Step 1: Put food in the oven.
Step 2: Close the oven door.
Step 3: Wait 30-40 minutes.
Step 4: Wonder why you still don't smell any food.
Step 5: Realize that it helps when you turn the heat on.
This is one of those things that's unbelievably aggravating in the moment but gets funny when you have a couple hours' distance.
People can surprise you. Take Marjorie Taylor Greene. I never really got the liberal panic over her, but I didn't expect anything from her either. She'd spend one term in the house, maybe two, and spend all that time being ignorant and exhibitionistic. Then she'd get a commentator job at Fox or OAN or something like that, trading on her forgettable time in Washington.
Now she's doing as much as anyone in Congress to avert World War III. Not all by herself, but more than most, and very clearheaded about what's wrong with our foreign policy. Of course Congress has been abdicating its job on that front for so long that Presidents tend to get what they want by default. That deference started a long time before Trump, but it may not be sustainable anymore.
Eric Ambler, a British author of thrillers and screenplays, was well-known for The Mask of Dimitrios, which I haven't read but probably will in the foreseeable future. He is not as well known for Send No More Roses, published in the US as The Siege of the Villa Lipp. That's probably because it's not one of his books adapted into a film or miniseries. One line from it is on his Wikiquote page, however: "What use is an honest lawyer when what you need is a dishonest one?" This is eerily similar to that line about Saul Goodman, "You don't want a criminal lawyer... you want a 'criminal' lawyer."
Anyway, Send No More Roses, or whatever you want to call it, is great. The narrator, Paul Firman, is a great rogue. Frits Krom, a man staying in his house with two younger colleagues, is a social scientist who believes Firman is one of the world's great unpunished criminals. Krom is very much an irritating fool, an Ahab who couldn't beat the Whale in a game of checkers. But he's not Firman's biggest problem. No, that would be Mat Williamson, a sometime business partner who finds it convenient to end his association with Firman in a very permanent way. Things get tense, but they never stop being funny. Ambler was 68 when he published it and I think it was his second-to-last. In top form, though.
Final blogger's note: Yes, this post should have gone up last night. I mostly had it written in my head, and only after going to bed did I realize I hadn't set it down on paper. Or whatever.
The title of the video above was sufficiently provocative that I was interested in hearing what Beato was talking about and listened to the whole thing. Death of memorable songs? Yes and no. He's identified part of the problem, at least.
Since he's a proudly whitehaired man in his sixties, it may need pointing out that Beato is not saying that there are no good musicians anymore. Far from it. And he's not saying that there are no good songs being written anymore. Rather that there's a near total break between what's interesting and what's popular. I wouldn't disagree.
My explanation for what happened might be a little different. Despite all the payola and hype, there used to be DJs who operated with a certain amount of freedom. And listeners trusted them enough to open themselves up to unfamiliar music. Britain's John Peel was the best known, but there were lower key exemplars here in the US. It wasn't a perfect system, but it had enough give so that there were pleasant surprises.
What went wrong didn't all go wrong at once. MTV was a double-edged sword. While it also introduced some unfamiliar artists, it effectively created a national playlist, taking oxygen from the locals. The 1996 Communications act was a disaster, opening the door to monopolies in radio who had zero interest in anything being unpredictable. Eventually DJs got sidelined where they existed at all. And now radio has been supplanted by Spotify. As Spotify is algorithm-driven, it basically guarantees that what you hear in the future will be an imitation of what you listened to in the recent past.
So what's needed to make good new songs popular again. Thinking humans in a position where they can recommend things again. Whatever genius figures out how to do that will have performed a great service.
If you or I or any other human had a lower lip full of warts that would be considered a medical problem. We'd almost certainly want to get rid of it.
The Jamaican Fruit Bat, by contrast, has them as a matter of course. Many leaf nosed bats do. It's sometimes said to be a defense against toxins in the skins of amphibians they eat. Possibly, but the Jamaican is mostly frugivorous, so wouldn't really encounter that problem. But still, these are an adaptation to something, with origins coming from within the body. So they're not really warts, which are caused by viruses.
Must be said that the Jamaican Fruit Bat is also quite fetching, especially the babies.
Mention Mother Goose and a lot of people will picture a plump middle aged woman with glasses and a bonnet, who may or may not have a pet goose. Then again, Mother Goose has been depicted as a goose herself, or at least an anthropomorphic one. There's a fairly marked difference there.
But where does the character come from? There are a few different schools of thought on that. Likely it's not a straightforward story. Charles Perrault, a French author who brought us Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood, among others, seems to have had something to do with it. The character was then revised in both the US and the UK. And has proven quite flexible.
Playwright Matthew Gasda presents an interesting analysis of student literacy and lack thereof in the AI era. It's at the very least worth taking seriously in conjunction with other informed views.
If it's true that you can't expect kids raised with iPads and smartphones to make a sustained argument in print, or to follow one for that matter, then these devices should have never been introduced. I mean, now you tell us.
But then there's also the matter of education being a formality that everyone has to go through, which was supposed to be a step towards greater democracy but which hasn't turned to be that. As Gasda writes, "Because the American education system from kindergarten through graduate school has become about securing diplomas and employment, long-form writing has been transformed from a core demonstration of learning to an impediment."
That tendency precedes our current technological environment, although the phones aggravate the problem. With the disappearance of industrial and agricultural jobs, the emphasis has been on getting everyone through college, with a professional job presumed to be at the other end. In effect it's meant that jobs that don't require much in the way of thinking nonetheless can only be gotten by people with educational attainment. But if the demand is that all kids be book smart, then the easiest way is to define book smarts down.
His advice to treat children like they have a soul is a good and necessary one, of course. I don't expect to see it applied at large scale.
Marcel Rieder's career as an artist started in the late nineteenth century but extended well into the twentieth, as he died during World War II. He'd have been among the first generation of painters to see the lightbulb come into common use. His usage of electric lighting was canny, as in "Kitchen Interior" above. These are shaded lights, bringing out color, leaving a healthy amount of ambient shadow. Not overpowering. To that he adds a lyric sense of what the domestic world is like in the evening and at night.
