Abstinence As An Act Of Resistance-- The Lysistrata Solution

-by Dorothy Reik

In 411 BC the comic playwright Aristophanes' heroine Lysistrata led her followers on a sex strike to force an end to the Pelopponesian wars. It was a comedy then but in 2003, Leymah Gbowee led the women of Liberia in a sex strike to end their civil war. It worked and she won the Nobel Prize. Centuries ago, in 1600, Iroquois women stuck to stop tribal wars. They got what they were striking for. In Kenya, in 2009, the women struck and the fighting in their country ended in one week!

Today the ruling men (and some women) of this country are engaged in a different kind of war-- not a war against other men but a war against women-- and the deciding battle is about to be fought. In our case it will be fought in the Senate when Mitch McConnell tries to push through a new Trump appointed justice who will overturn Roe v Wade. Drastic measures are called for! Some a sex strike can't win because we don't have a specific demand but we do-- keeping abortion legal!

For years advocating abstinence has been the work of hypocritical "conservatives" who send their mistresses to get abortions while fighting to outlaw them and to keep birth control from vulnerable, abstinence indoctrinated teens. But it is time we realize that abstinence in this situation is not capitulation-- it is an act of non-violent resistance. When I was young such resistance was common-- there were no pills and abortion was illegal everywhere. Movie stars did not have babies out of wedlock. Single motherhood was not a "thing." It was a disgrace-- so we resisted. I resisted!

While some abortions are to end planned pregnancies which cannot for medical reasons be carried to term, most are for unwanted aka "unintended" pregnancies. Women who don't have easy, affordable access to abortion have an simple way to avoid an unwanted pregnancy the same way we did before the pill, before abortion on demand-- don't have sex, resist! These unwanted pregnancies do not occur by immaculate conception. And it's not just abortion that these controlling misogynists (yes, that is what they are) want to outlaw-- they want to make reliable birth control hard to get. No woman who lives in a state which limits abortion and/or access to contraception, should risk pregnancy! Let the men beg, plead, threaten. If you fear violence then maybe you should not even be with that guy! But those of us in more liberal states have to step up too. "Sisterhood is strong" we say. How strong? Will women who can easily access abortion and contraception strike along with their not so fortunate sisters? I discussed this with Alan Grayson who agreed that this conversation should take place "but don't tell Dena (his wife)." "You live in Florida" I reminded him. He groaned.

To hear these "pro-life" so-called "men" crying about ripping babies from wombs while they are themselves ripping babies from their mothers' breasts down at the border should be enough to drive any thinking women to drastic action. So we can keep marching, calling our representatives, sending money to NOW and Planned Parenthood-- or we can get on Facebook and twitter and get this done. It won't take long! Remember-- in Kenya it only took a week for resistance to win!

Disappointing News For Señor Trumpanzee: Racist Presidents Are Not Eligible For Nobel Prizes

Trump grew up in a racist family. His father, who he has always emulated, was arrested as KKK street brawler and Trump was taught at an early age to discriminate against blacks and Latinos in their real estate business. "Throughout his public life," asserted the Washington Post [NOT FAKE NEWS] yesterday, "Trump has pitted one group of Americans against another and inserted himself in racial controversies… As he leads his party into the potentially perilous midterm election five months from now, Trump is trying to make cultural identity a central theme of the Republican pitch to voters. His messages have been amplified by his surrogates as well as by friendly broadcasters on Fox News Channel and elsewhere in the conservative media... Trump is calculating that by playing to people’s fears and anxieties he can maximize turnout among hard-core supporters to counterbalance evident enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Fueling Trump’s approach, advisers say, is an unremitting fear of his own: that his base could abandon him if he is deemed too weak on immigration, which was a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign."

I hope you took a look at our post yesterday on white evangelicals and racial anxiety. James Hohmann gave Post readers a comprehensive look at how Trump and Stephen Miller-- his in house neo-Nazi-- have outraged the county with their racist, xenophobic policies and how they have made a tactical retreat-- for now. "Young boys," he wrote, "who were forcibly taken away from their parents are waking up this morning at an old Walmart in Brownsville, Texas, that’s been converted into a shelter called Casa Padre. Painted on the wall is a mural of President Trump and a quote from The Art of the Deal, his 1987 book. 'Sometimes by losing a battle,' it reads, 'you find a new way to win the war.' Make no mistake: The executive order Trump signed Wednesday to end his own policy of separating families who are caught crossing the border illegally was a tactical retreat. It was not a surrender. The president’s war on immigration-- both illegal and legal-- rages on.

Trump made clear during a campaign-style rally last night in Minnesota that he hopes the order will let him shift the immigration debate back toward terrain he’s more confident he can win on. Speaking to 9,000 supporters at a hockey arena in Duluth, the president leaned into the us-against-them language that propelled his 2016 bid.

“I signed an executive order (so) we’re going to keep families together, but the border is going to be just as tough as it’s been,” Trump said. “Democrats don’t care about the impact of uncontrolled migration on your communities, your schools, your hospitals, your jobs or your safety. Democrats put illegal immigrants before American citizens. What the hell is going on?

“The media never talks about the American victims of illegal immigration,” he added. “What's happened to their children? What's happened to their husbands? What's happened to their wives? The media doesn't talk about American families permanently separated from their loved ones.”

As the crowd chanted “build that wall,” Trump attacked the caliber of Mexican immigrants to the United States: “They’re not sending their finest,” he said. “And we’re sending them the hell back!”

To wit, the Border Patrol says Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach will continue, which means any adult caught crossing the border will be prosecuted with a misdemeanor and families will now be held together in federal custody pending the trial. There’s a great deal of uncertainty among experts about whether this can pass legal muster, but immigrant advocates worry that Trump is laying the groundwork for indefinite detention.

“And senior administration officials said the order did not stipulate that the more than 2,300 children already separated from their parents would be immediately reunited with them … Top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees their supervision, were unable to say when the families would be reunited,” David Nakamura, Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey report. “One senior DHS official acknowledged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has almost no ability to add detention capacity for families because its jails are already full. … The DHS official said ICE is not planning to put children in adult detention centers as prohibited under the 1997 court settlement in Flores v. Reno, which stipulated immigrant children must be placed in the least restricted environment possible while awaiting immigration court proceedings.”

Trump reiterated that Congress must come up with a solution. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen even told lawmakers during a private briefing that the family separations could resume if they fail to act.

...White House Counsel Donald McGahn pushed back internally when the president ordered an end to the separations yesterday morning, arguing that an order could not be written to comply with the existing legal limits on child detentions. “Many aides, though, including Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway, urged the president to end the separations. Eventually, after a number of meetings, ideas and drafts, McGahn said the final product could be legal,” David, Nick and Josh report.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has formally requested the Defense Department's help in prosecuting the surge of new immigration cases, and the Pentagon has agreed to deploy active-duty military officers to the border in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to serve as special assistant U.S. attorneys. These judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, are being told to expect six-month tours of duty, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reports.

ICE is also ramping up raids in the heartland: While we were watching the Southern border this week, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 146 workers at a meatpacking plant in rural Ohio. It was one of the largest workplace raids carried out so far by the Trump administration. Agents lined up dozens of workers, in white helmets and smocks. Two weeks ago, ICE arrested 114 workers at a gardening company’s two Ohio locations. In April, the feds raided a meatpacking plant in rural Tennessee and arrested 97 immigrants. In January, ICE agents blitzed dozens of 7-Eleven stores-- but made only 21 arrests.

These raids, too, are tearing families apart. “One father said to me, ‘I feel like my heart is being pulled out.’ His wife was taken, and he has two children under the age of 2,” Sister Rene Weeks, director of the Hispanic ministry at St. Paul Church in Salem, Ohio, told Kristine Phillips after this week’s raid.

Trump remains keen on displaying resolve against illegal immigration and may look for other ways to do so. The president used the word “strong” nine times in rapid succession to describe himself during a meeting with conservative lawmakers in the Roosevelt Room, where he announced the order was being drafted. “We are very strong,” he said. “If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you’re strong, then you don’t have any heart. That’s a tough dilemma. Perhaps, I’d rather be strong.”

The president has no intention of rebranding himself as “a compassionate conservative” a la George W. Bush. He made that clear a few hours later when reporters gathered in the Oval Office to watch him sign the order. Before Trump signed it, Vice President Pence announced that doing so showed “compassion and … heart … and respect for families.”

“But it’s still equally as tough,” the president clarified, “if not tougher.”

“Stoking racial tensions is a feature of Trump’s presidency,” White House bureau chief Phil Rucker reports: “Echoing the words and images of the white nationalist movement to dehumanize immigrants and inflame racial tensions has become a defining feature of Donald Trump’s presidency and of the Republican Party’s brand. Trump has stirred supporters at rallies by reading ‘The Snake,’ a parable about a tenderhearted woman who takes in an ailing snake but is later killed when the revived creature bites her. It should be heard as a metaphor for immigration, he says. The president referred to some African nations as ‘shithole countries.’ He posited that ‘both sides’ were to blame for last summer’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And, again and again, he has accused black football players who took a knee during the playing of the national anthem to protest police discrimination of being un-American.

...The Trump administration changed its story on family separation no fewer than 14 times before ending the policy. JM Rieger tracks the evolving messages: “First it was a deterrent. Then it wasn’t. It was a new Justice Department policy. Then it wasn’t. The Trump administration was simply following the law. Then it said separations weren’t required by law. It could not be reversed by executive order. Then it was.”

...A Nobel Committee member says Trump is “no longer the moral leader of his country or the world.” Thorbjorn Jagland, one of the five members of the Norwegian committee which picks the winner of the peace prize, said: “Everything he does excludes him from the role American presidents have always had. He can not speak on behalf of the so-called free world.” Jagland is the head of the Council of Europe, a Strasbourg-based international human rights organization with 47 signatory states.

Melania Trump made increasingly clear to her husband in recent days that he should use his power to fix the mess he made. The Slovenian-born first lady’s own lawyer says the family separation policy evoked the internment of the Japanese during World War II and the inhumanity of detention in Nazi Germany. “It reminds us of past mistakes. It’s a big disappointment,” Michael Wildes told Mary Jordan. He also represents Melania’s parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs, and her sister Ines, also from Slovenia. (Wildes declined to say what Ines’s immigration status is at this point…)

Theresa May condemned Trump's immigration policy, even as the British prime minister reiterated the importance of keeping open the lines of communication with the United States: “On what we have seen in the United States, pictures of children being held in what appear to be cages are deeply disturbing,” she said. “I clearly, wholly and unequivocally said it is wrong.” But she dismissed calls to cancel Trump’s upcoming U.K. visit., adding that when “we disagree with what they’re doing, we will tell them so.”

Dylan Wins Nobel, Fights Ensue-- We Think It's Good News And Celebrate Him

by Denise Sullivan

The Thursday morning announcement that Bob Dylan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature seems to have struck a raw nerve among (mostly) male novelists and some crabby millennials on social media who were intent on disputing the 75-year-old American songwriter's worthiness of the honor. We wish to respond by saying they are entirely wrong: Dylan is an extraordinary figure. He's withstood serving as a cultural weathervane for over 50 years while flourishing as a writer. As a literary artist, we will never again see his likes in our lifetimes. That we lived in his age and were able to see him perform his written work just happens to have been our good luck and privilege, an idea suggested by the writer Paul Williams and one I believe should be kept close at hand as the inevitable bashing and clashing continues.

The Nobel committee called Dylan's work "poetry for the ear," celebrating him for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition; authors Joyce Carole Oates weighed in with a series of favorable tweets as did Mary Karr, and the great Salman Rushdie offered a comparison to Orpheus and Faiz. On the other side, Gary Shteyngart (Absurdistan) used his twisted sarcasm to tweet, "books are kinda gross." Irvine Welch (Trainspotting) was a little more coarse, and Hari Kunzru (My Revolutions) wins for angriest. That Dylan is a songwriter, and an innately American one, touring during his country's likeliest darkest hours yet was not enough to stop the novelists' outbursts: All three were born outside of the USA and are well read here, though none among them have written anything that can remotely compare to the beauty of "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Visions of Johanna" nor anything as compelling as "Masters of War," "Ballad of a Thin Man," "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" or "Subterranean Homesick Blues." Their lyricism has not been likened to that of Keats, Blake, and Shakespeare, like Dylan's work has been. Of course this is barely scratching the surface of a long list of Dylan-writings, including songs, poems, memoirs and screenplays, and possible reasons for other writers' grievances. One is tempted to simply list the titles and produce evidence of the full bodied depth and freshness to the work that stretches out following the '60s and into the '70s, 80s and beyond, whether it be the collaborative Desire or high watermarks Infidels and Oh Mercy, or late work like "Not Dark Yet" from Time Out of Mind and "Mississippi" and "Sugar Baby" from the 21st Century magnum opus, Love and Theft, released on September 11, 2001.

A close reading of the man and his canon has been ongoing by Dylan-scholar Scott Warmuth, working steadily since 2001 to uncover the vast labyrinth of allusions to the work of poets and writers past and present buried and also hiding in plain sight on Dylan's pages.

"His 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One showed Dylan at the top of his game. The book is so rich with allusion and other wordplay that it returns countless dividends with close study," wrote Warmuth in an email delivered with the authority of someone who's done the homework. The New Mexico-based DJ turned Bobcat will be presenting some of his findings at a well-timed Dylanology panel at the 2017 AWP Conference & Bookfair, alongside longtime Dylan-chronicler Ron Rosenbaum.

"I can think of no better comparative literature professor," Warmuth continues. "Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. It was Bob Dylan who taught me how to read Hemingway, and how to think about Hemingway's writing, by incorporating a vast Hemingway subtext in his recent work. William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. In an interview with The Paris Review Faulkner said, 'A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination-- any two of which, at times any one of which-- can supply the lack of the others.' The careful reader of Dylan's work will find commentary on that line," he says.

What Dylan brought to music, to language, to our culture is unprecedented in our age. It is ancient and contemporary, prescient and of the ages. Pulling threads from Beats like Kerouac and Ginsberg and conjoining their freewheeling associations with imagery and sounds shapes from great American folk tradition is his unique contribution. The powerful mixture and seeming contradictory nature of the work is at once mystical and practical in its wisdom, surreal, arresting, and startling in its imagery. His appeal extended from Black Panthers and the most radical of underground warriors, to children, and grannies and workers across the world (his songs have been recorded in just about every language). He opened the doors to discussions that people may have not otherwise had about love and war, life and death, black and white. Even his so-called protest material is packed with a rare lyricism that is absent in the Pete Seeger school of topical songwriting (not that there is anything wrong that), when the young Dylan took music of resistance to a whole other level and set the bar so high that few songwriters ever reach it and when they do, it's noticeable and appreciated (for their part, songwriters across the land were thrilled to learn of the Nobel news).



Very few noble laureates have been American by birth since the award was inaugurated after the turn of the last century: Dylan is joined on the list by fellow Americans Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl S. Buck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison.

As for the charges of "plagiarism" leveled at him through the years from critics harsh as Kunzru and Joni Mitchell, Warmuth answers, "Bob Dylan can also find the poetry in something as utilitarian as a travel guide, and challenge you with that notion. Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger are pretty good at what they do too, but they don't do that."

The idea of this extraordinary brand of genius was not lost on the Nobel committee who acknowledged America's greatest living writer with not only one of the highest literary honors in the land, but with eight million kroner (approximately $900,000) for his lifetime of labor. We commend them for their choice, we congratulate Bob Dylan and we thank him, for walking with us-- together through life.



Denise Sullivan reports on arts, culture and gentrification issues for Down With Tyranny!

Nobel economist Robert Shiller seems to be saying: I'm right, they're wrong, but we can all be friends

Why not Nobel Prizes for one and all? says Professor Shiller -- "even if we sometimes seem to come from different planets."

"Actually, I do not completely oppose the efficient-markets theory. I have been calling it a half-truth. If the theory said nothing more than that it is unlikely that the average amateur investor can get rich quickly by trading in the markets based on publicly available information, the theory would be spot on. But the theory is commonly thought, at least by enthusiasts, to imply much more."

-- Nobel economist Robert Shiller, in a NYT "Economic View"
column, "Sharing Nobel Honors, and Agreeing to Disagree"

by Ken

A lot of us who aren't exactly close followers of the inner workings of the economics profession were fascinated by this year's three-pronged Nobel award to economists who have all done work relating to markets, but work that seems, at least in two of the cases, the University of Chicago's longtime free-market worshipper Eugene Fama and Yale's more real-world-oriented Robert Shiller, openly contradictory.

I was happy to turn to Paul Krugman, who declared in the blogpost "The Nobel" that he's "actually fine with the prize."

It's an old jibe against economics that it's the only field where two people can win the Nobel for saying exactly the opposite thing; even the people making that jibe, however, probably didn't envisage those two guys sharing the same prize, which is kind of what happened here.

But I am actually fine with the prize. Fama's work on efficient markets was essential in setting up the benchmark against which alternatives had to be tested; Shiller did more than anyone else to codify the ways the efficient market hypothesis fails in practice. If Fama has said some foolish things in recent years, no matter -- he did earn this honor, as did Shiller. As for Hansen, his work involves econometric methods on which I have no expertise at all, but I'll trust the experts who consider it great work.

So, all good -- and you actually have to admire the prize committee for finding a way to give Fama the long-expected honor without seeming as if they are completely out of touch with everything going on around them.

This worked for me. Fama was getting a Nobel to make up for the one he didn't get when the Nobel people were handing them out like door prizes to Chicago economists, a number of them less deserving, and he even contributed to Shiller's work by providing an up-to-date version of the theory Shiller earned his prize by discrediting.

Now Shiller himself has gone public with his feelings about the "obvious incongruity" of this year's Economics prize, which he says harks back to 1974, when "the Nobel committee gave a joint prize to Gunnar Myrdal, a Social Democrat in Sweden and a proponent of the welfare state, and Friedrich Hayek, a conservative who believed that government should be minimal."

Eventually Shiller gets around to being diplomatic:

[L]ike Professor Hansen, Professor Fama is a first-class scholar who does careful research on the topics he focuses on.

We disagree on a number of important points, but there is nothing wrong with our sharing the prize. In fact, I am happy to share it with my co-recipients, even if we sometimes seem to come from different planets.

But in getting there, Shiller has what seems to me like some naughty fun. First, he deals with the third recipient, Lars Peter Hansen, yet another Chicago guy. He notes that Hansen "is well known for having rejected one form of the efficient-markets model," but says his heart still seems to be with what the Chicago markets fetishists call the "rational expectations" that make markets so wise and dependable.

With regard to the other winner, however:

Professor Fama is the father of the modern efficient-markets theory, which says financial prices efficiently incorporate all available information and are in that sense perfect. In contrast, I have argued that the theory makes little sense, except in fairly trivial ways. Of course, prices reflect available information. But they are far from perfect. Along with like-minded colleagues and former students, I emphasize the enormous role played in markets by human error, as documented in a now-established literature called behavioral finance.

As I've noted at the top of this post, Shiller says he doesn't "completely oppose" efficient-markets theory; he just considers it "a half-truth."

If the theory said nothing more than that it is unlikely that the average amateur investor can get rich quickly by trading in the markets based on publicly available information, the theory would be spot on. I personally believe this, and in my own investing I have avoided trading too much, and have a high level of skepticism about investing tips.

But the theory is commonly thought, at least by enthusiasts, to imply much more. Notably, it has been argued that regular movements in the markets reflect a wisdom that transcends the best understanding of even the top professionals, and that it is hopeless for an ordinary mortal, even with a lifetime of work and preparation, to question pricing. Market prices are esteemed as if they were oracles.

He doesn't make nice about this.

This view grew to dominate much professional thinking in economics, and its implications are dangerous. It is a substantial reason for the economic crisis we have been stuck in for the past five years, for it led authorities in the United States and elsewhere to be complacent about asset mispricing, about growing leverage in financial markets and about the instability of the global system. In fact, markets are not perfect, and really need regulation, much more than Professor Fama's theories would allow.

And now he's ready for his fun (links onsite):

It's interesting that Professor Fama is also the intellectual father and major adviser of an investment company that has, by many accounts, been beating the market. The company, Dimensional Fund Advisors, has impressed investors with its performance so much that its assets under management have grown to $296 billion, as of Aug. 31.

You see what he's done here, right? Normally it would be considered a feather in Fama's hat to be known for providing investment advice that beats the market. But how is this possible for a "rational expectations" maven? After all, according to believers of Fama's camp, financial prices efficiently incorporate all available information and are in that sense perfect.

Shiller turns to the DFA website and turns up some rather murky rational-expectations hemming and hawing, and points out that "he has ended up with an investing approach that looks, in some of its fundamental principles at least, a little like my own." He adds, "I can even recommend that people might consider investing in D.F.A."

I would not, however, recommend that monetary or fiscal authorities seek inspiration from his theories on how to stabilize the economy. He doubts the existence of any bubble before this crisis, and his philosophy would have let banks fail at the beginning of it.

And he concludes that both of the 2013 Chicago Two are "first-class scholars" doing "careful research" on their chosen subjects, and never mind that they're wrong. Okay, that last part is me, not Shiller, but isn't that what we means when he talks about the three of them "disagree[ing] on a number of important points" and "sometimes seem[ing] to come from different planets." That doesn't make them bad Nobel Prize recipients, does it?

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

The New Yorker's James Wood pays splendid tribute to much-loved new literature Nobelist Alice Munro

With "The Bear Who Came Over the Mountain" update below



"At the level of the sentence, [Alice Munro's] stories proceed within the grammar of conventional realism; but at the formal level, her work invents its own grammar, which is why her stories strike many readers as closer to novellas than to any idea of 'the conventional well-made short story.' "

-- James Wood, in a newyorker.com blogpost,
"Alice Munro, Our Chekhov"

by Ken

I didn't think much about the news of the great Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro's being award the Nobel Prize in Literature, beyond thinking how spectacularly well-deserved it is -- and maybe thinking that honoring her brings more distinction to the Nobel people than vice versa. If ever there was a writer who successfully carved out a well-deserved niche in the literary pantheon, it's Alice Munro.

I also can't claim to be an encyclopedically knowledgeable fan. Over the years I've read a bunch of Munro's stories as they appeared in The New Yorker, and I don't remember one that wasn't a singular and transporting pleasure to read, and that didn't seem to me a major event.

Here, however, is the more comprehending and comprehensive reaction of James Wood, a New Yorker book critic, in a splendid newyorker.com blogpost, "Alice Munro, Our Chekhov":

The announcement that this year's Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to Alice Munro probably strikes many readers and writers as deliriously incredible. Few contemporary writers are more admired, and with good reason. Everyone gets called "our Chekhov." All you have to do nowadays is write a few half-decent stories and you are "our Chekhov." But Alice Munro really is our Chekhov -- which is to say, the English language's Chekhov. (In Munro's great story, "The Beggar Maid," an ambitious man sees that a friend of the woman he is courting "mispronounced Metternich," and says indignantly to her: "How can you be friends with people like that?" I'm put in mind of Chekhov's story "The Russian Master," which has a character who repeatedly torments a young teacher by asking him why he has "never read Lessing.")

Yet many of Munro's readers had sadly concluded that she was not, somehow, the kind of writer that the Nobel committee seemed to like; I had decided that she would join the list of noble non-Nobelists, a distinguished category that includes Tolstoy, Nabokov, Borges, Hrabal, Sebald, Bernhard, Ingmar Bergman -- and Chekhov, as it happens.

We were wrong, and for once it was wonderful to be wrong.

I've become more and more comfortable with Wood as a critic, to the point where I guess I would have to style myself a fan. By now I've read enough of his work to know that his personal interests and enthusiasms aren't much like mine, but his sensibilities seem to work just fine for me.
Picking up where we left off above, Wood goes on: "Greatly enjoying being wrong, I spent an hour yesterday rereading one of Munro's finest stories, 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain,' which appeared in this magazine." For nonsubscribers, unfortunately, the link leads only to an abstract, but Wood provides a detailed enough synopsis to explain the points he proceeds to make about the story, though my suggestion, along the lines of a spoiler alert, would be that, by one means or another, you read the story first, to have the advantage of full, unspoiled surprisability -- and Munro is nothing if not a surpriser -- in the reading. One of her delights seems to be setting us readers up for utterly wrong expectations of where the story and the characters are headed.

That said, I don't think you'll want to miss Wood's discussion of the story, with regard to both beautiful details and large themes and technical accomplishments. "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," he notes, "is beautiful in the irony of its symmetries." But, he says, "two additional elements, both characteristic of Munro's careful art, make it a great story." Those elements are "Munro's astounding lack of sentimentality," which he particularizes extremely well, and ("the second very Munro-ish element") "the formal freedom of the story, which compacts a lot of life into a short space, and moves backwards and forwards over a great deal of terrain," which again is detailed in a strikingly illuminating way.

"Throughout her work," Wood concludes, "Munro is daring in this way --"

daring with the truth, and daring in her formal choices. At the level of the sentence, her stories proceed within the grammar of conventional realism; but at the formal level, her work invents its own grammar, which is why her stories strike many readers as closer to novellas than to any idea of "the conventional well-made short story." And notice, too, in that opening passage, how gently funny and slyly indirect Munro is: the impressive cardiologist who is subservient at home, happy to listen to "strange tirades with an absent-minded smile"; a household that is mysteriously full of different people, coming and going, all of them delivering "tirades" of one kind or another; and a household that is perhaps more fun to belong to than a sorority. Such life!

Over the years Munro has had her stories gathered in a now-long series of books. (Amazon has an Alice Munro page.) I assume the Nobel will produce a flurry of book sales, and perhaps also some recollecting of this large body of work. The attention is all deserved, and should richly reward those who are exploring more of her work as well as those who are coming new to it. As I suggeseted, I think her Nobel award reflects more honor on the award-givers than the prize bestows on the writer who produced all that work.

Still, it sure is nice to see her get the recognition.


UPDATE: NOW EVERYBODY CAN READ
"THE BEAR CAME OVER THE MOUNTAIN"

The story has been reprinted as the fiction piece in the October 21 issue of The New Yorker, with a conventional link. Now everyone can read the story and then read the Wood piece with its inevitable spoilers. Well done, New Yorker people!

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

A DWT shout-out to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman

Vice President Cheney looks on approvingly as Chimpy the Prez issues a hearty "Well done" in response to news that Paul Krugman has won this year's economics Nobel. (No, not really -- we're just making up the part about Chimpy and Big Dick. But we'd sure love to have seen their pusses when they heard!)

"The moral of this story is that failure to regulate effectively isn’t just bad for consumers, it’s bad for business."

-- Paul Krugman, in a June NYT column
called "Bad Cow Disease"

"At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs."

--Paul Krugman, in a December NYT column
called "Innovating Our Way to Financial Crisis"

by Ken

By now you've no doubt heard the news that Paul Krugman has been awarded this year's Nobel Price in economics, "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity."

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences explains the award of what is officially called The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008:

International Trade and Economic Geography

Patterns of trade and location have always been key issues in the economic debate. What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions. He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography.

Krugman's approach is based on the premise that many goods and services can be produced more cheaply in long series, a concept generally known as economies of scale. Meanwhile, consumers demand a varied supply of goods. As a result, small-scale production for a local market is replaced by large-scale production for the world market, where firms with similar products compete with one another.

Traditional trade theory assumes that countries are different and explains why some countries export agricultural products whereas others export industrial goods. The new theory clarifies why worldwide trade is in fact dominated by countries which not only have similar conditions, but also trade in similar products -- for instance, a country such as Sweden that both exports and imports cars. This kind of trade enables specialization and large-scale production, which result in lower prices and a greater diversity of commodities.

Economies of scale combined with reduced transport costs also help to explain why an increasingly larger share of the world population lives in cities and why similar economic activities are concentrated in the same locations. Lower transport costs can trigger a self-reinforcing process whereby a growing metropolitan population gives rise to increased large-scale production, higher real wages and a more diversified supply of goods. This, in turn, stimulates further migration to cities. Krugman's theories have shown that the outcome of these processes can well be that regions become divided into a high-technology urbanized core and a less developed "periphery".

Got that? (I'm sorry to have to report that you're responsible for all this material on the midterm.)

We're reminded, of course, that the Nobel is awarded, not for the work we're familiar with, but for this important work done mostly before he entered the current phase of his career, in which he came to be known as perhaps the single most important media voice for political sanity through the darkest years of the Bush regime.

When I heard the Nobel news, the first thing I thought of was the look on "Big Dick" Cheney's and Chimpy the Prez's pusses when they heard the news. Of course by now Big Dick and Chimpy have shrunk to little more than a historical footnote, one that should read something like this:

Between January 2001 and January 2009 they not only won but permanently retired the award for Worst Presidential Administration in the History of the Republic. About all that's left for them is to see how much loot they can still cart off, for themselves and on behalf of their cronies, and all the totalitarian and ideologically extremist rules, regulations, and appointees they can ram into the system in their way out.

So while it's not as sweet as it once might have been, there's still something mighty satisfying about Krugman receiving the Nobel just as Cheney and Chimpy are sliding onto their places on the Dunce Chairs of History. It's just the tiniest sense of order in the universe.

Oh sure, I make fun of all the vacation days the bum takes off from his column-writing. (Really, now, how long does it take to type 750 words?) And if I ever had a job that involved a contract, I'd want written into that contract that I get all "Krugman days" off. The fact remains that Krugman columns have been quoted so often in DWT that the guy is practically and involuntary (and unpaid -- which, come to think of it, means he's on the same pay scale as the rest of us) co-conspirator.

But through the darkest years of the Bush regime, the first term, in which the media conspired to such a large degree with the regime to brand any dissent from regime dogma as unpatriotic, even traitorous, I can't begin to convey how much I depended on Krugman's usually lonely twice-weekly voice of sanity. Through that darkest period of my political life, there was our Paul, and his Sunday NYT colleague Frank Rich, and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and eventually Air America Radio, whose potential would never be realized but which offered a roster of hard-hitting, no-bullshit on-air hosts and its best demonstration of what that promise could be in the zany and outrageous morning show, Morning Sedition.

As the story of the Bush regime turned from its extremist ideology and war-mongering to its criminal incompetence, pervasive corruption, and constitutional mayhem, our Paul's economics background came more and more into play. While Alan Greenspan, the Moe of establishment economics stooges, was still saying, "Housing bubble? What housing bubble?," Paul was trying to warn us, to prepare us, for pretty much what has happened.

In the next day or two I want to come back to the specific substantive importance of Paul's contributions, but for now I'm getting a helluva kick out of listening to the right-wingers squeal like stuck pigs about his Nobel.

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