¶ Dream Library (Marginal Revolution)

¶ It’s like playing with an the peel of a clementine. (New Scientist)

¶ We must have this chair! If only to look at. (ArtCat)

¶ Matins: In his review of Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy, Austin Frakt touches on what makes our working day possible. (Incidental Economist; via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Lauds: How Terry Gilliam completed The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus after Heath Ledger’s death. It wasn’t just technical. (Speakeasy)

¶ Prime: David Segal’s update on the failure to reform the ratings-agency biz in any meaningful way suggests that the conflict has little to do with lobbying (for once) but reveals a clash of visions, between bold (reckless) and cautious (ineffective). (NYT)

¶ Tierce: Bad as “fast food” is, it may be safer than the stuff that the government provides to school cafeterias. (Good)

¶ Sext: Does Mo’Nique really want that Best-Supporting-Actress Oscar? She sure sounds new to the Industry. (And the Winner Is…; via Arts Journal)

¶ Nones: The opera buffa in Honduras too a turn for the seriously dramatic on Tuesday, with the assassination General Julian Aristides Gonzalez, the Honduran drug czar. The crime opens a window on our view of the local economy. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Christopher Tayler (of the Guardian) visits Sir Frank Kermode on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. (via The Second Pass)

¶ Compline: They all laughed… but everybody’s looking at Roadtown now. (treehugger; via Good)

In retrospect, it was a fine day, but only in retrospect do we get to see the bottom line. For most of the afternoon, I fretted about having to go out this evening. I behaved as though seeing Lynn Redgrave’s Nightingale were a chore, which of course it was not. But I wanted to stay home and work on things. I suppose I was no better when I was nine, and thought only of my train set in the basement.

Then, at about 5:30, the bottom dropped out: the file transfer protocol program declined to function. The FTP program is the utility that transmits pages from my computer to Portico’s Web server. Even after rebooting, it declined to function. Rebooting was the problem, actually; I had rebooted the machine just before lunch. I’d promised Quatorze a copy of Barry Lyndon, and Jason (God of Tech) had cautioned me that DVDs were best copied on empty buffers. It had been over a week since the last reboot, so….

The next thing you know, checkdisk. I do hate the sight of DOS screens. And then a few of apps didn’t work quite as usual once the machine was up and running. PhotoShop, for example. I had to deselect an option that’s never checked in order to resize an image in pixels rather than inches. That was weird. When Cute FTP melted down, I wasn’t entirely surprised. But I was completely flustered anyway. The proverbial headless chicken — that was me. Jason would never give me up (I don’t think), but there are TeamViewer chat transcripts to prove it. Ned Beatty could have played the part of me.

I couldn’t be having this problem at 5:30! I had to get dressed for the theatre soon! I had to go out, and leave my wounded computer untended. Jason appeared as faithfully as the genie in Aladdin’s lamp (remotely — a bit of magic that couldn’t be managed in Sheherazade’s day), but even before he suggested that reloading the application was probably the best idea, I was wondering where, just the other day, I had put all the computer-related CDs. I had moved them for a reason — there were too many discs for the box that I’d been using — but where had I put them? Cluck, cluck!

After I got dressed, I found discs; sometimes, you have to solve a bother before you can solve the problem that it was bothering you from. By 6:45, the domestic security status was “copacetic.” My brain was recovering some of its wattage.

There had certainly been a brownout. Before making contact with Jason, I had madly attached the two pages that I’d planned to upload to Portico to emails sent from my mindspring account to my gmail account. On the laptop in the living room (where I “create”), I enjoyed a mad runaround trying to figure out whither, exactly, Firefox places downloaded attachments. Cute FTP was working fine on the laptop, so I was able to upload the pages — phew!

But here’s how crazed I was. In order to make sure that the pages looked just right, I had to go back into the blue room and interrupt Jason so that I could open Portico and see if all was well. It never ever crossed my mind that I could have conducted this examination from the laptop. My brain had self-stupiditized.

When I told Jason that, if I were rich, I’d plaster the town will billboards advertizing his services, he demurred: the phone calls would drive him crazy. But of course if I were rich, I could stake him to a receptionist. Get car! And you would, too. I’m talking about the thanks of a very grateful clientele.

¶ Oops! An anachronism on Mad Men! (Thanks, Mike!)

¶ What the Internet looks like. (Andrew Blum; via cityofsound)

¶ Matins: At the Guardian, Ian Buruma considers the Swiss ban on minarets. Like Tyler Cowen, he disapproves of referenda. (So do we.) Beyond that, he finds an interesting, if unexpected, resentment. 

Do we really live in a world where those who do not feel that they belong to the elite have a compensating need for something to die for? (via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Lauds: Film historian David Thomson hears the penny drop: Method Acting is over. Forget “truth”; let’s pretend! Haven’t the English been pooh-poohing Method all along? (Wall Street Journal; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Not for the first time, Felix Salmon asks, “Why are bankers so — ” Ahem. How Banks Fail at Foreclosure Auctions.

¶ Tierce: Natalie Angier muses on Kandinsky’s circles and the physics of spheres. One thing we don’t know: why are eyeballs spherical? (NYT)

¶ Sext: Amy McDaniel presents David Foster Wallace’s quick grammar-and-usage test. (htmlgiant; via The Morning News)

¶ Nones: The European Union’s foreign ministers have called for a sort of partition of Jerusalem, allowing to serve as a dual capital of Israel and Palestine. (Most foreign embassies have remained in Tel Aviv.) Jerusalem Post columnist Gershon Baskin is all for it. (via BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Now that we no longer have Susan Sontag to tell us which novels (a) in foreign languages that (b) we’ve never heard of we ought to read, Quarterly Conversation is there to inspire translations.

¶ Compline: We like to suggest that everyone ought to be upper class — we don’t really mean it as a joke. Now Adam Waytz explains why this is so. It isn’t poverty that makes people touchy. It’s disrespect. But then, didn’t we know that? (Mind Matters; via The Frontal Cortex)

Walking along 84th Street this afternoon, between York and First, I passed a family group headed in the opposite direction, toward the river. I fished myself out of the stream of consciousness in time to see the two little fellows who were bringing up the rear.  They might have been short for their age, but they were still very young — seven at the most, and I’d plump for six. I have never seen two boys less inclined to play, much less to roughhouse. On the contrary: they had the air of sixty-six. They were walking along with their hands in their coat pockets, their heads inclined toward one another, talking with bemused smiles, as if they had already seen everything.

I wish I’d taken their picture, especially as the camera was in the palm of my hand.

***

I have many reasons for being not regretting my youth, for not missing being young. Tonight, my reason is this: when I was young, I wished I were somebody else more or less all the time. Sometimes, I wanted to be the person that I hoped I’d grow up to be, but this image was understandably vague. I draw no small satisfaction from the general sense of having fulfilled that dream, whatever it was. Perhaps it’s because one always wants to be kind to children that I idiotically believe that I’ve done the kid that I used to be the kindness of turning into Moi.

Most of the time, however, I dreamed of being somebody else — somebody definite, this or that actual person whom I could see down the hall or across the room. My innumerable crushes were collaterally instructive, because each one involved imagining someone else’s life. There was nothing vampirish about my longing. I did not want to commandeer someone else’s existence; if I dreamed of being someone else, I did not want to have become someone else. But I spent every waking moment wanting to pop out of my skin.

I can’t think what made me so dissatisfied with my own life, but it had a lot to do with living in this body of mine. I don’t hate it, but I don’t really acknowledge it. To me, it is somebody else’s body, and I am not that somebody. I could complain about it for hours, but dissatisfaction has nothing to do with the case. Children often suspect that they’re adopted, that they’re really the children of (fascinating) offstage parents. I was adoped, and I understood that there was nothing fascinating about where I came from. Maybe that was it. Having been adopted, I wanted a new body to go with the new status.

I was well into my forties before I understood, profoundly, that my intelligence and my sensibility are no less physical attributes than my height or my elusively-colored eyes. (When Kathleen tells me that my eyes are “really green today!” I know that I am feeling well.) I now understand this paradox: wishing that I were someone else precisely because I am who I am. When I was young, however, such insights were beyond me. And, in any case, I no longer wish that I were somebody else. Not at all! I’m quite pleased to be me. I have succumbed to abominable conceit: I’m amazed by my good luck. But that’s now.

***

Those little men, walking all but arm in arm along 84th Street — I saw them for four or five seconds at the most. For minutes — hours — afterward, I wanted to be them. No: I wanted to be both of them, and there you have it. You can’t be two people. I wanted to be their friendship, their mutual comfort. I wanted it even though I know exactly what it is, from happy personal experience. My own desire to be somebody other than myself began to fade away when I met Kathleen. My often acute dislike of myself, complete with arioso tropes of suicide, took a while to disappear entirely, but it did disappear, because of the great niceness of being with her. I was thirty-three when Kathleen and I married; which means that I have not yet spent quite half of my life as her husband. But let’s say that I have, because I’d like to acknowledge that I want for nothing in this happy half.

Those smart little boys, though, reminded me that I wanted for everything when I was their age. — for everything beyond the food clothing shelter basics. I so badly, badly wanted someone to talk to.

Lucky fellas! I wish them every happiness.

¶ Words fail us. In this clip from an entertainment hosted by Drew Carey, Richard Simmons plays the props in a skit about a couple (played by two men) on a romantic tropical cruise. (Thanks, Quatorze!)

¶ Matins: Just what we all need: China produces and sells more than 12,000,000 cars in a single year.

In a sidebar, Jorn Madslien reports that Shanghai Automotive Industries owns a majority share of Shanghai General Motors’s venture in India, leaving (American) General Motors to take “a back seat.” (BBC News)

¶ Lauds: A very interesting comment from Felix Salmon, writing about productivity/price differentials between the fine-arts and photography markets. The former has split in two, with mass-marketed items buoying a “an elite circle of valuable works.” The dynamic hasn’t been tried in photography.

¶ Prime: Alex Tabarrok writes about Project Cybersyn, an economic regulator waaaaay ahead of its time. (Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: How to account for same-sex liaisons in terms of natural selection? The investigation promises to be complex and counterintuitive. Also: resistant to cross-species generalizations!

Gore Vidal has always insisted that there is really no such thing as homosexuality; perhaps he’s right after all. (New Scientist)

¶ Sext: What you need to know in order to navigate the tricky holiday shopping season: it will cost $395. (The Onion; via The Morning News)

¶ Nones: New, and with more than T-shirts: Ottomaniacs!  One thing seems clear: Turkey is finally emerging from Atatürk’s secular tutelage, a nation with imperial memories. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: At HuffPo, Alexander Nazaryan proposes Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as the American novel of the passing decade. We heartily concur, and we nominate Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End as runner-up.  

¶ Compline: Witold Rybczynski reports that academic architects still don’t like Christopher Alexander’s patterns. (Slate; via Arts Journal)

This is just to thank Hendrik Hertzberg for the Comment piece that opens this week’s Talk of the Town in The New Yorker.

A dismal process of elimination has left the President to design a strategy that he believes is the only one that offers a chance, in his words, “to bring this war to a successful conclusion.” Or, at least, a bearable one. Deliver a hard punch to the Taliban, break its momentum, and welcome its defectors; throw a bucket of cold water on the hapless and corrupt central government; carve out space and time for projects of civilian betterment and the development of Afghan forces that are capable of maintaining some semblance of security; forge “an effective partnership with Pakistan”—to list the elements of Obama’s strategy is to recognize its difficulty. It is full of internal tensions, most prominently between the buildup of troops and the eighteen-month timeline for beginning their withdrawal. (To the extent that the troop surge weakens the enemy while the timeline focusses minds in Kabul and Islamabad, however, that tension could be a creative one.) The plan does not, of course, guarantee success. The best that can be claimed for it is that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives almost certainly do.

Sorry for the long passage; the entire essay is necessarily dense with the complications of the mess that, as Mr Hertzberg points out, the president has inherited from his predecessor.

Last week, when Mr Obama made his West Point speech, I seemed to hear a lot of liberal folks of my own age complaining that he had let them down. I’m afraid that I wanted to smack each and every one of them for the wilful simplification of their thinking. They seemed — rather smugly, if truth be told — to believe that their rebukes ought to shame the White House into issuing, at the very least, an abject apology.

Tragic simplification may be a disease that the president brought with him to Washington. Last fall, before the election, I was appalled to hear one friend after another talk of the Rapture. It wasn’t that Rapture, for, when it happened, my friends would still be here, and they’d still be wearing their clothes. But their Rapture did happen — or did it?  That’s the problem. “I feel that we’re on the cusp of a new era,” they’d said. If they weren’t right, though, who’s fault would that be? I felt sorry for Barack Obama while he was still a candidate. It was clear that, within the year, he’d be up against some awful coalition of Lysistratas and Bacchantes. Thank heaven for Tiger Woods!

Does this sound misogynistic? I don’t mean it to be. It’s possible that women voice their political opinions in my hearing more willingly than men do. (Size matters.) At the same time, I observe that women make up their minds much more quickly than men do, probably because life obliges them to cope more pragmatically. The difficulty is that pragmatism is not expected of anyone here but the president. It’s everyone else’s job to strain, against the full current of stress and everyday confusion, to asppreciate the far greater stress and confusion of the issues that President Obama has to deal with. It is his job to turn these complications (messes) into complexities (necessarily imperfect solutions). Like Mr Hertzberg, I think that he is going about this job in a thoughtful, deliberate manner. He’s not perfect, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the behavior of his erstwhile supporters, who seem to have been partying on some leftover Bush-era Kool-Aid. Maybe they were drinking it then. Maybe they thought that all it would take for a new era to breast its cusp would be the election of a mule.

Well over forty years ago, The New Yorker‘s was the only establishment voice that was systematically committed to opposing the folly of our misadventure in Vietnam. Following the logic of that tradition, Mr Hertzberg might have called for the immediate pull-out from Afghanistan that so many “realist” liberals want. That he didn’t do so is all the proof I need that the most important periodical in the United States is still the home of the brave.

¶ An Silhouettes of Jazz — moving shadows generated by computer-generated mini-sculptures, and very nearly as cool as the music. (Brain Pickings)

¶ The good old days of sharp collegians. (Ivy Style)

¶ How China is perceived by the residents of Beijing, Shaghai, and Hong Kong — respectively but not respectfully. (The Atlantic)

Two artefacts of my youth that I don’t miss in the slightest: typewriters and phonographs. No amount of nostalgia — and nostalgia is not one of my weaknesses, anyway — will ever obscure from me the fact that neither machine was adequate to its purpose. It would be generous to call typewriters “unforgiving” — and also dishonest, because writing in type, imitating printed books that is, was categorically beyond the capabilities of typewriters until the very end of their run. As for a sound-transmission system that depends upon the physics of friction — erosion — for its effects, I have one word for devotees of vinyl: demented. And then I have another word: deaf.

These slightly churlish but metabolically stimulating reactions are prompted this morning by the most delightful little book, Arthur Krystal’s The Half-Life of an American Essayist, which was published by David R Godine in 2007. More specifically, what got me going was the following sentence from an essay on the typewriter:

Of course, if you are under twenty-one you have probably never used a typewriter except to fill out an application, and consequentely the loud thwack of typewriter keys striking a cylindrical roller and the satisfying ping of the carriage reaching the end of the track are not in your mnemonic repertoire.

I have read no further; I put the book down then and there to write this. But by then I had read two essays and the book’s introduction, all of which are really and truly and simply marvelous. I put the book down to discharge my dissatisfactions with pings and thwacks and scratches and skips — Mr Krystal does not take up the LP, I don’t think, but the memory lingered of an item in the Times reporting increased sales of “vinyl” — in order to clear my mind for larger thoughts on how better to distribute not so much Mr Krystal’s book as news of its excellence.

I don’t intend to write about the two essays that I’ve read and liked, although I am sorely tempted to admire the title piece, which is a rumination on the facts of life as confronted by anyone disposed to make a career out of writing essays. I’d like to copy out a rather large slab, three paragraphs from the heart of the piece. Some other time, perhaps. For the moment, a lovely drollery will do:

There are, it should be said, some good points about being a freelance writer: You can sleep late, set your own hours, work at your own pace, and not worry about someone looking over your shoulder. On the other hand, you tend to sleep late, you have to set your own hours, you work only when you feel like it, and there is no one looking over your shoulder.

Since this is supposed to be about Mr Krystal, and not about how I cope with fashioning a workable schedule, I’ll note the principle difference between us, which is that Mr Krystal hates writing for money but wouldn’t bother writing at all (or so he says) unless he were going to be paid. Money hasn’t entered the picture for me, so far, but it does not stand to reason, at least on the record that I have amassed to date, that I would write less if I were paid. (Perhaps I would, though: there is no end to the perversity of the curious imagination!) I do wish that Mr Krystal would keep a blog, or a Web site, or something;  it would suit him down to the ground — if he could be paid.

What is to be done? Pennies make dollars, mills make pennies, and computers have been keeping track of micropayments for the telephone company for over a generation. That is what is to be done.

The most astonishing thing happened this morning. I not only remembered that I had had an idea just before going to bed last night, but I remembered what it was. I hardly know which is more remarkable! I remember pulling back the bedspread reprovingly: write this down, I said to myself. But I was tired and comfortable. Short of a brass band’s marching through the bedroom, nothing could have put my happy sleepiness more at risk than pen and paper. So I hoped for the best. What do you know!

***

Because I spent last week in funseeking-missile mode, there was an awful lot of housekeeping to see to today. Ordinarily, I go about my weekend chores with a determined resignation that is always disappointed. Permit me to unpack that clause. I’m resigned to doing the housework. I’m determined to do more interesting things when the work has been done. But I’m almost always disappointed, because three or four hours of dusting and vacuuming, while hardly arduous, drudges the brain.  You can imagine what it would be like to sit down and write deathless prose, but you can’t actually do it.

The servant problem is still very much with us. Oh, there are no servants — don’t misunderstand. That is, there are no people who are just servants. The result is that we are all servants, all obliged to see after ourselves. I don’t regret this — nobody’s life ought to be centered on the care and feeding of another adult — but I hope that the coming years will offer more in the way of on-the-job training. When I was young, I thought that the computer would pick up some of the slack. I draw a veil over my conclusions about why it hasn’t done so. May it in future.

Ordinarily, housekeeping and writing run on parallel tracks: whichever thing you’re doing, you can see the other thing, but you can’t do it. The sterling exception to this rule is library work. Every once in a while, it becomes imperative to re-shelve books that, over the past six or twelve or eighteen months, have stacked themselves in no very rational order. You find that you can no longer live with the Chaos Decimate system, which absolutely precludes finding any book that you’re searching for. So you set your jaw and have at it.  

Nothing looks more like “housekeeping” than library work. There are stacks of books on every plane surface — and on most of the upholstered ones as well. Five minutes into the project, and your rooms are a wreck; you have no choice but to stumble on blindly, as through a Siberian blizzard, in the hope that some degree of order will have been imposed by the time that you run out of steam and start throwing books back onto the shelves just to tidy the mess.

Unlike all other housework, however, organizing books is a Feast of Tantalus. For the most part, it’s true, you say of the books that you lug from pile to pile, “I wish that I could be done with these clods of printed matter.” You don’t really mean it, but you’re relating to the books as an Upper Parlormaid, not as Sir Leslie Stephen. For the most part only, however! Sooner or later, you will encounter a book that you’ve forgotten all about. Perhaps it’s a book that you have really and truly meant to read, honest; perhaps it’s a book that spontaneously kindles a desire for greater intimacy. Either way, you want to sit right down (if only there were an empty chair) and fire up peruse mode. But can you?

Of course you can. You may, even. But as the overseer of a very disorderly project — most of your books seem to be in places where no books belong — dare you indulge yourself?

And that, my friends, is the servant problem.

***

The idea that I wanted to remember was this: even in a democracy, we don’t chose our leaders. Rather, we ratify choices made by the small coterie of gate-keepers and power-brokers who get to examine the political horseflesh up close and personal. I don’t take any credit whatsoever for this perception; it was written into the United States Constitution, whereby (originally) senators were elected by legislatures (not voters) and the President was elected by — the Electoral College, all by itself and not in spite of some popular vote.

If the direct voting that we favor in principle actually worked, then the gate-keepers and power-brokers would be free to choose men and women likely to prove to be excellent leaders. But it doesn’t. They have to choose candidates who will appeal to us directly — as if they weren’t there to do the job!

This is what comes of letting women be policemen.

In her lawsuit, Hayes claims she was raped in April while on assignment near Pittsburgh as part of a 49-member State Police detail sent to honor three city police officers killed in a shootout.

According to Hayes, her boss, Lt. Thomas King, 50, got her drunk, waited for her to pass out then somehow obtained a copy of her hotel room key and assaulted her in her room.

Her attorney said Hayes, who is married, became pregnant as a result and knew the baby was King’s because she only had protected sex with her husband. She later had an abortion.

We’re kidding! But how would a police lieutenant somehow obtain a copy of a room key?

Oh.

The Eileen Brennan part of the story (so to speak) is fresher, at least.

The suit contends that at the academy, Sgt. Christine Shalcross once grabbed Hayes’s necktie so hard that the clasp broke off. She said Shalcross also demeaned her by calling her “peanut” and drawing on her face with a black permanent marker. After graduation, Hayes said Shalcross, 43, whispered in Hayes’ ear and kissed her on the cheek.

It does not appear that Sgt Shalcross is a defendant.

¶ Matins: In an extremely thoughtful piece that may alter the grain of your thought — or, as it our case, highlight the way in which you’re already inclined to think — Tony Judt asks us to consider why it is that, in the Anglophone world, we reduce all political questions to economic equations. He proposes a very persuasive, historically-bound answer to the question. Don’t miss it. (NYRB)

¶ Lauds: Judith Jamison is looking to trade in “artistic director” for, perhaps, “Queen.” Those of us who were lucky enough to see her dance Revelations know just how aptly that very popular ballet is titled. (New York; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: As the giving season is upon us, Tim Ogden plans a series of blog entries about the dangers of evaluating charities by overhead alone. (Philanthropy Action; via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Melissa Lafsky urges us to stop trying to get more women to ride bicycles in urban areas, and focus instead upon making biking a lot safer than it is. (The Infrastructurist)

¶ Sext: The things that Choire Sicha digs up on the Internets! From a blog called firmuhment, a thoroughly wicked “imagineering” of Zac Efron’s newfound, post-Orson intellectual sophistication. (via The Awl)

¶ Nones: More Honduran predictability: the Congress declined, by a very large margin, to re-instate Manuel Zelaya in office for the weeks that remain to his term. The voting, 111-14 against Mr Zelaya, suggests that the ousted president is not a character worth fighting for. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: In a backlist assessment that has the whole town talking, Natalia Antonova convinces us that she loves Vladimir Nabokov’s best-known book not in spite of her history as the victim of abuse but because of it. (The Second Pass)

¶ Compline: Because it’s the weekend, we offer Ron Rosenbaum’s long and “Mysterian” query about consciousness and other unsolved mysteries as a way of killing time in the event of any dominical longueurs. Although we agree with his assessment of the the “facts” (ie questions), we do not, so to speak, share his affect.

While we recognize — insist! — that the universe remains profoundly mysterious, it doesn’t bother us in the least, because, really, it’s much too interesting to live with the mysteries that aren’t so profound. The profundity that Mr Rosenbaum highlights for us is the connection between adolescence and all forms of metaphysics. (Slate; via Arts Journal)

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

Roxy Paine’s Maelstrom will be coming down soon, at least from the Museum’s roof garden. It was my second-favorite roof garden installation, after the anthology of works by Cai Guo-Qiang.

It didn’t suggest “maelstrom” to me. It reminded me of the woods. The woods — I must decline to capitalize the name or to put it in quotation marks, so quotidian was it for us — was a seven-acre tract of undeveloped land that started almost across the street from our house on Hathaway Road in Eastchester, where I lived from 1955 to 1960, when we moved into the house in Bronxville proper that we would abandon for a place in Houston’s Tanglewood in 1968. “Tanglewood” — but Roxy Paine’s tubes and bulbs don’t make me think of Houston, that’s for sure. I came away from my few years in the woods (it seemed like forever) permanently disappointed by untrammeled nature. Which only made me appreciate Ms Paine’s sculpture more fully. Whatever she may have thought she was creating with all that velvety metal, her discipline ended up capturing, at least for me, the sloppiness of the local wilderness.

I was going to write on a very bourgeois theme this evening, my love of comfort, and my corresponding dislike of the sharp irritations of Modernism. For a week now, I’ve been considering the Hilobrow platform (for want of a shorter way of putting it), according to which, without a doubt, I am a rank middlebrow. A whole platoon!

Someone wrote that the middlebrow person is terrified of lust and magnificence — lust being “low” and magnificence being, well, you get it. And the only thing that I argued with was “terrified.” Magnificence is blinding and exhausting; the true secret of Versailles is that it is not very magnificent. Just magnificent enough to be lived with every day. As for lust, or desire, or whatever it was, I rejoice that it has been a long, long time since I was last consumed by it. There are lots of things that I want. I want to get up in the morning, and I want to want to read the paper (and I usually do). I want to write entries for this site. But I’m afraid that I don’t really want anything that I can’t have. Desire for the unattainable is both pathetic and monstrous.

At McNally Jackson the other night, Edmund White talked about Rimbaud’s invention of obscurity. I liked the frank way in which he conceded that his biographical subject’s work was pointedly, self-consciously difficult, or perhaps impossible, to understand. The impenetrability of Les Illuminations doesn’t bother me, though, because I feel that I’m expected to delight in the voluptuousness of the obscurities, not to decode them. Wallace Stevens generates the same kind of happiness. Who cares what it means;

                                                  This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

is gorgeous! There are more beautiful chains of words in Credences of Summer, but no thoughts more luxurious.

In the end, what it comes down to is that I developed an early taste for the courtly pleasures. I find the greatest beauty in ease (which is certainly not easy!), while deliberate difficulty of any kind strikes me as untutored rudeness, almost always devoid of interest.

Against all of this fine filigree, you will readily understand the pain of wanting to be the friend of someone who does not want you for one. The Cai photograph reminded me of that. I remember a day up there that was just that blue.  

¶ Matins: Andrew Sullivan, still a loyal Tory, abandons the GOP. The list of his objections to right-wing outlook, concludes with denunciations of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and a rejection of sole-superpower militarism.

As thinking people abandon the Republican Party to virtual fascists, the need for a Center Party intensifies. There must be a viable political alternative to leftism, if only for the sake of the latter’s health. (Daily Dish)

¶ Lauds: Ingrid Rowland writes richly (if with a rambling touch) about an important new book about Andrea Palladio, Francesco Borromini, and a modern Roman who has studied them both, Paolo Portoghesi. Ms Rowland also laments “the contemporary state of things” called Italietta. (NYRB)

¶ Prime: Thanks to Tyler Cowen, we’ve discovered a blog that looks to be congenial: Economists For Firing Larry Summers. We like the subtitle very much: “This blog is devoted to seeing to it that Larry Summers gets to spend more time with his family.” As Mr Cowen notes, however, the pseudonymous author has turned his attention to Ben Bernanke. (via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: Geoffrey Fowler, writing at the Wall Street Journal, joins the still-hushed chorus of e-reader skeptics: “Books are having their iPod moment this holiday season. But buyer beware: It could also turn out to be an eight-track moment.” (via Arts Journal)

¶ Sext: Eric Patton concludes his account of a recent trip to Rome and to Sicily with a characteristical hopeful melancholy. (SORE AFRAID)

¶ Nones: South Africa rejoins the communion of the sensible with a reality-based anti-AIDS program, thus overturning the notorious misrule of former leader Thabo Mbeki on this point. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: By placing a disk over the crime itself, Brooks Peters reveals the richly-detailed corolla that emanates from the so-called “crime of the century” — the Leopold-Loeb case — which Mr Peters rightly labels “an inept fiasco.” Who knew, though, that Leopold was eventually released on parole, and thanks to the efforts of none other than Perry Mason’s creator? And that Erle Stanley Gardner left behind a correspondence with the murderer that our Mr Peters may have been the first to remark upon? (An Open Book)

¶ Compline: Tony Horwitz traces fascinating parallels between 12/1/59 and 9/11/01. On the earlier date, abolitionist and insurrectionist John Brown was hanged.  (NYT)

Today’s banner is not what today looked like. At all. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, that the city ever looks as it does above, given its appearance over the past few grey days. By the way, what seems to be smoke drifting over the Park is actually the already bare branches of trees that have shed their leaves for the year.

The day was mezza mezza. I didn’t take a stab at the paperwork project, but I drew hope from the fact that I hadn’t given up on it and put things “away.” After yesterday’s excitement — for a sexagenarian like me, yesterday was chock full of incident, even though nothing happened that, twenty years ago, would not have gone unremarked — I felt dead on arousal, and if the morning was a struggle, the afternoon was — existential. I did write a letter to a good friend in which I described something that, for the first time in ages, I wouldn’t write about here. The letter took over an hour to compose, but I had a ball. I’ve been living such a dull life! Which is all for the best — I love dull! Dull is the new thrill! But it takes the gleam of indiscretion for me to write a proper letter these days; it calls for secrets that I must keep from you, my gentle readers.

By return post, the suggestion was made… but never mind. It involved Quatorze. It projected an unthinkable scenario. Delicious (and wholly respectable!), but unthinkable.

In the evening, I braved the pluviosity and took the train down to Bleecker Street, whence I hopped, skipped and jumped over puddles to McNally Jackson, where the paperback editions of three Atlas & Co biographies was celebrated by the three authors. Louis Begley (Kafka), Francine du Plessix Gray (Mme de Staël) and Edmund White (Rimbaud) talked about the pleasures of writing nonfiction books about long-ago writers — Mr Begley subtitled his book “biographical essay.” Ms Gray pronounced an aphorism that can’t have been making its first appearance, but I was so struck by it that I must copy it out: 

Biography is the transformation of information into illumination.

It’s not the solution to world hunger, but it’s pretty fantastic all the same.

As you can imagine, I hadn’t been in the mood to go out on a nasty day, especially as I’d gone out the night before. (Sexagenarian!) But two carrots were waving in front of me. One was so mundane that I’m not even going to discuss it. The other, however, was Ms NOLA’s enthusiastic agreement to have dinner with me after the event. I’ve been wanting to have dinner at the Chinatown Brasserie for the longest time! Ever since Quatorze and I walked by the place last spring, in fact. I’ve been several times for lunch, and while the food was always delicious, I had no reason to think that it would be different after dark. But the room would be different — and tonight I found out that indeed it is. For the Chinatown Brasserie, occupying the generically beaux-arts interior of a former bank or insurance office, has been decked out with Shanghai nightclub drag. Think the opening scene of …Temple of Doom. (Oh, how downhill that movie went from there!) Red red red paper lanterns hanging from the high ceiling ought to be enough to put you in the picture, but there is also the carp pool at the base of the stairs to the banqueting rooms in the basement. (How elegant the right sort of corpse would look, bobbing among those huge gold fish.)

Edmund White told a wonderful story about gaining access to a source of information for his book about Jean Genet. He paid a pretty young woman to take French lessons from the source; I guess he paid for the lessons as well. Eventually, the pretty girl was able to charm the source into seeing Mr White. They became friends, but it was la solita storia — Genet eventually broke with anybody who was close to him. Sooner or later, he mistreated his friends and “made them cry.” I thought of the lunacy of taking Jean Genet’s bad behavior personally. Then I remembered how personally I had taken — have taken — a rather Genetish fellow’s bad behavior toward me. It almost got me crying! Nobody has been planted at my doorstop, asking for English lessons!

That it is raining late at night on the second of December is not made any easier to bear by the fact that it is really rather cold as well. If it were just a few degrees colder, it could at least be scenic.

¶ Self-Righteous Sinatra. (Letters of Note)

¶ Best-Looking Books. (Amazon; via The Millions)

¶ Evolution of Storage (via Good)

¶ Matins: At New Geography, Aaron Renn looks at the outmigration of the middle class from “cool” cities, and attributes it, persuasively, to the failure of civic responsibility among “global” elites.

Clearly, the current models for organizing metropolitan areas are wholly inadequate. In our view, layers of government (state, country, local, school district) ought to be replaced by types of government: highly coordinated networking authorities (transit, power, hospitals) coexisting with highly localized service providers (schools, clinics, and parks). (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Cityscape critic Blair Kamin is surprised to be supporting the destruction of a shed designed by Mies van der Rohe. The accompanying photograph is a bit of a tease: the shed hides behind a fence. (Chicago Tribune; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: PIMCO’s Mohamed El-Erian finds in the Dubai debt standstill “a reminder to all: last year’s financial crisis was a consequential phenomenon whose lagged impact is yet to play out fully in the economic, financial, institutional and political arenas.” We knew this, but it’s great to hear it from an eminent fund manager.

In our own front yard, Wall Street’s influence inside the White House needs to be muzzled, if not baffled. (Telegraph; via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: Michael Bond briefly but lucidly reviews Eli Berman’s Radical, Religious and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism, a new sociological study that, notwithstanding its title, sees beyond the religious angle. (New Scientist)

¶ Sext: Nico Muhly, writing from Amsterdam, finds “a sort of childlike pornography” in Nederlands orthography. (This vanishes when you learn how to pronounce things.) He is also “obsessed” by the common digraph, ij. (via Snarkmarket)

¶ Nones: Predictably, Sunday’s election in Honduras settled almost nothing, even though Porfirio Lobo appears to have won more or less fairly. The Honduran Congress will vote today on whether Mel Zelaya will finish out his term in office. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: n case the popularity of a current blockbuster has you wondering if you’d like to read the book, Jenny Turner not only reconsiders her review in the London Review of Books but also supplies a list of blogs that offer highly entertaining spoilers about the later novels in this peculiar series.

¶ Compline: Having got wind of special treatment for denizens of the eastern-most block of West 61st Street on Thanksgiving Day, Clyde Haberman investigated in person. His worst fears are confirmed. (NYT)