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from: Alexander Star
to: Jim Holt

More French Revelations

Posted Monday, May 6, 2002, at 12:47 PM ET

Who are these people?

Jim,

I'm quite eager to bore you (it won't be the first time). I was just reading Thoreau's essay "Life Without Principle," which he occasionally delivered as a lyceum lecture. He describes our circumstances rather well: "They have sent for me, and engaged to pay for me, and I am determined that they shall have me, though I bore them beyond all precedent." Let that be our motto. Of course, Thoreau also took a rather dim view of daily journalism: "it is too much to read one newspaper a week."

I spent most of the weekend on the floor of the Javits center, where the annual book expo was taking place. It's typically a rather strait-laced event. But this year, Heidi Fleiss is publishing a book called Pandering, and a corner of the exhibit hall was set up as a mock brothel, with plush sofas and women in skimpy T-shirts bearing the "pandering" logo. Welcome to Mike Bloomberg's New York. Later on, I went to a party given by Oxford University Press in honor of an American history textbook for children. It took place on the windswept flight deck of the aircraft carrier Intrepid; apart from a few friends, the only people I recognized there were the historian Eric Foner and Monica Lewinsky. It was that kind of weekend.

I'm sorry that the automobiles of New York are keeping you up at night. Unlike the French, Americans will never give up the right to honk or bear arms (on the other hand, we're far more willing to surrender our rights to smoke and drink). A different political system could certainly solve the car noise problem. My father visited China in the late '80s and reported that there had been a lot of complaints about all the noise that Beijing's bicycle riders made every morning as they rode to work furiously ringing their bells. The government issued a decree against bicycle bell ringing, and the next day, the city's streets were silent. Is this progress?

The French elections were a curious sight; apparently, Chirac feared that if he got too many votes, it would dilute his mandate. But the French have always had a curious conception of democracy. In the first national assembly following the revolution, one of the members was a German nobleman who claimed that he represented the oppressed people of China. If a nation proclaims itself the bearer of universal ideals, why shouldn't its parliament represent all of mankind? In any case, I was startled to learn that Jospin's wife is a philosophy professor who once bore a child with Jacques Derrida. Somehow, I knew he would never be president.

Today's Times has a story about the ongoing effort to locate Vermeer's The Concert, which was stolen from the Gardner Museum in Boston a decade ago. There's also a story about the gentleman bandit who held up an Upper East Side shop clerk and made off with an original copy of the first Spider-Man book. He tied up the clerk with white plastic handcuffs, apologized for the inconvenience, and made sure to remove the bullets from his rifle before leaving the shop so he wouldn't be caught carrying a loaded gun. Should these two crimes be punished equally? Is the magnitude of the crime proportional to the aesthetic value of the stolen object? Just wondering.

All best,
Alex

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Alexander Star
to: Jim Holt

More French Revelations

Posted Monday, May 6, 2002, at 12:47 PM ET
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Jim Holt writes the "Egghead" column for Slate. He also writes for The New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. Alexander Star is a writer who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. This fall, he will begin editing the "Ideas" section of the Boston Globe.
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