Daily Office
Grand Hours
April 2011: Second Week
¶ At Koreanish, Alexander Chee concludes a wandering entry with an arresting and very disheartening assessment of the decadence of current democratic leadership worldwide.Â
And that really is the other point to make—the problems in the US are the problems in the world, really—few countries if any are inoculated from being subjects to a global financial elite that has figured out how to make money from firings and layoffs, foreclosures, highspeed computerized stock trades and stockpiled cash. Yes, I could move to about 60 other nations and receive socialized medicine, for example (one bright spot—soon may be able to add “Vermont†to that list of places), but wherever I go, this elite is indifferent to these crises, and no longer needs the good will or even the general population in order to be rich. They make money off each other, in brutal raids and corporate takedowns. They’ve manipulated the markets to the extent that we need their good will in order to survive them. It’s as if they decided 30 years ago that the creation of a middle class was a mistake, and they’re pulling up the gates.
Our only cold comfort is that the oligarchy is a patched-together international affair that lacks natural coherence.
¶ The enviably satisfying life of Charles Rosen, pianist and writer. (Also, French teacher at MIT.) Mr Rosen’s current preoccupation (he is 84) is the way that Mozart and Beethoven had of veing unconventionally conventional. “The public always demand something original, and then they resent it when they get it.” (Guardian; via ArtJournal) ¶ At Slate/FT, Jackie Wullschlager talks to “elusive billionaire,” purveyor of luxury goods, and art collector extraordinaire François Pinault, a self-made Breton who now sponsors two museums of new art in Venice. Takeaway: channel the emotions that you suppress in your ruthless business dealings into a passion for art collecting. As we said, “self-made.” ¶ Felix Salmon explains why Andy Warhol is not only the most successful modern artist but the best investment (or is that the same thing?) — twenty-odd years after his death. Liquidity, darling. ¶ At the Guardian, Simon Jenkins waxes impatient with “modernist nonsense” about ruins, and urges us to be more Victorian about them, fixing them up and restoring them for use instead of treating them as sacrosanct untouchables. (via Arts Journal)
¶ Although it’s billed as the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Bretton Woods conference sounds like the Same Old Same Old. Simon Johnson reports that a consensus of attendees holds that Goldman Sachs would be bailed out if it were in trouble. Politicians have given up on two fronts: cuttting down its size (and with it its riskiness), and raising its capital requirements. Capcha! (The Baseline Scenario) ¶ What with that budget adaptation of Atlas Shrugged going the rounds, Ayn Rand is back in the news, and who better than Maria Bustillos to examine Rand’s lunatic ethos, which, as she demonstrates with the example of Alan Greenspan, leads inevitably to hardening-of-the-brain. (The Awl)
¶ Facts and Figures: Jonah Lehrer reports that the Allen Institute for Brain Science has established a 94% similarity in gene expression among human beings — making us all only 6% different, to put it facetiously — and, even more startlingly, that 82% of our genes are expressed somewhere in the brain. (The Frontal Cortex)Â
¶ Simon Doonan’s Note on Camp (he has but one) is cheeky but accessible. He claims to be the child of camp parents. When was the last time you heard Sontag referred to as “Sue“? (Slate) ¶ Erin Carver, who resolved to sample religions this year, attends a meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, and, perhaps because she didn’t see any quaking, contemplates a return visit with something like enthusiasm. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ At Bidoun, Curtis Brown meditates on the author of The Eternal Male, a sometime Anglophone schoolboy in Cairo called Michael Demitri Chalhoub who, among other things, bullied Edward Said. This would be Omar Sharif. (That’s “Omar” as in “Bradley,” by the way.) A fascinating page. (via 3 Quarks Daily)
¶ To the extent that it alerts naive American technophiles to the fact that societies other than our own may have very different priorities and purposings for social networks, Niall Ferguson’s “Mash of Civilizations” is useful. But dismissing those other societies as “enemies of freedom” — when in fact they have a very, very different idea of what freedom means — is simply wrongheadedly simplistic. (Newsweek; via Real Clear World) ¶ Once upon a time, CIA officials retired from their profession; since 9/11, they’ve been taking their expertise to private contractors. Julie Tate covers this depressing but unsurprising development at the Washington Post. (via The Morning News)
¶ Until last week, we had never heard of Peter Mountford. Now we’re in the middle of his engaging debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism. Gregory Brown turned us on to it at The Rumpus; at The Millions, Caleb Powell interviews the author — who has a piece of his own at Speakeasy.
The hero/anti-hero of my novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, is tasked with trying to trying to find a monetizable angle on the 2005 Bolivian election for his new employer, a small unscrupulous (fictional) hedge fund called The Calloway Group. The mission is just a test. As the fund manager puts it, “In Bolivia, if you screw up, it won’t hurt us…you’re flying a worthless Cessna, not one of our gold-plated seven-forty-sevens.â€
In the first chapter, Gabriel attempts to obtain a copy of Bolivia’s Article IV Report—the IMF’s completely candid assessment of a country’s economic outlook. Countries with especially dour prospects (like Bolivia in 2005) often keep their A-IV Reports under lock and key. Gabriel’s mission is pulled directly from a nearly-identical experience I had in Ecuador in late 2000, when I spent the better part of a month trying to chase down the IMF’s recent (but classified) A-IV Report on Ecuador for my then-employer, a small (now defunct) think tank.
¶ “On its own terms, sex is information.” This startlingly Gleickian claim appears in Alexander Chee’s tribute to James Salter’s sex writing, as virtuosically displayed in the classic A Sport and a Pastime, from which many enticing quotes are drawn. (The Paris Review; via The Morning News)
¶ Nothing on David Cay Johnson’s list of “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes” will be unfamiliar to regular readers, but Mr Johnson’s tempered outrage is encouraging. “The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.” (Willamette Week; via 3 Quarks Daily)
¶ At City of Sound, amazing photographs by Dan Hill of the Linked Hybrid, a complex of buildings in Beijing, which basically comes off as the background of Eraserhead only in color. ¶ “This has been going on since Ronkonkoma.” (@ The Awl) ¶ Bent Objects, @ Brain Pickings. ¶ Canal Street subway interchange, much reduced, @ The Best Part.
¶ Getting Byrned. (GOOD) ¶ Tyler Cowen is in Brasilia. (Marginal Revolution) ¶ A selection of Vreeland Memos, @ Letters of Note.