Daily Office: Wednesday

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¶ Matins: Who are these people?

Many Americans have welcomed roundups of what the agency calls “ordinary status violators” — noncitizens who have no outstanding order of deportation, but are suspected of being in the country unlawfully, either because they overstayed a visa or entered without one.

It goes to show how ignorant such “Americans” are of their own family history, which may well have involved deportation or nativist discrimination. Where are the “I’m WASP and I’m proud!” bumper stickers?

¶ Lauds: It’s very late and I’ve been writing all day; maybe that’s why the idea of a play — no, a musical! — about Charles Ponzi, that eponymous person whose name is on everyone’s lips these days, sounds like a great idea.

¶ Prime: We pause to remember Doucette Cherbonnier, Slimbolala’s great-aunt, a ninetysomething who has been laid to her doubtless uproarious rest.

¶ Tierce: Michael Cooper’s depressing report about transit cuts around the nation, forced by receding tax revenues, in an age of rising ridership, gives me an idea.

¶ Sext: Quote of the Day: Richard Skeen, president of sales and marketing at now-defunct Doubledown Media, publisher of Trader Monthly and Dealmaker:

[advertising to bankers and encouraging them to spend money has become] incredibly out of vogue.

¶ Nones: In a strong sign that the Williamson Affair is not going to be swept away as easily as the Vatican would like, German Chancellor Angela Merkel continues to press for an “explanation.” Bear in mind that it is very unusual for a European head of state to take issue with the Vatican’s actions.  

¶ Vespers: Literary life isn’t all envy and backstabbing. Alexander Chee shares the pleasure of some richly social moments spent among people who care about letters.

¶ Compline: Receipt of an email from Ms NOLA this afternoon marked a change in my schedule. At 7 PM, I found myself at McNally Jackson, the great NoLIta bookstore in Prince Street, for a reading — more of a racontation — by In the Stalin Archives author Jonathan Brent.

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In the Book Review: The Architect of Love

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Not a bad issue, considering par. But what is Luke Sante’s review of Reborn (the first installment of Susan Sontag’s diaries) doing posing as an Essay? It’s a perfectly good review — better than most! — but the only answer that I can come up with is that the Book Review’s Essay format accommodates a higher word count.

Daily Office: Tuesday

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¶ Matins: Eric Holder has been confirmed by the Senate. It was grand to weigh and consider Republican opposition to his nomination, which seemed to stem from his participation in the pardon of Marc Rich, one of those dead-of-night doings at the fin de Billsiècle. Not really comparable to the shenanigans of Alberto the Goon.

¶ Lauds: What they ought to have done: close the university and keep the museum open. The dollars and sense point in that direction. The Brandeis trustees who approved the liquidation of the Rose Art Museum ought to be tarred and feathered — and then blinded.

¶ Prime: Joanne McNeil writes about Internet 2.0, at Tomorrow Museum, as if she had always lived there.  

If I were to log into Friendster today I would see a perfectly preserved document of my life in 2003. The people I was friends with then (most of them, sadly, I’m no longer in touch with) and the inside jokes we shared, not to mention the photos of me at that age. It makes me really want to not log in or log in and destroy it all. That’s almost too many memories worth keeping and for someone who prefers to think about life in the present rather than relive past experiences in my mind, it’s just baggage.

¶ Tierce: A good idea was proposed at Davos, of all places: pay the regulators! The source of the proposition is not surprising:

Tony Tan Keng Yam, deputy chairman and executive director of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, suggested that one reason American regulators fell down on the job was that they were paid too little.

Adam Ross Sorkin reports.

¶ Sext: I was going to link to John McPhee’s rather priceless account of his dealings with the formidable fact-checkers at The New Yorker, but access is limited to subscribers. (Don’t miss it; if nothing else, it will teach you the meaning of the important caveat, “on author.”) Instead, this year’s alternative Tilleys.

¶ Nones: Edward Wong files a chilling look at how the Chinese government abuses legal processes to silence dissidents: the [latest] Case of Huang Qi.

¶ Vespers: Delinquent as usual, I haven’t yet got round to writing up Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which I found to be a very important re-think. Now comes Isaac Chotiner, with a tendentious and skewed misreading of the book, full of snark and sneering (in The New Republic, natch). Nothing could be more wearying than rebutting the piece, and this is not the place to have any kind of thoroughgoing go at it, but one paragraph is all I need for the moment.

¶ Compline: Harry Markopolos, the investor’s advocate who blew enough whistles about Bernard Madoff to simulate Beethoven’s Ninth (except nobody listened), is no longer out sick. But he claims that he was afraid for his life.

He and his colleagues avoided taking their allegations to the industry self-regulatory agency, now called Finra, he said in the statement, because he believed Mr. Madoff and his brother, Peter B. Madoff, wielded too much power with that organization. Peter Madoff worked in his brother’s firm but has not been implicated in the apparent fraud.

“We were concerned that we would have tipped off the target too directly and exposed ourselves to great harm,” he wrote.

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Friday Movies: Taken

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Wowser! Is Taken ever the film to see in a dark and cold season. There was applause at the showing that Quatorze and I attended, and a woman in the audience hailed Liam Neeson’s character as “the new James Bond!” I think it just came out.

Morning Read: Well, and so?

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And so we resume the Morning Read. In future, the “season” will begin with the new year, and not in the autumn. (That gives me even more time to wade through the watery deserts of Moby-Dick. A mixed blessing.)

¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 10 May 1748 is yet another keeper. In it, the noble lord warns his son away from “commonplace observations.” In our world, these would concern baseball teams and women drivers, and they are just as annoying as the attacks on the clergy and against matrimony upon which Chesterfield heaps scorn.

These and many other commmonplace reflections upon nations or professions in general (which are at least as often false as true) are the poor refuge of people who have neither wit nor invention of their own, but endeavour to shine in company by second- hand finery. I always put these pert jackanapes out of countenance, by looking extremely grave, when they expect that I should laugh at their pleasantries; and by saying Well, and so; as if they had not done, and that the sting were still to come.This disconcerts them; as they have no resxources in themselves, and have but one set of jokes to live upon.

(Of course, you had better be a grandee of Chesterfield’s altitude before trying this one on your acquaintance.) Also important:

Falsehood and dissimulation are certainly to be found at courts; but where are they not to be found? Cottages have them, as well as courts; only with worse manners. A couple of neighbouring farmers in a village will contrive and practise as many tricks to overreach each other, at the next market, or to supplant each other in the favour of the squire, as any two courtiers can do to supplant each other in the favour of their prince.

And I can’t resist this sterling observation about scholars:

They are commonly twenty years old before they have spoken to anybody above their schoolmaster, and the fellows of their college. If they happen to have learning, it is only Greek and Latin, but not one word of modern history, or modern languages. Thus prepared, they go abroad, as they call it; but, in truth, they stay at home all that while; for being very awkward, confoundedly ashamed, and not speaking the languages, they go into no foreign company, at least none good; but dine and sup with one another only at the tavern.

¶ In Moby-Dick, I ran through two chapters with a common subject, viz ships meeting at sea. The first, “The Albatross,” is very short, curtailed as much by Ahab’s impatience for news of the White Whale as by any stylistic consideration; I should have suggested putting the chapter after the one that follows. “The Gam” describes how civilized whalers encounter one another. There are times when it seems that Melville can’t have read anything but the Bible and a heap of encyclopedia entries.

¶ Now, let me see. Who is “the captive” who commences the telling of the second “exemplary novel” in Don Quixote? It has been so long since I picked up the book that I don’t rightly recall. The naval Battle of Lepanto, in which Cervantes himself fought, is mentioned but not named. It is almost refreshing to hear of actual battles, fought by real soldiers without the help or hindrance of sorcerers.

¶ Barry Day’s Noël Coward: must we? If I had nothing else to do, I would pick apart the first part of Chapter 17, which to my ear is deaf to the tonal difference between matters of state and matters of state dinners. Several paragraphs after a thumbnail account of Dunkirk, and a glance at Roosevelt, “visibly moved by the epic adventures” in that evactuation — paragraph later, I say, we get an almost fatuous letter from Alexander Woollcott dated 4 January 1940, presented as if in temporal order.

Daily Office: Monday

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¶ Matins: Is the Republican Party taking its marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. If so, why? From Frank Rich’s column, yesterday:

Obama no doubt finds Limbaugh’s grandiosity more amusing than frightening, but G.O.P. politicians are shaking like Jell-O. When asked by Andrea Mitchell of NBC News on Wednesday if he shared Limbaugh’s hope that Obama fails, Eric Cantor spun like a top before running off, as it happened, to appear on Limbaugh’s radio show. Mike Pence of Indiana, No. 3 in the Republican House leadership, similarly squirmed when asked if he agreed with Limbaugh. Though the Republicans’ official, poll-driven line is that they want Obama to succeed, they’d rather abandon that disingenuous nicety than cross Rush.

Most pathetic of all was Phil Gingrey, a right-wing Republican congressman from Georgia, who mildly criticized both Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to Politico because they “stand back and throw bricks” while lawmakers labor in the trenches. So many called Gingrey’s office to complain that the poor congressman begged Limbaugh to bring him on air to publicly recant on Wednesday. As Gingrey abjectly apologized to talk radio’s commandant for his “stupid comments” and “foot-in-mouth disease,” he sounded like the inmate in a B-prison-movie cowering before the warden after a failed jailbreak.

¶ Lauds: Just what we need right now — and I’m not kidding. The warm and domestic light of late Bonnard, on exhibit until Kathleen’s birthday.

¶ Prime: Get a cup of coffee and look around you. You are where you are, and everything is fine. It is clear that Tao Lin did not make you up. You can look at his blog now. (via Koreanish)

¶ Tierce: The obvious lesson to be learned from the Geithner and Daschle tax imbroglios is that the nation’s tax system, devised principally for the aid and comfort of tax attorneys and accountants, ought to be scrapped. The very fact that the Senate Finance Committee is “trying to determine whether trips to the Bahamas and the Middle East provided to Mr. Daschle by the company should also have been reported as income” sounds the alarm: we’ve got to come up with something better — and much, much simpler.

¶ Sext: Here’s one of those maps that goes out of its way to be difficult — only to schematize information that you couldn’t care less about: Friseurnamen at Strange Maps. Just for starters: the madness of composing a background from strands of hair. Funny, once you’ve gotten over the immediate unintelligibility.

¶ Nones: As the pool of unemployed migrant workers in China swells, the prospect of widespread unrest looms, and the current regime appears to be no better-equipped to deal with it than its dynastic predecessors. The BBC’s Chris Hogg reports from Shanghai.

¶ Vespers: There Are No Words Dept: John Grisham originally sent his most recent protagonist, in The Associate, to Princeton Law School. Unaware that there isn’t one. (via Brainiac)

¶ Compline: Updating the liberal arts for Internauts: a refreshing topic of conversation in these disturbed times. Jason Kottke links to Snarkmarket, a site that’s new to me.

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Weekend Update: Chilly

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There ought to be a ban on plays, concerts, and whatnot during the first two months of the new year. Then Kathleen and I wouldn’t miss anything because we were too depressed by the ghastly weather to venture forth in the evening. As it happens, we didn’t miss anything this week, but we trudged off to the Oak Room on Thursday night, and to Carnegie Hall last night, with very reluctant footsteps.

We knew from experience that we’d be glad we’d gone, in the one instance to hear cabaret singer Steve Ross, in the other to hear Orpheus and Anoushka Shankar, and we were. They were great evenings out. But they would have been more fun if we hadn’t been wishing like mad that we could just stay home.

(Moving to warmer climes is not an option. There are no Steve Rosses or Orphei in the Sun Belt.)

Now I have the pleasure of writing up these events for your reading pleasure. Don’t hold your breath; I’m in the middle of a rethink about writing about music.

***

Getting used to life after Dubya is an interesting pleasure. It’s great to return to a more genuinely political world, one in which contestants engage in argument with one another instead of spouting ideological non-responses. So far, it’s true, the Republicans, at least the ones in Congress, are not “contestants” but “constipants.” More about that anon.

Peter Steinfels wrote today about Catholic bishops in the United States — and how they haven’t said “boo” about Benedict XVI’s rehabilitation of the Lefevrists, including a notorious Holocaust-denier. I haven’t said “boo,” either. There really isn’t much to say, at this point, about the future of the Roman Catholic Church. One can only wait and see what individual American Catholics will decide, soul by soul.

I am waiting for the members of some aggrieved parish or other to respond to a church closing by contesting diocesan title to church buildings. The law is squarely on the bishops’ side, but the equity just as certainly is not, especially when one considers that many of the Church’s money problems stem from the hierarchy’s high-handed coverups of its pedophile problem. Who ought to suffer? Parishioners or bean-counting bishops?

If there’s a precedent for the impending rupture, it is not the Protestant Reformation, which concerned profound doctrinal differences, but the split between Reform and Orthodox Jews, which concerned differences about how much weight to put on doctrines that were not in dispute.

***

The other big deal at the moment is — what to call it? Gaza? Israel? Palestine? It sometimes seems that Hitler had the last laugh after all, for the fear of another Holocaust (the only conceivable justification for the harrowing of Gaza) provokes Israeli responses that, in turn, provoke ever more generalized anti-Zionism; and anti-Zionism, as Bernard-Henri Lévy assures us, is but anti-Semitism by another name.

***

What’s not particularly amusing these days is enduring the utterly hypocritical explosion of populism. — Those greedy bankers! &c &c. But no one capable of using a search engine has the right to start complaining now about what has been going on in American finance since at least the collapse of Enron. And before smacking any of those greedy bankers, let justice to be done to the cheerleaders who encouraged them, Alan Greenspan and the editorial-page editors of the Wall Street Journal.

***

The Schott’s Miscellany calendar entry for last Wednesday, “Applause at Classical Concerts,” addresses a felicitous problem. The fact that many concertgoers don’t seem to know the rules about applause is encouraging: it means that serious music is finding new audiences. Now, I’m the first to forget my manners when the first movement of a stormy concerto comes to a rousing conclusion. Clap away! (And glare right back at those blue-haired biddies  — it’s amazing that they still make ’em, ain’t it — and their dim husbands.)

At the Orpheus concert last night however, it appeared that many people in the cheap seats thought that it was only polite to clap every time the music came to a stop. This completely broke the spell of Zoltán Kodály’s Summer Evening and gave the ensemble’s excellent performance of Haydn’s 99th Symphony something of a junior high feel. It’s time for someone to post a small “Attention New Listeners!” notice at the bottom of the programs. For nothing is sadder at concerts than polite applause.

Weekend Open Thread: Red

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Weekend Update:

After the movies, Quatorze (the regular reader formerly known as LXIV — say it just like “guitars,” only with a “k” at the start and an “oars” at the end) and I went to the Museum, so that I could renew my membership, something that I always do in person, in the interest of optimal cash flow. We had lunch, and we saw the retrospective exhibition of Philippe de Montebello’s major acquisitions — and then we went to the Frick. I had already renewed my membership there (“recreated it” is more like it), and Q hadn’t been in a while.

I was distracted, however; I was thinking about my neighbor, a lady who lives just a few floors belowstairs. We met on the elevator this morning and fell into conversation. By the time we got to the lobby, I had given her my card. For the blog, silly! In the driveway, she asked me if I could guess what she did for a living. I had to confess that I’d heard that she’s a therapist. She shrugged with a grace that matched her voice, which — I hope she won’t mind my telling you this — is Julie Christie’s to the life. If it’s a small world, how big can a 692-unit apartment house be? A normal man would be hoping that my neighbor took a fancy to me, but, being me, I hope that she takes a fancy to The Daily Blague. I certainly fancy her as a reader.

I was also distracted by the walk down Fifth Avenue, on the park side’s picturesque hexagonal stepping stones, which substitute for pavement. Ordinarily a pleasurable, interruption-free stroll, it called for hiking boots today: the havoc of a volatile winter has made for a situation that brought to mind traumatic pictures that I saw as a child, of Siberian tombs thrust up through the ground by the permafrost.  It was a trauma to which my feet could relate so well that by 75th Streeet I insisted upon crossing Fifth. I assured Quatorze that spring weather will make the rough places plain, but I’m not sure that either of us believed me.

Bon weekend à tous!

Daily Office: Thursday

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¶ Matins: Despite everything, Wall Street bonuses for 2008 totaled $18.4 billion — thank goodness!

¶ Lauds: Ian McDiarmid’s adaptation of Andrew O’Hagen’s novel, Be Near Me, opens at the Donmar Warehouse to warm if cautious praise from Charles Spencer.

¶ Prime: The site has a few strange navigational problems, but the Curated David Foster Wallace Dictionary might be just what you’re looking for in the Word-For-the-Day line. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Can anyone tell me the bottom line on the Blackwater story in today’s Times? The headline, “Iraq Won’t Grant Blackwater a License,” must mean that Blackwater will not be allowed to provide security services within Iraq, right? Not if you keep reading.

¶ Sext: Here’s a project for Google Maps: mowing the lawn.

¶ Nones: The best part of this story — “Putin’s Grasp of Energy Drives Russian Agenda“  — comes at the end.

As far back as 1997, while serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin earned a graduate degree in economics, writing his thesis on the economics of natural resources.

But —

¶ Vespers: Is Allen Bennett the new John Updike? He’s, er, two years younger. And quite as fluently prolific, if as a man of the theatre rather than as a novelist. Razia Iqbal talks about meeting him, but the interview is nowhere to be found.

¶ Compline: We were neither of us in the mood — at all. But we had to go, in that grown-up way that has nothing to do with obligation. So we got dressed and went. And of course the evening was unforgettable: Steve Ross at the Oak Room.

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Nano Note: Barocco

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One of the first playlists that I created was effectively a dump of all the baroque music that I had in my CD library. I avoided some of the greatest hits — the Water Music, the Brandenburg Concertos — and I excluded vocal music as well. Without scraping every corner of the apartment for miscellaneous discs, I was able to amass a list that would play for 2.8 days. That’s a lot of wallpaper.

Very carefully, I moved the music around. I didn’t want to listen to all twelve of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi in a row, followed by the three discs of Scott Ross’s Scarlatti Anthology. It took forever, and I didn’t do a very good job. But the result was — not tedious. Did I mention the six-CD set of Handel’s chamber music? There are only so many consecutive flute sonatas that I can listen to without going barkers.

Being the proselytizer for pleasure that I am, I persuaded LXIV to permit me to lend him the Nano with the baroque music on it, together with the Logitech dock/speaker set that I bought for travel. I have to upgrade it, because it conks out if the music is too quiet. The problem never arises with baroque music, all of which sounds just as loud as everything else, but Ravel’s Bolero stops it every time. Ten minutes go by, and I’m wondering why the music stopped. What now? Oh, that.

As I thought, LXIV was pleased to have the cornucopia of baroque music add a congenial note to the atmosphere of his flat. “It’s playing when I go to sleep,” he said, “and it’s still playing when I wake up.” (Now, for my part, I cannot fall asleep if music is playing.) So far so good. The thing was, the baroque music was loaded onto the one Nano that I’d bought directly from Apple. It was fire-engine red, and it had my initials stamped on the back. I thought I’d just load the playlist onto another Nano — the pink one, say — and exchange it with LXIV.

That’s when I discovered that I had done all my careful massaging of the baroque playlist on the red Nano itself. Guess what? You can’t download a playlist from a Nano. Not even if your hard drive contains all the same MP3 files! Are we stupid yet? (Why people extol Apple as they do, I’ll never understand.)

LXIV lived with the pink Nano for about a week. He never complained, but he didn’t have to. I was haunted by guilt. Having printed the playlist ( you can do that, at least), I exchanged the Nanos once again. And I am still, about a month later, reconstructing the baroque playlist, this time on a hard drive. Unfortunately, my standards have gone up dramatically, so the going is very slow. And of course there are the inevitable improvements…

It occurred to me that one of these improvements ought to be the overture, as it were; the first piece of music on the playlist. And what ought that to be? What else but Mouret’s famous Rondeau? Famous, that is, from years and years and years of use by Masterpiece Theatre.

As I don’t have a CD with the Mouret on it, I went to Amazon, where I was quickly seduced into downloading the item for the proverbial $0.99. There’s a first time for everything, and my first time with Amazon downloads included losing the Mouret somewhere in my computer. It certainly wasn’t appearing in iTunes! I was so exasperated that I had to do three other technical things before I could come back and thimk [sic!]about what to. Using ancient techniques learned in the days of Windows File Manager, I unearthed the file and put it where it belonged.

And, boy, does it sound cheesy! I couldn’t like it more.

Daily Office: Wednesday

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¶ Matins: Back to Afghanistan, where the war always made sense: one hopes that this is how our Iraqi misadventure will end, with a withdrawal to the most troubled part of Central Asia known to the West. What happens in Iraq really never did, at day’s end, matter, except to the Iraqis and to the petulant son of George H W Bush. The future of Pakistan (and, with it, India) is however tied up in the mountain fastnesses where a version of Iranian is lingua franca.

¶ Lauds: Although I’m disinclined to poach from coverage of the Book Review, Toni Bentley’s review of a new translation of Akim Volynsky’s Ballet’s Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911-1925 is so chock-a-block with densely beautiful passages about ballet that I must mention it here.

¶ Prime: Is Alaska really that big? Too bad it looks like a maple leaf.

¶ Tierce:  Of all the rackets to complain about in an apparently noisy neighborhood, a Hamburger homeowner has sued to close a nearby day-care center. Carter Dougherty reports.

¶ Sext: Although I can muster a few plausible observations to explain why I didn’t know until today about the Bacon Explosion, a torpedo of cholesterol that was launched on an unsuspecting world on or about Christmas Day, I think it’s best just to admit that I simply not cool. What’s really interesting is that I read about it in the Times. That’s how I found out about the latest (?) Blogosphere sensation.

¶ Nones: Members of Sri Ram Sena (the Army of Lord Ram) assaulted and chased women drinking in a public bar in Mangalore, Karnataka, according to BBC News. The group’s leader, Pramod Mutalik, says it is “not acceptable” for women to go to bars in India.”

For the past two days, he has argued that Saturday’s assault on the women was justifiable because his men were preserving Indian culture and moral values.

¶ Vespers: A few weeks ago, I came up with the concept of “Dorm Lit” — the masculine correlative to “Chick Lit.” A bookcase stocked with Mailer, Vonnegut, Heller, Pynchon, and The Catcher in the Rye is the prototypical Dorm Shelf. Just last night, I was wondering what newer authors might join these august ranks? Ms NOLA mentioned Murakami — Bingo! And now the brouhaha over the facts of Roberto Bolaño’s life reminds me to add the Chilean author to the list. You don’t even have to read any of the late writer’s books, because the quarrel over his biography seems torn from one of his stories.  

¶ Compline: It’s hard to imagine the publication by any mainstream American newspaper or magazine of Seumas Milne’s attribution of social progress in Latin America — and rejection of neoliberalism worldwide — to the Cuban Revolution. Harper’s or The New Yorker might print a watered-down version, but not what appeared in The Guardian.

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In the Book Review: Appraising Grace

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The cover review, by Toni Bentley, is an example of what the Book Review’s reviews could be like, if the editors were a little less prone to confuse “selling books” with “engaging readers,” — and if their acknowledgment that favorable reviews are harder to write than unfavorable ones would open them to the suggestion that ipso facto, perhaps, favorable reviews are more valuable as well as more difficult. In any case, this week’s issue is above par.

Big Idea: Angels and Idiots

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Here’s a notion that I should like to see laid to rest, interred with the bones of the Dubyas: that human beings are what the Vegan posing as Ellie Arroway’s Dad, in Contact, calls “an interesting mix.” Capable of both great good and great wickedness, yadda yadda yadda. This is nothing but the tired old Great Chain of Being idea: that men and women, uniquely among sublunary creatures, possess quintessential souls, partaking of the divine ether — but that they also, as mortal beings, are corruptly composed of clay and dust. Get it? If we were all quintessence, we’d be good all the time, but thanks to our quintessential souls, we’re not bad all the time. We’re what Plato and Aristotle never dreamed of being cool enough to call “an interesting mix.” Even though they thought it.

(If none of this chatter makes any sense to you, congratulate yourself: you’re as yet uncorrupted!)

The idea that we’re both as noble as angels and as base as tarantulas — an insult to tarantulas — persists. And why not, as long as we recognize that the conceit is altogether human. We’re the ones who have decided that we’re an admixture of spirits and beasts. It’s our way of saying that we’re good, we’re bad, and we can’t help it.

Maybe we can’t help it, but we can stop thinking of ourselves as “an interesting mix.” In fact, there are no angels on hand to make us look stupid, and no animals capable of acknowledging, in so many words, our superiority. Let’s just give it up and accept our uncomplicated starkness, as the smartest things that this little planet of ours has to offer. And let’s just try to live up to that.

Daily Office: Tuesday

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¶ Matins: Davos is shaping up to be the party not to be seen at this year. Our Governor Paterson is the latest defector. The White House is sending Valerie Jarrett.

¶ Lauds: Terry Teachout writes about the unglamorous side of being an opera librettist. Asked how he does it all, the man of letters gives the manly answer:

I’m extremely humble about whatever gifts I may have, but I am not modest about the work I do. I work extremely hard and all the time.

¶ Prime: Now that it’s over, I can read about it: the era of Press Bush. Errol Morris asks three wire-service photographers to talk about their most illustrative photographs of the late President. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Preserving the death camp at Auschwitz poses a peculiar problem: the installation wasn’t built to last. And parts of it were blown up by the evacuating Germans, who assuredly weren’t concerned about the difficulty of maintaining a ruin.

¶ Sext: Clyde Haberman talks about “nontraditional ‘shaming punishments’,” but I thought that shaming punishments were traditional. It’s prison time that’s new and “improved” (not).

¶ Nones: And here I thought that “slumdog” was a standard insult in Mumbai, applied to anyone (particularly anyone Muslim) from the city’s rather ghastly slums. Not so.

The screenplay writer, Simon Beaufoy, said people should not read too much into the title. “I just made up the word. I liked the idea. I didn’t mean to offend anyone,” he said.

Ijits!

¶ Vespers: Notwithstanding his prodigious output, John Updike was too young, at 76, to leave us. The commodore of American letters, he guided a convoy of writers from the avowedly amoral shoals of modernism to a native harbor of immanence, and he set his ships a high example for polished decks.

¶ Compline: It were churlish not to wish long lives to the eight children born tout d’un coup, in the Miracle of Kaiser Bellflower. What a Mozartstag! John Updike dead, a human octopus born!

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Friday Movies: Defiance

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It’s what the audience brings to the theatre that makes Defiance the very powerful picture that most people are going to find it to be.

Housekeeping Note :Mozart's Birthday

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Johann Chrysostom Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Wolfgang Amadé Mozart to you), 27 January 1756 — 5 December 1791.

Daily Office: Monday

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¶ Matins: When Kathleen read the Op-Ed piece in this morning’s paper, “How Words Could End a War,” her impatience boiled over. “They had to do a study to prove this?”

“This” being the possibility that words to the effect of “we’re sorry” could induce Israelis and Palestinians to consider peaceful coexistence.

¶ Lauds: Can serious actresses have “big bosoms”? Helen Mirren wants to know — in a Michael Parkinson inverview from 1975. That’s so long ago that — is her bust the smaller figure? (via The Wronger Box)

¶ Prime: You may recall that the State of West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1861, when Virginia seceded from the United States. You may be surprised to learn that the Federal government proposed a truly radical redrafting of Virginia’s borders, effectively confining it to the Shenandoah Valley.

¶ Tierce: Big Brother as cruise director: Pesky tenant’s lease is not renewed at community-oriented rental in Long Island City. And he’s surprised!

¶ Sext: Here is a list of recent books that have changed the world. Sorry! They’re about world-changing people, inventions, and whatnot. Or so their publishers want us to believe. (via kottke.org) 

¶ Nones: This isn’t funny, I know, but still: Geir Haarde, who has just stepped down as Iceland’s Prime Minister —  “the first world leader to leave office as a direct result of the financial crisis” — wasn’t going to seek re-election anyway, owing to throat cancer. The leader of rival Social Democrat party, Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir, has ruled herself out as Haarde’s successor; she is being treated for brain cancer.

¶ Vespers: Here’s a book that I will buy the moment I see it in a shop: To The Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod, by Reuel K. Wilson.

¶ Compline: Now that the children have gone to bed, it’s safe to read about bonobos, or, if you prefer, about what bonobos have taught Meredith Chivers, “a creator of bonobo pornography.”

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Weekend Update: Normal

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That’s what this weekend was about: feeling  normal again. No more holidays, no more special events. And no more excuses, either.

“Excuses” isn’t the right word. “Priorities” is. I’ve had my hands full of priorities, ever since we got back from St Croix at Thanksgiving. As a result of prioritizing the priorities, I live in a much less cluttered apartment. Oh, the place still looks as cluttered as ever,  but then that’s just a look, a decorative tic. The kind of clutter that I’ve been working on lurked in closets and drawers and cabinets and under-the-bed  boxes.

I took a walk today, and it felt great. That was new. I’ve been limping home from recent walks, so completely out of shape am I. But after a big walk on Wednesday — almost four miles — and another mile or two on Friday and about a mile yesterday, I was my old self again today. I walked over to Central Park. It was very cold, but I think that that helped. I walked the oval that surrounds the Great Lawn. Then I came home. The word for the experience was “invigorating.” At my age, unfortunately, “invigorating” means “good for nothing but a nap in front of a roaring fire.” In the absence of a roaring fire, I merely dozed.

Before the walk, I ran errands. I had to buy a birthday card. It has been so long since I last bought a birthday card that Kathleen had to remind me, if that’s the word, that Barnes & Noble sells them. I had thought I had the perfect card: the William Eggleston photograph of what looks like a Manhattan on the rocks, bathing on a tray table in the sunlight pouring in from a jetliner’s porthole at 35,000 feet. When I opened the box, the card turned out to be a postcard: not suitable under the circumstances.

At least I finally got to the Eggleston show at the Whitney. It closed today. I was an idiot to put it off. But I did see it twice, first on Friday and then yesterday. I persuaded Kathleen to see it yesterday after breakfast, on her way to George Michael. “It’s not the sort of thing that I would go out of my way to see,” she said, “but I’m glad that you suggested it.” The amazing thing about Eggleston’s color is that it makes everything look clean, even the dirt. Take the two most humdrum kitchen photographs in the show: the freezer and the oven. Neither is what you’d call next to Godliness, really; but because all the colors seem right, the subjects appear to be pristine.

Paying for the birthday cards at Barnes & Noble — unsure of my choices, I covered the waterfront, hoping that Kathleen would choose the right one — I bought Transsiberian on an impulse. We were going to watch it after dinner, but, after dinner, we both felt more like reading. Or, in my case, writing.

Everyone I passed in the Park seemed to be much younger than I — about thirty-five, max. Many were not only not speaking English, but not speaking a language that I recognized. Of the Anglophones, the only one to make an impression was a guy who was walking with a woman in a red quilted coat. “I’ve heard the word before, but I’ve never heard anybody use it,” he said. How I wanted to know what the word was! But instead of repeating the word, he repeated himself. As if he hadn’t said it before, he said it again. “I’ve heard the word before, but I’ve never heard anybody use it.” This time, I heard the woman say, “Yeah.” I tried to remember which playwright employs such repetitions, as a tic to signify our failure to attend to one another. I doubt that my thought patterns would have been so grandiose if I hadn’t been walking along the river at Carl Schurz.

Weekend Open Thread: Agitation at the Whitney

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