Finding Feuchtwanger
February 10th, 2009
Photo by Sam Fam
Among the many, many volumes I inherited from my father’s library is a near-complete collection of the works of Lion Feuchtwanger. No one reads Feuchtwanger these days. As far as I can tell, only one of his books is still in print in English, The Oppermanns (4½ stars on Amazon.com), funnily enough in a translation by someone I know.
But there was a time when Feuchtwanger was devoured by left-wing readers in the US. My father’s library has a lot of books like that. The resonance of Feuchtwanger was brought graphically home to me this weekend, when my family took advantage of a crisp, sunny day to wander around San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill. Coit Tower, at the summit, has a famous set of murals, completed by the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal. There’s a distinct left-wing ethos to these wonderful works, by a number of different artists. Look closely, however, at The Library (above), painted by Baruch Zakheim, and you’ll find many of the authors from my father’s library. Including Feuchtwanger.
I really need to pull one of those volumes down from my shelves and see if the neglected Feuchtwanger holds up well.
Wishing for unfairness
February 10th, 2009
If you think bank bonuses are unfair, then hold on to your hats. It’s a sad fact about life after the crunch that the best-case scenario now for the global economy may be the unfairest.
Where are the State Department blogs?
February 10th, 2009
I’ve been reading David Miliband’s blog since he started. Certainly in Britain it’s a first to have a minister as senior as Foreign Secretary truly blogging — and Miliband’s writing is certainly in his own voice. Because he pointed his readers to the British embassy’s blog from Harare, if we wanted to get a view from the ground, I’ve discovered a wealth of blogs from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
It’s a great way to bring some of the insights from a country’s diplomatic network to citizens. So what does my own State Department have to offer? There’s DipNote, the official blog of the State Department. And, as far as I can tell, that’s it.
Hillary Clinton wasn’t the most blog-friendly of candidates, so I don’t expect her first instruction to the diplomatic corps will be to let blogs blossom. But the people around the White House certainly know how powerful a distributed, informal network of communication and conversation can be (I was impressed that the British ambassador to Serbia not only writes, but seems to respond directly to comments). That would be a change I could believe in.