Looking into the future, the pessimist pundits of the past used to worry that food production would not keep pace with population growth. But they never imagined why that might be the case when in fact it happened. “Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Each year, an ever larger portion of the world’s crops — cassava and corn, sugar and palm oil — is being diverted for biofuels as developed countries pass laws mandating greater use of nonfossil fuels and as emerging powerhouses like China seek new sources of energy to keep their cars and industries running. Cassava is a relatively new entrant in the biofuel stream.

But with food prices rising sharply in recent months, many experts are calling on countries to scale back their headlong rush into green fuel development, arguing that the combination of ambitious biofuel targets and mediocre harvests of some crucial crops is contributing to high prices, hunger and political instability.

This year, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported that its index of food prices was the highest in its more than 20 years of existence. Prices rose 15 percent from October to January alone, potentially “throwing an additional 44 million people in low- and middle-income countries into poverty,” the World Bank said.

(Did we tell you that “taking the day off” means helping the Editor with his storage issues! Some break!) Another item that caught our eye over the weekend was a review by Nancy Koehn of Margaret Heffernan’s Willful Blindness.

Writing in clear, flowing prose, she draws on psychological and neurological studies and interviews with executives, whistleblowers and white-collar criminals. She analyzes mechanisms that limit our vision — individually and collectively — and thus jeopardize our safety, economic well-being, moral grounding and emotional wholeness.

Love, ideology, fear and the impulse to obey and conform all play important roles in rendering us blind to the makings of personal tragedies and corporate collapses.

Information overload is also a big factor, especially in our technologically sophisticated age. Ms. Heffernan explains how multitasking and excessive stimulation, combined with exhaustion, restrict what we see and do.

It was the “How Venice Works” vimeo that made me want to see Don’t Look Now last night. The jolly little short about the Venetian infrastructure left me feeling very sorry for myself, because it brought home what I wouldn’t be doing this fall: finally getting to Venice. (Regular readers know that we’ll be going to another, closer island instead, a month or so earlier.) Feeling sorry for myself about not seeing Venice — with a heap of napkins to be ironed: if ever there’s a state of mind more suited to watching Nicholas Roeg’s handheld horror film, I hope I never experience it.

I saw the movie when it came out, in 1973. What made it memorable wasn’t the grisly murder at the end, shocking as that was, but the love scene. And the way the love scene was shown in bits that alternated with the scene that followed, when the loving couple got dressed and ready to go out to dinner. There was the sex, which was very explicit for the time — pornographic, frankly; but redeemed by being claimed for marriage — and there was the playing with temporal frames, a fundamental and otherwise ominous element of the film.

Don’t Look Now is the opposite of a Hitchcock thriller: it blows its big secret the first time. There’s no going back to hoping, along with John Baxter (Donald Sutherland), that the petite figure in the red mac is the ghost of his dead little girl, Christine, who drowns in the movie’s opening scene. The last ten minutes of Don’t Look Now are pure, unrelieved melodrama, all bootless shrieks and running footsteps on the fondamento. And blood. And then, for the last scene, a stylish cortège (which John has foreseen — you see what I mean by temporal play), with Julie Christie looking chic and vaguely mad in a crushed cloche, shot from below. She’s wretched, but also exalted, transcendent — she knew she was right. What’s most salient now, though, is Pino Donaggio’s music, which is even more dated than Donald Sutherland’s outfits (which I still covet). How to describe it? Suave and romantic in the manner of the old studio movies, but with a sour, jazzy edge, a hipster wink that screams SIXTIES. Donaggio’s knowing score, with its faux-baroque runs during an agitated search scene, is in perfect accord with the famous love scene. Both promote the idea that Don’t Look Now is a classy film.

That is, you can have porn and you can have murder but if you play with them in an interesting way then what you’ve really got is, if not art, then something that won’t embarrass sophisticated audiencesc with vulgar appeals to the senses. You’ve got Donald Sutherland and you’ve got Julie Christie and you’ve got Venice and the restoration of an old church complete with an aristocratic bishop whose family has been patronizing the same tessera firm for generations. You’ve got the low-budget European look that handheld cameras still conveyed in 1973. Class, as I say. But the class is appliquéd. I’m reminded of Joseph Kerman’s famous dismissal of Tosca: Don’t Look Now is a shabby little shocker.

My point is not, however, to heap contumely upon Roeg’s movie, which I watched right through to the end even though I finished the ironing midway. My point is to recall that you could still do that in the early Seventies — paste a few arty elements on something and call it classy. Class, that’s to say, wasn’t a matter of style, a matter of filmmaking aesthetic. It was a bundle of references that cued the audience.

They really did make terrible movies in those days. Or, rather, they produced pretty good movies, but they made them badly.

We’re taking the day off, but there’s something from Sunday’s Times. Cornell’s Robert H Frank (whom we call “Luxury Bob” to distinguish him from the author of Richistan) wrote about what he calls the “toil index,” the number of hours that must be worked in order to pay for housing of average quality. Given income inequality, this average keeps climbing out of reach.

The index rejects the standard economic assumption that well-being depends primarily on absolute consumption. Instead, it assumes that the context of that consumption is often far more important. Context matters because the brain requires a frame of reference to make any evaluative judgment.

For example, is a particular family’s house adequate? The answer invariably depends on the quality and size of other houses in the surrounding area.

Rising inequality has shifted the context that governs housing choices. Higher incomes at the top have led the wealthy to build bigger mansions, shifting the frame of reference that shapes demands for those with slightly smaller incomes, who travel in overlapping social circles. The near-rich respond by building bigger houses as well, shifting the frame of reference for others just below them, and so on, all the way down the income ladder.

Have we missed something, or is there a reason why no one speaks of social economics?

The free flow of financial credit — our everyday lives depend upon it — is a confidence game. It may be honest, but it’s still a game, one in which nobody knows everything about anybody else’s cards. Ignorance is not only part of the game, it’s the secret of its success. That’s why we’re sorry that a glaring light has been thrown on the Federal Reserve’s discount window, a behind-the-scenes operation that contributed to economic stability merely by existing. Bankers knew that it was there if they needed it; they didn’t need to know who was lining up at it.

Unless we’re persuaded otherwise, our position is that, during the credit crisis that heated up in 2007,  the discount window was a bulwark standing between the nation and its financial collapse. We’re sorry to see that its actions are now being scrutinized for political impropriety when,  as even one critic admits, the partial disclosures that the Fed has had to make pursuant to a court ruling do not support conclusions one way or the other.

Charles Calomiris, a finance professor at Columbia University who has studied discount window lending during previous crises, said the Fed had not released enough information for the public to determine whether some of the recipients were propped up inappropriately and should have been allowed to fail more quickly.

“Do we know whether the Fed did that? No, we don’t,” he said. “But the Fed has become more politicized than at any point in its history, and I do worry very much that a lot of Fed discount window lending may just be part of a political calculation.”

We sense that this Times article, by Binyamin Appelbaum and Jo Craven McGinty, does not provide a full context for evaluating the reported inuendo.

Jane Austen has been much on my mind.  Every time I’ve run across her name, for the past couple of months, it has seemed that too much time has gone by since the last time I read one of her novels — Persuasion, I think it was. It’s harder now than it used to be to re-read things; despite my earnest attempts at pruning, my reading interests ramify, and I hear so much about so many more books than I used to do.

I bought the Penguin edition of Northanger Abbey and tucked it into my shoulder bag, as something to read if I ever got stuck somewhere without anything else. Needless to say, the book went unopened. Six or eight months went by, with Northanger Abbey going in and coming out of the shoulder bag at least once a week. Finally, it stayed out, along with the Everyman Library paperback of The Ambassadors, which I had actually dipped into. These two very different productions kept to a pile of their own, with late James lending an aura to early Austen that made it possible to think of Northanger Abbey as a classic, which it is not. 

What finally got me to open the book and re-read it for the first time since my teens was a sequence of nudges. The first was Colm Tóibín’s essay, “The Importance of Aunts,” which I wrote up two weeks ago. I picked up the second nudge as a result of the first: at the Museum, I came upon a little book on the sale table that I’d never have looked at ordinarily — for who needs “an appreciation of Jane Austen,” as the book is subtitled, by an Oxford don of whom one has never heard? The title, A Fine Brush on Ivory, seemed somewhat precious; and, in the event, it doesn’t really comport with the author’s robust grasp of Jane Austen’s vigor. There is nothing (or little) that is rough about Jane Austen, but there is also nothing that is mincing. Like any great comedian, Austen is very sure of her sense of humor, and if she laughs at her characters’ strained efforts, she makes few of her own.

The book’s dust jacket was irritating. Ladies simpering with parasols in a Regency garden; Cassandra Austen’s comparatively crude portrait of her sister in an oval below; and the title in the sort of typeface that Tiffany would sample with the words, “Mrs John Low Venable requests the pleasure of your company….” — this is all that one flies from in connection with Jane Austen. But I am not going to blame Richard Jenkyns for his book’s cover art. Among the many excellent points that he makes is one to the effect that Austen’s fictional world is generally less grand than the one into which she was born. Unlike almost everybody who toils in her shadow, Austen’s imagination works in a slightly downmarket direction, confined, with the exception of Persuasion, to the gentry. She has no intention of introducing her readers to scenes of social prominence, which, as Northanger Abbey richly suggests, she finds almost as silly as the “horrid” settings of The Mysteries of Udolpho. 

The third nudge was a comment that Ellen Moody made, at Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, to the effect that Andrew Davies’s 2007 adaptation of A Room With a View, which I’d never heard of, much less seen, highlights the novel’s imitation of Northanger Abbey. That did it. But by then, I’d read A Fine Brush on Ivory, and with the greatest pleasure. As books about books go, it’s one of the greatest. Jenkyns has a lot of good things to say about Austen, but what sets him apart from the many others who also have a lot to say about her is the pleasure that he takes in reading her and talking about her. The key to the book (not that it’s needed) lies in the Acknowledgments. 

For many years I have talked from time to time about Jane Austen’s novels, as about other books, with friends, without having the slightest idea that I would ever write anything about her, and I probably owe more to long forgotten conversations than I now realize. 

He goes on to thank a number of those friends, and a lucky crew I hope they felt themselves to be, because if his conversation were anything like his writing, they must have enjoyed some very fine evenings. 

Jenkyns, a classics scholar at Oxford, begins by apologizing for concentrating on three of Austen’s six completed novels. A long chapter on Austen’s  nderstanding of character, taking examples from all the novels but rooted in Pride and Prejudice, is followed by an ardent defense of Fanny Price. I don’t know that his arguments will win Fanny any new friends among that quarter of Austen’s fandom that regards Miss Price as a prig; the danger might be that he proves their point. Even if he does, though, he also makes the book even more interesting.

The subterraneous plot pattern in Mansfield Park is that of the successful adventuress, who rises from humble beginnings to social triumph, seeing off anyone who gets in her way. It is a splendid irony, both witty and touching, that this role is handed to so gentle and self-effacing a creature. Fanny is, as it were, the good stepsister to Becky Sharp and Undine Spragg, and in the end more fully successful than either. She becomes the cuckoo who kicks the other offspring out of the next. Edmund calls her “my only sister now” (not of course quite what she wants to hear). For Sir Thomas she becomes “the daughter that he wanted.” The weakliest of the heroines has become the most potent. 

This passage will have me re-reading Mansfield Park sooner rather than later. The final big chapter, “The Prisoner of Hartfield,” is one of the most delightful romps that I’ve ever encountered in the form of literary criticism. Jenkyns presents pathetic old Mr Woodhouse as the villain — nay, the monster! — of Emma. And what he has to say is perfectly plausible. 

He is an octopus whose tentacles draw others towards himself. His rank and wealth enable him to “command the visits of his own little circle.” He has succeededin making the world revolve around his person: everyone must spend time and trouble thinking about him. When the Westons, for example, want to give a dinner party, it is he who determines that the hours must be early and the numbers few, his “habits and inclination being consulted in every thing.” It is not enough for him to have his own comforts satisfied: his employment is to destroy the pleasure of others. in his own words, “the sooner every party breaks up, the better.” At the Donwell strawberry party, he is supplied with a comfortable room set up for his convenience. “Books of engravings, drawers of medals, cameos, corals, shells” and other curios are produced to entertain him, but it is not enough: to complete his pleasure he must damage that of others. Mrs Weston must sit with him, deprived of the enjjoyment of the sunny summer gardens, until Emma (a sign, incidentally, of her unobtrusive kindness) comes to relieve her. 

I don’t know when I’ve had so much fun, imagining Mr Woodhouse as a wicked Klingsor ensorcelling poor Emma in his Magic Shrubbery. An octopus, indeed!  I feel easy about agreeing with everything that Jenkyns says without having to give up an inch of my long-cherished picture of Mr Woodhouse as an ineffectual ninny who is gently teased behind his back and all but encouraged to cultivate his stupefying solipsism. (Mr Woodhouse is a tyrant in the way that a very large pet is a tyrant, and no more conscious of being one.) For all I know, Jenkyns is teasing me, daring me to agree with an outrageously contrarian reading. He has got hold of a plausible line of argument, and you almost want to thank Jane Austen for taking the trouble to provide him with the occasion for shining. 

 I have no intention of evaluating Jenkyns’s commentary, beyond insisting, that is, that his delivery is both delightful and (evidently!) provocative. There is no need to append further commentary reflecting what I think about Jane Austen. It’s enough that those thoughts will be somewhat more ample, thanks to the ones that I’ve borrowed from this book. What’s over and above — what makes reading Jenkyns sublime at times — is the reminder, made not so much by his remarks as by his brio, that books are there to be enjoyed, and that thinking about them can be a great deal of fun.  

About Northanger Abbey, I have only one thing to say: from start to finish, the book is a mother-lode of snark.

We applaud Joe Nocera for pointing out who’s really responsible for the fact that General Electric’s tax department is a profit center.

Is G.E. one of the companies that lobbies for the active financing exception? You bet it is. As Willens nicely puts it, “They are taking advantage of a loophole they helped create.”

But G.E. has also taken the next obvious step: It has managed, over time, to shift billions of dollars in profits from its U.S. income statement to its overseas income statements. Wouldn’t you know it? Most of their profits are also financing related. There is nothing illegal or even unethical about any of this. It’s Congress — the same Congress that is now screaming bloody murder about the deficit — that has paved the way for G.E.’s tax creativity.

We would go further. Who’s really responsible? Any voter who responds to paid political advertising, that’s who.

In response to the announcement by Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith that the City will be in-sourcing jobs from outside contractors — itself a response to last week’s revelations about City Time — the Times rounded up some experts, and as far as we can tell most of them only seem to speak the same language. For sheer rigor, the remarks of Cornell city planner Mildred Warner were a standout.

Rigorous quantitative analysis of every published study from around the world of water delivery and garbage collection (the two most commonly privatized services at the local government level) finds no statistical support for cost savings under privatization. Economic theory would predict this result. Private firms have incentives to reduce quality to enhance profits. Hence careful monitoring is required. But monitoring is expensive and it requires continuing knowledge, within government, of how services are produced.

Many public services are natural monopolies. In these cases, monopoly provision is cheaper than competition. But monopolies require public control. Even in services which initially experience competition, a competitive market erodes after the initial contract. Fully 75 percent of contracts are given to the incumbent without rebidding. For most local government services the average number of alternative providers is less than two. Only one third of the 67 most common local government services have two or more alternative providers in the market. So in many cases, all privatization does is substitute a private monopoly for a public one. There is more potential for public control over a public monopoly.

Convalescing from a nasty bit of stomach flu — or virus or whatever it was that sent me flying to the bathroom on Saturday night, hoping to minimize the messy side-effects of reverse peristalsis — has me in a ghostly state of mind. Not being wretchedly sick is oddly like not being alive, or the idea of it anyway. Convulsed with physical misery, you long for release, and release, when it comes, feels like heaven — but an empty heaven, one in which there is nothing to feel, not even boredom.

Recovering from a bout of good old-fashioned upchuck tipped me off to the way in which our manner of speaking about illness hasn’t caught up with the way in which medicine has changed it — especially for those of us who are older. Traditionally, the doctor’s job was to cure disease — to make it go away. People were either sick or they weren’t. But much of modern medicine is aimed at symptoms. Nothing has been done to cure the autoimmune disease that has turned my spinal column into one long bony mass, and that would afflict me with low-grade arthritis if it were not for remedial infusions of Remicade. I’m sick all the time, in other words; I just don’t feel it. The same goes for my hypertension issues. As I get older, the list is likely to longer — until it gets fatally short.

There are certainly days when I don’t “feel well.” I’m not sick, but I’m tired, creaky; sometimes, I’ve had too much wine the night before. The worst thing about not feeling well is the guilt at not getting things done. The wasted time hurts as badly as watching money fly out the window would. But when I’m really sick, this is not a problem. I don’t have the mental space for guilt. Either I’m in agony, seeking release in that vacant heaven, or I’m there, not feeling much of anything. On balance, I’ll take the guilt that goes with not feeling well.

Convalescing is a pleasant way of not feeling well, and I tried to make as much tried-and-true use of the day after as I could. I read two books and watched two movies. The books were Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey — I was already about halfway through — and Anne Roiphe’s Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason. Both were obviously delightful or I’d never have been able to look at them. The movies — neither of them “delightful” — were Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (Auf der aderen Seite) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen). There’s a tremendous, if incidental, sadness to The Lives of Others: Ulrich Mühe, who plays Wiesler, the diligent and committed Stasi agent who turns out to be “a good man,” died at about the time the film was being shown in the United States.

My indisposition was not without comic incident — ha ha. On Thursday, a glance at my Google calendar told me that we were scheduled for brunch with friends on Sunday. I’d have to cancel, I knew, because Kathleen was running off to Miami Beach for an impromptu getaway with another friend. But I dithered. On Saturday afternoon, I was on the point of picking up the phone when I procrastinated yet again, this time fatally, if not for me than for good manners. You can imagine how appalled I was when the doorman rang up our friends early on Sunday afternoon. You can imagine how appalled our friends must have been when I greeted them in the corridor — in my bathrobe! I can only imagine how appalled they were, though, because outwardly they were wonderful about it. It’s a pathetic thread to hold on to, but I can say that nothing like this has ever happened before! And it will never happen again, either.

I’ve been taking it easy today, but not so easy that I couldn’t change the sheets. 

We’d like to keep an eye on efforts by  Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood efforts to coordinate safety programs for oil and gas pipelines — currently a morass and a welter tied up in a Gordian knot. We’re not optimistic that the initiative will accomplish much on its own, but it may serve to highlight the antagonisms of transmission companies on the one hand and federal, state, and local authorities on the other, and let’s not forget about us.

Mr. LaHood said he had met with the executives of major natural gas companies to discuss better surveillance of pipelines and a new replacement schedule.

Cynthia L. Quarterman, the administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said her office did not have the authority to order replacement of pipes unless it found an “imminent hazard.” And, she said, pipes only had to be “fit for service.”

“There is no hundred-year deadline for any piece of pipe,” she said, although companies “have to assure it’s been operated and tested appropriately.”

But Mr. LaHood said “the point of this is to get everybody around the table and say, O.K., another 100 years in the ground is not going to cut it. We’re trying to work with all the stakeholders to reach a conclusion.”

Mr. Swift, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: “Part of the problem is there hasn’t been a focus on the replacement schedule, what we do with these 50 or 70 years down the line. People are aware it’s aging, but it’s a process we didn’t plan for gracefully.”

Matins

¶ Tyler Cowen divides humanity — past and present, if not future — into two “coalitions,” the rulers and the ruled. The rulers usually disagree among themselves, but they close ranks in union against uprisings of the ruled. This is good so far as it goes, but his placement of “modern Americans,” as a lump, among the rulers scrathes our complaisance. Surely there is a problematic third group, “the couch voters,” who want all of the benefits of power but shirk its responsibilities — especially the responsibility of assessing televised propaganda. (Marginal Revolution)

Lauds

¶ Brian Dillon write about Roland Barthes so movingly that we came to feel that Barthes died of despair. The ostensible subject of the essay is his last book, Camera Lucida, “probably the most widely read and influential book on the subject” of photography. (Guardian; via The Morning News) ¶ Although Andrew Searle’s talk of “crisis” is annoying, his “Drain in Spain“ assessment of the visual arts in Catalonia, Galicia, and elsewhere seems well-informed, at least about one side of the story. (Guardian; via Arts Journal) ¶ They’re teaching Mad Men over at Regis High School. (Speakeasy)

Several universities like the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern have incorporated the series into their media studies curriculum, producing essay anthologies and holding academic conferences. Regis is helping to  lead the way for high schools to take on the show and use it as a lens to view history.

Prime

¶ Felix Salmon has the sense to call what’s going on in Brazil — sorry; we’re talking about Adam Ross Sorkin’s gee-whiz piece in today’s Times, “In Brazil, No Room For Leverage at Buyout Firms” — venture capital, not private equity. ¶ Simon Johnson berates Spencer Bachus for claiming that Elizabeth Warren has been acting beyond her CFPB powers; but Yves Smith berates liberals for rushing to Ms Warren’s defense.

The key leverage point in this fight is not Warren; she’s become part of the problem. The leverage point is the attorneys general. Thus campaigns like CrimesShouldn’tPay and Credo’s “Jail Wall Street Crooks“, which organized calls to push the AGs to reject the settlement talks and to investigate the banks, are on the right track. Left-wing efforts to rally behind this Administration should be assumed to be wrongheaded until proven otherwise.

¶ While we agree with Robert Reich that the American economy’s health is not improving, but getting worse, we question the wisdom of his cold-water tone. “I’m sorry to have to deliver the bad news, but it’s better you know.” To the extent that economics is a confidence game, this is not helpful. We also believe that scolding is ineffective unless it is focused upon one individual or very small group of individuals. Scolding “Washington” is fatuous.

Tierce 

¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about the neuropsychopharmacy of the near-miss — and how casinos exploit this otherwise positive bit of wiring to our detriment. (The Frontal Cortex) ¶ At I, Cringely, an I-told-you-so note addressed to the TEPCO executives who dithered about plutonium containment at Fukushima.

Sext

¶ Laura Frey Daisley gave up snark for a month. She may just give it up, period. (Slate; via The Morning News)

Not giving voice to my flinty little put-downs also eliminated that weird guilt where you wonder if the person somehow heard you or found out what you said. I also stopped suspecting that anyone might be saying harsh things about me.

¶ Skiles Hornig writes about the desk that her husband would like her to get rid of, because an ex gave it to her. But it’s where she writes. (The Rumpus) ¶ At Salon, Drew Grant considers the dust-up over Big Al’s review of Jacqueline Howett’s self-published Kindle book, The Greek Seaman, and wonders about “people who have nothing to do all day than get into fights about grammar.” Big Al’s Books and Pals, a site that reviews indie fiction, was certainly given a boost.  

Nones

¶ David Rieff has a long piece in The New Republic about the foolishness of dismissing Mexico as a “failed state” à la Pakistan. We hope that it will spark meditation, in thoughtful minds, about the idiocy of the American gun and drug laws that have inevitably nurtured the cartels that, Rieff fears, may brutalize Mexican society. (via The Morning News) ¶ Even Omar Ali, revisiting the topic, dismisses talk of Pakistan as a “failed state” à la Pakistan. What worries him now is the governments flirtation with a Chinese alliance. (3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Yan Xuetong has some interesting things to say about the revival of Confucian values in Chinese political discourse; we didn’t know, by the way, that the Chinese navy had dispatched ships to evacuate Chinese nationals from Libya. (Project Syndicate; via Real Clear World)

Vespers

¶ Not exactly timely — perhaps the LRB wanted to herald the novel’s publication in paper — Pankaj Mishra’s excellent review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad places the book on very high ground and then considers its contents from an international point of view. There are many standout lines. “But there is no theoretical reason why abstraction should be incompatible with storytelling…” is one. Here’s another:

Remarkably for a writer of her generation (she was born in 1962), Egan seemed like an expatriate, looking back with biting irony at her fellow Americans and their insufficiently examined expectations of wealth, comfort, beauty and fame. 

Scott Esposito refers us to Luc Sante’s rave review, in BookForum, of Geoff Dyer’s new book, a collection of previously published essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Sante calls Dyer “a first-class noticer,” but complains about some items that he calls “dutiful.” Scott disagrees, at least with regard to the piece on Atonement, which he calls “ ingenious argument for a work you never would have expected him to get behind in a million years.” One mans gatherum is another’s omnium.

Compline

¶ Walking around the Old Town of Hannover, Justin E H Smith is drawn to make an arresting comparison, in an off-the-cuff entry entitled “When Buildings Stopped Talking To God,” between ancient Sanskrit inscriptions that are thought to have been addressed to the gods (not to mortals) and modern advertisements, which also “seem to be of no place.” (3 Quarks Daily)

Have a Look

¶ Happy Talk, Part Deux. (via MetaFilter)

Noted

¶ KMZT-FM returns to Los Angeles; experimenting with non-classical-music formats didn’t work. (LA Times; via Arts Journal) ¶ Richard Florida teases out some unsurprising but not uninteresting correlations between passport ownership and happiness, &c. (Atlantic)

Narendra Modi, the demagogue who runs the Indian state of Gujarat, has banned Joseph Lelyveld’s new book about Gandhi, even though it has yet to be published in India.

“The writing is perverse in nature,” Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, said of the book after the ban. “It has hurt the sentiments of those with capacity for sane and logical thinking.”

India’s law minister, M. Veerappa Moily, said on Tuesday that “the book denigrates the national pride and leadership,” which he said could not be tolerated. Officials “will consider prohibiting the book,” he added.

[snip]

In the interview Mr. Lelyveld said the information about Gandhi’s relationship with Mr. Kallenbach was not his own discovery and was never intended to be the main focus of his book.

“All I can claim is that I dealt with that material more extensively with an eye to the general public than anyone previously,” Mr. Lelyveld said. “But it’s not a central preoccupation. My book is about Gandhi’s struggle for social justice, not his intimate relationships. But he was a complicated man, and the two are linked.”

Brad Furman’s snappy legal thriller, The Lincoln Lawyer, has one thing in common with Gregory Holbit’s 2007 Fracture: both stories spring from the idea of someone rich who, in lieu of planning a clever crime, plans instead a clever abuse of legal process. In Fracture, the bad guy, played by Anthony Hopkins with unparalleled arrogance and contempt, seeks to put double jeopardy to his advantage by saddling the prosecution with a lot of inadmissible evidence. The Lincoln Lawyer is kinkier. A rich kid, played with equally unparalleled odiousness by Ryan Philippe, tries to force a defense attorney (Matthew MacConaughey) into securing what amounts to a second acquittal. 

And that’s where the similarities end. The Lincoln Lawyer has the look and feel of a really good television show from the 1970s. I mean that as a compliment, because the movie is very good at what it wants to do, but I also mean to suggest the things that it’s not interested in. Don’t expect the interesting visuals or haunting moods of a fim like Fracture. The Lincoln Lawyer is about different kinds of confrontations, but not about the implications of those confrontations — in the way that, say, every encounter in Chinatown seems to involve the whole history of Los Angeles. It’s certainly not about the oddity of practicing criminal defense law from the back seat of a Town Car. Rather, The Lincoln Lawyer is a sort of legal kung fu picture, its characters engaged in one outsmarting maneuver after another. Thanks to great star power — Matthew MacConaughey has never done better work, and he’s assisted by the top talents of Marisa Tomei, Ryan Philippe, Josh Lucas, Frances Fisher, Bob Gunton, John Leguizamo, Michael Peña, William H Macy and Laurence Mason — and a well-crafted story line, The Lincoln Lawyer crosses the finish line as fresh as a daisy. But it could easily have been awful, with its made-for-television values. 

Happily, Mr MacConaughey and his director know what they’re doing. We watch with mounting dismay as Mick Haller, a blithe jouster who still keeps a surfboard at home, realizes not only that he has been set up to defend a very guilty man but also how far he will fall if the guilty man succeeds. Haller doesn’t have a lot of friends; almost everyone in his world thinks that the sleaziness of his clients has rubbed off on him. But when you’re the sort of person who is asked, in a crowded elevator, how you can sleep at night, you may be able to tap special resources. Being Matthew MacConaughey, Haller is loaded with the kind of charm that, when it works, makes believers out others. Haller’s team believes in him. His ex-wife (Ms Tomei) almost believes in him; she’s still happy to have sex with him. But Haller also has a restlessness that takes the place of panic. He’s gifted at thinking his way out of tight spots. 

We only wish that Frances Fisher’s part had been a bit bigger. There’s a corker of a final showdown that, masterfully, comes soon after a false ending, and although no small part of its power comes from its being quick and deadly, it left me wanting more of Ms Fisher’s suave but haggard matron. I we suspect that Gregory Holbit would have had a field day directing her.

We couldn’t decide which story seemed most noteworthy, so we’re snipping bits from three items in the Times.

First, Paul Krugman on the Republican Party’s “Mellon Doctrine.”

Here’s the report’s explanation of how layoffs would create jobs: “A smaller government work force increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs.” Dropping the euphemisms, what this says is that by increasing unemployment, particularly of “educated, skilled workers” — in case you’re wondering, that mainly means schoolteachers — we can drive down wages, which would encourage hiring.

There is, if you think about it, an immediate logical problem here: Republicans are saying that job destruction leads to lower wages, which leads to job creation. But won’t this job creation lead to higher wages, which leads to job destruction, which leads to …? I need some aspirin.

For the resolution of this conundrum, we refer Mr Krugman to the piece by Motoko Rich piece in the Business section, “Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs.” Pay particular attention to the disparity between official poverty lines and the actual costs of a half-decent life.

The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.

“We wanted to recognize that there was a cumulative impact that would affect one’s lifelong economic security,” said Joan A. Kuriansky, executive director of Wider Opportunities, whose report is called “The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States.” “And we’ve all seen how often we have emergencies that we are unprepared for,” she said, especially during the recession. Layoffs or other health crises “can definitely begin to draw us into poverty.”

According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

The Mellon Doctrine, you see, contemplates a future with more poor people! Which makes perfect sense in an era in which, as Floyd Norris points out, bankers believe that they should not have to assume risks on mortgage loans.

Small banks especially seem to think it is a birthright for them to make money on mortgages without suffering any ill effects if the loans go bad. They argue that they did not cause the last crisis, so they should not have to suffer now.

The founders of many of those little banks — now long dead — would never have thought it possible that such a right could exist. Now it is defended as critical to saving the housing market.