Underbelly

Governor Brewer: If You Can't Stand the Heat, Stay in the Kitchen

2012-01-27T15:27:00.000-08:00

When in the blue blazes did Arizona Governor Jan Brewer mean, saying that she "felt unnerved" when the President gave her some pushback over the way she treated him in her book? Did she expect him to punch her lights out?

If she wants to learn about "unnerved," she might consult her near neighbor, Gabby Giffords. Also for advice on grace under strain.

Happy 256, Wolfgang

2012-01-27T08:36:00.000-08:00

Nun, komm!
Ach ja!

Republican Politics: a Footnewt

2012-01-26T20:23:00.000-08:00

I dunno, may be that the Newt mentum has gone out of the Newt bag before I begin to write (translated: I didn't watch the debate), but I can't resist one parting shot. The subject for the moment is the great sage of Muncie, R. Emmett Tyrrell and his lament that Newt is "our Bill Clinton."

No, wait.The point is he's right, more or less. Newt is Bill Clinton: a flesh-pressing mesomorphic volcano of ideas, some actually good, with a shock of white hair and only the dimmest notion of connubial fealty. Hell, until Clinton had his bypass, they could have worn the same suits. Maybe they did wear the same suits: chances are either one of them would pick up whichever was handy and built to fit, no matter who happened to leave it lying about.

No, don't get me wrong: Clinton can make me tear my hair out, but as between the two it's no contest. Someone said that Newt is a dumb guy's idea of what it is to be a smart guy. Clinton, who really is smart, gets credit from the voters when he is most acting like trailer trash. Maybe we get to the point if we say that Newt is a Republican's idea of what it is to be Bill Clinton.

I really don't want to spend ten minutes locked in an elevator with either of them, though.

Yom Kippur Meditation

2012-01-26T13:53:00.000-08:00

Here's (what I am told is) a Yom Kippur meditation I just stumbled across:

If some messenger were to come to us with the offer that death should be overturned, but with the one inseparable condition, that birth should also cease; if the existing generation were given the chance to live forever, but on the clear understanding that never again would there be a child, or a youth, or first love, never again new persons with new hopes, new ideas, new achievements; ourselves for always and never any others—could the answer be in doubt?

No. I'd say no doubt.

What Pundits Will Get Wrong

2012-01-25T13:13:00.000-08:00

Tod Kelly kinda liked the SOTU which, he believes, sets him apart from most of the punditry. No particular news there, but let me pick up on the punditry point. Tod says:

One of the tricks to being a good pundit is the ability to be clever. Being clever allows a pundit to put unique spins on the ordinary, and to describe things in ways that make them tasty and easily digestible. On the whole, this is a good thing. But part of the risk with being clever is that you have a tendency to over think things – (I do this a lot) – and when you over think things you sometimes find that even though you were sure you were almost to Vegas, you’re somehow just pulling into Amarillo. This is why Obama confuses so many pundits on the right and the left, despite the fact that there’s just not a lot of mystery there.

I'd drink to that, except perhaps that last where he talks about why Obama confuses so many pundits. I suspect it it why any object of punditry confuses the pundits, and I will generalize: specialist always differ from amateurs. That's why so many Booker Prize novels are unreadable, why nobody much loves modern opera, and why architectural prizewinners are leaky and drafty.

You'll say I'm just catering to the vulgar masses as if I want to transform the whole of the art world into Thomas Kinkade (or as his friends call him, Thomas "no sales tax" Kinkade) but that's not my point at all. My point is that the very process of becoming a (pundit/critic) redefines your horizon; it leaves you bored with a lot of things that others do not find boring and opens you up to a range of possibilities that no amateur (including your former self) is likely to comprehend. And in the particular case of punditry, it means the very process that qualifies you to speak as a specialist--that same process probably disables you from understanding the very subject on which you hope to pundicize.

More on Fighting Back

2012-01-25T12:57:00.000-08:00

My friend Ignoto weighs in on the 99 percent:

The ideologue sees the pepper-spraying and gets indignant. The intelligent ideologue sees the pepper-spraying, gets indignant, and then figures out how to make and sell gas masks and organic pepper spray.

Isn't all pepper spray organic?

Out of the Doldrums: Two New Finds

2012-01-25T09:35:00.000-08:00

I feel like I've gone a bit stale lately (you'd noticed?). I put down a lot of stuff half finished. I don't seem to be able to get any traction. I need a new entertainment.

All by way of a shoutout for two great new finds. One (for which I thank Michael Gilleland) is the blog of Andrew Rickard, Canadian translator and seeming polymath. Michael thought I'd enjoy "Weimar Wednesdays" on the literature of German inflation. He's right there, but the whole thing is wonderful, with snatches of Schopenhauer, Belloc and Céline, and what's not to like?

Thanks also to Bo for pointing me to The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss. People keep telling me I ought to read Liss' novels of commerce/fraud, and I can see why: there's certainly nothing like a little chicanery to get the day off to a good start. Up to now I've dipped into a couple but wandered away again. Whiskey Rebels is out of the main line in that the setting is American, not European--specifically America at the dawn of the Republic. Bo is right that Liss captures the volatile contention between pastoralist republicanism and the dynamic new vision of the market. I may even have to go back and take a second look at the others.

Meditation on the Italian Countryside

2012-01-24T20:41:00.000-08:00

Between 1950 and 2005 the Italian countryside lost to asphalt and concrete a total of 3.66 million hectares, a figure larger than the combined size of Tuscany and Umbria.

So David Gilmour in The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples (2011). I can't contradict him; I never saw Italy before 1950. But driving across southern Tuscany last fall, I was impressed at how empty it seemed. I suppose partly the point is hill country: you certainly can't farm anything much out here and maybe the highest and best use is the production of the admirable wild boar sausage.

The other side of Rome, you find the Capuan Plane which one may think of as empty though it's not: the problem is rather that it seems to belong to the Camorra and thus becomes a place where respectable folks, Italian and otherwise, just don't want to go. Once malaria country; evidently the mobsters are immune to the mosquito.

The 99 Percent and What They Are After

2012-01-24T16:44:00.000-08:00

I know a guy whose life requires him from time to time to run the gauntlet of 99 percenters. I'll try not to identify him to closely, but let's stipulate that he's not filthy rich himself, though he does get to go to meetings where people talk about great affairs. And he evinces no great hostility to the 99ers (though I guess not specially sympathetic either).

Anyway, he reports that he's chatted with some of these folks in his comings and goings. And what gets him is how (in the strict sense) ignorant they are about their own situation. I.e., if you take my friend's word for it, they know next to nothing about where the real pressure points might be, about who has how much, about where precisely to leverage the system. In particular, he says, they seem to know nothing about who in power they ought to be lobbying and how.

I don't know quite where to go with this one. I know that some sympathizers will say this is not about pressure points, lobbying, blah blah--that all that stuff is just knuckling under to the system and we want to move beyond the system. As perhaps you might say, change we can believe it. This is surely an appealing posture and in a way, I sympathize: in a well-run world, ordinary folks wouldn't have to spend all their time worrying about the intricacies of the market, etc.

Well, yes. But paraphrasing Trotsky: you may be done with high finance, but high finance may not be done with you. Ignoring the nuts and bolts may be a luxury that simply is not on offer.

That's All?

2012-01-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

Joel favors me with a quick-and-dirty summary of the campaign tax returns. Quick thoughts:

Mitt Romney paid $1.5 to the Mormon church. That strikes me as a bit light, actually. I've got a vague sense that the right rate is 10 percent of gross, maybe even before tax--which would suggest $2.17 million. If you go for after tax, you might figure $1.87--but then you'd have to go back and factor in the charitable deduction. Sounds like the bishop might want to have him in for a chat. Any way you slice it, the number is ballpark with the total income of the president.

Would I be right that our president has zero business/investment income? Or just too small for this summary chart?

Who's Newt's divorce lawyer?

Guess Who's On TV?

2012-01-23T13:02:00.000-08:00

One downside of not watching much TV: you miss out on a lot of popular culture. So I never knew until 20 minutes ago that the more-or-less champs of churchy TV are (ready for it?) the Mormons. Sure enough,it turns out that long before Big Love, the Mormons were making (or at least hiring) some of the most professional, most effective "public service" TV anywhere. So at least Rollo Romig in The New Yorker who can't say enough good things about the Mormon spots that he watched as a child back in the 70s.

And how do they compare to Big Love? Can't say for sure, but if you take Romig seriously, they might be better. It happens I have seen a bit of Big Love, and I like it: imaginatively scripted with convincing and surprising plot elements (and the villainous Harry Dean Stanton is a total hoot). But the scripting has always seemed a bit flaccid to me: somehow they haven't been able to come up with writers as good as those we learned to love on The Supranos or maybe even Mad Men. Maybe the Big Love crowd should simply have outsourced to the makers of the old TV spots.

Prospera

2012-01-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

Still abuzz with the music of the Met Enchanted Island--loosely based as it is on Shakespeare's tale of Prospero--we figured we'd take a flutter on the new (to us) gender-bender version, with the dispossessed wizard rechanneled through Helen Mirren.

Bottom line: file it under "rotten shame," or if you insist, "noble experiment." As a whole it does not work, but that is a shame because the core of it in fact works quite resoundingly well. The notion Prospero as a woman works better than any other Shakespearean crossover I can remember--much better, for example, than Ashland's Julius Caesar, for example, where the only reason for having a woman in the title role is that a woman wanted to play the title role.

Now reconsider: imagine Prospero as Prospera, the wise and beneficent duchess, cast aside by a brutish Brother and his gaggle of cronies. As Mirren herself as said, you have to change scarcely a line. Unexpected side benefit: aside from Mirren herself, the finest thing about the show is the extended intimate dialogue between Mirren/Prospera and her young Miranda (Felcity Jones), so much better as girl-talk than as some kind of stilted father-daughter thing.

The trouble is that everything else is a mess. It's as if Julie Taymor--the director--just said "whatever," and let everybody else just do whatever they wanted. There's a formlessness, a sprawl, made (perhaps unintentionally) worse, by the formlessness and sprawl of the Hawaiian Island on which it was shot. In this non-context, the brother and his cronies do a decent ensemble turn but you have to remind yourself how, if at all, it relates to the rest of the play. Ariel doesn't seem able to convey any grace or charm.Caliban is almost perfunctory in his (supposedly) suppressed lust and the comics--oh,dear, the comics. Why is it so many movie funnymen either (a) don't know how to get laugh out of Shakespeare; or (b) just don't seem to realize that there are any laughs to be had. Not that it's rocket science: I've seen high school troupes that have you falling out of your chair with their caterwaulings under the blanket Heck, I've seen my own grandkids crack themselves up with a homemade rendition on the living room floor. Not this crowd; they're just punching in on the clock. Which leaves just about everything in the hands of Mirren and Jones. That's a heavy burden; the consolation is that they do carry it well.

Attention All English Majors

2012-01-22T12:09:00.000-08:00

And there is no educated human being less likely to know business worse placed for knowing business than a young lord. Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply.

--Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution 161 (Dolphin Paperback ed.)

Bleakest, Most Chilly Phrase of the Morning

2012-01-22T09:37:00.000-08:00

"the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers..."

Apple executives, on why those jobs are never coming back.

Well,That's a Mercy

2012-01-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

She was decapitated and disembowelled. She was however not interfered with.

Letter to The Economist (ironic [and perhaps fictional?]).

Enchanted Island Again

2012-01-21T15:33:00.000-08:00

I can't imagine what of lunatic inattention possessed me this morning, almost impelling me to pass up a second chance at the Met's rollicking pastiche performance of Enchanted Island. Now would that have been a dumb move. It was wonderful, wonderful, to begin with and this time, out of all whooping.

Which is to say I liked it fine at the Met three weeks ago, but I'd say I liked it better this time around in HD. I don't know, maybe I was coming with the flu that first time. Or perhaps more likely, the HD was enriched, enhanced, by virtue of having seen it the first time on the big stage. Or it may be that the whole shebang is so multifarious that you just can't take it all in at first glance. And the close-ups: I remember enjoying all the boy-girl action, but there is a whole range of over-the-top mugging which just doesn't make it to the second balcony. And Joyce DiDonato: girl's got just a bit of Carol Burnett in her, wouldn't you say? And Luca Pisaroni as Caliban: concealed behind all that pancake, it was easy for me to overlook just how dignified and steady he really is.

One thing that didn't work quite as well in HD: Anthony Roth Costanza, the counter-tenor as Ferdinand. He's got a fine voice and should himself remarkably well ale to command the big hall. Ironically, the closed framework of the small screen just didn't give him quite as much room to shine.

And I still think the Placido Domingo Neptune was a bit much of a muchness. He's a Mount Rushmore figure and I don't begrudge him an ounce of his acclaim. But if it had been anybody else, you would have said the comic pacing was a bit slack, and you'd wonder why after a lifetime on the stage, he's still not so great at English. No matter; he's a lovable old coot at there is so much other good stuff that you're almost grateful for a breather.

Which is Rare

2012-01-20T20:02:00.000-08:00

I agree with just about every word of this.

Mothers Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Free-Lance Journalists

2012-01-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

You'll spend the rest of your natural life trying to squeeze a $200 fee out of Rupert Murdoch.

[Two comparisons come to mind: one, my friend Michael who used to run a Snap-on Tools franchise. He said he spent half his time trying to squeeze money out of his customers and the other half trying to wrestle commissions away from his boss. And two, my ex student who bagged carpentry for law school. He said in carpentry, the prime was always telling him--well, I can't pay you now, but I tell you what, I'll give you a bigger piece of my next job.

London Bookstores

2012-01-20T19:53:00.000-08:00

Back in the 70s I used to say my dream job was to be the checkout clerk at Collette's Marxist bookstore in Charing Cross Road. My customers would stock up on dialectics; I would argue with 'em. It would be just like law teaching but with a more motivated audience, and no grading.

Collette's Marxist is long gone as is Collette's itself and these days I'm pleasantly surprised when I get back to London to find that not every other bookstore has gone the same path. Now here is Rhiannon Batten in The Independent with a list of "The 50 Best bookshops," i.e., in England, Scotland and Wales. I suppose it is always possible to pick apart this kind of a list ("What? You didn't include--?"). I will deny myself this indulgence (ha!--see infra.) and just say I'm glad to find some dependable favorites still alive and kicking.

First on the list is an almost inevitable choice: The London Review Bookshop at 14 Bury Place up near the British Museum, interesting not least because it for all practical purposes a new bookshop, aggressively self-invented to cross-market product from its distinguished weekly newsletter. I can't think of any place in London more pleasant for idling away an hour.

Except it be my other old favorite, Waterstones (as it is now called) in Gower Street--but really Dillon's until it went belly up in (2000?), happily recreated by people who had the good sense to salvage the best of a good thing. And, well, yes I guess I am a little surprised to note the omission of my other London favorite, Foyles, across the street from the ghost of Collette's in Charing Cross Road. And while I'm at it, I suppose I am also a little surprised at the omission of Hartchard's at 187 Picadilly--never an habituelle of mine because I never lived or sojourned in the neighborhood, but still exuding a kind of English solidity that you've got to enjoy.

I know, I know: these places are all cutting against the grain as folks like me undertake to destroy them with a thousand digital cuts. If and when they vanish, I will be one of those to blame. Well, yes. And maybe they won't vanish. Maybe even in the cyclonic winds of change, there is a place for a few durable old monuments who find a way to buck the fashionable current and retain some of their old identity. For all my apostasy, I must say I hope so.

Demutualization

2012-01-20T17:04:00.000-08:00

This will be a more than usully half-baked post, but I'm wondering--isn't it time for a book entitled "demutualization," i.e. the get sea change that did so much to create the corporate culture that afflicts is today. It's fun to tell students about the early days when "insurance" arose in the form of mutual benefit societies, linked to churches or ethnic communities (which might be the same thing)--so also banking, and in a slightly different wy, farm production. Fun, but I might as well be lecturing on early Ugaritic bookkeeping, it is so distant from and alien to whatever we understand today. I suppose there might be such a book but I haven't found it yet. I do see a Wiki page; it seems to be tilted to the British experience, and it isn't as ambitious (or protean?) as I am beginning to visualize.

There'd surely be a chapter on the mutual fund industry, and the story that John C.Bogle recounts at every opportunity about how Massachusetts Investors Trust morphed alpha to omega while Vangurd's Wellington went from omega to alpha.

Though I know it isn't the sme thing, I suppose one could make room for (a) chapter(s) about the demise of the partnership model in Wall Street banking. If I'm not careful I suppose I'll find myself throwing in a chapter on the fall and fall of the Israeli kibbutz.

I smell the outlines of a larger social/history story here: the passage from active to passive wealth-making, the rise of a rentier class. I suppose what I'm really after is the kind of big history best undertaken by the young, eager to make a splash and too callow and ignorant to realize they are biting off so much more than they can chew.

If You Were a Car...

2012-01-19T12:45:00.000-08:00

What kind of a car would you be? The Wichita Bureau is amused that Newt Gingrich views his former wife as a Jaguar, and the incumbent as a Chevvie ("nearly old enough to be a Cougar," growls Wichita, in an uncharacteristic lapse of chivalry). Which segues to: what sort of car-personality is right for ol' Newty? Something ahead of its time, but not quite right for the market, like the Edsel, for example? A Delorean has more by way of daring and imagination (forget about the cocaine). But it is likely to lose out in any head to head showdown with the Batmobile.

Actually, I suspect it is wild choices like this that got ol 'Newtie into the kind of troubles that seem to beset him. The party is, after all, still American, and Republican. In the end, I suspect nothing says "Grand Old Party" quite so emphatically as the 1934 Belchfire Runabout, plate number 313.

BTW, all those Huffpost quotes from the ABC interview--didn't I read all that stuff a couple of weeks ago, if not before? Or don't they have internet in South Carolina?

Shakespeare's Golding

2012-01-18T15:50:00.000-08:00

One of Shakespeare's most attractive qualities is his ability to discern the merit in the work of others; to see the nascent possibilities that he can unlock and unleash. One of the most remarkable is this speech from Ovid as translated into jingling English hexameters by Arthur Golding:

Ye Ayres and windes: ye Elves of Hilles, of Brookes, of Woods alone,
Of standing Lakes, and of the Night approche ye everychone.
Through helpe of whom (the crooked bankes much wondring at the thing)
I have compelled streames to run cleane backward to their spring.
By charmes I make the calme Seas rough, and make the rough Seas plaine,
And cover all the Skie with Cloudes and chase them thence againe.
By charmes I raise and lay the windes, and burst the Vipers jaw.
And from the bowels of the Earth both stones and trees doe draw.
Whole woods and Forestes I remove: I make the Mountaines shake,
And even the Earth it selfe to grone and fearfully to quake.

See how little he has to change to recast it into a different dimension, and present it as one of the grandest pieces of verse he ever wrote--Prospero's incantation to the spirits at the end of The Tempest:

Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.

Interesting whether if Shakespeare tried it today, the Golding estate would slap an injunction on him, perhaps shutting down his website and confiscating his Ipad.

Compassion and the Indonesian Railroads

2012-01-18T13:25:00.000-08:00

I read that the Indonesians are trying to keep people from riding the roofs of trains. They've tried soft music; now they are erecting concrete balls that apparently will just boot the malefactors into the ditch.

Some see this is harsh. I'd say it is an improvement over the Nazis. As I recall, it came to their attention that prisoners were trying to escape the trains to the camps by hacking holes in the floor and dropping onto the track below. Ever inventive, the Nazis undertook to equip the trains with giant scythes, so as to cleave the body in to as they hurtled past.

Source: I can't pin this down at the moment but I believe I saw it in Richard Overy's Dictators.

A Job for Superlawyer

2012-01-18T13:17:00.000-08:00

The captain of the doomed Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia stands accused of abandoning ship (he now says he "fell into" the lifeboat). He's under criminal charges; apparently the judge will face the question whether to grant bail. Now, repeat after me:

"Your honor, there is no reason to think my client a flight risk..."

From the Chronicles of Tescovina

2012-01-16T18:28:00.000-08:00

You'd have a tough time recognizing that this is not an excerpt from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

"The Province of Tescovina, which is comprised of Tertiary Hill country rich in loess, has no natural eastern defenses and lies exposed to the Podolian Steppe, so that for thousands of years the land wa ssubject to the invasions of barbarian nomads." That was the sentence we had to commit to memory as one of our first lessons in local history and geography under Herr Alexianu, who worked for a while as our private tutor--one part of our vsry checkered and highly unsystematic education. The purpose was to acquaint us with the idea that running through our veins was the blood of Dacians, Romans, Gepids, Avars, Pechenegs, Cumans, Slavs, Magyars, Turks, Greeks, Poles, and Russians: "a strong mix of ethnicities" was how the book described Tescovina. In the fourteenth century some landed gentry whose names struck our ears like the curses we were always hearing--Bogdan Siktirbey, for example--founded small states, known as "voivodates," which soon came under Turkish rule. In 1775 the Sublime Porte ceded our homeland to Austria, which first annexed Tescovina to Galicia, and later declared it an independent Crown Land. Her Alexianu spoke about this historic episode with the greatest reluctance.

In fact, it is a selection from an introductory chapter in Gregor von Rezzori, An Ermine in Czernopol (NYRB ed. 2011). Sounds like he is once again remembering his youth in the lost world of pre-War (which war?) Eastern Europe, as he did in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear--though this time, perhaps more explicitly in the form of a fantasy. I'm advised that "Tescovina" is Romanian for "rape."