I've been avoiding writing about poopy diapers, that funny red spot on her neck, or the way only her mother and I can understand but she really does say "Shoes!" 'Cause I sorta figured nobody cared but us. But apparently that's what gets a weblog mentioned in
the paper of record.

This week, a two-parter.

1. Name a book that you like -- truly like, not a "guilty pleasure" -- which is widely disliked by those you know -- or that is a routine target of critical distaste. Can you extend this to a work of a particular author? What do you think accounts for the strong dislike exhibited? In a similar vein, name a book which has had a deep influence on you and retains an important place in your imagination, but which you are forced to admit has such major shortcomings that you find it difficult to explain why it is so meaningful to you?

2. Name the most overrated book (of at least ten years standing -- no recent publications, please) you can think of. Explain why you believe it is falsely esteemed. Works which were assigned to you in high school are not valid choices, as it is impossible to be objective about such things.

All Picks and Pans to comments, please.

Note: this post continues, more or less, from what began here.

We've been busy here, and I'm behind on my reading. But I finally got to Andrew Sullivan's essay in the New York Times Book Review (a location justified by the notion that he is "reviewing" two new books) on the extent of torture as a policy and practice in Guantanamo, Iraq and elsewhere. Sullivan quotes extensively from both volumes, one of which is comprised primarily of the government's own report into allegations of U.S. human rights abuses.

This article is something that you should probably read, if, like me, you haven't been reading a lot about what the government's report reveals.

Sulllivan makes a case strongly refuting the claims of a certain City Journal article which argued that Abu Ghraib should be understood solely as a failure of Army discipline. In his view, the available documents demonstrate that an ambiguous but meaningful message (which said that the old rules don't apply in how we treat prisoners now), filtered down from Bush, Rumsfeld, and various deputies. And that this message was understood by military intelligence personnel and others charged with detaining or interrogating prisoners to mean that it was time to make the omlettes -- break eggs. Or legs.

Unlike Professor Green, Sullivan doesn't invoke the Zimbardo-informed perspective that suggests torture was the natural thing to expect guards in Iraq to do, and that the Army's failure began with its lack of presumption that this must be prevented. He places responsibility more squarely on the makers of policy, and does a good job of proposing how the sundry maneuvers by the administration to get around the niceties of the Geneva Convention were the seedlings of torture. I don't know whether one perspective is more to the point than the other -- but in either case, our failure as a nation to honor our own ideals in the execution of our military actions is so extreme and obvious as to be freshly alarming when you look at it again.

Sullivan's also takes a swing at the political faction which, in its fervent support of Bush's military policies, failed to hold the administration accountable to execute them in a way that could be stomached by decent people. He includes himself in this critique. To which I say: good.

"Many of today's consumers associate breath strips with instant fresh breath. By combining toothpaste with breath strips, Colgate leverages relevant consumer trends while bringing innovation to the fresh breath segment of the category."

The sheer, delicious poetry of this press release is almost -- but not quite -- as wonderful as the monumental, unvarnished pointlessness of the product itself.

(As a grace note, the up-to-the-second sharpies at Colgate gave the boot to stodgy old terms like "peppermint" and "spearmint," in favor of the vastly better designations "Cool Mint" and "Clean Mint." Children everywhere rejoiced as the need to memorize these two dull-sounding, hard-to-spell flavors was eliminated.)

As promised, a new time-waster for your Friday. The weekly quiz is no more -- although we might return to it on something like a monthly basis. In its place, competition gives way to collaboration, as we present The Friday Question.

The goal here is not merely to answer and dispose of the Question (though, given my track record, early disposal is indeed the likely fate for many of my contributions), but to take it as an invitation to add your own related conundra, paradoxes, complaints, rants, observations, investigations, speculations, and reverberations.

Here, then, without further delay, is this week's conceptual grenadoe:

A great many words in English change everyday meaning over time. One interesting subset of changed words are those adjectives which have moved from having a meaning not wholly positive to having an almost solely positive one. That is, they are now synonyms of "good" or "excellent" when at one time they had specific and more emotionally complicated meanings. Examples of this phenomenon are terrific, fantastic, sublime and wonderful. A more subtle version is in the change wrought upon the adjective "nice" as applied to a person. At once time this meant particular, choosy, or even someone who stands too much on ceremony. Now, of course, it means "pleasant" or "well-intentioned."

A word currently in the midst of this transformation is enormity, which is rapidly losing its negative aspect and simply has become a synonym of "great size."

The Question: Are words more frequently changing to have emotionally positive meanings than vice versa? That is, are there a counterbalancing set of words which previously denoted positive experiences or values, which have changed in meaning now to becomes synonyms with "bad"? Are there examples of this we can point to?

Your contributions on this matter in the comments, please. And Google all ye like.

If you are thinking of coming to New York and are at a loss for how to approach your visit, The Morning News has performed for you an invaluable service.

This elegantly condensed rundown of how to approach a weekend or week as a visitor to New York is the best attempt at a manageable answer to the question "what should one do in NYC?" that I've ever found.

The restaurant recommendations may wind up outdated at some point (and are the part of the essay I've least ability to evaluate -- my dining-out experience is seriously contracted these days), but even there Mr. Baldwin has favored picks that have shown a certain longevity, such that even the likes of yours truly can vouch for some of them.

But he's right, right right, about museums, about neighborhoods, about times of day, about the pleasure of rambling in the right places and the wisdom of eschewing others. About the amazing number of performances its easy to see if you'll go off (off-off-actually) the luxe-priced theme park that is now "Broadway."

This guide, though, is in particular a gift to New York residents who find themselves hosting (or playing guide to) family and friends who -- naturally -- are seeking guidance in navigating the city and to picking from its many proferred pleasures.

Because we who live here are (paradoxically) often so hunkered down in our daily lives that we've forgotten what it's like to wander at liberty through the concrete canyons and down by the river and so forth...we can tell you all about that tricky subway transfer at Broadway-Nassau, but we turn all glassy-eyed when asked for suggestions for things to do. "Um...well, you could go to the Statue of Liberty. It's pretty crowded but, you know, if you're into that kind of thing." Useless.

So, I'm the one who needs to bookmark this. And email it to every person who announces their imminent arrival in my fair city. The brain-dead hosts of NYC salute you, Rosencrans.

This season of immunological challenges continues to keep us pretty heads-down around the Home Office these days. My second visit to the Long Island College Hospital Emergency Room in the span of about three weeks took place this weekend, this time for our daughter, whose latest bout with a cold left her so logy we were beginning to worry. (She's fine, she was just a little dehydrated as it turns out.)

For our readers abroad, by the way, Emergency Room sounds quite dire -- and then there's that panic-inducing music they play on the series ER. Rest assured that while people in real Emergencies go to the Emergency Room, most of the people there just Need to See a Doctor. And why do they then go to the Emergency Room? Because it is quite likely that when you Need to See a Doctor, it is an evening, a weekend, or a holiday. Because that's when God makes people sick (goes double for atheists, natch). And at such times, it's the ER or nothing -- unless you're a film noir-type private eye, and know some disreputable drunkard of an MD, and he can see you in his office after hours and remove that bullet with no one the wiser.

OK, where were we...oh, yeah. Anyway, we seem to have at least two people at any given time dedicated to the needs of our Virus Buddies(TM), drinking pots of ginger tea (or sippy cup upon sippy cup of heavily diluted juice), and swearing that This Is the Last Round. Not that we have any control over the issue at all.

Plus, the freaking INAUGURATION.

It has been a dark time which I would prefer to forget soon and yet one little bonfire of restorative warmth came in a package that Theresa bestowed on me for Christmas -- XTC's Transistor Blast, a collection of BBC studio sessions (some for John Peel, some for other hosts) ranging from the late 70's to the late 80's, and some concert recordings from the '78-'80.

I'm not normally one for live recordings or collections of alternate versions -- especially since my CD collection is full enough of holes that I often don't have a number of the "basic" studio recordings of favorite bands (do I, for example, have Mummer? No. I've worn out the cassette of it, and I can hear every note in my head. Yes, I should buy the CD and rediscover it -- but that would mean NOT buying something brand new. You can see why my collection is so swiss cheesy).

So this was an unusual collection for me to have, and I wasn't entirely sure what I'd make of it. Live versions on record are often wonderful, but sometimes only for the completist. And since the BBC performances didn't include songs not available in other versions, it wasn't like having your favorite band doing a special session where they tore through "Sweet Jane" or something like that. These were just alternate versions of XTC songs.

Except that they're terrific. The studio performances particularly are superb. The version of "Life Begins at the Hop" they recorded for Peel almost improves on the album version, goosing the energy without losing any of the restrained grinning charm of the familiar version. Songs which I'd found a bit underwhelming before -- like the early "Roads Girdle the Globe" and the much later "Garden of Earthly Delights" have a raucous energy that puts them in my head long after the headphones are off (OK, to be fair, "Roads" is much more memorable than "Garden," which is Partridge at his most overbearing. But the performance they did brings his sense of delight in it to the song, which is almost enough to redeem it).

The live performances are less uniformly satisfying, but it's a treat to hear the audience sing the opening lines of "Respectable Street" (yeah, I know, Bruce Springsteen gets the crowd to do it to cheesy effect on "Hungry Heart", but that's the point. The idea of a pretty large concert hall filled with people who can sing all the lyrics to the first song on Black Sea just fills me with longing to have been a much better-informed 13-year-old in 1980), and on the whole it's more than listenable instrumentally (the vocals are those of a performer who's at the end of a long tour).

Anyway, once it was all on the iPod, my subway rides felt like trips into an alternate adolescence, one in which I'd been magically bequeathed a copy of Drums and Wires in the years I was still blasting Rush in my bedroom.

I so enjoyed Transistor Blast that I found myself returning to the last XTC record I unreservedly liked, not their most recent release (Wasp Star) but Apple Venus Volume 1. Years and pastoral miles away from the pogostick pop of the Drums and Wires era -- it's as if Skylarking were recorded with no "Earn Enough for Us" or even a "Season Cycle."

I love it more, now that I hear it again in juxtaposition with those early live sessions. Partridge hasn't lost the tendency to put one too many layers of poetic wax on, and Dave Gregory is a presence sorely, sorely, sorely missed. But the sense of pop as intensely meaningful play -- and meaningful play as a kind of Platonic ideal of life -- is still there. And even in the midst of a cold and moderately cruel January, I can feel, somewhere out there, that absolutely idiosyncratic punk-pastoral-pagan Springtime waiting to burst out, burning with optimism's flame.

P.S. Yeah, I know I already blogged about re-listening to Black Sea. But I was hoping you'd forgotten.

A large part of the problem I have with having a weblog -- and which makes posting here so infrequent -- is that almost all of the things I’d really like to post about are complex enough that I balk both at trying to get it right, and also at trying to clearly represent what I do get into a post that doesn’t take hours and hours to compose, revise, and then smack my head into the desk over. A quick rant about fraternities in response to an NYT piece with a big blind spot is easy enough. But even I’m not trivial-minded enough to want to write about such things all of the time.

But, nevertheless, here goes, into an issue that I wish were easier to hash out than it is.

I’m not normally much of a Mickey Kaus reader, but every now and again I look at his blog/column/meta-screed. This week it pointed me at an article in City Journal by Heather MacDonald, which accuses lefties and human rights organizations of a couple of things. (Note: it looks like City Journal, with which I’m not really familiar, has something of a conservative pedigree. Or maybe not. I should look further into that, but I’m late. For now, however, I’m going to take the article at face value. Perhaps someone more familiar with the publication can enlighten me as to editorial slant.)

The first of MacDonald’s important charges against human rights activists is a fundamental misunderstanding of what U.S. interrogators have and have not been doing at Guantanamo, and the level to which their restraint has hamstrung their legitimate efforts to get information from detained “enemy combatants.” We think they’ve been fiendishly torturing people; she offers an argument (backed with descriptions from interrogators) that in fact they’ve been less bullying than your average narcotics detective is with a suspect in a crack-dealing case. And that, further, the al-Qaida conspirators, with their focus on eternal reward, are almost impossible to interrogate with the “gloves on,” because there is little they can be seriously threatened with or offered as a reward. They must, therefore, be placed in conditions of physical and mental stress, and even uncertainty about the possibility of being hurt, in order to shake their simple and effective strategy of clamming up and waiting to go to Heaven.

The second is a wrongheaded conflation of the Abu Ghraib abuses with the aforementioned legitimate techniques, and an assumption that the Abu Ghraib guards were the inheritors of a sadistic “torture ‘em” culture that has its origins in upper Administration circles and was first tried out on the Gitmo prisoners, later exported to Iraq. Part of the assumption she attacks is the notion that the infamous “Bybee memo” (which made a horrifying legal argument that you can torture a person without legally “torturing” them, and, anyway, maybe U.S. laws against torture have no bearing on the executive during wartime, which can do whatever it feels necessary, really) makes plain the connection between an administration eager to find legal justification for torture and the Abu Ghraib abuses. She makes the case that in Iraq (unlike in the case of the al-Qaida prisoners), military commanders made it clear that prisoners would be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and that the investigation of what happened at Abu Ghraib reveals that the abuses were committed by guards, not military interrogators, and were the product of faulty discipline, not any large-scale plan to use torture as a method of interrogation.

I won’t resummarize her article and argument further here, but it’s worth reading. Most people I know have read little about the actual techniques in use at Guantanamo, or the internal legal/policy struggles within military circles about how to define appropriate methods of interrogation there. And as someone who does not equate criticism of the administration with a dismissal of the necessity of defeating al-Qaida, I accept the notion that it should be legitimate to use the same techniques in interrogating a suspected terrorist that one uses to interrogate a suspected murderer. Especially since that could be seen as the same thing.

Her dismissal of the relevance of Abu Ghraib to the issue of how we are allowing interrogators to work is less convincing, perhaps because it’s more cursory. I’ll come back to that in a moment, I will first say that although I have reservations, I’ll grant that critics of the Defense Department and the Bush administration should consider the proposition that the Abu Ghraib outrages are, while horrible in and of themselves, not yet proven to be emblematic of how other prisoners taken in the “War on Terror” are being treated. And McDonald’s article makes some persuasive – if brief – points about the logic of seeing Abu Ghraib as a consequence of the general mismanagement of the Iraq war (that overly sunny forecast again), a problem not to be conflated with the issue of how tough we can be with suspected planners of terror attacks. Her willingness to join in the condemnation of how the administration has run the Iraq campaign does seem to add to her credibility.

But with all that said, I’m left with some questions.

Hasn’t the overwhelming aura of secrecy surrounding the status of, evidence against, and legal standing of prisoners at Guantanamo created the necessity of suspicions about prisoner treatment, especially from human rights organizations the world (including the U.S.) traditionally counts on to act as watchdogs? Especially given our not unblemished human rights record during the Central/South American phases of the Cold War, which involved a number of current administration players.

Isn’t the government’s failure to clarify how it will give accused and suspected terrorists due process a central problem in deciding how far it is legitimate to go in interrogating them? In the case of a suspected felon on U.S. soil, a lot of legal protections surround the interrogation process – particularly the right of the accused to a trial. Given that the prisoners are not (in the case of traditional hostilities) soldiers in the military of a state with which we are at war, they are more like accused criminals. By what process are we attempting to prove guilt or innocence? The government has been as secretive as possible about both the process and the facts in the individual cases – although it is certain that some who have been imprisoned cannot be said to have done more than hate the U.S. from a great distance away. How much stress are we allowed to put a person under whom we have no evidence is a true soldier in a war against us?

What about the accusations that prisoners have been “outsourced” to other countries where extremely rough methods of interrogation – not to say “torture” – are countenanced?

Even if Abu Ghraib (as a shorthand for the torture that took place there) is far removed from the context of interrogation at Gitmo, isn’t the burden now on the administration to demonstrate that our people really are under control? The context, after all, IS (as MacDonald admits) a shocking failure of discipline, which has so heavily damaged the credibility of America’s claim as a nation to respect the human rights of those we encounter in war and peace. But McDonald’s article reads like a scolding meant for lily-livered liberals, quick to imagine savagery on the part of our hard-working military interrogators. What fools we are for not seeing that Abu Ghraib and Gitmo couldn’t possibly be connected!

This is unreasonable: what is reasonable is to examine the possibility that misconduct in one situation may signal a broader problem with how we are handling military prisoners -- especially when many of these prisoners are very similar in terms of language and religion. Her article, indeed, is hopefully evidence that the rot, in fact, isn’t as bad as all that. But her rhetorical stance suggests that the fact that we even needed to ask betrays a weakness on the part of the questioner – rather than the necessity that those questions be asked. (And this is of a piece with the administration’s grudging response when they have been forced at times to actually justify their actions: what is perpetually implied is that it is unnecessary and dangerous for the public to have asked in the first place.)

Finally – and this is perhaps the most pressing question raised by my reading of the article, and not solely aimed solely at the author or those who agree with her wholeheartedly – why are we perpetually seeing those concerned with the preservation of human rights and civil liberties in the West played off against those who are fervent in the belief that Islamic fundamentalists represent an extreme threat to human rights and civil liberties, wherever they take power? I, for one, believe that egalitarian civil society is almost certainly incompatible with theocracy – at least any theocracy currently on offer. And insofar as Islamic fundies declare war on us, and attack us, I have no qualms about taking the fight to them. Or interrogating the captured prisoners. And continuing to imprison those who we can convince a jury were working as our enemies.

But it seems to me to be simultaneously important to preserve due process of law, open examination of our own treatment of prisoners and those we fight against in general, and (overarchingly) the minimum amount of government secrecy consistent with real (not political) security with regard to enemies. A government that makes a habit of secrecy about EVERYTHING, and sends its lawyers on repeat quests to find loopholes in inconveniently restrictive treaties and conventions is not a government that can be trusted to secure the moral high ground – the place we always counted on occupying in the first place. MacDonald chastises those who pursue a “utopian illusion” in applying human rights doctrine to prisoners. But the countervailing notion -- that we can trust the administration to pursue, interrogate, “break” and indefinitely detain the right people, given their record of hiding as much as they can and altering the rules in secret – well, that sounds downright fantastic to me.

The New York Times Magazine asks us, in its counter-intuitive way, to consider the consequences of the drive to reform the culture of fraternities at the nation's institutions of higher learning.

Written by a Phi Delta Theta of recent vintage, the article suggests that the movement toward "dry" fraternities -- an effort by collegiate administrations to stem the tide of dead-pledge news stories, and (one hopes) the rate of date-rape on campus -- might have (prepare to be stunned) the effect of making membership in said organizations unattractive. If so, whither this central part of the University?

Well, yes, we can see that taking the "drinking" out of a drinking club might make it unpopular. What we can't see is why -- with regard to the specific animal that is the modern American fraternity -- that would be a bad thing in the least.

The "Greek" system of hypertrophied student clubs is one of the lamest excuses for a social institution we've got going in America today. One doesn't have to be a puritan with regard to college-age drunkenness (a problem which has existed for about as long as there have been colleges) in order to see this. One only needs to acknowledge that frat culture is aesthetically impoverished (squalor being the dominant aesthetic for the men's houses), institutionally defensive of the nastiest sorts of notions about sex and gender, and (this is the big one) empty of purpose at the center. The most curious thing about them is their tautological appeal: join to belong to a group of...people who wanted to belong.

Despite all the nonsense fraternities spew about teaching the values of brotherhood, these clubs are not oriented around any common goal, and ask little of their membership in terms of communal sacrifice. Leadership and co-operation (and the earned sense of belonging) are better learned in rehearsing a performance, running the student newspaper, organizing a conference, doing collaborative research, playing on a team, hanging a gallery show, or working in community outreach. All things which ought to be possible on a college campus.

I pause to note that as adjunct to all of the above, there exist ample opportunities to throw drunken parties with/for your fellow students, and attempt clumsy seductions of those to whom you are attracted -- the vital elements people seem to value in a fraternity party. Indeed, there's nothing outrageous about the notion that one might join a purpose-oriented group largely in pursuit of companionship, drinking buddies, and even sex. But the point is that there will be something there for everyone involved beyond that -- something to build, say, friendships on (to say nothing, of you know, learning something or helping someone).

Of course, I can't say I'd want to forbid people from banding together in clubs dedicated to nothing in particular. It is, I have heard, a free country. But why establish such organizations as the primary opportunity to socialize? On many campuses, these parasitic outfits have come to dominate the social sphere. They have been granted over time an ex officio status as the location of "fun," regardless of the continually third-rate nature of fun that they offer. And of course, if you're silly enough to point this out, you risk appearing to be someone who just doesn't know how to let their hair down.

There's nothing that can be done about them, of course. They're entrenched enough to seem part of the academic firmament to most. However, New York Times think-pieces which attempt to find in the future of the frat some sort of valuable potential should, it seems to me, be laughed out of town.

I know, nothing about the butt-end of the disgraceful old year, the gleamingly shrink-wrapped new one we are even now despoiling...nothing about our favorite paganistical winter rituals...and not even our long-planned evisceration of the worst adaptation of literature for television that we've ever seen.

What's the deal? In a nutshell, the wombat has been a sickly beast for some time now, shaking with nightly fevers and sweating through the wee hours. Many false starts with antibiotics later, we are on the mend, but it may be a while yet before there's much going on here.