Matins

¶ Ellen Moody writes,

Over on facebook, someone told of a long day’s struggle to order, throw away, pack, and generally empty out his parents’ home (possible so as to sell it). What exhausting work emotionally and physically. Well his words reminded me of a moving diary entry in the LRB by August Kleinzhaler where he told of his experience of selling his childhood home.

The Kleinzahler piece dates from last winter, but it’s instantly engaging, so do click through.

Lauds

¶ The prolific director Raoul Walsh (1887-1980) is the subject of an appreciation by Dan Callahan, at The House Next Door. Two films are singled out for the honor of standing aside White Heat, the great Cagney vehicle: Me and My Gal, with Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett; and Band of Angels, starring Clark Gable and Yvonne de Carlo.

Walsh was half-Irish, and fond of introducing rowdy drinking humor into his films; this humor is always bracing and often directed straight at the camera. Me and My Gal ends with a man’s face filling the screen and howling at us, “Have another drink!” Whereas John Ford’s Irish humor is usually based in a beer-drinking kind of cuteness, Walsh’s hard liquor talk is as lusty and disarming as his love of sex. In Gentleman Jim (1942), he could even make boxing look like a clean “why not?” kind of sport, with Flynn in tights as an aesthetic object of real beauty in the ring. Given a story of mature romantic disillusionment, Walsh was capable of making something like The Strawberry Blonde (1941), which in my memory stands as a masterpiece about growing up, beautifully played by Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth and Jack Carson; as Walsh himself must have known by this point, the outwardly demure brunette (de Havilland) is usually the real firecracker in bed, not the high-maintenance redhead sexpot (Hayworth). After World War II, and the Flynn war movies covered in Kehr’s DVD review, Walsh wholeheartedly adopted the noir style for his brooding western Pursued (1947) and remade High Sierra as Colorado Territory (1949) with Joel McCrea, which is just as good as the original and even improves on it for a last shot that stands as the ultimate in male/female romantic solidarity.

Prime

¶ “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” cautions Michael Lewis, in Vanity Fair. His truly sensational account of Greek peccadilloes makes Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief seem muted and forgiving. The following extract, taken from the first half of the piece, is itself relatively forgiving.

Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other. It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes. Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

Tierce

¶ What’s this? It seems that the leopard can change his spots! And Alan Turing expounded the general principles that make this, and many other pattern shifts, possible.

Turing explained their partnership in terms of a slightly imperialistic analogy involving cannibals and missionaries living on an island. The cannibals (standing in for the activators) can produce more of themselves, but they can also be converted to missionaries (playing the role of inhibitors). The missionaries, being celibate, can only make more missionaries by recruiting cannibals. On a small island, you’d eventually end up with a stable mix of the two. But the people on the island aren’t just standing still. They move about, and the missionaries can do so faster because they have bicycles. This changes things. Cannibals bolster their own numbers through sex, so in the immediate area, their populations grow. Some of these extra cannibals might get converted to missionaries, who would cycle off to further parts of the island. This means that the far reaches of the island become saturated with missionaries, who convert the cannibals there. Close by, cannibals increase their own numbers. Far away, they actually inhibit themselves by producing missionaries. The two molecules on a fish’s skin interact in the same way. The activator reinforces itself at a short distance but further away, it’s blocked by the inhibitor. These simple rules can produce very complicated patterns, and this brilliant Java applet shows you how. Try playing with different speeds and colours to produce cheetah-like spots or fingerprint whorls. You can enter different numbers into the “diffusion constants” boxes to determine how quickly the cannibals and missionaries are moving. Note that you get very different patterns depending on these speeds, and that stable patterns only emerge if the second number is higher (i.e. if the inhibitor spreads faster than the activator).

Sext

¶ Michael Williams (A Continuous Lean) gets invited to a publication party for True Prep, the sequel to/update of The Preppy Handbook, that came out yesterday. He has a much better time than he thought he would — and what could be preppier than that?

When I arrived at Michael’s I didn’t know anyone, so I looked around the room for the person that looked as uncomfortable as I felt and went to talk to him. Before I get into that let me back up, the scene in the room was borderline ridiculous. Everyone was so overly prepped out it was an insane assemblage of pink and green. I was getting nervous as to what I had gotten myself into with all of these crazy preppies. The uncomfortable guy actually worked for the publisher and after a bit of chatting I asked if he could introduce me to the PR so I could say thank you for inviting me. I spoke with the very nice PR lady for a few minutes when she asked if I wanted to meet the author Lisa Birnbach. Wow, I thought. For some reason I never expected to meet her and I have no idea what to ask her. I certainly didn’t want to come off as a super-fan. As I spoke to Lisa about the book and preps and everything else it started to make sense why, after all these years, she is coming out with a follow-up. True Prep has a sense of humor and it is fun to see how some things have changed and how some haven’t. I was flattered to know that Lisa was aware of ACL’s existence and at the same time I felt slightly rude for my initial apprehension towards the book. But that is sort of my thing — change is bad! Though there are a few style related things in the book that I cannot endorse (which will go unnamed here), I have to say that after reading it with the mindset that the book is not meant to be a “part II,” (it is designed to complement the original) I really liked it. I also must admit that I was wrong about Lisa and True Prep. It is a worthy read and money well spent.

Nones

¶ The least we could do: restoring Iraqi antiquities to the country from which they were looted during our misadventure there. Steven Lee Myers reports, in the Times.

The United States has returned 1,046 antiquities since 2003, when looters ransacked buildings across Iraq, including its museums, according to the American Embassy here. For all the international outrage the looting stirred toward the United States and its allies, many of the items were smuggled out of the country before the invasion, often with the connivance of officials in Saddam Hussein’s government, according to archaeological officials here. They have been tracked and seized by the F.B.I., the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and other law enforcement agencies, often working on tips from experts and officials with the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, which stored many of them at its building on Massachusetts Avenue for safekeeping as Iraq remained engulfed in violence. Only a handful of the items returned on Tuesday once belonged to the National Museum. The most prominent is the statue of King Entemena, the oldest known representation of a monarch from the ancient civilizations that once thrived in Mesopotamia. Carved from black diorite, it is 30 inches tall and headless, and inscribed with cuneiform that says it was placed in a temple in Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, to please the god Enlil. It weighs 330 pounds but disappeared from the museum during the looting, only to be seized in a 2006 sting when someone in Syria tried to sell it to an art dealer in New York. Another Sumerian sculpture, a bronze depicting a king named Shulgi, had been shipped by Federal Express from a London dealer to a collector in Connecticut, but was seized at Newark Liberty International Airport. Many such pieces are items that Iraq never knew it had lost.

Vespers

¶ Garth Risk Hallberg asks: if the Internet is supposed to be shrinking our attention apans, what are we doing buying all these long novels that are coming out these days?

Publishers’ willingness to take a chance on a long book circa 2010 may be directly connected to chances taken in the past. The fierce bidding, in 2007, for Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (992 pp), a demanding work in translation, surely owes something to the rapt reception of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (600 pp) and subsequent widespread anticipation for 2666 (912 pp). McSweeney’s may be hoping The Instructions repeats the success of Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital (615 pp). And David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1104 pp) continues to have a remarkable second life on the backlist, which is still the publisher’s bread and butter. Biographical books and articles by David Lipsky and D.T. Max, as well as copious online discussion, sustain interest in the book. A clerk at a local bookstore told me last week that, for the last two months, it’s been flying off the shelves. Indeed, après Jest, doubters may catch a whiff of decadence, or at least self-consciousness, around the efforts of Cohen, Levin, and other candidates for wunderkindency.

(We think that the word is Wunderkinderei.)

Compline

¶ At The Oil Drum, Ugo Bardi argues cogently that science and technology advance more quickly when sparked by prizes than when fed by research grants.

So, it would be thinkable to organize research on innovation in renewables by offering prizes. Say, the government will award 10 million dollars to the first research lab which succeeds in developing a solar cell with a demonstrable EROEI = 50 (about the EROEI of petroleum in the golden days). Or it will award the same 10 million dollars for the first GWh consistently produced by a high altitude wind power system. Maybe the target is too high, and nobody will succeed in getting the prize, but if that happens, it is at no cost for taxpayers. And think how much money the governments could save dismantling the overblown bureaucracy needed for selecting grant applications and checking that the money is spent according to the promises. Now, why is it not done? Well, I think the reason lies in those lines that I just wrote. The main purpose of all bureaucracies is to perpetuate (and enlarge) themselves, so a reform that would get rid of a large number of government bureaucrats is almost inconceivable. Maybe there are other reasons that make it difficult to stimulate research using prizes, but I do know that there are cases in which public money has been used to reward success: it is the case of feed-in tariffs for renewables.

For the record, we believe that an effective and satisfactory way of getting rid of bureaucrats is buying them off — before they reproduce.

Have a Look

¶ The Future Is In Helvetica. (Joe.My.God)

¶ Joshua Marsh: Ten Things. (ARTCAT)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 at 6:00 pm.