Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth married in 1836, when he was 24 and she was 21. From then until the time of their divorce 20 years later, Catherine got pregnant at least a dozen times, had at least two miscarriages and gave birth to 10 children. Nine survived infancy, eight reached adulthood, and all of them disappointed their father, who lamented “having brought up the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves.”

A new group biography, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens (FSG, 256 pp., $25) by Robert Gottlieb, documents the lives of the mediocre progeny of a great man. Making use of existing scholarship, Mr. Gottlieb has digested the stories of the Dickens children into easily consumed biographical sketches, illustrated with photographs and portraits. But this neatly condensed book offers more than mere trajectories of not-so-great lives. Instead, Mr. Gottlieb, the dance critic for this paper, has produced a comparative study of child-raising, one that would seem to attest to the value of contemporary ideas: cuddling, affirmation, diagnosis of pathologies, psychopharmacology, college. The Victorians were more resigned. A child’s path through life was not so much guided as observed and judged, perhaps with the occasional input of a phrenologist. A failed child was a failure. A dead child was dead. “There are things about the Victorians that we will never understand,” Mr. Gottlieb writes. And yet, after brief contemplation of today’s pampered scions (George W. Bush, Paris Hilton, Chet Hanks), the Victorians might have had a point.

Dickens was 25 when his eldest son Charley was born. The author already enjoyed massive popular success, with The Pickwick Papers in serialization and Oliver Twist in the works. While it’s certain that having so many toddlers underfoot likely affected, say, Dickens’s description of the Jellyby household in Bleak House (“We passed several more children on the way up, whom it was difficult to avoid treading on in the dark ...”), it would be hard to identify any parallels between the extraordinary juveniles in Dickens’s books and his own brood. As Mr. Gottlieb notes, “There was, in fact, almost no overlap between the real children and the imagined ones.” By the time his own children reached adolescence, most of Dickens’s novels had been written—which is not to say that Dickens did not turn his own children into Dickensian sketches.

Three more children arrived by the time Dickens turned 30, and a pattern soon emerged: initial enthusiasm followed by utter disillusionment. An excitable father, Dickens seemed happiest during his children’s infancy. “He bombarded friends with news of their arrivals, their christenings, their charms, their accomplishments,” writes Mr. Gottlieb. Charley is referred to in letters as “the infant phenomenon” and “the infant wonder.” Frank, the fifth, is “decidedly a success—a perpetual grin is on his face: and the spoon exercise is amazing.” And of the youngest, known as Plorn, Dickens fondly wrote, “we have in this house the only baby worth mentioning; and there cannot possibly be another baby anywhere, to come into competition with him. I happen to know this, and would like it to be generally understood.”

The Dickens children were raised by Charles, Catherine and Catherine’s sister Georgina. Since Catherine spent much of the time between births recovering physically and suffering from postpartum depression, Georgina had primary maternal child-rearing duties. “Catherine represented all the messy business of life—sex, childbirth, ill health,” writes Mr. Gottlieb. “Georgina was the devoted mother/sister.” In the paternal role, Dickens took responsibility for polishing the children for public life. He monitored their education, discipline and careers. He demanded neatness and punctuality. He also presented them to the world at birth and at their comings of age, named them ambitiously (the eponyms included literary figures like Walter Savage Landor, Alfred Tennyson, Henry Fielding and Edward Bulwer-Lytton), and provided them with lots of amusement and entertainment.

“What a wonderful father he was!” writes Mr. Gottlieb. At first, anyway. Life in the family’s house in London included elaborate holiday productions starring the children, written and produced by their father. The Thackerays and the Tennysons were family friends. Each child also earned his or her own nickname, including Mild Glo’ster (Mamie), Lucifer Box (Katey), Young Skull (Walter), The Ocean Spectre (Sydney) and Skittles (Alfred).

“The Plornish Maroon is in a brilliant state, beating all former babies into what they call in America (I don’t know why) sky-blue fits,” Dickens wrote of his youngest son, Edward, whose original nickname, “Mr. Plornishmaroontigoonter,” Dickens soon abbreviated to “The Noble Plorn” and eventually just Plorn, the name by which Edward was known for the rest of his plain and forlorn life.

As the children grew, one by one, Dickens’s enthusiasm turned to ashes. Having earned his success and overcome childhood poverty while still a teenager through his own impressive energy and drive, his children’s complacency and lack of ambition disconcerted him. “I think he has less fixed purpose and energy than I could have supposed possible in my son,” writes Dickens of Charley. (This “lassitude of character” is attributed to Charley’s mother.) Of Frank: “A good steady fellow ... but not at all brilliant.” And Plorn: “he seems to have been born without a groove. It cannot be helped. He is not aspiring or imaginative in his own behalf.”

Mr. Gottlieb writes with avuncular concern and sympathy for the Dickens children, who had to cope not only with a famous, exigent and publicly critical father but also a broken home. In 1857, Dickens fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an 18-year-old actress. “By 1858,” writes Mr. Gottlieb, “he had made up his mind to change his life and ruthlessly expelled Catherine from it, packing her off to her own establishment (with a generous settlement) and removing her children from her—except for Charley, now twenty-one and his own man.” The children floundered through this estrangement from their mother and a Victorian culture generally lacking notions of self-esteem, self-improvement or much self-examination.

The two girls were groomed for marriage, but the boys were expected to launch careers in the armed forces, business or abroad. In the 19th century, Mr. Gottlieb explains, “university was the exception, far from the rule—and since the boys had no particular academic aptitudes, university was not an option for them except for the eighth-born Henry, and he had to plead to go to Cambridge to study law rather than being sent abroad like five of the others.”

Mr. Gottlieb defends the boys in their plight, particularly those dispatched to the far corners of the empire (one ended up as an unsuccessful Canadian Mountie; another died in debt after traveling to India; two went to raise sheep in Australia). “Yes,” Mr. Gottlieb admits, “half a dozen of them appear somewhat unfocused, even feckless.” But Mr. Gottlieb’s keenness to overturn history’s verdict of their ineptitude wins over the reader. “The saddest story is that of Plorn, a sensitive and nervous boy who couldn’t even handle a normal school situation and was then sent off alone, at sixteen, to the raw world of the Australian outback,” he writes.

The two girls had their own troubles. Katey entered into a white marriage with the brother of Wilkie Collins, whom Mr. Gottlieb describes as probably homosexual, “perhaps not in practice but in inclination.” Dickens’s eldest daughter, Mamie, chose not to marry, and Mr. Gottlieb says she might have had “lesbian tendencies.” Regardless of Mamie’s sexual orientation, she ended up in a situation more out of a Henry James novel than a Dickens one: she did not leave home until after her father’s death, whereupon she entered into a possibly sexual relationship with a clergyman and his wife, a “shadowy couple” that she had met through her involvement in a charity movement called Muscular Christianity. The rest of the family thought they might have exploited her for her money.

Several of the children “were undermined by drink” or had gambling addictions. At least one of them probably would have been medicated today. “When he is in full school employment, there is a strange kind of fading comes over him sometimes; the likes of which I don’t think I ever saw,” writes Dickens of his eldest son, Charley. Katey, the acknowledged favorite of her father, had a habit of obsessively touching the furniture and checking under the bed the same number of times on a daily basis. Frank stuttered and sleepwalked. Sydney, another early favorite of Dickens, went to sea, where he racked up so much debt as an adult that he earned his father’s disgust. Dickens confessed to another of his children: “I fear Sydney is much too far gone for recovery and I begin to wish that he were honestly dead.” (“This to Sydney’s brother!” marvels Mr. Gottlieb.)

The family’s attitude toward death is remarkable. When the profligate and worrisome Sydney did die of illness at 25, the family openly expressed its relief. “I fear we must feel that his being taken away early is the most merciful thing that could have happened to him, but it is very, very sad to have to feel this,” wrote his Aunt Georgina. So too with the baby who died before her first birthday, Dora: “If we could bring her back to life, now, with a wish, we would not do it,” Dickens reportedly said. We can picture Mr. Gottlieb shaking his head in dismay.

One unexpected conclusion of reading Mr. Gottlieb’s book is the realization that modern institutions intent on improving people—the therapies and education that offer progress and standardization to those who each begin life from a uniquely disadvantaged place—also serve as more effective propagators of dynasties. It seems not totally by accident that the most successful Dickens child, Henry, never had any peculiar mental tics, studied at Cambridge and became a lawyer. “Out of our large family of nine children there was only one who seemed to me to be really quite sane,” Katey later wrote of him.

Today, the path of the children of successful men and women would be to turn the other eight children into Henry: groomed into a functional sanity, coddled into college and an extended young adulthood that allows for some indiscretions, then passing into a career through carefully nurtured (if not inherited) industry. From this path Bushes, Kerrys, Kennedys, Gores, Romneys and one Clinton seem to have emerged with self-esteem and sense of entitlement fully intact. Our institutions of meritocracy might launder provenance, but they also secure privilege.

editorial@observer.com

"Eyebrows were raised last week when Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman—not known for her modesty—not only insisted on attending the World Economic Forum in Davos but demanded to fly to Switzerland first class. 'It's just jaw-dropping,' an insider said. 'Not only is her magazine not profitable, but she just laid off almost the entire Web site and fired many others on the print side.'"— Richard Johnson, et. al., Porfolio's First-Class Folly, The New York Post, February 2, 2009.

If you haven’t heard, My Bloody Valentine are touring again—for the first time in 16 years. It’s nearly impossible to over-state the influence of this London-by-way-of-Ireland quartet on the entirety of independent music. Kevin Shields’ woozy guitar sound on the band’s 1991 album Loveless hangs over every skinny-jean twenty-something with a six-string from Williamsburg (A Place to Bury Strangers) to Echo Park (Silversun Pickups). And it’s that guitar—paired with Bilinda Butcher’s cooing soprano—that will buckle the foundations of the Roseland Ballroom next Monday and Tuesday. Though if you don’t already have tickets, you’ll have to head to Craigslist to grab them. Tickets to both shows—there are only eight scheduled in the nation—are sold out. (MBV is also playing the ATP New York festival in Monticello on Sunday, but tickets to that performance and its unbelievable lineup are sold out too.)

If don’t have tix to My Bloody Valentine and don’t want to deal with the shysters on Craigslist, Mogwai’s show tonight at Terminal 5 may be your next best option. With their cinematic gloom and surging guitars, Mogwai's football-loving Scotsmen are the most accomplished of Shields' many offspring. MBV even invited the quintet to play with them at this weekend’s ATP New York festival. Mogwai’s sixth disc, The Hawk is Howling, hits stores on September 23. [Tickets on sale now]

No plans for Halloween? Don’t feel like going to Mutherfucker again? What about MGMT? The Brooklyn duo will present “2 Nights of Beauty, Enchantment, and Horror” with the Orange Baby (yeah, we have no idea) at Webster Hall on October 30 and Halloween night at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Even the opening bands—Bobb Trimble’s Flying Spiders, Amazing Baby, Francis and the Lights—sound like a good time. [Tickets on sale: Friday, September 19 at noon]

And the Pretenders have a new album. (Who knew?) It’s called Break Up the Concrete and it hits stores on October 7. That same night, the fabulous Chrissie Hynde and her band will play the Highline Ballroom. Here’s hoping she plays some of the old stuff. [Presale begins today; public sale begins Saturday, September 20 at noon]

And hold on just a minute, folks … they just added a third Beck show at the United Palace!! [Tickets on sale today at 10 a.m.]

THEATER

Amid the innumerable dramas of Wall Street’s collapse, Dickens seems somehow appropriate—but not in his novelistic form. These times demand a lighter Dickens, one that comes with a few tunes and a couple laughs. And that is precisely what Jill Santoriello is giving us with her debut musical, “A Tale of Two Cities,” opening on Broadway tonight at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. “Our first goal is to entertain,” Ms. Santoriello tells the Times. “Beyond that, of course, it’s great to move people or make them think.” Nah, we’re fine with just being entertained. [Tickets on sale now]

Which is why I want to begin my Neil Young polemic from the heights of Mount Wilson.

The Two Scrooges

Back in 1940, in one of the most influential literary polemics of the last century, Edmund Wilson argued in his “Two Scrooges” essay (the opening piece in The Wound and the Bow, originally published in The Atlantic) that the reigning condescending literary consensus on a superb popular artist—in this case, Charles Dickens—was all wrong. Indeed that it reflected an obtuse, snobbish philistinism. One that was able to see only the superficial, cheerful caricaturist in Dickens, and occluded the dark, complex resonances of the sensibility that surfaced in the later work.

“The Bloomsbury that talked about Dostoevsky ignored Dostoevsky’s master, Dickens,” Wilson memorably sneered, with good reason.

The Two Scrooges, the Two Dickens—and now, ladies and gentlemen, consider a similar cultural divide over the conception of another misapprehended popular artist: the Two Neil Youngs.

There’s the bland, insipid, complacent, syrupy, self-satisfied, family-values, country-pie, pious, rural-virtues Neil Young that Jonathan Demme’s just-released film, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, gives us. No doubt a true snapshot of a recent Neil Young moment, but a snapshot that doesn’t merely sugarcoat but virtually erases—denies—the existence of the Other Neil Young.

The occlusion of the artist’s complex identity is comparable to constructing an image of the work of T.S. Eliot based entirely on a film version of Cats. “Waste Land,” what “Waste Land”? Look at the big furry kitties!

Mr. Demme’s film omits the dark, electrifying, deeply disruptive, sometimes bleak, sometimes exhilarating and subversive Neil Young. Not the “country-rock” musician that Mr. Demme’s reliably adoring film-critic acolytes describe him as, but rather the hard-core, killer rock ’n’ roll genius whose electrifying, volcanic sound and deeply resonant and compressed lyrics left an imprint not just on music, but on popular culture itself. Neil Young is not just a transformative rock god—but as the spiritual godfather to Kurt Cobain, he was also a powerfully influential transformer of American popular culture, the progenitor of the wickedly acute, wised-up post-punk cultural sensibility.

Don’t get me wrong: Mr. Demme’s film is in many ways both beautiful and respectful. But by exalting rural virtues—in effect, by equating “rural” with “virtue”—and by making a hymn of praise for the prairie wisdom of the Great White North, Neil’s Canadian prairie roots, he verges on rural supremacism. By that I mean the ingrained American nativist, puritanical distrust of (and distaste for) the urban, the cosmopolitan, the seductive sins of sophistication, irony and complexity. Instead, simple is always best. Or less dangerous.

And so, in his extremely well-meaning way, Mr. Demme—well known as an admirably socially engaged director—has made perhaps the most reactionary film of the past year.

Reactionary in the sense that it implicitly gives the impression that family values of a certain kind—the Great White North, Great White Nashville kind—are the only true values. If you stay close to the land and practice rural virtues, you’ll go to heaven, (as long as you’re a rich rock—sorry, “country-rock”—star). Conventionality rules, dude!

‘The Idiocy of Rural Life’

Reactionary? I know I reacted to it by questioning the assumption that not all who live close to the earth are superior to those who don’t. Although I’m not a Marxist, I savored once again the bracing contempt for the cult of peasant wisdom that Marx and/or Engels expressed in The Communist Manifesto: The peasants need to be rescued, they say, from “the idiocy of rural life.”

Some have claimed that this is a mistranslation, that what was meant was not the “idiocy” but the stultifying isolation—but that’s absent too in the virgin-soil iconography of this prairie apotheosis, complete with primitivist dioramas of Neil’s life-giving Great White North wheat fields.

Yes, the film suggests, all this can be a reward for virtue; this is what virtue looks like—a contribution to the demonization of urbanity whose celebration was the best thing about Mr. Demme’s other films.

I don’t think I’d feel the same way were it not for the peculiar erasure of any trace of the Other in this film, the Other Neil Young. The one whose soul-shattering chords and trance-like lyric meditations suggested that there might be Other Values, realms beyond the rural to find fulfillment or (dare I say it?) excitement, the wild surmise at a glimpse of something not found in the Prairie Home Companion.

The Other Neil Young can be glimpsed—if you want a side-by-side comparison with Mr. Demme’s laundered version—in Jim Jarmusch’s 1997 down-and-dirty Neil Young documentary, Year of the Horse. A film and a sensibility almost entirely ignored—whitewashed—in the critical adulation accorded Mr. Demme’s film. Due to Mr. Demme’s critical cachet, his film will undoubtedly overshadow not just Mr. Jarmusch’s work (shamefully not even referred to in most reviews) but, even worse, will serve to eclipse entirely in the minds of most—in the collective consciousness of the culture—the very memory of the Other Neil Young.

Now I’m not proposing the equivalent of a W.W.E. steel-cage match between Mr. Demme and Mr. Jarmusch (although, come to think of it … ). Look, they each made their own movie of their own Neil Young. But the Jarmusch documentary at least does justice to the reason why Neil Young is an important figure in the culture. Not for his contribution to “country rock,” the misleading pigeonhole that the tunnel-vision reviews of the Demme film have consigned him to. Yes, he contributed to “country rock” (and I’m second to no one in my love of “country rock”—I probably play more Gram Parsons repeatedly than anyone you know), but the point is that he, Neil, is at the very heart of hardcore rock ’n’ roll, something the Bloomsbury types of our time seem to disdain appreciating or just don’t get.

He’s at the heart of rock ’n’ roll, on a plane with Dylan and Van Morrison, because of the way he harnesses the torrential energy of “Like a Hurricane,” because of the spooky, apocalyptic dreaminess of “After the Gold Rush,” the mordant forever-haunting, guilt-ridden death wish that is “Tonight’s the Night.” The incantatory, almost sinister romantic ecstasy of “Cowgirl in the Sand” (which can’t help conjuring up, for some of us at least, the bleak desolation of Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”). And the brilliant, truly insidious but somehow tragically joyful nihilism of “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” with its thunderous opening chords that sound like someone’s pounding on the Gates of Hell. Just to name a few.

I’m not saying there’s anything technically inaccurate about Mr. Demme’s film. Indeed, there’s much to admire about its dramatic structure and genesis. It’s basically a concert film of Neil Young doing songs from his new down-home, back-to-roots tribute to his Canadian prairie origin, the acoustic, rural virtues of his Prairie Wind album, with a few older “country-rock” throw-ins like “Heart of Gold.”

What lends it the drama that the songs (for the most part) lack are medical rather than musical factors. Neil wrote the songs shortly after learning he’d need to undergo surgery for a brain aneurysm. The concerts for Mr. Demme’s film were recorded at Nashville’s original Grand Ole Opry House, the Ryman Auditorium, with some of Neil’s remarkably gifted old-boy Nashville studio musicians (and none of Neil’s Crazy Horse compadres, the ones he made rock ’n’ roll history with, who are—like that history—nowhere to be seen, not even referred to, unpersons: part of the unpast in this snapshot).

I have to say I’m in awe of Mr. Young for having the courage, the level of spiritual evolution required to pull off with such calm panache a concert that so effortlessly weaves together such a remarkable array of musical elements—guitars, keyboards, backup singers, choruses. There is much beauty and bravery to admire in it. And the shadow of mortality endows the occasionally wistful but mainly self-satisfied music we’re given with an extra dimensionality that Mr. Demme modestly and unobtrusively records. Well-done, tasteful, somber, reflective and—did I mention?—self-satisfied.

Three Neil Youngs?

And yet … Neil Young being happy and self-satisfied, surrounded by friends and fellow music lovers: more power to him, and mad props for doing it so well. But hey, forgive me: I totally concede I couldn’t face brain-aneurysm surgery so admirably and stoically, no question—but still, this is a guy who used to give brain aneurysms with his music (metaphorically, anyway). This is a guy who could leave you shaken to the core with his chords, with a single incantatory phrase whose compressed, elliptical wisdom could haunt you for weeks, months, a lifetime ever after.

Mr. Demme’s movie, this Canadian Prairie Home Companion, is so nostalgically goody-goody and reverent about the Great White North that Neil came from, it becomes like a propaganda film. Sure, there are some songs on Prairie Wind that are haunting and wistful and plaintive—it’s Neil Young, after all—and you can’t help loving the weathered faces and battered fingers of the Nashville session wizards. It’s all admirable, really—I get that.

But art isn’t always about admirability, is it? All happy families are alike, alas, which is why there are few great novels about happy families. Indeed, Edmund Wilson was, if crude, at least closer to the heart of the matter when he said that art grows out of a wound, one that can’t be covered up with plastic surgery or sugary sentiment. (The Jim Jarmusch film gives you both the wound and the bow, so to speak.)

It’s not like I’m being anti-acoustic here. But as my friend Natalie—a major Neil Young fan who plays electric bass guitar in a cult-fave, punk-pop, all-girl (except the drummer) band called Ruffian—pointed out, it’s not just a split between Electric Neil and Acoustic Neil à la Dylan here.

She likes Early Acoustic Neil—the eerie trippiness of “After the Gold Rush,” for instance, or the deep mystification of “Helpless” (“Blue, blue windows behind the stars”—huh? Check out the Cowboy Junkies’ cover of “Helpless” sometime and you’ll see what we’re talking about.)

But she feels that Late Acoustic Neil is another story—the Neil of the terminally insipid “Harvest Moon” and the songs on Prairie Wind, simple to the point where it reminds you that while simplicity can be an artistic virtue, there’s a difference between simplicity and simple-mindedness.

So maybe, Natalie suggested in response to my Two-Neil typology, there are actually Three Neil Youngs—Early Acoustic, Electric and Late Acoustic—although she agreed that Early Acoustic and Electric are just on a higher plane than Late Acoustic. (I hope you’re following this.)

Meanwhile, there’s the Neil Young of the Jim Jarmusch movie, which is really a portrait of him and his decades-long companion band, Crazy Horse (the one he formed after leaving Buffalo Springfield). I have to give Mr. Jarmusch—whose films have not been faves of mine before—credit here for his instinct for greatness: for giving us footage of some amazing, extended versions of the insanely appealing, thunderous, incantatory Crazy Horse sound, interspersed with tales of OD’s, bad behavior, the rock ’n’ roll life.

Yeah, it’s Behind the Music stuff we’ve heard before, but it cumulatively convinces you that there’s some special Crazy Horse chemistry in the wail of sound—Neil on lead, Billy Talbot doing those thunderous bass riffs and Frank (Pancho) Sampedro ripping it all to intelligible shreds on rhythm guitar. Especially when you see the three of them locked into a riff they can’t escape from (nor do you necessarily want them to)—it’s so mesmerizing to watch them as they bob and weave in a semi-synchronized ecstasy that looks like Orthodox Jews davening before God. Indeed, on several songs—most notably “Like a Hurricane” and “Tonight’s the Night”—Mr. Jarmusch is content to let us watch and listen to something kind of breathtaking.

‘The Long Friends’

What exactly is it that’s unique about Neil Young? For one thing, his work still provokes interesting arguments; people who are smart about music and culture still care about figuring him out.

At a party recently, I found myself getting into a long argument with a smart dude who was knowledgeable about both film and music and had this theory of “the spook” in regard to Neil Young’s best work.

I seem to recall we started off arguing about “Cowgirl in the Sand,” which is my admitted Neil Young weakness, due to having been introduced to it under, um, special circumstances one night at some lodge on the Rocky Mountain slopes of Colorado. It was one of his longer songs, 10 minutes or so in the original, but this one seemed to go on forever (and yet one never wanted it to end).

Since then, in live performance, Neil has played longer and longer versions of this eerie ode, each accompanied by what I’d call an electric-guitar exegesis that—like the illuminations of a monk on an old manuscript—doesn’t necessarily spell out its meaning but somehow speaks to it and elaborates upon it.

I was talking about a relatively rare Neil CD, Road Rock, which has a full 18-minute version of “Cowgirl in the Sand,” a version I’m still learning from. I always feel that when an artist is obsessed with returning to one of his early works, it’s worth our while to take the proper time to understand why.

Nonetheless, I got no respect from this guy, who called the 18-minute version “noodling, Grateful Dead style” (killer put-down, and even if I think he’s wrong, you can see the subject brings the sharp knives out of the drawer).

Anyway, we went on to discuss other songs we both liked, and he offered the theory that what they had in common was something he called “the spook,” which sounded like an old blues term for something eerie, uncanny, in touch with ghostly forces. Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil—like that.

He said that some Neil Young songs definitely had “the spook” and others did not. As I recall, we agreed on “Helpless,” I think, but disagreed on “Powderfinger” (him yes, me no). And although I don’t know if I’d use the same phrase, I think there’s something true about it. Half the time, that quavering falsetto in Mr. Young’s voice makes it sound like he’s seen a ghost or like he’s walking past the graveyard, in touch with spirits whose provenance he’s not so sure about. His spooky muses. I think of the chillingly spooky phrase from Robert Stone’s Children of Light, the name that his half-mad heroine gives to the unwelcome visitors/creatures she begins to see when she’s losing her mind: the “Long Friends.” I have a feeling that Mr. Young has seen the Long Friends.

Girls Know

So there’s that—that spooky, moody, minor-chord Neil Young thing. But for me, it’s also about the songwriting, the lyrics: Neil Young as master of epigrammatic Compressed Elliptical Wisdom (C.E.W.). And, by the way, this is not just guy stuff—one interesting thing you learn is that many intelligent women are into Neil. There’s Natalie, the bass player, and her theory of the Three Neils. And my friend Naomi (who dates bass players), with whom I developed the theory of Neil’s C.E.W.

It’s what’s most distinctive about his songwriting. Dylan has it but tosses it off casually, almost too profusely—there’s so much to pay attention to that you don’t give any one element its due. Neil makes you focus on an elliptical phrase by repeating it over and over until all (or most) of its resonances rise and emerge. When Neil gets hold of a phrase, he doesn’t try to explain it, but rather exalts it through an almost trance-like incantation.

“Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” for instance: Has any phrase ever captured the transition from life to death with more take-you-by-surprise compression than “out of the blue and into the black”? (Kurt Cobain quoted from this song in his suicide note.)

Just about every line in that song has that quality. My favorite? “You pay for this, but they give you that.” Let’s just say it’s not about a retail transaction; it’s about another kind of price altogether. You could even call it a distillation of tragic wisdom that summarizes all of Sophocles. (O.K., that’s a hyperbole, but you know me—I like the friction that comes from mixing high and low references.)

Naomi’s favorite was another line from that same song: “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.” The way Neil turns an absolutely deadpan recitation of a cliché that’s been worn down to the point of meaninglessness, through his plaintive incantation, into a kind of transcendental affirmation of beautiful and frightening realms beyond our ken.

It’s what distinguishes great songwriting: the ability to take a familiar phrase out of the vernacular and, just by giving it the attention, the attentiveness we often neglect, defamiliarize it and raise it to another level.

That’s what this guy does, what he’s done. Not just affirm old-time family values and radiate complacency, as he does for Mr. Demme. Listen to Decade, listen to Live Rust, rent Year of the Horse.

Watch the Demme film if you want. It’s a beautiful snapshot for a family-values album. But believe me: “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.”

But maybe I should give Edmund Wilson the last word. A word about art and danger. At the close of “The Two Scrooges,” Wilson is talking about Dickens’ struggle to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a struggle interrupted by a fatal stroke. A death that left unresolved Dickens’ own internal struggle with the character of John Jasper, Drood’s mesmerizingly villainous, opium-smoking choirmaster, whom Wilson believes Dickens saw as an embodiment of his own divided self:

“Mr. Jasper is, like Dickens, an artist …. Like Dickens, leads a life of the imagination apart from that of common men. Like Dickens, he is a skilful magician whose power over his fellows may be dangerous …. ”

And so, Wilson suggests, “All that sentiment, all those edifying high spirits, which Dickens has been dispensing so long … has all this now grown as false as those hymns to the glory of the Christian God which are performed by the worshiper of Kali?”

Of course, last night the Observer broke the news about Rupert Murdoch installing himself as publisher of the NY Post.

And, in The Transom itself, the story of two dogs, one rich, one poor, and the assault that brought them together. Plus, the second item, on Citizens Band, explicates the new sincere downton cabaret.

The summer reading round-up is rather fantastic: Janet Malcolm is reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and Daniel Harris' Diary of a Drag Queen. When asked what she liked about the books, she replied, "What's not to like?" Ah, Ms. Malcolm, always the marvel of economy. And Nicholas Kristoff is reading... Harry Potter. And from Frank Gehry: "What makes you think I read?" Indeed.

Also: Thomas Krens takes his apartment off the market. What means this for the museum director's Guggenheimlich future?

To deaden or lessen the pain, there is no want of preachers and editorialists to explain the real or true meaning of Christmas, though the bumpy history of the holiday suggests that its real meaning is whatever the deuce you want it to mean. Holidays do not have one meaning for all time. A few years ago Kwanzaa didn't exist, and now it does, with its own intricate semiotic overlays. Nov. 11 used to be Armistice Day, a bitter moment of reflection on the needlessly dead; now it's a pep rally for the next war.

Marley's ghost notwithstanding, looking into the past will not yield up any meaning of the Christmas holiday that most of us will recognize. The December date on the festive calendar two centuries ago was an occasion for public brawling by wandering crowds of inebriates.

Until Christmas was transformed in the 1830's and 40's, it was not unlike Mardi Gras. Men dressed as women and vice versa; off-key, discordant, squeaky, tub-thumping bands marched through the streets; liquored-up groups of revelers would force their way into the households of honest burghers to demand money, food and drink. When they managed to get what they came for, it wasn't Christmas alms or charity, but something close to extortion-the same begging by menace that New Yorkers, prior to Rudolph Giuliani's administration, used to have to put up with. These bands of not-so-merry makers would stand in front of homes and wassail those inside with such songs as this:

We've come here to claim our right …

And if you don't open your door

We will lay you flat upon the floor.

Twenty-first-century New Yorkers, putting cash into envelopes for doormen, cleaning staff, janitors, trash personnel, etc. under threat of rotten service next year, are observing the last of the not-so-nice Christmas customs of the 17th century.

(Incidentally, the carol quoted above is from The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday by Stephen Nissenbaum, from which the other information about Christmas' history in this piece is drawn.)

In 1659, Massachusetts outlawed Christmas. A five-shilling fine was to be imposed on anybody "found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting or any other way." So how did this non-family-holiday become the epitome of domestic celebrations for American Christians and others taken in by the thought of everyone gathered round the bright, gleaming tree?

The bright, gleaming tree is itself supposed to have been an ancient bit of folkloric ritual brought over here from Germany, which is true as far as it goes. Apparently there was nothing ancient about it in Germany, where it was nearly unknown until the middle of the 18th century, when it may been popularized by the description of one in a Goethe novel. The tree doesn't seem to have arrived in the U.S. much before 1820, and the first reference to it in an English-speaking community dates from 1835, when one was set up in Cambridge, Mass., by a German professor at Harvard.

Santa Claus, evidently with a similar developmental history, arrives in roughly the same time period as the tree. He was imported from Holland in 1810 by John Pintard, the founder of the New-York Historical Society, with an eye toward suppressing lower-class misbehavior.

It appears from what Mr. Nissenbaum has found out that our contemporary child-centered Christmas cum tree and Claus was first popularized by that least of all Christian sects or churches, the Unitarians. To the extent that the modern child has become the tender, protected and special being that he/she is, the Unitarians must shoulder more than a little of the credit or blame. Turning Christmas into a children's holiday was one of the ways they achieved their ends.

And yet, although tree and Claus were important elements in shaping the commercial horror that is the modern American Christmas, it was the work of three writers who tamed the holiday and converted it into the form we recognize today. The first was Washington Irving, whose description of Squire Bracebridge in The Sketch Book making Christmas in the ancient (if largely fictitious) way seems to have had a great effect on the nascent middle-class American reader. Next came Clement Clarke Moore, a crusty, slave-owning reactionary who opposed abolitionism, and his relentlessly anapestic "A Visit from St. Nicholas"-or, as it is better known these days, "The Night Before Christmas." Finally, Charles Dickens did the rest when, in 1843, he gave us A Christmas Carol. For enduring impact, nothing compares with it, not even the Christian Bible (a document whose connection with the American way of Christmas demands a reach of the imagination): The sacred writing for this holiday was supplied by Dickens, who, given his antipathies for the uptrodden, might not welcome how his tale seems to have become propaganda for the rich. The message conveyed by the story in 2004-even though it doesn't reflect the author's intent-is that the best course is to stay cheerful and pray.

Look at the Cratchets. Without health insurance, their best-beloved child is a sickly cripple. Like millions of Americans in the same fix, the parents worry about their child, but the last thing on God's green earth to occur to them is that a society which lets little boys waste and die is one asking for a few adjustments. In the first half of the 19th century, the time of William Blake's "satanic mills," no money was available for public medicine. Extra capital in that epoch was being spent on new factories and technologies. As things worked out, those profits became seed corn for today's wealth and a society that does have enough money to attend to the medical needs of sickly youngsters-if the people have the means to pay.

Bob Cratchet is the precursor of the office-working armies to come. Like his white-collar successors, Bob is powerless against any petty cruelty or wage cut that his employer inflicts on him. He can't tell Scrooge to "Take this job and shove it," since he is living from paycheck to paycheck; he has no back-up resources, no power to defend himself. No law, no union, no professional association will intervene if Scrooge decides to can him. He and his little family are alone, utter isolates. Read in our time, A Christmas Carol counsels that Bob should work harder, grovel more enthusiastically, and throw himself ever more into the work of making a profit for an employer who is not going to share the extra money with the ever-pleasant, obsequious bookkeeper scratching away in the ledgers in the next room.

In the end, the long hours in the cold and the sweet optimism of the almost saintly naïf (or, if you will, the sucker) pay off: Scrooge has a nightmare in which it is revealed to his miserly self how cruelly he has treated poor Cratchet, whose faithful obedience could not even be found in an adoring dog. We know the rest of the story. It's New York's 100 Neediest Cases writ large. The Christmas goose and other goodies arrive at the Cratchet house, where Tiny Tim in his modest gratitude brings tears to our eyes.

Whatever the dark origins of Christmas in the Roman feast of Saturn, this is a tale of Christian virtues being rewarded. For the humble, the obedient, the happy striver, the dependent thinker, the cheerleader and the cheer follower, the possibility exists that those with power and money will have a bad dream, wake up and do right by those whom they employ.

It may have taken a couple of hundred years, but the starch has been purged from Christmas. No more bricks through the windows: The mobs of long ago have become the agitated shoppers of today, the office-party lechers, the Yuletide hysterics going further into debt to achieve a sparkly Christmas, for all is right and all is well, and the lesson of the day is trust to charity and the kindness of billionaires.

Mr. McGrath was ensconced in a leather couch in the lobby of the Essex House Hotel, cheerfully discussing Charles Dickens, whose 1838-39 book Nicholas Nickleby he has adapted and directed for the screen. Before him, a downright Dickensian gas fire roared below a mantelpiece strewn with pine needles and soft red bows.

"A friend of mine asked me whether or not I'd thought about modernizing [ Nickleby ]," said Mr. McGrath, in between sips from a cup of Earl Grey tea. "And it would work very well in modern New York. You could have the boarding school and the theater troupe, and you have Wall Street." But, he said, part of his joy in bringing Dickens to a modern audience was allowing them to be "surprised by how utterly relevant it is in its period."

At 44, with a neatly receding colorless hairline, Mr. McGrath looked like a droopy-eyed Dick Cavett and sounded like a man who might well have the theme from Masterpiece Theatre accompanying his sandwich orders.

But no matter how well he played the part of the WASPy filmmaker who could seamlessly interpret Dickens, Mr. McGrath's path has been more circuitous. A native of Midland, Texas, his oil-business parents were "not close friends" with George and Barbara Bush, but knew them "enough to say hello." Mr. McGrath came to New York via Choate, Princeton and Saturday Night Live , where he landed a writing berth during its famous low point, the Jean Doumanian–produced 1980 season.

"It has always been a kind of poisonous, near-mutinous brew of terror out of which, somehow, jokes come," said Mr. McGrath of SNL , adding that "our year was the most hatchet-throwing, bomb-sniffing, panic-stricken, back-stabbing, front-stabbing mess you could have imagined."

After being fired by the show's executive producer, Dick Ebersol, Mr. McGrath wrote a series of films that went unproduced and, with SNL colleague, Patty Marx, penned Blockbuster , a satirical novel about an imagined attempt to adapt The Pilgrim's Progress for Hollywood. Mr. McGrath also began to write political-humor columns for The Nation and The New Republic.

In 1992, he wrote the screenplay for a remake of Garson Kanin's 1950 comedy Born Yesterday , which starred Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson. It was around then that, through his then girlfriend (and now wife) Jane Martin, he met the filmmaker Woody Allen, and the two men collaborated on the script for Bullets Over Broadway .

Mr. McGrath's directorial debut was his well-received 1996 adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma , which starred Gwyneth Paltrow. A disappointment came in 2000 with his project Company Man , which featured a performance by Mr. Allen.

And now there's Nicholas Nickleby , a drastically liposuctioned version of Dickens' tale of a boy who loses his father. The film clocks in at a cool two hours and 10 minutes, and features performances from Queer as Folk 's Charlie Hunnam as the earnest Nicholas; Billy Elliot 's Jamie Bell as the crippled Smike; Christopher Plummer as Nicholas' harsh Uncle Ralph; a one-eyed Jim Broadbent as the evil headmaster of the Dotheboys boarding school, Wackford Squeers; Nathan Lane as the theater owner, Vincent Crummles; and Barry Humphries/ Dame Edna Everage as Mrs. Crummles. Alan Cumming also appears in the theater troupe.

But at the Essex House, Mr. McGrath was getting into the spirit of recasting the story with real-life figures. He balanced his teacup on his knee and eagerly thumbed through a copy of the New York Post , stopping at a photo of actor Nick Nolte emerging from his D.U.I. trial in Malibu. "Well, there you go-look at him! He could be Brooker," Mr. McGrath said with modulated enthusiasm, referring to a boozy character who haunts Nicholas Nickleby .

Mr. McGrath touched Mr. Nolte's photo lightly and added a Tiny Tim–style "Bless his soul" before turning the page.

"Who would be Ralph?" Mr. McGrath asked, in reference to Nicholas' hard-hearted financier uncle. "I know there's someone in this city who is Ralph. Who could it be? We need a kind of Wall Street ice machine."

The Transom threw out names of businessmen including Universal head Barry Diller and real-estate tycoon Donald Trump.

Mr. McGrath objected mightily to Mr. Trump. "Ralph wouldn't go for that hair, that carrot-colored hair," he said. "And Trump with the wives? No way is he Ralph. Trump is very out of Dickens, but he might have been one of the characters that Dickens didn't actually write."

And as for the noxious, violent Squeers, Mr. McGrath said, "Oh, there are always Squeers …. You know who looks like him? Not like Jim Broadbent [who plays him in Mr. McGrath's film], but like Squeers in the book?"

Mr. McGrath stopped meaningfully. "[ Hustler publisher] Larry Flynt. He is very Squeers."

The idea of the Dickensian villain-craggy, eccentric and power-wielding-had set Mr. McGrath off. The tea cup was forgotten, and so was the Post .

"Strom Thurmond!" Mr. McGrath said, in reference to the recently retired 100-year-old Senator from South Carolina. "He is an appalling person-a perfectly appalling person. But the details of his life would work perfectly in a Dickens novel: the charm with which he disguises his wickedness, the 'You're such a pretty girl' charm, even though there's Tang in his hair. He reminds me, somehow, of Bleak House . And the fact that he's been in the Senate for so long is surely out of Dickens. And it surely couldn't be true!"

Now we were on to Great Expectations . "Miss Havisham-oooh, she's a nut ! And she's not exactly like, but, well-Jocelyne Wildenstein?" Mr. McGrath considered it for a moment. "Miss Havishtein," he chuckled.

"Mostly, I don't know about the women. Except for Mrs. Squeers. Marilyn Quayle-she's my Mrs. Squeers. And even Nancy Reagan. They have that tight, super-wound-up thing." Mr. McGrath straightened his back primly and squinted. "They're watching always with the eyes … Marilyn Quayle particularly.

"Smikes you see every place," Mr. McGrath continued. "One of the things about this city that makes it very similar to Dickens is that the lame, the crippled and the deformed are often very much on display and very much in need of help, and yet very wary of it. It is a city full of kindness and full of cruelty."

-Rebecca Traister

The Stages of Fear

Having tackled infidelity numerous times on film, Unfaithful director Adrian Lyne is about to try it onstage. On Dec. 11, Mr. Lyne and A Walk on the Moon director Tony Goldwyn played host at a dinner at the Four Seasons in honor of actress Diane Lane, who starred in both men's movies and was about to be fêted the following evening with a retrospective by the Film Society of Lincoln Center. There, Mr. Lyne told The Transom that he was hoping to direct, probably for the New York stage, a Harold Pinter played called Landscape .

"I've never done a play before," Mr. Lyne said. "I thought it would be good to be scared stiff again."

Mr. Lyne, who got to know Mr. Pinter when the playwright wrote a draft of his adaptation of Lolita , said he saw the production that Mr. Pinter directed in Dublin and thought it was "wonderful" and "heartbreaking." He said he has since talked with Mr. Pinter about directing his own version.

The drama is about "noncommunication," Mr. Lyne said, and takes place "downstairs" in a country house in England. The two characters are a cellarman and his housekeeper wife. When the play begins, the two characters sit at opposite ends of the stage and take turns speaking. "At first, you think there's absolutely no connection between what they're saying. And then it comes together," the director said. "And you realize she's having an affair with the landowner."

Because of the brevity of the play, Mr. Lyne said he'd probably pair Landscape with another work. He also said he's thinking about Ray Winstone from Sexy Beast for the starring role, though he has yet to talk with the actor about it. Otherwise, Mr. Lyne said, his plans for the play were pretty preliminary. "This is in my head still."

Still, The Transom couldn't resist asking Mr. Lyne why he seems to be so transfixed with the subject of affairs and such.

"I haven't the slightest idea why," he said with a little laugh. "Especially since I've been married now for 28 years." But then, movies about affairs are perfect fodder for a guy who sees himself as the kind of director who "makes European movies in Hollywood."

-Frank DiGiacomo

Christy's Appetizer

That rough-boy filmmaker Ed Burns and yogawear mogul Christy Turlington are definitely back together. On the evening of Dec. 17, the pair dropped into the new Spring Street Italian restaurant Giorgione for dinner. Mr. Burns, sporting a very short crew cut, and Ms. Turlington, in a light blue yogawear jacket, shared pizza and red wine at the bar while waiting for a table, with the cigarette smoke from nearby diners wafting in their faces. (Ms. Turlington didn't flinch.) Then they moved to a table in the front room of the restaurant, but not before giving each other a quick peck on the lips.

Although the food tasted pretty good to The Transom that night, it seemed that Ms. Turlington-who removed her sportswear jacket to reveal a tiny turquoise number once she sat down-caused most of the drooling at the nearby tables.

- Elisabeth Franck

The Transom Also Hears...

Toilet Humor of the Stars-Episode 243 , The Plop : "Just ask Hugh about the ice dropping into a glass … it made a sound!" actress Sandra Bullock said as she walked down the red carpet with her co-star, Hugh Grant, at the Dec. 12 premiere of Two Weeks Notice at the Ziegfeld Theater. Noting The Transom's puzzled expression, Ms. Bullock elaborated: "It made a sound like something dropping into a toilet!"

-Noelle Hancock and Alexandra Wolfe

With our own modest or nonexistent portfolios, we are in the happy position of being tourists rather than natives to the country of high-finance finagling. The bad guys are getting it; better yet, the more extensive the wrongdoing, the more likely that heads will roll, that "systemic" changes will be made. Yet, delightful as it has been to find inarguable evidence of the villainy we'd long suspected, something in this chorus of virtuous revulsion has made me uncomfortable.

I've been doing some historical research lately, and I keep hearing echoes of this Schadenfreude in the words of some eminent literary tourists of the last century-namely Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles Dickens-over the economic misfortunes of my home state of Virginia. Despising the institution of slavery (and, in de Tocqueville's case, the landed aristocracy), they were downright jubilant at the sorry state of Virginia's economy.

De Tocqueville was as much a cheerleader for (and idealizer of) the stern probity and industry of Northerners as he was against what he perceived as the idleness and frivolity of the slave- and land-owning Virginia aristocracy-themselves, he gleefully pointed out, descendants of blue-blooded bad sheep who'd been happily shipped off by their families in England. At roughly the same point in time (in 1827), Fanny Trollope, the free-thinking novelist and mother of Anthony, arrived in America with utopian fantasies of her own. But after disillusioning experiences-a brief sojourn in a muddy, bug-infested progressive community, followed by the failure of a grandiose commercial scheme in Cincinnati-her view turned sour, and all she found was further evidence of the boorishness of America and its institutions. Having abandoned her 12-year-old son to the untender mercies of his intemperate and impecunious father, Mrs. T. wept over the treatment of slave children in Virginia. The book she wrote, Domestic Manners of the Americans , a slash-and-burn exposé, was a best-seller in England.

Dickens, on the trip that produced American Notes and Pictures from Italy (both 1842), had initially hoped to tweak and perhaps outsell his older colleague and friendly rival with a more salubrious portrait of the new country-but that was not to be.

With his nose for injustice and his genius for dramatizing and humanizing the plight of the oppressed, Dickens was more interested in prisons and poorhouses than signs of progress. After all, on his visit to Pennsylvania, after a cursory look at the historic sites, he went to the horrifyingly brutal Eastern Penitentiary and was inspired to savage eloquence by his reformer's zeal. Didn't all these writers see what they wanted to see, discover ammunition for novelistic or ideological predispositions already firmly in place? And for Dickens and Trollope, wasn't there a lingering-if unconscious-resentment of this upstart nation's victory over the powerful mother country?

In any case, Virginians have never gotten over the vilifications of Dickens, who was wined and dined in a style befitting the great man and then turned on his hosts with a keenly observant eye for the signs of misery beneath the façade.

Voyaging from Washington through Fredericksburg to Richmond by night steamer and by coach, in conditions that were at the very least uncomfortable and at the worst life-threatening, Dickens took perverse satisfaction in the "ruin and decay" that signalled the exhaustion of the soil by the slave system. "Dreary and uninteresting as its aspect is, I was glad to the heart to find anything on which one of the curses of this horrible institution has fallen; and had greater pleasure in contemplating the withered ground, than the richest and most thriving cultivation in the same place could possibly have afforded me," he wrote.

Dickens' host in Richmond was a good man and, to his relief, not a buyer or seller of slaves, though he owned and employed them in his tobacco factory. Like the guest from hell, Dickens was the kind of snoop who peers under the rugs. He observed the factory workers and sought out the poorer neighborhoods, looking for signs of moldering spirits. They were the very slums that we, growing up in a later century, tried to keep at the back of our consciousness. In the 50's and 60's, not so much had changed: Dickens' wry observations on mint juleps and sherry cobblers and deferential black waiters held true for these staples of our debutante years.

But what Dickens and de Tocqueville missed were the paradoxes: How was it that this miserable state had produced such farsighted revolutionaries as George Mason, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson-had, in effect, given us the Constitution? In his superb book American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia , the historian Edmund Morgan provides a complex portrait of the ups and downs of Virginia's government and economy: its boom years of greed (stemming from tobacco), the seesawing between protecting and restricting individual rights, and the state's resort to slavery in the late 17th century, when freed servants posed a threat of rebellion. Growing up in conditions in which slaves and free men intermingled, Jefferson worried that young Virginians must inevitably be tutored in tyranny with the example of such despotism before them.

"The man must be a prodigy," Mr. Morgan quotes Jefferson as saying, "who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances." If so, there were many prodigies in Virginia: men who, while complicit in the slave trade, were hardly depraved, and managed to retain manners and morals enough to suppress private disagreements and design the Constitution around the central belief in human freedom. The ultimate irony, Mr. Morgan suggests, is that it may have been precisely this concrete spectacle of bondage in their backyards, of men treated like chattel, that fired their ideas of independence and passion for liberty.

Even then, the drafters of the Constitution knew slavery had to be abolished, but so fragile was their hold on the union itself (their first order of business) that they didn't dare raise so divisive an issue at the time. What they had, what the great Presidents like Roosevelt had, was a combination of political acumen and farsightedness.

But now, with the instant-gratification impulse that rules our lives and our economy, nobody ever remembers (or wants to remember) while the times are good that boom is followed by bust. State governments go on drunken sprees of projects and commitments and then are surprised by the head-splitting hangover of money shortfalls. I did not have to be "persuaded" of the phenomenon by the Bad Guys, as the authors of we/them readings of the current crisis like to put it. As a "little investor," my investment was tiny enough, but I too was caught up in the same "irrational exuberance," perhaps even the same "infectious greed," that had others shifting from bonds to stocks like there was no tomorrow. Maybe that's just it: We no longer believe there is a tomorrow, which is a consequence of our inability to listen to history. You need a sense of the past to believe in the future, and you must believe in the future as a shared proposition to have any hope of making it better.

There is nothing like a perfectly done potato skin stuffed with melted cheese to prompt serious rumination, and watching the kids disport at the Day School occasioned miscellaneous reflections bearing on the future of this great land. What possible good can portend for the children of a culture that has bought more copies of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's banal, unmusical tribute to the late Princess of Wales, in a mere six weeks or so, than preceding generations have bought of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" in the past half-century? Not much, I wot. (Incidentally, readers wishing to know what a proper musical salute to an English rose should sound like are invited to listen to "Rose of England" from the musical Crest of a Wave , 1937, by Ivor Novello-an artifact of a much-beset era that held itself erect with penurious pride, rather than slumping and whining about its Versace-clad victimhood.)

Readers of this column will be familiar with the Old Blowhard's oft-expressed conviction that Karl Marx is likely to have another bite at the apple. Not that I'm in the least bit a Marxist, mind you (nor was Marx), but I do think that the man must be ranked among the greatest financial journalists who ever lived, every bit the equal in perspicacity of Adam Smith. His analysis of the "character" of capitalism, and the tendencies, largely self-destructive, that flow from that character, is as penetrating and on the money (if you will) as any ever written. Much of that analysis, let us not forget, was first mooted in the dispatches Marx wrote during the 1850's for the New-York Tribune , not exactly a socialist rag, whose ill-paid European correspondent he was. Capitalism, Marx saw, releases certain inherently antisocial, suicidal energies; it is Mammon who appears to hold the key to whatever it is that precipitates the lemmings, or the Gadarene swine, to destruction. And capitalism as a "system" probably has most to fear over the long term from nothing more or less than the public behavior of those who control or own the capital. In this the O.B. concurs-or, as the lady of this house puts it, "How long can it possibly be before someone just shoots Donald Trump?"

This is a typically long-winded O.B. way of getting to my point, which is to make sure you have all read John Cassidy's first-rate piece, "The Next Thinker: The Return of Karl Marx," in the recent double issue of The New Yorker . There is so much to think about in Mr. Cassidy's piece that one hardly knows where to start. Globalization, the sheer, irresistible force of capitalism, materialist values, downsizing and other tropes of "efficiency," all were anticipated and described by Marx-as I say, so much to think about. Go find it! Go read it!

The observation that particularly struck the O.B., not without a frisson of amusement, was the following: "Capitalism … made human beings subjugate themselves to base avarice. 'Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values,' [Marx wrote in 1843] … The money-driven debasement of popular culture, epitomized by most of Hollywood's output, was also foreshadowed by Marx. In the Grundrisse (Outlines) … he argued that the quality of the art a society produces is a reflection of the material conditions at the time."

Grundrisse was published in 1857, the same year that Charles Dickens, another Londoner, in infinitely better circumstances than the threadbare Marx, published a great book that tackled many of the same issues: Little Dorrit . Something was definitely in the air; predatory, shameless, callous capitalism-call it "trumpery" (defined by Webster's as "worthless nonsense")-was stinking up the joint. Indeed, when, not long ago in a talk on Dickens' great novel-perhaps his greatest-I compared Dickens' depiction of the Merdles' grand reception for the worthies of public and private life to the goings-on in the Bill Clinton-John Huang-James Riady Oval Office, a listener came up afterward and gently chided me for socialist tendencies.

What amused me about Mr. Cassidy's observation is this. There is a certain very vocal school of defenders of High Culture who look about themselves today and see a wasteland. I agree with that conclusion. This particular school, however, blames the whole catastrophe on "60's-style liberalism," in consequence of which it has formed an alliance with, is funded by, and has in general become the cultural dogsbody point man for free-market, laissez-faire, supply-side capitalism on the grounds that both stand for traditional, refined values.

But they do not. The current issue of Harper's Magazine excerpts a "must-read" excerpt from a new book, The Conquest of Cool , by Thomas Frank, which makes an inescapable point: Without capitalism's shoulder to it, thanks to the profit it saw in effecting a revolution in popular/mass culture, the great rock 'n' roll-spoked wheel of the anarchic, know-nothing, tradition-abhorring values ascendant in the 60's, in which the rock sensibility ruled all (and still does), could not have crushed everything in its path as efficiently as the panzers once overran the defenses of France or the barbarians the gates of Rome. Why, in God's name, do you think the Europeans resist the "New Global Economy" as determinedly and valiantly as they do?

Because they know what the true cost will be.

Sure, France and Germany would like the money, anyone would, but not at what they know the cost will be in terms of cultural annihilation. They have looked across the Atlantic; they know what unfettered capitalism's "long march through the institutions" looks like.

The O.B. intends to return to this theme in future columns, but let me leave you with this thought. In The New York Times of Oct. 22, Martin Arnold wrote the only insightful column on the current state of publishing that I have read in a dog's age. The point he makes is that publishing is bereft of talent-not writers, but editors, marketing people, people like that. It's tempting to blame this on low pay, but publishing has always paid badly. So here's something to think about. In the mid-1980's, half of one Yale graduating class signed up to interview with Goldman, Sachs & Company. This suggests a value system unlikely to produce many book people.

As Marx saw, the last laugh is generally Mammon's.