Jules Feiffer’s drawing shows how I feel before I have my weekly look at the Book Review. “Do I have to?”

¶ Matins: Call it Serene Socialism: the Crown Estate, which administers land belonging to the Queen of England, will match investments in deep-water wind turbines.

The decision by the Crown Estate to pay up to half of all pre-construction development costs has brought a huge surge in applications for the latest round of licensing, with almost 100 companies wanting to build wind farms far into the North Sea.

¶ Prime: Comes now Michel McGee, laid-off trader, in Laid off by Lehman. Now that he’s “salt of the earth,” he’s thinking of maybe working at Starbucks, which is a special joke all by itself. (Merci, Édouard)

¶ Tierce: Our current copyright laws create issues that swarm like mayflies at the intersection of politics and property law. What happens when everything that a candidate tells a reporter is copyrighted and, through a narrow reading of the “fair use” doctrine, made unavailable for use by his or her opponent? When — much worse — those remarks remain unknown to everyone who doesn’t buy the reporter’s employer’s product, whatever it might be? Lawrence Lessig opines.

¶ Sext: From Sunday’s Times Magazine (which I never got to), a truly heartwarming story about schooling autistic teenaged boys. Melissa Fay Green reports.

Because the goal of D.I.R./Floortime is the kindling of a student’s curiosity, intelligence, playfulness and energy, the lessons can take on a spontaneous, electric quality. I have seen sessions with young children during which the child and his or her therapist or parent tumbled across the house, behind the sofa, into closets or onto the porch, picking up balls, puppets, costumes, books and snacks along the way. At T.C.S., classes can look like debates between equals; school days can include board games, sports, plays, science experiments, music, art, ropes courses or rafting trips in which all students and teachers playfully compete, contribute and perform. All the boys at the school probably have average or better intelligence. Onlookers might call a few “high functioning” (though that adjective has no clinical meaning), and T.C.S. is an accredited high school and middle school, offering college prep and high-school courses to students able to complete a conventionally rigorous course of study. (Other students pursue less-demanding tracks oriented toward getting a G.E.D., attaining job skills or developing independent-living skills.) So it’s not all fun and social time. But rote learning is never the goal; the goal is that the students should be able to think, to feel, to communicate and to learn. Most of the kids are making the first friends of their lives here.

(more…)

¶ Chesterfield’s letter to his son of 22 February 1748 is so full of good advice for bloggers and other Internauts that I have dug up a link to it at Google Books.

Some learned men, proud of their knowledge, only speak to decide, and give judgment without appeal; the consequence of which is, that mankind, provoked by the insult, and injured by the oppression, revolt; and in order to shake off the tyranny, even call the lawful authority in question. The more you know, the modester you should be: and (by-the-bye) that modesty is the surest way of gratifying your vanity. Even where you are sure, seem rather doubtful; represent, but do not pronounce, and if you would convince others, seem open to conviction yourself.

Advice that I’m afraid I must give myself every day, like a tonic. (more…)

Ed Harris and his co-writer, Robert Knott, have taken Robert B Parker’s novel and whipped up an unusually entertaining Western, one that I expect will become a beloved favorite over time. Comparisons to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven turn out to be as inevitable as they are inapt — which makes things interesting. But then, Appaloosa is a genuine Western.

¶ Matins: Can’t make a difference? Do like Luis Soriano, the librarian with “4800 books on ten legs.” At least figure out how to get the man another burro and a few hundred extra books.

¶ Tierce: Best cheeky story in today’s Times: Stephanie Clifford reports on Ivanka Trump’s latest venture, a collaboration with ConAgra in which the entreprenootsie plugs prepared lunches that will last for up to a year in your desk drawer. No refrigeration required! “Office Workers, Ivanka Trump Is Thinking of You.” Yeah, sure.

¶ Sext: Another chapter of the terrible and unnecessary collateral damage of drug-prohibition: Mexican children coarsened by gangland slaughter. Marc Lacey reports.

¶ Compline: Bird & Fortune explain it all to you: Chronicle of the crash foretold:. But people were laughing then, way back in 2007.

(more…)

¶ Lord Chesterfield denies the existence of unconditional love. To his son:

Neither is my affection for you that of a mother, of which the only, or at least the chief objects, are health and life: I wish them both most heartily; but, at the same time, I confess they are by no means my principal care.

My object is to have you fit to live; which, if you are not, I do not desire that you should live at all.

(more…)

Before Mao Zedong, China swarmed with largely unsupervised American missionaries. When John Pomfret studied history at Nanjing University in the early Eighties, he was one of a highly-scrutinized handful of Yanks. In Chinese Lessons, he combines a measure of his own experiences with the lives of his classmates, most of whom suffered terribly in the Cultural Revolution. A great deal of insight is packed into this engaging account.

I’ve just finished Goldengrove, the new novel by Francine Prose, and I’m riven by a double vision. Is it sentimental? Or is it vital? Narrated by a bright but healthily vernacular thirteen year-old girl, Goldengrove takes the concept of the unreliable narrator to a degree of fine-grained transparency that only the most sophisticated novel could attain. For starters, aren’t all thirteen year old narrators ipso facto unreliable?

At the end, that narrator, Nico, goes to Rome.

I loved the arches, the Colosseum, the monumental reminders of how time layered over everything, cementing in the gaps, reparing or covering what was cracked or broken, pressing it down into the earth and building on top, and on top of that. At every moment, or, to tell the truth, every other moment, I thought how Margaret would have loved it. But Margaret had never been there, and no matter how hard I tried to see it through her eyes, I was the one who twisted throught the dark alleys and squinted when a plaza went off like a flashbulb. by the time I blinked, the open space had become a circus. Fried artichokes, mosaics, incense, the spires and the domes of churches. Even the car exhaust was sexy. I felt that the city was revealing itself in glimpses that I alone saw — sights saved for me, intended for me, as if the city knew me, because I was someone who could be known, who would love certain things and not others.

“Even the car exhaust was sexy.” Is that the sort of preciously cute thing that women say to drive men away? Or is it exactly the clasp of loving being alive? Plazas going off like flashbulbs? Goldengrove reminds me of the box that the Reverend Mother, in Dune, wants Paul Atreides to stick his hand in.

In the end, I cast my vote for the novel, and because of just this passage. At the beginning, Goldengrove is a novel about what the living lose to death: by dying, the loved one steals a part of ourselves, the part that we shared. At the end, Goldengrove is about what happens in the end: by living, we keep a part of the late lamented with us. And that is sexy.

¶ Matins: “10 Reasons Why Newspapers Won’t Reinvent News.” A very persuasive list, and one worth thinking about because of its core idea: today’s newspapers are keeping tomorrow’s from being born, so the sooner they step aside the better. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Kathleen, who reads the Letters to the Editor if she reads the paper at all, pointed out the following response to the American Dream of “Joe the Plumber”:

To the Editor:

Fair taxation isn’t about “redistributing the wealth” — it’s about giving back to the great country that gave you the opportunity to benefit so greatly.

It’s not about taking money from “Joe the Plumber.” It’s about making sure that “Joe’s Mega-Plumbing Incorporated” gives back to the country and the people who gave him:

¶Roads and bridges for his trucks to roll on.

¶Support for research for his latest plumbing equipment.

¶Public education so he can have a well-trained work force.

¶Markets so he can raise capital.

¶Police and firefighters so his business is protected.

¶Health care so the employees who helped him build his business can stay on the job.

¶Freedom so that he can build his business creatively.

If “Joe” has been able to become wealthy because of the bounty of America, then he should pay his fair share back to America — that is patriotic.

Daryl Altman

Lynbrook, N.Y., Oct. 16, 2008

¶ Sext: One of the best bits in Ghost Town is Kristen Wiig’s turn as a colonscopist. I had not heard of Ms Wiig before, but now I’m not surprised by the comedian’s virtuosic range, from Judy Garland to Suze Orman. (Thanks to Andy Towle)

(more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, a wearying, garrulous chapter about dining opportunities aboard the Pequod. Melville’s stab at jocular whimsy sails right by me. The sketch of the “Dough-Boy” who waits table — “naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse” — is rather nasty. (more…)

This isn’t the picture that I’d have taken. It’s very lovely, but it’s all about Kristin Scott Thomas in a way that her performance as Arkadina isn’t. The image might suggest that Arkadina is calculating her advantages. Doubtless she is. But that’s because she stands always in the draft of her disadvantages.

We were enormously distracted the night of the performance. The credit market was going to hell. Closer to home, Kathleen would be flying, at the crack of dawn, to London; so we wouldn’t be able to go out after the show and talk it over over dinner. The seats, finally, were tiny; even Kathleen felt cramped.

Director Ian Rickson (and adapter Christopher Hampton) made sure that we saw The Seagull as a comedy. But I didn’t feel the greatness of the comedy until a bit later.

¶ Matins: The other day, writing about The Seagull, I came across a commercial term paper site. I had forgotten that they’re out there. This morning, I see that Jason Kottke set up a poll yesterday about paying for term papers in high school — an option that didn’t exist in my day. What would I have done?

¶ Tierce: In honor of Joe Wurzelbacher and the American Dream, I think it’s best to take a break from the Blogosphere — lest I say anything that I’ll regret.

(more…)

¶ Matins: One of the saddest things that I’ve read in a long time is also one of the most timely: Paul Reyes’s account, in Harper’s, of clearing foreclosed houses for resale. (“Bleak Houses: Digging Through the Ruins of the Mortgage Crisis“) A big part of the job is hauling left-behind possessions to the landfill.

There, among the whines of reversing garbage trucks, the shriek and hiss of brakes, the groaning of horns, Sue’s possessions slid down into a heap, got fluffed, and were carried over the wall to burn, dissolve, and compress, all traces of what she once prized dragged along the sludge and shoved over the edge into an ash pile so tidal in its proportions as to be barely comprehensible. Foreclosures, in their own way, regenerate: one family’s loss is another’s first home. But this was the colossal deposit left behind, and it was growing by the cubic foot, by the ton. Pulling out of the hangar, driving toward the landfill’s exit, we could see the earth movers perched high up on the trash bluff, where their drivers awaited orders to till another layer, to massage that Kilimanjaro of garbage, and where—if they looked away from the incinerator— they would have had a pretty good view of the city from whose ruin that mountain grew, and into whose streets we now descended to fetch the next load.

¶ Lauds: I didn’t get to the end of this link before I had to go to bed, but I stuck with it a lot longer than I ought to have done. A O Scott showcases films that he finds particularly timely, from Wall Street to State of the Union. And beyond, for all I know!

¶ Tierce: The most curious cog in Sarah Palin’s infernal machinery has been her ability to deflect attention away from the overt racism with which many voters respond to Barack Obama. Democrats and progressives are too busy lambasting the Alaskan’s professional inferiority to attend to boneheads like Ricky Thompson, quoted in today’s Times:

“He’s neither-nor,” said Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter who works at a factory north of Mobile, while standing in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store just north of here. “He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.”

Instead of Brains-Against-Palin, Democrats ought to be supporting a Scripture-for-Obama movement. Has everybody forgotten the political implications of the Gospels?

¶ Vespers: In his column this morning, Thomas L Friedman quoted a book that ought to be required reading for every high-school student, Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds:

Money … has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

(more…)

I wish that this illustration didn’t bring Barack Obama to mind. Maybe it’s only me. I’ll bet not, though.

A better issue than usual, which is not saying much. I’ve decided to give up trying to parse Susann Cokal’s reviews, and I’m trying to be humble about it. I can’t expect myself to find every critic intelligible. It’s just that Ms Cokal has a way of making every book sound like a beach book, whether she likes it or not.

¶ In La Rochefoucauld, a phrase fit for a sampler, to be looked at, stitched upon a sofa pillow, every day:

Le caprice de notre humeur est encore plus bizarre que celui de la fortune.

I find that I can’t translate this to my satisfaction. “The caprice of our humour is even more bizarre than that of fortune” doesn’t begin to do justice to the elegant thought of the original; we don’t think in that way about that sort of thing in English. (more…)

¶ Matins: Head scarves for women — in Turkey! How transgressive! But, wait: Does this mean that Orhan Pamuk completely fabricated the head-scarf controversy that kicks off his last novel, Snow? It was translated into English, by the way, four years ago.

¶ Prime: Once again, Kathleen and I will be spending Thanksgiving at a pleasant old place on St Croix. But if it weren’t so far away, I’d prefer to do my beachcoming along the Gill Sands, on that remote and longed-for Indian Island jewel, San Serriffe.

¶ Tierce: I thought that it would be very clever to say that I’m having my head examined today, but I Googled the phrase first, and it led me to the creator of FeedDemon. I don’t know anything about this app, but it looks very useful. Unfortunately, as a head case, I can’t deal with technology today — I’m leaving that to the doctors.

¶ Vespers: Wow! Christopher Buckley has (a) endorsed Barack Obama and (b) resigned from The National Review. (Thanks, evilganome.)

(more…)

Keira Knightley plays a proxy for Lady Di in The Duchess. Won’t it be fun if, when she’s all grown up, Ms Knightley gets to play the Duchess — of Cornwall, the Prince’s second wife.

¶ Matins: Any lingering doubt that No Child Left Behind was a screw put to public education by arrogant Bushies whose only acquaintance with public schools is via their servants’ children will be quashed by Sam Dillon’s report.

¶ Tierce: The news from Thailand is weirdly familiar: city-dwellers — and not just the people of Bangkok — feel that rural voters are uneducated and ill-informed. They go further, proposing that rural votes be seriously diluted by interest-group appointments to Parliament — something that looks like the old Catholic idea of corporatism. Aside from that, however, it all sounds just like the American polarization of “flyover” areas — the Continental heartland — and the passengers flying from one Coast to the other. Seth Mydans reports.

¶ Nones: Jolly good news: Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. An economist whose Times columns are models of lucidity! Even better: the guy from the University of Chicago, Eugene Fama, didn’t win.

(more…)

I often feel that people spend too much attention to words in isolation, and not enough to putting them together with elegant coherence. And there’s a reason why I don’t use words that I’ve found in the dictionary: my vocabulary comes from my general reading, not from reference books. But I’m glad that Ammon Shea spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary, since he writes about the experience with wit and passion.