¶ Matins: Sometimes it seems that everything that has gone wrong in the United States since the first Reagan Administration can be described by the same sentence: “Let’s make conservatism sexy!” Consider this report about municipal bonds, which used to be safe as houses. (Little joke.)

¶ Lauds: Glenn Gould foresaw iPods, Audacity, Michael Hiltzik writes (so to speak) in the LA Times. The pianist was not, in other words, crazy when he stopped giving recitals.

This week marks 45 years since Glenn Gould made his last public performance. He preferred to offer recordings that someday, he wrote, could be altered by the listener in different ways.

¶ Prime: And now for something perfectly ridiculous: the PUMA, a joint project of General Motors (ha!) and Segway. (via  Good)

¶ Tierce: Tourists in Kyoto grab hair, pull sleeves, trip geisha. Also interfere with dialy fish auction. Walt Disney, what hast thou wrought?

¶ Sext: From the droll humor site, EnglishЯussia, a blast from the past: isn’t that Dave Thomas, of SCTV, hosting the spoof “What Fits Mother Russia?”

¶ Nones: The Grand Duke of Luxembourg may be reconstituted. New! With Fewer Absolute Powers!

¶ Vespers: Marina Warner writes about a new edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

¶ Compline: If you find yourself up late tonight with nothing that you’re in the mood, here’s just what you’re looking for: Jeremiah Kipp interviews film writer Glenn Kenny about working with David Foster Wallace.

Oremus…

§ Matins. How about this he said/he said weepie from Fairfield County in Connecticut, where the pensions of municipal workers was expected to issue forth from investments in Madoff funds.

Municipal investments are supposed to be safe, ergo boring. There is no such thing as safe and interesting. Regulators used to understand this, until they were reprogrammed by Thatchigans. In Tennessee,

Representatives of Morgan Keegan pointed out that they saved cities and counties money for years by delivering lower interest rates, and that the economic decline that created the turmoil in the bond market was beyond their control. Moody’s credit rating agency on Tuesday issued a negative outlook for the fiscal health of municipal governments.

But what goes down can go up. The only way that you can “save” [make] money on interest is by putting it at risk of being lost. And what about basic considerations of conflict of interest?

Municipal bond experts say they know of no other state where a firm was allowed to wear three hats; several states prohibit a single firm from acting as both adviser and underwriter.

And Tennessee, unlike most states, had laws intended to regulated these goings on! Looks like the regulators were just printing sheet music for the masked ball.

§ Lauds. But Gould was wrong to think that live performances would “face away,” as Mr Hiltzik puts it. On the contrary: if live performances had been as interesting forty-five years ago as they are now, perhaps Gould wouldn’t have foresworn them.

§ Prime. You don’t think that “Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility” units will be appearing anytime soon? Let me tell you: they’ll be on the street before anyone can think of a good reason for their existence. If they appear ever, that is.

This machine betrays a sublime oblivion of the factor that gave rise to intracity coach traffic from the Renaissance on: mud. Most city streets were unpaved until late in the Nineteenth Century. Sadly, the automobiles that required pavements were not promptly understood to be rendered unnecessary by them.

§ Tierce. Has a combination of theme parks and digital communications given tourists the misimpression that they know how to behave?

Rikiya Yamamoto, the leader of a local community group that recently began organizing patrols to guard the maiko from unseemly foreign holiday-makers, said the tourists’ hounding of the young women had become a safety issue.

“It’s dangerous to be chased around because the maiko walk on ohogo,” high-soled wooden shoes, he said. However elegant this footwear might be on a small-statured maiko in a long kimono, it is not designed for escaping intrusive strangers.

Tourists have even broken into teahouses and their gardens to photograph maiko and geisha at work.

Of course, there has always been something a wee bit theme-park-y about geisha and maiko. But only for the paying customers!

§ Sext. Read EnglishЯussia for the Russian-accented English.

“Moscow city stands on the top of the giant ancient volcano”, says scientist, “we call often Moscow – the city on the seven hills (as well Rome and some other cities) but just a few know that those seven hill actually are the ancient volcano structure. It doesn’t matter that it is not active for thousands of years already, still there are so called ‘fluid streams’ gases from the center of the Earth comes to surface through ancient volcanoes, they cause the tremors of the surface and ruining the roads and buildings in Moscow.”. He also admitted that around 15% of Moscow city surface can get under the ground. And there is still a chance that the volcano can wake up. “It’s not to clear what causes some old and forgotten volcanoes that were not active for years to wake up suddenly”. In this case all the city would be buried.

§ Nones. Grand Duke Henri recently refused to sign a bill enabling euthanasia. Tsk-tsk!

In a blitz session of Parliament, the Constitution was changed, making Henri’s signature unnecessary. But calls arose for a broader reform of the Constitution, to bring the grand duke’s role more in line with that of other European monarchs. If the changes are enacted, gone will be many of his executive powers, including his role as commander in chief of Luxembourg’s Army, with its 800 soldiers, though he is a graduate of the British military academy, Sandhurst. After national elections in June, the legislation is expected to move quickly through Parliament.

Back in the days when I glanced occasionally at Point de Vue, I learned the word roturière from the report of Henri’s marriage to one. It’s Gotha-speak (the language of European royalty) for “commoner.” 

Just how long has this Luxembourg grand-duchy thing been going on, you ask. 963? 1437? 1890? And why is it in Paris?

§ Vespers. (Even better, we’re told that Ms Warner is working on a book about the Arabian Nights — I’ve got a nice edition and have been waiting for a prod.)

The [Rubáiyát] held its own as a favourite for decades, but was scorned by Bloomsbury and modernists; its atmosphere of Oriental dressing-gowns and toffs’ dining clubs, its archaising mannerisms (all those capitalised nouns, all those quaint diacritics), were seen as repellent, if not reprehensible. The sexuality – the homoeroticism – was too sissy, and the carpe diem sentiments of the drinking songs and the worldliness of the tone were far too whimsical and decadent for most survivors of the First World War. And then there was the lingering imperialist politics of the enterprise. FitzGerald was a rich dilettante, whose Anglo-Irish mother’s fortune from Irish rents was so large that her husband had changed his name to hers.

§ Compline. The interview is invaluable if only for the background on Wallace’s fantastic piece on the AVN awards; Mr Kenny was “in the field” (Las Vegas) with DFW.

I think the reason he had such an aversion to severely urban areas was the sensory overload of having to perceive that much. When you were walking around with him on the floor of the AVN Expo, you got the sense of him being overwhelmed. Part of his way of dressing was, when he wasn’t wearing the bandana, trying not to be noticed. He said he wasn’t a reporter, and he didn’t do reporting per se. He didn’t go up to people and start asking them questions. I think this is where Evan and I helped him, bringing him to a situation where he could converse. The thing about someone like Paul Little a/k/a Max Hardcore is you don’t need much to get them talking, which was part of his problem. There are all sorts of stories of him being on a plane, first class, getting drunk on free cocktails and showing his portfolio of anal sex extravaganzas to the woman sitting next to him—who would immediately get horrified and request a seat change. It wasn’t difficult to get Max Hardcore to talk—or anyone in the porn industry, really.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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