…and All That, a book about Latin grammar, is #4 #14 on Amazon in England.

Whoa! Charlotte Higgins explains all in the Guardian:

A clue to a reason for the success of Amo, Amas, Amat is also provided by Amazon, which has nominated as the volume’s “perfect partner” Beyond Words, John Humphrys’ cross book about the use of English in today’s degenerate world. In other words, Amo, Amas, Amat is, broadly, part of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves phenomenon and thus falls into the category of books that are ostensibly cris de coeur for the correct use of the apostrophe, say, while really, deep down, betraying a sort of posh anxiety about standards in society generally.

I’ll buy that. The really sad thing about it is that this book’s predecessor in the status anxiety sweepstakes, Eats, Shoots and Leaves—a massive hit and runaway bestseller a few years ago—was a wretched piece of shit from a professional point of view, as Louis Menand wrote memorably in the New Yorker.

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause (“I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with”) and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes.

Ouch. Lynne Truss cried all the way to the bank.
But back to Amo, Amas, Amat. The Guardian piece is worth a read, even if just for this bit about the value of studying Latin.

Latin is about being thrown a passage you have never seen before and being asked to decode it - there’s still much more risk attached than there is with other subjects. Even the really clever [students] come up against something they just can’t do immediately, something that’s really tricky. And it’s good for them.”

Then there’s the literature. …[P]upils become mini-classicists. It’s got it all, really. It gives them a better English vocabulary, it helps them read English, especially English poetry, more analytically, because they are used to close study of passages, and then you are reading Virgil - really hardcore literature.”

I’ll vouch for that. I took four years of Latin. It was great, for all those reasons.

Veni, vidi, vinci. vici.

Listening to my iPod this morning, I got an adrenaline rush from some of the lyrics to ”No Retreat, No Surrender.”

‘Cause we made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Blood brothers in the stormy night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
There’s a war outside still raging
You say it ain’t ours anymore to win
I want to sleep beneath
Peaceful skies in my lover’s bed
With a wide open country in my eyes
And these romantic dreams in my head

Once we made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, baby, no surrender
Blood brothers in a stormy night
With a vow to defend
No retreat, baby, no surrender

Googling the lyrics, I came upon a little speech Bruce made as he campaigned for John Kerry in October 2004:

 I think the human principles of economic justice — just healing the sick, health care, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, a living wage so folks don’t have to break their backs and still not make ends meet, the protection of our environment, a sane and responsible foreign policy, civil rights and the protection and safeguarding of our precious democracy here at home — I believe that Senator Kerry honors these ideals.

So let’s roll up our sleeves. That’s why I’m here today, to stand alongside Senator Kerry and to tell you that the country we carry in our hearts is waiting. And together we can move America towards her deepest ideals. And besides, we had a sax player in the [White] House — we need a guitar player in the White House.

Alright — this is for John. This is for you, John.

[Bruce launches into No Retreat, No Surrender]

Funny thing about those lyrics, though: Bruce sanitized them and made them safe for anti-war Democrats.

There’s a ”war outside still raging”? What war? There’s no war here.

We made a promise we swore we’d always remember
No retreat, believe me, no surrender
Blood brothers in the stormy night with a vow to defend
No retreat, believe me, no surrender

Now on the street tonight the lights grow dim
The walls of my room are closing in
But it’s good to see your smiling face and to hear your voice again
We could sleep in the twilight by the river side
With a wide open country in our hearts
And these romantic dreams in our heads

We made a promise…  

Fuck you, Bruce.

They say there’s a war outside still ragin’ and they say it ain’t ours anymore to win.

No retreat, baby. And no fucking surrender.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: I know I’m quoting the annoying Thomas Friedman ($$) Except this time he’s got a few things right.

Iraq was already pretty broken before we got there — broken, it seems, by 1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions. It was held together only by Saddam’s iron fist.

Given that reality [whose import the United States government utterly failed to grasp, not to mention plan for---my point, not Friedman's], the results we could have accomplished in Iraq were way less than the grand promises so disastrously made by the Bushies:

Had we properly occupied the country, and begun political therapy, it is possible an American iron fist could have held Iraq together long enough to put it on a new course.

Well, maybe, I say: we might have been able to do something if al Qaeda hadn’t become a factor (which Friedman mysteriously fails to mention). Now that things are such a mess, Friedman continues, we have only two options.

This has left us with two impossible choices. If we’re not ready to do what is necessary to crush the dark forces in Iraq and properly rebuild it, then we need to leave — because to just keep stumbling along as we have been makes no sense. It will only mean throwing more good lives after good lives into a deeper and deeper hole filled with more and more broken pieces.

Um, no. Whether or not the media admits it, whether or not we call the conflict a civil war, we are still fighting al Qaeda in Iraq. So Bush will not retreat—that’s what my gut tells me. We shall see.

Finally I hear some people making sense about Jesse Jackson’s sad and stupid appropriation of the Michael Richards’s racist rant “crisis” for his own (well-intentioned) ends (racial harmony). Perhaps people were reacting to the means he suggested for attaining those ends—the first of which was his ban on the word “nigger.” Period. (What? you got free speech issues? Jackson claims the word is “unprotected.”)

As usual, though, he made it into a crusade and took things too far: Withholding his forgiveness of Richards last weekend even after the washed-up comedian had spent two hours “confessing” and repenting on Jackson’s radio show; urging a boycott of the new Seinfeld DVD, and accusing CNN (while on CNN’s air) of being “all day, all night, all white”—it was a massive overreaction.

The L.A. Times reports that some of Jackson’s detractors are prominent blacks (not that you’ll see them on television—they’re too rational, and the media would rather cover the hysteria, and the repeated confessions of Richards. Because it’s great television):

Joe Hicks, vice president of the civil rights organization Community Advocates Inc., called the move to ban the word “just silly and outrageous.” Outside the stray white bigot, the N-word is pervasive only in black communities and among hip-hop and rap artists, “not in the business world, not in the American court system, not in the government.”

Hicks, an African American and former director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, said Waters and others shouldn’t be trying to alter the course of contemporary urban culture and accused them of “racial opportunism.”

Hicks finds the essence of the problem:

“Here’s this guy [Richards], who’s been nearly out of work with virtually no career to speak of, who’s hand-grenaded his career in front of the whole world … and he’s supposed to be some sort of barometer for race relations? It’s the ultimate absurdity,” Hicks said.

Randall Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law, who’s written about the use of the “n” word, is troubled by the brouhaha over this “crisis”—and specifically about the drive to ban its use—because it doesn’t actually address racism. It addresses only our behavior in the public square.

“There is something troublesome going on,” Kennedy said, “when this amount of energy is targeted toward people and a phenomenon that in the overall scheme of things is probably marginal.”

The call for the boycott of Seinfeld DVD hasn’t worked, either.

Ironically, the publicity over Richards’ tirade may help spur sales of “Seinfeld: Season 7″ on DVD, which Jackson encouraged holiday shoppers to refrain from buying.

After less than a week on the market, it had zoomed to the 11th most popular DVD selling on Amazon.com.

As culture war issues go, the use of the word “nigger” (among other slurs) is actually a really important one to consider and to discuss openly, as John Ridley wrote recently. I wrote about it here.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a new phenomenon to consider [see Hicks above]: “racial opportunism.”

Nice notice for Ethan Hawke today in the New York Times review of Stoppard’s play Vogage:

Though Herzen dominates the trilogy (and the brooding Mr. O’Byrne certainly seems up to the task), it is Bakunin fils and his friend Belinsky, a socially inept literary critic, who set the energetic pace for “Voyage.” The duty is joyously fulfilled by Mr. Hawke, born to play the excitable egoist Bakunin, and Mr. Crudup, unmatchable in conveying the discomforts of self-consciousness.

Hey—I like Ethan Hawke

Actors who make it beyond teenage stardom are a rare breed. It takes a lot of self-discipline…or something…to survive. Hawke is among them.

Explorers (Hawke’s insanely talented co-star in this film, River Phoenix, overdosed in L.A.)

Dead Poets Society (Robert Sean Leonard, Hawke’s co-star, has also had great success in the New York theater)

A Midnight Clear (with Gary Sinise)

Reality Bites (with Winona Ryder, who has completely disappeared)

Gattaca

Before Sunset