Snoblog

Back from the Dead

2006-03-26T11:25:00.000-08:00

Well, a recent plug about me from my friend Meghan Daum over at The Elegant Variation has encouraged me to write a few words. I do this despite the fact that my sister Molly over at aptly named Molly.com has been urging me to write forever. But little brothers have an age-old right to ignore big sisters. And why should I write? The dissertation-writing process leaves me dried-up and blocked and I come to doubt that anything I write has any real meaning. Perhaps this is all part of the way graduate school builds character and my feeling is universal in the academic world.

So, since guilt prevents me from enjoying anything that doesn't have to do with history, the only movie I could justify seeing this weekend was CSA, a pseudo-documentary about the Southern victory in the Civil War. Or "The War of Northern Aggression," as some like to say. Since I'm now working on a Civil War chapter that deals with Henry Adams trying to convince the New York Times-reading public of 1861 that the war is, or should be, very much about slavery, the movie resonated on a few themes not much in the public consciousness these days. Like the fact that Lincoln's first goal was preservation of the Union and his theory of the war was that the South had no constitutional right to secede. Adams kept pounding home the concept that the war was about slavery and not only that, without the moral authority of that issue, Europe would follow her economic interests and interfere on behalf of the South. He had a good point: If the war was about the very localized idea that states had no constitutional right to secede, why would Europe care? In fact, hadn't the colonies separated from England under a very similar theory? But if the abstract and universal principle of "freedom" were at stake, then Britain, with her anti-slave and Dissenter heritage, and France with her supposed commitment to the principles of the Revolution, could hardly weigh in to preserve a nation built on bondage.

CSA does a creditable job of depicting an alternative America. Most disturbing perhaps are the ostensible commercial breaks which give a window into a country where slavery has become mainstream. The plug for a tv-show called "Runaway" has footage so close in appearance to the reality of "Cops" -- white officers pursuing blacks -- that one wonders if this is irony or reflection.

As for me, the most pertinent question is not how finding the moral imperative for a war defines its place in history (a question much on my mind since I can find no real moral imperative behind certain nameless wars) but, "how much of my dissertation do I write today?"

Go Not in Search of Monsters

2005-07-12T09:49:00.000-07:00

Playing as I am in the fields of empire this season, I occasionally come across golden nuggets laying about. Henry Adams, who is the subject of my disseration, has quite a few things to say on the subject of empire. Perhaps he was informed by his grandpapa, J.Q. Adams, who on Independence Day in 1821 made the following comment:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been unfurled, there will America's heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause by the countenance of her voice and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that, by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the color and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world; she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.

We sometimes choose our historic symbols with circumspection, and wisely no one has been dredging up the spirit of poor ole' J.Q. to rationalize under-the-thumb democracy as our grossest domestic export. No, perhaps it's best to keep John Quincy in the vague and fuzzy pantheon of dead presidents. Let's just keep his political philosophy in the "quaint" box for now. Indeed the argument today seems to be whether there are justifiable wars of expansion, as if what we need is atonement or affirmation. Once again we seek to make the world safe for Democracy, capital "D." One argument against this is that the justification of Democracy, for the United States, has too often been the calling card for empire. Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, -- bequeathing Democracy seems to end up, despite our best intentions, an imperial slog-fest. In the Philippines, of course, the anti-American "insurrection" lasted officially for three years, and unofficially for more than a decade; several hundred thousand Filipino civilians died so that their own revolution could be substituted for an American one.

So here we are in the slog-fest and we can't deny that fact. When George Bush spoke the other week and reminded us that we were staying in Iraq until the mission was complete (and who among us did not remember that he had long ago announced the mission accomplished), it was only a rhetorical flourish. We're not staying there until the mission is complete. A presidential babelfish is called for: We're stuck there. What we need now, rather than more justifications for spreading "Democracy," is to question what this imperial project, what all such projects, have done and will do to our own republic. The answer can be pretty scary, for when we go in search of monsters, we may discover the monster is us.

Cross-posted at histori-blogography

Iraq -- A Compound Phrase for Irony and Agony.

2005-05-31T09:37:00.000-07:00

As you are all probably aware, Newsweek Magazine recently published a story alleging an incident of Koran desecration at Guantanamo which turned out to be suspect.

White House spokesman Scott McLellan was appalled that a large organization dedicated to Constitutional principles like the First Amendment could act on inaccurate information and proceed to put lives at risk. "The report has had serious consequences," he said. "People have lost their lives. The image of the United States abroad has been damaged."

I would say that indignation works better when you have not committed the same offense, to a magnitude of power unfathomable. It seems that one of the great MIA's in the War on Terror has been irony, because Scott McLellan clearly has lost all sense of it. Acting on inaccurate information?? Putting lives at risk??? Damaging the image of the US abroad???? Indeed, perhaps Mr. McLellan knows something we don’t. Perhaps he knows that irony is confined to a secret detention center and is right now standing on a box in a corner, hooked up to the power supply with a garbage bag over its head. Or that irony is being smothered in a naked pyramid pile right along with paradox, satire, sardonicism, and, oh yeah, honesty.

But of course, bullshit still stands around, taking souvenir pictures, smiling, and giving us all a hearty thumbs up.

Meanwhile, my good friend and colleague Chris Bray, an amazing grad student, Teaching Assistant and all-around great intellect, has been recalled to active duty and will probably be going to Iraq in a few weeks.

Ironically, his dissertation work focuses on, among other things, some confluences between imperialism and racism.

Good luck, Chris, and in all earnestness, God Bless.

The Catalog of Atrocities and My Grandmother's Butter

2004-12-14T08:32:00.000-08:00

It's holiday time and that means my mailbox gets overburdened with the paraphernalia of pushers -- excuse me -- marketers of false cheer. Slick catalogs spill out every time I open the box. They slide to the floor in a torrent and make me drop my briefcase and whatever else I'm carrying in an effort to collect them all before one of the heavily scented seniors who lives in my building careens around the corner into the spill, slipping and falling, and then demanding from building management a copy of the security video of the lobby to use as evidence against me in the inevitable lawsuit.

Christmas brings out my best holiday neurotic ideations.

One particular catalog page, open on the floor, caught my interest. Beside a picture of a laughing redhead who stands with a friend next to a park bench is written, with italics and bold:

"I AM inspired by stories that endure, like my grandma's stories of evenings by the radio and fresh churned butter. Stories that last because they're about things that are real and rich and human, not synthetic like so much in life now. Wearing organic cotton is like that for me."

Now, doesn't that make you yearn for authenticity? Manipulative bastards. They got me thinking all warm and fuzzy thoughts about my grandma's fresh churned butter. Thing is, I don't know about you, but my grandma was probably too busy being chased by Cossacks across the plains of Mitteleuropa to care much about fresh churned butter. And I'm guessing you don't concern yourself much with foods that spoil quickly when you're huddled in steerage with the rest of the masses yearning to be free.

Come to think of it, sticks of butter wrapped in wax paper and readily available at the A&P probably made my grandmother pretty goddamned happy that she was finally living a life that was, if not rich, at least, and I quote, "real . . . and human." When it comes down to it though, my grandmother probably preferred to use schmaltz to butter. What is schmaltz? Chicken fat. But, and now I'm laying the irony on thick, the word schmaltz has come to mean . . . you guessed it . . . mawkish, hackneyed sentimentality. Coincidence? Perhaps not. But perhaps life without schmaltz in this second sense is too harsh for the marketers:

"I AM inspired by stories that endure, like my grandmother's stories of home butchered chickens and evenings in the ghetto spent hiding in the chimney from the press gangs. Stories that last because they are nightmarish and terrifying and real, not banal like so much in life now. Wearing organic cotton is like that for me."

Organic cotton? It probably just reminded my grandma of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

Now, I'm not knocking organic cotton. Synthetics in my closet are as rare as fresh churned butter. What pisses me off is the attempt to reimagine memory that's pushed by the marketers. The things that are "synthetic like so much in life now" are primarily the stories used to make us want stuff. If you choose to wear polyester, poor soul that you are, you're going to have an authentic experience, I assure you. Likewise for typing on a computer. You could blog with a fountain pen (I believe it's called writing in a journal), but your experience won't be any more or less real, even if it's more difficult to download.

This longing for authenticity isn't new, of course. I could turn you on to Herbert Marcuse or T.J. Jackson Lears, if you like. What's frustrating is that people keep falling for it. We now have glossy magazines, filled with advertising, whose editorial mission is to inform cosnumers how to live in a Real Simple fashion. Would you like to live simply? I'll give you a few of the great snob secrets of life. Read carefully, now. Don't buy what you don't need. When you buy what you need, make sure it is the best, longest-lasting, least faddish, you can afford. Oh, and stop giving gifts for the sake of giving gifts.

Maybe, just maybe, we can achieve an authentic experience that doesn't come from a catalog.

And check out my very cool sister's interview on blogging

Is it me, or is everyone else insane?

2004-12-05T21:36:00.000-08:00

So, here are the results of a variety of personality tests I've taken. Did you really want to know more about me? Well, then . . . .

The results of my general personality test are:

Big Five Test Results

Extroversion (73%) high which suggests you are overly talkative, outgoing, sociable and interacting at the expense too often of developing your own individual interests and internally based identity.
Friendliness (53%) medium which suggests you are moderately kind natured, trusting, and helpful while still maintaining your own interests.
Orderliness (59%) moderately high which suggests you are, at times, overly organized, neat, structured and restrained at the expense too often of flexibility, variety, spontaneity, and fun.
Emotional Stability (27%) low which suggests you are very worrying, insecure, emotional, and anxious.
Openmindedness (98%) very high which suggests you are extremely intellectual, curious, imaginative but possibly not very practical.

And the results of the test which says which classic movie I am . . .

I'm ready for my close-up, now. Want to take your own test? Go see http://similarminds.com/

!ACHTUNG!

2004-12-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

Now that I'm firmly in control . . . a few rules about "cuteness."

1) After January 1, 2005 any person displaying a menagerie of stuffed animals in the back window of their car shall be executed by firing squad at the DMV. The execution site will be covered in nylon bunting by Christo and an image of same will be placed on a postage stamp commemorating highway beautification.

2) Anne Geddes will be brought up on crimes against humanity charges. The names of parents consenting to have their child photographed in a daisy, sunflower, or bumble-bee costume will be added to a national child molestor database. Their children will be removed from their care and custody and raised in the emotionally more nourishing bosom of government bureaucracy as wards of the state.

3) Any one who publishes, distribues, or possesses a William Wegman doggie calendar will be sent to a reeducation facility and released only upon compelling evidence of rehabilitiation.

I'm Jewy McScrooge and I approved this proclamation.

Jay Leno's Falafel Cravings and a Little Hermeneutics

2004-10-31T13:48:00.000-08:00

I ducked into a cheap Greek restaurant on Ventura Boulevard for a quick gyro today, regretting only that I had recently removed all reading material from my car. So, I had to rely on imagination while eating alone, something I’m never happy about. Sadly, just as my imagination was failing, Jay Leno (or someone in a damned good Halloween costume) and a friend came in wearing motorcycle gear and sat down across from me. Thankfully this is LA, or more precisely Encino, so no one made a fool of themselves and fed his amour-propre, but of course, not having anything to read, I just had to sit there blandly looking at Jay Leno wolf down falafel when I really would much rather have had a copy of Terry Eagleton's Ideology of the Aesthetic. Hell, the Ikea Catalog would have been sufficient, under the circumstances. Not that I have anything against Jay Leno, just the cult of celebrity. In fact, judging by how he treated the restaurant staff (and that, in my estimation, is a pretty good indicator of character) he’s a stand-up fellow, but I can never get out of my mind what Bill Hicks said about him being a fevered ego and total sell-out. Nonetheless, whether it’s that Angelenos are too hip or too self-absorbed, I was delighted that even the women at the next table over, one of whom was holding a digital camera and showing pictures of “the new house” to the other, didn’t see fit to take advantage of the obvious opportunity. Actually, I ended up walking into the bathroom just as Jay walked out and I now know for certain that his shit isn’t any less malodorous than mine.

A friend of mine at campus read one of the entries here and told me “by God, you’re a Snob and a Socialist.” Well, it’s probably true and frankly I don’t see that these are contradictory. Contempt for the bourgeoisie? Check. Class insecurity? Check. Loathing of gaudy excess? Check. Support public funding of the arts and education, and, aw hell, just about everything else that’s high-brow? Check. Religion and/or television is the opiate of the masses? Check. And not really interested in a true worker’s revolution? Well, as the old joke goes: “The workers are revolting!” “Why yes, they are.” Look you might not find this all a compelling basis for a political and aesthetic ethos, but I’m not looking for converts. Go shove another Krispy Kreme in your pie-hole and leave me to ponder the good life.

Or the bad life. I will be going to Washington D.C. Friday after the election and if George Bush has won by a suspiciously slim margin, I’m hoping for chaos in the streets. A Kerry victory will only bring me relief, and though I earnestly like him and don’t think of him as the lesser of two evils, it will not bring me joy. To paraphrase Jeremiah, my heart is already sick at what I see as the breaking of my people. Maybe I am a Socialist, but is only because I fear there is no balm in Gilead.

And I thought we were supposed to be guarding the balms.

Consuming Blindly

2004-10-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles in the morning after a night of rain is an alien place. Cars move slowly past slowly flowing mud tendrils intruding into the highway. The air is sharper and the colors brighter, stranger, one’s vision is no longer blurred. Angelenos appear slightly stunned as if they had just been roused out of bed. This is what happens when the seasonal intrudes upon a people who have convinced themselves that all measures of time are artificial, or at least that the clock can be turned back.

I was at a party a few days ago with the usual suspects. My friend the novelist and a small collection of the people representative of the sedimentary stratum of Hollywood: screen-writers, photographers, film critics, editors, and the guy who played Harry Goldenblatt on Sex in the City.

I conversed with a couple of fellows who could discourse easily on nineteenth century history and literature, worked in political speech writing, boasted ivy league degrees, and now respectively, wrote for Blind Date and an upcoming show about a blind police officer. I suggested they name the show Eyeless in La-la, as long as we’re talking about loss of meaning and people falling in love with their own servitude. All this blindness must be a sign of something, I’m guessing. One of the writers invited me to participate in a discussion happening later in the month in which Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad would be talked over, proving to me that in Hollywood, the role of producers and consumers is turned on its head. It is those who produce who are alienated from property, who quest after authentic experience, however inauthentically.

Of course, I’m so happy just to consume. Give me Tivo and HotPockets, let the air be blurred again, and program my Caller ID to block any messages coming in from Mr. Huxley.

A Decisive Stand

2004-10-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

And of course on Friday, I was pleased to have the opportunity to watch the Presidential debate. For the life of me I don’t understand the liberal claptrap that passes for commentary here in LA-LA-Land Southern California. I thought our President was clear and decisive. In a brilliant disquisition on constitutional history, our leader came out firmly against the legal minds that brought us the 1857 Dred Scott decision. For this Texan, for this landed gentryman, to stand firm in the face of his own self-interests and ally himself with the forces of abolition against the grim prospect of slavery, warms the cockles of this hardened-heart. His lion-hearted manliness, his dauntless heroism in this crucial turning point in our nation’s history is a model for us all. Let us join voices with our leader and shout out, “NO!” “NO!” to those twisted legal minds that with the act of a crooked pen would provide sanctuary to the lash and the whip. Let us turn a deaf ear and a Christian cheek to all who would dare imply that our lofty Chief directs no amity toward the common salt. The Party of Lincoln knows no better way to honor the fallen martyr than in the flesh and blood of our great President. With this noble countenance at the helm someday our black brethren shall indeed enjoy the freedoms and rights of white men of property throughout this nation of destiny!

Oh. . . And Remember the Poles!

Darth Vader and A Statue of a Boy Pissing Pol Roger

2004-10-08T20:54:00.000-07:00

I have been missing in action – lost in time and space, actually. With the time travel equipment of the future we can, according to the manual, journey backwards and loll about in the past for as long as we wish. Then with the flick of a few switches we will be able to arrive back the moment we left.

My time-machine is obsolete.

For the past few weeks I’ve been stuck in the Paris of Napoleon III, antebellum Boston, and, most enjoyably, at a modest Manhattan party held by James Hazen Hyde on the last day of January 1905. Some back-story? Of course. When his daddy dropped dead of overwork, Hyde inherited the reins of the Equitable Insurance Company at the ripe age of 23. Before too long he was director of 46 different companies, performing such wise business acts as selling bonds from one company he directed, to another company he owned, and then to the Equitable for a nice profit.

What better way to celebrate insider trading and conflict of interest than with a big party? So, Hyde called upon architect Whitney Warren to transform Sherry’s Hotel into the Court of Louis XV for a night and then commissioned playwright Dario Niccodemi to compose a one-act play. At around eleven o’clock the Metropolitan Opera’s forty piece orchestra along with their ballet corps filled the ballroom and performed until midnight. Then a foursome of working stiffs carried a sedan chair into the room bearing the actress Gabrielle Rejane, fresh from Paris, who performed the play, which was about as inspiring as taffy. Trumpets announced supper and we all retired to a room that had been transformed into the gardens of Versailles with grass, a canopy of roses, marble statues, and fountains bubbling with Pol Roger ‘89. Dancing followed, but of course two more suppers were served before the guests, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and myself, collapsed of exhaustion.

So . . . when I arrived back in Los Angeles in 2004, minus a few weeks of my life, only to find that Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker had both come to life and emerged on a stage at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, you can understand the shock of recognition with which I was afflicted. It takes time to adjust to an all out battle between good and evil when you’ve been reveling in the spoils built by greed, waste, extravagance, imperial aims, corporate corruption, cheap imported labor, and no income tax for the rich.

But the historian’s mind, like the snob’s, is quite supple and soon I was carrying from 1905 to 2005 that emotion most appropriate for historians and snobs alike–indignation. Snobs and historians both have an aversion to the tasteless and the showy. Oh yeah, and the morally maladroit.

The ballot box is probably a better time-machine than mine. Vote appropriately and with hope we can revive the glory of parties past! Maybe, just maybe, they’ll even let us eat what falls from the tables.

No Comment

2004-08-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

I am always struck by the power of images, especially in juxtaposition. I give you the following fragments of history with no comment:

Ben Shahn WWII Poster
Abu Ghraib Prison Photo

The Geography of Doubt

2004-08-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

Tonight I came, filled with doubt, down over the hill and into the valley. But California is a doubtless territory; it was settled by, and has settled into, brazen assurance. The tall slender palm trees and the tall slender cypress trees thrusting into twilights of gold and sapphire and rose are quite certain of themselves. The tall trees and the mansions on spiders legs above Mulholland and the women too young to drive the cars they do, and too rich not to, are all part of the Siren’s song. It’s why I was drawn here, despite the snarl of wolves. If liberty is the possibility of doubt, I might be the only free man in Los Angeles.

I hear the snarling, I think, more readily than others. I doubt the landscape. Vladimir Keilis-Borok who in recent years predicted two quakes with great accuracy, one in Japan and one in San Simeon, has predicted a Los Angeles area quake before September 5 of this year, though no one seems to be listening. But Californians have studiously learned to isolate doubt. We know there is no tectonic stability in our Golden State just as we can not really believe in an everlasting golden adolescence. But an admission against our interest is not doubt. It is blind hope and faith that our faults will not expose themselves while we’re still in the game.

“It’s a hundred and eight degrees at the top of the hour in the Old Pueblo, and here are the Buckinghams with ‘Kind of a Drag.’”

2004-08-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

Heat rises, so I was taught. But in Tucson, where I have spent the last few days, the heat presses down. My shoulders become slack, my spine bends, my feet become heavy. It is no wonder that every corner here seems to boast a podiatrist and a chiropractor. I move slower and I begin to realize that the slight and annoying odor that seems to be everywhere is really the smell of my own mucus membranes drying out.

I left Tucson three years ago and I have to admit that the way things change concerns me. I don’t resent change itself, but I am moved to melancholy sometimes by its direction. Case in point: The façade of the El Con Mall. The El Con mall was built in the 1960’s, a study in that sort of desert mid-century modernism that was half Palm Springs and half Brasilia. It replaced the old El Conquistador hotel, a 1920’s Spanish Style behemoth where my mother spent her high school graduation dinner ogling Peter Lawford from across the hotel dining room. The cycle of life continues as the El Con Mall, like the El Conquistador hotel before it, is surpassed by trendier competitors.

Now, tacked onto the modern front entry of the El Con Mall there are a pair of awkward stucco-over-wire Mission-style towers and a Spanish arch. Perhaps someone thinks giving this mall a mission will draw in customers. It is an apt metaphor for an age in which false traditional virtues hide a decaying modernity, a modernity which itself held out the promise of breaking free from ossified traditions.

I’m not sure I would have noticed this kind of discord if it had crept up on me. But coming back to town, I notice such things. When I go to visit my old neighbors I receive another surprise. I remember the couple across the street from me as a model of happiness: friendly, funny, hospitable, smart, sincere, beautiful people, with a child I actually found bearable. Now they’re separated. All around me relationships are burning away like wildfires in the mountains above Tucson, and nothing seems to flame up faster than dried-out love.

The heat pushes down. The air above the desert writhes trying to escape the sun. The rippling atmosphere blurs the vision. Missions, modernity, marriage; they drift incorporeal like a mirage.

Tuna Melts, Retro Phones, and Imperialism

2004-07-30T18:59:00.000-07:00

Time was. Time was when thoughts of fond remembrance were collected under the name of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a very personal sentiment. What we look back upon with a smile in our heart is something very individual, very specific to each of us. For instance, I do not have any special tenderness for madeleines, although I do have a sweet tooth, but I know that certain people can look at one and find in the small, sweet cake cause for a flood of emotions and memories. My friend Adam knows this too. Passing a donut shop on Sepulveda near Venice, Adam noted with a genuine sigh, “Winchell’s Donuts really bring me back to my youth.”

The cuisine which most readily triggers wonderful memories for me is the tuna melt. The remembrance of tuna melts past transports me back to the Milburn Diner in Milburn, New Jersey where I am seated with my best friend, Jeff George, in a diner booth upholstered in resplendent maroon vinyl surrounded by an ambience that can only be described as Greek Revival Spanish Inquisition. The idea of the tuna melt, served open faced on golden toasted slabs of rye heaped with twin mountains of tuna fish rich with mayonnaise, each slice covered with a thin veil of ochrey American cheese, bubbling and slightly browned, opens up a world of lost youth, of old green train cars with wicker seats rumbling past on the Erie Lackawanna line, of waiting out rainstorms after late night movies, of strawberry-blondes in summer dresses. The Milburn Diner tuna melt is the holy grail of cookery, lost to my history, unattainable in my life since moving west. Every California menu that boasts one as a selection holds out false hope. These tuna melts inevitably appear as an exercise in disappointment, thin, pale, closed-faced, even defiled with a bitter crown of sprouts. But the disjointed and random sense-images that the tuna melt brings to mind is as unique to me as my own DNA. It is my time was.

Not that food alone can be the touchstone for nostalgia. A song – for instance the tune "Oh, What a Night," which is itself an ode to the backwards gaze – brings back good memories of trips to the shore that I’d rather not share. But I’ve noticed something happening in the world of nostalgia lately that gives me a sense of dread. More and more these days I come across false memories. I discover them quite a bit in television and the movies, but most of all I have found them in catalogs and upscale chain stores. They come in the form of assertions that some special thing brings to mind a wonderful past, out of my own consciousness, when in fact no such memory exists.

Before me is the catalog for the Restoration Hardware company, a business that has made much of commodifying the past. Here I can purchase a phone that is similar to those phones I remember so well -- designed by Henry Dreyfuss back in 1937. At least, I think I remember them well until I realize that the phones in my past were mostly plastic, 1960’s contraptions more evocative of a late cold-war era Navy training film than the image of Lauren Bacall reclining on a chaise lounge while chatting. No, my family did not acquire black rotary phones until my brother became self-consciously retro sometime in the 1980’s.

Restoration Hardware also promises that the new phone, so evocative of a past that I have been urged to think was mine, has actually, “been made better, infinitely so.” How so, they do not reveal unless it is the push button mechanism grafted on top of the original design to make it usable in this age of “press nine for customer service.” They want me to believe the past is a grand place, but they wouldn't want me to go so far as to stick my finger in it and give it a twist. Just leave the past to them to make it better, infinitely so.

Another gent is hooking up old telephone handsets to mobile phones.

The philosophy of Restoration Hardware and others with similar tactics is to provide things that are “pleasantly familiar.” But I don’t find these things pleasantly familiar after all. They are creepily familiar. They are only familiar because they are supposed to be familiar--as if there was some Jungian Collective Unconsciousness Catalog. These companies are profiting from our anxieties about the future by marketing to our longing for the past, any past, as long as it’s pleasant. To this end, historians would best be avoided. They keep reminding us just how bad the past was, or how different it was from what we desperately want to believe. What the marketers understand is our desire to find a good place in history, but they can’t provide that place bespoke for each of us. Madeleines and tuna melts won’t work because these are highly individualized triggers of lost time. Nostalgia now is generalized, stretched-out, and commodified for mass-market potential. Mass-past, as it were.

Plundering the Other for treasure is one of the oldest stories of commerce. Merchants have long set off to bring us the rewards of our global imperial project: printed cloth from India, bamboo settees from China, tea-sets from Malaysia, ready-made ethnic art from Africa, and deck chairs from the Dominican Republic. A new phalanx of merchant princes, however, has embarked on a mission of Temporal Imperialism looting the the past for artifacts which are manufactured to engender within us a feeling of so-called pleasant familiarity. Instant nostalgia. McSentiment. We don’t even have to work up for ourselves a taste for madeleines because these products are carefully "pre-selected" to tap into some image of the past we supposedly all share.

To the snob, nostalgia is a personal experience and tradition is not found in those objects in need of the resurrection du jour.

Slander, William Blake, and Bugs Bunny

2004-07-27T13:18:00.000-07:00

Today I began to write about what to do when you are the subject of lies. I erased what I wrote and decided I didn’t want to write about that. The subject is a quagmire and if you have ever been in the position of defending yourself before an unsympathetic audience, you know that there is little you can do to resolve the situation. I know people who might take a sort of “cosmic” view of this and believe that misrepresentations do not have the longevity of reality, that eventually the truth will reveal itself. This is the theory of “murder will out.” It assumes that a wrongdoing will be exposed and it’s a way for those who have been aggrieved to hold out hope much in the way that poor people have been assured that rich people can’t get into heaven.

I’m not so sure. There are murders unsolved, and more we don’t even know about; character assassination must operate along the same lines. I have no knowledge about the final reward of the rich.

The only sure thing about slander, I guess, is that it tests your friends in a crucible. You could act as if you were in a court of inquiry, present your evidence, make your defenses, but it won’t get you far. Some people will only respond with a shrug of the shoulders and inform you, with a sort of bland disregard, that there are two versions of the truth. You have already lost them. Others will stand and wait, and from what we know about them, they also serve. And others will support you. It will have very little to do with the details of the situation, it will have much to do with your character and the character of your friends.

And so it comes back to the judgment of friends. As for the opinions of others, I give you today a quote ascribed by Bertrand Russell to William Blake (and if you have any better knowledge of where it comes from, please let me know):

The only man that e’er I knew
Who did not make me almost spew
Was Fuseli: He was both Turk and Jew.
And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do?

We all need at least one Fuseli.

I’ll also add, on a lighter note, that today is Bugs Bunny’s birthday (sort of). Bugs is one of the great snobs of animation. Witty, ironic, charming, decadent, slightly effeminate, a concert pianist, disdainful of hunters, probably Jewish (well – he’s kosher, his nemesis was originally a pig, he’s from Brooklyn, and he retires to Beverly Hills – what more can I say?), he is practically the Marcel Proust of cartoons.

Bugs also lets us truly understand the sneering mischief of Blake’s interrogatory. Fearing that the world outside will make us queasy, that hunters skulk, that coyotes lurk, that cowboys are dangerous, that our friends are daffy, we give the public our guarded, mordant greeting . . . And so, dear Christian friends … eh, what’s up doc?

Architectural Disgust and My (Possibly) Broken Toe

2004-07-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

I think I broke my toe yesterday. I was walking around my place barefoot, as I like to, and drop-kicked the bedpost for no good reason other than that it was obscured by blankets. If traffic were better, I’d drive down to campus to have it checked out, but I know too well that there’s not a lot one can do about a broken toe, especially when it’s probably just stubbed.

There’s nothing quite like a nagging pain to put one in a misanthropic mood. At least, that holds true for many people. I require nothing to put me in such a mood other than casual observation of the world around me. Today’s bout of misanthropy was triggered by a short perusal through the pages of a recent copy of Architectural Digest.

Sitting on my couch with my leg extended, I flipped the pages of the magazine and began to long for someone to come by and just tie a tag to my toe and get it all over with. Something horrible has happened to Architectural Digest since I last paid attention to it lo those years ago.

When I was younger, I used to spend many nights in the library at the college where my mother taught. I loved to read the old architectural magazines and the ones from the 1930’s and 40’s were my favorites. The articles in these journals were well-written without being pompous and they featured large and modest houses alike, with a focus on design innovation and creativity.

AD appears to have suffered from the bloat of nouveau riche toxicity. The promotional material for the magazine invites one to give a subscription as a "gift of good taste.” But the magazine itself has little good taste to show for itself and the true gift of good taste in this instance would require the kind of restraint unknown by the editors of AD, at least as evidenced by pictures such as the following: a portrait of the house-owners done up in mock impressionism with a gilt rococo frame above a baroque fireplace of red and white marble with gold-plated andirons; a bathroom with gold-plated plumbing fixtures; a Waterford crystal, gold-plated, twelve-arm chandelier costing $24,000. I guess Auric Goldfinger survived being sucked out of that plane and made a soft landing as an interior decorator specializing in the feng shui problems of well-off people with cataracts. For goodness sake, if all it takes is some golden drek to make a décor, why not stack a mountain of raw ingots in the corner next to a La-Z-Boy and call it a day?

Of course, if your home is featured in the pages of AD, you’re probably terribly nouveau riche anyway. First off, these are clearly pictures of houses in which nobody actually lives. These are houses designed specifically to gain the owner social acceptance into a world where having a house in Architectural Digest matters; real living goes on in second and third houses in other places. The people in the photos, if there are any, appear as lost and stiffly out of place in these abominations as they would, say, at a UN conference on human rights violations, or at the downtown public library.

Moreover, no self-respecting minor earl or old-money socialite doyenne would air their bath mats in public. But if you grew up with an aesthetic dominated by the Montgomery Ward catalog and made your money either as a mass-market carpet retailer or an overproduced adult-contemporary diva, then it fits your psychological profile to desire attention from the very middling sorts who considered themselves your superior in those hard, early years (and who eventually made up your customer base) and you now can nourish yourself with the delicious thought of those mere commoners back in Harrisburg dazzled by your golden showers. AD is not a design magazine, then, but a sort of sick exercise in schadenfreude for its subjects who, I am presuming here, delight in the fact that some of us can’t acquire the Pussy Galore décor without ever venturing to contemplate why we would ever want to.

The lesson in all of this is quite a cliché. You can’t buy good taste, but you can acquire it. The trouble is that if you pay for taste without taking the trouble to develop it (which is quite an involved education), your hireling will provide you with all the garish things necessary to delight an aesthetic simpleton such as yourself in an effort to justify his fee. This was half the problem of the Gilded Age – excessive, intemperate, tasteless displays of wealth thrown at the faces of the laboring public out of crass ignorance. In those days the mob did not seem to desperately desire the trappings of the class overlords, but only their fair share of a living wage, and seemed to enjoy simple pleasures more than the rabble of today. Innocent, healthy amusements like reading newspapers, drinking at union halls, and throwing brickbats at stockbrokers have been replaced by the empty promises of reality television and fast-food sweepstakes which hold out to today's consumer the slim chance to mimic the lack of refinement we find in Architectural Digest.

Perhaps now the swelling has gone down enough to put on my gold-toe socks.

On Regret

2004-07-19T23:59:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wish I could lie down in a field of regrets and let the slender grains of the past grow up and around me. This way my mistakes and I could grow slowly indistinct, much like the occasional concrete gunnery stations that appear through the European countryside, brazen errors overgrown in the fullness of nature and time with moss and reeds. If not the pastoral, regret deserves to be accompanied by a nocturne on an old piano in a velvet-draped room smelling too much of jasmine. Regret is a luxurious sentiment; it arrives slow and soft, and it settles in heavily.

At least that is how I sometimes think it could be. These days my regret is clinical and cold like a coroner’s ward. I am called down daily to make an identification like some weepy bystander’s wife in a TV melodrama while drawers slide with hard, efficient sounds. There are the words I said to a lover that I can not make unspoken. There is a lie I told to enhance my status. There is a time I did not stand up for what was right.

There are some people who claim to have misgivings about nothing; that they never look back. I don’t like these people. Perhaps if they did look back they might catch a glimpse of their self-satisfied compatriot Adolf Eichmann, the man who organized Nazi death transports for millions of victims, and who stated during his trial, “to sum it all up, I regret nothing.” A soul without qualms is a soul without qualities.

Snobbery is a path of doubt. The person who asks, as a Snob does, what is best is distrustful of what is worst. Moreover, the Snob possesses an interior voice that borders on the neurotic which relentlessly examines the position and quality of one’s actions, associations, and words within a pattern of understanding. This attribute is beautifully exhibited by one of the great Snobs of all time, Marcel Proust, in a story itself involving one of fiction’s great Snobs, Swann’s Way. Both Proust and his protagonist, Charles Swann, view the world through the anguished elitism which is the burden of Snobbery and which, because it exists to judge, must also, always, reconsider and consider yet again.

The efficient, responsible, middle-brau Eichmanns of the world ship their doubts off to transit camps in execution without judgment. Snob’s Way is judgment without execution. As Proust noted, “There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.”

Regretfully, he can’t.

Dutch Royalty, Doctoral Exams, and the Problem of Neckwear.

2004-07-15T20:24:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago when I took the qualifying oral exams for my doctorate, I wore a coat and tie. My friend Jeff pointed out that I failed to use the “Windsor” knot for my tie. I had chosen instead to use the less sophisticated “Four-in-Hand” knot. Snobs find comfort in such small distinctions.

Allow me to explain my choice with a little anecdote from my reckless past.

Several years back when I was an attorney practicing in that frontier town of Tucson, Arizona – an environment hostile to all neckwear other than bolos and nooses – I was obliged to wear a tie in the courtroom.[1] I have never liked wearing ties to work, and in 117 degree heat neckties tend to operate against the best interests of the gullet. In my view, a tie worn to look good while out on the town, or perhaps while lying in repose during your wake, is a matter of taste. But a tie worn for work is an emblem of coercion. Allegiance to the tie suggests, as Paul Fussell has pointed out, middle-class reliability, respectability, and responsibility. One day, after chafing under the oppressive respectability of a zoning enforcement hearing, I emerged from the courtroom and immediately upon entering the crowded elevator, removed my tie. A fellow lawyer commented and I haughtily replied, “the necktie is the yoke of the bourgeois.”

A few days later, while strolling to lunch through the streets of downtown Tucson in my glorious open collared shirt, a man approached me with great excitement. “You’re the fellow from the elevator – the ‘tie is the yoke of the bourgeois’ guy! You’re my hero!”

I can’t take sole responsibility for the heroism. I was inspired in my act by the gallant Prince Claus of Holland, who during an awards ceremony in 1998 untied his tie and threw it to the ground declaring it a snake around the neck which made a prisoner of men. Prince Claus was able to assume this attitude towards conventional fashion without circumspection precisely because he was an aristocrat, no doubt also the reason he was able to interrupt another speech one day and comment, apropos of nothing, on his profound love for his wife, Queen Beatrix.

But, dear reader, you point out that lowbrow people also have a pretty contemptuous attitude towards the tie. The tie-less snob male avoids a coalition of the swilling by refusing to wear clothing of synthetic fibers or any garment advertising any consumable product of any sort. In this way, some of the most admirable snobs I know – college faculty – are able to assert in the workplace their comparative aristocratic freedom from the petty expectations of middle-managers or so-called “executives” as well as their resistance to the commands of beer company couture. Professors, who routinely earn less than carpet peddlers, are thus a noble breed, not one of whom, thank the lord, wore a tie to my orals.

If you must wear a tie, then, I urge you to consider the most cavalier, most breezy and aloof knot, the “Four in Hand.” It tells the world – or at least the world that knows about such matters – that you are really wearing a tie to avoid making others uncomfortable when occasion demands them to wear a tie, not because you care. If you really do care – and how terribly middle-class of you – I’d be glad to tell you someday about what ties you can and can’t wear. Till then, see http://www.tie-a-tie.net/ to learn just what in the hell a Windsor knot is.

And remember, September 6 is Prince Claus’ birthday. Please don’t wear a tie.

[1] Tucson's popular Pinnacle Peak Steakhouse, for instance, does not allow ties.

The Essays of Montaigne and Controlling the Homicidal Urge

2004-07-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

I went to a bookstore the other day to look for the latest translation of Montaigne’s Essays. I like skillful translations of classic texts and have heard that M.A. Screech’s version, which came out in 1993, is quite good. The essays themselves have been around since the sixteenth century and an English version available since 1603, but reading those early editions is painful and reading Montaigne should be fun. Montaigne practically invented the essay genre and was one of the first great modern skeptics. His prose was straightforward and witty and his subject – his own life – fascinating.

“Montaigne’s essays?” the clerk – a woman who had to be at least 45 years old - asked me from behind her computer terminal. “Do you know who wrote it?”

Montaigne believed that humanity is in no way superior to the beasts. I thought maybe because we had opposable thumbs or could manufacture self-cleaning ovens that we had one up on the animal kingdom. All the claims Montaigne might arrange in his essays to prove his point would not do as much to convince me as that clerk’s question: Who wrote Montaigne’s Essays?

If a device existed that could reveal my Snob brain activity, bystanders might have been happy to see the Snob ‘centers’ in my cerebral cortex turning magenta with overloaded activity, causing synopses in my brain to misfire, and generally resulting in a Snob meltdown accompanied by a mental slideshow of pscychotic ideations depicting various techniques of hunting, killing, and gutting humans in a suburban setting. Externally, I was too stunned to register any immediate response.

This is a Snob predicament. The gentleman or lady ignores intellectual and social trespasses with silent reprobation and outward calm, feeling all the better for their natural superiority. The dandy delights in merry and vain condescension. But the Snob cannot remain quiet at the scene of a crime, and doesn’t fit well in a cloak of petty arrogance. Maybe sarcasm is our last, best hope: a Molotov cocktail to toss at the shock troops of Ignorance. “I believe, perhaps, that Montaigne was the author of Montaigne’s Essays.”

But sarcasm is a dangerous weapon. It overtakes us and turns us bitter. Montaigne may have been on to something when he suggested that human beings are no better than animals. I think though that he is proof enough against his own argument. The trouble for Snobbery is trying to understand the difference between that which is superior and that which is not. This is a qualitative judgment and we are living in a time when qualitative judgments are quite out of fashion.

I am an historian and Snobs have an historical consciousness. History is not a Tsunami; it does not move all at once towards one end. The past, one might say, has many currents. They move in different directions, some glacier slow, others fast. The trend now may seem to overturn canons of judgment, while in the background historical forces are slowly uprighting them: fast currents above slow currents. Today we may be in the avant-garde of the Revolution, tomorrow Robespierre may have our heads for orthodoxy.

The Essays of Montaigne and the book clerks who ask stupid questions both challenge us to probe our own mental state. Snobbery is at heart a form of insecurity – a good form, but insecurity nevertheless. There is nothing smug about the Snob’s superiority. The Snob’s superiority floats with history, and cannot be assumed or certain. Our culture encourages people to ask themselves, “How can I be the best me possible?” as a positive, therapeutic measure designed to promote “human potential.” Yet if that person arrives at the next natural question, “What is the best?” the pale has been crossed. The indulgence of the first question is considered healthy, especially when compared with the impudence of the latter. The Snob occupies that lonely territory beyond the pale, mucking about in history trying to find what is best, hated by both the left and the right, and buying books from people who are forgetting how to read.

Towards An Ethos of Snobbery, I Need Your Help

2004-06-30T16:08:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed it too? Have you noticed as you go out into the world each day that people are getting more and more annoying? So many people today are simply uncouth, rude, loud, grubby and stupid. And the trend seems to be against the forces of civilized Society. -- Society with a capital “S.”

Recently a woman told me she admired a certain political figure because he was decisive. She is not alone. Instant action is the rule of the day. Men who make snap decisions are looked upon as commanding and strong. We aren’t stopping to think anymore, and we certainly haven’t stopped to think about our assumptions regarding decisiveness. For what value is decisiveness, really, when most decisions are stupid? I submit that the world would be a better place if more people thought and fewer people engaged in decisive action.

But contemplation has been eclipsed by shows of forceful action. Class, refinement, distinction, and erudition have been tossed to the curb along with thoughtfulness.

We need to pull back from the garish brink. We need to acknowledge that living in a consumer society doesn’t mean we must hastily consume whatever second rate, gimcrack gewgaws are thrust at us. They would have you believe that it’s all about “lifestyle.” Snobs don’t have “lifestyles.” Snobs live well, live graciously, live beautifully, live intelligently, and live thoughtfully. The rhetoric of consumer choice is alluring because it seems so downright egalitarian. And to challenge the concept of equality is an explosive risk. But people, I am sorry to break the news to you. Equality is an illusion. There is a difference between Amy Vanderbilt and some slack-jawed lummox who thinks that lighting his farts with a Zippo is droll.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the lummox is any less entitled to human dignity, rights, or happiness. I’m just saying that there is a hierarchy of things that come under the classification of “good living” according to long held cultural traditions.

We need to rescue snobbery from the jaws of the perjorative. Why do people hate snobs? It is because we recognize as signifiers of class association what so-called "elites" believe are universal principals. We understand that hierarchies of class distinction are determined by those who control the signs of social sophistication. The snob seeks to enjoy life by negotiating such structures. We know that there are very few spaces left where culture does not function as capital. Such knowledge endorses the social signs at the same time it threatens the hierarchy by revealing its arbitrary qualities. We snobs should revel in our role. We are mischievious cultural capitalists who understand the limits of our superiority far better than elites.

This is all very rarified and wearying. I need your help. In working towards an Ethos of Snobbery, I invite your input, your comments, your ridicule, and your admiration. Snobs of the World, Unite!

Patchouli versus Champagne

2004-06-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Saturday I went up to Ojai with Meghan Daum for the last reading on her book tour. Her novel “The Quality of Life Report” came out in paperback and her publisher has sent her on the rounds one more time to plug the book. (Allow me to plug it here. Meghan is witty, neurotic, creative, and brilliant – in person and on the page, whether writing fiction or non-fiction.) Ojai is one of those exurban towns an hour or so past the last outposts of overdeveloped Los Angeles but well within reach of overdeveloped Santa Barbara. The town is alluring in the way that any weekend-trip town has allure, and it’s an allure that smells of a little too much patchouli and fudge. When we arrived there was some sort of music festival being held in the little park around which most of the stores on the main street were grouped. The band covered old Led Zeppelin, Grateful Dead, Little Feat, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Eric Clapton tunes and most of the people around --bare-chested jugglers, women in overalls, tie-died moppets -- appeared to be readying themselves for the next Human Be-In. I was in loafers, khakis, and a blue silk shirt; Meghan in a simple black dress. We were marked.

This is where the saving remnant of the Haight-Ashbury exodus has gone. When the hangover faded and the new drug of commodified ideals took over the street corner, they counted their dead and retreated out of the neighborhood, then slipped quietly into small towns and cities all over the west, where the land is a little cheaper, nature a little closer, neighbors a little farther, and the police a little poorer. They moved to Marin and Ojai, Sedona and Tucson, Colorado Springs and Eugene. They set up food cooperatives, sat on community radio station boards, and opened bookstores. They even joined the zoning committee. Now on weekends they import tourists and fresh talent to their yoga retreats, encounter groups, poetry workshops, and book readings. And in the parks the ones too young to remember mimic the aesthetic and mistake the smell of patchouli for enlightenment, or perhaps revolution.

Some of the older ones came into the rear of the bookstore where a coffee bar was set up and where Meghan was now going to read since the originally planned outdoor venue was being overwhelmed by the sounds of “All Along the Watchtower.” The audience consisted of a middle-aged, silver haired, New York refugee in a shapeless, salmon-colored dress with teal patches on it, a couple who used to teach literature at Long Beach State and who derided the Iowa Writers Workshop as “too right-brained,” (a Snob will attempt to avoid the use of the name Iowa at all costs, except when it comes to the Writers Workshop, which is perhaps the best in the nation.), a wiry, frenetic man of about 60 with a Russian mail-order girlfriend 35 years his junior, a loud man with a beard, the bookstore proprietor (a Frenchman with a lazy eye) and his wife, and one radiant young lady in a straw hat who turned out to be from Chippewa Falls.

As Meghan began to read from her novel, the blender from the coffee shop began roaring, followed soon after by the cappuccino machine blowing steam like an old train. Despite this she managed to pull in the audience and after the reading there was a meandering and odd discussion with intermittent proclamations on the meaning of life from the Russophile Lothario and the loud-mouthed, bearded man.

The trouble with all group identification, “Hippie” or “Writer” or “Academic” or even “Snob” is the risk of falling into lockstep with platitudes. The Lothario smugly noted about the interruptions, “a loud child entering the bookstore, hey, that’s just life happening.” But is this pseudo Zen noise what passes for wisdom today? The cornerstone of philosophy is not in the recognition that shrill appliances or misbehaving children are “life happening.” The action of ambience upon awareness is not enlightenment and we should not be too quick to read either the divine or the demonic into the trivial. Sometimes an interruption is merely an interruption.

And what better way to interrupt this thread than with a word on Champagne. As a toast to my inaugural entry into the world of Snobdom, I give you the linked essay on how to choose and enjoy Champagne as a Snob. Consider it a bottle of Dom smashed across the bow of my vessel. My she’s yar, don’t you think?

Platonic Love and Hummers

2004-06-26T21:30:00.000-07:00

Last night I drove down to Santa Monica to go out to dinner with Debra. I made my way down the 405 freeway at half past six on a Friday evening with traffic going 70 miles per hour below a Getty Museum glowing with that luminescence peculiar to Los Angeles sunsets. Had a chorus of angels materialized in the sky over San Vicente Boulevard, I could not have been more charmed. Here are some things I saw on San Vicente on the way to Debra’s last night: a stalled caravan of film production vehicles outside the Brentwood Country Club accompanied by a pair of crewmen yelling at each other; a man road-skiing; a Hummer pick-up in camouflage colors. Once I witnessed a chicken walking down Sunset Boulevard, stopping occasionally to peck at the sidewalk. Los Angeles slips out of reach from the categorical grasp.

Everyone needs a friend like Debra: a specimen of humankind, preferably attractive, whose temper fits yours like the fine dovetailed joinery of an old writing table. This person is not just a versatile non-date for the socially active crowd, as vital a function as that may be. Friendship isn’t just a matter of contingency; it’s the silent, smiling acceptance of another’s flaws, sins and heresies that marks the terrain just south of love. Friendship is a conspiracy against convention.

As a snob searching for the best of everything, I am lucky to start off having found the best of friends. Spread across the nation, I have a dozen friends like Debra and most people would be blessed to find even one.

Friendship requires a state of nuance that Hummers--even camouflaged ones--can not approximate. With the Hummer we no longer need to develop road rage. We can purchase it. Its stance is the stance of offense and its design intentionally presumes hostility. But highway despotism is too unrefined for the hauteur elitist who prefers technology evocative of sensuality rather than raw penetration. The Hummer is an FUV not an SUV, and friends don’t let friends drive them. They are for shrews and unrepentant husbands.

And judging from the Hummer population, LA must have plenty of both.

Martin Lawrence and Naked Quotations

2004-06-25T16:54:00.000-07:00

Today I went to meet Barbara for lunch at a divey Italian restaurant in Granada Hills. She's at work on a Martin Lawrence film that is shooting up there. It seems Mr. Lawrence has a bold new venture in which he plays a greedy businessman who must do penance for his malfeasance by coaching a youth basketball team filled with losers. (Kenneth Lay, take heed!) This is the kind of dross for which screenwriters are paid extravagant sums of money, and to do what? To produce plots that are the literary equivalent of acid reflux disease.

On the way home I noticed a new office called Trading Partners. Their sign read "We're not emloyees of e-bay." Oh, it had the quotes around it on the sign. Why on earth do people do this? Who are they quoting? I'm pretty sure that phrase is not from Tacitus or Aristotle. Perhaps it's a bon mot from Trollope that's not in my Bartlett's. If you're not an employee of e-bay, do us all a favor and state it on the sign boldly, naked, unburdened by the pomp of authority that comes with fake citations. Can we all please, for the sake of civilized society, abuse our quotation marks correctly?

Now if only Martin Lawrence were sentenced to teach English to a basketball team filled with losers, that would be a plot!