Matins¶ At The Baseline Scenario, guests Mark Paul and Anatasia Wilson wring their hands about the unemployment of college grads and other young people. We agree that there’s a problem, but we don’t believe that current economic structures can be repaired. The sad or lucky truth, depending on how you think about it, is that this country has never had had to re-consider any of its initial arrangements — with the single and rather baleful exception of slavery. What we need to do for young people today is to provide them with whatever they ask for to meet the challenge of developing new ways of doing business. At a minimum, we need to make it very clear that creating an economy that will employ them is entirely up to the youth of America.

Lauds¶ Jim Emerson calls for all serious moviegoers to run out and buy a copy of David Thomson‘s New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Is it encyclopedic? No, but that doesn’t matter, and the review is sprinkled with enough nuggets to show why. On Francis Ford Coppola: “There is a talent in American films that makes for adolescent attitudes, veiled fascism, and a work that leads one to recognize the proximity of talent and meretricious magic.” Bring it on!

Prime¶ In the current New Yorker, John Cassidy asks “What Good Is Wall Street?” Not much, it turns out, in an atmosphere governed by the idea that financial markets, if left to themselves, are efficient. On the contrary, they’re as stuffed with “cotton, hay, and rags,” and impervious to sound advice, as Henry Higgins thinks women to be. Toward the end of the piece, Mr Cassidy visits with The Epicurean Dealmaker, who had the good sense to prepare for a lot of first-time visitors.

Tierce¶ There’s at least one thing to take away from Elizabeth Day’s look at reality television, in The Guardian. And that’s that nobody, except possibly a few clueless wannabees, is being exploited by this kind of entertainment. It may give us hives, but there’s no call for looking down on those who enjoy it; and it seems that nobody is taken in by the pretense of artlessness. We do stick to our belief that people who turn to television for a sense of belonging are fleeing the complications of reality community. (via MetaFilter)

Sext¶ Jean-Louis Gassée’s eloquence on the Third Lie of Computers (“You Can Do It”) brought tears to our eyes — we’d thought that it was just us! Mr Gassée wanted to set up a simple site using a simple app, and, hey, if Google isn’t simple, what is it? Impossible, that’s what. The bingo comes toward the end of the piece, where it is discovered that “the big guys” — the Times, the Journal — have given their glowing new-product reviews ZERO long-term follow-up. Hey, they don’t have to pay for anything, right? Men may come from Venus, but Google’s engineers come from a planet known only to Roz Chast. Payoff joke: “In the meantime, while Google has been preoccupied with “killing” Microsoft, Facebook has grown to become the Internet’s most frequented site.” We couldn’t like it more.

Nones¶ At A Fistful of Euros, P O’Neill pens a piece with a title, “Ireland: The timidity of the lawyers,” that seems quite completely controverted by what follows. For the only reasonable conclusion that one can draw coming away from the essay is that Irish lawyers — the Irish lawyers who serve the governments, whether as ministers or advisers — are a bold lot, happy to let the Irish taxpayer shoulder the bust of Ireland’s property bubble. In Mr O’Neill’s Irish turn of phrase, “Somehow the country never rose in importance as the client compared to the party.”

Vespers ¶ The Millions points us to Seth Colter Walls’s absorbing overview of David Foster Wallace’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center. It seems that Wallace followed in Trollope’s footsteps (see: The Eustace Diamonds ) in at least one way: he obtained detailed information from a tax attorney about “the single most confusing sentence in the tax code.” (There was a contest?) This has entirely reconciled us to the posthumous publication of Pale King. (Newsweek)

Compline

¶ The Nytpicker magnanimously calls on the Pulitzer Prize judges to give Frank Rich a prize. Hear, hear! Of all the major writers who are out there arguing for an America that we can be proud of (as distinct from the America that would like to kick us out), Frank Rich is by far the most scrupulous examiner of his own party’s shortcomings — its snotty condescension in particular. The Nytpicker allows that Mr Rich “preaches to the choir,” but we think that he does something much more important: he scolds it.

Have a Look

¶ Just about the silliest things we’ve ever heard of: Map of the World’s Countries Rearranged by Population. We link to it because — finally! — it proves American exceptionalism. American’s are the only peoples of the world who would not have to move! (Strange Maps)

¶ Coralie Pickford-Brown‘s lovely cloth-bound Penguin Classics covers. We’ve linked to them before, but now we own one. (Guess) (Brain Pickings)

Noted

¶ Dance troupe on the run — in the Lincoln Tunnel. (Mail Online; via ArtsJournal)

Re-reading The Keep this morning, I reached the scene (Chapter 6) in which Danny, the fictitious protagonist — he’s a fiction within Jennifer Egan’s fiction — encounters the baroness in the eponymous tower. The baroness, who appears to be a maiden at a distance, gradually ageing as Danny gets closer, spouts a lot of clever, snobby insults, which Danny, being the good “number two” that he is, takes in stride. “The oldest thing in your family closet is a tennis racket from 1955, whereas I have a thirteenth-century sarcophagus in my basement.” The put-down seems terribly familiar. By now, the stock European conviction that Americans are unsocialized savages seems itself to date from the thirteenth century, as does the Wildean waspishness. It’s no surprise that the baroness turns out to be a fabulous creature. She’s expansively unreal.

So are the underpinnings of her orgulous attitude. In the scheme of things — but I ought to tell you that, for me, the scheme of things is about 170,000 years in length. I read somewhere that human beings have been human beings — vulgo, we’ve been us — for about that long; and I’m sticking with it. Let’s not trouble our little heads with the age of the planet, or the dating of the earliest fossils, or the millions of years — millions — that were spent by dinosaurs romping and pillaging. Let’s leave “Lucy” and her toolkit out of it. It’s enough to ponder the figure, in the lower six digits, within which the number of years of actual history — written records of one kind or another — shrivels almost to invisibility: the low four figures. It’s a stretch to say that there are more than three thousand years of human history. By history, I mean the sense that things change on a linear, irreversible scale.

Bishop Ussher famously dated creation to 4004 BC; he worked it out, one supposes, from the proliferation of genealogies laid down in the Hebrew Bible. I suspect that even the most scientific minds, when they’re out of the laboratory anyway, settle on a six-thousand year time-frame for human affairs: it’s what we know. We infer a good deal about what happened earlier; carbon dating has allowed us to place cave paintings in France and arrowheads in America on a time-line. But we don’t really know anything about the people who made those paintings — I like to think that they were sportive adolescents, without a spiritual thought in their heads — or who crossed the Bering Strait so that those arrowheads could be manufactured in what would much, much later, when the experience had passed completely out of mythology, be called “The New World.” The way in which we know about prehistoric human beings is qualitatively different, and distinctly less vivid, from our imaginative access to the lives of our oldest writers, among them the poet of the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). However archaic its style and patchy its narrative, we know what the Song of Deborah is all about.

We — mankind, human beings; what will be the next term? — face a barrage of challenges in our time, many of them old challenges that we’ve only just awakened to. We’ve imposed huge burdens on our notions of a just society, which, as recently as two hundred years ago, had nothing to say about universal health care. Two hundred years! How does that relate to a hundred and seventy thousand? It doesn’t; we can’t make it. But we’ve got to learn how. We are not going to deal with the problems that face us in an intelligent way until we grasp the scale of our past: how long it has taken us to get here, but how rapidly the pace of change has increased. Again, everyone is aware that things change faster today than they used to do. (There is actually a growing chorus of observers who point out that the pace appears to have slackened, and that this is a sign of decadence or benightedness.) But compared to what? To life forty or fifty years ago, when today’s boomers were children? To fans of popular culture who think back to the early days of the movies? To students of the Industrial Revolution, which begins in earnest at some point in the middle of the Eighteenth Century (not quite three hundred years ago). If you consider the pace of change on my time scale, and we play the game of stretching it onto the scale of a minute, then everything happens — now together with the reference points from which we gauge all change — within a second or two.

We need to change the way things change. That’s what I’ll take up in the second part of this rumination.

Matins¶ Harry Cutting’s “Ode to a Flat Place” is an amazingly well-packed trip to the high plains of Kansas. Lots of information, lots of atmosphere. And then, boom, a picture of two weatherbeaten men (father and son) all but waving good-bye. One farmer worries about the image that the rest of us have of today’s farmers. When we learn that today’s irrigation rig can be controlled by BlackBerry; it also sends all sorts of feedback to the farmer’s computer, we see his point.

Lauds¶ Morgan Meis’s writes drolly about the new must-have, The Classical Tradition, a guide for the perplexed. The comparison to Maimomides is just about the funniest thing in the in classical laughs. Far from being an encyclopedic introduction to Greece and Rome that’s aimed at people who can’t tell their Hera from their Juno, The Classical Tradition is designed to help sophisticates regain “the sense of wonder” that, we too often forget, was at least as salient in the ancient world as the passion for ration.  (The Smart Set; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Prime¶ Repeat after us: “Sunk costs are lost costs. Sunk costs that aren’t lost are called “investments.” We like to keep things serious at our financial hour, but the story of Deutsche Bank’s “investment” in Las Vegas’s Cosmpolitan Hotel is too funny to pass over. If ever a hotel deserved to take its name from the great river of Egypt, this is it. Felix Salmon tells it well, but it wasn’t until we got to Bess Levin’s mention of the matter that we learned just how “cosmopolitan” the hotel was intended to be, with its “entry hall featuring 28-foot robots programmed to box, dance and play 12-foot Stratocaster guitars.”

Tierce¶ First, the good news: we’ve got thirteen million tons of the stuff! Bad news: start digging, yesterday. What are those rare earths, anyways (they’re the “lanthanides“), and who needs ’em (you do). Worse news: China has 97% of the earth’s rare-earth reserves. (New Scientist. )

Sext¶ The saga of Elif Batuman’s (Turkish?) towels, or How to Cut Through Red Tape in Istanbul. (My Life and Thoughts; via The Morning News)

Stepping back a moment from the scene, it occurred to me how remarkable it was that fate had brought me face to face in this way with the author of my bureaucratic troubles. All too often, such struggles just wind to an end without you ever finding out what the deal was, or what human interest was concealed in the heart of the machine.  And the nature of such ordeals is that, by the end, you don’t care anymore, anyway. What a rare treat then for me, as a writer, to actually meet my secret opponent, and to thereby be able to contextualize my own particular situation within the broader field of human activity—within, for example, the life-story of a purple-faced man whose mission was to shut down smugglers, and who believed that I was trying to sell my used towels to the Turkish people without paying import taxes.

Nones¶ Kenyan Mwangi Kimenyi lays out what an independent Southern Sudan is going to need in order to come into existence, with an accent on help from the West — and how important, especially for Kenya, it is that Juba gets what it needs. (LA Times; via Real Clear World)

Vespers¶ At The Millions, Colin Marshall bestows informally magisterial consideration upon the novels of Nicholson Baker, from The Mezzanine to The Anthologist — all of them intimate studies of consciousness, rendered palpable in keenly wrought prose. We’ve read almost anything, and what we hugely admire is Baker’s patient willingness to wait for his material to blossom; nothing is forced.

Compline¶ Our subtitle for a book called Manthropology would be quite different from the one that author Peter McAllister has given us; our view is that, the sooner people shut up about “masculinity” and “manliness,” the happier most men would be. But there’s no gainsaying that Mr McAllister has some sharp insights about a range of topics that stretches from the gene pool to sacrificial sports. (On second thought, that’s not much of a stretch, because almost everything tinctured with “masculinity” connects more or less directly with death.)(Salon; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Have a Look

¶ HTMLGiant’s Index. (After Harper’s)

Noted

¶ via Tyler Cowen: Your (lack of) rights as a cruise ship passenger.

¶ Important advice from Mark Lilla: “To understand someone like Beck, and the people who love him, you need to stay on the surface, not plumb the depths or peek behind the curtain.” (NYRB)

Monday. <sigh> It’s not so much that vacation is just about halfway over; it’s Monday. Kathleen is going to have to work today: read a document and then participate in a conference call. And I’ve got lots of things to do as well. (The difference is that no one will mind very much if I don’t do any of them; but I’ve internalized my self-employment to a grueling pitch.) I’d like to compile a Daily Office for tomorrow, if only because I’ve come across a lot of interesting things. At the same time, I’d rather not work. I’d certainly rather not think about the WiFi connection.

As part of the packing process, I decided not to bring many books. Aside from Jennifer Egan’s oeuvre (I do love it, but — work), I brought along the Ethan Mordden book that I was talking about the other day and that I really ought to write up while it’s fresh in my mind (work), and Alan Riding’s book about the arts under the Occupation, And the Show Went On. Now that’s a fun vacation read, eh? The first chapter gets things off to a depressing start. Riding writes about the failure of France’s political class between the wars in a way that makes it sound frighteningly reminiscent of what’s happening in the United States today; and then there’s his description of Paris as a site for “elite divertimento”:

The majority of Parisians were poor, but they had long been evicted from the elegant heart of Paris by Baron Haussmann’s drastic urban redesign a half century earlier. This “new” Paris was the favored arena of elitist divertimento, drawing minor royalty, aristocrats and millionaires to buy art, to race their horces in the Bois de Boulogne, to hear Richard Strauss conduct Der Rosenkavailier at the Paris Opera, to party in the latest Chanel and Schiaparelli designs.

That sounds awfully familiar, too. For “Haussmann’s redesign,” read “Robert Wagner’s determination to banish industry from New York City.” (That’s why the naked city, when it woke up, clutched at that filmiest of vestments, “the financial industry.”)

Anyway, I figured that I’d just download books to the iPad if I needed more to read, and notwithstanding connectivity issues, that proved to be a good idea. I bought and blazed my way through the new Cynthia Ozick novel, Foreign Bodies. (This made me want to download The Ambassadors, an old favorite, but I haven’t gotten round to that yet.) Then, yesterday at lunch, our favorite waiter  (she knew what I’d be ordering when we walked in on Thursday) mentioned a book that she’s finding very funny, Bitter Is the New Black, by Jen Lancaster, so I downloaded it then and there, as much as a party trick as with any intention of actually reading it. It is funny, and I wonder why I’ve never heard of it before. Lancaster writes of herself in almost grotesquely unflattering terms — but that’s what dealing with a world of incompetent boobies will do to you. The book remained funny even after Kathleen remarked that Lancaster’s diatribes sound just like mine.

During the night, I woke several times to howling winds and rain. The weather this morning is partly sunny but clearly unsettled. I’m going to step outside to the patio and read feeds. (The iPad, by the way, works perfectly well outside, as long as I’m not sitting in the sun, which, believe you me, I never am.)

We had a spot rain yesterday. Actually, it came down in torrents for about ten minutes. Later in the afternoon, gusts of wind would whirl through, making me feel somewhat chilled, even though it is nowhere near cold here.

At lunch, a fortysomething fellow stopped at our table and asked if we were the So-and-so’s. When we told him that we weren’t, and who we were, he explained his asking. No sooner had he arrived with his family the day before, than the front desk called to say that the car was ready to take them all into town. It seems that another party of the same name — So-and-so — was staying at the hotel. This sort of mixup had occurred on earlier visits, which, it just so happened, coincided with ours — Mr So-and-so remembered that I wore a neck brace a few years ago! — so he thought that maybe we were the other So-and-so’s. A recent family trip to the Waldorf-Astoria and all the sights of Gotham was described. I handed over a card and asked to be allowed to take the So-and-so’s on a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art next them they’re in town. “Is that what you do?” he asked.

What was going through both of our minds during this conversation was another amusing coincidence: “So-and-so” happens to be the name of a doubly-fictional creation, a character in a notoriously celebrated espionage thriller who does not, in fact, exist. Having been mistaken for “So-and-So” was the very opposite of rotten luck.

When Kathleen woke up from her afternoon nap, and we decided that neither of us was up for a walk on the beach — gawd, we’re tired — I read three stories from Emerald City aloud. Immersing myself in Jennifer Egan’s writing puts me in a very strange place. Egan reminds me of the whip-smart girls from private Catholic schools who always seemed to know ten times more about how the world works than anyone else, all the while conducting unexceptionably virginal lives. In Egan’s books, people can be very, very bad without ever breaking a law, or even driving over the speed limit — and that’s the point. So many of her characters seem to be looking for a line of sin that won’t get them in trouble with the police. It’s not that they do bad things that happen to be sins, but that they look for sins, sins that won’t too badly inconvenience their living arrangements. In short, Egan makes most students of evil look incredibly naive.

I’ve been reading Foreign Bodies on the iPad. In the Times digest that the hotel distributes every morning, I saw that it’s the subject of today’s book review. I think I’ll wait to finish the book before seeing what Thomas Mallon has to say.

At breakfast, this morning, the Air Force people were holding a meeting in the bar — a space that is nothing like a bar during daylight hours. By day, it’s a covered terrace, open arches giving out onto the Caribbean, with here and there some rattan chairs and tables. It was fairly clear from what could be overheard in passing that the unit’s work is medical in nature; one could also surmise that a recent exercise was being evaluated. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the tone was that of your run-of-the-mill middle-management powwow, but the military character of the gathering seemed to have been left back in the room, on coat-hangers.

I’m going to spare you all the things that we’re learning about WiFi connections and iPads and whatnot, not because I really want to spare you, but because I know all to well what that sort of thing reads like in a week or so, not to mention a year later. It reads like something that a toddler hollers for while holding on to the crib railing. When the child has been gratified, everyone wants to forget the hollering — the little one most of all. That would be me.

Since nothing whatsoever has happened since I struggled to upload the previous entry, late last night (when the learning curve is always steepest), I have nothing to report save that Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies is at least this good: you loathe the narrator’s brother immediately upon reading two or three sentences of a scolding missive that he sends her, not ten pages into the book. Marvin Nachtigall will be instantly recognizable to anyone of a certain age who grew up on the East Coast. He’s exploits the unsocialized manners of his Jewish-immigrant forebears to make his worldly success obnoxiously clear. He knows better; his rudeness is a calculated pretense. That’s what makes it loathsome. Foreign Bodies also has going for it the Ambassadors puzzle: how will this novel turn out to be like/unlike the most accessible of Henry James’s grand finale trio?

As soon as a staff person brings round a patio chair that I can sit on — the stylish new lounge chairs proved to be dreadfully hard on my backside — I shall join Kathleen outside. She is embroidering an alphabet book for Will. I brought some stitching, too, but I haven’t felt moved to pick it up yet. I do hope that we’ll feel up to taking a walk this afternoon. In other prospects, I lined up an interesting clutch of links for Monday’s Daily Office. Step one, so to speak. We’ll see.

Just to have something on hand that I don’t have to read if I don’t want to, I’ve downloaded Emma onto the iPad. Also Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies, a new book that the Times compares to The Ambassadors but that sounds to me, on the basis of three pages, like something that Elaine Dundy’s sterner, better-schooled older sister might have made of The Dud Avocado. As for Emma, I almost packed a slim leatherette Collins edition, printed on onion skin in tiny print; but I forgot. The next time I read Emma, whenever that happens, will be the eighth. Much as I adore it, I notice that I’m fonder and fonder of Persuasion. And I really ought to re-read Northanger Abbey, which I haven’t read since my teens.

Dinner was a bit raucous. There was a contingent of Air Force servicemen — we think that some were officers, and we overheard at least one man remark that he had been a medic in the same unit for seventeen years — and we realized that we don’t know much about the Air Force, except that it turns out airline pilots. We know that the hotel bivouacs the occasional airline crew, but a crowd of men and women in uniform — somewhere between twelve and twenty — was a bit of a surprise. As we worked our way through a bottle of cabernet, the new arrivals filtered back into the bar in shorts and polo shirts that would have made them look like everyone else if they hadn’t — the men, anyway — been tonsured (too much hair to be stylish; too little to be civilian). The youngest person in the party had to be thirty, and a few of the seniors had clearly seen fifty. They were a genial crowd, even if they were much louder than the Buccaneer’s regulars (and I’m referring only to speaking voices here). But it took a moment, as we walked in, to realize that these people in uniform were not armed, and not about to frisk us or take away our water bottles.

We meant to take a walk on the beach this afternoon, but neither of us was up to it: we could do no more than sit outside on our little patio and read. I glanced over about fourteen hundred feeds during the course of the day. After the nth sighting of the same headline, I had to tell Kathleen about Professor Bilal of NYU, the filmmaker (?) who has “implanted” a camera in the back of his head. Aghast, Kathleen simply repeated what I’d said in the interrogative mood. It’s so NYU: the students are worried about their privacy, but nobody questions Dr Bilal’s right to mutilate himself in the name of art.

Kathleen got a call from a partner this afternoon, and it’s now definite that she’ll be working on Monday and Tuesday. She expected as much, but still. Assuming that the connection problems really do straighten themselves out, Kathleen’s working may shame me into producing a Daily Office or two. Meanwhile, I am reading Jennifer Egan’s stories, and taking lots of notes. But, d’you know what? I’m on vacation, it seems, and not at all in the mood to work. (In the alternative, I’m so old that two days of travel rubbled my ways and means.) Ethan Mordden’s Guest List was almost demoralizingly agreeable — why can’t every book be like that? My guess is that Foreign Bodies won’t be. But I’m looking forward to it just the same, and, come to think of it, now I know why God invented bed time.

My promise not to discuss connection problems notwithstanding, I want to note that Brady, the Buccaneer’s IT director, has assured me that he wants to do everything necessary to make my stay “perfect.”

In a related development, Kathleen is unpacking, having been assured by me that we are staying in this room no matter what. I will work around whatever problems there are. “I can’t wear these clothes any longer,” Kathleen sighed happily, when we got back from breakfast.

So I’m settling down to a regime of reading feeds and reading Jennifer Egan’s short story collection, The Emerald City. It’s the only bit of her book-form work that I haven’t read, and it is stimulating reminders of the four novels that followed, some if not all of which I’ll be re-reading. I hope to come home with a sheaf of notes, if not a finished essay.

Absolutely nothing has happened.

If you ask me, this is the cliché to beat all clichés.

I have made a pact with the gods of connectivity: I am not going to discuss my issues with them until I return to New York. If you check out the site and don’t see anything new, you’ll know why. There: done.

Nor, I think, am I going to share the secret of my equanimity on this junket. I have been calm and collected most of the time, even when I was certain that the plane was about to blow up for who knows what reason (the flight was one of the most turbulence-free that I have ever enjoyed). The only loss so far has been my water-bottle, which I neglected to empty before security at San Juan this morning. I forgot to remember to do something about it. They wouldn’t let me drink what was in the bottle, by the way, so as to save it. I had a choice: either I lost it or I returned to the back of the line and went through all the screening lines again. Hey, I’ll live without my Rubbermaid quart. The agent was kind enough to strip off the ragg wool sock that serves as insulation. I still have that.

I’ve done little with my time but read The Guest List, a new book by Ethan Mordden that I didn’t know anything about until the other day when I saw it in the window at Madison Avenue Books. It has filled me with the desire to know more about Dorothy Thompson, Sinclair Lewis’s sometime wife but more importantly the model for Katharine Hepburn’s Woman of the Year. There are some wonderfully dishy lines — extraordinary, really; Brendan Gill is dismissed as a “lavish nonentity,” a phrase I’m furious with myself for never having thought of, à propos of anybody. I’ll have more to say about the book later, but for the moment I’ll report with relief that it is a book, as monumental as any. While it would be deeply wrong (and stupid) to say that the book is about Ethan Mordden himself, it does remain a magnificent vehicle for his sensibility, which happens to be one of the very important ones.

 

Well, connectivity anyway. The management is talking about moving us to another room, because all of a sudden none of the three machines that we’ve got with us can hold a connection — to the MiFi cards, either. (Which are blue — does that mean I’m roaming? Such an ignorant, I am.) With luck, we’ll find that it’s an atmospheric glitch. Ora pro nobis.

It’s still heavenly to be here. The air is soft and pleasant, slightly cool but very balmy. Everything is familiar, me especially: two waitresses and a sales clerk welcomed me back, very clearly remembering me, even though I haven’t been here in two years. I have never enjoyed unpacking quite so much!

Cristina García’s novel, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, is pretty plainly not my sort of book, but there was a line in John Vernon’s fairly nice review the Book Review that I took to be a bit more declarative than it was. “García … attempts to deepen her characters with each successive pass of their stories.” Attempts! I’ve just re-read the review, and I might as well just refer you to it again. The writing is very good, but the characters and situations have a stock feel to them — and I really haven’t read very much Latin American fiction! Set in a hotel in what feels like Guatemala or El Salvador, the chapters follow a band of initially unrelated characters through a tumultuous week. It is difficult not to think of Grand Hotel, not only because of the slice-of-life feel to the glimpses into the characters’ lives, but also because those lives are lacking a certain inner substantiality. I can’t say that I cared for any of them. A hotel waitress referred to as “the ex-guerilla” is perhaps the most sympathetic, but she’s troubled by the bitterness of her activist history (and the ghost of her brother). A lady lawyer of German extraction who arranges for the sale of infants to prosperous Americans is agreeably hate-able. The story of the sad-sack Korean factory owner comes to a surprisingly happy ending. There — I oughtn’t to have said that. I’m glad that I read the book, mostly because I can say that I did, and didn’t mind doing so. But I’m constitutionally unable to relish the highly-colored narrative arabesques that threaten to send Ms García’s stories over the top.

Much more sympathetic were two novels that I read over the weekend. Yes, two. One was Jane Gardam’s God on the Rocks, and the other was Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado. Both books are astringently funny, but the one is as English as the other is American. The spirit of Ivy Compton-Burnett hovers over God on the Rocks, which came out in 1978 and has only now made its appearance in the United States. There’s a hyper-real feeling to the dialogue, as if every remark not only carries several levels of meaning but is also directed at interlocutors unseen as well as seen. This is another way of saying that the dialogue does not feel straightforward — which is precisely what Sally Jay Gorce’s tumble of talk feels like. Sally Jay is Ms Dundy’s ingénue, in her third month in Paris just out of college. It’s difficult to believe that Jean-Luc Godard did not pattern Patricia Franchini, the Jean Seberg role in A Bout de Souffle, after Sally Jay; but then Sally Jay is an avatar of sorts, an embodiment of postwar American larkiness. Her picaresque adventures have the rough cut of memoir that has been only slightly touched-up, and indeed the author remarks in an afterward that “all the impulsive, outrageous things my heroine does, I did. All the sensible things she did, I made up.”

The novel is narrated in the first person throughout — Sally Jay’s voice is as distinctive as Auntie Mame’s — but the third part of the novel is told as a series of diary entries, in which the heroine does not know what’s going to happen the next day. Here she recounts an exuberant evening spent with a matador/film star and his entourage.

Dinner was a riot. We threw pellets of bread across the tale at each other and made airplanes out of the menus and sent them sailing around the dining room. Then we had a really great idea. We were going to put a pat of butter on the end of knife and use the knife as a catapult to see if the butter wouuld stick to the ceiling. But Larry stopped us, so we flipped water at each other with our spoons instead.

Bax and Larry thought we’d gone crazy. I don’t know what the Quadrille thought, except it was clear that anything old Wheero wanted to do was OK with them. They were all twice his age, but if he’d been the King of the Underworld, they couldn’t have been more under his thumb. Unwritten law of the bullring.

We drove off to Bérobie in the lavender Cadillac with the hood down, Wheero and I sitting on top, our feet on the back seat, waving to the cars that passed and nearly falling off at every corner.

We found the little bar we’d been to the other night and started playing some more games. We took the labels off beer-bottles and put them on everybody’s wallets, sticky side up, and thre them at the ceiling so that the labels stuck there and the wallets came clattering down all over the drinks on the table.

I can’t say that such high jinks are to be found on every page of The Dud Avocado, and the madcap reminiscence of Robert Benchley is pretty much unique to this passage. But the novel is almost always this much fun to read.

“Fun” is decidedly not a word that comes to mind in connection with God on the Rocks. Set on the eve of World War II, in a Yorkshire sea-side town that’s so middle-class respectable that even the weather seems bourgeois, it’s a story of lost loose ends being tied up and then tied up again. At the heart of the narrative, a cold and ambitious woman has long before forbidden her son to marry the daughter of a local shopkeeper whom he has known since childhood. Now, in the novel’s present, the mother is an invalid, and to spite her socialistically-inclined children she has turned her home into a lunatic asylum, where one of the patients is a painter who will some day be recognized as great — or at any rate one of those blue plaques will be mounted on a nearby wall. Now the old lovers reconnect, and turn out to be somewhat different from what they might have expected. The shopgirl has married a religious bank manager, with whom she has two children. Indeed, what keeps all of this information from coming straight to the fore is Gardam’s focus on eight year-old Margaret’s impressions, which underscore the futility of trying to “protect” intelligent children from the facts of life (in the broadest sense of that term). Only gradually do the adults achieve the spotlight.

I can imagine someone’s coming away from God on the Rocks with the impression that it’s about the strangeness of love, but to my mind it’s not about love at all, but rather about the things that often stand in the place of love — desire, affection, duty, failure of imagination. As for love, it’s what’s really on the rocks.

At a tea to which Margaret is taken by her mother, the unprecedentedness of which is obliquely but almost oppressively apparent, the adults suddenly fall into a puzzling exchange of remarks.

Margaret looked from face to face like a person at a tennis match. She knew — though heaven knew how — that this game had been played before and very often and very happily. The tennis match idea stayed with her and she had a queer picture of her mother and Mr Frayling playing tennis with careful slow strokes on a summer evening with the shadow of the net growing long across the grass. Some people stood watching from a distance. Perhaps some old photograph.

“Do you and Mummy play this?” Charles Frayling asked her with his head on one side, as if to catch her answer exactly. sToll muddled with tennis, she looked at her mother.

“I don’t think we do, do we, dear?” Elinor said.

“Not ever.”

“Try,” said Charles. “It’s called the grand great word game.”

“The great grand word game,” said Elinor.

Later, Margaret informs the company that her father does not like to hear her mother addressed as ‘Mummy.’

It’s easy to see why God on the Rocks wasn’t brought out over here in the late Seventies. Its Englishness is an acquired taste, its indirectness a jeux d’esprit that might strike the uninitiated as merely withdrawn. It is impossible to imagine Sally Jay Gorce reading it without wondering if it might make better sense if she held the book upside-down.

Matins ¶ Dominique Browning asks the two questions that plague all consideration of environmental degradation: how is it possible to be hopeful, and what can any one person do? Commendably, she offers no answers. Our own far from comforting thought is that global warming is only the latest of countless ways in which human beings have inflicted pain and misery upon each other. We’re also aware that much of the panic has roots in complacency: most people over fifty grew up without the shadow of a doubt about fossil fuels. The Editor remembers being far more concerned about the exhaustion of fossil fuels — which, one way or another, with more or less inconvenience, will inevitably solve the problem. (Slow Love Life)

Lauds ¶ The Addison Gallery of American Art has been spruced up, with a green wing and revived exhibition spaces, the better to house a collection that is almost uncertainly unparalleled in the world of — prep schools. The Addison, you see, is attached to Philips Andover, in Massachusetts. Karen Wilkin makes it sound extremely enviable, but we’d really be much happier to pick up the Editor’s grandson at the doors of, say,  Stuyvesant High and take him through the Metropolitan. Much cheaper. (WSJ; via ArtsJournal)

Prime ¶ With rueful but not unbecoming glee, “Thorstein Veblen” tips us off to Revivial, a new book about the Obama White House that shines a glaring light on its most inexplicable denizen, Larry Summers. (We’re not sure that we’re interested anymore to know what made Mr Summers attractive to the President.) Veblen lists three strikes against the outgoing adviser that the HuffPost piece omits, whether because “ the people who are dishing on Summers now don’t realize these were mistakes, or else they too were on the dumb side of these horrific lapses in judgment which have helped to make Obama the great failed hope of our generation.”

Tierce ¶ At the LRB, Peter Campbell presents a brilliant essay on escalators — specifically, the 4o9 moving stairs that operate in London’s Underground. What causes them to break down? Stuff falling in the 4mm gap between steps, mostly. We sat up sharply at the reminder that the Underground runs for only twenty hours a day — “only.”

Sext ¶ It’s not difficult to imagine how the citizens of a modest Midwestern town would have dealt, 150 years ago, with a raving atheist who insisted on denouncing God from the courthouse steps. Such a lunatic, like Waleed Hasayin in today’s Palestine, would certainly have been locked up “for his own protection.” The analogy is imperfect; a blog does not have the nuisance value of an unwanted orator; no one has to read Hasayin’s diatribes. But the offence is the same: how does a town live with someone who vehemently repudiates its core values, and urges others to do the same? We wonder if our compromise — Hasayin ought to be banished, not punished — would suit anyone involved. (NYT)

Nones ¶ As Robert Reich sees it, the reason that the G20 meeting at Seoul didn’t get anywhere is because of income inequality in China as well as in the United States. Wealth in both countries pools at the top, making exports doubly crucial. For the same reason, each country wants to have the weaker currency, because cheaper exports means greater employment. In theory, that is. In a long and somewhat rambling Times article, Motoko Rich and Jack Ewing report that the weakness of the dollar is unlikely to spur exports/job creation to any very significant extent. For one thing, multinational corporations, wherever nominally headquartered, are designed to play around currency imbalances. We wish that Mr Reich had said more about why he’s opposed to “outright protectionism.” (Christian Science Monitor)

Vespers ¶ Romain Gary (1914-1980) was a writer of many names, so it’s no surprise that one of his best novels, La vie devant soi, has been published under two other names, Momo (that’s how the Editor read it, in English) and Madame Rosa, the latter also the title of the film adaptation starring Simone Signoret — still not out on DVD. La vie devant soi won a second Prix Goncourt for Gary, which was a big no-no — that’s a one-per-customer award. Born Kacew de Gari in Vilnius, Gary signed the book “Émile Ajar,” and got a cousin to do the photo-ops for him. Back in the days when novelists were real men, Gary was a Free French hero; he later ran off with Jean  Seberg, and the two made glamorous work of making one another miserable. At the Telegraph, David Bellos writes up the subject of his new biography. (via ArtsJournal)

Compline ¶ Jessica Olien has been living in the Netherlands for a few months now, and she’s scratching her head. “Have we gotten it all wrong?” (Meaning: American women.) Relatively few women work full-time, even when encouraged to do so; and only a quarter of Nederlander women earn enough money to support themselves. Somehow, it seems, the business of making money — a veritable game, if truth be told, for most successful men — has been detached from questions of gender equality. We wonder if it’s really true that Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed — the title of a book, sadly unavailable, by Ellen de Bruin. (Slate; via MetaFilter; NYT)

Have a Look

¶ Ten centuries of Europe — in five minutes. (GOOD)

Noted

¶ How today’s Wii may make tomorrow’s work more fun. (Wired Science)

Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker about yet another memoir by Dick Cavett, recalls the time that Norman Mailer showed up drunk.

As any sort of intellectual exchange, the show was a disaster. But it was great television. It gave viewers what they want from a talk show: the sense that anything might happen.

Elsewhere in the current issue, David Denby complains that Becky Fuller, the news producer played by Rachel McAdams in Morning Glory, “doesn’t do anything worth doing,” and, indeed, as we recall, Becky makes strenuous efforts to prevent her new co-anchor from showing up drunk.

Although we haven’t left New York, we’re already on vacation, so let’s see what the Daily Office is going to look like for the next two weeks. Mind you, we’re not going to do this every day!

Matins ¶ At The Lede, Robert Mackie takes note of Glenn Beck’s strange ideas about George Soros. While it’s true, as Beck claims, that Soros has bankrolled revolutionary movements in Central Europe and elsewhere, he has invariably supported the proponents of open, genuinely democratic government. It is weirdly appropriate that Beck’s position on Soros sounds just like Iran’s. For anyone still in doubt, Beck’s “attack” is proof that making sense is not what interests the shiller of gold coins. Rebuttal, it follows, is a waste of time. Better just to make noise about the actual achievement of George Soros.

Lauds ¶ At The House Next Door, Paul Brunick writes appreciately of Todd Haynes’s movies, but he finds that Haynes, as an “ethical thinker” who “wants to make the world a better place” is at odds with the “amoral fantasist” Jean Genet, from whom he drew material for his 1991 triptych, Poison. ¶ Leah Rozen looks into why the Hollywood of today is so much less interested in the working class than Depression-era Hollywood was. (NYT) We think that it’s because the Warner Brothers are no longer with us, an idea that we probably picked up from Ethan Mordden.

Prime ¶ We didn’t roll up our sleeves and get to work on the national budget this weekend (the Editor’s wife gave it a shot), but we were dying to know what Felix Salmon would make of David Leonhardt’s learning game. We sensed, as indeed Felix argues, that “You Fix the Budget” oversimplified some things. But his main beef was that the Times didn’t offer enough in the way of tax-hike proposals, in effect making the game too difficult. (We like what Felix has to say about a consumption tax.) In a related entry, Mr Salmon gores the mortgage-interest deduction, mainly by asking just how many Americans benefit by it, and where they’re to be found on the economic landscape.

Tierce ¶ They’re digging up Tycho Brahe again, this time to submit his remains to the latest scanning techniques. Nobody can quite believe that the celebrated Danish astronomer, who worked on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution but remained thoroughly medieval in outlook — he had the best modern equipment, but a premodern mind — died of a bladder infection. When they exhumed him the last time, in 1901, scientists discovered a surfeit of mercury in a hair from his moustache. That’s what you get when you dabble in alchemy. (80 Beats)

Sext ¶ Sarah Bakewell writes one of those lovely Montaigne-was-the-first-blogger pieces that always make us warm and tingly, and often inspire us to pull down the Essais. In the comments that follow, Cecile Alduy complains that Montaigne’s pieces are not really as improvised as they appear to be; that he in fact reworked them repeatedly through three editions. Ms Bakewell heartily agrees, and so do we: blogging doesn’t have to be sloppy and mindless, and good bloggers usually revisit the issues that interest them. (Paris Review Daily; via The Millions)

Nones ¶ It’s possible that Fintan O’Toole intends “Ireland still has the power to make itself a country worth staying in” to be an ironic title for his hortatory essay, which basically calls upon the Irish to effect a complete reform of their government so as to fashion a true republic. We hear suitcases zipping. (Guardian; via Real Clear World) ¶ But Eliot Spitzer is plain as can be about what’s wrong with the United States: “Wall Street’s 30 year carnival.” We assent to his jeremiad against the “self-interested ideology” that conservatives have been spouting, but we wish that the former governor said more about the rupture between finance (investment) and industry (jobs) — American industry. (Slate; via Real Clear World)

Vespers ¶ Emily St John Mandel reads Hint Fiction and cuts right through the hype. Some of the pieces in this collection of “25 words or less” compositions are great — Joyce Carol Oates, Jason Rice, and Donora Hiller are singled out — but far more are “creepy in a cheap way.” She doesn’t say so, but Hint Fiction comes off as a gimmick.

Compline ¶ In a grand long read at The New Atlantis — shame on us for losing track of how we came across it — Algis Valiunis considers the more serious exemplars of self-help literature, which, even if it fails to help most of those who rely on it, at least tells us what we think we ought to be doing. ¶ Terry Teachout insists that no matter how many tens of thousands of hours you put in to developing a skill, you’re still not going to be Mozart. (WSJ) Our own view is that nobody was ever hurt by the Ericsson Rule. If nothing else, it crushes our natural yearning for royal roads and easy steps. The best way to help yourself is to work hard at something for which you have an aptitude. The trick, of course, is buying the time for all that practice.

Have a Look

¶ The new wing at Boston’s MFA. (Globe)

Noted

¶ Other -extings. (The Bygone Bureau)

¶ Richard Crary visits the zoo — bad idea. (The Existence Machine)

Good luck with that, says David Carr, writing about “Beastweek” and proffering a list of people (all men) who made it possible for Tina Brown to take on a great new business challenge. (NYT)

The list of people who turned down the job of reviving Newsweek reads like the reservation list of Michael’s restaurant in Midtown on a very busy day.

The people who said no before Ms. Brown said yes are said by at least two people involved in the process to include (in no particular order): Peter Kaplan, former editor of The New York Observer and now at Women’s Wear Daily; Josh Tyrangiel, formerly of Time Inc. and now at Bloomberg Businessweek; Kurt Andersen, the founder of Spy and the former editor of New York magazine; Adam Moss, the current editor of New York; Jim Kelly, the former editor of Time magazine; Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor in chief of the Slate Group; Fareed Zakaria, a former Newsweek luminary now at Time and CNN; and Andrew Sullivan, the blogger and former editor of The New Republic.

Our birthday present to Megan, a few days after the event, was brunch, served at her house but prepared at ours, using plates, forks, napkins, glasses, and even a frypan that we brought from home (and meant to bring back dirty). I packed everything in two giant Bean’s tote bags, and, if I do say so myself, it came off very nicely. The sausages were still warm when we got downtown; the fresh-baked sweet rolls slid out of their baking dish without any fuss; the pineapple corer not only handily provided Ryan with a bowl of a favorite fruit but made a nice present to leave behind; and the carafe of orange juice, squeezed minutes before leaving Yorkville, never came close to tipping over. It was really nothing but what I do every weekend at home; and, because I do it every weekend, it didn’t require much thought to make it readily portable. I scrambled the eggs on Megan’s stove — so much for cooking on arrival. As I went along, I deposted used utensils in plastic grocery store bags, and trash (eggshells!) in a Hefty bag that I’d brought along for the purpose. When the eggs were ready, Kathleen took over and served everyone. I’d meant to toss the dirty plates into shopping bags as well, but Ryan got to them first, while I was playing with Will. All I’d asked him to do was to make the coffee, which he did to perfection. Will liked the sausage, but not the pineapple. Astor licked the eggs that weren’t served right away.

You’d think that breakfast would be the hardest meal to prepare and transport, but it turned out not to be, not at all. It was no big deal — because, I hasten to repeat, I do this every weekend.

Then again: beginner’s luck?

Kathleen and I took Will for a walk in the neighborhood, covering the usual route, with Dinosaur Hill, a toy shop on Ninth Street just east of Second Avenue, as our destination. Among many wonderful things, Dinosaur Hill sells real wooden blocks, and in different languages. Today, we bought Will a set of Chinese blocks. I must get another set for up here, so that I can have a good look at them. (We already have one in Nederlands.) Will has loved toppling towers of blocks for some time now, but he’s beginning to give some thought to his demolitions, instead of just reaching out to knock them down.

Walking back along Ninth Street, Will’s head pitched forward into my chest. He slept like a teenager, so dead to the world that I actually roused him for a moment just to make sure that he was still with us. He shifted heavily and fell right back to sleep. It’s the walking that tires him out — his, that is. As Megan says, we may have already seen his first steps. He took two solo strides between Kathleen and his mother. At another point, he stood for a few beats. There is no clear line, no aha! moment. The interesting thing is that he walks with his feet more flat to the ground when he’s receiving assistance on one arm only. It is very clear that he is looking forward to unassisted self-propulsion. As he is already keenly attracted to the prohibited, the coming months are likely to be frolicsome.

The sun was low in Tompkins Square Park, and it felt late in the day at two. We came home shortly after bringing Will back to his house, and took a nap ourselves. Sunday afternoons in winter are always a little bit triste. We’re looking forward. you can bet, to finding ourselves, next Sunday at two, on the patio outside our room at the Buccaneer, looking out over the Caribbean to St Thomas and St John on the horizon. We won’t mind the late sun so much then.

Dwight Garner, on Sam Irvin’s biography of Eloïse creator Kay Thompson:

The tra-la-la is woven into the voice that Mr. Irvin, a veteran film and television director and producer, has concocted for his book, a voice that seems to have been stolen from the trade magazine Daily Variety about 1947. In “Kay Thompson” people don’t leave jobs, they’re seen “ankling” them. They’re not fired, they’re “eighty-sixed.” They’re not tricked but “bamboozled.”

A lover is a “boudoir companion”; the record industry is the “platter biz”; piano playing is “tinkling ivories”; clubs are “niteries”; executives are either “grand poo-bahs” or “muckety-mucks.” Oh, mama. As the gossip columnist J. J. Hunsecker is told in “The Sweet Smell of Success,” “You’ve got more twists than a barrel of pretzels.” Reading “Kay Thompson” is like running a cheese grater across your central nervous system.

Let’s get this straight: Morning Glory is a movie that is all about its stars. Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton and Patrick Wilson may be dressed and housed in the manner of New York professional types, but the profession that their characters are engaged in is entertainment, and so the roles become windows through which actors of varying degrees of diva-hood are equalized on a plane of screwball entertainment. Mr Ford shows us what an awful pain in the neck he could be if he took himself seriously. (Oh, doesn’t he?) Ms Keaton plays the Julie Kavner role that Woody Allen could never bring himself to cast her in. Mr Wilson, having impersonated something of a jerk in his last picture, is back to being Mr Ordinary Nice Guy (with Beautiful Features).

And Rachel McAdams is finally the star that she has been bursting to be. She is not half of a romantic team, or the member of an unusual family. She plays a stand-alone figure, notwithstanding her character’s unobtrusive romance with Mr Wilson’s. Her Becky Fuller, a television producer, has nothing going for her but her brains and dedication. Her beautiful smile doesn’t exactly hurt, but Becky is not interested in the things that can be achieved with nothing more than a beautiful smile. She wants to succeed. She wants everything that she does to succeed, be it a little story about ballerinas or her dreams of promotion. Never have I seen a character burn with so much pure energy. In Broadcast News, to which Morning Glory has understandably been compared, Holly Hunter’s interpretation of the Becky Fuller role depended on a host of functional psychopathologies — anxieties, nervous tics, and a crippling disdain that all functioned like symbiotic intestinal bacteria: she was crazy, but she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere otherwise. There is none of that here. All of this Becky Fuller’s problems are external to her, and she solves them by imposing her own robust good sense upon them. Morning Glory is not a movie about a successful television producer who saves a faltering morning show. It’s about Rachel McAdams, making the world a better place just by being in it. That is what the great movie stars do.

As such, Morning Glory is a movie to be seen and surrendered to, not analyzed. But I can’t resist highlighting the early scene in which Ms McAdams mounts her first display of wizardry. In the telling, it will sound simple. At her first staff meeting, Becky is barraged by a fusillade of miscellaneous questions that no sane person could keep track of. The last question comes from the show’s male co-host, a creepy guy who has actually propositioned Becky and who wants to know “Why did I have to stop watching ‘Banging Granny on line’ to come to this meeting?” Becky wilts, and we’re terrified. Ms McAdams sends us a false signal: we think we can see that Becky is thinking about how to restructure these meetings so that they’re manageable. A pretty wet solution, but it’s something. We’re resigned to a standard dénouement: Becky will buy time and then go back to her office, pound her head on the wall, and wonder what she has gotten herself in for. But no sooner has Ms McAdams taken us up to the very brink of this disappointing prospect than she starts spitting back answers with all of the questions’ incoming energy, and then some. She is supremely in control, and her triumph is a joy to see. At the end, she raises her head to the co-host and tells him, by the way, that he’s fired. Does this sort of thing happen in real life? Every once in a while — and only this sort of thing. Here we have the Hollywood fantasy version, and its magic is thrillingly effective.

Then, of course, Becky Fuller’s troubles begin in earnest. Her principal problem is coaxing cooperation out of a has-been who’s on contract to her network. Once a fabled news anchor, he is more or less in the position of a buggy-whip manufacturer, too proud to retool his act. Mr Ford’s Tom Pomeroy is as intractable as a chip of Gibraltar, and the fun of Morning Glory is watching Rachel McAdams use all the body English at her command to move him, in tiny, squeaking pushes, to where she needs him to be.

Screwball comedies let us laugh people who think that they can’t stand one another discover the awful truth that they can’t live without one another. Morning Glory extends this proposition to the world of work. Becky, Tom and Colleen Peck (Ms Keaton’s co-host) interact without the faintest latency of romance. (It would be a stretch to regard Tom as a father-figure for Becky; she’s pretty much beyond father figures.) Instead of the promise of love, Becky brings the promise of success, and it is her own success that finally kindles Tom. Which is as it should be: in the great fairy tales, nothing succeeds like success.

{The next Daily Office entry will appear on Monday}

Matins

¶ We begin and end the day with Felix Salmon’s insights, first on Medicare, then on Ireland. What both entries have in common is a stubborn refusal on the part of conservative, “property-owner” officials and business leaders to learn a new way of thinking about oversized liabilities. With respect to Medicare, which liberals acknowledge to be disastrously over-extended going into the future, Kevin Drum’s analysis has been discredited simply because it is liberal. That’s because there isn’t anything more cogent to argue.

The point here is that the deficit commission chairmen are doing everything in their power to perpetuate the intellectually dishonest meme that if we just pare enough excess from the government’s discretionary budget, that can somehow solve the problem of the soaring deficit. It can’t. Liberals like Drum recognize the problem, and can work out the mathematics of Medicare in public. The deficit commission, it seems, can’t.

Lauds

¶ The brouhaha about Cathy Black’s appointment as New York’s schools chancellor, we hasten to note, may be premature, because Mayor Bloomberg’s choice is subject to approval by Albany officials. All the more reason, then, to ask questions about the mayor’s fundamental premise, summed up (mockingly) by Alex Pareene. (Salon; via GOOD)

The New York public schools system serves more than a million students. Picking the woman responsible for keeping Cosmo profitable and publishing anti-literacy newspaper USA Today to run the whole thing is corporatism masquerading as benevolent rule by our wisest technocrats.

The fantasy of the superstar CEO who can parachute into any company — in any industry — and right the ship through time-tested management techniques is common in corporate circles, but so are books of New Yorker cartoons about golf. Only the sort of lucky billionaire convinced of the moral superiority of the financially successful would assume that a random executive with no education experience could manage the New York city public schools better than someone who… you know, has experience managing public schools.

Prime

¶ At Abnormal Returns, a thought experiment about ETFs, lately alleged to cause market pricing distortions. What if the performance of ETFs during the financial crisis were a better measure of their market effects than that during the “flash crash”?

As with all financial products the ETF industry seems to be living up to the old motto of MTV:  “Too much is never enough.”  We have written extensively** about the proclivity of the ETF industry to create me-too and poorly designed funds.  One could also argue that the rise of indexing has helped distort the pricing of individual securities.  There is little doubt that the rise of certain ETFs have changed the underlying dynamics of certain markets.  Further one cannot discount the possibility that additional market meltdowns could be exacerbated by ETFs.

All that being said, the rise of the ETF industry has been net-net a boon to investors.  The allocation of assets in ETFs reflect the collective decision of millions of professional and amateur investors alike.  If the underlying prices of those assets are ultimately proven incorrect, then those investors will pay the price.  In the meantime they provide many investors with the means to invest in a wide range of asset classes in a relatively cost efficient manner.  In that respect, the ETF experiment has to-date proven a success.

Tierce

¶ What a fun story to read, just a week before we take off for vacation: “Advanced jets hitting technological turbulence.” (Short Sharp Science)

But last night’s Boeing 787 emergency landing raises more issues for the much delayed airplane – the first ever to have a carbon-fibre pressurised fuselage rather than an aluminium one.

The source of the smoke that billowed in the cabin is uncertain but if it’s an electrical source in the plane – rather than the test equipment it is stuffed with for the certification programme – that could be a particular headache for Boeing. The reason? Like the A380, the airplane is what is known as a “more electric” design – in which some of the previously hydraulic systems are switched for electronic ones.

The aircraft is in many respects a flying computer network, and a problem with the electrics at this late stage will be unwelcome. Happily, the solution may be electronically identified: Boeing is now beaming data back from the Texas airfield to its base near Seattle, Washington, to diagnose the problem.

Sext

¶ Regular readers know that we like to check in with the raucous outlook of Awl columnist Mary H K Choi from time to time. She can be one sharp-tongued lady! Now we know why: she’s making up for all the repression of her Korean background. In a sweet piece at the Times (you’d never know…), she describes a recent pedicure.

By now, I’ve already fessed up to speaking Korean, because I’d never want to dupe this woman into freely talking smack in the refuge of my perceived ignorance. But that sets in motion the rapid-fire interrogation that, unlike Monty Python and the Spanish Inquisition, you expect every time. Round after round about my education, my apartment, my job, my man, my decision-making skills.

When among acquaintances and casual friends, I am vigilant to string up white lies like police tape around my personal details. But a nod from any woman born earlier than 1970 on our Asian peninsula flanked by the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, however, awakens pre-programmed behaviors I can’t control. I answer every question to the best of my ability, and make my own polite inquiries, always careful to employ deferential syntax, the doily-lined, dustier version of the language that rarely appears in pop songs or the revenge trilogies I stream from the Internet.

Nones

¶ Timothy Garton Ash calls upon EU members to respond en bloc to Chinese tempations to “splittism.” The Nobel Peace Prize controversy is a fine occasion for showing firmness, but already there are signs of wavering from France. (Guardian; via Real Clear World)

Thus, to take a small but richly symbolic example, China is currently trying to persuade everyone – including EU ambassadors – to boycott the Nobel peace prize ceremony for Liu Xiaobo in Oslo on December 10. When it comes to Tibet or Xinjiang, China insists on the importance of total respect for its sovereignty. Yet now it is telling Europeans they should not attend a European ceremony in Europe. So China’s sovereignty is absolute, other people’s sovereignty is negotiable. (The United States has a similar double standard.)

This should be an easy call for Europe. The EU’s 27 member states should simply announce that all their ambassadors to Norway will attend the ceremony. Basta. But in the runup to president Hu Jintao’s imperial visitation to Paris last week, I read that France’s foreign ministry “said it would announce before December 10 whether it intended to attend the Nobel prize-giving”. Europe splits again. More tittering into the teacups at Zhongnanhai.

In Brussels last week for the annual meeting of the European council on foreign relations, a think-and-advocacy tank (on whose board I serve) devoted to developing a European foreign policy, I caught up with some of those charged with pulling together the threads of the EU’s foreign policy. They observed with a mixture of irony and irritation that, in relation to China or Russia, EU member states almost invariably want the EU’s collective stance to be tougher than their own individual stances.

Vespers

¶ Maria Bustillos is crazy about her new Kindle, but, if anything, it has determined her to keep on buying books — because she’d rather own physical objects than license digital ones. The latter leaves the door open to fascist abuse. We advise all purchasers of ebooks to read the fine print.

Keep in mind these are your books that you bought or collected. Can you imagine a bookseller or publisher asserting rights over the contents of your bookshelves in your house? That’s basically what we’re talking about, here.

[snip]

After reading all this, I rang the (excellent, and very polite) Kindle customer service up to learn more, especially about privacy issues. One thing I wanted to know was exactly how much access Amazon has to my private, personal Kindle files (you can put your own files on a Kindle, .txt and .pdf files that you made yourself.) But after being bumped up through a couple of layers of supervisors, I didn’t get very clear answers to my questions. For instance, on the question of Amazon’s remote access to my personal stuff. “We don’t have access to your files,” I was first told. But can you see my personal files? And if you wanted to delete my personal files, as was done with the Orwell books, could you do it? “We don’t do that.”

Yeah, but could you?

Compline

¶ One of the most noxious developments in international finance has been the growth of big banks in small countries. It’s a kind of “globalization” that doesn’t make sense, as the good people of Iceland found out to their cost. Now it’s the turn of the Irish. Felix Salmon:

One of the key lessons we’ve learned in this crisis is that any time a small country takes pride in its large and profitable international banks, everything is liable to end in tears. Big banks are too big to fail, which means their national governments have to bail them out—but when the banks are as big or bigger than the government in question, such a bailout becomes politically and economically disastrous. My feeling is that no government should ever allow its banks to become too big to bail out, because no government can credibly promise not to bail out such banks should they run into difficulties.

If you look down the Financial Stability Board’s list of the top 30 systemically-important financial institutions, there are definitely a few on there which look like they’re too big for a national bailout. The two big Swiss banks certainly are, and possibly the two big Spanish banks, too; then there’s six insurers as well. I have no idea what can be done about this: no one’s going to blunder in and force UBS and Credit Suisse to break themselves up just because they happen to be based in a small Alpine nation. But the lessons of Iceland and Ireland should wear heavily on any government with an oversized financial sector.

Have a Look

¶ Tom Meglioranza sings Rückblick, from Schubert’s Winterreise.

¶ Manhattan: the underlying wilderness. (BLDGBLOB)

Noted

¶ Tyler Cowen: “Which works ought to be read in their original language?”

¶ “How the Gas Tax is Like Keyser Soze.” (The Infrastructurist)

¶ Choire Sicha on corpses in public. (The Awl)

The jobless recovery at a glance. (Nick Bunkley in the Times)

Three years ago, G.M. needed to sell nearly four million vehicles a year in the United States to break even, but today, it can be profitable at roughly half that sales volume, Mr. Liddell said in the video. Hourly labor costs have been cut by more than two-thirds, to $5 billion, from $16 billion in 2005, he said.