Gotham Diary:
Sequence and Heap
1 October 2013
It is probably too late in the day for me to learn anything serious about economics. Plodding through Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, I find the disputes to be incomprehensible, unless and until I translate the discussion into terms of “moneyed interests” and “social interests.” In an intelligent world, these groups would not conflict, but we’re far from intelligent: we are only beginning to know how money, on the one hand, and employment, on the other, interact. Sadly, we have learned nothing about incidental concentrations of wealth, except that they’re ugly. Most of what passes as “economics” is no more useful than Ptolemaic cosmology; it’s so much whistling in the dark. The economic history of the modern world is shallow, only a few centuries deep, but it is marked by such enormous material change in the fabric of everyday life, and by so many booms and panics, that it is hard to see what might be learned from it.
But then, I spend a lot of time alone. Thanking friends and former students for their helpful discussions of the drafts of A General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes wrote, “It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone.”
***
After an early dinner, Kathleen had work to do, so I turned on the Morphine playlist and washed the dishes. But then I couldn’t turn it off. I carried the Nano into the blue room and stuck it into the dock that connects to a truly excellent pair of Tannoy speakers that I’ve had for ages but that seem to sound better the older they get. I slumped in my reading chair and sipped wine. (Too much wine — we had enjoyed a nice bottle of Bordeaux at dinner, and I’m enjoying a nice headache today.) The tracks clicked by. I was almost always happy to hear whatever was song came up next. Sometimes, the sequence was brilliant, as from the National Lampoon’s “Kung Fu Christmas” to Ray Parker’s “Jack and Jill.”Sometimes, a song that I hadn’t thought of came to mind, as did Red Norvo’s “‘Smarvellous,” to follow Diana Krall’s “Dancing in the Dark.” In a few cases, I actually made a note of my bright ideas.
As a work in progress, the playlist consists of two parts, the sequence and the heap. The heap is a pile of songs that I want to place somewhere in the sequence but for which no place has yet been found. Progress occurs when a song that I have just tacked onto the bottom of the list finds ready company in the heap, allowing me to build a sequential module of anywhere from two to six songs, adding further songs as they come to mind. Then I hunt through the sequence, the “finished” part of the list, for a spot where the module will fit. This is still fairly easy to do, for only a handful of numbers are bonded to their neighbors.
How long will the Morphine playlist be? I don’t know the answer to that, either. I can’t even guess. The sequence part of the playlist is well shy of a hundred, while, at this very moment, there are 10,455 songs on this laptop’s hard drive. None of that is “classical music.” How many songs am I crazy about? And where can I get a better recording of Paul Whiteman’s “Whispering”?
***
Megan mentioned that when she was telling Will that he’d be making a trip to New York early next year, he thought about it for a moment and said, “But I want to be in California in January.” He was assured that the visit would not last long. He is settling in nicely, as are his parents. We miss them madly, but we’re very happy for them.