Obituary: John Updike

Obituary: John Updike

John Updike's novels, magisterial dissections of the soul of post-World War II middle America, placed him at the very pinnacle of his profession.

Works such as Couples and the Rabbit series chronicled the obsessions, passions and anxieties of three generations.

Whether writing novels, short stories, essays or poems, John Updike's work always seemed to find the pulse of modern America.

Often controversial, he remained at the cutting edge of literature into his 70s and, with his most celebrated character, Harold "Rabbit" Angstrom, he found an authentic 20th-Century everyman.

The son of a schoolmaster, John Updike was born in Pennsylvania in March 1932 and, after attending Harvard, spent a year in the UK, as a student at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford.

Later he joined the staff of the New Yorker magazine, to which he contributed numerous poems, essays and short stories.

Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published in 1959, to mixed, but generally favourable, reviews.

The following year, though, saw the publication of the book which established him as one of the greatest novelists of his age.

Rabbit, Run marked the debut of his most enduring, if not endearing, character, Harold "Rabbit" Angstrom.

In this and its sequels, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest - published at ten-yearly intervals - Updike charts the course of one man's life: his job, marriage, affairs, minor triumphs and death.

The Rabbit novels, though, are as much about the changing soul of the United States as about any individual character.

Even so, with all his petty failings and unrequited hopes, their main character presents not a mere cipher but a rounded, fully realised, portrait of a human being.

Updike was clear about the focus of his work: "My subject is the American Protestant small town middle class."

"I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."

During the mid-60s, works such as The Centaur and Of the Farm brought Updike critical acclaim but Couples, published in 1968, gave him his first popular success.

Couples, has been called "the best-written dirty book since the Decameron" - but this does less than justice to either Updike or Boccaccio.

The theme of the book is indeed adultery, as practised by ten middle-class couples in a small New England town

Though the author does not hesitate to give detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse, he does so with a lucidity and reverence that is completely removed from pornography.

Altogether, John Updike published more than 50 novels: one of his novels about Harold Angstrom, Rabbit is Rich, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, while Rabbit at Rest won in 1993.

Though often berated by critics for his seeming obsession with golf and sex, it is his mastery of the English language, its nuances, vagueries and sheer beauty, which brought John Updike millions of admirers.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/3526947.stm

Published: 2009/01/27 18:42:17 GMT

© BBC MMIX

Obama aims for oil independence

Obama aims for oil independence

Obama on the three steps to energy independence

President Barack Obama has called for the US to become energy independent, saying its reliance on foreign oil and global warming posed threats.

Outlining his energy priorities, he said the country would not be held "hostage to dwindling resources, hostile regimes, and a warming planet".

He called for greater fuel efficiency and an "energy economy" aimed at creating millions of jobs.

He also ordered a review of whether states can set car emission standards.

This challenges a Bush administration decision which favoured a national standard for vehicle pollution.

At his first White House news conference since becoming president, Mr Obama said he would reverse America's dependence on foreign oil while creating jobs, but warned there was no "quick fix".


OBAMA ENERGY PLAN
A customer at a petrol pump

Reverse US dependence on foreign energy
Review of decision to block states from setting own emission targets
Orders the transportation department to come up with new short-term rules on how carmakers can improve fuel efficiency
Federal buildings to become more efficient
Double 'green' energy from wind, sun and biofuels over next three years

Obama diary: First 100 days

"We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America that is freed from our energy dependence, and empowered by a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work."

He added: "Now is the time to meet the challenge of this crossroads of history, by choosing a future safer for our country, prosperous for our planet, and sustainable."

Mr Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review its refusal of a waiver which had previously allowed California to set its own - stricter - vehicle emission and fuel efficiency standards.

He said California had taken bold moves in implementing the standards.

Mr Obama said: "The days of Washington dragging its heels are over.

"My administration will not deny facts. We will be guided by them."

His statement that the US would lead on climate change was a clear swipe at his predecessor's sceptical view of global warming, says the BBC's James Coomarasamy in Washington.

Energy efficiency drive

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had asked Mr Obama to reverse the Bush administration's insistence on a single, national standard.

California wants a 30% reduction in motor vehicle greenhouse gas emissions by 2016, achieved by improving fuel efficiency standards.

President Obama also ordered the transportation department to come up with new short-term rules on how carmakers can improve fuel efficiency.

A 2007 law required that new cars and trucks produced by 2020 obtain 35 miles per gallon of fuel (about 15km/litre).

However, then-President George W Bush did not put in place the regulations to enable the law to be carried out.

Emissions from car exhaust (file photo)
Car exhaust is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions

The new rules Mr Obama wants to put in place would mean the new standard is reached by 2011, the New York Times said.

The president also announced plans to make all federal government buildings more energy efficient, and pledged to cut families's energy bills by "weatherising" 2.5 million homes.

He also said the US would double its capacity for "green" energy generation, from sources such as wind, sun, and biofuels, over the next three years.

More than 3,000 miles of transmission lines would be established to transmit the energy.

In the European Union, a recently agreed climate package set out average emission targets for the whole car industry of 120g of CO2 per kilometre by 2012 for new cars, compared with current levels of 160g/km.

The EU target for 2020 is 95g/km. But CO2 emissions vary from car to car, and manufacturers have been given until 2015 to meet their specific targets for each model.

According to media reports, the state department is to appoint a former Clinton diplomat as its "climate change envoy".

Todd Stern served under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001 and was involved in Kyoto climate change talks.

copyright: BBC World News

9 Ways NASA Can Tackle Climate Change

9 Ways NASA Can Tackle Climate Change
Scientists tell Pres. Barack Obama how the space agency could help solve the world's number-one problem

By William S. Marshall and James Clay Moltz

NASA could be one of the nation's most potent weapons in battling climate change. The space agency has conducted decades of research into weather, life-support systems and the atmospheres of other planets providing it with unique skills to address this problem.

It would be easy for policymakers to overlook NASA as they map out a strategy for solving Earth's biggest environmental woes. But here are some important reasons why they shouldn't.

NASA has 21 Earth-observing spacecraft in orbit today, five more missions in development, and has been studying Earth's climate for the past three decades. This includes, for example, ICEsat, which monitors polar ice cap shrinkage. Scientists from across the globe use the data from these missions to refine their understanding of Earth's changing atmosphere. Some of their number crunching is done on NASA supercomputers (including the largest civilian one in the world). In turn, these models provide us with a basic understanding of the status of our climate and the means to make predictions of future changes.

NASA has a proved ability to accomplish major engineering feats. Climate change is an immense challenge that involves an extremely complex system—the environment—along with advanced technologies that could be used to measure it and mitigate problems. Each of these facets is a significant scientific and technical hurdle, but perhaps the biggest challenge is to bring everything together into a comprehensive, integrated plan. This will require a coordinated effort of thousands of scientists and engineers, and large-scale deployment, perhaps not unlike the retooling of manufacturing during World War II or the Apollo project. There are few organizations with the relevant capacity, and NASA is one.

From the joint U.S.–Soviet Apollo–Soyuz mission during the height of the Cold War to the current International Space Station (ISS), NASA has successfully completed large engineering projects with other nations,and climate change management will undoubtedly require a global effort.

NASA also has decades of experience with green technologies such as solar cells, fuels cells, turbine technology, biofuels, carbon sequestration, and closed-loop life-support systems. This last capability helps NASA to manage the near-100 percent recycling of consumables on board the ISS—an important step to understanding how to do that on a natural spaceship, the one we call Earth.

Finally, NASA enabled the Planet Earth perspective. On Christmas Eve 40 years ago, the first human beings to enter the gravitational sphere of another planetary body, the moon, took a picture of Earth rising above the lunar surface—Earthrise. Pictures like these kicked off the environmental movement; allowing humanity to realize the extreme isolation and fragility of our planet.

But NASA can do more if the new Pres. Barack Obama and Congress give it the chance. The following are nine ways that it can help solve the world's energy and climate change problems:

1. Develop an integrated, global plan for energy and the environment. In collaboration with international partners and other agencies, and taking into account climate change data, the best models of their progression, and characteristics of renewable energy technologies (and the expected rate of their improvement), this plan would, among other things, detail: the rates of renewable technology deployment required; whatever additional climate data is necessary; the proper levels of carbon trading and caps; the data needed to measure the impact of those caps; and what mitigation technologies should be deployed. The plan would make clear whether nations could meet the internationally agreed-on carbon dioxide emission limits and still fulfill their energy needs. And if the current trajectory does not suffice, then what adaptations, in what technological areas, and in what locations would be needed to ensure they are met.

2. Open NASA facilities to "green tech" companies. NASA should be allowed to open its facilities and experts to innovative green technology companies and nonprofits. NASA has a wide range of facilities that are of relevance to green technologies from research stations in the arctic and desert, to the world's largest wind tunnels, to supercomputers. For example, a novel, high-altitude wind energy company Makani Power, partially funded by Google, is making use of the NASA Ames Research Center wind tunnels for advancing their energy production designs.

3. Create an energy/environment data center. NASA has vast amounts of relevant data. This includes Earth observation data and information on the global flow of energy, solar weather, the magnetosphere that influences our system, relevant green technologies, and aviation data. Together with other key agencies—such as the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA could provide all such data in common standard formats. Starting with the approach NASA already takes with its Planetary Data System to host the information, NASA should take it a step further, providing an application programming interface for others to use this treasure trove.

4. Utilize small, inexpensive spacecraft to collect climate data. Following the recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences's first-ever Decadal Survey for Earth Science, NASA should establish a venture class of spacecraft for Earth observing to enable the collection of more data for less cost. Today a great deal of valuable Earth observation data can be collected on small satellites that are an order of magnitude lighter as well as an order of magnitude lower cost. A good example is the Disaster Monitoring Constellation, which is an international constellation of five small remote-sensing satellites, each costing approximately $20 million (20 to 50 times less expensive than typical NASA satellites). Although of lower resolution and finesse than the NASA birds, at so much lower cost they can give higher temporal resolution and certainly more data for a given expenditure.

5. Invest in "green" aviation. Let us not forget that the first A in NASA is Aeronautics. NASA could be tasked to help to develop some of the key technologies that would enable "green aviation"—technologies that could help aircraft use less fuel or be carbon neutral. These include more fuel-efficient air traffic control, lighter-weight structures, more advanced combustion control systems as well as electric, solar or biofuel-based motors. For example, NASA could lead a concerted research effort on electric planes, focusing on production and testing of prototype vehicles whose designs are then made as open hardware, accessible to the aerospace industry.

6. Use of UAVs for regional climate modeling. Currently there is a gap between aircraft observations that are high-resolution but limited in coverage, and satellite data, which provide a global view but with lower resolution. NASA UAVs and other airborne platforms could be used as gap-fillers in a more active program that offers regional, high-resolution, climate data collection, along with immediate response to disasters. For example, in 2008 NASA flew an adapted Predator drone over California wildfires providing real-time, Web-based information delivery to decision makers, which California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger credited with playing a critical role in fighting those fires.

7. Greater U.S. Government collaboration. NASA should be encouraged to work more closely with the other relevant U.S. agencies as well as its international counterparts. Today researchers from NASA and the DoE, for instance, can't even enter one another's facilities without advance permission. Within the U.S., there is a lack of clarity for the roles played by the alphabet soup of federal agencies that have environmental programs—the DoE, NASA, NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey, among them. It is NASA and NOAA that primarily collect the climate change data, and it is the DoE that primarily deals with energy. These three organizations alone managed over 80 percent of the $11.6-billion U.S. environment and energy research budget in 2008; they also employ the bulk of government scientists and engineers that can contribute to solving the massive systems engineering problems of climate change and sustainable energy.

NASA and NOAA work together, but the relationship between them and the DOE needs an overhaul. The relevant programs of these agencies could all report to a new energy and climate czar, preferably with budgetary authority (being the convening impetus). Alternatively, the U.S. could even form a new "Energy and Environment Agency," along the lines of a similar department recently created in the U.K.—forcing the marriage of energy and climate change problems and a pooling of all the above investment. The Obama administration should also consider boosting the authority and size of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy so that it has the muscle to coax agencies into working together. It should seriously consider the benefits of such cross-organizational collaboration at an international level, as seen in the successful cases of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the European Space Agency.

8. Create an Earth Systems Directorate. NASA should be instructed to elevate its Earth Science Division to the status of a directorate—bringing it on par with human exploration, space science and aeronautics as key functions of the agency. This directorate would bring together all the other NASA programs relevant to energy and the environment, including Earth observation and modeling, green energy technologies, and supercomputing capabilities.

9. Increasing public participation in green programs. Climate challenge cannot be tackled without the participation of the public, and NASA is well-positioned to help connect the public with the exciting research being undertaken on ways to address our energy and climate change problems. One example of this is an Web effort called OpenNASA.com which is an open dialogue between NASA employees and the public on all of the agency's policies.

Of course, NASA is far from the end-all solution to climate change. Effective solutions must occur on a global scale with all nations coordinating their efforts and even, perhaps, resources. But NASA does have much untapped potential in this regard. Moreover, most of the changes above do not require new money so much as organizational changes: Small satellites just enable more within the same budget and opening up facilities to green tech companies costs very little, relatively speaking. The only recommendation that would require more than several million dollars annually would be a serious program on green aviation. That would likely cost about $100 million annually according to a recent study by NASA Ames: This could either come from new monies forked over by Congress or from existing aeronautics funds diverted toward that effort. All told, the above programs might add up to $200 million, or approximately 1 percent of NASA's annual budget.

NASA's primary function has been the exploration of the solar system. Along the way, however, it has contributed greatly to our understanding of Earth. Whereas NASA should certainly continue to conduct space exploration, its engineering muscle should be applied in a more focused manner to solve the biggest problems in our home world. Thus, the Obama administration should make better use of NASA's talents when implementing its energy and environment plan. Perhaps the new NASA motto could be: Science, Settlement and Sustainability.

Energy and emissions top Obama's green tasklist

Energy and emissions top Obama's green tasklist
What can be reasonably expected of the man who was the strongest environmental contender for the White House in US history?


Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 January 2009 10.44 GMT

Barack Obama is raising expectations of swift action on the environment - possibly within his first few days in the White House.

At one of two green balls for this year's inauguration, environmentalists were already describing Obama as America's first green president.

Obama, since his election, has repeatedly indicated he wants to push ahead on his campaign promise to create jobs by investing in renewable energy.

He used his last appearance before the start of celebrations for his inauguration on Tuesday to talk up his clean energy plans at an Ohio factory that makes components for wind turbines.

"A renewable energy economy isn't some pie-in-the-sky, far-off future," Obama said during the factory visit. "It's happening all across America right now. It's providing alternatives to foreign oil now. It can create millions of additional jobs and entire new industries if we act right now."

Such early gestures, the appointment of a team of respected scientists and experienced legislators, have fuelled anticipation of what Obama might do in the White House.

Environmentalists praise Obama for putting the environment at the heart of his economic renewal plan - part of the solution to the crisis, rather than the source.

They say there has been little sign that Obama has scaled back his thinking in response to the economic crisis.

"Obama gets it," said Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon congressman who is a member of the house committee on energy independence and global warming.

However, Teryn Norris and Jesse Jenkins, of the Breakthrough Institute, argue that as the recession has deepened, Obama has been relatively silent on cap and trade emissions schemes similar to the one operating in Europe in which companies can trade permits to emit carbon dioxide. "With green jobs now positioned as 'the solution' to both the economy and the climate, Obama has cover to take the politically expedient route of short-term green stimulus while ignoring serious climate policy," they write.

"Obama has made it increasingly clear that public investment is his preferred climate policy mechanism. What Obama has not made clear is whether or not he will embrace the type and scale of investments necessary to seriously confront the climate challenge."

So, once Obama is president, what can be reasonably expected of the man who was the most strongly environmental contender for the White House in US history?

On the campaign trail, Obama supported a 15% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 80% by 2050. He embraced the goal of obtaining 10% of America's electricity from renewable resources by 2012, and 25% by 2025.

Environmentalists see that translating into results almost immediately after Obama is sworn in with a number of executive orders overturning some of the most controversial decisions by George Bush.

These could include:

• Directing the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide. The Bush administration refused to act on a 2007 Supreme Court ruling giving the agency regulatory and enforcement power.

• Granting authority to California and 16 other states to regulate vehicle tailpipe emissions

• Ordering a ban on mountain-top removal coalmining

Next on the agenda is an economic stimulus package which Obama hopes to pass within the first three weeks. Environmentalists expect a heavily green component in the $775-825bn package.

"I think we are going to see a very large infrastructure proposal with a very strong green component - everything from putting solar panels on the rooftops of government buildings to providing tax credits to home owners to make their homes more energy efficient to retrofitting older buildings to beginning to stress mass transit," said Michael Moynihan.

Obama's stimulus plan revealed last week calls for doubling the production of renewable energy in three years. It envisages energy-efficient retrofits for 75% of government office buildings, and weather-proofing some 2m homes.

He said the plan would create nearly half a million new jobs in production of wind turbines and solar panels, and the building industry.

An early draft of the bill showed about $54bn in measures on weatherisation and retrofitting.

Democratic leaders in Congress hope to pass the package by February 20.

In the longer term, environmentalists were cheered by Hillary Clinton's confirmation as secretary of state last week. They see Clinton as a strong advocate for reaching a successor to the Kyoto protocol. "We have got a whole series of people who want to move in the same direction as the president-elect," said Eileen Claussen of the Pew Environment Group.

But the picture is mixed on domestic cap and trade legislation. Environmentalists who are in regular contact with Obama's advisers say his White House would be prepared to consult widely with Congress.

However, while the Democratic leadership is squarely behind cap and trade legislation, Republicans as well as some Democrats from coal-producing states are not behind a domestic cap and trade regime. Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker, said earlier this month that she was not hopeful of passing legislation this year.

The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike

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Harold Pinter R.I.P.

A poet's ear for language and a flawless sense of dramatic rhythm'
Michael Billington reflects on the life and work of Harold Pinter and his immense contribution to the world of drama

The death of Harold Pinter comes as a great shock. We all knew, of course, that he had endured a succession of illnesses ever since 2000. But there was a physical toughness and tenacity of will about Harold that made us all believe he would survive for a few more years yet. Sadly, it was not to be.

My own memories of Harold, and it's hard to think of him in more formal terms, are entirely happy. We'd had a relatively distant professional relationship for many years. I'd reviewed his plays, sometimes favourably, sometimes not. (I made a spectacular ass of myself over the original production of Betrayal.) Then in 1992 I was approached by Faber and Faber to write a book about him. What was intended as a short book about his plays and politics turned, thanks to his openness, into a full-scale biography. I talked to Harold himself at great length, to his friends and colleagues. And what I discovered was that his plays, so often dubbed enigmatic and mysterious, were nearly all spun out of memories of his own experience. If they connected with audiences the world over, it was because he understood the insecurity of human life and the sense that it was often based on psychological and territorial battles.

Pinter's contribution to drama was immense. He had a poet's ear for language, an almost flawless sense of dramatic rhythm and the ability to distil the conflicts of daily life. I believe his plays, from The Room in 1957 to Celebration in 2000, will endure wind and weather. Indeed many of them already, such as The Birthday Party, The Homeconming and No Man's Land, have the status of modern classics. Pinter was also, of course, a highly political animal, as evidenced by his later plays, his crusading articles and speeches and his famous Nobel Lecture which brilliantly skewered the lies surrounding US foreign policy.

But, just a few hours after learning of his death, what I chiefly remember is the generosity of the man himself. Harold had a great talent for friendship, as the next few days will surely testify. He also had a remarkable sense of loyalty. Eight weeks ago I directed a group of LAMDA students in a triple-bill of Party Time, Celebration and the Nobel Lecture. At the time, Harold was extremely ill. But he had promised to come and see the productions and, on the final Saturday-night performance, he and his wife, Antonia, duly arrived. They not only saw the shows. Harold got a up and made a speech afterwards thanking all the students. He then stayed on to drink and chat with them. Only later did I realise how much of a physical effort it was for Harold. But it was a golden night for the student-actors and, I have to say, for me too. It was also typical of the man. Harold was a great dramatist and screenwriter, a ferocious polemicist, a fighter against all forms of hypocrisy. What we should also remember today is his generosity of spirit and his rage for life.

copyright: The Guardian

From Times Online
December 25, 2008
Pinter: not just a playwright, but an adjective too
Pinteresque: "marked especially by halting dialogue, uncertainty of identity, and air of menace" (OED).

Pinter on Pinteresque: "I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't."
Philippe Naughton

Few playwrights are honoured with their own eponymous adjective; even more rarely does it gain currency.

But so distinctive was the voice of Harold Pinter, who has died aged 78, that the first recorded use of the word Pinteresque came as early as 1960, just three years after the first production of any of his plays.

Its precise meaning has been the subject of academic theses and learned articles over the years since then although most people will have their own understanding of the word: Pinter's plays keep the audience guessing, his dialogue keeps them off-balance, unable to relax.

His most famous literary device was borrowed from Samuel Beckett, although it is never described as Beckettian. Like his friend and mentor, Pinter punctuated his scripts with the word "pause", followed by a number of dots to indicate its duration. For a particularly long, menacing pause, he wrote the word "silence".

Of his major works, Betrayal contains no less than 140 scripted pauses, The Caretaker 149 and The Homecoming 224.

But although Pinter later advised actors that they did not have to follow his pauses religiously – and said that he himself, when acting in his own plays, had ignored up to half of them – the pauses were clearly crucial. They helped destroy the words in between, to induce the sense of crisis, from words left unspoken.

Yet the writer himself resolutely rejected that "damn word" Pinteresque, including in a Newsnight Review interview in 2006 when he was asked by Kirsty Wark to "finally acknowledge that there is such a thing as a Pinteresque moment".

"I've no idea what it means. Never have. I really don't," he said. I can detect where a thing is 'Kafkaesque' or 'Chekhovian' but with respect to the 'Pinteresque' I can't define what it is myself. You use the term 'menace' and so on. I have no explanation of any of that really. What I write is what I write."

Classical Dancers as Half-Witted Canaries

Lady Talky
Alison Light

* Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs John Maynard Keynes by Judith Mackrell Buy this book

Why does she want the red shoes? She wants to be special and she wants to be looked at. In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess. Like selfish Heidi and tomboy Katy, Karen is a mid-19th century girl crippled by egotism. The shoes force her to dance non-stop and to display herself ‘wherever proud and vain children live’. Though it seems simply a punitive response to female narcissism, this is a Christian morality tale intended to warn against the sin of self-love. Karen is cast out of her community and her church; she has her feet hacked off, and the story ends with her repentance. What we remember, though, is not the final image of her blissful reunion with God but the red shoes, with the little feet still in them, going on dancing. Shoes were a homely and powerful symbol of status for Andersen, the son of a cobbler, a lonely, ungainly outsider. He was greedy for fame yet tormented by guilt at his success; ‘The Red Shoes’ inflicts a cruel comeuppance on exhibitionists and social climbers like himself.

Judith Mackrell suspects that Lydia Lopokova was being mischievous when she chose to read ‘The Red Shoes’ on the wireless for the BBC in 1935. Lopokova was a born show-off but she never sold her soul to the dance. She was unusually free of ‘the psychological perils of her vocation’: ‘masochism, obsession and narcissism’. In fact she was always ‘hopping off somewhere’, as Lydia Sokolova, a fellow dancer in the Ballets Russes, recalled. Lopokova played fast and loose with Serge Diaghilev, the company’s formidable impresario, making and breaking contracts, abandoning dancing for acting when she felt like it, putting her love life first. After her marriage to Maynard Keynes she continued to work, but when his health began to deteriorate in the late 1930s she devoted herself to caring for him. As his widow she more or less withdrew from public life. Despite Mackrell’s title, Lopokova certainly wasn’t a ‘Bloomsbury ballerina’, if that implies cliquishness and hauteur. Though hailed as one of a new breed of dancers who turned ballet into an art form for the avant-garde, she was also ‘Loppie’, a huge favourite with British audiences in the 1920s. Mackrell, the dance critic for the Guardian, restores her to her rightful place in the history of ballet, but equally engrossing, and more unusual, is the story of a woman who refused to be sacrificed on the altar of her art and was equally happy out of the limelight.

Lopokova’s life was often dogged by good luck. Though she grew up in a cramped St Petersburg flat, her father, an usher at the prestigious Alexandrinsky Theatre, managed to wangle auditions for his children at the Imperial Theatre School. Fed, clothed and housed courtesy of the tsar, Lydia earned twice her father’s salary even as a junior dancer. She was pretty, with a natural sense of drama and rhythm, and blessed with remarkable leg muscles. Almost as soon as she arrived – aged nine – she became a show-pupil. If she was lonely and homesick, or suffered under the harsh discipline of the school, she learned to hide her feelings (she told Keynes that she had dreamed of running away to the circus).

She responded instinctively to the expressive choreography of Mikhail Fokine, his rebellion against the stiff academicism of the classical style, and her chance came when she was chosen to join the Ballets Russes – Fokine was then the choreographer for Diaghilev’s troupe – on their European tour in 1910. Diaghilev picked her out from the corps, casting her as a sweetly naughty Columbine in Fokine’s Carnaval, and, by contrast, as a baby-faced peasant girl whirling to Borodin’s frantic tribal rhythms in the Polovtsian folk dances. She even took the lead in Stravinsky’s L’Oiseau de feu (though one journalist thought her less a flaming phoenix than a delicate hummingbird). Tiny, fast and feather light, with a leap almost as high as Nijinsky’s, at 18 she was the latest sensation of the Ballets Russes. Diaghilev knocked a year off her age and promoted her as a child star.

Mackrell is astute about Lopokova’s handling of her early celebrity and her ‘cultural doubleness’. ‘La Précose’ already had an eye on her future. If she returned home she would soon be back in the corps: she was the wrong shape and size for the grand roles and there were already plenty of prima ballerinas in St Petersburg. Offered eight months’ work in America and a fee of £13,000 a month, she broke with the Mariinsky and crossed the Atlantic, accompanied by Alexandre Volinine from the Bolshoi and her brother Fedor, whose contract was an extra inducement. In the US, Lydia learned to ‘work her assets’: her high spirits, her Russianness and her juvenile appearance. Nicknamed ‘Little Pet’, though she was nearly 20, she was the darling of the press, as cute and dimpled as that other little sunbeam, Mary Pickford. Of all the things she liked in America, ‘the very most’, she told reporters, ‘is the shortcake strawberry’, charming the pants off them as she waved ‘goodbysky’. Though ‘Little Lydie’ seemed demure in her sandals and simple frocks (they made it easier, she said, to run and dance), there were already rumours of lovers and marriage offers. She enthusiastically praised American democracy and Americanised her name from its original Lopoukhova. Mackrell suspects she was thinking of getting US citizenship and thus being able to travel back to Russia. The Mariinsky had washed its hands of her.

Mackrell has scoured the press for details of Lopokova’s career in the US, tracking her across the continent. Americans had seen very little ballet except bowdlerised classics offered as light entertainment. Russian dancers had a reputation for immorality and their performances were censored or toned down (when the Ballets Russes played Kansas City the Police Department threatened to come up on stage if there was any funny business, complaining that ‘Dogleaf, or whatever his name is, couldn’t understand plain English’). Lydia managed to keep her nice girl image, but she learned more about showbiz than art. Demoted to a ‘toe dancer’ in musical interludes sandwiched into popular musicals, playing vaudeville alongside ‘Loughlin’s bicycle-riding dogs’ and other novelty acts, billed with singers, comics and Isadora Duncan wannabees in clunky revue imitations of Diaghilev, she was increasingly adored by audiences and increasingly weary of being an Americanised ballerina. Her ebullience just about kept her afloat until finally, after performing yet another dying swan solo in a Broadway operetta, she had had enough. She holed up for months in the Catskills, announcing that she was resting and practising her elocution with a view to a theatrical career. There may also have been a miscarriage or an abortion.

With no private income, Lopokova had to keep on dancing for her supper or look to men for security. Lovers were played off against one another. She dumped her nice American fiancé, the journalist Heywood Broun, in the heat of a reunion with Diaghilev in 1916, and married the company’s business manager, Randolfo Barocchi, instead. A ‘glossy man of the world’, he stole her earnings and – luckily – turned out to be a bigamist; meanwhile, in the midst of a wartime European tour, she had an on-off affair with Stravinsky, who was married and already attracted to the Parisian actress Vera Sudeykina (she eventually became his second wife). Shortly after her triumphant premiere with the Ballets Russes in London in 1918, Lydia suddenly disappeared again. She pleaded a breakdown but it was probably a desperate attempt to escape Barocchi; there was also a lover, a mysterious Russian general who might have offered a way back to Russia. Mackrell has trouble getting to the bottom of it all, though clearly one of Keynes’s attractions was his capacity to become her protector and manage her finances without turning into a Svengali.

When the Ballets Russes arrived in London, they brought a frisson of the avant-garde. Mackrell deftly weaves Lopokova’s performances into an account of the company’s fluctuating reputation at a time when ballet was a ‘modernist battlefield’. Diaghilev’s latest choreographer, Leonide Massine, far more experimental than his predecessors, had collaborated with Picasso, Cocteau and Satie on Parade (for which Lydia had donned a unitard as a female acrobat), grandly advertised in Paris as ‘the world’s first Cubist ballet’; his La Boutique fantasque brought André Derain’s designs to the Coliseum, then a music hall. The story of two cancan dolls who elope from a Victorian toyshop, it provided a satirical view of 19th-century mores, its human characters more like ironic cartoons and its dancing toys – Massine and Lopokova – strangely sinister as well as touching. Everyone loved it: the ‘kid glove and tiara set’ in the stalls, the balletomanes in the cheap gallery seats – bearded young men and intense young women with bobbed hair – and leading intellectuals too. Clive Bell praised the absence of naturalism and the emptying out of the characters; T.S. Eliot argued that on stage Massine embodied all that was ‘most completely unhuman, impersonal, abstract’. No longer clogged by Romanticism, soaring or sinking into emotion, it was possible to tell the dancer from the dance.

Keynes met Lopokova when she was on the verge of becoming a cult figure. Her final frenzied cancan with Massine, which transformed her from an inert doll into a bacchante, sent her fans crazy; they stood on their seats, clapping and chanting her name. It wasn’t long before ‘Lydia’ dolls were being sold. The British press loved her because she was more like the girl next door than an exotic Slav; she was a ‘London sparrow’ with an ‘exquisite plebeian beauty’. Lopokova was a fan of the music hall and her childlike, wistful face could imbue a role with Chaplinesque dignity and pathos. Nor was she above a bit of clowning. When her knickers slithered to the floor as she danced the lead in Les Sylphides – the most poetic of ballets – she threw them into the wings with a flourish (she used other such ‘accidents’ to play to the gallery). In 1921, hoping to bring in the crowds, Diaghilev staged a lavish version of The Sleeping Beauty. The production flopped. The critics felt it was a retrograde step and London’s postwar audiences were too jaded for romance. Except for Keynes. He sat every night in the stalls, enchanted by Lydia as the Lilac Fairy casting spells over the cradle.

Keynes had been an avowed homosexual since the age of 16, and now at 38 was apparently settled into an agreeable life divided between his teaching at Cambridge and his ‘London family’, centred on Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who had been the great love of his life. One of Lydia’s charms, he told Vanessa, ‘is the most knowing and judicious use of English words’, and Mackrell makes the most of their courtship correspondence, which was for both of them a source of erotic excitement and a release. Lydia fashioned a tender, affectionate language of arousal in her humorous, transliterated Russian, quite free of English prurience or smut. She wrote of ‘gobbling’ and ‘regobbling’ him, ‘detaining infinitely our warm wet kisses’, ‘tasting’ his ‘buttons’, ‘warming’ him with her ‘foxy lips’, or saluting his ‘slender’ and ‘subtle’ fingers. Lopokova was unfazed by his history (Nijinsky and Massine had both abandoned Diaghilev for wives) and sometimes played the part of a boy or man in her letters, flirtatiously conjuring up images of herself in trousers or pyjamas. Much more diffident about his appearance and less sexually confident, Keynes warmed to her easy physicality and her seductive ‘Lydian English’ – sending ‘many touchings’ to ‘his dearest pupsik’. Not for her the ‘left-handed’ or ‘intermediate’ relationship of Bell and Grant (who confided to his diary that in the absence of male lovers during the war ‘it is a convenient way the females have of letting off one’s spunk’), or a ‘marriage blanc’ like that of the Woolfs. Both wanted sex and a home, perfection of the life and the work. ‘I would come to your study,’ Lydia promised, ‘sit on the couch and you speak simple words to me, peacefully joyful.’

Lydia was Maynard’s escape route from the airless worlds of Cambridge and Whitehall. Her opinions were fresh and untainted by education; he thought her a natural poet, and, above all, she was an artist, a free spirit like Grant, as accomplished in her own sphere as Keynes was in his. Keynes never lost his reverence for the arts, part of his commitment to the moral philosophy of G.E. Moore which had so influenced him as an undergraduate, with its ideals of beauty and friendship. She, in turn, revered his intellect and knew how lucky she was to be tutored by him: ‘You do develop my cranium miely Maynarochka.’ If he found her Russianness and nomadic past romantic, she found his faith in rational argument, his sense of duty and honesty equally exotic. ‘Is there any resemblance between you and me?’ Lydia asked. ‘No! So different it becomes attractive.’ But perhaps only a foreigner could have coped with Keynes’s tendency to show off his cleverness; he too had been a horribly precocious child. Marriage to Keynes, Mackrell writes shrewdly, was another country to which she would acclimatise herself, but some of the territory was already familiar.

Keynes and Lopokova became lovers two weeks after meeting, but it took two years to wean him from the bosom of Bloomsbury. Initially untroubled by the liaison, Maynard’s circle were more and more appalled at their most brilliant mind falling for a ‘half-witted canary’, as Lytton Strachey described her. Bell and Grant were anxious about losing their friend but worried too about the prospect of losing his cash, which supported their work and subsidised Charleston, Vanessa’s house in Sussex (Keynes went on pouring funds into Bloomsbury’s projects). They barely tolerated Lydia, tried to keep her out of the Charleston ménage and, when marriage was on the cards, Vanessa suggested all kinds of places the couple might live, as long as it wasn’t in Maynard’s own house, 46 Gordon Square, where she and Grant were his tenants. Lydia was an extrovert who loved luxury, shopping and silly pranks; she was unapologetically foreign and blithely full of herself. ‘Maynar’ liked your article so much Leonar’,’ Virginia mimicked to Vanessa; Lydia’s ‘spiritual home’ was Woolworths, Clive Bell sneered. Admittedly ‘Lady Talky’ (as Keynes liked to call her) chattered merrily to Vanessa when she was trying to paint, ruining the precious little time she had to work; but they certainly looked down on her as a prole. When Virginia remarked snidely that Lydia had been racketing about the world ‘with the daughters of publicans’, it had its grain of truth: Lopokova’s great ally, Sokolova, was born Hilda Munnings in East London, where her mother had run an off-licence (she had a brief spell as ‘Munningsova’).

Yet Bloomsbury’s snobbery, Mackrell points out, was less surprising than their parochialism: there was a complete lack of curiosity about this woman who had danced before the tsar, seen the dead piled in Palace Square in St Petersburg on ‘Bloody Sunday’, travelled across continents and worked in the vanguard of the arts. There was also a failure to appreciate her intelligence: ‘How we all used to underestimate her,’ E.M. Forster had the decency to write with hindsight. If Lopokova was hurt by this she said little about it; her letters are remarkably uncatty. At Charleston she often found better company in the kitchen with Grace Germany, Vanessa’s housekeeper, or with the children and grandchildren (Quentin Bell remembered her ‘complete lack of side’). When Mackrell tells us that one of Lydia’s first acts of ‘festive rebellion’ after her marriage was to whitewash over Bell and Grant’s murals at No. 46, the reader wants to cheer.

Did the marriage work, as Mackrell suggests, because it was full of separations for the first ten years? With Keynes teaching at King’s for a large part of the week (and having lunch with his parents every Sunday in Harvey Road in Cambridge), Lopokova was free to cultivate her own motley crowd of theatre folk in London. She marvelled at Keynes’s ferocious capacity for work and never tried to trim his sails, though she thought economists a sad bunch: ‘tiresome, no wide outlooks, no touch with life, inferiority complexes and no great ideas’. She fussed over his digestion and his underwear; he kept track of her menstrual cycle, and felt his mood swings sympathised with hers. Their quietly connubial times at Tilton, the house they rented up the track from Charleston, were their happiest. Lopokova discovered the pleasures of ‘losing time’ and took up gardening and rambling between her daily ballet exercises. Domestic routine – thanks in large measure to Ruby Weller, their cook and housekeeper, who stayed with Lopokova for 50 years – made Keynes even more productive: he wrote a 20,000-word memoir of his economics teacher, Alfred Marshall, in their first two months at Tilton. Lopokova’s imaginative insights and spontaneous judgments appealed to what Robert Skidelsky, in his biography of Keynes, called the ‘liquidity’ of his mind. She didn’t pretend to understand his theories in detail but she responded to the patterning of his thought. His final book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, she found ‘beautiful like Bach’.

Lopokova had been unable to visit her family since the 1917 Revolution until ‘Maynarochka’ managed to take her there as a wedding present. In 1936 her brother Fedor’s new ballet, The Bright Stream, with a score by Shostakovich, was condemned for ‘aesthetic formalism’; he was stripped of his post and his librettist sent to the gulag; her mother would die, half-starved, during the Siege of Leningrad. And there were no children though they had both wanted them. Then, after being weakened by pleurisy, Keynes’s health began to go downhill. In 1937 he collapsed after an attack of angina (he was a very heavy smoker). Mackrell follows Skidelsky, mining Lopokova’s diary and her letters for details of the bizarre and seemingly effective treatments Keynes underwent with the unorthodox Janos Plesch, whom Lydia called ‘the Ogre’: a regime of coffee, tea, raw cabbage and sour oranges; icepacks placed for hours on his chest; homemade shock treatment when Plesch bounced up and down on the mattress while Maynard lay feeling ‘like Desdemona’; and injections with a red dye called Prontosil, an early antibiotic. Lopokova kept a journal monitoring Keynes’s health; she policed his diet and made sure he got enough rest; she cheered him and nursed him and accompanied him on all his Treasury missions across the Atlantic between 1941 and 1946. When she got the chance, she went shopping, and when she shopped, Maynard proudly reported to his mother, Lydia shopped for Britain, buying ‘some two hundred objects’ in a week in Washington: 18 pairs of shoes, 40 pairs of stockings, a large trunkful of food – the list goes on. Lopokova would certainly have spent her way out of a recession. But without her constant attention and her joie de vivre, Keynes might not have made it to Bretton Woods.

Professionally, in her forties, Lopokova made do with odds and ends of broadcasting, translating and the occasional foray onto the stage. Her most successful role was as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, Keynes’s gift to Cambridge and to Lydia. The couple provided crucial support to the Camargo Society, which helped keep British ballet alive in the 1930s; in 1933 Lopokova danced her last dance as Swanilda in Coppélia for Ninette de Valois’s new company, the Vic-Wells Ballet, and later the Keyneses were backers of de Valois’s Royal Ballet. In the late 1930s, when Lopokova reprised her reading of ‘The Red Shoes’, this time for BBC television, ballet fever was on the rampage. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, which was top of the children’s bestseller list, had been prompted by a memory of seeing Edris Stannus (aka de Valois) performing the Dying Swan as one of Lila Fields’s ‘Little Wonders’; a more recent inspiration was the latest baby ballerina of the Ballets Russes to take London by storm, the 14-year-old Irina Baronova. Lopokova’s gory warning against hubris would have fallen on deaf ears. All across the country, in makeshift dancing academies, in pubs or chilly village halls, little girls were longing for tutus and tarlatan, dreaming of glory and pointing their toes for ‘Madame’.

Mackrell divides Lopokova’s life into two, before and after marriage. But it is actually a life of three parts. At the age of 54 Lydia was widowed. She had been married to Keynes for 21 years. Mackrell writes that she lived her ‘last years’ in ‘obscurity’: these decades – Lydia’s sixties and seventies and eighties – become a brief coda of 27 pages entitled ‘After Maynard’. Partly, as Mackrell says, it’s a problem of sources – much less Bloomsbury tittle-tattle. I also think she is genuinely baffled by Lopokova’s retreat from public life. She briskly comments that ‘even two years’ after Maynard’s death, Lydia was ‘still’ grief-stricken; she sounds mildly suspicious that ‘it took her, she claimed, five years to get over her grief’ and surprised that ‘even after that, she never left the UK again.’ Yet she acknowledges that Lopokova had been globetrotting since her teens, and that the last nine years with Keynes had left her very little time to herself. Perhaps mourning gave Lydia another chance to go AWOL and the licence to leave off being Lopokova. She did not need to go on creating what Frederick Ashton saw as her special gift – ‘the illusion of spontaneity’.

Mackrell doesn’t idealise her subject: Lopokova was often ‘outrageously childish’, deliberately provocative in company, and inclined to lord it over her servants. Widowhood meant life on her own terms. She grew ‘nostalgic and insular’, sour about income tax and the Labour government. Not nostalgic enough, though, to pick over old memories with prying journalists and fans. She never traded on being the great man’s widow. She carried on his tradition of Sunday lunch in Cambridge with his parents, and embarrassed a new generation of students in the Keynes box at the Arts Theatre, applauding when she felt the dancers needed it: ‘I know how difficult it is,’ she insisted. But she gradually withdrew from the ballet world: she wasn’t going to spend her last years teaching or giving master-classes, strenuously groomed and coiffed. She just seems to have been glad to have had her day and to spend the stipend Keynes left her, though it meant wrangling with his trustee, Richard Kahn, and complaining constantly about a lack of cash. Eventually she dug in at Tilton, where she was, one visitor observed, ‘very comfortable in her own skin’. More so, one imagines, than the hikers who glimpsed her sunbathing naked in her seventies from the public footpath which bordered her garden.

Biographers often have trouble with old age. They want their subjects to go on dancing. But Lopokova was hardly a hermit, nor was her life uneventful – it depends what you mean by an event. She told friends she was relishing ‘contemplative idleness’. I wanted to know more about her final pas de deux with Logan Thomson, the farm manager of Tilton, who moved into the house and became her companion. He was 16 years her junior, a man of few words, and always called her ‘madam’; their relationship was mildly feudal but deeply intimate, though not sexually. The romantic in me wanted to see Lopokova’s old age as her last bid for freedom, and obscurity as the final adventure. Not seeing people, not bothering with proper meals, dressing like a bag lady: all this could be a way of turning one’s face to the sun (quite literally – Lydia and Logan had their armchairs installed in the hall so they could sit with the front door open and get a blast from an overhead electric heater too). But Mackrell’s final picture of their ‘nest’ is sobering: an increasingly dilapidated house, a squalid tableau of mouldering newspapers, old shoes and rusty tins, like a scene from Beckett, the actors’ heads just showing above the debris.

Dancers, as Mackrell knows, are hard to memorialise, their fleeting physical presence, their grace and energy surviving only in the memory of those who saw them. Lopokova looks lumpen on film. Virginia Woolf, who finally came to admire Lydia’s intelligence and acknowledge her artistry, thought biography was a compound of granite and rainbow. But I found this biography entirely enjoyable. Mackrell captures the fizz of Lopokova’s personality, her loveability, and makes her come alive. There is also a happy ending of sorts, a rapprochement with Charleston, when Vanessa Bell’s ten-year-old granddaughter Henrietta discovered by chance the funny, crinkly old lady who lived up the lane. They had sausage for elevenses or a glass of Sauternes for tea and Lopokova chatted gaily about ballet and death. ‘To have wrinkles is to be noble,’ she told her visitor. ‘We all of us grow old, what matters is how you age. We all grow old, very old and then we die.’

Alison Light was recently made a professor of modern English literature and culture at Newcastle University. Mrs Woolf and the Servants is out in paperback.

“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”: The USA and China

In his first interview since the world financial crisis, Gao Xiqing, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings, explains why he’s betting against the dollar, praises American pragmatism, and wonders about enormous Wall Street paychecks. And he has a friendly piece of advice:

by James Fallows
“Be Nice to the Countries That Lend You Money”

Americans know that China has financed much of their nation’s public and private debt. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agreed on the peril of borrowing so heavily from this one foreign source. For instance, in their final debate, McCain warned about the “$10 trillion debt we’re giving to our kids, a half a trillion dollars we owe China,” and Obama said, “Nothing is more important than us no longer borrowing $700billion or more from China and sending it to Saudi Arabia.” Their numbers on the debt differed, and both were way low. One year ago, when I wrote about China’s U.S. dollar holdings, the article was called “The $1.4 trillion Question.” When Barack Obama takes office, the figure will be well over $2 trillion.

During the late stages of this year’s campaign, I had several chances to talk with the man who oversees many of China’s American holdings. He is Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, which manages “only” about $200billion of the country’s foreign assets but makes most of the high-visibility investments, like buying stakes in Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, as opposed to just holding Treasury notes.

Gao, whom I mentioned in my article, would fit no American’s preexisting idea of a Communist Chinese official. He speaks accented but fully colloquial and very high-speed English. He has a law degree from Duke, which he earned in the 1980s after working as a lawyer and professor in China, and he was an associate in Richard Nixon’s former Wall Street law firm. His office, in one of the more tasteful new glass-walled high-rises in Beijing, itself seems less Chinese than internationally “fusion”-minded in its aesthetic and furnishings. Bonsai trees in large pots, elegant Japanese-looking arrangements of individual smooth stones on display shelves, Chinese and Western financial textbooks behind the desk, with a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. perched among the books. Two very large, very thin desktop monitors read out financial data from around the world. As we spoke, Western classical music played softly from a good sound system.

Gao dressed and acted like a Silicon Valley moneyman rather than one from Wall Street—open-necked tattersall shirt, muted plaid jacket, dark slacks, scuffed walking shoes. Rimless glasses. His father was a Red Army officer who was on the Long March with Mao. As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, Gao worked on a railroad-building gang and in an ammunition factory. He is 55, fit-looking, with crew-cut hair and a jokey demeanor rather than an air of sternness.

His comments below are from our one on-the-record discussion, two weeks before the U.S. elections. As I transcribed his words, I realized that many will look more astringent on the page than they sounded when coming from him. In person, he seemed to be relying on shared experience in the United States—that is, his and mine—to entitle him to criticize the country the way its own people might. The conversation was entirely in English. Because Gao’s answers tended to be long, I am not presenting them in straight Q&A form but instead grouping his comments about his main recurring themes.

Does America wonder who its new Chinese banking overlords might be? This is what one of the very most influential of them had to say about the world financial crisis, what is wrong with Wall Street, whether one still-poor country with tremendous internal needs could continue subsidizing a still-rich one, and how he thought America could adjust to its “realistic” place in the world. My point for the moment is to convey what it is like to hear from such a man, rather than to expand upon, challenge, or agree with his stated views.

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About the financial crisis of 2008, which eliminated hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of savings that the Chinese government had extracted from its people, through deliberately suppressed consumption levels:

We are not quite at the bottom yet. Because we don’t really know what’s going to happen next. Everyone is saying, “Oh, look, the dollar is getting stronger!” [As it was when we spoke.] I say, that’s really temporary. It’s simply because a lot of people need to cash in, they need U.S. dollars in order to pay back their creditors. But after a short while, the dollar may be going down again. I’d like to bet on that!

The overall financial situation in the U.S. is changing, and that’s what we don’t know about. It’s going to be changed fundamentally in many ways.

Think about the way we’ve been living the past 30 years. Thirty years ago, the leverage of the investment banks was like 4-to-1, 5-to-1. Today, it’s 30-to-1. This is not just a change of numbers. This is a change of fundamental thinking.

People, especially Americans, started believing that they can live on other people’s money. And more and more so. First other people’s money in your own country. And then the savings rate comes down, and you start living on other people’s money from outside. At first it was the Japanese. Now the Chinese and the Middle Easterners.

We—the Chinese, the Middle Easterners, the Japanese—we can see this too. Okay, we’d love to support you guys—if it’s sustainable. But if it’s not, why should we be doing this? After we are gone, you cannot just go to the moon to get more money. So, forget it. Let’s change the way of living. [By which he meant: less debt, lower rewards for financial wizardry, more attention to the “real economy,” etc.]

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About stock market derivatives and their role as source of evil:

If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.

I was predicting this many years ago. In 1999 or 2000, I gave a talk to the State Council [China’s main ruling body], with Premier Zhu Rongji. They wanted me to explain about capital markets and how they worked. These were all ministers and mostly not from a financial background. So I wondered, How do I explain derivatives?, and I used the model of mirrors.

First of all, you have this book to sell. [He picks up a leather-bound book.] This is worth something, because of all the labor and so on you put in it. But then someone says, “I don’t have to sell the book itself! I have a mirror, and I can sell the mirror image of the book!” Okay. That’s a stock certificate. And then someone else says, “I have another mirror—I can sell a mirror image of that mirror.” Derivatives. That’s fine too, for a while. Then you have 10,000 mirrors, and the image is almost perfect. People start to believe that these mirrors are almost the real thing. But at some point, the image is interrupted. And all the rest will go.

When I told the State Council about the mirrors, they all started laughing. “How can you sell a mirror image! Won’t there be distortion?” But this is what happened with the American economy, and it will be a long and painful process to come down.

I think we should do an overhaul and say, “Let’s get rid of 90 percent of the derivatives.” Of course, that’s going to be very unpopular, because many people will lose jobs.

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About Wall Street jobs, wealth, and the cultural distortion of America:

I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right.

When I graduated from Duke [in 1986], as a first-year lawyer, I got $60,000. I thought it was astronomical! I was making somewhere a bit more than $80,000 when I came back to China in 1988. And that first month’s salary I got in China, on a little slip of paper, was 59 yuan. A few dollars! With a few yuan deducted for my rent and my water bill. I laughed when I saw it: 59 yuan!

The thing is, we are working as hard as, if not harder than, those people. And we’re not stupid. Today those people fresh out of law school would get $130,000, or $150,000. It doesn’t sound right.

Individually, everyone needs to be compensated. But collectively, this directs the resources of the country. It distorts the talents of the country. The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too! Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.” So you have all these clever people going into financial engineering, where they come up with all these complicated products to sell to people.

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About the $700 billion U.S. financial-rescue plan enacted in October:

Finally, after months and months of struggling with your own ideology, with your own pride, your self-right-eousness … finally [the U.S. applied] one of the great gifts of Americans, which is that you’re pragmatic. Now our people are joking that we look at the U.S. and see “socialism with American characteristics.” [The Chinese term for its mainly capitalist market-opening of the last 30 years is “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”]

It is joking, and many people are saying: “No, Americans still believe in free capitalism and they think this is just a hiccup.” This is like our great leader Deng Xiaoping, who said that it doesn’t matter if the cat is white or black, as long as it catches the mouse. It doesn’t matter what we call this. It’s pragmatic.

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With so much of China’s money at stake, did U.S. officials consult the Chinese about the rescue plan?

Not directly. We were talking to people there, and they were hoping that we would be supportive by not pulling out our money. We know that by pulling out money, we’re not serving anyone’s good. Including ourselves. [This is the famous modern “balance of financial terror.” If Chinese officials started pulling assets out of the U.S. and touched off a run on the dollar, their vast remaining dollar holdings would plummet in value.] So we’re trying to help, at least by not aggravating the problem.

But I think at the end of the day, the American government needs to talk with people and say: “Why don’t we get together and think about this? If China has $2 trillion, Japan has almost $2 trillion, and Russia has some, and all the others, then—let’s throw away the ideological differences and think about what’s good for everyone.” We can get all the relevant people together and think up what people are calling a second Bretton Woods system, like the first Bretton Woods convention did.

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On what might make the Chinese government start taking its dollars out of America (I began the question by saying that China would hurt itself by pulling out dollar assets—at which he interjected, “in the short term”—and then asked about the long-term view):

Today when we look at all the markets, the U.S. still is probably the most viable, the most predictable. I was trained as a lawyer, and predictability is always very important for me.

We have a PR department, which collects all the comments about us, from Chinese newspapers and the Web. Every night, I try to pick a time when I’m in a relatively good mood to read it, because most of the comments are very critical of us. Recently we increased our holdings in Blackstone a little bit. Now we’re increasing a little bit our holdings in Morgan Stanley, so as not to be diluted by the Japanese. People here hate it. They come out and say, “Why the hell are you trying to save those people? You are the representative of the poor people eating porridge, and you’re saving people eating shark fins!” It’s always that sort of thing.

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And how should Americans feel about the growing Chinese presence in their economy? Isn’t it natural for them to worry that China will keep increasing its stake in American debt and assets—or that China won’t, essentially cutting America off?

I can understand why Americans might feel that way. But, talking with my lawyer head once again, it’s not relevant to discuss how Americans “should” think. We should discuss how Americans might think.

This concern is not really about China itself. It could be any country. It could be Japan, or Germany. This generation of Americans is so used to your supremacy. Your being treated nicely by everyone. It hurts to think, Okay, now we have to be on equal footing to other people. “On equal footing” would necessarily mean that sometimes you have to stoop to appear to be humble to other people.

And you can’t think as a soldier. You put yourself at the enemy end of everyone. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when people really treated other people like enemies. I grew up in an environment where our friends, our relatives, people I called Uncle or Auntie, could turn around and put a nasty face to me as a small child. One time, Vladimir Lenin told Gorky, after reading Gorky’s autobiography, “Oh my god! You could have become a very nasty person!” Those are exactly the words one of my dear professors told me after hearing what I went through.

But over the years, I believe I learned to be humble. To treat other people nicely. I learned that, from a social point of view, no matter how lowly statured a person you are talking to, as a person, they are the same human being as you are. You have to respect them. You have to apologize if you inadvertently hurt them. And often you have to go out of your way to be nice to them, because they will not like you simply because of the difference in social structure.

Americans are not sensitive in that regard. I mean, as a whole. The simple truth today is that your economy is built on the global economy. And it’s built on the support, the gratuitous support, of a lot of countries. So why don’t you come over and … I won’t say kowtow [with a laugh], but at least, be nice to the countries that lend you money.

Talk to the Chinese! Talk to the Middle Easterners! And pull your troops back! Take the troops back, demobilize many of the troops, so that you can save some money rather than spending $2 billion every day on them. And then tell your people that you need to save, and come out with a long-term, sustainable financial policy.

.....

Although Gao has frequently mentioned Chairman Mao’s maxim—“Go with the Republicans. They’re predictable!”—he obviously was hoping for a “change” agenda under the Democrats:

The current conditions can’t go on. It is time for the new government, under Obama or even McCain, to really tell people: “Look, this is wartime, this is about the survival of our nation. It’s not about our supremacy in the world. Let’s not even talk about that any more. Let’s get down to the very basics of our livelihood.”

I have great admiration of American people. Creative, hard-working, trusting, and freedom-loving. But you have to have someone to tell you the truth. And then, start realizing it. And if you do it, just like what you did in the Second World War, then you’ll be great again!

If that happens, then of course—American power would still be there for at least as long as I am living. But many people are betting on the other side.

All material copyright The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.

When Jesus met Buddha

When Jesus met Buddha
Something remarkable happened when evangelists for two great religions crossed paths more than 1,000 years ago: they got along
By Philip Jenkins
December 14, 2008

WAS THE BUDDHA a demon?

While few mainline Christians would put the matter in such confrontational terms, any religion claiming exclusive access to truth has real difficulties reconciling other great faiths into its cosmic scheme. Most Christian churches hold that Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and many also feel an obligation to carry that message to the world's unbelievers. But this creates a fundamental conflict with the followers of famous spiritual figures like Mohammed or Buddha, who preached radically different messages. Drawing on a strict interpretation of the Bible, some Christians see these rival faiths as not merely false, but as deliberate traps set by the forces of evil.

Being intolerant of other religions - consigning them to hell, in fact - may be bad enough in its own right, but it increasingly has real-world consequences. As trade and technology shrink the globe, so different religions come into ever-closer contact with one another, and the results can be bloody: witness the apocalyptic assaults in Mumbai. In such a world, teaching different faiths to acknowledge one another's claims, to live peaceably together side by side, stops being a matter of good manners and becomes a prerequisite for human survival.

Over the past 30 years, the Roman Catholic Church has faced repeated battles over this question of Christ's uniqueness, and has cracked down on thinkers who have made daring efforts to accommodate other world religions. While the Christian dialogue with Islam has attracted

most of the headlines, it is the encounters with Hinduism and especially Buddhism that have stirred the most controversy within the church. Sri Lankan theologians Aloysius Pieris and Tissa Balasuriya have had many run-ins with Vatican critics, and, more recently, the battle has come to American shores. Last year, the Vatican ordered an investigation of Georgetown University's Peter Phan, a Jesuit theologian whose main sin, in official eyes, has been to treat the Buddhism of his Vietnamese homeland as a parallel path to salvation.

Following the ideas of Pope Benedict XVI, though, the church refuses to give up its fundamental belief in the unique role of Christ. In a widely publicized open letter to Italian politician Marcello Pera, Pope Benedict declared that "an inter-religious dialogue in the strict sense of the term is not possible." By all means, he said, we should hold conversations with other cultures, but not in a way that acknowledges other religions as equally valid. While the Vatican does not of course see the Buddha as a demon, it does fear the prospect of syncretism, the dilution of Christian truth in an unholy mixture with other faiths.

Beyond doubt, this view places Benedict in a strong tradition of Christianity as it has developed in Europe since Roman times. But there is another, ancient tradition, which suggests a very different course. Europe's is not the only version of the Christian faith, nor is it necessarily the oldest heir of the ancient church. For more than 1,000 years, other quite separate branches of the church established thriving communities across Asia, and in their sheer numbers, these churches were comparable to anything Europe could muster at the time. These Christian bodies traced their ancestry back not through Rome, but directly to the original Jesus movement of ancient Palestine. They moved across India, Central Asia, and China, showing no hesitation to share - and learn from - the other great religions of the East.

Just how far these Christians were prepared to go is suggested by a startling symbol that appeared on memorials and stone carvings in both southern India and coastal China during the early Middle Ages. We can easily see that the image depicts a cross, but it takes a moment to realize that the base of the picture - the root from which the cross is growing - is a lotus flower, the symbol of Buddhist enlightenment.

In modern times, most mainstream churches would condemn such an amalgam as a betrayal of the Christian faith, an example of multiculturalism run wild. Yet concerns about syncretism did not bother these early Asian Christians, who called themselves Nasraye, Nazarenes, like Jesus's earliest followers. They were comfortable associating themselves with the other great monastic and mystical religion of the time, and moreover, they believed that both lotus and cross carried similar messages about the quest for light and salvation. If these Nazarenes could find meaning in the lotus-cross, then why can't modern Catholics, or other inheritors of the faith Jesus inspired?

Many Christians are coming to terms with just how thoroughly so many of their fundamental assumptions will have to be rethought as their faith today becomes a global religion. Even modern church leaders who know how rapidly the church is expanding in the global South tend to see European values and traditions as the indispensable norm, in matters of liturgy and theology as much as music and architecture.

Yet the reality is that Christianity has from its earliest days been an intercontinental faith, as firmly established in Asia and Africa as in Europe itself. When we broaden our scope to look at the faith that by 800 or so stretched from Ireland to Korea, we see the many different ways in which Christians interacted with other believers, in encounters that reshaped both sides. At their best, these meetings allowed the traditions not just to exchange ideas but to intertwine in productive and enriching ways, in an awe-inspiring chapter of Christian history that the Western churches have all but forgotten.

To understand this story, we need to reconfigure our mental maps. When we think of the growth of Christianity, we think above all of Europe. We visualize a movement growing west from Palestine and Syria and spreading into Greece and Italy, and gradually into northern regions. Europe is still the center of the Catholic Church, of course, but it was also the birthplace of the Protestant denominations that split from it. For most of us, even speaking of the "Eastern Church" refers to another group of Europeans, namely to the Orthodox believers who stem from the eastern parts of the continent. English Catholic thinker Hilaire Belloc once proclaimed that "Europe is the Faith; and the Faith is Europe."

But in the early centuries other Christians expanded east into Asia and south into Africa, and those other churches survived for the first 1,200 years or so of Christian history. Far from being fringe sects, these forgotten churches were firmly rooted in the oldest traditions of the apostolic church. Throughout their history, these Nazarenes used Syriac, which is close to Jesus' own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. No other church - not Roman Catholics, not Eastern Orthodox - has a stronger claim to a direct inheritance from the earliest Jesus movement.

The most stunningly successful of these eastern Christian bodies was the Church of the East, often called the Nestorian church. While the Western churches were expanding their influence within the framework of the Roman Empire, the Syriac-speaking churches colonized the vast Persian kingdom that ruled from Syria to Pakistan and the borders of China. From their bases in Mesopotamia - modern Iraq - Nestorian Christians carried out their vast missionary efforts along the Silk Route that crossed Central Asia. By the eighth century, the Church of the East had an extensive structure across most of central Asia and China, and in southern India. The church had senior clergy - metropolitans - in Samarkand and Bokhara, in Herat in Afghanistan. A bishop had his seat in Chang'an, the imperial capital of China, which was then the world's greatest superpower.

When Nestorian Christians were pressing across Central Asia during the sixth and seventh centuries, they met the missionaries and saints of an equally confident and expansionist religion: Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhists too wanted to take their saving message to the world, and launched great missions from India's monasteries and temples. In this diverse world, Buddhist and Christian monasteries were likely to stand side by side, as neighbors and even, sometimes, as collaborators. Some historians believe that Nestorian missionaries influenced the religious practices of the Buddhist religion then developing in Tibet. Monks spoke to monks.

In presenting their faith, Christians naturally used the cultural forms that would be familiar to Asians. They told their stories in the forms of sutras, verse patterns already made famous by Buddhist missionaries and teachers. A stunning collection of Jesus Sutras was found in caves at Dunhuang, in northwest China. Some Nestorian writings draw heavily on Buddhist ideas, as they translate prayers and Christian services in ways that would make sense to Asian readers. In some texts, the Christian phrase "angels and archangels and hosts of heaven" is translated into the language of buddhas and devas.

One story in particular suggests an almost shocking degree of collaboration between the faiths. In 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in Chang'an, bearing rich treasures of sutras and other scriptures. Unfortunately, these were written in Indian languages. He consulted the local Nestorian bishop, Adam, who had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese. Together, Buddhist and Christian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom. Probably, Adam did this as much from intellectual curiosity as from ecumenical good will, and we can only guess about the conversations that would have ensued: Do you really care more about relieving suffering than atoning for sin? And your monks meditate like ours do?

These efforts bore fruit far beyond China. Other residents of Chang'an at this very time included Japanese monks, who took these very translations back with them to their homeland. In Japan, these works became the founding texts of the great Buddhist schools of the Middle Ages. All the famous movements of later Japanese history, including Zen, can be traced to one of those ancient schools and, ultimately - incredibly - to the work of a Christian bishop.

By the 12th century, flourishing churches in China and southern India were using the lotus-cross. The lotus is a superbly beautiful flower that grows out of muck and slime. No symbol could better represent the rise of the soul from the material, the victory of enlightenment over ignorance, desire, and attachment. For 2,000 years, Buddhist artists have used the lotus to convey these messages in countless paintings and sculptures. The Christian cross, meanwhile, teaches a comparable lesson, of divine victory over sin and injustice, of the defeat of the world. Somewhere in Asia, Yeshua's forgotten followers made the daring decision to integrate the two emblems, which still today forces us to think about the parallels between the kinds of liberation and redemption offered by each faith.

Christianity, for much of its history, was just as much an Asian religion as Buddhism. Asia's Christian churches survived for more than a millennium, and not until the 10th century, halfway through Christian history, did the number of Christians in Europe exceed that in Asia.

What ultimately obliterated the Asian Christians were the Mongol invasions, which spread across Central Asia and the Middle East from the 1220s onward. From the late 13th century, too, the world entered a terrifying era of climate change, of global cooling, which severely cut food supplies and contributed to mass famine. The collapse of trade and commerce crippled cities, leaving the world much poorer and more vulnerable. Intolerant nationalism wiped out Christian communities in China, while a surging militant Islam destroyed the churches of Central Asia.

But awareness of this deep Christian history contributes powerfully to understanding the future of the religion, as much as its past. For long centuries, Asian Christians kept up neighborly relations with other faiths, which they saw not as deadly rivals but as fellow travelers on the road to enlightenment. Their worldview differed enormously from the norms that developed in Europe.

To take one example, we are used to the idea of Christianity operating as the official religion of powerful states, which were only too willing to impose a particular orthodoxy upon their subjects. Yet when we look at the African and Asian experience, we find millions of Christians whose normal experience was as minorities or even majorities within nations dominated by some other religion. Struggling to win hearts and minds, leading churches had no option but to frame the Christian message in the context of non-European intellectual traditions. Christian thinkers did present their message in the categories of Buddhism - and Taoism, and Confucianism - and there is no reason why they could not do so again. When modern scholars like Peter Phan try to place Christianity in an Asian and Buddhist context, they are resuming a task begun at least 1,500 years ago.

Perhaps, in fact, we are looking at our history upside down. Some day, future historians might look at the last few hundred years of Euro-American dominance within Christianity and regard it as an unnatural interlude in a much longer story of fruitful interchange between the great religions.

Consider the story told by Timothy, a patriarch of the Nestorian church. Around 800, he engaged in a famous debate with the Muslim caliph in Baghdad, a discussion marked by reason and civility on both sides. Imagine, Timothy said, that we are all in a dark house, and someone throws a precious pearl in the midst of a pile of ordinary stones. Everyone scrabbles for the pearl, and some think they've found it, but nobody can be sure until day breaks.

In the same way, he said, the pearl of true faith and wisdom had fallen into the darkness of this transitory world; each faith believed that it alone had found the pearl. Yet all he could claim - and all the caliph could say in response - was that some faiths thought they had enough evidence to prove that they were indeed holding the real pearl, but the final truth would not be known in this world.

Knowing other faiths firsthand grants believers an enviable sophistication, founded on humility. We could do a lot worse than to learn from what we sometimes call the Dark Ages.

Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks professor of the humanities at Penn State University. He is author of "The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -- and How It Died," published last month.
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