It will take a while, I expect, for a clear narrative to explain Jérôme Kerviel’s disastrous trades at SocGen. All we know now is that nobody can figure out how the young man contrived to hide his balloon of unauthorized bets. Well, we do know one other thing. It is mentioned in almost every news story, even though it has nothing to do with the wrongdoing. Mr Kerviel did not attend one of the Grandes Écoles — those redoubtable institutions that the Times this morning compared to Harvard and MIT. No; he attended a “business college in Lyon.” We all know that.

Isn’t it interesting that we all know that — that Mr Kerviel’s education (or lack of it) has been established as an integral part of his story? I wouldn’t want to be a French outsider trying to follow in the Breton clerk’s footsteps anytime soon, not while the portcullis of privilege, clattering shut even as we speak, bars entry to the Elysian fields of French advanced placement. It would be interesting to know the identity of the gatekeeper who made sure that early reports of SocGen’s losses gleamed with a detail that, however irrelevant, no journalist would be able to resist.

Who wouldn’t be a bleeding-heart liberal, writing in such cushy surroundings?

As a rule, I agree with the articles that inspire my Friday Fronts. This week’s ticked me off.

¶ George Packer on Hillary Clinton and “inspiration.”

In this month’s Harper’s, Ursula K LeGuin asks a very good question: why are big corporations interested in literary publishing? Why don’t they leave it alone? Click through to Portico, below, to read more.

Midway through her essay, Ms LeGuin discusses the “alternatives” to reading.

Of course books are now only one of the “entertainment media,” but when it comes to delivering actual pleasure, they’re not a minor one. Look at the competition. Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet.

Ahem. I make no claim to creativity here at The Daily Blague. But I daresay I’m as literate and reflective as the run of good, published books. Ms LeGuin, you need to get out more!

¶ Ursula K LeGuin on Books and Publishing, in Harper’s.

MP3    RSS

It’s official: 2008, according to the calendar that I got in Grand Street last night, is the Year of the Wedding.

We’re talking November. Sorry: they’re talking November.

Be happy.

The top of One Gracie Square, which presents two façades to Gracie Square (the easternmost block of 84th Street). Nice little terrace up there.

Yesterday, I put Christmas away. I removed the ornaments and the lights from the tree, which I single-handedly wombled into a very large plastic bag made for the purpose. As a result of this successful operation, I was able to transport the green but very dead tree to the freight elevator room without carpeting the corridor in fir. That was just the beginning, of course. Boxing up the decorations and sliding them back into their hard-to-get places took a few hours. The music that I listened to while I worked was distinctly un-seasonal: Schoenberg’s lush Gurre Lieder.

¶ James Wolcott on Books About Bush.

This spaniel, clearly too old (or disabled) to make any unnecessary moves, gazed at me with trademark mournfulness for quite a while before I responded by taking its picture. It had eyes for me only. Millennia of breeding made it impossible for me not to be warmed by such extravagant interest.

In November or December, I forget which, I watched Emmanuel Carrère’s La moustache. I had read the novel years and years ago. (Unsurprisingly, it took a while for the writer to make his own picture; the surprise was that he made it at all.) I wasn’t crazy about the book, and the movie, while quite a bit more engaging, was still too haunted by a paranoia that seemed forty or fifty years out of date. Accompanying the vivid camera work, however, was a striking score by Philip Glass: his Violin Concerto. The concerto, premiered in 1987, suited Mr Carrère’s story of a man who seems to have run through a bizarre temporal discontinuity (his father, much to his surprise, has been dead for two years, and his wife has no recollection of the moustache that he shaved off the night before). I wrote down the performance details as the final credits rolled by, and, sure enough, the soundtrack made use of the only recording, on Naxos. I ordered it from Amazon right away, but for some reason or other wasn’t in the mood to listen to it until last night.

The CD is a measure of how the classical music record scene has changed from what it was when I was a kid. When I was young, a performance by unknown artists on a budget label was extremely unlikely to be better than tolerable, and many were not even that good. Yet there is nothing less than first-rate about the Naxos offering, which features violinist Adele Anthony and the Ulster Orchestra under the direction of Takuo Yuasa. Ulster has an orchestra? Ulster has an orchestra that sounds this good? When I was young, the sound quality on an inexpensive recording would have been mediocre to awful — awful. The Naxos issue is clear as a bell and every bit as rich as it ought to be.

La moustache explores the fragility of the construct that we call the “self.” In my experience, this construct isn’t remotely fragile, but rather constituted of the grimmest granite. So inalterably stuck am I with the character that I wake up to every morning that the idea of a sudden singularity is more intriguing than frightening, as perhaps the reality would be, too. If I couldn’t dislocate my persona with a daily diet of LSD (senior year in college), then I’d like to know what kind of dynamite might have worked. One of the boons of growing older is that I no longer wish to escape an all-too familiar self; on the contrary, I’m prone to count my blessings, such as they are. But the notion that identity is tenuous doesn’t really sell in my vicinity. 

A very inadequate zoom shot of the top of York Avenue, with Harlem a blur in the distance.

There Goes My Everything, Jason Sokol’s study of the white response to the struggle for civil rights, appears at a time when I find myself coming round to the view that struggle for equal civil rights for black Americans fractured the United States at least as badly as many white supremacists feared that it would — in what turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. For a long time, as the dust seemed to settle, I stupidly wondered if the movement had been a success. A sense that its achievement was not altogether complete eventually gave way to a recognition that it was merely the opening assault in a war against patriarchy that the most fierce abolitionists may have been unwilling to undertake. “What Is Wrong With America Today”? The America that everybody professes to love and root for is as defunct as Colonial Williamsburg — and we all know it. We had better get to work on breathing some life into its successor.

¶ There Goes My Everything.

MP3    RSS

‘Tis the season to empty out cupboards and closets of seasonal boxes. And this year, we’re doing it!

These amiable creatures, representing characters from Alice in Wonderland and The Nutcracker, come from a midtown shop called The Gazebo, where you could have quilts made to order. (The shop is no longer with us.) Stuffed dolls make for odd Christmas tree ornaments — they’re a little on the large side, for one thing — but we’ve come to love them. One year, we even gave them their own small tree.

We’re much too low-key to do anything like that now.

Meanwhile, at the movies:

¶ Charlie Wilson’s War.

The Brearley School Playground

It is only in the past few weeks that I have seen schoolgirls on the absurd platform that used to do full duty as the Brearley School playground. (Now there’s a fieldhouse, quite close to my house, that’s shared by a handful of Upper East Side “ladies’ seminaries”). I really thought that the thing had been taken out of use.  What with all the ambiguous netting underneath, the structure does have a desperate air.

For some reason, I always took the playground to be a square, but it’s not — it’s really long enough to make a field for games. Little girls’ games, anyway. Every time I glance up at the youngsters, though, what I see is “recess” - variations on hanging out. Except that “hanging out” isn’t something that little girls do, is it? They’re not quite so brachiopod-ish.

These girls, anyway, are on the inside track to the top of the tree, if I may be permitted a fearfully mixed metaphor. How many of them will still live in New York when they grow up. And where in New York? On the Upper East Side, like the majority of their parents? And where will they shop? Where will anybody shop?

¶ The End of Retail Refinement.

MP3    RSS

Pierre Bayard’s book sounds, at least from the title, like a cute gimmick, but it turns out to be a deep book, one that, if you read it quietly, will change your idea of what it means “to read a book” — and demonstrate the large roles played by imagination and oblivion in “remembering” what you’ve read.  It’s fancy and it’s French, but it is as lucid and readily comprehensible as a Stop sign.

As in, “Stop worrying about all those books you haven’t read!”  

¶ How to Talk About You Haven’t Read.

MP3     RSS

A gate that never closes.

For a perfectly revolting good-ol’ boy metaphor, don’t miss what the charming Dean Allen has to say about how hard it is to tell which beardless brown-skinned furriners are here to wash dishes from the ones who are here to hijack planes.

Whoever owns the patent on Stupid Pills must be raking in the royalties.  

¶ Ryan Lizza on Anti-Immigration, in The New Yorker.  

MP3     RSS

For me, the most memorable moment in the original Poseidon Adventure that does not involve explosions, inundations, or other forms of mayhem is the one in which Reverend Scott (Gene Hackman) confronts the ship’s doctor. The doctor is leading a large group of survivors toward the bow of the ship, because in his view this is the way to safety. The fact that the bow is manifestly in deeper water than the stern means little to this visibly shell-shocked authority figure, and nothing that the reverend can say (or, more characteristically, shout) can dissuade him from his doomed course. He rejects the reverend’s goal (the engine room) out of hand.

Now that the subprime mortgage tsunami has left Wall Street wondering which way is up, the Reverend Scotts of this world – among them, the new president of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika — are looking less contrarian. But I fear that we still have a long way to go before we emerge from the Erector Set phase of free-market economic theory.

¶ Celia W Dugger on Malawi and the Free Market, in the New York Times.  

MP3    RSS

In the course of writing up Pierre Bayard’s How to Read Books You Haven’t Read, I needed (by my own lights) to check out a quotation from Montaigne. I can’t speak for the original, but the English translation offers extremely rudimentary annotation. The citations of Montaigne refer to Donald Frame’s mid-century translation, giving only the book’s title and a page number. The name of the essay in question would have been helpful. Although Frame’s translation has been revived for the Everyman’s Library edition, the pagination is evidently quite different. It took a while to discover that the essay that I wanted was one of Montaigne’s longest, “On Presumption.”

It was really quite shaming. Why don’t I know Montaigne – know him? Every time I open the Essays, I’m struck by his wise and sympathetic character. When he does not remind me of myself — “I flee command, obligation, and constraint. What I do easily and naturally, I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command.” — he makes his very flaws sound charming — “Of music, either vocal for which my voice is very inept, or instrumental, they never succeeded in teaching me anything.” His decent skepticism, and his insistence that the habit of putting himself at the center of Creation is a helpless vice that he bitterly regrets, mark him as astonishingly modern, far more up-to-date and congenial than men born hundreds of years later.  Even the peripatetic and unpredictable course of his discussions, innocent as they are of the rigors of Cartesian symmetry, breathes the free-for-all air of open possibility that our jaded sensibilities crave. Montaigne is by far the most ancient “authority” cited in M Bayard’s book.

As I lamented the disappointments of my own education, I read about Montaigne’s —

I gladly return to the subject of the ineptitude of our education. Its goal has been to make us not good or wise, but learned; it has attained this goal. It has not tuahgt us to follow and embrace virtue and wisdom, but has imprinted in us their derivation and etymology. We know how to decline virtue, if we cannot love it. If we do not know what wisdom is by practice and experience, we know it by jargon and by rote. With our neighbors, we are not content to know their family, their kindred, and their connections; we want to have them as friends and form some association and understanding with them. Education has taught us the definitions, divisions, and partitions of virtue, like the surnames and branches of a genealogy, without any further concern to form between us and virtue any familiar relationship and intimate acquaintance. It has chosen for our instruction not the books that have the soundest and truest opinions, but those that speak the best Greek and Latin; and amid its beautiful words, it has poured into our minds the most inane humors of antiquity.

— and it occurred to me that nothing could better complement the freshman art-history survey that used to be (and still is, I hope) the covert foundation of every student’s education in the humanities than a year (in two semesters) spent reading Montaigne. Nothing but Montaigne! Nothing but Montaigne, that is, and all the classical authors to which his Essays offer so inviting an introduction. The entire education, in other words, of a first-class Renaissance mind.

Montaigne isn’t much taught in English. Everybody gets an essay or two in the course of discovering essays (again, I hope that I speak for the present as well as the past), but the selection is necessarily narrowed to Montaigne at his most rational and least personal. And the focus of such lessons is always on the clarity of exposition; the essays are held up, after all, as models for students, not as personal reflections. Certainly Montaigne is not the backbone of liberal-arts education that he ought to be.

A year of Montaigne might be very boring for poor freshmen, but the stuff would almost certainly stick with them until better times.

Oscar Sosa/New York Times

The doctrine of Felony Murder is one of those troglodyte ideas that have come down to us from the Bad Old Days. It has been abolished in most of the other major Common Law markets (so to speak) — England in 1957; India and Canada thereafter. According to the aggressive version of this doctrine that holds in Florida, accessories to murder share full culpability. The guy who drives the getaway car, notoriously, is as guilty as the shooter.

Even the guy who lends the getaway car, it seems. If Adam Liptak’s story about Ryan Holle’s bad luck doesn’t put your bowels in an uproar, then you have no conscience.

Did I say “bad luck”? Ho ho! Could it be that Mr Holle, a black man, was unlucky to be charged with felony-murder in Florida?

Although I have no doubt that history will regard the Bush Administration as willfully, consciously, and even self-righteously lawless, I’m sometimes afraid that we will emerge from the nightmare (assuming that we do) without having learned very much what it means to be lawful. Only a very naive observer expects a sovereign executive to “follow the law” as a matter of course. Executives are not only forced to interpret the law at every turn, but they are also in sole possession of information about national affairs that necessarily colors their interpretations. Regardless of presidential devotion to the Constitution, the attempt to legislate the executive’s course of behavior will always be met with structural resistance,

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the impact of Vietnam upon my Boomer generation. This week, I’m reminded of a similar vintage, the unpopularity of Richard Nixon. Of all modern presidents, none is more likely to be judged in psychopathological terms: the man wasn’t “bad” so much as he was “sick.” The feeling that he had acted incompetently – not foolishly so much as beyond his powers – led Congress to try to clarify the margins of executive authority. One might as well, I fear, legislate the path of a particle in a cyclotron. Presidential authority is largely beyond our control because we want it to be.

This isn’t kindergarten. Changing the rules is never as simple or attractive as disregarding them. I think that we need a more grown-up understanding of what we expect from the law.

¶ David Cole on Jack Goldsmith, in the New York Review of Books.

MP3   RSS

Here’s a book that, I guarantee, will make you sit up. Here is a book that will reveal the secrets of your innermost psyche. All right, maybe not yours, but at least that of most Americans. On occasion, most of the French. Even a bit of the English and the Germans. What does everybody really feel about stuff? What do you look for in a car? In a cheeseburger? In a caravanserial interlocutor*?

This quick read will tell you.

¶ The Culture Code.

MP3 RSS

Clotaire Rapaille writes about “culture codes” with an enthusiasm that is almost always tempered by diplomacy: in the world of marketing, it does not pay to treat anyone with disrespect. There is one heartfelt lapse, however, a cri de coeur that will not endear the author to his (former) countrymen.

I was born in France, but like everyone else in the world, I had no choice of homeland. From the time I was very young, I knew that parts of the French culture failed to fit me properly. The French are extremely critical, they are pessimistic, they are jealous of what others have, and they put little value on personal success. When I told people there that I wanted to build a large business based on new ideas, they sneered and called me a megalomaniac.

The American culture seemed to offer so many of the things I wanted from life, especially in building a career. When I decided to emigrate, François Mitterand was president of France and he’d frozen the assets of any French citizen leaving the country. Therefore, when i went to New York, I had no money. I also had no place to live and my English was very poor. I’d come to America to do work on archetypes, and few people had any idea what I was even talking about.

I knew a few French immigrants in New York and I went to see them as soon as I arrived. They welcomed me, offering me a place to stay, some money, and the use of a car. When I told them about what I planned to do for a living, they encouraged me and told me they were sure I would succeed. As happy as I was to hear these words, the first thought that came to mind was “Are you sure you’re French?” These people, who’d been living in America for a few years, were utterly different from the French I knew in France. They were optimistic, helpful, generous, and enthusiastic about new opportunities. In other words, they were American. Yes, they’d embraced the American culture, but in addition, like me, they had many of these traits already and came here because they knew they would be surrounded by like-minded people. The French who were lazy and lacked imagination stayed in Europe. The ones with guts and determination came here. These people found “home” by moving elsewhere. Their homeland was an accident of birth; they found a permanent place to live when they left it to come to America.

Although I’m not lazy and don’t lack determination, I’m willing to give the French way a try, if it gets me a nice flat in the Seizième.

* Someone you pick up at a bar.

On the cover of the current issue of The Atlantic, there’s one of those great big portraits that’s composed of many much smaller images – except it isn’t; it just looks like one. In fact, it is an image of Barack Obama superimposed on a scrim of many much smaller images. Don’t ask me what they were thinking at the magaine, but the result suggests that they couldn’t be bothered to do it. And the headline – “Why Obama Matters – is even more wearisome. “Oh, that Atlantic,” I muttered to myself as I brought up the mail.

But although Andrew Sullivan can be shocking and even offensive, he is still a long way from boring or predictable. And his idea about Mr Obama is well worth mulling over.

¶ Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama, in The Atlantic.

MP3     RSS

Casting about for a Friday Front subject came to an end almost as soon as it began when I came across Michael Tomasky’s review of Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal. I can see you yawning from here: you already know what Mr Krugman has to say, and what Mr Tomasky has to say about it.

But, no: you don’t. I chose Mr Tomasky’s review because it was, against all likelihood, a surprise. I’m used to being on the same wavelength as Mr Krugman, but I didn’t know that the wavelength was quite so far-reaching.

¶ Michael Tomasky on Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books.

MP3     RSS

I hope that you’ll listen, because this PodCast inaugurates the embellishment of what in broadcasting are called an “intro” and an “outro.” Over the sound of Emmanuel Chabrier’s “Idylle” you’ll hear the clear and beautiful voice of this site’s principal booster, my dear Kathleen.

In her Huffington Post piece this morning, Nora Ephron complains that it is hard to be a Democrat these days. I agree with her, and I share her reasons for being a Democrat. But at the top of the list of “what’s wrong with Democrats today” I would put, not Hillary or Barack or John or anybody in Congress but – Democrats like Nora Ephron.

It’s hard to a Democrat these days because Democrats like Nora Ephron make me carry on as if I were David Brooks, and I hate that about me.

Sure, it would be nice to get an unequivocal denunciation of torture from the prospective attorney general – although I’m not sure that it would be entirely grown-up. “Unequivocal” and “lawyer,” see, are not words that belong in the same sentence, and it’s childish (and nothing but childish) to refuse to see that lawyers, including the Attorney General, are supposed to be equivocators. Michael Mukasey says that he doesn’t like waterboarding, but he refuses to tie his hands regarding agreements and contracts that he won’t be able to read until he’s actually Attorney General. Congressional Democrats who happen to be lawyers, just like lawyers across the board in the United States, have recognized the acceptability – the decency, even – of Mr Mukasey’s position. As Ms Ephron quotes Senator Charles Schumer as saying, Mr Mukasey is probably the best candidate that the Bush Administration is going to present to Congress. This is not a meaningless observation. In Alberto Gonzales, we saw the worst. There is a difference.

Except there isn’t, not to the Nora Ephrons. To moralistic Democrats, there is only one tiny shining issue, and it must be resolved before we can sleep at night. You would think it was 1968 – especially if, like me, you were there in 1968.

If I have stayed out of the Mukasey debate so far, though, it’s because I am offended – claiming even higher moral ground – that there are Democrats who put torture, which may be gravely immoral but which affects only a handful of people in uncertain situations, ahead of the economy, which affects everybody, especially including every child in the United States. The Bush Administration has done what it could to screw up the economy, but it has had a lot of help from Congress, from Wall Street, from the think tanks and the media – in short, from everyone who has stood up for unfettered free-market capitalism. The result is a looming financial meltdown – a seizing-up of the engines of market liquidity – accompanied by the collapse of two major investment banks, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. This is what we should be paying attention to right now – this and the blood-curdling fall of the dollar – not the scholasticisms of “torture.”

Once upon a time, during the New Deal that Ms Ephron claims to venerate, there was a piece of legislation that made it impossible to put “Citigroup” and “Merrill Lynch” in the same sentence. Citigroup was a commercial bank, while Merrill Lynch was a broker-dealer, and the Glass-Stegall Act of 1933 made sure, for sound hygienic reasons, that the twain did not meet. Before it was even repealed, Glass-Stegall was dismissed by the arrogance of Sanford Weill, the man who put Citigroup together in defiance of then-current law. My bet is that the saner heads at both embattled institutions – unlike Enron, Citigroup and Merrill are companies of enormous vitality and substance, and we can’t really afford to do without them – wish that they could scurry back behind what were essentially the protective prohibitions of the 1933 act.

Let’s talk about the New Deal, then. Let’s get off the high horses of Right and Wrong – leaving Jacobinism to the Republican rump – and roll up our sleeves about the economy. Can we manage to control it again, before it goes into the tailspin against which New Deal legislation provided such effective safeguards?

I wish that it were easier to put “Democrat” and “common sense” in the same sentence.

Catching up with magazines this week, I came across two pieces that, while no longer strictly current, seem worthwhile to look at together. One is Jim Holt’s essay, “It’s the Oil, Stupid,” in the next-most-recent – current on this side of the Atlantic – issue of the London Review of Books. The other, which appears in September’s issue of The Atlantic (I can’t find October’s anywhere, but I’ve got the big fat sesquicentennial issue*), is Matthew Scully’s outing of his fellow Bush-regime speechwriter, Michael Gerson, as a credit hog (“Present at the Creation“).

¶ Jim Holt and Matthew Scully on the American Press – Indirectly, in the London Review of Books and The Atlantic.

* Am I crazy to think that the only people who are truly comfortable with the word “sesquicentennial” were childhood philatelists?

MP3   RSS