I'm one season behind in "Only Murders in the Building" and only watched the scene pictured above last night showing Steve Martin with a fish called President William McKinley. Could it be a coincidence that the Fanta-faced phalangist is also catching up on the show, thereby motivating his new found sympathy for McKinley's tariff policy, ... and, and His Orange-ness being flushed down the toilet later in the same episode?
Among the lesser injustices, there is the failure of capitalism to produce the odd item that in my humble opinion would improve life in general, or mine in particular. I've written earlier about the Bialetti Elettrodomestici Macchina Per Pasta. It would be nice if someone brought chervil to my local farmers market. Such market failures don't measure up to the failure of the Soviet state to produce enough copies of the poetry of Osip Mandelstam to satisfy demand.
Which brings me to Penelope Unbound, a novel by Mary Morrissy, published last year by Banshee Press an independent Irish press. The premiss of the novel is simple: What if Norah Barnacle had grown tired of waiting for James Joyce at the train station in Trieste and had been taken home by a good samaritan? From this idea, Morrissy weaves a funny, but very poignant tale that deserves a much wider audience. In particular the novel deserves a U.S. publisher. John Banville wrote an ecstatic review in the Guardian, but this doesn't seem to have been appreciated in America. Why?
Every 20 years or so I am reminded to reread Thorstein Veblen's essay, The Intellectual Pre-Eminence of Jews in Modern Europe, Political Science Quarterly (1919). With the war in Gaza raging and my belated reading of Michael Chabon's novel Moonglow nearly finished, this seemed to be another such moment. The Veblen essay is brilliant not only because it turns all the ambient eugenicist anti-semitic tripe of its time on its head, but because it offers a warning about the consequences to Europe of the Zionist project. Were this project to succeed and Jews were to find a comfortable homeland that allowed them to retreat into their religious heritage and lose their engagement and skepticism about science and society in the rest of the world the loss of their contribution would be a tragedy. Of course this dream is far from realization and for most Zionists opting out of world of science and culture was never the objective. Perhaps now it is time for me to read yet another Veblen opus, his Yale Phd dissertation in philosophy titled, "Ethical Grounds of a Doctrine of Retribution". Unfortunately, to the best of my googling this item appears to be lost in the ozone, just when we need it most.
