The Dish

More than you’d imagine: a tour through a recent exhibition of art-work by Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Gunter Grass, Douglas Coupland (see above), William Burroughes, Mark Strand, Jonathan Lethem, and others:

Walking through the exhibit and leafing through The Writer’s Brush, one can discover, for example, that W. B. Yeats painted unusual watercolors to change his state of mind; before she became an established writer, George Sand supported herself as a painter; William Carlos Williams was inspired to paint by a friend from medical school; John Berger and Mark Strand were both art majors, and Henry Miller’s exuberant watercolors number in the thousands.

One small oil painting stands out, that of a “Cabaret Performer” (1935), a dancer in a sexually provocative pose with a moustache in place of pubic hair, being pelted with flowers. It is signed ee cummings.

Here’s the gallery page. Hat tip: Ron Silliman.

"You’re misunderstanding the role of the [NYT] columnists. You think that they are supposed to inform and provoke. They do that occasionally, but their main role is to comfort and confirm people in their prejudices – by helping readers fit the news into pre-existing narratives. Repetition and familiarity are more important than interesting ideas. Think of the op-ed page as the comics without pictures," – a commenter on Matt’s blog, after a lively discussion of the problem with Bob Herbert.

Ross says that affirmative action isn’t the problem: tenure is. Matt thinks twice a week is a bad idea for any columnist. Twice a week? I’m posting twenty times a day!

Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Bernhard Kouchner get jiggy with it. Background here.

A plea from Horton:

These emails will most likely help to demonstrate the meddling of Karl Rove and his staffers, like the celebrated "mini-Rove" Kyle Sampson, who went on to serve as Alberto Gonzales’s chief of staff before he was forced to resign, Monica Goodling and others, in internal affairs of the Department of Justice. Cross references in other documents already point to a substantial volume of communications on DOJ topics.

The emails are not only relevant to the U.S. attorneys investigation, but also to overtly political prosecutions, such as the Rove-directed prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman.

I guess the right-wing blogosphere can’t protest an Egyptian’s treatment with any integrity any more. And the methods used – mere beating – are not "torture" according to the Wall Street Journal, Dick Cheney and Rudy Giuliani. But it’s still horrifying.

More worries: A feminist and a protectionist lament Clinton’s double-speak.

Time to get out of a defensive crouch. Reding seconds Ponnuru.

Who knows? Charles Franklin looks at the polls. Wide open.

He’s hedging his bets, I’d say. But can one ask what this means:

A Giuliani presidency would be drama-filled and certainly unpredictable in many ways. But there would be no going wobbly in the war. Period.

It seems to me that, at this point in the game, we really do need a president who can articulate a strategy against Jihadist terror that does not fall into some inane binary of "wobbly" vs "non-wobbly." What would non-wobbly mean? The argument for attacking Iran, for example, is an extremely difficult one – and a case could well be made that such an attack would actually set us back in the long war. The same can be said for the terrible p.r. effects of the torture and detention policies that Giuliani supports. And the even deeper toll on America’s reputation abroad if he were to be elected. Have we not learned from Iraq that simply having an aggressive posture does not translate to success unless we have thought through strategy and tactics and diplomacy very, very carefully? I see no evidence of such thought in Giuliani’s campaign – or, indeed, in any of the Republican campaigns so far. The recitation of "strength" does not make a person strong.