Dear Marjorie,
Just back from lunch with Alice, 2 , at Savory in Takoma Park, which turned out to be a veritable salon du journalisme today. Our friend Elizabeth Kastor of the Washington Post was dining there with her son, Chris, 2; then who should I spot but Tom Petzinger, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who lives in Pittsburgh! (He was in town to interview a Takoma Park, Md., entrepreneur.) He congratulated me on my stylish exit from U.S. News, and sent you his best.
Thanks for pointing out the Times business-section profile of Michael Stamenson, the Merrill Lynch securities salesman who sold Orange County its ill-fated derivatives. An excellent piece, though, like all pieces on this subject, it fails to leave me with a strong grasp of what derivatives actually are. (I gather they’re very “meta,” and of course very risky, and that they depend on interest rates not going up. But I can’t do much better than that.) Stamenson now joins that elite group of people (Mike Ovitz is another) who reap more financial reward from failure than I can imagine ever extracting from my wildest dreams of success.
I can’t find anything by Blaine Harden in the Washington Post about the Conde Nast disaster. Before the Giuliani era, it would have been mandatory for the Post to run a story (probably on page A3). I await dissection of the Times coverage from you, our household expert on disasters. (Assume the Journal had something too, but can’t find it. Where did you hide it?)
The food sections of the Times and the Post each have interesting stories today. The Times has a piece about all the culinary artistry that goes into those little nibble-on-these thingies that waiters bring you in fancy restaurants before your meal. They’re called (I found out) amuse-bouches, or sometimes amuse-gueles. “Recently…like a bit player with big ideas,” these palate-pleasers have “begun to hog the stage.” Manhattan chefs are killing themselves to produce miniature masterpieces that, increasingly, are no longer provided gratis. (At a place called Union Pacific, you can order a whole meal of these suckers for a cool $135.) I’m torn between loving elaborately-prepared and delicate food like this and thinking that when this much creativity is poured into such trivial pursuits the End Must Be Near. Over to you, Tom Wolfe.
The Post food section has a fun piece on the science of taste. The best part explains that people can build up a tolerance for hot sauces: In one experiment, subjects had capsaicin (the hot stuff in chili peppers) applied to their tongues for 30 minutes a day; by the fifth day, they reported “less discomfort and less burn.” Also, according to the piece, a principal reason chocolate tastes delicious is because “it changes from firm to soft on the tongue.” I’m not quite sure I understand this, but it’s interesting to muse about.
We’ve got two more reader responses on Ulysses. My friend Lisa Smith, an editor at U.S. News, reports, “I’ve never gotten past chapter 3 of Ulysses,” even though it’s her husband’s favorite book. “This is the only work of fiction that’s absolutely defeated me, and I’ve read lots of heady stuff.” (But not, I’m guessing, Finnegans Wake. Am I right, Lisa?) An emerging theme from our research: husbands who’ve read Ulysses versus wives who haven’t. (So far you and I are the only couple where it goes the other way, though I’ll grant you this is a pretty unscientific sampling.)
Slate reader Joel Jacobsen, meanwhile, writes in to make the case for Ulysses: “It’s a lot less portentous and difficult than the academics think.” Unsurprisingly, he observes that it’s easier to read if you know Dublin. “Also: skip the first three chapters.” Huh? “Stephen Daedalus is exactly the sort of boring pretentious undergraduate know-it-all who dominates the discussion in those semester-long seminars on Ulysses. But in chapter four the POV switches to Leopold Bloom, a much more interesting and sympathetic character.” Jacobsen’s formula is to skip “any section that’s too tedious or precious or (almost the same thing) that mentions Stephen Daedalus.” Then Ulysses reads like “a Dubliners short story blown up to life-size.”
But isn’t that cheating? Also, if we start cutting Stephen Daedalus out of everything, where does that leave Portrait of the Artist, which is all about Stephen Daedalus?
Worriedly,
Tim
PS. Hate to turn all conventional on you, but you’re missing a good bet with William Faulkner.
