'the saddest urge of human nature'

The most interesting thing to me ... was the anecdote related by [Simon] Leys ... about sitting in an Australian café minding his own business while a radio is blaring musical and spoken pap in the background. By chance, the program switched to a Mozart clarinet quartet, for a moment turning the café "into an antechamber of Paradise." People fell silent, there were looks of bafflement, and then, "the the huge relief of all," one customer "stood up, walked straight to the radio," turned the knob to another station, and "restored at once the more congenial noises, which everyone again could comfortably ignore."

Leys describes this event as kind of an epiphany. He is sure that philistinism does not result from the lack of knowledge. The customer who could not abide hearing Mozart's music recognized its beauty. Indeed, he did precisely what he did for that reason. The desire to destroy beauty, according to Leys, applies not just to aesthetics but as much, if not more, to ethics: "The need to bring down to our level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendor that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature."

Ian Buruma, "The Man Who Got It Right." The New York Review of Books, 8/15/2013.

I'm looking forward to reading the NYRB's collection of Leys' essays, The Hall of Uselessness.

gifts for the bookish

Il Bisonte leather bookmark / tote with literary quotation (Elizabeth Bishop, in this case) / cozy reading sweater / back issues + a subscription to Slightly Foxed /  Absorene book cleaner / subscription to the NYRB Classics / dictionary tape / a reading lamp by 2nd Shift Studio / teapot / a reading chair / book darts (I wish I could order these in bulk) / book sleeves to protect the books and magazines that travel with you.

(There were too many books to list.)

life savers

Kahneman uses the phrase “availability bias” to mean a biased judgment based on a memory that happens to be quickly available ... A striking example of availability bias is the fact that sharks save the lives of swimmers. Careful analysis of deaths in the ocean near San Diego shows that on average, the death of each swimmer killed by a shark saves the lives of ten others. Every time a swimmer is killed, the number of deaths by drowning goes down for a few years and then returns to the normal level. The effect occurs because reports of death by shark attack are remembered more vividly than reports of drownings.

From Freeman Dyson's review of Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, in the NYRB 12/22/2011.

Photo of shark teeth by Quercus Design.