Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - Oct 26 - 30/09

Posts from the past week - enjoy!

October 26/09 - Gullible's Travels
October 27/09 - Soiree-Perfect Pashminas
October 28/09 - Fear of Social Theory
October 29/09 - Well-Deserved Criticism
October 30/09 - Skulls, Saints, Bread, and Vegetables

Skulls, Saints, Bread, and Vegetables

In the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, people celebrate the harvest, the annual cycle of the seasons, and dead ancestors. In many cultures, these celebrations have become one holiday, especially where earlier, indigenous cultures have become Christian.


The Mexican Day of the Dead originated in the indigenous Indian cultures, before the Spaniards brought Christianity. Today, the celebration               (and many similar ones around the world) fuse the earlier traditions with Catholicism's All Saints Day and All Souls Day.

Hallowe'en, of course, is All Hallows (Saints) Eve, the evening before All Saints Day - Nov1. The treats, food, and costumes reminiscent of death all share in different cultural aspects of Day of the Dead celebrations around the world.

Rich and colourful, Mexico's celebration involves flowers, bread, tamales, marigolds and Catrina statues (above), among many other elements. Hallowe'en revelers share many elements of the Mexican celebration.

Bread of the Dead (left).

Sugar skull (below).

Tamales (left).

Well-Deserved Criticsm

Popular, trashy romance novels have hackneyed characters, doggedly predictable plots, and no sentences more difficult than what a primary schooler could handle. They are painful to read.

Slightly more literate romance novels have slightly less hackneyed characters, perhaps an interesting plot twist or two, and sentences for middle schoolers. They are sometimes well-written, but are still painful to read.

Most romance novels are, purportedly, written by women. Regardless of the gender of writer and reader, they are still painful to read.

Emily Gould believes that "women are often the cruellest critics of other female writers." In her article "What Are Women Fighting About?" in More Intelligent Life (October 29/09), she discusses the particular venom she feels is levelled by women at women who offer traditional, vapid female characters - characters who are dependent, materialistic, and want someone to sweep them off their feet and take care of them by providing as much cash as possible.

Gould generously lists the aspects of good writing she finds in one particular novel, but says that she hates the novel, the "retrogressive plot," and the female characters and worries that readers will find the character portrayals representative of real women like her:

This worry elicits the cruel female response:

So I become, once more, the kind of person I can't bear: the female critic who despises any female writer who doesn't project what she feels is the accurate or ideal vision of modern womanhood. This critic believes it is her job to tear down women who are "off-message" because there is only so much publishing space allotted to women, and so more attention for them is less attention for her and other worthy types.

Female critics are right to give these novels a pass and to review them with a highly critical eye, but not because they don't fit with an agenda, and not because there is limited publishing space. As Gould's one example of a cruel critic says (and it's all she says as example!), "The novel is just terrible."

Female (and male) critics are right about these novels because they offer characters who are stereotypes, acting in stereotypical ways, in stereotypical situations. Even though the descriptions, locales, and outfits may be finely drawn and the sentence structure admirable, romance novels are painful to read.

Men and women who support the ongoing fight for women's equal place are right to criticize vehemently. The continued portrayal of women as dependent, sexualized children has real consequences in the world; it is more than an agenda issue. It is sad, disheartening, and frustrating, no matter who promotes the stereotypes.

To say that these novels and their authors are" giving women what they want" is to try and give them a legitimacy they don't deserve. Romance novels, like so many other aspects of pop culture, play to the lowest common denominator; they carry the messages of advertisers promoting stereotypes of those most likely to buy their products; they require no mental effort; they are easy and comfortable; they are often based on the worst aspects of humanity. They are thoroughly and readily criticized for many reasons.

Gould's critique of female critics pits women against each other much more insidiously than any outraged and open female criticism of romance novels. She takes what is healthy anger at the continued promotion of damaging stereotypes on one hand, and legitimate criticism of bad novels on the other and reduces them to that demeaning question Freud asked - "What do women want?"

Gould's title "What Are Women Fighting About?" invokes Freud and diminishes the well-deserved criticism of romance novels to the level of a bitchy catfight.


(photo credit)
(photo credit)


.

Fear of Social Theory

Philip Ball disagrees with David Stubbs about why audiences generally don't "get" atonal experimental music, but do "get" avante-garde visual art.

According to Ball, Stubbs' book Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen  claims that "our responses to music are determined by our context and perspective, not by what we actually hear."  Additionally, music, unlike visual art, has no "'original object'" which we can "venerate or trade."

Ball rejects the social theory view  in favour of the perspective of evolutionary psychology.

In his review"Who's afraid of the avant-garde?" in Prospect,  Ball argues that cognition - what we actually see and hear -  plays the major role in what we do and do not "get."

Visual and auditory stimuli are both processed using "'Gestalt principles'" of continuity and contiguity, which help us to understand complexity. According to Ball, late twentieth-century avant-garde visual art retained these principles, while avant-garde music did not.

Ball does not elaborate about which principles visual art obeys. He does claim that the "fact we can see the painting at all as a coherent object gives our interpretive mind something to work on." Music, on the other hand, is

“organised sound.” Yet sound is structured into music not on paper, nor even in the mind of the composer, but in the mind of the listener. Music is sound in which the organisation must be audibly perceptible to a listener, not just theoretically present.

I find some problems with this argument. First, vision takes place in the mind of the viewer just as surely as hearing does. The only difference Ball notes is that with a painting there is an object and with music there isn't. Yet, one of his points about Stubbs is that the absence of an object in music "applies equally to Beethoven and Birtwistle." Westerners like Beethoven; Birtwistle, not so much!

Here, Ball seems to employ an argument that he takes Stubbs to task for.

Second, Ball claims that there are "universal principles" governing the cognitive processing of music - Gestalt principles regarding steps between high and low notes in a melody and rhythm, to name two. He further claims that "these cognitive aids...are found in other musical traditions the world over." And indeed they are, but there are traditions in which tonality, regular rhythms, and heirarchies of notes do not exist.

Therein lies the problem. The fact that there are traditions without these aids suggests that they are not evolutionary, but social.

It seems to me that we have come back full circle to what Ball claims is wrong with Stubbs' argument, only it doesn't seem so wrong after all. 

Perhaps people (Western people, that is) "get" avant-garde visual art more because they have an object to refer back to (even if we don't completely buy the "venerate or trade" idea). There being no such object with atonal experimental music, it's more difficult to process. Beethoven (also "objectless") is an ongoing "hit" because he follows the conventions  - context and perception - of the tradition which is familiar to its audiences.

Philip Ball is a science writer and author of many books. His most recent book is Universe of Stone.




I would like to invite Philip Ball and David Stubbs to my soiree.

Gullible's Travels

Yahoo, shout feminism's critics at the results of the study "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" by researchers "Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972."

Phyllis Schafly, a long-time opponent of women's rights, and others of the same persuasion wish to see these results as a condemnation of feminism.

The trouble is that the study simply does not support that conclusion, according to Barbara Ehrenreich's article "Are women Getting Sadder? Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?" in Guernica (Oct.13/09).

For Ehrenreich "(1) ... there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2)... there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) ...even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's."

Ehrenreich writes that there was "an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates" that allowed the study's authors to find only a tiny difference between men's and women's reports on their levels of happiness. An equally tiny difference was coaxed out about each gender's assessement of the change in happiness levels since 1972.

The most (and only) objective measure of unhappiness that we have shows that women are happier (or less unhappy) than they previously were. Suicide rates for women have dropped from 1972 to 2006 (the dates of the study). Also, the Wharton study documents that African American women report being happier than in 1972, which means the results about "the blues" apply only to white women.

Finally, the researchers clearly note that those women involved most directly in second-wave feminism have similar results to those of younger women:

As the authors report,... "there is no evidence that women who experienced the protests and enthusiasm in the 1970s have seen their happiness gap widen by more than for those women ...just being born during that period."

There's no surprise that some will turn anything into an attack on women and women's rights. With this study, feminism's detractors have tried to turn Lilliputian results into Brobdingnagian ammunition.

Yahoo to you, too!

Ehrenreich has written 17 books, been a columnist for The New York Times and Time magazine, and contributed often to Harper's and The Nation. Her most recent book is Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Pursuit of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.




I would like to invite Barbara Ehrenreich to my soiree.

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - Oct 19 - 24/09

Just in case you missed one - enjoy!

October 19/09 - Round and Round and Round in the Plato Game

October 20/09 - That Vital Style

October 21/09 - Educators Behaving Badly
October 22/09 - A Mad, Mad, Mad Martini World

A Mad, Mad, Mad Martini World

I'm not at all surprised by the popularity of martinis, but 2,920,000 results from a Google search for "martinis" did, indeed, surprise me.

In the late 70s and all through the 80s, martini popularity was rather low. People joked about the 3-martini lunch, which became a symbol for unhealthy decadence. The beginning of the fitness rage in the 70s coincided with the decline of the martini, which had been popular since the early twentieth century.

In the 1990s, martinis again became popular. The original gin and vermouth martini (formerly THE martini) and the vodka martini from the 1950s were the norm. Now, the sky's the limit.

Brands of gin, many with new herb and spice infusions and flavoured vodkas are abudant on liquor store shelves. But beyond variations of the basic ingredients, the number of variations in the recipe has exploded.

Different flavour and ingredient combinations are very trendy - there are even full martini menus. They sound delicious, crazy, horrible, dessert-like.  A Classic Blue Cheese Martini (huh?)and a Chocolate Mint Martini (candy anyone?) are only two of dozens of trendy new recipes.

Cocktail shakers, glasses, and strainers come in every colour and design imaginable. Cocktail hours and parties abound.




It's martini madness. Much fun for a soiree.

Educators Behaving Badly

There is a movement afoot, which, until today, I thought was just a fringe response to the modest advances women have made in recent decades. But, no, it is going mainstream in Toronto (see Kenyon Wallace's article in the National Post - Oct 21/09).

The plan is to respond to boys performing badly in the city's classrooms by accommodating their bad behaviour. Boys shouldn't be asked to think, read, sit still, pay attention, or respect the authority of the teacher. They are not as able as girls to do these things and expecting them to is a form of "gendercide."

One serious plan for Toronto schools is that in boys-only classrooms, the boys will have clipboards rather than notebooks - presumably notebooks have something inherently feminine about them.

The belief that gives rise to such nonsense is that Western society has declared "war" on the male, and that this "war" begins in a most calculated way in kindergarten. Yes, that's right, kindergarten!

According to believers, boys now in the school system are underachieving because all extant modes of educating them are oriented towards females. Those educational practices have been supposedly implemented in the last twenty or thirty years at the behest and evil planning of second-wave feminists who promote the interests of girls only.

The literature about the issue is abundant; too bad the logic supporting it isn't.

First, proponents of this view ask us to accept that males born in the last thirty years have undergone a huge evolutionary change and have, today, innately different cognitive abilities, musculature, kinetic and reflex responses, and capacity for learning social skills and empathy.

The list of what today's males supposedly lack the capacity for is staggering. Stacked up against previous generations of males who have succeeded in the Western education system, today's boys are made to seem genetically deficient and unable to learn as their fathers and grandfathers did.

If we don't buy the far out evolutionary shift, we have a few problems.

First, history begs to differ.

Universities, tutors, indeed most schooling in the Western and other traditions employed the educational practices of reading, writing, and thinking, sitting still at desks or tables, in front of teachers, in libraries. In no way did students negotiate about scheduling or curriculum (another aspect of the plans in Toronto!).

To claim that centuries of these methods privilege females involves a radical re-writing of history. Women, generally, did not experience such educational methods until the late nineteenth century. Women weren't allowed at Oxford until 1878 and not as full members until 1920.

Finally, we have also to account for the millions of highly successful males educated in a supposedly feminized system. Are they wimps? Not real men? Genetically deviant?

We do have to address the poor performance of boys in our schools. But instead of a flavor-of-the-month pedagogy based on a popular, but illogical, backlash, we should find out what is really going on.

The war is not against males. The war should be against a pedagogy that treats them as genetically, cognitively, socially, psychologically, and physiologically deficient.

That Vital Style

Style. For soirees, for art, for people, for living - for writing.

Oscar Wilde wrote that "in matters of great importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing." Coco Chanel said that "fashion fades, only style remains."

Style requires effort.Writing with style is no exception. The occassional genius may achieve it easily, but the rest of us can always use some help.

For fifty years, the best selling help for writers has been Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Elements has helped millions improve their writing - 10 million to be exact.

There are dozens of books on writing style, but none seems to generate so much praise, blame, or sheer number of words as does Strunk and White's "little book," as Strunk called it.

Jennifer Balderama reviews a book about Elements in the New York Times, Sunday Book Review. In her article "Style and Alchemy,"she reviews (mostly favourably) Mark Garvey's book Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style."

In her review, Balderama captures E.B. White's basic premise about writing with style and correctness: "He simply believed that one must know, or at least intuit, the principles of lucid writing before one can flout them artfully."




The problem with so many writers today is not that they fail to flout artfully; the problem is that they don't know the principles at all.

Round and Round and Round in the Plato Game

Artists do it. Literary critics and academics do it. Museum curators and investors do it. They play the Plato game.

The Plato game has been really hot for about thirty years. In fact, there are no signs of its demise.The stakes are very high: Careers are made and broken over it; millions can be made and lost because of it.

The Plato game is the ongoing argument between theory and practice and is based on Plato's Theory of Forms. In roughly twenty- or thirty-year cycles, one comes to the forefront, while the other recedes.

Academics in English departments frame the game as one between literary theory and literature. Literary theory has been winning since the eighties, but signs of a turnaround are subtly surfacing.

For artists and museum curators and investors, the game is played between artistic technique and artistic concept.

Denis Dutton, in his article " Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?" in The New York Times (October 15/09), writes about the supremacy of conceptual art in today's museums and markets:

Sophisticated gallery owners or curators normally respond with withering condescension to worries about the lack of craftsmanship in contemporary art... What is important today is not technical skill, but skill in playing inventively with ideas.

Dutton believes the supremacy of the concept is temporary and argues that across time and across cultures we do, we have, and we will admire artistic technique, "the pleasure we take in admiring skilled performances;" whereas concepts become dated and stale:

The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art, on the other hand, depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist.

Aesthetics last, concepts fade. Investors in conceptual art may be left holding the bag when the context for a particular concept is forgotten,and there is no longer anything about the work that speaks to anyone.

So which will it be? Theory or practice; concept or object? The ongoing Plato game is our attempt to answer.

Denis Dutton is professor of philosophy in Christchurch, New Zealand, at Canterbury University. He is the author of The Art Instinct (2009).





I would like to invite Denis Dutton to my soiree.









(with thanks to Joni Mitchell for song The Circle Game)

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - October 12 - 16/09

Enjoy the celebrities, elephants, and tomatoes from the week's posts!
 

October 12/09 - Elephants at a Soiree
October 13/09 - Autumn Ode to Tomatoes
October 14/09 - The Long and Winding Path
October 15/09 - Educating Millennials for Fun and Profit
October 16/09 - On Celebrities and Soirees

On Celebrities and Soirees

Celebrities and soirees go together like cocktails and canapes, but for a sophisticated, interesting, intelligent shindig, too much celebrity just won't work.


So far, the invitees to my soiree are all well-known, in and well beyond their fields, but don't have super-celebrity status.

By "super-celebrity," I mean someone whose death would bring the media flocking to home or hospital (Michael Jackson), someone whose activities would rate the whole hour on Larry King. Someone like Oprah, whose appearance on TV commands millions of viewers.

To make my point: Do you know who these people are?

He's very, very well known. Your answer is?

                                                                                                                                  well,duh!                                                                                                       

                                                    

                                                                                                                                                       
The dynamic between mere mortals and super-celebrities is not one of equals. For the mere mortal, the glare of fame may be too bright to see beyond. For the super-celeb, the famous persona may, and may have to, block real connection.

What's lost is a lively exchange of ideas and the opportunity for mere mortals to make the acquaintance of another successful and interesting person, as opposed to a successful and interesting persona.

(martini photo credit)

Educating Millennials for Fun and Profit

Are they the generation of dumb narcissists or the rising, altruistic change-makers? Opinion seems divided, yet the split is hardly even.

Eric Hoover, in his article "The Millennial Muddle" in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 2009), ponders the wealth of information, circulating since the 90s, about the millennial generation, particularly about the millennials as students.

One of the most influential books on the subject is Millennials Rising: The Next Generation by Neil Howe and William Strauss. According to Hoover, in their view millennials are "rule followers, who were engaged, optimistic, and downright pleasant." They will build new institutions with smiles and team spirit.

This rosy picture is the engine that drives marketing, consulting services, and, unfortunately, pedagogy and policies in contemporary colleges and universities. The millennials are consumers.

Selling this rosy picture and explaining what millennials want is good business. The problem is that it just doesn't fit with what professors and social scientists find in their research and sitting in front of them in class. Howe and the late Strauss "were not social scientists," neither were they in those classrooms.

Hoover devotes much of his article to Mark Bauerlein, Jean M. Twenge, and Fred A. Bonner II, professors and researchers who see quite a different picture. Interesting, also, that their primary focus is education, not business.

Bauerlein finds that the millennials are dangerously ignorant and illiterate. His book The Dumbest Generation outlines his research and experience.

   Generation Me, by Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor who has studied generational differences, is about the rise in narcissim and entitlement she found in the millennials - the "everyone gets a trophy" generation.

Fred A. Bonner II approaches the issue of diversity in the millennial generation. The students he writes about in his forthcoming book Diverse Millennials in College don't match the upper middle-class white kids that Howe and Strauss based their work on.

 It is foolish nonsense to think that the youngest and least knowledgeable about what (and how) they need to learn should dictate. It is criminal for the adults who know better to allow it in order to turn a profit.

Approaching millennials as consumers of education denies them their right to a genuine education.

The Long and Winding Path

My first introduction to Buddhism in the 1970s was a series of books by a Tibetan lama who called himself Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Whether or not Rampa was either a Tibetan or a lama is the subject of considerable controversy, but he and his writings still have serious followers. At the time, I was captivated.

Rampa as Cyril Hoskin, or Cyril Hoskin as Rampa (part of the controversy) came to Canada in the early 1960s, to my hometown Saint John, New Brunswick.

I found this out with a jolt while reading one of Rampa's books in my new hometown in British Columbia. He mentioned the kindness of a woman in Saint John who lived in a little house behind the church that I had attended from birth to 18. I knew that woman.

It was an oddly surreal dose of reality amidst the astral travel, transmigration of souls, and talking cats. I'm no longer sure what I believe from within those pages (except for the church and the woman!), but they did influence me greatly and push me to investigate further.

Over the course of many, many years, from Rampa's books, to Alan Watts's The Way of Zen, I found the work of Jack Kornfield and the more western face of Buddhism.

I am still captivated, but more at home, and no one questions Kornfield's credentials or authenticity.

Kornfield is a Buddhist monk, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts and the Spirit Rock Center in California. He has a Ph.D. in psychology, a sense of humour, and a fine writing style.

Two of my favourite's of Kornfield's books are After the Ecstasy, the Laundry and A Path with Heart.

I look forward to reading Kornfield's latest book The Wise Heart. If it's as good as his other books, then I am in for a few days of good teaching and pleasurable reading.

I would like to invite Jack Kornfield to my soiree.

Autumn Ode to Tomatoes

Summer is over for another year. And so this tribute to the tomato - best and reddest of summer.

Ode to Tomatoes

Pablo Neruda

(trans. Margaret Sayers Peden)

The street

filled with tomatoes,

midday,

summer,

light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.

In December,

unabated,
the tomato

invades

the kitchen,

it enters at lunchtime,

takes

its ease

on countertops,

among glasses,

butter dishes,

blue saltcellars.

It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera

a cool

sun,

profound,

inexhaustible,

populates the salads

of Chile,

happily, it is wed

to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,

salt, its magnetism:

it is the wedding

of the day,

parsley

hoists

its flag,

potatoes

bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of the earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,

its canals,
its remarkable amplititude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.

Elephants at a Soiree

Elephants don't belong at soirees - not even when dressed in their best!

But for the new wealthy class in China, soirees come with a whole host of elephants ready to appear at any time.

(photo credit)

Ian Buruma, in his article "China's class ceiling" in the LATimes,
writes about the new wealthy class in China and the price it must pay for its continuing privilege.

Invited to the country home of Hong Huang, "daughter of Communist aristocracy...expensively dressed media mogul," were Buruma and "the avant-garde poet Yang Lian, who lives in London with his wife, Yo Yo, a novelist...free-spirited authors who chose not to put up with the restrictions of an authoritarian society."

The soiree went off track when Hong Huang began giving advice to the ex-pat authors about returning to China to live:

A certain edginess crept into the bracing mountain air. Hong's advice began to sound more like bullying. Tiananmen had not been mentioned, but it was the elephant in the room. It was one of the reasons Yang and Yo Yo opted for residence abroad. Suddenly, Hong brought it up, turning to me as well. "Tiananmen, Tiananmen," she said, "foreign journalists are always going on about Tiananmen. I think it's time to forget about all that. We should move on and feel proud of our country. Foreigners just use it to bad-mouth China."

The newly wealthy in China must constantly compromise and navigate around many unruly elephants  - peasants, school children dead because of substandard buildings that didn't hold up in an earthquake, and any mention of  the 1989 Tianamen Square Massacre, democracy, and human and individual rights.

"To justify its monopoly on power, the Chinese technocracy relies on the promise of order and constant economic growth, and the claim of patriotism." The problem is not with order, economic growth, and patriotism; the problem is that the government is unchecked in its power. Buruma believes a "messy democracy" like India's is better.

How many elephants does it take to...?

Buruma is professor of democracy, human rights, and journalism at Bard college NY. He is the author of The China Lover (2008).





I would like to invite Ian Buruma to my soiree.

Pride Goeth Before a Fool

Fools, foolishness, and folly are the subjects of Michael Dirda's article "These Foolish Things" in In Character.

Dirda discusses three types of fools: "Real Fools, Professional Fools, and Unsuspecting Fools."

I immediately thought of  King Arthur and his court in the story Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

During the New Year's feast at Camelot, the Green Knight bursts into the banquet hall and challenges the knights to a game: the Green Knight will stand still and allow one stroke against him from one of the knights, but in one year's time, Arthur's knight must stand still and allow him to do the same.

Although the courtiers can hardly believe what they see - a huge man and his horse all of green - Arthur agrees to the game.

 At first, one might think they are the Real (innocent) Fools of fairy tale and myth. Otherwise, wouldn't they have some inkling that things were a tad weird? If they are not Real Fools, why agree to such foolishness?

But the knights hesitate for some time before Arthur finally steps up and agrees to the terms. All the famous Knights of the Round Table sit in stunned silence - probably looking everywhere but at the Green Knight. They know this is not such a good deal.

Arthur agrees, as he must for the pride of himself and his court, and Gawain jumps in and begs to take on the task - as a loyal knight must.

 By accepting the challenge, the court shows itself to have the surfeit of pride Morgan Le Fay is testing them for in this grand ruse. A non-prideful person would weigh the odds here and decline what must mean certain death for friend and relative.

The pause and subsequent agreement because of pride show that Arthur and his court are Unsuspecting Fools:

As for Unsuspecting Fools, they are essentially everyone else in the world, starting with you and me. Everybody plays the fool sometimes; there’s no exception to the rule. More particularly, the Unsuspecting Fool is the supposedly wise figure — a sovereign, a pedantic scholar, a pillar of the establishment — who is blind to his own vanity and self-importance, ignorant of what’s really going on, puffed up with hubris. Pride goeth before a fall. In tragic vein, Oedipus and Lear are Unsuspecting Fools.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the classics in Dirda's Classics for Pleasure.

Dirda won the Pullitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1993 and is the author also of and Bound to Please.

I would like to invite Michael Dirda to my soiree.

With Both Barrels

Twice now, I've wished that I could vote in US elections.  

The first time was for Barack Obama last November. Like so many others, I felt that I had a part in something new and hopeful as I watched the crowds in Chicago.

Today, I wished that I could have voted for Representative Alan Grayson (D-Florida). He again blasted the Republicans for their position on health care.   

Grayson, in this scolding, refused to apologize for his earlier attack on the Republican prescription for health care ( i.e. don't get sick; if you get sick, die quickly).

Grayson's voice is a refreshing and strong change. Unlike the nuttiness of the right's diatribes, Grayson's speech laid it on the line about the dire need for reform.

Today's speech dovetails perfectly with Keith Olbermann's comments two days ago. Both have cut right to the quick of the issue - life, death, uncertainty, financial ruin.

Canadian parliamentarians snipe and carp at each other regularly, but rarely do they come out with such double-barrelled gusto.

Hats off to Alan Grayson and Keith Olbermann; I would like to invite them both to my soiree.

Money Only Talks; Micro-Credit Sings and Dances

The Grameen Bank  may look like a conventional bank, but the resemblance ends at the front door. Unlike most banks, owned by rich men, the Grameen is owned by poor women. The bank does not take its clients to court for failing to pay, and interest can never exceed the amount of the original loan.

Economist Professor Muhammad Yunus began the bank as a village project  in Bangladesh in 1976. It became a formal bank in 1983 and has helped millions of poor people.

The Grameen bank lends money to the rural poor, mostly women, without collateral and with terms that would make a conventional banker faint. The women use their loans for self-employment based on their existing skills.

They weave, make mats, do wood and bamboo work, fatten cows and goats, and do embroidery. (The photos are from the bank's gallery.)

The bank is successful. In 27 years as a formal bank, Grameen has made a profit in all but three years. Since 1995, it has taken no money from donors and has been self-reliant.

The repayment rate is 99%!

Professor Yunus believes that micro-credit can go a long way towards eliminating poverty - at least by half by 2015.

So far, the results support this claim:

Grameen Bank has today over 7.5 million borrowers. 65 percent of them managed to clearly improve their socio-economic conditions and lifted themselves out of extreme poverty.

Professor Yunus has written two books about the bank and his theories of a more broadly defined capitalism - Banker to the Poor and The Poor Pay Back.

Professor Yunus and the Grameen bank won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Yunus won the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.

The bank's website has a wealth of information about its history, principles for lending, FAQs, and results.

I would like to invite Professor Yunus to my soiree.