Yurii's Realm

I have long embraced the Heisenberg principle of nationalism: the closer you look at a  nation-state, the more likely it isn’t there any more.  Today’s case in point, Ukraine.  Yurii Andrukhovych seems to recognize this perspective in his 1993 novel Moskovodiada, where he itemizes the titles of Olelko II, king of Ukraine, descendant (so he says) of he Riurykovychs and Dolgorukiis:

Sovereign and Ruler of Rus-Ukraine, Great Prince of Kiev and Chernihiv, King of Galicia and Volhynia, Master of Pskov, Peremyshl and Koziatyn, Duke [Hertzog] of Dniproderzhynsk, First of May and Illich, Great Khan of Crimea and Izmail, Baron of Berdychiv, of both Bukovyna and Bessarabia, and also New Askan and Outer Kakhovka, rhe Wild Field and the Black Forest of Arkhysenior, Hetman and Protector of the Cossacks of the Don, Berdiansk and Kryvyi Rih, Tireless Shepherd of the Hutsuls and Boikos, Lord of All the People of the Ukraine, including Tatars and Pechenegs, peasant farmers [malokhokhlamy] and salo-eaters, with every Moldavian and Mankurt, on Our Pure Land, Patron and Pastor of Great and Little Slobidska Ukraine, and also Inner and Outer Timutorokan, the glorious descendant of all the ages, in a word, our proud and most eminent Monarch.

--Reprinted in Andrew Wilson, The Ukranians:  Unexpected Nation (2000; new material 2002—and I gather there is a new edition from 2009).

Ernest Renan says that history is as much about forgetting as remembering. 

Grr

Internet down all over town. I'm helpless, and don't like it.

Sent from my iPhone

Update 530pm: We're back on line thanks to a personable chap who gets to climb utility poles in the rain. I assume (and rather hope) he's got a union.  One of the last manly jobs.  

Where are the Good Histories of the Viet Nam War?

Mrs. Buce asked if I could suggest a good history of the War in Viet Nam.  I said, "oh sure," and quickly bogged down.  I dug out an old copy of Stanley Kranow's  Vietnam: A History, which I remember as instructive if not exactly mind-bending (I see from the Amazon blurb that it's in available in audio but not Kindle--the old fashioned way).  And beyond that--

Well--beyond that, there are any number of accounts written with high intensity and great personal engagement, about aspects of the war.  I'm thinking of stuff like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, or Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War, or Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake, or Neil Sheehan's  A Bright Shining Lie.  And as I scan, I'm remembering the movies: Apocalypse Now of course, and Deer Hunter, which I actually liked better.  There are some remarkable postmortems of the strictly military aspects--books like Harry Summers' On Strategy, or Andrew Krepinevich's The Army and Viet Nam.  If I'm not careful, I'll find myself getting sucked back into the undertow before the American involvement, to books like Bernard Fall's Street Without Joy  Graham Greene's The Quiet American or even Marguerite Duras' The Lover.

But it still seems to me like there is something missing here.  I suppose it is precisely because the war was such an open wound and because, yes, it remains so unfinished, that we seem never to have learned how to package it into a narrative.  So, Kranow it may have to be.

What I've Learned about Italian Nationalism from David Gilmour

Before this weekend, I knew enough about European history to know that Italy was/is "a geographical expression,"--a cut-and-paste smoke-and-mirrors nation-state, held together by the delusions and fantasies of its sponsors more than any durable threads in the fabric.  I more or less knew that  the fantasy was largely the fault responsibility of Giuseppe Mazzini and his ilk--19th Century dreamers/intriguers who imagined the Italian community:

[T]he goal that he and his democratic followers aimed for was simply an Italy that would be both independent and undivided. Only a unitary state, they believed, would liberate Italy from its age-old rivalries.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2698-2700). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

What I didn't know is that there were others on the left--not just the old fogeys of authoritarianism and empire--who did not see it that way.  These "others" believed

that only regard for [Italy's endemic internecine]  rivalries would allow Italians to respect each other’s differences and live together in harmony: a unitary state could never conceivably work in so diverse a country. The foremost federalist was the brilliant Milanese intellectual Carlo Cattaneo, who considered ‘the ancient love of liberty in Italy’ to be more important than ‘the cult of unity’. Like Guicciardini 300 years earlier, he believed that Italy had prospered from competition between the cities and argued that a political system that failed to take the communal spirit into account would not succeed. In his eyes this spirit was far from being a medieval irrelevance: it was alive – as it still is, 

remaining a vital component of the national identity even today. Cattaneo did not greatly exaggerate when he claimed, ‘The communes are the nation: they are the nation in the most innermost sanctuary of its liberty.’  Cattaneo was no romantic nationalist. Indeed he believed that nationalism was essentially illiberal – an unusual credence in those days – and he suspected with some reason that this would be the case with Piedmont. As a Milanese historian, he was aware of the old Piedmontese custom of grabbing and annexing bits of Lombardy, and he was rightly apprehensive about the ambitions of the Savoia monarchs in his own time. As a Lombard, he was also aware of his region’s ancient trading relationships beyond the Alps and recognized that there could be advantages, administrative and economic, in becoming a self-governing part of the Habsburg Empire. Such advantages would obviously disappear if Lombardy were to be annexed by Piedmont. 

 Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2699-2705). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.


I've spent a bit of time in and around Italy and I have to admit I don't remember ever hearing  of Carlo Cattanio before.


 

What I've Learned about Sex from Ian Buruma

It's probably nothing to be proud of, but I confess to a certain fascination with "defeat" literature--stories about wreckage and recovery in the aftermath of war.  I remain in debt to my late friend Ignoto for alerting me to Naples '44, Norman Lewis' darkly hilarious account of his service in the British cleanup crew at the end of World War II.  I've met the challenge of Primo Levi's spare-but-elegant Italian, not only in his account of his concentration camp experience, but also in his two accounts (one admittedly fictionalized) of the disintegration of the Nazi death camps, and the reconstruction of lives in the aftermath (link, link).  Now I'm onto Ian Buruma's   Year Zero: A History of 1945, with the same level of satisfaction.

Lewis and Levi lived through the horrors they describe.  Buruma,  generation younger, has a different task: he is trying to acquaint himself with what his forebears, particularly his father, went through.  The distance means that his account lacks some of the particularity of the other two (although Buruma, like the others, does have his share of hair-raising yarns).  But the detachment allows him to develop some independent critical judgments.  For example, about sex.

Grant that we've had no shortage of sex-in-the-wreckage accounts, prurient or horrific--particularly, I suppose, about systematic vengeance rape among Russian invaders in Germany, or about any girl (or boy) who might have to market what s/he had just to fend off starvation.   Buruma's account fits the general framework. What perhaps he adds is the suggestion of just various the sexual pallet was in those days: how many did how much for how many different motives.

Set aside outright rape (with the concession that yes, western soldiers raped too, but not as a matter of government policy).  Acknowledge sex out of desperation--to fend off starvation, or to ally one's self with a protector.  Buruma's point is that there was  lot more:  in particular, we are dealing here not just with desperation and hardship but also with the new birth of optimism: after four or more years of war, we observe an explosion of what we can only call erotic energy.  Aside from the girls trying to feed themselves, we have those who were just happy for the chocolate and the nylons.  We have some who formed loving, even lasting, relationships. And we have a whole lot of people who were just primed for a good time.  Side note: introducing a nice irony, Buruma remarks on how the Japanese were terrified that  the invading Westerners would treat Japanese women the same way the Japanese invading forces had treated subject peoples in East Asia--but it didn't happen. Not at all incidentally, we can observe  sudden, sharp spike in the birth rate, and the other thing that the chaplains warned of: venereal disease.

In this realm, the Western soldiers--not just US GIs, but also Canadians and Brits--were the fortunate beneficiaries.  It wasn't precisely their niceness that carried the day: rather more the exhaustion, emaciation and general air of defeat that hung like a cloud that hung over the  Germans and their collaborators.

Lying: It's a Tough Racket any More.

Justly or not, we take it for granted that politicians lie, and we tend to believe that they lie more now than they used to.  On that last point, I wonder. I suspect maybe the real truth is that pre-Twitter, pre-blogosphere, pre 24-hour yap yap channels, lying was so much easier.  Case in point, Napoleon the liberator on the occasion of his invasion of Italy:

‘Peoples of Italy!’ the young General Bonaparte proclaimed in April 1796, ‘the French army is coming to break your chains … We shall respect your property, your religion and your customs.’ 

With which compare:

His words doubtless sounded encouraging to people in Italy who had not heard another speech made by the same officer a month earlier. ‘Soldiers!’ he had told his army, ‘you are hungry and naked; the government [the Directory in Paris] owes you much but can give you nothing … I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces, opulent towns, all shall be at your disposal; there you will find honour, glory and riches.’

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2252-2256). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

The Musician's Life May Not Be a Happy One

My friend Carlton who is light years ahead of me on the music front, offers some further thoughts on that last post --the one about Murray Perahia.

Two points, actually.  One, it's can't be just Murray that has this lonely, peripatetic life.  It must be all of them, always out on Friday and Saturday night (and others, if  they they are lucky)--how do they have any home life at all.  I'll bet he's onto something here.  He prompted me to remember that wonderful "memoir" that I posted on a while back, by Renée Fleming.  Quotes because, as I believe I said at the time, as a memoir it's an oddly private book, the work of (so it seems) a private woman--yet at the same time, a wonderful guide on how one builds a career.  For present purposes, the thing I recall is a certain sadness that seems to hang over the project, as if for all her achievement, she's dismayed to find that she is just not having as much fun as she mint be.   And while it's  not quite on point, I remember some stuff I read back in 2001 when the conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli died at the age of 54.  What sticks in my mind are the stories about how conductors in general have  tougher life than you might guess--in their case,  maybe too much partying, but also lots of stress.

And Carlton's second point.  He offers a general (I guess) rebuke for my suggestion that there's something special about Bach and the harpsichord.  Bach--more perhaps than anybody else--transcends any particular instrument: harpsichord maybe, but also piano (at least fortepiano), harp, guitar, string ensemble, whatever.

He's got me there.  My defense is the distortion of my own vision.  As I guess I've said before, I really hated the standard pop I heard all around me in high school. Which is to say, I didn't hear really good music until I got to college--I really didn't know it existed before.   Which is to say that when I first heard the Art of the Fugue I cried (literally) tears of joy.  And my benefactress was Wanda Landowska, on the harpsichord.  You've got to dance with the one that brung ya.  I have a set of the CDs under this roof today.

Carlton offered no quarrel to my suggestions of Perahia and Tureck, but he did offer another name, new to both of us here at Chez Buce. That would be Angela Hewett, and after a brief sampling, heading this way.   Here's a bit of Angela. Starting at 1:41, she explains her preference for piano in Bach performance, with illustrations from the Goldberg Variations:

What Does He Do when the Music Stops?

Mr. and  Mrs. Buce betook themselves down to the Mondavi Center down in Davis last night for an evening's listen to Murray Perahia at the piano.  It was rewarding enough in its own right but it was also the climactic point in a long story arc. Short version: Mrs. Buce has been stalking this guy for years and across continents like some sort of musical Maltese Falcon.  He eluded her a couple of times before but this time she got it.

Rewarding, I say, but I didn't always find myself keeping my mind on the music.  Sure, he was bravura enough, with a kind of precision that sometimes made you wonder if he was trying to torture the piano into playing like a harpsichord.  But I kept drifting off to the context.  Forty years, give or take, with some notable interludes for health issues (problems with a hand, ugh).  Forty years.  And I would guess, a good chunk, maybe most of it, on the road.  On the road meaning--well, what, exactly?  Three concerts a week?  Four?  More?  A different hotel room every night?   I assume he does not travel with an elaborate equipage.  But what, then?  Is he alone?  How does he fill the time?  My friend who writes mystery novels--he actually kind of likes the road, because he says he gets a lot of work done in hotel rooms. But all he needs is a yellow pad, which I assume the concierge will send up.  I've been in a lot of hotel rooms myself, but I never yet saw one that came equipped with a piano.  An electric keyboard, maybe?  Can that be enough?  And if he is alone and at loose ends all this time in strange hotel rooms--well, how does he keep from drinking?  Even if he doesn't drink, his mini-bar bill must be astronomic.

Oh, and a footnote?   What lunatic thought it right to embellish the stage with two enormous clusters of plant life?  I hope--I assume--they cleared it with the artiste first, but what of the audience, who are supposed to remain quiet and well-behaved?  I don't know, I suppose they might have been plastic.   No matter; every time I looked at them, my nose began to crinkle.

Fn.  Actually, Perahia occupies center stage for a culture clash at Chez Buce.  We are the proud owners of two versions of Bach's Goldberg Variations (actually, more than two, but two that count).  Mrs. B favors the Perahia; I pledge my fealty to Rosalyn Tureck.  Although at the end of the day, I still come back to the point that this stuff was written for harpsichord and harpsichord it should be.  So maybe Perahia was on the right track after all.

Here's Perahia with the final aria from the Goldberg:

And here's a bit  of Tureck:

Come Here and you will Find Nothing, Nothing!

Everyone agrees that Venice is different from anywhere else. Visitors immediately see that it has no hills and that its streets are full of water; soon they also notice that it has neither ramparts nor a castle; the Doge’s Palace, the headquarters of the Venetian Empire, is unfortified. As they wander about, they will observe that there are no fountains, no ruins and not many statues in public places; since it was founded after the fall of Rome, it has no amphitheatres, no triumphal arches and no classical archaeologists.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 1712-1716). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Abraham, Brigham and AJ

I've been spending some time with John G. Turner's absorbing biography of Brigham Young and I find my mind seeking him to fit him into a larger culture that includes Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. 

Sure, the comparison is a stretch, but bear with me here.  It seems to me that the period beginning with Jackson and pretty much ending with Lincoln was the one time in American history when raw, unvarnished country boys--nobodies from nowhere--could rise to positions of real leadership,  Rise, moreover, on their own talents and energy, if not always their virtue. 

I'm not quite sure how far I can go with this without torturing the evidence beyond all recognition.   Jackson, surely is he most dramatic example of the three, not least because of his untrammeled and, yes, undisciplined energy: the man who won his great battle after the war was over, the scourge of the Indians, the man who destroyed an economy largely because he didn't understand it and was blissfully untroubled by his own incomprehension.*   Jackson's real contribution, I suspect, was not so much himself but the revolution he crystallized: the explosion of energy from a whole multitude of hitherto nameless and faceless Americans: the "ordinary sort: who proved themselves capable of extraordinary achievement.

Young's beginnings may have been quite as humble as Jackson's but they were close and he was, in any event, the sort who likely wouldn't have been able to make a place for himself in any earlier time.  His achievement may at first blush seem more modest: governor of a :"state" (broadly defined) and not president of an emerging nation.  But reading Turner builds the conviction that it may be easier to underestimate Young precisely because he was more successful: he made it look easy.

Or better: look easy from a distance.  Closer up, you can see what an extraordinary accident he was.  Poorly educated and the possessor of no noteworthy skills--except, perhaps, extraordinary energy--he found himself in a position top put a claim on leadership by the sheer fortuity of Joseph Smith's untimely death.  What he did show from that moment on through the rest of his life was a singular capacity to lead, coupled with (they do not always go together) a remarkable knack for administration.    Taken together, these qualities allowed him to dominate his movement from then on until his death some 30 years later.  It's hard to imagine Mormonism without him: indeed it's an entertaining thought experiment to wonder what might have become of these peculiar people had it been Young and not Smith who had been murdered by the mob in Illinois.

Which brings us to Lincoln who, in comparison with the other two, emerges as even more extraordinary than he does on his own.  Starting with at least as fragmentary an education as the other two, he equipped himself in a skilled trade and a learned profession--and as perhaps the best writer/speaker of ll our 44 Presidents.    And the elemental energy y that seems to define the other two--at least on the outside, Lincoln showed none of that.  .   What he did show was that still center in the eye of the storm that made him so hard to overestimate, so easy to undervalue.

I don't mean to belittle Young here.  Rather, my point is that each of the three personifies and even articulates a culture that no one before it could have anticipated and that we in our own time find difficult even to comprehend.


*I confess I didn't always feel this way: I grew up on Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson which now seems to me to be to be a bit of starry-eyed hero worship: Schlesinger in training for the courtier role he played so comfortably for Jack Kennedy.

Oh and another footnote.  It fell to me in my delusion to suggest to his mother that we name our son "Andrew Jackson;" we could call him "AJ."  I am eternally in her debt that she would have none of it.

The Dullest Post I Will Ever Write, I Hope

Here's a post that most--all--readers will regard as one of transcendent obscurity and mind-numbing dullness (if they read far enough to judge).  But I don't have much of any place else to lay it down so it goes here.

The topic is finance, in particular corporate finance, in particular leverage--the ratio of debt to equity on the right-hand side of the balance sheet.  Back when rocks were soft and I studied corporate finance under the great Marvin Chirelstein, we began our inquiry with a case in which the decider undertook to choose the "right" level of leverage (the answer was--I forget).  Anyway, later in the book we learned that there is no "right" level of leverage--the assets don't know who owns them and you can't expand the asset side of the balance sheet by monkeying around* with the liability side.    The jargon name for this insight is "the Modigliani-Miller irrelevance principle," and wouldn't it be cool to be remembered for expanding the realm of irrelevance?

Teaching that stuff now I work out a crude classroom example where the company gets all equity finance at 10 percent, but he could replace equity with debt at only eight percent.  At first blush you say-hey wait a minute, if you pay less for debt, there is more for equity.  Capitalize that equity share at the equity rate and you seem to make equity richer, i.e., to expand the balance sheet.

Can this be right?  No, it is not right.  The point is that equity behind debt is more risky than equity alone, and so demands  higher rate of return.  Once you factor in the risk, the aggregate value of the asset winds up the same.

But here's where I accidentally walked off a cliff.  I was improvident enough to ask myself--well, how do you know the "debt rate?"  Do you just pluck it out of the air or is there some way to derive it from the pure equity play?  First thought: well, senior debt ought to get the same return as pure equity would have gotten because it is facing the same asset value as pure equity. But then it dawned on me: no, senior is not facing the same asset value as pure equity.   Recall that there are no certainties in the world, and the "asset value" is best understood as the probability-weighted sum of all possible outcomes.  Equity gets the full spectrum of possible for values. But debt never gets more than the face amount of the debt.  If the asset value ends up at the top of the spectrum, equity just pays off the debt and keeps the residual for itself.    Or as the option pricing guys would say, buy the stock write a call.

The mind bending inference compelled by this analysis is that "senior debt"is actually less valuable than  pure equity.  Which is exactly the opposite of where I started out.  And, I might add, exactly the opposite of what I have been teaching all these years.

I must be making a rookie error, but what?  

Okay, resume your ordinary lives.  

*Most of my students are Chinese LLM candidates. They are a conscientious bunch, and their English is functional, if not elegant. But what in Sam Hill do they understand when I talk about "monkeying around?"  And who in Sam Hill is Sam  Hill?

Not Your Mother's Israel

I've made my way through Max Blumenethal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, with profit though I wouldn't say exactly with pleasure.  Any book that might be entitled The NeoNazification of Israel is not going to wind up on the shelf next to your DVD of Springtime for Hitler.  The book is, in short, pretty much what the author promises--a serious of vignettes, 70 or so, designed to show what is really going on in Israel these days, and a pretty picture it is not.

I've also read a bit of the blowback-notably the exchanges between Blumenthal and Eric Alterman (start here and Google for responses by Blumenthal, Alterman and others; this one is particularly subtle).  Though I'm actually a little surprised that there isn't more blowback; the American Likud noise machine must have decided that the best strategy against Blumenthal would be to ignore him--but I noticed a full page ad for the book in the NYT a couple of Sundays ago so it sounds like he isn't just going to go away.

I can't add much to the give-and-take although it is perhaps already obvious that I tend to think Blumenthal has on the whole to the better of the exchange (I'm open to the possibility that there are particular instances of error or distortion--with 70-odd examples, there are bound to be).  What I would like to do is to offer a bit of context. Specifically, I suspect that those of my generation (is there anybody left in my generation?) simply haven't got there mind around the idea of just how complicated the demographics of Israel have become.

That is: however careful we are in keeping up with the news, we can't disentangle ourselves from the sense of gauzy optimism that consoled us back when Israel was all about earnest social democrats building kibbutzes to make the desert bloom (saying nothing about the sense of guilty relief that might have overtaken us when the refugees on Cyprus took events in their own hands and simply claimed the country for themselves, rather than trying--heaven forbid!--to come here).

Yes, yes, we know better, sort of, but the seductive old vision (buttressed by a liberal dose of Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof ) dies hard.

Or maybe it is just me.  Anyway, review some basics, culled variously from Blumenthal and a bit of supplementary Googling.  For starters, some 20 percent of the Israeli population is Arab; most of the rest is "Jewish," although there are a lot of problems of definition here.  Of the Jewish portion, barely half are "Ashkenazim:" the ones who pretty much structured the new nation and fashioned its narrative.  You knew that, or you should have: you've been on notice since they elected Menachem Begin--himself from Belarus, but in politics the voice of the voiceless.

Way more important, I think--and still pretty much misunderstood in the west--would be the immigration of something like a million Jews from the old Soviet Union, mostly with the enthusiastic support of the United States foreign policy establishment. And what a mixed bag they are: something like a third aren't even "Jewish" by theological standards and an unknown portion really don't have any tie to Judaism at all, except that it provided a ticket out.  The cohort surely includes a large number of people who have made Israel second to (almost) none in skilled labor and high-tech entrepreneurship; also a who's who of Russian gangsters who get to call Israel home as long as they practice their trade elsewhere (recall how Cyprus ceded over its banks to the Russians on more or less the same principle). The cohort also includes quite a large component of the most bellicose nationalists--but a nationalism not so much rooted in Biblical tradition, nor even the memory of the Holocaust, as in the notion of "we're here, stay out."

Which brings me to the final major piece in the puzzle: per Blumenthal, something in excess of a million "Israelis" now live outside the Promised Land--lots in America, quite a few in Germany, particularly Berlin.  Apparently most of these are young, highly skilled; most descend from the old Ashkenazi originals.  Which is to say: an Exodus (heh) of "traditional" Israelis that more or offsets the former-Soviet immigration.  Not your mother's Israel, nor anybody else's mother's, either.

More: For on Russian emigres in Israel, go here.  For more on the "demographic time bomb" facing Israel, go here (though I don't think I buy it).

Man's Work

I could swear I read somewhere when I was young that the average railway brakeman in the 19th Century had a one in seven chance of dying in bed.  This is surely wrong.  But does sound like the brakeman's job was no day at the beach:

Coupling and braking had been a technical and safety problem for the railroads since their very invention. The coupling between cars involved a crude link-and-pin device that required brakeman to stand between the cars, guide the link into a socket, drop the pin in place, and, if necessary, hammer it down. Not easy, not safe. In the dark, with a slippery oil lantern in one hand, it was even more perilous. It was said that if a man was looking for work as a brakeman and claimed to be experienced, he was asked to show his hands—missing digits were the key to confirmation he had previously worked in the job....Braking, too, was primitive in the extreme. Locomotives had no mechanisms to slow them down apart from putting them in reverse, which good drivers did only in emergency. Instead, once the driver got the signal to slow down, a brakeman had to clamber along the roof of the train from the rear and apply the brakes fitted on each car. Normally, there would also be a brakeman at the front who would work his way toward the back of the train. There was no end of potential for accidents with this arrangement, nOt least the risk to the brakemen themselves. As a former brakeman described the process, it “took nerve, coordination, timing and a perfect sense of balance, to go over the top of a freight car—winter or summer ...  rain, snow, sleet, ice all over the roofs and on brake wheels and handholds.”

 Christian Wolmar, The Great Railroad Revolution 166-67 (2012).   Wolmar makes a few more general points about railway labor in the golden age of railroad construction--say, 1863 to 93.  He shows that the owners were avid for  manpower to chop trees, blast away rock faces, spread gravel and lay track.  Most of these were awful jobs--fit only for Irish or Chinese (sarcasm).  But nobody in those days worried about the end of work. 

Met HD Rusalka

Mr. and Mrs. Buce share of a vivid memory of their first visit together to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  It was 1990.  The show was Rusalka, with Renée Fleming.  It was coming on summer. We were way up in the balcony, and it was hot.

The trouble is, this memory has to be wrong in each critical respect.  The Met first sowed Rusalka in 1993.  And Fleming didn't play it there until 1997.  Must have been some other opera, or star, or year or whatever.

Give us this much, though: we have seen Rusalka more than once, more than twice in our long and varied career, and we know that it is Fleming's signature role.  Indeed while she did not play it in full at the Met until 1997, the showpiece aria-"Song to the Moon"--was her breakthrough performance as a competition piece at the Met back an 1988.   It has formed a sort of arc for her career.

Even if we didn't see her before, we did see her again yesterday in the Met HD.  It was a fascinating and rewarding performance.  With this kind of history, it was bound to be a Met crowd-pleaser.  It might even have been Fleming's choice--one gets the impression she has been able to dictate he choices of late. Still, I have to wonder how much she enjoyed it.  She was, granted, in good voice.  And while she's not my favorite Met superstar, I have to say I've always liked and admired her (or at least, ever since I read her fascinating memoir/briefing-book on how to build a career).  She's careful and disciplined and never phones anything in  Stll. when all is said and done, it is still an ingenue role: about a nymph and her sexual awakening.  Fleming is 55.  They had her up a tree--really.  You could see she was worrying about getting  her wig entangled in the branches.  Or worse, simply falling out.  You've got to think she is wondering whether, at this time of life, she should be looking for other uses for her talents.

It was nonetheless, as I say, a rewarding performance--much mores for us than it was 23 years ago (heh!) that first time.  I, at least, have a better sense of Czech culture--the folk tales arising out of the bogs and forests (I think also of the Pripet Marshes, not that far east, and of Carol Burnette, singing of "The Swamps of Home.)  I think I can understand Dvořák better--as an orchestral composer, even if he might not have had quite the knack for opera (I mean, what opera composer would let his Soprano go mute through the second act).  I think I can appreciate the kind of scoring that just couldn't have happened before Wagner (same for Verdi's Falstaff, almost exactly contemporaneous).

I must say I also got something out of those snippets of intermission interview that have become a staple of Met HDs.  I appreciated Piotr Beczala that he's not there to be a star; that he is part of a performance and he wants to make the whole thing work. I was greatly intrigued by Yannick Nezet-Seguin, the conductor, recounting how he tells his orchestra that they are there to perform "three Dvořák symphonies"--which nails both the virtue of the production and its limitation. And you've got to love Dolora Zajick as the witch--a role which, it says here, she also played in the Met's first outing back in 1997. She knows who she is and what she can do. And for what it is worth, turns out that she is only seven years older than the star.

Here's a treeless rendition of the "Song to the Moon" from the Proms in 2010:

The Affirmative Action Baby: A Different Take

I've been chatting with my friend the Wichita bureau over the puzzle of why Barak Obama has turned out to be such a mediocre President.  This blog post is the result although I should make clear that I haven't shown it to my colleague, and the opinions expressed herein are my own.

Be clear this is not a post about "born in Kenya" or "hates America" or "coming for your guns."  I'll certify that I think Obama is a decent man, even a smart man.  I hear that he masters his brief and that is comfortable making decisions (an underappreciated skill, I think, ironically rare in executive ranks).  I voted for him twice and  I'm pretty sure (particularly giving the indescribably awful competition) do the same thing over if I had to do it again.   It isn't even disappointment at Obama's centrism.    I know that everybody is a secondary source to himself after a while but I like to think that I knew he wasn't nearly the liberal that his enthusiasts took him to be.  I guess I am a bit surprised at his authoritarianism on the matter of spying and the phenomenon of demonizing journalists but for the moment, I think that's neither here nor there.

No: the question now is the matter of competence and in particular, how come Obama is so awful at the task of "leadership," understood here to mean the task of defining the issues and cajoling the troops to follow him--the characteristic, in other words, that made both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan so remarkable.  

Again, I like to think I saw this coming, though I can't honestly say I foresaw anything like its current dimensions.   Still, I had heard in particular about his career as president of the Harvard Law Review--the most important post, as his critics acidly recall--that he had ever held before.  I wasn't there but the story has been told.  Way I understand it, the board was riven between conservative and liberal factions who distrusted--all right, cordially hated--one another.  Obama presented himself as--well, no as the "compromise" candidate, but as a good presentable face forward, who could maintain an image of solidarity at the review while perhaps holding the contending factions somewhat at bay.

That can be an important role and if I am reading the scene right, then I'd have to say he played it well. But for his future career, it's a role that doesn't require him actually to do much of anything, except to stay cool and work to keep the temperature down.

All this may be old stuff. But now I'd like to expand the horizon.   Looking at Obama's pre-Harvard life here, isn't it possible to speculate that there might be a pattern here?  Don't we have a guy who is, first, pretty bright; second, likable (at least on the surface); and third, cool to the point of remote?  The kind of guy who, in short, is likely to get helped on his way up the ladder, even though he isn't really required to do anything?

I admit, in an effort to preempt criticism, that what I'm talking about here is a kind of affirmative action. But not what you might think.  I'm not thinking "stupid kid gets a break that should have gone to a smart white guy." I guess  I am thinking "smart, likable kid gets a helping hand without ever having to do very much."   And note that  don't mean to complain about any "unfairness" in the process--except possibly the unfairness to him insofar as it brings him up the escalator without ever realizing that hasn't really been seasoned.

One way to see this process at work is to consider the way Obama has presented himself persistently in times of crisis.  He certainly doesn't put your package in the top drawer, like Lyndon Johnson.  He doesn't try to mock or deride even to undercut his adversaries.   What he does do is to remind us that he's serious about good government, that he's thought hard about the issue, that he isn't influenced by base or unworthy pressures, and he more or less assumes (ha!) that his adversaries are doing the same thing.

I think you'd have to concede by now that this posture hasn't proven very effective.  More remarkable, in a world where appearances count for so much, it doesn't even seem very effective: think of how often Obama has taken a position which when you stop to think about it is perfectly reasonable but which, as presented, comes across as earnest, ineffectual, just naive.

Only one other point: I guess I'm also surprised that he doesn't seem to have learned from the experience. Some people grow into the job; some shrink.  Obama seems to have stayed pretty much the same. They say the Presidency is, or becomes, a prison. I certainly don't envy him the next three years (I didn't envy him the past five either, but let that be).   He's going to be miserable a lot and certainly won't all be his fault.  I do wish he could develop a bit of the grit and guile I suggest here, and which has been so lacking in his performance up to now.

What am I, Chopped Liver? (Fama-Markowitz Department)

I wanted to introduce my finance students to the efficient capital market hypothesis (don’t waste your time trying to pick stocks) and portfolio  diversification (reduce risk without sacrificing return). Because of time constraints, I had to do it by lecture, not problem sets.   So I jumped up and down, I waved my arms, I chewed the scenery, blah blah.  Then I put up a grid of 15 stocks. I explained that we were to pick five to make a diversified portfolio.  I picked one, then I asked a student to pick one; I said he could choose either one he wanted (because it would add diversification) or one he did not want (because it would not add diversification). 

Result: every single student I asked said “I pick x” (or y, or z)—and why?  “Because it is a good company and the price will go up.”

I might as well have entertained them by playing the saxophone.

Why Didn't the Japanese Make Better Use of its Conquests?

The Wichita bureau has been thinking again:

I think it is pretty well established (or at least commonly believed) that Japan lost WWII because of logistics and the US’s industrial base was much bigger (and better mobilized). That got me to wondering: Japan had over run much of N. China from the 30s on and had been in much of Korea since 1905. It had a huge army still in Manchuria after the war ended.

It had lost a major battle with the Russians (led by Zhukov) in a Cannae like envelopment - a technique he used against the Germans. So it hadn’t pushed into Siberia or tried to take Vladivostok. They also controlled SE Asia (rubber, tin and some oil) and the Dutch East Indies (oil).

But it had a huge part of the most industrialized part of China. Why didn’t it wring more military equipment and stuff out of the Chinese? Were they so poorly organized? Were the Chinese keeping them so busy that they couldn’t build an industrial base? Didn’t they have the capital base to do it?

They fought the war with the equipment that they started with - and developed little new in the way of guns or planes. The army that Zhukov captured was largely equipped with old stuff - WWI era guns and little heavy stuff. And poorly clothed. (the victory on the eve of the German invasion made Zhukov's reputation with Stalin).

To which I respond:

Most interesting and I never gave it any thought before but I suspect has something to do with the fact that they were such bloody awful conquerors. They did everything they could to demean and alienate the new subject peoples. Lots of yellow faces were glad to see Japanese coming because they were not white faces. What they got was torture and humiliation. Like the Germans in Russia but entirely unlike the British (and before them, the French) in India--who built everything on co-opting the locals and collaborating with local elites. ... 

Possible second thought: Japanese war/social machine is steady and stable but moves extremely slowly. Slow to get in gear. And slow to get out: Japanese have been in trouble since 1990 but the machine keeps grinding as if there was nothing wrong

So, what are we missing?

Footnote to the Workapocalypse

Thinking about all that talk re the non-future of jobs: I spend more time than is good for  me at a motel next to  campus, 90 miles from home.  I was reflecting the other day on the folks who make it happen.  In particular, the handyman/gardener/factotum.  He's a Latino, maybe 50, substantial, not portly.  Neatly dressed (neater than I sometimes, I suspect).  Thing is, he seems to be a happy man, and I suspect I might know why: fact is, he's got a pretty good job.   He gets to do different stuff in different seasons and on different days. He hoses down the parking lots. He moves around some of the heavy-duty trash (he has kind of a private trash yard out back by the fence). He manages those lovely gardens and flower boxes that change from season to season.  And he has one--no, maybe two--of those closets full of stuff that a handyman might need.

Of course I haven't any idea what he might earn and I suspect it is not as much as an investment banker (nor a law professor).  But if they know what is good for them (I think maybe they do), then they are paying him a bit more than the market rate.  Fact is, he is what someone on Downton Abbey would surely call "a treasure." You just can't get that kind very often.

But more than that, he comes close to being his own boss.   I suppose somebody tells him what to do sometimes, but I don't recall that I've ever seen it.  My take is that as long as he gets the job done--and it looks like he does--then nobody much cares how he goes about it. No, turn it around, then his bosses have the good sense to stay out of his way.   Interesting work at decent pay with no hassles from the boss--wouldn't we all want just that?

I suppose I can compare him to the gardeners on campus.  Back when I came first here, the gardeners seemed to work as "employees" or maybe even "labor"--with lots of managers, telling them what to do.  At some point a few years back, that seemed to change.  My impression is that now, each gardener has his own turf.  It's his (or her--several women) responsibility to keep it spiffy,. his (or her) decision to figure out how.  Maybe that, maybe something else--but whatever, it seems to work.  The place looks on the whole pretty nice and I don't recall ever seeing anybody just learning on a rake.

I think you may see some of that attitude evening among the janitors.  I get the impression that maybe they, too, are on a "results" model: all is well as long as the place does not smell like pee (okay, there's more to it than that, but I couldn't help myself).  I ran into one here on a Sunday. By way of small talk, I said, "don't they ever give you a day off?"  She said something like "well, I like to do my big projects on weekends when people are out of the way."  Wow.  On her free time?  Overtime?  Comp time?   Or just pride of craft.  Granted she has to clean up shit, but it is not a shit job in the David Graeber sense.

[Fn.:  Readers are invited to compare all those happy service employees to my favorite Simpsons character, Groundskeeper Willie,  Wiki describes him as "incompetent," along with "feral" and "quick to anger."   I'm not so sure.  My guess is that he might be better at his job than people realize, although he does seem to feel the need to keep the rest of the world at bay.]

Here's a Keeper: Railroads

Here's a keeper: Christian Wolmar, The Great Revolution: The History of Trains in America.  It's not particularly heavyweight, neither in doorstop nor in academic terms: the pitch is perhaps just a bit above American Heritage or The History Channel. But the virtue is that he seems to be interested in the stuff that interests me: the legal, structural and financial problems of getting, as you might say, the show on the road.  Among other things, I might just be forgetting but I don't recall any other railroad history that actually discusses eminent domain.

Two points in particular at the moment.  One, Wolmar does a wonderful job of reminding us how much of early railroad development and finance came direct from the state.  This shouldn't be a surprise: we know that the modern off-the-rack private corporation is largely an artifact of the 1830s, not before. But it is interesting to watch, say, small towns in the backward slaveholder south falling all over themselves to  assemble a rail project that will carry them (as the saying went) from "no place in particular to nowhere at all."  It would be interesting (but somebody has probably already done it) to drill down and compare "direct government enterprise" (on the one hand) with "private enterprise lubricated by wholesale corruption" on the other.  Reminds me of a point I was bemused by a couple of weeks ago: how into the 20C, there were serious people who just took it for granted that the manufacture of arms should be done by the government only--to important to be left to the market.

And two--Wolmar offers a fascinating spin on the phase during which rail projects went from being a local enterprise --"here to the river"--to being national in scope--"here to San Francisco," or at least Chicago  He poses the question--why didn't it happen sooner.  And he suggests: before rail, nobody thought in terms of  national transport.  Everything happened within 20 or 30 miles from home  People didn't sit around thinking, "if only somebody invented the railroad, we could get to San Francisco in a hurry."  Rather, they waited until after the technology existed and then said "hey wait--we could use this to get to San Francisco."  Another case, I suppose, of supply creating its own demand.  For extra credit, the student is invited to draw comparisons between this phenomenon in the rail era and parallel developments in the computer age.

The Epigraph

It's Paul Volcker, but isn't it also life?

Via John Authers, and h/t Joel.

How to Assure that Your Child Will Wind Up With an Obituary in The New York Times

Skimming the obit page of The New York Times this morning, I find myself meditating on the puzzle of upward mobility. Here is an only slightly skewed series of extracts.  Names have been stripped out as a distraction.

[He]was born in Manhattan on   the only child of   a tailor.  

His mother was a milliner; his father  was a Broadway ticket broker

His mother was a homemaker, and his father  worked in the livestock industry.

His father was a farmer, and until high school [he] learned his lessons in a one-room schoolhouse.

[He] was born   the last of six children. His father,   a postal employee, was a music lover ...

 His father, a Pullman porter, was often away on cross-country railroad trips, and [he] was raised mainly by his mother, a nurse.

[He was] the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His father and grandfather were tailors. 

His father owned a series of small millinery and garment-production businesses.

Of all the obits that I scanned  this morning, only three seemed to come from anything remotely like noteworthy backgrounds. One is psychoanalyst Martin S. Bergmann, whose father is identified as  "a noted philosopher."  The second is Irving Milchberg, born into  " a Warsaw housewares merchant’s family;" he gained distinction as a street urchin and gun runner, working under the nose of the Gestapo.  And the third was the child of a musicologist and concert violinist. That would be Pete Seeger, famed as a Communist, banjo player, and voice of the people.

Still, it seems the lesson of all this is that if you want your kid to wind up with an obituary in The  New York Times,  go into the rag trade.  Millinery is good.  Tailoring may be even better.