May 18

There was a story in the New York Times this weekend about how there's a new residential building boom in Las Vegas, a city with an extremely depressed economy, 9,517 currently unoccupied new homes, and 5,600 recent foreclosures: "Yet builders here are putting up 1,100 homes, and they are frantically buying lots for even more." One promoter says the next housing boom is going to be bigger than the last one. Say what? From what alternate universe do these buyers come? Whatever the answer to that puzzling question, the developers insist that those buyers want NEW CONSTRUCTION, not some damn foreclosed 2005 mini-mansion. And forget about all that "small house" stuff: "With our buyers, they always want bigger."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/business/16builder.html

Well, I know that the article is about Las Vegas, delusion's capital on earth. Still, pretty funny reading. You do get the sense that the Times reporter was shaking his head while he was writing the piece. I like it when he says, "...many Americans will always believe the latest model of something is their only option, an attitude builders are doing their utmost to reinforce." It is certainly true that Americans would rather repeat their mistakes than learn from them; I used to notice this in corporate life, too. A big mistake might be the elephant in the room, but it was not to be spoken of (unless it could be blamed on someone who was already gone) and definitely not to be analyzed. Only losers dwell on the past.

Those empty houses in Nevada are accusatory reminders of past errors which very few want to be reminded of. They're a downer. But new construction is always optimistic! It's the American spirit in action!

We're such babies in this country, honestly.

Julian Barnes welcomes the new French edition of Eugene Delacroix's Journal in two volumes and 2,520 pages -- another of those stupendous productions like Thoreau's Journal, “un document étonnamment complexe, hybride, chaotique, labyrinthique":

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7116876.ece

The coloration of artist Philip Taaffe's recent works suggest an explosion in a candy factory, but there is a lot else going on as well:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38112  

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/2010-05-18_philip-taaffe/ 

In addition to being talented, handsome, and charming, actor Colin Firth is well-read and has excellent literary taste:

http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/Colin-Firths-Bookshelf/1

Michael Dirda, one of the finest contemporary book critics, still catches up with well-known titles as all of us do, and is mesmerized by his encounter with William Lindsay's Gresham's Nightmare Alley:

While I've known for a long time that William Lindsay Gresham's "Nightmare Alley" (1946) was an established classic of noir fiction, I was utterly unprepared for its raw, Dostoevskian power. Why isn't this book on reading lists with Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts" and Albert Camus' "The Stranger"? It's not often that a novel leaves a weathered and jaded reviewer like myself utterly flattened, but this one did.       

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/12/AR2010051204784.html

Dirda has all the virtues of a great reviewer, and none of the flaws; if other writers in any branch of reviewing, not just books, want to know how it's done, they need to immerse themselves in his work. He is a descendant of and on par with Arnold Bennett, whose book reviews in The New Age and The Evening Standard early in the 20th century are the gold standard for engaged, whole-hearted, perceptive, and beautifully written reviews. (These are collected in Books and Persons and The Evening Standard Years.)

Vulpes Libris strongly recommends Claire Harman's biography of the British novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978), which gives a warm account of her relationship with the poet Valentine Ackland (1906-1969). Ackland, like the French provocateur Claude Cahun (1894-1954), was a woman who practised what we would now call "genderfuck":

...[she] set about challenging the female gender identifications expected of her. She took to wearing men’s clothing, cut her hair in a short style called the Eton crop, and was at times mistaken for a handsome young boy. She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s.

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/sylvia-townsend-warner-a-biography-by-claire-harman/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Townsend_Warner 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine_Ackland

Here is a Cahun self-portrait for comparison -- s/he was a distinguished photographer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Cahun

http://www.vinland.org/scamp/Cahun/

Among notables born on this date are philosophers Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, novelist W.G. Sebald, Scottish journalist and belle-lettrist John Wilson, poet Omar Khayyam, theater composer Meredith Willson, bass Ezio Pinza, jazz trombonist Kai Winding, singer/songwriter Charles Trenet, country singer George Strait, pop singer Perry Como, rock keyboardist Rick Wakeman, architect Walter Gropius, film directors Frank Capra and Richard Brooks, baseball players Brooks Robinson and Reggie Jackson, dancer Margot Fonteyn, photographer Carl Mydans, and actors Massimo Girotti, Chow Yun-Fat, Tina Fey, Robert Morse, and Dwayne Hickman. Hickman's television sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which aired from 1959 to 1963 (and later in reruns on Nick at Nite, when Nick at Nite was good), is urgently overdue for a full DVD release. It was a sparkling, innovative show, and it holds up beautifully. Dwayne Hickman's effortless charm (akin to Colin Firth's!) carries the monologues in which he "breaks the fourth wall" and speaks directly to the audience: