¶ Matins: The real surprise yesterday was not John Perry’s call for a military coup but Gore Vidal’s expectation of one. (London Times)

¶ Lauds: The paradox of art: Shane McAdams on “The Importance of Being Unimportant.” (Brooklyn Rail; via kottke.org)

¶ Prime: A triple play from Felix Salmon: two Bank of America notes, Kenneth Lewis’s departure (with honorable mention of Vikram Pandit at Citigroup) and a word about his successor; and a surprisingly elegant expression of risk-taking.

¶ Tierce: The orginal Think pad, at A Continuous Lean.

¶ Sext: And you get to live in Denver, too!

¶ Nones: China’s National Day was a Party affair: in Beijing, 30,000 spectators were invited to watch, and everyone else was asked to stay home. (Slideshow at BBC News)

¶ Vespers: An extremely strong, almost gripping appreciation of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, newly released by NYRB, at About Last Night.

¶ Compline: Welcome to the wonderful world of vooks — novels with little snippets of video. Yes, it sounds awful — but it’s what will probably save book publishing.

Bon weekend à tous!

Oremus…

§ Matins. Mr Vidal has been specializing in jaundiced views of the American Republic for fifty years. Although he scores a couple of nice points with interviewer Tim Teeman, his voice has taken on the tone of a cranky old man. That is no reason to discredit his thinking.

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

We think that President Obama is trying to educate the American people — which is why there are so many cranky young men out there. School is boring!

§ Lauds. Treating art as sacred, or too significant, is a way of not judging it.

Because of this, collectors and institutions involved in the acquisition of contemporary art tend to maintain an interest in declaring cultural importance before the dust of cultural history has settled. They hope to imbue a contemporary object with history and brand it with cultural significance as early as possible, even, as I witnessed, while it’s still on the wall. But determining actual importance is history’s chore, not critics’ nor collectors’; contemporary art for all its benefits is nothing if not ahistorical. Art can be historical, but contemporary art can’t, shouldn’t be, and thankfully there is a well-organized field of social-science called Art History to undertake that type of assessment anyway. Perhaps then we should acknowledge the moneyed elephant in the room and admit that if we abstain from real judgment someone will fill the void with an alternative judgment, one that only appears to be critical, but is actually defensive. So, as we return to a hobbled and hamstrung commercial art world this September, drink its wine and scuff its white walls, we might remember that even if it seems to be suffering, the best way to save it is to remember how unimportant it is and to remain critical of its offerings.

We believe that art is about pleasure, not importance, and that the quality of the pleasure is a blend of attentiveness and experience: How much have you seen, and how well have you seen it? You can’t make the case that an art work is important. All you can do is help someone else see it in such a way that it becomes important to that one person.  

§ Prime. The expression comes from a commenter:

The person most willing to take on risk is the one unaware he is doing so. He charges no risk premium…

The resulting market equilibrium is that the guy who is unaware of the risk ends up loaded with it. Then the music stops.

What would the market look like without the empty-headed, macho-fueled omadhauns who are drawn to the casino side of Moneyland? What if we figured out how to keep such gamblers (who contribute nothing to the economy except the gas needed to fill bubbles — and inflate the salaries of investment bankers) on the utility side?

What, in other words, if we flip-flopped on a fundamental point of fiscal philosophy, and taxed debt instead of equity?

§ Tierce. And, on a related note, Ivy Style finishes its freshman year. “From now on all posts will be sophomoric.”

Horror vacui and all that, but still, we find the “trad” scene hard to believe. It always reminds us of the late Mrs Buckley, in an interview with her son about fashion (The New Yorker, November 7, 1994, p. 163).

I loved Mary Quant. When was she? I fell for her clothes in a big way. I think I started wearing short skirts before almost anybody, mainly because of my beauteous legs. Who wants to read this kind of crap?

It’s a question that we don’t ask — of ourselves.

§ Sext. The Denver Westword is looking for a cannabis critic.

As with a dining or architecture critic, a background in the subject helps but Calhoun said the paper is looking for someone who displays a talent for writing and analytical thinking rather than getting baked. In other words, she said, ”You don’t have to smoke pot for 30 years.”

Sounds like a grim job. “Oh, shit, man, I gotta write this up, but I forget which stash this came from!”

§ Nones. But what’s this?

And some of the most notable changes did not involve the military at all, but the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary force that was a bit player in the past. On Thursday, the police had specially outfitted armored personnel carriers, a signal of their growing stature. The group is the government’s main internal security force and played crucial roles in suppressing ethnic disturbances in the Xinjiang region in July and in combating riots in Tibet in March 2008. Their performance in Tibet was widely criticized, and the government has since taken steps to modernize the force and train it to military standards.

We hadn’t heard of the PAP before; it dates to 1982.

§ Vespers. What’s another book in the pile?

One particular thing I’ve noticed is the ratio of Latinate to Anglo-Saxon in the paragraphs. Warner’s a very elegant stylist, and one danger of “elegant prose” is how easily it can become overly smooth and glassy. And then the reader slips right off the face of it. One of Warner’s tricks is to pop in an Anglo-Saxon-rooted word here and there that’s not only a good, just-right word, it also works like a prick to keep the paragraph from growing too smooth.

This is a very important guideline for writers who would be elegant, and we don’t follow it nearly as determinedly as we ought to do.

§ Compline. As we read this story, there shown a glint in our eye — a reflection of the glint in the eyes of media company executives.

“There is no question that these new media are going to be superb at engaging and interesting the reader,” said Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” But, she added, “Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?”

Yes, ma’am, we have the patience, but it’s true that there aren’t many of us; there probably have never been many of us. People who want to make megabucks with megaselling objects such as The Lost Symbol ought to leave us alone with are quaint codices. You big publishers out there! Stick to what you know! Publish vooks! And leave books alone.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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