South Dakota is full of dead and dying towns: the ones at the bottom of the giant reservoirs along the Missouri, the gold-rush shacks abandoned to tilt further down their crazy angles on the hillsides, the ones the railroad murdered by going somewhere else, the ones the Great Depression killed, the ones that the depopulation of the old buffalo commons is killing today.

Fall River County, where I am staying this month, seems particularly prone to the loss of towns. Ardmore is dead, Provo is comatose, and Edgemont doesn’t look too healthy. Hot Springs is doing all right, but, then, Hot Springs is on the edge of the Black Hills and gets a share of the tourist traffic. The rest of the county is not so lucky.

One of the oddest ghost towns in the Dakotas is Igloo, south of Hot Springs. Its death is less inexplicable than other towns’, if only because it was not a natural place to begin with. It was just a flat spot on the prairie, through which the railroad happened to pass, and during the Second World War, the Army decided to store munitions there for reshipping to the various places that needed the bombs and guns—which required inventory controllers, and safety inspectors, and clerks, and firemen, and then clerks to clerk the clerks, and pretty soon some schools, and before long there were a few thousand people living there. A hospital, a church, a post office, some shops: all in the bland, fast-construction style of the Army in the 1940s.

Through the 1950s, around seven hundred employees still worked at the site, but the depot was closed in 1967, and the town of Igloo was abandoned. The former residents maintain a website, and the land now belongs to the neighboring ranch. The owners of the ranch have apparently turned the schoolhouse into a bed-and-breakfast lodge, but when I drove down this weekend to look at the site, I didn’t see any guests.

Igloo, as I said, is different from other ghost towns—but it does have that sadness they all seem to have: a decaying marker of a human endeavor that failed.

Here’s Igloo as it was:

And here’s Igloo as it is:

Yes, well, perhaps that computerized translation program didn’t work out as well as it could for this Chinese restaurant, whose owners seem to have thought that the error message they got was the English translation for which they had asked. But, I don’t know, the food at a place called “Translate Server Error” sounds oddly tasty.

[from BoingBoing, via The Volokh Conspiracy]

So says the critic Joe Queenan in the Guardian (via Arts & Letters Daily). After 40 years and 1500 concerts, Queenan doesn’t think much of the taste of the average concert-goer, but he also doesn’t like much of contemporary composition either. When beauty, order, and meaning have been deconstructed in so much of our thinking, it’s no wonder that they should disappear in much of our music too:

During a radio interview between acts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a famous singer recently said she could not understand why audiences were so reluctant to listen to new music, given that they were more than ready to attend sporting events whose outcome was uncertain. It was a daft analogy. Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public’s lack of imagination. If they don’t know in advance whether Nadal or Federer is going to win, but still love Wimbledon, why don’t they enjoy it when an enraged percussionist plays a series of brutal, fragmented chords on his electric marimba? What’s wrong with them?

The reason the sports analogy fails is because when Spain plays Germany, everyone knows that the game will be played with one ball, not eight; and that the final score will be 1-0 or 3-2 or even 8-1 - but definitely not 1,600,758 to Arf-Arf the Chalet Ate My Banana. The public may not know in advance what the score will be, but it at least understands the rules of the game. . . .

Earlier this year, I attended a concert at Carnegie Hall by the National Symphony under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. Slatkin is a canny, industrious conductor and a champion of American music. His philosophy seems to be that if Americans do not support living composers, American composers will cease to exist - though if the best America can do is John Corigliano and Philip Glass and the dozens of academics who give each other awards for music nobody likes, this might not be such a bad thing. Slatkin’s programme consisted of three gimmicky pieces: Liszt’s flamboyant Second Piano Concert, Ravel’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition; and an ambitious new work by a young American named Mason Bates. This last piece, entitled Liquid Interface, examined “the phenomenon of water in its variety of forms”, something Ravel and Mussorgsky never got around to. It featured wind machines and bongos and an electric drum pad and a laptop and a gigantic orchestra. It was bloated but thoroughly harmless, and the audience responded warmly; nothing thrills a classical music crowd more than a new piece of music that doesn’t make them physically ill. But the concert underscored the problem in including new work on the same programme as the old chestnuts: it is not just asking striplings to compete with titans; it is asking obscure, academically trained liquid interfacers to compete with titans at the top of their game. As the saying goes: you don’t send a boy to do Franz Liszt’s job.

By now you have either seen or heard about the cover of the latest issue of the New Yorker. Barack Obama is depicted in Middle Eastern dress, and his wife Michelle carries an automatic rifle. From all quarters, including the Obama campaign, objections that the whole thing is scurrilous have been loudly raised. Everyone is indignant. The magazine’s response is that we don’t get it. As a caricature of what goes on in the supposedly fevered imagination of those of us who probably won’t vote for Obama, the cover art is aimed at us, not him.

I wonder. Another thing you’ve probably seen a lot of in your life is projection that takes the convoluted form of someone exaggerating a flaw or fault in order to demonstrate that he’s not fazed by your thinking he’s flawed in that particular respect or guilty of that particular wrongdoing. And, we are meant to infer, he’s not fazed because it isn’t true—he’s not really overweight or unaware or slow, and really he’s innocent. And, if we hadn’t really been thinking about him in those terms, well, we do now.

To be fair, we have to recognize that, just because he thinks we think he’s a monster doesn’t necessarily mean he thinks he is. Maybe it just means that he thinks we think he is. When William F. Buckley in 1955 wrote that National Review “stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” he was articulating, in order to expose, the liberal prejudice that to be conservative is to be reactionary. He was employing something of the same rhetorical device on display this week at the New Yorker, so why do those words of his continue to charm, whereas this cartoon grates?

Buckley snuck in an inside pitch and we backed off the plate a little. You tip your hat to him for his finesse. The New Yorker, by contrast, is throwing it at our heads, and the umpire in us recognizes the difference.

That much, evidently, the Obama campaign appreciates. In showing us what it thinks we think, the New Yorker feeds our suspicion that the culture represented by the Obama campaign has contempt for us—that it thinks we have questions about Obama not because of his positions on Israel (a “contiguous” Palestinian state?) or abortion, but because we are blinded by ignorance, bigotry, bad taste.

Under William Shawn’s long editorship, the magazine was famously courteous about politics. You got the sense that most of the writers and editors were left of center but that they would never make fun of you if you weren’t. The tacit understanding was that, besides being wrong, any attempt to taunt or bully you into accepting fashionable opinion would have degraded them more than you.

We’ve mentioned before news that some conservative Anglicans have been in talks about entering the Roman Catholic Church en masse. Now, conflicting reports are coming from the UK.

The Independent runs with this headline: “Pope rides to Rowan’s rescue. Exclusive: Vatican shuns defectors and backs calls for Anglican unity.”

While the Telegraph’s “Holy Smoke” blog says that’s nonsense. The headline: “Benedict is encouraging Anglican converts.” And the opening paragraph: “More evidence this morning that Catholic liberals are panicking at the prospect of an influx of conservative Anglicans. They want us to believe that Pope Benedict is ’shunning defectors’ in an attempt to shore up the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not true.”

Mike Potemra and Jack Folwer hash these stories out on “The Corner” here and here.