Dec
25
2024

Table for Two

(paid link)

I'm still kind of pissed off that the New York Times had zero Amor Towles books on its list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. They claim to have polled "hundreds of literary luminaries". I can only speculate as to the "luminary" criteria, and my speculation is not pretty.

(The NYT also polled readers; Towles showed up with two books on the readers' list. Hm.)

This book is a collection of six short stories and one novella:

"The Line"
A story of the Russian peasant Pushkin and his wife, as they deal with the infant Soviet Union. Moved off his tenant farm, Pushkin finds a new career, holding peoples' places in the lines that have become part of everyday life in the USSR. This causes his life to take some major unexpected turns.
"The Ballad of Timothy Touchett"
Timothy fancies himself a writer, but has no experiences worth writing about. Also missing, it seems: intelligence, writing talent, and character. His life is changed by accepting employment with a shady dealer in used and rare books, who discovers Timothy's actual talent: aping the handwriting style of famous authors.
"Hasta Luego"
The narrator, Jerry, makes a new friend in Smitty at LaGuardia Airport, where their travel plans are spoiled by bad weather. They cooperate in finding a place to eat, drink, and lodge. But soon Jerry finds that Smitty has a much more complex life, and a more iffy character, than he was counting on.
"I Will Survive"
The narrator's wife, Nell, has a mother, Peggy, who requests their help in finding out what's going on with Peggy's husband, who's been fibbing about his whereabouts. And it turns out there's a pretty good reason for that. Involving roller skating.
"The Bootlegger"
A couple attend a concert at Carnegie Hall, but the husband gets flustered and offended by the odd man in an adjacent seat, who appears to be illegally taping the concert. Dudgeon is high! But there's an innocent explanation! Or is there?
"The DiDomenico Fragment"
An idle heir is in danger of his fortune declining to levels which will not support his lifestyle. It's threatening to go from "lavish" to "slightly less lavish"! But financial salvation might be had if he can arrange for a lovely bit of artwork to be sold to a deep-pocketed collector. Unfortunately, it belongs to someone else. Nevertheless…
"Eve in Hollywood"
This is the novella, and it is sort of a sequel to Towles' first novel, Rules of Civility. It's set in the mid-1930s. At the end of that book, Eve was leaving New York to return to her parents' home in the midwest. But at the last minute, she changes her mind, leaves her parents waiting at the station in Chicago, and decides to seek her fortune in… well, you see the title. And (eventually) makes the acquaintance of an actual movie star. Who has a problem with blackmail.

This last one is a lot of fun. If the Raymond Chandler estate wants to get a good novelist to write another Marlowe novel, Towles would be a great choice. Example, the description of a Hollywood denizen with a tragic flaw:

Because here's the thing: Ma and Pa loved to see the girl next door, all right, sitting on top of the silver screen. But the only thing they loved more was seeing her tumble back to earth. That didn't mean Ma and Pa were bad people. There wasn't a mean-spirited bone in their bodies. They just couldn't help themselves. The Krauts call it schadenfreude, Litsky called it human nature—which is just a fancy term for the God-given flaws we have no intention of giving back.

So: interesting tales of interesting people, told with incandescent style.

"You There, Boy! What Day is it?"

"It's Christmas, you crazy old fart!"

So Merry Christmas, everyone! We lead off with a couple of Scrooge takes to accompany the seriously demented Getty Image du Jour.

David R. Henderson takes a Nobelist to task: Krugman Misstates the Lesson of Christmas Carol.

Anyway, instead of praising Scrooge for his principled stand against the welfare state, Charles Dickens makes him out to be some kind of bad guy. How leftist is that?

This is from Paul Krugman’s column, “The Humbug Express,” in the New York Times, December 23. Krugman has misstated the point of Charles Dickens’s classic, A Christmas Carol. The Scrooge whom Krugman and I dislike at the beginning of the story is the Scrooge who actually defended the welfare state and, because he thought it was working so effectively, refused to give his own money to charity. The Scrooge whom I (and, I assume, Paul Krugman) like at the end of the story is the one who gives his own money to charity.

In his defense, Krugman's Nobel was in Economics, not Literature. And that "December 23" column was in the print edition on December 24, 2010.

But here's a classic from Steven E. Landsburg, in a 20-year-old Slate article: What I like about Scrooge.

Here’s what I like about Ebenezer Scrooge: His meager lodgings were dark because darkness is cheap, and barely heated because coal is not free. His dinner was gruel, which he prepared himself. Scrooge paid no man to wait on him.

Scrooge has been called ungenerous. I say that’s a bum rap. What could be more generous than keeping your lamps unlit and your plate unfilled, leaving more fuel for others to burn and more food for others to eat? Who is a more benevolent neighbor than the man who employs no servants, freeing them to wait on someone else?

I'd say Steven deserves a Nobel for that insight.

Also of note:

  • Your tax dollars, paying for stuff you don't want or need. An annual tradition: Dr. Paul Releases 2024 ‘Festivus’ Report on Government Waste.

    This marks Dr. Paul’s tenth edition of the Festivus Report as he continues working to alert the American people to how their federal government uses their hard-earned money.

    Some of the highlights include the National Endowment for the Arts funding ice-skating drag queens and promoting city park circuses. Additionally, the Department of the Interior (DOI) invested in the construction of a brand new $12 million Las Vegas Pickleball complex. DOI also allocated $720,479 to wetland conservation projects for ducks in Mexico. This year, the Department of State is featured eleven times, with expenditures including $4.8 million on Ukrainian influencers, $32,596 on breakdancing, $2.1 million for Paraguayan Border Security, $3 Million for ‘Girl-Centered Climate Action’ in Brazil, and much more!

    The PDF report is 41 pages, make sure you've taken your blood pressure meds before reading.

  • Ah, I miss the old days of "rum, romanism, and rebellion". Michael Graham goes a different alliterative way: This Christmas, Dems Are Party of Protests, Pardons and Paganism.

    So who are Granite State Democrats celebrating this Christmas season? Could it be… Satan?

    Technically the ghoulish, goat-headed statute outside the state house is the pagan deity Baphomet, but given that it’s sponsored by The Satanic Temple (TST), that’s close enough for most people.

    How do we know the statue came from the Satanic Temple? Because Democratic state rep. Ellen Read of Newmarket said so. In fact, Read told the press she came up with the idea for the TST to stand their pagan statue next to the traditional Nativity scene to send a message.

    “Read also said she is a member of TST but has not participated in any of its meetings or events,” Fox News reported. 

    That old GOP slam at Democrats is described at Wikipedia, back in the days when anti-Catholicism was a Republican thing. These days, not so much.

    There was an effort last year to tag the Dems with …

    … but that quickly became a bumper sticker snapped up by Democrats.

  • And then there was a guy who… liked to talk about "pointy-headed professors who can't even park a bicycle straight." But he was a Democrat. These days, Christian Schneider points out: Republicans Descend Into Anti-Intellectualism.

    “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant,” Ronald Reagan quipped in his famous 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, “it's just that they know so much that isn't so.”

    Reagan’s gentle jibe came just days before the candidate he supported, Barry Goldwater, got his posterior handed to him in the presidential election. But while Republicans lost that battle, they eventually won the war. Reagan’s speech posited conservatism as the ideology for smart people who understood free markets, individual liberty, and military strength. Thus, an army of young pointy-headed, bow-tie-wearing Milton Friedman acolytes was born.

    But to be a conservative these days, one must not only know so much that isn’t so, one must constantly berate those who call out such misinformation and disinformation on the right. Swimming in GOP waters today means cozying up to self-interested scammers of all varieties who pitch nonsense to make Republicans believe they are constantly being victimized.

    Yeah, well… at least Republicans weren't the ones insisting that Biden was "as sharp as a tack" until Nancy Pelosi told them it was OK to stop.

  • One of many. Dominic Piro provides us with An Example of Why Bidenomics Didn’t Catch On. And it's one of Pun Salad's favorite punching bags:

    In 2021, Amtrak was given $66 billion in the bipartisan infrastructure law that Biden immediately claimed as his own after he signed it into law. For an idea of what that money was supposed to do, let’s go back to news coverage at the time.

    On November 8, 2021, NBC News quoted Amtrak CEO Bill Flynn as saying, “We have a clear vision for how we want to grow our business and reach more of America.” Flynn added, “This represents the largest investment of its kind since Amtrak was founded in 1971.”

    The Association of American Railroads and the Rail Passengers Association praised the funding. The university professor quoted in the piece said, “I would expect a good portion of that $22 billion is probably going to the Northeast Corridor,” considering that that’s where most of Amtrak’s ridership is and the needs are great.

    We don’t even have to go back that far to get glowing reviews of how the extra money for Amtrak was going to change the world. “President Biden Advances Vision for World Class Passenger Rail by Delivering Billions in New Funding,” reads a White House statement from November 2023. “Bidenomics and President Biden’s Investing in America agenda are tackling long-standing infrastructure needs, supporting communities nationwide, and making it possible to get people and goods where they need to be safely, quickly, and conveniently,” it begins.

    But you can almost see what's coming down the track, can't you?

    Yet service reliability on the Northeast Corridor has gotten worse, and the Christmastime travel rush this year has been a disaster.

    According to the Department of Transportation, in the past three quarters, on-time performance for the Acela, Amtrak’s flagship service, has declined from 83 percent to 69 percent. On-time performance for non-Acela trains on the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak’s most-used services, went from 86 percent to 74 percent. In July, only seven of Amtrak’s 47 services had on-time performances higher than 80 percent, which is supposed to be the minimum federal standard.

    Amtrak delenda est.