Jason Kasdan’s Bad Teacher didn’t amuse me as much as I hoped it would, for two reasons. First, Lucy Punch’s demonic fury was never unleashed. Second, Justin Timberlake’s cuteness never became ridiculous. That Cameron Diaz never made me laugh was not a disappointment, because I never expected her to. What did surprise me, though, was the intensity of the impression that she made of not acting at all. She left me convinced that if for some reason she were called up to teach seventh-graders, she would be as negligent and uninspiring as Elizabeth Halsey, the gold-digger with no gift for hiding her shovel. I’m not going to say that Ms Diaz is bad in this movie, but she really does put the bad in Bad Teacher. When she’s rude and unpleasant, she is also frightfully convincing. It is the sort of performance that raises doubts about the integrity of pretty blondes to something approaching certainty. 

Justin Timberlake, so adorable in The Social Network, is a curiosity here. As Scott Delacorte, the high-minded but sunny ingénu with a surprising taste for protected sex, he is utterly believable, but there is none of the edgy self-mockery that David Fincher elicited in the Facebook movie. Like Ms Diaz, he seems not to be acting a lot of the time. At best, he channels the clueless nice guys that Cary Grant played in movies like Bringing Up Baby, only without the improbability. I thought that the gist of the Justin Timberlake story was that he had survived his teen stardom as lead singer of ‘N Synch. You’d never guess it from Bad Teacher. While we’re on that topic, let me point out that even Jason Segel, as the gym teacher with an unlikely interest in the bad teacher, has difficulty projecting his role, but at least in his case this makes sense, as his character is not very believable; when was the last time you ran into a guy who dreamed of teaching phys ed at Harvard, settled for a Cook County high school — and likes to mock participants at poetry slams? Maybe this is what “high concept” means — you have to be high to get it. There is a lot of dope-smoking in Bad Teacher, but all it contributes is an unwanted taste of verisimilitude. 

All of this might have been saved by a really good mad scene for Ms Punch, who remains the sole reason for watching Jay Roach’s Dinner for Schmucks. She brings to thwarted affection a demented stubbornness that is truly life-threatening. As Amy Squirrel, she starts out as a goody-goody teacher who is too full of herself to win the trust of her pupils, and it’s clear that her cheerful oppressiveness is what makes students tolerate Elizabeth’s gross derelictions in the classroom. By degrees, Amy’s determination to get what she wants — Scott Delacorte, for one; an annual teaching award that she has becomed accustomed to winning, for another — gets the better of her, and at two points she is warned not to let “what happened in 2008” happen again. Oh, how I wanted to know what happened in 2008! I wanted to see it! But the actress was never permitted to realize the kind of comic meltdown that may, we hope, eventually become her trademark.  Ms Punch does a very good job with what she’s given, gamely shoving her way through the movie’s later scenes threatening “Jail time!” with her cheeks inflamed by poison ivy (contracted from the skin of an apple poisoned by Elizabeth) and retracting her upper lip with Freddy-Krueger-like monstrosity. But at no point is the Elizabeth, or anybody else, in real danger. Personally, I was hoping that Amy would blow up the school out of spite, perhaps using spite itself as an explosive. At least she might have immolated the bureaucrat played by Thomas Lennon in the lurid photographs of his night of shame. Instead, she is carried off stage in handcuffs, demanding that her urine be tested. 

The real failing of Bad Teacher is its vernacular setting. John Adams Middle School, which the principal played by John Michael Higgins constantly refers to as “Jams,” is a generic hellhole of adolescent ennui that would be unimpressive on television. You, too, might consume inappropriate substances and pass out in front of your class if you had to teach there. The clichés — take, for example, the anodyne performance by “Period 5,” the faculty band, at a place called The Midnight Cowboy Saloon, hoo boy what a night out! — are perked up by nothing more than the occasional touch of grossness. It is difficult for a Hollywood movie to have no production values, but Bad Teacher comes close. The worst thing is how oddly appropriate this dulness is: how catatonic would a world have to be to make a guidance counselor out of Elizabeth Halsey? That’s the movie’s final joke. A lot of viewers are going to find it distinctly unfunny. I laughed, but it wasn’t at anything that Cameron Diaz said or did.

¶ The effects of what cognitive scientists call time discounting can be felt in  a side-by-side comparison of this morning’s two big crime stories, the capture of Whitey Bulger in Santa Monica and the denial of bail for David Laffer in Central Islip. In a horrific drugstore robbery, Mr Laffer killed four people in cold blood last Sunday in Medford, Long Island. That’s what’s horrific about it: it happened last Sunday. ¶ Whitey Bulger killed quite a few more people that David Laffer, but that was long ago, and the old Boston gang leader has been living quietly in Santa Monica for over fifteen years. Another thing that makes Bulger’s crimes less horrific is what we might call intimacy discounting: Bulger knew some of his victims before he killed them. Laffer’s victims were all strangers — random strangers in two cases.

¶ We’ve just whiled away a few quarter hours staring at the Google Maps images of Rome. Up a certain magnification, the the images are satellite photos as usual, but when you zoom in, the view becomes decidedly more that from an airplane. Or a hot air balloon. You won’t believe it!

Zoom in until you find the Villa Medici, home of the Institut Français until fairly recent times. We were poking around this neighborhood because we thought we’d try to find the grotto that Velásquez painted in 1630. Michael Kimmelman prefers to spend time with this picture when he’s at the Prado, ignoring the vastly more famous Las Meninas around the corner. We think that the smaller picture is pretty neat, too; it would be nice to see it someday. We can’t quite make out the “workman looking down from a rooftop,” even though we’ve checked out several other images of the picture (which is how we learned that the arcade wall belongs to the Pavilion of Ariadne — a fact to which Kimmelman slyly alludes by describing the dangling rope’s glinting “like the silver thread of a spider’s web.” We couldn’t make out the rope, either, until we checked out the Times online. Maybe we were too busy envying Michael Kimmelman his youthful discovery of Italy, a world of “shady churches and neglected museums, cool, silent retreats from the hot days, and it was as if a whole universe opened up just to me.” Since he puts it so well, we’re glad of his good fortune.

The other day, I bought an iPod. Now he’s lost it, you’re thinking; how many times has he bored us silly with his Nano Notes? But this time, it isn’t a Nano, but a Classic iPod, or iPod Classic. It looks like a Nano that ate one of those cookies in Alice in Wonderland. It is quite ridiculously large. But with the storage to match (about ten times the capacity of a Nano), it is the perfect place for my opera collection, or as much of it as will fit. Every day, I load another five operas onto the thing. I still can’t listen to opera if the page that I’m writing requires actual thought, but as you can see there’s nothing here that Un Ballo in Maschera (Bergonzi, Nilsson, Molinari-Pradelli) would get in the way of. 

It’s Thursday, which means that I’m planning to go downtown in a few hours to sit with Will while his parents have dinner alone somewhere. Tonight, I am going to take a bunch of the shirt cardboards that I’ve been hoarding. There was a time when shirt cardboards were the joy of my youth, and I got in a lot of trouble once for advancing myself the cardboards from my father’s shirts drawer. For a while, I was very into constructing hybrid castle/stage sets. I was very into hidden doors and secret passageways, and even though these were not easily realized in shirt cardboard (which at least had the merit of being stone grey), it was exciting to create three dimensional models of the houses of horror that I hoped to live in some day. I have no memory of outgrowing this pastime, so maybe I didn’t. Maybe it’s going to blossom again in the guise of “playing with Will.” 

Being with Will is always quite straightforward — we do this, we do that — but remembering my time with him is quite strange; it’s as though I were reviewing my recollections through someone else’s prescription glasses. It is impossible, when he is not actually in the room, to think of him as a child of nearly eighteen months. There are too many precocities, or at any rate moments when I feel that I’m with a teenager, or a third-grader. There are shards of his personality, as it were, that are already fully grown. They’re surrounded by undeveloped parts, sort of like a Roman Forum but under construction, not in ruins. Most of what he says is still — unintelligible, and it’s not always clear that he knows what talking is for. (Or, rather, what it isn’t.) But he appears to understand a great deal of grown-up talk. Like his mother, he has a formidable memory, and just because he hasn’t been exposed to something in a while doesn’t mean that the unguarded mention of it won’t kindle an insistent interest. (When in doubt, I spell things out.) 

He’s also “musical” — he dances, bangs drums, and even riffs on the harmonica. There is a spectrum of his vocalizing that could be called singing, sort of. But we are a long way from Aida. There has been no listening to music at our house. When he and his parents come to dinner, there might be a jazz playlist purring away somewhere, but not loud enough to catch Will’s notice. And when he’s here with Kathleen and me, we somehow don’t think to play anything — except, of course, for Shaun the Sheep. There’s step dancing in Shaun, which Will gamely attempts to imitate. It is mostly a matter of shaking his butt. If there’s one thing I’m looking forward to, it’s taking him to see Paul Taylor. There are always lots of kiddies in that audience. But although it’s very easy to imagine Will sitting rapt through a twenty-minute dance, it’s also easy to imagine that he might respond in a manner more typical of his age. Pretty soon, I expect, I’ll be learning all the minimum ages. At the Museum, happily, there isn’t one, but you have to be ten to get into the Frick. If he keeps growing at his current rate, Will will pass for ten when he’s eight.

But I mustn’t push things. I must remember what happened when a friend of ours was taken, as her first opera ever, to Parsifal. Amazingly, her date’s passion for this masterpiece proved not to be contagious in the least!

¶ We were wondering when the Times would get round to mentioning the little problem that Mahmound Ahmadinejad, one of Iran’s two presidents, is having with his “divine” counterpart, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and the clerical class that actually runs things in Iran. Today must be the day: Neil MacFarquhar writes from Cario. The nub of the problem, as might have been expected, is that Mr Ahmadinejad is trying to build up a power base of his own. Unlike his scholarly predecessors, the secular president is very popular among the large class of poor Iranians. But he is also given to bold, somewhat swashbuckling gestures that don’t always come off as well in political life as they do in the movies.

¶ Never having attended a bookstore event without buying something (usually a second copy of a book that we’ve read and liked), we’re pleased to read that McNally Jackson, our favorite downtown bookshop, is going to charge a fee for events in its new downstairs space. We loathe the idea of something for nothing (which is usually just another way of saying “advertising” — the horror!), and the thought that readers might sashay through a reading and then buy the book from Amazon makes our blood boil. ¶ Sam Sifton tries to make Desmond’s sound tired and boring, but even with the help of a few precious put-downs (“This is pensioner food for those who run pension funds”), he fails.We want to go.

David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain isn’t a disappointment, exactly — which is to say that it is a disappointment, in being rather less amusing to read that I expected it to be. I have the awful feeling that I’m reading a book that is aimed at guys. Worse, it might even be written by one. Eagleman’s tone is that of the sharp guy who gets a kick out of showing you that your intuitions and unexamined assumptions are way off base. The prevailing imagery is drawn from business and sports. There’s a sense of wonder at all the trouble that the brain takes to make our lives simple and efficient — to make it possible for us to pay minimal attention. 

In other words, it’s a very different book from Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong. Schulz approaches the brain as an error-prone organ whose bad habits we have to bear more or less constantly in mind as we navigate the complexities of social life, correcting for bias and prejudice even when — especially when — we think that we’re free of them. Eagleman thinks that the brain is cool. “Sometimes it is tempting to think that seeing is easy despite the complicated neural machinery that underlies it,” runs a characteristic observation. “To the contrary, it is easy because of the complicated neural machinery.” Thinking and consciousness are not necessarily good things, especially when the brain can perform difficult tasks on autopilot. 

The handwriting on the wall appears early, on page 6. 

Consider the activity that characterizes a nation at any moment. Factories churn, telecommunications lines buzz with activity, businesses ship products. People eat constantly. Sewer lines direct waste. All across the great stretches of the land, police chase criminals,. Handshakes secure deals. Lovers rendezvous. Secretaries field calls, teachers profess, athletes compete, doctors operate, and bus drivers navigate. You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary. So you pick up a newspaper — not a dense paper like the New York Times but lighter fare such as USA Today. You won’t be surprised that none of the details of the activity are listened in the paper; after all, you want to know the bottom line. You want to know that Congress just signed a new tax law that affects your family, but the detailed origin of the idea — involving lawyers and corporations and filibusters — isn’t especially important to that new bottom line. And you certainly wouldn’t want to know all the details of the food supply of the nation — how the cows are eating and how many are being eaten — you only want to be alerted if there’s a spike of mad cow disease. You don’t care how the garbage is produced and packed away; you only care if it’s going to end up in your backyard. You don’t care about the wiring and infrastructure of the factories, you only care if the workers are going on strike. That’s what you get from reading the newspaper.

Your conscious mind is that newspaper. 

This imaginary “you” whom Eagleman is addressing, this solipsistic USA Today glancer, is precisely the sort of person whom one would have expected a front-liner in the cognitive revolution to disdain. Instead, Eagleman adopts the fawning peppiness of a car dealer. What does this “you” want to do with all the free time that simplistic summaries open up? From what I can tell, all “you” wants to do is to play Tetris. 

I understand that the importance of Incognito is not its presentation of the psychology experiments and fMRI analyses that have become almost familiar in recent years, thanks to books like Being Wrong — indeed, Eagleman writes for readers who haven’t been following this issue (who haven’t, for example, been reading Malcolm Gladwell) — but rather its insistence that we need to reconsiders our ideas of conventional and legal responsibility. If Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter, had survived his orgy of death, and if it had been possible to detect the tumor that was compressing his amygdala, would it have been correct to hold him criminally liable for his acts? How do we manage the problems that ensue when otherwise effective medication sparks the irrepressible urge to gamble in Parkinson’s victims? What is the culpability of drug addiction? These are all important questions, and working out practical answers — refashioning our criminal legal system in the process — is going to be a tough slog. What I’ve seen of Eagleman’s thinking on these points seems thoughtful and grounded, and I’m looking forward to seeing more. But I’m disappointed to see Eagleman giving a pass to vernacular masculine inattentiveness. 

At one point, Eagleman refers to what I’ve come to call the paradox of the centipede: the centipede managed its hundred feet just fine until it was asked how it managed, whereupon it was paralysed by second-guessing. If you think “too much,” you can screw up your golf swing or your sex life, and you can become awfully familiar with insomnia. But I don’t think that thinking is the problem. Thinking is the symptom. Centipedes, we may trust, never actually stop to consider their articulatory powers, but when we do, it’s usually a sign that they’re not working. When we toss in bed, it’s a sign that our wiring is faulty; whatever the cure might be (medication, life-style modification), it is consciousness that alerts us to the dysfunction. It’s too bad that more of our fallible parts don’t do the same. 

And it’s too bad, I suppose, that David Eagleman comes from Texas, and not the Northeast Corridor.

¶ The common-law meaning of the term “waste” has nothing to do with garbage, and everything to do with the failure of stewardship that has allowed politicians to yield to public unions’ pension demands throughout the decades of postwar prosperity. Charles Duhigg examines the situation on the ground in Costa Mesa, California, where a conservative real-estate developer, Jim Righeimer, has been attacked for his fight for fiscal responsibility. There are no heroes in this battle, which, ultimately, pits self-interests against the common weal. ¶ It’s nice to know, though, that California’s legislators won’t be paid until they do their job, and present a balanced budget to Governor Jerry Brown.

¶ It would be uttermost hypocrisy if we tut-tutted the Times for giving ample space to two not unrelated stories today. ¶ The first is a rather incoherent — unavoidably incoherent, perhaps — account of an ABC stunt show, 101 Ways to Leave a Game Show. Watch one of the show’s YouTube clips after a selection from Candid Camera, and you will taste the bitterness of our national decline. I don’t think that the ordinary people in these shows are dumber than they used to be, but the producers are cynical and the audiences debased. Now, if they repackaged it as The Darwin Awards… ¶ The obituary of one Ryan Dunn, whom we’d never heard of, a “Jackass” who lost control of his Porsche 911 in the woods near his Pennsylvania home, killing a passenger as well as himself. Our first tyhought was that fiery automobile crashes are at least less sordid than drug overdoses, but of course this may have been a case of both.

When I was writing yesterday about John Armstrong’s civilization book, I wanted to follow up a reference to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. But where was it? It wasn’t where I thought it ought to be. Before giving up entirely, I checked a resource that I haven’t turned to in years, my Readerware database. And what do you know? Civilisation was right where Readerware said it would be. Which only goes to show — something. It shows that I haven’t been looking at Civilisation much, or it probably would have drifted to another shelf. Most of the locations given in the database are not current. Bringing Readerware up to date is going to be a big job. 

I gave up on Readerware because its interface was so kludgy. Well, that was part of it. The library was one of many, many things that were neglected when I began blogging in late 2004. It wasn’t until 2009, in fact, that I felt that I oughtn’t to have to spend quite so much time on the Web sites; I took up cooking again, for example. But the Readerware experience was rebarbative. It was so unlike Microsoft Access, which I’d used for about fifteen years until the files were lost in a malware crash in 2003. It had the look of something that wasn’t designed for a computer. But when Jason, my tech adviser, asked me to take a look at it a few weeks ago — I felt that I was ready to take up bookhandling again — I noticed that, unlike Version 2.0, Version 3.03 actually looks like a Windows database. I was not happy to hear Jason point out that Readerware is still the most popular private library-management application, but after a moue of regret, I thought, why not — I’ve already input information about thousands of books.

Then a month went by without my doing anything, so that no sooner was I fiddling with a get-reacquainted session the other day than the free-trial period expired, and I couldn’t access the files until the upgrade 3.03 was paid for and properly installed. The application needed to be loaded onto the laptop as well, and it made sense to store the database on the NAS server that enables me to work with Quicken and iTunes and all of my photographs from either of two computers. Jason took care of all of that. Just before he left today, I got out the bar-code scanner and swept Armstrong’s book into the database. Its location, tentatively, is “TBFP” — a pile, nearly four feet tall, of books that I’ve read in the past six months. I’m in no hurry to shelve them, because the pile compensates so nicely for the stacks of books that I haven’t read. Also, when people ask, “What have you been reading lately,” and I draw a deer-in-headlights blank, I can check out the TBFP. 

I’m in the mood to re-read Middlemarch, but I can’t find the Oxford Classics clothbound edition that Kathleen read not too long ago. What happened to it when she was done? Chissà. I almost popped into Barnes & Noble at lunchtime to pick up another copy, but was able to resist the impulse. There is plenty of other stuff to read right now. I got through another chapter of Wilhelm Genazino’s little novel, The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt. I’ve already mentioned my suspicion that this book reads much better in German, a hunch based on the original title, Ein Regenschirm für diesen Tag — “an umbrella for this day.” Yesterday, I came across the line in the text. The narrator is at a dinner party. He has just been downsized in his shoe-testing work, so when another guest asks him what he does, he tells her that he runs an Institute for the Art of Memory and Experience. Frau Balkausen is intrigued, and asks “what kind of people I deal with at the Institute.” 

The people who come to us, I answer, a little hesitantly and at the same time as if it were routine, are people who sense that their lives !have become nothing more than one long drawn-out rainy day, and that their bodies are no more than the umbrella for this day.

Which certainly made me reconsider the novel’s many strange erotic encounters, many of which had triggered the “ew” reflex. More than ever convinced that Regenschirm (as I’ve taken to calling it) is one of those books that just doesn’t translate very well, I went to Amazon.de and bought a copy. My German isn’t really good enough to assess the quality of Genazino’s prose, but yesterday’s chapter transformed his novel from a chore into a charm. 

Meanwhile, I’m listening to my favorte Savoy operas round and round. As at the end of my last G & S jag, Patience is my favorite of the lot. There is something very pure and refined about the silliness in Patience — as befits a spoof of pre-Raphaelite aestheticism. The speedy concision with which Patience and Grosvenor fall in and out of romantic bliss takes my breath away. 

Patience: And it is possible that you condescend to love such a girl as I?
Grosvenor: Yes, Patience, is it not strange? I have loved you with a Florentine fourteenth-century frenzy for full fifteen years!
Patience: Oh, marvellous! I have hitherto been deaf to the voice of love. I seem now to know what love is! It has been revealed to me — it is Archibald Grosvenor!
Grosvenor: Yes, Patience, it is!
Patience: (as in a trance) We will never, never part!
Grosvenor: We will live and die together!
Patience: I swear it!
Grosvenor: We both swear it!
Patience: (recoiling from him) But — oh, horror!
Grosvenor: What’s the matter?
Patience: Why, you are perfection. A source of endless ecstasy to all who know you!
Grosvenor: I know am am. Well?
Patience: Then, bless my heart, there can be nothing unselfish in loving you!
Grosvenor: Merciful powers! I never thought of that!
Patience: To monopolize those features on which all women love to linger! It would be unpardonable!
Grosvenor: Why, so it would! Oh, fatal perfection, again you interpose between me and my happiness!

The rapdily-unfolding absurdity works the additional magic of preserving Grosvenor’s thoroughgoing fatuosness from becoming irritating. But there’s an underlying alchemy, and John Pemble describes it brilliantly in his review of Carolyn Williams’s new book, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (London Review of Books, 33/12, page 39). 

Gilbert communicated no real sense of chaos or panic because the instability of the world his characters inhabit is corrected by the stability of the language they speak. Lunatic logic and accelerating disorder are checked by metrical and elocutionary discipline. 

Which doesn’t mean that Gilbert’s lines are fussy. They’re just perfect. Consider the encounter of Phyllis, in Iolanthe, with the two nobleman to whom she offers herself when she discovers Strephon’s “infidelity” (and doesn’t believe, yet, that “the lady is his mother!”):

Lord Mountararat: Phyllis! My darling!
Lord Tolloller: Phyllis! My own!
Phyllis: Don’! How dare you? Oh, but perhaps you’re the two noblemen I’m engaged to?
Lord Mountararat: I am one of them.
Lord Tolloller: I am the other.
Phyllis: Oh, then, my darling! (to Lord Mountararat) My own! (to Lord Tolloller) Well, have you settled which it’s to be?
Lord Tolloller: Not altogether. It’s a difficult position. It would be hardly delicate to toss up. On the whole we would rather leave it to you.
Phyllis: How can it possibly concern me? You are both Earls, and you are both rich, and you are both plain.

“How can it possibly concern me,” asks the Arcadian shepherdess about her marital destiny. It doesn’t seem crazy so much as candid: a gallery of the coldly ambitious girls that Trollope described so much more convincingly than his heroines lines up behind her.

And then there’s the music. In his slightly fannish dual biography, Gilbert and Sullivan — this is one serious jag — Michael Ainger points to why Sullivan’s serious compositional projects were never as captivating as his Savoy work. Sullivan was basically a highly gifted playboy, a fun- and sun-seeker who could dash off engaging, even knowledgeable trifles in a series of all-nighters. A friend, John Goss, responded to his cantata, The Prodigal Son, with a caution. 

He praised his conducting, thought his orchestrations superb, and hoped Sullivan would try another oratorio, but he sounded a note of warning: “putting out all your strength — but not the strength of a few weeks or months, whatever your immidate friends may say.” Sullivan would never be capable of that long, sustained work. He preferred short, intensive bursts, followed by long periods of inactivity. 

Inactivity at the piano, that is.

Putting away Ian Bradley’s annotated edition of the G & S librettos, I see that I’ve acquired a new bookcase since I stopped updating Readerware. (I’ve acquired two, actually.) Putting the book back was a good occasion to update its location. Very easily done!

¶ In his column this morning, Joe Nocera writes about capital requirements for banks (the subject of an international convention that will be known as “Basel III”) and how unpopular they are with bankers. “Banks always want capital requirements to be as low as possible, because the less capital they have, the more risk they can take and thus the more money they can make (and the bigger the executives’ bonuses).” Underline that parenthesis — well-compensated executives everywhere identify with their paladin-rentier class far more than they do with any employer/institution — and ask yourself, as we do, if greater risk-taking by (not very bright) bankers leads to an increase in freaked-out panic, as we saw in the credit crunch of 2008. Meanwhile, note that the Rentier Party (a/k/a “Republican”) is obstructing the legislative imposition of higher capital requirements, taking the view, shared by no one who is not a rentier or a rentier’s tool, that capital requirements are unnecessary.

¶ Today’s obituary of Joseph Miller (93) tells a good business story: inheriting a harness-making firm in the 1940s, Miller skirted obsolescence by marketing the high quality of his goods to equestrians, who by definition are people who don’t need horses. Good to know (or maybe not): Venezuela, Colombia, Haiti and Cuba patronized Miller’s for the outfitting of their cavalries. Question: is there a US Cavalry tucked away somewhere that we never hear about? A real one, that is.

A week or so after reading In Search of Civilization, I’m still surprised by John Armstrong’s suggestion that business can come to the aid of civilization by providing “desire leadership.” And that business will learn how to do this from the study of the humanities. Earlier in the book, Armstrong discusses C P Snow’s “Two Cultures” lecture, and maybe it’s simply the fact that we have been familiar with Snow’s challenge for fifty years that makes the chasm dividing science and the humanities (basically, the numerate from the innumerate) look much easier to bridge than the gulf between the humanities and business.

It is, however, perhaps the same gap; what business and science share is the determined reduction of phenomena to figures. But the very possibility of a discussion between businessmen and humanists seems outlandish. The two groups have such a long history of mutual contempt! We’re educated to flinch at the claim that genuine happiness — Armstrong, very interestingly, is more interested in “flourishing” than in happiness — might require purchases and acquisitions. And yet of course it does require them, at least for most people. At a minimum, we require reliable electric power to remain connected to the Internet, which has already transformed the nature of public discussion to an extent from which there can be no going back. 

In the biographical note at the end of In Search of Civilization, John Armstrong is identified as Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School. Now, what sort of job is that? Since when did business schools take on resident philosophers, and what do they expect of them? Whatever the answer, the job certaintly throws light on the point that Armstrong has to make about “desire leadership.” (Desire leadership, by the way, replaces the old, false relationship between business and consumers, which was desire creation.) And it explains, to no small degree, why of all the figures in the history of civilization Armstrong chooses as his model “desire leader” the Abbé Suger of St-Denis, the twelfth-century adviser to Capetian kings and, in some accounts, the personal inventor of the Gothic style of architecture. 

Suger — at St-Denis — was such an important pioneer for civilization because of his way of combining, and yet keeping apart, idealist and realist attitudes. His idealism was evident in the way he held on to a vision of perfection: he wanted people to love what was fine and beautiful and intensely serious. His realism was evident in the way he recognized what people are often like (feckless, greedy, status seeking). He did not use his realism about what people are like to undercut his vision of where he wanted them to go. He did not end up saying that since people are like this, this is fine and who am I to say they should be any different? His idealism — and the gap it opens between perfection and the way things are — did not lead him to hate or despise people. He shows us how to link generosity and the pursuit of perfection. 

A hero of civilization — like Suger or Cicero or Matthew Arnold — is
someone who is teaching us how to combine devotion to noble values with an acceptance of the ways of the world. They are heroes in my eyes because they do not seek to exploit whatever authority they might have; they accept that they have to do the work if they are to convince other people; they stand for kindness as well as wisdom. 

To speak of the fabrication of the Gothic ideal at St-Denis mere paragraphs after extolling the civilizing propensities of commercial transactions is to rub against a stubborn grain in Western thought, which has, from the dawn in which the great poets and the great industrialists first walked the earth (at the same time, if not in company), shrugged helplessly and hopelessly at the two camps’ hostile styles, instead of trying to articulate a connection between the creation of wealth and the benefits of prosperity. 

As usual, I believe that the computer will solve many tensions. The big fight between poets and industrialists concerns the importance of details, with the industrialists insisting opon the obvious importance of paying attention to facts and figures and the poets complaining that attending to figures and facts crushes the soul. The computer certainly has the potential to reduce the soul-crushing tendencies of accounting and balancing budgets, freeing industrialists to read more poetry. Dwarfing that  issue, however, is the cognitive revolution that is transforming the way we think about ourselves. I often suspect that it was the computer’s hyperrationality that allowed human beings to overcome their vanity on this point, and concede that we are not, after all, rational creatures. This ought to make business much more interesting, if only because it deprives business of the power to be boring. 

I hope that Armstrong is alert to the biggest problem facing business today, which is the pre-emption of capital by financiers (who make nothing except private fortunes). 

Business is not only to do with making profits. It is to do with facing competition, understanding the needs of your clients and customers and knowing what your strengths (and potential weaknesses) are. 

That’s all very well, but too much modern business, especially at the global level, is only to do with making profits. The only competition in view seems to be among workforces, not their employers; increasingly, sovereign governments have been persuaded to eliminate competition (formerly with regulation and tariffs, now with tax breaks and other subsidies) and to compenate for those “potential weaknesses” (by supporting organizations that are “too big to fail”). And almost everyone I know would agree that, far from understanding the needs of clients, today’s businesses insist that clients accept their desires. What we need today is  more business as Armstrong  understands it. To me, this means more small businesses. Computers help here, too, both by denaturing the advantages of economy of scale and by enabling the proliferation of goods and services that will, by means of desire leadership, put an end to mass production. I’m optimistic, but I’d like to hear some of this from the Philosopher in Residence.

¶ Large American corporations claim that they’ll use “repatriated” profits — fund that they’ll shift to their United States balance sheets in the event of a tax holiday — to create jobs. As David Kocieniewski points out, “But that’s not how it worked last time,” in 2005, and there’s no reason to think that a replay would work out any differently. Those repatriated funds would almost certainly be shuttled into the arms of shareholders, and jobs be damned. ¶ David Carr tells a similar story in his unusual advance review of a book that’s going to come out next week, James O’Shea’s The Deal From Hell, a gruesome account of vicissitudes that the once-great Los Angeles Times has experienced since the Chandler family decided to sell it. Similar in that business considerations are grotesquely subordinated to short-term one-time gains.

What I’d very much like to know is how many New Yorkers bought tickets to one of the Royal Danish Ballet’s six performances here this week because Jennifer Homans’s chapter about August Bournonville, in her magisterial but deliciously readable history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, inspired them to do so. It can’t have been just me.

Kathleen liked the evening’s offerings very much, although when she told me that the company’s disciplined attention to detail reminded her of the title character in Coppélia (a mechanical doll), I had to quibble. I saw some of the most fluid, “natural” dancing ever. It was as though the members of the RDB spend their lives offstage as well as on- leaping effortlesly into the ether and floating across the room on point.

What’s specatacular about the Royal Danish Ballet is the complete absence of the spectacular. The dancing is very fine, and often intoxicating, but it is never showy. The reason why I think there were other Homans readers in the audience is that it would otherwise be suspicious for New Yorkers so vociferously to applaud understatement. This was a crowd that had a lot more in common with chamber music aficionados than with the opera crowd.

We saw La Sylphide, which I must confess to having confused, inattentively, with Les Sylphides (until Jennifer Homans straightened me out), and Act III of Napoli. or, as it is called in the program, Napoli, Act III. I suppose that the RDB must mount complete performances of August Bournonville’s Napoli ever now and then, out of professional courtesy, but most serious balletomanes will go to their graves without seeing more of this work than its final act, which, like the end of Nutcracker and Act IV of The Sleeping Beauty, is a chain of “characteristic dances” and showpieces without any narrative content. Back in my radio days, when I was first learning about ballet (a subject that I knew absolutely nothing about until I was twenty-three), Napoli, Act III was the cheesiest ballet in the repertoire, just on the basis of its title. First, Naples. Naples as imagined by a Danish ballet master. Stop right there. Second, the truncation — the third act performed “out of context.” That was then. Tonight, I sat through the first half of NA3 with slightly detached interest; the characteristic dances didn’t strike me as characteristic of much more than the Bournonville style. But then somebody clapped a tambourine, and the tarantella got going. What an orgy! I realize that that is not the best word to describe an ensemble that even at its most energetic never stumbled into incoherence. But most energetic is exactly what it was, a pile-up of couplings that amounted, almost, to one too many birthday presents. And then there was the finale!

La Sylphide is the first in a line of more sophisticated ballets, notably Giselle but also including, cousin-German-wise, Swan Lake; and it’s easy to reduce its mild, pantomimed melodrama to “precursor” status. But what I remember about it isn’t elementary, because the principals, Caroline Cavallo and Mads Blangstrup, were great actors as well as gifted dancers. Great actors can sell just about anything, and that’s why Mr Blangstrup’s Scottish bridegroom and Ms Cavallo’s elfin temptress blasted a niche in my memory whereby I will recall this evening. Being gifted dancers, they were able to act with their bodies, without speech. They showed me how an art form that imposes silence on its practitioners can be as eloquent as a Shakespearean monologue 

¶ We’ve never seen the play, but the film of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, with Jeremy Irons, Patricia Hodge, and Ben Kingsley, is one of our favorite hard-to-watch films. A revival in London with a cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas occasions Joan Bakewell, the original of Emma, to write about her affair with Pinter (not for the first time). Bakewell makes the affair sound much, much jollier than the one represented in the play. (Telegraph; via Arts Journal) ¶ Francine Prose rightly desponds that her ten-plus year-old essay, “Scene of a Woman’s Ink,” weren’t still as timely as V S Naipaul’s petulant outburst has made it. (Harper’s) ¶ Ruth Fowler gives The Tiger’s Wife the stinko review that our Editor so dreaded having to write that he didn’t read the book. There are many things that 25 year-olds can do as well or better than anyone else, but writing great fiction just isn’t one of them. (HuffPost; via HTMLGiant) ¶ Laura Miller writes wisely about the problem of bad people who make good art — “bad eggs like Naipaul aside” (!). (Salon; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Part of the sadly underrated process of growing up is realizing that people, the world and life are no less beautiful and amazing for being imperfect.

¶ With Syrian refugees pouring over its southern border, Turkey has been obliged to re-think its friendly relations with Syria’s Assad régime. At The National Interest, Henri Barkey grasps the impact of this reorientation on Turkey’s delicate relations with the West. (via Real Clear World)

The US recognizes that Turkey has important cards to play because of proximity and recent history, and Ankara also understands that the problem is far too big to handle alone.

¶ If you want to know why nothing outrages us more than a sleek rentier urging poor people to take “personal responsibility” for their plight, read Jamie Holmes’s report at The New Republic. Willpower is a depletable resource that rentiers rarely need to expend urgently. With the poor, diligence and self-denial are demanded at every turn. (via Brainiac) ¶ Greg Beato writes drolly about the decline of RTEs — ready-to-eat cereals — which is taking place without any help from government action. “Fruit Loops are now the morning newspaper of breakfast food.” (The Smart Set) ¶ And light rail to Rockaway will make it perfect: the Interior Department plans to convert Floyd Bennett Field into a campground. Wouldn’t it be nice if, in addition to being the first in the city, it was also the first without a parking lot? (GOOD)

Have a Look: ¶ A collection of photographs of surrealist objects @ MondoBlogo. (We love the last one.) ¶ Bad Day at BlAscot. (Mail; via The Awl)

Noted: ¶ Where Mexico’s handguns come from (no surprise). (Foreign Policy; via The Morning News) ¶ In a breathtakingly unsurprising development, Salman Rushdie takes to writing for the small screen. (An option denied to Odets, Fitzgerald, Parker?). (Telegraph; via Arts Journal) ¶ Cord Jefferson wonders if he may be that rarest of journalist — the kind that makes things happen. Probably not, if you ask us, but he was certainly riding a trend about Facebook departures. (GOOD)

Last week, Paul Krugman published a column that caught my eye. I don’t read Krugman as a rule, because I already agree with what he has to say, and it irks me that anyone who doesn’t wields any influence in Washington or elsewhere. But I read Friday’s column because its title, “Rule by Rentiers,” not only coincided with my own ideas but struck the same new note: “rentiers.” It had occurred to me only days earlier that the Republican Party, which used to be the party of business, had become the party of rentiers. As Krugman suggests, it’s not just Republicans. It’s political elites everywhere in the West. All seem to be in the pockets of wealthy people whose wealth no longer derives from personal effort.

A word about the word, which means the opposite of its English false-cognate. Rentiers, unlike renters, own things, and their income is derived from the “profits,” or surplus revenue, that their properties generate, whether they be farms, mines, or investment portfolios. (You might say that the French simply looked at the rental process from the other side; a rentier is someone who rents property out; our renters pay rent — to rentiers.)

I don’t mean to demonize rentiers. There may be nothing admirable about living on interest and dividend payments, but there’s nothing shameful about it, either. The mystery, though, is why leaders are attending to rentiers on the one subject that rentiers care nothing about, jobs. In the rentiers’ paradise, there would be no workers, only robots. There may be nothing wrong with that prospect, either. But surely in any discussion of serious social issues such as employment and health care, a class with every reason not to sympathise with workers ought to have a very limited voice at best.

Yesterday, an even fresher insight blossomed on the one that I shared with Paul Krugman. The men and women who run this countries large corporations (whether as executives or board members) are often members but always agents of the rentier class. That is why they are paid without any regard to their firms’ official profitability. Corporations are only incidentally commercial nowadays. They’re primarily strip mines for wealth whose operations are protected from outside interference by the executive class. It is the same with the big bankers. None of these people is any more interested in business as we know it than a medieval duke.

I don’t fear rentiers themselves. They’re not, as a rule, very bright — that’s how they dragged us into the credit collapse of 2008. As oligarchs, they have little solidarity except when under attack; getting them to agree is like herding cats. Except with regard to two things: the sanctity of contract in good times and an entitlement to bailouts in bad times.

The problem is that American campaign-finance laws have allowed the rentier class to buy the allegiance of the political class. The rentiers are the only people who can foot the bill of our preposterously bloated campaign-advertising programs. Rentiers also fund the think tanks that foment voter dissatisfaction with progressive causes. Rentiers have little interest in the social questions, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, that mobilize Republican Party supporters. But their spokesmen have astutely welded socially conservative issues to the economically regressive ones that mean a great deal to rentiers, and in this they are helped by the fact that economic progressives tend to be social progressives as well.

The only hope for a progressive party in America is to develop a genuine and knowledgeable passion for every kind of business except the conglomerate kind (which is no business at all). An economy of healthy businesses is the sine qua non of healthy societies generally, and it’s time for progressives to stop looking down their noses at people who are driven to earn money by making things and providing services. And to stop confusing these people with the three-card monte artists of Wall Street and their coupon-clipping (oh, for the days!) patrons.

¶ Amidst the developing, pending, and long-term stories that flood the pages of today’s Times, two columns stand out for offering something to think about. In his About New York space, Jim Dwyer questions the logic of reducing crime by arresting blacks and Latinos for possessing small amounts of marijuana (and then dismissing the charges), while affluent whites, among whom marijuana use is “rampant,” are spared the inconvenience. Dwyer assails, quite rightly in our view, the spurious notion that a correlation between pot and crime is any more meaningful than the correlation between pot and banking or academia that equal prosecution of white New Yorkers would undoubtedly reveal. ¶ Looking to history, Sara Lipton finds that, in at least one regard, the pop psychology of the Middle Ages was the opposite of our own: manly men “ruled themselves,” controlling their libidinous urges. Shameless sexual voracity was thought to be characteristic of women. Medieval men were expected to outgrow adolescence — reading about the hockey riot in Vancouver, by the way, lighted a light bulb in our little brain: sports is cosmetic surgery for men — and that was a good thing; the bad thing was that men ruled their households as well as themselves. The point isn’t that they understood things bettter in the so-called Age of Faith, but rather it’s a reminder that pop psychology is pop psychology: the reflection of shifting, unvoiced concerns about life.

About a thousand years ago, I had the bright idea of pulling a wool ragg sock from LL Bean over a Rubbermaid quart drinking bottle, thinking (rightly) that it would do good enough a job of absorbing condensation — I fill my water bottle with plenty of ice — to allow me to stash it in tote bags alongside books and other things that oughtn’t to get wet. I soon discovered, to my great delight, that the sock was an extraordinarily effective insulator. The water bottle chuggles with ice cubes hours after they’d have melted otherwise. I can’t tell you how much I wish that the socks were available in more appealing colors, and I regret that drinking from a sock — an athletic sort of sock at that — is going to trigger a lot of gag reflexes. But, boy, does it work.

I tell you all of that to explain what Will is holding in these pictures. That he is holding it ia nor surprising, I suppose, although I feel slightly immodest in saying so. He wants the grown-up water bottle. (He wants the grown-up everything. His joustings with the three-gallon watering can out on the balcony are absolutely heroic.)  He can barely hold it when it’s full, and even when it’s not, he likes to grip it by the top fold, which runs along the seam between the sock part and the ankle part. Inevitably, the sippy straw disappears in the wool, and Will hands me my water bottle for repairs.

Over pizza — when I’m not up to catering as well as babysitting, we order a fantastic sausage pizza from Lil’ Frankie’s; I’d give anything to have one up here in Yorkville — I was treated to all sorts of conspiratorial winks, nods, and leers. Of course it was nothing of the kind, but that’s what it seemed like. Not boys’ night out, exactly, but close. There was one squinting grin that seemed to say, “We are two cool cats, man.” For all I know, Will could have been imitating someone he saw making this expression sincerely. He is a quick study. The alternative explanation is that we ought to be worried that he hit his head twice today, once by running into a pole at school and then by later pulling down a small curtain rod.   

Later, it was clear that Shaun the Sheep’s adventures have become very familiar to Will. This was good, because I had no trouble getting him to go into his bedroom to play with things and to read books — for a little while at a time. Whenever he got wound up, we’d troop back to the living room for another favorite episode. I find that I’m developing protective feelings for the hapless sheep farmer, even if he is a jerk.

I was a little tired, what with the remnant of a cold and the wake of the infusion, which is always a bit exhausting, if only for a day; so I was really, really grateful for the taxis that appeared right away, on 86th Street heading downtown and Avenue C heading home. I don’t think that I’d have been able to write this if they hadn’t. 

¶ Our conviction that the Democratic Party is no more than the useless rump of a once-farseeing political organization has been unpleasantly strengthened by its now-successful pursuit of Anthony Weiner’s resignation from Congress. This ought to have been a “teaching opportunity” for Party leaders, given the utterly tendentious and/or hypocritical nature of the revelations in the case; but, no. There are no teachers among the Democrats (except maybe Barney Frank). That anyone would pay attention to discredited political hack Nancy Pelosi makes the whole business doubly depressing.