The Weekend Interview with Paul Johnson: Why America Will Stay on Top - WSJ.com

The Weekend Interview with Paul Johnson: Why America Will Stay on Top - WSJ.com

Review & Outlook: The Futures of America - WSJ.com

Review & Outlook: The Futures of America - WSJ.com

Linking Dodd Frank and Capital Flight and NYSE-DB merger

Hbr

On Poetry - Robert Hass’s Empathy and Desire - NYTimes.com

On Poetry - Robert Hass’s Empathy and Desire - NYTimes.com: "Hass’s greatest strength as a poet, however, is his equanimity, a quality that sets him apart from peers who rely on a sense of imbalance. That imbalance can register as pressure (that is, the language of the poem may seem inadequate to the task it’s asked to perform), or it can involve deliberate disjunctions in voice, tone, syntax and so forth. Reading a good Hass poem, though, is like watching a painter whose brush strokes are so reassuringly steady you hardly notice how much complex and unsettling depth has been added to the canvas."

If You like Bill Evans

Found this while listening to Pandora

T.B.C. (Terminal Baggage Claim)

by

Chick Corea

on

Akoustic Band

Video Review--A Dance to the Music of Time

A Dance to the Music of Time

 I gave it 4 out of 5 stars.

Description from Netflix:

Based on Anthony Powell's literary opus, this miniseries centers on Brit Nicholas Jenkins (James Purefoy) who, over the course of decades, observes the upper crust's uncanny ability to maintain propriety while keeping their secrets and scandals under wraps. Tea cakes ar...e spread with infidelity, failure, scandal and politics in this epic tale that spans from the 1920s to the '60s. John Gielgud, Miranda Richardson and Simon Russell Beale co-star.

Enjoying this book about William Howard Taft

 Let's face it--it would be tough for anyone to be sandwiched between the monumental and office defining presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Sadly, Taft was a very talented guy who just did not have the political temperament necessary to be President .  Taft had  distinguished career as an appellate judge, Governor of the Phillipines,  and a Secretary of War before his Presidency. And, he was a very capable Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court following his one term. Perhaps, Taft serves as a cautionary tale for all of us that just because you are excellent at one thing, you may not be excellent at everything and the difficulty of taking a role that is just unsuited to your fundamental personality.

Trollope Quote

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. --Anthony Trollope.

NYRblog - Girls! Girls! Girls! - The New York Review of Books

NYRblog - Girls! Girls! Girls! - The New York Review of Books
This piece by Tony Judt is interesting just as memoir. But it also raises the question whether our hyper-sensitive education and work environment has made mentoring more difficult. I often feel like I keep younger colleagues at greater arms length than my mentors did. This avoids the risk of being misunderstood, but my mentors knew a lot more about me as a person than I will ever learn about the younger people I coach. Knowing more about me as a person enbale them to give better advice.

Three by Powell and Pressburger

Three of Powell and Pressburger's World War II movies are especially dear to me because of their exploration of the Anglo-American Entente. The first, 49th Parallel (1942), is a very open appeal by the British to Americans to come in on the Allied side against the Axis. One of the most interesting scenes is set in a German Mennonite community in Canada. It underscores that the community of interest the British are appealing to is a community of values, not ethnicity.



The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945), is the most British of the three. It both is sympathetic to Germans, led astray by Prussian and then Nazi militarism, but also seems to warn against loss of honor by adopting an enemy's values in defense of one's own values.





A Canterbury Tale (1949) suggests commonality of values between the British and American's.



All are good watches with fine character actors.

Scoop by Waugh

Although considered by the Observer as a near masterpiece, Scoop is a short, light and very broad satire of the British newspaper industry, british foreign policy and African kleptocracies that European nations compete for and maintain. The decline of the newspaper industry and European influence in Africa has lessened the force of Waugh's satire considerably. Lampooning the mighty has a fine tradition; send-ups of the once mighty pack lees force. In addition, sixty years of sad post-colonial history makes Waugh's satire of the government of Ishmealia (Waugh's fictional African state based losely on Abyssinia) less funny too. The characters are less well etched than those in Waugh's other novels, and its tough to care too much about most of the novel's parade of cartoons. in particular, many of the puns embedded in the characters names are easy to miss for the modern American reader. But it is a fun, light, short read if one is in the mood for something highly satirical.

WXPN Welcomes Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs: An Evening with Sid ‘n’ Susie

A fan of Power-Pop, I have always liked Matthew Sweet. "Under the Covers, Volume 1," was a nice homage to to some Sixties' classics. "Under the Covers, Volume 2," which covers a number of Seventies' pop songs is just as good. This should be a good show.

Ben Folds Coming to the Grand, October 5, 2009

Saw him last Septemeber at the Mann Center. Very entertaining.

Voltaire Quote

“One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say”

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A Quote and a Thought on Wrting

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. --Anthony Trollope.

Trollope apparently rose each morning at four a.m. and wrote for three hours. This allowed him to churn out his prodigious catalog of literary works and work for a living. Graham Greene is said to have used a similar method. Two hours a day equalled 500 words of prose a day for Greene, or 180 thousand pages a year. That comes out two a little more than two good length novels and a novella each year.

Book Review--The Beatles by Bob Spitz

This was a Christmas gift nearly two years ago that I picked up and put down several times. I finally finished it and I was glad i saw it though to the end. At 856 pages, it was at some times, especially in the pre-Beatlemania slow going. The Beatles do not hit the big time until page 383 almost half-way through the book. It is here that the book really takes off. The book s fairly convincing in delivering on its unstated thesis that Beatlemania was extraordinarily had, physically and emotionally on the Beatles. Spitz is also a good sketch artists of the various personalities that float in and out of the story. For the Beatles later songs, he also provides interesting tid bits about their origins and how they were created. The earlier part of The Beatles is slower going for three reasons. First, Spitz tends to put his subjects on the couch , which is tedious to begin with. But it also gives rise to the notion that individual events in peoples childhoods are highly significant as to how they will act on particular occasions in their adulthood. This causes Spitz to bang on far too long about all sorts of boring trivia about the Beatles adolescent years. Second, although his insights into the composition of the Beatles songs from Rubber Soul on were interesting, the Beatles earlier songs just don't bear the weight of Spitz's exposition. Put differently, it is more fun to listen to "Please, Please Me," than to read or think about it. Third, life in obscurity tends to be more boring than stardom. if nothing else, the Beatles could afford to be weirder once they had money.

All and all this is a must read for Beatles fans. Just don't let the first 300 pages or so bog you down.

Book Review--The World Crisis

At 800 plus pages, Winston Churchill's 1931 overview on the First World War probably only appeals to Churchill and WWI junkies. Like many WWI overviews, the World Crisis is highly anglo-centric. The Somme, Dardenelles, and Jutland get through treatment, but developments in eastern Europe do not get much attention. And, as a political participant in Britain's prosecution in the first two years of the war, Churchill has some scores to settle and positions to protect. But the prose sparkles and Churchill clearly possesses the rare gift to see issues in broad and strategic terms. Alas, that strategic vision was not unerring.

If

It is difficult to imagine If being made today. The art house sensibility and the glorification of adolescent rebelliousness have become enduring thought cliches. But the denoument, the misunderstood and wrongfully repressed rebels mowing down their school masters and mates is impossible to stomach in light of a decade of school massacres, a la columbine. When it was written, it probably intended to shock because the slaughter was so outlandish, that one could only contemplate it as an outlandish allegory. Now that the allegory has been outstripped by reality, the slaughter does not shock and seems like grim exaltation. http://www.amazon.com/If-Criterion-Collection-Malcolm-McDowell/dp/B000OPPAEW

Two quotes by Samuel Johnson

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

and

People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.

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Churchil quote from"World Crisis"

Regarding his reorganization of the munitions ministry in 1917.



"Instead of struggling through the jungle on foot I rode comfortably on an elephant whose trunk could pick up a pin or uproot a tree with equal ease, and from whose back a wide scene lay open. "