¶ In Chapter 32 of Moby-Dick, “Cetology,” we have a crisp and timeless portrait of the Crank, the autodidact who plunges into the vasty deeps of his own ignorance with a few rough-and-ready ideas about System, and proceeds, more often than not, to get everything wrong. (more…)

The problem with my new weekend schedule — no work from Friday to Monday! (or at least until Sunday evening) — is that I get used to being away from the computer, away from the Internet, away from what is indisputably now my day job. My weekends, for the first time in about twenty years, are just like everyone else’s: short holidays that end with a downcast sigh. Do I have to? Do I have to go back to work?

And the answer for me is the same as it is for everybody else. Not for the same reasons, perhaps. Heaven knows I’m not putting food on the table by churning out the weekly reams. But the financial standpoint is the only one in which stopping what I’ve been doing at The Daily Blague would have any kind of explanation. People who know me would conclude that something was amiss, for I’m not the only one who thinks that blogging has made sense of my life, or at least given it a much-needed organizing structure. Nevertheless, the question loiters on my tongue: do I have to?

It may be that the momentary appeal of ongoing idleness stems from the crisis all around me. Never has the world seem so in danger of coming completely unstuck. I spent an hour or two this morning with “When Fortune Frowned: A special report on the world economy,” a tear-out collection of articles at the center of this week’s Economist. Partly I wanted to know what that newspaper’s sage heads made of the mess we’re in — and the chances of its getting worse — but, more than that, I wanted to see what, presumably, the financial community would be reading in its pages. This is a time when the very exclusiveness of The Economist — its considerable expense, its utter lack of interest in pop culture — make it invaluable. If The Economist is trying to sell magazines, it is going about the job invisibly.

Whatever the outcome of the credit crunch, and however long the apparently inevitable recession lasts, I have made up my mind about one thing: No citizen of any democracy to be heard speaking of him- or herself as a victim. We are all complicit in this disaster. We have elected the leaders who made it possible. I will hear no talk of Wall Street pirates. The boldest move on Wall Street in the past twenty years was Sandy Weill’s concoction of Citigroup, an assemblage of organizations that ought to have been illegal but that, because it was “so big,” and Washington — the people you’ve voted for if you’re a citizen of the United States (and could be bothered to vote) — was so craven, was instead ratified by Congress, by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, one of the cardinal safeguards of American finance. If the Congressman or Senator for whom you voted was actually opposed to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, you’re still not out of it, because neither you nor that representative managed to mount an effective opposition to Mr Weill’s bluff.

To speak of yourself as a victim of financial chicanery, of being obliged, as a “taxpayer,” to bail out a gang of greedy idiots, is to confuse our brave democracy with a sort of emporium, a department store in which, in exchange for your tax dollars, you get goods and services that are guaranteed to work (or your money back!). Anyone over ten who thinks of being an American in such consumerist terms doesn’t deserve democracy of any kind.

So you see I was not really taking the weekend off at all. Aside from the ominous economic backdrop, the weekend was delightful. (But in New York we are used to having the worst things happen on the loveliest days.) Back from her turnabout trip to London, Kathleen found that she’d actually gotten a lot of rest on the flights (as she rather enviably can) and was refreshed by meeting new people (her English partners, mostly) in new places (none of them more than a quarter of a mile distant from the Bank of England). She had breakfast with a South African client yesterday, and we had a nice dinner party in the evening. (Since I really hadn’t been busy at anything for more than a day, I was at the top of my game in the kitchen.) This afternoon, we strolled up Madison Avenue to Carnegie Hill for brunch, running into a couple of friends at the door of the restaurant that we’d chosen. They were leaving, so we caught up on the sidewalk. The husband made an excellent joke about the status of his 101(k).

After lunch, I bought a Perfex salt mill at Williams-Sonoma, stunned by sticker shock even though the price was no surprise at all. I can at least be confident that the thing will outlast me — a consideration of no small importance these days. When we got home, I continued catching up with magazines, because, even though I am “not working,” that is what I do on Sundays. I badly wanted to read The Maias instead, partly because Eça de Queirós’s romance is blossoming in the most lyrically menacing way, and partly because I’m wondering if I will ever actually finish his novel and live to read another. (Francine Prose’s Goldengrove, for instance.) But I was strong. I read, or at least started to read, an interview with Woody Allen in L’Express, a weekly that, because it’s shipped from France, costs even more than The Economist, and so is therefore even more obligatory reading. I don’t know why, exactly, but I wouldn’t expect Woody Allen to give an interview to an Anglophone publication in which he confessed that he set Vicky Cristina in Barcelona because the location would get him his financing, or that he had never seen Penélope Cruz in a film before Volver, because, in his opinion, her American films didn’t seem to be worth his time. He may think these things, but he doesn’t say them — not in English.

 

Dear R J and Daily Blague readers,

The first wave of the McCain campaign’s indecent Negative Surge has shaken me so badly that I can’t possibly write what I’d intended to write this week, which was a chatty post about eggplants (?), and comfort food. (!)  At a time when we are all so raw over the economy, McCain and Palin are actually inciting their supporters to a level of wild rage that the rest of us can’t help but fear.  Ratatouille Pie is not going to comfort anyone right now.

My only source of comfort in the news is Barack Obama himself.  Has anyone else noticed how he is handling this?  Has handled everything since we first became aware of him?

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¶ Matins: “No sex please; we’re not finished with the story: Joe Jervis of Butterfield, New York, attributes his longevity to virginity. He’s 105 today.”

— What? Oh! Sorry!

¶ Tierce: Looking into my crystal ball, I foresee a wave of circumspect austerity sweeping the affluent areas of the world (or what’s left of them) in the coming years, as the costs of energy and food are moralized into a kind of green vegetarianism. Here’s how it starts: “Pint-Size Eco-Police, Making Parents Proud and Sometimes Crazy,” by Linda Foderaro.

Bon weekend à tous!

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I’m already looking forward to reading The Maias a second time. Of course, I shall have to read all of it a first time before that can happen. (more…)

¶ Matins: Regular readers will have learned to sigh when I mention the name of Alan Greenspan. I have certainly felt like something of a crank on the subject of this man’s failure to stanch the market’s foolishness. So I felt rather transfigured by the discovery that I was not alone: witness Peter S Goodman’s “Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy.”  

¶ Prime: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

¶ Tierce: Cook County Sheriff Thomas J Dart has called a halt to foreclosure evictions in Chicago. John Leland reports. In many cases, diligent renters are unaware of a property owner’s default until the marshalls would show up to evict them.

¶ Sext: Nom de Plume sent me the link to a curious video, of unexplained provenance (and 1999 vintage), concerning, straight-faced, the unlikely bond between a crow and a kitten. I watched it in wait for a surprise, but there was none.

¶ Compline: No sex please; we want to live forever: Clara Meadmore, of Perranporth, Cornwall, attributes her longevity to virginity. She’ll be 105 on Saturday.

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¶ In Moby-Dick, Stubb’s dream of Ahab’s kick — a lot of Shakespearean hoo-ha if you ask me. “But mum; he comes this way. Coming up: “Cetology,” which just may constitute the entirety of a Morning Read next week. (more…)

¶ Matins: I wouldn’t have watched last evening’s presidential debate for less than a million dollars. A million dollars, invested in the right Madagascar Triple-A’s, would allow me to hold on to my rent-stabilized apartment for at least eighteen months. Happily, the Times assigned a dozen (!) journalists to the fun job of assessing the truthiness of the candidates’ claims. No need to submit one’s person to all that body English!

¶ Prime: I’ve just seen the instantly infamous “that one” clip, from last night’s debate. Ouch!

¶ Tierce: The press corps in Albany dwindles, with the closing of the Sun, to about forty reporters. That sounds like a lot, though, doesn’t it, to cover a climate notoriously afflicted with political lockjaw. The good old days in Byzantium seem more spontaneous by comparison.  

¶ Sext: Maybe what’s going to save us from the 1929 playbook will be the 1789 playbook! “After bailout, AIG sent executives to the spa.” (Thanks, George.)

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Reading, this afternoon, that Emily Gordon is stepping down as editor of Emdashes, the great New Yorker-centric Web log, I felt my toes curling in envy. How I’d love to give up this self-appointed weekly review of The New York Times Book Review. This week, especially. What a lackluster lot of books!

The Book Review is mired in a cesspit of publicists and chits. But it’s all we have. As soon as there’s an American version of Lire, I’ll quit. Gladly.

¶ Lord Chesterfield presses home the indispensability of good manners in the world — something that doltish, obstinate people perversely continue to regard as a failing of the world:

You may possibly ask me, whether a man has it always in his power to get into the best company? and how? I say, Yes, he has, by deserving it; provided he is but in circumstances which enable him to appear upon the footing of a gentleman. Merit and good-breeding will make their way everywhere. Knowledge will introduce him, and good-breeding will endear him to the best companies; for, as I have often told you, politeness and good-breeding are absolutely necessary to adorn any, or all other good qualities or talents. Without them, no knowledge, no perfection whatever, is seen in its best light. The scholar, without good-breeding, is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic; the soldier, a brute; and every man disagreeable. (more…)

¶ Matins: Floyd Norris on our current adventure, “The Long Way Down”:

Will this fall be recovered within a week? That is not likely unless someone develops a financial system to replace the fallen one that was based on the fantasy that investors could finance very risky loans, via complicated securitizations, without taking risks.

¶ Tierce: Just my luck: having decided to steer The Daily Blague on a course of secular humanism, I confront a wave of financial disaster that, just to make things irritating as well as inopportune, I’ve been worried about for years. At some point, I knew, some event would act to pull the plug on the warm bath of Greenspansiveness.

I could spend my days writing links to old Portico pages and Daily Blague entries that illustrate my prescience (which was really just common sense), but I think it more sporting to let others demonstrate, if they can, that I was just as deluded, on occasion, as the tycos of Wall Street. I’m too busy, anyway, listening to foreign language lessons on my Nano. Can Teach Yourself Latin — as an audio course — be far off?

¶ Sext: It’s heartening to see Jason Kottke zero in on what’s most important about the coming election. Writing about The New Yorker’s endorsement of Barack Obama in the current issue, Mr Kottke writes,

The key part of the article concerns the candidates’ possible appointments to the Supreme Court and their consequences. A more conservative court scares the shit out of me.

¶ Compline: When I wrote the entry for Sext, I hadn’t read “The Talk of the Town” myself. When I did read it, just now, over dinner, my eyes welled over. As long as an organ of the MSM can turn out a Ciceronian oration of such efficient persuasion, the United States is not altogether broken.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

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¶ In Moby-Dick, the two “Knights and Squires” chapters. There’s a lot of Whitman here; it’s fashionable nowadays to find such manly gushing about manliness “homoerotic,” but I can’t abide the anachronism of it. (more…)

I’m very glad that Rachel Getting Married came out when it did, because I learned a lot about weddings that I hope doesn’t happen at Megan and Ryan’s wedding party in November. (A) Potpourri of World Music. (B) Excessive toasting. I want to go to a party, not a spectacle.

Philip Ball’s Universe of Stone treats Chartres Cathedral as a doorway onto Gothic art and craft. The book is literate, instructive, and a great pleasure to read. It almost cannot help being a compact refresher course in the medieval worldview.

¶ Matins: Sam Harris’s Newsweek piece, “When Atheists Attack“ gets to the heart of the Palin phenomenon — and why I call her “The Infernal Machine.” For a Democrat or a Progressive to notice her is to contribute to her magnetism.

¶ Tierce: From the editorial pages of the Times, today’s moving piece by Lawrence Downes on Vets 4 Vets, a network of veterans of the War on Terror (a/k/a Iraq) who get together to talk about what they can’t tell anyone else; and an  Op-Ed piece by Roger Cohen, “Kiplin vs Palin,” datelined yesterday but not to be found in “The Week in Review,” about what we might call Sarah Palin’s larger heedlessness (the lady appears to be rivetedly mindful of her own career).  

¶ Compline: Just what the world needs right about now: the authorized sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Authorized by his heir and great-grand-nephew, Dacre Stoker; he’s going to write it, too. (“Dacre”? What were his parents thinking. He can’t not have been “Dracu” all through school.)

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It seems almost new and different to return, this evening, to the care and feeding of the Daily Office — the daily Daily Blague entry in which I post provocative links, ie links that inspire me to bloviate. It’s different because I’ve just discovered the world beyond blogging. I won’t be abandoning The Daily Blague anytime soon, but I won’t be feeling guilty for not writing “bloggy” entries, whatever that means. Because, as I discovered today, the fun part of the Blogosphere has moved on, to Facebook.

I did not sign up for Facebook in an idle moment. I happened to notice, on my WordPress “dashboard,” that the DB had received an incoming link from “Jahsonic.” Really! Exploring a bit, I came across this post. If you scroll down, you’ll find that the author of Jahsonic, Jan Geerinck, a gentleman in Antwerp, cites the DB as authority for the proposition that the old tale about the lady who hides her lover in a tub, launched by Apuleius and picked up by Boccaccio, provides the basis for Ravel’s highly but dryly entertaining one-act opera, L’heure espagnole. Wow!

This is why I don’t try to edit Wikipedia entries. I send them $10 a month, not my emendations. I would lose faith in Wikipedia altogether if I thought that the reference I was checking out might have been written by me. My attribution of Ravel’s plot is just the sort of armchair scholarship that I’m trying to purge from my system. Nevertheless, I stand by the assertion, at least for the time being. The important thing was to thank Mr Geerinck.

The problem was that I could do so in one of only two ways. I could post a comment, or I could contact him at Facebook. Posting a comment seemed a little vainglorious, or, what I call Tooting Bec. A Facebook contact would require me to sign up.

I’d been meaning to create a Facebook account. I’d been advised to do so — buy an adviser whom I pay! But whenever I thought of it, I saw myself as a dirty old man showing up at a middle-school sock hop. What’s he doing here? Well, that’s not what happened.

What happened was that, in the space of a day, I went from 0 to 29 friends, almost all of whom I know, but many of whom I’ve been out of touch with. A few people, I knew of. Wow! They confirmed our friendship? I do have to write to my rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery. I did not mean to ask him to be my friend. I think the world of Dr Magid, but I insist on maintaining a few shreds of our professional relationship. He is the doctor, and I am the patient. On the other hand, he does always ask what I’ve been reading. Maybe I ought to send him to Goodreads.

It’s not that I regard every one of my Facebook friends as friends. I’m not going to be asking anybody to help me paint the apartment. I take a very serious, French view of friendship: it includes one or two people outside your family plus everybody in your lycée class.

Speaking of friendship, Fossil Darling was complaining that Wells Fargo had “stolen” the Wachovia takeover from Citigroup. I told him that he has obviously been Drinking the Kool-Aid; in a year or less, I assured him, he’ll be thanking his lucky stars that Citi’s deal fell through. Then, yesterday, up at his health club in Luxury Haven, he ran into a Citi broker who “used to work with a lot of people at Wachovia.” Libel laws being what they are, I shan’t repeat what Fossil repeated, but I can tell you that the broker’s comments were highly uncomplimentary as to character and fitness. What a good thing it was, he thought, that Citi wouldn’t be trying to swallow the Charlotte bank. “That is so amazing!” replied Fossil. “My dearest friend has been telling me the same thing, and he’s not even in the business!”

“So,” I asked, “who’s your dearest friend?”

Needless to say, Fossil Darling will be the very last man to sign up at Facebook before the rule against perpetuities expires.

Two weeks ago, Paycheck got a rave review from Kathleen’s brother. When I finally got round to watching it, I was impressed, because the intelligence of the puzzle always rose above the cartoon violence. I ordered it from Amazon right away, and the DVD arrived this afternoon. Kathleen was dead tired, but Paycheck woke her up. When it was over, though, she went right back to sleep. I was unable to engage her in a double feature. The second film would have been Untraceable.

Both movies involve a lot of violence, but the violence is not the same kind of violence. Paycheck is a glorious comic book, perhaps the first one ever to be captured on film. Almost every settled frame is a bande dessiné image. There’s no doubt of the ultimate winner. You could almost say that Aaron Eckhart’s more chiseled features doom him from the moment you note the chiseled cleft in his chin.

Paycheck is an amazingly masculine movie because it combines cartoon violence with a genuinely arresting puzzle. Untraceable is a woman’s movie because women have been kicked around a lot. The violence in Untraceable — like that of Copycat, another woman’s picture — is horrific. Dreadful things not only happen but register as such. Both movies  not only involve but are built around kidnappings. Paycheck’s hero evades capture by means of tricks that the monsters in Untraceable and Copycat would have foreseen and forestalled. Aaron Eckhart has played a lot of nasty men, but to date his serial murders have been strictly metaphorical.

Would I sign over my brains in exchange for Ben Affleck’s looks? I ask the question only because I used to look something like him, when I was young, and what I envy most is his getting away with fleshy stupidity — God knows I didn’t. I don’t mean that Ben Affleck himself is stupid. I will always revere his performance in Hollywoodland. But this movie has the wit to change the question: would I trade my looks for  Michael Jennings’s brains?

¶ Matins: When I read yesterday’s Matins to Kathleen, she sighed and wondered if I wasn’t getting carried away about Alan Greenspan’s role in the credit crunch. For backup, I decided to search for a report of the disagreement that Mr Greenspan had with late Fed Governor Edward Gramlich. 

Gramlich, long worried about the fragility of the housing market, wanted an investigation that would close down predatory mortgage lenders. Here’s what — according to a Wall Street Journal article by Greg Ip, dated 9 June 2007 — Mr Greenspan had to say about that, last summer.

Mr. Greenspan, in an interview, says he doesn’t recall a specific discussion of the idea but confirmed his opposition to it.

There is “a very large number of small institutions, some on the margin of scrupulousness and very hard to detect when they are doing something wrong,” says Mr. Greenspan, who retired in February last year. “For us to go in and audit how they act on their mortgage applications would have been a huge effort, and it’s not clear to me we would have found anything that would have been worthwhile without undermining the desired availability of subprime credits.”

¶ Compline: How neat it would be to see this: “Paul Newman: Broadway to dim lights in actor’s honour”.

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