The Guy Who Brought You French Wine Have you ever enjoyed French wine or German Rhine wine? You have one person to thank. This same person is the only Roman pontiff, except St. Peter, that Jesus referred to by name.

His name also forms the root of the Russian "tsar" and the German "kaiser" and, if you're still in the dark, he gave his name to a surgical procedure by which my own darling daugher was born.

Of course I'm talking about Julius Caesar, a splendid Roman, probably the most splendid of them all, with due deference given to his nephew and namesake Augustus, a fairly splendid individual in his own right, who realized his uncle's vision and brought peace and prosperity to the Mediterranean World for many centuries.

But the original Caesar left to the world a narrative of his military successes and no one with an interest in military history could possitly fail to read it. Never mind that generation after generation of schoolboys have had to translate Caesar's Gallic Wars; it's an amazingly informative work about the Celtic people and about the winning ways of the Roman military.

My friend Ed says Caesar's account is all lies, starting with the migration of the Helvetii, but I say even if Caesar, or the guy he had writing this stuff for him, lied about everything that it was in their interest to lie about, there is an enormous amount of valuable historical material in these narratives that we can probably rely on because there was no reason for Caesar or his scriptor to lie.

For example, I don't think Caesar made up any tribes out of thin air. So if we take the number of tribes that he mentions and average it out, we find that the average Gallic tribe controlled about as much acreage as a New England county.

And Caesar always knew not only who was king of each tribe, but also whom that guy had slain to become king and which sons and heirs of the slain king were available to side with the Romans.

He also illustrates how the Roman army would try to force a battle on favorable ground, and then, when the Gauls took refuge in a fortified position, would deprive them of water, if possible, or food, if possible, and of forage for their horses.

And then, if none of that worked, they would build seige engines and wheel them up to the walls, or dig under the walls, or whatever. The upshot is that the Roman army won a lot more victories with the shovel then they did with the sword.

In the climax of the Gallic Wars, Caesar has built seigeworks around Alesia, where his enemy Vercingetorix has holed up with his army. Then a relieving army arrives and Caesar has to have his men dig an outer wall to hold them off, so that Caesar's entire holding in Gaul is in the shape of a doughnut around Alesia.

It all works out great for Caesar, but what could one expect. This is the guy who had to make his way to Italy, through Pompey's blockading fleet, and told the boatman,"Be bold and fear nothing, for Caesar's fate is in your hands."

That's a good motto, I think, "Be bold and fear nothing," as long as you're as crafty and as well-informed as Caesar.  ¶ 10:20 PM 0 comments

  A Poor Competitor Here's a microquote from the entry on George F. Kennan's Sad Appreciations:

"The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.

"The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain."  ¶ 8:21 PM 1 comments

  The Death of Ivan Ilych Another short, interesting work by a Russian author is "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy. Although it's about a guy dying, some of it is actually pretty funny. And it's a very powerful story that illuminates some profound truths about life and death.

The story begins with Ivan Ilych's funeral. All of Ivan Ilych's colleagues are gossiping about who's going to get his post and who will get their post and so on. The man he supposed was his best friend, Peter Ivanovich, is trying to figure out a way to sneak out and play bridge but Ivan Ilych's wife takes him aside.

"'Oh Peter Ivanovich, how hard it is! How terribly, terribly hard,' and she began to weep.

"Peter Ivanovich sighed and waited for her to finish blowing her nose. When she had done so, he said, 'Believe me...' and she again began talking and brought out what was evidently her chief concern with him -- namely to question him as to how she could obtain a grant of money from the government on the occasion of her husband's death.

"She made it appear that she was asking Peter Ivanovich's advice about her pension, but he soon saw that she already knew about that to the minutest detail, more even than he did himself. She knew how much could be got out of the government in consequence of her husband's death, but wanted to find out whether she could not possibly extract something more.

"Peter Ivanovich tried to think of some means of doing so, but after reflecting for a while and, out of propriety, condemning the government for its niggardliness, he said he thought that nothing more could be got. Then she sighed and evidently began to devise means of getting rid of her visitor."

Then we go back and get the story of Ivan Ilych's life which Tolstoy suggests was dedicated entirely to impressing others and "doing the right thing" socially. Then, as he is hanging a curtain in his new parlor, he falls and gets poked in the side with a curtain rod. Then he gets a pain in his side and it gets worse and worse and he gets treated by lots of quacks who all prescribe all kinds of ghastly medicines and so on and so forth.

At one point he tries to conjure up some happy memories to console him in his dying agony:

"In imagination he began to recall the best moments of his pleasant life. But strange to say none of those best moments of his pleasant life now seemed at all what they had then seemed -- none of them except the first recollections of childhood. There, in childhood, there had been something really pleasant with which it would be possible to live if it could return. But the child who had experienced that happiness existed no longer, it was like the reminiscence of somebody else.

"As soon as the period began which had produced the present Ivan Ilych, all that had seemed joys now melted before his sight and turned into something trivial and often nasty.

"And the futher he departed from childhood and the nearer he came to the present the more worthless and doubtful were the joys. This began with the School of Law. A little that was really good was still found there -- there was light-heartedness, friendship, and hope. But in the upper classes there had already been fewer and fewer of such good moments.

"Then during the first years of his official career, some pleasant moments again occurred: they were the memories of love for a woman. Then all became confused and there was still less of what was good; later on again there was still less of what was good, and the further he went the less there was."

There's a real testimonial for the legal profession.

I love the ending of this story and since there's little chance you will actually read it, I will tell you the ending because it's going to be your ending and mine as well. It turns out that even if you waste your life on social silliness, you still find eternal joy:

"And suddenly it grew clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him was all dropping away at once from two sides, from ten sides, and from all sides. 'How good and how simple,' he thought. 'And the pain?' he asked himself. 'What has become of it? Where are you, pain?'

"He turned his attention to it.

"'Yes, here it is. Well what of it? Let the pain be.'

"'And death... where is it?'

"He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death? There was no fear because there was no death.

"In place of death there was light.

"'So that's what it is!' he suddenly exclaimed aloud. 'What joy!'"  ¶ 7:12 PM 0 comments

  Taras Bulba
Here's an excerpt from Taras Bulba by Nikolai Gogol. The photo shows Yul Brynner as Taras.

"Taras Bulba was terribly stubborn. The cruel fifteenth century gave birth to such characters in that seminomadic corner of Europe. Russia, abandoned by her princes, had been devastated, burned to the ground by the irresistable raids of the Mongolian predators.

"A man who lost his shelter became daring; he became used to facing fire, restless neighbors, and unending perils, and forgot the meaning of fear.

"It was in that era, when the peaceful Slav was fired with a warlike flame, that the Cossacks made their appearance. They were like an explosion in which the free, exuberant Russian character found an outlet. Soon valleys, river crossings, sheltered spots, teemed with Cossacks. No one knew how many of them there were, and when the Sultan asked they answered in good faith:

"'Who can tell? We are scattered over the entire steppe and wherever there's a hillock, there's a Cossack.'

"It was the ordeals they had gone through that had torn this strange manifestation of Russian vigor out of the breast of the Russian people. The erstwhile towns and princely domains with their feuding and trading had disappeared and their place had been taken by warlike settlements linked by the common danger and by hatred of the heathen predators.

"The unbreakable resistance of this people saved Europe from the merciless hordes from the East.

"There were few things a Cossack could not do. He knew the arts of blacksmithing and gunsmithing, how to distill vodka, build a wagon, prepare powder, and, above all, he knew how to drink and carouse as only a Russian can.

"Moreover, besides the registered Cossacks, those who were paid to appear fully equipped in time of emergency, it was possible to recruit a whole army of volunteers. All that was needed was for Cossack chiefs to appear at various market places and village squares, mount a cart and call out:

"'Hey you beer brewers! Enough! You've lain around on your stoves too long, feeding the flies with your bacon! What about seeking a little glory! Hey, you plowmen, shepherds, skirt-lovers! Stop muddying your yellow boots and wasting your vigor on women! Time to act like Cossacks!'

"And these words were like sparks on dried wood. The plowman broke his plow, the brewers threw away their casks and destroyed their barrels, the merchants let their stores go to ruin, broke pots and pans and everything else in their houses, mounted horses and were off. In a word, the Russian soul found its outlet in the Cossack and his powerful physique."  ¶ 5:43 PM 2 comments

  Reading the Russians I think a lot of people feel they should read the Russians. After all, William Faulkner took a year off from the post office to read the Russians, and look what it did for him. He became yet another author people feel they should read.

The trouble is, people don't read what they should read. And I don't think they should. People should read for enjoyment. So don't read the Russians because you think you should. Read them because you feel like it.

I'd start with that spirited troika of contemporaries: Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Lermontov.

Pushkin, of course, is revered in Russia above all other writers. At one international literary conference, one of the speakers began a discussion of one of the female characters in the epic poem "Boris Gudonov."

A burly Russian scholar, I am told, rose up from his seat and waved his finger at the speaker, and said in a menacing tone, "You leave Tasha alone!"

People often think of Russian novels as long and ponderous like War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, but this troika of authors, who are acknowledged as the founders of Russian literature, have a number of very lively short works.

Pushkin wrote a very interesting "History of Pugachev's Rebellion," and in "The Negro of Peter the Great" he tells the story of his great-grandfather, an Abyssinian prince kidnapped and sold into slavery in Turkey. Gannibal, as he was known, was adopted by Peter the Great and became the toast of European society. Voltaire called him "the dark star of Russia's enlightenment." His descendants, besides Pushkin, include Lord Louis Mountbatten.

Gogol, a close friend of Pushkin's, wrote a bunch of books and plays that are really hilarious. His novel Dead Souls (sounds morbid, but it's actually very funny) is about a guy who goes around buying dead serfs, referred to as "dead souls."

You see they took a census of serfs (people who were owned by landowners) every ten years and that was used to determine the landowners' tax bills. So if a serf died, the landowner had to go on paying taxes on him or her until the next census.

So this guy Chichikov shows up and offers to buy the "dead souls," whom the landowners are happy to sell because it reduces their tax liability.

So why is this guy buying dead serfs? Well it turns out that the government is giving grants of land to people who own a certain number of serfs and apparently they weren't checking whether the serfs were dead or alive. Anyway, it's a funny story and it gives Gogol the opportunity to do what he does best, which is to spoof provincial Russian society.

Another excellent provincial spoof by Gogol is his play "The Inspector General" in which a dissolute, bankrupt nobleman arrives in this province just when the local officials (all laughable fops) are expecting a government inspector, so they all start kissing up to him until they find out who he really is.

Gogol also wrote a short novel about the Cossack Taras Bulba which reads like Homer. It was made into an excellent movie. The high point comes when Taras (played by Yul Brynner) shoots his son (played by Tony Curtis) at point-blank range. I have no particular animus against Tony Curtis, but for some reason I really enjoyed seeing him shot at point-blank range.

Two other Gogol stories that should not be missed are "The Queen of Spades" -- my favorite, a real corker -- and "The Overcoat," probably his most famous story. Dostoyevsky said, "We all came out of Gogol's Overcoat."

Lermontov was more a disciple of Pushkin's. He got in trouble for writing "The Death of a Poet" in which he insinuates that members of the tsar's court, and even the tsar himself, were complicit in causing the duel in which Pushkin died. The tsar (Nicholas I) gave Pushkin the lowest possible court title to humiliate him and to allow his wife, who had many admirers, including the tsar, to attend court balls. Pushkin then challenged his wife's reputed lover to a duel and was killed.

Anyway, some say Lermontov surpassed his hero and certainly his novel A Hero of Our Time is, in my humble opinion, one of the best books every written, right up there with A Passage to India by E.M. Forster. I make this comparison because both are beautifully crafted works with masterful shifts in the narrative point of view. That's probably why Vladimir Nabokov took the trouble to translate the work into English.

Regrettably, Lermontov was also killed in a duel at a young age.  ¶ 3:03 PM 1 comments

  George F. Kennan's "Sad Appreciations" There is a remarkable little book that has been kicking around for many years called American Diplomacy 1900-1950 by George F. Kennan. I see it all the time at tag sales and flea markets, so it's probably taught in a lot of history classes. I finally decided to pick it up and read it and I found it full of very perceptive insights to which no one in public office, as far as I can tell, has ever paid the slightest attention.

George Kennan, of course, was the one who said in the New Yorker before the war that an overthrow of the Iraqi regime would prove problematic because it would upset the balance of sectarian powers in the region.

American Diplomacy is a difficult read but utterly and completely worthwhile. I think the reason for this is that this was 1951 and Kennan was saying bad things about America. To avoid being branded a traitor by Senator Joe McCarthy and his ilk, Kennan adopted the simple expedient of speaking in a way that only intelligent people could understand.

His message is so compelling that I plan to do a number of entries about him (Be warned!) but let me begin by letting him speak for himself. Here he is talking about the horrific slaughter of World War I:

"If there was anything special about the first World War, it was only that the thing went on in the same way and in the same places for an awfully long time; there was not much movement, not much adventure, not much hope that anything could happen that would change the whole fortunes of war at any early date. The losses were terrific on both sides. You could practically calculate when your time would come. And it was all so unutterably futile.

"Now it would be pleasant, and would ease our task, if we could say that, as a war so sickening ran its course, people and governments on both sides sobered and became thoughtful, became aware of the increasing emptiness of victory, aware that no political objectives could be worth this price, amenable to any reasonable suggestion for a compromise peace that would put an end to the slaughter.

"Unfortunately, we cannot say this. There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of the experience of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics.

"It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war.

"But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular governments is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities -- politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like a fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent.

"These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.

"The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain.

"And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt on over the validity of democratic institutions.

"And until peoples learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves -- as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government -- this sort of thing will continue to occur."

Do you have a "truth reaction"? A physical sensation that you get when you hear or read or see something that strikes you as profound truth? I get a tingle up my spine and into the back of my shoulders. The first time that I can remember feeling this tingle was when I was 14 years old in the chapel of The Groton School listening to The Reverend Charles Sheerin preach.

I get that tingle every time I pick up this book.  ¶ 8:49 PM 1 comments

  The So-Called Potato Famine I hope I can be excused for violating the number one rule of this blog: "It's not about me. It's about the books."

My tour of the West of Ireland was so exhilarating and informative that I would like to share a little of what I learned from the scholars there who help so many travelers to understand the country's history.

The lead for my story on GoNOMAD is going to be "The West of Ireland: Stories in Stone". That's the first thing you notice about the place, the stones. I don't think I saw a single house made of wood. There just aren't any trees to speak of.

The stones tell us the story of the Irish people, and a grand uplifting story it is, though surely not a cheery one.

The stone tombs of an area called The Burren tell us about the people who farmed there in the late Neolithic Age -- two thousand years before the sack of Troy that the blind Greek guy wrote about.

The giant ring forts of Inis Mor tell of the Iron Age warriors who predated the Celts by about five hundred years, probably the same folks who built Stonehenge. About all we know of them is that they were able to transport enormous stones for hundreds of miles and set them upright in the ground -- clearly a guy thing, if you know what I mean. And the center of their civilization was on the Island of Malta, so they were clearly expert mariners.

Then there are the thousands of stone walls enclosing patches of land, some as small as an eighth of an acre. These tell us about the Penal Laws imposed on the Irish which required each family to subdivide its land among its sons. These patches were so small that the only way the farmers could support their families was to grow potatoes.

Which brings us to the so-called potato famine. It was not really a famine, you know. There was no shortage of food. There are countless proofs of this, but one is enough: when relief ships loaded with food arrived from Canada, they had to wait three days while a bunch of other ships were loaded with grain for EXPORT.

No it was not a famine; it was an act of war, an atrocity committed by a ruling class that had lost all sense of decency and humanity. Of a population of about eight million, a million and a half people starved to death and another three million emigrated, many to my home town of Boston, Massachusetts, known as the thirty-third county of Ireland.

Those who stayed held wakes for those who left, for they knew they would never see them again in this world.

I have taken some time to contemplate this terrible crime, committed out of arrogance and greed. As I biked around that idyllic landscape, I tried to picture what it was like to see more than a million people -- men, women and children -- starving to death while others who had plenty stood by unmoved. That's about fifty Fenway Parks worth of people.

It's not just a matter of nationality. Our friend and tour guide John Heagney pointed out that some English landlords like John Darcy did all they could to help their tenants and some Irish landlords were as cruel as their English counterparts.

It was yet another example of man's inhumanity to man, and I believe it should be studied and taught and remembered, just as the Nazi holocaust should be studied and taught and remembered, not just as a lesson of history, but as a manifestation of that eternal evil which, I fear, will never cease to rear its ugly head.

I believe that those who come after us should know what it looks like, what it smells like, how it hunts and captures the souls of men and binds them to its bidding.

As Ralph Ellison said in reference to another holocaust -- slavery in the good old US of A -- "Learn it to the young'uns!"  ¶ 6:17 PM 1 comments

  Bunratty Castle
The singers and musicians at Bunratty Castle played and sang so sweetly it brought tears to my eyes. I took some shit from the callous sophisticates in our group, but it was well worth it.  ¶ 4:38 PM 0 comments

  Biking in Ireland To all my friends in the blogosphere:

Sorry I have not posted for a week. I've been on a bicycle tour of the West of Ireland. I thought I would be able to blog from there, but we averaged just under 30 miles a day (not bad for a bunch of journalists) and I didn't even have time to use the jacuzzis.

I got a beautiful up-close and personal view of the Emerald Isle, though, smelled the manure and the burning peat and patted all the horsies we went by.

From the medieval banquet at Bunratty Castle to the ring forts of Inis Mor to the Stone Age tombs of The Burren to the breathtaking scenery of Connemara, it was truly an unforgettable experience, which you can read all about on GoNOMAD once I get it written.

As we drove to Shannon Airport to fly back to the States, we passed Kiltartan's Cross and I was reminded of the recitation that won me the Public Speaking Prize in the seventh grade back at Dexter School in Brookline, Massachusetts. I still know it by heart:


An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

by William Butler Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above.
Those that I fight I do not hate.
Those that I guard I do not love.

My country is Kiltartan's Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor.
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

I balanced all, brought all to mind.
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind.
In balance with this life, this death.


This may sound a little corny, but I was truly moved by the indomitable spirit of the Irish people. After centuries of conquest, sacking, looting, famine and oppression, the Irish have always been head and shoulders above all other countries in literature, music, dance, and theater -- in short everything that is ennobling to the human spirit.

Things are better in Ireland now. They have full employment, and they even have 160,000 Polish immigrants to fill all the jobs that have been created by a economic mini-boom.

I asked our guide, John Heagney, whose family has been farming in Ireland for many generations, whether all this prosperity might mean that Ireland will have to relinquish its preeminence in the arts. He laughed and said it's a chance they're willing to take.

"Besides," he said, "maybe it's time for some other countries to have their turn."  ¶ 4:12 PM 2 comments