Marbury

mr yates

Richard Yates is one of my favourite writers. I read Revolutionary Road a few years ago and was knocked out by it. Now it's top of my list of recommendations to any friends wondering what to read. It rarely fails to delight. Yates published Revolutionary Road, his first novel, in 1961. It was instantly acclaimed as a classic, something he never quite recovered from. Later, both book and author fell out of vogue, and the author drank and smoked himself to an early grave. In the last few years he's been recognised as one of the greats, but as he'd surely say if he knew, too fucking late. Yates is a master of the kind of taut, lucid, brutally honest prose that I'm drawn to. He lies somewhere (chronologically and stylistically) between Hemingway and Carver. All of which is to introduce this brilliant memoir of him published in today's Guardian, by the writer Richard Price. It's worth your time.

"So, Price," he would semi-growl, his elbow beer-damp on the varnish. "They paying you a lotta dough? Are you raking it in? Make sure the bastards pay for it," hacking like a Model T while palming his chest for the next fresh 20. "I wrote a good novel once, you probably never heard of it, well you were a kid, you're still a kid, no reason why you should," slowly stripping the seal. "Just make sure the bastards pay you through the nose."

doonesbury on palin

no, he has nothing to do with denim

Claude Levi-Strauss is still alive. Who knew? The French anthropologist, whose work has informed just about all the humanities (he was a great influence on structuralist thought in particular and these days anyone who does a literature degree has to read some of his stuff) is 100 today. He once referred to geology, Marxism and psychoanalysis as his "three mistresses". How beautifully French. Bon anniversaire, monsieur.

wise man sorrell

Martin Sorrell of WPP thinks the world economy might recover quickly and strongly - although by quickly he means 2010. This is based on his faith in Barack Obama's forthcoming stimulus package. It's a good piece but it contains a weird bit of cabbie wisdom:

As well as all that, we will see the US car industry bailed out. But this will happen before the inauguration because there are fears that General Motors will go under before Christmas. Politically, Mr Obama couldn’t have a black woman car worker being put out of work in Detroit while a white debt trader in New York is kept in work.

The words "black" and "white" here are entirely superfluous. The suggestion that Obama's political calculations have much to do with "looking after his own" is either naive or insidious. Not even Bill Clinton went that far. Sorrell is a fan of Obama, as he makes clear, particularly at the end of his piece. So we'll put this down to clumsiness. But it's unpretty.

There's something peculiarly ridiculous about Brits with barely a clue about America's racial politics nonetheless weighing in with abandon.

happy thanksgiving! (ii)

The latest David Brooks column is on how to use America's immediate financial crisis to begin solving its long term economic problems. It contains this sobering fact:

Over the past year, the federal government has poured money into the economy hundreds of billions of dollars at a time... this project constitutes the largest infusion in American history. If you add up just the funds that have already been committed, you get a figure, according to Jim Bianco of Bianco Research, that is larger in today’s dollars than the costs of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Korean War, Vietnam and the S.&L. crisis combined.

happy thanksgiving!

...to our American friends.

If you happen to be working the butterball helpline, here's your helpline.

Q: I just hung up with a caller with the words "gobble gobble" instead of "goodbye"—was this appropriate?

A: No. Make sure you note that in your report to your supervisor on Monday.

UPDATE: if you don't know what the butterball helpline is, that's OK. Neither did President Bartlet:

broder joins the swoon

David Broder of the Washington Post has been covering the White House for more than fifty years. Over that time he's come to believe that high intelligence is overrated as a desirable attribute of presidents (can somebody please keep this column away from Bill, by the way?). But Broder -  a hard-to-impress guy who until recently was something of an Obama-sceptic - is mightily glad that the man in charge of sorting out this unbelievably complicated economic mess has a big brain:

So for several years, I have been arguing that there are traits much more important to the success of a president than brainpower. Self-confidence, curiosity, an eye for talent, the ability to communicate, a temperament that invites collaboration -- all these and more rank higher on the list of desirable presidential traits.

I am not ready to abandon that view. But I am struck by how lucky this country is, at the moment, that the president-elect is a super-smart person like Barack Obama.

The whole thing is worth reading.

bad boys and girls

George Packer of the New Yorker notes that, unlike American bankers, the Swiss managers of UBS are eating humble pie, having agreed to forgo $27 million in bonuses and compensation:

The moral code of these Wall Street executives corresponds to stage one of Lawrence Kohlberg’s famous stages of morality: “The concern is with what authorities permit and punish.” Morally, they are very young children. The Swiss bankers are closer to stage four, most common among late teens, where a concern for maintaining the good functioning of society takes hold. Stage six, an elaboration of universal moral principles based on an idea of the good society, is a distant dream for the titans of global finance.

The Atlantic's Megan McArdle offers an alternative view, which might be termed the Murder On The Orient Express Theory: we're all to blame.

In general, I think that we're approaching this crisis the wrong way when we look for a villain... So while yes, part of this story has been simple greed, a willingness to believe that we could and should massively increase consumption no matter what, I tend to take this desire as a given.  The question is how you design an institution that channels those given desires into productive ends...

What I do not think is a major part of the story is that any simple change, or any handful of people or groups, somehow brought this on the rest of us.  Societies, and economies, cannot be brought down by a few people or a few bad decisions--elsewise we'd all still be living in hunter-gatherer tribes eating roast locusts for breakfast.  A failure this massive can only occur if massive numbers of people had their hands in it somehow.  If you want to find a villain, there's probably one handy at the nearest reflective surface.

Myself, I tend to the latter view. I'm instinctively uneasy with the blame-the-bankers approach. Apart from anything it underestimates the problem. If it's just a case of disciplining a few naughty boys and girls then we can do that and carry on as we were. But that's obviously not going to work. For every irresponsible lender there was an irresponsible borrower, and anyway this really is about the institutions in which our transactions are embedded rather than the morality of certain individuals. We're all responsible for those. Pointing the finger at one particular group is cheap and lazy and a waste of time, albeit satisfying for a short while.

the fine line between envy and bitterness

Obama is taking his chief speechwriter to the White House with him. Jon Favreau is 27. And quite good-looking apparently. Damn.

best guesses

Excellent NYT insta-analysis of what's happening in Mumbai suggests this is unlikely to be Al-Q (no suicide bombers) and more likely to be domestic group borne from India's unhappy Muslim minority:

“The public political face of India says, “Our Muslims have not been radicalized.’ But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad,” she said. “Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. “Al Qaeda’s in your toilet!’ But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”

Terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman is impressed and alarmed:

“It’s not often that things in terrorism alarm me. So much is a repeat of what we see almost every day, like suicide bombings. There’s no real innovation in terrorism, which is why 9/11 was so terrifying, because it was so innovative and heinously clever.

“But these attacks show how a handful of men, basically using weapons off the shelf, can paralyze a city and frustrate highly trained security forces. These attacks were calculated to spread alarm and anxiety — to put it quite frankly, to unhinge things — and that’s exactly what they’ve done.”

pic of the day

Obama visited a local school on Chicago's South Side today before his press conference.

gates unleashed

The people most unhappy about Obama's decision to keep Gates at Defence are likely to be defence industry executives. This post from TPM's Yuri Applebaum outlines why the president-elect's choice to retain Bush's Sec Def is actually a signal that he intends to pursue bold change in that department. Gates is a tough, independently minded operator who knows the defence industry inside out, can't be bullied or hoodwinked, and has strong views on how to cut spending on unnecessary programs. Now he'll be able to have his way, with the full backing of his president.

In retaining Gates, Obama is sending a clear signal to the Pentagon bureaucracy that their usual strategy of stalling and out-lasting civilian appointees is going to fail; that he intends to pursue Gates' key reforms. And that's a decision which should make us all stand and cheer... Gates and his team have attacked a series of previously-sacrosanct weapons programs. They've done so in the absence of any material support from the Bush administration, and in the face of fierce opposition from the Democratic congress.

siren voice

Hillary Clinton's former chief spin doctor Howard Wolfson on being haunted by Matt Drudge:

By the end of the campaign, I was seeing the Drudge siren in my sleep. As people in politics know all too well Matt Drudge is the Internet provocateur who runs the Drudge Report Web site, posts a flashing siren whenever he wants to alert readers to major campaign news or rumors. The siren haunted my dreams and was always in the corner of my eye — except when it was in plain sight, on my computer screen, signifying success or, more often, terrible failure and impending doom. As soon as that siren started flashing, instant messages would pop up, just below the siren, one after another — each one beginning with “Seen Drudge?” until my entire computer screen was filled with instant-message boxes illuminated by the light of Drudge’s siren. It might have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so frightening.

the roman president

In a slightly fawning but nonetheless very interesting piece on Obama, Charlotte Higgins of The Guardian notes the influence of Ciceronian rhetoric on his speeches (you heard it here first):

One of my favourites among Obama's tricks was his use of the phrase "a young preacher from Georgia", when accepting the Democratic nomination this August; he did not name Martin Luther King. The term for the technique is "antonomasia". One example from Cicero is the way he refers to Phoenix, Achilles' mentor in the Iliad, as "senior magister" - "the aged teacher". In both cases, it sets up an intimacy between speaker and audience, the flattering idea that we all know what we are talking about without need for further exposition. It humanises the character - King was just an ordinary young man, once.

escorting the VIPs and SIPs

A great Washington Post story about the "Military Assistants" who get chosen, after a rigorous interview process, to escort the great and the good around Washington on Inauguration Day:

It is a once-in-a-lifetime, much-sought-after job, interviewers said, especially this time, for the installation of Obama, the country's first black president...

...The main job for an MA is getting his or her "package" to events on time: to ceremonies, prayer services, the swearing-in, the parade, luncheons, balls. Timing is critical, and failure is "not an option," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Arthur C. Fong, the first- and second-family military assistant coordinator.

Each MA will have a car and a driver, who for this inauguration will have a cellphone with a global positioning satellite device allowing the car to be tracked at a command center downtown during the inauguration, Fong said. The MA must know which streets to take, which entrances to use, where to park and what credentials will be required.

The committee tries to strike good background matches between the MAs and VIPs. In addition, the MAs "will have to be smart on the person they're escorting," Air Force Capt. Robert Millmann, of the committee's ceremonies directorate, said.