Daily Office
Grand Hours
Saturday, 15 January 2011
¶ Tyler Cowen ticks off a list of the factors that make France a “highly dynamic and performative economy.” Item Number One: “ The French elite work very hard and are educated very well.” We could not agree more heartily, and if we have any purpose in the world it’s to prick members of the American/Anglophone elite into recognizing the importance of a rigorous education and the value of cooperative industry. Tyler also mentions what he terms “the prevailing norms of status competition” twice. We turn this around anc call it “the importance of setting a good example.” We are inclined to agree that the choice of acceptable examples in France is regrettablylimited; we believe that living happily, generously, and attentively can be attained in many different ways.  ¶ Don’t miss Jeremy Waldron on the political virtues of hypocrisy, at the LRB. The piece is behind the paywall, unfortunately, but that’s a good reason for buying a copy of the Review or, better, suscribing. In our view, it’s one of the three indispensable magazines, the others being The New Yorker and the NYRB. We’ll have more to say about hypocrisy during the week.
¶ The all-too-familiar conflict of artists and nationalists is simmering in Hungary. Conductor Adam Fischer (whose recordings of Haydn symphonies ought to be in your library) alerted journalists in Brussels to the seriousness of intrusions by the current conservative government into artistic affairs, which extends to tolerating anti-Semitic atttacks on pianist András Schiff, who has announced that, as a “persona non grata” in Hungary, he has no plans to revisit his native land, much less perform there. The great European experiment that remains to be undertaken is the decoupling of nationalist impulses from the exercise off sovereignty; short of that, “Europeanism” is just a lot of well-intentioned chatter. (Independent; via ArtsJournal)
¶ A tale of two temperaments: Floyd Norris’s scolding reproof to Charles Schwab & Company boils into outrage in Felix Salmon’s pages. Mr Norris has a reluctance, not shared by Mr Salmon, to accuse Schwab of lying, but it’s hard to know what else to call the fine-print borne mendacity of Schwab’s sales literature. No doubt that good people at Schwab expected, just like everybody else, that the market would continue to boom, and that nobody would mind; just as bankers confected huge volumes of mortgage-backed securities in order to minimize the appearance of risk, so Schwab sliced and diced the meaning of “maturity.” ¶ At The Baseline Scenario, Simon Johnson shows that Goldman, Sachs is far more suave at “misdirection.” Then he goes on to point out the increasingly apolitical cast of regulators and economist who argue that banks too big to fail are too big to be permitted.
¶ At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait notes that Salon has removed “an antivax hit piece” from its archives. Better, he suggests — and we couldn’t agree more — to leave the story in the archives, embedding it with links to stories that got the the anti-vaccination fraudernaut right from the get-go. ¶ We thought of Adam Fenwick-Symes when we read that European Commission tax officials have declared that lighting installations by Dan Flavin and Bill Viola’s video installations ought to be taxed as appliances instead of as art. This is molto dumb! Josh Rothman reminds us that the Customs Court here in New York was persuaded to reach the opposite conclusion vis-à -vis Brancusi’s Bird in Flight.
¶ Rebecca O’Neal writes about her hobby: requesting samples from consumer-products manufacturers.
In a good week, I’ll get over a half dozen samples: diapers and baby formula for my niece, magazine subscriptions, pads and tampons (!), laundry detergent, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, perfume, post-it notes, pens, vitamins, calendars, mouse pads, ziploc and trash bags, dog food, medicine, human food (mostly grains and instant beverages: health food bars, cereal, tea, coffee, protein supplements), calendars, subscriptions to Rouge, Ebony, and American Baby magazines, toothpaste, stickers, key chains, bumper stickers, condoms, and lube — pretty much all the things a single gal could need. And plenty of things I have no use for: a year’s subscription to MotorBoating and Dime magazines, anti-ball chafing salves, and, of course, the Dependsâ„¢
If you want to get things faster, she advises, write to retailers instead of manufacturers. Procter & Gamble, not surprisingly, has a subscription setup, so that you have to ask only once! Ms O’Neal recycles most of her loot among family, friends, and a neighborhood nursing home. If we ever decide to stop buying books but miss receiving all the packages, we’re going to remember this pastime! (The Awl) ¶ The greatest thing about our friend Eric (or so we feel right now) is that he will come out and admit to having wanted to change his name to “Eric Sèvres-Babylone” when he first passed through that station of the Métro. We’re so glad to hear that he had a good time in Paris, se débrouillant with the best of them. (Sore Afraid)
¶ In the Times Magazine, Paul Krugman prognosticates about the Euro, which is going to make life very difficult for the overheated peripheral economies of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, and also for Spain and Italy, as they attempt attempt deflation as to prices and wages without, however, being able to adjust their Euro-denominated indebtedness. Mr Krugman outlines four options: toughing it out; debt repudiation; withdrawal from the Euro Zone; and, least likely of all, “revived Europeanism.” We confess to being cranks on the subject; we believe that each local economy ought to have its own currency. (An idea that we got from Jane Jacobs.) We’re also intrigued by the parallel currencies in Renaissance Florence that Tim Parks describes in Medici Money. One way or another, local economies and the global economy must be connected by adjustable gears, not by bolts.
¶ Once you’ve heard Gary Shteyngart read, you see him for the entertainer that he is and claims to want to be; reading him on the page is a diminished experience of his mordant critique of American despair. (His word for that despair is “complacency,” the complacency that ensues when you no longer care about anything anymore.) We don’t want to suggest that this dependence, for full effect, on soundtrack makes Shteyngart a less literary figure, but we don’t know what else to suggest, either. His interview with Alex Shephard at Full Stop is a delight. (via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ In a grand long read at the Guardian, Laura Miller singles Shteyngart out (along with Jennifer Egan) as a rare fictionist who writes about the impact of the Internet on daily life.
¶ Kyle Minor meditates on the inappropriateness of politically-correct controls in literary life. He’s thinking, of course, of the expunging of the “N-word” from a new edition of Huckleberry Finn — a misguided but harmless editorial decision, in our view, at least so long as there are accurate edition of Mark Twain’s strange book. The simple truth, as Kyle clearly sees, is that people think of themselves in politically incorrect ways that can’t be captured without recourse to the proscribed vocabulary. But what’s needed is a signpost at the gate of literature that warns readers not that they might encounter offensive language but that they’re joining a community of human beings, many dead and many yet to be born, who test life against the imagination (their own and others’), and that they’ll be expected to keep their voices down until they understand that project. ¶ Elsewhere at HTMLGiant, Kyle interviews Elizabeth Harris, a translator from the Italian whose authors, Giulio Mozzi and Marco Candida, sound worth getting to know; and writes movingly of the comfort to be drawn in hard times from uncomfortable books:
The contemplation of death is for some people this great terror, and the best reading is often full of the contemplation of death, and so they stave off the contemplation of death by choosing the lostness of a contemplation of the contemplation of death.
¶ “So You Found Something Cool on the Internet…” (Rosscott, Inc; via Brain Pickings)
¶ Mieke Meijer @ The Best Part.
¶ La Tour Montparnasse. (Mnémoglyphes)
¶ Yves Smith’s “must-read” list, and why she doesn’t think much of NPR’s. (Naked Capitalism)
“Please Don’t Misinterpret My Inflammatory Remarks.” (The Bygone Bureau)