THE HOBBIT

Susie and I just got back from Place de l'Odeon, where we saw the new movie, THE HOBBIT, in the original version [which is to say, in English, and also in Elvish and Orkish and ancient Dwarvish with French subtitles -- it was a trifle odd.]   I loved it, but that is not the occasion for this blog post.  On the way walking home, I bethought myself of the brilliant unpublished essay by Charles Mills on THE LORD OF THE RINGS.  Mills is, in my opinion, one of the really important political theorists of our time.  His first book, THE RACIAL CONTRACT, is one of the two or three most important pieces of political theory of the past century -- way more important, for example, than Bob Nozick's delightful book, ANARCHY, STATE, AND UTOPIA.

As readers of my autobiography may recall, I was called on to evaluate Mills when he came up for tenure at Illinois Chicago Circle [he now has a chair at Northwestern.]  The main piece of writing they sent me was the manuscript of what became THE RACIAL CONTRACT, but included in the packet was the essay on Tolkein, which I just raved about.  For my sins, as people used to say, I got to write a little plug for the back cover of Mills' book.  I was honored.

THE HOBBIT is apparently the first of a trilogy to be made from Tolkein's slender book.  I hope I live long enough to see all three.

CULINARY ADVENTURES

Ever since Susie and I took the plunge and bought our Paris apartment eight years ago, I have been the cook.  Over the years, I have developed a small repertory of dishes of which I am inordinately proud, as only a mediocre amateur chef can be -- grilled quail, hazelnut encrusted rabbit, five spices duck legs, coquilles St. Jacques, dorade royale [a lovely white fish], tuna, swordfish, paupiettes provencale [a cheat, these, inasmuch as they are delicious little concoctions of turkey, bacon, and farci already prepared by the local butcher].  Today, urged on by Susie, who in the day was truly a great cordon bleu cook, I bought skate at the market [or "raie,"as it is called in France.]  Skate is a really scary looking thing, lying there at the fishmonger's stall as though it was ready to fly into your boat and bite you.  I found a fairly simple recipe online, and tomorrow night I shall try it.  Who knows, if this works, I might even try my hand at escargots!

AM I MISSING SOMETHING?

The resignation from the Senate of Jim DeMint has created an opportunity for Nicki Haley, Governor of the deep red state of South Carolina, to appoint a replacement for the two years until 2014, when a special election will be held to fill the seat for the remaining two years until it is normally up for election in 2016.   Needless to say, only certifiably far right wing Republicans need apply.  A number of quick polls, testing the support for five or six of the usual suspects, has revealed that the person with the most support is television personality Stephen Colbert.

Now, I admit that I am a naive boob from the clueless Northeast, recently transplanted to the equally clueless Research Triangle area of North Carolina, but isn't Colbert a liberal whose comic TV shtick is to masquerade as a batshit crazy right winger?  Have I been seeing comedy all these years when in fact it was just honest nuttiness?

CIRCUMNAVIGATING THE FIFTH

This morning, emboldened by a good night's sleep, I decided to set out on a major new route for my morning constitutional.  Instead of walking past Notre Dame along the quais to the National Assembly and then back home via Boulevard St.Germain, a walk of about six kilometers, I decided to try my hand [or my feet] at walking all the way around the fifth arrondissement where our apartment is located.  The fifth is pentagonal, roughly in the shape of a single-peaked house lying on its side.  Our street juts south from one of the long sides of the pentagon.  I started there, and walked east along the quais to the end of the Jardin des Plantes.  A 60 degree right angle turn on rue de l'Hopital followed by another 60 degree right turn on Boulevard Saint Marcel brought me to the southern edge of the arrondissement, Boulevard du Port Royal.  A long, long walk along that boulevard ended at a point where Boulevard St. Michel intersects, heading north.  That takes you back to Boulevard St. Germain, and then home.  This morning, when I got to the northeast corner of the Jardin du Luxembourg, I chose instead to turn right on rue Soufflot up to the Pantheon and then down rue des Carmes to our own Place Maubert.  All in all, a little less than four miles, which took me just an hour.  A side trip to pick up two bauguettes Keyser and I was home at about 8:40 a.m.

This morning's route was strikingly different from my usual walk, which goes by some of the classic spots of old Paris -- Notre Dame, the Louvre, the French Academy, the Musee d'Orsay, Brasserie Lippe, Cafe des Flores, and Les Deux Magots.  This morning I saw modern-day Paris waking up -- scores of people pouring out of Metro stations, hurrying to work, parents taking their children to school, the large Val de Grace hospital complex coming alive, and masses of traffic clogging the streets.

It was all something of an adventure;  I was not sure how it would go, or whether my estimate of the distance from my map wouldturn out to be accurate.  But all in all, I think I prefer the old Paris route.

A QUESTION FOR A SUNDAY MORNING

In this post, I am going to pose something akin to what legal theorists call a hypothetical.  I ask you to accept, hypothetically, a set of facts, so that we may discuss a question of policy without at the same time debating the facts of the case.  I am aware that from certain epistemological perspectives, this distinction is impossible to make, and we can discuss that as we go forward.

Assume, contrary to reality, that America is pretty much domestically what you would like it to be.  For me, that means assuming that America is a secular democracy with a socialist economy, a very flat distribution of wealth and income, and an operative commitment to policies addressing global warming, an America in which the Yankees are permanently mired in last place [oh well, you can leave that last one out if you insist.]  Your ideal America may differ from mine.  If you decide to join the conversation, try to sketch your own ideal America as part of your comment so that the rest of us understand where you are coming from.

In this radically counterfactual case, what should the foreign and military policy of such an America be?

It is no great effort in the real world to criticize every aspect of America’s military and foreign policy.  The real America is an imperial hegemon whose military budget virtually equals that of the rest of the world and whose actions over the past sixty years have again and again supported dictators and tyrants and undermined or actively deposed and defeated progressive forces on every continent except Antarctica.  Let us stipulate that, as they say in the trial courts.

But what should the policies of an ideal America be?  There are two obvious polar alternative responses to this question.  The first response is:  America should maintain its military dominance of the world, but use its power to advance democracy and socialism rather than autocracy and capitalism.  America should support the Fidel Castros and Mohammed Mosaddeghs and Daniel Ortegas of this world rather than doing its best to overthrow or kill them.  America should use its wealth and power to support the Palestinian cause.  And so forth and so on.

The second response is:  American should withdraw all of its troops from foreign soil, should reduce its military budget to the minimum necessary to defend itself [from Canada and Mexico, presumably], and should embrace Thomas Jefferson’s call for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”

Each of these alternatives has troubling consequences that it is difficult to disentangle from the policy.  A militarily dominant America will maintain an enormous military establishment whose existence will shape its domestic politics regardless of how well-intentioned its architects may be.  Every time such an America projects its power abroad for some indisputably progressive cause, there will be innocent men, women, and children who are killed unintentionally.  [It is not only military actions in support of dictators that produce “collateral damage.”]  The easy availability of those military options will have a powerfully corrupting effect on those who exercise the use of the armed forces, even though such exercise is, or is supposed to be, guided by impeccably progressive principles.  But if, let us say,  such an America wishes at a moment’s notice to be able to impose a no-fly zone on Libya during a popular uprising against Khadafy, it will need to maintain aircraft carriers and squadrons of fighters and spy satellites and special ops forces on a permanent footing.

The alternative is to adopt a non-interventionist policy with a military only large enough to deal with genuine threats to the security of America’s borders.  But such an America will have to stand idly by when the forces of revolutionary progress are being pounded into the ground by tyrants. It will be unable to move swiftly and effectively to stop genocidal slaughter by religious fanatics.  Such an America will not be the immediate cause of retrogressive tragedies nor will it prop up dynasts and dictators, but it will have to be content merely to watch the slave labor of children and the bondage of women abroad.

So, what should the foreign and military stance of an ideal America be?  I confess that I am genuinely unsure.

THE PREROGATIVES OF THE GODS

While Susie was out having her hair done, I set about making a simple dinner of salmon steaks, courgettes, and mushrooms.  To liven the apartment, I put on the great recording of Handel's Semele with Kathleen Battle singing the title role.  I do not know how many of you are familiar with Battle.  She is a coloratura soprano who, in the day, had a divine voice -- supple, exquisite, transcendent.  Her recording with Wynton Marsalis of arias for trumpet and soprano is one of the greatest CD's I have ever heard.  Early in Semele, Battle sings the aria "The morning lark to mine accords his note." As her voice filled the tiny apartment, my heart soared and tears filled my eyes.  When I have not listened to beautiful music for a while, I forget how powerfully it moves me.

Battle is a famously difficult artist. She was actually banished from the Met for "unprofessional behavior," the description of which makes it clear that she was the classic diva, imperious, selfish, egocentric, demanding, impossible. So the Met clearly had every bureaucratic right to banish her.  The only problem is that she sang better than anyone else they could find.  Now the Met exists for one and only one purpose: to make beautiful music.  If it fails to do that, it has no right to exist and to drain from the public purse the enormous resources that it takes to put great opera on these days.  I have always thought they should have put up with her outrageous behavior -- and it apparently was really outrageous -- simply for the privilege of putting her on stage to sing.

When I am in the presence of great music, I lose all sense of the quotidien world.  On one occasion, at Tanglewood, I heard Yo Yo Ma play several of the Bach Suites for unaccompanied cello.  He did not seem to be so much playing them as listening to himself play them.  He had long since so completely mastered the impossibly difficult demands of the music that now he simply existed in the same space and time with it.  He was actually accompanying a ballet troupe that was dancing to the music, but I could not bear to be distracted by their dancing [which was, to  be sure, quite expert], so I positioned myself behind the person sitting in front of me in such a way that I could see Yo Yo Ma but not the dancers.  The music he was playing was almost more than I could bear all by itself.

There is a glimmer of the same unearthly transcendence in that lovely old movie, The Hustler, in the scene in which Paul Newman prowls like a great cat around the pool table, destroying Minnesota Fats [played wonderfully by Jackie Gleason].  "I can't lose," he says to his manager, George C. Scott, and you know that something is moving within him that makes that true.

I am an atheist, as my blog site announces,so perhaps this is as close as I can ever approach to the experience of the divine.

BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN

My apologies for being out of touch – Paris has that effect on me.  Today, I shall post an omnium gatherum of bits and pieces of news from Paris.  Tomorrow, I shall broach a large and very difficult question that has bothered me for some time now.  Perhaps it will stimulate some interesting discussion.

Paris is unusually cold and rather rainy.  Since I gave away my heavy winter coat when I moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina four years ago, I have been reduced here to wearing several sweaters and a lined trench coat in an effort to stay warm.  I like to think that I look like Orson Welles in The Third Man [well, one can dream.]  The night before last snow was predicted, and all Paris braced, but in the end no more than a few flakes fell.

The big news from my little copropriété [which is to say “condo”] is the cave vouté or vaulted cave discovered right under our bathroom when workmen dug down to prop up the seventeenth century building [which was starting to show cracks in the outer walls.]  It is a rather large space, apparently.  I immediately announced dibs on any treasure discovered, but the engineer hired by the syndic that manages our building opined that it was probably part of an old septic system.  Pretty disappointing.  On Tuesday, at eleven in the morning, there was a gathering outside our French doors, at the hole, which narrows the access to our apartment.  The space is unusable, even as a wine cellar, because of the humidity, but it poses a threat of flooding since we are only half a block from the Seine.  The only good news is that since no one knew the cave existed, it is not mentioned in the legal documents forming the copropriété out of three buildings around an interior courtyard, so instead of charging only the owners of the apartments in our building for work dealing with the cave, all fifteen apartments will be charged.  Not equally, of course, but in proportion to their usable floor space.  Our tiny apartment is 2.77% of the total floor space, so we pay 2.77% of the repair costs.

Meanwhile, the really bad news in Paris is that the little weekly magazine, Pariscope, that lists concerts, movies, art exhibitions, and everything else happening in Paris, is on strike, so we are left to scrounge for places to visit.  On Wednesday [the day movies change in Paris] Susie and I walked down to Place de l’Odéon to see Killing Them Softly, the new Brad Pitt movie.  I thought it was a brilliantly powerful political commentary on contemporary America, with the last speech by Pitt an excoriating debunking of mainstream political rhetoric, but then I read Anthony Lane’s review in The New Yorker and discovered that I am an ignorant boob.  I think I will stick to the Critique of Pure Reason.   Film criticism is too sophisticated for me.  Next Wednesday The Hobbit opens.  I shall not attempt a commentary, lest I embarrass myself.

Today I went to the market to shop for dinner for tonight and tomorrow.  I got half a rabbit cut up [without the head], and some hazelnuts for my signature “rabbit loins with hazelnuts, five spices, and curry” dish.  Asparagus and mushrooms should go nicely.

An observation about small cultural differences between the French and Americans:  In a café, the French bring their dogs with them to the table but sit their children at an adjoining table so they will not interrupt the adult conversation.  Americans bring their children with them to the table and leave the dogs in the station wagon.

The parvis Nôtre Dame, the large cobblestoned square in front of the grand church at the bottom of our street, is almost totally occupied by large stands and other structures that have been erected to celebrate Nôtre Dame’s 850^th birthday next year.  Nôtre Dame took so long to build that the great grandchildren of the original workmen did not see it completed.  It remains, to my untutored eye, the most beautiful building in the world.

Susie and I dropped by Shakespeare and Company, the well-known English language bookstore, to find something to read.  They are asking for patrons to contribute recollections of the shop, especially in its earliest years, for a forthcoming volume. I spent a good deal of time hanging out there in the Spring of 1955, when it was still Le Mistral, and not yet Shakespeare and Co.  I shall send them an email with some reminiscences.

And so to bed, as Samuel Pepys liked to say.  Tomorrow, serious stuff.