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.

¶ Matins: Alex Williams’ cheeky piece, “Bad Economy? Good Excuse,” seems to me to capture something about the Zeitgeist that is being overlooked. Isn’t it possible that a good deal of downsizing going on throughout the markets is motivated not by panic or uncertainty but by a desire to pass a lot of the gas that the economy has been building up for fifteen or twenty years (or more)?

¶ Lauds: Regular readers will know that Lauds is for the arts that are not literary — but even so, Laura Cahill’s “readable furniture” seems closer to the library than to the gallery. (via Survival of the Book)

¶ Prime: You know how people have their pictures taken by the Campanile in Pisa, so that it looks as if they’re holding it up, ha-ha. Pseudo Jeff at Ads Are Boring snapped photos of people while they were posing, but the posing is all that you see in his images, not the “joke.” Don’t they look silly!

¶ Tierce: I’ve kicked off yet another category of blog entries: Capital Sins. This will be the rubric for the various manifestations of American anti-humanism, much of which appears to be one kind of racism or another. With its bloated prisons, the United States is clearly going about crime & punishment in a very bad way. Illegal mmigration is another matter that, try as they might, critics can never persuasively sell as a merely economic problem. An editorial in yesterday’s Times shows why.

¶ Sext: The funniest thing that I’ve read in these unfunny times is Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s Letter from Frankfurt in the current issue of Harper’s, “The Last Book Party.” The piece is funny even before the reporter gets to the Messe.  

That is, contemporary late-corporate publishing is a fallen world in which Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada, gets really rich, while Richard Ford, one of the indisputably important novelists of our time, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter, gets slightly less rich. None of the elegists say: What is coming to an end is the idea that Richard Ford is going to be richer than Lauren Weisberger. None of them say: What is coming to an end is the wishful insistence — for it is, ultimately, a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people—that Richard Ford is going to be rich at all.

¶ Nones: The highest court in France has acknowledged the state’s responsibility in the deportation of 76,000 Jews to prison (and death) between 1942 and 1944.

¶ Vespers: At Emdashes, Martin Schneider writes about that singular anomaly, the smart person who “hates” The New Yorker. Matthew Yglesias, it turns out, is one such — although he has “caved.”

¶ Compline: You just know that a 4% sales tax is going to chill purchases of online porn. Mean old Governor Paterson! (Thanks, Joe.)

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Here’s an extremely exciting novel that came out just last week. I was asked if I wanted to read it in advance, and I’m very glad that I did, because — in light of what happens in the book — that really did make the reading even more exciting.

Even so, I should also have enjoyed knowing that thousands, if not millions, of other readers were loving it or had loved Kathryn Stockett’s The Help already. I certainly hope that that’s what happens, because the intertwined tales of Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter have the feel of an American classic. And the rogues gallery of horribly hateful anti-heroines needs a new niche, for Miss Hilly Holbrook.

¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 5 September 1748 is not only full of pithy adages — “Pleasing in company is the only way of being pleased in it yourself” — but adorned, if that is the word, with the finest, most choice misogyny, eloquently but concisely put. It is positively pattern:

As women are a considerable, or at least a pretty numerous part of company; and as their suffrages go a great way towards establishing a man’s character in the fashionable part of the world (which is of great importance to the forture and figure he proposes to make in it), it is necessary to please them. I will therefore, let you into certain Arcana, that will be very useful for you to know, but which you must, with the utmost care, conceal; and never seem to know. Women, then, are only children of a larger growth…

When someone incredulous young person wants to know what the world was like when the word “people” implied a company of men only, one need only recommend Chesterfield’s momentary treatise.

¶ In Moby-Dick, There is a lovely paragraph in Melville’s quietly spooked chapter on the sighting of a great squid.

But one transparent morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the mainmast-head.

¶ Chapter XLV of Don Quixote ends with a fantastic tirade from Quixote himself, as he demands to be unhanded by officers seeking to arrest him for having “liberated” the galley slaves. It is cheeky of Cervantes to put this catalogue of privileged, aristocratical exemptions in the mouth of a lunatic.

Ah, vile rabble, your low and base intelligence does not deserve to have heaven communicate to you the great truth of knight errantry, or allow you to understand the sin and ignorance into which you have fallen you when you do not reverence the shadow, let alone the actual presence, of any knight errant. Come, you brotherhood of thieves, you highway robbers sanctioned by the Holy Brotherhood, come and tell me who was the fool who signed an arrest warrant against such a knight as I? Who was the dolt who did not know that knights errant are exempt from all jurisdictional authority, or was unaware that their law is their sword, their edicts their courage, their statutes their will? Who was the imbecile, I say, who did not know that there is no patent of nobility with as many privileges and immunities as those acquired by a knight errant on the day he is dubbed a knight and dedicates himself to the rigorous practice of chivalry? What knight errant ever paid a tax, a duty, a queen’s levy, a tribute, a tariff, or a toll? What tailor ever received payment from him for the clothes he sewed? What castellan welcomed him to his castle and then asked him to pay the cost? What king has not sat him at his table? What damsel has not loved him and given herself over to his will and desire? And, finally, what kight errant ever was, or will be in the world who doe snot have the courage to single-handedly deliver four hundred blows to four hundred brotherhoods if they presume to oppose him?

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward goes to the movies, and then writes to Lornie about it.

I only spent one night in Hollywood but I utilized it by sitting in a projection room and seeing the film they have made of Bitter Sweet. No human tongue could ever describe what Mr Victor Saville, Miss Jeanette MacDonald and Mr Nelson Eddy have done to it between them. It is, on all counts, far and away the worst picture I have ever seen. MacDonald and Eddy sing relentlessly from beginning to end looking like a rawhide suit case and a rocking horse respectively. Sari never gets old or even middle aged. “Zigeuner” is a rip snorting production number with millions of Hungarian dancers. There is no Manon at all. Miss M elects to sing “Ladies of the Town” and both Manon’s songs, she also dances a Can-Can! There is a lot of delightful comedy and the dialogue is much improved, at one point, in old Vienna, she offers Carl a cocktail! Lord Shayne was wrong, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy are very definitely the worng age for Vienna. It is the vulgarest, dullest vilest muck up that I have ever seen in my life. It is in technicolour and Miss M’s hair gets redder and redder until you want to scream. Oh dear, money or no money, I wish we’d hung on to that veto.

¶ Even in the days of La Rochefoucauld (praised by Chesterfield in another important passage of today’s letter), it was true that you can’t get a job unless you already have a job.

Pour s’établir dans le monde, on fait tout ce que l’on peut pour y paraître établi.

¶ “Brit,” the title of Chapter 58 of Moby-Dick refers, as best I can make out, to the microscopic zooplankton called copepods. But never mind. The chapter is really interested in distinguishing the peaceable land masses of the earth from the hostile oceans, and it ends on an elegiac note.

Consider all this: consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off frfom that isle, thou canst never return!

Like everyone else, I was brought up to nod reverently as this sort of humane sagacity. Now it simply reeks of incense, clouding the view of clearer truths.

¶ In Don Quixote, the only distinguished personage who hasn’t shown up at the inn is Forrest Gump. We have yet another recognition scene, as the muletier with the beautiful voice turns out to be Doña Clara’s youthful admirer from across the road in Madrid. I’d love to find out how this romance will end up, but I have to put the book down, because, after two chapters instead of the usual ration of just one, I’m so sick of Quixote’s antics that I can’t continue.

Just then, one of the horses of the four men pounding at the door happened to smell Rocinante, who, melancholy and sad and with drooping ears, stood unmoving as he held his tightly drawn master; and since, after all, he was flesh and blood, though he seemed to be made of wood, he could not help a certain display of feeling as he, in turn, smelled the horse who had come to exchange caresses; as soon as he had moved slightly, Don Quixote’s feet, which were close together, slipped from the saddle, and he would have landed on the ground if he had not been hanging by his arm; this caused him so much pain that he believed his hand was being cut off at the wrist or that his arm was being pulled out of its socket; he was left dangling so close to the ground that the tips of his toes brushed the earth, and this made matters even worse, because…

I have no idea what Cervantes is thinking, when he interrupts the tale of Don Luis with the roughhousing that Quixote provokes at every turn, but the tale itself is reminiscent not of The Marriage of Figaro but of its “pre-quel,” The Barber of Seville. Although I can’t remember what “Lindoro” (the Count in disguise) is supposed to be. Not a muletier, I don’t think.

¶ In Squillions, at the end of interminable Chapter 17, we learn why Noël Coward took to bunking at Cary Grant’s when he paid wartime visits to Hollywood. No, they were not an affair. The two men were both agents of “Little” Bill Stephenson, sizing up the sentiment of the movie crowd. It’s no surprise to be reminded that Errol Flynn was pro-Nazi.

It kills me to say this, but this week’s cover piece, William Safire’s omnibus review of books about Abraham Lincoln, is not bad!

¶ Lord Chesterfield advises his son, “Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is.”

¶ In Moby-Dick, three didactic chapters on whales in art, sculpture, astronomy, &c, with vigorous protestation of their general inaccuracy. Chapter 57, the last of these, is redeemed by the use of the words “dentistical” and “amphitheatrical.” Not.

¶ In Don Quixote, the protracted scene at the inn, with its two interpolated “exemplary novels”, has been going on for about eleven chapters. Now, the long-lost narrator of the second novel, Ruy, is abashed by the arrival of his brother and niece at the inn. The niece, of course, is a great, one might say, heroic, beauty.

He held the hand of a maiden, approximately sixteen years old, who wore a traveling costume and was so elegant, beautiful, and charming that everyone marveled at the sight of her, and if they had not already seen Dorotea and Luscinda and Zoraida at the inn, they would would have thought that beauty comparable to hers would be difficult to find.

And then we have the recognition scene, with its streaming tears and incredulous embraces; it’s as though Cervantes were writing a manual on the composition of comic operas.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward is detached to Hollywood by Bill Stephenson, but for what purpose, I can’t begin to say. Barry Day’s cavalier manner with chronology makes the going impenetrable as well as dull. In letters, Coward keeps referring to a “shindig” in the House of Commons.

I want you to do the following: first of all, send me a copy of Hansard with a verbatim account of the debate in it, then check up through dear herrings on the histories of the gentlemen saying those unpleasant things about me. There will come a day when the pen will prove to be a great deal mightier than the sword.

Or the seat in the House, presumably. All too presumably.

¶ Matins: Much as I hate to anticipate good news that might not pan out, I can’t help being excited by the prospect of an end to the infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws.

¶ Lauds: Months before its scheduled opening, the Mandarin Oriental Beijing has been destroyed by fire — one of the Chinese capital’s Olympic-era trophies, designed by Rem Koolhaas.

¶ Prime: Brian Stephenson, at Five Branch Tree, writes about fell0w poet August Kleinzahler, whose work appears regularly in the London Review of Books.

His other techniques are quite American, such as the incorporation of both high and low culture, the symbolic use of pop figures, real and imaginary characters, travel, temporality, displacement and nostalgia. And despite being a native of New Jersey and a long time resident of San Francisco, these poems are particularly American with respect to the experience of the immigrant. Not ‘immigrant’ as a sociological study, but as one of the working myths in American arts and culture.

¶ Tierce: I was thinking that 2009 would be the Year of the Kindle for me, but now I’m not so sure. Amazon has just introduced Kindle 2, a great improvement over the original device in many ways, but also a harbinger of roiling format wars with Google and Apple. So I’ll probably sit out the wait for an emergent standard.

¶ Sext: What’s really cute about Kirk Johnson’s story about the “Hitch,” the souped-up motel in Cheyenne, Wyoming that has served as a kind of tree-house for state legislators is the non-appearance of “woman,” “women,” and “female.”

And the Hitch, as lawmakers came to call it, in turn became more than just a hotel. It insinuated itself into how the State Legislature worked by creating an informal space where lawmakers in their socks, sometimes with a highball in hand, could wander down the hall and knock on the door of a neighbor and talk through the day.

¶ Nones: Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan’s stalking out of a debate with Shimon Peres at Davos has the diplomats’ heads shaking: the man is “erratic.”

Mr Erdogan’s temper tantrums are not new. But they used to be reserved for his critics at home. The Davos affair, says another foreign diplomat, is further evidence of “Mr Erdogan’s conviction that the West needs Turkey more than Turkey needs it.” It is of a piece with Mr Erdogan’s threat to back out of the much-touted Nabucco pipeline to carry gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe via Turkey. In Brussels recently Mr Erdogan said that, if there were no progress on the energy chapter of Turkey’s EU accession talks then “we would of course review our position”. Meanwhile, Turkey sided with Saudi Arabia and the Vatican in opposing a UN statement suggested by the EU to call for the global decriminalisation of homosexuality.

¶ Vespers: Patrick Kurp writes about the only leading economic indicator that bibliophiles need to be acquainted with.

After completing my rounds, I checked back with Angel who made me an offer: $15.50. I was parting with the most books I had ever sold to Half-Price Books and was, in return, receiving the smallest amount of cash. I took it, silently. I didn’t feel like repacking two boxes, carrying them back to the car and explaining why to my wife. I would have felt like Jack telling his mother about the magic beans, which I did anyway. Angel said, “Everybody’s selling books. They need the money. We can’t afford to pay ’em as much.” The supply and demand of used books: my first economic indicator.

¶ Compline: Scout captures some great keystone demons, only to discover that they’re green men.

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¶ What to make of Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick? “The Town-Ho’s Story” (what an unfortunate title, given &c &c), while long enough to be a short story on its own, is hardly an independent episode; after all, it’s the title character’s first major appearance. Ishmael relates a backstory, as it were, to his adventure on the Pequod, and frames it doubly as a narrative. First, it was told to his shipmates on the Pequod during a “gam” with sailors from the Town-Ho, another whaler. Second, it is told to us as Ishmael claims to have told it to acquaintances in Lima, after the action recounted in the novel itself. The elaborate framing seems to be nothing more than just that — a bit of tarting-up.

What bores these sailors must have been on land! But the Dons of Lima give as good as they get, at least as rendered in Melville’s ridiculously starchy translated Spanish. In a “witty” gloss of Ishmael’s bracketing of the Erie Canal and Venice as equally corrupt, a Peruvian interrupts Ishmael with the following bolt of fustian:

“A moment! Pardon!” cried another of the company. “In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look surprised, you know the proverb all along this coast — ‘Corrupt as Lima.’ It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and forever open — and ‘Corrupt as Lima.’ So, too Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St Mark! — St Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill, now, you poor out again.”

It’s a bit rich.

Tim Blanning’s The Triumph of Music is a history about music. No theory required — none on offer! Rather, a social history of music in the West. And a very readable history it is!

I learned almost nothing from this book in the way of facts, but the facts that I know where provocatively rearranged and presented from the other end, as it were, of the telescope.

By the way, Mr Blanning’s title is not, you will note, The Triumph of Good Music.

¶ 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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¶ Nothing much today, just the two longish chapters of the second of the “exemplary” novels — about the abduction of Zoraida. At least to my ears, Cervantes does not tell a story as well as Boccaccio. Further complicating things, of course, is Cervantes’ desire to interpolate a few details of his own captivity — and even to wangle a cameo appearance.

…a Spanish soldier named something de Saavedra, who did things that will be remembered by those people for many years, and all to gain his liberety; yet his master never beat him , or ordered anyone else to beat him, or said an unkind word to him; for the most minor of all the things he did we were afraid he would be impaled, and more than once he feared the same thing; if I had the time, I would tell you something of what that soldier did, which would entertain and amaze you much more than this recounting of my history.

I’m relieved that Cervantes Saavedra doesn’t put that boast to the test.

In a New Yorker review in 1961, John Updike wrote,

Some novels might be fairly described as ruined parodies. The little dolls whittled in fun escape the author’s derision and take on life. Joseph Adnres and Northanger Abbey are examples. Don Quixote is the towering instance. Cervantes masterpiece lives not because it succeeds at parody but because it immensely fails.

It must be that I am not so sophisticated. I adore successful parodies, but books like Northanger Abbey awkward and vaguely embarrassing, like the appeals for charitable donations that actors sometimes make directly after their curtain calls. It’s not the giving money that I mind, but the little spiel that is felt to be necessary to inspire it, and that invariably jars with the sparkling or glittering show that has just come to an end.

¶ 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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Not a bad issue, considering par. But what is Luke Sante’s review of Reborn (the first installment of Susan Sontag’s diaries) doing posing as an Essay? It’s a perfectly good review — better than most! — but the only answer that I can come up with is that the Book Review’s Essay format accommodates a higher word count.

¶ 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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And so we resume the Morning Read. In future, the “season” will begin with the new year, and not in the autumn. (That gives me even more time to wade through the watery deserts of Moby-Dick. A mixed blessing.)

¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 10 May 1748 is yet another keeper. In it, the noble lord warns his son away from “commonplace observations.” In our world, these would concern baseball teams and women drivers, and they are just as annoying as the attacks on the clergy and against matrimony upon which Chesterfield heaps scorn.

These and many other commmonplace reflections upon nations or professions in general (which are at least as often false as true) are the poor refuge of people who have neither wit nor invention of their own, but endeavour to shine in company by second- hand finery. I always put these pert jackanapes out of countenance, by looking extremely grave, when they expect that I should laugh at their pleasantries; and by saying Well, and so; as if they had not done, and that the sting were still to come.This disconcerts them; as they have no resxources in themselves, and have but one set of jokes to live upon.

(Of course, you had better be a grandee of Chesterfield’s altitude before trying this one on your acquaintance.) Also important:

Falsehood and dissimulation are certainly to be found at courts; but where are they not to be found? Cottages have them, as well as courts; only with worse manners. A couple of neighbouring farmers in a village will contrive and practise as many tricks to overreach each other, at the next market, or to supplant each other in the favour of the squire, as any two courtiers can do to supplant each other in the favour of their prince.

And I can’t resist this sterling observation about scholars:

They are commonly twenty years old before they have spoken to anybody above their schoolmaster, and the fellows of their college. If they happen to have learning, it is only Greek and Latin, but not one word of modern history, or modern languages. Thus prepared, they go abroad, as they call it; but, in truth, they stay at home all that while; for being very awkward, confoundedly ashamed, and not speaking the languages, they go into no foreign company, at least none good; but dine and sup with one another only at the tavern.

¶ In Moby-Dick, I ran through two chapters with a common subject, viz ships meeting at sea. The first, “The Albatross,” is very short, curtailed as much by Ahab’s impatience for news of the White Whale as by any stylistic consideration; I should have suggested putting the chapter after the one that follows. “The Gam” describes how civilized whalers encounter one another. There are times when it seems that Melville can’t have read anything but the Bible and a heap of encyclopedia entries.

¶ Now, let me see. Who is “the captive” who commences the telling of the second “exemplary novel” in Don Quixote? It has been so long since I picked up the book that I don’t rightly recall. The naval Battle of Lepanto, in which Cervantes himself fought, is mentioned but not named. It is almost refreshing to hear of actual battles, fought by real soldiers without the help or hindrance of sorcerers.

¶ Barry Day’s Noël Coward: must we? If I had nothing else to do, I would pick apart the first part of Chapter 17, which to my ear is deaf to the tonal difference between matters of state and matters of state dinners. Several paragraphs after a thumbnail account of Dunkirk, and a glance at Roosevelt, “visibly moved by the epic adventures” in that evactuation — paragraph later, I say, we get an almost fatuous letter from Alexander Woollcott dated 4 January 1940, presented as if in temporal order.

¶ Matins: Despite everything, Wall Street bonuses for 2008 totaled $18.4 billion — thank goodness!

¶ Lauds: Ian McDiarmid’s adaptation of Andrew O’Hagen’s novel, Be Near Me, opens at the Donmar Warehouse to warm if cautious praise from Charles Spencer.

¶ Prime: The site has a few strange navigational problems, but the Curated David Foster Wallace Dictionary might be just what you’re looking for in the Word-For-the-Day line. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Can anyone tell me the bottom line on the Blackwater story in today’s Times? The headline, “Iraq Won’t Grant Blackwater a License,” must mean that Blackwater will not be allowed to provide security services within Iraq, right? Not if you keep reading.

¶ Sext: Here’s a project for Google Maps: mowing the lawn.

¶ Nones: The best part of this story — “Putin’s Grasp of Energy Drives Russian Agenda“  — comes at the end.

As far back as 1997, while serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin earned a graduate degree in economics, writing his thesis on the economics of natural resources.

But —

¶ Vespers: Is Allen Bennett the new John Updike? He’s, er, two years younger. And quite as fluently prolific, if as a man of the theatre rather than as a novelist. Razia Iqbal talks about meeting him, but the interview is nowhere to be found.

¶ Compline: We were neither of us in the mood — at all. But we had to go, in that grown-up way that has nothing to do with obligation. So we got dressed and went. And of course the evening was unforgettable: Steve Ross at the Oak Room.

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¶ Matins: Back to Afghanistan, where the war always made sense: one hopes that this is how our Iraqi misadventure will end, with a withdrawal to the most troubled part of Central Asia known to the West. What happens in Iraq really never did, at day’s end, matter, except to the Iraqis and to the petulant son of George H W Bush. The future of Pakistan (and, with it, India) is however tied up in the mountain fastnesses where a version of Iranian is lingua franca.

¶ Lauds: Although I’m disinclined to poach from coverage of the Book Review, Toni Bentley’s review of a new translation of Akim Volynsky’s Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911-1925 is so chock-a-block with densely beautiful passages about ballet that I must mention it here.

¶ Prime: Is Alaska really that big? Too bad it looks like a maple leaf.

¶ Tierce:  Of all the rackets to complain about in an apparently noisy neighborhood, a Hamburger homeowner has sued to close a nearby day-care center. Carter Dougherty reports.

¶ Sext: Although I can muster a few plausible observations to explain why I didn’t know until today about the Bacon Explosion, a torpedo of cholesterol that was launched on an unsuspecting world on or about Christmas Day, I think it’s best just to admit that I simply not cool. What’s really interesting is that I read about it in the Times. That’s how I found out about the latest (?) Blogosphere sensation.

¶ Nones: Members of Sri Ram Sena (the Army of Lord Ram) assaulted and chased women drinking in a public bar in Mangalore, Karnataka, according to BBC News. The group’s leader, Pramod Mutalik, says it is “not acceptable” for women to go to bars in India.”

For the past two days, he has argued that Saturday’s assault on the women was justifiable because his men were preserving Indian culture and moral values.

¶ Vespers: A few weeks ago, I came up with the concept of “Dorm Lit” — the masculine correlative to “Chick Lit.” A bookcase stocked with Mailer, Vonnegut, Heller, Pynchon, and The Catcher in the Rye is the prototypical Dorm Shelf. Just last night, I was wondering what newer authors might join these august ranks? Ms NOLA mentioned Murakami — Bingo! And now the brouhaha over the facts of Roberto Bolaño’s life reminds me to add the Chilean author to the list. You don’t even have to read any of the late writer’s books, because the quarrel over his biography seems torn from one of his stories.  

¶ Compline: It’s hard to imagine the publication by any mainstream American newspaper or magazine of Seumas Milne’s attribution of social progress in Latin America — and rejection of neoliberalism worldwide — to the Cuban Revolution. Harper’s or The New Yorker might print a watered-down version, but not what appeared in The Guardian.

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The cover review, by Toni Bentley, is an example of what the Book Review’s reviews could be like, if the editors were a little less prone to confuse “selling books” with “engaging readers,” — and if their acknowledgment that favorable reviews are harder to write than unfavorable ones would open them to the suggestion that ipso facto, perhaps, favorable reviews are more valuable as well as more difficult. In any case, this week’s issue is above par.

¶ Matins: When Kathleen read the Op-Ed piece in this morning’s paper, “How Words Could End a War,” her impatience boiled over. “They had to do a study to prove this?”

“This” being the possibility that words to the effect of “we’re sorry” could induce Israelis and Palestinians to consider peaceful coexistence.

¶ Lauds: Can serious actresses have “big bosoms”? Helen Mirren wants to know — in a Michael Parkinson inverview from 1975. That’s so long ago that — is her bust the smaller figure? (via The Wronger Box)

¶ Prime: You may recall that the State of West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1861, when Virginia seceded from the United States. You may be surprised to learn that the Federal government proposed a truly radical redrafting of Virginia’s borders, effectively confining it to the Shenandoah Valley.

¶ Tierce: Big Brother as cruise director: Pesky tenant’s lease is not renewed at community-oriented rental in Long Island City. And he’s surprised!

¶ Sext: Here is a list of recent books that have changed the world. Sorry! They’re about world-changing people, inventions, and whatnot. Or so their publishers want us to believe. (via kottke.org) 

¶ Nones: This isn’t funny, I know, but still: Geir Haarde, who has just stepped down as Iceland’s Prime Minister —  “the first world leader to leave office as a direct result of the financial crisis” — wasn’t going to seek re-election anyway, owing to throat cancer. The leader of rival Social Democrat party, Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir, has ruled herself out as Haarde’s successor; she is being treated for brain cancer.

¶ Vespers: Here’s a book that I will buy the moment I see it in a shop: To The Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod, by Reuel K. Wilson.

¶ Compline: Now that the children have gone to bed, it’s safe to read about bonobos, or, if you prefer, about what bonobos have taught Meredith Chivers, “a creator of bonobo pornography.”

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