The windows are open today! Even though it’s still February, spring is undeniably in the air. No doubt my cold will get even worse.  

¶ Tierce: Josh Marshall wins the Polk; TPM ineligible for the Pulitzer.

¶ Sext: Another reason for taking an interest in the Oscars this year: reading Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution.

¶ Nones: Books on Monday: Breakable You, a third and, for the time being, final, novel by Brian Morton.

¶ Vespers: What to do with Swimming in a Sea of Death, by David Rieff?

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The recently-closed restaurant branch of one of my favorite food shops. I’m sorry that they didn’t make a go of it, but I never gave it a try, either. I’d say that it was in the wrong part of town. It would have been heaven in or near the theatre district. Or perhaps in Grand Central Terminal.

The weather today suits my indoorsy, stock-taking frame of mind. Without the slightest intention of cutting back on my posting, I’m considering changes. Metamorphoses, perhaps. It’s as though the sheer weight of the blog’s verbiage were altering the site’s nature, its composition.

Ordinarily, I don’t like to write about blogging — I’d rather just do it. But lately I’ve felt the need for some public throat-clearing. The fundamental nature of the enterprise hasn’t changed; The Daily Blague is still a combination diary and notice board, pointing on occasion to longer, less dated essays at Portico. If I’ve offering very few links to the rest of the Blogosphere, that’s because I haven’t really been visiting very much of it beyond the sites listed on the Blog Roster.

But the whole point of the blog seems about to tilt in some new direction. Literally — think of it as the vanishing point, the dot in the distance where all the sight lines converge. I’ve been looking for a new pole star. I haven’t found it yet, but of course I don’t have to, since I’ll be inventing it along with everything else.

This may surprise you, but assisting spring fever as a catalyst are the Diaries of Monty Python veteran Michael Palin, which I’m listening to on my daily walks (as read by the author). I can’t tell you how much I should like to shake this gentleman’s hand! Creator of many of my favorite Python routines (together with Terry Jones, whom I hadn’t properly appreciated), Mr Palin comes off as a charming but thoroughly decent man, with his feet on the ground, his heart in the right place, and his head stocked to bursting with articulate expression. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Diaries take one into his workroom, but they do give off the most invigorating fizz. (more…)

Do not miss Roman’s floor plans for “1000 Fifth.”

Thanks to Fossil Darling.

If so, the market’s not to worry.

Although I haven’t received my copy, George Snyder was kind enough to pass along the link to Sarah Boxer’s survey, “Blogs,” in the current issue of The New York Review of Books.

George wrote,

I will be very interested to know what you make of Miss Sarah Boxer’s piece on Blogs and books on blogs in the 14 February issue of the NYRB, for one can say she covers some ground, it was my opinion she leaves out an important element —

Us.

Or people like us.

Indeed. The curious thing about these surveys is that, even when they acknowledge Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (Ms Boxer does not), they don’t seem to understand how it underlies what is really remarkable about the Blogosphere. It allows the handful of “people like us” to gather in a way that was never before possible in the history of mankind. There are never enough of us in any one place to begin to form a group, and our affinities don’t bring us together geographically. Web logs have changed that.

Unlike other small bands of agglutinated aficionados, however, “people like us,” George, are very, very articulate. We would not be fired by The New York Review of Books for writing as we do — although there are several editors of other periodicals whom we should certainly fire!

I hope to have more to say about this on Friday.

Upstairs at Caffè Grazie, a very agreeable destination for after-concert repasts, right around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum.

As the picture suggests, my life has hardly been an unmitigated misery for the past couple of days. But I haven’t had much time for sitting down, or any at all for thinking. I’ve been on the go since first thing Thursday morning. On Friday, I had to be at Ruptured & Crippled at noon, to see the rheumatologist; a Remicade infusion followed at one. The good news on the infusion front was that I’d gone a full three months since the last one. I hadn’t meant to push the interval so far past ten weeks, but twelve is how it worked out, and as I was none the worse for the delay, Dr Magid and I could congratulate ourselves (and the makers of Remicade) upon having gone from six to five to four infusions per year within the space of twelve months. The only thing better than a wonder drug is being able to get by on less of it.

On Friday night, I went to the museum for the first of this season’s Met Artists concerts. A very bad boy, I left at the interval. The music was wonderful, as always, but I was tempted away by the prospect of dinner with Kathleen, which I’d have missed if I’d stayed. She was still at the office at nine, and about to leave. Instead of going home, she met me at Caffè Grazie, where we had a lovely dinner, although the “personal” pizza that she ordered was as big as a regular from Ottomanelli’s.

After the usual tidying-up on Saturday afternoon (during which I listened to Don Carlo and thought how much I’d have enjoyed being a censor during the anciem régime), I attacked the kitchen. The kitchen didn’t really need attacking, but that just made the task more effective. Instead of being demoralized by carrying loads of decayed leftovers to the garbage chute, I had plenty of energy for taking inventory — and then for running across the street to stock up on shortfalls.

Satisfying as all of that domestic accomplishment was, I was stalling and I knew it. Sitting in a large box in the blue room was the second RoomGroove, purchased expressly to act as a receiver for transmissions from the first unit, in the bedroom.*  Would I figure out how to make this work? At first, it didn’t. But then it did!

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m meeting with Steve Laico, technical adviser to The Daily Blague. Among other things, we’re going to look at voice recognition software. Having recorded a thick wad of PodCasts through the fall and early winter, I’ve decided that reading scripts is not for me, and I’d like to experiment with ex tempore speaking from bullet points. Text obsessive that I am, however, I’ll have to have transcripts!  I also hope to learn a few thing about a more sophisticated handling of images.

It’s all phew.

* In other words, music playing on the Nano in the bedroom should be able to be heard in the blue room, even with the bedroom unit muted. If the new RoomGroove didn’t pick up a signal from the old one (or vice versa), I’d have simply made an expensive and unnecessary upgrade from the Logitech portable that I bought for the Thanksgiving trip to St Croix.

Has your attempt to get rid of unwanted pop-up ads made things even worse? Maybe you ought to have read this first.

This afternoon, Kathleen and I had brunch at the museum with Jean Ruaud, of Mnémoglyphes – the blogger from a foreign capital to whom I alluded the other day – and his nephew, André-François Ruaud. André is the publisher of Les moutons électriques,  an imprint that he manages at Lyon, and that has just issued Les nombreuses vies de Maigret, a collection of essays and other materials devoted to Georges Simenon’s most celebrated creation. Among other contributions, there is a portfolio of photographs taken by Jean. If you have ever visited any of his sites over the years, particularly Empreintes, his ‘Fotoblog,’ you know that Jean Ruaud is one of the most gifted amateur photographers on the planet. (Actually, with the publication of Les nombreuses vies de Maigret, he is no longer an amateur.) Jean and André are in New York at the moment to collaborate on an upcoming project that promises to be very interesting to fans of another famous fictional detective – and I leave it to Jean to fill in the blanks as he sees fit.

When did I first encounter Jean’s blog at the time, Douze lunes? During the summer or early autumn of 2004, I think, right before I launched the first Daily Blague. Over the years, Jean and I have broached the idea of meeting in person, either here or in Paris, often enough for me to begin to wonder if we might actually ever get together. (At our end, Kathleen has been so tied up with work for the past few years that we’ve only managed brief escapes at Thanksgiving. As it happened, we spent the Thanksgiving of 2003, somewhat before I met Jean online, in Paris, and we were not inclined to revisit the City of Light in late November anytime soon – considering that one of the key points of winter travel for Kathleen is plenty of soleil. In Paris that year, it was miserably rainy the entire time we were there.) In the end, it was probably inevitable that the decline of the dollar ordained that the meeting would take place in New York.

Jean was very generous with his time, for me met not once but twice. How I wish that my French were in better shape! I ventured a few mistake-riddled phrases, but stuck to English out of sheer humanitarian concern for Jean’s sensibilities. Among other things, we talked about Jean’s really very interesting job, which I would describe by likening him, in a way at least, to the subjects of Andrés last and forthcoming books. But when Kathleen turned to Jean and said, “RJ tells me that you’re a detective!” Jean all but hid his head under the tablecloth in embarrassment. Really, he is much too modest. All I will say is this: come to think of it, I won’t. 

Kathleen and I hope that Jean and André enjoyed getting together as much as we did. As Confucius says… I was going to quote Confucius in French, but it’s quite different, and my classical Chinese isn’t up to deciding who’s more faithful, Simon Leys (in English) or Séraphin Couvreur. Compare:

To have friends coming from afar: is this not a delight?

Si des amis viennent de loin recevoir ses leçons, n’éprouve-t-il pas une grande joie ?

Who said anything about leçons? My joie, however, was grande indeed.

At last: a news item from our own corner of the Blogosphere, not yet reported in the Times.

Mig at Metamorphosism has made a queasy discovery. Clicking on the link in his entry, “I was afraid of this,” (“Welcome to the canon”) will take you to a sort of Internet syllabus for the Fourth Grade Marine Biology Unit at the Wilmette [Illinois] public schools. You will find a table filled with the names of various fish. Click on “Flying Fish 2,” and you’re back at Metamorphosism, for Mig’s drolly mock-scientific entry. Among the “facts” noted about the flying fish:

This sounds an awful lot like surfing, which is done for fun, not to escape predators, man.

As the entry proceeds, it becomes ever more mired in yearning existential uncertainty.

[The flying fish] wonders, did walks calm its father this much? Walks at night? Are they as good as walks at dawn, the flying fish wonders. Because the light at dawn, not bad man. The clarity, the shine of the world. The swans. The way ducks look small and insufficient next to a swan, although they probably think the swans are way too big and prone to bird flu and a bad color – white – that gets dirty way too easy, while the swans maybe think, eat my wake, duck.

Let’s see, do any of my law school friends have kids in these schools? It’s a possibility – although grandchildren are getting to be more likely. Or we could try to get a saving note to Mr Elman.

Here is a bit of schist or granite or whatnot – rockface – from Carl Schurz Park. The only interesting thing about the image is that I just learned how to resize it, using the latest version of PhotoShop Elements (an application that I have used for three generations), which I bought for my new-ish laptop. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to resize the pixels. The instructions at Help were totally counterintuitive; it was only when I did what they told me not to do that I was able to move forward. 

Typical. Resizing images is just about all I use PhotoShop for.

Not so typical is a bit of what feels like bait-and-switch from Coffee Cup. I  bought their HTML editor for the new-ish laptop for one reason only: Microsoft has discontinued FrontPage. I’ve used FrontPage for seven years, learning to live with and love its maddening limitations. Were it not for Microsoft’s greedy copy protection racket, I’d just go on using FrontPage for the rest of my life. Now, Coffee Cup isn’t as expensive as FrontPage, but perhaps there’s a reason for that. Whereas FrontPage reads my stylesheet without so much as a burp, just as every browser does, Coffee Cup requires an additional product to render stylesheets usable with their HTML editor. $34 additional, to be exact, and another $13 for hard copy. (Essential, because I’ve been unable to download software of any kind with our wi-fi connection.) I’ve written a blistering letter of outrage, but I haven’t sent it.

By and large, I’ve had it with innovation. Everything can just stay where it is for ten years. Then maybe I’ll have an appetite for a bit of change.

Three weeks ago, on the day after I came home from the hospital, I went to the barbershop for a trim. Working around the neck brace proved very difficult for the barber. In any case, short and scruffy as it was, the beard still needed trimming, so I went back today. It was my regular barber’s day off. One of his colleagues asked me if my beard had been shaved in the hospital, or, worse, by me. He was shocked by my answer. But he got me looking fairly normal.

Why do I feel that I’m leaving something, when nothing is going anywhere? The only change, for me, will be no longer having to deal with MovableType, a blogging platform that I chose in 2004 precisely because it was said to be the most daunting. (And it was daunting. I discovered that I am a closet masochist.) Exchanging MovableType for WordPress is like taking off a very heavy backpack. Life is suddenly, startlingly easy. I have no regrets.

But it’s true that I am leaving school. I started the Daily Blague at a strange time, right after George Bush’s second victory. The Blogosphere had been hopping during the campaign and was still very lively, as the writers at political sites that I visited, such as Crooked Timber and Obsidian Wings, tried to make sense of the disaster. Eventually, I lost interest in political blogs. I lost interest in all single-issue blogs. And I really didn’t know what to do with my own. For far too long, I filled it with reams of material that belonged in a different setting. I was like the bore who shows up at a cocktail party and wants to talk about the death sentence.

At some point or other, the old Daily Blague developed a serious comment-spam problem, and my Web host actually considered shutting it down, along with at least one other MoveableType site. That’s when I decided to move, both to another host and to another platform. By now, I had a very clear idea of what The Daily Blague ought to look and feel like. Thanks to the heavy lifting of Searchlight Consulting, the look and feel has been realized. But as Steve Laico can tell you, I knew what I wanted.

What distinguishes a blog structurally from other Web site is, of course, its interactivity: the solicitation of comments. Most blogs don’t get nearly as many comments as their creators would like, and The Daily Blague is one of them. But every comment is a lively acknowledgment that someone has been reading what I’ve written. I don’t know why any writer doesn’t keep a blog for that reason alone. (Writers who aren’t celebrities, that is.) The comments that the Daily Blague has accumulated have given me a better idea of where I stand in the world than I had before blogging.

To all readers, but especially to those who were “in at the birth,” I say Thank You!

In a couple of days, this site has passed from Sandbox to Home-Sweet-Home. My allegiance has already been transferred – to the extent that this post isn’t going to appear at the old Daily Blague. I feel as though I’m graduating from a really hard boarding school, one run by Mena Trott. Except that I don’t feel that I learned anything particularly useful under the tutelage of MovableType.

WordPress has already won my heart in two ways. First, comment moderation. Everyone’s initial comment is moderated and thereafter approved (or forever rejected!). This bit of Internet hygiene is utterly basic, and there’s nothing that anyone at MT can say that will ever alter my position, which is that they were as thoughtless as the bureaucrats who thought that holes in the floor were good enough toilets on Chinese trains. Second, I can post in advance, and the post won’t show before its timestamp. This is another elementary convenience that was beneath the attentions of the Internet Zsa-Zsa.

 Justified paragraphs, I’m told, may be a struggle. Do I know struggle!