“[Francois] Hollande is just a beret and a string of onions away from cementing global preconceptions of the nation indelibly.”

I’m giving thanks for what I just saw.

Just now, 7:33 in the morning, Thanksgiving Day, Rokeby Avenue, Garrett Park, Maryland:

I was sitting in the office reading, on the screen, E. B. White’s very short story, “The Second Tree from the Corner.” As I finished its last lines, I looked up to see a walloping big orange fox in my driveway.

She walked slowly – she loped – her nose somewhat to the ground, her eyes calm and thoughtful.

For the first time in my years of fox-watching… fox-glimpsing… here was a large slow meditative one, generously giving me a long shot of her glossy body, her elegant snout. She pondered, pondered, pondered, along my driveway, me all agog gazing, her thick tail grazing the paving. She pondered maybe the mice and voles and rats she’d rid us of that evening…

She loped then along the side path of flat gray pavers; wound along the curving mulch I packed down to make a trail through the back lawn…

And these paths that I’d made – they were hers… She knew them, used them, the paths I’d made for her dreaming feet (see Sunday Morning, the thanksgiving poem), and for my dreaming feet.

Finally the fox entered yet another path of mine, this one created by clearing leaves and twigs in a curving line through a little wood that dips and then rises toward the very back of my forest, where I’ve long known the foxes live.

Instead of disappearing into her den, she paused at the last place on the path my eyes could follow her, and she pondered again and placed her snout along the path and shook her tail. And then she went up into the deeper woods.

*********************

Thus she is, by the sheer coincidence of my happening to read White’s story in such a way as to have summoned her (I read it in search of a Thanksgiving story to which I could link you), my natural disturbance in the lovely scene, my gilt-edged excellence.

It was an evening of clearing weather, the Park showing green and desirable in the distance, the last daylight applying a high lacquer to the brick and brownstone walls and giving the street scene a luminous and intoxicating splendor. Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted. “What do you want?” he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted; and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep, formless, enduring, and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick, and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the dim saloons, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of the glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it. Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of these things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down, and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor’s office would fall flat on his face.

Trexler felt invigorated. Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene. “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,” he said, answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away.

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that was not disappointed. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him.

********************************

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you’re ready. It’s a terror. It’s a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We’ve set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear.

… titled The Last Days of the GOP.

What Washington business lobbyists say on-the-record about the House Republicans and about Tea Party activists pales before what they are willing to say if their names aren’t used. One former Republican staffer says of the anti-establishment groups, “They want to go in and fuck shit up. These non-corporate non-establishmentarian guys—that is exactly what they are doing. And the problem with that is obvious. What next? What happens after you fuck shit up?”

… tweeting.

Ask around Poznan and residents offer all sorts of different explanations for [Poland’s] recent [economic] success. Some say history has inured Poles to such drastic turns in their fortune that they enjoy life while they can, spending their hard-earned zlotys. Others say they learned to be resourceful under the hardship of Communism, where a company like Apart once had to buy old gold jewelry and melt it down before it could make a new ring or bracelet.

Mr. Niespodziany attributed it to a positive form of incompetence. “Even the crisis doesn’t work in Poland,” he joked.

[Camus] fell in love several times over, notably with Patricia Blake, a 19-year-old student and Vogue apprentice. He read her pages from “The Plague” and she, in return, noting his fascination with the American way of death, found him issues of undertakers’ trade magazines — Sunnyside, Casket,and Embalmer’s Monthly. He particularly admired a funeral parlor ad: “You die. We do the rest.”

From an article about Camus and Sartre in New York.

Readers will be reminded of the case of Johan Hari, a young hot British journalist who got much farther than Jonah Lehrer has along these lines.

Mr. Buatta did turn down a job for a “pizza king,” who wanted the Prince of Chintz to design a kind of dungeon in an A-frame house on Long Island. As Mr. Buatta recalled: “I told him, ‘I don’t do this. I do English style.’ And he said, ‘What kind of a meatball are you?’ I heard later he’d been found dead in his car.”

UD has always found his 1997 essay, Cars and their Enemies, repulsive. A striking example of American entitlement, it’s also pointlessly flippant and nonchalantly incorrect.

Nowhere, in his paean to the car, does Wilson talk about any location in the world but the United States of America (occasionally he touches on Europe, in order to ridicule its system of trains). It seems not to occur to him that what the car does, it does to the globe, and so confining yourself to what it does to Washington DC and San Francisco is irresponsible.

Wilson loves the feel of the wind in his hair as he speeds through the countryside. He can’t get this feeling unless he’s alone, and only a car delivers absolute privacy.

These feelings are quintessentially American, and people who don’t like cars are unAmerican:

Cars are about privacy; critics say privacy is bad and prefer group effort. (Of course, one rarely meets these critics in groups. They seem to be too
busy rushing about being critics.) [No one says privacy is bad and insists on solidarity all the time… except … what? Socialists?] Cars are about autonomy; critics say that the pursuit of autonomy destroys community. [Ask someone who has pissed away large amounts of his life sitting in traffic how autonomous that made him feel. He’s stuck in traffic because like everyone else around him he has no option but to take the one feeder highway available to his job. Talk about personal liberty.] (Actually, cars allow people to select the kind of community in which they want to live.) [Just the opposite. Many people tend to live in very distant, less expensive exurbs because they figure they can commute a bit longer and save on the price of the house. They’re not choosing hours each day of car dependency.
This is simply the best they can do.] Cars are about speed; critics abhor the fatalities they think speed causes. (In fact, auto fatalities have been declining for decades, including after the 55-mile-per-hour national speed limit was repealed. Charles Lave suggests that this is because higher speed limits reduce the variance among cars in their rates of travel, thereby producing less passing and overtaking, two dangerous highway maneuvers.) [Critics abhor the fatalities cars cause. Note that Wilson says nothing here about injuries rather than fatalities.] Cars are about the joyous sensation of driving on beautiful country roads; critics take their joy from politics. [Does Wilson really think he’s making a point here? Is he being funny? He doesn’t care about the answer to these questions. He’s too insouciant. That’s been his tone throughout. I like cars, and you can fuck yourself.] (A great failing of the intellectual life of this country is that so much of it is centered in Manhattan, where one finds the highest concentration of nondrivers in the country.) Cars make possible Wal-Mart, Home Depot, the Price Club, and other ways of allowing people to shop for rockbottom prices; critics want people to spend their time gathering food at downtown shops (and paying the much higher prices that small stores occupying expensive land must charge).

Endless rockbottom-price exurbs full of people bumping around in cars all day — I’ve drunk the milk of Paradise.

The pride of the University of Montana.

Jane Brody reminds UD to mention that the magazine of New Yorker cartoons she read on her flight to Phoenix featured at least six cartoons whose punch line depended on the fact that zillions of Americans are taking antidepressants.

And the next edition of the DSM will guarantee that the few of us left in this country who are not dependent on these pills will soon be taken into the fold.

“He (Gingrich) said, ‘You know and I know that she’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president,'” [Leonard] Carter, who now lives in South Carolina, told CNN recently, relating the conversation he had with Gingrich the day Gingrich revealed he was filing for [his first] divorce. Carter served as treasurer of Gingrich’s first congressional campaigns.

Lee Hausner, a California-based psychologist who works with the ultrarich, has one client she calls “The Phoenix,” a real-estate developer and investor who borrowed and spent heavily. He has surged and crashed twice over the past decade, reaching a net worth of $400 million, losing it, then hitting $200 million and losing it again.

“He’s an impulsive risk-taker,” she says. “He always lays everything on the line.”

For risk-takers who want to get rich and stay rich, Ms. Hausner advises taking a step back every so often and evaluating important decisions rather than leaving them to impulse.

“Some of these people roll the dice and they get rich,” she says. “But they have to realize that if they roll it again, the result may not come out as well. They need to stop themselves before they roll again, and deliberate.”

Noting that there were reporters in the room, [the judge] read Doyle’s rap sheet into the record, including his convictions for stealing a BMW, posing as a furrier to swipe a woman’s mink coat for “cleaning,” impersonating a Secret Service agent and repeatedly violating probation.

————————————-

Doyle has [also] spent time in prison for stealing a bronze Degas sculpture by posing as a member of an art-collecting family, pilfering books from the art library at the University of Kansas, and filching jewelry from a Tennessee woman.