It is impossible to read Michael Ainger’s Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography without hearing the voice of Jim Broadbent intone the many, many letters and memoranda that are quoted in the text. It’s a testament to the spot-on casting of Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvey that not only do all the people in Ainger’s book seem weirdly familiar, as if you had known them, but even the photographs don’t do much to dent this effect. It’s uncanny that a film made by a proverbially vernacular writer-director should take on, over time, the patina of a Merchant-Ivory production. 

In any case, as I say, there are lots of letters. William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) was something of a terrier — unusual in someone tall and commanding. When he knew that he was right, he simply would not let go. And not only would he persist, but he would rail indignantly at anyone who complained about his persistence. He was only doing what was right! Surely no man should ever have to apologize for that! It’s amazing that he wasn’t put down by popular acclamation. Instead, as we know, he was hailed by popular acclamation, doubtless because the number of people who had to deal with him was a microscopic fraction of the number that enjoyed his writing for publication and for the stage. 

Sullivan is both more appealing and a greater disappointment. (Actually, there is really nothing disappointing about Gilbert at all, considered biographically; he was right!) Charming and easy-going, Sullivan liked pleasing people, so long as it pleased him to do so. He was also a weak man, as pleasure seekers often are when good things come easily. What was weak about Sullivan artistically wasn’t his yielding to financial temptation and writing the lucrative Savoy operas, it was rather his failure to recognize that this is what he was good at. He wasn’t strong enough to correct people who insisted that he was capable of “greater things” — that most Victorian of miasmas. Without equating Gilbert to Mozart, I would venture that Sullivan was very much like Lorenzo da Ponte, whose great work was summoned by a fertile collaboration. If Gilbert’s best work is also the fruit of that collaboration, it’s from a different kind of luck. Read the Bab Ballads, many of which are quite close to lyrics from the Savoy operas, and you’ll find that Gilbert was always Gilbert. (As was Mozart.) Sullivan wasn’t always Sullivan; perhaps it’s better to say that there were several Sullivans. Without Gilbert, away from topsy-turvydom, Sullivan could be fustian and turgid. 

But I am not here to assess the geniuses of Victorian musical theatre. Ainger tells us that his is the first joint biography in fifty years, and that he has made use of papers that were not available to his predecessor. He does not wear this scholarship lightly. This is partly the consequence of his narrative plan, which is chronologically straightforward. One damned thing, in other words, after another — and in the case of Gilbert’s touchy sense of honor and his inability to see the faults that others found so irritating (perhaps because he didn’t see them as faults), that means plenty beaucoup of damned things. The many short chapters are stuffed with minor details and incidents that are only slightly more interesting than shopping lists. A random example: 

Once again Sullivan put off working on the cantata or the opera. He went to the races for the opening of the spring season at Epsom on 6 April; two days later he was at the Grosvenor Gallery for a reception for Liszt organized by Walter Bache, and the next day, 9 April, Sullivan escorted Liszt to a smoking concert at St James Hall.

I leave it to you to find out what a smoking concert was (no great surprise); for my part, the bit about Sullivan’s two days at Epsom is so much noise. The chatter isn’t quite noisy enough, however, to conceal the most serious defect of Ainger’s book, its anemic grasp of Sullivan’s place in the history of serious European music. I don’t mean the evaluation of Sullivan’s compositions so much as his career as an all-round music man, from his student days at Leipzig to his connection with the Leeds Festival. There is no discussion of the qualities that led Nineteenth Century listeners to distinguish the serious popular success of Verdi from the frivolous popular success of Offenbach. This is important, because Sullivan’s froth was sophisticated (that’s why we still listen to it). Insofar as Sullivan was a gifted parodist, he was an enlightened critic of tastes and fashions. Ainger quotes a contemporary critic to the effect that Sullivan’s music would do nicely at least until the “English Beethoven” emerged. The composer who came closest to claiming that title, Edward Elgar, is mentioned only in passing, and his music, which infused the symphonic tradition with genuinely English sentiment (and not just tunes), is not discussed at all. Nor is there much background or context for Gilbert’s career as a playwright. Not unreasonably, perhaps, this dual biography is written from the perspective of the Savoy Theatre. But that’s the perspective of Richard D’Oyly Carte, whose biographical details are presented almost grudgingly, even though he is the unifying force throughout the book: Gilbert and Sullivan had almost no contact that Carte was unaware of. The limitation of this perspective is that everything that Gilbert or Sullivan does that doesn’t concern the Savoy seems flat and irrevelant. 

It would appear that I’m looking for a different book, a series of connected essays, perhaps, exploring the careers of each of these interesting men in a way that treats more comprehensively the matters that meant most to them and shrugs off Ainger’s almost extreme interest in his subjects’ appointment diaries and business correspondence. I’d like to have more in the way of thoughtful response to their output, and less — much less — of the commentary of newspapermen. Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography belongs on the shelf of anyone who loves the Savoy operas, but I hope that it inspires another writer or two to approach the lives of these two — three! — eminent Victorians from a different angle.

¶ We have been thinking about Zahi Hawass lately. He has been Egypt’s peppery and grandstand-prone minister of antiquities for some time now — meaning, during the Mubarak régime — and we’re not surprised to see that he remains tenaciously in office. (What we didn’t know is that he has licensed a line of clothing that features his ageing Indiana Jones style.) Will guilt by association put an end to his autocracy? Or will — much the same thing — public weariness force his retirement? Mr Hawass claims that, because he is appointed, not elected, “the question of public support is not relevant to my position.” Perhaps he has been breathing too much of the bad air in the pharoahs’ tombs.

We’re having hot and humid weather again, and I’m finding it difficult to pay attention to anything. Well, there have been plenty of distractions — real distractions! For example! Did you see the picture of Queen Elizabeth outside 10 Downing Street yesterday? She was wearing a printed skirt with a solid top, and no hat. If proof was wanting that Rupert Murdoch’s End Times are upon us — upon him, I mean — surely that photograph closed the gap. It is very hard not to wish for terrible, terrible things to happen to Rupert Murdoch. For many of them, he’s responsible. For others, he’s not — few people can have been coerced into watching his television network or buying his newspapers — but then that’s why scapegoats were invented, and you have to admit that Rupert Murdoch looks like a scapegoat. In the words of Ko-Ko, I don’t think he’ll be missed.

Then there was the fire, which by the flukiest of flukes I saw with my own eyes. The building that houses Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, built in 1872, was gutted by a roaring blaze last night. The fire started about five or ten minutes before I stepped out onto 86th Street, heading west to Madison to have dinner with Kathleen at Demarchelier. Because of my (painless) neck and back problems, my gaze is usually confined to the pavement when I walk, but something made me pause and look up. At first I thought that it was a violent thunderstorm sweeping up Central Park. Then I realized that this strange weather was not only much closer than the Park but smoke, not clouds. Because the wind was blowing west, I didn’t smell the fire until I was halfway between Third and Lex. (The synagogue stands a few doors in from Lex toward Park on the north side of 85th Street.) The crowd at 86th and Lex was almost impassable, and almost everyone seemed to be taking pictures with a cell phone. I couldn’t see any flames, but the smoke near the rooftops was illuminated by a hellish red glare. I happy to find that I could  cross Lex and continue on my way. (On our way home from dinner, Kathleen and I found the policemen pulling down white tape that would have obliged us to detour to the north — I was glad that I had lingered over dessert.) At Park, I walked into low-lying smoke and found it unpleasant for a moment or two to breathe.

When we got home from dinner, I was good for nothing but searching the Internet for news of the excitement. Pix (Channel 11) was first to post a story, then NY1, and, eventually, the Times. Not only had no one been injured (except for a few firefighters suffering minor injuries), but in view of its renovation the building had been stripped of all sacred objects, such as the Torah scroll. So, as Rabbi Hankel Lookstein said, it was only the building. This news made the excitement of passing a violent scene a lot less depressing and shameful than it might have been. And that’s when I spotted the picture of Her Majesty, for the first time in my experience not swathed from head to ankle in one color. How would I ever get to sleep?

Then, this morning, the sofa in the blue room came back from the upholsterer.  The sofa was built for my mother-in-law fifty-odd years ago, and we had it reupholstered when we came into possession in the mid-Eighties. If it hadn’t had a sentimental appeal for Kathleen, we might have deaccessioned it some time ago, because it is very wide for a sofa that seats only two people comfortably. (Three with drinks, if you know what I mean.) That’s not to say that I don’t like it; I do, very much. It’s a convincing replica of a Louis XVI piece, with beautifully distressed woodwork washed in pale blue. The upholstery from the Eighties had gotten very tired looking, but we had no plans to do anything about it until Will leaned over, shortly after he began to take steps, and took a bite out of the padding at the armrest. He couldn’t have done any damage if the fabric hadn’t been quite worn out, so Kathleen set to finding some new material. That was the cheap part; the fabric cost about 1/20th of the repholstery labor. But what beautiful work Jeff Alexander does!

Ray Soleil helped me carry the sofa upstairs, and later, after lunch, we drank a pot of tea while discussing the Greek debt problem and Ray’s conviction that the French really want to reinstate the monarchy. I can think of one Frenchman who doesn’t! I wrote to him just a little while ago, to tell him most of what I’ve just told to you, explaining that I therefore had nothing worth writing about here.  

¶ William Yardley writes about the closing of the Washington State tourism office, and explains that the state’s name has been a problem ever since 1853, when lawmakers were concerned that Columbia would cause confusion with the federal capital. You can’t make this stuff up! ¶ Michael Powell writes about politics in New Jersey, which we already knew to be screwed up, but still. He uses the term “purely medieval“ in a sense different from the one in which we apply it to American politics; we see the Middle Ages as a time of weak central power and the corresponding proliferation of small but obstinate jurisdictions; to Mr Powell, it means — well, we think that the word that he wants is “Renaissance.”

¶ Never having visited the Barnes Museum, formerly in Merion, Pennsylvania and slated to reopen in Philadelphia, we were appalled by what we saw on the Times‘s virtual tour of several rooms, hosted by Randy Kennedy. It is shocking to think that the bad taste of a private collector has been respected for more than fifty years. Dr Barnes expressed his bad taste not in his collections of fine French paintings and African carvings but in the manner of displaying them, which, in our view, submerges them in unintelligible clutter while draining away the possibility of aesthetic pleasure. It is nothing less than barbaric to permit dead hands to interfere with the imaginative lives of the living.

Since the “collapse” of the prosecution’s case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Times has published at least three editorializing complaints, written by columnists Joe Nocera, Jim Dwyer, and, most recently, Roger Cohen. The gist of all three pieces is that American justice rests on a principle of equality before the law. The possibility that a criminal might beat a rape rap by virtue of being a powerful and (hitherto) respected statesman is anathema to these writers, and one fears that they will bay to the moon until some sort of punishment is meted out. But their righteous indignation ought to be directed at more pressing targets.

We believe in equality before the law, but we also believe in something that needs to be discussed more frankly in our republic: equality of the law. While statute books bulge with draconian prohibitions that betray our history of wishful thinking on matters of the flesh — that there should even be such categories as “sex offense” and “drug offense” gives an idea of our disinclination to accept the contours of human nature — they are full of loopholes for other kinds of wrongs, the kind of wrong, say, perpetrated by James Johnson, the Washington operative with no business experience who was put in charge of the political patronage machine known as Fannie Mae. Mr Johnson’s activities have been anatomized in excoriating detail by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, in Reckless Endangerment. As almost every tut-tutting review of this angry history will tell you, Mr Johnson appears not to have broken any laws.

Reckless endangerment, as any law student can tell you, is a variety of the common law tort of negligence. But torts are civil, not criminal. I expect that reckless endangerment while driving a car is probably a criminal offense in a few jurisdictions, and that other bans on reckless endangerment are tied to contexts involving heavy or dangerous machinery. Reckless endangerment of the nation’s economy while administerting a semi-public financial corporation is not a crime. But it ought to be one, and not just because Mr Johnson’s misbehavior suggests the need for such a law. It always ought to have been the law. But we prefer to cloak the activities of corporate executives in moral neutrality. We strip them of their corporate status when they’re found to have indulged in crimes against property such as embezzlement and blackmail. Rather, turn that around: if embezzlement and blackmail are business as usual, then the malefactor keeps his corporate pass. Mr Johnson’s self-enrichment and political influence — what would you call them? — are therefore all right. Bernard Madoff goes to jail — but the array of bankers and fund managers who enabled his operation with their carelessness, deemed to have been “doing business,” are allowed to join the chorus of outrage.

Rape is an unconscionable abuse of power, and when a man combines the power of status with superior physical strength to overpower a sexual victim, his punishment out to be more severe than that of the ordinary Joe Schmoe. I hope that French voters will discover that Mr Strauss-Kahn is at best a recklessly imprudent man (assuming that the semen on the housekeeper’s dress was deposited there in the usual way) who perhaps ought not to be entrusted with great state powers. I don’t believe in jail time for criminals who are not mentally disturbed, but I would be happy to Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought to some kind of justice if indeed his encounter was not consensual. What I want no more of is sanctimonious whining at a newspaper that refuses to question the fundamental inequity of our corporation laws, which ironically, by granting corporations equal protection under the law, endow corporate executives with enormous powers to characterize what they do as normal and healthy while avoiding responsibility for financial and environmental damage.

The New York Times provides this country with a vital cleansing service, subjecting its operations to critical scrutiny. That mission is not best served by harping on sex scandals — not with a new band of robber barons abroad in the land. 

¶ We’re cheered to read that Labour Party leader Ed Milliband has “declared war on Rupert Murdoch.” The easy winner of any right-minded person’s Most Loathsome Human prize, Mr Murdoch is all that holds us back from full-throated opposition to the death penalty.

Mr Murdoch is of course not responsible for the expansion of his evil media empire. That is the doing of dozens cowed politicians and regulators and millions of heedless “consumers.” That’s why he will embody, long after he is gone, a failure of democracy nearly as malignant as Germany’s Nazi misadventure.

Horrible Bosses delivers on its title: the bosses in Seth Gordon’s first feature film since Four Christmases are so horrible that you’re grateful every time the camera turns away from their tyranny. Not all bad bosses abuse power, but those who do are fully represented here. There is the suave user, the sexual predator, and the drug-addled maniac, played, respectively — and at full throttle — by Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, and Colin Farrell. All of them will make you cringe in your seat, even the comely Ms Aniston — perhaps even mostly the comely Ms Aniston. Happily, the horribleness of the bosses is this film’s only realistic aspect. Otherwise, it is a compleat farce, a perfectly whipped soufflé whose bubbles lift and lighten material that would be as leaden as the bosses are horrible. Which is to say that the well-written script is acted with acrobatic precision. 

We have the three bosses, their three employees (who are old friends), a “murder consultant” (Jamie Foxx), a fiancé (Lindsay Sloane), a disembodied navigational system (Brian George), and a passel of supporting characters that includes a brief appearance by Donald Sutherland. We have a lot of dark sets and night-time shots, the overall taste of which is pretty dreary. (Among the outtakes played during the final credits is a hilariously naughty line: looking around the cokehead boss’s lair, Jason Sudeikis says, “It looks like Sharper Image took a shit in here.”) This is not the sunny Southern California to which anyone dreams of relocating, but a brown, gritty place with sky-grey offices and bronze-brown homes. At the start, the bad jobs are bad enough, but each one is made insupportably worse, and from this trauma emerges the conspiracy to murder the three bosses. Our boys know that they’re not capable of committing undetectable crimes, so they retain a series of hit men, both of whom prove to be disappointments. Homes are broken into, in search of “intel,” but the success of these missions is largely inadvertant, and when, in the most exciting scene in the film, one of the horrrible bosses shoots one of the other horrible bosses dead, the heroes have no idea that this deliverance was effected by their own sloppiness. Horrible Bosses ought to be unwatchable. 

But instead, it’s mesmerizing. Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis begin by establishing each of their characters as decent, level-headed guys who really do deserve to get ahead. This is key, because if we didn’t regard them as responsible men in search of flourishing environments, what followed would be annoying. Once they’ve got our sympathy, Nick, Dale and Kurt can embark on a desperate if ill-defined mission that has our complete support. When, as often happens to old friends under pressure, they regress “the eighth grade” (as Dale complains when the other two lock him out of the car so that they can think), we regress right along with them. They shout each other down, vacillate between bravado and timorousness, and largely forget not to leave fingerprints. Kurt, who for some reason thinks that he’s sexy, has a winning way of worrying just how rape-worthy he will be when he and his friends land in prison — specifically, more rapeworthy than Nick, or less? Dale can be counted on to act first and think later (“it sounds bad when you put it like that”) — and to raise his voice higher and higher to protest any criticism. Courtly by comparison, Nick has a spoilsport’s faith in the effectiveness of declining to participate in a scheme deemed hare-brained; he priggishly announces that he will “wait in the car.” These men are the polar opposite of masterminds. As we would undoubtedly be in their place. Although they sometimes do idiotic things, they’re not jerks, and we don’t laugh at them. We’ve see those horrible bosses! 

The bosses are horrible in very different ways. Kevin Spacey’s financial executive, Dave, is a leonine monster whose every move is considered and deliberate. He speaks the language of corporate uplift with the expressiveness of a diva singing Verdi, and we can see that he will always triumph over Nick, who has been slavishly doing his bidding for eight years in hopes of a promotion, because Dave doesn’t have a decent bone in his body. (His Achilles heel, which only their ineptitude brings within the conspirators range, is marital jealousy.) Jennifer Aniston plays Julia, a naughty dentist who is determined to deflower (so to speak) her assistant, Dale. (Dale, unfortunately, has been branded a sex offender because he was caught urinating in the middle of the night — and quite alone — near a playground. I would have tried to come up with a better reason why he can’t get another job.) Like Dave, Julia speaks with a thoroughgoing disingenuousness that makes rubbish of everything she says. (But bosses can declare that rubbish rules.) In one scene that amply showcases Ms Aniston’s comic talent, Julia threatens Dave while wearing nothing but panties and an unbuttoned lab coat; I can’t think of another actress who could have pulled this off without being more embarrassing than her character. Horrible boss that Julia is, her scenario remains a great deal more palatable than the more likely one — genders reversed — that twinkles behind her vamping. Unlike the other two horrors, Colin Farrell’s Bobby doesn’t waste time twisting the truth or manipulating egos. Utterly infantile, he barks preposterous commands with complete indifference to the difficulty of obeying them. But like his two costars, Mr Farrell gives a performance that is loaded with the sincerest self-parody. Strutting about with his regrettable comb-over and his surprisingly slight physique — is he really that little? — Mr Farrell howls through his scenes like a scowling Kabuki actor painted on a windblown kite. 

Horrible Bosses is a farce, but it is also a nightmare. It doesn’t so much come to an end as run one complete cycle; if it weren’t for the outtakes at the end, we might leave with an uncomfortable sense of its starting all over again. But nightmares of often quite farcical — once you leave the theatre of dreams.

¶ Jeffrey Gettleman writes about the inauguration of Africa’s 54th country, South Sudan, from its capital city, Juba. One can only wish that South Sudan’s sovereign chances were better: the new nation, facing serious internal divisions as well as the long-standing enmity of the North, must spend more on security than on social services. Even the bright side — lots of oil — is not, given oil’s history elsewhere, very bright. We freely admit that this would be just another news story to us were it not for the indelible impact of Dave Eggers’s novelization of the experience of Valentino Achak Deng, What Is the What. That book made South Sudan an intensely distinct part of our world. (Another book that did the same for another, hitherto off-the-map part of the world is Thomas Goltz’s riveting Azerbaijan Diary.) 

¶ We wish that whoever edited Rachel Minder’s story about Spain’s stolen babies had seen to let us know why we’re reading about it today. What, precisely, is the news? It’s a journalistic quibble, perhaps, but we pose it because the story is so awful. How long has it been going on, and what is being done about it? The Times report answers the first question: for decades. But it leaves the more worrisome question open. What is being done, it seems, is precisely nothing, nothing beyond a morass of lawsuits, in which parents and children charge nuns and hospitals with the atrocious crime of informing new parents that their newborns have died, while spiriting off the babies, actually quite healthy, to purchasers — all in compliance with the evil “righteousness” of Franco’s fascism. What the old state did, the new state must rectify. Saddling individuals with the burden of resolving their terrible losses is almost as heinous as the underlying crimes. The news ought to have been that the Attorney General is consolidating all suspected cases, which, sadly, it isn’t.

This afternoon at lunch, I was reading Ken Auletta’s profile of Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, a woman who feels passionately that “The Nº 1 impediment to women succeeding in the workforce is now in the home…” A page or so later, something else gave me what I think is a great idea. 

Many women in the room were among the rotating cast of two hundred whom Sandberg invites to her home each month for a buffet dinner and to listen to and question special guests, who have included Steinem, the playwright Eve Ensler, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, the educator Geoffrey Canada, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. 

Being me, as asked myself what I would have to say to these high-powered career women. Maybe not much — but perhaps I could talk to their husbands. My wife may not be a Silicon valley billionaire, but she’s a leader in her professional field. True, we don’t have children; and it’s also true that I don’t have to show up for work anywhere. But let’s face it, it’s not the pressing demands of a top job that prevents men from doing more than desultorily helping out at home. Most men haven’t got a clue about what goes into keeping house. Their mothers, in all likelihood, saw to it that they don’t. This saddles wives with a problem.

We will all agree that marriage is a learning experience for everyone, but there are perhaps a few courses that might be taught as prerequisites, and housekeeping is an obvious candidate. A woman oughtn’t to have to teach the man she loves how to empty a dishwasher any more than she has to teach him how to kiss. It may never be as easy to identify good vacuuming skills as it to spot a good kisser, but that’s where my idea comes in. There is no need for kissing credentials — to borrow a fashion term, they’re self-degreed. But wouldn’t it be nice if a woman could know that not only did her fiancé attend a great college but also that he passed its housekeeping course? If mothers aren’t going to do the job, then perhaps higher education can make itself useful for a change. 

Here’s how it would work. Undergraduates electing the program — which would be non-academic but as rigorous as participation in any athletic team — would be assigned to four- or six-man suites. The suites would include kitchens and laundry facitilities. Household duties would rotate among the suitemates. At first, you might only have to cook once a week, and do the laundry once every two weeks. Eventually, though, you’d have to feed and clean a suite for two weeks at a time — all the time carrying your courseload. Forget all that hogwash about “nurturing”; the food would have to be tasty and “hot food hot,” and the clothes would have to be clean and neatly folded. Suites would be very regularly examined by advisers — drafted from the ROTC program, perhaps. (Who might themselves learn a thing or two. There is a lot to be said for military tidiness, but of course  it stresses personal responsibility, not picking up after others.) The designated housekeeper would have to stock the suite with groceries and cleaning products from a school commissary, observing some kind of budgetary constraint. The course would be pass-fall, with the pass-fail rate geared more toward Navy SEAL selectivity than rocks for jocks. 

No one would be thrown into this program without a little advance training. In domestic boot camp, students would learn how to wash clothes properly and how to prepare a variety of basic foods, especially soups, salads, and stews. Nutrition and utility would be stressed. Grilling steaks would be discouraged. In a really well-run program, students would be forbidden to import snack foods from the outside world. Hey, this is school we’re talking about, not an amusement park! In the advanced programs, suites would be divided between men and women — but the women would not contribute to the housekeeping. At all. Ever. This would also be a training program, in its way, for them.

Readers inclined to dismiss my proposal as jocular ought to reflect for a moment. Housekeeping has undergone great changes in the past 50 years, but coming resource constraints and increased preventive-health awareness are going to require an even greater transformation. Men who are clueless about the day-to-day basics of feeding a household and keeping it safely clean aren’t going to be of much help. Quite the reverse.

To avoid confusion with Harvard, Haverford, and the University of Houston,
varsity housekeepers would be awarded minuscule h’s to sew onto their pristine butchers’ aprons. 

¶ Although the story is ongoing and long from over, the embarrassment of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire by further discoveries of News of the the World phone hacking — more disgusting than the first round in that celebrities and royals have been replaced by the victims of violent crimes and their families — appears to be reaching a possibly critical turn. The real issue for Murdoch & Co is full ownership of Sky Broadcasting, which may be blocked by Parliamentary outrage. (It ought to be blocked for any number of better reasons.) The Conservative-led coalition may be at risk as well, because Prime Minister David Cameron is a personal friend of Rebekah Brooks, the former NotW who may be forced to fall on her sword. Mr Cameron is also a beneficiary of Murdoch support for all things (w)r(o)i(n)ght. The irony is that Murdoch’s print publications contribute very little to his empire’s bottom line.

¶ On our next visit to the Museum, we’re going to spend a few minutes with the Cy Twombly paintings — assuming that they’re still hanging in the Lila Acheson Wallace galleries. Twombly, who died at Rome, claimed a kinship with Poussin that we have a lot of trouble making out, but no matter; we like his big, dreamy canvases best of all the midcentury splashers’.

It’s a slow afternoon, and I’ve nothing on my mind — nothing except this drawing by Poussin (detail). It wasn’t just Cy Twombley’s obituary that made me think of it, but of course that was part of the spark. I spent a lot of time (for me) with this drawing when it at the Museum in the spring of 2008. And I’m very fond of the last line of Pierre Rosenberg’s catalogue entry. “Two tiny figures at the entrance to the fortifications [not shown] provide an indication of the dimensions of these buildings from the environs of Rome, which one hopes will be identified someday.” Now, that’s scholarship.

¶ David Leonhardt examines the annoying habit that business groups have of calling for deficit reduction while espousing tax policies that would continue the bloat. Abundant supplies of (virtual) earwax must be helpful: “When I ask roundtable officials and other lobbyists about this contradiction, they show an impressive ability to avoid specifics and stick to their talking points.” ¶ Steven Davidoff defends Silver Lake — the private equity outfit that Felix Salmon has branded as “evil” — and insists that former Skype employee Yee Lee ought to have been more diligent about nailing down the specifics of his options. We’d like to see a deficit reduction program that nullified private equity’s appeal.

¶ Well, maybe not: Otto von Hapsburg, who has died two years shy of his centenary, and briefly the Austro-Hungarian crown prince, is survived by a younger brother, Felix — as well as a clutch of offpsring that includes two great-grandchildren (lucky man!). But when Dr von Hapsburg finally abdicated his claim to the vanished throne, in 1961, it was not assumed by anyone else. The erstwhile prince devoted his life to pursuing a high-minded and less personally invested version of his imperial family’s ambitious but generally benign project of unifying all of Europe. As Holy Roman Emperors, and then as the rulers of the reduced but still vast Dual Monarchy, the Hapsburgs were a steadfast counterweight to the deadly sectarian and nationalistic trends that, finally prevailing in the mid-Twentieth Century, taught Europeans the importance of a common union.

As I was tidying the bedroom on Sunday, I had second thoughts about putting a stack of books back on top of a dresser after I’d dusted it. Instead, I carried the pile to the laptop at the dining table, opened Readerware, and used the barcode scanner to autoload the books into the database. When that was done, I bulk edited the lot, assigning each book the same shelf location. Off the top of my head, I chose “Korean” to designate the location; the dresser in question is in the Korean style, or so we were told long ago. Now I have a handy printed list of the sixteen non-fiction titles that spend their time hidden by an array from framed family photographs, waiting for me to read them. At one point, they were all books that I was going to get to “next.” 

I continued to tidy my way around the bedroom, coming eventually to a pile of books that Kathleen plans to read. I brought this to the laptop computer as well, with “Kathleen’s Reading” as the location. Unlike the “Korean” batch, the books in “Kathleen’s Reading” were in no sense shelved; they were stacked in a pile. There are a number of such piles throughout the apartment, and by the end of the afternoon I had catalogued them all, even the multi-pile aggregation of 61 books located as “NonFiction.”

There were three distinct piles of books, “Chevet” (tucked into my nightstand), “Fiction Basket” (a dump in front of my nightstand), and “Fiction Annex,” a small pile in the blue room that didn’t fit anywhere else. The last pile to be catalogued ended up being called “Chair,” because I resolved to stack it in my reading chair whenever I wasn’t sitting there. This has already proved wearisome. It is a very tall stack. Thirteen books, plus a few extras. The extras are Rizzoli’s Treasures of Venice, and the Hallwag map of Venice, both of which are accompanying me through Judith Martin’s No Vulgar Hotel, an extremely amusing book about La Serenissima. No Vulgar Hotel by itself is not a thick book, but it makes a bundle with the guidebook and the map. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity is in the pile, of course, although I don’t think that it’ll be there much longer, as I am barrelling through the final quarter, my fondness of lingering over the great writing being trumped by the urge to shrink the pile, to which nothing will be added until there are only five books in the lot.

Another book that I hope to speed through is Jasper Becker’s book about Beijing, The City of Heavenly Tranquillity. There’s a Forbidden City guidebook to go with that, too, although I don’t need it anymore, as Becker has moved on to other parts of town. A third entry along these lines is Ina Caro’s delightful Paris to the Past, a sort of souvenir guide to day trips that someone staying in Paris might take to outlying sites of interest, such as Chartres and Malmaison. There’s Michael Ainger’s very good dual biography of Gilbert and Sullivan, and Giles Tremlett’s very something-else biography of Catherine of Aragon. Also Joseph Lelyveld’s book about Gandhi. A N Wilson’s new Dante in Love, which arrived the other day from the UK, went straight into “Chair.” The one book that Readerware’s autoload function detected as already in the database was a thick novel by George Sand that I retrieved from the storage unit last week, Consuelo. I don’t know if it’s any good — and that’s really the appeal. More than 900 pages! There are 105 chapters, plus a conclusion. I read the first one standing in the storage unit, and since I knew all the words I thought I might make a go of it. After all, it is set in Venice in the Eighteenth Century. I’m not sure that I’ll like Sand the novelist, but I already do like Sand the writer.

One book has already been knocked off the list: Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. It may have been the slimmest book in the title, but it was also the least congenial. Although I can’t say that I found most of it incomprehensible, I did have a strong feeling of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other. It is a very death-haunted book — understandably, if you know the context. (Barthes’s beloved mother had just died, and he was sparked to write about photography in part by a photograph of her as a child in which he felt that he really made her out, the mother he had known as a girl in a winter garden.) I will be on the lookout for temptations to use the terms studium and punctum. 

At the top of the pile is John Ashbery’s new translation of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. I know this prose poem via Benjamin Britten’s (very selective) setting, so it took a moment to find the sung work’s signature line (J’ai seul la clef de cette parade), because it comes after two paragraphs of what Ashbery translates as “Sideshow.” Rimbaud makes Barthes read like a comic book. At the bottom of the pile is James Gleick’s The Information, which I read right up to the penultimate chapter months ago and then set aside, because I wanted to digest the book before I finished it. Even though I’ll finish it soon and find a good place for it in the bookcases, it ought to remain at the bottom of the pile, because it’s what got me to get back to managing my library. I want to own the information. God wot there’s a lot. 

The most exciting book in the pile, if also the most tiring, is the Ainger, which is really a triple biography of W S Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan — and Richard D’Oyly Carte, the impresario who harnessed the incompatible artists and provided a showcase for their collaboration at the Savoy Theatre. The details are dense, but they don’t obscure the personalities, although poor Helen Lenoir has faded into a translatlantic blur. All sorts of things that I didn’t know: Lewis Carroll approaching Sullivan about adapting Alice for the stage. (Hmmm….) Gilbert’s yachts. Sullivan wading in a creek at Yosemite. I always thought that Sullivan got his knighthood (in 1883) partly so that Victoria could shout “We are not amused” at Gilbert, but this is arrant nonsense, not least because it supposes that the Queen was paying attention to the Savoy operas. Sullivan was by nature an assiduous courtier, and numbered the Duke of Edinburgh among his good friends; one of the fruits of this connection was a Te Deum that Sullivan wrote to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s recovery from typhoid in 1872. That would have endeared him to Her Majesty, the dedicatee. 

As a reward for all my hard library work, I came down with a cough and a touch of sore throat on Saturday night, and spent the rest of the weekend in a listless state. Reading until I thought that I’d explode with information. 

¶ The budget problems of Wilmington, North Carolina, according to a discouraging story by Kevin Sack in this morning’s paper, are slow-mo rather than catastrophic, so perhaps city leaders and others will have the leisure to reflect on how affairs might be managed differently, specifically by channeling the currently dissipated reserves of post-adolescent labor — superfluous to the private sector — into temporary public service. Mr Sack is to be commended for articulating the relationship between this story’s many moving parts.

¶ Even if we don’t post another link this week, we’re so startled by the wisdom of Michael Drury — whoever he is — that we have to share it with our friends. At The Smart Set, Jessa Crispin reviews a couple of books about “the other woman,” and in passing refers to a book called Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress. In a nutshell:

The only people worth loving are those who are determined to find life good whether you love them or not.

This is one of those observations about life that are so coldly, startlingly true when you first encounter them that you can’t imagine not having known them — or you just can, and it’s terrifying. Thereafter, you make them your own, and the excitement dies down completely — until, as in this case I expect must happen, you hear about someone who’s attracted to a deadly, somebody who wants to die. The only people who are worth loving are the ones who can live without you — but are happy that they don’t have to.

¶ Given the current “political ecosystem of influence and money,” Matt Stoller writes, it’s unrealistic to expect talented Washington operators to put principles first. Why should they throw away their careers? “ If you want to fix that dynamic, then make sure that people like Doug Thornell have places to go where they don’t have to work to help Google cut its own tax rate.’ Or amend the Constitution to provide for campagin finance restrictions that no Supreme Court can overturn. (Naked Capitalism) ¶ The always bright Ed Yong nails it: (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

Do bloggers “count” as journalists? Are blogs journalism? And I’ve come to realise that this debate is exactly like the film Titanic: it is tedious, it goes on forever, everyone’s a caricature and they’re stuck on a massive sinking ship.

¶ Nancy McDermott’s review of Brian Caplan’s Selfish Reasons for Having More Children makes a lot more sense than the book it discusses. Here’s a passage that pinpoints the American social crisis about as neatly as can be done: (Spiked; via 3 Quarks Daily)

In a culture as deeply ambivalent about adulthood as America, it is not surprising that socialising young people has become problematic. The rich web of traditions and conventions that governed the interchange between one generation and the next is broken – and parents are left to pick up the slack. Even something as simple as teaching children how to behave in public becomes difficult today because adults can’t agree upon common standards of behavior, let alone enforce them collectively. Children run wild, and naturally the parents are to blame.

It’s often observed that home ownership prevents workers from moving to where the jobs are. It also prevents parents from finding congenial neighborhoods. ¶ John Hyduk of Cleveland is a 59 year-old soda truck loader who can write about his working life and his resistance to regret well enough to listen to. (Esquire; via MetaFilter)

¶ Riverside fish-and-dance halls, guinguettes — immortalized by Renoir — never went quite extinct, and now are coming back, although it’s taking a while for the kids to master the old-timey dance staps. (LA Times; via The Morning News)

¶ There is really no other word for Robert Finch, chairman of the Monarchist League of Canada.

“Many Canadians may think we’re dreadfully boring,” he said. He added that while the royals enjoy a life of great wealth and privilege, it is not without costs to their personal lives.

“The fact that the queen can’t change her hairstyle because she has to look like the person on her money, that’s an example of a big sacrifice,” Mr. Finch said.

We can think of a few qualities that Canadians might think of before getting to “boring.”