¶ Matins: It seems that I had my eye on the wrong target. I expected the outgoing Bushies to act up. Instead, it’s the Wingnuts.

¶ Lauds: Sharon Butler writes about how Facebook works — for artists. “Go away Purity Police.” Amen — I guess. (via Art Fag City)

¶ Prime: Daniel Green is thinking of doing something like what I do, at The Reading Experience…

¶ Tierce: Three out of four of today’s Times Op-Ed pieces concern the AIG bonuses. Two are by regular columnists, but the third, by Lawrence Cunningham, is the one to read.

¶ Sext: Christoph Niemann’s sweet elegance imposes order on the most disorderly of all things: cords.

¶ Nones: A few weeks ago (at the beginning of last month), Angela Merkel of Germany protested the Pope’s handling of Bishop Williamson. Now the French government is attackinig the Pope’s stand on condoms in Africa.

¶ Vespers: Simon Creasey interviews topnotch graphic fictionist Adrian Tomine. (via Emdashes)

¶ Compline: New Hampshire: the “Peter Pan” state!

Terry Stewart, a member of the town budget committee in Gilford, N.H., and a seat-belt-law opponent, has had it with the new majority. “No matter what’s your pleasure in life, sooner or later they’re coming,” he says.

(more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, “The Monkey-Rope,” another one of Melville’s joculo-Shakespearean entertainments.

“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,” he suddenly added, no approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. “Will you look at that kannakin sir: smell of it, if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added: “The steward, Mr Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bellows by which he blows back the breath into a half-drowned dman?”

Not to mention the flogged-to-death Siamese-twins image.

¶ In Don Quixote, Sancho continues to dream about governing ínsulas. The bachelor, Don Sansón, encourages Don Quixote to appear in the Zaragoza lists, where “he could win fame vanquishing all the Aragonese knights, which would be the same as vanquishing all the knights in the world.”

¶ In Squillions, a whispering campaign at the Admiralty aims to shut down Noël Coward’s production of In Which We Serve, the patriotic re-telling of, among other adventures, Lord Mountbatten’s misadventures in Crete; but the interference halts abruptly with a letter from “Bertie” to “Dickie.”

¶ Matins: Is President Obama going too far on the economy, or not far enough? Both, says The Economist, in a piece that explicitly opposes voters’ interests (“rage”) and “market confidence.”

¶ Lauds: Steve Martin will “produce” a high school performance of Picasso at the Lapin Agile. That is, he’ll contribute (mightily) toward the costs, after parents banned the play from the high school itself.

¶ Prime: What to do when a much-loved blogger dies? That’s what Robert Guskind’s executor will have to decide, vis-à-vis Gowanus Lounge.

¶ Tierce: Louis Uchitelle’s report on using the railway bailout of the 1970s as a template for saving Detroit reminds me of the importance of taxonomy.

¶ Sext: “How to Write Like an Architect,” Doug Patt’s brisk clip at YouTube, is more than a primer on stylish block printing. Like the most seductive advertising, it holds out the promise of a life well-lived. (via Kottke.org)

¶ Nones: You know things are bad if the best thing the Irish can think up at the moment is how to repatriate Irish-Americans.

¶ Vespers: Lance Mannion won’t be reading Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever.

¶ Compline: They’re looking for qualified workers in the Auvergne (“backwater” is a serious understatement) — and beginning to find them.

(more…)

In Zoë Heller’s new novel, The Believers, one of the characters, Rosa Litvinoff, walks into a synagogue out of pure curiosity but walks out engaged by her ancestral faith, even though it takes her a while to recognize this fact.

Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny. And there was a sense in which its unlikelihood, its horrible inconvenience, was precisely what made it so compelling.

Compelled by horrible inconvenience — this must be an update of quia absurdum est. To be drawn to something by a negative — a lack, a loss, a flaw, a defect— is incomprehensible to me. My mind scurries to transform the bad thing into a good thing. Rosa, for example, likes annoying her family; it’s a way of maintaining her integrity in a family of leftists while at the same time keeping the faith. She has recently lost her faith in socialism, however, so there’s plenty of room for something that will really annoy her determinedly unobservant parents: Orthodoxy. (Her mother, the inconveniently lovable Audrey, refers to Rosa’s newfound religiousness under the fantastically ugly adjectival rubric, “Jewy.”) So I have no trouble believing that Rosa is drawn to the synagogue by something very positive — which she only perversely labels “inconvenience.”

(One thinks not only of the mid-century Jews for whom religion was not optional, and a great deal worse than inconvenient; but one also remembers the early Christian martyrs, to whom the sedition of proscribed faith provided a fast track to glory. To speak of an inconvenient religion is to conjure Lady Bracknell.)

Intellectually, I oblige myself to presume my own imaginative limitation: it is circular to insist that the mere act of wanting something makes that something good, in however unlikely a way. I can’t go there, though. I want only good things — which I only wish made me a good person.

¶ Matins: “Unseemly” is the nicest word that I can come up with to characterize attempts by the Roman Catholic Church (and other religious organizations) to block a temporary repeal of the statute of limitations on child abuse.

¶ Lauds: Is there a movie here? As the UN prepares to evacuate its Turtle Bay headquarters for a four-year renovation, lots of valuable artworks seem to have been evacuated earlier, less officially.

¶ Prime: A new and very smart-looking literary blog, The Second Pass.

¶ Tierce: Muntader al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at our last president, was jailed immediately after the “insult, not an assault”; he has just been sentenced to three years in prison. Bernie Madoff will spend less time in jail prior to sentencing — presumably. I must say, prison looks more and more like the waste of a public good in cases involving the crimes (and “crimes”) with which these men have been charged.
 
¶ Sext: One great thing about the recession so far is the way it has replaced “because I can” with “because it’s smart” as a principle of style. Consider the chic $300 re-think.

¶ Nones: Soi-disant Prime Minister Vladimir Putin “forgives” Ukraine its penalty debts in the wake of winter’s gas crisis.

¶ Vespers: Nina McLaughlin re-reads Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, at Bookslut. It’s not the book she remembered!

¶ Compline: At the Infrastructurist, Barbara McCann writes about a bill in Congress that might make the economic stimulus/transportation vector a lot smarter. Also, a great pair of before-and-after photos.

(more…)

¶ The second part of Don Quixote is indeed a great deal more amusing than the first, largely because it redeems the one-damned-thing-after-another quality of what goes before. Quixote and Don Sansón, a student at Salamanca who has read the account of the knight errant’s adventures in the First Part — the publication of which, when “the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the  blade of his sword,” our hero has no difficulty attributing to enchanters — talk about the book’s reception among the reading public.

“Now I say,” said Don Quixote, “that the author of my history was no wise man but an ignorant gossip-monger who, without rhyme or reason, began to write, not caring how it turned out, just like Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, when asked what he was painting, replied ‘Whatever comes out.’

(This was indeed my judgment of the narrative of the First Part.)

Pderhaps he painted a rooster in such a fashion and so unrealistically that he had to write beside it, in capital letters, ‘This is a rooster.’ And that must be how my history is: a commentary will be necessary in order to understand it.”

“Not at all,” responded Sansón, “because it is so clear that there is nothing in it to cause difficulty: children look at it, youths read it, men understand it, the old celebrate it, and, in short, it is so popular and widely read and so well known by every kind of person that as soon as people see a skinny old nag they say: ‘There goes Rocinante.’ And those who have been fondest of reading it are the pages. There is no lord’s antechamber where one does not find a copy of Don Quixote: as soon as it is put down it is picked up again; some rush at it, and others ask for it. In short, this history is the most enjoyable and least harmful entertainment ever seen, because nowhere in it can one find even the semblance of an untruthful word or a less than Catholic thought.”

But what one could find it was a massive critique of aristocratical foolishness. Might this explain why the first translation into any language was Thomas Sheltons, of 1612, into English?

¶ In Moby-Dick, a flurry of short chapters about whale butchering, culminating in “The Sphynx,” in which Ahab addresses the head of the decapitated leviathan. His poetical and rather awful gush is interrupted by the sighting of another ship.

“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man — where away?”

The ship is another whaler, the Jeroboam. Although the captain and crew are healthy, the ship has been commandeered by a madman on board who calls himself Gabriel. Gabriel has convinced the “ignorant” crew that he is indeed archangelic, and the state of things aboard the Jeroboam might best be characterized as ongoing but non-violent mutiny. A boat from the Jeroboam pitches alongside the Pequod. Gabriel is among the oarsman; Stubb has heard his story from the Town-Ho. For the first time since beginning the book, I am thrilled and terrified by the scene that Melville conjures. Difficult as it is to shout over high seas, Captain Mayhew is continually interrupted by the lunatic.

“Think, think of thy whale-boat stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!”

“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that — ” But again the boat tore ahead as though borne by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional caprices of the sea were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to warrant.

The raving madman, the roiling sea, and the invocation of Moby-Dick left me queasy and ill at ease.  

Regular readers will have noted the scarcity of Morning Reads since the New Year. It is a matter of late nights, I’m afraid; it has never been so difficult to get to bed at a decent hour. Two o’clock in the morning menaces as the new eleven at night. One of these days, the “Morning” descriptor may become altogether notional.

¶ Matins: Now that health care reform is back in the news, an aspect of the much-maligned Canadian system ought not to be overlooked.

¶ Lauds: Call it Cats and Rats — or whatever! Just write the book about the buck that stopped with Cai Mingchao, the Chinese dealer who had “second thoughts.” Now he’s having thirds: tears.

¶ Prime: Jean Ruaud went to Hyères, and took a load of great pictures comme d’hab’; but did he see Mrs Wharton’s place?

¶ Tierce: China’s unlucky number: 6521. These are “interesting times.”

¶ Sext: They call this “counter-cultural”? Flash-mob pillow fights irk San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department. (via Morning News).

¶ Nones: President Obama’s first visit to a Muslim country will take him to Turkey. Great news indeed.

¶ Vespers: Michiko Kakutani’s review of William Cohan’s House of Cards — the Bear, Stearns post-mortem — makes compelling reading in its own right.

¶ Compline: Franchise Christianity? Robert Wright recasts early-Christian history in terms of business models and globalization.

(more…)

Very late last night, I was seized by a fit of giggles. I’d finally gotten round to Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair piece on Iceland.

The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

What’s amazing is that so much of the piece could have been written last year, or even earlier. Tony Shearer resigned his post at a venerable City firm in 2005, when it was acquired by one of the Icelandic banks. He quit “out of fear of what might happen to his reputation if he stayed.” Last October, Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander (Mr Shearer’s old firm) collapsed — just as Mr Shearer feared, three years earlier.

Is it possible that kids are growing up so fast today that even they don’t see what the emperor’s new clothes are made of?

¶ Matins: As a big believer in the effectiveness of no-fly zones, I agree with this proposal for dealing with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

¶ Lauds: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest lady in the West End? The answer? A whole deck of baseball cards, leading with playwright Bola Agbaje as “The New Voice” but with plenty of room for “Queen Bee” and “Eternal Siren.”  (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Over the weekend I discovered a constellation of Web sites that seem to be keeping the preppie flame burning. The Trad, for example…

¶ Tierce: A caption from the print edition: “Similarities (and differences) exist in David Axelrod’s relationship with the current president and Karl Rove’s with the past.”

¶ Sext: Great news: Chuck Norris talks of running for President of Texas. (via Joe.My.God.)

¶ Nones: Good news (sort of): Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, insists that the collision that killed his wife, and sent him to the hospital, had to have been an accident.

¶ Vespers: At Emdashes, Martin Schneider has a go at cutting Ian McEwan’s reputation down to size. What might have been an irritating exercise is rather worth reading.

¶ Compline: Now that the “Consumer Society” is on its deathbed, it’s safe for critics to take hitherto unfashionable pokes at sacred cows, and Jonathan Jones, at the Guardian, has his needle out.   (more…)

¶ If there’s one thing that Lord Chesterfield and I disagree about, it’s laughter.

Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh, since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore only seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a horrible chapter, “Stubb’s Supper.” Between complaining about his overcooked slice of whale meat and ordering the black cook to “preach” to the sharks feeding on the capture’s carcass, Stubb lurches with deranged, operatic swagger.

“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear? away you sail, then — Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go. — Avast heaving, again! Whale-balls for breakfast — don’t forget!

¶ The second part of Don Quixote really is a second beginning. The priest and the barber visit Don Quixote in his chamber, where he is recovering from all the mishaps of the first part. The three men have an amiable and reasonable discussion, and all seems well until our hero firmly makes it quietly clear that he has not given up on being a knight errant or stopped believing in the historical existence of such figures of Felixmarte of Hyrcania. At no point, however, is he held up to ridicule. The barber’s tale of the mad canon of Seville is a far more engaging challenge to Don Quixote’s delusions than another tumble in the dust.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward is surprisingly disapproving of Margaret Rutherford’s highly popular performance as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit.

The great disappointment is Margaret Rutherford, whom the audience love, because the part is so good, but who is actually very, very bad indeed. She is indistinct, fussy and, beyond her personality, has no technical knowledge or resources at all. She merely fumbles and gasps and drops things and throws many of my best lines down the drain. She is despair to Fay, Cecil and Kay and mortification to me because I thought she would be marvellous. I need hardly say that she got a magnificent notice.

I doubt very much that I’ll be saying anything like this sort of thing of Angela Lansbury, when I see the revival in a few weeks.

¶ Matins: Between this and this: I just had one of my big ideas: Libraries in France are bookstores. (Bibliothèques are libraries, but never mind.) What if we altered the English definition, and publicly funded small bookshops?

¶ Lauds: The world’s “largest concert“: the Hamburg State Orchestra plays Brahms — all over Hamburg.

¶ Prime: It took me forever to realize what Formenwandlungen der &-Zeichen means. “&-Zeichen” is the (rather klutzy) German term for “ampersand.”

¶ Tierce: The good news is also the bad news: Orient-Express Hotels wants to back out of a deal with the New York Public Library that may leave the Donnell Library building standing.

¶ Sext:  Keith McNally, owner of Balthasar and other eateries, would like to swat the bloggers who are swarming around his latest venture (which doesn’t open until next week), Minetta Tavern. Buzz, buzz!  

¶ Nones: Amazing news: “Arrest warrant issued for Sudan leader.”

¶ Vespers: Maud Newton reconnects with Katherine Anne Porter, who has just appeared in the Library of America.

¶ Compline: This is a joke, right? The United Transportation Union objects to surveillance cameras in railroad engine cabs; recommends staffing same with two people.

(more…)

Looking for a book yesterday, I came across one that I hadn’t even opened, much less begun to read: Edward Mendelson’s The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life. It was immediately clear that this was a book that I ought to have looked into a while ago, and, retiring with it to my reading chair, I was soon so engrossed that I forgot all about updating the Daily Office. I have never seriously considered reading Frankenstein, the first of Mr Mendelson’s choices, but his chapter on the novel left me feeling something of a booby. Right now, though, I want to share a paragraph from his introduction. Because it could serve as a mission statement for this Web log, I wish I’d said it myself.

One of the themes of this book is its argument that the most intellectually and morally coherent way of thinking about human beings is to think of them as autonomous persons (the plural noun “persons,” not the collective noun “people”) instead of as members of any category, class or group. A second theme, inseparable from the first, is that persons exist only in relations with other persons, that the idea of an absolutely isolated and independent person is intellectually and morally incoherent, that all ideas of personality and society that emphasize stoicism and self-reliance are at best only partially valid, while ideas that emphasize mutual need and mutual aid have the potential to be true.

Like Mr Mendelson, my perspective lies between that of the soul-stuck solipsism of individualism viewpoint and the mechanical oversimplification of collectivism. I am not ashamed to label this perspective socialist. Whatever the political connotations of that term, it correctly denotes the focus of my values: mutual need and mutual aid, distributed in the society with which I’m familiar, which happens to include folks at many socio-economic levels.

¶ Matins: In a foreseeable development that few wanted to think about very much, the downside inequalities of European Union constituents threatens to pull the EU apart. Steven Erlanger and Stephen Castle report.

While Western European countries are reluctant, with their own problems both at home and among the countries using the euro, there is a deep interconnectedness in any case. Much of the debt at risk in Eastern Europe is on the books of euro zone banks — especially in Austria and Italy. The same is true for the problems farther afield, in Ukraine.

Having watched the Soviet Union collapse, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe embraced the liberal, capitalist model as the price of integration with Europe. That model is now badly tarnished, and the newer members feel adrift.

¶ Lauds: In the Chicago Tribune, Mike Boehm asks, “Will the Obamas’ interest in the arts create an inflation of appreciation?” The prospect of presidential interest in theatre and dance is so dizzying that he doesn’t stop to ask why it would be a good thing.

¶ Prime: Perhaps you’ve already discovered Look At Me, the Web site of found photographs, but it’s new to me, and I’m checking it out every day. (I’ve linked to a recent posting that shows what has to be an old Howard Johnson’s — looking not so old.)

¶ Tierce: As usual on Monday mornings, I begin with the Times’s Business section, because that’s where the interesting stories are, even if they would fit just as comfortably in the first section, alongside the “regular” news. Two stories today that generate a certain twinned-snakes synergy:

• “In Obama, Labor Finds the Support It Expected” by Steven Greenhouse, and
•  “India Maintains Sense of Optimism and Growth,” by Heather Timmons.

¶ Sext: A party who signs himself “MDL Welder” seeks advice about a romantic “att[achment].” The Non-Expert replies in an odd demotic.

You are very att. To each other. Man we all know that, we can all see it. When you two are passing yes there will be kiss in return, geddit? So obv. Most people wish they were with someone who was so att. To each other. So you say “Do you think she is falling for me?” and all of us here are LOAO because YES YES YES she’s falling for you and she’s already falling so far down you have to reach down and catch up. You need to jump that diving board and triple flip and angle downwards for minimum air resist. She att. You att. To each other. It’s the best way to be, it’s the best way to start. And we say aww.

This drollery has me imagining a novel yet to be written, set, like Then We Came to the End and Personal Days, in the workplace — but not in a very literate workplace.

¶ Nones: I’ll be watching to see how the US press in general and the New York Times in particular cover this story (from the BBC): “Israel ‘plans settlement growth’.”

¶ Vespers: Charles McGrath paves the way for a revival of interest in John Cheever, soon to appear in the Library of America.

¶ Compline: The Infrastructurist lists the top ten hot infrastructure jobs, complete with tips about getting one. For example (“Smart Meter Installer”):

There are 150 million electric meters in the US. About 90 percent of them are “dumb.” Obama has offered a plan to upgrade 40 million of the meters, but eventually they will probably all be replaced. Some utilities are well under way: PG&E in California is putting in 10.3 million smart meters, while Oncor in Texas is planning to install 3 million in the next four years.

(more…)

¶ On a whim, I read through to the end of Part I of Don Quixote this morning. Busy evenings and late hours left me wanting to spend time with just one book, and only four chapters remained. I was curious to see what Cervanted originally intended as an ending to his mocking epic.

Although I’ve been very amused by Don Quixote, and keenly interested in its dramatic foreshadowings of the comic opera of the Eighteenth Century, I have never once felt the rustle of greatness in its pages, and I’m far more sympathetic than I was, before opening the book, to the generations of Spanish readers who failed to recognize it as their national classic. Cervantes appears to have two fundamentally incompatible objectives in mind. He wants to entertain his readers with comic situations, but he also wants his entertainment to embody a critical analysis of popular literary forms. In one of today’s chapters, the canon and the priest engage in a leisurely discussion of the current theatre scene that betrays Cervantes as a very inexpert ventriloquist. Not for the first time, the narrative forgets about its hero (caged, at the moment) and gives way to the language of the treatise.

It would not be a sufficient excuse to say that the principal intention of well-olrdered states in allowing the public performance of plays is to entertain the common folk with some honest recreation and distract them from the hurtful humors born in idleness, and since this can be achieved with any play, good or bad, there is no reason to impose laws or to oblige those who write and act in them to make plays as they ought to be because, as I have said …

Far more troublesome than the story’s shambolic structure is its failure to bring Quixote himself alive, at least for me. This, again, seems to be the result of conflicting conceptions of his character.

The canon looked at him, marveling at the strangeness of his profound madness and at how he displayed a very find intelligence when he spoke and responded to questions, his feet slipping from the stirrups, as has been said many times before, only when the subject was chivalry.

I myself don’t marvel, but I do squint and scratch my head. In the end, I’m comforted by Jane Smiley’s claim, in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that the “second volume is vastly more literary than the first.”

¶ Matins: Although I haven’t parsed President Obama’s joint-session speech, I hail his fundamental premise:

Now is the time to act boldly and wisely — to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity. Now is the time to jumpstart job creation, re-start lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education that will grow our economy, even as we make hard choices to bring our deficit down. That is what my economic agenda is designed to do, and that is what I’d like to talk to you about tonight.

It’s an agenda that begins with jobs.

¶ Lauds: Having heard Sondra Radvanovsky sing “D’amor sull’ali rosee” tonight, “I can die,” as Wagner said after writing Tannhäuser. Spinning miraculous pianissimi may not be the singer’s strongest suit — hey, she’s not bad at it, by any means — but her legato is some kind of national treasure, seamlessly winding through a bewitchment of tones and registers in a perfect marriage of judgment and control. 

¶ Prime: Scout captures an installation on West 23rd. Man jumps from ledge!

¶ Tierce: The L train, which connects Chelsea with Canarsie in the only way imaginable — literally — will be operated by computer from now on. Whatever that means.

¶ Sext: It’s interesting that Farhad Manjoo looks back specifically at 1996 in his “Jurassic Web” piece at Slate. That’s when I logged on.

¶ Nones: How about abandoning the War on Drugs and diverting those resources to a War on Weapons. We might even be able to make a difference. How many Monzer al-Kassars can there be?

¶ Vespers: Michiko Kakutani hates Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade…

¶ Compline: Watch for Dating For (Broke) Dummies. “Market for Romance Goes From Bullish to Sheepish.”

(more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, a sperm whale “smokes his last pipe,” before being killed by Stubb. In the following chapter, Melville makes recommendations for improving the harpooning process. I could hardly put the book down, so I read it all over again, and, this time, I had a faintly clearer idea of the events transpiring. Does blood really seethe and bubble when it pours into the ocean? Sounds like claptrap to me.

¶ Not much happens in Don Quixote, but it’s far more amusing. The canon from Toledo denounces the faults of chivalric romances in a tirade that all but clicks with castanets.

Fuero de esto, son en el estil duros; en las hazañas, increíbles; en los amores, lascivos; en las cortesías, malmirados; largos en las batallas, necios en las razones, disparatados en los viajes, y, finalmente, ajenos de todo discreto artificio y por esto dignos de ser desterrados de la república cristiana, como a gente inútil.

That the canon takes it all back a page later only adds to the fun.

The more I think about this book, the happier I am that (a) I read it and (b) I live in New York City. Something about this darkly funny book — not as darkly funny as it might have been, by the Waugh— taught me something that I ought to have seen before: in genuine cities, people of substance do not drive; they are driven (if only by cabbies!).

I wish I could remember how I find out about This One Is Mine. It’s a great read! 

¶ In another densely rich letter, Lord Chesterfield writes about good Latin, just warfare, and, not inaptly, letters. The just-warfare issue comes up when Chesterfield objects to a line in Philip Stanhope’s Latin essay that advocates the use of poisons in dealing with intractable enemies. Then he enlarges on the importance of relying on one’s own good sense to tell right from wrong.

Pray let no quibbles of Lawyers, no refinements of Casuists, break into the plain notions of right and wrong; which every man’s right reason, and plain common sense, suggest to him. To do as you would be done by, is the plain, sure and undisputed rule of morality and justice. Stick to that; and be convinced, that whatever breaks into it, in any degree, however speciously it may be turned, and however puzzling it may be to answer it, is, notwithstanding, false in itself, unjust, and criminal.

(How nice it would be to have Chesterfield’s excoriation of the Bush régime.)

It’s bracing to read, a few paragraphs later, Chesterfield’s opinion of Bishop Berkeley’s skepticism. For us, Berkeley is a philosopher from the early Enlightenment. Chesterfield makes him a contemporary.

His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable; but yet I am so far from being convinced by them, that I am determined to go on to eat and drink, and walk and ride, in order to keep that matter, which I so mistakenly imagine my body at present to consist of, in as good plight as possible.

Chesterfield’s exhortation about letter-writing is more than a little heart-breaking for me. How many times have I conveyed similar sentiments to correspondents:

When you write to me, suppose yourself conversing freely with me, by the fireside. In that case, you would naturally mention the incidents of the day; as where you had been, whom you had seen, what you thought of them, etc. Do this in your letters: acquaint me sometimes with your studies, sometimes with your diversions; tell me of any new persons and characters that you meet with in company, and add your own observations upon them; in short, let me see more of You in your letters.

This is hard enough for friends, but impossible, I should think, for most children. In any case, Chesterfield makes the amateur writer’s besetting mistake: unlike the professional, who preens himself upon the distinctiveness bestowed by his skills with a pen, the amateur completely forgets how hard it is to learn to write well, and supposes that inertia alone explains his friends’ “laconic” communications.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a lecture on rope, for which I am none the wiser.

… but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strenggth, however much it may give in compactness or gloss.

Good to know.

¶ Cervantes makes me laugh out loud. When Don Quixote instructs him to prepare to resume his campaign to restore the Queen of Micomicón to her throne, Sancho shrugs and gurgles something about “wickedness in the village.” Pressed to explain, he blurts out,

“It’s just that I’m absolutely certain and positive that this lady who says she’s the queen of the great kingdom of Micomicón is no more a queen than my mother, because if she was who she says she is, she wouldn’t go around hugging and kissing one of the men here at the inn, beyind ever door and every chance she gets.”

Dorotea turned bright red at Sancho’s words, because it was true that her husband, Don Fernando, had, on occasion, taken with his lips part of the prize his love had won, which Sancho had witnessed, and such boldness had seemed to him more appropriate to a courtesan than to the queen of so great a kingdom…

Again, a heuristic about opera. The kings and queens, heroes and damsels in opera do not behave altogether like ladies and gentlemen, and we wouldn’t be able to sit through operas if they did. An early audience for opera would have had to learn not to react to hugs and kisses as Sancho does, by mistaking the figures on the stage for strumpets and libertines (except where indicated).

¶ In Squillions, Coward tours Australia; his letters home are enthusiastic both about Australians, who are neither “common nor social,” and about his own efforts at raising war spirit (and filling war coffers). To Duff Cooper, he writes,

When I have done that, this particular job will be finished and some other plans will have to be made. If it really turns out to have been successful, perhaps you would help over this. As I told you in my last letter, I have been naturally upset about some of the dirty cracks in the English press about my activities, and I would like in the Spring to come back and deal with some of this.

But “this” had already dealt with him, as he would discover when he got home.

¶ In La Rochefoucauld, a much less blasphemous expression of the idea that “God helps those who help themselves.”

Il n’y a point d’accidents si malheureux dont les habiles gens ne tirent quelque avantage, ni de si heureux que les imprudents ne puissent tourner à leur préjudice.

There are no events so adverse that clever people can’t draw some advantage from them, nor any so propitious that fools cannot put them to their own disadvantage.

¶ 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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