¶ 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)

(more…)

¶ 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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Wowser! Is Taken ever the film to see in a dark and cold season. There was applause at the showing that Quatorze and I attended, and a woman in the audience hailed Liam Neeson’s character as “the new James Bond!” I think it just came out.

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: Is the Republican Party taking its marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. If so, why? From Frank Rich’s column, yesterday:

Obama no doubt finds Limbaugh’s grandiosity more amusing than frightening, but G.O.P. politicians are shaking like Jell-O. When asked by Andrea Mitchell of NBC News on Wednesday if he shared Limbaugh’s hope that Obama fails, Eric Cantor spun like a top before running off, as it happened, to appear on Limbaugh’s radio show. Mike Pence of Indiana, No. 3 in the Republican House leadership, similarly squirmed when asked if he agreed with Limbaugh. Though the Republicans’ official, poll-driven line is that they want Obama to succeed, they’d rather abandon that disingenuous nicety than cross Rush.

Most pathetic of all was Phil Gingrey, a right-wing Republican congressman from Georgia, who mildly criticized both Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to Politico because they “stand back and throw bricks” while lawmakers labor in the trenches. So many called Gingrey’s office to complain that the poor congressman begged Limbaugh to bring him on air to publicly recant on Wednesday. As Gingrey abjectly apologized to talk radio’s commandant for his “stupid comments” and “foot-in-mouth disease,” he sounded like the inmate in a B-prison-movie cowering before the warden after a failed jailbreak.

¶ Lauds: Just what we need right now — and I’m not kidding. The warm and domestic light of late Bonnard, on exhibit until Kathleen’s birthday.

¶ Prime: Get a cup of coffee and look around you. You are where you are, and everything is fine. It is clear that Tao Lin did not make you up. You can look at his blog now. (via Koreanish)

¶ Tierce: The obvious lesson to be learned from the Geithner and Daschle tax imbroglios is that the nation’s tax system, devised principally for the aid and comfort of tax attorneys and accountants, ought to be scrapped. The very fact that the Senate Finance Committee is “trying to determine whether trips to the Bahamas and the Middle East provided to Mr. Daschle by the company should also have been reported as income” sounds the alarm: we’ve got to come up with something better — and much, much simpler.

¶ Sext: Here’s one of those maps that goes out of its way to be difficult — only to schematize information that you couldn’t care less about: Friseurnamen at Strange Maps. Just for starters: the madness of composing a background from strands of hair. Funny, once you’ve gotten over the immediate unintelligibility.

¶ Nones: As the pool of unemployed migrant workers in China swells, the prospect of widespread unrest looms, and the current regime appears to be no better-equipped to deal with it than its dynastic predecessors. The BBC’s Chris Hogg reports from Shanghai.

¶ Vespers: There Are No Words Dept: John Grisham originally sent his most recent protagonist, in The Associate, to Princeton Law School. Unaware that there isn’t one. (via Brainiac)

¶ Compline: Updating the liberal arts for Internauts: a refreshing topic of conversation in these disturbed times. Jason Kottke links to Snarkmarket, a site that’s new to me.

(more…)

There ought to be a ban on plays, concerts, and whatnot during the first two months of the new year. Then Kathleen and I wouldn’t miss anything because we were too depressed by the ghastly weather to venture forth in the evening. As it happens, we didn’t miss anything this week, but we trudged off to the Oak Room on Thursday night, and to Carnegie Hall last night, with very reluctant footsteps.

We knew from experience that we’d be glad we’d gone, in the one instance to hear cabaret singer Steve Ross, in the other to hear Orpheus and Anoushka Shankar, and we were. They were great evenings out. But they would have been more fun if we hadn’t been wishing like mad that we could just stay home.

(Moving to warmer climes is not an option. There are no Steve Rosses or Orphei in the Sun Belt.)

Now I have the pleasure of writing up these events for your reading pleasure. Don’t hold your breath; I’m in the middle of a rethink about writing about music.

***

Getting used to life after Dubya is an interesting pleasure. It’s great to return to a more genuinely political world, one in which contestants engage in argument with one another instead of spouting ideological non-responses. So far, it’s true, the Republicans, at least the ones in Congress, are not “contestants” but “constipants.” More about that anon.

Peter Steinfels wrote today about Catholic bishops in the United States — and how they haven’t said “boo” about Benedict XVI’s rehabilitation of the Lefevrists, including a notorious Holocaust-denier. I haven’t said “boo,” either. There really isn’t much to say, at this point, about the future of the Roman Catholic Church. One can only wait and see what individual American Catholics will decide, soul by soul.

I am waiting for the members of some aggrieved parish or other to respond to a church closing by contesting diocesan title to church buildings. The law is squarely on the bishops’ side, but the equity just as certainly is not, especially when one considers that many of the Church’s money problems stem from the hierarchy’s high-handed coverups of its pedophile problem. Who ought to suffer? Parishioners or bean-counting bishops?

If there’s a precedent for the impending rupture, it is not the Protestant Reformation, which concerned profound doctrinal differences, but the split between Reform and Orthodox Jews, which concerned differences about how much weight to put on doctrines that were not in dispute.

***

The other big deal at the moment is — what to call it? Gaza? Israel? Palestine? It sometimes seems that Hitler had the last laugh after all, for the fear of another Holocaust (the only conceivable justification for the harrowing of Gaza) provokes Israeli responses that, in turn, provoke ever more generalized anti-Zionism; and anti-Zionism, as Bernard-Henri Lévy assures us, is but anti-Semitism by another name.

***

What’s not particularly amusing these days is enduring the utterly hypocritical explosion of populism. — Those greedy bankers! &c &c. But no one capable of using a search engine has the right to start complaining now about what has been going on in American finance since at least the collapse of Enron. And before smacking any of those greedy bankers, let justice to be done to the cheerleaders who encouraged them, Alan Greenspan and the editorial-page editors of the Wall Street Journal.

***

The Schott’s Miscellany calendar entry for last Wednesday, “Applause at Classical Concerts,” addresses a felicitous problem. The fact that many concertgoers don’t seem to know the rules about applause is encouraging: it means that serious music is finding new audiences. Now, I’m the first to forget my manners when the first movement of a stormy concerto comes to a rousing conclusion. Clap away! (And glare right back at those blue-haired biddies  — it’s amazing that they still make ’em, ain’t it — and their dim husbands.)

At the Orpheus concert last night however, it appeared that many people in the cheap seats thought that it was only polite to clap every time the music came to a stop. This completely broke the spell of Zoltán Kodály’s Summer Evening and gave the ensemble’s excellent performance of Haydn’s 99th Symphony something of a junior high feel. It’s time for someone to post a small “Attention New Listeners!” notice at the bottom of the programs. For nothing is sadder at concerts than polite applause.