Delanceyplace.com 12/29/06-The Amygdala and Peace

In today's encore excerpt, perhaps the xenophobia that seems so intractable in certain nations and populations really isn't that intractable--and the brain's amygdala plays a crucial role in the analysis:

"In exploring [relations among different groups], one often encounters a pessimism built around the notion that humans ... are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active--aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented 'subliminally,' which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it.

"More recent studies, however, should mitigate this pessimism. Test a person who has a lot of experience with people of different races, and the amygdala does not activate; or, as in a wonderful experiment by Susan Fiske of Princeton University, subtly bias the subject beforehand to think of people as individuals rather than as members of a group, and the amygdala does not budge. ...

"The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the seventeenth century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility."

Robert M. Sapolsky, "A Natural History of Peace," Foreign Affairs, January/February 2006, pp. 119-120.

Delanceyplace.com 12/28/06-Nerve

In today's encore excerpt, Lynda Obst, producer of such movies as Sleepless in Seattle, Contact and The Fisher King, discusses the essential Hollywood quality of "nerve":

"Nerve most commonly comes from having nothing to lose. ... That means you’re either so low it looks like up to you, so rich you can sustain a loss, or believe in something so strongly you don't care what anyone thinks. It's easy to be nervy when your livelihood is not at stake. This has, sadly, never been an option for me, but it is how the game is most effectively played. As in all high-stakes gambling, you should never roll the dice with dinner money. You must play baccarat as if you were an aristocrat so you are not devastated by any likely subversion. Always remember the famous adage about the movie business: You can't make a living, you can only get rich. So I have to play like I am a high roller whether I have the cushion or not. When Monday morning comes and I've rightly walked away from a bad deal, it only feels good when I have money in the bank. Low overhead can be a great protection, one that I've never afforded myself.

"One of the most winning power strategies is the ability to walk away from a deal. People want you when you don't need them and it stuns them that you're willing to split--it implies that you are fine without them. Then they wonder how they will be fine without you. When Laura Ziskin was asked to run a new division at Fox, she took months to decide. Her ambivalence raised the ante--certainly her salary--for the studio. As noted above, the ability to take this position implies options or money or both. No one cares where the money comes from either: arms merchants, beauty salons, money launderers, Mafiosi (kind of charming in fact), shopping centers. Money talks; nobody walks. The tragedy is that talent with no nerve equals failure, whereas there are many careers that attest the power of nerve alone. Harry Cohn, crass former garment executive who founded Columbia, is the paradigm. Scores of others have followed in his image.

"A director can have nerve and no talent with a good producer and a crew. If she has talent and no nerve and no producer with nerve, no movie. Someone in the mix has to have nerve, and most nervy people have bad manners. Nerve mixed with style, of course, is the ultimate. Many elegant people are embarrassed at the show of nerve, moxie, or unbridled aggression. They try to cultivate stylish ways to be in your face, but in the end being in your face is being rude and not being in your face is being absent. Subtlety doesn't work here because no one is looking long enough to see it. Modesty prior to success is too authentic for Hollywood . It makes everyone uncomfortable. Anyway, too much modesty inhibits nerve. Modesty postsuccess is what passes for grace."

Lynda Obst, Hello, He Lied, Broadway Books, 1996, pp. 143-4.

Delanceyplace.com 12/27/06-Harold Arlen

Today's encore excerpt gives us a glimpse into the creative process--in this case the creative process of the prolific Harold Arlen, composer of such tunes as "Over The Rainbow", "Stormy Weather", and "Get Happy":

"In 1933, Billboard heralded ... Arlen as the most prolific composer (in history). ... Arlen, who eventually wrote the music for eight Broadway shows and thirty films, understood his own talent and served it with humble rigor. ...

"To Arlen, the arrival of a song was a sort of blessing. 'You wonder later, in mystery, how it happens,' he said. His daily quest was to find what he called 'the unsought phrase.' 'He tries to tries to be different,' [Johnny] Mercer explained. 'He won't let a simple phrase take him where it would ordinarily lead somebody else.' 'When your daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously,' reads a newspaper snippet that Arlen clipped to his journal. 'Drift, wait, and obey.' Arlen was also in the habit of invoking his unconscious through prayer. Before he began his day's work at the piano, he lowered his eyes, brought his hands together, and put himself in a worshipful state of mind--a gesture that bemused his less pious collaborators. 'When he gets to the piano, it's a feeling of witchcraft,' [the late lyricist E.Y.] Harburg said of Arlen's ritual. ...

"Oscar Hammerstein, Jr., said, 'You are listening to [Arlen's] sweet and caressing notes and suddenly the tune flies up and away and you are carried with it. This is thrilling.' "

John Lahr, "Come Rain or Come Shine", The New Yorker Magazine, September 19, 2005, p. 90.

Delanceyplace.com 12/26/06-Sicilian Olives and Grapes

In today's encore excerpt--Sicily, olive oil and wine:

"Sicily, the ancient Trinacria (Three-cornered Land, so-called from its shape), is one of the largest islands in the Mediterranean. When the Greeks ... planted their settlements, dispossessing the native islanders, Sicily was heavily wooded and had extremely fertile soil. ... The struggle for the possession of Sicily [among the Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans] was to rage for nearly five hundred years, from about 700 BC until 212 BC, when it was finally annexed as a province of Rome. Even stripped and denuded as it is today, it remains not only one of the richest, but also one of the most beautiful islands in the sea. ...

"The olive and the vine, both of which the Greeks assiduously cultivated in their new colonies, are as emblematic of Sicily as they are of Greece itself. Animal fat, especially in the form of butter, is difficult to get in typical Mediterranean lands on account of the scarcity of summer pasturage. ... A digestible fat like olive oil is especially necessary to Mediterranean man since his diet typically includes little meat ...

"[G]rapes swell with juice precisely at the period when [Mediterranean] rainfall is minimal or altogether absent. But the drying up of the streams makes it difficult for man to get pure drinking water at the time when thirst is greatest. ... [T]he grape as plucked has a 'bloom' on its surface. In that waxy bloom lives a kind of yeast, which, if mingled with the juice by the crushing process, causes 'spontaneous' fermentation, turning sugar into alcohol. Wine-making in its origin is thus a purely natural process."

Ernle Bradford, Mediterranean, Penguin, 1971, pp. 91-6.

Delanceyplace.com 22/12/06-The Date and the Star

In today's excerpt, the date and the star:

"The date of Nativity was first placed placed by the Western church on December 25th in the fourth century, in a Roman calendar of AD 334, when Christmas supplanted the pagan festival of the unvanquished sun. But most Eastern Christians celebrated Jesus' birth on the feast of Epiphany [January 6], while other oriental communities in Egypt and Syria observed it on April 21st or May 20th. ...

"Extraordinary astral phenomenon regularly appear in Jewish and classical literary sources as signs heralding the birth of illustrious individuals. ... [L]iterature close to the time of Matthew's gospel testifies to the popular belief that the birth of an important personality is always marked by the apparition of a new star. Just a few months before the birth of the future emperor Augustus in 63 BC, a celestial portent had forewarned the Roman senate about the advent of a king. However, the story in Matthew was most probably built on an Old Testament prophecy of Balaam in Numbers 24:17 ('I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; a Star shall come out of Jacob; a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and batter the brow of Moab, and destroy all the sons of tumult') which was interpreted both by Jews and by Christians as alluding to the Messiah. This prediction was referred to by Rabbi Akiba when he proclaimed Simeon ben Kosiba, the leader of the second Jewish revolt ag
ainst Rome (AD 132-135), to be the Messiah."

Geza Vermes, "The First Christmas," History Today, December 2006, pp. 24-28.

Delanceyplace.com 22/12/06-The Date and the Star

In today's excerpt, the date and the star:

"The date of Nativity was first placed placed by the Western church on December 25th in the fourth century, in a Roman calendar of AD 334, when Christmas supplanted the pagan festival of the unvanquished sun. But most Eastern Christians celebrated Jesus' birth on the feast of Epiphany [January 6], while other oriental communities in Egypt and Syria observed it on April 21st or May 20th. ...

"Extraordinary astral phenomenon regularly appear in Jewish and classical literary sources as signs heralding the birth of illustrious individuals. ... [L]iterature close to the time of Matthew's gospel testifies to the popular belief that the birth of an important personality is always marked by the apparition of a new star. Just a few months before the birth of the future emperor Augustus in 63 BC, a celestial portent had forewarned the Roman senate about the advent of a king. However, the story in Matthew was most probably built on an Old Testament prophecy of Balaam in Numbers 24:17 ('I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near; a Star shall come out of Jacob; a sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and batter the brow of Moab, and destroy all the sons of tumult') which was interpreted both by Jews and by Christians as alluding to the Messiah. This prediction was referred to by Rabbi Akiba when he proclaimed Simeon ben Kosiba, the leader of the second Jewish revolt ag
ainst Rome (AD 132-135), to be the Messiah."

Geza Vermes, "The First Christmas," History Today, December 2006, pp. 24-28.

Delanceyplace.com 21/12/06-Pilgrims

In today's encore excerpt, Bill Bryson speaks to how ill-prepared the 102 Mayflower Pilgrims were for the trip to the New World:

"It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they misunderstood the purpose of the trip. They found room for sundials and candlesnuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line. Among the professions represented on the Mayflower's manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter--occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment. Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as "Captain Shrimpe"--hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. ...

"They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence...by dying in droves...just 54 people, half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self- sustaining colony."

Bill Bryson, Made in America, Perennial, 1994, p. 2-3.

Delanceyplace.com 20/12/06-How to Gain a Kingdom

In today's excerpt, how to gain a kingdom, Middle Ages-style, in this case as part of the Third Crusades in 1191 C.E.:

"Eleven months after [losing] the battle of Hattin, Guy of Lusignan had been released by Saladin on condition that he would take no further part in the fighting. Guy had agreed, but everyone knew that promises made to infidels could be safely ignored. ... Guy, deprived of Tyre, determined to show his mettle and, desperate for a city to rule from had marched down ... to Acre and ... maintained his position until the arrival of Richard Coeur-de-Lion in the early summer of 1191. ...

"[T]he Muslim garrison in Acre capitulated, and the Crusaders took possession of the city. Six weeks later, Richard gave orders for the massacre of all of his Saracen prisoners--2,700 of them, together with their wives and children--before leaving Acre in the hands of Guy of Lusignan.

"Guy's difficulties should then have been over--but for Conrad of Montferrat, whose eyes were now firmly on the throne of [nearby] Jerusalem. ... Admittedly Montserrat had no legal title to it, but to this problem there was a simple solution: marriage to Princess Isabella, daughter of King Amalric I. It was perhaps a minor disadvantage that she was already married, to Humphrey, Lord of Toron; but Humphrey, though a man of considerable culture and an impressive Arabic scholar, was also famously homosexual. With every semblance of relief, he unhesitatingly agreed to a divorce. On 24 November 1190 Conrad and Isabella were pronounced man and wife.

"A royal marriage, however, is not a coronation; the rivalry between Guy of Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat dragged on for another eighteen months, and might have continued for substantially longer had not King Richard--whose power and prestige in the Holy Land was far greater than theirs--received news from England that persuaded him to return at once if his crown were to be saved. Before his departure he called a council of all the knights and barons of Outremer and told them that the question of the kingship must now be decided once and for all. ... Unanimously, they chose Conrad. Guy was sent by Richard to Cyprus where--for a consideration--he was allowed to rule the island as he liked. He assumed the title of king and founded a dynasty that was to reign in Cyprus for nearly three hundred years."

John Julius Norwich, The Middle Sea, Chatto & Windus, 2006, pp. 130-1.

Delanceyplace.com 19/12/06-George Marshall

In today's excerpt, General George Catlett Marshall, Jr. Considered by many as the second greatest general in American history behind Washington himself, Marshall was the architect of victory in World War II as military chief of staff under Roosevelt. Yet he refused to seek the war's most coveted command, the one that would have brought unprecedented fame: D-Day and Overlord:

"In the four years since 1939 and his appointment as acting chief of staff, George Marshall had raised and equipped an army and air force of almost 7 million men and women; in the last two years they had fielded fifty combat divisions. More were to come each month. His air force had grown thirty-five-fold, to 2 million men and more than 100,000 aircraft of all types:

"In these same two years he had become the most powerful figure in the government after the president himself. no soldier since George Washington commanded such political influence and public respect as did this soldier of sober optimism.

"[Many assumed that Marshall would take the prestigious Overlord command and talk began of] Marshall's shift to London and his probable replacement in Washington by Eisenhower. ... From his room at Walter Reed Hospital, retired general of the armies [and World War I hero] John J. Pershing wrote FDR urging that Marshall be retained as chief of staff. 'To transfer him to a tactical command in a limited area, no matter how seemingly important, is to deprive ourselves of the benefit of his outstanding strategic ability and experience. I know of no one at all comparable to replace him as chief of staff.' ... Roosevelt [himself said], 'I doubt very much if General Marshall can be spared ...'

"[At the Tehran conference with Churchill and Stalin], Roosevelt had one major decision yet to make: command of Overlord. ... The president ... asked his chief of staff which post he preferred. Marshall would not be drawn out. It was for the president to decide. ... The president then decided, as he put it, on a 'mathematical basis.' Eisenhower as chief of staff would have to become familiar with the Pacific theater and handle MacArthur ... and would have to learn to deal with a Congress impatient for the war's end.

"Roosevelt's decision was politically motivated, influenced by both national and international considerations. As Winston Churchill would later write, 'It is not possible in a major war to divide military from political affairs. At the summit they are one.' However much the chief of staff sought to put himself above the political, he had paradoxically become the one man acceptable to all. It would cost him the one command he most desired."

Ed Cray, General of the Army, Cooper Square Press, 1990, pp. 403, 414, 417, 436-7.

Delanceyplace.com 18/12/06-Power

In today's excerpt, Robert Greene's bestseller, The 48 Laws of Power. When first released in the late 1990s, it was read by Hollywood agents, hip-hop moguls and other power aspirants everywhere. It was not something to look for, however, in the bookstore section on genuineness or caring. Here Greene elaborates on Law 4: Always Say Less than Necessary:

"Power is in many ways a game of appearances, and when you say less than necessary, you will inevitably appear greater and more powerful than you are. Your silence will make other people uncomfortable. Humans are machines of interpretation and explanation; they have to know what you are thinking. When you carefully control what you reveal, they cannot pierce your intentions or your meaning.

"Your short answers and silences will put them on the defensive, and they will jump in, nervously filling the silence with all kinds of comments that will reveal valuable information about them and their weaknesses. They will leave the meeting feeling as if they had been robbed, and they will go home and ponder your every word. This extra attention to your brief comments will only add to your power.

"Saying less than necessary is not for kings and statesmen only. In most areas of life, the less you say, the more profound and mysterious you appear. As a young man, the artist Andy Warhol had the revelation that it was generally impossible to get people to do what you wanted them to do by asking them. They would turn against you, subvert your wishes, disobey you out of sheer personality. He once told a friend, 'I learned that you actually have more power when you shut up.'

"In his later life, Warhol employed this strategy with great success. His interviews were exercises in oracular speech: He would say something vague and ambiguous, and the interviewer would twist in circles trying to figure it out, imagining there was something profound behind his often meaningless phrases. Warhol rarely talked about his work; he let others do the interpreting. He claimed to have learned the technique from Marcel Duchamp, another twentieth-century artist who realized early on that the less he said about his work, the more people talked about it. And the more they talked, the more valuable his work became."

Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power, 1998, pp. 34-5.

Delanceyplace.com 15/12/06-Madame Marie Tussaud

In today's excerpt, Madame Tussaud's (1761-1850) wax museum:

"A self-made woman in an age of male hegemony, she used her grit, audacity, artistic skill and entrepreneurial talents to build one of the most successful brands in the commercial world. Over 200 million visitors have experienced her waxworks shows; the long queues have become landmarks in their own right outside her original Baker Street site in London and its branches ...

"Born ... in Strasbourg, Tussaud claimed to be part of a distinguished Swiss family, though in reality she was descended from a long line of executioners (perhaps offering a genetic explanation for her penchant for horror). Papa had absconded and Marie's eighteen-year-old mother took the infant to Berne, entering domestic service for Dr. Curtius, a maker of wax anatomical models with a profitable sideline in erotic wax tableaux. Curtius soon spotted little Marie's precocious talent and enlisted her to help with the waxworks ..."

"The menage moved to Paris ... and when the opportunistic Curtius became a prominent Jacobin, his dinner party circuit expanded to include the revolutionaries Marat and Danton; Marie would be reacquainted with them during the Terror when she modelled their corpses. ... [Soon she] was playing a starring role in the Terror. Stoically picking her way through the newly stormed Bastille with Robespierre as a guide (she soon would soon be casting his decapitated remains), stepping through the gore in the Tuileries, fainting away as Marie Antoinette climbed the scaffold, but reviving in time to collect the royal head, Tussaud seems to have been present at every important occasion. On her release from prison, where her cellmate had been none other than Napoleon's Josephine, Tussaud recounts that the authorities had compelled her to produce death masks of the executed. ... There is little to substantiate Tussaud's claims for this period; indeed, [Kate] Berridge suggests that Curtius and Marie had a cozy arrangement with the public executioner who procured the bloody models for them. ...

"Crossing the Channel [with her wax models to] Georgian England ... the new middle classes flocked to the exhibition, which offered them history, news and celebrity gossip not just about monarchs, statesmen and military figures, but also notorious criminals and fashionable actresses. Tussaud's medium was perfectly suited to the era's new culture of impermanence. As fashions came and went, those no longer in the public eye were removed and melted down."

Sarah Howard, "Chambers of Horror", The Times Literary Supplement, October 27, 2006, p. 36.

Delanceyplace.com 14/12/06-Immigrants

Today's encore excerpt addresses the perennial fear of allowing immigrants to enter the country:

"New York, in its continual processing of new immigrant groups, tends to remain what it was at the beginning when it had a population of just five hundred that nevertheless spoke eighteen different languages, and thus stays a source of hope and fear. The demographic fears that [Boss] Tweed stirred--that 'we' are about to be engulfed by 'them'--are alive and well, not only in New York but throughout the country. We all have, somewhere within, a lowercase puritan who wants to hold the barbarians outside the gate, keep things as they are or return them to an imagined state of grace. ...

"Kenneth Jackson put it to me this way: People always fear that [New York] is about to become a minority city. A hundred years ago the fear was that it would become Italian or Irish. But what happens is 'they' become 'us'. Americanness is always changing, and that tends to happen first in New York."

Russell Shorto, "All Political Ideas are Local", New York Times Magazine, October 2, 2005, p. 61.

Delanceyplace.com 13/12/06-The Perils of Jornalism

In today's excerpt, in a story that is well-known and much-loved, on November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg address. It was the first speech he had prepared ahead of its delivery in two and one-half years. The accuracy of reporting in the immediate aftermath was mixed:

"Most Americans first learned about the president's remarks from their local newspapers. However, in the wry words of a Boston reporter, the speech 'suffered somewhat at the hands of telegraphers' as it was wired across the country. The version that ran in the Sentinel of Centralia, Illinois, on November 26, 1863, is a striking example of what could be lost in translation.

"Ninety years ago our fathers formed a Government consecrated to freedom, and dedicated to the principle that all men are created equal. and [sic] that we are engaged in a war testing the question whether any nation so formed can long endure. and come to dedicate a portion of a great battle- field of that war to those who had died that the nation might live. He could not dedicate, consecrate or hallow that ground, for it was consecrated above our power to add or detract. The world would not long remember what was said there, but it could never forget what was done there, and it was rather for it to be dedicated on that spot to the work they had so nobly carried forward that they might not have died in vain, and that Government for and of the people, based upon the freedom of man may not perish from off the face of the earth."

Actual Text of the
Address: <http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=yodqy9bab.0.mmigoxbab.yo7g7qbab.3604&ts=S0222&p=http%3A%2F%2Fshowcase.netins.net%2Fweb%2Fcreative%2Flincoln%2Fspeeches%2Fgettysburg.htm>

Gabor Borritt, "For Us the Living", American History, Volume 41, Number 6, p. 26.

Delanceyplace.com 12/12/06-Noah Webster

In today's excerpt, in 1800, Noah Webster, "a sometime schoolteacher, failed lawyer, and staggeringly successful spelling-book author," began work on an American Dictionary. He finally completed his work in 1825 and it was published in 1828:

"In June of 1800, Noah Webster's proposal for an American dictionary made national news. No news might have been better. Within a week, a Philadelphia newspaper editor called Webster's idea preposterous (it is 'perfectly absurd to talk of the American language') and his motives mercenary ('the plain truth is that he means to make money').

"Two American dictionaries, published just months before, had been badly drubbed, too. The first promised 'a number of words in vogue not found in any dictionary.' One reviewer, dismissing 'sans culotte,' 'hauter,' and 'composuist' as, respectively, French, not even a word, and just plain silly, deemed the dictionary, 'at best, useless.' No better were notices of the Massachusetts minister Caleb Alexander's 'Columbian Dictionary,' containing 'many new words peculiar to the United States.' 'A disgusting collection' of idiotic words coined by 'presumptuous ignorance,' one critic wrote, referring to Americanisms like 'wigwam,' 'rateability,' 'caucus,' and 'lengthy' (lengthy? what's next, 'strengthy'?) ... [H]e saw it as nothing more than a record of our imbecility. ...

"You might think it would be hard to top that kind of clobbering, at least without thumbing through a thesaurus for synonyms for 'worthless' and 'tripe,' but Webster's critics were pretty resourceful. [Newspaper editor] Joseph Dennie said ... 'If, as Mr. Webster asserts, it is true that many new words have already crept into the language of the United States, he would be much better employed in rooting out those anxious weeds, than in mingling them with the flowers.' ...

"Their logic about Webster's proposed dictionary went something like this: Because any words new to the United States are either stupid or foreign, there is no such thing as the 'American language'; there's just bad English. ... Americans, scoffed [Englishman Jonathan Boucher], were 'addicted to innovation,' no less in language than in anything else. ... Federalists [agreed with this aversion to innovation and] believed ... now that an orderly government had been established, the time had come for Americans to stop making the world anew, to leave off rethinking the social order, to forswear novelty."

Jill Lepore, "Noah's Mark", The New Yorker, November 6, 2006, pp. 78-80.

Delanceyplace.com 11/12/06-Casino Royale

In today's excerpt, Ian Fleming pens his very first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1953. With the current remake of Casino Royale, exotically staged in Montenegro and Venice and quickly soaring past the $100 million sales mark, it is worth looking back at the more inauspicious debut of the original. In the post-war poverty of Britain, the town of Royale, on the northern coast of France, suffices for the exotic, and the Bond franchise is so new and little known that it merits only a poorly made CBS movie and then--shortly after--a second, disastrous David Niven/Woody Allen version:

"Casino Royale is a book all about privilege, but privilege of a very marginal and almost grimy kind ... The action is entirely based in and around the dull, failing Normandy coastal town of Royale--a sort of hopeless Deauville. One can imagine that French casinos circa 1950 had been through rather a lot--the previous decade having seen a 'mixed crowd' at the tables. The nature of Bond's privilege is to be at Royale at all. [Post-war] currency and travel restrictions meant that the [English] Channel, the barrier essential in 1940 to keeping the Germans out, was now quite as actively penning non-military British people in. The very wealthy, or those with friends in France, could make arrangements to get round the restrictions (which stayed in place in various ways until the 1970s--yet another example of how strange the recent past was), but for virtually everyone, France, even blustery, sour northern France, had become as exotic as Shangri-la. Fleming could not have chosen his location more cleverly: he would need to ratchet up the flow of exotica with each of the later books ... but Britain's frame of reference had shrunk so small by the early fifties that Royale was quite enough. ...

"There were all kinds of abortive schemes to film the Bond books in the 1950s. None came to anything, and it is interesting how this reflects Fleming's quite moderate prominence at the time, particularly in the United States. The one exception was Casino Royale, sold to CBS to make a one-off for American television in 1954. ... The program features an American 'Jimmy' Bond, played by Barry Nelson. ... Nelson's Bond wanders around a casino, fluffing his lines, and bizarrely and at great length explains the rules of the card game being played. ... Particularly oddly he drinks only water. ... It is a shambles. ...

"[T]he rights to Casino Royale meant that they were passed on outside anyone else's control to the makers of the Swinging Sixties movie disaster Casino Royale. This David Niven/Woody Allen horror is rarely seen and effectively has nothing to do with Bond--or with anything. It is cruel that Bond should be played by David Niven--one of the essential British actors of the forties who somehow went completely wrong and spent the rest of his career pimping to some deep-seated American wish to see British twerpy ineffectuality in action.

Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain, Farrar, Strauss, 2006, pp. 77, 146-8.

Delanceyplace.com 08/12/06-Peanuts

In today's excerpt, Charles Schulz, with the meteoric success of his comic strip Peanuts, becomes one of America's most influential commentators on life in this country through his clear and original insights into the nature and behavior of his own children:

"Linus's beloved Miss Othmar, his teacher, is a rather strange person, and I tried to do much with her through the conversation of Linus. I have experimented with a two-level story line at times. I have tried to show Linus's view of what is happening at school, but then show what actually was occurring. I have done this to bring out a truth that I have observed, and this is that children see more than we think they do, but at the same time almost never seem to know what is going on. ...

"Charlie Brown defined security as being able sleep in the back seat of your parents' car. This, again, is a childhood memory, one supported by many readers who have told me that they also recall the wonderful joy of doing this with a feeling of complete security when returning home late at night. The shattering blow comes in later years when one realizes that this can never happen again. Adults are doomed to ride in the front seat forever. ...

"Children do not converse. They say things. They ask, they tell, and they talk, but they know nothing of one of the great joys in life, conversation. Then, along about twelve, give or take a year on either side, two young people sitting on their bicycles near a front porch on a summer evening begin to talk about others that they know, and conversation is discovered. Some confuse conversation with talking, of course, and go on for the rest of their lives, never stopping, boring others with meaningless chatter and complaints. But real conversation includes asking questions, and asking the right ones before it's too late. ...

(And then Schulz inserts this gem) "One evening, the entire family was around the dinner table and, for some reason, my daughter Amy seemed particularly noisy. After putting up with this for about ten minutes, I turned to her and said, 'Amy, couldn't you be quiet for just a little while!' She said nothing, but picked up a piece of bread and began to butter it with a knife and asked, 'Am I buttering too loud for you?'

Charles Schulz, edited by David Larkin, Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, HarperResource, 1999, pp. 39, 41, 91, 120.

In today's excerpt, in 330 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine moves the empire's capital to Byzantium, which is renamed Constantinople and today is known as Istanbul and is Europe's largest city. Why did he make this move? As discussed in this excerpt, Rome had become a backwater, and Roman Emperors had long had the habit of establishing their courts elsewhere--especially those whose priority was leading military campaigns into the far regions of the Empire. (It is interesting to note that many centuries later, Rome would again become a backwater: the brilliant artist and architect Filippo Brunelleschi, visiting from vibrant Florence in the early 1400s in the aftermath of the Plague, found less than 50,000 inhabitants in the city of Rome):

"When Constantine first set eyes on Byzantium, the city was already nearly a thousand years old. According to tradition, it was founded in 685 BC by a certain Byzas as a colony of Megara; there can, at any rate, be little doubt ... that the Emperor was right to choose it for his new capital. Rome had long been a backwater; none of Diocletian's four tetrarchs had dreamed of living there. The principal dangers to imperial security were now concentrated on the eastern frontier: the Sarmatians around the lower Danube; the Ostrogoths to the north of the Black Sea and--most menacing of all--the Persians, whose great Sassanian Empire now extended from the former Roman provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia as far as the Hindu Kush. But the reasons for the move were not only strategic. The whole focus of civilization had shifted irrevocably eastward. Intellectually and culturally, Rome was growing more and more out of touch with the new and progressive thinking of the Hellenistic worl
d; the Roman academies and libraries were no longer any match for those of Alexandria, Pergamum, or Antioch. Economically, too, the agricultural and mineral wealth of what was known as the pars orientalis was a far greater attraction than the Italian peninsula, where malaria was spreading fast and populations were dwindling. Finally, the old Roman republic and pagan traditions had no place in Constantine's new Christian Empire. It was time to start afresh.. ...

"The advantages of Byzantium as a strategic site over any of its oriental neighbors were self-evident. Standing as it did on the very threshold of Asia ... it had been molded by nature at once into a magnificent harbor and a well-nigh impregnable stronghold ... protected by two long and narrow straits: the Bosphorus to the east and the [Dardanelles] to the west. ...

"Constantine spared no expense to make his new capital worthy of its name. Tens of thousands of artisans worked day and night. ... All the leading cities of Europe and Asia, including Rome itself, were plundered of their finest statues, trophies and works of art for the embellishment and enrichment of Constantinople. ...

"And yet the fact remained there had been no real change. To its subjects, it was still the Roman Empire, that of Augustus and Trajan and Hadrian. And they were still Romans. Their capital had been moved, that was all; nothing else was affected. Over the centuries, surrounded as they were by the Greek world, it was inevitable that they should gradually abandon the Latin language in favor of the Greek, but that made no difference either. It was as Romans they proudly described themselves for as long as the empire lasted ..."

John Julius Norwich, The Middle Sea, Chatto & Windus, 2006, pp. 54-55.

Delanceyplace.com 07/12/06-Conventional Wisdom

In today's encore excerpt, John Kenneth Galbraith speaks regarding 'conventional wisdom', and suggests that it is often a poor surrogate for truth:

"It was John Kenneth Galbraith, the hyperliterate economic sage, who coined the phrase 'conventional wisdom.' He did not consider it a compliment. 'We associate truth with convenience,' he wrote, 'with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.' Economic and social behavior, Galbraith continued, 'are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere, as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.'

"So the conventional wisdom in Galbraith’s view must be simple, convenient, comfortable, and comforting--though not necessarily true. It would be silly to argue that the conventional wisdom is never true. But noticing where the conventional wisdom may be false--noticing, perhaps, the contrails of sloppy or self-interested thinking--is a nice place to start asking questions."

Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics, Harper Collins, 2005, pp. 89-90.

Delanceyplace.com 06/12/06-Constantine Moves the Capital

In today's excerpt, in 330 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine moves the empire's capital to Byzantium, which is renamed Constantinople and today is known as Istanbul and is Europe's largest city. Why did he make this move? As discussed in this excerpt, Rome had become a backwater, and Roman Emperors had long had the habit of establishing their courts elsewhere--especially those whose priority was leading military campaigns into the far regions of the Empire. (It is interesting to note that many centuries later, Rome would again become a backwater: the brilliant artist and architect Filippo Brunelleschi, visiting from vibrant Florence in the early 1400s in the aftermath of the Plague, found less than 50,000 inhabitants in the city of Rome):

"When Constantine first set eyes on Byzantium, the city was already nearly a thousand years old. According to tradition, it was founded in 685 BC by a certain Byzas as a colony of Megara; there can, at any rate, be little doubt ... that the Emperor was right to choose it for his new capital. Rome had long been a backwater; none of Diocletian's four tetrarchs had dreamed of living there. The principal dangers to imperial security were now concentrated on the eastern frontier: the Sarmatians around the lower Danube; the Ostrogoths to the north of the Black Sea and--most menacing of all--the Persians, whose great Sassanian Empire now extended from the former Roman provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia as far as the Hindu Kush. But the reasons for the move were not only strategic. The whole focus of civilization had shifted irrevocably eastward. Intellectually and culturally, Rome was growing more and more out of touch with the new and progressive thinking of the Hellenistic worl
d; the Roman academies and libraries were no longer any match for those of Alexandria, Pergamum, or Antioch. Economically, too, the agricultural and mineral wealth of what was known as the pars orientalis was a far greater attraction than the Italian peninsula, where malaria was spreading fast and populations were dwindling. Finally, the old Roman republic and pagan traditions had no place in Constantine's new Christian Empire. It was time to start afresh.. ...

"The advantages of Byzantium as a strategic site over any of its oriental neighbors were self-evident. Standing as it did on the very threshold of Asia ... it had been molded by nature at once into a magnificent harbor and a well-nigh impregnable stronghold ... protected by two long and narrow straits: the Bosphorus to the east and the [Dardanelles] to the west. ...

"Constantine spared no expense to make his new capital worthy of its name. Tens of thousands of artisans worked day and night. ... All the leading cities of Europe and Asia, including Rome itself, were plundered of their finest statues, trophies and works of art for the embellishment and enrichment of Constantinople. ...

"And yet the fact remained there had been no real change. To its subjects, it was still the Roman Empire, that of Augustus and Trajan and Hadrian. And they were still Romans. Their capital had been moved, that was all; nothing else was affected. Over the centuries, surrounded as they were by the Greek world, it was inevitable that they should gradually abandon the Latin language in favor of the Greek, but that made no difference either. It was as Romans they proudly described themselves for as long as the empire lasted ..."

John Julius Norwich, The Middle Sea, Chatto & Windus, 2006, pp. 54-55.

Delanceyplace.com 01/12/06-John Coltrane

In today's excerpt, John Coltrane, the brooding, obsessive, and intensely spiritual jazz saxophonist, starts down the path that leads to his masterwork, A Love Supreme. This 1964 recording, still very difficult to approach for a first-time listener, yet considered by some as 'one of the most beautiful and sublime recordings of the twentieth century,' has deeply influenced artists from John McLaughlin to Moby to Bono to Carlos Santana. In the years leading up to the album, during his last days as a sideman for Miles Davis, Coltrane's music begins to change--most memorably during a set in Paris in 1960:

"Coltrane was mid-solo on the first number, 'All of You,' when the whistling and catcalls began. ... A breathless flurry [of notes] cascaded forth. Coltrane built up steam, leaping between registers, finding sounds that tested ears attuned to more mellow tones. ... So, part of the audience thinks that Coltrane doesn't play well, that he was playing the wrong notes involuntarily. [They thought] too much drugs or alcohol or something like this. So they started to whistle.

"For the first time, most Parisians were witnessing the raw, boundless intensity that would guide the rest of Coltrane's career; what had been a tentative, experimental breeze when he first upped with Miles was becoming a full-force gale. ...

"Following Mile's habitual set-closer, 'The Theme,' [French club impresario Frank] Tenet rushed backstage:

" 'So, after the show, I said to John, 'You're too new for the people, they don't hear much of what they liked in the past. You go too far.' And he always had a little smile on his face. He said, 'I don't go far enough.' "

Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme, Penguin, 2002, pp. 3-5.