¶ Matins: Mayor Bloomberg’s third term: an endlessly interesting question that won’t be answered until (a) Mr Bloomberg fails to win the term by one means or another, or (b) long after his third term. Michael Barbaro and David W Chen report.

¶ Tierce: A word about credit:

In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.

A year later, Mishkin was out of business: no workingmen customers. “It” served him wrong, and it’s likely that a similar credit crunch today would have the same impact on ordinary Americans who have never actively invested in anything except a house. (The story was told by Mishkin’s grandson, a former Federal Reserve Board member, to David Leonhardt.)

¶ Sext: Wanting to see what Le Figaro had to say about Belgium’s breakup (the latest on which I read about at Joe.My.God), I came across something far more amusing: Are American writers too ignorant for the Nobel Prize? Horace Lundgren, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel) seems to think so.

(Ha! Now that I read Joe’s update, I understand why there was nothing about Belgium at Figaro to keep from scrolling all the way down to Mr Lundgren.)

¶ Vespers: I have a new crush — and it’s very educational. Sarah Sherborne is the moderating voice on the latest crop of Teach Yourself language courses from Hodder & Stoughton. I felt the first flutter of attraction in Teach Yourself Arabic, but before Teach Yourself Turkish Conversation was halfway through, I was besotted. I’ve now added Chinese, Chinese Conversation, and Dutch to my collection, and I’m longing for Portuguese.

Oremus…

§ Matins. It’s an interesting question because of the tension between (a) the desirability of having an excellent mayor, one especially known, in a time of declining revenues, for his financial savvy, continue to “run the city,” and (b) the undesirability of playing footsie with the law in order to accommodate a very rich man.

Note that the first proposition is specific: you’ll be hard pressed to find a Manhattanite who wishes that Rudy Giuliani could have run for a third term. The second proposition is general. Antagonism between the personal and the abstract, the special case and the law, is what makes Verdi’s best operas so sustaining. It is not unrelated to the occasional irreconcilability of mercy and justice.

Do you do the wrong thing because, just this once, it happens to be the right thing — such that, if it were the common thing, the law would be different? And then there’s all that money to consider.

I can’t tell you how much happier I’d be to help put Michael Bloomberg in the White House, which is where he really belongs.

§ Tierce. And — although there was nothing subprime about these deals — “Failed Deals Replace Real Estate Boom.” You can call this a “correction,” but lowering the boom on fragile credit structures (a/k/a anxious lenders) can rip a hole right through the “correct” levels if it drops too fast.

§ Sext. I can’t disagree with two of Mr Lundgren’s complaints. Americans don’t read enough literature in translation, and they are too immured in la culture de masse. The only Americans who see their culture as part of a global tapestry seem to be the very Americans who loathe their culture. I certainly don’t. That’s why, if I were on the Nobel nominating committee, I would advance the name of Jane Smiley, an extremely lucid novelist who grasps both comedy and tragedy more clearly than any other writer I can think of.

I’d also kill to see Ms Smiley ream Mr Lundgren a new you-know-what, and without raising her voice.

§ Vespers. Ms Sherborne makes learning a language sound very easy. “That wasn’t too difficult, was it.” Not a question. I purr like a cat whenever she says “prompt” with just the hint of a diphthong. She makes “airport” sound like a great place to visit.

Sarah Sherborne has transformed learning foreign languages from an aspirational exercise into a genuine hobby.

The good thing about the Conversation kits is that the dialogue is printed in an accompanying pamphlet that’s easy to carry on a walk in the park.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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