BLYTHE DANNER AND THE FOURTH WALL. On New Year’s Eve in 1980 (I just looked it up), my wife Mary Jane and I saw our favorite actress, Blythe Danner, in a performance of PHILADELPHIA STORY at Lincoln Center. In the last act, there was a loud screeching noise that wouldn’t stop and made it hard to hear the lines. It turned out to be a defective microphone hidden in the garden at the front of the stage. It kept screeching. Finally, Blythe Danner stepped forward and asked that the microphone be turned off. “We can project. We’re all professionals.” The microphone was not turned off. A loud voice from the back called out “We’ve almost got it fixed, Miss Danner.” After a while, the screeching stopped and the show went on. I guess the lesson I draw from this is that the incident did not spoil the show. Audiences put up with glitches and commercials because they don’t interfere with what they are imagining. It was a wonderful performance. When we came out of the theater, we found that a heavy snow had begun. We went down to the White Horse Tavern and sat and watched the snow. Happy New Year to all!
Archive for December, 2006
BLYTHE DANNER AND THE FOURTH WALL.
Sunday, December 31st, 2006GERALD FORD–EX-MID
Saturday, December 30th, 2006GERALD FORD—EX-MID. Calvin Trillin once wrote an article about two kinds of transplanted Midwesterners and used Gerald Ford and Thomas Dewey to illustrate the difference. Both were from Michigan, had spent a lot of time in the East and were very successful. Trillin called them both “ex-Mids”, short for “ex–Mid westerners.” The difference for Trillin was that Dewey was the kind of ex-Mid that preferred to be thought of as an Easterner while Ford would have been embarrassed if anybody thought he had gone Eastern. I am the Gerald Ford kind of Ex-Mid.
ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS FOR THE NEW YEAR.
Friday, December 29th, 2006ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS FOR THE NEW YEAR. It’s always fun to read predictions at this time of year. Professor Summers’s article is especially interesting because it summarizes the predictions that are being made by financial markets: clear skies.
“At the same time, financial markets are pricing in an expectation of tranquillity as far as the eye can see. Stock prices in the U.S. are at all-time highs. The risk premiums that corporations or developing countries have to pay to borrow money are at or near historic lows. In addition, estimates of the volatility of the stock, bond and foreign exchange markets inferred from the prices of options are near record lows.”
The article can also be found here. The Financial Times site has good economics articles on a regular basis. Summers contrasts what the markets are saying with predictions by various commentators of big swings in markets. This is a different kind of prediction for a couple reasons. First, it is not Summers’s own prediction, but what the markets are saying. Also, Summers is concentrating not on any direction that a variable will go, but on the narrow range in which things are expected to move. Also note, as Summers points out, that rare events come as surprises. I’ll try to come back to these predictions at the end of next year and see what happened.
HEMINGWAY AND FEMINISM.
Thursday, December 28th, 2006HEMINGWAY AND FEMINISM. There was a wonderful phrase in the Wall Street Journal for December 23-24. In an article on William Empson, Robin Moroney refers to the “Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway types who made their discoveries while drunk in brothels in countries where the president had just been shot.” When I read that quote to my wife Mary Jane, she said, “That reminds me how much I hate all that Alpha Male tough guy stuff that Hemingway has.” With the successes of the feminist movement, we tend to forget that Hemingway led the way in the opposite direction. Kurt Vonnegut has a Hemingway caricature in his play HAPPY BIRTHDAY, WANDA JUNE. The caricature says at one point, “Educating a beautiful woman is like pouring honey in a fine Swiss watch.” I used to repeat this line from time to time in appropriately ironic inflections. Then one day my wife told me that she had repeated the line to her book club and that they were not amused. I asked if she had made it clear that this was a quotation. No, she hadn’t had a chance to. I was already afraid of her book club.
GERALD FORD–A NICE MAN.
Wednesday, December 27th, 2006GERALD FORD—A NICE MAN. Years ago Gerald Ford, before he was President, was a visiting dignitary at Harvard. A friend of mine had the honor of escorting him to various functions in his honor. One was an afternoon reception which took place, as I recall, at Professor Galbraith’s house near Harvard Yard. My friend realized when he got to Divinity Avenue that he had forgotten the address and brought himself to confess to Ford that he had forgotten. Ford immediately said, “You take this side of the street and I’ll take the other side and we’ll knock on doors until we find somebody who knows.” And that’s what they did. My friend used to finish telling the story by observing that there were few important people he could imagine doing that.
SUFFERING THEATER CRITICS
Tuesday, December 26th, 2006SUFFERING THEATER CRITICS. My third post on this blog pointed out that “Theater critics are long suffering types who find only one or two plays a year that are worthy of their attention.” Ben Brantley says in this article “But this is the first year in my decade as chief theater critic of The New York Times in which Broadway, all by its big, bloated self, provided enough laurel-worthy shows that even a list of 10 can’t include them all.” People who like theater imagine that being a drama critic and going to the theater all the time would be a dream job. But what if you don’t like the theater very much? We should sympathize with the poor critic who year after year goes to plays that he doesn’t like.
GOOD WILL TO MEN.
Monday, December 25th, 2006GOOD WILL TO MEN. My father’s wisdom: In my encounters with Dickens, I have always been moved by the characters who appear suddenly and are generous and kind (such as the Cheerybles in NICHOLAS NICKLEBY). Thirty odd years ago in New York City, I took my parents to see PROMISES, PROMISES, a musical set in New York in which the curmudgeonly neighbor from the first part of the show comes to the rescue at the end. I joked to my father that this turnabout seemed unlikely in New York. He said, “Oh no, if you needed help, you might find some one like that anywhere in the city.” About that time, I was standing in a crush of people on a morning rush hour subway train when I passed out. (It turned out to be a 24 hour flu.) I awoke to find that room had been made for me on the bench and my head was cradled in a lady’s lap. Another stranger got off at the next stop (not his usual one) and put me into a cab. God bless us, everyone!
LONELINESS IN AMERICA.
Sunday, December 24th, 2006LONELINESS IN AMERICA. In the early sixties when I was in graduate school there was a Nigerian graduate student who was nice to me. He had already gotten his Masters at Boston University and was going on for his Ph.D. He told me this story. When he first got to this country, he was lonesome during the entire fall. But he looked forward to Christmas because of the way Christmas was celebrated in his village. He said that on Christmas Day the door to every house in the village was open. People visited each other all day long. If you had quarreled with somebody, Christmas was the day that you sought each other out and forgave each other. It was snowing that first Christmas Day in Boston and he walked the streets for a long time, alone.
WHAT IS A HOBBY HORSE?
Saturday, December 23rd, 2006WHAT IS A HOBBY HORSE? Yesterday, I referred to the proposition that American bonds are attractive as a “hobby horse” of mine. One of the purposes of this blog is to provide a place for my hobby horses, which my family would be subjected to if they were in my presence. A hobby-horse is defined as “an obsession of which a person won’t let go” by Wikipedia. Wikipedia has two different derivations for “hobby.” One entry derives “hobby-horse” from “hobby”, which was a border horse trained to cross difficult and boggy country. It supposedly became associated with the notion of a pastime because of the popularity of horse racing in the time of Henry VIII. I recently met a delightful man named Wes Hobby, who said that his surname went back to the time of Henry VIII but that it related to the king’s love of falconry. And Wikipedia has an entry on the hobby as a small falcon.
AMERICAN BONDS ARE ATTRACTIVE.
Friday, December 22nd, 2006AMERICAN BONDS ARE ATTRACTIVE. David Malpass, Bear Stearns’s chief economist, has a wonderful article in the Wall Street Journal for Thursday December 21, which reminds people of this. The article has a detailed analysis of foreign demand for American investments, but I limit myself to this simple hobby horse for my target audience (my family). It is still common in the press to speak as if the United States imported too many goods and services and left the trade deficit as a residual. Discussions of “global imbalances” often do not mention the fact that American debt instruments are attractive. We take it for granted that portfolios in the United States and the balance sheets of American companies include American debt. And yet, people speak of foreign holders of American debt as if they were stuck with the Old Maid in a child’s card game. Most American one hundred dollar bills are held abroad. American bonds are attractive to foreigners for some of the same reasons.
