Interesting essay on Terry Eagleton in The Chronicle of Higher Education…

Literary theorists, and probably other scholars, might be divided into two types: settlers and wanderers. The settlers stay put, “hovering one inch” over a set of issues or topics, as Paul de Man, the most influential theorist of the 1970s, remarked in an interview. Their work, through the course of their careers, claims ownership of a specific intellectual turf. The wanderers are more restless, starting with one approach or field but leaving it behind for the next foray. Their work takes the shape of serial engagements, more oriented toward climatic currents. The distinction is not between expert and generalist, or, in Isaiah Berlin’s distinction, between knowing one thing like a hedgehog and knowing many things like a fox; it is a different application of expertise.

[…]

Terry Eagleton has been a quintessential wanderer. Eagleton is probably the most well-known literary critic in Britain and the most frequently read expositor of literary theory in the world. His greatest influence in the United States has been through his deft surveys, variously on poststructural theory, Marxist criticism, the history of the public sphere, aesthetics, ideology, and postmodernism. His 1983 book, Literary Theory: An Introduction, which made readable and even entertaining the new currents in theory and which has been reprinted nearly 20 times, was a text that almost every literature student thumbed through during the 80s and 90s, and it still holds a spot in the otherwise sparse criticism sections of the local Barnes and Noble. His public position in Britain is such that Prince Charles once deemed him “that dreadful Terry Eagleton.” Not every literary theorist has received such public notice.

Frank Kermode once told me about a lecture tour he did in China at the behest of the British Council. In every university, he was listened to by rapt, serried ranks of Chinese students. In vain did the translator try to elicit questions from these awestruck audiences. Finally, after the final lecture, the head of the host institution begged students to ask at least one question of their very distinguished visitor.

Eventually, a shy student stood up and said to Frank: “Do you know Telly Eagleton?”

Shock, horror! Programmers get bored or fed up and write rude words when commenting code. Nice piece in The Register.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.

Well, well! The Observer reports that

Flat taxes fail to boost revenues, as their advocates claim, and are likely to be abandoned by the countries that have introduced them, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund.

‘The question is not so much whether more countries will adopt a flat tax, as whether those that have will move away from it,’ the study says, after examining the experience of eight economies that have introduced the policy since the mid-Nineties.

Sweeping away variable tax bands and replacing them with a single rate has long been a dream of right-wing economists. Since a number of Eastern European governments introduced flat taxes, support for them has grown in the UK, and shadow Chancellor George Osborne has flirted with the idea.

But the IMF analysts who carried out the research cast doubt on the main advantage claimed for flat taxes: that they increase revenues by allowing people to pocket more of their hard-earned cash, and thus persuade them to work harder.This is the so-called ‘Laffer effect’ named after US economist Arthur Laffer. But the authors say: ‘In no case does there appear to have been a Laffer effect: these reforms have not set off effects strong enough for them to pay for themselves.’

Nice profile of Micheal Moritz…

Michael Moritz has a few simple rules for investing in internet start-ups: look for people who are pursuing their own ideas for doing something better; prefer youth to maturity; ignore business plans looking a few years ahead; and avoid anyone wearing Armani T-shirts, loafers with no socks or who uses words like ‘synergy’, ‘no-brainer’ or ‘slam-dunk’.

Moritz is worth listening to. The 51-year-old Welshman is one of the duo running Sequoia Capital, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has just made an estimated $480m profit in less than a year by backing YouTube, the video-sharing business this week acquired by Google. And it is not the firm’s only success: it was one of the only two venture capital firms to back Google itself, investing $12.5m in the start-up business; its 10 per cent stake is now worth more than $12bn. Its other investments read like a who’s who of the technology business: PayPal, Yahoo, eBay, Apple, Cisco.Small wonder that Moritz tops the list of technology deal-makers produced by Forbes, the US business magazine – or that his own wealth, estimated at £518m in the Sunday Times Rich List, makes him the sixth richest internet millionaire….

This morning’s Observer column…

Before he hit the jackpot with YouTube, Jawed (like Hurley and Chen) had made a pile from his earlier involvement in PayPal, the online payment system bought by eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn. His share of the $1.65bn paid by Google for YouTube will reportedly be less than theirs, but it should still be sufficient to fund a private squadron of F-16s. And yet the lad chooses to bank the cash and return to considering ‘algorithms for edit distance on permutations’ and other arcane matters engaging students on the Stanford CS300 course. His one concession to the events of the last week was to cancel the seminar he had been scheduled to give on Thursday on ‘YouTube: from concept to hyper-growth’.

If Jawed has started a trend, who knows where it will end? Traditionally, university professors in elite US institutions find students a tiresome distraction from important work like private consulting, appearing on television and testifying before Congressional committees. For these superprofs, the really important people – the folks they have to suck up to – are rich alumni who have made good in the corporate world. But now a terrible prospect looms – US academics may in future have to pander to their students. Perhaps it will eventually become known as sucking down?

Sebastian Faulk’s technique:

Place a sharp knife pointing out at right angles to the kitchen counter, then stand with your back to it and don’t move until you’ve finished a whole book.

Quoted by Anthony Quinn in today’s Daily Telegraph.

From today’s New York Times…

SHANGHAI, Oct. 12 — China is planning to adopt a new law that seeks to crack down on sweatshops and protect workers’ rights by giving labor unions real power for the first time since it introduced market forces in the 1980’s.

But guess what?

Some of the world’s big companies have expressed concern that the new rules would revive some aspects of socialism and borrow too heavily from labor laws in union-friendly countries like France and Germany. The Chinese government proposal, for example, would make it more difficult to lay off workers, a condition that some companies contend would be so onerous that they might slow their investments in China…

Christopher Hitchens has written a thoughtful review of Myra MacPherson’s biography of I.F. Stone. Hitch signs off like this:

I possess a fairly full set of I. F. Stone’s Weekly, as well as all his books and several anthologies of his essays, and rereading them lately has made me morose as well as exhilarated. Some of the old battles now seem prehistoric: as it happens, Izzy never believed that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were innocent, and as it happens he was as right about that as he was wrong about the Hitler-Stalin pact. I recognized my own middle age in his confession of angst about the writer’s life: “The perpetual gap between what one would have liked to get down on paper and what finally did get itself written and printed, the constant feeling of inadequacy.” (His italics.) I also moaned with shame at the current state of the profession. Even the slightest piece written by Izzy was composed with a decent respect for the King’s English and usually contained at least one apt allusion to the literature and poetry and history that undergirded it: an allusion that he would expect his readers to recognize. Who now dares to do that? Who would now dare to say, as he did as an excited eyewitness, that there was still something “saccharine” about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” oration? The rule of saccharine rhetoric and bland prose is now near absolute, and one could almost envy Izzy the sad deafness and myopia that allowed him to tune out the constant bawling from electronic media. I once had the honor of being the I. F. Stone fellow at Berkeley (where his old typewriter is enclosed in a glass case: probably the most hagiography he could have stood), and I told my students to read him and reread him to get an idea of the relationship between clean and muscular prose and moral and intellectual honesty. Perhaps I could invite you to do the same, if only to get an idea of what we have so casually decided to do without.

Paul Berman’s New York Times review says, en passant:

He was especially shrewd at explaining how the government, by playing to the vanity of individual journalists, was able to manipulate the news. MacPherson, who used to work at The Washington Post (and has written a book on the Vietnam War), quotes him saying, “Once the secretary of state invites you to lunch and asks your opinion, you’re sunk” — which may not be true of every reporter who ever lived, but does point to a recognizable human frailty.

And the relevance to our own time is hard to escape, given our own recent experiences with disastrous policies, official mendacities and a sometimes error-prone and manipulated press. To read Stone’s description of clueless Americans wandering around Saigon in 1966, reprinted in “The Best of I. F. Stone,” is to plunge into glum reflections on the Green Zone of Baghdad, 40 years later…