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Art, virtue, and dogs in sailor suits

Nine biographies into his work, Plutarch explains what he’s up to! See, each of the Plutarch so far has essentially dived into the biography itself. But with Pericles’ section, Plutarch instead begins by, um, decrying people who love their pets too much:

Caesar once, seeing some wealthy strangers at Rome, carrying up and down with them in their arms and bosoms young puppy-dogs and monkeys, embracing and making much of them, took occasion not unnaturally to ask whether the women in their country were not used to bear children; by that prince-like reprimand gravely reflecting upon persons who spend and lavish upon brute beasts that affection and kindness which nature has implanted in us to be bestowed on those of our own kind.

Sure, I was a little insulted by this. It’s not like I dress Rufus up in a little sailor suit, but he does make a wonderful substitute kid for us, and he’s already lived up to his old man’s dream of being a professional athlete! Still, I get what Caesar was complaining about, even though he had to pass his power on to his nephew, rather than a son.

Anyway, Plutarch’s point is that our enjoyment of the sensual world is a betrayal of our natural spirit of inquiry, just as fawning over pets is a betrayal of our parental impulses. He goes on to contend that art — whether it be dyeing, perfuming, music, poetry or sculpture (note that art carried a stronger connotation of artifice than art nowadays does) — doesn’t enrich the soul —

He who busies himself in mean occupations [the aforementioned arts] produces in the very pains he takes about things of little or no use an evidence against himself of his negligence and indisposition to what is really good. Nor did any generous and ingenuous young man at the sight of the statue of Jupiter at Pisa ever desire to be a Phidias or on seeing that of Juno at Argos long to be a Polycletus or feel induced by his pleasure in their poems to wish to be an Anacreon or Philetas or Archilochus. For it does not necessarily follow that if a piece of work please for its gracefulness therefore he that wrought it deserves our admiration.

— the way reflecting on virtue does. Hence, writing these paired biographies of noble lives!

[V]irtue, by the bare statement of its actions, can so affect men’s minds as to create at once both admiration of the things done and desire to imitate the doers of them. The goods of fortune we would possess and would enjoy; those of virtue we long to practice and exercise; we are content to receive the former from others, the latter we wish others to experience from us.

Because I’m all about The Why (and secondarily about The Process), I’m glad Plutarch explored his rationale in this passage, even if my depiction of it makes the Lives sound boring or moralistic. They’re not, and I’m awfully glad I’ve made the time to read them.

On to Pericles and Fabius Maximus!

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Good Night, Sweet Captain Chaos

Dom DeLuise died at 75.

Obligatory joke: I hope Burt Reynolds doesn’t crack up laughing while delivering his eulogy.

(Sorry about the headline; Cannonball Run was actually one of my least fave of his roles. I never knew that his character in Blazing Saddles — “Don’t be surprised, you’re doing the French Mistake! Voila!” — was named Buddy Bizarre. Which is now my screen name on MSN, replacing MANCHOVY!)

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Cinc0-fer de Mayo

In honor of “Drink Corona (or whatever Mexican beer you choose) Day,” I thought I’d go find some well-regarded Mexican authors whom I’ve never read a word of. Only having thought up this idea this morning, I decided to dive into the “canonical appendixes” of Harold Bloom’s Western Canon, since the lists of authors and books are broken up by nationality.

Except for Latin America, which is lumped together. So I had to spend a few minutes checking out the nationality of all the authors he listed, only to discover that he only has two Mexican authors on his list and I’ve actually read a book by one of them (Aura, by Carlos Fuentes)! Grr!

Bloom’s list did manage to yield a Mexican 0-fer author for me: Octavio Paz.

For the sake of bulking up this post, here’s the full list of Bloom’s canonical authors of Latin America (in the sequence he lists them), with 0-fer annotations:

  1. Rubén Darío (Nicaragua): 0-fer
  2. Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina): I’ve even read his long novel!
  3. Alejo Carpentier (Cuba): 0-fer
  4. Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba): 0-fer
  5. Severo Sarduy (Cuba): 0-fer
  6. Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba): 0-fer. Haven’t even seen that movie about him.
  7. Pablo Neruda (Chile): We read one of his poems at our wedding.
  8. Nicolás Guillén (Cuba): 0-fer
  9. Octavio Paz (Mexico): 0-fer
  10. César Vallejo (Peru): 0-fer
  11. Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala): 0-fer
  12. José Lezama Lima (Cuba): 0-fer (but his wife is awesome)
  13. Julio Cortázar (Argentina): I tried reading Hopscotch, but didn’t get far.
  14. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia): Read One Hundred Years of Solitude and some short stories
  15. Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru): 0-fer
  16. Carlos Fuentes (Mexico): The aforementioned Aura.
  17. Carlos Drummond de Andrade (Brazil): Wh0-fer?

Looks like Bloom really digs Cuban writers, huh? Now go get messed up on Tecate!

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What It Is: 5/4/09

What I’m reading: I didn’t read much this week, but I did manage to read Plutarch’s lives of Themistocles and Camillus.

What I’m listening to: The Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack. Anyone know if M.I.A. is any good?

What I’m watching: The Bulls-Celtics series. Game 7 didn’t live up to the previous 6 (well, 5, if you discount that blowout in game 3), but it was some entertaining basketball. I think this is more of a function of the dumbness of the coaches and some of the players than of the high level of play. The most rewarding part for me was the discovery that Stephon Marbury is now afraid to play basketball.

What I’m drinking: Not much.

What Rufus is up to: Getting affection from everyone he meets, including the local policeman who stopped us on our walk one morning to ask me about a neighborhood dog’s aggression. Oh, and taking another Sunday hike in Wawayanda.

Where I’m going: Toronto for a long weekend with friends, family, and cartoonists!

What I’m happy about: Getting away for the aforementioned long weekend.

What I’m sad about: Having to leave Rufus with people who haven’t taken care of him previously. Because I’m a neurotic mess.

What I’m worried about: The short timeframe for my June ish, which I’ll somehow need to finish while I’m in Atlanta in 2 weeks. Also, I’m worried that I’ll never get around to writing up the rest of my Las Vegas trip notes. Grr.

What I’m pondering: How I managed to amass an iTunes library of more than 43,000 tracks but not manage to have any songs by Barry Manilow.

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Don’t know much about history. . .

As someone whose focus of study in college was the evolution of the encyclopedic novel, I was fascinated by this brief article by Randall Stross on the birth and death of Encarta, Microsoft’s encyclopedia:

Gary Alt, who joined Microsoft in 1995 after working as an editor at World Book and at Encyclopedia Britannica, spoke with pride of the editorial work that he and his Encarta team had done. Fifty people — editors, fact-checkers and indexers — were on the team in 2000, at the peak of Microsoft’s editorial investment in Encarta, he said.

That investment, however, seems to have gone unnoticed by Encarta’s users. Tom Corddry, a senior manager at Microsoft from 1989 to 1996 who headed up its multimedia publishing unit, said, “The editors overestimated the way students would say, ‘This has been carefully edited! And is very authoritative!’”

I liked the way Stross avoids the easy out of “encyclopedias are rendered worthless by Wikipedia” and instead focuses on Google’s indexing process as a meta-encyclopedia of human knowledge. One of my greatest advantages in this world is my ability to come up with the right combination of words to find information.

I’m not being facetious; there’s a skill to figuring out what words or phrases someone else would have written in a web-page or blog-post about a certain topic. I should put “Internet gumshoe” on my non-existent business cards.

(Bonus! I didn’t do much research on Diderot and the encyclopedia’s roots in the Enlightenment during my college project, largely because I knew almost nothing about the history of philosophy and knowledge. On the plus side, I’m now painfully aware of how ignorant I was, so that means I’m on the path to, um, something!)

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Just Don’t It?

Am I the last person in America to notice that the insignia for Newport cigarettes is an inverted Nike swoosh?

newport

It adds new resonance to that passage from “Gas Face,” by 3rd Bass:

Deceivers, stupefied through fable,

Say let’s make a deal at the dinner table

Put you on tour, put your record on wax (trust me!)

Sign your life on the x

You exit, x-off, but what you really get:

A box of Newports, and Puma sweats (damn!)

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The Big Stall

This lengthy WSJ article on how Chrysler got into this mess is pretty informative. In some respects, it’s just another story of how private equity execs were geniuses when credit was cheap, but became dumb when they actually had to come up with ways to run the businesses that they’d bought. The article also includes some gems that require translation (all emphases mine):

By the mid-90s, it was one of the most profitable car makers in the world, with its strong minivan sales and its Jeep brand benefiting from the growing U.S. love affair with SUVs. But management was under pressure, most visibly from billionaire shareholder Kirk Kerkorian, to deliver more value.

By “deliver more value,” they meant, “sell to a bigger company so we can get our shares bought out.”

When the deal was announced in May 2007, Cerberus founder Stephen A. Feinberg went to the company’s sprawling headquarters to meet its top management. He wore an American-flag lapel pin and he told his audience of about 300 executives that he drove an American-made pickup truck. People who attended the meeting say he said he wanted to save this icon of American industry, not to bleed it of assets and value.

By “not to bleed it of assets and value,” he meant, “to bleed it of assets and value.”

Under the terms of the deal, Daimler essentially gave the company — it was basically debt- and cash-free — to Cerberus, with the latter agreeing to invest $5.4 billion into the car company.

By “agreeing to invest,” they meant, “mortgaging the assets they’d just been handed, so they could load the company with debt,” not anything like, “put up their own money to run the company they ‘bought’.”

By then, Cerberus was seeking a way to hand off the car company to a partner.

Read: “dump off the car company on a sucker.” And maybe “bleed it of assets and value.”

By November, Chrysler’s sales were in free fall. Chrysler Financial was so short of funds that it practically stopped approving loans altogether, leaving many dealers with no way to get financing to those customers who were ready to buy, people familiar with the matter said.

Inside Cerberus’s Manhattan offices, the firm’s top officials realized an auto-financing business was profitable only if it’s connected with a healthy car company. “We had this stupid illusion that the finance company could have value on its own,” said one person familiar with Cerberus’s thinking. “We were wrong.”

You don’t really need translation for this one, but it’s nice to hear someone actually say, “We made a huge mistake.”

But my favorite nugget from this article is the realization that Chrysler was going to be owned by Thomas Pynchon:

[Cerberus founder Mr. Feinberg] also met with union boss Mr. Gettelfinger. Although Mr. Feinberg is famously camera-shy, he allowed a Chrysler photographer to shoot him and the union boss together, a person familiar with the matter said. The photographer was instructed to make two prints of the shot — one for each subject — and then to permanently erase the digital files, this person said.

I have no translation for this. It’s just flat-out and delightfully weird. It’s like when I read the intro to the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson and discovered that LBJ hunted down copies of his college yearbook so he could excise his nickname and other comments about himself from the record. (Did you even know People Magazine keeps an online archive?)