¶ Matins: Over the weekend, the Times published architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff’s summary of good ideas for urban infrastructure, “Reinventing America’s Cities: The Time Is Now.” Although Mr Ouroussoff never uses the term, one leitmotif of his essay is the importance of undoing the long modernist trend of treating cities as “factories for living.”

¶ Lauds: How about some eye candy? (via  kottke.org)

¶ Prime: Moscato goes shopping at the One Rial Store in Oman. I want a Mosque Shape Alarm Clock!

¶ Tierce: In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki shares a misgiving that has been bothering me for more than a few years: what if the bank bailout works?

¶ Sext: Just what I needed: a “Variety Show” of Borden’s line of cheeses. (Remember Borden’s? Elsie the Cow?) And not only that, but a new-to-me “pop culture” site, Curly Wurly. Eight mouth-watering ways to “meet the royal family of Borden’s fine cheeses.

¶ Nones: Athens bombers said to be anarchists, not terrorists — well, that makes me feel better!

¶ Vespers: Maud Newton writes about Brad Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor at NPR.org: “In its painstaking honesty, the book is both a great gift and a curse to O’Connor’s fans.” If you know anything about O’Connor, you know that Ms Newton is referring to the writer’s unconsidered racism.

¶ Compline: An appropriately colorful obituary for Sir Reresby Sitwell, Bt, of Renishaw Hall, in the Telegraph. It’s amazing how much family dysfunction can be fitted into a few paragraphs with hardly a mention of Auntie Edith.

Oremus…

§ Matins.As to how to do it: when Felix Rohatyn gets behind an idea, I get behind Felix.

I am also a fan of a National Infrastructure Bank, an idea that was first proposed by the financiers Felix Rohatyn and Everett Ehrlich.

The bank would function something like a domestic World Bank, financing large-scale undertakings like subways, airports and harbor improvements. Presumably it would be able to funnel money into the more sustainable, forward-looking projects. It could also establish a review process similar to the one created by the government’s General Services Administration in the mid-1990s, which attracted some of the country’s best talents to design federal courthouses and office buildings. Lavishing similar attention on bridges, pump stations, trains, public housing and schools would not only be a significant step in rebuilding a sense of civic pride; it would also prove that our society values the public infrastructure that binds us together as much as it values, say, sheltering the rich.

§ Lauds. How incredibly interesting — and, one would almost say, unnecessarily intricate — the iris is. But for all the glassy sheen, there are those moth-like blobby patches that, in case someone had the bright idea of making iris-patterned candies, would make me think twice before sucking on one.

The photographer, Rankin, has taken made fantastic portraits of leading British actors. (Scroll over.)

§ Prime. In another sunny part of the world, Father Tony strolls through Palm Beach, lately neutron-bombed by Bernie Madoff. Watch for the Worth Avenue’s new Dollar Store!

§ Tierce. Not that one wants it to fail. But if it does succeed, then how can we resist, for once, the urge to “recover” business as usual?

We’ve been like people living on a floodplain who during the deluge talk about moving or making the levees higher but end up rebuilding in the same spot. As a result, a small number of banks (and other financial institutions, like A.I.G.) have become ever bigger and more crucial to the U.S. economy, while the government’s tools to manage and mitigate the systemic risks they pose have not kept pace. It’s unrealistic to think that we can prevent banking crises per se; as the economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have documented, the world has had eight centuries of financial crises, in countries with many different regulatory schemes. But it should be possible to insure that when bankers go careering off the road they don’t take the rest of us with them.

§ Sext. Liederkranz, even – that fine old American cheese.

Scrolling down to Marla’s entry on So-Good Meals, a pamphlet from Better Homes and Gardens, I wish that someone would write about the evolution of the style and design thinking that produced the Tender Betterburgers shoot. Whose appetite were such photographs intended to whet?

§ Nones. Here’s the pathetic part:

Clinging to power with a one-seat majority in parliament, Greece’s ruling conservatives have turned to Britain’s Scotland Yard for advice on how to tackle rising crime and extremism.

“If deemed necessary, the police may also turn to the U.S. and France for similar advice,” said the National Police spokesman, Panagiotis Stathis.

In other words, the Government, unpopular at home, will seek ratification abroad.

§ Vespers. Ms Newton’s surprise suggests that she may have forgotten Hilton Als’s “Critic at Large” piece in the January 29, 2001 issue of The New Yorker.

“No I can’t see Georgia,” she wrote in 1959 to a friend who had tired to arrange the introduction. “It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on — it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia.” One feels a sense of loss on reading this, not only because of what such a union might have produced but also because of the limitations of O’Connor’s time and place and the inevitable restrictions they placed on her art. Her regionalism was both a strength and a weakness; the emotional distance caused by her physical suffering was the axis on which both her comedy and her cruelty turned.

§ Compline. In 1944, writing to Natasha Spender in thanks for having been asked to be godmother to the Spenders’ coming child, Edith Sitwell wrote,

I hope I shall be a good godmother. I have managed to keep my seventeen-year-old nephew Reresby’s love and confidence. He trusts me, — and he has a very difficult life in some ways, poor child, through nobody’s fault. Anyhow, he talks to me with a feeling of safety and assurance…

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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