Rashid Khalidi. Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East

I read and enjoyed Khalidi’s The Iron Cage back in January, and so got this, Khalidi’s latest book, out of the library shortly afterwards (I’m only getting around to writing about it now). Sowing Crisis is a more sharply polemical book than The Iron Cage and I liked it a bit less, partly because I have a limited appetite for polemic and partly because Khalidi isn’t really great at it. (He’s not awful; just not great.) Nevertheless, there is a lot in this wide-ranging review of American foreign policy to learn from and by stimulated by. Khalidi’s main objective seems to be to try to get Americans to understand how non-Americans see American foreign policy. This is a worthwhile project, and Sowing Crisis is a worthwhile book.

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This is a sensible point: why would a publisher not want to capitalize on the fact that an author has a popular blog?

Note that it seems not to have occurred to OUP that mentioning LH might actually bring hordes of readers clamouring for the book. Some believe in God without knowing whether one exists; some know the Internet exists without believing in it.

A lot of the books that make it onto my reading list get there by way of a blog recommendation.

Howls of outrage (2)

Simon Singh. The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots, to Quantum Cryptography

When I was seven or eight I read a kid’s book in which the protagonist is challenged by a professor/substitute-father-figure type to come up with a cipher that the professor-type can’t crack. The protagonist whips up an enciphered message and then watches in dismay as the professor-type cracks it quickly before his eyes using frequency analysis, a simple technique that uses the relative frequencies in letters in the relevant language to make educated guesses about the cipher used to encipher the original message.* (If you know what book this was, please let me know. I can’t remember.) When I was seven or eight this blew my mind and I spent many hours in the following years daydreaming about stronger methods of encryption. Indeed, even though my talents obviously don’t lie anywhere in the vicinity of this sort of problem, I still sometimes find myself idly thinking about it and related problems on the subway or while I’m walking down the street.

Thanks to Simon Singh’s entertaining The Code Book, I was recently able to relive some of my childhood enthusiasm for cyphers and cryptography. Singh reviews the history of cyphers and secret writing, from the cipher that Mary Queen of Scots trusted (unwisely) to keep the secret of her involvement in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth to the enigma machine to quantum cryptography. Over eight unhurried chapters, he charts the history of the problems that cryptographers faced and the characters involved in each chapter of this history.

Singh’s willingness to digress a bit from his main theme also leads him to include a chapter not on cryptography at all, but rather on the related problem of discovering the meaning of lost languages. This was just as well, since the two episodes that Singh reviews—the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone and the decipherment of Linear B (Mycenaean Greek)—are fun and interesting.

Readers looking for a technical, advanced discussion of cryptography might be underwhelmed by parts of Singh’s exposition, but I thought he did a great job of providing an accessible and non-technical explanation of some reasonably sophisticated ideas. There’s nothing here that would really stump a bright high school kid, and a lot that would she would find stimulating. Recommended.

* The letter ‘e,’ for example, occurs more than any other in the English language. If you’re trying to crack a monoalphabetic substitution cipher (a very simple type of cipher in which each letter in your message is swapped for a different one in the enciphered text), and you see a ton of z’s, for example, you can guess that ‘z’ encrypts ‘e’ in the cipher. If you find a letter standing alone in your enciphered text, you’re likely to be dealing with either an ‘I’ or an ‘a,’ since these occur alone in English all the time. And so on.

Howls of outrage (7)

Liaquat Ahamed. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

Who knew that 500 pages about central banking in the interwar years could fly by so quickly? I’ll leave it to economists and historians to assess the accuracy of the story Ahamed tells. What I can say is that the story is well told, moving briskly and with good humour over a complicated series of events. Ahamed structures his account around the lives of four central bankers, for the United States, Britain, France and Germany respectively. A fifth character, John Maynard Keynes, also makes a number of appearances, usually in the role of a gadfly. And there is a sixth item, of such importance to the story that it might as well be a character in its own right: gold.

Going into World War I, the major currencies of the world were on the gold standard. The central bank for a country—that is, the bank with a “monopoly on the issuance of currency”—would issue currency with the promise that it was convertible at a certain fixed rate with gold. Gold had to be held in reserves at a fairly conservative proportion to the total amount of currency in circulation. For a long time, this arrangement had the effect of limiting inflation, and providing a predictable, stable rate of exchange between currencies, which were pegged to the same standard.

The system meant that the supply of credit in an economy—indeed, in the global economy—was tightly correlated with the quantity of gold held in reserve. For a long time, the supply of new gold flowing into the global economy as a result of mining roughly matched the slow expansion of the economy. But this only masked the fact that it made little sense to tie the availability of a precious mineral to the business cycle, with its changing requirements for the availability of credit. As Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian newspaper man based in Britain and one of the few prominent critics of the gold standard at the time, complained, “[i]t is an absurd and silly notion that international credit must be limited to the quantity of gold dug up out of the ground. Was there ever such mumbo-jumbo among sensible and reasonable men?”

World War I changed things, as it changed so much else. The nations of Europe had plunged into the conflict expecting a brief, successful encounter which would pay for itself in reparations, and emerged bloodied, shaken, and seriously in debt four long years later. The United States, which has a habit of entering world wars a bit on the late side, came out looking very well, and with an absolutely massive imbalance of the world’s gold in its reserves which it had acquired as a lender to many of the other belligerents. For the United States to have remained strictly on the gold standard would have supplied the economy with far more credit than would have been healthy. Meanwhile, Britain had so exhausted its resources that it was for a time after the war unable to honour its obligation to convert its currency into gold, effectively abandoning the gold standard for this period.

As Britain, France and Germany all struggled to put themselves back on a sound economic footing after the war, they dealt in different ways with the return to the gold standard. Britain, against the advice of Keynes, went back on gold as soon as possible, but at an unsustainably high rate of conversion. It was an attempt to regain the global preeminence in banking which Britain had enjoyed prior to the war, but the result was a deeply uncompetitive export market and steep consequent unemployment in Britain. France, by contrast, did rather well by pegging its currency at a fairly low rate. Germany, reeling from the war and unable to cope with the ruinous payments expected of it by the victors, took its economy on an absolutely wild inflationary ride.

Since the inflationary policies of Germany had been made possible in part by its abandonment of the gold standard, the economic chaos of Germany was interpreted by many as a warning of the perils of leaving gold. Without the discipline of gold, it was thought, governments, especially democratically elected ones, would fall into the same inflationary policies. Thus, behind the debate over the gold standard was a debate about government discretion over the management of the economy.

Ahamed traces the twisting course these economies took through the twenties, as central bankers struggled to learn the rudiments of modern central banking. His account aims to explain how crucial mistakes by some of the main players created the credit policies that underlay the speculative boom preceding the Great Depression. He then shows us how central bankers struggled to cope with the economic fallout of the depression, learning, often too late to prevent economically disastrous consequences, many of the tools that are now a standard part of the central banker’s tool kit.

There were a few points in Lords of Finance at which I wanted Ahamed to explain the workings of the economy more slowly. Like a lot of potential readers of this book, I have a pretty weak grasp of basic economics. But on the whole, this is a clear, readable, and entertaining book. As can be expected with any first printing, I noticed that Lords of Finance was not completely free of typos and errors. Just a few of the ones that caught my eye: If I’m reading it correctly, a sentence on page 249 seems to imply that Benedict Arnold was executed. The temperatures on page 329 should be specified in Celsius or Fahrenheit. That Montagu Norman walked about with a feather jauntily poking out of his hat is a nice detail, but it’s unnecessary to tell us this twice. And the statistician and economist Roger Babson’s anti-gravity pamphlet was titled Gravity—Our Enemy Number One, not, as Ahamed has it, Gravity—Our Number One Enemy.

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Evan Wright. Hella Nation: Looking for Happy Meals in Kandahar, Rocking the Side Pipe, Wingnut’s War Against the Gap, and Other Adventures with the Totally Lost Tribes of America

Hella Nation is a collection of profiles originally published in different form in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Hustler, and a few other places. Wright, recovering from his own struggles with drug use and alcohol, and with most of his previous professional experience in the porn industry, has an outsider’s sympathy for, or at least understanding of, the troubled outsiders, misfits, and criminals he profiles in these pieces. These include anarchists, white supremacists, soldiers in Iraq, pornographers, con-men, and Hollywood agents. Wright doesn’t bother to hide his own reactions to his subjects, but like a good journalist, he also seems willing to let the reader make up her own mind, often just by letting his subjects speak. Set aside some time for the book if you plan to read it: once you’ve started, it’s hard to stop.

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Caitlin Macy. Spoiled: Stories

Spoiled is a collection of short stories, all of them featuring women or girls, most of them wealthy Manhattanites, usually newly wealthy. The stories are about the problems and preoccupations of this class: difficult maids and nannies, rivalries over status and wealth, struggles with envy and schadenfreude. I only come into occasional glancing contact with the types depicted in these stories—just often enough to see that Macy has a pretty good eye for social observation. But what a cold eye: there isn’t a genuinely sympathetic character in the book; nor is there a single moment of intimacy or warmth between two human beings. I expect a lot of people would find the privileged characters in this book too obnoxious to justify the trouble of reading an entire book about them, but I actually found my interest more or less sustained throughout. The writing is uneven: weak in places, pretty good in others.

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Howard W. French. A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

This is an angry book. On practically every page French has something withering to say about a Western diplomat, or an African leader, or a thug at a checkpoint trying to extort money. They have all contributed in their own way to the lost opportunities and staggering suffering of a continent with extraordinary potential. French, an African American born in Washington, D.C., spent more than two decades in Africa, first as a translator and then as a journalist. He has stories to tell, and a few scores to settle, and in A Continent for the Taking he does both in a compelling way. His book does not range across the whole of Africa, as the title might suggest. Rather, French focuses on a few countries where he has significant experiences to relate, among them Nigeria, Liberia, Mali, the Republic of Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).

Perhaps the most gripping and interesting part of the book is French’s account of the fall of Mobutu and the rise of Kabila in the DRC in 1997. French won awards for his reporting on this incident for the New York Times, and he offers more than simply a gripping story about the dissolution and chaos of the end of one regime and the rise of another. He argues that the United States, attempting to make up for turning a blind eye to the Rwandan genocide three years earlier, again turned a blind eye to Ugandan and Rwandan efforts to use Kabila as a proxy to dominate their much larger neighbour. French claims that in this they were heavily influenced by the strongly pro-Kagame slant of Philip Gourevitch’s We Regret to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. (I have occasionally wondered whether subsequent events led Gourevitch to revise his opinion of Kagame; I don’t think I’ve seen anything else on the subject by Gourevitch since I read Regret to Inform). Unfortunately, backing Kabila at the crucial moment meant backing away from the most credible democratic figure in the DRC. Once again, the US’s involvement in the region was cynical and counterproductive. The Rwandan and Ugandan invasion-by-proxy of the DRC marked the beginning of an absolutely catastrophic war that claimed the lives of millions.

This book has a lot to recommend it: close observations of people from all walks of life, reflections on the depiction of African issues in the Western media, trenchant critiques of the foreign policies of outside actors in African affairs. But perhaps the book’s greatest virtue is simply that it made me very curious to learn more about the entire continent: about the ancient culture of Mali; the history of Belgium in the Congo; the Ashante and their struggle with the British, and so much more.

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Eugene Mirman. The Will to Whatevs: A Guide to Modern Life

The Will to Whatevs is an extended spoof of a self-help book by NYC-based comic Eugene Mirman. Mirman offers advice on how to handle everything from childhood to your career to the afterlife. Here’s Mirman on whether you need to get a master’s degree if you want to be a writer:

Probably not. Some people go to grad school for writing, but you don’t have to. Because, like, you have so much inside you that needs to come out. Plus, nows-a-day there are edit people with fixy buttons to make everything read right. On the other hand, the opposite point.

Here is Mirman helping us to understand politics:

Politics is simply how groups of people in various countries run their governments. Some countries (that are assholes—China, Uzbekistan, Utah—LOL!) run their countries like a prison, while others run their countries like a pretend not-prison—i.e., citizens believe they are free and they don’t want leave [sic], but also, they can’t. (Keep in mind that I am only trying to make an Almost Point.) The best examples of this are Russia and Star Trek‘s various idealized-worlds-with-a-dark-secret, but I bet there are other places.

Originally, I was going to say that if you like this, you’ll probably like The Will to Whatevs. But the question is really whether you would like two hundred pages of this. In the first Preface (in this first printing of the book, there are two prefaces and three introductions), Mirman tells us to get ready for “a long hot shower of wisdom.” But this book is probably best taken in small doses.

Howls of outrage (3)

John Chadwick. The Mycenaean World

The Mycenaean Greeks flourished on parts of mainland Greece and on Crete and a few surrounding islands from about the sixteenth to the thirteen centuries B.C. We don’t know why their civilization collapsed, one city after another, at the end of this period, but when it did Greece entered a period of decentralized, impoverished chaos. The Iliad and the Odyssey were put together around 800 B.C., as Greece began to emerge from this dark age. Both hearken back over the centuries (often anachronistically, as I’ll point out below) to the dimly remembered golden age of the Mycenaean world.

The Mycenaeans wrote, but mainly on perishable substances, like parchment. Parchment falls apart eventually; as far as I know, not a scrap of parchment with the Mycenaean script on it survives.

Fortunately, the Mycenaeans also wrote on clay tablets, a cheap and easy way of keeping temporary records. These were discovered at several sites, the most important of which were at Knossos, on Crete, and at Pylos, on the Western prong of the Peloponnese. They would certainly have crumbled away long ago, but fortunately (for us) both sites were ravaged by fire for some reason and never rebuilt. The clay tablets baked in the fires, turning the temporary writing surfaces into items sturdy enough to survive to the present.

For many years, the Mycenaeans were known to us only through the efforts of archaeologists, who had only the mute relics of this era to assemble theories about it. We had the tablets, but the Mycenaeans did not use the Greek alphabet that we’ve all come to know and love. Indeed, for some time a firm majority of scholars insisted that whatever the tablets meant exactly, the language employed on them was not Greek. We call the script “Linear B,” and for years it was a tantalizing mystery.

The problem was not cracked by mainstream scholars, most of whom were hooked on the “not Greek” theory. Instead, a brilliant and eccentric British architect named Michael Ventris made the most important breakthrough in 1952, shortly before his untimely death at the age of 34 in a car crash. He was soon joined by the Classicist John Chadwick, who contributed a number of breakthroughs of his own, and then wrote a series of foundational works on the subject. Linear B was Greek after all, though a very archaic form of it.

If you were hoping for great literature, the surviving texts in Linear B are a grave disappointment. But they are not without their uses:

At first sight their contents are deplorably dull: long lists of names, records of livestock, grain and other produce, the account books of anonymous clerks. Here and there a vivid description of an ornate table or a richly decorated chariot breaks the monotony. But for the most part the tablets are drab and lifeless documents. Their one virtue is their utter authenticity, for they contain the actual words and figures noted down by the men and women who created the same civilization that has yielded such splendid treasures to the archaeologist’s spade.

With the decipherment of Linear B, we could finally supplement, modify, and correct many of the aspects of the picture given to us by archaeologists working on the period. Although The Mycenaean World is alive to the archaeological evidence at every step, it’s central mission is integrating this rich trove of written evidence into our view of the Mycenaeans.

The Mycenaean World is a work of consummate scholarship about a fascinating, remote era. I would guess, though, that a nonspecialist would require a fairly strong degree of antecedent interest in the subject to get through it. The book is well-written, but it offers a level of detail that could easily wilt the curiosity of most readers. How much do you want to know about the Mycenaean system of weights and measures? If the answer is, “several pages, at least!” then by all means, this is your book. Otherwise, you might want to stick to Homer for a glimpse of this distant world. On the other hand, you should know that by doing so you’ll be sacrificing authenticity for action. Perhaps the most interesting chapter in The Mycenaean World, “Homer the pseudo-historian,” points out how dimly the period was remembered by the time Greece finally started to climb out of the dark ages that separated the Mycenaeans era from the vibrant renaissance that began several centuries later.

Howls of outrage (4)

Tom Bissell had a appreciation in the NYT recently of the book length version of a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace that I was complaining about in the comments earlier in the month. Jacob Silverman riffs on the piece here at the Virginia Quarterly. Both spend some time mulling over the apparent removal of an allusion to suicide in the published version of the speech:

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.

Bissell writes of the excision:

It is not difficult to understand why. Any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace’s work (and there are many: the patriarch of “Infinite Jest” is a suicide; Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” is narrated by a suicide) now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it. These are craters that cannot be filled. The glory of the work and the tragedy of the life are relations but not friends, informants but not intimates. Exult in one; weep for the other.

Silverman argues that excising such passages is a mistake.

[Update: As Bissell points out in the comments, he's left a comment at the Virginia Quarterly site clarifying things: The line in question wasn't in the original written version of the speech, on which the book is based.]

[Second Update: Oh, check out the correction to Bissell's piece in the NYT.]

Setting aside the personal tragedy it reminds us of for a moment, I think it’s worth pointing out that the text is better off without the passage because the point it makes is so transparently idiotic. People shoot themselves in the head because (provided you don’t miss, as some people do, unfortunately), it’s the quickest and most painless way to kill yourself with a gun. Where the fuck else are you going to shoot yourself, if you’re going to shoot yourself? Your liver?

Howls of outrage (3)

Hunter S. Thompson. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

“What I would like to preserve here,” Hunter S. Thompson writes in the opening pages of Fear and Loathing, “is a kind of high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history.” This conveys fairly accurately what Fear and Loathing includes, as well as what it leaves out. Except in the most general terms, there is almost no discussion of policy in this book—what the candidates stood for in the presidential race of 1972, whether their platforms were realistic or feasible, how they differed from one another. This isn’t a book about that kind of politics. It’s about the daily horse-race in the polls, about spin and counterspin, about the tedium of campaigning, and the thrill of high-stakes convention maneuvering.

It’s also very much a book about Hunter S. Thompson. “Gonzo journalism,” Thompson’s brand, allowed him the freedom to insert himself in all his frenetic, drugged up glory right smack into the story he was telling. Since Thompson is so consistently strange and funny and out of control, this adds interest to what is already a pretty interesting, if sad and frustrating, story: the rise and fall of George McGovern from an obscure unknown at the outset of the primaries to the crushing defeat he suffered against Nixon on election day.

It wasn’t supposed to end that way. Nixon was a polarizing figure in a time of widespread discontent, committed to an unpopular war, and facing 25 million new potential voters, who could be expected to skew against him. Watergate had only started to penetrate the national consciousness, but there were considerable forces arrayed against Nixon already.

The setting convinced many that the Democratic nomination would be harder to win than the Presidency, since any Democratic nominee was expected to have great odds against Nixon. The Democratic nomination went to McGovern, who beat out party insiders Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie in the course of a grueling struggle through the primaries by campaigning as a principled outsider, a refreshing and authentic voice for substantive change in a party that many felt offered a poor alternative to the Republican option.

But after a promising start, the McGovern campaign crashed in a messy convention, and a string of disasters that kept the campaign on the defensive right up until the vote. The worst of these was McGovern’s decision to back Thomas Eagleton, his (first) Vice-Presidential running mate, “1000%” after the news broke that Eagleton had been hospitalized several times with fairly serious psychiatric difficulties (for which he had undergone shock therapy)—only to reverse course later and dump Eagleton in favour of a new running mate. The stunning reversal following an agonizing period of indecision badly tarnished McGovern’s image as an unusually candid politician. It was a terrible shame. As Thompson points out a number of times, McGovern was a decent candidate whose faults and considerable missteps were hardly worth mentioning in comparison with the sins of his opponent in the White House.

After years of complaining about horse-race coverage of political campaigns, I was a bit chagrined to find Thompson’s account of the ’72 campaign so gripping. The superficiality of the approach makes it a poor substitute for a serious discussion of how a society ought to organize itself. But there really is a place for accounts of the machinery of political life and for accounts of life on the campaign trail, especially when they’re this strange and original.

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Andrew George (translator and editor). The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation

About 2800 B.C., long before Moses led the Israelites from Egypt, long before the walls of Homer’s Troy went up*, there lived a man named Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, a Sumerian city in the South of what is now Iraq. After Gilgamesh died he slipped into legend. A tradition of oral poetry grew up around his life, and then a body of written poetry in both Sumerian and Akkadian. Around 1100 B.C., this tradition of written and oral poetry was brought together into a version of Gilgamesh’s life that is now referred to as the “standard version.”

The standard version of the Gilgamesh epic opens to reveal a restless, unrestrained young Gilgamesh. He is a tyrannical ruler, relishing his seigneurial rights, forcing the young men of Uruk into ceaseless contests for his amusement. What Gilgamesh lacks is a companion, an equal who can advise him and moderate his conduct. Accordingly, the goddess Aruru fashions a man out of clay and sets him down in the wild. The man is Enkidu, and he will be Gilgamesh’s companion, but not until he is tamed and brought in from the wild. This happens after Enkidu is spotted by a hunter, who reports the sighting to Gilgamesh, who has dreamed of Enkidu already. Gilgamesh dispatches a harlot, Shamhat, to civilize Enkidu. She tracks Enkidu down, and:

For six days and seven nights
Enkidu was erect, as he coupled with Shamhat

Impressive.

She also removes his hair and teaches him to eat and drink in the human way. The animals who had been his companions now flee at his sight. Enkidu also seems to have acquired a human sense of justice at some point. Although they are destined to become friends, Enkidu first comes to Uruk in anger, when he learns about Gilgamesh’s practice of sleeping with the women of Uruk before their husbands. He challenges Gilgamesh, blocking his path, and the two wrestle. The fight breaks off with Enkidu’s acknowledgement of Gilgamesh’s supremacy, but Gilgamesh emerges from the challenge with deep respect for Enkidu. They become inseparable, just as the Gods planned.

Gilgamesh now has a friend to counsel him, but that doesn’t incline him to take all the advice he’s offered. He wants to take cedars from the forests of Lebanon, which are guarded by the fearsome Humbaba. Enkidu urges him not to do this, then accompanies him anyway when it becomes clear that Gilgamesh cannot be dissuaded. Together the two succeed in slaying Humbaba and removing the cedars. Together they also slay the Bull of Heaven, sent by an angry goddess Ishtar, whom Gilgamesh has scorned.**

These two outrages—the theft of the cedars of Lebanon and the defeat of the Bull of Heaven—provoke the Gods, who decide that one of the two friends must now die. They choose Enkidu, who sickens and then dies.

For six days and seven nights, Gilgamesh refuses to surrender Enkidu’s body for burial, only giving it up when it begins to decompose. His grief propels him from society, and he abandons his responsibilities as a King, wandering in the wild wearing the skins of animals. He is mourning his friend, but he is also frankly and unambiguously disturbed at least as much by the revelation, prompted by Enkidu’s death, of his own mortality:

For his friend Enkidu Gilgamesh
did bitterly weep as he wandered the wild:
‘I shall die, and shall I not be as Enkidu?
Sorrow has entered my heart.’

Gilgamesh’s lament alternates between these two sources of grief:

How can I keep silent? How can I stay quiet?
My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay,
My friend Enkidu, whom I loved, has turned to clay.
Shall I not be like him, and also lie down,
never to rise again, through all eternity?

Gilgamesh sets out to find Uta-napishti, who has received the gift of immortality by the Gods. After much trouble, he succeeds in finding Uta-napishti, who tells him that death is inescapable. Uta-napishti relates the story of how he survived a deluge sent by the Gods, using an ark which he loaded with animals. (This part of the story has many parallels with the story of Noah and his ark, and is clearly a precursor to it.) Uta-napishti challenges Gilgamesh to go without sleep for six days and seven nights. When Gilgamesh fails at this, he sees that death will be impossible for him to conquer if he is even unable to go without sleep.

Uta-napishti’s parting gift to Gilgamesh is to tell him about a sea plant that will restore him to youth. Although Gilgamesh succeeds in harvesting some of this plant, he leaves it on the side of a lake on his way home, where it is discovered and devoured by a snake. It is lost forever. He returns home, and in spite of his failure, exults in the grandeur of his city’s wall.

There are many translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is partly because such a monumental text in the Western canon is bound to draw scholars wanting to take a crack at it. But it’s also because we’re constantly finding new pieces of the text, and so updating our understanding of it. New discoveries aside, there is also simply the fact that the scholarly issues involved in the reconstruction and translation of the texts are tricky enough to leave room for a wide variety of approaches.

There’s no easy answer regarding how to present such a text to a popular audience. I first encountered the epic when I was about 16 in a different translation (I think it may have been David Ferry’s version, but I don’t have it handy to confirm this), and was surprised later to learn just how much the translator had smoothed over. The text of Gilgamesh, unfortunately, is fragmentary and broken in many places. Even well-preserved tablets have rough patches where words need to be conjectured or filled in using the many clues left by the text’s frequent repetition of clusters of lines. Behind the standard edition too, as I mentioned above, stands a long, equally fragmentary textual tradition in several languages that, however imperfect, allows us to supplement the gaps in the standard edition.

Andrew George’s edition of the epic strikes a very nice balance between giving the non-specialist an accessible and readable story and allowing her to appreciate the actual scholarly foundation on which the translation rests. This is accomplished in a variety of ways: Gaps in the standard version are filled in using supplementary evidence so that the reader can follow as smooth a narrative as possible, but the supplements are also clearly marked so that the reader isn’t misled about the nature of the evidence. Conjectures and reconstructions are also clearly but unobtrusively marked (as they are not in the quotations above), with the difference between firm and uncertain conjectures also indicated. A helpful appendix, “From Tablet to Translation,” aims to give the reader a sense of the various challenges involved in putting together the edition. And finally, the edition includes a number of other fragments (not nearly as gripping as the standard edition, but interesting nonetheless) about Gilgamesh, including much older Sumerian and Babylonian texts, to round out the evidence. Although I’m obviously not in a position to say anything about the quality of the scholarship, I can say that George’s presentation of the epic appeals to my own taste much more than a version that conceals too many difficulties from the reader in an attempt to be accessible.

Even if the actual story of Gilgamesh were boring, it would be an object of real interest simply on account of its great antiquity. But, as it happens, it isn’t boring at all. The outline I’ve given above is only a lean summary of the 100 pages it takes to set out the standard version in my edition of the text, and so omits many of the twists and turns in the tale, as well as most of its rough poetry. For all the talk of Gods and monsters, at its core the story is about a man who loses a friend and, for a time, simply can’t deal—either with the original loss, or with its implications for himself—and who then, after a long struggle, learns to accept, and to take pleasure in this world again. It may be among the oldest stories, but in this respect it could have happened yesterday.

* The Troy of the Illiad is only one of a number of successive settlements on the same site, the earliest of which predates even the historical Gilgamesh.

** Gilgamesh points out that Ishtar’s previous lovers have not ended up having a good time. Unfortunately, refusing Ishtar’s advances hardly improved your chances of survival either. After Ishtar approached one Ishallanu with what I assume is a standard pickup line for a Goddess—”let us taste your vigour: Put out your ‘hand’ and stroke my quim***!”—and he turned her down, she turned him into a dwarf.

*** Such are the perils of a British translator.

Howls of outrage (2)

David Foster Wallace. Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

A collection of essays exhibiting the author’s characteristic range and depth: from a trip to a porn industry exhibition to meditations on the lobster to some (even now) fascinating reflections on John McCain’s failed bid for the Republican nomination in 2000. DFW trains his considerable intellectual firepower on these topics, with notable success. Without meaning to detract from DFW’s thoughts on these subjects, what is most remarkable to me about these pieces is how tremendously rhetorically effective they are. DFW was clearly a humane, decent person, but so are lots of people. What is extraordinary about his essays is how effectively he manages to communicate those qualities. One measure of how deft his touch is is how gracefully he manages to smooth over tensions that would be more apparent in the work of a lesser writer: acknowledging Feminist criticisms of pornography on the way to quickly setting them aside, for example, or somehow managing to be the unassuming, unthreatening dude-next-door while sending you to the dictionary more frequently than any other author you’ve ever read. Good stuff.

Howls of outrage (14)

John Daishin Buksbazen. Zen Meditation in Plain English

A beginner’s book about zazen in Zen Buddhism, the practice of “just sitting.” The book focuses on breathing meditation, and gives practical tips (with sketches to help) about posture, breathing, and dealing with various obstacles encountered in meditation. I found it among the most helpful books I’ve read on this subject. The book has very little to say about Buddhism as a philosophy, emphasizing that the practices of meditation described in the book are compatible with a number of different religious traditions, as well as with atheism.

Nada (0)

Chelsea Handler. My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands

The author, a stand-up comic and television personality, regales us with stories about her many one-night stands. I could complain about the alcohol soaked nihilism, the reduction of everyone in this book, including the author, to the shabbiest stereotype; could point out that it’s redundant to speak of “chances” as “probable,” that “inference” doesn’t mean the same thing as “implication,” that the same lame Michael Bolton joke twice in the space of less than fifty pages is two times too many—I could go over all these criticisms and more, but you’d probably reply that what is even more pathetic than reading a book like this is reading it from cover to cover and then having the cheek to assume an air of moral superiority while discussing it. And so I will limit myself to this: For a man of exquisitely refined sensibility, a man such as myself, getting to the end of this book, which I did solely so that I could report to my readers whether it is worth reading (it is not), required an almost heroic perseverance.

Nada (0)