Eide’s former deputy Peter Galbraith, who was fired last month, has challenged Eide’s credibility, complaining he turned a blind eye towards the extent of the fraud in the August vote.
Eide on Friday called Galbraith a “footnote in the electoral history of Afghanistan.”
… forgets to attend the October meeting of the Garrett Park Town Council. Yet she still covers the event for the town paper.
How does she do it?
Scroll down to Wordplay.
In which case, a run-off or a power-sharing arrangement would ensue, and Afghanistan’s government would gain enormously in legitimacy.
Kudos to UD‘s buddy Peter – he’ll be on the Lehrer News Hour tonight – for having pressed the issue.
President Obama is concerned about how Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai will react to the United Nations-backed Electoral Complains Commission’s ruling which administration sources say will likely show that Karzai actually received less than 50% of the vote in Afghanistan’s election, once fraudulent ballots are removed from the final tally.
UD’s old friend Peter Galbraith is paying a high price for being right.
But there’s a great deal to be said for being right.
… rather than Karol, but otherwise it’s an okay article.
Excerpts:
In Poland, it was “Byczek Fernando.”
The Polish translation of “The Story of Ferdinand,” a children’s book that chronicles the peaceful life of a Spanish bull who preferred the smell of flowers to the heat of a bullfight is also one of the few children’s books Carlos Soltan can remember from growing up.
So when Soltan and his wife, Margaret, moved into the former home of its author, Munro Leaf, in 1995, the couple began making the abode into “Ferdinand House,” a residence and shrine to the peaceful bull.
“It seemed appropriate to somehow maintain the continuity, preserve the spirit of Munro Leaf,” Soltan said.
Margaret Soltan, an English professor and writer, had grown up across the street from the house, but didn’t know Munro. She knew his wife, Margaret as a potter, adventurer and all-around “strong lady,” but upon moving into the airy cottage with giant windows, felt a writer’s belonging.
“It was such an irony to move into Margaret Leaf’s old house, and I thought it was such a marvelous irony that this was a writer’s house,” Margaret Soltan said. “I think it was when I slowly realized how beloved the book was. It just gradually occurred to me how really marvelous that book is.”
To pay tribute, the Soltans installed a small gold plaque by the door, proclaiming it “Ferdinand House.” In a town where folks know houses not by their current residents, but by their former ones, the Soltans had christened theirs for a larger-than-life fiction.
They installed two topiary bulls in the front yard, discovered after a long search at a Shenandoah roadside stand. The bulls, filled with sphagnum moss, sit not under Ferdinand’s favored Spanish cork tree, but just as serenely under the leafy canopy of Garrett Park. A Picasso sketch of bulls hung in the hall was bought in remembrance of Leaf. For years, the Soltans kept a copy of the tale by the door.
The book, written in 1936 — before the Leafs moved to Garrett Park — was received as a critique of the Spanish Civil War and universally adopted as a pacifist allegory. Leaf wrote more than 30 books, but “Ferdinand” has been read by generations of children and influenced pop culture. The band Fall Out Boy named an album “From Under the Cork Tree” after Ferdinand’s sitting spot, and singer-song writer Elliot Smith had a tattoo of the character.
“It was simple, the illustrations were very simple, the writing was very simple,” Margaret Soltan said. “Underneath the simplicity is kind of this fable, it’s not pushy or manipulative.”
The fable is still being told locally and not only in Garrett Park. Imagination Stage, a children’s theater in Bethesda, commissioned Washington, D.C. playwright Karen Zacharias to adapt the book into a musical in 2001. The result, “Ferdinand the Bull,” is being performed at the theater through Nov. 1.
Laurie Levy-Page, director of marketing at Imagination Stage, said she knew he was from Maryland but “had no idea Munro Leaf had lived nearby.”
… Margaret Soltan has frequently contemplated the character in blog posts about living in the house, from the children that stop to see the bull statue to her belief that the house somehow retains the essence of Leaf and his bull.
“My Ferdinands sit in the shade of a dogwood. Squirrels nibble their sphagnum moss; dogs bark at them. Children stop and point,” blogged Soltan last fall, noting that somewhere the couple even has stationery datelined Ferdinand House. “Is there such a thing as the spirit of a house? If there is, this one’s got a calm, expansive one, I guess.”
Why was I outside? … Watering, right.
Things looked dry, plus we bought
mums yesterday and I wanted to
give them a shower.
The dog was lying in the pachysandra,
watching me.
I set the sprinkler going,
with special attention to
the hydrangea and the new
mums. Then I sat in one
of the gray Adirondacks
and called the dog over.
While petting him, I noticed
a low-flying bird which on
closer inspection was a bat.
Plenty of them in Montgomery
County, and I am instructed to
feel grateful I’ve got them because
they eat my mosquitos.
It was late afternoon. Four o’clock.
The bat kept flying overhead.
For a couple of minutes, around
and around. It’s true I shuddered
a little bit.
A few years ago, I wrote an essay in the Garrett Park Bugle about why it was important to preserve the architecture and ambience of the town.
The next day, in the mail, I got a silver note card whose careful, beautiful calligraphy read:
MARGARET SOLTAN
TOWN PHILOSOPHER
I was especially flattered because it came from Donal McLaughlin, an eminent Garrett Parker — architect, designer, fellow writer.
Donal was famous around town for being very old — he just died at 102, and the New York Times has a long obit — and for being very political. His calligraphy was all over town on homemade signs which urged us to vote for various Town Council candidates (he supported Mr UD in his successful Council run). There were tons of other signs, most expressing some view of local, national, or international politics.
Donal objected to the expansion of the town’s main commercial building, Penn Place, and after the town voted to go ahead with the project, one of his signs appeared at the entry to the post office:
IF YOU HAVE TEARS,
PREPARE TO SHED
THEM NOW.
Brooding gray letters, funereal background.
*********************************
We used to brood, Mr UD and I, about the fact that in his hundreds Donal still drove. “I just saw McLaughlin in his car again,” Mr UD would say. “Driving it.” We’d look at each other, wide-eyed.
This is what the world will remain Donal for.
He designed the United Nations logo.
********************************
And speaking of the UN, UD‘s old friend Peter has been, as you may know, fired. Here’s his account of it.
… and then a longer canal walk
through Georgetown, where
the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
cuts through Washington.
UD stopped to pay her
respects to William O. Douglas,
an environmentalist who saved
the canal from people who
wanted to turn it into a
parkway. He was a Supreme
Court Justice too, as I’m
sure you know.
[Yes, it’s a creepy photo.
Only good one I could find.]
We saw many cormorants
in the trees, gazing at the
kayakers as if trying to decide
which ones to eat for lunch.
During last Saturday’s walk,
we decided we’d eventually
like to divide our time between
an apartment in Cracow, on
or near the Rynek, and an
apartment in Key West.
Today we decided we’d
eventually like to divide our
time between an apartment
in Old Town Warsaw and an
apartment one block off the
Boulevard Saint Germain.
… Gazette has been interviewing UD this afternoon about what it’s like living in Ferdinand House — which is what Les UDs call their Garrett Park house. The last owner of the house was Munro Leaf, who wrote Ferdinand. UD knew his widow, Margaret Leaf, slightly.
A photographer’s coming to the house this Sunday – the article will feature the two topiary bulls we have in the front yard.
UD will link to the article, of course, when it appears.
… at George Washington University.
La Kid’s on the phone with me: “My class right now in Funger has been cancelled and people are coming out of the building. They’re closing off streets. There are police cars and police everywhere.”
*******************
Update: From the radio: Foggy Bottom Metro and surrounding streets – and some buildings, I guess – had been shut down due to a suspicious package. They’ve now reopened. The package was examined and is not dangerous.
… but she often attended his lectures, and listened to his conversations with other professors and students [at the Warsaw Academy] on a range of issues related to modern art. She was inspired by his fresh and open attitude to art, his nonhierarchical approach to the applied arts, and his enthusiasm for his students. Abakanowicz came into closer contact with Soltan after her graduation, when he granted her permission to use studio space at the academy and encouraged her to submit her painted fabrics to interior and industrial design shows in the mid-1950s. His integrationalist philosophy, which tried to destroy the traditional division between ‘art’ and ‘craft,’ helped convince Abakanowicz that her textile work belonged within the language of contemporary art.”
UD’s late father-in-law, Jerzy Soltan, was an important influence on the sculptor Magda Abakanowicz.
UD smiled and remembered the many books about her in his Cambridge house when she read this article from The Daily Princetonian:
The nine-foot headless guardians of McCormick Hall have vanished. The collection of statues by 79-year-old Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, titled “Big Figures,” has been on loan to the University Art Museum for the past five years and was taken down this summer.
“We were sad to see the work go,” art museum director James Steward said in an e-mail. “It was a great piece to have for that length of time, and now we have a new opportunity to site something there that makes dynamic use of the space.”
… “Big Figures” — which is made up of 20 unique, bronze, headless, armless, backless, hollow human forms that each weigh 600 pounds — is only one work in a series of metal headless figures done by the artist, according to Abakanowicz’ website. In total, she has created more than 1,000 figures, which are displayed in museums and private collections in Italy, Australia, Venezuela, Japan and Israel, among other nations.
… The disappearance of the bronze statues has elicited a mixed response from students.
“I find it difficult to give good directions this year,” Rivka Cohen ’12 said. “I can’t say things like ‘Walk straight until you pass the extraordinarily disturbing visages of potentially modern art. When you’re level with the leftmost column of the giant, headless bodies, turn right.’ ”
… “They always seemed sinister and depressing to me,” [Avital] Hazony said. “It would be nice if [the art museum] had something as striking, but more positive, instead, since it is such a central location.”
Abakanowicz said she intended for “Big Figures” to be unsettling, though.
“It happened to me to live in times which were extraordinary by their various forms of collective hate and adulation,” Abakanowicz told the Princeton Weekly Bulletin in 2004, when the figures were originally installed.
“Marchers and parades worshipped leaders, great and good, who turned out to be mass murderers,” explained Abakanowicz, who lived through the occupation of Poland during World War II and the Soviet regime. “I was obsessed by the image of the crowd, manipulated like a brainless organism and acting like a brainless organism. I began to cast human bodies in burlap to finish in bronze, headless and shell-like. They constitute a sign of lasting anxiety.’’…
It’s 3:58 on a dreary afternoon. UD, fighting a cold, is in bed drinking tea and eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. Next to her, La Kid, visiting the old folks for the weekend, is asleep with her glasses still on and her right hand still holding Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol open to page forty.
The bad news is that La Kid loves Dan Brown. The good news is that she’s taking The Lost Symbol out of UD‘s house forever.
In the living room, Mr UD lies asleep on the couch, a legal pad resting on his chest. At his feet sleeps the dog.
Ecoute. It doesn’t get any better than this.
… which includes my remarks on the News Hour last night.
They used my best bit — the bit about serious literature and the mystery of life.
If I am, it’ll be in the second half of the hour.
The segment is a report about Dan Brown’s blockbuster, The Lost Symbol. It mainly involves showing viewers various locations around Washington that figure in the book. But — assuming I’m not left on the cutting room floor — every now and then things will switch to this female English professor wearing a blue scarf and holding forth on what it means that this thing sold two million copies in its first week.
This was UD‘s first outside interview — Jeffrey Brown and I stood in front of the News Hour‘s building in Virginia on a hot windy afternoon and chatted. I don’t think I was very good… Something about being outside, maybe? I don’t teach very well outside, either. Nothing sounds right to me. There are many distractions. Anyway, I wasn’t at my best.
But, you know, another media thing, and UD loves media things.
UD‘s currently holed up in an undisclosed location reading THE LOST SYMBOL by Dan Brown. She’s preparing for a phone interview this morning with a Lehrer News Hour producer, who may want to interview her on this evening’s show about it.
Later.