Candide's Notebooks

The Shame of Lebanon

19 Jul 2008 17:50:39 GMT

The release of prisoners of war long held unjustly should occasion celebration, even a bit of triumphalism, maybe even a national holiday. But Samir Kuntar was no prisoner of war. He was no liberator or freedom fighter or whatever else the eye of the beholder might fairly judge him. He was no hero by any possible stretch of the imagination. He captured a father and his daughter, murdered both, and was the reason the father's other daughter was also killed--smothered to death by her terrorized mother, who tried to keep her quiet as they hid in their apartment. Samir Kuntar was tried and convicted in a court of law. He was, he is, a murderer. In his name, hundreds of others were terrorized and killed.

Whatever the political calculations, a celebration is not what was called for with Kuntar's release. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government would have showed themselves infinitely more noble and maybe even just had they wrapped the occasion not in the jingoism of yellow-and-green flags and triumphalist speeches and rallies, but with the kind of modesty that acknowledges the misery and untold suffering for thousands that led to this moment, and the kind of modesty that opens the door to more humane, and dare we say peaceful, possibilities in the months and years ahead. That was not to be. As a native Lebanese, I'm embarrassed for my former country, and have never been so grateful for that word: former.

Readables: July 19-20

19 Jul 2008 17:47:27 GMT

The Trouble With Sex & Marriage

How McCain Could Make Himself Even Duller

19 Jul 2008 17:48:18 GMT

Word has it John McCain and Mitt Romney are making up. So McCain�s assisted-living candidacy (well, he calls his politico-intellectual walkers his “campaign surrogates�), as deadening a presidential candidacy as Bob Dole�s in 1996 and Walter Mondale�s in 1984 combined, appears ready and willing to inject itself with yet another dose of dull. Barack Obama should be dancing in his turbans.

Poison

19 Jul 2008 17:49:59 GMT

Henrietta Rose Innes is a 36-year-old South African writer. Earlier this month she won the Caine prize for �Poison,� the best short story in English by an African writer. She beat out Nigeria�s Uwem Akpan, whose �My Parents Bedroom� appeared in the June 12, 2006 New Yorker, and Nigeria�s Ada Udechukwu, whose �Night Bus� appeared in the August 2006 Atlantic. Last year, Uganda �s Monica Arac de Nyeko was the winner, for �Jambula Tree.� Here�s Rose-Innes�s �Poison.�

Poem: As One Put Naked Into a Cigarette Boat

19 Jul 2008 17:49:23 GMT

Continue chiding, since it's part of the new aesthetic, and parcel to our coming home, as if we'd disappeared into the burning bush that calls to those who sit vacantly in parlors awaiting a fate freighted with song and dance. I stroll while staring and raging with difficulty at the stubborn sky. [...] [By Van Foreman]

Readables: July 17

19 Jul 2008 17:51:50 GMT

“Touching a waitress�s chest is Not Okay. Pouring the coffee onto the floor instead of the cup is Not Okay. Drinking something I paid for the way I want to drink it � that�s more than Not Okay, it�s perfectly fucking fine.��Jeff Simmermon of I Am Not Lying. For more on this delicious story, click on the image below.

Readables: July 15, 2008

15 Jul 2008 19:26:02 GMT

The New Yorker's Cheap Shot

14 Jul 2008 18:05:13 GMT

The latest New Yorker cover you see above is supposedly a satirical summation of the endless prejudices Michelle and Barack Obama have sustained so far. But does it work as such? Doubtful.

John McCain's Voodoo

14 Jul 2008 18:04:26 GMT

It�s a performance requirement. Miss America contestants dream of world peace. Republican presidential candidates promise balanced budgets on top of enormous tax cuts. No one takes the Miss America contestants seriously. The same can�t be said of the candidates. They promise the impossible. They deliver worse. Still, they get elected. John McCain is running a fantastically dull campaign. His ideas have the grayed optimism of 1950s television commercials pegged to the fear factor of 1980s cold war hysterics. He�s a 20 th-century museum piece, as good a fit in the Senate�s gilded chumminess as it is an anachronism beyond it (which is just what makes Barack Obama such a lousy fit in the Senate). But McCain�s got this much going for him�a promise to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, to pile on gargantuan tax cuts and tax credits of his own, rebuild the military while it wages its usual quota of wars and still balance the budget by the end of his first term. Sham promises like that have been getting Republicans elected going back 30 years.

Justice Linda Greenhouse Retires

14 Jul 2008 18:06:41 GMT

Linda Greenhouse hasn�t been merely the best reporter covering the U.S. Supreme Court in the last thirty years. She�s the principal reason why we understand better the oversized role the court plays in our daily lives, and how it plays it�how Planned Parenthood v. Casey and a couple of cases on affirmative action, when Sandra Day O�Connor was still on the court, represented the last great gasps of the court�s respect for precedent, how Bush v. Gore marked the fatal (for now) politicization of the court, how June�s gun-case decision (D.C. v. Heller) revealed “originalism� for the sham that it is�it is whatever the justice in the majority decides it is. Reading Linda Greenhouse was compelling, fun, absolutely essential.

Say It Ain't So Bobby: On the Death of Bobby Murcer

13 Jul 2008 01:57:42 GMT

But part of my experience as a Yankee fan in the 1980s was getting attached to a few players that didn�t seem overtly vulgar, repulsive, self-aggrandizing and just plain obnoxious, as star athletes are required to be (it�s a clause in some of their contracts, depending on their agent and advertising sponsors). One of those players in the 1980s was Bobby Murcer, the guy who never once swung at a first pitch in all the years I watched him. Now he's dead.

Romancing the Brutes

12 Jul 2008 16:57:51 GMT

The November 1984 issue of Esquire carried a long article by William Broyles Jr., a Vietnam veteran, entitled “Why Men Love War��“why men in their sixties and seventies sit in their dens and recreation rooms around America and know that nothing in their life will equal the day they parachuted into St. Lo or charged the bunker on Okinawa,� why, despite the brutality (because of the brutality), war is a “deadly game, but a game, the best there is. And men love games. You can come back from war broken in mind or body, or not come back at all. But if you come back whole you bring with you the knowledge that you have explored regions of your soul that in most men will always remain uncharted. Nothing I had ever studied was as complex or as creative as the small-unit tactics of Vietnam. No sport I had ever played brought me to such deep awareness of my physical and emotional limits.� Broyles was describing what Philip Roth summed up in one line (in The Human Stain): “ape-shit guys who recognize the horror but know it is the very best moment of their lives.�

Shot of the Day: Eagle of Dutch Harbor

12 Jul 2008 16:55:31 GMT

This is by Bostonian and self-described drone Andrew Robins, who goes by Cody Pomeroy on Flickr. He writes about this shot: “I took this photo in late 2004, Dutch Harbor Alaska. Our boat docked there for a couple of days to refuel and rest. The fuel pier had a couple of crabbers tied up and about 100 eagles swarming about. I don't remember what I was doing, and this eagle wasn't in this spot for more than 20 seconds, but I think it came out alight, despite my crappy camera and lack of time to frame it well.� His work is a lot more impressive than this, but I was in the mood for a shot from Dutch Harbor, where the bald ones fly about like egerts in Florida, and this did fine.

Readables: July 12

12 Jul 2008 16:56:27 GMT

Bernie Mac, Off Color?

12 Jul 2008 15:34:43 GMT

So let me get this straight. One person's audience reaction, (one!) which is the equivalent of an errant, and usually idiotic, blog comment, now warrants a national news story that gives the Asssociated Press a chance to yet again spank Obama?

Readables: July 11, 2008

11 Jul 2008 12:59:14 GMT

As is the case with so many things in this life, the search for a sissy maid has proven to be far more difficult that I ever imagined.�From AlwaysArousedGirl.

Bloggerback: Can You Divorce a Country?

11 Jul 2008 12:58:58 GMT

Probably not. Lebanon follows you everywhere you go. Whatever position you occupy in your adopted country, you will always be the Lebanese. Wherever you go in this world, and especially if your adopted country did not bestow its nationality on you, you will always be the one with the Lebanese passport: a recipe for humiliation for you and your family. My trip to Lebanon began with humiliation and psychological torture at the hands of US border agents. I am not one to complain about the US, for God knows I am grateful for what this country gave me, and continues to give me. But what a shame that a government agency consistently violates its own written rules, and discriminates based on the national origin of its residents, and treats children like terrorists. Read the full post...

Shell Shlock

11 Jul 2008 12:57:32 GMT

I don�t know what it was, this fascination with shell casings�of bullets or actual heavy artillery shells. I don�t know of any boy in Lebanon, myself among them, who didn�t have it. Most adults had it, too, collecting artillery shells as vases for the women or trophies for the men, collecting bullet casings as some form of macho currency.

Readables: July 10, 2008

11 Jul 2008 12:56:59 GMT

Yes. The New Yorker.

11 Jul 2008 12:55:38 GMT

They've finally done it. The New Yorker's cartoonists have their own blog. Plenty of terrific stuff that never makes it into the magazine, including the artists' own brain doodles. They call it the Cartoon Lounge. Check it out...

Reign of the Idiots

9 Jul 2008 13:05:40 GMT

There were 1.5 million home foreclosures in 2007. The Treasury secretary is predicting that there will be 2.5 million foreclosures this year. The worst of the housing meltdown is yet to come. The Bush administration says it can't do anything about those foreclosures, that it's too late. The reason we're in this mess was Alan Greenspan's doing, in 2001, when he flooded the financial markets with the cheapest money this country has ever known�by lowering interest rates effectively to zero and printing money like Weimar on the Potomac. On Tuesday, Ben Bernanke, Greenspan's replacement, predicted that the worst of the crisis will stretch to 2009. His solution? Amazingly, re-do what Greenspan did. Print more money, extend cheap loans to banks and corporations in trouble. And hope the illusion lastst a little bit longer. As for those 2.5 million homeowners about to discover the street: tough shit. This land is your land, if you can keep it.

Another Death on Denali

9 Jul 2008 13:04:11 GMT

This always saddens me. The death of a mountain climber. It shouldn�t, overly: Why should the death of a climber on a mountain, be it Denali in Alaska or Everest wherever, be more saddening, more “tragic� (that tragically overused word) than the death of a child in any circumstance, the death of a mother or father for that matter, of anyone who didn�t choose to die, as mountain climbers undeniably do, if only fractionally?

Readables: July 9

9 Jul 2008 13:03:20 GMT

Video: John McCain, Censor, Kicks Librarian Out of Meeting

9 Jul 2008 13:02:18 GMT

What was that about differentiating himself from Bush?

The Supreme Court's Future Is In Your Hands

7 Jul 2008 16:52:15 GMT

From the Editorial Board:

For all the high-profile cases� importance, it�s in less splashy ways that the Roberts court is likely to make the greater impact. Two trends show how. First, the court is taking fewer cases, which gives lower courts� decisions greater weight. Those lower courts have been stocked with conservatives in the past eight years. Second, business cases represented 45 percent of the court�s load this year. That�s not necessarily good for consumers if the court is unevenly pro-business, as it appears to be. The full edit...

Florida's Modern-Day Slavery

7 Jul 2008 13:53:08 GMT

Reggie Brown was upset. As executive vice president of the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, he was before a U.S. Senate committee in April to dispute charges of slavery and human trafficking leveled at tomato growers by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, what Brown called “a purported labor organization.� There�s nothing “purported� about the South Florida-based organization (ciw-online.org) other than the status of its mostly Latino, Haitian, and Mayan Indian membership of migrants. Their employers often don�t consider them quite human. More like purported human beings. They pay them accordingly. “We used to own our slaves,� one Florida farmer told Edward Murrow in 1960. “Now we just rent them.� Nothing has changed.

Nadal, New Emperor of Tennis

7 Jul 2008 13:52:31 GMT

It really was a magnificent match, scintillating quality from beginning to end despite being delayed by rain at the start and interrupted by rain twice along the way.

Mozart Monday

7 Jul 2008 13:51:48 GMT

Not to be confused, of course, with the Bangles' classic which, for all I know, will get many more hits than my Mozart trio bit (especially in this pee-streaming X-Files rendition). This is the third movement from the trio in E major, K 542. If you listen closely enough you'll see the parallels between Mozart's idea and the Bangles's grammatically dubious masterpiece.

Notebook Readables: July 7

7 Jul 2008 13:49:25 GMT

Live Blogging: Germany v. Spain, Euro 2008

28 Jun 2008 14:43:01 GMT

Set your alarm clocks, prep your laptops, give your chihuahua a swift kick in the arse and stock your fridge full of Carlsberg: The Notebooks is where to be Sunday afternoon for completely pointless, malinformed and likely inebriated live-blogging of the Euro final.

Seven Dirty Words

23 Jun 2008 12:49:21 GMT

R.I.P is not the first idea that comes to mind when thinking of the death of the great George Carlin. At least I hope he won't rest in peace. He'd disappoint all that he lived for. Here's his chance to stick it to The Man, finally, to speak fuck to power where it really matters (if he manages to get past the matter of unbeing and nothingness first). I can think of no better way to honot one of the greatest and most enduring comedians of the last fifty years�America's Coluche�than by posting again his Seven Dirty Words routine, which once was the heart of a Supreme Court decision. John Paul Stevens himself, that old bow-tied bundle of propriety, couldn't keep himself from footnoting the whole routine in his decision.

Stoned in Vegas

23 Jun 2008 12:51:07 GMT

A few years ago I reported from vegas for my American Impressions series and had the chance to see George Carlin live. An epitaph of a paragraph.

Religion is Bullshit

23 Jun 2008 12:48:45 GMT

We could be here until kingdom come embedding George Carlin routines. So here's just one taken at random, telling it, as always, not just like it is, but like no one dares say it. The applause you're hearing in the background is Voltaire's. All of it.

Journalism�s Tim Russert Problem

17 Jun 2008 12:30:36 GMT

Respect for the man aside, there�s a matter of respecting journalism when assessing Russert�s place in the trade. That respect has been lacking in the almost universally fawning tributes to Russert and the craft he represented. Journalists and politicians from the president on down have formed yet another procession of praise and prostrations worthy of, say, Diana or Elvis. But Tim Russert? That�s what journalism as we know it today is, primarily: an adjunct to the cult of celebrity, a shareholder in the business of image management to protect, foremost, the business of America. When the powerful pay tribute to Russert (“he was an institution in both news and politics for more than two decades,� were President Bush�s autopilot words) they�re paying tribute to themselves�to the establishment Russert represented, defended and, unfortunately for us, encrusted.

Tragedy: Uzbekistan 3, Lebanon 0

17 Jun 2008 12:30:18 GMT

The world, and more especially journalism, will survive the death of Tim Russert, who represented more of what ailed journalism than what honored it. But can the world survive Lebanon being eliminated from the World Cup? By Uzbekistan, of all world powers? (“Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan: you wondered why the Lord ever made so much wasteland in the world, with a gold dome or blue lake now and then as a sop to the thirsty soul,� went John Updike, trying to outdo Mark Twain�s scorn for lands he wanted to know little of.) It happened Saturday�a day that will live in infamy, or at least in miffed floppies�in Tashkent, a city older than Socrates that now boasts the only subway system east of the Urals and counts Seattle among its sister cities (Karachi, Istanbul and Berlin are the others: Tashentis are choosy).

When Health Insurance Is an Illusion

17 Jun 2008 12:29:49 GMT

The Zammit family of Deltona is the victim of two staggering injustices. No one can be blamed for the first, at least no one here and now. Nathan Zammit, 16, has had a brain tumor and half his skull removed. He faces eight months of chemotherapy. The second injustice is more like a crime because it�s man-made: A health-care system that punishes and ruins instead of insuring against catastrophes. The Zammits are insured. But rather than being able to focus exclusively on their son�s battle, and like a growing number of middle- and working-class families facing medical crises, the Zammits are having to raise money to pay the family�s medical bills. They face debts exceeding $10,000 and growing. Even generous fund-raising can only go so far when co-pays for medicines are $50 a pop (Nathan takes seven medicines), when 20 percent co-pays apply to medical services and when coverage is riddled with fine-print exceptions that give the lie to that cynical misnomer of our day: insurance.

Heartlands and Keffiehs

17 Jun 2008 12:30:58 GMT

When hysterically reactionary bloggers who, born the day before yesterday, associate the keffieh uniquely (and fearfully) with Palestinian militants, and manage to make enough noise to force a company to stop airing commercials featuring a keffieh, one has to wonder: what, exactly, is the objection? For all its famous wraps around the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat�s head, the keffieh isn�t primarily a symbol of Palestinian militancy. It is, as it has always been, primarily a symbol of the Arab heartland, as human and humanizing a cloth as the smile on that Cairo man�s face at the top of this blog post. The last thing reactionaries want is humanized Arabs.

Dog and Petraeus Show

8 Apr 2008 15:54:14 GMT

The apologists of perpetual war in Iraq got lucky last week. The latest catastrophic fiasco over there � the Iraqi government�s face-saving surrender to a truce offered by resurgent Shiite militias � was overshadowed over here by meltdowns in the economy and sectarian battles inside the Democratic Party. From luck to spin. Today, the Bush administration gets to do what it does best: translate defeat at Arabs� hands into victory with an American accent. For all the wishful talk you�ll hear this week from the Petraeus show and the war apologists, and even from those, like Clinton and Obama, who pretend to be looking for solutions, little will change until they concede that there will be no peace except on Arabs� terms. To save himself, the occupier has a choice: submit to reality, or keep suffering its defeats while pretending back home that not losing is somehow success enough.

A Note to Readers and Susbcribers

6 Apr 2008 18:50:48 GMT

A couple of you may have noticed that the email updates have fallen off lately. That's only because I haven't taken the time to prepare them. My apologies to those who were expecting them, my apologiers, now that they're resuming, to those who were glad to do without them, and my thanks for the continuing addition of many new subscribers since I did update last. I know that I promise daily updates on the front page of the Web site. I'll try not to honor that promise: Daily updates are a bit much, and let's be honest, they clutter the mailbox and annoy the reader. I'll update every few days, and more often only when absolutely necessary--in case the world ends or I write something I particularly want to show off. And as I started doing a few months ago, I'll include relevant links and updates from my Middle East Notebooks.

When America Can�t Handle the Truth

6 Apr 2008 18:50:01 GMT

The word, attributed to the late writer Saul Bellow, is “angelization� � willfully putting someone beyond blame. Angelizing America is the common tongue of all national politicians, the oath candidates implicitly take when running for president. It�s what the most sentimental people on earth expect. It�s what enables a country that committed its share of atrocities in the past and is committing more than its share of moral degradations today to look itself in the mirror and see something exceptional looking back, rather than just another empire trampling down its march of folly, as the great historian Barbara Tuchman called it. Angelizing America is the unspoken, self-evident pledge of allegiance. Someone didn�t tell the Obamas.

Poll Time: What Middle East Priority?

6 Apr 2008 18:50:24 GMT

All right everyone, time to make your voice count and help me out with my first poll. Come on out at About and vote on the question of the week. The next president, whoever it is, will have to deal with the Middle East, as has every president since Harry Truman. The question: where should those Middle East priorities be? It's a lost cause for the current nullity in the White House. But you can help the next president decide. Get out the vote...

Homeschool Confidential

6 Apr 2008 18:49:41 GMT

A California court decision almost banning homeschooling was disturbing for a couple of reasons. It�s the first time in legal memory that a court made home-schooling so conditional. And California court decisions are a bellwether of national legal trends. The decision is a warning to the home-school movement, suggesting state regulations and intrusions may be next. The movement has been growing exponentially (30 percent between 1999 and 2003, to 1.1 million students nationwide), not always for the right reasons. Disassociating from one�s community or fearing a secular environment is not, in my view, as good a reason to home school as seeking higher academic standards. But that�s irrelevant so long as parental choice isn�t trumped by government presumption, overbearing enough as it is, on how to educate children.

Terrorism Less Deceptively Defined

6 Apr 2008 18:49:24 GMT

Quick test. Which of the following were acts of terrorism: a) Al-Qaida�s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors; b) Hezbollah�s raid on an Israeli military patrol in July 2006, killing three soldiers and capturing two, and triggering a 34-day war; c) The Hamas ambush last week of an Israeli patrol on the Gaza border, killing one Israeli soldier d) Attacks on American troops in Iraq, which have killed about 3,500 soldiers (not including some 800 non-hostile deaths); e) None of the above. The answer, of course, is (e) � none of the above. The full essay...

Bush: Torturer, Tyrant, Disgrace

6 Apr 2008 18:49:04 GMT

On Saturday, Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the CIA's use of torture in interrogations (a bill, it should be noted, John McCain, alleged opponent of torture, voted against). He had the temerity, our Dear Leader, to begin his official endorsement of torture in his radio address this morning with these words: “Good morning.� Good for him and his kind of delusional sadists, maybe. Not so good for this country, whose reputation today takes one more plunk toward the abyss of rogue and less than ordinary nations. Not so good for the rest of the world, either, whose nations have been disbelievingly howling, in Babels of translations, that most American of plaints: “Say it ain�t so.� This spring training for terrorist-interrogators (for torture is terrorism at its distilled worst), it very much is so. The United States is officially, proudly, the land of torturers. It�s true that the United States has been at this for years. But the difference here is not only that the president is endorsing torture, but that he�s doing it so openly and willfully. It isn�t arrogance anymore. It isn�t even hubris. Arrogance and hubris suggest that at least some awareness that public perceptions still matter. In Bush�s mind, perceptions are for the birds. This is pure tyranny. His statement embracing torture, a study in mendacity, is worth a line-by-line look.

How Democrats Self-Destruct

6 Apr 2008 18:48:48 GMT

By day�s end Hillary Clinton�s campaign will be over. If she chooses to keep it on life support seven more weeks, it�ll end on April 22 in Pennsylvania , where Barack Obama�s numbers are surging faster than John McCain�s born-again conservatism (the same John McCain who considered switching to the Democrats in 2001 and discussed joining the Democratic ticket over six meetings with John Kerry in 2004). Either way, Democrats are poised to do what they do best come November: lose.

William F. Buckley�s Rich Veneers

6 Apr 2008 18:48:17 GMT

Had William F. Buckley Jr. not long ago become a has-been�and intellectual dandy who overstayed his uses by about 25 years, which coincides roughly with Ronald Reagan�s first symptoms of Alzheimer�s�the tributes he�s been receiving from the right and the left would have been revolting, as opposed to merely nauseating. You expect the self-deluded right to revel in an elegiac orgy for the founder of grand delusions as ideology. You expect it less from liberals, who�ve nevertheless been swallowing whole the conventional ruse that while Buckley was a conservative, his intelligence, his wit, his probity, his stylistic elegance, kept him many cuts above the bullying Hannity-OReilly-Limbaugh sort. What crock. Buckley�s grace, when he displayed it, was his Trojan horse. His ideas, his politics, his insinuation of religion in politics, his obsession with liberalism as subversion and his dressing up of rank bigotry as some sort of moral redress are among the rea

Lynching Obama, the Arab

6 Apr 2008 18:48:01 GMT

Why dress up Arabs as the bad guys? For the same reason that Ann Coulter and like-minded racists have started referring to Barack Obama as B. Hussein Obama. The middle name�s Arab origin is supposed to provoke self-evident revulsion. It works, pushing all sorts of bigoted little buttons in the mind of the American voter whose ethnic tolerance for things Arab draws a line at humus. That voter will never go for the combination Arab-Muslim-Saddam cocktail that “Hussein,� with a little help from the Coulters of the world, evokes, because anti-Arab chauvinism is still accepted currency in most political circles, especially when it appeals to that other deranged strain in the national psyche � that the most powerful country on earth is somehow besieged, alone and vulnerable to sleeper cells snoring in Arabic. In this calorific stew-pot of paranoia, “B. Hussein Obama� is a bait made to order.

The Obama Smear

4 Dec 2007 12:24:44 GMT

But to Obama�s detractors, whose ranks grow in proportion with his popularity, Barack's middle name, “Hussein,� is a gift, the bait that keeps snagging on just the right smears that, Obama�s race being off limits, can always attach to his Arab-sounding past. Arabs (along with gays) are the last remaining groups Americans feel comfortable stereotyping and presuming guilty of whatever. It doesn�t have to be terrorism. It doesn�t have to be anything at all. It�s guilt by ethnicity, a vague, unspoken coloring that just hangs there, like an unmovable obsidian cloud over an otherwise sunny stretch of Norman Rockwell canvass.

Gandhi, Terrorism, Bush & Afghanistan

4 Dec 2007 12:24:05 GMT

No one has time to read books, magazines, journals, newspapers and the Notebooks. So we read a few noteworthy pieces from periodical universe and summarize them for you. In the earliest days of the Notebooks, when the site could count its readers on the fingers of a Saudi Arabian caught stealing, this used to be a regular and half-way favored featured. It may be revived periodically, as printed matter accumulates in toto with the guilt of not eulogizing it. Here then are this week's eulogies.

Teddy Muhammad

30 Nov 2007 02:09:29 GMT

What�s embarrassing, what�s reviling, is that one of the most violent and murderous nations on the planet, the only genocidal one at the moment, can still manage not only to deflect attention on a manufactured scandal of cartoonish proportions, but to do so in the Prophet Muhammad�s name, whose message and spirit the Sudan has been smearing to the sound of endless bloodletting for decades. There would be redress, not insult, if every Muslim (if not every human being) were to brandish a teddy bear tomorrow and call it Muhammad, not only to protest the imbecility of genocidal zealotry, but, more poignantly, to speak for the innocence of millions of Sudan�s children lost to genocide, lost to fanaticism, lost to the very opposite of the meaning and purpose of Islam as Muhammad taught it.

Metaphysics in Hardcover

28 Nov 2007 14:12:14 GMT

An essentially metaphysical experience with books in England three decades ago comes to mind every time I hear that books, as Newsweek�s current cover has it, are “going digital.� Many books will, but I think it�s a mistake to think of digital books as merely electronic versions of their hard-copy equivalents. They�re entirely different creatures that yield different experiences, even if the words are identical in both formats. I don�t think I�d have experienced nearly the sense of salvation that I did that oppressive fall in Canterbury had my grandmother zapped me a gigabyte of books from her computer to mine, as opposed to sending me a box-full of my cherished Jules Verne collection. A book is also its cover, its place on one�s shelves in the same way that it has a place in one�s history, like a memory�s limbs.