'History is written by the winners, literature is written by the losers'

Here's Paul Holdengraber's deeply rewarding, enriching interview with Howard Jacobson from the NY Public Library.

Jacobson is suspicious of those who are hell-bent on winning (suspicions confirmed now by Charlie Sheen), although it must be said that Jacobson himself is keen on winning when it comes to ping pong. Perhaps that's okay, though, since ping pong, as Jacobson suggests, is (or was) a game for losers. His remarks on ping pong connect with his really wonderful observations on the nature of comedy and failure, which prompted his statement in the subject header. Here's an article at the Tablet about this great interview.



This is from an article on ping pong by Jacobson:

'From the start, table tennis had attracted deracinated intellectuals, thinkers, depressives, sun-avoiding contemplatives and melancholics. The first official world champion was Dr Roland Jacobi, a Hungarian attorney. Note the doctorate. In photographs I have seen of him, he plays without removing his cardigan. No sweat. His nationality, too, I take to be significant. If you discount the Englishman Fred Perry ... every world champion for the next 25 years came from one dejected outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or another.'

Junker shuns liberal teachings

Henry Kissinger on a new book about Bismarck: 'Bismarck’s opponents were still wedded to the 18th-century concepts of the international system as a great clockwork with intricately meshed parts: the science of Newton. Bismarck foreshadowed an age whose equilibrium was an ever-changing interaction of forces, themselves in constant flux, like later atomic physics. Its appropriate philosopher was not Descartes but Darwin; not “I think, therefore I am,” but the “survival of the fittest.”'

Schleiermacher oversaw Bismarck's confirmation in the Lutheran Church at Berlin's Holy Trinity Church. Later in life, Bismarck forgot whatever Schleiermacher had taught him.