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Hot and sour soup

Saturday, December 30, 2023


Next time: More mushrooms!

I’m pretty sure that I had never made hot and sour soup before. I’m not sure what made me think of it. But the soup was so easy, and so good, that I’ll do it again soon.

As usual, I use recipes only to get the concept, then I improvise. I almost never measure. There are many recipes for hot and sour soup on the web, and if you look at a bunch of them you’ll see that they vary quite a lot. My take on it is that hot and sour soup is a kitchen sink sort of thing. Some elements are necessary, and other elements are left to your imagination and what’s available in your kitchen.

I’d say that the essential elements are a savory stock, vinegar, tamari, a little thickener, toasted sesame oil, a pepper paste, mushrooms, tofu, and the egg (added last). Then deploy whatever vegetables are handy. Carrots are good. I don’t think I’ve seen recipes that called for cabbage, but cabbage works well. I think that Quorn would make a good substitute for chicken. Color and crunch in the vegetables are to be desired. Shitake mushrooms are the usual rule, but I think any brown mushrooms would work.

It’s a quick soup. And it will definitely knock the chill off on a winter day. Unless you live in a city with an excellent Chinatown, you can surely make a better, and a healthier, hot and sour soup at home.

Filed in Food, Umami | | Comments (0)

The ecology of corruption

Wednesday, December 27, 2023


Two angles of the iron triangle: Ronald Reagan with Rupert Murdoch, 1983. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Corruption and national security

Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter, “Letters From an American,” is a must-read every day. Today’s newsletter, though (the link is to Substack), is particularly important. It’s about international corruption. Richardson quotes an FBI statement to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City from 2011:

International enterprises, the FBI statement said, “are running multi-national, multi-billion dollar schemes from start to finish…. They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military…. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder…. These groups may infiltrate our businesses. They may provide logistical support to hostile foreign powers. They may try to manipulate those at the highest levels of government. Indeed, these so-called ‘iron triangles’ of organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders pose a significant national security threat.”

Take note of this “iron triangle”: organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders.

Russia, of course

Richardson touches on how the collapse of the Soviet Union, the looting of Russia by oligarchs including Vladimir Putin, and the need to launder Russian money in the West made the United States one of the money-laundering capitals of the world. Richardson writes:

“In March 2023 the Treasury told Congress that ‘[m]oney laundering perpetrated by the Government of the Russian Federation (GOR), Russian [state-owned enterprises], Russian organized crime, and Russian elites poses a significant threat to the national security of the United States and the integrity of the international financial system,’ and it outlined the ways in which it had been trying to combat that corruption. ‘In light of Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine,’ it said, ‘we must redouble our efforts to prevent Russia from abusing the U.S. financial system to sustain its war and counter Russian sanctioned individuals and firms seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.'”

The vast right-wing conspiracy

Richardson does not mention “the vast right-wing conspiracy.” But clearly the “iron triangle” of corruption and “the vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton described are pretty much one and the same.

The Wikipedia article on the vast right-wing conspiracy quotes Paul Krugman:

In some of his books, Krugman has used the phrase (“Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy”[1]) to refer not to a conservative Republican-leaning campaign against Clinton (or Obama), but more generally to “an interlocking set of institutions ultimately answering to a small group of people that collectively reward loyalists and punish dissenters” in the service of “movement conservatism.” The network of institutions provide “obedient politicians with the resources to win elections, safe havens in the event of defeat, and lucrative career opportunities after they leave office. They guarantee favorable news coverage to politicians who follow the party line, while harassing and undermining opponents. And they support a large standing army of party intellectuals and activists.[2]”

In Krugman’s view, the network of foundations that fund conservative scholarship, the national and regional think tanks and advocacy groups, talk radio media outlets, and conservative law firms through which they pushed their agenda to move the Republican Party to the right, far surpass in funding, size, inter-connectedness or influence anything the Democratic Party or the American political left/liberal movement have at their disposal.

The iron triangle

In short, it’s all of a piece, and it’s the piece that overhangs the greatest struggle of the present times — democracy vs. authoritarianism, economic fairness vs. the super-rich, the Putin-Trump axis, the iron-triangle politics of the Republican Party, and the terrifyingly effective machinery of disinformation that sells the billionaire politics of the oligarchy to deplorable Americans who don’t have a pot to piss in, such that every national election in the U.S. is now a deadly conflict between the international ecology of corruption and those who struggle against it.

Wikipedia notes:

1. Krugman, Paul R. (2004). The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, pp. 217, 269–71.

2. Krugman, Paul R. (2007). The Conscience of a Liberal, p. 163.

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Trains: Social glue we Americans will never have

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

When people ask me why I love Scotland, I have lots of answers. Most of them are nice, because there are so many nice things about Scotland. But I also have a snarky answer:

“Scotland,” I say, “is what white people are like when they aren’t Americans.”

We Americans are overexposed to wedge-issue social toxins and desperately underexposed to social glue. A train network, with stops in villages as well as cities, is a powerful social glue.

The village of East Linton is about 25 miles east of Edinburgh. Though East Linton is right on the route of the eastern train line between Edinburgh and London, the train station in East Linton had closed in 1964, and all the trains sped through without stopping. It was a very big deal when a new train station in East Linton opened a few days ago. There was a crowd, and there were bagpipes. The two people who made the video above are YouTube celebrities who travel around the United Kingdom making videos about trains.

A friend who lives in East Linton sent me the link to the video above. That new train stop will change his family’s life. They’ve been eagerly waiting for the new station to open. (The station, newly built, opened three months ahead of schedule. Scotland may have its ferry problems, but the trains are doing fine.)

Twenty to twenty-five minutes to Edinburgh Waverley! By car, it would be about 35 minutes or more.

On my first trip to the U.K. in 1985, I rode that train from Edinburgh back to London (there was no stop then in East Linton), and I’ll never forget it. North of Newcastle, the train line is often in sight of the English and Scottish coasts. That was my first-ever sight of those coastlines. Trips to other coasts — Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and western Scotland — eventually followed.

It’s certainly true that Britain’s compact geography is much better suited to train travel than America’s sprawling vastness. American trains are good transportation between a few major cities, but there are no longer any passenger trains that are of any use to rural America. It’s all about cars now, of course. It could have been otherwise. But Americans wanted roads, not trains.

If the United States had invested in a train network rather than super-highways, would the country have fractured into a Red America and a Blue America? I doubt it.

The video above is a reminder that village life, in some places, still exists. We Americans have suburbs, and we have rural places. Villages? Not so much.

Five minutes of highlights, London to Edinburgh ⬇︎

Update:

Both the video above, and a comment on this post, mention the “Beeching closures” of the 1960s, when more than 7,000 miles of Britain’s railways were closed, supposedly in the name of modernization and efficiency. That this was a terrible mistake to which a certain kind of thinking always leads (in the U.S., think Republicans) is shown by how many stations have since been reopened. The man responsible for the closings was Richard Beeching, who was then chairman of British Railways. This deserves a political rant, but the video of the East Linton opening is so cheery, and speaks for itself so well, that I’m in no mood for a political rant.

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Is it obvious now?

Monday, December 11, 2023

“One down, two to go,” said Elise Stefanik, gloating over the resignation of Liz Magill as president of the University of Pennsylvania. Magill had blindly walked right into Stefanik’s right-wing gotcha trap during a congressional hearing. An orgy of right-wing glee followed Magill’s resignation, amplified by a clueless media eager to pose as nonpartisan and principled.

Magill’s cautious answers, which were intended to respect the difference between speech and conduct, were exactly what Republicans would have wanted to hear, if right-wing speech had been the issue. But, to Republicans, left-wing speech is a different matter. To Republicans, the protection of left-wing speech on campus is so dangerous, even in the absence of conduct, that, not only does the principle of free speech not matter, liberal heads must roll.

As a Democratic member of the House (Robert C. Scott of Virginia) pointed out, Republicans wouldn’t hold a hearing in 2017 after white supremacists marched through the campus of the University of Virginia shouting, among other things, “Jews will not replace us.”

The issue I’m drawing attention to here has nothing to do with Israel and Gaza. My point, as I’ve argued before, is that all the fuss and spilled ink about free speech on campus has nothing to do with the principle of free speech. Rather, it is a right-wing propaganda strategy, funded by right-wing money and furnished with lipstick by right-wing think tanks. Its purpose is to weaken the standing of America’s universities and to advance the right-wing project of corporatization and right-wing control of education. This propaganda has been very effective, partly because so many well-meaning people who actually do care about free speech have fallen for the lie that it contains — that the right actually cares about the principle of free speech. For the right, it’s the perfect disguise for what they want to do to American education (and what they are already doing, in the states where they have the power to do it).

Now right-wingers have a university president’s head on a platter. They hope to have two more, and soon. They hope to also get the heads of the presidents of Harvard and MIT.

So far, I’ve seen only one piece in the media that saw through the lie (though only partly). That is in the Washington Post, “Republicans say they believe in free speech. Except when it comes to Israel.” I say “partly” because I don’t think it’s Israel that makes the difference. I think what makes the difference is whether speech serves, or opposes, right-wing power.

Why did Magill walk into the trap? I can only guess. But my guess would be that she was thinking in principles, and like a lawyer, but that she’s fatally naive on the matter of persuasion and propaganda.

Update 1:

Here’s a fine example of how right-wing interests use the media and how the media fall for it. The headline in the New York Times this afternoon is “Are academics best suited to lead big schools?” The idea is that maybe academics are not qualified to run academia! Who might be qualified, then? We know their answer to that, of course: political figures and our corporate masters.

Update 2:

Paul Krugman writes about this issue in his column for Dec. 15, 2023: “The Biggest Threat to America’s Universities.”

Update 3:

Here’s an example of how eager Republicans are to put money men in charge of universities: “Lee Roberts, former McCrory budget director, to serve as interim UNC chancellor.” Pat McCrory was a Republican governor of North Carolina. Roberts was appointed to the university’s board of governors by the state senate, which is controlled by Republicans. As the story in the Raleigh newspaper points out, Roberts has no experience in university administration. It’s all about money. What’s to stop university chancellors who are academics from choosing university vice presidents who’ll deal with money issues? Money rules, and the money men will do everything they can to accelerate the corporatization of universites.

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A complete set of the Waverley novels, 1876, Edinburgh

Tuesday, December 5, 2023


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The books were a birthday gift

For my 75th birthday, a friend who now lives near Edinburgh brought me a stunning gift that he had carried in his luggage across the Atlantic. It’s a complete 13-volume set of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, bound in leather, printed in the Old Country in 1876. He bought the books at McNaughtan’s book shop in Edinburgh. There are 26 Waverley novels, two novels per volume.

Sir Walter Scott was once one of the most popular writers writing in English. Today, for whatever reason, very few people read him. I have read ten or eleven of his novels so far, and now that I have a complete set of the Waverley novels I’ll make a years-long project of reading all of them. I’ve written here previously about the novels of Walter Scott, and I don’t want to repeat myself, but you can search for “Walter” (on this blog’s main page) if you’re interested in my older posts.

We need a Walter Scott revival

Sooner or later, it seems inevitable to me that, either in America or in Britain, someone will make a beautiful movie based on a Sir Walter Scott novel, and that will start a revival. Then, instead of my being a Walter Scott boor, people might start asking me for recommendations on what they might read. For the record, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d suggest The Heart of Mid-Lothian, or The Antiquary. I do not recommend Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe is not even set in Scotland, and its story of chivalry and Robin Hood will already be familiar to most people. It’s Scott’s stories about life in Old Scotland that I find most appealing — Highlands to Edinburgh, peasants to princes, castles to Highland huts, violent coastal storms to spring in the mountains, and all manner of speech and dialogue.

Yes, reading Scott can be hard work, even compared with other 19th Century writers. The structure of Scott’s novels also can be a deterrent. Typically, in the first third (or so), it appears that nothing is ever going to happen, as Scott introduces his characters and settings and sets up what writers call exposition, covering all the details and background that the reader needs to know to follow the story. In the last third of the book, things will definitely happen, and every element that was introduced early in the novel will play its part.

Where have these books been since 1876?

I was very curious to know whether any information about the previous owners of these books had survived. I emailed an inquiry to McNaughtan’s, and I received this reply:

Thank you for your enquiry. I am glad that you like the books and I can see even from your photo that they have found a home with plenty of friends around.

This set came to us from the estate of a collector of leather bindings based in the north of Scotland. They were likely previously acquired within either the Scottish book trade or from a London bookseller, beyond which the trail goes cold, I’m afraid. The most probable earlier history for the set is that they were originally bought by inhabitants of a large-ish house and remained there through several generations before entering the secondhand book trade.

When I started scanning the illustrations, two clues were tucked inside the books (see below). Inside volume 9 were fragments of a Dundee newspaper dated February 15, 1948. In the back of volume 13 was an invoice. The books had been purchased at an auction in Edinburgh on November 5, 1994. A best guess, then, is that the original owners of the books lived in Dundee or thereabouts. The books probably were in the hands of the original owners until well after 1948. Then, probably in an estate sale in which the contents of a “large-ish house” were sold, the books were bought by a collector in 1994. Then that collector’s books were sold to McNaughtan’s much more recently.

I will never ask my friend how much he paid for this set of books, but some Googling reveals that, in 2000, Christie’s sold what appears to be the same set for £1,645.

The posthumous editions

My guess is that few universities other than the University of Edinburgh do Scott scholarship anymore. In Googling, I came across a thesis for a master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh, written in 2008 by Ruth M. McAdams. The title is “The Posthumous British Editions of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, 1832-1871, and the Evolution of his Literary Legacy.” The abstract reads:

This thesis argues for the importance of the posthumous editions of Sir Walter Scott‟s Waverley Novels in shaping his literary reputation between 1832 and 1871. In the series of editions published by Robert Cadell and later A. & C. Black between Scott’s death and the centenary of his birth, changes were made to the paratextual presentation of the novels, particularly through illustrations and notes. By tracing these changes, I will show how Scott’s literary legacy evolves over this crucial period. Furthermore, by demonstrating that these posthumous editions reached a far wider audience than ever before, I will suggest that these editions, rather than any published during Scott’s lifetime, most powerfully shaped his status as a cultural icon in the nineteenth century. These editions are, thus, still important to the way that Sir Walter Scott’s place in the literary canon is understood.

There is even a reference in this paper to the Nimmo editions that I now have.

Why post all this?

More than half of the hits on this blog come from Google. Over the past 16 years, I’ve written on many subjects. Some of those subjects are not exactly in the mainstream, subjects on which one has to dig a little to find information. For example, a good many people have come here from Google to read my post from 2022, “We’re overdue for a Sir Walter Scott revival.” I suppose I’ve joined the rarefied ranks (most of them probably are in Edinburgh) of Scott evangelists longing for a Sir Walter Scott revival.

Also, the engravings in my Nimmo editions are beautiful and beautifully printed. They are, of course, in the public domain, and in addition to making them available here I’ll also post the scans at Wikimedia Commons.

Who was Walter P. Nimmo?

I was able to find very little information on Walter P. Nimmo. There’s not even a Wikipedia article. He was, however, a writer as well as a publisher.

Buying old editions

Good luck trying to find newly printed editions of Walter Scott’s novels! You can buy the 30-volume set from the Edinburgh University Press for $2,445. You’d be able to buy Ivanhoe easily enough on Amazon. But I highly recommend finding, reading, and preserving the old editions. There is a good market on eBay, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. If you buy a single copy, that copy probably came from a set which was broken up for sale. It’s sad that so many sets have been broken, but on eBay you’ll also find sets that are complete or nearly complete. These old editions, unless they’re rare and collectible, are not expensive.


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Try my French verb conjugator

Friday, December 1, 2023

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I made a valiant effort to learn French. For three semesters, I went to night classes at the University of California (Berkeley) extension in San Francisco. With that foundation, I started reading. I never claim to speak French, and my aural comprehension is terrible. But I did learn to read French quite well, and I would have to say that the effort I put into it was well rewarded, because I was able to read some of the classics of 19th Century French literature — Les Misérables, Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, Notre-Dame de Paris (the English title is The Hunchback of Notre Dame), La Dame aux Camélias, and some of the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud.

Verbs, of course, are a major problem. Back then, no online verb conjugators existed, so I made my own. As a learning exercise, and working with books on the conjugations of French verbs, I typed in the conjugations of 1,446 French verbs. I imported all those verbs into a MySQL database and made a web interface for queries. Fortunately, I preserved the data over the years, though it existed only on old archive disks. Not too long ago I retrieved the data, put it into MySQL again, and got the query interface running again (written in php), just to preserve it. There are many conjugators (not to mention translators) on the web today, so my efforts are redundant. But I figured that it would be a shame to let all that work be lost.

The verb conjugator lives on the site that I use as a hot backup for this blog. I synchronize the backup only once a month, so, other than the verb conjugator, you should ignore the backup site. The verb conjugator is here:

Verb conjugator: 1,446 French verbs

Reading (at least for most of us) is much easier than speaking. If we need a verb form while speaking, then the correct form of the verb needs to be on the tips of our tongues. But when we encounter verb forms in reading, all we need to do is recognize from the verbs’ ending what form of the verb we’ve encountered — whether the verb is singular, plural, indicative, conditional, subjunctive, etc. And of course many forms of verbs are very rarely used. In English, how often do you say, “I shall have been there for three hours before you arrive”?

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But is it a crisis?

Tuesday, November 28, 2023


Students chilling each other’s speech. AI image generated by Dall-E 3.

Today at the Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff has a piece with the headline “The latest victims of the free-speech crisis.” If there are free-speech issues on campus, and no doubt there are, is that really a crisis? Or is someone trying to distract us from the real crisis of free speech — the banning of books, laws threatening librarians with jail sentences, efforts to reverse New York Times v. Sullivan, and legislating — legislating! — what teachers can and cannot say. A recent article in Foreign Policy reports that these Republicans actions to limit speech are spreading abroad.

In right-wing (and centrist) propaganda, one of the most common ways of intentional deception is to create false equivalencies to slam the left. An excellent example is claiming that the property damage caused by the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 was somehow just as bad, and just as serious a threat, as the violent right-wing attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. At the Capitol, people died in a violent attempt to stop the constitutional functions of government, subvert the will of American voters, and install a neofascist permanently in the White House.

Yes, BLM protesters lit a fire in the entryway of a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, on July 20, 2021. That was at 1:30 a.m. No one was hurt, and federal agents quickly extinguished the fire. They hurt their cause with such behavior, but BLM is not a threat to this country, unless it’s a threat to draw attention to racism, discrimination, racial inequality, and racially motivated violence against Black people.

I mention the false equivalency of the BLM and Capitol cases because I myself encountered it during the Thanksgiving holidays. I was told that “people like me” use January 6 to distract from the BLM protests. I of course replied that it’s the other way around. The implication was that the BLM protests were worse than January 6. I’m sure that many people think that, and, if they do, can we think of any reason for it other than racism?

Some of the contributors to Greg Lukianoff’s organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, are among the most right-wing and billionaire-run organizations in the country — the Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. If Lukianoff’s efforts to protect free speech have ever attempted to hold conservatives accountable for their attacks on “woke” speech, I’m not aware of it.

Lukianoff, in other words, is a right-wing propagandist, and his foundation is a right-wing propaganda outfit. Lukianoff, and many others, use the red herring of free speech on campus to draw attention away from the organized and well-funded attacks on democracy from the right, attacks that use the coercive power of government whenever possible, as in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. If Greg Lukianoff was really concerned about free speech instead of producing the propaganda for which he is paid, then he’d be writing crisis alerts about his billionaire contributors, the Republican party, and the corporatization of American universities.

A few lonely voices have tried to point out how right-wing propaganda is attempting to gaslight us on the matter of free speech. For example, “Remember This Article? It Was Conservative Propaganda, and a Lot of Us Fell for It.”

A more nuanced view from an academic, Wendy Brown, was published in the New York Times: “Why Angry Critics of Woke College Kids are Missing the Point.”

From the interview with Wendy Brown:

“We need to appreciate that young left activist outrage about a burning planet and grotesque inequality and murderous racial violence and gendered abuses of power is accompanied by disgust with the systems and the rules of engagement that have brought us here. Young left activists are pulling the emergency brake because it feels as if there’s no time for debate and compromise and incrementalism; because many see conventional norms and practices as having brought us to the brink and kept us stupid and inert….

“My point here is that if we just focus on this generation’s political style — and we have to remember youth style always aggravates the elders — we ignore their rage at the world they’ve inherited, and their desperation for a more livable and just one, and their critique of our complacency.”

I’m with the kids. The kids, after all, are the ones with no money to corrupt them, unlike Greg Lukianoff, his billionaires, and his friends in the think tanks and media.

Update:

European universities accept €260 million in fossil fuel money

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Two recently published books

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Tolkien’s letters

Just last week the new edition of Tolkien’s letters was released. There was a previous edition of Tolkien’s letters (1981, a book that I have had for years), but the new edition adds about 150 new letters, bringing the total number of letters to 500.

In many ways, I find the letters of notable figures just as interesting as biographies — Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, or the Freud-Jung letters. My to-be-read stack is pretty high at this point, but I’m eager to get to this volume.

Encounters

A couple of weeks ago, a strange new book on UFO’s was published. I haven’t yet read it, but apparently it takes UFOs very seriously. Ken made me aware of it. Ross Douthat mentioned it in his New York Times newsletter (to which Ken subscribes) and included a link to an interview with the author: “UFOs and Aliens Are (Probably) Not What You Think: An Interview with Diana Walsh Pasulka.” (For the record, neither of us is conservative enough to follow The European Conservative, but Ross Douthat certainly is.)

Ken has almost finished the book and is intrigued. I will write more about the book after it comes up in my stack of reading.

Ken is here

Ken is here for a week. He spoke at High Point University on Monday, and he’ll be here not only for a proper American Thanksgiving (he now lives near Edinburgh) as well as — dare I mention it — my 75th birthday, a few days after Thanksgiving.

Ken’s last book was This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take it Back, in 2018. I’m very excited about a new book proposal he’s working on and that he plans to have ready for his agents in a month or so. It’s such a great idea that I’m sure he’ll get a book contract, and, if so, of course I’ll write more about that later.

Meanwhile we’re caught up in a social whirlwind, because everybody wants to see Ken while he’s here.


This was the second time that Ken has spoken at High Point University.


Ken does battle against the woods, which are always trying to get into the yard.

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A minor repair on a deserving book

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

The injured book

A few days ago, I mentioned here that I am very enthusiastic about a five-part BBC series from 2012, Parade’s End. (The series can be streamed on HBO Max.) The series is visually beautiful, perfectly cast, and brilliantly written, with some of the best dialogue I’ve ever encountered. I don’t yet know to what degree the perfect dialogue should be attributed to Tom Stoppard, who adapted the novels and wrote the screenplay, or to the author of the novels, Ford Madox Ford, who published the novels between 1924 and 1928. I had not heard of Ford Madox Ford, but I was determined to explore the novels. First editions of these novels are rare, but I found a 1961 revival edition on eBay. This edition contains all four novels in a single volume, at a hefty 838 pages. My guess is that even this 1961 edition is not common.

When the book arrived, I was sad to see that it had been injured. The front end paper was broken at the hinge, exposing the innards of the binding. No doubt librarians have a standard method of repairing such injuries, but I had to make up my own solution. That was to cut a strip of strong paper and glue it in with rubber cement to close up the rip in the end paper. That worked great. Books with lots of pages are particularly vulnerable to this kind of damage. I can’t help but wonder what happened to the book. Some previous owner clearly understood the book’s historical value, because inserted under the back cover was a printout of an article about Ford Madox Ford from the September 17, 1950, issue of the New York Times Book Review.

Ford Madox Ford

The 1950 article from the New York Times Book Review can be read here but requires a subscription to the New York Times. The article is “The Story of Ford Madox Ford: In Parade’s End a Master Novelist Caught the Essence of His Generation.” The article was written by Caroline Gordon, who I now see represents some literary history that I need to explore, including a connection to my native state of North Carolina. Here is the article’s first paragraph:

In 1938 Ford Madox Ford made a talk before a class of girls who were studying “the novel” under my tutelage. It was in April. In North Carolina. April in North Carolina is like July in less-favored climates. Ford was then in his early sixties and already suffering from the heart disease that killed him; he seemed to feel the heat even more than we had feared that he would. My husband and I debated as to whether it would be safe to let the old man make the talk he was bent on making. When we reached the classroom the next morning and I saw that his veined, rubicund face had gone ashen from the effort of climbing the stairs I wished that I had not accepted his offer to speak. He sat down at one end of a long table, his chair pushed well back in order to accommodate his great paunch, his legs spread wide to support his great weight.

Also:

It is easy to see why Ford’s work was not popular in his own day, but it is hard to see why it has been neglected in our own, for he would seem, in these times, to have a special claim on our attention. He is a superb historical novelist, seeming as much at home in a medieval castle or in Tudor England as in Tietjen’s twentieth-century railway carriage.

I am not yet certain what Caroline Gordon’s connection to North Carolina was, but I suspect it was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I am hoping that I will like Parade’s End and that Ford’s novels — as long as I can find copies of them — will be as rich a mine of literary history as I have found in the also-neglected historical novels of Sir Walter Scott.


⬆︎ The end paper was torn from one end to the other, exposing the book’s spine to stress and the risk of more damage.


⬆︎ The white strip of paper covers the tear and makes the end paper strong again.


⬆︎ Cutting the paper


⬆︎ I used a 100 percent cotton paper


⬆︎ Ready to be glued in place


⬆︎ Rubber cement is amazing stuff!

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We have a serious media problem

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

This past Sunday (Nov. 5, 2023) the New York Times started hyping an utterly screwball poll saying that Trump was leading Biden by an average of four points in six swing states. Right-wing subscribers to the Times swooped into the comments section to gloat. Times pundits doubled down on their usual snide and superior lecturing of Democrats while repeating and amplifying the usual Republican fictions.

Three days later, reality struck in the form of an actual real-world election. In the real world of elections, as opposed to the imaginary world that the media herd have bought into, Democrats won, bigtime, in multiple states, while MAGA Republicans got their you-know-whats handed to them.

I have no idea why political polling has gone haywire. Is it the “weighting” that pollsters apply? I have a hunch, though it’s untestable. When a pollster calls, more than 85 percent of the people who get the calls refuse to answer because of what they see on caller ID. My guess is that while most people roll their eyes and ignore the call, MAGA types are much more motivated to answer, because a poll gives them a way to register their rage and demoralization as their world falls apart. The hope of revenge is pretty much all they have left.

What’s frustrating is that there is no way for rational people to discipline the media for their malpractice. The New York Times thinks it knows better than everyone else, and nothing short of a major scandal (such as a reporter nailed for making stuff up) penetrates the Times’ unlimited faith in its own infallibility.

What we can do as rational people is to always keep in mind how Republican propagandists, starting in 1996 with the birth of Fox News, figured out how to use the principles of journalism to destroy journalism. For years, newspapers as a matter of principle refused to print the word “lie,” because that word wasn’t “objective,” even when reporting on Republican lies that journalists knew perfectly well were lies. That coincided with the rise of the internet and the ability to count clicks. Lies are designed to be provocative and thus get lots of clicks. Good government is boring to most people, which is why the media mostly ignore President Biden’s accomplishments. Whereas lies about Biden are never boring and thus get repeated and amplified by the mainstream media.

The New York Times poll that they hyped on Nov. 5 got lots of clicks. But the poll got the current political mindset of American voters exactly backwards, as the election on Nov. 7 showed. What’s worse is that the New York Times will learn nothing from this very public display of their own ongoing pattern not only of being wrong, but also of the now blind and baked-in pattern of being manipulated by right-wing propagandists. And worse still is that the mainstream media will never admit to having been a megaphone and amplifier to all the lies that led, starting in 1996 with the rise of Fox News, to an attempted right-wing coup against the government of the United States.

And they’re still not telling us that Trump is doomed, becaused they need the clicks.

Update:

The Biden campaign has sent letters to major media outlets scolding them for their distorted coverage of polls:

Biden campaign sends memo to media outlets asserting disparity in polling coverage

Filed in Political issues | | Comments (1)