The other night, at a cocktail party, I excused myself from holding forth about Pakistan so that I could refill my wine glass. While I stepped away, the gentleman to whom I was talking whispered to Kathleen, “Your husband sure knows a lot.” Indeed, I was shamelessly gratified, the next morning, to find nearly everything that I had said echoed (as it were) in Lawrence Wright’s latest contribution to The New Yorker‘s Annals of Diplomacy, “The Double Game.” I did know a lot — and I learned almost all of it from reading articles at 3 Quarks Daily. 

I recommend the site highly, especially to Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan diplomat whose Op-Ed piece in the Times, “Demanding Answers From Pakistan,” struck me this morning as almost hygienically pure of common sense, not to mention common knowledge about Pakistan. Mr Khalilzad envisions diplomacy as a sort of chess game, which every nation plays in the same way and with a single purpose. Did diplomacy ever function in that way? I understand that treaties are designed to pretend that it does, but beyond that I have always understood that each nation plays the diplomacy game according to its characteristic bent. It would be treason not to do so. Every sovereign power owes a far greater duty of care to its subject people than it does to other sovereigns, and most sovereign powers represent multiple constituencies with inconsistent, sometimes colliding interests. And while it is laudable to encourage one’s own sovereign to play the game fairly and candidly, it is childish to expect other sovereigns to do so.  

This is why the second prong of Mr Khalilzad’s “two-stage strategy” for obliging Pakistan to behave more like an ally is so fatuous.

Then we should follow up with demands that Pakistan break the backbone of Al Qaeda in Pakistan by moving against figures like Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri; remove limits on the Predator drone campaign; uproot insurgent sanctuaries and shut down factories that produce bombs for use against American and Afghan soldiers; and support a reasonable political settlement in Afghanistan.

This assumes a sovereign unity in Pakistan that simply does not exist. Lawrence Wright quotes the late Benazir Bhutto’s description of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate as “a state within the state.” Then he proceeds to write about S Wing, a supposedly secret organization comprised of retired ISI officials that operates within (or alongside) the ISI. It is thought that if Osama bin Laden had any support from Pakistani officials, it was the men of S Wing who knew where he was and who respected his cover. It would seem that the official government of Pakistan has little or no say in the doings of S Wing. The Predator drone campaign is understandably unpopular with Pakistani people, and expanding it in any way would increase the unpopularity of the government, which whatever its party affiliation or campaign promises is invariably drawn from the wealthy, largely feudal (landowning) elite. This ruling class has undertaken for decades to distract disaffected Pakistanis with the pursuit and acquisition of Kashmir, which was foolishly allotted to India in the last hours of the Raj. Pakistan’s dealing with Afghanistan — another country that, as we have found to our cost, harbors a number of mutually hostile elements that jockey for nominal control of the nominal government — are in contrast cloudy and multifarious. It is unclear what Pakistan stands to gain from “a reasonable political settlement” in Afghanistan, and Mr Khalilzad’s blather actually serves to underline this point. 

It is in neither America’s interest nor Pakistan’s for relations to become more adversarial. But Pakistan’s strategy of being both friend and adversary is no longer acceptable.

While Mr Wright and many others entertain the possibility of withholding financial aid to the government of Pakistan, in retaliation for the double game that Pakistan appears to have been playing (against itself as much as the United States), that option figures nowhere in Mr Khalilzad’s four-pronged backup plan (in case the “two-stage strategy” fails). Doubtless his diplomatic proposals are pregnant with significance for diplomatic insiders, not so much for their patent content as for their timing (and Mr Khalilzad is in any case far more concerned about Afghanistan than he is about Pakistan). But I can’t imagine what use the editors of the Times expected the bulk of their most educated and well-informed readers might make of Mr Khalilzad’s boilerplate. It’s almost criminal of them to make precious Op-Ed space available to a writer who has so little genuine information to offer.  

¶ They say that Nicolas Sarkozy is not happy about La Conquête, a new movie that’s about him — “the story of a man who wins power and loses his wife.” The film opens nationally and at Cannes next week, along with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, a film in which Carla Bruni, the president’s current wife, has a small role. Ms Bruni has plead pregnancy as her excuse for missing the film festtival. ¶ Princess Chulabhorn Walailak, the youngest daughter of Thailand’s ailing King Bhumibol thinks that flattering coverage of royal family news ought to be given ten more minutes of daily air time. We can only imagine what her father’s subjects think about that, because unflattering coverage of the royal family is prohibited by law. Somsak Jeamteerasakul, a history professor who spoke out against princess (on the Internet), has been charged with violating the country’s draconian laws forbidding lèse majesté. ¶ Manuel Zelaya is going home, sometime soon, to Honduras. How we’ve missed him!

The first unambiguous laugh comes on the second page of Francine Prose’s delicious satire, My New American Life. We’ve been introduced to the point of view of Lula, a young Albanian woman who, a day after learning that her residence in the United States is “legal,” espies a black SUV from a window in the suburban home of her employer, whom she calls “Mister Stanley.” 

Raindrops beaded the SUV as it trawled past the house where Lula lived and worked, taking care of Mister Stanley’s son Zeke, a high school senior who only needed minimal caretaking. In fact Zeke could do many things that Lula couldn’t, such as drive a car. But since Mister Stanley believed that teenagers shouldn’t be left on their own, and since he went off to Wall Street at dawn and didn’t return until late, he had hired Lula to make sure that Zeke ate and slept and did his homework. Mister Stanley was very safety-conscious, which Lula found very admirable, but also dangerously American. No Albanian father would do that to his son and risk turning him gay. 

The second laugh comes moments later, just a few lines down. “On the way, Zeke gave Lula driving tips: who went first at an intersection, how to speak the silent language that kept drivers from killing each other like they did constantly in Tirana.” The object of satire here is not suburban life in New Jersey but the sentimental attachment that Lula and her Albanian friends maintain for their murderous homeland, which is always described as a nightmare in terms too cartoonish to take quite seriously. Just considering Albania as a homeland takes on an oxymoronic quality. “No one in Albania went near a court unless they were in handcuffs or were suing to get back their land.” Lula herself has absolutely no desire to return, but when her quondam boyfriend is deported, his chums are happy for him, because he’ll have lots of girlfriends and, besides, his mother is a great cook. 

Lula went to the magazine rack and was soon engrossed in an article about a Texas dynasty literally and figuratively screwing each other for generations, when they weren’t crashing cars and jumping off the room. The story cheered Lula. It sounded like a family you might hear about at home, though the money would have been different, as would the trees and cars and roofs.

The writing is what’s funny: what the first sentence grants, the last appears to retract. It was the same but different. Marking a distinction in the types of roof that crazy relatives are jumping off us is absolutely funny prose. Exaggeration telescopes in both directions, from overstatement to understatement. The humor never lets up for more than a page or two as Lula plummets through a slow-motion adventure that’s set in reverse. 

For Lula has no idea what she’s going to do when she is no longer needed by Mister Stanley. She only knows that continuing to live in his house will snuff the life out of her; it already feels like a tomb. Nothing ever happens in Baywater, the close-in Jersey town where he lived with his wife and son until one fine Christmas Eve when his wife ran off. (This uneventfulness is just as stylized as the recklessness of Albania.) Ever since she started working for Mister Stanley, nothing has happened to Lula. She isn’t nostalgic about waitressing at La Changita, the Alphabet City bar where she worked illegally before reading Mister Stanley’s ad at Craigslist, but she does miss her best friend, Dunia, whom she hopes has gone back to Tirana. Dunia has dropped from sight and beyond email range, and in dark hours Lula fears that she may have fallen into worse hands than those of the INS. Until the black SUV drives up to Mister Stanley’s house, Lula’s only connection to the outside world is an amiable librarian a few blocks away, and Mister Stanley’s childhood chum, Don Settebello — the immigration lawyer who has arranged Lula’s wonderful “legal” status. 

This turns out to be what has attracted the guys in the SUV. Two of them are heavies, but the third one, Alvo, reminds her of an old boyfriend. He asks her to do a “teensy favor” for him — to hide a pistol. She doesn’t dare to refuse, but she doesn’t really want to refuse, either, because Alvo is cute, and Lula has been alone for a long time. (At 26, she considers herself to be “old.”) She will spend most of the book dreaming about Alvo, and thinking that it’s odd of him to break into Mister Stanley’s house from time to time, to take a shower, or perhaps to finish one of the stories that, encouraged by her boss and Don, she has taken to writing. The stories are old Balkan folktales that Lula repackages as personal history, appalled that life in America has made such a liar out of her but also tickled by her daring. As it turns out, of course, the mysterious burglar isn’t Alvo at all, but a foreseeable-in-retrospect surprise guest who pops out of hiding at the most inopportune time. 

But nothing really terrible (or frightening) ever happens.  Lula’s safe and secure life at Mister Stanley’s is such a successful American dream that it enables her to outgrow it. Where a more biting satirist such as Gary Shteyngart might interpose some gruesome or humiliating personal detail, Prose highlights Lula’s longing to live in a place where loving-kindness is a real possibility and not an absurd fantasy — her Albanian dream. Although the narrative pace never lags, the novel is not particularly plot-driven; what happens is not as interesting as what Lula thinks about what’s happening. (A longer title might well have been What My Old Albanian Mind Makes of My New American Life; formally, the book is a masterpiece of point-of-view discipline.) Whether or not she ever takes control of her destiny is not something that we care very much about; what we want is for Lula to go on thinking and talking like Lula. And she does not disappoint us. 

¶ It took the whole length of the story for Jesse McKinley to mention the bitter child-custody battle that might have disturbed the unnamed son of neo-Nazi Jeff Hall enough to make him shoot his father dead. What this story is doing on the front page of the Times is beyond us — unless, that is, it’s another Idiocracy alert. ¶ Westie gangleader Jimmy McElroy died recently in prison (sentence: “forever and a day”) but got a nice send-off Holy Cross, just off Times Square, occasioning an hommage à la manière de Joseph Mitchell by Jim Dwyer. ¶ Omar bin Laden and three of his brothers have “lashed out” at President Obama for killing their unarmed father. In a statement that, if not quite politely phrased, was presumably politely delivered, Mr bin Laden reminds us that he disavowed his father’s violent undertakings; by the same token, he feels that his father ought to have stood trial. We agree, although we’re glad for Barack Obama’s political career that  that is not what happened. What we’d really like to see is the complete destruction of Pakistan’s military resources. We paid for it, after all, and it would send a message to other potentially perfidious allies.

¶ Doreen Carvajal ends a bittersweet story about the chuetas of Majorca — Jewish families that pretended to be Christian in response to the Inquisition (which burned three of them alive in 1691) but that didn’t fool the neighbors, who taught their children a taunting rhyme containing fifteen surnames, including that of (did you know?) Joan Miró — with the rather ouchmaking news that 78-year old Bernat Pomar has recently undergone conversion to Judaism, if you know what we mean by that.

Jumping the Broom is a movie about a poorly planned wedding. I don’t mean the arrangements for the service and the reception (although the latter are in the care of a frazzled blonde, played by Julie Bowen, whose comic potential is scratched deeply enough only to be cringe-making). I mean planning as something that you do for people whom you care about. Only idiots would wait until the rehearsal dinner to introduce parents of such wildly divergent social backgrounds, and neither Sabrina (Paula Patton) nor Jason (Laz Alonso) is an idiot. Their oversight and/or wishful thinking is never explored, because the wild divergence in their social backgrounds, aside from being something that they have personally triumphed over, is there for comic effect only. But the laughter never really muffles the cruelty of the embarrassment to which the mothers of the happy couple are subjected. 

The duel of the mothers, played by Loretta Devine (his, poor) and Angela Bassett (hers, rich) calls for the two actresses to do everything they can think of to make themselves unsympathetic. Ms Devine looks mean and dowdy most of the time, and Ms Bassett always looks like Medea. You just wish that they could don a couple of T shirts and get down to the mud wrestling. Instead, the rich mom speaks French and declares, with odiously unsociable conceit, that not only were her forebears never slaves, they owned slaves. Happily, I suppose, the beady self-righteousness of the poor mom is enough to keep your dislike of these witches in perfect balance. Postal workers and Martha’s Vineyard homeowners had, until Jumping the Broom, little common ground for outrage, but this screenplay, by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, has filled the lack. 

Ms Patton is adorable in the same way that Amanda Peet is adorable in Something’s Gotta Give; close your eyes, and you would never guess that these girls didn’t grow up in the same well-tended garden. Mr Alonso’s performance is awkward in exactly the manner of a jeune premier in a Broadway musical comedy; when he tries to sound sincere, it would be better if he could just sing. I mean it as a compliment: it’s only right that an actor should cough and burp when his character is asked to declare respect for a fiancé’s silly primness. The couple’s more estimable achievement is holding center stage while competing love interests sprout to either side, between his mother’s colleague, the genuinely funny Tasha Smith, and her cousin from Yale, played by Romeo Miller; and between her bridesmaid, Meagan Good, and the catering chef, Gary Dourdan. (The ineptness of the latters’ love scene in the kitchen, while pone burns, ought to be taught, prophylactically, in film schools.) Valarie Pettiford, Mike Epps, DeRay Davis, Pooch Hall, and a rather tired-looking Brian Stokes Mitchell do what they can to push the stone uphill, while a pixieish Vera Cudjoe cajoles one into wondering if Cicely Tyson is doing another cameo. All in all, the cast gives this bad film the visual pizzaz to make it well worth sitting through. It’s only when the screen goes dark that you ask yourself what all that was about.

I feel somewhat impertinent criticizing Jumping the Broom, because it struck me as sending a fusillade of coded messages to an intended black American audience. Without atttempting any deciphering, I’ll just point out that the movie is given to pretending that its true subject is pre-marital continence. At one awful moment, Sabrina apologizes to Jason’s penis for arousing an erection that cannot be — what’s the word? “eased”? — until the next day’s ceremony. At another, equally awful moment, the bridesmaids speculate about Jason’s fortitude in the face of Sabrina’s virginal vows; maybe he’s on the down low! The juxtaposition of raunch and respectability curdles the fun; Jumping the Broom is neither the farce nor the comedy of manners that it might have been. The whole idea of “saving it for marriage” seems wrong-headed if not delusional, resting as it does on the presumption that, since two sexy-looking people are sure to find erotic satisfaction in one another’s arms, they might as well wait until they’ve bound themselves together. I no longer live in a world in which such a view seems moral; indeed, it seems quite immoral. What a message! 

¶ Although there’s not much real news in today’s Times, there are lots of interesting items about personal technology, such as the really very intriguing story about the Polara golf ball, which is dimpled in a directional manner that reduces slices and hooks. It’s also “illegal” — not permitted in official tournaments. The substrate of the story is an anxiety about making the pastime attractive to young man who are inclined to play in cargo shorts and whose sense of the rules is flexible at best. Will golf develop a hardball/softball divide? ¶ After months of dithering, Condé Nast and Apple have finally come up with a subscription model for The New Yorker. Not that we’re excited. The great thing about the print issue is that you don’t need a connection to read it. And while the online archives make it unnecessary to stack unread issues or even to clip favorite articles, you still have to type out anything that you want to copy — cutting and pasting are not enabled. Makes you feel like it’s the Middle Ages! ¶ Further proof that it was the tablet, and not the personal computer, that would save trees (because reading a tablet involves the same body moves as reading a book) is forthcoming in Martha White’s story about Ativ Software, an outfit that packages conference materials in a tidy app. (Sell Staples!) ¶ Facebook 2.0: in which the Zuckerberg competes with a crowd of “anti-oversharing” alternatives.

As Kathleen put it to Will at lunch yesterday, “You are probably the youngest person to have paid three visits to the Museum.” Who can tell? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are several kids Will’s age (16 months) who have been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art a lot more often than he has. We can’t be the only folks to have discovered what a child-friendly place the Museum is.

Who’d ‘a’ thunk it? When Kathleen and I were Will’s age, no one would have dreamed of taking us to a museum of any kind. It might well have been prohibited (as indeed it still is at the Frick). Then, too, there were none of the vast interior courtyards that abound at the Museum these days, none vaster than the plaza surrounding the Temple of Dendur — a bit of Central Park under glass, really. Kids seem to be just as comfortable running around in it as they are on the other side of the huge window, and nobody minds.

The guards certainly couldn’t be more welcoming. Kathleen says that they’re nice because Will is a good boy. Even though Will is a good boy, I can’t agree. It would mean that the guards were sizing kids up one at a time and giving those who are well-behaved special treatment. Too much work! It’s my hunch that the guards actually prefer children. They take up so much less room, and they never try to take flash photographs.

You may wonder why I’m publishing the image below. There are several reasons, but the most powerful one relates to why it makes me so happy, as best I understand it. I look at the picture and I see a boy impelled by curiosity to go off on his own. It’s true that, in the very next shot, he turns around and summons me with an extended hand. But his instinct is to take off first and to look for support later; he doesn’t doubt that he’ll have it. (Whenever he approached a flight of steps, he reached out for a hand.)

Coming up: the museum on the other side of the Park, where the dinosaurs live. Saving for a rainy day: the Guggenheim spiral. Watch for us!

¶ Whatever you think of Paul Krugman and his insistence upon the priority of jobs creation (we’re inclined to agree), there’s no disputing his account of the deficit, which we note particularly because he places responsibility for the ballooning of our national debt entirely upon the shoulders of “the elite.” The Bush tax cuts, the Iraqi misadventure, and the recession were all the doing of powerful cliques who now, because they can, blame ordinary Americans for “wanting something for nothing.” We wish that Mr Krugman would resort to different terminology: “elite” is now a cant word that means little more than “powerful people whom I don’t like.” ¶ Here’s hoping that Dominique Browning will galvanize American mothers (and fathers) and create an effective demand for thoroughgoing regulatory reform on the product-safety front. There can be no unguided free markets in anything pertaining to infants.

¶ Michael Kimmelman meditates on the fiftieth anniversary of the Eichmann trial, causing us to meditate on the ineffable transformation of the present — now — into “history.” Hannah Arendt would be unpleasantly surprised to learn that her theory of totalitarianism was richly grounded in the Zeitgeist — but so it seems to have been. We’re also reminded of Jonathan Littell’s sharp portrait of Adolf Eichmann in Les Bienveillantes — nothing banal about him!

¶ At A Fistful of Euros, Charlie Whitaker advances several arguments against the British monarchy, one of which seems, at first blush, absolutely damning — and then, suddenly, not so: “The monarchy promotes the idea that some people are to receive certain rewards while the rest of us get to watch.” When you consider the equally unfair distribution of movie-star looks… ¶ In a narrow sense, Terry Teachout is right about arts organizations: today’s administrators are finally facing some awful truths (and shutting down or declaring bankruptcy). What’s missing is the notion that they oughtn’t to be going through this alone. Mr Teachout’s persistent use of “business models” is key: the arts are not a business and they never will be. He must be thinking of “entertainment.” The arts require state patronage, and state patronage in turn requires an educated body politic. What kept our concerts hall full for decades was a commitment, long abandoned, to strong music-education programs in public schools. (WSJ, natch)

¶ Yves Smith socks it to the libertarians, even if it’s “like talking to a wall.” She wraps up with a concise rebuttal of the libertarian claim that the “coercive” state can do no good. (Naked Capitalism)

 It simply denies that the private sector is intrinsically dependent on the state for key functions for it to perform well, and ignores the fact its ideal of a minimal state does not scale at all. Similarly, many forms of enterprise show considerable economies of scale and hence will dominate the political realm if the political sphere is not allowed to constrain the economic realm when broader society prefers to impose rules

¶ Michael Bourne takes a good look at the “cultural irrelevance” that disheartened Jonathan Franzen back in the days before he was (very) famous (1996), and decides that it’s a good thing after all: “A novel never sells anything but itself, which means that the whole huge noisemaking machine we call popular culture leaves novelists more or less alone.” (The Millions)  ¶ Why Spy? Will Hines (who was a junior in high school when he subscribed) shares five great things about the mothership of modern humor. We’re saving our search strength for the piece with the complicated math formula that proved that Pine Mattress was a lousy school. (The Awl)

¶ Do you think Geoff Manaugh realizes that he has set a compelling creative writing assignment? “A particular type of early modern warehouse or other such industrial structure is found to house a specific species of bird, perhaps because only its frame can fit through gaps in the brickwork, precluding colonization by other species.” Thing is, he’s got to review the damn novels when FSG publishes them.” (BLDGBLOG) ¶ We don’t know if Lucas Amory is an instrumental virtuoso, but, at eight years old, he’s definitely a prodigious listener. His reponse to Anthony Tommasini’s (quasi-idiotic) “10 Best Composers” list. (Letters of Note) ¶ Jacob Lambert’s “Requiem for a Video Store,” about Beaux Arts Video in Philadelphia. We wonder how many stories like this one are out there. A hundred, perhaps? More? How many truly interesting video-rental outlets were exterminated by Netflix? (The Millions)

¶ Tom Scocca grrouses, not unreasonably, about the cost of the Black Hawk helicopter that failed the other day and had to be blown up/burned/destroyed by the Special Ops who took out Osama bin Laden. “ Estimates of the price tag for the MH-60K vary.” (Slate) Philip Greenspun, who sidelines as a pilot, puts the cost at $20 million. (Philip Greenspun’s Weblog)

New: ¶ David Cain’s Raptitude. Four words to avoid: “Wish,” “Try,” “Should,” and “Deserve.” We don’t avoid them, but we use them with care. We find that substituting “Ought” for “Should” keeps us serious, as well reducing the ambiguity that clouds that verb form. (via The Morning News) 

Have a Look: ¶ The Taxi of Tomorrow — which might have been Turkish from Brooklyn. (via Joe.My.God) ¶ Better Book Titles. (via The Morning News)

Noted: ¶ We hate to admit it, but we only just learned about Angela Lansbury’s interesting family history. Her grandfather was a founder of the Labour Party. (Guardian; via Arts Journal) ¶ Mark Singer on Donald Trump: “I’m convinced that he’s convinced that everything he says and does is ultimately good for business.” (The New Yorker) ¶ Jeff Bezos’s $1.6 security detail, a gift from Amazon. (Felix Salmon) ¶ James Franco @ Days of Yore. ¶ Derek Miller’s last post. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Even more regrettable, in our view, than the CUNY board’s yielding to Jeffrey Wiesenfeld’s opposition to granting the author of Angels in America an honorary degree is the bizarre assertion by Valerie Lancaster Beal, one of the trustees, that she doesn’t know who Tony Kushner is. “I don’t know his issues,” she is reported to have said. We only wish that we were surprised to discover that the governance of an important institution of higher learning is shouldered in part by such an uninformed person. We have no idea what degree of remediation would equip Ms Beal to perform her duties to CUNY, but Mr Wiesenfeld is as beyond the pale as he charges Mr Kushner with being, and his resignation ought to be demanded immediately.

For nearly two months, on most weekdays (other than Friday), I’ve been cycling through five identical playlists, or versions of a template playlist, the difference between them being the performers. The original Bach in Order playlist is the first one below, headed by Trevor Pinnock’s recording of Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerti Grossi, Opus 6. Red type indicates that the performer plays on a harpsichord.

Each set begins and ends with a concerto grosso and includes the ordinal Bach suites. Thus, the first set comprises the English Suite No 1 in A, BWV 806; the French Suite No 1 in d, BWV 812; the Cello Suite No 1 in G, BWV 1007; and the Partita No 1 in B-Flat, BWV 825. It begins with the Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 1in D and ends with the Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 2 in F. The second set begins with the Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 3 in c, and includes the second English Suite, the second French Suite, the second Cello Suite, and the second Partita. And so on. There are six sets in all.

I don’t know when the first playlist was compiled; I believe that it dates back to 2009. Nor can I remember when it struck me that I ought to have more than one list, but once I had that idea, I settled on five in total. While there are many more recordings of the Cello Suites and the Partitas, and even a few more Corelli sets, complete recordings of the English and French Suites are relatively uncommon; most performers play the one or two that they like and are not encouraged, doubtless, to be exhaustive.

Round about the time I was compiling the four new playlists, I thought that it would be a good idea to insert other works by Bach between the pairs of concerti grossi that delimit the sets. The well-known Italian Concerto fits between the second and the third of the Concerti Grossi; the fourth and fifth are separated by the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, and so on. The last punctuating work, the Toccata in C, BWV 914, is the work that Thomas, the Romain Duris character, wants to play at his career-reviving audition, in Jacques Audiard’s De battre mon coeur s’est arreté; and the third version of the playlist includes the recording that Caroline Duris, the actor’s sister, made for the sound track.

So far, I don’t know this music well enough to match up the different performances in a way that maximizes the interest of each, Fashions have changed a lot since Neville Marriner recorded the Corelli with the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields, and it shows, believe me. At some point, I’ll use one of Pablo Casals’s recordings of the Cello Suites, and I’m not sure that putting them next to Glenn Gould’s Partitas (arguendo) will be a good thing or a bad thing. We’ll see! The only programming criterion is to arrange things so that no performer appears on the same version “twice” — meaning that we don’t hear Gould playing the Toccata or the Goldberg Variations on the fourth version, the one with his Partitas; as it is, Angela Hewitt and Ralph Kirkpatrick are heard in every one. I’m beginning to feel the itch to rearrange things a bit, substituting one or two performances that I haven’t used so far. I have no intention of altering the template; that has worked very well. The Goldbergs, coming in the late afternoon, make for a complete change of pace, almost a hiatus — only one of the variations lasts as long as the sarabandes and courantes of the dance suites.

Since the beginning of March, only one or two weeks have gone by without my listening to any of these playlists; I usually manage three or four. If I’m going to be out for hours at a time, I find something else to listen to when I’m home; but once I’ve started a playlist, it plays through to the end. I’ve been getting better lately about starting the lists as soon as I get up. They run for about twelve hours, and it’s best to have them end before dinner — largely because Kathleen has become very tired of the antepenultimate item, the sixth Cello Suite. Which is a pity, because it’s my favorite.

I’ll be referring to these tables in future entries. I’ll be talking about how some of the hundreds of pieces (individual dances and variations) that comprise each list have emerged from the “wallpaper” of twelve hours of daily Bach; about how some of the different performers have become immediately recognizable (making it unnecessary for me to consult the table in order to know who’s playing what); and about what it’s like to wheel through the day alongside this musical planetarium.

¶ Elisabeth Bumiller writes about Team 6, the crème de la crème of Navy SEAL units that allows no margin for error. If not exactly unsung, these heroes stay out of the limelight, at least until they retire. Interestingly, these paragons of fitness are about ten years older than average servicemen — mature judgment is one of their precious skills. ¶ We agree with President Obama’s decision to withhold photographs of the dead Osama bin Laden, especially after LiveLeak got scammed.

¶ That David Barton is considered by anyone, much less former presidents of the United States, to be a reputable historian is surely a grave indictment of the academic establishment. If it’s pretty clear that the self-taught, Christianist Mr Barton doesn’t really “do history,” it’s also evident that there’s something that the professionals aren’t getting right, either.  ¶ And let’s remember what Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Caligari had to say about not blaming underpaid and undersupported teachers when we decide what to do about American students’ pervasive ignorance of the nuts and bolts of “civics.”

It would be interesting to know how many of us there are: men and women who picked up Jennifer Homans’s history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, not because of any great interest in the dance but because the author is the widow of Tony Judt, one of the age’s great historians. And how many of us found that the books shared this curious strength: an agreeably efficient power to organize miscellaneous motes  of information floating through readers’ brains? Postwar reminded us that, contrary to sense as this seemed at the time, both parties to the Cold War shared the same planet and the same sunlight during the same decades. Apollo’s Angels teaches something similar, if from an inverted perspective: what we call “classical ballet” has, through four centuries of change and more, has generally depended upon the patronage of the state. 

There is a danger of circularity: one could easily define ballet in terms of state support. That would rule out modern-dance experimentalists and idiosyncratic choreographers along the lines of Martha Graham and Paul Taylor. But the connection is not so much one that Homans is at pains to make as a link that surfaces again and again as she tells her story. It also explains the valedictory character of her conclusion: the last two chapters of Apollo’s Angels, covering ballet in America and, in particular, in New York City, concern two ballet companies that, although they are both still very much with us, have never enjoyed so much as the semi-official backing bestowed (for example) on Diaghelev’s Ballets Russes. They were kept going by dancers and choreographers — most heroically, George Balanchine — who knew how things were done in the ancien régime that came to an end with the Tsars, and who were able to inspire wealthy benefactors to open their purses. What they could not do, these Petersburg exiles, was to reproduce themselves; the dancers whom they trained never knew what it is like to bask in the favor of sovereigns. I’m not talking about money alone. “We have grown accustomed to living in multiple private dimensions, virtual worlds sealed in ether: myspace, mymusic, mylife.” It may be that classical ballet cannot survive without the atmosphere into which it was born: the authority of princely courts. 

To fasten on the luxury and the discipline of classical ballet is to risk missing the point that, wherever it has flourished, it has provided a clear cultural idea of how those who are close to power — courtiers, originally — ought to move. There we have an explanation for the drastic decline in French ballet after Napoleon. The ballet that developed from court dances during the latter part of Louis XIV’s reign inevitably yielded to something wilder and more bravura during the Revolution, but the virtuoso dancers of the early Nineteenth Century were unwilling to abandon opulence. The combination of splash and flash was too rich for the rising bourgeoisie. “By the 1830s male dancers were being reviled as disgraceful and effeminate creatures, and by the 1840s they had been all but banned from Parisian stages.” In France, ballet was unable to suggest an acceptable model for masculine demeanor, and, without this ballast, it quickly degenerated into wispy attitudinizing and Folies Bergères kick lines. But in royal Denmark, the half-French, Danish-born August Bournonville was able to keep the old discipline alive — as a discipline. Much later, in the lurid twilight of the Tsars, ballet would burn with a gilded transmutation of folk exoticism that would explode in the early masterpieces of Stravinsky. Throughout Apollo’s Angels we encounter examples of the alignment of patronage and artistic triumph. And there is even an entire chapter — “Italian Heresy: Pantomime, Virtuosity, and Italian Ballet” — that shows what happened in the absence of patronage. (Short answer: Busby Berkley-esque kitsch.)

It is not a thesis that Homans belabors, and I’m not sure that you couldn’t argue just the opposite, that state sanction was more oppressive than liberating. But there seems to me to be a firm connection between the interest taken by the elites in ballet and the willingness of dancers to suffer for their art. Suffering enters the picture in a serious way with the career of Marie Taglioni (another demi-Scandinavian), an artist who learned to make her stumpy body flit across the stage en pointe. It’s with Taglioni and Bournonville that the day ceases to be long enough to accommodate the ideal amount of rehearsal. Dancers glow in the prestige of bejewelled archduchesses and beribboned grand dukes even as, in an increasingly bourgeois age, they display an awe-inspiring, arguably regal control of their bodies.

The great thing about Apollo’s Angels is that it complete distinguishes the history of ballet from the history of ballets — from the list of famous works that have come down to us, as well as the dances that have been lost. The individual dances are discussed, certainly, but Homans disavows the choreographic chronology that would attribute any given dance to the influence of its forebears. The best dancing has always thrived on a high degree of tension between conservative rigor and inspired innnovation. We can see this in the example of Swan Lake, a ballet that, curiously, it may be said that Tchaikovsky never saw; for it was only after his death, after the successes of The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, that the earlier work was re-conceived, and by two men, not one. “This division of labor, however, turned out to be fortuitous: the enduring success of the ballet owes much to the tension between Petipa and Ivanov’s constrasting choreographic styles.” Homans is particularly lucid in describing the entry of the swans. 

This scene is often held up as the greatest possible achievement for a corps de allet: properly performed, the dancers seem to move as one, and audiences today still marvel at how “together” they are. It is often assumed, moreover, that they are so together because each dancer has been trained meticulously to calibrate her movements to those of her neighbor. But this is not really how it works.  Ivanov’s swans are not an assembly line or human machine, nor even a closely integrated community: they are an ensemble created by music. His steps do not so much fit the music as allow a dancer to find the phrase and sustain it in movement, making her way into the sound rather than moving smoothly across its surface. The unity is not “out” to one’s neighbors, but paradoxically a turning “in” and away; it is a togetherness based on musical and physical introspection, the polar opposite of show or ceremony. 

Over the course of centuries, classical ballet has developed a repertoire of music and gesture that, perhaps because of its wordlessness, seems to reinvent the known world in terms that momentarily deny the existence of that world. Thus the power of the great ballets on stage; thus, also, the claustral airlessness that is the signature of stories about the offstage life of dancers. Jennifer Homans manages to keep this gravity from overwhelming her story, which is always set in the secular world of Europe’s social history. That alone is why the book must be read: it so handily takes every scrap of ballet-related information that you have accumulated and puts it in its proper place. Significantly, the only interesting detail that Homans appears to have omitted is Mozart’s collaboration with Jean-Georges Noverre, the Franco-Swiss innovator whose career takes up the bulk of her second chapter. It’s no big deal: the name of the little ballet in question is Les Petits Riens.

¶ Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, has called upon Libyan strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi to step down. As symbolic gestures go, this is an important one, but some sort of material follow-up will be required to strengthen Turkey’s position as a “regional power broker.” ¶ The pros and cons of Chinese direct investment in American industry always pit realism (take the money) against idealism (it’s tainted money!). We’re inclined toward the realism espoused by the Asia Society’s Orville Schell.

Kathleen is en route to Amsterdam. (What a great time to be traveling, eh?) A long time ago, we planned a trip that would have taken us to London and Paris for a few madcap days on either side of the conference that brings Kathleen to the Nederlander capital, but by the time Kathleen got round to looking for firm upgrades on coach-to-business seats, there were none to be had. So that was the end of the trip for me, and the end of everything but Amsterdam for Kathleen. She’ll be home on Saturday, by which time I’ll have accomplished few if any of the many things on the to-do list that I always compile for Kathleen’s absences. I imagine that, undistracted by the need to make dinner or whatnot (and there really isn’t very much in the way of whatnot when it comes to looking after Kathleen; she is decidedly a kitty and not a puppy), I’ll throw myself into grands projets. But it never happens. I’m just despondent when she’s away, Mr Pillar-to-Post. Oh, I worry about her flights and fly into panics when I can’t get her on the phone, but there’s more to it than that, a low hum of not-quite-right. I think that travel is great, but it should take place while I’m asleep or otherwise unconscious. Otherwise, I want the people in my life to be in New York, most especially Kathleen. 

This time, the inertia set in before Kathleen even left the office. I spent what was supposed to be a day at home, reading, writing, tidying, organizing, and perhaps even menu planning — instead of all that, I goofed off. After some fiddling around with a bonsai tree out on the balcony (one of Kathleen’s discards, partly because she didn’t like the tree itself but mostly because it arrived in a broken pot), I had lunch with WWW. Having just paid the bills, I was in no mood for retail experiences, but as soon as I got home I remembered that Helen has just returned to the Morning Calm Gallery from a family visit abroad. Now she could help me frame some of the pictures that I’ve been stockpiling in recent months. I’d start with the three prints of Christian Chaize’s Praia Piquinia series that I’ve bought at Jen Bekman’s 20×200. There are forty-five images in this series so far, but I think that I’m good with the three that I’ve got. Exce[t that the nighttime view, showing bright city lights along the far headland, is pretty exciting. It’s exciting in part because it tells me that the secluded beach in the foreground, the location of which Mr Chaize is naturally disinclined to publicize, more or less has to face the town of Lagos. This ought to make finding Praia Piquinia on Google Maps fairly straightforward, but it doesn’t. Believe me, I’ve already spent an hour looking. (It goes without saying that Google Maps does not recognize “Praia Piquinia.”) Eventually, I will find the beach, but not today.

While Kathleen packed last night, I watched a movie that put me in a melancholy mood, Ben Sombogaart’s De Tweeling (Twin Sisters), a film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award in 2003. It’s one of the films that I’ve ordered from Amazon in Europe because it stars Thekla Reuten. Here I am telling you how much I miss my wife when I’m also mooning over a beautiful and sophisticated movie star who is younger than my daughter — boo hoo! So far, I’ve seen three new-to-me pictures, one of them in German without subtitles, and the one point in common that I find in the roles that Ms Reuten plays so well is that her characters always know more than they can say, or that can be said. Sometimes, as in The American, this makes them dangerous. Sometimes, as in Twin Sisters, it makes them volatile. Sometimes, as in Wit Licht and  Waffenstillstand, it leaves them heartbroken but still hopeful. I’ve just asked the Video Room to send over Everybody’s Famous, and I look forward to discovering what shades that will add to the actress’s palette. 

Twin Sisters has a fairy-tale setup. When their father dies,  in 1926, leaving them orphans, two German sisters are split up by a divided family. Anna, the sturdier of the two, is taken in by farmers who have the strongest claim to custody of both girls. Lotte, who is consumptive, is taken by well-to-do cousins who naturally see themselves as the better providers. Each family produces a bogus explanation for why neither sister receives a letter from the other. By the time the girls grow up and are replaced by Nadja Uhl and Ms Reuten — I was dying to know whether my latest film obsession would be the rich girl or the poor one, and I was pleased as punch to see that she was Lotte, because it entitled her to the full movie star treatment of flattering costumes and agreeable surroundings — we have been treated to flash-forwards in which it is made clear that even in old age the sisters are estranged, thus framing the movie’s mystery: what could turn these peas-in-a-pod against one another. It turns out that only Lotte harbors any animus. And the film ventures the intriguing suggestion that it is Lotte’s posh upbringing that makes her less understanding rather than more. It’s not that she’s a snob or in any way narrow-minded; quite the contrary. As World War II laps at the girls’ feet, Lotte falls in love with a nice Jewish boy. It is her discovery, after the war and its horrors, that Anna was married to an SS soldier that compels Lotte to sever ties with her sister. This is unreasonable; Anna was no real Nazi, and her husband wasn’t either; they were just two ordinary kids stumbling through catastrophe. But educated Lotte cannot imagine what it like to lack the long view, the big picture, the perspective that implicates everyone in national shame (especially and conveniently the people of another nation, in another shame). 

Like many European movies, Twin Sisters takes fairly melodramatic material and illuminates it with distinctive individualities. There is, for example, Anna’s strange relationship with her employer, the wealthy Countess Falkenau, a stylish but fundamentally silly woman who depends upon Anna for the management of her household, and who even kisses her goodbye when Anna goes off to be married, but who is still a petulant and self-centered rich girl. In an American movie, Anna would treat her mistress with ironic detachment, but here, instead, she worships her, because, after all, a countess is a countess, and a countess who treats her favorite domestic nicely is a princess whose brilliance blinds Anna to the narcissism of her benevolence. There is the curious relationship between Lotte’s adoptive parents and the family of her fiancé. The fiancé is lost in the war, but his family is sheltered by Lotte’s, with something less than red-blooded enthusiasm. And the Jewish family survives — Lotte marries Abraham, the older brother. The characters in Twin Sisters are subjected to some of history’s most oppressive constraints, but the actors do such a good job that they keep their heads well above the plotting. 

A sad story, though. Lotte, although thoughtful and loving and right-minded, is beset by a rotten sentimentality masquerading as “the principle of the thing.” And Thekla Reuten, unlike all but the very best actresses, shows Lotte’s limitations from inside. From her very first scene, when we catch her singing a Schumann lied — how cultivated! — we sense the mulishness that lies beneath her gentle exterior; she is well-behaved but not docile. This ought to be a good thing, of course, but in the event it is turned against her good-hearted sister, not some bad guys. 

I wonder what kind of a movie De Tweeling would have struck me as being, if Kathleen hadn’t been packing for Amsterdam.

¶ The drop is slight, to be sure, but it’s the first ever (all right, in twenty years): the percentage of American households with television sets declined from 98.9 to 96.7. It’s pathetic to be cheered by such small change, but we can’t help it. Even if the same content can be viewed on computer screens, the interaction is entirely different. ¶ A martyr, not a a suicide: Football star Dave Duerson was right to shoot himself in the heart: his brain, sent by his family at his request to a clinic at Boston University, reveals the onset of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the players association, said in a telephone interview that Duerson’s having C.T.E. “makes it abundantly clear what the cost of football is for the men who played and the families.”

On Friday night, Kathleen had a reunion dinner that I wanted to go to — it’s no surprise that, although I’ve kept up with hardly anyone that I went to school with, a lot of Kathleen’s former classmates (and their husbands) have become good friends — but I thought that I had better show up for the last of this season’s Orpheus concerts at Carnegie Hall. My attendance record has been pretty bad, but what really got me to go was the challenge of writing about it later. Nothing is more difficult than writing about concerts, and most serious music reviews are stunningly uninformative. (They may be packed with information, but not about the performances.) There is also the ephemerality: nothing that can be said about a concert is going to bring it back; even a recording won’t bring it back.

Consider the concert that opened the season, back in October. As an encore, after Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, Garrick Ohlsson played Chopin’s most famous waltz, and he played it as if it had never been played before and would never be played so well again. I remember the intensity of that feeling very well, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what it was about the playing that took the music from exceptional to unique. It was an illusion, in any case. I’ve heard the waltz played several times since then and never thought to myself, “but this is not as good as Ohlsson!” The magic, I conclude, was the pianist’s ability to infect the waltz with the peculiar excitement of the piano concerto’s finale. This is not to say that he made Chopin sound like Beethoven — not at all. He simply made it seem, given what we had just heard, that this was the way to play the waltz, and the only way. He made it bigger than it had ever been — immense, articulate, and perfect. You had to be there. Even if you had heard Garrick Ohlsson play the same music half an hour later, in another hall or at someone home, and some sort of computer were able to document the fact that he played the waltz in exactly the same way twice, you wouldn’t have been there, at Carnegie Hall, after the Beethoven, listening with us. There is more to music than notes. 

So then: for all my verbiage, I’ve said nothing about what Chopin’s waltz sounded like in October. And that was my point. I can’t tell you about the concert. I can only talk about what I heard. That alters the challenge. 

Friday’s concert turned out to have a wonderfully old-fashioned flavor, because although Arabella Steinbacher, the Bavarian violinist who played Hartmann and Mozart, is a slip of a girl, she plays like Jascha Heifetz. She plays like Jascha Heifetz the way that Garrick Ohlsson played Chopin’s waltz in the only correct manner: You had to be there, and I was. The Hartmann, a Concerto funèbre written at the start of World War II and revised twenty years later, was just about the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. Its brighter moments were saturated with a melancholy that reminded me of Korngold’s violin concerto. Hartmann’s tonality wanders further from the heavenly steps than Korngold’s, but it is never harsh. Which is surprising, given Hartmann’s fondness for supersonic high notes that, even though they were perfectly sounded, must have pained a few ears in the audience. The string band was both lush and austere, like an extraordinarily soft but short-napped velvet. Ms Steinbacher played with complete authority and more than a touch of “longhair” romanticism. Where a violinist such as Gil Shaham will persuade me that he has just written the Beethoven concerto, maybe yesterday, maybe earlier this afternoon, imbuing it with an ineffable up-to-the-minute-ness, an artist in Arabella Steinbacher’s mold takes me back to my childhood, when the music seemed ancient even when it was new, and violinists were pre-eminent brooders. 

And then what did she play, after the interval? Two pieces that a) haven’t appeared on a concert program in the past fifty years, having been overplayed to death in the preceding century and b) never never never ought to be played side by side — or so you would think. I’m talking about Mozart’s Adagio, K 261, and Rondo, K 373, for violin and orchestra. These stand-alone pieces, written long after the five violin concertos, have a fluty quality that suggests a Meissen bust of Beethoven playing the piano, if you can imagine such a thing. To put it another way, they seem incredibly fake — much too pretty to be genuine. (Mirabell rather than Reber Mozartkügeln, if you will.) This is the sort of music that has Mozart the reputation for cuteness that he never quite lives down. (Maybe Leopold wrote them.) What made listening to all that gorgeousness side by side bearable was the violinist’s venerable tone. I was reminded that Bavaria is one of Europe’s more conservative corners, and I don’t mean its politics only. And that’s what made the pieces’ meretriciousness so moving: the violinist’s complete faith in them.

I have not been able to identify Ms Steinbacher’s solo encore, which was extremely old-fashioned. Lots of gypsy bravura. What it reminded me of, more than anything else, was the show-off opening of Ravel’s Tzigane. Also Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy (but minus the laughs). This was fiddling!

At the end, we had Haydn’s London Symphony, the 104th. The last. Did Haydn know that it was his hundred and fourth when he wrote it? It seems unlikely. Did he know that it would be his last? The most exciting part of the performance was the Andante, which alternates an almost banal tick-tock motif with abrupt outtakes from Beethoven’s stormier development sections. The impression conveyed by the orchestra was that Haydn really had no idea of how to bridge these modes, but that his raw blurting would inspire Beethoven to figure it out. I used to think that Beethoven took Haydn’s classicism and roughed it up a bit, making it romantic. Now I think that what Beethoven did was just about the opposite: he smoothed Haydn’s sometimes jocular juxtapositions and gave them an Olympian integrity that is actually more classical than Haydn’s originals. 

The first work on the program was the big surprise: Richard Strauss’s Serenade for Winds, Op 7. I had never heard this before and I wasn’t looking forward to it; really early Strauss can sound post-Wagnerian in a sawdusty way. But the Serenade turned out to be far more like the composer’s great late wind serenades, written in the 1940s (and superbly recorded by Orpheus decades ago), than I should have thought possible. Although not so magical, so shimmery as late or even mature Strauss, the music contemplated the same sort of beauty, at once comfortable, sensuous, and transcendant — it is the beauty of a dreaming child. Not yet twenty years old when he wrote the piece, in 1881, Strauss nevertheless demonstrates a complete understanding of Mozart’s Gran Partita, also known as the Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments, and is itself scored for thirteen musicians. (No double-bass, though.) Unlike the Adagio and Rondo that would come later in the evening, the Serenade was far too Mozartean to sound like Mozart. The Orpheans’ performance was extraordinarily convincing. Without ever playing too loudly, they filled every cubic inch of Carnegie’s space with musical volume — I had never understood that term so well before. There was a moment when the four horns had a gloriously burnished passage just to themselves, and this just about stopped my heart.

I was disappointed to hear the audience’s applause peter out while all the musicans were still on stage. I had just heard something excitingly lovely, but perhaps I was the only one. I had to be there! 

So, we Americans were right all along: Osama bin Laden was living in Pakistan, even though that country’s government insisted that he wasn’t. Given the size and fortified character of the Abbottabad compound, apparently built for the terrorist in 2005, it is impossible to believe that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence was genuinely unaware of his presence. As Simon Tisdall writes at the Guardian,  the discovery that climaxed in the death of bin Laden “is an enormous and dangerous embarrassment for Pakistan’s government.” We would underscore Mr Tisdall’s use of the present tense.

We Americans also seem to be treating the event as a championship victory. Score one for us! The fact that the operation against bin Laden involved the surprise invasion of an uneasy ally’s territory was not deemed important enough for a headline in today’s print edition of the Times — although Jane Perlez’s online analysis generally accords with Mr Tisdall’s. “With Bin Laden’s death, perhaps the central reason for an alliance forged on the ashes of 9/11 has been removed…” This is the real news, and it is momentous in every way. The military and intelligence officials whose cooperation made the capture of Osama bin Laden deserve every kind of praise as well as the nation’s gratitude. But we see no call for jubilation.

Francis Lawrence’s Water For Elephants is a very old-fashioned movie at heart — and on its sleeve as well. The darkness of life in the circus has been a movie trope since Freaks; you might almost say that movies were invented not so much take us behind the scenes as to persuade us that we want to go behind the scenes. All the glamor that circus performers know, after all, they know when they don their spangly costumes and perform. The rest is rehearsal or worse. (Tightrope artists don’t go out on the town after the show.) So why would anyone want to peer into the world of underpaid drudgery on the other side of the canvas?

The answer is, “nobody but a kid who dreams of running away with the circus.” Jacob Jankowski doesn’t run away with the circus, exactly, but when he does run away — from the void left by his loving parents’ sudden death in an automobile accident — it’s a circus train that he hops on to. Having left Cornell within an inch of graduating as a veterinarian, Jacob brings some useful skills to his new berth; as an Ivy Leaguer, he brings a gentlemanly polish that the manager and master of ceremonies finds congenial — until, of course, the manager’s wife responds to his ardent glances, whereupon the manager’s sideline as a sadist takes over. Or is it the plot of I Pagliacci? Mo matter, because — and this is what’s really old-fashioned about Water For Elephants — the film is not about the circus at all. It’s about the rescue of a lovely woman by a pure-hearted young man. And it is set in the distant past, when even roustabouts were better-dressed than most people today.

I’m going to have to see Water For Elephants a few more times before I can tell if it’s any good. Reese Witherspoon, as I say, is the reason to hold out hope. Her Marlena — an abandoned child, raised in a hell of foster homes until her escape into the circus manager’s arms — shimmers with luminous waves of goodness even when her face is set with hard smarts. When Marlena strikes her triumphant poses atop Rosie, the elephant that her husband buys in order to buoy up the circus’s fortunes, you see someone who is very pleased to be doing something well. Christoph Waltz, as August, the manager, looks perhaps too pleased to be doing what he’s doing; no one brings a more enthusiastic, authoritative glitter to the art of cruelty. What saves his performances from seeming typecast is the fact that Water For Elephants is nowhere near as much fun as Inglorious Basterds, the Quentin Taratino fable in which Mr Waltz stole every scene in which he appeared. As for Robert Pattison, the vampire heart-throb who plays Jacob, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s he who’s the mess or his part, which may have undergone unfortunate tailoring to suit the actor’s fan base. Mr Pattison has dreamy eyes, a great smile, and the frame of a genuine Hollywood Everyman. But his wounded air may not wear well; he too often seems too debilitated to withstand the hardships of circus life. It may be that his career needs a fatal accident that will seal him in imperishable amber.