¶ Come, peer into our crystal ball for a glimpse — more than a glimpse — of the future of manufacturing. Chances are, if you’ve half a brain, what you see won’t surprise you. “Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers” — sorry, the crystal ball belongs to reporter Catherine Rampell — suggest that we ponder whether largely inevitable trends require tax incentives. Companies like Vista Technologies will do well no matter what. We need to give their accounting advantages to firms that rely on people, not machinery, to get the job done.

¶ We would not mention the Anthony Weiner matter at all if it were not for a scourging denunciation of everyone who has drawn attention to and from it by Glenn Greenwald. (Salon; via 3 Quarks Daily)

On some level, I find the behavior of the obviously loathsome Andrew Breitbart preferable; at least he’s honest about his motive:  he hates Democrats and liberals and wants sadistically to destroy them however he can.  It’s the empty, barren, purse-lipped busybodies who cannot stay out of other adults’ private and sexual lives — while pretending to be elevated  — that are the truly odious villains here.

This story is about the lamentable fact that there is a story, and for that Mr Weiner is not responsible. To say that he “should have known” that scandal might ensue when he yielded to erotic (but disembodied) temptation is inhumanly hypocritical. ¶ An amazingly moving and calmly vivisecting nonfictional-auto-Bildungsroman by Irish writer Brian Dillon. An early fascination with Roland Barthes misled him into a standard academic career, but it was Barthes who eventually rescued him. A long, beautiful read. (via paperpools)

But I did start to notice something about Barthes that I hadn’t before, or that perhaps had not occurred to me since I was seventeen: he was not really a scholar or a theorist, he was a writer.

¶ Whether it turns a penny or not, we can only applaud the establishment in London of the New College of the Humanities, intended, according to its founder-director, A C Grayling, to “bridge the C P Snow gap” between the “two cultures” of letters and science. For this to work, the pedagogy of mathematics will have to be reconceived for those without a natural aptitude — which ought to be the purpose of education anyway, but rarely is. (Brainiac) ¶ Rob Horning’s much-linked essay at n + 1, “The Accidental Bricoleurs,” does not impress us as a reasoned appraisal of “fast fashion” and social-network self-rebranding. “Neoliberalism” hulks in the corner like a criminal mastermind’s thuggish henchman, but the real malefactors are those who tell ordinary people that they have the right to be no more critical and attentive than they’re inclined to be. ¶ We’re all familiar by now with Anders Ericsson’s 10,000 hours rule, which not only claims that ten thousand hours of practice will make a virtuoso or an expert out of anyone but also that inborn talent is not a factor. The last part is deeply counterintuitive. Can it be tested? Christopher Chabris, co-author of The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, outlines the difficulties of implementing a viable test for Scientific American. (via Arts Journal) ¶ The amazingly polymathic career of Erez Lieberman Aiden, co-developer of Culturomics and also the man who figured out that DNA folds in fractal globules first conjectured by an Italian mathematician in the 1890s. Ed Yong is so enthusiastic that we’re afraid he might have had to invent Aiden if he hadn’t actually existed. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

¶ Felix Salman palpates a bubble, and decides that it’s probably not in canine umbrella stands, reminiscent as these might be of the days of Dennis Kozlowski.

¶ At The New York Review of Ideas, Elizabeth Vulaj interviews Jane Austen Education author William Deresiewicz, who points out an aspect of Austen’s writing that we much admire even though we never noticed it (that’s why): no metaphors. ¶ We absolutely do not condone the stealing of books, even from apathetic WaldenBooks outlets where the “ books were needed to take up the rest of the retail space, because there weren’t enough magazines.” (Nice try!) But we enjoyed reading how John Brandon became a reader, and we rejoiced that when he finally did get busted it wasn’t for book theft. (The Awl) ¶ At The Rumpus, Kyle Minor and Justin Taylor discuss A Heaven of Others and its author, Joshua Cohen, who also wrote Witz. We’re not convinced that we’d find these books anything but a trial to read (although we’re intrigued by the idea that the book reads as though it was written in a hurry, and was in fact read in a hurry by Kyle), but the conversation is interesting. ¶ At Jewcy, Adam Wilson interviews Paris Review editor Lorin Stein about being -Ish. (via The Morning News)

When I was a kid I wanted to have a bar mitzvah just so we [Stein and his stepfather] could have that in common. That’s how I discovered pretty much the one thing my four parents agreed about—the essential badness of this idea.

¶ Also -Ish: Arundhati Roy, daughter of a Bengal tea-planter and a  the daughter of a wealthy Christian family from Kerala. We’re aware that Roy is a prize-winning novelist and committed opponent of the glitzification of India, but there’s more than a whiff, in Stephen Moss’s interview, of Hemingway’s Lady Brett. (Guardian; via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ The Internet Archive, cognizant of the material nature of digital storage, seeks to store one copy of every book that it scans in refitted shipping containeers. (via MetaFilter) ¶ James Kwak unpacks that right-wing shibboleth, “regulatory uncertainty,” booming from the wingnut echo-chambers but without real-world substance. (The Baseline Scenario) ¶ At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrrok points to the sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics on farm animals as a dangerous facilitator of bacterial gene transfers occuring faster than we can combat them. Denmark has found it to be unnecessary as well.

New: ¶ At Ironic Sans, David Friedman proposes .ugh domains, for people who are sick & tired &c, and ingeniously forbids the owner of CelebrityN.com from owning CelebrityN.ugh. (via The Morning News)

Have a Look: ¶ Christoph Niemann at the Venice Biennale. Not shown: missing luggage. (NYT) ¶ Manhattan in Motion @ Mnémoglyphes.

Noted: ¶ “Couple Forecloses on Bank of America — And Wins” @ GOOD. ¶ Yves Smith: “Is Facebook Foreclosure Coming to the US?” (Naked Capitalism) ¶ Jeff Martin sees Tree of Life at an Oklahoma preview, with the filmmaker’s 99 year-old mother, Irene, in attendance. (The Millions)

Over the past few weeks, the mother of a friend of mine has been dying. I am in no way a friend of the family, so I knew nothing about her illness beyond what my friend told me, and, as I wasn’t a friend of the family, and we are both reserved to the point of being French about eschewing personal disclosures that might seem offhand, he did not tell me very much. When he mentioned hospice care, and the need to keep his mother comfortable, I knew that death was at hand, but it was not in the nature of our friendship for me to expect a trumpeted announcement that it had arrived. I felt sad for my friend for all the usual reasons but also for a few quirky ones. (His mother was my father’s age when he died, twenty-six years ago; from which another special reason might be deduced: she was twice as close to me in age as he is. My friend is only a few years older than my daughter, and I worry a lot about dying before my grandson, who pretty clearly loves me as deeply as a child his age can, is old enough to remember me.) The illness had come on suddenly, one of those factors that is a blessing or a curse depending on your perspective at the moment. I hoped, as I think we all do, that when it came to my friend’s telling me that his mother had died, I wouldn’t say anything fatuous or otherwise unwelcome.

Being me, however, I would certainly want to say something, and that is how Facebook presented a problem. My friend mentioned the hospice care to me, as I’m sure he did to other friends, but he said nothing about it at Facebook. He said very little at Facebook, counting, I believe, on his friends’ intelligence and empathy to infer the absolutely necessary information, which he had also stated, in one sentence (saying that his mother was very ill), on his Web log. I want to make two points here. The first is that my friend’s Facebook page was, laudably, a place of implication, at which friendship was honored by the absence of bogus intimacy (chitchat, gossip, and drama). I find that I cannot get round the word “noble” when thinking of it. The other day, for example, he posted an album of photographs that he has taken while attending to his parents out of town. He is a talented photographer, and his pictures were, under the circumstances, eloquent without being garrulous. It was done, if I may say so, as Elizabeth Bennet would have done it, not as Mrs Bennet would have done.

The other point is that I tied myself to the mast when reading the comments of Facebook friends who were friends of the family. One friend commented on the photo album by saying that she was so sorry to hear what her own mother had just told her. (Ah, so it has happened, I said to myself. Then I said to myself, told her what?) Another friend appears to have committed the faux pas that I was determined to avoid, regretting my friend’s loss before it actually occurred. Once upon a time, that’s exactly what I’d have done; I’d have been unable to resist the occasion for expressing my condolences, because, frankly, I couldn’t help displaying the possession of knowledge. I don’t care for the cruder forms of power, but I have a passion for the latest information. I don’t so much want to know things before other people do as I want to know them at the very first instant when I might reasonably be expected to know them. Every now and then, this leads me to bank on an inference, and in the past my banking has been more than occasionally imprudent. Now that my natural impetuousness is fading with age, I’m better equipped to resist such temptations.

This morning, the announcement came, at Facebook; my friend’s friends were linked to a handsome Web site that included an obituary published in the local city newspaper. My relief at not having made a fool of myself was, under the circumstances, arguably unseemly, but nobody saw it and I mention it now for the edification of others: since I believe that we ought to risk a little more than we do making fools of ourselves, I have to prize the moments when foolishness is averted, because it is not as a matter of policy. (Let no one imagine that tying yourself to the mast as Odysseus did is a policy.) My friend wrote to me, briefly, and in his email he mentioned a piece of music that he has been listening to. It was something that I knew only a famous excerpt of, but whether from freakishness or synchronicity, a CD of the work sat atop a very small pile of dics within reach of my workspace. So I listened to it, all of it, and I allowed myself the largely but not wholly ignorant speculation that my friend’s mother would have smiled to know that I finally did. 

¶ When Sanjay Kaul jokes that the sprawling development south of New Delhi is like the United States, he means that there isn’t much in the way of res publica on offer. “You’re on your own.” It is hard to read about the political dysfunction that has prevented the construction of water supplies, sewage systems, and public transport in Gurgaon, a town that’s run directly by its state (or not), without any municipal government, without seeing the realization of a right-wing and libertarian dream for the American future.

Among the writers presentging their foundation  mythologies — how they became readers and writers — in the Summer Fiction issue of The New Yorker is Jennifer Egan. Egan offers up her brief career in “Archeology“; having realized that she was too squeamish for the pulse and flow of medicine, she was attracted by the dead humans of paleontology. Visions of foreign travel and exotic climes were splintered by the blinding heat of a field in Illinois. Her experience with a square meter of Native American remains started badly but improved, and when it improved to the point where Egan had learned what she needed to learn from it, she went back to San Francisco and saved up for a sojourn of non-invasive contact with living Europeans. “But my sojourn in Kampsville has stayed with me—the sensation I had of scraping away the layers between myself and a lost world, in search of its occupants.”

And I thought, is that it? I am still trying to put my hands on the qualities that make Egan’s fiction special. The best that I can do is to say that she captures in her prose — which is to say that she does more than merely describe — the temptations of the glamorously dodgy. Her characters are almost always doing something wrong, but it is rarely something very wrong: a matter of misdemeanors, not felonies. In A Visit from the Good Squad, Sasha not only steals things — little things, like cheap binoculars and pens and a child’s scarf — but she sets them out, as trophies, in her flat. Somehow the display seems as wrong as the kleptomania, and possibly worse. But it’s easy to miss what Egan’s characters avoid (for the simple reason that Egan is a mistress at leading the dance of fiction): the vicious and the disgusting. Their sins are sins of weakness, of giving in to the glittering trinket. And yet Egan invests these sins with all the desperate loss of Eve’s biting into the Apple, and then offering it to Adam. The first sin didn’t much look like one.

If it takes me a while to figure Egan out, I won’t mind. I’ve known her work for little more than a year (in which I’ve read everything, some of it twice), and that’s not very long for taking the measure of subtlety. It occurs to me that Egan belongs to the small company of great women writers because, unlike notable male novelists, she doesn’t trumpet her emotions or swish her toe in the nostalgia of lost youth; while, unlike the run of women writers, she takes an ironic (displaced) view not only of her characters but of the very art of fiction as well. (I maintain that the PowerPoint chapter of Goon Squad is a triumph of imaginative literature, and perhaps the degree zero of graphic fiction.) And while Egan assuredly wants to be read, I doubt that she wants to be grasped. (Men always do, and complain that they never are — why is that?) Much as I’d like to roll out a critical reading of Jennifer Egan that sparkles with insight, I’m going to distinguish between wanting to do it and wanting to have done it. I’m not going to let the latter impulse (which is of course the stronger) hurry me.

What a prolix old fool I am: this was meant to be an apology for not having finished John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilization, a book that makes a number of highly sympathetic arguments about the linkage between virtue and prosperity (linkages, I say, not causalities). I completely share his horror of populism and its works; I also share his interest in popularization, which is the art of taking the trouble to strip away the non-essential accretions of sophistication from things that are beautiful and true. At one point, in connection with Abbé Suger of all people, Armstrong insists on the importance of charm. Can you think of a quality more deplored by modernism? Today’s cognitive revolution is demonstrating the many ways in which warmth and sympathy are vital to human fulfillment, and how deeply even the chilliest of us crave them, but our artists are taking their time about getting the message.

Realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to say anything solid about Armstrong’s book, I broke off at a keenly interesting place and went downstairs to collect the mail. Along the way, I read another foundation story, Salvatore Scibona’s “Where I learned to read.” The question has two answers. The first really answers a slightly different question: Where I learned that I wanted to learn how to read. That took place in an old shack outside his working-class home. The answer to the title question is “St John’s College at Taos.” Regular readers will know that nothing makes me happier than hearing about young people buckling down with the great books and loving it. “All things considered, every year since has been a more intense and enigmatic joy.” Exactly. 

¶ Jenny Anderson’s front-page article about parents who supplement their children’s already expensive private schooling with private tutoring has rocketed our temper into Fulmination Mode, but we shall try for self-restraint. What’s wrong with private tutoring? It’s an absolute insult to the private school. A child in need of remedial education is probably at the wrong school. A child honing marginal advantages over fellow-students is a sociopath. A private school charging fees of upwards of $50,000 per year ought to be expected to provide everything needed. It ought to expel students whose parents doubt its ability in this regard; and it ought to create an atmosphere in which mechanical overachievement is manifestly objectionable. Private tutoring in private schools is the sort of thing that leads a friend of ours to shrug off the brouhaha by dismissing the schools themselves: “I thought probably they were just breeding pens for the type of human who eventually goes to Yale on the suspect credentials that they provide.”

When I saw in the paper today that Andrew Gold died, I couldn’t really place him. His song, “Thank You For Being A Friend,” came back, dimly, but not in any particular voice. It wasn’t until I saw the album cover for All This And Heaven Too at Joe.My.God that the full blast of the late-Seventies sensation came back to me. Lord, how I loved that album! Or did I? Only two song titles are familiar; the other one is Never Let Her Slip Away, which I loved to pieces. To pieces! And yet it had slipped completely out of my mind; I didn’t even miss it! (If something had ever brought a fragment of it to mind, I’d have scoured the work of Harry Nilsson or Lowell George or Rupert Holmes in search of it.) I just listened to it now, thanks to iTunes, where I bought it as well, and soon it will be on the Nano that I take on errands. This wonderful modern world! This crazy modern world, I mean, where you can live for thirty-three years without thinking of a song, where there are such songs (to be loved to pieces and absolutely forgotten), and then, hey presto, the singer dies and everyone hauls out his stuff. Last time I looked, the import pressing of the All This And Heaven Too was priced at Amazon somewhere in the neighborhood of $175. I remember when that sort of thing used to happen to LPs. Which is why I’m the sort of person who would consider, however briefly, paying nearly two hundred dollars for a compact disc: I need hard copy.

It’s warm again, but it’s still fairly dry. I’ve just come in from a round of errands. I wasn’t in the mood for errands, but on Saturday I ordered a veal tenderloin at Eli’s. They don’t — surprise surprise — carry the cut as a matter of course. It was just dumb luck that wafted me into the store two weeks ago on the very day that, for some reason, they were stocking it. I was terrified to think of the cost of an entire tenderloin, but that’s what I had to order. Turns out to be about a pound, just enough for four. At less than $10 a slice, that’s not so very bad. The only question is, what am I going to do with it? When I ordered it, I wasn’t thinking. Or rather, I was thinking about ordering a veal tenderloin in the abstract. I wanted to declare my interest in the ordering of veal tenderloin in a way that the butcher at Eli’s would best appreciate. Sadly, however, I have no use for veal tenderloin today. The meat went straight into the freezer, because Kathleen talked me out of putting an impromptu dinner party together over the weekend. It’s going to be hot, and I’m going to be tired. I’m in that ten-day trough before a Remicade infusion that I wrote about in March.  Which also explains my ordered the veal tenderloin. The grey cells are not firing on all cylinders. 

I want to save what zip and vim I’ve got this weekend for Will. Will was in Washington last weekend; his father was best man in a wedding. He himself wore a tux, like his dad and the other men in the wedding party; and, like them, he wore black Converse high-tops with his black tie. He wasn’t actually wearing a tie, but my hunch is that any Manhattan-born kid who grows up in Alphabet City and wears his first tuxedo before he’s eighteen months old will probably grow up to be even more sophisticated than Woody Allen. Even if he does retain an attachment to Shaun the Sheep. Megan stumbled on the Shaun the Sheep series at Netflix by happy accident. And I do mean “happy,” because this stop-motion animation by the makers of Wallace and Gromit is superbly watchable, and before you accuse me of losing my self-respect I’ll tell you why: there is no dialogue as such. There is a great deal of baa-ing and barking and moaning and groaning, and it is always perfectly clear what is happening, and what is about to happen. But you have to watch, because there are no dialogue cues. No corny jokes, no tedious talking down to kidlets. I expect that Shaun the Sheep was made in this way because the filmmakers tapped German financing, but it’s a model that ought to be widely followed in children’s entertainment. (There’s only so much of Adam Sandler singing “Fare-wElmo!” that I can take.) The episode in which Shaun engineeers a pizza-buying expedition is delightful, by the way, and, as for Will, he already knows that the part where the three pigs try to scare the sheep is going to scare him, and he wants to be held.

Reading James Surowiecki’s column in The New Yorker just now (“The Warrren Court“), it occurred to me that we must be more careful about using the word “competition.” I haven’t researched the matter, but I believe that the word is of greatest use in the commercial world, where it describes behavior designed to attract voluntary transactions with opposite parties who have several merchants or bankers or service providers to choose from. As such, any connection with the violence of plunder is unfortunate. It’s probably best to avoid talking of “competition for resources” among plants and animals, who are not known to intend any such thing. (Some sexual rivalries are competitive, but those ending in the death or dismemberment of a contender are not.) It is also unwise to speak of competition in connection with banking. Bankers are the most natural monopolists in the world, and as the history of banking in New York City alone will attest, they swallow each other up with gusto — eliminating competition. Bankers are not interested in providing “the best service” or “the best interest rates” or the best of anything. They’re interested only in having the most “assets” — other people’s money on deposit (and technically the bankers’ liabilities). Bankers, like doctors and lawyers, are not, as a rule, good businessmen, as is attested by the numbers of gifted lawyers, doctors and bankers who have become successful businessmen by moving outside the confines of professional frameworks. In any case, Mr Surowiecki’s argument that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau will be good for banks because it will improve competition is certain to fall on very deaf ears.

¶ The “young people” of Spain — in their 30s, actually, but still living at home owing to anemic employment — may or may not have begun to shape an alternative government, with “protestors” occupying plazas all over the country, but we can see, in a story by Suzanne Daley, that they are establishing, in Europe, the alternative means of organizing that have already been seen in the Arab Spring. Their complaints, like those in Egypt and Tunisia and elsewhere, suggest both a generational bottleneck and an associated attrition of jobs. The status quo is clearly no kind of future for the world’s younger people. ¶ Meanwhile, in the United States, the operation of state parks is increasingly undertaken by retired volunteers, as budget cuts, as well as a lack of consensus about what parks are for, erode public funding.  William Yardley reports.

¶ There is nothing like “moral peril” to get Ross Douthat worked up — so worked up that his brain shuts down. His snarky eulogy-not of Dr Jack Kervorkian is a classic of slippery-slope shivers. While we would do anything to prevent rash and violent acts of self-destruction, we want to know what right anyone has to prevent the deliberate suicide of another.

“Being Good,” the fourth chapter of William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education, and the one that deals with Mansfield Park, is not particularly longer than the others, but it feels bigger. Not surprisingly, it is darker than the others. Mansfield Park is Austen’s one difficult novel, the difficulty being that we are never in love with nor wish for an instant to be Fanny Price. Fanny is very good, and she is not really so good that she is bad; when Deresiewicz strings together “prim, proper, priggish, prudish, puritanical” to describe her, the alliterative overkill suggests to a thoughtful ear that at least some of these words will be eaten before he is through with this novel. But Fanny is not enviable, and that’s something of a gyp for anyone accustomed, as who isn’t, to the pleasures of the other books. She is not inviting. Lots of readers, it seems, dislike her; and if you dislike Fanny Price, you are not going to enjoy Mansfield Park. At the end of the chapter, Deresiewicz confesses that he still doesn’t like her, but, perhaps because he is a student of literature, he makes this lack of affectionateness pay a handsome profit. 

What makes “Being Good” especially memoriable is the artfulness with which Deresiewicz parallels his account of the novel with his recollection of a post-graduate period in which he spent a lot of his free time with a friend from the past, college presumably, who was dating “a woman who’d been raised on the Upper East Side and gone to a fancy Manhattan private school.”

Her prep-school crowd was back in the city after college, dabbling in this or that and living the high life, and these were the people I started spending time around. It would have been hard not to. This was the upper crust, the world of Edith Wharton or F Scott Fitzgerald updated for the nineties: posh, polished young people who gave off a glow of glamour and sophistication that drew me like a moth. I was dazzled, I was seduced. It was an undreamed-of world of privilege, and I was grateful just to be able to watch. 

We can see where this is going, if not how long the gratitude will last. Just as he prefers Mary and Henry Crawford to the Bertrams and their poor relation, Fanny, so he dances witty attendance on people for whom being “high maintenance” is worse than being poor; gradually, he lets Jane Austen teach him that these preening birds of paradise are cold, calculaing wretches. He backs away from them even as he comes to an appreciation of Fanny’s moral beauty. He contrives to feel sorry for gilded youth. 

Being able to get whatever you want, Austen was showing me, leaves you awfully unhappy when you cannot get what you want.

At the highest levels of wealth, I heard, doing well meant no more than not having tried to kill yourself. 

If these nuggets taste of the sour lemon of resentment, dipped in the chocolate of Schadenfreude,  that does not invalidate Deresiewicz’s observations. The first time I read the chapter, I thought that he was being a bit hard on his old friends, but later I saw that what bothered him was passing so much time with people who weren’t his friends. This isn’t quite as explicit as it might be; “It would have been hard not to” is never refuted outright. The suggestion that there’s something wrong with this crowd because it is “privileged” hovers over the page. The simple truth, which Deresiewicz grasps, is that it’s wrong to pursue a social life as an act, which is of course what entering “the world of Edith Wharton … updated for the nineties” necessarily entails. The questionableness of mounting Lovers’ Vows without adult supervision — the drama in the middle of Mansfield Park — stands in for the dubiousness of the author’s dining upon upper crust. 

In the end, then, Deresiewicz learns how to “be good”: following Fanny’s example, he makes himself useful. (“Being Useful” would have been a much better title.)

Most of all, I practiced sitting still and listening — really listening. to friends, to students,even just to people I met, as their stories came stumbling out in the awkward, unpolished way that people have when you given them the freedom to speak from the heart. People’s stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them. 

Indeed! Nothing could be more commendable, and as someone who finds talking much easier than listening, and listening to unshaped narratives almost penitentially hard, I certainly appreciate the effort. But the more I consider the truth of Deresiewicz’s conclusions, the more shocked I am by the cruelty of his portrait of that old friend of his, the one whose girlfriend provided entrée to the “magic kingdom.” It appears in the chapter’s pivotal paragraph.

But then, something happened to change my mind, not only about Mansfield Park but also about myself. A year or so after I’d begun to hang around the private-school crowd, my friend and his  irlfriend got married. It was more like a coronation than a wedding: a rehearsal dinenr the night before at an elegant restaurant overlooking the East River… [&c &c] And then as I was watching the dancing with some of the other single guys … one of them said, apropos of the groom, “Well, he got what he wanted.”

“What do you mean?” I said, looking over to where the newly married man, a big grin on his face, was shaking hands with some of his father-in-law’s friends — cool, confident men who looked like they knew where all the levers were. “He’s on the inside,” came the reply. “He’s been working on this for years.” My friend, it was true, was not of that world. He had grown up in the South, a professional’s son but the grandson of a state trooper, and his mother had been a stewardess. He had gradually worked his way up the chain of academic prestige, through college and graduate school, always traveling in a northeasterly direction, then came to the city, moving from job to job in the same fashion. But I had never imagined that the whole thing had been so calculated. 

The wife doesn’t come off too much better. Like Mary Crawford, she charms people because that’s what she does. It’s not who she is that matters. Unlike Lizzy Bennett, and even, in spite of herself, Emma Woodhouse, Mary Crawford is charming by design, and the friend’s wife shares her need for an appreciative audience. (“Apparently, no matter how poised and confident they seemed to be, they wren’t sufficiently convinced of it themselves.”) I expect that the day will come when William Deresiewicz hangs his head sadly and wishes that he could wipe this picture away from an otherwise sterling book. Of course it makes for arresting reading. But it is an insult. If his friend and his wife are not profoundly offended by this published assessment of their marriage, then they must be debased; we must in any case be offended on their behalf. 

I was about to say that it’s a pity that there is not a seventh novel in the Austen canon, to school the author in the inhumanity of wringing great copy out of the lives of others, But there’s no need; the very first one in Deresiewicz’s canon emblazons the lesson. Back to Box Hill, Bill!

¶ You have to wonder why and how a state-run facility for the mentally and physically disabled could take the name “O D Heck” — no matter how admirable Oswald Heck might have been as a person. Danny Hakim’s report on the sad state of affairs at the Heck Developmental Center, and elsewhere in New York State’s 23,000-staffed Office for People With Developmental Difficulties, makes for tough morning reading. Unfortunately, it fails to confront what it hints at: facilities of this kind do not attract anything like the required number of qualified workers, and probably never will. You have only to read about the demoralization of unqualified workers to see why. It is clear that officials at every level have salved their consciences by throwing money at insitutions like O D Heck, and then strenuously looking the other way. The viability of actual reform is anything but clear. ¶ The real story about the awful outbreak of E coli in Germany (22 dead; more than 600 in intensive care) exploded over the weekend with the profoundly unsurprising news that locally-grown sprouts, and not Spanish cucumbers, might have been the epidemic’s vector. What’s surprising, of course, is that this wasn’t surmised from the get-go, since sprouts are at the top of the epidemiologist’s checklist — and they’re rarely shipped long distances. Calls for Germany to indemnify Spanish farmers for the loss of ripe vegetables make a lot of sense, at least at this point in the story.

¶ Despite its odd and rather misleading title — the actual subject of George Soros’s epistle in the current issue of The New York Review of Books is the arguable failure of the United States as a truly open society — “My Philanthropy” is a compelling piece. One passage in particularly ought to be memorized by every reader:

[Karl] Popper’s hidden assumption that freedom of speech and thought will produce a better understanding of reality is valid only for the study of natural phenomena. Extending it to human affairs is part of what I have called the “Enlightenment fallacy.”

Except that there is an even more pressing bit of wisdom in the final paragraph:

 The fact that your opponent is wrong does not make you right.

¶ David Eagleman’s Incognito is going to garner a lot of attention, not because it’s another pretty book full of interesting stuff about the way our brains work but because it argues that many moral problems are neurochemical in origin, and that the idea of equal justice before the law may be unhumane. (Brainiac) ¶ We think that Laura Miller takes William Deresiewicz a tad too literally — perhaps more literally than his book actually is — when she insists (rightly) that reading good literature does not, by itself, make for better people. There must be some sort of readiness or predisposition. We don’t think that Deresiewicz was touting Austen as some sort of patent remedy that ails us, but it’s true that the passion of A Jane Austen Education might lead a reader, even a smart one like Miller, into unintended conclusions. (Salon; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ The sensible and successful Grace Bonney critiques the Times story about online shelter magazines, and while she’s at it she presents the state of play between print and online journalism. Bonney is one of the few writers and editors whom we regard as a Digital Grownup. Jason Kottke is another; but Bonney produces more content of the same high quality. (Design Sponge)

¶ This week’s Ingenuous Audiobook Review goes to David Fishkind, who has a summer job as a farmhand, shoveling you-know-what. To lighten the monotony, he listens to Richard Poe’s reading of Blood Meridian, that beach book by Cormac McCarthy. “Actually, I should point out that I didn’t follow most of the novel.” Lucky David! We;re particularly charmed by his doing almost everything to guarantee a failing grade but holding our interest all the same. What we remember best about Blood Meridian is how well Edward Jones retold it as an episode in The Known World. (HTMLGiant) ¶ Dan Hill is moving to Finland, and writes engagingly about making the change after four years in Australia. (City of Sound)

Have a Look: ¶ Disturbing Household Touches, @ Oddee. ¶ Scout’s Excellent Memorial Day Adventure: visiting the wreck of a Navy jet that crashed in the Jersey woods in 1962 (the pilots lived; amazingly, the Navy didn’t clean up the mess). (Scouting New York) ¶ Mondobloggo is among the guests at a mayoral event at City Hall Park, with sculptures by Sol Lewitt.

Noted: ¶ 29 things about H L Mencken — a list that will probably not be forgotten. (Letters of Note) ¶ Elderly Japanese engineers return to work — volunteering at Fukushima. They’re likely to die of other causes before radiation-induced cancers can kill them. (BBC News; via The Morning News) ¶ David Hawkes writes that we enjoy stories about revenge because it is an equalizer. (TLS) ¶ The Global War on Drugs Has Failed, @ Marginal Revolution.

¶ Two years ago, we had never heard of Hans Keilson, the German writer who has died in Nederland at the age of 101. As it is, we have read only one of his books, the surprisingly droll Comedy in a Minor Key, but we recommend it to everybody. The gentle good humor of Keilson’s sense of absurdity quickens our optimism about the future of the species.

A spell of fine, dry weather has set me to a thousand household chores that were unthinkable during the dark, dank spring that preceded the blisteringly sultry spring that made the even more unthinkable. Ray Soleil came by this morning, to help out with one or two things (such as hanging the three photographs from Christian Chaize’s Praia Piquinia series that I picked up at Jen Bekman’s 20×200 Project). After lunch and a bit of shopping — when we walked into Crawford Doyle, Dot McCleary was holding up the Times obituary of Hans Keilson, which prompted me to buy a copy of The Death of the Adversary — we came back to the flat, and I decided to rearrange my closets. Although strange in many ways, I am quite normal about closets, and habitually throw things into them for as long as I can get away with it. About two months after I stop getting away with it, I do something. Reorganizing the closets this afternoon turned out to be farily straightforward, and it was done in the short time that it took Ray to watch Blame It On the Bellboy, Mark Herman’s glorious 1992 farce. What I’ve still got to deal with is the clutch of shopping bags that had, over time, been thrown into the closet for lack of a better hiding place. One of the bags, naturally, is stuffed with neatly folded shopping bags. It is not the only one in the house, I’m afraid. What do you think would happen if I threw it away?

***

Thanks for the encouragement and  inspiration! I threw away another bag in its place. The bag of bags that emerged from the closet was packed with really big bags, from Venture Stationery, Eli’s, and Gracious Home. But if I couldn’t quite do without them, I resolved to get rid of the bag of bags in the hall closet, the one that’s full of the cheap paper bags in which the laundry returns my “boxed” shirts, as well as a large accumulation of plastic shopping bags from Agata & Valentina. Agata & Valentina used to dispense a stout paper shopping bag that was perfect for storing just about anything, from a stack of books to a half-dozen short-sleeved summer shirts to an entire collection of Silpat bakeware. But, at just about the time when these bags were discontinued, I became incapable of overlooking the downside of storing things in shopping bags, so I don’t miss them. I’ve also gotten rid of a lot of the stuff that I was storing in shopping bags. Getting rid of the bag of bags just now was yet another breakthrough in my resistance to the permanent attachment of everything that comes through the front door and doesn’t rot.

***

In addition to The Death of the Adversary, I bought two other books, a first edition of Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics that beckoned alluringly from the shopwindow (Edith Sitwell is the most gloriously perfectly genuine old fraud that ever was) and something that I hadn’t heard of, John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilization: Reclaiming a Tarnished Idea. I’ve been getting better at resisting the appeal of books that “look interesting” (meaning that I didn’t know they existed five minutes before), but I’m pretty sure that Armstrong’s book is not going to make it into the Guilt Pile. It’s not very long (195 pages) and the objective stated in its subtitle could not be more arresting. Even if I disagree with Armstrong’s ideas, I’ll get plenty out of the book — and the prospect of serious disagreement is very doubtful, if my random glance at the discussion of the Japanese tea ceremony can be generalized. “The lesson of the tea ceremony is not that we should copy it exactly. The lesson is that we can take fairly minor ordinary activities and raise them to a higher meaning.” Good heavens, this was written for me!

When I paid for the books, I told Dot that I didn’t need a bag. I’ve already got dozens, folded neatly in a shopping bag.

¶ The French press and the Parti Socialiste are being dragged into the Twentieth Century by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal. Anne Mansouret, the mother of Tristane Bonet, the journalist who now describes DSK as having been a “chimpanzee in rut” when he tried to rape her during an interview, regrets counseling her daughter to keep silent about the offense. And now that Ms Mansouret is talking about it, she faces expulsion from the PS. For decades, an able but pathologically libidinous man has been not only protected but nurtured by a code of silence that has no place in the future of France.

¶ Front-page news: “Korean Grocers Are Dwindling.”. Few things could be more foreseeable, even if we hadn’t read Ben Ryder Howe’s My Korean Deli, in which a lawyer sets her mother up with a corner store so that she’ll have something to do. If that’s what running a Korean fruit stand has come to — but of course that’s exactly what they were supposed to come to. These operations, which required little background skill but endless attentiveness, were intended to serve as booster-stage engines that would rocket families out of poverty and into the American middle (or upper-middle!) class.

Instead of taking over the businesses when their parents retire, as some Italian- and Jewish-Americans did generations ago, the children of Koreans are finding work far from the checkout counter, in law firms, banks and hospitals. And parents insist on that, Mr. Lee said.

As success stories go, this one is slightly bittersweet; our beloved Green Village turned into a 7-11 years ago. Now, when is that goshdarned Fairway going to open up across the street?

In his review of some of the depressing books about higher education that have been appearing right and left lately — among them, Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, which I think I’m going to have to read after all — Louis Menand advances three theories of education. They’re not essentially incompatible, and I don’t see why we can’t operate them concurrently. But most people, it seems, naturally favor one theory over the other two, and wonder why anyone would consider the others as viable alternatives. That’s almost as interesting as the theories themselves.  What everyone does agree about is that the Theory 1 approach is not for everyone.

Theory 1 holds that the purpose of higher education is to make the most of society’s most talented minds. This means not wasting energy on minds that display little or no academic talent. It means winnowing and culling, with high standards and tough grading. Theory 2, looking through the other end of the telescope, regards education as a socializing tool that, for that very reason, ought to be made available to everyone. Theory 3 is vocational: education enlarges your skill set by teaching you things that you need to know to get by and/or ahead in real-world situations. All three approaches are utilitarian, which is what makes them compatible in the end. Nobody is arguing that
education is an inherent good. I don’t have a problem with that, so long as we make it easy for people who feel that education is inherently good to educate themselves. 

What distinguishes the first theory from the second and third is not its apparent high-mindedness but its faith in abstraction and indirection. In other words, the liberal arts. Or maybe not. I’m not sure that “liberal arts” means anything anymore; Menand keeps coming back to “toughing it out with Henry James.” As synecdoche goes, it’s not inapt, because Henry James, at least in his late style, is so extraordinarily articulate that he is difficult to follow, and the ability to follow James’s sentences fluently enough actually to enjoy them is a good sign of the literate competence that we expect of so-called professional people — people who are effectively a law unto themselves, as doctors and lawyers quite often are. (The compact that we make with professional people is that the law that they implement will be sound.) There is an almost hieratic vagueness about the liberal arts that becomes palpable the minute you start looking for books about critical thinking. Everyone agrees that critical thinking is a key compenent of a liberal arts education. But you can’t buy books that will teach you how to do it, the way you can buy chemistry handbooks. Critical thinking turns out to be more of an experience than a skill. Those of us who have had the experience recognize it in others, like vacations in Paris. 

To some extent, in short, “the liberal arts” is simply a racket that the proponents of Theory 1 have settled on — did I say, “racket”? That was rude; I meant “convention” — as a “measure of intellectual capacity and productive potential,” as Menand puts it. It happens to be an academic convention, in that mastering the liberal arts entails a lot of reading and writing. Professor X, quoted by Menand, puts it very well: 

“I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.”

It is impossible to demonstrate a mastery of the liberal arts without the ability to write clearly and effectively — which means, engagingly. “Mysterious mix” is putting it mildly. My point here, however, is not to talk about what makes good writers. It is rather to suggest that an education scheme bottomed on the liberal arts is going to serve Theory 2 and Theory 3 very poorly, because most people are not good writers. Why? Most of the bad writers are probably poor readers — of the kinds of liberal arts materials that are adumbrated throughout elementary school and that make high school so tedious for any student who is not in a frantic mood to read David Copperfield. That’s the part that Professor X leaves out. The writing from which he expects readers to internalize the rhythms of the written word is the kind of writing that he teaches from his liberal arts curriculum.

What the beneficiaries of Theory 2 and Theory 3 need (and this would seem to be everyone who doesn’t attend a liberal arts college) is a kind of reading material — let’s not call it “literature” yet — that is aimed away from the abstractions and the assumptions of liberal arts prose. I have no idea, really, what this writing would look like, or — most intriguingly — if liberal arts readers would like to read it with enthusiasm. Maybe it wouldn’t be reading at all — it might be visual (the dichotomy between “reading” and “seeing” never ceases to surprise me). The one thing I do know is that this new material would put an end to the twin complaints that Theory 1 people have about the alternatives, which are that Theory 2 and Theory 3 offer watered-down versions of Theory 1 education, and that they thereby threaten the integrity of Theory 1’s all-important standards. 

We need to know a lot more about why most people don’t enjoy reading. It may have a lot to do with what they have been offered.

¶ When we peer into China’s mid-term future, we’re usually pessimistic, and nothing augurs worse, in our view, than the current dynasty’s inability to address the size of Beijing, which really ought to be a very small city or, even better, an urban version of Colonial Williamsburg showcasing the Forbidden City. Like several other world cities — Los Angeles, Petersburg, and Mexico City (Denver also comes to mind) — Beijing is situated in an environment that cannot support large human populations. Problems of water supply and/or air pollution intractably ensue, and in Beijing’s case both are quite bad. Edward Wong’s story about plans to transfer very large amounts of water to the capital from elsewhere in China points ultimately to an official fecklessness that does not bode well for the future of the Chinese Communist Party. ¶ The Calhoun School, over on the other side of Central Park, has a history of embracing progressive ideas about education. The school year there is currently divided into five terms, and instead of 45-minute classes there are 2 hour 10 minute blocks. Quoth senior Robert Ronan: “There are some classes that lend themselves more easily to 2-hour-and-15-minute classes and teachers that can do that, but I sort of feel like a lot of the classes are the same, just stretched.”

This will be brief — I’m not good for much today. The fusebox was upgraded this morning, in an absolutely painless operation that took about forty minutes at the most. I managed to follow instructions about turning things off and then turning them back on again, and you’d never know that the power was out for a spell. If you checked my blood for traces of stressed-out levels of cortisol, however, you might gather that I was anxious about something. For five minutes this morning, making the bed, I wished I were dead, and no longer subject to contingencies. Meanwhile, a cold front is moving in, which is only making things sultrier; apparently, we’re in for an evening of storms — and drier weather tomorrow. Hallelujah! 

If I’d put in an honest day’s work, I’d have tried a more substantial paragraph or two about Midnight in Paris, because I want to propose that we consider Woody Allen more as a magician specializing in delight than a comedian specializing in laughs. Yesterday, I wrote about the idea for a movie that Gil Pender shares with Luis Buñuel — a one-line concept that we smarty-pants in the audience know will blossom into Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie. The joke is so elegantly presented (and this is what Woody Allen’s magic is all about) that we don’t stop to think how unnecessary it is for Gil to buttonhole the filmmaker with his idea. Gil knows, after all, that the film has been made; he has undoubtedly seen it many times (he’s a scriptwriter). He might as well save his breath. But the whole business is over long before this conundrum can tempt us into a headachy tangle of metaphysical speculations about causation. We’re not watching Gil; we’re not thinking his thoughts. We’re watching Buñuel shrug as he tries, without immediate success, to make sense of Gil’s idea. The cinematic actuality — Allen’s sleight of hand — is that it might never have occurred to Buñuel to make Le Charme discret, if he hadn’t been given the idea by a strange American visiting from the future. This is no more plausible, when looked at, than the whole confection of Midnight in Paris: the sequence of Gil Pender’s evenings in 1920s Paris. The minute you start thinking about what’s going on in this movie, the spell is as broken as Cinderella’s slipper. But Woody Allen makes sure that you don’t. I’ve said that he’s a magician, but his magic wand is the comedian’s most indispensable tool: an impeccable sense of timing. And even when you can see the timing (and you can; Allen hides nothing), it still works. 

I gave up hunting through my CD library for Sidney Bechet’s “Si Tu Vois Ma   Mère,” the film’s signature tune that plays the same role as Rhapsody in Blue in Manhattan, and just bought a copy of the song from iTunes. And I’m glad I did. If
I squint, it brings Marion Cotillard into my living room. By the way, I know that Cinderella’s slipper doesn’t break. Neither does Woody Allen’s spell.

¶ While things are going well for Turkey at the moment — a booming economy (and Turkey had a lot of room to boom in) has eased many of the nation’s chronic social tensions — a clamor for war is getting louder  in Azerbaijan. The difference, you might say, is that Azerbaijan, whose population is primarily Turkic, still has an Armenian problem, while Turkey has only the memory of one. A look at most maps (although not those in Wikipedia’s entry) will show why: the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, autonomous since a 1994 cease-fire agreement, displaced tens of thousands of Azerbaijani refugees, many of them still awaiting the restoration of something like their old lives (while many others are children who have grown up on venom). If it were just a question of Azerbaijan versus Armenia, the enclave would be reclaimed by Azerbaijan in a trice. But Russia would certainly come to Armenia’s aid. It does make one rather wish that the Ottoman Empire were still with us, except that the sultans were far better at conquering than they were at governing — and Azerbaijan wasn’t part of the empire, anyway.