A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
I guess it’s not that weird that the NBA has started running blogs by various players, commentators, and front-office personnel.
No, what’s weird is that they decided to launch a blog written by Scottie Pippen. It’ll probably be a greatly underrated blog, but really help nullify the other team’s best blog.
There’s a not-so-nice biography out about Bernard-Henri Levy, the Frenchman who wrote a book about the murder of Danny Pearl. Here’s a quote from the biography’s review:
Character assassination in France is less of a sport than in Britain, because the French care less about character, and in the culture that gave us Les Liaisons Dangereuses it is hard to inflame prurient sentiment by saying that a man has slept with a woman not his wife. On the other hand you can seriously damage a reputation by suggesting that an idea for a book was not the author’s own, or that he has misconstrued his classical sources.
A few posts down, I ran the From the Editor page of my magazine’s new ish. In it, there’s a quote from the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, whom I praise for trying to raise the alarm about the false numbers in the Medicare prescription benefit bill:
“Two equally plausible scenarios for the future of healthcare costs yield Medicare and Medicaid being either 11 % of GDP–half the size of the current federal government–or over 20% of GDP–larger than the current federal government. So there’s an enormous certainty out there but the trends in the long term, I think, are the central issue. There’s no question about that.”
I gave the page to my associate editor, and told her, “Here’s my vituperative rant for the month. Sometimes I get so vituperative that I make typos.”
She proofread my page, found no typos, and said, “I don’t think it’s a certainty.”
“Hmm?”
“That part about how there’s an enormous certainty. I don’t think he meant to say that.”
“Maybe he was being ironic,” I said. She frowned.
Still, best to double-check, since the quote did come from a transcript, and not a prepared statement. So I called the CBO’s communications department. I got bumped over to someone’s voice mail, and figured that I’d have to let it go as is.
Y’know the funny thing? The CBO got back to me within an hour, asked to see the exact passage in an e-mail, and called back within minutes to let me know that Mr. Holtz-Eakin’s words had been mis-transcribed and that he meant “uncertainty”.
I’m just amazed at how quickly they responded to my request, especially given that my magazine doesn’t exactly have a household name. So, additional kudos to the CBO! Keep watchdoggin’!
The Official VM Mom turns [fill in number here] today!
What’s $320 billion among friends?
(Editorial from the March issue of my magazine)
Last March and April in this space I wrote about the scandal(s) behind the passage of the Medicare prescription drug bill. At the time, I was irate over the fact that the White House hid $134 billion in costs for the bill, conveniently capping the publicized cost at $400 billion in order to gain votes. It was transparent fraud, and it was compounded by the fact that the chief actuary at Medicare/Medicaid was threatened with firing if he revealed the “true costs” of the prescription drug benefit bill.
The former head of the agency, Thomas Scully, was recently fined $85,000–equal to seven months’ salary–for this action,* Fortunately, he’s now on the speaking/lobbying trail, discussing the intricacies of health care coverage. Why, “[f]rom Medicaid and Medicare to the future of U.S. public health services, Thomas Scully precisely understands the intricacies of health care & public policy,” according to his online biography. This job must’ve taken up a good deal of Mr. Scully’s time. After all, his busy travel schedule prevented him from testifying in front of Congress about Medicare costs last April.
But maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on Mr. Scully. After all, it appears that his strongarm tactics only cost the American people $134 billion (minus the amount of his fine). As we learned in February 2005, the true extent of budget mendacity was actually a lot worse than we thought.
Revised estimates of the prescription benefit’s cost now range from $720 billion to $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The higher number’s skewed by ignoring cost-savings that the program is likely to generate, but it’s a big number that left-wing partisan hacks like to publicize. The problem is, that leaves the right-wing partisan hacks swallowing a $720 billion program, nearly double what was approved.
How on earth did the numbers jump from $400 billion to $534 billion to $720 billion? Mainly because the initial estimates of the cost included years when the program wouldn’t yet be in effect. That’s right: Congress voted on a bill for a Medicare prescription drug benefit that takes full effect on Jan. 1, 2006, but the initial (fraudulent) costs floated were for the 10-year stretch from 2004 to 2013, since the first phase-ins were to begin last year. But the cost of the program is negligible for 2004 and 2005, making the program look cheaper than it is. This administration has made a practice of that sort of cost-estimate trickery, a hinge of its 2001 and 2002 tax cuts.
So it’s the 2006-2015 costs that are now leaping up to bite us, just around the same time that the administration has a much more valid point to make about the long-term insolvency of Social Security. Virtually no one will treat this matter seriously, since the White House has made a practice of crying wolf, fiscally speaking.
Last June, in a Policy Forum on fiscal policy, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the director of the Congressional Budget Office (and one of the few people to denounce the initial false numbers of the Medicare bill), remarked, “Two equally plausible scenarios for the future of healthcare costs yield Medicare and Medicaid being either 11% of GDP–half the size of the current federal government–or over 20% of GDP–larger than the current federal government. So there’s an enormous uncertainty out there, but the trends in the long term, I think, are the central issue. There’s no question about that.”
No question at all.
–Gil Roth
Editor
* Actually, the correct amount of the fine is $84,933. We want to be exact about our numbers.
My buddy The Brooding Persian is on fire.
On March 7, the New York Times published an article entitled, “Literary Novelists Address 9/11, Finally“, on the occasion of several new novels about the attacks and their aftermath.
Unfortunately, your writer seems not to have researched this matter well enough. In September 2003, I published Paul West’s novel, “The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11.” This book was reviewed by the Village Voice, Library Journal, Booklist, Midwest Book Review, American Book Review the Santa Fe New Mexican, Boston’s NPR affiliate (WBUR) and the Air Force Academy’s literary Journal, War Literature and the Arts (where it was the Editor’s Choice), among other venues.
Among the comments Immensity received:
“‘The Immensity Of The Here And Now’ is profound, disturbing, and a compelling inner study of picking up the pieces in the wake of personal devastation.” (Midwest Book Review)
“In Paul West’s 23rd book of fiction [. . .], the aftereffects of [9/11] gradually come into view, then withdraw into a jungle of memory and hallucination — the tragedy perpetually accessible and elusive, too easy and too impossible to imagine.” (Village Voice)
“As West so ingeniously perceives it, 9.11 is not just a day that will live in infamy, but an infamy that will exist at a particular place and on a particular day forever.” (War, Literature and the Arts)
“Risky, raucous, filled with moments of audacious beauty, ‘Immensity’ proves that West, our foremost word wizard, won’t play it safe, unlike so many American artists.” (Bill Marx at WBUR radio)
“West’s phenomenal command of language and the flux of consciousness, and his epic sense of the significance of 9/11 are staggering in their verve, astuteness, and resonance.” (Booklist Magazine)
Immensity was also blurbed by literary critics Sven Birkerts, Irving Malin and Hugh Nissenson. The book is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s sites, along with national distribution to bookstores via several wholesalers and distributors. An extensive collection of reviews and blurbs is on the book’s site [now defunct. –ed].
The New York Times received advance copies four months before publication, but declined to review the novel. Evidently, a new work of fiction about 9/11 by a literary author with more than 20 volumes to his credit was not even deemed “new and noteworthy.”
Given the limited space the paper has for book reviews, I can understand the decision to pass. However, I can’t begin to imagine why Mr. Wyatt would write, “only now are books being published that some literary critics are saying take the substantial risks needed to give them staying power” when The Immensity of the Here and Now has been in print for 18 months.
Paul West may be a difficult writer, but he is one whom we should not ignore.
Gil Roth
Publisher
Voyant Publishing
The Official VM Girlfriend‘s birthday was on Thursday, so I did some nice stuff for her this weekend. First, I picked up the first season of Deadwood, a show she loves. The new season started earlier tonight, so we spent the weekend watching the first season (I hadn’t seen it): all 12 one-hour episodes.
It’s a heck of a show, with its Hobbesian portrayal of frontier life. For some reason, critics harped on the excessive profanity of the characters’ speech, but I really didn’t notice it. Of course, I tend to curse like a sailor, to the point at which I made it a routine question when I was interviewing potential associate editors last year: “Do you take offense at profane language? Because if you do, this is not a good working environment for you. I can just about guarantee that you’ll get offended and quit before I get around to changing my ways.”
So the language on Deadwood wasn’t too shocking to me. The means of exploring “the city and man,” on the other hand, was pretty vibrant and compelling. Ian McShane’s performance as Al Swearengen is amazing and complex. Amy & I talked about it Saturday night, during a conversation about how this show was sorta impossible before The Sopranos, and it reminded me of that show and how I realized that it was about an evil man who loves his family (at least, in the first season: I heard subsequent seasons of The Sopranos sucked ass, so I never watched them).
It’s so hard to get depth out of evil characters in our art, as opposed to simply justifying their evil by bringing up their hard childhoods or something. But portraying the complexity of an evil person is heck of an accomplishment; those two shows do it in different ways, while also tackling larger subjects. Deadwood, as I said, really seems to go after Hobbes’ view of reality, the way that law and governing arises out of lawlessness and chaos. I TiVo’d the first episode of the new run tonight, and will give it a whirl tomorrow, I figure.
As I mentioned, I did some nice stuff for my girlfriend. In addition to spending twelve hours on the sofa watching the DVDs with her, I also treated her to dinner at one of the finest restaurants around: Café Matisse. My publisher had told me about this place for years, but I’d never gotten around to it. Saturday night, I realized the error of my ways.
I had one of the finest dinners I’ll ever eat. Here’re the details:
Gil’s appetizer: Lump Crabmeat Croquette – orange glazed seared scallop and shrimp with citrus salad vanilla oil, chili oil and cilantro
Amy’s appetizer: Thinly Sliced Rabbit Tenderloin – roasted braised garlic and caramelized shallot manchego, thyme timbale with sour dough crostini and balsamic burgundy butter sauce
Gil’s entrée: Parmsean / Olive Crusted Veal Loin Medallions – with roasted garlic potato confit, grilled artichoke hearts with tomato infused demi glace
Amy’s entrée: Roasted Venison Loin – with carmelized foie gras, cardamom infused parsnips, candied pearl onions & currants with red wine date demi glace, zinfandel syrup
My dessert was a chocolate/marshmallow/espresso ice cream confection that nearly finished me off. Amy went with the vanilla cr�me brulee. We also had a bottle of Ristow Cabernet Sauvignon (2000).
Now, those of you who know me can attest to my near-inability to discriminate, when it comes to food. I don’t have high tastes, and I have a propensity to eat whatever’s in front of me, or nearby. That said, as my girl realized Saturday night, “You really are a Foodie! It just needs to be some of the best food ever prepared!”
So it was a learning experience for both of us. I seriously advise, if you’re in NJ (or close enough), have some money to spare, and are looking for an unforgettable meal, to get thee to Caf� Matisse. I have spoken.
In other weekend news, I bought a new bed (frame only) last Saturday. It was supposed to arrive in about 6 weeks, but the retailer called mid-week and explained that they were ready to deliver the same model to another place, but were informed that that house wouldn’t be finished for 2 more months. “Would you mind if we delivered the bed to you on Saturday?”
“You’re going to get me the bed ONE WEEK after I ordered it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sure thing!” So they did. I managed to heft the king-sized platform bed out onto the balcony, a last remnant of Dad’s mid-life crisis, back in 1981. It’s a legendary platform bed: alternating stripes of matte & gloss black, plus a fluorescent light tube under the overhang of the platform. I think Rick James used to own it.
Anyway, I hefted it out and it’s now been replaced with some Zen.
And I got an estimate for a new garage door; after 37 years, it’s time to retire the current one.
So here’s the weekend: watched a ton of Deadwood, ate one of the best meals ever, and got a new bed. It ain’t a bad life.
Barry Bonds, rambling about steroid abuse without ever saying, “No, I don’t use steroids”:
Bonds even brought up another alleged side affect of using steroids, a reduction in size of genitalia.
“They say it makes your testicles shrink,” he said. “I can tell you my testicles are the same size. They haven’t shrunk. They’re the same and work just the same as they always have.”
I like that the article’s sidebar reads, “Canseco: Steroids help staying power”.