I'm a big fan of highbrow Cliff Notes. For example, Kant's famous metaphysical treatise is called
Critique of Pure Reason; I eventually had to read it for an upper-level course on Kant, but in 101, we read his much shorter Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, which was, our intro professor explained to us, Kant's own summary presentation of his longer work.

These days, I'm reading H.G. Wells's A Short History of the World, which is the summary version of his two-volume Outline of History.

In both cases, the author wrote his own summary. I couldn't hope for an equivalent with the Bible — which I've started several times but never made it out of Genesis — so instead I'm reading and enjoying David Plotz's "Blogging the Bible," from Slate.com.

As they come up, I'm also keeping track of famous saying I didn't realize were biblical in origin, some of which have been reworded in their popular form, such as, "Can the Cushite change his skin or the leopard his spots?" (Jeremiah 13:23). I guess the Bible isn't very politically correct.

Here's Plotz's introductory comment to Jeremiah chapters 14–16:

Anyone who's ever been in a bad relationship knows the Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Cruelty: Before you go through the torture of dumping a boyfriend, you act meaner than you feel toward him. (This usually goes on at an unconscious level.) Boyfriend understandably bristles and retaliates. This makes the actual leave-taking much easier. You get to lighten your own guilt by blaming the dumpee for being such a jerk.

This appears to be God's strategy.

My father used to lament the lack of biblical literacy in my so-called education. For most of my life, I haven't shared his regret. But that concept alone — the doctrine of preemptive cruelty (which yes, I suppose might be more Plotz's than God's) — would have been well worth knowing in my formative years. My teens and 20's would have looked very different if I'd known it.

My father, who in one of his professional incarnations was a college English instructor specializing in Shakespeare, is currently reading Conn Iggulden's Emperor series, historical fiction based on the life of Julius Caesar. He's also watching the HBO/BBC series Rome, at our enthusiastic recommendation.

He wrote me today about the complexities of emotionally allying with different "sides" in historical struggles, and how much our allegiance is affected by already knowing the winners and losers.

I replied with a very different perspective on what affects the sides we take and who we root for:

This is something I've been meaning to ask you about, and to research more generally.

Do you think of Shakespeare's play as pro-Caesar? That's certainly the impression I remember.

For most of my life, I've sensed from our culture an approval of Julius Caesar and a disapproval (or hatred) for Brutus. But the more history I learn, the less sense this makes. Or rather, the more Anglo-American republican history I learn, the greater is my sense that American admiration of Caesar is a 20th-century phenomenon.

The Lockean liberals in England, the American revolutionaries, and the founding fathers wrote and published under not just Roman names but Roman republican names — the names of the opponents of Caesar, the allies of Brutus. The once-upon-a-time-libertarian Cato Institute is named for the 18th-century "Cato's Letters" whose English authors were taking the name of the Roman republican Cato. When the American Revolution was over and the debate was beginning for and against a centralizing constitution, the so-called anti-Federalists (the classical liberal/libertarian, decentralist, republicans) wrote under the names Cato and Brutus! (And despite the eventual victory of the Federalists, the mass of the population was on the side of the anti-Federalists.)

Eighty years later, John Wilkes Booth expressed his bafflement, after assassinating Lincoln, that he was so universally reviled when Brutus was so universally honored!

My current guess is that Shakespeare wrote a pro-Caesar play in an era of pro-monarchy, at least somewhat genuinely felt. But English and American republicans recognized that they were historically on the opposite side. In the 20th century (this theory would have it), Americans lost their classical educations and forgot their historical alliances. We knew we should admire Shakespeare, and Shakespeare seemed to admire the centralizers, therefore we abandon our decentralist history and alliances and all hail Caesar.

My father says that Shakespeare saw through Julius Caesar — but despised Brutus.

I'm still hoping someone can tell me about the evolution of Anglo-American attitudes toward Caesar and Brutus. How much of this story do I have right?

I'd never heard of G.K. Chesterton before reading David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom. For some reason, Friedman ends his anarchocapitalist manifesto with a defense of G.K. Chesterton against accusations of antisemitism. I learned that Chesterton regularly debated George Bernard Shaw in public on the question of socialism, which endeared him to me without my knowing anything else. I later learned that Chesterton had written a mystery novel about a man who goes undercover to investigate a cell of bomb-throwing anarchists. That sounded like something I had to have a look at, but I've read so little fiction in the past 4 years that I never got around to it.

Then last week, LearnOutLoud.com announced that ChristianAudio.com was giving away a free audiobook of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday for the month of April. You still have a week left to grab it.

The text of the novel is available at Project Gutenberg and also at Bartleby.com.

I've only listened to the first chapter (which I then downloaded and read aloud to my wife), but I'm already tempted to give the book high praise. Here's an excerpt from the opening:

Gregory resumed in high oratorical good humour.

"An artist is identical with an anarchist," he cried. "You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."

"So it is," said Mr. Syme.

"Nonsense!" said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. "Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!"

"It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"

[Read the rest »]

"Moral courage is the rarest of all the rare things of this earth. The war has shown that millions have physical courage. Millions were willing to face rifle and cannon, bombardment, poison gas, liquid fire, and the bayonet; to trust themselves to flying machines thousands of feet in air, under the fire of anti-aircraft guns of enemy planes; to go into submarines, perhaps to meet a horrible death. But how many had the courage merely to make themselves unpopular? The bitter truth must be told: the many enlisted or submitted to the draft on both sides of the conflict not because they were convinced that they were helping to save the world, not because they had any real hatred for the enemy, not to uphold the right, but simply that they hadn't the moral courage to face the stigma of "slacker" or "conscientious objector." ... Fear of death? No; the soldiers faced death bravely. But they feared unpopularity. They dreaded the suspicion of their fellows. What was needed in war is needed no less urgently in peace. How many persons in public or even in private life have the courage to say the thing that people do not like to hear?" – Henry Hazlitt, The Way to Willpower (via blog.Mises)

Robert Higgs shares with us this note to the author of Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism:

I have finally finished reading your great book about Mises. When I use the word "great," I mean not simply that it weighs at least a kilo and contains more than 1,000 pages. I mean most of all that it is a magnificent scholarly achievement. I can't remember when I have taken more pleasure from a book. It is a joy to read, in every way. The English is precise and polished, and everything is put just right. The research is amazingly broad, yet deep, too. The judgments are sensible and mature. The coverage — from the personal details to the content of Mises's ideas to the context in which he lived and worked — is extraordinary, and the organization puts everything into comprehensible order. The bibliography is more than impressive. All in all, the book is simply an amazing accomplishment, and a fitting tribute to its great subject.

The Mises Institute deserves great credit, too, not only for its support of your work on this project, but also for producing a book that is a fine example of the publisher's art: the typeface is clean and clear, and large enough to permit effortless reading; the layout is spacious and proper; the footnotes are where they should be, and they, too, are large enough to be read without a magnifying glass; the illustrations are splendid complements to the text; and the indexes are terrific. The work is thus not simply beautiful intellectually, but beautiful physically, as well.

If I had ever written anything half so wonderful — and I recognize that I lack the abilities to do so — I would consider my career a complete success, and feel myself justified in taking my ease, to rest on my laurels. I do not perceive that you have this plan in mind for yourself, and therefore the world will be the better, not only for your great book on Mises, but also for all the great achievements that lie in your future. I salute you, my friend, not without a touch of envy, but with my whole heart.

I'd love to claim that this was all planned and coordinated, but really, the scheduling of this weekend edition and the publishing of this book review just happened to coincide:

The Laissez-Faire Radical: A Quest for the Historical Mises by Murray N. Rothbard

[This article originally appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies. You can listen (MP3) to Murray Rothbard presenting the paper on Friday, 16 October 1981, at the monthly Libertarian Heritage Series, hosted by the Center for Libertarian Studies.]

That Ludwig von Mises was the outstanding champion of laissez-faire and the free-market economy in this century is well known and needs no documentation. But in the course of refining and codifying his political views, Mises's followers have unwittingly distorted them and made them seem at one with the modern conservative movement in the United States. Mises is made to appear a sort of National Review intellectual concentrating on the free-market aspects of conservatism. While the image of Mises as an essential conservative is scarcely made up of the whole cloth, it totally overlooks rich strains of Misesian thought that can be described only as "laissez-faire radical." Unfortunately, these strands of Misesian thought have been all but lost. Perhaps this essay will help to right the balance.

There is no need here to try to define and distinguish laissez-faire "conservatism" from "radicalism." A setting forth of various radical positions taken by Mises should make the distinction clear enough.

Some anti-conservative aspects of Misesian thought are, again, too well known to require discussion. Thus, for Mises, personal liberty was required by logical consistency; for, if the government began to restrict or suppress one or a few consumption goods, why should they stop at regulating all? As a champion of consumer sovereignty and the consumer society, Mises also had no patience with aristocratic conservatives who scorned mass consumption or the rule of production by consumer demand.

[Continue reading this article at Mises.org.]

Life of a Hero by Warren Gibson

If you're going to write a biography of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), you have your work cut out for you.

You face a mountain of books, articles, speeches, and correspondence by and about the great libertarian economist and his forebears, contemporaries, disciples, and critics, much of it in German. Because his productive career lasted from the 1880s into the 1960s, you have to be thoroughly grounded in the intellectual and political history of that time, sweeping all the way from Marxism, historicism, and fascism, through Keynesianism, and into the beginnings of monetarism. You must be conversant not just with economics, but with history, sociology, and philosophy, since Mises ranged over all these subjects. You must focus on the political and military events that shaped Austria and its neighbors in the early 20th century, because Mises was personally involved in many of them. You must come to grips with terms and concepts that are central to Mises but unknown outside the Austrian School of economics, of which he was a part — terms such as praxeology, catallactics, thymology, etatism, and Verstehen.

Your own prejudices will likely be activated either by Mises' extreme positions or by an occasional belief that he failed to follow through on his own principles. You must try to divine the mental and emotional life of a man who kept his feelings to himself and whose devoted wife very likely took a number of his personal secrets to her grave. Lastly, you must condense and shape your work into something people will want to read.

[Continue reading this book review at LibertyUnbound.com.]

First a note from Scott Lahti, then a couple of comments:

From the folks wot brought you the "Li'l Hef" bathrobe for boys, and the sale on "Choirboy robes, half-off", the latest reason for any image-conscious corporation to keep at least one English major on retainer:

Woolworths pulls "Lolita" bed for young girls

Fri Feb 1, 9:22 AM ET
[From Reuters]

A shopping chain has withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita and designed for six-year-old girls after furious parents pointed out that the name was synonymous with sexually active preteens.

Woolworths said staff who administer the website selling the beds were not aware of the connection.

In "Lolita", a 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov, the narrator becomes sexually involved with his 12-year-old stepdaughter -- but Woolworths staff had not heard of the classic novel or two subsequent films based on it.

Hence they saw nothing wrong with advertising the Lolita Midsleeper Combi, a whitewashed wooden bed with pull-out desk and cupboard intended for girls aged about six until a concerned mother raised the alarm on a parenting Web site.

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the Web site had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told newspapers.

"We had to look it up on (online encyclopaedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

Woolworths said the product had now been dropped.

"Now this has been brought to our attention, the product has been removed from sale with immediate effect," the chain said.

"We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about."

(Reporting by Peter Apps)

Lahti then adds:

Just like the
Old man in
That book by Nabokov.

- The Police.

I had to double-check the lyrics, because I thought Lahti had remembered them incorrectly.

The way I hear the song in my head is "Just like the old man in that famous book by Nabokov!"

Apparently the lyrics that play in my memory are from the 1986 version, which added the word "famous." It made other very significant changes, as well, making it my favorite song by The Police: "a new, brooding arrangement with a different chorus and a more opulent production" according to Wikipedia.

I had an argument with a college acquaintance about the new version, as we listened to it on the juke box and played a game of 8-ball. He thought they'd ruined his "favorite Police song." I thought they'd made it what it should have been from the beginning. He said you couldn't dance to it anymore. I said a song about statutory rape maybe shouldn't be danceable. He had no idea what I was talking about.

"The lyrics," I said. "They call for a much moodier treatment."

"Oh," he said. "I've never listened to the words before."

Remember: he claimed this was his favorite Police song.

So anyway, my first reaction when reading this Reuters article about the Lolita bed was, How can they not know what "Lolita" means? My second reaction was, Have they never even heard "Don't Stand So Close" by The Police? Then my third reaction was to recall that brief pool-hall debate and realize that either (a) they, like my classmate, had "never listened to the words before" or (b) did listen to the words and didn't bother finding out what they meant. I suppose there's another option (c) where they fall victim to the musical mondegreen. Here are some mishearings I've found on the web:

1. Just like the old man / Who's been hit by an apple core!
2. Just let me, don't mend it, let put by nectar cup
3. Just like the old man who / Got bit by an apricot
4. Just like the old man in that book by now because!

Last comment: The unabridged audiobook of Lolita, read by Jeremy Irons who had just played Humbert Humbert in the latest film adaptation, is just stunning. Probably my favorite audio novel. Irons is even better at reading the book than he is in the movie.

To close, I'll give you the great opening passage of this great novel:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palette to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

(Lolita, Part I, by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955.)

An impromptu tribute to Henry Hazlitt by Scott Lahti:

Henry Hazlitt definitely held his own with the academics, to say the least, and not just with The Failure of the "New Economics", or his near-million-selling Economics in One Lesson. His whole life was testament to the power of well-directed self-education, maintained across almost 99 years. Take a look at his library sometime at FEE in Irvington. Or read, e.g., such non-economic works as Thinking as a Science (1916); The Way to Will-Power (1922), virtually impossible to find outside university libraries (I own two of the only privately-held copies in all of Christendom); The Anatomy of Criticism (1933), a charming "trialogue" on the principles of literary judgment, and *summa* of his three-year stint as literary editor at The Nation; The Foundations of Morality (1964), an erudite tome on ethics; or The Wisdom of the Stoics (1984), a selection from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, assembled with wife Frances as old age found stoicism of more than scholarly interest.

I had the good fortune of meeting Hazlitt while on spring break in 1982 in Wilton, Connecticut, where I lived while in high school five miles or so from Hazlitt. He was then 87. Two letters from him are in my files. Try to imagine him running regularly in the latter-day incarnations of Newsweek or the Reader's Digest, as he did for decades surrounding the mid-century last.

"Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings." - Julius Caesar

"So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?" - "THE PUNCH LINE," Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

I came across this rave review in a letter dated July 18, 1959 from Murray Rothbard to the Volker Fund:

In a forthcoming review of Henry Hazlitt's The Failure of the "New Economics" in National Review, I write that this is the best book on economics to be published since Mises's Human Action, ten years ago. I do not think this an exaggeration. Exempting reprinted books, such as Mises's Theory of Money and Credit or the Böhm-Bawerk volumes, what book can compete with this one? (Mises's Theory and History and Hayek's Counter-Revolution of Science are more philosophical or epistemological than straight economics). […]

Frankly, I didn't realize that Henry had it in him. [Read the rest »]

After I posted an email from my friend about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Scott Lahti and David Zemens asked in the comments about the author, David Miller — specifically where they could read more of his prose.

David was the best man at my wedding and the humorless friend I mention in my first piece for LewRockwell.com, "Staw Men & Ham Sandwiches."

He is a poet and a photographer, who works for Associated Press, but unfortunately, despite his insinuation otherwise, David doesn't currently keep a blog. I will encourage him to try again.

In December, during the fortnight around the solstice, my wife and I sip single-malt whisky and take turns each evening, one reading the other a poem about the season. Every year, I include some of David Miller's poetry in my readings. Here's the one I read this year:

"Christmas Shopping"

Our hands slip apart,
I'm castaway.
Bobbing in a pedestrian current
thrown out among the hungry shoppers
of east 59th street.

David?

My name, like me is so small
among these people
as they hunt for symbols,
things to give the sense of
"Lie with me for 12 times 4 years."

She scans full-circle
a lighthouse look,
taking in the street
(its pickpockets,
          vendors,
               beggars innocents.)
in two half circles.

I, a baby boy in a red row boat
lost in the juggling and jostling
     handbags-thighs-knees-shoes.
She picks me out
the child she takes clasping
warm and tight against
the tide
her mother smell sweet,
with a deep hint of woman
                    shuts out the rest.

Lets it be unsaid
that you are my love,
               my jacket,
                    my safety belt
and I will never undo you
or let you come undone.