What do Martin Van Buren and Peter Sellers have in common?

From Obit Magazine (yes, I know) a cool little feature called “Died on the Same Day.” It’s kind of like one of those “Born on the Same Day” lists in entertainment mags, only slightly more macabre, and therefore fun.

Byron in Love

Cross-posted on Bookforum.com

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Edna O’Brien. Byron in Love: A Short and Daring Life. New York: Norton. 240 pages. June 2009.  $25.

Edna O’Brien opens Byron in Love with a simple question: “Why another book on Byron?” The answer comes in the form of a remark by the poet’s friend Lady Blessington, who once referred to Byron as “the most extraordinary and terrifying person” she had ever met. Within a few chapters, the reader is convinced; O’Brien’s narrative is a compelling account of Byron’s Caligula-like cruelty, his gifts as a narrative poet, his amorous adventures in Europe (and with Cambridge choir boys), and his infamous eccentricities (he paraded around Trinity College with a pet bear and wanted to own Percy Bysshe Shelley’s skull). For O’Brien, a novelist known for employing themes of eroticism and literary history, the opportunity to profile such a character—described by his lover Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”—is understandably irresistible. O’Brien details Byron’s life with precision and verve, beginning with his humble birth in London, mapping his ascent to aristocracy at the tender age of ten, and ending with his exile and death in Greece. The tumultuous thirty-six years of Byron’s life resulted in a trail of scorned lovers, abandoned children, and most important, some of the English language’s most celebrated poetry, which, unfortunately, often takes a backseat to stories of the writer’s bawdy escapades.

A slim addition to the tall stack of Byron scholarship, Byron in Love is most remarkable for how much it accomplishes in a mere 240 pages. O’Brien spent two years engrossed in letters, journals, and biographies; her exhaustive research allows her to convey a keen sense of the poet’s life, rich with period detail. She imparts society gossip with a cloak-and-dagger intensity, lushly describes political and social climes, and offers sympathetic portrayals of those in Byron’s orbit who were overcome by the eroticism of his words. O’Brien takes every measure to capture the grandiose (and frequently absurd) atmosphere that Byron inhabited and the violent emotions he invariably aroused.

The intricate sentences and ornate language of O’Brien’s fiction have won her praise from the likes of John Banville and Philip Roth. Byron in Love, however, is a different story. An odd blend of description, scholarship, and primary-source material, the book is a pastiche of multiple voices, which have the effect, as Jane Shilling noted in the London Times, of couching her narrative in “a florid patois.” O’Brien is also fond of switching between past and present tense (sometimes as often as five times in a single paragraph) resulting in a mildly schizophrenic tone, which, while possibly meant to be Byronic, is disconcerting.

Her writing aspires to be Elizabethan theater; or, more precisely, to the melodrama of a Romantic novel: “Augusta, at Byron’s request, has also been invited, but she declines, now finding herself pregnant and therefore queasy and also guessing that she might be a wallflower in that company. Accepting, Byron requests that he be excused from going to the races at Doncaster and also from dining with them, as he does not dine at all.”

Byron was a figure overshadowed by the mythology that grew around him. He apparently mystified even himself—as he said, “I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions.” It is the biographer’s task to separate history from lore, to untangle the contradictory strands of the subject’s interior life. O’Brien’s book partially succeeds but performs the task with distracting affectations. For the reader willing to brave these thickets of prose, Byron in Love is a solid introduction to the poet’s madness and genius.

An actual media roundup.

Here’s a cluster of stuff I’ve been reading on recent developments in internet regulation and media law (I’m reviewing the new Cass Sunstein book, so I was inspired). An older WSJ piece on homelessness and internet access; a Wired article on the future of Pirate Bay as a legal enterprise (really?); and an overview of Sunstein’s rather disturbing views on regulation, and how they may play out if he’s confirmed as regulatory czar.

Also, and thankfully, for those concerned about civil liberties and online censorship, the Lori Drew verdict was overturned on Thursday.

For a bit of background info, I refer you to the writings of Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, and generally the guy who foresaw our current technological conditions fifteen years ago. Enjoy.

(Yet another) Media Roundup

From Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam examines how widespread unemployment among young men is changing the workforce and its potential political and social consequences. Fascinating stuff. Meanwhile, Haruki Murakami discusses his new novel, 1Q84, which had absolutely no publicity until it hit Tokyo bookshelves (an apparently very successful marketing technique);  and Conversational Reading asks, “Will Inherent Vice be Filmable?” (This is the title of Pynchon’s upcoming novel, but it’s more fun not to know that).  In Prospect, Mark Cousins identifies the year’s major cinematic theme as vengeance (although based on several upcoming Hollywood releases, I would argue that new age-y spiritual fulfillment is also a contender) and in American Prospect, Michelle Goldberg (presumably no relation to Jonah) writes about the burqa as a symbol of political liberation.

Finally, at OpenDemocracy, Ismael Morena has an excellent analysis of Honduras’ current political predicament. I never thought I’d see then day when two feature spots on the New York Times’ website were dedicated to Latin America (the other was the Argentine elections).

Media roundup

Apologies for the long hiatus. I’ll have many real things to post soon, but in the meantime, the Atlantic writes about Newsweek’s last stand (and has a nifty summer ‘ideas‘ section), Spiegel covers the rise of Sweden’s Pirate Party, an older piece about the history of the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, and of course, food art.

Elsewhere… “You created it, you nurtured it. . . . He is now your Hitler. I marvel at the effort. It was masterful, shrewd and stunningly peemptive. It’s what I want to do with Elvis.”

Finally, what’s going on with Honduras? And did Gawker really cover it like this?

The National Review scores again

The June 22 cover of the National Review: Another brilliant move from the people who brought you Liberal Fascism and other American classics. Apparently they missed the New Yorker’s Obama/Muslim cover controversy last summer. The cover is in response to a remark Sotomayor made at a 2001 Berkeley lecture on the topic of judicial conclusions: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Guns away.

From Salon’s War Room blog:

In an e-mail, Salon asked (National Review Editor) Rich Lowry, “Why approve the depiction of (Sotomayor) with slanted eyes, given the sensitivity of that stereotype? Was that something you considered before publication? Were you worried about the reaction to it?”

Lowry responded, “[N]ot sure I’m following you. Can you be more specific?”

The National Review has been treading on thin ice on all things Sotomayor since her nomination. On May 27th, Mark Krikorian complained about the way Sotomayor pronounces her name — too ethnic, in effect — and concluded that “multiculturalism means there’s a lot more [adapting to newcomers] going on than there should be.”

Yes, well, if this is the best that conservatives can do, they’re going to be adapting to a lot more than just immigration.

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Also, Salinger lives!

Person Mark Krikorian

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Media Roundup

A roundup of non-required (but entertaining) reading.

Thoughts on Sotomayer: The Village Voice, Washington Post, Slate, George Lakoff, Stanley Fish and The Nation weigh in.

The Economist reports that living abroad gives you a creative edge; New Scientist answers the eternal question of why cats fail to grasp string theory; The Nation covers ‘the Kundera conundrum‘; Spiegel examines the decline of humanitarianism in the recession; The Wall Street Journal analyzes Obama with the assistance of South Park; Louis Menand asks if you can teach creative writing; The New York Times makes a trend out of the ‘bad mommy‘ movement; and the first college graduation occurs on Second Life.

Recessionomics: Legal blog Above the Law reports on Lev Ekster, a New York Law School student who decided to open a mobile cupcake service after coming to terms with the grim job prospects for lawyers and the grim cupcake prospects at the Magnolia bakery.

Concerning the line at Magnolia: “‘The experience reminded me of my parents’ stories of waiting in line for bread,’ says the native Ukrainian.”

From Buzzfeed, the best of the top five David Lynch mashups:

Wrapping up, here’s the funniest thread in the Chronicle of Higher Ed forums, and Bookforum.com is finally alive and kicking. I recommend Chad Post’s excellent syllabi of works by Latin American authors (LatAmLit?) as a good point of entry.

On another note, is anybody else excited about the EU elections?

Person Louis Menand

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The Times’ other ethicists

Cross-posted on BigThink

With the newspaper industry in turmoil and media suffering from what Clay Shirky refers to as “mass amateurization,” it’s not a particularly good time to entangle the New York Times in an ethics scandals, but I guess these things are difficult to plan.

Last week, Maureen Dowd made headlines for something other than her profoundly irritating op-eds when she was accused of plagiarizing Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall. To clarify, here’s Dowd’s passage, which ran on May 17th:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

And Marshall’s, which was posted the previous Thursday:

“More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.”

(Note the difference, which replaces the phrase “the Bush crowd was” with Marshall’s more inclusive “we were”). When confronted with accusations of plagiarism, Dowd confessed to having lifting a sentence from a friend’s email (who failed to mention she had borrowed liberally from Marshall’s article) and stood her ground, refusing to acknowledge deliberate misconduct.

Personally, I fail to understand how repeating a friend’s words without crediting her doesn’t constitute plagiarism in itself, but that’s not really the issue here.

In response, Times public editor Clark Hoyt ran a roundup of two more scandals that have marred the paper’s name in recent weeks: Thomas Friedman’s decision to accept a $75,000 speaking gig at a government agency in Oakland, and more spectacularly, the downfall of gonzo economic journalist Edmund Andrews, who drove himself into financial ruin while researching the ways in which people fall into debt. According to Hoyt, Andrews is “seven months behind on his mortgage, [and] he may lose his home unless ‘Busted,’ which comes out this week, is a hit.” I’m sure there are a number of poets and novelists in similar positions, but as a financial reporter, this is particularly scandalous.

Of course, mistakes are unaviodable, and in the cases of Dowd and Friedman, theirs were understandable if not stupid. As the exemplar of print journalism, however, the thin line delineating the Times from the wilds of the internet is not only the quality of its writing, but also the standards of its ethics. Scandals such as these put the paper in the precarious position of leaving quality control to its readers, and, in the minds of its critics, demonstrating the merits of open-source editing. When Dowd’s column ran, the sentence was first caught by a blogger at TMPcafe who then turned the story into national news. At the Huffington Post, John Ridley wrote an op-ed trenchantly titled “The New York Times: Let It Fall,” and in The Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section, Dan Kennedy took the opportunity to rack up a list of the Times’ more glaring ethical failures.

But in spite of all this, these scandals could be the best thing that’s happened to the paper in recent memory.

As a famously cloistered institution, the Times is increasingly compromised as news becomes a tool of the masses. With troops of citizen journalists pounding at the gates, the paper of record has conceded by opening itself up a little — most notably through its hyperlocal blogs — and introducing a little more transparency to traditional journalism. This, of course, is not a replacement for hard reportage, and moreover, has had the unfortunate effect of shifting coverage away from real news and more towards lifestyle pieces and fluff content. (If you don’t believe me, see this). However, with the recent wave of scandals, one important thing has happened: the Times has stepped up and revealed some of the machinations behind running the most respected paper in the world.

In Hoyt’s article, the public editor elucidates the logic underpinning journalistic ethics, going through the ways in which the Times’ ethics police keep writers from slipping on research or racking up millions on the lecture circuit. With all the talk lately of the Death of Journalism, ethics is something that seem to have gone under the radar. While open-source peer-editing may keep information largely accurate, it doesn’t promote a culture of integrity and newsworthiness like an established paper does. Rather, that’s the job of the individual publication, or in the case of the Times, the teams of editors and advisors kept on staff precisely to counterbalance the work of the writers. While the ethics editors have been called into the limelight for the wrong reasons — although, like fact-checkers, I can’t think of any other way they’d get public attention — the scandals also highlight the significance of their work, and the thought that goes into maintaining the integrity of the paper. Perhaps rather than see these scandals as an omen for print media, it’s more useful to learn from what they expose about our expectations for good journalism.

A Pakistani Underworld

“70% of our customers are Democrats.”

Media roundup

Many things to read this week.

Slate’s Double X launches as a standalone site (and they have a piece on the true nature of dolphins)…

OpenDemocracy on Ester Duflo: France’s Great Economic Hope for poverty reduction; The Wilson Quarterly on the shift in global birthrates; The Art Newspaper on Pal Hollender, a Swedish artist who uses ‘unethical’ cash for cultural scholarships; Ange Mlinko on the birth of the theaurus; Jonah Lehrer investigates the art of delayed gratification (and he has a great piece in Seed about creativity on command); TNR on homocons; Clay Shirky on newspapers, and a possible resolution for the problem of file-sharing?