Daily Office:
Monday
¶ Matins: At Snarkmarket, Robin rightly complains about the routine misanthropy of the “Earth is Hiring” Campaign.
¶ Lauds: Citing financial concerns, blah, blah, blah: no Gehry stadium for Atlantic Yards. Quelle surprise!
¶ Prime: Roger Lowenstein calls for democratizing corporate boards, and begins his plea with a parable that will help you see what’s wrong with the way we manage now.
¶ Tierce: We take this break from the Marshall trial to bring you some truly great photographs from a Flickr photostream that is — amazingly — official. For annotations, turn to my source, The Awl.
¶ Sext: Golly, clothes do make the man. Presumably, Thomas J Watson, one of the key figures behind the screen that you’re reading, did not wear a three-piece suit on his yacht, the Palawan (there were seven!). But it’s hard to imagine him without a tie.
¶ Nones: Who cares how the European Parliament elections turned out, given that the turnout was the lowest ever.
¶ Vespers: Alexander Chee observes that identity publishing (gay fiction, Asian fiction) has degenerated into a triage tool that perpetuates clichéd story lines.
¶ Compline: At The Rumpus, Claire Caplan considers the social costs of innumeracy. I wish that she had gone further.
Oremus…
§ Matins. Having noticed that “the beautiful shots” in Home “are the ones without humans, Robin makes a brisk point:
And then, later on, the rapid-fire cuts of cities are supposed to be emblems of corruption and destruction. Except, of course, dense cities are better for the planet than other living arrangements.
There is no doubting that environmentalism, just like pet-ownership, attracts people who find their fellow-creatures unsatisfying, and would be happy if there were (far) fewer of them. This tendency needs to be overtly handicapped, and sooner rather than later.
§ Lauds. Citing financial concerns, the developer ought to put the entire project on hold. Build a park and stick a temporary stadium (ie, a circus tent, or one of those inflatable tennis-court quonsets) in the middle of it, to bring in revenue. Developers, even more than financiers, ought to be regulated. What’s that? They already are? Good joke!
So what was supposed to be the vibrant hub of a renascent downtown Brooklyn will be a routine struture that we’ll all have to live with for at least forty years.
§ Prime. He also shows how current arrangements assure that the theory of corporate governance is never put into practice.
As the biggest shareholder, you request that your name be included on the proxy ballot for the next election to the board. This the corporation refuses to do. Only the management (or its handpicked board) chooses nominees, and it is an iron rule of American corporations that ballots should not contain more nominees than seats. In the former U.S.S.R., this style of democracy endured for only 72 years. In American business it is timeless. Until last month, anyway, when the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed that shareholders who own at least 1 percent of the stock be able to nominate candidates to run in opposition to — and on the same ballot as — the slate offered by management.
§ Tierce. Is this not a fantastic man? This is what leaders ought to look like for the indefinite future.
§ Sext. On a completely irrelevant note, former patrons of the late, great Books & Co, the institution that Watson’s daughter ran, right next to the Whitney, will recognize the eyes in the photo at the bottom.
§ Nones. (An American might argue that, on the bright side, the “lowest turnout ever” is rather higher than non-presidential elections in this country garner.
As predicted:
Fringe groups appear to have benefited, with far-right parties picking up seats in the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia and Hungary. The British National Party won its first UK seat.
§ Vespers. The worst of it is that publishers seem unconscious of quotas for white people.
This is perhaps the most destructive outcome of identity politics I can imagine, albeit a byproduct—the treatment of writers as senators of a kind from a particular community, with space made only when death comes or when sales “vote” you out of office, as it were. My fear is that this incredibly reductive approach to the selling of literature is reverse engineering the work people write. It reduces us as writers to mere performances of ethnography, forced to write from inside a particular boundary, which is the least interesting idea of literature I can imagine. And for a “half-Asian” writer like myself or Marie, it becomes bewildering—where, exactly, is the country we are “from”? Put another way, which parent do I reject, and which one do I pretend I am the most like, and then perform that, waiting to be exposed as “inauthentic”?
§ Compline. It seems to me that blame for American innumeracy ought to fall squarely on the shoulders of the teaching profession, which at some point back in the mists of time decided that boys were good at figures while girls excelled at words. This specious bifurcation embedded permission for quasi-autistic behavior on the part of maths teachers, among whom favoritism for students with a facility for mental calculation seems to have taken the place of a genuine desire to teach mathematics.