Just an Accident

I tell all my students, whenever I am fortunate enough to have some, that they need a fiction reading habit. I won't go here into the reasons I give this advice, but an excellent example of one such reason--fortuity, and the accidental inspiration it sometimes produces--came upon me unawares recently. I will now tell you about it, distressing though this particular episode of fortuity happened to be.

I am a big A. S. Byatt fan. I think she is probably the finest living English-language prose stylist. I love reading her even when I don't manage to care much about her characters, which happens from time to time. Since I can read faster than she can write and publish (unlike some bloggers I know, who can actually write faster than I can read), the appearance of a new book by A.S. Byatt works as the opposite of what I call a petty subversion of everyday life. It is, therefore, something of a petty, or more than petty, boon to everyday life. I look forward to these, and the latest is The Children's Story, which my wife, Lord love her, gave me as a gift some weeks ago.

I don't want to ruin the book for those now reading it or who intend to read it, but it is curious how the petty subversions and the petty boons of everyday life have a way of intersecting. The petty, or not so petty, subversion of everyday life bothering me lately is the utter tanking of my book, Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Nearly Everything. The book came out in September (from John Wiley & Sons), with back-jacket praise from Les Gelb, Itamar Rabinovich, Michael Mandelbaum, Peter Berger, Joe Joffe, and Robert D. Kaplan. I heard unsolicited praise for the book from Dov Zakheim, Aaron Miller, Eliot Cohen and others. So I know it is a good book; all these people are not just being polite. Everyone who see it takes an interest in it -- the publisher did a fine cover. Yet it has gotten zero reviews. No newspaper will publish a op-ed related to it. Sales are terrible. I have been to three bookfests trying to hawk it, and given a series of other talks and radio interviews as well--small time stuff, to be sure--and I have found that nothing works, and so I give up. The ratio of time invested to benefit extracted is appalling. I'd rather stay home and read novels (or wait to be drawn back to my Gibson F-4).

Now, of course, the book is about exaggerations about the Jews, of which there are a lot (of exaggerations that, is, not Jews). So when I immerse myself in something where I can detect no trace of Jewcentricity, I am rather delighted these days. Having written a book about exaggeration, in which I myself very carefully did not exaggerate, took a psychic toll on me. I am therefore a little bit sick of thinking about the Jews just now--all of the Jews, some of the Jews, and any one of the Jews, including myself. What better way to heal that sickness than to get absorbed into a wonderful novel that is, to be precise about it, Judenrein! A.S. Byatt to the rescue, to my rescue, in any case.

The Children's Story begins, in Britain of course, in 1895 and ends in 1918. It is not just a story about specific children, the Wellwood children and their friends in this case. It is about a cultural phenomenon as well, wherein some upper-class British and other European do-gooders and assorted confused radicals elevated the idea of childhood as a metaphor for cleansing the human race from the degradations associated with industrial civilization. We humans need be simpler and more childlike, was the general idea, more natural and unadorned with the artificial; so we write stories like Peter Pan, swim naked and c0-ed in forest streams (there's a bit of that in the book) and otherwise indulge in fantasies and pretend to love new arts & crafts styles like Jungenstil to express, knowingly and not, that longing for the child-likely authentic.

This impulse is anything but child-like and simple as it plays out in the book, of course. It turns out, for example, that some of the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood are not exactly the children of Humphrey and Olive Wellwood. Many of the men in the book are real rounders, some of them sweet and almost forgivable, others quite monstrous and hurtful. But Olive has had a fling herself, back before 1895 in Munich, and one of the children in the house, Dorothy, we learn is not in fact the daughter of Humphrey, whom Dorothy had always believed was her real father until a disturbing whiskey-fueled incident and a subsequent confession revealed otherwise.

Now, without either boring you or entirely ruining the story for those who want to read (or finish) the book, let me simply say that Dorothy's real father is a German artist named Anselm Stern, from Munich. He appears early in the book, in the Wellwood's garden at a midsummer eve's party, but we do not know then about Olive and Anselm Stern's brief intimate history. We also do not yet know about Wolfgang and Leon, Anselm Stern's two sons with his German wife, who are, of course, Dorothy's half-brothers.

Now Dorothy, of all the children in the Wellwood household, is serious as a student and resolves at a tender young age to become a medical doctor and surgeon, at a time when that was no easy course of ambition for a female. She succeeds, and we readers are most glad for her. Her friend and (she thought) her cousin on her father's side, Griselda, is the most beautiful woman of the younger set in the book; they are confidantes. So it goes, on and on, in Britain and in Paris and in Munich, and the story is fine fun as the narrative weaves and wobbles its focus on a large clutch of main characters. And then, for me, Byatt ruins everything in the last few pages of a 675-page novel. She crashes the petty boon into the petty subversion, and makes a complete hash of everything. How?

Well, after having mentioned Jews only once in some 670 pages--a passing remark about a Boer War-era financial scandal in the City involving the Montagu family having frothed up some mild anti-Semitism--she suddely reveals that Anselm Stern is a Jew. She reveals this in the context of a discussion of the hair-raising goings on in Bavaria near the end of World War I, telling the reader in brief the wild but true tale of Kurt Eisner, Gerhard Landauer, and Erich Muhlsem--all of whom were Jews. And now we see it: Dorothy, the only kid of the whole lot to become a professional success, a doctor no less, is half Jewish. Griselda, the beauty, falls in love with her half-brother Wolfgang--a Jew. Everyone else either commits suicide, gets killed in the war, or in some other way melts out of the story. Damn you, Byatt! Damn you.

So I finish the book, with some sense of unease, naturally. I have been Jewcentricized, most unwillingly. But you know how it goes: Those of us who must always be reading some kind of fiction cannot survive long after finishing one novel without starting another. Otherwise we end up weeping for the death of the fantasy we have just completed, and it doesn't matter if the book has a happy ending, more or less, or a sad one, less or more. The key is that it's over and reality rushes back in, filling up more cognitive space than I wish to relinquish.

So I ask my wife, "What else is there around here to read, that I have not already read and failed to completely forget (because you see, if I have read something and managed to completely forget it, why would I want to read it again?)?" And then I see and remark about this little paperback (little compared to the hardback copy of The Children's Story) by Laurie E. King called The Beekeeper's Apprentice. "Oh, that," she says. That's just a little light summer stuff I picked up, in the summer of course, that I did not get far with. Something about Sherlock Holmes, as I recall."

So I pick up The Beekeeper's Apprentice and start into it, and I am delighted. It is preposterous by design: the author nicely pretends to be the charmed recipient of an old truck within which is there is an old manuscript written by a woman named Mary Russell, born January 1900, and the manuscript is about her "real" encounters with the real Sherlock Holmes. This is pretty rich, since Watson writes of Holmes according to Conan Doyle. So here we have King on Russell off to the side of Watson and Doyle, all about Holmes. Watson is real as amanuensis to Holmes, but he is fiction within Doyle; and now Doyle is real within Russell, but Russell is fiction within King. Isn't this fun? We get so involved, momentarily, trying to figure out what is fictional and fanciful and what is not that we forget that, layered though the authorship seems to be, it is all fictional and fanciful.

King does not write with the grace or intricacy of Byatt, but some novels don't need either to keep me happy, at least for a while. There is the lovely coincidence that where Byatt leaves off chronologically, 1918, King picks up with but modest overlap, in 1917. Some themes about women and society and the war's impact on Britain's class stratification overlap nicely, too, and entirely by accident as far as my eyes are concerned. And most important by far, there are, I say to myself, going to be no Jews sneaking around in this silly little summer book.

Ta-dum...... On page 16--just page 16, mind you--it turns out that Mary (named for Magdalene and not the virgin, we're told a few pages earlier) not only has one Jewish parent, but reads and writes Hebrew! Holmes deduces this, you see, from the shape of the ink-smudges on Mary's left thumb and second finger. Had I not been on a fairly crowded Metro car when I read this, I might have thrown the book--Dorothy Parker-style--against the nearest wall. Damn, damn, damn!

I know it's all just an accident, a minor irritating accident. I know it's not aimed at me, this mocking episode of fortuity. It's not kismet, and it's not mystical. But damn, damn, damn it is annoying.

Free Advice

A few days ago I had lunch at a newly renovated hotel in downtown Washington with an old colleague, by which I mean both someone I have known for many years and someone beyond age 60--not that 60 signifies anything in particular for someone, like myself, who is a mere 58. The conversation touched on many things in no particular order, as a midweek Washington luncheon conversation should. We both have new books; that took some time, each of us complaining in turn about what readers don't read, editors don't review, and publishers don't help with. At one point, I don't know why, I expressed some sense of being more tired lately than I remember and would like to be. My friend, who will remain unnamed for an excellent reason that will become clear in a second, offered me empathetic counsel based on his own experience: "Slim down at the gym, shave off your beard, and get a mistress. Does wonders."

"What does wonders--which one, I mean?", I asked.

"All three," he replied.

This is not the sort of advice I get every day, or even every decade. It's true: This friend was not born and raised in the United States (or Britain), and so that may help explain the novelty. My reaction, immediate and unshakable, was that "this is impossible."

"Which one?", he asked.

"All three," I answered, and it's true. But I like to think that either going to the gym regularly or shaving the beard would be hardest.

The lunch was overpriced; the advice free. Do you really get what you pay for?

Sunday's New York Times carried a front page story on Genentech lobbyists perverting the health care debate, such as it's been. Seems that lobbyists provided copy to House staffs, which made its way into the record verbatim, thus leading to a bunch of Congressmen saying exactly the same things. Genentech had of course earlier poured dollars into these Congressmen's campaign coffers. This is mildly embarrassing, but what Genentech and related lobbyists said about the episode was not embarrassing--it was outrageous.

Note the quote from Even L. Morris, head of Genentech's Washington office: "There was no connection between the contributions and the statements." If you believe that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to talk with you about. Worse, another lobbyist said: "This happens all the time. There is nothing nefarious about it." The fact that, indeed, it does happen all the time is precisely what is nefarious about it. That someone can say such a thing with a straight face, and maybe even believe it, is the truest measure of what a state of decay this democracy is in.

It's get more and more frustrating to see the New York Times on Sundays. The Magazine might as well be named The National Homosexual Advancement Journal. The Book Review has turned into a journalists' delight: almost no standards, no rules of evidence, few serious books reviewed, and only journalists who know less than the authors seem to be able to review them. What is Sam Tanenhaus doing?

Case in point from a month or so ago -- Tony Horwitz reviewing Rich Cohen's book Israel is Real. It was hard to tell from the review essay which made the largest number of factual mistakes, the book or the review. Certainly the book, now that I've seen it. I even saw the author at a Bookfest at the JCC in San Francisco, but I couldn't bring myself to go over and introduce myself. What would I say? "Gee, Rich, you sure write well; too bad you don't have a clue what you're talking about"? There was a intro to the Horwitz review, in the form of a brief interview, on the inside cover of the Book Review that week, in which Horwitz let his discomfort with synagogues and rabbis and Judaism hang out for all to see. Cohen, apparently, too. So one semi-alienated Jew who feels heroic about it reviews a book by another semi-alienated Jew who feels heroic about it, and what do you think is going to happen? Well, it happened.

And then there's this week--nothing (thank G-d) to do with Judaism, only with a few Jews. We have in the November 9, 2009 issue Hanna Rosin reviewing a book by Barbara Ehrenreich -- her book entitled Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich lampoons positive thinking, which is right but she goes a little overboard. Rosin somehow managed to love the book even while dissenting from Ehrenrich's thesis--which is that corporate greed and connivance is behind the positive thinking plague. Of course Ehrenreich and Rosin appreciate the uses of sadness and angst--they're both reasonably well educated and well accultured Jews, after all; how could they not? But, that said, it is usually hard to like a book so well but at the same time disagree with its core argument. Do you think? But no, not in the NYTimes Book Review, where you get maximum points for striking the right mood and disliking the right things. Logic? Argument? Please don't bother me with that stuff.

And then there's Nicholas Thompson's review of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Preditioneer's Game. Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist (I've even published him myself once, or half of once -- he was a co-author...) who seems to have been bitten by the rational choice bug. He argues that people act in their own self-interest, and that most collective behavior can be predicted from this insight. The reviewer wonders at one point if Bueno de Mesquita is full of baloney, so the reviewer is clearly not a complete idiot. Of course, Bueno de Mesquita is at least half full of baloney. Sure, one has to start with self-interest, but one cannot possibly stop there. Self-interest can be interpreted in all sorts of ways by individuals, rationally and not so rationally. After all, all of us are emotional creatures, and some of us are stupid, too. Moreover, collective behavior -- of governments, corporations, large organizations of all kinds, not to mention societies -- is not a simple aggregation of individual behaviors. Anyone who hasn't appreciated that little fact yet needs remedial training in the act of having an adult consciousness. Rational choice modeling is a a step backwards, and it is only as popular as it is because it seems you can load a lot of data into a computer and watch it gurgle and purr. Oh what fun. Oh what alchemistic baloney. Oh what "stuff" to ignore in a New York Times Book Review essay.

Thank heaven, at least, for TLS.

I Have No Idea

I give up trying to be a regular blogger. Too lazy; too little time. So once in a while, when the spirit moves me, I will post. No promises beyond that.

The spirit moves me. The spirit of bureaucracy moves me.

Vignette 1. Some weeks ago I became the president of my family's real estate holding corporation. I will spare you the bizarre details of this matter, but suffice it to say that when the corporation's officers changed, we had to get a new bank account to service our needs. That meant we had to get new cheques. We used the same bank as the previous officers, Chevy Chase Bank, transferred the money and all seemed well. But the bank sent the new cheques to the treasurer, my cousin Debbie, via UPS, and left them on her front porch during the middle of a Wednesday, while she was at work. The cheques disappeared, probably into the arms of opportunistic thieves trawling after the UPS truck. This is common. So I went into the bank and told them of the problem. The bank manager, Marsha Brogdon, put a restriction on the account until we could find out what happened. This was on August 11. The cheques never showed up, and meanwhile we needed to use the account to pay some federal and local taxes. So the bank put a hold on those cheques that were lost and ordered new ones printed. In the meantime, four temporary cheques were given to us to use for urgent purposes. I assumed, and was told, that the account would work, except for the cancelled range of cheques that had gone missing. We used the temporary cheques, three of them, one to pay our accountant for services rendered, one to pay the IRS and one to pay the District of Columbia government.

A little while later, the accountant called me to say his cheque had bounced, and he got tagged for a $35 fee. So I went to the bank to find out what the hell was going on. The assistant manager, Barry Robinson, looked at the account on-line and said nothing was wrong. He showed me that all three cheques had been paid and the money removed from the account. This was on August 31. So I told the accountant that something must be wrong on his end. That was not so. Then the IRS cheque came back, having bounced. I asked my cousin to call the bank, and she was told the cheques bounced because there was a restriction on the account. Incredulous, I called the bank. Neither Ms. Brogdon nor Mr. Robinson was there. I left a message to have someone call back before 5 pm (this was around 12:30). I got no call. The next morning I went into the bank; again, neither Ms. Brogdon nor Mr. Robinson was there. I left a message to call. Mr. Robinson finally did, and when he did I let him know in no uncertain terms how irritated and disappointed I was. It seemed not to occur to him that if a hold was put on a missing range of cheques, there was no longer a need for a restriction on the whole account. We needed for the account to work; why else would we request and the bank give those temporary cheques? I also explained that the bank's stupidity had and would cost us money: the accountant's bounce charge, probably the IRS and the DC government's bounce charges, and probably late fees from them as well. I told him the corporation would not be responsible for those fees because it was Chevy Chase's stupidity that caused them. I explained that if he did not see things my way, I would close the account and take it elsewhere. He saw things my way.

This whole stupid thing took up hours of my time, however. I hate clerical incompetence. The routine mismanagement of ordinary tasks is a mark of the Third World (along with massive deferred maintenance and the systematic evasion of personal responsibility for anything), not this world. What does that really mean? Is America becoming more like the Third World, while the Third World itself is becoming something else? I have no idea.

Vignette 2. In mid-August we refinanced our mortgage to take out money to pay off a dangerous and unstable mountain of college loan debt. I wrote a cheque for $68K and change, and send it to a Plus-Loan DoED address in Atlanta with a plain-as-day note saying, in effect, "Hey, look, I paid this off in full before the deadline for this payout amount to expire, August 31, so do not--repeat, do NOT--take $939 and change from my account electronically as of Sept. 7."

They took it out anyway. I called to scream at them, of course. A guy named Leroy looked it all up, admitted I was paid off, and said the money would be returned to me. Then the conversation went like this.

Me: "When and how?"

Leroy in Atlanta: "Well, takes about 60-80 days."

Me: "What? !?! An electronic credit takes 60-80 days? Why?"

Leroy: "It's not done that way. DoED does not return your money, the Treasury does, and they do it by cutting a cheque."

Me: "Why? Why does DoED involve another Executive Branch department in a simple transaction?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Seems sort of crazy, doesn't it?"

Leroy: "Well......I suppose...er"

Me: "Leroy, why is it that with all the fancy computers and telecommunications technology we have, it now takes much, much longer to complete a simple clerical operation than it did even before the invention of an IBM Selectric typewriter?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me:"Say Leroy, how much interest is the Treasury going to pay me for the privilege of holding my money for so long?"

Leroy: "They won't pay you any interest."

Me: "Leroy, if I have to pay interest when I hold the government's money in loan, why doesn't the government pay me interest when they hold my money?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Do you think that's fair?"

Leroy: "I have no idea."

Me: "Leroy, do you have any ideas?"

Leroy: "Not between 9 and 5 I don't, no sir."

Me: "Have a nice life, Leroy."

Leroy: " You betcha."

Vignette 3. I take the 37 Ride-On rush-hour bus to the Metro in the cold, dark weather and when it rains. Yesterday morning the bus was 15-20 minutes late in a light rain, way off schedule. This morning, something much stranger happened. Instead of moving in a little clockwise loop in our part of the route, as the bus has done every weekday morning for the past ten years, not one but two busses came round in a counterclockwise direction. A woman who got off the bus on the other side of the road mumbled something about locos driving d'buuus, and said she thought the schedule had changed. Well, we knew vaguely that the schedule would change September 6, not so much the times as where the bus would go after the Grosvenor Metro, for the 37 route had been partly merged with another (this is amazingly complicated for a simple thing). Finally a bus came headed in the right direction. I asked the driver if the schedule had changed.

He said, "I have no idea. I'm not the regular driver on this route."

I said: "Well, OK, what's your schedule today. When are you, were you, supposed to be at this stop?

He said: "I have no idea. You need to ask the county about that."

I said: "You mean you're just driving the route and have no idea when you're supposed to be where?"

He said: "Please just have a seat, sir."

When I got to work I called Ride-On. They knew nothing about any of this. The schedule had not changed. So why has the bus been way off the last two days, and why are buses headed in the wrong direction around the loop, and why don't your drivers even pretend to care about their passengers?"

And she said: "I have no idea."

Two speeches

Alas, another long hiatus between posts. Why? Well, again, I've either been "busy" or "lazy", two of the most fungible words in the English language (perhaps, probably, mutatis mutandis with the vocabulary, in every language). But I just had to comment on the Obama Administration's speechmaking of late in foreign policy. Had to.

The President gave a major, architectural speech in Moscow on July 7 at the New Economics School graduation. At least it was supposed to be an architectural speech. It had five major elements, pillars or points, and it was very far-reaching in its language (wait just a minute and I'll come back to that). So this, I and others thought, was THE speech, the one given near the beginning of an administration that tells the world what the purposes of American power are. Usually THE speech, the architectural blueprint, is given by the Secretary of State, but since, by nearly all accounts, this President is acting as his own Secretary of State with the help of the Vice-President, this did not come as such a surprise.

But then, just eight days later, the Secretary of State gave a speech at the Washington offices of CFR that--you could have knocked me over with a feather--looked, smelled, quacked and read like THE speech, an architectural blueprint for U.S. foreign policy. This was a surprise. At the beginning of the Bush Administration, for various reasons I know but don't want to spend time explaining here, we got no such speech. This time we got two.

It would not have been so surprising if Secretary Clinton's speech had tracked along with the President's. It too featured five elements or pillars or main points, after all. And as these things are properly done, for a Secretary of State to echo and elaborate on the President's policy would have been a good idea, and it would have been proper and standard practice. But it didn't track with the President's speech.

Here are President Obama's five pillars from July 7: anti-WMD proliferation; isolating and defeating violent extremism; global prosperity; democracy; and international system that advances cooperation while respecting sovereignty. Here are Secretary Clinton's five pillars from July 15: build stronger mechanisms for cooperation; lead with diplomacy; make development as a core priority; coordinate civil-military efforts in conflict zones; and shore up the traditional sources of American influence, notably the international economy.

There is some overlap here. Obama's #3 matches, sort of, Clinton's #5. Obama's #5 could be read as akin to Clinton's #3. Clinton mentions democracy and human rights, Obama's #4, but does not call them a pillar. Basically, however, these are two separate speeches saying different things in different tones and with different emphases. Obama's five pillars are goals or aspirations, living at a high level of abstraction, if one had to describe them; Clinton's are less goals than operational principles, living at a high--but not as high--level of abstraction. I can see some clever White House type, if asked, claiming that the speeches are complementary on this basis--the President lays out what we want to do and the Secretary lays out how we're going to do it. But no one has done so because the press, so far anyway, has been too stupid, or too fawning, to notice the disconnect and ask any questions about it. And it would be cleverness without substance, because in fact these are what they appear to be: two uncoordinated speeches.

How did this happen? I don't know the lead time on the President's speech, but I do know, or can surmise, that the lead time on Clinton's was more than eight days. That means that the speech was being prepared before Obama spoke in Moscow. I don't know how these folks operate, but I do know that when I was writing Colin Powell's major speeches, and the first two that Condoleezza Rice gave before I left her service, it would not have occurred to us to keep the White House uninformed as to what we were doing; in short, we would have cleared a mature draft at some point. Even more important, it would never have occurred to Powell, and certainly not to Rice, to essentially ignore what the President had said or was about to say on the same subject. They would have made it their business to know and align their language. They would have told me or the chief-of-staff or somebody to call over to the White House and talk to the speechwriters and find out what was going down. Powell used to insist that there never be any publicly perceivable "blue sky" between himself and President Bush, because that would just reduce his leverage, such as it was, on the President in private. What was Clinton thinking when she stood up there at the CFR podium, just days after the President's Moscow speech, knowing she was about to give a speech of parallel purpose to the President's but not of parallel content? Beats me.

Now, as to the speeches themselves, both are pretty bad as expressions of the "black arts" of speechwriting, to invoke Peggy Noonan's wonderful old phrase. Neither one is memorable, and neither sticks conceptually to the wall, as it were. But Obama's is worse. Good thing, I suppose, that no one noticed it since Michael Jackson died..... Clinton's at least has a theme that transcends pure banality, something the Building can understand and be lifted by, and the pieces fit together logically, sort of. Obama's, meanwhile, is all over the place; there is no logical thread connecting the parts, no theme one can remember as a take-away, no deliverables, no proposals or plans revealed. And there is way too much sentimental eyewash toward the end, and this in front of an extremely cynical Russian audience. Bad audience read.

But again, the real problem is that the President and the Secretary of State don't seem to be in the same huddle. I don't know this crowd--don't know the staffers who know the principals. But from the looks of this spate of speechmaking, I'd have to suppose that these teams are simply not speaking to one another on any level that matters. Maybe there's another explanation, but if so I can't see what it might be. So I'd have to conclude that this episode confirms my original view that Obama was on balance wrong to offer Hillary Clinton this job, and she was wrong to have accepted it.

It has been a long time since I wrote here.  Been busy, I guess.  But I just had to make a small remark for posterity's sake:  I heard Robert McNamara is finally dead. I know it is considered in poor taste to express happiness over the death of a fellow human being, but the only thing that would have made me happier is if the son-of-a-bitch had died a long time ago.  I hope he suffered.  What a horrible man, not just as Secretary of Defense, but also as World Bank president and then as semi-retired moron for many, many years.  Oh, I am so glad he's finally dead.  I want to know where his grave is.  I won't go out of my way to visit, but if I find myself nearby I hope to have my dancing shoes handy.

I needed this, too.  It has not been a great morning.  Squirrels in the plum trees this morning, and I missed, as usual, the one shot I managed to squeeze off. Just got back from attending a wedding in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin; cost me $1,700 and I can't honestly say I had any fun doing it. Gained a few pounds, too. Was late to work despite being awake early; more slowness on the Red Line....  Great weather for July, nice and cool. Otherwise, have not played my instruments for weeks, longest break I can ever remember, and don't have much taste even for listening to music.  Don't know what's the matter with me. So thanks, McNamara, for cheering me up at least a little.