It’s no use; I can’t tear myself away. I spent an hour poring over the Google Maps view of Edensor, trying to identify the Old Vicarage — in vain. I’m pretty sure that I located Edensor House, though. That’s where the Marchioness of Hartington lived when she received Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip, in 1948 — the only photograph that I’ve ever seen in which Her Majesty the Queen looks (painfully) overdressed. Do admit: the memoirs of Deborah Mitford, dowager Duchess of Devonshire, can’t be put down. Wait For Me! is one of the most aptly titled books that I’ve ever encountered, because that’s what you’re going to do once you’ve got the book in your hands. You’re going to wait until Debo has told you everything that she has to say.

That’s what you’re going to do if, like me, The Sun King, Nancy Mitford’s book about Louis XIV, was one of the first books that you owned. (It was also, arguably, the first coffee-table book.) If, in your twenties, you found Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels to be a profoundly simpatico but life-affirmingly positive account of family dysfunction. If, in short, you’ve known about “the Mitford Sisters” for a long time, longer, even, than Charlotte Mosley has been annotating the family correspondence. (Charlotte’s mother-in-law, Diana Mitford, was the beauty who left a Guinness for Sir Oswald Mosley — almost as rich — and a wedding chez Goebbels.) You’ve forgotten more stories about these six girls and their crazy parents than most people ever know about their own families. You feel as though you must have met Nanny Blor herself in some dim childhood playroom.

What makes the Mitfords fascinating has changed over the years. As girls (they were born between 1904 [Nancy] and 1920 [Debo]), they were madcaps out of Waugh; when their mother opened the newspaper and saw a “peer’s daughter” headline, she knew that the story would probably concern one of her brood. Then Nancy began writing novels, and became something of a literary lodestone. She knew everybody and everybody knew her, and she couldn’t wait to get out of England. So she went to France and became what her sisters called “the French lady writer.” This was a sweet way of suggesting that Nancy could be really nasty and unloving. (Just how unloving, her sister Diana wouldn’t find out until decades after Nancy’s gratuitous testimony stuck her in Holloway Prison, during the War. Perhaps if Nancy had been a boy, she wouldn’t have been so envious of Diana). When Nancy lost interest in dreaming up novel plots, she turned to great figures of the good old days in France, and found them to be wittier and better-dressed versions of the aristocrats whom she’d grown up among. Voltaire. Madame de Pompadour. Louis le grand. Frederick the Great.  She wrote about these characters as though she had lived down the hall from them at college (as if, indeed, she had had any kind of education), and her impertinence was delicious. Don’t confuse impertience with disrespect: Nancy Mitford genuinely admired her subjects, and that’s what makes her four histories so supremely delightful. What’s impertinent is her intimation of intimacy, which is wholly, modestly implicit. There’s a passage in which Nancy says that doctors are no better today than they were in the Seventeenth Century. That’s as close as she gets to interposing herself into the narrative. These were the books that made her famous.

Shortly after The Sun King appeared, Jessica Mitford (the fifth of the six) came out with The American Way of Death. A book with less in common with The Sun King cannot be imagined — except that it, too, is impertinent. Flagrantly so. Jessica had already published the profoundly disrespectful Hons and Rebels, but her new book was, as its title indicated, American, and it was of those riveting exposés (The Making of the President 1960 and Silent Spring were contemporary examples) that announced the new world order of the 1960s. Jessica’s sisters did not take to calling her “the American lady writer,” possibly because she was a card-carrying Communist who seemed, despite all protestations of love and affection, to dislike them. Jessica heartily disliked England, even as she floated on a personal confidence that only an Englishwoman of her background could have possessed.

By this time, in other words, the Mitfords were literary. There were two of them, Nancy and Jessica. They were discovered to have interesting sisters. One was dead. Unity shot herself when England declared war on her beloved Führer. (She lived for nearly ten years, in reduced mental circumstances.) Another — Diana — was a virtual Nazi, having married the head of the British Union of  Fascists in 1936. So: Communists and Nazis. Very inter-esting. And then there was the duchess.

Deborah Mitford and Andrew Cavendish did not anticipate a ducal future when they married, in 1941. Andrew had an older brother, Billy, and guess who he married! None other than Kathleen Kennedy, doomed sister of our own JFK. (It really doesn’t stop with these people.) Billy, like Jessica’s husband Esmond and the sisters’ own brother Tom, perished in the War. That’s how Andrew Cavendish became the Marquess of Hartington. (Which is exactly like being the Prince of Wales, but with respect to the ducal Devonshires. You’re next — if you live.) When Andrew and Deborah became duke and duchess in their own right, they were poor as churchmice, with a colossal tax bill that must have seemed something like today’s American national debt. The common wisdom about great houses like Chatsworth was that they ought to be pulled down, and lots of grand houses were pulled down. But something about the new owners committed them to fight for their inheritance. In her memoirs, the duchess generously says that it was her husband’s doing. But she acknowledges that the world believes that it was hers, and it’s hard to imagine how the whole thing could have been pulled off without Deborah’s inborn entrepreneurial zeal.

We have come a long way from writing books — something that the duchess was famous for not doing until she took it up (just as she put it out that she couldn’t speak French and wore nothing finer than Barbour coats). Nowadays — long after Nancy’s death (in 1973) and Jessica’s famous books — Debo has blossomed into a sort of alternative Queen. Actually, she’s a replacement for the Queen Mother (to whom she refers, in her letters, as “Cake,” having been tickled by the late royal’s eagerly remarking at a reception that “she’d been told that there would be cake.”) Like the Queen Mother, the dowager duchess is one of those grandes dames whom the common people adore with medieval zeal, but exactly how the youngest daughter of a middling baron acquired this royal touch is even more intriguing than her sisters’ careers as notable scribes. She’s that rarest of creatures, the conservative who, by ruthlessly distinguishing the important conventions from the silly ones, can marinate herself in everything that’s admirable about the comme il faut, while daringly rejecting everything that’s fade.

The appeal of Wait For Me!, for one such as me, is that Deborah writes about the people in her life with a deep civil humanity. There are none of the caricatural arabesques that make Wigs on the Green and Hons and Rebels such fun. Deborah has very little to say about people whom she doesn’t like, which almost makes you wonder if she can really be Nancy’s or Jessica’s sister; but then you run into a crack about modern manners that makes you sit up straight. The people whom she does like are good, capable types who get up in the morning with clear heads and a sense of the day’s work. This means that they’re either dependable employees or reliable friends, and it’s obvious that you don’t get to be the chatelaine of Chatsworth without a mastery of the art of cooperation, even if you’re the one giving the orders. There is also the charm of watching a pretty but determinedly unremarkable girl become a monument with a sybil’s blue-eyed gaze. Deborah Mitford’s memoirs make the mystery of the Mitfords thicker and deeper than it ever was.   

Matins

¶ James Fallows tackles coal, here and in China, as only James Fallows can. (The Atlantic; via The Morning News)

What would progress on coal entail? The proposals are variations on two approaches: ways to capture carbon dioxide before it can escape into the air and ways to reduce the carbon dioxide that coal produces when burned. In “post-combustion” systems, the coal is burned normally, but then chemical or physical processes separate carbon dioxide from the plume of hot flue gas that comes out of the smokestack. Once “captured” as a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide, this part of the exhaust is pressurized into liquid form and then sold or stored. Refitting an existing coal plant can be very costly. “It’s like trying to remodel your home into a mansion,” a coal-plant manager told me in Beijing. “It’s more expensive, and it’s never quite right.” Apart from research projects, only two relatively small coal-fired power plants now operate in America with post-combustion capture.

Designing a capture system into a plant from the start is cheaper than doing refits. But even then the “parasitic load” of energy required to treat, compress, and otherwise handle the separated stream of carbon dioxide can come to 30 percent or more of the total output of a coal-fired power plant—so even more coal must be burned (and mined and shipped) to produce the same supply of electricity. Without mandatory emission limits or carbon prices, burning coal more cleanly is inevitably more expensive than simply burning coal the old way. “When people like me look for funding for carbon capture, the financial community asks, ‘Why should we do that now?’” an executive of a major American electric utility told me. “If there were a price on carbon”—a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions—“you could plug in, say, a loss of $30 to $50 per ton, and build a business case.”

“Pre-combustion” systems are fundamentally more efficient. In them, the coal is treated chemically to produce a flammable gas with lower carbon content than untreated coal. This means less carbon dioxide going up the smokestack to be separated and stored.

Either way, pre- or post-, the final step in dealing with carbon is “sequestration”—doing something with the carbon dioxide that has been isolated at such cost and effort, so it doesn’t just escape into the air. Carbon dioxide has a surprisingly large number of small-scale commercial uses, starting with adding the sparkle to carbonated soft drinks. (This is not a big help on the climate front, since the carbon dioxide is “sequestered” only until you pop open the bottle’s top.) All larger-scale, longer-term proposals for storing carbon involve injecting it deep underground, into porous rock that will trap it indefinitely. In the right geological circumstances, the captured carbon dioxide can even be used for “enhanced oil recovery,” forcing oil out of the porous rock into which it is introduced and up into wells.

Lauds

¶ Attending the third Avignon Forum, John Thakara is put in mind of the popes and cardinals who once held sway there — and their blithe hypocrisy. For example: the holy principle of copyright protection.

A desire to use culture for social control is not unique to the digital age. The connection between culture and money goes back even further.

I was impressed at this point by the candor of the man from Ernst&Young. His slides featured the “ME Industries” — and I had thought it was just me who believed that modern media fosters mass narcissism. Then I realized that ME was shorthand for Media and Entertainment industries and that no disrespect was intended. On the contrary, the man from E&Y was on a serious quest: “Monetizing digital media and culture: creating value that consumers will buy.”

Monetization, or its lack, was a sensitive issue for this gathering. Digital is proving a mixed blessing. It was not a surprise that the issue of piracy soon took central stage. From the European Commisisoner down, a panoply of popes waxed righteous about the necessity for artists to be paid fairly for their creativity. Any crumbs left over from the cultural cake could be divided among the publishers, they added humbly — but the Rights of the Artist were paramount.

Mind you, those crumbs soon add up. Pope Philippe Dauman of Viacom, for example, was paid about $34 million in 2009. Mr Dauman’s “compensation” is roughly 3,000 times more than what most of my artist friends are paid. It’s fully 48,000 times more than is available to “Bottom of the Pyramid” types — among whose number, in my experience, the most vibrant culture and creativity is often to be found.

But pah! to the politics of envy. These vulgar details commanded little attention in Avignon. The popes and their cardinals spoke as one: copyright protection is a matter of principle, not profit.

Prime

¶ A leading Japanese economist, Noriko Hama, plays the child’s part in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes — where the dollar is the emperor, or in monetary terms, a currency with no backing. (Japan Times; via Naked Capitalism)

When you say the dollar should have lost its value “a long time ago,” when exactly was that?

I can pinpoint the timing exactly, and that was Aug. 15, 1971.

So long ago?

Yes, because that was the day of the so-called Nixon shock. Until that day, the U.S. dollar could be converted to gold. So anyone who took dollars to the United States could have them exchanged for gold. But on that day, the U.S. declared that it could no longer keep that promise. From that point on, the dollar ceased to be an international, key currency in the world. So from that perspective, the dollar could have fallen to a level that matched the strength of the U.S. economy. But everyone has treated the dollar in the same way they cajoled the emperor in (Hans Christian Andersen’s story) “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

After the Nixon shock there was the Plaza Accord of 1985 (when representatives of the U.S., Japanese, British, French and German goverments — meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York — agreed to depreciate the dollar by intervening in currency markets), followed by Black Monday (Oct. 19, 1987, when stock prices plummeted in New York and elsewhere). Then came the Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s and the Lehman Brothers shock of 2008. Through all these events, the dollar has shown us what a dangerous currency it is, losing its clout step by step. And now we are in the final stage of the dollar’s demise.

From 1947 till 1971, the dollar established itself as a key currency, and from Aug. 15, 1971, we have been witnessing a long, long epic drama about the dollar’s end — and we are at the beginning of its climax.

Tierce

¶ Ed Yong reviews what looks like the much-needed contemporary re-writing of John Greene’s The Death of Adam: Written in Stone, by Brian Switek The role of the fossil record in the evolution of evolutionary theory is crucial, and all smart people ought to be familiar with the onlines of this story. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

But Written in Stone is really a book about two kinds of fossils. Switek doesn’t just consider bodies entombed in rock; he also digs up fossil ideas. Through quotations and historical anecdotes, Switek unearths the intermediate hypotheses that illustrate how our knowledge has itself evolved. Some of these past ideas are fanciful and seemingly absurd (birds evolving from flippered dinosaurs, anyone?) but they greatly enrich what could have been a textbook account of the fossil record.

Switek tell the stories of the men and women who influenced the way we think, with figures like Lyell, Owen, Darwin and Koch looming larger than life. He tells us not just about the discoveries but the way they were discovered, from the 17^th century to the present day. And I do mean present; the book is remarkably up-to-date and even includes findings about dinosaur colours and Neanderthals that were published earlier this year.

Sext

¶ “Secret optimist” Chris Lehmann marks the recent , first-time upholding of a pre-nuptial agreement by a British panel of judges. “Purple” is too common a word for his account of the Radmacher case; we’ll go with “magenta.” (The Awl)

The only trouble is that the wife-favoring British system may soon be a receding mirage, thanks to a surpassingly odd recent case in which the English high court upheld a prenup drawn up by a German chemical heiress named Katrin Radmacher prior to marrying a French investment banker named Nicolas Granatino. In the buck-passing tradition of French investment bankers everywhere, Granatino claimed that Radmacher concealed the true scale of her family’s £106 million family fortune, and had exploited his “besotted” romantic state (in the classy locution of his attorney) to rush him into a pre-nup that shorted him out of his true stake in their now-sundered union. Radmacher’s legal team countered that it was something shy of a romantic you-and-me-against-the-world gesture for Granatino to promptly quit his day job after his marriage to work as science researcher at Oxford University and loll around his wife’s £2.5 million estate. He clearly had a pretty good idea that he was in the hands of a flush provider—and what’s more, the Radmacher attorneys noted, he was in line for a £30 million inheritance himself once his own parents, a proud pair of French tax exiles, were dispatched to their own earthly reward.

All in all, one can quickly size up the Radmacher case as a piece without heroes. But when the British Supreme Court upheld the pre-nup in an 8-1 ruling, family law specialists began to worry that ushering Mayfair’s financial moguls into the pre-nup age could mark a distinct step backwards in the cause of gender equality. The court’s sole dissenting vote came from its only female member, a family law specialist who is also—of course—a baroness, named Lady Hale. If the Radmacher precedent stands (which, by the way, the change-averse panel tried to guard against by characterizing the ruling as a one-off), it could open up “some profound questions about the nature of marriage in modern law and the role of courts in determining it.” Some far-seeing opulent lovebirds might well elect “to contract out of the guiding principles of equality and non-discrimination within marriage; others may think this a retrograde step likely only to benefit the strong at the expense of the weak.”

Nones

¶ Hürriyet reporter Mustafa Akyol persuasively argues that the Turkish government is not in any meaningful (menacing) way an “Islamist” one. (Daily Star; via Real Clear World)

The point here is that the AKP is not arguing for the abolition of secularism. It only argues for a more liberal interpretation of secularism. Erdogan has publicly stated that the AKP “prefers the American model over the French model.”

But besides all these legal issues, there really is a big transformation in Turkey on the societal level: the socio-economic rise of the religious conservatives who for decades were the underclass or rural poor. The change began with their migration to big cities and then the rise of “Muslim Calvinists,” as a Western think-tank called them. These are religiously conservative but economically entrepreneurial businessmen who have successfully engaged in regional and global markets. The AKP is more the result of this new middle class than its cause, though it is further enhancing its ascendance now by using the power of the state in their favor (nepotism is a well-established Turkish tradition).

In other words, the AKP is not imposing Sharia on Turkey, but it is helping conservative Muslims to be more influential in public life. The secularists are shocked by this change, which they see as the end of the good-old hyper-secular Turkey. But the ideological Islamists are shocked, too, for they think that their fellow Muslims are becoming too pragmatic and worldly. And that is perhaps where the most interesting part of the story lies.

Vespers

¶ The uncollected stories of J D Salinger — published only once, in magazines — are notorious for tempting vandals to cut them out with razors. Emily Darrell writes about “A Girl I Used to Know,” a story that did appear in a book, The Best American Stories of 1949, but that suffered the fate of the uncollected. It took her a while to find an intact copy of the anthology. Good for her! (The Millions)

Evidence suggests that Salinger chose to safeguard these stories not because he doubted their quality, but out of spite towards both the world of publishing and the world at large. Several of these “Uncollected Stories” (as they are officially known by Salinger-philes to distinguish them from the “Unpublished Stories,” the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of stories that Salinger may or may not have written in the final five-plus decades of his life) deal directly with the war, and a few, like “A Girl I Knew” are thought to be autobiographical.

Though I didn’t feel like breaking the law in pursuit of some ramshackle, Xeroxed copy of the “Uncollected Stories,” I saw no moral dilemma in tracking down an un-butchered copy of The Best American Short Stories: 1949 where I could find “A Girl I Knew.”

I made a trip to the Richmond, Virginia public library, which at first revealed another TBASS: 1949 in which “A Girl I Knew” had been ever-so-carefully razored out. But after sending a recalcitrant librarian to the basement to retrieve yet another copy of the anthology – which had been apparently been gathering dust since about 1950 – I was able to read the story. I wasn’t sorry that I’d gone to the trouble.

While a few of the selections in Nine Stories had seemed a bit flat to me (“Teddy” and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” come to mind) I found “A Girl I Knew” to be positively brimming with humor, pathos, and romance. It managed, in a mere 12 pages, to make me both laugh out loud and to cry.

Compline

¶ How Vikram Akula learned how to help the poor. (Hint: academic education not required — nor even particularly useful.) (GOOD)

But once I was living in the field (literally) I started to understand what Biksham meant. In India there were many examples of projects intended to help the poor that often only backfired. There were government subsidized loans for the poor to buy high-milk-yielding buffaloes—but the buffaloes couldn’t handle drought conditions and died. A project that touted capital-intensive agriculture led to a drop in water tables that caused communities to suffer.
The longer I spent in the field, the clearer it became that the people who knew the most about helping the poor were the poor themselves. It struck me that the poor were seldom asked what they actually needed. This idea was vividly captured in a book I read at that time called “Rural Development: Putting the Last First” by Robert Chambers, a development scholar at the Institute for Development Studies in England. NGO executives and bureaucrats have limited direct engagement with poor people. They get information from large survey questionnaires or brief visits to villages. Their top-down approach to rural poverty meant they got incomplete information and ended up designing inadequate programs that sometimes proved harmful. In reality, poor people themselves are actually far more knowledgeable about their situations than outsiders, and they also have ideas about how to improve things.

By living and working in a village I saw the poor knew far more than I did. I realized that we couldn’t help the poor.

Have a Look

¶ The Roman Army Knife. (Wired)

Noted

¶ Well, well: Alex Ross got his start in college radio.

The Kaplan College imbroglio reminds us that the management of a for-profit corporation that sets out to turn a buck on human enrichment will inevitably discover that there is more profit to be made in turning their back on it. (NYT)

But many current and former Kaplan employees and students — including those, like Mr. Wratten, not involved in the lawsuits — said in interviews that they believed the company was concerned most with getting students’ financial aid, and that Kaplan’s fast-growing revenues were based on recruiting students whose chances of succeeding were low.

They cite, for example, a training manual used by recruiters in Pittsburgh whose “profile” of Kaplan students listed markers like low self-esteem, reliance on public assistance, being fired, laid off, incarcerated, or physically or mentally abused.

Melissa Mack, a Kaplan spokeswoman, said the manual had not been used since 2006.

Matins

¶ Memo to the aptly-named Patrick Hipp: when planning the secession of Gotham from New York State, do not leave the city’s watershed behind. Delaware, Ulster, Rockland and Orange Counties come with. (Water also explains how New York State as it is used to make sense.) What we love about Mr Hipp’s piece is the overall tone of just having had the idea of secession for the first time. (The Awl)

And to the new old New Yorkers (we hope; if not, to the new Gothamites): enjoy packs of cigarettes that don’t require loans, a city-run MTA (did we mention that the City of New York will be absorbing our “public benefit corporations”? Oops! Well, you already signed the papers), city taxes that are your state taxes, and in all likelihood, legalized possession of marijuana, state-wide recognition of gay marriage, and bars that are open all goddamn night. Our state flag will be the front of a pack of Parliament Lights, our state anthem will sound an awful lot like Cee Lo, and our state bird will be the middle finger. And the next time this mercurial little country of ours swings suddenly from the left to the right, we’ll still be anchored in the same place we’ve always been.

Lauds

¶ It’s nice to know that the top of the art market is doing well, thanks to a “new breed” of billionaires from all over the place who share a taste for the “tried and tested.” (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

For ordinary mortals – those dealing with the bleak everyday challenges of recession on both sides of the Atlantic – the prices are staggering. How come, when our own economy is struggling through the deepest downturn since the second world war, the art market seems to have wriggled out of the crash of 2008 and auction houses are mounting what one expert calls “ambitious, pumping, thrusting” sales?

After last week’s impressionist sales, it is the turn of contemporary art to go under the hammer. At Christie’s, Campbell’s Soup Can With Can Opener by Andy Warhol is among the star turns, estimated at $30-50m (£18m-£30m). Sotheby’s has a Coca-Cola bottle canvas by him at $20-25m.

The answer, or part of it, is that the very top of the art market is semi-detached from the movements of individual economies. Rather, it is bound up with the tastes and choices of a number of super-rich people in Europe and America – and, increasingly, Russia, China and the Middle East. As Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of Christie’s, put it: “The market is not reliant on one single economy at any one time.”

In pockets, at least, the very rich are spending on luxuries – a category into which contemporary art arguably falls – without apparent restraint. In Hong Kong this month, Sotheby’s held an auction of fine wine that saw an Asian buyer purchase three bottles of 1869 Château Lafite for $232,000 each, a new record. Even more surprisingly, cases of wine that retail for $17,000 in New York were selling at the auction for $70,000.

Prime

¶ From Simon Johnson’s letter to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, imploring it to make the Volcker Rule work. (The Baseline Scenario)

With regard to the importance of the Volcker Rule (e.g., for your Question #12), James Kwak and I provided a great deal of supportive evidence in our book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown (see http://13Bankers.com).  American prosperity does not rest on having global megabanks of this nature and scale; we definitely do not need them to have proprietary trading businesses.  They pose great dangers to our financial system – and to taxpayers, as seen in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.  Please be sure to take our analysis into account when considering this matter.

The Volcker Rule is not a panacea but if designed and implemented appropriately, it would constitute a major step in the right direction.  The effectiveness of our financial regulatory system declined steadily over the past 30 years; it is time to start the long process of rebuilding it.[1] 

With regard to your Question #6, on capital requirements, which is closely related to these general questions, I urge you to read the latest writings from leading analysts of this issue.[2]

In particular, I would stress that Professor Anat Admati and her colleagues find that stronger capital requirements would not be contractionary for the economy (see footnote 2).  Professor Jeremy Stein and his colleagues show that capital requirements can and should be increased through requiring specific dollar amounts of capital to be raised – rather than through requiring banks to hit a particular capital-asset ratio (see footnote 2).  If you proceed in the fashion that they recommend, stronger capital requirements will make the financial system safer – without any discernible effect on short-run growth and making it more likely that we can sustain reasonable growth rates over the next 10 years.

Tierce

¶ At Bad Astronomy, Phil Platt looks at the Nile at night from a great height, and makes the best case for space travel ever.

Of course, pictures like this are more profound for what you don’t see: country borders. Many astronauts come back from long-durations stays on the ISS with a deep new sense of citizenship not of just their country, but of their planet. I’ve heard several give impassioned talks about this. I sometimes wonder if this may prove to be the long-term benefit of space travel. I’m all for exploration, and getting off this planet to ensure the survival of our species.

But if enough people can get to space, they’ll see the planet for what it is: a fragile, magnificent ball with a thin shell of atmosphere protecting it from the entire Universe… and no artificial boundary lines to be seen. We made those ourselves, and we put an awful lot of stock in them. Remembering that fact might also be an important way to make sure our species endures.

 Sext

¶ At The Bygone Bureau, Darryl Campbell interviews Mark Bittman. Why is it so not a surprise to learn that Mr Bittman started out in community organizing?

Do you think there’s been a transition in the way you write, that you’ve become less of a general food writer and more interested in particular issues in the last few years?

Yeah. I want to talk about the issues. I still want to develop recipes, I want to write cookbooks, I’m going to write more conventional cookbooks than The Food Matters Cookbook, although there’s a way in which How to Cook Everything is the chef d’ouevre of my life. I’m not going to do anything much better or bigger than that.

But there are ways to approach this. People want fast recipes, I can work on that; people want to concentrate on baking, I can work on that; there are other cookbooks that I can do. I think that my style of cooking, as it has been for 30 years, is to encourage people to get into the kitchen. I still strongly believe that one of the three or four most important things I can do or say is that cooking solves a lot of your problems. So I’m not going to stop doing that. And I think my recipes encourage people to cook, because they’re really, really simple. I’m not a chef, I’m not even a great cook. I can make pretty good food on demand and write great recipes.

But to be able to get up here and not do a cooking demo, and instead to give a talk that has a real message, which includes why people ought to cook, it’s totally exciting for me. It’s not a new career, it’s an extension of my career. It’s exactly what I want to do.

I started… I did community organizing, I did political work, I ran a little newspaper in Massachusetts when I was in my twenties, and when I started to write I really wanted to write about politics. No one was at all interested in what I had to say, and the fact is that I didn’t know shit. So I started writing about food. And I thought, well, writing about food — that’s not bad. And then ten years later, I thought, writing about food, well, I’m doing good. And now, I’m writing and talking about food and politics. It’s gone full circle, and it couldn’t have worked out better.

Now, if I could have an impact, then it would really work out great. (laughs) I feel like I don’t have much of an impact, but at least I’m saying something that I think is important for people to hear.

Nones

¶ We’re disappointed by the provincial, Middle-Kingdom-y editorial in today’s Times that calls for France and Britain to devote their new program of military cooperation to manpower, not weaponry — the better to aid our misadventure in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon can easily provide NATO with all the aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles it is ever likely to need. But NATO needs more ground troops, and the United States has been straining to meet that need.

It makes sense for Britain and France to save money on marginally useful aircraft carriers and on the costs of maintaining nuclear weapons they do not really need. The real threat to Europe now lies elsewhere. European cities have suffered repeated Al Qaeda terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, with new assaults threatened.

Britain and France should use the money they will save on these 20th-century prestige weapons to expand the number of combat troops, trainers and peacekeepers they can contribute to NATO missions like Afghanistan. That would strengthen a vital alliance strained by unequal burden sharing. And it would focus both countries’ military resources on their most pressing 21st-century military needs.

Vespers

¶ At Crawford Doyle this afternoon, we bought a copy of Wait for Me! — the memoirs of a certain dowager duchess whose doings we’ve been following for, oh, decades, ever since we read her sister’s memoir, Hons and Rebels, nearly forty years ago. Although the book has come out over here, and not just in the UK, we weren’t able to rustle up any interesting Stateside reviews. Here are two from England, the Guardian‘s surprisingly sweeter than the (still admiring) Telegraph. From the latter:

Debo had the consolation of being her irascible father’s favourite, which may partly explain why Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity and Decca (Jessica) would chorus at her: “Who’s the least important person in this room? You.” “I read now about the necessity of self-esteem in children,” says the duchess. “We would have become impossibly pleased with ourselves had we been indulged with such a thing.”

Hmm. Some people might say that the Mitfords did indeed become impossibly pleased with themselves. Nancy’s novels may be a timeless tonic and the Communist Decca produced some fine campaigning journalism, but the Mitfords would not, I suspect, have become a thriving publishing industry unto themselves were it not for the beauty and the beast frisson provoked by Diana and Unity’s pash for Fascists. Question: Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? Answer: the Mitfords.

Even hard-core fans must start to wonder how many more publications can be squeezed out of the Mitford mythology: how long, in short, before we are treated to the absolutely spanking diaries of Doughnut the pony and Mr Lay the poultry man? (What else would a Mitford chicken farmer be called?)

It is, however, my duty to report that even those who would gladly see all Honourables strangled at birth will find it hard to resist this book. It’s not just that the youngest Mitford sister has a hereditary talent to amuse; she is also blessed with the democratic ability, uncommon in the posh, to revel in human beings regardless of their station. As Debo wrote in In Tearing Haste, her immortal exchange of letters with the great Patrick Leigh Fermor: “Do admit one gets hold of some odd people in Life’s Rich Tapestry.”

Naturally, the first index item that we looked up was: “Presley, Elvis, 279-80, 311.” Aha!

Compline

¶ Justin E H Smith considers the Okies of California’s Central Valley (where he grew up) as an ethnic group. If they did the same, instead of seeing themselves, spuriously, as “Caucasian” (which means really nothing), perhaps they would have addressed their disadvantages without tumbling into Tea Party resentment. (3 Quarks Daily)

Until the 1960s (just before my era) one could still see ‘No Okies’ signs in stores and restaurants in the Central Valley. Okies had a way of speaking and a way of dressing that would pick them out as ethnic others just as surely as one might pick out a blond Chechen Muslim going through airport security. The Okies were an ethnic group, or an ethno-historical community with shared experiences and shared sources of meaning (embodied in material culture in the form of canned foods, orange cheese, Coors beer; in artistic culture as Bakersfield country; in spirituality as televangelism; in values as a love of independence and a suspicion of the federal government), and to deprive them of the ability to conceptualize themselves as such could not but deprive them of the ability to think about their plight in a lucid way.

It was bound, I mean, to lead them to stupid and reactionary political views, rooted most fundamentally in nativist resentment of non-‘white’ people both American and foreign, and in the valuing of self-sufficient plot-ownership (or, later, tract-house ownership) above community-based social welfare. The shift from ethno-historical community to ‘race’ occludes from view the various commonalities the dustbowl migrants might have with other ethno-historical communities, particularly African-American and Mexican agricultural laborers. An ethno-historical community can grasp that it has been shaped by the same forces that forged a neighboring community, whereas someone who thinks of himself in terms of ‘race’ could never grasp this, since races are conceived as essential and unchanging, and so as never having been historically forged at all. According to a very plausible strain of radical history, racial thinking in the United States has been aggressively imposed upon the self-understanding of disadvantaged communities precisely as a way of forestalling any possible recognition of common cause between these communities. In this respect, it seems reasonable to me to suggest that the Tea Party is a sort of revolutionary force manquée.

Have a Look

¶ Antique paper theatres. (WSJ)

¶ Portaits of the Mind. (GOOD)

Noted

¶ Tarantula Terror Study. (80 Beats)

Barry Obama’s childhood pals remember when. (NYT)

One time, recalled the elder son, Slamet Januadi, now 52, Mr. Obama asked a group of boys whether they wanted to grow up to be president, a soldier or a businessman. A president would own nothing while a soldier would possess weapons and a businessmen would have money, the young Obama explained.

Mr. Januadi and his younger brother, both of whom later joined the Indonesian military, said they wanted to become soldiers. Another boy, a future banker, said he would become a businessman.

“Then Barry said he would become president and order the soldier to guard him and the businessman to use his money to build him something,” Mr. Januadi said. “We told him, ‘You cheated. You didn’t give us those details.’ ”

Matins

¶ David Carr outlines the correct way of evaluating cable personality Keith Olbermann’s campaign contributions: the air time that he has given to Democratic Party candidates is vastly, vastly more valuable. MSNBC ought to re-instate the exile and put this embarrassment behind it. (Note: we have never seen Mr Olbermann’s show.)

Keith Olbermann was suspended for writing a check to support candidates. That was really dumb on Mr. Olbermann’s part. As a die-hard partisan, he had to know that his willingness to provide untrammeled airtime to liberal candidates was a form of in-kind contribution that his measly $7,200, given to three campaigns, could never match.

Then again, the man who suspended him, Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC News, threw down a gauntlet before the election in an interview with The New York Times: “Show me an example of us fund-raising.” Conservative bloggers happily obliged and came up with numerous examples, including Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, pitching for dollars on MSNBC.

MSNBC is enforcing a set of standards meant to apply either to another entity — NBC News — or another era, when news people had to act as if they didn’t have political rooting interests. The game has changed, but the rules remain the same, at least at some media outlets.

MSNBC ended up in a fight that resembled nothing so much as a brawl within a political party, with the base — in this case the audience — pushing back against the leadership. While Mr. Olbermann is not talking to the media, he is using Twitter to reach his supporters: “Greetings From Exile! A quick, overwhelmed, stunned THANK YOU for support that feels like a global hug & obviously left me tweetless. XO.”

Before its decision, there were more than 275,000 signatures on a petition demanding the return of Mr. Olbermann. The language seems less like the keening of a group of television viewers and more like an outcry from the progressive wing of the MSNBC Party.

Lauds

¶ Movie maven Jim Emerson tips us off to the blog of The Self-Styled Siren, who writes in a recent entry about having been allowed to watch anything old and black-and-white on television, but forbidden to see an R-fated movie until she was actually seventeen. This gave her an understanding of what good movies ought to be like that’s very familiar to us.

Result was that I grew up watching old movies and thinking this was the way movies were supposed to look, lush or spare, shadowy or sparkling, the camera lingering or gliding and no such thing as acne or pores. And this was how a movie was supposed to sound, resonant, highly individual voices speaking wonderful dialogue against the gentle sonic hiss of the soundtrack, a score trailing the action like a cloud of perfume. Without those things, I can still be enthralled. But sometimes the lack of them is a small barrier to intimacy. “I see you have pores. Gosh no darling, of course it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen them before. Is that a lamp on the side table, sweetness? You know, if we switch it on, we’ll have light coming from three points…”

As usual, I wind up going to my commenters for the real insight. There’s the friend who said simply, “There’s something in the rhythms of these movies that’s in tune with your own.” There’s David Ehrenstein, who maintains that “the 30s, not the 70s, was the great period for American commercial filmmaking,” citing James Whale, Dorothy Arzner and George Cukor as directors doing genuinely experimental work. And there’s Arthur S., who once remarked here that it isn’t nostalgia if what you’re watching is actually more daring and more radical than what’s playing at the multiplex. There’s an overarching style to classic cinema, but within it you can see astonishing variation and innovation, like poets ringing changes on sonnets or terza rima.

It is, essentially, an aesthetic preference like any other, one that was probably imprinted early by the circumstances of my childhood. Which brings me to my own children, now safely asleep. They watch a lot of Pixar, which is fine–Up and Wall*E? Brilliant. Spell-casters for sure. And heavily influenced by classic Hollywood. I haven’t watched that many old movies with my kids. At ages seven and four they are already more in tune with popular culture than Mom. That’s good in a lot of ways. Dragging Astaire and Rogers into everyday conversation didn’t exactly make me queen of the Alabama schoolyard. Maybe I should just let my brood continue like that.

Prime

¶ We had already come across the Erzinger hit-and-run story via MetaFilter when we saw that Felix Salmon had picked it up; as usual, we prefer to link to considered commentary than to regurgitate news items. Apparently on the theory that Denver money manager Joel Erzinger can make financial restitution to New York physician Stephen Milo, the District Attorney in whose jursidiction Vail lies has decided not to prosecute a felony charge. Income inequality has made greater (or more egregious) strides than we had imagined!

Erzinger immediately drove away from the scene of the crime, eventually stopping in a parking lot on the other side of town, where he called the Mercedes auto assistance service and asked that his car be towed.

This kind of egregious hit-and-run is, obviously, a very serious crime. Milo is incredulous at the suggestion from Erzinger’s attorneys “that Erzinger might have unknowingly suffered from sleep apnea”, and wants Erzinger to be charged with a felony. Justice must be served: the case “has always been about responsibility, not money”, he wrote to DA Mark Hurlbert.

[snip]

In other words, Erzinger has bought his way out of a felony charge, over the strenuous objections of his victim; it’s very unlikely that online petitions will do any good at this point. Just another thing to add to the list of things that money can buy, I suppose.

Tierce

¶ Peter Smith sensibly argues that the proper response to the scourge of Four Loko abuse is not a ban but a learning campaign that will teach adolescents how to drink instead of pretending that they don’t. (GOOD)

Perhaps what’s at stake are the larger cultural issues around drinking. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times, “[Four Loko is] a malt liquor in confectionary drag … serving as the clearest possible reminder that many drinkers aren’t seeking any particular culinary or aesthetic enjoyment. They’re taking a drug. The more festively it’s dressed and the more vacuously it goes down, the better.”

Prohibition came and went for good reason. Still, kids who aren’t exposed to drinking in appropriate and safe settings make mistakes, some of which will make the local police blotter. It’s entirely possible to drink “blackout in a can” in a reasonable and prudent manner, so maybe a ban is not the answer. What is in order? A better conversation about drinking. In an earlier debate over provisional drinking licenses (essentially a learners’ permit for inexperienced drinkers), David J. Hanson offered this bit of advice in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “It’s time to open the doors to constructive debate and to teach through trust and potential rather than through blame, accusation, and guilt. It’s time to move beyond the forbidden-fruit syndrome—and its tragic consequences.”

Sext

¶ Jessanne Collins refers to her brief stint as a copy editor for Demand Publications as “ill-fated,” but we can’t agree; she got a very funny piece out of the experience — not to mention $10.50 in carfare remuneration. (The Awl)

My role, as a “copy editor,” was roughly akin to that of Lucy’s with the candy wrapper. I was to be an intermediary between the web at large and the raw, reliably weird substance that results from the unlikely union of algorithmically created topic assignments and writers of, shall we say, widely variable competence. The actual nuts and bolts of style consistency and tone were part of it, of course. But they seemed to be peripheral to what I was actually being asked to do, which was to quality-check each piece of content according to a set of generic yet meticulously detailed standards. It fell on my shoulders to ensure not just that no dangling modifiers marred any directories of Jacuzzi-having hotels, but that the piece wasn’t plagiarized, written off the top of some Jacuzzi-having hotel aficionado’s head, based on obvious or non-information, referencing other websites, or plagued by any of the other myriad atrocities that web content can be subject to these days.

The overarching theme of the trilogy of how-to manuals, as far as I could tell using my admittedly rusty elementary reading comprehension skills, was “cut fluff.” A straightforward enough mission, and obviously, a necessary one. I was to ensure that as many sentences as possible began with vivid, actionable verbs. And that I could clearly picture in my head the step a reader was being instructed to take. If a piece was a total mess, I wasn’t supposed to spend time rewriting. Instead, I was to make very specifically worded comments (there were so many notes on phrasing said comments constructively and politely, I could only assume that this had been a point of prior contention) back to the author. The author then had a few days to turn a rewrite around. I’d review it again, and then I could approve it for publication or reject it if it was still too fluffy or sucky. At the time of publication or rejection I’d also rank the veracity of the article on a numerical scale, and have the opportunity to make notes about the author for internal review.

And then? Then I would get paid $3.50.

Nones

¶ We don’t want to complain, but we do wish that President Obama had mentioned something besides automobiles in his Op-Ed piece about exports — trade suddenly being the subject of his mission to India and Korea — if only because we’d like to know what this country is still manufacturing for export. (NYT)

The great challenge of our time is to make sure that America is ready to compete for the jobs and industries of the future. It can be tempting, in times of economic difficulty, to turn inward, away from trade and commerce with other nations. But in our interconnected world, that is not a path to growth, and that is not a path to jobs. We cannot be shut out of these markets. Our government, together with American businesses and workers, must take steps to promote and sell our goods and services abroad — particularly in Asia. That’s how we’ll create jobs, prosperity and an economy that’s built on a stronger foundation.

If this concluding paragraph makes the United States sound like an emerging market, there’s a reason.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Kevin Frazier flourishes a keeper review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary, with especial attention to the novel’s echoes of Don Quixote.

Emma is full of this alertness, a heady combination of physical, emotional, and intellectual responsiveness that makes her unique in Flaubert’s writing.  Though it’s common for critics to ignore her intelligence, she is by a wide margin the smartest and most perceptive of the novel’s main characters.  The world gives Don Quixote a beating for his romanticism, but he is usually in the honorable position of standing up for his convictions against external circumstances—circumstances that he amusingly chooses to reinterpret to his advantage.  Emma, in contrast, gives most of her beatings to herself.  She faces the difficult task of finding something to believe in when she must constantly fight her own mixed feelings.  She is far too fierce for the tame choices available to her, and far too wise to find fulfillment in the limits of her socially allotted slots as either a contented wife or a secret adulteress.

Often in the novel we join her at the window as she looks outside and struggles with the subtleties of her dissatisfaction.  She wonders how to “express an uneasiness so intangible, one that changes shape like a cloud, that changes direction like the wind…”  At times she works towards a tentative feminist critique, and ponders how much more freedom her hoped-for son might someday enjoy compared to her.  She sees quite clearly that much of her sense of confinement comes from the restraints placed on her as a woman, “always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.”  Soon the gap between what she actually thinks and what she can openly admit grows intolerable:

She was sometimes surprised at the shocking conjectures that entered her mind; and yet she had to keep smiling, hear herself say again and again that she was happy, pretend to be happy, let everyone believe it…

Compline

¶ Zadie Smith’s powerful meditation on Facebook (posing as a review of The Social Network) is the talk of the town. As the footnote that we’ve included suggests, old folks like us probably don’t get what’s most potent — and dangerously reductive — about Facebook in its current version.  (NYRB)

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?

We don’t know why, but the intriguing footnote at the end of this quote (#4) has been truncated online. The full footnote reads:

Perhaps the reason why there has not been more resistance to social networking among older people is because 1.0 people do not use Web 2.0 software in the way 2.0 people do. An analogous situation can be found in the way the two generations use cell phones. For me, text messaging is simply a new medium for an old form of communication: I write to my friends in heavily punctuated, fully expressive, standard English sentences—and they write back to me in the same way. Text-speak is unknown between us. Our relationship with the English language predates our relationships with our phones.

Not so for the 2.0 kids. When it comes to Facebook the same principle applies. For most users over thirty-five, Facebook represents only their e-mail accounts turned outward to face the world. A simple tool, not an avatar. We are not embedded in this software in the same way. 1.0 people still instinctively believe , as Lanier has it, that “what makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.” But what if 2.0 people fee their socially networked selves genuinely represent them to completion?

Have a Look

¶ A Jolly Day Out in London. (The Age of Uncertainty)

¶ Prank casserole. (The Awl)

Noted

¶ Essential books — in 1974. Where are they now? (Guardian; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Congressman-elect Nan Hayworth, a graduate of Princeton and Cornell Medical College, demonstrates the bankruptcy of higher education in America.

Are we perfect? No. But we are the greatest nation ever to exist. I do believe in American exceptionalism with all my heart, and that’s why I ran, because American exceptionalism comes from free enterprise.

Apologies are in order for last night’s somewhat testy paragraphs about circling like a dog. It was one of those late-night mistakes; too tired to write about what was really on my mind (that’s what I’m doing now), but determined not to write about what was bothering me (never finding the time to write about what’s on my mind, a topic that I find at least Ï€ times more irritating than you do), I turned my attention to a problem that I’m actually well on the way to solving. Perhaps that’s what made it possible to make use of the metaphorical frustration of endless circling: the end is in sight.

The problem is, in a word, reviews. I don’t write reviews. A review is a notice designed to steer the buying public to or from books, plays, movies, and other optional entertainments. Ideally, a reviewer communicates her interest and enthusiasm (or their opposites) without giving away too much of the novelty that the buying public rightly craves. Even more important than getting the facts right, for a reviewer, is knowing the language and expectations of his readership; without this, the reviewer will say either too much or not enough. Reviewing is a service industry, designed to help people save and spend time and money wisely. It is not to be confused with criticism.

Don’t think me sniffy. Reviewing is very hard work, and you’d think that it would be in the interest of arts providers to see that it is done well. They don’t, and the job is generally pretty badly done. Week after week, I peruse the pages of The New York Times Book Review and am amazed by the lack of rigor and even attentiveness. As I parcel out my complaints in this area elsewhere in my digital domain, I’ll say no more about it now, except to note that every now and then someone slips in what is effectively a good blog entry. I’ll come back to that.

What I have to say about the books that I read (and the movies that I see, but not so much the plays and concerts that I attend), snaps naturally into two kinds of writing, each lying on one side or the other of the well-done review. For my Web sites, Portico and now Civil Pleasures, I write what used to be called “appreciations.” These are intended for people who have read the book in question and are curious to see what others have to say about it. The appreciation is in many functional ways an inversion of the review: spoilers are not a problem, but frothy enthusiasm is out of place. The accent shifts from the fun to be had to the source of the fun.

Appreciations may not be harder to write than book reviews, but they require a good deal of thought, and plenty of rumination, too — by which I mean that you can’t expect to appreciate a book the day after you put it down. Judgments must settle and clarify. In most cases, the book has to be read a second time before it can be written about comprehensively — comprehensiveness being, I hasten to note, the last thing that the consumer of a book review is interested in. What I’ve really been circling, this past year, is the problem of finding time for that second reading, not to mention the writing-up itself.

The other kind of writing is about me, not the book. It’s about how I feel the day after putting it down — or, even better, the minute after. This isn’t as easy at looks, but it is the sort of thing that I can usually write off the top of my head. Why haven’t I done it more often? Well, I’m still catching up to the iPad, and to what I call “reading the Internet.” In the bad old days, blog entries had to be kept short, no matter how easy they might be to read. The difference between the blog entry and the Web page became for me the difference not between improvisational and deliberate but between short and long. Writing short doesn’t come naturally to me. As is already evident right here.

In any case: calling for New Forms! (With hopes of being less futile than Konstantin Gavrilovich), I offer a roundup of some books that I’ve read recently.

¶ I’ll begin with the book that I mentioned last night, Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, translated by Damion Searle. The German original (Komödie in moll) appeared in 1947, but has only just been rendered in English. The time is right, I think. Until very recently, Comedy would have been read as a Holocaust book, and readers might have objected to its mordantly smiling tone. (Keilson, it must be noted, is of Jewish background; he is also still with us, at the age of 100 — 101 next month.) Very little can be said to people who have not read the book through (it’s quite short, a novella with the heft of a novel).

By the third page, we have learned all the basic plot elements (save one, a detail that gives the book a propulsive kick about twenty pages before the end). Toward the end of World War II, somewhere in a coastal city in the Netherlands, a stranger who has been hiding in an upstairs room of the home of a married couple has now taken ill, and is about to die — of natural causes! A somewhat hasty search indicates that the stranger’s being a Jew is not stated until page 25, but anyone who requires that disclosure is too young to be reading this novel on general grounds. By page 25, by the way, the stranger — his hosts call him “Nico” — is long dead. And yet, thanks to the author’s agile shifts of time frame, never obtrusive but never missed, either, we’ll hear a lot more from Nico, and in a way he has the last word. But the book is not about Nico. It is about his beneficiaries, Wim and Marie.

Wim and Marie are good people, and at no point in the story do they do anything that isn’t morally unexceptionable. There is nothing special about them — Keilson almost goes overboard in stressing their ordinariness. (But only almost.) They do fret a bit, Marie especially. It turns out that doing the right thing — hiding a Jew in their home is presented as a “patriotic” act — is complicated, and it’s easy to trip over complications. Let’s just say that, not being saints, Wim and Marie expect, however unconsciously, to reap a reward for saving Nico — or at least for doing everything that they can to save him. Comedy in a Minor Key is about how circumstances force Wim and Marie to confront their expectations, and, in the process, lose their innocence. It occurred to me as I was brisking through the last pages of the novel that Keilson has retold the Adam and Eve story, only without the damning transgression (quite the reverse), and without the exile from Paradise. But Wim and Marie do eat from the tree of knowledge, however unknowingly, and the result is that Paradise goes up in smoke as if it never existed.

I have to point out that this is one of the best-titled books ever. It is a comedy, and the comedy is in a minor key. There are no laughs, but almost every page brings a smile. We’re ready for Keilson’s ironies; we’re beginning not to be ashamed of how poorly we understand ourselves. Unpacking Keilson’s immense narrative skill can’t be attempted, though, until the finale has been digested a bit. In most suspenseful books, you want to know how the story comes out. In Comedy, you’ve got to see how it comes out before you know what the story really was.

When I mentioned this book to a doctor the other day, she told me that she has in-laws who were “in the camps,” and that they’re very prone to making odious distinctions about suffering: people who were hidden through the war didn’t, in their view, suffer as much as people in the camps did. I wrote down the information on a prescription form — for her, not for her in-laws. They’re past saving: what could be more American than competing about suffering?

¶ Walks With Men is a comeback event for Ann Beattie. (Isn’t it?) Where “a novel” would appear on the cover, it says “fiction” instead. It’s about the same length as Comedy in a Minor Key, and that’s about all that the two books have in common. I read the book a few weeks ago, and too much time ahs passed for me to make any positive statements about it, but I can say that it took me for a walk down memory lane, back to the good old days when the exhibition of a pleasant personality provoked the scorn and contempt of people who considered themselves intelligent. Ms Beattie’s narrative style is similarly unhelpful. If her tone of voice weren’t so bland and impersonal, her book would be one long act of rudeness. It reminded me how angry I used to be at my bright college friends for wearing the tedious and annoying patina of disaffection. Beattie suggests that it would be thick to allocate the attention that she pays to the parts of her story to their relative importance. 

Jane Jay Costner, a writer who had a splash and then a big success not longer after getting out of college — we’re in the Eighties — tells us how she fell in with another writer, a man called Neil. Walks With Men ought to be all about Neil, but it’s not; there’s also the man whom Jane left in order to be with Neil. Plus a couple of cutups who live in Jane’s building in Chelsea. Jane almost leaves Neil when she finds out (from his wife) that he’s married, but she doesn’t. Neil gets a divorce and marries Jane. In what feels like a very short time, Neil tells Jane that he is going to disappear, becoming legally dead. In the forty pages between the wedding and this announcement, about ten pages go to a drama involving Jane’s old boyfriend, and even more than that are divided between Neil’s wife (sans Neil) and Jane’s goofy housemates. Pffft! Neil’s gone. Perhaps this is how it ought to be, given Neil’s fondness for astute-sounding aphorisms. Perhaps an editor worried that any more of Neil would cause readers to tear the book apart with their bare hands. Worse, maybe someone told Ms Beattie that Neil is funny. Well, he is, in a pathetic sort of way.

• When you travel to Europe, never wear a fragrance from the country you’re in. In France, wear a perfume made in Italy.
• Notice who the cinematographer is. In the future, see movies based on that.
• When depressed, look at Halsman’s photographs of people jumping, especially the Duchess of Windsor.

Walks With Men reminds me of the time when pompous buffoons gave the exhibition of a well-stocked mind the bad reputation that it has to this day. Back in the early Eighties, when Ann Beattie was The New Yorker‘s must-read short story writer, I despaired of ever being so sophisticated. Now I just cluck my tongue. I can’t say that I minded finding out what Beattie is up to these days.

¶ The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson. Why did I read this book? It had just won the Man Booker Prize when I found it on a table at Crawford Doyle, out in paper already. I can’t have had any idea that it would remind me David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury — two writers named by James Wood in his withering New Yorker piece — but I did feel that reading a comedy about Jewishness would be daring and different. Different because I avoid ethnic fiction, although not so rigorously as I used to do. Daring because I grew up in a Westchester suburb where no one would sell a house to a Jew, and my shame moots any and all attempts to make judgments “about Jews.”

I happened to like Jacobson’s tone of voice right away, and I was happy to spend time in his company. But his story is not even clear enough to be dismissed as “shaggy dog.” Don’t worry about my summarizing the plot for you, because I wouldn’t want to misrepresent the book as having one. This isn’t to say that nothing happens — but it’s pretty much one-damned-thing-after-another, until we have the pleasant sense of knowing his characters — three men and two women — about as well as we need to know them. The screech of gears at the very end, where Jacobson hastily improvises a dramatic finale, was so loud that I couldn’t make sense of what was actually happening.

I could see quite clearly that The Finkler Question would have driven me crazy as recently as ten years ago. Age has definitely altered my tolerance. Jacobson’s characters spout a great deal of flash-frozen protein about Israel and anti-Semitism, but they do it so well, with such zesty panache, that I just smiled along with them. The absence of a real plot was a good thing, too; it tended to diminish the characters’ responsibility for their actions — very much as friendship does.  

This is how it is: I circle and circle and circle, like the Labrador retriever I grew up with. I am not going to settle down until the conditions are right, and the orientation is correct. Star — so called for the obvious reason, a patch of white on her brow — rarely spun more than six revolutions. I’ve been circling for over a year.

But then, I’m a human being; even lying down is more complicated. Mere comfort isn’t the only consideration. Sometimes, the reason for my not saying anything amounts to no more than the difficulty of deciding where to say it. Here, at a blog? Or at Civil Pleasures, contrapositively out of time, bookishly permanent? Where to keep a diary? Where to talk about the movie that I saw last Friday (Wild Target) but still haven’t found the moment for commenting on? Circling like Star, I say nothing.

So I thought that I would at least acknowledge the circling.

From the very start of my Web site life, back in 2000, I’ve been perplexed by a division that gets absolutely no attention. Let’s say that I’ve jsut read a great book — Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, say. How to write about it? You can’t say anything about this book that will be truly interesting over the long term without talking about what happens at the end of the book. Why? Because, at least as I see it, Comedy in a Minor Key is a book about  an Adam and Eve whose expulsion from paradise does not involve a physical dislocation. Nor do this Adam and Eve sin — on the contrary! But how to write about all of this without worrying about spoilers? I want to write something that will be interesting long after everyone has read it, has — as I believe will happen — been taught the book in high school. I’m not particularly interested in recommending it to people who haven’t heard of it: there’s no future in that. (Imagine writing a piece for readers who had never heard of Hamlet.) And, given my conviction that you get more out of a story if you know how it comes out, I am not sympathetic to readers who treasure what really does seem to me to be the meretriciousness of “surprise.” Comedy in a Minor Key was surprising for me only because the review in the Times was incompetent. I’d have enjoyed it more, on the first read, if I’d known where it was really going.

Circling, then, until I figure all of this  this out. And circling about plenty else, too.

¶ My adoptive mother, who died at the age of 59 in early 1977,  was born today in 1918, on what came to be known as “false Armistice” day. My daughter will celebrate her next birthday on Thursday next, the anniversary of the actual end of World War I. Just being born between Scorpios wouldn’t have been good enough for the likes of a Capricorn like me.

{The next Daily Office entry will appear on Monday, 8 November.}

Matins

¶ We’ve looked at Sabrina Tavernise’s story about Washington’s storeys, but we can’t find what triggered it. As you know, an old Act of Congress limits the height of buildings in the nation’s capital to a multiple of the width of the street on which they stand. This most excellent law is not about to be repealed or seriously amended — or is it?

Now, on the act’s centennial, a small tribe of developers, architects and urban experts are questioning the orthodoxy of the rule’s application. A modest change, they argue, would inject some vitality into the urban scene, would allow for greener construction, and could eventually deliver bigger tax receipts for the badly pinched city budget, currently in a hole of about $175 million.

But raising the limit is nothing short of sacrilege for preservationists here, who fear that any change, however slight, will open the door to more.

“I don’t think you get it — it’s a very special place,” said Ann Hargrove, a resident and ardent defender of the limit. “Our capital was designed in such a special way to be different. One great feature is its height.”

It is an emotional debate, largely because the limit has defined Washington’s character for generations. Its original designer and planner, Pierre L’Enfant, came from Paris, another low-built city, and Washington residents say they love its light, airy quality, contributing to the city’s “livable” feel.

For some, that is a dubious distinction, not unlike calling a woman you went out with for one date, and one date only, “nice.” Without high-rise residential buildings to sustain a vibrant shopping and restaurant scene, downtown D.C. tends to empty out at night and on weekends.

If there is a movement to change the law, Ms Tavernise is helping it to keep a low profile.

Lauds

¶ Here’s good news: HM Government have postponed the grant of an export license for JMW Turner’s Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino, to give British buyers a chance to meet the Getty Museum’s winning auction bid. Campo Vaccino is a pendant to Turner’s Ancient Rome, and it belongs alongside it, at the Tate. (LA Times; via Arts Journal)

The Getty had bid for the Turner knowing that the sale could be negated, as happened in 2004, when the National Gallery of London was able to match the $46.6 million price the Getty had agreed to pay  to buy Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks” from the Duke of Northumberland. In 2005, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge balked the Getty’s bid to acquire the Macclesfield Psalter, a medieval illustrated manuscript, for $3.2 million.

“We anticipated there would be a decision to delay the export license,” David Bomford, the Getty Museum’s acting director, said Wednesday in a prepared statement. “We greatly respect the export process in the U.K. and look forward to the possibility of having this masterpiece in our collection.”

In a 2005 commentary for The Times, James Fenton, a trustee of the National Gallery of London, noted after the failed bids for the Psalter and the Raphael, that “it makes sense for the Getty to have a go at bidding for the probably unobtainable, on the principle that you never know your luck.”

Prime

¶ For the most concise account of the pros and cons of Quantitative Easing II is, predictably, Yves Smith’s, at Naked Capitalism. But Felix Salmon makes a important general point about the way in which the plan was announced by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

So while I welcome Bernanke trying to explain his actions in the form of an op-ed, I’d be much happier if he did so in the form of a press conference, or some other place where people could ask him questions. He’s good at communicating; why doesn’t he use those skills better?

Tierce

¶ From the Dept of Whizbang (meaning, don’t hold your breath), researchers have brought the refresh rate for holographic teleprojections down from four minutes to two seconds. Thet’s about two-thirds of the way  to an acceptable rate of 30 times per second. The secret ingredient is a new type of plastic. (Wired Science)

Then the researchers trained the laser onto a newly developed plastic called a photoreactive polymer, which is coated with a material that converts light into electrical charges that create and store the image. The charges move around the plastic in such a way that when light bounces off the material, it reaches your eyes as if it had bounced off the toy plane or the researcher’s head.

“With this material, since you can move the charge around, you can erase the hologram and write another hologram on it,” Blanche said.

Two years ago, Peyghambarian’s team made a similar material that could only refresh the image every four minutes. The images in that material were also disturbed by vibrations and temperature changes, so the screen had to be kept in a highly controlled box.

The new material rewrites every two seconds, a 100-fold improvement, and isn’t bothered by changes to its environment, the researchers say.

Sext

¶ Even more whizbang: James Somers imagines the Deskotron, the perfect personal assistant. The bit at the end would be the beauty part. (jsomers.net)

He would understand strategic relationships between tasklets. By that I mean that he would understand which tasklets feed well into one another. For instance, I might write better after perusing my Google Reader queue, or I might write worse; deskotron would know which. He would know how many programming tasklets I can do before getting exhausted, and how to stagger hard and easy tasklets to squeeze the most effort out of me. He would know that I don’t like to read too many serious magazine articles in a row, and that I have to be primed in a certain way before I want to solve a Project Euler problem.

deskotron would be like a good personal trainer, demanding nearly too much of me, holding me to my commitments, pushing me when I falter, and knowing when to give me a break. He would monitor my mood and gauge my engagement. He would be like the logical extension of that Mercedes feature that wakes you up when you doze off.

With all this, deskotron would be able to dynamically pack my days. He would turn me into one of those high-powered guys who’s scheduled down to the minute, except that I wouldn’t feel constrained by him. Instead, I’d feel like he had the perfect answer every time I asked, “What’s next?” 

Nones

¶ In Hanoi, last weekend, the members of ASEAN held a summit meeting with China. China continues, however, to insist on treating its South China Sea claims as bilateral agreements with ASEAN members. Simon Roughneen reports, at Asia Times.

In recent months, China has alarmed countries in Southeast and East Asia with some remarkably strident Freudian slips, which wary neighbors have interpreted as the hegemonic aspirations behind Beijing’s “peaceful rise” rhetoric. Some influential commentators, including American Walter Russell Mead, have made the historical analogy with post-Bismarck Germany, which famously, and disastrously, abandoned the Iron Chancellor’s relatively cautious diplomacy for a more strident and clumsy approach under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In July, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reminded Southeast Asian countries that China is a big country. This not-so-subtle language amplified alarm bells set off when US officials leaked Chinese statements that the South China Sea is viewed by Beijing as a “core interest”, a term usually used to describe its claims over Taiwan and Tibet. ASEAN members Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and non-ASEAN Taiwan, all have competing claims in the maritime area.

Vespers

¶ We thought that the VQR was in abeyance, but Kyle Minor caught an extraordinary interview with Alice Munro (with Lisa Dickler Awano) that, among other things, explains that blush-making dinner-for-two in the celebrated story, “Wenlock Edge.”

LDA: At one point in the story, while the student is at the home of a near-stranger, an older man named Mr. Purvis, she finds herself complying with his wishes, although they make her feel uncomfortable. Mr. Purvis, who is fully dressed, desires that she sit naked at his dining room table while they eat together. Later, while she is still undressed, he leads the way into his library, where he asks her to sit in a revealing way while she reads poems to him from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Although he doesn’t use force to win his way, the student doesn’t refuse him.

AM: Actually that was something someone told me that had happened, but I wanted very much to use it in a way of finding out why the girl would do that, and what she would feel like before and afterwards. So I put myself in that position, thinking it out.

After that story was published, I was at a party, and the men there all thought it was unrealistic; they thought it would never happen. And the women all said, “Oh, yeah?” I think (the men) wanted to think that way. Because what the student does is her own investigation, which she doesn’t realize the implications of. She really thinks that she is in power, even though it’s a thing she has to force herself to do. She doesn’t realize actually how much power Mr. Purvis has over her and her mind and her future until it’s all over.

LDA: Both the student protagonist and her roommate, Nina, seem like victims to me.

AM: The student has all kinds of smarts to keep her afloat in the world. But Nina is totally a victim because she has nothing. And Nina finds an implausible sort of romance that she is nevertheless willing to invest in and our heroine doesn’t even allow her to keep that. So in a way, it’s a bleak story. But I don’t think it’s bleak in terms of being not what people would do. “Dimensions,” the first story in the book is fairly unusual—it’s an extreme story—and I don’t think “Wenlock Edge” is extreme.

Compline

¶ Simon Johnson hopes that President Obama will boldly confute incoming House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s claim to be a fiscal conservative, which Mr Johnson challenges on three grounds (Mr Ryan wants to cut taxes, has no spending cuts in mind beyond the blather of the “Pledge to America,” and has yet to say anything about Medicare’s future). (The Baseline Scenario)

Mr. Ryan has an important job in the next Congress and will no doubt have great influence on Republican policy in the run up to the 2012 presidential election.

The White House would do well to take him and his colleagues on directly.  We should have the debate about our long-term fiscal future and lay out a path to sustainability that is consistent with an economic recovery. 

It is up to the Obama administration to explain clearly and widely why Mr. Ryan’s proposals do not deal with the first order problems that have increased government debt dramatically in the past decade and that threaten future fiscal stability.  Let us hope the White House has learned from the midterms that there are dire electoral consequences when the president shrinks from directly confronting misleading ideas.

Have a Look

¶ Sketches from Chris Roth’s jury duty. (The Rumpus)

¶ Written in stone. (Letters of Note)

¶ “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” for our whatevs times. (GOOD)

Noted

¶ Google’s “creepy line.” (Short Sharp Science.)

Why we worship and adore Jenny Diski:

Somewhere in their teens or early twenties just about everyone discovers the inter-connectedness of things material and metaphysical, and tells anyone who’ll listen about the rose window at Chartres and the orbits of Venus and how they’re almost exactly the same, and about homeostasis and the amazing balance between the alpha rhythms of the brain and the tides, and how prehistoric peoples conserved and limited their eco-footprint while drawing rose-like patterns in stone, and that everything is everything, and everything is in that oceanic mystic moment when, just before the curtain closes again, you can see precisely how it all fits together. I know about all that and it’s lovely. But then, for those of us who don’t have our toothpaste squeezed onto our toothbrush each night, there’s the business of regular life, of time and consequence, and of how actually to live in and deal with our own particular sector of the oneness.

The context of these remarks (most amusing) really doesn’t matter.

Matins

¶ In “Caucasion Nation,” Marco Roth  reflects on racism in America in its surreptitious but no less malignant modern form: the crisis of “white victimhood.” We haven’t read anything so in accord with our own view of the problem — ever. (n + 1; via 3 Quarks Daily)

In spite of Sherrod’s vindication, the affair was another political triumph for the right. The White House went no further than to blame the fake scandal on technology and the 24-hour news environment, probably because polls show that distrust of the media is bipartisan. The actual content of the fake scandal, unlike its form, could hardly be discussed by respectable parties. We all know that racism has been sufficiently anathematized in America that it can no longer present itself directly, perhaps no longer even to the minds of those who engage in it. A paradoxical consequence of this apparent progress is that only in extreme cases can racism be referred to publicly by people in a position to condemn it. One begins to think of race in Obama’s America like sex in some caricature of Freud’s Vienna: simultaneously the main theme of all conversation, and the one that can’t be mentioned. Instead of being “overcome,” historic American racism against nonwhite people has gone into deep cover and, with the irrefutable illogic of the unconscious, emerged as a newfangled American antiracism for the protection of white people.

[snip]

Despite “40 acres and a mule” talk of land redistribution, most freed slaves signed contracts to sharecrop for their former masters within a few months of the war’s official end. Defeated only on the battlefield, the Confederate army rapidly reorganized into the rifle clubs and citizens’ watch councils that would come to be known as the Ku Klux Klan. President Andrew Johnson granted full amnesty to all but a handful of secessionist Southern representatives, because he was their President too, and one year after Lee’s surrender, a former slave-hunter turned gunman could openly plot race murder, writing in a local paper about the need to “thin the niggers out and drive them to their holes.” The Civil War continued by other means and the South did rise again.

Racist vigilante groups derived a sense of their legitimacy from the idea that they were defending themselves against lawless blacks and Northern “carpetbaggers.” Their tactics were the perennial tactics of terrorists everywhere: attacks on lines of communication, both railway and telegraph; attacks on schools and teachers who wanted to educate the minority population; night visits to prominent but poorly protected ideological opponents. Cross burning happened later. In those early days, the Klan was likely just to beat a man for twenty minutes with a horse stirrup before either hanging him or agreeing to let him go as a warning to others. More relevant for our more repressed era, they also scored a remarkable PR success with the aid of rehabilitated Southern congressmen, who dismissed reports of white Southern violence as mere “waving the bloody shirt”; that is, as fictions spread by northern “radicals” to incite more civil violence. In a 2008 case study of what he calls “terror after Appomattox” in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, the historian Stephen Budiansky concludes that the Confederate vigilantes “made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency.”

Lauds

¶ We knew that David Hockney began creating art on his iPhone the moment he got one; we’re not surprised to find that he has moved on to the iPad. Nor is it really unexpected of him to prefer to display his digital art on the tablet as well — instead of printing and framing it. (BBC; via Arts Journal)

When he’s worked with computers in the past he has printed the images and framed them before hanging them on the gallery wall.

But for the Paris show, he did not want to display copies. Instead, he wants visitors to see the works just as he created them with his fingers on the various iPads.

Visitors to the show are shown this process up close.

Inside the cathedral-like space, with low-lighting to enhance the luminosity of the images on the iPad, visitors are also treated to a short film in which he snappily draws the Eiffel Tower in real time.

[snip]

“You know sometimes I get so carried away, I wipe my fingers at the end thinking that I’ve got paint on them.”

Prime

¶ Felix Salmon is back, and he has lost no time picking up on a guest post by Barbara Kiviat that we linked tothe other day about whether financial regulation ought to be rules-based or principle-based. Felix agrees with the Michael Lewis rule that Barbara captured, banning “any sort of position-taking at the giant publicly-owned banks.” He goes further to make an extraordinarily interesting point, one that we’re still chewing on.

More generally, I suspect that a lot of people who blame Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the repeal of Glass-Steagal) for the financial crisis should really be blaming the broker-dealers going public instead. After all, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were both entirely Glass-Steagal compliant, as, for that matter, were Fannie and Freddie and AIG. The problem wasn’t that they were merged with commercial banks; the problem was that they had far more leverage than any private partnership would ever be comfortable with.

People who blame the repeal of Glass-Steagall &c — that would be us.  

Tierce

¶ Tyler Cowen tips us off to the blog of former Scientific American editor John Rennie, The Gleaming Retort. (And he has us on “retort,” always our favorite piece of chemistry-set glassware.) In “Height, Health Care, and I Q,” Mr Rennie makes a very strong case for attributing variations across populations to environmental, rather than genetic, factors.

What’s noteworthy about this observation that the varying heights of populations are not limited primarily by their genetic differences is that the best estimates peg the heritability of height at around 80 percent. That is, within a population in a consistent environment, 80 percent of the variation in height owes to genetic factors. (Or if you prefer, your parents’ height was 80 percent predictive of your own because their height suggested how much your height might vary from the mean.) In the case of height, those genetic factors are still rather obscure—a Nature Genetics paper published last summer suggested that tiny nudges might be scattered throughout the genome rather than concentrating within a few clearly identifiable “tallness” or “shortness” alleles. But whatever the case, two facts are undeniable: (1) a genetic signal in height is undeniable, and (2) environmental influences can swamp—not erase, but overwhelm—the variation otherwise attributable to genetics, which is why the traditionally short Japanese are nearly the height of Americans now and we are nine inches taller than the Frenchmen who stormed the Bastille.

Remember this the next time you read about the genetics of I.Q. and the arguments that are framed around differences in intelligence between races or other population groups. The heritability of I.Q. can be hard even to define (read this lengthy but worthwhile post by Cosma Shalizi to understand why) but good estimates often place it at around 50 percent—well below that of height. Environmental influences on I.Q. should therefore be huge, and one should be very skeptical of arguments that imply (or state outright) that any alleged differences between those groups are innate or unchangeable. Indeed, if Komlos and his colleagues are right that differences in health care explain the plateau in U.S. height, one might expect that those same health care differences—which certainly correlate with economic status and race in this country—could have a very marked effect on I.Q., too.

Sext

¶ Someone’s gotta do it, and Roxane Gay steps up to the plate. She not only makes the case for money, but she suggests that, in the wake of the Virginia Quarterly Review debacle, everybody in the lit world did.  

Poverty is not awesome. I cannot say I am at all acquainted with poverty but I have certainly seen it (both relatively, in the US, and absolutely, abroad). Graduate school taught me that it’s a pain in the ass to live on an extremely tight budget. There was nothing cool or special about it. Just because we can live on some absurdly low sum of money does not mean we should if it is within our means to do otherwise. Just because we can produce a good literary magazine on, say, $5,000 a year, doesn’t mean we should turn our noses up at producing a magazine for $25,000 a year or even $250,000 a year.

When the VQR story broke, a lot of people, myself included, were simply staggered by the kind of money they had to work with–not thousands or tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of dollars. The death of Kevin Morrissey and the accusations of bullying were troubling and tragic, but really, it was the money we were interested in discussing. Being able to produce a magazine with that kind of capital was (and is) simply flabbergasting. Many of us began composing wish lists of everything we could do with a mere fraction of the VQR money (unicorns! ponies! cupcakes!) and there was an undercurrent of anger in many of the discussions. We weren’t worried about a man’s unfortunate passing or the events leading up to his death. We were outraged, I think, that a magazine dared to spend money, and a lot of it and did so without explanation or apology.

Nones

¶ Yves Smith, who lived in Australia for a few years, insists that they’ve got some things terribly wrong Down Under; but, when it comes to elections, they put us to shame. No TV ads, and no shirking the ballot.

One of their strong points was politicking and voting. Australia didn’t, and I hope still does not, permit paid TV ads. Each party (or was it candidate? I never was clear on the mechanics) who scored above a very low threshold got a certain amount of free air time. This took the big reason for fundraising out of the picture. And the result, a limit on how much TV advertising their was in total, seemed to have the effect that people got proportionately more of their information about politics via print, which allows for longer form discussion.

Another interesting feature was that voting is a duty not a right. I was surprised at about month three in my apartment there to get a sternly-worded official notice, which wanted to know who the hell I was and why hadn’t I voted. If you don’t vote, you get fined.

Vespers

¶ As Yevgeniya Traps argues, in her discussion of Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker winner at The Millions, the real “Finkler Question” is one of just how different Jews are from everybody else. Not that it can be answered clearly; but one point that the book doesn’t make is the Family-of-Man thesis that Jews are “just like everybody else.”  And she turns to the author himself for an eloquent rebuttal.

Some British reviewers have suggested that the novel’s concern with Jewishness is merely cover for a larger concern with the self. Writing about the novel in the Observer, Edward Docx concludes that “Jewishness” is here “a metaphor for human culture in general.” This is true in so far as The Finkler Question is finally interested in the way a particular personal identity intersects with the larger world and in what it means to be an outsider in the very worlds that we expect to be most welcoming. But it also seems false to deny the particularity of the way in which such issues are explored in The Finkler Question. For one thing, there is Jacobson’s own identity, which, despite his lack of religious feeling, he has repeatedly identified as Jewish: “What I feel is that I have a Jewish mind, I have a Jewish intelligence,” he remarked in a 2004 interview with Tablet Magazine. “I feel linked to previous Jewish minds of the past. I don’t know what kind of trouble this gets somebody into, a disputatious mind. What a Jew is has been made by the experience of 5,000 years, that’s what shapes the Jewish sense of humor, that’s what shaped Jewish pugnacity or tenaciousness.” There seems to be, for Jacobson, a personal concern with what it means to be a Jewish writer, especially in a country that has given rise to a number of anti-Israel boycotts, measures that Jacobson has publicly opposed, and it is this concern that gives The Finkler Question so much of its energy, its frisson. Having said that, it would indeed, be unfortunate to reduce the novel to identity politics, or, rather, to any one set of identity politics, given Jacobson’s enthusiasm for poking fun at the highmindedness brought to discussions of what it means to be anything. And anyway, what the novel is about is hardly half as important as how it goes about being about anything. The Finkler Question is never portentous, never precious. It swells with laughter and with sorrow, and you are glad to be its reader, whatever your identity.

Compline

¶ At Salon, Michael Humphrey interviews Ted Fishman, author of Shock of Gray, a book about “How old people will remake the world.” We certainly sat up. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

You have a section title in your book called “Why We Don’t Like Old People.” Do you really think we don’t?

I think it is true. In general, we don’t like them because for people who are not in late life yet, late life remains a mystery. And it’s a mystery fraught with danger. Lots of things start happening to people at age 60 and the people who are on the young side of that divide see those as frightening and threatening. But there’s also another divide: We think very differently about people in our own lives who are above that age than we do about the general population above that age.

There’s a notion that certain cultures do better by their elderly than we Americans do. You looked at this as a worldwide phenomenon. What did you conclude?

One of the really dumbfounding truths of the book is that very often the places that insist that they are the most loyal and faithful to their families are the places that do the most violence to them. As soon there are geographic distances, the things that once bound the family break up very rapidly. Almost all these very traditional places have driven down birthrates to among the lowest in the world. I think there’s a relationship between the mythologies — and expectations of people to be bound to their families — and the desperation to escape those bonds.

Have a Look

¶ Antonio Rubino. (The Rumpus)

Noted

¶ Amazing retinal implant. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

¶ Facebook knows when you will break up. (GOOD)

Carl Paladino conceded the New York gubernatorial election with characteristic aplomb. (via Joe.My.God)

Eventually, he addressed Cuomo, saying he had called his Democratic opponent to concede. “I offer Mr. Cuomo my best wishes for him in his work as New York State’s next governor,” he said.

Then Paladino brought out a baseball bat, reminding the audience of the one he said he’d bring to Albany if elected governor. He offered it to Cuomo, saying the governor-elect could use it or leave it untouched — and “run the risk of having it wielded against you.”

Matins

¶ At The New Yorker Online, Eric Osnos posts a bracing Letter from China: what we look like to the Chinese as we thrash through the midterms. Actually, it makes more sense to us than anything we’ve heard here.

Bottom line: All in all, the Chinese have been left puzzled by the midterms, which appear, from afar, to be defined by a kind of cognitive dissonance. From the Chinese perspective, Americans appear to be thrashing against the realities of a new era: faced with a sudden sense of weakness and global changes in power, Americans look unable to summon the energy or unity to make even the simplest self-sustaining choices, and instead, are seeking refuge in the tinny appeals and false comfort of demagogues. “Americans are feeling quite contradictory,” as a piece in the Southern Daily put it recently. “[T]hey want to build more railroads, train stations and schools, they want to use clean energy, but they don’t want to pay higher taxes in order to do all of these. They are the offspring of immigrants and feel very proud of that, and yet they also oppose the idea of immigration.”

Lauds

¶ Via Arts Journal, a couple of pieces about classical orchestras that, taken together, show us where we’re going (compact, traveling jazz-like bands) and what we’ve left behind (city-centered behemoths).

Comparing the Kremerata Baltica with the Knights of the Many-Sided Table, Mark Swed writes (LA Times):

It would be easy, on the basis of these performances, to write off the Knights as a kind of club experiment. These hapless Knights in a battle of the bands with the deep, technically superb Kremerata would seem almost Pythonesque.

But not so fast. The Knights brings out a dazzling spectrum of color in Frank’s “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout.” And in Osvaldo Golijov’s “Last Round,” which rounds out the CD, the band reveals a level of sizzle that even Kremerata can’t match in its Piazzolla.

Maybe the Ives and Copland aren’t so bad either when you consider that the Knights so often need to cut through a background of food, drink and talk. Their rough-and-ready CD, moreover, seems equalized for the iPod. It sounds better through ear buds or cheapo computer speakers than it does on a stereo. And as much as “Appalachian Spring” captures the spiritual essence of America for many of us, the Knights remind us that Copland did write it for the dance.

Coincidentally, the Kremerata and the Knights also have recent Mozart. Evgeny Kissin leads the Kremerata from the keyboard in sublime performances of the Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 27 ( EMI Classics). The Knights back up the Canadian violinist Lara St. John in excitable performances of the First and Third Violin Concertos as well as the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola (with her brother, violist Scott St. John).

Meanwhile, Mark Stryker writes from Detroit:

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra strike has reached day 28 with the parties no closer to a settlement than when talks stalled in July.

The sides have not met since Aug. 27, no bargaining sessions are scheduled, concerts are canceled through Nov. 7 and feelings remain raw. Drew McManus, a Chicago-based arts consultant, said if neither side substantially alters its position, and the players stay unified through the holidays, the entire season could be lost.

Prime

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Nick Werle explains the preference for fiscal austerity or Keynesian stimulus in terms of Foucault’s distinction between discipline and security. And he’s perfectly lucid, too, so once you’ve finished throwing up your hands, give his page a read.

Political economy first entered the realm of security when Keynes invented macroeconomics as a way of managing unemployment and taming the business cycle. For the first time, economists could attend to a population and direct their policies at the economy as a whole. Indeed, the concept of unemployment only makes sense for a whole economy; it has no microeconomic analogue. In his General Theory, Keynes shows how governments can use fiscal policy to keep their unemployment rates within reasonable bounds, consistent with long-term economic growth and social stability. Government’s deficit spending is the distinctive technique of this regime of Foucauldian security. An economic stimulus is not intended to help any particular individuals – though some sectors certainly benefit more than others – but rather boost aggregate demand. Its target is the whole economy, the population. Indeed, classical economics did not admit the economy per se as an organic object, since it was seen as merely a large collection of individual, rational actors. Insofar as macroeconomic policy has this population as the target of its interventions, Keynes can be said to have invented the economy as an object.

It is easy to see where austerity fits in Foucault’s taxonomy: It is a disciplinary force exerted against free-spending governments. Just as the structures of school buildings make rambunctious children into docile bodies, pressure to embrace public austerity is an effort on behalf of international capital to restrain the free-spending tendencies of welfare states. This fiscal discipline, sold as a virtuous and commonsensical “pain after the party,” is intended to produce chastened governments, which maintain capital-friendly tax policies at the expense of social services and in the name of stability, predictability, and job creation. Even though newly streamlined corporations are again flush with cash but have not rehired the workers laid off during the worst of the financial crisis, business leaders continue to argue for an emergency loosening of labor laws that would allow them to fire employees more cheaply. 

Tierce

¶ A study of the bluffing brain, reported simply at the Times, a bit more richly at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Are you a strategic deceiver? If so, there are three parts of your brain that will give you away to a mind-reader.

As the players made their moves, the brains of the strategists were more active than those of the other groups in three areas. The first – Brodmann area 10 (BA10) – sits at the very front of the brain. It has been implicated in many complex behaviours including keeping our goals in mind and looking ahead to the future. Both are important to the strategist, who must bear in mind the long-term goal of making as much money as possible, while playing the short-term tactic of building up the seller’s trust.

The second – the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) – also sits to the front of the brain, but slightly off to the side. It’s active during tasks that involve memory, complex decision-making, mental control and social understanding. Again, all are important to strategists; they need to remember their previous suggestions, while holding back the impulse to play a simpler strategy. The more deceptively the players played, the stronger the blood flow in both BA10 and the DLPFC.

The third area – the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) – runs down the middle of the brain and has been implicated in understanding other people’s beliefs and switching attention between different goals. It was unique in that its activity also depended on the value of the different objects. The greater the value and the higher the prize at stake, the greater the activity in a strategists’ TPJ. It’s in these rounds when the ability to know what the seller is thinking really matters. By contrast, the different stakes had no influence on the TPJs of conservatives and incrementalists.

We threw in the mind-reader bit only because Ed Yong predicted that we would.

Sext

¶ We love  Ted Wilson — or whoever it is who writes under his name for The Rumpus; he is a breath of fresh air on the Internet, because you don’t have to wonder if he’s out of his mind. He is out of his mind. And yet he is much too funny to be suffering from actual dementia. His gift for dropping deadpan bombs reminds us of Robert Benchly; perhaps Ted Wilson has tacked down a Mergenthaler Laugh Detector!

I searched a thrift store for the cheapest costume available. Between a box labeled “sexy nurse” and another labeled “sexy cat” I found one labeled “used Borat” for only $1.50. There were dozens of them. The costume revealed a bit more skin than I would have preferred, so I wore a pair of evening gloves I found with a pair of panty hose. Halloween isn’t Halloween without a mask, so I also threw on an old homemade Howdy Doody mask I had in my attic.

No one had invited me to a party, so I drove my van all over town until I found one. I had to drive very slowly, because it was hard to see through the mask, but I eventually found a big party. Unfortunately, the partygoers didn’t have the Halloween spirit. Whenever I asked any of them to trick or treat me – instead of offering candy – they would say things like, “Did George invite you?” or “Ew.”

Nones

¶ The always-provocative Bob Cringely has a theory about India and China. It’s crazy, but so crazy that we’re inclined to agree.

China has the population, the will, the educational system, the foreign currency reserves — everything to make it the next global superpower except two things: 1) an emerging middle class generation comparable to our Baby Boomers, and; 2) a functional diaspora (look it up, I’ll wait).

In contrast to China, India has only those two things: 1) a real Baby Boomer class, and; 2) a functional diaspora (did you look it up?). Nothing else about India works at all — nothing. India is corrupt and divided. While India has a commercial tradition it isn’t an especially functional one. Fractionalism and factionalism, whether economic, social, or religious, will keep India from ever truly pulling together. But that doesn’t matter because my two original points are enough.

Vespers

¶ We almost forgot! Cathleen Schine wrote a terrific review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad in the NYRB. It works especially well as an appreciation of the book, to savor after it has been read. How’s this for a tight little wow:

If all the characters in A Visit from the Goon Squad are inevitably on their own Suicide Tour—where else are we all headed, after all?—they are also, some of them, survivors who, after so much running away, so much drunken stumbling, so much ambitious clawing, and so much aimless yearning, have found what they didn’t know they wanted where they least expected it. It is this sense that distinguishes Egan’s book from one more clever piece of prose about disconnected and dissipated young people in New York City and makes it a rich and unforgettable novel about decay and endurance, about individuals in a world as it changes around them, as grand in its scope as, say, Buddenbrooks or Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters.

Compline

¶ We don’t want to carp, but there is something a trifle disingenuous about Cornell University president David Skorton’s plea for humanities funding. Forgetful, anyway. Swamped by “theory” and other deconstructive programs, the liberal arts curriculum has tended more to undermine civility, in the past thirty-odd years, than to bolster it. (Inside Higher Ed; via Arts Journal)

He would make the case this way: “You can’t recreate the past and relive it again, but we can understand so much more,” he said, and that can be to the benefit of American goals. “When I hear military leaders talking about winning the so-called hearts and minds of people in other countries, the way I translate that is all based on humanistic and social science disciplines. That requires that we understand the language, the culture, the religion, and the values of those societies — and that is the humanities.”

Turning to current headlines, he said that the lack of civility in society points to the need for the humanities. “Watching the midterm elections, they seem nasty to me, not civil. The tragedy at Rutgers — isn’t that a lack of civility and a lack of values?” Skorton said. If people want to restore civility to public life (a goal of James Leach, the NEH chair), then “the values of the humanities need to be emphasized.” He also argued that ethics problems in the business world and in academic research (with recent misconduct scandals) illustrate the importance of the critical thinking that is taught in the humanities.

Have a Look

¶ Edward James, rememberd at Mondoblogo. (Note: Monkton is a Lutyens house.)

Noted

¶ The John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science. (BLDGBLOG)

In The New Yorker, Steve Coll assesses the murkiness that has been stirred up by Julian Assange’s Wild-West, anarchic brand of journalism.

If the organization continues to attract sources and vast caches of unfiltered secret documents, it will have to steer through the foggy borderlands between dissent and vandalism, and it will have to defend its investigative journalism against those who perceive it as a crime. Assange is animated by the idea of radical transparency, but WikiLeaks as yet lacks a fixed address. Nor does it offer its audiences any mechanism for its own accountability. If the organization were an insurgency, these characteristics might be in its nature. Assange declares that he is pioneering an improved, daring form of journalism. That profession, however, despite its flaws, has constructed its legitimacy by serving as a check on governmental and corporate power within constitutional arrangements that assume the viability of the rule of law. The Times and the Washington Post, in successfully defending their decision to publish the Pentagon Papers before the Supreme Court, extended considerably the political impact of their revelations.

Matins

¶ At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith is persuaded by a commenter to retrieve, from one of her daily roundups, a link to Johann Hari’s persuasive essasy on the efficacy of protests and demonstrations. The most curious thing is that it’s the powerful, the exponents of policies that demonstrators are protesting, who appear to be the most sensitive. And — a point that Anthony Trollope would appreciate — protestors may never know how effective they’ve been.

And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.

Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.

Lauds

¶ In today’s Times, two pieces on ephemeral art. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Starn brothers are dismantling Big Bambú, while at an undisclosed,abandoned subway station somewhere in the city, an exhibition of graffiti closes immediately upon opening, and not because the MTA shut it down, either.

They hadn’t planned, for example, to have bamboo cup holders, which sprouted throughout the piece (the climbers put them in), or the cresting wave of bent bamboo at the top, or the spontaneous wind chime that turned up toward the southern end. They could not have predicted that the roof’s wisteria would wend its way all the way up the piece; that the red-tailed hawk Pale Male would regularly circle overhead; or how breathtaking Central Park would look from “Big Bambú” as the seasons changed. The installation had to close every time it rained and the climbers and the Starns had to stop work for a week when the artists ran out of cord, which was used to lash the poles together.

***

They set some ground rules. Since bringing artists in and out of the space required careful planning — by now they had figured out that the active platform was emptiest on late nights early in the week — and since one or both of the curators had to be on hand, Workhorse and PAC set strict schedules and limited each artist to one visit, with four hours of working time. The artists were not allowed to go out for more materials if they ran out. (Workhorse and PAC supplied lighting in the form of camping lanterns. “We went through hundreds of batteries,” Workhorse said.) And in addition to their materials, the artists had to pay for their transportation, regardless of the distance.

Of the international artists approached, most were from Europe. (Banksy, the most famous of this group, turned them down: He was promoting his film “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Workhorse said, and told them through a mutual friend, “ ‘Great project, love it, but I can’t risk going in.’ ”) But more contributors were American, among them well known names like Ron English (whose most recent work has been priced at up to $200,000), Swoon and Revok.

Prime

¶ At Felix Salmon, Barbara Kiviat weighs and considers the utility of legal vagueness: Paul Volcker believes that financial regulations ought to be vague, to make gaming them difficult; but Michael Lewis thinks that they ought to be starkly unambiguous. Her conclusion:

If you have little faith in regulators’ ability to keep up with Wall Street behavior and to use flexible rules to their fullest, then maybe Lewis’s approach is the smarter one. I’m sympathetic to that argument; I’ve voted to chop up overly large and entwined financial institutions before. But I don’t know if at this point that path is politically feasible. Dodd-Frank could have broken up the banks, but it didn’t. And I’m not sure that since the bill passed, the political clout of the be-tough-on-Wall-Street camp has grown.

Yet that camp is, admirably, still fighting. A group of senators, led by Carl Levin, recently wrote a letter to the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, urging regulators to really crack down and not let Dodd-Frank get watered down in the rule-making. It’s a good thing for people to hear, but so is Volcker’s message—that often the toughest rules are the ones that specifically prohibit the least.

Tierce

¶ Anybody who types will be fascinated to read about the two independent feedback loops that alert us to typographical errors. The first, surprise surprise, is called “proofreading,” but there doesn’t seem to be a name for the second, unless it’s “You can just tell.” Ed Yong reports at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

According to Logan and Crump, this “illusion of authorship” reflects the fact that typing involves two different groups of skills that spot mistakes in different ways. The “outer loop” involves the language centres of the brain and is involved in producing the words that we type. It detects errors by checking what appears on the screen and matching it to our original intentions. If what turns up looks right, the outer loop thinks all is well and if what appears is wrong, the outer loop raises the alarm. The outer loop falls for the illusion.

Meanwhile, the “inner loop” sets up the right sequence of hand movements that type out the words put forward by the outer loop. It detects errors by checking the feedback from the fingers and no matter what Logan and Crump do on the screen, it knows what the typist actually typed. The inner loop sees through the illusion but it operates at a largely unconscious level. It’s the one that slows down the typists’ fingers when they sense that the wrong keys were pressed.

Sext

¶ Have you seen the Feltron Annual Report before? In it, Nicholas Felton (note the interpolated “r” in the report’s title) compiles masses of mundane data about how he has spent a given year. Then he works them up into a spankingly handsome, beautifully printed object. Would you pay for hard copy ($23)? Sean Patrick Cooper does, hopeful that the Report will achieve, one of these years, genuine narrative thrust. That hasn’t happened yet, though. (The Rumpus)

That said, there’s something worth taking at face value from the statement Felton released just prior to the publication of his ‘09 Report and from something he said in a conference talk not too long after the publication. The former, “I have strived to sort and collate the data in a clinical and repeatable manner that could be reproduced by someone looking for the same stories I have selected.” The latter, “As a graphic designer, I’d been searching for a while for means of telling stories.” Implicit in both statements is that Felton fashioned his Reports to contain what are essentially stories. If we look at the Reports this way, the data is not simply numbers and stats about Felton life; the data becomes a mode of stories about Felton’s life. The distinction is small but significant. It’s a matter of elevation and orchestration. If Felton transforms the raw data (1.5:1::social dinners:solo dinners | Report: 2006 Page 6) into the frame for a story: In 2006, Felton spent more time eating in the company of others than eating in solitude—then Felton has orchestrated an elevation of the data to a level of story telling. Despite what Felton has stated as his intent, the orchestrated elevation does not occur. The data never communicates anything beyond what it is. The frames are never built. It never tells more than it shows.

If Felton wished for the graphs, charts, and lists of his Reports to become stories, he would have to provide some context to give them meaning. Otherwise, the data acts much as a photograph does—and, as Susan Sontag said, “strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.” The Report data is in many ways a context-free snapshot of a very particular part of Felton’s behavior. In 2007, Felton traveled 7.4 miles over the course of 5 bus trips via the M15 route. Sontag again, “In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.” The data on Felton’s bus activity over the course of the year amounts to nothing more than data about Felton’s bus activity over the course of a year. A Report Owner cannot understand anything more about Felton’s life if the Report Owner does not know how these bus trips functioned within Felton’s life. Were these bus trips taken to visit an aunt recovering from surgery in a hospital uptown? Were these bus trips taken to see a favorite painter showing for a limited time in a gallery downtown? The data never reveals the context that embeds that data with significance and the Report Owner is left with only a photograph of a very particular part of Felton’s activity.

Nones

¶ Simon Johnson’s essay on the background of the now-averted “currency wars” has our heads spinning, largely because we can’t believe that a respectable columnist asserts that the emerging-markets portion of the G2o is in better economic health than the 0ld G7 rump. The problem that interests Mr Johnson, however, is the EMs’ determination to keep their currencies cheap and their reserves “safe.”

This is exactly the kind of issue – inherently cross-border and very political – for which a structure like the G-20 is needed. But it will do nothing about these flows for three reasons:

1. The emerging markets want to save in this fashion, thinking they can dodge the consequences.
2. The United States needs to borrow, big time. Our politicians refuse even to think about the first-order causes of our recent fiscal disaster; they would rather just continue to borrow (at least as long as interest rates remain low).
3. The big banks like this approach. Their influence is in no way diminishing, and there is nothing about their recent track record that has diminished their appeal in the eyes of policy-makers (just this week, for example, the I.M.F. appointed a senior Goldman Sachs executive to head its high-profile European Department).

Accommodating emerging markets in global governance structures is appealing; their aspirations are legitimate, and the G7 looks outmoded. The profound instability of global financial structures and the broader “doom cycle” today is not the fault of emerging markets – the blame lies squarely with the United States and Western Europe, which have consistently failed to rein in their global megabanks.  (For an 8-minute primer on the “doom cycle,” if you are not familiar with the concept, try this video.)

Vespers

¶ Sonya Chung offers an appealing modest defense of teaching the writing of fiction. At no point is it a rebuttal of Elif Batuman’s thunderclap, but this only makes it more eloquent. (The Millions)

When you teach writing, you have to have a sort of world-view about it, or else you’ll go a little nutty. Here’s mine: at a certain level, there is pretty-good writing (“capable,” in Emily [St John Mandel]’s words), there is really-good writing, and there is great writing. Those of us who set ourselves to the work of writing well will move among these categories throughout our lives; we’ll aim for greatness and more often than not land somewhere along the way. If you are earnest in this endeavor, if you understand that your pretty-good writing can and must always be getting better, then I can’t see why I, as a teacher, shouldn’t encourage you and help you along as best I can.

The truth is that your pretty-good writing may very well get published and make you famous; it’s happened before. Your great writing may never see the light of day. Your really-good writing may get published and be read by very few. You may write something great this time around and something pretty-good next time around and something not-very-good-at-all a few years down the road and never get published at all. It’s happened before. (Read this, and this, if you don’t believe me.) I don’t decide these things. I’m only here to help you write better, because I think it’s important and worthwhile.

Compline

¶ “If television is, indeed, our art form, we need to start treating it as such.” So says Daniel D’Addario, who proceeds to demonstrate why we can’t. (The Bygone Bureau)

Like baseball broadcasts, a season-long narrative with jolts and twists for each team’s partisans, television knows how to give its viewer what he or she wants. For instance, when Mad Men began, Joan Holloway was a delightful supporting character whose presence alerted the viewer to all manner of uncomfortable prejudices in the 1960s. In a book or film, her evolution would have taken place in the viewer’s mind, turning over all of her complex valences, rather than at the hands of producers who turned her into something out of fan fiction. Consider the conversation between Joan and her fiancé in the season-four finale: the revelation that Joan has kept her baby says nothing more about her character. It’s just an OMFG moment, capped off with the campy and tonally bizarre “Yes, they’re bigger” comment. Whoever’s putting words in Joan’s mouth knows how the audience feels about actress Christina Hendricks’s breasts.

Have a Look

¶ Steerforth visits the second-oldest building in Britain. (The Age of Uncertainty)

¶ The photographs of Evan Leavitt. (A Continuous Lean)

Noted

¶ Khoi Vinh’s iPad Magazine Stand. (via kottke.org)

¶ Hungarian is just, what with everything else on one’s plate, too Hungarian. (Sore Afraid)

Ross Douthat in the Times.

Nor have Obama’s political instincts helped him through these difficulties. Presidents always take more blame than they deserve for political misfortune, but Obama’s style has invited disillusionment. His messianic campaign raised impossible hopes (particularly among Comedy Central viewers, apparently), and he has made a habit of baldly overpromising, whether the subject is the unemployment rate or the health care bill. Obama seems as if he would have been a wonderful chief executive in an era of prosperity and consensus, when he could have given soaring speeches every week and made us all feel tingly about America. But he’s miscast as a partisan scrapper, and unpersuasive when he tries to feel the country’s economic pain.

There were three things on today’s to-do list, and, amazingly, I did them all. I went:

1. To the movies (Wild Target — a delicious romp for anyone who likes Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt, Ruperts Everett & Grint, Eileen Atkins, or Martin Freeman, and something of an orgasmatron for anybody who likes all of them.
2. To the Cloisters, to take “fall pictures” for the Daily Office. Don’t worry; you’ll be seeing plenty of them in the next quarter.
3. To the Museum, for a Musicians from Marlboro chamber concert. Truly superb, but my fatigue made listening to Mozart’s clarinet quintet something of a trial, particularly the can-we-go-now final theme and variations. But I’m talking about me, here, not about the music, which was — Sarah Beaty is astonishing.

Any normally healthy man ought to be more than capable of seeing to these three tasks, but that wouldn’t be me; I haven’t got the sense to be healthy.

Reviewing the new AMC Series, The Walking Dead, Alessandra Stanley nails a cultural distinction of vital importance.