Those of you who ordered Far From Algiers from Kent State University Press in advance of last Friday’s publication date have received notice that it’s “on the truck.” Thank you for this vote of confidence. I hope you will be rewarded. If you contact me, I will be happy to inscribe a bookplate for you.

I was in Provincetown, MA, when the book was released Friday. Wagnerian thunder and lightning storms were passing over that topsy-turvy arts colony. My mission there was relevant to the book, in a way. The cover of the book features Hole in Time, a Surrealist painting by my mother, the artist Juanita Guccione, and I had come to Provincetown for the opening of an exhibition of three of her Surrealist paintings and three gouaches by her sister and my aunt, Irene Rice Pereira. You can see Hole in Time if you click on Far From Algiers.

I was happy to be there because it’s a bastion of tolerance and thoughtfulness in a time of heightened intolerance and witlessness. There are more than sixty art galleries in Provincetown and people wander the streets, dropping into galleries and socializing as they go. The town is full of people who look as if they ought to be famous. Undoubtedly some of them are. But, unlike many art colonies, there is little exhibitionism. People don’t seem to go there as much to be seen as to see, to share the hospitable eccentricity. This is just where I want to be as my little book appears, I told myself.

I had another reason for being there, too. I had helped manage my aunt’s paintings when she died in 1971, as I manage my mother’s paintings now. They had devoted their lives to art, to the creation of beauty, and I thought Provincetown was a fitting place to pay my own homage to that achievement.—DM

The business of The New York Times, like that of any media company, is language, and as newspapers go The Times is the most literate. That is why I was disquieted to read this passage in a Times editorial yesterday:

“Mr. Bush’s father deftly managed the Soviet Union’s dissolution. President Bill Clinton did a poorer job managing Russia’s post-cold war decline and Mr. Bush has done even worse managing its resurgence.” (more…)

There are African elephants and Asian elephants, but nobody talks about The Great Invisible American Elephant whose herds roam the cultural scene.

There they are, standing in hospital waiting rooms, in news rooms, in class rooms, in back rooms. And here we are,  navigating around them like waiters with a tray of cocktails over our heads. Problem? Cocktail, anyone?

Anyone who has ever tried to schedule a test with a hospital or a laboratory and encountered a telephone tree, in fact anyone who has ever encountered a telephone tree anywhere, has been run over by one of these elephants. (more…)

In the August 8th Times Literary Supplement there is a piquant 1936 photograph by Alfred Eisenstadt of four ballet dancers in a window at The School of American Ballet. George Balanchine, cofounder with Lincoln Kirsten of the school, had a famous penchant for tall, lithe women dancers. One can’t tell from Eisenstadt’s photo how tall these women are, but they’re clearly not the epitome of Balanchine’s preference for elongation.

When I was a young man I fell in love with a young woman who was attending that school in the early 1950s and I can attest that by then Balanchine’s anatomical preferences had been fully expressed. So, contemplating those women in the window, it occurred to me that American culture has developed schizophrenia in the matter of body mass.

On the one hand, the advertising and entertainment industries have presented us with the ideal of fencing-foil bodies that verge on the anorexic, while the food industry encourages us to consume as if our sole ambition is to become dirigibles. We’re caught in a commercial vise. We’re asked to idolize thin people while turning ourselves into blimps. It’s not unlike the television advertisements still cajoling us to buy SUVs while we’re implored to save gasoline. It’s even more like the dilemma of being urged by feckless politicians on the one hand to save while at the same time being urged to spend more to rescue the economy. (more…)

It is perhaps a measure of the White House’s cockeyed hubris that Russia has seized a moment in history when our armed forces are overextended to bully our ally, neighboring Georgia. Given such hubris, it was inevitable the White House would forget it’s not the only bully on the block. (more…)

The news industry is worrying itself from its 19th Century decrepitude to the ether, but it needs to redefine the concept of news itself. What we read in our newspapers and watch on television is antiquarian. In some ways magazines, with their broader perspectives, are ahead of the curve.

What the news needs more than anything else is historical context, the very thing news executives have always eschewed in favor of immediacy. Without historical context the news becomes a major cause of ill-considered, slogan-driven policy.

The news industry has given itself a pass for its culpability in taking us to war in Iraq, but while we’re remembering the distortions of intelligence data and the downright lies of the White House we ought to remember how CNN and Fox News melodramatically beat the war drums and how the print media failed at due diligence when there were plenty of Arabists around to challenge the war policy. (more…)

Some people become ghosts before their time. They’re spoken about but avoided like sharp-edged furniture or a malodorous back alley. They’re painted into problematical corners, as if somehow they’re a problem which everyone knows but can’t name. It’s the kind of thing that happens when a wife starts calling a well read husband The Professor or an orderly husband Ned Neat. Women become The Missus or The Boss. Ghosts before their time, not because they chose to be but because others needed a problem, an object to avoid, something to get around. (more…)

Are we becoming a land of belittlers and giggly sycophants?

I listened to John McCain, the man who promised us the high road, deriding Barack Obama’s innocuous admonition to pump more air into our car tires to get more mileage. McCain’s point was that Obama is silly, and there was giggly laughter from the audience. But any sensible person who has ever bothered to learn anything about mileage knows that Obama was absolutely right, if in a small ball way. So what were the McCainites laughing at? They just like derision. (more…)

When you search the web for Sinbad you’re likely to find David Adkins, the comedian,  before you find that wealthy young sailor of Basra whose adventures are immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights.

When you search on Odysseus you find Homer’s mythological sailor immediately. We are, after all,  Eurocentric, and worldwide accessibility to the web has not yet redressed its many Eurocentric biases. But the web is ahead of most textbooks in this regard.

In Sinbad’s case this historical tilt is particularly unfortunate because his native land and city have been making front-page headlines for many years. It’s not that Sinbad has been neglected—the Safari search engine shows 5,210,000 results for his name—but that he isn’t taken seriously in the same way we take seriously Greek mythological figures such as Odysseus and Achilles. In fact, there is a tendency to confuse Greek mythology with Greek history in the popular mind. (more…)

The fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis keeps ambushing us. As I scan the world wide web I see another rogue wave rolling in as homeowners ask themselves why they shouldn’t be given property tax relief in light of declining market values. (more…)