Letters from
Dorothy J. Solinger, Paul Reitter, Seth Harp, Charles Glass, Kieran Jones, Hayden Pelliccia, and Jon Wiener
To the Editors:
The article by Paul Reitter, “The Business of Learning” [NYR, February 22], contained an egregious error. It reads that “hundreds of admissions offers [were] rescinded by UC Irvine on shaky grounds.” As of August 2 Howard Gillman, chancellor of UC Irvine, announced that the decision to withdraw admissions was “unacceptable” and stepped in, stating that “effective immediately, all students who received provisional acceptances into UCI will be fully admitted, except those whose transcripts clearly indicate that they did not meet our academic standards.” Thank you to the Editors for correcting this mistake.
Dorothy J. Solinger Professor of Political Science Emerita University of California, Irvine Irvine, California
Paul Reitter replies:
It would have been easy, alas, to make the list of administrative missteps in my essay longer and harsher. But my aim wasn’t to impugn UC Irvine or state universities in general. Tony Judt once wrote that “by far the best thing about America” is its public universities; most days I agree. As part of a discussion of the pressures on public higher education, I was simply pointing out that some administrators in the UC system—and elsewhere—chose a bad time to commit obvious errors of judgment. I didn’t mention that the university was attempting to fix a problem brought about by its own misguided enrollment projections, or that students were only informed that their admission had been rescinded after they had committed to attend Irvine and had turned down other schools. What mattered for the purposes of the essay was that, citing technicalities, UC Irvine told hundreds of successful applicants they were no longer admitted, and that this did not go over well with the public. It was evidently the outcry that led the university to reverse its action. But that reversal won’t undo the damage to its reputation, and contrary to what Professor Solinger appears to be suggesting, it can’t wipe away the fact of the university’s poor original decision or erase the weeks of anguish that decision caused.
NOT OVER YET To the Editors:
Normally I would hesitate to correct a journalist of Charles Glass’s stature, but as a reporter who’s covered the war in Syria for several years now I have to point out some inaccuracies in his “Syria’s New Normal” [NYR, March 8].
First of all, it’s misleading to say that “only a few zones of rural Syria” are outside the regime’s control, above all since Kurdish-led forces control a good third of the country. This area isn’t a “desert” either; there is a desert area near Sinjar, but most of it is rich agricultural country often described as a “breadbasket.” The Kurds also control much of the Euphrates River Valley.
Second, Turkey’s “stated purpose” in invading Syria wasn’t “to control... Islamist jihadis.” The Turks have been very open about their intent to clear the Afrin region of the Kurdish militia. Occasionally they say it’s also to clear ISIS, but that’s a throwaway aside that no one can take seriously since ISIS has never been in that region of Syria and certainly isn’t there now. The only jihadis are the FSA fighters with whom Turkey is working hand-in-glove.
Third, with regard to the paragraph on the “Shiite crescent,” I don’t know what he’s talking about when he says “the defeat of Iraq’s Kurds by the Iraqi army and Shiite paramilitaries allow Iran’s influence to run across Iraq and Syria to Hezbollah’s enclaves in Lebanon.” What victories? Iraq’s Kurds worked together with the Iraqi army and Shiite paramilitaries to clear ISIS from Mosul. There were some clashes around Kirkuk, but they took place too far north to affect Iran’s access to the Syrian border. What allowed the so-called crescent to exist, above all, was the Iraq War and the rise of a Shiite government in Baghdad. Finally, while he never mentions the Syrian Democratic Forces, a major player on the current battlefield map of Syria, he refers to the “US-backed Border Protection Force” as if it’s a real thing. My sources tell me it simply doesn’t exist.
Overall I found that the piece presented a misleading picture of the war in Syria as basically over, when in reality much of the country is outside regime control; the US, Russia, Turkey, and Iran still have boots on the ground; and, instead of winding down, the war seems to be mutating into separate conflicts between Assad and the FSA and the Kurds and Turkey, with the major question of how the regime will square off with the newly empowered Kurds still unresolved.
Seth Harp Austin, Texas
Charles Glass replies:
Mr. Harp’s observations on the Syrian war are not as far removed from mine as his letter implies, perhaps more a matter of emphasis than substance. However, many of his criticisms miss the mark.
In terms of population rather than mere terrain, the Syrian government controls most of the country, perhaps as much as 85 percent. I specifically named the areas outside its grasp as “Idlib in the northwest, two areas adjoining the Jordanian and Israeli borders in the south, the Kurdish-held desert beside Iraq in the east, and a small enclave between Idlib and the Turkish border.” It is hard to understand which areas Mr. Harp feels are missing. In any case, the northeast that he calls a “breadbasket” is mostly desert, as those who have been there know, with some agricultural and grazing lands. The bulk of Syrian agriculture is concentrated in the west around Aleppo, Homs, and Hama—where grain, olives, cotton, and other staples grow in abundance— and the Ghouta orchards on the fringes of Damascus. A report in New Agriculturalist points out that “crop production is, for the most part, restricted by rainfall to the semiarid west of the country, including the wetter coastal plain and mountains, and to the northern region along the Turkish border.” All of these areas, except the zones of Afrin and Idlib now occupied by Turkey, are in government hands.
Mr. Harp’s assertion that Turkey’s “stated purpose” in invading Syria was not “to control . . . Islamist jihadis” ignores Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdo÷an’s statement on the Turkish army’s invasion last October of Idlib province: “We will absolutely not allow the creation of a terror corridor along our borders.” Jihadists, not
Kurds, controlled the Idlib region. There is a difference between “stated” and “real” purposes, and my reference was clearly to what Erdo÷an claimed his objective to be. He said Turkey’s initial targets were jihadists not under its control. Only afterward did he turn his attention to the Kurds in Afrin.
Mr. Harp’s criticism of my use of the term “Shiite crescent” misses the fact that I was describing an impression shared by the Sunni Muslim monarchs in Amman, Riyadh, and Doha, rather than one of my own. On the issue of the Kurds and Iran, the elimination of ISIS’s territorial control in Iraq came about thanks to Kurdish fighters, the Iraqi army, and Iraqi militias with Iranian field support and American air cover. However, the Kurdish-Iraqi cooperation against ISIS did not prevent Iraqi forces, with Iranian and US approval, from conquering the “disputed territories” claimed by both Erbil and Baghdad, including Kirkuk, and reducing the Iraqi Kurds’ de facto independence from Baghdad. Iran emerged stronger, not weaker, from the post-ISIS order in Iraq and Syria.
The Border Protection Force (BPF) that the US said it is creating is based in part on the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), something I was not attempting to conceal. It includes, however, Arab tribes from the Syrian-Iraqi border areas. Whether it is called the SDF or the BPF is immaterial. What is relevant is that, under any name the US chooses, it keeps the northeast out of Syrian government control and gives the US a possible base for subversion against Damascus and its Iranian and Russian allies. US officials have repeatedly stated just that.
Finally, my use of the phrase “postwar” did not imply that the war in Syria is entirely over. I stated, and I see no evidence to counter this view, that the government has won the battle over the original casus belli: regime change. The fighting that prolongs the conflict, as H.G. Wells wrote in Mr. Britling Sees It Through of the later stages of World War I, is “a war without point, a war that has lost its soul, it has become mere incoherent fighting and destruction, a demonstration in vast and tragic forms of the stupidity and ineffectiveness of our species .... ” Like World War I, the battle in Syria goes on. And on.
A VERY GOOD MEAL To the Editors:
In reply to Peter Green [“A Banquet of Words,” NYR, November 23, 2017], Hayden Pelliccia writes that the “carcasses at Troy would have been picked over by carrion birds . . . not by birds of prey equipped to rend the living.” This is wildly wrong. There is no raptor sense of pride that forbids birds of prey from feeding off anything they have not killed themselves. Birds of prey far prefer a free, easy meal to the energy expenditure and risk of failure and injury involved in a hunt. Bald eagles, for example, are more than happy to avail themselves of US landfill sites—photos are easy to find online. Animals are evolved to follow the route of least resistance, regardless of what greater potential they have. In fact, even though it forms an important part of Hayden Pelliccia’s argument, following M. M. Willcock, there is no strong natural argument against, or even for the further qualification of, Homer’s phrase “all birds” so far as it regards those that may be pecking at a corpse. It is certainly not definitively “incorrect” or “inaccurate,” especially given the leeway poetic license allows. As far as nature is concerned, a corpse represents a dense bonanza of nutrition and many animals may feed from one even if it is outside their usual behavior. (Especially when a fresh supply of corpses has been littering the landscape for years. This after all would constitute an unusual situation for unusual behavior to evolve in.) I have seen one of my own ducks swallow a dead mouse whole, and not easily; it took her five minutes or so to get it down her throat. A duck behaving like a snake is bizarre, but there was no mistaking she did it with intention. A second example: a few years ago here in the UK, the BBC’s Winter Watch filmed a robin feeding off a deer corpse. Animals know where there is nutrition to be had.
Certainly carrion birds, such as corvids and vultures, would not hesitate to feed off corpses, but neither would birds of prey, omnivorous gulls, and possibly other sea birds. It is also perfectly possible that smaller birds would latch onto them as a food source, and if not feeding on the actual corpses, they may at least appear to be doing so by feeding on the insects, flies, maggots, worms, etc. in and around them. (There would be quite an ecosystem going on around such rich pickings.) In short, there is a distinct potential of corpses attracting sufficient avian activity and variety to justify the phrase “all birds.”
The cross-pollination of disciplines might have shed some additional light on the debate, but no one seems to have consulted a naturalist, though Homer himself appears to have been a keen observer of nature. As a footnote to this happily morbid debate, I have no problem with the use of “all” poetically, aside from it being fairly clumsy to render into English. It seems to me an emphatic “zero qualification” that highlights the complete lack of discrimination in the disposal of the corpses, thereby emphasizing the destruction of ceremony, and so the indignity, impiety, and chaos that war has brought.
Kieran Jones Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire United Kingdom
Hayden Pelliccia replies:
Mr. Jones wants to bring the actual behavior of birds to bear on the interpretation of Iliad 1.5, and points to the bald eagle, a notoriously opportunistic feeder confined to the Western Hemisphere and completely irrelevant to Bronze Age Asia Minor. Homer, like any birding handbook, was interested in a species’s characteristic preferences rather than behavior at the extremes. A cow will eat meat if you throw it on the ground in front of her, but that does not change the classification of cows as herbivores. Since seed-eating birds like doves and sparrows are unlikely ever to eat carrion, saying “all birds” would have fed on Iliadic corpses is a stretch.
Mr. Jones shares the common sentimental view that Homer was “a keen observer of nature.” It is hard to tell if he was, since so much of his world is inaccessible to us; it is at any rate clear that his intense classconsciousness extended to the animal kingdom and was often allowed to override whatever facts about nature he knew. His human characters, for example, subsist almost entirely on meat, mostly freshslaughtered beef. This is not realism but status-marking: it would be beneath their dignity to show heroes eating anything less prestigious. Homer makes few direct statements about birds, but he is consistent in representing them: when, as happens fairly often, one fighter predicts to another that birds will feed on his carcass, it is the vulture (gyps) that will do so, and this is the only activity the poet assigns the gyps. The eagle— most likely the golden eagle—is for Homer a hunter, and it is the bird of Zeus. Does the predator bird of Zeus sometimes avail itself of Mr. Jones’s “dense bonanza of nutrition” and feed on carrion? Perhaps in reality it might, like other raptors, if it’s on offer, but you wouldn’t know it from Homer.
In book 8, for example, Agamemnon exhorts his flagging soldiers, concluding with a prayer to Zeus. The battle has been intense all day and the field is strewn with corpses, but the eagle Zeus sends as a portent to encourage the Greeks is completely indifferent to these dense bonanzas: he bears in his talons a fawn, though a naturalist might not predict the precincts of a battlefield to be a doe’s first choice of shelter for her progeny. But this is how Homer conceives the eagle: as a “noble” bird that hunts—just like human noblemen.
If it is any consolation to Mr. Jones, the reading “takings for dogs and a banquet for birds” (vs. “for dogs and all birds”), though it does not actually include the bald or more relevant eagles, does not exclude them either: it’s just “birds.”
A HANGING MATTER To the Editors:
Your beautiful Jasper Johns cover—the painting “Summer” from his “Seasons” series of 1985–86—is part of the retrospective currently at the Broad museum in Los Angeles that Jason Farago writes about [NYR,
March 22]. But there’s a problem with the way that series is displayed.
As Farago suggests, Johns’s paintings of the Eighties displayed “a new engagement with death, one that deepened amid the first awful years of the AIDS epidemic.” In the richly symbolic series, the artist (in shadow) has packed up his belongings in “Spring,” and hit the road in “Summer”; everything “falls” in “Fall,” and “Winter” brings snow and stasis. But at the Broad (and before that at the Royal Academy in London), “Spring” is hung last, suggesting that the artist was thinking about returning to life and youth after his inevitable decline. That seems unlikely.
Ever since the four paintings were first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1987, “Spring” came first and “Winter” last—at the 1988 Venice Biennale, and now with the prints in the collections of the Met, the Tate, and MoMA. When I asked the show’s curators, Edith Devaney at the Royal Academy and Joanne Heyler at the Broad, why they hung “Spring” last, they agreed that it changed the meaning of the series, but said they did it because of chronology: he painted “Spring” last. But as Farago says, the principle of this show is the rejection of chronology in favor of a thematic organization. I wish they would hang them the way they always have been hung.
Jon Wiener Professor of History Emeritus University of California, Irvine Irvine, California