My latest resolution, which I have made several times now but not kept, is to refrain from commenting upon one of Eric Patton’s entries at Sore Afraid until I have actually written to him privately. This may put a stop to my comments altogether, but at least I’ll be free of that awful sticky teenaged feeling of having ventured an unappreciated witticism. Eric’s writing always makes me feel playful, but his subject matter makes me feel thoughtful. It’s a problematic blend, best bottled and shelved for a day or two.

As so often happens, it’s the obiter dicta that really caught my attention (even though I had the sense not to comment upon it). In passing, sharpening a point, Eric constructed the opposite of a so-called bucket list. “Puck-It” is, of course, a stand in for the name that I really have in mind; I refrain because I know — and delight in the fact — that many of my readers would be somewhat shocked and possibly offended if I headed an entry, in great big letters, “Fuck-It List.” Either way, such a list itemizes the things that one intends never to know more about than one already does, things that one rather wishes one didn’t know about at all, because they weren’t there to be known.

The subject of Eric’s entry is the variety of religious experience, historically considered, and, at an early point, he is forced to acknowledge that this is a variety in which, per se, many if not most people are uninterested. 

If I had a United States dollar for every time I heard or read “All religion is equally bad!” I would be able to afford a very nice dinner in one of the fine restaurants in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, located on the southwestern corner of New York’s famed Central Park. 

Also, it’s much easier to simply reject anything that falls under the rubric of religion than to actually learn about the differences between religions or religious movements or about religious history and philosophy, and it seems more even-handed.  I have chosen to do the same for business, sport, finance, cooking, real estate, and most technology, although I am a fan of the wheel, fire, and several metals.

The presence of cooking on this list makes saddens me a bit — I can’t believe that Eric wouldn’t make a very good cook, and it’s the item that, in combination with the others, proclaims Eric as a serious male intellectual. But when I remember that Eric is usually generating laughter on one level or another, I stop worrying: he’s not that serious. Or, rather, is not serious like that.

I think about my own list, which definitely includes sport — and may I pause to say how pleased I was to find another American willing to adopt the English singular, which emphasizes the absence of varieties of athletic experience. I’m certainly squeamish about real estate, but I can’t, as a trained lawyer, claim to be unaware of the varieties of property ownership. Technology interests me hugely, as an extension of cognitive capability, but I suspect that Eric is talking about toys here; if so, I share the allergy. (This would include the universe of automobiles.) Where we differ most is on the matter of business. I used to feel that business was a soul-destroying activity, but when I realized that it was only soul-destroying for me (and a few others), I began to appreciate it as the force that really does make the world go round. I’m not talking about “capitalism” here. I’m talking about the kind of commerce in which the proprietor knows most of his customers by name. Not necessarily small business, by the way: J P Morgan knew most of his customers by name.

But I have awakened to the fact that finance — a daring and often dodgy variety of the banking experience — has nothing to do with business. Repeat this often. Nor does it have much to do with retail investment (college and retirement funds) or the varieties of insurable risk. Finance ought to be occasional, triumphant, and apotheothetical, its gods invoked from time to time for the subscription of grand public goals such as the Triborough Bridge or the Museum of Television and Radio. Everyday finance — the trading routine of Goldman Sachs — would be indefensible if it were more generally understood. And advertising is to creativity as finance is to business: parasitical and mindless. At best, it is catalytic, as vital as vitamin A, and as lethal in greater than small amounts.

I have another list, one that Eric’s too young for yet. It comprises things that I know a lot about, so much in fact that they’re no longer really interesting. I’m not sure (to pick a slight example) that I can ever read PG Wodehouse again. I can’t take the thing known as “conceptual art” much more seriously than the fabulous accomplishments of other people’s little children. I’m shocked by how little I miss having my own garden, and knowing the Latin name of every plant in it. I pray that I remain ignorant of war, that worst variety of religious experience.

¶ Googolopoly. (via reddit)

¶ Electoral College Reform (via Joe.My.God)

¶ Visualizing the campaign finance case. (via Marginal Revolution)

(A little “café” in Paris, by Jean Ruaud)

RJ asked me the other day to guestblog at the Daily Blague during his vacations which will be next week. I should say that I’m at the same time, daunted, humbled and grateful, at the prospect of this task. As a try-out I will now present myself to the Daily Blague’s readers.

My name is Jean Ruaud (Jean is John in English and is pronounced Jan, and is not the feminine Jean), I’m a frenchman of fifty two years old, working and living in Paris. I’m an amateur photographer and blogger.

Once upon a time RJ read my blog (ô, the magic of the Internet), which was, at this time (2004), L’Homme qui marche and contacted me by e-mail. We became Internet friends, RJ and me, and I visited him and Kathleen in 2007 during one of my visits to New York City (and again last year). RJ and I share, I think, the same cultural interests and the same sense of what is important in the world and in life and a great friendship.

I’m a veteran blogger, I opened one of the first blogs in France, in 2001. I began with Douze Lunes (Twelve Moons) and now I write in Mnémoglyphes (which means glyphs or prints or tracks of memory and is a neologism invented by a friend in a book devoted to the philosophical meaning of prints).

I have a job, wich is doing criminal analysis and criminal maps for the French Railway’s law enforcing and security unit.

English is not my maternal language, as you can guess by this post, French is. I was born in a little town, Chinon, in the center of France, some fifty years ago. Close to my little French town, when I was a kid, was something special: a US Army camp and military hospital, right there, at the edge of town. “Les Américains” were everywhere and participated a bit to the life of the city. A number of French citizen were employed at the camp and at the hospital and the city’s pubs and saloons benefited greatly of the American soldiers patronage, as you can figure. Thus, I was exposed early to “les Américains”, to their language and the American popular culture. Some officers and doctors lived with their families in little American villages at the edge of town and before that they even lived in town, in rented french houses or appartments. They had a very different way of life, different products and appliances in their houses, even different cars, and they listened to a different kind of music: jazz and rock’n roll. They were wealthy, athletic and healthy, at least for us! It was exotic and very enticing for us french kids and it gave me a natural fondness for all things American. “Les Américains” were sent home by the General De Gaulle in 1964, much to my dismay.

I learned English in high school but the language I learned there was a literary language not a spoken one. At the time of my first visit in the US, in 1993, I became aware of my incapacity to understand what people said and, more seriously, I was not able to speak in a coherent fashion. Back in France I was seriously commited to learn the English language and I undertook to read, learn the vocabulary, listen to English language TV (thanks CNN and BBC World) and see all the films and TV shows only in original version. Gradually I became almost fluent in this language I love.

During the recent years I visited parts of the United States, above all Manhattan, where I went five times out of ten visits, California (two times), parts of Colorado and Arizona (one) and Houston, Texas (two trips) where I have family working in the oil industry there.

I’m interested in the US culture, politics and history, and, of course, in the Internet and what is called the web 2.0, but my prime hobby is photography. My images were reproduced in some books here in France and you can see them on Flickr. I’m a proud member and reader in the famous American Library in Paris, a venerable institution and a wonderful place of culture and civilisation.

Well, I look forward to write here next week and do my best to entertain you while RJ is busy resting in the sun. See you when? Saturday? I’ll be there!

Jean

Back in callow college days, when I was assigned The Watershed, the book about Johannes Kepler that Arthur Koestler excerpted from The Sleepwalkers, I knew Koestler’s name, and I knew (from the jacket copy on The Watershed) that Koestler was the author a familiar title, Darkness at Noon, although I knew nothing about this latter book. I didn’t know much of anything about the Spanish Civil War, beyond Picasso’s Guernica, and it would have surprised me, in those days, to learn that the same man could face death in one of Franco’s prisons and, later on, write up Kepler’s search for the music of the spheres. But I’d have adjusted right away, because I somehow knew enough to place Koestler under the same rubric as Norman Mailer.

Arthur Koestler, in other words, wasn’t someone that I had to get to know right away, because he was one of those culturally immanent presences that float overhead from year to year, so constant that we don’t notice that they’ve been fading until something obliges us to look at them closely. That something, in Koestler’s case, was his suicide in 1983; which would have been unremarkable if he hadn’t been joined in the act by his younger, perfectly healthy wife. When I heard about that, I realized that I hadn’t heard Koestler’s name in quite a while, and that in fact I had never really known why he was famous.

Increasingly, fame feels like a kind of style; it is bestowed upon those who for one reason or another are in tune with the intellectual fashion of the moment. And it is withdrawn to the extent that its beneficiaries have committed themselves to looks and feels that have dated and staled. Koestler’s case is more encompassing. As Anne Applebaum notes in her review of a new biography of Koestler, the most urgent topic of Koestler’s prime has vanished from everyday discourse.

The most important change, however, is political. To put it bluntly, the deadly struggle between communism and anticommunism—the central moral issue of Koestler’s lifetime—not only no longer exists, it no longer evokes much interest. Thanks to the opening of archives, quite a few Western historians are, it is true, still investigating the history of the Soviet Union and of the international Communist movement. But outside of a few university comparative literature departments, Soviet-style Marxism itself is not a living political idea anywhere in the West. In the wake of the Lehman Brothers crash in the autumn of 2008, there were calls for a government bailout of the auto industry. No one—no major newspaper columnists, no leading politicians, no popular intellectual magazines—called upon the vanguard of the proletariat to rise up and overthrow the bourgeois capitalist exploiters. In the Europe of 1948, somebody would have done so.

What that means, though, is that the entire political context in which Koestler, Sartre, and Camus functioned—and in which Koestler’s most important works were written—is now gone.

Ms Applebaum goes on to suggest that, if Koestler is to regain anything like the fame that he enjoyed sixty years ago, it won’t be because he wrote about important things, but rather the reverse: he’ll be read, if at all, because he convinces readers that, beneath the political dramas that he addressed in his work, there is a timeless struggle between forces that bear more universal names than “communism” and “democracy” — a struggle that he understands with compelling clarity. Ms Applebaum doesn’t appear to find this eventuality very likely.

This has always been much on my mind, this “Koestler problem.” It’s one thing to be forgotten because you didn’t really grasp the issues that interested you. That’s a risk that we take knowingly when we publish an essay. What you can’t really grasp is the possibility that the issues that you address so well will fall away, and concern nobody. You can’t grasp it because you can’t see where things are going. You can guess, but you can’t see.

If you’re a journalist, you probably don’t care.

¶ Matins: Rebecca Solnit addresses media complicity in the property-rights racket of post-disaster “looting.” (Guernica; via The Rumpus)

¶ Lauds: London art critic Jonathan James asks: “Should critics point out how exhibitions could have been done differently?”

We think that Mr Jones is exactly wrong about a critic’s principal duty: motivating the public to see and hear things. There’s a place for considering the purposes of exhibitions and such, but it is not in the daily critic’s commentary. Mr Jones confuses stock and flow. (Guardian)

¶ Prime: Megan McArdle assesses yesterday’s White House banking proposals. In passing, she notes the witlessness of Big Banking’s business-as-usual behavior in 2009. (The Atlantic)

Ms McArdle’s expecatation that the legislation will hurt New York will probably be what ensures passage.

¶ Tierce: Terry Teachout still seems surprised by the popularity of Pops, his life of Louis Armstrong. It has kept him exhilaratingly yet worryingly busy. (About Last Night)

¶ Sext: Liz Colville treats us to a parody preview of Elizabeth Gilbert’s as-of-yet untitled next book. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: Here’s a headline: “Accord Reached to Let Honduran President Depart.” Only problem: Guess Who hasn’t signed on. Elisabeth Malkin reports. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Martin Schneider considers the possibility that the number of “game-changing” non-fiction books has been dwindling.

Don’t miss the list of important books from the period 1955-1975 — a lot of them still look important to us, especially that game-changiest of paradigm shifting books, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). It was a thrilling read five or six years later, when it figured in the Editor’s assigned reading at college. (Emdashes)

¶ Compline: “Thorstein Veblen” celebrates the first anniversary of Economists For Firing Larry Summers by renewing the appeal implicit in his Web log’s title.

In a few hours, Will O’Neill will be three weeks old. Next week, when I hope to see him for the third time, he’ll be four weeks old, but not yet a month. I expect that the counting in weeks will end when he’s three months old, and that counting in months will end sometime between his eighteenth and his twenty-fourth. From then until his early teens, half-years will be noted. There’s something self-contradictory about saying “thirteen and a half”; it sounds like the kind of puffing that cool kids don’t go in for.

So much is known of Will’s future, and not much more. He has not announced any plans so far, and his parents have nothing more definite (and limiting) than health and safety in mind for his coming years. When will intimations of his future begin to present themselves? Will we recognize them? These are open questions, too. Looking back on my own life, I see a complete break with childhood round about 1961. I stopped playing in the basement (I had already stopped playing with trains), and I started reading, preferably by candlelight. Beyond the odd Hardy Boys mystery, I hadn’t  been a reader; that changed with A Tale of Two Cities. I began singing, too, in the chorus at school, and almost instantly I knew all about Mozart and Vivaldi. Not to mention the Water Music, which provided the soundtrack for Dickens. Overnight, I became a pompous jerk. For the most part, I’ve spent the rest of my life filling in the pretentious gas of my own private Big Bang with material experience.

What also strikes me is the totality with which my new preoccupation with music, literature, and history — my abiding interests to this day — sublimated sexuality for me. Stendhal wrote that people wouldn’t fall in love if they didn’t read about it first, but even then, although I had a few monumental crushes that went nowhere (because, among other reasons, I was constituted like one of the denizens of Pleasantville), I didn’t think about making love, myself, in spite of reading rather a lot about it. Sex, like sports, was for other people. I’m quite sure that I should have grown up to be a forty year-old virgin if I had not, at some convenient point in my college career, been taken by the hand.

More important than sex, though, was the awakening that came on a day in 1974 or ’75, during my Houstonian exile. I was on the Westheimer bus, going one way or the other between work (Post Oak) and home (Montrose). I was reading Anthony Trollope’s An Autobiography. I don’t recall the passage, but it said the very same thing as Rilke’s archaic torso. It was time to stop being a shambolic solipsist. It was time to start being a gentleman. I felt like Adam and Eve being thrown out of Eden. But it wasn’t paradise that was taken away; it was only childhood. I cleaned up my act. I got myself through law school and into the New York Bar. 

After that, it was a simple matter of waiting for Al Gore to invent the Internet.

Will is only three weeks old, but, doubtless as a doting grandfather, I’m sure that it’s not going to take him to the end of his twenties to grow up. Whether or not Will knows what he wants to do with his life by the time he’s thirty is another matter altogether. If my experience is any guide, you can’t find out what you want to do with your life until you claim it as an adult; you can’t take real advantage of passing opportunities if you are not already conducting your affairs — and I don’t mean just checkbooks — with diligence and the conviction that what’s really interesting about life is going on all around you.

¶ Crayola’s Law.

¶ Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion, coming out next week. (via About Last Night)

¶ The wildly inappropriate paperback covers of Tutis. (via The Second Pass)

¶ Matins: E A Hanks breaks up with The Left.

Regular readers know that we have been lamenting the continued existence of the Democratic Party for most of our online career. Mr Hanks, 27, can’t be expected to remember the Party’s good works (Medicare and Civil Rights) that seem to have precipitated its demise. It’s heartening to hear a call for a genuinely new progressivism that’s at least more amusing than ours.

¶ Lauds: According to a recent paper that Jonah Lehrer discusses, listening to music hones our predictive skills, in the short term at least — by flouting them. (The Frontal Cortex)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon responds to news of the proposed paywall at the New York Times with a lot of very good advice.

Two further updates from Mr Salmon: Here and here.

¶ Tierce: When he isn’t thinking about the Times lately, Felix Salmon is rooting for Tyler Cowen’s suggestions for Haiti relief.

¶ Sext: Wherever did Brooks Peters get the idea that he would enjoy walking in the countryside more than he did in Manhattan? (An Open Book)

¶ Nones: Interesting news from Chile: according to Times reporter Alexei Barronuevo, “The election of a billionaire from a right-wing party as Chile’s president on Sunday appears to be less a signal of a regional move to the right than that of a pragmatic convergence of left and right agendas.” (NYT)

¶ Vespers: In a touching, almost coltish confession, Lydia Kiesling admits to being moved, contrary to her expectations, by A House For Mr Biswas. (The Millions)

¶ Compline: The Epicurean Dealmaker patiently explains to us not only why we oughtn’t to expect much in the way of insight from the lords of Wall Street, but whose job it is oversee the markets. (via Felix Salmon)

Although I had paid only the most glancing attention to the Massachusetts senatorial election, I can already see that I’ll be griping about politics for a while. Something about the Democratic Party fiasco popped a very fizzy cork.

When did it come to be said of Edith Wharton that she was too fashionable for Boston, and too intellectual for New York? Fashion and intellect having been the antipodal attributes of ladies in those times. The problem was complicated, I think, by Wharton’s rather severe physiognomy. She wasn’t ugly, but she was no pretty slip of a girl, either — ever. She grew more handsome as she got older, really; and by the time she was older she was a terror to younger women. Rich, published, admired by men of all ages and persuasions, thoroughly sophisticated, addicted to motor-cars, and capable of the most wonderful put-downs, Wharton was beyond the fashion-intellect divide once she settled in Paris (that, too!). She was Edith Wharton. A party of one.

That’s what I’ve been feeling like, lately. I’m too smart for the conservatives but too gracious for the progressives. I get along very well with conservatives, as long as we don’t talk about anything important, but progressives, notwithstanding the fact that I agree with them on everything that’s important, give me a rash. Meanwhile, I am a traitor to my class. (So was FDR, but let’s not be grandiose.)

Have you heard that story about Wharton in the Berkshires? She was visiting a neighboring monstrosity, and the hostess drew her into a furiously overly-upholstered chamber. “I call this the “French” room,” purred the chatelaine naively. “But my dear,” replied Wharton, feigning confusion (or perhaps not), “why?”

That was the only thing that I could think of to say when the best that the Massachusetts Democrats presented Martha Coakley and said, “We think of her as a Kennedy.” Who are these uncouth Democrats? They can’t hold a fork, they hardly know how to shake hands while looking you in the eye, and they say “No problem” instead of “You’re welcome.” In short: their manners are either ill-considered or rustic. Why are they the people who believe in all the right causes?

I’ve wondered about this all my life. I grew up in a town of virtual lobotomees, a village that still rivals anywhere in Texas in passion for sports talk. Why did they have all the money? Why does having a brain actually prevent the acquisition of wealth? Oh, I know the answer to that one, too.

People who make a lot of money are usually very smart indeed, but in a highly focused way that no genuinely intelligent person would acknowledge. My code word for Wall Street brilliance is “shrewd.” I believe that “shrewd” used to be a coded insult directed at Jews, which I mention because I don’t mean it that way myself. The town I grew up in, where nobody would sell a house to a Jew (in those days), was full of very shrewd people. The shrewd person is preternaturally gifted at looking out for Number One. You can’t say anything against it, except that it’s despicable, and that it gives intelligence a bad name.

People who believe in good causes fall into two groups. The first group is made up of the intelligent siblings of shrewd people. Intense loathing for shrewdness of any kind often tempts these good folk into looking out for everyone but Number One, which — paradoxically? — is not only not shrewd but not intelligent, either. Running away from your trust fund to join a commune in Asia, only to discover an immitigable aversion to dirty fingernails, isn’t, in the end, very bright. Eventually, these people come to terms with their lot, but their guilt is oppressive and their intelligence sicklied o’er.

The other group consists of meritocrats. It would be nice if meritocrats always said “thank you” to the social institutions that lifted them out of their native narrow confines, but very few do. Most are determined to insist that, compared to the siblings of the shrewd, the latter enjoy no serious advantages. A young man who plows through Harvard on a much-needed scholarship may fancy himself not only smarter but better-endowed than the roommate who, although equally bright, descends from generations of Yard Men. If the roommate is a shrewd operator, this is true. But the sibling of a shrewd operator will know a lot more than the meritocrat about putting people at ease and making them proud of what they do, whether they’re deans or dishwashers. Meritocrats have an unfortunate knack of making everyone feel miserable — or at least shabby — about everything.

There you have it, and the solution is obvious. We must all move to Paris.

¶ Charting the Beatles. Our favorite: the work schedule, 1963-1966. From constant performance to occasional recording.

¶ Kevin Cooley’s saturated colors. (via  The Best Part)

¶ Just what Haitians need: talking Bibles.

¶ Kids today. Glad I got rid of the microwave!  (via Felix Salmon) 

¶ Matins: Mark Peters suggests a useful new word (over ten years old, actually, and born, like so many fashions, in the sporting world): “Nontroversy.” (Good)

¶ Lauds: Today, it’s the Video Game Music Club. Tomorrow, it will be an academic specialty at Berklee College of Music and elsewhere: Interactive Audio. (Boston Globe; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon takes apart a wishy-washy column by Andrew Ross Sorkin in order to make a definitive case against financial institutions so large that they pose a systemic risk to the stability of financial markets — the TBTFs. Here is Mr Salmon’s reply to Mr Sorkin’s belief that huge corporations need huge banks.

¶ Tierce: Robin Sloan applies the economic terms, stock and flow, to activities that we might as well call “creative.” (Snarkmarket)

¶ Sext: Minneapolitan Lily Coyle thanks Pat Robertson for his thoughtful explanation of the earthquake in Haiti — in the voice of Satan. (StarTribune; via The Rumpus)

¶ Nones: Japan Airlines seeks bankruptcy protection. Not at all the same thing as going out of business! (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Amy Halloran writes a nice appreciation of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s Scary Fairy Tales, at The Millions.

¶ Compline: Maria Popova addresses the importance of “data viz,” or what Edward Tufte calls The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Don’t miss the clip of Alex Lundry’s short talk on the subject — and steer clear of pie charts! (Brain Pickings)

I have just read Jessica Michael Hecht’s much talked-about entry forbidding suicide. It’s a good thing that I didn’t happen to read it in the middle of a funk when I was half as old as I am now, because it would have decided me to “be a man” and put an end to myself. The very possibility of staying alive in honor of Ms Hecht’s ultimatum would have been so humiliating that there would have been only one way to make sure that I wasn’t.

I’ve outgrown the impulse to kill myself that began to make itself felt during adolescence. That’s not to say that I can’t imagine killing myself now. But the deed would be a rational response to illness or poverty. (I would not permit myself to live in the world of Cormac McCarthy’s road — and I think that the man is despicable, really, for having permitted himself to imagine it, a genuine misanthrope whom we’d all be better off without.) I do not have the whole of my life ahead of me. But I would not kill myself because I could no longer bear to feel totally alone and misunderstood. My dear wife has made it hard for me to imagine being totally alone (even if she weren’t here), and, as for being misunderstood, I now grasp that this is a condition that invariably begins with not understanding oneself.

These are lessons of old age, however, and of long companionship. They are lessons that nobody can expect to have learned before the age of fifty.

I’m thinking of David Foster Wallace. Right now, it’s as though Shakespeare had killed himself in the mid 1590s. One imagines the things that Wallace would have written had he lived — or, to put it more correctly, one imagines one’s delight at his brilliant surprises. He was a Wernher von Braun of English syntax; there was nothing about our crabbed language that obstructed his ability to send it aloft. Had he lived, he would have taught us to speak English as grandly as Shakespeare taught us to speak an earlier version centuries ago, a version that, but for him, would have slipped into sheer unintellibility over a century ago.

But I never get mad at David Foster Wallace for taking his own life. I’ve lived with clinical depression, and with the dissatisfactions that anti-depressent splatter all over life, and I know that minds really can close down. Nobody has the right to tell David Foster Wallace that he can’t kill himself.

Ms Hecht writes:

Anyway, some part of you doesn’t want to end it all, and I’m talking to her or him, to that part of you.  I’m throwing you a rope, you don’t have to explain it to the monster in you, just tell the monster it can do whatever it wants, but not that.  Later we’ll get rid of the monster, for now just hang on to the rope.

To which I can only say that, for any potential suicide to whom she might address this injunction, she herself is the monster. Not for wanting to prevent a suicide, not for intervening, but for being too far away and yet too noisy, for being unjustifiably warm and loving. I don’t know the first thing about Rachel Wetzsteon or Sarah Hannah, Ms Hecht’s sometime fellow students at Columbia, and I don’t really know anything about the personal life of David Foster Wallace, but I’m willing to venture that they faced hard impossibilities that, however transitory, were as fatal as a momentary spike in blood pressure or a momentary drop in breathable air.

For all the entry’s well-meant appeal, I believe that Ms Hecht owes her late friends an apology.

¶ A startling example of ébénisterie érotique, said to have been made for Catherine the Great. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Matins: David Brooks’s Op-Ed piece on Haiti ignites a blowtorch of fury from Matt Taibbi. (True Slant; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Lauds: Vampire Weekend, a band that, like Talking Heads thirty years ago, emerged from an institution of higher learning wearing very neat clothing, gets an intriguing review in the Times.

¶ Prime: Used equipment! Bob Cringely wonders why anybody does business with IBM, which increasingly operates like a bad auto dealership.

¶ Tierce: Jonah Lehrer explains why “Charity Is Social.” We think that there’s an explanation of the power of organized crime lurking in the vicinity of this study, but since we don’t know what we’re talking about, we’ll keep it to ourselves. (The Frontal Cortex)

¶ Sext: Just what we need: the SarcMarc. (via The Morning News)

¶ Nones: Honor among thieves: Somali pirates squabble over dividing $5.5 million ransom. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Peter Coates makes a case for James Branch Cabell (rhymes with “rabble”), at The Second Pass. A Southern Edith Wharton, maybe?

¶ Compline: Tyler Cowen on Barack Obama: “The Haiti President.” (Marginal Revolution)

Some sort of internal sensor has always warned me away from William Zinnser’s On Writing Well. If there’s more to the avoidance than that, some more lucid explanation for my persistent discinlination even to have a look at On Writing Well , I’ve forgotten it. But a talk that Mr Zinsser delivered on the subject, to incoming international grad students at the J school, not only left my caution intact but reminded me why I have always regarded the “profession of journalism” as hostile to language in general and to writing in particular.

Mr Zinsser’s conception of writing appears to be a kind of service — perhaps the kind of service that leads its customers to feel serviced. There are five basic rules:

Short is better than long.
Simple is good.
Long Latin nouns are the enemy.
Anglo-Saxon active verbs are your best friend.
One thought per sentence.

Do you know what that sounds like to me? That sounds like a quickie manual for quickie masculine sexual gratification. I can reduce those five precepts to one: “Let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.”

Simple may be good, but Mr Zinsser’s sketch of the history of the English language is simple-minded. First, he says, there’s Latin, “the florid language of ancient Rome.” The floridity of Latin is undoubtedly the virtue that generations of schoolboys had flogged into them at the better English schools.

Arma virumque cano…

Florid? Having noted the wrong-headedness of this judgment, we go  back to Mr Zinsser’s simple history. First, there’s Latin, which is bad; then there’s Anglo-Saxon, which is good. No connection, no interrelationship between these background families is traced. The criminal importation of Latinate words must have been effected by people who couldn’t speak English well enough to press nuance, suggestion, or abstract indeterminacy from hard-grained nuggets of Anglo-Saxon.

What a disservice Mr Zinsser does these students by drawing their attention to his cartoonish view of our language’s development! The very first thing to know about English, surely, is that it is the child of violent conquest and long-term social stratification. We not only know about these evils, but we’ve been talking about them for roughly a thousand years. A provincial early French was spoken by governing Normans and Angevins while the common people were divided by regional variations of a Teutonic dialect. Inevitably, these linguistic resources were made use of by the same people, and in the same sentence. My favorite example, a legal maxim that I can no longer source, defines “nuisance” as a situation in which

le noisomeness de la stench est plus que le utility de le use.

The best way to put this in clear contemporary English would probably be: “The stink outweighs the advantages,” and I don’t think that the final word, with its four syllables and its Romance parentage, can be improved on. And note that “use,” a nice, firm word of one syllable, is also Latinate in derivation.

English has been a battleground of highbrows and lowbrows since Chaucer’s day at least. The best writers get over their class-bound prejudices and and try to balance the short and plain against polysyllabic complexity. “Short is better than long” is simply stunting.

Yesterday’s brunch was perfect, simply because it was exactly what I intended it to be. I’m talking about the food part, the part for which I, and I alone, was responsible. Because it was exactly what I wanted it to be, I had a great time talking with my friends. Indeed, I was at the table, without more than momentary interruption, for seven hours. And so were most of them.  

Because Quatorze was sick [sicker than he dreamed, he found out in the morning, when he went to the doctor — although still ambulatory] there were only five of us at the table. In these early days of adult entertainment, I aim no higher than for six, but I do look forward to planning for eight. This evening’s five, though, was very jolly. Kathleen, although exhausted, was in great spirits. As was everyone else. That was the aspect of the occasion that I can’t really plan for. In addition to Fossil, we had an old friend of his who is rapidly becoming an old friend of ours, and, vice versa, a law school classmate of ours whom Fossil wishes he were young enough to run off with. These two old friends became good friends on the spot, or so it seemed. As I say, I can’t plan for that; I can  but hope. For me, the ideal dinner party makes fast friends of at least two complete strangers. All I do is set the stage.

The menu was, for the most part, startlingly unabitious:

Tomato Soup
Lobster Salad
Dilled Blanquette de Veau
Pots de Crème au chocolat.

The lobster salad was the exception. It was an invention, and it was the only dish that wasn’t prepared well in advance. I wanted something light and lobster-sweet. I murdered and cut up a two-pound lobster, wrapped it up, and slipped it into the fridge. Then, when it was time to compose, I sliced the tail into medallions and cut up the claws. I shucked three ears of corn and sautéed the kernels in butter. I minced a seedless cucumber. These ingredients got tossed in one bowl. In another, I combined three small heads of frisée, two Belgian endives, and one medium head of radicchio, all cut up nicely. Then I made a dressing of fresh tarragon (bushels, it seemed), raspberry vinegar, Dijon mustard, salt and pepper, and safflower oil (with a dollop of walnut oil). Oh, and a jolt of honey.  I didn’t measure anything, but I thought very hard about each ingredient as I added it to the bowl of the small food processor, and because I am a very old man who has been doing this sort of thing since before you were born, it came out just right. At the last minute, the greens were tossed with a sparing amount of dressing, and tonged to plates; the lobster-corn-cucumber mixture was dressed rather more substantially, and scooped atop the cabbages; and, finally, a lobster medallion was placed atop each pile, spooned over with a bit of dressing and a dash of retro paprika. At wash-up time, I was gratified by the generally clean plates.

The old friend of Fossil’s who is becoming an old friend of ours brought a tin of home-made chocolate-chip meringue cookies, and I tucked two at the base of each pot de crème. I was so collected that I even made a pot of coffee without feeling fussed.

I was ready for my guests to arrive a full forty minutes before anybody showed up. That is as it should be. That is how it used to be with me. I’d spend at least twenty minutes wallowing in the certitude that nobody liked me and that nobody would come to my party. Then I got to be rather a slob, occasionally waiting to dress until after everyone had arrived. Those days are over.

Sorry about last night — no Dear Diary. There’s a reason, and it’s called night-time. I am too old to be writing after dark; all I can think about is me, which is not a very interesting topic. To me, anyway — and last night, in a New Year’s burst of candor, I couldn’t be bothered to try. I know that I’m going to have to swim very hard against the tide of everyday life if I’m going to write up what I’ve been thinking about (not me) during the day-time, preferably in the morning.

The only reason I’m up now is the reason why I’m writing. I want to make a note of something sweet. The new neighbor across the hall, approaching me in stages too delicate to recapitulate, asked to borrow a chair. A chair! She and her husband are giving their first dinner party, and they were short one chair. Although we’re not exactly stocked with the sort of chair that you just lend out, I couldn’t say no. “When you’re through with it,” I said, “just knock — we’ll be home.” Kathleen is of the opinion that they’ll think that their party has broken up too late to disturb us, and that we’ll get the chair back tomorrow.

When I stuck my head into the hallway a few minutes ago, the party was still going strong. It’s a dinner party, definitely — just a few voices, not the babble of a party party. But a good times is being had by all.

Doubtless because my loan was one of our Eddie Monsoon chairs.

¶ Shelving books spines in. (Apartment Therapy)

¶ 1602 Chinese map of the Gulf Coast. Our Gulf Coast. (Guardian)

¶ Cheap at $12,000,000 — even Choire Sicha thinks so! Take the tour. (Business Insider)

¶ Sculptor Cal Lane. Love those shovels! (The Best Part)

¶ Bon weekend à tous!