Things We Read Today, September 25, 2014

Michael Lewis stares into the abyss.   This is a glimpse into the psychology of those who willingly sell their souls in 2014.

The last few years, Silicon Valley has grown in its appeal to top Ivy League graduates.  But working for a tech start-up can't quite match the allure of the financial markets: "[E]ntrepreneurship doesn’t offer the sort of people who wind up at elite universities what a lot of them obviously crave: status certainty."

It's a mistake to believe your values can survive any ordeal you put them to.

People like to think they have a “character,” and that this character of theirs will endure, no matter the situation. It’s not really so. People are vulnerable to the incentives of their environment, and often the best a person can do, if he wants to behave in a certain manner, is to choose carefully the environment that will go to work on his character.

Remember, kids, it's a statistical reality that no one can really pick stocks.  No one beats the house.

To succeed in this environment you must believe, or at least pretend to believe, that you are an expert in matters where no expertise is possible. I’m not sure it’s any easier to be a total fraud on Wall Street than in any other occupation, but on Wall Street you will be paid a lot more to forget your uneasy feelings.

...
... the people who work inside the big Wall Street firms have no serious stake in the long-term fates of their firms. If the place blows up they can always do what they are doing at some other firm -- so long as they have maintained their stature in their market. The quickest way to lose that stature is to alienate the other people in it. When you see others in your market doing stuff at the expense of the broader society, your first reaction, at least early in your career, might be to call them out, but your considered reaction will be to keep mum about it. And when you see people making money in your market off some broken piece of internal machinery -- say, gameable ratings companies, or riggable stock exchanges, or manipulable benchmarks -- you will feel pressure not to fix the problem, but to exploit it.

Addendum, or a reminder to myself: Dave McKenna did a piece at Deadspin about prep-school lacrosse players willingly being held back in school for a year to gain a competitive advantage in their sport. All because of Malcolm Gladwell. One factoid from the Duke lacrosse controversy from a few years back is that the majority of Duke lacrosse players, literally 70% or so, will go on to jobs on Wall Street. I think the trade-off here is, the family pays an extra $30,000 or so in prep-school tuition, to gain a place in top-flight NCAA lacrosse, which is a golden ticket to becoming one of Tom Wolfe's Masters of the Universe.

Cool Data Viz of the Day: U.S. Immigration, Foreign and Internal, State by State, Snice 1900

This is the kind of thing that tempts me to break down and get a New York Times subscription.  The Disunion blog is another one.

A Football Fan's Dilemma: Things We Read Today, 8/15/2014

Once again I say, I love Brian Phillips.  Grantland publishes a good deal of crap, but Brian Phillips, Charlie Pierce, and Bryan Curtis make up for a lot. 

With the World Cup having occupied a lot of my attention this summer, I have been trying for weeks to finish a post about soccer.  One thing I wanted to say is that soccer players have become my heroes, my avatars of manhood, the badasses whose bravery and grace under duress I thrill to.  Clint Dempsey playing with a broken nose, guys having a bloody gash glued up by the physio and then re-entering the game -- they are to me what Emmitt Smith is to Brian Phillips and his father in the piece. 

I guess having a zone where I can admire "men being men" is important to me.  Football used to serve that function: (See: Kellen Winslow, 1981 playoffs.)  But the brutality of football has gotten to be more than I can take.  The "spectacle of acrobatic violence, an endless war between shiny cartoon armies" -- I don't believe in it anymore.

Phillips starts in on the Ray Rice spousal-abuse debacle, and the peculiar kind of PR morass that the NFL keeps finding itself in:

...It has to do, I think, with the NFL’s curious, quasi-self-appointed role as the safe zone of troubled American masculinity — or, more broadly, as a kind of wildlife refuge for endangered privilege. You could glimpse the character of this role throughout the Michael Sam story, in which a background of frank homophobia was barely kept hidden by the curtain of celebration. You could see still more of it in the controversy over the Redskins name, in which the real question, for the term’s indignant defenders, has never been “Is this word acceptable?” The real question has been “Why wouldn’t this word be acceptable in football, where we’re supposed to be able to do things like this?”

....

Internet comments defending Rice and the NFL are — well, many of them are genuinely and chillingly misogynistic, but I think more of them are primarily concerned with protecting football from mainstream cultural norms: Don’t take this away too.

I love the common thread he finds among Ray Rice, Michael Sam, and the Washington football team nickname.

The title of Phillips's article, "Tough Talk," reminds me of my overarching theory about Republican foreign policy: tough talk is all Republicans are good at, and at some some strange juncture the tough talk takes on a life of its own, regardless of its objectives or any reasonable cost/benefit calculus.  This problem can bleed over into domestic public policy too.  (See: the police in Ferguson, Missouri.)

The piece concludes:

What I really want is to save football, a game that I love, from the men who think it should work like this. I want to dispel the illusion; I want that hypertrophied caricature of male prerogative to have no place in American life.

Me too; but I believe it's an illusion to think that football can be saved on these terms.  Phillips doesn't even mention the issue of concussions, which is easily the toughest challenge Roger Goodell faces.  To me, the answer is to eliminate the use of the helmet as a weapon.  But football won't be football anymore if that happens.  The players know that's true; in fact, one of the thorniest aspects of the concussion debate is that the players love the danger of the sport, are not ready to trade away the immediate thrill for their own long-term health.

Things We Read Today, August 7, 2014

I'd never heard of Jacob Bacharach until today, when I came across his Bloggingheads video made with Will Wilkinson.  It spurred me to spend my Amazon gift card on his novel (along with the new Rick Perlstein) and to check out his website.  The guy is a hell of a good writer.

In my recent absence from the blog there have been two big news events in world politics.  One was the shoot-down of a commercial airliner over Ukraine, and I worked up a high dudgeon over that one.  (What would you have if you took this country's scummiest Tea Party elements, egged them on officially, and gave them state-of-the-art military hardware?  You'd have the pro-Russian separatists in east Ukraine.) 

The other has been the escalation of fighting in the Gaza Strip, and I have lacked the courage of my convictions on that one.  It's a sign of their bankrupt position that so many supporters of Israel view their mission as a PR battle; that being said, they're doing well in the PR battle.  Even an Israeli liberal like Amos Oz is speaking in favor of the campaign to eliminate Hamas.  And it's discouraging to see just how many U.S. fora where criticism of Israel is still beyond the pale.

In this blog post, Jacob Bacharach writes in part from his perspective as an American Jew who has felt his childhood faith become tangled up with the political program of Zionism.  He knows whereof he speaks, and he has harsh words of criticism:

The terrible truth is that Israel was infected from the moment of its birth with the European evils whose virulent, 20th-centurty apotheoses necessitated, in the minds of so many, the creation of Israel in the first place, and we Jews, through Israel, have become a sick reflection of our own historic persecutors. I am not even speaking of the still unique evil of Nazism, although in the more extreme eructations of Israeli hard-liners, you do hear the debased language of racial purity and superiority. I am thinking of the old, durable, seemingly ineradicable traditions of pogrom, persecution, expropriation, and colonization. The Israelis possess the imperial arsenal of a modern Western nation-state, which camouflages the essentially primitive, pre-modern nature of their policy toward the Palestinians. The state of Israel is behaving like a village mob. Palestinian tunnels are the poisoned well. The Israelis are killing and lighting fires. “We will drive them out!” Where will they go? How will they escape? “They will have to figure it out, the devils!” But you forced them into the ghetto in the first place. “Yes, and they should be happy for what they have!” The US stands by like a distant monarch, its silence and occasional provision of more kindling a kind of majestic assent.

It would be comforting to say simply: I wash my hands of all of you. But we have accepted a state made of our religion, and that state is behaving abominably, unforgivably. It is a shame that we will not erase in a hundred years.

Rogue's Gallery, 7/8/2014

I'm not sure of the process whereby a Legacy.com obituary becomes a meme.  But I am always on the lookout for a good portrait of a preacher-scoundrel.  Hat tip to my friend Joel for linking this on Facebook. 

Here is a choice selection:

What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. 

[...]

While George did not live well by some people's lights, it should be universally accepted that he did die well. In hospital, two days beforehand, he said he'd finished with the medical procedures he had been avidly seeking for the past few years; he said he was 'checking out'. He was completely calm and committed to the decision. The next day, we brought in some beer, toasted his life with him, drank with him, and helped him to make several thoughtful good-bye phone calls. He reminisced a bit and gave us a few unhelpful instructions. He died without pain the next evening, from a slow gastric bleed, with his wits about him and a light heart.

Turns out, his timing was impeccable: the next day we found out that he had been racking up ominous bank and credit card debts. Clearly, those supplemental incomes were about to dry up. In earlier years, George would sometimes slip out of a town after he had accumulated local debts and after the relevant woman's purse had been snapped shut. But of late, he was in no condition to skip town. And women just don't see old men on scooters as the stuff of their dreams - they see them as impending burdens. Perhaps George felt cornered. Perhaps he thought that, under his present circumstances, dying was the only way out. Whatever the story, no one can deny that George made his final exit with style and grace.

 

What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timescolonist/obituary.aspx?pid=171625687#sthash.ArXl3z8d.dpuf

What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timescolonist/obituary.aspx?pid=171625687#sthash.ArXl3z8d.dpuf

What to say about George? Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He'd gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people's money. Was he a small-time con-man with grandiose schemes? Probably. But another view of him is that he was the most exciting member of his family and of the families he married into. He was a poor man's rhetorician who beguiled certain woman into buying into his promises and dreams. This latter view is lent some support by the fact that he was a United Church minister who passionately improvised sermons for congregations in Quesnel, Barkerville, Bella Bella, Greenwood, Nipawin, Sask. and Kelowna. It is impossible to say whether or not George was actually religious. Anyway, God's name rarely came up when George was flush. - See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/timescolonist/obituary.aspx?pid=171625687#sthash.ArXl3z8d.dpuf

Things We Read Today, 6/30/2014

Historian Carolyn Dupont, writing about Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964, and the response of the Methodist and Southern Baptist responses to events at that place and time.

Via Slacktivist, which I may need to add to the blogroll here.

Three Chords and... a Hack Syndicated Columnist

Dave Barry opines that "Gloria" by Van Morrison is the best song ever written. 

I kind of agree with this basic thesis.  The movement of my whole 40-odd years as a pop music fan has been toward the side of punchy simplicity instead of virtuosity.  I had settled on Creedence Clearwater Revival's five or six biggest hits as the highwater mark.  But I can see the case for "Gloria."  I do love that song.

But I am uncomfortable anytime I am in the same camp with Dave Barry. 

Also: It is unbecoming of Dave Barry to advocate for the "Simple Is Better" aesthetic.  It seems a rationalization on behalf of all simple-minded humor writers, who rely on moves such as the CAPITAL LETTERS method of selling a joke. (see link for an example)

So in conclusion, "Gloria" may have been the greatest song ever written until Dave Barry said so. 

Map of the Day

You never know when you might need to consult a map of all the tribal nations in North America.

Immensely Thoughtful Yet Appropriate Love

Sam Wells in Christian Century.  The defining job of a minister is to say the right thing at the right time.  That certainly includes remembering people's names; a lot of pastors are intentional and methodical about remembering names.  Of course, no human being can live up to this expectation every time, and this piece is about failing to live up to it.

Traveling back to a church he previously served, to preach a funeral sermon, Sam is greeted by a former member who clearly remembers him warmly.  And he blanks on her name.  I am going to block-quote a big chunk because it may retreat behind CC's paywall:

. . . But the damage is done. The lie is exposed. I’m all surface and no depth, the pastor who can put on a show but deep down doesn’t care enough to remember, who made her feel special but when she was no longer useful moved on elsewhere, who could talk but didn’t walk. Maybe God, in the end, was like that too.

This is the banality of clergy failure—that we put ourselves between people and God. That we tacitly assume God is distant, remote, occupied, distracted, and so we, to compensate, must be present, intense, hearty, and inspiring. We must be more human than God. God can’t possibly remember this woman’s name, her complex story of not having and then having children and their complex story. So we invest deeply in her, utterly professionally, of course, and her melting heart, her trust, her signs of faith and hope—these are the medals of our ministry. Our people need us, need us badly, because only through our sacrificial and immensely thoughtful yet appropriate love can they possibly glimpse a God who seems reluctant to be made known in any explicit and tangible way.

[...]

Of course we’re not up to it. We forget her husband was going in for a scan and we should have inquired how it went. We neglect to ask her to read at the carol service. We get talking to someone else after the worship service, and she drifts away disconsolate to her car. But all these things are forgiven. And we know that they’re healthy ways of indicating she shouldn’t overinvest in us, because it’s not really about us, it’s about Christ and Christ’s body, the church. In fact, we shouldn’t be standing between her and God in the first place. God can look after that part without our unique contribution. The pastor’s job is not so much in front of the people as behind them, ushering them like sheep into a place where they may encounter God together. It’s not about being more interesting than God. Cyprian never said, “Outside the pastor there is no salvation.”

Things We Read Today, 6/18/2014

I wonder if this is a record for longest time lapse between posts. Anyway. Here are a couple of articles I wanted to bookmark.

This TNR piece by John Judis touches on American history, the New Left and its discontents, and an academic career gone seriously awry. Suggested by Rick Perlstein on Facebook.

A novel jumping off the life of Jonathan Edwards? Count me in! Suggested by Faith & Leadership's daily roundup of links. I thought I was getting a discussion of the New Calvinism in America, which this article is concerned with only indirectly, but the novel and novelist sound intriguing.

Perspective

There are rumors that Gabrielle Giffords's husband, Mark Kelly, may run for U.S. Senate from Arizona. Or anyway, here is a rumor to that effect.

Wow. Trying to place myself in Mark Kelly's shoes: My wife has been a target of threats, harassment, and finally a near-successful assassination attempt, due to her work in politics. Now she is disabled and needs daily rehab for a brain injury, from the assassination attempt previously mentioned. Now I am going to leave her side AND enter the business that messed up her life?

Ronaldo retires

Slate soccer writer Brian Phillips, being awesome as usual, writing about Ronaldo, who announced his retirement yesterday.

As a media figure, Ronaldo was never cool in the ruthless-visionary way of Zidane or in the lost-album-cover manner of Beckham. He seemed affable, funny, a little ingenuous, a little strange. Those qualities made him human, but they also made him a terrible fit for modern sports journalism, which knows how to handle only one kind of superstar—the kind who is entirely focused on being one. (That is, the kind of superstar who uses the media back.)...
...

And so, in the retirement stories, you get bizarre summations like this one, from Paul Wilson's oddly half-hearted Guardian write-up: "His career choices may not have been ideal, his lifestyle questionable and his fitness, particularly his knees, suspect throughout, but in spite of all that Ronaldo deserves to be remembered as a remarkable player." In spite of being the person who became a remarkable player, Ronaldo deserves to be remembered as a remarkable player. This is where you can either stay alive to what's wonderful about sports or give up and admit you see players as oil wells. Ronaldo isn't a quantifiable reserve of potential that was never efficiently tapped or a set of character traits that never reliably pumped out his natural talent. He's a person, the interface of whose personality with the world produced some breathtaking moments in a game.

Phillips also touches on that theme beloved of futbol-intellectuals, that the highest purpose of the game is to model beauty and innocence, not to yield the competitively-correct outcome.

Lombardi blogging

There was a 1973 made-for-TV bio of Vince Lombardi, Legend In Granite, starring Ernest Borgnine. There is a scene when Lombardi is in his first training camp as the newly-hired coach of the woefully bad, underachieving Green Bay Packers. Lombardi has been brought in to instill discipline and get back to fundamentals, and in his first team meeting holds up a pigskin and intones, solemn as the grave, "Gentlemen, this is a football."

One of the players, Paul Hornung probably, pipes up: "Slow down, coach, you're going too fast," and Lombardi struggles to look mad but finally breaks down laughing, the whole room full of players cracks up, the tension is lowered and male bonding ensues. The players begin to see that in Lombardi there is love beneath the sadism; he bullies because he cares. A well-crafted piece of sports hagiography, this film.

But I'm thinking Coach Lombardi probably never used the "this is a football" line again, it was just too ridiculous.

Why do I mention this today? Via Atrios: The Federal Reserve has created an online training resource for new bank directors. The need for this is that some people are appointed to bank boards knowing very, very little about banks. From the Fed website:

The legendary Green Bay Packers football coach, Vince Lombardi, recognized the importance of teaching basics to his players. Even after winning championships and being surrounded by future Hall-of-Fame players, Lombardi had a tradition of beginning every preseason training camp the same way. He stood before his players, football in hand, and said, “Gentlemen, this is a football.” He assumed his players were a blank slate at the beginning of each season. With that in mind, we begin with the basic discussion, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a bank.”

Suffice it to say, this is an analogy that is botched in a revealing way. Our banks are far from being champions -- at this point they are underachieving failures. But the Fed's approach here does not fill one with optimism. As a general observation, when Vince Lombardi is invoked to make a point about leadership in this day and age, little good can come of it.

Man, Ernest Borgnine's IMDB page is a trip. I never thought about it, but Ernest is Italian himself (originally Borgnino -- man, he needed either to change his name more drastically or not at all) and darn near as old as Lombardi, who died in 1970! This is one of those pairings of actor to non-fiction role that was destined to be, like Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain, or Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl. I'm a little bummed that IMDB will no longer show the full cast and crew of an old program like Legend In Granite unless you register for IMDB Pro. For people who enjoy aimlessly browsing the cast lists of unremarkable made-for-TV films from the 70s, this is a shame.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vidiot/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Quick answer

MoveOn e-mails me this afternoon -- subject line "Quick question for you?"

It's no longer clear whether Congress will pass a comprehensive health care reform bill this year.

The White House and Congress will decide within days whether or not to go forward with reform—and before they do, it's critical they know the impact that decision will have in terms of participation in the next election.

So we're polling MoveOn members: If Democrats do not pass comprehensive health care reform this year, will you donate to Democratic candidates in the 2010 elections? Just click the appropriate link below to let us know:

• Definitely won't donate
• Probably won't donate
• Probably will donate
• Definitely will donate

I clicked Probably Won't. But I wished for a 50/50 option, and I also wished for a comment field to say the following:

Let's be honest, I don't have a lot of discretionary cash for political contributions, so I wouldn't be "making it rain" in a midterm election anyway. The best I could conceivably answer is Probably Will.

However, if the Congressional Dems walked away from the health care bill, I would likely conclude (1) they were acting like a minority party anyway -- like a de facto opposition party to Obama, and (2) they were acting as if special interests were more important to them than the "un-organized" support of individual base voters like me. So I'd be inclined to treat them the way they're asking to be treated.

I'd vote for my Democratic candidates, sure, but give money to the DCCC or DSCC? Give financial expression of enthusiasm for the national party's efforts? Not bloody likely.

Well, that was quick! More later.

"Forty-one! Forty-one!"

This was the victory chant at Scott Brown's rally last night. How completely absurd: (1) that the revelers were so giddy at their party's strengthened ability, still as the opposition minority, to prevent anything from getting done; and (2) the idea that this is the magic number in modern day Washington. 41 No votes out of 100, in the most dubiously democratic assembly in the developed world.

Mark Schmitt argues that a 59-vote Democratic caucus will be an improvement.

Sixty votes not only put Lieberman and Nelson in charge, it meant that every little twist and turn in political life became the difference between total policy deadlock and historically breathtaking progress. A butterfly flaps its wings in Uruguay, and health reform survives or dies. Just as a few hundred votes in Minnesota created the 60-vote majority, a bizarrely incompetent candidate in Massachusetts took it away, but if it had not been that, it would have been something else.

Certainly the main lesson I've gotten from the health care reform debate is the need to reform the Senate and do away with the supermajority.

Haiti

Thoughts and prayers for the people of Haiti, which was struck by a major earthquake yesterday.

Higher ed reform

Via Ezra Klein, an interesting piece by Kevin Carey in Democracy about the need for reform in American higher education.

The main takeaway: The marketplace in US colleges operates on reputation, not information – there is a paucity of comparative outcomes data on how well, e.g., business departments’ graduates perform in business – and the elite colleges (via a powerful lobbying shop in Washington) do their best to keep useful outcomes data from seeing the light of day.

Carey notes the huge boom since World War II in the number of Americans who attend college. Some of the younger institutions founded in that time frame deserve more credit, and some of the older brand-name institutions are coasting. I am the parent of a high school student, soon-to-be tuition payer, and as a matter of fact the college she expresses most interest in is in the “young and possibly on the rise” category. So color me intrigued.

I've been seeing the end-of-decade spate of retrospectives, mostly gloomy. Also, I'm working through James Fallows's Atlantic cover story which is an anti-jeremiad: why Americans shouldn't be pessimistic about our national future. I still worry that America has slipped into a state of decadence preceding a steep fall. One reason is the harmful influence of lobbying. Carey's story may not be the best example, but it is a data point. The US has lost focus on producing goods and services. Our economy is founded on real estate flips, other forms of financial sleight-of-hand, and lobbying for regulatory relief and/or government-sponsored obfuscation. Add college presidents to the list of classes of leaders who would rather pay lobbyists to sustain the corrupt and ultimately unsustainable status quo, rather than seriously re-vision and reform their way of working.

Also, I want to highlight this passage that compares the arrogance and self-protectiveness of colleges to that of churches:

Colleges are often lumped in with other non-profit entities like charities and hospitals in the public mind. But they actually most resemble the institution from which many of the oldest and most renowned colleges sprang: organized religion. Like the church, colleges have roots that pre-date the founding of the republic. They see themselves as occupying an exalted place in human society, for which they are owed deference and gratitude. They cherish their priests and mysteries, and they are disinclined to subject either to public scrutiny.

Interesting to me largely for the view of religion being expressed. Not saying it’s right or wrong, either the view of contemporary religion or the college-church analogy. It bears thinking about.

Beach read

The fam and I had a week's vacation at the Outer Banks of N.C., where we had a most excellent time. We stayed on Hatteras Island, in a house that's within a 20-minute walk of the ocean, and whose property backs onto Pamlico Sound, with a dock that's ideal for swimming, fishing, kayaking, or just chilling with a beverage and some reading material. We've stayed at this house (owned by a friend) three summers running now. I have a soft spot for the Outer Banks, since one of my favorite family vacations from childhood was there, and I took my wife there on our honeymoon. We've managed in three visits to do all the touristy and nostalgic stuff I had on my list: the Lost Colony outdoor drama at Roanoke Island, the Wright Brothers museum, the giant sand dune at Jockeys Ridge, the ferry to Ocracoke, the climb to the top of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

The property where we stay is four acres, mostly marsh and maritime forest, boasting a great assortment of wildlife. We came home one day to find a deer in the yard, and we're pretty sure we saw an otter on the banks of the sound. The house and yard are ringed with trees, screening out the road and neighboring houses. There isn't a curtain or blind anywhere in the house, being unnecessary for privacy. At the top of the house is the master bedroom suite, with a vaulted ceiling perhaps 15 feet high. On one wall there is a sliding glass door and a sundeck facing inland toward the marsh and the sound, an excellent birdwatching spot. On another wall, the windows taper and stretch almost to the roofline. These soaring windows face in the direction of the ocean, with Buxton village sitting in the foreground, though neither ocean nor village can be seen due to the trees, only the municipal water tower jutting up. Lying in bed and gazing out the window in the dark, I see the water tower with its red light on top, burning steadily, and then at intervals, the beam from Hatteras Lighthouse sweeps over us. It's a lovely thing to look at before drifting off to sleep.

So the location is a blessing, a real stroke of good fortune. Friends are another blessing: the family whom we invited to share the house with us, whose kids and my kids mutually entertained one another, and who brought and shared good stuff to read: magazines they were catching up with, finds from the used book shop, the Sunday New York Times (a rare treat for me). It was a great vacation for reading. The kids played board games or watched DVDs in the evening, while the grown-ups read, or talked about politics or fiction, about what we were reading.

My random book choice: <a href="http://www.biblio.com/isbn/9780671200299.html">Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria</a> by Nicholas Halasz, (c) 1955. I can't be sure but I may have bought it at a used book sale in Louisiana, oh, about 22 years ago, and been lugging it to various apartments and houses ever since.

It's a good read. I was on the lookout for parallels b/t the Dreyfus affair and recent U.S. history, and they're there: a country admired worldwide as a center of Enlightenment values losing its collective mind, exalting national security while ignoring civil rights, fleeing from justice and truth if those violated nationalist myths. But France in that period is fascinating in its own right, with priests, generals, royalists, Bonapartists, and "republicans" of many stripes vying for an upper hand, obsessed with the growing power of the Kaiser, and still working out the implications of the French Revolution which at that time was a mere hundred years old.

Blade

Do you ever have a day at the office like this? For legitimate work-related reasons, I Googled the name of a woman who is a mental health counselor, trying to get her contact information. To my surprise, I learned that she apparently used to be a DJ on an AOR radio station here in Raleigh in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Which set me off on an online reading tangent. There actually is a Wikipedia entry about WQDR, which I know as a country station but which started life as Raleigh’s first AOR station. It drops the names of various disc jockeys I remember, some of whom can still be heard on local radio, most of whom have moved on to other things. And then I discovered the blog Blade’s World. This is where I have spent half my day.

Bob “The Blade” Robinson inspired me to write this High Hat essay a couple of years ago. A longtime rock DJ in Raleigh, Blade had his station, WRDU, suddenly change formats on him, from classic rock to country. This was a mildly depressing development for me; for the Blade, it was heartbreaking. He was faced with a dilemma. He liked his co-workers, didn’t want to leave Raleigh -– hell, we all need to have a job -- so he tried to keep working under the new country format. He lasted a week. This newspaper account of his abrupt on-air sign-off got me to thinking about the decline of rock music on FM radio, and its effect on me as a music fan. Also the figure of the rock DJ, his passion for music, the intimate bond he could form with listeners, his role in the community. My article ended up being about the rock station I heard as a teenager, but it started about being directly about Bob the Blade.

I wouldn’t even say I’m a fan of Bob the Blade, I just felt like I knew him. I've heard his voice on a pretty regular basis for 20 years now, often just him and me in my car. I admired his quitting due to "artistic differences" back in '06. He's back on the air in Raleigh now, but I don't tune him in every day; I'm more of an NPR guy now. Anyway, his blog sucked me right in. He’s a slacker in many ways, exhibits the taste for parties and girls and odd hours that originally helped attract him to the radio business. But now he’s a middle aged slacker, eying his own mortality, examining his relationships present and past, snarking about the industry he's spent his life in. There’s an intriguing self-awareness and honesty at work in that blog.

Here are the surprising things I learned about the Blade. He has a brother who has a disabling mental illness, whom Bob helps care for. Under the man’s-man exterior, Bob is a decent, patient, caring guy. (Actually, family and pets represent a lot of the blog’s content.) Also, he’s a pretty good writer. I say that a little grudgingly – I enjoyed his blog more deeply than I expected to. Frankly I don't always share Blade’s musical taste, I have to say I figure I’m "smarter" than him (I spent more years in school, certainly), but he’s a better writer than I am. He just has a good way with a story. Also a pretty good way with a camera.

Beehive

 

This NY Times profile is notable for its no-holds-barred interview with Sarah Palin's hairdresser. Nice get.


Also, I hate it when somebody writes on my kid with a Sharpie. That shit will take weeks to rub off.