“It was wrong and bad and exactly right.” This sentence appears in “Sacred  Heart,” the second story in Jennifer Egan’s collection, Emerald City — also her first book. The narrator, Sarah, a fourteen year-old schoolgirl, is on the verge of befriending an oddly attractive classmate named Amanda.

She wore silver bracelets embedded with chunks of turquoise, and would cross her legs and stare into space in a way that suggested she lived a dark and troubled life. We were the same, I thought, though Amanda didn’t know it.

Sarah comes upon Amanda in the girls’ lavatory one day. Amanda is trying to cut herself, but she doesn’t have anything sharp enough. Sarah offers a pin that she is wearing. the pin was a gift from her step-father, whom she dislikes, but without real conviction, “as if my not like him had been decided beforehand by somebody else, and I were following orders.” 

The offer of the pin is not enough; Amanda asks Sarah to do the cutting.  Convinced that Amanda will never be her friend otherwise, Sarah overcomes her revulsion and complies. But Amanda does not quite become her friend. If she and Sarah are “the same,” then Amanda still doesn’t know it. When Sarah confesses that, if she had only one wish in the world, it would be to be Amanda, Amanda pulls away with incredulous laughter: she’s not even going to try to understand Sarah. 

Later, Amanda runs off with her brother (to Hawaii, it turns out), leaving Sarah in despair at having been left behind: her school now becomes the place that Amanda has rejected. This is a theme that runs through Egan’s fiction: home is the place that you leave because you have so literally outgrown it, like a shell that must be sloughed off, that it simply ceases to exist. What’s left is a dull but irritating simulacrum that must be escaped. 

One night, Sarah cuts her arm deeply with a razor blade. It is something between an accident and a suicide; it’s as though she’s offering herself as a sacrifice to Jesus (whom she imagines Amanda’s brother to resemble). The ecstasy is too fast and frightening. She summons her stepfather, who rushes her to the hospital. They make peace. Later, she encounters Amanda, who is now selling shoes in a department store. After a brief, almost desultory conversation, Amanda walks Sarah to the door of the store and gives her a kiss. Sarah treasures the scent of Amanda, only gradually realizing that what she smells is herself. 

You feel that Sarah has negotiated a tricky passage in her life, but you can’t be sure.

In Look at Me, the escapes are recursive. The principal character, Charlotte Swenson, leads a life of escapes that, finally, she escapes once and for all. A rough schematic of her career would have her escaping her childhood home, Rockford, Illinois, at the earliest possible moment, for a life of modelling in New York, where she is happily married for a few years only to find, on assignment in Paris, that she must escape that life. She continues to be a successful model, but she escapes New York at last, on an impromptu road trip with a mysterious foreigner whom she hardly knows. Their destination? Rockport! The foreigner wants to see the heartland. But the road trip turns into something that Charlotte has to escape — which she very nearly kills herself doing. After a long  recuperation (and this is where the novel begins), Charlotte returns to New York to try to resurrect her career, but her reconstructed face is not what it was, and she winds up participating in a bizarre docu-drama about her own (failed) life. In the act of playing herself, Charlotte finally finds resolution — by selling her identity to an Internet outfit that has weirdly prefigures the social network. 

The three other important characters, Charlotte Hauser, her uncle, “Moose” Metcalf,  and the mysterious foreigner, are also engaged in escapes. What is omitted is the reason, the cause, the emergency, the whatever-it-is that makes Egan’s characters believe that they must escape. But it would not be wrong to say that their maneuvers often begin with something that feels wrong and bad and exactly right.

Reading A Visit From the Goon Squad last year was a revelation, but it remains one that I don’t quite understand, and in a series of entries here I want to come to terms with that. I have read Look at Me and The Keep twice; I shall re-read Visit as I work on this project. I don’t mean to slight The Invisible Circus, Egan’s first novel; it’s a great read, not least because it contains the most sustained (but not prolonged) incidents of sexual surrender that I’ve encountered between the covers of a novel. But it did not leave me with the unsettling uncertainty with which I came to the end of the two middle novels, both of which are virtuoso performances as well as ripping yarns. 

We’re glad that we don’t belong to the Century Association, because we should have had a very hard time deciding how to vote on reciprocity with London’s Garrick Club. The Garrick does not admit women — neither did the Century, until state law obliged it to do so in 1988 — and female members of the New York Club cannot enter its premises unattended by a male member. After a great deal of hooing and hahing, a majority of Centurions voted to terminate reciprocity — clearly the correct decision in the long term. But where we actually live and work is in the short term, and we can well understand why Marion Seldes, a Centurion who wouldn’t have any trouble finding escorts, will miss the chance to haunt the Garrick’s “romantic” precincts. However! Our mind might have been made up for us if we had overheard the following intemperate outburst:

Inside the club, tensions grew. Several female members described fraught exchanges with male counterparts. “Who do you think you are,” a male member asked one of them, “telling me what I can do?” It felt, one member said, as if some in the club were relitigating the original decision to admit women, who now constitute a quarter of its ranks.

Further evidence, if it is wanted, that clueless boors continue to walk the corridors of power will be found in Raymond Hernandez’s dismally delicious story about resigning Congressman Christopher Lee — to whom it apparently never occurred that a prospective inamorata might employ Google to spare herself some heartache. Serves him right: the lady asked, and told.

Today’s prize for Rank Disingenuousness goes to Steven Behar, who is in litigation with Silvercup Studios about his appropriation of the name for a nearby hotel and his registration of a domain name.

Mr. Bahar, who is also known as Steven Baharestani, maintained in a telephone interview that he was not thinking of the bakery or the studio when he chose the name for his hotel.

“Somebody had suggested that name,” he said. “I’m a tennis player. I immediately thought of tennis, golf, hockey. When you win, you get a silver cup. That’s what I thought of.”

[snip]

As for why he had sought to register the Web address silvercupstudio.com — which does not lead to a live site — Mr. Bahar said his lawyer had told him not to answer questions about that.

James Barron has another Queens-side story, about an Italianate villa surrounded by hulking body shops in Steinway. (It was, in fact, built by George Steinway.) You can see it for yourself on Google Maps; it’s on 41st Street between 19th Avenue and Berrian Boulevard.

David Mendelsohn launches his fond disparagement of Mad Men as an odious comparison to such shows as The Wire, The Sopranos, and Friday Night Lights. 

With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.

Once you’ve read this, you know that Jon Hamm is going to get hammered; the only question is, how soon. Mendelsohn takes his time: the bomb drops toward the end of his essay’s second section. 

The acting itself is remarkably vacant, for the most part—none more so than the performance of Jon Hamm as Don. There is a long tradition of American actors who excel at suggesting the  unconventional and sometimes unpleasant currents coursing beneath their appealing all-American looks: James Stewart was one, Matt Damon is another now. By contrast, you sometimes have the impression that Hamm was hired because he looks like the guy in the old Arrow Shirt ads: a foursquare, square-jawed fellow whose tormented interior we are constantly told about but never really feel. With rare exceptions (notably Robert Morse in an amusing cameo as the eccentric Japanophile partner Bert Cooper), the actors in this show are “acting the atmosphere,” as directors like to say: they’re playing “Sixties people,” rather than inhabiting this or that character, making him or her specific. A lot of Mad Men is like that.

I haven’t seen either The Wire or Friday Night Lights, and, on the basis of the few episodes that I watched, I found the world of The Sopranos to be distasteful — distasteful for the very reason why I’ve enjoyed Mad Men. Mad Men comes closer than any show that I’ve seen to portraying the world that I grew up in. I like to think that I’ve outgrown that world, but there are things about it that I haven’t put behind me, and one of them is a sniffy disdain for Italian-Americans with dodgy connections who live in New Jersey or on Long Island. I’ll watch a good movie about mobsters — Goodfellas has been a fave since the first time I saw it — but two hours is enough; I can’t take an interest in those people that brings me to the television set week after week. In short, I’m in no position to argue with Mendelsohn about the comparative merits of other TV shows. I have a hard enough time watching Mad Men, because it really is the only television that I watch (aside from not-enough TV5, the French-language channel), and I’m not in the habit of showing up for something on time in my own home. 

I do watch Mad Men, though, but not for the interesting reasons that Mendelsohn proposes. In his view, the popularity of Mad Men reflects the grave curiosity of the children in the show, whose real-world counterparts have grown up to form the bulk of its audience. As one of the oldest baby boomers, I’m a bit older than that; I started working at a summer job on Wall Street in 1964, a period that lay in the future when Mad Men began but that has since been left behind. And I’m here to tell you that Mad Men captures not only what that world looked like, but what it felt like as well. And what it felt like was a zizzing nothing, an anxious emptiness.

I watch Mad Men because it makes me feel lucky: I outlived that barren time! Although I disagree with Daniel Mendelsohn’s conclusions about the quality of Mad Men, I agree with many of his observations, only I apply them the United States of 1960, not to Matthew Weiner’s “soap opera.” “Remarkably vacant” is how I would describe the lives of the adults I saw in our prosperous Westchester suburb. We inhabited an atmosphere of phoney optimism that was sustained by overlooking and forgetting the facts of life. It was a time of deliberate inattentiveness to anything beyond the fetishistic palette of appearances, and oblivion about the past. People make silly exaggerated claims about the impact of the Internet on daily life now, but the late Fifties and early Sixties were ensorcelled by a pious devotion to the idea that baroque automobiles and domestic appliances would regenerate human nature. 

Mendelsohn speaks admiringly of the “darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures” of The Wire and The Sopranos. I can’t imagine anything that would be more out of place in a show about the advertising executives of fifty years ago than tragic necessity. He complains about the inconsequence of many of the narrative threads. I recall a period when just about the only dependable causal relationship was the one between showing up at work and getting paid. Everything else was variable: sometimes interesting but mostly boring — boring and small. You can recreate this world by following a jiffy recipe from one of the period’s many breezy cookbooks: you will wonder why you took the trouble to produce a dish with so little flavor. Insipid edibles were made appealing by exotic serving vessels — fondue pots, clever platters and bowls for dips for Jell-O salads, and outdoor grills. (That these are all still with us doesn’t mean that we need them as we used to do.) The world was painted in saturated pastels that spoke of summer on Mars. Grown men and women talked about nothing: golf and bridge and vacation and novelty. Earnestness of any kind was shunned: the ideal was a “fun” person, someone with a macaroni backbone. The adults of the Western World had annihilated themselves in the final paroxysm of the French Revolution, and seniority devolved upon adolescent postwar Americans who mistook their zealous careerism for maturity. (Even motherhood was a career.) 

I watch Mad Men with the satisfaction that you might feel passing by the marked grave of serial murderer who claimed a victim from your family: I like being sure that it’s really dead. And I mean it literally when I say that Jon Hamm’s impersonation of Don Draper is divine: he not only looks like a god but his eyes crinkle with the pained wisdom of Wotan: alone of his tribe, he knows that not even gods are immortal. He has the grace to avoid the tragic implications of his role; fretting would be bad style. He is a resistance fighter without a cause, a man doing his best to find interest in a wilfully uninteresting world. Jon Hamm is just about perfect as the existentialist hero of an alienated time. I like to think, for his sake, that he’s acting.

We’re pleased, this morning, to learn about social impact bonds, which inject “market discipline” into public welfare, by rewarding investors in measurably successful programs. We like the structural indirection, which de-politicizes the business end of making society better, and the idea of harnessing private investment to a limited time-span (the life of the bonds), after which programs that work can be taken over by the government or, even better, spun off as not-for-profit enterprises suits our vision of post-capitalist commerce.

Antony Bugg-Levine of the Rockefeller Foundation told me it had invested in the project for two main reasons. One, it expected to get its money back and then be able to reuse it. Two, if social impact bonds work, they have the potential to attract for-profit investors — and vastly expand the pool of capital that’s available for social programs.

Clearly, social impact bonds have limitations. For starters, it’s hard to see how private money could ever pay for multibillion-dollar programs like Medicaid or education.

Just as important, the execution of any bond program will be complicated. It will depend on coming up with the right performance measures, which is no small matter. Done wrong, the measures will end up rewarding programs lucky (or clever) enough to enroll participants who are more likely to succeed no matter what.

But whatever the caveats about the bonds, the potential for improving the government’s performance is obviously huge. That’s true in education, health care, criminal justice and many other areas.

The death of Digital Equipment founder Ken Olson has prompted a bit of sniggering; the late entrepreneur dismissed the personal computer as a toy for playing video games that would never find a place in the business world. But as Bill Gates is the first to point out, there would have been no personal computer without DEC’s generation of minicomputers.

Mr. Olsen and his younger brother Stan lived their passion for electronics in the basement of their Stratford home, inventing gadgets and repairing broken radios. After a stint in the Navy at the end of World War II, Mr. Olsen headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. He took a job at M.I.T.’s new Lincoln Laboratory in 1950 and worked under Jay Forrester, who was doing pioneering work in the nascent days of interactive computing.

In 1957, itching to leave academia, Mr. Olsen, then 31, recruited a Lincoln Lab colleague, Harlan Anderson, to help him start a company. For financing they turned to Georges F. Doriot, a renowned Harvard Business School professor and venture capitalist. According to Mr. Colony, Digital became the first successful venture-backed company in the computer industry. Mr. Anderson left the company shortly afterward, leaving Mr. Olsen to put his stamp on it for more than three decades.

In Digital’s often confusing management structure, Mr. Olsen was the dominant figure who hired smart people, gave them responsibility and expected them “to perform as adults,” said Edgar Schein, who taught organizational behavior at M.I.T. and consulted with Mr. Olsen for 25 years. “Lo and behold,” he said, “they performed magnificently.”

Yesterday at Crawford Doyle, I was moved by an unforeseen whim to pick up Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, one of the many Man Booker 2010 finalists that I did not read last year. From Maria Russo’s review in the Times I got the impression — read in by me, I’m afraid — that the narrator of the book’s three linked novella was a bit of a masochist who couldn’t be comfortable with comfort. Now I can’t remember what made me change my mind. Nor can I remember what made me pick the book up last night, instead of the dozens of others that I’m in the middle of. It seems that the experience of reading In a Strange Room has blotted out the traces that led me to it. Reading the first story, “The Follower,” was certainly a surprising experience, for the last thing I expected was that I’d be laughing out loud, wishing that I could read out some of the more pungent bits to friends.

Two men, a German and a South African, meet on a road in Greece, heading in opposite directions. The next thing you know, the German has changed course, and the two men are visiting a ruin together. Reiner, the German, retails the story of Agamemnon’s bloody welcome-home after the Trojan War. Then, like a boy who has tired of a plaything, he claims not to take much interest in myths, and proposes a climb up the neighboring mountain. Why, asks Damon, the South African.

Because, he says. He is smiling again, there is a peculiar glint in his eye, some kind of challenge has been issued that it would be failure to refuse.

They start to climb. On the lower slope there is a ploughed field they walk carefully around, then the mountain goes up steeply, they pick their way through undergrowth and pull themselves through branches. The higher they go the more jumbled and dangerous the rocks become. After an hour or so they have come out on a lower shoulder of the mountain with its tall peak looming overhead, but he [Damon] doesn’t want to go further than this. Here, he says. Here, Reiner says, looking up, have you had enough. Yes. There is a moment before the answer comes, okay, and when they settle themselves on a rock the German has a strange sardonic look on his face.

Reiner explains to his new friend that he’s taking a trip in order to think through whether he ought to get married. Damon replies that he is simply trying to forget someone, and that this someone is not a woman.

Reiner makes a gesture on the air, as if he is throwing something away. A man or a woman, he says, it makes no difference to me.

And it doesn’t, because it isn’t sex that draws Reiner to Damon. And let it be noted that the follower here is Reiner. It is Reiner who changes his plans at the beginning, and Reiner who flies to South Africa so that he and Damon can go hiking there. Damon’s desire for Reiner does not really seem to be any clearer. In comparison to Damon’s “thin and pale and edible” body, Reiner’s is “brown and hard, perfectly proportioned.

He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly.

Of course it does, because in fact you cannot know that you are beautiful; you can know only that your appearance gives you power over other people. To add the consciousness of this power to your beauty is to turn it into a weapon.

Galgut’s understatement about a man’s desire for another man would be irritating if he did not exploit it to demonstrate how, when two men decide to engage with one another beyond the conventions of friendly mutual cooperation, their relationship, whether eroticized or not, will be clouded by claims of power and priority, both real and imagined. As Reiner and Damon push themselves rather pointlessly through the unwelcoming landscape of Lesotho, the childishness of their power struggle manages, in Galgut’s laconic prose, to seem more inadvertently funny than exasperating.

Over the top of the ridge on the right there is a steep drop, halfway down is a cave larger than the one they slept in last night. Reiner wants to climb to it. But it’s a long way down. So what. So we have to climb back up again. So what. There is another moment of unspoken conflict, the sardonic mockery in the dark eyes of the one man wins over the reluctance of the weaker man, they pick their way down between boulders and aloes, loose pebbles scattering under their feet.

But is Damon the weaker man? It suits him to say so — just as it suits him to strike the note of “sardonic mockery.” In fact, Damon’s one moment of weakness comes when he loses it after a storm, and pours forth a denunciation of his companion, whereupon he abandons their trek. Not following Reiner — that is the weakness. Later, when both men are in Pretoria, still interested in one another but too vain to meet, Damon realizes that Reiner is telling people a version of the story in which he, Damon, is the bad friend. “The two stories push against each other, they will never be reconciled, he wants to argue and explain till the other story disappears.” That’s what I mean by “both real and imagined.” Reiner really indulges in power plays, but that’s not to say that Damon’s understanding of them is not somewhat  imaginary. There is no objective reality here, only a bristling competition of motives, both between the men and within each of them. 

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the hopeless combination of manly moodiness, caprice, and mortal one-upsmanship presented so starkly and unsentimentally, not even in film. Galgut doesn’t give his characters the chance to kid us with the pretense of grown-up feelings. We’re taught that maturity follows puberty because puberty teaches us that other people feel things as deeply as we do. And maybe it does. But Galgut’s two followers are proof that puberty doesn’t necessarily make us care.

In a Strange Room is not billed as a novel, and that’s just as well, because the “three journeys” of its subtitle are very different trips, and the third story, while highly dramatic in itself, does not serve as any kind of climax to the foregoing two. If anything, it stands for the proposition that climaxes occurring in later life, while more harrowing, carry less significance. What’s very interesting and character-forming for a twentysomething is likely to be blankly catastrophic for someone over fifty, while, from the observer’s standpoint, the amusingly quirky behavior of callow youth is likely or ought to be smoothed out almost to blandness by middle age.  

Nothing betrays the adolescent nature of American society — its heedless emphasis on the present moment; its revulsion at the very idea of long-term thinking — than our decaying infrastructure. Not surprisingly, things decay faster in New Jersey, where Hudson waterfront piers and other structures less than twenty years old are crumbling into the river.

Hoboken’s tale is a variation on themes heard around the country — politicians who preferred cutting ribbons on new projects to taking care of old ones, governments that spent their way into debt even when times were relatively good, and new executives taking office and finding that things were much worse than they realized.

There have been similar problems in other towns along the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway, conceived as an unbroken strip from the Bayonne Bridge to the George Washington Bridge, but they have been most pronounced in Hoboken.

“It seems almost criminal that it’s come to this,” said Helen S. Manogue, president of the Hudson River Waterfront Conservancy, which promotes the walkway project. “It seems like nobody allowed for what a brutal environment the river is to build in — not the towns, not the developers, not the engineers.”

If you want to know where all this will be taking us, if we don’t decide to grow up and take responsibility for the future, you can always watch Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.

David Carr laughs out loud at the libel suit brought by Redskins owner Daniel Snyder against the Washington City Paper; he calls the complaint “a kitchen sink of splendors,” which we believe is meant to be taken sarcastically.

Sports team owners, a historically entitled bunch — you don’t buy the biggest toys in town unless you feel you deserve them — are particularly sensitive to the tough coverage that goes with owning a sports franchise. And if Mr. Snyder really wanted to quash the City Paper article, the lawsuit didn’t help.
[snip]
The complaint manages to sound both haughty and wounded, suggesting City Paper “crossed every line of ethics and decency.” What the newspaper seems really guilty of is picking a target with a lot of time and money on his hands. It is the off-season, after all.

Let’s just hope that Mr Carr’s laughter dosn’t turn out to look premature.

For some reason, I’ve been listening to the Ring cycle. Last week, I was about to embark on a tedious household project when it occurred to me that I’d really like to hear Das Rheingold. I’m sure that I’m not the only Wagner fan who nurses a secret preference for the first opera in the tetralogy; and I’m just as sure that I wouldn’t like it nearly so much if it weren’t so pregnant with everything that follows. Rheingold is more pageant than opera — there are no mortal characters — and its four scenes have a ceremonial sequence. (The only other part of the Ring that’s ceremonial in the same mythic way is the Q&A between Mime and the Wanderer in the first act of Siegfried. There’s lots of ceremony in the Ring, but it is subsumed within the operatic drama.) Rheingold‘s ending is stupendously pretty — “Heda! Hedo!,” followed by the shimmering Rainbow Bridge — and it always makes me think of a deeply-upholstered country-house weekend.

What the Ring has never made me think of is the critique of capitalism that it’s often said to be, and that it was made to look like in the great 1976 “Chéreau” Ring from Bayreuth, which spruced up the décor with references to Victorian clothing and Beaux-Arts design. Even after that, I was unpersuaded. The Ring has always struck me as being a lot bigger than “capitalism” — a term that is usually misunderstood by the people who throw it around. The Ring, it has always seemed to me, is about power, and that’s what makes it different from other operas, which are all about love and family. Power as an overarching, timelessly human problem. Not as an allegory of the Nineteenth Century’s bourgeoisie.

But this time, it’s different. I’m thinking a lot about contract. The problem that engenders the entire plot of the Ring cycle can be described in a short phrase: an unavoidable contract turns out to have unfortunate consequences. In sixteen hours of drama, we watch gods and heroes squirm within the constraints of the deals that they’ve made. Wagner is so good at coaxing tragedy from the Ring‘s contracts that we’re put in mind of the relentlessness of Greek drama. But Greek drama is overshadowed by divine caprice, and the Greek gods are spectacularly unfettered by the promises that they make. Wagner’s Wotan & Co is very much at home in the Industrial Revolution, which took place, after all, because the governments of Western Europe and North America invested business contracts with the same sacred insuperability that renders Wagner’s Valhalla defenseless against the flames of the pyre that Brünnhilde mounts at the end of Götterdämmerung.

The sacredness of contract has become a bit of a headache lately. At one end of the spectrum, we have bondholders, the vast majority of whom have lent their money to borrowers on the understanding that there won’t be any problems about repayment with interest. At the other end, we have the public-sector workers who were promised retirement benefits that states and municipalities can’t afford to pay. It’s important to note that neither bondholders nor pensioners are productive; they don’t do anything but collect payments. Does this make them parasites? To the worldview that Wagner’s Ring portrays, certainly not: nothing is more important than honoring the bond — the oath, the promise; call it what you like — that arises from a legitimate contract. To permit dishonor is to undo the basis of social obligation. But you know me and “honor” — I think it’s unhealthy.

I remember my father’s distress when, in the early Eighties, his 16% bonds were about to mature. Imagine paying sixteen percent in interest! But that’s what a lot of municipalities were reduced to in the late Seventies. It oughtn’t to have been necessary, but the country’s finances were already so shakily run that such inequities erupted like pimples on a teenager’ face, as they’ve been doing ever since. Dad actually expected me to commiserate: no more sixteen percent! The poor guy! Nor, by the same token, have I been able to enter into the glee expressed by government workers whom I’ve known as they’ve retailed their generous retirement benefits — benefits enacted by reckless, I’ll-be-dead-by-then politicians.

The Immolation Scene that concludes the Ring is grand opera at its grandest, and the inexorability of Wotan’s promises has a great deal to do with its power. But I’m not willing to see the world around me go the way of Walhall for that kind of reason.

The United States is much bigger than Europe, with far more moving parts. But that shouldn’t mask the awful resemblances. There are plenty of Ahmed Ezzes in this country; let’s hope that a few of them figure out how not to be scapegoated.

Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt has long functioned as a state where wealth bought political power and political power bought great wealth. While hard facts are difficult to come by, Egyptians watching the rise of a moneyed class widely believe that self-dealing, crony capitalism and corruption are endemic, represented in the public eye by a group of rich businessmen aligned with Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son, as well as key government ministers and governing party members.

We’ve already had our Gamal.

This afternoon, Will and I paid our first social call. Until now, our Sunday walks across the East Village have always had the same destination, St Mark’s Bookshop, on Third Avenue at Stuyvesant Street. I’ve longed to go someplace where we might take off our coats, sit down for a minute, and visit. The “visit” part, of course, would consist of my showing off my grandson to admiring friends. But that’s putting it crudely. Will would show himself off, without any plugging from me. And that’s exactly what happened today.

From the moment that I unzipped his snowsuit and sat him on my knee, he behaved like an angel — and angel who dropped a lot of crumbs on the floor, but an angel all the same. He munched on bits of mini-cupcakes from Le pain quotidian — our hostess bought them specially for our visit — and took a few sips of water. But it was obvious that his attention was held by new people and new surroundings, and not once did he attempt to place himself at the center of ours. After half an hour or so, I felt that we had visited for long enough, and I zipped Will up without any making any announcements. I had to be helped a bit with his arms and legs; this was the first time that I had taken him out of the Becco carrier, much less unzipped his coat, without one of his parents’ being in the vicinity. Getting him back into the carrier was awkward, too, but Will didn’t complain.

When we got back to Will’s house, his mother was a little bit anxious; we’d been gone for almost two times longer than ever before. And Will had fallen asleep as we walked thorugh Tomkins Square Park. Was he okay? Watching Megan peer at him with concern just about sank me, but as I lifted him out of the carrier he showed all the desired signs of life. Waking up, he looked just like hisGreat Grand Uncle Fossil after a nap — faintly surprised to find himself on Planet Earth, still, but deeply pleased to have stolen a few Zs.

But I’d forgotten that I’m an old man. Buoyed up by the mildness in the air — it wasn’t warm by any means, but there was no bite to the temperature — I’d walked across the East Village as if I were worried about being late, which is standard whenever I’m doing something for the first time. When we got to the house of our friend (whose delightful contribution to our Valentine’s Tea next weekend gave me the delightful idea of picking it up at her house today) I was a Niagara of perspiration. I was even damper when we got back to Loisaida Avenue (via St Mark’s Bookshop, natch). I didn’t stay long at the O’Neills’; I wanted to be sure of catching a cab before the witching hour of 4 PM. I asked to be dropped off at Agata & Valentina, where I picked up a few supplies (but not the pancetta that was on the list that I’d — left at home; just as well; the charcuterie counter was mobbed). When I walked back outside, my undershirt went chilly, and I knew that I’d better get home and into dry clothes as quickly as possible. What I didn’t expect was that the moment I sat down, showered and dressed, I’d feel totally bushed. Well, duh. (But that’s why Advil was invented.)

When we crossed Second Avenue the first time, I pointed uptown and told Will that Doodad’s place was eighty-two blocks thataway. “That’d be a long walk! But we’ll do it someday.” After today, the sky’s the limit.  

 

Matins

¶ Whenever we think of consciousness, and what it might be (if it means anything at all, which it probably doesn’t, by virtue of meaning too much for one word), we put ourselves in the place of Ramses II, who clearly thought that he was doing well. Knowledge has a history, people — which means that it has a future. Trust in us to get there without wasting time anticipating what will be found. Soul dust, indeed! (BBC Today; via MetaFilter) ¶ All things considered, we’re not terribly worked up about the recent decision in the Bombay High Court that upheld astrology as a science. The law itself is no more scientific than astrology. (Short Sharp Science) Leave astrology to Carl Sagan. (Bad Astronomy)

Lauds

¶ We’re inclined to agree with Wayne Anderson, that “what Marcel Duchamp did to the history of art is comparable to the impact of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.” That doesn’t mean that we want to read Anderson’s book, which, in Francis Naumann’s utterly and completely unfavorable review, sounds crochety and undigested. We’re grateful to Christopher Higgs for raising the subject, and we agree with him, that any book that makes you fighting made is some kind of success. (Toutfait; HTMLGiant) ¶ Anne Yoder explores the “alignment” of Arthur Rimbaud and David Wojnarowicz, as “miscreants, meddlers, thieves, deranged to the point of seeing, i.e., visionary.” We’re glad that they weren’t too deranged to get their work done, even though we wouldn’t have wanted to have them to dinner. ¶ But who cares about art anymore? It’s the artist that’s the thing. Felix Salmon writes about oligarch Victor Pinchuk flew Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons into Davos just to have them show up at a big non-WEF lunch. The meteor has definitely killed the dinosaurs.

Prime

¶ The incomparable Michael Lewis travels from Greece to Ireland — one begins to worry that airport officials will brand him as a terrorist before he can enter Spain or Portugal — and delivers a Vanity Fair piece, “When Irish Eyes Are Crying,” that makes a conclusive case that the Irish were as vulnerable to the ravages of optimism as Native Americans were to that old Irish staple, firewater. Most delicious sentence: “The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.” ¶ At Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell surveys Irish politics and recent history. He offers three forecasts for the long-ruling Fianna Fáil, which may have outlived its historic combination of “nationalist ideology and right-of-center populism.”

Tierce

¶ Noting a political likeness between “Metternich and Mubarak,” Bob Cringely reminds us that Europe was swept by revolutions in 1848 without any help from modern communications technologies. When the people are dissatisfied enough to rise up, they do so faster than Facebook can keep up. ¶ Cam Hui, at The Humble Student of the Markets, is also reminded of 1848, noting that discontent in China is becoming more open than ever. Tim Wu argues eloquently for dropping US charges against Julian Assange. (Foreign Policy)

Prosecution of WikiLeaks would hurt, if it not destroy, the credibility of the United States in claiming to be the world’s most vital advocate of an open Internet. It would send the dangerous signal that the United States only claims to uphold the virtues of an open Internet and free speech — until it decides it doesn’t like a particular website. There could hardly be a worse moment to send that message, to be telling the Arab world:  Do as we say, not as we do.

¶ Writing about Montaigne and the very different wars of his time, Saul Frampton ventures a few speculations on mirror neurons that argue for the importance of physical proximity in human affairs, further dampening the effectiveness of remote communication in exciting times. (Guardian; via The Rumpus) ¶ Simon Roberts, we suspect, doesn’t know much about the producers of the little video that he showcases, but, much as we object to AARP as a special-interest group, we’re willing to trust its numbers for the sake of fun. Old people really do need Facebook; they can’t get out anymore. (We should know!) (The Ideas Bazaar)

Sext

¶ We congratulate our friend JRParis upon the award of a medal from his employer, marking 25 years’ service. He’s a good sport about the fact that he ought to have received it in 2007. There is no TGV, apparently, in the administration of SNCF. ¶ According to the British Toilet Association, Britain’s toilets were once “the envy of the world.” James Ward wants to know whose toilets are the envy of the world today. If that’s a bit too gross for your reading pleasure, James has also visited the Web site of the British Plastics Federation, where you’ll find the bastard word, “pultrustion.”

Nones

¶ The editors of The Morning News have the great good sense to refer us to a tour d’horizon of Egyptian politics by Adam Schatz that appeared last May. Despite its titles, “Mubarak’s Last Breath,” it was written at a time when the temperature of Cairene politics was set determinately at “business as usual.” Schatz is particularly good, toward the end, at placing Mohamen El-Baradei. ¶ Justin E H Smith recalls the style dictatoire that he encountered in Egypt, where young men made “menacing attempts at immediate friendship” — an almost comical phrase that, we’re nonetheless certain, ought to be taken at naive face value. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Henriette Lazarides Power writes about Ismail Kadare’s chilling version of a widespread Balkan folk tale, “The Three-Arched Bridge.” Ms Power already knew the story from her family, in Northern Greece. She had even crossed the very bridge itself, said to contain, in its foundations, the body of an immured volunteer. ¶ If Kyle Minor, stuck in Toledo, is going to miss the AWP thing in Washington, you can bet that he’s going to dream up a conference worth missing missing. The things that he’s sorry to have been left out of will be the envy of AWP attendees as well. Sing to us, Svetlana. In a nearby entry, Jimmy Chen soliloquizes for a lost soul who assumed that “Washington, DC” means “Deep Creek, Spokane, Washington,” and who wonders where everybody is. (HTMLGiant)

Compline

¶ The (depressing) state of play in the development of high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor. John Mica, the new chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is chasing the chimera of “private investment,” which is just about exactly 100% wrong-headed. We agree that Amtrak’s record is poor-to-terrible, but we attribute this not to government sponsorship (such as it is) but to the legacy of the old railroad companies that devolved into it. We need to send a troop of smart yong engineers, accountants and administrators to Europe and insure that they replace current managers upon their return. (The Infrastructurist) ¶ Why Republicans hate mass transit — as if you didn’t know. They may say that they’re against subsidizing enterprise, but, as Ben Jervey points out, that doesn’t stop them from providing massive support to automobile-related transport (roads, especially). Republicans like to help people who don’t need help. (GOOD)

Have a Look

¶ Lily Pons, glamour girl with a voice. (Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist)

¶ Galaxy Quest — the 20th Reunion documentary! (via MetaFilter)

¶ Dominique Browning at the Taj Mahal. (Slow Love Life)

Noted

¶ Geoff Dyer loves Friedrich Nietzsche. (Guardian; via Maud Newton)

¶ Twilight on the syllabus at Ohio State. (GOOD)

¶ David Leonhardt talks to Tyler Cowen about necessary cultural changes. (NYT)

¶ Ayn Rand depended on government handouts in her battle, after a lifetime of smoking, against lung cancer. (GOOD)

¶ “Why I Am A Socialist” — In this moving testament, Wallace Shawn never uses the term. (Guernica; via MetaFilter)

It’s almost too perfect: How Ronald Reagan saw himself, notwithstanding the realities of the situation.

The main voice of reason is that of Reagan’s son Ron, who is interviewed by a swimming pool, describing his father with affection, but also critical distance. He traces his father’s worldview to his success as a young lifeguard, despite his terrible eyesight. (Nearsightedness kept Reagan in Hollywood making propaganda and training films during World War II.)

“He grew up seeing himself as somebody who saved people’s lives,” Ron Reagan says. “I think that carried through into his later years as well, the sort of roles he liked to play in movies. He wanted to be the hero.”

And that yearning to be America’s lifeguard helps explain Reagan’s thinking in the Iran-contra affair, which darkened the second term of his presidency. He denied trading arms for hostages in Iran, then later admitted it in a televised address. The film cites the secret diary of the former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who recorded that when warned that the deal was illegal, Reagan said he didn’t care.

The Mechanic is a bouncy film about a hit man. You wouldn’t think to call him a killer, really, because killing implies passion and hit men are, apparently, all business. Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is one of the best: he can make a death seem accidental, or he can “send a message.” He develops his fastidious plans in a modernist aerie lost in the Louisiana bayous, and likes to listen to Schubert on a very high-end LP player. (For fun, he soups up an old Corvette.) Determined to have none but satisfied customers, Bishop is perhaps overly inclined to believe what his paymasters tell him. Even though anyone in the audience over the age of ten can see that Tony Goldwyn is the bad guy, we have to admire Bishop’s ability to put assignment ahead of sentiment.

At the burial of Bishop’s mentor, McKenna (Donald Sutherland), our hero runs into  McKenna’s ne’er-do-well son (Ben Foster), who has so many issues that he can’t hold a job — but he can shoot. Bishop adopts him as a partner while Junior (his actual name is Steve) thinks about how to run down the man who killed his father — who is of course &c. Hair-raising adventures climax in the only possible way, and then go onto climax, once and for all, from there.

The Mechanic is not a mannered movie, but it is all about style — the masculine style of speaking softly while carrying deadly weapons. For that reason, it’s good to get Donald Sutherland out of the way early, just as it was in the remake of The Italian Job; Mr Sutherland has always been a scarily expressive actor and is not about to retire as such. And, again as in that film, he is once again closer to one of his colleagues in crime than he is to his own flesh and blood. Steve McKenna’s sulking is tolerable because it’s laced with astringent and even cocky self-hatred. Also, unlike his father, he is not wheelchair-bound. Mr Statham inhabits a role that was obviously conceived with him in mind — brooding, stoic, afflicted with painfully good mental health, and impressively articulate at those times when he has something to say. If Jason Statham is a favorite actor of mine, it’s precisely because he is able to make this bundle of masculine attributes interesting, and I admire his director, Simon West, for creating a film in which swaggering would be in bad taste. Mr West is also to be applauded for deploying the story’s weaponry and other matériel without showing off.

I had the feeling of watching a James Bond movie in 3-D, for full-dimensional characters. Even Bishop’s targets, odious as they may be, come to us as fully realized human beings. They don’t “deserve to die,” and there is nothing cartoonish about their deaths. (Their bodyguards are of course another matter.) Only an odd person would call The Mechanic a “feel-good” film, but its pieces come together with a very satisfying click — even if it’s a click that goes “boom.”

According to trustee Irving Picard’s newly-unsealed complaint against JPMorgan Chase, Bernard Madoff’s principal bankers had their doubts about his activities over a year before his arrest — yet they did nothing beyond limiting the bank’s exposure. 

What emerges is a sketch of an internal tug of war. One group of senior Chase bankers was pursuing profitable credit and derivatives deals with Mr. Madoff and his big feeder-fund investors, the hedge funds that invested their clients’ money exclusively with him. Another group was arguing against doing any more big-ticket “trust me” deals with a man whose business was too opaque and whose investment returns were too implausible.

For much of 2007, the tide was with the Chase bankers designing and selling complex derivatives linked to various Madoff feeder funds. By June of that year, they already had sold at least $130 million worth of the notes to investors, and they sought approval for deals that would have pushed that total to $1.32 billion, the lawsuit asserted.

The committee agreed to increase the bank’s exposure to Mr. Madoff only to $250 million, but by 2008, the bank’s risk management executives were gaining, backed up by suspicions raised by the “due diligence” teams visiting the large hedge funds that invested with Mr. Madoff.

Also juicy: the string of 318 transfers, all in the round number of $986,301, that ought to have set off the bank’s money-laundering alarms.

Thanks to an overzealous decision by a yahoo judge, masterpieces held by Russian museums won’t be visiting the United States. We hope that the Chabad Lubavitchers are happy about that.

In recent years the organization has taken its case to court in the United States, and on July 30, 2010, Royce C. Lamberth, a federal judge of the United States District Court in Washington, ruled in favor of the Chabad organization, ordering Russia to turn over all Schneerson documents held at the Russian State Library, the Russian State Military Archive and elsewhere.

Russian officials, saying that an American court had no jurisdiction, had refused to participate in the proceedings. And after Judge Lamberth’s decision, the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced it as a violation of international law. The ministry said an American court had no right to get involved in a case concerning Russian assets on Russian soil.

Russian cultural officials reacted more slowly, but by autumn they began warning Russia’s state-controlled museums that any artwork lent to the United States was at risk of being seized by the American authorities to force Russia to abide by the decision.

Before dinner last night, I was sitting here in the living room with my friend Eric. We were talking about a new novel that we had both read, and all of sudden I felt flush, because I’d just heard Eric tell me that he had written a blurb for the book’s dust jacket. How had I missed this? I don’t read blurbs; I may glance at the names of the blurbers — and in this case, I’d  recognized two names but unaccountably missed Eric’s. It was probably just as well; if I’d know about his blurb while I was reading the book and talking about it to friends, I’d undoubtedly have dropped a lot of fatuouscomments about knowing someone who’d written a blurb &c a friend of the author &c. But my reputation as an observer was severely dinged.

Then, this afternoon, I couldn’t find the American Express bill. I hadn’t seen it come in, and my suspicion is that it was misdelivered; there’s been a lot of that going on lately, whenever our regular mail deliverer is off duty. After a lot of dithering — I hate to talk to credit cards company representatives, doubtless the long-term aftereffect of decades-old impecunious traumas — I called American Express and arranged for a replacement to be sent. No problem. Meanwhile, the outstanding balance that was due this month, which I also asked for, seemed very high. Without the bill in hand, I couldn’t analyze the figure, and I experienced a variation of another old waking nightmare, not being able to remember what I did last night. It took a while to calm down enough to remember some hefty up-front expenses at the dermatologist’s. This brought the balance due into line.

I’m not going to bleat about senior moments or incipient dementia. The plain truth is that this sort of thing used to happen all the time, because I paid little or no attention to things that didn’t interest me. Tedious details were a crime against nature. The consequences of this lackadaisical outlook were not pleasant, and I was often put into quite a fugue state by the fruits of my shambolic disregard. I don’t know when I discovered that life was a lot more agreeable if I made an effort to put things where they belonged, and if I made a point of paying the bills once a month. But it doesn’t come naturally, and if I couldn’t rely on slowly but surely developed habits, I’d break down every day.

I expected, back in 1985, that the personal computer would make a good substitute for the personal secretary, and it took about twenty years for me to realize that that was never going to be the case. Ever. I can’t tell you how much time and wretchedness I poured into teaching desktops and laptops how to manage my home. Beyond using Quicken to write checks — but wait, you say; you’re still writing checks? Oh, yes, indeed; without the bits of paper hardcopy, I wouldn’t know from one week to the next where I stood. I have become a heavy user of pads and pencils.

When Kathleen got home last night, we had a very nice dinner — but one that would have been better if I’d remembered to season the sauté de boeuf à la Parisienne with salt and pepper.

It figures. The Securities and Exchange Commission nets the federal government about $300 million in fees and fines, after its own expenses), but it is so poorly organized that, according to GAO audits, “basic accounting continually bedevils the agency responsible for guaranteeing the soundness of American financial markets.” Is this what “starving the beast” comes down to?

“It’s almost as if the commission is being set up to fail,” said Harvey L. Pitt, who was S.E.C. chairman from 2001 to 2003 and who now is chief executive of Kalorama Partners.

Dodd-Frank did authorize a doubling of the commission’s budget, to $2.25 billion, over the next five years — without providing the money for it. It also authorized the commission to spend as much as $100 million beyond its operating budget for new technology systems.

Ms. Schapiro said that buying new technology was crucial because it helped to attract specialists in mathematics and financial systems that the S.E.C. needed to help police the rapidly evolving financial markets.

“It’s very hard to attract great people if they think that there’s not going to be the opportunity to use technology to get the job done, which can make us so much more efficient,” she said.

It’s a pity that Edward Wyatt’s story doesn’t offer an explanation of where the SEC’s budget bloat — its funding doubled during the first GW Bush administration. Money isn’t everything; it can’t solve problems by itself, especially if administrators (such as former Chariman Christopher Cox) are not interested in solving them.

In an important development, pepperoni is showing up on artisanal pizzas. Julia Moskin reports.

“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title: “How Italian Food Conquered the World.” “Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Abruzzo in the south are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mr. Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.
Pepperoni certainly has conquered the United States. Hormel is the biggest-selling brand, and in the run-up to the Super Bowl this Sunday, the company has sold enough pepperoni (40 million feet) to tunnel all the way through the planet Earth, said Holly Drennan, a product manager.
Michael Ruhlman, an expert in meat curing who is writing a book on Italian salumi, doesn’t flinch from calling pepperoni pizza a “bastard” dish, a distorted reflection of wholesome tradition. “Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.” He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.

Our own preference is for prosciutto and no tomatoes. How we miss Loui Loui!