Republicans and big-bizmos are blowing their tops, now that they’ve been denied permission to do the same to West Virginia. “Agency Revokes Permit for Major Coal Mining Project.”

The boldness of the E.P.A.’s action was striking at a time when the agency faces an increasingly hostile Congress and well-financed business lobbies seeking to limit its regulatory reach. Agency officials said that the coal company was welcome to resubmit a less damaging mining plan, but that law and science demanded the veto of the existing plan.

Environmentalists welcomed Thursday’s decision. But the mining company and politicians in West Virginia expressed fury, saying the action was an unprecedented federal intrusion, an economic catastrophe for the state and a dangerous precedent for all regulated industries.

The project would have involved dynamiting the tops off mountains over an area of 2,278 acres to get at the rich coal deposits beneath. The resulting rubble, known as spoil, would be dumped into nearby valleys, as well as the Pigeonroost Branch, the Oldhouse Branch and their tributaries, killing fish, salamanders and other wildlife. The agency said that disposal of the mining material would also pollute the streams and endanger human health and the environment downstream.

We hope that Jonathan Franzen will issue a statement. (In the form of a New Yorker essay.)

Robin Pogrebin accompanies Robert Caro to a rehearsal of Robert Moses Astride New York, a new opera by Gary Fagin that was inspired, obvs, by Mr Caro’s big book of 1974, The Power Broker.

To be sure, the musical is considerably less comprehensive than Mr. Caro’s 1,286-page 1974 book, “The Power Broker,” which follows Moses’ career as city parks commissioner and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. “Robert Moses Astride New York” moves through major chapters of history in just a few stanzas, and the piece to be performed Saturday is only a sampling of what the composer, Gary Fagin, ultimately hopes will become a full-fledged production featuring additional characters like the neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. Saturday’s concert will feature the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra (Mr. Fagin is its music director and conductor), which will also perform classics by American composers like Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein and Bob Dylan.

At a piano rehearsal the other day the work sounded like an opera. It is sung through, performed by a booming tenor (Rinde Eckert), and there are no dance numbers. And Mr. Caro understandably seemed a little self-conscious, seeing it in the intimate setting of a music studio, sitting in a single straight-back chair, with only a reporter and a photographer joining him as audience. Even as Mr. Caro was observing the performance, he was being observed by them, not to mention Mr. Fagin and Mr. Eckert, who were pretty psyched to have him there.

[snip]

“All the time I was writing it, people were saying, ‘Who’s going to read a book about Robert Moses?’ because he was already being forgotten,” he added. “I said, ‘People will read this book, if I can do it right,’ and it mattered to me that the book went on beyond a couple of years. I didn’t want just one generation to know it.

“Now here they are, singing about him. It’s transmuting itself into another form of art. You feel, in a way, you did it, what you set out to accomplish.”

New lines for “New York, New York”: “If I can make Moses sing/I can do anything!”

In response to my entry, last week, about Colm Tóibín’s story, “Barcelona, 1975,” my friend Ellen Moody wrote,

The reality is fiction is free: for some writers it’s not limited to states of mind or whatever we as readers like to read about. It may give Toibin great pleasure to re-enact the sex act as it may other readers. I agree with your response but know it’s just one. The story is interesting because in The South the narrator is a painter who goes to Barcelona and creates a life with a man — so there is autobiographical content in South. 

Something about Ellen’s comment — the idea that a a writer might re-enact a sexual encounter by writing about it  — woke me up to something about reading novels and stories, which most people consider a perfectly private thing. I do not. I am never alone when I read fiction. I am quite conscious of reading in a gathering — a gathering of other readers and writers past, present, and future. I may not have any distinct names in mind (although when I read Colm Tóibín’s fiction I always think of Henry James, and I wonder what The Master would think of it), but I am in company. And that’s why I’m a bit squeamish about plumbing — by which I mean not only sexual sensations but gastro-intestinal ones as well. There is something about obtrusive organic processes that breaks down the self, and this diminishment is embarrassing in a crowd. Especially now that we’re all so much more candid about memoir, and can publish just about every fact from our past, I want fiction to capture life not at its most intense but at its most aware. (That is certainly the lesson of The Master!) I have no objection to a blow-by-blow-by-blow account of Tóibín’s erotic life in Barcelona, so long as it’s fact, and includes all the heartbreak that the writer strains from his stories. But when it comes to fiction, I would prefer not to read about anything that Tóibín wouldn’t be doing in my presence.

(What about crime fiction? Perhaps this is what genre means: the simulation, by a quickened pulse, of someone else’s plumbing.)

“The Street,” as I said last week, is another story. The Master might wrinkle his nose here and there, but it would be only fair of him to concede that “The Street” is a masterpiece of feeling intensified by disciplined point of view. It is not so much that we see what Malik, a poor Pakistani migrant worker recently brought to Barcelona, sees as that we touch it through his words. Because Malik’s language has no correlative of “gay” or “lover” or even “romance,” his description of what we would call an affair is altogether free of shorthand. Without handy but hackneyed keywords, Malik’s awareness of his attachment to Abdul (another migrant) is unself-conscious. He knows that it is considered “bad” to have such feelings for another man, but this makes him careful, not guilty. It also makes him confused, doubly: he not only doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but he also has no idea how it ought to happen. It’s as though Tóibín were describing a natural dancer learning his first steps.

The story’s brief moment of “graphic sex” is essential precisely because it is discovered, and the discovery changes everything for the two men, quite badly at first, as you would expect, but then for the better. It is never made clear why the leaders of the Pakistani community decide to grant Malik and Abdul a measure of privacy, but this is world (not unlike the writer’s Ireland) where humane kindness is tempered by the withholding of explanation, tantamount to denial. Malik and Abdul are not to forget that their love is suffered. The story ends on a transfigured note.

But all of that was hours away, the hours after darkness fell. Now it was still bright. And all Malik wanted was for this walk to go on, for him to say nothing more and for Abdul to leave a silence too, for both of them to move slowly by the big strange bronze fish, both of them looking at the tossed sand and the small waves breaking and being pulled out again, out to sea. Both of them were on their afternoon off, away from all the others, away from the street; both of them were slowly walking away from everything as though they could, but not minding too much when they had to turn back and face the city again. Brushing against each other, they both knew that they could do that only once or twice, and only when no one was watching them.

That’s more like it.

In our view, nothing exemplifies the anti-social strain of American life more bitterly than the fact that the possession of handguns is debated, much less permitted. Nicholas Kristof reminds us that handguns don’t even make sense as safety features.

A careful article forthcoming in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine by David Hemenway, a Harvard professor who wrote a brilliant book a few years ago reframing the gun debate as a public health challenge, makes clear that a gun in the home makes you much more likely to be shot — by accident, by suicide or by homicide.

The chances that a gun will be used to deter a home invasion are unbelievably remote, and dialing 911 is more effective in reducing injury than brandishing a weapon, the journal article says. But it adds that American children are 11 times more likely to die in a gun accident than in other developed countries, because of the prevalence of guns.

Likewise, suicide rates are higher in states with more guns, simply because there are more gun suicides. Other kinds of suicide rates are no higher. And because most homicides in the home are by family members or acquaintances — not by an intruder — the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of a gun murder in that home.

We’re hoping that there’s more where Randy Kennedy‘s story came from: we’re already crazy about Mark Landis, the amateur forger who dresses up like a priest and presents small-town museums with “family bequests.”

Unlike most forgers, he does not seem to be in it for the money, but for a kind of satisfaction at seeing his works accepted as authentic. He takes nothing more in return for them than an occasional lunch or a few tchotchkes from the gift shop. He turns down tax write-off forms, and it’s unclear whether he has broken any laws. But his activities have nonetheless cost museums, which have had to pay for analysis of the works, for research to figure out if more of his fakes are hiding in their collections and for legal advice. (The Hilliard said it discovered the forgery within hours, using a microscope to find a printed template beneath the paint.)

The authenticity of art is one of our favorite bugaboos. In truth a work’s authenticity has nothing to do with who made it.

What would it be like, I can only wonder, to be eighteen or twenty-one today (instead of sixty-three), and to have just read “Social Animal,” David Brooks’s little fable in this week’s New Yorker. Even harder to grasp is what it is going to be like for my grandson, who is going to grow up in the aftermath of the cognitive revolution that forms the backbone of Brooks’s tale.

A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over reason, of social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

I’m wholly on board with this new story; I’ve spent the past ten or fifteen years coming to understand it — and experience that has oddly reminded me of Plato’s theory of knowledge. Plato thought that learning was actually a form of remembering (he believed in reincarnation), and the new story that Brooks outlines seems more familiar to me with every time I learn a new detail. I say “oddly,” though, because the new story reduces Plato’s intellectual accomplishment to rubble. What a waste of time it was, laboring under the notion that “man is a rational animal.” The notion, rather, that man’s “rationality” is what’s important and distinctive about him. How typical of the old story to talk of “man” in the singular, and to compare him to other creatures. The new story compares people, asking, earnestly, “Who’s happy?”

Plato’s ideas about human nature may range from the mistaken to the bizarre (they are certainly misanthropic), but it is in his methods that the seeds of his undoing lie. It is not hard to imagine the appeal of his teaching, at least in ancient times. Irrationality is frightening and painful, as anyone in the throes of unrequited love can attest. And it is thanks to the tradition of systematic clear thinking that Plato began that today’s researchers are able to study the unconscious: the cognitive revolution is nothing but the deployment of what we call “science” to the study of its place of origin, the human mind.

Off all the things that the cognitive revolution is bound to change, education comes in at the top of the list, or very near it.

Scientists used to think that we understand each other by observing each other and building hypotheses from the accumulated data. Now it seems more likely that we are, essentially, method actors who understand others by simulating the responses we see in them.

It doesn’t sound very interesting to say that man is a social animal (one of many), but it’s going to be the cardinal virtue to bear that in mind. We’re going to be more vitally conscious that happiness is mediated by society — by civilization, itself — and that it is for most post people wholly unobtainable in solitude. (Even in solitude, men and women keep company with the society of ideas that they’ve acquired at other times.) The model of education that is centered on a periodic examination of individual skills will be seen to be as intrinsically useless as most people instinctively think that it is. What fun it will be, at last, to go to school!

 

It may seem divinely foreordained that MySpace would wither in the shadow of Facebook’s triumph — now — but Tim Arango‘s story suggests that the old social site might have done better without Rupert Murdoch’s idiosyncratic brand of support.

Mr. Murdoch was an early champion of the site and its founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. He would have them to his ranch in Carmel, Calif., for long chats about the future of media, and often intervened personally to help them navigate the News Corporation’s hierarchy so decisions could be made quicker, according to a former executive who demanded anonymity so he could maintain his business relationships.

In 2007, when Mr. Murdoch set his sights on Dow Jones and its prize, The Wall Street Journal, his attention was diverted from what had been his obsession, nurturing MySpace.

The calls to Mr. DeWolfe and Mr. Anderson for impromptu beers at a bar near the News Corporation’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters became less frequent, as did Mr. Murdoch’s help in cutting through the bureaucracy.

Another early sign of the culture clash was the News Corporation’s decision — which executives publicly complained about at the time — to move MySpace’s offices from Santa Monica, where employees worked in a loft space and had access to countless restaurants and coffee shops, to a building in Beverly Hills that was originally intended to be a medical facility. There were many fewer restaurants nearby, and employees began leaving work early to eat, and not returning until the next day.

How typically Murdoch, to think that Beverly Hills is cooler than Santa Monica.

At the risk of being irritatingly jocular, that’s what we propose for Anthony Tommasini, if he carries out his threat to drop Haydn from his unnecessary and wrong-headed attempt to compile a “top 10” list of classical composers. Even if, in the process, he’s making useful observations right and left, cramming the essentials of what used to be called “music appreciation” into three paragraphs.

Haydn, who was widely celebrated during the 200th anniversary of his death in 2009, is often called the father of the symphony, as it came to be known. I’d throw in the father of the string quartet and the piano sonata. Haydn was a pioneer in figuring out how to write a sizable multimovement instrumental piece that sounded organized and whole, an entity. The system of sophisticated tonal harmony had developed to the point where a genius like Haydn could figure out how to process themes and manipulate major and minor keys to dramatic effect throughout the many sections of a long work.

Moreover, Haydn was the first great master of what is called motivic development, in which bits and pieces of music — a few notes, a melodic twist, a rhythmic gesture — become the building blocks for an entire symphony in several movements.

Haydn passed on this technique to his recalcitrant student Beethoven, who, for all his notions of having invented himself, was deeply indebted to Haydn. Beethoven took the technique of motivic development even further. If you were going to make a case for Beethoven as the greatest composer in history, you would base it on his ability to make a long work, like the “Eroica” Symphony, seem like a musical monument in motion. For all the episodic shifts and turns of this piece, as it plows through four dramatically contrasting movements, most of the music is generated from a handful of motifs that you hear at the beginning.

But be sure to watch the video in which Tommasini illustrates his notion that the rondo from K 311 reminds him of the back-and-forth between Susanna and Figaro. It’s delightful.

If you want to know why Julia Child and Avis DeVoto got to be such good friends long before they actually met, the answer is very simple: both were tireless correspondents. No slouch in this department myself, I feel like a total piker every time I finish one letter and begin the next. These unflagging typists wrote at length! They also wrote very well, and you forget from time to time that they are writing off the tops of their heads, not for publication in the book that you hold in your hand.

But it’s this generosity at the keyboard that cemented their bond, not kindred spirits. I’m not at all sure that they would have become good friends had they started off face-to-face; although generally sympathetic, they were very not on the same track at all. Avis DeVoto was happy to be a devoted wife and mother; Julia wanted to Do Something. There was something of the hipster about Avis, a breeziness that might have sat very poorly with Julia’s good-humored earnestness. Here, for example, is Avis’s retort to Julia’s fondness for pigeonholing people:

I think you are carrying this Upper Middle Brow etc. thing too far, my good girl. I told you I distrust categories and I am pleased that Paul does too. It is too pat and all-inclusive, and if I know anything at all it is that there are no final answers to anything, and the older I get the less I know and the less final the answers are. It’s just possible, you know, that those upper middle class Republicans you distrust may have some answers that are better than we eggheads have. Could be. You can only approximate — and if you can do that occasionally you’re in luck. I condemn all kinds of Republican thinking, but really I know better, because I’m continually being surprised by the good things about these people. And I’ve been living in the pockets of the intellectuals for thirty years and some of them are the awfullest fools. If I could write I would write a book called the “Care and Feeding of Intellectuals.” There aren’t any more final answers about how people’s minds work than there are about how their marriages work. I used to think, in my innocence, that there were some awfully well-adjusted people who got on together like a house afire most of the time. Well, there aren’t. Or if there are I never met them. All you have to do is know them well enough to find out how things really are. In the family I bet on for years and years — four wonderful children, a fine position in the community,  great sympathy between husband and wife — it turns out (and this I might mistake but B. never makes mistakes like that) the husband has got definite strong homosexual tendencies though I doubt if he has faced them, and the wife is a mass of well-concealed panic. They function damn well, but at what a cost. Thoreau was quite right, you know. It turns me into a mush about the human race, I love them all so much. I am quite sure I could never love McCarthy, but I suppose I could love Eisenhower, the poor boob.

As I see it, DeVoto and Child were brought together by the extended correspondence course in one another’s personalities that they conducted for two years before they met, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Speaking of which, there’s an interesting ambiguity in Joan Reardon’s introduction to the second chapter of her edition of the letters, which recounts the women’s meeting, which was nothing at all like the scene in Julie & Julia; the Childs arrived at the DeVotos’ in the middle of a cocktail party.

As Avis recalled in a short unpublished remembrance of Julia, Bernard was trying to finish a book and wanted no part of Avis’s plan to have guests for a week or more. “Benny wasn’t very happy about strangers. But he went up to Julia and he said, ‘What will you have to drink?’ and she looked down at him, because she’s a very tall woman, and said, ‘Well, I think I’ll have one of those martinis I’ve been reading about [in Harper’s].’ Julia drank two or three without turning a hair, although she must have felt them. Bernard admired that enormously, so his attitude toward the Childs’ visit softened a great deal.”

That bracketed referernce to Harper’s — Reardon’s or DeVoto’s? Because it’s clear that Julia had been reading about the martinis in her new friend’s letters. (Among other things, the martinis explain why the DeVotos didn’t — couldn’t — drink much wine. 

***

You can stop here if you’d rather not hear more about The Kindly Ones. Ever since I claimed, a week or so ago, that Max Aue, Jonathan Littell’s hero, is a man like any other, and not a monster, I’ve been nagged by the recollection of Max’s homicidal frenzies. The murders at the heart of the novel are so dire that Max has no recollection of them, even years later, in his quiet postwar life in France. (Since the book is narrated by Max, we don’t witness the murders, but, like the detectives who dog his footsteps right up to the novel’s end, we realize that the killer can only have been he.) In the middle of a long march back to Berlin, behind enemy lines, Max shoots an elderly organist playing Bach in a private chapel on a Pomeranian estate..

The old man finished the piece and turned to me: he wore a onocle and a neatly trimmed little white moustache, and an berstleutnant’s uniform from the other war, with a cross at his neck. “They can destroy everything,” he said to me calmly, “but not this. It is impossible, this will remain forever: it will go on even when I stop playing.” I didn’t say anything and he attacked the next contrapunctus. Thomas was still standing. I got up too. I listened. The music was magnificent, the organ wasn’t very powerful but it echoed in this little family church, the lines of counterpoint met each other, played, danced with each other. But instead of pacifying me, this music only fueled my anger. I found it unbearable. I wasn’t thinking about anything, my head was empty of everything except this music, and the black presence of my rage. I wanted to shout at him to stop, but I let the endd of the piece go by, and the old man started the next one, the fifth. His long aristocratic fingers fluttered over the keys, pulled or pushed the stops. When he slapped them shut at the end of the fugue, I took out my pistol and shot him in the head. He collapsed forward onto the keys, opening half the pipes in a desolate, discordant bleat. I put my pistol away, went over, and pulled him back by the collar; the sound stopped, leaving only the sound of blood dripping from his head onto the flagstones. “You’ve gone completely mad!” Thomas snarled. “What’s the matter with you?” I looked at him coldly. I was livid but my cracked voice didn’t tremble. “It’s because of these corrupt Junkers that Germany is losing the war. National Socialism is collapsing and they’re playing Bach. It should be forbidden.”

(Do I detect a sly echo of  Adorno in that “forbidden”?)

I’m not going to try to square this with a claim for Max’s humanity, much less the far grislier strangulation of an importunate lover in a lavatory, during a disorderly party during the very final days of the Reich. Nor the murders on the last page! I will note that Max’s murders are impassioned; conversely, he cannot bear to take part in the “actions” against the Jews, in which all members of the SS, officers as well as their men, are expected to participate. Max’s squeamishness in this regard is noted by the gimlet eyes of his superiors; at last there is nothing for it but to climb down into a ravine and shoot. 

Men came and went, they shot round after round, almost without stopping. I was petrified, I didn’t know what to do. Grafhorst came over and shook me by the arm. “Obersturmführer!” He pointed his gun at the bodies. “Try to finish off the wounded. “I took out my pistol and headed for a group; a very young man was sobbing in  pain, I aimed my gun at his head and squeezed the trigger, but it didn’t go off, I had forgotten to lift the safety catch. I lifted it and shot him in the forehead, he twitched and was suddenly still. 

Max is genuinely and deeply grieved when his new friend, Leutnant Dr Voss, a linguist attached to the army (not the SS), is killed by peasants who dialect he is
studying. He rushes to the dying man’s bedside and begs the attending doctor to administer morphine even though it is in short supply. “I gently touched Voss’s cheek with the back of my fingers, and went out too.”

Carlotta Gall‘s important story about age and class divisions between the upper and lower levels of Pakistan’s elite (à propos last week’s assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer by one of his own bodyguards) is not to be missed. We certainly hope that the wonks in Washington who are responsible for our biggest foreign-policy headache have some bright ideas!

This conservatism is fueled by an element of class divide, between the more secular and wealthy upper classes and the more religious middle and lower classes, said Najam Sethi, a former editor of The Daily Times, a liberal daily newspaper published by Mr. Taseer. As Pakistan’s middle class has grown, so has the conservative population.

Besides his campaign against the blasphemy laws, it was Mr. Taseer’s wealth and secular lifestyle that made him a target for the religious parties, Mr. Sethi said.

“Salman had an easygoing, witty, irreverent, high-life style,” he said, “so the anger of class inequality mixed with religious passion gives a heady, dangerous brew.”

Is “quiet” a synonym for “silence“? As regards the voices of other people, the answer is elusive. At least among New Jersey Transit riders, a concensus has yet to develop as to whether chitchat, when conducted at “subdued levels,” is noisy.

The rules for the quiet cars ask riders to refrain from cellphone use, disable the sound on laptops and other devices, and maintain low volume on headphones.

New Jersey Transit’s literature concerning the quiet cars, which has been available on trains for the past week, states that “conversations should be conducted in subdued voices,” but many riders are demanding complete silence.

“I think the whole concept of quiet cars is ridiculous,” said Mr. Arbeeny, 44, of Manalapan, N.J. “People are going to talk, it’s human nature. Many passengers, like the woman who told me to be quiet, are misinterpreting the new rules, and it is having the reverse effect in the quiet cars, creating tension instead of quiet.”

This will not be a problem for the commuters of tomorrow, who will board New Jersey Transit with a longstanding preference for texting.

On the front page of the Times Arts & Leisure section yesterday, the trouble with Anthony Tommasini‘s article began with the title: “The Greatest: A Critic Tries To Pick the Top 10 Classical Composers.” Why ten? The pervasiveness of the “top ten” meme in popular culture ought to be irrelevant to thinking “bigger,” as Tommasini puts it, dismissing the ritual end-of-year lists of bests. His only excuse is inexperience: the critic claims, “I don’t do ranking.” Well, he does now, so let’s hope that he gets better at it.

This isn’t to quibble with his choices; in the event, he doesn’t make any. The piece turns out to be the announcement of a project that Tommasini will carry out in the coming months, with input from readers. No, my complaint is with that procrustean figure. The simple truth is that there is no way to compose a list of “top ten classical composers.” Such is the state of the art, so to speak, that many names cannot appear on a list of ten if other names are excluded.

The difficult is manifest in the article’s illustration, a montage of thirteen, not ten, portraits. Whether or not a “top thirteen” list would be useful, it wouldn’t be comprised of the composers chosen by the Times, for the simple reason that three faces are missing, those of Verdi, Wagner, and Mahler. A “top sixteen,” then?

There are many traditional lists of seven — vices, virtues, wonders — and as it happens we can put together a list of Seven Classical Masters in an instant — all of them speakers of German.

• Bach
• Handel
• Haydn
• Mozart
• Beethoven
• Schubert
• Brahms

I think that this is about as unobjectionable a list as can be. Bach and Handel wrote with a seriousness that inspired the Viennese classicists to put on gravitas, and in Brahms the tradition flowered metamorphically. You might extend this list to eight, by including Mahler (who apotheosized the lineage), or to nine, naming Mendelssohn and Schumann (captivating crossers of classical and romantic currents), or to ten, by adding all three. But you could expect a good deal of argument against each choice. And it must be borne in mind that the restriction to German-speaking composers, working in a narrow, if powerful tradition, is not a musical restriction.

A list of great composers that includes Schumann but not Chopin doesn’t make much sense. And a list that includes Chopin but not Tchaikovsky is equally unstable. Once Tchaikovsky appears, then the absence of Verdi and Wagner becomes intolerable. I am not ranking composers here; I’m just pointing out the inevitable consequences of trying to put together a list of important composers. In my opinion, a list that includes Beethoven but excludes Verdi and Wager is myopic, reflecting a mistrust of opera that every really musical mind outgrows. And I expect that, over time, Puccini and Strauss will stand in relation to Verdi and Wagner much as Brahms does to Beethoven, and Mahler to Brahms, indispensably.

Our crowd of sixteen composers fairly screams with the injustice of overlooking Debussy and Ravel, two composers whose names are often coupled but whose works are deeply different. Eighteen! Can we go for twenty? Easily: how can Stravinsky and Prokofiev be left out? The problem lies in stopping there. A list of “21 Great Composers” would surely include Rachmaninov.

One face from the Times that doesn’t figure in my lists is Arnold Schoenberg’s. For reasons that I won’t expound now, I see Schoenberg’s break with tonality as severing him from the classical tradition, which unlike fashionable critics I regard as a closed book. Schoenberg is important; he wrote what I’ll call “serious” music. But so did George Gershwin and Duke Ellington and Steve Reich and John Adams and….

The task of filling up the list I’ll gladly leave to you — just so long as you don’t start out with a number in mind. 

China is so vast that its version of communist capitalism rumbles along in juggernaut faashion, but in relatively tiny Vietnam the tensions and breakdowns that are more or less guaranteed by the attempt, economically, to have it both ways are more difficult to conceal. Inflation is making food unaffordable to many, and one vast state-run entity, Vinashin, is hemorrhaging debt. But foreign investors remain optimistic, and the economy is growing at an annual rate of 7%. 

Still, many foreign investors say they are betting that Vietnam’s legendary work ethic and a history of overcoming adversity will help it get past its latest setbacks.

“There’s no way you can understand Vietnam unless you can see the frenetic activity and the happiness that’s here,” said Peter Ryder, the chief executive of Indochina Capital, an investment company. “It’s one of the reasons the government gets away with its incompetence. After 100 years of war and starvation, people never thought life would be this good.”

Double-digit inflation is indeed preferable to war.

Matins

¶ We doubt that any report of Saturday’s grim attack on a Congresswoman and her constituents will resonate more deeply that that of Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. (via Joe.My.God) Sheriff Dupnik is not the best-spoken of men, but he brings, with rare authority, a warm heart to his office, and we think that he is a great American. It is not necessary to follow the press conference after the sheriff begins to be peppered with trivial, sound-bitey questions from the press corps. (Have they no sense of decency?) ¶ Michael Tomasky argues that Sarah Palin has been “diminished” by the shootings; we wish that we didn’t find her so phoenix-like. We do concur, however, with the note upon which Mr Tomasky’s piece ends: “Today’s Republicans and conservative commentators, however, surely understand the fire they’re playing with. But they do it, and a tragedy like Saturday’s won’t stop them, as long as they can maintain a phoney plausible deniability and as long as hate continues to pay dividends at the ballot box.” (Guardian; via Mnémoglyphes)

Lauds

¶ We wholly support Zawi Hawass‘s demand that the obelisk in Central Park that’s known as Cleopatra’s Needle be returned to Egypt. The secretary-general of Egypt’s ministry of antique loot and treasure is right to claim the obligation to protect such monuments, wherever they may be, and if New Yorkers are not going to shield the granite sculpture from the distinctly non-Nilotic weather obtaining on the Northeast Seaboard, then we ought to send it back to where it came from. Ditto for London’s. (Yahoo News; via Arts Journal). ¶ James Franco has filmed an episode from Blood Meridian, in an attempt, apparently successful, to obtain the rights to adapt Cormac McCarthy’s novel for the screen. This gives new meaning to the term “screen test.” (Entertainment Weekly; via Arts Journal)

Prime

¶ While we were holidaying, Richard Crary published a fine piece on the Dunbar number, which is “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships,” and which Dunbar sets, provisionally, at 150. We came across this number a few years ago in a description of a manufacturing firm that builds a new plant whenever the number of workers at an existing one swells above 150. Of course we can’t remember where we read this, so Richard’s piece comes as something of a godsend. We call for an economic theory that takes the Dunbar number fully into account. ¶ In one of his characteristically brilliant summaries, Felix Salmon touched last week upon the Dunbar number in two distant contexts, US homebuyers with less than stellar credit histories and Bangladeshi microborrowers. In both cases, debts are far more likely to be discharged when a community relationship (paralleling, not replacing, the financial relationship) exists between debtors and creditors. This is hardly surprising to anyone with an ounce of common sense — but that’s the very deficit that we’ve come to expect in eonomists.

Tierce

¶ Whenever we read that “Dear ” is an inappropriately intimate way to begin a letter (or an email) addressed to unloved-ones, we’re reminded of our adolescent grousing about the insincerity of non-heartfelt thank-you notes. But we can understand that men whose introduction to functional literacy was digitally midwifed might regard the salutation as “girlie.” (Dionne Searcy in WSJ; via Arts Journal). ¶ How to make a pot of tea — Christopher Hitchens gets it wrong: boiling water is too hot for the subtle flavors of Earl Grey and the like. Of course the tea leaves go into the pot before the hot water, but pre-warming is counterproductive: a cool pot cools the water down a bit. Mr Hitchens doesn’t mention steeping times; does this mean (horror!) that he drinks from the brewing pot? Despite the occasional gleam of polished prose, Christopher Hitchens is all guy. (Slate; via MetaFilter and Scocca)

Sext

¶ No site that we’re aware of honors the sweet silliness of youth better than The Bygone Bureau. Three recent pieces have made us laugh very wistfully, because they magically restore the lost perspective of the twentysomething worldview. First, Darryl Campbell commemorates the third pair of shoes that he has worn in his adult life; after five years’ service, they can no longer be worn. We are not told what becomes of them, but dumpsterization is difficult to imagine: “I’m still fairly certain that sand from the Kuwaiti desert and dirt from the Louisiana bayou are commingling in a wrinkle somewhere.” It’s when your next pair of shoes collects similarly evocative detritus that your perspective shifts, and, hopefully before the age of sixty, you get rid of them. Hallie Bateman’s “Sex For Idiots” makes up in brio what it lacks in plausibility. We loved her response to learning about the birds and the bees from mom: “I only remember coming to consciousness later, with water all over my eyes and face, with my fingers jammed really deep in my ears. I guess I was trying to hold in all that sexy, dirty knowledge in order to write this column!”

Best of all, David Tveite describes the first thrilling intimations of mortality that transmute vague abdominal rumblings and mild muscle spasms into terminal cancer — confirmation of which, by a licensed physician, must at all costs be avoided. It’s so much easier (and cheaper and sweeter) to imagine one’s impending demise, planning one’s funeral &c — few narcissistic exercises are more anodyne.

Honestly, I can see the appeal of being dead. It’s one thing that’s impossible to do wrong; it happens and then nobody expects anything of you. And people will say wonderful, nice things about you that they never would have said while you were still alive. And the younger you die, the less you have to do for it to be considered a tragedy. Death is easy. Life is hard.

I know that this is all pretty morbid, but before my family starts planning an intervention I think I should say that I doubt I’d ever seriously consider suicide. But if I did, I know that it wouldn’t be for a good reason. If anything really bad ever happened to me, I’d be too shattered to get out of bed, let alone buy a rope and write a note and whatever else I’d have to do. Even now I’m getting exhausted just thinking about it.

But this morning, I got out of bed and went into the kitchen to get some breakfast and I realized that I didn’t have any food in the house. And I really didn’t want to walk the three blocks to the grocery store. And for just a moment, I was like, “That’s it. Today’s the day.”

Then it passed, and I went grocery shopping.

Nones

¶ All about the Republic of San Marino, a mountain fastness famous for its postage stamps. (Hey, it’s a living.) One reason for the republic’s persistence: there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of local attractions. (MetaFilter) ¶ Mention of San Marino always reminds us of Andorra, which lies on the Pyrenean border of France and Spain. Way back when, sovereignty was held by the Bishop of Urgel, a neighboring potentate; in 1095, the bishop turned to the Lord of Caboet, on the French side, for military protection from the Count of Urgel, an even greater potentate. The bishop of  Urgel and the French aristocrat made a deal to rule Andorra jointly. It’s a measure of the great differences in French and Spanish national development that the Bishop of Urgel is still co-ruler; the Lord of Caboet’s title has devovled upon the shoulders of the President of France. (BBC News; Wikipedia)

Vespers

¶ We’re in the middle of  All a Novelist Needs, a collection of pieces by Colm Tóibín on the subject of Henry James, and we read Gabriel Josipovici’s review, in the Irish Times, with the greatest interest (via 3 Quarks Daily). We’re very much inclined to agree with the review in its one dispute with both Tóibín and James:

I do, however, have to take issue with Tóibín and with James himself on one important point. In an essay on the meaning for the novelist of Lamb House, his Sussex retreat in his later years, Tóibín quotes a letter James wrote to his friend Grace Norton about the heroine of A Portrait of a Lady and her relationship to the real-life Minnie Temple: “I had her in mind and there is in the heroine a considerable infusion of my impression of her remarkable nature. But the thing is not a portrait. Poor Minny was essentially incomplete and I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished. In truth everyone, in life, is incomplete, and it is [in] the work of art that in reproducing them one feels the desire to fill them out, to justify them, as it were.”

Tóibín is so taken with this formulation that he repeats it verbatim in one later essay and paraphrases it in another. But what artists say about their work, even artists as self-aware as James, is, as Tóibín knows all too well, not necessarily the truth. It seems to me that both James and Tóibín in The Master are using their art not to round out and fill out a portrait left incomplete by life, which sounds more like the sort of aim Oscar Wilde might have expressed, but to bring home (to themselves, to the reader) the mystery of that life. That is why each of the great last novels ends not with resolution, not with final understanding, but with the sense that something which could be said in no other way has, remarkably, been said by the accumulation of things not said, of actions not done. That is why James’s greatest short story, The Turn of the Screw , ends so magnificently and so mysteriously: “I caught him, yes, I held him – it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it was truly that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.”

¶ Dwight Garner on Annie Proulx: “Reading Ms. Proulx’s prose is like bouncing along rutted country roads in a pickup truck with no shock absorbers.” Couldn’t agree more. (NYT)

Compline

¶ At Brainiac, Josh Rothman writes about a new collection of essays, The Offensive Internet, that argues for equal protection in the digital sphere — in other words, equal enforcement of free-speech restrictions that hold in the bricks-and-mortar world. “The Internet has grown up – and it should be subject to grown-up laws.”

Have a Look

¶ SS Streets of Monaco (Superyacht Design; via Things)

¶ The Baroque Inevitable — an LP that the Editor bought new, in 1966. Can it really have been reissued on CD? We shall see! (The  Rumpus)

Noted

¶ We have ALWAYS wanted to attend a concert at Wigmore Hall. (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

Here’s a New Year’s resolution for you: I’m not going to spend Saturday afternoons tidying the apartment anymore. I’m going to look after the household on weekday afternoons, after lunch, one room per day. The amount of work won’t change, but its impact on my reading-and-writing life will be greatly diminished.

I hope. I’ve been doing the dusting on Saturday afternoons for nearly forty years. It used to be something to do while listening to the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts — which I stopped listening to over twenty years ago. But the center of my daily pattern has been reversed in the past couple of years. In the old days, I worked at a job, took care of the house, and wrote, in that order. I had no real idea of what to write, and that lack of drive and direction made most of what I wrote (outside of letters, a significant note) fairly unreadable. When I stopped working (practicing law), I allowed housekeeping to take its place: we had a house in the country, with a garden, and between the two places I was busy every day. But was this what I wanted to do with my life? No. And the house in the country often kept Kathleen and me apart. So we got rid of it.

That was in 1999. (I stopped spending time at the country house two years earlier.) It would take a full ten years to reverse the polarity between housekeeping, on the one hand, and reading and writing, on the other. What is all this housekeeping, you may well ask, and I do mean one of these days to write something about it; for the moment, I’ll just say that: it’s a great deal more than washing the dishes, doing the laundry, and running a vacuum over the rugs. Library management, for example. That’s part of housekeeping — a rather headachy part if you have a few thousand books and are always buying new ones. More recently, as I’ve written about in Nano Notes, I’ve put the iTunes playlist to work as a device for filling the air with the sound of many times more recordings than was practicable in the days of “putting on a record.” It takes oceans of time — I’ll never get to the end of the job I’ve set myself, unless someone comes up with some intelligent apps for handling classical music on iTunes. Bref: housekeeping is simply personal hygiene, conducted on an exoskeletal basis. The walls of this apartment are my true skin.

Something that’s true for everybody, I believe — although most people are unaware of it. I have the sneaking suspicion that more men would be aware of it if their housekeeping weren’t being seen to by women. (Or, as in bygone years, by servants.) And the fact that women (and servants) do most of the housekeeping explains why it is not thought to be important. Or interesting. I’ll agree that dusting is not very interesting, and I hope that I haven’t bored anybody with a description of my way of seeing to it. But look what has happened to cooking in the past thirty years. Happened, that is, as a matter of interest. Now that it is generally understood that men do most of the serious cooking in the world — there are more Anthony Bourdains than Julia Childs in professional kitchens — cooking has an edge. I don’t think that dusting will ever have its own TV show, but I do hope that home storage gets more attention from designers and essayists. What do essayists have to contribute? Nothing less than thoughts on the most pressing philosophical question that we face in our everyday lives: what do I keep, and what do I pitch, and why? 

Dwight Garner has a lot of fun playing with the latest nonsense from Timothy Ferriss.

Here’s a better analogy: “The 4-Hour Body” reads as if The New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the SkyMall catalog. Some of this junk might actually work, but you’re going to be embarrassed doing it or admitting to your friends that you’re trying it. This is a man who, after all, weighs his own feces, likes bloodletting as a life-extension strategy and aims a Philips goLite at his body in place of ingesting caffeine.

As befits the former chief executive of a nutritional supplements company, Mr. Ferriss talks up a witches’ brew of juices, nuts, potions and drugs. Here’s a typical burp from an early chapter: “Overfat? Try timed protein and pre-meal lemon juice. Undermuscled? Try ginger and sauerkraut. Can’t sleep? Try upping your saturated fat or using cold exposure.”

Want to have “wolverine” sex? Who doesn’t? Eat 4 Brazil nuts, 20 raw almonds and 2 capsules of fermented cod-liver oil and butterfat four hours before intercourse. Mr. Ferriss used a hormone-slash-drug called human chorionic gonadotropin and more than tripled his semen volume. “Happy days,” he writes.

Giving new meaning to the phrase, “a man of parts.” Or, better: not.

The city is going white once more, but this time, one expects, without the pileup. Not that we were inconvenienced in the slightest by the post-Christmas dump. It wasn’t until the beginning of this week that I noticed the ramparts of garbage bags that lined most streets. Most of them are gone by now, too.

I woke up with a cold. How serious a cold remains to be sneezed. I was tired all week. Thinking that perhaps I was no longer equal to my holiday bibulousness, I cut back night after night, but to no avail; the mornings, once I was up, I always felt headachy and listless. This malaise would pass during the afternoon. Yesterday afternoon I spent on my feet, alternately preparing dinner and playing with the new shredder.

We have never thought it necessary to keep a shredder at home, but two weeks ago I discovered a pile of fat folders stuffed with all of our monthly billing records from 2000 and 2001, plus credit-card account statements reaching back into the Nineties. Tossing the papers down the chute, with identifying information on every page, seemed rash. So I went over to Staples on Lexington Avenue and bought the cheapest shredder on offer. I bought the cheapest shredder because it was also the smallest; I couldn’t imagine how I would house the ordinary run of units, which ranged from medium wastebasket to clothes hamper in size. The smallest shredder is not the most efficient; its bin has to be emptied constantly, and it quickly overheats. But it will fit in the hall closet in its box (which makes a great temporary wastebasket for the shreds). I don’t expect to use it very often. But I kept it busy all afternoon yesterday — what with all the cooling-down periods.

Trying to decide how to spend the day in bed, I’ve settled on finishing Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: or, a Life of Montaigne. This was, to my mind, the best book of 2010, and I can’t imagine being a blogger and not finding it of the greatest interest. Montaigne’s textual remains would be far easier to sort out if he had been writing in the digital age; as it is, his Essays would be a vast untraceable palimpsest if had had had a mind to correct what he wrote. Instead, he was happy to add to it, more the doubling the length of his original collection in a bit more than ten years. He left two “final” drafts when he died, and disagreements between them have generated ongoing contentions between proponents of what’s called the “Bordeaux Copy” and of the edition published by Marie de Gournay in 1595. (The recent Pléiade edition, Bakewell tells us, reverts to the long-deprecated 1595 publication.)

Sarah Bakewell’s book is a delight because she tells us how Montaigne wrote, how he lived, and not what he thought. If you want to know what Montaigne thought, there is no reason to read anything but the Essays themselves; and you will do well to avoid simplifying explanations by other hands. Montaigne is an invaluable writer because he captures the ever-shifting appearance of life as we live it; he is not interested in rigorous principles, seeing them for the reductions that they are. As a result, Montaigne does not make sense. His sentences are always intelligible, but his chapters are not; sometimes it is not clear what he is really talking about. Comparing the first edition to the later ones, Bakewell hits on extremely apt imagery.

It filled only two fairly small volumes and, although the “Apology” was already outsized, most chapters remained relatively simple. The often oscillated between rival points of view, but they did not wash around like vast turbulent rivers or fan out into deltas, as later essays did.

Montaigne’s texts may be messy, but they are prodigiously fertile.

Taking breaks from How to Live, I’ve tidied up the apartment from last night’s rout and fixed myself a small sandwich: sliced tenderloin, red onion, and Swiss with mayonnaise on a dinner roll. If I’d bagged the leftover rolls last night, it would be heaven, or at least quite a bit less crumbly. I’m thinking of making a loaf of bread with dinner-roll dough.

Matt Bai argues that the appointment of William Daley as White House Chief of Staff, while certainly a confirmation of the Administration’s centrist sympathies, also signals a shift from low deal-making to high politicking

In the same way, Mr. Sperling, unlike the less-than-diplomatic Mr. Summers, is known to be politically sophisticated, a policy nerd with long experience as an adviser to Democratic politicians going back to Mario M. Cuomo. His advice to the president will be informed not just by economic theory but also by a sense of what can sway voters and how.

What these appointments suggest is that Mr. Obama is now readying himself for an extended public campaign — or, rather, for two of them. The first begins now, as the president tries to recast himself as a reformer beholden to neither party, a grownup parrying the partisan thrusts of pettier adversaries.

The second will kick in soon enough, as Mr. Obama looks toward 2012 in hopes of becoming only the second Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected twice. The other, of course, was Mr. Clinton

We hope that more liberal supporters of the Democratic Party will, instead of carping as they did through the Nineties, find a more constructive outlet for their energies than complaining that the President has betrayed them.

Stories about people with miles of empty bookshelves that need to be stocked by designers have been known to make us laugh and cry at the same time. This one, by Penelope Green, almost reached a satisfactory solution of the content/object problem that books have posed ever since rich people paid illuminators.

Mr. Wine, who is more of a library artist than a mere book dealer, and who can swathe a book in just about anything, had fun last month wrapping the autobiographies of Keith Richards and Jay-Z in old-fashioned red leather. It’s a practice that irritates book designers like Chip Kidd, who creates noted covers for Knopf.

“It feels sort of needlessly complicated, like turning on the vacuum cleaner and going and finding a piece of dirt,” Mr. Kidd said. “You don’t have to redesign the jacket; the jackets have been designed. This feels arbitrary, like taking a piece of wood and wrapping it in paper.”

The next paragraph, instead of lurching off into Restoration Hardware’s much-mocked “book bundle,” ought to have taken us to libraries composed of  books designed by Chip Kidd. There must be a few them about somewhere.

We resorted to Wikipedia for a better understanding of null hypotheses and Bayesian analysis — ours could hardly be worse — but we still don’t grasp the objections to the publication of Daryl Bem’s ESP research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. We agree with the critics that Dr Bem’s experiments are probably unsound, and that the journal’s publishers can’t be unaware of the likely uptick in sales (a null hypothesis?). But is it a disgrace? We can’t say.

Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis.

In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?

Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment “changes the odds that a hypothesis is true,” in the words of Jeffrey N. Rouder, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who, with Richard D. Morey of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has also submitted a critique of Dr. Bem’s paper to the journal.