Author: Caleb Crain

“What about me, what?”

Yesterday Yoli Cuello, an interviewer for Radio Caracol Miami, interviewed Republican presidential candidate John McCain (I learned about it from TPM). The interview was rebroadcast by Cadena Ser in Spain, where it made a stir, because in the interview McCain either failed to recognize the name of the Spanish president or implied that Zapatero was hostile to America. The faux pas instantly became news in the Spanish newspaper El País and elsewhere.

This morning, Cadena Ser released the original, undubbed version of the interview, which was conducted in English. A partial transcript:

Yoli Cuello, Radio Caracol Miami: Let’s start with Venezuela. What do you think you should do with Venezuela if you’re elected President?

McCain: I think Venezuela is a compelling argument for energy independence. I would not sit down with President Hugo Chavez, as Senator Obama said that he would do without precondition, and I would do everything in my power to support democracy and freedom and human rights in Venezuela. As we know, Hugo Chavez is moving towards autocracy in Venezuela and depriving people of their democratic rights.

Do you think the United States should ignore the comments that Hugo Chavez made every time he talk about the United States?

I think we should not dignify Hugo Chavez in any way and we should become independent of foreign oil and we should advocate strongly for the preservation of democracy in Venezuela.

What do you think about Bolivia, the situation that is going on right now there?

I think it’s very similar with Morales as it is with Chavez. They are very similar. And I would basically say the same thing. Our advocacy for democracy and human rights throughout the region means we should be paying a lot more attention to the region. We should be supporting President Uribe in Columbia, we should be in support of free trade agreements, and Senator Obama has opposed the free trade agreements. I support them. It would be good for the economies and good for democracy.

Many people have the feeling, Senator, that Latin America is ignored in Washington. If you’re elected president, what do you do to no forget Latin America?

Pay more attention. I know the issues, I know the leaders. Sen. Obama has never been south of the border in his entire life. I understand, and will pay much more attention to the region.

Since we are here in Miami, let’s talk about Cuba. . . .

I think that Raul Castro has just shown by refusing humanitarian assistance to his people, that he cares more about power than his people, and I think it’s very disappointing that he has done so and we have to maintain our advocacy of free elections, human rights organizations functioning and emptying the prisons of political prisoners.

Senator, finally, let’s talk about Spain. If you’re elected President, would you be willing to invite President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to the White House to meet with you?

I would be willing to meet with those leaders who [are] our friends and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion. And by the way, President Calderón of Mexico is fighting a very, very tough fight in Mexico against the drug cartels. I’m glad we’re now working in cooperation with the Mexican government on the Mérida plan, and I intend to move forward with relations and invite as many of those leaders as I can to the White House.

Would that invitation be extended to the Zapatero government, to the president itself?

I don’t, honestly, I’d have to look at the relations and the situations and the priorities, but I can assure you, I will establish closer relations with our friends and I will stand up to those who want to do harm to the United States of America. I know how to do both.

So you have to wait and see if he’s willing to meet with you—would you be able to do it, in the White House?

All I can tell you, I have a clear record of working with leaders in the hemisphere that are friends with us and standing up to those who are not, and that’s judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America and the entire region.

Okay, what about Europe. I’m talking about the president of Spain.

What about me, what?

Are you willing to meet with him if you’re elected President?

I’m willing to meet with any leader who is dedicated to the same principles and philosophy of human rights democracy and freedom, and I will stand up to those that do not.

Finally, senator, can you say, um, dum, dum, I forgot the word. Say hello to the listeners of Caracol radio.

Thank you to the listeners and thank you all for being involved in the election, which is one of the most important elections in history. . . .

“The great postmodern uncertainty that we live in”

I was very sorry to read this morning that David Foster Wallace died on Friday.

A fan of his work, I was lucky enough to interview him for the Boston Globe in October 2003 about his book Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ [Infinity]. The interview took place in his room at a hotel that he was briefly staying at, in New York. According to my notes, when I arrived, Wallace “had been air conditioning the room in preparation for a nap, but he kindly stopped the fan, for the sake of the tape recorder. He was wearing a blue Pomona College sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off. Before the interview started, he served me a glass of club soda and applied a nicotine patch to his upper left arm, over which he put an armband. During the interview, whenever I managed to empty my club soda, he refilled it.”

He was a little wary at first; it seemed that he didn’t expect that I would have read his book. When he found out that I had, his first question was, “Does it seem halfway clear to you?” and once we started talking about the math, he seemed to relax and, as I wrote in my notes, was “certainly more self-composed than this reporter,” who was star-struck. Throughout, he was focused on helping me interview him. When, for example, he called a book that sentimentalized a mathematician’s life story “horseshit,” he immediately upbraided himself for saying something unquotable: “Shit fuck fuck shit—none of it can be used.” He repeatedly asked if he was answering my questions satisfactorily and repeatedly apologized for not being more clear or more concise.

The published interview, as is conventional with the genre, was an edited and condensed version of the conversation we actually had, which went into much more detail on the math and a bit more into what really intrigued me: parallels between the mathematics of infinity, as resolved by the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor, and certain ideas in Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest that for lack of a better adjective might be called “religious.” For example, during one exchange, part of which does appear in the published interview, Wallace and I were talking about whether numbers exist outside the minds of the mathematicians who think about them. People who think numbers do have an independent reality are called Platonists, and I wanted to ask Wallace if he was one, because he’d been a bit cagey about his own beliefs in the book.

CRAIN: So are you a Platonist? Do you think mathematical concepts exist?

WALLACE: [Pause.] How, if this is going to be in the article, how would you provide enough context for the question to make sense?

CRAIN: That would be the challenge for the—

WALLACE: Personally, between you and me, yeah, I’m a Platonist, and I think, I personally think that God has particular languages, and one of them is music and one of them is mathematics, and that’s not something I can defend, it’s just something I’ve felt in my tummy since I was a little kid, but how exactly to try to make sense of that and to fit it in any kind of a working philosophy, much less cross the street to buy a loaf of bread is a different matter. In a certain sense, really really in the ultimate sense, it doesn’t matter what I think, what the book is about is what Cantor and Godel thought. The fact that Kurt Godel was a Platonist, when Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem—

At that moment, aptly but unfortunately, the tape ran out, and I didn’t notice for a few minutes. Here is my memory of what we talked about in the interval, according to the notes I took at the time: Since Wallace had introduced Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, I asked about the Infinite Jest character Pemulis (which, because I asked, Wallace said that he pronounced with a long e, but that I was free to pronounce however I liked)—I asked about Pemulis’s reassurance to Todd Possalthwaite that “you can trust math,” (p. 1071) and how Godel shows that this turns out not to be true. Wallace responded that it had been a long time since Infinite Jest, but that he had intended Pemulis to be “one of the book’s Antichrists,” and so readers shouldn’t take anything he said unskeptically. Then I asked about the physicality of Wallace’s fiction and how it felt to write about something as abstract as math. His first answer was to ask me if his fiction was any more physical than anyone else’s. Shortly after that, I noticed that the tape wasn’t moving, and flipped it over.

Somewhat later in the conversation, we came back to the topic, because of a line in Everything and More that I was curious about. (You probably have to have read Wallace’s book to follow every twist and turn in his reply, but the glory of the internet is that paragraphs don’t have to be perfectly intelligible to everyone to be worth posting.)

CRAIN: One question we haven’t really talked about is, you have a line where you say, “analogies to certain ideas of God are obvious.”

WALLACE: The book is rather odd, because there’s kind of the opening straw-boater-and-cane chapter, where you’re kind of trying to give a general overview about why this whole thing is going to be kind of mind-bending. I think the idea is that in the anthropology of religion, you basically build an idea of god by simply removing all the limitations you see, all the limitations and imperfections you see in the real world around you, is that what we’re talking about? And that infinity is kind of the same thing. Everything’s limited—imagine something without that. Probably a Kroneckerian [i.e., someone who doubts the independent existence of mathematical concepts—CC] would say, infinity and god are the same sort of thing, they’re pie-in-the sky dreams of people who haven’t adjusted to the ineluctability of limit in the universe and so like to dream of something without that, and it’s really just a unicorn. We’re just sticking various concepts together.

You have an odd facial expression when the person is answering the question because it usually looks like stark incomprehension. Did that make any sense at all?

CRAIN: Yeah yeah yeah.

WALLACE: Is the part of the book that I think your question’s referring to what it’s referring to?

CRAIN: Yeah. There’s a part in Infinite Jest, I don’t know which character it is, talking about, having trouble with the Higher Power and AA, and having to accept that— I think it’s Gately—that if he has a merely technical response, it will eventually work.

WALLACE: Interesting.

CRAIN: And I was sort of relating that to the idea of infinity as being mysterious and then Cantor coming along and having this technical apparatus for interfacing with it.

WALLACE: My guess, and again I’ve got to confess I don’t remember Infinite Jest very well, is that Gately’s talking about certain spiritual realities, and what you have to do to cultivate a relationship in a churchgoing or twelve-step-program-going versus, um, . . . You could say then that the whole agenda of this book [Everything and More] is very—diametrically?— different. We want not just to have a technical understanding of this. ‘Cause it really could be a booklet and could start at the last chapter and simply give you these . . . And there’s a certain interest about it. And in fact you really don’t need calculus to understand, for instance, Cantor’s diagonalization. Helps to know a little bit about the philosophy of math when you get into Cantor’s paradox and the Continuum Hypothesis and stuff. Much of the stuff in the book that’s hard in a math way is just providing context. Cantor just didn’t wake up one day and decide to do this. He was very much part of this math world. And to be honest, the whole reason for doing that is that it was the only way to write about this in a way that hadn’t been done before. And seemed to me to be somewhat worthwhile and was an interesting challenge. I sure wouldn’t say, if you’re interested in Cantor, just read the last chapter. I don’t think you can really understand Cantor if you don’t know something about Dedekind and the schnitt method, because the two of them, well whatever, they’re really twin towers. But he [Dedekind] doesn’t get much billing. He did a lot more for solidifying math, because he came up with a way to define irrationals that’s absolutely clean as a whistle.

Whereas Cantor, yeah, codifies the transfinite, but Cantor’s paradox is the first step into Godel’s incompleteness and self-reference. It’s at once this beautiful climax of the two hundred years before it and the first note of the funeral dirge for math as something that you can just, ‘You know what, we can explain the entire universe mathematically. All we have to do is come up with the right axioms and the right derivation rules.’ I mean, Cantor’s paradox starts the wheel of self-reference.

I don’t know if you know much about Godel’s incompleteness theorem. But in a lay sense, Godel is able to come up mathematically with a theorem that says, ‘I am not provable.’ And it’s a theorem, which means that math is either not consistent or it’s not complete, by definition. Packed in. He is the devil, for math.

Cantor’s paradox, that whole ‘If it’s not a member of the set, it is a member of the set,’ and then Russell’s paradox about twenty years later, those were the first two . . . You know, when you start coming on a really interesting theme in a piece of music, you usually hear it in echo notes that foreshadow it, those are the foreshadowings. And I don’t imagine Godel would have come up with the self-reference loop if it hadn’t been for Cantor and Russell. [Sotto voce] Whatever. You’re not interested.

CRAIN: When some of the technical questions about infinity are answered, this other abyss opens up.

WALLACE: Yeah. Infinity was the great albatross for math. Really ever since calculus. Infinitesimals were horseshit, and everybody knew they were horseshit. But the limits thing used natural language stuff like ‘approaches,’ which math isn’t supposed to do. So it’s this great shell game. Weierstrass, Dedekind and Cantor close all those holes, and it’s beautiful, and at the same time they open what turns out to be a much worse one, and that’s Godel. . . .

After Godel, the idea that mathematics was not just a language of god but a language we could decode to understand the universe and understand everything, I mean, that doesn’t work any more. It’s part of the great postmodern uncertainty that we live in. Very few people know about it.

CRAIN: Yeah, yeah. It’s a chilling way for the book to end.

WALLACE: The book ends very abruptly, because you come to the shore of an ocean I’m not even going to dip a toe into, because then we’re into three hundred more pages. . . .

I can’t think of any other contemporary novelist who thought about such philosophical questions with the same combination of depth, rigor, and feeling.

Lincoln and Not-Lincoln

A few paragraphs of Charles Gibson’s interview with Sarah Palin have been released early, and in them she invokes Lincoln:

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?

PALIN: You know, I don’t know if that was my exact quote.

GIBSON: Exact words.

PALIN: But the reference there is a repeat of Abraham Lincoln’s words when he said—first, he suggested never presume to know what God’s will is, and I would never presume to know God’s will or to speak God’s words. But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side. That’s what that comment was all about, Charlie.

According to a widely distributed video of Palin’s remarks to the Wasilla Assembly of God church—there’s a transcript, link, and forensic appraisal here—she said, “Our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God.” She continued: “That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”

I suspect that she objects to Gibson’s quotation not because it’s inaccurate but because it doesn’t include this second sentence, about praying that “that plan is God’s plan.” It is this sentence which she would like to believe echoes Lincoln.

The first interpretive crux to resolve here is which passage by Lincoln Palin has in mind. The first that occurred to me was his “Meditation on the Divine Will”:

The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds. (c. early September 1862).

The line of thought is one that recurs in Lincoln. She may equally have been thinking of the First Inaugural Address:

In our present differences, is either party without faith of being in the right? If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth, and that justice, will surely prevail, by the judgment of this great tribunal, the American people. (4 March 1861)

And there’s something of the same idea in the Second Inaugural:

Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. (4 March 1865)

The trouble is, in none of these passages does Lincoln pray to be on God’s side. God seems, rather, to have a side all his own, unknowable to human beings. There’s a touch of irony in the way Lincoln presents the paradox of two faith-filled groups at war with one another. And the irony is even stronger in less familiar Lincoln texts. In his “Reply to Chicago Emancipation Memorial, Washington, D.C.,” Lincoln grew almost caustic about Christians who were sure that God wished, or didn’t wish, for the emancipation of slaves:

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other class is mistaken in that belief, and perhaps in some respects both. I hope it will not be irreverent for me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me. (13 September 1862)

Thinking about God’s will and human intentions a few years before he became President, Lincoln went so far as to ridicule an imaginary reverend who tried to pray his way into agreement with God on the question of slavery:

Certainly there is no contending against the Will of God; but still there is some difficulty in ascertaining, and applying it, to particular cases. For instance we will suppose the Rev. Dr. Ross has a slave named Sambo, and the question is “Is it the Will of God that Sambo shall remain a slave, or be set free?” The Almighty gives no audible answer to the question, and his revelation—the Bible—gives none—or, at most, none but such as admits of a squabble, as to its meaning. So, at last, it comes to this, that Dr. Ross is to decide the question. And while he considers it, he sits in the shade, with gloves on his hands, and subsists on the bread that Sambo is earning in the burning sun. (1858?)

It doesn’t seem likely that Palin has this ironic Lincoln in mind. So who is she thinking of? Her Lincoln, fortuitously, seems to have been channeled by Pat Buchanan on the September 8 episode of The Rachel Maddow Show, during a discussion of the same speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God:

MADDOW: She’s not praying that the war be part of God’s plan.

BUCHANAN: Oh, yes, she is.

MADDOW: She’s asserting that the war is part of God’s plan.

BUCHANAN: No, no. She did not say this war is God’s plan. Look at it again—

MADDOW: She’s asserting that God has a plan for the war just as God has a plan for the pipeline.

BUCHANAN: Just like Lincoln said, “Look, let us pray that we are on God’s side.”

There is a bit of mystery here. Either Buchanan is a mind-reader, or he and the Palin-McCain campaign have been in touch. Further Googling reveals that Buchanan and/or the Palin-McCain backup team seem to be thinking of an unsourced anecdote that circulates on the Internet in a dozen versions, about a supposed encounter between a Northerner, who hopes God is on his side, and Lincoln, who hopes the North is on God’s side. Maybe a source for the anecdote will turn up, but I don’t recall having read of it before today. (It doesn’t seem to be in the Google Books scan of Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, a scholarly compendium of everything that Lincoln’s contemporaries remember him to have said.) The earliest telling of the anecdote that I could find in Google Books dates from 1943; my guess is that it’s a mid-twentieth-century fabrication.

The hard truth is, Lincoln didn’t think God spoke to human beings, whether they prayed or not, in such a way as to tell them what to do on Earth. He thought the Bible gave no guidance on worldly matters—or at least “none but such as admits of a squabble.” And the quaint anecdote that Palin cites, though one can see how some of the thoughts in the Second Inaugural gave rise to it, gets Lincoln slightly but tellingly wrong. There isn’t practically much difference between praying that God is on your side and praying that you are on God’s side, unless you’re willing to change sides, and Lincoln, for one, felt he had little choice in the side he finally took. What he was saying in the passages quoted above—the ones actually by him, that is—was darker. He was suggesting that God’s will may not have any relationship to human will at all. Thinking that it did—even, perhaps, thinking that it could—might be mere delusion. That sort of delusion happens to have governed the White House recently; one hopes that it won’t still govern it next year.

UPDATE (Sept. 12): Harold Holzer has told the Boston Globe that he also believes Palin’s Lincoln quote to have been a fake: “‘I think there is no computing the precise Lincoln quote with her own quote,’ Holzer said. ‘Lincoln sought guidance from God, he didn’t tell people that God was guiding him. It is just different.'”

FURTHER UPDATE (Sept. 12): Today John McCain recited the same probably-fake Lincoln anecdote on the daytime television show The View, so perhaps it will soon flower into the full virulence of a meme.

Of more interest: This afternoon, I received an email from David Emery, who writes about urban legends at About.com, and he reports finding an earlier telling of the anecdote. Near the end of the Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Convention of the Connecticut Temperance Union, Held in the First Congregational Church, Meriden, January 19, 1881, the anonymous author (perhaps the union’s secretary, J. N. Stearns?) wrote:

One of the best of the many good stories that are told of our Martyr President, runs as follows: At the close of a scientific convention in Washington, the members called upon the President. One of them said: “Mr. President, we trust during this time of trial in which the nation is engaged, God is on our side, and will give us victory.” The noble Lincoln replied: “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My great concern is to be on God’s side. For God is always right!”

On his blog, Emery also reports discovering that Barack Obama told the same probably-spurious anecdote on CNN on June 8, 2007, so I suppose that takes some of the wind of righteous indignation out of my sails. Oh well. Still, the thought of Palin quoting Lincoln remains for me personally rather itchy-making and preposterous, and reminds me of that Veronica Geng story that riffed on the idea that the words “Reagan” and “read Proust” are statistically unlikely to appear in the same sentence. Ascending from politics into scholarship, however, Emery’s discovery raises the question: Can anyone do better? Can anyone find the story being told while Lincoln was alive? I’m afraid that whether Obama told it or no, it still sounds fake to me. I should probably say that I don’t to my sorrow actually own a copy of Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, and I won’t feel safe about ruling it out until I’ve looked at the physical copy. Ideally someone like Douglas L. Wilson might notice this controversy and resolve it in 23 seconds or whatever it would take him.

STILL MORE: One of David Emery’s readers notes that Rev. Matthew Simpson, in his Funeral Address Delivered at the Burial of President Lincoln, 4 May 1865, writes:

To a minister who said he hoped the Lord was on our side, he replied that it gave him no concern whether the Lord was on our side or not, “For,” he added, “I know the Lord is always on the side of right;” and with deep feeling added, “But God is my witness that it is my constant anxiety and prayer that both myself and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”

I have to admit, this begins to sound plausible. The anecdote is coming from someone who knew Lincoln, and knew him so well that he was chosen to give the elegy at his funeral. There also seems to be a touch of the authentic doubting Lincoln in the prefatory assertion that “it gave him no concern whether the Lord was on our side or not.” I’ll persist in believing that the anecdote doesn’t represent Lincoln as well as any of his writings on the subject do, and that if you want a politician who reads Lincoln, you can’t do better than Obama, but I think I have to concede that the anecdote itself could be authentic.

YET MORE, IN CLARIFICATION (Sept. 25): A reader argues that I take Palin’s words out of context when I quote her as having said, “Our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God.” She suggests that I ought to have quoted the whole sentence: “Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending them out on a task that is from God.” She objects:

If I say, “I hope that I will get the job,” and I am quoted as saying “I will get the job,” it is an inaccurate quotation. A subordinate clause is being quoted without the information that shows it to be
contingent on something else. Charles Gibson would be right to say “exact words” in this case, too, but at the same time what he is saying is not at all what I meant when I said those words.

The objection is well put, and I see the point, though I don’t think I’m wrong to have quoted Palin above as I did. Palin’s wording is ambiguous, and I do say above that Gibson would have made Palin’s meaning clearer if he had also quoted the sentence that followed, which resolves the ambiguity.

If Palin had said simply, “Pray . . . that our leaders . . . are sending them out on a task that is from God,” her meaning would have been clear. But by adding that long intervening phrase (“for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right also for this country”), she made it easy for listeners to hear the word “them” as a mistaken addition. In other words, she made it easy for people to hear her as saying, “Pray for our military men and women, . . . that our leaders . . . are sending . . . out on a task that is from God.”

Gibson doesn’t seem to have heard the word “them” in Palin’s sentence, and it doesn’t appear in the Cogitamus transcript. This might be deliberate partisan obtuseness, but I’m inclined to think it’s a reasonable mishearing. I added the word back in when I quoted the Cogitamus transcript, because I heard it when I listened to the video and realized that it made her meaning a little more perspicuous.

However, to use the reader’s example, if I were to say, “I hope for the sake of my family and also my friends who have always been there for me and who understand me that I will get the job,” it wouldn’t be crazy for someone listening to think that the word “me” was a mistake and to hear me as having said that my family and friends understand that I will get the job. In fact, I would have meant to say I hope I get the job for the sake of my family and friends, who understand me. If I then went on to say, “That’s what I’m hoping for, that I won’t disappoint the people who understand me,” then it would be moderately unfair for someone not to figure out what I meant, and that’s roughly what I say in my post above—that Palin’s first sentence was ambiguous and that her second cleared up the ambiguity, and that she had a point in objecting to Gibson’s quote.

If only Palin had used the subjunctive, none of this would have happened.

My first lipstick-wearing pig

At the risk of dignifying an absurdity with attention, I happen to remember exactly when I first heard about pigs who wore lipstick. I first came across the turn of phrase in the Reagan-appointed Chief Judge of the Seventh Circuit Richard A. Posner’s book Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline, which I reviewed for The Nation in 2002. In chapter 6, a reprint of an essay originally published in 1998, Posner discussed the literary criticism of Wayne Booth and why he found it heavy-handed:

To prove the inescapability of the ethical in any final aesthetic judgment on a work of literature, even when it is a brief lyric, Booth does something very strange—I am tempted to say desperate: he changes the end of the second stanza of Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” so that feeding on peerless eyes becomes stroking peerless thighs. But this is aesthetic butchery. The imagery of devouring (mostly poison) is pervasive in the poem, and this gives the image of feeding on the peerless eyes a resonance and hint of menace that Booth’s image of stroking thighs lacks. The substitution changes an image of great emotional power—because of the fusion of devouring with seeing—that is integral to the poem’s pattern of imagery into an irruption of soft-core porn that breaks the spell created by the poet. Not that pornography can’t be literature; but the “Ode on Melancholy” is not improved by being made risqué, just as a pig is not enhanced by wearing lipstick. Everything in its place.

To which one today feels obliged to assent, grimly, Indeed. In my review, “License to Ink,” I called these moments of bravura by Posner “highly entertaining” and I wrote of this passage in particular that it contained “a simile that becomes more disturbing the more it is considered.” Lipsticked pigs were new to me at the time, but since then I’ve seen them often in the prose of pundits, no doubt because they all make a point of reading my reviews and Posner’s books. (Kidding! I understand the image has been around for ages. I’m only pretending to be grandiose.) I leave it to John McCain to demonstrate that Posner was actually thinking neither of John Keats nor Wayne Booth nor even Immanuel Kant but only of a certain Alaskan.