The bacon at breakfast this morning was extra-delicious, doubtless because it had been cured by a special twenty-minute session in a cold oven.

Or, you could say that breakfast was twenty minutes late, because I forgot to turn the oven on when I slid the pound of bacon onto the middle shelf. In this alternative interpretation, the bacon was delicious because Oscar Meyer’s Hearty Thick-Cut is always delicious, even when the pieces are structurally unsound.

I got the trick of baking bacon from the Silver Palate girls. It’s very simple: line up the strips on a rack in a roasting pan and bake them in a 400º oven for forty minutes, turning once after twenty. When people ask me for this “recipe,” I say, as slowly as I can, “Forty. Minutes. at Four Hundred. Degrees.” The rule of fours, no? Of course, the advantage of cooking bacon the regular way, in a frypan, is that you know right away if it is “benefiting” from the “cold cure.” And you get your cooked bacon a lot faster, too — once you turn up the heat. But these are not advantages that the true bacon connoisseur will savor. Baked bacon is magnificently evenly-cooked and crisp, and there’s hardly any need to “drain” it on paper towels. Though of course I always do. Even when the bacon is twenty minutes late.

I coped with the delay by prepping a bunch of leeks and a packet of mushrooms for a quiche. And when the breakfast dishes were running through the dishwasher, I composed the tart, filling the sink with fresh dirties in the process. I baked the crust, purchased at Eli’s not long after Agincourt (and probably a “sweet,” rather than a “savory” shell), and let it cool. Then I tossed in the filling, beginning with the boring stuff, the mushrooms and the leeks. After this, I took a scissors to three slices of thick-cut bacon, and grated a passel of cheddar over the top. Then I stirred these ingredients, thinking how much easier it would have been to stir them in a bowl. Finally, hunted down a print copy of the recipe. I have most details of Julia Childs’s Quiche Maison in my head, but owing to age, and to the creation, by means of eminent domain, of vast new brain regions devoted to adoring my grandson, I couldn’t remember a) how many eggs or b) how hot or c) how long. (Answs: 3, 375º, 35-40 minutes.) Yes, the mushrooms are my interpolation, and, yes, I know that a proper quiche Lorraine has no cheese. Lots of places have no cheese. We don’t have to be like them.

Then I made lunch. It is my settled philosophy that Sunday lunch ought always to be grander than Sunday dinner. Not lunch but luncheon. My current idea of Sunday lunch is a salad of chicken or fish dressed with mayonnaise, avocado, curry and lemon. My ultra-current idea of additions to this mixture involves sautéed corn and steamed poivron (that’s “Bell pepper” you, bub). Today’s fish, which I poached on Friday, was salmon trout — a fish that always made me want to fret, “Make up your mind!” until I bought a piece by mistake two weeks ago, and found that Kathleen preferred it to just plain salmon. It makes a delightful, rather sweet, salad. The only thing that a cook needs to know, beyond what I’ve already rattled off, is that I blend half the avocado into the dressing and cube the rest. Avocado two ways, as they say in the garde-manger.

Along the way, I refilled the ice-cube bin. The bin holds six trays of ice cubes — it holds more than that, actually, but the freezer won’t take more than six trays. If you want to know how I’m doing on the domestic front, all you need do is check my ice-cube bin. If it’s full, I’m on top of things. If it’s half-full, I’m still fine. If it’s empty, I’m tired. If it’s full of items that are not ice cubes, I have abandoned domestic economy (temporarily, at least) and cannot be asked to do anything out of the way. That’s the freezer test. The refrigerator test, which is much easier, calls for a bottle of good Champagne. I’d fail that just now, but only because there is no room for a bottle of Champagne. This isn’t because the icebox is stuffed with incipient garbage. It’s because I’ve arranged things in neat bins that don’t allow for the deposit of a bottle of beer, much less something bigger.

We’re going to have the quiche for dinner, on trays, while we watch Rubicon and Mad Men. Comfort food! In contrast to which, the salmon-trout salad sparked a conversation that kept us at the table for an hour and a half. We talked about Mary (as in “BVM”), Augustine, and why college is so expensive these days, and a bunch of other things. When Kathleen left the table (to run an errand), I thought how odd and peculiar and absolutely wonderful it is that we two old married folks (29 years this October) can still have the kind of animated dinner-table conversation that two people have when (as it seems) they’re finding one another to be very interesting conversation partners but when (in fact) they’re also falling in love.

To post a comment, visit The Daily Blague.

Matins

¶ Why professional football must change or die: the scandal of glossed-over concussions. Cord Jefferson, at The Awl, goes on to target the economic foundation of sports-pension inequities. (“Boxing, which drops the niceties of football and lets minorities and poor whites pound each other’s heads sans helmets, sometimes until someone dies, has no nationwide pension plan at all.”)

Exacerbating its unwillingness to accept that football can cause brain damage is that the NFL isn’t doing everything within its power to prevent head injuries in the first place. As recently as February, helmet-manufacturers were questioning the league’s helmet-testing program, worried that it was dangerously flawed. The tests proved so bad, in fact, that one manufacturer pulled out, with its CEO saying the NFL’s tests are “not deserving of credibility.”

For reasons that are obvious yet difficult to describe, the NFL’s policy of allowing its players to gradually destroy themselves would probably be less offensive were African Americans involved in ways other than just running, jumping and hitting. They aren’t. As of today, there are still no black majority owners in the NFL, and only one who comes close (Reggie Fowler owns 40 percent of the Minnesota Vikings). Out of 32, only six of the league’s head coaches are African American, a dearth that may be part of why blacks don’t even watch the NFL. According to an ABC study, less than 13 percent of the league’s viewership is black. Football fans are primarily white and relatively wealthy, earning $55,000 annually on average. 40 percent are over the age of 50. “Football has demographics that baseball would kill for,” said one CNN analyst, who, were he more direct, would have said, “White guys with hefty disposable incomes watch football.”

Maybe it’s a fair trade–black kids losing the ability to remember their mother’s name in exchange for a decade of big checks and fame amongst middle-aged white men. What’s not fair by any reasonable metric is what comes next, when players retire. Although the NFL recently started a fund that will give ex-players with dementia $50,000 a year for medical treatment, it’s also installed a byzantine bureaucracy between the patients and that money. Brent Boyd, a former Vikings lineman who now suffers from dizziness and chronic headaches, has been deemed ineligible for funds multiple times by league doctors, who say that one of his major on-field concussions “could not organically be responsible for all or even a major portion” of his symptoms.

Lauds

¶ Ellen Moody writes so persuasively about the virtues of Alejandro Amenábar’s film, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, that we’re going to make a point of seeing it while it’s still in the theatres; we had planned on waiting, but no longer.

It’s a parable which is intended to comment on theocracries in the middle east which (just yesterday it was reported) stone women to death for pregnancy outside marriage.

It does makes a strong use of ritual scenes and large crowd ones (part of the point) but these are made more interesting by also moving out to shoot the earth from a distance. We have a metaphysical take or perspective (dazzling visuals as Izzy says), and as in George Eliot’s films, intertitles (yes intertitles are used and skilfully) persist in framing these events as universal and felt somehow further off or in history (writing) as in Eliot’s poem (above).

But at its heart is something quiet: there are so many intimate quiet scenes of learning, of reading, and of teaching, thinking, trying to understand how the earth relates to the sun, and both to the cosmos. The script is intelligent and the acting subtle and vivid, the stage business filled with intensities, including Hypatia’s large sandbox where she traces out with her faithful servant different visions of the planet’s movements. There’s a sequence of Hypatia aboard a ship with Orestes on the water with Orestes in a classical kind of boat. I don’t know if historically accurate but it was visually stunning and I liked to see her enjoy herself out in the open too.

Prime

¶ At the end of a lengthy piece about deficits, fiscal austerity, and other bugaboos, Simon Johnson and James Kwak remind plutocrats that cake cannot be had and eaten — not even theirs. You say that tax cuts ought to be extended, as a form of drip-down stimulus. Well, this is probably idiotic, but assuming it’s not, then the tax cuts should be terminated as soon as the unemployment drops to healthy leavels. We think that you’ll have a lot of fun pondering this object lesson. (The Baseline Scenario)

What do matter are taxes and entitlements. Therefore, the coming battle over the Bush tax cuts is of real importance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, extending the Bush tax cuts would add $2.3 trillion to the total 2018 debt. The single biggest step our government could take this year to address the structural deficit would be to let the tax cuts expire. And a credible commitment to long-term fiscal sustainability should reduce interest rates today, helping to stimulate the economy.

Critics say that this amounts to increasing taxes at a time of high unemployment, and that instead the tax cuts should be extended as a stimulus measure. This overlooks the fact that tax cuts are an inefficient form of stimulus, because many people choose to save their additional income instead of spending it.

If the goal is to boost growth and employment immediately, it would be better to let the tax cuts expire and dedicate some of the increased revenue to real stimulus programs. Alternatively, if some tax cuts are extended – as it seems likely that at least those for the middle class will be – there should be provisions to eliminate them automatically when unemployment falls to a preset level. 

Tierce

¶ At You Are Not So Smart, a frontal attack on the Hydraulic Theory of Anger — to which you are, in all likelihood, an unwitting subscriber. Far from dissipating toxic frustrations, it seems, catharsis — well, venting, anyway —creates a need for them.

Thanks to Freud, catharsis theory and psychotherapy became part of psychology. Mental wellness, he reasoned, could be achieved by filtering away impurities in your mind through the siphon of a therapist.

He believed your psyche was poisoned by repressed fears and desires, unresolved arguments and unhealed wounds. The mind formed phobias and obsessions around these bits of mental detritus. You needed to rummage around in there, open up some windows and let some fresh air and sunlight in.

The hydraulic model of anger is just what it sounds like – anger builds up inside the mind until you let off some steam. If you don’t let off this steam, the boiler will burst. If you don’t vent the pressure, someone is going to get a beating.

It sounds good. You may even look back on your life and remember times when you went batshit, punched a wall or broke a plate, and it made things better, but you are not so smart.

Sext

¶ Dear Choire Sicha: the Daily Blagueurs want you to know that they totally get you. We never, ever complain about how hard it is to do what we do here, never.

Behind the scenes, however, the controversy has not subsided.

In daily telephone calls, Fred Sainz, vice president of Human Rights Campaign, said he was talking with top Target executives about “making it right.”

“Among the bullets in our gun is their continued relationship with the LGBT [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender] community,” Sainz said. “Gay and lesbian customers are among Target’s most loyal customer base.” The company is seen by many in the gay community as “the progressive alternative” to Walmart.

Human Rights Campaign has also targeted Best Buy Co., another company that donated to MN Forward.

Best Buy spokeswoman Sue Busch Nehring said the donation “was focused solely on jobs and an improved economy.…We’ve learned from this and we will review the process we use to make political contributions to avoid any future confusion.”

Never! Not ever. (If anything, our labors have made the Editor somewhat insufferable; he likes to boast to friends that “now,” (and this would be thanks to us), he’s “staggeringly well-informed.” (But then we’ve always known that his role model is the Jodie Foster character in Inside Man.)

Nones

¶ Why is Beijing cozying up to the PRC’s ancient enemy, the KuoMinTang party of Chiang Kai-Shek? Well, things evolve, and it’s the KMT’s opposition that China would like to keep out of power.  (It is our expectation that the democratization of China will be accomplished by a gradual Taiwanese takeover of the Mainland.) Nicholas Consonery at Foreign Policy:

The Chinese government is looking for ways to bolster support within Taiwan for Ma and the KMT — and, by extension, for the current direction of cross — Strait relations. Ma’s government has moved Taiwan toward ever-closer economic integration with the mainland and is probing the political implications of this integration. But Beijing is aware that skepticism of the mainland’s intentions remains strong in Taiwan, and that Ma must avoid being cast as overly solicitous of Beijing. 

That said, a major driver of Beijing’s approach is a trend I laid out on this blog last year: Beijing is seeking to avoid steps that create opportunities for Taiwan’s major opposition party — the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) — and is working hard to avoid any risk of a DPP resurgence. The Chinese leadership does not want to revisit the lows reached during the presidency of former DPP head Chen Shui-bian in Taiwan.

Beijing is playing this game deftly. For the past year, Ma has promised Taiwanese voters that he would boost Taiwan’s international profile by signing the controversial Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China, a deal he said would open the door to trade agreements with other countries. If Beijing had pressured Singapore to back away from these negotiations with Taiwan after ECFA, it would not only have raised Taiwanese ire toward Beijing — it would have inflicted serious harm on Ma’s domestic credibility and strengthened DPP arguments that Taiwan should simply go it alone.

Vespers

¶ Yes, yes, we ought to read The Huffington Post on our own more often, instead of waiting for other people to find the fun. It has been days and days and days since Anis Shivani published his list of the 15 most overrated American writers. but if his list is no longer news, exactly, it’s still a gas to read. Here he is on the last writer on his list — whom he rushes to insist is not a writer — the Times’s own Michiko Kakutani. Rude and impolite it may be, but we dare you to look away. (via MetaFilter)

Not a writer, by any stretch of even my novelistic imagination, but I include her here as the enabler-in-chief for the preceding mediocrities. Simply the worst book critic on the planet. Possesses only one criterion to judge fiction–does it fit her notions of the mid-twentieth century realist novel? No postmodern experiments for her, nothing radical that doesn’t fit her naive realist mold. If she loves a book, avoid it like hell (it’s bound to be banal). If she dislikes it, consider buying it. If she really hates it, run to the bookstore and get it, right now! Every good book is Chekhovian or Jamesian or Forsterian or Updikean–she has mastered the technique of saying nothing in a review by comparing books to an author’s previous books and to classics which have nothing to do with the book at hand. Judges books as if the entire modernist and postmodernist canon had never existed. One of the world’s great purveyors of mindless philistinism–it’s divine justice that she would be the New York Times‘s chief book critic (and soon to go behind the pay wall). Sample judgments: “What’s amazing is that Mr. [Denis] Johnson [in Tree of Smoke] somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original–and potent.” “A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.” I limn you, Michiko, lapidarily!

Compline

¶ The fracas ensuing from Target’s contribution to the campaign of a gubernatorial candidate with an anti-LGTB agenda has thrown an unholy practice into a new and probably darker zone. While Target has endeavored to make nice with gay activisits, many lobbyists feel that the affair will just push corporations to figure out more anonymous ways of giving. We hope that the Human Rights Campaign will seize the day by demanding verifiably transparent campaign-contribution disclosures from targeted companies. We heartily support business boycotts. (Los Angeles Times; via  The Morning News)

Behind the scenes, however, the controversy has not subsided.

In daily telephone calls, Fred Sainz, vice president of Human Rights Campaign, said he was talking with top Target executives about “making it right.”

“Among the bullets in our gun is their continued relationship with the LGBT [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender] community,” Sainz said. “Gay and lesbian customers are among Target’s most loyal customer base.” The company is seen by many in the gay community as “the progressive alternative” to Walmart.

Human Rights Campaign has also targeted Best Buy Co., another company that donated to MN Forward.

Best Buy spokeswoman Sue Busch Nehring said the donation “was focused solely on jobs and an improved economy.…We’ve learned from this and we will review the process we use to make political contributions to avoid any future confusion.”

Have a Look

¶ Has somebody remembered Giambologna’s Marina from Art 101? Cool. (Mila’s Daycreams)

Here’s a thousand words’ worth of explanation for why the Blagueurs took a holiday! Back tomorrow!

¶ Book Review reviews, in their umpteenth reformatting since the summer of 2005, have reappeared at Civil Pleasures. We’ve cut back on the block quotes and relaxed our tone of voice, turning up the smart-ass setting a bit — frankly, we couldn’t endure the project further without sounding the occasional note of s-ass.

The reviews will appear on monthly pages, with the oldest on top. After six years, we’re entitled to break with one tradition in favor of another, much older one.

As it is, I can barely crawl. The book, manifestly superb, defies my attempts to crown it; any reaching toward grand transcendent pronouncements on my part will be flattened by obvious ignorance. I don’t begin to know enough about Emily Dickinson’s poetry to tell you how wonderful Helen Vendler’s new book is, or why it is wonderful. Attempting to praise the book would be, for me, essaying a swan dive into an empty pool: the risk of disaster followed by the certainty of it. I can barely summon the mettle to urge you to buy a copy, as soon as possible, of Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. But do — oh! — do. In Helen Vendler, Emily Dickinson has a reader who takes her with complete, exhaustive seriousness, unafraid to state the obvious if it throws (as it does here) Dickinson’s vision into “relief.”

To crawl, then. Before dinner — a chicken was roasting; water was coming to the boil for spaghetti; the table was set, and Kathleen was on her way home — I opened Dickinson and read two poems, together with the commentaries. The first choice was absolutely random, the first poem that i encountered. Entitled “Indian Summer” by Dickinson’s first publishers, it contains this amazing tercet:

These are the days when skies resume
The old – old sophistries of June –
A blue and gold mistake.

Here’s what Vendler has to say about these lines. 

But she cannot remain fixed in her “objective” critique of what she initially calls “The old – old sophistries of June – ” (as if June, seeming to promise eternal skies of blue and gold, were a philosopher manipulating the truth) and secondly names as “a mistake” (as though June were a prophet in error).

As if, as though: it’s wonderful. The final line, “A blue and gold mistake,” has thrown a shard into my heart, not least because blue and gold used to be the Notre Dame colors, before that nasty leprechaun inspired a change to green and gold, a detestable combination of two colors that I love. Yes, yes; Dickinson doesn’t say “green and gold mistake.” In poetry this well put-together, opposites are found to have been smoothly compressed into the barest phrases.

The second poem was chosen after some riffling of pages, probably because it’s quite short — eight lines in all. “This is my letter to the World.” I’m so ignorant that I didn’t know that it is a “justly famous poem.”

The sticky line for me:

The simple News that Nature told –

Vendler unpacks it magnificently:

Yet almost everything about both this Nature and this messenger puts into relief the maleness of God’s authoritative messengers, from Moses and the prophets to Jesus and his disciples. Jehovah is masculine, but Nature is feminine (by virtue not only of her Latin gender, but also of her ability to bear fruit). God’s “Majesty” is intimidating; Natures is “tender.” God gives a Decalogue; Nature gives “simple News.”

Everything that Vendler says is obvious — the moment you’ve read it. But the shock of the last sentence persists, as if it were the very opposite of common knowledge. There are big, important things that, until now, at least, men really haven’t bothered to think or talk about. Sometimes, understanding the world is a matter of listening to “simple news,” not interpreting codes.

I hope that I’ve kept it simple.

Matins

¶ Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (translated by Steven Rendall) has just come out in the UK, and it tosses a smart hand grenade into the body of presumptions known in this country as “political correctness.” Eric Kaufmann reviews the book at Prospect. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

Substituting the complex reality of history for victimology, Bruckner’s spade turns up some awkward truths. For instance, there has not been one slave trade, but three: an Arab, an African and a European. The first two were more enduring and trafficked more people than the western variant. The west’s innovation was to end slavery on moral grounds, while it lingered in the Arab world until the 1980s. Despite these inconvenient facts, any questioning of the idea that slavery is a predominantly European crime immediately places one beyond the pale. On this note, Bruckner neatly juxtaposes the tirades of a contemporary professor who urges reparations for slavery from “the Christian nations” with the actual words of Frantz Fanon, the black intellectual whom the reparationists appropriate without a proper reading: “Don’t I have other things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the seventeenth century… I am not a slave of the slavery that dehumanised my ancestors.”

Bruckner seeks a more rounded history. Nations should celebrate their heroes and victories while acknowledging their stains, because there are “no angels and sinners among nations.” In the west, the balance needs to tilt back toward a celebration of achievements and heroes who have fought for freedom and equality. Elsewhere, a little self-criticism would go a long way.

Lauds

¶ At The House Next Door, Tom Elrod goes over the films of Christopher Nolan with an appreciative eye. We hope that the talented director weighs and considers his fan’s astute perception. (By the way, we’d forgotten that the very cool, black-and-white Following is an early Nolan title.)

It comes down to this: Nolan may be not a great storyteller, but he is a great constructer of moments. When Batman first appears in Batman Begins or when Leonard decides to fake evidence that Teddy is his wife’s killer in Memento the “Holy Crap” feeling is genuine. I believe this is what attracts people to Nolan. He plots his films in such a way as to give maximum exposure to the handful of “awesome” moments throughout, allowing them to feel earned in a way they probably aren’t. In an age when Michael Bay can deliver an instinctual or visceral thrill, Nolan offers something just a little bit more: the sense that it’s not all chaos, that the story at least appears to be planned. Thus, when a big moment occurs, you feel the rush of being taken for a ride. It’s not quite the same thing as being told a well-crafted story: almost all of Nolan’s films fall apart or become scrambled at the end. But it’s better than being on a roller coaster with absolutely no sense of direction. In today’s blockbuster environment, that may be enough to turn you into an auteur.

The problem is that as Nolan’s career has progressed, he’s lost sight of how to make those moments feel organic. The moments are there, but how do they connect to the larger film? Nolan’s filmography can perhaps be summed up by the iconic shot of the Joker in The Dark Knight, sticking his head out the police car window, oblivious to the dangers around him—an image of freed chaos. It’s a small, lyrical moment, and it feels like it happened by accident. The shot is surrounded by so much plot detritus that it feels like a scream from a smarter, better film. Alas, such fleeting moments are perhaps the best we can hope for from Christopher Nolan, the plot-master.

Prime

¶ The look of our structural unemployment is beginning to set, and David Leonhardt sketches a few broad outlines. Wages, for those with jobs, are rising, not falling; the states in the dead center of the country, from the Dakotas to Texas, are holding their own (and, aside from Texas, using their enormously leveraged Senatorial power to minimize the expense of aiding the rest of the nation); and this is a white-collar slump. Education is still makes a difference, though; the unemployment rate for college graduates is only 4.5. (NYT)

¶ Of the long-term unemployed, Felix Salmon (back from vacation and most welcome!) writes:

The problem is that persistent unemployment at or around 10% is unacceptable in the U.S., especially with the social safety net being much weaker here than it is in Europe. Leonhardt is right that Euro-style safety nets aren’t particularly innovative, but they do at least keep people housed and clothed and fed and living outside poverty — reasonable expectations for anybody to have, I think, in the richest country in the world. If David Leonhardt can’t think of any bright ideas for solving the persistent-unemployment problem, then the chances are such solutions aren’t going to magically appear. Which means we need to help the long-term unemployed, rather than simply ignore and forget about them.

¶ We’re still pretty new at this, but we’re surprised to see that Tyler Cowen agrees.

Furthermore, I don’t buy the idea that so many of the unemployed are stupidly and stubbornly holding out for a higher wage than they can get, while at the same time they can be reemployed by a mere bit of money illusion.  There are so many blog posts written to the Fed, to Bernanke, etc. “Hey guys, goose up the money supply!  Bernanke, read your old writings!” 

Yet I have seen not one such post to the unemployed: “Hey guys, lower your wage demands!  It’s good for you!  You’ll get a job and avoid the soul-sucking ravages of idleness.  It’s good for the country!  It’s good for Bernanke, you’ll get those regional Fed presidents off his back!  Why not?  The best you can hope for is to get tricked by money illusion anyway!  Show up those elites and get to that equilibrium on your own!  Take control!” and so on.  If such posts would seem patently absurd, we should ask what that implies for our underlying theory of current unemployment.

I sooner think of these unemployed individuals as having gone down economic corridors which are no longer promising and not facing any easy adjustment to set things right again.  Furthermore I consider that portrait of their troubles to be more consistent with the general tenor of liberal, left-wing, and progressive thought, not to mention plain common sense.

Tierce

¶ Anchoring update: birds do it, bees do it — sure they do! They must! Because Physarum polycephalum, a brainless, single-celled slime mold, does it! Ed Yong reports, at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Latty and Beekman did one such test using two food sources – one containing 3% oatmeal and covered in darkness (known as 3D), and another with 5% oatmeal that was brightly lit (5L). Bright light easily damages Physarum, so it had to choose between a heftier but more irritating food source, and a smaller but more pleasant one. With no clear winner, it’s not surprising that the slime mould had no preference – it oozed towards each option just as often as the other.

But things changed when Latty and Beekman added a third option into the mix – a food source containing 1% oatmeal and shrouded in shadow (1D). This third alternative is clearly the inferior one, and Physarum had little time for it. However, its presence changed the mould’s attitude toward the previous two options. Now, 80% of the plasmodia headed towards the 3D source, while around 20% chose the brightly-lit 5L one.

These results strongly suggest that, like humans, Physarum doesn’t attach any intrinsic value to the options that are available to it. Instead, it compares its alternatives. Add something new into the mix, and its decisions change. The presence of the 1D option made the 3D one more attractive by comparison, even though the 3D and 5L alternatives were fundamentally unchanged.

Be sure to click through, to see how it’s done!

Sext

¶ Having read that “local artisanal soda pop is the next hot food trend” (oy!), Chicagoan Claire Zulkey proceeds to palpate the difference that price makes in our moralo-nutritional calculations. (The Awl)

There’s a double standard when it comes to food that’s calorically bad for you. Hell, there’s a double standard even when it comes to food that’s good for you. Those of us who allegedly can afford it and “know better” aren’t supposed to eat baby carrots anymore: we’re supposed to go to the farmers’ market to purchase beautiful fresh-from-the-dirt carrots with green tops, or have them delivered to us in a weekly produce co-op box. You don’t cram them in your face to fill the void and grimly just take it because the food suits its purpose and is filled with these goddamn vitamins and nutrients—you thank Gaia for the soil and the sun that brought it to you and consider yourself one of the “good ones” next time you read a Michael Pollan article.

When it comes to people who live in urban “food deserts” though, we don’t expect that type of worship: they’re lucky to get frozen, even canned, produce. But junk food? That’s when we get snobbish. High-class cupcakes, local pop, hamburgers made by top chefs, these are little indulgences for foodies. But gas-station treats, Coke and Big Macs are part of the nation’s nutrition problem.

Nones

¶ Simon Tisdall’s report on the renewed violence in Kashmir makes us wonder: what if the wealthy nations of the world sat India down and asked what it would take to relinquish its claim on territory inhabited overwhelmingly by Muslims? What would it take? We suspect that the price would not be exorbitant. (Guardian; via Real Clear World)

But Delhi’s blinkered Kashmir policy since partition in 1947 – ignoring UN demands for a self-determination plebiscite, rigging elections, manipulating or overthrowing elected governments, and neglecting economic development – lies at the heart of the problem, according to Barbara Crossette, writing in the Nation.

The violence “is a reminder that many Kashmiris still do not consider themselves part of India and profess that they never will,” she said. “India maintains a force of several hundred thousand troops and paramilitaries in Kashmir, turning the summer capital, Srinagar, into an armed camp frequently under curfew and always under the gun. The media is labouring under severe restrictions. Torture and human rights violations have been well documented.” Comparisons with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians were not inappropriate.

India’s failure to win “hearts and minds” was highlighted by a recent study by Robert Bradnock of Chatham House. It found that 43% of the total adult population of Kashmir, on both sides of the line of control (the unrecognised boundary between Indian and Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir), supported independence for Kashmir while only 21%, nearly all of whom live on the Indian side, wanted to be part of India. Hardly anyone in Jammu and Kashmir wanted to join Pakistan.

Vespers

¶ Getting a little ahead of ourselves, we want to talk about a book that the Editor picked up this afternoon at Crawford Doyle, never having heard of it before. It’s Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. The word “magisterial” was invented to describe books such as this one, which will sit very nicely next to Ms Vendler’s edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

So far, there are no online reviews (that we can find), so we’ll have to make do with plush from the publisher, Harvard’s Belknap Press. It’s probably all true, though. If we weren’t so diligent about our duties here, you can bet that we’d be finding out.

In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.”

In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

Compline

¶ Slow Reading — we know that it’s what this site is all about; but what exactly is it? Forget “exactly.” In a Guardian piece from the middle of last month, Patrick Kingsley pins down some foundational differences of opinion.

“If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author’s ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly,” says Ottawa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term “slow reading”, disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader’s creativity, as uncovering the author’s. “My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content,” the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. “I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can’t understand something written in the text, it’s your fault, not the author’s.”

¶ We’re picking this up now because, yesterday, two blogs that we follow wrote about Slow Reading. At The Neglected Books Page, Brad Bigelow notes that while the environment has changed in a way that may make long-form reading more difficult, it has not changed that much — enough, that is, to render long-form reading redundant.

While I side with Darwin and believe that adaptation to its environment is a species’ greatest survival skill, I also believe that we have a tendency, at least in the U. S., to think that momentum carries us further than is the case. As Timothy Wilson shows in Strangers to Ourselves, when it comes to self-knowledge, we don’t know what we don’t know–but we’re finding out that it’s a whole bunch. So while some of us are Twittering into the future, we are still only a few steps from the cave in much of our unconsciously-driven behavior.

And our environment is not changing that quickly, either. Our culture still has strong roots going back thousands of years. Our institutions go back decades and centuries. And our knowledge is still deeply bound to materials, practices, and skills that cannot be mastered in a few clicks. I wouldn’t be too happy to learn that my surgeon earned his license by surfing through “Cardiology for Dummies.” There is a vast amount of information relevant to our world that offers almost nothing of value to a skimmer. I well remember highlighting sentences in my calculus of variations text in college that were grammatically correct and mathematically valid and utterly incomprehensible to a non-mathematician. I’m not sure I could even understand them now, thirty years later. There is no way to unlock material such as this aside from time and close attention.

¶ And Anne Trubek, as a person young enough to have been shaped by environmental changes, is beginning to worry about her reading proficiency.

I have been writing “Signatures,” this column, for almost two years now. Although the title is taken from printing technology, I have always championed digital technologies and gainsaid arguments like Carr’s that would have us believe reading and writing are deteriorating. But I must come clean: I am feeling increasingly worried about my reading capacity. My lifelong habit of reading a book before I fall asleep is turning into a new twitter scrolling habit. I am writing more than I ever have in my life, but I am reading less. I worry.

I still become absorbed in books (Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad is rocking my world). But my attention wanders more quickly than it used to. Email, texts and, most distressingly, this really stupid Tetris-type game I downloaded onto my iPhone beckon. I am not ready to agree with Carr, but I am ready to take one day off the internet a week. I will turn on the perfectly named Freedom software for my Mac, delete that speed-reading email and hopefully find out how to  lose my self again.

¶ It’s customary in these discussions to make some sort of mention, however passing, about the future of books — codices, the things that you buy in a bookstore. In our view, all such talk is rendered moot by Coralie Bickford-Smiths designs for forthcoming Clothbound Classics editions of six Fitzgerald volumes. It’s obvious that, so long as books so lovely are produced, buyers will want them. They may even read them.

Have a Look

¶ Hat tips for ladies and gentlemen. (via  The Morning News)

¶ “Large puter angle – $15.” Now, what do you suppose a large puter angle might be? (You Suck at Craigslist)

Over the weekend, I said to Kathleen that I think that this summer, this summer of 2010, is the point from which we’re going to date the beginning of a very bad economic time, something at least as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crickets have stopped assuring us that this would/will never happen again, which corresponds at last to what we’ve been seeing right in front of our eyes.

I’d like to think that, having stopped worrying that it’s coming, we’ll do something about making it not so bad. But what? What can one do? I can’t even find the old entries that scolded Barack Obama for not speaking up against the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans after Katrina. I know that I made a few; I also know that I muffled them a bit, kept them as low-key as I could without completely castrating my point. Mr Courage, eh? That was the most that I could do — words! I complained that Barack Obama was a savvy politician who would pick his fights shrewdly. Now, of course, I only wish that that were true. If he’s picking his fights shrewdly at the moment, then he must be so savvy that nobody else has the faintest idea what we’re in for. And perhaps we don’t.

“Structural unemployment.” Philip Greenspun wonders if today’s unemployed human beings aren’t the “structural equivalents” of the Nineteenth Century’s draft horses. Now, there’s an idea that will warm Middle America’s heart toward the élite! Have a look at something that I wrote in 2006, in response to a brief article in Foreign Affairs by Alan Blinder. What good did that do, my prescience about the outsourced economy? The structurally superfluous economy.

When I was young, the battle cry was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” It would be music to my ears to hear that now. Nobody over forty has a single good idea. (Except for me, of course; and what I’ve really got is a lack of bad ideas — I hope and pray! Oh, and my friend Joe Jervis.) Let me know if you encounter an exception.

Matins

¶ Here’s a page to bookmark for ready-reference: Keith Hennessey, an economic adviser to George W Bush, outlines the roles of the various White House economic advisers. Now, you, too, can master the difference between the NEC and the CEA! In the alternative, you can see the fungal spread of medieval jurisdictional kudzu thick enough to forestall any and all presidential initiative! (via Economists For Firing Larry Summers)

Mr Hennessey sketches the mechanics of proposing a $1/gallon gasoline tax.

If you have two from NEC (running the meeting) and the Chief’s office, and only one from each other shop (don’t forget the other senior White House Advisors listed above), that’s at least 18 people in the room.  At least.  Each has a legitimate claim to be there, and each has a view on whether the President should support a $1 gas tax increase.

I would guess that in the Obama White House they would also include Carol Browner, who has a new role as an Assistant to the President for Energy & Environment Issues (one of the new czars), as well as Valerie Jarrett, who among other things handles State and local issues for the President.  If the Feds raise gas taxes, that makes it harder for the States to do the same.

On a straightforward question like a gas tax increase for which the substantive analysis is easy, there would probably be three meetings:  one of mid-level White House and Agency staff chaired by the NEC Deputy or the NEC Special who handles energy issues, a principals meeting of Cabinet-level officials and senior White House advisors chaired by the NEC Director, and then a meeting with the President.  I’d guess that maybe 200-300 man-hours (of very senior people) would precede a 45-minute decision meeting with the President.

(Hennessey post too long? Try Weakonomics.)

Lauds

¶ At The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the new Arcade Fire album qua independent label phenomenon. We think it’s totally cool that Arcade fire licenses its recordings to its CD producer, Merge Records. We’d also like to hear more of the sassy wit of Matador Records’ Gerard Cosloy.

Now that the outsized profits of the CD era have disappeared, the music business is rapidly retrenching. With a limited amount of money to make—a sum dwarfed by movies, video games, and sporting events—many bands may figure out that major labels’ publicity budgets are an unsustainable luxury.

The idea of the label as a tastemaker is not dead, though, regardless of size. The major labels will continue to feed hits to radio and, this October, Matador will celebrate its anniversary with an almost entirely sold-out three-day event in Las Vegas called “Matador at 21.” Cosloy wrote to me, “Record labels aren’t nearly as fucking smart as they think they are, otherwise they’d have found a way to have done away with these pesky artists. Conversely, who is actually thriving without the benefit of a trad record label?”

¶ In “I’m With the Brand,” Chris Lehman has a kind of hung-over fun with Paul Keegan’s advice for getting a job in today’s you-know-what. Chris has some sharp advice of his own — to employers. (The Awl)

Of course, the title “search-optimization expert” by itself is enough to make any chronically unemployed person despair that this economy will ever create a real job again. But all this dizzying comment-for-branding’s sake raises a larger question: Why would mastery of the time-killing canons of the blogging and social media worlds recommend anyone as a desirable worker in the first place? Why should a prospective employer assume that if you’re now furiously shoring up your reputation in blogland, then hieing over to Twitter and Facebook to boost your SEO quotient, you’d behave at all differently when he or she grants you a bit of scarce and valuable cubicle space? Transforming yourself into an online brand doesn’t mean you represent anything of real value, any more than commenting on a blog means you really have anything to say.

¶ To offset the foregoing levity (ha. ha.), read about the world’s longest garage sale. (Time; via  The Morning News)

Which leaves Johnston marching her daughters from yard to yard, as Brian follows behind in the family’s new Ford Expedition. “We’ve only spent $20 so far,” she says. “If I’d bought all these clothes in stores, I’d be out at least $250. We just can’t afford that anymore.” Johnston stands in the driveway of Stan Stevens, who tends his yard sale from the porch of a two-story house with new red siding. But the yard doesn’t belong to him. Until last year, Stevens owned the house next door. Then he was laid off from a factory that made gas tanks for minivans. His wife Michelle was laid off from her job as a hospice nurse. They lost the house to foreclosure and the minivan to repossession. Big crowds at the yard sale are the first good financial news that Stevens has received in months.

“This has been huge,” says Stevens, 46. “You can tell that with the economy people are shopping more at garage sales like this and less at stores.” In past years, many in Hudson say, buyers rarely haggled. This year, sellers were keeping their prices especially low, asking $2 or less for most items. Even so, shoppers were still looking for deals.

Great for aggregate demand, eh?

Tierce

¶ Move over, you opposable thumbs! You depend upon — or from, actually — an equally distinctive human characteristic: the shoulder. (NPR; via  3 Quarks Daily)

To understand the shoulder, look at a human skeleton. What you see is an intersection. The head of your arm bone (the humerus) meets your collar-bone (the clavicle) and part of the shoulder-blade (scapula). They’re held together with tendons and ligaments. The whole joint angles out horizontally from the neck, like a coat hanger.

“Because it’s pointing straight out,” says David Green, an anthropologist at George Washington University who studies the evolution of the shoulder, “our arms are allowed to just kind of hang freely, and then we can flex our arms at the elbow and have our hands out front, and that’s useful for manipulation. In apes, the joint actually points almost toward the ceiling.”

The ape shoulder is good for hanging from a tree, but when our ancestors started walking on two legs, the shoulder started to change. Early on, the joint descended lower on the chest. For a while, the shoulder-blade was more on the side, over the rib cage. Then it moved onto the back.

Sext

¶ In case you’re still thinking of branding yourself, notwithstanding Chris Lehman’s caustions, be sure to know what you’re doing when you have your profile picture taken. Christian Rudder crunches the responses to thousands of okcupid photographs. People with iPhones have more sex it seems, but they don’t look as good as — surprise! — SLR subjects. And: “The flash adds 7 years.”  (oktrends; via  The Awl)

Soft light can hide wrinkles, blemishes, devil eyes. The hard light of a flash often brings them out. As I illustrate with the dotted lines below, you can calculate the equivalent “aging” effects of a flash by counting years horizontally between the ‘flash’ and ‘no flash’ lines. For example, a 28 year-old who used a flash is as attractive as a 35 year-old who didn’t.

Nones

¶ Wouldn’t it be nice if all we had to worry about was China’s claim to the Spratly Islands? This diplomatic skirmish is so agreeably reminiscent of the run-up to World War I that we feel an almost Edwardian placidity. “The other” Geoff Dyer refreshes the screen on the South China Sea hypocrisis. (FT)

China has been happy to engage with the US on economic issues, joining the World Trade Organisation and stockpiling Treasury bonds, but Beijing has also accelerated a military build-up that has the US in its sights. Rather than preparing for a fight with the US, Chinese planners want gradually to squeeze the US out of its dominant position in Asian waters by developing a series of missile systems they describe as “anti-access” weapons.

Yet in the last year or so, China’s charm offensive in Asia has run into trouble – not least in the South China Sea, which for many Asian countries is a barometer of how a powerful China might treat them. The Paracel and Spratly islands are claimed in full or in part by Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei. On China’s maps, however, the islands are inside a U-shaped line of its territorial waters, which stretches down to cover most of the South China Sea.

Amid rising tensions, China has reportedly told other Asian countries not to discuss the issue among themselves. According to US officials, Beijing also now says it considers the area a “core interest”, alongside Taiwan and Tibet. Some push-back was inevitable. Sure enough, Vietnam – the one country in the region with a Leninist political system comparable to China’s – lobbied its old nemesis in Washington to get involved. (The USS George Washington aircraft carrier visited Vietnam at the weekend.) Even Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who has spent much of the past decade praising Beijing, called last year on the US to remain the Pacific’s “superior power”.

Vespers

¶ Ron Rosenbaum writes with the greatest enthusiasm about a new edition of Pale Fire — just the poem. Illustrated by Jean Holabird, the boxed edition includes simulacra of the file cards on which John Shade wrote his 999 lines of iambic pentameter, and that Charles Kinbote stole from Shade’s widow. (If you haven’t read Pale Fire — as Vladimir Nabokov published it in 1962 — don’t try to make sense of this entry.) (Slate; via  3 Quarks Daily)

And then as I read and reread the novel, and sometimes just the poem, it began to dawn on me. Maybe the poem wasn’t meant as a pastiche, a parody, an homage to Robert Frost. John Shade refers to his reputation with characteristic modesty as being “one oozy footstep” behind Frost, but that doesn’t mean we should take his self-deprecation as gospel.) In fact, I must admit Frost has always left me cold, so to speak. And when I started asking myself what other American poet of the past century has done anything comparable in its offhand genius to “Pale Fire,” I could only think of Hart Crane, the Hart Crane of White Buildings.

Once it dawned on me that the poem might not be a carefully diminished version of Nabokov’s talents, but Nabokov writing at the peak of his powers in a unique throwback form (the kind of heroic couplets Alexander Pope used in the 18^th century), I began to write essays that advanced this revisionist view of the poem. It was actually one of these that came to the attention of Dmitri Nabokov who seemed to indicate this was his understanding as well: That his father intended the poem to be taken seriously.

It would have been nice of Mr Rosenbaum to tease out some of the beauties of Pale Fire the poem, but he’s much too excited about his new toy.

Compline

¶ Nicholas Carr digests the latest Nielsen numbers: depressingly, we’re watching more television (or “consuming media”) than ever — surely more than Nielsen’s 5.6 hours a day. (Rough Type; via  Marginal Revolution)

To give an honest accounting of the effects of the Net on media consumption, you need to add the amount of time that people spend consuming web media to the amount of time they already spend consuming TV and other traditional media. Once you do that, it becomes clear that the arrival of the web has not reduced the time people spend consuming media but increased it substantially. As consumption-oriented Internet devices, like the iPad, grow more popular, we will likely see an even greater growth in media consumption. The web, in other words, marks a continuation of a long-term cultural trend, not a reversal of it.

(Well, of course we’re not. We’re in our two-hours-per-week season. Rest of the time, it’s zero.)

Have a Look

¶ Nederlands dectective-mystery covers. (The Rumpus)

¶ Kari’s bar-fight face. (Feel better soon!)

1. Friday night: Mozart Mozart at Lincoln Center. A smashingly good concert, which is all the more super because I chose only two events, and this was the only Avery Fisher night, the only “normal concert.” (Next week’s Emerson String Quartet recital at Alice Tully ought to be great as well, but I’ll always associate Mostly Mozart with Philharmonic Hall, as it was during the first season — when, as I recall, you could be a sort of book of chits, convertible into tickets at your pleasure during the Festival.

The concert began with Così fan tutte and ended with Don Giovanni. Well, you’ll see what I mean. I don’t know when I last heard the Così overture by itself. It’s a jolly, but rather brainless piece, repeating its two very simple themes over and over; as such, it’s perfect for the opera that follows, which is about very silly young people who don’t really notice much of anything. As a rule, I disapprove of playing opera overtures by themselves (Rossini’s excepted), but this one is a very old friend, and of course it does the job of warming up the orchestra very nicely.

Mozart’s 22nd Piano Concerto was the last of the great ones that I got to know. It’s big (plenty of trumpets and drums), but its middle movement is ruminative rather than tuneful, the very opposite of the previous concerto’s. The pianist was David Fray, who, unlike our conductor (see below) looks rather younger than his 29 years. He is an excellent pianist, with very fine ideas about the balance of Mozart’s compositional blocks, but I should like to hear a few recordings, because, in person, M Fray is a romantic poet, given to raptures and collapses. You’d never know it, but his fingers have a wicked sense of humor, and when I read the review in the Times I agreed with James Oestreich that he ought to write his own cadenzas — one just feels that they’d be interesting. (Edwin Fischer’s were played; I knew the concluding one, but I’d never heard the first movement’s.)

Lionel Bringuier is one of those men who look totally grown up when they’re fifteen. He’s twenty-three now, but he could pass for a youthful forty. I don’t mean to say that he looks old. He just looks fully formed, set. And he conducts like someone three times his age. His way with the Andante of the Prague Symphony was extraordinarily controlled but also, well, wise. I want to say “organic,” because it wasn’t at all mechanical. The music was regular in the way that breathing is regular. The orchestra respired, between passion and sweetness, in and out, with no jerking shifts of tone. It was the most natural thing in the world — and very beautiful. If you can make the Prague Symphony sound fresh at any age, you’re a genius. The outer movements were grand, too, with the introductory Adagio and the entire Presto finale deeply infused with Don Giovanni, the opera that Mozart wrote at about the same time. (Indeed, he wrote it for Prague, along with the Prague Symphony, because the music lovers of that town responded so much more favorably to Le Nozze di Figaro a year or so earlier.)

The fountain at Lincoln Center — I must write about that separately. I feel rather stupid, since it’s got to be at the top of anybody’s must-see list, and here I thought it was just a fountain. It was redone, when? Last year? And is now a computerized marvel cum water cannon. I can’t wait for Will to be old enough to join the children runnng back and forth, shrieking in joyous terror.

2. Saturday night: Deep-Fat Fryer Disaster, narrowly averted. I haven’t had the big DeLonghi deep-fat fryer out in a while, what with &c &c. Having experimented with every known oil, and combination of oil and lard, I’ve come to realize at last that, whatever else, Crisco doesn’t stink up the apartment. The problem is that it’s solid. Which is not a problem, except that you know what happens when you power electric heating elements that aren’t immersed in liquid. If it’s one of those little numbers that boils water in a mug, it’s not so bad; if it’s a DeLonghi deep fryer, you’re talking expensive replacement. I had the bright idea (o tremble!) of placing the frying tub, which can be lifted out of the insulating frame, on a low burner, and melting the Crisco that way. But, oh, why was it taking so much Crisco to cover the heating element? The answer to this question occurred to me in the nick of time. I’d left the little drain tap open, and the oil had just about filled the well of my stovetop, without reaching the burners or flooding the sparkplugs that ignite the gas.

Ladling the melted Crisco from the stovetop — which is basically a one-piece enamel basin, thank heaven — was tedious but not impossible, and it only felt as though it would take forever. When the level dropped below ladling range, I sopped up the remainder with paper towels, and then cleaned the basin with ammonia. All better!  But the French fries that I made for dinner weren’t very good; in the slight confusion of aftershock, I’d put the lid on the fryer while the potatoes were cooking, not a good idea.

If the disaster had to happen, Saturday night was the night. I was in a good mood, not too tired, and equipped, it turned out, to deal with the near catastrophe without raising either my voice or my arms. I’d say that it delayed dinner by no more than twenty-five minutes.

3. Sunday afternoon: Brunch at Orsay. The French fries were better, but not that much better. The croque monsieur was delicious, however. It was good to see our friends, a Brearley classmate of Kathleen’s and her husband.

Question that I keep forgetting to ask: is that what Mortimer’s looked like, or did they do the place over when it became Orsay? By the way, the banquettes have been removed from the larger dining room (the one without the bar). They probably did that months ago; it’s possible that I haven’t been to Orsay since we had brunch with the same couple last summer.

After brunch, we walked our friends toward their apartment, on our way to Gracious Home, where I picked up a brochure for an “ironing system” that costs $2500. You get the ironing board, the iron (which stores in a compartment) and even a tank of water. The whole thing folds up to a thickness barely deeper than the ironing board that I’ve got (also from Gracious Home, but a lot cheaper). Question: what’s the market for a $2500 iron & board? Even on the Upper East Side of Manhattan — who’s ironing?)

4. Sunday evening: Rubicon and Mad Men. When I got back from Gracious Home, I was too hot to do anything but shower and read. (See below.) As dinnertime approached, Kathleen suggested that we go out, and that sounded just fine to me. It was only at 8:30 that we woke up to the impossibility of going out, unless we wanted to miss Rubicon. So we called Gracie’s Corner for a burger and a grilled cheese sandwich, and we finished dinner just in time to turn on the Bravia. (This entails turning on the cable box as well; it must shut itself off after a day or so.)

Rubicon is a fairly dumb show with a great cast. I wonder if I’ve seen Dallas Roberts on the stage? I haven’t seen any of the movies listed at IMDb; nor, of course, have I seen the actor’s television shows. But Kathleen and I are both certain that we’ve seen him before.

Mad Men was good: lots of Don and lots of Joan — and no Betty. We really liked the goof-up on Lane’s flower orders, and we loved it when Joan fired the careless secretary who was responsible. More Peggy would have been great.

5. Every spare minute: Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me. I’ll have more to say about this masterpiece when I’ve knocked off Ms Egan’s first two books, The Emerald City and The Invisible Circus. Or at least I hope that I will; where I’ll find the time to write a comprehensive view of this amazing writer’s fiction I’ve no idea. Jennifer Egan is the only writer whom I would class with Jonathan Franzen: they can deploy technique in interesting, almost experimental ways that never, however, interfere with narrative thrust or threaten to degenerate into solipsistic moaning. (When he gets older, I may include Joshua Ferris in this small, expert group.)

In 2002, a year after Look At Me came out, Jennifer Egan appended an afterword to make it clear that her book was imagined in the “more innocent time” prior to 9/11. I think that she owes us another postscript, this time disavowing clairvoyant knowledge of Facebook. Uncanny!

Matins

¶ At The Morning News, Michael Dacroz compiles an Internet reading list as an admirably suitable memorial to Tony Judt, who died the other day, at 62, of ALS.

I think there’s great value in understanding the perspective of someone who’s seen combat (in the Seven Day war), experienced a debilitating disease, and spent his career trying to understand the failure of the left. If he can sustain optimism, not become cynical in spite of all that, and go on to propose a huge reimagining of what a fair society should look like, then I think he deserves our attention for longer than we’ll spend reading his obituary. Which I why I just brought his book “Ill Fares The Land.”

— A New York profile is full of juicy quotes and Judt offers an apt one to close:

The meaning of our life…is only incorporated in the way other people feel about us. Once I die, my life will acquire meaning in the way they see whatever it is I did, for them, for the world, the people I’ve known.

There you have Tony Judt, fairly confident of being remembered, but aware that it will be in that rememberance that his life acquires its meaning. Might we propose, as Judt’s Law, that “the meaning of (your) life is none of your business.”

Lauds

¶ At City of Sound, Dan Hill shares his notes of the World Design Conference  that he attended in Beijing almost a year ago. At the beginning of his multi-part account, he tells us why it took so long to publish it.

I was in Beijing for the first time, for the World Design Congress conference – where I was a speaker on Tuesday and a panellist on Wednesday – and to launch the aforementioned ‘Designing Creative Clusters’ project. It’s my first visit of any significance to China and as usual I’m fascinated by a new city, a new map, but this is something else, as if I’d been waiting for years to experience this first hand (in truth, I had.) The flurry of thoughts and observations is proving almost impossible to pin down – and new reflections keep emerging, weeks later – so as usual please excuse the impressionistic jottings. This one is organised in broadly chronological order.

I’m also conscious of a note at the beginning of Thomas J. Campanella’s book The Concrete Dragon, regarding visiting academics “discovering” China.

Upon his first visit, the scholar is ready to write a book; after visiting a second time, he decides to settle for an article. By the third visit, our erstwhile academic realizes he knows next to nothing about China, and had better keep his mouth shut.

This is probably the first visit of three for this research project alone, and unfortunately I have new publishing platforms such as this at my disposal, so here goes. (NB. Re-reading this, months later, and a visit to Hong Kong and Shanghai later, I think Campanella’s anecdote is right, in that I already wouldn’t write in the same way about China. But this is the nature of first impressions, after all.)

Prime

¶ At the Opinionator, Allison Areff notes that the strange American practice of choosing a home for its resale value is waning, along with the idea of moving up to something bigger and better with every promotion/pay raise. What stands in the way can only be called regulatory prejudice. (NYT)

The 2009 Builder/American Lives New Home Shopper Survey showed a trend toward smaller house size in 2010. The “unprecedented housing bust, which brought about the largest loss of home equity in history,” the magazine reported, “has fostered fundamental attitudinal changes in new-home prospects…. The desire for a McMansion seems to have been supplanted by the desire for a more responsible home.”

People still want amenities, that same survey suggests, but they also want energy-efficient heating and cooling. Yet the status quo makes such greener options hard to come by: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently announced a decision to block green financing projects in California, for example, making solar and other energy efficiency projects nearly impossible to achieve. The state is suing to overturn the decision.

Perhaps recognizing that they’ll be staying in their homes longer, buyers are starting to look for universal design, ranging from wheelchair-accessible bathrooms to single-story homes — options that will allow them to “age in place” — in other words, move into a home they can grow old in. They want accessory dwellings (a k a granny flats) to accommodate rising numbers children moving home after college and aging parents needing care. So far, the market isn’t offering many of these, a lack one can chalk up somewhat to inertia but also to legitimate obstacles ranging from zoning and code restrictions to difficulties with financing.

Housing, like many econimic activities, needs to be seen less as a business and more as an amenity.

Tierce

¶ First, the dish: Razib Khan doesn’t appear to like Jonah Lehrer, whom he entitles “the boy-king of the cognitive neuroscience blogosphere.” We hope that this resentful animus is strictly personal, and not a byproduct of different enlistements (Wired Science in MrLehrer’s case; Discover for Mr Khan).

Not that there appears to be a substantive disagreement in their responses to the entry at Neurocritic that’s the reason why, er, we’re here.

The latest search for genetic variants that underlie differences in personality traits has drawn a blank (Verweij et al., 2010). The researchers conducted a genome-wide association study using personality ratings from Cloninger’s temperament scales in a population of 5,117 Australian individuals:

Participants’ scores on Harm Avoidance, Novelty Seeking, Reward Dependence, and Persistence were tested for association with 1,252,387 genetic markers. We also performed gene-based association tests and biological pathway analyses. No genetic variants that significantly contribute to personality variation were identified, while our sample provides over 90% power to detect variants that explain only 1% of the trait variance. This indicates that individual common genetic variants of this size or greater do not contribute to personality trait variation, which has important implications regarding the genetic architecture of personality and the evolutionary mechanisms by which heritable variation is maintained.

We like the way Jonah Lehrer puts it at the end of his piece.

We’re trying to find the genes for personality constructs that don’t exist. It’s not that people don’t have personalities, or that these personalities can’t be measured – it’s that we aren’t the same person in every situation, which is what all these “tests” implicitly assume. It turns out that Shakespeare had it right all along. Just look at Hamlet – the Danish prince wouldn’t fit neatly into the categories of Myers-Briggs. He’s brooding and melancholy in one scene, and then violent and impulsive in the next. But this doesn’t seem strange to the audience. Instead, the inconsistency of Hamlet seems all too human.

We would go a bit further: we don’t believe that the language of humanist psychology — and the metrics, such as the Meyers-Briggs test, that have been built with it — corresponds with useful precision to neuronal events in the brain. It is, instead, a language of speculative ignorance.

Sext

¶ Thanks to Nige, we’ve come across a new blog, The Dabbler, and learned-something-new-every-day, in this case, about the “British Israelite movement” — don’t try to guess what that was! Frank Key reprints a supplicating letter (a true de profundis) written in Buffalo in the late Eighteen Eighties.

I am in great distress and know not my future. My failure is in Buffalo. I have been here so long because I have no money to move away. I have been evicted and have lost all my clothes and goods, am destitute, a stranger in a strange land, friendless, helpless and hopeless; have not had a full meal for a month, am dirty, ragged and in tatters; precisely in the condition that Joshua might be expected to be in, and do not know at all what is to become of me – all seems dark. I am aged, have grown infirm, and badly ruptured with always a swimming in my head. Walk about the streets ready to fall, inclined to think my mission in life has ended, and that this is my last letter… People at home have been secretly working against me. I am too honest to steal, too proud to beg, too old to work, and have no trade at my hands.

We are grateful that “swimming in the head” has not figured among our limited tribulations.

Nones

¶ Jon Lee Anderson’s report from Iran (in The New Yorker) prompts thoughts about the futility of middle-class revolutions. No one ever quite comes out and says so, but it seems to us fairly clear that the regime’s popular, almost semi-official Basiji militias are engaged in a class war against their “betters.”

Some analysts interpret this as part of Mousavi’s continuing attempt to present himself as an unflinching nationalist, in the hope of retaining influence in the reformist movement. But the Iran expert told me that, in the absence of strong leadership, the movement was splintering. He explained, “The Green Movement was made up of different kinds of people: those who hated the regime, those who were offended by the election fraud, and those who joined because they were offended by the treatment of the prisoners. Eventually, they began to separate out.”

One Iranian, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his safety, described the movement’s status. “Despotism works,” he said. “That’s what this situation shows. The reformist movement is over. The middle classes aren’t willing to die en masse, and the regime knows this. It has killed and punished just enough people to send the message of what it is capable of doing. The reformist leaders and the regime have a kind of unspoken pact: ‘Don’t organize any more demonstrations or say anything and we’ll leave you alone. Do anything and we’ll arrest you.’ It’s over.”

But the members of the movement I spoke to have not changed their sympathies. In Tehran, I was invited to watch a televised soccer match in the home of an Iranian family. During a break in the action, someone mentioned that I had interviewed President Ahmadinejad that week. One of my hosts, a professional woman in her thirties, immediately put two fingers into her mouth and bent over in a pantomime of gagging. “Oh, how I hate him,” she said. “He makes my skin crawl. He is the worst kind of Iranian; he offends our dignity and our sense of ethics, and the worst thing is he thinks he is so clever.” The mere mention of his name, she said, made her feel depressed. In the crackdown that has followed last year’s unrest, she added, many of her friends and acquaintances—mostly other educated young professionals, of the sort that overwhelmingly supported the Green Movement—had fled the country, or were planning to. She did not plan to emigrate, but she understood the urge to do so. “The frustration is almost too great to bear. People feel so robbed, and their dignity and hopes are so offended. Every day, it is so painful. It hurts. This feeling will not just go away. The Green Movement represents this feeling, and it can’t just disappear. Somehow, maybe in another shape, it has to reëmerge.”

¶ A brief and jaunty encounter with Carl Hiaasen, whose latest entertainment, Star Island, has just come out. James Adams at the Globe and Mail (via  Arts Journal)

With the exception of his three novels for children and a smattering of non-fiction, most of Hiaasen’s oeuvre can be found in the crime or mystery fiction section of your favourite bookstore, racked like so many boxes of brand detergent in bright, candy-coloured covers. Yet it’s a berth Hiaasen finds rather, well . . . mysterious.

“My books are character-driven. They’re not driven by the story,” he explained. “There’s not this precise, linear plotting . . . And there’s no mystery really. If anything, the mystery is how are these people going to get out of this fix or end up.”

In the late 1980s, Hiaasen’s editor at Random House pressured the writer to take a character from his third novel, Skin Tight — a state’s attorney investigator — and hook all his future novels around the investigator’s exploits. Hiaasen begged off becoming a serialist, even though, sipping a big glass of Coca-Cola, he acknowledged it likely would have “made an easier road.”

But, as Mr Hiaasen doesn’t need to tell usw, he gets “bored so easily.”

Compline

¶ We don’t hear much about “cybernetics” anymore, possibly — it occurs to us this afternoon, reading Jaron Lanier’s Op-Ed piece, “The First Church of Robotics” — because the relationship between humanity and machinery implicit in that term has been reversed, so that “technology” is now the grander term, the source of metaphor for human cognition. Some old farts might find in this a worrying development, but we think, along with Mr Lanier, that it’s mostly froth. (NYT)

What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.

In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial — real thought and creativity — takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.

A devaluation — but of course not a termination.

Have a Look

¶  Mig goes to Paris. (Metamorphosism)

¶ “Doing the Reactionary“: Barbra Streisand sings Harold Rome’s 1937 tongue-in-cheek novelty dance item. Thing is, she sounds as though she were singing in 1937. (via MetaFilter)

¶ “Ceremonial Esophagus — $40” (You Suck at Craigslist)

Kevin Nguyen’s “Domestic Conflict, Explained By Stock Photos” (The Bygone Bureau)

To post a comment, visit The Daily Blague.

I’ve headed this entry with the French word for “exhausted” because, given that it’s French, I suppose, and therefore a term that I have to think about, however fleetingly, it actually means “used up” to me. “Exhausted” means used up, too, technically, but its strong everyday meaning is just another word for “tired.” I’m not just tired, though; I’m used up, physically, and I’ve been running a sort of temporal deficit for two or three months now. There haven’t been enough hours to do everything that I’ve signed up to do. In a red-alert, heart-attack sense, as distinguished from the familiar too-many-books-too-little-time complaint.

Something was going to have to go, and it kills me to say that what’s going to go is my Thursdays with Will. Megan will be returning to work full-time-at-the-office next month, and Will will spend Thursdays just as he spends the other weekdays, at his coolisssimo day care in SoHo. I have promised myself that Thursdays will be repitched to the upkeep of Civil Pleasures, which site I have totally neglected these past two weeks. I have to work up a template for new pages before I continue posting there, and I can only hope that I’ll be able to design it before September.

But I’d rather go on running the temporal deficit. Except that I couldn’t. I’d be either a dishonest or a lousy grandparent if I said that helping to take care of a small child for even just one day a week is a breeze; it’s not. But although Will might tire me out, he doesn’t use me up; what uses me up is the shortage of sheer blank hours to do what I want to do here. If my Thursdays with Will were to continue, I now understand, I’ have to ratchet back my expectations for these sites of mine. Which I would do willingly. What’s more important, reviewing the Book Review or taking Will for a walk? What has bothered me most in the past couple of weeks is knowing that, even if I gave up the Book Review review, I’d still find it difficult to get round to writing about that walk with Will.

For the first time in ages, I got to the end of this week without having written my review of the Book Review. I toyed with the idea of abandoning the feature; it has taught me what I needed to learn. I’ve developed a clear understanding of what the Book Review ought to be, along with a rather dispiriting conviction that this ideal Book Review is never going to be published by The New York Times. But who knows? I’ve decided to keep my hand in, but on far less demanding terms. I’ll write about the good reviews and the awful reviews, and mark the reviews that don’t belong in the Book Review in the first place with silence. Truth to tell, I’m tired of reading the Book Review — it’s so utterly mediocre. (The worst weeks are the ones when Liesl Schillinger, my great hope for literary understanding at the Book Review, turns in something that’s not up to her own standards. Such lapses are inevitable; I oughtn’t to have to count on one gifted reviewer. No, the worst is when Walter Kirn plays it safe and pretends not to understand a genuinely edgy book. )

I’ll close this housekeeping entry (which I haven’t dared to present as such, preferring to masquerade as a diarist) with two notes. First, I want to write about yesterday’s walk up and down 86th Street with Will. And about this evenings top-notch Mostly Mozart concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Second, I want you to know that I love compiling the Daily Office. The more I do it, the sharper my sense of what it ought to be like becomes — and the more difficult to find suitable pages to link to. If I’m used up, it’s in no small part because I glance throught three to six hundred feeds a day, reading about twenty long ones from beginning to end. Most of what I read, obviously, never appears here. You’d think, though, that it would be easy to harvest eight good links a day from such a mass of input. But it’s hard, and it gets harder. And I love what I do.

Which is another good reason for complaining in a foreign language.

Matins

¶ A forceful leader in this week’s Economist connects the dots between secular reform of the Roman Catholic Church and the debate about cultural self-determiantion that Islamic immigrants have brought to politics.

At the same time, with stunning insensitivity, it was declared that “attempting to ordain a woman” as a priest would be treated as a serious offence.

To put it kindly, whoever crafted those statements must be out of touch with the reality that is now catching up with the quasi-theocratic regimes (in other words, situations where religion is immune from state power, and has power of its own) which persist across Europe. In Ireland a point of no return was reached in November when a report found police collusion in covering up clerical misdeeds. Irish citizens, including pious ones, will never again treat the church as untouchable. In June Belgium’s authorities virtually dissolved an internal church inquiry into sex abuse by seizing files and detaining the country’s bishops for several hours. In Germany cosy ties between religious and political authorities have been shaken by news of abuse at prestigious Catholic schools and monasteries. In Italy the church still enjoys a sort of immunity, for cultural reasons, but Italians will surely one day insist that their religion should be answerable to the law of the land. That principle is especially important at a time when Western democracies are struggling to work out what place, if any, they can accord to subcultures that wish to regulate their family affairs under the laws of Islam, or some other minority faith.

Lauds

¶ If you can find a longer, more fleshed out version of this story, please let us know: Chinese state administrator for cultural heritage, Shan Jixiang, is complaining about excessive demolition. Is he on his own here, or is this part of a coordinated goernment attempt to cool down the housing market? (Guardian; via Arts Journal )

The outspoken remarks from Shan, head of the state administration for cultural heritage, echo growing concern about the destruction of buildings which date back centuries.

“Much traditional architecture that could have been passed down for generations as the most valuable memories of a city has been relentlessly torn down,” he said. He warned that without support, much of China’s heritage would be extinguished.

The China Daily reported that in Beijing alone, 4.43m square metres (1,100 acres) of old courtyards had been demolished since 1990 – equivalent to around 40% of the downtown area.

Another planned development will require razing large swaths of land around the capital’s Drum and Bell towers, until now a largely untouched district.

Prime

¶ Simon Johnson holds Timothy Geithner and the Treasury Department to the fire, for their do-nothing disinclination to put some regulatory teeth into the version of the Volcker Rule that was recently enacted, and their equally passive hope that Basel III will make banks safe. (The Baseline Scenario)

The latest details on the international negotiations for higher capital requirements – to which Mr. Geithner continually defers – are not any more encouraging. All the indications from the so-called Basel 3 process are that banks are fighting back hard against having to hold substantially stronger buffers against future losses. The Treasury may not have conceded all the ground on this issue, but it is in retreat – with the Secretary insisting on Tuesday that raising capital requirements could damage growth, despite all the evidence to the contrary (reviewed here last week).

Given this context, we should worry and wonder about the “financial innovation” to which the secretary alludes. Again, this sounds good in principle, but in practice the benefits are elusive, if not illusory – other than for people in privileged positions within the financial sector. Mr. Geithner wants the financial sector to be able to take more risk – but to what end, from the point of view of society as a whole?

Tierce

¶ Why Wrongology is our most needed science: We have seen the rational animal and he is — a talk radio host. The indispensable Jonah Lehrer:

The larger moral is that our metaphors for reasoning are all wrong. We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host. That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false. (Put another way, we’re not being rational – we’re rationalizing.) While it’s easy to read these crazy blog comments and feel smug, secure in our own sober thinking, it’s also worth remembering that we’re all vulnerable to sloppy reasoning and the confirmation bias. Everybody has a blowhard inside them. And this is why it’s so important to be aware of our cognitive limitations. Unless we take our innate flaws into account, the blessing of human reason can easily become a curse.

Men have always known themselves to be capable of gross error. Only recently, however, have we dared to lift the woeful trunkline that leads from reason to error. (The Frontal Cortex)

Sext

¶ At BLDBLOG, a project that sounds almost preposterously meta — until you get to the end of Geoff Manaugh’s entry. The Columbia University students describe their project thus: “By focusing on the space of the document, we can avoid simplistic predictions of the future while creating a database of potential evidence which can be analyzed and interpreted by a wider audience of designers.” Mind-numbing! But here’s what it means:

I only say this here because it is extraordinarily exciting to see a project like this, that out-fictionalizes the contemporary novel and even puts much of Hollywood to shame—to realize, once again, that architecture students routinely trade in ideas that could reinvigorate the film industry and the publishing industry, which is all the more important if the world of private commissions and construction firms remains unresponsive or financially out of reach. The Nesin Map alone, given a screenwriter and a dialogue coach, could supply the plot of a film or a thousand comic books—and rogue concrete mixtures put to use by nefarious underground militaries in Baghdad is an idea that could be optioned right now for release in summer 2013. HBO should produce this immediately.

My point is not that architecture students should somehow be expected to stop doing the very thing they are in school for—i.e. to learn how artificial enclosures are designed and constructed. I just mean that they should never overlook the interest of their own preliminary ideas, notes, sketches, and scenarios. After all, with just a well-timed email or elevator pitch, all of that stuff—all those bulletin boards, browser tabs, sketchbooks, notes from late-night conversations, site maps, and more—needn’t become just more crap to get filed away in your parents’ house somewhere, but could actually be turned into the seed of a film, novel, game, or comic book in another cultural field entirely.

Nones

¶ We would never say the extent of social and structural dysfunction in Pakistan couldn’t surprise us, but when it does, we’re — surprised. At the Guardian, Kamila Shamsie writes about — ready? — Pakistan’s timber mafia.

One of the most powerful and ruthless organisations within Pakistan, the timber mafia engages in illegal logging, which is estimated to be worth billions of rupees each year – the group’s connection to politicians at the local and federal level has been commented on in the media for years. The constant warnings about the timber mafia almost always include mention of the increased susceptibility of de-forested regions to flooding, landslides and soil erosion. But, in the way that horror tends to pile on horror in Pakistan, not only has the flooding been intense in areas where the timber mafia is active but the felled trees, hidden in ravines prior to smuggling them onwards, have caused havoc. Dislodged by torrents of water, they have swept away bridges and people and anything else in their path.

There has been some suggestion that the high volume of timber transported along the rivers has been a factor in the weakening of the dams and retaining walls that are supposed to protect the land from flooding but have proved unequal to the task. Their failure to function has also brought up comparisons to the poor construction that resulted in collapsed government schools during the 2005 earthquake; then, blame landed on corrupt practices and lack of oversight by the authorities in the allocation of construction contracts.

That the timber mafia reportedly gave active support to the Pakistan Taliban when they controlled Swat seems to have done nothing to diminish their influence with the state. Corruption transcends political difference. Where action is taken against the timber mafia it is often in the form of local villagers coming out to defend their trees. Pakistan’s citizens, time and again, find it falls to them to fill in the vacuum where there should be a state.

Vespers

¶ At Survival of the Book, Brian is reading Jason Epstein’s Book business, a book that we’ve decided that everyone interested in books and their contents ought to read (so, yes, we’ve ordered a copy, even though we’ve read what Mr Epstein has had so say upon the subject at The New York Review of Books. The inexorable truth that remains to be accepted is that big business will never make a success in publishing.

(NB: Brian’s somewhat infelicitous phrase, “crap consumers,” means the opposite of “consumers of crap.”)

My point is, this is so much to ask of a book. People that love books aren’t sharks. People who like reading books are by their nature kind of slow movers, and maybe that’s not so bad. In fact, if more shit hits the fan, the world will most likely need people who are patient and thoughtful and attentive to figure out how to fix some major problems. But we can be crap consumers. We like libraries, and used bookstores, and we hold onto books we love for far too long. You can’t get us to buy a stupid gift card to give out on someone’s birthday, because instead we pick out a book we love that makes us think of the birthday boy. We probably don’t have much money anyhow – we work in things like publishing, we teach, we write, maybe we work in a cubical 9 – 5 but daydream during work about what we’re going to read on the train heading home. That won’t get us a big promotion and big raise, now will it?

But these big industries and these rich shareholders are staring at us and saying they want more from us. Well too bad. So leave us be. And for those of us who got jobs at Random House and B&N and Holt thinking, well, it’s not ideal but I get to read here and be involved so I can overlook the evil… we’ll have to use the skills elsewhere, because the writing’s on the wall. The dinosaurs are falling, they’re crippled. They may not recover. That big fat publisher could be one 12 year old pop star away from landing on his face and not getting up again.

Compline

¶ Imagine that a major factor in choosing where to live was proximity to other people in your line of work, people with whom you could meet productively while commuting to the office. Sounds nuts, right? But it’s no crazier than this country’s suburban experiment itself. This is the wild re-alignment of planning priorities that’s envisioned in Melissa Lafsky’s piece at The Infrastructurist inspired by — natch — creative types in Barcelona.

One notion that’s being shaken up is the idea that work must take place in designated work spaces, and cannot be combined with transportation. The above video shows a business meeting taking place on the Barcelona metro. The idea was created by a social and digital innovation firm called Citilab, which describes itself as an “incubator for business and social initiatives.”

Granted, the idea has a few snags — unless you and all your relevant co-workers are taking the same train, coordinating meetings on public transit may be difficult. And what about all the commuters who still doggedly rely on cars? Presenting Powerpoints while driving isn’t really an option. Still, as the developing world continues to expand exponentially, it’s worth asking these questions sooner rather than later.

Have a Look

¶ Comparing New York City (Manhattan, really) to California’s Bay Area, Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s dyspeptic but amusing anti-Gotham tirade reminds us of the problem that Edith Wharton faced: In Boston, she was found too fashionable to be intelligent; in New York, too intelligent to be fashionable. (Adgrok; via Marginal Revolution)

We have fed lots of out-of-towners home-cooked meals.

¶ The Tiger Oil memos have resurfaced at Letters of Note. Weekend fun!

Matins

¶ Christopher Hitchens is not going to give anyone the satisfaction of watching him fail to write about his cancer with lucid humanity. He may not be the most introspective of men, but that is neither a vice nor a virtue. He can be counted on to register the world around him with profoundly interested attentiveness. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

Lauds

¶ At the Threepenny Review, Imogen Sara Smith meditates on the still-life photograph, focusing on work of Josef Sudek and André Kertész — making for a warm mitteleuropäisch vibe. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

Sudek’s still lifes combine solid, durable objects with the most ephemeral phenomena, light and shadow, moisture and reflections. In pictures like his Glass Labyrinths, he blurred the distinctions between light, glass, and water: all are translucent, all are veiled as though by breath, all leave permanent traces in the gelatin-silver print. Despite their softness and absence of strong contrasts, Sudek’s contact prints illuminate the tiny bubbles clinging to the sides of a glass of water, the flaking cracks in old paint, the separate filaments of feathers. Still life is an art of intimacy and nearness; it addresses the world within our reach, the things we touch, hold, smell, and taste. It brings us “tête-à-tête with things.” We know how the rim of a glass feels on our lips, the weight of an egg cradled in our hands, the sound of dry onion skin crackling as it’s peeled. But still life is defined by the lack of human presence; it shows us our rooms when we are not in them, complete without us.

Prime

¶ In an entry that had us wondering if we’d tuned into an episode trimmed from Inception, the Epicurean Dealmaker writes about something called “The Dollar Auction.”

It is an auction, with any number of participants, the object of which is to win a single, unadorned one hundred dollar bill. If you win the auction, you get to keep the money. (No tricks, I promise.) Bidding starts at a minimum of one dollar, and topping bids must exceed the prior bid by no less than one dollar, in even, undivided dollars. There is only one additional rule: the runner up in the auction must pay his or her last bid to the auctioneer, as well as the winner paying the winning bid. So, for example, if the winning bid is $10, and the next highest bid is $9, the winner will pay $10 and collect the hundred dollar bill, and the runner up will pay $9 and receive nothing.²

So, here we go. I am holding in my hands a crisp, new, freshly-issued one hundred dollar bill. Genuine U.S. currency, guaranteed legal tender for all debts, public and private. The opening bid is one dollar. Only one measly dollar to walk away with a crisp new hundo. Who will start the bidding?

Not us, that’s for sure!

Tierce

¶ “How Swearing Works.” We’re not familiar with How Stuff Works (a Web site, not a blog — we think), and we’re not quite sure what we think. The layout is a little on the Golden-Book side, and the material does not appear to be very penetrating (we’re not impressed by anything that we can understand immediately), but the article on swearing is studded with interesting nuggets. (via  kottke.org)

Swearing vs Cursing: A lot of people use the words “swearing” and “cursing” interchangeably. Some language experts, however, differentiate between the two. Swearing involves using profane oaths or invoking the name of a deity to give a statement more power or believability. Cursing takes aim at something specific, wishing for or trying to cause a target’s misfortune.

Sext

¶ At the Guardian, Andrew Brown explains why funerals are better than weddings. Or does he? It occurs to us that there is no funereal correspondent to Mr Brown’s target, the self-centered modern bride and groom who, in his view, risk shortening their marriages with personalized ceremonies. (via  The Morning News)

The great point about completely impersonal ceremonies, whose form is the same for everyone, whether these are religious or entirely civil, is that they remind us that the problems and difficulties of marriage are universal. They come from being human. They can’t be dodged just by being our wonderful selves, even all dusted with unicorn sparkle.

On your wedding day you feel thoroughly special, and your guests will go along with this; so that is the moment when the ceremony should remind you that you’re not all that. What you’re doing isn’t a step into fairyland. And if it does turn out to be the gateway to a new life, that is one that will have to be built over time and unglamorously with the unpromising materials of the old one.

Funerals, on the other hand, should be much more personal. I love the gloom and grandeur of the prayer book service; and there is much to be said for thinking about our own deaths from time to time. But death is the extinction of an individual life, and remembering and celebrating that individual is part of the proper response. And it’s one time when we can be certain it won’t inflate anyone’s self esteem.

Nones

¶ Our wish to see more history in the Blogosphere was given a puff of gratification the other day when Tyler Cowen, at Marginal Revolution, linked to Armarium Magnum, “a repository for book reviews, mainly of books on ancient and medieval history, but also on early Christianity, the historical Jesus, atheism, scepticism and the occasional novel that takes my fancy.” That fancy would be Tim O’Neill’s; we’ll let you find his self-portrait for yourself.

Armarium Magnum is not, alas, a very active blog; going back only three entries took us to February of this year, and a review of a book about the Fall of Rome. Devout subscribers to the view that Rome Crumbled From Within, we all but applauded our way through Mr O’Neill’s description of the Third-Century game, “Who’s Emperor Now?”

But when it broke down in the Third Century the veil was torn off and the Imperial system was exposed as the military dictatorship it had always been.  So now it became clear that any Senator who could win the support of enough of the Army or, failing that, who could simply bribe the increasingly mercenary and predatory Praetorian Guard, could become emperor, albeit (in most cases) very briefly.  All it took was a reverse in a foreign war against the resurgent Sassanid Persians or the increasingly bold Germanic barbarians and a usurper would appear or the Army or the Guard would mount an assassination and the whole process would repeat itself, seemingly on a shorter and shorter cycle of usurpation, civil war and anarchy.

This cycle became so intense that the primary goal of a Roman emperor was no longer wise rule and stability but mere survival.  As the Third Century progressed changes were put in place – changes that were aimed solely at reducing the threat of usurpation.  Senators were gradually excluded from military commands, since a Senator with a sizeable portion of the Army at his back was a usurper in waiting.  But by giving more and more commands to the lower, equestrian order the emperors simply pushed the opportunity for usurpation down the Roman food chain and actually broadened the numbers of those who took it into their heads to jostle for the purple.  The size, and therefore the garrisons, of the provinces were steadily reduced, since this left a governor of any given province with fewer troops with which to mount a challenge.  But this in turn weakened the Empire militarily and strategically, since a governor no longer had the military force to deal with serious local threats himself.  Incursions over the frontiers by barbarians increased in size and number and only the Emperor had the capacity to deal with them.  Cities which had been unfortified for centuries began building walls for protection, both against barbarians and against the next cycle of civil wars.

Vespers

¶ Who knew? There really was a Charlie Chan — sort of. Yunte Huang, a student at Beijing University at the time of the Tienanmen Square protests, and subsequently a Chinese takeout laborer who worked his way through graduate school in Buffalo, shares his obsession with Charlie Chan in a new book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History. Jill Lepore’s review, in The New Yorker, could not be more fun-teresting.

Chang Apana was recruited by the Honolulu Police Department, which was growing, because of those two developments. In a force of more than two hundred men—the officers mainly Hawaiian and the chiefs mostly white—he was the only Chinese. He excelled, and was promoted to detective. In the nineteen-tens, he was part of a crime-busting squad. His escapades were the stuff of legend. He was said to be as agile as a cat. Thrown from a second-floor window by a gang of dope fiends, he landed on his feet. He leaped from one rooftop to the next, like a “human fly.” When he reached for his whip, thugs scattered and miscreants wept. He once arrested forty gamblers in their lair, single-handed. He was a master of disguises. Once, patrolling a pier at dawn, disguised as a poor merchant—wearing a straw hat and stained clothes and carrying baskets of coconuts, tied to a bamboo shoulder pole—he raised the alarm on a shipment of contraband even while he was being run over by a horse and buggy, and breaking his legs. He once solved a robbery by noticing a strange thread of silk on a bedroom floor. He discovered a murderer by observing that one of the suspects, a Filipino man, had changed his muddy shoes, asking him, “Why you wear new shoes this morning?”

Compline

¶ Richard Posner, of all people, reviews David Kilpatrick’s The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, taking pains to explain the details that might not mean much to old farts like us. Of course, it reads more like an opinion than a review, but that’s the fun of it. (The New Republic; via MetaFilter)

We may laugh at Socrates, in the Phaedrus, for denouncing literacy, which he said would create “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves…. They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” But maybe his anxieties about the cultural consequences of communications technology were just premature. Still, I doubt we need worry too much about the effect of Facebook on the psychology or the cognition of its adult users. They each have their social network created mainly the old-fashioned way, and Facebook will help them maintain it. But what about the teenagers, enabled by Facebook to form immense social networks? They are said to be abandoning “best friends” in favor of having looser relations with more friends, a trend surely accelerated by Facebook—if you spend a lot of “face time” with just one or two of your “friends,” you will have no time for the other 398 or 399. A Facebook network is a social collective, a virtual kibbutz, and studies have found that children brought up in a traditional kibbutz have difficulty forming strong emotional relationships as adults.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin led one hundred children into a cave from which they never emerged. Some 500 million people, of whom about 10 percent are thirteen to eighteen years old and another 25 percent are eighteen to twenty-five years old, are now marching to the digital pipes of Mark Zuckerberg, who is twenty-six years old. I have no idea where they are marching, and whether they will ever return.

Have a Look

¶ From the editors of The Bygone Bureau, an Internet reading list. Some of the writers on the list (if not the actual pieces) will be familiar to regular readers. iPad owners really ought to set aside a Field Day.

The Wednesday circuit goes like this: I begin by walking to Crawford Doyle, on Madison between 81st and 82nd. Then I walk down 81st Street to Willy’s, my barbershop. Trim and spruce, I head for the Hi-Life, which used to be at 72nd and First but which has moved to Second Avenue between 78th and 79th. (Here be excellent club sandwiches.) After lunch, I creep along 78th or 79th Street, depending on the temperature and the need for shade, to Agata & Valentina, at 78th and First, to shop for Thursday night’s dinner. Bags in hand, I head up first, more often than not stopping at Morning Calm Gallery, and, today, paying a rare visit to Yorkshire Wines and Spirits (I usually phone in), with a final stop at Gristede’s.Today, tThe circuit took a bit more than two and a half hours to run. That’s about as quick as I can be.

I make it sound like an immemorial routine, but it dates no further back than May of this year. I’ve been making each of the Wednesday circuit  for years — decades, in some cases — but I’ve never chained them together in a regular row. The comfortable sense that I’ve been doing this for years is offset by the knowledge that I haven’t been doing it for years, not at all; I try not to feel too stupid. But when it hits me that I’m 62, I wonder, with finger-tapping impatience, just what it is, exactly, that I’ve been doing for most of that time. How could it have taken so long to figure out the simplest everyday rhythms?

In lieu of speculative answers to that question, let me just say that I’m deep into Look At Me, Jennifer Egan’s last novel but one (two?). Crawford Doyle didn’t have it in stock, but Dot McClearey was happy to order it for me. I could, of course, have ordered it from Amazon. (And you might think that I could have found it at the big Barnes & Noble down the street, but no — they had nothing but The Keep. It’s my settled conviction that, for all his moolah and whatever, Leonard Riggio does not really know how to operate a bookstore.) But nobody at Amazon is going to ask me, as Dot does, what I’ve been reading and thinking — much less actually listen to my answer.

The great thing about the Wednesday circuit is that it lets everybody know when I’m going to show up.

Matins

¶ If it were up to us, of course, students who expressed views consonant with deficit-hawks such Concerned Youth of America would be flunked out of elite schools such as Andover for solipsistic social stupidity. A school that does not inculcate the paramountcy of equity is a bad school. (There; we’re done.) Christopher Shea picks up a chilling development at CNN. (Brainiac)

Both Gruskin and Matthews attended Phillips Academy, Ryan McNeely points out (writing at Matt Yglesias’s blog), a boarding school with tuition and fees of $41,000. Indeed, that is where the group was born, and its leaders now attend such colleges as Harvard, Penn, Yale, Duke, and Georgetown. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with going to Phillips,” McNeely writes, or to a highly selective college. But McNeely, for his part, is concerned that these demographically distinct and well-connected students–a slice of America “least affected by the current downturn”– are getting an outsize amount of media and political attention. They have testified before the president’s federal deficit commission. “Will the debt commission,” McNeely asks, “listen to young Americans who didn’t go to Phillips Academy?”

Lauds

¶ A propos of the apparent ban on music (!) in Iran, Frank Oteri writes about the act of listening to music in terms that are new to us. It made us realize that we secretly believed that composers discover music, instead of inventing it. We’re not sure that we’re wrong to do so! But we’re savoring Mr Oteri’s thoughts all the same. (NewMusicBox; via  Arts Journal)

Last week I remarked in passing that music’s greatest asset is that if you truly listen to it, you are allowing the input of someone other than yourself into your consciousness. For leaders who don’t want their citizens to challenge them, this is extremely subversive. If you really want to be open to other ideas and other points of view, and you don’t want to unquestioningly do what someone else tells you to do, listen to music. For even if the act of listening is in some sense an act of submission to someone else, it is an open-ended submission that ultimately leaves you with a new perspective. Since it is impossible in the process of listening to completely lose your memory of everything you have listened to before, everything you listen to adds to that memory rather than negates it—so it is never a monolithic experience. Plus if you make music as well as listen to it, you have the opportunity to share that perspective with someone else.

Prime

¶ James Kwak struggles to maintain a hopeful tone, but his thoughts about new financial regulation fill us with despair. He puts one thing very, very well:

The regulators in all these agencies should realize that they are going to spend the next two years fighting against the Wall Street banks and their legions of lobbyists. If they do their jobs right, they will never work in the financial sector again (except maybe at a hedge fund or a buy-side investment consultancy). And if they’re not up for that fight, we need someone else who is.

We have always believed that financial regulators ought to be paid financial-industry standards, to insure that they do fight the good fight, without being asked to be heroic about their income as well. (The Baseline Scenario)

Tierce

¶ Think about it for a moment, and it’s obvious: curiosity is an emotion. Jonah Lehrer writes about a recent Caltech study that “extended this information gap model of curiosity. (The Frontal Cortex) 

The lesson is that our desire for abstract information – this is the cause of curiosity – begins as a dopaminergic craving, rooted in the same primal pathway that also responds to sex, drugs and rock and roll. This reminds me of something Read Montague,  a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me a few years ago: “The guy who’s on hunger strike for some political cause is still relying on his midbrain dopamine neurons, just like a monkey getting a sweet treat,” he said. “His brain simply values the cause more than it values dinner…You don’t have to dig very far before it all comes back to your loins.”

The elegance of this system is that it bootstraps a seemingly unique human talent to an ancient mental process. Because curiosity is ultimately an emotion, an inexplicable itch telling us to keep on looking for the answer, it can take advantage of all the evolutionary engineering that went into our dopaminergic midbrain. (Natural selection had already invented an effective motivational system.) When Einstein was curious about the bending of space-time, he wasn’t relying on some newfangled circuitry. Instead, he was using the same basic neural system as a rat in a maze, looking for a pellet of food.

Sext

¶ Will the English language survive Sarah Palin? Of course it will! It will co-opt her many unwitting (and witless) contributions, of which the wonderful “refudiate” is simply the latest. Who knows what a future this word has? We surmise that, if anything, it will be the former governor’s ticket to immortality. After all, what singles out Boss Tweed from a host of Nineteenth Century political operatives? Excess! (Tweed didn’t invent corruption any more than Ms Palin coined “refudiate.”)  Mark Peters explores. (Good)

As almost always seems to be the case, this “new word” is not entirely new. New York Times On Language columnist Ben Zimmer found a use going all the back to 1925, in an Atlanta Constitution headline: “Scandal Taint Refudiated in Teapot Case by Court, Fall Says in Statement.” In 2006, Historical Dictionary of American Slang editor Jonathan Lighter pointed out Senator Mike DeWine using the word a couple of times, and there’s enough in common meaning-wise and sound-wise between “refute” and “repudiate” to assume lots of others have made the same mistake. Still, if and when “refudiate” appears in a dictionary, it will feature a picture of Palin and no other: She is to “refudiate” as Homer Simpson is to “d’oh.”

Perhaps because of her folksiness, if the collected Palinisms took on physical form, they would fill several barnyards: there are animals aplenty. Her nickname “Sarah Baracuda” preceded her step into the national spotlight, and when John McCain picked her as his running mate, a joke of her own choosing linked her with a pit bull. The oft-repeated punchline of that joke led the Palin camp to take offense when Barack Obama used the common expression “lipstick on a pig.”  Palin professes a love for hunting wolves, caribou, and moose, and those critters are shorthand for her, like when a writer described her campaign as having “Moose-mentum.” When Palin resigned as Alaska governor, she said, “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish go with the flow.” With that zooful of words, it’s no wonder a writer mistakenly referred to “Sarah Palin and her elk.”

“…and her elk”! Ha! We’d never heard that one.

Nones

¶ Regular readers will not be surprised to hear about the New Great Game, or to be unaware of who’s playing it and on what field. Matteo Tacconi’s essay, (translated by Francesca Simmons) concludes with the prospect of a rather unstable Central Asian Islamic heartland. (Reset DOC; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Will there be a domino effect? Such a risk exists, and, in addition to the Americans and the NATO countries involved in Afghanistan, Russia too fears this possibility. In Moscow the thesis is that if the Afghan front spreads to Central Asia, it is possible that it will then also expand into the borders of the Federation, reigniting the never-sedated separatist desires of Islamic movements in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, always rather active on the stage. But the risks do not end here. According to the respected and authoritative analyst Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the world of the Taliban, to the rise of radicalism one must also add another danger; the prospect of a regional conflict, pitting any one of these former Soviet republics in Central Asia against the other. According to Rashid such a war could break out due to a number of border controversies, widespread poverty and the chronic lack of water. On the other hand, it is known that the intense exploitation of water basins in Central Asia in the days of the USSR has added to the more recent effects of global warming, which have slowly melted part of the surfaces of glaciers situated locally at high altitudes. This has resulted in each of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia becoming annoyed and blaming their respective neighbours. The bomb may not necessarily explode. The fuse, however, has been lit.

¶ Meanwhile, in “Is Pakistan a Failed State?”, Ali Hashmi rephrases the question. We wish that the American foreign policy elite would do the same. (Daily Times of Pakistan; via Real Clear World)

For our purposes, let us assume that the average citizen of Pakistan has not read Weber or Engels and for him or her, the state simply means those organs of government power outlined above with which he or she interacts on a daily basis. In Pakistan’s case (as in the case of the US and any other society based on the capitalist mode of production), this means that the state (the institutions named above) always represents the interests of the wealthy and influential. That being the case, the Pakistani state is failing the vast majority of its citizens by not providing the bare essentials of existence, i.e. clean affordable food and water, basic services (energy, healthcare, education, etc) as well as physical security in the form of protection of the citizens’ lives and property.

This offends the nationalistic sensibilities of our intelligentsia (those who write the opinion pieces) but is a stark fact for the vast majority of Pakistan’s citizens. As such, were the question to be rephrased from “Is Pakistan a failed state?” — which engenders lots of excited but confusing discussion about states, public sector debts, foreign policy, elites, electoral process, etc — to “Is the Pakistani state failing the majority of its citizens?”, the answer would be a simple yes.

Vespers

¶ Doug Bruns writes engagingly on the solution (imprisonment) to a problem (piles of unread books). It is not the optimal solution, certainly, and we find that we read best when we feel most free to put the book down and do something else. But we enjoyed contemplating Doug’s prospect, and that was a surprise. (The Millions)

Prison cells. Towers in Bordeaux. Cabins in the woods, and tents on the sides of mountains. At work behind the scene is the argument that life can be forced into an edifying and redeeming corner. It is a persuasive, if not compelling notion: That when everything is lost or set aside or taken from you, only then do you have the opportunity to do what it is you truly wish to do, to review your list of what is worthy and what is wasteful. The theme rings true. “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.” I never grow tired of this quote. Thoreau’s desire to live deliberately resonates and is at the heart of Socrates’ observation that the unexamined life is not worth living. Although I cannot personally attest to its efficacy, it carries weight that I suggest prison a good thing because it would strip one of everything extraneous. Extraneous to reading, of course.

Compline

¶ Taking Jean Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic to task for overdramatization — “Words such as ‘epidemic’ should only ever be preceded by words like “smallpox,’ and should henceforth be stricken from the social scientist’s lingo. — Charles Ferguson argues for excitement-avoidance among fellow social scientists (Chron Higher Ed; via  The Morning News)

Twenge and her colleagues are not the first to lambaste the self-esteem movement. Others have been identifying it as the source of all that ails us for years. I’m no fan of it myself. All the efforts to ban competitive sports, encourage group hugs, and say nary a negative word to a child do seem to run the risk of turning today’s youth into some socialized version of the Children of the Corn. I’m the first to acknowledge a certain absurdity at the core of the self-esteem movement and the implication that competition is harmful and children so delicate that any failure will be horribly crushing rather than an opportunity for learning and growth. However, the notion that children are so malleable that the self-esteem movement, or anything else, could twist them into an antisocial horde is equally absurd.

There’s nothing wrong with examining narcissism rates over time. It’s an interesting question. Yet once we start throwing sneering labels around and started talking about “epidemics” and “crises,” we have left the realm of science and entered that of polemics and pseudoscience. The narcissism debate is, I’d argue, no extreme case in the social sciences either. The rush to slap young people with the tag “Generation Me” is simply one more spin of the “kids today” wheel, as in “kids today, with their music and their hair. … “

Have a Look

¶ “The Truth About Boscoe.” We have no idea what he’s up to, but we’re tickled by Sean Adams’s impersonation of a very naughty teacher. (The Bygone Bureau)

¶ “The paradox of an earlier, more primitive time that was more advanced than ours“: Frank Jacobs muses on a TWA ad from a mid-Sixties issue of Paris-Match. (Strange Maps)

¶ The beautiful, sand-flooded rooms of Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes. (The Best Part)

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At Crawford Doyle last Friday, I bought two novels, even though I have a rule against buying novels and, worse, despite the fact that I had been in the store on Wednesday, and not only bought several books but ordered — two novels. I had not planned to visit the bookshop quite so soon, but Ms NOLA had been at the Museum, so there we were. Crossing Fifth Avenue, I headed along the south side of 82nd Street, but it was Ms NOLA who voiced the suggestion — no doubt regarding it as foregone. Stepping into the cool, dusky air, I felt almost criminal, as though I were about to buy a large ice cream after a heavy dinner, complete with dessert. The idea of leaving the store without buying something was unthinkable; I’d have felt that I’d insulted the staff and presumed upon the air conditioning. Very silly compunction. The upshot was that I walked out with those two novels. But neither of them was new, and I could imagine devouring one of them on the spot.

That would be Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori, which I hadn’t read. I had just read a review of the recent life, and mention had been made of Ivy Compton-Burnett. It seems that Spark actually acknowledged the influence of Compton-Burnett, which of course made it official, and I was curious to test the connection. The review also mentioned that caring for her ancient grandmother gave Spark the familiarity with the elderly that is manifest in Memento Mori. So that seemed to be the book to read, and there it was, at Crawford Doyle. In case you’ve never read Ivy Compton-Burnett — well, I don’t really know what to say. I’ve got a book somewhere that hails her as a camp classicist, and there is about her style a self-conscious intensity that seems now and then to wink at the reader. Compton-Burnett wrote about ghastly old Victorians, patriarchs and matriarchs who, wholly wrapped up in themselves, tyrannized the the young people who had the misfortune to be nearby. They’re not quite human, too; they glitter and gleam like birds of prey, determined but brainless. If you are writing anything serious at the moment, stay away from Ivy Compton-Burnett, because her manner is dreadfully catching; you’ll find yourself imitating her, horrified but fascinated, unable to stop.

When did I last read a book by Ivy Compton-Burnett? Decades ago, I think. I read a batch of them, and then I couldn’t read another. The last one that I read was published by Virago, I think, and it had a dyspeptic Picasso on the cover. Ah yes, here it is: Two Worlds and Their Ways. I don’t remember much about it, except that the atmosphere was oppressive, and that there weren’t any attractive characters. Maybe there was an attractive character or two, but they didn’t stick in the mind. The horrid old people stuck in the mind. Well, their horridness sticks in the mind. Imagine a life of heaping but flavorless food, served up in overheated rooms at punctual hours, silent but for the sounds of genteel people eating and digesting. Eventually, you conclude, “I can’t read this sort of thing anymore,” but it sticks with you, and, when you read Memento Mori, it all comes back.

Rather, it does not come back but it lingers in your peripheral vision. You know that it’s there and you sense it compulsively, but you cannot look at it. Spark’s characters are not so awful, possibly because they’re the children of the Victorian horrors in Compton-Burnett. But now it’s their turn to be old, and most of them are cross about it. There is the feeling, strong in Compton-Burnett, that age distills the vices of the mind, so that even if some old fool is physically incapable of doing much of anything, he can still splash around in a sulfuric puddle of universal loathing. There is also a return to childishness, to sudden hatreds and silly requests; an unwillingness to take very seriously what might make another person happy. A brusque self-pitying rudeness takes the place of politeness.

“You might have opened the door for me,” she said.

Godfrey did not at first understand what she meant, for he had long since started to use his advanced years as an excuse to omit the mannerly conformities of his younger days, and was now automatically rude in his gestures, as if by long-earned right. He sensed some new frightful upheaval of his habits behind her words, as he drove off fitfully towards Sloane Square.

As in Compton-Burnett (but also as in Spark’s other novels), the plot is buried in the busyness of a dozen microscopic campaigns. Godfrey Colston feels so embattled by his wife, by his wife’s former lover, and by his housekeeper, that he no longer has the faintest idea what he wants; he is simply at war, albeit on subdued terms, with the entire world. He lunges at imagined encroachments without much conviction in the effectiveness of either his bark or his bite. There is an inheritance, but Spark couldn’t be more desultory about its settlement, and when it ends up in the hands of the woman who was counting upon it all along, the chanciness of this outcome is so comic that one almost fancies it as a pie in her face. There is a notional mystery: the gang of old people who constitute the cast of Memento Mori have all been pestered by anonymous telephone callers who simply remind them, before hanging up, to “remember that you must die.” I put “callers” in the plural because the old folks can’t agree on what sort of voice makes these announcements, young, old, distinguished or common. Dame Lettie Colston, a do-goodering battleaxe, is so outraged by the calls that she wants the matter raised in Parliament. In contrast, Charmian Piper, a once-famous novelist who begins to recover from incipient dementia when her books are reissued and made a cult of by young readers, believes that the proper response to the phone calls is to take them at their word: it can’t hurt to remember that you must die. Dame Lettie considers the warning impertinent at best and menacing at worst, and indeed she comes to a corresponding end, while Charmian dies “one morning in the following spring,” in manifestly uneventful circumstances.

Almost everybody dies, but that’s what the title promised, no? One survivor, Alec Warner, is an unwitting mischief-maker whose amassed observations of old people, researched for some Casaubon-like book, are consumed in a fire; he suffers a stroke and goes to live in a nursing home “and frequently searched through his mind, as through a card catalogue, for the case-histories of his friends, both dead and dying.” Another is the awful Mrs Pettigrew, the officious housekeeper schemes to benefit from her employers’ wills. Mrs Pettigrew has lived among the gentry long enough to pass for one of them, but she knows her place, and one of the most astute passages in Memento Mori ties together her ersatz morality with her caste uncertainty.

Mrs Pettigrew went upstairs to look round the bedrooms, to see if they were all right and tidy, and in reality to simmer down and look round. She was annoyed with herself for letting go at Mrs Anthony. She should have kept aloof. But it had always been the same — even when she was with Lisa Brooke — when she had to deal with lower domestics she became too much one of them. It was kindness of heart, but it was weak. She reflected that she had really started off on the wrong foot with Mrs Anthony; that, when she had first arrived, she should have kept her distance with the woman and refrained from confidences. And now she had lowered herself to an argument with Mrs Anthony. These thoughts overwhelmed Mrs Pettigrew with that sense of having done a foolish thing against one’s interests, which in some people stands for guilt. And in this frame of heart she repented, and decided, as she stood by Charmian’s neatly-made bed, to establish her position more solidly in the household, and from now on to treat Mrs Anthony with remoteness.

Fat chance of that.

Matins

¶ At Salon, Michael Lind writs about the faux upper middle class, saddled with “worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford.” Cui bono? The left and the right are pretty much in pari delicto. (via The Awl)

But many have profited from the peddling of the dream of the mass upper middle class. The claim that everyone should go to college served the interests of the educational-industrial complex, from K-12 to the universities, that now serves as an important constituency of the Democratic Party. (Along with Wall Street investment banks, universities provided Barack Obama with his largest campaign donations.) And the claim that everyone needs to pour money into the stock market, to be managed by banks and brokers who fleece their clients, served the interests of the financial-industrial complex that has replaced real-economy businesses as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Both the educators and the brokers have successfully lobbied Congress to subsidize their bloated industries, swelling them even further, by means of tax breaks for student loans and personal retirement savings. The big losers have been the millions of working Americans whom many Democrats and Republicans alike have persuaded, against their interests, to indulge champagne tastes on beer budgets.

Lauds

¶ Ellen Moody assesses The Kids Are All Right as a serious women’s film that updates, without substantially revising, our idea of the American family.

Though again we are confronted by the ritual humiliation of the woman character. After all, it is Jules who plays the woman in this marriage who almost destroys it by having sex with Paul; Jules who must apologize and beg for forgiveness. At the same time to be fair (and explain why I so enjoyed the film), as Jules Julianne Moore holds the family together for real. Her loving interventions, her continual kindnesses and urging of everyone to get along; the way she goes over to Joni and Laser after Nick makes it clear she has gone to bed with Paul — the film values someone intensely who has no career, makes no money. It’s she who has to sleep downstairs when Nick throws her out of their bed, and she holds no grudges. I’ve usually liked the characters Julianne Moore plays and this film showed the best sides of her typology. Not abject, giving and then appreciated.

What saves this film are the nuances of the individual scenes and dialogue — script, acting, the perfect timing, and discordant moments. Especially the ongoing little jarring comments by Jules and Nick at and to one another. Jules reminds Nick that she has drunk too much. Nick cuts across Jules’s super-kindness to the kids (Jules is the woman reconciling everyone) to insist on making choices based on remembering harder dangers: riding on motorcycles the way Paul loves to is dangerous, statistically you are courting death or crippling, so she works hard to prevent Joni and Paul from doing it.

¶ Noting an interesting paradox about Christopher Nolan (“he’s fascinated by identity but not much good with character”), The Owls (Ben Walters and JM Tyree) air their disappointment with Inception.

BW: Well, his protagonists tend to (mis)remember and investigate rather than, um, live. We root for them because they’re the narrative engine, not because we’re actually invested in their welfare to any great degree. And I think this brings us to another problem with Inception – this lack of facility for the quirks and charms of actual present people result in a film basically comprised of really boring, thuddingly rational dream sequences.

JMT: They’re not that dreamy. A friend pointed out that the snow level of the narrative/dream is a Bond film. And really it’s also an Inception video game. Blam! I’m using the bigger gun now. Someone else I talked to reminded me, though, that since the dreams are constructed they would tend to be less weird than “real” dreams. So that can be unwound as possibly more interesting…

BW: Cop-out! Dreams should be weird and woozy and hot and fickle. Inception plays like a two-and-a-half-hour American Express ad

In their utterly different ways, these are the big movies of Summer 2010 — the shows that anyone interested in film must see. We’ve had our say here and here.

Prime

¶ At the Boston Globe, Michael Fitzgerald talks to Mark Valeri about Heavenly Merchandize, his intriguing reconsideration of the relationship between Puritanism and capitalism in Colonial America. How did the austere Puritans become energetic businessmen? It seems to have something to do with settling down and discovering home in exile.

Tierce

¶ At Not Science Fiction, Kyle Munkittrick considers how handy an AI Physician X Prize-winning tricorder would be at solving the problem that too many doctors are poor diagnosticians.

Now imagine an app as smart and accurate as a panel of ten doctors in the hands of a trained MD or EMT, emphasis on the “trained.” Walker’s essay focuses on allowing patients to self-diagnose, but the huge benefit would be for professional diagnoses. Instead of being required to memorize thousands of potential diseases and syndromes, each with their own fickle and bizarre permutations, a doctor’s two primary goals would become 1) ensuring accurate, exhaustive entry of symptoms into the tricorder and 2) giving comprehensive, patient oriented care. Diagnoses, particularly esoteric ones, would become the prerogative of the device, instead of certain hobbled, cantankerous MDs named “House.” In addition to the symptoms entered by the doctor, the tricorder would have access to the patient’s entire medical history — including reoccurring issues, worsening conditions, potential genetic dispositions, and a plethora of other minutia — that could be the difference between sending someone home with “drink fluids and come back if it gets worse” and hospitalization. Furthermore, long, infection-prone hospital stays for “observation” would be reduced or even eliminated thanks to better initial diagnoses. The health industry as we know it might change so much as to become unrecognizable.

Sext

¶ Choire Sicha has fun with the strangely overlapping interviews of highbrow actresses in the Sunday Times. Laura Linney’s alabaster complexion graced the Magazine, while, in a much pithier Arts & Leisure piece, Michelle Orange interviewed Patricia Clarkson. Choire wants to know if you can attribute fifteen snips correctly. Of course Choire picks the most generically puffy bits. Here they are on the subject of family life. First Linney —

She declared her husband and her family off-limits for interviews. Friends who talked with me about her worried aloud that they might be straying into areas she might not want them to. And while Linney never took offense or balked at any question I asked, she would dispense with some topics — like whether she ever wanted, or still wants, children — with a just a few inconclusive, anodyne words. She clearly meant to be professional and polite, but she just as clearly had no intention of serving up a quivering, tremulous heart on a platter.

— then Clarkson.

Living the dream doesn’t leave much room for sleep. Or settling down, an expression that makes Ms. Clarkson — who has never married and has no children, nor a computer or an assistant, for that matter — visibly recoil.

“I have very strong ideas and strong convictions, and I think I have brought to fulfillment the life I’ve really always wanted,” she said. “There isn’t really anything I would change about my career right now.”

She paused, the mischief returning to her eyes. “O.K., a few things,” she relented. “Usually involving a check with some zeros.”

Nones

If we weren’t ticked off at The Economist ourselves (all that tendentious reporting!), we probably wouldn’t link to this story, in which Edward Hugh, of A Fistful of Dollars, is ticked off at The Economist, for its anti-Catalonian approach to the bullfighting ban in the region. (And the age of unsigned articles is so over!)

At the same time it is hard not to notice that the correspondent does his best not to find too many positive things to say about Catalans. In an article back in July 2009 “All must have prizes”, he also argues that one of the reasons for Mr Zapatero’s continuing spending spree was to keep Catalan politicians happy, without mentioning – as the group of young professionals who for Collectiu Emma point out – that there is a net fiscal transfer annually from Catalunya to the rest of Spain of around 10% of GDP. Indeed trying to hold Catalonia responsible for Spain’s economic woes makes about as much (and as little) sense as holding Germany responsible for the Greek economic mess. In fact, the comparison goes further, since it is reasonably clear that Catalonia has an external surplus with the rest of the world just like Germany does, which is why the Catalans share the same kind of reputation inside Spain for being thrifty and austere as their German counterparts on the European level.¶

Vespers

¶ We’ll read anything by or about Jennifer Egan, and Patricia Z0hn’s intereview at The Huffington Post is a nice “addition to the literature.” But in answer to a question about the Sixties, Ms Egan deftly binds the overtly Sixties-era themes that have freckled her fiction with the covert activities, also beginning in the Sixties, that have inspired her technique.

CZ: Though you were born a decade late, you seem to have been defined by the Sixties. People who were adolescent then are tired of hearing all of us say it was, so far, the most interesting time to come of age. Yet you have not only embraced these years but have made their themes–sex, drugs, rock and roll, politics, and the subsequent disillusionment and burnout–the calling cards to your work. Why, and what was missing from your own era that they were so easily able to eclipse it?

JE: I’d say that I’ve been defined by missing the Sixties. My mother and stepfather moved us to San Francisco in 1969, when I was seven, and I grew up there convinced that everything spontaneous and raw and thrilling had passed me by. Had I actually experienced the sixties, I might have a more nuanced memory of that era. I guess what I’m saying is that in San Francisco, anyway, “my” era was mostly about processing the era that had just passed. Until the punk rock scene of the late seventies, there wasn’t much, counterculturally, to compete with it.

Looking back, though, I’d say that my era has actually been defined by dizzying technological change. I grew up before there were answering machines, and in 47 years I’ve watched us hurtle into a hyperconnected state whose implications none of us can fully grasp. Funnily, the origins of that change can be traced right back to the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970’s–the very same years when it seemed like nothing new was happening! Things were happening, it turns out, but we couldn’t see them yet.

Compline

¶ Ann Jones, seneior citizen and embedded journalist, tootles around an American operation in Afghanistan that makes Men Who Stare At Goats look like a documentary. On top of all the surreal weirdness, she plops the following sundae cherry, which might explain why COIN isn’t working as well as we might like. (Asia Times; via MetaFilter)

On the base, I heard incessant talk about COIN, the “new” doctrine resurrected from the disaster of Vietnam in the irrational hope that it will work this time. From my experience at the FOB, however, it’s clear enough that the hearts-and-minds part of COIN is already dead in the water, and one widespread practice in the military that’s gone unreported by other embedded journalists helps explain why.

So here’s a TomDispatch exclusive, courtesy of Afghan-American men serving as interpreters for the soldiers. They were embarrassed to the point of agony when mentioning this habit, but desperate to put a stop to it. COIN calls for the military to meet and make friends with village elders, drink tea, plan “development”, and captivate their hearts and minds. Several interpreters told me, however, that every meeting includes some young American soldiers whose locker-room-style male bonding features bouts of hilarious farting.

To Afghan men, nothing is more shameful. A fart is proof that a man cannot control any of his apparatus below the belt. The man who farts is thus not a man at all. He cannot be taken seriously, nor can any of his ideas or promises or plans.

Blissfully unaware of such things, the army goes on planning together with its civilian consultants (representatives of the US State Department, the US Department of Agriculture and various independent contractors who make up what’s called a Human Terrain Team charged with interpreting local culture and helping to win the locals over to our side). Some speak of “building infrastructure”, others of advancing “good governance” or planning “economic development”. All talk of “doing good” and “helping” Afghanistan.

In a typical mess-up on the actual terrain of Afghanistan, army experts previously in charge of this base had already had a million-dollar suspension bridge built over a river some distance away, but hadn’t thought to secure land rights, so no road leads to it. Now the local American agriculture specialist wants to introduce alfalfa to these waterless, rocky mountains to feed herds of cattle principally pastured in his mind.

Have a Look

¶ Clandestine grilled cheese sandwiches. Should this be “Anywhere But New York”? Or is it a hoax? (New York Post; via The Awl)

¶ Design Disasters of the Past 25 Years. (The Infrastructurist) Our favorite is the top-rated Lotus Riverside Complex.

On Saturday afternoon, Kathleen and I went to see The Girl Who Played With Fire — the second installment of the Stieg Larsson adaptations. Kathleen was very annoyed by some changes that, in her view, were not only unnecessary but also distracting — perhaps “detracting” is the word. For myself, the movie was pleasant and engaging; Noomi Rapace has one of the truly great screen presences. (Although gifted with generally lovely features and truly amazing cheekbones, she can look plain and used up.) But, perhaps because I don’t think that it could stand on its own — which isn’t so much a fault as an accident of its mode of release — I wasn’t prompted to comment. The Girl Who Played With Fire certainly lacks what was for me the most powerful thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, that haunting photograph of the young Harriet Vanger (Julia Sporre) burning like a lighthouse at its center. Rarely has a still image been so evocatively deployed in a movie. (The only thing that comes to mind is the portrait of the missing heroine in Laura.) Niels Arden Oplev’s use of that photograph amounts to a kind of contract: no one with Harriet’s piercingly intelligent gaze could ever be murdered and dumped. But reassurance is missing from the second movie. Even though we know that she has to make it to the third installment, we can’t count on the survival of Lisbeth Salander herself. There is no hope within the movie. And if you know that the third and final installment picks up right where the second one ends, with Lisbeth and her monstrous father, Zala, in the same hospital, it’s difficult to see The Girl Who Played With Fire as having a genuine ending. It’s more a series of interesting episodes. Which is fine! But nothing to write here about.

The itch to see a film that would make me want to say something persisted, and this morning I succumbed to curiosity about Inception. I’m not going to waste much time distinguishing Inception, which I enjoyed, from Avatar, which I wouldn’t see; it’s enough to say that I wasn’t afraid that the new movie would offend me. As, indeed, it did not. But it did bore me, here and there. The ennui got particularly thick during the Alpine shoot-out scenes that I think were to represent an attack upon the subconscious of a godfather. I felt as though I were being forced to stare over someone’s shoulder at a video game. There was nothing in it for me. My interest in the good guys dropped to zero, so much so that I didn’t bother to sort out who was where or doing what. The gunfire was an obvious insurance policy, hedging against the risk that the story’s inventive theory of dreams would lose the young men in the audience. Actually, explicating the mechanics of invading the dreams of others risked losing everyone, because the job was assigned to Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m afraid that it is spectacularly difficult for me to connect Mr DiCaprio’s Cobb with the kind of sustained intellectual effort that mastering the art of “extraction” would require. And he was woefully shown up by the electrically bright Ellen Page, who as Ariadne plays the only character who is even halfway privy to her team leaders dark secrets, and who was able (as an actress) to put us in the picture every time she was obliged to scold Cobb for putting his people at uninformed risk. If Ariadne had been the one to tell us all about “Limbo,” I’m sure that we’d all have been far more terrified of the possibility of winding up there.

It’s a pity that Christopher Nolan doesn’t trust his cinematic virtuosity enough to have made what this movie might have been: a coruscating adventure story without either guns or spiels. He comes close, or at least he did so for me, in the layer of the climactic dream sandwich of dreams that takes place in a swank hotel. While the other characters dream down one level, their wool-suited bodies defenseless,  Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) remains behind to protect them. I had no idea what Mr Gordon-Levitt was doing throughout this sequence, but I didn’t mind; I was happy to watch him scramble about the corridors (sometimes along the ceiling) and up and down an elevator shaft, satisfied that he seemed to know what he was doing. (Mr Gordon-Levitt would have made a great Cobb, but I’d hate to lose him as Arthur.) The scene in which Cobb and Ariadne stroll through Paris, in a dream in which she re-invents the city while he populates it, is great visual fun, as is the crumbling city-by-the sea that represents the failure of the dream that Cobb shared with his late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard). But Mr Nolan’s adherence to the action-thriller playbook guarantees that the buds of his visual creativity never fully bloom. It seems churlish to complain about this; what’s wrong with a beautiful action-thriller. Well, nothing, except that, as an action-thriller, Inception is not very inventive.

We learn, at the end of Inception, that Cobb knows that it’s possible to plant an idea in someone’s brain because he has done it before, to his wife. The guilt that he feels flows from having so well convinced her that what seemed to be real life was also just a dream that she lost interest in it and took her life. Thus she bowed to the same Panglossian morality that assures us that people who could live forever would come to regard immortality as a curse. Life may be tough, but if it were any easier, we’d be really miserable. If life were a dream, it would be unlivable. Is this an interesting proposition? Most of us would unhesitatingly agree that mistaking life for a dream is a kind of pathology, an illness to be treated. We’re somatically rooted in a life that does not seem dream-like at all. But what if it were a dream? What if we could live forever? (Living in a dream world for eternity is, of course, the Abrahamic afterlife.) These are not grown-up questions, and making Marion Cotillard look wretched because she has been betrayed by one of them is sad diminishment. I’d have liked it better if she’d just been an all-out bad girl.