What a surprise it was, to read about Clayton Christensen in the new New Yorker yesterday afternoon. His ideas about business “disruptions” made immediate sense to me, and I could account for my ignorance of them only by thinking back to 1997, when Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know what I was doing in 1997 — reading a lot of Trollope, I suppose; I’d joined a Trollope listserv just the year before and was for the moment very engaged in discussions of his novels — but of course I know what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t keeping a Web log, or even a Web site. I wasn’t scanning hundreds of feeds a week to keep a wetted finger in the breeze. I’m sure that many other tremendously interesting new ideas flew around me back then; I can only hope that writers as good as Larissa MacFarquhar will continue to unearth them for me.

The least surprising detail in MacFarquhar’s account of Christensen’s work is his discovery of the “Church of New Finance.”

After puzzling over this mystery for a long time, he finally came up with the answer: it was owing to the way the managers had learned to measure success. Success was now measured not in numbers of dollars but in ratios. Whether it was return on net assets, or gross-margin percentage, or internal rate of return, all these measures had, in the past forty years, been enshrined into a near-religion (he liked to call it the Church of New Finance) by partners in hedge funds and venture-capital firms and finance professors in business schools. People had come tot think that the most important thing was not how much profit you made in absolute terems but what percentage of profit you made on each dollar you put it. And the belief drove managers to shed high-volume but low-margined products from their balance sheets, even though nobody had ever come across a bank that accepted deposits in ratios. This was why he called it a church: it was an encompassing orthodoxy that made it impossible for believers to see that it might be wrong.

As of course it is: for all their mathematical aura, these “ratios” involve nothing but adolescent erotic calculus, projected onto a larger field. How much trouble does a guy have to take to get into some girl’s panties? That is the ratio; that is the “thinking.” That is the reaasons for New Finance’s immediate appeal and fire-like spread. Did you think that “how much bang for the buck” came out of nowhere?

Whether we’ll be able to stop using ratios faster than the Roman aristocracy stopped eating from leaden saucepans remains to be seen.

***

Something else new: Greta Keller. How did I live to be 64 without having heard her sing before?

By the time I was washing the dinner dishes last night, the playlist in the iPod had come to an end, and I was casting about for something to listen to while I was in the kitchen. In the stack on my writing table, I found a collection of songs recorded between 1932 and 1938 by the Viennese-born “Great Lady of Chanson,” opened it up, and stuck it into the DVD player in the kitchen. The sound was not optimal, even disturbing Kathleen, who can work through anything. A few minutes later, I was able to play the music on a Nano. That sounded better. I remembered choosing this disc from among the others available because one of the numbers is “Music, Maestro, Please,” a song that I didn’t really pay attention to until a few years ago, when I noticed that the weepy lyrics are bucked up by what can only be called a striptease march. It’s a fetching juxtaposition, so profoundly campy that it’s actually funny.

When you hear Greta Keller for the first time, you think of drag queens lip-synching to Marlene Dietrich, because Keller taught Dietrich how to perform. Keller has the better voice, and she sings where Dietrich would strike a pose. Amidst the standards on the album that I’ve got (“Blue Moon,” “Stormy Weather,” “These Foolish Things”) are some interesting Continental items, such as “A Little Ramble in the Springtime With You,” which is sung mostly in German, and “When I Learn French,” which climaxes with “Please teach me some more.” Something about these songs wants to pretend that the Great War didn’t happen, and that its sequel wouldn’t have to. They sing of a parallel world in which the Dual Monarchy has become a world empire dotted with Ruritanian capitals that look a lot like Paris. If you’d like to see the Hollywood version, permit me to recommend either Trouble in Paradise or Midnight. In the end, it took the laid-back, irreverent Sixties to put an end to the dream. Now Greta Keller’s charm seems sad not because her world was reduced by war or economic dislocation but because her kind of sex appeal was discontinued, and therefore became, qua sex appeal (as distinct from a manner of singing, which in her case is timeless), ludicrous. Even gay men are giving up on “darling.”

***

For several days, I’ve been mulling over Charles Rosen’s essay, “Hofmannsthal and Radical Modernism,” which appears in his formidable collection, Freedom and the Arts (Harvard). The center of the essay is a discussion of a work that I didn’t know of, Hofmannthal’s so-called “Chandos Letter.” The Letter is a manifesto of sorts, cloaked in the costume-drama allure of a late-Sixteenth Century date, but frankly modernist in substance. Having been one of the outstanding lyric prodigies of German letters, the still-young Hofmannsthal woke up, as it were, to an understanding of the world that made poetry impossible. Here is Rosen:

Lyric poetry is properly the expression of the most personal and individual thoughts and feelings. But Hofmannsthal would claim later: “The individual is inexpressible. What is expressed already slips into generality, and is no longer individual in the strictest sense. Language and individuality are opposed.” Language is social not personal; words must be understood by others, an idiolect is non-sense. There are no special words to convey what I alone have experienced. What is most individual, most deeply personal, is therefore perverted and ruined by being put into words.

“Perverted and ruined” — loaded words. Looking at this paragraph from the other side of the Cognitive Revolution, I see Hofmannsthal and, in a more muted way, Rosen himself, as shocked by preliminary tremors of the upset; and that inclines me to regard Modernism as something like an allergic reaction not so much to the world as it had been understood before (before the Enlightenment, before the Industrial Revolution, before Freud) as to the hope that springs eternal, the hope for a new world. A new world could, according to imaginations that had been damaged by the shock of the new, only be dystopian; there was no reason to look forward to it. (Although some Modernists did, they tended toward the totalitarian megalomania of Le Corbusier, making the backsliders like Eliot and Stravinsky and Matisse preferable companions.) I haven’t really perused the essays on literature that constitute that last part of Rosen’s collection, but I expect that it would take long to find mention of “alienation” as an attribute of Modernism.

I’ll be frank: I’m heartened by the idea of Modernism as a pathology. It has always, all might life, struck me as wrong, and as I’ve grown older I’ve seen it as inherently wrong, not, as I thought when I was young, wrong simply for dismissing everything that had gone before. The Modernist impulse (I don’t believe that it was ever crystalized into an idea) was a matter of repulsion and rejection.

In another essay, “Modernism and the Cold War,” Rosen writes of Modernism’s failure to win support in the United States.

The relative, or even absolute lack of success in America is not due to the absence of brainwashing propaganda, but to the fact that almost all modernist art is rebarbative at first encounter and requires several experiences of it to come to terms.

This acknowledgment is almost sweet. Certainly there are artworks cast in the Modernist idiom that take their places, once we’re familiar with them, alongside all the other artworks that we know. But there are many that don’t, that just go on remaining rebarbative, that are meant to be unpleasant, because that is what they record: the trauma of realizing that (just as Hume always insisted) there is no natural connection between the order of the universe and the order that we perceive. The order that we perceive is determined by the struture of our brains, not by actual perception. There is a rough congruence between the two orders — there would have to be, or we would have evolved into extinction. But the truths that we need lie hidden within ourselves. And, as Hofmannsthal vaguely grasped, they are not individual. We are none of us individuals. We are all of us variations.

***

It’s the middle of the evening, and I may clip this paragraph and recycle it tomorrow. I’ve just watched W./E. for the second time, and I feel as though I’ve been to the coronation of a pope. It’s not just the stories that the movie has to tell, but the movie itself, the presence, metamorphosed, of Madonna Ciccone, the director and co-writer of the film. There were two moments that took me back — took me back to the early Eighties, when music videos were the cool new thing and Madonna was not quite that cool. Never mind what they were — all right, the second was the absolutely immortal Twist just before the end — the point is that, with this movie, Madonna becomes the person she always, I think, wanted to be, and yet never can be, except perhaps through a movie (and not in it). It is as though she discovered that for us to find out who she really is, she has to be invisible, because, if we can see her, we’ll be distracted by everything that she tried to be instead. So she enlists Abbie Cornish and Andrea Riseborough to stand in for her, or to be her bridesmaids, perhaps. There is a way in which this movie, more than anything else the performer has ever done, is all about the girl from Bay City. Like a ghost in her own movie, Madonna presses against the screen from time to time, never moreso than in the long scene in which Wallis writes and Wally reads the letters that, quite miraculously actually, it seems, Mohammed el-Fayed has held on to all these years, letters that will eventually change the whole Abdication story.

As to the movie part of the movie, there were two delights about seeing it the second time. First, I knew where the Abbie Cornish plot line was going and I was be comfortable with it. It stands up well on its own (thanks in no small degree to Oscar Isaac, a genuine screen gem), and it supports the pointilliste re-telling of the older tale. Second, I marveled at Andrea Riseborough’s voice. Her voice and her accent. I can remember when ladies from the Upper South talked just like her, especially after a martini or two. I don’t know where the actress picked it up, but she nailed it. I adored the poise with which she and Ms Cornish stand up from the park bench at the end: ladies down to the ground.

The power of great fictions to change over time — to produce different effects, to revert into more than occaasional unfamiliarity, and to blot up the sense of alteration as thought it were not the case that it is we who have changed, not the texts that we’re re-reading for the third or fourth time over a period of many years — is a fact of life that can’t be taught. I’m in the middle of Henry James’s late novella, The Turn of the Screw, and it’s nothing like what it has been before. For one thing, it’s funny. The humor is altogether inadvertent; I don’t think that I’ve mined a vein of intended comedy. But I find that I’m “reading” The Turn of the Screw as if it had nothing really to do with governesses and remote mansions and wicked ghosts. What I’m seeing instead is the problem of in-laws.

I’m reading the novella because I chanced to watch The Innocents a few weeks ago. Jack Clayton’s production, with a script to which Truman Capote contributed, seemed to want to trace Gothic horror back to Freudian roots, and that was clearly something that James could not have compassed. So I thought I’d read the story again. I don’t recall which time it was, but I remember once re-reading The Turn of the Screw in a lather of frustration: it seemed imperative that Edward Gorey be commissioned to illustrate it, but I had no idea how to go about this. (Gorey was very much alive at the time.) That urge has palpably passed; the very idea of illustrating the story itself seems gauche. (And in any case many of Gorey’s little works could be said to “illustrate” Henry James, particularly on the points of children and innocence.) What I’m going for now is the character of the unnamed governess who narrates the tale. James knits character and tale together in such a way that a claim can be made that the governess is a deluded madwoman, so hysterically attached to her little charges that she manufactures devils from whom she cannot protect them. Her story altogether lacks corroborative detail. That she is able to prevail upon the housekeeper, illiterate Mrs Grose, to agree with her hypotheses is nothing remarkable; she, after all, is a lady. And she is a lady in contest with another lady, the only other kind of lady — a fallen lady. This would be Miss Jessel, her predecessor.

Miss Jessel, the new governess learns, abandoned herself to the attentions of Peter Quint, the valet of the rich man to whom the care of little Miles and Flora has devolved. On its face this is an unspeakable mésalliance, almost to the point of outright bestiality. Whether Quint died (in an accident, slipping on an icy patch while drunk) before or after Miss Jessel’s departure from Bly (the great house), I’m not sure; I’m not sure that it matters. Miss Jessel is believed to have died, too. The governess comes to believe that the ghosts of the man and the woman have come back to claim the children. Unless you’re very out of sympathy with James’s writing, his story will flow by without striking any rocky questions about why the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel haven’t better things to do; the governess’s belief in their malignancy is so convinced that it is somewhat beyond convincing: we don’t interrogate the governess — we let Mrs Grose do that, in her half-hearted way. Instead, we let the governess set our teeth chattering with her lurid anxieties.

The great problem in all of Henry James’s fiction is other people’s knowledge. What do other people know — about the things that we know, about us; what plans do they harbor? Writing in a somewhat simpler moral universe, James presented the problem in terms of candor and dishonesty; he appears to have believed that people know what they know, and can share it or not as they choose. (We are today quite sure that this is never the case.) The difference between what I know and what you know is a crack in which the flowers of evil can take root — when it is not a fatal abyss. 

What children know — children of any age, as Maggie Verver’s history reminds us — is an aspect of the larger problem that interested James throughout his career. What Maisie Knew is a tour de force of what we might call disimagination, as James cramps his point of view into the head of a little girl, allowing her no thoughts beyond her tender years. (Such thoughts are the abstractions from which we erect our “understanding.”) In The Awkward Age, knowledge takes on a hymeneal significance; the lack of it is a badge of virginity. Trying to figure out what other people know is hard enough. What children know is of a bafflement!

What distinguishes the governess from other James characters is her impetuous inference of what Miles and Flora “know.” No sooner has a possibility occurred to her than it becomes a sure thing. At the same time, she persists in a sentimental view of childish innocence that was one of the Victorian era’s most insistent daydreams. Mere possession of wicked knowledge does not taint Flora or Miles. In the early stages of being “on to” the children, the governess worries that her attentiveness will tip them off to her suspicions. But not her worry is calmed in the most interesting way.

It would have been easy to get into a sad wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace I could still enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember asking if I mightn’t see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations.

Reading this, I was attacked by the most inconsequent image. I remembered holding my grandson in my arms, and he was studying my face with a view to playing with it, pulling my ears and whatnot. He likes to try to put my glasses on, but until recently it was always with the air of poking an eye out to see what might happen. What this recollection had to do with anything I’ve no idea, but I suddenly understood that the governess was in the position of a mother-in-law, or perhaps a grandmother, who has allowed herself to believe that the relations of her child’s spouse are something less than a good influence on the marriage, on the grandchildren. And the position of the children, Flora and Miles, is exactly that of any perspicacious grandchildren, careful to suppress any intimations of bad influence. In The Turn of the Screw, it is precisely the children’s model behavior that convicts not them but the dreadful Quint and his paramour, Miss Jessel.

These insights, if that’s what they are, don’t make The Turn of the Screw a funny book, but they do raise a smile, because James has so cleverly (whether he knew it or not; unintended masterstrokes are always a risk with cleverness) repackaged a family problem that is as common as dirt in glitteringly scary wrappings.  

***

Perhaps I misspoke about Henry James’s “apparent belief” that people can choose whether or not to say what’s on their mind. It might be better to propose that his characters labor under that hope. Whatever he himself thought, his prose is a manifestation of the difficulties of clear and complete expression. Ultimately, it is impossible; James ends up listing the things that he does not mean to say, and hedging them in with highly nuanced qualifications.

Friday

Kathleen has just left. She’s going to spend the weekend with her father in Durham. She’ll be back on Sunday. My own plans for the weekend are simple: I’ll see a movie this afternoon and then sit with Will while his parents go out to dinner; and, tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have a look at the pre-dynastic installation in the Egyptian galleries at the Museum. I think that I’ll be able to manage that. It’s hard to think very clearly this morning. We had a thunderstorm, about an hour ago. For the third day, the sky is leaden and the air is neither wintry nor warm, but uncomfortably indifferent.

It’s a good weekend for digesting the altera pars of Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? I’ve just pulled down Fun Home, the “family tragicomic” that came out, astonishingly, six years ago (that long!). It’s shorter, it’s more roughly drawn, and it’s a much simpler, more straightforward read — as would befit comparisons between a book about a father and a book about a mother. Most of yesterday afternoon went to Are You My Mother? I read it in about three sittings, almost breathlessly, trying to keep track of the constantly-shifting time frame and to absorb all the ideas of Donald Winnicott that serve as a kind of ground-bass to the story. Then I got to the last box. “She has given me the way out.” I felt a shocking discharge; the tears popped out of my eyes and I gasped for breath. There was nothing intrinsically surprising about this last line; it simply culminated everything that went before. Everything. It was the way out of the book, too, of course: “this way to the egress.”

The Bechdel family saga involves an openly homosexual daughter and a closeted homosexual father, but it doesn’t stop there. What, exactly, is the problem between Alison and her mother, Helen? Growing up, Alison found her mother to be distant, and as an adult she came to wish that her mother were more interested in her life — more prying, even. What wounds and dissatisfactions held Helen back? I don’t think that she will ever tell us; she’s on record in this book as holding memoir (as a literary form) in contempt. But perhaps there is no need for a memoir, if Helen can say, in one memorable outburst, “I regret that I wasn’t Helen Vendler.” What doesn’t that tell us?

I came away from the first reading persuaded that mother and daughter were literary rivals in much the same way that a father and a son might be, and that the mother quite beautifully managed her side of the rivalry by staying out of her daughter’s way. Bad mothering, perhaps (inadequate, certainly), but, as the book says at the end, “the way out.” The mother-daughter connection, qua female, was something of a red herring, particularly as the two women never competed sexually. There was a hole in Alison’s infancy — when she was about three months old, her mother became pregnant again, and Helen always made more of her two boys — and much of Are You My Mother? is an analysis — a psychoanalysis — of that gap and how the adult Bechdel dealt with it. The book is so good — The Pain Recaptured would have made a good title — that it is easy to overlook the obvious: mother and daughter were (are) both serious writers. Helen Bechdel isn’t Helen Vendler, and Alison Bechdel tells stories graphically, but they are still, both of them,  intellectual hunters after truth. I don’t know anything about the brothers, but the evidence suggests that Helen and Alison are the men in the family. 

***

Among my more egregious sins, lately, I’ve been failing to write up the movies that I see. The Five-Year Engagement is a marvelous picture that deserves nothing less than hosannas; perhaps I’ll get to it on Sunday. Perhaps I’ll see it again, in the theatres, with Kathleen (not very likely before our trip to Amsterdam, though). Today, I saw a film that elicited a very different response, but as it won’t take long to state it I’ll jump in even though it’s nearly ten and I’ve just had a good time with Will, if you know what I mean. (Which you don’t unless you’re my age. He was an angel, but he did order me around a bit.) I think that it’s better to write about Damsels in Distress late in the evening than early in the morning, when I have more energy.

I was disappointed, first by the production values and then by the story, such as it was. I’m all for making movies on the cheap, but I’m not a fan of cheap-looking movies, and there were moments in Damsels that reminded me of the educational filmstrips that we used to have sit through in Sixties auditoriums. The visuals were not crisp and the sound took some getting used to. It was a long, long way from Barcelona.

The story makes sense only as an undergraduate project. If Whit Stillman were to tell me that he’d pulled a scenario out of a college trunk, I’d have thought, exactly. The point of view was the kind of muddle that’s inevitable when you think (as some sophomores really do) that everything you do is très cool. It was almost, but not quite, a train wreck. Is Damsels a satire of upscale dimwits loitering in the Groves of Academe, or is it merely set there, like Too Many Girls and My Lucky Star? The entire dancing business, all of it, was strange at best and just wrong most of the time. (If only the Sambola had been a dance sensation!) And I was less and less sure about Greta Gerwig’s character as the movie progressed; by the end, I was thinking that Payne Whitney might be the place for her. There were lots of good things in the movie (Analeigh Tipton, Ryan Metcalf, and Megalyn Echikunwoke all deserved more time in the spotlight). But they didn’t cohere, so they couldn’t offset the terrible things in the movie (the Cathars! the Roman Holidays!). There were too many fizzled plotlines (it would have been better with no professors, and the whole Daily Complainer line was hardly more salvageable than the dancing), all of them more engaging than they would have been with a strong central plot.

The worst of it was this awful fear, that Whit Stillman never saw Mean Girls.

Nevertheless, I recommend Damsels in Distress, partly out of class loyalty (I’ll be honest) and partly out of class treason. I don’t know how I’m going to feel about it the second time around. There will be a second viewing; there almost always is. Question is: will there be a third?

Saturday

What a glorious evening I’ve just had. It’s my new model for a night out on the town. First of all: not a “night”; it’s not even ten, and here I am at the keyboard. The second thing is that I would have had an even better time if Kathleen had been with us, because then, of course, we could talk all night about everything that we learned.

At four o’clock, I met up with Marc LeBlanc, Ms NOLA’s brother, a very nice guy who also happens to be a credentialed Egyptologist (PhD Yale, 2011). He conducted me through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of pre-dynastic objects, at the bottom of the Lehman Wing. The fact that I had never given such objects much of a thought made the visit what we used to call “a trip.”

“Pre-dynastic,” it occurred to me on the walk home from dinner, is not the way to put it. “Ante-dynastic” is, as in “ante-bellum,” the phrase that used to denote life in the United States between Jackson and the Civil War. The culture of Egypt before unification under the pharoahs (Marc is rigorous about speaking of “kings”) was not erased by what came later; it was simply developed. Certain things were dropped, such as the “bird dance,” or whatever it was that was signified by the representation of a female profile (none too hippy or busty, by the bye) raising her arms over her head in a heart-shaped manner, fingers pointing down. Some scholars believe that the gesture is meant to suggest the horns of a heifer, but Marc is not persuaded by this theory; he thinks that a bird is the object of imitation. I was inclined to agree, but the uncertainty is not without its appeal. There is always much to be learned.

Other things, such as boats, became fixtures of Egyptness. Also, palm trees and chorus lines of ostriches. (Well, chorus lines.) The objects at the Museum begin by looking generically “archeological”; hippopotamuses (all of whom look pretty much like Tiger in Kipper) are the only Egyptian cue. Then human figures appear. A few cases on, and you get to the palettes. The palettes are ceremonial inkstones, as it were, for the preparation of ceremonial makeup; the working center of each palette is a perfectly rimmed circle in which the cosmetics were ground. I think that we’re talking about make-up for men here: men for whom the difference between hunting, religion, and warfare did not exist. I hope to write more about the palettes after further visits; I’ve never seen anything like them, and they are not only fascinating but brilliantly executed. Marc can’t have imagined how far I was from being bored by his explication. If I slowed down now and then, it was only because I was soaking everything up. I saw serekhs everywhere, especially before I knew how to spell them. (A serekh is the royal insignia, inscribed in a square and topped by a falcon. Literally, the square part of a serekh is the wall of a king’s palace.) I was more disappointed by the end of new things to look at than I have ever been in my life. I was just getting started!

So I asked Marc to take me through the Egyptian Wing itself, the part of the Museum that I know least well. I’m glad that I’d waited for this particular guided tour, because it was as though someone (namely Marc) were saying, “And all of this is just down the street from your house, too.” Here’s one great thing that I learned. By the time of Rameses II (I’m spelling it the old way, I think), the ancient Egypt that I’d discovered at the pre-dynastic show was already ancient Egypt! It was already thousands of years old, more or less, and ripe for rediscovery and retooling. Retooling? We’ll talk about Amenhotep III’s Colonial Williamsburg ball some other time. In the Great Hall of the Museum, right in front of the Membership desk, there stands a great granitic statue of Amenemhat II (1929-1895 BCE), from Berlin. Thing is, the cartouches — the rounded lozenges in which the king’s name is inscribed — say “Ramses II.” And why not, Rameses, or Ramesses, okay (watch out, or I’ll call him “Ramsay”), was a Very Great King (1303-1213) in whom I have always had a close interest, because, like me, he suffered from ankylosing spondylitis — even if Wikipedia says he didn’t. But forget about that; the point is that, even in Egypt, nothing was sacred. I joshed with Marc about it. I said that the reinscription may have been effected without royal directive. Maybe Ramesses was on a tour, and the good folks in Thebes wanted to welcome him warmly. “What have we got?” said the mayor to his minions. I realize that this is sounding more Preston Sturges than Dio Cassio. But I will tell you this. By the time we got to the statue in the Great Hall, I would have recognized Ramses’s cartouche anywhere. (And it is all over Amenemhat, the poor sod.)

We were on the point of leaving the Museum for dinner when I asked Marc if there was anything that he wanted to see. The upshot of that was that we went up to the Irving Galleries in the Asia Wing, which are more often closed than not. I wished that I could have told him more about the luohans, but we liked them well enough without my blather.

After that, we had a good dinner at Demarchelier — after which it was great to walk outside into the cool evening. Marc persuaded me (without trying) that I really have to see The Wire. Walking down 86th Street in the middle of the Saturday night, I felt that I was having as great a time as anybody. And I still do, except that now I’ve done the writing and must be prepared for the edits. Better edits than smitings!

Sunday

Last Saturday, when I headed downtown for Ray Soleil’s party, I left Kathleen in bed, weeding through her emails. I also left a playlist running. The next day, she told me what a pleasure it had been to listen the music through the afternoon and into the evening — it stopped only shortly before I came home. I could not have been more pleased. I had compiled the playlist for weekend lazing, which is to say with a firm awareness of what Kathleen would like to listen to and what she wouldn’t, and it was great to know that I had accomplished just that. She thanked me, which was the most unlooked-for pleasure. Not Kathleen’s thanking me, but thanking me for the music.

Compiling another playlist this afternoon (this one built around Handel’s two sets of keyboard suites) I’m remembering how awful it used to be —I used to be — when I’d play records for friends. “Oh, you must hear this.” “Wait, there’s something else that you’ve just got to hear!” “This will only take a second; it’s very short.” “I thought it was this cut; it must be the next one.” How good people were, on the whole, to put up with such torture. Now, I’m absolutely mystified by the need that I had to make other people hear the music that I happened to be crazy about. I have lost the urge to “share.” And I don’t “play records” anymore. I can’t underline sharply enough how the act of listening to music at home has been transformed by these vast iTunes playlists that I’ve been putting together for five years.

***

Having stayed up late last night — I watched the outstanding Charlize Theron in Young Adult, and would have perished of sympathetic mortification if I hadn’t been too tired for strong feelings — I slept in this morning, getting up at ten, breakfasting at half-past noon, and getting dressed quite indecently late. After spending a few hours with the Times, I picked up The Turn of the Screw and read as much as I could before the pot of rich, dark coffee that I’d drunk made it impossible to continue. Kathleen flies home this evening; she’ll have had an early dinner with her father and brother before boarding the plane. I’m thinking of watching a movie that I’ve never heard of.

***

And the question is, why haven’t, or hadn’t, I heard of Stephen Poliakoff’s Glorious 39? Or, for the matter of that, Stephen Poliakoff? He seems to be a one-man TV industry in Britain, and Glorious 39 is the sort of movie that you’d expect American Anglophiles to gobble right up. Imagine: Brideshead Revisited meets Remains of the Day, with a dash of Atonement. The cast includes Julie Christie and Bill Nighy, also Jeremy Northam, Eddie Redmayne, and Juno Temple. Romola Garai is the star. She plays the adopted daughter of a very grand family, from which she is cut apart by the discovery of its participation in an aristocratic attempt to steer the UK toward surrender to Hitler — a conspiracy that is not shy of murder. I forgot Notorious — there’s more of a dash of that in Glorious 39. Hitchcock is definitely in the air. (I also forgot to mention Hugh Bonneville, who, with Charlie Cox, is one of at least two Downton Abbey stars on hand.) Melodramatic and gorgeous at the same time, Glorious 39 is perhaps a tad sententious, but it kept me on the edge of my seat just the same. When I ordered it, from Amazuke, I prepared myself for something awful, because otherwise there’s no explaining why the picture wasn’t shown and isn’t known over here. Or perhaps I’ve just had another one of my senior moments, and everyone knows all about it.  

There isn’t anything particularly new in the “Ego Depletion” entry at You Are Not So Smart — not for anyone who knows how to spell “Tierney” — but these are early days in the Cognitive Revolution, and it’s going to take a while for the gyre of tests and studies to gel into a popular program, or at any rate a program popular among literate folk. And David McRaney wraps up the entry on a lyrical note that captures the affect as well as the effects of will-power exhaustion.

Modern life requires more self control than ever. Just knowing Reddit is out there beckoning your browser, or your iPad is waiting for your caress, or your smart phone is full of status updates, requires a level of impulse control unique to the human mind. Each abstained vagary strengthens the pull of the next. Remember too that you can dampen your executive functions in many ways, like by staying up all night for a few days, or downing a few alcoholic beverages, or holding your tongue at a family gathering, or resisting the pleas of a child for the umpteenth time. Having an important job can lead to decision fatigue which may lead to ego depletion simply because big decisions require lots of energy, literally, and when you slump you go passive. A long day of dealing with bullshit often leads to an evening of no-decision television in which you don’t even feel like switching the channel to get Kim Kardashian’s face out of your television, or sitting and watching a censored Jurassic Park between commercials even though you own a copy of the movie five feet away.

This passage is embedded in a paragraph that begins and ends with admonishments to plan ahead. I think that that’s what I’ve been trying to do since my time on Fire Island last summer, and that that’s why life has felt so different and, paradoxically (?), so fatiguing ever since. Planning ahead means understanding your life in very fine detail — your routines, your environment, and so on — so that you can manipulate your course through them. Acquiring this understanding demands an entirely new set of demands upon your attention, and a new range of decisions, all of which are depleting. (Is this why it’s so hard to make serious changes? Does this explain “force of habit”?) It’s only when you’ve made the set of correct decisions about reorganizing your life that you can proceed to live that reorganized life — if you still have any energy.

This came to me this morning when, before getting up, I mulled over the title of yesterday’s entry, which I never changed even though I also never got round to giving it a raison d’être in the entry. What was on my mind, early yesterday morning, was that it has been a very long time since I popped out of bed, eager for the new day. (For breakfast, at a minimum.) I’ve attributed this lack of zip to age, and to the fatigue that increases with age (for some people), and of course to drinking too much wine, even though I now go to bed, night after night, with a perfectly clear head. This morning, it occurred to me that there might be something else at work. Out on Fire Island last summer, I had a “torso of Apollo” moment, in which I not only knew that I must change my life but saw the direction in which I must change it. And that is what I have been doing ever since, day after day — either changing my life or collapsing from the task. All the while, of course, I’ve been living my regular life — writing here, reading endless feeds, keeping house, washing up after dinner, and to some extent looking after Kathleen. You’ll say: well, what changed? All those things. I do almost everything a little bit differently, and the changes were all made with a view to conserving my will power. Whatever could be turned into an easy, unthinking habit, was. That’s probably not what Rilke had in mind, but he wasn’t living in the Cognitive Revolution. Changing your life nowadays is a matter of coding. 

***

When we were young, we Boomers, we were told that we could be anything, do anything. Our opportunities were said to be boundless. I suspect that the more affluent among us — those who grew up to assume an inordinate number of positions of power — heard the message incessantly. Of course, it was wrong; we were misinformed. We were brought up on bad information. It’s no wonder that we thought that we had all the time in the world, or that we would be allowed to slough off the consequences of our mistakes and start again. That we saw the error in this outlook is attested by the tendency that we and succeeding generations have followed toward overprogramming the lives of our children.   

Finished off by the Museum yesterday afternoon, I was good for nothing but watching movies at home. Happily, something new arrived in the (Royal) mail, a DVD of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. I didn’t know anything about this film until I read a snatch of what Wesley Morris had to say about it (in the Globe, I presume); Wesley Morris, the fourth film critic to win a Pulitzer ever, was hailed by Jim Emerson at Scanners; I’d never heard of Morris, either. When Weekend was over, I watched Runaway Jury. I’d been tempted to watch it whilst cleaning the refrigerator on Monday afternoon, but I hadn’t been up for the grim opening sequence, in which a disaffected day-trader (remember them?) goes haywire and takes a rifle to his brokerage office. I wasn’t up for that yesterday, either; I contrived to be in the kitchen making dinner for most of it.

Weekend is such a delicate picture that synopsis can only mislead. Wesley Morris writes,

Sometimes you don’t want to escape. You want to connect with a movie that’s really about something, to listen to a filmmaker talk things out, to watch him amp everyday life without calling attention to his turning up the sound.

And what Weekend is about is, again in Morris’s words, “the way intimacy compounds sex until it begins to sprout feelings.” It is not about this-happened-then-that. Of course things have to happen: on a Friday night, a lifeguard and an artist meet in a gay bar and go back to the lifeguard’s apartment; on the following Sunday afternoon, the artist leaves Nottingham for Portland, Oregon and a two-year course, and the two men, who are now lovers, are as heartbroken as if they’d known each other for years. Weekend is, indeed, about the sprouting of feelings, and Andrew Haigh is a magician, because the sprouting of anything is pretty slow watching, and yet Weekend is never boring. He knows how to keep his material fresh. He perches Russell, for example, in a fourteenth-floor flat in what seems to be a well-maintained council estate. This allows for several interesting variations on the theme of his new friend’s several departures, seen walking away along an angular path from the high distance of Russell’s window.

Then there is the brilliance of excising the entire one-night-stand experience that brings the men together. We realize, with the dawn of the morning-after, that the foregoing scenes have been by way of introduction, and that the movie is starting now, when Glen pulls out a voice recorder and solicits Russell’s assessment of the sex that they’ve had, “for an art project,” he says. Russell is immediately put off, and before you know it, he and Glen have had their first fight, without raising their voices. Glen, the artist, is a sharp-tongued connoisseur of the self-hatreds of gay life; Russell, more cautious in every way (he is a lifeguard), thinks that it’s right to want to be happy. As the two men realize that they really click, Glen becomes distraught: he grasps Russell’s arms and says, “I don’t do [being] boyfriends, and I don’t want us to fall out about it.” Which is to say, I want us to be friends about not being friends. It’s impossible of course, just as the prospect of maintaining any kind of relationship for two years across thousands of miles is impossible. But Weekend,  gloriously, is not about problem-solving. As for the sex, Haigh has a genius for highlighting surrender, which registers in heads and shoulders as well as it does in any other parts of the body. His discretion is never coy.

Tom Cullen (Russell) and Chris New (Glen), appearing in their first feature, have the look of indie amateur innocents that a movie like Weekend needs; I can’t imagine how the film will read when the actors’ faces become familiar, as I’ve no doubt that they will, from other projects. That alone is a great reason to get hold of Weekend now.     

Runaway Jury, which I watched quite a number of times when the DVD came out, feels older than it is, possibly because it was shot in New Orleans before Katrina. Like Fracture, which is the movie that I did watch whilst cleaning the refrigerator, it is a game of cat-and-mouse that uses the law for tokens in much the way that Monopoly uses battleships and steam irons. This would be objectionable if the movie weren’t so fast-paced that it can dispense with absolute coherence. At the very end, the characters played by John Cusack and Rachel Weisz are presented as the Good Guys, but their justice is a little rough and certainly not legal. You forgive this, because, good or not, they whip the dickens out of Gene Hackman, whose Bad Guy status is certified from the beginning. As a “jury consultant” who will stop at nothing, not even suborning jurors, to win a favorable verdict for his clients, his Rankin Fitch flies an enemy-of-democracy flag that must have been picked up at a Cold-War souvenir shop, and Mr Hackman invests him with all the gleeful malevolence of a Bond villain. Unlike a Bond villain, however, he does not perish invisibly in the explosion of his bunker. No, he is reduced to wobbling sobs at a rundown bar, his career (and life) in utter ruins — and he’s still alive!

It’s also fun to watch Jeremy Piven before.

***

 

“Nevertheless,” Kathleen said, “and in spite of everything, I still do love you.” Not forty seconds ago she said this, concluding a discussion of last night’s late hours. I argued that she was a wicked enchantress who would stop at nothing to raise topics of interest in the wee hours; never mind what she claimed. I do know that it was not I who began, at midnight, to tabulate the locations of all the Vermeers in the world. On the other hand, it was I who brought out the London A-Z to establish where, exactly, St Pancras Station stands in relation to everything else. (Far from, just as I thought.) Don’t be surprised when I confess that we slept through our flight to Heathrow.

I want to see The Mousetrap, with an unidentified cast. The show has been running since the year before Kathleen was born — how bad can it be? Kathleen wants to see Hay Fever, with Lindsay Duncan and Jeremy Northam. So do I, but not so much. The idea of seeing Hay Fever in the West End reminds me of seeing Deborah Carr as Candida in 1977, which I actually did. It is possible to be too authentic.

Now I am off to the Museum, for a Far Corners tour of the Wing That Used to be Islamic and the wing that is still American. First, my old law school classmate and I will have lunch — her treat. When she complained about my paying for brunch on Sunday, I laughed and allowed that I would let her take me to the cafeteria at the Museum. Upon reflection, I became more generous, and arranged to meet at the Petrie Court.  

***

Wherever the Vermeers are, they’re not where they belong. The Sleeping Maid is hanging more or less in the right place, but the other four are AWOL. Serves me right.

¶ At Gene Expression, Razib Khan comments on Jonathan Haidt, whose book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is just about the most interesting thing that we’ve read in the past year. (4/3)

Finally there’s the point about human flourishing, and Haidt’s contention that conservative political and social philosophy has a lot of insight in fostering human happiness. I agree with Haidt broadly on this. That’s why I’m a conservative. But a key point I want to inject here is that I personally am not the type of person who flourishes in a conservative society. I’m too individualistic, egotistic, and lacking in the depth of moral sentiments which are the human norm (I am a natural libertarian). This is why another important insight is that societies need internal structure and genuine diversity of niche, so that people with different lifestyles can flourish. There does need to be a Castro district in San Francisco, but there also needs to be conservative small towns which are relatively homogeneous in population and values.

¶ Maria Popova praises Stuart Firestein’s Ignorance: How It Drives Science, and does a dandy job of placing the book in the burgeoning field of wrongology. (Brain Pickings; 4/3) ¶ Jason Kottke considers Instagram and Facebook as “company towns.” (kottke.org) ¶ Why, Felix Salmon thinks, the $1 billion purchase of the former by the latter makes sense: “Think of it as a $1 billion way to make your parents’ status updates more interesting.” ¶ Why belle-époque Vienna still matters: Jonah Lehrer interviews Nobelist Eric Kandel, author of The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain: From Vienna 1900 to the Present. (Frontal Cortex; 4/13)

¶ “What if Schools Weren’t Schools Anymore,” asks Liz Dwyer, reporting on an inquiry into education reform the reminds us of the Editor’s crackpot scheme. (GOOD) ¶ The poor design of the Retreat at Twin Lakes, the “gated community” in which George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, confused essentially public roads with private driveways, making a trespasser, Zach Youngerman writes, out of almost any pedestrian. (Boston Globe; via Things; 4/18)

¶ Timothy Garton Ash explains why the major powers’ preoccupations elsewhere are working to a resurgent Turkey’s advantage. Questions for Syrians: to be Arabs in an Ottoman world again? (Globe and Mail; via Real Clear World; 4/13) ¶ Kaya Genç tells us why conservative backbiters created the plagiarism scandal out of thin air when Elif Shafak’s new novel, Honour, proved to be a hit. (LRB; 4/18) ¶ The interesting takeaway from Nicholas Burns’s Turkey-as-superpower piece is the argument that President Obama is playing a very smart game. (Globe; via Real Clear World; 4/30)

¶ Tadas Viskanta joins Joshua Brown in calling for more financial blog entries about the problems faced by ordinary investors.He notes that “by and large the finance and investment blogosphere exists apart from the everyday needs of most savers.” (Abnormal Returns; 4/3) ¶ Matt Stoller lists three things that progressive Democrats will have to learn how to do in order to beat back the neoliberal juggernaut: Get the voters to turn out in primaries; deliver goods (information, mostly) along with the arguments; and remount the neglected “radical” issues. (Naked Capitalism; 4/13) ¶ Blake Masters’s notes on Peter Thiel’s Startup 101 lectures will teach you a great deal about good business thinking, but we cite the piece because we agree with Mr Thiel’s first principle: “A startup messed up at its foundation cannont be fixed.” His example? Regarding the US Senate’s unrepresentative constitution, he writes, “Some say that’s a feature, not a bug. Whatever it is, we’re likely to be stuck with it for as long as this country exists.” Can we please have a real American Revolution? (via The Browser; 4/30)

¶ Peter Dinklage built a career on never playing leprechauns. And he doesn’t like “lucky” (NYT; 4/3):

Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people.

¶ Something about Whit Stillman’s interview with David Coggins, at A Continuous Lean, suggests that Mr Stillman himself would have to be played by Colin Firth. ¶ Iris Veysey writes about the power of Edith Head’s costume designs for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We always feel that Judy Barton’s clothes embody Scottie Ferguson’s ache for Madeleine Elster: he has to get rid of them. (Clothes on Film) ¶ We already knew this, and so did you, but Ben Fritz reminds us that movie trailers are evolving under serious pressure from the Internet, and movies along with them. (LA Times; via Arts Journal; 4/11) ¶ Josh Lieberman does his best to dust off the reputation of Orson Welles, which, if Google is any indication, is in pretty bad shape. (Splitsider) ¶ Jim Emerson shouts out Wesley Morris, a writer at the Globe who is only the fourth film critic to receive a Pulitzer Price. The entry includes generous extracts. Morris has his own voice and looks to be well worth following. (Scanners; 4/24)

¶ Levi Stahl wonders what we’d like if we had, or were, servants. Without literature, who would even think of such a question? (Ivebeenreadinglately; 4/13) ¶ Janet Potter lays down the rules — and now that she’s done so, everybody ought to know them — about introducing authors at bookstore readings. Basic rule: “Any synopsis you do give of the current book should be one sentence long.” Rule Nº 2: Don’t synopsize anything else. (The Millions; 4/30)

The literary life is famously short on pleasure, but it does equip its acolytes with tools for amusing others. Three cases in point: ¶ Rob Roberge remembers a particularly unsuccessful writing class that he was saddled with teaching; there were some good women in the class, but they were driven away by the two men, who ranged from creepy to creepier. (The Rumpus) ¶ Jim Behrle, who claims to be writing “on a blue Selectric II typewriter in a meadow filled with ducks” (he has “a very long extension cord”), unfurls a list of pitfalls to be avoided by would-be Roths: Brooklyn, Starbucks, adultery, &c. (The Awl). ¶ And the always edgy Jimmy Chen defends, sort of, his excellent infographic on modern literature. (HTMLGiant; 4/3)

I will not apologize for my non-inclusive list. This website’s width is 600 pixels, and I wanted the font to be legible, so you can imagine my constraints.

¶ Books that we loved when we were young but that make us wince now: Nadia Chaudhury polls a number of people familiar in the Blogosphere, but see if you can guess which writer Edmund White has outgrown. (The Awl; 4/5) ¶ Russell Smith agrees with the suggestion that we ventured the other day: How is Damien Hirst different from Thomas Kinkade? (Globe and Mail; via Arts Journal; 4/13) ¶ Brian Dillon’s catalogue essay on Damien Hirst places the artist in the Wunderkammer tradition. (Ruins of the 20th Century; 4/18) ¶ Two really good Rumpus interviews, with John Jeremiah Sullivan (“Yes, my whole interest in the early eighteenth century is a sublimated interest in the present.”) and Elif Batuman (“In a way, the Mike Daisey story was perfect for This American Life – except that this time they were victims of the hoax, which maybe interfered with how they covered it.”) Fab stuff. (4/30)

¶ Checking in at Wuthering Expectations, we found a raft of great entries, a few of them about the great Portuguese novelist, Eça de Queirós. “Modeling the Canon,” however, caught our fancy, with its demonstration that we can never know who the great writers are, because the readers of the future make it an open question. As if that weren’t bad enough, everyone has his or her own canon, and we’red quite unequally persuasive. (4/5) ¶ John Self’s write-up of Greg Baxter’s novel, The Apartment, is very appetizing. (Asylum; 4/13) ¶ Alizah Salario’s review of Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan is also an autobiographical fragment. (The Rumpus) ¶ “Very quickly these poor young men are reaching that critical juncture in life that decides everything, though they are heedless to this fact.” Kevin Nolan reviews Nescio (The Rumpus) ¶ We’re in no hurry for Maria Bustillos to make up her mind about Tom Bissell — no sooner does she scribble “v true” in the margin, than she hurls the book across the room. She makes us laugh! (LARB; via 3 Quarks Daily; 4/24)

¶ Helen DeWitt goes to Meeting (in Berlin) and silently applauds standing in silence. (Paperpools; 4/4) ¶ There are few surprises (for anyone familiar with the school) in Janet Reitman’s Rolling Stone story about Andrew Lohse, the Dartmouth undergrad who blew the whistle on his fraternity’s hazing rituals, and who may wind up the only man punished. (via The Morning News; 4/5) ¶ At The Rumpus, a collection of reader contributions on the conundrum of having sex without having a relationship: Friends with Benefits. (4/11)

¶ At The Age of Uncertainty, Steerforth looks back with fond regret on his dealings with publishers’ sales reps, even though as a rule they had no use for books as such. “When I left high-street bookselling, one of the things I really missed was having a good gossip with a rep.” (4/3) ¶ Levi Stahl reviews Emily Cockayne’s Cheek  by Jowl: A History of Neighbors, which seems to collect a great many grumbles from ages past. He reasonably concludes that the best way to avoid problems with the neighbors is to know them no better than strictly necessary. (I’ve Been Reading Lately; 4/4) ¶ We cite this Discover piece about Driverless Cars not because it’s astute but because it points to one of the gaping holes in American jurisprudence, the other being corporate-executive criminal library. Sometimes, don’t you know, the law has to be fundamentally updated. A government that controlled the roads on which driverless cars operated would also be the government that provided healthcare to occasional accidental victims: end of story. (4/30)

Have a Look:  ¶ Move over, Monet. Another stunning picture of water lilies at JRParis’s country retreat in Touraine. (Mnémoglyphes; 3/3) ¶ New from Rufus (with Helena Bonham Carter) @ Joe.My.God. ¶ Got a minue? Rear Window compressed @ kottke.org. (4/4) ¶ Fragments of a Gerard Hoffnung spoof interview, guaranteed to make you laugh unto weeping. (@ Nigeness; 4/5) ¶ Scouting NY tracks the Titanic trail in Manhattan. (4/11) ¶ The Existential Housecat, who speaks absolutely murdered French. (Thanks, Susan!) ¶ David Olivier has a vision. (Slimbolala; 4/18) ¶ “Should I Check My Email?” Wendy MacNaughton thinks, probably not. (The Rumpus; 4/24) ¶ The Most Average Girl in the World, Florence Colgate. (Artifacting; via MetaFilter; 4/30)

Noted: ¶ Why you ought to have 3 children, or none. (New Yorker; 3/3) ¶ Shawn Cornally discovers the awful truth about American “schooling.” (GOOD; 4/4) ¶ Killer Book Club. (The Millions) ¶ Perez Hamilton. (via kottke.org; 4/5) ¶ The strangely breathtaking Ted Wilson writes about a movie that he hasn’t seen (involving a zoo) — natch. (The Rumpus; 4/11) James Surowiecki on “Club Med” and the globalization of hip surgery. (New Yorker; 4/13) ¶ Titanic fragment: How there came to be a Widener Library at Harvard. (Brainiac; 4/13) ¶ All about iceberg tracking. (MetaFilter) ¶ Terry Teachout discovers the jewel of his neighborhood, Fort Tryon Park. (About Last Night) ¶ George Frazier’s duende. (Ivy Style) ¶ Jason Diamond visits Chartwell Books. (Paris Review Daily; via The Morning News; 4/18) ¶ Gel, foam, or emulsion: Rishidev Chaudhuri knows from eggs. (3 Quarks Daily; 4/24) ¶ Coffee is a lot more expensive than you think. (GOOD; 4/30)