Bob Dylan names Burns as inspiration

BY ALISON CHIESA
The Herald
http://www.theherald.co.uk/
October 06 2008


Music legend Bob Dylan has revealed his source of greatest inspiration - Scotland's national bard, Robert Burns.

Dylan was asked to name the lyric or verse that has had the greatest impact on his life.


Bob Dylan

He selected the 1794 love song A Red, Red Rose, penned by Burns, who was regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and became a source of inspiration to the founders of liberalism and socialism.

Dylan - the poet of the protest generation - revealed his choice of the verse to HMV as part of the music retailer's "My Inspiration" campaign.

David Bowie kicked off the campaign two years ago when he selected lyrics by the late Pink Floyd star Syd Barrett.

Dylan is the 100th artist to participate. Sir Paul McCartney, Morrissey, Nick Cave, film-makers Guillermo Del Toro and Mike Leigh and actress Audrey Tautou have previously revealed their greatest inspirations.

A Red, Red Rose was, according to some experts, based on a song Burns heard a girl singing in the countryside.

The bard himself referred to A Red, Red Rose as a "simple old Scots song which I had picked up in the country".

Dr Gerard Carruthers, director of the centre for Burns study at the University of Glasgow, called A Red, Red Rose "one of the greatest love songs of all time".

He said: "It's a song that resonates down the ages. It's part of the Burns song canon. It's one of his most emotive and emotional, perhaps his biggest expression of love.

"It's very much about comparing love to the joyous things of nature and in the arts.

"It's Burns where he rejoices most in love. It's from the love gut.

"Some of the songs by Burns are dedicated to particular women. This is perhaps his greatest, so it's slightly strange that it's not dedicated to a particular woman.

"There was a married woman, Agnes McLehose, who Burns had a flirtation with. It's probable that she is somewhere behind the emotion, but in a very generalised way."

Mr Carruthers added: "Burns has been interpreted by classical composers and folk artists. He was a hugely committed artist who dealt with everyday emotions and big emotions so, in that sense, it's not a surprise he's influenced Dylan.

"I imagine Dylan will still be loved in 200 years as much as Burns is."

Also commending Dylan's choice was Lesley Duncan, poetry editor of The Herald. She said: "While I'm not a great fan of Bob Dylan's work, this news certainly makes a nice change from the puerile sniping of Jeremy Paxman."

Earlier this year, Paxman dismissed Burns as "no more than a king of sentimental doggerel".

Mrs Duncan added: "A Red, Red Rose is an astonishing work. It's obviously a great love song with universal resonance."

By coincidence, new research has found that Burns also influenced US president, Abraham Lincoln, in his battle to abolish slavery.

A leading US academic has revealed that the bard's verses and passion for social justice had a profound influence on Lincoln during the American civil war.

Often able to recite Burns's work by heart, Lincoln's liberal political views and inspiring public addresses are now said to have stemmed from the works of the Ayrshire poet.

Leading American academic Dr Ferenc Morton Szasz, who has published his findings in Abraham Lincoln and Robert Burns, Connected Lives and Legends, said the links between the men had long been overlooked.

He said: "On January 25, 2009, Scots will mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. Seveteen days later Americans will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of their favourite president."

Simple Song:

O, my luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my luve's like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry

Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!

O I will luve thee still, my Dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Luve,
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

Today's Tune: Etta James & Chuck Berry - Rock n' Roll Music

(Click on title to play video)

With a Wink and a Smile

A citizen-politician runs for veep.

By Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com
October 04, 2008, 0:00 p.m.


Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, autographs a poster as Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, center, smiles after an election rally in Omaha, Neb., Sunday, Oct. 5, 2008.
(AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

Back in February, several political lifetimes ago, I was on the radio with Laura Ingraham and she played Stevie Wonder’s campaign song for Barack Obama, whose lyric, in its entirety, runs:


Ba-rack O-ba-ma
Ba-a-rack O-ba-a-ma
Ba-ra-ack Obama-a...

(Repeat until coronation.)

And Laura and I had a good laugh about it, until it occurred to me that, in politics as in pop, the tune is more important than the words. A guy can run for president with all the right lyrics — on the war, the economy, the social issues — but what matters is whether people respond to the underlying music: not what he’s saying, but how he’s saying it. At the time, I was reflecting on Mitt Romney: The song looked great on paper, but when he stuck it on the stand and started to warble it never quite soared.

That’s where Sarah Palin scored in the vice-presidential showdown. A lot of the grandees in the post-debate analysis reviewed the lyrics and missed the music. Whereas, I would wager, a big chunk of uncommitted voters out in TV land listened to Governor Palin, and liked the tune they were hearing. If you’re one of those coastal feminists who despise Alaska’s sweetheart as a chillbilly breeder whose knowledge of foreign policy is as full of holes as the last moose to make the mistake of strolling past her deck, Thursday night’s folksy performance isn’t going to change your view. But, if your contempt for her wasn’t already chiseled in granite, she came over as genuine, confident …and different. Change you can believe in, to coin a phrase.

I was a bit alarmed at first. I hadn’t seen her for awhile, not since the halfwits at the McCain campaign walled her up in the witness protection program and permitted visitations only by selected poobahs of the Metamucil networks. When she walked out on stage, her famous reach-for-the-skies up-do seemed a bit subdued and earthbound, like a low-budget remake of the famous scene in There’s Something About Mary. Then she started speaking. The lyrics were workmanlike, but the music was effective. I have a couple of favorite snapshots from the evening. One was when Governor Sarah Palin said that John McCain hadn’t required her to check her principles at the door, and she still believed in drilling in ANWR and she was hoping to bring him round on that. And then she grinned and gave a mischievous wink into the camera, and to the nation.

“Don’t sell the American people short,” said Obama honcho David Axelrod. “They need more than a wink and a smile.” Okay, so how about this? Joe Biden mocked the McCain campaign’s energy policy as “Drill, drill, drill”, and the governor came back to correct the line: “It’s not ‘Drill, drill, drill’,” she grinned. “It’s ‘Drill, baby, drill!’”

To be sure, if you listened to the lyrics — the policy, the facts, the platform — they weren’t always what you wanted to hear. Governor Palin’s riff on education quickly descended into a rote call for more spending, even though America already spends more per pupil than any advanced nation other than Switzerland and has less to show for it. And more than once you pined for a more devastating putdown: The Obama “plan” to “end” the war was, more precisely, a plan to lose the war, and in a healthy political culture would disqualify him from serious contention. If I’d been in charge of “coaching” Governor Palin, I’d take her out back, and set up the various Obama policy platforms as cardboard elk, lurking in the protective undergrowth of the mainstream media but still eminently hittable to a crack shot.

By contrast, Senator Biden was glib and fluent and in command of the facts — if by “in command of the facts” you mean “talks complete blithering balderdash and hogwash.” He flatly declared that Obama never said he would meet Ahmadinejad without preconditions. But, on Debate Night, the official Obama website was still boasting that he would meet Ahmadinejad “without preconditions”. He said America spends more in a month in Iraq than it’s spent in seven years in Afghanistan. Er, America has spent over $700 billion in Afghanistan since 2001. It’s spending about $10 billion a month in Iraq. But no matter. To demonstrate his command of the “facts”, Senator Biden sportingly offered up his own instant replays:

“My friend John McCain voted 422 times against tax cuts for the middle classes. Let me repeat that so the American people are clear on this. My friend John McCain voted 673 times against tax cuts for the middle classes.”

The problem was that it all sounded drearily senatorial. Mention any global crisis — civil war in Bosnia, genocide in Darfur, Russian aggression in Georgia, the lack of five-star restaurants in Wales — and Biden has been there, usually within the last two weeks, and always at public expense. What the American taxpayer gets for the Emir of Delaware’s frequent-flyer miles is harder to discern. Biden was doing his best to turn in a decent karaoke version of Lloyd Bentsen, but, unfortunately, Governor Palin declined to play Dan Quayle. That left Joe sounding like an ancient pol being generically vice-presidential. Sarah, at her best, sounded like the citizen-politician this country’s Founders intended. She hasn’t voted 397 times against this or that in the U.S. Senate, because she’s been running a state, and a town, and a commercial fishing operation. She’s a doer, not a talker, which is why so many of my fellow professional talkers disdain her.

When Regular Joe Six-Pack Bluecollar Biden tried to match her on the Main Street cred, it rang slightly wacky. “Look,” he said, “All you have to do is go down Union Street with me in Wilmington or go to Katie’s Restaurant or walk into Home Depot with me, where I spend a lot of time.” Why? Is he moonlighting as a checkout clerk on the evening shift? Or is he stalking that nice lady in Lighting Fixtures? As for Katie’s Restaurant, ah, I’m sure it was grand but apparently it closed in 1990. In the Diner of the Mind, the refills are endless and Senator Joe is sitting shootin’ the breeze over a cuppa joe with a couple other regular joes on adjoining stools while Betty-Jo, the sassy waitress who’s tough as nails but with a heart of gold, says Ol’ Joe, the short-order cook who’s doing his Sloppy Joes just the way the Senator likes ‘em, really appreciates the way that, despite 78 years in Washington, Joe Biden is still just the same regular Joe Six-Pack he was when he and Norman Rockwell first came in for a sarsaparilla all those years ago. But, alas, while he was jetting off for one-to-one talks with the Deputy Tourism Minister of Waziristan, the old neighborhood changed.

In a conventional presidential environment, Bidenesque fake authenticity would be enough. Up against Sarah Palin’s authentic authenticity, I’m not so sure. All I know is that the McCain campaign should have her out on the road and doing every interview she can over this final month. Oh, and send her snowmobiling hubby to Maine, which splits its electoral college votes. He’ll put their Second Congressional District back in the red camp, and the way things are looking that could be the 270th vote that saves McCain’s bacon.

© Mark Steyn 2008

A Scandal Takes a Timeout

Where's the outrage over steroid use in the NFL?

By ALLEN BARRA
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com
October 4, 2008

Suppose they gave a drug scandal and nobody came.

On Sept. 21, the San Diego Union-Tribune published a blockbuster report listing 185 NFL players who had used performance-enhancing drugs -- men at every position from every team over the past three decades. (George Mitchell's headline-grabbing 2007 report on such drug use in baseball listed 100 fewer players in that sport.) Charles Yesalis, professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and one of the country's leading anabolic steroids experts, believes that "we're just touching the tip of the iceberg."


Martin Kozlowski

As it turns out, the tip may be all we see for a while. Though the Union-Tribune's study was called by many "the Mitchell report of pro football," there have been no suspensions, few newspaper headlines, and no threats of congressional hearings. Not yet, anyway. Less than two weeks after the newspaper published its findings, the NFL's sweeping drug problem seems like a scandal that never happened.

How is this possible in a sport that claims to be the most popular in America? No single reason seems to provide a sufficient answer, but several of the dots, when connected, start to form a picture.

First, there's the matter of statistics. The argument goes that baseball fans take stats very seriously and thus are spurred to action when performance-enhancing drugs taint the record books, while football fans are much less concerned about steroids and other such substances given that football has no identifiable statistical benchmarks such as Hank Aaron's 755 career home runs or Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Only a few players on a team of 22 starters in football really have any stats.

Prof. Yesalis believes the statistical argument to be largely a creation of the media: "I think it's sportswriters who care about records being broken. I don't think the average fans really care all that much. They view sports mostly as entertainment." But Bob Costas disagrees. "I don't know about the average fan, but judging from the reaction to Barry Bonds's surpassing Aaron's home run record, a great many fans do care, and if they don't think the competition is legitimate, they're liable to seek their entertainment elsewhere."

Whether or not most fans care, the fact is that it's only when players like Bonds achieve certain statistical milestones that the question of performance-enhancing drugs comes into focus; what statistics do we have for offensive linemen in football?

For that matter, who notices offensive or defensive linemen at all? While experts have long acknowledged that linemen (whose average weight has increased by nearly 90 pounds over the past quarter century) are the primary users of bulk-up substances, most fans never get to see the faces of the players down in the trenches. Defensive linemen might not even get their names mentioned more than once or twice a game when they make a spectacular play like a quarterback sack, and offensive linemen almost never get their names announced on TV.

Every baseball fan knew Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens, and other star players who testified in congressional hearings, but if even the best-known linemen were to sit in front of the microphone, their staunchest fans might be getting a good look at their faces for the first time.

Why haven't football players been called to testify in hearings on steroids use in professional sports? For one thing, timing. Revelations of the extent of the NFL's problems with performance-enhancing drugs have surfaced during an economic crisis that makes last December, when the Mitchell Report was released, seem idyllic in comparison. Congress dare not be concerned with distractions concerning millionaire athletes.

For another, pro football isn't under threat of losing its exemption from antitrust laws as was Major League Baseball, which made its pitch to Congress in an effort to prove it was trying to deal with the problem. (Sen. Arlen Specter threatened to yank the NFL's antitrust free pass in 2006, but only in connection with the league's negotiation of exclusive TV packages. Drugs were never mentioned.)

The reason the NFL's antitrust exemption isn't on the line isn't clear either, but as Stephen Ross, chairman of Penn State's Sports Law Institute, puts it: "Congress only cares if the people they talk to care. Their constituents aren't complaining, so they aren't either."

That there is so comparatively little public outrage over drugs in the NFL may simply be because the league has done such a superb public-relations job. The earliest documented use of steroids in pro football dates back to 1962, when the San Diego Chargers' strength coach, Alvin Roy, was handing out steroid pills. It took the league 21 years to ban anabolic steroids, and in 1989 Commissioner Pete Rozelle helped implement the first game suspensions for positive steroid tests. But the NFL was still well ahead of baseball's pace; MLB would not adopt such regulations until 2004. Under Rozelle, the NFL's proactive stance bought it a great deal of good will while MLB continued to struggle with its image.

What no one knew then was that much of this good will was based on false perceptions. An example was reported by Mike Freeman in his 2003 book, "Bloody Sundays: Inside the Dazzling, Rough-and-Tumble World of the NFL" (HarperCollins). At a 1999 meeting of the NFL players union in Hawaii, union officials somehow forgot that the proceedings were being videotaped by a Florida company that they themselves had hired. With the cameras rolling, a union official told the session that 16 players had failed their drug tests that year but weren't punished because of a "secret agreement" between the league and the union not to enforce existing drug rules until a new policy, which was in the works, could be established. Apparently neither side wanted any bad publicity while the new agreement was being finalized.

How many other secret agreements has the league had with its players over the years not to enforce its own policies?

Enough, apparently, to create a major scandal, whether anyone outside pro football chooses to recognize it or not.

Mr. Barra writes about sports for the Journal.

Write to Allen Barra at allen.barra@wsj.com

Links:

Players of substance-http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/nfl/20080921-9999-1s21nflmai.html

Why less outrage over drugs in the NFL?-http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports/nfl/20080921-9999-1s21nflmlbs.html

The Rough Rider's Collectivism

By George Will
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
October 05, 2008

WASHINGTON -- John McCain, like many Americans who should know better, extravagantly praises Theodore Roosevelt. He is a kindred spirit of the impulsive Rough Rider, but the visceral McCain is rescued from some of TR's excesses by not having TR's overflowing cupboard of ideas.

In "Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness" (Yale University Press), Joshua David Hawley, 28, a former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, demonstrates that TR, far from being, in Henry Adams' acerbic description, "pure act," was a man of many complex ideas. Some were admirable; many were repellant.

He was an individualist who considered the individualism of others an impediment to the social unity required for national greatness. Having read Darwin's "The Origin of Species" at age 14, and having strenuously transformed himself from an asthmatic child into a robust adult, he advocated "warrior republicanism" (Hawley's phrase). TR saw virtue emerging from struggle, especially violent struggle, between nations and between the "Anglo-Saxon" race and lesser races. Blending "muscular Christianity," the "social gospel" -- which sanctified the state as an instrument of moral reclamation -- and Darwinian theory, TR believed that human nature evolved toward improvement through conflict.

This dark vision of progress through strife made him advocate concentrated national power to serve his agenda, which was radically more ambitious than the Founders' vision of limited government maintaining order, protecting property and otherwise staying out of the way of individual striving.

Like Winston Churchill, who said that mankind had entered "the region of mass effects," TR said "this is an age of combination" -- of vast interlocking economic entities. Big was, he thought, beautiful and, anyway, inevitable. So government, and especially the presidency, must become commensurate to the task of breaking American individualism to the saddle of collective purposes. Here TR and "Country First" McCain converge.

TR, who a critic said "keeps a pulpit concealed on his person," almost wore the word "corruption" threadbare before pastor McCain came along to make it the centerpiece of his political lexicon. TR, like McCain, rejected James Madison's vision of politics driven -- and freedom preserved -- by peaceful conflict between competing factions.

McCain's signature legislation (McCain-Feingold) restricts what he calls "quote 'First Amendment rights'" in the name of taming "special interests." It expresses a TR-like rejection of Madisonian politics, a rejection McCain echoes when equating consensus -- about the public interest, as McCain understands it -- with patriotism. But another name for the "partisanship" McCain deplores is ... politics.

Ted Kennedy, speaking to the Democratic convention, advocated an end to a politics of "group against group." TR would have heartily agreed. But what is politics for if not the adjustment of such conflicts? McCain was in a TR mood when he said the bailout of the financial system should be "above politics." Wrong. It involves the fundamental political questions about freedom, justice and role of government.

TR invested the materialist doctrine of evolutionary struggle with moral significance for the most manly "races." He wanted the state to rescue America from the danger, as he saw it, that a commercial republic breeds effeminacy. Government as moral tutor would pull chaotic individualists up from private preoccupations and put them in harness for redemptive collective action.

Such as war. TR's response to William James' idea of a "moral equivalent of war" could have been: Accept no substitutes. TR wanted the body politic to be one body, whose head was the president. He disregarded civil society -- the institutions that mediate between individuals and the state, insulating them from dependence and coercion. He had a Rousseauan notion that the individual could become free only through immersion in the collective.

By the time TR tried to recapture the presidency in 1912, he was gripped by what Hawley calls "shocking personal hubris" that manifested itself in an anti-constitutional populism. For example, he thought the Supreme Court should invalidate no law that enjoyed public support, and the people should be empowered to overturn court decisions by referendums.

McCain's identification with TR is, fortunately, superficial -- more about TR's exuberant personal style than his intellectual constructs. McCain's preference for public involvement over private preoccupations stops short -- so far -- of TR's vague but menacing agenda of building civic identity through compulsory national service.

TR's collectivist nationalism became unhinged, polluted by sinister advocacy of eugenics, and by statist sentiments such as: "The woman must bear and rear the children, as her first duty to the state." McCain's Rooseveltian interest in our moral reclamation is at least better than that.

georgewill@washpost.com

Do Facts Matter?

By Thomas Sowell
http://www.tsowell.com/
October 3, 2008

Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain-- which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama's rhetoric and the media's spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years-- including the present year-- denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today's financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, five years ago.

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration "right-wing ideology" of "de-regulation" that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?

We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn't.

Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?

Then there is the question of being against the "greed" of CEOs and for "the people." Franklin Raines made $90 million while he was head of Fannie Mae and mismanaging that institution into crisis.

Who in Congress defended Franklin Raines? Liberal Democrats, including Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus, at least one of whom referred to the "lynching" of Raines, as if it was racist to hold him to the same standard as white CEOs.

Even after he was deposed as head of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines was consulted this year by the Obama campaign for his advice on housing!

The Washington Post criticized the McCain campaign for calling Raines an adviser to Obama, even though that fact was reported in the Washington Post itself on July 16th. The technicality and the spin here is that Raines is not officially listed as an adviser. But someone who advises is an adviser, whether or not his name appears on a letterhead.

The tie between Barack Obama and Franklin Raines is not all one-way. Obama has been the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae's financial contributions, right after Senator Christopher Dodd.

But ties between Obama and Raines? Not if you read the mainstream media.

Facts don't matter much politically if they are not reported.

The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public. Republicans, for reasons unknown, don't seem to know what it is to counter-attack. They deserve to lose.

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.

The Late, Great "New York Sun"

For over six years, the paper defended liberty and supported culture.

By Sol Stern
http://www.city-journal.org/
1 October 2008

As I have done every weekday morning for the past few years, I opened the door of my apartment yesterday to pick up my copy of the New York Sun. Immediately, I spotted the headline above the fold announcing the paper’s demise. No surprise, of course. All of us who counted ourselves as the Sun’s friends knew this day was coming. Still, the paper’s demise is a profoundly sad moment for the city. It feels as if a cherished and inspirational colleague has passed away and, moreover, that our democracy and civic life are diminished.

Before the Sun published its first issue on April 16, 2002, I had conversations with media wags of every political persuasion who predicted that it just couldn’t be done. After all, the newspaper business as a whole was already contracting under the challenge of the Internet, and all of New York’s other city dailies were struggling. The conventional wisdom was that starting a conservative-oriented daily broadsheet with a limited circulation base, in the most liberal city in the nation, was a fool’s mission. Founding editor Seth Lipsky seemed like one of those romantic, ink-stained newspaper wretches, a throwback to the era of Ben Hecht’s Front Page.

The fiscal realists were eventually proven right, of course, about the balance sheets. But what a romance in political and cultural journalism we have experienced over the last six and a half years. The Sun proved in the field of newspapers something I learned again and again in covering education: there are lots of talented people out there in every community with none of the traditional credentials for entry into the professional guild, but who nevertheless can become great contributors.

Lipsky was able to recruit lots of bright kids out of the best colleges by dangling the lure of instant entry into the world of big-city newspapers. With a little on-the-job training, many of those young people became beat reporters who soon ran rings around their competitors. Elizabeth Green came to the Sun a year out of Harvard and quickly become the best education reporter in the city, breaking story after story that revealed the gap between what City Hall and the state were saying about student academic achievement and the reality in the schools. Lipsky also had a knack for discovering talent off the beaten track right here in the city. Andrew Wolf was an unknown publisher of two small community newspapers in the Riverdale section of the Bronx when serendipity brought him to the Sun’s attention. Wolf’s reporting on education, the sleazy world of Bronx Democratic Party politics, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s misguided initiatives on food, became must reading for political and education junkies. Plus, his columns were often hilariously funny.

Lipsky counts Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein as friends; some of the paper’s financial backers were also Bloomberg and Klein confidants. So it’s even more admirable that Lipsky steadfastly stood by writers like Green and Wolf, even when their work drew angry complaints from the education department. After Mayor Bloomberg publicly criticized Green at a press conference for questioning the city’s data on graduation rates, Lipsky responded with an editorial backing his reporter and chastising his friend, the mayor. If only more publishers showed such courage.

Though a paper with a sharp political agenda, the Sun nevertheless provided its readers with a treasure of delightful adornments, including some of the best arts coverage and book reviews in the city; an excellent sports section, topped by Tim Marchman’s prescient analysis of why our local baseball heroes were just not up to the job this year; John Hollinger’s peerless basketball columns, and the city’s only regular soccer column; Peter Hellman’ regular wine column; and superb coverage of photography by William Meyers. I even found myself reading Amanda Gordon’s society column every morning, with its photos revealing who was out with whom at the best social events of the previous evening.

But the single greatest void left by the death of the Sun will likely be its principled commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about the great struggle of our times—the battle between democratic civilization and the forces of worldwide jihad. In some respects, the Sun was a Jewish paper in its editorial management, its financial backing, and its staff. And it didn’t try to hide its passions or equivocate about the moral imperative of defending Israel. It was openly Zionist at a time when that label has become a term of disdain in the sophisticated world of liberal opinion. It refused to be deterred by the bogus charge of “dual loyalty” hurled by academics like Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer and nervous Jewish journalists like Time magazine’s Joe Klein. Almost every week for the past six-plus years, the Sun ran a column by the brilliant Israeli (originally American) writer Hillel Halkin that invited readers to see Israeli democracy and society, warts and all, from the inside. More than any other daily newspaper of our time, the Sun helped its readers understand that in standing up for the defense of Israel, they were also standing up for the defense of America.

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.

Film Reviews: "Appaloosa"

By Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/
October 2, 2008

"Appaloosa" started out making me feel the same as I did during the opening chapters of Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove," and its TV miniseries. At its center is a friendship of many years between two men who have seen a lot together and wish they had seen less. This has been called a Buddy Movie. Not at all. A buddy is someone you acquire largely through juxtaposition. A friend is someone you make over the years. Some friends know you better than you know yourself.

That would be true of Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), who for years has been teamed up with Virgil Cole (Ed Harris). They make a living cleaning bad guys out of Western towns. Virgil wears a sheriff's badge, and Everett is his deputy, but essentially, they're hired killers. They perform this job with understated confidence, hair-trigger instincts, a quick draw and deadeye aim. They're hired by the town of Appaloosa to end a reign of terror under the evil rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons).

So already you've got an A-list cast. Harris plays a man of few words, many of them pronounced incorrectly, and steel resolve. Mortensen is smarter than his boss, more observant, and knows to tactfully hold his tongue when he sees the sheriff making mistakes, as long as they're not fatal. Irons plays the rancher as one of those narrow-eyed snakes who is bad because, gosh darn it, he's good at it.

Then a lady comes into town on the stage. This is Allison French (Renee Zellweger), a widow, she says. No, she's hasn't come to Appaloosa to find work as a schoolmarm or a big-hearted whore (the two standard female occupations in Westerns). She plays the piano and the organ, and dresses like a big city lady in fancy frocks and cute bonnets. She inquires at the sheriff's office about where she might find respectable lodgings. Her budget is limited. She has one dollar.

Zellweger is powerfully fetching in this role. She wins the sheriff's heart in a split second, and he "explains" to the hotel clerk that Miss French will be staying there and will play the piano. Virgil Cole has practiced for a lifetime at avoiding the snares of females, but he's a goner. Everett looks at him quizzically. But you don't keep a friend if you criticize his women --too quickly, anyway. Is there anything about Alison to criticize? The movie has a ways to go.

Virgil and Everett reminded me immediately of Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call in "Lonesome Dove," not only in their long-practiced camaraderie, but also in their conversations about women. So smitten is Virgil that he abandons his tumbleweed ways and starts building a house for the widow. Meanwhile, Bragg sends three boys into town, who get themselves killed. A showdown approaches, viewed warily by the town leaders. Phil Olson (Timothy Spall) is their spokesman, and who better than Spall? He is the master of telegraphing subdued misgivings.

No more of the plot. What is seductive about "Appaloosa" is its easygoing rhythm. Yes, we know there will be a shoot-out; it can't be avoided. But there is also time for chicken dinners and hot pies and debates about the new curtains, and for Miss French to twinkle and charm and display canny survival instincts. What makes the movie absorbing is the way it harmonizes all the character strands and traits and weaves them into something more engaging than a mere 1-2-3 plot. I felt like I did in "Lonesome Dove" -- that there was a chair for me on the porch.

The film has been directed by Ed Harris and bears absolutely no similarity, as you might have anticipated, to his "Pollock" (2000), the story of an alcoholic abstract expressionist. Harris as a director allows the actors screen time to live. They're not always scurrying around to fulfill the requirements of the plot. They are people before the plot happens to them -- and afterward too, those who survive. He has something to say here about hard men of the Old West and their naive, shy, idolatry of "good" women.

Harris comes ready for the gunplay. He just doesn't think it's the whole point. The shootin' scenes are handled with economy. Everett observes that one shootout is over lickety-split, and Virgil tells him: "That's because we're good shots." At the end of the day, everything works out as I suppose it had to, and we're not all tied in emotional knots or existential dread. I know I want me another slice of that hot pie.

Cast & Credits
Virgil: Ed Harris
Everett: Viggo Mortensen
Allison: Renee Zellweger
Randall: Jeremy Irons
Phil: Timothy Spall
Ring: Lance Henriksen

Warner Bros./New Line Cinema present a film directed by Ed Harris. Written by Robert Knott and Harris. Based on the novel by Robert B. Parker. Running time: 115 minutes. Rated R (for violence and language). Opening today at local theaters.


RIO BRAVO FOR WESTERN

By Lou Lumenick
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
September 19, 2008


Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris play lawmen pals in the Harris-directed old-school oater "Appaloosa."

Rating: 3 Stars (out of 4)

THERE is perhaps no genre as full of pitfalls for contemporary filmmakers as the Western.
Last year's crop were either pretentious ("The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford") or ramped up the violence to absurd excess (the remake of "3:10 to Yuma").

Ed Harris, though, directs the old-school Western "Appaloosa" in a refreshingly straightforward style.
It's as no-nonsense as his lead performance as Virgil Cole, a leathery gunfighter with nerves of steel. He is hired by the city of Appaloosa in the New Mexico Territory.

It's 1882, and city fathers (led by Timothy Spall) want the streets made safe for business after rancher Randall Brigg (Jeremy Irons in an intriguing bit of casting) has killed the marshal.

So they hire Virgil, who arrives with his longtime deputy Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) and suspends the city's laws in favor of his own, much stricter ones.

Given that Harris bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Republican presidential candidate, it looks for a spell like Harris and his co-screenwriter, Robert Knott, might be fixing to offer up a political allegory in this reverse twist on "High Noon."

Fortunately, Harris heads off in a more interesting direction in an adaptation that sticks close to a novel by Robert B. Parker, including much witty dialogue taken directly from the printed page.
Virgil and Everett are two of the more talkative Western heroes we've seen in a while, and their exact relationship is intriguing.

Everett tells us in narration that Virgil's contact with women has been limited to "whores and squaws." Indeed, the new marshal's motto is "feelings get you killed."

So Everett is possibly jealous, certainly bemused and finally concerned when a piano-playing widow named Allison French (Renée Zellweger, in her first tolerable performance since "Cold Mountain") arrives in Appaloosa and his smitten pal begins building a house for her.

Things come to a head as Virgil puts Randall on trial for murder and the widow is abducted.
Harris, whose only previous directorial effort was the vastly different "Pollock," has an abiding affection and affinity for the Western, paying homage to "Rio Bravo" among more obvious sources.

Beautifully photographed by Dean Semler, "Appaloosa" is the best Western since "Open Range" (2003) and shows there's still life in this most unfashionable of genres.

APPALOOSA

Running time: 115 minutes. Rated R (violence, profanity). At the E-Walk, the Lincoln Square, the Loews Village, others.

lou.lumenick@nypost.com


APPALOOSA

By Mike Mayo
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
October 3, 2008

Compared with recent westerns, "Appaloosa" is less flashy than "3:10 to Yuma," and it lacks the Rabelaisian energy of HBO's late, lamented "Deadwood." Filled with dusty light, craggy facial features and broad landscapes, it's a solid story that honors the traditions of the genre as it reworks them.It's unashamedly old-school, but an off-beat, literate sense of humor keeps the action from becoming too weighty or self-absorbed.

The premise is familiar: Freelance lawmen Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) go to the little town of Appaloosa in the New Mexico Territory in 1882 in search of work. Bad guy Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) has just murdered the sheriff and two of his deputies. The frightened townspeople want things set right. After swift negotiations over the scope of their duties, Cole and Hitch take the job and go after Bragg's gang. Enter the widow Mrs. French (Renee Zellweger), who attracts both men.

No one needs to be a serious student of westerns or of buddy films to predict where the story is going. Part of it, anyway.

Ed Harris, who also directed, produced, co-wrote the screenplay and sang a song over the closing credits, has a sure touch with material that's more physically demanding than his directorial debut, "Pollock." He balances a few economically violent gunfights against domestic conflicts and other complications. Three big scenes set on a train, in a grove by a river and in a town square work well and build to satisfying surprises. Harris also seems comfortable and even show-offy with the Texas and New Mexico locations.

The film has nothing to do with 1966's "The Appaloosa," starring Marlon Brando. This one is based on crime writer Robert Parker's novel, and at times, Cole and Hitch sound like Spenser and Hawk in their modest self-congratulatory camaraderie. Still, the characters have a comfortable fit that's not likely to bother fans of westerns.

Harris and Mortensen may not have the combined star power to push "Appaloosa" to the level of popularity of last year's "3:10," but the film is every bit as enjoyable, and, for traditionalists, more measured.

Contains violence, strong language and brief nudity.

Movie Review

Appaloosa (2008)


Lorey Sebastian/Warner Brothers Pictures

Viggo Mortensen and Ed Harris in “Appaloosa,” directed by Mr. Harris.

Gunman Meets Widow. Trouble Starts.

By A. O. SCOTT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: September 19, 2008

There are some recent movie westerns — “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” was last year’s notable example — that self-consciously address the mythology of the Old West, using the familiar features of the genre to map new territory on the borderland between history and legend. Like the expensive, prestigious A-westerns of the postwar era, these movies explicitly take up big questions about national identity, historical memory and the nature of justice.

Other films, meanwhile (like last year’s remake of “3:10 to Yuma”), try to recapture the lean, tense storytelling style of the old B-westerns. Those pictures, staples of the American moviegoer’s diet in the middle decades of the last century, approached the grand themes more modestly and obliquely, embedding them in deceptively simple yarns about men, horses and guns.

With its studiously picturesque wide-screen compositions and its stately, sober pacing, Ed Harris’s “Appaloosa,” based on a novel by Robert B. Parker, seems at first to aspire to the A-list. Thankfully, though, its gestures toward grandiosity are superficial and few.

Mr. Harris can be an imposingly serious actor, his face as hard and unyielding as quarried stone, but there is often a saving glint of mischief in his eye. And in “Appaloosa,” his second feature as director (after “Pollock”), he leavens the atmosphere of costumed rigidity and somber stoicism with sly, relaxed humor.

There is no shortage of killing — it’s a large part of how Virgil Cole, Mr. Harris’s character, makes his living — but “Appaloosa” works best as a cunning, understated sex comedy. Superimposed on the usual diagram of good guys and bad guys, with a scattering of fools, cowards and mercenaries in the middle, is an improbable romantic triangle. Virgil and his sidekick, Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), are like a long-married couple, with Everett as the patient helpmeet, backing up his partner’s gunfighting bravado with quiet competence and helping him with difficult Latinate words.

The two men make their living as lawmen for hire, imposing the rule of the gun on chaotic frontier towns like Appaloosa, in the New Mexico territory. There a gaggle of bumbling town elders (including the near-ubiquitous and always welcome Timothy Spall) need help dealing with a murderous landowner named Bragg. Played by Jeremy Irons with some vocal inflections borrowed from Daniel Day-Lewis in “There Will Be Blood,” Bragg is a smooth-talking killer attended by a large retinue of unshaven thugs.

As such he causes some problems for Virgil and Everett, but the real trouble starts when they meet Allie French (Reneé Zellweger), a not terribly grief-stricken widow who — how else to put it? — has Virgil at hello. Before long Virgil, who has never shown much interest in settling down, is building a house at the end of Appaloosa’s main street and asking Everett’s advice about window treatments.

This experiment in domestic bliss is complicated by a number of developments, including some darting glances (and then a bit more) between Everett and Allie, who turns out not to be the paragon of wifely constancy Virgil takes her for. The most subversive aspect of “Appaloosa” may be the way it quietly jettisons the shopworn sexual categories the Production Code imposed on the women of the old westerns.

Respectability is a hazy concept in a half-settled world ruled by greed and violence. Everett and Virgil are honorable men who dwell in a gray area between venality and virtue, and the compromises Allie makes in order to gain a bit of freedom and security are not all that different from theirs.

The movie’s tolerant, good-humored view of its characters drains it of some dramatic intensity, but Mr. Harris seems more interested in piquant, offhand moments than in big, straining confrontations. One important gunfight goes by so quickly and anticlimactically that even Everett remarks on how fast it was over. “That’s because the folks knew how to shoot,” Virgil says, offering an implicit defense of Mr. Harris’s crafty and unassuming approach to filmmaking.

And like Virgil and Everett, everyone involved in “Appaloosa” favors professionalism over bluster. This is especially true of Mr. Mortensen, whose features are half-hidden behind facial hair that is by far the showiest thing about him. Everett says very little and spends a lot of time just watching the other, more voluble characters, so Mr. Mortensen’s performance resides almost entirely in his eyes, which register tiny, unmistakable nuances of surprise, suspicion and amusement.

These are what make the movie worth watching. It’s not a great western, and, as I’ve suggested, it doesn’t really try to be. Some potentially interesting political themes — about what it means for a polity to privatize its apparatus of justice and security, about the relationship between righteousness and force — are left for other, more earnest pictures to explore. This one shows a square jaw and a steely gaze, but also a smile and a wink.

“Appaloosa” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has gun violence, brief nudity and profanity.

APPALOOSA

Directed by Ed Harris; written by Robert Knott and Mr. Harris, based on the novel by Robert B. Parker; director of photography, Dean Semler; edited by Kathryn Himoff; music by Jeff Beal; production designer, Waldemar Kalinowski; produced by Mr. Harris, Mr. Knott and Ginger Sledge; released by Warner Brothers Pictures and New Line Cinema. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

WITH: Viggo Mortensen (Everett Hitch), Ed Harris (Virgil Cole), Renée Zellweger (Allison French), Jeremy Irons (Randall Bragg), Timothy Spall (Phil Olson) and Lance Henriksen (Ring Shelton).


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More Fun, Less Politics, at Toronto Film Festival (September 6, 2008)
Clips and Trailer: 'Appaloosa'
More on Ed Harris

Sarah Palin, the Winner by a Wink

Team Obama tries to understand her performance.

By Byron York
http://www.nationalreview.com
October 03, 2008, 8:40 a.m.

St. Louis — In the hours before Sarah Palin and Joseph Biden took the stage here at Washington University, Barack Obama’s top advisers went out of their way to talk up Palin’s debating skills. “I expect that Gov. Palin is going to be very effective tonight,” chief strategist David Axelrod told reporters. “She’s been working hard at this.” David Plouffe, the campaign manager, upped the ante when he called Palin “one of the best debaters in American politics.”

Maybe they were just trying to raise expectations, set about a millimeter off the ground after Palin’s interview with CBS’s Katie Couric. Maybe they really thought Palin would do well. In any event, their statements before the debate allowed them to stride into the Spin Room after the session and say, See? — I told you she was good.


Republican vice presidential nominee Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gestures during the U.S. vice presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri October 2, 2008.
(Jim Young/Reuters)

“Everybody thinks I was joking about it,” Axelrod said after the debate ended. “I was not joking about it. Sarah Palin is a good performer.”

No argument there. Despite a few weak moments, Palin delivered a strong and sure performance Thursday night. After enduring weeks of derision, Palin didn’t just beat the low expectations for her performance; she ran all over them.

But how? Superior debating ability? Commanding logic? A winning manner? No, not at all. If you listened to Team Obama after the debate late Thursday, you learned Palin accomplished her impressive performance by . . . winking.

“Don’t sell the American people short,” Axelrod told reporters after the debate. “I’m sure they liked Gov. Palin, but they need more than a wink and a smile.” Axelrod also said Biden gave people hope, “rather than offering them a wink and a smile.” And he added that, “The American people are asking for more — they want more than a wink and a nod and a smile.”

A few minutes later, I talked to Bob Barnett, the Washington lawyer who has played key roles in past Democratic debate preparation and who this time represented the Obama campaign in negotiating ground rules between the two candidates. Barnett knows how to watch and evaluate a debate, so I asked him to critique Palin’s performance. “She played her tapes,” Barnett said, meaning that Palin repeated pre-planned statements. “She came in with ten things to say and six winks to perform, and she did them.”

“Six winks?”

“Yeah. Did you see? Six. I counted six.”

“You were watching closely.”

“Well, I was counting.”

It’s probably safe to say that this was the first national debate in which one side explained that the other had done its best work by winking. By a few hours after the debate, the great wink issue had driven some commentators on the Left nearly to distraction. “The next person that winks at me, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to take it after tonight,” said MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.


Republican vice presidential candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin winks as she speaks during her vice presidential debate against Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Representatives of the McCain campaign had a different explanation for Palin’s performance. “Smart, tough, and together,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a key member of the McCain Posse. “I thought she understood where the country would go and articulated how the country would be different with McCain-Palin vs. Obama-Biden, and she had a personable nature that said, ‘I am different and new to Washington.’"

I asked Graham whether the Palin on stage seemed different from the Palin of those CBS and ABC interviews. “Yeah,” he said. “I think she just hit her stride. I think over 90 minutes you can understand who the person is . . . she had a level of confidence and likeability, for lack of a better word, that shone tonight that you’ll never see in a 15-second sound bite.”

Graham’s words brought up the complaint, going around in Republican circles, that the McCain campaign has mishandled Palin, keeping her under wraps except for those high-profile, old-fashioned broadcast network interviews. Insiders concede that there was something wrong in Camp Palin — a problem that was fixed, at least somewhat, by the intervention of top campaign officials as debate prep got underway. Now, everyone has signed on to the idea of letting Palin be Palin. “I think we ought to use her more,” Graham said. “I think one of the biggest mistakes we made was not to showcase her to the people.”

Well, she is showcased now. From the very beginning, Palin came out strong in a way that overshadowed Biden. For example, if it is vitally important in this campaign for a candidate to convey the impression that he or she understands a typical family’s economic anxieties — well, Palin passed the test easily. She was solid throughout on taxes, and even though she pressed too hard on the issue of predatory lending, she also acknowledged the role that bad personal decisions have played in today’s financial mess. “Let’s do what our parents told us before we probably even got that first credit card,” Palin said. “Don’t live outside of our means.”

For the first time in any extensive way, Palin also stressed her own experience “as a mayor and business owner and oil-and-gas regulator and then as a governor.” She talked at some length about energy, both her own record and that of Obama and Biden, and she spoke with real authority. Even when the subject was Darfur, she mentioned something she had done in Alaska.

On foreign policy in general, Palin showed vast improvement over her performance in the network interviews. But it’s not her strong suit — can you name a governor other than Reagan who has been elected president for whom foreign policy was a strong suit? — and she had less command of the issues than did Biden. On the other hand, Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used his long experience to make some points that were simply preposterous. For example, he continued to deny that Barack Obama had ever pledged to meet with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions. “This is simply not true about Barack Obama,” Biden said, pointing out that Ahmadinejad “does not control the security apparatus” in Iran.


Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., left, and Republican candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin shake hands at the finish of their vice presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008.
(AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Just for the record, in a Democratic debate on July 23, 2007, Obama was asked whether he would be “willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?” Obama answered, “I would.” Any reasonable reading of that would say that Obama pledged to meet the leader of Iran — be it Ahmadinejad or someone else — without precondition. On another occasion, Obama said it specifically with reference to Ahmadinejad. So score some points for Palin even in her weak area.

On the other hand, Palin delivered some answers that left viewers scratching their heads. On climate change, she said:

I’m not one to attribute every man — activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet. But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don’t want to argue about the causes, what I want to argue is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

It was one of those answers that, if you were sympathetic to Palin, you said, “I understand what she means.” If you were unsympathetic to Palin, you said it was gibberish.

Palin should also probably not have wandered into the question, explored by Dick Cheney and few others, of whether the vice president has the authority to play a greater role in the Senate than previously thought.

But if you were looking for Palin to stumble — and Democrats wouldn’t have minded that one bit, despite all their pre-show praise of Palin’s debating skills — you just didn’t see it onstage Thursday night. Palin emerged from a couple of weeks of misguided Team McCain handling with her Palin-ness intact, and she showed it onstage when it counted.

And that, for a lot of Republicans, was a deeply satisfying turn of events. “One of the reasons I feel so good for her, just as a human being,” said former Sen. Fred Thompson, “is I have never seen anybody undergo the ridicule, the slanders and the lies, and the blogosphere and what they’re doing, and breaking into her private e-mail, rumors and things about her, and now, most recently, belittling her, taking little snippets of interviews and laughing at her and satirizing her. Those people ought to be ashamed of themselves, if they’re capable of shame, because they’ve proven that what they were doing does not represent who she was and who she is. Thank goodness, just as she said, that this was an unfiltered event for an hour and a half. She could stand toe-to-toe with Joe Biden, who’s been around for all these many, many years, and basically take him to the woodshed.”

— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.

Writing Between The Lines with Stephen Hunter

Between The Lines

By Carolyn Haines
http://www.thrillerwriters.org/
September 2008

Blending a career in journalism and fiction writing is a delicate balancing act, but for a number of years, Stephen Hunter has done just that. A Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, Hunter has long made daily deadlines and also created a world of action-packed fiction with his characters Earl Swagger and Bob Lee Swagger. His books are consistent NYT bestsellers.

Hunter recently retired from the Washington Post, where he was a film critic for a number of years. His latest novel is Night Of Thunder: a Bob Lee Swagger Novel.

In this latest action-packed thriller, Bob Lee Swagger must protect his journalist daughter Nikki, who is injured while following leads that point at the Dixie Mafia. There's also a bit of corrupt law enforcement and deranged evangelicals thrown into the mix. All of this is set against a week long NASCAR event in Tennessee.

What inspired this particular plot? And I have to know, are you a fan of NASCAR?

My professional athletic poisons of choice are the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, who between them have tried to drive me to suicide for years. (The Patriots game last year came close!) So, no to NASCAR, not a fan, didn't have policies or attitudes or favorites going in. Never even changed the oil on a car. But I went to Bristol to visit my daughter, Amy, a reporter on the Courier-Herald, during big race week (entirely by accident) and consequently stumbled not upon NASCAR but NASCAR culture. It was astonishing! It was rapture combined with tribal unity, lubricated by beer and cigarettes and it was the damndest thing I ever saw or felt in my life. I had never even suspected such a great wild festival still existed, and I realized no book or movie had ever briefed me. So the book more than anything is meant as a kind of tribute to the crazy joy of NASCAR, the cone of utter happiness and obsession its zealots generate as they gather in the glens and hollows, Bud cans in hand, and enjoy. Not being a lyric poet or a penetrating New Yorker essayist (both way above my pay grade), I could only offer a thriller in tribute. I just tried to think of ways to get the scene into the book, really to make the scene the star of the book. It was great fun.

Many of your books have inter-related characters. Earl, Bob Lee and Nikki Swagger. What are the pleasures, for a writer, of interconnected characters?

The pleasures of linked characters. . . are fabulous if completely unanticipated. I never set out to tell the generational story of the Swaggers and their friends, lovers and enemies in Polk County, Arkansas; it was never even a blip on my mind in the smallest way. I never read or enjoyed family sagas and my own family is spread from sea to sea, never again to assemble under one roof, I fear. But as all professional fiction writers know, the characters are wiser than you are by far, and they are constantly explaining things to you and showing you connections, genetic traits spread throughout the generations, ironies, pains, and secrets. Who knew Sam and Miss Connie were in love? I didn't until the exact moment I wrote it, and saw how it explained SO MUCH. Who knew that Earl and Bob would have similar but not identical talents: Earl was a small-unit leader, a sergeant's sergeant with the highest warcraft in the Corps; Bob was a solitary, no leader or charmer at all, but a man who wanted to test himself alone against the harshest circumstances. That meant, of course, that Earl was a charmer, a cajoler, a charisma merchant; Bob was the man without name or past who hardly uttered a word but watched and processed at genius level, uttered cryptic remarks when prodded, and found himself in exile. Who knew that as he aged, re-entered society, married, had children, that he would grow verbally and acquire a kind of avuncular charm, in essence becoming more like the father he mourned so even after 50 years. Who knew. They all did, and I'm lucky that they got around to telling me.

Stephen Hunter

A lot of your books are set in the South, but you were born in Missouri. What's the attraction of the South in your work?

That came about as a consequence of exposure to an urban legend (the same one Tom Wolfe discovered in his Junior Johnson piece) which goes like this: "If you are going to have to fight for your life with fists, and can chose a few allies, chose African Americans. If you are going to have to fight for your life with guns, chose white southerners." I'm sure Sicilians were included for blades, and New Englanders for frugality and so forth. But I just felt there was more courage in the south, especially the courage to use firearms in battle and Medal of Honor statistics tell that story too. Audie Murphy, Alvin York, Carlos Hathcock, William Darby: all southerners. So that got me there but what kept me there was the language. I loved conjuring a slightly more stylized southern accent, and somehow felt at home. In fact, I think I'm pretty good at it. It's a south of the imagination, I suppose, but nurturing just the same. And, for the record, I always thought of Missouri as "southern," and visited an Uncle's farm frequently in the '50s. They all talked funny-beautiful and I never forgot it, worked like dogs, were as honest as the day was long and brave as their whiskey was powerful. I never went back but I also never really left.

In several reviews, your work is noted as "violent." Do you think that's a negative description? What role do you think violence plays in contemporary fiction?

I am, after all, the son of a squalid murder victim, a man killed in the most lurid, demeaning way possible. It taught me how a murder rips through a family and even a society and if rarely spoken of, is never forgotten, and casts its shadow into the years that follow. All that is true and I've tried to get it into the books. But it's equally true that I have an imagination for the stuff and have always enjoyed its representation in movies and books. I love the guns, as is well known, and trying to portray how they were used truly instead of in a Hollywood fake way was really the raison d'etre of the whole thing, and it necessarily involved violence. And the final truth is, I have no idea how to write a book without violence in it. I wouldn't know how to plot it, I wouldn't know what direction to take it, what to build toward; my whole definition of "story" is "events building to and resolved in violent confrontation." It's my one-trick pony, it's really all I have or know.

Writing for a newspaper means having rigid deadlines, often on a daily basis. How did you manage to write fiction around the deadlines of your "day job" schedule? Did the day job requirements make you work harder?

It turns out that I'm fast. Don't know why, don't know where it came from, only know I was damned lucky to be fast. The newspaper work just somehow happened. I'd sit down and it would explode out of me, and there it was, in plenty of time. It was enormously helpful and editors knew they could always count on me to do what I said I'd do (Not doing what you say you'll do is a surprisingly large problem on every newspaper that has ever existed). So that was a "given" of my life: the commitment to getting it done. As for the fiction, it's a similar thing. I dreamed of it for 30 years and believed I had nearly enough talent to get it published, but the actual doing of the thing arose from a newspaper discipline in a strange way. For a while I was the book review editor of a paper and every Christmas, by tradition, the book review editor would churn out a giant piece that reviewed 40 or so of the leading Christmas gift books. Good god, it seemed like a killer job. So I decided to do one piece every morning for a month, just a graf or two, but as always in the course of writing, the graf would turn to four and then eight. In the end, a month later, I pasted it all together (it was done that way in those far-off times) to send by tube to composing. Holy Freakin' Cow, it was 50 pages long! I remember holding the substantial stackage of copy paper, feeling the weight, the heft, the floppiness of it all, and realized I had just written 50 pages and I wasn't even tired. That taught me the only secret of my career, which I have passed on in a variety of forums: Start now, work every day, finish. You'd be stunned how much the pages add up to in a very short time and how much a half an hour a day can amount to. That's a newspaper lesson that explains why all the geniuses of my early years are still trying to decide which form of greatness to pursue, while I've modestly published 18 books and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Has your fiction been impacted by the films you watched and reviewed? If so, how?

Of course, in many and varied ways. I once wrote an entire novel and not until somewhere late in the process did I realize it was basically "influenced," as in "stolen" from, Dr. Strangelove, almost plot beat by plot beat, with minor adjustments in point of view. Of course I immediately . . . did nothing. The book was pretty successful, and then the Russians had to go and end the Cold War and kill my shot at a movie. Agh. In other ways, it seems to me I picked up the rhythms of cross-cutting from the movies, the play of competing narrative strands against each other in order to manipulate and intensify narrative tension. Now and then there's a particular movie "quality" (don't know another word) that gets into a book, like the chaos of The Wild Bunch or the hysteria of Reservoir Dogs or the bleak rural despair of One False Move. That stuff just creeps in and when I discover it, I immediately . . . publish it. But there's another way the movies are in play: sometimes I'll write a book to rebuke a particular film or aspect of film. To take one obvious example, I saw Barry Levinson's Bugsy and liked it very much except that it bothered me in that its portrayals of Ben Siegel and Virginia Hill were all wrong--they were too refined, too witty, ironic and sophisticated. Somehow, I worked the Bugman and Ginny into Hot Springs and I tried in some way to "correct" the Levinson version: I wanted them cruder, more primal, more powerful, more violent, more rough-edged, less classy. The same thing happened with The Green Mile, an endless Frank Darabont version of a Steve King novel, which envisioned death row in a southern prison in the '30s as a kind of Harvard Department of Sociology Outreach Program, full of noble guards and empathetic prisoners and I just HATED it. It made me crazy, such a lie. So I returned to that theme and created a racist southern prison of the Fifties in a book as an upside-down, hellish vision of such a place, a primal bog, full of savagery and hatred and completely shorn of nobility and sacrifice. It gave me much pleasure to turn The Green Mile on its head in that book. Then there's an issue of action. I read something Francis Ford Coppola said about filming The Godfather with so many gangland cliches, and how to make them fresh again. He said the trick was in finding some new detail--the blood floating in mist behind Stirling Haydon and Al Leteri's heads in the scene where Michael plugs them--and building the sequence around that. So that's my mantra: I try and find some new detail--maybe the gunflashes, maybe the speed and craziness of close-quarters gunplay, maybe the way full-autos spit empty shells and fire so fast it seems almost unbelievable--when I do a set piece.

Is there an author who has greatly influenced your work? A director or screenwriter or actor?

When I was writing a book called Dirty White Boys I thought of it as a Jim Thompson novel, you know, the GREAT Jim Thompson. And then I realized I had never actually READ a Jim Thompson novel, and so I did, and I realized my book was nothing at all like it. For one thing, I actually did some research, but I guess when you're churning 'em out in two weeks driven by booze and poverty, research is a luxury, like re-writing, you can't afford. So my book was influenced by my dream of Jim Thompson, my sense of him as I had inferred his reality from other critics. That's so common with me that I realize the truth about other writers is: No. Uh-uh. This hasn't made me popular, much less one of the guys, and I'm completely apart from the culture of thriller writers, and go out into the world unblurbed (I hate the whole blurb thing, but don't get me started) and I almost never read other thriller writers or even other novelists. I loved le Carre, but I can't read him any more. I loved Thomas Harris, but the recent books have become thin and, while fun, nowhere near the dense genius of Silence of the Lambs. I read . . . nobody. Mostly magazines with things that go bang in them, snarky blogs, the occasional bio or battle history, and that's about it. It seems like a secret coping mechanism: I really don't want to read anybody who's more successful but much less talented, and I don't want to read anybody who's much more talented but less successful. In fact, I just realized that in the last five years, I've finished more books as a writer than as a reader.

When you write an action scene, which your books are acclaimed for, do you visualize it cinematically, like a film?

I love it. I think I should get a T-shirt made that reads, "Actually, I'd rather be a second unit director." That's my dream job, cooking up, then implementing gunfights in hitherto undreamed of locales with hitherto undreamed of permutations. I plan the books up to and away from the gunfights and truly enjoy finding new ways to bring drama and realism to that sort of thing. I talked earlier about finding "the new detail," so I won't repeat myself, and I talked about how I couldn't plan a book without violence (meaning, for me, action, or vice versa) so I needn't repeat that either, but there are certain rules I might pass on. The first is that the action has to be not merely organic but expressive. By that I mean, you just don't stick it in anywhere to heat things up; it has to come naturally in story and you have to care about the characters, or it's nothing but spectacle. By "expressive" I mean that each character must stay IN character during the fight and act in accordance with his personality as previously evoked. Next, you should feel death; it's a big thing and if you're exposed to death, especially by violent misadventure, it's a shattering emotional experience: you don't come back from it fast, and I hate the movie trope where somebody gets killed and none of his friends are depressed or upset about it and get back to the business of the plot without a second thought. (Heat was particularly annoying in that respect: when Ted Levine got killed, an integral member of Pacino's team, none of the survivors gave it a second thought. And when Pacino is closing in on DeNiro, it's clear that he actually likes and admires him, when De Niro is, after all, the guy who killed one of his own men.) And there's another thing: the death of bad guys should be appropriate. I hated the moment in the movie Shooter where Swagger shoots old Ned Beatty as the Senator. Please. Beatty was not a man of physical violence so dispatching him with a bullet in the forehead seemed to completely upset the moral balance of the universe. Much better if Beatty were destroyed in terms of the life he lived: by scandal, by arrest, by exposure on TV. I always try and get my bad guys the deaths they've earned; that seems to me to be one of the rules of the game.

How did winning the Pulitzer affect your fiction writing life?

This is an easy one: not in the slightest. S&S puts it on the cover, a slight marketing subterfuge that suggests I won in Fiction (it was, of course, in Criticism) and I feel so strongly about it, I intend to write them a strong letter . . . never.

And finally, you have the reputation of being a tough critic. Do you read reviews of your books, and if so, do they have an impact on you?

I have no trouble with the epic proportions of my hypocrisy here. I am two men: as a movie critic, I kicked ass, took names but not prisoners, ripped, shredded, spindled mutilated and took pleasure in the carnage I wrought. When I am subjected to same, it is one of the greatest unfairnesses in the history of man. It is wrong, unfair, rotten and whoever is doing so is motivated by envy, greed, sexual favors from female rivals, drunkenness, or stupidity. There's someone on PW right now I wouldn't mind beating to a pulp with a hockey stick, and I don't even LIKE hockey. So the answer to your question reveals the following sad truth: the writer is pathetically, tinily, inconsequentially and unsurprisingly human. Sorry about that, but as Dutch said to Pike, "I wouldn't have it any other way."

Contributing editor Carolyn Haines's last novel is WISHBONES, the 8th of the Sarah Booth Delaney Mississippi Delta mysteries. She was recently named a 2009 recipient of the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence.

Rare bird: Cardinals' Pujols put up another amazing season

By Joe Posnanski
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com
October 1, 2008

One thing that has always baffled me is how baseball scouts missed on Albert Pujols. The baffling part is not that Pujols was a 13th round pick in the 1999 amateur draft -- hey, there are quite a few late-round success stories in baseball. Jim Thome was a 13th round pick too. Ryne Sandberg went in the 20th. Heck, Mike Piazza lasted until the 62nd.


Albert Pujols finished 2008 with a .357 average, 37 HRs and 116 RBIs

There's a difference though: It took Thome, Sandberg and Piazza years to grow into stars. Pujols, though, was like a Lean Cuisine Superstar -- pop him in the microwave and a few minutes later you had a piping hot batting machine. Barely 18 months after Pujols was passed over at least 10 times by every team in baseball*, he showed up at St. Louis Cardinals spring training ready to dominate. Tony La Russa talked every day about being in awe of the guy. And Pujols went on to one of the greatest rookie seasons in baseball history.

*The Kansas City Royals actually picked SEVENTEEN players ahead of Pujols in '99 even though Pujols, the player of the generation, played high school and college ball IN KANSAS CITY. True, it might not be fair to single out one team for missing Pujols -- they all have scouts in every territory. But let's face it: The Royals had the star who might have changed their fortunes down the street, and they whiffed. You know that line, "God helps those that help themselves?" Well, um, yeah.**

**By the way, that line, 'God helps those that help themselves," is not, as most people think, from the Bible. It's from Poor Richard's Almanack, by Benjamin Franklin. Yes, we're a full-service operation here.

That's why the Pujols miss baffles me. Sure, baseball scouting is imprecise. Heck, life is imprecise -- politicians didn't see the financial crisis coming and fantasy football gurus didn't see the Tom Brady crisis coming. But Pujols, based on the timeline we have here, played one year of minor league baseball and promptly dominated Major League Baseball. I'm thinking a scout or two might have noticed that sort of breathtaking, just-add-water talent when Pujols was bashing baseballs for Maple Woods Community College in Kansas City (and, according to legend, not striking out once the entire year).

Perhaps there were once genuine grounds for debate about Pujols' talent. Not anymore. He is, in my mind, the best player in baseball, and I don't think that anyone approaches him. OPS+ is a pretty good statistic -- it takes a player's OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) and compares it to the rest of the league. A 100 OPS+ is exactly average.

Over the last five years, here are the Top 5 players in OPS+.

1. Albert Pujols, 173

2. David Ortiz, 154

3. Chipper Jones, 153

4. Alex Rodriguez, 153

5. Manny Ramirez, 152.

So, well, that's not especially close. OK, so you can look at runs created, Bill James' invention that basically measures how many runs a player, um, you know, created:

1. Albert Pujols, 756

2. Alex Rodriguez, 682

3. David Ortiz, 671

4. Lance Berkman, 646

5. Mark Teixeira, 627.

So, that's not really all that close either. Maybe you're old school. Maybe you don't like these newfangled statistics. Maybe you prefer batting average.

1. Albert Pujols, .335

2. Ichiro Suzuki, .332

3. Vladimir Guerrero, .323

4. Matt Holiday, .319

5. Todd Helton, .315.

And so on. He has the best on-base percentage the last five years. He has the highest slugging percentage the last five years. He has the most total bases, the most extra base hits, the most times on base. And this year, despite missing a few games, he probably had his greatest offensive season. With offense down all around baseball, the guy hit .357, walked 104 times (while striking out 54), banged 44 doubles and 37 homers, scored 100 and drove in 116. There are any number of advanced stats -- Value Over Replacement Player, Equivalent Average, Isolated Power, Offensive Win Percentage and so on -- that show Pujols was the Usain Bolt of baseball this year.

Pujols is so good you would not expect anyone to miss it. And yet, it seems, people do. When Sports Illustrated's Jon Heyman asked 20 anonymous front office executives this summer to name the player they would build a team around, one (1!) chose Pujols. Heck, when you totaled up the execs' ballots, Pujols received only one more point than Joba Chamberlain. Yes, many of those decision-makers probably disqualified Pujols because he's not young (and many still think he's not even as young as he says). Still, GMs apparently have more respect for other veterans such as A-Rod and Chase Utley.

Over the last couple of weeks, I asked five baseball executives and scouts to name the best player in baseball -- nothing official, just an informal poll. One did say Albert Pujols. Three said A-Rod and a fifth offered Grady Sizemore. Those are perfectly fine choices. The interesting part is that when I brought up Pujols, TWO of them said: "Oh yeah, I didn't really think about him."

That seems to be a trend: Many baseball fans just don't seem to think about him. Pujols' greatness is so easily apparent -- he hits, he walks, he hits for power, he plays outstanding defense at first base, he makes winning plays just about every day and his teammates will tell story after story after story about how Pujols helped them with their swing, taught them a curveball, cured their sciatica, introduced them to their wives.

And maybe that gets to the heart of why he's sometimes overlooked. Maybe he's so good it's boring. Maybe Pujols' greatness, like a plane landing safely, doesn't make the news. There's no doubt that A-Rod is so much more human, you can see his mood swings, you can read about his crises, you can boo his salary and marvel at the way he flicks the bat out there and send the ball soaring. Sizemore and Curtis Granderson and Hanley Ramirez and Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran play a more exciting style, they play more significant defensive positions, they can wow you with their power and speed and the way they chase down fly balls in the gap or grounders in the hole. Ryan Howard and Ryan Braun and maybe even Ryan Ludwick -- lots of Ryans -- may hit with more power. Dustin Pedroia and Chase Utley and Joe Mauer may win more hearts with their scrappiness.

But Pujols is simply better than any of them.

This year, before the madness of the playoffs began, I decided to watch Pujols closely the final weekend, with the Cardinals out of the playoff hunt, with the only thing as stake being what John Updike, in describing the greatness of Ted Williams, called the "tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill."

On Thursday, Pujols went three-for-three with a walk, two runs, a homer and four RBIs in a victory over Arizona.

On Friday, he went three-for-three with two walks, two runs, a homer and two RBIs in a victory over Cincinnati.

On Saturday, he only managed one hit, but it was a homer, as the Cards beat the Reds again.

And on Sunday, he went one for two with a walk, a double, an RBI, and that was before he was pulled in the third inning. The Cardinals won again.

What did it mean? Not much. And everything. The baseball playoffs begin without Pujols again, which is too bad. This time of year I always find myself thinking about that moment in the NLCS in 2005, ninth inning, Houston up by two, their unhittable closer Brad Lidge on the mound, Pujols at the plate. And it wasn't just that Pujols hit the enormous game-winning home run -- great, good and mediocre have hit clutch home runs -- it was that with Pujols, you figured he would.

It's funny, Pujols' team didn't make the playoffs this season, and because of that there seem to be some who would not vote for him as MVP. What a shame. There are even a few who would vote for Brad Lidge, who had such a nice comeback year for Philadelphia (and even retired Pujols two of the three times they faced each other). Seems a bit odd. I've seen that match-up. I know how it turns out.