Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber quotes this self-description by the sociologist Charles Tilly, who died this morning:
Among Tilly’s negative distinctions he prizes 1) never having held office in a professional association, 2) never having chaired a university department or served as a dean, 3) never having been an associate professor, 4) rejection every single time he has been screened as a prospective juror. He had also hoped never to publish a book with a subtitle, but subtitles somehow slipped into two of his co-authored books.
In equal parts sickened by all the time I’ve spent hassling myself over matters political and inspired by the mischievous brilliance of Kent Johnson’s Epigramititis, I’ve decided to work out some fast-and-loose translations of Dante’s Tenzone with Forese Donati. I’ll post them individually as they emerge over the next few days and/or weeks.
In keeping with the spirit of the thing, I’ll try to keep the pedantry to a minimum, but will say that these poems date from sometime before 1296, the year Donati died. (Dante would have turned thirty-one that year, and Donati was probably close to his age.) Some scholars suggest that the Tenzone signals a real break in Dante’s and Donati’s friendship, but I’m less than convinced. In any case, Dante portrays Donati quite affectionately in Purgatorio 23 and 24. For the purpose of today’s installment, it helps to know that “Bicci” was Forese’s nickname, as, it seems, was his father’s. Also, the “dried figs” of the penultimate line are almost certainly a sexual pun, but I don’t think I’ve quite got the sense of it.
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Dante to Forese Donati
Whoever heard the cough
of Bicci’s misfated wife
might say she’d wintered up north
where the snow crystals form.
But even mid-August finds her with a cold—
you can guess how it goes in every other month!
And it does her little good to sleep in socks,
thanks to the short covering she’s got.
No, the cough, the cold, and all her other ills
aren’t the fault of any old phlegm;
the problem is what’s gone missing from her nest.
Her mother, who has more than one reason to cry,
laments, “Oh, and to think that for a few dried figs
I could have put her in the house of count Guido!”
+ + +
Chi udisse tossir la mal fatata
moglie di Bicci vocato Forese,
potrebbe dire ch’ell’ha forse vernata
ove si fa ‘l cristallo in quel paese.
Di mezzo agosto la truovi infreddata;
or sappi che de’ far d’ogni altro mese!
E non le val perché dorma calzata,
merzé del copertoio c’ha cortonese.
La tosse, ‘l freddo e l’altra mala voglia
non l’addovien per omor ch’abbia vecchi,
ma per difetto ch’ella sente al nido.
Piange la madre, c’ha più d’una doglia,
dicendo: “Lassa, che per fichi secchi
messa l’avre’ ‘n casa del conte Guido!”
You know you’ve got a problem when even things like this remind you of the Democratic party. (Be sure to watch the very end.)
As a codicil to last night’s probably ill-advised explication de Milbank, may I suggest this post over at David Dayen’s D-Day blog. Dayen quotes a pretty eye-opening exchange between the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza and Hardball host Chris Matthews. In it Matthews gives voice to the secret fear that Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright are really the same person. (He even invokes Jekyll and Hyde.) Lizza argues—rather nobly, I’d suggest, but what do I know?—that journalists might have some responsibility to work against that way of thinking:
LIZZA: There should be a principle in these cases in this campaign. There is no guilt by association. This guy has one set of views, Obama has another set of views. If the views match up, then it’s fair game. But the guy’s been in politics since the mid-90s. He has a record in the State Senate in Illinois. He has a record in the US Senate. He’s laid out an agenda as a presidential candidate. Where do his views match up with Jeremiah Wright’s? And why as journalists are we confusing the two? It seems to me totally unfair that this guy is getting smeared with the views of someone just because he’s his former pastor.
But Matthews will have none of it:
MATTHEWS: So every time you have a problem with Barack, because you don’t really know him and he seems a little foreign to you, you think of him as both these guys. They’re different faces of the same guy. Jeremiah Wright to a lot of people is Barack Obama. They’ve become the same Chicago character running for President. One is the good doctor, the other is the monster that shows up at night.
LIZZA: Look, I think there’s a danger of that happening. But as journalists I think there’s a responsibility to make it clear…
MATTHEWS: OK, carve it apart, separate the two. Try.
LIZZA: This guy went to a church. This guy is the pastor of that church. Now one of those guys is running for President and has laid out a vision that is radically different than anything his left-wing pastor had to say. Yes, it tells you something about who he is, it tells you something about the community where he came from. But it doesn’t tell you anything, and nobody should confuse one with–
MATTHEWS: Do you think it might be hurting a good man like Mitt Romney and his family, and good members of the LDS Church, that they’re being embarrassed by this breakaway group down in Texas in the last couple weeks? You don’t think that story hurts Mitt Romney’s chances of being on the ticket? Yes it does. So I’m saying, these associations, fair or unfair, birds of a feather, it’s the way people think.
“It’s the way people think”—by “people” Matthews means–or he thinks he means, anyway–the little people, the people out there in TV land, and especially the working-class white people in his beloved Pennsylvania. But as the Klein and Milbank pieces I quoted yesterday show us, it’s really the “people” in the political-media echo chamber he’s describing.
Which leads me to offer an odd kind of praise for Matthews. However minor his value as a conduit of actual news, you’ve at least got to give him credit for this: he seems to be a pretty accurate mouthpiece for the id of the national media. All the irrational hopes, desires, and fears that most journalists are too professional to ever cop to openly come tumbling from Matthews’s mouth on a near nightly basis.
Today, in a posting on his “Rough Sketch” blog at the Washington Post Dana Milbank perpetrated one of the most grotesque examples of hatchet journalism I’ve seen in a while. I’ll get to the particulars soon enough, but first it’s worth setting a little context.
Milbank was reporting on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the National Press Club this morning, a speech that marked the third public appearance of Barack Obama’s former pastor in the last couple of days. The first appearance came on Friday, when Wright appeared in a PBS interview with Bill Moyers. The second came yesterday, when he spoke at the Detroit NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner.
The Moyers interview was so uncontroversial that one commentator had to wonder why we hadn’t heard more about it. But the question-and-answer period after today’s Press Club speech gave the media just the kind of thing it was waiting for. Joe Klein of Time said that “Wright’s purpose now seems quite clear: to aggrandize himself–the guy is going to be a go-to mainstream media source for racial extremist spew, the next iteration of Al Sharpton–and destroy Barack Obama.” Amy Sullivan, also at Time, said bluntly that Wright’s performance at the National Press Club “can only be described as a political disaster.”
Only small-t time will tell if Sullivan is right–one sign she’s correct is that Obama is already inching his way onto the denounce-and-reject road. [UPDATE 4/29: The inches have become miles.] But it only takes one look at the transcript of Wright’s appearance at the Press Club to see that Klein’s characterization of it as “racial extremist spew” is ridiculous.
Milbank’s post is worst of all. (more…)
