"They were elevated moral landscapes..."

Cemeteries were... once. Shouldn't they be, again? Meet the cemetery architect.

"People always say it's ghoulish," [Michael Howe] says, "but we also design things like lavatories and bathrooms, and that's much more icky. Designing cemeteries is a lot more interesting than designing a middle-class person's kitchen extension."...

The decline of cemeteries can partly be explained by the increase in cremation. ... [T]hose in the "industry" were so convinced by cremation that many thought there would be no need for cemeteries at all. But he points out that 30% of people still prefer to be buried - a figure that has been stable for some time....

"One of the issues that has led to the desecration of burial grounds is fear. Socialising these spaces is absolutely essential, so young people see them as part of the cycle of life and death," he says.

He hopes that people will visit the cemetery as a park and even take a picnic there. "If there are green open spaces and woods, why wouldn't people romp around or have a picnic?"

He adds: "It was only in the 20th century that we stopped using cemeteries in this way. The Victorians thought of them as highly cultured places of genteel resort and instruction. A cemetery was considered a neat and proper place to meet and spend time."

He argues that it is not only the Victorians who can find cemeteries uplifting places. "Everyone thinks of the commemoration of deaths as a Victorian thing, which is amazing since we are not going to get out of the habit of dying."

Indeed.

Here:



Spread out your morally elevated picnic.

ADDED: Here's a nice photoset that my son John took in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Blaming the media.

Paul McCartney blames the media for his breakup with his wife, Heather Mills.

Sunstein on Dworkin.

Cass Sunstein reviews Ronald Dworkin's "Justice in Robes." Excerpt:

Dworkin agrees that judges generally must be faithful to existing legal materials, but he insists that they are not merely "following" something. The law is often unclear. Dworkin contends that when resolving real disputes, judges must select the principle that puts previous decisions in their most attractive light. For this reason, the task of interpretation requires judges to think seriously about what morality requires, and they might well end up moving the law in dramatic and novel directions. ...

... Dworkin's central arguments are right. Legal reasoning typically works by attempting both to "fit" past decisions and to "justify" them, by making them into sense rather than nonsense. Too much of the time, politicians and judges ignore the fact that judicial judgments, about principle and policy, play an inevitable role in determining what the law is. ...

Dworkin's second claim is that the Supreme Court should adopt an approach that calls on the justices to make large-scale judgments about the meaning of our highest ideals. I think that the Court should, most of the time, refuse to assume such a role. It should refuse to do so because fallible judges ought to avoid engaging, in particular cases, with the most fundamental problems in morality and politics. No theory of interpretation can avoid moral and political controversy, but it is possible to adopt, on moral and political grounds, a theory of interpretation that asks judges to decline to deploy their own moral and political judgments as weapons against the democratic process.

"Just how cheap is the State of Wisconsin?"

Howard Bashman asks.

What's the shocking truth about "The Da Vinci Code"?

The movie's boring!

The Vatican has led the offensive against The Da Vinci Code, calling for a boycott and even unspecified legal action against both the book and film.

While the protests have provided studio Sony Pictures with the kind of publicity money can't buy, the reaction at the first press screening in Cannes was largely negative, and loud laughter broke out at one of the pivotal scenes.

"Nothing really works. It's not suspenseful. It's not romantic. It's certainly not fun," said Stephen Schaefer of the Boston Herald.

"It seems like you're in there forever. And you're conscious of how hard everybody's working to try to make sense of something that basically perhaps is unfilmable."

Whoops! Too bad the Vatican jumped the gun and gave them all that free publicity.

Here's that New Yorker article about how Sony Pictures envisioned religious controversy as a marketing project:

The Sony strategy... was to try to turn the controversy over “The Da Vinci Code” to the film’s advantage. There was no way to stop a Christian critique of [author Dan] Brown’s ideas, but, if leading Christian voices could somehow be coaxed into an association with the “Da Vinci” movie, the criticism might seem less like an attack and more like engagement.

UPDATE: The links to the reviews are currently collecting over at Rotten Tomatoes, which is currently registering 0% positive reviews (out of 7).

"The personal is political" has become the notion "that just about anyone is allowed to transform her personal experience into a political program."

Anne Applebaum objects:

Judith Warner, the author of a book on "why we are all overscheduled," couldn't resist turning her portrait of real-life women wringing their hands over Mackenzie's class party and Joey's soccer team into a plea for "progressive tax policies that would transfer our nation's wealth back to the middle class."....

Writing about oneself has a long history: The memoir, the autobiography, the roman à clef, the essay that draws on personal experience to make witty social observations -- all are legitimate literary forms. But writing about oneself and then turning these observations about one's narrow social circle into a party platform or a tax policy -- that is a more modern invention, and one of more questionable legitimacy and usefulness.

Is this a special problem with women writing about women's issues, and does it suggest that there's something wrong with the feminist slogan "the personal is political"? Personal stories are used to make writing and speeches accessible. It's often tedious and predictable. It pads out speeches and makes books excessively easy to read. This is a widespread strategy that transcends writing by or about women.

And the slogan "the personal is political" does not mean that one's personal story ought to provide the basis for your political program. It represents the argument that what goes on in women's personal relationships with men belongs in the public, political debate and is not just a private matter to be dealt with individually. It is an invitation to turn outward from the personal sphere and, instead of working on your relationship, to think in terms of what you have in common with other women.

Pravda on Condi and Hillary in '08.

What does Pravda have to say about the female contenders for the U.S. presidency?

IN THE COMMENTS: Everyone's confessing to misreading the title here as "Prada on Condi and Hillary in '08." And amusingly, people seem to want to read about what Prada thinks of Condi and Hillary in '08. It's a good thing -- isn't it? -- that we're more interested in Prada than Pravda.