If there is one word that Will’s mother does not want him to hear, ever — applied to himself, at least — it is “smart.” Whether or not it’s a word that anyone would ever think of applying to my grandson, I quite agree. Certainly nothing endangered the promise of my own life more toxically than being told that I was very smart. I became addicted to the notion that hard work was infra dig and déclassé. Indeed, I regard myself today as a recovering smart person.

It would be gross disingenuousness to deny my delighted belief that Will is loaded with brains. But this does not at all mean that he is, or ever will be, smart.

“Smart” is an American virtue. It describes the ideal American intellectual capacity: a knack for beating the system. Europeans cheat the system, by not paying taxes. Americans believe in a combination of luck and smarts, with the smarts providing a blueprint for cutting corners (a/k/a red tape) and advancing directly to Go. This makes us love the system, by the way; it explains why socialism has never had a chance on these shores. Beating the system means leaving the suckers around you behind. When my father went to Harvard Law in the late Thirties, the incoming first-years, planted in their proto-stadium seats, were directed to look to their left, then to their right. One of the men that each man beheld would not graduate, they were told. This is what is meant by “socialism for the rich.”

One of the things that I love about my father is that he did graduate — barely.

My father thought that I was a lot smarter than he was, which was touching but very wrong. (Even he knew it: he used to say that I had more books than sense. True enough — at least for the first fifty years.) No matter how brightly I turn up the brilliance of my critical wattage, I am never going to be offered a seat on the board of Twentieth Century Fox, an organization that was happy to pay my father for his good advice as a director (a director of, not at) for nine happy years, during the last of which he got to hobnob with Princess Grace. Even though he never ever went to the movies and argued against investing in the original Poseidon Adventure.

It was Dad’s dirty secret that he worked very hard. So dirty that no one ever saw it happen. No matter what the season, Dad was never at home, and, when he was, he was asleep, zonked in the latest of a series of plush leather easy chairs. 

It’s very Maureen Dowd of me to say so, but I do believe that my father slept his way to the top. Without ever taking his clothes off or getting into be with anyone else. In plain view of his family, in fact, while endless golf tournaments unspooled on the television set in the den. His example certainly makes Sir Joseph Porter’s polishing up the handle so carefully look downright grinding.

Whatever Will’s intellectual capacities might be, his life at the moment is sharply constrained by the skeleto-muscular limitations of life at thirteen or fourteen weeks of age. As such, Will faces a challenge that even the smartest kid can’t beat. If he were really smart, he would get the picture and stop complaining. Right?  

¶ Matins: Tyler Cowen answers a question posed at EconLog: Why do colleges care about extracurricular activities, when businesses don’t? (Yes, we think that the question is interesting, too, regardless of the answer.)

¶ Lauds: James Ivory finishes the last Merchant Ivory production, an adaptation of Peter Cameron’s The City of Your Final Destination, with MI alum Anthony Hopkins.

¶ Prime: More about Magnetar from one of the men who really knows, Jim Kwak of The Baseline Scenario. Wait! There’s more. In the following paragraphs, Mr Kwak illustrates the disconnect between “performance pay” and real performance. (via Abnormal Returns)

¶ Tierce: Elementary school teachers are always talking up “creativity,” but in fact they don’t want genuinely creative students in their classrooms. Jonah Lehrer reports. 

¶ Sext: Next time a loved one threatens suicide, try the piss-off gambit, which recently saved a live in Sweden. Come to think of it, this is the sort of thing that works only in Sweden (Mail Online; via The Awl)

¶ Nones: Two views of the situation in Thailand. Joshua Kurlantzick (LRB) is not only less optimistic than Philip Bowring (IHT), but he has a significantly different take on the economy.

¶ Vespers: Terry Teachout ties up a bouquet of books that he would not care to re-read (no matter how much they affected him when he was a student) with a glance at the kind of book that he doesn’t read now. (About Last Night)

¶ Compline: At DoubleX, K J Dell’Antonia writes movingly about how close she came to following the example of Torry Hansen, and sending her little girl back to China. (via The Morning News)

A game that Will particularly likes to play at the moment is the game in which I talk utter nonsense, spouting verbal salad like a patch of mint. For some reason, I have no inhibitions about producing these nonsense syllables. For some other reason, Will can tell that they’re nonsense — that they’re not the sort of thing (equally incomprehensible to him, no doubt) that I say when I’m changing his diaper, for example. I changed his diaper six times this afternoon, and we both had so much fun at it that I began to feel quite unhealthy. At one point, in fact, I worried that I was morphing into the Witch in Hansel & Gretel. He was such a plump little fowl! I bent over and asked, “Shall we stuff you with mushrooms or onions?” His mother laughed, thank heaven. So did he.

But he didn’t laugh as heartily as he did when I spouted nonsense. How can he possibly have a sense of nonsense? I’m not going to claim that he does. Maybe he just thinks that I make funny faces when I talk nonsense. When I ask him whether he’d prefer to be stuffed with mushrooms or onions, he cocks an eyebrow, a would-be stichomythic. When I burble, in contrast, there’s no critic in his look; I’m just being silly. How does he know about silly?

***

We had talked about going to park, either Carl Shurz or the much-closer Ruppert. But since the weather wasn’t very nice, and Will had been up all night with congested sinuses, Megan thought that Metro Minis would make a better outing. We didn’t get round to going until late in the day. I hailed a taxi easily enough, but when we tried to turn left on Lex, the traffic cops wouldn’t permit it, and the same prohibition was in effect at Park Avenue. Megan promptly decided that, whatever the explanation, she didn’t want to be caught in some sort of bad late-afternoon traffic thing, and she begged the driver to turn round and take us back to Yorkshire Towers. She had to beg, because the driver was full of enthusiasm for finding better routes, circumventing what he called “making a movie.” In the end, I had to insist. My instincts were the same as the driver’s — we’d find a way. He and I were both unhappy with the idea of a fare to nowhere, even if the driver was going to be paid for his pains. But I saw in a way that I have never seen it before that the mother’s wishes must be paramount. Generations of gentlemen have known as much in their twenties. Why didn’t I know about safe?  

 

¶ Matins: “Asian flair” — wo-men bu savons shemma. At The Bygone Bureau, Darryl Campbell writes about the persistence of a culinary phenomenon that we really thought was dead. But then we don’t want television.

¶ Lauds: At WSJ, Eric Felten puts conductor Leonard Slatkin’s unconscionable indiscretions to good use.

¶ Prime: Just when we thought that Michael Lewis had made everything perfectly clear, along comes Magnetar, the very successful hedge fund that made sure that no trader’s shot glass was empty. (Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: It sounds like Nunsense 1.01. If you think that no one will ever know that you bought your (counterfeit) Gucci bag at a table on 86th Street, you’re wrong, because you will. (Not Exactly Rocket Science; via The Morning News)

¶ Sext: At WSJ, Eric Felten puts conductor Leonard Slatkin’s unconscionable indiscretions to good use.

¶ Nones: What happened in Kyrgyzstan, anyway? Was Russia possibly behind the ouster of president Kurmanbek Bakiyev? David Trilling lays it out in two crisp pages. (Foreign Affairs)

¶ Vespers: Books don’t always furnish a room; sometimes, they litter it. Maud Newton appeals to publishers to send her ebooks.

¶ Compline: Thanks to Michael Idov, we now know what a hipster Hasid will look like: Baruch Herzfeld, proprietor of the Treyf Bike Gesheft. (New York Magazine; via MetaFilter)

When I was young, I was sure that I was the only oddball. Okay, not: there were plenty of real oddballs to make me look normal. But in crowd that excluded genuine misfits, I looked pretty unusual. I now realize that the operative word in that statement is looked.

Now, when I’m walking down the street, I’m struck by the strangeness of youth. It’s not a strangeness from me, but an absolute oddness. Young people are haunted by the newly-heard rasp of their own windy tunes, and beset by the need to make the music presentable on what amounts to nothing more gracious than a set of bagpipes. Some are better at this than others, and some figure it out sooner. But no one is really good at it. Except, perhaps, sociopaths, who, poor things, haven’t got anything better to do with themselves.

I find myself looking at all the blandly scrubbed — but hoodied — denizens of the Upper East Side and asking: what does this guy expect of life? Is it sex? Money? Showing the folks back home? What’s on his mind? Does he have a clue? About what’s on his mind, that is. After all, the most overlooked fact of life is that most people are the opposite of narcissist: they’re deeply bored by themselves. They don’t find themselves fascinating and they don’t for a moment wonder why the world isn’t quicker to recognize their latent genius. Think about it for a while, and you begin to wonder how anyone who isn’t borderline manages to get up in the morning.

How do we preserve what’s wonderful about the oh-so-adorable Buddha-baby principality of my little man Will from the onslaughts of ripening? How do we teach him that it’s right, when you’re twenty, to think that you don’t know anything?

And not the only one in the room who doesn’t know anything.

Topic A this week is the new iPad. We are getting one. We are going to roll out a new Web site very soon — as soon as our iPad arrives, really. It will share content with our existing sites, but it will look different; above all, it will be inviting, we hope, to read.

When we are not daydreaming about the iPad (a matter, really, of “Game Change” blinking continually in the brain), we are watching the dishwasher. The dishwasher is working. We watch the digits count down to zero — Done! It was not fun, two weeks without a dishwasher.

News about the dishwasher doesn’t belong in this space, of course, but we’re putting it in anyway because we have nothing else to report — nothing positive, that is; and what would be the point of tallying the arrears? We are going to poke the Editor this evening, after dinner, to make him write up City Island, a movie that you ought to see right away.

Considering how lovely the weather is, we’ve got an awful lot of good reasons to stay indoors.

How do you refer, in notes and lists, to the person closest to you? What do you actually write down? A full name? That would be fine, but I’ve never done it. I write down Kathleen’s initials, because, for me, everyone’s service name is a monogram. This will surprise no one who has received an email from “rjk.”

I spent the day reading. At about five, I began to worry about Kathleen. It was getting on eleven where she was (Amsterdam), and I had a hard time not knowing that she was safe and sound. She called at twelve-ten her time, just back from a conference dinner. The worrying uncertainty always feels terribly corrosive, but the moment the phone rings Kathleen’s ring, my heart lifts up as light as can be.

What I read took a back seat to an ongoing meditation about the iPad. It’s not that I want one — and, even if I did, I’d wait for the preliminary bugs to be unkinked, and for the preliminary price to be reduced. But I knew by Wednesday morning (7 April 2010, for the record book) that my work here and at Portico is going to be read, sooner or later, on instruments such as the iPad, and not on what we now call computers. As someone who rails on against writers who never read, I’m especially bound to familiarize myself with the new environment, which seems, at my ignorant remove, to have succeeded in extracting everything humanistically useful about the PC and discarded the rest, a voluminous residuum.

Nevertheless: Russell Baker on Gerald Boyd (NYRB), Jonathan Lears on Ralph Nader (LRB) and David Samuels’s amazing piece about Balkan criminality in The New Yorker. Also Bernard Friedman on Cassidy and Lanchester.

¶ Strange how-to books (e.g.: How To Be Pope). (Oddee)

¶ Human Centipede trailer (via  MetaFilter)

¶ “Furniture Music” — with balloons (ArtCat)

¶ Matins: Martin Schneider’s account of a conversation between New Yorker editor David Remnick and Ta-Nehisi Coates is interesting all round, not least for its extended peroration on the question (raised in the conversation) whether Barack Obama’s political career would have been more difficult if he had married a white woman. (Emdashes)

¶ Lauds: Jonathan Glancey visits the new Pompidou Metz museum. (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Simon Johnson puts his finger on exactly why we must not allow the development of banks that are “too big to fail.” (The Baseline Scenario; via Abnormal Returns)

¶ Tierce: We wrap up our week of hymns to the iPad with John Gruber’s exhaustive (and enthusiastic) review. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Sext: The Editor, who is known as “Doodad” to his grandson, was delighted to find that Will’s mother is a devoted follower of Free-Range Kids, a blog kept by author (and Mom) Lenore Skenazy.

¶ Nones: A report from Moscow on events occurring very far away, in Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan. Distance may explain why Clifford Levy’s account of the revolution is long on press releases.  (NYT)

¶ Vespers: A sample of Ian McEwan’s “British deadpan,” sparked by the publication of his new novel, Solar. (Speakeasy)

¶ Compline: A long, long read from New York magazine about the diva that 91st Street alum (who knew?) Stefani Joanne Germanotta has grown up to become. Vanessa Grigoriadis figures that you can make your own artistic assessment of Lady GaGa’s oeuvre; she supplies the bildung. (via kottke.org)

¶ Matins: Nate Silver peruses two recent polls on the tea-party constituency, calling the results “more interesting than surprising.” (fivethirtyeight; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Lauds: We wonder if Anne Midgette was thinking of our favorite diva, Sondra Radvanovsky, in mind when she penned the parenthesis toward the end of this paragraph. (Washington Post)

¶ Prime: Larry Summers will leave the White House (National Economic Council director) when Larry Summers leaves the White House. Discussion of the matter now is interesting only because it throws the question of his fitness to serve in the first place into high relief.

¶ Tierce: At The Bus Ride, six views of the iPad, only one of them (Cory Doctorow’s) negative. Michael Arrington, at Tech Crunch, is waxes particularly effusive. (The Bus Ride via MetaFilter)

¶ Sext: Choire Sicha reviews the new issue of Architectural Digest — really the only way that such a publication can be borne. Gerard Butler’s not only on the cover but all over it. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: In a reversal of previous policy, Thailand’s Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva has declared a state of emergency in Bangkok. (BBC News) At the LRB, Jonathan Kurlantzick explains that Duncan McCargo’s new book about Thai problems, Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand is very aptly titled. It would appear that few Thais sense a genuine urge to hold their country together.

¶ Vespers: Ruth Franklin pokes through the politeness with which we pretend to respect critical responses that are contrary to our own. When critics differ she feels, one is likely be correct, and the other mistaken. We don’t agree, but the argument is an interesting one. (The New Republic; via The Morning News)

¶ Compline: At The Gloss, Elizabeth Spiers ruminates on what genetic testing tells her about her place in her adoptive family. (via kottke.org)

As I was wrapping up the Daily Office this afternoon, I came across an entry at MetaFilter about the Hut-Sut Song. This was vaguely familiar, but only vaguely. By the time that I had listened to the Hut-Sut song forty or fifty times, however, I was thinking “Mormons.” Who else would support a ministry devoted to “Hut Sut rawlson on the rillerah, and a brawla, brawla sooit”? Well, maybe not even the Mormons.

I did buy four recordings of the songs from iTunes, however. Including one by Spike Jones. I have resisted Spike Jones unto my sixty-second year. Now I wish that I had kept on resisting. The only thing worse than Kathleen’s rolling her eyes is her not rolling her eyes.

In the middle of downloading all those versions of the Hut-Sut song, I took a moment to find the one tune from 1980 that Kathleen hated the most — hated the most because I liked it so much. It was “Just So Lonely” by Get Wet. They say that you can hear all your favorite songs from  high school. Fine — all of my favorite songs from high schools are total classics, even the Beach Boys’ “Be True to Your School,” which I adored at a time that was mostly devoted to learning Bach cantatas. I’m in dire need of Get Wet, and always have been.

Hearing Get Wet’s song for the first time in nearly thirty years, I wasn’t taken back in time, but rather I was reminded of what I liked about the song the first time. It’s too late to go into that now, but it has something to do with church music. Chercherz l’église would be a not unrealistic motto for understanding my taste.

We watched Pirate Radio after dinner. Kathleen gave it her hightest accolade — she fairly knighted it. Meanwhile, I thought about teaching my grandson the Hut Sut song. What a great big-band introduction! And, besides, I know that I can make “rillerah” a totally favorite code word for having fun.

¶ Matins: Pushing back the age of evidence for social stratification, archaeologists have begun to study Ubaid cultural remains (prior to 4000 BCE) in northern Syria. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: In what might seem a rather desperate, latter-day argument, Rachel Campbell-Johnston makes an interesting appeal for bold religious patronage of the arts. (Times UK; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Without coming out saying so (how disappointing), Tyler Cowen points out that the debate about financial regulation has to shift planes, from the discussion of particular policies to a reconsideration of regulatory agencies themselves, and how they are staffed. This is what needs to be changed first.

¶ Tierce: Laura Miller (somewhat predictably and for predictable reasons) likes her iPad. A good part of it seems to be “less is more.” (Salon; via Arts Journal)

¶ Sext: The hoot of the week, without question, is Anthony Lane’s review of Clash of the Titans, in The New Yorker. We can think of nothing in the writer’s highly entertaining oeuvre to compare with his assessment of actor Sam Worthington.

¶ Nones: George Friedman reconsiders the failed-state argument about Mexico, and makes an important point: although lots of money pours into Mexico via the trade in illegal drugs, the lately notorious violence is largely confined to the northern frontier of the nation, far from Mexico’s heartland. (RealClearWorld).

¶ Vespers: Adam Gallari makes an appealing case for Booker finalist Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness. (The Millions)

¶ Compline: Amy Cunningham writes very thoughtfully about the wisdom of humility, as experienced by the Poor Clares and as understood in Zen Buddhism. (In Character; via The Morning News)

Nothing new to report. And yet, within just the past couple of days, New York has swung the broad arc between winter and summer that ought to be spring. From too cold, it has gone to too hot, and I can only imagine the havoc that this is wreaking among the youngsters.

I still remember one Saturday afternoon, nearly thirty years ago, sitting in the balcony doorway (stop right there!) in running clothes, polishing something arduous, drinking beer and listening to Derek and the D0minoes. It only happened the once. I got it, and then I never did it again.

Spring in New York City is a time of unforeseen possibilities. Not only unforeseen but invisible. You can feel them, though. At the same time, recollections crowd round, memories of every lighthearted moment that you have ever tasted. For me, owing to some quirk of timing and generations, spring in New York always involves a touch of Barefoot in the Park sophistication that is no longer sophisticated. We know everything that they couldn’t pack into the movie — smells, mostly; sharp scents of florid air. Sparkling aternoon light and distant cries of exuberance. The very idea of “the Village.” Which at this point is not that distant from the town that Edith Wharton knew, personally.

Everyone complains about the spread of national mall stores in Manhattan. Nobody complains about the spread of mall attire, though. I do wish that ordinary young New Yorkers would dress a little less comfortably, a little more anxiously. You really ought to channeling the Ed Koch mantra at all times when you’re young in New York: “How’m I doing?” You ought to be entitled to assume that, if you’re looking good, then it’s because you work at it — that you know how to set yourself off in the crowd. Even if it’s unconscious.

New York in the springtime is the last time that you will ever be a freshman. Submit and enjoy. This won’t happen again.

¶ Matins: There’s money in them thar drugs: economist Jeffrey Miron calculates the likely tax revenues that would be collectable if cocaine and marijuana were legalized. (NPR; via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Nige discovers the Southgate station of the Piccadilly Line, one of several designed by Charles Holden. (Nigeness)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon suggests tolling the Cross Bronx Expressway.

¶ Tierce: Tyler Cowen likes his iPad, but “most of all it feels too valuable to take very far from the house.”

¶ Sext: They say that youth is wasted on the young, and the contributors to The Bygone Bureau show exactly how and in what ways this is true. Tim Lehman, for example, was sufficiently hooked by Magic: The Gathering to dream of winning a tournament.

¶ Nones: Jeffrey Gettleman writes about the collapse of sovereignty in post-Cold War Africa. (Foreign Policy; via RealClearWorld)

¶ Vespers: Translator Marian Schwartz notes that contemporary readers are more accepting of “foreignness.” (Globe; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Compline: Thomas Byrne Edsall writes about the growing “Obama Coalition,” in The Atlantic.

The dishwasher’s non-working status has grown Really Old. And very distracting: I’m worn down by the anxiety of wondering if it will ever work again. (Actually, it’s not broken. The water intake filter is clogged, so saith the super.) That’s why I haven’t got much to report this evening.

That and Will. Will’s day care was closed for Easter Monday, so Megan brought him up to our place for a change. The blue room was transformed into the slumber chamber — the draperies can actually be drawn in here. The coffee table was cleared and set on edge; the Pack and Play took its place. Will got the idea, all right: he actually napped for a total of seventy minutes during the course of the day, a record so far as my being around is concerned. Megan and I agreed that Will ought to spend an hour or more in the blue room, at regular intervals, whether he’s asleep or not, whether we’re holding him or he’s stretched out in the crib. The two of us understand his reluctance to fall asleep from the inside.

At thirteen weeks, Will has come a long way from Day One. The impression of unimaginable development is paradoxically enhanced by his unchanging character—he has always been the one and only Will O’Neill. Every time he picks up a new trick, I respond as though he were now all grown up, finished with this childhood thing. And yet he is months away from eating solid food, much less crawling across the floor. He is, in a word, an infant. But when he gazes about the blue room in the draped dusk, it is obvious that he is at some level registering all of the stuff in here. When I whispered in his ear the question that I always get — “Have you really read all of those books?” — he smiled to one side, as if I didn’t know the half of it.

He likes to be held, and he likes to play. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose, but the boy could use a few lessons in decent dissumulation. He brakes from sixty to zero— from squalling infant to fun-seeking jokester — with shameless brevity. This reminds me of the more naive portion of my own childhood. I would convince my mother that I was too sick for school — no problem. Then I would give the game away by rearranging all the furniture in my bedroom. It does not yet seem to have dawned on Will that we are not out-of-towners. 

I wish that there were a way to describe the exhaustion that Will leaves behind him (or that I carry away in my taxi uptown, if I’ve been at his house) without appearing to complain. Or even to seem to be excusing the trickle of my contributions to Portico. (I’m now I don’t know how many New Yorker stories in arrears, and I’ve got two movies to put up.) It’s not physical fatigue, but more a matter of wary remoteness, as if I were carefully avoiding the job of carrying a thought across the room. I certainly don’t mind. I’d much rather carry Will.

We don’t usually have the Editor’s grandson in the house on Mondays, but, because of holiday schedules, he was here all day today, and up to his usual tricks. The child is criminally charming — but that’s no more exculpatory than the dog’s eating the homework. We plan to have Will take care of our homework as soon as he is old enough. If we don’t eat him with a spoon first.

¶ Non-DIY.

¶ A video to remember the next time you’re consumed by MustHaveItis. (Poor Sony.)

¶ How long before we watch this on Law and Order?

¶ Matins: At Oktrends — you wouldn’t have believed this if we’d mentioned yesterday — some fascinating graphs (including an animated one!) demonstrate, ahem, that Democrats are never, ever going to show the kind of solidarity lately shown by Republican congressmen. Also: the Democratic Party is too big. Yes, we knew all that, but you’ve got to see the graphs!

¶ Lauds: Nina Munk goes over the Metropolitan Opera’s finances in the new Vanity Fair. Not a pretty picture. Will Peter Gelb’s spending today save tomorrow’s audiences? But what we especially liked was this snippet from opera non-person Luc Bondy, who devised last fall’s fiasco production.

¶ Prime: The funny thing about reading Felix Salmon on Netflix is that he sounds exactly like Jonah Lehrer on Costco, which we referred to yesterday — only without the lingo. 

¶ Tierce: More than we ever knew about Angkor Watt, the “hydraulic city.” Dendrochronologists, examining ancient fir trees in nearby Vietnam, have pinpointed catastrophic droughts that finished off the already tottering Khmer empire. (Discovery; via MetaFilter)

¶ Sext: We can’t tell quite how it worked, but John Warner, of TMN‘s Tournament of Books ran a service that advised readers what their next book ought to be, given the past five that they’d read. The comment thread is interesting in many ways, but our favorite is the slice-of-life look at other people’s choices. We’ve actually read a few of those! Here’s Kevin Guilfoile’s two cents.

¶ Nones: If there’s one thing that Belgium’s Flemings and Walloons can agree on (and there can’t be two), it’s probably that the burqa ought to be illegal in public. A parliamentary committee has just passed such a prohibition, which will come to full vote in weeks. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: At Maud Newton, James Hynes discusses some of the day-in-the-life novels that he read in preparation for writing his own contribution, the amazing Next.

¶ Compline: What is it about the book that that beautiful woman over there is reading, that’s making her look so dreamy? Well, sorry to pop your balloon, but it’s not about the book. The lady is a book model.