Since winning the Nobel Prize in 1993, Morrison has, not altogether reluctantly, taken on the voice of America’s conscience. After the marvels of empathy that were Beloved and, to a lesser extent, Jazz, that public voice has grown – she has sometimes seemed a spokeswoman rather than a writer – and the voice of her novels has become sparer. In this book, a good deal of Morrison’s stark, almost biblical imaginative power is on display, without all of her former detailing energy. Nathaniel Hawthorne has become her model in some ways; like him, she is capable of creating fictional environments in which everything can come to seem symbolic. Portentous is not always a comfortable tone, but in the coming American weeks it may well be the appropriate one. The first line of A Mercy? ‘Don’t be afraid.’
EMILY POST: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American MannersBy Laura Claridge
It was in part to make that world more hospitable to others that Post embarked on her magnum opus, Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, in which she declared that “charm of manner . . . and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members.” Despite the book’s “glacial prose” and a morality-play dramatis personae that included such characters as the Toploftys, the Kindharts, Mrs. Bobo Gilding and the Richan Vulgars, Claridge argues that Etiquette’s emphasis on manners over money places it in a “triumvirate of the modern moment,” with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. By the 1930s it had sold over a million copies, and its author had become a brand name, with a syndicated newspaper column and radio show, all of which she had engineered on her own initiative (and often without the help of an agent). The book remained on bestseller lists through World War II and the social changes that followed; and although attempts to extend her reach to television were (in the words of her grandson and manager) “a disaster,” Post’s influence and activity continued well into the 1950s: The last edition of Etiquette overseen by its author was published in 1955, and the book has never gone out of print.
Much of Claridge’s narrative is devoted to an examination of Post’s career, and accounts of contractual negotiations — not to mention tallies of sales and circulation figures, exegeses of revisions and lengthy quotes from reviews — don’t always make for compelling reading. Such details do, however, provide a measure of the ways in which a girl who just wanted to be a worthy heir to her father turned herself into one of the most powerful women in America, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt, according to a 1950 poll of women journalists. They also show how (as Claridge puts it) Post’s Etiquette was “a cultural history of her nation.”
In 1960 — having lived through the introduction of the telephone, automobile, airplane, radio and television — Emily Post died politely in her bed. “Just over two weeks later,” Claridge tells us, “during a General Assembly meeting at the United Nations, Comrade Nikita Khruschchev removed his shoe and banged it on the table.” As Life magazine asked, “What Would Emily Post Have Said?” ·
The kiss begins……………in the center of the belly and travels upwards…… through the diaphragm and throatalong fine filaments…………which no forensic scientist has ever been able to find.
From the hard flower………of the kisser’s mouth, the kisses leave the body…… in single file, into the reciprocal mouth… of the kiss-recipient, which for me is Kath.
What can I say? My kisses make her happy and I need that. And sometimes, bending over her, I have the unmistakable impression ……………… .that I am watering a plant.
gripping myself softly………by the handle, tilting my spout……………… forward pouring what I need to give ………………into the changing shape of her thirst.
I keep leaning forward……… to pour out what continues to rise up from the fountain……………of the kisses which I, also, …………… am drinking from.
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has a couple ofinteresting posts on the seeming collapse of the wave function and Saturn’s moon Hyperion:
One of the annoying/fascinating things about quantum mechanics is the fact the world doesn’t seem to be quantum-mechanical. When you look at something, it seems to have a location, not a superposition of all possible locations; when it travels from one place to another, it seems to take a path, not a sum over all paths. This frustration was expressed by no lesser a person than Albert Einstein, quoted by Abraham Pais, quoted in turn by David Mermin in a lovely article entitled “Is the Moon There when Nobody Looks?“:
I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I looked at it.
The conventional quantum-mechanical answer would be “Sure, the moon exists when you’re not looking at it. But there is no such thing as `the position of the moon’ when you are not looking at it.”
Nevertheless, astronomers over the centuries have done a pretty good job predicting eclipses as if there really was something called `the position of the moon,’ even when nobody (as far as we know) was looking at it. There is a conventional quantum-mechanical explanation for this, as well: the correspondence principle, which states that the predictions of quantum mechanics in the limit of a very large number of particles (a macroscopic body) approach those of classical Newtonian mechanics. This is one of those vague but invaluable rules of thumb that was formulated by Niels Bohr back in the salad days of quantum mechanics. If it sounds a little hand-wavy, that’s because it is.
The vagueness of the correspondence principle prods a careful physicist into formulating a more precise version, or perhaps coming up with counterexamples. And indeed, counterexamples exist: namely, when the classical predictions for the system in question are chaotic. In chaotic systems, tiny differences in initial conditions grow into substantial differences in the ultimate evolution. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that it is hard to map the predictions for classically chaotic systems onto average values of predictions for quantum observables. Essentially, tiny quantum uncertainties in the state of a chaotic system grow into large quantum uncertainties before too long, and the system is no longer accurately described by a classical limit, even if there are large numbers of particles.
Some years ago, Wojciech Zurek and Juan Pablo Paz described a particularly interesting real-world example of such a system: Hyperion, a moon of Saturn that features an irregular shape and a spongy surface texture.
In the New Yorker, Alex Ross reviews this production of John Adams’ opera:
I first heard John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945—while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. In the course of chronicling the first production of “Atomic,” at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, I had arranged to visit the Trinity site, and brought with me the composer’s computer realization of his score. An eerie trip ensued. Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams’s characteristic musical gestures—the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of “Harmonielehre,” “Nixon in China,” and “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”—disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise.
Rehearsals for the première revealed “Atomic” to be not only an ominous score but also an uncommonly beautiful one. Scene after scene glows with strange energy. There is an inexplicably lovely choral ode to the bomb’s thirty-two-pointed explosive shell, with unison female voices floating above lush string-and-wind chords and glitterings of chimes and celesta. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the atomic project, and Kitty, his brilliant, alcoholic wife, sing sumptuous duets over an orchestra steeped in the decadent glamour of Wagner and Debussy. Oppenheimer’s central aria, a setting of the John Donne sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” has a stark Renaissance eloquence, its melody a single taut wire. The night of the countdown is taken up with a hallucinatory sequence of convulsive choruses, lurching dances, and truncated lyric flights. After the first run-through with singers and orchestra, it seemed clear that “Doctor Atomic” was Adams’s most formidable achievement to date.
Over at NYPL Live, an audio conversation with Ferran Adrià, Corby Kummer and Harold McGee:
No one can get into elBulli, Ferran Adrià’s restaurant on the northeast coast of Spain. But plenty of people certainly try: every year, the restaurant receives over two million requests for only 8,000 seats during the six months it is open. For the other six months, Adrià, who is proud to be called the “Salvador Dali of the Kitchen,” travels, dreams, and creates at his “food laboratory” in Barcelona, called elBulli Taller, where his team includes a chemist and an industrial designer who also design plates and serving utensils to go with the food. No wonder, as Corby Kummer wrote in The Atlantic, “making the twisty two-hour drive from Barcelona for a dinner that ends well into the wee hours has become a notch on every foodie’s belt—perhaps the notch, given the international derby to get reservations.”
For mortals who won’t be making the trip soon—or who didn’t hit the lottery last year in the German contemporary-art exhibition Documenta, which flew two people at random per day to el Bulli to experience “the exhibition” that is dinner at elBulli—Adrià has given the world A Day at elBulli: An Insight into the Ideas, Methods and Creativity of Ferran Adria. This is the first book to take a behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant whose sources and methods every ambitious chef wants to know. It shows a full working day from dawn until the last late-night guests leave, using photographs, menus, recipes and diagrams that reveal the restaurant’s preparations, food philosophy, and surroundings.
“New cars smell the same in India as they do in the US”, was the first thought that came to my mind as I took my seat in my nephew’s new Hyundai sedan in which he had come to pick me up from the Chandigarh airport. It was the first of August and I had just arrived in India for a short visit. My home- town was my first stop. New cars in India may have the same leathery-plasticky smell as new cars every-where, but they look like nothing else in the world. The car that I was riding in, like the tens of thousands that roll out of auto-showrooms everyday all over India, was bedecked in red ribbons and had a garland of fresh marigolds strung around the number plates. The top of the front window had two swastikas and an “Om” painted on it in red colour. The drivi ng-wheel had the “auspicious” red string tied to it. The Ganesh idol on the dashboard had the residue of burnt incense in front of it.
My nephew told me that he was coming straight from the temple where he had taken his car for a vahan puja, a brand new Hindu ritual invented to bless the new vehicles that are clogging the Indian roads these days. This being his first car – and the object of his loving devotion, at least for now – my nephew told me that he wanted to do something really, really, special for it. That is why, he told me, he took it to the temple where he had to shell out some serious cash for the ceremony, instead of getting a free puja which his dealership had offered as a part of the incentive package. “What”? My ears pricked up. I must have sounded incredulous: “Car dealers offer free pujas? Do they have pundits on their staff now? Car dealerships have become new temples or what?”
My nephew looked at me as if to ask where I had been all these years! This is nothing new, he said. Knowing how popular vahan pujas are, more innovative car-dealers throw in free pujas for their customers.
When I was a boy, a relative Asked for me a job At the Weeks Cemetary. Think of all I could have raised that summer, That money, and me Living at home, Fattening and getting Ready to live my life Out on my knees, humming, Kneading up docks And sumac from Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful Grocers and judges, the polished Dead of whom we make So much.
I could have stayed there with them. Cheap, too. Imagine, never To have turned Wholly away from the classic Cold, the hill, so laid Out, measure by seemly measure clipped And mown by old man Albright The Sexton. That would have been a hell of A way to make a living.
Thank you, no. I am going to take my last nourishment Of measure from a dark blue Ripple on swell on ripple that makes its own garlands. My dead are secret wine jars Of Tyrian commercial travelers. Their happiness is a lost beginning, their graves Drift in and out of the Mediterranean.
One of these days The immortals, clinging to a beam of sunlight Under water, delighted by delicate crustaceans, Will dance up thirty-foot walls of radiance, And waken, The sea shining on their shoulders, the fresh Wine in their arms. Their ships have drifted away. They are stars and snowflakes floating down Into your hands, love.
From: Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (1990).
So annealed into pop culture are the five stages of grief—introduced in the 1960s by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross based on her studies of the emotional state of dying patients—that they are regularly referenced without explication. There appears to be no evidence, however, that most people most of the time go through most of the stages in this or any other order. According to Russell P. Friedman, executive director of the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and co-author, with John W. James, of The Grief Recovery Handbook (HarperCollins, 1998), “no study has ever established that stages of grief actually exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss…. No matter how much people want to create simple, bullet-point guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are no stages of grief that fit any two people or relationships.”
Friedman’s assessment comes from daily encounters with people experiencing grief in his practice. University of Memphis psychologist Robert A. Neimeyer confirms this analysis. He concluded in his scholarly book Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (American Psychological Association, 2001): “At the most obvious level, scientific studies have failed to support any discernible sequence of emotional phases of adaptation to loss or to identify any clear end point to grieving that would designate a state of ‘recovery.’”
Nevertheless, the urge to compress the complexities of life into neat and tidy stages is irresistible. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud insisted that we moved through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson countered with eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (infant); autonomy vs. doubt (toddler); initiative vs. guilt (preschooler); industry vs. inferiority (school-age period); identity vs. role confusion (adolescent); intimacy vs. isolation (young adult); generativity vs. stagnation (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (older adult). Harvard University psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg postulated that our moral development progresses through six stages: parental punishment, selfish hedonism, peer pressure, law and order, social contract and principled conscience.
John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters. His output alone (60 books, almost 40 of them novels or story collections) has been supernatural. More wizardly still is the ingenuity of his prose. He has now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles of transubstantiation whereby some hitherto overlooked datum of the human or natural world — from the anatomical to the zoological, the socio-economic to the spiritual — emerges, as if for the first time, in the completeness of its actual being.
This isn’t writing. It is magic. And it’s not surprising that the author who practices it should be drawn repeatedly to the other, darker kind, though it is often masked in droll comedy. In the 1960s, surveying the field in the literary rat race, Updike put a hex, collectively, on the Jewish novelists (Bellow, Mailer, Malamud, Roth) then looming as his chief competition. He invented a wickedly funny composite parody, Henry Bech, whom he entraps in a web of debilitating spells, from hydrophobia to sleep-anxiety. At one point Bech squanders the best part of a work morning on the toilet, “leafing sadly through Commentary and Encounter,” journals not often hospitable to Updike’s own fiction. Lest we, or his rivals, miss the drift, Updike afflicts Bech with the cruelest curse of all, writer’s block, which leaves him unable to begin, much less finish, his next novel. “Am I blocked? I’d just thought of myself as a slow typist,” Bech weakly jokes to Bea, his current emasculating Gentile mistress, who has supplanted her even more emasculating sister in Bech’s bed. “What do you do,” Bea sneers in reply, “hit the space bar once a day?”
I used Facebook to create an “event” and invite my digital chums. Some of them, of course, didn’t live in Toronto, but I figured, it’s summer and people travel. You never know who might be in town. If they lived in Buffalo or Vancouver, they could just click “not attending,” and that would be that. Facebook gives people the option of R.S.V.P.’ing in three categories — “attending,” “maybe attending” and “not attending.”
After a week the responses stopped coming in and were ready to be tabulated. Fifteen people said they were attending, and 60 said maybe. A few hundred said not, and the rest just ignored the invitation altogether. I figured that about 20 people would show up. That sounded pretty good to me. Twenty potential new friends.
On the evening in question I took a shower. I shaved. I splashed on my tingly man perfume. I put on new pants and a favorite shirt. Brimming with optimism, I headed over to the neighborhood watering hole and waited.
I have accorded former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers the apparently unusual honor of actually reading her book, Why Women Should Rule the World, and I will now discuss it, whether you want me to or not.
By “you,” I mean the surly female ur-reader who long ago elected to ignore the encroaching continent of women’s- studies tomes. Forget the male ur-reader. At this point, I doubt a man exists who would dive eagerly into a book about women’s superior leadership qualities. As to which men should, well, if there remains even one male executive in Canton, Ohio, unaware that hiring a qualified, well-liked, profit-driven female is a good thing, I say let him slump gloomily in business class with his Chivas and Clive Cussler, because his skyrocketing cholesterol (“Cholesterol? What’s cholesterol?”) will soon fell him anyway.
To be gender-neutral where one can, it is fair to note that the genre of Important Unread Books — by authors with weighty resumes who seem to be on every TV talk show, and in every Barnes & Noble window display, gazing boldly, hands on hips — is apparently not limited to women. In response to my puzzled query as to why I’d seen Myers’s book mentioned everywhere but read almost nowhere, a (male) friend of mine in publishing wrote:
I’d say the Myers book sounds like the female equivalent of what we in the bookstore business (my former occupation) used to call Father’s Day Books, e.g. anything by David Halberstam and/or about a Founding Father. Do people buy these books? Sure — they make great, heavy Father’s Day gifts. Do people read them? Er — I don’t have any exact figures, but I imagine more than a few of them are holding up wobbly Black & Decker work benches right now.
The downward spiral of credit contraction is being driven by a pervasive collapse of trust in the entire structure of financial intermediation that underpins capitalist economies. With debt levels running high and the economic climate worsening, many enterprises in the real economy must be close to bankruptcy; hence lenders and equity buyers are staying out of the market. Governments have therefore moved to stabilize credit markets by taking steps to encourage buyers to re-enter the market for securities—most notably the us Treasury, with its $700 bn bail-out scheme. Several European states have moved to steady the banking sector, with Ireland, Greece, Germany, Austria and Denmark guaranteeing all savings deposits in early October 2008. Competition rules have been set aside, as governments foster mega-mergers. In the uk, the recent merger of hbos and Lloyds tsb creates a bank with a 30 per cent share of the retail market.
The sheer monopoly power of such new financial conglomerates is likely to prompt a stronger regulatory response. Another key area to watch in terms of gauging the robustness of governmental responses is the market for Over the Counter (otc) derivative contracts—which Warren Buffet famously described in 2003 as ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’. Buffet went on to say that, while the Federal Reserve system was created in part to prevent financial contagion, ‘there is no central bank assigned to the job of preventing the dominoes toppling in insurance or derivatives’. In the event that more regulation of the otc market is implemented—even in the minimal form of requiring the use of a standard contract format and registration of the details of each contract with a regulatory body—Brooksley Born will have some satisfaction. She was head of the Chicago Futures Trading Commission in the late 1990s, and proposed in a discussion paper that the otc market should come under some form of regulation. Alan Greenspan, sec Chairman Arthur Levitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were so angry at her for even raising such an idea that they sought Clinton’s permission to have her fired; in January 1999 she duly resigned for ‘family reasons’.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: I want to tell you a bit of straight psychology that I find very exciting, that I found more exciting this year than I had before, and that in some ways is changing my view about a lot of things in psychology. There are two big things happening in psychology today. One, of course, is everything that’s got to do with the brain, and that’s dominating psychology. But there is something else that is happening, which started out from a methodological innovation as a way to study memory, and we’ve always known, that’s the idea of the notion of association of ideas, which has been around for 350 years at least.
We know about how associations work because we have one thought, and when it leads to another‚windows and doors and things like that, or white and black‚and we have our ideas of associations, and it’s always been recognized as important and interesting. But our view of how associations work has been changed in a profound way by a technical innovation, which is something that happens a great deal in psychology and I suppose in all sciences. This innovation is the following: If, for example, you hear the word “sick”, there are few associations that come to mind. But there are a number of other things that you can do, that are little more refined. You can present words, and measure the amount of time that it takes people to read the words. Or you can measure words and non-words, and the task is to decide whether they’re a set of letters, or a word, or a non-word, and it’s the ease with which words are recognized as words as against non-words. I’ll begin by focusing on reaction time, because that’s the simplest one.
Let’s be honest—this new millennium, so far it’s been a huge disappointment. It was preceded by a false alarm (the Y2K rollover), was cursed by hanging chads (the Florida recount), and has been held hostage ever since by the ministry of fear, with Americans meekly removing their shoes for the privilege of flying in airplanes charging fees for pillows and blankets. It’s been seven years since 9/11, no follow-up attack has stabbed our shores, and yet the front pages of so many papers resemble the end is near signs toted by bearded prophets that were once a staple of New Yorker cartoons. The decade has traveled from bin Laden’s cave to the Dark Knight’s Batcave in a jagged thrust of clenched force and unleashed chaos. Even an unforeseen blossom of good news, such as the declining death toll in Iraq, seems almost incidental in the log stream of general lousiness. Journalism used to perform a higher civic function than it does today, so spanked up is it with gaffes, gotchas, spin-doctoring, celebrity pimping, crisis-mongering, minnow-brained punditry, drama criticism practiced from under the troll bridge (usually at the expense of Democrats—Al Gore’s sighings during the debate with George Bush, Hillary Clinton’s “cackle”), and instant amnesia. To watch archive footage of TV reporters from the black-and-white era with their measured intonations and ashen visages—before everybody burst into Michael Kors orange—is to crack open the crypt on a more responsible, somber, and, yes, duller era, when journalists still conducted themselves as a priestly caste serving the needs of an informed citizenry, as opposed to catering to cud-chewing dolts. Those days are gone and there’s no point in mourning them, the Walter Lippmanns and similar wise men (and women) having proved worse than useless when the Vietnam War sawed the country into two with its lies and delusions. But the intelligent drone of old-school journalism served to extend a support bridge through national trauma, the term “anchorman” symbolic of the media’s role in securing coverage of the news with weight and authority, a fixed point in a sea of raging foam. Now it’s all raging foam, a steady, indiscriminate diet of excitation to keep us permanently on edge.
My husband called it first. Then, a brilliant, 75-year-old scholar and raconteur confessed to me over wine: ‘I’m sexually attracted to her. I don’t care that she knows nothing.’
Finally, writer Robert Draper closed the file on the Sarah Palin mystery with a devastating article in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine: ‘The Making (and Remaking) of McCain.’
McCain didn’t know her. He didn’t vet her. His campaign team had barely an impression. In a bar one night, Draper asked one of McCain’s senior advisers: ‘Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?’
The adviser thought a moment and replied: ‘No, I don’t know.’
Early Friday Morning Update: Yesterday Thursday I gave a speech in London (see video below) arguing that markets were in sheer panic and becoming literally dysfunctional and unhinged. I also made the point that policy makers may soon be forced to close financial markets as the panic selling accelerates.
Indeed, we have now reached a point where fundamentals and long term valuation considerations do not matter any more for financial markets. There is a free fall as most investors are rapidly deleveraging and we are on the verge of a a capitulation collapse. What matters now is only flows – rather than stocks and fundamentals – and flows are unidirectional as everyone is selling and no one is buying as trying to buy equities is like catching a falling knife. There are no buyers in these dysfunctional markets, only sellers and panic is the ugly state of this destabilizing game.
And while panic and destabilizing market dynamics is the driver of financial markets even economic fundamentals are awful as investors are finally realizing that a severe US and Eurozone and G7 and emerging markets and global recession is coming and will be deep and protracted.
Law enforcement officials say the intense public interest and historic nature of the vote could lead to violent outbreaks if people are unhappy with the results, encounter problems casting their ballots or suspect voting irregularities.
Police departments say they cannot rule out disorder and are mobilising extra forces and putting SWAT teams on standby.
In Oakland, near San Francisco, police will have tactical squads, SWAT teams and officers trained in riot control on standby.
“We always try to prepare for the worst,” said Oakland police department spokesman Jeff Thomason.
“This election is going to mark in history a change in the presidency: you’re going to have a woman in the presidency or an African American as president. I think everybody around here is voting for Obama, so if he gets in the White House everybody’s going to be happy.
“But we’ll have our SWAT teams on standby and traffic teams here, so if something goes off we’ll organise and take care of the problem.”
There have also been internet rumours about plans for protests or civil disobedience by supporters of Democratic candidate Barack Obama if he is beaten by Republican rival John McCain on November 4.
Since winning the Nobel Prize in 1993, Morrison has, not altogether reluctantly, taken on the voice of America’s conscience. After the marvels of empathy that were Beloved and, to a lesser extent, Jazz, that public voice has grown – she has sometimes seemed a spokeswoman rather than a writer – and the voice of her novels has become sparer. In this book, a good deal of Morrison’s stark, almost biblical imaginative power is on display, without all of her former detailing energy. Nathaniel Hawthorne has become her model in some ways; like him, she is capable of creating fictional environments in which everything can come to seem symbolic. Portentous is not always a comfortable tone, but in the coming American weeks it may well be the appropriate one. The first line of A Mercy? ‘Don’t be afraid.’
