Matins

¶ Horrors! The wealthy (annual income > $90,000) are spending less — $119 a day, down from $145. (We can’t believe how silly this is.)

Policy makers are divided on what may be needed to spur economic growth, with a current debate raging over whether to extend unemployment benefits, payments that are usually spent immediately. Even Fed policy makers seem divided, based on the minutes of their recent meeting, on whether they should shift their monetary stance to encourage economic activity.

“In the short term we need to do everything we can to raise the consumption capacity of average American households,” said Sam Pizzigati, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, a left-leaning research center. “Otherwise, we find ourselves in an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world where average people are hurting and the solution to the hard times that the economy is going through is to help the people that are not going through hard times.”

For now, some affluent spenders are getting thrifty. Linda Stasiak, who sells high-end skin care products to retailers like Whole Foods, said that her biggest sales increase had been for a $15.95 tube wringer, made to get every last drop out of a bottle of lotion.

“During peak time, I don’t even really remember selling them,” Ms. Stasiak said.

“Consumption capacity!” How deranged is that? What if frugality — the frugality that we remember so well, from the Fifties and the Sixties — comes back into style? What will turn the economy’s rotos in that case? We tremble.

Lauds

¶ James Rhodes plays Chopin’s E-minor Prelude from an iPad. Total stunt — and as critic Tom Service carps, why did this famously brief piece require a “page turn?”? Nevertheless, we’re glad that we’re not in the music publishing business.

It had to happen. As the press release has it, “The first classical performance using an iPad in place of traditional paper music” – that’s sheet music, to you and me – happened on Wednesday night. Venus went into eclipse with Saturn, Orion traversed Sagittarius. Almost. Pianist James Rhodes did play Chopin’s E minor Prelude off of his iPad at the Parabola arts centre, a concert that was part of the Cheltenham festival. 

A couple of things ring alarm bells (you can watch the performance here and make your own mind up). First is that Rhodes didn’t know the E minor Prelude off by heart anyway (a staple of the grade 5 repertory, or at least it was when I learned it, and it would only take a professional pianist about half an hour to get under his or her fingers).

Concertgoers will know what we’re talking about: Just think: the second player at each orchestral desk could just tap a pedal, instead of reaching forward awkwardly to turn the page.

Prime

¶ James Surowiecki’s piece on the financial reform bill cuts through the fog of might-have-beens and nails two positive developments, the consumer financial-protection agency and the resolution authority. The latter just may drain Too-Big-Too-Fail insitutions of their attractions. (The New Yorker)

Valuable as this new agency will be, the creation of resolution authority for big banks could be even more important for the health of the system as a whole. The bill has been subject to considerable criticism because it doesn’t break up the country’s biggest banks, with people saying that this leaves our Too Big to Fail policy in place. But while the bill doesn’t do much, if anything, about the “Too Big” part, what it does do, at least in theory, is make it possible for even too-big institutions to fail, by creating a mechanism that will allow the government to, in effect, place failing institutions under conservatorship, and wind them down over time, thereby avoiding both the chaos of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on the one hand, and the need to give troubled banks government-subsidized handouts on the other. With resolution authority in place, big banks and their creditors can’t assume that they will be made whole in the event that they get into trouble, which in principle should reduce the threat of moral hazard and limit the economic advantage that big banks get as a result of the implicit “TBTF” guarantee.

Tierce

¶ Dmitry Chestnykh, the man behind the current rage in parlor games, I Write Like, talks (in English as a second language) to The Awl’s Katjusa Cisar.

Dmitry Chestnykh is the creator of I Write Like. He’s a 27-year-old Russian software developer living in Montenegro. His company, Coding Robots, also offers a blog-writing program and an application to keep diaries.

He answered a few of my questions via e-mail Thursday night, explaining how his algorithm is like a spam-detector, how he plans to sustain the site beyond short-lived meme, and why he’s totally unqualified to analyze writing but still thinks I Write Like is useful.

[A note: since English is not his first language, he asked me to fix any grammatical or style errors in his answers. He barely made any mistakes, predictably putting the typically pitiful American foreign language skills to shame. I just fixed an awkward construction here and there. Based on I Write Like’s calculations, by the way, Chestnykh’s writing style here is most like David Foster Wallace.]

Sext

¶ The other day, Jonathan Harris dispatched a beautiful post from Mykonos, where he has been the guest of a wealthy Greek family. He’s quite brilliant at penetrating the veneer of leisure that both muffles and baffles the lives of the young people whom he meets there.

In this lavish life, the people have had so much sex, bought so much stuff, seen so many cities, slept in so many hotels, ingested so many South American drugs and gobbled down so many excellent meals that to get the same highs they have to go deeper and deeper, at more and more cost to their wallets and bodies, not to mention their spirits. 

So every hour from midnight to sunrise it is back up onto the roof, and then they became a party of supermen, talking so fast and so loud because so much is so funny and brilliant and suddenly needs to be said. And with every line they cross, the gap between me and them becomes bigger and bigger, and as they go up into orbit, I go back down to the ground and think about another day, because the sky is getting bright and sleep is losing patience. 

The post’s ending came as a surprise, because Jonathan seemed to feel so distant from his Greek friends.

 “I know what you mean,” I said, squinting into the brightness all around her. “It’s weird, you know? It’s easy for them, but it’s also hard. You have to play the part, and if you don’t play the part, then that creates other problems, because other people expect you to. So there is a kind of burden with it, even though it seems so easy. I think you can only really understand it from the inside. From the outside you kind of hate the people in it because they get to live like that, but then you’ve never lived like that yourself, so you don’t really know what it’s like, and maybe if you got to live like that for a while, then you wouldn’t really want it, and maybe all the resentment would be replaced with some weird kind of sympathy, or even some kind of pity. But I don’t know — that’s not quite it either.”

Then we remembered: nobody ever feels privileged. We appreciate the privileges that we see other people enjoying; we take our own entirely for granted. I don’t know Jonathan Harris, but I gather that, while his family’s values aren’t those of Mykonos millionaries, his upbringing was relatively privileged, too.

What we hate about people whom we regard as “privileged” (luckier than we are, in some material way) turns out to be exactly what we have in common with them: their inability to see how good they’ve got it.  

(It appears that this entry has been deleted from Jonathan Harris’s site. We quoted from our news feed.)

Nones

¶ More seriousness silliness in Belgium, where nobody seems to be thinking about a Brussels (bilingual) zone. (NYT)

“It is hard to know where this will go,” said Lieven De Winter, a professor of politics at the Université Catholique de Louvain, though like many others he believes breaking up the country would be so complicated as to be impossible, largely because neither side would give up Brussels, the capital.

For Mr. Andries, this state of affairs comes as no surprise. A friendly man of Flemish descent, he has been juggling the tensions between the two halves of Belgium for more than a decade, running a town that is technically on the Flemish-speaking side of the country, but that has become home to many French speakers looking for trees and backyards not far from Brussels.

Mr. Andries’s house was covered in protest placards once because he was accused of forcing his librarian to write letters in French to French theaters inquiring about materials that might be available for the library. Not allowed. He should have sent the letters in Flemish, which is really just a Belgian variant of Dutch.

For those of you who just tuned in, Brussels lies unambiguously in Flanders, but ever since the creation of the Belgian monarchy, in 1830, it has been consciously developed as a Francophone city; as the EU capital, moreoever, it has been a magnet for French-speaking civil servants.

Vespers

¶ If only Lydia Kiesling’s take on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet had been out there before we bought our copy. Oh, we’d have read the book eventually, maybe in paper, or through Kindle-for-the-iPad. (The Millions)

In addition to enjoying his prodigious stylistic gifts, I find David Mitchell’s novels refreshing  because they are in their way morally unambiguous.  It’s usually not clear right away who the good guys are, and there are lots of bad guys disguised as good ones and good guys doing bad deeds.  Nonetheless, Right and Wrong are things in Mitchell’s universe(s), and his work seems to have a lot invested in righting wrongs.  I’ve read all of his novels but one (Number9Dream), and in each I have been surprised and touched by the author’s care for people.

This novel is no different; by the end, you know just who to root for.  I don’t look for morality in my books, but it’s nice to read something outside of the young adult section that reminds us, just to be on the safe side, what’s what.  It’s kind of retro, actually, considering the decades of post-war literature that told us there isn’t right or wrong, just our own confused, fucked-up feelings (man).  Maybe I’m the victim of some haute post-modern joke, but Mitchell seems very earnest to me.  To throw my own potentially bizarre comparison into the mix, David Mitchell is a little bit like Lois Lowry (The Giver, Number the Stars), writ large and writ for grownups.

Despite that fact that I’ve basically (I realize now) presented The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet as a made-for-TV movie for a juvenile audience (starring Russell Crowe), I loved this book.  It’s the best thing I read on what was supposed to be my summer vacation.  If you have free time or can fashion some, you should read it too.

All the same, we’re happy to own our British edition, with its utterly YA printed book cover (no jacket!)

Compline

¶ At The Last Psychiatrist, some thoughts on why sexing up murders by calling them “honor killings” egregiously indulges the culprits’ narcissism — and what to do about the problem.

Change the form of the argument.  You have to make the narcissistic honor killing a thing of even greater shame; you have to speak their language.   Don’t say it’s wrong– they don’t care if it’s wrong– don’t say it’s against Allah, don’t say it’s tribal, don’t say it’s a backwards practice, none of those things matter.  Say it is a sign of weakness and impotence.  Keep repeating that they aren’t signals that you were strong and steadfast in your faith, but signals that you so petty and unfocused such that you had to resort to this.  Remind them how stupid it is to think that people are now going to forget that you’re the father of a harlot and you’re a cowardly murderer.  No Iraqi will send his sons over to the U.S. to marry your other daughter, and for sure no American will.  Keep saying that, not so the potential murderer hears it but so the kids hear it.

Have a Look

¶ “Stomp Mel Gibson!” (FAIL)

¶ “It’s a kind of ‘Prince of Denmark’ of the hotel world.” (Letters of Note)

¶ Just when you thought it was a stupid question: Scientists prove that the chicken came first. See? You were right. (Metro.co.uk; via  MetaFilter)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 10:06 am.