On my daily round of links, I came across a reference to something called “Larchmont Lockjaw” [not at this site]. I sat up like a shot, because of course the manner of speaking referred to — best characterized as speaking through clenched teeth, so that one’s jaw remains stationary — is not called “Larchmont Lockjaw.” It is called “Locust Valley Lockjaw.” In tribute to its best known exponent, Katharine Hepburn, it probably ought to be called “Hartford Lockjaw.”

But, Larchmont! The very idea! Larchmont’s one claim to fame is that nobody knows whether it is to the North or to the South of Mamaroneck. Yes, I know — you can look it up and tell me! But you will forget! It is impossible to distinguish the Tweedledee and the Tweedledum of Westchester country living.

Locust Valley is on the other side of Long Island Sound. It is, therefore, on Long Island. (On the evidence of the Web site, however, I rather doubt that the patois is spoken there anymore.)

If you want to know what Locust Valley Lockjaw sounds like, let your Auntie Mame help out. It’s the way that young Patrick’s would-be fiancée, Gloria Upson, melds her incisors. “And then I hit the ball….”

¶ Matins: Midnight finds me unprepared with an interesting link, so I have to go with this nonsense, which I link to as such. (Laff riot!) I’ve been chatting with a friend about the election, more and more convinced that the United States is a broken wheel, an idea that will never work again.

¶ Lauds: I knew about Stella, but not about Mary, who, like her mother, Linda Eastman McCartney, is a photographer. I came across her name at the Guardian site, where she talks about her best shot (below).

¶ Prime: Feeling jazzy? Dreaming of kidney beans? Well, then, download some Mad Men-inspired wallpaper. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: David Gonzalez writes about the “morality” of double-parking — the theory being one of justification by acclamation: “everybody does it.”

¶ Vespers: Boy, do I need to lie down! I’ve just scrolled through all fifty-four pairs of New York’s then-and-now photos showing recent changes in local streetscapes. (via kottke.org)

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It’s all I can do to keep from pulling down Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in order to perk up my recollection of the details of Jack Boughton’s difficult life, as told, in that book, by his father’s best friend, the very disapproving Jack Ames. Instead, I’m letting Home refresh my memories. Home, we’re told, relates events “concurrently” from the point of view of Jack’s sister, Glory, a good woman who has seen more of life than her family suspects. Glory has come back to Gilead to take care of her ailing, widowed father — but that isn’t the whole story. The whole story unspools in what can only be called immense narrative piety.

She thought. Yes, a little like the old times. Graying children, ancient father. If they could have looked forward from those old times, when even a game of checkers around that table was so rambunctious it would have driven her father off to parse his Hebrew in the stricken quiet of Ames’s house — if they could now look in the door of the kitchen at the three of them there, would they believe what they saw? No matter — her father was hunched over his side of the board, mock-intent, and Jack was reclined, legs crossed at the ankles, as if it were possible to relax in a straighted-backed chair. The popcorn popped.

In the best sense in the world, Marilynne Robinson is a great respecter of persons.

¶ Matins: Lucy Q Denett, former associate director of revenue management at the Minerals Management Service, the government’s second-best source of revenue after taxes, was frank with investigators — up to a point:

But the report quotes Ms. Denett repeatedly telling investigators such things as “obviously I did it and it doesn’t look proper” and that in retrospect she had made a “very poor” decision. She also told them that “she had been preoccupied with a very stressful personal issue at the time,” which the report did not spell out.

Justice (Dept of) has already decided not to prosecute. Charlie Savage reports.

¶ Lauds: What a concept: a clutch of readable novels is up for the Man Booker Prize. That would exclude Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence.

¶ Tierce: In the Times, this anniversary morning, a few then-and-now photographs of notable structures that are no longer backdropped by the Twin Towers.

What do you see first when looking at the old photographs on the left? Almost certainly not the intended subjects. One of the pictures is meant to show the Woolworth Building. Another is of the Brooklyn Bridge. The third is supposed to depict Division Street.

Well, the thing is, I do see the Woolworth Building. It is in every way a more meaningful building than the lost towers, which achieved significance only in destruction.

¶ Sext: Queens University Belfast will be offering a course called “Feel the Force: How to Train in the Jedi Way.” Won’t Mum and Dad be glad to hear about that! That old lunchbox will be great for lugging mobile, iPod and other kit to class.

¶ Compline: Jean Ruaud reports that his cousins in Houston are staying put. So is my sister, in Port Aransas. The other day, she wrote to say that she’d be evacuating the next morning at six. Carol, if you can read this, our prayers are working!

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¶ A N Wilson writes about the first great press baron, Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, and his (inadvertently) not-very-bright conduct of the Great War. He was, after all, out to sell newspapers.

Fireside chats with political leaders would, for many a decade to come, and perhaps for ever, be one way in which political deals were brokered, and power wielded. But the days in which the political class met in clubs and country houses, and could conduct their nation’s affairs without popular will or consultation, were over.

It was one thing for “the Press” to corral politicians. It seems to be quite something else when “the Media” try to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Matins: Ms NOLA was kind enough to slip me a link to Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial call to brawn, yet another mandarin voice urging liberals to sock it to ’em. If only we knew how! — even as we digest Mr Wieseltier’s fine talk (and it is fine!) of “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” Who knew that the thickest plank in the Republican Party platform had such a fancy name?

“You remember the teleological suspension of the ethical,” Mr Wieseltier writes with absurd optimism. Happily, he does not count upon the strength of our recollections.

¶ Lauds: Although I’m not sure that I’d like to sit through The Fly — now it’s an opera, with music by Howard Shore (Silence of the Lambs) and book by David Henry Hwang (M Butterfly) — I’d sure like to hear it.

¶ Tierce: While Americans struggle to deal with a resurgent but definitely post-Soviet Russia, separatists within Russia take heart from the formal recognition of new breakaway states in the Caucasus. The interesting thing about Ellen Barry’s story is the refrain of “20 years from now.” Nobody’s talking about anything’s happening tomorrow. Instead, the talk is of death warrants and planted seeds. 

“In the long term, they could have signed their own death warrant,” said Lawrence Scott Sheets, the Caucasus program director for the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that tries to prevent and resolve global conflicts. “It’s an abstraction now, but 20 years down the road, it won’t be such an abstraction.”

Mr Sheets is speaking of Russia.

¶ Nones: If JMW Turner’s watercolor of Merton College, Oxford goes missing, I will insist that I know nothing about it. Having just paid my nth visit to the Turner show at the Museum — easily the sixth, I think — I’m beginning to fall in love with a few paintings just as they’re about to wrenched away, but I fell for the Merton watercolor the moment I saw it. Why?

¶ Compline: Thomas P Campbell, a 46 year-old curator of tapestries, will become the ninth director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the start of the New Year. As a card-carrying Old Fart, I’m happier with Mr Campbell than I would have been with Gary Tinterow, the strong and clever curator of — you have to love this tripartition — 19th Century, modern, and contemporary art.

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Helene Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach looks very good, but snagging the cover of the Book Review is no substitute for a review that engages with the book instead of merely telling its story. What’s definitely on my list is Alissa Torres’s American Widow.

¶ Matins: Even if you have already come across the Kilkenny letter, I urge you to consider it as a model memorandum that, in an ideal democracy, every voter would be sufficiently informed to compose. Anne Kilkenny is a resident of Wasilla, Alaska, who has known Sarah Palin for many years, and who opposed her attempt to fire the local librarian. She is definitely an “interested” observer. But her letter seems candid and level-headed. Her take on Trig, as well as on some of Ms Palin’s political positions, suggests a scrupulous determination not to demonize. The main thing is that she sat down and composed her thoughts. (via Suz at Large.)

¶ Tierce: As someone who ingested a good deal of LSD back in the day, I read today’s Times report on Salvia divinorum with great interest. The recreational aspect of drug use doesn’t interest me very much anymore, but I remain curious about altered states of mind. Overall, though, the story has me spluttering with rage, at the drug’s troglodyte opponents.

¶ Sext: Thank God for France! Nowhere is pleasure more expertly rationalized. From Le Figaro, a review of Mamma Mia! that talks of Shakespeare and “postmodern irony.”

¶ Nones: How big is New York City? As big as the populations of Idaho (Manhattan), Maine (the Bronx), Nevada (Brooklyn), New Mexico (Queens), and Wyoming (Staten Island). (via JMG > Gothamist)

¶ Vespers: Times columnist Bob Herbert enjoins liberals to hold up their heads. It’s a great idea, but he has no suggestions about what to when the wingnuts start shooting at it.

Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.

Yes, and that’s the problem. Consider:
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Dear Daily Blague Readers,

As part of some sort of Outreach Program for the Blogless or something – I don’t know what he’s thinking, exactly – R J has kindly invited me to guest blog from time to time.

After a giddy twelve seconds of pride in this wondrous achievement – from my humble beginnings in the mail room, I have ascended to the rank of contributor  to The Daily Blague! – I began to fret that R J would ask me to write an inaugural post “introducing myself” to Daily Blague readers.  I apologize for whining – already! – but an introduction would be difficult for me.  I have issues.  Not the least of which is this one:  in the real world, introductions are a near-phobia of mine.  The truth is, you do not want to be introduced to me.  As a woman with a warm heart, I feel great compassion for people who are introduced to me.

Because I have really, really cold hands.  There are worse afflictions, but this one is weird, and a little funny, I think.  When a person offers a hand to me for shaking, I must immediately compose my face so that he or she can’t detect the involuntary inner cringe – that  would surely be misunderstood…!  This poor stranger doesn’t know what’s coming, but I do. Read the rest of this entry »

¶ This morning’s chapter of After the Edwardians, “Revolutions, dispenses with Russia and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in short order, the better to move on to the scientific upheavals that, gathering force as the Nineteenth Century ended, climaxed with the theoretical bang of Einstein’s celebrated theories of relativity on the eve of the Great War. (The audible bang would conclude the next war.)

It was a very long time before the implications of such ideas reached the public imagination, and could be adapted, with such terrifying consequence, for military or political purpose. But by the end of the First World War, scientists who had been away to fight returned to their laboratories to discover that they were quite literally in a different universe.

Wilson gets in a quick but not very sly poke at E M Forster, whose novels “had their unaccountable mid-twentieth-century vogue.” Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Matins: One thing that I thought about all weekend was how much I agreed with Arianna Huffington about Sarah Palin: Democrats must forget that she exists.

¶ Tierce: Even though you probably don’t want to read about mortgages — especially on a Monday morning —the refreshingly cogent Floyd Norris assesses Feddie Fran.

¶ Nones: Cake Wrecks goes meta: readers are creating their own disasters! “We ‘read’ your ‘blog’,” says one, highlighting Jen’s pet peeve, inappropriate quotation marks.  

¶ Vespers: Thanks to JR at Mnémoglyphes, I’ve discovered a new blog, Project Sidewalk. Don’t miss the Procrastination Flowchart (with its chuckling plethora of foreclosed alternatives.

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¶ In After the Edwardians, A N Wilson considers the Great War as an expression of the lust for destruction that colored the thinking of the Vorticists and the Futurists. He quotes the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, killed at Neuville Saint Vaast in 1915, aged 23:

The war is a great remedy.

In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride. It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become noxious as the recent trade crises have shown us.

When artists are misanthropes, a state of emergency cannot be far off. Read the rest of this entry »

Part of the wicked fun of Ed Park’s Personal Days is finding out the significance of the crow on the keypad.

This is one of the great movies. Like the Hitchcock films of which it reminds me, Transsiberian manages to look detailed even when it’s sketchy. The balance of great script and great cast is peculiarly witchy.

Since this is only a blog, I can say, “Woody Harrelson. What an actor.” Zero as criticism but more than that, I hope, as a bit of flag waving. The man is magnificent. On top of everything else, he has the decency to be a co-star, almost a supporting actor. It took my breath away, every time I saw that battered nose.

¶ Matins: The frontier of modern humanist research lies in neurobiology, not philosophy. The days of armchair speculation are over: we’re not interested in what ought to be the case (which is all you’ll get out of Plato). Even so, sometimes I think that the researchers don’t quite understand the parameters. In a study announced today, blah blah blah (see below). The part that captured my eye was this:

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).

How is it possible that anyone, in the age of the computer, doesn’t know that everything is memory. There is no difference between what happened last year and what happened last nanosecond. There is no “other” kind of neural activity, that does not involve remembering.

¶ Lauds: I wish that Jason Kottke had explained a bit after saying that “I could read about con men and tricksters all day.” I believe that he shares my interest in the phenomenon of the con, and is not planning to take up the practice; but it would be nice to be sure, especially as I do rely on kottke.org for a great deal of “my news.”

¶ Tierce: The first paragraph of Stephanie Strom’s story announces Eli Broad’s $400 million gift. The second paragraph outlines what the Broad Institute intends to do in the way of research. Here’s the third paragraph:

The money will be managed by Harvard University’s vaunted investment unit with the goal of turning it into a $1 billion endowment that will ensure the institute’s future and make it one of the wealthiest scientific research centers in the world.

¶ Sext: “All dressed up and nothing to say” — The Telegraph on Keira Knightley in The Duchess. Sukhdev Sandhu’s review. “Knightley looks woefully, painfully thin throughout. It’s hard to listen to what she’s saying when all you want to do is feed her chips.”

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¶ A N Wilson looks at World War I from an Asian perspective in today’s chapter — by which he means the importance, to English leaders at the time, of blunting German access to the vicinity of India. The infamous Gallipoli campaign, from the sponsorship of which it was long thought that Churchill would never recover, appears not to have been a bad idea, but a muddled one. At chapter’s end, an intriguing appreciation of T E Lawrence.

Many read Seven Pillars of Wisdom as fraudulent historical text, without realizing that it is intended to be read, as Malory, Homer or the Bible are intended to be read, as a mythological compendium whose stories interpret, as they describe, the world. …

One of the reasons Seven Pillars has such an hypnotic effect on the reader is precisely its lack of realism.

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¶ Matins: You have to wonder, how much did it hurt Carly Fiorina to choke out these words:

“This is a well-qualified candidate for vice president and well-qualified to be a heartbeat away from the president,” said Carly Fiorina, a top McCain campaign adviser and former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard.

Without wishing Ms Fiorina any ill, I hope that it hurt a lot.

¶ Tierce: The lead editorial in this morning’s Times highlights the growing weirdness of Republicans: they’re running against themselves. They can do this because, for many of the Party faithful, Democrats and “liberals” are not so much an opposing political faction as a collective bogeyman right out of the Stalinist toybox. What could Mitt Romney meant by “liberal Washington,” if not some spectral equivalent of “international bourgeois financiers”?

¶ Sext: Patricia Storms collects two tales of library crime, at Booklust.

¶ Vespers: Looking for an intriguing, end-of-summer pop movie quiz? Try this one, from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. Read the rest of this entry »

¶ From After the Edwardians, I learn that nobody referred to the Titanic as “unsinkable” (without the qualifier “practically,” that is) until after she sank. We must also not overlook the Duchess of Cambridge’s capsule history of the Nineteenth Century:

Alas! All the dearest countries that my heart loved best have been stolen (I can’t give it another name)… Hanover, which is the cradle of our English family, Hesse is mine and Nassau was my dear own mother’s; so you may judge of my feelings at the moment; that is the moment of Germany becoming one nation.

The Duchess was Queen Mary’s grandmother. Read the rest of this entry »