Daily Office:
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Matins¶ At The Baseline Scenario, guests Mark Paul and Anatasia Wilson wring their hands about the unemployment of college grads and other young people. We agree that there’s a problem, but we don’t believe that current economic structures can be repaired. The sad or lucky truth, depending on how you think about it, is that this country has never had had to re-consider any of its initial arrangements — with the single and rather baleful exception of slavery. What we need to do for young people today is to provide them with whatever they ask for to meet the challenge of developing new ways of doing business. At a minimum, we need to make it very clear that creating an economy that will employ them is entirely up to the youth of America.
Lauds¶ Jim Emerson calls for all serious moviegoers to run out and buy a copy of David Thomson‘s New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Is it encyclopedic? No, but that doesn’t matter, and the review is sprinkled with enough nuggets to show why. On Francis Ford Coppola: “There is a talent in American films that makes for adolescent attitudes, veiled fascism, and a work that leads one to recognize the proximity of talent and meretricious magic.” Bring it on!
Prime¶ In the current New Yorker, John Cassidy asks “What Good Is Wall Street?” Not much, it turns out, in an atmosphere governed by the idea that financial markets, if left to themselves, are efficient. On the contrary, they’re as stuffed with “cotton, hay, and rags,” and impervious to sound advice, as Henry Higgins thinks women to be. Toward the end of the piece, Mr Cassidy visits with The Epicurean Dealmaker, who had the good sense to prepare for a lot of first-time visitors.
Tierce¶ There’s at least one thing to take away from Elizabeth Day’s look at reality television, in The Guardian. And that’s that nobody, except possibly a few clueless wannabees, is being exploited by this kind of entertainment. It may give us hives, but there’s no call for looking down on those who enjoy it; and it seems that nobody is taken in by the pretense of artlessness. We do stick to our belief that people who turn to television for a sense of belonging are fleeing the complications of reality community. (via MetaFilter)
Sext¶ Jean-Louis Gassée’s eloquence on the Third Lie of Computers (“You Can Do It”) brought tears to our eyes — we’d thought that it was just us! Mr Gassée wanted to set up a simple site using a simple app, and, hey, if Google isn’t simple, what is it? Impossible, that’s what. The bingo comes toward the end of the piece, where it is discovered that “the big guys” — the Times, the Journal — have given their glowing new-product reviews ZERO long-term follow-up. Hey, they don’t have to pay for anything, right? Men may come from Venus, but Google’s engineers come from a planet known only to Roz Chast. Payoff joke: “In the meantime, while Google has been preoccupied with “killing†Microsoft, Facebook has grown to become the Internet’s most frequented site.” We couldn’t like it more.
Nones¶ At A Fistful of Euros, P O’Neill pens a piece with a title, “Ireland: The timidity of the lawyers,” that seems quite completely controverted by what follows. For the only reasonable conclusion that one can draw coming away from the essay is that Irish lawyers — the Irish lawyers who serve the governments, whether as ministers or advisers — are a bold lot, happy to let the Irish taxpayer shoulder the bust of Ireland’s property bubble. In Mr O’Neill’s Irish turn of phrase, “Somehow the country never rose in importance as the client compared to the party.”
Vespers ¶ The Millions points us to Seth Colter Walls’s absorbing overview of David Foster Wallace’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center. It seems that Wallace followed in Trollope’s footsteps (see: The Eustace Diamonds ) in at least one way: he obtained detailed information from a tax attorney about “the single most confusing sentence in the tax code.” (There was a contest?) This has entirely reconciled us to the posthumous publication of Pale King. (Newsweek)
¶ The Nytpicker magnanimously calls on the Pulitzer Prize judges to give Frank Rich a prize. Hear, hear! Of all the major writers who are out there arguing for an America that we can be proud of (as distinct from the America that would like to kick us out), Frank Rich is by far the most scrupulous examiner of his own party’s shortcomings — its snotty condescension in particular. The Nytpicker allows that Mr Rich “preaches to the choir,” but we think that he does something much more important: he scolds it.
¶ Just about the silliest things we’ve ever heard of: Map of the World’s Countries Rearranged by Population. We link to it because — finally! — it proves American exceptionalism. American’s are the only peoples of the world who would not have to move! (Strange Maps)
¶ Coralie Pickford-Brown‘s lovely cloth-bound Penguin Classics covers. We’ve linked to them before, but now we own one. (Guess) (Brain Pickings)
¶ Dance troupe on the run — in the Lincoln Tunnel. (Mail Online; via ArtsJournal)