Showdown in Little Tokyo dvd The New Republic has a quartet of articles on what may be the death knell of print newspapers and journalism as we know it. A page 1 editorial blames a coarsening national attitude towards the press for accelerating the decline:

Just as the press has been slammed by the tides of technology, it has been hit hard by the political culture. The master narratives of both the right and left have come to include the same villan: the hypocritical biased elite media. And their combined grouching has helped foment the anti-media backlash.

Elsewhere, Joe Mathews laments the decline of investigative journalism in his old paper, the Los Angeles Times:

You can count up the journalists who have left the profession and are out of work, but much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can’t be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom…Today’s Times carries plenty of fine news stories…But there are few stories that show deep digging, that took more than a few days to put together.

This new paradigm, the shearing off of investigative reporters and editorial staff, may be glimpsed in microcosm in Gabriel Sherman’s piece on Politico

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, the upstart website that got several of last year’s biggest scoops:

Black Cloud ipod Dadnapped film [Politico CEO Robert] Allbritton is dismissive of one of the things print papers did well – long-term, long form investigative journalism – and tells me Politico is unlikely to field an investigative reporting squad. I think we have to acknowledge that the money is spent for reputational benefits and a public service play,” he says of the Times

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’ and the Post’s investment in enterprise journalism. “Why does someone have to go off and write their thesis paper while they do it?”

Finally, and most depressingly, Paul Starr turns in a huge essay Closing the Ring hd on the death of the newspapers, and what he sees as the coming era of corruption. The problems are manifold:

[Warren] Buffett’s law of the newspaper jungle, the “survival of the fattest,” favored a broad conceptin of the purview of the newspaper, attentive to a wide variety of human interests. Now the incentives are working in the opposite direction, pushing newspapers toward a more constricted view of their role…

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The predominant response in the industry to rising financial pressures has been to concentrate editorial resources close to home…the number of American newspaper correspondents abroad dropped 30 percent between 2002 and 2006…it cannot be a good thing that at a time when America’s economic and security interests are so entangled with the rest of the world, America’s news media are withdrawing from it.

So far the internet hasn’t generated the revenue to make up for the discrepancy abroad, or locally, where government at the federal, state and local level has seen a decline in assigned reporters across the country. For some background on the internet era turn to Greg Waldmann’s review of Andrew Keen’s sloppy The Cult of the Amateur, from our September 2007 issue. Then read our latest issue, where we continue our efforts to attend “to a wide variety of human interests.”

Steve Coll, perhaps the best-sourced American reporter on foreign affairs, has an excellent primer on the simmering conflict over Kashmir in the New Yorker. The situation in Pakistan is less stable than most in the West realize. In stepping down last year, Pervez Musharraf handed Pakistan’s new civilian President Asif Zardari (widower of slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto) not only the sixty-year Kashmiri conflict in the northeast, but internal unrest that threatens to topple the government.

The violent contest for power and legitimacy between Taliban militants and Pakistan’s government is in many ways a struggle over Pakistan’s national identity – and, particularly, over whether the present government is righteously Islamic enough.

Failure here will torpedo gains anywhere else. India and Pakistan have been conducting quiet negotiations over Kashmir for much of the last decade, but “in the midst of such [an internal] contest, any agreement that made concessions to India would be harder to than ever to sell to the Pakistani public.” The Indian leadership likewise faces pressure from more militant factions to act with force. The struggle for peace reflects

a competition between two schools of radical thought: the millenarian terrorism of jihadi groups and their other supporters; and the less well-known search by sections of the Indian and Pakistani elites for a transformational peace. For both groups, Kashmir is symbolically and ideologically important. It is also, still, a territory of grinding, unfinished war.

And it is a conflict tied intimately to America’s presence in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, built up the Taliban in Afghanistan as a bulwark against Indian influence, just as they supported jihadi forces in Kashmir as proxies in their fight for territory. Weaning them off of their reliance on Islamic militants will take a combination of American pressure (the US gives billions every year in military aid to Pakistan) and a workable solution to the question of Kashmir.

For an idea of the precariousness of Pakistan’s government, see this video from the The New York Times, about the fight between the government and the Taliban for the valley of Swat, a mere 100 miles from the nation’s capitol. For more on related subjects, turn to Zac Marconi’s review of The Great Gamble, about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, from our February 2009 issue. On the wider subject of the so-called “war on terror”: Greg Waldmann’s review of Lee Harris’ The Suicide of Reason, from our October 2007 issue and his review of Michael Scheuer’s Marching Toward Hell, from our April 2008 issue.

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Jane Mayer’s reportage on the Bush administration’s detention policies has won her praise in many quarters. Greg Waldmann reviewed The Dark Side The Leon (Professional) download The Magdalene Sisters movie download

, her disturbing book on the subject, back in our December 2008 issue. Her coverage continues into the Obama Administration in the New Yorker Dolls psp .

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri has been held at the U.S. Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina since June of 2003, when he was on the brink of standing trial for “credit-card fraud, bank fraud, identity theft, and lying to a federal agent.” The charges stemmed from al-Marri’s 2001 arrest as a material witness in an investigation of the September 11th attacks. Al-Marri intended to plead innocent, and the F.B.I couldn’t coax any information out of him, so the Bush Administration put him in the care of the Department of Defense, hoping they would have more luck. Before agreeing to release him to the government,

the presiding judge in the case ruled that the White House would be barred from charging Marri again with the same crimes. In legal jargon, the original charges were “dismissed with prejudice,” to protect Marri’s right not to be place in “double jeopardy.” As a result, if the Obama Administration decides to charge him in the criminal system now, it has to bring a different set of charges, unless Marri’s lawyers offer a deal.

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Years of wrangling later, Al-Marri’s lawyers, hoping to secure a trial, have brought the issue all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Obama Administration must file a response by March 23rd. This response will have to address the folly of eight years of George Bush’s detention policy as much as it does the particulars of the case. Aside from wasting what federal prosecutors thought would be an easy conviction, Bush held Al-Marri without trial partly on the basis of statements made by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – statements made under torture. And al-Marri seems to have been abused during his stay there:

For the first six months, Marri was kept in an eight-foot-by-ten-foot cell with one blacked-out window, no social interaction, and nothing to do or to read…the Department of Defense ordered the removal of the mattress, pillow, and Koran…He was denied hot food, and consistently felt cold…At other points, Marri started feeling “tingles” all over, and began hallucinating…

After months of non-compliance, interrogators “chained [him] in a fetal position… [wrapped] duct tape around his mouth…tried to gag him. But as they started to tape a sock in his mouth he began to choke, causing the agents to panic and stop.” These facts are not in dispute; all of this is on tape somewhere. After a few years, the efforts of al-Marri’s lawyers secured him better treatment.

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Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrel told Mayer that “The Department of Defense treats all detainees humanely, and this is particularly true in the case of al-Marri, for whom we have taken extraordinary measures to insure his physical and mental well-being.” The first assertion is a blatant lie, the second a probable one, but what’s important is that it’s the first instance of such duplicity under Barack Obama’s Presidency. The incongruity in Morrel’s statement pertained to the policies of the last President. The upcoming Supreme Court case will show what the current President plans to do with them.

Pianist Alfred Brendel gave his final recital on December 18 in Vienna, and he has given Gramophone’s Stephen Plaistow what the magazine calls his “one final interview.” Aside from giving no concerts and interviews, Brendel has also decided to abandon recording, and so all we’ll have from now on (aside from his massive discography) are a few unreleased live performances. But he has no regrets:

I wanted to stop when I am maybe still in pretty good shape – the difference with my colleagues being that I’m not addicted to giving concerts…It shouldn’t be drawn out until some of my faculties might deteriorate, or until I become a glorification of arthritis…As to the public, I am most grateful to it, in spite of all those obnoxious coughers and the mobile telephones and hearing aids going off…I would have preferred not to announce my retirement but it was technically impossible…On the whole, these farewell concerts have turned out to be enlightening. When I have been told “you are leaving a big hole in the lives of so many people”, I felt glad that I could leave something behind, even if it’s a hole.

OLM’s Greg Waldmann attended Brendel’s final Carnegie Hall appearance last February, and reviewed both the concert and the pianist’s legacy in our March 2008 issue.

Pandemonium

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By Daryl Gregory
Ballantine Books, 2008

An alternate reality is a great premise for a novel—taking the familiar boundaries of our world, and twisting it into something all the more gripping for its similarities to what we know. Consider Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Orwell’s 1984, novels that take us into a bleak future, where technology and power-hungry leaders have gone unchecked. Del Pierce, the narrator and protagonist of Daryl Gregory’s stunning debut novel Pandemonium, has a rather more medieval problem to deal with: demons.

His world is riddled with these mysterious entities, which, far from having satanic purposes, exist within rigid archetypes. The Little Angel is always a young girl whose kiss is deadly. The Truth, a vigilante dressed in fedora and trench coat, mercilessly hunts down liars. The Painter, a mute artist, produces the same rural landscape every time he manifests. These demons and others possess at random, using their host until their goal is fulfilled, and depart with as little ceremony as they arrived. Del himself was a victim as a young child:

The demon that had possessed me was called the Hellion. It was a Dennis the Menace, a Spanky, a Katzenjammer Kid….the eternal prankster. He booby-trapped doorways with paint buckets, threw baseballs through windows, slipped snakes into beds. Whipped out his homemade slingshot and knocked those glasses right off your head.

In this world, as in ours, experts attempt to rationalize these odd phenomena. They cite the Jungian collective unconscious, the Freudian id running wild, or simply individuals trying to get attention—anything but the supernatural. Gregory’s integration of the theories of famous psychologists is smoothly done, and stays relevant to the plot. With this tactic, he deepens the novel into something more meaningful. Pandemonium could have come off as a literary version of a cheap horror flick—instead, it’s an engrossing psychological thriller.

In any case, Del is sure those theories don’t explain away demons. After the trauma of a car accident, something is in his head, and he has a terrifying suspicion that the Hellion never left.

They weren’t exactly sounds. I didn’t hear voices, or humming, or music, or screams. It was more physical than that. I felt movement, vibration, like the scrape of a chair across the floor, a fist pounding against a table. It felt like someone rattling a cage in my mind.

Psychology and barbiturates failing him, he sets out to find help exorcising the demon, before the lines between them permanently blur together.

Pandemonium quickly becomes a deep, twisting search for identity and answers, taking us through a world where the possibilities locked inside the human mind are sent forth into waking life. And yet, despite the darkness of the material, the author has a playful knack for surprising us, for making the supernatural seem natural.

But where Gregory truly excels is in taking the fantasy premise of demon possession, and diving beneath that surface to explore human nature and the unconscious. “There are some humans who have a gift for seeing the seams that stitch the world,” explains Valis, an AI entity who, rather fittingly, possesses the body of Philip K. Dick. This novel shows you those seams—and the demons walking both among us, and in us.

-Kristen Borg

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Sam Tanenhaus, senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, claims that the conservative movement is dead Pathology hd

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in the current issue of The New Republic. And he thinks it’s time they abandon their movement politics and return to their Burkean roots:

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In the end, movement conservatives got the war they wanted–both at home and abroad. It ended, at last, with the 2008 election, and the emergence of a president who seems more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right. What our politics has consistently demanded of its leaders, if they are to ascend to the status of disinterested statesmen, is not the assertion but rather the renunciation of ideology. And the only ideology one can meaningfully renounce is one’s own. Liberals did this a generation ago when they shed the programmatic “New Politics” of the left and embraced instead a broad majoritarianism. Now it is time for conservatives to repudiate movement politics and recover their honorable intellectual and political tradition.

Seed psp Decades ago, the ubiquitously quoted Richard Hofstadter noted that “In our politics, each major party has become a compound, a hodgepodge, of various and conflicting interests; and the imperatives of party struggle, the quest for victory and for offices, have forced the parties to undertake the business of conciliation and compromise among such interests.”

Like Mike dvd Last year Ronald Brownstein claimed that with the ascendence of the “ideological vanguard” in both parties “that definition is obsolete.” Greg Waldmann reviewed Brownstein’s The Second Civil War only a year ago in our February 2008 issue, but considering the recently fragmented Republican party and the loose coalition the Democrats must keep together, Hofstadter might not be as outdated as we thought.

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Jerry A. Coyne has a long and interesting essay in the New Republic that takes up the question of whether or not science and religion can be reconciled (he says they can not). He certainly throws down the gauntlet:

There are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers.) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of Judeo-Christian sensibilities. But tension remains.

Addressing not perpetuity but the present, he says that “the cultural polarization of America has been aggravated by attacks on religion from the ‘new atheists,’” and you can read about one of them right here, in Amanda Bragg’s review of god is not Great buy Flow: For Love of Water

, from our June 2007 issue.

Also in the New Republic, Isaac Chotiner writes the unthinkable: an in-depth (!) look at Outliers, Malcom Gladwell’s latest piece of fluff. After briefly summing up the career or the NBA’s Hakeem Olajuwon, he does a hilarious lampoon of Gladwell’s style:

Olajuwon is just over 6′10.” He perfectly exemplifies what might be called the Height Trumps Experience Rule, which I have just coined. This rule stipulates that people who are at least a foot taller than the average height will excel at a chosen sport, especially when height is an advantage in that sport. The rule also obtains when the individual in question discovered the game relatively late in life, and spent little time practicing during his or her youth. It sheds light on a variety of hitherto unexplained phenomena. I hope to be recognized for it.

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Chotiner explains: “I have done my best to tell Olajuwon’s story in a Gladwellian manner, because it is an axiom of Malcolm Gladwell’s method that a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.” Open Letters Monthly’s own Swiss Army knife The Air I Breathe movies , Steve Donoghue, pilloried Gladwell’s latest on our blog a few month’s ago:

In a world growing rapidly smaller through advances in technology, it’s the encouraging of that knee-jerk American bigotry that’s Outliers’s chief sin. On every page, business-class idiots are reassured that the disadvantages they experience on the global stage aren’t really their fault, or their country’s fault. Like the noted deficiency of average Americans in math and the sciences: Gladwell explains that it’s all about Asian culture. Asian languages, you see, denote numbers in a way that makes them quicker to see and say in the “two-second memory loop” Gladwell claims rules everybody’s memory; likewise the way Asian children are taught to think about fractions makes it easier for them to do calculations…See? It’s not your fault that you’re trapped in that virtuous circle!

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“I am quite seriously discussing the propriety of omitting it,” James Garfield wrote of his inaugural address, just two months before he had to give it. Well, he didn’t really have to give it. There’s no provision for it in the Constitution, but George Washington thought he ought to give a speech after he was sworn in and every President since has done the same. So we learn in Jill Lepore’s wonderful New Yorker piece on the evolution (or devolution) of the quadrennial speech.

Washington started it but addressed only the Congress; Jefferson addressed the American people, but only in the presence of Congress. James Monroe moved it outdoors but didn’t specifically address anyone. Finally, Andrew “The Lion” Jackson addressed the American people while outdoors. And that’s been the paradigm.

Garfield was plagued by his impending address, and he studied up by reading his predecessors. Most of what he found was uninspiring, and Lepore argues convincingly that they’ve actually gotten worse. Of course Lincoln’s addresses loom over the others. Jefferson had the most elegant zinger: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.” John Adams had the longest sentence (700 words). Harding beat all comers for sheer monotony. And “George H. W. Bush compared freedom to a kite.”

Nineteenth-century Presidents pledged themselves to the Constitution; twentieth-century Presidents courted the American people. We now not only accept that our Presidents will speak to us, directly, and ask for our support…we expect it, even though the founders not only didn’t expect it, they feared it.

Lepore traces the recent pandering, anti-intellectual trend to Richard Nixon, who established the Writing and Research Department, an office of official speechwriters. Words got smaller and rhetoric became more supplicating. Prior to that, when President’s had help they usually got it from friends or advisors. Ted Sorenson was Kennedy’s primary speechwriter, but he also did much more than that.

With all this in mind, and with Barack Obama’s inaugural looming in the near future, Lepore hones in on the moment

The problem doesn’t lie in the length of their sentences or the number of their syllables. It lies in the absence of precision, the paucity of ideas, and the evasion of every species of argument. Presidential rhetoric is worth keeping an eye on. But the anti-intellectual Presidency is fast expiring. And a rhetorical Presidency begins to look a lot better, after some years of a dumbfounded one.

She also reminds us that these inaugurals have traditionally been meant to be read as much as they were meant to be heard. Penguin, even in the age of YouTube, is already betting on it: they’ll be publishing Obama’s speech in Februrary – coupled with Lincoln’s two inaugurals, his Gettysburg address, and Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Obama is a gifted orator, among other things, but stay tuned to Open Letters to see if he can keep pace with this sort of company.

Jack Spicer’s poetry is back in print with the new My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Barry Schwabsky gives it a review in The Nation, whose poetry editor happens to be one of the collection’s editors. About the poet’s later work Schwabsky says

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download The Brothers Grimm Spicer’s serial method allowed him to weave a dense mesh of myth, metaphor, literary allusion and searing emotional candor through his text while letting each line stand brutally blunt–almost physically perspicuous–to the point where it could be mistaken for something artless. As a result, his books have a structural concision that protects them from the self-indulgent longueurs as well as the ostentatious erudition that sometimes mar the Modernist epics.

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It’s poetry “salvaged from, if not the trash, in any case the filing cabinet in a friend’s basement. One can only be grateful.” Jared White delves into Spicer’s poetry in depth for our forthcoming issue. Here’s a sneak peak:

Yet it is not exactly a misrepresentation for Spicer to label his own poems “translations,” since his entire project depends upon envisioning the poet as not exactly the creator of his poetry, but rather a passive listener to the poems’ active music, taking dictation upon their arrival. The mysterious, magical source of poems remains in question, a worthy subject for speculation. In a series of lectures in Vancouver delivered shortly before his death, Spicer offered the most memorable narrative: poetry comes as radio signals “from Mars.” Spicer’s Mars evokes a science fiction world of canals and ghostly aliens, a kind of derelict, outer-space Venice of the mind.

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It can take a while for British books to travel across the Atlantic, and the reverse is true as well. So it is that Martin Schifino looks (In Brief) at Clayton Eshleman’s one-volume translation of César Vallejo’s poetry.

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Can Vallejo’s poems travel? He was, and remains, a difficult writer…Anyone translating Vallejo is bound to fall short in some area, and no one has surmounted the challenge as well as Eshleman…It is difficult to imagine how it could be superceded.

John Cotter, OLM’s Poetry Editor, reviewed the same volume in depth all the way back in June of 2007. He and Schifino come to similar conclusions.

Thwarted and inherited loves, inspiring patriotism, a resentful standoff with God, the dream of perfect socialism, and a loving, brutal fuck with language lace his poems like loaded coils. These are not poems to be measured at first glance. These are poems to live with. Vallejo’s clustered poems want unpacking, then revisiting…

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No one else has done so much, posthumously, for Vallejo, and his passion radiates through the work. Plenty of other editions deserve our time, but Eshleman’s is a much-needed milestone and what his individual translations occasionally lack in accuracy, they make up for in courage. This is as it should be. Vallejo, as a poet, was more courageous than his time allowed.

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