Archive for 2009

09w18:2 All Eyes on Ignatieff (2005)

by timothy. 4 Comments

All eyes on Ignatieff

Peter C. Newman
National Post

Saturday, February 26, 2005

Now that Paul Martin has recognized there exists a middle ground between shooting from the hip and rigor mortis, and has finally begun to act like a prime minister, the review of his leadership at next week’s Liberal convention is a predictable formality.

The real star at the gathering will be Michael Ignatieff, who has been asked to deliver the keynote address. Given the pivotal role he may eventually come to play within the party, the attention will be richly deserved.

The Toronto-born academic has taught at Cambridge University, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, as well as St. Anthony’s College at Oxford, and is currently a tenured professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has written half a dozen defining books on ethnic nationalism and the moral imagination. But unlike most intellectuals, he has also ventured into fiction. His book Scar Tissue was nominated for the Booker Prize, while Charlie Johnson in the Flames has been compared to thrillers by Graham Greene and Len Deighton. His current projects include a book on Canada, which will follow the trail blazed by his great-grandfather George Munro Grant, the great principal of Queen’s University.

Ignatieff’s speech will be of interest not only because of the insights he is expected to offer on the prospects for a world in turmoil. Some senior party strategists have convinced themselves he might be persuaded to run for the leadership once Paul Martin decides to seek calmer pastures.

Significantly, it was Martin himself who recommended that Prof. Ignatieff address the convention on the theme of “Liberalism in the 21st Century.”

So far, switching careers is not part of Prof. Ignatieff’s life plan, but he doesn’t recoil in horror when the same idea is mentioned, as Pierre Trudeau did when the subject was first broached in 1967. Certainly, the aura of great things hangs about the man: A far-sighted TV crew is following his footsteps as he researches a new book, modelled on Alexis de Tocqueville’s epic journey across the United States 150 years ago.

If this still hypothetical but entirely plausible manoeuvre succeeds, it would be very much in keeping with the masterful strategy that has kept the Liberal party in power longer than any other democratic political movement in history. Unlike Conservatives, who seem to choose leaders by drawing straws, the Liberals take a more systematic approach. The eight candidates who have assumed command of the Governing Party since the 1919 leadership convention demonstrate a pattern: Liberal kingmakers often ignore the clamouring of ambitious Cabinet members and opt instead to pluck from obscurity an untried but inspiring outsider.

That’s political sorcery of the highest order. Instead of having to defend the corruption and patronage of the ancien regime, the freshly-minted leader can innocently declare: “Who me? What Sponsorship Scandal? This is moi, a new guy with new ideas.”

Thus does discontinuity rule.

The pattern began with Mackenzie King, the Party’s patron saint, still worshipped for turning Liberalism into Canada’s state religion. At the 1919 leadership convention, his main opponent was William Stevens Fielding, who had been a successful minister of finance in Wilfrid Laurier’s 1896 cabinet and was considered Laurier’s natural successor. Instead, delegates voted for King, then deputy minister of labour, who had briefly sat as a Liberal backbencher 10 years earlier, but left to become a consultant. A spooky bachelor who was so fastidious that he travelled with six spare shoe laces, he led the Liberals into office two years later, and kept them there for most of the next three (eternal) decades.

In 1948, when it came time for Mr. King to prepare his departure, Jimmy Gardiner and Chubby Power were the party regulars in line to grab the brass ring. Instead, Mr. King went outside his circle to recruit Louis St. Laurent, a Quebec City corporate lawyer, and manoeuvred the 1948 Liberal leadership convention to assure his victory. Ten years later, Paul Martin Sr., father of the current PM, was the obvious insiders’ choice. But the delegates selected Lester Bowles Pearson, a political neophyte who’d been a life-long public servant.

The transition that followed tested the outsider pattern with a vengeance. In 1968, when Mike Pearson felt ready to retire, nine candidates ran to succeed him, including Robert Winters, a handsome M.I.T. graduate who had served with distinction in the St. Laurent Cabinet before becoming one of Canada’s most powerful corporate bigwigs. Instead, the Liberals opted for Monsieur Trudeau, the ultimate party outsider, a man who only a few years earlier had been a member of the NDP, attacking the government for its nuclear-friendly defence policies. The convention delegates recognized in Trudeau the philosopher-king who could salvage their party, and he did.

Former Justice Minister John Turner was next up in 1984, having turned himself into an outsider a decade earlier, when he suddenly resigned from the Trudeau Cabinet to practise law in Toronto. Jean Chretien’s succession in 1990 similarly followed his resignation from the Commons in 1986 to follow Turner into the hedonistic hollows of Bay Street. Likewise, Paul Martin, Jr. became a nominal and temporary outsider when he was fired from his finance portfolio by Chretien. (In truth, though, he is the exception that proves the rule.)

Given his lack of expressed interest in the job — and the fact he has put down strong roots in the United States — Ignatieff has as great a claim to outsider status as any of these men. He follows closely in the Trudeau mould: a charming and distinguished academic who would endow the crumbling Liberal party with a sense of purpose and the excitement that comes with fresh ideas. Even those untutored Liberal apparatchiks who think charisma is a brand of French perfume will recognize his magnetism, and feel it when he evokes his vision of Canada’s Liberal future.

Ignatieff could be just the man for our time. Canada’s most serious dilemma is not the calamitous state of our health-care system, nor the dithering of our PM, or our growing irrelevance on the world stage. It is the belief among ordinary citizens that they can no longer change things through the political process.

Because democratic activism forms the core of Prof. Ignatieff’s writing and thinking, he might –once he has served his political apprenticeship — turn out to be the ideal successor to Mr. Martin.

During the decade-long Chretien-Martin feud, Canada’s public life became legalized mayhem. Michael Ignatieff’s divine mission, should he choose to accept it, will be to restore the civility, trust and vitality that give birth to creative politics. Next week’s convention will be his proving ground. (National Post 2005)
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The speech Ignatieff gave is transcribed in Goodreads Special Content. – Timothy

09w18:1 Shakespeare's Blog Part XIV

by timothy. 0 Comments

May 1st
We were together, she and I, in my bedchamber, she but newly arrived in a sort of hunting costume with feathered hat, than who should enter by H, whom I have but heard of these many weeks and hardly seen for any length of time since my few minutes of slobbering gratitude over the £1000. She drinks him in, I see that, this striding-about-the-chamber lord with his ringflashing hands beating time to his loudly elegant eloquence of t hat and this and what Lady Such-and-such said and what His Grace observeth of the evil times and the approach of HM’s grand climacteric. He is full of French – bon and quelquechose and jenesaisquoi – so that she listens to him in wonder. He then, as she were a Bart Fair show like a pig-headed child, praises her strangeness, her colour, her littleness. Oh bring her over, he says, we must exhibit her, my friends will be much taken. And all the time she quaffs him and, when he is gone, will not do what she is rightly come to do (or have done) but talks of his clothes and his deadgold swordhilt and his quicksilver words, Mercurio. He is gone now for his plump prostitute boy, I roughly tell her. Oh, dat believe I not, she answers, he is much a gentleman for de ladies; dat see I bwery clear.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p.153)

09w17:1 Shakespeare's Blog Part XIII

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April 20th
Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is out at last as a printed book. Well, we have done better than Gorboduc in the years since he penned it. He would have right tragedies and right comedies and delightful teaching &c. Yet if we are to hold a mirror to nature (I thank thee, nasty Chapman, for that phrase) we must see all in one. Thus, gibbering in my nakedness and approaching her with my cock-crowing yard, I see I am a clown, I see I am also a great king that will possess a golden kingdom. Tragedy is a goat and comedy a village Priapus and dying is the word that links both. Cut your great king’s head off and thrust him in the earth that new life may spring.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p.152-153)

09w12:2 Revealed faces of Victorian Reputations

by timothy. 0 Comments

Mr. Shakespeare


(Image from Time.com)

Portrait of Shakespeare Unveiled, 399 Years Late | Robert Mackey
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/portrait-of-shakespeare-unveiled-399-years-late/?hp

Is This What Shakespeare Looked Like? | Richard Lacayo
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1883770,00.html

Is this a Shakespeare I see before me? | Independent.ie
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/is-this-a-shakespeare-i-see-before-me-1672807.html

A new view: is this the real Shakespeare? | Mark Brown
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/mar/10/shakespeare-cobbe-portrait

Why is this the definitive image of Shakespeare? | BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7936629.stm

Newly Identified Portrait Of William Shakespeare Is Unveiled
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/85308131/Getty-Images-News
LONDON – MARCH 09: A painting of William Shakespeare which is believed to be the only authentic image of Shakespeare made during his life is unveiled by The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on March 9, 2009 in London, England. The recently discovered painting, which is believed to date from around 1610, depicts Shakespeare in his mid-forties. The portrait is due to go on display at The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, 2009.

A reminder: “Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare’s genius, and the Victorians hero-worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called ‘bardolatry’.” [from Wikipedia]

Mr. Da Vinci


(image from PDF linked below)

Da Vinci’s Self-Portrait, Discovered two Years Before Piero Angela’s Television Show
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2009/05/c6273.html

‘Early Leonardo portrait’ found | BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7916351.stm
[there’s an embedded video on this page but the audio doesn’t work for me]

Da Vinci’s Self-Portrait, Discovered two Years Before Piero Angela’s Television Show
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2009/05/c6273.html
“MILAN, March 5 /CNW/ – During the television program Ulysses, aired in Italy on Saturday, the 28th of February, the well-known scientific divulgator Piero Angela stated that a secret drawing, a youthful self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, had just been discovered. Actually, the Leonardo3 (http://www.leonardo3.net) research center in Milan, Italy, had published its own edition of the Codex of Flight (book & interactive software) in the October of 2007: this work included the digital restoration of page 10, revealing the underlying portrait. The same center had also created a 3D reconstruction of the image.”

Leonardo3 SRL (Home Page; PDF containing the PR for the revealed image)

A reminder: ” The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo’s genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: “Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius …”[60] This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: “He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents.”[61] By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo’s notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: “There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries.”[62]” [from Wikipedia]

09w12:1 Shakespeare's Blog XII

by timothy. 0 Comments

March 15th
I hear news from Court that H plays no longer about amoung the Queen’s flowers, that he, in his great man’s new-found maturity, himself now tweaks the pink peach-cheeks of a lovely boy. Ah, how love, in all herhis manifold guises, doth take hold on us and squeeze us of our pride and lustihead. I am besotted with her, would eat her like a butter lamb. I tell her of my near friend’s pederastia, thinking it may make her mirth, but she says men go only so an they lack a powerful woman to keep them to the proper way God ordained. She tells me Tales of the Wise Parrot, which she writes down in her language Hikayat Bayan Budiman, wherein serpents bite the toes of great princesses and are left as dead till some magical prince cometh to kiss them alive again. And then she asks a piece of gold for telling of the stories.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p.152)

09w10:2 Shakspeare's Blog XI

by timothy. 0 Comments

March 4th
Lying on, in, under her, I pore with squinnying eyes on a mole on that browngold rivercolour riverripple skin with its smell of sun, or else a tiny unsqueezed comedo by the flat and splaying nose. Her breath was sour today, too many squares of powdered marchpane. She did not want but, chewing the honey almond stuff still, all careless of my madness, she careless let me do. That I hate, then I would strike her down to grovel like a bitch on her belly. She poutsays I must take her to fine places, go to feast as others do. But I am jealous; not even to the Theatre am I willing that she come, though masked and curtained from men’s viewing. I question the wisdom of her coming now to my lodgings, though mobled up in her coach, her coach to return for her in two hours. Shall we set up house together, this lodging being small? She will keep her own house, she says, she would be free. I have not talked of my wife and children, nor she ever of marriage.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p.151-152)

09w10:1 Göbelki Tepe

by timothy. 0 Comments

Do these mysterious stones mark the site of the Garden of Eden? | Tom Cox
The Daily Mail UK
// in his article he mentions having written a novel: Amazon link; Review

Digging for Paradise | Yigal Schleifer
Walrus Magazine, March 2008

Göbelki Tepe | Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Göbelki Tepe | Deutsches Archäologisches Institut
http://www.dainst.org/index.php?id=642&sessionLanguage=en

Location on Google Maps

09w09:1 Shakespeare's Blog Part X

by timothy. 0 Comments

February 25th
Money money. My presents are not enough (the bolt of silk, the dress of taffetas, the mask encrusted with brilliants). WS, prospering man of affairs, gives gold. Prices are so high, she says. It is on account of the crops failing last year. What does she like best to eat? Mutton stewed tender in spices, coughing with pepper. Odi et amo. Her smell, rank and sweet, repels my sense and drives me to madness. (And all the time poor Richard jogs on toward his foul death. Roan Barbary I have called her: that horse that thou so often hast bestrid, that horse that I so carefully have dressed. Then I see the twoness. She harps still on Burbage, a proper man. Well, that Bolingbroke shall never ride her).

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p. 151)