Usa

Thursday

Lewis Jones

Lost Kerouac that should have stayed lost

In 1944, when he was 22, Jack Kerouac lost a manuscript — in a taxi, as he thought, but probably in Allen Ginsberg’s room at Columbia University — and it stayed lost until 2002, when it was auctioned at Sotheby’s. Now it has been published, all 70 pages of it, together with some youthful sketches and some letters between Kerouac and his father, in an edition by a professor at Lowell, Massachusetts, Kerouac’s home town. The Haunted Life is billed as a novella, but turns out to be the first part — ‘Home’ — of a projected novel, to be completed by ‘War’ and ‘Change’. Set in 1941, it is

David Blackburn

Our own folly may yet lead us to a second dishonourable Yalta

‘He was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.’ Those words are taken from Officers and Gentlemen, the second volume in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour, his trilogy about the second world war. The words describe the disillusion of the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, as Britain sides with Soviet Russia to defeat Hitler: an alliance with an atheist tyranny to defeat an atheist tyranny, an alliance that led to the betrayal – perhaps necessary – of Eastern Europe at Yalta. The words resonate

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Isn’t Obama’s Two Ferns interview just a bit crap?

Have you seen Barack Obama’s appearance on the satirical interview show Between Two Ferns? What did you think? According to some pundits, it is amazingly funny. Obama is the ‘best Between Two Ferns guest ever’, says Oliver Franklin at GQ. I must be missing something, because I found it painful and somewhat depressing. There a couple of quite good moments, granted – such as when Obama is busy plugging Affordable Healthcare and the host, Zach Galifianakis, says ‘Is this what they mean by drones?’ – but the rest is just a bit crap. It is weirdly off, too. At times Obama, trying to be dead pan, just seems to miss

Thursday

John Osullivan

Europe’s ‘new world order’ is letting Vladimir Putin run riot

[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/Untitled_2_AAC_audio.mp3″ title=”John O’Sullivan discusses why we shouldn’t be so afraid of Putin” startat=1088] Listen [/audioplayer]If Vladimir Putin’s invasion and occupation of the Crimea brings to an end the Pax Americana and the post-Cold War world that began in 1989, what new European, or even global, order is replacing them? That question may seem topical in the light of Russia’s seemingly smooth overriding in Crimea of the diplomatic treaties and legal rules that outlaw aggression, occupation and annexation. In fact, it is six years behind the times. To understand the situation in the Ukraine, we need to go back to the Nato summit in Bucharest, in April 2008. There, Putin

Thursday

Ed West

Vladimir Putin is a reactionary autocrat, not a conservative

Apparently the new Muppets film features Russians as the baddies, a sign of the times as we increasingly draw into a new ideological cold war with the old enemy. Or perhaps a hot, ethnic war, if events in Crimea get any worse, events which raise questions about western foreign policy. Why are we getting involved in this country ‘steeped in blood and carpeted with unquiet graves’, as Peter Hitchens calls it? Another paleocon type, the Telegraph’s semi-deprogrammed former leftist Tim Stanley, says that by provoking Russia into a direct confrontation we look foolish and weak. The ideological cold war was the subject of last week’s cover story, in which Owen

Thursday

Matthew Lynn

You, too, can be a shale profiteer

It might not be something you want to mention in the Half Moon Inn in Balcombe, or around any of the other communities where people are getting anxious about shale gas explorers ripping up the countryside with their drills and pipelines. But if shale is the tremendous source of wealth that David Cameron insists it can be for this country, how do you go about investing it? After all, if there are fortunes to be made, there is no reason not to claim your share. There is no longer any question that shale gas is a major industry. In the US, where it is most advanced, it is already worth

Tuesday

Molly Guinness

Shirley Temple, 1928 – 2014, remembered in The Spectator

Shirley Temple has died in California at the age of 85. She was known as America’s little darling after she appeared in her first film at the age of three. Later in life she moved into politics, running for Congress and joining the diplomatic corps. Henry Kissinger, she said, was surprised she knew where Ghana was, but she became ambassador to Ghana and later to Czechoslovakia. As for her films, Graham Greene, reviewing Shirley Temple’s latest performance in August 1936, was rather shocked: Captain January, the latest Shirley Temple picture, is sentimental, a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent… Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance,

Friday

Allie Renison

What the US really thinks about Europe (and why it might help push reform)

Whether it wants to or not, Washington has a role to play in the UK’s EU debate. Eurosceptics and Europhiles constantly wrangle over what the US position is on Brexit, splitting hairs interpreting State Department officials’ carefully worded remarks in order to claim victory for their side. The latest episode in this running saga sees the sceptics feeling vindicated by Washington’s exasperation with the EU. Assistant Secretary of State (for European Affairs no less) Victoria Nuland appears to have landed herself in some rather hot water – both diplomatic and political. In a reportedly leaked phone call to the US ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland is heard unceremoniously blasting the EU

Thursday

Ed West

Meritocracy doesn’t work. It’s in the Left’s interest to recognise this

At the end of Coming Apart Charles Murray mentions, rather enigmatically, that our assumptions about society will soon be blown out of the water by new discoveries about human nature. I imagine he’s talking about genetic discoveries, in particular about the human brain. One of our current assumptions is meritocracy, and the idea that we can produce a fair society in which the most talented and energetic rise to the top. This is sometimes what people mean when they talk of the ‘American Dream’, a term that seems to be used more now that social mobility in that great country is fading and inequality rising. That is why The Son

Thursday

Florence King

America’s war on sleep

 Fredericksburg, Virginia Ask an American to name the author of the line ‘Sleep, that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’, and he will promptly reply ‘Shakespeare’. It’s pure guesswork but we always credit the Bard with anything that sounds like a literary quotation, so he inadvertently gets it right. But if you recite the rest of the passage and ask what it means you will draw a blank. The American mind will not spark until it hears ‘Macbeth hath murdered sleep’, which sets off a cascading display of audience-identification fireworks, and visions of a new American production in which Macbeth is renamed Big Thane and cast as the hero

Friday

The Spectator

The Spectator on the assassination of JFK and how to remember the president

6 December 1963 …That we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain… Lincoln, a hundred years ago at Gettysburg. And President Johnson, in his noble speech to Congress, echoed the words in tribute to John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Earlier in November we in this country had been wondering how long Remembrance Sunday could remain. Wondering whether the poppy symbolism of the First World War meant very much to those who fought in the Second, the youngest of them now moving towards their forties. That President Kennedy should have become the spokesman of those who fought in war and yearned for peace was natural. But he became

Thursday

Anthony Sattin

American Smoke, by Iain Sinclair – review

If you have read Iain Sinclair’s books you will know that he is a stylist with a love of language. You will also know that he has opinions to express and projects to promote or destroy: London’s Olympic park was one of his targets. He has lived in Hackney for much of the past 40 years and his previous book of that name was so provocative that Hackney council tried to ban him from giving a reading at a local library. He can be digressive to an extent that becomes challenging, as you would expect from a writer who long ago rejected the need for anything as banal as a

Tuesday

Alex Massie

John F Kennedy was one of the nastiest presidents in American history

The fiftieth anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination is, of course, an occasion for a fresh outbreak of the virulent hagiography that has corrupted the memory of his actual record. The New York Times, a paper that should know better by now, published an article this week that repeated the old lie that somehow right-wing hysterics in Texas were the people really responsible for Kennedy’s murder. A theory inconvenienced only by the fact Lee Harvey Oswald was a pro-Castro leftist. But never mind that. Better to reframe the assassination as a part of America’s culture wars. And we know who the guilty men are in those, don’t we? American history is a

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

The painter of poetry

The famous court case in which Ruskin accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’ continues to rumble through the public response to art in this country. The man in the street, the man on the Clapham Omnibus and most of the men who drive black cabs all like their art to be recognisable. (Perhaps women are less hidebound.) Their definition of skill is the ability to paint with photographic fidelity, and they prefer art to tell a story. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), leading exponent of ‘art for art’s sake’, painted pure visual poetry rather than the hard facts of detailed realism. His paintings are

Celia Walden

Celia Walden’s diary: Have I finally caught my husband in an affair?

For a minute I just stood there with my back against the wall, staring at the credit card receipt. Then I slid down into a crouching position on the kitchen floor. ‘So this is it,’ I thought to myself. ‘This is really going to be how I find out.’ I’d found the receipt in the front pocket of one of my husband’s suitcases on Tuesday morning. It was for dinner for two at the Four Seasons Hotel in Santa Barbara — a place he’d told me he’d never been. He’d had the Merlot and the rib-eye; she’d had the cucumber martini and a Caesar salad. I’m guessing that she waived

Thursday

Steerpike

Ed’s love for Bill de Blasio runs deep

The court of Ed has a new hero. Francois Hollande, who was credited with ‘turning the tide’ of austerity by taking a ‘different way forward’, has been usurped by Bill de Blasio, the Democrat Mayor-elect of New York, who Team Ed credit with a ‘different kind’ of politics. Ed’s greybeard Lord Wood has penned a gushing paean to de Blasio in today’s Telegraph. Wood applauds de Blasio’s ‘Disraelian theme: “One New York, Rising Together”’. Mr S can’t see all that much of Disraeli in de Blasio’s mundane slogan — the word ‘one’ seems to have assumed mythic proportions in the minds of Ed’s counsellors. Then again, it’s Lord Wood’s business to talk

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

Visar Arifaj is Kosovo’s answer to Borat and Beppe Grillo – only funny

Kosovo held regional elections over the weekend…and it rather looks as if the Serbs in the north of the country, in Mitrovica, stayed away in droves, notwithstanding the instructions from Belgrade that they should participate in the elections. The Serbian government stance is in turn dictated by Coffee Housers’ favourite EU politician, Britain’s own Cathy Ashton. She has intimated that Serbia’s bid to join the EU will depend on its support for the elections, which in turn is linked to the implementation of her EU plan for a Serbia-Kosovo deal. While I was in Pristina I met someone who was involved in the talks that led to the plan, and his assessment was that

Tuesday

Rod Liddle

Convince me that Aaron Alexis, the mentally ill Washington shooter, should have been allowed to buy guns?

Is it only the mentally ill who are allowed guns in the USA, or is it only the mentally ill ones that we hear about? Aaron Alexis, responsible for shooting dead 12 people within a military base in Washington DC, had a bunch of exciting guns with him, including an AR 15 semi-automatic rifle, which seems to be the weapon de jour for homicidal mentalists. Alexis also was in possession of voices in his head, apparently, and was paranoid and possibly schizophrenic to boot. Quite soon, in your newspapers, someone from a mental health charity will tell you that statistically speaking crossing the road is far more dangerous than a

Gloria Deak

‘A banishment’ – Gloria Deak describes the visits of celebrated Victorians to America

No, they decidedly did not like us — this is true at least for the majority of the nineteenth-century British travelers to the New World. They came out of a sense of wonder, somewhat akin to the reaction of Thomas More who declared in his sixteenth-century Utopia that ‘nowadays countries are always being discovered that were never in the old geography books.’ Over the next few centuries, perhaps no emerging country west of the Atlantic would excite as much curiosity as the vast expanse of territory that would become known as the United States. It soon became manifest that, in expanding her geographical borders, the United States had staked out

Thursday

Sam Leith

Signifying Rappers, by David Foster Wallace – review

Since his suicide, David Foster Wallace has made the transition from major writer to major industry. Hence this UK issue of a slender work of music history got up for a small US press in 1990 by a young Wallace and his college friend Mark Costello. The premise: it’s the early days of rap, and two overeducated white kids who like it produce a sampler considering What It’s All About. That it’s dated doesn’t matter much. That it’s juvenilia does. Its cleverness is that of a writer in possession of an immense talent but not yet remotely in control of it: a learner driver doing doughnuts in a powerful car.