Daily Office
Grand Hours
March 2011: Third Week
¶ Sarah Firisen doesn’t say anything that we haven’t said a proverbial thousand times, but her exasperation with public education in the United States has a rousing edge that put a spring in our step. We’re very glad that she brings up Finland and Singapore and South Korea, because we believe that most public-school teachers ought to be recent honors graduates of the nation’s top colleges and universities, “giving back” two or three postgraduate years. (3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, three writers cope with the Tiger Mom phenomenon and its afterglow. Sandra Tsing Lo concedes that Amy Chua makes her feel like a slouch, and quotes a “report” on owls by her eight-year-old that, even she has to acknowledge, is “terrible”; Caitlin Flanagan just about sticks her tongue out, in “The Ivy Delusion,” and scolds that she has been issuing warnings about Tiger Mom-ism for ages (“I know a lot of social workers who would be very interested to learn of a 7-year-old forced, as Lulu once was, to sit at the piano, apparently for hours, without water or even a bathroom break.”); Christina Schwarz reflects on Robert Paul Smith’s newly reissued 1957 best-seller, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing, and reminds us that children believe that adults should be seen little and heard less.
¶ Woody Allen talks to the Guardian about his loved ones. “They love me and are supportive in a meaningful way but they are very critical of what they would euphemistically call an eccentric. Although they think it’s worse than an eccentric, it really is much more like an idiot savant.” We know people who still won’t see his movies because of the scandal (almost twenty years old!). We’ve only seen You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger once, and we found it — dark. But we’re going back for Naomi Watts. ¶ Arthur Laurents has withdrawn permission for Barbra Streisand to star in a film of Gypsy. The reason he gives may not be the real one, but we applaud it, and its source, Stephen Sondheim. (Hartford Courant; via Arts Journal)
He recently spoke with the musical’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, who asked Laurents why he wanted to allow the film project to happen. “He said, ‘What is the point of it?’ And I said, ‘They have this terrible version with Rosalind Russell wearing those black and white shoes.’ And then Sondheim told me something that he got from the British — and it’s wonderful. He said, ‘You want a record because the theater is ephemeral. But that’s wrong. The theater’s greatest essence is that it is ephemeral. You don’t need a record. The fact that it’s ephemeral means you can have different productions, different Roses on into infinity.’
¶ A reporter from Chicago, Blair Kamin, takes a look at the Dallas Arts District, which remains very much a work-in-progress so far as the people part is concerned.
¶ Edward Hugh projects the economic consequences of the earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan, and surmises that it may mark an era — the end of the “Modern Growth Era,” a period somewhat paradoxically opened by another catastrophe, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.¶ At The Economist, we learn about a 2002 study showing that the “bonus” effect of natural diasters (rebuilding invigorates the economy, &c) does not occur when the upset is “geological.” (via Marginal Revolution) ¶ Meanwhile, Joshua Brown talks about his small-cap Japanese ETF investments, which have been doing nicely. We couldn’t follow his remarks about Sell Stop Limit orders, but we’re assured by experts that they’re not nonsense. (The Reformed Broker) ¶ Felix Salmon rehearses the reasons against sending relief money to specific countries; better to trust the discretion of organizations such as Médecins sans frontières.
¶ Bob Cringely brings good tidings of the Toshiba 4S (Super Safe Small and Simple) nuclear reactors, just right for a substation near you.
4S reactor cores are like nuclear building blocks, built on a factory production line and transported by truck to be installed 30 meters under the ground. Each 4S puts out 10 megawatts of electricity or enough for 2000 Japanese homes. Following this path means the lost 1000 megawatt reactors will need 100 4S’s each to replace them or a total of 1200 4S reactors. 4S’s are fueled at the factory, put in place to run for 20 years then returned to the factory for refueling. They are sodium-cooled and pretty darned impossible to melt down. If the cooling system is compromised they automatically shut down and just sit there in a block of sodium.
¶ For those who still think in terms of conventional nuclear power plants, Yves Smith concludes her piece, “Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?” with another question: “And if you argue against it, what energy/economic strategy do you recommend in its place?”
¶ How nice it is, as Confucius might have said, when one blogger whom we follow writes about another. Kyle Minor recently read all of Alexander Chee’s Koreanish, falling into it as if it were a book — a book without an end; a book with its end in its beginning. ¶ Bess Levin does a jerk a favor and lets him go nameless in her high-larious response to an article entitled “Sexless and the City.” You have to wonder what paid journalists are being paid to do, exactly. (Make Viagra-popping editors feel better about ageing?) “Capitalism has replaced sex”? Nate Freeman must be new to this — any “this” you care to specify. (Dealbreaker) ¶ Felix Salmon enumerates the ways in which good blogging beats traditional journalism.
The main impact I think is the way that blog reporting can iterate. In traditional media, you report the story and then you publish it; with blogs, you can start with something much less fully formed and then come back at it over time in many ways and from many angles. Every print journalist knows the feeling of publishing a story which is read by great sources who then provide lots of really good information which would have been great in the original piece. Bloggers don’t worry about that: they just put up a new post, or an update.
Blogs can also geek out in a way that traditional journalists can’t. There’s no space constraint online, and so if I want to spend 5,000 words writing about vulture funds, or a reporter at HuffPo wants to spend 4,000 words getting into the weeds of regulatory reform, they can. Or look at the Ars Technica reviews of every new Macintosh operating system. That kind of material can be incredibly popular, but it just doesn’t work in print. Blogs have a reputation for being superficial, but they can also be much more detailed and accurate than traditional journalism. Not to mention the fact that they’re often written by genuine experts in their fields, rather than by journalists.
¶ In The New Yorker, David Remnick urges the Obama Administration to stop waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu to have his Nixon moment regarding a Palestinian state. We’re all for that. What surprised was the bit toward the end about the “unforeseeability” of the Palestinian crisis ‘way back in 1967.
One of the myths of Israeli history is that only a few intellectuals on the left could see, in the wake of the 1967 war, that a prolonged occupation of Palestinian lands would be a moral and political calamity. In fact, records of the first cabinet meeting after the war show that the Justice Minister, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, said, “In a time of decolonization in the whole world can we consider an area in which mainly Arabs live, and we control defense and foreign policy? . . . Who’s going to accept that?â€
What’s surprising is that such a “myth” could ever have taken root.
¶ At the tender age of 69, Paul Theroux contemplates the autobiography, and shivers. The only literary one that he approves of is Trollope’s, and look what that did to the celebrated novelist’s reputation! Nobody read Trollope for decades! Theroux finds a more practical model in Dickens. (Smithsonian; via MetaFilter)
The more I reflect on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel. The immediate family is typically the first subject an American writer contemplates. I never felt that my life was substantial enough to qualify for the anecdotal narrative that enriches autobiography. I had never thought of writing about the sort of big talkative family I grew up in, and very early on I developed the fiction writer’s useful habit of taking liberties. I think I would find it impossible to write an autobiography without invoking the traits I seem to deplore in the ones I’ve described—exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction. Therefore, I suppose my Copperfield beckons.
¶ Charles-Adam Foster-Simard writes about binge-reading Henry James for a course in the UK, making us glad that we are no longer young. Although his piece bears signs of binge-writing, it’s clear that our reader has gathered the essentials, and is now prepared simply to enjoy Henry James. He also provides yet another indication that Colm TóibÃn’s The Master — which we read after we knew all about James — is an effective and alluring portal to James’s great novels. ¶ Also at The Millions: Lydia Kiesling doesn’t argue the point; she just comes out and says that Lolita is “the ne plus ultra of the novel form.”
¶ At The Best Part, designer Jason Dean makes an important plea, and cautions his colleagues against fashioning Japan-relief posters from disaster porn. “As poster designers, it is our duty to create something that functions beyond a simple depiction of a disaster and inspires empathy or even action on the part of the audience.” Well said! ¶ Richard Crary rambles, but we’re always glad to ramble with him, because the beginnings of his ideas are like buds in March. On him, they look good. Now he explains why his blog is called The Existence Machine. The following passage, from the end of the essay, is perhaps a bit over the top — people are always saying “capitalism” when they mean something else, something that doesn’t have a name — it has the rawness of a fine spring day.
I resist the strong tendency in this tradition to see life itself as the misery. I wish rather, writing as the father of a beautiful little girl, to celebrate life. It is, at times, easy to do that. All I have to do is be in her company for a few minutes, and life is great. Life is great. But it doesn’t take long, when away from her, when commuting, when reading about the problems of the world, to despair about the future world that awaits her. And I thus write with sadness and anger as I consider, as I often must, the death cult that is capitalism, its continued encroachment on and destruction of the natural world, and the immanent disaster “into which science has led us and abandoned us”.
¶ Andrew Woolner, from Yokohama, reminds us that, even in Japan, the world has not come to an end. (A Perfect Lover Has No Memory; via Mnémoglyphes)
¶ Kottke.org turns ten. ¶ 650 Quilts (@ Design Observer) ¶ Boris Smelov’s photographs. (ARTCAT)
¶ One world traveler’s list of Philippine quirks. (via Marginal Revolution) ¶ “A Century of Meat” — chicken used to be special. (NYT) ¶ Gordon Lish Bibliography. (HTMLGiant)