Clive Davis

BALL PLAY

Time was so short last week that I never got round to posting anything on the death of Alan Ball. I feel as if a part of my childhood just crumbled away. More Than Mind Games has a video montage of some of the great man's finest moments. Evertonians should be warned that he's wearing a red shirt. (I mean Arsenal, not England circa '66).

A sign that the game may be going transatlantic again... As 101 Great Goals points out Time magazine has just run a long article on soccer finance. (BTW, I'd never seen that clip of Diana Ross's penalty kick before. It's a lot more fun than any of her recent albums.)

UP AND DOWN THE LADDER

Michael Winerip's essay on all those hyper-talented, hot-house kids who won't get into Harvard makes a wonderfully touching read. The fact that Winerip is a blue-collar boy made good gives his views special weight:

What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard? Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake. At his age, when I got hungry, I made myself peanut butter and jam on white bread and got into Harvard.

Of course, evolution is not the same as progress...I see these kids — and watch my own applying to college — and as evolved as they are, I wouldn’t change places with them for anything. They’re under such pressure.

Who deserves to win, who deserves to fail? Driving home on Sunday night, I just managed to catch the first part of Anne McElvoy's radio series on the promises and pitfalls of meritocracy. Going to Oxford from a state school in the north set her thinking about the way the class system squanders talent.

Also worth checking: Madeleine Bunting's article on the 50th anniversary of that milestone in sociology Family and Kinship in East London. Critics and admirers weigh in.

PACKING HEAT

It's not my idea of civic bliss, but Michael Barone is sanguine about America's gun laws:

In 1987, Florida passed a law allowing citizens who could demonstrate that they were law-abiding and had sufficient training to obtain permits on demand to own and carry concealed weapons. In the succeeding 20 years, many other states have passed such laws, so that today you can, if you meet the qualifications, carry concealed weapons in 40 states with 67 percent of the nation's population (including Vermont, with no gun restrictions at all).

When Florida passed its concealed-weapons law, I thought it was a terrible idea. People would start shooting each other over traffic altercations; parking lots would turn into shooting galleries. Not so, it turned out. Only a very, very few concealed-weapons permits have been revoked. There are only rare incidents in which people with concealed-weapons permits have used them unlawfully. Ordinary law-abiding people, it turns out, are pretty trustworthy.

...In most of the United States, as you go to work, shop at the mall, go to restaurants and walk around your neighborhood, you do so knowing that some of the people you pass by may be carrying a gun. You may not even think about it. But that's all right. Experience has shown that these people aren't threats.

Barone is another commentator who thinks the Virginia Tech massacre might have been prevented if the students had been allowed to carry firearms on campus. Undergrads with guns???

STROLLERS

Sorry for the silence here yesterday. My brother, Kelly and his family arrived from Canada for a short visit. That's him on the right with two of my boys and his son, Howard on the far left. We don't own a dog, but we were looking after a friend's lurcher for the weekend. The kind of dog for which you need a large house, which we don't have. Needless to say, the cat was deeply disgruntled.

ENDURANCE

Perfect fare for armchair travellers... The Wall Street Journal's pick of the five best books on the subject of man versus nature. I almost bought a secondhand copy of The Worst Journey in the World last week. I'll have to go back and see if it's still on the shop's shelves.

INSIDERS, OUTSIDERS

"Being an experienced journalist, I do not use the internet as a vomit bag. My thoughts are worked over and then edited. Most of what appears in cyberspace is what Keen terms rampant "digital narcissism". I know there's no point trying to persuade my friend, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, that good things do sometimes come out of blogs. She's right that there's an awful lot of rubbish swilling around, but then there's an awful lot of rubbish in the newspapers too, only most of it is rather more polished than the stuff you see on the Net. What puzzles me about so many of the critics is that they continually focus on the lowest common denominator, which is a little like writing a column about the Independent based solely on a week's reading of the Daily Sport.

I honestly have no idea whether blogging will turn out to be a long-term phenomenon or just another fad. But I do believe it is capable of making a difference. Of course, we're so overwhelmed with competing voices in this country that it's easy to become blasé about freedom of expression. But consider the plight of the Egyptian blogger, Sandmonkey, who feels so intimidated by the authorities that he has stopped posting. A sad, sad story. Would Yasmin describe his site as a "vomit bag" too?  [Via Pickled Politics]

NOTEBOOK

College students, like Professor Rorty, rarely have to cope with an atrocity or give a reason for condemning those they learn of. To them, the perils of cultural relativism are purely hypothetical. One can get along most of the time with unanchored beliefs.

James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense.

FORTHCOMING

My plans to re-design this blog, mentioned some time ago,  had to be put on hold in the end. Apologies for that.  But I hope to have even better news in the week ahead. Stay tuned, as they say.

SELF-CONTAINED

John Lukacs's biography of George Kennan receives a generally positive review from James Traub. Not that Lukacs's portrait of the arch-realist is all that attractive:

He is honest about Kennan’s defects of thought; and yet he seems unwilling fully to accept what they imply about the man’s nature. Kennan made no secret of his low regard for the wisdom of the common man, and thus for the practice of a so-called democratic, as opposed to a professional, foreign policy. But Lukacs also notes that in the late ’30s — as Hitler’s Germany rose to power — Kennan began writing a book proposing that America adopt a more authoritarian model of government in which both immigration and suffrage would be curtailed. Kennan could not bring himself to despise Germany before, during or after the war. He was, on the other hand, "enraged" by Washington’s clumsy attempt to acquire bases in the Azores.

The predicament of ordinary people seems not to have moved him much. Lukacs quotes Kennan’s own memoirs to the effect that when the Wehrmacht marched into Prague, Kennan, then serving as a high-ranking diplomat, turned away the desperate Americans, "including a Jewish acquaintance," who came to the American legation. Lukacs characterizes this nonchalance as "cold," not "callous". Is there a difference?

While the Washington Post's notice runs along similar lines, the National Interest is much more sympathetic, even if it does reinforce the impression that Kennan was a man born into the wrong era:

For the landmark CNN documentary series on the Cold War in the 1990s, convincing Kennan to sit for a television interview was no easy task—he never owned a television and reviled the medium and its impact on American society.

ROSTROPOVICH, R.I.P.

From Bach´s cello suite No 3 in C major:

From the NY Times obituary:

In 1991, when Communist hard-liners tried to topple the more open regime, Mr. Rostropovich went to Moscow to stand beside Boris N. Yeltsin. And two years later, during the siege of the Russian White House, Mr. Rostropovich, who was touring Russia again with the National Symphony, gave a free concert in Red Square, attended by 100,000 people.