I’ve headed this entry with the French word for “exhausted” because, given that it’s French, I suppose, and therefore a term that I have to think about, however fleetingly, it actually means “used up” to me. “Exhausted” means used up, too, technically, but its strong everyday meaning is just another word for “tired.” I’m not just tired, though; I’m used up, physically, and I’ve been running a sort of temporal deficit for two or three months now. There haven’t been enough hours to do everything that I’ve signed up to do. In a red-alert, heart-attack sense, as distinguished from the familiar too-many-books-too-little-time complaint.

Something was going to have to go, and it kills me to say that what’s going to go is my Thursdays with Will. Megan will be returning to work full-time-at-the-office next month, and Will will spend Thursdays just as he spends the other weekdays, at his coolisssimo day care in SoHo. I have promised myself that Thursdays will be repitched to the upkeep of Civil Pleasures, which site I have totally neglected these past two weeks. I have to work up a template for new pages before I continue posting there, and I can only hope that I’ll be able to design it before September.

But I’d rather go on running the temporal deficit. Except that I couldn’t. I’d be either a dishonest or a lousy grandparent if I said that helping to take care of a small child for even just one day a week is a breeze; it’s not. But although Will might tire me out, he doesn’t use me up; what uses me up is the shortage of sheer blank hours to do what I want to do here. If my Thursdays with Will were to continue, I now understand, I’ have to ratchet back my expectations for these sites of mine. Which I would do willingly. What’s more important, reviewing the Book Review or taking Will for a walk? What has bothered me most in the past couple of weeks is knowing that, even if I gave up the Book Review review, I’d still find it difficult to get round to writing about that walk with Will.

For the first time in ages, I got to the end of this week without having written my review of the Book Review. I toyed with the idea of abandoning the feature; it has taught me what I needed to learn. I’ve developed a clear understanding of what the Book Review ought to be, along with a rather dispiriting conviction that this ideal Book Review is never going to be published by The New York Times. But who knows? I’ve decided to keep my hand in, but on far less demanding terms. I’ll write about the good reviews and the awful reviews, and mark the reviews that don’t belong in the Book Review in the first place with silence. Truth to tell, I’m tired of reading the Book Review — it’s so utterly mediocre. (The worst weeks are the ones when Liesl Schillinger, my great hope for literary understanding at the Book Review, turns in something that’s not up to her own standards. Such lapses are inevitable; I oughtn’t to have to count on one gifted reviewer. No, the worst is when Walter Kirn plays it safe and pretends not to understand a genuinely edgy book. )

I’ll close this housekeeping entry (which I haven’t dared to present as such, preferring to masquerade as a diarist) with two notes. First, I want to write about yesterday’s walk up and down 86th Street with Will. And about this evenings top-notch Mostly Mozart concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Second, I want you to know that I love compiling the Daily Office. The more I do it, the sharper my sense of what it ought to be like becomes — and the more difficult to find suitable pages to link to. If I’m used up, it’s in no small part because I glance throught three to six hundred feeds a day, reading about twenty long ones from beginning to end. Most of what I read, obviously, never appears here. You’d think, though, that it would be easy to harvest eight good links a day from such a mass of input. But it’s hard, and it gets harder. And I love what I do.

Which is another good reason for complaining in a foreign language.

Matins

¶ A forceful leader in this week’s Economist connects the dots between secular reform of the Roman Catholic Church and the debate about cultural self-determiantion that Islamic immigrants have brought to politics.

At the same time, with stunning insensitivity, it was declared that “attempting to ordain a woman” as a priest would be treated as a serious offence.

To put it kindly, whoever crafted those statements must be out of touch with the reality that is now catching up with the quasi-theocratic regimes (in other words, situations where religion is immune from state power, and has power of its own) which persist across Europe. In Ireland a point of no return was reached in November when a report found police collusion in covering up clerical misdeeds. Irish citizens, including pious ones, will never again treat the church as untouchable. In June Belgium’s authorities virtually dissolved an internal church inquiry into sex abuse by seizing files and detaining the country’s bishops for several hours. In Germany cosy ties between religious and political authorities have been shaken by news of abuse at prestigious Catholic schools and monasteries. In Italy the church still enjoys a sort of immunity, for cultural reasons, but Italians will surely one day insist that their religion should be answerable to the law of the land. That principle is especially important at a time when Western democracies are struggling to work out what place, if any, they can accord to subcultures that wish to regulate their family affairs under the laws of Islam, or some other minority faith.

Lauds

¶ If you can find a longer, more fleshed out version of this story, please let us know: Chinese state administrator for cultural heritage, Shan Jixiang, is complaining about excessive demolition. Is he on his own here, or is this part of a coordinated goernment attempt to cool down the housing market? (Guardian; via Arts Journal )

The outspoken remarks from Shan, head of the state administration for cultural heritage, echo growing concern about the destruction of buildings which date back centuries.

“Much traditional architecture that could have been passed down for generations as the most valuable memories of a city has been relentlessly torn down,” he said. He warned that without support, much of China’s heritage would be extinguished.

The China Daily reported that in Beijing alone, 4.43m square metres (1,100 acres) of old courtyards had been demolished since 1990 – equivalent to around 40% of the downtown area.

Another planned development will require razing large swaths of land around the capital’s Drum and Bell towers, until now a largely untouched district.

Prime

¶ Simon Johnson holds Timothy Geithner and the Treasury Department to the fire, for their do-nothing disinclination to put some regulatory teeth into the version of the Volcker Rule that was recently enacted, and their equally passive hope that Basel III will make banks safe. (The Baseline Scenario)

The latest details on the international negotiations for higher capital requirements – to which Mr. Geithner continually defers – are not any more encouraging. All the indications from the so-called Basel 3 process are that banks are fighting back hard against having to hold substantially stronger buffers against future losses. The Treasury may not have conceded all the ground on this issue, but it is in retreat – with the Secretary insisting on Tuesday that raising capital requirements could damage growth, despite all the evidence to the contrary (reviewed here last week).

Given this context, we should worry and wonder about the “financial innovation” to which the secretary alludes. Again, this sounds good in principle, but in practice the benefits are elusive, if not illusory – other than for people in privileged positions within the financial sector. Mr. Geithner wants the financial sector to be able to take more risk – but to what end, from the point of view of society as a whole?

Tierce

¶ Why Wrongology is our most needed science: We have seen the rational animal and he is — a talk radio host. The indispensable Jonah Lehrer:

The larger moral is that our metaphors for reasoning are all wrong. We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host. That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false. (Put another way, we’re not being rational – we’re rationalizing.) While it’s easy to read these crazy blog comments and feel smug, secure in our own sober thinking, it’s also worth remembering that we’re all vulnerable to sloppy reasoning and the confirmation bias. Everybody has a blowhard inside them. And this is why it’s so important to be aware of our cognitive limitations. Unless we take our innate flaws into account, the blessing of human reason can easily become a curse.

Men have always known themselves to be capable of gross error. Only recently, however, have we dared to lift the woeful trunkline that leads from reason to error. (The Frontal Cortex)

Sext

¶ At BLDBLOG, a project that sounds almost preposterously meta — until you get to the end of Geoff Manaugh’s entry. The Columbia University students describe their project thus: “By focusing on the space of the document, we can avoid simplistic predictions of the future while creating a database of potential evidence which can be analyzed and interpreted by a wider audience of designers.” Mind-numbing! But here’s what it means:

I only say this here because it is extraordinarily exciting to see a project like this, that out-fictionalizes the contemporary novel and even puts much of Hollywood to shame—to realize, once again, that architecture students routinely trade in ideas that could reinvigorate the film industry and the publishing industry, which is all the more important if the world of private commissions and construction firms remains unresponsive or financially out of reach. The Nesin Map alone, given a screenwriter and a dialogue coach, could supply the plot of a film or a thousand comic books—and rogue concrete mixtures put to use by nefarious underground militaries in Baghdad is an idea that could be optioned right now for release in summer 2013. HBO should produce this immediately.

My point is not that architecture students should somehow be expected to stop doing the very thing they are in school for—i.e. to learn how artificial enclosures are designed and constructed. I just mean that they should never overlook the interest of their own preliminary ideas, notes, sketches, and scenarios. After all, with just a well-timed email or elevator pitch, all of that stuff—all those bulletin boards, browser tabs, sketchbooks, notes from late-night conversations, site maps, and more—needn’t become just more crap to get filed away in your parents’ house somewhere, but could actually be turned into the seed of a film, novel, game, or comic book in another cultural field entirely.

Nones

¶ We would never say the extent of social and structural dysfunction in Pakistan couldn’t surprise us, but when it does, we’re — surprised. At the Guardian, Kamila Shamsie writes about — ready? — Pakistan’s timber mafia.

One of the most powerful and ruthless organisations within Pakistan, the timber mafia engages in illegal logging, which is estimated to be worth billions of rupees each year – the group’s connection to politicians at the local and federal level has been commented on in the media for years. The constant warnings about the timber mafia almost always include mention of the increased susceptibility of de-forested regions to flooding, landslides and soil erosion. But, in the way that horror tends to pile on horror in Pakistan, not only has the flooding been intense in areas where the timber mafia is active but the felled trees, hidden in ravines prior to smuggling them onwards, have caused havoc. Dislodged by torrents of water, they have swept away bridges and people and anything else in their path.

There has been some suggestion that the high volume of timber transported along the rivers has been a factor in the weakening of the dams and retaining walls that are supposed to protect the land from flooding but have proved unequal to the task. Their failure to function has also brought up comparisons to the poor construction that resulted in collapsed government schools during the 2005 earthquake; then, blame landed on corrupt practices and lack of oversight by the authorities in the allocation of construction contracts.

That the timber mafia reportedly gave active support to the Pakistan Taliban when they controlled Swat seems to have done nothing to diminish their influence with the state. Corruption transcends political difference. Where action is taken against the timber mafia it is often in the form of local villagers coming out to defend their trees. Pakistan’s citizens, time and again, find it falls to them to fill in the vacuum where there should be a state.

Vespers

¶ At Survival of the Book, Brian is reading Jason Epstein’s Book business, a book that we’ve decided that everyone interested in books and their contents ought to read (so, yes, we’ve ordered a copy, even though we’ve read what Mr Epstein has had so say upon the subject at The New York Review of Books. The inexorable truth that remains to be accepted is that big business will never make a success in publishing.

(NB: Brian’s somewhat infelicitous phrase, “crap consumers,” means the opposite of “consumers of crap.”)

My point is, this is so much to ask of a book. People that love books aren’t sharks. People who like reading books are by their nature kind of slow movers, and maybe that’s not so bad. In fact, if more shit hits the fan, the world will most likely need people who are patient and thoughtful and attentive to figure out how to fix some major problems. But we can be crap consumers. We like libraries, and used bookstores, and we hold onto books we love for far too long. You can’t get us to buy a stupid gift card to give out on someone’s birthday, because instead we pick out a book we love that makes us think of the birthday boy. We probably don’t have much money anyhow – we work in things like publishing, we teach, we write, maybe we work in a cubical 9 – 5 but daydream during work about what we’re going to read on the train heading home. That won’t get us a big promotion and big raise, now will it?

But these big industries and these rich shareholders are staring at us and saying they want more from us. Well too bad. So leave us be. And for those of us who got jobs at Random House and B&N and Holt thinking, well, it’s not ideal but I get to read here and be involved so I can overlook the evil… we’ll have to use the skills elsewhere, because the writing’s on the wall. The dinosaurs are falling, they’re crippled. They may not recover. That big fat publisher could be one 12 year old pop star away from landing on his face and not getting up again.

Compline

¶ Imagine that a major factor in choosing where to live was proximity to other people in your line of work, people with whom you could meet productively while commuting to the office. Sounds nuts, right? But it’s no crazier than this country’s suburban experiment itself. This is the wild re-alignment of planning priorities that’s envisioned in Melissa Lafsky’s piece at The Infrastructurist inspired by — natch — creative types in Barcelona.

One notion that’s being shaken up is the idea that work must take place in designated work spaces, and cannot be combined with transportation. The above video shows a business meeting taking place on the Barcelona metro. The idea was created by a social and digital innovation firm called Citilab, which describes itself as an “incubator for business and social initiatives.”

Granted, the idea has a few snags — unless you and all your relevant co-workers are taking the same train, coordinating meetings on public transit may be difficult. And what about all the commuters who still doggedly rely on cars? Presenting Powerpoints while driving isn’t really an option. Still, as the developing world continues to expand exponentially, it’s worth asking these questions sooner rather than later.

Have a Look

¶ Comparing New York City (Manhattan, really) to California’s Bay Area, Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s dyspeptic but amusing anti-Gotham tirade reminds us of the problem that Edith Wharton faced: In Boston, she was found too fashionable to be intelligent; in New York, too intelligent to be fashionable. (Adgrok; via Marginal Revolution)

We have fed lots of out-of-towners home-cooked meals.

¶ The Tiger Oil memos have resurfaced at Letters of Note. Weekend fun!

Matins

¶ Christopher Hitchens is not going to give anyone the satisfaction of watching him fail to write about his cancer with lucid humanity. He may not be the most introspective of men, but that is neither a vice nor a virtue. He can be counted on to register the world around him with profoundly interested attentiveness. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

Lauds

¶ At the Threepenny Review, Imogen Sara Smith meditates on the still-life photograph, focusing on work of Josef Sudek and André Kertész — making for a warm mitteleuropäisch vibe. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

Sudek’s still lifes combine solid, durable objects with the most ephemeral phenomena, light and shadow, moisture and reflections. In pictures like his Glass Labyrinths, he blurred the distinctions between light, glass, and water: all are translucent, all are veiled as though by breath, all leave permanent traces in the gelatin-silver print. Despite their softness and absence of strong contrasts, Sudek’s contact prints illuminate the tiny bubbles clinging to the sides of a glass of water, the flaking cracks in old paint, the separate filaments of feathers. Still life is an art of intimacy and nearness; it addresses the world within our reach, the things we touch, hold, smell, and taste. It brings us “tête-à-tête with things.” We know how the rim of a glass feels on our lips, the weight of an egg cradled in our hands, the sound of dry onion skin crackling as it’s peeled. But still life is defined by the lack of human presence; it shows us our rooms when we are not in them, complete without us.

Prime

¶ In an entry that had us wondering if we’d tuned into an episode trimmed from Inception, the Epicurean Dealmaker writes about something called “The Dollar Auction.”

It is an auction, with any number of participants, the object of which is to win a single, unadorned one hundred dollar bill. If you win the auction, you get to keep the money. (No tricks, I promise.) Bidding starts at a minimum of one dollar, and topping bids must exceed the prior bid by no less than one dollar, in even, undivided dollars. There is only one additional rule: the runner up in the auction must pay his or her last bid to the auctioneer, as well as the winner paying the winning bid. So, for example, if the winning bid is $10, and the next highest bid is $9, the winner will pay $10 and collect the hundred dollar bill, and the runner up will pay $9 and receive nothing.²

So, here we go. I am holding in my hands a crisp, new, freshly-issued one hundred dollar bill. Genuine U.S. currency, guaranteed legal tender for all debts, public and private. The opening bid is one dollar. Only one measly dollar to walk away with a crisp new hundo. Who will start the bidding?

Not us, that’s for sure!

Tierce

¶ “How Swearing Works.” We’re not familiar with How Stuff Works (a Web site, not a blog — we think), and we’re not quite sure what we think. The layout is a little on the Golden-Book side, and the material does not appear to be very penetrating (we’re not impressed by anything that we can understand immediately), but the article on swearing is studded with interesting nuggets. (via  kottke.org)

Swearing vs Cursing: A lot of people use the words “swearing” and “cursing” interchangeably. Some language experts, however, differentiate between the two. Swearing involves using profane oaths or invoking the name of a deity to give a statement more power or believability. Cursing takes aim at something specific, wishing for or trying to cause a target’s misfortune.

Sext

¶ At the Guardian, Andrew Brown explains why funerals are better than weddings. Or does he? It occurs to us that there is no funereal correspondent to Mr Brown’s target, the self-centered modern bride and groom who, in his view, risk shortening their marriages with personalized ceremonies. (via  The Morning News)

The great point about completely impersonal ceremonies, whose form is the same for everyone, whether these are religious or entirely civil, is that they remind us that the problems and difficulties of marriage are universal. They come from being human. They can’t be dodged just by being our wonderful selves, even all dusted with unicorn sparkle.

On your wedding day you feel thoroughly special, and your guests will go along with this; so that is the moment when the ceremony should remind you that you’re not all that. What you’re doing isn’t a step into fairyland. And if it does turn out to be the gateway to a new life, that is one that will have to be built over time and unglamorously with the unpromising materials of the old one.

Funerals, on the other hand, should be much more personal. I love the gloom and grandeur of the prayer book service; and there is much to be said for thinking about our own deaths from time to time. But death is the extinction of an individual life, and remembering and celebrating that individual is part of the proper response. And it’s one time when we can be certain it won’t inflate anyone’s self esteem.

Nones

¶ Our wish to see more history in the Blogosphere was given a puff of gratification the other day when Tyler Cowen, at Marginal Revolution, linked to Armarium Magnum, “a repository for book reviews, mainly of books on ancient and medieval history, but also on early Christianity, the historical Jesus, atheism, scepticism and the occasional novel that takes my fancy.” That fancy would be Tim O’Neill’s; we’ll let you find his self-portrait for yourself.

Armarium Magnum is not, alas, a very active blog; going back only three entries took us to February of this year, and a review of a book about the Fall of Rome. Devout subscribers to the view that Rome Crumbled From Within, we all but applauded our way through Mr O’Neill’s description of the Third-Century game, “Who’s Emperor Now?”

But when it broke down in the Third Century the veil was torn off and the Imperial system was exposed as the military dictatorship it had always been.  So now it became clear that any Senator who could win the support of enough of the Army or, failing that, who could simply bribe the increasingly mercenary and predatory Praetorian Guard, could become emperor, albeit (in most cases) very briefly.  All it took was a reverse in a foreign war against the resurgent Sassanid Persians or the increasingly bold Germanic barbarians and a usurper would appear or the Army or the Guard would mount an assassination and the whole process would repeat itself, seemingly on a shorter and shorter cycle of usurpation, civil war and anarchy.

This cycle became so intense that the primary goal of a Roman emperor was no longer wise rule and stability but mere survival.  As the Third Century progressed changes were put in place – changes that were aimed solely at reducing the threat of usurpation.  Senators were gradually excluded from military commands, since a Senator with a sizeable portion of the Army at his back was a usurper in waiting.  But by giving more and more commands to the lower, equestrian order the emperors simply pushed the opportunity for usurpation down the Roman food chain and actually broadened the numbers of those who took it into their heads to jostle for the purple.  The size, and therefore the garrisons, of the provinces were steadily reduced, since this left a governor of any given province with fewer troops with which to mount a challenge.  But this in turn weakened the Empire militarily and strategically, since a governor no longer had the military force to deal with serious local threats himself.  Incursions over the frontiers by barbarians increased in size and number and only the Emperor had the capacity to deal with them.  Cities which had been unfortified for centuries began building walls for protection, both against barbarians and against the next cycle of civil wars.

Vespers

¶ Who knew? There really was a Charlie Chan — sort of. Yunte Huang, a student at Beijing University at the time of the Tienanmen Square protests, and subsequently a Chinese takeout laborer who worked his way through graduate school in Buffalo, shares his obsession with Charlie Chan in a new book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History. Jill Lepore’s review, in The New Yorker, could not be more fun-teresting.

Chang Apana was recruited by the Honolulu Police Department, which was growing, because of those two developments. In a force of more than two hundred men—the officers mainly Hawaiian and the chiefs mostly white—he was the only Chinese. He excelled, and was promoted to detective. In the nineteen-tens, he was part of a crime-busting squad. His escapades were the stuff of legend. He was said to be as agile as a cat. Thrown from a second-floor window by a gang of dope fiends, he landed on his feet. He leaped from one rooftop to the next, like a “human fly.” When he reached for his whip, thugs scattered and miscreants wept. He once arrested forty gamblers in their lair, single-handed. He was a master of disguises. Once, patrolling a pier at dawn, disguised as a poor merchant—wearing a straw hat and stained clothes and carrying baskets of coconuts, tied to a bamboo shoulder pole—he raised the alarm on a shipment of contraband even while he was being run over by a horse and buggy, and breaking his legs. He once solved a robbery by noticing a strange thread of silk on a bedroom floor. He discovered a murderer by observing that one of the suspects, a Filipino man, had changed his muddy shoes, asking him, “Why you wear new shoes this morning?”

Compline

¶ Richard Posner, of all people, reviews David Kilpatrick’s The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, taking pains to explain the details that might not mean much to old farts like us. Of course, it reads more like an opinion than a review, but that’s the fun of it. (The New Republic; via MetaFilter)

We may laugh at Socrates, in the Phaedrus, for denouncing literacy, which he said would create “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves…. They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” But maybe his anxieties about the cultural consequences of communications technology were just premature. Still, I doubt we need worry too much about the effect of Facebook on the psychology or the cognition of its adult users. They each have their social network created mainly the old-fashioned way, and Facebook will help them maintain it. But what about the teenagers, enabled by Facebook to form immense social networks? They are said to be abandoning “best friends” in favor of having looser relations with more friends, a trend surely accelerated by Facebook—if you spend a lot of “face time” with just one or two of your “friends,” you will have no time for the other 398 or 399. A Facebook network is a social collective, a virtual kibbutz, and studies have found that children brought up in a traditional kibbutz have difficulty forming strong emotional relationships as adults.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin led one hundred children into a cave from which they never emerged. Some 500 million people, of whom about 10 percent are thirteen to eighteen years old and another 25 percent are eighteen to twenty-five years old, are now marching to the digital pipes of Mark Zuckerberg, who is twenty-six years old. I have no idea where they are marching, and whether they will ever return.

Have a Look

¶ From the editors of The Bygone Bureau, an Internet reading list. Some of the writers on the list (if not the actual pieces) will be familiar to regular readers. iPad owners really ought to set aside a Field Day.

The Wednesday circuit goes like this: I begin by walking to Crawford Doyle, on Madison between 81st and 82nd. Then I walk down 81st Street to Willy’s, my barbershop. Trim and spruce, I head for the Hi-Life, which used to be at 72nd and First but which has moved to Second Avenue between 78th and 79th. (Here be excellent club sandwiches.) After lunch, I creep along 78th or 79th Street, depending on the temperature and the need for shade, to Agata & Valentina, at 78th and First, to shop for Thursday night’s dinner. Bags in hand, I head up first, more often than not stopping at Morning Calm Gallery, and, today, paying a rare visit to Yorkshire Wines and Spirits (I usually phone in), with a final stop at Gristede’s.Today, tThe circuit took a bit more than two and a half hours to run. That’s about as quick as I can be.

I make it sound like an immemorial routine, but it dates no further back than May of this year. I’ve been making each of the Wednesday circuit  for years — decades, in some cases — but I’ve never chained them together in a regular row. The comfortable sense that I’ve been doing this for years is offset by the knowledge that I haven’t been doing it for years, not at all; I try not to feel too stupid. But when it hits me that I’m 62, I wonder, with finger-tapping impatience, just what it is, exactly, that I’ve been doing for most of that time. How could it have taken so long to figure out the simplest everyday rhythms?

In lieu of speculative answers to that question, let me just say that I’m deep into Look At Me, Jennifer Egan’s last novel but one (two?). Crawford Doyle didn’t have it in stock, but Dot McClearey was happy to order it for me. I could, of course, have ordered it from Amazon. (And you might think that I could have found it at the big Barnes & Noble down the street, but no — they had nothing but The Keep. It’s my settled conviction that, for all his moolah and whatever, Leonard Riggio does not really know how to operate a bookstore.) But nobody at Amazon is going to ask me, as Dot does, what I’ve been reading and thinking — much less actually listen to my answer.

The great thing about the Wednesday circuit is that it lets everybody know when I’m going to show up.

Matins

¶ If it were up to us, of course, students who expressed views consonant with deficit-hawks such Concerned Youth of America would be flunked out of elite schools such as Andover for solipsistic social stupidity. A school that does not inculcate the paramountcy of equity is a bad school. (There; we’re done.) Christopher Shea picks up a chilling development at CNN. (Brainiac)

Both Gruskin and Matthews attended Phillips Academy, Ryan McNeely points out (writing at Matt Yglesias’s blog), a boarding school with tuition and fees of $41,000. Indeed, that is where the group was born, and its leaders now attend such colleges as Harvard, Penn, Yale, Duke, and Georgetown. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with going to Phillips,” McNeely writes, or to a highly selective college. But McNeely, for his part, is concerned that these demographically distinct and well-connected students–a slice of America “least affected by the current downturn”– are getting an outsize amount of media and political attention. They have testified before the president’s federal deficit commission. “Will the debt commission,” McNeely asks, “listen to young Americans who didn’t go to Phillips Academy?”

Lauds

¶ A propos of the apparent ban on music (!) in Iran, Frank Oteri writes about the act of listening to music in terms that are new to us. It made us realize that we secretly believed that composers discover music, instead of inventing it. We’re not sure that we’re wrong to do so! But we’re savoring Mr Oteri’s thoughts all the same. (NewMusicBox; via  Arts Journal)

Last week I remarked in passing that music’s greatest asset is that if you truly listen to it, you are allowing the input of someone other than yourself into your consciousness. For leaders who don’t want their citizens to challenge them, this is extremely subversive. If you really want to be open to other ideas and other points of view, and you don’t want to unquestioningly do what someone else tells you to do, listen to music. For even if the act of listening is in some sense an act of submission to someone else, it is an open-ended submission that ultimately leaves you with a new perspective. Since it is impossible in the process of listening to completely lose your memory of everything you have listened to before, everything you listen to adds to that memory rather than negates it—so it is never a monolithic experience. Plus if you make music as well as listen to it, you have the opportunity to share that perspective with someone else.

Prime

¶ James Kwak struggles to maintain a hopeful tone, but his thoughts about new financial regulation fill us with despair. He puts one thing very, very well:

The regulators in all these agencies should realize that they are going to spend the next two years fighting against the Wall Street banks and their legions of lobbyists. If they do their jobs right, they will never work in the financial sector again (except maybe at a hedge fund or a buy-side investment consultancy). And if they’re not up for that fight, we need someone else who is.

We have always believed that financial regulators ought to be paid financial-industry standards, to insure that they do fight the good fight, without being asked to be heroic about their income as well. (The Baseline Scenario)

Tierce

¶ Think about it for a moment, and it’s obvious: curiosity is an emotion. Jonah Lehrer writes about a recent Caltech study that “extended this information gap model of curiosity. (The Frontal Cortex) 

The lesson is that our desire for abstract information – this is the cause of curiosity – begins as a dopaminergic craving, rooted in the same primal pathway that also responds to sex, drugs and rock and roll. This reminds me of something Read Montague,  a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me a few years ago: “The guy who’s on hunger strike for some political cause is still relying on his midbrain dopamine neurons, just like a monkey getting a sweet treat,” he said. “His brain simply values the cause more than it values dinner…You don’t have to dig very far before it all comes back to your loins.”

The elegance of this system is that it bootstraps a seemingly unique human talent to an ancient mental process. Because curiosity is ultimately an emotion, an inexplicable itch telling us to keep on looking for the answer, it can take advantage of all the evolutionary engineering that went into our dopaminergic midbrain. (Natural selection had already invented an effective motivational system.) When Einstein was curious about the bending of space-time, he wasn’t relying on some newfangled circuitry. Instead, he was using the same basic neural system as a rat in a maze, looking for a pellet of food.

Sext

¶ Will the English language survive Sarah Palin? Of course it will! It will co-opt her many unwitting (and witless) contributions, of which the wonderful “refudiate” is simply the latest. Who knows what a future this word has? We surmise that, if anything, it will be the former governor’s ticket to immortality. After all, what singles out Boss Tweed from a host of Nineteenth Century political operatives? Excess! (Tweed didn’t invent corruption any more than Ms Palin coined “refudiate.”)  Mark Peters explores. (Good)

As almost always seems to be the case, this “new word” is not entirely new. New York Times On Language columnist Ben Zimmer found a use going all the back to 1925, in an Atlanta Constitution headline: “Scandal Taint Refudiated in Teapot Case by Court, Fall Says in Statement.” In 2006, Historical Dictionary of American Slang editor Jonathan Lighter pointed out Senator Mike DeWine using the word a couple of times, and there’s enough in common meaning-wise and sound-wise between “refute” and “repudiate” to assume lots of others have made the same mistake. Still, if and when “refudiate” appears in a dictionary, it will feature a picture of Palin and no other: She is to “refudiate” as Homer Simpson is to “d’oh.”

Perhaps because of her folksiness, if the collected Palinisms took on physical form, they would fill several barnyards: there are animals aplenty. Her nickname “Sarah Baracuda” preceded her step into the national spotlight, and when John McCain picked her as his running mate, a joke of her own choosing linked her with a pit bull. The oft-repeated punchline of that joke led the Palin camp to take offense when Barack Obama used the common expression “lipstick on a pig.”  Palin professes a love for hunting wolves, caribou, and moose, and those critters are shorthand for her, like when a writer described her campaign as having “Moose-mentum.” When Palin resigned as Alaska governor, she said, “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish go with the flow.” With that zooful of words, it’s no wonder a writer mistakenly referred to “Sarah Palin and her elk.”

“…and her elk”! Ha! We’d never heard that one.

Nones

¶ Regular readers will not be surprised to hear about the New Great Game, or to be unaware of who’s playing it and on what field. Matteo Tacconi’s essay, (translated by Francesca Simmons) concludes with the prospect of a rather unstable Central Asian Islamic heartland. (Reset DOC; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Will there be a domino effect? Such a risk exists, and, in addition to the Americans and the NATO countries involved in Afghanistan, Russia too fears this possibility. In Moscow the thesis is that if the Afghan front spreads to Central Asia, it is possible that it will then also expand into the borders of the Federation, reigniting the never-sedated separatist desires of Islamic movements in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, always rather active on the stage. But the risks do not end here. According to the respected and authoritative analyst Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the world of the Taliban, to the rise of radicalism one must also add another danger; the prospect of a regional conflict, pitting any one of these former Soviet republics in Central Asia against the other. According to Rashid such a war could break out due to a number of border controversies, widespread poverty and the chronic lack of water. On the other hand, it is known that the intense exploitation of water basins in Central Asia in the days of the USSR has added to the more recent effects of global warming, which have slowly melted part of the surfaces of glaciers situated locally at high altitudes. This has resulted in each of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia becoming annoyed and blaming their respective neighbours. The bomb may not necessarily explode. The fuse, however, has been lit.

¶ Meanwhile, in “Is Pakistan a Failed State?”, Ali Hashmi rephrases the question. We wish that the American foreign policy elite would do the same. (Daily Times of Pakistan; via Real Clear World)

For our purposes, let us assume that the average citizen of Pakistan has not read Weber or Engels and for him or her, the state simply means those organs of government power outlined above with which he or she interacts on a daily basis. In Pakistan’s case (as in the case of the US and any other society based on the capitalist mode of production), this means that the state (the institutions named above) always represents the interests of the wealthy and influential. That being the case, the Pakistani state is failing the vast majority of its citizens by not providing the bare essentials of existence, i.e. clean affordable food and water, basic services (energy, healthcare, education, etc) as well as physical security in the form of protection of the citizens’ lives and property.

This offends the nationalistic sensibilities of our intelligentsia (those who write the opinion pieces) but is a stark fact for the vast majority of Pakistan’s citizens. As such, were the question to be rephrased from “Is Pakistan a failed state?” — which engenders lots of excited but confusing discussion about states, public sector debts, foreign policy, elites, electoral process, etc — to “Is the Pakistani state failing the majority of its citizens?”, the answer would be a simple yes.

Vespers

¶ Doug Bruns writes engagingly on the solution (imprisonment) to a problem (piles of unread books). It is not the optimal solution, certainly, and we find that we read best when we feel most free to put the book down and do something else. But we enjoyed contemplating Doug’s prospect, and that was a surprise. (The Millions)

Prison cells. Towers in Bordeaux. Cabins in the woods, and tents on the sides of mountains. At work behind the scene is the argument that life can be forced into an edifying and redeeming corner. It is a persuasive, if not compelling notion: That when everything is lost or set aside or taken from you, only then do you have the opportunity to do what it is you truly wish to do, to review your list of what is worthy and what is wasteful. The theme rings true. “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.” I never grow tired of this quote. Thoreau’s desire to live deliberately resonates and is at the heart of Socrates’ observation that the unexamined life is not worth living. Although I cannot personally attest to its efficacy, it carries weight that I suggest prison a good thing because it would strip one of everything extraneous. Extraneous to reading, of course.

Compline

¶ Taking Jean Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic to task for overdramatization — “Words such as ‘epidemic’ should only ever be preceded by words like “smallpox,’ and should henceforth be stricken from the social scientist’s lingo. — Charles Ferguson argues for excitement-avoidance among fellow social scientists (Chron Higher Ed; via  The Morning News)

Twenge and her colleagues are not the first to lambaste the self-esteem movement. Others have been identifying it as the source of all that ails us for years. I’m no fan of it myself. All the efforts to ban competitive sports, encourage group hugs, and say nary a negative word to a child do seem to run the risk of turning today’s youth into some socialized version of the Children of the Corn. I’m the first to acknowledge a certain absurdity at the core of the self-esteem movement and the implication that competition is harmful and children so delicate that any failure will be horribly crushing rather than an opportunity for learning and growth. However, the notion that children are so malleable that the self-esteem movement, or anything else, could twist them into an antisocial horde is equally absurd.

There’s nothing wrong with examining narcissism rates over time. It’s an interesting question. Yet once we start throwing sneering labels around and started talking about “epidemics” and “crises,” we have left the realm of science and entered that of polemics and pseudoscience. The narcissism debate is, I’d argue, no extreme case in the social sciences either. The rush to slap young people with the tag “Generation Me” is simply one more spin of the “kids today” wheel, as in “kids today, with their music and their hair. … “

Have a Look

¶ “The Truth About Boscoe.” We have no idea what he’s up to, but we’re tickled by Sean Adams’s impersonation of a very naughty teacher. (The Bygone Bureau)

¶ “The paradox of an earlier, more primitive time that was more advanced than ours“: Frank Jacobs muses on a TWA ad from a mid-Sixties issue of Paris-Match. (Strange Maps)

¶ The beautiful, sand-flooded rooms of Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes. (The Best Part)

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At Crawford Doyle last Friday, I bought two novels, even though I have a rule against buying novels and, worse, despite the fact that I had been in the store on Wednesday, and not only bought several books but ordered — two novels. I had not planned to visit the bookshop quite so soon, but Ms NOLA had been at the Museum, so there we were. Crossing Fifth Avenue, I headed along the south side of 82nd Street, but it was Ms NOLA who voiced the suggestion — no doubt regarding it as foregone. Stepping into the cool, dusky air, I felt almost criminal, as though I were about to buy a large ice cream after a heavy dinner, complete with dessert. The idea of leaving the store without buying something was unthinkable; I’d have felt that I’d insulted the staff and presumed upon the air conditioning. Very silly compunction. The upshot was that I walked out with those two novels. But neither of them was new, and I could imagine devouring one of them on the spot.

That would be Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, which I hadn’t read. I had just read a review of the recent life, and mention had been made of Ivy Compton-Burnett. It seems that Spark actually acknowledged the influence of Compton-Burnett, which of course made it official, and I was curious to test the connection. The review also mentioned that caring for her ancient grandmother gave Spark the familiarity with the elderly that is manifest in Memento Mori. So that seemed to be the book to read, and there it was, at Crawford Doyle. In case you’ve never read Ivy Compton-Burnett — well, I don’t really know what to say. I’ve got a book somewhere that hails her as a camp classicist, and there is about her style a self-conscious intensity that seems now and then to wink at the reader. Compton-Burnett wrote about ghastly old Victorians, patriarchs and matriarchs who, wholly wrapped up in themselves, tyrannized the the young people who had the misfortune to be nearby. They’re not quite human, too; they glitter and gleam like birds of prey, determined but brainless. If you are writing anything serious at the moment, stay away from Ivy Compton-Burnett, because her manner is dreadfully catching; you’ll find yourself imitating her, horrified but fascinated, unable to stop.

When did I last read a book by Ivy Compton-Burnett? Decades ago, I think. I read a batch of them, and then I couldn’t read another. The last one that I read was published by Virago, I think, and it had a dyspeptic Picasso on the cover. Ah yes, here it is: Two Worlds and Their Ways. I don’t remember much about it, except that the atmosphere was oppressive, and that there weren’t any attractive characters. Maybe there was an attractive character or two, but they didn’t stick in the mind. The horrid old people stuck in the mind. Well, their horridness sticks in the mind. Imagine a life of heaping but flavorless food, served up in overheated rooms at punctual hours, silent but for the sounds of genteel people eating and digesting. Eventually, you conclude, “I can’t read this sort of thing anymore,” but it sticks with you, and, when you read Memento Mori, it all comes back.

Rather, it does not come back but it lingers in your peripheral vision. You know that it’s there and you sense it compulsively, but you cannot look at it. Spark’s characters are not so awful, possibly because they’re the children of the Victorian horrors in Compton-Burnett. But now it’s their turn to be old, and most of them are cross about it. There is the feeling, strong in Compton-Burnett, that age distills the vices of the mind, so that even if some old fool is physically incapable of doing much of anything, he can still splash around in a sulfuric puddle of universal loathing. There is also a return to childishness, to sudden hatreds and silly requests; an unwillingness to take very seriously what might make another person happy. A brusque self-pitying rudeness takes the place of politeness.

“You might have opened the door for me,” she said.

Godfrey did not at first understand what she meant, for he had long since started to use his advanced years as an excuse to omit the mannerly conformities of his younger days, and was now automatically rude in his gestures, as if by long-earned right. He sensed some new frightful upheaval of his habits behind her words, as he drove off fitfully towards Sloane Square.

As in Compton-Burnett (but also as in Spark’s other novels), the plot is buried in the busyness of a dozen microscopic campaigns. Godfrey Colston feels so embattled by his wife, by his wife’s former lover, and by his housekeeper, that he no longer has the faintest idea what he wants; he is simply at war, albeit on subdued terms, with the entire world. He lunges at imagined encroachments without much conviction in the effectiveness of either his bark or his bite. There is an inheritance, but Spark couldn’t be more desultory about its settlement, and when it ends up in the hands of the woman who was counting upon it all along, the chanciness of this outcome is so comic that one almost fancies it as a pie in her face. There is a notional mystery: the gang of old people who constitute the cast of Memento Mori have all been pestered by anonymous telephone callers who simply remind them, before hanging up, to “remember that you must die.” I put “callers” in the plural because the old folks can’t agree on what sort of voice makes these announcements, young, old, distinguished or common. Dame Lettie Colston, a do-goodering battleaxe, is so outraged by the calls that she wants the matter raised in Parliament. In contrast, Charmian Piper, a once-famous novelist who begins to recover from incipient dementia when her books are reissued and made a cult of by young readers, believes that the proper response to the phone calls is to take them at their word: it can’t hurt to remember that you must die. Dame Lettie considers the warning impertinent at best and menacing at worst, and indeed she comes to a corresponding end, while Charmian dies “one morning in the following spring,” in manifestly uneventful circumstances.

Almost everybody dies, but that’s what the title promised, no? One survivor, Alec Warner, is an unwitting mischief-maker whose amassed observations of old people, researched for some Casaubon-like book, are consumed in a fire; he suffers a stroke and goes to live in a nursing home “and frequently searched through his mind, as through a card catalogue, for the case-histories of his friends, both dead and dying.” Another is the awful Mrs Pettigrew, the officious housekeeper schemes to benefit from her employers’ wills. Mrs Pettigrew has lived among the gentry long enough to pass for one of them, but she knows her place, and one of the most astute passages in Memento Mori ties together her ersatz morality with her caste uncertainty.

Mrs Pettigrew went upstairs to look round the bedrooms, to see if they were all right and tidy, and in reality to simmer down and look round. She was annoyed with herself for letting go at Mrs Anthony. She should have kept aloof. But it had always been the same — even when she was with Lisa Brooke — when she had to deal with lower domestics she became too much one of them. It was kindness of heart, but it was weak. She reflected that she had really started off on the wrong foot with Mrs Anthony; that, when she had first arrived, she should have kept her distance with the woman and refrained from confidences. And now she had lowered herself to an argument with Mrs Anthony. These thoughts overwhelmed Mrs Pettigrew with that sense of having done a foolish thing against one’s interests, which in some people stands for guilt. And in this frame of heart she repented, and decided, as she stood by Charmian’s neatly-made bed, to establish her position more solidly in the household, and from now on to treat Mrs Anthony with remoteness.

Fat chance of that.

Matins

¶ At Salon, Michael Lind writs about the faux upper middle class, saddled with “worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford.” Cui bono? The left and the right are pretty much in pari delicto. (via The Awl)

But many have profited from the peddling of the dream of the mass upper middle class. The claim that everyone should go to college served the interests of the educational-industrial complex, from K-12 to the universities, that now serves as an important constituency of the Democratic Party. (Along with Wall Street investment banks, universities provided Barack Obama with his largest campaign donations.) And the claim that everyone needs to pour money into the stock market, to be managed by banks and brokers who fleece their clients, served the interests of the financial-industrial complex that has replaced real-economy businesses as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Both the educators and the brokers have successfully lobbied Congress to subsidize their bloated industries, swelling them even further, by means of tax breaks for student loans and personal retirement savings. The big losers have been the millions of working Americans whom many Democrats and Republicans alike have persuaded, against their interests, to indulge champagne tastes on beer budgets.

Lauds

¶ Ellen Moody assesses The Kids Are All Right as a serious women’s film that updates, without substantially revising, our idea of the American family.

Though again we are confronted by the ritual humiliation of the woman character. After all, it is Jules who plays the woman in this marriage who almost destroys it by having sex with Paul; Jules who must apologize and beg for forgiveness. At the same time to be fair (and explain why I so enjoyed the film), as Jules Julianne Moore holds the family together for real. Her loving interventions, her continual kindnesses and urging of everyone to get along; the way she goes over to Joni and Laser after Nick makes it clear she has gone to bed with Paul — the film values someone intensely who has no career, makes no money. It’s she who has to sleep downstairs when Nick throws her out of their bed, and she holds no grudges. I’ve usually liked the characters Julianne Moore plays and this film showed the best sides of her typology. Not abject, giving and then appreciated.

What saves this film are the nuances of the individual scenes and dialogue — script, acting, the perfect timing, and discordant moments. Especially the ongoing little jarring comments by Jules and Nick at and to one another. Jules reminds Nick that she has drunk too much. Nick cuts across Jules’s super-kindness to the kids (Jules is the woman reconciling everyone) to insist on making choices based on remembering harder dangers: riding on motorcycles the way Paul loves to is dangerous, statistically you are courting death or crippling, so she works hard to prevent Joni and Paul from doing it.

¶ Noting an interesting paradox about Christopher Nolan (“he’s fascinated by identity but not much good with character”), The Owls (Ben Walters and JM Tyree) air their disappointment with Inception.

BW: Well, his protagonists tend to (mis)remember and investigate rather than, um, live. We root for them because they’re the narrative engine, not because we’re actually invested in their welfare to any great degree. And I think this brings us to another problem with Inception – this lack of facility for the quirks and charms of actual present people result in a film basically comprised of really boring, thuddingly rational dream sequences.

JMT: They’re not that dreamy. A friend pointed out that the snow level of the narrative/dream is a Bond film. And really it’s also an Inception video game. Blam! I’m using the bigger gun now. Someone else I talked to reminded me, though, that since the dreams are constructed they would tend to be less weird than “real” dreams. So that can be unwound as possibly more interesting…

BW: Cop-out! Dreams should be weird and woozy and hot and fickle. Inception plays like a two-and-a-half-hour American Express ad

In their utterly different ways, these are the big movies of Summer 2010 — the shows that anyone interested in film must see. We’ve had our say here and here.

Prime

¶ At the Boston Globe, Michael Fitzgerald talks to Mark Valeri about Heavenly Merchandize, his intriguing reconsideration of the relationship between Puritanism and capitalism in Colonial America. How did the austere Puritans become energetic businessmen? It seems to have something to do with settling down and discovering home in exile.

Tierce

¶ At Not Science Fiction, Kyle Munkittrick considers how handy an AI Physician X Prize-winning tricorder would be at solving the problem that too many doctors are poor diagnosticians.

Now imagine an app as smart and accurate as a panel of ten doctors in the hands of a trained MD or EMT, emphasis on the “trained.” Walker’s essay focuses on allowing patients to self-diagnose, but the huge benefit would be for professional diagnoses. Instead of being required to memorize thousands of potential diseases and syndromes, each with their own fickle and bizarre permutations, a doctor’s two primary goals would become 1) ensuring accurate, exhaustive entry of symptoms into the tricorder and 2) giving comprehensive, patient oriented care. Diagnoses, particularly esoteric ones, would become the prerogative of the device, instead of certain hobbled, cantankerous MDs named “House.” In addition to the symptoms entered by the doctor, the tricorder would have access to the patient’s entire medical history — including reoccurring issues, worsening conditions, potential genetic dispositions, and a plethora of other minutia — that could be the difference between sending someone home with “drink fluids and come back if it gets worse” and hospitalization. Furthermore, long, infection-prone hospital stays for “observation” would be reduced or even eliminated thanks to better initial diagnoses. The health industry as we know it might change so much as to become unrecognizable.

Sext

¶ Choire Sicha has fun with the strangely overlapping interviews of highbrow actresses in the Sunday Times. Laura Linney’s alabaster complexion graced the Magazine, while, in a much pithier Arts & Leisure piece, Michelle Orange interviewed Patricia Clarkson. Choire wants to know if you can attribute fifteen snips correctly. Of course Choire picks the most generically puffy bits. Here they are on the subject of family life. First Linney —

She declared her husband and her family off-limits for interviews. Friends who talked with me about her worried aloud that they might be straying into areas she might not want them to. And while Linney never took offense or balked at any question I asked, she would dispense with some topics — like whether she ever wanted, or still wants, children — with a just a few inconclusive, anodyne words. She clearly meant to be professional and polite, but she just as clearly had no intention of serving up a quivering, tremulous heart on a platter.

— then Clarkson.

Living the dream doesn’t leave much room for sleep. Or settling down, an expression that makes Ms. Clarkson — who has never married and has no children, nor a computer or an assistant, for that matter — visibly recoil.

“I have very strong ideas and strong convictions, and I think I have brought to fulfillment the life I’ve really always wanted,” she said. “There isn’t really anything I would change about my career right now.”

She paused, the mischief returning to her eyes. “O.K., a few things,” she relented. “Usually involving a check with some zeros.”

Nones

If we weren’t ticked off at The Economist ourselves (all that tendentious reporting!), we probably wouldn’t link to this story, in which Edward Hugh, of A Fistful of Dollars, is ticked off at The Economist, for its anti-Catalonian approach to the bullfighting ban in the region. (And the age of unsigned articles is so over!)

At the same time it is hard not to notice that the correspondent does his best not to find too many positive things to say about Catalans. In an article back in July 2009 “All must have prizes”, he also argues that one of the reasons for Mr Zapatero’s continuing spending spree was to keep Catalan politicians happy, without mentioning – as the group of young professionals who for Collectiu Emma point out – that there is a net fiscal transfer annually from Catalunya to the rest of Spain of around 10% of GDP. Indeed trying to hold Catalonia responsible for Spain’s economic woes makes about as much (and as little) sense as holding Germany responsible for the Greek economic mess. In fact, the comparison goes further, since it is reasonably clear that Catalonia has an external surplus with the rest of the world just like Germany does, which is why the Catalans share the same kind of reputation inside Spain for being thrifty and austere as their German counterparts on the European level.¶

Vespers

¶ We’ll read anything by or about Jennifer Egan, and Patricia Z0hn’s intereview at The Huffington Post is a nice “addition to the literature.” But in answer to a question about the Sixties, Ms Egan deftly binds the overtly Sixties-era themes that have freckled her fiction with the covert activities, also beginning in the Sixties, that have inspired her technique.

CZ: Though you were born a decade late, you seem to have been defined by the Sixties. People who were adolescent then are tired of hearing all of us say it was, so far, the most interesting time to come of age. Yet you have not only embraced these years but have made their themes–sex, drugs, rock and roll, politics, and the subsequent disillusionment and burnout–the calling cards to your work. Why, and what was missing from your own era that they were so easily able to eclipse it?

JE: I’d say that I’ve been defined by missing the Sixties. My mother and stepfather moved us to San Francisco in 1969, when I was seven, and I grew up there convinced that everything spontaneous and raw and thrilling had passed me by. Had I actually experienced the sixties, I might have a more nuanced memory of that era. I guess what I’m saying is that in San Francisco, anyway, “my” era was mostly about processing the era that had just passed. Until the punk rock scene of the late seventies, there wasn’t much, counterculturally, to compete with it.

Looking back, though, I’d say that my era has actually been defined by dizzying technological change. I grew up before there were answering machines, and in 47 years I’ve watched us hurtle into a hyperconnected state whose implications none of us can fully grasp. Funnily, the origins of that change can be traced right back to the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970’s–the very same years when it seemed like nothing new was happening! Things were happening, it turns out, but we couldn’t see them yet.

Compline

¶ Ann Jones, seneior citizen and embedded journalist, tootles around an American operation in Afghanistan that makes Men Who Stare At Goats look like a documentary. On top of all the surreal weirdness, she plops the following sundae cherry, which might explain why COIN isn’t working as well as we might like. (Asia Times; via MetaFilter)

On the base, I heard incessant talk about COIN, the “new” doctrine resurrected from the disaster of Vietnam in the irrational hope that it will work this time. From my experience at the FOB, however, it’s clear enough that the hearts-and-minds part of COIN is already dead in the water, and one widespread practice in the military that’s gone unreported by other embedded journalists helps explain why.

So here’s a TomDispatch exclusive, courtesy of Afghan-American men serving as interpreters for the soldiers. They were embarrassed to the point of agony when mentioning this habit, but desperate to put a stop to it. COIN calls for the military to meet and make friends with village elders, drink tea, plan “development”, and captivate their hearts and minds. Several interpreters told me, however, that every meeting includes some young American soldiers whose locker-room-style male bonding features bouts of hilarious farting.

To Afghan men, nothing is more shameful. A fart is proof that a man cannot control any of his apparatus below the belt. The man who farts is thus not a man at all. He cannot be taken seriously, nor can any of his ideas or promises or plans.

Blissfully unaware of such things, the army goes on planning together with its civilian consultants (representatives of the US State Department, the US Department of Agriculture and various independent contractors who make up what’s called a Human Terrain Team charged with interpreting local culture and helping to win the locals over to our side). Some speak of “building infrastructure”, others of advancing “good governance” or planning “economic development”. All talk of “doing good” and “helping” Afghanistan.

In a typical mess-up on the actual terrain of Afghanistan, army experts previously in charge of this base had already had a million-dollar suspension bridge built over a river some distance away, but hadn’t thought to secure land rights, so no road leads to it. Now the local American agriculture specialist wants to introduce alfalfa to these waterless, rocky mountains to feed herds of cattle principally pastured in his mind.

Have a Look

¶ Clandestine grilled cheese sandwiches. Should this be “Anywhere But New York”? Or is it a hoax? (New York Post; via The Awl)

¶ Design Disasters of the Past 25 Years. (The Infrastructurist) Our favorite is the top-rated Lotus Riverside Complex.

On Saturday afternoon, Kathleen and I went to see The Girl Who Played With Fire — the second installment of the Stieg Larsson adaptations. Kathleen was very annoyed by some changes that, in her view, were not only unnecessary but also distracting — perhaps “detracting” is the word. For myself, the movie was pleasant and engaging; Noomi Rapace has one of the truly great screen presences. (Although gifted with generally lovely features and truly amazing cheekbones, she can look plain and used up.) But, perhaps because I don’t think that it could stand on its own — which isn’t so much a fault as an accident of its mode of release — I wasn’t prompted to comment. The Girl Who Played With Fire certainly lacks what was for me the most powerful thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, that haunting photograph of the young Harriet Vanger (Julia Sporre) burning like a lighthouse at its center. Rarely has a still image been so evocatively deployed in a movie. (The only thing that comes to mind is the portrait of the missing heroine in Laura.) Niels Arden Oplev’s use of that photograph amounts to a kind of contract: no one with Harriet’s piercingly intelligent gaze could ever be murdered and dumped. But reassurance is missing from the second movie. Even though we know that she has to make it to the third installment, we can’t count on the survival of Lisbeth Salander herself. There is no hope within the movie. And if you know that the third and final installment picks up right where the second one ends, with Lisbeth and her monstrous father, Zala, in the same hospital, it’s difficult to see The Girl Who Played With Fire as having a genuine ending. It’s more a series of interesting episodes. Which is fine! But nothing to write here about.

The itch to see a film that would make me want to say something persisted, and this morning I succumbed to curiosity about Inception. I’m not going to waste much time distinguishing Inception, which I enjoyed, from Avatar, which I wouldn’t see; it’s enough to say that I wasn’t afraid that the new movie would offend me. As, indeed, it did not. But it did bore me, here and there. The ennui got particularly thick during the Alpine shoot-out scenes that I think were to represent an attack upon the subconscious of a godfather. I felt as though I were being forced to stare over someone’s shoulder at a video game. There was nothing in it for me. My interest in the good guys dropped to zero, so much so that I didn’t bother to sort out who was where or doing what. The gunfire was an obvious insurance policy, hedging against the risk that the story’s inventive theory of dreams would lose the young men in the audience. Actually, explicating the mechanics of invading the dreams of others risked losing everyone, because the job was assigned to Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m afraid that it is spectacularly difficult for me to connect Mr DiCaprio’s Cobb with the kind of sustained intellectual effort that mastering the art of “extraction” would require. And he was woefully shown up by the electrically bright Ellen Page, who as Ariadne plays the only character who is even halfway privy to her team leaders dark secrets, and who was able (as an actress) to put us in the picture every time she was obliged to scold Cobb for putting his people at uninformed risk. If Ariadne had been the one to tell us all about “Limbo,” I’m sure that we’d all have been far more terrified of the possibility of winding up there.

It’s a pity that Christopher Nolan doesn’t trust his cinematic virtuosity enough to have made what this movie might have been: a coruscating adventure story without either guns or spiels. He comes close, or at least he did so for me, in the layer of the climactic dream sandwich of dreams that takes place in a swank hotel. While the other characters dream down one level, their wool-suited bodies defenseless,  Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) remains behind to protect them. I had no idea what Mr Gordon-Levitt was doing throughout this sequence, but I didn’t mind; I was happy to watch him scramble about the corridors (sometimes along the ceiling) and up and down an elevator shaft, satisfied that he seemed to know what he was doing. (Mr Gordon-Levitt would have made a great Cobb, but I’d hate to lose him as Arthur.) The scene in which Cobb and Ariadne stroll through Paris, in a dream in which she re-invents the city while he populates it, is great visual fun, as is the crumbling city-by-the sea that represents the failure of the dream that Cobb shared with his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). But Mr Nolan’s adherence to the action-thriller playbook guarantees that the buds of his visual creativity never fully bloom. It seems churlish to complain about this; what’s wrong with a beautiful action-thriller. Well, nothing, except that, as an action-thriller, Inception is not very inventive.

We learn, at the end of Inception, that Cobb knows that it’s possible to plant an idea in someone’s brain because he has done it before, to his wife. The guilt that he feels flows from having so well convinced her that what seemed to be real life was also just a dream that she lost interest in it and took her life. Thus she bowed to the same Panglossian morality that assures us that people who could live forever would come to regard immortality as a curse. Life may be tough, but if it were any easier, we’d be really miserable. If life were a dream, it would be unlivable. Is this an interesting proposition? Most of us would unhesitatingly agree that mistaking life for a dream is a kind of pathology, an illness to be treated. We’re somatically rooted in a life that does not seem dream-like at all. But what if it were a dream? What if we could live forever? (Living in a dream world for eternity is, of course, the Abrahamic afterlife.) These are not grown-up questions, and making Marion Cotillard look wretched because she has been betrayed by one of them is sad diminishment. I’d have liked it better if she’d just been an all-out bad girl.

Matins

¶ An interesting piece about the improving the levees of New Orleans, not just as engineering necessities but as features of the landscape, throws light on a big shift in contemporary thinking, away from the Enlightenment project of triumphing over nature, from making environmental problems disappear to making them feel at home, for everyone. (Good)

Living in a city bisected by the Mississippi River and abutting Lake Ponchartrain, New Orleanians have a complicated relationship with water. Where other cities might take advantage of these shorelines for recreation and community activities, prizing a natural access to water in a sweltering urban center, New Orleans is, instead, walled in—its residents’ interactions with nature is mediated by 104.8 miles of levees and floodwalls. These structures are, of course, necessary for the safety of the city (even if they have been far from perfect), but they create a visually forceful divide between the city and its surrounding wetlands. With pumping stations behind walls, even the infrastructure hides itself. It’s as if there is no water at all.

With that in mind, GOOD asked a few of New Orleans’s finest designers to re-imagine, improve upon, or replace these floodwalls and levee spaces. What we got were ideas that are at once community-enhancing, dynamic, and effective—a testament to the power of thoughtful design and public art, especially in blighted areas.

Lauds

¶ Move over, Mad Men: Sherlock’s back in town. Or will be, presently: the BBC has exhumed and updated Anglophonia’s most famous sleuth, and engaged Benedict Cumberbatch to impersonate him. (Guardian; via MetaFilter)

Coming to BBC1 next Sunday, Sherlock is a re-imagining of the Conan Doyle stories, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role and Martin Freeman as his Watson. The three 90-minute episodes were commissioned on the strength of a pilot that was never shown and have already been sold around the world. Resembling a cross between Withnail and I and The Bourne Ultimatum, there is also a hint of Doctor Who about the drama; hardly surprising, since it has been written and created by Doctor Who writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat….

“What appealed to us about the idea of doing Sherlock in the present day is that the characters have become almost literally lost in the fog,” he said. “And while I am second to no one in my enjoyment of that sort of Victoriana, we wanted to get back to the characters and to why they became the most wonderful partnership in literature.”

Casting Cumberbatch as Holmes was a natural decision, but finding the right Watson was harder. “But as soon as they came together, it was obvious.” Freeman’s dependable, capable Watson unlocks this modern Holmes, a man who now describes himself as “a high-functioning sociopath”.

Prime

¶ At Private Sector Development Blog, Ryan Hahn compares microcredit to the ropes that lashed Odysseus to the mast of his ship when the Sirens sang. (He goes on to point out that Odysseus himself, like most men, would not resort to microcredit for self-help purposes.) (via  The Awl)

A recent paper by Jonathan Morduch of the Financial Access Initiative and coauthors Michal Bauer and Julie Chytilova takes a look at the behavioral underpinnings of microfinance. The authors find that women with hyperbolic discount preferences — i.e., individuals who have a tendency to give in to the temptation of consumption in the moment — turn to microfinance as a way to force themselves to save….

So would Ulysses have taken out a micofinance loan as a way to overcome the temptation of current consumption? Probably not. Morduch et al. find that men who are present-biased aren’t particularly likely to take out loans through self help groups but at the same time don’t have lower savings levels than men without this bias. Why this difference between men and women? In a sentence that cries out for further explanation, the authors note that “we didn’t find lower saving levels for present-biased men as we did for women, which suggests that, unlike women, they have access to other ways to cope with self-discipline problems.”

What might these ‘other ways’ be, and why don’t women have access to them? The paper doesn’t speculate on the answer. But this sounds like an avenue for future research that is screaming for attention.

Tierce

¶ At Wired, Kevin Kelly has a short interview with Fred Brooks, author of (most recently) The Design of Design, a book that we’ve enjoyed dipping into. via kottke.org) Some nuggets:

Wired: In your experience, what’s the best process for design?

Brooks: Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.

Wired: But surely The Design of Design is about creating better processes for great designers?

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

Wired: How has your thinking about design changed over the past decades?

Brooks: When I first wrote The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, I counseled programmers to “throw the first version away,” then build a second one. By the 20th-anniversary edition, I realized that constant incremental iteration is a far sounder approach. You build a quick prototype and get it in front of users to see what they do with it. You will always be surprised.

Wired: You’re a Mac user. What have you learned from the design of Apple products?

Brooks: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.

Sext

¶ Nige takes a walk in the beautiful Leicestershire countryside, where the land still tells of a past that was by no means bucolic and charming. 

Villages were deserted for various reasons – epidemic disease reducing population below viable levels, marginal sites proving unsustainable, loss of crops causing famine – life was hard, and people more mobile than we commonly think – but Ingarsby is a classic case of 15th-century enclosure driving the population off the land. Those sheep pastures, so peaceful and picturesque today, represented the end of village life for the inhabitants of Ingarsby and many another village, at a time when, in Thomas More’s phrase, sheep ate men. While the sheep barons grew fat in their big houses (and indeed abbeys – it was Leicester Abbey that enclosed this land), those who had once lived off the land around were evicted and thrown on their own meagre resources, many becoming beggars, many dying of disease and want. To walk amid the remnants of their village life – which survive only because the heavy land has remained as unploughed pasture – is a poignant reminder of a historical experience that resonated for centuries, continuing in different forms (read John Clare!) and still feeds into the unique English relationship with the countryside, into that faint unease behind our enjoyment of it, a sense of brutal disruption, shameful appropriation, of something lost beyond recall.

Nones

¶ Burma — land of the future? The “military junta” that controls Myanmar’s wealth is nothing but a retro-patriarchal plutocracy. That it should flourish in the Twenty-First Century is shocking — until we consider growing income disparties around the world. Hannah Beech at Time. (via Real Clear World)

The red sign blocking the main entrance to the half-built Yadanabon Cybercity looks innocuous enough to someone who doesn’t read the local language, a swirl of curved Burmese letters and numbers. But the people of Burma have been conditioned to fear this sign: “This area is under military order 144,” it says. “Shoot to capture.” It’s a measure of Burma’s peculiar mix of isolationist paranoia and technological ambition that its future Silicon Valley has been declared a military zone inaccessible to normal civilians. Inside the 4,050-hectare construction site, I drive along empty stretches of tarmac, past plots of land that will soon boast offices for Burma’s biggest crony companies: Htoo Trading, Tay Za’s conglomerate; IGE, headed by the son of Burma’s Minister of Industry General Aung Thaung, who is barred by the European Union; Redlink Communications, owned by the sons of the junta No. 3, General Thura Shwe Mann, one of whom is on the U.S. visa blacklist. Thai, Malaysian, Russian and Chinese firms have staked their ground too. Burma’s state media reports that foreign companies have so far invested $22 million in the first phase of Yadanabon.

Ever since images of protesting monks escaped from Burma during the crushed demonstrations of 2007, the regime has been scrambling to centralize control over the Internet. Thousands of websites have been blocked, cyberdissidents jailed and debilitating strikes launched against exile-media websites. Yadanabon will be the nerve center of Burma’s Internet operations. But it’s not all computer cubicles and high-tech wizardry. On a point overlooking the famous hills of Shan State, $200,000 vacation villas are being built. One model drawing shows a BMW SUV in a garage, and the half-finished houses already feature Tudor trimmings and spacious verandas. Nearby, a farmer toils on a sliver of land that has belonged to her family for at least three generations. Soon the Cybercity will eat up this tiny plot too. The woman doesn’t expect any compensation since she received nothing when the rest of her fields were confiscated a year ago. “We are little people, so we cannot complain,” she says. “All we can do is concentrate on feeding ourselves.”

History suggests that the junta class will disintegrate from within over time. But that is only a suggestion.

Vespers

¶ At Critical Mass, Mark Athitakis talks to David Pritchard, founder of the literary Web site Critical Flame.

Reviews for the site have no specific word-count limits (the guidelines require only that “an article’s length never exceed its coherence”). Still, the Critical Flame strongly embraces long-form essays. What has your work on the site taught you about how willing online audiences are to read such articles?  

As an editor, I never cut for the sake of length. Maybe this section is redundant, or that one needs to be re-written for clarity — but no, word count is no longer a controlling force. Not for internet reviews. I’m also not sure that a book worth reviewing at all can be dealt with in 300 words anyhow, not with the depth that we aim for. I think our shortest essays are 800-1000 words, and they do feel a bit short to me.

 

But, we’ve found no problem with readership in regards to length, nor correlation between length and readers at all. There is — well, I am suspicious of questions regarding length and online audiences. For really good content, people will read until their eyes peel (which takes longer and longer as technology gets better) but they won’t read 300 words of crap, or 600 words of mediocrity, on paper or on the internet. Treat readers as if they deserve to be involved in the conversation, as equals, with enthusiasm and insight, discussing a book that is worth consideration: length will never be an issue.

Compline

¶ “Our T-shirt will read: I just don’t know.” Ron Rosenbaum is lucid about agnosticism, which ever way it faces.

Huxley originally defined his agnosticism against the claims of religion, but it also applies to the claims of science in its know-it-all mode. I should point out that I accept all that science has proven with evidence and falsifiable hypotheses but don’t believe there is evidence or falsifiable certitude that science can prove or disprove everything. Agnosticism doesn’t contend there are no certainties; it simply resists unwarranted untested or untestable certainties.

Agnosticism doesn’t fear uncertainty. It doesn’t cling like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates uncertainty and has been doing so since before quantum physics revealed the uncertainty that lies at the very groundwork of being.

Have a Look

¶ New York art critic Jerry Saltz’s favorite NYC paintings. (via The Morning News)

¶ There goes the garden! What happens to a (dying) washing machine when you toss a brick into its spin cycle. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Nice Muscles. (Café Muscato)