¶ In keeping with our governing idea that smaller is better, we applaud the determination of Alex Salmond, first minister of Scotland as well head of the once marginal Scottish National Party, to set his country’s course away from Westminster. His conundrum, as observer John Curtice put it, is that his “success as first minister [makes] the case for independence less pressing.”

There are lots of things that I haven’t done, but one thing that I can check off that list is Swan Lake. I saw the ballet for the first time last night. I had such a perfectly good time that I’m rather glad that it wasn’t a great one. I get to save seeing a great performance of Swan Lake for another time. 

Of course I know the score just about by heart. I’ve seen the ballet on video, not to mention in countless movie clips ranging from Far From Heaven and The Deep End to Poupées russes. (I’ve just ordered a DVD of the Fonteyn-Nureyev performance that I used to own on LaserDisc). More to the point, I’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s deconstruction/reconstruction, in Black Swan, which I’ll come back to later. But it was Jennifer Homans’s Apollo’s Angels that convinced me that I ought to see the ballet on stage as soon as possible. That meant the end-of-season American Ballet Theatre production. 

Having seen ABT’s Raymonda a few years ago, and read a review or two of ABT productions down through the ages, I knew where to expect last night’s performance to fall short. The sets and, to a lesser extent, the costumes were showy but dramatically inconsequent, bordering on kitsch. (There is a perfectly dreadful maypole in the first act that shows off the company to embarrassing disadvantage. Also: any first-time visitor would be pardoned for inferring from the Queen Mother’s getup that there will be vampires.) And corps de ballet would be a concept with no visual onstage correlative. 

Perversely, the worst corps dancing was that of the swans. I don’t expect the robotics of Busby-Berkeley synchronization, but I believe, as Homans suggests, that the proper execution of the steps ought to produce a pleasing coordination of arms and legs. Nowhere is a lapse on this front more regrettable than in Swan Lake, where the swans are anything but decorative backdrop, willi-style, to the romance of a prince and an enchanted beauty. Times dance critic Alistair Macaulay writes that Odette’s “swan-maiden subjects become chorally wrapped up in this love story, and their involvement makes this ballet like no other. They share her hopes and fears; their destiny hangs on hers.” Indeed, unless the swans are as eloquently tragic as their queen, then the showpieces, such as the danse des cygnets and Odette’s thirty-two fouettés, take on the air of stunts. 

I knew from Macaulay’s review that the final act of Swan Lake would not astonish me. (Tchaikovsky’s amazing send-off, however, did, as it always does, and my eyes were flooded.) I had to ask, though, if a better production than Kevin McKenzie’s would have made much of a difference. Like the singers of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, the ABT corps seemed comprised of somewhat independent soloists. I’d almost rather do without. What I didn’t expect was the damp sparklessness of Marcelo Gomes’s dancing with Paloma Herrera. Strong and limber in solos, or even when engaged in mime, Mr Gomes demonstrated less than no interest in Ms Herrera, who, for her part, was as excellent as it is possible to be without being quite great. I don’t fault her; the atmosphere was not conducive to greatness. It’s entirely possible that she would have been great, doing exactly as she did, on a less fussy stage. 

The evening was far from disappointing, however, thanks to the svelte pace established by conductor David LaMarche. Notwithstanding the absence of romantic fire onstage, and compensating greatly for the sloppiness of the corps, the orchestra poured forth a current of generous accompaniment that supported the secondary soloists (who, after all, do a great deal of the dancing — the pas de trois in Act I and the national dances in Act III.) Here there was something like real elegance, with a connection among the dancers that corresponded to what could be heard from the pit. 

I haven’t watched The Black Swan lately, but I recall that the choreographer, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), says that a production of Swan Lake has to be great; otherwise, why bother? Indeed, it was my doubt that Swan Lake could be great that led me to avoid it in the days of my ignorant youth. I thought that it must be all fustian and feathers (and whatever complaints I’ve made about ABT’s version, it’s certainly much, much better than that). Black Swan assured me that Swan Lake could be great, and it showed a way of making it great, by working the seam of madness that is implicit from the very beginning of Tchaikovsky’s score.

One girl is enchanted and spends her days as a swan. Another is enchanted and spends her days as a ballerina. Black Swan suggests not only that there isn’t much difference between these fates — thus making Swan Lake a meditation on the art of ballet at its most demanding — but that either enchantment is likely to lead to or require madness, making healthy everyday affections impossible. (There’s probably something unhappy about Prince Siegfried, too, or he would have found satisfaction at his mother’s court. This is Matthew Bourne’s insight.) Is it possible to find happiness in disciplined transcendance? Plumping for an answer one way or the other is a mistake; it’s enough for a work of art to let the tension vibrate. I expect that this is exactly what Black Swan will inspire choreographers to do with Swan Lake. Now that I’ve seen a respectable performance of the old interpretation, I’m ready for the next step. 

¶ “The most pronounced development in banking today is that executives have become bolder as their business has gotten worse.” That’s howJesse Eisinger, a ProPublica financial reporter appearing in the Times’s DealBook, begins a politely indignant essay on the federal government’s mollycoddling of big bankers. What the bankers have become bolder about, however, is guaranteeing their infantile behavior, by demanding further protection from downsides and insulation from litigation and freedom from regulation. They want their cake and they want to eat it and then they want another cake! We wish that Mr Eisinger had put it like that, because there is, otherwise, nothing remotely bold about what bankers are up to these days. ¶ But if you really want cheering up, don’t miss Azam Ahmed’s story about Armageddon investing, which involves losing millions every day so that you’ll have gazillions when the markets go to hell, after attack by black swans with fat tails. The worst of it is that something constructive might be done with these assets. We’re only sorry that excitably pusillanimous investors aren’t going to be the only ones who get what they’re paying for.

What was Guy Tremlett’s Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen doing in my Amazuke shopping cart? Well, I put it there, of course, but why? I should probably have taken it out if I hadn’t been in a big hurry to order A N Wilson’s Dante in Love last week. I couldn’t be bothered to delete the two books that were already there (Tremlett’s, and Clarke Hutton’s Picture History of Britain — not quite the mystery that Tremlett is), or to “save” them for later. The Wilson and the Hutton won’t ship until the middle of July, but Catherine arrived yesterday.

Arriving along with it were sentences such as the following (describing  the atmosphere in Alcalá de Henares, where Catherine was born in 1485): “In winter it freezes. A pales sun shines weakly from a clear pastel sky, losing its battle against the harshe, obstinate chill.” Well, we can infer that Tremlett, the Guardian‘s Madrid correspondent, knows what he’s talking about from personal experience. And that’s just the problem. What Guy Tremlett knows and doesn’t know about history often gets in the way of his story.

Pages earlier:

The man holding the mule’s reins was Archbishop Carillo of Toledo, primate of Spain — a formidable warrior priest and one of the wealthiest and most powerful political players in the land. He was also Isabel’s chief ally. The records do not say whether he was wearing the same scarlet cloak with a white cross that he was said to wear over his armour when leading his men into battle.

Oh dear oh dear. “Said to wear”? Wearing armour in battle in late-Fifteenth-Century battles? If the meeting of Isabel and her half-brother Enrique at Guisando was indeed the ritual reconciliation that Tremlett tells us it was, then the archbishop was almost certainlywearing his archiepiscopal kit. But, really, it doesn’t matter. It’s not important. The ritual is not important. A serious historian — and by this I mean a writer who wanted to tell the story of Catherine’s resistance to Henry’s demand for an annulment — might dispose of her mother’s encounter before “the four bulls of Guisando” in a sentence or two, or might not mention it at all.

The serious historian would instead concentrate on why Archbishop Carillo supported Isabel. We’re told that he hated Enrique, against whom he had rebelled (no details), and that he tried to talk Isabel out of the reconciliation. A miniseries might be equally informative without risking ennui.

That same serious historian, however, might well decide, after some preliminary research, that the tale of Catherine of Aragon can’t be told in a manner that modern readers will find satisfying. This isn’t just because she was a woman. In my view, it’s because the modern idea of personality had not fully developed — had barely begun to develop. According to the prevailing world view, men and women were all more or less fungible, distinguiable only in terms of accidents that, however consequential for history, had none of the densely personal roots that we call “psychological.” There was no psychology.

This isn’t to say that Catherine of Aragon didn’t have powerful feelings about her husband’s behavior. By and large, however, they appear to have been the feelings that she ought to have had, the feelings that went with her status as a Spanish princess who had conducted her side of the marriage in an entirely blameless manner. Neither she nor anyone who advised or opposed her — no one, in short — was equipped to suppose that her bull-headed insistence on her “rights” might result in the first magisterial rent in the fabric of Christendom. Had she yielded to Henry, and stepped aside — had it been easy for Clement VII to grant Henry’s request for an annulment — the history of the Reformation would have been unimaginably different.

That would have been a story — except that it could not have been. Only the realm of science fiction would support it. I don’t mean to say that Guy Tremlett’s book is not a good one. I’m sure that many readers will see a vivid past through its old-glass window panes. But it’s not my kind of book at all.

¶ Don’t get us wrong: we agree that Bernard Madoff’s sustained defrauding of investors was very, very bad. But “extraordinarily evil“? That’s what Judge Denny Chin called it in his decision to sentence Mr Madoff to 150 years in prison. (We’re not sure why this is news two years later, but let that pass.) Quite aside from our discomfort with the idea of “evil” — especially as attached to a person (in the form of an onerous sentence), and especially in connection with a nonviolent crime against property — we have a big problem with the fact that Mr Madoff’s loser-take-all condition. The complete story remains to be told, but from the start it was clear that the Ponzi scheme was hugely enabled by complaisant counterparties at “feeder” funds and at banks — not to mention sophisticated investors who really ought to have known better; not to mention the wilfully stymied enforcers at the SEC. This was a case, moreover, in which it was the emperor himself who made the announcement about his invisible assets. We’re not saying that Bernie Madoff’s sentence ought to be reduced. We’re just saying that, standing alone as it does, it’s unconscionable.

¶ We honor the passing of Margaret Tyzack, one of our very favorite actresses, at the age of 79. We never saw her Martha (in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), but we loved her Lotte Schoen, battling with Maggie Smith’s Lettice Douffet in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice & Lovage. Plus everything from 2001 to Match Point. What a voice! Tyzack will be much missed!

In her engaging guide to Venice, No Vulgar Hotel, Judith Martin devotes a chapter to visiting the Serenissima with “Your Imaginary Friend.” This would be the poet or artist whose work has kindled your desire to visit Venice in the first place, or kept the flame burning brightly. Dante, Ruskin, Titian, Henry James, Byron — they’re all there and more. So is Donna Leon.

Fans of Donna Leon’s mysteries give themselves away by their abnormal interest in mundane places  — a counterintuitive desire to visit police headquarters or a sudden cry of “Look! That’s where Guido buys flowers for Paola!” For years, we responded to gracious luncheon invitations from friends who cautioned that they lived up ninety-four steps by cajoling them into coming to lunch with us instead. When they let drop that their apartment was used as the home for Miss Leon’s hero, we bounded up those ninety-four steps in a flash, brushed past our hosts and tore through the familiar setting.

Shown above (somewhere) is the Questura, or police headquarters, where Guido Brunetti cajoles Signorina Elettra Zorzi into helping him cope with the zombie careerist, Vice-Questore Patta (a Southerner, wouldn’t you know). I told you about Rome last week; yesterday, I discovered that Google Maps has given Venice the same treatment. Zoom in close, and the satellite pictures give way to breathtaking balloon views.  

It’s hot and humid today. Not miserably so, but enough to make me feel that summer is no time for working. After lunch with a friend in Turtle Bay, I walked up First Avenue to the storage unit, where I dropped off some winter shirts and picked up some summer shirts, along with a summer bedspread and a summer blanket. As if that weren’t enough to carry around — my next stop was Gracious Home, where I bought a Vornado fan — I tucked in George Sand’s Consuelo. I’d like to tell you something about this novel, but I am trying not to read the jacket descriptions and the introductory material, so all I can say is that Consuelo is very long. Having read the first chapter, I can also tell you that the heroine is a diligent Spanish girl with a beautiful voice who for some reason lives in Venice, possibly in the Eighteenth Century.

My friend at lunch planted the seed, when she asked me what my summer reading project was — would I re-read Proust? She meant that as a jest; it’s the all-purpose, perennial summer project that no one ever gets around to doing (except me; I’ve read In Search of Time Past three times, all during the summer). I thought about taking the Pléiade paperback of the entire cycle out to Fire Island in August, and maybe I’ll do that. I’ve not read Proust in French. But at the storage unit, there was Consuelo, equally fat but written, I expect, with a more circumscribed vocabulary. One is always running to the dictionary with Proust, unless one has the brains to have an English translation open to the same spot. How many times in your life have you looked up acajou, a word that bears absolutely no resemblance to mahogany? It’s all very well for Proust to use lots and lots of  different French words, which French people can presumably be expected to know; but it’s awfully hard on the rest of us, and I for one would like to see an edition in which every word that is used fewer than fifty times throughout the novel is translated in the margins. That’s precisely the sort of edition, by the way, that would be a snap to compile for an e-reader, in case anybody ambitious is listening. I have no recollection of a reason for ordering Consuelo from Amazon in Franch, and I really ought to finish François le champi, said to be Proust’s favorite novel as a boy, first. But let’s not get started on the Things That I Ought To Do Instead.

So I’m going to read now — read and tidy up. I made a frightful mess looking for a map of Venice earlier. A map-type map, that is, something that folds up and contains all the traditional information that Google Maps ignores in favor of restaurant locations. (The not-so-little church that I wanted to identify from the aerial image turned out to be Sant’Aponal, which dates from the early Eleventh Century. According to Rizzoli’s The Treasures of Venice, the interior is not open to the public. Imagine that!) The Venice map wasn’t with the other maps, which themselves are secreted in various spots at the moment (a transitional situation); the Venice map was tucked neatly alongside Paris From Above, in a bookshelf by my reading chair. But I didn’t think of that until I’d scattered maps all over the blue room. (The road map for Veneto-Friuli did not serve.) Plus, I’ve got to put the summer bedspread and blanket away for a few days (I’ll change the sheets on Friday), and plug in the new fan somewhere, and run downstairs to collect the mail and pick up something for dinner.   

And I’ve got to find where Guido buys flowers for Paola.

¶ An inevitable problem has finally arrived: new drugs that extend the lives of prostate cancer patients by months — by two years at most — are going to be very expensive. As a preliminary pushback, Medicare and insurers alike are expected to underwrite the drugs’ expense only if they are used according to the instructions on the label. This restriction will narrow the field of eligible patients. The larger question of affordability is not, for the moment, being addressed. But the issue that will lead to discussion of triage and rationing is squarely in front of us. How much are “marginal” extenstions of life worth — in a world where an one more day of life is “marginal” only for other people? Also unaddressed is the drugs’ actual costs to pharmaceutical companies, an accounting jungle if ever there was one.

¶ There is only one word for our response to Elisabeth Rosenthal’s front-page story in this morning’s paper, “Europe Stifles Drivers in Favor of Alternatives“: GLEE. Our dislike of private cars on Manhattan streets is becoming, we confess, pathological. In particular, we bitterly resent the expropriation of sidewalks by parking spaces. It’s nice to see that European civic leaders are on the right track on this issue (as is, to some extent at least, our own mayor, who sought unsuccessfully to impose tolls on the East and Harlem River bridges). We were tickled pink to read that the approaches to Zürich are dotted with gratuitous traffic signals that are set to linger on red. Toll the bridges!

Toward the end of Incognito, David Eagleman discusses the strange case of Phineas Gage. The name first appears at the beginning of a section entitled “What It Does and Doesn’t Mean To Be Constructed of Physical Parts,” and, as is my habit, I glanced at it even as I decided to take a short break from the book. Before Eaglemen reminded me, I recalled that Phineas Gage was a nineteenth-century laborer who survived a ghastly head injury, which was so wondrous and strange in itself that it took his doctors a while to note a personality change for the worse. I had read about the case somewhere else, not too long ago. But where?

This was only the last of several such experiences while reading Incognito. An earlier example was Eagleman’s summary of a “time discounting” experiment by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Not only had I read about that experiment, but I recalled that Tversky died before Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for their work together. Where did I read that? Not in Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works, which mentions the Kahneman and his Prize, but in connection with another experiment altogether, all in one succinct paragraph on page 206. Not in Eduardo Porter’s The Price of Everything, which mentions other work by Kahneman several times, but not Tversky. Not in Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, which doesn’t mention either scientist.

Frustrated, I conceived the idea of the Museum of Cognitive Monuments, a Web site devoted to curating the cases and experiments that pop up again and again in books on the most exciting of current topics, the cognitive revolution — in which the notion of man as a rational animal &c &c is trounced and trashed. The Museum of Cognitive Monuments would be a concordance, collection references to discoveries in the field (both in psychology and in neurobiology, which are approaching a state of lamination), and offer brief précis of different writers’ handling of the material. In addition to indexing the growing library of books in the field, the MCM would work as a prolegomenon to it, allowing writers to assume that readers were already familiar with the relevant cases and experiments, cutting down on instances of entertaining but distracting pops of magazine-style introduction.

Incognito is altogether an introduction to “the secret lives of the brain” (the book’s subtitle), clearly aimed at readers who have never concerned themeselves with the cognitive revolution — otherwise, there would be no need for the first three chapters, which address a reader who, assuming that the conscious mind controls behavior, appears to be unaware that a cognitive revolution is underway. Eagleman’s original contribution begins when he borrows Doris Kearns Godwin’s phrase about the Lincoln Cabinet: a “team of rivals.” This metaphor serves Eagleman well, although, as I wrote last week, I find the overall tone of his business- and sports-flavored language distastefully complacent. Not to mention his reliance on the term “zombie” to describe more or less automatic and unconscious behavior patterns.

As long as the zombie subroutines are running smoothly, the CEO [the conscious mind] can sleep. It is only when something goes wrong … that the CEO is rung up. Think about when your conscious awareness comes online: in those situations where events in the world violate your expectations. When everything is going according to the needs and skills of your zombie systems, you are not consciously aware of most of what’s in front of you; when suddenly they cannot handle the task, you become consciously aware of the problem. The CEO scrambles around, looking for fast solutions, dialing up everyone to find who can address the problem best.

This is so guy that it’s embarrassing. If the passage has one inadvertent virtue, it’s that it silhouettes the unsleepingly resourceful nature of artistic consciousness. Eagleman seems unwilling to propose that the health of the moderrn mind depends on its ability to register a fair current of internal contradiction. But he lays out the evidence for such a conclusion.

Eagleman is far more interested in the assessment of criminal behavior, which he all but defines as deviant — another complacency. The book’s final two chapters constitute a mini-treatise on the overhaul of criminal law. His argument on behalf of legal reform that would bypass considerations of “blameworthiness” is interesting and persuasive, and it will undoubtedly be taken up again by Eagleman and others in bolder form elsewhere. By then, I hope, the author will have outgrown the boyish tendency to associate the normal mind with inattentiveness.  

¶ We are, of course, thrilled that same-sex marriages will be permitted in our home state, but we remain sobered by the thought that the victory, like too much political action these days, was to some extent purchased, in this case by wealthy Republican donors who happen to be progressive on this issue. Michael Barbaro’s compelling behind-the-scenes report in yesterday’s Times details, among other things, the persuasion of Rochester senator James Alesi.

¶ Great pianist and occasional blogger Jeremy Denk inveighs against an odious comparison of classical-music performances to long-ago baseball-game re-enactments. He comes up with a much  better one. (Think Denk)

¶ At Academe Online, Eric Alterman outlines the differences in “truth” as understood by academics, journalists, and think-tank pundits. Journalists, of course, are harried opportunists who are satisfied with the truth of someone’s having said something, no matter how false that remark might be. The real struggle is between tendentious think-tank analysts, who are more or less baldly paid to advocate certain positions, and disinterested academics who will follow a thought wherever it leads. Unfortunately academics have become even more uninteresting than disinterested. (via Brainiac) ¶ Simon Mainwaring’s excellent and concise Four Reasons We Must Re-Engineer Free Market Capitalism, at GOOD. What we’d like to see is a painstaking historical account of how self-interest, that Enlightenment engine, became stupid and destructive. ¶ Jordan Michael Smith argues that David Mamet’s rightward swerve has nothing to do with liberal disenchantment — like all the other neoconservatives, Mamet never was a liberal, but a leftist. (The Awl)

¶ At the Guardian, a garland of summer-reading reveries by eminent novelists. A S Byatt discovered, the summer before she was married, that she was a writer, not an academic, and Proust was her teacher. Colm Tóibín, at 17, was turned on by Hemingway, which must explain his subsequent attraction to Henry James, no? (via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ In a preview of coming attractions, Robert Gordon reviews A N Wilson’s Dante in Love, a companion to the Divine Comedy that’s due to appear here in October but that you can order right now from Amazuke. Which we’ve just done. (Literary Review; via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ GThe Saxon exodus from Romania that followed the end of that country’s communist regime (and the recrudescence of nationalism) left behind a newly-discovered trove of baroque sacred music, now being edited by Kurt Philippi and performed by a trans-European ensemble throughout the region, which, by the way, is Transylvania. (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

¶ We remember it well… but, just the same, it’s nice of Jordan Barber to remind us of the “fun” of moving out of an old apartment and into a new apartment with new roommates. Mercifully, he doesn’t dwell on details. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ If we don’t remember being taught by slovenly graduate students, that’s because they hadn’t been invented yet. (Pocket protectors were weird but not slovenly.) Robert Watts, considerably younger, was so demoralized by sloppy TAs in college that he grew up to look just like them — until, one fine day, he invested in the Medallion Fund. The Medallion Fund look, that is. (The Smart Set) ¶ In a decision that will make producers and restaurateurs think about repatriating to Formosa, a court in Taipei fined and jailed a blogger for “defaming” a noodle parlor. The plaintiff said that “he hoped the case would teach her a lesson.” You might want to bear this in mind if you’re planning to blog about Taiwan… (Taipei Times; via MetaFilter)

¶ At Wired, Thomas Goetz writes up the latest in feedback loops, which can be surprisingly effective in altering behavior — provided they’re neither annoying nor too easy of ignore. Inventor David Rose speaks of “enchantment.” (via Arts Journal)

New: ¶ “Enthusiasm For Heat” @ Fake Science (via The Morning News) ¶ Wisconsin Grilled Cheese Academy. (via MetaFilter)

Noted: ¶ Irrepressible general: Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1915-2011. (Telegraph) ¶ Knowing Urdu, Anjum Atlaf decides to learn Hindi and Farsi. All Indo-European languages, by the way. (The South Asian Idea; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ It’s an ongoing story, with no clear outcome. Sleepy Bonn, capital of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (known here as “West Germany”), has been growing of late, while Berlin suffers high unemployment and is still inching its way back to its post-unification population peak. What may tip the scales in Berlin’s favor is the end of military conscription in Germany, an operation that was run from the university town on the Rhine that was also the summer retreat of the Electors of Cologne. The sad truth is that Germany’s powerhouse city, Frankfurt, has an aura that makes Chicago look like Paris. Alan Cowell reports.

 Jason Kasdan’s Bad Teacher didn’t amuse me as much as I hoped it would, for two reasons. First, Lucy Punch’s demonic fury was never unleashed. Second, Justin Timberlake’s cuteness never became ridiculous. That Cameron Diaz never made me laugh was not a disappointment, because I never expected her to. What did surprise me, though, was the intensity of the impression that she made of not acting at all. She left me convinced that if for some reason she were called up to teach seventh-graders, she would be as negligent and uninspiring as Elizabeth Halsey, the gold-digger with no gift for hiding her shovel. I’m not going to say that Ms Diaz is bad in this movie, but she really does put the bad in Bad Teacher. When she’s rude and unpleasant, she is also frightfully convincing. It is the sort of performance that raises doubts about the integrity of pretty blondes to something approaching certainty. 

Justin Timberlake, so adorable in The Social Network, is a curiosity here. As Scott Delacorte, the high-minded but sunny ingénu with a surprising taste for protected sex, he is utterly believable, but there is none of the edgy self-mockery that David Fincher elicited in the Facebook movie. Like Ms Diaz, he seems not to be acting a lot of the time. At best, he channels the clueless nice guys that Cary Grant played in movies like Bringing Up Baby, only without the improbability. I thought that the gist of the Justin Timberlake story was that he had survived his teen stardom as lead singer of ‘N Synch. You’d never guess it from Bad Teacher. While we’re on that topic, let me point out that even Jason Segel, as the gym teacher with an unlikely interest in the bad teacher, has difficulty projecting his role, but at least in his case this makes sense, as his character is not very believable; when was the last time you ran into a guy who dreamed of teaching phys ed at Harvard, settled for a Cook County high school — and likes to mock participants at poetry slams? Maybe this is what “high concept” means — you have to be high to get it. There is a lot of dope-smoking in Bad Teacher, but all it contributes is an unwanted taste of verisimilitude. 

All of this might have been saved by a really good mad scene for Ms Punch, who remains the sole reason for watching Jay Roach’s Dinner for Schmucks. She brings to thwarted affection a demented stubbornness that is truly life-threatening. As Amy Squirrel, she starts out as a goody-goody teacher who is too full of herself to win the trust of her pupils, and it’s clear that her cheerful oppressiveness is what makes students tolerate Elizabeth’s gross derelictions in the classroom. By degrees, Amy’s determination to get what she wants — Scott Delacorte, for one; an annual teaching award that she has becomed accustomed to winning, for another — gets the better of her, and at two points she is warned not to let “what happened in 2008” happen again. Oh, how I wanted to know what happened in 2008! I wanted to see it! But the actress was never permitted to realize the kind of comic meltdown that may, we hope, eventually become her trademark.  Ms Punch does a very good job with what she’s given, gamely shoving her way through the movie’s later scenes threatening “Jail time!” with her cheeks inflamed by poison ivy (contracted from the skin of an apple poisoned by Elizabeth) and retracting her upper lip with Freddy-Krueger-like monstrosity. But at no point is the Elizabeth, or anybody else, in real danger. Personally, I was hoping that Amy would blow up the school out of spite, perhaps using spite itself as an explosive. At least she might have immolated the bureaucrat played by Thomas Lennon in the lurid photographs of his night of shame. Instead, she is carried off stage in handcuffs, demanding that her urine be tested. 

The real failing of Bad Teacher is its vernacular setting. John Adams Middle School, which the principal played by John Michael Higgins constantly refers to as “Jams,” is a generic hellhole of adolescent ennui that would be unimpressive on television. You, too, might consume inappropriate substances and pass out in front of your class if you had to teach there. The clichés — take, for example, the anodyne performance by “Period 5,” the faculty band, at a place called The Midnight Cowboy Saloon, hoo boy what a night out! — are perked up by nothing more than the occasional touch of grossness. It is difficult for a Hollywood movie to have no production values, but Bad Teacher comes close. The worst thing is how oddly appropriate this dulness is: how catatonic would a world have to be to make a guidance counselor out of Elizabeth Halsey? That’s the movie’s final joke. A lot of viewers are going to find it distinctly unfunny. I laughed, but it wasn’t at anything that Cameron Diaz said or did.

¶ The effects of what cognitive scientists call time discounting can be felt in  a side-by-side comparison of this morning’s two big crime stories, the capture of Whitey Bulger in Santa Monica and the denial of bail for David Laffer in Central Islip. In a horrific drugstore robbery, Mr Laffer killed four people in cold blood last Sunday in Medford, Long Island. That’s what’s horrific about it: it happened last Sunday. ¶ Whitey Bulger killed quite a few more people that David Laffer, but that was long ago, and the old Boston gang leader has been living quietly in Santa Monica for over fifteen years. Another thing that makes Bulger’s crimes less horrific is what we might call intimacy discounting: Bulger knew some of his victims before he killed them. Laffer’s victims were all strangers — random strangers in two cases.

¶ We’ve just whiled away a few quarter hours staring at the Google Maps images of Rome. Up a certain magnification, the the images are satellite photos as usual, but when you zoom in, the view becomes decidedly more that from an airplane. Or a hot air balloon. You won’t believe it!

Zoom in until you find the Villa Medici, home of the Institut Français until fairly recent times. We were poking around this neighborhood because we thought we’d try to find the grotto that Velásquez painted in 1630. Michael Kimmelman prefers to spend time with this picture when he’s at the Prado, ignoring the vastly more famous Las Meninas around the corner. We think that the smaller picture is pretty neat, too; it would be nice to see it someday. We can’t quite make out the “workman looking down from a rooftop,” even though we’ve checked out several other images of the picture (which is how we learned that the arcade wall belongs to the Pavilion of Ariadne — a fact to which Kimmelman slyly alludes by describing the dangling rope’s glinting “like the silver thread of a spider’s web.” We couldn’t make out the rope, either, until we checked out the Times online. Maybe we were too busy envying Michael Kimmelman his youthful discovery of Italy, a world of “shady churches and neglected museums, cool, silent retreats from the hot days, and it was as if a whole universe opened up just to me.” Since he puts it so well, we’re glad of his good fortune.

The other day, I bought an iPod. Now he’s lost it, you’re thinking; how many times has he bored us silly with his Nano Notes? But this time, it isn’t a Nano, but a Classic iPod, or iPod Classic. It looks like a Nano that ate one of those cookies in Alice in Wonderland. It is quite ridiculously large. But with the storage to match (about ten times the capacity of a Nano), it is the perfect place for my opera collection, or as much of it as will fit. Every day, I load another five operas onto the thing. I still can’t listen to opera if the page that I’m writing requires actual thought, but as you can see there’s nothing here that Un Ballo in Maschera (Bergonzi, Nilsson, Molinari-Pradelli) would get in the way of. 

It’s Thursday, which means that I’m planning to go downtown in a few hours to sit with Will while his parents have dinner alone somewhere. Tonight, I am going to take a bunch of the shirt cardboards that I’ve been hoarding. There was a time when shirt cardboards were the joy of my youth, and I got in a lot of trouble once for advancing myself the cardboards from my father’s shirts drawer. For a while, I was very into constructing hybrid castle/stage sets. I was very into hidden doors and secret passageways, and even though these were not easily realized in shirt cardboard (which at least had the merit of being stone grey), it was exciting to create three dimensional models of the houses of horror that I hoped to live in some day. I have no memory of outgrowing this pastime, so maybe I didn’t. Maybe it’s going to blossom again in the guise of “playing with Will.” 

Being with Will is always quite straightforward — we do this, we do that — but remembering my time with him is quite strange; it’s as though I were reviewing my recollections through someone else’s prescription glasses. It is impossible, when he is not actually in the room, to think of him as a child of nearly eighteen months. There are too many precocities, or at any rate moments when I feel that I’m with a teenager, or a third-grader. There are shards of his personality, as it were, that are already fully grown. They’re surrounded by undeveloped parts, sort of like a Roman Forum but under construction, not in ruins. Most of what he says is still — unintelligible, and it’s not always clear that he knows what talking is for. (Or, rather, what it isn’t.) But he appears to understand a great deal of grown-up talk. Like his mother, he has a formidable memory, and just because he hasn’t been exposed to something in a while doesn’t mean that the unguarded mention of it won’t kindle an insistent interest. (When in doubt, I spell things out.) 

He’s also “musical” — he dances, bangs drums, and even riffs on the harmonica. There is a spectrum of his vocalizing that could be called singing, sort of. But we are a long way from Aida. There has been no listening to music at our house. When he and his parents come to dinner, there might be a jazz playlist purring away somewhere, but not loud enough to catch Will’s notice. And when he’s here with Kathleen and me, we somehow don’t think to play anything — except, of course, for Shaun the Sheep. There’s step dancing in Shaun, which Will gamely attempts to imitate. It is mostly a matter of shaking his butt. If there’s one thing I’m looking forward to, it’s taking him to see Paul Taylor. There are always lots of kiddies in that audience. But although it’s very easy to imagine Will sitting rapt through a twenty-minute dance, it’s also easy to imagine that he might respond in a manner more typical of his age. Pretty soon, I expect, I’ll be learning all the minimum ages. At the Museum, happily, there isn’t one, but you have to be ten to get into the Frick. If he keeps growing at his current rate, Will will pass for ten when he’s eight.

But I mustn’t push things. I must remember what happened when a friend of ours was taken, as her first opera ever, to Parsifal. Amazingly, her date’s passion for this masterpiece proved not to be contagious in the least!

¶ We were wondering when the Times would get round to mentioning the little problem that Mahmound Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s two presidents, is having with his “divine” counterpart, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and the clerical class that actually runs things in Iran. Today must be the day: Neil MacFarquhar writes from Cario. The nub of the problem, as might have been expected, is that Mr Ahmadinejad is trying to build up a power base of his own. Unlike his scholarly predecessors, the secular president is very popular among the large class of poor Iranians. But he is also given to bold, somewhat swashbuckling gestures that don’t always come off as well in political life as they do in the movies.

¶ Never having attended a bookstore event without buying something (usually a second copy of a book that we’ve read and liked), we’re pleased to read that McNally Jackson, our favorite downtown bookshop, is going to charge a fee for events in its new downstairs space. We loathe the idea of something for nothing (which is usually just another way of saying “advertising” — the horror!), and the thought that readers might sashay through a reading and then buy the book from Amazon makes our blood boil. ¶ Sam Sifton tries to make Desmond’s sound tired and boring, but even with the help of a few precious put-downs (“This is pensioner food for those who run pension funds”), he fails.We want to go.

David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain isn’t a disappointment, exactly — which is to say that it is a disappointment, in being rather less amusing to read that I expected it to be. I have the awful feeling that I’m reading a book that is aimed at guys. Worse, it might even be written by one. Eagleman’s tone is that of the sharp guy who gets a kick out of showing you that your intuitions and unexamined assumptions are way off base. The prevailing imagery is drawn from business and sports. There’s a sense of wonder at all the trouble that the brain takes to make our lives simple and efficient — to make it possible for us to pay minimal attention. 

In other words, it’s a very different book from Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong. Schulz approaches the brain as an error-prone organ whose bad habits we have to bear more or less constantly in mind as we navigate the complexities of social life, correcting for bias and prejudice even when — especially when — we think that we’re free of them. Eagleman thinks that the brain is cool. “Sometimes it is tempting to think that seeing is easy despite the complicated neural machinery that underlies it,” runs a characteristic observation. “To the contrary, it is easy because of the complicated neural machinery.” Thinking and consciousness are not necessarily good things, especially when the brain can perform difficult tasks on autopilot. 

The handwriting on the wall appears early, on page 6. 

Consider the activity that characterizes a nation at any moment. Factories churn, telecommunications lines buzz with activity, businesses ship products. People eat constantly. Sewer lines direct waste. All across the great stretches of the land, police chase criminals,. Handshakes secure deals. Lovers rendezvous. Secretaries field calls, teachers profess, athletes compete, doctors operate, and bus drivers navigate. You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary. So you pick up a newspaper — not a dense paper like the New York Times but lighter fare such as USA Today. You won’t be surprised that none of the details of the activity are listened in the paper; after all, you want to know the bottom line. You want to know that Congress just signed a new tax law that affects your family, but the detailed origin of the idea — involving lawyers and corporations and filibusters — isn’t especially important to that new bottom line. And you certainly wouldn’t want to know all the details of the food supply of the nation — how the cows are eating and how many are being eaten — you only want to be alerted if there’s a spike of mad cow disease. You don’t care how the garbage is produced and packed away; you only care if it’s going to end up in your backyard. You don’t care about the wiring and infrastructure of the factories, you only care if the workers are going on strike. That’s what you get from reading the newspaper.

Your conscious mind is that newspaper. 

This imaginary “you” whom Eagleman is addressing, this solipsistic USA Today glancer, is precisely the sort of person whom one would have expected a front-liner in the cognitive revolution to disdain. Instead, Eagleman adopts the fawning peppiness of a car dealer. What does this “you” want to do with all the free time that simplistic summaries open up? From what I can tell, all “you” wants to do is to play Tetris. 

I understand that the importance of Incognito is not its presentation of the psychology experiments and fMRI analyses that have become almost familiar in recent years, thanks to books like Being Wrong — indeed, Eagleman writes for readers who haven’t been following this issue (who haven’t, for example, been reading Malcolm Gladwell) — but rather its insistence that we need to reconsiders our ideas of conventional and legal responsibility. If Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter, had survived his orgy of death, and if it had been possible to detect the tumor that was compressing his amygdala, would it have been correct to hold him criminally liable for his acts? How do we manage the problems that ensue when otherwise effective medication sparks the irrepressible urge to gamble in Parkinson’s victims? What is the culpability of drug addiction? These are all important questions, and working out practical answers — refashioning our criminal legal system in the process — is going to be a tough slog. What I’ve seen of Eagleman’s thinking on these points seems thoughtful and grounded, and I’m looking forward to seeing more. But I’m disappointed to see Eagleman giving a pass to vernacular masculine inattentiveness. 

At one point, Eagleman refers to what I’ve come to call the paradox of the centipede: the centipede managed its hundred feet just fine until it was asked how it managed, whereupon it was paralysed by second-guessing. If you think “too much,” you can screw up your golf swing or your sex life, and you can become awfully familiar with insomnia. But I don’t think that thinking is the problem. Thinking is the symptom. Centipedes, we may trust, never actually stop to consider their articulatory powers, but when we do, it’s usually a sign that they’re not working. When we toss in bed, it’s a sign that our wiring is faulty; whatever the cure might be (medication, life-style modification), it is consciousness that alerts us to the dysfunction. It’s too bad that more of our fallible parts don’t do the same. 

And it’s too bad, I suppose, that David Eagleman comes from Texas, and not the Northeast Corridor.