Daily Blague

Yesterday morning, I dragged myself out of bed only to pitch headlong into the slough of despond. Reading the Times only made things worse. It occurred to me to issue an SOS: can anybody out there buck me up? Gradually at first but then quite quickly, the malaise evaporated.

When I wake up, I think of all the things that I have planned for the day. Normally, they amount to something to look forward to, but on days like today they're empty burdens, chores to be performed for no good reason. Except for that best of all reasons: don't make things even worse.

What's causing this spontaneous negativity? A dread that I have to talk myself out of every day - a dread that the United States is in a rudderless little boat heading straight for Niagara Falls. Does it matter which particular rocks destroy the ship and its passengers? An oil shock? A debt shock? The evisceration of the Republic's vitals by theocrats? The rudderless little boat is, of course, the Administration. We're still too far from the precipice for outright panic. But the anxiety is wearing.

We liberals stand by uselessly while our countrymen swallow the line from Washington. Here's a sterling example of how stupefying that line is, taken from a Times editorial about the White House's refusal, so far, to do anything about New Orleans.

But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of Representative Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give everyone the capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the governor and the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury, two days after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President Bush suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of a plan.)

How does the man get away with it? Thomas Frank sheds some light on the problem in the current Harper's (February 2006). Mr Frank has been trying to understand how Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America has held onto its Best-Seller listing. After all, as Mr Frank is able to show, there is nothing, quite literally nothing, in Mr Goldberg's book that could not be cobbled together from popular conservative Web sites. How can it be that so many book-buyers lack the critical acumen to see that Mr Goldberg brings nothing new to the discussion? (And that they are really - unless they wish to support Mr Goldberg - wasting their money?) Mr Frank eventually hit upon an explanation.

Like so much of today's right-win thought, 100 People owes its success to the remaking of American consciousness by television. The book's episodic structure, for example, reflects TV's amnesiac style: Each little hit-piece flickers by, the previous installment's outrage instantly forgotten, the staggering, mind-stopping contradictions between them (were Goldberg somehow to critique himself, he would no doubt call them "hypocrisies") flowing without narrative consequence.

Mr Frank does not leave it at that, but goes on to suggest why television has such mindless impact.

A convenient rhetorical benefit of this emphasis on electronic speech is that it solves the difficult problem of real-world power - by which I mean a problem that is difficult for conservative populists who like to depict themselves as society's victims. If offensive speech is the raw material of politics, then things like ownership or wealth distribution are not worthy of consideration. Nor can the threat posed by liberals be minimized or made to seem less dire by pointing out those liberals' inability to win elections: as long as liberals exist, getting their ten seconds on TV or posting their liberalisms on the Internet, the danger to America is clear and present.

Just as speech trumps deeds, so do individuals trump larger social forces. In the world of the right, as in the world of TV, personalities rule. Character is king. "There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher said; there are only individuals.

And so Bernard Goldberg scolds Kenneth Lay of Enron but has nothing to say about the moldy climate that has spread through the nation's executive suites as the sun of federal regulation has been dimmed. I want to take Mr Frank's point one half-step further, if only because I've never thought of this before and am feeling somewhat eureka-ish: television can't handle institutions. It can only reduce them to individual representatives or spokesmen. Institutions, insofar as they are more than rude collections of individuals, are necessarily abstractions. They're very real abstractions: they own property and file lawsuits about it all the time. But when television inquires into a bit of litigation, it can't see the abstraction that is, say, the General Motors Corporation. It can only see lawyers and executives - individuals all. You, meanwhile, following the camera and trying to understand what it's showing you - you will find it very hard to keep the abstraction in your mind, no matter how bright and sophisticated you might be. The only way to judge television footage critically - to discover, that is, what is being ignored or withheld - is to have seen it before.

The invisibility of abstract institutions, from the "Federal Government" on down, is dandy for conservative pundits, because if we could see institutions on television we'd be asking a lot of questions about how, for example, so few people own so much of the country. Instead of which we see the occasional plutocrat, on his way to prison or not as the case may be. We don't see his wealth, however. We see a few of the things that it has bought, but we will never learn from television that most of the assets of the rich are highly liquid, and therefore much too boring to look at. (Television is also constitutionally incapable of registering quality, obvious to the naked eye, on the screen. That's what makes the home-shopping networks so successful. Visit a TV set if you doubt me.) And we will never see "the rich." So they don't exist - on television. There are only rich people, and someday, if you're lucky, you might be one of them. Although that's highly unlikely, given the collective power of "the rich" to keep you right where you are.

Torture:Others :: Watching Television:Self.

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In general, I'm very pleased with the education that I received at the University of Notre Dame in the late Sixties. The version of the Great Books program that the faculty had devised suited me down to the ground, and in all my later reading, I have never felt that anything fundamental, at least in Western thought, was omitted. Upon reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, however, I can no longer claim such pleasant innocence. A book that had been in print for over fifteen years when I went to college, Totalitarianism is perhaps more important than ever, as the United States fumbles amidst reckless experiments and faces underestimated dangers in debt finance and fuel supply.

We are still too close to the twin dawns of the late eighteenth century - the industrial revolution and the inauguration of the nation-state - to understand how each effected the other. Nor, to follow the analogy to natural cycles, do we know where to put totalitarianism. (I'm inclined to regard it as an adolescent breakdown.) What we do know is that all three developments are related. It is possible that the nation-state might have eschewed totalitarianism, instead of steaming toward it, at least in Arendt's view, with deliberate speed, had there been none of the uprooting of the industrial revolution, filling the cities with superfluous people. I am only beginning to reassemble my grasp of modern European history from the rubble to which Arendt reduced it, but I do see that some sort of totalitarian episode was inevitable by the end of the old regime and the upsurge in scientific and technological expertise, both of which occurred in the late eighteenth century. Because I had not been properly grounded in modern European history, and also because I grew up in an exceptionalist America that has not suffered modern Europe's ongoing crisis of political legitimacy, I had a very hard time understanding Hannah Arendt until well into The Origins of Totalitarianism.

In the American view, the American and French revolutions put an end to monarchical tyranny and ushered in an era, perhaps more than just an era, of democracy. The proposition that democracy is a boon is one that Americans have a very hard time questioning, possibly because it means little more to them than the right to elect their own leaders. Democracy does indeed seem to be the least-bad political system, but its benefits are hardly unmixed with serious drawbacks. Local circumstances, however, worked to shroud these drawbacks in the United States. Take, for example, the very European problem of identifying the "demos" in the first place This was swept aside in the United States by degrading a slave class identifiable by skin color and facial features, compactly if erroneously recognized as a "race." Everyone who did not belong to this outcast group was included in the American demos. That's because the American "nation" (as distinct from the formal American state) consisted wholly of immigrants. Earlier-arriving classes invariably tried to lord it over late arrivals, but without long-term success. (It was perhaps vital for the persistence of racial bigotry that, from first settlement until quite recently, the American Southeast did not attract immigrants from outside the United States.) Regardless of personal prejudice, Irish-Americans are no better or worse than Italian-Americans, or Jewish-Americans, or any other kinds of American. Everybody is equally American. The struggle to extend this equality to the descendants of slaves persists, but it is under way.

From the moment of emancipation, however, the people of Europe had a hard time defining their nations - initially, races in the political and characterological sense, but soon enough racial in a voodoo biological sense - and the relation of those nations to states. France, the pre-eminent nation-state, declared that everybody living within French frontiers was...

Continue reading about The Origins of Totalitarianism at Portico.

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In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.

Fiction & Poetry

We have nine novels this week, five of them in Etelka Lehoczky's Fiction Chronicle. Good reviews go to

¶ The Bird is a Raven, by Benjamin Lebert and translated by Peter Constantine. Mr Lebert is something of a prodigy, having published his first novel in his teens. Now 23, he gives us a conversation between strangers on a train. "Lebert explores the limits of trust, blending broad humor and sudden bursts of melodrama while maintaining a sense of delicately balanced tension." Sounds good.

¶ Billie Morgan, by Joolz Denby. The memoir of a fictional "aging biker babe" in the North of England. "Denby's other characters aren't as full-fleshed as Billie," writes Ms Lehoczky - but why should they be, in a memoir? - "but she's got enough personality to carry the novel." Given my interest in motorcycles and their owners, this is a novel that I would read only if commanded to do so by a very close relative.

¶ Becoming Strangers, by Louise Dean. This is about a bad vacation, centering two couples at a luxury resort in the Caribbean. One of the four principals is dying of cancer and in search of some meaning. Like this character, Ms Lehoczky writes, the author "never quite finds deeper meaning. But Becoming Strangers is still a diverting trip.

Not-so-favorable reviews go to

¶ Against Gravity, by Farnoosh Moshiri. Ms Lehoczky doesn't say what this novel is about, but she hates the characters even as she finds them unbelievable. The author "shares their belief that their extraordinary experiences make them interesting people."

¶ Time Won't Let Me, by Bill Scheff. Mr Scheff is a columnist at Sports Illustrated, which is not a plus. His book could be about people I knew - prep school friends who formed a successful garage band in 1965, cutting an album before the inevitable breakup. (If there's anybody else out there who remembers Davy and the Badmen, please holler!) Now approaching sixty, the four old friends decide to stage a comeback - hugely embarrassing their children. Ouch.

Liesl Schillinger calls Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov "subtle and vertiginous." I think that's good. The novel is about the downfall of a hack art critic as the dissolution of the Soviet Union approaches. Instructed by higher-ups to write an essay praising Marc Chagall, Ms Grushin's protagonist balks, suspecting a trick that will lead to his deportation. But it is not a trick, and, soon out of a job, Sukhanov falls prey to the radioactivity of his years of self-serving dishonesty. I'm going to read this book. I may also read Christmas in Paris 2002, by Ronald K Fried. According to reviewer Charles Wilson, this is a dismantling à la Balzac of pampered American lives, with an appealing Parisian setting. Also appealing is Joe Keenan's third novel, My Lucky Star. Fans of the first two, the side-splitting Blue Heaven and the somewhat less hilarious Putting on the Ritz will rejoice to hear that Gilbert Selwyn is still up to no good and still dragging Philip Cavanaugh and Clair Simmons into frightful imbroglios - this time, in Hollywood. Goodness, the possibilities! Reviewer Mark Kamine files a few complaints, but that won't stop me. I'll just wait for the QPBC edition.

Nothing in Blake Bailey's review of Over the Rainbow? Hardly: Collected Short Seizures, a collection of the late prose of Chandler Brossard (1922-93) edited by Steven Moore, nothing in this review suggests that its subject is a book that I would enjoy reading. Brossard Who Walk in Darkness, published in French before it appeared in English, has been hailed as "a pioneering work of Beat fiction." The present miscellany, which includes pornographic parodies of fairy tales, seems eminently missable. Mr Bailey concludes,

It's like listening to a lonely man mumbling to himself - and loneliness, it seems was very much to the point. "I've never felt comfortable with other people at all," Brossard admitted toward the end of his life. And so perhaps he kept company with the voices in his head, his various babbling personae, and wrote it all down for the benefit of some possible kindred soul.

Nonfiction

The big story this week is Garrison Keillor's emphatically unfavorable review of American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, by Bernard-Henri Lévy and translated by Charlotte Mendel. Nearly every sentence in Mr Keillor's put-down is sarcastic, and much of it is funny. Be sure to read it. But don't let it dissuade you from reading American Vertigo, which is a lively look at the United States by a sympathetic outsider. Mr Keillor would seem to have been hand-picked to misunderstand BHL's assessment of what's distinctive about American culture; the writer and radio star has built a career on preferring the mundane. (Repeat after me: bay-ahsh-ell, and try not to say "béchamel.") I am going to read this book in French, when the "original" appears in a couple of months.

Another book on my list is Eric Foner's Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. This enormously sad book is about the mangled and untrue account of Reconstruction with which America salved its post-Reconstruction conscience, largely by falling back on the idea that the former slaves were not fully-developed human beings. James Goodman's review is almost as sad:

Four decades and untold political abuse later, our federal government is again held in low esteem. Many wonder if it is even competent to do what it used to do best: wage war. I would like to think that the prejudice at the heart of the old history of Reconstruction would prevent its revival. But as long as Americans continue to see government simply as a problem, we won't know much, or care, about Reconstruction.

There are a few books about Conservative America. Donald T Critchlow's Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade appears, in Judith Warner's view, to have been written by a camp-follower. Like Betty Friedan, I'd like to see Ms Schlafly burned at the stake for her opposition to ERA and other initiatives, but I acknowledge that this is a grudging way to respect her importance. I would much rather see Ms Schlafly lose her audience. Adrian Wooldridge gives Richard Reeves's President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination a favorable review, even though it adds little to our knowledge of this strange man who acted at being an actor. In My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front,  Jonathan Raban, a writer whom I've always admired, racks his brains in search of an explanation for the political success of the Bush Administrations in the teeth of failure and disaster; according to reviewer John Leland, Mr Raban doesn't understand how "infantilized" the American electorate has become. Nevertheless, this is a book that I look forward to reading.

One sign of the extent to which we've become infantilized is the apparent need for two collections of essays about torture. That any amount of valuable, even life-saving information can ever justify the infliction of pain and humiliation on the source of that information is a proposition that I refuse to entertain, period. If this makes me a sissy, then I'm happy to be a sissy. The alternative is to be a thug, period once again. Lance Morrow's largely thoughtful review of The Torture Debate in America, edited by Karen J Greenberg, and Torture: Does It Make Us Safer? Is It Ever Okay?, edited by Kenneth Roth and Minky Worden, with Amy D Bernstein, made me sick: what debate? How can there be a debate about torture? What on earth has happened to my country?

Wild, creative types are represented by new biographies of Christopher Marlowe and John Cassavetes. Review Philip Lopate feels that journalist Marshall Fine is too great a fan, in Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented American Independent Film, to judge the filmmaker's work. I'm inclined to agree with Mr Lopate:

There are revelations in Cassavetes's films that show with startling clarity the map of human confusion, but there are also scenes where actors fumble and bluster through embarrassing shtick.

As for Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy, I wonder at the folly of attempted the book-length treatment of a man about whom we know enough to fill no more than five pages of print. Michael Feingold particularly faults Mr Honan for refusing to acknowledge the sheer cruel cynicism that runs through all of Marlowe's powerful drama. (I wish I could find my collection thereof, by the way. If you borrowed it, please return it.)

John C Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group of mutual funds, has written a diatribe about the sorry state of Wall Street's ethics, in The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism. Jeff Madrick writes that while Mr Bogle's analysis of the situation is astute, his recommendations are wishful and fuzzy - for the simple reason that he won't face up to the fact that governmental deregulation is the true culprit here. On a more personal note, Liz Perle's Money, A Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash elicits the polite but firm scorn of Ariel Levy.

What's frustrating about Perle's tropism toward generalizations and evasions is that her subject matter and, at times, her writing about her own fiscal experiences and feelings are so interesting. But whenever she gets too close to nuance and specificity, Perle seems to run for cover under pronouncements about womankind rather than continue on the unmarked path toward insight.

This leaves two books: Honky Tonk Parade: New Yorker Profiles of Show People, by John Lahr, and A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, by Susanne Antonetta. I've enjoyed Mr Lahr's insidery New Yorker pieces (Mr Lahr is the son of the Cowardly Lion), but not quite enough to reread them. Reviewer Ada Calhoun writes of Mr Lahr's interview with Laurence Fishburne that the writer "sounds more like a prom date than a leading drama critic." As for A Mind Apart, Polly Morrice's review suggests the  quirky and inconsistent poeticizing of bipolar disorder and autism. I remain stubbornly convinced that true creativity arises, when it does, despite and not because of serious mental disturbance.

Jeffrey Rosen's Essay, "Judicial Exposure," is a sensible call for restraint to memoir-writing justices. "Too much revelation may undermine the public's respect for judges as apolitical authorities." Amen.

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Is it me, or is it the neighborhood? Possibly it's Hollywood's aversion to the Bush Administration, which as several critics have noted has begun to show up in movies that were greenlighted after the 2004 election. In any case, there always seems to be a movie in the neighborhood that's worth seeing. This was not always the case. In fact, it was almost always not the case. The screens were reserved for films directed at teens and children. Dumb cop sequels. High concept trash. Now, even a movie as formulaic as The Last Holiday is a delight.

The Matador, which I saw yesterday, spends its entire run playing with formulas and derailing expectations. I'm not sure that I can say more about it than that, because this is definitely one film not to "spoil." It is a fun movie that likes to fool around with gasoline; the urge to urge businessman Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) to steer clear of assassin Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan) is constant, and never more pressing than when Julian dances with Bean, Danny's wife (Hope Davis), in the Wrights' living room. In this parody of a thriller, Mr Brosnan, always sleek and debonair in said thrillers, leaves his customary mien farther behind than George Clooney, in O Brother, Where Art Thou? got from his. In fact, the man is repellent - but amusingly so. Mr Kinnear takes "sidekick" to new levels, so that it does not seem quite fair to think of him as a supporting actor. Ms Davis is a bit loopier than usual - just a bit, but the only thing straight about her is her blond hair. Philip Baker Hall and Dylan Baker do their usual good work in smaller roles.

Director Richard Shepard has injected a juicy tic into The Matador: every time the action changes location (something that happens fairly often), the name of the city in question is spelled out in huge blue letters that cover the entire screen, a truly preposterous (and hilarious) send-up of the thriller genre's penchant for datelines.

Don't see The Matador if you're in a meat-and-potatoes mood. Mission Impossible III is coming up.

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It's not only Mozart's birthday, it's Mozart's 250th birthday. Do you think they're going to remember yours?

Here's how we ought to say "Happy Birthday." No singing, just listening.

The composer himself, I am almost certain, would have been surprised that this is the piece by which I think we ought to remember him on this big day. It's the second movement of the String Trio, or Divertimento, in E-Flat, K 563, supposedly a party piece, but still the work that I put at the top of the list of Great Mozart Works. If listening isn't enough, you can always read.

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Last night, TV5Monde (the Francophone cable station) broadcast Un Amour de Swann, the 1984 Volker Schlöndorff adaptation of the novella-within-the-novel by Marcel Proust, starring Jeremy Irons as a dubbed Charles Swann. I hate dubbing, and the voice chosen for Swann en français was nowhere near Mr Irons's baritone, but it was clear that the actor knew his lines, even if he couldn't say them. Once I realized that the movie could have been called Deux Jours de Swann, I was completely won over. The first day occurs in the 1880s, when Charles Swann is besotted with the courtesan Odette de Crécy. It takes up most of the footage. The second is an elegiac retrospective set on the eve of World War I, when Charles is dying.

Can you make movies out of A la recherche du temps perdu? Out of even a part of it? Raoul Ruiz made a gallant stab in 1999's Le temps retrouvé. Everybody who was anybody in French film, at least on the distaff side, was lined up to play one part or another, and by adapting the conceit that a drowning - here, dying - man sees his whole life passing before him, the project ended up being amazingly comprehensive for a movie that lasts only two and a half hours. Un amour de Swann is an entirely different animal, and in its way it's devilishly untrue to "the Marcel of the author." When it was over, I was positively attacked by the idea that the characters had escaped from Proust's novel and gone out for a night on their own; in a way, I don't think that the author would have disapproved. Schlöndorff gives us Odette, Charles, Charlus, Oriane de Guermantes, and Mme de Verdurin as they were, before Proust got hold of them and wrote them down in his book.

The broadcast was, inadvertently, saturated in a very Proustian passage of time. Jeremy Irons, Fanny Ardant - so young. Alain Delon (as Charlus) still young-ish. What a novel Proust would have written about film, and its preservation of the young, firm faces that we used to have. Un amour de Swann, despite every obstacle, is a success.

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With well over a year of solid blogging behind me, I'm finding that the experience has taken a few unexpected turns. For one thing, I'm no longer so interested in the links to impish or naughty pages; in fact, I'm not really interested in links per se. I've discovered that, with a moment's thought, I can get to whatever's being talked about via Google. For another, I've all but eliminated single-purpose blogs from my rosters. Blogs that are always and only satirical, political, self-absorbed or preoccupied with any one thing might be useful from time to time, but I can't bring myself to check them out every day. The time that I would devote to Go Fug Yourself - a very funny blog that invariably reduces me to tears by the fourth entry - goes instead to exploring the Blogosphere in search of sites that resemble my own. And there isn't much of such time. Trying to keep up with my the many blogs that I've "bookmarked" since June 2004 would be a full-time job if I were diligent about it.

Which I'm not. I've only just taken a first look at Jasper Emmering's eminently sensible and progressive blog, Hollandaise since September, when Mr Emmering posted some amazingly insightful entries comparing New Orleans to the Netherlands as to flood-prevention and preparation. The author is a physician whose English is just about native, and I don't know where he finds the time to read as widely as he does. (I'm not doing anything besides this, much less tending to the sick.) Nor have I noticed that Ronnie Cordova is writing a lot less these days at Sublethal, where, to be sure, the prose style often suggests slo-mo self-flagellation. Just as self-punishing, bar bouncer Rob, of Club Life, is somehow getting his book written for - Harper, was it? And I'd forgotten the existence of Mr Sun altogether!    

The other day, JR, at L'homme qui marche, proffered a bunch of cool photographic links. JR has been experimenting with "faux lo-mo," Photoshopping his digital images to give them the undernourished look of pictures taken with old Soviet cameras. Turns out that a lot of Flickr patrons are doing the same. Hours fly by! Then Amy, at The Biscuit Report, announces that she's being plugged by a site called King of Zembla. So I visit King of Zembla and have a look at the other plugged sites. One of these, Daai Tou Laam Diary - kept by an American expat in Hong Kong - links in turn to a site that I haven't visited in a very long time, Jesus' General. Scrolling down at JG, I find the General having some fun with a Mr Andrew Longman, born-again contributor to Renew America who is very unhappy about Brokeback Mountain. Mr Longman is, indeed, fun - if unintentionally.

Has it occurred to the great bulk of our people that we need to quit tolerating the forces of internal destruction which work night and day to deconstruct our manliness at a time when our nation faces an absolute need for valor, ferocity, the force of arms, and the defense of the innocent pregnant woman and her children at home? Has it occurred to anyone, anyone at all, that it is immoral to assault masculinity? In a time of war?

The writer wins this week's Mr Patriarch award.

It goes on and on. There's one thing I've learned. It came to me when I was talking about this to Kathleen and she told me about a former colleague who likes the site but who, like Kathleen herself, doesn't always have the time to check in. "I'm a bit behind with The Daily Blague," she said. I told Kathleen to tell her, "Don't worry about catching up!" I used to say - at Portico, and with profound wrongheadedness - "this is not a blog." Now, I say, "this is not a book." You don't have to catch up.

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Do you know this secretary? More to come.

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Garry Wills's review of Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis is so favorable that I'm actually tempted to buy a presidential tome. The piece, "Jimmy Carter & the Culture of Death" (I'd have swapped the ampersand for a "vs"), appears in the New York Review of Books for February 9, 2006, and it is perhaps the strongest essay yet to contrast true religion with hateful religiosity. What few people knew at the time was that Jimmy Carter was awkward when he made religious statements because he didn't really believe that he ought to be making them, but felt badgered by the press. Mr Carter belongs to the Baptist World Alliance, an organization with which the more fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention has severed ties, the better, in Mr Wills's view, to promote its culture of death.

Mr Wills' deftly argues that the "pro-life," anti-abortion movement of the Religious Right maintains an anti-life agenda. When abortion is illegal, women desperate enough to get them not infrequently die, but that is only one part of a program that focuses on death. By refusing to limit the distribution of guns, this movement makes the United States a world hub of homicide; it is also among the top four sovereignties that inflict capital punishment. It insists on the United States' right to the first use of nuclear weapons; its myopic foreign policies reap a world-wide harvest of contempt for this country. Mr Wills winds up beautifully, with solid praise for the former president:

Carter is a patriot. He lists all the things that Americans have to be proud of. That is why he is so concerned that we are squandering our treasures, moral even more than economic. He has come to the defense of our national values, which he finds endangered. He proves that a devout Christian does not need to be a fundamentalist or fanatic, any more than a patriotic American has to be punitive, narrow, and self-righteous. He defends the separation of church and state because he sees with nuanced precision the interactions of faith, morality, politics and pragmatism. That is a combination that once was not rare, but is becoming more so. We need a voice from the not-so-distant past, and this quiet voice strikes just the right notes.

"Punitive, narrow and self-righteous" - a comprehensive description of patriarchs on the defense. I wish that Mr Wills had mentioned the word "patriarchy," but perhaps to do so would have raised an awkwardness. The "not-so-distant past" to which he hearkens was a settled patriarchy, with white men firmly in possession of all executive power,. Not only that, but their possession was not seriously questioned by most Americans. If you wanted a secure place in this patriarchy, you sucked up to it if you were a man and served it if you were a woman. Those who were drawn to alternatives could take their chances (in the big cities), but with no expectation of rescue in case of failure. Welfare wasn't wrong because it was expropriation - that just made it "unfair." What made it wrong was that it rescued folks who had opted out of the patriarchy. PS: It is understood, in a patriarchy, that those who haven't found a place within its structure have chosen not to, at least insofar as they haven't tried "hard enough."

Whether we are living through the patriarchy's last gasp, or whether natural and economic catastrophes will make the patriarchy look like the best chance for survival yet again, remains to be seen.

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The current issue of The Atlantic contains the magazine's fourth annual State of the Union section. Arguably the most centrist periodical in the country, inclined these days to snort at the left while blandifying the right, The Atlantic publishes the occasional alarmist article (usually by William Langewiesche), but its editors seem determined not to get flustered about American life, and that in itself is a good thing, or at least a respite. In the kickoff essay, "The Values Racket," they make two very interesting points. First: the culture war  

is between those who want a culture war - a vocal minority demanding political attention - and those who don't.

This is an idea that E J Dionne works out in his contribution, "Why the Culture War Is the Wrong War." The other point is well worth ponderation.

As Paul Starobin argues, the United States has become isolated by its values. Many of the cultural attributes that have made America attractive to outsiders - boisterous democracy, economic opportunity, respect for human rights - have proliferated abroad. Some have been tarnished at home. At the same time, many of the values that remain uniquely American do not endear us to most other societies. No other country is both as devout and as libertarian as America, and this unusual mixture has of late exacerbated mistrust of the United States.

Implicit here is the fact that there has been no real need for the United States to "export" its democracy; the citizens of other countries, admiring it from afar, have cleared the way for its welcome import. We're at our best when we're simply being our best and not worrying about the rest of the world. I would go so far as to say that the world would be a better place without official United States charity (always excepting Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan, the latter of which reflected a cosmopolitan pragmatism rarely approximated in our aid schemes). 

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A small box arrived from The Musical Heritage Society, containing two CD albums of Bach, and I'm finding this extremely quaint. Extremely. My membership in the MHS can be divided between three distinct periods: three years of high school, about four years ca 1988, and since 2000. At all times, of course the MHS has been a redistributor of other labels' recordings; the difference between now and the 1960s is that now it reissues recordings that have already been released here on major labels. In the 1960s, it was the American (North American?) licensee for minor European labels.

Yesterday's arrivals add another layer. Both albums were recorded in Vienna by an undisclosed label and released in the United States on the Bach Guild label, which, while not quite premium in those days, was certainly not a budget line, either. The Bach Guild was targeted to the growing body of listeners, largely professional people I expect, who found in Bach an intellectual tonic and who preferred a lean, "original instruments" sound, preferably performed by a small chamber orchestra, to the lush arrangements by Leopold Stokowski and others that one encountered in the concert hall. There weren't many professional chamber orchestras in the United States in those days; there were plenty of academic and amateur groups, but they didn't travel. I remember the New York Pro Musica coming to Notre Dame - and I remember how exceptional that sort of thing was. Chamber orchestras would begin to appear in the Seventies. By then, the repertoire - Vivaldi through, say, KPhE Bach - had been made more or less familiar by imported recordings. The notable performances appeared on labels such as The Bach Guild, while people you never heard of played on LPs released to MHS subscribers. Now, today, 24 January 2006, I have on my desk two albums that, having been redistributed decades ago by the Bach Guild, have been reissued by the MHS.

Bach is the only composer to whose music I can listen when I work - if I can listen to anything at all. I can guess why this is so, but my surmises probably wouldn't make much sense to anyone who hadn't experienced the same thing. Almost everything that I can think of makes Bach sound trivial and very limited. In fact, Bach limits himself. Every piece - and it's worth noting that very few approach ten minutes in length, much less surpass it - sets a very specific goal, such as working out the possibilities of casting a given musical fragment in a certain canonical structure. (If you don't know what that means, just think "puzzle.") And that's that. There are no distractions and few surprises. Bach writes with a beautiful craftsmanship that accords with and soothes the working brain.

If Mozart makes you smarter (temporarily, by making paying attention more interesting than it usually is), Bach actually makes you think. 

The reissues in question are: Gustav Leonhardt's 1953 recording of the Goldberg Variations and a complete set of the keyboard concerti (single and multiple), played by I Solisti di Zagreb under (who else?) Antonio Janigro. Anton and Erna Heiller, Kurt Rapf and Christa Landon are the soloists. I haven't listened to the Leonhardt yet, but the concerti are clear and lively. 

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Good Morning again! It's a bright, cold Tuesday - perfect weather for "I told you so." Today's headline:

IRAQ REBUILDING BADLY HOBBLED, US REPORT FINDS

PROBLEMS FROM THE START

Understaffing, Infighting and Lack of Expertise Are Cited in Draft

by JAMES GLANZ

The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.

Except, I didn't tell you so.

2 May 2003: Hurrah! The war in Iraq is over! Saddam Hussein hasn't been accounted for, and neither have his weapons of mass destruction, but military opposition to American troops has ceased. As our intervention in Afghanistan ought to have taught all thinking people, the American mission would come down to this: the war would be over when resistance to our invasion melted away. Installing a US-friendly person as the nominal head of local affairs (in the case of Afghanistan, 'local' means 'Kabul and environs,' no more), we would hale our troops home to a hero's welcome. The Administration could rest assured that no one except nigglers like me would fault it for having altogether failed to accomplish its trumpeted prewar objectives. Is it so hard to remember six-week-old headlines? (Link)

I truly had no idea what a disaster our Iraqi misadventure would be. I knew that it wouldn't succeed, but my conception of its failure was pretty limited.

Of course, it's not over yet.

"Problems from the start" will keep me chuckling all day. Oh! Almost forgot. The headline is from The New York Times.

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Good Morning! It's a cold, wet Monday, and the Times is correspondingly cheering.

¶ As Profits Soar, Companies Pay US Less for Gas Rights

¶ Seeking Edge in Spy Debate

¶ In a Stronghold, Fatah Fights To Beat Back a Rising Hamas

¶ Potent Mexican Meth Floods In As States Curb Domestic Variety

¶ Held in 9/11 Net, Muslims Return To Accuse US

¶ Answering the Fire Bell in the Company of Women [an upbeat story, but not exactly front-page news]

And "Inside":

¶ New Orleans Hospital System Overwhelmed

¶ Another Warning From Iran

¶ Deal for ABC Radio Is Near

¶ A Big Story With Big Risks [Jill Carroll's captivity]

¶ Prime-Time Moves at NBC

And what do I do when I finish reading the paper? I pick up The Stories of John Cheever and read "The Country Husband," a masterpiece that returned me to the suburban emptiness of my childhood. Francis Weed, Cheever's protagonist, is roused from his utterly unreflective commuting life by touches of violence - the emergency landing of an airliner in a Pennsylvania cornfield (nobody's hurt), and an encounter of sorts with a woman whom he recognizes as a collaborator who was shaved and stripped while he and a few other GIs stood by - and primed, as it were, to fall in love with the first beautiful girl he sees. Besotted, Francis embarks on a half-willed course of destroying his life, but is saved before any permanent damage has been done by a psychiatrist who recommends woodwork. Woodwork works. Francis calms down and rediscovers domestic happiness.

Looking around, I see a nation that is manifestly not in great shape. Our res publica, as the first Times story indicates, is steadily passing into the hands of private interests; I sense that many Americans, dimly aware of this, would rather liquidate public holdings than share them with their fellow-citizens, rather as if we were all contentious siblings squabbling over an estate. Cheever's story, however, reminds me of a more somnolent era. The country was apparently healthier, but its managerial class was living in whited sepulchres. In many ways, life back then was worse.

Until very recently, I've always felt that things were getting better, more or less, overall. Serious problems lay ahead, but we would figure out how to deal with them. Five years of Dubya and his minions, however, have shown me how naive I was, how untested my optimism. I'm still hopeful; the United States may be the mega whatever but once you factor out its energy consumption and its production of pap, it's not such a big deal. But we have a lot of fixing to do here. More than just woodwork, I'm afraid.

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Here is the ending of Geoff Dyer's introduction to The Ongoing Moment:

Dorothea Lange said that "the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." I might not be a photographer but I now see the kind of photographs I might have taken if I were one.

What are we to make of this amateur's production? It is clearly an exponent of what Barry Gewen called "the belletrist option" of art criticism, which 

allowed for the exercise of personal style, the careful inspection and precise expression of one's own reactions, and it found adherents among poet-critics like John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, and individualistic, iconoclastic intellects like Susan Sontag.

In The Ongoing Moment, Mr Dyer writes about photography, for the most part American photography as practiced by a handful of masters. It is not a book for beginners; it assumes not only some knowledge of the history of American photography - the famous photographers and what sort of pictures they have taken - but also access to the many photographs that Mr Dyer talks about but does not reproduce. It is certainly not a picture book; the black-and-white reproductions are quite small and just as matte as the text. There are section breaks, but no chapters - no formal organization of any kind. I was reminded of the French phrase, de fil en aiguille, which is best translated, "from one thing to another." The "things" are photographic subjects, the subjects that have caught Mr Dyer's eye. Sometimes these subjects are real objects, such as hands or barbershops. Sometimes they're much more conceptual, such as seeing the world in black-and-white but photographing it in color, or variations on that theme. Sometimes it is the relationship between the photographer and his subject, a matter that's illustrated by nude photographs taken by Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston. Always playing somewhere in the background is some idea or other of "America."

Photography presents three unique aesthetic challenges - challenges that don't arise in other, older art forms. First...

Continue reading about The Ongoing Moment at Portico.

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In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.

Fiction & Poetry

The name of Charles Reznikoff is new to me. His shorter poems, edited by Seamus Cooney, have been collected in the Poems of Charles Reznikoff 1918-1975. Reznikoff was a lawyer by day but a very serious poet at all times. He summed up his ars poetica thus: "images clear but the meaning not stated but suggested by the objective details and the music of the verse; words pithy and plain; without the artifice of regular meters; themes, chiefly Jewish, American, urban." I'm attracted by everything that reviewer Joshua Clover has extracted, including the relatively well-known couplet

Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies

A girder, still itself among the rubbish.

Sold!

I'm also caught by Ligaya Mishan's favorable review of Thrity Umrigar's novel, The Space Between Us. Ms Umrigar is a Parsi from Mumbai, which tells of the relationship between a poor housemaid and her middle-class employer, a widow with good reason to think about "the unclean." I'm liking Indian literature more and more, not least because of a quiet local lilt that it's just possible I'm imagining. Gustave Flaubert's conundrum of a novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, has been newly translated by Mark Polizzotti. Left incomplete at the author's death, the novel - if that is what it is - rambles on about the adventures of two ambitious dimwits; Christopher Hitchens's solid review is entitled "I'm With Stupide." It does not make the novel sound like a fun read.

Flaubert is pitiless with his wretched creations, allowing them no moment of joy, or even ease. It is enough for them to turn their hands to a project for it to expire in chaos and slapstick, and after a while this, too, shows the shortcomings of the unpolished, because we can hear the sound of collapsing scenery before the stage has even been set. True bathos requires a slight interval between the sublime and the ridiculous, but no sooner have our clowns embarked on a project than we see the bucket of whitewash or the banana skin.

And then there would be the shame of reading this in English when I ought to be reading it in French. You should see the queue of books en français waiting to be read by moi.

Joyce Carol Oates's fiction is not on my list. Not, not, not, not, not. The quality of her prose is that of cake made from cake mix. Even reviewer Hillary Frey can't restrain herself from saying, in what's meant to be an enthusiastic review, that "this collection ... works best as a source of cheap thrills.

Nonfiction

Kenji Yoshino's Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights, is on my list. I've already written about its central idea here, and I don't know how much the book will add to that, but I recommend it sight-unseen. Professor Yoshino distinguishes between "covering" - minimizing the display of your personal peculiarities for the sake of maximizing your swim in the mainstream - and "passing," which is simply denying that you're peculiar. Norah Vincent has written very well, according to David Kamp's glowing review, about passing as a male in Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again. Ms Vincent's masquerade was entirely cosmetic, but perhaps because she wasn't trying to impress anyone that she was really a man, she was undistracted enough to see just how different public life is for men. Mr Kamp can only fault her for being too forgiving; but then Ms Vincent is a lesbian without a number-one reason to regret that the same men who would avoid eye contact out of respect for another man would indulge in that famous gaze were she in skirts. He does point out that

Conspicuously absent from Self-Made Man, though, are men leading full, contented lives.

Sounds like a very interesting read.

There are several works of biography and memoir. Sherwin B Nuland's Maimonides looks like an important book, one in which one intellectual Jewish physician examines the career of another, albeit one who flourished in the twelfth century. Eminent solicitor-advocate Anthony Julius writes that Dr Nuland "endeavors to find 'the common ground on which Maimonides can walk together with a man or woman today," but he regrets that "Nuland does not concern himself with the tension between what Maimonides stood for and what modern Judaism stands for."

Maimonides was concerned with maintaining the simple faith of the uneducated. The arduous business of philosophy, the esoteric understanding of religious truth, was not for them. He had no conviction that the profound truths of Judaism were within equal reach of all Jews. Maimonides was a bold and (to use an anachronism) fundamentally undemocratic thinker.

Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr Nicholas Murray Butler, by Michael Rosenthal, sounds grim. Review Thomas Mallon suspects that, in researching the life of a celebrated president of Columbia University whose celebrity dimmed the moment he died, in 1947, Mr Rosenthal "endured a long, depressing surprise as the vacuity of his subject fully dawned, or dimmed, on him."

Naysaying jabs from Walter Lippmann, H L Mencken and others never made a dent in this ermine-trimmed nullity while he was being chauffeured from one testimonial to another or writing the autobiography whose only revealing phrase may have been its title, Across the Busy Years.

Sorry as I am for Mr Rosenthal, but I'm not going to read this book. Nor am I going to read Between You and Me: A Memoir, by Mike Wallace with Gary Paul Gates. Even if Tara McKelvey had pronounced it the Book of the Year, which she most certainly doesn't, her review would not have moved me. What Mr Wallace has done to newscasting forces me to imagine cake mixes using no natural ingredients except fear and loathing. Another memoir that I probably won't read, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir, but this only because the subject of growing up in working class Hartford, known at another well-written Web log as "the Wretched Little City," is just too depressing. And in the Fifties, no less! 

Wyatt Mason gives Colin McGinn's The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact, a very mixed review. As a philosopher at Rutgers, Mr McGinn is perhaps not best-qualified to deal with what seems indisputably to me to be a question of neurophysics, and indeed Mr Mason soon charges him with "twaddle." But he does not dismiss the book:

That few readers will have the patience to get past the book's first 60 turgid pages is doubly unfortunate, for when McGinn calms down he can be a lucid, rewarding writer. His chapter "The Metaphysics of the Movie Image" is as enlightening as the book's earlier pages are undistinguished. Staring at an actor on screen, McGinn notes that we feel "no alienation from a body like this, no division into me and it. It is the body as transformed into another type of material, an immaterial material.

If I encounter the book, I'll be sure to start checking it out well past the beginning.

A posthumous collection of the essays of Joan Didion's late husband could, in Edward Lewine's view, have been better edited; the editor of Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne is anonymous. More problematic is Dunne's preoccupation with Hollywood. I'm going to get this book anyway; if I'm lucky, I'll be able to dig out a copy of Dunne's novel, The Studio. I used to have one.

There are three books about money that I'm tempted to pass over. Gary Sperling's The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity is all but damned out of hand by Noam Scheiber for failing to acknowledge that the Bush Administration does not bargain in good faith, and that the political outlook that enabled Mr Sperling's former boss, Bill Clinton, to eliminate the deficit has vanished from Washington. On a more personal level, Neil Genzlinger reviews The Number: A Completely Different Way To Think About The Rest of Your Life (please! when will editors understand what a turn-off such titles are?), by Lee Eisenberg, and Dave Barry's Money Secrets, by Dave Barry. Mr Barry's book, of course, is a send-up of books such as Mr Eisenberg's. According to Mr Genzlinger, both books bear "shamelessly misleading subtitles."

Judith Shulevitz has written a thoughtful essay, "When Cosmologies Collide," in which she urges elite followers of Darwin to listen to themselves talk. In the course of reviewing two books - Eugenie C Scott's Evolution vs. Creationism and Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle, Ms Shulevitz asks, "Could something as trivial as scientists' lack of self-awareness help explain why, nearly 150 years after Darwin, creationism in its various forms has become the most popular critique of science? Praising Mr Ruse for distinguishing between "evolution" and "evolutionism," she writes,

Evolutionism addresses questions of origins, the meaning of life, morality, the future and our role in it. In other words, it does all the work of a religion, but from a secular perspective. What gets billed as a war between hard science and mushy theology should rather be understood, says Ruse, as "a clash between two rival metaphysical world pictures."

As for the substance of each sides' debate, Ms Shulevitz praises Ms Scott's book for its explanation of "the scientific method, which many invoke but few describe vividly."

Paul Beatty's Essay, "Black Humor," is a call to lighten up on the gravitas thing in black literature. After listing writers whom he only discovered as grown man - Ishmael Reed, Fran Ross, Bob Kaufman, Bert Williams, and even W E B Du Bois - Mr Beatty laments,

I wish I'd been exposed to this black literary insobriety at an earlier age. It would've been comforting to know that I wasn't the only one laughing at myself in the mirror.

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It's still something of a surprise to me that I went to see The Last Holiday this afternoon. Qua hip-hop diva, Queen Latifah is not a draw, and while she has always seemed accomplished in the few movies that I've seen her in, I shouldn't have thought that I'd go to see something that for all intents and purposes is a vehicle for her good spirits. But I did go, and those spirits are very good indeed.

Every movie leaves its own aftertaste. Leaving the dark theatre for the humdrum banality of a movie lobby and a too-bright street (or sometimes one that's incredibly gloomy), I am usually overwhelmed by a particular emotional reaction. (Sometimes, as after The Family Stone, this feeling took a while to condense.) Last week, after Match Point, I felt very dark and fearful; I felt as if I'd done something awful and was about to get caught. Walking out of The Last Holiday, the emotion was quite simple. I felt the remorse of the chastened, and I wanted to be a better person.

The Last Holiday remakes a 1950 J B Priestley screenplay of the same name that starred Alec Guinness in the Queen Latifah role (I've put this on my to-rent list). Georgia is a young and reserved New Orleans woman who sells cookware in a department store while pursuing culinary ambitions at home. When she slips and falls at work, a CAT scan is prescribed. The scan reveals that Georgia is suffering the final stages of an obscure disease -although she feels just fine. Assured that she has mere weeks to live, she decides to try to realize a few of the dreams in her scrap book of "possibilities." Cashing in her IRA and some bonds that her mother left her, Georgia flies off to Carlsbad - Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia - a wedding cake of a spa in the mountains. Here she bumps into some people from home - she knows them, but they don't know her. The outcome is perfectly obvious within ten or fifteen minutes of the opening credits. While the plot unfolds on cue, Georgia opens up and lives for the first time in her life. She treats herself liberally, and is only just beginning to tire of luxury when the plot conveniently takes her to the next level. This opening-up to life is the whole point of the movie, and it would be insufferable if Queen Latifah, lit from within, didn't so powerfully demonstrate her character's consciousness of a conversation with God. Beginning with "why me?", this conversation ends with what can only be called the most pious of winks. It's as though Georgia decided to spend her last days on earth on a fabulous package weekend with the Almighty as her escort. When she accumulates a fortune by placing the same bet betting three times in a row at roulette, Georgia does indeed appear to have some extraordinary assistance.

Director Wayne Wang shows his trust in his star by keeping the other actors out of the her way until it's time for Georgia to change their lives with a smile and a few wise words. Hotel chef Didier (Gérard Depardieu) is won over immediately; Matthew Kragen (Timothy Hutton), the heroine's erstwhile boss and a corrupt, overcompetitive businessman, is her last beneficiary. Queen Latifah's Georgia confronts the high life with precisely the correct balance of abashed surprise and shrewd assessment; she's not a slow learner. She is always a lady; for a good while at the hotel, she's the only lady. The screenplay gives her two episodes of wild physical abandon, once on a snowboard (hilarious) and once beneath a parachute (terrifying), but her exuberance is never crass. Meanwhile, she is never the cocky, full-of-herself person that the plot might easily have elicited. Even when eating cucumber slices that she has just peeled from her eyes, Georgia seems to be in some sort of prayerful converse.

After talking Matthew off the ledge of the Hotel Pupp, it's time to go home in earnest, with Mr Right on one arm and the news of her misdiagnosis on the other. Mr Right is played by LL Cool J. If this gentleman was ever (or is still) an habitué of the bling monde, no trace of it shows in his collected, grown-up Sean. Who knew that little Alia, of Dune, would grow up to be Alicia Witt, the new Julianne Moore? Ms Witt handles her character's transformation from scheming bitch to grateful friend with intelligent tact, never asking the audience to like her too much too soon. Giancarlo Esposito, who just turned in a powerful performance in Derailed, plays a US Senator here with dash and soul. There are lots of fine things in the small touches - Jane Adams, Jascha Washington, Julia LaShae, Ranjit Chowdhry and Susan Kellerman are just a few of the fine supporting actors. Ellen Savaria was arresting in a very small, one-line part; I liked the look of her. M Depardieu is such a pro that he repeatedly gave the impression of having worked with Queen Latifah in many previous films.

The Last Holiday is a Class A treat. Despite its picture-perfect ending (which Mr Wang has the wit to muss with a funny touch), it's not a "feel good" movie - it's not easy. Google's Movie Showtimes bills it as a "Drama/Comedy/Action/Adventure" feature, but, if you ask me, it's a movie of faith.

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Late the other night, I was reading a John Cheever story, "The Wrysons," in which a suburban woman is afflicted with a recurring dream of nuclear holocaust. The dream winds up with a sort of yacht-club immolation scene in which boaters are drowned as they over-crowd the waters of refuge. In the dream, she weeps "to see this inhumanity as the world was ending."

Well, it isn't the world that is ending. The post-holocaust planet will go on spinning somehow, and opportunistic life-forms that have been waiting for the opportunity will flourish. (For example, a virus that replicates through the digitized memory of chatted vacuities such as "I'm standing outside your building, where are you?") Life will begin the long trek back to Descartes. This much we know. But I found myself wondering this evening about cultural extinctions in our own long past. One hundred fifty thousand years is no time at all on the geological scale, but it's plenty of time, I imagine, to scrub the traces of human artifact from the face of the earth. We think of the time between the moment of homo sapiens's unmistakable arrival (whenever that was) and the composition of the first granary account as a long, boring and unrecorded progression toward us. But what if we've done this already a few times? What if there were was a New Yorker seventy thousand years ago - and all record of it has been obliterated by natural processes, just as natural processes would clear Earth of our record in, say, fifty thousand years? What if, far from living in savannahs and bumbling our way toward speech, we've done this sophisticated cultural thing a few times already, but with such catastrophic results that We Don't Remember?

As you know, my mind doesn't drift toward science fiction. But I found myself plausibly wondering...

(But it's another Cheever story altogether that I urge you to read, a lovely tale called "The Duchess.")

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A few days ago, I responded to a storm of comment spam by requiring commenters to acquire and use TypeKey Identities. As of this morning, however, the attempt to sign in meets with the following:

Comment Submission Error

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

The sign-in validation failed.

Peachy, huh? While I wait for advice from Six Apart support, I've removed the TypeKey Identity, and rolled up my sleeves to repel more spam. PS: It's already back.

Update: The storm resumed immediately; in a few hours, I've brushed off well over a hundred comments. TypeKey sign-ins appear to work again; I can only assume that there was a glitch at the server. In any case, I'm requiring authentication once more, as you'll see.

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Until a few years ago, I never took MTA buses. The only exception was to take the crosstown bus (M86) through the Park to Broadway, where I'd change to the downtown IRT (the 1 train). The crosstown bus crawls through Yorkville; I outwalk it routinely, without even trying. But it does pick up beyond Lexington Avenue, and pretty soon you're crossing Central Park West.

Eventually, I discovered that the buses that run up and down the avenues move a lot more quickly than the crosstown bus, and I started taking the M15 down Second Avenue to 70th Street, which is by curious chance the address of most of my doctors. Coming back, though, is a different story. I'll take the bus sometimes, but I'm just as likely to grab a taxi, and, in fine weather, I'll walk along the river. Today, I actually walked several blocks out of my way, to the 68th Street IRT station (to catch the 6 train). Why? Even though I was a commuter for a brief seven years, a long time ago, I still feel fine waiting on a subway platform, and I still feel faintly ridiculous standing out in the street (even in the shelter) for a bus. There's another thing. The train you want is usually the only thing that's going to pass by; on the avenues, the urge to stare into the oncoming traffic for the sign of a bus is irresistible but also annoying. In the subway, I can read until I hear the approaching roar. In the bus shelter, I can't pay attention to anything but the monotonous and disappointing traffic.

I walked by Shakespeare & Co, which has a branch on Lexington between 68th and 69th. Last week, I stopped in and bought a couple of things, Consider the Lobster (David Foster Wallace) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (David Leavitt, on Alan Turing). I bought my own copy of Tauranac Maps's Manhattan: Block by Block A Street Atlas. This is an indispensable book for all persons who find themselves, for whatever reason and whatever length of time, on Manhattan Island. (It seems to be hard to get at the moment. The latest edition came out in 2004, but someone told Kathleen that a new edition was in the works and would be coming out soon - and that sounds about right.) Today, however, I walked right on by. Consider the Lobster is indeed very funny.

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The other night, I was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and coping with the tangents that shoot forth from Hannah Arendt's pages like guided missiles. I wonder if the New School offers a course in this book. I'd love to be guided through it by a seasoned professor. Quite aside from the main thrust of Arendt's thesis, there is much historical interest in this book that is about as old as I am. Arendt's contempt for the bourgeoisie, for example, strikes a quaint note. It's quaint precisely because I can remember the prevalence of such an attitude among "thinking" people, among whom bourgeois values and, more vehemently, bourgeois hypocrisy were invoked to explain everything that was wrong with the world.

I can no longer recall just what it was in Origins that triggered a sudden recognition: to wit, that, because the implicit template for journalism in American life is the sportswriter or -caster, reporters will always struggle to reduce current events to some sort of contest between two teams. They will also root for whichever team performs better (not necessarily the winning team). And for the simple reason that sports are value-free - teams have no 'content,' no non-game agenda - media rooting will always tend toward the amoral. Hence today's "liberal" media falls over itself presenting right wing elements in a positive light. Regardless of the programs that Republicans and Democrats stand for, the Republicans are obviously performing better in the "game of politics."

Whoa, you say. Just where did I get that bit about sportswriting as the template for American journalism? Hell knows. M le Neveu would call this another one of my "Egyptian beer" brainwaves. (I was right about that one, though.) But it is difficult to read political journalism without encountering the language of games.

Following a link from Joe-of-Joe.My.God's friend Aaron, I discovered a magnificent term of abuse at Steve Gilliard's The News Blog: "Vichy Dems." (Scroll to the bottom of the entry.) It's brilliant! In an ashen sort of way, of course, given that this is a mid-term election year.

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Kathleen woke up with a sore throat, and decided to take a sick day. I seem to be doing the same, by association.

In case you've thrown away the weekend's Times Magazine without opening it, here are links to two unusually interesting pieces. The first is Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino's essay proposing a replacement of jurisprudence of equality with one rooted in liberty. Where the former seeks to redress the inequities of the patriarchal culture from which we are emerging (a movement that Islamists have resolved, for the time being, to resist), the latter simply refuses to recognize any patriarchal values. Mr Yoshino's primary concern, as his title indicates, is "The Pressure to Cover," where "covering" is the tendency of individuals in outsider groups (black, lesbian and so on) to minimize their deviations from mainstream behavior and appearance. Current jurisprudence encourages covering by refusing to uphold discrimination charges brought by employees for, say, having been fired for wearing a skullcap while in uniform.

When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the "angry straight white man" reaction. A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn't racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help. But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control - wearing cornrows, acting "feminine" or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time. I have to mute my depressions, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my shyness, or my working-class background or my nameless anomie. I, too, am one of the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Why should legally protected groups have a right to self-expression I do not? Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?

I surprise these individuals when I agree.

The other piece, not intentionally related but oddly inverse, is about hikikomori, or the withdrawal of as many as a million Japanese teenagers and men from all social contact. Maggie Jones's "Shutting Themselves In" describes a disturbance that has taken root in Japanese culture, which presses young men to succeed while discouraging their parents from acknowledging failure. The "solution": to withdraw to one's bedroom. I was about three fourths of the way through the text when I realized that a friend of mine suffered from something very similar after a bad job experience (and, for all I know, he still does).

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We went to a marvelous party on Saturday night. It was given by a banker who wanted to celebrate a birthday in high style. Just under three hundred people made their way to a Park Avenue town house that currently houses a prestigious organization that, like most clubs and institutes and such, rents its facilities for parties. The facilities in question were pretty grand: five large rooms on two floors. In the ballroom, upstairs, a very accomplished big band provided the music for some very accomplished dancing; the host has taken up ballroom dancing with a vengeance, and old relics such as Kathleen and I quickly learned that our comfortabl