¶ Matins: The nation of which Amsterdam is the capital is rightly considered to be one of the most densely-populated sovereignties in the world. But it’s as empty as Arizona when compared with the former New Amsterdam.

¶ Lauds: On the eve of shooting Wall Street 2, Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas chuckle ruefully over the unintended aura projected by Wall Street, twenty-three years ago.

¶ Prime: Bob Cringely reconsiders the virtual university, and obliges us to do the same. What seems at first to be an unlikely monstrosity may indeed provide the most effective education for most students.

¶ Tierce: Assault By Actuary: the Bruce Schobel Story. Or not, since, perhaps for legal reasons, Mary Williams Walsh never does describe the crime of which the (then teenaged?) in-and-out president-elect of the American Academy of Actuaries was convicted.

¶ Sext: Tom Tomorrow catches up with Goofus and Gallant.

¶ Nones: The latest story on the Fall of Lehman Brothers, from the Guardian‘s Larry Elliott and Jill Treanor, highlights the soverignty problem in global regulation.

¶ Vespers: Ben Dooley offers a short list of books to read about Japan, in case you’re boning up for a trip. Read Murakami if you must, but for a real Japanese novel…

¶ Compline: In a Talk piece from this week’s New Yorker, “Zoo Story,” Lauren Collins registers the general public’s dislike of the seating arrangements in Times Square, as well as its approval of the Thigh Line and the Eyeful Tower.

(more…)

At one end of things, Kathleen’s mother is ailing. At the other, Megan talks about “the little one.” Now that my daughter is more than halfway through her pregnancy, I expect that she will just laugh when she hears that, contrary to my recollections, I’ve been itching for grandchildren since she was eight years old. At least! That’s to say that Megan was eight years old when Kathleen met her, and already, according to my wife, I was looking forward to future generations. I myself date this anticipation to a far more recent period. The moment I knew that Megan and Ryan would be getting married, I became Grandchildren Central, although I tried not to betray this preoccupation, even though it was as though antlers were growing out of my scalp.

There are grandfathers who want to enroll their grandchildren at prestigious universities. I want to take my grandson to the Cloisters. Actually, I’m thinking more about a Fort Tryon Park experience; we can leave the Cloisters itself for later — as long as he sees the building through the trees. The simple truth is that I grew up in the ecosphere of which Fort Tryon Park — but not Central Park — is a part. I probably won’t live long enough to want to take my grandson all the way out to Bronxville (that would be never), so the homeyness at the northern end of Manhattan is most welcome.

If I’m not thinking much about the prestigious-university thing, that’s only because I doubt that there’s a school that’s good enough for this kid. No vanity intended! At The Daily Blague today, I did a little math, and calculated that the tuition for a truly superior education, taught by five seminar leaders to twenty students, would come to a total of $50,000 for a three-year program (pricey, but also dirt cheap, considering current costs), at an annual payout to the teachers of $200,000. The math is probably incorrect — and, sadly, it wouldn’t have been any better if I’d gone to this sterling academy. Paying the teachers, though, would be the only signifcant cost. It’s inconceivable that the books would cost more than $500 altogether. As for location, I’m counting on the kindness of strangers, because, frankly, classroom costs oughtn’t to amount to much more than zero.

The prospect of being a grandfather is certainly concentrating my mind. To an extent that I’d have thought objectionable as well as improbable, I’ve lost interest in non-family connections. While I was still seeing a psychotherapist, a year or so ago, I discussed the possibility that my personaltiy lay on the Asperger’s-autism spectrum. This was pooh-poohed professionally, rightly I’m sure. (How like me to be crestfallen at not “having” a stylish handicap.) I wondered about it, though, because my connections to other people have always been so weak. I don’t know a soul from childhood; I’m barely in touch with my sister. Aside from Fossil Darling (food for thought, when you think about it), I wouldn’t know anybody from prep school or college if it weren’t for Facebook. I have one friend from my seven years in Houston, and I’ve actually lost two others, definitively. Six years of collegiality on Wall Street have left no trace at all. At best, I’m like the clubman in the William Maxwell story who “had no friends.” If I do have friends, it’s because I’m married to one of the friendliest women on earth. Left to myself, I’d have no encounters off the Internet.

This line of thinking has been intensified by my summer experiment of giving up everything except The Daily Blague and Portico. Whether the experiment was a success or not, it’s too early to tell;  but I’ve come out of it with the most magnificent feelings. There’s no doubt in my mind that I unearthed my métier this summer, and the discovery has rendered me mightily impatient with the activities of  the past sixty years. I need people more than ever, but I need them on the other side of a correspondence, not at the other side of a table. I’m in almost desperate need of people who want to write as well and as badly as I do. That must be why I can’t wait to make the acquaintaince of my grandson, with whom I won’t be conversing for a while. Knowing someone whom I love to pieces (as I doubtless shall) and of whom I expect nothing: that will happen.  

¶ Matins: Edward Glaeser reviews Anthony Flint’s book about the Jacobs-Moses Wars in Midcentury New York, at TNR. (via Marginal Revolution) 

¶ Lauds: The painting of Kim Cogan; detail below the fold. (via The Best Part)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon provides some helpful background on the most upsetting story of the past weekend. Here’s hoping that he’s right, and that “life settlements” won’t go anywhere this time around, either.

¶ Tierce: Roman Hans has a problem with his cable bill.

¶ Sext: Carrie Fisher admits that she USED TO BE hot.

¶ Nones: At the LRB, Thomas Jones digs out an 1880 book about the futility of waging Western-style war in Afghanistan. Lots has changed since then, but Afghanistan hasn’t, not much.

¶ Vespers: Gadzooks! A New England prep school with no library! No books! Instead, a “learning center,” and a $12,000 cappuccino machine. (via Survival of the Book)

¶ Compline: Failure and free markets: is it any wonder that the inhabitants of a small island kingdom would be far more risk averse than the settlers of a resource-rich continent? Peter Goodman filters last week’s election through contrasts between Japan and the United States.

(more…)

As you know, I like to watch movies in the kitchen, while I’m cooking. And, because I’m cooking, “listening” would  be a much better word. The movies are always so familiar that I don’t need to look at them, and, anyway, it’s the voices that stir me. But tonight, for editorial reasons, I was actually looking at the screen, and seeing something that I wouldn’t have heard.

Yesterday, I found myself watching The Philadelphia Story. I had been watching Cary Grant movies, but The Philadelphia Story took me off in a new direction: I wanted to see High Society next. High Society is the musical version of The Philadelphia Story, and I have always thought that Grace Kelly’s was incredibly courageous to take on  the part of Tracy Lord. Impersonating Katharine Hepburn, the actress for whom the part was written — the actress who, being not so unlike Tracy Lord in real life that she couldn’t buy the rights to Philip Barry’s play — and in a musical in which she doesn’t sing much: either great nerve or dumb determination. I haven’t researched the matter, but one assumes that, if Katharine Hepburn owned the rights, then she must have approved of Grace Kelly. Which makes High Society impressive for Hepburn as well.

I was weeping during the Overture. The movie hadn’t even begun, and tears were pouring out of my eyes. But those tears were different from the ones that cascaded during “True Love,” the musical’s interpolation in which Tracy remembers her honeymoon with Dexter on the True Love. I have always thought that “True Love” is one of the most beautiful songs in the world, but that’s because I was a defenceless kid when I heard it the first time. Later, I came to find the scene sort of tacky. The color is too vivid, and the scene is too obviously shot in a studio, not on a boat. This is a charge that can be leveled at the entire movie, but “True Love” is extraordinarily romantic: you want it to be right. Tonight, though, I decided, that it’s just fine.

I changed my mind because what I saw on screen wasn’t some dream of love that it would be nice to encounter in some ideal world, but an exact impression of the wonder of being married to Kathleen for years and years. (You’ll pardon my taking the Bingle’s POV). I’m not going to say that Kathleen would be mistaken for Grace Kelly even when she was 26. But she moves just like Grace Kelly, and she always has. And she is in fact the smart loving woman that Kelly is pretending to be.

True love is the most delicate, breakable object in the world, and even after thirty years it cannot be taken for granted. Even after a hundred, I’m sure — could it be put to that test. But when true love has lasted for thirty years, you look at a scene like the one in High Society and you don’t say, “it’s just the movies.” You say, hey, this really happens. And the tears pour out of your eyes.

New at Portico: On Thursday night — knowing that I’d be involved with moving furniture on Friday morning — I went across the street to the movies, and saw Inglourious Basterds. I was very uncertain about what to expect. Although I liked Jackie Browne, there was something about Pulp Fiction that I disliked very deeply, and I never saw either of the Kill Bills. The new movie, however, is hugely fun. Setting the film in Forties Paris instead of Nineties Los Angeles has a lot to do with it. The sad fact is that, washboards notwithstanding, people used to look a lot better.

The week’s New Yorker story is by Orhan Pamuk, and it made me wish that I could read it in Turkish. As languages go, Turkish is like Japanese — very different from English. (Chinese is practically a member of the same linguistic family, by comparison). Maureen Freely, whose father taught at Robert College, Turkey’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, and who therefore grew up speaking Turkish as well as English (and, on the evidence, a rich, literate Turkish to boot), continues to serve as the writer’s alter ego. I read the other day, at Marginal Revolution, that Mr Pamuk’s new book, The Museum of Innocents, has already appeared in German. What’s with that? Is it the generation of Turkish-ancestry Germans who don’t really understand their parents’ language?

The Book Review was very brief this week. Perhaps our rentrée littéraire will pick up next week. Perhaps the cool weather will catalyse the wholly new approach to book reviewing that the Book Review so desperately needs. Does anyone under forty read it, except for professional reasons?

This week’s book, rather cursorily dealt with, is Niall Ferguson’s objectionally usefull history of finance, The Ascent of Money. If it were not against all the commandments of my religion (every single one of them, except for the one banning sex with unequals), I would watch the TV version of the book, just to gloat over its flashy thinness. As it is, I can barely contain the horrified glee that Harvard’s hiring of such a media-savvy professor occasions. As for the book, it’s something that, for all of its problems and drawbacks, ought to be read by every intelligent person.

The shift continues: Don Draper, formerly an an anxious outsider, desperate to conceal the secrets of his past, has become the true insider, the one man who really knows how the world works. We already know from scattershots of Don’s pre-Don past that he’s a basically a decent sort of guy. Now, having acquired an exceptional authority at Sterling Cooper, Don is turning into a kind of Wotan, a flawed keeper of contracts who wields respect for What’s Right both as a weapon of justice and as a plinth.

His care for of Sal Romano is the touchstone. In the first episode, Don espied some dishy blackmail evidence about Sal, but, so far from using it to hurt the art director, he has made a point of treating Sal as a comrade. In “The Arragngements,” he responds to the news that the Patio spot’s director has dropped out with the suggestion that Sal direct the ad. After all, Don observes, Sal designed the storyboards, and the clients want a copy of Ann-Margaret in Bye-Bye Birdie. Sal is thrilled by the assignment — so thrilled that, in  one of the most amazing scenes to issue from Mad Men, he reveals the problem of his sexuality to his wife, all unknowing, when he rehearses the spot for her, and you can see that she finally understands that he identifies his excitable self with a woman. (It’s a terrifying, heartbreaking scene: you don’t know whether to feel sorrier for Kit, whose eyes are opened, or for Sal, who still doesn’t understand himself.) The spot is duly produced and, when it bombs, we’re interested to note that none of Sal’s colleagues — especially Harry Crane, the agency’s TV guy — understand what was wrong with it.

The feint is utterly characteristic of the show. While the spot runs onscreen, we can tell that it’s not a success, but of course we don’t know why. We’re tempted to think that it’s because a gay man, unaware of his sexuality, has transgressed the limits of acceptable seduction. And perhaps he has, for the clients — the marketers of what turned out in fact to be a short-lived brand name — are speechlessly repelled. But Sal’s colleagues at Sterling Cooper shake their heads in bewilderment. To them, Sal’s spot did exactly what the client wanted it to do. Peggy Olson’s smirk reminds of what she said when the assignment came in: sometimes clients are wrong. Roger Sterling puts it well when he says that the girl in the ad isn’t Ann-Margaret. (And she isn’t!) Sometimes, it’s that simple.

Toward the end of the episode, Sal knocks at and enters Don’s office, saying that he has decided on coming to the woodshed before being invited. Don not only declines to punish, but recommends thinking of the episode this way: at last, Sal is a film director. It’s almost anachronistically wise, but Don is simply telling a gay man to go with the flow. On top of this, Don adds, he’d hire Sal again, notwithstanding the flop of the maiden effort. There is a kindness in Don’s protectiveness that changes the reasons for our rooting for him.

One thing that struck me forcibly is how sure of himself Don is in stocking feet. When he walks into Bert Cooper’s office — Bert is a Nipponophile, but one suspects that his real reason for requiring visitors to remove their shoes is his desire to disconcert them — you stare at his feet, because he walks as though he were wearing shoes, even though he isn’t. What’s this about? Most men would rather be barefoot, but it’s a private thing, and removing shoes in the workplace is discombombulating. (After all, you’re not supposed to be comfortable at work!) I haven’t gone back to look, but I seem to recall a certain self-consciousness among Bert’s stocking-footed visitors. This evening, in contrast, I felt that Don Draper dresses for the shoe-removal every day, that his socks are the best on the market, and nothing to be ashamed of; that, really, Don would be disappointed if an entire day went by without a visit to Bert Cooper’s office.

Bottom line: when the aliens land and list their demands, Don Draper is the guy we want to negotiate on our behalf. He has developed a fine sense of the difference between the Significantly Weird and the Merely Stupid. We’ve never needed such an arbiter more urgently.  

Jericho, Arkansas — which, with 174 inhabitants, is no longer the cotton hub that it used to be — is the ideal spot for committing felonies that do not involve automobiles. The zealous seven-man police force spends all of its time pulling drivers over and writing traffic tickets. Fire Chief Dan Payne finally had enough.

It was anger over traffic tickets that brought Payne to city hall last week, said his lawyer, Randy Fishman. After Payne failed to get a traffic ticket dismissed on Aug. 27, police gave Payne or his son another ticket that day. Payne, 39, returned to court to vent his anger to Judge Tonya Alexander, Fishman said.

It’s unclear exactly what happened next, but Martin said an argument between Payne and the seven police officers who attended the hearing apparently escalated to a scuffle, ending when an officer shot Payne from behind.

Doctors in Memphis, Tenn., removed a .40-caliber bullet from Payne’s hip bone, Martin said. Another officer suffered a grazing wound to his finger from the bullet.

The big question, of course, is where the proceeds of all those fines has gone. The town recently missed payments on official vehicles. D’you think that Judge Tonya knows? (via MetaFilter)

¶ Matins: Amazing: Significant legal reform from Albany. The new Power of Attorney, with 50% less bluffing! (via Estate of Denial)

¶ Lauds: “Theatre Royal Bath to be Revamped.” Accent on Theatre, kiddoes.

¶ Prime: Memo to Twentysomethings: Just as the ultimate human destination is a long, narrow box, the ultimate gamer’s destination seems to be a body that’s overweight, depressed, and thirty-five.

¶ Tierce: Stalking your ex-girlfriend? There’s an app for that. (You may require hilariotomy after.)

¶ Sext: Choire Sicha deconstructs — no, “annotates” — Saki Knafo’s Times Magazine piece about the epic struggle behind the making of Where the Wild Things Are. If Spike Jonze thought that he was beleaguered before…!

¶ Nones: On facing pages of yesterday’s Times, stories about divisions in Honduras (which we knew about) and Jerusalem (which we’d forgotten about). Some people just don’t want to get along!

¶ Vespers: Jane Kramer on Montaigne: if it’s an easy read, you’re no Montaigne fan. (If you’re no New Yorker subscriber, the link may not work. So continue below.)

¶ Compline: The suburban dreams of Ross Racine are just what we want to think about this weekend. (via The Infrastructurist)

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

Another reading day? That’s what I wanted when I got up. So much for last week’s feeling that I was really living in the rhythm of my new assignments. Work wasn’t effortless, exactly, but work was the only effort. There was none of the much more common effort of worrying about working. I was getting somewhere! But that was last week.

What I wanted, of course, wasn’t a reading day. What I wanted was a check-out day. This is what depression is like for me, when it hits.  I want to have nothing more to do with the world, at least of a transactional nature. Today, I wanted very much to have nothing to do with the lady in charge of the building’s office, but there was no way round it. I had to tell her that I was expected a mover tomorrow. That was really all that I had to do, but I knew that there would be complications, if not outright trouble. When I told the lady in charge that I was expecting a mover tomorrow, she said that she hadn’t heard anything about it. What she meant (since of course she was only just now hearing about it from me) was that she hadn’t received a certificate of insurance from the mover. No matter what I said, she repeated that I would have to arrange for the certificate of insurance, or the mover would not be allowed to set foot in the building. As I expected, she took a palpable pleasure in repeating this condition. If not, then not. It was making her day. Not that I was helping.  Having expected the encounter to go badly, I did what I could to assure that it did go badly.

It didn’t go that badly — nothing happened that a nice call from LXIV couldn’t smooth over. (The energetic and resourceful LXIV has been helping us out with some refurbishment projects, and now, a year after the bolt of fabric took up its post by the front door, we’re sending a love seat out to be reupholstered.) The mover, it turned out, had already submitted the certificate of insurance (can you believe how boring this is!), but the lady in the office hadn’t got round to checking her fax machine. (A capable and helpful adminstrator would have thought to check that detail, instead of idiotically repeating the need for me to contact the mover, but this woman wouldn’t have done such a thing for the likes of me if there were a million dollars in it for her. Of the same age and, if I may presume, both more or less Irish, we are born enemies. It is that simple. Each one of us is dead certain that the other is a useless sack of water.) I was so rattled by the sour aftertaste of this inescapable enmity that I couldn’t do anything when I got back to the apartment.

My mother (and more than a few friends) would have said: what a big baby you are! I can understand that I might look infantile, or, at any rate, deeply chickenshit; I avoid encounters with certain kinds of people with panicky rigor. But I don’t shrink from such people because I’m afraid of them. It’s rather that they make me fear myself. The desire to visit physical mayhem on dull-witted bureaucrats who aren’t well-paid enough to (a) have a brain or (b) give a damn frequently threatens overwhelms me. They say that you have to put up with such people in the world, but I, for one, would like to know the reasoning behind that proposition. I say — but we’ll draw a veil over what I say.  

I hope you realize how mortified I am to confess such high-strung ricochets. This is supposed to be the Web log of a civilized humanist, but for an hour today my soul could not decide between homicide and suicide.

In the end, I did sit down and write up this week’s book — and then I went to the movies. In view of tomorrow’s Chinese fire drill, I thought that I’d better get this week’s movie-going out of the way. And while I was at the movies, Kathleen was on a train, chugging home from Washington, where she spent an exciting couple of days that I’ll ramble on about anon, hopefully with the aid of a link to the Wall Street Journal.

Yesterday, as I noted, I was burnt out. Today, I was intemperate. That’s progress for you.

¶ Matins: Jonah Lehrer, cross-posting for the vacationing Andrew Sullivan, anticipates the legalization of marijuana.

¶ Lauds: It’s not new, but we just found out about it: Thorsten Fleisch’s Gestalt.

¶ Prime: Although slightly intemperate in tone, David Barash’s essay at Chron Higher Ed persuasively equates the “growth economy” with the “Ponzi economy”: “We Are All Madoffs.”

¶ Tierce: We forget who it was who commented on the following report with the quip, good thing Alan Bloom is dead: “Twitter 101: DePaul University’s Social Media Prof Gives His Syllabus.” Oh! Of course! It was Christopher Shea.

¶ Sext: V X Sterne urges respect for the typical Ian Fleming villain. “With his historic level of megalomania, his massively outsized sense of entitlement, his complete lack of perspective, his issues with impulse control, that infantile fixation on revenge, it’s a wonder he gets anything done.”

¶ Nones: Greece reboots: Prime Minister Karamanlis calls for a “snap election.”

¶ Vespers: At Survival of the Book, Brian picks up Christopher’s thread (Oops! We mixed them up) and considers the lost art of writing — writing real books, that is.

¶ Compline: Tom Scocca muses on the mad appeal of Useless Facts. (via kottke.org)

(more…)

When I woke up this morning, I knew that I’d be having a Reading Day. I’ve been firing on all cylinders for a longer stretch than usual, and I’ve feeling good about it, too. It got to the point where I felt so good about it that I couldn’t stand it. In future, I hope to trim these lapses into immoderate ebullience, but, for the moment, there are Reading Days.

Yes, there’s something bogus about the label, something prim and euphemistic, because of course Reading Days are devoted to reading because I’m good for nothing else; they’re Burnt-Out Days. If they were genuine Reading Days, then I wouldn’t feel so guilty about them, especially around lunchtime, which is when it becomes obvious that I’m never going to get any real work done. I’d say, this is a scheduled Reading Day! In fact, I could never schedule a day for reading. It would be like scheduling a day for taking taxis or eating potato chips.

What saves my Reading Days from ignominy is the fact that I can’t stand to read junk. Just as I can’t stand to watch television, unless it’s Mad Men or something in French. (If my French were as good as it ought to be, I’d have to give this up.) I find “escapist” reading to be anything but: the only thing that I want to escape is the lousy book. For example: I picked up a copy of Harlan Coben’s Tell No One once. I should say right away that I love the French film that was adapted from it. But the book revealed itself to be utterly unreadable by me on the fifth page. The writing was execrable. That’s why they invented the word “execrable”: to describe the prose style of Harlan Coben. I take my hat off to the stronger sorts who can wade through it.

(Memo to self: compose a list of well-written junk. Is there any? There must be!)

So what I read to today was history. Like most men, I would rather read history than fiction. Unlike most men, I would rather read fiction than military history. I don’t mind the occasional battle, but let’s be honest: the average battle is about as interesting, from a strategic sense, as a game of roulette. You want to win, yes; but you don’t want to read about it. Except for the odd mis-match, battles are to accident what the human body is to water: mostly.

I have not encountered any battles yet in Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000, but then I’ve been skipping around.  I see that Mr Wickham sternly disapproves of reading the history of these much-maligned centuries for “the narrative of nationalism,” by which (I think) he means evidence of the origins of modern Belgium, &c. But that’s exactly what I love about the period.

Take that treaty, which I’m always disposed to mention at the slightest inducement, between Charles the Simple and Hrolf the Viking, in 911. Charles went on to be extinguished, but Hrolf, a/k/a Rollo, begat and begat until William the Conqueror, wouldn’t you know, issued; and one of the intermediate begats, a Richard or a Robert, decided that “count of Rouen” wasn’t grand enough, so he started calling himself “duke of Normady.” No battles involved in any of this, but look what came of it! (The Battle of Hastings, yes; but Other Things, too.) Mr Wickham doesn’t shed much light on the meeting at St-Claire-sur-Epte (rightly so, given the scope of his book), but he does say this:

Charles was not an entirely useless king. His Lotharingian adventure was at least a sensible strategy, even if a desperate one [must go back and learn more!]. He also had the vision to deal with the Vikings of the Seine by recognizing them and settling their leader Rollo as count of Rouen in 911. The Vikings (Nortmanni in Latin) of the Seine more or less respected their side of the deal, and held off future attacks; they settled down and soon began to behave in ways analogous to other Frankish magnates, and “Normandy,” though prone to civil war, remained fairly firmly in the hands of its count/duke.

The magic, of course, lies in the idea of Vikings settling down. It’s enough to make you believe that anything is possible. As, indeed, it is!

Dublin was the most powerful and dangerous of these new polities, and in the 850s it became the focus of stubstantial reinforcements, but the Vikings never engaged in large-scale territorial conquest in Ireland. It was too difficult, with all those tiny kingdoms, and also not hugely remunerative, as there were too few stores of movable wealth (as in eastern Europe, slaves were Ireland’s most valuable exportable commodity.)

Not so cheering, no. But I’m sure that I would read Harlan Coben’s books if they were written by a stylist of Chris Wickham’s caliber.

You’d think that a book about “the Dark Ages” would be more depressing than any other kind of history, but Jonathan Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 is the saddest book that I’ve read in eons. I want to shout, Stop that Making of America! The making of Frankenstein’s monster sounds like a much better idea. I had not gathered from the reviews — and the publisher, Harper, has gone out of its way to package the book misleadingly — that Mr Lears intends his title with extremely bitter irony. It refers, of course, to D W Griffith’s horribly proto-fascist film epic of the same name (more or less). I wasn’t expecting this, but The Rebirth of America seems designed to support my conviction that the “Civil War” wasn’t worth it.

Still, concentrated capital set the boundaries of permissible debate. The Supreme Court proved particularly helpful to business interests, eviscerating the Sherman Act by excusing offenders on technicalities, and defining labor unions as “combinations in restraint of trade.” Equally important was the Court’s gradual redefinition of the Fourteenth Amendment as a substantive defense of corporate property rights. The culmination of this process was the Court’s decision in Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), which extended the definition of the word “persons” in the Fourteenth Amendment to include legal persons — ie, corporations. What began as a measure to confer rights on ex-slaves became a boon for big business.

I suppose, though, that it’s better to feel Burned than Burnt Out.

¶ Matins: Lawrence Krauss is not joking when he suggests, on the Times Op-Ed page, that the best way to get men to Mars is to abandon the idea of bringing astronauts back home.

¶ Lauds: Luc Sante reminisces about Jean-Michel Basquiat. “I was happy for him, but then it became obvious he was flaming out at an alarming pace.”

¶ Prime: William Cohan profiles Chris Flowers, a financial Icarus — of sorts (he’s still worth $1.5 billion). (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: MetaFilter Discovery Nº 1 (we made two of them, the other day): amassblog, designer James Phillips Williams’s catalogue blogué of the things that he collects.

¶ Sext: MetaFilter Discovery Nº 2: Stuff Christian Culture Likes. Mordant and wry but not patronising.

¶ Nones: Visiting Dansk on the 70th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin denounces the Nazi-Soviet pact as “immoral,” and deplores the Russian atrocity at Katyn in 1940.

¶ Vespers: Michelle Huneven explains the not-so-pedestrian charm of listening to books while taking a daily constitutional.

¶ Compline: We only just finished reading “Critical Shopper,” Justin Wolfe’s magnificent essay on the pleasures of reading about exotic foodstuffs and expensive scents, neither of which he expects to sample in this lifetime. Take your time, but be sure to read it yourself!

(more…)

It turned out to be a nice day. Thanks to two nightmares that visited me this morning, though, I expected it to be rather awful. I looked out at the beautifully clear September sky, and all I could think of was that beautiful Tuesday morning nearly eight years ago. I’m not given to anniversaries and commemorations — not emotionally, that is — but the nightmares were discouraging.

The nightmare that I had while I was sleeping was a computer thing — my desktop wouldn’t boot up properly. I’m pretty sure that it was inspired by what I’ve just learned is a new Windows update that won’t install itself properly, and that has to be manually quelled. It’s not a big deal, but it kindles ancient anxieties.

And notwithstanding the nice-day business, this nightmare turned out to be prophetic. When I sat down to start work at The Daily Blague, the site’s server was in the process of melting down. The outage didn’t last very long, and I worked around it with what struck me at the time as supernatural aplomb. Then, in the afternoon, Gmail went down for a few hours. Nobody seemed very upset about it; aside from one feed at reddit, I saw no mention of it at all. Oh, there was a Times story about the “fail,” and all that; I knew that it wasn’t just me. But it seems that I don’t know anybody who really depends on Gmail for anything, and I find that unsettling. Is everyone really too busy otherwise, texting at the wheel of a car?

The much worse nightmare that I had while I lay in bed awake was occasioned by the September sun. In theory, the morning sun ought to fall full strength on my face in in late April, but I’m never aware of it doing so, as I always am in early September, when it’s the first harbinger of autumn. My eyes were closed, but the intense light filled my head with a fiery redness — or at least the hot orange that is so not yellow (the sun’s high-noon color) that we read it as red. Most people, I think, would have rejoiced in the life-giving light and warmth, but I couldn’t.

Whether it’s because I never believed in God or because I read a Golden Book of solar-system science at too tender an age, I regard the sun as a massive and ongoing atomic explosion. To me, the sun is, above all things, violent — a very big bomb. This sort of thinking makes it difficult to accept the fact — and what kind of fact is it, anyway? — that the sun is prodigiously stable. How stable is “stable”? What if there were — an event?

In this nightmare, I got past the total extermination of life part as immediately as life itself would be exterminated in the event of an event. I moved right on to wondering how long it would take the Eiffel Tower to burst into flames and/or melt. And for the ensuing puddle to evaporate, like drops of water in a hot skillet. Thirty seconds?

And yet: it turned out to be a very good day! I didn’t do a lot of work, it’s true. But I read a great deal, and I took an energetic walk. I cooked the first batch of the season’s ragù. And I watched most of two Cary Grant classics. The most remarkable thing about the day was the intensity with which the Cary Grant classics didn’t strike me as classics, as beloved old-chestnut movies. They were as fresh and lively as anything showing in a theatre right now.

The movies, His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby, hadn’t changed — I had changed. I was every bit as exhilarated by the witty, deeply romantic dialogue as I was forty years ago by the discovery of the witty, deeply romantic pleasure of intimacy with brainy girls. The badinage between Grant and his leading ladies, Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn, is as joyously abandoned as what used to be called “criminal conversation” (illicit sex). It isn’t a stand-in for sex, it is sex. How had I missed this? I hadn’t missed it, but I hadn’t felt it. Today, I felt it, you-know-where.

On my smiling face.

¶ Matins: Our hero: Judge Arthur Schack, who has rejected 46 out of 102 foreclosure claims in the past two years.

¶ Lauds: Jeremy Denk at the Highline Ballroom: Bach, Ives, Chopin, Liszt, T-shirt and running shoes. Alan Kozinn reports.

If classical music is dying, as we’ve been hearing for years, why are so many rock clubs suddenly presenting it? And why are so many people, with the young outnumbering the old, coming to hear it?

¶ Prime: How about some advice? We may not follow it, but we’re always interested in hearing what someone else considers to be good advice. Especially when it’s phrased as a reminder: “My needs don’t motivate anyone.”

¶ Tierce: Tom Vanderbilt argues persuasively for treating vehicular offenses as no less serious than other criminal acts. (via  The Morning News)

¶ Sext: Mary Pilon reports on “recession haircuts” at the Journal. Alex Balk: Please, don’t let the Seventies happen again!

¶ Nones: East Timor — ten years on: “Mixed emotions.”

¶ Vespers: Philip Lopate talks about his recent Notes on Sontag, at The Millions.

¶ Compline: Ann Leary contemplates Moses Pendleton’s sunflowers.

(more…)