The weather was awful — snow! — but I had to get out of the house. I had to get a haircut, but that’s not what I mean; I had to break out of the ordinary routines, which regular readers will know about my fiddling with since the New Year. The new ordinary routines are working well; they’re much more flexible thant the old ordinary routines. But they’re also much more conservative: the list of things to do is quite a bit smaller. In fact, it’s comprised of necessities. There has been no room in the routines for optional entertainments. That’s why, although I’ve been writing well and regularly, I’ve been circling my navel so far as subject-matter goes. I had to get out of the house in order to have something fresh to report. 

How conservative? My idea of “something fresh” was a trip to the Museum. Oh, boy; how exotic! Sad truth is: it has gotten to be exotic. I’ve been to the Museum once this year, and that was to take my grandson on his first visit — to get him out of the house on a cold day. He and I did not study the curios, exactly; from my point of view, the trip was all about him, not the Museum. 

Today, I vowed, I would go to the Museum and see something new. The Qianlong Emperor obliged. More about him in a minute. Even better, the Museum’s curators obliged. I saw something old — old and very familiar. In a show complementing the exhibition of knickknacks from the emperor’s retirement pavilion, constructed in the Forbidden City in the 1770s, the Museum has displayed one of the few treasures that I long to possess — a large painted-enamel ginger jar. The Museum has two of them; I’d be happy to let it keep one. (As long as they’ve got the pair, though, I wish that they’d turn one of them around, so that I could inspect the back.) 

What I love about the jar, aside from its riotous tackiness, is its cosmopolitan flavor; in a vitrine with other Chinese decorative objects, it stands out as  foreign. And it is foreign. According to the label, one of the patterns beneath the illusory wrapping looks more Indian than Chinese. The technique of painted enamel was developed a few centuries earlier in Limoges. The Chinese, after all, didn’t invent everything. The Qianlong period (1736-1795) was unusually open to foreign styles; the Jesuits were still providing the emperor with a window on the West through which European styles were allowed to pass. One of the objects on display this afternoon — I don’t think that it came from the Forbidden City — was a perfectly frightful vase with long panels showing ladies in French court attire romping beneath parasols; the panels are “framed” with half-carat crystals. Unlike my ginger jar, it’s heavy and dreary and an embarrassment really. 

The conceit of the ginger jar lies in the incompatibility of the patterns above and below the trompe-l’oeil cloth wrapping; it’s as if the broken top and bottom of completely different jars had been glued together, with the swath of ribbony fabric concealing the join. You don’t notice this right away, though, because the cloth itself is so busy: layered fantastically in three colors, embroidered with a tiny pattern, and overlaid with floral emblems that don’t quite tuck into the folds. The whole thing comes this close to being one of those horrors that you used to see in the furniture showrooms on Grand street — when Grand Street was still part of Little Italy. With a ghastly tasseled lampshade. 

I can’t help thinking of the Qianlong Emperor as the Chinese Louis XV. Their long reigns overlapped considerably, and were characterized by an easygoing opulence and a nonchalant grandeur that inspired the production of a lot of beautiful things. (And their régimes were equally doomed, even if it took China more than a century longer to tumble into the abyss.) Of course we know a lot more about the French king than we ever will about the Chinese emperor; it’s not difficult to bring the lazy and sensual but warm-hearted and good-natured Louis to life, but the personal qualities of the Qianlong Emperor are so much rubble beneath the official transcripts of his reign, in which almost everything occurs as it was supposed to occur. (There are no reliable unofficial transcripts.) Poor Lord Macartney never got to have the tête-à-tête that would have allowed him to take the emperor’s measure; the wall of officialdom that blandly blanketed the empror was never breached. 

A nearby vitrine held an assortment of medium-sized lacquer dishes and boxes. I wondered, as always, what they are like to hold. The thought of what it must be like to have to keep a piece of lacquerware dusted led immediately to the guilty recollection that I’ve forgotten all about my resolution to re-read The Dream of the Red Chamber, also known as The Story of the Stone, all four Penguin volumes of which rest beneath my bedside table. I have Volume I in my hands as I write. A Taoist  is talking to a large, inscribed stone — a stone that has everything written on it save the authentication of a dynastic date. Somehow, the stone is going to be sent down to participate in the great illusion of human life — it’s probably best not to dwell on the mechanics. When does the story get going? If I could only get past this prefatory mumbo-jumbo….

I have been thinking lately that I ought to stop reading new books for a year and just re-read old favorites. The Tale of Genji. Austen, Eliot, and James. And Forster. And Waugh. The barber today asked me to recommend a book. He’s from Peru and he wants to improve his English by reading a book that is interesting but not too difficult. I almost suggested Vile Bodies. The language itself is not very difficult, as I recall. But the goings-onmight shock him, might sail right over his uncomprehending head. I recommended Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live, the book about Montaigne. Tito may never ask me to recommend another book, but it will be for a perfectly respectable reason. 

Ah, there’s nothing new here at all! It looks like I’ve fallen back on my old game, trying to write about the same old things with a hint of freshness. How well I’d have fit in at the Qianlong Emperor’s retirement pavilion,which was called, by the way, the Juanqinzhai — the Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service.

Census data indicate that the population of Detroit has fallen by 25% in the past decade, making it the first American city to cross and then retreat from the million mark. While the collapse of Detroit is certain to be regarded by some observers — economists, mostly, we expect — as a benign development, reflecting the free choice of thousands of former residents, we don’t see much that’s creative in the destruction of a major city’s hopes for the future.

The question now is the degree to which the most recent census figures will discourage those who have invested in Detroit and continue to try to make a go of it.

“Obviously it’s going to be a blow,” Mr. Metzger said. “All of us are kind of shocked, but it means we have to work that much harder.”

With more than 20 percent of the lots in the 139-square-mile city vacant, the mayor is in the midst of a program to demolish 10,000 empty residential buildings. But for many, the city already seems hollowed out.

“You can just see the emptiness driving in,” said Joel Dellario, a student at the College for Creative Studies. “I’ve been in and out of this city my whole life, and it’s just really apparent.”

We believe that a lot of things went wrong in Detroit, and that Americans need to know a lot more about what happened there. We pray that the city will find redemption in the hands of astute historians.

You might dismiss what Bryn Mawr undergraduate Jennifer Cook says about Shakespeare as callow, but to deny its pertinence would be foolish. The world is slowly tipping toward those for whom the Internet is more familiar than the contents of any book, and nothing less than a reorganization of knowledge is inevitable. Assistant professor Katherine Rowe’s remark about the rapidly-closing gap between the new fluency and the old is sparkling.

Many teachers and administrators are only beginning to figure out the contours of this emerging field of digital humanities, and how it should be taught. In the classroom, however, digitally savvy undergraduates are not just ready to adapt to the tools but also to explore how new media may alter the very process of reading, interpretation and analysis.

“There’s a very exciting generation gap in the classroom,” said Ms. Rowe, who developed the digital components of her Shakespeare course with a graduate student who now works at Google. “Students are fluent in new media, and the faculty bring sophisticated knowledge of a subject. It’s a gap that won’t last more than a decade. In 10 years these students will be my colleagues, but now it presents unusual learning opportunities.”

As Ms. Cook said, “The Internet is less foreign to me than a Shakespeare play written 500 years ago.”

The essay is entitled “The Importance of Aunts (in the 19th-century novel)” — the unbracketed portion quoting Jane Austen — but a more indicative title would have been “The End of Marriage.” No matter; Colm Tóibín’s thoughts about the novel are so bracing that my first thought upon swallowing them was a gratitude to the younger self who took the time to read all the great books that Tóibín mentions (all but The Mill on the Floss). You might be tempted to ask, now and then, what the point is of reading great novels for pleasure; the answer is extensively evident in Tóibín’s discussion of — of what? Aunts in fiction? That’s his starting-point, certainly; he begins by showing why, in a narrative form that has throughout its development hewed closely to the portrait of the protagonist as a solitary, self-inventing figure, the presence of mothers would be stifling. Hence aunts, who act as portals rather than as authorities. But the scope of the survey widens to include trenchant writing about the novel itself.Â

Tóibín considers the problem of Lady Bertram, in Mansfield Park. It’s clear that Austen expects us to detest Mrs Norris, Fanny Price’s other aunt; she’s a harridan out of “Cinderella.” But Austen doesn’t seem to care how we feel about Lady Bertram, and, indeed, it’s necessary to stop and think about the matter, because, for the most part, the presence of Lady Bertram signals such a respite from the scourge of Mrs Norris that we’re grateful for it on Fanny’s behalf. Lady Bertram’s protection is of course entirely passive and not the result of any intended benevolence; the atmosphere surrounding the woman’s sofa happens to be one that Fanny finds naturally congenial. When we stop to think about Lady Bertram —  but Tóibín tells us not to care, because it’s not important. And then he tells us what is important.

The novel, after all, is not a moral fable or parable; it is not our job to like or dislike characters in fiction, or make judgments about their worth, or learn from them how to live. We can do that with real people and, if we like, figures from history. They are for moralists to feast on. A novel is a pattern and it is our job to notice how the textures were woven and the tones put in place. This is not to insist that a character in fiction is merely a verbal construct and bears no relation to the known world. It is rather to suggest that the role of a character in a novel is never simple. A novel isn’t a piece of ethics or sociology. It is a release of certain energies and a dramatisation of how these energies might be controlled and given shape. Characters in fiction are determined by the pattern, and they determine the pattern in turn.

The pattern of Mansfield Park calls for a lady of the house who “lives a gloriously underexamined life.” If she were not there, dozing on her sofa, Fanny could not be seated beside her when Edmund came into the room; indeed, she could not be at Mansfield Park at all. Austen is not interested in Fanny’s battles with Aunt Norris, nor in the material hardships of Fanny’s life in Portsmouth; these are foils to her life of contemplation at Mansfield Park, which, Tóibín makes clear, is what the novel is really about.Â

And in the centre of the book stands a strange and insistent mass: the consciousness of Fanny Price. She has no vivacity, no wit; she is mainly silent. She repels as much as she attracts. Trilling dislikes her, as many do: ‘Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park. Fanny Price is overtly virtuous and consciously virtuous.’ This may be so, if we insist on looking at her from the outside as though she were human. What is more  important is that the novel reflects her essence. She has a way of noticing and registering which has nothing to do with virtue, but everything to do with the novel’s pattern. Her uncertainty, and our uncertainty about how she will live, is what gives the book its strangely powerful momentum.

The essay does not end where it might, with the aunts in Henry James — especially the aunt-like figures in Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors who turn out to be sexual creatures (and, thereby, not aunts at all) — but it keeps moving, in order to make a point about Tóibín’s real subject, which is nothing less than marriage as the end of the novel. Having begun by showing how novelists employed aunts to take the place of parents, in the process breaking up families and depriving heroes and heroines of natural shelter, Tóibín concludes by casting light on the novel’s dissatisfaction with marriage.Â

It was clear that, since something fundamental had already been done to the idea of parents, something would also have to be done to the idea of marriage itself, since marriage was a dilution of the autonomy of the individual protagonist.

Tóibín discusses three scenes, or three versions of the same scene, in Trollope’s Phineas Finn, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and Portrait of a Lady: scenes in which a woman acknowledges the unhappiness of her marriage to a male friend.Â

This male figure is not, in any obvious way, looking for a wife, and this is what makes him dangerous, more dangerous than any aunt has been. He can have an uneasy sexual presence, and an unusual way of noticing and listening. He  can have the power of conscience, and the pure force of someone who does not have obvious desires. He can represent the novelist in the novel, but he is also from the future, from a world in which the making of marriages is no longer the main subject for a novelist. Again, it is his solitude that gives him power, as Darcy in Pride and Prejudice derives his power from his solitude as much as his fortune, until he marries Elizabeth.Â

The bit about this figure’s coming “from the future” is one of the most exciting things that I’ve ever read; it casts light on the great shift that would follow the Victorians, a shift in which James himself is the pivot: from telling stories about people finding companionship, novelists moved on to telling stories about people finding themselves. Tóibín closes with a most unexpected discovery: a happy ending for Portrait of a Lady. Well, perhaps not “happy.” But free, in the sense that Isabel Archer “untells” the story of Patient Griselda.

And Isabel returns to her husband. But there is a sense, here at the end, that she has not returned to be his wife, part of his family, but comes with a new power she has found, a resource which will allow her to resist him, repel him, move in the world alone and free not only of the family she inherited and the one she came into, but the one she chose and sought to make.

John Tierney’s report, “Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s the Only Choice,” was much more interesting the first time. How can you talk about free will and its opposite number, determinism, without calling in James Gleick on chaos and randomness? Oh, well. We do agree that belief in free will is good for your health; plus, we’re apparently hard-wired for it. We also think that “free will” is a semantic dustball that science inherited from philosophy.

At an abstract level, people seem to be what philosophers call incompatibilists: those who believe free will is incompatible with determinism. If everything that happens is determined by what happened before, it can seem only logical to conclude you can’t be morally responsible for your next action.

But there is also a school of philosophers — in fact, perhaps the majority school — who consider free will compatible with their definition of determinism. These compatibilists believe that we do make choices, even though these choices are determined by previous events and influences. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”

Does that sound confusing — or ridiculously illogical? Compatibilism isn’t easy to explain. But it seems to jibe with our gut instinct that Bill is morally responsible even though he’s living in a deterministic universe. Dr. Nichols suggests that his experiment with Mark and Bill shows that in our abstract brains we’re incompatibilists, but in our hearts we’re compatibilists.

“This would help explain the persistence of the philosophical dispute over free will and moral responsibility,” Dr. Nichols writes in Science. “Part of the reason that the problem of free will is so resilient is that each philosophical position has a set of psychological mechanisms rooting for it.”

Some scientists like to dismiss the intuitive belief in free will as an exercise in self-delusion — a simple-minded bit of “confabulation,” as Crick put it. But these supposed experts are deluding themselves if they think the question has been resolved. Free will hasn’t been disproved scientifically or philosophically. The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.

We never watched Big Love, and we were always mystified that anyone would want to watch a show about polygamy. Ew! But Ginia Bellafante’s recessional opened our eyes a bit.

Perhaps nothing is less sexy to the prototypical thinking woman who watches HBO than the sort of man he represented, someone blind to his own subversions and immune to ambivalence. During the course of the series many women told me that they had stopped watching “Big Love” after a few episodes because polygamy as a notion was just too distasteful. This might be translated to mean that Bill Henrickson didn’t seem to have the right to all of the sex he was getting — not the way Don Draper, by virtue of his emotional afflictions, has the right on “Mad Men.” Women forgive the demonstratively tortured but never the brutally dull “nice.”

“Big Love” arrived in 2006, the pre-Obama age, and the series was served up as a chewy slab of sirloin for the network’s liberal audience, offering in Henrickson a character bound to infuriate as he seemed to enjoy an Esalen-era sex life without having to concede to the philosophies and politics that might attend it. The series always made “the principle” — the ostensibly religious foundation for the Henricksons’ living arrangement — vague enough to feel entirely suspect if not absurd. Tony Soprano was an appealing avatar of Clintonian compartmentalization and appetite. Henrickson was a distinctly Bush-era counterpart, forever unquestioning and wed to his certainties. His righteousness, merely annoying at first, became increasingly repellant as the series progressed and his hypocrisies mounted.

That he was partially redeemed in the final hour, granting his first wife, Barb, the religious autonomy she craved, seems peripheral to the larger matter of his actual death. In the end the series chose to affirm the idea that families must exist, as much as they can, as democracies. In an epilogue depicting the Henricksons 11 months after Bill’s death, we see the women existing as a kind of contented, collectivist sorority, with the youngest wife, Margene, finally pursuing her dream of medical volunteer work abroad as she guiltlessly leaves her children behind with her sister wives.

Literally speaking, a disgruntled and out-of-work neighbor — a casualty of the recession and his own traditionalism — shot Bill Henrickson. A mainstream Mormon, he explicitly resented Bill’s heresy and implicitly couldn’t stomach his virility. This was a man who couldn’t care for his lawn or even a single wife as Bill simultaneously bed-skipped his way through three marriages. Figuratively, though, it was all of us who pulled the trigger, all of us who could never really give over our sympathies to a man who seemed to get way more than he deserved. The dictator had to go.

At Ward Six the other day, J Robert Lennon tossed in a note about Tadzio Koelb’s deflating review (in the NYTBR) of Rebecca Hunt’s Mr Chartwell.  Koelb wrote,

Now England has seen the rise of “Mr. Chartwell,” a humorous and amiable novel about which such extravagant claims have been made — for its prose, psychological insight and emotional depth — that one might imagine a work to rival Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” instead of what is, in fact, well-packaged chick lit.

The end of Lennon’s note stuck with me: 

While I am enjoying the democratization of literary discourse that the internet has brought us, the trend Koelb describes is a consequence of the decline of newspapers and print magazines–hardly anyone is being paid to recognize artistic value anymore. And so, I fear, hardly anyone is bothering.

My first reaction was to protest: I’m not being paid, and yet I am bothering to recognize artistic value. My second reaction was to wonder if the first was actually correct. I’m conscious of being on the lookout for interesting things, and of trying to explain what it is about things that interest me that interests me. But: recognizing artistic value? I’m not sure that I believe in it. And it’s not as simple as doubting that “artistic value” exists. There’s the matter of recognition, too, the sense, which I think Lennon intends, of making an award. You pin a blue ribbon on something, and, voilà, it has artistic value. (The ribbon is what you have to say about it, and the quality of that ornament is for others to judge.) You go on to the next thing, leaving your little ribbon behind for all time. 

This old model of critical authority has almost completely broken down, not because we don’t have faith in people who make authoritative pronouncements (we’re if anything too credulous) but because we don’t have time for them. All we want to know is whether to read the book or not. Will our friends all be reading the book? There is no need for much of a ribbon; a letter grade will do. This is indeed what has happened in “the democratization of literary discourse.”  I’m unfamiliar with the string of admiring reviews that Mr Chartwell evidently garnered — I hadn’t heard of the book before reading Koelb’s review — but his description suggests an excited readership enthusing over a shiny bauble. I daresay that careful readers of those reviews were not deceived into thinking that Rebecca Hunt might take a place alongside Trollope and Tolstoy. They could probably tell that satisfaction was guaranteed by a plaubile patina of “history.” I’m reminded of Frederick Arbuthnot, the happily faithless husband in The Enchanted April, who writes sexy potboilers under an assumed name. 

He wrote immensely popular memoirs, regularly, every year, of the mistresses of kings. There were in history numerous kings who had had mistresses, and there were still more numerous mistresses who had had kings; so that he had been able to publish a book of memoirs during each year of his married life, and even so there were great further piles of these ladies waiting to be dealt with. 

What has changed since those days is that nobody is being punished for publishing critical flummery anymore; it’s unlikely that anyone is going to lose a gig because Tadzio Koelb has seen through a gushing review or two. The people who care about psychological insight and The Anatomy of Melancholy won’t be lodging complaints, because they won’t have been tricked into buying the book. 

So, then, what am I doing? I’ve already said, putting it with cheeky complication: I’m “trying to explain what it is about things that interest me that interests me.” What’s left out of that formulation is the time-stamp, which is always set to “right now.” What interests me now? It’s not necessarily what interested me last week or last year, or when I was in my twenties. And what interests me now has been shaped by what has interested me (recently, for the most part, but not always), so that my liking a book this week may be tied up in my having liked another one last week, or last month, or whenever. Far from being an unchanging authority who makes judgments according to some fixed protocol, I’m more or less impressed, literally, by everything that I read. It would almost be better to say that the book judges me. 

That’s what I was thinking on Saturday night, listening to Rudolf Buchbinder and Orpheus play Mozart’s D minor concerto — the most dramatic of the lot and destined to stand at or near the top of anyone’s ranking. I was trying out a new metric: the measure of a performance’s excellence is the extent to which it blots out all others. It would not occur to me, in connection with any actual concert, to judge the concerto itself.  I might say that it reminds me of my sheltered youth, when I could hardly imagine what real tragedy would be like; or I might wonder what the first audience made of it — I expect that everyone who stopped talking and listened was aware of unprecedented music; or I might quote Donald Francis Tovey (well, no, I couldn’t; Tovey didn’t write it up). But nothing in any of these passing, colorful remarks would address the music that Mozart wrote. I am no longer sufficiently conceited to believe that I have anything useful to add to the overflowing store of Mozart commentary. So much for his artistic value. As for that of the performance, my new metric keeps things simple. I can report that the horns had a bit of a flub in the Romanze — one that happens often enough to make its way onto recordings — but I don’t expect you to be find this news interesting.

Of Mr Buchbinder’s reading, I’ll say that it coincided with an ideal of the concerto that I carry around in my head. His playing was temporally acute (by which I mean that he kept time in an interesting way) and dynamically expressive (he used the shift between loud and soft to structure the thematic lines). His left hand was particularly gratifying: the low notes were always sonorously there, assuring us that the current of music was flowing through clear and capacious channels. But because I never heard a thing that I did not hope or expect to hear, I cannot say that it was the best imaginable performance of the concerto. I have to be content with pronouncing it extremely well done, and very satisfying to sit through. What I hope I’m conveying is that this “judgment” is really about me. Beyond a presumable level of competence, the performance of music is so peculiar to time and place, to the vibration of the air between player and listener, as to have the quality of magic. It makes no sense to attempt objective descriptions of such things. 

In his blog entry, Lennon mentions Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. 

I am still bewildered by the fact that nobody seems to have recognized Freedom as Jonathan Franzen’s worst book; it’s a lopsided domestic drama with a lot of timely and unnecessary sociopolitical nonsense slathered over it.  (FWIW, I enjoyed it anyway–but it is not up to Franzen’s usual standard.)  In that book, we were seduced, I think, by its ambitious title, its environmental subplot, its political undertones.

Worst book? That’s more impish than intelligent. “Least successful,” perhaps — and I say that not because I agree with Lennon about Freedom but because there is no call to speak of the “worst book” of a writer who always turns out excellent, sometimes extraordinary, work. I do agree that there was a lot of tedious hype about the novel last spring and summer, and that the novel was tedious to write about because one couldn’t begin without clearing away at least some of the critical lumber.

What matters more, in Lennon’s commentary, is that he enjoyed the book even though it wasn’t, in some way or other, good enough. What is the point of Jonathan Franzen’s maintaining his “usual standard” if readers will like what he writes even if he doesn’t? What is this standard, this excess beyond enjoyment? Let’s talk about that. 

More than ten years on, great progress has been made at MIT, where two reports conducted in the late Nineties revealed a number of gender inequality issues among professors. The school has done just about everything that it can do to eliminate disparity. The stubborn remainders are more broadly “societal,” reflecting prejudices that persist even among the most talented Americans. Men are still prepared to make almost any sacrifice for their families other than actually caring for them.

Because it has now become all but the rule that every committee must include a woman, and there are still relatively few women on the faculty, female professors say they are losing up to half of their research time, as well as the outside consultancies that earn their male colleagues a lot of money.

While women on the tenure track 12 years ago feared that having a child would derail their careers, today’s generous policies have made families the norm: the university provides a yearlong pause in the tenure clock, and everyone gets a term-long leave after the arrival of a child. There is day care on campus and subsidies for child care while traveling on business.

Yet now women say they are uneasy with the frequent invitations to appear on campus panels to discuss their work-life balance. In interviews for the study, they expressed frustration that parenthood remained a women’s issue, rather than a family one.

As Professor Sive said, “Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast.”

Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children’s primary care giver — creating more professional inequity.

Matins

¶ Sarah Firisen doesn’t say anything that we haven’t said a proverbial thousand times, but her exasperation with public education in the United States has a rousing edge that put a spring in our step. We’re very glad that she brings up Finland and Singapore and South Korea, because we believe that most public-school teachers ought to be recent honors graduates of the nation’s top colleges and universities, “giving back” two or three postgraduate years. (3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, three writers cope with the Tiger Mom phenomenon and its afterglow. Sandra Tsing Lo concedes that Amy Chua makes her feel like a slouch, and quotes a “report” on owls by her eight-year-old that, even she has to acknowledge, is “terrible”; Caitlin Flanagan just about sticks her tongue out, in “The Ivy Delusion,” and scolds that she has been issuing warnings about Tiger Mom-ism for ages (“I know a lot of social workers who would be very interested to learn of a 7-year-old forced, as Lulu once was, to sit at the piano, apparently for hours, without water or even a bathroom break.”); Christina Schwarz reflects on Robert Paul Smith’s newly reissued 1957 best-seller, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing, and reminds us that children believe that adults should be seen little and heard less.

Lauds

¶ Woody Allen talks to the Guardian about his loved ones. “They love me and are supportive in a meaningful way but they are very critical of what they would euphemistically call an eccentric. Although they think it’s worse than an eccentric, it really is much more like an idiot savant.” We know people who still won’t see his movies because of the scandal (almost twenty years old!). We’ve only seen You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger once, and we found it — dark. But we’re going back for Naomi Watts. ¶ Arthur Laurents has withdrawn permission for Barbra Streisand to star in a film of Gypsy. The reason he gives may not be the real one, but we applaud it, and its source, Stephen Sondheim. (Hartford Courant; via Arts Journal)

He recently spoke with the musical’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, who asked Laurents why he wanted to allow the film project to happen. “He said, ‘What is the point of it?’ And I said, ‘They have this terrible version with Rosalind Russell wearing those black and white shoes.’ And then Sondheim told me something that he got from the British — and it’s wonderful. He said, ‘You want a record because the theater is ephemeral. But that’s wrong. The theater’s greatest essence is that it is ephemeral. You don’t need a record. The fact that it’s ephemeral means you can have different productions, different Roses on into infinity.’

¶ A reporter from Chicago, Blair Kamin, takes a look at the Dallas Arts District, which remains very much a work-in-progress so far as the people part is concerned.

Prime

¶ Edward Hugh projects the economic consequences of the earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan, and surmises that it may mark an era — the end of the “Modern Growth Era,” a period somewhat paradoxically opened by another catastrophe, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.¶ At The Economist, we learn about a 2002 study showing that the “bonus” effect of natural diasters (rebuilding invigorates the economy, &c) does not occur when the upset is “geological.” (via Marginal Revolution) ¶ Meanwhile, Joshua Brown talks about his small-cap Japanese ETF investments, which have been doing nicely. We couldn’t follow his remarks about Sell Stop Limit orders, but we’re assured by experts that they’re not nonsense. (The Reformed Broker) ¶ Felix Salmon rehearses the reasons against sending relief money to specific countries; better to trust the discretion of organizations such as Médecins sans frontières.

Tierce

¶ Bob Cringely brings good tidings of the Toshiba 4S (Super Safe Small and Simple) nuclear reactors, just right for a substation near you.

4S reactor cores are like nuclear building blocks, built on a factory production line and transported by truck to be installed 30 meters under the ground. Each 4S puts out 10 megawatts of electricity or enough for 2000 Japanese homes. Following this path means the lost 1000 megawatt reactors will need 100 4S’s each to replace them or a total of 1200 4S reactors. 4S’s are fueled at the factory, put in place to run for 20 years then returned to the factory for refueling. They are sodium-cooled and pretty darned impossible to melt down. If the cooling system is compromised they automatically shut down and just sit there in a block of sodium.

¶ For those who still think in terms of conventional nuclear power plants, Yves Smith concludes her piece, “Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?” with another question: “And if you argue against it, what energy/economic strategy do you recommend in its place?”

Sext

¶ How nice it is, as Confucius might have said, when one blogger whom we follow writes about another. Kyle Minor recently read all of Alexander Chee’s Koreanish, falling into it as if it were a book — a book without an end; a book with its end in its beginning. ¶ Bess Levin does a jerk a favor and lets him go nameless in her high-larious response to an article entitled “Sexless and the City.” You have to wonder what paid journalists are being paid to do, exactly. (Make Viagra-popping editors feel better about ageing?) “Capitalism has replaced sex”? Nate Freeman must be new to this — any “this” you care to specify. (Dealbreaker) ¶ Felix Salmon enumerates the ways in which good blogging beats traditional journalism.

The main impact I think is the way that blog reporting can iterate. In traditional media, you report the story and then you publish it; with blogs, you can start with something much less fully formed and then come back at it over time in many ways and from many angles. Every print journalist knows the feeling of publishing a story which is read by great sources who then provide lots of really good information which would have been great in the original piece. Bloggers don’t worry about that: they just put up a new post, or an update.

Blogs can also geek out in a way that traditional journalists can’t. There’s no space constraint online, and so if I want to spend 5,000 words writing about vulture funds, or a reporter at HuffPo wants to spend 4,000 words getting into the weeds of regulatory reform, they can. Or look at the Ars Technica reviews of every new Macintosh operating system. That kind of material can be incredibly popular, but it just doesn’t work in print. Blogs have a reputation for being superficial, but they can also be much more detailed and accurate than traditional journalism. Not to mention the fact that they’re often written by genuine experts in their fields, rather than by journalists.

Nones

¶ In The New Yorker, David Remnick urges the Obama Administration to stop waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu to have his Nixon moment regarding a Palestinian state. We’re all for that. What surprised was the bit toward the end about the “unforeseeability” of the Palestinian crisis ‘way back in 1967.

One of the myths of Israeli history is that only a few intellectuals on the left could see, in the wake of the 1967 war, that a prolonged occupation of Palestinian lands would be a moral and political calamity. In fact, records of the first cabinet meeting after the war show that the Justice Minister, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, said, “In a time of decolonization in the whole world can we consider an area in which mainly Arabs live, and we control defense and foreign policy? . . . Who’s going to accept that?”

What’s surprising is that such a “myth” could ever have taken root.

Vespers

¶ At the tender age of 69, Paul Theroux contemplates the autobiography, and shivers. The only literary one that he approves of is Trollope’s, and look what that did to the celebrated novelist’s reputation! Nobody read Trollope for decades! Theroux finds a more practical model in Dickens. (Smithsonian; via MetaFilter)

The more I reflect on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel. The immediate family is typically the first subject an American writer contemplates. I never felt that my life was substantial enough to qualify for the anecdotal narrative that enriches autobiography. I had never thought of writing about the sort of big talkative family I grew up in, and very early on I developed the fiction writer’s useful habit of taking liberties. I think I would find it impossible to write an autobiography without invoking the traits I seem to deplore in the ones I’ve described—exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction. Therefore, I suppose my Copperfield beckons.

¶ Charles-Adam Foster-Simard writes about binge-reading Henry James for a course in the UK, making us glad that we are no longer young. Although his piece bears signs of binge-writing, it’s clear that our reader has gathered the essentials, and is now prepared simply to enjoy Henry James. He also provides yet another indication that Colm Tóibín’s The Master — which we read after we knew all about James — is an effective and alluring portal to James’s great novels. ¶ Also at The Millions: Lydia Kiesling doesn’t argue the point; she just comes out and says that Lolita is “the ne plus ultra of the novel form.”

Compline

¶ At The Best Part, designer Jason Dean makes an important plea, and cautions his colleagues against fashioning Japan-relief posters from disaster porn. “As poster designers, it is our duty to create something that functions beyond a simple depiction of a disaster and inspires empathy or even action on the part of the audience.” Well said! ¶ Richard Crary rambles, but we’re always glad to ramble with him, because the beginnings of his ideas are like buds in March. On him, they look good. Now he explains why his blog is called The Existence Machine. The following passage, from the end of the essay, is perhaps a bit over the top — people are always saying “capitalism” when they mean something else, something that doesn’t have a name — it has the rawness of a fine spring day.

I resist the strong tendency in this tradition to see life itself as the misery. I wish rather, writing as the father of a beautiful little girl, to celebrate life. It is, at times, easy to do that. All I have to do is be in her company for a few minutes, and life is great. Life is great. But it doesn’t take long, when away from her, when commuting, when reading about the problems of the world, to despair about the future world that awaits her. And I thus write with sadness and anger as I consider, as I often must, the death cult that is capitalism, its continued encroachment on and destruction of the natural world, and the immanent disaster “into which science has led us and abandoned us”.

¶ Andrew Woolner, from Yokohama, reminds us that, even in Japan, the world has not come to an end. (A Perfect Lover Has No Memory; via Mnémoglyphes)

Have a Look

¶ Kottke.org turns ten. ¶ 650 Quilts (@ Design Observer) ¶ Boris Smelov’s photographs. (ARTCAT)

Noted

¶ One world traveler’s list of Philippine quirks. (via Marginal Revolution) ¶ “A Century of Meat” — chicken used to be special. (NYT) ¶ Gordon Lish Bibliography. (HTMLGiant)

General Motors has announced that it will be closing a light-truck manufacturing plant for want of Japanese parts that the recent catastrophe (time to name earthquakes, guys!) has made unavailable. In retrospect, it seems idiotic to depend exclusively for the supply of any single part on factories located in lively seismic zones.

An average vehicle has about 20,000 parts and depends on thousands of suppliers, and the sudden loss of any one could be enough to stop production, Mr. Hoffecker said.

“It’s a real scramble for everybody,” he said. “It could be a chemical plant that got hurt that supplies material to make plastic that goes into a door panel that goes to someone.”

For parts that are shipped by boat to North America, shortages could take about a month to materialize. But for lightweight, high-value parts like microchips that travel by plane, problems could crop up much faster.

G.M. declined to identify the parts in short supply at Shreveport or their manufacturer. A person with direct knowledge of the situation said just one part was involved and it was also used in other G.M. models built elsewhere in North America. G.M. is diverting parts that would have gone to Shreveport so it can continue building models that are more important or in shorter supply, said this person, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and so spoke anonymously.

It’s hard to imagine what Limitless would be like without its star, Bradley Cooper. I know nothing about the actor himself, but in all of the films that I’ve seen him in he projects an inborn air of the smart guy who never met a corner he wouldn’t try to cut. At the start of Limitless, Eddie Morra has pretty much run out of corners. He can’t get started on the sci-fi novel for which has received a modest advance, and he can’t seem to do anything else, either, except sponge off his lovely girlfriend, Lindy (Abbie Cornish) and sip whiskeys through the afternoons. He and his Lower East Side apartment vie for unkemptness. 

No sooner has Abbie pulled the plug on her support for Eddie than he runs into his former brother-in-law (long story), who used to be a drug dealer. Vernon (Johnny Whitworth) has left the old hard drugs behind, and is now peddling something that is not only just as addictive but farm more likely to render its user a prosperous member of society. Trading on the old eyewash about how we use only twenty percent of our brainpower, Limitless invites you to imagine what it would be like to remember everything that your senses have ever scanned (forget study!), not only effortlessly but correctly. It unfurls a vast turkey carpet crowded with the good things that such powers might effortlessly attain: primarily — and in this I find the screenwriting acute — the interest and attention of other smart people. It also reminds us of what life is like when such powers drain away, as they do every day if you don’t take your nifty little pill. It’s hard to say which vision Mr Cooper plays better. His smiling Eddie is unabashed by wealth; he behaves as if to the manner born. His deperate Eddie, craving the transparent tablets without which he is less endowed than Cinderella in her ash-heap, will do anything for the drug, right up and including the drinking of another man’s blood — a scene that, for all its grisly horror, Mr Cooper infuses with a faint virtual smirk. 

Eddie has two opposite numbers in these proceedings. The first is a tycoon, Carl van Loon, played by Robert de Niro with suave earthiness. Carl never misses the chance to remind Eddie that he has not worked his way up the ladder of success, but flown to the top on the wings of miraculous gifts. There is another, darker movie implicit in this performance: although purportedly unflappable — tycoons don’t do flap, after all — Carl smolders with resentment even as he picks Eddie’s brain. In the end, when he thinks he has Eddie in his pocket, it’s very agreeable to find out that he’s wrong. More overtly antagonistic is Gennady (Andrew Howard), a Russian thug whose penalties for non-repayment of loans are predictably barbaric. Once he gets hold of the wonder drug, Eddie is in a lot of trouble. 

The best thing about Limitless is that it ends on a note of redemption; we are spared the Hollywood ending. Eddie Morra is clean but still smart, and very successful, too — the sky’s the limit on his career. But this fabulous resolution is over before it begins. We don’t have time to decide that the now virtuous hero, having become a straight-arrow, honest worker, can really be Bradley Cooper. The film ends with a wink that acknowledges the problem — and then the screen goes black, and “it’s only a movie.”

When will George Grayson be lead off in chains? Maybe he won’t be — maybe the president of the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation hasn’t done anything wrong — but one thing’s for sure: there’s more to the story that Joe Drape reports in today’s Times (“Ex-Racehorses Starve as Charity Fails in Mission to Care for Them“). The foundation posted a $1.2 million deficit in 2009, and it has not been making payments to the stables that care for the horses, as a result of which many thoroughbreds are emaciated, and some have died.

“I was being emotionally blackmailed to lower my per diem, and was the subject of retribution because I questioned the care of the horses,” said Mrs. Hurst-Marsh, who is owed $10,000.

When Gayle England, whose farm in Stroud, Okla., is also highly regarded as a special-care facility, complained not only of the chronic slow pay but the general lack of regard for the farms and the horses, 26 T.R.F. horses were taken from her.

Last month, some of the horses in the worst shape were taken from other foundation farms and returned to the Hurst-Marsh farm and Ms. England. In fact, one of the 14 horses moved to England’s farm with the help and funding of the Mellon Estate had to be put down.

“They were making their administrative payroll this whole time, but the horses they were suffering,” Ms. England said. “They need to be held accountable.”

Mr. Terry, a Mellon estate trustee, said he still does not know what went wrong.

The sesquicentennial of Italian unification is coming up. What’s often overlooked is that unification was really more of an eviction: the Austrians were thrown out, and the Pope was put in his place. Italy remains a congeries of distinct regions, each one the center of the world — except for the ambitious ones who leave. Silvio Berlusconi is the perfect symbol of the meaninglessness of “Italy” as anything more than the name of a peninsula.     

In 1911, Italy celebrated the 50th anniversary of unification by inaugurating the hulking Victor Emmanuel Monument in central Rome. (It also invaded Libya, the start of 40 years of bloody colonial rule.) In 1961, for the 100th anniversary, Italy was riding high in an economic boom.

This time around, as the country gears up for fireworks, concerts and special exhibitions — and kicks off a four-day weekend, with public offices and schools closed starting Thursday — the mood is different. Italy is facing economic difficulties, political scandals, brain drain, and once again problems with Libya, its largest supplier of natural gas.

In a fictive letter to the editor in the Turin daily La Stampa on Sunday, the humorist Massimo Gramellini assumed the guise of Italy. “The person writing to you is an old and unpredictable lady who as her birthday approaches feels overcome by a melancholy anxiety,” he wrote.

Last night, Kathleen had a business dinner, so I scooted across the street to the Japanese pub. Like any pub, this place has its regulars, who can be found at the bar on almost any night. I didn’t at first note that one of the regulars was sitting at a nearby table, with an older couple. I was reading Sandra Tsing Loh’s response to the Tiger Mom and sipping a Sapporo contentedly when my chicken teriyaki arrived. As I began piling a few pieces of dripping chicken onto the bowl of rice, however, I became aware of the regular’s voice, which was expressing concern about military preparedness. It was, as always, a very clear voice, almost unaccented — a public speaker’s voice if ever there was one. Without being loud, exactly, the regular was projecting his well-modulated tones throughout the bar area, and I later realized that he was intending to be heard by another regular, this one seated at the bar, whom he was baiting with opposing political views. 

By this time, he held me captive; I couldn’t keep my mind on the page. I couldn’t stop listening to his remarks, but, worse, I couldn’t fathom an effective challenge. As he sang the praises of Sarah Palin and charged Barack Obama with having adopted some of his father’s communist ideas; as he informed his fellow diners that the problem with liberals is that they reduce politics to the personal, and try to smear their opponents with scandal instead of confronting the real issues; as he conceded that he would vote for a libertarian — reluctantly — against a socialist — as he spouted a stream of idiotically short-sighted and poisonously selfish vews, I could think of nothing to say that would pierce his sleek smugness. I had no intention of barging in on the conversation, but I was so unnerved by my inability to venture any silent counter-arguments that I gobbled down my dinner and fled. 

It was very distressing. A great deal of my helplessness, I knew, owed to the man’s genial, level tone. Several times, he said that he quite liked a certain politician, but wouldn’t vote for him because the politican’s views were too far to the left. Nothing personal! In defense of his preposterous claim about the president’s alleged communism, he urged his antagonee, who had joined in from his perch at the bar (making reading quite perfectly impossible), to read Dreams of My Father. Then they would talk about it and he would see! This was as close as the guy came to offering proof of anything — and I almost wished that I had an annotated copy of the book with me, so that I could ask him to point to passages in support of his claim. It would be a depressing exercise, of course; to my objection that a such-and-such a sentence in the book did not make Mr Obama out to be a communist (and here I thought that “socialist” was as extreme as the name-calling was going to get), he would demur suavely and even regretfully; I must be naive, misinformed, or in some other way intellectually wanting. The best that I could hope for would be an offer to agree to disagree — and that has become a wholly unsatisfactory option (hence my liberal “hostility”). 

I can agree to disagree about the nature of the Holy Trinity, but I cannot agree to disagree about creationism or evolutionism. I cannot agree to disagree about drug laws, the death penalty, or restrictions on abortion. As lamentable as some actions may be, they neither justify nor warrant incarceration, execution, or unwanted pregnancy. I can expect society to arrange for my protection, but I don’t give it permission to punish those who would endanger me (hence my liberal “naiveté”). I can only persist in denouncing the opposing position as wrong. I can only tear my hair out wondering how the humanism that I have always espoused and that used to be honored in the breach has become so embattled. 

I can only hope that those who think the way I do outnumber those who think the way he does.

How we wish the Tea Partiers would get on the bus, instead of trying to wreck it. There’s nothing that this country needs more than popular concern for effective regulation. But when you consider the regulatory baackground (or lack of it) behind last weekend’s casino bus disaster, it’s hard not to share the TP’s cynicism about government.

Federal guidelines limit passenger-bus drivers to 10 hours behind the wheel, within a 15-hour work day, and bus carriers face a fine if violations are discovered. But the hours, recorded in a handwritten logbook, are easily falsified, and even outstanding violations are often ignored: World Wide Travel, the operator whose bus crashed in the Bronx, had been cited several times by regulators for problems with its logs.

At Foxwoods on Monday, a driver for World Wide Travel was preparing for a nap in his bus’s front passenger row. The driver had arranged a blanket and several small pillows atop a knapsack; later, he opened an overhead compartment to reveal a stash of blankets. “You see my bed?” he said with a smile.

[snip]

Federal law is nearly silent on qualifications for the job: for the most part, anyone with a state-issued commercial driver’s license is eligible. Carriers are expected to obtain medical certificates from their drivers and occasionally test for drug and alcohol use; a spokesman for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the industry’s regulator, said that the responsibility for administering those tests fell to the business, not the state, and that violators could face fines.

Some skeptics wonder if discount bus companies, which are rarely unionized and have only a few employees, end up with castoffs from more reputable places.

Jeff Gordinier visits Alex Ott, a former bartender from Germany who has gone on to bigger and better-smelling things in the cool-hunting area.

For him, sorcery begins at home. Beneath a mounted surfboard in his apartment is the nook where Mr. Ott, who studied organic chemistry during his younger years at the Braunschweig University of Technology, likes to tinker.

It’s like a dorm-room version of a laboratory, complete with a microscope, a bouquet of pipettes and a spice rack crowded with essential oils “worth about $2 million,” he claimed. He even has a gas mask. “When you work with some oils, they’re very strong,” he said. “They’ll burn your nostrils.”

Mr. Ott’s curiosity about the mood-altering potential of various aromas and ingredients led to an immersion in “Meaningful Scents Around the World,” a dense 2006 book by Roman Kaiser that explores the chemical properties of unusual scents and flavors, from “watermelon snow” algae in the Swiss Alps to pine resin in Italy to Cordyceps sinensis, the prized “caterpillar fungus” of China. “I was hooked,” said Mr. Ott, who became so obsessed with bark extracts and botanicals that he now owns a signed copy of the tome. “It explained everything about volatile molecules, your brain, your olfactory bulb, memories. The juices and herbs and spices that I choose come from the studies that I’ve done.

“There are people who do research and read books, and then there are people who just do cosmopolitans and sling drinks, and they know nothing about these things. They’re more entertainers. Bartenders should never be people who come up with cocktails, because they have no education.”

How quaint, that somebody interesting doesn’t live in Brooklyn.

Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey is a strange case in its own right. An unbroken essay of 166 pages, including occasional and often miscellaneous illustrations, this series of sketches of a famous friend rambles senescently across a small patch of ground. You sense that the mere organization of the material into discrete chapters would show up enough repetition to warrant cutting the text by about a third, but this is not to complain. If you find that this little book is making you impatient, put it down and save it for a more congenial time. 

Nothing could be more fatuous than recommending or otherwise evaluating the Strange Case. If you’ve ever fallen beneath the spell of Edward Gorey’s work, you’ll want to read it. When you discover that it is neither an objective biography of Gorey nor a measured consideration of his work, but instead a rather doddering memoir that tells you at least as much about Theroux as about his subject, you will feel at least a moment of keen disappointment; whereafter you may either throw the book against the wall or continue reading with adjusted expectations. In the latter alternative, you will not object when Theroux goes on about Sainte-Beuve, Beardsley, Auden, or other to him kindred spirits. You will not try too hard to grasp the point of mystifying anecdotes. You will probably not even wonder why Fantagraphics Books, which published the Strange Case in 2000, in paper, declined to “do anything about it” when issuing a hardcover edition just this past January. (The Strange Case of Edward Gorey is much too strange to be fixed.) Above all, you will not mind that Gorey never sticks around long enough for you to get a good look at him. You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Theroux wrote this book, which at first you might have thought Gorey would hate had he lived to see it, to hide his friend behind a smokescreen of plausible chit-chat. Consider: 

I attended a party at my brother Paul’s house in 1983, just after Lady Diana’s wedding, when Gorey’s highly amusic if satirical comments on the overluschness of the Princess’s wedding gown (delicious acres of crushed ivorty silk-taffeta and lace embroidered with mother-of-pearl sequence of pearls [sic], something she herself very soon thereafter came to agree with, at first scandalized Tina Brown and Harold Evans who were also guests, having just more or less arrived at the time to take their respective positions with anity Fair and New York Times [sic] but who had clearly never quite met anybody like Edward Gorey with his wistful, somewhat dramatic manner, filled with hyperbole and curmudgeonly wit. My understanding was that they did not initially like him. They had never seen such a person. To their credit, they caught on quickly to the slant of his humor and soon everything went swimmingly. I can  still see him in my mind’s-eye walking to his car in the rain under a big cherry-handled cotton umbrella. 

What can one ultimately say in defense of a person who with studied conviction quite unequivocally preferred the company of cats over human company?…

This is enormously unkempt; if I were glancing through a blog entry written with such carelessness, I’d give its site a pass. Everything potentially interesting about the passage is buried, as if in a black hole, in the sentence that begins by giving the Evans-Browns credit for “catching on.” Theroux might have done a better job of putting us in the picture by reminding us that the oddness of Gorey’s appearance would have been intensified by his being dressed like an overgrown high school student, inappropriately attired for the task at hand, and by his sporting hefty iron rings on all of his fingers. But we would still be left with an odd dissonance: although it was clearly desirable from Theroux’s point of view that Gorey get on “swimmingly” with the English newcomers, it’s highly unlikely that Gorey gave a damn what they thought about him — a conclusion that’s clinched by the strange final sentence, which has nothing to do with anything: exactly! The first sentence of the following paragraph carries us even farther away from Gorey, whose lack of interest in the opinions of others might seem autistic were it not more likely that he had good reason to rely on his eccentric manner to rally a contingent of supporters. He would not have cared what Theroux said in defense of his preference for the company of cats. I can almost see him patting Theroux gentle and suggesting that, “ultimately, you can say that I died on the last page.” 

I can see that gesture because Theroux does a pretty good job, if only by aggregating instances, of conveying a sense of Gorey’s performance mode. If you have lived among creative types in a big city, Gorey’s behavior will not be so terribly unfamiliar; it follows one of several available standards of “impossibility.” Witty, capricious, and determined to mix things up, Gorey seems to have been one of those smarty pants whose opinions about almost everything are formed as if in a vacuum. You could not infer from his fondness for Buffy the Vampire Slayer that he would look down his nose on Cavalleria rusticana. For the matter of that, his disdain for the opera might be temporary, the whim of a mood swing — don’t hold him too it! (Gorey took the kind of interest in silent films and in the actors who appeared in them that would eventually make Botticelli a much-loathed game.) Theroux insists upon his generosity, and I don’t doubt that he was free with his professional services, as well as in other material ways. But he was not intellectually generous. It may have had something to do with his being, as he put it, “undersexed.” 

What made Edward Gorey stand out, as the Strange Casehammers home with nails of negative implication, is the work, the work that Gorey hated to discuss. I can’t exaggerate my admiration for this disposition; it seals my faith in Gorey as an artist. His work was complete; there was nothing left over to talk about. If there remains plenty to deconstruct, if Gorey’s work seems to beg for unpacking, it is nevertheless clear that it can’t be decoded — all the signs are overdetermined, and then compressed in the clichés and references of a narrow swathe of popular culture. Assuming that one of his dark little stories “means” anything, it would mean a great deal more than the materials out of which it was made. To say that a certain drawing is reminiscent of the style of a frame from a Charlie Chan movie (not a comparison made by Theroux) would serve only to make the movie seem paltry. Gorey brought two special ingredients to his mash-ups, a highly-wrought and perfectly consistent decorative style and an irreppressible sense of humor that was perfectly coordinated to his sense of design. Theroux tells us that Gorey spoke in giggles. Without making a sound, we giggle at his squiggles. 

I came away from The Strange Case of Edward Goreyrather relieved that I never met the man in passing. But I surmised that he would have made an interesting neighbor. At his memorial service, we’re told, a number of people who were not mutually acquainted claimed to have been Gorey’s best friend. As for his dislikes, you have to imagine that he would never have spilled them onto the pages of a book with the gusto displayed by Theroux. Martha Stewart, Barbra Streisand, Barbara Walters, and Oprah Winfrey all get withering goings-over by Theroux’s basilisk prose, as do popular genre eminences such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The word “vitriol” comes all too often to mind. 

His standoffishness vividly came through in an appearance he made in 1997 on the Dick Cavett Show, which was pretty much of a disaster. With his characteristically pretentious and intrusive self-importance — those phony Yale witticisms — Cavett, right in his element, was clearly trying to score off his unassuming and visibly uneasy guest from the very first moment with the farcical banter he presumptuously assumed an original, thoughtful man like Gorey would expect. Gorey, out of shock, I suspect, but maybe disgust, was virtually mute. He gave one-word answers, nettled replies. A public forum was not anything he enjoyed. Quipping with fools or professional girdle-salesmen was certainly not what he was about. “I see,” he invariably said softly as the dry, gloomy response to anyone feeding him a line or trying to cozen him. “I was under the impression that this was leading somewhere.”

There’s a lot of dish in Strange Case, from the mention of which I could easily transition into the complexities of its grapplings with sexuality — but I won’t. It’s enough to mention that the most annoying thing about this book is its heterosexual author’s overdeployment of the epithet, “a gay thing.” Given the facts, it’s unclear what this really means, since Gorey appears to have coupled an array of campy behaviors with genuine celibacy: he really did prefer the company of cats, and might very well have been a hermit if he hadn’t liked to talk so much. Theroux may be using “a gay thing” to draw Gorey into a community (even if it’s one that Theroux himself doesn’t belong to), but the effect is invariably diminishing and even borderline homophobic. Nobody on earth for whom the observation might otherwise be interesting needs to be told that a taste for mauve is “a gay thing.” 

Gorey fans will be familiar with The Listing Attic, an early collection of really rather good limericks, two of them in French and one quite magnificently getting revenge on “some Harvard men, stalwart and hairy.” What I did not know is that Gorey may have picked up this knack from Auden, whom he hugely admired. I think it best to conclude this page in Theroux’s entertaining spirit at its best, with a truly impressive poem by Auden that sports, among other things, no end of internal rhymes. 

The Bishop elect of Hong Kong
Had a dong that was twelves inches long.
He thought the spectators
Were admiring his gaiters
When he went to the gents’. He was wrong.

Jim Dwyer’s column about executive pay at regional hospitals underscores the need to take a fresh look at the idea of the “task force.” Tasked with recommending spending and service cuts throughout the hospital system, which is broadly supported by state and local taxes, a force composed of industry consultants made sure that the seven-figure salaries paid to top executives were kept off the negotiating table.

A proposal to allow public financing for only the first $1 million in wages for an executive died before it even reached the task force. “It was classic how it was killed,” said Judy Wessler, director of the Commission on the Public’s Health System, an advocacy group that had suggested the limits.

“We submitted the proposal in writing, met with the state staff members about it, then testified for our two minutes at a hearing,” Ms. Wessler said. “Then in the written summary of all the 4,000 proposals, they twisted the wording of ours so that it would be impossible to implement. Then they said it was not viable, so it wasn’t even put up for a vote.”

State officials acknowledged that the proposal had been drastically changed from its original meaning, but did not explain how that happened. In an e-mail exchange provided by Ms. Wessler, Jason A. Helgerson, the state’s Medicaid director, apologized “for not having had the time to do all we wish to do.” Mr. Helgerson was not available for an interview on Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.
The subject of executive wages would have been familiar to the task force, many of whose members came from the health care industry. One had worked as a consultant for Mount Sinai Medical Center, which received $250 million in Medicaid and paid its chief executive $2.7 million in 2008. A co-chairman of the task force, Michael Dowling, was paid $2.4 million in 2008 by North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, which received about $220 million from Medicaid.

It’s nonsense like this that, sooner or later, brings on the likes of the Tea Party.

In a provocative post at Economix, Edward Glaeser, author of Triumph of the City, points to three issues on which city dwellers and Tea Partiers — strange bedfellows — might make common cause against the federal government’s biases.

Urbanites are not natural libertarians. New Yorkers should like government more than Montanans, because New Yorkers have more need for an effective local government.
Crowding thousands of people into a tiny spot of land creates a risk of crime and contagious disease and congestion, and those downsides of density need public management. America’s cities became healthy only when local government spent vast sums on clean water; they became safe only through massive local policing efforts.

While urbanites do need strong local governments, they can make common cause with libertarians opposed to a larger federal government, especially because national largess often goes to low-density states with more senators per capita.

The original Tea Party was a child of the city. Urban interactions in 1770s Boston helped create a revolution and a great nation.

The current Tea Party could return to its urban roots if it stands up against subsidies for home borrowing and highways and if it encourages competition in urban schools.

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been getting Remicade infusions for seven years now. The anniversary falls next month, but when I have my next infusion, in June, I’ll be in my eighth year of treatments. As Sarah said — Sarah is one of the two nurses who have been at the HSS’s Infusion Therapy Unit longer than I’ve been a patient there — time flies when you’re having fun. Or, I thought to myself, when you have good health insurance.

The Remicade infusion protocol calls for infusions at eight-week intervals — roughly six per year. Each dose — each bag of mixed-to-order Remicade — costs about $10,000. If I were following the protocol, I’d have cost our health insurer $430,000 since 2004. (I believe that less money changes hands in practise, but the bill is still huge.) That’s a staggering amount of money — what does it buy?

A much better quality of life, to be sure. The medicine prevents the low-grade inflammation of arthritis, and it also calms the irritable bowel problem that has plagued me since my twenties. In short, it spares me the consequences of having an overactive auto-immune system. But it doesn’t actually prevent any auto-immune disorders. And by the time I started taking Remicade, it was already too late for the drug to halt the advance of ankylosing spondylitis. There was nothing to halt; the degenerative process of ossifying my spinal discs was complete.

So I have felt a moral incentive to reduce the number of infusions, and I’m happy to say that I’ve cut it down from six to four. It’s a bit of a stretch. If I had five infusions per year, I would never notice the gradual ebbing of the drug’s effect. At thirteen-week intervals, I do notice. From anywhere between two weeks to ten days before the next infusion, I begin to find that doing almost anything is more of an effort than it usually is. There’s no pain, but there’s no vigor. Once I accept the fact that I’m running low on Remicade, and not malingering, I can turn my time in what I call “the trough” to advantage: it’s a great time for reading and watching videos. 

I tell myself now that this is how life felt every day for about six years before Remicade came to the rescue. I can’t believe it.