Daily Office:
Monday
¶ Matins: Of the 1929 crash, veteran Al Gordon (who died the other day at 107) once said, “Young men thought they could do anything.” Things haven’t changed, as an autopsy of Lehman Bros’ real-estate operations shows.
¶ Lauds: RISD prof Anthony Acciavatti teaches an “advanced studio” that has spawned Friends of the Future, a traveling exhibition that, on the side, will distribute 36,000 postcards at popular stops: gas stations and McDonald’s. (via Art Fag City)
¶ Prime: Is Daily News gossip columnist Joanna Molloy writing the juiciest items about the Marshall trial? Or is the Post’s Andrea Peyser more your style (who knew that Louis Auchincloss grew up in Five Towns?)
¶ Tierce: On the front page of today’s Times, an old story — one that I’ve been reading since 9/11 at the latest: “Pakistan’s Islamic Schools Fill Void, but Fuel Militancy.” What the madrasas really fill is poor little boys’ stomachs. Instead of spending billions on ineffective warfare, why can’t we?
¶ Sext: Patricia Storms discovers Struwwelpeter. Here’s hoping that the Toronto artist will conceive an update.
¶ Nones: The more I think about NATO, the less sense it makes, and the more it looks like a club with which minutemen want to beat up Russia, while shouting, “You lost the Cold War! You lost the Cold War!” John Vinocur reports on Georgia (from Brussels).
¶ Vespers: Marie Mockett on girls, ghosts, Genji, and her own forthcoming novel, Picking Bones from Ash, at Maud Newton.
¶ Compline: Silvio Berlusconi not only refuses to reconcile with his wife, but he demands an apology as well! Now, that’s a spicy meatball!
Oremus…
§ Matins. It’s like Dick Cheney and torture: once you get started, there’s no turning back.
As real estate went into overdrive in 2003, [Mark] Walsh, in order to help clients pump up their offers in heated bidding wars, started frequently putting Lehman’s own cash into deals — alongside the debt they raised. With its cash on the line, Lehman would be dangerously exposed in any downturn, so, once a deal closed, the firm would try to sell its equity stake as quickly as possible.
Lehman made ripe 4 percent fees for its equity investments — twice the going rate for loan securitization. As long as the market was rising, Mr. Walsh’s group was fine. But if the bank couldn’t sell the bridge equity and if real estate prices fell, it could end up with nothing.
The worst of it is that that “nothing” turned out to be an infectious disease that has eaten through thousands of jobs. One of the oldest diseases known to soiety, the disease is Panic. Thanks, Mr Greenspan, for assuring us that there was nothing to worry about.
§ Lauds. The postcards, Life Without Building tells us, will promote “speculative futures of regional transit systems.” I hope that the cards are not too conceptual — and that, in any case, someone will send me one.
§ Prime. You won’t hear me complain that Ms Molloy’s stories are too long.
It was that long friendship that formed the basis of Auchincloss’ worry “about her mind” since 1998, when she’d given a speech at the Union Club on the social chronicler Edith Wharton. “She said she’d known Edith Wharton and they had been great friends.”
It just so happens that in his copious spare time from writing 60 novels and short stories and holding down a day job as a lawyer, Auchincloss had researched a bio of Wharton. “[Brooke] told me years before she’d never met her.”
The other day, I set out to find Web log coverage of the trial, and was surprised to come up empty-handed. I did come across a very interesting site called Estate of Denial, devoted to publicizing the evils of IRAs — Involuntary Redistribution of Assets. Be sure to read all about it, before the Charlene in your extended family fixes her beady eyes on your bibelots. E of D appears to be digesting press accounts of the Marshall trial, which is almost as good as liveblogging.
§ Tierce. If nothing else, Pakistan is a monument to the failure of American foreign policy since the Cold War.
I know almost nothing about the history of Pakistan. (I almost qualified that confession thus: “since the partition of India in 1947.” But I don’t know anything about Pakistan in the days of the British Empire, either.) It was only a year or so ago that I “realized” that Lahore is not a city on the Ganges. My curiosity, however, is whetted by the following insight (which I’ve also read before):
With few avenues for advancement in what remains a feudal society, many poor Pakistanis do not believe education will improve their lives. The dropout rate reflects that.
“Feudal”? Can that be true? Maybe I’d better read The Idea of Pakistan, by Stephen P Cohen. It comes highly recommended (top-of-the-list) by Wikipedia.
§ Sext. I’d like to read the heartrending tale about a tween who came to a horrifying end because she insisted on chewing gum and chatting on her cell phone in the elevator.
§ Nones. The Soviet Union was the “evil empire” because it was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Bolshevik tyranny. American hostility made sense. But the Soviet Union went up in smoke, leaving Russia and a number of border countries.
I asked a Brussels diplomat (who requested no specific identification) for his more sober reading. “The Russians,” he said, “are asserting a sphere of influence to see how Europe and the West will react. It comes with their assumption that some in Europe may be tempted to back off. We don’t accept that.”
What a senseless echo of 1914 that “sober reading” sounds!
§ Vespers. Ms Mockett is particularly interesting talented girls.
There must be something deeply unsettling to us about talented girls; they often don’t fare well in fiction. In AS Byatt’s Possession, the poet Cristobel Lamott suffers obscurity and a broken heart after her initially inspiring affair with fellow poet Roland Ash; he goes on to enjoy great fame and a stable marriage. Ditto for Griet in Girl with a Pearl Earring; she helps to birth Vermeer’s masterpiece due to her sensitive eye for color and lighting, but doesn’t manage to make much else of her own, except for a nice marriage with the butcher’s son. And who can forget how Briony, the plawright protagonist of McEwan’s Atonement, disastrously meddles with her sister’s love life?
Oh, for the time to re-read The Tale of Genji. What I’d really like is a digested summary of the first two-thirds of the epic. It’s the final part, all about Kaoru and the ladies of Uji.
§ Compline. What fun it must be to be an Italian these days! When the pollsters ask you how you feel about the prime minister, you know in advance that your opinion doesn’t really matter.
Berlusconi, who on Friday declared himself the world’s most popular leader, said he did not believe the media frenzy surrounding his private life would hurt his approval ratings or his party’s performance in the European elections in June.
A poll published last month showed Berlusconi’s approval ratings rose in April to 56 percent thanks to his swift response to a deadly earthquake in central Italy, while the premier puts his own popularity at just over 75 percent.
Your opinion is irrelevant not because Mr Berlusconi will ignore it but because your countrymen — perhaps even you yourself — find his bad behavior endearing. This is what comes of having missed out on the Protestant Reformation.