Lance Mannion: Ideas in search of a post:

Tolstoy on marriage; Hemingway on non-violence

David Brooks wrote an incredibly (fill in the blank) _____________ column the other day advocating joint checking accounts as a way to ensure that the human race survives the next Martian attack, or something.

I’m not sure. It’s hard to say. It’s not clear that Brooks even knows what he’s saying. Matt Yglesias captures the muddledheaded flavor of Brooks’ writing these days.

The man thinks. . . well, it’s hard to say exactly what he thinks, but it’s something about married couples maintaining independent checking accounts. He thinks that’s a bad thing. But he doesn’t deny that under some circumstances, it could be a good thing. He just thinks it would be a bad thing if this became the normal procedure — i.e., the one most people use. But he doesn’t try to go down the list to calculate whether the considerations that make separate accounts a good idea for some people do or do not apply to most couples, or are or are not likely to apply to most future couples. So it’s a bit puzzling. He also doesn’t think people should be forced to maintain unified accounts. He just thinks they should be discouraged in some unspecified way.

All of Brooks’ columns suffer from an on this hand/on that hand woolyness. It’s what happens when you try to maintain your reputation as a open-minded, reasonable although conservative thinker while simultaneously writing propaganda for a pack of Right wing zealots. They’re mutually contradictory exercises.

It’s like Bertie Wooster says about the aspiring fascist dictator Spode who it turns out runs a lingerie shop on the side.

Jeeves: Mr Spode designs ladies’ underclothing, sir. He has a considerable talent in that direction, and has indulged it secretly for some years. He is the founder and proprietor of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs.

Bertie: You don’t mean that?

Jeeves: Yes, sir.

Bertie: Good Lord, Jeeves! No wonder he didn’t want the thing to come out.

Jeeves: No, sir. It would unquestionably jeopardize his authority over his followers.

Bertie: You can’t be a successful Dictator and design women’s underclothing.

Jeeves: No, sir.

Bertie: One or the other, but not both.

Jeeves: Precisely, sir.

You can’t be a good writer and shill for a gang of ideological thugs. One or the other, but not both.

What’s clear though is that Brooks thinks that the basis of a happy marriage is an abjection of ego, particularly on the part of uppity wives who want to keep control of the money they earn.

Brooks’ teacher in the ways of blissful conjugality is…

Leo Tolstoy.

Brooks:

Tolstoy’s story captures the difference between romantic happiness, which is filled with exhilaration and self-fulfillment, and family happiness, built on self-abnegation and sacrifice.

The story he’s referring to is Family Happiness.

This is a story in which the young wife narrating the tale of her marriage realizes that she has lost her husband’s interest and affection, deservedly, through trying to enjoy herself in life and then concludes, with a shrug, well, it’s ok, at least she has the kids and the grocery shopping to make her happy again.

That day ended the romance of our marriage; the old feeling became a precious irrecoverable remembrance; but a new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life and happiness have lasted to the present time.

TolstoyThis is the writer Brooks wants to make our collective marriage counselor.

I have never met a woman who has read War and Peace who wasn’t appalled by what Tolstoy does to his smart and vivacious heroine Natasha at the end of the novel. I haven’t met any man who’s read Anna Karenina who doesn’t think the Kitty-Levin subplot is insipid and a waste of time and who wouldn’t rather be married to an cuckolding Anna than to the vaccouous and docile like an over-affectionate puppy is docile Kitty.

(Of course I haven’t met a man who isn’t convinced that if he was married to an Anna she wouldn’t have reason to look twice at any Vronksys swaggering by.)

The Kreuzter Sonata was the single most misogynistic piece of writing in the Western Canon before Hemingway sweated out The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber after waking up in the middle of the night screaming from yet another feverish nightmare in which his mother came at him with a meat cleaver

Brooks wants us to take advice on a how to live happily ever after from the author of The Kreutzer Sonata?

Tolstoy’s ideas on family happiness aren’t a recipee for a happy marriage. They were a recipee for a very unhappy Mrs Tolstoy.

This is so intrinsic to both Tolstoy’s work and his biography that I wondered if Brooks had actually read anything by him. I’ve always suspected that despite the way conservatives tout for The Great Books and push to have college literature courses teach them to the exclusion of all else, they themselves have never actually read any of The Great Books and don’t want to. I think this because I believe that if they had read those books and absorbed their lessons they wouldn’t be conservatives.

Wishful thinking, I suppose. Education rarely trumps vanity and self-interest, even in liberal academics.

But I was thinking that Brooks couldn’t have read even the story he quotes from. I figured he has a well-thumbed edition of Bartlett’s on his desk and he had flipped to the index and looked for quotes that included the words “family” and “happiness.”

Then I remembered the time in Doonesbury when Trip Trippler went to work for George Will as a quote boy. (And liberal admirers of Brooks who keep asking ruefully what happened to Brooks’ writing skills should re-read some of Will’s books. I think Brooks is trying to rewrite Wills’ old columns from memory and he needs to take more ginseng tablets.) Maybe, I thought, Brooks has a quote boy celebrating his last day on the job by playing a practical joke.

Hee hee. Mr Brooks thinks I’m giving him a quote that supports his argument. He’s also writing a column on humility and I’m going to slip him this great quote from Nietzsche.

Family Happiness is a great story—and very interesting to read in conjunction with Chekhov’s better story The Party. Chekhov was a highly critical admirer of Tolstoy.—but its basic message on the subject of marriage is the same as in all of Tolstoy’s work: Intellectually and sexually independent women are scary as all get out and the key to happiness for a man is to marry a doll.

I couldn’t believe that Brooks would honestly think that using a story by Tolstoy as an example would be persuasive to an audience of 21st Century readers, particularly his female readers.

But Amanda Marcotte at Mouse Words set me straight. She’s got Brooks’ number. Marital happiness isn’t Brooks’ concern. The happiness of men is. Brooks, she says, “is a firm Victorian, completely convinced that a man’s life is empty without the rustle of petticoats in his home, soothing the tired brain after a day of man-work.”

What Brooks wants, Amanda says, is to bring back the Victorian idea of The Angel of the House. Victorian men insisted that

…there were two realms, the private/feminine one and the public/masculine one, and that women were to be relegated to the private one with their main duty to be subservient to men and make the home pleasant for men who were doing the hard, manly work in the public realm. Brooks avoids using gender-specific terms in this paragraph, but the fact that the only examples he uses of spouses who are too fond of their independence are wives makes it clear who he thinks has the duty of sacrificing for the private realm.

World-O-Crap:

Elder care obligations have kept me on the run this week, but I see that Jonah Goldberg left his mark on the Los Angeles Times Opinion page yesterday. So did my parakeet, but Jonah clearly outperformed her by managing to cover twice as many column inches while still working with the same basic materials.

ONE THOUSAND three hundred and forty seven days.

Jonah’s head has now officially been up his ass longer than America was involved in World War II.

That’s how long the United States was involved in combat in World War II, and Monday, the U.S. passed that “grim military milestone,” as one TV anchor called it. This factoid has become a fixture of respectable talking points about the futility of the Iraq war. Newscasters and pundits note its gravity with sober foreboding and slight head-shaking.

The only thing they don’t note is the grotesque stupidity of the comparison.

And when Jonah wants to talks about “grotesque stupidity,” it’s like a bearded sea captain in a yellow sou’wester who wants to tell you about his 3 Way Chowder and Bisque Sampler. Trust the Gorton’s Fisherman.

Let us start with the obvious. World War II may have lasted 1,347 days, but it cost the lives of 406,000 Americans and wounded 600,000 more. Losses among Allied civilians and military personnel stretched into the tens of millions. Whole cities were razed, populations displaced, economies shattered.

All that and it still took less time than George Bush’s Outward Bound excursion to Baghdad.

The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq remains much less than 1% of our WWII losses.

Amazing! Unless you continue with the obvious, and observe that we have roughly 135,000 troops in Iraq, while there were over 16 million men and women in the Armed Forces during World War II.

World War II ended when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Were it not for those grave measures, the war might have lasted for another year or two and cost many more lives. So maybe those wielding the WWII yardstick as a cudgel would prefer we gave Sadr City and Tikrit the Hiroshima-Nagasaki treatment?

Well, Jonah promised grotesque stupidity, but I have to say, he delivered well beyond my wildest dreams. This is the H-Bomb of Strawman Arguments, and earns the coveted Order of the Wicker Man with Screaming Christopher Lee Cluster:

That would surely root out even the most die-hard insurgents and shorten the war.

Yeah, I can’t see any of the other Sunni and Shiite communities in the region getting all worked up just because we expunged a couple of Sunni and Shiite cities in Iraq with nuclear weapons. Tony Snow might have to take a little chin music at the next presser, but I predict it would be a 24 hour story, tops.

The phase of the Iraq war that was comparable to World War II ended in less than three weeks.

That would the phase where we weren’t sucking like Jeff Gannon on an overbooked holiday weekend.

Remember “shock and awe”?

Yeah. Principally, I remember that it sounded pretty stupid. But now – and I gotta admit, props to Jonah – it sounds grotesquely stupid.

As far as such things go, the conventional war put WWII to shame.

Yeah, all the Allies had to do in WWII was to fight a multi-front war spanning the globe from Scandinavia to the South Pacific. In Iraq, we had to fight our way from Kuwait City to Baghdad, a distance of 344 miles! (And it sounds even more impressive when you count it in kilometers!)

the U.S. military victory was akin to defeating all of Italy in less than a month.

Wellll…If you don’t count the fact that Italy was muddy, mountainous, and defended by both Fascist troops and a well-equipped, battle-hardened German Army that didn’t collapse at the first sound of gunfire, then yeah. Sure.

The current phase of the Iraq war — whether we call it post-occupation, reconstruction, civil war or whatever — is really a separate war.

Donald Rumsfeld’s greatest innovation: The Modular War. Today…Iraq. Tomorrow…Ikea!

It’s at once a Hobbesian nightmare in which chaos rules as well as a complex, multi-front battle between various regional factions and their proxies.

I can see why Jonah is so prone to defend it. Who wouldn’t want to hop on some of that sweet action?

But as insurgencies go, it hasn’t lasted very long at all or cost very many American lives.

At least, it hasn’t killed any of the people Jonah meets for crumble cake and vanilla mocha lattes at Starbucks.

The man who probably deserves the most credit for the low number of American deaths in Iraq is Donald H. Rumsfeld. The outgoing Defense secretary decided from the outset that U.S. forces would have a “light footprint” and would opt for surgical efficiency over the kitchen-sink approach that characterized World War II.

Jonah has a point. If there’s one gripe I have with our strategy in WWII, it’s that we simply had too many men. It wasn’t sporting, and it made us look like big insecure bullies. Imagine how much more respectfully the Nazis would have received us if, instead of rolling into Germany with 3 separate armies and millions of troops, we’d tried to occupy them with, say, 150,000? Now that would have been a fight! Face it, people like to get their money’s worth; nobody likes a knockout in the first round. And if we’d only followed the Rumsfeldian “light footprint” doctrine, why, we might still be fighting the Nazis today. Just imagine the pay-per-view possibilities!

Rumsfeld’s way is better, at least on paper. All else being equal, it’s better to have a long war with fewer casualties than a short war with more of them. That’s why the World War II comparison is so frivolous: Days don’t cost anything, lives do.

Except when we’re losing 2 or 3 or 4 lives per day, every day we stay in Iraq. But who cares? Sands through the hourglass, and all that.

Given the enormous scope of World War II, it was a remarkably short war. (Just think of the Hundred Years War by comparison.)

Given the enormous amount of traffic it carries, Fifth Avenue is a remarkably short street. (Just think of the Pan-American Highway. Or the distance from the Sun to Uranus.)

(Okay, I admit, now I’m just cherry-picking the juiciest fruits of stupidity.)

Indeed, when partisans claim that the American people are fed up and want our troops home, they’re deliberately muddying the waters.

Which Jonah objects to on principle, except when he’s using your Jacuzzi.

The American people have never objected to far-flung deployments of our troops. We’ve had soldiers stationed all over the world for decades.

Not getting shot at and blown up on a daily basis, but still…They’re definitely out of earshot.

What the American people don’t like is losing — lives or wars. After all, you don’t hear many people complaining that we still have troops in Japan and Germany more than 20,000 days later.

Even though you can’t get from Tempelhof to the Unter den Linden without your taxi getting hulled by a .50 sniper rifle or dismantled by an IED, people still support our occupation of Berlin. See? It’s all just a matter of perspective. Grotesquely. Stupid. Perspective.

Wingnuts | 10 Comments

Polonium – Alexander V. Litvinenko – Vladimir V. Putin – New York Times:

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored ByDecember 3, 2006
All Aglow
Polonium, $22.50 Plus Tax
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

THE trail of clues in the mysterious death of Alexander V. Litvinenko may lead to Moscow, as the former spy claimed on his deathbed. But solving the nuclear whodunit may prove harder than Scotland Yard and many scientists at first anticipated.

The complicating factor is the relative ubiquity of polonium 210, the highly radioactive substance found in Mr. Litvinenko’s body and now in high levels in the body of an Italian associate, who has been hospitalized in London. Experts initially called it quite rare, with some claiming that only the Kremlin had the wherewithal to administer a lethal dose. But public and private inquiries have shown that it proliferated quite widely during the nuclear era, of late as an industrial commodity.

“You can get it all over the place,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who has advised the United States government on nuclear forensics. “And it’s a terrible way to go.”

Today, polonium 210 can show up in everything from atom bombs, to antistatic brushes to cigarette smoke, though in the last case only minute quantities are involved. Iran made relatively large amounts of polonium 210 in what some experts call a secret effort to develop nuclear arms, and North Korea probably used it to trigger its recent nuclear blast.

Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax. “Radiation from polonium is dangerous if the solid material is ingested or inhaled,” warns the label of an antistatic brush. “Keep away from children.”

Peter D. Zimmerman, a professor in the war studies department of King’s College, London, said the many industrial uses of polonium 210 threatened to complicate efforts at solving the Litvinenko case. “It’s a great Agatha Christie novel,” he said. “She couldn’t have written anything weirder than this.”

Mr. Litvinenko, 43, a vocal critic of the Russian government, died on Nov. 23 after a traumatic illness in which his organs failed and his hair fell out. As he lay dying, he claimed that he had been poisoned and blamed Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. The Kremlin dismissed the charge as absurd.

The British authorities soon found that Mr. Litvinenko had died of polonium 210 poisoning in what appeared to be its first use as a murder weapon. Conspiracy theorists said Russia had the motive and means, noting its long history of polonium work, as well as creative assassinations. The recent discovery of traces of radioactivity on British commercial jets flying to and from Russia has heightened the suspicions.

As in any good murder mystery, the deadliness was foreshadowed. Marie Curie, who discovered the radioactive element in 1898 and named it after her native Poland, organized its close study. One of her polonium workers died in 1927 from apparent poisoning, according to Susan Quinn, author of “Marie Curie: A Life” (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Another worker lost her hair.

At first, mines provided minute samples nearly invisible to the human eye. But the debut of nuclear reactors let scientists make polonium 210 by the pound. The substance emits swarms of subatomic rays, and the Manhattan Project in 1945 used them to trigger the world’s first atom bombs. Such initiators became the global standard for basic nuclear arms.

President Eisenhower, eager to promote “atoms for peace,” had the high heats of polonium 210 turned into electricity for satellites. But the batteries lost power relatively fast because of the material’s short half-life, just 138 days. The United States made few such spacecraft.

By the 1960’s, researchers worried increasingly about polonium 210’s deadly health effects. Harvard researchers found it in cigarette smoke and argued that its concentrations were high enough to make its radioactivity a contributing factor in lung cancer.

Vilma R. Hunt, who helped lead the studies, called polonium 210 a nightmare for health workers, and perhaps sleuths, because it tended to move about in unexpected ways. “It crawls the walls,” she said in an interview. “It can be lost for a while and then come back.”

Though dangerous when breathed, injected or ingested, the material is harmless outside the human body. Skin or paper can stop its rays cold.

Industrial companies found polonium 210 to be ideal for making static eliminators that remove dust from film, lenses and laboratory balances, as well as paper and textile plants. Its rays produce an electric charge on nearby air. Bits of dust with static attract the charged air, which neutralizes them. Once free of static, the dust is easy to blow or brush away.

Manufacturers of antistatic devices take great pains to make the polonium hard to remove. Even so, Dr. Zimmerman of King’s College said it could be done with “careful lab work,” which he declined to describe.

The Health Physics Society, a professional group in McLean, Va., that distributes information on radiation safety, estimates that a lethal dose of polonium 210 is 3,000 microcuries (a radiation measure named after Marie and Pierre Curie). Other experts put the figure slightly higher.

An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.

The company’s antistatic brushes contain less polonium, typically 500 microcuries of radiation. The three-inch brush often sells on the Web for $33.99. In theory, by spending $203.94, before tax and any handling charges, and then disassembling six brushes, someone with lab experience could accumulate a lethal dose.

In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.

“That’s typical” of exotic radioisotopes, he said. “We can’t compete with their prices.”

Last week, Russia’s top nuclear official said it exports 8 grams of polonium 210 a month, or 96 grams a year, to the United States. That is 3.4 ounces, which seems like a trifle but in theory is enough for thousands of lethal doses. He also said Russia had made no exports to Britain in the past five years. “Allegations that someone stole it during production are absolutely unfounded,” Sergei Kiriyenko, director of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency, said on Tuesday. “The controls are very tough.”

Russian officials have repeatedly called Mr. Litvinenko’s death part of a choreographed effort to discredit Mr. Putin. But despite such denials, British tabloids have tended to blame the Kremlin, and the affair has strained relations between London and Moscow.

Nuclear experts said the apparent origin of much of the world’s polonium 210 in Russia, including quantities used in American products, meant that investigations of the toxin’s provenance would probably reveal little. What would be surprising, the experts said, was if the radioactive toxin turned out to have been made or mined outside Russia.

Still, several experts held out the possibility that close examination of polonium 210 residues from Mr. Litvinenko’s body or from the multiple sites where it has been found around London might reveal nuclear fingerprints that could throw light on the baffling case.

“What they’ll be looking for is radioactive contaminants made at the same time,” said Dr. Happer of Princeton. “They’ll do the best they can technically,” hoping to find a match between the London samples and the known attributes of the world’s stocks of polonium 210. “But my guess,” he added, “is that it will take an informant” to clear up the mystery.

Mia Culpa: Keep it Secret, Keep it Safe:

Arriving in tuxedos and gowns to honor departing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld last night, members of the Union League of Philadelphia were greeted by Celeste Zappala holding a sign: “Rumsfeld Betrayed My Son. Betrayed My Country. Gets A Medal… For What!”

Standing among dozens of protesters outside the Union League building on Broad and Sansom streets, the grieving West Mount Airy mom wore a poster with a large photo of her late son and the words: “We Mourn Sgt. Sherwood Baker. Killed in Baghdad. April 26, 2004.”

“Rumsfeld is the symbol of the failed policy that has killed 2,888 American soldiers and wounded over 20,000,” Zappala said, “and they’re giving him a medal for that? This is appalling.

“If they want to give out a gold medal, give it to our soldiers who somehow made it home alive.”

When the league gave Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor its Gold Medal in 2004, the event received full press coverage.

But the league kept the Rumsfeld medal cloaked in secrecy until the Daily News broke the story on Thursday, after club member James A. Ounsworth told a reporter that he was “astonished and ashamed” because “Rumsfeld is a failure. I don’t think you should give an award for failure.”

When asked about the secrecy surrounding the Rumsfeld medal, league spokeswoman Patricia Tobin said, “It’s up to the awardee. We always try to respect the wishes of the awardee.”

Asked why the league had chosen Rumsfeld to receive the medal, Tobin said, “I’m not going to be sharing that with anyone.”

The replacement of Donald Rumsfeld has been no great victory for anyone. He’s still the ‘official’ Secretary of Defense, and won’t be leaving that position until the end of this year, with a full government pension, and all the medals he can carry home. And worst of all, no one who replaces him will be any different.

-D.

Tony Brooke: California Whirls (I Wish You All Could See):

Company – Theater – Review – New York Times:

THEATER REVIEW | ‘COMPANY’
A Revival Whose Surface of Tundra Conceals a Volcano
By BEN BRANTLEY

Fire flickers, dangerous and beckoning, beneath the frost of John Doyle’s elegant, unexpectedly stirring revival of “Company,” which opened last night at the Ethel Barrymore Theater. This visually severe, aurally lush reinvention of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s era-defining musical of marriage and its discontents from 1970 is the chicest-looking production on Broadway.

One glance at the symmetry, the starkness, the midnight-black palette that dominates the stage, and you feel like putting on a sweater. It’s surely no coincidence that the clear modules that serve as furniture resemble ice cubes. What could be more appropriate for a musical with a passive, willfully unengaged leading man (wearing black Armani, natch), who is almost never seen without a defensive drink in his hand?

But if Bobby the bachelor, embodied with riveting understatement by Raúl Esparza, at first comes across as a man of ice, it becomes apparent that he is in a steady state of thaw. Given the subliminal intensity that hums through Mr. Esparza’s deadpan presence, you sense that flood warnings should probably be posted.

Mr. Doyle is the inspired British director who last year gave New York the most unsettling, emotionally concentrated production on record of another Sondheim musical, the macabre “Sweeney Todd.” In that show, for which Mr. Doyle won a Tony Award, the cast members doubled as musicians, a device repeated in this “Company.”

This “I-am-my-own-orchestra” approach probably shouldn’t be used ad infinitum. Mr. Doyle applied the same stratagem to Jerry Herman’s “Mack and Mabel” in London last summer to underwhelming effect.

But there’s something about Mr. Sondheim that allows Mr. Doyle to find a new clarity of feeling through melding musicians and performers. It is, after all, the person who controls the music in a Sondheim production — in which there is usually a sophistication gap between the songs and the relatively pedestrian book — who has the best chance of finding the show’s elusive but resonantly human heart.

Mr. Doyle’s “Company,” first staged at the Cincinnati Playhouse earlier this year, isn’t the unconditional triumph that his “Sweeney Todd” was, partly because the show itself is less of a fully integrated piece and partly because much of the acting is weaker. Only a few of the 14 ensemble members — playing the couples who are permanent fixtures in Bobby’s life and his strictly temporary girlfriends — seem at ease dispensing Mr. Furth’s brittle, uptown, shrink-shrunk dialogue.

But they all blossom as musicians and singers of wit and substance. As soloists they’re more than adequate, but it’s their work as a team that sounds new depths in “Company” in ways that get under your skin without your knowing it.

Mr. Doyle and his invaluable music supervisor and orchestrator, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, have shaped “Company” into a sort of oratorio for the church of the lonely. The choral passage that opens the show — a litany of variations on Robert (a k a “Bobby, baby”), the name of the central character, about to celebrate his 35th birthday — is performed in near darkness a cappella, sounding like liturgical chant.

The effect is not flippant. The voices — belonging to “those good and crazy people, my married friends”— seem to echo through Bobby’s head like elements of some beautiful but arcane ritual that he can observe only from a distance. Watching is what Bobby does. His outsider’s status is confirmed with pointed eloquence when it registers that Bobby is the only person onstage who isn’t playing an instrument.

The production gets astonishingly diverse theme- and character-defining mileage out of this discrepancy. Bobby’s failure to pick up an instrument and join the band becomes a natural-born metaphor for his refusal to engage with others. Yes, he sings soulfully. But as the other cast members circle the lone Mr. Esparza, playing their instruments, it is clear they possess talents for connecting that Bobby lacks, fears and longs for.

Watching the couples carp and bicker in black-out vignettes — practicing karate, experimenting with pot, visiting a discothèque — you may wonder why Bobby would ever be envious of them (which has always been a problem with “Company”). It’s when they make music together that you understand.

Mr. Doyle’s staging repeatedly and ingeniously echoes this isolating difference. Mr. Esparza is often found climbing onto the top of a Steinway or one of those transparent cubes as others crowd him. Sometimes he stands at a skeptical, uneasy remove as different groups serenade him: the married men with the haunting “Sorry-Grateful”; three girlfriends, all playing saxophones as if they were assault weapons, in a scintillating version of “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.”

The seamlessness of these motifs lends a fresh coherence to “Company,” which was originally structured as a cabaret of urban neurosis. Stand-alone crowd pleasers like “Getting Married Today” (performed by a too-grounded-seeming Heather Laws as the skittish Amy) and “Another Hundred People” (warmly sung by Angel Desai) now blend into a general musical fabric of anxiety in search of reassurance.

Even the fabled character number, “The Ladies Who Lunch,” sung by the worldly, much-married Joanne (a fierce Barbara Walsh), feels less like a show-stopping appendage than it usually does. Instead, building to a climactic repeated note that suggests what Edvard Munch’s silent scream might sound like, it becomes the perfect preface to Bobby’s breakthrough breakdown at the end of the show.

If Ms. Walsh doesn’t erase the memory of Elaine Stritch, who created (and will probably always own) the part, she handles her vodka-stinger-flavored dialogue with a vintage Manhattan suaveness, which is more than can be said for many of the others.

Bruce Sabath, though, is touching and credible as Joanne’s patient husband. And Elizabeth Stanley is absolutely delicious as April, the ditzy airline stewardess, who sings “Barcelona” (the best one-night-stand song in musicals).

The sense that ambivalence and confusion are not unique to Bobby is enhanced by the cold, austere glitter of David Gallo’s set and Thomas C. Hase’s superb lighting. But it’s Mr. Esparza who is the top expert on ambivalence here, giving “Company” the most compelling center it has probably ever had. In previous productions, Bobby has registered principally as a wistful window onto other lives.

But Mr. Esparza is anything but a cipher. Though his Bobby can seem as laconic and drolly unresponsive as Bob Newhart, you are always aware that this is a man in pain. As anyone who saw him in “Cabaret” or “The Normal Heart” knows, Mr. Esparza is generally a pyrotechnic actor, sending sparks and smoke all over the place.

In keeping the lid on such volcanic energy, he makes Bobby’s climactic explosion inevitable. Though he sings beautifully throughout — in ways that define his character’s solipsism — he brings transporting ecstasy to the agony of the concluding number, in which Bobby finally joins the band of human life.

For much of Mr. Sondheim’s career, directors have approached his work as if “keep your distance” were woven into the copyright. More recently, a new generation of artists have heard an altogether different directive: “Come closer.” Mr. Doyle and Mr. Esparza make it clear that there are infinite rewards to be had in accepting that challenge.

COMPANY

A Musical Comedy

Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; book by George Furth; directed by John Doyle; musical staging by Mr. Doyle; musical supervision and orchestrations by Mary-Mitchell Campbell; sets by David Gallo; costumes by Ann Hould-Ward; lighting by Thomas C. Hase; sound by Andrew Keister; hair and wig design by David Lawrence; make-up design by Angelina Avallone; associate director, Adam John Hunter; production stage manager, Gary Mickelson; resident music supervisor, Lynne Shankel; general manager, Richard Frankel Productions and Jo Porter; production manager, Juniper Street Productions, Inc. Presented by Marc Routh, Richard Frankel, Tom Viertel, Steven Baruch, Ambassador Theater Group, Tulchin/Bartner Productions, Darren Bagert and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. At the Ethel Barrymore Theater, 243 West 47th Street, (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

WITH: Raúl Esparza (Robert), Keith Buterbaugh (Harry), Matt Castle (Peter), Robert Cunningham (Paul), Angel Desai (Marta), Kelly Jeanne Grant (Kathy), Kristin Huffman (Sarah), Amy Justman (Susan), Heather Laws (Amy), Leenya Rideout (Jenny), Fred Rose (David), Bruce Sabath (Larry), Elizabeth Stanley (April) and Barbara Walsh (Joanne).

Voted “Top ten websites with the best links”

erasing.org:

Welcome to December. An apparel-soaking, marrow-chilling, street-flooding, window-pelting, tree-felling umbrella-destroyer of a morning this morning, outdoors. Nonstop pouring rain, violent winds, the temperature that perfect sweet spot of misery: a biting low-aughts (or mid-thirties F) cold that hovers just above freezing enough to keep these sideways sheets of rain from becoming slightly-tamer snow. To compensate for my being in a warm dry home office, I get to listen to someone buzzsawing something made of metal just down the hall for much of the day.

Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Six:

For your possible edification: The low-fi, necessarily incomplete, increasingly outdated thumbnail gallery that I use for browsing through the UK/Canada Modern Classics covers. Much easier than combing endlessly through Amazons .co.uk and .ca. (Created earlier this year via a few minutes of grepping the text of a Penguin catalog PDF of Modern Classics ISBNs and plugging them into Amazon image URLs.)

Out of those 377 covers, here are 147 more-or-less favorites.

While we’re at it, because they were included at the end of the PDF, the typographically excellent covers for Penguin’s Great Ideas series.

Improv Everywhere Mission: McDonald’s Bathroom Attendant:

McDonald’s Bathroom Attendant

Featuring: Simmons, Todd, Kula, Balaban, Krafft, Skillman

Digital Photography: Agents Kula & Todd
DV Cam (hidden): Agent Kula

About a month ago, I was brainstorming a mission idea with a few friends called “Five Star Fast Food”. The idea was to deck out a fast food joint with all the trappings of a five star restaurant. There would be a Maitre D’ standing behind a podium asking for your reservation, a hostess to seat you, a waiter to take your order, and an attendant in the bathroom. The obvious problem with this idea is that it would very likely be shut down as soon as it begins. I decided to focus on the bathroom attendant aspect, figuring that we could last much longer in a secluded men’s room.