A Caravaggio Roundup

My friend Michael catches a typo in my latest Caravaggio post.  His prize is a set of curated links to Underbelly's best Caravaggio posts--a prize which I  now degrade by sharing them all with you:

Top Five. 

Top Two.

Shakespeare.

Stillness.

Still blows my mind that Shakespeare, Caravaggio and Cervantes would all have been flourishing around 1600.  Well: Cervantes was on his uppers but his pivotal moment--the completion of part I of Don Quixote--was just five years away.

Only Once

We were playing an amiable conversation game around the TG dinner table last night when I faced the question: is there something that you have done only once in your life that you would like to do again (I quote from memory)?

At first I said:  no, sorry, nothing, I don't think that way.  Might be an age thing. Lots of things I'm glad to have done, would enjoy doing some over, hope to do new things.  But no.

Then on second thought:  well, now, for example Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew, in the San Luigi die Francesi, just off the Piazza Navona in Rome.  I'd love to go see it again. Wait, but you've done it before more than once (half a dozen times, I would guess).  So you can't say you've seen it only once.   Yes, but I did it only once for the first time, and what I'd really like is to do it again for the first time.

You can see where I'm going here.  Good as it was, it will never get any better.  Now that I think of it, I suppose there are a thousand things in my life--maybe tens of thousands, to  which I would give the same treatment.

Update:  but then, one of my co-conversationalists asked: you've been to Rome more than once?  Oh yes, I love Rome.  When you went the second time, did it seem like the first?  Actually no, it was quite different.  So even though not the first time, it was the first second time, not so?  And we wandered off happily arm and in arm into the vale of infinite regress.

Remembering Parker Fielder

Recycled from 2008, but worth reprinting in full:

Parker Fielder provided me with one of my very few accounting jokes. Did you hear the one about the Polish accountant? He ran away with the payables. Ka-voom-foosh. If you get it, you are on your way to passing first-semester accounting.

If you don't get it, not to worry, it's not that important. But it is a helpful introduction to a man who, though I did not know him well, I remember as smart, gentle witty—and, though I scarcely understood it at the time, a friend when I needed one.

Parker was a professor of tax law at the University of Texas—he died in 1985, but they still have a tax law conference down there in his name. He was also, not incidentally, awesomely competent: trained as an accountant, worked as an inspector general (a bean counter?) in the Army, graduated first in his class at UT law school, experienced as a tax lawyer in the oil patch, by almost any measure the right man for the job.

But whatever your caricature of a law professor, he probably didn't fit it. He was restrained and low-key, masking his formidable abilities behind a kindly smile.

I met Parker in the fall of 1979 when I showed up in Austin as a visiting professor, keeping the seat moist while David Epstein was off finding out he didn't want to be a dean at Arkansas. It was a transition point for me: I was newly single, on my own for the first time in adulthood. Short of company, I more or less imposed myself on the old boys' conversation in the faculty lounge. Parker was one who received me with courtesy and civility.

Along about mid-November, I got an invitation: would I like to be the guest of Parker (and his wife—to my shame, I do not remember her name) for Thanksgiving dinner. Well now that you mention it, yes I would. I didn't—don't--much cotton to holidays. But the thought of spending Thanksgiving actually all sole alone suggested an experiment I wasn't really eager to undertake.

So at the appropriate time and day, I presented myself Chez Fielder out in Austin's west hills. I found that this was no casual threesome. In fact, there was quite a crowd: in the kitchen, savoring the aroma of roasting bird; in the living room, gearing up for the football, even (though it was pretty chilly) drifting away from the crowds onto the patio.

Besides Parker I recognized, I think, only one person in the crowd—another bachelor law prof. But I figured it was a good day to be on my best behavior, so I started striking up casual chat. I quickly came to a generalization: this is a congregation of broken-winged birds—people with no place else to nest on the holiday. Here was a guy who ran some sort of medical missionary clinic, in a trailer out in the grassland. Here was a hip psychiatrist, recently washed up from San Francisco. And here was—well, here was me. I caught on for the first time: this was a whole flock of broken-winged birds. And I, too, was a broken-winged bird. And they had taken me in.

I can't remember much else in detail, except to say that it was one of the mellowest days of my life. I watched some football—something I almost never do—and I remember letting out a yell. At dinner, they partnered with me with the very Teutonic widow of a formidable professor. “Her husband,” I explained to the person at my elbow, “was the leading international law scholar of his generation.” “Sank you,” she responded gravely. After dinner, we played “Fictionary”--that game where your adversary has to guess whether your word is made up or real. I can still remember the psychiatrist saying “Gondi—the language of the Gonds”with such a leer that everybody voted for the lie (but he was telling the truth).

And so it went. Eventually, we drifted off home and I, at any rate, got on with my life. I hope I sent a thank-you note. I don't suppose I fully understood until much later what a favor they had done me. But hey, to remember this sort of thing, I should say that “Thanksgiving” is just the right time, not so?

Not Another Thing, Ma, I'm Stuffed...

Forget about Thanksgiving.  Here is Sunday lunch with Marcel's family at Combray under the ministrations of  Françoise, the family's apparently immortal retainer.

[A]u fond permanent d'œufs, de côtelettes, de pommes de terre, de confitures, de biscuits, qu'elle ne nous annonçait même plus, Françoise ajoutait— selon les travaux des champs et des vergers , le fruit de la marée, les hasards du commerce, les politesses des voisins et son propre génie, et si bien que notre menu, comme ces quatre-feuilles qu'on sculptait au XIIIe siècle au portail des cathédrales, reflétait un peu le rythme des saisons et les épisodes de la vie—: une barbue parce que la marchande lui en avait garanti la fraîcheur, une dinde parce qu'elle en avait vu une belle au marché de Roussainville -le-Pin, des cardons à la moelle parce qu'elle ne nous en avait pas encore fait de cette manière-là, un gigot rôti parce que le grand air creuse et qu'il avait bien le temps de descendre d'ici sept heures, des épinards pour changer , des abricots parce que c'était encore une rareté, des groseilles parce que dans quinze jours il n'y en aurait plus, des framboises que M. Swann avait apportées exprès , des cerises, les premières qui vinssent du cerisier du jardin après deux ans qu'il n'en donnait plus, du fromage à la crème que j'aimais bien autrefois, un gâteau aux amandes parce qu'elle l'avait commandé la veille, une brioche parce que c'était notre tour de l'offrir.

Marcel Proust. Du côté de chez Swann (Kindle Locations 113-1144). 

[U]pon a permanent foundation of eggs, cutlets, potatoes, jams, biscuits which she no longer even announced to us, Françoise would add—depending on the labors in the fields and orchards, the fruit of the tide, the luck of the marketplace, the kindness of neighbors, and her own genius, and with the result that our menu, like the  quatrefoils carved on the portals of cathedrals in the thirteenth century, reflected somewhat the rhythm of the seasons and the incidents of daily life—a brill because the monger had guaranteed her that it was fresh, a turkey hen because she had seen a large one at the Roussainville-le-Pin market, cardoons with marrow because she had not made them for us that way before, a roast leg of mutton because fresh air whets the appetite and it would have plenty of time to “descend” in the next seven hours, spinach for a change, apricots because they were still uncommon, gooseberries because in two weeks there would not be any more, raspberries that M. Swann had brought especially, cherries, the first that had come from the cherry tree in the garden after two years in which it had not given any, cream cheese, which I liked very much at one time, an almond cake because she had ordered it the day before, a brioche because it was our turn to present it.  

Proust, Marcel (2004-11-30). Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) (pp. 72-73). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. 

He's Ba-a-a-a-ck

Source: Wiki

For the nonce at the gym yesterday, I fired up a Librivox audio of Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle.  You've heard of Rip?  Of course you have, wonderbuns.  He's probably America's most visible literary icon, ahead of Tom Sawyer and oceans ahead of that white whale.  Curiously, prior to yesterday, my only encounter with the real thing was back around the age of six when they were desperately serving up diversions to keep me from turning into a monster while recovering from some long-since forgotten childhood ailment.  No, wait, that wasn't the original Rip:  it was the Classics Comics version--my source of all culture through most of the latency years, and I must say, a fond memory, right up there with Picture Stories from the Bible and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories.

And while memory may be untrustworthy, yesterday's encounter suggests they get full points for faithfulness.  Whatever you say about Irving (probably not very much) he did know how to tell a story.  But here's an insight that I can entertain in my dotage though it would not have been available to me back then.  That is: the whole tradition of "back from the dead" stories.  I can see now that there are literary echoes just all over the place.  Wiki does offer a  catalog of "forerunners," although oddly, it doesn't seem to mention any of the items that come to my mind.

I'm thinking, for example, of Odysseus, hero of the world's first great homecoming story (also one of the world's first buddy stories, but leave that for another day).  There are obvious differences: Odysseus seems to have had a better relationship with his wife, and Rip doesn't slaughter all the suitors, but still.  Twenty years. Think of it.

Another that comes to my mind is Balzac's Colonel Chabert.  I see that it was published in 1832, just a few years after Rip.  A casual Google search confirms that others have noted the similarity, though I have no idea how much the critics make of it.  Again, it isn't exact.  The Colonel is not asleep; he is just away and thought dead.  The notable similarity between Balzac and Irving is that they both draw on the  insight as to how much the world has changed: in Rip's case, the American Revolution, in Balzac's, the French.  The interesting difference is that the Colonel finds he is profoundly unwelcome: the world has changed and there are plenty of people (by which I mean "his wife")  for whom it would be far more convenient if he were dead.

Which naturally brings me to mind another riff on the "what do we do now?" theme, but this time, for real.  I'm thinking Martin Guerre, subject of a respectable movie, a piece of high-concept history and a superb little novel:  this time the theme is "is he or isn't he," and I won't be the spoiler.

And finally to my own favorite Henry James story (competition is thin: I'm not a huge James fan).  That would be The Jolly Corner, about Spencer Brydon who returns to New York and the family home after 30 years in Europe. Once again, we have the theme of "how the world has changed!"--but this time the pivotal figure aside from Spencer himself is--oh, I shouldn't be a spoiler now, should I? 

Update:  Ignoto reminds us of the ultimate comeback story.

As I Lay Dying: How to Deal with a Classic

Chez Buce took in a screening last night of James Franco's As I Lay Dying last.  It's a good movie, maybe a a very good movie, but it screws up one of my hobbyhorse theories of moviemaking.  Let me see if I can explain.

First; it's a movie-from-a-book.  More precisely a movie from a famous book: William Faulkner's first or second or third best novel, depending upon taste.  We did it as a readaloud a few years ago, and sign on to the conventional opinion.

But here's the hobbyhorse. It's not original with me, but I share the view that to make a good movie from a book, you need a second-rate book. Think Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz, or Bridges of Madison County.  A really good book, either the director just uses the franchise for his own private flight of fancy: think The Great Gatsby. Or he tries to be faithful to the original and winds up with an expensive high-end visual aid: think Merchant-Ivory (admit it now--has anybody ever watched a Merchant-Ivory movie twice?).

Franco's Faulkner is not at all a directorial private fancy (with one glaring exception-see infra).   It's  faithful--you might almost say obsessive--attempt to remain loyal to its source.  So far, sounds like trouble, but the odd thing is, it works.  This is, in short, the most successful obsessive recreation I can remember.

I'm not certain I understand why it works.  I can offer a tentative guess: it's the style of the telling in the source.  Faulkner's novel (not all Faulkner novels, but this one) is a monument to artistic restraint.    It's short: Amazon says 267 pages but that overstates because so much of it is in the form of short chapters that leave  lot of white space on the page.  It needs to be savored.   And so much of what you come to appreciate is unstated, so as to make you seek it out for yourself.  In this sense it is almost the opposite of the (even shorter) Great Gatsby, where so much of its appeal is in the magic of the prose.

So my guess is that you don't need to worry about the stuff that is left out: it was left out in the first place, and we are the better for it.  

But there is a perplexing flip side here. That is: I 'm not in a position to know but this is one movie where I suspect you really do want to have read the book beforehand.  There is a lot going on beneath and around the surface, and you're always saying "wait a minute--what?"  With the novel, you can stop and think.  Or you can flip back a few pages and double check.  Without the book as a crutch, you don't have that luxury.  So it might be that this really not so satisfying a movie for one who does not know the original.  Still, we thought it was great.

Well--I said one exception.  That is: Franco never should have cast himself.  Too much of a pretty boy. Way too self-indulgent.  Not an easy task, I suppose to fit out a cast of semi-human scrub farmers.  Tim Blake  Nelson as Anse  and Logan Marshall-Green as Jewel filled the bill admirably: one step short of Planet of the Apes.  Ahna O'Reilly as Dewey Dell was conscientious and honorable but somebody should have fitted her out with a set of rotten teeth.  Franco himself makes you think (at least for a moment) to Leonard DeCaprio, and that is never a good thing

Winning the Battle of Old Age: Dispatch from the Front LInes

Most remarkable Amazon review I've read all day:

Montaigne dans le métro
It's surely very presumptuous of me to rate Montaigne, but Amazon has asked to share my experience with this Kindle edition and I feel bound to say, urbi et orbi, that it has been splendid. I downloaded the file to my Galaxy S III phone and I read a bit of Montaigne every time I ride the Metro (subway) in Santiago de Chile. (I manage to get a seat because I live at the end of Line 1; on the return journey I sometimes get one because I am over 80). …

Link.  Author is a certain Robert Torretti, otherwise unknown to me.  In another review, he says he watched more than 100 opera DVDs in 2006.  I do like to read about people who handle old age well.

Addendum:  Oh, I see here is a reviewer bio:

Location: Santiago, Chile In My Own Words:Professor of Philosophy, Universidad de Chile Member of Institut Internationale de Philosophie, Paris Author of 'Relativity and Geometry' (Dover), 'Creative Understanding' (U. of Chicago Press), 'The Philosophy of Physics' (Cambridge University Press) You go, Robert.

The Retirement Model

Lifehacker urges that we will improve our chances of solace in retirement by a factor of 10.  It's intriguing, although I am not sure it is fully articulated. I suppose the point is: would you give up 10 later on for one now?  I guess I see that except if we are doing the time-is-money comparison we'd want to discount that future 10 back to present value we might wind up right where we started from, which is not exactly what they had in mind, now is it?

Joel is not impressed.  " Too optimistic about the rate of return in my humble opinion," he says.  I haven't cross-examined him on the point but I think I see where he is going.  Sure enough, (1.06)^40=10.29, which is to say that a dollar compounded at such  a rate from age 25 would yield $10.29 at age 65.  And I take it on faith that the S and P has yielded something like six percent over the past couple of generations (I haven't done the homework myself).   I'll even concede that we're talkin' real returns here, i.e., inflation adjusted.  Still, are we looking forward to another 40 years of six percent real?  Oh my.  On the other hand, I don't suppose many people forecast the real returns of the last generation, either.

[Compare: public employee pension funds are still assuming 7-7.5 percent, and that is part of the problem, not so?]

And of course the rate is just the beginning.  Recall, so far we are talking about investment at age 25. And how many 25-year-olds do you know who are fully funding their 401ks  right now, huh?  Huh?  But to get the same $10 from, say, a mere  30 years, you'd need to start with a buck 75.  From 20 years, a bit over $3.10.  From ten years, you don't even want to know.

So I agree with Joel that a 10 factor is a fantasy.  FWIW, I do think I have some sense of why we are in such a pension mess, though understanding it may not be much help.  The trouble is--well, sure, there are corrupt and incompetent managers, lying politicians, greedy unions and all that.  But a major difficulty, IMO, is that the whole structure of the pension system is such that none but the mavens has any sense what a pension really costs.  You worked for BigCo for 40 years, you looked forward to a defined-benefit payout. Just as you come to the golden day, the fund collapses and you get nothing or, if lucky, the measly payout from the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation. Well, of course you were disappointed: the employer was robbing you blind. The trouble is, if the employer had dealt with you honestly, it surely would have affected your compensation all those years on the job.  Similar with public: we could make those glorious promises to people like, well,  me, only to the extent that we weren't paying for them.  A new world in which we all live longer, and want not to have to work forever, and where we have to tot up the true cost of those golden years--it won't be nearly as much fun as it was to live on smoke and mirrors.

Don Draper and the Other Predator

Still on Netflix time, we're just now getting ready to Season Six of Mad Men (actually, I think we must have missed some of season five; there are characters here I don't recognize, but no matter).

Anyway--Mad Men has never made a lot of sense to me.  I kind of like all the retro stuff; I did live through it after all, before, I suppose, most of the writers were born.   Or maybe not: I was there, but not there: the Mad Men life has very little to do with my own and I often find myself wondering whether it's me or just that they don't get things as right as they think they do.  

There also seems to be an elephant-sized structural problem with the show, and that's Don Draper: he's never made the  least bit of sense to me as a character and the efforts to build a show around him have always seemed artificial, strained.  This is emphatically not true of the whole cast: I think Pete Campbell is a marvel of dark comedy.  Roger Sterling must have the head writer's kid locked up in the basement: Roger gets all the funniest lines.  Don's first wife--is it Peggy?-- Betty (!) is a marvel of a train wreck in her own way.

But we were postmorteming this morning and Mrs. B said, a propos of nothing in particular: "Is Don Draper Jack Kennedy?"

My first thought was "huh?"  My second was "what a du" -- but no, I long ago learned that any idea of Mrs. B's that I begin by thinking a dumb idea will very likely turn out to be at least an interesting, maybe a very smart, idea.  So I've learned how to stifle.  And as I think about it, I begin to see her point.   Don's magnetic, good-looking, slim-waisted (though while we are speaking of "wasted"--I can understand stays tanned, fit and ready on all that booze and tobacco no more than I understand how Kennedy brought it off under the weight of his parlous physical infirmities).

We're also supposed to believe that Draper is talented although the writers have never figured out a way to make that convincing, except to keep telling us so.  Kennedy--well, the tempting comparison is too facile. I did think he was an empty suit at the beginning of the campaign although I'm willing now to give grudging recognition to the theory that he seems to have grown in the job.  Still, you had to wonder.

But of course, the real point of connection is the womanizing.  I suppose we all have our intuitions as to why Kennedy did it: for sheer sensual enjoyment, as a power play, for the joy of humiliating an 18-year-old virgin, to flirt with danger, whatever. With Kennedy, over time it has come to ring true. With  Don, I'm not sure you even see that.  You wonder time after time why he even bothers.  Again this strikes me as a dramatic failing--there was a way to put gristle on this character's bones, but I don't think they have found it.

Which is to say, maybe the Kennedy comparison is the most enlightening possibility.  Think of Kennedy as we know him now.  Think of Draper as Kennedy, and a lot falls into place.

It's Dobermann! Swallow the Cash!

I remember reading years ago how the aristocrats among tax evaders were the sheep farmers.  They lived in the crummiest houses, maybe up on concrete blocks, and in the front yard you could see some kind of  mean-looking pooch, on a chain that looked like it might not be too tightly tethered  to the planet.  And they had the greasiest hats.

Comes now Taxmom to remind us that in her line of  work, this sort of thing may work both ways.   As it happens, clan Taxmom just lately acquired a pooch of its own: a cheerful if somewhat puppy-like terrier.   But here is Taxmom's frequent human companion to suggest that they may have missed an opportunity.  As evidence he offers an account of the origin of the Doberman Pinscher:

 Doberman Pinschers were first bred in the town of Apolda, in the German state of Thuringia around 1890, following the Franco-Prussian War by Karl Friedrich Louis Dobermann. Dobermann served in the dangerous role of local tax collector, and ran the Apolda dog pound. With access to dogs of many breeds, he aimed to create a breed that would be ideal for protecting him during his collections, which took him through many bandit-infested areas. He set out to breed a new type of dog that, in his opinion, would be the perfect combination of strength, speed, endurance, loyalty, intelligence, and ferocity.

 Ah.  Well, I'm sure we'd all agree that nobody beats a German tax collector for strength, speed, endurance, loyalty, intelligence and ferocity.   But I seem to have been misled about the identity of the inventor: I had always assumed it was Mildred Pinscher, Apolda's bankruptcy trustee.  Also said to be Dobermann's very close friend  if you get my meaning, heh heh.   I'll have to concede about the dog, but I do believe she still gets credit for inventing the chain-link fence.

BTW Taxmom's pooch tweets.  Follow him at @Gandalfterrier.

Nov. 22, 1963

Where was I?   I was trying to stay awake at a meeting of the Kentucky League of Cities on the second floor (mezzanine?) of the hotel at Fifth and Walnut in Louisville, the one that is now the Kentucky Towers.  I suppose I was trying to think of something, anything  to take back to my editor at The Louisville Times to justify my presence at so anodyne an event.  Anyway, my problem was shortly solved:  some guy came in and said something on the order of "Gentlemen, I have important news..."

I'm hazy on the next few hours.  I was in front of a TV set somehwere--maybe the same hotel--when I heard Walter Cronkite bring us all the final pronouncement.*  I do remember running into Marlowe Cook, the County Judge/Executive (and mentor of Mitch McConnell) at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, where Marlowe fulminated for a bit about the times and the people.  It was clear from the way he talked that he took it for granted that the killer was some right-wing nut and I for my part never troubled to doubt him; neither he nor I ever mentioned the encounter again.

Life was going well for me that fall.  We had lost our first baby but the next one was alive and well and a another was on the way.  I had finally, somewhat belatedly--I was 27--finished my BA and had started my first semester of night law school, and was loving every minute of it: after some false starts, the gears were beginning to mesh.  That night, perhaps in a daze, I drifted off to my property class where I found a good many of my classmates, probably in the same impaired state.  Our professor--heaven knows what was in his mind--conducted business as usual.  After a break, we reassembled for torts; Jim Merritt came in and announced "I don't know why we are all here tonight, but I'm going home."  Then it dawned on us--or at least, me--that there were probably better things to do than to recite torts.

Afterthought: I shouldn't be too hard on our benumbed property teacher.  Years later, on 9/11, I faced the same kind of choice.  I was due to meet my corp fin students at 9am, 2-2.5 hours after the crashes.  Most student showed up.  I said: look, I can do this either way, we can stay or go.  What is your preference?  Nobody went to the door, so we went about our business usual.

*The Wichita bureau adds an curious footnote: the gazillion replays of the Cronkite announcement--they all look clearer on modern TV sets than they did at the time.  Is there some way they could have tweaked the original picture (uh oh, that sounds lie conspiracy talk)?

New Epigraph Again

Proust, quoting.  A footnote to the Lydia Davis translation identifies it as Corneille, La Mort de Pompée, act III, scene 4.  But to gets more abstruse than that. The original French Proust says "Seigneur, que de vertus vous nous faites haïr!  But Davis says the Corneille reads "O ciel, que de vertus vous me faites haïr!" Haven't a clue whether the change was a slip on the author's part or a particular point about the speaking character.

Auto-correct kept telling me to say "What virus," etc.  The reader is left to meditate on the meaning of that version.

Swann's Way with the Rush of Events

Now let me see--shall I go surf my Feedly or shall I settle down with some Proust?  Oh, I have it--let's ask M. Swann:

Ce que je reproche aux journaux c'est de nous faire attention tous les jours à des choses insignifiantes tandis que nous lisons trois ou quatre fois dans notre vie les livres où il y a des choses essentielles. Du moment que nous déchirons fiévreusement chaque matin la bande du journal, alors on devrait changer les choses et mettre dans le journal, moi je ne sais pas, les... Pensées de Pascal! 

--Marcel Proust. Du côté de chez Swann (Kindle Locations 392-394).

What I fault the newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential.  Since we tear the band off the newspaper so feverishly every morning, they ought to change things and put into the newspaper, oh, I don't know, perhaps … Pacsal's Pensées!"

--Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (Lydia Davis trans. Kindle page 26), 

Right, that settles it.  Pascal it is then. 

Who Are These Guys?

Why are so many of my blog hits coming from something called Vampirestat?  I won't link, it sounds like bad news to me.

Report from the End Times

It's conventional for accounts like this to provoke analogies (real or imagined) to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.  But I'd say a more plausible, if equally facile, comparison might be to the end of the Roman Republic--a gaggle of loosely intertwined clans all striving for eminence in a polity which from many perspectives wasn't really governed at all.     Readers who have not chucked their copies of Roland Ronald Syme may want to dust them off for a refresher.

Taxmom on MOOCs

Taxmom shines the  life-giving glow of her wisdom on MOOCs:

…  I think the problem with online education is that learning a discpline is, by defnition, hard (hence "discipline"), and 98% of the people need someone to lead them through it.  How many times have we all decided to learn something new, skimmed the surface with ease, and then about 2% of the way in realized that there is something pretty basic that is either a) really hard to comprehend or b) requires skill and practice, and building up stamina, or both.

With guitar, everything is rosy until you have to play an F-chord.

With algebra, everything's peachy until you have to do that (a + b) (a - b) thing.

With a language, everything is great until you realize you have to keep more than 8 words in your brain at one time, and that words don't necessarily look the same in the dictionary as they do on the page.

I'd add:sociality.  People still learn more from each other than they do from the teacher.  Or even if not directly from each other, then from the buzz of learning in the vicinity.    

What the Tenor is Telling You

Lovely Alex Ross piece on Joyce DiDonato (gated) gives us yokels a glimpse into how much there is to opera beyond what we see on stage.  Including an explanation of the behavior of the tenor, from Paul Curran, director of "La Donna del Lago" last summer at Santa Fe:

A compact, fast-talking Scot who has worked everywhere from Sydney to St. Petersburg, [Curran] has a wide frame of reference and a fine understanding of ritual. A former dancer, he wages war on the stock attitudes that opera singers recycle generation after generation--for example, the tenorial arm gesture that he characterizes as "Please examine our fine display of jewelry" or "Would you like a pie?"

You Just Can't Get Good Help Anymore

Washington Irving, already a celebrity of sorts as a literary gent, takes his ease as a guest of the Governor of Granada in the palace/fortress of the Alhambra. Probably no site on the travel itinerary better suited his taste for romantic storytelling, tinctured with unvarnished malarky. Here he considers his situation in the hands of his staff, including (among others) Antonia, the de facto proprietress, and Mateo Ximenes, his personal attendant--considers, and finds it suitable:

The good dame Autonia fulfils faithfully her contract with regard to my board and lodging; and as I am easily pleased, I find my fare excellent; while the merry-hearted little Dolores keeps my apartment in order, and officiates as handmaid at meal-times. I have also at my command a tall, stuttering, yellow-haired lad, named Pepe, who works in the gardens, and would fain have acted as valet; but in this he was forestalled by Mateo Ximenes, "the son of the Alhambra." This alert and officious wight has managed, somehow or other, to stick by me ever since I first encoun- tered him at the outer gate of the fortress, and to weave himself into all my plans, until he has fairly appointed and installed himself my valet, cicerone, guide, guard, and historiographic squire; and I have been obliged to improve the state of his wardrobe, that he may not disgrace liis various functions; so that he has cast his old brown man- tle, as a snake does his skin, and now appears about the fortress with a smart Andalusian hat and jacket, to his infinite satisfaction, and the great astonishment of his comrades. The chief fault of honest Mateo is an over- anxiety to be useful. Conscious of having foisted himself into my employ, and that my simple and quiet habits render his situation a sinecure, he is at his wit's ends to devise modes of making himself important to my welfare. I am in a manner the victim of his officiousness; I cannot put my foot over the threshold of the palace, to stroll about the fortress, but he is at my elbow, to explain everything I see; and if I venture to ramble among the surrounding hills, he insists upon attending me as a guard, though I vehemently suspect he would be more apt to trust to the length of his legs than the strength of his arms, in case of attack. After all, however, the poor fellow is at times an amusing companion; he is simple-minded and of infinite good humor, with the loquacity and gossip of a village barber, and knows all the small-talk of the place and its environs.

So Washington Irving, The Alhambra, composed around 1829, available here.  I'd say that anyone who condescends to his tour guide "simple-minded and of infinite good humor" ought not be surprised if he finds himself first in the queue for the guillotine. 

Well Hey (Language Division)

Well hey--I sort of knew that this had to exist but I didn't trouble until just this weekend to figure out that it actually exists.

That is, translation.  I see that I can download a book to my Kindle app (or, I suppose, send it to the cloud*) and download along side it a dictionary in the appropriate language.  So when you poke the word, the dictionary you get is not English but, you know, whatever.  

This doesn't get you the whole way, of course.  The next step (but maybe this exists too, and I just haven't found it yet) would be to let me link to an English version so I could go friction free from English to  (shall we say) Klingon to the Klingon dictionary, etc.  And the dictionary can be a dead end: if I don't understand the dictionary definition, so far as I can tell I can't just press for the definition's definition.**

You knew all that.  Okay, but I still count it as progress. And did you also know that you can get a complete A la recherché du temps perdu plus a French dictionary for less than 10 bucks?  Ain't nature grand?

And did you know that the English translation of "ferrugineux" is "ferruginous?"  I say, ain't nature grand?
 ===
*Apparently not the cloud.  I sent the book out there, but I can't figure out how to load the dictionary.

**Well, not quite.  I can tap through to the definition and then seek definitions of words inside the definition.  And so on ad infinitum, I suppose.

Afterthought:  But then, I saw a modern mystery in French that I wanted to put on my Kindle.  I punched one-click and they told me that it wasn't available in my part of the world.  Well okay, but then why did you offer it to me?

From the Annals of Administrative Train-wreckery: Just Sayin'

James Q. Wilson says:

Executives who want to influence policy but who define “policy” largely in terms of what outside constituencies want (or will not denounce) are in an awkward position—more awkward than they sometimes realize. To change their agency, these officials need to understand its workings, know its people, and appreciate its constraints. But the external, constituency-serving orientation of such executives, combined with their short tenure in office, reduce the time and energy they can devote to this learning process. As a result, the policy changes they make are likely to be ill-considered and inadequately managed.  Even the Social Security Administration, an agency with a tradition of strong and well-informed leaders, seriously underestimated the difficulty of implementing the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in the early 1970s. Top executives were busy assuring Congress and the White House that the SSA could do the job of identifying three million aged, blind, or disabled persons, verifying their eligibility for SSI benefits, and hiring fifteen thousand new employees to service these beneficiaries; meanwhile, the working-level managers were approaching a state of panic, for they knew that the agency was in deep trouble.  It could not possibly train the people and install the computer systems fast enough to meet the deadlines.  Martha Derthick concluded her study of this episode with language that could describe executive-agency relations in many bureaus: It is impossible not to be struck by the differences between the view from the top, reflected in the serene pride that valuable social ends are about to be served, and the mounting panic and frustration in the field offices as unreadiness for the concrete task becomes all too clear.

Wilson, James (1991-01-29). Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It (Basic Books Classics) (p. 206).  The Derthick reference goes to Martha Derthick, Agency Under Stress: The Social Security Administration and American Government (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, forthcoming), chap. 5.

The Apple-Warehouse Problem

I can't pretend that I've every word of the new "law school is going broke" meme, but I've read enough so I suspect I've picked up the main themes ("They're ripping of the students!" "They're being creamed by the central administration!"  "Paul Campos is an addlepated numbskull!"  "We're all going to die!").  And enough, I think, to take note of an elephant that is absent from the room.'

That is: capital cost.  So far as I can tell, nobody is talking about the cost of capital--plant, the real estate, the physical facility. I haven't any idea why the cost of capital for any particular law school might be, but it's not negative and not zero, and unless we count it, I don't think we have any idea what he cost of law school might be.

Think it through in terms of a private-sector income statement.  You tot up your gross revenues. You subtract cost of inventory, expenses for sales and general administrative and what not and then you stop.  Or at least pause.  If the number so far is negative, you've got to do something, now: raise prices or cut costs.  Otherwise you're better off dead.  

But suppose the number is positive.  Are you done? No, you are not done.  Then you ask: is the surplus  from operations (above) sufficient to lure in the capital I need to make the business go?  If the answer is "yes," then great, we all go to the seashore.  If the answer is no, then we might as well take our ball and bat and go--where? Well I don't know where, exactly, but someplace where the resources may be deployed more profitably.  Back in my newspaper days, I worked in a cavernous old concrete block monstrosity in the Cleveland suburbs.  Community folklore told us it used to be an apple warehouse.  Apparently "newspaper" was thought more productive.

Anyway--I've never once had a conversation with a law school dean about costs (and I've had a few) where the cost of plant even began to figure.  Example, when we took on a new dean here in Palookaville about 20 years ago he carpet-bombed us about the cost of operations.  We learned some interesting stuff (example: "fund-raising" turned out to be "fund-reducing").  We engaged in anguished bleating about  how much  vigorish was being sucked out by the brass hats across the street.

But not one word about the cost of the physical plant.  Strike that: cost of maintenance, okay, we learned about that.  It's part of the home office vig.   Probably even the amount spent on replacement lightbulbs. But nothing about you-know what.

And it's not just us.  A few years later I was talking to Henry Manne, the guy who more or less reinvented George Mason U Law School.  "And we make a profit!" squealed the profit-minded Henry with malicious glee.   But how much to you allocate to real estate?  Henry wiggled very much like a guy who has just been asked a question he'd never thought of before.  Well, he said, the building was abandoned.

Okay, maybe.  But I suspect somebody could have sold it. The question would be--what would Henry have had to pay if he had to buy it?  That's the question that never gets asked.

[And it may happen more than we guess.  I'm told that Cardozo got that nice building on Fifth Avenue at Twelfth Street as  gift. Something about an old surplus textile factory (it's just blocks from the sit of the notorious Triangle Fire).  But they seem to have turned it into  (along with a law school) a nicely profitable real estate example.  Once I heard a third  such story but I can't remember just now--Seattle?]

I suppose I can think of one reason why this issue never arises.  That is: the leadership of the law school is middle management.  Somebody may indeed take their building way to be devoted to what the planners might call a "higher and better use."  Say, computer science.  Okay, fine.  That means that giving it to a law school and denying it to computer sci  is an opportunity cost which isn't being explicitly measured at the law school level.  But I bet they know somewhere up the line. And at a place like NYU, say, plunked down in the middle of hugely expensive and profitable urban real estate, I bet somebody knows pretty exactly.

That's it; there is no real secret message here.  Only that we are not measuring the true cost of law school, and we are almost certainly underestimating.  Oh, and another word about the newspaper in the Cleveland suburbs.  I said that the folklore was that we began life as an apple warehouse.  One of the wise guys drew a D&D-like chart to describe the history of the enterprise. Way over at the beginning--the left end--it said "apple warehouse."  And at the right, the end, it said--yeh, you guessed it.

Oh, So That Was It

From a friend's in-house security detail:

Twitter Fixes Bug That Enabled Takeover of Any Account 
We recently reported on a discovery by security researcher, Henry Hoggard, exposing a cross site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in Twitter’s “add a mobile device” feature, that would allow a user to read direct messages and tweet from any account. An exploit of this vulnerability would force users to perform unwanted actions in an application or service for which they are already authenticated. Twitter fixed the bug within 24 hours of Hoggard’s report. According to Hoggard, even before it was fixed, users with their browser’s No-Script extension installed would not have been impacted by this bug. 

I think that happened to me.  Taking my courage in my teeth, I have reopened with, I hope, better security.  I do seem to have acquired (and have killed out) a bunch of new followers with a bunch of cool stuff to sell.   Give me a headsup if you notice anything weird. 

Got That?

You cut a thee dimensional watermelon, you get a two-dimensional ellipse.  You cut a four dimensional ellipse, you get a three-dimensional watermelon.

 Details here.

So Much Hope

Actuated by my investigation of The Prince,  I pulled down my copy of its companion-piece, The Discourses, to fill an idle hour the other night.  Shorter Discourses: it's wonderful--provocative, shrewd, funny and a rattling good read.  Also proof of what a little age and experience can do for you.  I clearly read it before--my underling and checkmarks are all over the piece.  But I remember it as a bit of a grind, something I did because I felt I ought to more than because I really wanted to.  Much different today, and I think the difference has more to do with paltry achievement than anything vaporous like wisdom.  I know more about Italy today (even a bit of Italian) and I know more about Livy: I'm much better able to get my mind around the sinewy dynamism of something like this:

Affermo, bene, di nuovo, questo essere verissimo, secondo che per tutte le istorie si vede, che gli uomini possono secondare la fortuna e non opporsegli; possono tessere gli orditi suoi, e non rompergli. Debbono, bene, non si abbandonare mai; perché, non sappiendo il fine suo, e andando quella per vie traverse ed incognite, hanno sempre a sperare, e sperando non si abbandonare, in qualunque fortuna ed in qualunque travaglio si trovino.

I assert once again as a truth to which history as a whole bears witness that men may second their fortune, but cannot oppose it; that they may weave its warp, but cannot break it. Yet they should never give up, because there is always hope, though they know not the end and more towards it along roads which cross one another and as yet are unexplored; and since there is hope, they should not despair, no matter what fortune brings or in what travail they find themselves.

Book 2, Ch. 29, unfinished at his death in 1527 (Leslie Walker and Brian Richardson trans., 1974)

What gets me here is not just the dynamism and the style by the resiliency: he begins on what might sound like a pessimistic note ("they may weave its warp, but cannot break it").   Yet he turns instantly to a kind of determined hopefulness.  Doesn't take long to recall another great Renaissance thinker in a near-canonical moment:

[E]ven if the breath of hope which blows on us from that New Continent were fainter than it is and harder to perceive, yet the trial (if we would not bear a spirit altogether abject) must by all means be made. For there is no comparison between that which we may lose by not trying and by not succeeding, since by not trying we throw away the chance of an immense good; by not succeeding we only incur the loss of a little human labor. But as it is, it appears to me from what has been said, and also from what has been left unsaid, that there is hope enough and to spare, not only to make a bold man try, but also to make a sober-minded and wise man believe.

So Francis Bacon, Novum Organum 114 (1620)The reader is left to make his own inferences about any change of attitude from the times of Machiavelli and Bacon to the preen day.

Witty, Taciturn, Polymathic...

Kurp ate his Wheaties this morning:

...a familiar newsroom type – the odd, wryly witty, taciturn, polymathic autodidact. They seem to flourish in particular among the ranks of copy editors and take laconic delight in the arcana of baseball statistics, French irregular verbs, Confederate Army regiments or the early recordings of Muggsy Spanier. They occupy the realm where hobbyist bleeds into reputable amateur authority and, in more serious cases, crank. Most, however, are perfectly harmless, like bloggers. 

Details here.   For early Muggsy Spanier, go here.

Gil Blas

Kottke flags a list of the 100 best novels--no, wait, it was assembled in 1898.  I've actually read eight--no wait, seven, no wait six--of the top  ten but my coverage falls off pretty fast after that.  Of he top ten, two struck me as surprising choices from not-so-surprising writers.  I wouldn't have thought you would pick Tobias Smollett's Roderick Random (which I've never read) over Humphrey Clinker (which I quite liked).    I've never even heard of John Bunyan's Holy War, though I am an admirer of both Pilgrim's Progress and Grace Abounding.  I'm still beating up on myself for never having waded through Clarissa, though now more from force of habit than any real conviction.

The one that in intrigues me most, though is  Gil Blas by one Alain René le Sage--tagged as France, 1715.   I first heard of (read about) Gil Blas back at an age when I was still more interested in assembling a list of books I should read (or at least, to pretend to have read) rather than  actually to read.  I think it was an answer to a literary quiz question (my mother loved literary quizzes and could always beat me at them--a topic worth years of expensive therapy).   I suspect the question had something to do with "picaresque novel"--another entry in the cabinet of literary curiosities then otherwise unknown to me.

I had never heard of Gil Blas, then, and just for the record, I have never read it. What intrigues me, though is that not only have I never read it--I don't think I've ever seen it, or at least not last night when I went a-Googling.  My impression is, for a long time has been, that, whatever its esteem in the 19th Century, still by my time it had utterly tumbled out of respectable company.

So, what kept it in and what drove it out?  Hard to say, but here's a thought: I remember reading a commentary on Ovid some years ago in which the commentator asked a similar question about his subject: what made Ovid so hugely popular for so many centuries, only to disappear?  His answer, as I recall, was something on the lines of "it's TV."  Or maybe movies (this is was quite a while ago).  Or maybe just the expansion of publishing. Anyway, the point was that Ovid was okay as long as there were no competitors.   Maybe (but how would I know?) a lovable scamp like Gil Blas could find an audience as long as there was no Mel Gibson?

A scan of the Gil Blas Wiki (yes, he rates that much) suggests another, albeit somewhat question-begging, reason. That is: he comes to the club with the best recommendations.   We have Poe, Dostoevsky, even Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.  Oddly, the Wiki does not mention two other promoters: Washington Irving and Smollett (of whom more in a moment).   Evidently a later generation of literary promoters missed the memo (an odd exception: Wiki lists Italo Calvino).

I said I'd never seen a copy.  Is this just inattention?  Apparently not. A quick skim of Amazon suggests that that it is readily available in French, but that its English presence is almost negligible.  There are free ebook versions, so maybe somebody somewhere is slugging away at it as I write even now.

One more oddity about the book, and the list: the compiler ranks Gil Blas as #3.  Inevitably, #1 on his list is  Don Quixote.  Smollett's Roderick Random is #6.   A condition of the list was that each author was allowed only one entry.  Yet for English speaking audiences in his time, if they found Quixote at all, the chances are it was through the translation by Smollett (or "workshop" of Smollett)--I read it a few years ago and it is still pretty good.  And for Gil Blas--yes, once again Smollett.  So working under pseudonyms, Ol' Tobias seems to have come to the party three times.

An Obama Twopher

Two notes about our President.  One, go and read the shrewd profile by Todd Purdum.    The Browser, endorsing Purdum, says "Nobody loves him; nobody fears him"--i.e., the President, not the profiler.  I think that is spot on and I wonder if the blurber understood that he was tracking a great predecessor:

Nasce da questo una disputa: s’elli è meglio essere amato che temuto, o e converso. Respondesi, che si vorrebbe essere l’uno e l’altro; ma, perché elli è difficile accozzarli insieme, è molto piú sicuro essere temuto che amato, quando si abbia a mancare dell’uno de’ dua.

And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

Machiavelli, of course, The Prince, Il Principe, Ch XVII, link, link.  So, we have a null set.

And two--I was idling through a back copy of Time Magazine the other day when I happened on the profile of another world luminary who put me in mind of our President.  The comparison is not exact, but what if I told you he is instinctively civil, well-intentioned by his own lights, seemingly eager to make the world a better place, yet emotionally paralytic.  Would you think our President?  Or would you think this guy?

Getting a Grip on Rossini

Chez Buce has enjoyed the viewing of two Rossini operas in the last couple of weeks, with  lot on common. One, we'd never really heard of either. Two, they both showcase Juan Diego Flórez who (among other achievements) is on the shortlist of Mrs. B's operatic heartthrobs.  And three, they both come from the Rossini Festival at Pesaro, Rossini's  birthplace, on the east coast of Italy, downhill from Urbino and south of Ravenna.    Mr. and Mrs. Buce have never set foot in Pesaro.  I guess I've breezed by at 55 mph but without so much as a how d'ya do.  

But our inattention doesn't seem to have impeded them in any particular way.  Seems like they have established themselves as a major-league summer festival venue, with three theaters, a comfy state subsidy, and the mandate to keep alive--or better, to revivify-- some of the overlooked items among the 40-odd entries in Rossini's operatic catalogue.

The two new entries in our consciousness are Matilde de Shabran, #32 (1821)  if my count is correct,  and Zelmira, #33,  a year later in in 1822.  Zelmira gets a place in the larger constellation because it was the next-to-the last Rossini opera to open in Italy, and also the first to introduce him to a more general European audience (months later, in Vienna).

This makes about a dozen Rossini operas we've seen live or on disk.  We've perhaps as many Verdis, so we've reached a point where it is possible to put these individual items in a more general framework. Let me see what I can do.

One, it's increasingly clear how much Rossini must have dominated the Italian scene in his own time.   Stendhal brackets him with Mozart although the compliment verges on the back-handed:

I have bracketed [Mozart and Rossini]  together for, under the combined influence of distance, of he difficulty experienced in reading Mozart's scores, and of the average Italian's utter scorn for any artist of foreign origin, it ma legitimately be claimed that Mozart and Rossini made their début simultaneously in the year 1812.

So Stendhal, Life of Rossini 125 (Richard N. Coe trans. 1970).  It's actually not entirely clear what Stendhal has in mind here: of Mozart's juvenilia were produced at La Scala in the 1770s, and the Rossini catalog assigns five operas to the year 1812.  But the drift is right: Italians don't seem quite to have got the point of Mozart, at least in the 19th Century.  And at him, so it is said, even Donizetti and Bellini,  worked in Rossini's shadow (though poor Bellini, who died so young, scarcely had a chance).  

But the other side of the coin is to marvel at the things Verdi learned how to do that his predecessors, even at their best, simply didn't know how to do.   You can see the point on full display in Matilde di Shabran.  It brims over with wonderful ensemble work--even a love-duet with two active onlookers, all four participating in the music.  There's some glorious music here but almost invariably, what you see each character assigned to a role and then permitted to interweave their vocal lines without  breaking type.  This is precisely the sort of thing that Verdi figured how not to behave, as he learned to fill is characters with more nuanced and more nuanced destinies.

Remarkably, you see just a hint of what you might call Verdian character development in Matilde di Shabran--specifically in Flórez role as Corradino, the lord of the manor.   The plot point is that Corradino has the public face of a monster but we learn in the first act that he's actually a pussycat.  The upshot is that Flórez, for one, is able to put some nuance and variety into his character in  way that it nobody really found again until Verdi smoked it out 40 years later.

Fun fact:  if I read the notes right, this is Flórez' third appearance in this role in this place--and that his first one came classic storybook opera fashion in 1996, when he got his great breakthrough by stepping in (at age 23) for a more established talent who was taken sick.  The other singer was Bruce Ford who had a respectable run in the Bel Canto repertoire, although a skim of his webpage suggests that  he may be out of action.

Here's a good review of Matilde di Shabran.  Here's an enthusiastic appreciation of Zelmira.

Elizabeth

I dearly hope it is all media hype that Elizabeth Warren wants to run for the Presidency.  I've said before that I've known Elizabeth over the years (albeit not at all well) and I like her; I think she has the right enemies and mostly the right friends.  I thought (and still think) the Senate was/is the right place for her, much more suitable than that consumer agency she incubated.  That is: afflicting the comfortable is clearly part of her skill set, and senators have bully chance to do just that.  On the other hand  I see no reason to believe she has any chops as an administrator.  And we've had our experience with a one-term senator in the White House and does anybody want to remind me how that turned out?

I can believe she wants to lure Hillary to the left.  I suppose that might work,  if she plays her hand with great finesse.   But it might backfire, in either of two ways.  One, recall how opposition from the left (Henry Wallace) and the right (Strom Thurmond) lifted the incubus of extremism from the shoulders of Harry S Truman and allowed him to barrel home through the center.  And two, if she really thinks she can make a statement by energizing the left, she might want to consult the ghost of Ralph Nader (Oh, still alive.  Right).  

I guess she might just  be just positioning herself as the go-to second choice if by chance Hillary chooses to bail.  Gives me one more reason to hope Hillary goes all the way.

In any event, I'd hate to think it is really Potomac fever. 

Irvin Who?

Quick now: who hosted the 1935 Academy Awards?  

You don't know, do you?  And if I tell you that the answer is Irvin S. Cobb will you still be as unenlightened as you were before?  Maybe, and that fact is interesting in itself.   It was Cobb  I was quoting (from memory) the other day in a comparison (perhaps impertinent) to the ghost of Hamlet's father.  The exact quote is 

 Kentucky rotgut] smells like gangrene starting in a mildewed silo, it tastes like the wrath to come, and when you absorb a big swig of it you have all the sensations of having swallowed a lighted kerosene lamp.  A sudden, violent jolt of it has been known to stop the victim's watch, snap his suspenders and crack his glass eye right across.

Gangrene is good; I missed that.  I find the text in an old favorite of mine, not yet discarded: The American Treasury, 1455-1955--"select, arranged, and edited" (it says here) by Clifton Fadiman, assisted by (the soon-to-be-disgraced) Charles Van Doren (at p. 254)  My copy says I acquired it in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1957, which is to say, just about the time I flamed out of Antioch College and began by unsteady foray into journalism.  

The Treasury accords Cobb two other claims to fame.  One:

There is this to be said for New York City: it is the one densely inhabited locality--with the possible exception of Hell--that has absolutely not a trace of local pride.

Id., at 73.  Well, I guess I wasn't there, but if he was writing in the time of Jimmy Waker or Grover Whelan, I suspect that as to New York City, this is flat wrong. As to Hell--well, it is good he included the qualifier, because I've read my Dante and I'd say that Hell is suffused with local pride.  

The third Cobb item in the is his supposed riposte on hearing that his boss,  Charles S. Chapin of the World was ill:

I hope it's nothing trivial.

At p. 994.  Fine again, except that I could swear I've heard it Ben Hecht, to Gene Fowler possibly to others.  You find all this somewhat less than hilarious?  Okay,  except that it's all the more interesting how these crashing banalities come from the mouth of one who was (per Wiki) the most highly paid journalist of his time.  Some compare him to Mencken, another celebrity journalist, except I suspect that  the comparison does more to highlight the differences than the similarities.  Mencken, for his part, had a way of shaking things up--of disturbing the verities in ways that may continue to matter (like my bud Dos Passos he went sour in his old age, but let that pass).

Cobb on the other hand seemed to like nothing so much as to comfort the comfortable.  It is a Cobb novel that underlies Judge Priest, the 1934 John Ford movie--Will Rogers, Hattie McDaniel and, yes, Stepin Fetchit.   David Thomson in his "personal introduction to 1,000 films" describes Judge Priest as "outrageous, shockingly racist, and serenely opposed to all forms of progress or argument.  At the same time" (Thomson continues) "it feels like a yarn spun on a porch in the late afternoon sun, and it reminds us of how closely and mysteriously allied such story-telling can be with the blunt lineaments of fascism."

Might  be a bit much to blame Ford on Cobb, but my guess is that what Thomson calls "the blunt lineaments" are right there in the original. 

Oh, and I see there is a fourth and final Cobb item in the Fadiman collection:

Epitaph: a belated advertisment for a line of goods that has been permanently discontinued.

Probably cheesy to observe that Cobb  may have wound up describing himself.

Afterthought:  Apparently not quite forgotten.  Evidently there is a bridge that bears his name someplace.  And the Paducah Wal-Mart is located on Irvin Cobb drive.

Who Is It?

Who is it, and described by whom?  Strictly speaking, you might not recognize the actual speaker but you will know his father, and the son is thought to be a chip off the old block.  I doctored it to remove clues:

Tall, largely built, handsome, genial, with liberal ...openness toward all he liked he  had also [his peoples']  habit of command. … For a year, at least … was the most popular and prominent man in his class, but then seemed slowly to drop into the background. The habit of command was not enough, and [he] had little else.  He was simple beyond analysis; so simple that even the simple [outsider]  could not realize him. No one knew enough to know how ignorant he was; how childlike; how helpless before the relative complexity of a school. As an animal [people of his sort] seemed to have every advantage, but even as an animal he steadily lost ground.
 … Strictly,  [a man of this sort] has no mind;  he  had temperament.  He was not a scholar; he had no intellectual training; he could not analyze an idea, and he could not even conceive of admitting two.

Who? Go here.