Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. And technology is continually being refined to produce more and more desirable things. Which means that as we learn to avoid one class of distractions, new ones constantly appear, like drug-resistant bacteria.

Television, for example, has after 50 years of refinement reached the point where it's like visual crack. I realized when I was 13 that TV was addictive, so I stopped watching it. But I read recently that the average American watches 4 hours of TV a day. A quarter of their life.

TV is in decline now, but only because people have found even more addictive ways of wasting time. And what's especially dangerous is that many happen at your computer. This is no accident. An ever larger percentage of office workers sit in front of computers connected to the Internet, and distractions always evolve toward the procrastinators.

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Labels: alas, lit crit

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Thirty thousand visitors came in the Mount's first full season of operation as a historic house, and although the upper floors remained unfurnished--Edith Wharton's bedroom contained no more than a bed frame--the gardens had been restored, at a cost of $2.7 million. (Efforts were made to acquire all twenty-three varieties of phlox that Wharton's gardeners had planted.) Copeland, responding to diminished fund-raising opportunities after September 11th, had decided that the grand public rooms on the first floor would not be faithful reproductions of Wharton's domicile, as planned; instead, the rooms would be interpreted by contemporary designers, in accordance with the principles expressed in "The Decoration of Houses." Libby Cameron installed a leopard-print carpet on the staircase, and Thomas Jayne equipped the den of Wharton's husband with a laptop computer. "I asked Libby why she selected the spotted rug, and did she do it because the spots mirrored the circles in the wrought iron of the bannister," Copeland recalled. "And she said, 'I did it because thousands of people will be going up and down these stairs, and you want to be able to disguise the fact.' And that is Wharton's theory of practicality!" One room that was not updated was the library, whose shelves Copeland filled by issuing an appeal for donors to scour their own libraries for appropriately aged-looking volumes.

Basically, for those of you who aren't going to read the article, no one wanted to go to the Mount, so to increase historical cache they purchased Wharton's original library for several million dollars, which no one at the time understood was a loan, and now they can't pay it back, which is sort of perfect when one considers the current foreclosure spree.

Anyway. Stephanie Copeland, the focus of the article, is no doubt a very intelligent woman, well-trained to do any number of things. Unfortunately, running a historical estate/museum is not one of them, and therein lies one of my biggest problems with the state of historical societies and smallish museums right now. Places like the Mount get shafted because of the assumption that they're the domain of wealthy white women, many of whom haven't a clue about how to actually navigate the often incredibly thorny path between maintaining a sense of historical integrity and creating an economically sustainable business.

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Labels: alas, gender wars, the arts

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--David Brooks on William F. Buckley, foreword, Let Us Talk of Many Things

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