Pulitzer board to fiction jury: why did you give us this crap to read?

NMC notes that the Pulitzer Prizes are out, and for the first time since 1977, the board has refused to make an award.

The way it works is, a jury picks three finalists and then the board votes. This year's finalists were Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and The Pale King by DFW. (I can't imagine that last was a good book, and know nothing of the other two.) No word whether the board had a hung vote, hated all three, or just what.

... Hung vote, it's said:

"The main reason (for the fiction decision) is that no one of the three entries received a majority, and thus after lengthy consideration, no prize was awarded," said Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. "There were multiple factors involved in these decisions, and we don't discuss in detail why a prize is given or not given." * * *

Susan Larson, chairwoman of the Pulitzer fiction jury, stressed that it wasn't up to the jury to select the winner. Rather, she said, its job was to submit three finalists to the board. "The decision not to award the prize this year rests solely with the Pulitzer board," she wrote in an email to the AP.

The board has 20 members, including such luminaries as Thomas Friedman (himself heavily favored to win Wanker of the Decade) and a co-founder of Politico - heavy with newspaper editors, which perhaps suggests part of the problem: a single board that evaluates journalism, fiction, poetry ....

UPDATE: Aaaaand it's Friedman.

Annals of finding the glass half-full

Democrats are taking cheer in the fact that Mitt Romney is a pretty unpopular guy:

A new ABC News-Washington Post poll finds Mitt Romney has emerged from the Republican primary season with the weakest favorability rating on record for a presumptive presidential nominee since 1984, trailing President Obama in personal popularity by 21 percentage points.

Romney is the first likely nominee to be underwater - seen more unfavorably than favorably - in eight presidential primary seasons across the past 28 years.

An unpopular guy, that is, who's edging Obama in the polls (or at least is statistically tied).

If Obama is neck-and-neck with the least popular candidate since Walter Mondale, that does not bode well.

Money and justice

In welcome news, Judge Primeaux reports that the judicial pay-raise bill, which raises some filing fees to fund long-overdue salary increases for the state judiciary, has been signed into law. Yay!

You get what you pay for, and what you don't pay for, you don't get—as Justice Dickinson is reminding folks in Washington:

Mississippi Supreme Court Presiding Justice Jess H. Dickinson will participate in the White House Forum on the State of Civil Legal Assistance at 1 p.m. Tuesday, April 17, at the White House. * * *

The forum will focus on access to civil justice, benefits of legal aid for the judicial system and the effect on courts when they risk being overwhelmed with unrepresented litigants.

Justice Dickinson said, “I view this as an incredible opportunity to provide information to people who make decisions about funding this critical program. I hope that it will help the President and Congress formulate reasonable budget priorities.”

Funding for the Legal Services Corporation has been cut in recent years. Legal Services Corporation funding in Mississippi is currently $4.7 million. The state’s two Legal Services organizations currently have 21 attorneys, and have cut back staff and closed offices. In 1985, there were 259 lawyers working for Legal Services offices in Mississippi, with a $6.8 million budget.

“We are going backwards,” Justice Dickinson said. * * *

“The primary message that I hope to get across is that the principle of access to justice and fairness in the courts is not at the same level as other spending priorities,” Justice Dickinson said. “The right to fairness in our courts is not only a basic, fundamental, Constitutional right of every citizen, but it is one of the government’s absolute obligations.”

I am guessing those dollar figures aren't adjusted for inflation. $6.8M in 1985 equates to $14.5M in 2012, which would mean today's budget in real terms is one-third what it was back in the heyday of the Reagan years.

Pet peeve: "M.I. Self, Esquire"

At some point in law school, students should be informed that, should they ever practice law, "Esquire" is not something one calls oneself. Cue Bryan Garner:

"Esq. is ... not used on oneself, e.g. neither on a card (which bears Mr. [sic]) nor on a stamped-and-addressed envelope enclosed for a reply * * *" Alan S.C. Ross, "U and Non-U: An Essay in Sociological Linguistics," in Noblesse Oblige (Nancy Mitford ed., 1956). But somehow, the idea has gotten out that Esq. is something you put after your own name ....

—Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage (2d ed.). Don't do this, folks. Not every reader will infer that you are ignorant, naive, or self-important, but in a profession where image counts, it's a silly mistake to make.

... Nancy Mitford? Yes, Nancy Mitford.

Norway killer claims self-defense

OSLO, Norway (AP) — With a defiant closed-fist salute, a right-wing fanatic admitted Monday to a bomb-and-shooting massacre that killed 77 people in Norway but pleaded not guilty to criminal charges, saying he was acting in self-defense.

Fortunately, Norway's statutes do not mirror those of Florida, or else the courts would probably be forced to acquit. [Rimshot.]

Is the judicial counterrevolution underway?

It's difficult to believe that Jerry Smith of the 5th Circuit would've been so bold as to call out the President of the United States over a press conference Q&A had the ACA oral arguments at the Supreme Court not put the scent of blood into the water.

Now some other judges are happily anticipating the judicial counterrevolution:

In a concurring opinion today in Hettinga v. United States, Judge Janice Rogers Brown (joined by Judge Sentelle) contends that the Supreme Court should overturn its rational basis caselaw in the economic area and return to a Lochner-era regime of judicial scrutiny for economic regulations.

Orin Kerr confines himself to tsking that such an op-ed piece was placed in a judicial opinion, but the merits of the position are catnip to the conservatives who have thought for 80 years that the country went wrong in the New Deal and have longed to return America to the Gilded Age.

The ACA opinion(s) will be meaningful for a lot more than whether or not the individual mandate or Obamacare get overturned. The rationale will be the real story. Will the Court contrive some Bush-v.-Gore one-shot rationalization for a nakedly political act? Or will the Court actually establish its decision on case law by overturning, or "distinguishing" so as to effectively overturn, the modern understanding of the Commerce Clause? Are the Randy Barnetts and Janice Rogers Browns the wave of the future?

Pop quiz on professional ethics!

Inspired by this Philip Thomas post ....

PREMISES: You're a trial lawyer with considerable success in premises-liability cases in a particular venue. A potential client wants to hire you to file such a suit for him in that venue.

The facts strike you as dubious at best, and on the one hand, you don't really think he's entitled to any significant relief.

On the other hand, you've won six- and seven-figure verdicts in this venue for some pretty dubious plaintiffs. You can predict that, with a little luck on the judge assignment and jury pool, you can do the same for this guy. It may not stand up on appeal, but then, the insurer may settle rather than risk your going to a jury.

If you haven't accepted the client, is it unprofessional to take his case?


... My answer in the comment thread.

The bookshelf

Haven't done one of these in a long time, so I've forgotten a good bit of reading. Not that it matters. Anyway:

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove series: I read these in story order, not publication order. They're page-turners, though I question whether I'll read any of them again. No, I never saw the mini-series.

Ross Macdonald, Lew Archer series: found a good many of these at Choctaw Books and have been consuming them like potato chips. Macdonald may be more clever at plotting than Chandler, but Chandler is the better stylist and Marlowe is the more memorable character. OTOH I'm only on, what, book # 7.

Michael Grant, Saint Peter: picked this up re: the class on Acts that I'm trying to lead. No one should ever have high expectations from Grant, but the book was weak even from that limited perspective. I'm sufficiently aware of some of the debates around the history of the early church and of the New Testament's composition to catch Grant when he simply takes some fact for granted (heh) without mentioning that anyone might think differently.

A.N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle: thus far a much better book than Grant's. Written from the same relentlessly secular perspective, but with a richer appreciation of the debates and the context - lots of context (what did Paul's near-contemporaries write about Tarsus? etc.). The only thing I've wondered about is Wilson's assumption that Paul really did study under Gamaliel the Elder, which I recall Garry Wills' being unconvinced of ... for some reason ... that I'll have to go back and check ....

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, The Glass Key, The Dain Curse: these are books I'd read a long while back but had forgotten in large part. It would be interesting to think about how each novel fails in some respect, though Red Harvest, the best of the three, may not. Ned in The Glass Key never quite comes together as a character in the way that, say, Sam Spade does. And The Dain Curse is just an implausible mess. But bad Hammett is still better than good lots-of-other-people.

J.E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth I: presumably not the title it bore when published in 1934? The classic biography, judicious and never dull.

Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: everything you will ever want to know about Himmler, for whom the tidying-up of Europe's Jews was simply a preliminary to the wonderful future Germania, an empire defended by stalwart, micro-managed SS knights. In a better universe, Himmler would've been the slightly nuts proprietor of the health-food store down the street, who would detain unwary or like-minded shoppers with his theories about "ice people" and the Pyramids. As it turned out, he became the most feared man in Europe and one of the darkest criminals ever. History's a bitch.

But please, please, don't combine the two

Just as future historians will conclude that the internet was invented for the distribution of pornography, they will likely also decide that the purpose behind the invention of photography was to record images of cats.


... Really, it's a little mindboggling:

To put that 800Gbps figure into perspective, the internet only handles around half an exabyte of traffic every day, which equates to around 50Tbps — in other words, a single porn site accounts for almost 2% of the internet’s total traffic. There are dozens of porn sites on the scale of YouPorn, and hundreds that are the size of ExtremeTech or your favorite news site. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.

Evidence of incompetence

Judge Primeaux relays the news that Ole Miss Law [EDIT: like MC Law as well] no longer requires its students to take the Evidence course.

I suppose one could debate whether to have any required courses in law school, but any sane list of requirements would have to include Evidence. I don't care what kind of law a student thinks he or she is going to practice - Evidence is too fundamental to omit.

If any of you happens to run into the new law dean, you might ask him what the heck his school thinks it's teaching. But more polite-like.

Character is fate

He was always writing, and even then he wrote long. His sixth-grade essays dwarfed everyone else’s. His senior thesis at Princeton — on existentialism in Hemingway — was so long, he was told, that the college’s English department subsequently instituted a rule limiting the number of pages a senior could turn in.

The New York Times has a long profile on Robert A. Caro, who " is now spending more time writing the years of Lyndon Johnson than Johnson spent living them, and he isn’t close to being done yet." Long, but not as long as Caro would've written it.

Mark Twain and the hard-boiled style

Stumbled upon a lecture of Twain's on the prose style of James Fenimore Cooper. Summary would be invidious:

Here is a passage from Chapter xi of The Last of the Mohicans, one of the most famous and most admired of Cooper’s books:

Notwithstanding the swiftness of their flight, one of the Indians had found an opportunity to strike a straggling fawn with an arrow, and had borne the more preferable fragments of the victim, patiently on his shoulders, to the stopping-place. Without any aid from the science of cookery, he was immediately employed, in common with his fellows, in gorging himself with this digestible sustenance. Magua alone sat apart, without participating in the revolting meal, and apparently buried in the deepest thought.

This little paragraph is full of matter for reflection and inquiry.

And he goes on to pick it apart, sentence by sentence, needless word by needless word, until he arrives at what he thinks Cooper should have written:

During the flight one of the Indians had killed a fawn and he brought it into camp. He and the others ate the meat raw. Magua sat apart, without participating in the revolting meal.

Though Twain has some qualms about "revolting," since it's vague who is revolted - presumably not Magua.

And that seems nicely to illustrate how we get to Hemingway and Hammett.

The PDF is excellent for distribution to a composition class, as Twain illustrates the editor's mind in action.

Hillary turns out to be kinda cool actually

Hillary Clinton is apparently a big fan of “Texts From Hillary,” the viral site imagining the Secretary of State messaging various celebrities and politicians on her Blackberry. So much so that she invited the creators, Stacy Lambe and Adam Smith, who TPM interviewed this week, to join her at the State Department for an in-person meeting. She even came up with her own“Text With Hillary” and signed it

- TPM. 2016! 2016! 2012!

Let the (general) games begin!

As Santorum goes back to being a frothy mixture of semen, feces, and lubricant, Political Wire gives us a look at that folksy master of charm, Mitt Romney:

A mole gives Gawker video of Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity bantering before the taping of a Fox News interview in February.

"Of note: Romney professes his and his wife Ann's well-known love of horseriding, praising the qualities of the 'Austrian Warmbloods' that his wife rides -- they are 'dressage' horses, he notes -- while maintaining his own preference for the 'smoother gait' of his own 'Missouri foxtrotter.' Now there's nothing wrong with Mitt and his wife loving horseback riding. But remember this video next time Romney attacks Obama for golfing. The inherent elitism and snootiness of golf is NOTHING compared to competitive horseback riding. And I think Mitt loses points with the GOP base for his correct pronunciation of dressage. To GOP-voter ears it sounds not only gay, but even worse, French."

BuzzFeed isolates the part where Romney tries to do an impression of a gay man asking for a pink tie.

Though as Walter Kirn points out, empathy ain't Obama's strength, either:

Thanks perhaps to his peripatetic childhood and his absent father, Obama seems both hungry for crowd approval and limited in his ability to reach out to others. He's a bright, lonely boy who needs a lot from us but can't always return the favor, and he really only expresses public emotion when talking about Michelle, Malia, Sasha, or March Madness. The mythically cool and diffident figure whose blood supply goes mostly to his forebrain to oxygenate and nourish his IQ does make Romney, at moments, seem positively small-town, like a well-dressed Gomer Pyle on an especially great hair day. And Obama is also slightly better than Romney at dumbing himself down for humble occasions (he talks hoops more convincingly than Romney talks hunting and he bothers to drop his Gs when touring the heartland, a trick that is woefully willed-seeming and obvious although he appears to think he does it masterfully, the same way he thinks he does everything masterfully). But in the end he's just brittle where Romney's leaden, and twisty-quick where Romney's straight and plodding. Neither man shares your burdens; they both have the springy, tensile, perfect postures of students who like to get their hands up fast, expect to be called on, always are, and never fail to offer the right answer, or at least a convincing rationale for how their wrong answer was properly arrived at given the flawed information they had to work with.

I suppose the "rather have a beer with ______" is foreclosed by Romney's being a Mormon abstainer from such things. Of course, Dubya was supposedly on the wagon, and he still won that test.

Mike Wallace

"The debate between atheists and Christians is rather stale to me.... It's as difficult to get charity out of piety as it is to get reasonableness out of rationalism."
--Reinhold Niebuhr to Wallace, April 27, 1958, "The Mike Wallace Interview."

"The people who emerge in leadership positions in this country usually come from a lifetime of experience which doesn't prepare them for the conduct of foreign policy."
--Henry Kissinger to Wallace, July 13, 1958, "The Mike Wallace Interview."

"That's a question [i.e., segregation] of where every amateur is an expert and where experience counts for naught. We've worked out a system that is harmonious."
--Sen. James Eastland to Wallace, July 28, 1957, "The Mike Wallace Interview."

... Tim Noah marks the passing of Mike Wallace by posting some quotes from his pre-60 Minutes career. N.b. our own Senator Eastland on Mississippi's "harmonious system."