¶ Matins: At the end of this very well-titled piece, “Waiting For Something To Turn Up: Europe’s Looming Pensions-based Sovereign Debt Crisis,” Edward Hugh writes a paragraph that describes Americans just as well, even if the foundation of our nightmare is more manifold. (A Fistful of Euros)

¶ Lauds: Anne Midgette writes about the varieties of excellence in artistic performance. (Washington Post)

¶ Prime: The fall of Lehman Brothers (the second fall of Lehman, actually; there was one in the Eighties as well) was marked by a weird offset of desperately shambolic accounting with what Chris Lehman calls a “Foucauldian regime of total marital surveillance.” (The Awl)

¶ Tierce: Both Jonah Lehrer and David Brooks approach Washington from an acutely anthropological angle, in “Personal Narratives” and “The Spirit of Sympathy.” One hopes that the cognitive lesson that both men touch on — with regard to almost anything that you choose to name, the specific/individual and the general/collective trigger entirely different psychological responses — will quickly pass into common understanding.

¶ Sext: The fun thing about Lady Gaga, we think, is the alacrity with which so many writers accept her status as a performance artist worthy of a museum installation — or at least of catalogue-gravity prose. What we’d really like to hear more about is Ms Germanotta’s education, formal and otherwise. How has a young woman come to seem so knowing? Oscar Moalde swoons. (The House Next Door)¶ Nones: Christopher Hitchens on Benedict XVI: predictably but enjoyably sulphurous. (Slate; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Vespers: At The Second Pass, Alexander Nazaryan interviews Donald Pease, the Dartmouth Professor who has just written a Life of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Who knew that Dr Seuss went to Dartmouth? That he drew Jewish caricatures to compensate for having been thought (erroneously) to be Jewish by a Dartmouth fraternity. Who knew? Well, we didn’t.

¶ Compline: Glenn Kenny has a good winge about the non-future of (paid) film criticism. (ARTicles; via Arts Journal)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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