Morning

¶ Hot: It’s too hot to do just about anything but read, and that’s what I spent all day yesterday doing. But inactivity on that scale is depressing, and I’m bedeviled, this morning, by a sense of the futility of things.

Noon

¶ Onward: Paul Krugman writes very optimistically (I think) about the “de-racialization” of American politics.

Night

¶ Sudden Death: The whole day was overshadowed by the looming of power cuts. Just when I’d decided that the crisis was past, I got a phone message from Con Ed. Here’s the gist.
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Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland, read from his novel and signed copies at the 82nd Street branch of Barnes & Noble this evening. I bought the novel for the fifth and sixth times. The first copy, you can read about here. The second copy, purchased at St Mark’s Bookshop, went to the other O’Neills, my daughter and son-in-law. The third copy went to Lady Diana (our Lady Diana, sister of late House Secretary Sir Kenneth Bradshaw). The fourth copy is destined for Nom de Plume. I don’t know what I’ll do with the fifth copy, but don’t worry: the one sure thing is that I’m not giving away the sixth copy that, very obligingly, Mr O’Neill signed for me on page 135, alongside the following passage:

There we instantly became confused by a succession of signposts placed in accordance with a bizarre New York convention that struck me again and again, namely, that all directions to motorists should be so located and termed as to disorient everyone except the traveler who already knows his way.

With this single sentence, Mr O’Neill proves himself to be the master of New York life that Tom Wolfe so entertainingly but regrettably showed himself not to be when he built an entire novel on a “save” that, while it might work anywhere else in the country, no born and bred New Yorker (“Sherman McCoy”?) would think of trying. As a traveler who grew up on local roads, I had the leisure to note how useless the signs were. If you’re on the Bronx leg of the Triboro bridge, hoping to get closer to Times Square, and you suddenly see the “Downtown NYC” sign with its little arrow, you’re probably toast. Your chance to position yourself in the correct lane expired fifty yards ago.

And then there’s the beautiful prose in which Mr O’Neill embeds his observation.

So, bibliomanes everywhere: know that there is a copy of the most beautiful novel in the world that does not, on its title page, appear to be a “signed” copy. Whilst, one fine day many centuries from now, in a world that, it’s to be hoped, has not been reduced to cinders (I’m not giving up the book any sooner), a general reader will turn the page and frown, seeing what you see above. What’s, she will ask, that about? 

William J Bernstein’s new book, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, is a paradigm-shifting book if there ever was one. In all the hoo-ha that we have had to listen to about Islam in the past seven years, no one has gotten to the heart of the matter more clearly than Mr Bernstein does here:

Alone among the world’s religions, Islam was founded by a trader. (Muhammed’s immediate successor, the cloth merchant Abu Bakr, was also a trader.) This extraordinary face suffuses the soul of this faith and guides the historical events that ricocheted over the land routes of Asia and the sea-lanes of the Indian Ocean through the next nine centuries. It’s traces are visible in today’s world, from the modern colonies of Muslim Indians in East Africa to the Lebanese merchants still active in West Africa to the “Syrians” who populated the third-world outposts of Graham Greene’s novels.

The most sacred texts of Islam resonate with the importance of commerce, as in this famous passage from the Koran: “O you who believe! Do not devour your property among yourselves falsely, except that it be trading by your mutual consent.” The most important passages on trade and commerce, however, are found in the hadith, the collected stories of Muhammed’s life, which offer advice on the conduct of trade from the general … to the specific.

…

Within a very few decades, the new creed would sweep from Mecca to Medina and back, next across the Middle East, and then west to Spain and east to India. In a commercial sense, early Islam can be thought of as a rapidly inflating bubble of commerce; outside lay unbelievers, and inside lay a swiftly growing theological and institutional unity. 

Mr Bernstein goes on to hazard a quickly-sketched explanation of Islam’s very rapid spread that makes it sound rather more like a Lions’ Club than a world religion.

A big issue, with lots of Noes. “Summer Reading” is not “Summer Reviewing”!

Morning

¶ Quiet: The calendar is blank. Nothing on for the entire week. No excuses, in other words, for not attending to the prosaic domesticalities that have been piling up for weeks.

Noon

¶ Eco: At Varieties of Unreligious Experience, the Web site that he revived not too long ago (how quickly I lose track, though!), Conrad Roth lays into the historical fiction of Umberto Eco, which he used to like but now finds emptily pretentious.

Night

¶ Parade: Make nice, sez hizzoner. Don’t board up the borders because the [epithet deleted] are coming.

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One day last week, I happened upon a Web-page discussion of Netherland, Joseph O’Neill’s astonishingly beautiful new book. I had just finished reading the novel, I think, when I read that Mr O’Neill published a piece about a Trinidadian death-row prisoner in an issue of Granta entitled “Overachievers.” My heart leapt. “Overachievers” is one of the handful of old Grantas that I’ve held on to. Now, where was it? (more…)

Morning

¶ Cool: After a muggy, summery afternoon yesterday, rains cooled things off a  bit, but it’s almost chilly this morning. Which is just fine.

¶ Have It Your Way: A bit of chuckleheaded reporting in today’s Times, about Democratic Party shortfalls in the Convention account: Leslie Wayne’s “Democrats Miss Marks to Finance Convention.”

Noon

¶ Please, Mr Postman: Reading “the personals” for fun is something I stopped doing a while ago. In an idle moment this afternoon, however, I noticed that some advertisers are listing e-mail addresses. This can’t be wise.

Night

¶ Papaflessa: That’s the name of the street in New Erythrea (Ν Ερυθραια) that my old foreign-exchange student friend lives on — or lived on the last time anybody I know had an address for her.

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¶ This week’s Book Review review…

¶ Matins: Just my luck. Coming across an unattributed line of Latin in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherworld, I google it and discover that, not to my surprise, it comes from Virgil’s Georgics:O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
agricolas.
It’s a typical bit of aristocratic sentimentality: how happy the peasants would be if they only knew how lucky they are to be peasants. Yes, well. It took a moment to track down the source, though, because the first return at Google took me to a discussion of Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory. It was only by checking out the next couple of links that I discovered Amerloque: A Long-Term American Expatriate Resident in France Shares His Views.

¶ Sext: I tip my hat to Guy Trebay, who says a number of things that I’ve been thinking about the Thom Browne look.

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The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The tail-lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the the thought that the final twilight was upon New York.

Methinks I’m in for a good read. The foregoing passage, from pages 20-21 of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, induced such a mild rapture that I had to stop, to copy it out somewhere. (more…)

¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review, which is just about as disappointing as last week’s was inspiring.

¶ Tierce: Is there anything as compulsively readable as oral history? Florent, the pioneering restaurant in the meatpacking district that has finally, some might say, reaped what it sowed, will be closing late next month, and a number of habitués, including Calvin Klein and Roy Lichtenstein’s widow, join Florent Morellet and members of his staff at Frank Bruni’s microphone.

¶ Sext: How about a $150 burger? (Price subject to market fluctuations.) Where but at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe would you expect to find ground Kobe-style beef?

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¶ Matins: This week’s Book Review is without a doubt the best issue in all the time that I’ve been peering at it through my reproving lorgnette.

¶ Tierce: The good people of Juneau cut power consumption by 30% — because they had to. There’s nothing like an avalanche to get everybody’s attention.

¶ Sext: At her apartment on Sunday, Megan handed me a bag of books that I had given her years and years ago: time to make room for Ryan’s library. I was very glad to get my second copy of this back.

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¶ In the Decameron (IX, iv), an anecdote rather than a tale, involving actual Siense gentlmen, contemporaries of Dante: the two Cecchi, very dissimilar men who were united only in their given names and their hatred of their fathers. The story will put readers of a certain vintage in mind of Eddie Haskell.

¶ In Aubrey, two Lives: Ben Jonson and Ralph Kettell. The second gent, who served as the second President of Trinity College, garners quite a few more pages than rare Ben does. Of the latter’s celebrated career, Aubrey write “I need not give any account.” Whereas Kettell, who would have been lost to time, emerges very clearly as a sort of gangly Monty Woolley, born at forty, more able administrator than scholar — an amiable loose-leaf with regard to everything but discipline. And the quality of the beer at Trinity, which was so excellent that the scholars “could not go to any other place but for the worse.” Surely another college president must have given Kettell’s theory about excellent beer a try — surely?

¶ Returning to Merrill, dipping into the “Previously Uncollected Poems” at the back of the book. From “En Route”:

Tank dry, this eerie, by now selfless power

Was bearing me beyond
The windblown kids with signs
Upheld in hope: New Haven, Providence …
Their mouths worked. But a wand
Had grazed me. On I drove
Under the curse or blessing of no love.

¶ In Le rouge et le noir, I gallop through the final titled chapters toward the finale. That leaves four to which Stendhal couldn’t be bothered to affix titles. Once I’ve done with them — I already know what’s going to happen — I shall read the introductory material with hopeful interest, in search of an explanation for Stendhal’s manifestly fading interest in this project. Could it have been the tumult of the Revolution of 1830, which replaced one branch of Bourbons with the other? More anon …

¶ Clive James, rather briefly, on Nirad Chaudhuri, according to him the “most distinguished” Indian master of English prose. I have added Chaudhuri’s The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian to my reading list.

Chaudhuri’s prescience was about a future that had not yet happened, and is happening only now. By the mere act of writing such a richly reflective prose, he suggested that a civilization continues through the humane examination of its history, which was its real secret all along.

Tom Meglioranza has tagged me with the 123 Meme. Here’s how it works: you open the book nearest to hand, turn to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and quote it, together with the next two sentences, on your Web log. Then you tag five blogging friends and see what they come up with.

As I had just stowed my Morning Read library, there was no danger of French, Latin, or Italian making an unwelcome intrusion. The book nearest to hand was Harold McGee’s On Food And Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (Second Edition; Scribner, 2004). It’s always nearby, because Kathleen and I often dip into it at the dinner table to answer a question or settle an argument. (This makes, if not for Slow Food, at least for Long Dinners.) Here are the fifth, sixth and seventh sentences on page 123:

In the 1870s a wider distrubution of fresh meat, especially beef, was made possible by several advances, including the growth of the cattle industry in the West, the introduction of cattle cars on the railroads, and the development of the refrigerated railroad car by Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour.

Today, with one fifteenth of the world’s population, the United States eats one third of the world’s meat. Meat consumption on this scale is possible only in wealthy societies like our own, because animal flesh remains a much less efficient source of nourishment than plant protein.

That can’t be news to regular Daily Blague readers; nor, perhaps, is the synchronicity startling: I had just finished reading Bee Wilson’s “The Last Bite,” in the current issue of The New Yorker. I’ll have more to say about that on Friday. For now, I’ll just point out that it isn’t wealth alone that permits our massive meat consumption, but a corporate organization that churns out hecatombs of  the substandard foodstuffs that critic Michael Pollan famously dismisses as “foodish.” So, while we’re eating a lot of beef, the bulk of it is junk that we’d be better off avoiding. The problem, of course, is that we eat with our eyes and ears, where the advertisers get us.

I hereby tag Édouard, George, Migs, JR, and Tony. (I’d tag Mig as well, but I suspect that he has already been through this one.)

¶ Matins: A week to look forward to! Close encounters with fiber-optics! The worst will be over tomorrow, when I drain the dregs of a certain four-litre container.

¶ Tierce: “I’m With Stupid”? A Times/CBS poll brings forth my inner Dick Cheney:

While just 24 percent of voters said they thought the Wright issue would matter a lot or some to them in the fall, 44 percent said it would matter a lot or some to “most people you know.” And while just 9 percent of Democrats said the issue would matter a lot to them should Mr. Obama be their party’s nominee, even that small a slice of the electorate could be a problem for Mr. Obama if he won the nomination and the contest against Mr. McCain was close.

“So what?”

¶ Vespers: Working my way through the book pile, I read something that has been sitting around for about year, Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony.

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¶ Matins: What a weekend! I was about to say that it left me in need of a rest cure, but then I did a little research.

¶ Tierce: How sweet it is: Robert Crandall, the daimon of American Airlines during the glory days of deregulation, declares that only government intervention can save the airlines.

¶ Sext: The lost art of diagramming sentences: Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, at Portico.

¶ Vespers: Now that the Wi-Fi is working fairly reliably in the living room, I’m running the household from the secretary desk and staying on top of the paperwork.

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What an orderly book Jane Austen’s last novel is! I had never noticed before that it is so neatly divided into two books of twelve chapters each. And almost as evenly divided between county (Somersetshire) and town (Bath).

Has Persuasion ever been so beloved? It seems, these days, to be second in popularity only to Pride & Prejudice. Toward the end, every other page sparkles with a well-quoted line. Perhaps this novel, like its heroine herself, has been rediscovered because Austen has so many more older readers. Austen has always been important to thoughtful and intelligent young women, but she is no longer their particular property — as, I suspect, the Brontës always will be. People go on re-reading Austen — and finding that a lot of what she has to say is lost to anyone under forty. And ageing boomers are far less likely to be vexed than girls might be by the matrimonial prospects of a woman of twenty-nine who has lost (only) her “bloom.”

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¶ Matins: The book that I ordered was Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant. The book that I got was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World. That’s how it is with QPBC sometimes. You print one shaky digit on your reply card* and you’re screwed. I ought to have put what I got out on the windowsill. Instead, I started to read it.

¶ Tierce: An ongoing sad story: the catastrophically depleted ranks of Roman Catholic seminarians. Here’s a story about Dunwoodie, the late-Gothic pile on a hill that, when I was a child, loomed over brash new highways, greatly intensifying the bogus feel of the image. Already the Church seemed not so much traditional as airlocked.

¶ Nones: The Papal Schedule (He’ll be up bei uns at six on Friday afternoon). The Papal Apology (same old, same old).

¶ Compline: This just in (Dept of ROTFLOL): John the Doorman has assured us that the Pope is going to make a little parenthesis on Friday, to Bless the Bratwurst at Schaller & Weber.

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Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman turns out to be the first of three projected books that, collectively, will propose new ways of managing human behavior for the better. I’m only a few pages into the first chapter, and already I’m overwhelmed by the force of Sennett’s ideas. (more…)

¶ Matins: Ms Cornflower is not as lucky with her new dishwasher as I have been with the new computer. Even if it didn’t work — and it does, just fine — the new computer would not flood the blue room with suds. My heart do go out.

¶ Sext: Kathleen, expects to fly on American Airlines to North Carolina this weekend, to visit her parents. I wonder if she’ll be able to get there.

¶ Vespers: After a quiet day of reading and minding the domestic front (isn’t that a nicer way of referring to “paperwork”?), I’m going to try to finish watching Ha-Buah (The Bubble), an Israeli movie that I rented the other day. Whose idea was it to print the subtitles in yellow?

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