Daily Blague

Today's walk was more than two times longer than yesterday's, and sheer length was my only reward. The weather wasn't nearly so nice, for one thing. For another, I had hardly set out than my ankles began to swell. This is a hypertension issue, sometimes, and it is always worrisome. It is also uncomfortable. If I had been going anywhere but to a doctor's office, I'd have turned around and crawled into bed. When I reached the Hospital for Special Surgery, where Dr Steven Magid, the rheumatologist, has his office (it's the horizontally-striped smallish building in the center of the snapshot), my blood pressure was quite high, and I was in a state that didn't improve when I was asked if I wanted to go to the emergency room. You may be wondering what's wrong with me, and I only wish I knew. My blood pressure presently dropped to an okay level, but my ankles remained swollen until I'd been home for a while and taken a blue pill. I walked home, too. Let's say that I clocked just under two and a half miles. Can't hurt. Right?

The photograph does nothing to convey the pleasures of walking between the FDR Drive and the East River, and that's as it should be, because I was too frazzled to enjoy them. I noticed that the current was flowing in my direction, and that was about it. Traffic was heavy but moving. As an ambulance threaded its way through the traffic, I wondered what emergency had taken place at its destination.

Dr Magid was encouraging. On the spot, he rang up two of the other doctors who minister to various aspects of my illness and its side-effects. (It helps that I've memorized almost all their numbers.) Medication was changed. I left in much better spirits, but that's only to say that I wasn't worrying about presently collapsing after an aneurism or a stroke. Not so worried. And I was looking forward to dinner with Ms NOLA, who was kindly to keep me company at dinner - Kathleen is in Florida. I stopped at Agata & Valentina on the way home to pick up one or two things, and then, not having eaten since breakfast (it was now nearly five), I thought of a quick bite at the coffee shop catercornered from the store. I crossed First Avenue and decided to take a picture of St Monica's, a church that I stared at for however long it was that I stayed with Kathleen in the summer of 1979, when she had a sublet in an apartment opposite the church, and I was on my way up to a summer of clerking for my uncle in New Hampshire. Later I would learn that a priest from the parish had baptized my sister way back in 1949. That's another story, and perhaps not mine to tell, but I think of Carol every time I pass the church. I have never been inside it.

Dinner was a chicken dish from the new issue of Saveur. The chicken is baked in a hot oven and then bathed in a Swiss cheese sauce. It would have been great if the chicken hadn't been underdone. Very stupidly, I neglected to test the meat; it has been so long since I turned out an underdone chicken that I simply couldn't be bothered. I had a number of issues with the recipe, but the culprit was the pizza stone that I keep meaning to remove from the oven; it greatly prolongs the preheating period, and I haven't replaced the last broken oven thermometer. Forty minutes at 450º would have done the job. When I get this dish down, I'll upload my version. Happily, the breasts were edible, delicious even.

Ms NOLA told me that I'm an unusual man in that I really like women. This was very depressing. Is it really unusual? I know that a lot of men have no use for women beyond the carnal commodities, and I long ago realized that these men have more in common with some gay men than they do with me. We talked about men being "threatened" by women. This is a concept that I understand less and less. I think it's psychobabble. I think that these "threatened" men simply want to have their desires gratified without comment or qualification. They imagine that that would be normal. Mind you, I can't take any credit for really liking smart women, because I simply really do. (I threw in the qualification that modesty prevented Ms NOLA from mentioning; I am indeed very uncomfortable around the intellectually challenged, which means I'm no better than someone who's only happy around beautiful people.) If I've done anything, it's having avoided the socializing claptrap that can interfere with this pleasure.

I was supposed to call Kathleen at 6:30, to wake her from a nap that she needed to take and propel her to an important conference event. But I forgot. Never mind the explanations and the excuses. As we were sitting down at eight, Ms NOLA asked if Kathleen had called me, and I cried out in dismay. I went into the blue room and called the number that she'd given me, and left an apologetic message. Over an hour later, the phone rang with Kathleen's special ring, and I hastened to my judgment. It seemed early for Kathleen to have returned from her event, but I was really shocked when she said that she'd just gotten up. "But I called you at eight!" I decided to test the number right away, and, indeed, the number that appeared on her bedside phone couldn't be reached by me. I had to dig up the link that she'd sent me to her hotel's Web site. Kathleen wondered what movie she ought to watch, and Ms NOLA and I both jumped at The Incredibles, which I have not seen but which Ms NOLA adored. I look forward to hearing how Kathleen liked it, although I won't be surprised if she'll have fallen asleep in the middle of it. My poor dear is working off a very serious sleep deficit.

But don't worry about me. If I could walk to the HSS and back, I can't be that sick. Can I?

Update: Kathleen called at just about the time when The Incredibles would have ended, but she hadn't watched it; she'd fallen asleep again and just awakened. So we will probably see it for the first time together.

I neglected to mention my admiration for Ms NOLA upon her account of why she took a course in "Modernism" at Bryn Mawr in her senior year: she was determined to get the most out of James Joyce's Ulysses by reading it in the context of a college course. Intelligent or what?

Posted by pourover at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

"Gluehands of the world, I salute you," hails Jason Kottke, revealing a secret childhood vice (Elmer's Glue is expensive!) All right, I'm dramatizing. But does Mr Kottke understand that full-time blogging is a career that rules out funseeking? Of course, if he and his friend were spreading Elmer's all over their palms and then peeling it off while taking pictures, and - eew, are you eating that? - just to have something to post, well, then it's okay. As a micropatron, I'm keeping tabs!

Posted by pourover at 06:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This afternoon, I went for a walk. I can't remember the last time I did that - just went out for a walk, with no particular destination in mind. My only idea was to walk a mile. Of course, I would take pictures, and because I've taken so many pictures in Carl Schurz Park, I thought I'd head west instead. It wasn't until I reached Madison Avenue that my plan developed. I would walk up Fifth Avenue, on the Park side (with its nearly uninterrupted sidewalk), up to 96th Street, where Kathleen grew up, and then I would head back.

It was a nice enough day. Far from glorious; the sun seemed somewhat overcast and pale, and the temperature was too high for a wool jacket but to low to go without. (I need a new windbreaker.) But if Fifth Avenue was quiet (except for buses full of tourists), the rest of my walk was fairly well populated. Yorkville High Street - the stretch of 86th between First and Lexington Avenues - was jammed.

I took a lot of pictures, and, miraculously, all but two of them were clear; I need a camera that's operated by voice, not push. But I'm only going to show two this afternoon, both souvenirs of Kathleen's Carnegie Hill childhood (only, of course, the realtors hadn't dreamed up "Carnegie Hill" in those days). The photo above shows two Fifth Avenue mansions. The one to the right was built by Andrew Carnegie, and currently houses the Cooper-Hewitt branch of the Smithsonian Institution, a museum of design. The cream-colored pile to the left was built by Otto Kahn, a prominent financier, and it currently houses the Convent of the Sacred Heart, one of several in the Metropolitan Area and accordingly known as "91st Street." Oh, the tales of mischief that Kathleen harvested from her years there. Always in trouble! Squirting the late Ms Onassis with water pistols, for example. (Caroline was a few years behind Kathleen.) It was an accident, honest! Other misdeeds were not so accidental, and if you have not heard Kathleen tell of the ingenious method that she devised for mopping the convent's corridors (a punishment), you have missed a very good laugh. Couventiennes will want to know that Kathleen's little Advent lamb was always très, très loin from the Baby Jesus. Finally, the Mesdames had a brainwave: they rigged an election so that Kathleen became Student Body President. This maneuver shamed her into the good behavior for which she has since become celebrated on three continents and Puerto Rico.

Then we have 17 East 96th Street. I'll bet that this picture will surprise Kathleen when she sees it, because I don't think she knows about the new building at the corner of Madison Avenue. The corner site was occupied by a one-storey Rexall Drug Store for decades. I can't look at the sidewalk without recalling Kathleen's complaints, still quite lively, about an obnoxious poodle-type dog whom the Moriartys babysat for a week. The little beast's name was truly over the top: "Dragée."

Posted by pourover at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The climate of political comment has become so rank, so hormonally malodorous lately that I hesitate to applaud the Times for publishing a remarkable pair of Op-Ed pieces today. One is by former Republican Senator John C. Danforth, and the other is by former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley. Each piece advises the author's own party, not the opposition. That's a relief right there. And I could not more enthusiastically endorse what each statesman has to say.

Mr Danforth is unhappy with the conjunction of the Republican Party with conservative Christianity, and he explains quickly and lucidly why the mixing of politics with religion is inadvisable:

When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.

Mr Bradley believes, as I have done for most of George W Bush's presidency, that the Democratic Party has got to take a good look at the massive but disciplined rganizational effort that made the Republican Party the political powerhouse that it is today, and he astutely traces his party's haphazard fortunes to the charisma of John F Kennedy. But no party can run on charisma alone, as the sequel to Bill Clinton's administrations shows.

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.

Actually, I believe that progressive Democrats who happen also to be influential ought to form a new party, and call it either "Liberal" or "Progressive." Political advisers would be sure to laugh this idea down, but then few of them would have predicted the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater's campaign.

Posted by pourover at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As the previous entry indicates, not much is going on at this end. I've been vacationing at the spa in our bedroom. Ordinarily, I can't wait to get out of bed, but for two days now I've had a very hard time not staying in. Don't think I'm staring at the ceiling though. I've been reading. Reading and reading and reading. I intend to do the rest of today's reading sitting up, but I think I'll actually plan next Monday's Day of Rest. I caught up on a lot of stuff yesterday, and I listened to Volume Two of Jean-Yves Thibaudet's recording of Debussy's piano music, which combines very well-known things such as the Children's Corner and the Suite Bergamasque with the highly abstract Études, not to mention the jolly "Danse (Tarantelle styrienne)." And I started reading Ceux qui prennent la large, the translation of Patricia Highsmith's Those Who Walk Away, which I've not read in the original, and, as I thought, Highsmith's kinkiness is more graceful in French. Today, I read David Owen, in The New Yorker, on the city's golf courses, of which there are many.

Something about a recent public outcry (from which I have decided to remove the feeding tube by leaving it nameless) has so heavily clouded my outlook that I can't summon my usual enthusiasm for social observation. It is not the particulars of the case itself, but the eagerness with which it was embraced, first and gratuitously by the right, then, necessarily but still too gleefully, by the left. The insistent focus on what is happening right now this very minute gives me the phobic feeling of being trapped face-up beneath a bed. A good deal of the richness of life - my life, anyway - comes from a sense of the past and an idea of the future. And a reasonably calm environment.

The question on my mind is whether Web logs can be interesting without being exciting or immodest. This is a question about readers, really. It's a question about citizens. Has the body politic developed an addiction to extremes? That's what Paul Krugman writes about in today's column. The right may be the source of much contemporary intemperance, but I can't help seeing it as a response to the anarchic left of my youth. 

Posted by pourover at 03:57 PM | Permalink

How long does it take to watch Lawrence of Arabia? Over a week, if we're any indication. We could have bought the DVD for what we're going to pay in rentals. If you keep falling asleep right after the exciting moments, or have martini-induced blackouts during which you proclaim, seconds before the screenplay does, the evils of the Sykes-Picot treaty, announce that "Mr Sykes" was actually a baronet, "Sir Mark," and then forget absolutely everything that you've just said, well, it makes for a long week. And if you're ironing napkins during the second viewing necessitated by all the foregoing, you will definitely feel that the movie is too long. Scheherazade had nothing on Kathleen, though. When I asked her if my problem with the movie owed more to "its being boring" or to "my knowing too much about the real history of these events," guess which one she picked! I could be the lead in a basement air guitar band and Kathleen would be rooting for me.

But maybe not. My serious question this evening is why there hasn't been more deconstructive journalism (i.e., dish) about the three ladies who head the most important Vogue franchises. Anna Wintour, Carine Roitfeld, and Anna Piaggi, all edictrices of local Vogues. As faithful readers of this site know, we go for the funny hats, and Ms Piaggi wins hands down. To answer the serious question, it is in nobody's interest to investigate the lives of powerful fashion editors. I just asked the question as an excuse to line up the pictures.

Posted by pourover at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Notwithstanding ankles that looked as though lemons had been sewed under the skin, I had one of the loveliest Easters I've ever known. I hope that your long-weekend finale was sweet, too - if not quite "shiveringly delicious,"   as Nicole Kidman's character puts it in Fliriting (which I saw for the first time tonight, thanks to Ms NOLA). Can anybody tell me why Ms Kidman made this move as a supporting actress two years after she'd starred as the only woman in a cast of three (Sam Neill, Billy Zane), for the scariest movie ever made, Dead Calm?

Even though nobody is interested anymore (I hope), here is my take on the Terri Schiavo case: Skee-ah-voe. The Italian for slave, not that that means anything, since her name was Schindler, which means, I suppose, roofer in German, since a Schindel is a shingle. Whatever else the case amounted to, it put an absolute end to my patience with the mispronunciation of Italian names. Italian-Americans: have you no pride? If you've gotten used to the Americanized version of your name, then be effing American and change the spelling! ("Chimento" for Cimento. I hate this when I see it on the moving vans, but at least I know that "Chimento" non si dice in italiano.) Baritone Thomas Meglioranza's post on how he has decided to say his own name all'italiana decided me: this is a major issue!  Cimento, by the way, means struggle.

And while we're at it, the leader of all the Russias is Vlah-DEE-mir Poo-TEEN. If Putin means something in Russian, I don't know what it is, but I do know that the American newscaster's habit of rhyming it with "shootin'" is meant to be disrespectful, like a junior-high boys' joke. Meant.

Posted by pourover at 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Is everyone having a quiet holiday weekend? Here in New York, we are wondering if spring missed its train, and, if so, whether we ought to wait at the station or go home until it's time to bring out the madras.

There was a simple reason for my not posting yesterday ("TTT" was written the night before, and postdated), but because it was a health reason, and because my fears proved to be exaggerated, I'll keep it to myself. But I couldn't really write about anything - except of course what was on my mind, and that wouldn't have been "writing about" anything, but just miserable babbling.

Today, je suis devenu un peu plus philosophe. (As M Portes says, "Il faut l'être." Can the pun with lettres be entirely coincidental?) I have spent most of the day either doing the usual Saturday housekeeping or working on our little dinner for tomorrow afternoon. The dessert will be a tarted-up version of the Famous Wafer chocolate icebox cake, which simply adds instant Medaglia d'oro to the whipped cream and a pile of toasted hazelnuts as garnish. I'll let you know.

But in order to have something to do when I sat down (right), I brushed off every page in Portico's Audience branch, fixing the little linky problems and backing each page with a very bleached snapshot from my archives. Can anybody identify the subject?

Posted by pourover at 08:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

And guess who else has a blog? You won't, so I'll tell you. Todd in Brussels. That would be the son of prizewinning Zoe, rédacteur of My Boyfriend is a Twat. In case you don't follow Zoe, she is of English ancestry (and therefore Anglophone), and she lives in Greater Brussels with her boyfriend and her three children by a previous marriage, teenaged twin daughters and a younger son. Todd is - what? - eleven. He is also Belgian, which means that he must learn his country's other language, Nederlands. That makes three tongues for Todd, Guess what? You won't, so I'll tell you. He doesn't like the mevrouw (madam) who teaches "nerlandais" [sic]. His site lacks permalinks at the moment, so I'll quote:

mevrouw est la pire prof du monde sa on peut le dire toujours avec ses chouchous(ce n'est pas moi ne vous inquieters pas)et elle parle toujours d'elle comme une petite fille parfaite , ses phrases commence tout le temps par ''dans mon temps moi je...'' quel imbecile celle la.

et ceux qu'elle n'aime pas (moi et d'autres)elle trouvent des surnom,sylvaine c'etais sylvaine la vilaine et moi c'etais t.t.t.(Todd tais-toi).

As Zoe herself says, Todd's French isn't the best, but you get the picture. It has ever been thus between the little students and the big teachers. But it has never been thus with the little students and the little blogs.

Mevrouw, I hope, is too busy studying the proposed European Constitution to check up on her tween press agents, but, hey, has anybody else heard of eleven year-old bloggers? I have mused more than once that my life would have been different if there had been blogs when I was young - but not that young. That young, and I'd have been put away for real, and not just threatened with being put away. You will note that Todd has left no doubt whatsoever about which Belgian Todd is the author of this teacher evaluation. Are there any American parents out there who feel an immediate discomfort with the possibility that their little darlings might, like Todd, be calling their teacher "the worst in the world"? "Imbecile"? (Admittedly, it just means "stupid," but still.) We're probably not talking libel here, but - well, maybe European teachers have more sense of humor than American teachers. They could hardly have less. 

Posted by pourover at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Well, Ms NOLA has a blog. She's sharing it with the friend who actually did the setting up. It's all I can do to keep from posting a gorgeous picture of the lovely young lady, looking her best at a recent wedding, but discretion stays my hand. (I will be happy to send her the file, in case she'd like to use it as her profile photo.) And to think she was here only a couple of hours ago, stopping by on her not the way home, to pick up some of the odds and ends that I am perpetually casting off. In the event, my supply of the desired odds and ends was short, and I'm afraid my conversation wasn't very bright, but I was much cheered to hear about Crazy Eights, and no sooner had I washed the dishes than there was a ding in my mailbox. I made my first martini of the evening (it's nearly eleven) and sat down at the piano. (Metamorphosism readers: piano~computer :: truss~cello. Très musical.)

If I didn't have this Web log, and all of the chores that surround it, to occupy my intelligence, I'd plunge flaming into the East River. Having begun this project during an Era of Good Feelings, meaning health, I am loath to break the spell with reports of my eruptive maladies, but they do weigh upon me, particularly because it is never clear whether they are serious or just irritating. I am certainly very tired of playing Stump the Doctor, not a game often played by patients at New York Hospital.

Édouard at Sale Bête has been the source of innumerable links over the years - well, it feels like years - but Joe.My.God is in a different class. Why Joe Jervis isn't being paid but plenty for his work (and with a little practice, he could do rueful autobiographical stand-up with the best of them) is beyond me. He is an immensely talented storyteller. But he's also a clear thinker. The following excerpt from a recent post has me thinking hard.

I've often considered the point of enabling comments at all. I never know if it's just a shamelessly transparent vehicle for continuous validation, an effective means of judging what works and what doesn't, or a simple way to engender a sense of community among my readers. Probably a little of all three, of course. But still I wonder if it's no small coincidence that some of the writers I admire most do not allow comments.

I happen to believe that comments are the heart of any blog. We've done the book thing. Which was always sort of an Ozymandias thing, don't you think? The difference between writer and reader was comparably adamantine but brittle. I know of only one blog that would fit the last sentence of Mr Jervis's observation, and that's, of course kottke.org, and even then the prohibition is intermittent. And understandable; if I've fought the impulse to ask Jason Kottke for help on a dozen perplexities, I'll bet there are dozens who have lost the battle. As I say, though, I'm thinking hard.

The sabbatical so far has yielded somewhat subpar results. I have not begun the very serious work on my blog roster that really must be done right away. (Memo to Movable Type: develop a plugin that treats blog rosters as image files, so that the roster can be changed without opening the Template of Horror.) I did upgrade the Audience branch of Portico, although, as always, my capacities evolved as I went along, and much remains to be re-done about menus and target frames. I am looking for a graphic to use as the branch's background; like the Pennell etching that haunts Portico's index page, it must be hanging on some wall or other here. Perhaps I might explain why the Pennell is so blurred - an effect that I don't think I should ever have managed to coax from PhotoShop. The etching is in a frame, and the depth of the frame spaced the graphic at a distance from the scanner plate. Serendipity for Dummies.

Posted by pourover at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Although I wouldn't want to touch the point of contention among pro- and allegedly anti-Israel factions at Columbia with yard-long tongs, I'm glad that university president Lee Bollinger has spoken up.

"We should not elevate our autonomy as individual faculty members above every other value," the president, Lee C. Bollinger, said in a speech to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.

What this means, I hope, is that the freedom that professors have to explore the consequences of all conceivable ideas does not entail a license to vent personal hostility while on the job. This would include publication of the kind of intemperate remarks that have landed Ward Churchill on the hot seat. University professors ought to spend more time guiding society and less time antagonizing it.

At the same time, the American public's refusal to take an interest in the Middle East means that the debate is confined to campuses and special interests. I don't mean that we ought to have opinions about every global problem. That would be nice, but perhaps overexcited. A region to which we have committed considerable amounts of money and military force, however, would seem to merit broad public attention.

Posted by pourover at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Once upon a time, the Times would have discreetly cleaned up the following quote.

The only role for the court is once the state legislature establishes what the rules are, the court can decide if the rules have been properly applied.

That's Bob Levy of the Cato Institute. Time was, of course, when Mr Levy would not have opened his mouth except to say something far more difficult to misquote. If you have ever been deposed, or read an accurate transcription of your remarks, you will almost certainly have had the awful feeling that you're a bigger dunce than you think you are. That's the price of the mushrooming informality that has transformed public life, draining it of seriousness and gravitas. Most of us no longer even try to speak as we would write. While observing a few rules - getting our personal pronouns right, and making sure that verbs more or less agree with their subjects - we give little attention to extended sentence structure. We signal our meaning with body language as we go along, with pauses or changes in tone. That's what punctuation is for, and punctuating spoken words is something of an art. Now, the "correct" version of Mr Cohen's sentence - at least as I'd fix it - would be, "The only role for the court is to decide whether legislative rules have been properly applied." But this entirely suppresses the lanky quality of Mr Cohen's utterance, and perhaps an important glimpse into his personality and mode of thought. To capture the syntactic complexity of what he said, this might be better: "The only role for the court, once the state legislature has established what the rules are, is to decide if the rules have been properly applied." That's easy enough to read, but we no longer expect listeners to follow us through independent clauses; hence the superfluous second "the court," and the ungrammatical "can." But by simply inserting a colon after "is," Mr Cohen's sentence can have its cake and eat it, too. Voilà: what looked like an observation becomes a declaration.

Mr Cohen's remarks appear at the end of an article by Adam Nagourney about dissension within the Republican party regarding the Schiavo intervention. As I've said more than once, Terri Schiavo's occupation of center stage has broken me down. There are hundreds, if not thousands of people who right this minute are in the same state that she's in, and the only reason for singling her out and focusing on her life or death is grandstanding on the right. Grandstanding is objectionable at any time, but against the backdrop of looming crises in currency and oil it is positively Neronic. As I write, the case is on its headed for a full-court decision by the Eleventh Circuit - which it may not get. What a mercy it would be if Ms Schiavo would quietly expire in the meantime. When I think of the electrons that have been spilt in this affair, I'm sickened.

The Schiavo case does, however, reinforce my conviction that the Democratic Party should expire, too. It has shown itself to be clueless throughout the proceedings, exhibiting no leadership that might direct attention elsewhere. I don't think that the powerlessness of the Democratic congressional contingent is a matter of mere numbers. It is a lack of focus. The Democrats appear to have no concrete plan for accomplishing anything; it's as if they're weirdly ashamed of politics. Whenever I propose to M le Neveu that the Democrats fold their tents and steal away, he asks me what I'd replace it with, and I've never had an answer beyond a call for new blood. Today, though, I had an idea. The seed for it was planted yesterday, when I scanned an article by Nir Rosen in the new Harper's, about the elections in Iraq - ordinarily a subject that I refuse to think about (on grounds of extreme prematurity). Mr Rosen writes,

Election specialists generally agree that national elections in post-conflict countries should be held as late as possible; instead, local elections should occur first because they restore the conditions necessary for a fair and safe federal vote.

Gee, why didn't I think of that? What we need in our still-conflicted country is a party that works vigorously at the local level for local office by trying to advance a liberal agenda up close. The local party ought to be activist, invoking federal authority as rarely as possible. The Democratic Party has never operated in this way. It has always been a top-down, boss-driven institution, with voters taking their cue from party hacks and union leaders rather than making up their own minds. The Democratic Party, in short, has never been a liberal party.

Some sabbatical this is. I did have my best French lesson ever, though, yesterday; I think that I'm more than halfway to where I want to be. And I'm having a ball with Fleshmarket Close. When will Siobhan Clarke marry John Rebus? When he asks?

Posted by pourover at 01:34 PM | Permalink

Something funny in the mail. (Thanks, Arlene)

Pfizer Corp. is making an announcement today that Viagra will soon be available in liquid form and will be marketed by Pepsi Cola as a power beverage suitable for use as a mixer. Pepsi's proposed ad campaign claims it will now be possible for a man to literally pour himself a stiff one.

Obviously we can no longer call this a soft drink. This additive gives new meaning to the names of cocktails, highballs and just a good old fashioned stiff drink. Pepsi will market the new concoction by the name of Mount & Do.

The long term implications of drugs and medical procedures must be fully considered: Over the past few years, more money has been spent on breast implants and Viagra than was spent on Alzheimer's research. It is believed that by the year 2030, there will be a large number of people wandering around with huge breasts and erections who can't remember what to do with them.

America the Beautiful.

Posted by pourover at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Terri Schiavo case may wreck - may already have wrecked - my little sabbatical, announced yesterday. On the front page of this morning's Times, there's a story about how conservative groups nursed the case for two years, sustaining it through a series of judicial "reversals" and eventually bringing it to the US Capitol for what I pray will turn out to have been an unconstitutional extravaganza. Thank you, reporters David D Kirkpatrick and Sheryl Gay Stolberg - but where were you? Where were we all, really.

Instead of complaining about the extremely faulty logic of Michael Schiavo's opponents, instead of formulating elegant rebuttals and researching the hypocrisy of the right, liberals ought to be asking themselves, where were we? The Schiavo case has been in the news ever since Jeb Bush got on board in 2003. That didn't alarm me, because the story appeared to be local. This was willful thinking. Nothing that the President's brother gets excited about is local. But I hadn't really begun the reeducation program that George Bush's victory last fall has forced me into, had I.

My blood pressure's rising, I'm reaching for the potato chips - signs of stress that Peter C Whybrow attributes to American mania. Was I right to resist blogging for two years? According to Dr Whybrow, the Internet is a drug that has dangerously disturbed our human equilibrium, our ability to balance desire and curiosity against love and thoughtfulness. This equilibrium, calibrated over millennia of evolution, can't adapt quickly enough to the radically altered environment in which we find ourselves. The instant gratification provided by Amazon and Visa has confounded our sense of limits. Dr Whybrow believes that Americans have recently passed through the grandiose - I can do anything - phase of mania and are now teetering on the brink of inevitable, depressive collapse. Even though I tell myself that I am not preoccupied by status and possessions, the drives that fuel Dr Whybrow's hypothesis, I believe that I have been touched by this malady, less so perhaps than others but what, in the end, is the difference? Sick is sick.

American Mania: When More Is Not Enough seems at first glance to be a disappointment. The fundamentals are stated on nearly every page, for one thing; for another, television is mentioned exactly once, according to the index. These details suggest to me that while Dr Whybrow is on to a big idea, he has not really worked it out. There is something manic about the book itself, beginning with the tabloid-style dust jacket. Just the same, I'm going to spend some time with it. (I apologize for the bogus language, but I can't commit to reading the book all the way through.) As faithful readers know, I've been working on my own pet theory about why half of the country thinks the way it does, but while I still think that I'm on to something, too, I think that American Mania does a good job of explaining why the whole of the country behaves the way it does. If you have ever lived in the company of mania (and I have), then the stubborn refusal to listen to reason that seems to have infected nearly everybody will strike a dreadfully familiar note.

But, hey, maybe a little mania's good for you! Even though it occasioned a very amusing drawing from Michael Witte, Benedict Carey's "Hypomanic? Absolutely. But Oh So Productive" is a disgrace. The best thing to be said about it is that it belongs in the newpaper's Sunday Styles section, and not in the Science Times, lackluster as that section is. (Come to think of it, a weekly science section looks like evidence of manic grandiosity. Is there that much real science news for a daily paper with a general readership to print?) The article comes under the rubric of "It's okay to be bad" journalism that Hugh Hefner and Helen Gurley Brown pioneered. Dr Whybrow's cautionary opinion isn't cited until the end, when the party's over.

The Times did get at least one thing right: it pasted a biggish photograph of Bobby Short on the cover, devoted the top of the first page of the Arts section to an appreciation of his career, and printed a reasonably long obituary as well. Mr Short died yesterday at New York Hospital (as I persist in calling it) of leukemia, aged 80. Kathleen, a fan ever since she first heard him, in her teens, said she wasn't surprised, because he had worked all his life and probably oughtn't to have retired, but perhaps she had it wrong way round: who knew about his leukemia? The last time we saw Bobby Short at the Carlyle was two years ago, when he surprised us with the band that lined up, a little foolishly, along the banquettes along the wall behind his piano, but for the most part the shows were pretty much alike, which was just what everybody wanted (think of Bayreuth). I can remember taking in the show from at least five different tables; on three occasions, we had dinner first, a truly gala experience. Bobby Short transcended "café society" to become part of the definition of this city, and his passing diminishes the place.

Posted by pourover at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This was to have been written yesterday, an announcement that I'm going to post very little on the Daily Blague this week. I want to spend some time bringing order to Portico, which is rather like a house with additions dating from different centuries - a charming effect in buildings, but not a good look for a Web site. I want to step back, too, from the traffic that I play in every day, because I have some ideas about its flow and its blockages that need to ripen. I have been blogging now in one for or another since June, and the need to take stock is overwhelming. Don't be afraid that I'm pulling out; anything but. I will keep you up to date on progress at Portico. The hiatus may take two weeks.

As I'll be posting a temperature chart every day, though, I might as well add right now that I'm feeling very low. Every now and then the bits and bolts of wrongheaded nonsense and bad luck that we manage to duck through while getting our work done coalesce in a malignant cloud that fouls the atmosphere. Mine is made up of minor but irritating medical complications, harmonised to a bourdon of mortality's intimations; a clutch of personal matters that from time to time manage to drown out cheerfulness with whining; and the fear and loathing that wingnuttery and dereliction in Washington have inspired. Ordinarily, I resist, but today, I'm giving in. And doing something that I've not done enough of lately: reading. Wouldn't it be nice to finish with Richard Wolin's astute and timely (alas) study of the misreadings and distortions of Nietzsche that have fueled reaction against the Enlightenment, The Seduction of Unreason? (I am finding the chapter on Maurice Blanchot a little long and vindictive.) And to put a dent into Ian Rankin's latest, Fleshmarket Close? I could have done worse than to begin the day with Anthony Hecht's A Love for Four Voices.

From the cool shadows of this rock,

These crowding blues and heliotropes,

As from some attic of my youth

I gaze out at the distances

That contrast renders almost white,

Like frocks of garden-party girls

I once knew or desired to know,

Speckled and flecked by shadow leaves

Like missing jigsaw puzzle parts.

And whether the girls were known or not,

Whether those yearnings were stillborn

Or were met with kindness, now they lie

Like quilts of sunlight spread to dry,

Scattered and thin and dimly gold

And permanently out of reach -

Small flags of failure, or, at best,

Triumphs will all their glory lost.

The Guarneri Quartet's performance on Saturday night was excellent; this time, the Mozart was completely on pitch, the intervening Dohnanyi golden and glowing, and the Dvorak exuberant. The pianist joining three members of the Quartet, for Dvorak's Piano Quartet, Op. 87, Anton Kuerti, was a marvel of precision nuance.

Posted by pourover at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sondra Radvanovsky moved me to tears at the end of today's Met broadcast of Don Carlo. I'm half sorry that I didn't hear her Elisabetta in the house, but only half, because only one other singer would have been better than bearable, Ferruccio Furlanetto, the Filippo. I have learned something new about opera; my new understanding springs from the recognition that, as long as Ms Radvanovsky's mouth is open and producing sound, I am a happy man. (I even like her speaking voice.) Little imperfections here and there - all is forgiven in advance. I have never felt this way about a singer before. I've always held singers up to a preconceived idea of how they ought to sound, and so every one of them has necessarily disappointed me, at least occasionally (although a tiny few, such as Cheryl Studer in her prime, have had a breathtaking way of nailing my ideal again and again). But with Ms Radvanovsky, I am listening to Sondra Radvanovsky oblivious of ideals. I'm not going to try to persuade you that she is the best singer ever. That, as anybody familiar with opera fans should know, would be purposeless and possibly counterproductive. I'm just saying that at long last I get it.

Yesterday, I watched The Saddest Music in the World. This is not a film that I am quite ready for. Half Eraserhead, half I really have no idea what, this Canadian oddity, directed by Guy Madden,with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro,  does have one unforgettable image, and that's of the Baroness's transparent, beer-filled legs. By all means, watch it just to see them, but don't expect me to explain them... Last night, we watched The Asphalt Jungle for the first time. This 1950 classic directed by John Huston is the mother of all heist flicks, and I've got to see it again soon. I've got to see it again soon in any case, because Kathleen fell asleep toward the end and wants to know how it comes out.

Off to Grace Rainey Rogers for the second of our two evenings there with the Guarneri Quartet. Mozart, Dohnanyi, and Dvorak. 

Posted by pourover at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When the Manhattan Theatre Club gets things right, memorable theatre is the inevitable result. But because I didn't care for The Loman Family Picnic, Donald Margulies's 1989 play, my expectations for Broadway Boy, which augured to mine the same territory, were not high. The identity crises of Brooklyn Jews who have grown up to be successful aliens to home base have if anything been overexposed on Broadway in the past ten or fifteen years. (Why, wasn't there a touch of this in Sight Unseen, the Craig Lucas play that MTC revived last season?) But Mr Margulies has reinvented the genre. His hero, Eric Weiss, isn't having the identity crisis. Everybody else is. The switch makes for a very funny play. Along the way, we watch a horror show, as the full horror of America's reading habits are only slightly exaggerated. To this base, add perfect casting and perfect everything else, and you've got a hit. Ralph Funicello's set, centered on the façade of a city walkup that was almost always in the background, was fluid and minimal but always convincing; I always felt that the spaces were real (as I never quite did while watching Democracy earlier this year, right across the street). Chris Parry's score contributed to a melancholy that you didn't really notice until it was replaced with a Hollywood glare in the penultimate scene. Jess Goldstein's modest, self-effacing costumes were spot on. Michael Roth's music established a somewhat sombre background that was the perfect foil to the play's humor. I kept wondering if the play would follow Doubt to Broadway, but, with a production directed by Daniel Sullivan at MTC's Biltmore Theatre, Broadway Boy is already on Broadway.

Continue reading about Brooklyn Boy at Portico.

Posted by pourover at 09:11 PM | Permalink

¶ The greatest American diplomat of the Twentieth Century (or perhaps since Benjamin Franklin), George F. Kennan died last night in Princeton, aged 101. Kennan devised a strategy of "containment" for dealing with Soviet Communism, but his recommendations were often misunderstood or twisted to suit the goals of powerful leaders. I thought that I had mentioned his 1993 book, Around the Cragged Hill, at some point on Portico, but it seems that I haven't. An unblinking elitist, Kennan writes of "persons of high distinction" with an assurance that will strike many of today's cynics as hopelessly quaint.

¶ At Open Democracy, Robin Wilson reports, not too optimistically, one hopes, that the McCartney sisters, bereft of their IRA-slain brother Robert, have launched a campaign to expose the IRA and Sinn Féin as Leninist, anti-democratic organizations that will not do the Catholic cause any good. The White House has taken note; Gerry Adams was frozen out of the traditional St Patrick's Day gathering there.

¶ If, like me, you wonder what baseball players testifying before Congress about steroid use are doing on the front page of the Times, or anywhere outside the Sports section, you'll probably agree with Blondesense.

Posted by pourover at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Out of the house two days running - that's unusual. Today, it was a visit to the dermatologist. The good doctor confesses that he is somewhat stumped by my rather painful démangeaisons, and defers the question of what to do next to the rheumatologist. Whom I called from the street when I left the dermatologist, on the off-chance that he could squeeze me in. All of my doctors, you see, have their offices between 67th and 72nd Streets. Walking from Park to the river would have been a hike, but had the chance not been completely off, I'd have made it happily. As it is, I'm reduced to washing my own shirts and shorts, to be certain that I'm not weirdly allergic to some additive at the laundry across the street. I don't mind the washing, but what about the ironing? Good thing they're all flannel... Having put off lunch until now, I was starving. Neil's Diner, at Lex and 70th, was packed with students; in fact, I don't know how I've gotten this far without mentioning clots and crowds of St Patricians all over the Upper East Side. What a lot of uniform I saw! I heard a bunch of tweens ask a kilted guy if his sporran or whatever it's called was made of hair, and when he said "horses hair," we were in Eww! City... Why being very hungry but frustrated at the first try should inspire me to walk all the way back to 86th is hard to say, but it's typical. Nor did I proceed directly. I stopped at Eli's, for Bachman's pretzels and Lurpak butter, and at the Video Room, just to see what was new, or, better, in the "Staff Picks" section. Then I called Wu Liang Ye and ordered pork lo mein.

Yesterday, it was the theatre. We had tickets to Brooklyn Boy, the MTC production at the Biltmore. If I'd suspected that Brooklyn Boy would be the play that it is, I'd have moved the tickets so that Kathleen could see it; it's an extraordinary play, not least in covering very familiar territory with a completely fresh eye. Or ear. (That's because it's also a play about reading in modern American life.) Ms Nola was happy to take Kathleen's place, and we agreed to make an afternoon of it. But our late lunch had us starting out too late for serious museuming. I didn't know where to go, and, frankly, I was so itchy that I didn't really want to go anywhere. Allez, courage! We got onto the 6 train, blithely unaware of the troubles that afflicted the line all day, and at 59th Street we changed to the R train. We got off at Carnegie Hall; I wanted to go to Patelson's House of Music, because I've really got to get Eulenberg miniature scores of the Brahms Piano Quartets. Those weren't in stock, but I bought a Dover miniature of the Requiem, and Eulenbergs of the Horn Trio and the Schicksalslied, two favorites. Then we walked to MoMA, where we had just enough time to see the mostly trivial junk in the exhibition space, the Thomas Demand show, and Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, which resonated all the deeper after last week's trip to the Arbus show... When the museum proper closed, we looked at books, and bought nothing. Then we wandered up Fifth Avenue to Tiffany. Ms Nola has set aside some revenues for the much-needed boost of a deluxe purchase, and at the risk of appearing to be her sugar daddy I looked at some silver jewelry. Prices were noted, and then we went to Coach, across both of the streets that constitute Tiffany's intersection. Coach had just the right bag, but it cost twice the budgeted amount, and Ms Nola is too cool-headed even to consider such a temptation... A few doors down 57th Street, we came to Rizzoli, and I remembered that the bookstore carries unusual CDs. I hadn't been in a record store (that's what I still call them) in eons, and it had been years since I'd last seen a collection as spruce as Rizzoli's. I bought four things for me and one for Ms Nola - the truly essential recording of the Ella-Louis collaboration... Pooped at this point, we headed for the Biltmore, where I figured that we could sit in the lounge until curtain time. Which is what we did.... After the play, we took the R train from Times Square back up to Carnegie Hall, for dinner at the Brooklyn Diner. I took a taxi home, and had the sense to go to bed before passing out at the keyboard.

Posted by pourover at 07:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Yesterday afternoon, I was on the Lexington Avenue No. 6 train during it’s brief hour of proper functioning. I thought that it was strangely crowded, but I forgot about it as soon as I boarded the R at 59th Street. It wasn't until this morning that I found out how lucky I'd been. On the front page of the Times this morning, I read that power failures and signal breakdowns halted the East Side trains for most of yesterday’s work day. I almost threw up from sheer bitterness, but I wasn't surprised. I have decided that the following fragment from Overheard in New York captures the guiding ethos of today’s business and political leaders:

Man in fur: You know, we should get rid of the subways.

Woman in fur: Why? People ride them to get to work.

Man in fur: Exactly. The subway is the weapon of the masses.

--82nd St. and 3rd Ave.

And it isn’t just “the masses” to whom the leadership is indifferent. It’s everyone, other insiders included. The control of this country has been taken over by manic sharks who don’t give a damn about the dollar’s fall or the price of oil. They’re gleefully engaged in a destructive game of musical chairs, each convinced that he or she (but mostly he) has a good shot at the final survivorship - and, hey, when you're the one who can't find a chair, you've at least racked up a fortune mismanaging things. What kind of world the survivor will have to make do with doesn’t enter into the calculation, however, because, like sharks, these people can’t see further than the struggle for survival. They have forgotten, in their collective mania, that nobody survives indefinitely even in the best of all possible worlds, much less the one that’s taking shape on their watch. Frenzied dementia on high, narcotism (by television) below.

My head feels like a Flemish village in World War I: barraged by futility.

Posted by pourover at 11:14 AM | Permalink

¶ Reading Zoe in Brussels this morning, I learned that the site had won a Bloggie. I had decided not to vote this year, because I'm still a little new at this, and I haven't had time to read all the contestants, or even the ones that I would understand. But I ran through the awards, and pretty soon as I was staring at Michael Chu's site, Cooking for Engineers. Mr Chu has designed an incredibly interesting graphic for recipes, and he writes knowledgeably about equipment. I wonder what my culinary life would have been like if there had been blogs. Congratulations to Mr Chu!

¶ Thomas Meglioranza is the baritone who sang the part of Jesus so beautifully at the New York Collegium's presentation of Bach's St Matthew Passion a week ago last Friday. He came across my entry about the performance, thanked me, and left a calling card. That happened yesterday. I visited his personal site, Tomness (he's got a professional one, too), and read the entire Web log, which he started last summer. He writes brilliantly about the singing life, or at least about those aspects of the singing life than anybody who loves music will find interesting, such as: how do you carry yourself at a performance of Messiah where, as a baritone, you go for an hour, plus intermission, without singing. At one point (at Marlboro), he gets to hear what Mitsuko Uchida thinks of his approach to Schubert's Winterreise.

I also continued my work on Winterreise, which culminated in a dining hall performance of the first 12 songs. The day before our performance, Mitsuko Uchida came to listen. I had sung these songs, and lots of other Schubert, for several people at Marlboro, including Ken Noda, Ernst Haefliger, Irena Spiegelmann (the German diction coach at the Met), and had been getting some extremely positive feedback. It was therefore both...

You'll have to click here to read more. 

Posted by pourover at 01:23 PM | Permalink

Well, it was probably inevitable. Dennis Brain's recording of Mozart's Horn Concerti was one of the first LPs that I owned; it was one of the four "free" discs that I got by subscribing to the Angel Record Club. (At least two of the others also featured Herbert von Karajan). By the time I'd played the Mozart into the ground, I'd "grown up," and learned to look down my nose a little at this music. Besides, the recording was monaural. Reasoning that was persuasive to a seventeen year-old took a long time to lose its grip. The other day, I ordered the recording from MHS, somewhat incredulous at EMI's having let this cornerstone recording go. (Perhaps they haven't; perhaps MHS simply picks up the marketing and distribution without buying any rights. It would be nice to know more.)

Listening to the horn concerti this morning, I dusted off some vintage mental lumber. I promise to check it out later, and don't you believe a word of the rest of this paragraph until I do. But here's what I recall: the concerti were written for Michael Puchberg, a wealthy fellow-Mason who played the instrument as an amateur. I forget how he made his money, but Mozart wrote not only the concerti for Puchberg but a lot of letters to him, begging for cash, and we know that Puchberg came through because Mozart wrote to say thanks, too - although the thank-you notes often asked for more. On top of that, the manuscript scores of the concerti are littered with insulting challenges to the soloist that are not fit for republication in this family blog. At least not until later when I've looked them up.

These Puchberg letters have contributed to the very incorrect idea that Mozart had money troubles because nobody appreciated his genius. It seems rather that Mozart was a manic-depressive who lived far beyond his means. At one point, he rented an apartment in the center of Vienna that had its own ballroom. (Mozart loved parties.) He dressed like a Kurfürst and a weakness for gems. His popularity, it is true, ebbed after the premiere of Don Giovanni in 1787, but that had almost as much to do with an expensive war against Turkey as anything else. If anything Mozart was too appreciated, in that he was seen as complicated and demanding. He asked too much of everybody.

That's why I think there ought to be a Puchberg Prize. Decency requires this award to be posthumous, but then that's when the winners will need it most. After all, who would remember Michael Puchberg if he hadn't lent money to Mozart? 

Posted by pourover at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As a rule, I hate long blockquotes, but Terry Eagleton's almost insanely dystopian assessment of Enlightenment civilization does not appear on Harper's Web site; nor can it be cut.

Contrast this, then, with the second form of society, in which men and women are solitary creatures locked fearfully within their own private spheres. All they can know with any certainty is their own immediate experience, and even that is alarmingly unreliable. They cannot know enough of other people even to be sure that they exist, or that they have minds like their own. Communication is sickeningly precarious, and friendship, community, and solidarity are less genuine bonds than an interlocking of private interests. In fact, it is self-interest that drives this social order, in which others are seen either as potential predators or as pale replicas of oneself.

Reason still plays a major role in this culture, but only in a withered, anemic sense of the term. It no longer provides a foundation to social life. Instead, having scornfully dismissed metaphysical first principles, this society is left hanging in a void. It is a cacaphony of colliding values, and reason cannot adjudicate between them. Reason is just a set of mechanical procedures for calculating which means will most effectively secure your self-interested ends. Those ends are not in themselves rational: like the instinct for self-preservation, they are set by appetites that are built into our nature and, as such, are beyond all criticism. Reason becomes a blunt instrument for promoting one's own gratification, rather as science and technology are ways of mastering and dominating Nature (which includes other people and other cultures) so as to press it into the service of one's desires. Torn loose from feeling, custom, and the senses, reason runs riot; in fact, it ends up replicating the despotism of earlier regimes with a tyranny all its own, from which no particle of human life is permitted to escape.

Nature is no longer valuable or meaningful in itself; it is just an inert lump of matter to be cuffed into whatever shape takes our fancy. A bleak utility now reigns sovereign in social life, expelling all of those dimensions of existence - art, feeling, humor, imagination, sensuous fulfillment, doing things just for the hell of it - which have a value but no price. A wedge is driven between humanity and Nature, as subjects are ripped from objects, bodies from souls, and values from facts. God is killed off in all but name, and human beings are hoisted into His place at the apex of creation. But exactly because they have the absolute freedom to do what they like, whatever they actually do seems futile and arbitrary.

In previous paragraphs, Mr Eagleton offered a standard rosy account of the Enlightenment's benefits; here he flips the coin and shows us a much less pleasant world. Outside of Mr Eagleton's imagination as he wrote this, however - and the theatre of alienation that seemed so daring when Mr Eagleton was a youth - does it exist? I don't think so. As a summary of the Enlightenment's consequences, it is not only unimaginative but anti-imaginative. Lazily post-Marxian, it targets not the Enlightenment itself but the Enlightenment's patrons and principal beneficiaries, the bourgeoisie. Mr Eagleton presents The Ice Storm as a universal template.

(The three paragraphs come from a review, appearing in the March 2005 issue of Harper's of two recent books on the Enlightenment, one by Louis Dupré and the other by Francis Wheen. Neither these books nor anything else in the review concern us now, but such is the background.)

Even on your worst day, have you been genuinely beset by doubt that other people really exist? Assuming that you don't believe in God, whatever that word means to you, do you feel that you have been asked to take his place? Do you feel that your day is spent navigating a cacaphony of colliding values? Seriously? I understand that we can all step back, squint, and persuade ourselves that things are not going very well for humanity. But people whose immediate lives are infected by such perceptions are likely to be very seriously depressed, incapable, perhaps, of getting out of bed except for strict necessities.

Behind almost every sentence, moreover, lies the implication that things used to be better once upon a time, even if they seemed worse. This was until very recently the Roman Catholic Church's view of the Enlightenment, and its thinking still informs many conservative minds: better to do nothing than to suppress a tradition for the sake of helping someone out. But I seem to recall that the wedge between humanity and nature makes a very early appearance in Genesis, and from the dawn of Western thought the concept of the human soul has been exploited to set mankind apart from the rest of creation. The beef seems to be that, with his "Godlike" technological powers, modern man would do better to honor the traditional cosmology, according to which we are all condemned to live in the sublunary zone of corruption.

I don't suggest that everybody's life is peachy keen. No indeed. But Mr Eagleton is wrong to propose his dark summary as a vision of the Enlightenment at its ideal best. The Enlightenment program is an outline for helping humanity make a better world for itself. It is not a full-fledged plan, and certainly not a timetable. We have learned to be rather more patient than the men of two centuries ago - than even the men of 1900. We have learned that an equation of power with justification is a route to extinction in an radioactive miasma. We have learned that the men of the Enlightenment were a tad optimistic about the force of reason within the human mind, but their overestimation does not diminish the importance of trying to be reasonable about things and to seek compromise wherever we can find it. We have learned that reason does indeed have its bad side, rationalism, and we are learning to check the kind of pipe dreams that rendered LeCorbusier's architectural fantasies into slummy housing projects or Henry Ford's River Rouge plant into Auschwitz. And some of us have learned that talk like Mr Eagleton's has frightened many people into giving up on learning. We are still learning.

We are worth the effort, and, what's more, that instinct is built into our nature. So are all our weaknesses, but so also is the desire, always there but unbound by the Enlightenment's insistence upon equality, to make something of ourselves. 

Posted by pourover at 10:11 PM | Permalink

For the first time, I've just read through someone's entire blog, from inception to now (in reverse, of course). I'll tell you more about it in tomorrow's Loose Links. That the blog's entries center on music and cooking must have had something to do with the charm. (And no politics, which certainly makes for a change.) But truly good writing is the secret. I'd commented on four or five posts - I only discovered the blog this afternoon -  when I began to feel that I'd better stop, lest my interest seem creepy. Then I wrote the author an interminable email. (Well, he'd written to me first.) That sent, I ought to have gone on to something else, but all I wanted to do was go back and read some more of the new blog.

By the time I'd read the first post, I had built up a little list of the many things that the author does not discuss, and that's an odd sensation, given the inevitable illusion, after reading an entire blog, of knowing someone well. If it weren't for this illusion, we'd never read fiction. And, as with a piece of fiction, I wonder why the author excluded this and that. But I'm not in the habit of interrogating novelists about such things; the same goes here. And yet I can't help feeling that one half, at least, of a friendship has been laid down. It's a good thing that my natural exuberance has been tempered by age and experience.

You'll have to wait tomorrow for the link, and a clearer statement of what the new-to-me blog is like. This entry is about me, and something I want to keep to myself for a little bit.

Posted by pourover at 07:43 PM | Permalink

¶ Princeton has put up a video interview with Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit, and you can watch it in snippets or all at once. Most interestingly, perhaps, Prof Frankfurt does not have a clear idea of what should be done about it: it's possible that torosplat serves a purpose. I quite agree that it shouldn't be punished, but as to do what-to-do? Recognize it. (Thanks to Majikthise.) The professor also points out that, given the widespread expectations that the citizens of a democracy will have an opinion about everything, reliance upon the subject of his study is inevitable.

¶ Shelley Powers at Burningbird has a field day with gender differences regarding hyperlinks. All I can say is "Phew!"

Mags shook her head. “No, this attitude isn’t universal among men. There are many guys who see a link as nothing more than a way of inviting a conversation or passing along useful information. They link without regard to the consequences, and the most they hope for is that it might spark an interesting discussion.”

She stopped wiping the counter and leaned closer to me, lowering her voice. “The power-link guys have a word for men who link just to link,” she whispered. “They call them linkless.”

At that point, a couple of people entered the bar and Mags hurried off to do her job, leaving me to think on our extraordinary conversation. The more I thought on Mags words, though, the more I could see the truth in them. Much that has confused me about this environment is explained if one considers for a moment that some men think of links as some form of virtual penis.

The (imaginary) conversation with Lawrence Summers is sweet fun.

¶ Today's Nobel Prize for Hasslehandling goes to Andrew Kirk, bless him.

"I've come to realize that I'm almost addicted to the sick little pleasure I get from lashing out at these things," said Mr. Kirk, 24, a freelance writer from Brooklyn who collects and returns magazine inserts.

What a great idea! Instead of cursing those annoying little reply cards that tumble out of magazines and require endless bending-over, start combing your periodicals for them as they come in. When you've got a stack, just drop it in the mailbox. Don't bother filling out the cards; the recipient will have to pay for blank cards as well as for written ones. Send a message! Congratulations to Times reporter Ian Urbina for uncovering such healthy passive aggression.

¶ And I thought I'd seen everything. This aerial shot of the city really took my breath away. Hats off to Jesse Chan-Norris!

Posted by pourover at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's something awful, I've decided, in the mechanics of Movable Type's habit of underlining each date in the current calendar on which a blogger has added a new post. I don't know quite what Ben and Mena Trott were thinking; the only time I've ever found this feature useful was when Édouard revived Sale Bête. Otherwise, underlined calendar dates look like an achievement test. Did you miss one? Whatever its use to a visitor, this feature reminds me rather more graphically than I'd like of the cruel passage of time. I can remember - it was only days ago - when March was a largely un-underlined month. Now we're more than halfway through. April will be marvelous, but our arrival there will mean that the days I'm living through now are over.

Posted by pourover at 01:08 AM | Permalink

The other day, I quipped that the format in which David Foster Wallace's "Host," appears in the current Atlantic might upstage its contents. I hope that that doesn't turn out to be the case. Mr Wallace, always a fan of footnotes, and even, I seem to recall, of footnotes to footnotes, has taken the aside to a new plateau of articulation. The footnotes to "Host" are signaled by lightly colored boxes that frame words in the text. These correspond to larger - well, generally larger boxes of the same color in the sidebar. This is not just a gimmick; it gives to each of Mr Wallaces notes a slightly different voice, and as most of his footnotes introduce some ironic qualification of the story, the different colors suggest, what is the case, that the note of irony shifts from note to note, ranging from faux disbelief to outright disagreement; one note consists of nothing more than "?!". Because the notes slow down the story, it might be said that the reader will have evolved a more deliberative response to "Host"; certainly the varying sizes and colors suggest a complexity of vision that would be quite beyond the power of monotonal footnotes situated in their customary place.

But "Host" is not just a delivery system for gimmicky layout.

In the best tradition of magazine journalism, it takes an interesting exponent of a way of life, in this case talk radio, as a synecdoche for something serious in our way of doing things. John Ziegler was a thirty-seven year-old radio veteran last year when Mr Wallace sat in on a few of the shows that Mr Ziegler broadcasts from KFT, an AM station situated near Koreatown in Los Angeles. (If I could deploy sidebar-studding footnotes, I would interject in a more interesting way that the reader of "Host" will soon begin to wonder why reportage that Mr Wallace did last spring and early summer is only now appearing in print. As it is, parenthesis will have to do.) The climax of the story, upon which the article promptly closes, occurs on the tenth anniversary of the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman; to say that O J Simpson is John Ziegler's bête noire is to sound uncomfortable echoes of the talk-show host's checkered career, so perhaps it would be better to say that the former athlete is an obsession of Mr Ziegler's. As a sportscaster in North Carolina nine years ago, the then twenty-something Mr Ziegler rather foolishly convinces himself that he can get away with "an incredibly tame joke" - Mr Ziegler's words - about Mr Simpson's lack of innocence, and when is fired for this lapse of judgment, he decides that he has been a martyr to Political Correctness. A few years later, in Nashville, he screws up bigger-time by using the 'N' word, in a friendly sort of way you understand, to describe Tiger Woods. As recently as three years ago, Mr Ziegler lost a post in Louisville for dissing the physical attributes of a current colleague/former lover. Mr Ziegler is still young enough to offend Jewish sensibilities and, by doing so, collect all three of the conservative stigmata.

When Mr Wallace's subject was fired in Louisville, his employer was Clear Channel Communications. When he showed up for work at his next (and current) gig in Los Angeles, his employer was - Clear Channel Communications. Clear Channel owns over a thousand radio stations in the United States, and it can afford to be breezy about giving a talented talker work in a newer, bigger market after it has seen fit to take it away in a smaller, lesser place. David Foster Wallace rightly recognizes the promotion here. What you do with a gifted employee who, for the right reasons, has become an embarrassment in the highly local field of radio, is: move him. Memo to John Ziegler: don't follow in the footsteps of KFT predecessor Laura Schlesinger and go national; once you've botched national, you'll have nowhere else to go. "Host" is tangentially informative about the Darth Vader-ish concentration of media outlet ownership in the past ten years; Mr Wallace refers to it intelligently, but it is not his topic. It is my topic, though; I would prohibit any person, natural or otherwise (corporate) from owning more than one radio or television frequency. (I would allow owners to pool expensive back-office operations, which are mostly automated anyway.) The closest that "Host" gets to a critique of modern media ownership is in a discussion of the dismantling of the old "Fairness Doctrine," pursuant to which broadcasters were obliged to give "equal time" to "both sides" of a public argument. It was one of the most flawed New Deal propositions, and it proved to be unworkable, but it wouldn't have been necessary in an environment of solitary broadcasters. Liberals worry about the unholy influence that monolithic corporations can bring to bear on what gets published and what gets broadcast, and their anxiety is not mistaken - except insofar as it overlooks something worse: the freedom that media behemoths bestow upon their outposts to do anything that will make a lot of money. Censorship isn't the problem! Au contraire!

What sort of man is John Ziegler? If "Host" never quite discloses the man, that may be because the man is utterly resistant to exposure. The article shows us a type of guy whom we all know to be fiercely protective, if not positively stupid, about his "inner man." Mr Ziegler attributes his unmarried state to a peripatetic career, the moves of which are, in his mind, somebody else's fault. Religious background is never spelled out, but I sense that "the host" is a Catholic kind of guy. He is certainly a patriarchal male. His boss, as it happens, is a woman, and during their weekly critiques - during which she makes her points with a "no moving parts" blandness that certainly underscores Mr Ziegler's mistrust of Program Directors - Mr Ziegler resorts to an utterly pathetic world-weariness that anyone would recognize as the challenged male's first line of defense. Or perhaps he's yawning because he really is tired. You decide.

The interesting thing about John Ziegler is that he clearly regards himself as a normal American guy. And why not? That the host of a talk show to which angry white men direct their anger, an anger motivated by profound social shifts that severely discount their formerly brontosaurean standing, should regard himself as a normal guy is perhaps the most eloquent comment that can be made about this country right now. Talk radio is the medium par excellence for venting the cyclonic discontent of remaindered men. Men, that is, who used to get by on simply being men. A similar rage infected the old European aristocracies as their privileges were everywhere stripped away, and they're still fighting it, so God only knows how long the Willy Lomans are going to fuss. Attempts to create a talk-show galaxy on the left are bound to fail, I think; or else they'll mutate into something really unlike the Rushes and the Dr Lauras. That's because, while people on the left are plenty angry, they're not angry about the same things that make talk-show participants on the right feel that they're being crucified. They can address the political developments that make them mad. The agony on the right has nothing to do with politics per se. It has everything to do with sexuality, with the erosion of a consensus that had lasted for millennia.

Talk shows are angry for many reasons. As Mr Wallace points out, negative emotions are much easier to rouse than positive ones, because we share our fears but not our joys, particularly in secular, individualistic societies. (To a true, old-fashioned Whiggish liberal like me, you can't say anything better about a civilization than that no two of its eccentric citizens share quite the same idea of happiness.) Our fears represent the common hardships that we all have behind us; our joys partake of extremely diverse hopes and futures. Besides, who would bother to call in to a radio show to vent happiness? You have to get through the screener, first of all, and, depending on the pitch of your contribution, you may be kept on hold for an hour or more before your phone becomes a feed, and even then there are no guarantees that your call will be used. That you will be used. Happy people have other things to do, and in any case happiness is its own reward. Serious dissatisfaction requires sharing - at a minimum. If this weren't as true as the color of the sky, there wouldn't be any bars.

As constant readers know, I used to be in radio myself. It was classical radio, and there were certainly no talk shows on KLEF. But our facilities were so underdeveloped that, after office hours, announcers on duty were expected to answer all incoming phone calls. These came almost exclusively from cranky listeners: if I say that happy people don't call up radio stations, I know whereof I speak. As part of the broadcasting community in the city that zoomed from seventh to fourth place in size (interest is another matter altogether), I can say with confidence that nobody at any radio station wanted to get listeners worked up. In a Houston where shootouts at four-way stops were not unheard of, the risks of spontaneous male violence were fully appreciated. They still are, but now they're being made to pay. 

And even though the kind of radio that I did was utterly different from Mr Ziegler's, it was still radio, and I'm happy to attest that David Foster Wallace has got his radio right. There are undoubtedly slips and mistaken inferences. But until someone points one out, I'm going to assume that there are no important lapses. "Host" is a great piece of reporting, beautifully written and brilliantly laid out. Mr Wallace's next innovation ought to be the replication in print not of the Internet but of talk radio.

I've been so sure of what I took from "Host" that I haven't felt the need of offering proof-quotations, but I never meant to deprive you of the pleasures of Mr Wallace's text. Ordinarily, I would go back and force an insertion somewhere - and then work like hell to make it look seamless. But in the course of considering that option, I came across a tangent in the article that happens to have stuck in my mind: I want to hear Phil Hendrie!

In some cases, though, the personas are more contrived and extreme. In the slot preceding Mr. Z.'s on KLI, for instance, is the Phil Hendrie Show, which is actually a cruel and complicated kind of meta-talk radio. What happens every night on this program is that Phil Hendrie brings on some wildly offensive guest - a man who's leaving his wife because she's had a mastectomy, a Little League coach who advocates corporal punishment of players, a retired colonel who claims that females' only proper place in the military is as domestics and concubines for the officers [zut! zut! zut!] - and first-time or casual listeners will call in and argue with the guests and (not surprisingly) get very angry and upset. Except the whole thing's a put-on. The guests are fake, their different voices done by Hendrie [sidebar: "(who really is a gifted mimic)"] with the aid of mike processing and a first-rate board op. and the show's real entertainment is the callers, who don't know it's all a gag - Hendrie's real audience, which is in on the joke, enjoys hearing these callers get more and more outraged and sputtery as the "guests" yank their chain. It's all a bit like the old Candid Camera show if the joke perpetrated over and over on that show were convincing somebody that a loved one had just died. So obviously Hendrie - whose show now draws an estimate one million listeners a week - lies on the outer frontier of radio persona.

Well, hey, folks, nobody gets hurt. Not in America. Not yet. 

Posted by pourover at 12:34 AM | Permalink

¶ Have you met the best of the right-wing pundits, R. Robot? Mr/s Robot is a "rhetoric simulator" that has been fed Newt Gingrich's style manual for praising coreligionists while demonizing liberals. The perfect send-up of insulting conservative twaddle, it demonstrates the level of critical thinking that you will find at such sites as Powerline. In other words, Mr/s Robot doesn't think very clearly but s/he's burning with passion for sure.

¶ At kootke.org this morning, I discovered a site, Long Tail, that is hosted by the editor of Wired, Chris Anderson. The title refers to the extended, flattening end of the Pareto Curve, which shows, among other things, that in any scale-free network (eg the Web) there will be only a handful of very busy nodes (eg Web sites) and a galaxy of quiet ones (eg the Web log that you are currently visiting). I believe that Mr Anderson is on to something that I've been expecting, in my intuitive, uninstructed way since I started playing with my new Peanut in 1985. The spread of computational power is slowly undermining mass marketing, which attends to the eighty percent of stuff that nearly everybody wants or needs while ignoring the fragmented remainder. This remainder constitutes the long tail, and the Web has made it possible (for the first time in history) for the twenty percent of stuff that almost everybody does not want or need to find the handful of people who do. The everyday word for this is "niche marketing," but the term is fundamentally stupid, relying as it does on an architectural term that suggests nothing about networks. Naturally, this reshaping of markets starts at the top, among relatively affluent and educated computer users. But it will spread throughout civilization wherever electricity is available.

Posted by pourover at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There is a Post-It on the computer screen reminding me, in M le Neveu's hand, that "klondikes (are) low". Is this found poetry or what? Could we not go completely hermeneutic about glossing the message? (Sorry; I'm reading about Gadamer.) The parenthesis itself seems wishfully significant. If only I had the nerve to ask Zoe how Quarsan, assuming that he had a taste for Klondikes, would phrase such a note... Kathleen flew out to Palm Desert yesterday for the big IM thingie - that doesn't stand for "instant messaging," by the way - and she's staying at Rancho Rocko, where if she could spare the time from spa treatments she might try out the new Bing Crosby's Restaurant & Piano Lounge. (I am now, officially, a dead man.) PPOQ is in London, for the umpteenth wedding of his old friend, Lady McIlhenny. This leaves me dangerously unattended. Who knows what I'd get up to if it were a pleasant spring day and I wouldn't look odd in shorts on the streets of Yorkville?... I don't know what it is, but there's a certain song that I can't get out of my head, and it's not "Since U Been Gone"... Here I'd thought that Martha Wainwright was the current Mrs Loudon III! And where did I get that impression? From Private Astronomy, Geoff Muldaur's homage to Bix Beiderbecke. The photographs in the booklet do not suggest that Ms Wainwright is under thirty and her brother's little sister. As for papa, his voice is so much simpler than his son's. and I think he's a true tenor. He sings a cheeky Al Dubin number, "Bless You! Sister," with Martha and two Muldaur girls doing magnificent close harmony. When I got the CD two years ago I could not stop listening to this song. But even though I don't know what it is, "Bless You! Sister" is not the current earworm.

Posted by pourover at 09:26 AM | Permalink

¶ "The Drugs I Need" is the latest from Consumers Union, which has launched a campaign to require drug companies to release all of their research about the pills that they peddle. And you thought that Consumers Union was the center of the Humorless Galaxy! Pay attention to the disclaimer announcement at the end: "If you experience psychotic episodes, you're crazy." And I wondered how JibJab was going to make a living! Speaking of JibJab, my "Second Term" poster just came back from the framer. I'm going to hang it in my bathroom.

¶ Ms Nola writes, "when are you going to write about rufus and kelly?" Kelly is of course Kelly Clarkson, the American Idol winner, who has a song that's all over the Web. That is, people are talking about it everywhere. After a while, I wanted to hear it. I asked Ms Nola if she knew a handy way of downloading it, but I still feel a certain resistance to downloading from iTunes; there's something about the whole Napster/iPod universe seems off to me. Faute de mieux, Ms Nola offered to run across the street to Circuit City to buy the album. Now that I've heard the song, I feel the same way that Jason Kottke did at first. I think that I may leave it there. ""Since U Been Gone" reminds me powerfully of the much better Cars song, "Since You're Gone," and not just