Daily Blague

If you're a fan of really bad reviews, then today is turkey day at The New York Times. Section E is stuffed with laughs - provided you're not a participant in the endeavors under review. Basic Instinct 2, Adam and Steve, Brick, and A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop all fare badly at the hands of Times critics Manohla Dargis, Stephen Holden, and Charles Isherwood. But the palm goes to Alessandra Stanley's response to "Liza With A 'Z'," the rebroadcast of Liza Minnelli's 1972 spectacular. It's weirdly worse than a bad review.  

As the orchestra plays the opening bars of Cabaret, the star strides onstage in a white Halston pantsuit and white feather boa and belts "Yes," and Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child," her eyes shuttered by spiky false eyelashes and her long, painted fingers stretched out like Struwwelpeter's. She was only 26 and flush with the box-office success of Cabaret and she was already beginning to look like a Liza Minnelli impersonator.

But that's not the best. Here's the best:

Of late, she has become a Michael Jackson-ish figure, too preposterous to function even as a nostalgia act.

There's something about "function" in that sentence that I'm just not going to go into. Enjoy!

Posted by pourover at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night, I watched Capote for the second time. I had thought a lot about the picture since first seeing it at the beginning of October. I went along with what seems to be the conventional view: Truman Capote kept killer Perry Smith alive only long enough to get his story about murdering the Clutter family, and then couldn't wait for Smith to be hanged so that he could finish In Cold Blood. Awareness of this exploitation undermined Capote afterward, and wrecked the rest of his life.

What I saw last night doesn't really alter that summary, but it adds an explanation of Capote's motivation: Why was he so taken by Perry Smith? At first uninterested in the killers - or even in their apprehension - Capote did a volte-face when he recognized a kindred spirit in Smith. This is easily confused with an erotic attachment, but I think that, in Smith, Capote encountered a sort of brother. Whatever fraternal feelings this recognition may have aroused would have been distinctly secondary, however, to the fascinating possibility that Smith might show him something about himself. That's why he had to get Smith's story. That's what led to his exploitation of the condemned man.

It's this same fascination that leads some adopted people to unearth their birth families. I am not in principle opposed to finding out, and although I have elected against it myself I have left open room for my daughter to do whatever can be done to supply her with medical information that might be useful (her health is perfect at the moment). What I've noticed, however, is that when the excitement of discovering blood relatives fades, genuine affection doesn't necessarily follow.

Capote puts it beautifully. As she's leaving his place in Spain, Capote tells Harper Lee that it's as though he and Perry Smith grew up in the same house. Then one day Perry went out by the back door, while he, Truman, went out by the front door. Such "brothers" would share a dark bond - why the different doors - but could one count on love?

Something else occurred to me. If the movie is to be believed, In Cold Blood is grotesquely mistitled. Finally giving Truman what he wants, Perry claims to have slashed Herbert Clutter's throat almost unconsciously, overwhelmed by the difference between himself and this "nice gentle man." That crime committed, he yielded to a second violent urge to finish off the rest of the family. There wasn't anything cold-blooded about the killings.

But then, by the time he heard Smith's story, Capote was already married to his title.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seemed about time to take this picture. The apartments on the upper floors have been empty for years; now, all the commercial tenants have departed. Although the squat turret at the corner suggests a bygone charm, the complex has become an eyesore, and nobody will miss it. It's to be replaced by something sleek, with, according to deafening gossip, a Whole Foods in the basement. The scaffolding and sidewalk shed will be going up any day now.

The Yorkville branch of Papaya King remains the Miracle of 86th Street in its one-storey corner building. (I'm standing in front of it.) In over 25 years in the neighborhood, I have never set foot inside the place. It's almost always very crowded, there's no place to sit, and I want my hot dogs to be fried.

In other real estate developments, Joe and I were talking a while back about having a drink at the Hi-Life some day; neither one of us had ever been there, and I'm a sucker for anyplace with a big neon martini glass on the marquee. But we dilly-dallied, and now the whole block of First Avenue, from 71st to 72nd (the Hi-Life was at the 72nd Street corner), will be coming down, to make room for a New York Hospital administration building. 

Posted by pourover at 08:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

For its fourth concert of the season (I missed the third, devoted to Clérambault), the Collegium offered a very interesting contrast between Handel and Telemann. I myself am crazy about Telemann, because he carries on the élan of Vivaldi. Vivaldi's effect upon Bach was momentous, but Bach completely transmuted Vivaldi's style into something serious and Saxon. Telemann, although his music never demonstrates the primacy of The Tune that Bach learned from Vivaldi, is the only one of the trio to display Vivaldi's exuberance.

Handel doesn't come into this discussion, because he learned about tunes, I suspect, later on in life, and from the English - certainly not from the composer he idolized as a young man, Arcangelo Corelli. That may be why I found the portion of Alexander's Feast (1736) that closed the concert...

Continue reading about the New York Collegium at Portico.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My mother-in-law called me up last night to ask for a recipe that she'd lost in transition. It comes from a wonderful old cookbook, A World of Menus and Recipes by a lady called Gertrude Bosworth Crum. Mrs Crum, who appears to have led an interesting life, ran Menus By Mail, a subscription service much used (it was said) by diplomats. When she published the book in 1970, it was rumored that Jacqueline Kennedy had relied on Menus By Mail, and that assured the book a success in certain quarters, notably my Jackie-holic mother.

In brisk, soigné prose, Mrs Crum pulls off the neat trick of appearing to address both the well-heeled and well-organized women who bought the book and their cooks. Efficiency is everything, and if there is a corner that can be cut, it's cut. Processed ingredients seem to appear in every recipe, and yet few of the recipes are budget productions. The menu from which the Beets in Aspic recipe is drawn is a "Weekend Luncheon" of Crab Salad (two pounds of crab meat - ouf! - 1½ cups mayonnaise and 1¼ cups mustard; simplicity itself), served with the beets ("If you have used a ring mold for your Julienne of Beets in aspic, fill the center of the ring with crab salad."), and followed by a Compote of Fresh and Cooked Fruits with Chocolate Cookies. I don't think that I've ever followed an entire menu.

Continue reading about Mrs Crum at Portico.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When did the name of Cees Nooteboom first catch my eye? I'm pretty sure that I took it to be the name of a woman, but that by the time I bought one of Mr Nooteboom's books, I knew better. That was in Amsterdam a couple of years ago, and the book was Allerzielen, or All Souls Day. Buying the novel in its original text was a characteristic act of folly. I know a bit of Nederlands, but not enough even to attempt a literary novel of such richness. But I was thinking of tackling the language seriously, which I did until I fell ill. When I got better, I was already spending Tuesday afternoons with my French prof; Nederlands was set aside. I still have Allerzielen, though.

And I have All Souls Day as well - Susan Massotty's translation. It's no longer in print, but I found a copy somewhere. When it arrived, it went into the gross fiction pile, and there it stayed for I don't know how long. I ought to read that, my superego whispered. You know what that leads to: prolonged procrastination. All Souls Day is a serious novel by an unknown writer who's not, at the moment, a topos of buzz.

Then my French kicked in. I don't mean the language, I mean the sérieux. All Souls Day went into the bedside fiction pile. I finally opened it up because it was the book at the bottom, and getting it out of the way would diminish the clutter.

I say all of this because it's a very typical instance of the skirmishes that aspiration and laziness wage for my attention.

Most concisely, All Souls Day is about the end of a long mourning. Arthur Daane, a cameraman who occasionally produces his own documentaries, lost his wife, Roelfje, and his son, Thomas, ten years ago, when their airliner crashed in Spain. Arthur knows how to keep busy, but his busyness has become a way of not moving on. We find Arthur on the streets of Berlin on a winter afternoon. Arthur's Berlin circle of friends includes Viktor, a sculptor who also hails from the Netherlands; Arno, a German philosopher; and Zenobia, Arno's Russian sister-in-law. Together with the proprietors of their two favorite restaurants, these people comprise Arthur's family. He has an apartment in Amsterdam, and a woman friend, Erna, who barrages him with advice, but Arthur has become "a traveler without baggage." Whether working on an exotic project or loafing around a favorite city, Arthur does not have a home. And he is in mourning.

The quality of this mourning is not probed; it is clearly something that Arthur tries not to bump up against, and he does not examine it. His wife and daughter seem, from time to time, to be in the same room, but they're not happy, because they can't get older. I hesitate to say that much, because this is by no means a work of magic realism or high-toned science fiction. All Souls Day is very firmly planted on the geography of Berlin. And Berlin doesn't need any special effects to serve as the matrix for the novels rich meditations. The scar left by the wall, the ruins of the Gedächtsniskirche, the brutalist cement housing projects in the East, these are all explored for what they can tell us about mortality.

Surely no other century had seen as much murder, slaughter, and genocide as this one. It was common knowledge; so there was no point in bringing it up. Perhaps the worst part was not just the killing itself - the attacks, the executions, the rapes and beheadings, the slaughter of tens of thousands of people - but the amnesia that set in almost immediately afterward, business as usual, as if it were a drop in the bucket to a world population of six billion, as if - and this fascinated him even more - humanity wasn't interested in individual names, only in the blind survival of the species. The woman who happened to be passing by when the bomb exploded in Madrid, the seven Trappist monks whose throats were cut in Algiers, the twenty boys gunned down before their parents' eyes in Colombia, the entire trainful of commuters hacked to death with machetes in a five-minute burst of orgiastic fury, the two hundred passengers on the plane that exploded above the sea, the two, three, or six thousand men and boys killed in Srebenica, the hundreds of thousands of women and children slain in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola. For one moment, a day, a week, they were front-page news, for several seconds they flowed through cables in every part of the globe, and then it began, the black, delete-button darkness of oblivion that from now on would only get worse. The dead would no longer have names. They would have been erased in the emptiness of evil, each in the separate moment of his or her horrible death.

The range of Arthur's thinking is but one of the elements that mark All Souls Day as a European novel. Its focus outward on the world, and not inward on the self, is another. An untutored reader might dismiss them as "intellectual" or even "idealistic," but to do so is to miss the warmth and humanity of Arthur's internal monologue. Warmth and humanity also characterize the restaurant conversations with his friends. Arthur does not say much; guarding against stabs of loss, he refrains from launching tangents or offering comprehensive explanations. On the rare occasions when he does speak at length, we're simply told that he spoke; we already know what he has to say. All of this comports further with Arthur's profession, which in turn drags him into the romantic encounter that gradually comes to support the narrative trajectory. All Souls Day may feel rambling and even directionless at times during a first reading, but it is a beautifully composed Big European Novel.

The romance is unromantic in ways that we have come to appreciate in European films. There is a much deeper respect for patches of resistance, and there is no underestimation of how difficult it is to reconcile desire with difficult personal history. The relationship that Arthur develops with a woman whom he runs up against in a café, improbably names Elik Oranje, starts out on a difficult note and only gets more difficult. It's a relationship between two hurt and wary people who, though each becomes quickly obsessed with the other, react in opposite ways to obsession. When American lovers behave like this, it's because they're empty and inexperienced, not the case with Arthur and Elik. The romance is "resolved" on the novel's very last page.

This is not a novel that can be discussed after a first read. I can recommend it, but I can't assess the details - and perhaps that's as it should be. All Souls Day is a novel that needs to be read a second time. I'm out on a very windy limb when I ask: Will I ever?

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

At The Guardian, John Mullan interviews Kazuo Ishiguro on the subject of Never Let Me Go. Mr Ishiguro says everything that I was trying to say last year, but much more clearly, and, obviously, with greater authority.

Posted by pourover at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The March/April issue of Foreign Affairs is focused on Iraq; I found Joel Rayburn's "The Last Exit from Iraq" - about the British pull-out in 1932 - interesting and instructive. But it was an essay by Alan S Blinder, an economics professor at Princeton, that gave me pause. "Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution" seems to be an excellent analysis of the Internet's impact upon the world of work, but one from which the author fails to draw coherent conclusions. Or so it seems to this untutored mind.

Prof Blinder sketches the industrial revolutions of the past. The first turned farmhands into factory workers, while the second, after World War II, turned factory workers into office workers. The third revolution, if that's what it is, will turn office workers into people whose clients and employers may never see them, owing to thousands of miles of physical distance. Prof Blinder notes, for example, that radiologists are already feeling a competitive challenge from India. Having thought long and hard about this revolution, he sketches a prediction of the kinds of jobs that Americans ought to be training for.

But first, some figures.

Contrary to current thinking, Americans, and residents of other English-speaking countries, should be less concerned about the challenge from China, which comes largely in manufacturing, and more concerted about the challenge from India, which comes in services. India is learning to exploit its already strong comparative advantage in English, and that process will continue. The economists Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, and T N Srinivasan meant to reassure Americans when they wrote, "Adding 300 million to the pool of skilled worker in India will take some decades." They were probably right. But decades is precisely the time frame that people thinking about - and 300 million people is roughly twice the size of the US work force.

Prof Blinder astutely draws a distinction between personal and impersonal services. Your barber and your divorce lawyer provide personal services involving face-to-face contact. Your bank and your answering service provide impersonal services. You want a barber who's nearby, but you don't care where your answering service is. The providers of personal services, according to Prof Blinder, have relatively little to worry about. It's the impersonal service providers whose jobs will be offshored.

This makes sense. It's in his what-to-do phase that Prof Blinder breaks down. Of course he is adamantly opposed to any attempt to hinder or prevent offshoring. Such interventions won't work - and perhaps Prof Blinder is right about that as far as today's world goes. But how long would today's world continue into a future populated by investors and their personal service providers? Prof Blinder never asks this question, but all of his (admittedly tentative) explanations point to the question.

Am I being naive? Am I wrong to assume that we don't already live in this world?

Prof Blinder blithely posits ever-falling transportation costs. It seems clear to me that we are going to have some serious reckoning about fuel allocation - the more serious the longer the reckoning is put off. How much of our oil to we commit to power generation? How much to industrial production (plastics, &c)? And how much to transportation? I don't believe in a free-market answer to this question, just as I don't believe in a free-market solution to the problem of smoking. Some things must be decided by society, pre-empting individual choice.

I was no socialist in my early life, and the extreme forms of socialism attempted by Russia, China, and other countries was demonstrably a failure. But the perils of the free market are not so modest, either. When are we going to hear reasoned, non-partisan discussion of them?

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From my sister, an old joke, well told.

A couple had only been married for two weeks when the husband, although very much in love, couldn't wait to go out on the town and party with his old buddies.

 So, he said to his new wife, "Honey, I'll be right back."

"Where are you going, Coochy Coo?" asked the wife.

"I'm going to the bar, Pretty Face. I'm going to have a beer."

The wife said, "You want a beer, my love?" She opened the door to the refrigerator and showed him 25 different kinds of beer, brands from 12 Different countries: Germany, Holland, Japan, India, etc.;

The husband didn't know what to do, and the only thing that he could think of saying was, "Yes, Lollipop... But at the bar...You know...they have frozen Glasses... "

He didn't get to finish t he sentence, because the wife interrupted him by saying, "You want a frozen glass, Puppy Face?" She took a huge beer mug out of the freezer, so frozen that she was getting chills just holding it.

The husband, looking a bit pale, said, "Yes, Tootsie Roll, but at the bar they have those hors d'oeuvres that are really delicious... I won't be long. I'll be right back. I promise. OK?"

"You want hors d'oeuvres, Poochie Pooh?" She opened the oven and took out 5 dishes of different hors d'oeuvres: chicken wings, pigs in blankets, mushroom caps, and pork strips plus smoked oysters.

"But my sweet honey... At the bar.... You know there's swearing, dirty words and all that..."

"You want dirty words, Cutie Pie? LISTEN UP CHICKEN SHIT! SIT YOUR ASS DOWN, SHUT THE HELL UP, DRINK YOUR BEER IN YOUR FROZEN MUG AND E AT YOUR HORS D'OEUVRES BECAUSE YOUR MARRIED ASS ISN'T GOING TO A DAMNED BAR! THAT SHIT IS OVER, GOT IT, JACKASS?"

And, they lived happily ever after. Isn't that a sweet story?

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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

It has become clear to me that I undertook this weekly review of the Book Review in order to find out what the Review is about. What's it for? Why do people read book reviews, and for whom are they written? What are the elements of a good book review? None of these questions were present to me when I started the feature last fall, but they've emerged as I've paid close regular attention to the publication, reading all of the reviews and not just the ones that interest me.

The principal purpose of a book review, it seems pretty clear, is to provide readers with some idea of what the book under review is like, and there are two reasons why people want this idea. The first, and more innocent, is the search for recommendations. "I'm looking for a book to read; what do you recommend?" I would say that no more than one person in fifty is such a reader. More common, and less innocent, is the search for inside information. "What can I learn about that book without reading it?" This information may or may not be used to enhance such a reader's conversation, but it is acquired with little or no intention of making a purchase. The Book Review allows its readers to stay roughly current with the latest important books - that's the idea, anyway. Defining "important" involves demographic calculations that don't interest me right now; on the whole, I think that the Times does a fairly good job of fulfilling its mission. Bearing in mind that no source of buzz can be comprehensive, the Book Review is a reliable provider of the commodity.

Book reviews have an important afterlife, however, and I often wonder how conscious reviewers are of it. In time, they become historical documents that reflect the Zeitgeist in which they were written. What did people think of Gone With The Wind when it was published? The easiest way to find out is to collect book reviews and seek a consensus. What this research will show, of course, is what professionally literate writers thought of the book, but I think that we can depend on editors to know their markets. Most book reviews that appear in The New York Review of Books would be wildly out of place in the Book Review. They're much longer, for one thing. They're more demanding, and they focus on more demanding books. And they're much less ephemeral than the reviews in the Book Review.

It is important to note the difference between a book review and a book report. Book reports are pedagogical devices designed to test literacy skills, and teachers grade the students who write them, not the writers of the subject books. I fear that many book reviewers, doubtless adepts of the form in elementary school, have not fully realized that grown-up readers are not looking for book reports.

Fiction & Poetry

First, the poetry. Aliki Barnstone has published a new translation of the poems of C P Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek (1863-1933) so often quoted by Lawrence Durrell. In his exemplary review, Brad Leithauser makes a case for Cavafy, concluding with a roster of poets whom he has profoundly influenced. The review grips the essence of Cavafy's aesthetic:

The poems themselves are like little rooms; most are of modest length, most are concerned with either private action or with scholarship's interior forays. Cavafy certainly was no nature poet. His poems give little indication that he ever saw with any clarity a tree or an animal or - despite Alexandria's maritime history - a seascape.

Mr Leithauser praises the translations, but explains that he still prefers earlier work by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, because their renderings give a better sense of "how Cavafy put his poems together."

Joyce Carol Oates's review of Some Fun: Stories and a Novella, by Antonya Nelson, is a classic book report. The stories and the novella are summarized - rewritten, in effect. Fragments of Ms Nelson's prose don't quite convey the feel of her prose; they're cut off too soon. I am not entirely sure that Ms Oates liked the book.

The stories of Some Fun are so similar in tone, characters and situation that they tend to overlap in the memory like a single story with numerous, proliferating subplots. This is domestic realism, with something of the aura, jarring and yet convincing, of the TV sitcom.

I think that that's positive.

Donald E Westlake's review of John Mortimer's new book, Quite Honestly, belongs to a genre of reviews that I have yet to find the name of. Perversity has something to do with its composition - the editor's or the reviewer's. Why does Mr Westlake feel called upon to make a big brouhaha (in a half-page review, no less) about differences between British and American English? Is it to disguise

... the problem that I'm having here? If I tell you much about the plot I'll give the whole thing away. There's an inevitability to it, to tell you the truth. Not exactly the inevitability of the Greek tragedies, a little more clockwork than that - which sounds awful, but isn't.

How about the inevitability of farce? Say "farce," and you don't have to apologize for saying something that sounds awful but isn't? This would have been a perfect occasion to some up the distinctly British type of funny novel at which Mr Mortimer is a pastmaster.

Leonora Todaro's review of Rose of No Man's Land, by Michelle Tea, is a much better piece.

With Rose of No Man's Land, Tea is trying to do for working-class teenage lesbians what S E Hinton's Rumble Fish and The Outsiders did for greasers and street-brawling tough guys in the 1970s and 80s: to let them be heard and felt.  ... with this novel, Tea moves forward into her imagination, reining in her story so it can buck free.

That's not only well done, but it persuades me, not so much to order the book, but to listen for other comments on what might, despite it area of interest, be a very good read.

This leaves David Leavitt's book-reportish review of The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters. It is difficult to resist the impression that Mr Leavitt's job is to say something nice about a cohabitant of his ghetto - another writer of "gay fiction." He tries, valiantly, counting, perhaps on the reader's coming to an early decision that he likes the book when in fact it's clear that he sees it as a failure.

The problem is Water's decision to use reverse chronology. ...

Indeed, by the time we reach the end (or is it the beginning?) of this otherwise estimable and moving book, we know so much more than the characters that our knowledge dilutes the impact of what should be the most dramatic section. For all the vigor and intensity of its prose, The Night Watch leaves us with the sense that both the reader's experience and the characters' lives have been manipulated to suit the author's design.

To which I'd add that I'm only too happy to be manipulated by a writer, as long as I'm never aware of it.

Nonfiction

I hope you've got a while.

On the cover, there's Paul Berman's cautious assessment of Francis Fukuyama's America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. With this book, Mr Fukuyama withdraws his allegiance to the neoconservative program that is ruining the country and parts of the world. One is reminded of David Brock's Blinded By The Right. It isn't always nice when former opponents come to share your point of view; you want to be sure. And Mr Berman is not sure.

The neoconservatives, he suggests, are people who, having witnessed the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break, like winning the lottery. Instead, the neoconservatives, victims of their own success, came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws of history, which were operating in their own and America's favor - a formula for hubris. This is a shrewd observation, and might seem peculiar only because Fukuyama's own "End of History" articulated the world's most eloquent argument for detecting within the collapse of Communism the deepest laws of history. He insists in his new book that The End of History ought never to have led anyone to adopt such a view, but this makes me think only that Fukuyama is an utterly unreliable interpreter of his own writings.

Mary Roach has some quibbles with Annie Cheney's  Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains, but she bestows the highest imaginable honor:

Like Jessica Mitford's American Way of Death, this book's combination of readability and investigative firepower will, one hopes, draw the broad readership and outrage needed to instigate change.

Dominique Browning, the chief editor at House & Garden, reviews Winifred Gallagher's House Thinking: A Room-By-Room Look at How We Live, and in the process tells me exactly what I want to know: House Thinking is as fizzily earnest as was Ms Gallager's The Power of Place (1994).

Gallagher speaks to many of the professionals of house thinking (thought they wouldn't think of themselves that way) - not just architects but also behavioral scientists and environmental psychologists. And this is where her book runs into trouble. There's something intriguing about a subculture devoted to studying the way we live at home, but do we really need a PhD to understand "environmental psychology's most important, and deceptively simple, principle regarding home: yours should meet your physical and psychological needs"?

In another strong review, Erica Wagner all but trashes Fernanda Eberstadt's Little Money Street: In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France, and you ought to read the piece for yourself.

You can learn a lot about Fernanda Eberstat in this book, and perhaps more than the author intended. But if you too wish to go in search of these Gypsies and their music, do as I did, and buy their CD.

Ouch! The other review that you have to read is Ron Powers's piece on Arnold Weinstein's Recovering Your Story: Proust Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison.

Before you know it, Weinstein is managing to make Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison sound like the editorial staff at Self magazine.

Funny stuff, and Mr Weinstein comes across better than you'd think.

James Reston Jr's Fragile Innocence: A Father's Memoir of His Daughter's Courageous Journey, gets a sympathetic review from Polly Morrice, but it's not a particularly inviting one. I can't what it was the Hillary Reston's, but a nonmedical term might be "permanent nightmare." Diane Johnson reviews The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism, by Ross King. There's a blooper: Ms Johnson writes that it was Meissonier, not Manet, who led the revolt that founded the Salon des Refusés. Otherwise, she gives this somewhat revisionist history moderately good marks.

King doesn't miss the character flaws of any of his large cast, and the effect is a meticulously detailed panorama not unlike one of Meissonier's grandest battlefield scenes.

I may find myself reading this book. Moving right along through the Kings, Will Blythe's review of Larry L King's In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor is pretty pungent, stressing Mr King's complete lack of objectivity.

Appropriately for a book in which enough alcohol is consumed to fill Long Island Sound, In Search of Willie Morris feels like a reminiscence spilled over a long night sitting at the bar - rambling, bawdy, score-settling, gossipy, partisan and sentimental with occasional bouts of weeping. There are even a few places where King seems to have fallen asleep next to his drink before lurching awake to resume his monologue.

Aside from making In Search of Willie Morris sound irresistible, that passage makes me mourn the great days of Esquire, of which Mr Blyte was literary editor for a spell.

On facing pages, Peter Beinart and Rick Lyman cover new books about - what, exactly? Politics? Electoral Engineering? Process? Policy? Let me begin by saying that I can't imagine why anyone would buy either Take It Back: Our Party, Our Country, Our Future, by James Carville and Paul Begala or Rebel-In-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W Bush. Mr Lyman wryly describes them as "fresh logs to stoke the nation's partisan furnaces." Crashing the Gage: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, by contrast, sounds almost worthwhile in Mr Beinart's hands. I ask myself, however, why the authors of this book aren't busy laying the foundations of a new party, organized entirely differently and run by altogether different personnel. Their book appears to stop just short of such audacity, but Mr Beinart catches a whiff of it.

It's possibly no coincidence that Moulitsas, the founder of the popular blog Daily Kos, did a stint in Silicon Valley. In his complaints about the Democratic establishment, he sounds like the head of Google describing General Motors: the party is slow, top-heavy and destined for obsolescence unless it makes a radical change in its culture.

Mr Beinert dwells on the authors' concession that they don't know which "common principles" are shared by Democrats. This is perhaps backward: it's the Democratic leadership that ought to leading their supporties in a common purpose.

If there's one book in this week's Review that I'm definitely getting, it's Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music, by English conductor Jane Glover. It is wrong to see a "feminine" quality in Mozart's music, when what's really there is an esteem for women. Reading Anthony Tommasini's review, it occurred to me that there are two strains of heterosexual men: those who really like women, and those who need women but don't like them. (I'd further posit that women who only care for the latter type are doomed to the same unhappiness that afflicts gay men who pursue straight lovers.) Mozart was assuredly in the former camp, as the briefest reading of his X-rated letters to Constanze make clear. Mr Tommasini praises Ms Glover's book but doesn't talk about it much; instead, he retells its story and then winds up, incredibly, with this:

Is it permissible any longer to say that only a woman could have written this refreshing and valuable book?

No, Mr Tommasini, it is not permissible. I can't believe the thought occurred to you.

At the other end of the musical spectrum - well, perhaps not quite the very end - is Karen Schoemer's Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with '50s Pop Music, reviewed, not entirely favorably, by singer Nellie McKay. Great Pretenders profiles seven pop singers who specialized in "unspoken passion, earnest preachers at the altars of puppy love," among them Patti Page, whose recording of "You Belong To Me" was a great favorite of mine when I was about ten and just beginning to be interested in music. (Nowadays, however, I'm likelier to listen to the great Yao Li sing it. You can, too.) Despite her reservations, Ms McKay concludes that Great Pretenders is "a truly unique background to a grossly underappreciated era in American music."

Lucy Ellman doesn't care for My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud, by Janna Malamud Smith, and has no trouble saying why.

Smith should be asking why she would want to write a book about a novelist when she seems to have so little idea of how or why fiction comes into being.

I know that critiques of American intelligence gathering is a hot and important topic, but David Holloway's moderately favorable review of Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence From Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea, by Jeffrey T Richelson, simply makes me want to turn the page. Mr Holloway does not convey an idea of the book that he would have liked this one to be. Indeed I had a hard time distinguishing what Mr Holloway, as a specialist in this area, was reporting from what he might be interjecting. Reviews that try to tell a story and pass judgment in the same passages often lose me.

All right, I've been at this for nearly three hours, and Short Shrift is all that Pets in America: A History, by Katherine C Grier (reviewed by Alida Becker) and Glory Road: My Story of the 1966 NCAA Basketball Championship and How One Team Triumphed Against the Odds and Changed America Forever [Oh, please!], by Don Haskins with Dan Wetzel (reviewed by Gerald Eshkenazi), are going to get from me. Who slept with whom?! Nor will I discuss Blake Eskin's Essay, "Books to Chew On." Is it permissible to say that literal bibliophagy is a topic that doesn't belong in the Book Review?

Like, I mean, Yikes.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On my way to pay for a painting, driving an armored minivan with a few million dollars in the back seat, I encountered a Brinks (armored) truck. I drove straight into it, to see what would happen. There you have my entire childhood! What happened was this amazing ka-chunk as the armor was activated (whatever that means). Nobody was traveling fast, and I emerged unscathed. I knew I'd done something wrong, but it amounted, in the dream, to no more than an inconvenience. The dream changed the subject: in the next scene, I was being presented to the seriously leftist aunt of an old friend. She was impatient with me - doubtless because of my "troublemaking" entry.

Posted by pourover at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday's entry about Rachel Corrie rang in my ears all through V for Vendetta, James McTeigue's shooting of the Wachowski Brothers' latest output. The story is taken from a graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and I understand that Mr Moore is not happy with the adaptation. That's how it goes in movieland. Twenty years from now, someone will make a period, pitch-perfect film of the original.

Interestingly, V for Vendetta is true to the airless and remote atmosphere of most graphic novels and their comic book predecessors. There is a stunning want of windows with a view. One ascends from the Underground to a rooftop in a matter of moments. Hugo Weaving, the actor playing V, never shows his face, but everything is done to vary the effects of light and shadow on his mask. The important shots seem taken from drawn frames. Except for a heartbreaking episode in the middle of the film - meant to show England's slow but sure slide into dystopia - V for Vendetta recycles the same compositions, with the same characters (the people watching television, for example). There is a strict economy to the feel of the picture; only certain emotions and responses are interesting. That's both characteristic of graphic novels and the marker of a sick society.

The film tells its (confected) backstory very well, so I won't. It's about how a democracy became - well, a dictatorship, certainly, but not a totalitarian state. People seem to be leading recognizable lives. Despite the future setting, the clothes are pretty much what you'll see on the street today. The filmmakers have been careful, in other words, to show these complicit citizens as folks like us. Out of fear, they - we - let the fascists take over. (In the movie, the United States has sunk into a ruinous civil war and has run out of almost everything.) I jumped aboard the Impeach Bush bandwagon about fifteen minutes into the show; we'll see how that lasts before I say more, and if I don't, it didn't. Chancellor Adam Sutler (John Hurt) rules England from a bunker, and until the very end, all we see of him is his craggy, badly-barbered face, and, behind it, his lower teeth. He's about as pleasant as a scorpion. In all but one of his scenes, he addresses his principal lieutenants from a giant TV screen.

One of these is Dascomb (Ben Miles), the director of broadcasting. Another is Finch (Stephen Rea), the chief of police. The KGB cognate appears to be Creedy (Tim Pigott-Smith, and I hope he gets counseling for playing despicable characters again and again.)

Who is V? Well, he is a comic book hero. Although mortal, he has a supernatural way with knives, and he can really take a beating. He likes to weave Shakespeare into his punctilious conversation. He rescues Evey (Natalie Portman) when she is intercepted by a couple of Creedy's toughs after curfew, on her way to dinner with Dietrich (Stephen Fry), a TV comedian. V takes the pretty young woman to his lair, and keeps her there for a few days. Little by little, troubled pasts emerge. Evey's parents were executed as dissidents. V was subjected to malignant biological tests that eventually went awry, rendering him a superhero. (Who wants to know?) 

The most interesting performance is Stephen Rea's, as his Finch shifts his allegiance. Mr Rea's perennially sad face registers the stale defeat of life in a broken society. Rupert Graves, as Finch's aide, Dominic, looks sharp and still somehow boyish.

Mr McTeigue, who has directed many second units, knows what he's doing, and V for Vendetta barrels along to the final uplifting fireworks. I don't know how often I'll want to watch this movie again, but it gets its important message across with great power.

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

When Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer two years ago, I shrugged. It was awful, but Corrie was a troublemaker. I don't like troublemakers. Don't try telling me that troublemaking is effective. Patriots on the right can wail that it was lack of support at home that cost us the Vietnam War, but this is nonsense. The war ended when it became clear that it could never be won. Now we're on a similar trajectory in Iraq, only, this time, opponents of the war are careful to honor soldiers, not revile them. To people in power, demonstrators are unarmed terrorists - and all the more contemptible for that.

I say this knowing that the struggle for equal civil rights for all Americans required a lot of troublemaking. Trying to figure out how to respect people who fight for a good cause with my bone-deep, profoundly bourgeois dislike of disorder keeps me busy. 

I make an exception, very characteristic, for troublemakers who are very amusing, but I don't believe that there was anything amusing about the idealistic twenty-three year-old Washingtonian who suffered such a horrific death. Whether I'd change my mind about Rachel Corrie is pretty much a matter of how I felt about My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Like most people, I didn't even know that a production had been slotted, if not scheduled, until the day its cancellation was announced. It was dreadfully discomfiting news, because it seemed that unnamed "Jewish interests" were pushing for censorship. Perhaps the play ought to have opened somewhere else in the United States. When I was growing up, they used to say that there were more Jews in the Metropolitan Area than there were in Israel. Is that still true? I somehow think not. But anti-Semitic folks can expect to be made very uncomfortable in the Big Apple.

And, as Bernard-Henri Lévy asserted at the end of January, anti-Semitism = anti-Zionism. By a quick equation, Rachel Corrie = terrorist supporter. In "Why These Tickets Are Too Hot For New York," Philip Weiss's clear-eyed account of the very much ongoing Corrie affair, in the current (April 3) edition of The Nation, playwright Tony Kushner explains his own reluctance to step forward in to denounce the New York Theatre Workshop's self-censorship, attributing it to fatigue. In part, he has just been through a similar brouhaha about Munich, which he co-wrote. But the longer perspective is daunting.

There is a very, very highly organized attack machinery that will come after you if you express any kind of dissent about Israel's policies, and it's a very unpleasant experience to be in the cross hairs. These aren't hayseed from Kansas screaming about gays burning in hell; they're newspaper columnists who are taken seriously. ... [They leave challengers] overwhelmed and in despair - you feel like you should just say nothing.

When Tony Kushner is too worn out by wingnuts to speak out, I conclude that my canary is about to give up the ghost, and that I'm in trouble.

Regardless of what I feel about Rachel Corrie, a play that memorializes her words - drawn from her diaries, the show professes her to be its playwright - should be mounted without hindrance. At a minimum, the NYTW's director, James Nicola, owes us a list of the names that brought pressure upon him not to open My Name Is Rachel Corrie.

Readers of Mr Weiss's story will discover that there is a constellation of New York theatre blogs. Oui bien sûr! The impatient can start reading Parabasis, Superfluities, and Playgoer right now.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wednesday is the day for refreshing the "Tune de la Semaine" feature of the Daily Blague (under the thumbnail to the right), but I didn't get round to it yesterday. I don't call attention to the Tunes as a rule, but I'm making an exception this week because I'm hoping that someone will tell me just who Karl Zéro is. His cheeky retro album, Songs for Cabriolets and Otros Tipos de Vehiculos is one of my favorites: beautifully produced but totally preposterous.

Posted by pourover at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sensible people around the world ought not to miss V X Sterne's spot-on confession about high-end California car culture. You are what you drive! Just as my part of the world, Manhattan, is an antidote to American follies, Southern California is their vector. If you're out there wondering how George W Bush got to be president, perhaps this essay will give you a clue. (But thanks to V X for being so amusing about it all!)

Posted by pourover at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, I was exhausted. I could not really get up, and didn't make the bed until after dark. The dishwasher remained full of Monday night's dishes. I got dressed several hours after I cleaned up. I kept falling asleep over All Souls Day, the mighty Cees Nooteboom's novel, and it certainly wasn't the writer's fault. I re-read an unwittingly alarming piece in Foreign Affairs; I'll be sharing my thoughts about that presently. And then I watched Kinsey. I expected it to be distracting, and it was.

My first thought, after rewinding the disc to prove that, yes, that was Lynn Redgrave playing the "Final Interview Subject," was that I wish that everybody felt the way I do about other people's actual sex lives. I don't want to hear about them. That's my sex hang-up. If everybody shared it, then nobody would care much what other people did (and they'd know better not to entertain comparative guesswork), and, in that case, Kinsey's research would never have been necessary. Nobody would make anyone else's life a hell by proscribing certain acts. Aside from protecting everyone from any involuntary sexual encounters, society would simply not recognize sex. This would greatly improve flirting.

Sex for me becomes plumbing when I am not personally involved, and hearing about other people's plumbing alienates me from myself. We all work more or less the same, it's true, but unfortunately our nervous systems don't recognize this fact.

I suppose I'd better note that none of the foregoing means that I'm against sex education! On the contrary. Perhaps everybody ought to flip through the Kama Sutra and The Joy of Gay Sex. Nor am I against sex writing that's really well-written, where the artistry interposes a screen of discretion.

In any case, Kinsey made me squirm, because it was constantly running along the knife's edge of dissociating love from sex. Lots of people can keep the two distinct, but lots of people can't, and almost everyone around Kinsey seems to have discovered that the ability to do so can vanish in an instant, leaving dreadful hurt. The performances were as marvelous as everyone said when the movie came out, and the film was beautifully shot. But there was one expectation that Kinsey turned into a conclusion: I wouldn't want to watch it with anyone else in the room.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I share Maureen Dowd's indignation: if Harry Samit can provide evidence of the seventy memos that he sent to FBI superiors on the subject of Zacarias Moussaoui, then David Frasca and Michael Maltbie should be terminated at once. These gentlemen were the recipients of the memos, but declined to take action because to do so would be "troublesome" for the Bureau. Makes me feel safe and protected.

It's heartwarming, but not satisfying, to read further that, according to an "administration official," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "does not hold the same sway in meetings anymore," but is regarded "as an eccentric old uncle who is ignored." One imagines an entire cabinet of eccentric old uncles, all being ignored. What a can-do country we live in.

In the Business Section, there's a dark little story about the so-called Wright Amendment, enacted some thirty years ago to stunt the growth of Southwest Airlines. Moral: democracy works, eventually. But O that Lone Star State. The Texans are different.

Posted by pourover at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The other night, while Kathleen was having a long nap, I went surfing. I seem to spend most of my days surfing the Blogosphere, but at that moment on Sunday, I was very relaxed. Dinner was as good as made.

I opened the bookmark folder marked "AAA." The blogs linked from here are the ones that, at the moment, interest me - and the ones that I've already listed on my blog roster. Lots of sites look interesting but don't hold my attention, or lose it altogether with infrequent entries. It's much easier and less embarrassing to remove them from the privacy of the AAA folder than it is to delete them from the published roster.

Conversational Reading is a service blog that I don't know enough about yet to list it among the Utilities, but I check it often and usually get something out of what Scott Esposito has to say. On Sunday, I scrolled down to this very brief entry and bit. I read the piece about William H Gass's The Temple of Texts, and was convinced that this was a book that I'd have to read. I kept reading down the blog, taking time out to learn something about Michael Smith, the owner of CultureSpace. Eventually, I reached the entry about a cut from Herbie Hancock's Inventions and Dimensions (1963). Mr Smith heard the number at a record store and was immediately taken by it.

The tune that caught my ears was "Succotash"; it begins with a 6/8 melody that makes you feel as if you're standing on a precipice. The sense of abandon, especially in the song's structure, is the result of Hancock's eager, if somewhat conservative, foray into the jazz avant garde. He assembled the great bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Willie Bobo, and percussionist Osvaldo Martinez and told them they could play whatever they wanted within the very basic boundaries he set for each song, none of which, save one, were written beforehand. "I didn't tell Paul what chords to use," Hancock said of "Succotash" (in the original liner notes), "because I didn't know what they were to be myself. All he and the musicians knew was the time signature. The melody and the form of the piece developed spontaneously." Hancock employed this off-the-cuff approach to music after working with free-jazz experimentalist Eric Dolphy just a year before. And like the playing, listening itself becomes an exploratory experience. "There's no telling what's going to happen," Hancock said. "In music, all things are possible."

Several years ago, I was standing by the stereo at a cocktail party. Prominent among the litter of jewel boxes was a boxed set: Herbie Hancock: The Complete Blue Note Sixties Sessions. (It appears to be out of print.) Lust and ignorance convinced me that I must own this six-disc set, even though I only knew of only one of the albums therein collected, Maiden Voyage. One of Kathleen's LPs, and not one that I'd listened to much. But the Blue Note package was exactly what a magisterial jazz album would look like if such an article were wanted. I had to have it.

It was much more Hancock than I could chew. I listened to one of the discs in the set for a while and then put the set aside. It was never hidden away, and it often reproached me. In vain. Until Sunday.

It occurred to me that "Succotash" might be on Sixties Sessions, and indeed it is. It's the seventh of nine cuts on Disc 2. I prepared to stand on a precipice.

But instead, I wondered if I'd lost my left speaker. The racket coming out of it sounded somewhere between typing in another room and mashing up plastic wrap. It is produced by Mr Martinez's guiro. It was so novel that I really didn't pay much attention to the rest of the performance. I found the piece interesting, but not interesting enough to play again. I let the disc play on while I continued with FreeCell.

FreeCell is an ideal device for capturing interesting music, because it lets me continue to hear what's playinig without paying attention. Good hooks will reach out and recapture that attention. Somewhere in the middle of "Triangle," the eighth cut on Disc 2 of Sixties Sessions, my ears perked up enough to note that Mr Hancock was really rolling, displaying enormous and well-honed technique. "Triangle" comes in three parts, and the beat of the second and third parts obsessively highlights the piano virtuosity. Happily, I can play FreeCell without paying attention. "Triangle" mesmerized me.

And "Mimosa," the final cut on the disc, came through as a deluxe bonbon of Latin jazz, svelte and cut on the bias.

I was immensely grateful to Mr Smith for the prodding me to listen to this music, even though I assessed "Succotash" rather differently and even though I preferred the two following songs. And, for once, the narcissism of small differences wasn't working. I had no desire to say anything but "thank you" to Mr Smith. There was no pressure to launch a super-persuasive version of my response in an attempt to convert Mr Smith to my point of view. Was I really that relaxed?

Talking about the experience after dinner last night, I hit on what underlies my relaxation. The Blogosphere has begun to teach me that I don't have to fight to have certain discussions. I've known very few people, in person, who share my interests (I've known very few people, period), and the effort to turn a conversation in my direction used to be so much trouble that on the few occasions when I succeeded I'd be talking, by the time I had the floor, at full throttle, a boiler of self-assertion no matter how politely masked. I genuinely wanted to know what other people thought, but I was too worked up to listen, and any discord triggered debate. I still get worked up from time to time, but the occasions are becoming rarer. Blogging has taught me, I think, to listen. I don't have to fight to get interesting discussions going. I can listen in on others'.

Thank you, CultureSpace. 

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For weeks, I've been listening to ancient recordings of Bach's Keyboard Concerti. They're not as old as I tend to think they are, but they completely antedate modern performance practices. And yet they sound great.

They were made in Vienna, in 1958 (the solo concerti) and 1964 (the multiples). I Solisti di Zagreb, led by Antonio Janigro, with Anton Heiller and others at the keys. How exotic that name sounds - "I Solisti di Zagreb." I can't tell if they're still going, because their site is in Croatian. I see that I have to do some research: were these Yugoslavian exiles working in Vienna, or did they travel to the West to make their recordings?

The recordings have a driven, dramatic quality that I like in this music. When the music's in the minor, I'm reminded of horror films. There was a time when I thought that the Concerto for Four Harpsichords in a, BWV 1065 would make the perfect score for a Dracula movie. (It's a transcription of the last concerto from Vivaldi's L'estro armonico.) There is a spooky quality that one doesn't ordinarily associate with Bach. Perhaps it's worth mentioning that I first heard these works at a time when harpsichords were beginning to be used by soundtrack composers.

I was crazy about harpsichords in those days, so much so that I built my own clavichord from a kit (harpsichord kits were too expensive). But I take the view nowadays that everyone from Bach to Mozart would have killed to play on Beethoven's Broadwood. Get this dinky tinkly thing out of here! Wanda Landowska, the pioneer of harpsichord revival, used to say, "You play Bach your way, and I'll play Bach his way." I think she's mistaken about what Bach's way would have been if he had been given the choice. The keyboard concerti, in any case, are the only works by Bach that I can bear to listen to on the harpsichord; conversely, I can't stand to hear them played on pianos. Clunk-eeee. But the piano is the only instrument for the solo keyboard music. I'd give anything to have Keith Jarrett's recording of the Goldberg Variations on a piano - if he would make it. (He has recorded the work on the harpsichord.) His piano recording of several of Handel's keyboard suites is, to my mind, the gold standard of Taste.

Ah, here's the movement that's playing when Michael Caine rams Barbara Hershey up against the record player, making a frightful scratch (Hannah and Her Sisters).

As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, MHS has made these recordings available

Posted by pourover at 01:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

When I finally woke up this morning, the black dog was panting at my side. I'd had a bad dream, which was bad enough, but the taste of Diet Coke - my soda of choice, but not first thing in the morning, thank you - was in my mouth. I felt existentially null.

So I skipped the first section of the Times for the nonce and went straight to the Metropolitan Diary. Here I found six short stories drawn from True Life. In the fifth one, a woman got lost in Queens while trying to change Interstates. (She made the Sherman McCoy mistake - which I don't believe any genuine New Yorker would dream of doing, Mr Wolfe - of getting off at the next exit and looping back.) When she asked a policeman in a squad car for directions, he did the right thing, the only thing, the thing that I hope I'd do in his place: he told her to follow him.

I have no idea how drivers who grew up somewhere else ever learn their way around New York's tangle of roadways. Simply aiming a car in the right direction is enough of a challenge for those of us who know all too well that we're going to have to move through four lanes of Triborough Bridge in order to get to "Downtown NY," as the pathetic little sign puts it. When Kathleen and I had a house in Connecticut, I would begin my instructions with the assumption that visitors could get themselves to the south end of IH 684 in one way or another. That's almost ten miles beyond the city limits.

Two of the Metropolitan Diary stories involve small children and the darnedest things that they say. In one, a little boy asks the denizens of a senior center, "How do you get to be old?" It sounds almost like a wish. My answer would have been, "Continue breathing and wait," I don't know how old I was when I finally understood that I would really grow up some day. It would just - happen! I couldn't wait, and now look what happened. I've got as many years as Heinz used to have varieties.

(That's the first time that I've made that quip, but I've got an awful feeling that it's not going to be the last.)

In other story, a little girl, recently transplanted from the city to New Jersey, asks her mother, "Do I have a New York accident?" This reminds me of my childhood dream of owning a set of "Resonance" chessmen. (I never got them, but that was okay, because my obsession eventually taught me that they were pretty cheesy.) It also reminds me of how often I was told, when I went to school in Indiana, that I had an English accent. O were it so! I'd think to myself.

Then there's the correspondent who betrays his alien status by thinking that he's overheard someone order "a Kofi Annan bagel." Proximity to the United Nations is no excuse.

As for the story about the hero on the subway, it speaks loudly for itself. If only God would advise his churchgoing adherents that their selfishness gives him a bad name!

Posted by pourover at 01:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich at least got some jobs. They were lousy, no-collar jobs that didn't quite support her. She lived on the margin of poverty and reported a lot of her co-workers' very serious headaches. The grit was bearable partly because of her humor, but also because you knew that the author was going to experience a happy ending - you were holding proof, in the form of a printed book, in your hand. This good feeling is absent from Ms Ehrenreich's account of trying to get a better, white-collar job, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, because she never gets a job to begin with. The only people she meets are sadly laid-off people and the hucksters who "teach" them how to find their way back to work. The futility noted in the subtitle suffuses the entire book. There is still plenty of mordant humor. But there is also plenty of despair.

It's not easy to break into a line of white-collar work without some serious educational channeling. Ms Ehrenreich, an investigative reporter, figures that she can find something in reporting's evil twin, publicity. She legally resumes her maiden name and cobbles together a plausible resume. She devises a schedule, which ends every afternoon with a trip to the gym,

as recommended by all coaches and advice-giving web sites. I would work out anyway, but it's nitce to have this ratified as a legitimate job-search activity. In fact, I find it expanding to fill the time available - from forty-five minutes to more than an hour a day. I may never find a job, but I will, in a few more weeks, be in a position to wrestle and job competitors to the ground. On the downside, I have no clue as to how to use the gym as a networking opportunity. With whom should I network? The obviously unemployed fellow who circles the indoor track for at least an hour a day? The anorexic gal whose inexplicable utterances on the Stairmaster are not, as I first hoped, attempts to communicate but an accompaniment to the songs on her iPod? No matter how many inviting smiles I cast around the place, my conversations never seem to get beyond "Do you mind if I work in?" and "Whoops, I guess that's your towel."

As this passage suggests, the business of looking for a job involves a lot of pretense - and very active pretense at that. I'm not talking about the bland politeness with which I navigate formal social settings. I'm talking about always appearing to upbeat and interested in other people. For a happy few, such behavior comes ...

Continue reading about Bait and Switch at Portico.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

My correspondent, Empress in Pittsburgh, sent me a link that has been keeping my cheeks wet (I cry when I'm amused). "Microsoft designs the iPod package."  Does anybody know where the music came from? It's so - catchy-Khatchaturian! And I know I've heard it before. 

Posted by pourover at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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

Fiction & Poetry

First, the poetry. Eric McHenry doesn't like Dave Smith's Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992-2004.

Immediacy may be what Smith is after, but he achieves very nearly its opposite - a halting, stilted speech that substitutes accumulation for arc, a sort of rhythmless repetitiveness for the "sentence-sounds" that mattered so much to Robert Frost. "A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung." Frost wrote. "You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but - it is bad for the clothes.

That's a lovely image, Frost's is, and I'm grateful for the encounter. Mr McHenry does exploit his bad review of Dave Smith as an occasion to say some very nice things about the poetry of the late William Matthews.

David Orr, in "On Poetry," deplores the proliferation of poetry prizes. I'm not sure that I understand the full measure of his words, but I like this:

With the fading of transcendent ideals in certain areas of American life comes the inevitable fading of the dream of unsullied, undying art - and the nostalgic desire for prizes that remind us of that dream, if nothing else.

The occasion for Mr Orr's essay is a "Neglected Master Award," concocted by, among others, the Library of America. The first volume in this series (itself an award of sorts) goes to Samuel Menashe. The bit of verse that's quoted in the essay is very attractive indeed. Mr Orr notes that Mr Menashe belongs to the "austere Dickinsonian school."

There are seven novels this week. Collectively, the views make me wonder if there's a point to writing up novels just because they're new. Each of the reviews is more book report than critique, and each of them fails to quote enough original text for a reader of the Book Review to assess the novelist's command of sentence-sounds. Sam Lipsyte (author of Home Land) really likes Chris Abani's Becoming Abigail: A Novella, but instead of showing us why, he falls back on sketching the novella's (grim) story. Megan Marshall's review of A Million Nightingales, by Susan Straight, is equally enthusiastic and a little less lame in that it appraises Ms Straight's grasp of the race and gender issues that naturally rise in a story about a light-colored slave girl in antebellum Louisiana.

Straight's book is a deep consideration of the servitude all women experienced then - and, in some ways and some places, continue to experience even now.

But the bits of text that are quoted all function as book reports: evidence of plot points. Susan Cokal's review of Dara Horn's The World To Come is mystifying rather than interesting. The plot hangs on the provenance of a small painting by Marc Chagall.

No single character can unlock the secrets of the Chagall because the answers lie both too far back in history and too far into the future - the "world beyond" this life, which Horn depicts as a kind of ethereal mixer where old souls meet new ones, who learn from them before being born. This realm of the spirit is also the place where art may take us, and Horn offers sly reminders that we may not like what we find there.

This is all very teasing, but I don't have time to scratch my head over it. If I'm not puzzled by Andrey Slivka's review of The Woman Who Waited, by Andreï Makiine (translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan), that's because I've read the novelist's first book, Dreams of My Russian Summers. Mr Slivka's book report makes the new book sound unintelligible. While it praises "the dreamy lusciousness of Makine's prose images," it offers only a pair of thumbnails, not quotes.

Three novels get short shrift (half a page - admittedly better than a roundup). Alexander McCall Smith, author of the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series (and other books), really likes Passarola Rising, by Azhar Abidi - and spends a surprising number of words saying just that. Comparisons to Candide are intriguing, especially as Voltaire turns up in this historical fantasy. Why does it sound like something that would make a better read in French? Dawn Drzal really likes Hilma Wolitzer's The Doctor's Daughter, but seems content to rely on fans who have already read Ms Wolitzer's previous fiction (Hearts and others) to generate their own enthusiasm.

In the only unenthusiastic review, Max Byrd is tepid at best about The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, by Dominic Smith. He likes the first couple of chapters, but wonders why Mr Smith has changed so many of the facts in Daguerre's life and then observes that "Daguerre's compulsions never generate much urgency."

Aren't these reviewers being paid enough?

Nonfiction

On the cover this week is Alan Brinkley's frightened review of American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century, by Kevin Phillips. There isn't anything in the review that regular readers of the Daily Blague won't have read right here, but it's nice to see that the alarm is spreading and perhaps getting louder. Mr Brinkley concludes thus:

There is little in American Theocracy that is wholly original to Phillips, as he frankly admits by his frequent reference to the work of other writers and scholars. What makes this book powerful in spite of the familiarity of many of its arguments is his rare gift for looking broadly and structurally at social and political change. By describing a series of major transformation, by demonstrating the relationships among them and by discussing them with passionate restraint, Phillips has created a harrowing picture of national danger that no American reader will welcome but that none should ignore.

Buy the book! And give it to someone who needs it when you're done.

Now we need a laugh. And Walter Kirn gives us one - a bushel, actually, in his review of Manliness, by Harvard Professor (of Government) Harvey C Mansfield. The review is acute and funny, and you've got to read it for yourself. But here's a little preview:

After a section on the history of "the great explosion of manliness that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries" (an image that gives even me, a straight man, erotic chills), it's time for Mansfield to stop preheating the oven and cook up the goose he's already got trussed and cleaned: the feminists.

The cheesy photo accompanying the review is wrong in so many ways that it's almost right. On the facing page, Budd Schulberg (author of What Makes Sammy Run) writes about Dave Kindred's dual biography, Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship. The two lives belong(ed) to Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali. This certainly looks like the one sports book so far that it might be interesting (for me) to read, and in Mr Schulberg's opinion it's clear and candid, notwithstanding the author's friendship with the boxer.

A note at the beginning state's the author's intention: "My ambition was to recover Muhammad Ali from mythology and Howard Cosell from caricature." With the Niagara of words that has been pouring over these two superstars for more than 40 years, that's a heady assignment. But Kindred is up to it. Mission accomplished.

Another biography, Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova, by Elaine Feinstein, is everything that it oughn't to be. Olga Grushin holds it in such contempt that she won't use Ms Feinstein's translations of the poems - except to expose them as shoddy. Ms Grushin refers interested readers to Akhmatova's memoirs. Gossipy and hyperdetailed, the book "lacks depth."

When Akhmatova doe