Gotham Diary:
New News
6 August 2013
We slept in this morning. We both had crazy dreams. In my case, they were unusual and not unpleasant. (Has there ever been an opera called Amelia al ballo?) The air was uncommonly fragrant, more floral than woodsy; there is always a touch of the jungle about the backyards of Ocean Beach. It was also deliciously cool — too cool to get out of bed at first. We’ve been promised bad weather for most of the week, so every clear blue sky, such as the one above us now, is precious.
While waiting for the verve to get out of bed, I read the last couple of paragraphs of an old Ruth Rendell mystery, which I simply hadn’t been able to keep my eyes open for last night, called No More Dying Then. It’s in this novel that Mike Burden, Inspector Wexford’s number two and recently widowed, falls in love (or fancies he does) with the mother of a missing child. They are all wrong for each other but the sex (discreetly sketched) is quite passionate on both sides. Happily — very happily, when you think about it — the mother’s reunion with her child, who was kidnapped not murdered, puts an end to Mike’s by now merely honorable plans to marry her. His feet are already cold enough. I read the novel in dribs and drabs, half-asleep sometimes, and didn’t quite follow the action — something that has happened several times with mysteries read in ebook form. We’ll see what happens with the next title on the list: Susan Harrison’s The Silent Wife.
Color me happy at the news about the Washington Post. One thing that has becoming clear became even clearer last week, when the Times sold the Globe for a a very small fraction of what it paid for it twenty years ago. The people running newspapers today don’t know how to do it — for today, and much less for tomorrow. Jeff Bezos has demonstrated visionary abilities in the world of print, and, more important in a newspaper owner, he has demonstrated heroic patience. He’s not perfect or above criticism, but the alternative to men like him is men like Murdoch. With luck, Bezos will create a new business model for newspapers that inspires the Times to stay in print after all. To browse a newspaper and to browse a Web site — it’s misleading to use the same verb.
Yes, it’s true that I grew up reading newspapers, and that I’m an old man. But I’ve known a few fashions to come and go. The Seventies, after all — need I say more? And when I see people tapping on their smartphones while walking down the street, or, as we did last night at dinner, both members of a young couple fixing their attention on their screens instead of upon one another, I say to myself, they’ll grow out of it. Eventually, people will prefer not to be on the receiving end of such rudeness. At some point, a venerable app that’s wired into our roughly civilized brains will kick in.
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A book that arrived in the mail as I was planning to pack for the week here on Fire Island was Simon Leys’s collection of essays, The Hall of Uselessness. Leys (a Belgian sinologist who settled in Australia and adopted this nom de plume) is a noted translator of Confucius, and he has always struck me as someone who understands what is the same and what is different about China, something few scholars and pundits do. Leys gets China right, to put it crassly. A book of essays by such a writer seemed just the thing to have by the sea, and, in case I fell into a serious mood, I brought along the Analects as well, which I’ve had since it came out in 1997. In case I got really serious, I added James Legge’s translation of the Analects, too. This hardy tome is more than a translation. The original text appears on facing pages, a scholarly apparatus crowds the back of the book, and there is even a dictionary of the characters.
Leys is a Catholic and, in the best sense, a conservative. It suits me now to read thoughtful, pious books that are nevertheless not dogmatic. When Leys is upset, as he is by Christopher Hitchens’s attacks on Mother Teresa, his indignation is personal, not propagandistic. As a born non-believer (as I have long understood myself to be), I naturally have no interest in spreading my lack of spiritual inclination; I wish only to be left alone. That granted, I’m happy to attend to religious meditations, so long as they’re not flamboyant. There are no actual meditations in The Hall of Uselessness, but Leys’s devoutness is palpable, and not at all disagreeable.
This interest in conservatism — which ought not to be taken as the sign of a political drift to the right; for the right would be my natural home, if it were possible to be an American conservative since Nixon’s Southern Strategy and Reagan’s Personal Responsibility (with its odious long tail of “deregulation” — has brought me to the point of wanting to learn more about Friedrich Hayek, who is such a (misunderstood?) totem of market fundamentalists. I’ve got two good books, in addition to The Road to Serfd0m, in my pile at home. One, which I’ve so far found very intriguing, is Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression. (The other is Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek.) I’m wondering what Hayek would have made of the big Sunday Times story about the cartelization of orthopedic implants, by Elisabeth Rosenthal. As I’m on vacation, I’m not going to say more about that now than to toot my own horn: back when the Clinton’s were working everyone into a frenzy about health insurance, I wondered why they didn’t begin with an attempt to rationalize health costs, which are still, as Rosenthal’s story makes clear, capricious and quite contrary to the spirit of American law. Toot!