¶ Matins: For what it’s worth, I support the mortgage bailout that President Obama is expected to unveil in Phoenix later today. Helping those who can’t afford to pay their mortgages is the right thing to do. Helping homeowners whose mortgages are simply “underwater” — worth more than the home’s likely sales price — is a different problem that ought to be addressed in some other way, and not right now.

¶ Lauds: The whole town’s talking — or so it seems — about Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera, with the one (1) singer who has ever given me pleasure in an opera house, Sondra Radvanovsky. Steve Smith gave the show such an enthusiastic review that I had to get a ticket. 

¶ Prime:  No Sh*t, Please; We’re British: R*tard Rids Reptile Researcher’s Reserves of Reclusive Retrosaur’s Refuse. Okay, I made up “retrosaur.” But it’s pretty cool as neologisms go, don’t you think? In case you’re wondering what it means, a “retrosaur” is a lizard that everyone thought was extinct — which is what this exceedingly English story is all about.  (via Brainiac)

¶ Tierce: More good news from Washington: stepped-up merger scrutiny, and this time with brains. Rob Cox reports.

But there is a growing movement in the antitrust community to challenge this rational choice theory of neoclassical economics in favor of behavioral economics. Under this school of thought — loudly espoused by Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers — economists examine how real people actually make decisions.

Applying behavioral economics to antitrust “risks expanding the scope of agency review to transactions that were previously unassailable,” two lawyers with Skadden Arps, Neal R. Stoll and Shepard Goldfein, wrote in The New York Law Journal last month. It would, among other changes, require the retention of psychologists alongside the economists, marketers and industry experts currently reviewing deals.

¶ Sext: Does anyone remember Lady Fanny of Omaha? (The great Barbara Harris, in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.) Now we have Robert Allen Stanford, Texan financier and alleged swindler, dubbed Sir Allen by the government of Antigua in gratitude for his benefactions, which ranged from cleaning up the state balance sheets to sponsoring a cricket league.  

In Texas, Robert Allen Stanford was just another wealthy financier.

But in the breezy money haven of Antigua, he was lord of an influential financial fief, decorated with a knighthood, courted by government officials and basking in the spotlight of sports and charity events on which he generously showered his fortune.

I know that it’s silly, but I already think of him as “Sir Allen of Obama.”

¶ Nones: The crucifix crisis has flared up in Italy again. A teacher has been sacked for removing the (non-compulsory) crucifix from his classroom, and the supreme court has let stand the conviction of  Jewish judge who refused to serve in a courtroom adorned with a cross.

¶ Vespers: In a classic case of the deadly short-circuiting that can occur when book publishers have other interests — as, being components in media empires these days, they all do — Brian, at Survival of the Book, comments on Barry Ritholtz’s problems with McGraw-Hill, which didn’t like what he had to say about Standard & Poor’s, a McGraw-Hill property.

It’s also interesting to note yet another example of an author going right online with his case, and with a whole lot of material, to prove his innocence. On this post, he includes revised versions of pieces of the manuscript and footnotes, all of which he has every right to post. He’s making the case the he himself did not expose this story to the media but now that it’s out there, he can explain himself and his position as an author at a massive corporate publisher. As more such cases emerge and more authors speak out and get attention for it, perhaps publishers will work more in partnership with authors rather than seeing them as disposable manufacturers churning out products they depend on. As authors are expected to do more marketing, more publicity, more leg work all around on behalf of their books, then publishers must also know that they are armed with tools to broadcast their complaints.

¶ Compline: Now, this is fun: in a new Pew poll, respondents were asked if they were happy where they lived or if they’d like to move.

Seven-in-ten rural men are content where they are, compared with just half of rural women.

Hmmm . . . how mysterious! (via Snarkmarket)

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¶ Matins: For my part, I’m willing to trust the president to keep his new helicopters reasonably simple and expensive-extras free. Either that, Mr Obama, or please just don’t fly in helicopters! “Roger, pay the two dollars!”

¶ Lauds: This story might appear to have more to do with business cycles than the arts, but it’s a spectacular — and spectacularly frightening — story about Level Zero of the arts, which is: the city. Dubai is just a lot of buildings.

¶ Prime: My good friend, Liz Tilsley Garcia, has climbed behind the wheel again. NOT REALLY! It’s just another sensational road trip story.

At the time, S. owned a very practical Honda to get back and forth to work. I had an equally practical Toyota and our commuting needs were well covered. However, the cars were a bit too practical. Thus, they were basically boring and totally unsexy. S. and I shared a love of driving too fast and somewhat recklessly. Our practical cars were just no fun for that sort of activity. But we didn’t have lots of money to throw around and our jobs weren’t particularly high paying. So practical it was.

Happily, someone says the magic word: “BMW.”

¶ Tierce: A word to avoid during the current economic breakdown is “recovery.” We don’t want to go back to the good old days. Richard Florida tackles home-ownership, once the centerpiece of American economic democracy.

The housing bubble was the ultimate expression, and perhaps the last gasp, of an economic system some 80 years in the making, and now well past its “sell-by” date. The bubble encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real-estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl, which is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy. And not least, it created a workforce too often stuck in place, anchored by houses that cannot be profitably sold, at a time when flexibility and mobility are of great importance.

¶ Sext: Phil T Rich complains to Clyde Haberman that the new president is making things tough for the Billionaires For Bush.

“He’s difficult to satirize,” Mr. Boyd said. “He’s very self-aware. He calls himself out on stuff. He’s able to leaven his own heaviness.” Self-awareness, Mr. Boyd said, was not a conspicuous trait of the previous president.

¶ Nones: With the onset of tough times, will Russian familiarity with same breed docility or protest? The smart money, according to The Independent, is on docility.

“However bad things get, ordinary people won’t become political,” says the editor of a newspaper based in Ekaterinburg, the nearest big city to Asbest. “The women will grow potatoes to see them through the hard times, and the men will drink more vodka, and that’s it.”

But there’s smarter money: Garry Kasparov.

“People have had a stable life and still think that things will get better again,” says Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion turned opposition politician. “I expect the first waves of protests to start in earnest in March or April.”

¶ Vespers: Mark Greif’s essay on Reborn, the first installment of Susan Sontag’s  notebooks to be published by her son, David Rieff, has startled me like a sudden ray of sun pouring across a dark vault. Sontag’s thought has always felt familiar, but for the first time I have the sense of seeing it. 

Sontag made you acknowledge that she was more intelligent than you. That cost little enough. She then compelled you to admit that she felt more than you did. Her inner life was richer, even if she didn’t fully disclose it. She responded to art more vividly and completely. Not only her sense, but her sensibility, was grander.

That’s the familiar part.

¶ Compline: What if the organization chart were turned upside-down — and the managers were charged with supporting the workers? That’s what good bosses have always done, or tried to do, but it flies in the face of the authoritarian bent of work. Aaron Swartz walks us through the well-run team. Approval plays a tiny, almost invisible role. In effect, you approve a worker when you hire him — subject to learning that you ought to fire him. There is no in-between. (via kottke.org)

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The panel discussion at McNally Jackson Books on Friday night marked a departure of sorts, but a dimly familiar departure. Eric Alterman, Susan Jacoby, David Samuels and Colm Tóibín (seated, left to right) talked about “How History Was Made: Books That Inspired a President.” (Laura Miller, also billed, did not appear.) The president in question was the current incumbent, and the book list was compiled by staff bookseller and moderator John McGregor. The event might have taken place in a more institutional setting, at a university or in a library, but as it took place at a bookstore I was reminded of the Gotham Book Mart, which I was unfortunately unable to visit when Edith Sitwell gave a reading, in November, 1948 — not having attained the age of one.

The mood in the packed bookshop was ebullient — so much so that it was easy to overlook the deflated undertones in much of what was said, particularly by Mr Alterman and Ms Jacoby. Perhaps it was simply a case of my agreeing with them: while it’s wonderful to have a president who reads books, it oughtn’t to be remarkable; and as for the end of the Bush era, this is nothing to celebrate, either, since the era ought never to have begun.

Mr Tóibín was quick to claim Barack Obama as an outsider, and I had no argument with that. The bracing but understandably unheralded leitmotif of the new administration seems to me to be that we are all outsiders. (The more I get to know about Mr Obama — something about which, I confess, I’m taking my time — the more struck I am by the challenges posed by such huge and intrusive question marks about identity as must have loomed for a bi-racial child of the Seventies.) Mr Tóibín drew interesting comparisons between the president and James Baldwin, finding almost startling parallels in their memoir writing. Something tells me that it will be Mr Obama himself who effectively eases the discomfort that some people might have to hear him compared to a gay black American writer; until he does, the gay Irish writer’s patient analysis is likely to provoke a fair amount of suppressed wincing and gritting of teeth.

David Samuels, author of The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, was also preoccupied by the question of identity, but his concern was somewhat more occult than Colm Tóibín’s, and it took longer for me to grasp — if, indeed, I did grasp it. Mr Tóibín’s reference to Barack Obama as a “self-invented man” who has found a mirror in books struck me as an interesting observation, but Mr Samuels’s comments along the same lines struck me as ominous; they seemed to suggest that the president is too adaptable. From the phrase “usable identity,” which Mr Samuels used several times, I was inclined to infer an unsavory opportunism, and I began by thinking that Mr Samuels is not a fan. Eventually, however, a thesis was advanced: Barack Obama has achieved a mastery of self-possession because he is a writer. This was an interesting idea, not because it might be correct, but because of the light it cast on Mr Samuels’ conception of writers and writing.

I don’t recall any opposition from Colm Tóibín, but Susan Jacoby and Eric Alterman would have nothing to do with Mr Samuels’ thesis. To them, the president is a man of parts who has written one good book (Dreams of My Father) and one piece of political hackery (The Audacity of Hope). They stoutly resisted the notion that all good books are written by writers. Mr Alterman went so far as to insist that one of the best books that he has ever read was not written by a “writer” — Katharine Graham’s Personal History. Without flogging his idea, Mr Samuels refused to let it go, and pretty soon what I sensed, despite the journalist’s persistent (and somewhat “archaic”) smile, was a gatekeeper’s anxiety. Rather than have a president out there who happened to have written a good book, Mr Samuels preferred to see Mr Obama as a writer out there who happens to be president.

It occurred to me, later, that a professional writer is a someone who writes well enough) who is also capable of meeting deadlines, showing up for appointments, and exhibiting other tokens of adult responsibility. When, talking with Kathleen about the panel, I ventured this point, she asked, “Where does that leave Proust?” The simple, professional answer would have been to remind Kathleen that she has never read Proust. Merely semi-pro myself, however, I didn’t think of that one until just now.

Update: For another account of the discussion, see what Rollo Romig has to say at The Book Bench.

In the Times this morning, news that scientists may really have figured out how to defeat the common cold — but also that big pharma will be disinclined to make the necessary investment in a cure for a “minor nuisance.” (Nicholas Wade reports). Regular readers may recall that I have an idea for re-inclining the drug companies to do their jobs. Patent protection for valuable medicines ought to be coupled with the obligation to develop less remunerative remedies.

But then, I am the worst sort of elitist socialist.

Kathleen has been working late all week, rushing for a deadline that will fall early tonight. (She doesn’t have Monday off, but since neither her clients nor the SEC will be making or receiving phone calls, she is looking forward to a quiet day.) I’ve been devoting the long evenings to the ongoing game of I Am My Own Executor, in which I go through drawers, closets, manila folders, and whatnot in a terrifying Stalinist purge of Expendibilia. Great bags of old newspaper clippings, expired subscription offers, and such superseded essentials as Avery labels for floppy disks are hauled to the garbage chute.

As if honor my efforts, the building’s latest and rather sketchy stab at refurbishment has adorned the door to what used to be known as the “trash room” with a handsome brushed metal plaque that says just that, “Garbage Chute,” in Gill Sans Bold. It’s enough to make one look for the red circle crossed by a blue bar , saying something like “Tower Hamlets.”

¶ Matins: Good news on the international justice front:

Judges at the International Criminal Court have decided to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, brushing aside diplomatic requests to allow more time for peace negotiations in the conflict-riddled Darfur region of his country, according to court lawyers and diplomats.

¶ Lauds: What do you think? Does support from dodgy, possibly criminal corporations corrupt the arts that they subsidize? Tom Service, at the Guardian, certainly thinks so.

How can the art made at festivals sponsored by these bankrupt individuals and companies do the job that classical music should do, and have a necessary, critical voice in contemporary culture, if it continues to be supported by the dead hand of big banking?

¶ Prime: Eric Patton celebrates the Darwin bicentennial by turning to The Pillow Book — not Peter Greenaway’s film so much as Sei Shonagon’s book — at SORE AFRAID. What on earth has the one got to do with the other? Having scrolled through Eric’s photographic lists, one will find Darwin’s conclusion all the more immanently enlightened.

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

¶ Tierce: Personality clash or whistleblowing? “You decide.” Either way, Sir James Crosby, who fired an evident whistleblower when he ran the now-ailing HBOS, has had to resign as Britain’s deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority.

¶ Sext: We take you now from the buttoned-down elitism of The Daily Blague to Belfast, Maine, where a trust fund baby from California who collected Hitler’s silverware was found, after having been shot dead by his wife, Amber, to have been stockpiling the raw materials for a dirty nuclear bomb! (Thanks Alexander Chee!)

¶ Nones: Isn’t it amazing? In a mere half-century, we have cluttered inner space with tons and tons of junk. Two items crashed on Tuesday.

But experts now see another potential threat. Richard Crowther explained: “Unique to the Iridium system is that all the remaining 65 satellites in the constellation pass through the same region of space – at the poles.

“So the debris cloud that is forming as a result of the Iridium satellite breakup will present a debris torus of high (spatial) density at 90 degrees to the equator that all the surviving Iridium satellites will need to pass through.”

Intact satellites share Earth’s orbit with everything from spent rocket stages and spacecraft wreckage to paint flakes and dust.

The diffuse mist of junk around our planet is the legacy of 51 years of human activity in space.

¶ Vespers: Valerie Martin has a little list: six great novels about doomed marriages. Before peeking, make your own list. Okay, now you can look.

¶ Compline: An amusingly ambiguous map from newgeography: American states that people don’t leave? Or states that they don’t move to? (via Brainiac)

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¶ Matins: So manypeople still don’t get it: the important thing right now is to do something, and then, maybe, something else. Waiting to get it right is the only guarantee of disaster. The Obama/Geithner plan faces a “brutally negative” response.

¶ Lauds: I read it at Classical Convert first: Muzak has declared bankruptcy.

¶ Prime: So, you’re going through the attic, convinced that it’s full of treasures. Sadly, you’re probably in the The Trough of No Value. Saving those “collectibles” always requires more patience than you think it will. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Now that the Obama Administration is re-directing American focus to Afghanistan, the sub-sovereign creation of British mapmakers is metastatsizing from a sorry mess to the new Vietnam. Uh-oh!

The attacks in the capital underlined the severity of the challenge facing American policy-makers who have declared the war in Afghanistan a high priority for the new administration in Washington and who plan to almost double American troop levels with the deployment of some 30,000 additional soldiers.

¶ Sext: What happened at The New School? Put it another way: why does Bob Kerrey stay on as President when he is so massively unpopular with the faculty? What is he thinking?

¶ Nones: Trouble in Paradise Azerbaijan. For the first time since 1994, a “high-ranking” Azerbaijani military officer, Air Force leader Lt-Gen Rail Rzayev has been shot dead.

¶ Vespers: Steven Moore reviews Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of Donald Barthelme, whose student Daugherty was in the Eighties: Hiding Man. (via Emdashes) 

¶ Compline: Something very interesting and beautiful to look at before you go to bed: Scintillation, a short film by Xavier Chassaing (at Snarkmarket).

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¶ Matins: Is it taking Frank Rich longer than necessary to reset his outrage gauge, even though the new administrations failings and disappointments are barely venial by comparison to those of the old?

The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

¶ Lauds: Chinese Tags, from the Kwan Yin Clan in Beijing. At first, you may not even seen the graffiti-inspired spray paintings; they blend right in with the traditional scroll art. (via Tomorrow Museum).

¶ Prime: Maud Newton contributes to the online extension of the Granta issue on fathers. Upbeat tone nothwithstanding, it’s one of the saddest things that I’ve ever read. But then, I’m a father.

¶ Tierce: Eluana Enlargo, in a coma since 1992, is about to be let go . . .  or is she?

¶ Sext: James Surowiecki talks. On Colbert. And now I have to stop referring to him as “James Soor-oh-vyetsky.”

¶ Nones: Slumdog Millionaire — but without the ‘millionaire’ part. Meet Rewa Ram, as Rupa Jha reports on the sewer cleaners of Delhi.

¶ Vespers: I can’t remember where I came across the recommendation in the Blogosphere, but somebody said that Maria Semple’s This One Is Mine is a smart novel, so I bought, and I’m reading it, and — I don’t know why, really — I’m finding it really, really depressing. It isn’t the novel, I don’t think. It’s Los Angeles.

Anyway, Maria Semple talks to Marshal Zeringue, of Campaign for the American Reader, about her work. She’s not depressing.

¶ Compline: Plenary indulgences . . . How is the Catholic Church like the Bourbon Dynasty? Paul Vitello reports.

Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.

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¶ Matins: Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for Uncle Niall. This time, “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid” really means what it says. A tsunami of economic disarray is barreling toward the ship of state. Unlike the pooh-bahs in Washington, Professor Ferguson believes that the ship is at present upside-down, rather like the SS Poseidon you might say, and that trying to borrow our way out of the problem à la Keynes is rather like what “climbing” for the boat deck was in that disaster.

¶ Lauds: The 25 Random Things meme (see below) is one thing; the truly daring will be sending their Facebook portraits to Matt Held to have them painted (possibly) and exhibited in all their unflattering glory. (via ArtFagCity)

¶ Prime: I never miss a chance to rejoice that I’ve lived into a new epistolary age; when I was younger, people didn’t answer my letters because they were “intimidated.” The 25 Random Things meme, however, is something altogether and delightfully new. Memes like it have been circulating for “ages,” but something about the Facebook tag has prompted a lot of scribbling — 35,700 pages of randomness. Douglas Quenqua reports — without saying a thing about himself!

¶ Tierce: Learning about the Bacon Explosion in the pages of The New York Times — and not on the Internet — was bad enough. Discovering the frabjilliant Web log of Sandro Magister there is really the limit!

¶ Sext: A fantastic slideshow: The End — or words to that effect. Repeat 189x. Brought to you by Dill Pixels.

¶ Nones: The last thing China needs right now is a major drought, but that’s what’s afflicting the north-central, wheat-growing provinces.

¶ Vespers: Sheila Heti interviews Mary Gaitskell for The Believer.

¶ Compline: Something to chew on over the weekend: where both quantity and quality of work are measurable, as, say, in academia, is the childless candidate for a position intrinsicially preferably to the parent? Ingrid Robeyns kicked off the debate at Crooked Timber. (via Brainiac)

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¶ Matins: Who are these people?

Many Americans have welcomed roundups of what the agency calls “ordinary status violators” — noncitizens who have no outstanding order of deportation, but are suspected of being in the country unlawfully, either because they overstayed a visa or entered without one.

It goes to show how ignorant such “Americans” are of their own family history, which may well have involved deportation or nativist discrimination. Where are the “I’m WASP and I’m proud!” bumper stickers?

¶ Lauds: It’s very late and I’ve been writing all day; maybe that’s why the idea of a play — no, a musical! — about Charles Ponzi, that eponymous person whose name is on everyone’s lips these days, sounds like a great idea.

¶ Prime: We pause to remember Doucette Cherbonnier, Slimbolala’s great-aunt, a ninetysomething who has been laid to her doubtless uproarious rest.

¶ Tierce: Michael Cooper’s depressing report about transit cuts around the nation, forced by receding tax revenues, in an age of rising ridership, gives me an idea.

¶ Sext: Quote of the Day: Richard Skeen, president of sales and marketing at now-defunct Doubledown Media, publisher of Trader Monthly and Dealmaker:

[advertising to bankers and encouraging them to spend money has become] incredibly out of vogue.

¶ Nones: In a strong sign that the Williamson Affair is not going to be swept away as easily as the Vatican would like, German Chancellor Angela Merkel continues to press for an “explanation.” Bear in mind that it is very unusual for a European head of state to take issue with the Vatican’s actions.  

¶ Vespers: Literary life isn’t all envy and backstabbing. Alexander Chee shares the pleasure of some richly social moments spent among people who care about letters.

¶ Compline: Receipt of an email from Ms NOLA this afternoon marked a change in my schedule. At 7 PM, I found myself at McNally Jackson, the great NoLIta bookstore in Prince Street, for a reading — more of a racontation — by In the Stalin Archives author Jonathan Brent.

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¶ Matins: Eric Holder has been confirmed by the Senate. It was grand to weigh and consider Republican opposition to his nomination, which seemed to stem from his participation in the pardon of Marc Rich, one of those dead-of-night doings at the fin de Billsiècle. Not really comparable to the shenanigans of Alberto the Goon.

¶ Lauds: What they ought to have done: close the university and keep the museum open. The dollars and sense point in that direction. The Brandeis trustees who approved the liquidation of the Rose Art Museum ought to be tarred and feathered — and then blinded.

¶ Prime: Joanne McNeil writes about Internet 2.0, at Tomorrow Museum, as if she had always lived there.  

If I were to log into Friendster today I would see a perfectly preserved document of my life in 2003. The people I was friends with then (most of them, sadly, I’m no longer in touch with) and the inside jokes we shared, not to mention the photos of me at that age. It makes me really want to not log in or log in and destroy it all. That’s almost too many memories worth keeping and for someone who prefers to think about life in the present rather than relive past experiences in my mind, it’s just baggage.

¶ Tierce: A good idea was proposed at Davos, of all places: pay the regulators! The source of the proposition is not surprising:

Tony Tan Keng Yam, deputy chairman and executive director of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, suggested that one reason American regulators fell down on the job was that they were paid too little.

Adam Ross Sorkin reports.

¶ Sext: I was going to link to John McPhee’s rather priceless account of his dealings with the formidable fact-checkers at The New Yorker, but access is limited to subscribers. (Don’t miss it; if nothing else, it will teach you the meaning of the important caveat, “on author.”) Instead, this year’s alternative Tilleys.

¶ Nones: Edward Wong files a chilling look at how the Chinese government abuses legal processes to silence dissidents: the [latest] Case of Huang Qi.

¶ Vespers: Delinquent as usual, I haven’t yet got round to writing up Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which I found to be a very important re-think. Now comes Isaac Chotiner, with a tendentious and skewed misreading of the book, full of snark and sneering (in The New Republic, natch). Nothing could be more wearying than rebutting the piece, and this is not the place to have any kind of thoroughgoing go at it, but one paragraph is all I need for the moment.

¶ Compline: Harry Markopolos, the investor’s advocate who blew enough whistles about Bernard Madoff to simulate Beethoven’s Ninth (except nobody listened), is no longer out sick. But he claims that he was afraid for his life.

He and his colleagues avoided taking their allegations to the industry self-regulatory agency, now called Finra, he said in the statement, because he believed Mr. Madoff and his brother, Peter B. Madoff, wielded too much power with that organization. Peter Madoff worked in his brother’s firm but has not been implicated in the apparent fraud.

“We were concerned that we would have tipped off the target too directly and exposed ourselves to great harm,” he wrote.

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Here’s a notion that I should like to see laid to rest, interred with the bones of the Dubyas: that human beings are what the Vegan posing as Ellie Arroway’s Dad, in Contact, calls “an interesting mix.” Capable of both great good and great wickedness, yadda yadda yadda. This is nothing but the tired old Great Chain of Being idea: that men and women, uniquely among sublunary creatures, possess quintessential souls, partaking of the divine ether — but that they also, as mortal beings, are corruptly composed of clay and dust. Get it? If we were all quintessence, we’d be good all the time, but thanks to our quintessential souls, we’re not bad all the time. We’re what Plato and Aristotle never dreamed of being cool enough to call “an interesting mix.” Even though they thought it.

(If none of this chatter makes any sense to you, congratulate yourself: you’re as yet uncorrupted!)

The idea that we’re both as noble as angels and as base as tarantulas — an insult to tarantulas — persists. And why not, as long as we recognize that the conceit is altogether human. We’re the ones who have decided that we’re an admixture of spirits and beasts. It’s our way of saying that we’re good, we’re bad, and we can’t help it.

Maybe we can’t help it, but we can stop thinking of ourselves as “an interesting mix.” In fact, there are no angels on hand to make us look stupid, and no animals capable of acknowledging, in so many words, our superiority. Let’s just give it up and accept our uncomplicated starkness, as the smartest things that this little planet of ours has to offer. And let’s just try to live up to that.

¶ Matins: Among the phrases that we’re going to retire for at least a few years, alongside “personal responsibility,” let’s hope that “ownership society” finds a place. It was nothing but code for the enrichment of mortgagebaggers.

Who, like the viruses that they so closely resemble, have found a new line of weakness.

¶ Lauds: At dinner tonight, Kathleen asked me if I’d known about Peanuts and the Beethoven scores. Well, er, yes! But so what? I was never a Peanuts fan. Especially when I was a kid.

¶ Prime: Here is a blog — The Art of Manliness — that I came across during the recent Weblog beauty pageant. I agree with almost everything it says, until author Brett McKay assumes that I know what to do with duct tape. Which, in all fairness, I must confess that he doesn’t. (He might try to teach me, though.)

¶ Tierce: Here’s a story that took a while to appear, at least on my radar screen: How much did she know, when did she know it, and how much is hers? The Ruth Madoff Story. (Part 1/1000)

¶ Sext: Gail Collins says it all in a few words:

I think I speak for the entire nation when I say that the way this transition has been dragging on, even yesterday does not seem like yesterday. And the last time George W. Bush did not factor into our lives feels like around 1066.

¶ Nones: Can this really be happening (Good News Department!)? A clip from BBC World News: three-ton T-walls are coming down in Iraq, no longer needed.

¶ Vespers: No sooner do I begin to digest the news that a new Kate Christensen novel is on the way than I open Harper’s and find a story by Joseph O’Neill!

¶ Compline: Here’s hoping that the pilots and crew of US Air Flight 1549, captained by C B “Sully” Sullenberger, will be able to honor the city with a tickertape parade.

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¶ Matins: Here’s hoping that no regular readers of The Daily Blague were under the illusion that the Cold War was “won” — and by US! Andrew Kramer reports on the cold Cold War.

¶ Lauds: The year in music: Steve Smith sums up 2008.

¶ Prime: The last thing you need is yet another blog to check out, but I’m afraid that you’ll have to make room on your list for Scouting New York — at least if you have any interest whatsoever in this burg of ours. The site is kept by a professional location scout — what a dream job! (There are no dream jobs, but we don’t have to know that.

¶ Tierce: A story that I’m afraid I was expecting to see: “State’s Unemployment System Buckles Under Surging Demand.” That the outage was repaired later the same day is not the point.

¶ Sext: Will nonbelievers spend eternity at the back of a bus? 800 London buses will begin bearing “atheist” messages, such as “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Sarah Lyall reports.

¶ Nones: Oops! Another I-Lied accounting story, this one involving Satyam, the outsourcing firm that provides back-office services to “more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies.” Heather Timmons reports, with Bettina Wassner.

¶ Vespers: Don’t ask what has taken me so long, but I’ve gotten round at last to adding Koreanish to the blog roster. It is kept by novelist Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh. Yesterday, he posted an entry from this years MLA convention in San Francisco.

¶ Compline: Stanley Fish lists his favorite American movies of all time. Of the ten, only Vertigo makes my list. I don’t begin to understand the appeal of John Wayne, and I could never omit Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, or Fred Astaire, not to mention Preston Sturgis.

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¶ Matins: Wouldn’t it be nice if Arianna Huffington’s wish comes true, and the Madoff Affair puts an end to the faux-cluelessness of modern management?

¶ Tierce: Today’s verse of the Madoff chapter: New York’s commercial real estate developers. This mess begins to look like one of Stanley Milgram’s disturbing behavioral experiments. While there’s no doubt that the SEC blew this one, it’s hard to feel sorry for investors who overrode commonsense basics in the stampede to “invest.” Especially when Mr Madoff appears to have mirrored their own way of doing business.

The outsize impact on the industry may have resulted largely because Mr. Madoff (pronounced MAY-doff) managed his funds much the way that real estate leaders have operated successfully for decades: He provided little information and demanded a lot of trust.

¶ Nones: Thailand seems to have turned a corner, as defectors from the People’s Power Party in support of a coalition government headed by Abhisit Vejjajiva.  

¶ Vespers: In 1618, the Defenestration of Prague launched the Thirty Years’ War. (Catholics threw some Protestants out the window.) In 2008, the ? of Baghdad ended the American Misadventure in Iraq. (Wouldn’t that be nice!)

¶ Compline: Something I’d written myself: Lee Stranahan’s plea for large-mindedness from folks unhappy with President-Elect Obama’s invitation to Rick Warren to deliver the invocation on 20 January.

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The more I learn about George Kennan, the more clearly he stands out as my favorite American. After an unexceptional start, he became just about the only man in this country’s foreign service capable of grasping the fact that, in Russia,

what had really happened during the purges of the 1930s was that “the ship of state had been cut loose from the bonds of Communist dogma”; that Stalin was a limitless autocrat, a peasant tsar, and not an international revolutionary.

That’s John Lukacs, writing in George Kennan: A Study of Character (Yale, 2007). A few pages later, a footnote ends: “…at a time when ideological anticommunism became not only an element of but a virtual substitution for American patriotism.” Indeed. The thought strikes an interesting chord: for many on the conservative side of American political life, Christianity has taken the place, exactly as Mr Lukacs limns it, of “ideological anticommunism.” I find patriotism tiresome to the extent that it doesn’t involve the defense of the nation from actual, manifest attack; but if there have to be patriots, I prefer them to take Clint Eastwood as their model, and to eschew position statements. Mr Eastwood inclines toward the right, if ever more loosely, but I don’t doubt for a minute that he would agree with Kennan that the enemy, during the Cold War, was Russia, not the Soviet Union. Have you ever asked yourself how it was that the Soviet Union came to a virtually bloodless end, in a puff of gay bravado? Kennan, Mr Lukacs tells us, addressed the Foreign Service School in 1938 thus:

We will get nearer to the truth if we abandon for a time the hackneyed question of how far Bolshevism has changed Russia and turn our attention to the question of how far Russia has changed Bolshevism.

As for Mr Lukacs, he is something of a conservative himself, in the old, old sense: his books about Churchill’s conduct of the Battle of Britain give the measure of that. It’s no real surprise, then, to read the following gratuity:

Their friendship was an example of the condition that the sessence of true friendship between men is almost always intellectual: a genuine appreciation of a friend’s mental and spiritual, rather than of his physical or material qualities.

Excuse me while I choke! The observation is fundamentally so true that one must wonder why Mr Lukacs makes it. Does he wish to defend his late friend from the implications, whatever they might be, of having “a kind of sensitivity so fine as to be somehow feminine — surely feminine rather than masculine”? (And what’s that about, the “feminine” nature of a “sensitive” mind?) Then there’s the Cartesian dualism inherent in Mr Lukacs’s analysis of friendship: men bond with their minds and overlook their bodies. Which I rather doubt. The tall and dominating, deep-voiced man will invite far less rigorous review of his opinions than the stammering pipsqueak. But it’s the tail of the observation that stings: the implication that relations between men and women are “physical and material.”

It would be naive to deny that that’s exactly what they are in many, perhaps most cases; but it would be obtuse to deny they’re that way largely because it is convenient for men so to limit them.

If I fuss, it’s because I admire John Lukacs. A man of compleat and correct education, fluent in a second language, he thinks, as one might have said, nobly. But it raises an eyebrow, does it not, to read that he is “past president-elect” (?) of the American Catholic Historical Association. That suggests the kind of nobility that the West has been trying to shrug off since 1789.

¶ Matins: Musing on the Times’ ten best books of 2008 — of which I’ve read only one.

¶ Sext: Lance Arthur has decided to come out of the closet — as an atheist. This means more than just writing about his lack of faith in his (latest) blog, Just Write.

 ¶ Nones: And we thought it was just us… Every now and then, somebody writes about the fact that almost all advertised watches are set at (roughly) 10:10. The other day, it was Andrew Adam Newman, at the Times. (For Timex, it’s 10:09:36; at Rolex, it’s 10:10:31.) Now Kathleen and I scan the ads for watches that are set at odd times. (via kottke.org)

 ¶ Vespers: Two new biographies of Samuel Johnson occasion one of Adam Gopnik’s invaluable essays.

The worst of literary faults for him is, exactly, tediousness. “We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and over-burdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master and seek for companions.” (His firmest statement on art was that it should be “harmless pleasure.” He knew it would shock in its Philistinism, but he stood by it.) Johnson was certainly “serious” about literature, but he thought that writing was serious as conversation is serious, an occasion for wit and argument, not as sex and sermons are serious, a repository of fears and hungers.

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¶ Matins: Roger Ebert’s complaint about the “CelebCult” — the news about “divorces, addiction, disease, success, failure, death watches, tirades, arrests, hissy fits, scandals” that is killing contemporary journalism at the speed of liver cancer — is remarkable for the quality of comments that it has attracted, most of which are (dauntingly!) worth reading, especially the ones that Mr Ebert has answered.

But when I read Jason Kottke’s entry about the post — Mr Kottke shares Mr Ebert’s dismay — I thought: all very well, but what are we to do? This led me to wonder if a misguided interest in gossip is really the problem.

¶ Tierce: This morning’s Times brings a nice column by David Leonhardt, “Budgets Behaving Badly,” that extends the hope that Barack Obama will staff his administration with behavioral economists. He has already nominated one, Peter Orszag, for budget director.

¶ Compline: Now that the Episcopal Church is finally splitting, with the conservatives abandoning the mother ship for their shriveled-up future, one can only wonder how long it will take American Catholics of conscience to break with Rome in the name of true Christian values.

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¶ Matins: So often, reading stories in the business section is like watching fish dart in a rolling stream. Glints of brilliant suggestion disappear almost immediately. What does the following passage, taken from Michael de la Merced’s lengthy story about the bailout to date, actually mean?

“What hasn’t improved is the psychology,” said Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors, an investment firm based in San Francisco. “This thing has morphed from a credit market issue into a banking crisis into an economic crisis.”

¶ Sext: Michael Kinsley writes about a new state of mind: not wanting to buy something cool.

But ultimately even the bargain didn’t seduce me. My mind followed an unfamiliar path. I thought of all the coffee makers we already have, and how each of them had let us down. I thought about another clock to reset twice a year or face its accusatory blinking in the kitchen dark. I asked myself whether attempting to master another set of instructions written in English as a Second Language was really the best use of a month of my time.

For possibly the first time ever, I considered the question of getting the thing home (the issue: juggle coffee maker and fare card on the Metro, or eat up my bargain with a $20 cab ride) before I owned it rather than after. I even remembered — as I had vowed to do the last time my consumer confidence boiled over like this — the trauma of disposing the corrugated cardboard box and all those infuriating blocks of Styrofoam. I went home empty-handed, and my consumer confidence was shot.

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¶ Matins: I have not had the pleasure of meeting Andy Towle in person, but I understand that he is not a tall man. It now appears that everybody understands that he is not a tall man. So well that the little surprise at the end of this clip of Rick and Steve needs no explanation. If I were Andy, I’d slap me silly for laughing so hard. As I said in a recent entry, I’m pretty mixed up these days, but that’s no excuse. (Thanks, Joe.)

¶ Tierce: Something in Brent Bowers’s story about executive coaching, small businesses, and overcoming understandable anxiety caught my eye. It has to do with a state-change that, inevitably it seems, faces entrepreneurs as their enterprises grow.

¶ Nones: The brains of bullies appear to be wired differently, according to fMRI studies. Tara Parker-Pope reports.

While the study is small, the striking differences shown in the brain scans suggests that bullies may have major differences in how their brains process information compared to non-bullies. Dr. Decety said the aggressive adolescents showed a strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum, areas of the brain that respond to feeling rewarded. The finding “suggested that they enjoyed watching pain,” he said. Notably, the control group of youths who weren’t prone to aggressive behavior showed a response in the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction, areas of the brain involved in self regulation.

This comes as no surprise, and yet it seems to add some urgency to the question of how we deal with such information.

¶ Vespers: Amazingly, this doesn’t happen more often: “American Idol reject found dead near Paula Abdul’s home.” Although I would not outlaw it, I can’t see reality television as anything but debased, debasing, and utterly inhumane.

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On the right, the Azure, the luxury condominium whose crane fell, last summer, into the building on the left, scraping and denting a few evidently unrepaired balconies. I can see both buildings from my desk, but I have not drifted this far north on First Avenue since long before the accident.

Here we are in the middle of November: the year-end holidays will be upon us very shortly. More than ever, I wish that I lived in a shack in the Laurentian Mountains, far from everyone; once again autumn has fooled me. I expected to enjoy getting back into the social swim, going to concerts and plays and having dinner with friends at dusky but no longer smoky cabarets. And I’m doing my best. But my mind is elsewhere, because, once again, a summer’s reflections have resulted in what I’m afraid I’m going to have to call a paradigm shift.

Given everything that’s happening in the greater world — the glorious election, the terrifying market — I can’t expect anyone to take an interest in the jumble of ideas that, at some point in August, fell into a bold and clear intellectual pattern before my very eyes. Suddenly the world — my world, my little me-centered world, but nonetheless a world in which I think of myself only when I’m in some sort of physical pain — made sense in new terms. In retrospect, the terms weren’t so new, and the paradigm shift was preceded by plenty of warning. But the newness of things is still as sharp as that good old new-car smell, or the shot of green growth that intoxicates a woodland path on a dewy late-May morning.

I suppose I ought to be grateful that I didn’t have to schedule a fourth-anniversary re-think of The Daily Blague. It happened all by itself. So far at least, the brainstorm has nothing to do with design, format, or “features.” But enough of this repassage, which I’ve mentioned only because the world around me is changing, too.

The election, the market — &c &c! Reason to wonder how economic developments will affect everything from Kathleen’s law practice to our continued tenancy in the heart of Yorkville. The health of a few near and dear relatives. And of course the wedding party.

The wedding party! That’s what brought me to First Avenue and 92nd Street, and this view of the new, safer-looking crane at the Azure (which spent most the summer without so much as a new cinderblock). We’ve booked rooms for my cousin, Bill, and his family at the Marriott Courtyard hotel that neither of us knew existed until a very early morning in June. The driver taking us to the airport for our flight to Santa Monica chose 92nd Street to get to the FDR Drive. Not exactly crazy, but unusual. We can see the hotel out of the window, too, but we didn’t know that it wasn’t just another apartment building. Although, the moment we did know, we thought how obvious it was.

My cousin and his family don’t get to New York very often, so they’ll be striking out on their own when they arrive on Friday. Me they can see when I visit my aunt in New Hampshire. Not to mention on Saturday, at the wedding party. Kathleen, it appears, will be working late; she’s moving heaven and earth to clear her desk before we leave for St Croix next Wednesday. That leaves me fancy-free and unattached on the eve. A dangerous combination, especially as I have two invitations in my pocket, both to gatherings at bars on the west side of Midtown.

One is the crowd that Megan and Ryan are assembling in lieu of a rehearsal dinner. The other is the birthday party of a fellow blogger. That sounds like fun — or would have done until this summer, when being a little bit drunk became, for the first time in my life, genuinely disagreeable. Vis-à-vis alcohol, I’m very much in a limbo between habit and abstinence. Who knows how that’s going to turn out.

Church of the Holy Trinity, East 88th Street.

Between the new Weltanschauung and the seasonal bustle of family and friends, I’m pretty confused. Last night, I came home from a stirring recital at Zankel Hall, as eager to chat about the evening as a teen home from the prom. But the Internet had nothing to offer. I was all fired up to talk about Ives and the Alcotts, but no one was home.

Tonight, however, is a different story. An old friend has just signed up at Facebook, and is going through the same tumult that I found myself in a few weeks ago. We’re being very naughty. I just asked her if her niece (a new Facebook friend) is hot.

I can still do naughty.