Turin, Who Would have Guessed?

Turin: it's nowhere, and it is history, famous for the Savoy dynasty who departed in the 1860s, and for the Fiat plants--the Detroit of Italy. But surprise: it is a pleasant, easy-going city, with some remarkable baroque architecture, good food and a drop-dead view of snow-capped Alps. Not a destination stop, maybe, but (at least with a bit of opera) a perfectly pleasant place to spend a couple of days. They've even got the shroud of Turin, which they brought out for the Pope, although not for us; we had to settle for the Virgin Mary on a cruller.

One thing I don't understand: how it is that Italian cities sustain so many bookshops, with so many books, and in so many languages. Of course I don't think of these people as ignorant in any sense, but it's hard to manage anybody achieving the level of obsessive reading that would seem to be necessary to sustain all that print stuff.

The architecture in Turin is great if you like that kind of stuff, although it may be a special taste; among other things, I suspect they have more heroes on horseback than any other city their size (or bigger). The Chiesa Reale, where they (claim to house) the shroud is also a model of baroque excess elegance.

There is one piece of unambiguous awfulness: a tall skinny red-brick Mussolini tower (above), built (so they say) on purpose to overawe the Savoy Palace. Brings to mind the old joke which holds (remodeled) that the best place to live is in the Mussolini tower because that's the one place from which you cannot see the Mussolini tower. I talked to a local who said some people were sorry the Allies didn't blow it to kingdom come, but he was glad that it was still here, so as to remind the Torinese of what a mistake they'd made.

Food:top marks to Paficco Defillipis in Via LaGrange, hand-maker (it says here) of pasta since 1872. But somebody in the family seems to have discovered the slow foods movement and they turn out lovely veggies and semi-dried meats.

Opers Note: La Bohème in Turin

Having disparaged Wagner, I have to admit I am not that nuts about Puccini either.* But after an evening of Das Rheingold, I'd have to say that there is nothing more refreshing than an afternoon of La Bohème, particularly so in the company of the good folks of Turin at the Teatro Regio. It's a diverting venue in its own right, modern in so many ways that La Scala and La Fenice are not (indeed, I suspect you could pack both La Scala and La Fenice into Teatro Regio and still have seats left over. For they fielded an all-round heavyweight cast, leading off with Marcelo Álvarez as Rodolfo (although my friend Joe points out that he skipped the high Cs). Barbara Frittoli might seem just a bit just too poised and restrained to play the great consumptive Mimi (it was her debut role at Naples 18 years ago). But she has such a lovely voice you forgive her a lot. Gianandrea Noseda let his orchestra play a bit on the noisy side, although Puccini is noisy to begin with and things might have sounded better on the ground floor than it did up in the box were we sat. Still, it was a perfect example of Italian mellow: a cheerful audience digesting a good lunch or looking forward to a good dinner on a bright spring day and an old warhorse that it is almost impossible to get wrong.

Fn,: My attention is called to the fact that La Bohème had its premier here back in 1896, conducted by the young Arturo Toscanini. Different theatre, though. Allies bombed the old one in WWII.

===
*Well, is there anything you do like? Yes, quite a bit. Mozart, a lot of Verdi, a good bit of Handel, most Strauss. And Gianni Schicchi, and the second act of Tosca.

Opera Note: La Scala Das Rheingold

In the realm of opera, I generally do Wagner only if it is a condition of my parole, but we got a chance to see Daniel Barenboim conduct Das Rheingold at La Scala last night and I figured this was an opportunity I shouldn't pass up. As it happens, we hit it at a dramatic moment. As the curtain rose, we encountered not swimming nymphs but a gaggle of (I guess) stage hands in their everyday combat togs with a banner saying

NO AL DECRETO
SI ALLA MUSICA
SI ALLA CULTURA

That is: no to the decree (?); yes to music, yes to culture. Somebody then read us some kind of manifesto denouncing a (n as it appeared) recent funding cut. Actually, two people--a man read it in Italian, then a woman in English. You might think they were greeted with an outpouring of labor solidarity, but recall this is Italy and if there is one thing they love better than work stoppage it is opera. Strike that: booing at the opera, or specifically at this gaggle of agitators who stood between them and their Wagner fix.

Oh, yes, the opera. Ah, let's put it this way: Barenboim is a wonder. Everything about the orchestra was crisp, disciplined, forceful, expressive (though loud, but that is not really DB's fault). The singing seemed fine although I'm not really competent to judge. Friend more competent than I said that Barenboim finds a natural ally in René Pape, who sang Wotan.

Staging seemed remarkably restrained for Wagner (I should think you would want it to be, considering how much you'd have to pay for a cast): a lot of projector visuals, chiefly what appeared to be a worked-out Kentucky coal mine:I assume this passes for heaven in some circles. There were dancers; the dancers got roundly booed, more, I think, for there mere presence than for the quality of their work. My thought was hey, at least they weren't singing.

Which brings us back to the opera itself, and to Wagner, and I swear I just do not grt it. I'll grant a fecundity of musical ideas--the notorious leitmotifs. But a lot of them are just not that interesting. And sorting out leitmotifs becomes a kind of obsessive game, like sudoku. And I barely want to speak of the plot. Recall that when all is said and done, this is an opera about a guy who tries to sell his sister-in-law to a couple of building contractors. For my money that is a plot fit for Married with Children. Yes: Sudoku and Married with Children, what a pair.

Afterthought: Forget about the decreto, this is a time when governments all over Europe are talking about painful budget cuts ("lacrime e sangue," said one Italian paper, tears and blood). Even though it won't be more than a gnat's eyebrow, I should think that the (sometimes lavish) European opera subsidies will have to be one item on the block.

Lost in Translation

At the Verdi museum, the English says that a good tenor must "be raring to go." The Italian says "aver il diable indosso." I should think a better translation would be "have the devil up his backside."

North Italian Gazeteer

Veneziani, gran' signori
Padovini, gran' dottori
Vicenzetti, mangia gatti
Veronese, tutti matti.

That is:

Venetians, great lords.
Paduans, great scholars.
Vicenzians, cat eaters.
Veronese, all crazy.

Hey, I guess that last one rhymes.

The Evolutionary Role of Ex Voto Offerings

Verona is a lovely city, clean and energetic with a fair number of interesting archaeological monuments. But the first thing they take you to will almost certainly be "Juliet's balcony," after the great romantic heroine who never lived her nor, in fact, anyplace else. There you'll also see the wall--really two walls--full of messages--little notes penned out by countless nameless visitors and presented as entreaties to the spirit. They say the favored form of adhesive is chewing gum, so that in a short time they will all blow away, making room for the new batch.

All of which prompted me to wonder again: what, exactly, is the evolutionary function of these ex voto offerings? In this respect I don't see a dime's worth of difference between the Juliet wall in Verona and the wailing wall in Jerusalem nor letters to Santa Claus. Nor, I suppose, curse messages, where the sender writes "may my enemy be covered with honey and tied to an anthill"--and puts the document into a clay pellet or whatever. Query, is there a "Dracula wall" someplace in Transylvania?

Everybody does it, but what is the point? I mean, I can understand the function of religious feeling in a group as a kind of social glue, holding together tribes or fighting forces (religare="to bind fast"). But what is it with all these purely private utterances of impulse? At the moment, the only one I can think of is that it provides harmless employment--perhaps he only remaining source harmless of employment--for postal clerks from Juliettaville, Italia, to Santa Claus, Indiana.

By the way, at the Juliet wall, there is also a Juliet statue, where you can get your picture taken. There is also a "Club de Julietta," which seems to be a sewing shop, not the one she hits Romeo over the head with when he spends too much time with with Rosaline. It is said that if you want to get married in an aura of romance, the mayor of Verona will rent you Juliet's balcony for a mere 2,000 Euros. No word on whether they allow Elvis regalia.

What I Learned Today: Palladio

I'm one up on William Shakespeare, author of Romeo and Juliet. I'm in fair Verona, where he laid his scene, and he never set foot in the place. But forget that: what I learned today made its mark up the road in Vicenzia, where I lunched in the shadow of the Basilica of Palladio, most influential of all the world's architects.

I suppose anybody who cares knew this all along but here's the deal: this Basilica is not a church. It began life as some sort of government office building. Apparent the old building fell down, or part of it, and they commissioned Palladio to build a new one. But here's the catch: they told him he had to build the new one around the old one. It's like that town in Maine that told the selectmen to build a new jail and to build it out of materials from the old jail, and not to close the old jail until the new one was finished.

So Palladio did as he was told (apparently he milked it for all it was worth--he won the contract in 1549, but it was still unfinished (and he still drawing fees) when he died 31 years later.

But here's the thing: Palladio did build the new around the old. He kept it interesting by turning the new into (per Wiki) "a loggia and a portico"-- a covered walkway lined with shop fronts. Translated: because of some silly rule imposed by the bankers, Palladio developed what must be the most standard single design for the 19th Century big-city shopping center. Here's a picture.

The moral of this story: when you've got a lemon, make lemonade.

Opera Note: Venetian Don Giovanni

Just a word about a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni that we caught at La Fenice in Venice last night, and the word is: rehearsal. And I mean that in the good sense: this is a DG energetic, well-sung and (mostly) convincingly staged but it was also tightly morticed at the joints. As such it is a bracing reminder of so many major league performances you see these days, where the name star seems to have parachuted in just 20 minutes before the performance; one can only assume that he has his stage movements stenciled on the floor.

The singers were people we'd pretty much never heard of which was more testimony to our parochialism than to their skill. There was a lot of good vocal talent on display, together with some better-than-good acting. It was also a cast that knew how to work with ambiguity. Simone Alberghini's Don is a nasty piece of business who is doing it all more out of malicious amusement than for sensual pleasure. Still he has his moves, and the ladies do seem to be taken with him as they try to negotiate the treacherous void between seduction and rape. It sets you up nicely for Leonardo Cortellazzi's Don Ottavio--a skilled interpreter with a lovely voice who conveys the sad truth that he may be just a bit too nice to be interesting. It also made space for William Corrò's Musetta--the best job I've ever seen anybody do with this secondary role. He made you understand that he was basically a decent young man, not very sophisticated and a bit hot-headed, who didn't want anybody messin' with his woman.

And speaking of women--they were generally convincing although I must say this was a DG more Italian than Spanish, with plenty of effusion and more than a hint of Anna Magnini in the background. And during the "banquet" scene--here, more of an "orgy" scene--there really was more tit on display than I think I've ever seen in a major opera house before. I assume we were also getting a glimpse into the future of opera staging--not that that's a bad thing, of course. I'd save a rosette for Caterina Di Tonno as Musetta's beloved Zerlina, wide-eyed and bewildered but off on adventure not quite like anything she'd ever undergone before.

I'm not certain who deserves credit for bringing this all together so nicely but I suspect it may be Antonello Manacorda, who conducted. Whoever--he deserves credit for making a production that collected so many unforgettable numbers and wove them into a coherent whole.

This was also, as it happens, our first look at the "new" La Fenice, lately risen from the flames that kept it out of action for so many years. Or rather, the "new, old" La Fenice, insofar as it's clearly an attempt to recreate what some arsonist destroyed. Never having set foot in the old, I can't say exactly how successful they are, but I must say I do like these old European opera houses and here as elswhere, I am always surprised at how tiny they are.

Footnoe: Did I forget to mention the reserves of raw courage on display when they used real candles on stage in this monument to modern incendiarism? I assume this explains why the place was so think with Vigili di Fuoco.

Italy: Projections of Whatever

I'm still meditating on the physical/political landscape of Northern Italy and all its projections of p--I almost said "power," but that's the problem: the Italian central government has always (yes, even under Mussolini) seemed a somewhat perfunctory affair. Now that The Economist is reporting on a new spasm of second thoughts over the very principle of national unity in Italy, it's well to reflect on just how tinpot the whole business really is.

That's the ironic message that you seem to derive from all those pathetic and somewhat shrill attempts to persuade you that matters are otherwise. I'm thinking again of all those statues of Garibaldi, all those Via Cavours that I was talking about the other day. I suppose we could throw in the Via Mazzinis, the Via XX Settembres and the rest of the odd assortment of public utterances that are supposed to speak of the greatness of the Italian state. We call those sorts of things "projections of p0wer," but in Italy's case at least, they have always seemed to be projections of exactly the opposite--a painful reminder of just how lacking in real legitimacy the centralized Italian has been and today remains.

If this proposition doesn't stand on its own, then it comes home with special force here in Venice, in so many ways that most un-Italian of cities. It happens there is a statute of Garibaldi here (in the Castello, out towards the Arsenale), but I suspect nobody pays much attention to it. In general, the city seems extraordinarily free of these 19th-Century physical expressions of public authority you see so widely distributed elsewhere. The Venetians will tell you that this is because the Venetians have always been suspicious of these kinds of assertions of preeminence, and taken with a large grain of salt, this proposition harbors a grain of truth. Of all cities in the world there is probably none that operated (in its pre-themepark heyday) more is a joint stock company in which everybody had a stake and in which (as Milo Minderbinder would say) everyone has a share. There are projections of power here--the Cathedral of San Marco can hardly count as anything else. But it operates at a wholly different level of eminence and prestige. You want a real projection of power, it beats Garibaldi six ways to the jack

The Verdi Biz

I met a lady today in Italy whose name is Verdiana. Apparently in Italy there are Wagnerians and Verdians and her papa wanted everybody to know she was on the right side. It's a tiny whiff of just how much cultural apparartus still persists around here in the wake of the Great Man.

Granted, he was a first-rate talent, but that is not quite enough to explain all the stuff he left behind. I suspect it has more to do with the fact that he got his timing right: the 19th Century liked heroes, and Italy in partiularly needed a roster of great men to define its nationhood. You can only go so far with Garibaldi, and although just about every Italian city has a main drag named Via Cavour, still I suspect not one in a hundred Italians could so much as tell you who Cavour is. Verdi at least has a legitimate claim to fame.

Verdi probably did a not to nourish it himself when, after achieving fame and fortune, he moved back to his home turf at Busseto, with the intention (so it appears) of picking fights with his old friends and neighbors. They even built a pocket opera house in his name; he publicly snubbed it. As I guess I've said before, conflict is a kind of intimacy: some people just can't get enough of it.

There also, so I am told, a Verdi family, and apparently they control the paper. And I gather (though Google seems to be no help here) they too are feuding: evidently a critical player died without a will and his children have fought each other to a standstill. All I know for sure is that at the Verdi country house, nobody is mowing the lawn.

Finally, here's one I never heard of before: the Club dei 27: self-appointed self-designated keepers of the flame, one for each (so it is said) Verdi opera. All male of course (and doesn't this sound like a guy thing?). The woman (not Verdiana) who told me about it said that just the other night at the Parma opera, she sat next to Giovanna d'Arco. Evidently Stiffelio just died. I surmised that the lady who told me the story believed that she would make a fine replacement Stiffelio, but I don't think she' enjoy it: way too laddish. Maybe they need a lady's auxiliary.

Venice

To Venice, where the sky is clear, the air is cool, and where things feel unexpectedly (and uncharacteristically) clean as if a nasty rainstorm just moved through. The weather is as pleasant as I suspect you ever get it here, though still muggy enough that we may have to ration the clean laundry. I marvel once again at what must be the world's longest running and perhaps most successful historical theme-park. Consider: except for the predation of tourists, Venice hasn't had a real reason for being since the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. Yet everything we remember about Venetian art -- Titian, Tintoretto, assorted Bellinis, Tiepolo--comes later. After that, a long party, and then the more or less desperate effort to flog tee-shirts and gondola rides and generally to stay above water. Must be a great place to be a ringworm.

A gondola is going by under our window: a guy in a striped shirt is belting out "Venezia." With a karaoke machine, too much.

Questions About Italy

If culture is a secular religion, then I guess you could say we are on pilgrimage among the shrines of Verdi country (we could paint a 747 on the outside wall of our house in Palookaville, like Egyptians do after they make the Haj). Meanwhile, two question:

One, why did Verdi move back to Busseto when he could have settled in Milan, Paris, Rome? One has to conclude (not so?) that he really enjoyed quarreling.

And two, who paid for rebuilding the cultural infrastructure of Parma? It's a projection of state power in a country that was too poor for that sort of thing. Do I smell the CIA?

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Cat Salami?

[Apparently no--seems to be a place name.]

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Outta Here

We're outta here again--off to Europe for some opera, and to spend time with friends. I sort of hope I get a chance to post some opera comments along the way but I can't be sure what kind of facilities I will have (and if I try to much of it, Mrs. Buce might brain me with her opera glasses). One way or another, I'll take up my home post again around June 14.

Harvard Sociopaths

Tyler Cowen asks:

How much would the world differ if Harvard reserved a fifth of its entering class for those individuals who showed the most talent for fraud?

The obvious response is: would that be an invidious quota, like imposing a limit on Jews (or, these days, Asians) because they show up the rest of us? Okay, granted, Adam Wheeler-- Harvard's answer to Frank Abagnale--is not likely to be replicated often (for a spicy account of Wheeler's academic joyride, go here). But that doesn't necessarily mean he is more brazen than his classmates; it could be only that he is less competent. The really dangerous sociopaths in society are the ones who learn how to work in the white space around the letter of the law, to use their charm and manipulative skills to bamboozle anybody who stands in the doorway including admissions officers, department chairs, fellowship screening committees.

They say that criminals are stupid and I agree to the extent of acknowledging that unsuccessful criminals are stupid--that's why they get caught. They also say that good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere. The same may be true of the Harvard admissions pool.

Fn,: Sure enough, someone is saying that Wheeler is not all that different from the other guy.

Bureaucrats, Pointy-headed and Otherwise

First Things offers up an appreciation of a certain civil servant:

[H]e belongs to a type of quiet and careful civil servant that Caesar Augustus would have recognized. As would Phillip II and Napoleon and Gladstone, for that matter. Powerful governments have always needed this kind of man: the senior administrator, the superior public official who (to reverse the entropy the Irish senator W.B. Yeats feared) makes the center hold and keeps things from falling apart.

For "Caesar Augustus," I suspect that the writer thought he was saying "Hadrian," but let that be: the general point is important, and well made. But how ironic to see it come from an institution somewhere near the center of the right-wing bile machine--guys who have spent almost every moment of every waking hour over the past generation trying to mock or demean or belittle the (as it is said) pointy headed bureaucrats who (as it is said) dedicate their lives to complicating our lives while fattening their own retirement plans.

Of course very stereotype is founded on truth and there are plenty of time-servers who fit the description exactly (and god knows I rolled around on the floor helpless with hilarity in my first encounter with Yes, Minister). But that's why FT's narrow point is so important. In an age that does so much to demonize public service, it's at least a small comfort to see that once, just once, a commentator will let slip a word of well-deserved appreciation.

And who is he, this paragon, the subject of this encomium, and what does he do? Go read the original; it's quite a story.

Crank on the Broomstick

Crank offers a first lesson in marketing and enterprise organization:

Years ago I met a well-to-do man who told me how his struggling immigrant family put him through college.

“Mom and Dad owned little New York corner deli. Mom hung a kitchen broom next to the cash register. As each customer checked her stuff out, Mom would add in the price of the broom.

"If a customer balked, Mom would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I thought that was your broom,’ and she’d give the money back, but customers didn’t catch her often. Well let me tell you something, that broom sent me and my brothers to college.”

It's a good first principle except--they sell broomsticks in a deli?

Posh

Incoming British Prime Minister David Cameron is a member of at least two posh clubs (Whites, the Bullingdon). The great uncle of incoming Deputy Prime Minister Nicholos Clegg "was clubbed to death by his own peasants." Link.

Today's Thread

The New Testament as fanfic.

You Go, Girl!

Saudi Woman Beats Up Religious Cop

Link.

Kentucky: The Last Republican Revolution

Watching the returns roll in for Rand Paul tonight, I remember being a witness to the last Kentucky Republican Revolution, 49 years ago when a coalition of upstarts disestablished an old Bourbon-urban machine that had dominated Louisville since the bottom of the Great Depression. William O. Cowger, who got himself elected mayor, was born in Nebraska. He was smooth and nonconfrontational in the style of his profession: he was a mortgage-broker, back when a "mortgage broker" was a guy who imported eastern capital to the hinterlands. His partner Marlow Cook, who became chief county administrator, was from upstate New York. His campaign papers said he was a lawyer, but he was nearer to being a career politician.

Cowger could be almost too cute at times--we used to say that when Cowger said "frankly and honestly, Jack, I'm going to tell you the truth," then you knew he was lying. But he also had just a wisp of a smile as if to suggest he didn't want to take any of it too seriously. Cook was more active and engaging, more hands on, funnier.

In truth the Louisville Democrats weren't nearly as awful as many of their Southern counterparts: they had generated Wilson Wyatt, who helped create the Americans for Democratic Action, and a quirky but innovative mayor named Charlie Farnsley who governed with imagination and wit. But they'd gotten old and gone stale and retreated to their traditionalist roots. What Cowger and Cook brought was fresh energy, an openness to innovation. And in particular, they didn't give a hoot about race. Which is to say that they weren't precisely abolitionists, but that race simply wasn't an issue for them and they wanted to bat the race issue out of the way so they could apply their energies to other issues that looked more promising. Louisville had plenty of racial turmoil during the 60s but they would have had a lot more without the Republicans' attitude of benign neglect. Anecdote: Cowger once told me he thought the super markets were damn fools for not hiring black clerks; didn't they realize that these people were their customers?

They were both under 40 at their election; Cowger succeeded a decent but clueless establishment voice who was old for his age at 73. It says something about Cook's predecessor that I can't even remember his name (and Wiki is no help).

Cowger was barred by law from succeeding himself; he went on to a couple of terms in Congress and then died early. Cook won a second term as county administrator by a two-to-one margin and then moved on to a single term in the Senate; he was defeated there by another establishment Democrat.

Cook's most conspicuous legacy may be that he, in a grand gesture of anti-libertarianism, engineered the purchase of the steamboat Belle of Louisville from the public purse; the City of Louisville still owns it and runs it as an excursion vessel. His most meaningful contribution is that he gave a start to another who went on to be a Republican US Senator. That would be Mitch McConnell, who got his hands slapped when his chosen candidate lost out to Rand Paul tonight.

Cook lived long and prospered as a Washington lawyer; from retirement he resurfaced in 2004 to endorse John Kerry over George Bush:

For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction.

So far as I know, Cook is still alive (he'd be 84). Wonder what he thinks of the Tea Party.

What's The World Coming To, Part Umpty Ump

John points out that we are fast approaching a world in which all the closeted gays will be Christian fundamentalists, and all the uncloseted, Anglican bishops.

Yo, My Brother, Wassup: A Comment on Group Identity

Seeking to outline a theory of group solidarity, Peter Turchin recycles a wonderful anecdote from British journalist Patrick Neate:

It's 1992 and I am sitting in a bar in Harare, Zimbabwe when a guy walks in wearing a Lakers vest and Chipie jeans, his hair neatly dreaded and he walks with a rolling ease of the B-boy swagger. He clocks my Karl Kanis and second pair of Air Jordans and comes straight over. 'Yo, my brother, wassup?

Turchin spells out the moral:

Here were two complete stranngers, one a Zimbabwean black kid, another a white kid fomm Chippenhsm, U.K., but they instantly recognized each other as being "us," members of the ssme hip-hop subculture--from the way they dressed, the way they walked or even sat, the way they were "blunted." (I do not even pretend to understand what the last one merns--but I am an outsider.)

From War and Peace and War 134 (2006). Point well taken but I wonder if I can expand on it. As nations disintegrate, could it be that the next great loci of political legitimacy will be sports teams? They're a throbbing nucleus of symbolism and story. I know, they've tried to break out into larger society before, without ever quite going bigtime (think Il Palio di Siena). Perhaps they are limited because they lack armies.

But this prompts one to consider the other side of the equation--outfits like Halliburton or Blackwater, private armies. While sports teams have never quite achieved sovereignty, plenty of military organizations have done the trick--think the Templars or the Mameluks, or the Cossacks. Others have failed only for lack of a good story--think Cromwell's New Model Army, which forced out a monarchy in the 1640s but (for lack of a good story) could not prevent its return in the 1660s.

Isn't there room here for some 21st-Century organizational imagination: what if Halliburton merges with Man United, Blackwater with the Lakers? Is there any limit to how far they could go in providing the organizational glue for the next generation? Today, Shea Stadium, tomorrow the world...

Fn.: I see that Wiki describes Neate as an award-winning podcaster. Not sure I ever saw that phrase before but perhaps I was not paying attention.

Krugman Confesses He Didn't Get It

There's a refreshing moment of candor down at the bottom of Paul Krugman's Sunday New York Times entry, when he confesses he didn't see the Tea Party coming:

Right-wing extremism may be the same as it ever was, but it clearly has more adherents now than it did a couple of years ago. Why? It may have a lot to do with a troubled economy.

True, that’s not how it was supposed to work. When the economy plunged into crisis, many observers — myself included — expected a political shift to the left. After all, the crisis made nonsense of the right’s markets-know-best, regulation-is-always-bad dogma. In retrospect, however, this was naïve: voters tend to react with their guts, not in response to analytical arguments — and in bad times, the gut reaction of many voters is to move right.

Hoo boy. Not the way it's supposed to work? Paul, have you forgotten the Mussolini Fascists, the Nazis, the Peronistas and all the other instances where economic dislocation has curdled into political poison?

I guess the short answer is that yes, he has forgotten. Which is forgivable--hey, everybody makes mistakes. But I think there may be larger lesson here: it's a bracing reminder that even someone so supple and clever as the Krugster is so bathed in the professional Kool-Aid that he fails (or at least failed) to recognize any scenario beyond the narrow range of Benthamite maximization.

In his column, Krugman goes on to say that there's a recent paper by a couple of economists that confirms his revised vision. Fine, but there is also a library full of literature that his been making the same point for a long time. He might want to start with some of the classics of state-formation, perhaps the work of the late Charles Tilly, summarized and collected in Coercion, Capital and European States (1990). He could certainly learn from studies of modern politics like Robert Paxton''s Anatomy of Fascism (2005). There are some brilliant insights (along with a fair amount of BS) in Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War (2006)--he might want to start with Chapter 5, "The Myth of Self-Interest" ans the Science of Cooperation)"--whose title more or less explains himself. Even closer to home, he could have pulled down his copy of Benjamin M. Friedman, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and read (at page 9):

I believe that the rising intolerance and incivility and the erodihng gnerosity and openness that have marked important aspects of American society in the recent past have been, in significant part, a consequence of the stagnation of American middle-class living standards during much of the last quarter of the twentieth century. ... If our growth falters, however, or if we merely continue with slower growth that benefits only a minority of our citizens, the deterioration of American society will, I fear, worse once more.

Kudos for your candor, Paul, and congratulations on your new and broader vision. Hang on to what you've taken hold of, and try to make it richer, more nuanced, more meaningful. You'll do yourself a favor and you'll help economics to catch up with the rest of the world.

Ritholtz on Kudlow: Let the Market Rule!

Invictus engages in a bout of cheerful pummeling, bas he beats up Larry Kudlow on the matter of Kudlow's (supposed) preference for free markets.

As Larry Kudlow tells us nightly, “Free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity!” Free markets rock! Get regulations and restrictions out of the way and let good ole free market competition determine the winners and losers. Regulations and government intervention are for (socialist) losers. It’s in our DNA.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw a section of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (Sec. 1004) that places limits on liability for polluters! How un-free-market-like, to limit BP’s liability in the Gulf of Mexico debacle to a mere rounding error of $75 million! What true free-marketeer would ever stand for such nonsense? ... Let the free markets determine BP’s fate. Why should it be otherwise? Should they face multiple lawsuits and get sued out of existence, that’s nothing

So here’s the deal: What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If you’re a free-marketeer and believe that BP’s liability for the gulf disaster should be capped by statute — at whatever amount — you’re either not a free-marketeer or a hypocrite.

Fine, beating up on Kudlow is always doing God's work but Invictus may have bitten off more here than he can chew. He's scratching the surface of the more general point: that any free market is a cultural construct, a panoply of custom and choice that represent the more or less arbitrary local definition of "freedom." Just for starters, I wonder how Invictus feels about the campaign for "tort reform," so popular with free-marketeers in general who don't like to get booted when the shoe is on the other foot. Contingent-fee plaintiff's litigation in general could be seen as honoring the principles free-marketeers like best: money rewards geared to private incentives. Somehow, they never see it that way.

Or more generally, how does Invictus (or, come to think of it, Kudlow) feel about the limited liability company? It provides a kind of protection that is identical in principle to the statutory limit that concerns Invictus here.

One could go on. andonandonandon. I won't burden the record here but I will restate the basic point: there is no abstract "freedom" this side of the grave. No market is ever "free," except within the limit of a highly contingent set of constraints that a particular society chooses to define as bearable at a particular point in time.

Liveblogging The Future of Opera

Liveblogging a DVD performance of Richard Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten, I'm marveling at how the whole business of opera is morphing (you could say) before our eyes.

Review the bidding:there was a time when you went to the theatre and listened while overweight and overaged warhorses belted out the favorites (sometimes they sat on stools, which cannot have helped the drama). Then somebody cooked up the ides of translation--I still have a couple of CDs of Italian operas sung in English, and they're actually not bad. -

Then the operatic Bolshies stood the whole business on its head with translation subtitles--an innovation from which the purists have not yet recovered. Subtitles (surtitles) are a problem, I admit, when they are so situated that if you watch the subtitle, you can't be watching the stage (or where, like the Kennedy Center, there are parts of the theatre from which they can't be seen at all). But they sure made the whole process accessible to a much broader audience. I got a sense of what life was like before subtitles a couple of years back when I went to a performance of Die Zauberflöte--an opera I have seen many times--in Budapest, sung, of course, in Hungarian: if you didn't already know what was going on, you were just lost.

And then recordings. Along about 1944 my mother, determined to inflict a little culture, brought home as stack of 78rpm recordings of longhair favorites. One of them was laabeled Rienzi. Since the operatic Rienzi extends over six hours (two evenings), it is interesting to wonder what we could have gleaned from a three-minute disk.

Then come LPs and then CDs and a whole body of quite respectable full-length performance.s But of course, vocal only: we can imagine the cast in Levis and sweatsuits with folding chairs and music stands.

VHS and DVD brought some quite respectable repackaging of live [performances like the one I'm watching right now (Solti, from Decca). But even the best of these are pretty static, in the sense that they show you little that you wouldn't see if you were sitting in the audience.

Somehow it took the Met's new HD to liberate the techies to play with the old toys in a wholly new way. So far in the first couple of seasons it has been free-range experimentation (bliss was it in thet dawn to be alive!). Some of it is goofy but forgivably goofy as they explore the limits of this whole new venture. One thing that is clear is that the electronic version is moving further and further away from live performance. Example: we saw Hamlet at the Met a few weeks aback and then just fdays laater Mrs. B. (though not I) caught an HD replay. She says it is a whole different show when you can see Simon Keenlyside's nosehairs,

Someday soon, someone will ask--no, wait, surely somebody already has asked--hey, wait a minute, why do we need the live audience anyway? If we did away with those messy spectators, there's no telling how much we could come up with by way of swoops and dives--we wouldn't have to worry about the camera blocking anybody's view. And we could do it all in Wichita, where the rents are lower. And so the Met finds a whole new home.

Fn: A particular enthusiasm--I don't know if anybody else does this or not, but I like to watch Italian opera with Italian subtitles--I can almost make it out that way. And if it works for Italian, I should think it would work for English just as well--uncoupling "subtitle" from "translation altogether."

Hugo and the Zinger

Best throwaway line of the week comes from The Economist's wrapup on Hugo Chávez, the duly constituted tinpot dictator of Venezuela.. The big E says:

[T]o many... including this newspaper, he has come to embody a new, post-cold-war model of authoritarian rule which combines a democratic mandate, populist socialism and anti-Americanism, as well as resource nationalism and carefully calibrated repression.

And he zinger:

This model has proved surprisingly successful across the world. Versions are to be found in countries as disparate and distinct as Iran, Russia, Zimbabwe and Sudan. In one way or another, these regimes claim to have created a viable alternative to liberal democracy.

Link. If some latter-day Rip Van Winkle woke up this morning and asked how the world had fared in the 20-plus years since the fall of Communism, this would be a good insight with which to start, except that the E is far too cautious in it approach. I should think they are describing also China, the Central Asian Republics and a whole host of less-noticed governments where a combination of state capitalism and soft police state have coalesced into s viable--well, the E says "alternative to liberal democracy," but I should think that maybe "parody/lampoon of liberal democracy" captures the new reality even better. For more background, look here.

The Fortunes of the Fed

Joel is intrigued by the financial disclosure form of Janet Yellen, the incoming Federal Reserve Board Vice-Chair, though I am not certain whether he is more impressed by the fact that she may be worth $8.5 million than that Chairman Ben Bernanke may be worth less than a million (link).

The Bernanke number is interesting, though he may be part of a great tradition. By my recollection Paul Volcker, the Uber-Fed, was not remotely wealthy until, at least, he left the chairmanship. Nor, I think, Ben Strong, the architect of the Federal Reserve system: as I recall, his prospective father-in-law was scandalized that his daughter ws marrying a mere government clerk (he was President of the New York Fed). Some guys just seem to have a thing for sound money.

Re Yellen, three things. One, I bet her balance sheet does not include the discounted present value of her University of California pension--considering that she is reporting jointly with her husband, another famous UC Berkeley econ prof, that is worth another $2-4 millon easy. Second, I wonder whether it catches all her discretionary tax-deferred pension funds--403(b)s and such. From Bloomberg I get the impression that maybe it does, and I should hope so. Humble English professors at Poduink U can easily have a couple of mill in their TIAA-Cref if their lives are sufficiently prudent or boring, and I suspect she could have done no less well. But third, the number apparently does not include her primary residence, which, given that she is at Berkeley, is probably worth a fair chunk of change.

Bloomberg adds a neat bit of context:

The number of U.S. households with a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding primary residences, increased 16 percent to 7.8 million last year after a 27 percent drop in 2008, according to the Spectrem Group, a Chicago-based consultant. The median U.S. family’s net worth was about $120,000 in 2007, according to a triennial Fed survey.

I should add that I am not particularly scandalized that all members of the Fed are millionaires. Considering that their primary job is to preserve the integrity of the money supply, I'm glad they all have skin in the game (I am intrigued that they seem to have a taste for inflation-protected securities--should that be telling us something?). Indeed, the real concern may be that as millionaires go, they are all pretty minor league.

On This Day...

On this day in 1886, Emily Dickinson died. Here's an old standard, in a somewhat non-standard version:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

For background, see the notes at the end of the text here. The poem can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

Thanks, Arnie, Where Have you Been?

California's lame duck governor threw all his dwindling onto the green felt yesterday with a much-touted speech outlining a lot of much-touted budget cuts. Jennifer Steinhauer in the Times offers context:

As a practical matter, the Governor, a Republican, tends to propose large cut to services that the Democratic-controlled Legislature has no intention of brooking. A compromise--one that still reduces services greatly--is no doubt in the offing, along with a hefty dose of accounting tricks and the infusion of some federal money...

Well, I suppose that passes the giggle test, but with important qualification. One, yesterday's outline probably does count ss more assertive and challenging than any budget initiative the governor has taken before. And two, it is even more doomed to failure. I'll repeat what I (think I) have said before: Arnie piddled away a golden opportunity at the beginning of his term by (apparent) laziness and lack of focus. If he had really tried to do something dramatic then--when his numbers were still stratospheric, and when he still had a whole term or two ahead of him--he just might have proved a history-maker. He can be ambitious now--now!--because he knows that nobody has to pay much attention to him.

Must Read of the Day: Circular Firing Squad, with Strobe Lighting

Fascinating Charles Homans piece about Trotskyite liquidationist tendencies on the right. Yes, I know it is a stale topic, but somehow I had missed "Culture11" a righty answer to "Slate," with the surprise hook of some dazzling snark:

Culture11’s in-house writers also had a gift for whacking their own partisans, with varying degrees of constructive criticism and snark. "Filmmaker Jean Luc Godard famously declared that, to do his job, all he needed was ‘a girl and a gun,’" [Arts Editor Peter] Suderman wrote on the occasion of Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate, alongside a photo of the Alaska governor posing with a stuffed grizzly bear. "On his hunt for a Vice President, John McCain apparently came to the same conclusion." A month after the election, when even respectable right-leaning publications were expending ink and pixels on the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Culture11 offered up a mischievous list of the "Top 11 Fringe Right Arguments Against Barack Obama Becoming President" (Number two: "He’s not really black." Number one: "He’s black."). [James] Poulos, the political editor, wrote about Democratic and Republican dynasties with equal acidity: the Clintons were "wily, and probably deathless, political opponents, with an arsenal of depleted-uranium loyalists"; Bush was "a man who thinks in grand words made up of few letters." When Palin, at the apex of her popularity, held a campaign rally in Virginia, he stopped by and was perturbed by what he saw. "In place of a detailed contrast between the GOP’s shortcomings and failures and the real change that’s promised," he wrote, "the McCain campaign seems content with zingers and chants. Those things are fine and natural ornaments for the election-year tree—but they do require a tree."

Update: A brief search of my archives shows that League of Ordinary Gentlemen knew all about Culture11; I just wasn't paying attention. And here's an Atlantic piece about a new Poulos enterprise.

Roman Fever

They say that Henry Laurens, the American Revolutionary leader, so admired Roman freedoms that he used Tully, Valerius and Claudius as names for his slaves. He wasn't alone in his tastes. Almost unversally, the Founders admired classical models, and in particular, models drawn from the Roman Republic, via Plutarch, Cicero or Livy, perhaps filtered through Montesquieu.

I wonder just when it was that this taste for Roman virtus fell out of the political landscape. Contrast the Empire--that comes later, and we still cite it from time to time as a judgment or a warning, But the Republic seems to have vanished from history: "nowadays," says William R. Everdell, "all anyone seems to know about Rome is that it fell."

Everdell thinks this a pity--"a real pity," he says

that [the history of the Republic] is so little known, for the analogies--the true analogies--between the Roman Republic and our own remain striking. Their hatred of monarchy was enduring, dating form the time they expelled their kings, and their belief in constitutional checks and balances was the product of years of practical experience.

Maybe. Or it may just be that we've discovered that the Roman Republic--like so many others before and since--was not so much a model of ordered liberty as a barely stable detente between competing factions at home, and a calamity for its neighbors abroad. So Samuel Finer:

More than any polity so far looked at except the Assyrians, the Republic was shot through and through with militarism. It is unlikely that there are more than perhaps ten individual years over its entire span when Roman armies were not waging war somewhere or another, and in few previous societies was military glory so central an ambition to members of the ruling class. And discipline in the field was of the harshest kind. ... [But] if Roman soldiers suffered ... the enemy suffered worse. ... [L]ike the Assyrians but unlike the Persians, the Republic (not the empire) gave the conquered next to nothing in return. .. Whatever their original motivation, these campaigns were gigantic wars of plunder. ...

Finer returns to his central theme: "The Republican constitution and its political processe":

The first was bad; the second in its final phase, lethal. The Republican constitution was preposterous. Stripped down to the legal provisions only, this constitution was unworkable. Yet it did work and until 133 BC, to be just, it worked very well, but in spite of itself, not because of it. It worked because of unwritten conventions that its provisions should, effectively, be side-stepped. This is a great compliment to the men--both populus and nobilitas--who had to accept the conventions. But it is no compliment to the constitution itself.

After 133 and even worse after 82 BC, it is no longer possible to praise the men who operated it. On the contrary, the practice of politics in Rome was thoroughly degenerate. ... If you strip the personalities away--if you forget that what was st stake was the 'wide arch of the ranged Empire', if in fact you put away the drama and look at nothing but the political process itself--you will find no more sophistication, disinterestedness, or nobility than in a Latin-American banana republic. ...[Y]ou will find clientelist factions, personalist parties, private armies, and military struggle for the presidency ...

Sources: "Finer" is Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government I, 439-40 (1999)--a monument of modern scholarship that seems to be vanishing into obscurity almost more quickly than it was brought into being. "Everdell" is William R. Everdell, The End of Kings 45 (1983), a totally "reactionary" work in the narrow and technical sense that it retells the old stories in a style to suggest that the 20th Century never happened (update: apparently there is a second edition, and a forthcoming third (link)). The story of Henry Laurens and his slaves comes from Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics (1994), a superb backgrounder on what the Founders knew (or thought they knew) about the Greek and Roman world. Richard's Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts (2009) looks promising, although it might be a rework of the same topic.

Lena and Annie

On hearing the news of the death of Lena Horne, I am sure I am not the only one whose response was--she's still alive? Sure enough, there she was at the age of 92, an artifact from an almost irretrievably distant era. I felt the same way this morning when I read that the Tribune syndicate will be canceling "Annie," known to my pre-musical era as "Little Orphan Annie," at 85.

In the hard-edged world of segregated America, I doubt that Horne and Annie ever met, though if they did, they might have found that they had more in common than appeared at first blush. Annie, of course was the great avatar of resourcefulness, pluck and luck. Horne presented herself to her public as aloof and aristo but as she herself would tell you if you asked, she needed to do a lot of scratching and clawing along the way. They could have had a nice chat.

Horne for her part, was able to put her past behind her (although I am enchanted to learn that she once threw a table lamp at a guy who dissed her with a racial slur). Annie continued scratching and clawing to the end.

With Horne, it seems that some people marveled that such a cool demeanor could overlay such a turbulent past. But this apparent contradiction is more common than might at first appear, I suspect. I'd hazard a generalization that those who most successfully posture as aristos are those who had to learn it on there own; those born to the purple are no doubt more comfortable throwing it away. The coolest most butter-wouldn't-melt-in-your-mouth lady (white) that I knew grew up one flight above the candy store: her mother made her learn the piano as her ticket out.

And now that Annie is dead, perhaps we can at last learn the truth about her long-rumored involvement with this guy.

Comment Vit l'autre Moitié

14 May 1968

This is the house in which, this week, Maria delivered a woman of her child. At the upper end of the Boulevard Magenta, in a colony of huts--which are leased to the poorest of the poor in Paris by whom? Baron James de Rothschild--a room where the planks that form the walls are coming apart and the floor is full of holes, through which rats are constantly appearing, rats which also come in whenever the door is opened, impudent poor men's rats which climb on to the table, carrying away whole hunks of bread, and worry the feet of the sleeping occupants. In this room, six children: the four biggest in a bed, and at their feet, which they are unable to stretch out, the two smallest in a crate. The man, a costermonger who has known better days, dead-drunk during his wife's labour. The woman, as drunk as her husband, lying on a straw mattress and being plied with drink by a friend of hers, an old canteen attendant who developed a thirst in twenty-five years' campaigning and spends all her pension on liquor. And during the delivery in this shanty, the wretched shanty of civilization, an organ-grinder's monkey, imitating and parodying the cries and angry oaths of the shrews in the throes of childbirth, piddling through a crack in the roof on the snoring husband's back.

--Edmund and Jules de Goncourt,
Pages from the Goncourt Journals 136-7 (NYRB Classics 2007)

Per Wiki, Baron James de Rothschild had turned 76 just three days before; he died on 15 November of the same year, just three months after purchasing the Chateau Lafite vineyard. There still is a Boulevard de Magenta in Paris; it runs through the unfashionable ninth and tenth arrondissements..

As Maine Goes...

It is customary in some circles to think of Maine Republicans as a bastion of old-fashioned sanity in a world gone mad. But David invites us to consider the platform of the Maine Republican party:

The document calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, demands an investigation of "collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth," suggests the adoption of "Austrian Economics," declares that "'Freedom of Religion' does not mean 'freedom from religion'" (which I guess makes atheism illegal), insists that "healthcare is not a right," calls for the abrogation of the "UN Treaty on Rights of the Child" and the "Law Of The Sea Treaty" and declares that we must resist "efforts to create a one world government."

It also contains favorable mentions of both the Tea Party and Ron Paul. You can read the whole thing here.

Link. Guess we haven't been paying attention. Apparently neither of Maine's two Republican senators--certainly "moderate" by the standards of our own time, if no other--is up for reelection this year.

Afterthought: I feel impelled to reiterate a point I've made before. That is: it is important not to dismiss these folks as a bunch of hate-filled, self-indulgent nutsos. Okay, they are a bunch of hate-filled, self-indulgent nutsos, but nutsos with a point and a world o' hurt. I'll grant that there is a quantum of old-fashioned racism here (can you say KEEN-yah? Yah?). But these are people whose lives are falling apart and who don't see them getting much better and who feel that the government doesn't give a rat's patootie about their plight--in a context like this, the presence of a guy who just doesn't look like home is one final insult.

Lenin Confronts the Cold Heart of Capitalism

One hundred years ago this spring Lenin, soon to be the leader of the world revolution, touched down as a transient in Paris, along with his faithful wife Nadezhda Krupskaya:

Studying in Paris was very inconvenient. The Bibliotèque Nationale was a long way off. Vladimir Ilyich usually cycled there, but riding a bicycle in Paris was not what it was in the suburbs of Geneva. It was a great strain. Those cycle rides tired him out. The library closed at lunch time,. There was a lot of red-tape in the arrangements for ordering books, and Ilych swore at the library, and while he was at it, at Paris in general. ... In the end his bicycle was stolen. he used to leave it on the stairs of a house next door to the Bibliotèque Nationale and pay the concierge ten centimes a day for it. When he came for the bicycle and found it gone, the concierge declared that she had not been hired to look after the bicycle but only to let Ilyich keep it on the stairs.

--N.K. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin 194 (1970)

Cowen on Gladwell on Rereading

Tyler Cowen is impressed by Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that "rereading is much underrated." I agree with every word of that except "underrated"--I'm not at all sure it is underrated, at least not in the circles where Cowen and Gladwell would hope to travel. Or maybe they are just too young. There comes a point when it sinks in on you that you can draw on your experience, your accumulated cultural apparatus. You realize you can plumb new depths of nuance in your old favorites. You also (I am not sure whether Cowen/Gladwell intended this or even know it) --you find the truth in the maxim that every reading is a rereading. You realize (in retrospect!) that your first exposure to (say) Pinocchio was cast against an implicit model, to which the exposure becomes an affirmation, a criticism or a challenge. When those guys finally grow up, they may come to see the truth of Whitehead's maxim that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato.

For an elaboration of the point, with the obligatory Nabokov reference, go here. Whether love is lovelier the second time around--is left as an exercise for the student.

upfdsate: Joel points out that Lady Kaga rereads Pride and Prejudice every year.

Kagan: The Lost Episode

Joel flags me to a gripping piece of Kagania that casts her in as favorable a light as anything I'd seen before. It's witty, acerb and bless her heart, opinionated, or at least committed in a way that she seems to have tried to evade ever since:

I worked for Liz Holtzman last summer — some 14 hours a day, six days a week. So that night I was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, attending what I was fairly certain was going to be a celebration. Instead, it was a wake. And let me tell you there is nothing more depressing than drinking vodka and tonics and watching Walter Cronkite with 500 other people whose expectations had differed similarly from reality.

I got kind of drunk that night. A lot of people did. Most of us had grown to admire, even to love, Liz or rather, not Liz herself — actually, she was not terribly personable — but her intelligence, her integrity, her ideals. The defeat of those qualities by an ultra-conservative machine politician just come from the town of Hempstead was not a pleasant thing to watch.

Go ahead, read it all: link. See also link. It's got exactly what I've missed up to now: the flash of humanity. I think what we are seeing here is Kagan back when she was too young and ignorant to have been captured by the mentality that David Brooks described in this morning's Times:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

If you listen to people talk about Elena Kagan, it is striking how closely their descriptions hew to this personality type.

Works for me. I don't suppose the Supreme Court is likely to be the venue to lure Kagan back into her sharp-tongued, vodka-swilling adolescence, but it's nice to know she was there once.

Meanwhile, if you want to get your blood pressure up, go read this account of Kagan's Civ Pro class--though not, I suppose, for the reasons the author intended. Let's just say that if there is anything more annoying than a Harvard kid, it is a self-pitying Harvard kid. I hope she was just as mean to him as he thinks she was.

Solicitor General

I hear talk about how the office of Solicitor General is some sort of steppingstone to the Supreme Court.

Is it? A desultory Google is inconclusive, but I can think of a few examples and the record seems not very instructive.

The most recent example, I believe, would be Kagan's own mentor, Thurgood Marshall. I happily number myself among the ranks of Marshall admirers; I remember watching him argue (I think it was Miranda), and it was quite a sight: big hulking guy in a morning coat with the easy manner of a seasoned litigator -- "that's exactly what I mean, your honor," he said to somebody about somethin g.

Two more: Robert Jackson and Stanley Reed. In other respects also, you can bracket these two together: both old-fashioned country lawyers (the last two justices not to graduate from law school;); both New Deal partisans. Jackson was a superb writer, one of the few really good ones ever to sit on the bench. Both surely counted as liberals by the standards of their time but their record appears more equivocal in retrospect.

There most be others but that's all I can think of at the moment. Oh, but then there is this guy.

Releases

Listening to an NPR story about how gulf oil workers were being pressured into signing liability releases, I remember the story of Hanratty, who used to work in and around the coal fields at Birmingham, Alabama. Apparently every time there was an accident, Hanratty would show up on his motor scooter and quick get everybody to sign liability releases which he then sold to the coal companies.

Apparently this got too rich even for the Alabama bar and so they went to work to put together a disbarment case against Hanratty. The morning of the hearing, the bar's lawyers showed up in their lawyer combat togs with lots of brief cases and file folders. Just in time for the hearing, Hanratty strolled in alone. The judge called the case.

"Mr. Hanratty, you are summed to show cause why you should not lose your license to practice law in this community, how say you?"

"That can be easily answered, your honor, I have no license to practice law..

With BP in the oil spill case, looks like we might not have a chance.

Taxmom on the Valley

My friend Taxmom is back from chaperoning a junior high road trip to Universal City--19 hours she says, and have you noticed how that when we talk about time spent with junior high schoolers, we measure very precisely? Taxmom used to live in (around) LA. She reports:

The one tranquil moment that sticks in my mind is looking down Third Street in Burbank (we were standing in front of Burbank High School) at 7:45 on a Saturday morning: cool sunny day, pink orchid trees in bloom, fairly clear air, the Hollywood hills looming above, and the San Fernando Valley with all of its potential (Thai food! Sam Goody! Ikea!) spread before us - made me almost miss LA.

Oh Hey, the Smoke House! Tower Books and Records! Bob Hope Airport, I could go on and on.

But I can relate. One summer Sunday evening a few years back: I was driving west on the Ten just south of downtown where you can see all the high-rises. I was thinking:

Boy, this is an interesting place!
Man, I had fun here!

And:

Thank God I don't live here any more!

Lady Kaga

That's Ignoto on Miz Justice Kagan. He says he thought it up and I don't doubt it for a moment but I suppose it is one of those spontaneous eructions that emerge after any sharp discontinuity in the news cycle. Like back on '06 when they made Benedict Pope. Within hours, it seems everyone was calling him Papa Razzi.

For Elena's Inbox

Well, best wishes to Miz Justice Kagan. I still don't quite get it, but she does sound like an improvement over most of the current lot. And maybe she can find a way to do something about this.

More on Exam Time--Party Schools

After I wrote my previous post about student anxiety in the job market, I ran across ATL's characteristically arch account of the party school sweepstakes. It's all good fun, but I wonder if they gave sufficient to one important determinant in the party-school milieu: student stress.

I don't know exactly how this fits in and I'm sure it is complicated but I suspect it is an issue worth considering. That is: why do students get shitfaced drunk? Possible reasons: (a) they like getting shitfaced drunk; (b) they don't know any better; (c) they value partying more than work; (d) it's an escape from disabling anxiety. I suspect that the correct answer is (e) all of the above in vary degrees, and differing at different schools. I mean, look at the list: Arizonas at numbers one and four--sure, sun and sand. Tulane at number two--New Orleans, a no brainer. Florida State--well okay, Florida, but FSU is in the non-tourist wing (from Miami, they say, you go north to go south).

And then 5-6-7: Berkeley, Virginia, Michigan. I suppose you can make up all sorts of reasons, but this looks to me like overachiever central--places like the first of La Traviata, where everybody is whooping it up but nobody seems to be having much fun.

Afterthought: No joke, the kiddies from Tulane really stole Mr. Rogers' shoe?

Exam Time

  I'm cooling my heels in my squatter digs at the law school this morning while my bankruptcy students take their final exam. It is their last for the semester, and it rounds out the 40th year since I first stepped up to the podium. It's been a memorable year in the not-fun sense--students the jumpiest I have seen them since...

Since when? Let me think: well, since 1978. That was the high point of a different generation. The Law School was educating its first crop of female students. In my own graduating class just eight years before, there had been only one. By '78 we were up to perhaps 30 percent.

And this was the "transitional" cohort--girls (sic) who had set out to be wives and mothers and found out it wasn't working for them, and were desperate to re-equip. They were often excellent students and many of them went on to be fine lawyers but at this point, there were very insecure. A great many of them were just coming out of (or going into) a divorce--you could see it coming, the same way you used to be able to see a car crash coming as you stood and watched the two vehicles charged at each other across Trafalgar Square. Worse: the faculty was still almost all male, and we all reminded them of their ex husbands. In the Chinese-proverb sense, it was an interesting time.

All that is ancient history now: the student body is a bit above 50 percent female and the faculty is close to that. There may still be a women's caucus, but it's not on my radar. The issue today is, of course, jobs, in the sense of they don't have any. Oh, I exaggerate--in fact some have jobs--a few, just as good as they could have hoped for in any market. But even among those, there is a bit of survivor anxiety. Plus, they all read David Lat and they know that their good fortune might be snatched away from them at any moment.

And for the rest of them, zip; for most, not even a nibble or a hope. And I marvel at how unfamiliar such a world can be. That is: when sat down for my first class as a student in 1963, the dean welcomed us with the encouraging news that we were joining an under-peopled profession. He was right: at the end of World War II, a whole lot of veterans had piled into law school and the profession just wasn't able to absorb them all. So for half a generation, law just wasn't a particularly attractive career option compared to, say, high school teaching. Strivers used it as a method for career advancement up the corporate ladder. Others--well, you really had to want to do it, or you were going to find yourself pretty unhappy.

Starting in the mid 60s, everything changed. Lyndon Johnson funded legal aid to the (as we then called them) poor. The civil rights revolution gave lawyers an unheard-of glamor. And in 1968, Cravath jacked up starting salaries by half, from $10,000 to a stratospheric $15,000. Law school enrollments soared.

So here's the thing: from about the time I started teaching, any reasonably bright and diligent law student--and most of them were reasonably bright and diligent--any one of them could expect to find a job which, even if it did not promise great wealth (I don't think any of our grads ever went to Cravath), still provided a living and even a modicum of respectability. And here is the beauty part: you didn't even have to care that much about law. Just be successful in the negative sense: stay out of trouble, don't let your grades fall too low, don't call too much attention to yourself. Things would work out and life would be good.

For forty years or more, that was the pattern. But no more. This year, for the first time, we are surrounded by a bunch of kids who have--not just no great options, but very close to no options at all. Or so it seems (but cf. infra). And here's an aggravating truth: we on the faculty are virtually no help to them in this milieu because we've never seen this kind of world before and know nothing about it.

So I don't blame the students for being jumpy. I'd be jumpy too. I wish that there was more I could tell them (scratching up 40-year-old war stories is a device not often welcomed). So far, it seems, the most notable initiative we've taken is to bring in a motivational speaker to blow steam into their deflated of sense of self-worth. You will thrive, he told them. They did not find it consolatory.

I do, as it happens, hold strongly to one insight that I would intend as consolatory, though they might not see it so. It's not that they will thrive: maybe they will thrive and maybe not. My insight is just that the future lies ahead, and its corollary, something will turn up. These are, as I say, bright kids. And they have the potential to be resourceful, although they find themselves under constraint to deploy resources that they have never deployed before. They'll respond to this challenge not because they are so eager to do so, but because they have no other choice. Above I took a long view. I can end with an even longer view: recall how Caesar, to motivate his army to move forward, used to burn his boats on the beach. It's a grim sort of tough love, I suppose, but for the Roman army at least, it ended rather well.

PS: Oh, and did I mention that applications for places in next year's class are even higher?
==
Fn,: for a nostalgia trip through the history of the profession, go here. The Cravath number is on page 56.

What Would Jesus Hype?

When I was a kid, they said the three things that would sell a book were: Lincoln; and doctors; and dogs. So obviously someone suggested a book called Lincoln's Doctor's Dog.

Evidently tastes have changed.

Do I Have This Right?

Let me review the bidding:

• A synthetic or uncovered derivative is just a zero-sum game, a gamble in which, in the long run, only the house makes money.


• And "end-user" derivative is a loan in sheep's clothing, priced higher than a loan because it transfers keeps the debt off the balance sheet and insulates the holder from the entanglements of bankruptcy. These extra costs are passed on to the chumps unsophisticated or uninformed lenders (tort claimants?) unable for whatever reason to escape the burden.

A One-man Show with Ian McKellen

Mrs. Buce conjured up a nice surprise out of the Netflix queue--a one-man Shakespeare evening with Ian McKellen. McKellen is perhaps best known to crossover audiences as Gandalf the Grey but he has deep roots in classical theatre, particularly Shakespeare.

It's an agreeable way to spend an evening. It's not as overpowering as the imperishable John Gielgud's dazzler, but then few things are. It's affable, good-natured and unpretentious--it apparently dates from the late 70s, long before his emergence as a world-class wizard. Nonetheless, McKellen makes clear that he is a master at the far-trickier-than-it-looks rendition of Shakespearean verse.

McKellen tackled a number of more or less familiar characters in some depth. No surprise, perhaps, that he was a knockout with Richard III--a role which some years later he turned into a highly satisfying movie. More surprising, perhaps, that the skinny and delicate McKellen could turn himself into that paradigm of fat men, Falstaff. And here's one that has to be a stretch: I'd say that McKellen is about the most convincing Juliet I've ever seen. I've never seen a Juliet whom I thought was really up to it; erhaps one reason is that Shakespeare's Juliet is so fluent beyond her years. The play presents her 14 and though I doubt many 14-year-olds actually tackle the role, still I suspect a lot of actresses who take it on are living off intellectual capital they haven't earned. McKellen, with his superbly convincing delivery, was able to put across lines that you know are there but which I've never seen delivered so well.

Perhaps ironically, I didn't think he was as convincing as an actor with either Hamlet or Macbeth, but here's something I learned by watching him: even though he may not have been convincing as a character, still he was you wanted to stick with him as a speaker. He was able to tease so much out of the verse that you wanted to stick with him even if he might not have inhabited the role.

This is the second time in the past few months I've had a look at the young McKellen: he was also part of the team that put together those superb master classes with John Barton. I wouldn't say McKellen alone was quite as astounding as McKellen in the company of Barton et al., but it was still a lot better than a poke in the eye with a pointed stick. Highly recommended

I Guess He's Not Counting the Bible?

Link.

One Right-on and One Huh?

Turcopilier who is in a position to know endorses Defense Secretary Gates' newly announced assault on the military industrial complex:-

Gates is right. The armed forces are loaded up with too many generals and admirals. There is feather bedding everywhere. The money taps were turned on in Republican days and have been opened even wider in the present administration. The armed forces are structured now to support a forward leaning aggressive foreign policy in which the expectation is clear that finesse counts for little and massive brute force and large troop commitments are the pattern. A COIN strategy in Afghanistan that relies on so many soldiers for what the generals would clearly like be an indefinite period is the very emblem of this kind of thinking.

Headquarters have multiplied remarkably in the last 20 years. Bush '41 once said that he lacked the "vision thing." Today's armed forces are burdened with far too many flag officers and SESs who are unable to even imagine "the vision thing." As a result the processes of equipment acquisition and creation of new doctrine have been relegated to huge committees, endless paper and expensive endless experimentation.

But then he drops a going-away zinger:

Gates' statements about multi-layered civilian contracts would be more impressive if he were not guilty of the same thing. He has a number of "pet rocks" for which this outrage does not seem to apply.

Ah--details, please? Or at least a hint?

A Philosopher on Lawyers (or Law Professors)

Being neither a serious nor a second-rate philosopher, I may not be the right person to adjudicate this little dustup:

[L]awyers. unlike serious philosophers [but. in this regard, quite like second-rate philosophers], do not actually seek to demonstrate the positions they defend. Rather, they aim to assimilate issues with which they are concerned to the existing structure of laws and precedents in hopes that courts will construe those issues in ways that favor their clients. For this purpose, lawyers need a large and versatile armamentarium of concepts. categories. distinctions. and argument-fragments with the aid of which they can articulate intuitions. convictions, or interests to which they are already committed. Both utilitarianism and cost/benefit analysis provide just such weapons to advocates of the left or the right, none of whom can be said ever to prove their positions, but all of whom gain argumentative leverage from their ability to embed their advocacy in a preexisting proof structure.

So Robert Paul Wolff. The first few sentences sound about right to me. But when he gets to the end, I think he may be talking more about law professors than to the person who tends to (as I think Rumpole once said) "a spot of indecency down at the Uxbridge Magistrate's Court." Even the superachievers who served apprenticeship at the low philosopher's table, once they get out there moiling for a buck tend to forget the refined the eminence of the seminar room. Or if they recall their academic roots at all, it is perhaps most likely to take the form of an Adam Smith necktie.

Missed the British Election?

Not to worry. Chances are, it will be around again soon.

In the meantime, says John Lanchester, Conservative David Cameron and Lib Dem Nick Clegg will jockey for position:

The Tories’ goal will be to look like a plausible government and to reassure both the markets and the electorate. Doing both at the same time, in the current fiscal climate, won’t be easy. Cameron’s one big advantage is that electorates hate being made to elect and will resent the party which forces the next contest. Clegg’s goal will be to remind everyone he exists and to get them thinking that he would be a better PM than anyone else. He can bring the government down whenever he likes, so his task is to pick the right moment, one which makes him look like a man of principle and the Tories look like eye-bulging ideologues.

Oh, and the other guys? Their job will be to pick a successor to the most unloved British Prime Minister in modern history.

Some Weekend Reading

As is sadly customary, other people's postings seem far more interesting than my own. Here's the best thing I've seen so far about gulf oil. Here, James Fallows breaths a gust of sanity into the acrid stench of paranoia that lingers over the terrorism/security debate. DeLong offers a challenging insight into the politic situation of undergraduates at Berkeley, suggesting that (surprise!) it is a good deal more complicated than the right-wing slime machine believes.

Ashland Theatre Note: Pride & Prejudice

You may remember the Madison County rule of movie adaptation: to make a good movie adapted from a novel, you need a mediocre novel. Something like The Bridges of Madison County, say, is far more likely to be a successful movie than all those pious yawners from Merchant-Ivory. The reason is clear enough: start with a good novel and you'll have to leave too much out; you'll wind up with an audio-visual aid where the best the audience can do is to try to remain the absent good stuff.

Evidently it works for stage plays too. Pride and Prejudice, at the Angus Bowmer theatre in Ashland this week, makes it clear that you can take the story line and a good many of the astringent one-liners from Jane Austen's most beloved novel but you can't keep the subtlety, the nuance or (perhaps this is most important) the rhythm, the pacing, the feel for time and the change of seasons.

Facing down into this kind of a void, Ashland fell backward into what it knows best how to do: broad burlesque, with lots of good-natured almost-clowning. It worked in a way, but I suppose it worked best among those who didn't know anything about the novel beyond the Cliff Notes. Devotees of the novel--I sat through the show with a couple--on the available evidence were likely to find it a kind of desecration.

Exhibit "A" was the casting of James Newcomb as Mr. Collins, the fawning and frightened little time-server clergyman who is there to remind the heroine that there are worse things in the world than not being married at all. Newcomb's Collins is a hoot and it is not, strictly speaking, out of keeping with the character in the original. But Director Libby Appel allowed Newcomb to transform it into a star turn, a standup routine that became its own reason for being.

Exhibit "B" would be Judith-Marie Bergan as Mrs. Bennett, the daft and bewildered mother of all those marriageable young ladies. I see that Bergan is in the rota also this spring for Mistress Quickly in Henry IV and you have to wonder if she got her characterizations mixed up: it would be interesting to see if Bergan's Eastcheap inkeeper turns up as a befuddled Hampshire matron. In any event, her Mrs. Bennett has far more of the fishwife about her than you'd ever expect to find in a country house.

But Exhibit "C" would be the whole tone of the piece. No doubt it was funny and no doubt that Austen is funny. But Austen's wit is quicksilver, gone before you can catch it; Ashland's is one step down the line towards Curly, Moe and Larry. And perhaps more important, Austen's wit is sauced with an undercurrent of sombre unease. For step back and think for a moment--husband-hunting is inherently comic, but these five Bennett girls really do have a problem: fail in the marriage competition and they will find themselves--well, probably not exactly out on the street, but very likely dependent on the famously unreliable good graces of some relative stranger. Moreover Mr. Bennett: no doubt about it he is a witty man--he has some of the best lines in the novel and the play. But he has somehow arranged life so his nearest and dearest face a life of penury and he treats it all with an air of merry indifference. The genius of Austen is that you never quite forget unsettling ironies like this even while he is making you laugh.

There is another problem here, and this one may lie in the novel itself: Mr. Darcy, the young man of ten thousand a year who lies at the center of the action. Face it, Austen wasn't really very interested in her young men, except insofar as they provide furniture for the young ladies. This is excusable in a book where you can concentrate on so much else (although even in the book, you somehow sense that the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy is going to be one of the most tempestuous that Derbyshire has ever seen). On stage, Mr. Darcy has to be himself, and you find yourself thinking he might have done better had he tried to be someone else.