Dear Jim,
Yes, you’ve got a point about Phyllis Diller at 90. I can’t even grasp the magic of Dylan at 60 (though I seem to be alone on that one). The Washington Post has a story today about the retirement of the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s rock critic Jane Scott, who is 82 years old. She covered the Beatles’ first show in town and has been at it ever since. Last night, there was some kind of tribute to her at Cleveland State University. I also see that the Village Voice’s rather venerable rock critic, Robert Christgau, has won a fellowship at Columbia University. We’ve gotten used to the idea of our novelists living on campus; it seems only natural that most of our rock critics will end up there as well.
I can’t speak for the merits of the Borda scheme, though I think something quite like it is used to elect the city council in Cambridge, Mass.; this may or may not satisfy the scheme’s requirement for “honest men.” As it happens, I’m moving back to Boston in a couple of months. I like it there; unfortunately, they’ve been working on the replacement of the city’s “central artery” for 12 years, and much of downtown remains a vast construction site: For some reason, it’s taken longer to complete the “Big Dig” than it did to sequence the human genome. In my first year after college, I typed memos for the director of the Dig’s “bridge design group.” Among the fruits of our labor is an extremely complicated system of bridges known as “Scheme Z” that has been snarling traffic all along the East Coast for years; I’m afraid it may be the result of one of my typos.
Did you see the story in today’s New York Times about the FBI’s hounding of Einstein? I didn’t know that right-wing politicians organized “anti-relativity” rallies in the 1920s. The coverage of Pim Fortuyn’s death is also rather interesting. His success is taken as a sign that the Netherlands is becoming an intolerant place, and his demise is taken as a sign that the country is becoming more intolerant still. He articulates his attacks on immigrants and Islam in the language of liberalism, rather than in the nationalist, family-oriented idiom of the traditional European right. One wonders if he will have his imitators.
All best,
Alex
