Daily Blague

O, the reams. The reams and reams and reams. If it would only snow, I could go out and play, and not sit around reading through piles of periodicals. Here's the Wilson Quarterly - the Autumn issue! Christopher Hitchens, who vies only with fellow-Brit Andrew Sullivan as the Mr MixItUp, scolds us (he is always scolding) for disapproving of political divisiveness and wishing that campaigns would make nice. He's right to do so, but it would have been better if he had followed through and identified the longing for political politeness as a precursor of fascism.... Terry Eagleton, in Harper's - the current issue this time - takes a long look at the Enlightenment and assesses its ambivalences. Current History? Why do I take Current History? Because of a very good article years ago about the Kurds. This issue is devoted to Latin America. Pass. When it becomes common knowledge that Latin American societies (north of Argentina and Chile, anyway) are as structurally racist as the Old South ever was, then I'll pay attention.... Tell me, have you seen Unconditional Love? PPOQ says that it's as bad as Plan 9. Surely he exaggerates? But does Julie Andrews really sing from a cockpit to calm passengers on a choppy flight?... RSS Feeds. How much longer can I put off learning about RSS Feeds? Answer: indefinitely. The queston is, how much longer can I go on worrying that I ought to know? Not much.... Gee, it's snowing. Effing blizzard.

And I'm signed up with NewsGator, with their Outlook Edition and everything. And I only asked one dumb question during the whole procedure! Nothing like asking a dumb question to quicken the little grey cells.

Remark of the day (last Friday, actually): a rather young Frenchman renouncing love (en anglais): "I have stoped this stupid game; it’s too much expansive." (From La Coquette, of course)

Posted by pourover at 05:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

¶ Let's have more thinking and less shouting. Writing in today's Times, Adam Cohen cautions bloggers against demanding the head of Lawrence Summers, Harvard's recklessly maladroit president. Yes, we can call him names, but we should resist the temptation to storm the university gates in a torch-bearing mob. Two can play at that game, and when they do, life gets ugly. I'm thinking of the rivalry between the Greens and the Blues in old Constantinople that, in 532, boiled over in the murderous Nika riots. (Gibbon's account is, predictably, dramatic in a long-winded way; scroll here to Chapter XL if you've not got the classic handy.) The collapse of our body politic into mortally aggrieved factions is only encouraged by shrill imperatives.

¶ Bob Somerby is right, too, to protest that the mainstream media have not been derelict in ignoring the Jeff Gannon story. It is extremely trivial. There is, perhaps, reason to inquire into the admittance of an edgy, ex-military hustler into the White House briefing room, but to call this a security risk is nonsense. As the Daily Howler says, Mr Guckert was not the only lightweight in the room. Bloggers who expect this affair to dent the Bush Administration are hyperventilating. This is not to suggest that we give all concerned a pass. But the matter is not really news, and there are no grounds for demanding action. Really. Aside, that is, from the action of talking calmly and deliberatively about the culture that has enabled such monstrosity. And, by the way, such a fascination with the trivial.

¶ A good place to begin would be with a viewing of Mr & Mrs Bridge. (Shamless, I know.)

Posted by pourover at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Kathleen's at Mass, and I've just slid into the oven a nice little chicken stuffed, not in the chest cavity but between the skin and the breast, with persillade. My version of persillade involves taking two or three surplus cooked breakfast sausages, a handful of parsley leaves, and a couple of cloves of garlic, and whirring them into a grainy blend. Kathleen and I don't eat the breast meat, so it doesn't matter if the persillade turns out to be too loud. We eat the dark meat, and throw the white into salads... Megwoo at IHeartBacon noted the other day that the current issue of Saveur has a big spread on bacon, and indeed it does. But I would never follow the prescribed recipe for fried bacon - which is, after all, the way most people cook it. Over medium heat for five to fifteen minutes? No way. I melt bacon, over very low heat for as long as two hours. I use an AllClad nonstick griddle. The bacon, so very evenly cooked, turns almost the color of mahogany. I slip the bacon into a warm oven while I make pancakes or French toast. (French toast is a great way of using up homemade bread before its lack of preservatives starts to show.). Weekends only, you understand... But enough about food. I discovered a fantastic piece of music yesterday, one that I didn't even know existed, Jacques Ibert's Ouverture de Fête (1940). I know nothing about Ibert (1890-1962) beyond Escales, a Ravelian trilogy of tone poems on Mediterranean themes that was much recorded in the old days. This overture could not be more unlike. In a blind hearing, I'd take it to be the work of an English composer sensitive to Austrian influences, particularly the Austrian influence of the wretchedly undervalued Franz Schmidt (who did make the mistake of writing a hymn to the Anschluss - but to make up for, he died the following year). The performance took place in Paris in 1974, under the baton of Jean Martinon, who must have scoured the town for bold and brassy trumpeters. In a magnificent passage that (trust me) suggests Bruckner tweaked by Gershwin, the brass choir lets go with a disciplined abandon the likes of which I've never heard, either in concert or on disc. Sorry to rattle on so about obscure music, but - let me put it another way: Ibert's Ouverture de Fête will bring Jean-Paul Rappeneau's Bon Voyage immediately to mind. And wait till you hear who commissioned it!.... We were to have had the roast chicken, by the way, last night, but I'd forgotten about tickets for a program of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Dvorak by the Guarneri Quartet at Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Quite the sellout: there were about a hundred listeners on the stage itself. More about that anon.

Posted by pourover at 08:50 PM | Permalink

Reports filtering back from a pre-reunion lunch of law school classmates in Chicago have reminded me what a cut-up I used to be. (Used to be?) Sitting in the back of the lecture rooms, I doodled endlessly and improvised limericks, which for a unique moment in my life poured forth. (Even if I'd saved them, you'd have had to be there, as they were all woven of references to nicknames and fresh anecdotes.) But one of my unscholarly activities enlisted the students sitting nearby as an audience. There happened to be a somewhat strange man who sat toward the front of the hall and who specialized in asking, with comic regularity, penetrating questions concerning topics that had been thoroughly disposed of in the preceding class. Professors politely let him ramble; in the back, we were losing it. One day, I drew a picture on the inside cardboard backing of my legal pad. I would refine it on further legal pads throughout the year. It looked like this:

Although there was only one head, and, beneath it, the legend read "Oh, shut up!" That was in 1977. You can imagine my astonishment when I came across this 1984 Ken Brown postcard.

Posted by pourover at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

What I'm reading now: Thomas Goltz's Chechnya Diary and Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Close. Mr Goltz and I have a mutual friend, and she tells me that there's a Georgia Diary in the works. Azerbaijan Diary was the literary equivalent of our trip to Istanbul: it opened up an overlooked world and demanded that attention be paid. I don't expect the Chechnya book to be quite so sanguine, however. I wonder: will Mr Goltz take on the Kurds? All of these peoples seem have always been prone to tribal violence, but contact with nation-states has transformed their skirmishes into genocide... In between these books and whatever I was reading before, I swallowed Danny Gregory's Everyday Matters: a New York Diary (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003). There are lots of interesting things to say about this album of annotated drawings, but what struck me was the blog-like quality of Mr Gregory's self-disclosure. Everyday Matters is riddled with bullet-hole sized glimpses into Mr Gregory's personal history, but no comprehensive picture is coaxed from the details. This open-endedness is remarkably life-like - although if one were having a cup of coffee with Mr Gregory it would not be overstepping to ask for a capsule summary of his parents' relationship(s), or for the precise number of full and partial siblings. It's not that these are important details; they're not. But they're the details that I'm curious to know. Other people might be just as tantalized by the author's sparing way with his successful career in advertising. Danny Gregory is not the actual subject of his "diary"; living is. And we're all doing that.... I had the wacky idea yesterday of inventing a talking bird whose witty remarks would spice up these entries - and don't be surprised if I do. It seemed so compelling and irresistible that, despite intense j'en doute expressions from Kathleen, I found myself thinking about it the moment I woke up this morning. The problem is, I'm not a sitcom writer; I don't have that kind of cleverness. I'd goof it up and get arrested probably, like the lady two floors down who was seized by ASPCA officials at her Columbia University office because she'd taken measures to repel pigeons from her windowsill, and thereby offended the neighbors who were feeding them from their balcony. (This was years ago; she's gone, but they're still there, and you don't want to think what the color of their balcony railing is.) But what if I called it Numa Numa the Wonder Bird? Would that draw visitors? How desperate.... "Never complain, never explain," counsels Danny Gregory on his blog. What kind of birds talk, anyway? I could set it up like this: an important client of Kathleen's would give her the bird for some compelling reason and she would have to take care of it. Already we have crossed a line into the wildly improbable. Ours is a no pets! household.... If I've made you laugh with this nonsense, cut it out, because I was almost as humiliated as Gary Brolsma to learn about the Numa Numa Dance video - today. It's been a center of attention since late last year; how can I not have heard of it? Not that I particularly want to see some poor shlub do what an old friend of ours calls "SID" - seated interpretive dancing. But I'm crazy about the name. How much would Danny Gregory charge to make a watercolor of my fantasy fowl?

PS: I think the video is kind of sweet. I can picture M le Neveu letting go in a similar fashion, although not in front of a camera.

PS: I neglected to thank Patricia Storms at Booklust for finding and recommending Danny Gregory's work. Apologies to the creator of The Tart!

Posted by pourover at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

How things change. In 1989, when David Fromkin published A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (Henry Holt), I couldn't have been less interested. I dimly recall the title, but I never handled the book or heard of anybody reading it. So I'd probably have gone on obliviously if it hadn't been for Amazon's practice of bundling related books. You don't save anything by buying these bundles (Amazon's prices are already fairly discounted), but you do make discoveries. As it happened, I recently wanted to buy a friend a paperback copy of Margaret Macmillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, and there it was, Mr Fromkin's book, as a suggested companion purchase, and I couldn't have been more interested. I bought the bundle at once.

It won't do any good, but I'll declare at the outset that this book is required reading for all Americans. That's the bullying sort of remark that I try never to make, but my sense of avertable tragedy has overwhelmed my manners. It is impossible to read End All Peace without being conscious, on almost every page, of the folly of the American misadventure in Iraq; it is also impossible not to hope that, if more people knew that the modern Middle East was fashioned in another, kindred folly of good intentions and fond conceit, then the misadventure might more quickly be brought to a close. Finally, there is the Cassandra touch, of having learned from a book that it might have been read before it was too late.

A Peace to End All Peace appeared, as I say, in 1989, before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Lebanon and Afghanistan were at war, but the first attack on the World Trade Center lay in the future, and the impending dissolution of the Soviet Empire had everybody's attention. Fatefully, the Cold War, which in retrospect provided the gravity that kept global stability in place, was about to come to an end, with sorrowful consequences for many people - Bosnians, certainly - and a a reassessment of alliances all round. Yet much that has happened since 1989 could have been foretold by the assiduous reader of this book.

I have only one complaint to make, and that is about the subtitle, which ought to have read, The British Undoing of the Ottoman Empire.  Mr Fromkin writes in his introduction,

As you will see when you read the book, Middle Eastern personalities, circumstances and political cultures do not figure a great deal in the narrative that follows, except when I suggest the outlines and dimensions of what European politicians were ignoring when they made their decisions.

It would have more accurate to substitute "British" for European here. End All Peace is overwhelming concerned with British politicians, civil servants, military officers, and journalists. From it one might construct the beginnings of a catalogue raisonnée of that key diplomatic documents, from treaties to diary entries, that between 1914 and 1922 shaped a Middle Eastern order out of the dust of the Ottoman Empire, and most of these were British. The narrative is propelled by an inner tension that Mr Fromkin says he only discovered in the course of writing it. First, there was the story that he always meant to tell. This story centered on Sir Mark Sykes, a wealthy baronet and amateur diplomat who championed the arrangement that was eventually put into place in 1922, four years after Sykes's death of influenza. By itself, this story would be a straightforward account of the thinking behind the line-drawing and power-sharing that disposed of the non-Turkish regions of the Ottoman Empire. The second story was implicit, and I daresay had to be teased out by Mr Fromkin. The second story was about growing British resistance to the first story. Mr Fromkin's conclusion appears near the end, and the italics are his.

It was no wonder, then, that in the years to come British officials were to govern the Middle East with no great sense of direction or conviction. It was a consequence of a peculiarity of the settlement of 1922: having destroyed the old order in the region, and having deployed troops, armored cars, and military aircraft everywhere from Egypt to Iraq, British policy-makers imposed a settlement upon the Middle East in 1922 in which, for the most part, they themselves no longer believed.

We tend to think of World War I as a morass of trenches and corpse-ridden no-man's-land. It was certainly that, but on the other side of Europe there was another war, in which the Entente powers fought the Ottoman Empire, which had sided with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Where the Western Front was a stalemate, however, the Middle Eastern front was a veritable pinball game of hits and misses, contingencies that could easily have worked out otherwise. To begin with, the Turks courted an English alliance in 1911 but was rebuffed. Thereafter, it sought a German alliance, but again without success - until the very eve of war, 2 August 1914. Two days later, Britain seized the two dreadnoughts that had been built for and paid for by Turkey; presently, two German warships that had skirted British naval incompetence in the Mediterranean would be "refitted" as Turkish ships, "purchased" to take the place of the dreadnoughts. No one was clearly informed of anyone's acts or motivations, and misinterpretation abounded on all sides. It is only by snaking through the feints and bluffs, however, that one gets from the outbreak of war to the creation of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq - all fashioned from the Ottoman Empire, and fashioned according to commitments made during the war for reasons that had in many cases vanished by the war's end. To give but one example, part of the motivation behind the Balfour Declaration - the statement of British sympathy with the "idea" of a Jewish homeland - was a hope that Russian Jews would be galvanized into continuing the war, although by November 1917, when Balfour addressed his celebrated letter to Lord Rothschild, it was already too late for that. Almost without exception, British military men stationed in the Middle East, moreover, were both sympathetic to Arabs (whom they did not, however, believe capable of self-government) and hostile to Zionists. Nor did the document have the support of all of Britain's leading Jews. The British were prepared to muddle through somehow, but their every gesture seems to have made peace in the Middle East an ever more distant prospect.

It would be hard to say that Mr Fromkin is sympathetic to the British statesmen and officers who, while usually meaning well, suffered terribly blinkered vision. The only clear-sighted man in the bunch was Churchill, but his impatient swagger simply fueled passive aggression all round, with the result that it was Churchill who was blamed for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, even though it never would have occurred if his directives had been executed by the Navy. Indeed, Churchill was the only Englishman with any real fighting courage. Even Kitchener, the hero of Khartoum and head of the war effort, was a worrier who could not directly relate to the Cabinet, but could only communicate through underlings. The most serious British blunder, repeated again and again, was the assumption that Arabs would rather be ruled by fair and honest Britain than by corrupt and inert Turks. Nor did the British recognize, in Mustafa Kemal, a Westernizer who would transform Turkey itself. Indeed, that oversight may be forgiven; Kemal, better know now as Atatürk, was the only one of the charismatic nationalists to emerge from World War I who would leave his people better off than he found them. It is lucky that Kemal took Churchill's bluff seriously in 1922, and backed down from the imminence of a new war, over the occupation of Istanbul. But the crisis brought Lloyd George's coalition to an end, and, unlike Churchill, Lloyd George would never taste power again.

The parade of arrogant cluelessness on parade in this book is enormously distressing, because even though the War was over long ago, its legacy persists.

Some of [today's] disputes, like those elsewhere in the world, are about rulers or frontiers, but what is typical of the Middle East is that more fundamental claims are also advanced, drawing into question not merely the dimensions anbd the boundaries, but the right to exist, of countries that immediately or eventually emerged from the British and French decisions of the early 1920s: Iraq, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. So at this point in the twentieth century, the Middle East is the region of the world in which wars of national survival are still being fought with some frequency.

If nothing else, Mr Fromkin's book will help readers make sense of Arab "insurgency," and perhaps even explain the urgency of removing our troops from a menace that their presence in the Middle East will only intensify. But how foolish I feel, exhorting visitors to pick up a book that's more than fifteen years old.

Posted by pourover at 06:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

¶ Must we allow religious hate speech for the greater good of "free speech"? At Open Democracy, Shakira Hussein, a self-declared mongrel, rebuts her literary hero, Salman Rushdie, on this tricky question - which she, however, contrives to present with stunning clarity. She writes about Australian legislation that has been tested in court, and that in my view falls safely under the proscription of false alarms. One might even argue that shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre is not speech in the first place. But be sure to read Ms Hussein, even if you can't get to her until the weekend.

¶ "Jeff Gannon has a blog." Okay, there's his picture, and there's his name - or rather it's not his name - and there are some entries. But I will not go further than the assertion that there exists a Web log that purports to be authored by James Guckert's alter ego. Since Mr Whoever has been "advised" not to discuss his other professional activities, the site is anything but interesting; it seems to be a matter of links to articles that support - well, no, they don't support Our Hero so much as demonize his "liberal attackers."

¶ Visit The Apostropher for an elegant deconstruction of Wingnut jungle drumbeats.

¶ Now the truth can be told: Art Linkletter bored Richard Nixon stiff.

Posted by pourover at 12:28 PM | Permalink

Last night, Kathleen came home early and tucked herself into bed at eight o'clock, lunchtime practically. She had planned another very late night, but gas pains had made her afternoon hell, and she was worried about flu. And she was certainly tired enough to go to sleep as soon as she had eaten something. Not hungry yet myself, I made her an omelette with some Grafton cheddar and urged her to drink a glass of cabernet. Then we had one of our big-book talks. Big-book talks involve lugging the Columbia Encyclopedia into another room - it is never in the right room - and getting down at least one version of the Bible, plus a lot of peering at small print in the lamplight. First, having alighted on the topic of monotheism, we had to look up Ikhnaton (not "Akhnaton," thanks very much - what does Ms Nola's Egyptologist brother have to say about that? not that she'll read this, because she's off on a wedding weekend - not her own, I hasten to note). Ikhnaton was a sun-worshiper who got so wrapped up in religion that his empire crumbled away; he was also Nefretete's husband. I rambled on a bit about Moses and Monotheism, but we did not actually consult that singular essay by Sigmund Freud (two Moseses?). It occurred to me that Tutankhamen, Ikhnaton's successor, might have been murdered at the tender age of seventeen so that the priests could stage a tradition-reviving funeral. In any case, there was nothing in the Encyclopedia to suggest cross-fertilization between an Egyptian king and the sons of Abraham. We moved on to the Gospel story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38). Surely the most remarkable thing about the mission of Jesus as he actually conducted it (not quite the same thing as how it got written up) is his feminism, or at any rate his habit of not treating women as second-class persons. Kathleen and I love to parse the Gospels because, having been brought up as Catholics, we're quite ignorant of Scripture relative to our Protestant countrymen. I've even fallen into the cynical habit of trying to size up exactly why the Church sorted out this or that particular snippet for spoon-feeding to the faithful - who of course were forbidden to read the Bible on their own - and in this light I perceived that the Mary/Martha story supports the notion of idle monastics. But then we got out Luke, and read it, and what stuck out was Mary's being allowed to sit at Jesus's feet - in the position of an acolyte - and to listen with the men. It's stories like this one, I'm sure, that set the West on its unique trajectory toward equality of the sexes - not that we've arrived, but still.

Presently Kathleen was drifting off. The wine and my voice had done their work. I always feel foolish saying that, if she's at all sleepy, I can put Kathleen to sleep with a few sentences, but Kathleen claims that it's one of the things she loves about me - a "wonderful radio voice." Well, I know professionally that I don't have a wonderful radio voice; I used to work with Mark Fowler, after all, and I know the real thing. But I can't convince Kathleen. Not infrequently, I'll be on the phone with her in the late afternoon and I'll notice that she's beginning to sound like a zombie: time to say goodbye, or I'll be saying goodnight.

Posted by pourover at 09:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

¶ What do you know: hardly have the electrons dried on my carbonara piece than Jason Kottke posts a link to Bacontarian, a collaborative Web log devoted to smoked pork. It's a brand-new site, and who knows where it will go, but follow it I must. And the links! Here's one that I won't even identify - be careful if you're at work, Oh, what the hell. I told them my zip code to see what would happen, and I got the following message:

Your zip code 10028 is covered by our New York office.

Due to overwhelming demand, there are currently no BaconWhores appointments available in the next two weeks. Check back soon for updated availability!

Right. Somebody sure had nothing to do one weekend. Soon I was at IHeartBacon, a serious cooking site from Seattle, which took me to Rate the Bacon, which is simply odd. Don't forget the Bacon of the Month Club! I'm afraid that I'm not ready for its level of commitment. When I order bacon my mail, I go to Nueske's. Nueske's bacon is smoked in applewood, and it is quite unlike anything that you'll find at the supermarket. But it is also unlike those nitrate-free bacons, which always taste like smoked salmon. I love smoked salmon, but not when I'm in the mood for bacon.

¶ Sometimes I wonder if I invented the peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Nobody ever seems to have heard of it, and, what's more, people tend to gag when I mention it. But if there were ever two foods more made for each other, that was in another world. This is a very high sodium treat, though, so I've been avoiding it. My mother made them for us when I was little - I think. Maybe my father liked them. I really don't remember. But they're delicious, and I don't really have to tell you that they're made of two slices of white toast, three slices of crisp bacon, and a spread of peanut butter. Note: take small bites and prepare to chew. Recommended for insomniacs. By the way, there are some kinky varieties out there. Mozzarella? Celery?

¶ Why "Canadian bacon"? Canadian bacon is smoked loin, not belly. That's why it's so lean, and impossible to fry without a little butter. There is no lard to render. But of course it's just right for Eggs Benedict, where true bacon would be much too salty and ham - well, hammy.

¶ Dietz & Watson explains the world of cured meats and sausage, or at least that part of the world in which it traffics. 

Posted by pourover at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Talk about a piece writing itself! Kathleen was working very late, which is different from just plain late in that she gets a bite to eat at the office and we don't have dinner together and it's usually tomorrow by the time she gets home. Because she thinks she doesn't care for spaghetti alla carbonara, it's one of those dishes that I make for myself. And because I'm making it for myself, under no pressure whatever, I not only consider improvements but remember the ones I've made. Maybe Kathleen would like it now; in any case, I've resolved to serve it as a primo piatto sometime soon. Anyway, I was watching Sneakers, the cool hacker film - has anyone noticed that James Horner, a self-poacher only slightly less voracious than George Frideric Handel, anticipated his celebrated score for A Beautiful Mind by about ten years? - and making the carbonara, and then I was eating the carbonara, and the movie ended, and I felt so good that I just had to write about the carbonara. Hours later... The results of my physical exam were explained to me yesterday, and, contrary to recent anxieties, I am not about to expire. My "good" cholesterol is twenty-nine points higher than normal, which is very good, because you subtract that figure from the bad cholesterol number, and without all that good cholesterol I'd be in big trouble - although I can hear you saying that no cholesterol would probably be best. I restrained myself from sharing with my internist the theory that martinis dissolve cholesterol. They certainly dissolve something.... I did not finish A Peace to End All Peace yesterday, hard as I tried. But I did change the light bulbs in one of the hallway ceiling fixtures. And then I decided that the shopping bag of very old candy, which was in a tote bag with the light bulbs, should really be tossed, and I was about to toss it when I thought that perhaps I'd better have a closer look at what was in it, and while it was indeed mostly candy in there, and old cigars (don't ask), there was also the remote control for a defunct VCR/DVD combo. I definitely think that I should hold onto the remote until I can throw away the player as well. Don't laugh. The porters in this building are brilliant scavengers.... Who writes the weather blurbs for the Times? (If they're online, I'm too lazy to look.) You know, the little announcements in the upper right-hand corner of the front page. Our favorite is "ample sun." Today's: "Today, snow arrives by afternoon." Where? At Penn Station or Grand Central?

Posted by pourover at 09:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This recipe began in the pages of Giuliano Hazan's The Classic Pasta Cookbook (Dorling Kindersley, 1993), one of those super DK cookbooks with oodles of helpful photographs. (You can still get it from Amazon's Marketplace.) Spaghetti alla carbonara is one of the Classic Sauces, which puts it in a special chapter where every ingredient is pictured in an arc around a bowl containing the finished product. (Other classics are Pasta puttanesca, Pasta primavera, Fettuccine all'Alfredo, and, most important, a recipe for the Bolognese sauce known as ragù.) You don't really have to know how to read to use this cookbook.

That cookbook. This is my cookbook. I strongly advise you to read what follows all the way through before even thinking of making the dish. It's not that carbonara is in any way difficult. It's simply that I want you to savor my prose in tranquility.

Continue reading about the Spaghetti alla carbonara at Portico.

Posted by pourover at 01:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Sure, the Gannon/Guckert story is amusing in itself. In its sick little way. But beneath this tale of the hustler-fluffer (that was Gannon's role at the White House, wasn't it?) there is a very serious story, and it has nothing to do with national security. Well, not directly. The New Yorker kicked off this week's Talk section with a pithy summary of the affair and the opinion that it be dubbed "Nothinggate," because, with both houses of Congress controlled by legislators still loyal to the White House, official hearings are unlikely, and we may never learn just how Mr Guckert got those credentials. Meanwhile, however, the more serious story concerns the reluctance of the mainstream media to cover the cascade of embarrassing revelations about Mr Guckert's various Web sites. We all know that the Rove White House has perfected the art of cowing the contemporary press corp, but how in tarnation did the press corps ever become so cowable?

When I say that the answer is "corporations," I want to be perfectly clear that the businesses that publish and broadcast our news have always been organized as corporations. But their corporate structure was a little more than an accounting technicality. Nobody thought of "newspapers" as "corporations," not even when the newspapers in question were published by W R Hearst. The Hearst and Pulitzer organizations were instruments - I would almost say "weapons" - that their creators wielded with idiosyncratic freedom.

Modern corporations are not run offensively. Marketing campaigns are aggressive, it is true, but they are too calculated to be called offensive. There is a heedlessness of the consequences about genuine offensiveness that corporations, purged as they are of individual authorities, can't even simulate. Old-time newspapers were bold, particularly when they'd been warned off a story. We used to have a robust press. What happened?

Too much attention to the bottom line, perhaps. Too much marketing. To much thinking about things other than the news. We all know about the declining readership problem that plagues every newspaper in the country (with the exception of the Grey Lady). The question is: how to deal with it? The explosion of the Blogosphere suggests that the problem is inaccurately described. Perhaps the Cold War made the great newspapers sleepy; perhaps newspapers became too dependent on scandals to hold onto tough-minded readers. Somewhere along the way, too many of these readers began to ask themselves why they ought to read about matters over which they had no control? This was a question that robust journalism forestalled with an almost Biblical display of authority. And nobody appears to be asking it in the Blogosphere. Have there ever been so many daily consumers of "printed" news as there are now? Newspapers have been slow to adopt new technologies, and they've done almost nothing in the way of adapting new technologies to the delivery of their product.

Product? Did I say "product?" There you have the corporate creep in all its banality. Can you imagine an old-time newsman talking about product or (my favorite) content? These terms betray the all-purpose thinking of corporate generalists: it doesn't matter what you fill the pages with so long as readers buy the product. And that proposition leads quickly to another: don't put anything on the page that readers won't like!

To these anxieties about sales, Karl Rove has brilliantly added concern about supplies - access to the White House. Journalists who displease the White House are routinely frozen out; the President himself, when a candidate in 2000 (I think it was), insulted Times reporter Adam Clymer in public. The old-time newsmen would have fought back like tigers, but Mr Rove knows that old-time newsmen aren't running the show anymore. Indeed, they've passed largely out of existence. Today's reporters are almost as image-conscious as broadcast personalities, and have lost the taste for haphazard lifestyles kept their predecessors stoic. But whether or not newsmen have changed, control of media enterprises has changed, and the new masters are as defensive about the markets, their products, and their customers as any auto-maker.

How newsmen came to be replaced by bean counters is a matter that our country's "B" schools will have to answer for. For the time being, you have a choice: you can get your news from "professional" sources that only once in a great while hire a Jayson Blair, or you can plunge into the Rialto of commentary that's no more than one link away from this page - in which case you will have to use your own head. Presently, I hope, there's a new Horace Greeley clicking away at his or her keyboard. Eventually, this writer's voice will generate its own authority, and beg politely but firmly to tell us things that we may not like to hear.

Posted by pourover at 06:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

¶ The big news is that Jason Kottke has quit his day job to run kottke.org full time; to support himself, he is soliciting ‘micropatronage.’ Mr Kottke, a physics major from Coe ('95), has been publishing online for ten years, and for seven at his current site. (Ten years ago, I wasn’t even doing much email; it wouldn’t be until the summer of ’96 that I'd join a listserv and began spending a portion of each day on line.) I don’t know where full-time blogging will take him, but I became a supporter immediately – see the little button at the lower left. To give you an idea of how clever Mr Kottke is, let me tell you that his roster of micropatrons is randomly regenerated each time the page is reloaded, so that where you appear on the list means nothing; you can't boast to your friends that you were among the first ten contributors and expect the list to back you up.

I dream of supporting my sites with contributions - "patronage" and "subscriptions" are closer to what I'm looking for than "donations" - far smaller than the ones that Mr Kottke is soliciting (he suggests $30, or $2.50 per month; I make one-time donations to sites that I like at least once a month, $10 usually, and I have never received a dime from anybody), but for that to work I’ll have to have lots more readers. While I’m gathering them, it’s oddly comforting to know that it has taken ten years for kottke.org to attract its huge following, especially given that most of its readership was pre-sold (prepared, that is, to look to new technology for information about new technology). I’m at the other end of the spectrum; very few of the readers I'm writing for even think of finding satisfaction on the Web. I have to hope that that will change, and in fact I have to believe that I will be instrumental in bringing the change about. So the big news about Jason Kottke is also big news, if only in my apartment, about me.

¶ The good news is that Édouard has revived Sale Bête. He wasn't gone for very long - not quite two weeks - but his absence left a real hole. He was coy about retiring, and equally coy about returning; he launched his re-entry in parenthesis, even:

(Désolé, c’est plus fort que moi. En plus, j’suis en vacances pour quelques jours — donc, j’ai du temps à perdre.)

But his readers posted enough comments, first of sorrow and desolation, then of delight and gratitude, to make his importance crystal clear. I remember that someone asked, in a comment on De Bric et de Blog, if Édouard could really be permitted just to "dump us." I'm sure that Édouard never thought that he was courting celebrity resentment.

¶ An example of something that should be done more often: Jesurgislac, a writer who posts frequent comments on Obsidian Wings, did what ObWi member Sebastian Holsclaw's asked her to do. Jesurgislac had contributed several comments to a very long thread about whether Eason Jordan's remarks about GIs targeting journalists had any factual support. Mr Holsclaw asked her to organize them into a coherent post on her own site, and this she has done. There are jewels in many comment threads, and they should be sifted when the dust settles. Next time, Jesurgislac, don't wait to be asked.

Posted by pourover at 12:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ordinarily, I make use of cotton handkerchiefs that I wash and press myself, but I've had to resort to giant boxes of Kleenex these past few days. Mercifully, my nasal passages are clear at night, and my sleep is undisturbed, but the hacking and sneezing are well underway by the time I'm pouring the last cups of boiling water into the Chemex. The only nuisance about tissues is the need to carry around a wastebasket... Because I had canceled last week's French lesson on account of my cold, I was disinclined to do so again, even though the waterworks were running even more amok. They say that nothing improves one's French accent like a cold, but accent isn't really my problem; it's the one thing that I really got out of those private lessons when I was twelve. ("La rose est une fleur," repeated ad infinitum.) My problem, increasingly it seems, is a dimness about gender. You can slur "le" and "la," of course, but the agreement of adjectives will be there to betray you. I have added one little brick to my grasp of French: photographie means "photograph" as well as "photography," and photographe means "photographer." Got it? Why does Turkish seem simpler?... One of the bloggers on my roster is unhappy about her husband's terrible working hours, and since he has what appears to be a dead-end job, there's the question what to do about a change. Remembering an observation made by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, I reflected that the Blogosphere ought to become the greatest job bazaar ever, because you are far more likely to get a job through someone you know slightly than through a good friend. I suppose that's what craigslist is for, but the chain of linked Web logs introduces a very useful personal note. Of course, everybody would have to have a blog, but that already seems inevitable. Even Édouard - but I anticipate.

Posted by pourover at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

¶ What did the Roman Forum look like in its heyday? Have a look at Robert Garbisch's model.

¶ Oh, that wide and wonderful Web! Just be sure that I got the quote from The Philadelphia Story right (without watching the movie again; see preceding post), I Googled it and stumbled on a great collection of quotes from the movies, on Filmsite.

¶ Chas and Cam face White House ban? Can this be serious? That one should even have to ask...

Posted by pourover at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The other day, I wrote about improving my manners when advancing the liberal agenda. To a great extent, this would be the same thing as bothering to advance the liberal agenda. It certainly wouldn't involve making significant alterations to the liberal agenda for the sake of appealing to illiberal people.

The first lesson in manners is to understand where other people are coming from. That's what distinguishes true politeness from an act. Sometimes, however, one simply doesn't understand where other people are coming from, and in such cases one can only fall back on understanding one's own very imperfect understanding in a way that's not condescending, that doesn't announce the opinion that some people come from places that aren't worth knowing about. (As in: "South Bend! It sounds like dancing.")

So what I'm trying to understand right now - what I've been trying to understand since whenever it was that I grasped that the Kerry campaign was not going to be an easy winner - is the appeal of George W Bush and the appeal of his Administration's policies. These are two very different things. The man inspires the respect of voters who don't understand his policies, while his policies command the loyalty of voters who, privately, can't stand the man. His very unfitness for office gives him an advantage over other contenders, because it widens his constituency to include a mass of resentful conspiracy theorists who are prone to blame others for everything that's wrong in their lives.

Wait a minute. What happened to manners?

I have nothing to say to people who genuinely admire President Bush as man. I don't address myself to them. It's for the voters who like what his Administration is doing -  or, to put it better, who dislike what his Administration isn't doing - that I frame what I have to say about the body politic on this site. And this is where I have to leave off, because I'm on the steepest part of the learning curve.

Posted by pourover at 09:29 AM | Permalink

Omigod, literally. A really quite perfect souvenir of Presidents' Day 2005. (Look carefully at the First Person of the Trinity.) The Gannon/Guckert story has gone baroque. (Thanks, Andy.)

Update: Or is this story going for broke? The Poor Man's latest contribution, a sort of infomercial for the Jeff Gannon New Beginnings Career School, is terrifically funny. Majikthise muses that l'affaire Gannon may have pushed the now late Hunter S. Thompson over the edge.

Posted by pourover at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Incredible as it still seems to me, I got dressed right after breakfast and walked over to Central Park. This ought to be a perfectly ordinary sort of outing, and perhaps it will become one. I made my way purposefully to the edge of the Great Lawn to take the snap above, for until then I wasn't quite sure that the snow made much of a difference. Well, such snow as remained. The roads and paths were all dark and slushy, and there were plenty of people, too, although nothing like last weekend's crowd. The thick cloud cover worked to the color's advantage: this time, I could see some merit in the claim that it is "saffron." Where the panels were thickly planted, they seemed to draw a glow from one another; we probably carry a deeply-wired neural association that causes orange to signal sources of light. In any case, the gates seen across the white expanse of the Great Lawn looked much better.

The panels had held up to a week of the great New York outdoors very well. Nevertheless, it's good that they'll be gone shortly. It's hard to say hello and goodbye at the same time - doubtless the reason why we always promise to reconnect with strangers met by chance on journeys. Last week, everyone was saying "hello" to The Gates. Today, I said "goodbye." I almost missed them.

Posted by pourover at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The day began early, but there were dishes to wash up from last night's dinner for five persons in four courses. (Plat principal: two Porterhouse steaks, to celebrate M le Neveu's recent attainments - he has been asked to deliver papers at several prestigious venues. He and the other gentleman at the table savored the bones.) Kathleen had to go in to the office - she lost much of last week to a time-consuming attack of bureaucratic pettifogging. I meant to spend the afternoon reading, but I had an inexplicable panic attack that made it impossible to concentrate on the Treaty of Sèvres. Eventually, I found a Xanax to calm me down, but by then I was watching French movies, Touchez-pas au grisbi and L'auberge espagnole. These pictures have nothing in common, but they've been sitting in my 'get to' pile for too long, because it's been hard to find time for sitting deliberately in front of the screen and reading subtitles. The title of Jacques Becker's 1954 film translates as "Hands off the loot," and the loot in question is two hundred pounds of gold bars, stolen in an unsolved crime by two polished thieves, Max and Riton. Jean Gabin plays Max, an imperturbable man who is determined to retire. That has become a familiar posture in a lot of recent American movies, but this story does not embroil Max in one last heist. Rather, he's got to protect the loot, now that a drug lord knows that he stole it. (Riton, played by René Dary, blabbed about it to impress his faithless girlfriend, Josy, played in turn by the young and slightly unrecognizable Jeanne Moreau. The excitement stems from the steady focus on Max's point of view. We don't see much of the drug lord, and have to piece together his plans right along with Max, as he anticipates every move while trying to keep the hapless Riton out of danger. There is a big scene of fascinating violence near the end, but, aside from an interlude in pajamas, Jean Gabin proceeds through Grisbi in a succession of bespoke suits and opulent neckties, with never a hair out of place. L'auberge espagnole (2002) is a charmer by Cédric Klapisch that does not feature Audrey Tautou, as the DVD box would lead an unsuspecting viewer to believe. The star of Amélie is a cast member, certainly, but she represents the life that Xavier (Romain Duris) leaves behind when he goes to spend a year in Barcelona studying Spanish and economics - and sharing an apartment with six other Europeans, all of them, like him, participants in Erasmus, the intra-EU exchange-student program. (The movie might have been named after the great writer, of whom the narrator never seems to have heard.) The movie depends on the moody authenticity of its young cast (on M Duris in particular), and on the fresh and intriguing use of split screens.... When Kathleen comes home, I'm thinking of making patty melts, which I've just figured out how to do, and then we're going to crawl in with Inspector Morse on the SDP 2700.  

Posted by pourover at 07:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

¶ The Times is buzzing this morning with Gatesiana. Rick Moranis has a dream that takes him back to a childhood cooled by apricot-colored linens flapping in the breeze, while Dan Barry, crying "Christo Shmisto," points out in his "About New York" column that The Gates are "Home Depot, Nedick's, traffic-cone orange ... the color of Cheetos." NOT SAFFRON. Cut the torosplat! In the Metro Section's Arts subdivision, Sarah Boxer covers - or does she? - The Crackers, an alternative Central Park installation that you can visit here. (And don't leave before visiting the museum store at CaféPress.) All of this according to Kathleen; I haven't even seen the paper yet. So if I missed something, it's her fault.

Posted by pourover at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Have you joined The Readers' Subscription? It's a book club, and, because the reply cards go to Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, I assume that it's part of the BOMC empire. It seems odd now, but I "belonged" to the Book of the Month Club for a while, long ago. I'm still a "member" of the Quality Paperback Book Club; it's useful every now and then - though not nearly so often as I thought it was twenty years ago - to have the softbound edition of some big, noisy book that's physically closer to the clothbound original than paperbacks usually are. Both BOMC and QPB(C) are broadband outfits, aimed at the consumers of regular books. (By "regular" I mean to exclude the works of Tim la Haye and Jerry Jenkins.) The Readers' Subscription, in contrast, targets a more earnest group. There are no beach books, few self-helps and how-tos, and hardly any recent fiction. Instead, there is philosophy galore. This may sound sarcastic, and I suppose that, despite my protestations, I mean it to be, but The Readers' Subscription is aimed at people who believe in serious books that will explain the meaning of life, or at least the difficulty of finding the meaning of life. I hereby confess that I used to believe in them. The faithful evidently constitute a large enough market to attract Camp Hill's interest.

Note that this is not a club but a "subscription" - I hope that whoever dreamed that one up has gone on to a richly rewarded career in marketing. Its monthly offerings are published in a booklet called The Griffin. The cover of the Spring 2005 edition advertises a book about Spinoza. Actually, it is two books, yours for just under sixty dollars. Are we sufficiently serious? The cover art features the philosopher's name in a spindly, autographic script, superimposed on the image of a worn old book with a highly embossed cover that, if it's at all real, probably contains pretty poems, not philosophy. The background is an arrangement of tantalizingly illegible columns of type - I daren't even speak of "words." I don't know how it is that the spirit of Mary McCarthy descended upon me this morning, but I can't even look at this month's Griffin without seeing that is is literate pornography. Like real pornography, it distills pleasure from complication. You have not read a word, much less a word of Spinoza, but holding The Griffin in your hand, poised to open it, you feel good about your brain. If only you had the time....!

I'm not laughing. I'm writing this as a kind of therapy, because the Spring 2005 Griffin is chock-a-block with temptation. The Spinoza offering, a two-volume set by Israeli writer Yirmiyahu Yovel, claims that Spinoza is the true father of the Enlightenment, an argument that I seem to recall as the subject of a recent book by Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Mr Yovel's books, however, appear to be appealingly slim. (Memo to self: Expatiate on the paradox of slim books.) Then there is another pair of books, consisting of Ali and Nino, the famous Azerbaijani novel, and a biography of its author, whose name at birth was not Kurban Said but Lev Nussimbaum, "a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a bestselling author in Nazi Germany." The author's adventurous and improbable career has been the appeal of Ali and Nino since its appearance in English a decade or so ago - whether or not the novel is actually worth reading. Now that I'm fiddling with Turkish, this package has taken on a real glow, but the piles of books in the blue room remind me of what is all too likely to happen. On page 7, there are three tempters, one about Mary Lamb, the co-author of Tales from Shakespear who - I certainly didn't know this - stabbed her mother to death; another that retails a "sensational" Victorian case of murder; and Opera: The Art of Dying. "Might opera," The Griffin editors inquire, "teach us how to die? This provocative work brings together scientific and humanistic perspectives on the lessons of living and dying that opera imparts." Very tempting! What could be grander than learning how to spice up a fatal mugging with "Niun mi tema"? Turning the page, I am confronted by none other than William Gaddis, the famously difficult writer that Jonathan Franzen, intentionally or not, convinced me that I don't have to read. But these are such attractive Penguins. Turn! Oh, no! Another famously difficult novelist (isn't he?), Halldór Laxness! How much longer will I be able to keep the polymathic reputation that no one who hasn't read at least one of this author's Icelandic sagas deserves? Panting with inadequacy, I glance at the final pages of the booklet without taking anything in. I'm bushed!

Thank you; I feel much better now. And I've sent this month's mailing from The Reader's Subscription down the chute, remembering with guilty pleasure that I've ordered the "new" Ian Rankin from Amazuke.

Posted by pourover at 09:46 AM | Permalink

To see why Spandex cycling shorts should always be black, keep reading.

What, how you say, were they thinking?

Posted by pourover at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

¶ Is Fafblog (no relation to the "Aloha" postcard) the sharpest and funniest critic going? The site is almost always funny, but it not infrequently satirizes its target so perfectly that there's no air left for laughter. This one, on treason, is exalted:

Treason isn't just providin aid an comfort to the enemy. It's providin not-aid an discomfort to America. Treason is hurting America's feelings.

That cornball hillbilly accent, by the way, is just about impossible to imitate. Its pervasiveness makes the few "lapses" into quite correct English funny in themselves. Note that, although Fafblog dabbles in surrealism, it does not exaggerate.

¶ Don't miss the "Worst Wedding " thread at Obsidian Wings. You may have to decide which story to tell! I told the shortest.

¶ Chad Everett's plugin, MT-Moderate, seems to be working nicely. It holds up posts to older comments for moderation, or approval. That makes spam much easier to get rid of, and visitors never see it - not that they would anyway. But I have to tweak the settings for "older," if I can, because over on Good For You, where we're reading The Ambassadors, posts go up the moment anyone comments on the previous chapter, which means that readers are still commenting a week later.

Posted by pourover at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thinking further along the lines of yesterday's post, "Conventions of Disrespect" (see below), I thought that I'd say a few things about the regrettable side-effects of our bottom-up, decentralized school governance system, which gives local civilians with (very possibly) no academic or intellectual qualifications a leading role in determining how and what kids are taught. For many reasons, decentralization has never struck me as a good idea. Never mind what the reasons are; it's enough to confess that I'm an arrogant liberal. That's to say that I prefer the European model, which concentrates power in the hands of the manifestly, demonstrably intelligent, and which coordinates curricula throughout the land. Keeping experts at bay has been so deeply built into the American way of doing things that it would take a crisis of religious hysteria to put this country on the European course.

My arrogance betrayed itself in my Google search. "Lowest common denominator," "school district," "textbook" - I was fishing for a particular kind of page, one that would argue my already-held ideas and, with luck, join an authoritative chorus of support. What I got was rather different. I stumbled on a few well-written sites that I want to spend a little more time on before summarizing them here. Had I found what I was looking for, what you're reading now would have written itself. Instead, I'm groping. (Does it show?) I've been tossed back on one of two lessons that I've learned during these years of conservative hegemony: liberals are eating the bitter fruit of decades of swaggering presumption. (The other lesson concerns "moral values" and resistance to the shift away from what I call the Augustinian Settlement - you'll find that among the Categories, below right.) The sooner we learn why we've been served this bitter fruit, the sooner we'll begin to move on.

The casual reader, eyeing the phrase "arrogant liberal," might make the snap judgment that this is a conservative blog, and there would be some truth to that, although not the kind of truth that's popular in Washington these days. In fact, though, I do identify myself as an arrogant liberal for the simple reason that I've never been allowed to forget that I am one. For most of my life, I've stirred up a running low boil of resentment. I'm big, I'm smart, and, at least when I'm holding forth, I'm not the best listener. I can control a conversation the way a good cowboy herds cattle, and it shows. And I certainly like to hold forth. I have learned that I can whip up a load of resentment in no time. It's the sort of resentment to which a younger me used to respond with scorn, dismissing it as a failing that only proved the resenter's unworthiness. Middle age has made me rather more reflective.

Now I see that it's the sort of resentment that put George W Bush in the White House.

After World War II, liberals became passionate about civil rights. From a standpoint of pure self-interest, they learned from the McCarthy travesty that bright, inquiring minds could be marginalized in the same way that Afro-Americans were. But completing the work begun in 1861 and so malignantly forestalled was obviously a fight for the good. As blacks were enfranchised, the public began to pay a new attention to the circumstances of black society in America, and a very liberal connection between education and prosperity led to a vast increase in the funding of social and educational programs that, inevitably, sported plenty of instances of waste and folly. (Liberals believe that improved school systems will produce an improved society. Conservatives see the importance of education, too, but they believe that a bright person will make the most of whatever educational opportunities are available. That is conservative arrogance.) But liberals were so convinced that what they were doing was right, so very - although they would have choked on the term - self-righteous and optimistic about social engineering that they deflected criticism. Only nasty old bigots ("John Birchers") could be opposed to the liberal project.

So you can see who taught whom this bad habit, so loudly decried by today's liberals, of refusing to hear what you don't want to hear.

That the liberal project did have right on its side remains, for me, a core belief. But I have been taught this bitter lesson: for the project to advance, I and every other liberal will have to work on my conversational manners.

Posted by pourover at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

An afternoon in the kitchen: baking white bread, cooking tomato soup (I'll save the processing for tomorrow), bleaching the counter, emptying and filling and emptying and filling the dishwasher, watching the end of Howard's End and the beginning of Five Corners (maybe I'll see the whole thing by the time dinner is done - if we ever have dinner, considering Kathleen's day)... Listening to the CD that Ms NOLA made for me - an effort to keep me up to date pop musicwise. Was that Fountains of Wayne in there? Although I'm playing the disc on the computer, the interface is silent as to "artists" and "titles," so I don't know what I'm listening to, but most of the songs have fairly handy hooks, like "Judy's Dream of Horses." The sound is very good.... The Toshiba SDP 2700 arrived this afternoon, so now we can watch movies in bed. The top volume is pretty low, so headsets may be a must; at the same time, we will be watching at bedtime. I used to think that portable DVD players were the height of wastefulness, since any laptop does the job, and with a bigger picture. But when you're putting something at the foot of the bed - maybe not even that far away - laptops are way too big. If I could see our regular TV from the bed, the portable wouldn't be necessary, but I can't, and I've been falling asleep in my armchair too often; this afternoon, I passed out five or six times over The Peace to End All Peace, an outstanding but very detailed book.... Tomorrow is the last day of the building's latest maintenance program for the elevators, and all three cabs ought to be in service.... Oh, and one kitchen activity that didn't take place in the kitchen was the reformatting of the Culinarion branch of Portico. The whole damned thing.

Posted by pourover at 08:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

¶ La Petite Anglaise has discovered the reason why it is so hard for Anglophones to learn the genders of French words (or, by extension, Italian words, Spanish words, and so on). Her little girl is learning two languages simultaneously, and PA grasped that, to the child, the French for "mouth" is labouche.

¶ In case you're toying with the idea of reading the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, perhaps you'd better know something about the author, Thomas E. Woods, first. Max Boot, of the Weekly Standard, checked out Mr Woods on the Internet, and discovered, among other things, that he is

a founding member of the League of the South. According to its website, the League "advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic." As an interim step before this glorious goal is achieved, the League urges its members to "fly Confederate flags at your residence or business every day" and to "become as self-sufficient as possible"--"if possible, raise chickens and keep a cow to provide eggs and dairy products for your family and friends." The League also counsels "white Southerners" that they should not "give control over their civilization and its institutions to another race, whether it be native blacks or Hispanic immigrants."

That the Politically Incorrect Guide has appeared on the New York Times's best-seller list is more upsetting than anything in the Gannon/Guckert bag of tricks.

¶ Better get two: A French site reports on a new development: customizable keyboards. You program the keys according to your needs. Now, this would make typing my Turkish vocabulary lists a lot easier! But just imagine the catastrophe of becoming dependent on your very own idiosyncratic keyboard, which in the wonderful future you would carry around in your backpack so as to be able to work on any machine, and then dropping it onto the subway tracks.

¶ Memo to Rob Press:

No half measures. Next time you're in Incan-God mode, wear the robes, too. Is that a big soda in your hand, or a beaker of blood from ritual slaughter? Finding someone who knows how to keep fingers away from the lens would be good, too. In any case, welcome home

Posted by pourover at 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Over the weekend, I took a look at Daily Howler, the often intemperate scourge of journalism. One thing that drives the author, Bob Somerby, bonkers is the self-censorship that has induced mainstream journalists to take the Bush Administration at its own word. Last Friday, Mr Somerby scolded E J Dionne, of the Washington Post, for making the following remark: 

More than any of his predecessors, President Bush understands the conventions of journalism and the traditions of political debate. These require that respectful attention be paid to whatever claims the president makes. Journalists who have the temerity to question whether the claims ring true (or whether the numbers add up) can count on being pummeled as liberal ideologues, even when they are only seeking the facts.

The last part of this passage certainly appears to state the truth. It's as simple as the chanting at a football game. The Administration's My Way/Highway philosophy is rigorously enforced. Criticize any of the President's men, and you will promptly and unthinkingly be plastered with "liberal bias" labels, or some other equally unlovely marker accusing the bearer of self-interest. Once applied, these labels are impossible to remove quickly, and the awkward business of peeling them off makes dignified rebuttal impossible. This has made reporters cautious and, yes, a mite obsequious. Or, in Mr Somerby's view, cowardly.

Sorry—there simply is no “convention of journalism” which requires respectful treatment of bald-faced misstatements. As civics textbooks tell your eighth-graders, traditions of journalism require skeptical, aggressive “attention” to such misstatements by presidents.

Mr Somerby is probably correct, from a journalism-school point of view, to deny the existence of Mr Dionne's "conventions." But I can't see that scolding journalists is going to get anyone anywhere. What if we rewrite Mr Dionne's observations thus:

More than any of his predecessors, President Bush understands the a sizable bloc of American voters is tired of the conventions of journalism and the traditions of political debate.

Everything that Mr Bush does in public is meant to be seen by his supporters. This is so obvious that we forget earlier times in which statesmen did not calibrate every gesture to the fine-grained prejudices of their constituents, who could be presumed to be paying less than constant attention. Cable TV and the Blogosphere have eliminated such unguarded moments. The President, accordingly, does not answer questions from the Press. He retrofits questions into launch pads for the statements that he knows his supporters want to hear. The conventions of journalism are utterly irrelevant to these people - where they are not actually objectionable. These people have had it with political debate, which they understand to be loaded with terms of art that don't quite mean what the man in the street thinks they mean. These people are sick and tired of seeing their leaders harassed by eggheady East Coasters. They demand that he be shown the "respectful attention" to which their support entitles him.

The President's success does not stem from the success of his policies. What success? It does not stem from widespread support for his Administration's often radical ideas about changing government in particular and the United States in general. It has nothing to do with actions, but is a response to George W Bush's image. I used to wonder why the Republican Party chose this man as its candidate for the highest job in the land, but now I see the genius of Karl Rove's Machiavellian shrewdness. In Mr Bush, the Republicans presented a man who would strongly appeal to a hitherto overlooked bloc of voters while so infuriating the liberal enemy that it would be reduced to spluttering squawks of outrage.

(For a concise description of the hitherto overlooked bloc of voters, see the exchange of letters among Andrew Hacker, Paul Cohen, and Mark Danner at the back of the current issue of the New York Review [Vol 52, No. 4 - not online as of this writing].)

Posted by pourover at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Wet again, but only when I was outside. I am still wondering what the Latin woman on the First Avenue bus was upset about, but I agreed when the driver told her that she was being "hysterical" - like Photoshop when it's been too long since the last reboot, she was not responding. Which is not by any means to say that she was silent... I had a fine lunch of steak and kidney pie at the new apartment of good friend who told me that she'd been told, in the elevator, by the woman upstairs (or maybe it was downstairs), that Noel Coward had my friend's apartment for years as his New York pied-à-terre. My friend isn't taking the story too seriously. But I do know someone who lives in the apartment of a great Broadway belter (possibly the best); she insisted that he take it over when she moved on. This celebrated performer did nothing to stifle the widespread assumption that she was Jewish; indeed, she may have played it to her advantage. Whether the Episcopalian would have gotten away with this if she hadn't hailed from Queens is a good question.... Now it's getting cold again, and I'm off to the East Village, where, over dinner, Megan is going to return some of my books. It seems that, like me, she has been spring cleaning in advance. So that's where the leatherette Collins edition of Emma, part of a set, has been these last fifteen years... Does FreshDirect have any empty delivery time slots tomorrow? Yes they do - I'd better place an order.

Posted by pourover at 07:00 PM | Permalink

Don't mind me if I take the day off. Lunch in Turtle Bay and dinner in St Mark's Place will leave me little time for reading and writing. But you'll find plenty to read on Her Majesty's official site, which has been going for some time and which always strikes me as hitting exactly the right note for the presentation of heredity monarchy online. If you haven't got any time for introductions, you can go straight to Ich Dien (not its real name) for snaps of Charles and Camilla. For a very, very irreverent take on the consequences of normalizing the world's most famous protracted love affair, see Scaryduck. Finally, read about a home-grown aristocrat, Lord Dumpling, at Towleroad.

Posted by pourover at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In Monday's Times, there was an Op-Ed piece by Judith Warner that I would have linked to, but I'd already posted the day's Loose Links and couldn't be bothered. This morning, though, I found that it had provoked The Biscuit Report to do something that it normally doesn't: talk about Baby Biscuit. I hope to come back to this matter after lunch, but I'll post now in hope of comments.

Ms Warner writes about a tendency among parents (one she does nothing to document) to put their children where their spouses ought to be in their love-lives.

If you flip through the magazines aimed at moms this month, you'd be hard pressed to find much talk of romance, unless you count all the articles on modern marriage's lack of romance, which are legion: Working Mother pleads, "Make Time for Your Valentine." Good Housekeeping insists, "Men can be romantic." Child magazine offers tips on "Staying Lovers While Raising Kids." And Parents, acknowledging that marriage with children often feels "about as romantic as changing a dirty diaper," offers advice for getting "back in the groove," like establishing "no-sex nights." (Absence makes the heart grow fonder?)

In many marriages, erotic love has been supplanted by what The New Yorker once called "the eros of parenthood." Up to 20 percent of couples now report having sex no more than 10 times a year, qualifying them for what the experts call "sexless marriages." Many mothers freely admit to preferring their children's touch to their husband's, without regret or shame.

Where did our love go? Look no further than the adorable little girl on the cover of this month's Parents, clutching a huge, red-sequined heart in her chubby little hands. According to a recent report by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, children are a "growing impediment" to a happy marriage.

What this tells me is that there are a lot of parents who haven't grown up themselves, and that, basically is the point that Amy makes at TBR when she writes about "attachment parenting":

The Wikipedia entry on attachment parenting is a bit of a caricature of it -- describing a parenting style in its maximal forms and with all the other cultural choices that are more-or-less associated with it. I would lean more toward the minimal description: raising your children secure in the knowledge that too much love won't hurt them. Lots of parents who "do attachment parenting" are anxious, rigid, and obsessive about the rules they follow, about what they must do for their kids, about, generally, doing everything right. So, for that matter, are lots of other parents. There are all kinds of 'systems' out there, and they do make parents crazy. Lots of families involved in "attachment parenting" end up with a rigid division of labor in which the mother is basically completely responsible for the kids and must be incredibly available to them, and the father is busy at work all the time. So, too, do lots of families who don't "attachment parent". Parental anxiety and preoccupation with their kids is real, and no doubt it does put a real strain on some marriages, but my own observations (anecdotal of course, but I didn't see any hard citations in Ms. Warner's essay, either) lead me to believe that parents become preoccupied with their kids because their marriages aren't so great to begin with, not vice-versa. If a husband works 80-hour weeks and the wife is busy with kiddie activities all the time, or if both work all the time and spend their little spare time in a "quality" way with the kids, then yeah, I'll bet the marriage is going to suffer. And it'll suffer whether the toddlers are still nursing and sleeping in the parents' bed.

It has always seemed to me that many children are conceived faute de mieux. What do we do now, honey? How do we sustain this relationship beyond what's looking more and more like its natural expiration date? Divorce is no longer frowned upon, but I suspect that it remains wrenching and humiliating for most people. I am not saying that many babies are born in order to save marriages; that would be wildly overdramatic. But I sense that many couples turn to parenthood as a way of turning away from the deep friendship that distinguishes marriage from a legitimized love affair. This kind of friendship is never as easy as it looks, and it requires change on both sides, as the spouses literally grow closer together. The time to begin working on this friendship is the moment when it begins to require it; that is, at the very moment when one begins to wonder if one has chosen the right mate. It is an awkward, even sickening moment, and children simplify everything. Instead of growing together, spouses become "mommy" and "daddy." Mind you, I am speaking only of couples that drift into parenthood or yield to family pressure. There are lots of loving couples who know exactly what they're doing when they decide to have children, and who know themselves well enough to live up to their commitments. But I don't think that such people constitute a majority of parents. The self-consciousness of the magazine articles that Ms Warner cites alone suggest that they're not. 

What happens next, faute d'amitié, is the withering of the attachment between husband and wife, and the intensification of parental feelings that Amy mentions.

Here, it seems to me, the fundamental question is one of narcissism - of whether the child is seen as an extension of the parent or as an autonomous person. As someone for whom neither childhood nor parenting was ever straightforward, I've concluded that children never match their parents' love, and that they don't understand this until they have children of their own. It is the role of a parent to help a highly dependent baby become a highly independent adult, and the leading edge of independence sets the child apart from its parents. I have always been surprised by the weedlike persistence of my unwillingness to recognize my daughter's independence. Oh, she might do whatever she likes - so long as she remains, in ways that I like, a reflection of me. I've had to learn to be proud of her. Disconnecting the longing to see her grow in my direction from my behavior has proved to be difficult and painful.

Everything was so much simpler when paternal authority went unquestioned, and when marriage marked a woman's move from one kind of servitude to another. Yes, sir, it sure was simpler.

The heading refers to a great limerick by Felicia Lamport Kaplan. Anybody ever hear of her?

Posted by pourover at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The weather is as gorgeous today as it was awful yesterday, but I'm being hounded by a cold, and anyway after lunch I thought I'd give something a try. The front page of Portico badly