¶ On the very off chance that you are an elementary-school pupil who might find yourself in Manhattan, be advised that aunts and uncles who offer to treat you to Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark either aren’t very bright or don’t think you’re very bright. Having pronounced the reconstituted show “a bore,” Ben Brantley compares it to its troubled predecessor thus:

So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward? Well, until last weekend, when I caught a performance of this show’s latest incarnation, I would have recommended “Spider-Man” only to carrion-feasting theater vultures. Now, if I knew a less-than-precocious child of 10 or so, and had several hundred dollars to throw away, I would consider taking him or her to the new and improved “Spider-Man.”

¶ Sam Sifton demotes Masa, the sushi temple at TimeWarner Center, from four stars to three. The food is extraordinary, but the overall experience, in the dining room at least, is not. (Perhaps Masa ought to abandon the pretense of a Western-style restaurant and just expand its bar.)

Bruised by recession, wizened by experience, gun-shy about the future, New York City now demands of its four-star restaurants an understanding that culture at its highest must never feel transactional, whatever its cost. We ascend to these heavens for total respite from the world below, for extraordinary service and luxuriant atmosphere as much as for the quality of the food prepared.

Now, of course, I feel very silly. It turns out that common colds don’t make Remicade infusions unsafe. Every kind of fever and infection does, but not colds. So there was nothing to worry about all along. I was misinformed by an overzealous nurse; the rheumatologist set me straight. It turned out, though, that the Infusion Therapy Unit had me down for an infusion tomorrow. Coming back would have been a bore, but not a very great one; in the event, I didn’t have to — there was a vacancy. So I had the infusion after all and am determined to be Superman by Saturday at the latest.

We had Manhattan Theatre Club Tickets for this evening. We neither of us wanted to go, but we thought we’d better, so we did. (We couldn’t postpone, because the run of the show ends on Sunday.) We didn’t know anything at all about Daniel Goldfarb’s Cradle and All, but it turned out to be an almost perfect theatre piece (but for some journeyman longueurs in the second act). Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller played two couples, one per act, living in adjacent Brooklyn Heights apartments. One couple can’t agree about having a baby; the other’s has kept its parents from getting a good night’s rest for eleven months. The trials endured by the parents when they follow “expert” advice for getting their daughter to sleep on her own were bizarrely, electrically familiar. I had to wonder, though, who, aside from grandparents like me, Mr Goldfarb had in mind as his audience, because if there is one truth that’s not sufficiently universally acknowledged, it’s that new parents don’t go to the theatre.

And I really do believe that it would have killed my daughter and son-in-law to sit through — not a re-enactment, exactly, but, worse, an alternative hell. In other words, things could be different but just as bad. Neither of the parents appeared to be working, for one thing, and still… When, toward the end, the dad pours a glass of wine for himself and one for his wife, and she asks why they didn’t think to do this “five hours ago,” he blithely answers, “We’re Jews.” It brought the house down — that’s the sort of line that’s practically an old family joke for MTC subscribers, even the goyim. At one point, the mom finds a Sophie behind the sofa cushions and explodes with rapture: she has been looking for Sophie for weeks! A few minutes later, the dad has good reason to want the Sophie out of the way, so he tosses her right across the room, and, let me tell you, it is a shocking sight. If you don’t know what kind of an animal Sophie is, or why she’s so popular with today’s little ones, you’re just not cool (but I won’t tell). Which reminds me of the time that Megan mocked me for subscribing to Time Out New York: “You just want people to think you’re young.” Now she would be accusing me of making her produce a grandchild just so that I could catch all the allusions in a smart off-Broadway play.

In case I don’t get round to writing up Cradle and All properly, let me say that the two actors were great. Ms Dizzia is very beautiful, even when she’s not, and Mr Keller reminded me more than once of that whole-deck-of-cards-up-my-sleeve virtuosity of Mark Rylance.

¶ The Chinese Navy is rattling sabers, or whatever it is that gunboats do, in the surrounding seas, irritating Japanese, Vietnamese, and Philippine neighbors. This quasi-belligerent activity is one thing that is truly new about China, which has not been much of a maritime presence since the Ming emperors scuttled Zheng He’s flotilla in the Fifteenth Century. With no traditions to guide the captains of its expanding, up-to-date fleet, this land of venerable traditions is bound to behave with adolescent rashness. ¶ Which isn’t to say that traditions are necessarily a good thing. China’s lead-poisoning nightmare couldn’t have a more familiar ring. Sharon LaFraniere writes,

Such scenes of heartbreak and anger have been repeated across China in recent months with the discovery of case after case of mass lead poisoning — together with instances in which local governments tried to cover them up.

What’s worst about the cold that I’m battling at the moment is the likelihood that it will force a postponement of the Remicade infusion that has been scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday afternoon. What’s almost as bad is suffering the indignities of a bad cold — sniffling, sneezing, hacking and hawking — alongside the miseries, great and small, that Remicade suppresses. The last dose has been exhausted in the fight against my over-active autoimmune system, and I’m once again under imflammatory attack.

I’m scribbling this note in the morning, because I not only the energy but the will do so. This afternoon, if yesterday’s experience is anything to go by, I shall slip into a black funk of purposelessness that will feel a lot like despair. The only treatment is reading, which at a time like this really does make me forget myself (between sneezes). I’m in the middle of two good books, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity and Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. In the first, I’ve just finished with medieval Christianity in the West, and will now turn to the East, for about a hundred pages of Byzantium and Russia. I shall try to get through that today. As to the novel, it’s perfect reading for the pickle I’m in, because everybody is at least mildly discontented, and at least one character — I’m thinking of Ingeborg Middleton and her demented and disappointing Christmas carol party — strikes me as borderline psychotic in a Tennessee Williams way, although, refreshingly, not from the South. What could be more miserable than England in 1954? (I’m not asking.)

Knowing how wretched I was, Kathleen was resolved to play Sheherazade last night, or our version of that fable, which consists of provoking me into rambling on about one of my hobby-horses. She had no idea, however, of how to begin. I was bearishly clamped and cross. But a glass of wine (and some Advil) warmed me up a bit, and I started talking, without any prompts, about things that I’d read in MacCulloch, familiar things for the most part that he reminded me of. For example, “the rediscovery in Italy around 1070 of two copies of a compilation of imperial law,” which triggered the launch of the first university, at Bologna, and the formalization of the fine art of medieval forgery (which MacCulloch glancingly mentions), according to which it was perfectly all right to “reproduce” lost or missing charters.

We can call them forgeries, but our attitudes to such matters are conditioned by the humanist historical scholarship which emerged in Italy in the fifteenth century. That leads us to expect that our history must be based on carefully checked and authenticated evidence, or it simply cannot exist. For centuries before, though, people lived in societies which did not have enough documents to prove what they passionately believed to be true: the only solution was to create the missing documentation.

I don’t know how Kathleen sits through these ruminations, but she keeps me going with questions, and she claims that she enjoys learning what I have to say. Perhaps she just likes the sound of my voice. In any case, I’m not so miserable after all.

¶ Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler have a story, certainly, but is “In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust” the best title? Nowhere do the reporters demonstrate that the response of Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan to the Fukushima disaster was actually crippled by his decision to bypass a bureaucratic apparatus that he had good reason to mistrust. The closest argument for hampered effectiveness concerns the use of an Education Ministry weather-analysis system that would have advised civilians not to take refuge in an area covered by the reactors’ radioactive plume.

Mr. Kawauchi said that when he asked officials at the Ministry of Education, which administers Speedi, why they did not make the information available to the prime minister in those first crucial days, they replied that the prime minister’s office had not asked them for it.

This makes us even more sympathetic to Mr Kan’s misgivings. The reporters seem to be under the impression that speed and “decisiveness” are invariably good things in a crisis. This leads them to step over the real story, which concerns plant manager Masao Yoshida’s heroic insubordination.

Somebody’s having fun.

What Will is having fun with requires a bit of product description. In 1942, among my parents’ wedding presents was a set of coasters. Does everybody know what a coaster is? I’m not sure. They’re usually useless*, so there’s no reason to have them around, and nobody would if it weren’t for housewarmings and hostess gifts and whatnot. (Just buy “cocktail napkins.”) My parents’ coasters are emblematic, I think, of their time. Ringed in sterling, their bases are a weird transparent pseudo-cut-glass plastic that isn’t like the plastic that was ubiquitous in my boomer’s life but harder, more like glass somehow, but not glass. Modern but very traditional, à la fois.

Megan used to ask, “Do you like all this junk?”, meaning the stuff that I’d inherited from my parents and somehow felt obliged to display in our apartment. She had a point. I didn’t like a lot of it, and the coasters were near the top of the list of things that I could do without. One of these days I’ll give them the home-studio treatment, so that you can see them if as I were putting them up for sale at eBay. Why did I keep them? More to the point, why did I put them on a table in the living room, as if they were useful and/or decorative, when in fact they are neither? Call me Virgil, as in the Fourth Eclogue: I clearly must have foreseen the coming of Will.

The coasters are one of Will’s favorite toys. His playing with them follows a two-stage program. First, he holds them up and does things close at hand. Then he throws them around the room. As his pitch isn’t very serious, “around the room” means “on the floor in front of wherever he happens to be,” but that’s going to change.  Just now, as you can see in the photo below, he has discovered what to us looks like the deep-sea diver possibiltiies of the coasters: he can look through them! Later in the day, he would discover that he could look throught two coasters at the same time, but even if I’d caught that with the camera, I’d prefer the image below, because it has a weird Nineteenth-Century craziness vibe.

I ought to point out that the coasters spent almost the entirety of my parents’ marriage locked up with the other silver items in a breakfront cabinet in the dining room. My mother was a lot less attached to things of the past than I am: why did she hold on to them? No matter, no matter. The point is that, being “modern plastic,” they’re safe for Will to throw around as well as to peer through. They have finally found a purpose. I believe that, now that we know what these objects are really for, we must make sure that he keeps them for his children.

***

Last week’s “Summer Reading” edition of the Book Review was so difficult to get through that I decided, finally, that I have had enough of reviewing it week after week, as I’ve been doing since the summer of 2005. I’ve learned a lot about book reviewing, and especially about what a general-reader-oriented paper-of-record Book Review ought to look like, and the Times’s offering is so off the mark that if it ceased publication next weekend I should probably feel more relief than regret.

I never got as far as the first fiction title. The line-up of books about figures from the worlds of sports and entertainment was as endless as a coach class check-in line at Thanksgiving, but what made the pieces indigestible was the snarky condescension of reviewers who ought to have been in some sort of analytic therapy that would help them either to embrace their heartfelt values or to renounce them as elitist nonsense. The Book Review walks an impossible line, not that it has to but because, I think, the world of New York publishing from which it emanates is so awfully confused right now. As I say, I learned a lot from poring over the reviews for six years, and wondering why most of them were written in the first place. There will always be a place at this blog for Liesl Schillinger and for other thoughtful commentators. (Lydia Davis on John Ashbery’s Rimbaud — fascinating!) But the energy that I’ve spent on the Book Review reviews is needed elsewhere.

***

Unless I fall asleep at the wheel, Will will be allowed to toss one of the coasters as if it were a frisbee just once. There will be no second toss; the coasters will be taken away, regardless of wails and sobs, if any, and put away for a future in which, who knows? a future Mrs Will decides that coasters circa 1942 are just what she’s been looking for. Or the other thing. I know that there will be an attempt to “throw a flying disc” (as Wikipedia so discreetly puts it) because of the Shaun the Sheep episode entitled “Fetching.” This episode elicits an exceptionally keen response from Will, and even though the part that appeals to him has little to do with discurgy (I just made that one up), it’s a big part of the action, and the inevitable is the inevitable.

The scene that Will likes is the dalliance between Bitzer, the show’s sheepdog, and a lady dog who is traveling with her human owners in neighboring caravan. The lady dog looks just like Bitzer except: (a) she wears a beret instead of a watch cap (b) she has proposterous eyelashes and (c) her long ears roll out in what I believe is called a “flip.” The moment Bitzer signals his determination to win this lady-dog’s favor, by spitting on his paw and smoothing down the hair (?) under his watch cap, Will starts to laugh, as if Johnny Carson had just made a funny, and he continues to laugh throughout the entire dalliance, which, let me tell you, involves the most discreet stand-in-for-sex scene since smoking became immoral (the two dogs’ tails — the upraised tips of the two dogs’ tails — go round and round, while the beasts do their carnal sniffing offscreen). Will laughs when Bitzer whistles, faute de mieux, his appreciation of the lady-dag’s charms. The thing is, this episode is the only one in all of Shaun-the-Sheepdom that makes Will laugh. He is an ardently engaged follower of all the episodes, but this he finds funny. This makes him laugh.

As if it were Preston Sturges. Hoo boy.

There will be no frisbees thrown in my living room! I hope that I’ve put my foot sufficiently down.  

* Drinks that require a coaster are invariably cold, and invariably the condensation that accumulates on the tumblers’ exterior causes the coasters to adhere to them, for a moment or two, before they clatter down onto the table, splashing wet everywhere and defeating the whole purpose of their existence.

J J Abrams’s Super 8 is a pleasant summer movie. It’s pleasant largely because its two young stars, Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney, are not only engaging but engaging in the same way as two older actors, Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman. Whether there’s a facial resemblance I won’t claim, but Ms Fanning has Ms Kidnman’s ability to make passionate outburst look like the natural consequence of steely reserve, while Mr Courtney has Mr Bateman’s modest but genially attentive charm. The sense of kids playing at being movie stars is of course enhanced by the fact that their characters are making a movie — a zombie movie shot in Super 8 film (Mr Abrams’s film is set in 1979). You can watch Super 8, in fact, as a movie about moviemaking, ignore the Spielbergian science fiction story altogether, and have a perfectly good time. I’ll let you do the unpacking. Let’s just say that watching Charles, an enthusiastic, power-mad fifteen year-old would-be auteur (Riley Griffiths), run around exclaiming an urgent need for and ecstatic appreciation of “Production Values!” is going to be more of a treat for viewers who have actually considered  the movies than it’s going to be for those who haven’t. (The more I think about this kid’s chutzpah, the more I’m put in mind of Charles Laughton.)

Mr Abrams is to be congratulated for cloaking his movie in the Aura of Spielberg without suffocating it. It may be that he is simply the better director of actors. The pressboard clichés of Steven Spielberg’s Mittelamerika are all on display. We have a slightly dumpy and sad Ohio manufacturing town that doesn’t know what’s going to hit it — the visitor from outer space will be a benign memory once the offshoring and shuttering starts. We have perfectly nice, normal Americans, complete with their domesticated hostilities about patriarchy and propriety. We have a hero whose mother died in a factory accident the winter before the story gets going. We have a heroine whose mother abandoned her to the care of her shiftless, long-haired father (Ron Eldard, made up to resemble, very spookily, Gérard Depardieu — more references!). We have the overweight Charles, one of ten or fifteen children in a happily chaotic home overseen by a can-do mom (Jessica Tuck). The hero lives with his deputy sheriff stepfather (Kyle Chandler) in the nicer part of town, which wouldn’t be the nicer part of any village in Westchester, while the heroine lives in a more rackety pile that’s reminiscent of New England mill towns. In the climax, the town is destroyed —so maybe its citizens won’t suffer the onslaught of globalization, after all. The important thing is that the hero and the sheriff share a warmly heartfelt embrace at the finish. If the production values of Super 8 were a font, we would call it Spielberg Vernacular Bold.

The town is destroyed by special forces of I forget which branch of the armed services; Air Force probably. It would be misleading to say that Super 8 resounds with echoes of Sixties-era countercultural loathing for the military, because the sounds that you hear are much, much  louder than echoes. The special forces, headed by a tall silent type with bad skin played by Noah Emmerich, are the film’s bad guys. They will stop at nothing to prevent a brachyurous alien of nightmarish allure but superhuman intelligence from repairing its space ship and, like ET, going home. It is not its fault that the weaponry aimed in its direction misfires and destroys the town; it is only acting in self-defense. Mr Abrams insures that the creature’s final departure is a glittering, almost hypnotizing bit of Las Vegas glitz, leaving behind a wreckage of microwave ovens, console television sets, and too-large automobiles that no sane person would want anyway. If the creature does have an unfortunate habit of sustaining itself on a diet of humans, that’s just a gentle parallel of the kids’ zombie movie — which is shown in its entirety during the final credits, so sit still after the happy ending.

Super 8 may unfold in a thoroughly predictable manner, but then so does Midnight in Paris; in both cases, the unfolding is expert. As a Manhattanite, I have a thoroughly predictable preference for Woody Allen’s Gotham Comic Sans, but I had a good time at Super 8, and if you have ever thought about why you like going to the movies, you will, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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