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Here are the Blogs in the Hugh Fitzgerald category.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Adjective Plus Noun
Here's a baker's half-dozen of the most unpleasant adjective-plus-noun pairings in English:
Human resources
International community
Organizational management
In-depth study
Focus group
Overarching goal
Holistic approach [or, for that matter, holistic anything]
You are invited to add to the list.
Posted on 03/10/2010 6:32 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
A Musical interlude: A Cottage For Sale (Jack Teagarden)
Posted on 03/10/2010 2:53 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
A Musical Interlude: I Know That My Baby Is Cheatin' On Me (Sophie Tucker)
Posted on 03/09/2010 10:27 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Mosab Hassan Yousef On The God Of Islam
From The Wall Street Journal:
'They Need to Be Liberated From Their God'
The 'Son of Hamas' author on his conversion to Christianity, spying for Israel, and shaming his family.
Nashville, Tenn.
'I absolutely know that in anybody's eyes I was a traitor," says Mosab Hassan Yousef. "To my family, to my nation, to my God. I crossed all the red lines in my society. I didn't leave one that I didn't cross."
Now 32, Mosab is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder and leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Throughout the last decade, from the second Intifada to the current stalemate, he worked alongside his father in the West Bank. During that time the younger Mr. Yousef also secretly embraced Christianity. And as he reveals in his book "Son of Hamas," out this week, he became one of the top spies for Israel's internal security arm, the Shin Bet.
The news of this double conversion has sent ripples through the Middle East. One of Mr. Yousef's handlers at the Shin Bet confirmed his account to the Israeli daily Haaretz. Hamas—already reeling from the assassination of a senior military chief in Dubai in January—calls his claims Zionist propaganda. From the Israeli prison he has occupied since 2005, Sheikh Yousef on Monday issued a statement that he and his family "have completely disowned the man who was our oldest son and who is called Mosab."
For the past two years, Mosab Yousef has lived near San Diego, where he's kept a low profile out of concern for his security. The U.S. is currently weighing his application for political asylum, and until his confession to espionage and the publicity blitz that accompanied it this week, only knew him as the son of a terrorist who sometimes attends evangelical churches in California. The book is intended to launch a new life in America.
Mr. Yousef, whose large, engaging eyes sit prominently on an oval face, says he was confused for many years himself, and realizes many people will be as well. His family has been shamed and old friends refuse to believe him. The book, a Le Carréesque thriller wrapped in a spiritual coming-of-age story, is an attempt to answer what he says "is impossible to imagine"—"how I ended up working for my enemies who hurt me, who hurt my dad, who hurt my people."
"There is a logical explanation," he continues in fairly fluent English. "Simply my enemies of yesterday became my friends. And the friends of yesterday became really my enemies."
The first half of his memoir describes a childhood in Ramallah marked by close familial ties and the Israeli occupation. He describes a kind and unusual Muslim father who cooks dinner, treats his mother well, and cares for his neighbors. An imam trained in Jordan, Sheikh Hassan Yousef rises to prominence in their hometown, and in 1986—along with six other men including the wheelchair-bound cleric from Gaza, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin—forms Hamas at a secret meeting in Hebron. The first Palestinian Intifada—or uprising—breaks out the following year. Mosab did his part, throwing stones at Israeli settlers and army vehicles.
ccusations of "collaboration" as an excuse to torture and kill rivals or the weak.
Mr. Yousef traces his awakening to his first sustained exposure to Hamas cruelty. In 1996, he was arrested by the Israelis for buying weapons. He says he was beaten and tortured badly in custody. It was then that the Shin Bet approached him. He says he thought about becoming a double agent. "I wanted revenge on Israel," he writes. But when he was sent to serve his term at the Megiddo prison in northern Israel, he says he was more shocked by the way the maj'd, Hamas's security wing, dealt with other prisoners.
"Every day, there was screaming; every night, torture. Hamas was torturing its own people!" he writes. The Muslims he met in jail "bore no resemblance to my father" and "were mean and petty . . . bigots and hypocrites."
By agreeing to work with the Shin Bet, he got out of prison early. He says he was curious about the Israelis and fast abandoned his idea to become a double agent. Though he took money from Shin Bet and stayed on their payroll for a decade, his handlers in the early years didn't ask much of him. They encouraged him to study and be a model son. His code name was the Green Prince: green as in the color of the Islamist Hamas flag, and prince as the offspring to Hamas royalty.
During those quiet years he met a British cabbie in Jerusalem who gave him an English-Arabic copy of the New Testament and invited him to attend a bible study session at their hotel. "I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about," he says in "Son of Hamas."
As a spy, Mr. Yousef wasn't fully activated until the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000. A few months before at Camp David, the late PLO chief Yasser Arafat had turned down the Israeli offer of statehood on 90% of the West Bank with East Jerusalem as the capital. According to Mr. Yousef, Arafat decided he needed another uprising to win back international attention. So he sought out Hamas's support through Sheikh Yousef, writes his son, who accompanied him to Arafat's compound. Those meetings took place before the Palestinian authorities found a pretext for the second Intifada. It came when future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Mr. Yousef's account helps to set straight the historical record that the uprising was premeditated by Arafat.
Mr. Yousef tells me that he was horrified by the pointless violence unleashed by politicians willing to climb "on the shoulders of poor, religious people." He says Palestinians who heeded the call "were going like a cow to the slaughterhouse, and they thought they were going to heaven." So, as he writes in the book, "At the age of twenty-two, I became the Shin Bet's only Hamas insider who could infiltrate Hamas's military and political wings, as well as other Palestinian factions."
Mr. Yousef claims some significant intelligence coups for himself, and he says he isn't telling the world everything. Early on, he was first to discover that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a terrorist group born during the second Intifada, was made up of Arafat's guards, who were directly funded by international donors. He says he found the most lethal Palestinian bomb maker and foiled assassination plots against President Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, as well as a prominent rabbi. He says he broke up cells of suicide bombers about to attack Israel. And he helped convince his father to be the first prominent Hamas leader to offer a truce with Israel.
His handler—a "Captain Loai," now retired from the Shin Bet—corroborated many of these stories to Haaretz. The paper said the Shin Bet considered Mr. Yousef "the most reliable and most senior agent."
Mr. Yousef strains to justify himself, but ultimately "the question is whether I was a traitor or a hero in my own eyes."
So we're back to why?
The motivation, he says, was to save lives.
"I'd seen enough killing. I was a witness to lots of death . . . Saving a human life was something really, really beautiful . . . no matter who they are. Not only Israeli people owe me their lives. I guarantee many terrorists, many Palestinian leaders, owe me their lives—or in other words they owe my Lord their lives."
He says he used his influence at Shin Bet to get the Israelis to try to arrest Hamas and other Palestinian figures rather than blow them up with missile strikes. He says he saved his father from the fate of Sheikh Yassin and other Hamas leaders whom the Israelis killed by secretly arranging to have him arrested. "I know for sure that my father is alive today, he still breathes, because I was involved in this thing," he says.
Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion. He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.
"I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn't leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it's a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.
"I'm not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can't deny they came from Christianity as well."
Mr. Yousef says he felt burned out and decided to stop working for the Shin Bet in 2006, against their wishes. He made his way to friends in southern California whom he'd met through bible study. As the son of a Muslim cleric, he says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can't be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Do you consider your father a fanatic? "He's not a fanatic," says Mr. Yousef. "He's a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he's doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn't matter if he's a terrorist or a traditional Muslim. At the end of the day a traditional Muslim is doing the will of a fanatic, fundamentalist, terrorist God. I know this is harsh to say. Most governments avoid this subject. They don't want to admit this is an ideological war.
"The problem is not in Muslims," he continues. "The problem is with their God. They need to be liberated from their God. He is their biggest enemy. It has been 1,400 years they have been lied to."
These are all dangerous words. Of the threats issued to his life by Islamists, he says, "That's not the worst thing that can happen to you. I'm OK with it, I'm not afraid. . . . Palestinians have reason to kill me. Some Israelis may want to kill me. My goal is not to defeat my enemy. It is to win over my enemy."
Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board. Posted on 03/09/2010 11:33 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
A Cinematic Interlude: Confession In An Elevator (Alberto Sordi Stefania Sandrelli)
Posted on 03/09/2010 1:39 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Turkey, Its Army, The PKP, And Western Defeatism
March 7, 2010
How to Make Defeatism Look Good: Let’s Give Up and Cheer the Islamists
By Barry Rubin
I’m not going to bash or rant about a Newsweek article about Turkey by Owen Matthews—shocking and dangerous as it is--but rather talk about what is wrong and inaccurate about it. That article is part of a new wave of defeatism sweeping the West, though it still remains subordinate to the more ostensibly attractive idea that there is no real conflict or at least one easy to fix by Western concessions.
Here’s the title: “The Army Is Beaten: Why the U.S. should hail the Islamists.” Yes, we should thank the Islamists for taking over Turkey. But wait a minute! The ruling AK party says it isn’t Islamist. Indeed, I have been viciously attacked by them in the Turkish media for saying so. Up until now the line--including that from the regime itself--has been that we shouldn’t be afraid of them because they are really just democrats. But now some are willing to face the truth and still sugarcoat it.
Matthews writes:
“The political logic should be simple. The arrest of a shadowy group of generals for allegedly plotting a bloody coup should be a victory for justice. The end of military meddling in politics should be a victory for democracy. And greater democracy should make a country more liberal and more pro-European.”
Each of these sentences makes a false assumption and must be examined a bit.
Sentence one: Arresting military officers is only a victory for justice if they are guilty. Why does the author assume they are guilty? In fact, the claims are ludicrous. That a group of officers created a 5000 page plan for a coup that involved attacking mosques and massive attacks on civilians. It is one of a series of such accusations for which no real evidence has been presented, in which a widely disparate group of people have been arrested as alleged conspirators when their sole connection is that they are critics of the government.
This is ridiculously gullible. It’s like the famous sentence by a newsweekly magazine that even if the Hitler diaries were forgeries (they were) that would tell us a great deal about the history of the time. If in fact the arrests were trumped-up to tame the army so that the current regime can impose a dictatorship in practice it was not a victory for justice but for injustice. Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamists in general lie a lot (and a lot more than democratic government) so why should they be taken at their word, especially when any serious examination of evidence shows the truth.
Sentence two: Of course, in general, keeping the army out of politics is a victory for democracy, but that ignores the specific history of Turkey. The army has viewed itself and been accepted there as the guardian of democracy. This history is certainly imperfect but when the country has been sliding into anarchy in the past or fallen into the hand of those who threatened to destroy the republic, the army has stepped in briefly, gotten civilians to reorganize things on a stable basis, and quickly gone back into the barracks.
The Turkish army is not like those of the Third World which hunger for power, destroy democracy, and unleash corrupt and repressive regimes. On the other hand, this article--and many others--show ignorance about the actual shifts in Turkey.
For example, there is no awareness that the regime is seizing control of the media; that the party leader (which means the prime minister for the ruling party) simply picks candidates for parliament as he pleases; that the reforms have strengthened the prime minister's power and not parliamentary democracy; and that women are being forced out of high positions. Merely weakening the army doesn't mean more democracy when in almost every other respect there is less.
Sentence three: If indeed—as is the case—the regime is systematically cracking down on the free media and imposing its control over all the institutions. This is not leading to greater but to less democracy. There should be a lot more reporting on what's happening within the country instead of just repeating the regime's claims.
Indeed, the author states:
“And with the last major obstacle to the ruling AK Party's power gone, Turkey's conservative prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will be free to implement his vision of a more Islamic Turkey. More democracy, then, doesn't necessarily lead to more liberalism, either.”
The assumption here is that this is what the Turkish people want. Yet it should be noted there are some big problems for that claim. Turkey’s electoral system is so weighted that the AK has received near-monopoly control on the basis of a vote that in most parliamentary democracies would have produced a coalition government.
Moreover, many or most Turks who voted for the AK weren’t doing so because they wanted Islamism—as public opinion surveys clearly show--but because they thought (mistakenly, even according to this author) that it was a mildly conservative party.
And finally, the AK is seizing control over institutions so as to be sure that it will never lose another election. It is destroying Turkish democracy, a point made rather obvious by a long list of such actions over non-military institutions like the civil service, courts, and media. The author—and many others—are simply taking the regime’s word for it and ignoring what the government is actually doing.
The author concludes by saying: “It's also clear that Turkey under the AK Party will remain a Western ally, and NATO will remain Ankara's most important strategic partner.”
Then, this unusually candid if wrong author explains:
“How do we know? The AK Party says so, and it has no real options. There's no rival alliance, not with Iran, the Arab world, or Russia, which could possibly rival the clout Turkey has, with the second-largest Army in NATO.”
Of course, Turkey has options. And here is the option the regime has chosen: To keep as much as possible the Western alliances while the content of its policy favors radical Islamist forces.
Incidentally, this "no option" argument is the root of a huge amount of confusion in the Middle East. Supposedly, Iran has "no option" but to become moderate; Syria has "no option" but to dump Iran; the Palestinian Authority has "no option" but to make peace. Yet over and over again the local forces find an option that they are quite happy to pursue other than the one laid out for them by Western observers. They have their own view of the world, ideology, and goals (often the goal of the regime being to amass wealth and stay in power).
And one of the key factors in this process is that--rightly or wrongly--they think they are winning so why should they change course or make compromises? And certain other ideas are calculated into their list of options: soon Iran has nuclear weapons. And the divine being is on their side. And the West is weak, stupid, cowardly, and easily fooled.
Turkey is one of the main places they think they are winning, according to Syria and Iran.
Now of course, the Turkish government doesn’t have to say: America stinks and we’re pulling out of NATO. It can keep the benefits of these relationships, having their cake and eating it, too. But in practice Turkey is moving closer to Iran and Syria, with the leaders of both of these two countries openly pointing out that fact. The question is what does it mean for Turkey to be a Western ally in a practical sense? If it supports Iran, Syria, Hizballah, and Hamas, just how does Ankara function as a Western ally? It’s meaningless.
So, the article concludes, “The world would be wise to side with the AK Party, not seek a return of the discredited generals.” I’m not sure why the generals are supposed to be discredited by ludicrous accusations orchestrated by an anti-American (in practice) government which needs to destroy them. Rather, it is the current regime in Turkey that should be discredited.
Still, it’s a pretty neat trick when a regime repressing Turkish democracy and increasingly siding with the enemies of the West can convince people in the West that this is a good thing.
Incidentally, the New York Times has only a slightly more nuanced editorial than the Matthews article. Among other things, it take at face value that the story about the military planning a coup was broken by a small "independent" newspaper in Turkey. Actually, that publication is a front from the regime and is most unreliable--a point one might expect the Times to have discovered. The story was part of the regime's strategy, not some journalistic scoop.
As the theme song to the television show “MASH” put it:
“The game of life is hard to play,
I'm going to lose it anyway,
The losin' card I'll someday lay;
So this is all I have to say...
“That suicide is painless…
And I can take or leave it if I please.”
The Western world should reject playing that particular card as its strategy.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal and of Turkish Studies journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His new edited books include Lebanon: Liberation, Conflict and Crisis; Guide to Islamist Movements; Conflict and Insurgency in the Middle East; and The Muslim Brotherhood. To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books. To see or subscribe to his blog, Rubin Reports.
Posted on 03/09/2010 2:39 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Leo Rennert Analyzes A Story From The Washington Post
Here is the copy of a letter written by former Washington journalist Leo Rennert to the editor of The Washington Post. It is one of many, and no doubt Brauchli's response is to engage in a little eye-rolling, combined with a world-weary expression, as he by now is used to these letters from those he no doubt tells himself, and for all I know allows himself to believe, are "pro-Israel cranks" who just never are satisfied. But I have been reading, over the past half year, a great many letters sent by Leo Rennert, whom I do not know and have not met, and they strike me as full of telling points and keen analysis that, if Brauchli were fulfilling his tasks responsibly, he would look at, he would take to heart and most of all, to mind. It's not a case of a "crank" at all, but of the too-incessant-to-be-merely-carelessness coverage of the war being waged against Israel, and of how each act by Israel to defend itself and the lives and normal leading of lives by its citizens is always and everywhere ripped out of context, twisted, distorted, and the effect is --- well, if you read The Guardian steadily, or Robert Fisk, or somehow came to believe that the BBC World Service was the best place to learn about the Arabs, and israelis, and about Islam, and were fed a steady diet of such stuff, then you know what the effect is.
Here's one of Leo Rennert's latest. Imagine how Brauchli and company have a good laugh as they dismiss the whole thing as exaggerated, ignoring its points, and deprecating, I have no doubt, its author.
Judge for yourself:
Dear Mr. Brauchli:
Pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bias is on full display in the March 6 edition of the Washington Post in an article about Arab rioters who were goaded by an inciteful sermon at the Al-Aqsa Mosque atop Temple Mount in Jerusalem and emerged after services, hurling stones on Jews praying below at the Western Wall. Riot police had to be called to quell the riot, whcih resulted in injuries on both sides. The riot forced evacuation of Jewish worshippers from their holiest shrine.
Except that's not how the Post reported this incident. In a six-paragraph piece carefully and selectively culled from a lengthier Associated Press dispatch, the Post rewrote the AP version so as to tamp down the extent of the riot and report only Palestinian injuries, while blaming Israel for setting off this violent protest and totally ignoring calls by Palestinian religious and political leaders for another intifada against Israel. ("Violence erupts at contested holy sites" page A8).
Here, in brief, is the Post's version:
The lead paragraph reports that Israeli troops clashed with Palestinian stone-throwers at two contested holy sites and in a West Bank village, "seriously injuring two Palestinians."
The second paragraph reports that, in Jerusalem, a Palestinian woman was hospitalized in serious condition after a violent clash at Temple Mount.
The third paragraph reports that a 14-year-old boy, in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, was critically wounded by a rubber bullet and that skirmishes also broke out at a holy site in Hebron.
The fourth paragraph reports that the March 5 events "were sparked, in part, by rising anger over Israel's decision to add two shrines in the West Bank to its list of national heritage sites" -- a move perceived by Palestinians as an indication that Israel wants to hold on to large parts of the territory. Note, the "in part" qualifier, in the Post's version of what sparked these clashes -- the only time the Post article gives readers an inkling of who was to blame -- namely Israel. The Post version omits any other "parts" of what sparked the clashes, such as the more immediate Palestinian incitement from Mahmoud Abbas on down, and the Al-Aqsa imam's Friday sermon, which pumped up Arab youths to start the rampage.
The fifth paragraph mentions that Hamas called for a new uprising, but makes no mention of Abbas's role in sparking the violence, or use of the Al-Aqsa pulpit for an inciteful sermon.
The sixth -- and final -- paragraph reports that U.S. envoy George Mitchell is due to arrive in the region to launch indirect Israeli-Palestinian talks.
And the entire article is attributed to the Associated Press.
Except there are glaring differences between the Post and AP reports. The AP at least made some effort to file a balanced piece, while the Post edited the AP dispatch by removing any and all elements that might point a finger at Palestinian culpaiblity for the riots.
For example:
1. The AP version mentions that hundreds emerged from prayers and threw stones at policemen and Jews "praying below at the Jewish shrine known as the Western Wall." The Post carefully removed that part from its own version. The Western Wall and Temple Mount are Judaism's holiest sites, but the Post saw no need to point out this essential fact about the riot.
2. The AP version makes clear that the rioters threw stones at Jewish worshippers. The Post excised this bit of information, mentioning only that stones were thrown at contested holy sites, but leaving out the fact that Jews at prayer at their holiest site were the target. Throwing stones at a site is one thing, but throwing stones at civilians at prayers in quite another thing. The Post, however, is not interested in factual precision.
3. The AP version mentions that Israel's decision to include two West Bank holy sites on its list of national heritage shrines, in part, sparked the riots. So does the Post. But the AP threw in an important qualifier -- that Israel's decision "has no immediate consequences" -- a bit of information carefully removed by the Post in its editing of the AP dispatch. The fact is that at one of the sites, the Cave of the Patriarchs, Israel ensures access to both Muslim and Jewish worshippers and that Israel recently completed access improvements for Muslims, ahead of such renovation work for Jewish worshppers. The other West Bank shrine, Rachel's Tomb outsie of Bethlehem, has been a Jewish holy site for several thousands of years, while Muslims only sought to connect it to Islam 10 years ago -- in the meantime using it repeatedly for target practice. But such facts don't interest Post editors in pursuit of their anti-Israel agenda. Pro-Palestinian myths take precedence over Jewish history at the Washington Post.
4. The AP version, when it comes to the critically wounded teenager in Nabi Saleh, quotes Israeli officials as saying that police fired rubber bullets "to disperse a violent riot." The Post makes no mention of Israel's explanation of why it fired rubber bullets in the village.
5. The AP version, while pointing to two Palestinians who ended up with serious injuries, mentions that 18 Israeli policemen were also hurt. The Post makes no mention of injuries to Israeli police.
One wonders how Washington Post readers would have been informed if the paper also had displayed such biased, one-sided journalism in reporting the shooter incident at the Pentagon. Would the Post have carried a headline reading, "Violence erupts at Pentagon, one person dead"? Followed by a lead that might have read, "Shootout claimed one life at the entrance to the Pentagon" without mentioning that a conspiracy-addled shooter opened fire at two Pentagon policemen, who returned fire and killed him?
I don't think so. Why? Because such gross distortion at the Post is specially reserved for its coverage of Israel and the Palestinians.
LEO RENNERT
Posted on 03/09/2010 2:45 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
From The Archives: Mom-And-Pop Quiz
Timely Mom-and-Pop Quiz
Two places, one a country, and one a city, have recently been in the news. And the two are linked by a curious fact of literary history.
What fact is that?
No, that's too much to ask. So I will first tell you that fact. The literary work that has come to be regarded as the national epic of that recently-in-the-news country was composed by a man who, it is widely believed, spent his last years in that recently-in-the-news city, and that city is not the capital of that country, but of another country. The quiz requires you to name that literary work and its author, the city in which he is said to have spent his last years, and the country of which that work is considered to be the national epic.
Answers to be posted on Friday or Saturday (whichever comes first).
[P. S.: Receipt of a postcard yesterday from a friend now travelling for two weeks in sunny southern Italy prompted this quiz. He'd been making his way slowly to Naples, had stopped for a brief rustication in Avellino, but when he fully took in the news of what has been going on in Naples, of how that fabled Parthenopean port, all pickpockets and pasta, had become -- one hopes temporarily -- a vast camorra-caused garbage dump, a regular Rifiutopoli, he changed his plans, and in the postcard he announced he'd instead turn northward. The next postcard I receive is likely to have a view of the Florentine skyline at sunset, or of the Ponte Vecchio and the corridoio vasariano in broad daylight, or of the Boboli Gardens at dewy dawn, and any one of those scenes, if that traveller up the boot plays his postcards right -- will trigger a tricky quiz similar to this one.]
Posted on 03/09/2010 5:30 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
From The Archives: Answer To The Mom-And-Pop Quiz
Georgian Nights, Or, That Mom-And-Pop Quiz
On the 17th of January [2008] a mom-and-pop quiz was put up. It went like this:
“Two places, one a country, and one a city, have recently been in the news. And the two are linked by a curious fact of literary history.
What fact is that?
No, that's too much to ask. So I will first tell you that fact. The literary work that has come to be regarded as the national epic of that recently-in-the-news country was composed by a man who, it is widely believed, spent his last years in that recently-in-the-news city, and that city is not the capital of that country, but of another country. The quiz requires you to name that literary work and its author, the city in which he is said to have spent his last years, and the country of which that work is considered to be the national epic.”
The correct answer to that week-old mom-and-pop quiz is as follows:
The writer is Shota Rustaveli. He wrote what is now considered to be the national epic of Georgia, called “The Knight in a Tiger’s [or Leopard’s] Skin.” Rustaveli, is believed to have spent his last years in Jerusalem, the city which is the capital not of his own country, Georgia, but of another country, Israel.
Here is more from Wikipedia:
Little, if anything, is known about Rustaveli from the contemporaneous sources. His poem itself, namely the prologue, provides a clue to his identity; the poet identifies himself as "a certain Rustveli." Now, "Rustveli" is not a surname, but a territorial epithet which can be interpreted as "of/from/holder of Rustavi". The later Georgian authors of the 15th-18th centuries are more informative: they are almost unanimous in identifying him as Shota Rustaveli, a name which is preserved on a fresco and a document from the formerly Georgian Monastery of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem. The fresco was described by the Georgian pilgrim Timote Gabashvili in 1757/58, and rediscovered by a team of Georgian scholars in 1960. The same Jerusalem document speaks of Shota as a sponsor of the monastery and a "high treasurer," thus echoing a popular legend that Rustaveli was a minister at Queen Tamar’s court and retired to the monastery in an advanced age. Both a folk tradition and the 17th-century royal poet Archil identify Rustaveli as a native to the southern Georgian region of Meskheti, where his home village Rustavi was located (not to be confused with the modern-day city of Rustavi near Tbilisi). He is assumed to have been born in between 1160 and 1165. A legend has it that Rustaveli was educated at the medieval Georgian academies of Gelati and Ikalto, and then in "Greece" (i.e., the Byzantine Empire). He must have produced his major work no earlier than the 1180s and no later than the first decade of the 13th century, most probably c. 1205-1207.
“Reactionry” doled his winning answer out in bits and pieces. In an earlier posting he had suggested W. H. Auden but couldn’t quite make the “Letter from Iceland” become “national epic” of that land, and upon a quick consultation with the ghost of Viljalmur Stefansson must have realized his mistake. In his second, and successful, entry-post, he mentions the author-compiler of the Finnish “Kalevala,” but only to dismiss him: “Elias Lonnrot ain’t right.” He was having fun, alluding to a quiz some months ago about Longfellow and Lonnrot. Incidentally, the full-marks winner of that quiz, Paul Blaskowitz, was given credit – at first -- for having read the entire “Kalevala” in Latin. I suddenly realize I still haven’t found, and mailed to PB, the promised prize of a copy of a work slightly less-well-known than his compiled “Kalevala” – Lonnrot’s essay on education in Ostrobothnia.
“Reactionry” explains -- without telling us why -- that he googled “national epic of Georgia.” He undoubtedly googled the phrase "national epic" and "New English Review" and discovered that an expanded variant of it -- "national epic of Georgia" -- has appeared in past postings at NER. He then supplies the answers to each part of the quiz, but not all at once, and not straightforwardly, but by dropping various elements of that answer along the way.
First, he mentions the “[n]ational epic of Georgia.”
Then he supplies the name of the city, Jerusalem, obliquely and with pretend-uncertainty, by noting that the writer of that Georgian national epic lived for a time “in a Georgian monastery located in….now where was it? “Next year in Monrovia”? Nope. “Next year in Nairobi” [this lifted from a previous post by Rebecca Bynum] Nah…It’ll come to me.”
Then, alluding to still another past posting at NER, one about a quasi-Italian restaurant in Cambridge, England where “pene con crema” was advertised as the Day’s Special, he notes that at his own, invented “Buon Giorno Italia Café” he “didn't see any Rustaveli” on the menu.
And finally he supplies the author’s first name, and most of the title of that epic (enough to win the palm, the oak, the bays) in the form of a couplet:
“I Shota sorrow into the air,
It pierced a Knight in panther's hair.”
In the posting in which the mom-and-pop quiz was offered, readers were told that both the name of the country of that national epic, and the name of the city where the author of that epic had lived in later life had both been in the news. Georgia, in mid-January, had been much in the news because of its presidential election, but the incumbent's former allies, including the glamorous Salomé Zourabichvili (formerly of Paris and the French Foreign Ministry, with indiscreet conceivable billets-doux e-mailed to zourabachvili.gouv.fr), had abandoned him, and the 90% plus of the votes he had won in the previous election was reduced, in this election, to just over 50% of the votes. The city, Jerusalem, had also been in the news, even more than usual, alas, in mid-January because of proposals being considered by the Israeli government, the result of that fateful meeting in Annapolis and its heedless aftermath.
But there was also a postscriptum to that posting, containing what I regarded as the best clue of all. However, the winner apparently did not notice it. For if he had, he would certainly have found a way to mention it.
Here is that postscriptum:
[P. S.: Receipt of a postcard yesterday from a friend now travelling for two weeks in sunny southern Italy prompted this quiz. He'd been making his way slowly to Naples, had stopped for a brief rustication in Avellino, but when he fully took in the news of what has been going on in Naples, of how that fabled Parthenopean port, all pickpockets and pasta, had become -- one hopes temporarily -- a vast camorra-caused garbage dump, a regular Rifiutopoli, he changed his plans, and in the postcard he announced he'd instead turn northward. The next postcard I receive is likely to have a view of the Florentine skyline at sunset, or of the Ponte Vecchio and the corridoio vasariano in broad daylight, or of the Boboli Gardens at dewy dawn, and any one of those scenes, if that traveller up the boot plays his postcards right -- will trigger a tricky quiz similar to this one.]
Now the friend, his two weeks of travel in Italy, the news about the garbage piling up in Naples (the Parthenopean port now described as Rifiutopoli), and that friend’s hasty departure for Florence, was all made up, created for only one reason: to both contain, and disguise, the clue that I wanted to offer. Here is that clue, in the second sentence of the made-up vignette: “He’d been making his way slowly to Naples, had stopped for a brief rustication in Avellino, but when he fully took in the news of….” The sentence should have troubled, because it contains one word that is used in a slightly-off manner. That word is “rustication.” Ordinarily it was used to describe the practice of sending students at Cambridge or Oxford, whose behavior -- and more recently, whose academic performance -- left something to be desired, away from the university, and back to their families, for a time. Such students were said to be “rusticated.” The most famous student to be “rusticated” was John Milton, from Christ Church, in 1626 (I once visited a friend who lived in Milton's rooms at Christ Church, but I can't remember if they were Milton's before he was "rusticated" or after). I suppose that was why he had to offer that apology to Smectymnuus. But Dryden, Shelley (now lying statuesquely, in ci-gît marmoreal state at University College, Oxford) in the postscript to the postcard the word “rusticated” is clearly being used in a different sense, and the reader has to decide whether the writer is unaware of the word’s real meaning, or is deliberately using it as he wishes to use it, or whether that word possesses another, more general meaning, no doubt derived from the root “rus,” and was assumed to mean something like “settling for an undetermined period in a rural cot, or in rural surroundings.” Had you assumed or concluded any of that, then you might have missed the premeditated clue. But if you thought there was something untoward about that use, something that might merit further reflection, then you would re-read the sentence and find the clue: ““He’d been making his way slowly to Naples, had stopped for a brief rustication in Avellino, but when he fully took in the news of….” But no one, including the winner, did so.
The final clue was given in the same oblique fashion. Two musical interludes were put up on January 17. The first was “Daddy, Won’t You Please Come Home.” The second, “You’ve Got To See Mamma Ev’ry Night” was accompanied by a comment:
“The previous Musical Interlude was "Daddy, Won't You Please Come Home." The quiz put up, just before that Interlude, was described as "mom-and-pop." An article posted on Thursday night was called "Only Connect." All three prompted the choice of this song.”
One might have limited one’s use of that comment to the obvious: the “mom-and-pop quiz” gave rise to both he musical “Daddy” and to the musical “Mamma” amd thus we have done our bit to “Only Connect.” And my intent, to offer a clue and at the same time to to divert attention away from that offered clue, would have been fulfilled. For the performers of “You’ve Got to See Mamma Ev’ry Night (Or You Can’t See Mamma At All) were named “The Georgians.”
He was already allert to the many previous references at this website to the country of Georgia, the Georgia of the Caucasus,. For example, there was. among many such postings, this one:
Une Autre Rive, Une Autre Vie [February 2006]
Nobody chose Shota Rustaveli's ??????????????(The Knight in the Panther's Skin)? ---- Mary Jackson
I have Rustaveli's national epic of Georgia, in a Soviet-era edition. But I didn't buy it - it was given to me by a Russian whose fondest memories are of Khvanchkara and Kindzmarauli, and toasts by tamadas, and "Georgian Nights." There is something unusual about this, the Georgian national epic. Care to try to guess?
And "tiger's" rather than "leopard's" skin is how the Rustaveli title should be rendered.
If you want to drag Shakespeare into this (and who doesn't?) and offer him a walk-on part, then you might go so far as to emend the second part of Robert Greene's cutting phrase and use it to translate the second part of Rustaveli's title: "wrapped in a tiger's hide."
But I don't want to be critical, corrosively or otherwise, on this occasion.
Instead, I wish to thank you for giving us the opportunity to bring the Republic of Georgia and its fine products and tourist-destination possibilities to the attention of the English-speaking world. The producers of the desert-island disque "Chansons de la Géorgie" ("ne pei, krasavitsa, pri mne...")* thank you. The Wine-Makers Association of Georgia thanks you. The Fondation Bagration thanks you. The Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Tbilisi thanks you. The Travel Agency of George Papashvili thanks you. The Committee to Elect Salomé Zourabachvili thanks you. The heirs and assigns of Paul Chavchavadze thank you.
A tamada's toast, a toast now, brat'ya, to....well, let's all, at least this once, hail Mary.
_____________________________________
*A Pushkin poem beautifully translated into French by Vladimir Nabokov decades ago, and ending, if memory agrees to serve, "ces chansons de la Géorgie/Leur amertume me rappelle/Une autre rive, une autre vie.”
Now, when “reactionry” saw that the second musical interlude was sung by “The Georgians,”he knew he was right. It did not matter that those singing “Georgians” were not the long-lived moustachioed karakul-hatted yogurt-eaters of the wild Caucasian kind, revelers sitting around the table (za stolom) as the not-impossible tamada directs the toasts, and still more Khvanchkara (Stalin’s favorite wine) is poured, but rather Georgians of the American kind, ces géorgiens-là of Peachtree Plaza and Peachtree Street and Peachtree Boulevard, the Georgians of Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks in asylum-haunted Milledgeville, the Georgians getting out of the way of Sherman when he exelaunically marched to the sea, the Georgia of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Two Tickets To Georgia.” “The Georgians” – that, for the winner, was the clinching clue.
In his wintry Vendée, “reactionry” receives almost full marks, a 96. Why do I deny him the last full measure of proud emotion, by begrudgin him those remaining four points? In order to keep up standards, that's why. Had he discovered the “Rust…avelli” hidden in the mountebank’s postscribal patter about the contents of that non-existent postcard, and noted it, he would indeed have received that perfect score. But he didn’t.
Nonetheless, in a display of benevolence, and by way of further disproof of that silly insistence that "there are no second acts" in American life (all of American life, nowadays, appears to be full of second acts, third acts, tenth, even fifteenth acts) I will give him the chance to earn those four points. All he has to do is to identify, within a reasonable period -- et soyez raisonnable, M. Le Maistre, M. Reactionnaire! -- a certain non-obvious literary allusion that was embedded, akin to a CNN reporter in one of those superhypallagistic expeditionaryocious Bradley Fighting Vehicles, earlier, with malice aforethought, in this very posting.
Posted on 03/09/2010 5:33 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
From The Archives: The Final Answer To The Mom-And-Pop Quiz
The Final Answer To the Mom-And-Pop Quiz
When, more than a week ago, I posted here the correct answer to the mom-and-pop quiz posted still earlier, I also made an offer to the winner, “reactionary,” that if he could find a non-obvious literary allusion in the text of that posting, he would be given the four extra points that he had been denied because of his failure to find “Rust…avelli” in the text of the post-scriptum postcard. He has not done so, so I will now post again that answer, with several allusions – but not, immediately, the right one – highlighted in bold.
Here is the original answer:
“The correct answer to that week-old mom-and-pop quiz is as follows:
The writer is Shota Rustaveli. He wrote what is now considered to be the national epic of Georgia, called “The Knight in a Tiger’s [or Leopard’s] Skin.” Rustaveli, is believed to have spent his last years in Jerusalem, the city which is the capital not of his own country, Georgia, but of another country, Israel.
[Here a Wikipedia article on Shota Rustaveli was quoted at length, but as it obviously did not contain my “non-obvious literary allusion” it need not be reprinted here]
“Reactionry” doled his winning answer out in bits and pieces. In an earlier posting he had suggested W. H. Auden but couldn’t quite make the “Letter from Iceland” become “national epic” of that land, and upon a quick consultation with the ghost of Viljalmur Stefansson must have realized his mistake. In his second, and successful, entry-post, he mentions the author-compiler of the Finnish “Kalevala,” but only to dismiss him: “Elias Lonnrot ain’t right.” He was having fun, alluding to a quiz some months ago about Longfellow and Lonnrot. Incidentally, the full-marks winner of that quiz, Paul Blaskowitz, was given credit – at first -- for having read the entire “Kalevala” in Latin. I suddenly realize I still haven’t found, and mailed to PB, the promised prize of a copy of a work slightly less-well-known than his compiled “Kalevala” – Lonnrot’s essay on education in Ostrobothnia.
“Reactionry” explains -- without telling us why -- that he googled “national epic of Georgia.” He undoubtedly googled the phrase "national epic" and "New English Review" and discovered that an expanded variant of it -- "national epic of Georgia" -- has appeared in past postings at NER. He then supplies the answers to each part of the quiz, but not all at once, and not straightforwardly, but by dropping various elements of that answer along the way.
First, he mentions the “[n]ational epic of Georgia.”
Then he supplies the name of the city, Jerusalem, obliquely and with pretend-uncertainty, by noting that the writer of that Georgian national epic lived for a time “in a Georgian monastery located in….now where was it? “Next year in Monrovia”? Nope. “Next year in Nairobi” [this lifted from a previous post by Rebecca Bynum] Nah…It’ll come to me.”
Then, alluding to still another past posting at NER, one about a quasi-Italian restaurant in Cambridge, England where “pene con crema” was advertised as the Day’s Special, he notes that at his own, invented “Buon Giorno Italia Café” he “didn't see any Rustaveli” on the menu.
And finally he supplies the author’s first name, and most of the title of that epic (enough to win the palm, the oak, the bays) in the form of a couplet:
“I Shota sorrow into the air,
It pierced a Knight in panther's hair.”
In the posting in which the mom-and-pop quiz was offered, readers were told that both the name of the country of that national epic, and the name of the city where the author of that epic had lived in later life had both been in the news. Georgia, in mid-January, had been much in the news because of its presidential election, but the incumbent's former allies, including the glamorous Salomé Zourabachvili (formerly of Paris and the French Foreign Ministry, with indiscreet conceivable billets-doux e-mailed to zourabachvili.gouv.fr), had abandoned him, and the 90% plus of the votes he had won in the previous election was reduced, in this election, to just over 50% of the votes. The city, Jerusalem, had also been in the news, even more than usual, alas, in mid-January because of proposals being considered by the Israeli government, the result of that fateful meeting in Annapolis and its heedless aftermath.
But there was also a postscriptum to that posting, containing what I regarded as the best clue of all. However, the winner apparently did not notice it. For if he had, he would certainly have found a way to mention it.
Here is that postscriptum:
[P. S.: Receipt of a postcard yesterday from a friend now travelling for two weeks in sunny southern Italy prompted this quiz. He'd been making his way slowly to Naples, had stopped for a brief rustication in Avellino, but when he fully took in the news of what has been going on in Naples, of how that fabled Parthenopean port, all pickpockets and pasta, had become -- one hopes temporarily -- a vast camorra-caused garbage dump, a regular Rifiutopoli, he changed his plans, and in the postcard he announced he'd instead turn northward. The next postcard I receive is likely to have a view of the Florentine skyline at sunset, or of the Ponte Vecchio and the corridoio vasariano in broad daylight, or of the Boboli Gardens at dewy dawn, and any one of those scenes, if that traveller up the boot plays his postcards right -- could trigger a tricky quiz similar to this one.]
Now the friend, his two weeks of travel in Italy, the news about the garbage piling up in Naples (the Parthenopean port now described as Rifiutopoli), and that friend’s hasty departure for Florence, were all made up, created for only one reason: to both contain, and disguise, the clue that I wanted to offer. Here is that clue, in the second sentence of the made-up vignette: “He’d been making his way slowly to Naples, had stopped for a brief rustication in Avellino, but when he fully took in the news of….” The sentence should have troubled, because it contains one word that is used in a slightly-off manner. That word is “rustication.” Ordinarily it was used to describe the practice of sending students at Cambridge or Oxford, whose behavior -- and more recently, whose academic performance -- left something to be desired, away from the university, and back to their families, for a time. Such students were said to be “rusticated.” The most famous student to be “rusticated” was John Milton, from Christ Church, in 1626 (I once visited a friend who lived in Milton's rooms at Christ Church, but I can't remember if they were Milton's before he was "rusticated" or after). I suppose that was why he had to offer that apology to Smectymnuus. But Dryden, Shelley (now lying statuesquely, in ci-gît marmoreal state at University College, Oxford) in the postscript to the postcard the word “rusticated” is clearly being used in a different sense, and the reader has to decide whether the writer is unaware of the word’s real meaning, or is deliberately using it as he wishes to use it, or whether that word possesses another, more general meaning, no doubt derived from the root “rus,” and was assumed to mean something like “settling for an undetermined period in a rural cot, or in rural surroundings.” Had you assumed or concluded any of that, then you might have missed the premeditated clue. But if you thought there was something untoward about that use, something that might merit further reflection, then you would re-read the sentence and find the clue: ““He’d been making his way slowly to Naples, had stopped for a brief rustication in Avellino, but when he fully took in the news of….” But no one, including the winner, did so.
The final clue was given in the same oblique fashion. Two musical interludes were put up on January 17. The first was “Daddy, Won’t You Please Come Home.” The second, “You’ve Got To See Mamma Ev’ry Night” was accompanied by a comment:
“The previous Musical Interlude was "Daddy, Won't You Please Come Home." The quiz put up, just before that Interlude, was described as "mom-and-pop." An article posted on Thursday night was called "Only Connect." All three prompted the choice of this song.”
One might have limited one’s use of that comment to the obvious: the “mom-and-pop quiz” gave rise to both the musical “Daddy” and to the musical “Mamma” amd thus we have done our bit to “Only Connect.” And my intent, to offer a clue and at the same time to to divert attention away from that offered clue, would have been fulfilled. For the performers of “You’ve Got to See Mamma Ev’ry Night (Or You Can’t See Mamma At All) were named “The Georgians.”
He was already alert to the many previous references at this website to the country of Georgia, the Georgia of the Caucasus. For example, there was. among many such postings, this one:
Une Autre Rive, Une Autre Vie [February 2006]
Nobody chose Shota Rustaveli's ??????????????(The Knight in the Panther's Skin)? ---- Mary Jackson
I have Rustaveli's national epic of Georgia, in a Soviet-era edition. But I didn't buy it - it was given to me by a Russian whose fondest memories are of Khvanchkara and Kindzmarauli, and toasts by tamadas, and "Georgian Nights." There is something unusual about this, the Georgian national epic. Care to try to guess?
And "tiger's" rather than "leopard's" skin is how the Rustaveli title should be rendered.
If you want to drag Shakespeare into this (and who doesn't?) and offer him a walk-on part, then you might go so far as to emend the second part of Robert Greene's cutting phrase and use it to translate the second part of Rustaveli's title: "wrapped in a tiger's hide."
But I don't want to be critical, corrosively or otherwise, on this occasion.
Instead, I wish to thank you for giving us the opportunity to bring the Republic of Georgia and its fine products and tourist-destination possibilities to the attention of the English-speaking world. The producers of the desert-island disque "Chansons de la Géorgie" ("ne pei, krasavitsa, pro mne...")* thank you. The Wine-Makers Association of Georgia thanks you. The Fondation Bagration thanks you. The Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Tbilisi thanks you. The Travel Agency of George Papashvili thanks you. The Committee to Elect Salomé Zourabachvili thanks you. The heirs and assigns of Paul Chavchavadze thank you.
A tamada's toast, a toast now, brat'ya, to....well, let's all, at least this once, hail Mary.
_____________________________________
*A Pushkin poem beautifully translated into French by Vladimir Nabokov decades ago, and ending, if memory agrees to serve, "ces chansons de la Géorgie/Leur amertume me rappelle/Une autre rive, une autre vie.”
Now, when “reactionry” saw that the second musical interlude was sung by “The Georgians,”he knew he was right. It did not matter that those singing “Georgians” were not the long-lived moustachioed karakul-hatted yogurt-eaters of the wild Caucasian kind, revelers sitting around the table (za stolom) as the not-impossible tamada directs the toasts, and still more Khvanchkara (Stalin’s favorite wine) is poured, but rather Georgians of the American kind, ces géorgiens-là of Peachtree Plaza and Peachtree Street and Peachtree Boulevard, the Georgians of Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks in asylum-haunted Milledgeville, the Georgians getting out of the way of Sherman when he exelaunically marched to the sea, the Georgia of “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “Two Tickets To Georgia.” “The Georgians” – that, for the winner, was the clinching clue.
In his wintry Vendée, “reactionry” receives almost full marks, a 96. Why do I deny him the last full measure of proud emotion, by begrudging him those remaining four points? In order to keep up standards, that's why. Had he discovered the “Rust…avelli” hidden in the mountebank’s postscribal patter about the contents of that non-existent postcard, and noted it, he would indeed have received that perfect score. But he didn’t.
Nonetheless, in a display of benevolence, and by way of further disproof of that silly insistence that "there are no second acts" in American life (all of American life, nowadays, appears to be full of second acts, third acts, tenth, even fifteenth acts) I will give him the chance to earn those four points. All he has to do is to identify, within a reasonable period -- et soyez raisonnable, M. Le Maistre, M. Reactionnaire! -- a certain non-obvious literary allusion that was embedded, akin to a CNN reporter in one of those superhypallagistic expeditionaryocious Bradley Fighting Vehicles, earlier, with malice aforethought, in this very posting.
_____________________________________________________________
The Final Four-Possible-Points Answer To The Additional Question:
There are four literary allusions that I have highlighted in bold, and one – the correct one – that I did not put in bold enough.
The four emboldened bits are:
- “the palm, the oak, the bays.” This is an allusion to Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” the first stanza reads:
How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the Palm, the Oke, or Bayes;
And their uncessant Labours see
Crown'd from some single Herb or Tree,
Whose short and narrow verged Shade
Does prudently their Toyles upbraid;
While all Flow'rs and all Trees do close
To weave the Garlands of repose.
3. “wrapped in a tiger’s hide” –the Rustavelian title treated by me, with that mention to Shakespeare, as an avant-la-lettre allusion to a phrase that comes much later, in the attack on Shakespeare by Robert Greene in his “Groatsworth of Wit,” wherein he mocked Shakespeare, unnamed, in this passage:
There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
4. “he exelaunically marched to the sea” – an allusion to a phrase in Xenophon’s “Anabasis” – Exelauno meaning “to march forth” and therefore used by classics wits to refer to March 4th. One such wit established at Roxbury Latin the tradition, some fifty years ago, of Exelaundo Day. I once heard from a Groton graduate that a similar Exelauno Day was, or still is, observed at Groton. And Exelauno Day is now observed at a few other schools, or possibly colleges, in this country.
5. “ superhypallagistic expeditionaryocious” is a jerry-built silly-season allusion to “supercalifragilistic expialodocious,” as any five-year-old will immediately recognize, in the movie (and in the book?) “Mary Poppins” by the Australian writer P. L. Travers (Helen Lyndon Goff)
Of these five literary allusions – to Marvell, Milton, Shakespeare, P. L. Travers, and to Xenophon – only the last can be said to be non-obvious. But that is not enough. The allusion here – via the suspiciously tautological adveb “exelaunically” -- requires recognition, if not knowledge, of Greek (these quizzes are hard enough, and I don’t want to make a knowledge of any foreign language, or the possession of any specialized knowledge, a prerequisite for entrants). So it is disqualified as the answer, it cannot be the “non-obvious literary allusion.”
Only one literary allusion meets the criterion of being both “non-obvious” and in English. It is contained in the following sentence:
The city, Jerusalem, had also been in the news, even more than usual, alas, in mid-January because of proposals being considered by the Israeli government, the result of that fateful meeting in Annapolis and its heedless aftermath.”
“Heedless aftermath” is a non-obvious allusion to a beautiful phrase in Robert Frost’s poem “A Late Walk”:
When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.
And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words
A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.
I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.
There, in line 2, is the “headless aftermath” which prompted my “heedless aftermath.”
And that concludes the answers to the Mom-and-Pop Quiz, and its heedful head-crammed aftermath.
Posted on 03/09/2010 5:37 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Why These And Not Those, You May Ask
i happened to glance at those searches that have led people today to this site, and sixteen of them were apparently brought here by the phrase "Exelauno Day." And so i decided to put up the original quiz, the answer I posted to that quiz, with the phrase "Sherman exelaunically marched," and with the "final answer" which recapitulated all that had been posted about the mom-and-pop quiz before, and then, larkishly, added some extra, just for you.
That's why these and not those. Posted on 03/09/2010 5:39 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
A Cinematic Musical Interlude: El Negro Zumbon (Anna Magnani)
Posted on 03/09/2010 5:44 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Member Of Al-Saud Family Honored For Contributions To Art
Prince Khaled honored for contribution to art
Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal receives the National Order of the Montenegrin Grand Star from Montenegro President Filip Vujanovic at a function held at the King Faisal Palace in Riyadh on Tuesday. (AN photo by Misfr Al-Dossary)
By MD RASOOLDEEN | ARAB NEWS
Published: Mar 10, 2010 00:33 Updated: Mar 10, 2010 00:34
RIYADH: Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal received on Tuesday the National Order of the Montenegrin Grand Star in recognition of his longstanding contribution to furthering cultural, artistic and educational understanding between Europe and Saudi Arabia.
The medal was presented by the President of Montenegro, Filip Vujanovic, at a function held at the King Faisal Palace in Riyadh.
The ceremony was attended by Chairman of the Board of Directors of King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies Prince Turki Al-Faisal; Montenegro Culture, Sports and Media Minister Branislave Micunovic; Director of the King Faisal Foundation, Prince Bandar Al-Saud; Chairman of Painting & Patronage, Anthony Bailey; and King Faisal International Prize winners who came to receive their awards at Tuesday’s King Faisal International Prize ceremony.
Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, a renowned artist, displayed his first exhibition of oil paintings and gouaches in 1985 at Al-Khozama Center in Riyadh.
“The award is being given to Prince Khaled for his outstanding contribution to art, culture and education,” said Vujanovic, adding that he hopes this will herald new relations with the Kingdom.
Accepting the award, Prince Khaled said he was honored to receive the award from Montenegro’s president himself. “Art and culture creates relationships between humans,” he said.
The award comes under the Painting and Patronage Program established by Prince Khaled under the patronage of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah.
Formed in 1999, with its founding Chairman Bailey, the organization funds exchange programs and organizes artistic summer schools and outreach programs as well as exhibitions for Saudi and European artists. Previous programs have taken place in several countries including the UK and Portugal.
“This is yet another illustration of the high regard of the lifetime achievements of Prince Khaled Al-Faisal,” said Bailey. “Painting and Patronage Program looks forward to engaging with its artistic community in the years to come,” he said.
After the awards ceremony, Vujanovic and other dignitaries were given a tour of Alfaisal University, which is located in the grounds of King Faisal Palace. The visiting president and his delegation met with Alfaisal University officials Ronald Bulbulian, acting provost, Ala Al-Bakri, vice president for accreditation and quality assurance, and Princess Maha bint Mishari, executive director for external affairs.
Posted on 03/09/2010 10:35 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Monday, 8 March 2010
Johanna Markind On The Case Of Jesus (Hold The Christ) And Muhammad (Add The Prophet)
March 08, 2010
NYT and WaPo: Muhammad Is the Prophet of God
By Johanna Markind
Is Muhammad more deserving of reverential treatment than Jesus? The New York Times seems to think so.
A Times article reporting on the collapse of Christian communities in the Middle East contains two references to Jesus. Not "Christ," which is a religious title, or "Jesus Christ," but simply "Jesus," who was (or may have been) a historical figure. The same is true of other Times stories and wire service articles published by the Times which no longer appear on its website (but still appear on other sites under different titles and are linked below). A December 21 story entitled " First Jesus-Era House Discovered in Nazareth" (AP byline) contains ten references to Jesus and none to Christ. Ditto another item, " Mass. School Denies Suspending Student for Drawing" (also AP), about a second grader who may have been suspended for drawing a figure of Jesus on the cross. Three references to Jesus, none to Christ. The Times, the AP, and Reuters all have style manuals setting forth their policies about usage for proper names like "Jesus." Both the Times and Reuters manuals explicitly caution against using the term "Christ" when referring to Jesus because it is a theological term, "a title non-Christians would not give him," as Reuters' handbook says. Similarly, the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage does not list "Prophet Muhammad" as an acceptable usage. It says only: "Muhammad. Use this spelling for the name of the prophet of the Muslim religion." Both Reuters and the AP Stylebook identify Muhammad as "Prophet," but neither explicitly states whether "Prophet Muhammad" is a preferred, disfavored, or neutral usage. The Times confirmed that its above-cited styles are current, but did not respond to an inquiry about its actual practice. The Washington Post, AP, and Reuters did not respond at all to inquiries for this article.
If the New York Times views Jesus as "undisputed and therefore preferred," its current practice regarding Muhammad does not meet the same standard. As a historical personage, Muhammad is, well, at least as " undisputed" as Jesus. Thus his name alone should presumably be preferred. But in fact the paper regularly refers to Muhammad by his religious title, "Prophet Muhammad." This is not the exception, but it appears to be the rule in major media today, including:
- Recent Times stories about Iran and Iraq ("Prophet Muhammad" identified as the grandfather of Imam Hussein, whose death is commemorated on the Shiite holy day of Ashura).
- A Washington Post article about political unrest in Iran during Ashura (two references to Muhammad, the first as the "prophet Muhammad").
In short, the foundational figure of Islam is treated with a reverence not meted out to the foundational figure of Christianity or other faiths like Judaism. Newspaper references to Moses do not identify him by titles such as "Prophet" or "Rabbeinu," "our teacher," the traditional Jewish honorific applied to him. There could be several reasons for this. Editors may be attempting to educate a non-Muslim readership or to placate Muslim readers and/or reporters.
Regardless, it bears an uncomfortable resemblance to pressures being felt in America and other Western countries to create exceptions to societal norms in favor of Islamic ones. For example, Ontario and Great Britain provide welfare benefits to multiple wives. Public colleges and private colleges have used their resources to provide Muslim prayer facilities. Other efforts have thus far been less successful, like allowing Muslim women to veil themselves in driver's license photos, enabling Muslim cabbies to refuse blind passengers accompanied by guide dogs, or refusing medical treatment to or from those not conforming to Muslim modesty strictures. Free expression has been the greatest victim so far. For example, hate speech laws have been used to penalize critics of Islam through the filing of frivolous " defamation" lawsuits against them. Even more worrisome is the self-censorship that has taken root in American media and publishers. Few prominent newspapers published Kurt Westergaard's Muhammad cartoon. Yale University Press' refusal to publish the cartoons in a book about the controversy is clearer evidence yet that the threat of physical violence, like the attempt to kill Westergaard and the threat of financially draining lawsuits, have had a chilling effect on publications about Islamic extremism. Referring to Muhammad by his religious title is a related development, but it is also a step beyond. It is not self-censorship, which is the failure to publish material out of deference or fear. Rather, it flirts with propaganda. The media are affirmatively recognizing Muhammad by his religious title, almost endorsing his prophethood -- and proclaiming Muhammad's prophethood is half of the Muslim credo -- while demoting or devaluing other religions whose foundational figures are not treated with the same respect. The cumulative end result of this campaign, if it is successful, is recreating American society in the image of Islam, where Islam and Muslims have an elevated status above other religions and their adherents. However, Americans may remain blithely ignorant of these developments as they are happening, because the media will not report them.
Johanna Markind is an attorney specializing in criminal law and a part-time journalist specializing in religion. This article was sponsored by Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.
Posted on 03/08/2010 10:30 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Monday, 8 March 2010
A Musical Interlude: Miss Otis Regrets (Ethel Waters)
Posted on 03/08/2010 11:40 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Monday, 8 March 2010
Or, As Muslims Call It, Al-Quds
The article by Joanna Markind here, on the increasing use of the phrase "the Prophet Muhammad" by the very same newspapers that carefully refrain from referring to "Jesus Christ" notes that these papers have Style Guides with rules of usage to which they presumably adhere:
"The Times, the AP, and Reuters all have style manuals setting forth their policies about usage for proper names like "Jesus." Both the Times and Reuters manuals explicitly caution against using the term "Christ" when referring to Jesus because it is a theological term, "a title non-Christians would not give him," as Reuters' handbook says.
Similarly, the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage does not list "Prophet Muhammad" as an acceptable usage. It says only: "Muhammad. Use this spelling for the name of the prophet of the Muslim religion." Both Reuters and the AP Stylebook identify Muhammad as "Prophet," but neither explicitly states whether "Prophet Muhammad" is a preferred, disfavored, or neutral usage.
The Times confirmed that its above-cited styles are current, but did not respond to an inquiry about its actual practice. The Washington Post, AP, and Reuters did not respond at all to inquiries for this article.
If the New York Times views Jesus as "undisputed and therefore preferred," its current practice regarding Muhammad does not meet the same standard. As a historical personage, Muhammad is, well, at least as " undisputed" as Jesus. Thus his name alone should presumably be preferred. But in fact the paper regularly refers to Muhammad by his religious title, "Prophet Muhammad."
So, while "Christ" or "Jesus Christ" cannot be used by these newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post) and news-reporting organizations (Reuters, AP) "because it is a theological term, a title non-Christians would not give him'" as it says in the Reuters handbook, apparently the Muslim title of "Prophet" - a title non-Muslims would not give him -- is entirely right and proper.
And this solicitousness, or even submissiveness, about Muslim usage, can be seen as well in the remarkable way that the Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism, known to both Jews and Christians as "the Temple Mount," has now suddenly become transmogrified into the impossibly unwieldly "the Temple Mount, as Jews call it, or the Harim al-Sharif, as Muslims call it" as if these were of equal lineage and legitimacy, and as if Christians and Jews were under some obligatin to reflexively recognize, whatever name, and interpretation, Muslims wished to give to what has always been known as Temple Mount. Still another way has been to write "the Temple Mount, or the Noble Sanctuary, as Muslims call it" -- but this is just a little less effective, because many non-Muslims know perfectly well that the term "The Two Noble Sanctuaries" refers to Mecca and Medina, and the Saudis have arrogated to themselves, and call themselves, "The Guardians of the Two Noble Sanctuaries." So it becomes a little strange to have this other, far less important, almost-an-afterthought (well, it was an afterthought, of the Umayyad caliph in Damascus who first decided to place the "farthest mosque" (al-masjid al-aksa) in a place that had no mosques at the time, Jerusalem, and thereby to lay claim to the Temple Mount (now the site from which Muhammad's journey on his winged steed al-Buraq, from earth to the Seventh Heaven and back, all within a single day) and to Jerusalem.
And mention of Jerusalem makes one wonder how long it will be before the New York Times, or the London Times, or other papers in the Western world, dutifully worrying about Muslim sensibilities with furrowed brows, will refer to Jerusalem thus: "Jerusalem, as Christians and Jews call it, or Al-Quds, as the Muslims call it."
The obvious possibilities suggest themselves. Al-Quds Artichokes. Build a new Al-Quds, in England's green and pleasant land. Next year in Al-Quds. Al-Quds the Golden. Go ahead -- think of some yourselves.
Be the first on your block. But not the last. No, if we don't start to inform ourselves adequately and respond with a modicum of sanity and a sense of self-preservation, we'll all have to get with this program.
Posted on 03/08/2010 12:05 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Monday, 8 March 2010
A Cinematic Musical Interlude: Pane Amore e Gelosia (Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio De Sica)
Posted on 03/08/2010 7:41 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Monday, 8 March 2010
Agence France Press Words It Thus: Clinton Calls On Nigerian Government To Bring "Killers Of Christians" To Justice
Nigeria must bring killers of Christians to justice: Clinton
(AFP) – 9 hours ago
WASHINGTON — US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Monday on Nigeria to find and punish those responsible for the killings of more than 500 Christians in a wave of sectarian slaughter.
"We continue to urge all parties to exercise restraint," Clinton told reporters, adding the Nigerian government "should make sure the perpetrators are brought to justice."
Clinton addressed reporters during a press conference with Gabon President Ali Bongo after more than 500 people were reported killed in three Christian villages in the north of the country.
"The Nigerian government should ensure that the perpetrators of acts of violence are brought to justice under the rule of law and that human rights are respected as order is restored," the chief US diplomat said. Posted on 03/08/2010 11:46 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Monday, 8 March 2010
A Musical Interlude: There Are Strange Things Happening Everyday (Sister Rosetta Tharpe)
Posted on 03/08/2010 11:49 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Sunday, 7 March 2010
A Musical Interlude: Never Swat A Fly (Abe Lyman Orch., voc. Marjorie White, Frank Albertson)
Posted on 03/07/2010 10:35 AM by Hugh Fitzgerald
Sunday, 7 March 2010
Muslim Marauders Hack Christian Villagers To Death In Nigeria
From Reuters:
Up to 300 feared dead in central Nigeria clashes
By Shuaibu Mohammed
JOS, Nigeria (Reuters) - Nigeria's acting president Sunday ordered the security forces to hunt down those behind clashes involving Muslim herders and Christian villagers in which more than 300 people may have been killed.
The latest unrest in Nigeria's central Plateau state comes at a difficult time, with acting leader Goodluck Jonathan trying to assert his authority while ailing President Umaru Yar'Adua remains too sick to govern the oil-producing nation.
Villagers in Dogo Nahawa, just south of the state capital Jos, said Hausa-Fulani herders from surrounding hills attacked at about 3 a.m. (10 p.m. EST), shooting into the air before cutting those who came out of their homes with machetes.
A Red Cross official said at least two other nearby communities were also targeted, in an area close to where sectarian clashes killed hundreds of people in January, but that it was too early to give an overall death toll.
A Reuters witness counted more than 120 bodies -- most lying in Dogo Nahawa, others taken to mortuaries in Jos -- but Plateau State Commissioner for Information Gregory Yenlong said more than 300 people, including women and children, had died.
Jonathan put the security forces on red alert to try to prevent reprisal attacks spreading into neighboring states.
"Reports reaching us indicated marauding bands launched a flurry of attacks on certain communities in the state, causing considerable death and injury," Jonathan's office said.
"The Acting President ... has directed that the security services undertake strategic initiatives to confront and defeat these roving bands of killers," it said in a statement.
Some of the bodies seen by the Reuters witness -- including those of women and children -- were charred, others had machete wounds across their faces. Aid workers said some had been shot.
"The shooting was just meant to bring people from their houses and then when people came out they started cutting them with machetes," said Dogo Nahawa resident Peter Jang, women crying behind him.
POLITICAL UNCERTAINTY
Four days of sectarian clashes in January between mobs armed with guns, knives and machetes killed hundreds of people in Jos, which lies at the crossroads of Nigeria's Muslim north and predominantly Christian south.
Jonathan deployed hundreds of troops and police to quell January's unrest, in which community leaders put the death toll at more than 400. Official police figures estimated the death toll from the clashes two months ago at 326.
Yenlong said the state government may consider extending a dusk-to-dawn curfew still in place after January's unrest.
It was not immediately clear what triggered the latest unrest, but thousands have died in religious and ethnic violence in central Nigeria over the past 10 years.
The tension is rooted in decades of resentment between indigenous groups, mostly Christian or animist, who are vying for control of fertile farmlands with migrants and settlers from the Hausa-speaking Muslim north.
The instability underscores the fragility of Africa's most populous nation as it approaches the campaign period for 2011 elections with uncertainty over who is in charge.
Yar'Adua returned from three months in a Saudi hospital, where he was being treated for a heart condition, a week and a half ago but has still not been seen in public. Presidency sources say he remains in a mobile intensive care unit.
Fears of a debilitating power struggle between Yar'Adua's inner circle, a northern elite keen to maintain its grip on power, and Jonathan -- who is from the south -- sprang up in the OPEC member state of 140 million people when the 58-year-old leader was flown back late at night and driven off by ambulance.
(Additional reporting by Felix Onuah and Camillus Eboh in Abuja; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Peter Millership)
Posted on 03/07/2010 6:38 PM by Hugh Fitzgerald
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