Pumpkin Carving

Teaser Anguish

Ever see a great link but can't click through because of the computer you're on? This happened to me today. So now here for you all, Vietman considers ban on small-chested drivers.

Obama Infomercial!

So, will you watch tonight? I'm not sure I care to sit through the whole thing but I am very curious to see what the ratings will be. Against it is the fact that it is essentially a 30 minute ad. For it is the public appetite for political theater. Against it the fact that normally for political theater you need the drama of an opponent. For it is the fact that people watch sermons on TV too. So who knows. Either way what an closing gesture, a 30 minute aria on a gusher of cash!

Ho Hum

Finley Farm

The girls were very excited about the bonfire, the hot dogs (C. 2, B. 2, W.4), the hayride, and the smores.


Especially the smores

Now He's Gone and Done It

Richard Dawkins vs. Harry Potter. He's writing a children's book, only this one will lift the veil on the insidious nature of fairy tales. It's one thing to go after the Judeo-Christian myth, but I think he is going to find the public a lot less receptive to giving up their Harry Potter. New Atheism is punchy and polemical in long essay form. Why expose its lack of charm to the rigors of the bedtime story?

Public Grief

Anne Pressly passed away last night. P. and I were coming home from the country when we received a call. It was a shock to me how affecting it felt, made worse I think by reports of her recent improvement. This morning at St. Andrews church, where Anne attended on occasion and was a member of a bible study, Philip redirected the tenor of his sermon to focus on recent events. He appeared to speak extemporaneously, and it was moving and direct. He said he had spent most of the week at the hospital. He fought back his tears at one point but many in the congregation was less successful.

Afterwards P. said it surprised him that people who did not know Anne would allow themselves to become so emotionally involved in her death. Then there was the item from the paper earlier in the week where coverage of the attack and the outpouring of public support drew the criticism that other violent crime hadn't produced the same result. Is there something selfish in participating in grief for someone you do not know? Is public sympathy undeserved or illegitimized if it is not dispensed equally?

To think that it seems you would have to pretend that personal knowledge is the only true ground for grief and that every death has the exactly same claims to symbolic or emblematic significance. Sure public grief can be outsized and massive. And maybe we find disproportionately compelling the deaths of the young or the attractive or the successful. But we are a society, and our sense of ourselves is not just individual but also collective. And in judging our collective status we rely on the emblematic all the time. It is not just the man who committed the crime or the young woman who suffers and cannot survive but society too that is guilty and victim. The shock of the unlooked for event, the unnatural interference of violence and death, they seem to me good reasons for public grief.

Another Minor but Nevertheless Happily Acknowledged Reason to Enjoy Faulkner

Reading Faulkner:

"- his conscience and the land, the country which had created his conscience and then offered the opportunity to have made all that money to the conscience which it had created, which could do nothing but decline; hated the country so much that he was even glad when he saw it drifting closer and closer to a doomed and fatal war... and so he would not be present on that day when the South would realize that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of stern morality but on the shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage."

Faulkner doesn't really describe the financial transaction that is at the nub of this crisis of conscience. Apparently it is something to do with credit and "one of those things that when they work you were smart and when they don't you change your name and move to Texas." Let's just assume that it is genuinely fraudulent, since Faulkner's choice between "stern morality" and "sands of opportunism" only reminds me of how difficult it is to quantify acceptable financial risk in terms of righteousness. The deadly sin of usury anyone?

But leaving that aside, there is genuine pleasure in watching Faulkner combine the puritan and profligate critiques of America: the tender conscience on the one hand, the promiscuously abundant opportunity for money on the other. It is not simply an act of "moral brigandage" that offends Faulkner's merchant, although Faulkner himself calls it out, but rather that the country should have offered him (the merchant) the opportunity for such a thing at all. And that conscience, that could revolt at the lush seedbed of possibility that is the plain reality of the nation, is named as explicitly American made. What a conundrum between the puritanism of our consciences and the profligacy of our opportunities. And how topical, even without throwing in the specter of economic impotency in the face of a "doomed and fatal war." Economic edifices with sham foundations! Judgment on departure from "stern morality!" As I mentioned above I am a little skeptical of making too much of the morality point, failure to appropriately evaluate risk being not quite the same as an evil cabal. Still it is interesting how our current discussions fit so easily into old critiques, summed up beautifully here by Faulkner. It points to something touchingly constant in the national character.

Ahh Fall. The Cool Air, the Crisp Leaves, the Sense that Reformation Day is Just Around the Corner...

Martin Luther rap. Oh snap! He just called out Philip of Hesse!

Prayer Request

Anne Pressly is in critical condition at St. Vincent's.

While I am not close to her personally I know many people who are. Please keep her in your prayers.

1. Cup of

Missed the Last Debate

Donor preview of Warhol + Project Runway Finale get together = shirking civic duty.

But it feels perfunctory anyway. They have ticked off the last box. McCain could be a lot better candidate than he is and I think it still wouldn't matter much in the final going.

Warhol looks good if I do say so. Just one more hurdle tomorrow morning and I'm in the clear.

Hurray for Leanne! I liked Kenley's separates and Korto's color, but Leanne deserved to win.

Evasion Links

Evasion links are tricky. They have to be entertaining but substantial enough to burn up the clock over a long, dull stretch of duty calling.

First up, L'Hôte/Freddie DeBoer, who has a long post on the trouble with postmodern conservatism, a critique kicked off by Nicola Karras' existential crisis.

The L'Hôte response to Karras has provoked a couple of responses, most notably Eve Tushnet, who is herself link-rich and sent me to this delightful post.

State Fair

10,000 Hamburgers on the Hoof!

Gourmet Snow Cones!

Beef Sundae!

October 10, 2008

Yesterday was quite full and in a way representative of what you would like to imagine life was like when you look back on it in twenty years. It was moving between my job and a few things around town and larger events hovering over everything and sometimes even directly intersecting the day, like the stock market ticker tape over the door at lunch or the Clinton rally for Obama on the front steps of the Capitol. It will be nice to look back on it as a day that encapsulates all that was going on at that moment in time, and maybe it does encapsulate. But is it representative? Not really. Maybe that is why it is standing out to me today. Because yesterday broke up a continuum of jeans and t-shirts and crates in the galleries with Warhol work, and then coming home tired and to news reporting so intense you feel required to work it in to your day, that all of that was what was really happening in the world and if it didn't intersect the crates well that was just an illusion. Nevertheless you have no concrete memory to represent the fact that the stock market or the election was intersecting the unpacking of the crates. It was all just crates. But yesterday I dressed up some and got out a little and finally had a day that felt representative of the larger whole. Or encapsulates.

Yesterday P. was sworn in at the court house and there was a ceremony of giving the license. He looked pretty sharp once I actually got to see him. I went in to the courtroom and they had chairs set up behind the desks for counsel so I sat down there, and then the new lawyers L - Z came in and were layered in rows before the bench so that I couldn't see a thing.


While I waited I took in the courtroom, which is where the Supreme Court of Arkansas meets, and pondered all those new lawyers and whether they aspired to sit on the Supreme Court, and then decided if it were me it would feel like its own sentence to have to sit under the giant plush carpet seal of the state of Arkansas suspended behind the bench, which is so ugly it would daily discourage belief in higher and ultimate truths. But this is the sort of aesthetic overreaction that is supposed to happen to you working in the arts, so I guess it is taking.


Afterward P. and I went over to the bar at the Capital Hotel. We had it to ourselves and had a long lunch of sandwiches and iced tea and a celebratory moon pie.


The Capital Hotel is a relic fished up from the 1870s and restored by a local investment banker. It is a bit of a time capsule hauled into modernity with polished surfaces and, in the bar, flat screen TVs set to CNBC for the businessmen. The Capital Hotel is just across the street from Stephens Inc. investment bank. It felt anecdotal of the day that the ticker across the bottom of the flat screen TV showed the Dow down across the board and the bar was largely deserted. What now for those other restoration projects, the old Main Street Theater also owned by Mr. Stephens and indeed the rest of the street, which is mostly a shell. There is the old M.M.Cohn department store, for example, which a year ago a friend suggested as great place for a Halloween party because, according to him, despite closing decades ago the mannequins are still there and some of the old merchandise too and it would make for a ghostly dinner. Last year was when the last of the M.M.Cohn stores closed under a weight of corporate debt, and the Little Rock chain that had begun about the time of the Capital Hotel and then prospered a century and sold itself off to Texas finally died. So no more Cohn stores in Arkansas, no more employees, and now maybe no more restoration projects for a little while.

Sitting in the bar of the hotel, with the bright sky outside and the doom and gloom ticker tape inside, it reminded me of a fantasy I had as a little girl. Some report would be on the evening news of a terrible storm (this happened once or twice) and I would get a thrill at the taste of an adventure. How would we weather it? And I would imagine that the house on Edgewood was a fort during the French and Indian war and we had to stockpile to survive and every moment was precious. Or I would imagine we were a ship and a storm on the horizon line gave lie to the clear skies and we had to batten down hatches and trim sails and such. So I would run around squaring away my toys, which was hardly key to survival, and once I organized the pantry, which was a little closer to a realistic gesture. Anyway it was exciting. Almost exciting enough to look forward to the storm. If you were a child. Now as a young adult and being completely honest with myself there is a little romance in wondering what things would be like if everything were to change and how I would weather a defining challenge. But it is the unrealistic heart of a child that indulges that even for a moment, first to let your mind run to the worst possible scenario, second to embrace it without giving thought to what it really means. Hopefully the adult would triumph in the investment banker skipping lunch and (according to the Dow) dumping shares as if believing in a panic the worst case scenario. And hopefully the adult would triumph in me as well, eating lunch in the bar and flirting with a rosy fantasy of loss.

After lunch I went over to the museum and checked in on the vinyl signage going up in time for the donor events, and placed the last of the 3-D work, and made slow progress through some copy for extended labels. There is some irony in chastising yourself over lunch at the possibility of taking too cavalier an attitude at the loss of material wealth, and then come to work on Warhol whose unabashed celebration of surface deep material culture could give even the cheeriest capitalist pause. A generous interpreter would say this is what he intends, to both revel in the shallow surfaces of mass produced culture and raise the curtain on it, nevertheless generosity is involved. To the extent the show is taken seriously I expect it could have a queasy effect at a time like this, or maybe not and people will just be thrilled with a celebrity name. Anyway I started in on labels. I got stumped though at the medieval derivative stuff, where Warhol takes a unique single work from the history of art and turns it into a flattened, electric colored detail for screen print mass production. Nothing sounded right and still didn't at five so I emailed it home to myself for the weekend and grabbed my bag and headed over to the capitol.


Hillary Clinton was holding a rally for Obama. P. was out in the crowd with a clipboard signing up volunteers, but by the time every Arkansas democrat of any recent prominence at had a wack at the podium he was free and we stood together by the campaign table and listened to Hillary.


The campaign seemed mainly there to work the crowd for volunteers. "Are you not coordinating the rally?" I asked P. "Nope," he said, "in fact it is surprising how little we have to do with it considering it is for Obama." Why are these solo? Does Hillary not want to have the editorial interference? But it was a strong if routine endorsement and the crowd had saved the pitch of its enthusiasm for her. I couldn't help wondering how it felt for her coming back to Little Rock, mainly because I'm unsure about how she feels of her time here, but it hardly matters. She extorted the us to surprise the world again and turn Arkansas blue and blessed us and closed the evening. I felt overwhelmingly tired, probably from standing in uncommonly high heels all day long. P. and I made plans to meet up later and with that I headed for home.

Heaven Forfend

The Louvre is under fire for low brow mugging for crowds. The undeserving object of the show? Picasso.

Johnathan Jones doesn't argue the dumbing down charge, but he blames the Mona Lisa.

Civic Duty? Check

I watched the debate. This feels like doing my civic duty and that is about all that can be said for it. I don't know if I ever recognized the disconnect between the term "debate" and what our modern political cycle stages for election purposes. It is more sporting event than a sparring of ideas through exposition and defense. Perhaps great for cheering your guy or observing political theater, but not for trying to judge the veracity of ideas.

It's not the candidates' fault. Partly it is the format, the range of what must be covered, the necessity of the coached response. I'm asking what the debates no longer are meant to provide.

The most substantive answer of the evening was Obama's on health care. His scalpel vs. hatchet metaphor in describing their differing tax plans continues to be my favorite bit of campaign imagery. It works on so many levels! He was also by far the most gracious and well spoken, an impression which serves him well. I thought he won it.

This feels like a postscript, but as far as the economy goes it will probably take reading some tome of history in future years to discover what I would like to know now, namely are we going to get some fresh political philosophy to go with our economically rocky kick off to the 21st century and what will that look like?

Debate Tonight

I would like to hear about the economy. I don't want to hear about Ayers. I don't want to hear about the Keating Five. I even don't want to hear about who is most to blame for the current financial crisis, although it is an important topic. What I really want to hear is what in the world is going on now. I want someone to explain to me with some fluency of detail the larger picture, the longer view, and what the implications are for government. I realize neither candidate is an expert on economics, but both are supposedly experts on governance. The impression I get is that both these guys are thrashing around for a rubric to deal, are susceptible to flurries of new legislation, and to the extent that there are guiding principles here they are husks of phrases out of each sides' ideological grab-bags. Can someone please explain to me carefully why whatever language they have decided on should apply? Can someone please integrate their uncertainties with their core verities and show me how those would interact in the come-what-may future? Please no populist thumping over "elites." Please no pure hand wringing over "greed." Please show me the groundwork of how you think and why you plan to act as you do. That would help.

Blame Game

Megan McArdle takes a look.

Over the past few weeks, much has been made of the various regulatory actions that enabled this mess. Though some are wrong, two are not: the Democrats protected OFHEO's shockingly loose regulation of Fannie and Freddie against the White House's attempt to toughen it; and the Republican-appointed SEC loosened the capital requirements for the five largest banks.

But why did they do this? Democrats seem to believe that the Republicans and the SEC simply did this out of wanton greed and a blind faith in markets; Republicans seem to believe that OFHEO, the Democrats, and Fannie/Freddie did this because of political corruption and a blind belief in homeownership for poor people. But neither side was simply accepting the risk that the whole thing might come crashing down leaving the economy in tatters and the taxpayers on the hook. The regulators, too, were misled by recent history. In recent history, lending had been safer, and risk models did seem to be performing better. Both groups genuinely believed that improvements in both computer models, and in economic theory of regulation, would allow them to identify and halt any crisis before it occurred. And just like everyone else, when no disaster occurred, they became ever more confident in their own genius.

What we need, fundamentally, is not simply stricter regulation or less greedy bankers. What we need is better economic theory of how these things play out, so that the regulators have better tools to assess and prevent systemic risk. But that's not how we're thinking right now. What we're looking for is not better tools, but someone to blame.

Sunday Morning Links

Marilynne Robinson is interviewed over at The Paris Review on her new novel Home. When she was a student she kept lists, she says, of metaphorical language in early American literature and this was her springboard into novels. Also possibly into sermons, as she admits to subbing for her priest on occasion. I would like to attend that church.

Nancy Huston is interviewed at The Prague Post on the occasion of her most recent work's translation in Czech. Movement between languages is Huston's specialty. Nord Perdu, an essay on minding the gap between French and English came out the year I was in Paris. It might have been the first non school related book I bought in French.

And speaking of French, yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the constitution of the Fifth Republic. Arthur Goldhammer takes a look and reflects on the different conceptions in French and English political terminology.

Birthday Breakfast

W turns 11. I think that was the biggest donut there.


W's Shipley's is the oldest Shipley's in Little Rock. Almost everyone uses the drive through, so the girls and I had the little cafe to ourselves, but they were still shy about singing Happy Birthday.

Project Runway Serendipity

Yesterday finished installing the Delta Exhibition (regional juried competition), ran home for lunch and a shower, caught up on most recent episode of Project Runway (local girl Korto gave me a scare but made it to the top four!), ran back to museum for opening reception, ran into Korto herself! Can now breathe easier for the finale.

Fall Restless

Is this why I've been waking up so early lately?

Trolling around on the internet and found this:




There aren't many movies I care much about seeing this year. Typically there are loads. Can anybody even name a blockbuster coming out in the next few months besides James Bond?

I'll see Bond. And I'll see more arty films like Changeling and Rachel Getting Married. I'll see I Have Loved You So Long if we get it this year. But the last is really the only one I care about so far.

Revolutionary Road is supposed to be Oscar bait but P and I saw the trailer in the cinema and it looked like another take on a 1950s vision of the suburbs as a form of self-immolation. Fun.

But I live in the suburbs and I'm reading the Rough Guide to Argentina so maybe I shouldn't scoff.

Waiting for the Weekend

The Morning After

Waking up this morning, I am a less impressed with Sarah Palin's debate performance than I was last night. Given some space and some distance from the tinkling pixels of my TV screen, it seems clear Biden won on points. The problem for people who don't like Palin is that during the debate itself it felt a lot more like Palin's night.

Part of this was expectations. WaPo guy Howard Kurtz wondered if Palin would "fall on her face." Atlantic guy Ross Douthat said it would take the greatest resurrection since Lazarus for Palin to survive the debate (or I think he did, but I can't find the link). Anyway the story line seemed to be that Palin was on the verge of loosing not just the debate, but control of her public image to such an extent that her political future in any election was on the line. The specter of Dan Quayle was raised. Given that context, the mere act of being able to transcend the crash and burn trajectory felt heroic.

It would be unfair, though, to pretend that the juice in Palin's performance during the debate was only an illusion of low expectations. Her freshness, her enthusiasm, and her authenticity are genuinely appealing. Noam Scheiber, no fan of Palin's, acknowledges it in a gobsmacked way at TNR ("how can we compete with that") before insisting that all is OK because it wears thin. The standard critique here is that this is not really a plus because elections should be decided on substance not style. This is a dodge; of course elections are decided on both and ought to be. To be an elected politician is to fill a symbolic role in the publics eyes, to be a representative. But beyond that it is a pretense that Biden has no style and Palin no substance. Biden's most effective moment was when he spoke to knowing what it is like to raise children as a single parent and reflected on tough moments around the proverbial kitchen table, the kind of homey direct-to-the-viewer pitch that is supposed to be Palin's strong suit. And any sober look at Palin's record shows not only competence but the sort of staid effectiveness that is often a selling point for old hands in the Senate.

Any politician has both style and substance, but the difference between any politician and a mere think tank guy or policy wonk is the ability to connect to a public and fill that representative role. If you are in the opposition you call this style and downplay it - witness Republicans on Barack Obama - but it is a massive part of what it means to be a politician, it was the juice in Palin's performance last night, and it will probably secure her political future.

Rough Centenniel

The Model T turns 100 today.

Ford's stock is down, it's hand is out, and tomorrow what amounts to a feature length anti-Ford commercial hits theaters. P and I went to a preview last night for "Flash of Genius", all about Bob Kearns (Greg Kinnear) the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper only to have it stolen by Ford. Maybe you are the company whose early idea of customer choice was to say that any color was fine on a car so long as it was black, and maybe you are the company who could knowingly sell a fire hazard on the logic that the wrongful death suits would be cheaper than a redesign. Clearly, you are tough. But this is the big leagues. You took away Greg Kinnear's wiper and you made him suffer. The nation may not forgive. Say you were wrong, say it was a different time in the industry. This press release makes it sound like you are loath to admit wrong and unwilling ever to give an inch. We are talking about a lovable Greg Kinnear here guys. Don't play with fire (again).

Coyotes

My friend D announced the other night that someone needs to write a book for hunters, When You Can Kill Things in Arkansas, because the options are so overwhelming. Still, I think it was with a little disbelief that P and D put on their boots and plunged into the gully behind the house in search of the coyotes I swore were back there. I've only ever seen one adult, but late at night you can hear a whole mewling chorus of them. I think there might be a litter of pups somewhere. Sure enough the boys' trip flushed the adult, who came trotting up and crossed the low end of the yard before disappearing again into the woods.



I don't like the idea of going out for my morning run while a species of pack animals with a chase instinct live in the backyard.

Early Nomination for "Noun of the Year"

Commercial Paper. Such an education.

If You Have the Time

Yves Smith and Megan McArdle hash out the bailout mess. I don't understand all of it, but when I do it is really gripping.