¶ The common-law meaning of the term “waste” has nothing to do with garbage, and everything to do with the failure of stewardship that has allowed politicians to yield to public unions’ pension demands throughout the decades of postwar prosperity. Charles Duhigg examines the situation on the ground in Costa Mesa, California, where a conservative real-estate developer, Jim Righeimer, has been attacked for his fight for fiscal responsibility. There are no heroes in this battle, which, ultimately, pits self-interests against the common weal. ¶ It’s nice to know, though, that California’s legislators won’t be paid until they do their job, and present a balanced budget to Governor Jerry Brown.

¶ It would be uttermost hypocrisy if we tut-tutted the Times for giving ample space to two not unrelated stories today. ¶ The first is a rather incoherent — unavoidably incoherent, perhaps — account of an ABC stunt show, 101 Ways to Leave a Game Show. Watch one of the show’s YouTube clips after a selection from Candid Camera, and you will taste the bitterness of our national decline. I don’t think that the ordinary people in these shows are dumber than they used to be, but the producers are cynical and the audiences debased. Now, if they repackaged it as The Darwin Awards… ¶ The obituary of one Ryan Dunn, whom we’d never heard of, a “Jackass” who lost control of his Porsche 911 in the woods near his Pennsylvania home, killing a passenger as well as himself. Our first tyhought was that fiery automobile crashes are at least less sordid than drug overdoses, but of course this may have been a case of both.

When I was writing yesterday about John Armstrong’s civilization book, I wanted to follow up a reference to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. But where was it? It wasn’t where I thought it ought to be. Before giving up entirely, I checked a resource that I haven’t turned to in years, my Readerware database. And what do you know? Civilisation was right where Readerware said it would be. Which only goes to show — something. It shows that I haven’t been looking at Civilisation much, or it probably would have drifted to another shelf. Most of the locations given in the database are not current. Bringing Readerware up to date is going to be a big job. 

I gave up on Readerware because its interface was so kludgy. Well, that was part of it. The library was one of many, many things that were neglected when I began blogging in late 2004. It wasn’t until 2009, in fact, that I felt that I oughtn’t to have to spend quite so much time on the Web sites; I took up cooking again, for example. But the Readerware experience was rebarbative. It was so unlike Microsoft Access, which I’d used for about fifteen years until the files were lost in a malware crash in 2003. It had the look of something that wasn’t designed for a computer. But when Jason, my tech adviser, asked me to take a look at it a few weeks ago — I felt that I was ready to take up bookhandling again — I noticed that, unlike Version 2.0, Version 3.03 actually looks like a Windows database. I was not happy to hear Jason point out that Readerware is still the most popular private library-management application, but after a moue of regret, I thought, why not — I’ve already input information about thousands of books.

Then a month went by without my doing anything, so that no sooner was I fiddling with a get-reacquainted session the other day than the free-trial period expired, and I couldn’t access the files until the upgrade 3.03 was paid for and properly installed. The application needed to be loaded onto the laptop as well, and it made sense to store the database on the NAS server that enables me to work with Quicken and iTunes and all of my photographs from either of two computers. Jason took care of all of that. Just before he left today, I got out the bar-code scanner and swept Armstrong’s book into the database. Its location, tentatively, is “TBFP” — a pile, nearly four feet tall, of books that I’ve read in the past six months. I’m in no hurry to shelve them, because the pile compensates so nicely for the stacks of books that I haven’t read. Also, when people ask, “What have you been reading lately,” and I draw a deer-in-headlights blank, I can check out the TBFP. 

I’m in the mood to re-read Middlemarch, but I can’t find the Oxford Classics clothbound edition that Kathleen read not too long ago. What happened to it when she was done? Chissà. I almost popped into Barnes & Noble at lunchtime to pick up another copy, but was able to resist the impulse. There is plenty of other stuff to read right now. I got through another chapter of Wilhelm Genazino’s little novel, The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt. I’ve already mentioned my suspicion that this book reads much better in German, a hunch based on the original title, Ein Regenschirm für diesen Tag — “an umbrella for this day.” Yesterday, I came across the line in the text. The narrator is at a dinner party. He has just been downsized in his shoe-testing work, so when another guest asks him what he does, he tells her that he runs an Institute for the Art of Memory and Experience. Frau Balkausen is intrigued, and asks “what kind of people I deal with at the Institute.” 

The people who come to us, I answer, a little hesitantly and at the same time as if it were routine, are people who sense that their lives !have become nothing more than one long drawn-out rainy day, and that their bodies are no more than the umbrella for this day.

Which certainly made me reconsider the novel’s many strange erotic encounters, many of which had triggered the “ew” reflex. More than ever convinced that Regenschirm (as I’ve taken to calling it) is one of those books that just doesn’t translate very well, I went to Amazon.de and bought a copy. My German isn’t really good enough to assess the quality of Genazino’s prose, but yesterday’s chapter transformed his novel from a chore into a charm. 

Meanwhile, I’m listening to my favorte Savoy operas round and round. As at the end of my last G & S jag, Patience is my favorite of the lot. There is something very pure and refined about the silliness in Patience — as befits a spoof of pre-Raphaelite aestheticism. The speedy concision with which Patience and Grosvenor fall in and out of romantic bliss takes my breath away. 

Patience: And it is possible that you condescend to love such a girl as I?
Grosvenor: Yes, Patience, is it not strange? I have loved you with a Florentine fourteenth-century frenzy for full fifteen years!
Patience: Oh, marvellous! I have hitherto been deaf to the voice of love. I seem now to know what love is! It has been revealed to me — it is Archibald Grosvenor!
Grosvenor: Yes, Patience, it is!
Patience: (as in a trance) We will never, never part!
Grosvenor: We will live and die together!
Patience: I swear it!
Grosvenor: We both swear it!
Patience: (recoiling from him) But — oh, horror!
Grosvenor: What’s the matter?
Patience: Why, you are perfection. A source of endless ecstasy to all who know you!
Grosvenor: I know am am. Well?
Patience: Then, bless my heart, there can be nothing unselfish in loving you!
Grosvenor: Merciful powers! I never thought of that!
Patience: To monopolize those features on which all women love to linger! It would be unpardonable!
Grosvenor: Why, so it would! Oh, fatal perfection, again you interpose between me and my happiness!

The rapdily-unfolding absurdity works the additional magic of preserving Grosvenor’s thoroughgoing fatuosness from becoming irritating. But there’s an underlying alchemy, and John Pemble describes it brilliantly in his review of Carolyn Williams’s new book, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (London Review of Books, 33/12, page 39). 

Gilbert communicated no real sense of chaos or panic because the instability of the world his characters inhabit is corrected by the stability of the language they speak. Lunatic logic and accelerating disorder are checked by metrical and elocutionary discipline. 

Which doesn’t mean that Gilbert’s lines are fussy. They’re just perfect. Consider the encounter of Phyllis, in Iolanthe, with the two nobleman to whom she offers herself when she discovers Strephon’s “infidelity” (and doesn’t believe, yet, that “the lady is his mother!”):

Lord Mountararat: Phyllis! My darling!
Lord Tolloller: Phyllis! My own!
Phyllis: Don’! How dare you? Oh, but perhaps you’re the two noblemen I’m engaged to?
Lord Mountararat: I am one of them.
Lord Tolloller: I am the other.
Phyllis: Oh, then, my darling! (to Lord Mountararat) My own! (to Lord Tolloller) Well, have you settled which it’s to be?
Lord Tolloller: Not altogether. It’s a difficult position. It would be hardly delicate to toss up. On the whole we would rather leave it to you.
Phyllis: How can it possibly concern me? You are both Earls, and you are both rich, and you are both plain.

“How can it possibly concern me,” asks the Arcadian shepherdess about her marital destiny. It doesn’t seem crazy so much as candid: a gallery of the coldly ambitious girls that Trollope described so much more convincingly than his heroines lines up behind her.

And then there’s the music. In his slightly fannish dual biography, Gilbert and Sullivan — this is one serious jag — Michael Ainger points to why Sullivan’s serious compositional projects were never as captivating as his Savoy work. Sullivan was basically a highly gifted playboy, a fun- and sun-seeker who could dash off engaging, even knowledgeable trifles in a series of all-nighters. A friend, John Goss, responded to his cantata, The Prodigal Son, with a caution. 

He praised his conducting, thought his orchestrations superb, and hoped Sullivan would try another oratorio, but he sounded a note of warning: “putting out all your strength — but not the strength of a few weeks or months, whatever your immidate friends may say.” Sullivan would never be capable of that long, sustained work. He preferred short, intensive bursts, followed by long periods of inactivity. 

Inactivity at the piano, that is.

Putting away Ian Bradley’s annotated edition of the G & S librettos, I see that I’ve acquired a new bookcase since I stopped updating Readerware. (I’ve acquired two, actually.) Putting the book back was a good occasion to update its location. Very easily done!

¶ In his column this morning, Joe Nocera writes about capital requirements for banks (the subject of an international convention that will be known as “Basel III”) and how unpopular they are with bankers. “Banks always want capital requirements to be as low as possible, because the less capital they have, the more risk they can take and thus the more money they can make (and the bigger the executives’ bonuses).” Underline that parenthesis — well-compensated executives everywhere identify with their paladin-rentier class far more than they do with any employer/institution — and ask yourself, as we do, if greater risk-taking by (not very bright) bankers leads to an increase in freaked-out panic, as we saw in the credit crunch of 2008. Meanwhile, note that the Rentier Party (a/k/a “Republican”) is obstructing the legislative imposition of higher capital requirements, taking the view, shared by no one who is not a rentier or a rentier’s tool, that capital requirements are unnecessary.

¶ Today’s obituary of Joseph Miller (93) tells a good business story: inheriting a harness-making firm in the 1940s, Miller skirted obsolescence by marketing the high quality of his goods to equestrians, who by definition are people who don’t need horses. Good to know (or maybe not): Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba patronized Miller’s for the outfitting of their cavalries. Question: is there a US Cavalry tucked away somewhere that we never hear about? A real one, that is.

A week or so after reading In Search of Civilization, I’m still surprised by John Armstrong’s suggestion that business can come to the aid of civilization by providing “desire leadership.” And that business will learn how to do this from the study of the humanities. Earlier in the book, Armstrong discusses C P Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture, and maybe it’s simply the fact that we have been familiar with Snow’s challenge for fifty years that makes the chasm dividing science and the humanities (basically, the numerate from the innumerate) look much easier to bridge than the gulf between the humanities and business.

It is, however, perhaps the same gap; what business and science share is the determined reduction of phenomena to figures. But the very possibility of a discussion between businessmen and humanists seems outlandish. The two groups have such a long history of mutual contempt! We’re educated to flinch at the claim that genuine happiness — Armstrong, very interestingly, is more interested in “flourishing” than in happiness — might require purchases and acquisitions. And yet of course it does require them, at least for most people. At a minimum, we require reliable electric power to remain connected to the Internet, which has already transformed the nature of public discussion to an extent from which there can be no going back. 

In the biographical note at the end of In Search of Civilization, John Armstrong is identified as Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School. Now, what sort of job is that? Since when did business schools take on resident philosophers, and what do they expect of them? Whatever the answer, the job certaintly throws light on the point that Armstrong has to make about “desire leadership.” (Desire leadership, by the way, replaces the old, false relationship between business and consumers, which was desire creation.) And it explains, to no small degree, why of all the figures in the history of civilization Armstrong chooses as his model “desire leader” the Abbé Suger of St-Denis, the twelfth-century adviser to Capetian kings and, in some accounts, the personal inventor of the Gothic style of architecture. 

Suger — at St-Denis — was such an important pioneer for civilization because of his way of combining, and yet keeping apart, idealist and realist attitudes. His idealism was evident in the way he held on to a vision of perfection: he wanted people to love what was fine and beautiful and intensely serious. His realism was evident in the way he recognized what people are often like (feckless, greedy, status seeking). He did not use his realism about what people are like to undercut his vision of where he wanted them to go. He did not end up saying that since people are like this, this is fine and who am I to say they should be any different? His idealism — and the gap it opens between perfection and the way things are — did not lead him to hate or despise people. He shows us how to link generosity and the pursuit of perfection. 

A hero of civilization — like Suger or Cicero or Matthew Arnold — is
someone who is teaching us how to combine devotion to noble values with an acceptance of the ways of the world. They are heroes in my eyes because they do not seek to exploit whatever authority they might have; they accept that they have to do the work if they are to convince other people; they stand for kindness as well as wisdom. 

To speak of the fabrication of the Gothic ideal at St-Denis mere paragraphs after extolling the civilizing propensities of commercial transactions is to rub against a stubborn grain in Western thought, which has, from the dawn in which the great poets and the great industrialists first walked the earth (at the same time, if not in company), shrugged helplessly and hopelessly at the two camps’ hostile styles, instead of trying to articulate a connection between the creation of wealth and the benefits of prosperity. 

As usual, I believe that the computer will solve many tensions. The big fight between poets and industrialists concerns the importance of details, with the industrialists insisting opon the obvious importance of paying attention to facts and figures and the poets complaining that attending to figures and facts crushes the soul. The computer certainly has the potential to reduce the soul-crushing tendencies of accounting and balancing budgets, freeing industrialists to read more poetry. Dwarfing that  issue, however, is the cognitive revolution that is transforming the way we think about ourselves. I often suspect that it was the computer’s hyperrationality that allowed human beings to overcome their vanity on this point, and concede that we are not, after all, rational creatures. This ought to make business much more interesting, if only because it deprives business of the power to be boring. 

I hope that Armstrong is alert to the biggest problem facing business today, which is the pre-emption of capital by financiers (who make nothing except private fortunes). 

Business is not only to do with making profits. It is to do with facing competition, understanding the needs of your clients and customers and knowing what your strengths (and potential weaknesses) are. 

That’s all very well, but too much modern business, especially at the global level, is only to do with making profits. The only competition in view seems to be among workforces, not their employers; increasingly, sovereign governments have been persuaded to eliminate competition (formerly with regulation and tariffs, now with tax breaks and other subsidies) and to compenate for those “potential weaknesses” (by supporting organizations that are “too big to fail”). And almost everyone I know would agree that, far from understanding the needs of clients, today’s businesses insist that clients accept their desires. What we need today is  more business as Armstrong  understands it. To me, this means more small businesses. Computers help here, too, both by denaturing the advantages of economy of scale and by enabling the proliferation of goods and services that will, by means of desire leadership, put an end to mass production. I’m optimistic, but I’d like to hear some of this from the Philosopher in Residence.

¶ Large American corporations claim that they’ll use “repatriated” profits — fund that they’ll shift to their United States balance sheets in the event of a tax holiday — to create jobs. As David Kocieniewski points out, “But that’s not how it worked last time,” in 2005, and there’s no reason to think that a replay would work out any differently. Those repatriated funds would almost certainly be shuttled into the arms of shareholders, and jobs be damned. ¶ David Carr tells a similar story in his unusual advance review of a book that’s going to come out next week, James O’Shea’s The Deal From Hell, a gruesome account of vicissitudes that the once-great Los Angeles Times has experienced since the Chandler family decided to sell it. Similar in that business considerations are grotesquely subordinated to short-term one-time gains.

What I’d very much like to know is how many New Yorkers bought tickets to one of the Royal Danish Ballet’s six performances here this week because Jennifer Homans’s chapter about August Bournonville, in her magisterial but deliciously readable history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, inspired them to do so. It can’t have been just me.

Kathleen liked the evening’s offerings very much, although when she told me that the company’s disciplined attention to detail reminded her of the title character in Coppélia (a mechanical doll), I had to quibble. I saw some of the most fluid, “natural” dancing ever. It was as though the members of the RDB spend their lives offstage as well as on- leaping effortlesly into the ether and floating across the room on point.

What’s specatacular about the Royal Danish Ballet is the complete absence of the spectacular. The dancing is very fine, and often intoxicating, but it is never showy. The reason why I think there were other Homans readers in the audience is that it would otherwise be suspicious for New Yorkers so vociferously to applaud understatement. This was a crowd that had a lot more in common with chamber music aficionados than with the opera crowd.

We saw La Sylphide, which I must confess to having confused, inattentively, with Les Sylphides (until Jennifer Homans straightened me out), and Act III of Napoli. or, as it is called in the program, Napoli, Act III. I suppose that the RDB must mount complete performances of August Bournonville’s Napoli ever now and then, out of professional courtesy, but most serious balletomanes will go to their graves without seeing more of this work than its final act, which, like the end of Nutcracker and Act IV of The Sleeping Beauty, is a chain of “characteristic dances” and showpieces without any narrative content. Back in my radio days, when I was first learning about ballet (a subject that I knew absolutely nothing about until I was twenty-three), Napoli, Act III was the cheesiest ballet in the repertoire, just on the basis of its title. First, Naples. Naples as imagined by a Danish ballet master. Stop right there. Second, the truncation — the third act performed “out of context.” That was then. Tonight, I sat through the first half of NA3 with slightly detached interest; the characteristic dances didn’t strike me as characteristic of much more than the Bournonville style. But then somebody clapped a tambourine, and the tarantella got going. What an orgy! I realize that that is not the best word to describe an ensemble that even at its most energetic never stumbled into incoherence. But most energetic is exactly what it was, a pile-up of couplings that amounted, almost, to one too many birthday presents. And then there was the finale!

La Sylphide is the first in a line of more sophisticated ballets, notably Giselle but also including, cousin-German-wise, Swan Lake; and it’s easy to reduce its mild, pantomimed melodrama to “precursor” status. But what I remember about it isn’t elementary, because the principals, Caroline Cavallo and Mads Blangstrup, were great actors as well as gifted dancers. Great actors can sell just about anything, and that’s why Mr Blangstrup’s Scottish bridegroom and Ms Cavallo’s elfin temptress blasted a niche in my memory whereby I will recall this evening. Being gifted dancers, they were able to act with their bodies, without speech. They showed me how an art form that imposes silence on its practitioners can be as eloquent as a Shakespearean monologue 

¶ We’ve never seen the play, but the film of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, with Jeremy Irons, Patricia Hodge, and Ben Kingsley, is one of our favorite hard-to-watch films. A revival in London with a cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas occasions Joan Bakewell, the original of Emma, to write about her affair with Pinter (not for the first time). Bakewell makes the affair sound much, much jollier than the one represented in the play. (Telegraph; via Arts Journal) ¶ Francine Prose rightly desponds that her ten-plus year-old essay, “Scene of a Woman’s Ink,” weren’t still as timely as V S Naipaul’s petulant outburst has made it. (Harper’s) ¶ Ruth Fowler gives The Tiger’s Wife the stinko review that our Editor so dreaded having to write that he didn’t read the book. There are many things that 25 year-olds can do as well or better than anyone else, but writing great fiction just isn’t one of them. (HuffPost; via HTMLGiant) ¶ Laura Miller writes wisely about the problem of bad people who make good art — “bad eggs like Naipaul aside” (!). (Salon; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Part of the sadly underrated process of growing up is realizing that people, the world and life are no less beautiful and amazing for being imperfect.

¶ With Syrian refugees pouring over its southern border, Turkey has been obliged to re-think its friendly relations with Syria’s Assad régime. At The National Interest, Henri Barkey grasps the impact of this reorientation on Turkey’s delicate relations with the West. (via Real Clear World)

The US recognizes that Turkey has important cards to play because of proximity and recent history, and Ankara also understands that the problem is far too big to handle alone.

¶ If you want to know why nothing outrages us more than a sleek rentier urging poor people to take “personal responsibility” for their plight, read Jamie Holmes’s report at The New Republic. Willpower is a depletable resource that rentiers rarely need to expend urgently. With the poor, diligence and self-denial are demanded at every turn. (via Brainiac) ¶ Greg Beato writes drolly about the decline of RTEs — ready-to-eat cereals — which is taking place without any help from government action. “Fruit Loops are now the morning newspaper of breakfast food.” (The Smart Set) ¶ And light rail to Rockaway will make it perfect: the Interior Department plans to convert Floyd Bennett Field into a campground. Wouldn’t it be nice if, in addition to being the first in the city, it was also the first without a parking lot? (GOOD)

Have a Look: ¶ A collection of photographs of surrealist objects @ MondoBlogo. (We love the last one.) ¶ Bad Day at BlAscot. (Mail; via The Awl)

Noted: ¶ Where Mexico’s handguns come from (no surprise). (Foreign Policy; via The Morning News) ¶ In a breathtakingly unsurprising development, Salman Rushdie takes to writing for the small screen. (An option denied to Odets, Fitzgerald, Parker?). (Telegraph; via Arts Journal) ¶ Cord Jefferson wonders if he may be that rarest of journalist — the kind that makes things happen. Probably not, if you ask us, but he was certainly riding a trend about Facebook departures. (GOOD)

Last week, Paul Krugman published a column that caught my eye. I don’t read Krugman as a rule, because I already agree with what he has to say, and it irks me that anyone who doesn’t wields any influence in Washington or elsewhere. But I read Friday’s column because its title, “Rule by Rentiers,” not only coincided with my own ideas but struck the same new note: “rentiers.” It had occurred to me only days earlier that the Republican Party, which used to be the party of business, had become the party of rentiers. As Krugman suggests, it’s not just Republicans. It’s political elites everywhere in the West. All seem to be in the pockets of wealthy people whose wealth no longer derives from personal effort.

A word about the word, which means the opposite of its English false-cognate. Rentiers, unlike renters, own things, and their income is derived from the “profits,” or surplus revenue, that their properties generate, whether they be farms, mines, or investment portfolios. (You might say that the French simply looked at the rental process from the other side; a rentier is someone who rents property out; our renters pay rent — to rentiers.)

I don’t mean to demonize rentiers. There may be nothing admirable about living on interest and dividend payments, but there’s nothing shameful about it, either. The mystery, though, is why leaders are attending to rentiers on the one subject that rentiers care nothing about, jobs. In the rentiers’ paradise, there would be no workers, only robots. There may be nothing wrong with that prospect, either. But surely in any discussion of serious social issues such as employment and health care, a class with every reason not to sympathise with workers ought to have a very limited voice at best.

Yesterday, an even fresher insight blossomed on the one that I shared with Paul Krugman. The men and women who run this countries large corporations (whether as executives or board members) are often members but always agents of the rentier class. That is why they are paid without any regard to their firms’ official profitability. Corporations are only incidentally commercial nowadays. They’re primarily strip mines for wealth whose operations are protected from outside interference by the executive class. It is the same with the big bankers. None of these people is any more interested in business as we know it than a medieval duke.

I don’t fear rentiers themselves. They’re not, as a rule, very bright — that’s how they dragged us into the credit collapse of 2008. As oligarchs, they have little solidarity except when under attack; getting them to agree is like herding cats. Except with regard to two things: the sanctity of contract in good times and an entitlement to bailouts in bad times.

The problem is that American campaign-finance laws have allowed the rentier class to buy the allegiance of the political class. The rentiers are the only people who can foot the bill of our preposterously bloated campaign-advertising programs. Rentiers also fund the think tanks that foment voter dissatisfaction with progressive causes. Rentiers have little interest in the social questions, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, that mobilize Republican Party supporters. But their spokesmen have astutely welded socially conservative issues to the economically regressive ones that mean a great deal to rentiers, and in this they are helped by the fact that economic progressives tend to be social progressives as well.

The only hope for a progressive party in America is to develop a genuine and knowledgeable passion for every kind of business except the conglomerate kind (which is no business at all). An economy of healthy businesses is the sine qua non of healthy societies generally, and it’s time for progressives to stop looking down their noses at people who are driven to earn money by making things and providing services. And to stop confusing these people with the three-card monte artists of Wall Street and their coupon-clipping (oh, for the days!) patrons.

¶ Amidst the developing, pending, and long-term stories that flood the pages of today’s Times, two columns stand out for offering something to think about. In his About New York space, Jim Dwyer questions the logic of reducing crime by arresting blacks and Latinos for possessing small amounts of marijuana (and then dismissing the charges), while affluent whites, among whom marijuana use is “rampant,” are spared the inconvenience. Dwyer assails, quite rightly in our view, the spurious notion that a correlation between pot and crime is any more meaningful than the correlation between pot and banking or academia that equal prosecution of white New Yorkers would undoubtedly reveal. ¶ Looking to history, Sara Lipton finds that, in at least one regard, the pop psychology of the Middle Ages was the opposite of our own: manly men “ruled themselves,” controlling their libidinous urges. Shameless sexual voracity was thought to be characteristic of women. Medieval men were expected to outgrow adolescence — reading about the hockey riot in Vancouver, by the way, lighted a light bulb in our little brain: sports is cosmetic surgery for men — and that was a good thing; the bad thing was that men ruled their households as well as themselves. The point isn’t that they understood things bettter in the so-called Age of Faith, but rather it’s a reminder that pop psychology is pop psychology: the reflection of shifting, unvoiced concerns about life.

About a thousand years ago, I had the bright idea of pulling a wool ragg sock from LL Bean over a Rubbermaid quart drinking bottle, thinking (rightly) that it would do good enough a job of absorbing condensation — I fill my water bottle with plenty of ice — to allow me to stash it in tote bags alongside books and other things that oughtn’t to get wet. I soon discovered, to my great delight, that the sock was an extraordinarily effective insulator. The water bottle chuggles with ice cubes hours after they’d have melted otherwise. I can’t tell you how much I wish that the socks were available in more appealing colors, and I regret that drinking from a sock — an athletic sort of sock at that — is going to trigger a lot of gag reflexes. But, boy, does it work.

I tell you all of that to explain what Will is holding in these pictures. That he is holding it ia nor surprising, I suppose, although I feel slightly immodest in saying so. He wants the grown-up water bottle. (He wants the grown-up everything. His joustings with the three-gallon watering can out on the balcony are absolutely heroic.)  He can barely hold it when it’s full, and even when it’s not, he likes to grip it by the top fold, which runs along the seam between the sock part and the ankle part. Inevitably, the sippy straw disappears in the wool, and Will hands me my water bottle for repairs.

Over pizza — when I’m not up to catering as well as babysitting, we order a fantastic sausage pizza from Lil’ Frankie’s; I’d give anything to have one up here in Yorkville — I was treated to all sorts of conspiratorial winks, nods, and leers. Of course it was nothing of the kind, but that’s what it seemed like. Not boys’ night out, exactly, but close. There was one squinting grin that seemed to say, “We are two cool cats, man.” For all I know, Will could have been imitating someone he saw making this expression sincerely. He is a quick study. The alternative explanation is that we ought to be worried that he hit his head twice today, once by running into a pole at school and then by later pulling down a small curtain rod.   

Later, it was clear that Shaun the Sheep’s adventures have become very familiar to Will. This was good, because I had no trouble getting him to go into his bedroom to play with things and to read books — for a little while at a time. Whenever he got wound up, we’d troop back to the living room for another favorite episode. I find that I’m developing protective feelings for the hapless sheep farmer, even if he is a jerk.

I was a little tired, what with the remnant of a cold and the wake of the infusion, which is always a bit exhausting, if only for a day; so I was really, really grateful for the taxis that appeared right away, on 86th Street heading downtown and Avenue C heading home. I don’t think that I’d have been able to write this if they hadn’t. 

¶ Our conviction that the Democratic Party is no more than the useless rump of a once-farseeing political organization has been unpleasantly strengthened by its now-successful pursuit of Anthony Weiner’s resignation from Congress. This ought to have been a “teaching opportunity” for Party leaders, given the utterly tendentious and/or hypocritical nature of the revelations in the case; but, no. There are no teachers among the Democrats (except maybe Barney Frank). That anyone would pay attention to discredited political hack Nancy Pelosi makes the whole business doubly depressing.

¶ On the very off chance that you are an elementary-school pupil who might find yourself in Manhattan, be advised that aunts and uncles who offer to treat you to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark either aren’t very bright or don’t think you’re very bright. Having pronounced the reconstituted show “a bore,” Ben Brantley compares it to its troubled predecessor thus:

So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”

¶ Sam Sifton demotes Masa, the sushi temple at TimeWarner Center, from four stars to three. The food is extraordinary, but the overall experience, in the dining room at least, is not. (Perhaps Masa ought to abandon the pretense of a Western-style restaurant and just expand its bar.)

Bruised by recession, wizened by experience, gun-shy about the future, New York City now demands of its four-star restaurants an understanding that culture at its highest must never feel transactional, whatever its cost. We ascend to these heavens for total respite from the world below, for extraordinary service and luxuriant atmosphere as much as for the quality of the food prepared.

Now, of course, I feel very silly. It turns out that common colds don’t make Remicade infusions unsafe. Every kind of fever and infection does, but not colds. So there was nothing to worry about all along. I was misinformed by an overzealous nurse; the rheumatologist set me straight. It turned out, though, that the Infusion Therapy Unit had me down for an infusion tomorrow. Coming back would have been a bore, but not a very great one; in the event, I didn’t have to — there was a vacancy. So I had the infusion after all and am determined to be Superman by Saturday at the latest.

We had Manhattan Theatre Club Tickets for this evening. We neither of us wanted to go, but we thought we’d better, so we did. (We couldn’t postpone, because the run of the show ends on Sunday.) We didn’t know anything at all about Daniel Goldfarb’s Cradle and All, but it turned out to be an almost perfect theatre piece (but for some journeyman longueurs in the second act). Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller played two couples, one per act, living in adjacent Brooklyn Heights apartments. One couple can’t agree about having a baby; the other’s has kept its parents from getting a good night’s rest for eleven months. The trials endured by the parents when they follow “expert” advice for getting their daughter to sleep on her own were bizarrely, electrically familiar. I had to wonder, though, who, aside from grandparents like me, Mr Goldfarb had in mind as his audience, because if there is one truth that’s not sufficiently universally acknowledged, it’s that new parents don’t go to the theatre.

And I really do believe that it would have killed my daughter and son-in-law to sit through — not a re-enactment, exactly, but, worse, an alternative hell. In other words, things could be different but just as bad. Neither of the parents appeared to be working, for one thing, and still… When, toward the end, the dad pours a glass of wine for himself and one for his wife, and she asks why they didn’t think to do this “five hours ago,” he blithely answers, “We’re Jews.” It brought the house down — that’s the sort of line that’s practically an old family joke for MTC subscribers, even the goyim. At one point, the mom finds a Sophie behind the sofa cushions and explodes with rapture: she has been looking for Sophie for weeks! A few minutes later, the dad has good reason to want the Sophie out of the way, so he tosses her right across the room, and, let me tell you, it is a shocking sight. If you don’t know what kind of an animal Sophie is, or why she’s so popular with today’s little ones, you’re just not cool (but I won’t tell). Which reminds me of the time that Megan mocked me for subscribing to Time Out New York: “You just want people to think you’re young.” Now she would be accusing me of making her produce a grandchild just so that I could catch all the allusions in a smart off-Broadway play.

In case I don’t get round to writing up Cradle and All properly, let me say that the two actors were great. Ms Dizzia is very beautiful, even when she’s not, and Mr Keller reminded me more than once of that whole-deck-of-cards-up-my-sleeve virtuosity of Mark Rylance.

¶ The Chinese Navy is rattling sabers, or whatever it is that gunboats do, in the surrounding seas, irritating Japanese, Vietnamese, and Philippine neighbors. This quasi-belligerent activity is one thing that is truly new about China, which has not been much of a maritime presence since the Ming emperors scuttled Zheng He’s flotilla in the Fifteenth Century. With no traditions to guide the captains of its expanding, up-to-date fleet, this land of venerable traditions is bound to behave with adolescent rashness. ¶ Which isn’t to say that traditions are necessarily a good thing. China’s lead-poisoning nightmare couldn’t have a more familiar ring. Sharon LaFraniere writes,

Such scenes of heartbreak and anger have been repeated across China in recent months with the discovery of case after case of mass lead poisoning — together with instances in which local governments tried to cover them up.

What’s worst about the cold that I’m battling at the moment is the likelihood that it will force a postponement of the Remicade infusion that has been scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday afternoon. What’s almost as bad is suffering the indignities of a bad cold — sniffling, sneezing, hacking and hawking — alongside the miseries, great and small, that Remicade suppresses. The last dose has been exhausted in the fight against my over-active autoimmune system, and I’m once again under imflammatory attack.

I’m scribbling this note in the morning, because I not only the energy but the will do so. This afternoon, if yesterday’s experience is anything to go by, I shall slip into a black funk of purposelessness that will feel a lot like despair. The only treatment is reading, which at a time like this really does make me forget myself (between sneezes). I’m in the middle of two good books, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity and Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. In the first, I’ve just finished with medieval Christianity in the West, and will now turn to the East, for about a hundred pages of Byzantium and Russia. I shall try to get through that today. As to the novel, it’s perfect reading for the pickle I’m in, because everybody is at least mildly discontented, and at least one character — I’m thinking of Ingeborg Middleton and her demented and disappointing Christmas carol party — strikes me as borderline psychotic in a Tennessee Williams way, although, refreshingly, not from the South. What could be more miserable than England in 1954? (I’m not asking.)

Knowing how wretched I was, Kathleen was resolved to play Sheherazade last night, or our version of that fable, which consists of provoking me into rambling on about one of my hobby-horses. She had no idea, however, of how to begin. I was bearishly clamped and cross. But a glass of wine (and some Advil) warmed me up a bit, and I started talking, without any prompts, about things that I’d read in MacCulloch, familiar things for the most part that he reminded me of. For example, “the rediscovery in Italy around 1070 of two copies of a compilation of imperial law,” which triggered the launch of the first university, at Bologna, and the formalization of the fine art of medieval forgery (which MacCulloch glancingly mentions), according to which it was perfectly all right to “reproduce” lost or missing charters.

We can call them forgeries, but our attitudes to such matters are conditioned by the humanist historical scholarship which emerged in Italy in the fifteenth century. That leads us to expect that our history must be based on carefully checked and authenticated evidence, or it simply cannot exist. For centuries before, though, people lived in societies which did not have enough documents to prove what they passionately believed to be true: the only solution was to create the missing documentation.

I don’t know how Kathleen sits through these ruminations, but she keeps me going with questions, and she claims that she enjoys learning what I have to say. Perhaps she just likes the sound of my voice. In any case, I’m not so miserable after all.

¶ Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler have a story, certainly, but is “In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust” the best title? Nowhere do the reporters demonstrate that the response of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan to the Fukushima disaster was actually crippled by his decision to bypass a bureaucratic apparatus that he had good reason to mistrust. The closest argument for hampered effectiveness concerns the use of an Education Ministry weather-analysis system that would have advised civilians not to take refuge in an area covered by the reactors’ radioactive plume.

Mr. Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.

This makes us even more sympathetic to Mr Kan’s misgivings. The reporters seem to be under the impression that speed and “decisiveness” are invariably good things in a crisis. This leads them to step over the real story, which concerns plant manager Masao Yoshida’s heroic insubordination.

Somebody’s having fun.

What Will is having fun with requires a bit of product description. In 1942, among my parents’ wedding presents was a set of coasters. Does everybody know what a coaster is? I’m not sure. They’re usually useless*, so there’s no reason to have them around, and nobody would if it weren’t for housewarmings and hostess gifts and whatnot. (Just buy “cocktail napkins.”) My parents’ coasters are emblematic, I think, of their time. Ringed in sterling, their bases are a weird transparent pseudo-cut-glass plastic that isn’t like the plastic that was ubiquitous in my boomer’s life but harder, more like glass somehow, but not glass. Modern but very traditional, à la fois.

Megan used to ask, “Do you like all this junk?”, meaning the stuff that I’d inherited from my parents and somehow felt obliged to display in our apartment. She had a point. I didn’t like a lot of it, and the coasters were near the top of the list of things that I could do without. One of these days I’ll give them the home-studio treatment, so that you can see them if as I were putting them up for sale at eBay. Why did I keep them? More to the point, why did I put them on a table in the living room, as if they were useful and/or decorative, when in fact they are neither? Call me Virgil, as in the Fourth Eclogue: I clearly must have foreseen the coming of Will.

The coasters are one of Will’s favorite toys. His playing with them follows a two-stage program. First, he holds them up and does things close at hand. Then he throws them around the room. As his pitch isn’t very serious, “around the room” means “on the floor in front of wherever he happens to be,” but that’s going to change.  Just now, as you can see in the photo below, he has discovered what to us looks like the deep-sea diver possibiltiies of the coasters: he can look through them! Later in the day, he would discover that he could look throught two coasters at the same time, but even if I’d caught that with the camera, I’d prefer the image below, because it has a weird Nineteenth-Century craziness vibe.

I ought to point out that the coasters spent almost the entirety of my parents’ marriage locked up with the other silver items in a breakfront cabinet in the dining room. My mother was a lot less attached to things of the past than I am: why did she hold on to them? No matter, no matter. The point is that, being “modern plastic,” they’re safe for Will to throw around as well as to peer through. They have finally found a purpose. I believe that, now that we know what these objects are really for, we must make sure that he keeps them for his children.

***

Last week’s “Summer Reading” edition of the Book Review was so difficult to get through that I decided, finally, that I have had enough of reviewing it week after week, as I’ve been doing since the summer of 2005. I’ve learned a lot about book reviewing, and especially about what a general-reader-oriented paper-of-record Book Review ought to look like, and the Times’s offering is so off the mark that if it ceased publication next weekend I should probably feel more relief than regret.

I never got as far as the first fiction title. The line-up of books about figures from the worlds of sports and entertainment was as endless as a coach class check-in line at Thanksgiving, but what made the pieces indigestible was the snarky condescension of reviewers who ought to have been in some sort of analytic therapy that would help them either to embrace their heartfelt values or to renounce them as elitist nonsense. The Book Review walks an impossible line, not that it has to but because, I think, the world of New York publishing from which it emanates is so awfully confused right now. As I say, I learned a lot from poring over the reviews for six years, and wondering why most of them were written in the first place. There will always be a place at this blog for Liesl Schillinger and for other thoughtful commentators. (Lydia Davis on John Ashbery’s Rimbaud — fascinating!) But the energy that I’ve spent on the Book Review reviews is needed elsewhere.

***

Unless I fall asleep at the wheel, Will will be allowed to toss one of the coasters as if it were a frisbee just once. There will be no second toss; the coasters will be taken away, regardless of wails and sobs, if any, and put away for a future in which, who knows? a future Mrs Will decides that coasters circa 1942 are just what she’s been looking for. Or the other thing. I know that there will be an attempt to “throw a flying disc” (as Wikipedia so discreetly puts it) because of the Shaun the Sheep episode entitled “Fetching.” This episode elicits an exceptionally keen response from Will, and even though the part that appeals to him has little to do with discurgy (I just made that one up), it’s a big part of the action, and the inevitable is the inevitable.

The scene that Will likes is the dalliance between Bitzer, the show’s sheepdog, and a lady dog who is traveling with her human owners in neighboring caravan. The lady dog looks just like Bitzer except: (a) she wears a beret instead of a watch cap (b) she has proposterous eyelashes and (c) her long ears roll out in what I believe is called a “flip.” The moment Bitzer signals his determination to win this lady-dog’s favor, by spitting on his paw and smoothing down the hair (?) under his watch cap, Will starts to laugh, as if Johnny Carson had just made a funny, and he continues to laugh throughout the entire dalliance, which, let me tell you, involves the most discreet stand-in-for-sex scene since smoking became immoral (the two dogs’ tails — the upraised tips of the two dogs’ tails — go round and round, while the beasts do their carnal sniffing offscreen). Will laughs when Bitzer whistles, faute de mieux, his appreciation of the lady-dag’s charms. The thing is, this episode is the only one in all of Shaun-the-Sheepdom that makes Will laugh. He is an ardently engaged follower of all the episodes, but this he finds funny. This makes him laugh.

As if it were Preston Sturges. Hoo boy.

There will be no frisbees thrown in my living room! I hope that I’ve put my foot sufficiently down.  

* Drinks that require a coaster are invariably cold, and invariably the condensation that accumulates on the tumblers’ exterior causes the coasters to adhere to them, for a moment or two, before they clatter down onto the table, splashing wet everywhere and defeating the whole purpose of their existence.

J J Abrams’s Super 8 is a pleasant summer movie. It’s pleasant largely because its two young stars, Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney, are not only engaging but engaging in the same way as two older actors, Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman. Whether there’s a facial resemblance I won’t claim, but Ms Fanning has Ms Kidnman’s ability to make passionate outburst look like the natural consequence of steely reserve, while Mr Courtney has Mr Bateman’s modest but genially attentive charm. The sense of kids playing at being movie stars is of course enhanced by the fact that their characters are making a movie — a zombie movie shot in Super 8 film (Mr Abrams’s film is set in 1979). You can watch Super 8, in fact, as a movie about moviemaking, ignore the Spielbergian science fiction story altogether, and have a perfectly good time. I’ll let you do the unpacking. Let’s just say that watching Charles, an enthusiastic, power-mad fifteen year-old would-be auteur (Riley Griffiths), run around exclaiming an urgent need for and ecstatic appreciation of “Production Values!” is going to be more of a treat for viewers who have actually considered  the movies than it’s going to be for those who haven’t. (The more I think about this kid’s chutzpah, the more I’m put in mind of Charles Laughton.)

Mr Abrams is to be congratulated for cloaking his movie in the Aura of Spielberg without suffocating it. It may be that he is simply the better director of actors. The pressboard clichés of Steven Spielberg’s Mittelamerika are all on display. We have a slightly dumpy and sad Ohio manufacturing town that doesn’t know what’s going to hit it — the visitor from outer space will be a benign memory once the offshoring and shuttering starts. We have perfectly nice, normal Americans, complete with their domesticated hostilities about patriarchy and propriety. We have a hero whose mother died in a factory accident the winter before the story gets going. We have a heroine whose mother abandoned her to the care of her shiftless, long-haired father (Ron Eldard, made up to resemble, very spookily, Gérard Depardieu — more references!). We have the overweight Charles, one of ten or fifteen children in a happily chaotic home overseen by a can-do mom (Jessica Tuck). The hero lives with his deputy sheriff stepfather (Kyle Chandler) in the nicer part of town, which wouldn’t be the nicer part of any village in Westchester, while the heroine lives in a more rackety pile that’s reminiscent of New England mill towns. In the climax, the town is destroyed —so maybe its citizens won’t suffer the onslaught of globalization, after all. The important thing is that the hero and the sheriff share a warmly heartfelt embrace at the finish. If the production values of Super 8 were a font, we would call it Spielberg Vernacular Bold.

The town is destroyed by special forces of I forget which branch of the armed services; Air Force probably. It would be misleading to say that Super 8 resounds with echoes of Sixties-era countercultural loathing for the military, because the sounds that you hear are much, much  louder than echoes. The special forces, headed by a tall silent type with bad skin played by Noah Emmerich, are the film’s bad guys. They will stop at nothing to prevent a brachyurous alien of nightmarish allure but superhuman intelligence from repairing its space ship and, like ET, going home. It is not its fault that the weaponry aimed in its direction misfires and destroys the town; it is only acting in self-defense. Mr Abrams insures that the creature’s final departure is a glittering, almost hypnotizing bit of Las Vegas glitz, leaving behind a wreckage of microwave ovens, console television sets, and too-large automobiles that no sane person would want anyway. If the creature does have an unfortunate habit of sustaining itself on a diet of humans, that’s just a gentle parallel of the kids’ zombie movie — which is shown in its entirety during the final credits, so sit still after the happy ending.

Super 8 may unfold in a thoroughly predictable manner, but then so does Midnight in Paris; in both cases, the unfolding is expert. As a Manhattanite, I have a thoroughly predictable preference for Woody Allen’s Gotham Comic Sans, but I had a good time at Super 8, and if you have ever thought about why you like going to the movies, you will, too.