Claudio Guillen

My great uncle Claudio Guillén died yesterday evening. Claudie, as the family called him, was an intellectual in the best European tradition: man of bottomless learning and infinite curiousity, yet at the same time fundamentally humble and always open to new experiences. He was also a great academic innovator: one the earliest practitioners of the discipline of comparative literature, he spent much of his career setting up departments of comparative literature at universities across the world: from Princeton to San Diego to Buenos Aires to Barcelona. Despite being the son of one of the most famous literateurs in all of Spain, he moved out of his father's shadow and became recognized as a great mind in his own right.

Here's the obituary in El Pais:

Un sabio de la crítica literaria
El maestro de la literatura comparada
Claudio Guillén, académico y crítico ejemplar, falleció ayer en Madrid a los 82 años

Claudio Guillén, académico, profesor, era el amigo de todo el mundo: en la Real Academia, en la Universidad, en su generación, en las que vinieron. Su muerte, ocurrida repentinamente a medianoche del sábado en Madrid, mientras veía la película La Reina de África en La 2, llenó de consternación y de pena a los muchos que le conocieron. Tenía 82 años, y mantenía el porte juvenil que Domingo Yndurain, académico también fallecido, calificaba como de "noble elegantemente desmadejado".

Fue soldado en la II Guerra Mundial y luchó por la República en España

Era un maestro de la literatura comparada; la introdujo en España, la enseñó en Harvard y en otras universidades del mundo. Fue soldado en la II Guerra Mundial con De Gaulle, y también luchó a favor de la República en la guerra civil española. Era hijo de Jorge Guillén, el gran poeta de la generación del 27. Pero nunca presumió de nada; estuvo en mil batallas, pero nunca contó batallitas.

Su compañero Ángel González estuvo el jueves con él en la Academia. Claudio se le acercó, charlaron, y en algún momento evocaron a don Jorge; Claudio se llevó a un lado al poeta y le dijo al oído: "Escucha esto de mi padre; a ti sí te lo puedo decir...". Estaba hecho de la elegancia de los que no son presuntuosos.

Natacha Seseña, historiadora del arte, amiga suya desde 1955, decía ayer tarde: "Era muy guapo, de una sensibilidad extraordinaria. Amaba España, pero quizá una España que no existía. El que mejor estudió la literatura española. Iba al fondo de las comparaciones". Beatriz de Moura, directora de Tusquets, su editora, lo recordaba como "un hombre humilde, muy humilde; acaso esa humildad contribuyó a que en España fuera menos reconocido que en el resto del mundo". El director del Cervantes, César Antonio Molina, abundó: "Era una autoridad. Un día me dijo George Steiner que era el único especialista en literatura comparada que merecía la consideración de un maestro, similar a la del propio Steiner".

Claudio Guillén nació en París en 1924; su madre era francesa, y en Francia vive ahora su hermana Teresa. Claudio y su esposa habían estado trabajando, hasta las ocho de la noche del sábado, en el epistolario de don Jorge y en el prólogo que formará parte de la edición especial de Cien años de soledad, de Gabriel García Márquez, que prepara la Academia para rendir homenaje a Gabo cuando se celebren en Colombia el Congreso de la Lengua, los 80 años de hijo del telegrafista de Aracataca y los 40 de la aparición de su texto más célebre.

Claudio Guillén dio por concluido su exilio en 1982; obras suyas fueron Entre lo uno y lo diverso y Múltiples miradas; ingresó en la Academia en febrero de 2003.

Víctor García de la Concha, el director de la Academia, estaba consternado. Él recibió la primera noticia, y ayer, cuando habló, manejaba ese texto introductorio de Cien años de soledad. Lo habían estado comentando el jueves último Francisco Rico y él con el propio Claudio, poco antes de que la institución le dedicara un homenaje a Francisco Ayala.

Estaba lleno de vida, y de proyectos, decía el director de la Academia; el epistolario de don Jorge le llenaba de ilusión. Quería trabajar con José Manuel Caballero Bonald en las cartas que se intercambiaron éste y su padre; Caballero (que el año pasado entregó a Guillén el premio de su fundación por la obra Entre lo uno y lo diverso) se mostraba "anonadado"; era, dijo, "un gran crítico, un hombre que luchó siempre por superar los nacionalismos culturales, y consiguió en este terreno logros magníficos. Heredó de su padre esa pinta magnífica, la caballerosidad, los buenos modales". Francisco Ayala, en cuyo homenaje académico cumplió Guillén su último acto público, tenía la misma impresión cuando ayer supo que su compañero había muerto. "Era un hombre de gran erudición en cuyo talante personal podía el afán de la amistad. Un amigo".

Víctor García de la Concha aseguró: "No sólo es el introductor de la literatura comparada en España: la introdujo en el mundo; empezó en 1958, cuando era profesor en Harvard; su obra es casi un autorretrato, cosmopolita, universal; estaba equipado para las categorías, no para las anécdotas; era un hombre esencial, respetuoso con lo importante; un gran filólogo viajero, estudió todas las literaturas modernas; vivió el privilegio de ser hijo de la generación que supuso para España un renacimiento literario; es muy europeo, y muy americano; enseñó por todo el mundo; su concepto de la literatura partía del contraste de los arraigos y los estímulos universales". Y eso era lo que estudió, precisamente, en su último trabajo, sobre "el lenguaje de las cosas" en Cien años de soledad.

Su entierro parte hoy del tanatorio de la M-30, a la una de la tarde, hacia el Cementerio Civil de Madrid.

I'll have more personal reflections later.

The partisan point on the war

1. The Republicans started the war. It was their idea, and their choice.
2. The Republicans lost the war. Either it was never winnable, or they bungled it -- but either way, they lost the war.
3. Now, the Republicans are too prideful to admit they have lost he war. They continue and so want to throw good money after bad on their failed political investment, while at the same time desperately looking for ways to pass the bad political debts to others. Sorry, but no: you get to pay.

Rent-a-Demonstrator!

Nice business model:

A German Web site has come up a novel niche market -- renting out demonstrators for public protests. Good-looking protestors can help an organization get its political message to the public for as little as €145 a day....

Judging by their profiles, most of the 300-plus people currently listed in the "rent a demonstrator" category are young and attractive. Potential agitators looking for support for their public protests can choose, for example, Steffen, age 22, 190 cm tall (6 feet 2 inches), "athletic" and with a shoe size of 45. He's available for gigs all over Germany, but says he prefers the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Or Manuela, who has green eyes and "very long" hair and is available within a 100-kilometer range of Berlin. Included in the extensive personal information -- which at times seems more suited to a dating site -- are skin color and "appearance type," which can be for example "European," "African," "South American" or "Asian."

Best of all, you can book them online.

A Marriage Proposed in Hell?

Concerning the recent revelation that the French prime minister in 1956 proposed subsuming France within Great Britain, the Independent wonders how it might have turned out if they plan had gone forward:

Could such a marriage, between mutually jealous and perennially quarrelling siblings, ever have worked? Fifty years on, we might have blended the best of France and the best of Britain. On the other hand, we might have shared our faults. France might have had our public transport and health systems. We might have had the ramshackle, French university system. We might have had French rates of unemployment. They might have had the London Tube, instead of the Metro.

We both might have ended up with French TV, British hospital waiting lists, the French police, British estate agents, French trades unions, British school dinners, French plumbers and Scottish joie de vivre.

This is of course a gloss on the old joke about "European Heaven and European Hell," which usually goes something like this: in European Heaven, the Italians are the lovers, the French are the cooks, the the Swiss are the bankers, the Germans are the intellectuals, and the English are the police; in European Hell, on the other hand, the Swiss are the lovers, the English are the cooks, the Italians are the bankers, the French are the intellectuals, and the Germans are the police.

"Don't be scared," one of them said. "Feel free."

Sebastian Junger provides an amazing view of Nigeria, and his own pluck:

Mike and I stepped out onto land and were immediately blessed by a man who dipped a handful of leaves into what might have been palm wine and splashed us twice. No one blesses someone before killing him, I thought.

Read the whole thing....

Dirty Kuffar

It's YouTube day here at Small Precautions.

Here's an amazing video example of dark globalization -- a rap video (an originally American artistic genre itself with deep roots in African-American musical forms and the social experience of oppression and resistance) that celebrates jihadi resistance to the U.S.

Footage from Barajas

Surveillance cameras at Madrid's Barajas airport in the very moment that the ETA car bomb explodes (bomb goes off at 0:15).

Apparently the people in the walkway above somehow survived.

The "hail mary" metaphor

The blogosphere is awash with descriptions of Bush's decision to escalate in Iraq as a "hail mary."

The "hail mary" metaphor is actually too kind to Bush. Hail mary passes make a morbid kind of sense when you are down to the last few seconds of a game and have to score a touchdown to win, in a binary win-lose situation. That metaphor may be fairly accurate as a description of Bush's personal political fortunes and place in history, but it is far from the truth about the grand strategic situation for the U.S.

For the United States--as opposed to for Bush personally--the global situation is bad, but not (yet) nearly so dire. The situation in Iraq undoubtedly poses an existential threat to Bush's legacy, but not (yet) does it pose an existential threat to the United States. Come what may, the country will lumber on after January '09, and a realistic assessment of the country's options at this point do not point to a binary win/lose situation, but rather to a nuanced lose/lose-worse situation. However, instead of focusing on our country's long-term real interests, Bush and team are throwing a hail mary for his legacy.

In other words, the better football metaphor is that Bush is like a quarterback who has thrown three interceptions in the first half of the game; but even as the coach responds to the quarterback's incompetence by calling running plays, the quarterback goes to the line and unilaterally overrides the coach by calling an audible for a hail mary pass, hoping for a miracle that can salvage his reputation. If this were a football game, the coach would certainly bench the quarterback at this point; alas, in our game of political football, we have little realistic possibility for such.

Confidence, Requiescat In Pace

My old high school pal and sometime neocon fellow-traveller, tells it like it is about Bush's plan for limp-wristed escalation in Iraq:

This is really either (more likely) a bunch of hot air (additional carrier strike group, destroying "networks", etc), masquerading as resolve (as Teheran and Damascus will likely smell out), or the beginning of a colossal blunder of epic proportions well beyond the very significant fiasco and disaster we've already witnessed in Iraq. With this team one can't really ever know, of course, a fearful reality indeed as we run out the clock until January '09.

Political valences

Via Andrew Sullivan, here's a political questionnaire that puts you on a matrix of left to right and (social) libertarian to authoritarian. I scored as a moderate left-libertarian, and more libertarian (14/20) than left (13.13/20) -- a slightly more pro-business version of Gandhi (ha!).

Orwell lives!

Nationalist Socialism

How and why the Bush regime still refuses to come clean with the American public about the real costs of the disaster in Iraq, even as they demand escalation:

For some who continue to support the war, a substantial increase in the tax burden might diminish their support. In fact, taxes have not byeen raised at all since the war began and the cost of the war has been heavily deferred to future taxpayers. Thus, the Bush administration’s tax policy insulates consumers from a truer sense of the cost of the war they are buying.

We can think of this tax policy as a form of artificial government price control that deprives consumers of the price information needed to decide how much to consume of a product. In this case, the product is war. Artificial price (tax) control makes the war seem relatively cheap to the consumer, so war will be over-consumed. The result is a shortage of war supplies, and more specifically, a shortage in the number of troops needed to wage this war.

Hat tip: ZB.

Civil Liberties

Commenting on how the Bush regime has assaulted civil liberties by holding people without charges, suborning torture, spying on Americans without a warrant, and issuing "signing statements" that baldly state the President's plan not to uphold the law, the New York Times exhorts Democrats not to be

swayed by the absurd notion circulating in Washington that the Democrats should now "look ahead" rather than use their new majority to right the dangerous wrongs of the last six years of Mr. Bush’s one-party rule.

This is a false choice. Dealing with [how the Bush regime has eroded civil liberties] is not about the past. The administration's assault on some of the nation's founding principles continues unabated. If the Democrats were to shirk their responsibility to stop it, that would make them no better than the Republicans who formed and enabled these policies in the first place.

Mission Accomplished

This article nicely captures the horror in Iraq:

An interview with the family of a man recently mutilated and killed, a prominent sheik considered to be the prince of the Tamim tribes, gives a glimpse into the complicated underworld that is, in part, responsible for the trucks full of bodies collected around this city every day.

The man, Sheik Hamid Mohammed al-Suhail, 75, was found Wednesday in the Shuala neighborhood of Baghdad, a Shiite redoubt, by members of his tribe, which is mixed Shiite and Sunni, who were searching for him. He disappeared last Sunday, and his mutilated body was found wrapped in a blanket, covered in blood. The search party recognized his body by the distinctive way the beard was trimmed.

He had been an outspoken critic of the sectarian fighting and participated in a recent conference in Cairo on national reconciliation.

The kidnappers, whom his relatives hinted they knew but would describe only as “militiamen” for fear of reprisal, initially called his family asking for $100,000, said a nephew, Sheik Ali Sammi al-Suhail.

The family told the kidnappers they did not have the money, the nephew said.

“The body was mutilated in a brutal way,” he said. “They used a drill on him and perhaps other tools.”

One hand and one leg were almost completely severed.

The nephew said he had been told by people who said they witnessed the killing that after his uncle was tortured, his body was thrown from a two-story building. He survived the fall but was brutalized further before finally being killed.

And this is just what's in the bottom half of the article.

Ethnic Baghdad