Sunday, June 30, 2013

Ashland Cymbeline

When I was a junior in high school, Mr,. McAllister, the orchestra leader, came to Donald Mothes and (who?) and me and said: "Now boys, we are going to the opera.  It's not an ideal opera, not the one that should be your introduction to opera, but it is the one I have tickets to and we will do what we can."

And we did.  Mr. M drove us to into Boston and back (pre-expressway, a real grind).  I have no idea who paid for dinner but I'm pretty sure it wasn't I.  And we went to the opera: Verdi's Falstaff.  

All thanks to Mr. M but I didn't see another opera for about 20 years, and I think he was probably right about first-time introductions.  I've since grown to love Falstaff but it is absolutely not one I would put at the head of the list of candidates for first-timers.  Carmen for sure.   I suppose La Bohème.  Maybe even Rigoletto but Falstaff is just way too inaccessible to anyone who doesn't have a pretty good sense of what he might listen for.

I suppose I'd say the same sort of thing about Shakespeare's Cymbeline.  I don't want to torture the comparison: Falstaff still is, at the end of the day, a much better piece of work.   And Verdi was in his 80s when he wrote; Shakespeare, not yet 50.  But it was Verdi's last work and  for Shakespeare, at least one of the last (the evidence is equivocal).  They have common virtues in that each represents a kind of summing up, something on the order of autumnal wisdom.  And a common vice: in each the artist tries to cram in too much.  In both cases you find yourself thinking--hey wait a minute; what did he just say (or sing)?  And the action has moved on without you.  Ideas--in music, or in verse, often good ideas, just come flying too thick and fast.  And in Cymbeline, at least, I just can't get control of the plot. I've seen it three times in my life (that I remember) and in each case I find myself saying--um, just how did we get to Wales, and why are we here?

All of which is by way of background for a pleasant surprise: faced with these obstacles, I think Ashland this year is doing a superb job with it.  They've worked hard to make it accessible and intelligible--I wonder if, in general, they are getting better at the verse?  And as to the generally refractory structure, they've decided mostly to go with the flow.  Or rather, more than the flow: somebody obviously decided that they can't really conquer all the clutter and distraction without doing violence to the essence.  So let it all pile in and in addition, pile on some more (this is, for example, the first Cymbeline  I ever saw with a Disney subtext, and it doesn't hurt).

The result is a Cymbeline in which, for all the play's natural frustrations, you really are able to discern a distinctive tang, a flavor consistent and memorable and not quite like anything else Shakespeare ever did.

NSA Spying: a Class Act

 How surveillance works:
[T]he US monitors Germany as closely as it does China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Daily, an average of 20 million telephone connections and 10 million internet transactions are collected by the NSA. This is ten times as many telephone connections as the NSA monitors for France, e.g.

The NSA does not spy in the same way on the UK, Canada, Australia or New Zealand, who are class 2 partners and therefore are not targets. Germany, the leaked document says, is only a class 3 partner and therefore is also considered a target.
Link.  Let's review the bidding.  We go easy on "nice" countries like New Zealand and Canada.  We go harder on "not-nice" countries like Saudi Arabia and China.  Germany--well, old-fashioned Germany was "nice" enough (the ex-Nazis were mostly reformed).  But then they took in the East Germany and those East Germans used to run the Stas--oh, right.

See also: NSA’s Surveillance Operations the Envy of Former Stasi Commander

Saturday, June 29, 2013

In Which I Hate, Hate Hate a TV Show
(And Watch it Anyway)

Against my better judgment, I just spent most of an hour watching the third episode of Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom. It was almost unbearably awful: a relentless drumbeat of cheap shots and preaching-to-the-choir that made Rachel Maddow look like Walter Cronkite.*  Mrs. Buce, not quite so revolted, said "Oh, it's Sorkin.  You saw the same thing in West Wing."  Well, sorta kinda, but not really. I liked West Wing, at least the early seasons. Of course you knew all along that Sorkin was the very model of beltway conventional wisdom and that Jed Bartlett's was the best government since Rome under the Antonines.  But mostly he didn't let his politics distract him from telling a good story.  This time, it seems, all bets are off.

This is a shame for more reasons than I can count, but one is surely this: American right-wing populism, whatever it horrors, is almost certainly a far more complicated and I suspect interesting story than anybody in Sorkin's inner circle appears to suspect.    I'm not sure that it is anywhere on TV yet: maybe Breaking Bad, although I haven't watched it.  But so far, the one thing you can tell before is that as an analyst of current American culture, Sorkin doesn't even get out of the gate.  

Happily for my blood pressure, I also today happened onto an approach far more interesting and far more likely to move the ball down field. It's Josh  Barro's new Business Insider piece on why Toronto's clown-show mayor  is almost worth taking seriously.  Here's a takeaway paragraph:
So in addition to producing a fountain of amusing news-of-the-weird stories, Rob Ford presents a useful cautionary tale for the often-cozy business, government and labor elites that govern large cities. If you allow people in the less-glamorous parts of town to come to believe that you do not care about their interests and needs, they may toss you out and replace you with a populist, “straight-talking” buffoon who energetically demonstrates that he does -- even if he is totally unfit to run a city, and might be the sort of person who smokes crack.
 Aaron, next time you set out to break a lance for good government, you might want to put Barro on your speed dial.  Might make for a far more interesting show.

*Afterthought: only after writing the above did I stumble on a snippet called "Aaron Sorkin has Answers for Haters of 'Newsroom.'"  Interesting, but I'm not sure it addresses the point I am trying to make here.

Second afterthought:  I'm getting some blowback from which I infer that some people thought I was actually expressing fondness for the Tea Party here.  Oh nonononono;  I think the whole enterprise is calamitously misguided, and the leadership mostly vile sacs of pestilence.  But it's interesting even so, and the mainstream incomprehension can be fatal.

Sock it To 'Em, Baby

The gang down at the law school spends a lot of time agonizing over "the Socratic method," or perhaps better "the dreaded Socratic method," whereby the professor attempts to liven up a somnolent classroom by actually asking a question.*  I'm not precisely sure where/when this obsession began; by convention it starts with the (putatively) brilliant and (clearly) half-mad Christopher Columbus Langdell who more or less invented "the case method"--the strategy of studying law via reported opinions of judges--back in the 1860s.  I suspect a more precise inflection point would be September 9, 1978, when the actor John Houseman took the TV screen as Darth Vader Professor Charles Kingsfield, the scowling, beetle-browed holy terror of the law school classroom who (Wiki catches the conventional wisdom here) "inspires both awe and fear in his students in his unremitting determination to prepare them for the practice of law."  It's one of the alltime great pieces of television schtick, and a whole generation of lawyers went through their entire professional careers under the sincere conviction that Professor K represents the truth of their own rite of passage, as distinct from anything that they really underwent.

A trifling sidebar set of questions, surely of no more than entertainment value would be: who was Socrates?  And what, if anything, was his method?  I will trust UB readers to be informed enough to gin up some sort of answer to the first question  As to the second, here's a fascinating little trifle that I just stumbled across in the notes to a schoolbook edition of a Platonic dialogue:**
The technique of [Plato's Symposium] is characteristic of the Platonic Socrates: self-deprecating and self-effacing; disarmingly complimentary; insistent on the need to agree at each step and on the recollection of essential steps;  courteous but firm in the rejection of hesitant answers; patient in making each general question clear by taking individual cases; swift and bold in forcing fallacious inferences and assumptions on the collaborator in the dialogue; motivated by the need to prepare the ground for doctrinal exposition and assisted both by the fallacies which the collaborator has himself committed and by the intellectual paralysis which strikes down the collaborator at any moment of Plato's choosing.
References omitted. So far, I would say this is bang on.  But the commentator continues:
A dialogue in which one speaker agrees at every step with the other, never offering serious resistance or making serious criticisms, differs in form from the type of continuous, authoritative exposition which Socrates decries [elsewhere], and differs (at least on a cursory reading) in the impression which it conveys, but does not differ in substance.
 I'm really not clear what the commentator is trying to tell me here.  I'll grant that at least the best of the dialogues are hypnotic reading: at times funny, magical, breezy seductive, deadly earnest and just about any other rhetorical or literary strategy you can imagine.  The trouble is that for the most part, they aren't really "dialogues."  True that Socrates' "questions" (really, expositions) are cameo masterpieces; still the stark truth is that his poor stooges almost never get a decent line and almost always wind up dumbfounded and empty-handed, like Hamilton Burger losing every trial to Perry Mason, or Ed McMahon responding to every one of Johnny Carson's assertions with a booming chord of "You are correct, sir!"  Socrates says all the stuff you wish you had said to the brute at the party; and the responder says all the things you wish the other guy had answered.   Maybe that is the problem with classroom dialogue, too.

---

*Or maybe they don't.    I may just be dating myself here, and references to "the Socratic method" may now be just as dated as references to "The Simpsons" or "the Presidency of Adlai E. Stevenson."

**Plato, Symposium (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, Kenneth Dover ed.).  I see that Dover's edition was first published in 1980. Could it have  been a response to--nah, that is way too simple.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Ashland Shrew

Another Ashland theater note: I've complained more than is good to me how  (ironiically?) the Shakespeare company doesn't seem to trust Shakespeare: how they they feel to tart it all up for fear the'll poison the box office if they just what is advertised.

But here is a play for which it works pretty well: Taming of the Shrew.  The dancing, the wrestling, the juggling, the air guitar--it's all fine and adds to, rather than detracts from, the whole effect.

To anticipate: you're going to say they can do that because it's because Shrew is a bad play, not echt Shakespeare, or at any rate not what we want him to be.  But that's the thing: it's not a bad play, it's just a different play, and taken on its own terms, it works fine. Recall that Shakespeare tried just about everything over a long career.  He even joked about trying everything: see what Polonius tells Hamlet about the players.  He certainly tries farce; no surprise at all to find that he also tries slapstick.  It's obvious to even a casual observer that farce/slapstick is fiendishly difficult, and it's a tradition which at Ashland by now seems deeply ingrained.

Indeed if there is any surprise here, it is how the play almost (well: not quite) slips its traces and becomes a better play than Shakespeare felt he needed.  You remember Petruchio and Kate; what you may not remember is that they aren't on stage really all that much, in contrast with a dozen or so other characters, many of whose names you have trouble remembering. Almost in spite of the playwright's apparent intention, the lovers come close to emerging as flesh and blood.

And while we're on topic, we might as well pause for a moment to put the play in context.  It must be--what, the fourth? The seventh?--play Shakespeare wrote.  And look at the menu: o;ne way or another in these early hears he does a blood-and-thunder horror show  (Titus Andronicus); a good-natured rom-com (Two Gentlemen of Verona);   an almost-tragedy (Richard III); an old-fashioned Renaissance comedy (Comedy of Errors)-and whatever he did of the three parts of Henry VI. Not only does he try everything; he tries everything at here at the beginning of his career.  He'll do virtually everything better (one of the many wonders of Shakespeare is his unexampled capacity for self-correction, and for learning from experience).  But a good way to approach Shrew is to think of it as one more instance of his courage, his daring, his optimism and his (it must have surprised even him) his natural creative fluency.

Whazzappenin' Bro?

I've been taking a bit of down time.  Anything going on?


Monday, June 24, 2013

Back in the Ill-Behoover Administration

The estimable Michael Quinion puzzles over "behoove/behove" as in "it ill behoves":
It’s one of those few expressions in modern English that is almost always impersonal. You or I, or even they, do not generally behove. The empty agent it is usually in charge of the verb. Behove can also appear with negative sense, for which a common marker word in the UK is ill. Ill behoves implies acting inappropriately or improperly, as in this editorial pronouncement from a Sunday newspaper:
In an age of genuine austerity, it ill behoves those who have enough cash to eat as they wish to stand in judgment on those who do not.
The Observer, 10 Feb. 2013.
Americans use ["behove"] only rarely, but make up for it by using behoove more often and with a wider range of modifying words such as would, might and certainly.
I think I can help re the American instance.  Back in the 50s, all the clever people (= myself and my friends) owned an LP record called "I Can Hear it Now," in which Edward R. Murrow curated snippets of radio broadcasts of famous events.  Clever people could recite chunks of it, including this from John L. Lewis:
Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep for their fallen and they lament for the future of the children of the race. It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.
Amazing how flat ir sounds without his orotund Welsh sonorities.  Best I can do is a snippet of some testimony before the Senate, from back  in the days when private-sector unionism was stilll a public issue:




Meanwhile, I'm still looking for a good finish to the limerick about the girl from Vancouver who thought it would never behoover.  "Louvre" seems indicated, although I am not quite sure how.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Lazare on Sand

Catch of the day: Daniel Lazare's LRB deconstruction of Shlomo Sand's deconstruction of the history of the Jewish "People"  and "Land"--the terms Sand uses, though he describes each not as a history but as an "invention"   Lazare's account seems to have been long in the baking: Sand's "people" book came out in English in 2010, in Hebrew two years earlier.   Fashioning it as an attack on Jewish "essentialism," Sand certainly understood his book to be contentious, although in many ways it builds on the work of earlier inquirers, notably Israel Finkelstein.  He cannot have been disappointed: his book has already generated a subgenre all its own (a Wiki does a pretty good job of summarizing criticism of Sand's earlier book). 

Lazare is ideally equipped to carry the inquiry forward.  He's been a sympathetic student of the general topic for more than a decade now: here is a 2002 article that offers a superb introduction to the inquiry in an earlier manifestation.  He says that as a line of inquiry,  "Sand's investigation is more than justified," but he calls the earlier book "a messy polemic" (he says the new one is "better").  Whatever: if you read Sands, you will want to read this.  If you don't read Sands but feel you should, this might  be a good place to staat. 

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Something that Just Dawned On Me about My Grandparents

Here's a point--some points--about my grandparents that I never thought of before.  One, my grandmother Augusta was left a widow with seven children.  She brought them all to honorable adulthood and, what may be even more astonishing, she kept the family together.  I tell that story often, with admiration and awe.

Two,I almost never talk about my other grandparents, Fernando and Sadie (I had grandparents named named Fernando and Sadie, how cool is that).  There's nothing shameful or scandalous here.  It's just that there isn't a lot to say.  So far as I can tell, they had an untroubled marriage.  They raised four lovely kids, and they seem to have enjoyed each other's company.  Fernando was a high-skill leather worker down at the shoe factory.  Maybe the most interesting thing I know about him is that he wore a white shirt to work, and changed the collar every day, including Saturday.  They even had a cottage by the lake-a piece they had come into by the luck of geography: they both grew up in central New Hampshire, back when nobody much cared about the place.

And that is about it.  And here's the thing: we want our loved ones to have lives without plot.   Plot means misfortune, perplexity, challenge.  But most of our lives have plot.  August's had all the plot she could handle.  But Fernando and Sadie seem to have lives without plot.  To which I say, lucky them.

Fn.:  I never knew any of these people.  They all died just shortly before or after I was born.

Fn.: How "Fernando?"  Go  here.  For more on 'Augusta and her children, go  here and here.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Krugman on Rents

There's a tantalizing possibility--okay, I wouldn't bet on it, but still a possibility--that Paul Krugman may just have kicked off a useful public debate over the meaning of a central but, I think, ill-articulated fundamental concept in economics.

The takeoff point is this morning's NYT column which (news in itself) is not about the evils of austerity and the need for more stimulus spending.   Rather it's a more general inquiry into burgeoning inequality, declining investment and the fizzling middle class.  None of this is entirely new but you've still got to salute Krugman for putting the points so crisply and so well, and from his bully pulpit.  But look at  Krugman's culprit, right there in paragraph three: "rents," more particularly "profits that don’t represent returns on investment."

Rents?  Really?  Now, perhaps uncharacteristically I was awake that morning in Econ 1A so I have at least a 1A notion of what rents are to an economist: as set forth in the world's most popular economics textbook, "an analytic term for the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of that which is needed to keep it employed in its current use."  Contrast "perfect competition," where nobody makes a penny beyond what is necessary to keep him in the market.   Cf. (I repeat myself, I am sure) the last thing you want in the world is a job where you get paid what you're worth.  Think Warren Buffet's legendary "castle with a moat around it," or more exactly "enduring competitive advantage."

That much I understood even through my sleep-deprived undergraduate haze.  A little more time and a little more patience made me realize that the concept of "rent" may be far more protean than they taught in 1A--or, indeed, than its expositors ever suspected.   Two-head Gruskin, the pitcher who can watch first and third at the same time, draws down a gazillion a year from the Pawtucket Piranhas, although truth be told, he'd probably pitch for free.  Is he enjoying an economic rent?  Or just born lucky?  

The notion gets even trickier as it gets more "social."  Consider my lakeside cottage with its mountain view.  Grandpa got the land for a dollar because nobody wanted to live out in the woods in those days.   I know what you are thinking but no, I wouldn't take a million dollars for it today.  And don't even think of driving your pickup in through the strawberry patch so you can picnic on the beach.  If need be I'll enlist the power of the sovereign to protect my (thanks, Warren) "enduring competitive advantage."   We think competition is great.  We think property rights are inviolable.  Three into two don't go.

I can now admit that I cheated in quoting Krugman's definition of rents (above).  Here's the fuller version:
[M]onopoly rents: profits that don’t represent returns on investment, but instead reflect the value of market dominance.
Ahah.  So, Krugman, the master dialectician, has anticipated my paltry cavil and has tried to squash me coming out of the gate.  He's concerned about "the value of market dominance."  So what can we make of this limitation?   I'd put it this way: sure, Apple (say) enjoys "market dominance"--but it is far from clear that "market dominance" per se is an actionable evil.   Skip out of 1A and on to law school.  One of the first things you learn in the anti-trust course is that bigness alone is not an offense.  You conspire to restrain trade, you may wide up in the clink, you merely grow big, you may get a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

And this may be more than a mere tic in the law: not everybody thinks bigness is per se  bad; by corollary, not everybody thinks that competition is per se a social good.  Just coming of Jean Strouse's fine biography of J.P. Morgan, I'm recalling how the great buccaneer felt pretty near to exactly the opposite: he thought excessive competition an appalling waste: too many railroads and nobody can run an effective railroad.  Some people would make the same kind of argument about, e.g., airlines today.

[Krugman himself seems to wobble on the point.  He says that "You can argue that Apple earned its special position — although I’m not sure how many would make a similar claim for Microsoft..."  Exactly.  I suspect quite a few people would regard Steve Jobs as an unusual human being with a knack for thinking up things to sell us that we didn't know were possible until he thought them up.  Bill Gates, by contrast, may well count as just a guy who figured out how to put up toll bridges and charge for stuff that was going to happen anyway,.]

I suspect that Krugman may get closer to his target when he says that "Apple ... seems barely tethered to the material world."  Unh hnh,.  I think his point here may have something to do with intellectual property laws, the modern enclosure system, a once-good idea that has metastasized into a monster whose virtues are pretty much invisible to everyone other than the folks who get to sluice up all the money.  It may well  be these that provoke the disconnect between activity and reward--the disconnect that seems to trouble Krugman and might justly trouble us all.

I don't particularly want to pick a fight with Krugman here (it is my great good fortune that he'll never notice). My point is that this column looks uncharacteristically like a promising first draft--a beginning effort to grasp hold of a problem which deserves--nay, desperately needs--the kind of attention that he is empowered to offer.

Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer

Thenne cam Sleuthe al byslobberd with two slimed yes.
'Y moste sitte to be shryue or elles sholde y nappe;
Y may not wel stande ne stoupe ne withouten a stoel knele.
Were y brouhte in my bed, but yf my tayl-ende hit made,
Sholde no ryngyng do me to ryse til y were rype to dyne.
 So William Langland, Piers Plowman, the beginning of Passus 7 as transcribed by Derek Pearsall (York Medieval Texts, second series (n.d.?), subtitled "an edition of the C-text."

Then came Sloth all beslobbered with two slimed eyes.
I must sit to be shriven or else should I nap.
I may not wwell stand nor stoop nor without a stool kneel.
Were I brought to my bed, unless my rear-end brought me to it,
Should no ringing do me to rise till it were ripe to dine.



Thursday, June 20, 2013

Consicentious Objection: Discuss

NSA leaker Edward Snowden:
He said he decided to leak information after becoming disenchanted with President Barack Obama, who he said had continued the policies of predecessor George W. Bush. "I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things ... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under," he told the Guardian newspaper, which published a video interview with him on its website.
Mob executioner  John Martorano
“Family and friends come first. ... My father always taught me that. The priests and the nuns I grew up with taught me that. They taught me that Judas — Judas was the worst person in the world.” ...

Mr. Martorano ... who has confessed to at least 20 murders, took offense at being called a “mass murderer,” did not like the term “hit man” and rejected the label “serial killer.”

He preferred the term “vigilante,” seeing in it the noble pursuit of protecting friends and family, especially if they were being hurt or double-crossed or could be hurt or double-crossed. ...
Discuss.

Rick Perlstein has the Gift of Knowing When he is Well Off

Perlstein on (his) writing life:
The way I look at it, the work I’m blessed to be able to do affords me a cascade of privileges—attention, respect and a middle-class income; all that for safe, dry, indoor work; the grace of spending my days honoring the wellsprings of creativity churning inside me; near-constant affectionate avowals from strangers who trust that the things I tap out on my laptop have afforded them some measure of meaning, pleasure or understanding; that the small quantum of stupid stuff that comes my way never much penetrates. 
 Link. I can relate.  I have never published anything nearly so impressive as Perlstein's histories of modern Republicanism, butI'm 77 years old and the sovereign still sends me checks in exchange for my yelling of half-truths at post-adolescents,.  Pretty cool, say I.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

AP: General Studies

1.  (Easy)  Distinguish
a) Arbiter
b) Arbitrator
c) Arbitrageur
d) Arbeiter

2.  (Medium)  Distinguish
a) Jacobin
b) Jacobean
c) Jacobite

3.  (Hard)  Distinguish
a) Rebellion
b) Revolution
c)  Coup d'etat
d)  Putsch

4.  (Mixed)  Who, whom?
a) He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.

b) He is a man of splendid abilities but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks, like a rotten mackerel by moonlight.

c) When they circumcised him they threw away the wrong bit.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" --
How it Worked in the 50s

All these old memories  inspire an Army story from my friend Ignoto
I was a company commander of a basic training company at Fort  Jackson in ’54.   We had one trainee – viperish guy in his upper 20’s who was a volunteer, not draftee, in one of the companies that cycled through basic training every eight weeks. First sergeant always walked through the barracks after lights out, checking on things, before he went to his quarters. He found the viper fast asleep, cuddled up behind a 17 year old little guy, draftee, barely able to read and write, just making it through basic.  He took the little guy aside who immediately confessed that  the viper had talked him into doing it. First sergeant said tell nobody nothing. Then he marched the viper into the woods outside the company area and beat the crap out of him. Mercilessly. Told him what it was like in Leavenworth Prison for people who did what he “done.” Found a civilian shirt and pants for him to put on, drove him out the gate to Fort Jackson, and sent him on his way. In other words, drove him AWOL. This saved the victim kid from a court martial that would have sent him to Army prison, probably killed him. ... I got a demerit for having an AWOL  but in basic training companies you always had a few at least  AWOLs.
For valuable prizes, say whether this story describes an act of (a) savagery or (b) compassion.  Discuss.  

Fn., Viperish?

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

"Don't Shoot Me, I'm a Lawyer!": The Lyrics

God bless the intertubes.  Five years ago I put up a post recounting the story of a vengeance killing in the lobby of a hotel in Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1937, preserved in legend only by the response of bystander who got his moment in history by coining the immortal response:

Don't Shoot Me, I'm a Lawyer!

I learned the story along about 1961 in the most agreeable possible manner: in the form of a ballad scratched out almost on the spot by a memorialist with an eye to posterity.  Better, I heard about it from the most agreeable possible source: the author himself, George Hendon, a gentleman of the old school. witty and learned, the best possible company (actually a lawyer himself, at least by the time I met him, though he wore his professional identity lightly).  

Anyway, I lamented five years ago that I couldn't find the ballad anywhere on the web.  Ah, but a couple of weeks ago when I got a message from a certain "Uncledoc," who said that he remembered the song and would be happy to share.  An exchange of emails disclosed that "Uncledoc" was in fact a real doctor, practicing in Calhoun, Kentucky, on the Green River just a hop, skip and a jump from Madisonville.  Uncledoc let slip that he doesn't mind being confused with "Uncle Dave" Macon, last of the pre-radio country vocalists. He said that why yes, he would indeed be glad to share, and that if we could get together on a phone like, he would be happy to sing it to me.

We did, and he did: "just let me put the phone down here," he said.  Whereupon he not only sang the song but accompanied himself on the banjo.  It is my great disappointment that I can't provide an audio version here, but I do offer this transcription of the lyrics:
The harvest moon was shining on the streets of Shelbyville
The night that General Denhardt met his fate.
The Garr boys was a-gunnin', they were out to shoot to kill
And death and General Henry had a date.

Sad the end of soldier Henry, His military records clean
Now he lies beneath the sod, his soul has flown to God
But his body's in Bowling Green.

Pretty Verna Garr was lying, a-mouldering in her grave
in LaGrange 16 miles away,
And folks for miles around thought the general shot her down
Because she would not let him have his way.

Little did the general fear as he sipped his foaming beer
with lawyer Otte up from Louisville
That before the night had fled he'd be lying cold and dead
with Verna's secret locked within him still.

As the general reached the doorway of the old Armstrong Hotel
He stumbled and fell upon his face.
Roy Garr strode up beside him, smokin' pistol in his hand
And with one shot passed on to God the case.

“Don't shoot me I'm a lawyer!” cried attorney Rodes K. Myers
Down on his knees a-beggin' for his life.
His earnest words were heeded by doctor E.J. Garr
Who spared him for his kiddies and his wife

Now ladies don't you fear: if you've got a brother dear
That someday you may meet poor Verna's fate.
With lovin' ones around you to protect your womanhood
And the laws are what they are in this here state.
Seems to me there is a line missing in the second verse but Uncledoc says he thinks not (he says it is a chorus, not bound by the format for verses).  I told him it was a rotten shame that this wasn't on Youtube.  He said yes, well, he didn't know how to do that sort of thing, but that others have in fact posted some of his other stuff.  So to get a sense of what the lawyer song might sound like, listen here:




Here's a memorial plaque for the shooting, and for the old Armstrong Hotel.  FWIW, I've read a coule of summaries of the case and the general sure as hell sounds guilty to me.

Monday, June 17, 2013

A Further Offering on Parental Advice

Now that Father's Day recedes safely in the rear view mirror, it's a good moment to remember one of the most extraordinary books I've ever encountered--the Handbook for William, subtitled "A Carolingian Woman's Counsel for Her Son," written by one "Dhuoda" in the middle of the century and ably translated from its original Latin by Carol Neel.

"Dhuoda" was the wife of Bernard, count of Septimania, whom Neel identifies as "one of the most prominent Frankish magnates of the generation after Charlemagne."  William, there elder son, was born in 826; a second son, unnamed, was born in 1841.  During most of the intervening years, Bernard was away from home--not, strictly speaking, on a frolic, but rather attempting to maintain or secure his position in the lethally unstable milieu of the children of the great emperor.  At last Bernard accepted the authority of Charles the Bald, Charlemagne, but (for Dhuoda, at least) at a terrible price: Bernard delivered William up to Charles as hostage against the possibility of betrayal.  The second son was taken also, although his story is less clear: Dhuoda refers to him in her manuscript as the one "whose name I still do not know."

Dhuoda prepared her manuscript, then, in a vain effort to provide guidance to these two absent children.  Her purpose is not earthly practical advise; rather, she seeks (in Neel's words) "to teach her children how they might flourish in God's eyes as well as men's."  She says:
Read the words I address to you, understand them and fulfill them in action.  And when your little brother, whose name I still do not know, has received the grace of baptism in Christ, do not hesitate to teach him, to educate him, to love him, and to call him to progress from good to better.  When the time has come that he has learned to speak and to read, show him this little volume gathered together into a handbook by me and written down in your name.  Urge him to read it, for he is your flesh and your brother.  I, your mother Dhuoda, urge you, as if I even now spoke to both of you, that you "hold up your heart" from time to time when you are oppressed by the troubles of this world, and "look upon him who reigns in heaven" and is called God.  May that all-powerful one whom I mention frequently even in my unworthiness make both of you, my sons--along with my lord and master Bernard, your father--happy and joyful in the present world.   May he make you successful in all your undertakings, and after the end of this life may he bring you rejoicing to heaven among the saints.  Amen.

Dhuoda apparently never saw either of her sons again,  and may have known nothing of their fate.  In the event, Bernard was executed by Charles the Bald and William died in trying to avenge his father's death.  The unnamed second son "probably was" (Neel's judgment) the child who becomes Bernard Plantevelue-Hairyfeet--and founds the duchy of Aquitaine.  His son, her (probable?) grandson became William the Pious, who endowed the great Benedictine abbey at Cluny.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Paths to Enlightenment

Here's a story I don't think I've told before but only because it happened not to come to mind until just lately. Anyway, the time is late 1958 and I am finishing my Army "training" (oh hoh hoh) at Fort Leonard Wood, MO.  One night I drew telephone-answering duty at company HQ (what if President Eisenhower called?). To kill time I was fiddling with my newly-acquired Greek-language textbook, when a couple of MPs showed up with another young man in charge. They instructed me to furnish him with a cot and a corner to sleep in, explaining only that "he would be going home in the morning." The MPs left and we fell to chatting, my new charge and I. He was a tall black youth with medium-light skin, a bit fattish for a basic trainee, and with a ladylike manner. It didn't take long to surmise why he was on his way home but he I was glad for some diversion and we fell into an amiable chat.

At one point idly he flipped open my Greek book and straightway began to read:


ἐv ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and God was the Word. 

Okay, so it is easy Greek (this was, after all, a beginner book);   But so far as I could tell, his rendition was letter perfect.  I reflected then and there on the bewildering truth that the world was a more complicated place than I had anticipated.

Followup:  Now that I think of it, here's another.  This one takes place nearly three years earlier, Spring of 1955, while I am working as a general gopher for the Associated Press in the reporter's lobby at the House of Representatives in DC.  One day I was lounging in the viewer's gallery gazing down into the well of the House when my co-gopher slipped in beside me.  This young man was, in a word, a yokel: amiable enough and probably more competent at gophering than I, but so green he squeaked--green enough that even I, in the full wisdom of my 19 years, could hear the squeaking.  After a moment, he tipped his head towards a particular corner of the chanber. 

"Look at that," he whispered.  I thought I knew what he meant but I stayed noncommittal.  "Mm?"  I replied.

"It's a --" (and he used a word not currently deployed in polite company).

No words could convey his astonishment.  But he was right  By my memory it was William L. Dawson, of the Illinois First, only the third black to serve in Congress since reconstruction.  "That's right," I said and could think of no safe continuance. So I left my colleague in his stunned reverie.  So what have we learned today, children?  We have learned that enlightenment comes in many forms.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Class Master Class

 I was recounting our trip to Spain to our bud Sean.  Somehow I felt it apposite to explain how he guys sat in the front seat, the ladies in back.  Sean, who thinks and talks in paragraphs, explained (I paraphrase from memory)::
It's definitely lower class.  Were you middle class, the couples would have stayed together, each with his own.  And upper class, anything goes.
 Oddly enough, this sounds right o me, I have no idea why.  But it does remind me to write a letter to the GPS maker, with whom I have an unpicked crow.  Dear Mr. Tom;  may I call you Tom...

What I Learned This Week: Shakespearean One-Liners

Over dinner the other night, our friend Becky dismissed an absent presence as "fit to be sent on errands."

Cute, said I.  Where'd you get it.

Oh, Shakespeare, said Becky.

I don't believe you, said I, and I am pretty good at my Shakespeare one-liners.  

But a brief house call from Dr. Google demonstrated that she was correct. It is indeed Shakespeare, and not just Shakespeare--it is Marc Antony, colluding with his co-triumvir Octavian to determine who shall live, who shall die in the maelstrom that follows Caesar's assassination.  And not just Antony but Antony completely in character, with his jokey cruelty and his preening contempt for a supposed ally. For it is this Antony who has just dispatched Lepidus, the supposed third of the triumvirs, to fetch Caesar's will:
This is a slight unmeritable man,
Meet to be sent on errands.

Friday, June 14, 2013

The WinCo Demographic

I don't think we are part of the target audience but Mrs. B is a careful manager and take my word for it: WinCo actually has a lot of perfectly decent stuff at attractive prices.  Perhaps more intriguing is how little the crowed here resembles the folks at Wal-Mart just down the road.  Not nearly as many tattoos nor as much flab.  This is clearly a downmarket cohort, but they look mostly like serious people striving to make a go of a limited budget.  And, sad to say, not a lot of happy faces.  Particularly among the older portion of the human inventory: lots of  them grey and impassive, as if just getting through the day was a challenge in its own right.

The only discordant note: the array of cheap tschatschkes arrayed in the entryway, like prizes at the shooting gallery at the county fair.  Got to keep the kids mollified somehow, I guess.

Damn, I Forgot to Tell Them That ...

Lifehacker has up a piece of feelgood nostalgia about advice from dads.  But it could just as well  serve as a checklist of advice to dads as to just exactly what they should pass on.  Children, did I remember to tell you that "Highways going N/S are odd numbered and E/W are even numbered"--?  Or that "If you want a pair of diamond earrings, win them in a poker game!"  Or the best so far:
...to kill silently, and without any evidence, stab the kidney with a large ice sickle. The pain is so intense that normally the victim cannot scream and bleeds-out quickly, and the weapon eventually melts and evaporates!
And the beauty part is that apparently you do not need to be in the Arctic to, ahem, execute the execution.  Turns out that a good thermos will keep the weapon in order for several hours.

Have I overlooked anything important?

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Not Good for the Tourist Trade

 So Pausanias,Guide to Greece, 1.32.3,  link.   W.H. Jones translates:
Here is also a separate monument to one man, Miltiades, the son of Cimon, although his end came later, after he had failed to take Paros and for this reason had been brought to trial by the Athenians. At Marathon every night you can hear horses neighing and men fighting. No one who has expressly set himself to behold this vision has ever got any good from it, but the spirits are not wroth with such as in ignorance chance to be spectators.
Link.  No, wait, maybe that is exactly what the tourist trade wants.

The Strouse Morgan

Note to self: quit reading all those hot-off-the-press must reads.  A few of them are good and original: a lot of them just recycle stuff you've been reading on the blogs, etc.  A lot re good 35-paage longreads tucked inside 180 pages of hard cover.Stick to stuff a few years, maybe a few centuries, old. 

Case in point: Jean Strouse's biography of JP Morgan.  I read Ron Chernow's doorstopper about the House of Morgan a few years ago and figured I could skip Strouse.  Not sure what changed my mind: perhaps Chernow had faded enough in my memory that I was ready for refresher.  Anyway, the takeaway: I'm not sorry to have read Chernow but I am delighted to have read Strouse.  For understanding how 19th Century finance worked, it's one of the best things I've run across so far.  Some critics complain that it is too thick with detail and that might be true.  But the details are still the natural venue of the devil and I don't know anybody (including Chernow) who walks you through so many individual deals in a way that makes you understand what the players were trying to accomplish and how they did it.   

That' last is particularly true of what I suppose you'd have to say is a hobbyhorse: railroad reorganization: the salvaging and refinancing of rail projects in boom years from the end of the Civil War to the end of the Century.   Among many other virtues, Strouse does an admirable job of putting the rail problem in context: vastly excessive overbuilding, "ruinous competition," (as they so loved to call it) and the exquisite challenge of nurturing investors, particularly foreign investors who still saw America as a cowboys-and-injuns show.  Strouse shows that not the least of Morgan's achievements is how he made the American market plausible: a place where you could put your money knowing that a deal was a deal.  And that may be the core point of the Morgan story: difficult, irascible, self-absorbed, unreflective though he have been, still Morgan was a man who wanted things to work.  He saw every project as an occasion, not just to make money (though he made plenty) but to put together a project with a result: a railroad, a power company, a sovereign government, whatever.

 Another reason Strouse is so good at her job is that she seems to understand the complexities and ambiguities of a competitive market place, together with the problem of (as the 19C liked to call it) "the trusts."  She makes it clear (how could she not?) that concentrated power may confer unimaginable wealth on the lucky holder of the winning ticket.  But she just as well shows how colossally wasteful the 19th-Century investment casino might be.

A bit of more general reflection: I suspect one reason why there isn't more good business-financial history is that most people who tackle these projects really don't have much of a feel for their task.  I liked Chernow because I felt he did seem to know what he was doing. I like Strouse better.  That might be partly a matter of coverage: Chernow was trying to cover the whole history of the firm, not just a single lifetime--and in fewer pages--so naturally he was a bit thinner on the ground.  But here;s the thing: much as I liked the Chernow Morgan book, I felt his later effort on Alexander Hamilton was far better (I haven't read his others).  Could it be that he learned from experience?

Monday, June 10, 2013

More on the Lottery and Taxes
[Hint: Dying is Not a Good Strategy]


The Wichita Bureau reminds us of what we overlooked in the lottery/tax inquiry:
The real reason an 84 year old takes the lump sum payment is that if she took the ‘annuity’, on her pending demise (what’s her life expectancy, 90?), her estate will have to pay federal estate tax on the present value of the annuity – which can be huge and more than she’s collected in annuity. As it is, she can give away as much as possible (although no where near the whole amount) and what’s left will be available to pay the fed estate tax. 
...[A]s it is, the fed taxes the lump sum at about 35% (Florida has a wealth tax but no income tax) - and then lies in wait for the real hit: the estate tax ... .*  So the lottery is a real tax break for the feds – who end up in this case with more than the family. 
 And an undocumented extra:

Have you ever wondered what you would do with the net? Say $300 million? At my age, my imagination runs the gamut from A to C ... [A] wheelchair van isn’t terribly sexy or speedy. Hmm, maybe the gamut runs from A to B.
---
*Which is not what it used to be.  See link, and HT Joel.

Sunday, June 09, 2013

Point of View

The spectre of death in a marriage educes differing fears;  Here is Golde, wife of Tevye the Dairyman in the Scholem Aleichem story (not the bowdlerized Broadway version):

I am dying, Tevye; who will cook your dinner?


--Scholem Aleichem. Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son (Penguin Classics) (Kindle Location 255). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition.


Compare Cleopatra, informed that Antony has committed suicide:

Noblest of men, woo’t die? Hast thou no care of me?

--William Shakespeare,  Antony and Cleopatra,  Act IV, Sc. 15.  Cleopatra goes on to say of Antony:
Oh, withered is the garland of the war.
The soldier’s pole is fall’n! Young boys and girls
Are level now with men. The odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.
...which may or not be true of Antony, but no one would have said of Tevye.





Saturday, June 08, 2013

Flo

I just  now learned that Flo Gibson died.  Happened two and a half years ago; I wasn't informed, but I wasn't an intimate so I wouldn't have been on the phone tree.  And she was 86, so more a proper cause for a celebratory New York Times obit then for great lamentation.

You know remember Flo?  Chances are you do, even if you had forgotten her name.  Flo was the grande dame of audio books, having recorded more than 1,100 of them, mostly from a specially appointed studio in her basement.  I can't certify to the entire corpus, but I did absorb perhaps as many as 200 or so back in the 90s when I was commuting sometimes 360 miles a week.  Given that the default alternative was The Rev. Harold Camping, the infestation in those days of smalltown radio stations everywhere, I can testify that Flo's tender ministrations probably saved not merely my sanity but my entire professional career.

I never met Flo but I did chat with her once.  I achieved this prodigy by picking up the phone and dialing her number.  She responded with a brisk "hello?"  Or at least I think it was she, though how she could field phone calls while achieving her unmatchable career reading record must leave the matter open to doubt.  She answered some kind of technical/practical question for me, I have long since forgotten just what.  But then somehow I chose to abuse her good nature by engaging in a bit of chat.  Or at any rate, I recall that we talked about Trollope.  I asked her if she had to work for the English accent.  She said she deliberately chose, not precisely English, but the most plausible ersatz English that her audience would tolerate.  She did not say "ersatz."

I remember thinking years ago that her inventory must be a treasure and that  I hoped the executor of her estate would  have the good sense to preserve it, rather than just upending it into the trash.  So I am delighted to find that indeed her website is still alive, continuing to market a good deal of her classic ouevre.

But here's thing: best I can tell, the website offers only CDs and cassettes (!)--the latter at enticing bargain prices.  So, what is missing?  Right: streaming--so far as I can tell, the Gibson website has done nothing to respond to the technology of the time (which, to be fair, virtually did not exist while she was in business).  The site does include a cross-link to the all-embracing Audible.com.  A brief foray suggests that yes, some of the Gibson stuff is up at Audible. But so far as I can tell, it isn't particularly well-marketed--and in any event, there doesn't seem to be nearly as much at Audible as there was/is in the original inventory.

I find this puzzling.   Surely it can't be all that much of a trick to recast the CDs, even the tapes, into the streaming format.  And grant there may not be much of an Audible market.   Grant that there is never going to be much demand for Alice Dugdale--still, with marginal cost close to zero, what's the downside of just putting them all up and taking what comes?  Or better, with a little marketing, flush out all the old guys like me who had thought she had passed from the scene altogether?

Friday, June 07, 2013

Double Taxation and the Lottery

This is probably old stuff to tax pros, but I just noticed a curious inconsistency in the way we treat lottery winnings for tax purposes. 

Here's the deal: I'm thinking of Gloria Mackenzie of Zephyrhills, Florida, who rode home on a 175-million-to-one longshot to take what is being described as the largest lottery jackpot ever.  Link.  Like most lottery winners, Ms. Mackenzie had her choice: she could take a lump sum now, or a stream of payments.  The payment stream is billed as $590 million; the lump sum as just $370 million.  No surprise that there is a discount for present payment, but I am surprised to learn how they compute it. I had assumed that lottery officials keep those lump-sum payouts artificially low, so as to discourage winners from taking all the money now.  Apparently no: discount the payment stream in the Mackenzie case and you come up with an internal rate of return of about three percent which is just bout as low a return as you can imagine, and which yields a correspondingly generous present value.

But I want to consider the fax consequences.  Underbelly's crack tax department hits the high points. Apparently Ms. Mackenzie has opted for immediate payout, and will liable for a tax right now.  If she had gone for the payment stream, then (so I am told) she would have been liable for tax on each payment as it came due.

But here's the funny thing.  Suppose she takes the payment now and then decides to reinvest. Who knows why: maybe she thinks she can beat three percent.  Or maybe she wants to manage a trust account for her grandchildren.  In any event, apparently she will have to pay tax on any returns from reinvestment.

This struck me as double taxation.  My friend Bruce, whop knows this stuff far better than I, says I'm just thinking like a Republican.  It's no more unfair (says Bruce) then when they tax your salary and then tax any returns your make on reinvesting your salary.

Maybe so.  But now look back at the payment-stream option.  In the case of the payment stream, she would have to pay tax on the individual payments.  But she would not pay any tax on the present value up front.  This strikes me as at lest inconsistent.  If Bruce's pattern is to hold, shouldn't we also tax her on the present value of the payment stream now?

Thursday, June 06, 2013

All Greek to Me

From the movie touchscreen last night at Seat 31C on UAL 1264, Newark-SFO:


For Korean, select Dutch.

Or, as the Italians say, "per me è arabo."

 Afterthought: I see that United,  in addition to charging for food, has now figured out how to charge for all inflight entertainment.  I can understand the business reason and I do have a suggestion: couldn't they eke out a but more by way of revenue if they charged me for the disposal of any trash generated by food I had not purchased from them?

I Hate it when That Happens

The Thracian is easily confused with the Hoplomachus

Information panel in the Roman ampitheatre at Mérida, Spain.  Those of you still seeking enlightenment can go here.

A Real Porker Corker

The Wichita bureau makes the headline catch of the day:

Spam Doubles as Bull Market Returns

Oh, tee hee, oink oink. 

[Brings to mind my Army buddy who looked art the pink slime on the stainless steel tray and prounced: Government inspected they say, didn't say whether it passed or not.]


Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Plutocracy Rules OK


[Updated with a better crop of the picture]. It's a graffiti from wall about two streets away from Great Mosque at Córdoba in Spain. Mr. Chubby on the right, tossing away bills, is "First World." The rest are "Third World." Guess I wasn't real clear those concepts existed any more

Notes: I suppose that is a pile of --Money?  Shit?  --off to the right-hand side, a complement to the bills the capitalist pig is so thoughtlessly dispensing (update, Eb says skulls and he may well be right).  In the lower-left, I think that may be an artist's signature but I can't read it and didn't stop to note it when I took the picture.

More Archaeological Turducky

In Bohumil Hrabal's novel I Served the King of England, there's the story (I'm working from memory here) of how the Emperor of Ethiopia shows up at the Prague Palace. He brings his retainers who occupy the courtyard where they butcher a camel and stuff it with a goat, and a turkey, and a duck, yada yada.

I'm realizing that is what I am seeing in Spain: architectural Turducky.  Here (from) is the latest, this from Mérida: a Graeco-Roman temple repurposed as a Renaissance palace, lately reborn as a tourist shrine.

Sunday, June 02, 2013

Spanish Counterfactual

Thought experiment: how would the world look different today if the Latin America had been settled by Catalunyans instead of Castilians?

Secret History: Córdoba

At the Sephardic House Jewish museum in Córdoba:
--How many Jews are there in Spain today?
--Oh, about 30,000.
--Where are they?
--Madrid, Barcelona, all over.
--How many in Córdoba?
--Twenty-five.
--Only?  Not 25,000?
--No, no, twenty-five.  
--Are you one?
--No, not me.  But they went underground, so maybe we re all Jews.

Keeping the Memory Green


"When we were ruled by Franco we had money in the banco." Etc., but it ends with Felipe (i.e., Gonzalez?) who left office 16 years ago. So, just overstock for tourists?