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What Profits a Wednesday
Sep. 23rd, 2020 10:18 amI was crushed to learn that my library does not have Gossip Girl or any of its sequels, though searching for it gets you about three dozen very important pop-culture studies books on the portrayal of mean girls in fiction. I'll just have to wait for it to show up in a used bookstore and hope I remember to buy it.
What I've Finished Reading
What It Takes: The Way to the White House! A quarter of the way into this massive book I already loved every weirdo on the roster, and that stayed true throughout. I laughed, I cried, I wished they all could be President. Except Dick Gephardt. There's nothing wrong with Dick Gephardt necessarily; he just wasn't as loveable as the other weirdos. Maybe he arrived too late in the game for the false intimacy to work its chatty magic? Even his team's ill-starred attempt to improve his TV-readiness by painting visible eyebrows over his eyebrows couldn't make me love him. But that's hardly the fault of Richard Ben Cramer.
NB: if you were wondering whether Joe Biden has been quoting cheesy Vat II hymns in his speeches since at least the 1980s, wonder no more! Cramer is here to remind you that of course he has.
What I'm Reading Now
The Rose Wilder Lane letters collection The Lady and the Tycoon is not really a beautiful enough disaster for me, but it still manages to have its moments. Right now (around 1952) Crane and Lane are discussing the possibility of founding a new school of economics, just as academically rigorous as all those wrong schools of economics that keep oozing deleterious acids into the nation's muscle mass, but CORRECT in its underlying principles. Lane loves this idea, but immediately has a moral crisis about the indefensibility of running an institute dedicated to the rehabilitation of the profit motive. . . on a non-profit basis! and she doesn't trust any millionaires to invest in it without the lure of tax-deductability. Then there's the matter of faculty. Lane can think of a few respected scholars who are down with the libertarian ideal . . . but are they truly Laneitarian enough to save America? No, they're all right about some things and unaccountably WRONG about others! So maybe America is over and they should all just go home and feed the chickens. (Crane reassures her that gifts to private schools can also be tax-deductable).
There is also a lively account of a Danbury, CT town hall meeting in which Lane leads the charge against giving some teachers a raise, and this extremely relatable observation:
In other books: The drawings in The Story of Mankind, all of which look like they were made on a napkin late at night, began to grow on me immediately after I disparaged them.
What I've Finished Reading
What It Takes: The Way to the White House! A quarter of the way into this massive book I already loved every weirdo on the roster, and that stayed true throughout. I laughed, I cried, I wished they all could be President. Except Dick Gephardt. There's nothing wrong with Dick Gephardt necessarily; he just wasn't as loveable as the other weirdos. Maybe he arrived too late in the game for the false intimacy to work its chatty magic? Even his team's ill-starred attempt to improve his TV-readiness by painting visible eyebrows over his eyebrows couldn't make me love him. But that's hardly the fault of Richard Ben Cramer.
NB: if you were wondering whether Joe Biden has been quoting cheesy Vat II hymns in his speeches since at least the 1980s, wonder no more! Cramer is here to remind you that of course he has.
What I'm Reading Now
The Rose Wilder Lane letters collection The Lady and the Tycoon is not really a beautiful enough disaster for me, but it still manages to have its moments. Right now (around 1952) Crane and Lane are discussing the possibility of founding a new school of economics, just as academically rigorous as all those wrong schools of economics that keep oozing deleterious acids into the nation's muscle mass, but CORRECT in its underlying principles. Lane loves this idea, but immediately has a moral crisis about the indefensibility of running an institute dedicated to the rehabilitation of the profit motive. . . on a non-profit basis! and she doesn't trust any millionaires to invest in it without the lure of tax-deductability. Then there's the matter of faculty. Lane can think of a few respected scholars who are down with the libertarian ideal . . . but are they truly Laneitarian enough to save America? No, they're all right about some things and unaccountably WRONG about others! So maybe America is over and they should all just go home and feed the chickens. (Crane reassures her that gifts to private schools can also be tax-deductable).
There is also a lively account of a Danbury, CT town hall meeting in which Lane leads the charge against giving some teachers a raise, and this extremely relatable observation:
As to whether we are batty or not, please don't ask me. Perhaps our only reassurance is the (alleged, at least) fact that anyone who asks, Am I batty? isn't. Thus reassured, I often conclude, Then I am NOT batty -- which eliminates the reassurance.
In other books: The drawings in The Story of Mankind, all of which look like they were made on a napkin late at night, began to grow on me immediately after I disparaged them.
