Felix Rohatyn, a statesman of finance if ever there was one, looks back with no small discontent on the evolution of finance during his fifty years of notability. He is still haunted by the RJR Nabisco deal.

Still, almost 25 years later, he is grappling with how to fix a system built upon selling to the highest bidder.

“The trouble with this is that it is very difficult to quantify,” he said of valuing the impact on all the other constituents. “I am very troubled by my difficulty in trying to determine which was the better of the two deals.”

Matins

¶ Justin E H Smith argues passionately for the centrality of foreign-language study in the humanities curriculum. In our view, language makes the difference between true education and hot air.

I want to suggest also that it is not just language and literature programs that have been seriously damaged by the changes I’ve described, but indeed all of the humanities. When I say that foreign-language training is the anchor of the humanities, I mean it anchors, or ought to anchor, disciplines apparenty as independent of it as philosophy and history. There is a wonderful model of education that will be familiar to anyone who has read about the Little Russian monasteries in Gogol’s stories, and that also existed in classical India and in the Islamic world. In the Byzantine version of it depicted by Gogol, schoolboys pass through four stages: first they are ‘grammarians’, then ‘rhetoricians’, then ‘philosophers’, and, finally, ‘theologians’. This seems to me pretty much the proper order of things (leaving off, perhaps, the ultimate stage). In the Indian tradition, claiming to be a master of any of the darshanas or doctrines without first demonstrating a deep, thorough, intimate mastery of the elements of phonetics, grammar, and prosody (and I mean a real mastery, comparable to what enables Anne-Sophie Mutter to do what she does with her violin), would be simply absurd. Without mastery of language, a student trying to spin out ideas is like me trying desperately to scrape a few notes from a stringed instrument. Potentially, that mastery could simply be of English, just as the pandits gave their exclusive attention to Sanskrit. But students today are permitted to remain nearly as estranged from the inner workings of their own native tongue as they are from the foreign languages they were expected until recently to at least sample.

Lauds

¶ HTMLGiant‘s Kyle Minor is in town, where he spent a chunk of time at the IFC, watching Olivier Assayas’s Carlos. At 5 hours 19 minutes runtime, the Roadshow Edition of this film calls for serious intestinal fortitude, which is why we’re grateful for Kyle’s report, which also serves to remind us how much political orientations have changed since we were his age.

True enough, but what was most exciting about the movie was that in many ways (and without ever being didactic about it), it served concurrently as a moral interrogation of the militant left, a thing which hardly exists anymore thanks to the unlikely collaborators who served as its joint executioners — the brutal excesses of the Communist bloc (which eventually turned off most leftists who were decent human beings to the idea of revolutionary violence altogether) and the overwhelming victory of the American capitalist global order (which rendered other economic systems implausible, at least for the time being, unless you wanted to become North Korea. Even what we used to call Red China is now on its way to becoming a capitalist power, albeit under the auspices of an authoritarian regime.)

It’s not that nobody talks about these things anymore. It’s more that hardly anyone does, and even to a person of my generation (the Berlin Wall fell when I was in the eighth grade), they have come to seem irrelevant, quaint, and anachronistic. These days most of the really violent stuff seems to come from the right, or at least the really violent stuff that isn’t state-sanctioned (but some of that, too.) Still, those times are closer to ours than I usually consider them to be, and certainly the contemporary obsession with security and the war on terror and so on is largely rooted in those times of too-frequent hijackings and more-public political assassinations and all the other horrors from which Americans are now mostly shielded, despite their continuance in parts of the world distant and near.

Prime

¶ Maybe the practice of economics will be truly scientific some day, but two pieces in the Times over the weekend show where the difficulty of attaining true predictability lies: in economists’ very imperfect understanding of human nature — namely their own, as reflected in philosophical bias. First, in a piece on income inequality, Robert Frank reminds us how far economists have wandered from Adam Smith‘s fundamental concern for moral sentiments.

By contrast, during the last three decades the economy has grown much more slowly, and our infrastructure has fallen into grave disrepair. Most troubling, all significant income growth has been concentrated at the top of the scale. The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent.

Yet many economists are reluctant to confront rising income inequality directly, saying that whether this trend is good or bad requires a value judgment that is best left to philosophers. But that disclaimer rings hollow. Economics, after all, was founded by moral philosophers, and links between the disciplines remain strong. So economists are well positioned to address this question, and the answer is very clear.

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. His first book, “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” was published more than 25 years before his celebrated “Wealth of Nations,” which was itself peppered with trenchant moral analysis.

The tile of David Segal’s “The X-Factor of Economics: People” tells you where he’s going.

Which gets to another great variable: personal values. In his textbook “Principles of Economics,” N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor, proposed this thought experiment: A town must maintain a well. Peter, who earns $100,000, is taxed $10,000, or 10 percent of his income, while Paula, who earns $20,000, hands over $4,000, or 20 percent of her income.

“Is this policy fair?” Mr. Mankiw asks in “Principles.” “Does it matter whether Paula’s low income is due to a medical disability or to her decision to pursue an acting career? Does it matter whether Peter’s high income is due to a large inheritance or to his willingness to work long hours at a dreary job?”

Economics, Mr. Mankiw concludes, won’t tell us, definitively, whether Peter or Paula is paying too much, because an answer inevitably leads to matters of values, which inevitably leads to different answers.

This is not to suggest that economics is a total free-for-all, lacking a broad consensus on any subject. Polls of economists have found near unanimity on topics like tariffs and import quotas (bad), centralized economies (very bad) and flexible, floating exchange rates (very good). Nor is it fair to say that economists have done little to help in the latest crisis. A depression seemed possible two years ago, and thanks to the ideas of economists, that didn’t happen.

But economics will forever have to contend with the biggest X factor of all: people. As Mr. Solow notes, you feed people poison, and they die. But feed them a subsidy and there is no telling what will happen. Some will use it wisely, others perversely and some a mix of both.

Tierce

¶ Chris Mooney picked up Sam Harris’s new book, and found that it repeated an objection to Mr Mooney’s “accommodationism” to which the blogger had responded before at The Intersection. We take Mr  Mooney’s part in this important discussion, which pits intellectual principles against respect for different views. What Chris Mooney said and still says:

There is a bit of bravado here. The point is not to watch what you say, but to understand the context in which you are trying to communicate—and to recognize that most Americans are not going to be dragged all the way from fundamentalism to atheism thanks to the force of reasoned arguments. No matter how much we may wish it, it just isn’t going to happen. Giving them some more moderate stopping off points along the way is the only common sense approach if you want to change minds, or change the culture. In this sense, what is derided as “accommodationism” is actually an extremely important position between two poles on the intellectual spectrum, a position where many people will want to reside–right or wrong.

Sext

¶ At 1904, our friend George Snyder wonders, improbably we should have thought, if he is turning into his old man. He probably thought that it was improbable as well. If you live long enough, though, life does begin to look like the Princesse de Guermantes reception — minus the footmen and the goodies and mirrors and the feathers.

As for feeling like I’m becoming my dad, I admit there was a time when I might have been dismayed at any resemblance, however superficial, but I am more forgiving and accepting in my old age.  And I hasten to add, my father never possessed a faux leopard throw which he could toss artfully over the headboard (he was not the faux leopard tossing sort of guy), and moreover he preferred a pipe to a cigar.  As for me, the cigar box (which keeps the lamp raised to a proper height) belonged to a friend who does like to indulge in a good Cuban cigar now and then, but not in the house and not in his wife’s presence.  Not in bed certainly.  More likely the barn, to be truthful.

Reading in bed, however, is another matter entirely.  Something I do have in common with the old man.  And a lot of the rest of you, if I’m not mistaken.

Nones

¶ Michael Pettis, an associate of the Carnegie Asia Program in Beijing, advances a modest proposal: instead of buying Treasuries, China ought to fund the rehabiliation of United States infrastructure. (via Humble Student of the Markets)

So why not have China do it directly?  Let China engage in a massive rebuilding of US infrastructure – it can build airports, highways, damns, and railways – which would raise investment levels enough keep the US trade deficit high in a way that benefits the US and China.

Of course China would also have the right to charge for the use of these projects so that it can earn a positive return on its investment.  The return doesn’t even need to be high – just better than the return it gets on its huge expansion in investment in China, which I suspect is negative for the country as a whole.

Even worse, China is lending money to foreign borrowers anyway to boost China’s trade surplus, and I am not sure they can count on a positive return there.  Look at the $5 billion loan Premier Wen pledged to Greece to buy Chinese ships.  That may look like a clever deal economically, but I think there is a very high probability that within five or six years Greece will be forced to default on its debt and will obtain significant debt forgiveness.  In that case China will earn a negative return there too.  You can’t get rich giving away ships.

As long as it earns more than it earns on its USG bond holdings, it will be better off economically even without considering the immense advantage of keeping the US trade deficit high for the eight to ten years China is going to need to rebalance its economy away from its toxic over-reliance for growth on the trade surplus and economically non-viable investment.

Mr Pettis is the first to acknowledge the political implausibility of this “win-win” plan. The best ideas, unfortunately, are always politically implausable — that’s precisely why they’re so good. If they’re really good, the politicians are eventually swept into line.

Vespers

¶ Alexander Chee proffers the syllabus for his graphic fiction course at Amherst — and explains why he did not offer the two-semester expansion that he’d have had no trouble filling.

While the field is considered new at best (it is routinely dismissed as unserious by many) the boom also means that I could have easily taught the course as a year-long class, with a “History of Comics” first semester and a “Graphic Novel” second semester, and if the post I had at Amherst had been tenure track, I might have considered it, and could easily have filled it. Teaching the graphic novel typically means you’ll be popular with students but potentially controversial with colleagues, to be clear—and on the job market, it has been both a plus and a minus, with faculty both intensely interested and intensely repulsed. It is a polarizing form to teach right now, more so than creative writing, which still suffers in the esteem of many academics, despite its popularity.

Compline

¶ At The Awl, Mike Barthel’s engagine reflections on “Bully Crisis 2010,” wherein he asks, “What do we do with the assholes?”

Let me tell you a story. In fifth grade, I was being bullied by this boy named Jason. As a weird little kid, I was not new to this sort of thing, but this experience was particularly shitty. It was one of those situations that you particularly must endure as a child, where you can’t choose to avoid the person who’s tormenting you. Jason was awful to me and yet I had to see him on a regular basis both at school and at Cub Scouts, where his mom was our den leader. It made me miserable. But after a lot of thought (of course!), I decided I was going to stand up for myself the next time the opportunity presented itself. That opportunity happened to be when we were taking our class photo. While getting lined up in the back row, Jason jostled me, and I responded by giving him a bloody nose.

I faced no disciplinary action for this. As I recall, I got a subtle nod of approval from my teacher. I did, however, get a reaction from one of the other kids. During a lull in class, a guy named Dave showed me a piece of loose leaf paper, on which was written a list of all the people in our class. “This is the list of who’s most popular,” Dave explained, and pointed to my name: “See? You moved up.” And indeed, there I was, now four spaces from the bottom of the list rather than two. And at the very bottom was Jason.

I’m pretty sure that was the exact moment I decided that popularity was stupid, an attitude that would cause me no small amount of trouble later in life.

But it also drove home that, as scary as bullies are, they’re not exactly society’s winners. Unless we’re prepared to say that a ten-year-old kid deserves to be a loser and has permanently entered a class of loser-hood by his own fully-informed choice—entering a class that may run him up one side of the criminal justice system and down the other—then we have to be willing to entertain the prospect that people like Jason ended up on the bottom rung perhaps through some situations that were not entirely of their own making.

Have a Look

¶ Planet Berlin. (Strange Maps)

¶ Lisa Breslow’s Urban Silences; Tom Wizon’s Homespun Peregrinations. (ArtCat)

In an Op-Ed piece in the Times, about the costs of our unthinking everyday numerologies, Daniel Gilbert plays a quiet little joke on the unsuspecting reader.

In 1962, a physicist named M. F. M. Osborne noticed that stock prices tended to cluster around numbers ending in zero and five. Why? Well, on the one hand, most people have five fingers, and on the other hand, most people have five more.

As with the well-known vase-profile illusion, we’re surprised when a very common figure of speech is put to literal use.

Huzzah! Hooray! The fourth season of Mad Men is over! I loved it, but it’s over, and now I don’t have to watch television again until July!

This season — well, the novelty had worn off, of course. Mad Men was great, but the fact that it was, after all, a TV show began to obtrude. We had to be in our seats on time. We had to wait a week to find out what happened next. We had to sit through commercials for BMW and Hotels.com. I won’t miss any of that.

And Rubicon is over, too. Everything about the show was great, except for the writing, which was Grade X melodramatic garbage. A telenovela would be more surprising. People said the most inane things on tonight’s final episode, things like “It’ll be all right,” and “You can trust me, I promise.” The combination of great production values and dreckulacious dialogue convinced me that the Koch brothers are at the bottom of Atlas International. As if I didn’t know!

***

I took Will for a walk yesterday. It was our second Saturday walk. The second of many more, I hope. We walked all the way over to the St Mark Bookshop, on Third Avenue. I wanted to acquaint Will with Theory at an early, pre-impressionable age. A lovely young woman tried very hard not to show that the two of us (me and Will) struck her as a very cute couple, but she failed; I caught the last of an involuntary wistful smile. I hadn’t been to the store since before Megan and Ryan were married, I realized. I used to stop there on my way to have dinner with Megan at Jules. I used to think that it was a really cool bookstore. Then I was introduced to McNally Jackson.

(And nowI hear that McNally and Jackson are getting divorced. Another name-change party? I’m up for it!)

The contentment that I feel when I am carrying Will on my chest is the most complete pleasure that I have ever known. As a documented besotted grandfather, I need say no more on this subject. (If I do, Fossil Darling will have to pretend that he skimmed through it.) Will seems to have a good time, too. Mostly he looks out at the world from his perch. Every now and then he vocalizes, I never can figure out why. But for the most part he is quiet and almost grave. My attempts at cajoling him to look up at me are dismal failures. Every once in a while, he throws his head back, looking always to the side, and when I tickle his neck he smiles faintly, as if doling out a treat for the old man. But he enjoys the ride. If he didn’t, we’d all know.  

If I had grown up with people who knew me as well as Will and his mother know me, and as well as their knowing me has helped me to know myself, there would have been a lot less ennui and indigestion in my early life.

***

Three and a half of last week’s allotment of five days were preoccupied by household matters. Largely home improvement, but also that dead modem thing. I’m cautiously optimistic that the coming week will be different, although already there’s a big conflict on the horizon. I intend to deal with it by resorting to a technique that is not really part of my toolkit: sleight of hand. Yes, I shall seem to be in two places at once. In one of them, though, Will will really be sitting on my chest.

Why does anyone who lives in this amazing city watch television? 

Matins

¶ You can almost hear the screenwriters cranking away in Marina del Rey: David Streitfelt’s front-page story about Nicolle Bradbury’s foreclosure and Thomas Cox’s successful attempt to halt it at the eleventh hour — thereby shutting down millions of such procedures across the country — must be sparking all the synapses nurtured by Erin Brockovitch. We’re sure that there is more  to Mr Cox’s story.

Mr. Cox, 66, worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s for Maine National Bank, a subsidiary of the Bank of New England, which went under. His job was to call in small-business loans. The borrowers had often pledged their houses as collateral, which meant foreclosure.

“It was extraordinarily unpleasant, but it paid well,” he said. “I had a family to support.”

The work exacted its cost: his marriage ended and a serious depression began. He gave up law and found solace in building houses. By April 2008, he said, he was sufficiently recovered and started volunteering at Pine Tree Legal.

By the time Mr. Cox saw Mrs. Bradbury’s case, it was just about over. Last January, Judge Keith A. Powers of the Ninth District Court of Maine approved the foreclosure, leaving the case alive only to establish exactly how much Mrs. Bradbury owed.

Mr. Cox vowed to a colleague that he would expose GMAC’s process and its limited signing officer, Jeffrey Stephan.

Lauds

¶ The trial of Getty Museum curator Marion True has been terminated on technical grounds by Italian judges. While this leaves Ms True in a limbo of allegations, the shock of her indictment has eliminated many dubious practices in the field of museum acquisitions. (LA Times; via  Arts Journal)

Observers said the trial has succeeded in changing American practices and
signals the end of an era of unbridled American collecting.

Over the five years that her trial spanned, several of America’s most prominent museums — the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and others — forged settlements with Italian and Greek authorities, returning more than 100 looted antiquities in exchange for loans and cultural cooperation.

In 2007, the Getty agreed to return 40 objects to Italy, including its heralded statue of Aphrodite, and led the reform effort by adopting one of the strictest acquisition policies in the country. It requires that ancient art considered by the museum have a clear ownership history placing it in the United States in 1970, the year of an international treaty on the protection of cultural property. The association of art museum directors followed suit not long after, marking a dramatic change in the collecting practices of America’s leading museums.

Prime

¶ At the head of his list of bad long-term investments, Philip (of Weakonomics) places the 30-year US treasury bond. Philip is not yet 30 years old himself. Does the rising generation regard Old Faithful with new skepticism?

 Eventually the US will default or cease to exist.

All great empires die. And the sad truth is they die when no one is really expecting it. If you invest in shorter term bonds you may see the payoff in time to collect before our beloved country falls apart. But if you bought a 30 year bond there is a risk that over those 30 years the bond could become worthless. You might sell it off for a small loss, but the likelihood is that prices would fall faster than mortgage bonds did. Sure you’re paid a premium for the risk you take on, but you know and I know that 30 years is a long time (seeing as I’m not even 30).

Tierce

¶ A new study finds a correlation between the amount of walking an American is likely to do and the presence of a local rail network: convenient trains make for active pedestrians. (The Infrastructurist)

The researchers found no association between daily steps and living environment (e.g. urban, suburban, or rural), which is a bit hard for this New Yorker to imagine. It also doesn’t quite square with a fascinating statistical breakdown of commuting methods done by Yonah Freemark over at the Transport Politic. Using Census data, Freemark charts how people got to work in America’s 30 largest cities between 2000 and 2009. We’ll focus on changes in the percentage of people walking to work during this time, although the chart compares all types of transportation modes:

• All cities experienced a slight increase in commuter walking, at 1.8 percent
• Cities without rail had a 2.7 percent decrease
• Cities with rail but no major new rail investments saw a 1.7 percent increase
• Cities with major new rail investments jumped 4.2 percent

So Americans in general don’t walk much, but something about a good rail system seems to bring them to their feet, if you will.

Sext

¶ Sal Cinquemani has some question about the “It Gets Better” campaign, in which (successful) adult gay men assure teens that their hassles will pass. All well and good, but hardly enough to make it better. (The House Next Door)

Gay teens aren’t killing themselves because being a “gay teen” in America isn’t easy. They’re killing themselves because being gay in America isn’t easy. Justin Aeberg, Cody Barker, Asher Brown, Tyler Clementi, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, and the countless others whose stories we haven’t heard yet had plenty to live for. But despite brave testimonials like the one shared this week by Forth Worth, TX city councilman Joel Burns, who is married to his husband and who has ostensibly been accepted by his 67-year-old “tough-cowboy”-of-a-dad, things getting better isn’t guaranteed to everyone—or anyone.

In New York City, one of the safest cities in the country for gays, three separate alleged hate crimes against adult gay men were reported over the course of just a few days earlier this month. October also marks the 12th anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s murder. These are stark reminders that violence against gays isn’t simply a teenage epidemic.

When we’ve created an environment in which discrimination, bigotry, and violence are accepted, how can we expect our children not to follow suit in our schools and in our streets? It Gets Better is a beautiful campaign, and a necessary one, but it’s one that can only work in conjunction with real, fundamental change: change in our schools; change in our churches, synagogues, and mosques; and change in our government. To the president, I say: You claim you want to see an end to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, but you refuse to do it by executive order out of some pass-the-buck ideal that the body that legislated it should also be the one to repeal it. But I say that all three branches of government are equal. It’s clear where the judicial branch is coming down on the issue, but your Department of Justice insists on appealing those decisions—partly made possible by gay Republicans, to boot—for that same idealistic reason.

Nones

¶ Why China is so upset about Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize, even though there really are no (or not many) “dissidents” in China: in a land where history has a more cyclical look than it does almost anywhere else (with dynasties toppling every two hundred fifty years or so), elites try to forestall the seemingly inevitable. (LRB blog)

So why has Beijing’s reaction to Liu’s winning the prize been so extreme? One thing Beijing fears at times like this is division within the ranks of Chinese leaders: authoritarian regimes generally fall when those at the top are divided, and global attention has a tendency to bring out dissent – in the wake of Liu’s win, a group of veteran Party members have written a letter calling for greater freedoms of speech.

More generally, Beijing could be said to be excessively scared of history repeating itself. China’s leaders have studied in detail the mistakes that their predecessors made prior to 1949, and that Central and Eastern European Communists made in the late 1980s. The 1989 protest movement reminded them of Solidarity; Falun Gong resembled the syncretic sects whose risings unseated (in the case of the 14th-century Red Turbans) or nearly toppled (in the case of the 19th-century Taipings) dynasties. The response to Liu’s co-authorship of Charter 08, a document that could be seen as merely an expression of concern by a relatively powerless set of individuals, fits into this pattern. Twelve years after Charter 77 was published, Václav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia.

Vespers

¶ M Rebekah Otto just bought a lot of books at a library book sale. Now she faces the familiar quandaries. (The Rumpus)

And I can’t help but wonder – will I read them? I started Oliver Sacks’ The Anthropologist on Mars ($4) on the bus ride home. Perhaps I need a plan. Chronologically: all of them – even The Gulag Archipelago ($5). Or by topic. An experimental literature syllabus: Three Lives by Gertrude Stein ($2), then B.S. Johnson, then John Barth, George Saunders. The Paul LaFarge fits in there, too. Then a late-20^th and early-21^st century literature class. Then a Woolf-Didion-Mary McCarthy class. I don’t know if William Safire’s On Language ($2) will fit with any other book in this bizarre collection. I could have a misfits streak where I unite the Safire with The Letters of Abelard and Heloise ($2) and the Oliver Sacks book.

In early encounters with these piles, I have gravitated towards the essays on literature rather than the literature itself. Mary McCarthy’s On the Contrary ($2) and Donald Bartheleme’s Not-Knowing ($3) both discuss the state of the novel and the role of fiction. And these two estimable thinkers reach more or less the opposite conclusion. In her essay “The Fact in Fiction,” McCarthy makes clear that the novel is a fact-filled product. She defines it as: “A prose book of a certain thickness that tells a story of real life… The distinctive mark of the novel is its concern with the actual world, the world of fact, of the verifiable, of figures, even, and statistics.” Bartheleme tells me, “Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed…” Not McCarthy’s novelists, I suppose, not Melville or Tolstoy or Faulkner. When Bartheleme condemns “work that rushes toward the reader with outflung arms” as irrelevant, I see McCarthy scoff.

Of course, these two critics come from different generations, McCarthy being twenty years Bartheleme’s senior, not to mention divergent literary lineages. This is also to say nothing of the immense volumes of scholarship and criticism on this subject by other writers. But their arguments are beside the point, or beside my point at least, which is to say the relationship between the ideas is as important as the ideas themselves. I can have it both ways, factful and factless, and they both lend a new and useful lens to my reading.

Compline

¶ Applying the principles of phylogenetics (evolutionary relatedness) to languages, and mapping social forms over the findings, yields controversial findings that Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel hails “the best method to solve questions about the evolution of political complexity.” (Nature; via 3 Quarks Daily)

But the data used by Currie and his team relate instead to the spreading out of people and their languages over a wide geographical area — so the ways in which societies might change structure in that situation might be rather different. For example, a small group breaking away from the mainland is a different case to a large state falling apart into several smaller groups, each of which remain in the same area.

Some anthropologists might also lack familiarity with these heavily statistical methods taken from genetics. “Even supposing I knew these statistical techniques, just how you get from a linguistic phylogeny to political evolution, I don’t know,” Carneiro says.

Diamond defends the method. “The languages are not used to derive any results at all about societies, but to work out the phylogenetic tree. And once that’s worked out, you can use that tree to study — in this case — political evolution. So the only question would be ‘are languages a good way to work out relationships between societies?'” In general, Diamond says, languages do fit the bill.

Have a Look

¶ Steerforth’s Greatest Hits. (The Age of Uncertainty)

Carrie Fisher is sorry about the cocaine, and wants to work in this town again.

In closing, I suggest you stay away from ingesting this anxious making powder & if you run into Mister Lucas, Please tell him how sorry I am that this ever happened, that I’ve admitted to its occurring & I promise not to do it again should he decide to do another sequel starring a geriatric Mr & Mrs. Han Solo, on the shopping planet- having pedicures & trying on nightgowns from deep space.

Every time I sit in Carnegie Hall and listen to Orpheus play, I feel very lucky. Every time. Now and then, though, Orpheus does something blitzing, and I jump out of my seat. Tonight was one of those nights. Garrick Ohlsson had a lot to do with the fabulousness, but we’d been well primed.

Let’s start with the encore, Chopin’s biggest waltz, E-Flat, Op 18. Everybody knows it by heart but it got a completely fresh performance, highly mannered in being true to the period (the very affected 25 years, 1815-1840, that we call the “Silly Quarter”). But clear and perfectly articulated, a dance for ten figures choreographed by Paul Taylor.

And go from there to cadenzas. Never before in my life have I found cadenzas interesting in the concert hall. There has always been an obligatory feel to them; “we have to do this, even though we don’t like to show off.” I’m afraid to say (which is why I’m not quite saying it) that Garrick Ohlsson made the cadenzas seem the whole point of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. A shocking idea; if there’s one Beethoven concerto that seems not to be about showing off, it’s the Fourth. And Ohlsson wasn’t showing off! He was just filling Carnegie Hall with something like the inescapable presence of a massive pipe organ as he tootled through the orthodox cadenzas — with the air of improvising them, not getting them exactly right. You know what I mean; does this run come before that trill or after? Who pays attention? I didn’t pay attention to the composition of the cadenza, that’s for sure. I was completely taken in by the playing. Music that I’ve known like the back of my hand since I was a freshman in college reared from the Carnegie stage like a new kind of animal.

At the beginning of the Beethoven, I thought that Ohlsson was doing his own thing on the runs. This is a feeling that I get when pianists begin and end a run on time but fall out of synch during the execution. Rhythms seem almost syncopated, and not in an interesting way. But long before the midpoint of the first movement, Ohlsson dropped his needle into the groove and stayed there, the beating heart (pulse) of the music. The soloist, in my view, is the real conductor of a concerto. The orchestra is with him or not. When it seems that the soloist is not with the orchestra, the effect of his playing is never more than decorative.

Enough about Ohlsson for the moment. The program began with Schubert’s Fourth. I don’t really know the work. I recognize the hooks, ah yes, this is the symphony where that happens. But this was Orpheus playing. With a little effort, I could hear the sprouts of mature Schubert pushing through the Haydn. The program notes, by the way, compared the propyleia (the slow introduction) to Haydn’s 97th, but to me it emulated the opening of The Creation. Not bad for the nineteen year-old Schubert. I felt that everyone on stage was working hard to present Schubert’s not-at-all Tragic symphony as an interesting piece of music. (This was distinct from my impression of the playing, which was one of effortlessness.) I was persuaded. I need to get another recording. (Which is unfair to the EMI-era Karajan in my library; I’ve really never listened closely to it.)

Berg’s Lyric Suite: I thought to myself before it started, maybe I’ll get it this time. And I sort of did. The music of the Second Viennese School breaks the promise that Western  music makes from the Seventeenth Century on, which is that you will always know more or less how far you are from the end of the piece. The three movements from the Lyric Suite could have been three times longer or half as long, and only the experts in the audience would have felt the difference in a musical way. But the music is pregnant with possibilities for movie soundtracks. It’s almsot a sample book, especially if you’re thinking of horror or suspense. I want to listen to this again, a lot. Maybe on my Chopin playlist!

Here’s a good one: the program misplaced the Intermission, putting it between the Schubert and the Berg. I didn’t notice,  because it would never occur to me to check to see where the intermission would fall in such a program. I expect that most of the other people sitting in the stalls knew just as well as I did that a mistake had been made, but that didn’t stop them from getting up and milling about. It was a bad high school moment. When Orpheus came back out to play the Berg, they had to sit tight for a good three minutes whilst stragglers found their seats. After the Berg, Kathleen overheard a nearby woman complain that she hadn’t heard a piano.

For Kathleen, as for me, this was one of the great nights. Orpheus is always at least wonderful. Tonight it was scary: what if we’d missed it? And I came to an odd conclusion at dinner afterward. Orpheus is proof that you do need a conductor to make most orchestras play well. Every musician who can do without one is already committed to Orpheus. Seriously, I don’t think that most symphony orchestra musicians want to work as hard as the Orpheus gang does. It was a sobering reflection: Orpheus is not the “wave of the future,” as we used to say. It’s anomalousness proves a point. The Mutis and Levines will always be with us.

Matins

¶ We don’t have a problem with ebooks, probably because we’re sure that books will continue to be produced — just as, digital cameras notwithstanding, we’re living in a golden age of archaic film revivals (callotype, &c). But book production will probably be a top-of-the-line affair, though, something that Joe Moran perhaps inadvertently hits on in his low-key jeremiad against ebooks. Hint: we remember when station wagons still had real wooden panels — to simulate the coaches that they permanently and utterly displaced.

The valedictories for what is now disdainfully called “dead tree publishing” may be similarly premature. The lessons from history are that technological progress is uneven, that consumers are often sceptical of techno-hype, and that new technologies do not supplant old ones in linear fashion. Look at the iPad’s ebook reader: your book purchase is stored on a real-looking wooden bookcase and you take it off the shelf and flip its virtual pages over with your fingers. Why, it’s exactly like … reading a book! So long as the ebook continues to pay it the compliment of mimicry, I suspect that the printed book need not fear for its life just yet.

Lauds

¶ We were just this minute shocked to read that there’s a critic out there who regards Eve Harrington and Addison deWitt as gay characters in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. Happily, this idea was immediately refuted by The House Next Door‘s Odienator.

Speaking of Addison, he is my favorite character in All About Eve. Like Bette Davis, George Sanders was introduced to me by Disney. He also showed up 8 million times on Channel 11’s endless loop of 1972’s Psychomania. Addison lives up to the last syllable of his name, upping his Kinsey Score with every wonderful, malicious and catty remark. Sanders uses his voice to brilliant effect, turning even Mankiewicz’s cheapest lines into comic and Oscar gold. How can anyone not love a man who uses his charm like a razor? According to Wikipedia, Roger Corber has no love for my dear Mr. DeWitt. Corber writes:

“The nurturing heterosexual relationships of Margo and Bill and of Karen and Lloyd serve to contrast with the loveless relationship predation and sterile careerism of the homosexual characters, Eve and Addison. Eve uses her physical femininity as a weapon to try to break up the marriages of both couples, and the extreme cynicism of Addison serves as a model of Eve’s future.”

I will concede that several lines of dialogue do lean toward a reading of both Addison and Eve being homosexual: Eve says yes to taking off all Margo’s clothes and tucking her into bed, and Addison describes his desire for Eve as the “height of improbability.” I’m just not convinced that their sexuality, whatever that may be, is the cause of their unwholesome actions; they are both mad with power and ambition. Besides, a truly gay version would have had Addison trying to be Margo, Eve running off with Birdie and Bill running off with Darryl Zanuck. (Carol Burnett certainly had that last idea…) What would Mankiewicz’s point be in putting Eve and Addison together and implying that Addison is nailing her if he wanted to slam gays?

Prime

¶ Adam Gopnik’s review of Nicholas Phillipson’s new biography of Adam Smith, in the current issue of The New Yorker, sums up the latest scholarly thinking about the father of Anglophone economy, and suggests how much better off we would all be if we had really paid attention to what Smith actually had to say about the role of government in commercial affairs, instead of taking the free market fanatics’ word for it. [P] 

Smith believes, in a way that few neoclassical economists seem to accept, that there is a “natural” price for goods — a price that takes in the cost of making them and a profit for the makers — and a “market” price, and that these two are not always the same. The market is susceptible to pressures from the masters and dealers to keep prices unnaturally high. Smith does not think that “government is the problem”; he thinks that the producers’ compact against the consumers is the problem, and that the producers, because they are concentrated and rich, are usually able to make the government take their side. Itt is the proper function of the state to prevent the dealers from ganging up on the customers: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” For Smith, the market moves toward a monopoly; it is the job of the philosopher to define, and of the sovereign state to restore, free play.

Tierce

¶ BPA has been declared “toxic” by Canadian authories. It’s a great first step, in the face of commercial resistance to the ban, which has held back state action in the United States in Europe. (See Adam Gopnik, Prime) (NYT)

The compound, commonly known as BPA, has been shown to disrupt the hormone systems of animals and is under review in the United States and Europe.

Canada’s move, which was strenuously fought by the chemical industry, followed an announcement by the government two years ago that it would eliminate the compound’s use in polycarbonate bottles used by infants and children.

The compound was formally listed as being toxic to both the environment and human health in an official notice published online by the government without fanfare, a noticeable contrast to the earlier baby bottle announcement, which was made by two cabinet ministers.

George M. Enei, the director general of science and risk assessment at Environment Canada, one of two government departments that made the designation, said the move would make it easier to ban the use of BPA in specific products through regulations rather than by amending legislation, a cumbersome and slow process.

But he said the government’s first step would probably be to set limits on how much BPA can be released into the air or water by factories that use the compound.

Sext

¶ Jan Freeman looks into the pressing mystery of why we don’t say “governatorial.” (Globe; via The Morning News)

And so we could. In fact, English has tried out a number of variations on the ”governor” word family. In the 13th century, it borrowed govern from Old French, which eventually gave us governance, government, and, briefly, governator (insert Schwarzenegger joke here). Then, in the 15th century, English went back to the Latin gubernare to form another set of ”govern” words–gubernate, gubernatrix–of which the sole survivor is gubernatorial.

One obvious reason is that Americans had increasing numbers of state governors, and thus of elections in need of an adjective. As early as 1848, John Russell Bartlett, in ”Americanisms,” listed gubernatorial among words ”whose origin has grown out of our peculiar institutions, and which consequently are of a permanent nature.” (Caucus, lobby, mileage, and bunkum also made his list.) If the British had shared our need for gubernatorial, they too might have kept it current. But this commonsense analysis seems to have eluded the mavens.

We really can’t call it archaic–gubernatorial is only 300 years old, and thriving–but American critics have called it some other names along the way. Richard Grant White, a hugely popular 19th-century language maven, denounced the word in 1870 as ”a clumsy piece of verbal pomposity…pedantic, uncouth, and outlandish.” Thirty years later, Ralcy H. Bell told his readers that only ”pedants and ’small potatoes’” flaunted this big word. And Ambrose Bierce, in 1909, called gubernatorial ”needless and bombastic.” ”Leave it to those who call a political office a ’chair,’” he urged. ”’Gubernatorial chair’ is good enough for them. So is hanging.”

Why the ferocity? One possible reason is that gubernatorial was probably coined, and certainly embraced, by Americans. That would have tainted it in the eyes of our insecure language police, who were often anxious about our divergences from British usage. If England had given up on all its gubernator-derived words, why were we sticking with gubernatorial?

Nones

¶ George Clooney, diplomat. (Washington Post; via Real Clear World)

So what can the administration do? Clooney and Prendergast advocate a stronger mix of incentives and disincentives for Bashir. They point out that much stronger sanctions are possible, including the targeting of bank accounts and companies linked to the regime and its senior figures. More controversially, they say the United States should be prepared to normalize relations with Bashir and even consent to the suspension of his indictment by the International Criminal Court, if he makes peace with both southern Sudan and Darfur.

In the worst case, Prendergast said, the United States should be prepared to prevent the North from using its air force to indiscriminately attack the civilian population of the South, as it did in Darfur. That implies military intervention.

Though he spent the day meeting high level officials, Clooney said one of his aims was to motivate as many average citizens as possible to contact the White House and Congress and support aggressive U.S. action to prevent a war. “I don’t think of myself as a journalist and don’t pretend to be a journalist,” he said. “My job is to show up, because cameras follow me. That is the best way to spend my celebrity credit card.”

Vespers 

¶ Laura Miller gives us Michel de Montaigne — the patron saint of ruminative, unreliable bloggers. (Salon)

Montaigne’s essays can be meandering, yes, and often only tangentially related to their supposed themes. He filled them with anecdotes and examples collected from classical literature but also stories he got from friends and the peasants on his estate. In this and other qualities, he probably had more influence on the free-form English essay than on the lofty, abstraction-prone style of Académie française-sanctioned French. And even back in the day, people complained that he shared too much trivial detail, such as his preference for white wine over red; “Who the hell wants to know what he liked?” one crabby scholar retorted. In the 19th century, Montaigne’s candid discussion of carnal matters led concerned editors to produce a bowdlerized version of his works, more suitable for the tender minds of young ladies.

In short, Montaigne was accused of every sin attributed to today’s memoirists and bloggers, whose literary great-grandfather he is. Nevertheless, you will find “Essays” in every one of those collections of great books you used to be able to buy by the set, bound in “full genuine leather,” with gold lettering. This suggests that the line between trash and literature may be less firmly drawn than some would have us believe, a notion that would probably please Montaigne himself. Or perhaps the real lesson here is that it doesn’t really matter what you write about, provided that you do it well.

Compline

¶ Roger Cohen talks to Christiane Lagarde, French minister for the economy, about the need for retirement reform. (NYT)

“This is a key test of France’s ability to be sensible about its public finances, sensible about grabbing the future and not taking it on credit,” Lagarde, 54, said, dismissing some Socialist Party opposition as “totally irresponsible.” She sighed: “I hope we can demonstrate that France can actually change without breaking its chemistry and its culture and its intricacies.”

Aaah, French chemistry and culture and intricacies! Lagarde, whose elegant professionalism has proved an essential foil to Sarkozy’s explosive restlessness, spoke in the lovely Hôtel de Seignelay overlooking the Seine. On a mantelpiece lay the gravestone of Coco, “the favorite dog,” the inscription says, of Marie-Antoinette, who entrusted the pet to a friend before her execution in 1793. The stone has been uprooted from the garden because the property is for sale. The state needs cash, and not just from asking people to work a couple of years longer.

I believe France can change and preserve its social-market balance-cum-essence. The trouble is Sarkozy’s unpopularity is such that the reform has become a lightning rod. The left loathes his policies; many on the right loathe his style.

But he’s right. Lagarde estimates the reform, expected to get final parliamentary approval this month, would add 0.3 percent to annual G.D.P. growth and cut the deficit by 0.5 percent (beginning in three years).

That’s critical to a fragile recovery not helped by the clouds over America. “I am more concerned about the U.S. economy than the French,” Lagarde told me, citing the “structural de-leveraging” that is hitting a “world economy that had been driven by high U.S. consumption.” Add to that U.S. unemployment trends that are “not reassuring” and a low-interest U.S. monetary policy that’s “understandable” but “not helping developing countries or emerging markets or anyone.”

Have a Look

¶ The Procrastinators. (Brain Pickings)

The Childean miners have all be lifted to safety, after weeks of suspense and NASA-aided rehabilitation. For a few of the men, the return to regular life will be the final chapter of the ordeal.

Esteban Rojas, 44, said he would give his wife of 25 years the church wedding she always deserved, while Yonny Barrios, 50, faced a slightly more complicated future. The woman he embraced upon exiting the rescue capsule turned out to be his mistress, not his wife.

“He has another companion,” Marta Salinas, his wife of 28 years, told reporters, adding that she might wait for him at home. “I’m happy for him, and if he remakes his life, good for him.”

Yesterday, in the course of a bit of home improvement, the antique modem that has served us for over ten years boiled to death. There is never a good time for such things to happen, but I have to say that I managed rather well, at least after a bit of preliminary whining. I didn’t sleep very well, but just before I got out of bed I formulated a list of four things that I ought to do in the morning, trusting that arrangements to replace the modem by lunchtime would solve the connectivity problem. (Meanwhile I was able to rely on the two MiFi cards that we stock, against just such disasters.) I set to work at once, and completed three of the tasks on the list, doing the greater part of the work on the fourth as well. If I had not managed the morning so well, I should never be sitting here this evening nattering on about what I’m reading.

¶ Darin Strauss’s Half a Life is a more modest book than the promises trumpeted by its blurbs suggest. It is not “staggering” (Elizabeth Gilbert); nor is it, really, a “story of hope” (Carrie Fisher). This is all to the good, and for the reason that the memoirist, whose car collided with an errant bicycle when he was eighteen, killing the cyclist, a younger student at his high school, states at the very end: “This tragedy isn’t mine to own. It’s hers.” With a resolve that brings the stern Puritan fathers to mind, Strauss refuses to aggrandize the terrible thing that happened to him, and in the end, as we’ve seen, he disclaims finding any meaning in it. What happened to the girl, Celine Zillke, was terrible. (Strauss himself was as blameless as it is possible to be in such an accident.) But it happened to her, not to him. What happened to him was something else, something that it took “half a life” to come to terms with.

The accident has formed me. I can no more discard it than I can discard having grown into adulthood. But I am grown now. And because I am, I can say no. I can say no to the hectoring, blistery hurt. I can say to myself: It’s all right to take in the winter beach and grass smells, and crackle back across the sand of the raod, and smile at the faces you love.

Half a life, in other words, to realize that he himself was still alive — too much so ever to regret it with any sincerity.

Half a Life is very much a book — a codex. The blank pages that lie between its short texts act as cinematic fades-to-black, pressing the reader to allow the closing moment to dilate a bit before displacing it with the next. The effect is serious without being pretentious; in a book as oppressed by mortality as this one, silence is the most eloquent reminder that personal catastrophes are often, and perhaps usually, meaningless. The “ordinary” version of Half a Life would be a search for significance. Strauss is searching only for peace, and what is meaningful is that he doesn’t begin his search in earnest until he has a family to protect from his still-disordered feelings about the accident. He can’t share what he went through, of course, but he can tell us as carefully as possibly what it felt like (and this would entail not saying too much). That is what Half a Life does. The experience that Darin Strauss has imprinted on the pages of his book is a good deal more precious than meaning would be.

¶ I’ve just begun Richard Jay Hutto’s A Peculiar Tribe of People, a book about a gruesome murder in Macon, George, in 1960, that my Internet friend Brooks Peters recommended. The recommendation itself is part of the charm; this is the sort of book that, when I was a boy, a convalescent would be given as a gift. We don’t do convalescence anymore, but it’s still very pleasant to retire with a book like this, as irresistible as a dish of cocktail peanuts.

Hutto’s book is also the sort of book that simply wasn’t written when I was a boy, because of what let’s coyly call “the sexual element.”

¶ The Cunningham billing is false advertising; I’m not going to say very much about By Nightfall right now. The book impressed me as a kind of Old Master character study, like one of the Bronzino drawings that the Museum exhibited last year. The story, with its stinging little climax — a surprising, eccentric detail that turns out to be the focus of the work — is less a drama than a complete and coherent gesture. And once you see it that way, what might have seemed a slight bit of fiction becomes a magnificent portrait. 

Due to technical difficulties (the death of a very old modem), today’s Daily Office may not be complete by 6 PM.

Matins

¶ In case we all have something better to do tomorrow, it’s been nice knowing you: “Retired NORAD Officer’s New Book Predicts a Tentative Worldwide UFO Display on October 13, 2010.” (Yahoo; via MetaFilter)

Fulham writes it is generally recognized UFOs function beyond our earth’s physical laws, and has concluded answers to questions regarding who they are, where are they from, why are they here, are they a threat, and the mystery of abductions could only be found at a higher dimension of reality.

For more than a decade, through the services of a world renowned channeler, the author has communicated with an ethereal group of entities known as the Transcendors — 43,000 very old souls who combine their vast experience and knowledge through eons of incarnations, providing advice and information to humans in search of basic realities of mankind’s existence.

The book Challenges of Change reports on the author’s years of communication with the Transcendors in a question and answer format intended to inform and challenge. The Transcendors reveal through the author crucial information about urgent global challenges facing mankind such as earth changes, international terrorism, worldwide financial collapse and the environmental crisis. One revelation is al Qaeda has a dirty nuclear bomb and WMD, but faces a moral quandary over “containment of collateral damages.”

Utilizing the theme of the Four Horsemen as symbolic metaphor, Fulham warns mankind will survive all of these future challenges, except the CO2 pollution of our atmosphere. According to information provided to the author by the Transcendors, the build-up of CO2 pollution is rising 1% annually to a “critical mass” of 22% in which mankind could not survive ”without outside intervention.”

We’re dying to know if the UFO pilots can name the Four Horsemen. Also: love “tentative.”

Lauds

¶ Dance director Robert Bettmann considers the “sequestration” of his art form, and the consequent drop in grants and revenues, as an industrial, not artistic, problem. We think that he’s barking up the right tree: dance, like all the fine arts, needs to re-present itself for new patrons. (Dance USA; via  Arts Journal)

Every industry, from steel to cars to buggy whips, wants to preserve itself. Every industry is made of a complex of managers, workers, and their families, all of whom benefit meaningfully from employment by the industry. Industries in slow decline –steel or cars – have shown extraordinary resourcefulness in blaming others, and attacking competition. Hardship breeds insularity, and as working professionals, we are sensibly prioritizing preservation (in every sense), and in so doing are slowly disconnecting from the main which validates our worth. Our cultural value is in decline because we are increasingly sequestered within our own industry (by necessity.)
 
I’m not a guy who 20 years ago could have predicted the iPhone. I marvel at people like farsighted author Jules Verne, who envisioned massive cultural and technological trajectories before they were even really in motion. I can see the problem of declining cultural value, but I don’t have a solution. I do know that art and art forms are born in tiny little revolutions that occur in individual rooms — and individual minds — springing to collectives and communities. And that the somatic sensitivity and creative plasticity that keeps us in thrall within the dance field are not threatened at all. To put it more succinctly: Dance is not in decline; only the industry is struggling.

Some of us today look back on the jazz of the 1930s, or the classical music of the 18th century, and relish the bright lights of those days. Who are we to know if the artistic value of our product today will be valued in two hundred years? Is that question relevant to our industry, or to us as individuals? We will continue to sell tickets, and to the extent that we provide broad value to those not already engaged with our form, our cultural stock will rise, or fall.

Prime

¶ At naked capitalism, Yves Smith comments on a largely-overlooked wrinkle in the foreclosure mess: “Bank of America is now eating title insurance liability on foreclosed properties sold by its servicer.”

It isn’t hard to see that other banks are likely to be required to take the same step as Bank of America, at least if they want to unload foreclosed property.

It isn’t hard to see where this is going. The biggest servicers are part of TBTF banks. The biggest trustees (the folks who were supposed to make sure that the loans all got to the securitization trust properly) are part of TBTF banks. The major structurer/packagers are now all part of TBTF banks.

Isn’t a concentrated financial services industry grand? Any time they screw up, they are too large to be made to pay for their crimes. The die was cast at the beginning of the Obama administration. It was a critical window of opportunity to take over and put new management in the weakest of the big banks (and probably force them to shed operations too) and they instead were coddled and sent back on their merry way.

I guarantee that the losses, between extend and pretend that will no longer be viable (in particular, the unrealistic marks on second mortgages) and the liabilities resulting from this colossal mess, at least one major bank will be insolvent. But the odds of the new special resolution authority being used? I put the odds at pretty much zero.

Tierce

¶ At the Telegraph, Tom Chivers talks to neuroscientist Paul Haggard about free will. Which, scientifically speaking, can’t exist. Which suggests to us, as it does to Mr Chivers, that the concept of free will needs to be revisited rather than junked. (via  The Morning News)

“It’s a rule that we need to have as social animals. You couldn’t have society unless, if you do something wrong, you pay for it. The question is, what do we do when people don’t have the brain machinery to play by the rules – or decide not to play by them? That’s not a scientific question. That’s a moral one.”

Maybe, I suggest, we’ve over-defined free will. Perhaps it doesn’t exist in the mystical breaking-the-laws-of-the-universe way, but there is a sense in which this “me”, this brain and body, responds to the world, reacts to information, tries to shape its environment; takes decisions. Can we not pull free will back to something more defensible? He taps his fingers.

Sext

¶ Simply by announcing, in the title of his blog, that “I Like Boring Things,” James Ward is letting us know that he himself is not boring. Something else, but not that. Be sure to click through for the comic.

A while ago, I mentioned that I wanted people to fictionalise me – to name a character after me in some work of theirs; a novel, a short story, a script, a song, anything.

What I like about this idea, apart from its obvious appeal to my sense of vanity and self-importance, is its slow burn nature. Both Emma Kennedy and Jenny Colgan have said they’ll include James Wards in their books, but book publishing takes quite a long time, so these fictional versions of me won’t come to life until the middle of next year at the earliest. I like that. This is a long, slow process. It will continue long after I have forgotten all about it.

I also like the chaotic nature of the idea. Because this is something I am asking other people to do, I’ll never really be able to monitor it. It happens without any input from me, without my knowledge, and over a timescale I can’t control.

The other day, I got an email from someone called Morgan Seekoo saying they believed a character in a web comic was based on me.

Nones

¶ Although we believe that the first lesson in the study of history is that history does not repeat itself, we’re intrigued by Karim Sadjadpour’s re-reading of George Kennan’s 1947 “Sources of Soviet Conduct” essay, in which “Tehran” is substituted for “Moscow.” Final point:

“It would be an exaggeration to say that American behavior unassisted and alone could exercise a power of life and death over the Communist Islamist movement and bring about the early fall of Soviet power the Islamic Republic in Russia Iran. But the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet Iranian policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin Islamic Republic a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet Iranian power.”

In other words, hunker down for the long haul. (Foreign Policy; via Real Clear World)

Vespers¶ While a favorable review isn’t necessarilyas informative as it might be, it generally gives a much better sense of what a book is like than a bad review does, and for this very reason, a “good” review can function as a “bad” review. John Brown’s page on The Instructions, by Adam Levin, makes it sound like a hermetic game, not a novel. (The Rumpus)

The Instructions is hyper self-aware. It narrates its own creation. It utilizes false paratextual elements such as a publisher’s disclaimer. It sometimes cross-references by page number. But these elements are not surprising in an era where drawing attention to artifice is no longer innovative in itself. That isn’t to say The Instructions doesn’t have innovative elements. For example, Levin uses e-mail replies to sneak in a bit of anti-chronological narration and creates fun text diagrams that are useful for mapping the physical spaces of the novel, such as “the Cage,” the lockdown program for behavioral disorders at Aptakisic.

[snip]

The Instructions draws heavily from Jewish tradition. Gurion mimics the style of Hebrew scripture, and he uses titles that make direct parallels (e.g. “Story of Stories”). However, the relationship to scripture is much deeper, as it undergirds the symbolic structure of the novel. Gurion possesses many messianic markers (his birthmarks, his scholarly ability, his geneology), and in that respect The Instructions resembles the Gospel of Matthew, which piles high fulfilled prophecies. But The Instructions pre-empts such naïve interpretation by including a discussion of messianic prophecy which concludes that any prophecy can be reinterpreted in retrospect (also providing another example of this book’s sophisticated treatment of interpretation). Readers unfamiliar with scripture may find the exegetical sections tedious, but they are essential, especially the discussion of Abraham’s sacrifice. Levin is meticulous and does not shy away from literacy. Nothing is off-limits from allusion or extended discussion, from Borges to Roth to Salinger. I thought I had caught an anachronism when Obama came up, until I realized that in the timeline of the novel, he was just elected as the junior Senator from Illinois, and the story takes place in suburban Chicago.

Compline

¶ The biggest bone of contention in the labor dispute that has bogged France down in transport cuts appears to be a proposed raise in the retirement age, from 60 t0 62. (The idea that the Editor would have already retired under current rules cracks us up.) We understand why workers would want to collect pensions and days off sooner rather than later, but the youth of France also opposes the age increase. (WSJ)

To extend the pension protest over the next few days, unions are counting on support from young people, who have proven a formidable force in the past. In 2006, the government retreated from plans to introduce a short-term labor contract for young people because of massive student demonstrations.

Some high-school students took part in the marches. At the Montaigne school in central Paris, some students attended classes inside while about 200 pupils picketed in front of the building’s main door as a Coca-Cola Co. marketing crew distributed free beverages. “We must join the movement,” said Karim Boursali, a 17-year-old student at another nearby school and a delegate with the UNL high-school union. “If our parents don’t retire at 60, we won’t get jobs.”

Still, student participation remained limited, with classes disrupted at about one in ten high schools, according to unions and the French education ministry. Mr. Boursali said he wasn’t sure how many of his friends would continue to protest.

Have a Look

¶ Useless Australia. (Strange Maps)

Regarding the Senate campaign of Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, the Editors of The New York Times openly deplore the inattentiveness of voters, but their complaint is fairly aimed at right-wing demagoguery.  

The public’s lack of attention to detail, and Mr. Johnson’s willingness to exploit it, could end the career of Mr. Feingold, who in three terms has distinguished himself for trying to bring fairness to campaign finance and decency to national security, among other achievements. He has routinely crossed party lines to work with Republicans and has had the courage to break with his own party more often than almost any other senator.

[snip]

But the Wisconsin electorate he faces seems to have lost its progressive streak and become more like other Midwestern states. Several polls have shown that the number of likely voters who consider themselves conservative has risen from a quarter of the electorate to nearly half. The misinformation and simplistic solutions propounded by talk radio and the Republican Party are having an effect even in a state that preferred Mr. Obama by 14 points two years ago.

Matins

¶ Although we’re terrified of a Republican takeover of Congress, we try not to show it, even to ourselves, because fear is so bad for morale. We do our best and hope for the best. You’d think that politicians, clever boys that they are, would figure out a way to making doing the best and hoping for the best sound like a satisfying and doable social goal — but perhaps they’re not so clever, after all. And we’re left with the problem of an electorate disappointed by deflated hopes — the subject of an interesting essay by Drake Bennett at the Globe.  (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lauds

¶ With the death of Joan Sutherland, the trio of Space Age voices has deserted Planet Earth.Like Birgit Nilsson and Luciano Pavarotti, Sutherland possessed a voice of superhuman power and accuracy, and reminded opera fans what it’s like to live in an era of exciting voices. As she was the first to say, however, Joan Sutherland was half of a team, and she is survived by the other half, her husband, Richard Bonynge, a man whose influence on his wife’s career brought Svengali to many minds. (NYT)

Paradoxically, Mr. Bonynge contributed to the sometimes dramatically uninvolved quality of her performances. By the mid-1960s he was her conductor of choice, often part of the deal when she signed a contract. Trained as a pianist and vocal coach, he essentially taught himself conducting. Even after extended experience, he was not the maestro opera fans turned to for arresting performances of Verdi’s “Traviata.” But he thoroughly understood the bel canto style and was attuned to every component of his wife’s voice.

Yet if urging her to be sensible added to her longevity, it sometimes resulted in her playing it safe. Other conductors prodded Ms. Sutherland to sing with greater intensity: for example, Georg Solti, in an acclaimed 1967 recording of Verdi’s Requiem with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera Chorus, and Zubin Mehta, who enticed Ms. Sutherland into recording the title role in Puccini’s “Turandot,” which she never sang onstage, for a 1972 recording. Both of these projects featured the tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who would become an ideal partner for Ms. Sutherland in the bel canto repertory. Ms. Sutherland’s fiery Turandot suggests she had dramatic abilities that were never tapped.

Prime

¶ Two good stories about business technology in today’s Times: Wayne Arnold’s report on the obstacles to cloud computing in Asia — China’s government requires Chinese servers, but the bandwidth isn’t up to the task — and Ashlee Vance’s story about Michael Simon, an entrepreneur who went to Hungary in 1992, after b school, and turned himself into a “mogul.”

Mr. Simon’s latest creation to bubble out of Budapest is LogMeIn, a 400-worker outfit that makes software that allows one computing device to take control of another. Using this technology, a person can tap into a home or office PC while on the road with a laptop. Customer support technicians also use LogMeIn’s products to take control of people’s machines and fix their PC problems.

Similar technology has existed for years. What LogMeIn did was make it quick, easy and cheap to use by shielding people from complex computer configuration work. The company, which went public last year, stands as one of the most profitable of its kind and competes against GoToMyPC from Citrix and pcAnywhere from Symantec.

Mr. Simon, who is 45 and the chief of LogMeIn, attributes the success to the company’s penny-pinching Hungarian roots. “In Silicon Valley, someone comes up with an idea and people pour money into it,” Mr. Simon said. “In Hungary, you’re expected to do a lot more than people expect with a lot less.”

Tierce

¶ Remember being told, when you were little, that deaf people can see better, and vice versa? It turns out to be objectively correct: the brain compensates for sensory deprivation by intensifying certain existing powers — the ones that would be especially useful to the deprived individual. (Wired Science)

Deaf cats don’t have better overall vision than their hearing counterparts, the researchers found. Rather, like deaf humans, the cats are better at two particular visual tasks — seeing objects in far peripheral vision and detecting very slow motion. These particular enhancements might help deaf people assess their surroundings more accurately: “You can’t hear the dog running or the car coming at you, so being able to see it seems like a really good skill,” says Lomber, of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.

After establishing that these two visual abilities were enhanced in deaf cats, Lomber and his team tested whether hearing-related brain areas were responsible for the boost. With the help of a 3-millimeter-wide cooling device, the researchers inactivated very particular regions of the cats’ auditory cortices. The coil sits on the outside of the brain and induces a precisely localized hypothermia, causing the region to effectively shut down until the device is turned off.

Deaf cats with chilled hearing-related brain regions lost their visual edge, and in a very specific way. “What we found was, much to our surprise, that these functions were not distributed randomly over the auditory cortex, but they were specifically localized in particular places,” Lomber says.

Sext

¶ A story you gotta love: Speakeasy hounds are sniffing out Mad Men‘s plot twists but doing real-world research. When the American Cancer Society called on Sterling Cooper, in the last episode (this is pretend, mind you), did that herald a return of “Connie” Hilton, the real-life hotelier who appears in the show’s third season, and (also in real-life) a patron of the ACS?

“He did not have an official corporate charity, but if there was one, it probably would have been City of Hope,” said Mark Young, a historian and archivist for the University of Houston’s Conrad N. Hilton College, who worked with the show’s writer’s last year to ensure an accurate portrayal of Hilton.

This morning, Young was away from his office—where a Hilton painting, a gift from City of Hope, hangs—so he did not have full access to his records. But he said he wasn’t surprised to hear about Hilton’s interest in American Cancer Society. “If someone was explaining how they were going after studying cancer, I can see him getting into it,” he said. “He was always fascinated, in a sense, by what made things tick.”

Remember Hilton, the character? He was last seen in the Season Three finale, ruefully informing Don that Sterling Cooper was being sold. He and Don shook hands, postponing a whirlwind relationship that ended as improbably as it began. They expressed mutual desire to work together again. One new firm, lost account and Mrs. Blankenship later—by golly!—it’s possible that the two men could soon shake on another sort of deal.

Or, while we’re speculating, maybe Connie will just introduce Don to one of his pals. Like, say, Walt Disney. “They were pretty good friends,” Young said of Hilton and Disney. “They were in the same business, hospitality, and friendly. I wouldn’t call them competitors, because Disney World hadn’t come about yet.”

Whoa, boys! Don’t go running off to Disney World in your dreams!

Nones

¶ At Real Clear World, Claude Rakisits, of Australia’s Deakin University, calls for a Marshall Plan for Pakistan. A nice idea, but hardly viable without first abolishing Pakistan’s feudal power structure first. The plea is primarily useful as a reading on how inadequate the national and international response to the summer floods has been.

Unfortunately, the response to what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon refers to as “the biggest, most complex natural disaster we have faced in UN history”, was pathetic and utterly inadequate relative to the challenge facing Pakistan.
The spokesman for the global aid organisation Oxfam, Louis Belanger, described last month’s meeting as “yet another letdown by the international community”.

The participating countries did pledge more funds in response to the UN’s global appeal to raise $US2 billion ($2.02bn) but managed to reach only 33 per cent of this.

Taking into account all the new pledges, the US has allotted about $US450 million, Britain has doubled its aid to about $US200m and the EU has given about $US315m.

Australia has committed a total of $75m.

Meanwhile, some of Pakistan’s closest friends, China and the UAE, came up with $US47m and $US8m respectively — fair-weather friends indeed.

After a slow start, Saudi Arabia, a country only too happy to spend millions on building in Pakistan madrassas that churn our thousands of unemployable jihadists, has donated more than $US240m. Meanwhile, India, Pakistan’s erstwhile enemy, has given $US25m.

Vespers

¶ Ms NOLA tipped us off to a Tom-Sawyer event that’s going to hosted by the Philippine bloggers who run Literary Stew and Coffeespoons, in the second week in November (7-13): read a book published by the New York Review of Books (nyrb) and blog about it.

During the week, Honey and I will collate your posts and blog about them. As soon as you’ve posted one of your reviews, please leave a link in our comments section. Everyone who participates will get a chance to win prizes at the end of the week which of course will be NYRB books. The prizes come courtesy of
Fully Booked Philippines. Thanks so much Fully Booked! We’ll be giving out a prize for the best book review to be judged by Honey and I and another prize will be chosen at random and given to one of the lucky reviewers who participated. This is open internationally.

Compline

¶ David Brooks writes about “demosclerosis” (Jonathan Rauch’s coinage), the paralyzing effect of pension commitments. While we’re not entirely opposed to public-sector unions, the wrong-headedness of public-sector pensions is obvious. (We believe that pensions generally must be funded by payroll deductions — now, that is, rather than later.) (NYT)

In addition, public sector unions can use political power to increase demand for their product. DiSalvo notes that between 1989 ad 2004, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees was the biggest spender in American politics, giving $40 million to federal candidates. The largest impact is on low-turnout local elections. The California prison guard union recently sent a signal by spending $200,000 to defeat a state assemblyman who had tried to reduce costs.

In states across the country, elected leaders raise state employee salaries in the fat years and then are careful to placate the unions by raising future pension benefits in the lean ones. Even if cost-conscious leaders are elected, they find their hands tied by pension commitments and employee contracts.

In our view, this is a corrupt practice, no matter how “legal” it seems.

The end result is sclerotic government. Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose. But we don’t have that government. We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.

 

Have a Look

¶ Terry Teachout’s “Not Unlike,” an illustrated memoir about color television.

¶ The cloudy future of the Yerkes Observatory. (Wired Science)

In France — “Where Having It All Doesn’t Mean Having Equality” — mothers are still expected to put femininity ahead of feminism. Geneviève Fraisse winds up Katrin Bennhold’s report with a great crack.

Ms. Fraisse, the philosopher, says more than two centuries after France got rid of the king as the father of the nation, it needs to get rid of the father as the king of the family. “We had one revolution,” she said, “now we need another one — in the family.”

We wish we could say that we’re holding our breath. For the time being, can we get that in French?

Matins

¶ In Context, Amy Schalet writes about how differently adolescent sexuality (pretty much the same thing everywhere) is treated in the Netherlands. (via MetaFilter)

Karel and Rhonda illustrate a puzzle: the vast majority of American parents oppose a sleepover for high-school-aged teenagers, while Dutch teenagers who have steady boyfriends or girlfriends are typically allowed to spend the night with them in their rooms. This contrast is all the more striking when we consider the trends toward a liberalization of sexual behavior and attitudes that have taken place throughout Europe and the United States since the 1960s. In similar environments, both parents and kids are experiencing adolescent sex, gender,and relationships very differently. A sociological exploration of these contrasts reveals as much about the cultural differences between these two countries as it does about views on adolescent sexuality and child rearing.

Today, most adolescents in the U.S., like their peers across the industrialized world, engage in intercourse—either opposite or same-sex—before leaving their teens (usually around seventeen). Initiating sex and exploring romantic relationships, often with several successive partners before settling into longterm cohabitation or marriage, are now normative parts of adolescence and young adulthood in the developed world. But in the U.S., teenage sex has been fraught with cultural ambivalences, heated political struggles, and poor health outcomes, generating concern among the public, policy makers, scholars, and parents. American adolescent sexuality has been dramatized rather than normalized.

At least, we suppose, the christianists and other social conservatives are making sure that, if they do manage to send this country to hell in a handbasket, it will be a proper, gated hell.

Lauds

¶ Will French studios save British fimmaking? Adam Dawltry, at the Guardian, thinks that they might. (via  Arts Journal) 

Historically, the UK and the French film industries have never been as close as they should have been. The British have always looked to Hollywood first while the French barricaded themselves behind the fortress of their language. In cinematic terms, the Channel is wider than the Atlantic, and harder to bridge.

The British mistrust the seriousness with which the French regard the septième art while envying the unshakeable political and financial support their film-makers enjoy. The French laugh at (not with) our floppy-haired comedies while envying our international success. And like Truffaut, who delivered his notorious snub in an interview with none other than Alfred Hitchcock, they love to provoke us with their sense of cinematic superiority – yet cherish our great directors better than we do ourselves.

But some on both sides have always dreamed of an entente cordiale that could unite the contrasting strengths of these two industries and mount a real European challenge to Hollywood.

Prime

¶ In an omnibus review of recent meltdown books, at Naked Capitalism, Satyajit Das has a lot of fun with the Money Honey’s contribution.

In “The Weekend that Changed Wall Street” CNBC “star” Maria Bartiromo aka “Money Honey” provides a “celebrity” take on the crisis. Some readers may be reminded of Groucho Marx’s famous comment: “From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it.”

There was a time, long past, when reporters merely reported on the facts and only occasionally passed opinions. Ms Bartiromo seems to have cast herself as a central and sometime the sole character in the drama. “Weekend” self consciously on each page focuses on the “I”.

The author seeks to share what happened “in a way that ordinary people can understand”. In order to do this, “Weekend” takes us into the author’s boudoir – “my world – behind the curtain of capitalism” (a hitherto unknown financial metaphor) to provide ” an intimate look at the personal stories of those involved…from the richest and most powerful to the average workers.” From the airbrushed “come hither” look on the dusk jacket to highly derivative and, at times, corny text, “Weekend” exceeds the sum of your worst fears. Certainly, as Faulkner noted about Hemingway, there will be no need for the reader to rush for a dictionary in perusing this offering.

There are problems of “time space” as the weekend seems to stretch out for a number of years, emerging through a wormhole into the European debt crisis (imaginatively entitled “A Greek Tragedy”) and the Goldman Sachs indictment over a CDO transaction. There are problems of judgement – Ken Lewis is “a quiet man who masked his masterful business sense…” (page 85) and Goldman Sachs’ “reputation was solid”. (page 183) There are problems of classification – Nassim Taleb’s “Black Swan” is apparently “a critical view of the deception inherent in financial instruments” (Page 177).

There is “in depth” analysis – “Greece was in over its head and didn’t show it.” (Page 179). There is poetry – “Each afternoon, when I alight from my car on Broad Street in front of the New York Stock Exchange, I pause for a moment to look up. I have been doing this for sixteen years; it’s an automatic response. There is majesty to the edifice, and its architectural grace is breathtaking.” (page 208) There is hope, although some readers by this stage may be in despair – “…we must restore fundamental principles. We must, once again, allow integrity to guide and protect us.” (Page 208)

The real insight provided by “Weekend” is unintended. The surreal power of the vapid medium of financial TV and its frequently shallow coverage of events is striking. The “names” that curry favour with the networks for coverage and airtime is astonishing. What they say is perhaps even more astonishing, as is the author’s readiness to share “off air” and presumably private remarks. The book also reveals some interesting things about modern publishing, especially its focus on celebrity rather than content, argument or writing skill.

If the future of democracy and capitalism requires a free, knowledgeable and fearless press then this book does not augur well.

Tierce

¶ Everyone goes through a period, during adolescence if not later, of thinking that saying “thank you” is a meaningless social nicety. So it’s good to know that, quite aside from what your mother told you, expressing gratitude has objectively positive consequences. (PsyBlog)

The idea that saying thank you makes people more likely to help in the future is unsurprising, although the 100% increase is interesting, but what the researchers were interested in was why this happens.

Perhaps Eric’s gratitude made people feel better, or at least less bad? Or perhaps saying thanks boosted the helper’s self-esteem, which in turn motivated them to help again.

In fact the experimenters found that people weren’t providing more help because they felt better or it boosted their self-esteem, but because they appreciated being needed and felt more socially valued when they’d been thanked.

This feeling of social worth helps people get over factors that stop us helping. We are often unsure our help is really wanted and we know that accepting help from others can feel like a failure. The act of saying thank you reassures the helper that their help is valued and motivates them to provide more.

Sext

¶ While it may be true that, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, it’s different if you’re known to be a woman, especially a young, pretty woman. Patrick Brown reflects on the problem — and it is a problem — by recounting the experience of a disturbing art installation. Do blondes have a life? (The Millions)

A few weeks ago, I went to an performance exhibition by my friend, the artist Charlie White. It was called Casting Call, and according to its website it was meant to further explore “White’s ongoing interest in the complexities of the American teen as cultural icon, image, and national idea.” For the exhibition, an art gallery was converted into two rooms, each separated from the other by a pane of glass.  On one side of the room was a casting call for teen girls exemplifying “the All American California girl” — blonde hair, tan skin, etc. — between the ages of 13 and 16. White and his crew interviewed the models, took a mug shot-style photograph of them, and then brought in the next girl. On the other side of the glass, an audience — mostly art students and hipsters — watched. Our friend Stephanie, White’s partner, pointed out that everyone on our side of the glass was brunette (except, it must be pointed out, Edan) while all of the models were, of course, blonde. White and his crew discussed each girl, both amongst themselves and with the girl, as well, but we could hear none of it. We were left to interpret the scene for ourselves. “Oh, look, they’re letting that girl look at the photo. They must really like her,” I said. “Yeah, either that or they could tell she was upset, and wanted to reassure her she did a good job.”

A seemingly never-ending stream of girls came through the door. What fascinated me most about the entire exhibition is how quickly we could objectify the girls. I don’t mean objectify them in the way that it’s commonly used — to turn them into sex objects — though there was certainly a tinge of the erotic about the event; by objectify, I mean to make them into something not quite human, and in turn, to talk about them as though they were things rather than people. “She’s too old.” “I like that one, in the leopard-print shorts. She’s my favorite.” “Look at how weird her hair is. Why does she look like that?” It was how we talk about people when they’re on television, but these people were merely a few feet away. The pane of glass, and the contrast between the brightly lit casting room and the dim audience space, was enough distance to effectively dehumanize these girls. There were other factors at work, such as the blonde California girl’s status as marketing conceit and sexual totem, but I think a big reason we all felt free to dissect and dismiss these girls is because they couldn’t really see us. We were, more or less, anonymous. It was especially unsettling to turn around after watching for a few minutes and see one of the girls who had been in the call standing just behind us. How long had she been there, the girl in the leopard print shorts? And how did she suddenly become so real?

Nones

¶ As it turns out, John Cutler’s unspeakable syphilis “experiments” in Guatemala, recently unearthed by historian Susan Reverby, were conducted during one of the rare good times in that country. (LRB blog)

So, for Guatemalans, the news that the US was complicit in crimes against humanity in their country is hardly surprising, though the fact that Cutler chose Guatemala precisely because it would permit experiments impossible in the US has made people angry. But above and beyond the revulsion at the details of the experiments, there is the hurt that will be caused by an investigation that in any way tarnishes the memory of Arévalo, one of the best loved men in Guatemala’s recent past. Already, right-wing voices are muttering darkly about the ‘excesses of Communism’.

Vespers

¶ The Millions‘s editorial intern, Ujala Sehgal, has unearthed a What-Is-Literature essay by Nobelist Mario Vargas Llosa that the New York Times published in 1984. Even in translation, its Latin impatience with physicial reality is palpable.

At the heart of all fictional work there burns a protest. Their authors created them since they were unable to live them, and their readers (and believers) encounter in these phantom creatures the faces and adventures needed to enhance their own lives. That is the truth expressed by the lies in fiction – the lies that we ourselves are, thelies that console us and make up for our longings and frustrations. How trustworthy then is the testimony of a novel on the very society that produced it? Were those men really that way? They were, in the sense that that was how they wanted to be, how they envisioned themselves loving, suffering and rejoicing. Those lies do not document their lives but rather their driving demons – the dreams that intoxicated them and made the lives they led more tolerable. An era is not populated merely by flesh and blood creatures, but also by the phantom creatures into which they are transformed in order to break the barriers that confine them.

THE lies in novels are not gratuitous – they fill in the insufficiencies of life. Thus, when life seems full and absolute, and men, out of an all-consuming faith, are resigned to their destinies, novels, perform no service at all. Religious cultures produce poetry and theater, not novels. Fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis, in which it’s necessary to believe in something, in which the unitarian, trusting and absolute vision has been supplanted by a shattered one and an uncertainty about the world we inhabit and the afterworld.

Compline

¶ Even though she intended to donate the proceeds of her recital in Detroit to the local orchestra’s pension fund, concert violinist Sarah Chang was hounded by union musicians into canceling the event, ostensibly in recognition of the Detroit Symphony’s labor dispute. The wrongheadedness of the campaign to prevent the making of fine music in a distressed city sharpens our sense that labor unions, while not necessarily bad in themselves, have got stuck in legacy issues. The fact that there was for many years an excellent symphony orchestra in Detroit does not mean that there ought to be one now.

The DSO players walked off the job after management implemented the terms of a new contract, including base pay cuts for veteran players from $104,650 to $70,200, rising to $73,800 in three years. The players had offered a cut to $82,000 in the first year, rising to $96,600 in year three. The parties are also at odds over work rules and other issues.

“The musicians of the DSO and professional musicians around the country are very grateful to Sarah Chang for her powerful gesture in refusing to play the replacement concert. … I feel very sorry if she or her manager received any communication which could be perceived as threatening,” said DSO spokesperson Haden McKay, a cellist.

Parsons said that the cancellation of Chang’s recital meant that the public was also victimized by what she called “reprehensible” and “unethical tactics.”

“We were just doing what we’re meant to do, which is present musical experiences at the highest level for our public, and if we can’t present orchestra concerts we have to present other things.”

Star soloists typically steer clear of labor disputes. Chang’s decision to perform as a good will gesture for Detroit music lovers was a tightrope walk from the start. “There’s little hope of not offending either side in a labor dispute when engaging in exclusive artist activity with one side or the other during a strike,” said Chicago-based arts consultant Drew McManus.

Have a Look

¶ Dalton Ghetti’s pencils. (Good)

¶ Photos from the Sixties. The Eighteen Sixties. (The Age of Uncertainty)

Legendary editor Diana Athill talks to Sarah Lyall about life in the nineties.

People tend to tell Ms. Athill that she is an inspiration, a word that gives her the willies. But her matter-of-fact, hopeful depiction of life as an elderly woman presents an encouraging antidote to the accounts of writers like Philip Roth, with their self-pitying fetishization of physical decline.

“I think getting old very often is horrible, really,” Ms. Athill said. “But if you’re lucky, if you keep your health, if your aches and pains are not too bad, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a perfectly agreeable life, in many ways, discovering new and nice things.”

This week, I resumed reading. I didn’t have the time for it; I didn’t wait to have the time. I just sat down on one of the love seats in the living room and read, instead of doing other things that needed doing. It was rash; it was like spending money that I didn’t have. But it was essential. Much of the time was stolen from a bad habit of resigned prudence. Sitting down to read was bold and defiant. I took notes.

¶ I finished two books, books that I’d nearly finished months ago. They were drawn from a pile of five such books; I chose them because they were the ones I was nearest to finishing. One was Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land. A lot of great stuff happens in that book toward the end. Judt has said the things that you expect him to say, but now he begins to say things that are surprising. An admiring endorsement of something that Edmund Burke said. It’s important, Judt goes on to say, for the Left to engage with history. Not with history as a mechanical process leading to right now, but history as a gathering of people who are no longer alive but whose intrigues and passions have a lot to do with why we find ourselves where we are. Now Tony Judt is one of those people who are no longer alive. While he was stalled in a final stage of ALS, not dying, his plight was horrible to think about. Trapped in an unresponsive body! I thought that dying would be a release. It may well have been one for Judt. But it wasn’t one for me. The world is a poorer place without him, dictating somehow, in a room sixty or eighty blocks south of here.

¶ The other book was a collection of essays about comfort in the Eighteenth Century. The writer, Joan DeJean, is what Agatha Christie called a “noticing sort of person,” with an enviable habit of registering details. I wish that I could push her further, though. Her work would be stronger if she were more mindful that comfort is not at all necessarily casual, and that the abyss between the carefree and the careless is unbridgeable, and that all the opposition in the world to solemnity does not unite them.

¶ This evening, I read a few chapters of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, By Nightfall. I could easily spend the rest of the night with it. The hero is a forty-something gallerist who lives with his wife in Mercer Street. “Hostile child, horrible adolescent,” Peter has grown up to be — well, not altogether unsympathetic. But the book’s New York is not my New York. It’s recognizable, even familiar in a way. But I don’t know people like Peter. There was a time when I regretted that, when I wished that I knew the people in his world. Now, I am almost glad that I don’t. I meet them at parties and make small talk and it stops there. We smile over our mutual snobbery, which has nothing to do with birth and position but which is a matter of differing ideas about what constitutes foolishness.

Interesting, that. In all those discussions of universal values and self-evident moral imperatives, nobody ever makes claims for a common sense of foolishness. One might almost suppose that the oppopsite of “foolish” is “sexy” — if it were not terribly foolish to confer upon sexiness a vitality that it altogether lacks.

Matins

¶ New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s withdrawal of support for a Hudson River rail tunnel was utterly predictable, because expensive infrastructure prrojects are anathema to Republicans. Why? Because everybody gets to use them. (The governor plans to divert funds to road and bridge repair, which is principally useful to automobile owners.) We wish that this were as obvious to Paul Krugman as it is to us, but no. (NYT)

And right now, by any rational calculation, would be an especially good time to improve the nation’s infrastructure. We have the need: our roads, our rail lines, our water and sewer systems are antiquated and increasingly inadequate. We have the resources: a million-and-a-half construction workers are sitting idle, and putting them to work would help the economy as a whole recover from its slump. And the price is right: with interest rates on federal debt at near-record lows, there has never been a better time to borrow for long-term investment.

But American politics these days is anything but rational. Republicans bitterly opposed even the modest infrastructure spending contained in the Obama stimulus plan. And, on Thursday, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, canceled America’s most important current public works project, the long-planned and much-needed second rail tunnel under the Hudson River.

It was a destructive and incredibly foolish decision on multiple levels. But it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.

Yes, yes, Mr Krugman, you’re almost there. All you need to add is that nothing but narrow-minded selfishness can be expected of a free-market democracy.

Lauds

¶ Kyle Minor’s impatience with his own failure to produce a good review of a book that he admires very much, Joshua Cohen’s Witz, explodes in a splat at HTMLGiant.

When I was a less accomplished reader (and yesterday I was a less accomplished reader than I am today, as these things are progressive through time), it helped to have training wheels designed by Frank Kermode or James Wood or Margaret Atwood or William Deresiewicz. Reading difficult books alongside those who intelligently explicated them helped me to become the kind of reader who could read difficult books without those training wheels. Why have I become such a stingy and ungenerous person that I find myself unwilling to offer a similar service to someone else? Criticism costs the critic, is why, and while some of the costs — the upset you invite, the ways in which you open yourself to reciprocal criticism for the things you get wrong, the possibility that you fail to achieve the strong criticism your intentions prescribed – are costs I can live with, the cost of time is a cost I’m increasingly unwilling to pay.

Prime

¶ Someone’s gotta do it — but making a free market in books is something that few people want to think about, much less confront. Perhaps it’s the afterburn of the pre-eminence of the Bible among books, but for some reason or other we balk at treating books as commodities, although that is of course what they are to everyone who hands them on their way to the reader. At Slate, Michael Savitz captures the cloud of bad vibrations in which he does his business. (via MetaFilter)

The bibliophile bookseller, and the various other species of pickers and flippers of secondhand merchandise, would never be reproached like this and could never be made to feel bad in this way. Record geeks are, obviously, crazy music fans. The dealer in used designer clothes or antique housewares, when he considers a piece, can evaluate its craftsmanship and beauty with the same gaze he uses to appraise it. But the aesthetic value of a book—its literary merit—doesn’t have anything to do with its physical condition. Besides, libraries are for readers, not people who see profit in the shelves. When I work with my scanner and there’s someone else shopping near me who wants to read books, I feel that my energy is all wrong—high-pitched, focused narrowly in the present, and jealous. Someone browsing through books does it with a diffuse, forgetful curiosity, a kind of open reckoning that she learned from reading. Good health to you, reader. One day I will be like you again.

More than once, this piece made us think that Mr Savitz and his colleagues could learn a thing or two from morticians.

Tierce

¶ “Small, crazy details” upend five centuries of physics — which is no surprise, since only now can we see what’s really going on in the world, instead of relying on thought experiments. (Wired Science)

For centuries, physicists have thought that the amount of force needed to start a book sliding across a table is equal to the force from friction that keeps book and table stuck together. That frictional force is determined by a number called the coefficient of friction, which is the ratio between the forces pushing sideways and pushing down (basically, how much the book weighs).

These laws were first described by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century, and re-derived by Guillaume Amontons and Charles Coulomb a few hundred years later. They’ve been the stuff of introductory physics textbooks for decades.

But when Fineberg’s student Oded Ben-David, first author of a paper in the October 8 Science describing their experiments, tried to reproduce them in carefully controlled lab experiments, the laws fell apart. Ben-David found that he could apply up to five times as much sideways force as the coefficient of friction predicted, and the book still wouldn’t move.

“Even in the lab, he couldn’t predict what was going to happen,” Fineberg said. “Small, crazy details made a really big difference. ”

Sext

¶ A good friend of the Editor has recommended Instapaper, and we look forward to having the time to explore it, especially because it shares our dedication to the pleasures of long-form reading. As usual, we’re too busy reading right now. (Capital; via Tomorrow Museum)

Perhaps, for the small (relative to the whole web) world that has adapted his product, mostly by word-of-mouth, there is a feeling of contributing to the next-next thing by sending Arment a small donation. The fact that Instapaper seems to be heading in the opposite direction from so many sites starting up now—one that encourages reading long-form writing instead of short bursts of text and pictures—is part of what makes Instapaper refreshing. It’s also what makes it a risky bet.

“This is the beginning of the end of design,” said Rich Ziade, the creator of Readability, another online service that strips article pages from their original design and places them into formatted text. He was standing next to Arment, and the pair were in a carpeted room at the Sheraton in Midtown last week, presenting their tools at the Web 2.0 Expo for a discussion titled “The Reading Experience and the Web.” A young man dressed in fitted jeans and Vans sneakers stepped up to a microphone and introduced himself as a user experience designer for websites and applications. He said he is a fan of Instapaper, but wondered if the applications essentially make his job irrelevant.

There was nervous laughter from the crowd, about three dozen or so young people. They were mostly men in button-up dress shirts and khakis (investors and ad sales types) or t-shirts and Converse sneakers (coders and young entrepreneurs). “A few users talk about [our applications] in that it’s a little addictive and I think what they’re speaking to is consistency,” said Ziade.

Take one article on the web and it could be read in dozens of formats. You can view it in a rolodex of web browser choices (Opera! Firefox! Safari!). The text size, font, color and background images can look completely different in each browser, not to mention if the text is squeezed onto a tiny mobile phone or bloated onto a widescreen P.C. “You have particular dimensions and constraints, and all sorts of shapes and sizes on platforms,” Ziade said. “We’re giving people control.”

Nones

¶ China wants to give Norway a spanking. Guess why? Norway just slapped China — with a very unwanted Peace Prize.  (NYT)

The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a “desecration” of the peace prize and saying it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations. The Chinese government summoned Norway’s ambassador to protest the award, a spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry told reporters.

“The Nobel Committee giving the peace prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize,” Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site. “Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.”

Headlines about the award were nowhere to be found in the Chinese-language state media or on the country’s main Internet portals. Broadcasts about Liu Xiaobo (pronounced Liew Show Boh) on CNN, which reach only luxury compounds and hotels in China, were blacked out throughout the evening. Many mobile phone users reported not being able to transmit text messages containing his name in Chinese.

Vespers

¶ Shocking evidence that parents want to spare their children the languors of childhood abounds in Julie Bosman’s report on the decline of picture-book sales. (Is this really a story for Lauds?) (NYT)

“Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’ ” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. “There’s a real push with parents and schools to have kids start reading big-kid books earlier. We’ve accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books.”

Booksellers see this shift too.

“They’re 4 years old, and their parents are getting them ‘Stuart Little,’ ” said Dara La Porte, the manager of the children’s department at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington. “I see children pick up picture books, and then the parents say, ‘You can do better than this, you can do more than this.’ It’s a terrible pressure parents are feeling — that somehow, I shouldn’t let my child have this picture book because she won’t get into Harvard.”

Literacy experts are quick to say that picture books are not for dummies. Publishers praise the picture book for the particular way it can develop a child’s critical thinking skills.

Compline

¶ It is no surprise that New York City and the Federal Government approach counterterrorism in opposite ways. Scott Horton outlines both, at Harper’s. We’re not New Yorkers for nothing.

The German philosophy, which is close to that of the United Kingdom and the New York City Police Department (explained by my friend Mike Shaheen here), runs something like this: the aim of terrorists is to instill fear and to disrupt lives. Therefore it is only doing the terrorists’ bidding when a government makes statements that generally spread anxiety without providing any specific guidance. The approach of these governments is thus to share the basic information but to downplay its significance (usually by stressing that the information is general, that it shows planning but that there is no specific information about an attack). They urge people to go about their lives and to report suspicious activity to the police. Quietly, law enforcement and intelligence agencies will follow up leads, interrogating individuals and making arrests. Generally speaking, however, the aim is to get a good look inside the terrorist cell and follow its threads from within, not moving too quickly. The theory is that, once alerted, the terrorists are less likely to reveal the full scope of their plans or their support network.

The approach that is still favored by the United States federal authorities and the French stresses the need for the state to share its sense of alarm with the public and then to take public measures that show its vigilance even when such measures are not likely to have a high payoff. Compared with its European allies, the United States has also been quick to “spring the trap.” That is, it often arrests individuals believed to be involved in a plot early on, giving up the opportunity to learn more by monitoring them. This has in the past been a point of some friction between Britain and the United States.

Have a Look

¶ Scout explores the Farley.

¶ Special Pencils redux. (Globe)