Dear Marjorie,
Yes, I agree, we are switching places. From my end, it may have something to do with the fact that I’m now living your life–working at home, tending to household-maintenance chores (I brought the Taurus back from the shop), spending more time with the kids.
That’s my excuse. What’s yours?
I agree with you, though, about the Irene Silverman saga. Clearly there’s something here that fascinates New Yorkers (I note your friend Sally, though a Washingtonian, lived in New York for many years), but its charms feel inaccessible to me. Eccentric and rich old lady runs a flossy boarding house and ends up “missing.” Okay, good one-day local story. But on page one? I think it’s now made page one in the Times twice, maybe three times, and (not meaning any disrespect) they haven’t even found the body yet. Perhaps there’s a Manhattanite out there in cyberspace who can explain this story’s appeal to us.
Even though it took me four hours to read the papers today, I missed the BrainBank story. Thanks for pointing it out. The big question it raises is: Do workers want BrainBank to play intermediary with their bosses because they’re greedy, and know BrainBank will pay them more for their ideas than their bosses would? Or do workers use BrainBank because they assume any idea they bring directly to their bosses will be sneered at or ignored? In other words, is the dysfunctional relationship between bosses and employees that BrainBank profits from the fault more of the bosses or of the employees? The Post story doesn’t really say. My guess is that worker greed weighs less heavily in the balance than management arrogance, but no doubt there’s some spiraling effect.
Anyway, it’s a nice variation on the Cult of the Consultant story, whose essence is that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch and then tells you what time it is. (I think I got that joke from a consultants piece David Owen wrote for Harper’s in the early 1980s; probably they’ve heard it more than once at McKinsey and Bain.) Yeah, Crown is junky. But then again, so is Barnes and Noble. I like Borders much better, and I like Amazon.com and bibliofind.com best of all. I know I should support my Local Independent Bookseller, and I really do try to, but jeez, do you know how much our Local Independent Bookseller just charged me for Ron Rosenbaum’s new book , Explaining Hitler? With tax, it was $31.73! And I had to carry it home!
What are we to make of the sudden emergence of Mark Twain chic, as reported in today’s New York Times? And is it sudden, or just one of those trends invented to fill the newspapers during slow summer months? And when, oh when, is someone in Hollywood going to tackle Pudd’Nhead Wilson or The Man That Corrupted Hadleyville, either one of which would make a great movie?
Lighting out for the territory,
Tim
