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THE RISE OF THE JOURNO-GURUS

Adrian Wooldridge — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:36:19 +0000

AMERICAN SUPERSTAR HACKS | November 18th 2008

Critics complain that journo-gurus are merely masters of the dark arts of global branding, spinning best-selling books and $50,000 speech engagements out of one big idea. "But it would be churlish not to admire these hacks for thriving in hard times", writes Adrian Wooldridge ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

These are the locust years for the journalistic profession. American newspapers are sacking staff by the hundred. The surviving hacks are having to do ever more for their stagnant salaries--to produce blogs and podcasts as well as reporting. Sales are slumping and advertising (which traditionally made up 80% of revenues) is in a death spiral. The refrain in the newsrooms goes: "I wish I'd gone to law school."

But amid all this gloom a few hacks are doing better than ever. These are the first-class passengers of the journalistic world--sitting on upholstered thrones, surrounded by adoring hostesses, while the rest of the profession is crowded into cattle class or getting hurled off the plane. These are the journo-gurus. They focus on business rather than the usual staple of high-profile journalism, politics. And they specialise in big, bold, brave ideas about world-changing trends.

The king of the journo-gurus is Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist. His big idea is globalisation, a phenomenon he did not discover but one he has chronicled as artfully as anyone. He saw that the big foreign-affairs story of our time is economic rather than diplomatic: cheaper communication is levelling the playing field, so clever people in Bangalore can go head-to-head with their peers in Boston. Friedman broke the New York Times mould by spending as much time interviewing business leaders as heads of state.

He laid out his arguments in "The World is Flat", chronicling the rise of an inter-connected world, in which American companies can outsource brain-work, as well as manufacturing, to the developing world, and Indian companies such as Infosys can become software giants. Friedman has been widely criticised for oversimplication, but his argument is much more nuanced than it sometimes appears, even under his own byline. As a former Middle East correspondent, he is well aware of the importance of political events and tribal loyalties. In his first bestseller, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", he not only celebrated globalisation but looked at its discontents, especially people who felt that their identities were under threat.

The crown prince of the journo-gurus is Malcolm Gladwell, a British-born Canadian who writes for the New Yorker, whose latest book, "Outliers", has just come out this week. He has produced a string of big ideas and illustrated them with myriad examples from every walk of life--business and pop culture, sport and the military, academic literature and the detritus of daily newspapers. In "The Tipping Point" he argued that small trends can spark big social epidemics; in "Blink" he made the case for the power of first impressions, arguing that snap judgments are not always blind ones, because we are hard-wired to make complicated deductions about people we meet, by reading their facial expressions, or to react in an instant to accidents and emergencies by relying on pure instinct.

The Gladwell of the new economy is Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine. (For the record: Anderson used to work at The Economist and shared an office with this author.) In "The Long Tail" he argued that the internet is shifting the focus of the economy from producing a small number of big hits to satisfying a legion of niche markets. Amazon and iTunes can stock virtually everything. And the falling cost of distribution means that every niche consumer can get their hands on what they want. Anderson insists that the demand for products not available in bricks-and-mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are, and suggests that a relatively homogeneous culture is giving way to a fragmented world in which a thousand flowers bloom.

These journo-gurus are not just sharp observers of business, but sharp practitioners too. They have mastered the dark arts of synergy and global branding. They churn articles into books and books into lectures. (Top business writers now command $50,000 a speech.) Friedman dreams up Madison Avenue phrases that stick in the mind, such as the "golden straitjacket" for foreign investment. Gladwell turns complex business ideas into engaging narrative. Anderson has broken with convention by inviting readers of his blog to debate his arguments before they reach the presses.

They are also relentless in their pursuit of the next big thing. Friedman has now gone green. His new book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded", looks at the implications of environmental change for business. Gladwell's new book "Outliers" is about the best-and-the-brightest. Why do some people achieve the American ideal, mega-success? (He emphasises their environment rather than genes--their culture, families, generational backgrounds and idiosyncratic experiences.) Anderson's new book continues to explore the theme of the "economics of abundance" by examining "the most radical price of all--zero". How can companies thrive when so many things, particularly on the internet, are available for nothing?

These journo-gurus have overturned two established hierarchies. The first is the billion-dollar management theory industry, hitherto ruled by business professors and management consultants who produced books and then turned those books into business fads. Alas, the books were often dismally written, the fads a recipe for disaster. This created an opportunity for those with sharper pens and more dispassionate attitudes. A recent Wall Street Journal ranking of management gurus, based on Google hits, newspaper mentions and academic citations,
included two journalists in the top five (Friedman at two, Gladwell at four) and only one traditional management guru, Gary Hamel. The New Yorker is now a bigger generator of management fads than the Harvard Business Review.

The second overturned hierarchy is that of journalism. This used to be dominated by political journalists who hogged the front pages and secured the best book deals. But the most successful of those--Bob Woodward, George Will--are all getting long in the tooth. And younger political writers are finding it almost impossible to talk their way into the first-class cabin. The big money goes to TV journalists whose grinning faces launch a dozen worthless bestsellers. Political partisanship is tempting political writers to turn themselves into ideological water carriers rather than serious reporters. And the internet is multiplying the number of voices while diminishing the impact of any of them.

These superstar hacks have inevitably provoked criticism, not least from the people stuck in cattle class. Some of it is sour grapes--Friedman, jealous hacks whisper, lives in a palatial mansion in Bethesda; Gladwell collected a $1m advance for his first book. But some of it has merit. There are legitimate worries that the journo-gurus see too little of the downside of a system that is treating them so conspicuously well. There are also concerns about substance. All these writers follow the old axiom about simplifying and exaggerating: they take one idea and illustrate it with endless examples rather than address complications. The idea at the heart of each book is as much a brand as an analytical tool. "Blink" has been the subject of an amusing send-up, "Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All". Richard Posner, one of America's public intellectuals, dismissed it as "written like a book intended for people who do not read books."

But it would be churlish not to admire these hacks for thriving in hard times. They produce big ideas that throw light on profound changes. And their books are manna from heaven for a global business class grappling with dizzying challenges. Once the height of journalistic ambition was to shape political events. Now the cleverest journalists are shaping the business world as well. Not bad for a profession in terminal decline.

Picture credit: Pop!Tech/flickr, Kathryn Rathke (illustration)

(Adrian Wooldridge is The Economist's bureau chief in Washington. His last article for Intelligent Life was "Great Bores of Yore" in the summer issue.)

A NORTH SEA DIARY

Economist.com — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:06:43 +0000

BRITISH OIL | November 17th 2008

It is surprising "how easily you become disoriented" when you're capsizing, writes a Britain correspondent for The Economist. Before he can visit a North Sea oil platform, he must learn what to do should his helicopter crash ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

Most passengers ignore the earnest safety briefings given at the start of every flight. But as water began gushing into the helicopter cabin, I was doing my best to remember. Use one hand to find your nearest exit (in my case, a window that looked rather too small to fit through). Use the other to find the release mechanism for your four-point seatbelt, but do not activate it immediately. Instead, use the same hand to open the compartment on your lifejacket that contains the rebreather. Put it in your mouth, and the noseclip on your nose. Take a deep breath, squeeze the red sphere to close the valve, and exhale into the bag.

At that point, we began to capsize. It is surprising how easily you become disoriented. You struggle to remain seated upright as the rolling cabin carries you into the air, and then as you are plunged into the water your head is forced sideways against the wall. You know, intellectually, that you must remain in your seat for a few seconds to give the rotors time to stop spinning, but strapped into a chair, upside down, and submerged in a confined space, deep-seated instincts are insisting--vehemently--that you do something, and quickly.

The rebreather helps, by allowing a limited form of underwater breathing (you are actually breathing your own stale air, but that is better than breathing water). But the noseclip is not perfect, and water is beginning to trickle through. We were told that the window would pop out without too much fuss, but my first shove does not move it. That causes a spike of panic, and I shove again, much harder, and the window comes free. I twist the buckle, lean forward, and the seatbelt falls away. In my haste to get away, and fighting against the buoyancy from my rebreather (which is trying to strand me in the cabin), I yank myself through with both hands, painfully wrenching my right shoulder.

Fortunately, I have made my escape not into the freezing waters of the North Sea, but into the heated swimming pool of Falck Nutec, a Denmark-based firm that provides emergency training to workers in the offshore oil industry. Fraser, the cheery Scot in charge, seems satisfied with our performance, and so the cabin is righted in preparation for its next passengers and we are sent off to learn how to pull ourselves into a liferaft (which, when wearing a drysuit and a lifejacket, is far harder than it sounds).

I am here, along with several other journalists, at the behest of Marathon, a Texas-based oil company that has invited us to see one of their North Sea oil platforms. Before we are allowed to fly out, we must learn what to do should the helicopter come down. To properly simulate the experience of ditching in the North Sea, the swimming pool can be plunged into darkness, a wave machine started up and hoses used to blast participants with spray. Being journalists, and hence pushed for time and rather unfit, we have been given a slimmed-down version of a course which usually takes several days and includes lessons on fire-fighting and common offshore hazards.

I have been offshore in the North Sea before, but this is the first time I have had to do helicopter escape training. But safety is taken seriously in Aberdeen, and has been ever since the Piper Alpha oil platform caught fire in 1988, killing 167 people. It remains the world's worst offshore disaster, and on its 20th anniversary everyone is keen to talk about developments in oil-platform safety.

Visiting the offices of one big oil firm last year, I was required to watch a video reminding me to hold on to the stair rails, watch for loose cables and keep the lid on any cups of hot coffee. I was assured that this wasn't just for the benefit of visiting journalists, and indeed Falck Nutec's offices are dotted with graphic posters warning of the dangers of "slips, trips and falls".

The people I speak to seem sincere. But high oil prices make commercial pressures keenly felt, and safety can suffer. Health and safety inspectors rebuked Shell over the state of its platforms in 2006.

Relentless propaganda can be irritating, too: coming back from a previous trip to Aberdeen, I sat next to an offshore worker who was abandoning the North Sea to work in West Africa. "It's all this health and safety bollocks," he explained. "It takes three times as long to do anything here as it does anywhere else." It is a tricky message to get right.

Picture credit: Strocchi/flickr (top), Jeff Kubina/flickr

(This is an instalment of a correspondent's diary about British oil, published on Economist.com.)

AUDIO: ADVENTURES IN HUMAN WASTE

Emily_Bobrow — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 23:18:34 +0000

BATHROOM READING | November 16th 2008

The Economist talks to Rose George, author of "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters" ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

"The last taboo, surely, is shit", observes The Economist in its review of Rose George's "fascinating and eloquent" new book. But "there is a great deal that needs to be said about excretion that is not remotely funny. Two-fifths of the world's population has nowhere to defecate except open ground. That is 2.6 billion people whose drinking water contains their and their neighbour's faeces; whose food is contaminated by the flies that lay their eggs in human waste; who live in filth and very often die because of it."

In this Economist podcast, Ms George talks about her travels around the world, where she witnessed various strategies for dealing with this problem, from underground tanks in rural China to fancy robo-toilets in posh parts of Japan. "I think if seven-year-olds were in charge of the world's sanitation we would be in a much better place", she contends. "They don't see it as a threatening substance, whereas we adults it gets educated into us that this is a dirty, nasty subject." ~ E.B.

SKATING TO NIRVANA

Art.view — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:44:11 +0000

RENDERING THE SMALL PLEASURES OF DAILY LIFE | November 15th 2008

A work by the father of Dutch Romantic landscape painting goes up for sale ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

The stolid, clog-wearing, cheese-making Dutch are not your obvious Romantics. But when Holland gained independence in 1813, after decades spent fighting the French, a resolute high-mindedness that was thrifty, intimate, idealistic and in its way peculiarly Dutch, finally settled on the Low Countries.

These good people had no time for the high Romanticism of the Germans, who hankered after the lances and legends of the Middle Ages, or the leafy ideals of the English with their love of daffodils and the bucolic greenery of the Lake District.

For their Romantic inspiration the Dutch turned back to their own golden age, the 17th century, with its enduring characteristics of domesticity and diligence. Nineteenth-century Dutch pastorals show windmills and waterways, red-cheeked boys and little yellow hatchlings. Spring, summer and autumn are sometimes the backdrop. But one after the other, artists such as Jan Jacob Spohler, Nicolaas Johannes Roosenboom, Francs Breuhaus de Groot and Andreas Schelfhout, turn their attention to the icy landscape of winter.

Nothing epitomises the ideal of Dutch 19th-century life so much as ice-skating on winter's frozen waterways. Market days and jolly parties bathed in a pinkish winter light all happen on ice, where dogs and children cavort among men in tall hats and women in fur muffs enjoying the small pleasures of daily life. That these canals might be transformed in summer into stagnant ditches rank with mosquitoes and malaria, or even altogether overwhelmed by the ever-present sea nearby, is a reality that never intrudes.

Dutch cityscapes show a similar moderation. Tall buildings gather, hugger-mugger, along the edges of canals. Ruined gateways and cracked roofs radiate timelessness. The human figures on the pavements are small and rarely give expression to extreme emotions. They call their dogs, tie their shoelaces, shush their teething babies and look for reassurance to the striking of the town clock. Within, Hubertus Van Hove's Amsterdam orphan girl, in her characteristic red and black uniform, with white cap and white apron, prepares a simple meal. The Bible has the last word and the clock stipulates a life of domestic continuity.

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek, a modest citizen of Cleves, father of five daughters, was a master at portraying the contrast between humble humanity and the greatness of creation. Regarded as the father of Dutch Romantic landscape painting, he counted among his clients King Willem II of the Netherlands, King Friedrich-Wilhelm IV of Prussia and Tsar Alexander II, which goes some way to explaining why there is a fine example of his work in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

In 1846 Koekkoek began working from a new atelier in Cleves, heralding the start of his most important period. "Le vieux manoir" (pictured above) was the first picture he painted there. Against a massive sky is a filigree of trees and branches. A woman pushes a laden toboggan and small children carry bundles of kindling, indicating that in a fulfilled life everyone must play their part. But it is to the far left of the painting that the viewer's eye is drawn: a woman, well bundled against the cold, is trudging along the snowy road. Holding her hand is a child who, given her height, cannot be more than five or six. They have far to go, and you can almost see how their even breaths mark the passing of the miles.

In a buoyant market the finest Koekkeoks have almost always exceeded their estimate. An 1843 work, "Late Afternoon with Numerous Skaters by a Town", sold in April 2006 for €1.25m ($1.56m) against a top estimate of €350,000, whereas another winter landscape sold the following October for €1.15m against an estimate of €500,000.

Collectors who were happy to sell during the boom are now being leaned on by the auction houses to reduce their expectations. If so, this is the moment to buy. Koekkoek's "Le vieux manoir" may be smaller than the two pictures that sold in 2006, but even if it fetches only its top estimate, it will be a bargain.

"Romantic Affair: Paintings from a Dutch Private Collection" will be sold at Christie's, Amsterdam, on November 18th. Lot 116, "An Amsterdam Orphan Girl Preparing Supper" by Hubertus van Hove is estimated at €10,000-15,000. Lot 421, "Le vieux manoir" by B.C. Koekkoek, is estimated at €200,000-300,000.

Picture credit: Christie's

(The Art.view column appears every week on Economist.com.)

IS "2666" A MASTERPIECE?

Garth Risk Hallberg — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:09:00 +0000

ROBERTO BOLAÑO'S MYSTERIOUS LEGACY | November 14th 2008

Reading "2666", "it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Roberto Bolaño's genius from his excess. Indeed, it starts to seem that Bolaño's genius is his excess", writes Garth Risk Hallberg. ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In his treatise on drama, "Three Uses of the Knife", David Mamet cribs a distinction from Stanislavsky. Some narratives, he suggests, leave us saying, "What a masterpiece! Let's get a cup of coffee," while others ask us to wrestle with them for the rest of our lives. It's a contrast that feels almost obsolete in book publishing. On the supply side, publishers rush to promote "instant classics" before posterity can render a verdict. On the demand side, we feel grateful for the distraction of "a good read." An academic cottage industry has arisen to debunk categories of high and low, obscuring tensions between inspiration and craft, between edification and mere delight. Still, the old Horatian binaries tend to obsess the serious novelist, whose medium lives and dies along the borderline where art and entertainment meet.

The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño had a foot in each territory. His long 1998 novel, "Los detectives salvajes" ("The Savage Detectives"), earned one of the Spanish-speaking world's most prestigious literary awards, and its structural innovations credentialed him as a daring avant-gardist. Most of the book's pleasures, however, lay in its unbuttoned exuberance, its evocation of a mid-70s milieu of sex, drugs, and rebellion.

Bolaño, a poet by vocation, had initially (not to say quixotically) turned to fiction as a money-making proposition, and after the success of "The Savage Detectives", he might have settled into a lucrative middle age repackaging his dissolute youth. His next book, "Amuleto" ("Amulet"), a loose, novella-length expansion of a chapter in "The Savage Detectives", hints at the career that might have been. But Bolaño's longevity was far from assured--in 1992, at age 39, he had been diagnosed with a fatal liver disease--and his ambitions for his remaining years were enormous. The climax of "The Savage Detectives", set in a violent Mexican boom-town called "Santa Teresa," would find him already imagining his way into his next grand edifice.

In real life, Santa Teresa was Ciudad Juárez, and by 1998, it was home to the largest serial killing in recorded history. The brutalised corpses of young women had begun turning up in Juárez' vacant lots and garbage dumps in the early 1990s. Many of the hundreds of eventual victims were migrants from impoverished regions further south, who had come to work in low-wage maqiladoras, assembling consumer goods for Norteamericanos. It's impossible to reconstruct what Bolaño felt when he first read news accounts of these events, just as it's impossible to imagine Proust finding Combray in a madeleine. But in the resulting novel, "2666", we overhear a reporter trying to persuade his editor that the killings in Santa Teresa suggest "a sketch of the industrial landscape in the third world... a piece of reportage about the current situation in Mexico, a panorama of the border." In other words, they offer a writer the scale of the magnum opus--a chance to memorialise himself, even as he memorialises the victims.

Now that we English readers have a posthumous version of "2666" before us, in Natasha Wimmer's vibrant translation, there can be little doubt that Bolaño intended it to be his masterpiece, a work to be wrestled with over the course of a lifetime. However, this naked bid for permanence would seem to complicate the more immediate questions--whether and how we should enjoy "2666".

This 900-page book unfolds in five novel-length sections, each with its own characters, style and chronology. The first volume, "The Part About the Critics," begins on a deceptively intimate scale, introducing us to three young men: Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manual Espinoza and Piero Morini. The Frenchman, the Spaniard and the Italian have made their professional reputations studying a reclusive German novelist, a Teutonic Thomas Pynchon with the unlikely nom de plume, Benno von Archimboldi. The narrative conceit that emerges--literary types on a quest for a vanished writer--will be familiar to readers of "The Savage Detectives". In several ways, however, "The Part About the Critics" departs from Bolaño's standard procedure. Where the poets who populated "The Savage Detectives" were aging adolescents, raging against the dying of the light, these critics are settled, self-satisfied and bourgeois.

The prose, too, diverges from Bolaño's earlier work. Where novels such as "Amulet" and "De nocto Chile" ("By Night in Chile") revelled in orality, the opening of "2666" is conspicuously literary. Bolaño deploys free indirect discourse to comic effect, as our protagonists collectively imagine the "downed flags" of rival scholars and "a book that might be the grand Archimboldean opus, the pilot fish that would swim for a long time beside the great black shark of the German's oeuvre." Pompous equivocations signal differences of opinion--characters have a "talk (or discussion)," or speak of "vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers)"--even as they call our attention to the utter triviality of the opinions in question. Unlike some of Bolaño's previous creations, these pedants easier to laugh at than to love.

A funny thing happens, though, with the introduction of a fourth critic, an Englishwoman, Liz Norton. When she first reads Archimboldi, we are told, it is raining:

Oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park... Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallised spiderwebs or the briefest crystallised vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.

Suddenly, and by dint of the same qualifiers and parentheses that have heretofore served as emblems of meaninglessness, Bolaño is straining against the limits of the expressible. Metaphors arrive like seizures, disorienting in their rapidity.

The fever of significance slowly infects the rest of the novel. As the mystery of Archimboldi's whereabouts draws the four critics in, foreboding images proliferate. A plane passing overhead disappears. A hotel toilet is missing a piece, "as if someone had ripped it off with a hammer. Or as if someone had picked up another person who was already on the floor and smashed that person's head against the toilet." In each case, the suggestion of violence works like a radioactive marker, alerting us to some sinister symbolism at work beneath the skin of the text. Just as importantly, the abrupt shifts of mood draw us into sympathy with the characters. Still, an excess of atmosphere cannot compensate for a lack of plot, and it's only at the end of "The Part About the Critics", when the Archimboldian pursuit leads the critics to Santa Teresa, that "2666" really gets going--and, paradoxically, breaks down.

A remarkable sense of place enriches the second volume, "The Part About Amalfitano". Descriptions of houses, "devastated" yards, cinderblock walls topped with brick, factories, cavernous bars and omnipresent black Peregrino sedans are as sinister as they are banal. That Santa Teresa could be any number of burgeoning Central American cities is precisely its horror. In dramatic terms, however, "The Part About Amalfitano," the shortest section of "2666", allows the book's energies to dissipate. In a previous cameo, Óscar Amalfitano, a professor of German literature, has served as the critics' guide around Santa Teresa. Now we see him literally losing his mind. The bursts of paranoia that enlivened "The Part About the Critics" swell and distend into lunatic digressions. Absent any meaningful interlocutors, Amalfitano's thoughts become a prison. Part of Bolaño's narrative method is to imply motion as film does, through the alteration of scene and stasis, but as "The Part About Amalfitano" winds down, the gaps begin to show, and the reader begins to wonder if the novel's momentum has been illusory.

In the third volume, "The Part About Fate", Bolaño begins to offer an answer. The stylistic signature here is hardboiled noir. In the uninflected manner of Raymond Chandler, Bolaño follows an African-American journalist named Quincy Williams (aka, Oscar Fate) to Santa Teresa. Assigned to cover a boxing match in which he has little interest, Fate spends several days adrift in the city, ruminating on September 11th, black nationalism, and the relative merits of VHS and DVD, among other subjects. Even as Fate conceals his disaffection, though, the lingering dread of the "Amalfitano" section has thickened, signalling our proximity to the novel's central trauma.

The Santa Teresa killings surface in overheard conversations, in the news media and in moments of unanticipated weirdness. Some sketchy new companions, for example, show Fate a violently pornographic video attributed to Richard Rodriguez. It ends with these images: "Glasses and a jar of Nescafé. A frying pan with the remains of scrambled eggs. A hallway. The body of a half-dressed woman sprawled on the floor. A door. A room in complete disarray." Like Kafka, a writer he often resembles, Bolaño intuits the homology between laughter and horror--the way each confronts us with our ultimate lack of control. "The camera zooms in on the mirror," he tells us. "The tape ends."

It is Amalfitano's daughter who rouses Fate from his torpor, and eventually brings the tension to a head: Fate comes to realise that she may be the killers' next victim. The old-fashioned plot thus initiated begins to unite the discrete pieces we've encountered so far--Amalfitano's madness, the air of menace, and the connection between Archimboldi and Santa Teresa--the way a the presence of a magnet sweeps iron filings into a straight line.

Which brings us to "The Part About The Crimes." Heretofore, Bolaño's vacillations between order and excess, stasis and motion, and divergence and convergence, have suggested an artist struggling with his subject. Now they reveal themselves as the motions of a surgeon preparing his tools. The flat, declarative opening sentence--"The girl's body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores"--lays bare the logic of Bolaño's circuitous approach. Had this come on the novel's first page, we might have written it off as a mechanism to build suspense. Now, after so long a delay, this murder has become literally central to the novel.

The 300-page tour-de-force that follows both recreates and explodes the conventions of the police procedural. In careful detail, Bolaño documents the discovery of scores of bodies between 1993 and 1997. The repetitive descriptions of victims have a percussive effect on the reader; rather than diminishing the victims, the similarities Bolaño catalogues--of dress, of occupation, of injury--compound the tragedy of their deaths. In between postmortems, we meet corrupt politicians and weary working people, journalists and priests and the drug-lords who seem to be behind the killings. Where verisimilitude made the critics of the first volume somewhat ridiculous, it deepens our engagement with characters like Juan de Dios Martínez, a veteran inspector, and Lalo Cura, a rookie with an unbending code of honour.

More affecting still are this volume's many women: mothers and daughters, lovers and wives, each a potential victim. An undercurrent of machismo can sometimes complicate Bolaño's attitude toward his female characters, but in "The Part About the Crimes", the women of Santa Teresa become the avatars of all of history's anonymous victims. A television psychic named Florita Almada exemplifies their courage:

No matter what I take for my nerves, nothing helps. So I stay up until dawn and I try to read and do something useful and practical but in the end I sit down at the kitchen table and start to mull over the problem.... I'm talking about the women brutally murdered in Santa Teresa. I'm talking about the girls and the mothers of families and the workers from all walks of life who turn up dead each day in the neighbourhoods and on the edges of that industrious city in the northern part of our state. I'm talking about Santa Teresa. I'm talking about Santa Teresa.

Florita Almada broadcasts visions as dark and obsessive as anything that has preceded them, but her voice is also, like the novel as a whole, shot through with tenderness, humility, and good humour. As the pages of her monologue pile up, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Bolaño's genius from his excess. Indeed, it starts to seem that Bolaño's genius is his excess. This impression will find confirmation in the long, wild, final volume of "2666", which returns to that other subject we've been hungry to hear about: Archimboldi.

The structure of "2666" has been parabolic, moving us from Europe to the charnel-pit of Santa Teresa; now, in "The Part About Archimboldi", we find ourselves once again far from the killings, geographically and chronologically. Taking up the style of the Bildungsroman, Bolaño deposits us in the 1920s, in the hermetic imagination of a German boy named Hans Reiter. For Reiter and his family, the "short Twentieth Century" will turn out to be a violent nightmare.

This violence is not purely European, though European culture (including literature) often serves to paper over it. Reiter's journeys as a conscript in the second world war expose him to the Holocaust, but also to the bloody past, and to visions of an apocalyptic future. Elements of the first half of "2666" that had seemed merely digressive now appear, in retrospect, pregnant with meaning. They are entries in an encyclopedia of iniquity that culminates in Santa Teresa. As history takes its toll on Reiter, he becomes more vivid--not the object of irony, but an ironist himself, stunned into detachment. Reiter becomes, in other words, a writer. He adopts a pen-name, and in a set of twists we've been awaiting for hundreds of pages, his own plot discloses its connection with those of the other four volumes of "2666".

This long-delayed concatenation dramatises a running philosophical concern, distilled in the name of one of the novel's hero: Fate. Bolaño's fatalism works in an odd way: it exists, but is invisible to the characters it acts upon. Archimboldi's life now appears, to the reader, to have launched him toward Santa Teresa. And aesthetically, what had seemed a model of postmodern messiness emerges as the kind of modernist masterwork Archimboldi might have constructed himself, polished to a high finish.

Or rather, the conclusion of "2666" posits order and chaos as facets of a single phenomenon, like convergence and digression, the perfect work of art and the spectacular failure. In Bolaño's cosmology, order and infinitude and artistic perfection are imaginary; chaos and digression and futility are merely their earthbound aspects. Which may explain Bolaño's preoccupation with literary immortality: it's as close as we mortals ever get to the real thing. And so, in "2666", he attempted to write a book that would last forever, even as, in reality, the pages ran out.

One way to judge to "2666", then, is to think of it not as a real-world masterpiece, but as an imaginary one--one big enough to encompass any atrocity, one whose ink never dries. Its restlessness and recklessness, its relentless pursuit of the inexpressible, may frustrate readers searching for the finite comedy of Bolaño's earlier novels. But in light of the brevity of his life, and the gravity of his subject, Bolaño's magnum opus resembles an act of heroism. Early in the novel, Amalfitano praises the "great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown." "2666" is imperfect and torrential, as well as upsetting and intricate and unusual. This is not to certify it prematurely as the masterpiece it was clearly meant to be. It is, however, to point out how gaudily improbable--how literary--it is that Roberto Bolaño even came close.

Image credit: Troballola/flickr, Ricky/flickr, Mabel·[equilibrio precario]/flickr, New Directions.

(Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of "A Field Guide to the North American Family", and is a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in fiction. He contributes to the literary weblog, The Millions. His last piece for More Intelligent Life was about Joseph Mitchell's "True Facts".)

7 WONDERS: ILSE CRAWFORD

Rebecca Willis — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:05:00 +0000

VARIATIONS ON SUNSHINE AND THE SEASIDE | November 14th 2008

These days she is best known as the designer behind Soho House in New York and the Olde Bell Inn near Maidenhead. Before that she was a pioneering magazine editor, at Elle Deco and Bare. Ilse Crawford talks to Rebecca Willis about the seven wonders of her world ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

HOTEL: Wolwedans, Namibia
One of the most inspiring hotels I have visited is Wolwedans safari camp in the sand dunes of the Namibian desert. An integral part of the NamibRand Nature Reserve, it is idealistic, pragmatic and sustainable. It is idealistic in that the staff are all local and are trained in astrology, botany, geology and ecology so that they are genuinely inspiring guides. It is pragmatic in that it has comfy cabins as well as walks through the desert that end with nights spent under the stars. And it is sustainable because it uses solar energy and has a light carbon footprint.

VIEW: From my studio, London
My studio is on the top floor in Great Guildford Street near the Tate Modern, and there are windows on three sides, so we have the sky, which gives infinity, and also the detail of the constant life of the dynamic city of London. It's an urban landscape, and I love the messiness of the buildings around, with lots of roofs of completely different characters; we can see the big wheel, too, as well as fat pigeons strutting their stuff. The light is fantastic, and I need light in order to work; when I lived in a Georgian flat, I couldn't see properly to work.

BUILDING: Stepwells, India
Stepwells, the stone cisterns which are found mostly in western India, are such an amazing combination of beauty and practicality. They contain and measure water which, being scarce, is sacred. Built between the fifth and the 19th centuries, they are architecturally exquisite and they are a place for drinking, bathing, washing and socialising--a perfect integration of form and function. I'm currently working on a book about water with Jane Withers and an exhibition (which ran at Z33 in Hasselt, Belgium, earlier this autumn). We need to rethink its role in our lives today.

BEACH: In front of the Tate Modern, London
I don't do sunny beaches--I'm too white! I like windswept beaches where nature comes right up to the sea (Holkham and Studland), but I am choosing the one in front of the Tate Modern on the Thames, where people are still doing what they have always done--finding stuff. Historically, "mudlarks" (often but not always children) scavenged in the mud and found things to use or sell. In poorer societies people naturally recycle--it's part of the economy--but I find it fascinating that even though in theory the waste economy has disappeared here, people carry on doing it. Every day there are a dozen or so people looking for treasure, and they find it (old coins and bits of pottery) because the river was such a centre of activity--it was a forest of masts at one time.

WORK OF ART: "Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams"
A cracker of a title, this one. Vilhelm Hammershoi's paintings are moving studies of light and life which somehow feel very modern although they were painted over a century ago. I love the way he brings such sensitivity and wonder to the very familiar things of home: the way light enters windows, non-spaces such as entrance halls, the views through rooms. He makes the ordinary extraordinarily beautiful. In shades of grey he focused on his immediate environment and gave it huge emotional power. He has been an influence on many film-makers. The show at the Royal Academy this summer was much overdue. (It ran until September 7th, then moved to the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, where it stays until December 7th.)

CITY: Stockholm
I've spent a lot of time in Stockholm recently. It is a great mix of all the things that make cities exciting--people, ideas, culture, hipness--and nature is very close by. The city and nature are much more integrated than in London (an architect might go off to an island and chop wood at weekends, for instance)--partly because of the scale, but also because of the way people are, slightly puritanical and straightforward. It's not the most hedonistic city, but I think I could live there. It is very balanced: few cities give you the chance to be physical and cerebral at the same time; but we are part of nature, and a body requires both.

JOURNEY: Cartagena to Baru, Colombia, by boat
I'm married to a Colombian and his uncle lives on the island of Baru. It is over an hour by boat from Cartagena--a surreal city, built by the Spanish in the midst of the jungle on this tropical coast, a triumph of the imagination. It is no wonder Gabriel García Márquez chooses to live there. The boat passes between two towers at the mouth of the harbour, which used to have a chain between them to stop British ships entering, and you head out to sea where there are huge waves. You can either hire a boat, or get the city boat which is crowded and low in the water and goes early in the morning before the waves get too big. Scary but amazing.

Picture credit: Agenda (top), Stephen Bruckner (right)

(Rebecca Willis is an Associate Editor at Intelligent Life. See previous "7 Wonders" interviews with Belinda Earl, chief executive of Jaeger, and Carlos Ghosn, chief executive at Renault.)

THE BEST RETAIL WINE LIST IN LONDON

Tim Atkin — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:18:33 +0000

TIM ATKIN | THE WINE-LIST INSPECTOR | November 13th 2008

Dodge the tourists wandering around Fortnum & Mason's food hall, and head to the wine bar in the basement, writes Tim Atkin. An oenophilic hush pervades 1707, where patrons can sample from the 1,200-bottle wine-list ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

Fortnum & Mason has mastered the art of packaging and selling comestible England. Judging by the accents of the people wandering through its premises, happy to pay over the odds for tea, fruitcake and Burlington breakfast marmalade, most of its customers are tourists. Shopping there feels a bit like visiting the duty free area at Heathrow, give or take the interminable delays.

The Englishness of the food hall--some of the assistants even wear tails--obscures one very important fact: Fortnum & Mason has one of the best retail wine lists in London, with 1,200 bottles sourced from all over the world. Its prices are surprisingly keen, especially when compared with the likes of Harrods and Selfridges; it has an excellent selection of own labels; and in Tim French it has a young, fresh-faced buyer who has transformed the fusty image of Fortnum's wine department.

You don't have to visit the store to buy its wines. Fortnum & Mason has a website and will deliver for a one-off charge of £7. It also operates a case discount of 8%. But if you do go to Piccadilly, you can now drink as well as look at the bottles. Since October 2006 Fortnum & Mason has had its own wine bar, called 1707, where diners can try wines from the main retail list for an extra £10 (plus 12.5% service charge). This is not an entirely new concept--Vinoteca and Green & Blue got there first in London--but it is nonetheless welcome for that, especially in St James's, which is prime rip-off territory.

The bar itself, separated from the wine department by a pair of slightly forbidding cage doors, is stylish, even if it is something of a mixed metaphor, design-wise: brick vaults, wooden, log cabin-style panels on the walls and dangling black lamps. Appropriately, the wines are the focus of the room, housed inside a temperature-controlled steel and glass cube. I suspect that no one goes to 1707 for the atmosphere or the rather predictable, tapas-style food, but if you want to drink some very good wines at more than reasonable prices, head for Fortnum's basement.

There are two ways to buy here: the first is to visit the wine department and pick something off the shelf yourself; the second is to order one of the wine flights from a waiter. These are presented on a stainless steel tree in a trio of 125ml glasses. In price order, they are themed as rosé (£10.25), lunch (£11), Alsace (£13.50), Pinot Noir (£13.75), Chardonnay (£14), Sauvignon (£14.50), Australian (£15), Syrah/Shiraz (£16) and celebration (£34). All of these are available by the single 175cl serving too, as part of a by-the-glass selection of 50 wines.

The flights are generally well chosen and avoid obvious selections. I tried the Pinot Noir and Syrah/Shiraz flights and, in each case, liked two of the three choices. The 2005 Fortnum & Mason Bourgogne Rouge from Drouhin, the 2006 Santa Maria Pinot Noir, Au Bon Climat, the 2006 Crozes-Hermitage, Les Meysonniers, Chapoutier and the 2006 Fortnum & Mason Barossa Shiraz from Torbreck are all great examples of what they are supposed to be, but I found both the 2005 Pegasus Bay Waipara Pinot Noir and the 2001 Il Bosco Syrah, Luigi D'Alessandro clunky and over-extracted. Nonetheless, this is an interesting and inexpensive way to try a bracket of wines.

If this is one of 1707's USPS the other is access to such a large and varied range of wines, with particular strengths in fizz, red Bordeaux, Burgundy, the Loire, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria and Sherry. Prices in the wine department range from £6.90 for the 2005 Fortnum's Côtes du Rhône to £2,950 for 1990 DRC La Tâche, so you've got a wide choice.

You'll also find an impressive selection of half bottles, for which you pay only £5 corkage at 1707. My only gripe about buying the more expensive wines on the list is that you will be charged 12.5% service on top of the bottle and corkage price, but this is common to most restaurants in Britain.

1707 is a great idea that doesn't quite work at the moment, largely because of its subterranean location. Once the main store is closed, the exit runs past the toilets and emerges in the middle of another restaurant, the Fountain. As things stand, it's worth going to 1707 to plunder Fortnum's excellent list, but located on another floor and given a more adventurous menu, this would be a destination venue for wine lovers.

1707 at Fortnum & Mason 181 Piccadilly, London W1. +44 (0)20 7734 8040

IN THE BIN

Number of wines: 1,200

By the glass: 50

Under £30: 302

Over £100: 165

Best value: 2005 Louis Carillon Puligny-Montrachet £48.50

Worst value: None: all are competitively priced

Picture credit: Sam Barker (of Tim Atkin)

(Tim Atkin is a Master of Wine. In his last piece for Intelligent Life he checked out the wine list at the Fat Duck.)

INSIDER TRADING: WOODLAND

Jakub Figurski — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:00:48 +0000

INTO THE WOODS | November 12th 2008

Buying a wood brings many benefits, and it’s not necessarily the preserve of the super-rich. Pete Leeson of the Woodland Trust UK explains...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

Prices in woodlands have soared and they may carry on going...or they may not. However, it's still possible to find small areas in Britain for the price of a decent family car, say, £25,000. There is some fantastic heritage; you can often see the twists and turns in natural and cultural history. As a conservationist I'd say that buying a woodland can give you much pleasure and you should own woodland with the intention to change very little about it. Take good advice--contact the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors--and aim for pleasure, not financial return or development.

Some people want peace and tranquillity, far from roads and away from the madding crowd. Others want coppicing and wood fuel potential. Many have a desire to pass on something of value to their children, and you'll even find the odd naturist. For a weekend purchaser who wants a retreat, I'd recommend a small, broadleaved wood; partly due to evocative things like birdsong, wildflowers and sunlight dappling the leaves--but also because conifer stands are usually filled with evenly aged, densely packed trees, making them much darker, danker, less happy places.

Finding a wood isn't difficult. Because of replanting, commercial and conservation efforts, Britain still has an average of 12% woodland cover, though it might also be worth looking abroad. France has close to 30%, and Finland 75%. You should take into account all the costs: solicitors' fees, public-liability insurance, a survey by a woodland consultant, any necessary fencing and tracks, and making safe any dangerous trees. (Accidents from trees falling are thankfully very rare--eating peanuts is much more dangerous.) And consider the tax breaks: for non-commercial woodland you'll only pay stamp duty on plots over £150,000--and there's no council tax to worry about. ~ INTERVIEW BY JAKUB FIGURSKI

WHERE TO BUY

Savills Farms & Estates Branches across the United Kingdom, +44 (0)20 7409 8644

John Clegg & Co The Old Coach House, Southern Road, Thame, Oxfordshire, and branches, +44 (0)1844 215800,

Woodlands.co.uk 35 Giant Arches Road, London SE24, +44 (0)20 7737 0070

Pierre Chavet 61 Avenue de la Grande Armée, Paris 75782, +33 (0)1 45 00 17 37

IMAGE: ny156uk/flickr

(See previous "Insider Trading" stories about barbecues, training shoes, Persian carpets and wild mushrooms.)

PARTYING FOR CHARITY

Allison Schrager — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:05:37 +0000

ALLISON SCHRAGER | THE MICROPHILANTHROPIST | November 12th 2008

"Yes, children are starving and puppies are dying, and you should probably support these causes", writes Allison Schrager. "But better to support a great museum than my local pub" ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In my pursuit of community through philanthropy I learned there is another way to spend your time and money: going to parties. I don't mean fancy benefits and galas; those are not the domain of microphilanthropists, who can't spend thousands of dollars on an evening of charitable giving. But I discovered that it could be fun to become a member of a non-profit group and regularly attend its modest events.

On the surface, it seems to be an ineffective way to give to charity. How can attending parties possibly make the world a better place? In the current economic climate, it seems frivolous, even dated, a relic of a gilded age that ended only a few short months ago. In these spare times, giving money directly to the charities you believe in, instead of forcing them to throw costly social events, feels more appropriate.

Nonetheless, a few months ago I became a "Young Fellow" at the Frick museum ($500 per year; "all but $340 is tax deductible"). I'll admit I felt slightly ambivalent about it. As much as I enjoy going to museums and sincerely believe they help to make the world a better place, giving to them is not quite on a par with giving to a cancer hospital. Cultural institutions are a luxury in our society. Surely there are more pressing concerns.

My agenda was to join an organisation that promotes community. In my research, I found that cultural institutions have a monopoly on providing frequent, affordable events that also, frankly, seem fun. My hard-earned, limited income could instead go toward feeding starving children in Africa, which is surely a worthier cause than maintaining the art collection of an old mansion on Fifth Avenue. But starving children do not provide fun parties. Point: museum.

Another concern I had was that the Frick has a reputation for catering to socialites. It has become known as a place to find your future rich ex-husband. Did joining such an organisation make me a social climber? A gold digger? Did its popularity among the posh set undermine my purpose for joining?

The truth is, the Frick is my favourite museum in New York, and meeting others who share my enthusiasm for it appealed to me. Sure, I worried that being in a room of angular socialites angling for a well-connected spouse would make me feel uncomfortable, even repulsed by the very community I was hoping to pursue. Still, I love the Frick collection. If their events left me wanting, at least I could spend the next year regularly admiring its Vermeers.

My first event was a summertime garden reception. Feeling a little nervous, I gulped down a mint julep and introduced myself to some of the other young fellows. Some explained that they had joined to meet new people and heard about the good parties. Others said they genuinely loved the museum and wanted to meet like-minded people.

One man I spoke with had been a member for more than ten years. "When I first joined," he said, "there were only about 40 young fellows. We all loved the museum, went to all the events and grew quite close. Over the years people moved and it caught on with the social set. Now events fill up quickly and are crowded and photographed by people like that", he said, motioning to a legendary society photographer. We catch his eye and he comes over clutching his camera, looks us up and down, and keeps walking. "The events are still fun, though, and now there are more of them and the museum has much better funding, but sometimes I miss the way it used to be," he said, wistfully.

Later I spoke with Heidi Rosenau, the Frick's communication officer, who has been with the Frick for ten years. She conceded that the Young Fellows Ball--launched in 2000, and now a big social event in New York--has been instrumental in drawing in new members. The Frick recently passed the 4,000-member mark (this includes all types of members, not just Young Fellows), which is impressive for a relatively small museum.

An increase in membership and greater visibility benefit a museum, but at what cost? According the to the Frick's 2007 Annual Report, the Frick took in nearly $1.9m in membership dues (again, this includes all types of members), an increase of nearly 16% from 2006, and nearly double than the amount from 1999. Income from dues increased almost every year since 1998, the exception being 2001, when they fell slightly and then stagnated until 2004. But with the economy going south, most museums expect donations and memberships to dry up.

Membership dues easily pay for the member events, and seem to help cover expenses that benefit the wider public. In 2007, the museum spent about $1.7m on special exhibits, concerts, lectures and special programmes (including exhibitions and programmes available to regular visitors). "It's not all about cost-benefit", explained Mary Emerson, associate director for development at the Frick. "It's about encouraging deeper relationships that, in turn, encourage philanthropy, and membership is just one of the vehicles we employ towards that positive goal."

I've certainly come to enjoy the lectures and receptions in the last few months, and I have been impressed by the diverse array of the people I've met (albeit few wealthy bachelors, mind you). That the museum offered a full programme of demographic-friendly events made becoming a member seem worthwhile, and encouraged me to donate more than I would ordinarily (in part because the expense is both charitable and social, making it an efficient use of resources). When I am boozing up at the Frick, I can also feel like I am doing some good. Better to support a great museum than my local pub. I think I'll renew my membership next year.

Yes, children are starving and puppies are dying, and you should probably support these causes. But if you are looking to expand your social circle, joining a local museum is a nice way to get out and have fun while supporting a worthy cause. I mean, it's hard to do better than mint juleps and Vermeer.

Picture credit: Young Fellows Ball, Mary Hilliard

(Allison Schrager is an economist based in New York. Her last microphilanthropy column was "Does one Abused Woman = 100 Abused Puppies?"; her last article for More Intelligent Life was "How to Cheat at Everything".)

THE PLAYLIST: ALFRED BRENDEL

Richard Morrison — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:42:53 +0000

EIGHT ESSENTIAL RECORDINGS | November 11th 2008

A great pianist is about to play his last note in public--but the recordings will live on. Richard Morrison chooses Brendel’s best ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, Autumn 2008

Self-taught, prodigiously intellectual and utterly devoid of razzle or dazzle, Alfred Brendel has nevertheless sustained one of the great musical careers. Now, at 77, he is retiring. He'll be remembered for profound, beautiful and cogent interpretations of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Liszt, Haydn and Brahms. And also for the humour twinkling behind his professorial visage and well-tempered pianism. His favourite occupation, he once said, is laughing. Here are eight essential recordings, all on Philips.

FIVE PIANO CONCERTOS BEETHOVEN
With Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic in glorious support, Brendel captures the 18th-century wit of the first three concertos, the lyricism of No 4 (especially in the otherworldly slow movement), and the majestic Romantic sweep of the "Emperor". You'll never need another recording of a Beethoven piano concerto.

PIANO CONCERTOS K466, 491 MOZART
Witty, lithe, elegant readings of two of Mozart's most sublime concertos, with the excellent Scottish Chamber Orchestra directed by another tireless veteran--Sir Charles Mackerras.

SONATA IN B MINOR LISZT
A heroic test of any pianist's technique, imagination and musicality. Brendel makes every note in this epic piece sound inevitable. On no other recording can you follow so clearly the continuous evolution of Liszt's themes.

TROUT QUINTET SCHUBERT
Another collaboration, another meeting of kindred spirits. This time Brendel's associates include the honey-toned violinist Thomas Zehetmair, and the result is a performance of inspiring impetus and warmth.

PIANO SONATAS, OPP 109, 110, 111 BEETHOVEN
For a taste of Brendel's magisterial approach to Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas, try this 1996 recording of the final three. Music that often sounds unfathomably enigmatic is made crystal-clear. Brendel draws the listener irresistibly into Beethoven's world.

SECOND PIANO CONCERTO BRAHMS
Massive 19th-century warhorse superbly interpreted by Brendel at his most intense. The Berlin Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado add to the splendour of a performance that somehow manages to be both intellectually compelling and ethereally poetic.

WINTERREISE SCHUBERT
Brendel's late-flowering artistic partnership with the young German baritone Matthias Goerne produced this riveting account of Schubert's hauntingly sad song-cycle--the winter's journey of a spurned lover to his lonely death. Recorded live at an unforgettable concert in the Wigmore Hall in 2003.

COMPLETE WORKS FOR PIANO AND CELLO BEETHOVEN
Probably the disc that gave Brendel the greatest personal satisfaction: a joyous, affectionate collaboration with his talented cellist son, Adrian. And it's a true meeting of equals, too--not a masterclass from Dad.

Brendel's final tour ends at Musikverein, Vienna, on December 18th

IMAGE SOURCE: Raoul Pazzi/flickr

The Playlist is a regular feature of Intelligent Life magazine. See our picks for rock music, romance and Leonard Cohen.

(Richard Morrison is chief music critic of the Times. His last contribution to Intelligent Life was "The Visual CV: Daniel Barenboim" in the Winter 2007 issue.)