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Saturday, February 26, 2005
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SUMMERS AND SMOKE And speaking of corporate consulting (see post directly below), Larry Summers’s consultants are doing a bang-up job. UD is all for his keeping the presidency of Harvard, however he has to go about that, and she’s impressed with the take-no-prisoners approach his consultants have adopted toward that end. In particular, if today’s New York Times feature on Summers is anything to go by, his people have advised that Summers urgently needs to feminize his image, to stress his sensitivity and his capacity for suffering. Consider, for example, the photograph that accompanies the article. It’s a big photo, taking up more than half of the top of page A9, and it shows Summers in his office, seated in a classic pensive pose, his soft eyes fixed on the middle distance and his chin cupped by a loosely curving hand. Lost in the Faulknerian half-light that plays gently upon the white shutters and the soft chairs and the wisteria, he sits alone and infinitely vulnerable. UD found this photograph similar to one she’d seen years ago, and, thanks to Google Image, she was able to come up with what she suspects was indeed its model. Edith Piaf was old and fragile when this picture was taken. But there’s the same mottled light playing on her sensitive features and her bent body, and on her pale face there’s the same pained introspective gaze… (A final cautionary note. Although the consultants seem to be on the right track with Summers, UD doubts that they were right to advise him to wrap up the NYT interview in the way that he reportedly did. When his conversation with the reporter began to lag, Summers apparently tottered over to a cupboard in his office, took out two miniature trucks, and began playing with them on the floor. “Look. Look,” he said to the astonished reporter. “This big truck is the Daddy Truck. This little truck is the Baby Truck.”) |
