Daily Office:
Wednesday
¶ Matins: So manypeople still don’t get it: the important thing right now is to do something, and then, maybe, something else. Waiting to get it right is the only guarantee of disaster. The Obama/Geithner plan faces a “brutally negative” response.
¶ Lauds: I read it at Classical Convert first: Muzak has declared bankruptcy.
¶ Prime: So, you’re going through the attic, convinced that it’s full of treasures. Sadly, you’re probably in the The Trough of No Value. Saving those “collectibles” always requires more patience than you think it will. (via kottke.org)
¶ Tierce: Now that the Obama Administration is re-directing American focus to Afghanistan, the sub-sovereign creation of British mapmakers is metastatsizing from a sorry mess to the new Vietnam. Uh-oh!
The attacks in the capital underlined the severity of the challenge facing American policy-makers who have declared the war in Afghanistan a high priority for the new administration in Washington and who plan to almost double American troop levels with the deployment of some 30,000 additional soldiers.
¶ Sext: What happened at The New School? Put it another way: why does Bob Kerrey stay on as President when he is so massively unpopular with the faculty? What is he thinking?
¶ Nones: Trouble in Paradise Azerbaijan. For the first time since 1994, a “high-ranking” Azerbaijani military officer, Air Force leader Lt-Gen Rail Rzayev has been shot dead.
¶ Vespers: Steven Moore reviews Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of Donald Barthelme, whose student Daugherty was in the Eighties: Hiding Man. (via Emdashes)
¶ Compline: Something very interesting and beautiful to look at before you go to bed: Scintillation, a short film by Xavier Chassaing (at Snarkmarket).
Oremus…
§ Matins. My feelings grow more and more radical. Although I remain a nominal capitalist, and profoundly respectful of most property rights, I come closer every day to believing that the one thing that has to happen before we make any progress is to set all investments at zero. All investments. And then we deal. How else to respond to this:
The stock market, propped up for weeks on the expectation that Washington would finally deliver a comprehensive rescue plan, dipped almost as soon as Mr. Geithner began speaking in the morning. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 382 points, or 4.6 percent, by the time the market closed. Yields on Treasury bills dropped, indicating a flight from stocks to the safety of government bonds.
Memo to Sir Elton John: Write a hit song called “The Swedish Solution”!
§ Lauds. The news was not a surprise. I remembered David Owen’s piece, “The Sountrack of Your Life,” in The New Yorker (10 April 2006). Mr Owen wrote,
Muzak—which is privately owned, although its bonds trade publicly—has lost money for a number of years. The company has tried many times to broaden its business, with mixed results. After September 11th, it made a major effort to sell closed-circuit-television security systems, but that enterprise proved almost immediately to be a dead end. (Collis told me, “With audio branding, you’re selling emotion, love, caring, feelings. With CCTV, you’re selling fear. Not a good combination.”) Other ventures have turned out better. Muzak has a large and profitable “on hold” business, which creates music-and-voice programming for commercial telephone systems. The voice division also creates in-store promotional announcements, which can be patched seamlessly into the company’s backgroundmusic programs. All in all, Muzak creates about thirty thousand voice spots a month. It also provides the drive-through ordering systems used by many fast-food restaurants.
I did have to grit my teeth to read the piece, though. I couldn’t bring myself to hope that Muzak would find its way in the world of personal stereos.
I direct your attention, as Michael Carlebach does, to the wall at the back of the room that also displays the clock. Know what those are? They’re negatives—the newspaper’s photographic archive. The hundreds of cases you see there in neatly-shelved rows contained thousands of negatives of newsworthy events, people, and places, collected at considerable expense by the paper and with great labor and sometimes risk by the men in the picture and their cohorts.
When the newspaper folded, all those negatives were thrown away.
And as time goes by, and stuff exponentially piles up, trying to figure out what people are going to be interested in in fifty, a hundred, or a thousand years ceases to be the question. It’s rather: how much will they be able to sort through?
§ Tierce. As Gertrude Stein put it, there is no there there. Afghanistan — the territory within the borders drawn on the political map — simply doesn’t have what it takes to be any kind of democracy.
This will be as big a test of Mr Obama’s abilities as avoiding another Depression. He needs to work with the armed forces to device an entirely new way of approaching some sort of sensible mission in Kabul.
And, by the way, the decriminalization of drugs would go a long way to emptying the Taliban’s pockets. Last time they were in charge, the Taliban were puritanical about poppies, but they’re not making that mistake again.
§ Sext. What Mr Kerrey is thinking, apparently, is that he has the support of his Board of Directors — and of course he does, because he appointed almost half of its members. In an ordinary corporation, the CEO could uproot management opposition root and branch. Not, however, in the land of tenure!
Whatever the merits of faculty opposition to Mr Kerrey, this is a case of Toxic Top. Mr Kerrey’s advisers ought to warn him that power poisoning is bad for the health.
§ Nones. Nobody knows why; there’s an overflow of possible explanations. But instability in Azerbaijan is never, er, healthy. All that oil!
§ Vespers. I still remember reading “Snow White” — or is it Snow White? — in The New Yorker, in the South Dining Hall, in February 1967.
“Oh I wish there were some words in the world that were not the words I always hear!” Snow White exclaimed loudly.
§ Compline. The music had me for a moment; I thought it was going to be Bach’s “Air” (on the G-string). Toy pianos have really arrived.