¶ Well, maybe not: Otto von Hapsburg, who has died two years shy of his centenary, and briefly the Austro-Hungarian crown prince, is survived by a younger brother, Felix — as well as a clutch of offpsring that includes two great-grandchildren (lucky man!). But when Dr von Hapsburg finally abdicated his claim to the vanished throne, in 1961, it was not assumed by anyone else. The erstwhile prince devoted his life to pursuing a high-minded and less personally invested version of his imperial family’s ambitious but generally benign project of unifying all of Europe. As Holy Roman Emperors, and then as the rulers of the reduced but still vast Dual Monarchy, the Hapsburgs were a steadfast counterweight to the deadly sectarian and nationalistic trends that, finally prevailing in the mid-Twentieth Century, taught Europeans the importance of a common union.

As I was tidying the bedroom on Sunday, I had second thoughts about putting a stack of books back on top of a dresser after I’d dusted it. Instead, I carried the pile to the laptop at the dining table, opened Readerware, and used the barcode scanner to autoload the books into the database. When that was done, I bulk edited the lot, assigning each book the same shelf location. Off the top of my head, I chose “Korean” to designate the location; the dresser in question is in the Korean style, or so we were told long ago. Now I have a handy printed list of the sixteen non-fiction titles that spend their time hidden by an array from framed family photographs, waiting for me to read them. At one point, they were all books that I was going to get to “next.” 

I continued to tidy my way around the bedroom, coming eventually to a pile of books that Kathleen plans to read. I brought this to the laptop computer as well, with “Kathleen’s Reading” as the location. Unlike the “Korean” batch, the books in “Kathleen’s Reading” were in no sense shelved; they were stacked in a pile. There are a number of such piles throughout the apartment, and by the end of the afternoon I had catalogued them all, even the multi-pile aggregation of 61 books located as “NonFiction.”

There were three distinct piles of books, “Chevet” (tucked into my nightstand), “Fiction Basket” (a dump in front of my nightstand), and “Fiction Annex,” a small pile in the blue room that didn’t fit anywhere else. The last pile to be catalogued ended up being called “Chair,” because I resolved to stack it in my reading chair whenever I wasn’t sitting there. This has already proved wearisome. It is a very tall stack. Thirteen books, plus a few extras. The extras are Rizzoli’s Treasures of Venice, and the Hallwag map of Venice, both of which are accompanying me through Judith Martin’s No Vulgar Hotel, an extremely amusing book about La Serenissima. No Vulgar Hotel by itself is not a thick book, but it makes a bundle with the guidebook and the map. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity is in the pile, of course, although I don’t think that it’ll be there much longer, as I am barrelling through the final quarter, my fondness of lingering over the great writing being trumped by the urge to shrink the pile, to which nothing will be added until there are only five books in the lot.

Another book that I hope to speed through is Jasper Becker’s book about Beijing, The City of Heavenly Tranquillity. There’s a Forbidden City guidebook to go with that, too, although I don’t need it anymore, as Becker has moved on to other parts of town. A third entry along these lines is Ina Caro’s delightful Paris to the Past, a sort of souvenir guide to day trips that someone staying in Paris might take to outlying sites of interest, such as Chartres and Malmaison. There’s Michael Ainger’s very good dual biography of Gilbert and Sullivan, and Giles Tremlett’s very something-else biography of Catherine of Aragon. Also Joseph Lelyveld’s book about Gandhi. A N Wilson’s new Dante in Love, which arrived the other day from the UK, went straight into “Chair.” The one book that Readerware’s autoload function detected as already in the database was a thick novel by George Sand that I retrieved from the storage unit last week, Consuelo. I don’t know if it’s any good — and that’s really the appeal. More than 900 pages! There are 105 chapters, plus a conclusion. I read the first one standing in the storage unit, and since I knew all the words I thought I might make a go of it. After all, it is set in Venice in the Eighteenth Century. I’m not sure that I’ll like Sand the novelist, but I already do like Sand the writer.

One book has already been knocked off the list: Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. It may have been the slimmest book in the title, but it was also the least congenial. Although I can’t say that I found most of it incomprehensible, I did have a strong feeling of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other. It is a very death-haunted book — understandably, if you know the context. (Barthes’s beloved mother had just died, and he was sparked to write about photography in part by a photograph of her as a child in which he felt that he really made her out, the mother he had known as a girl in a winter garden.) I will be on the lookout for temptations to use the terms studium and punctum. 

At the top of the pile is John Ashbery’s new translation of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. I know this prose poem via Benjamin Britten’s (very selective) setting, so it took a moment to find the sung work’s signature line (J’ai seul la clef de cette parade), because it comes after two paragraphs of what Ashbery translates as “Sideshow.” Rimbaud makes Barthes read like a comic book. At the bottom of the pile is James Gleick’s The Information, which I read right up to the penultimate chapter months ago and then set aside, because I wanted to digest the book before I finished it. Even though I’ll finish it soon and find a good place for it in the bookcases, it ought to remain at the bottom of the pile, because it’s what got me to get back to managing my library. I want to own the information. God wot there’s a lot. 

The most exciting book in the pile, if also the most tiring, is the Ainger, which is really a triple biography of W S Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan — and Richard D’Oyly Carte, the impresario who harnessed the incompatible artists and provided a showcase for their collaboration at the Savoy Theatre. The details are dense, but they don’t obscure the personalities, although poor Helen Lenoir has faded into a translatlantic blur. All sorts of things that I didn’t know: Lewis Carroll approaching Sullivan about adapting Alice for the stage. (Hmmm….) Gilbert’s yachts. Sullivan wading in a creek at Yosemite. I always thought that Sullivan got his knighthood (in 1883) partly so that Victoria could shout “We are not amused” at Gilbert, but this is arrant nonsense, not least because it supposes that the Queen was paying attention to the Savoy operas. Sullivan was by nature an assiduous courtier, and numbered the Duke of Edinburgh among his good friends; one of the fruits of this connection was a Te Deum that Sullivan wrote to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s recovery from typhoid in 1872. That would have endeared him to Her Majesty, the dedicatee. 

As a reward for all my hard library work, I came down with a cough and a touch of sore throat on Saturday night, and spent the rest of the weekend in a listless state. Reading until I thought that I’d explode with information. 

¶ The budget problems of Wilmington, North Carolina, according to a discouraging story by Kevin Sack in this morning’s paper, are slow-mo rather than catastrophic, so perhaps city leaders and others will have the leisure to reflect on how affairs might be managed differently, specifically by channeling the currently dissipated reserves of post-adolescent labor — superfluous to the private sector — into temporary public service. Mr Sack is to be commended for articulating the relationship between this story’s many moving parts.

¶ Even if we don’t post another link this week, we’re so startled by the wisdom of Michael Drury — whoever he is — that we have to share it with our friends. At The Smart Set, Jessa Crispin reviews a couple of books about “the other woman,” and in passing refers to a book called Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress. In a nutshell:

The only people worth loving are those who are determined to find life good whether you love them or not.

This is one of those observations about life that are so coldly, startlingly true when you first encounter them that you can’t imagine not having known them — or you just can, and it’s terrifying. Thereafter, you make them your own, and the excitement dies down completely — until, as in this case I expect must happen, you hear about someone who’s attracted to a deadly, somebody who wants to die. The only people who are worth loving are the ones who can live without you — but are happy that they don’t have to.

¶ Given the current “political ecosystem of influence and money,” Matt Stoller writes, it’s unrealistic to expect talented Washington operators to put principles first. Why should they throw away their careers? “ If you want to fix that dynamic, then make sure that people like Doug Thornell have places to go where they don’t have to work to help Google cut its own tax rate.’ Or amend the Constitution to provide for campagin finance restrictions that no Supreme Court can overturn. (Naked Capitalism) ¶ The always bright Ed Yong nails it: (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

Do bloggers “count” as journalists? Are blogs journalism? And I’ve come to realise that this debate is exactly like the film Titanic: it is tedious, it goes on forever, everyone’s a caricature and they’re stuck on a massive sinking ship.

¶ Nancy McDermott’s review of Brian Caplan’s Selfish Reasons for Having More Children makes a lot more sense than the book it discusses. Here’s a passage that pinpoints the American social crisis about as neatly as can be done: (Spiked; via 3 Quarks Daily)

In a culture as deeply ambivalent about adulthood as America, it is not surprising that socialising young people has become problematic. The rich web of traditions and conventions that governed the interchange between one generation and the next is broken – and parents are left to pick up the slack. Even something as simple as teaching children how to behave in public becomes difficult today because adults can’t agree upon common standards of behavior, let alone enforce them collectively. Children run wild, and naturally the parents are to blame.

It’s often observed that home ownership prevents workers from moving to where the jobs are. It also prevents parents from finding congenial neighborhoods. ¶ John Hyduk of Cleveland is a 59 year-old soda truck loader who can write about his working life and his resistance to regret well enough to listen to. (Esquire; via MetaFilter)

¶ Riverside fish-and-dance halls, guinguettes — immortalized by Renoir — never went quite extinct, and now are coming back, although it’s taking a while for the kids to master the old-timey dance staps. (LA Times; via The Morning News)

¶ There is really no other word for Robert Finch, chairman of the Monarchist League of Canada.

“Many Canadians may think we’re dreadfully boring,” he said. He added that while the royals enjoy a life of great wealth and privilege, it is not without costs to their personal lives.

“The fact that the queen can’t change her hairstyle because she has to look like the person on her money, that’s an example of a big sacrifice,” Mr. Finch said.

We can think of a few qualities that Canadians might think of before getting to “boring.”

There’s a lot of talk these days about how Terrence Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life, is a “personal” film, a curious term to substitute for “autobiographical” that I take to imply a certain opacity; favorable critics seem happy to give depictions of the creation of the universe, the age of the dinosaurs, and other whatnot imagery a pass, on the theory that it means something to the filmmaker. I’m not a Malick fan; Days of Heaven gave me a good idea of what Wagner’s Ring cycle must be like for people who don’t care for late-romantic music. So I’m not one to evaluate “personal” as applied to his oeuvre. When I say that Mike Mills’s Beginners is personal, I mean that Mr Mills has pierced the carapace of autobiographical event with a sureness of touch that allows him to present his distinctly idiosyncratic outlook in an intelligible, sympathetic manner. That’s what I mean by “personal.” 

The nub of Beginners — and of Mr Mills’s life — is that his parents’ helplessly unsatisfying marriage rendered him skittish, if not paralyzed, about committing to relationships. His parents loved one another, and were faithful in their fashion. But his father was gay, and his mother, who knew this before she married him, thought that she could “fix it.” After ten years or so of childlessness, as the sexual revolution was dawning — a moment, in short, in which they might have been expected to give up on a failed, if well-intentioned experiment — they became parents. Many years later, when the mother died of cancer, the father, resolving that late was better than never, came out, and for the first time showed his son what it looked like to be him in love. The lesson came a bit late, but, as Beginners attests, it was eventually learned.

For Beginners is a movie thoroughgoingly about love. It is not about bitterness or resentment or my-parents-fucked-me-up. It’s precisely because the boy felt that his parents loved him, and allowed him to love them, that he grew up to be capable of learning not only not to make their mistakes, but to give up worrying about making their mistakes. That is what Oliver (Ewan McGregor) achieves in the course of the film, which begins a few months after his father’s death. We have a few intense scenes that take us back to boyhood with his his mother (Mary Page Keller, an actress every bit as good as her top-billed costars; the young Oliver is played by Keegan Boos), but what feels like half the of the movie features the grown Oliver and his gay, dying father (Christopher Plummer). (We’re told that Hal died four years after coming out, in his mid-seventies.) Hal has a boyfriend, Andy (Goran Visnjic), a man about Oliver’s age, but Oliver sppears to take a bigger place in his father’s everyday life, even before he bcomes very sick, than you might expect either of these independent professional men to accommodate.

Near the end, Andy nicely accuses Ollie of staying away from him — never calling or visiting — after Hal’s death because of the gay angle. Oliver is able to say right away that it wasn’t that. “It was because my father loved you so.” Again, this is said without bitterness or regret. With Andy, Hal was able to live a life that Oliver hadn’t been able to imagine, for his father or for himself. And this failure of imagination has almost cost him a very good thing, his attachment to another survivor of distubed childhood, a French actress called Anna (Mélanie Laurent).

One of the most delightful achievements of this film is the wit of its nimbly sailing through the easy part and showing, without telling, what the hard part looks like. The easy part is attraction — easy because, almost by definition, it’s involuntary. Sooner or later, a healthy relationship can be sustained only because two people want to keep it going. That’s where both Oliver and Anna have problems. They don’t know what happens when you don’t stick around instead of running away; they know only that it feels awkward and unusual. Registering this ambivalence without dimming her personal charm, Ms Laurent shows herself to be a player in the same big league in which her male costars have been headlining for years (decades, in Mr Plummer’s case). Adroitly interlacing romantic ambivalence with scenes of filial confusion (not the same thing as ambivalence), Mr Mills shows himself to be worthy of his extraordinary cast.

As it happens, I crossed Central Park to see Beginners on one of those rare summer days when the dry, diamond-hard sunlight is painfully strong. I understand that they have days like today all the time in Los Angeles — that’s why people live there. But Mike Mills’s Los Angeles is the least glamorous of hometowns. I felt quite sorry for everyone in Beginners on this point alone — what a shame, to have to live out there in all that shapeless nothing. (The jumbly banality of Sunset Boulevard is almost hard to believe.) The reek of depression that fills Oliver’s house — all the more noticeable because he’s a sophisticated graphic artist — is meant, I’m sure, to express bleak feelings about “home” that his parents’ ultimately loveless marriage inspired, but I wasn’t above attributing it to an urban environment in which style is something that, like health care, you hire professionals to provide.

I loved Beginners, and I look forward to getting to know it better over the years.

¶ If we were inclined to entertain conspiracy theories, we would find it velly intellesting that the prosecution of Daniel Strauss-Kahn “collapsed” within a day or so of Christine Lagarde’s installation as his successor at the IMF. But we’re delighted that she’s got the job, so we’re taking no further notice of odd coinkidinks. We attribute the delay in annoucning that the allegedly assaulted housekeeper’s credibility has all but evaporated to the understandable difficulty of calculating just how how many cubic feet her incarcerated colleague’s 400 pounds of marijuana would fill without accidentally-on-purpose striking a match and succumbing to morbid petrifaction.

¶ In keeping with our governing idea that smaller is better, we applaud the determination of Alex Salmond, first minister of Scotland as well head of the once marginal Scottish National Party, to set his country’s course away from Westminster. His conundrum, as observer John Curtice put it, is that his “success as first minister [makes] the case for independence less pressing.”

There are lots of things that I haven’t done, but one thing that I can check off that list is Swan Lake. I saw the ballet for the first time last night. I had such a perfectly good time that I’m rather glad that it wasn’t a great one. I get to save seeing a great performance of Swan Lake for another time. 

Of course I know the score just about by heart. I’ve seen the ballet on video, not to mention in countless movie clips ranging from Far From Heaven and The Deep End to Poupées russes. (I’ve just ordered a DVD of the Fonteyn-Nureyev performance that I used to own on LaserDisc). More to the point, I’ve seen Darren Aronofsky’s deconstruction/reconstruction, in Black Swan, which I’ll come back to later. But it was Jennifer Homans’s Apollo’s Angels that convinced me that I ought to see the ballet on stage as soon as possible. That meant the end-of-season American Ballet Theatre production. 

Having seen ABT’s Raymonda a few years ago, and read a review or two of ABT productions down through the ages, I knew where to expect last night’s performance to fall short. The sets and, to a lesser extent, the costumes were showy but dramatically inconsequent, bordering on kitsch. (There is a perfectly dreadful maypole in the first act that shows off the company to embarrassing disadvantage. Also: any first-time visitor would be pardoned for inferring from the Queen Mother’s getup that there will be vampires.) And corps de ballet would be a concept with no visual onstage correlative. 

Perversely, the worst corps dancing was that of the swans. I don’t expect the robotics of Busby-Berkeley synchronization, but I believe, as Homans suggests, that the proper execution of the steps ought to produce a pleasing coordination of arms and legs. Nowhere is a lapse on this front more regrettable than in Swan Lake, where the swans are anything but decorative backdrop, willi-style, to the romance of a prince and an enchanted beauty. Times dance critic Alistair Macaulay writes that Odette’s “swan-maiden subjects become chorally wrapped up in this love story, and their involvement makes this ballet like no other. They share her hopes and fears; their destiny hangs on hers.” Indeed, unless the swans are as eloquently tragic as their queen, then the showpieces, such as the danse des cygnets and Odette’s thirty-two fouettés, take on the air of stunts. 

I knew from Macaulay’s review that the final act of Swan Lake would not astonish me. (Tchaikovsky’s amazing send-off, however, did, as it always does, and my eyes were flooded.) I had to ask, though, if a better production than Kevin McKenzie’s would have made much of a difference. Like the singers of the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, the ABT corps seemed comprised of somewhat independent soloists. I’d almost rather do without. What I didn’t expect was the damp sparklessness of Marcelo Gomes’s dancing with Paloma Herrera. Strong and limber in solos, or even when engaged in mime, Mr Gomes demonstrated less than no interest in Ms Herrera, who, for her part, was as excellent as it is possible to be without being quite great. I don’t fault her; the atmosphere was not conducive to greatness. It’s entirely possible that she would have been great, doing exactly as she did, on a less fussy stage. 

The evening was far from disappointing, however, thanks to the svelte pace established by conductor David LaMarche. Notwithstanding the absence of romantic fire onstage, and compensating greatly for the sloppiness of the corps, the orchestra poured forth a current of generous accompaniment that supported the secondary soloists (who, after all, do a great deal of the dancing — the pas de trois in Act I and the national dances in Act III.) Here there was something like real elegance, with a connection among the dancers that corresponded to what could be heard from the pit. 

I haven’t watched The Black Swan lately, but I recall that the choreographer, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), says that a production of Swan Lake has to be great; otherwise, why bother? Indeed, it was my doubt that Swan Lake could be great that led me to avoid it in the days of my ignorant youth. I thought that it must be all fustian and feathers (and whatever complaints I’ve made about ABT’s version, it’s certainly much, much better than that). Black Swan assured me that Swan Lake could be great, and it showed a way of making it great, by working the seam of madness that is implicit from the very beginning of Tchaikovsky’s score.

One girl is enchanted and spends her days as a swan. Another is enchanted and spends her days as a ballerina. Black Swan suggests not only that there isn’t much difference between these fates — thus making Swan Lake a meditation on the art of ballet at its most demanding — but that either enchantment is likely to lead to or require madness, making healthy everyday affections impossible. (There’s probably something unhappy about Prince Siegfried, too, or he would have found satisfaction at his mother’s court. This is Matthew Bourne’s insight.) Is it possible to find happiness in disciplined transcendance? Plumping for an answer one way or the other is a mistake; it’s enough for a work of art to let the tension vibrate. I expect that this is exactly what Black Swan will inspire choreographers to do with Swan Lake. Now that I’ve seen a respectable performance of the old interpretation, I’m ready for the next step. 

¶ “The most pronounced development in banking today is that executives have become bolder as their business has gotten worse.” That’s howJesse Eisinger, a ProPublica financial reporter appearing in the Times’s DealBook, begins a politely indignant essay on the federal government’s mollycoddling of big bankers. What the bankers have become bolder about, however, is guaranteeing their infantile behavior, by demanding further protection from downsides and insulation from litigation and freedom from regulation. They want their cake and they want to eat it and then they want another cake! We wish that Mr Eisinger had put it like that, because there is, otherwise, nothing remotely bold about what bankers are up to these days. ¶ But if you really want cheering up, don’t miss Azam Ahmed’s story about Armageddon investing, which involves losing millions every day so that you’ll have gazillions when the markets go to hell, after attack by black swans with fat tails. The worst of it is that something constructive might be done with these assets. We’re only sorry that excitably pusillanimous investors aren’t going to be the only ones who get what they’re paying for.

What was Guy Tremlett’s Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen doing in my Amazuke shopping cart? Well, I put it there, of course, but why? I should probably have taken it out if I hadn’t been in a big hurry to order A N Wilson’s Dante in Love last week. I couldn’t be bothered to delete the two books that were already there (Tremlett’s, and Clarke Hutton’s Picture History of Britain — not quite the mystery that Tremlett is), or to “save” them for later. The Wilson and the Hutton won’t ship until the middle of July, but Catherine arrived yesterday.

Arriving along with it were sentences such as the following (describing  the atmosphere in Alcalá de Henares, where Catherine was born in 1485): “In winter it freezes. A pales sun shines weakly from a clear pastel sky, losing its battle against the harshe, obstinate chill.” Well, we can infer that Tremlett, the Guardian‘s Madrid correspondent, knows what he’s talking about from personal experience. And that’s just the problem. What Guy Tremlett knows and doesn’t know about history often gets in the way of his story.

Pages earlier:

The man holding the mule’s reins was Archbishop Carillo of Toledo, primate of Spain — a formidable warrior priest and one of the wealthiest and most powerful political players in the land. He was also Isabel’s chief ally. The records do not say whether he was wearing the same scarlet cloak with a white cross that he was said to wear over his armour when leading his men into battle.

Oh dear oh dear. “Said to wear”? Wearing armour in battle in late-Fifteenth-Century battles? If the meeting of Isabel and her half-brother Enrique at Guisando was indeed the ritual reconciliation that Tremlett tells us it was, then the archbishop was almost certainlywearing his archiepiscopal kit. But, really, it doesn’t matter. It’s not important. The ritual is not important. A serious historian — and by this I mean a writer who wanted to tell the story of Catherine’s resistance to Henry’s demand for an annulment — might dispose of her mother’s encounter before “the four bulls of Guisando” in a sentence or two, or might not mention it at all.

The serious historian would instead concentrate on why Archbishop Carillo supported Isabel. We’re told that he hated Enrique, against whom he had rebelled (no details), and that he tried to talk Isabel out of the reconciliation. A miniseries might be equally informative without risking ennui.

That same serious historian, however, might well decide, after some preliminary research, that the tale of Catherine of Aragon can’t be told in a manner that modern readers will find satisfying. This isn’t just because she was a woman. In my view, it’s because the modern idea of personality had not fully developed — had barely begun to develop. According to the prevailing world view, men and women were all more or less fungible, distinguiable only in terms of accidents that, however consequential for history, had none of the densely personal roots that we call “psychological.” There was no psychology.

This isn’t to say that Catherine of Aragon didn’t have powerful feelings about her husband’s behavior. By and large, however, they appear to have been the feelings that she ought to have had, the feelings that went with her status as a Spanish princess who had conducted her side of the marriage in an entirely blameless manner. Neither she nor anyone who advised or opposed her — no one, in short — was equipped to suppose that her bull-headed insistence on her “rights” might result in the first magisterial rent in the fabric of Christendom. Had she yielded to Henry, and stepped aside — had it been easy for Clement VII to grant Henry’s request for an annulment — the history of the Reformation would have been unimaginably different.

That would have been a story — except that it could not have been. Only the realm of science fiction would support it. I don’t mean to say that Guy Tremlett’s book is not a good one. I’m sure that many readers will see a vivid past through its old-glass window panes. But it’s not my kind of book at all.

¶ Don’t get us wrong: we agree that Bernard Madoff’s sustained defrauding of investors was very, very bad. But “extraordinarily evil“? That’s what Judge Denny Chin called it in his decision to sentence Mr Madoff to 150 years in prison. (We’re not sure why this is news two years later, but let that pass.) Quite aside from our discomfort with the idea of “evil” — especially as attached to a person (in the form of an onerous sentence), and especially in connection with a nonviolent crime against property — we have a big problem with the fact that Mr Madoff’s loser-take-all condition. The complete story remains to be told, but from the start it was clear that the Ponzi scheme was hugely enabled by complaisant counterparties at “feeder” funds and at banks — not to mention sophisticated investors who really ought to have known better; not to mention the wilfully stymied enforcers at the SEC. This was a case, moreover, in which it was the emperor himself who made the announcement about his invisible assets. We’re not saying that Bernie Madoff’s sentence ought to be reduced. We’re just saying that, standing alone as it does, it’s unconscionable.

¶ We honor the passing of Margaret Tyzack, one of our very favorite actresses, at the age of 79. We never saw her Martha (in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), but we loved her Lotte Schoen, battling with Maggie Smith’s Lettice Douffet in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice & Lovage. Plus everything from 2001 to Match Point. What a voice! Tyzack will be much missed!

In her engaging guide to Venice, No Vulgar Hotel, Judith Martin devotes a chapter to visiting the Serenissima with “Your Imaginary Friend.” This would be the poet or artist whose work has kindled your desire to visit Venice in the first place, or kept the flame burning brightly. Dante, Ruskin, Titian, Henry James, Byron — they’re all there and more. So is Donna Leon.

Fans of Donna Leon’s mysteries give themselves away by their abnormal interest in mundane places  — a counterintuitive desire to visit police headquarters or a sudden cry of “Look! That’s where Guido buys flowers for Paola!” For years, we responded to gracious luncheon invitations from friends who cautioned that they lived up ninety-four steps by cajoling them into coming to lunch with us instead. When they let drop that their apartment was used as the home for Miss Leon’s hero, we bounded up those ninety-four steps in a flash, brushed past our hosts and tore through the familiar setting.

Shown above (somewhere) is the Questura, or police headquarters, where Guido Brunetti cajoles Signorina Elettra Zorzi into helping him cope with the zombie careerist, Vice-Questore Patta (a Southerner, wouldn’t you know). I told you about Rome last week; yesterday, I discovered that Google Maps has given Venice the same treatment. Zoom in close, and the satellite pictures give way to breathtaking balloon views.  

It’s hot and humid today. Not miserably so, but enough to make me feel that summer is no time for working. After lunch with a friend in Turtle Bay, I walked up First Avenue to the storage unit, where I dropped off some winter shirts and picked up some summer shirts, along with a summer bedspread and a summer blanket. As if that weren’t enough to carry around — my next stop was Gracious Home, where I bought a Vornado fan — I tucked in George Sand’s Consuelo. I’d like to tell you something about this novel, but I am trying not to read the jacket descriptions and the introductory material, so all I can say is that Consuelo is very long. Having read the first chapter, I can also tell you that the heroine is a diligent Spanish girl with a beautiful voice who for some reason lives in Venice, possibly in the Eighteenth Century.

My friend at lunch planted the seed, when she asked me what my summer reading project was — would I re-read Proust? She meant that as a jest; it’s the all-purpose, perennial summer project that no one ever gets around to doing (except me; I’ve read In Search of Time Past three times, all during the summer). I thought about taking the Pléiade paperback of the entire cycle out to Fire Island in August, and maybe I’ll do that. I’ve not read Proust in French. But at the storage unit, there was Consuelo, equally fat but written, I expect, with a more circumscribed vocabulary. One is always running to the dictionary with Proust, unless one has the brains to have an English translation open to the same spot. How many times in your life have you looked up acajou, a word that bears absolutely no resemblance to mahogany? It’s all very well for Proust to use lots and lots of  different French words, which French people can presumably be expected to know; but it’s awfully hard on the rest of us, and I for one would like to see an edition in which every word that is used fewer than fifty times throughout the novel is translated in the margins. That’s precisely the sort of edition, by the way, that would be a snap to compile for an e-reader, in case anybody ambitious is listening. I have no recollection of a reason for ordering Consuelo from Amazon in Franch, and I really ought to finish François le champi, said to be Proust’s favorite novel as a boy, first. But let’s not get started on the Things That I Ought To Do Instead.

So I’m going to read now — read and tidy up. I made a frightful mess looking for a map of Venice earlier. A map-type map, that is, something that folds up and contains all the traditional information that Google Maps ignores in favor of restaurant locations. (The not-so-little church that I wanted to identify from the aerial image turned out to be Sant’Aponal, which dates from the early Eleventh Century. According to Rizzoli’s The Treasures of Venice, the interior is not open to the public. Imagine that!) The Venice map wasn’t with the other maps, which themselves are secreted in various spots at the moment (a transitional situation); the Venice map was tucked neatly alongside Paris From Above, in a bookshelf by my reading chair. But I didn’t think of that until I’d scattered maps all over the blue room. (The road map for Veneto-Friuli did not serve.) Plus, I’ve got to put the summer bedspread and blanket away for a few days (I’ll change the sheets on Friday), and plug in the new fan somewhere, and run downstairs to collect the mail and pick up something for dinner.   

And I’ve got to find where Guido buys flowers for Paola.

¶ An inevitable problem has finally arrived: new drugs that extend the lives of prostate cancer patients by months — by two years at most — are going to be very expensive. As a preliminary pushback, Medicare and insurers alike are expected to underwrite the drugs’ expense only if they are used according to the instructions on the label. This restriction will narrow the field of eligible patients. The larger question of affordability is not, for the moment, being addressed. But the issue that will lead to discussion of triage and rationing is squarely in front of us. How much are “marginal” extenstions of life worth — in a world where an one more day of life is “marginal” only for other people? Also unaddressed is the drugs’ actual costs to pharmaceutical companies, an accounting jungle if ever there was one.

¶ There is only one word for our response to Elisabeth Rosenthal’s front-page story in this morning’s paper, “Europe Stifles Drivers in Favor of Alternatives“: GLEE. Our dislike of private cars on Manhattan streets is becoming, we confess, pathological. In particular, we bitterly resent the expropriation of sidewalks by parking spaces. It’s nice to see that European civic leaders are on the right track on this issue (as is, to some extent at least, our own mayor, who sought unsuccessfully to impose tolls on the East and Harlem River bridges). We were tickled pink to read that the approaches to Zürich are dotted with gratuitous traffic signals that are set to linger on red. Toll the bridges!

Toward the end of Incognito, David Eagleman discusses the strange case of Phineas Gage. The name first appears at the beginning of a section entitled “What It Does and Doesn’t Mean To Be Constructed of Physical Parts,” and, as is my habit, I glanced at it even as I decided to take a short break from the book. Before Eaglemen reminded me, I recalled that Phineas Gage was a nineteenth-century laborer who survived a ghastly head injury, which was so wondrous and strange in itself that it took his doctors a while to note a personality change for the worse. I had read about the case somewhere else, not too long ago. But where?

This was only the last of several such experiences while reading Incognito. An earlier example was Eagleman’s summary of a “time discounting” experiment by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Not only had I read about that experiment, but I recalled that Tversky died before Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for their work together. Where did I read that? Not in Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works, which mentions the Kahneman and his Prize, but in connection with another experiment altogether, all in one succinct paragraph on page 206. Not in Eduardo Porter’s The Price of Everything, which mentions other work by Kahneman several times, but not Tversky. Not in Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, which doesn’t mention either scientist.

Frustrated, I conceived the idea of the Museum of Cognitive Monuments, a Web site devoted to curating the cases and experiments that pop up again and again in books on the most exciting of current topics, the cognitive revolution — in which the notion of man as a rational animal &c &c is trounced and trashed. The Museum of Cognitive Monuments would be a concordance, collection references to discoveries in the field (both in psychology and in neurobiology, which are approaching a state of lamination), and offer brief précis of different writers’ handling of the material. In addition to indexing the growing library of books in the field, the MCM would work as a prolegomenon to it, allowing writers to assume that readers were already familiar with the relevant cases and experiments, cutting down on instances of entertaining but distracting pops of magazine-style introduction.

Incognito is altogether an introduction to “the secret lives of the brain” (the book’s subtitle), clearly aimed at readers who have never concerned themeselves with the cognitive revolution — otherwise, there would be no need for the first three chapters, which address a reader who, assuming that the conscious mind controls behavior, appears to be unaware that a cognitive revolution is underway. Eagleman’s original contribution begins when he borrows Doris Kearns Godwin’s phrase about the Lincoln Cabinet: a “team of rivals.” This metaphor serves Eagleman well, although, as I wrote last week, I find the overall tone of his business- and sports-flavored language distastefully complacent. Not to mention his reliance on the term “zombie” to describe more or less automatic and unconscious behavior patterns.

As long as the zombie subroutines are running smoothly, the CEO [the conscious mind] can sleep. It is only when something goes wrong … that the CEO is rung up. Think about when your conscious awareness comes online: in those situations where events in the world violate your expectations. When everything is going according to the needs and skills of your zombie systems, you are not consciously aware of most of what’s in front of you; when suddenly they cannot handle the task, you become consciously aware of the problem. The CEO scrambles around, looking for fast solutions, dialing up everyone to find who can address the problem best.

This is so guy that it’s embarrassing. If the passage has one inadvertent virtue, it’s that it silhouettes the unsleepingly resourceful nature of artistic consciousness. Eagleman seems unwilling to propose that the health of the moderrn mind depends on its ability to register a fair current of internal contradiction. But he lays out the evidence for such a conclusion.

Eagleman is far more interested in the assessment of criminal behavior, which he all but defines as deviant — another complacency. The book’s final two chapters constitute a mini-treatise on the overhaul of criminal law. His argument on behalf of legal reform that would bypass considerations of “blameworthiness” is interesting and persuasive, and it will undoubtedly be taken up again by Eagleman and others in bolder form elsewhere. By then, I hope, the author will have outgrown the boyish tendency to associate the normal mind with inattentiveness.  

¶ We are, of course, thrilled that same-sex marriages will be permitted in our home state, but we remain sobered by the thought that the victory, like too much political action these days, was to some extent purchased, in this case by wealthy Republican donors who happen to be progressive on this issue. Michael Barbaro’s compelling behind-the-scenes report in yesterday’s Times details, among other things, the persuasion of Rochester senator James Alesi.

¶ Great pianist and occasional blogger Jeremy Denk inveighs against an odious comparison of classical-music performances to long-ago baseball-game re-enactments. He comes up with a much  better one. (Think Denk)

¶ At Academe Online, Eric Alterman outlines the differences in “truth” as understood by academics, journalists, and think-tank pundits. Journalists, of course, are harried opportunists who are satisfied with the truth of someone’s having said something, no matter how false that remark might be. The real struggle is between tendentious think-tank analysts, who are more or less baldly paid to advocate certain positions, and disinterested academics who will follow a thought wherever it leads. Unfortunately academics have become even more uninteresting than disinterested. (via Brainiac) ¶ Simon Mainwaring’s excellent and concise Four Reasons We Must Re-Engineer Free Market Capitalism, at GOOD. What we’d like to see is a painstaking historical account of how self-interest, that Enlightenment engine, became stupid and destructive. ¶ Jordan Michael Smith argues that David Mamet’s rightward swerve has nothing to do with liberal disenchantment — like all the other neoconservatives, Mamet never was a liberal, but a leftist. (The Awl)

¶ At the Guardian, a garland of summer-reading reveries by eminent novelists. A S Byatt discovered, the summer before she was married, that she was a writer, not an academic, and Proust was her teacher. Colm Tóibín, at 17, was turned on by Hemingway, which must explain his subsequent attraction to Henry James, no? (via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ In a preview of coming attractions, Robert Gordon reviews A N Wilson’s Dante in Love, a companion to the Divine Comedy that’s due to appear here in October but that you can order right now from Amazuke. Which we’ve just done. (Literary Review; via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ GThe Saxon exodus from Romania that followed the end of that country’s communist regime (and the recrudescence of nationalism) left behind a newly-discovered trove of baroque sacred music, now being edited by Kurt Philippi and performed by a trans-European ensemble throughout the region, which, by the way, is Transylvania. (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

¶ We remember it well… but, just the same, it’s nice of Jordan Barber to remind us of the “fun” of moving out of an old apartment and into a new apartment with new roommates. Mercifully, he doesn’t dwell on details. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ If we don’t remember being taught by slovenly graduate students, that’s because they hadn’t been invented yet. (Pocket protectors were weird but not slovenly.) Robert Watts, considerably younger, was so demoralized by sloppy TAs in college that he grew up to look just like them — until, one fine day, he invested in the Medallion Fund. The Medallion Fund look, that is. (The Smart Set) ¶ In a decision that will make producers and restaurateurs think about repatriating to Formosa, a court in Taipei fined and jailed a blogger for “defaming” a noodle parlor. The plaintiff said that “he hoped the case would teach her a lesson.” You might want to bear this in mind if you’re planning to blog about Taiwan… (Taipei Times; via MetaFilter)

¶ At Wired, Thomas Goetz writes up the latest in feedback loops, which can be surprisingly effective in altering behavior — provided they’re neither annoying nor too easy of ignore. Inventor David Rose speaks of “enchantment.” (via Arts Journal)

New: ¶ “Enthusiasm For Heat” @ Fake Science (via The Morning News) ¶ Wisconsin Grilled Cheese Academy. (via MetaFilter)

Noted: ¶ Irrepressible general: Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1915-2011. (Telegraph) ¶ Knowing Urdu, Anjum Atlaf decides to learn Hindi and Farsi. All Indo-European languages, by the way. (The South Asian Idea; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ It’s an ongoing story, with no clear outcome. Sleepy Bonn, capital of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (known here as “West Germany”), has been growing of late, while Berlin suffers high unemployment and is still inching its way back to its post-unification population peak. What may tip the scales in Berlin’s favor is the end of military conscription in Germany, an operation that was run from the university town on the Rhine that was also the summer retreat of the Electors of Cologne. The sad truth is that Germany’s powerhouse city, Frankfurt, has an aura that makes Chicago look like Paris. Alan Cowell reports.