Homer's Wine Dark Sea

This morning I fell into the NYTimes Op-Ed page and found an uncommon richness. Will Self started my morning off with a tasty (if somewhat sardonic) snapshot of Ibiza in the summer

On the horizon the superstructure of a freighter piled high with containers wavered in the heat, never seeming to progress: all that stuff, cars and car tires, dishwashers and dialysis machines — the whole lot being thrust through Homer’s wine-dark sea. The sheer inertia of global commerce began to make me feel dizzy — there was this, and also the sense that with our ceaseless advances and retractions we were in some way mimicking the vacillations of our own culture, with its Promethean thefts always being found out by the aeronautical engineering of Icarus.

I began to worry: would we become lost here in the Ibizan hinterland? Meeting perhaps with other Brits who’d gone feral? A lost tribe, stark naked save for denim penis-sheaths, who called themselves “the Ex” and enacted weird psycho-sexual rituals.

Next, Pinker has an interesting article on Palin's debate performance:

SINCE the vice presidential debate on Thursday night, two opposing myths have quickly taken hold about Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. The first, advanced by her supporters, is that she made it through a gantlet of fire; the second, embraced by her detractors, is that her speaking style betrays her naïveté. Both are wrong.

Then Judith Warner has an utterly depressing piece on the financial crisis:

And those of us who felt, well, like losers, are feeling like even bigger losers, as we shove our unopened 401K or (if we’re double-loser freelancers) SEP-IRA statements into bottom desk drawers and wait for a cathartic burst of schadenfreude that simply refuses to come.

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats — the ones who bent the rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed regulations on the banking and mortgage industries — are taking us down with them.

Just thought I'd share my Sunday Morning reading with you.