¶ Our eyebrows cocked at the mention of an understandably surreptitious luxury private club in the Jian Fu Palace Garden of the Imperial Palace in Beijing. We hope to hear more about this operation, which appears to be the backwash of a preservation project designed by Pei Partnership Architects and funded by Hong Kong jillionaires. Forbidden fun in the Forbidden City! Doesn’t get any better. All they need is DSK. ¶ Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the goose from the golden eggs — which is the one that will work better in your portfolio? Silicon Valley’s ground assault walkers (Google, Facebook, &c) have been buying up start-ups not in order to own the latest gizmos but to shut them down and “acqhire” the engineers who designed them. It will be interesting to see if the fizz kills the whiz. ¶ Now it can be told: Elaine Kaufman’s eponymous eatery, long a watering hole for literary lions, wasn’t doing so well even before she died. Not six months later, her heir, Diane Becker, is closing the joing. “The nature of a business is to make a profit.” Hemingway himself couldn’t have put it more concisely.

¶ Sign of a slow news day: two tabloid-worthy tales on the front page of the Times. The arguably ewwier one is a  report by Timothy Williams on the countrywide thefts of human hair, which “perplexed” law enforcement officials. (You’ll be relieved to know that the hair in question is not attached to human scalps.) Mr Williams ventures, by way of explanation, the new respectability of hair extensions. ¶ More sordid, somehow, is Daniel Wakin’s pickup of an Irish Times exposé of bogus symphony orchestras touring the American heartland under the auspices of Columbia Artists Management, who would undoubtedly staff their class acts with roller derby queens if they thought they could get away with it. A tale of switcheroo immigration manifests in which the members of the Dublin Philharmonic are mostly Bulgarians. (Maybe they meant Lublin Philharmonic.) The Photoshopped image of the “Tschaikowsky St Petersburg State Orchestra” (which they’ve never heard of on the banks of the Neva) is particularly toasty.

Never, ever, have I found the Metropolitan Museum of Art as packed with people as it was today. Never! It was almost impossible to cross the Great Hall, so thick were the lines snaking back from the ticket counters. (The advantage of membership at any level is the convenience of getting an entry pin from the members’ desk, just outside the gift shop, without delay.) Upstairs, the line of visitors waiting to see the Alexander McQueen show stretched the full length of the Chamber of Horrors, all the way down to the Assyrians. I’ve never seen such a line!

Happily, Ray Soleil and I were interested in the Eighteenth-Century pastel portraits. No crowds there. Lots of lovely things, but lots of not-so-lovely things as well, including one piece of rather dreadful kitsch by Anton Mengs, the bust of an éphèbe with rancidly liquid eyes and a crown of roses — the template for a thousand ghastly late-Nineteenth Century candy boxes. Most of the beautiful things are French — a Nattier, some Coypels, a few Quentin de la Tours — but what caught my interest most was a pastel by Gainsborough, who didn’t do much in the medium. It’s a small, half-length portrait of the fourth Duchess of Marlborough. Her head and hair are finely modeled; her dress and lace shawl are a riot of impressionistic strokes. In reproduction — the Museum Bulletin for Spring 2011 is effectively this exhibition’s catalogue — the picture has an anemic air, because the palette is almost that of grisaille, with shades of blue and pink emerging only after your eyes adjust (the duchess’s face, it must be said, is grey); but in the life it is a formidably attractive portrait.

Among the Quentin de la Tours, there was a sketch for his portrait of Louis XV — a sketch that is fairly finished enough for most purposes. What’s striking about the artist’s portraits of the king is the care that they take to show the royal five-o’clock shadow. This can only be meant to reassure us that beneath the powder and the finery there pulses what Fossil calls a manly man. We are certainly not supposed to think that Louis needed a shave. The effect is quite indecent.

On our way to the pastels, Ray and I stopped in at the Rooms With a View show, which occupies a small quarter of the old-master special exhibition space. Like most shows with a theme, this one features works of widely varying quality, with the result that the really good things stand out all on their own, without your having to know anything about them. (If you want to know how great Mozart is, listen to Salieri or Gluck.) It’s no surprise to cross the room, drawn by a dream of romantic concision, and find that it’s the work of Caspar David Friedrich.

Two of the pictures are views from the Villa Medici — which still accommodates, according to Wikipedia, the French Academy in Rome — that feature St Peter’s and Castel Sant’ Angelo off in the distance, the Castel looking rather small in both. One is a painting (1817) by Jean Alaux, and one is a watercolor (1863) by Constant Moyaux. Both artists were Prix de Rome winners. We wondered what had become of the Prize, and were distressed to learn later that André Malraux put an end to it in 1968, that awful year for the French establishment. “Stupid,” said Ray, when I told him.

As you can see, those horrible concrete garden statues are still gracing the portal of the Duke-Semans Mansion at 1009 Fifth Avenue, right across the street from and a smack in the ey of the Museum. It would probably be going to far to say that the house is currently being gutted, but evidence suggests that the new owner has contracted for an extensive renovation. Since the statues of Feebus and Phlora were not the first things to go, we hope that they’ll be the last. We will miss them, mostly because, when they’re gone, no one will believe us when we say that they were ever there.

¶ Senator John Kerry’s visit to Pakistan appears to have calmed our roiling relationship with that perfidious ally — for the moment. Interestingly, what the Pakistanis appear to have wanted was an assurance that the United States has no designs upon its nuclear capabilities. As usual, Pakistan is thinking about its epic rivalry with India, not about the United States and its problems. ¶ New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has requested “information and documents” relating to mortgage securitization at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Gretchen Morgenson doesn’t tell us why Mr Schneiderman’s move, which seems too good to be true (we’d given up on seeking bankers brought to justice), and which was apparently launched a few weeks ago, is news today.

In a review, at The Nation, of twelve recent books about the plight of higher education, William Deresiewicz writes, 

Our system of public higher education is one of the great achievements of American civilization. In its breadth and excellence, it has no peer. It embodies some of our nation’s highest ideals: equality, opportunity, self-improvement, useful knowledge and collective public purpose… Now the system is in danger of falling into ruins.

After meditating on this passage for a few days, I’ve decided that it provides an accurate mission statement for the great American state universities (and the larger private ones as well), but that its objectives have never been persistently realized. Ideals are targets, and American leaders of the past can be praised for having aimed at “some our nation’s highest” in the design of a public university system. But in order to approximate ideals in reality, you have to understand the reality that you’re working with, and candid self-assessment has never been a marked feature of the American character. We’re optimists and visionaries who don’t in fact see very clearly with our eyes. The system has always been in danger of falling into ruins, much like an overheated real estate development that never gets to the point of housing a living tenant. 

I am not a scholar; I haven’t studied facts and figures. I’m willing to rely on those who have, such as William Arum and Josipa Roksa, whose Academically Adrift, which figures among the books under Deresiewicz’s review, suggests that students aren’t learning much of anything in college these days. But my willingness is born of experience: when I look round the Internet, for example, I see hosts of very bright young people who are teaching themselves things that they ought to have been taught in college. The only thing that’s new about this state of affairs is that the Internet provides a medium for observing it on a much larger scale than was available before. Even in the days when students put in longer hours studying than they do now, the objective was rarely to attain true understanding of a subject. The point was to pass tests. Then as now the only way to learn about something was to write about it in a manner that would meet a modest level of critical inquiry; then as now the only way to evaluate such writing was to read it and to grade it, something most intelligent people would rather not do. Most writing is not pleasant to read. And when it is, the disappointment of a gifted student’s sudden unsuspecting drop into error can be maddening. With very, very rare exceptions, young minds have little of interest to contribute to the general discussion of ideas. But they must be educated if that discussion is to continue, and the fact that educating them is in large part a tedious slog must be faced squarely. Going to college may be fun overall, but education is always going to be as painful, and in much the same ways, as any other form of demanding exercise. Clever students have been getting better and better at avoiding the rut of education for nearly fifty years, ever since the introduction of course evaluations. That really has to stop.

I was a very clever student: I managed to avoid ever having to parse Caesar’s Gallic Wars. I was also bright enough to see where this cleverness would lead me if unchecked, and before it was too late I signed up for a Great Books Program, five semesters of talking about thinkers from the pre-Socratic to the post-Revolutionary. (As I recall, I bluffed my way through discussions of only one book, Moby-Dick, a book that, forty years later, I put down as utter rubbish; everything else I mostly read.) In other words, I surrendered my options and read what I was told to read. I doubted that the reading list was as good as it might be, but flush with youthful arrogance as I was I was also determined to get something out of school beyond a passel of interesting personal experiences. I’m reminded of a nightmare that used to trouble me: The print in a book that I was reading in my dream would grow fainter and fainter, as a realization slowly dawned that the words were becoming invisible because I hadn’t written them yet. This always woke me up with a shudder. That’s what college seems to have become for many students: an environment in which they produce everything out of themselves. 

The American university system underwent a tremendous expansion after World War II; so did the foundations of learning, which would soon support such unimagined realms as the superstructure of information technology. The old model of university education, germinated in Enlightenment Germany and polishe d to a high gloss at dozens of late Nineteenth-Century colleges and research universities, was primarily an apprenticeship system in which the stock of knowledge was transmitted from teachers to students. The stock of knowledge was known to be expanding, but the expansion was thought to be manageable because professors increased their sub-specialities. After World War II, it was increasingly understood that the unknown — the unmanageably learnable — vastly outbulks the masteries of credentialed professors. In 1800, it might not have been possible to read all of the books that were thought to be important, but it was certainly possible to house them all in a library. This was not the case in 1950, by which time the authority of transmission that foremerly underwrote the virtue of traditional education had evaporated. But the model remained, and to some extent it still with us in the liberal arts graduate departments with which Deresiewicz begins his review. It made so little sense, however, that the sprawling American university saw no reason not to corrupt itself by recruiting graduate students as the underpaid teachers of undergraduates. That was the end of the apprenticeship system: graduate students took the jobs that former students a couple of years older, on the other side of completing doctoral programs, ought to have had. It hasn’t taken long for this cannibalism to create a small but powerful class of tenured professors who have no more interest than any other powerful group in expanding their ranks and diluting their privileges. Whether this class is dooming itself to extinction is only a variant of the question that confronts most modern institutions, which, as mature institutions always and everywhere do, have concentrated power in ever fewer hands and increased the inequality of access to resources of all kinds. 

I don’t believe that the modern research university has ever justified itself as a provider of the kind of education that matters in civil society, which, as I’ve said, is a matter of training young minds to participate in public discussion. (I shy away, in these polarized times, from all thought of “debate”). It seems obvious that a solid grounding in the history of the nation’s problems would be the one indispensable subject, but this has never been on offer in the way that, say, art-history survey courses used to introduce students to centuries of imaganative creation. From what I can tell, colleges and universities have dismissed history surveys as belonging to the high-school curriculum. But what high school students can’t be expected to digest is the contentiousness of American historiography: true history is never settled, and can never be reduced to the tenets of a creed. (Doubtless it would be grand if high-school students could be required to memorize a lot of dates, freeing college students to explore their significance.) Nor has the research university been adept at inculcating social values, perhaps for the simple reason that the academic knowledge is diffracted into shards of sub-specialty. The ideal university, it seems to me, would prepare students for what I call the social paradox: the strength of any society is a function of its constituents’ cooperative pursuit of distinctions and differences. “Knowing thyself” is only part of what a good education imparts; figuring out where you might fit and what you might improve — matters that require learning a lot about other people — is just as important. 

I see no reason for higher education to be as expensive as it is. The current university, like some sort of interplanetary rocket, consists of three stages, with an athletic and quality-of-life stage consuming most of the resources, a capital-intensive stage of scientific research consuming most of the rest, and only a tiny nugget of money going to the actual teaching of undergraduates. I don’t see why these three stages ought to operate as parts of a unit. Graduate professional schools ought to be free-standing, and vastly less numerous than undergraduate schools. To me, the model college professor is a more sophisticated high-school teacher, not a grudging research scientist. It is likely that secondary and higher education might be unified, with some sort of non-academic national service interposed at varying points. As for athletics, their presence on the academic campus has always been the snake in the garden. How wonderful it would be if national service, and not education, were infused with the atmospheric attractions of today’s university life!

The origins of the university stretch back a thousand years, and its rich heritage must not only be preserved but kept alive. But whether the university has ever been or will ever be suited to equipping the citizens with the knowledge and intellectual habits that a liberal democracy depends on is a question that ought to be answered without reference to ideals.

¶ Less shocking, sadly, than the news of DSK’s downfall, “Your So-Called Education” is nevertheless a great deal more disturbing. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa measured college students at the beginning of their first year, at the end of their second, and upon graduation. 36% of the students failed to gain the equivalent of even one point over their entire undergraduate career. Almost as upsetting, 36% of a smaller group — students who reported spending five hours or fewer on weekly studying — maintained grade point averages of 3.16. This is what consumer-driven education must inevitably lead to: zero product.

¶ Junot Diaz’s essay, in the Boston Review, on Haïti’s apocalypse — a social, not a natural disaster — is this week’s legendum. In an anaphoral passage that is powerfully reminiscent of our Declaration of Independence, Diaz encapsulates the sins that have been visited on the country’s body since the time of the French. The worst of it is that Haïti’s abyssal social inequality looks more and more like everyone else’s future. (via The Morning News) ¶ Historian Richard Evans writes about looting through the ages, and about emerging guidelines for restitution. The idea that works of cultural significance are to be treated differently from other property can be traced explicitly to Union Army policy in the American Civil War. (The National Interest; via Brainiac) ¶ Josh Jacobs, who lost a brother on 9/11, is troubled by the “mercifulness” of his Facebook friends in the wake of the bin Laden take-out. Clarity is not the object of this essay; never have we seen the thickness of grief presented so masterfully. (The Awl)

¶ Gary Antonacci writes about “the world’s first index fund.” We were tickled to death. (Optimal Momentum; via The Reformed Broker) ¶ David Cain’s No-Procrastination policy is so fierce that we can tell just how big and bad the problem of putting things off has become for him. We’re glad that “disorganization” heads his list of pitfalls. (Raptitude) ¶ Frédéric Filloux haruspexates the tweeting that preceded the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death, and argues that it spells the end of such media concepts as “edition” and “deadline.” (Monday Note) ¶ The wisdom of Felix Salmon: “The more that both publishers and advertisers concentrate on the creative side of things, and the less they worry about the distractions of granular economics, the more successful both are likely to be.” Down with the the Math State!

¶ Mary Snydor, a descendant of Eng Bunker (the Siamese twin of Chang), visits Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, where her progenitor’s liver is on display. Yes, it’s awkward. (The Smart Set)

The guide became excited. He asked me if I had told any of the museum staff and I mentioned that I had the last time I came, but no one seemed to be too interested. For a few moments, he quietly contemplated the display with me, but then things started to get awkward. Outside the museum, people couldn’t be more fascinated about my heritage; inside, no one ever knows quite what to say. It’s hard to be impressed with my tie to Chang and Eng when you’re staring at the their grimacing faces and preserved liver.

¶ Richard Crary reminds us (sorry! we’re late) that last Thursday was International Midwife Day. (The Existence Machine) ¶ Mr Wrong diets on CLIF bars — tacitly raising the question, when are they going to invent an energy bar for people who sit at desks all day and who don’t need the energy so much as something to fill you up? (The Awl) ¶ Mother’s Day with lots of mommies. (Philly Post; thanks Philip!) ¶ Meet James Priest, the English ex-pat gardener who’s about to take over at Giverny. (Telegraph; via Arts Journal)

¶ Josh Kurp does some virtual spelunking and unearths what information there is about the lost DuMont television network, which came to an end in 1956. We remember it!But we didn’t know that it was the same Dr DuMont who invented radar.  (Splitsider) ¶ Kevin Nguyen discovers that the only way to read Harper’s on an iPad is to subscribe to the print edition. (Zinio sucks, apparently.) The good news is that Kevin thinks that it’s worth it. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ At The Neglected Books Page, a few words about Theodor Fontane, whose Irretrievable has just been published in a fresh translation by NYRB. ¶ Francine Prose talks to The Paris Review about one of our favorite books, her new novel, My New American Life. “[N]othing has ever happened to me. I had to go to Albania; I couldn’t make it up.” (Thanks, Ms NOLA!)

New: ¶ College fraternities: “notorious sites of anti-intellectualism, alcohol abuse, and sexual assault,” in the words of Historiann. Why do good schools tolerate them? (via MetaFilter)

Have a Look: ¶ “I Want to Support My Local Bookshop,” @ The Age of Uncertainty. ¶ The Final Edition. (via The Morning News) ¶ “Transformer Apartment” @ Joe.My.God.

Noted: ¶ “My Two Days As a Russian Tabloid Sensation,” from Michael Idov’s “forthcoming” book about Russia. WDKWTLOC. (The Awl) ¶ Superman renounces American citizenship, @ Naked Capitalism.

¶ So long as the Republican Party is in the grip of plutocratic ideologues, we will never cast a vote for one of its candidates in a national election. In our defense of this arguably simplistic policy, we point to the Supreme Court, which has been reduced to Gilded Age dementia by the appointments of the three Bush administrations. Today’s editorial, “Gutting Class Action,” points to the latest in a long linie of judicial monstrosities. Nor is trhe evil confined to the Supreme Court. Not until 2040 at the earliest will the Federal Bench be purged of right-wing judges — and that’s of course assuming that wingnut-financed Republicans never hold the White House or Congress again.

With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow’s school of middle-American humor opens its female wing; and the maiden flight begins with a wonderful flourish that’s just as funny as anything in the boys’ movies even while it informs us of a slightly different climate. The essence of the joke is having Jon Hamm play a jerk. He’s an amiable, cuddly jerk; he’s no smarmy narcissist. But his ears don’t work. He makes love the way he likes to make love. It’s not great for his girlfriend — who is not only not his girlfriend, as we find out right away, but just his “Number Three,” as he calls out after she makes him let her out of the car and he leaves her in the dust. But we can see right away why this woman would come back for more, because he is, after all, Don Draper. 

And she has nothing better to do. In a briskly summarized back-story, we learn that her real boyfriend left her in the lurch when the two of them were running a bake shop in downtown Milwaukee. Whether it was his defection or the recession that closed the place, Annie (Kristen Wiig) has lost her way since. She’s not good at the jewelry-shop job that an AA member gave her as a favor to his sponsor, Annie’s mom (the late Jill Clayburgh, looking great, considering). She has a scary roommate situation that involves an English brother-sister team that seems dropped-in from an aliens nightmare (What are Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson doing in Milwaukee?). And now her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is getting married. 

Lillian is marrying a well-placed young man from Chicago. His parents belong to a ritzy country club, as does his boss, whose new wife, Helen (Rose Byrne), has gratiously taken Lillian — a poor Milwaukee girl, after all — under her wing. We misspelled “graciously” on purpose, because Helen’s sweetness is as grating as a bed of sugar cubes. It’s unfortunate that Lillian has asked Annie to be her matron of honor, because Helen is second only to Martha Stewart in the expertise department, and she knows how to deploy correct politeness as a deadly weapon. Annie and Helen quickly fall into a duel for Lillian’s soul, and the movie’s second act passes in a blaze of animosity that makes the bitchery of The Women look very antique indeed. 

There are two other nice ladies in the wedding party (played by Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper), and then there is the groom’s sister, Megan, who is played by Melissa McCarthy. Ms McCarthy is built, to put it nicely, like a fireplug, and she has a direct sense of assaultive humor to go with it. (More than once she struck me as the American, female counterpart to Ricky Gervais). The buzz about Bridesmaids is that a good deal of improvisation was encouraged, and Ms McCarthy not only brings the freshness of stand-up to proceedings but she makes it work. Although wildly implausible as any kind of bridesmaid, she throws herself at you with irresistible conviction. (Sometimes, she throws other characters at you.) The air marshals of America, meanwhile, are going to have to work on their cover.

Romance eventually taps Annie’s shoulder in the form of a policeman who pulls her over because her tail lights are out. He turns out to be Chris O’Dowd, who played the sad-sack disk jockey in The Boat That Rocked who was conned into marrying January Jones. (The Mad Men linkages are going to ramify densely in the coming years.) His character, Rhodes, is portrayed as sweet-natured and vulnerable, and we don’t know whose side to take when Annie walks out on him during what ought to have been a nice morning-after scene. His offense? To presume on her baking abilities (he was a satisfied customer of her bake shop). Bridesmaids would have been just about perfect if this cloud in Annie’s past were cleared up — we watch her do enough baking to agree with Rhodes that it’s probably what she ought to be doing, so what’s the big problem? — but we can be thankful that the point is not belabored. 

I found Bridesmaids the movie to be a lot funnier than Bridesmaids the trailer. The trailer includes at least two so-so jokes that got dumped from the final feature, much to its improvement. Still, for all its riotous moments, this is not a sidesplitting movie. Comparisons will be made, I expect, to Mr Apatow’s Funny People, in which Adam Sandler made frequent crossings of the frontier between drama and comedy. Ms Wiig, one of the great character actors of all time, plays Annie more or less straight, which is only fair, since the point of the film is to demonstrate that women can be just as funny at being losers as men can (if they’re funny). But there are bathtubs of momentary pathos that would never be tolerated in a boys’ movie, and it will be interesting to see how well audiences digest the many moments at which Ms Wiig looks like a homesteader lost in the dust bowl. Without saying a word (almost), she conveys the awfulness of being the one who isn’t getting married, the one whom nobody wants to marry. These moments don’t last long. Bridal mayhem persistently intervenes. And when Annie begs Rhodes to turn on his patrol car’s siren at the end, you wonder if there are any justices of the peace in the neighborhood who are working late.

¶ Although we can’t claim to have been “distracted by flooding along the Mississippi, warfare in Libya or the latest on Newt Gingrich,” we didn’t know about the James Tate Prom Saga until we read about it this morning. Our verdict: “grim-faced” headmaster Beth Smith should be thrown into a Polish space capsule for 1000 hours of community entertainment. ¶ And what, pray tell, is Arthur Newmyer’s lawsuit against Sidwell Friends doing in the pages of the Times? We should have thought that Mr Newmyer is too old to carry on like James Tate, but, sadly not.

¶ Vitaly Borker, the online eyeglasses merchant who couldn’t resist boasting to David Segal  about his deplorable business practises, may be regretting his Iron Curtain cheekiness. Having plead guilty to High Crimes and Naughtiness, he now faces sentencing of up to six years.

¶ What with the piles of books that sprout in every room, we worry about hoarding. Our closets, cabinets, and even the refrigerator are stuffed almost to the point of disorganization. The worst thing about holding on to something because it might come in handy someday is that every now and then it actually does. But we have never given much thought to the children of hoarders, who, it turns out, have some not very surprising tics, such as a disinclination to give parties. The impulse to hoard can lead its victims to choose their clutter over their children. Yikes!