DEA. The boats, named Blue Thunders, were produced by Aronow, apparently, and bought, given this recommendation, by the DEA.

Aronow was gunned down in a mob hit. Burdick, investigating the murder, was puzzled by rumors he heard about the Blue Thunders. The DEA had apparently failed to interdict even one drug craft with the boats. The design of the boats was so bad that the agents using them had to be more alert for engine explosions than for the chugging of speedy boats full of drug smugglers. The enigma was explained when he uncovered the fact that Aronow’s company was secretly owned by Jack and Ben Kramer. Jack and Ben were names in the boat industry – but they were more famous when they were hauled into court and charges with running the largest marijuana smuggling operation in the U.S.

Yes, this happened. The war on drugs had many farcical moments, but this has to be one of the funniest. Bush, it goes without saying, cut his ties of compassion to Widow Aronow, and went on, as President, to intensify the War against drugs to the point that the misery inflicted on one to two million Americans, imprisoned under his draconian regime, and the laws and procedures he introduced that were, with exemplary cowardice, left undisturbed by Clinton, do dwarf the misery inflicted by the current Bush whelp. Although to give him his fair share of abuse, the current Bush, ravening for Iraqi blood, is well on his way to surpassing his pa in terms of sheer feebleness.

Incidentally, Burdick includes a little aside that hints at how, well, lucky the Bushes are in Florida. When Ben Kramer was arrested, apparently original copies of the primary speeches given by Gary Hart were found in his safe. Kramer and Aronow belonged to a ‘swinging” club, Turnberry Isle. It was from Turnberry Isle that Gary Hart extracted his temporary honey, Donna Rice, who was photographed with him on a boat in the Miami harbor. How did the press find out about this? An apparently anonymous tip from another Turnberry hostess. This isn’t to say that the Bush organization, using its dirty connections in Florida, culled the Democratic field in order to organize the elevation of Bush to the presidency. To believe that would be to believe, well, that the Bushes would do anything to retain power, including corrupting an election…

All of which reminded LI of the last time we voted for a Democratic candidate for president: 1992.

Bollettino

"C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."

LI recommends Thomas de Waal’s article about the Charge of the Light Brigade in Friday’s Financial Times. According to Waal, the Charge went down in history when William Howard Russell, the London Times war correspondent, wrote it up 150 years ago. Russell decided to cast it as a magnificent spectacle of civilization, brought to nought by the barbarity of the enemy.

At the time, the vocabulary of propaganda didn’t include the term “terrorist” so beloved of the embedded American reporter. But like your average NYT or WP reporter today, Russell realized that his first job was to lie for the governing classes. That was also priority number 2 and 3. And like his modern day counterparts, he was so steeped in the mendacity and delusion of the governing class himself that he barely recognized his lies as lies.

Here’s how Russell described the Charge:

"A more fearful spectacle was never witnessed than by those who, without the power to aid, beheld their heroic countrymen rushing to the arms of death. At the distance of 1,200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame, through which hissed the deadly balls."

Thus began the myth of the charge of the Light Brigade. Russell not only gave a passionately dramatic description of what happened, he gave it an inspiring spin, beginning his dispatch, "If the exhibition of the most brilliant valour, of the excess of courage, and of a daring which would have reflected lustre on the best days of chivalry can afford full consolation for the disaster of today, we can have no reason to regret the melancholy loss which we sustained in a contest with a savage and barbarian enemy."

One is reminded of the mindnumbing dumbness of the early coverage of the war in Iraq – the stupid confidence that the war’s end was determined by the Bush administration’s desire, rather than its actions – the empty headed repetition of the pathetic lies that preceded it, that invested its operation during the first phase, and that covered up the wholesale looting of the country – by Bush connected corporations – during the wild ride of proconsul Bremer.
Russell’s account of a charge that was, actually, insignificant, inspired Tennyson’s poem. But Tennyson was too much of a poet not to be more penetrative than Russell – Tennyson did realize that ‘someone had blundered.” Russell took it as his job to obscure just who that someone was. As de Waal puts it:

“Russell also ducked what should surely have been a journalist's main aim in reporting this fiasco, to investigate the chain of command that led to the disaster and apportion blame. His account signally lets off the hook the British commander Lord Raglan, who issued the fatally ambiguous order. Raglan, who was on friendly terms with Russell, was never held to account for losing the Light Brigade.”

The Lord Raglans of the Rumsfeld gang – the Tommy Franks and Ricardo Sanchezes – have, if anything, been even more coddled by the press, which does love a man in uniform, and since getting their fingers burned in the Vietnam war have reliably laid down a covering fire of delusions for the U.S. government as it has supported death squad democracy in Central America and, now, Iraq. It is rather embarrassing for the newspapers to have to confront the obvious screwups of our politicized and incompetent high command – Franks inability to hurt Al Qaeda when it was concentrated in Afghanistan, and Sanchez’s mindblowing underestimation of the insurgency last fall – so the reporters prefer to do in depth reports on these things a year or two after they have happened. News may upset the bourgeois reader, but never his prejudices. And so the world is cut out for us on a paperdoll pattern.

De Waal is not uniformly critical of Russell: “His reports on the failures of the army supply system and the lack of nursing care for the wounded shocked British public opinion and helped bring down Lord Aberdeen's government. After the war they helped lead to a public inquiry held in Chelsea Hospital. It was the Hutton inquiry of its day - many witnesses were called but no one took the blame at the end of it.”

Interestingly, while the British were wallowing in their mock chivalry, the French were winning the war. As de Waal points out, the French army, under Pierre Bosquet, took Sevastopol. Russell, who shared with his British readers the kind of gallophobia that so infects Fox News today, skewed his reports, as much as possible, to exclude the French.

What's the other phrase about that? Plus ça change...

Bollettino

LI has been reading, lately, of an early generation that tried to suppress, as it could, a terrorist threat that eventually destroyed their entire society. I mean, of course, the terrorist threat posed by the early Christians, and their persecution by the defenders of that inflation of the status quo known as Empire.

Unfortunately, the edition of Gibbon from which I am getting my unbiased account of the Christian pissants and the Roman mercies is the one e-booked for, I believe, CCEL. This edition contains not one but two sets of notes from defenders of the faith, who ardently gibber contradictions of Gibbon’s calm, implacable destruction of Christian myths of martyrdom. To read it, as I am doing, on an Microsoft Reader means going from a page of main text to a page of footnote, inside of which is nested another footnote, and so on. Thus, Gibbon’s eviscerations, which already punctuate his marmoreal dismissals with extensive and confusing abbreviations of ecclessiastical obscurities, are pursued by the further citing of ecclesiastical authorities by his pygmy Christian commentators, all trying to kick his ankles. It all gets to be too much of a mix.

Virginia Woolf wrote an appreciation of Gibbon that catches a lot of what he does. She notes that the famous style can seem, in the remembrance, monotonous – a rocking horse of predictable phrases, chosen to balance each other out on a principle of decorum that, in prolonged doses, induces sleep. But to return to Gibbon and read him, after that image and experience has been impressed on one’s memory, is to find that he is a sharper writer than you would expect:

“…we forget the style, and are only aware that we are safe in the keeping of a great artist. He is able to make us see what he wants us to see and in the right proportions. Here he compresses; there he
expands. He transposes, emphasizes, omits in the interests of order and
drama. The features of the individual faces are singularly conventionalized. Here are none of those violent gestures and
unmistakable voices that fill the pages of Carlyle and Macaulay with
living human beings who are related to ourselves. There are no Whigs and Tories here; no eternal verities and implacable destinies. Time has cut off those quick reactions that make us love and hate. The innumerable figures are suffused in the equal blue of the far distance.”

Woolf has a weakness for Carlyle that comes from the Stephen family – her father and uncle regarded Carlyle as the Victorian Bwana. But her assessment of the innumerable figures suffused “in the equal blue of the far distance” is exactly right – even if it is the impression over the long haul. For, as Woolf also writes, “Sometimes a
phrase is turned edgewise, so that as it slips with the usual suavity
into its place it leaves a scratch. "He was even destitute of a sense of honour, which so frequently supplies the sense of public virtue."

What we see, in Gibbon, is the construction of that curious thing, Enlightenment Regret. The effect for which Gibbon strove, in his history, was to make the intellectuals of Europe feel the loss brought about by the advent of Christianity as a sort of evening chill, a sort of sunset. This is a whole other thing from casting a skeptical glance at its mysteries. It is, rather, to claim that the effect of Christianity was vastly injurious to the course of civilization, the infusion of an alien fanaticism that poisoned the simple joy of life. Enlightenment regret, given this idea, twists the Christian version of the fall – the West’s original sin was to adopt a creed as ridiculous, undignified, objectionable, and productive of crimes both mental and social as the worship of Jesus Christ.

In order to make his point, Gibbon becomes the apologist for the persecutors of the Christians. It is interesting how he couches this point of view by drawing a contrast between the acts of such cultivated men as Nero and Pliny and the host of ragtag bishops who, three hundred years after the era of martyrdom, instituted their own reigns of terror:

“The total disregard of truth and probability in the representation of these primitive martyrdoms was occasioned by a very natural mistake. The ecclesiastical writers of the fourth or fifth centuries ascribed to the magistrates of Rome the same degree of implacable and unrelenting zeal which filled their own breasts against the heretics or the idolaters of their own times. It is not improbable that some of those persons who were raised to the dignities of the empire, might have imbibed the prejudices of the populace, and that the cruel disposition of others might occasionally be stimulated by motives of avarice or of personal resentment. ^66 But it is certain, and we may appeal to the grateful confessions of the first Christians, that the greatest part of those magistrates who exercised in the provinces the authority of the emperor, or of the senate, and to whose hands alone the jurisdiction of life and death was intrusted, behaved like men of polished manners and liberal education, who respected the rules of justice, and who were conversant with the precepts of philosophy. They frequently declined the odious task of persecution, dismissed the charge with contempt, or suggested to the accused Christian some legal evasion, by which he might elude the severity of the laws. ^67 Whenever they were invested with a discretionary power, ^68 they used it much less for the oppression, than for the relief and benefit of the afflicted church. They were far from condemning all the Christians who were accused before their tribunal, and very far from punishing with death all those who were convicted of an obstinate adherence to the new superstition. Contenting themselves, for the most part, with the milder chastisements of imprisonment, exile, or slavery in the mines, ^69 they left the unhappy victims of their justice some reason to hope, that a prosperous event, the accession, the marriage, or the triumph of an emperor, might speedily restore them, by a general pardon, to their former state. The martyrs, devoted to immediate execution by the Roman magistrates, appear to have been selected from the most opposite extremes. They were either bishops and presbyters, the persons the most distinguished among the Christians by their rank and influence, and whose example might strike terror into the whole sect; ^70 or else they were the meanest and most abject among them, particularly those of the servile condition, whose lives were esteemed of little value, and whose sufferings were viewed by the ancients with too careless an indifference.”

There’s a certain feline cruelty just underneath the surface, here, as the defense of civilization calls for the “milder chastisements” of such things as slavery in the mines. It is part of Gibbon’s irony that the reader faces a dilemma, reading a phrase like that: does Gibbon know what it meant to be a slave in the mines? To be worked to death, in other words, in a dark salt pit? On the other hand, of course, Gibbon did know that the numberless victims of Christianity had endured the salt pits and worse – the devastation of Africa, the silver and gold mines of the New World, the violent persecution of any ray of light that would make for human happiness – a liberal attitude towards sex, a love of material things, science, etc., etc. It is always to be remembered that the Roman world was the greatest slave society every assembled in the West, and that Christianity bore, as its most burning truth, a contradiction to those “sufferings [which were] viewed by the ancients with too careless an indifference.”

Bollettino

The U.S. is gearing up for major war crimes in Fallujah. Apparently, the Bush administration, seeing that the attacks on Kerry for criticizing the Vietnam War have had an outstanding success, has decided to associate their candidate with their very own Iraq My Lai. Thus, pleasing that segment of the American public that values toughness, especially when it comes to squeezing blood from non-white skin. We are all so proud here at LI.

There isn’t a voice in the American press that is crying out against this. Hell, there hasn’t been a voice crying out against the inhuman and criminal methods developed by the Americans to enforce crowd control in the cities they occupy – random strafing by helicopters and drones, bombing that targets civilians, etc. The sham that Americans came into Iraq to establish democracy has long been exploded, at least in Iraqi eyes. The upcoming My Lai is a gamble. Americans believe that the Iraqis, being of a lesser race, valuable only insofar as they supply God’s white people with oil, are eminently enslaveable. Thus, we have put a part time terrorist, ex Baathist executioner up as puppet ruler of the country, to show what we mean by "democracy," and have pulled the strings so that any atrocity committed by the Americans against Iraqis will receive this quisling's seal of approval. This is known officially as loving freedom. However, the bet that the Iraqis spirit is so generally crushed that they can be ground indifferently into the dust has so far not paid off. We imagine that the upcoming My Lai will cause some kind of explosion in Iraq. It will certainly dwarf the video-ed beheadings of Zarqawi in terms of the scale of the homicide. Another bet: as we grind more meat from Iraqi bones, we will hear the oafish president sing more songs of the freedom loving Iraqi, like an offkey Josephine the Singer. It’s the same ageless rhetorical principle that moved the East Germans to call theirs a Democratic Republic.

Meanwhile, the NYT is catching up with events that happened a year and a half ago with a series of articles by Michael Gordon that merely reproduce themes more strikingly adumbrated by LI last year, in May and June. It is a spectacle: the war the NYT actively worked to provoke being reported on a year and a half late. We are waiting with baited breath for their indepth story revealing that men have landed on the moon.

The lead in the Guardian reads:

“This morning, ministers will sit round the cabinet table to hear Mr Blair and the defence secretary Geoff Hoon recommend that some 650 British soldiers should be moved from the south of Iraq to the centre of the country in order to free up American forces for an expected assault on Falluja and other centres of armed Arab resistance. This is a big decision for our country, for a variety of reasons, and it is right that the whole cabinet should be involved in it. Ministers will need to ask themselves very frankly whether the threatened onslaught against Falluja is an operation in which Britain should be involved, especially in the light of the disastrous and bloody attack on the town earlier this year. They will need to ask, too, whether the United States, with 130,000 troops already in the field, and tens of thousands others able to be flown in at short notice, really seeks British support for military reasons or for political ones. They will need to ask what the consequences of this move will be for the redeployed troops, who will now be at much greater risk of injury and death, as well as for the inevitably depleted forces left behind to maintain the peace around Basra.”

LI is being a little harsh on the Americans and their co-conspirators, the Brits. At least the Americans haven’t dropped poison gas on Fallujah, or at least not yet. Surely if that decision is taken, however, the U.S. media, courageous to the last, will investigate it – a year or two years later.

“Sometimes the Quarrel between two Princes is to which of them shall dispossess a third of his Dominions, where neither of them pretend to any Right. Sometimes one Prince quarreleth with another, for Fear the other should quarrel with him. Sometimes a War is entered upon, because the Enemy is too strong, and sometimes because he is too weak. Sometimes our Neighbours want the Things which we have, or have the Things which we want; and we both fight, till they take ours or give us theirs. It is a very justifiable Cause of War to invade a Country after the People have been wasted by Famine, destroyed by Pestilence, or embroiled by Factions among themselves. It is justifiable to enter into War against our nearest Ally, when one of his Towns lies convenient for us, or a Territory of Land, that would render our Dominions round and compleat. If a Prince sends Forces into a Nation where the People are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to Death, and make Slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous Way of Living. It is a very kingly, honourable, and frequent Practice, when one Prince desires the Assistance of another to secure him against an Invasion, that the Assistant, when he hath driven out the Invader, should seize on the Dominions himself, and kill, imprison or banish the Prince he came to relieve. Alliance by Blood or Marriage, is a frequent Cause of War between Princes; and the nearer the Kindred is, the greater is their Disposition to quarrel: Poor Nations are hungry, and rich Nations are proud; and Pride and Hunger will ever be at variance. For those Reasons, the Trade of a Soldier is held the most honourable of all others: Because a Soldier is a Yahoo hired to kill in cold Blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.”

Bollettino

In LI’s opinion, most prizes are so much hackwork, and the most honest ones are still for pickles or pies in some shady Ozark ville. Still, our ears rather perked when the National Book Award nominees were announced. Last year, the award prostituted itself by lavishing unnecessary trumpery on Stephen King with all the aim of the float of some bankrupt krewe. This year, the award decided to repent with gruel and stale bread and nominated five writers who seemed more like names on some Iowa state creative writing scholarship more than the five writers who wrote the best American novels last year. These obscurities will not, alas, be lit by the giving of the award. Novels are not poetry – obscurity is not prized, in the novel writing field, as a piece of authenticity. Since we make a living reviewing, and read an average of one hundred new novels per annum (“these are the chains I forged in life…”), we have a pretty good chance of reading at least one of the candidates per year. This year, we had not read one of them.

And, by the descriptions we’ve read of the book, we doubt we will try to read one of them.

Happily, there is the much more interesting Booker. This year’s award actually went to literary merit – although you wouldn’t know it by the NYT story:

“Tale of Gay Life in Britain Wins a Top Literary Prize

"The Line of Beauty," Alan Hollinghurst's lavish novel about a young gay man negotiating the confusions, delights and horrors of life in Thatcherite Britain in the mid-1980's, won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday night, defeating David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas," which had been widely considered the favorite to win.”

The story goes on to tell us that the L. of B. is about Gays. It is, as we were saying, about gays. Did we mention it was about gays? And, in conclusion, it is about gays.

Undoubtedly, as with all of Hollinghurst’s novels, gay desire – gay gay gay – is the predominate template. One doubts, however, that your average Jane Austin novel would be described as being about straight life during the Napoleonic era. The reason to read Hollinghurst is that he is an incredibly beautiful writer. What you wouldn’t know, from the headline, is that the book is as much about class and money as it is about gay life.

About here I was planning on quoting one randomly selected exquisite paragraph, only to discover that my copy was gone. I dimly remember giving it to someone – but who? In any case, we’d urge you to read Nicholson Baker’s essay on Hollinghurst in The Size of Thoughts if you want to come to critical/appreciative grips with the writer – or just read The Line of Beauty for yourself. Oh, did we add that it is about gays? Gay sex takes place abundantly in its pages. Gay. Sex. Gay. Or as the NYT puts it, in a “can you believe it” sigh of a sign-off:

“Speaking to reporters after the announcement, Mr. Smith, [the spokesman for the judges] a member of Parliament, said the winning book's focus on gay life had not figured in the judges' discussions as they considered it for the prize.”