Daily Office
Grand Hours
March 2011: Fifth Week
¶ Tyler Cowen divides humanity — past and present, if not future — into two “coalitions,” the rulers and the ruled. The rulers usually disagree among themselves, but they close ranks in union against uprisings of the ruled. This is good so far as it goes, but his placement of “modern Americans,” as a lump, among the rulers scrathes our complaisance. Surely there is a problematic third group, “the couch voters,” who want all of the benefits of power but shirk its responsibilities — especially the responsibility of assessing televised propaganda. (Marginal Revolution)
¶ Brian Dillon write about Roland Barthes so movingly that we came to feel that Barthes died of despair. The ostensible subject of the essay is his last book, Camera Lucida, “probably the most widely read and influential book on the subject” of photography. (Guardian; via The Morning News) ¶ Although Andrew Searle’s talk of “crisis” is annoying, his “Drain in Spain“ assessment of the visual arts in Catalonia, Galicia, and elsewhere seems well-informed, at least about one side of the story. (Guardian; via Arts Journal) ¶ They’re teaching Mad Men over at Regis High School. (Speakeasy)
Several universities like the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern have incorporated the series into their media studies curriculum, producing essay anthologies and holding academic conferences. Regis is helping to lead the way for high schools to take on the show and use it as a lens to view history.
¶ Felix Salmon has the sense to call what’s going on in Brazil — sorry; we’re talking about Adam Ross Sorkin’s gee-whiz piece in today’s Times, “In Brazil, No Room For Leverage at Buyout Firms” — venture capital, not private equity. ¶ Simon Johnson berates Spencer Bachus for claiming that Elizabeth Warren has been acting beyond her CFPB powers; but Yves Smith berates liberals for rushing to Ms Warren’s defense.
The key leverage point in this fight is not Warren; she’s become part of the problem. The leverage point is the attorneys general. Thus campaigns like CrimesShouldn’tPay and Credo’s “Jail Wall Street Crooks“, which organized calls to push the AGs to reject the settlement talks and to investigate the banks, are on the right track. Left-wing efforts to rally behind this Administration should be assumed to be wrongheaded until proven otherwise.
¶ While we agree with Robert Reich that the American economy’s health is not improving, but getting worse, we question the wisdom of his cold-water tone. “I’m sorry to have to deliver the bad news, but it’s better you know.” To the extent that economics is a confidence game, this is not helpful. We also believe that scolding is ineffective unless it is focused upon one individual or very small group of individuals. Scolding “Washington” is fatuous.
¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about the neuropsychopharmacy of the near-miss — and how casinos exploit this otherwise positive bit of wiring to our detriment. (The Frontal Cortex) ¶ At I, Cringely, an I-told-you-so note addressed to the TEPCO executives who dithered about plutonium containment at Fukushima.
¶ Laura Frey Daisley gave up snark for a month. She may just give it up, period. (Slate; via The Morning News)
Not giving voice to my flinty little put-downs also eliminated that weird guilt where you wonder if the person somehow heard you or found out what you said. I also stopped suspecting that anyone might be saying harsh things about me.
¶ Skiles Hornig writes about the desk that her husband would like her to get rid of, because an ex gave it to her. But it’s where she writes. (The Rumpus) ¶ At Salon, Drew Grant considers the dust-up over Big Al’s review of Jacqueline Howett’s self-published Kindle book, The Greek Seaman, and wonders about “people who have nothing to do all day than get into fights about grammar.” Big Al’s Books and Pals, a site that reviews indie fiction, was certainly given a boost. Â
¶ David Rieff has a long piece in The New Republic about the foolishness of dismissing Mexico as a “failed state” à la Pakistan. We hope that it will spark meditation, in thoughtful minds, about the idiocy of the American gun and drug laws that have inevitably nurtured the cartels that, Rieff fears, may brutalize Mexican society. (via The Morning News) ¶ Even Omar Ali, revisiting the topic, dismisses talk of Pakistan as a “failed state” à la Pakistan. What worries him now is the governments flirtation with a Chinese alliance. (3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Yan Xuetong has some interesting things to say about the revival of Confucian values in Chinese political discourse; we didn’t know, by the way, that the Chinese navy had dispatched ships to evacuate Chinese nationals from Libya. (Project Syndicate; via Real Clear World)
¶ Not exactly timely — perhaps the LRB wanted to herald the novel’s publication in paper — Pankaj Mishra’s excellent review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad places the book on very high ground and then considers its contents from an international point of view. There are many standout lines. “But there is no theoretical reason why abstraction should be incompatible with storytelling…” is one. Here’s another:
Remarkably for a writer of her generation (she was born in 1962), Egan seemed like an expatriate, looking back with biting irony at her fellow Americans and their insufficiently examined expectations of wealth, comfort, beauty and fame.Â
Scott Esposito refers us to Luc Sante’s rave review, in BookForum, of Geoff Dyer’s new book, a collection of previously published essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Sante calls Dyer “a first-class noticer,” but complains about some items that he calls “dutiful.” Scott disagrees, at least with regard to the piece on Atonement, which he calls “Â ingenious argument for a work you never would have expected him to get behind in a million years.” One mans gatherum is another’s omnium.
¶ Walking around the Old Town of Hannover, Justin E H Smith is drawn to make an arresting comparison, in an off-the-cuff entry entitled “When Buildings Stopped Talking To God,” between ancient Sanskrit inscriptions that are thought to have been addressed to the gods (not to mortals) and modern advertisements, which also “seem to be of no place.” (3 Quarks Daily)
¶ Happy Talk, Part Deux. (via MetaFilter)
¶ KMZT-FM returns to Los Angeles; experimenting with non-classical-music formats didn’t work. (LA Times; via Arts Journal) ¶ Richard Florida teases out some unsurprising but not uninteresting correlations between passport ownership and happiness, &c. (Atlantic)