If you know a singer who can take a bunch of songs by such diverse creative talents as Anton Webern, Charles Ives, Carrie Jacobs-Bond, and Irving Berlin, and fashion a program that makes them sound as though they were all written not only at the same time but in the same rooming house as well, I’ll be dutifully impressed. If you had a really good time listening to all of it, I can match you.

That sounds like a great opener for a Portico page about this evening’s cabaret at Café Sabarsky, so I’ll cool it. This is supposed to be a diary entry, not a review. Tom Meglioranza and Reiko Uchida gave an evening of cabaret at the Neue Galerie, just down the road — at the Fifth Avenue end. There was a nice prix-fixe dinner beforehand, with two choices for each of three courses; we drank an agreeably substantial Pannobile along with it. Every table was full; Kathleen estimated that there were about sixty people in the room — once upon a time the dining room over which Grace Vanderbilt’s presided.

We thought we’d miss the event; we were to have flown off to St Croix yesterday. As Kathleen said to Tom afterward, the evening was no small compensation for the bummer of postponing vacation. We laughed and we cried — mostly, we laughed. Tom has a beautiful voice — there’s no need to discuss that. He is also a great entertainer, with a knack for cabaret that makes you forget how few people have it anymore. He weaves an incredibly engaging texture from songs both obscure and overexposed. Carrie Jacobs-Bond, for example, wrote a lot of popular music, most notably “I Love You Truly,” but she also seems to have been the venerable ancestress of the advertising jingle, as evidenced by her Half-Minute Songs. Nothing could be droller, by the way, than Tom’s announcement that he is about to sing a set of “twelve songs” by this rather sentimental composer; he plays it straight, for the groans that his audience is too well-mannered to betray. Two minutes later, they’re laughing like delighted kids. I wish I had written down some of the lyrics to these extremely brief and moralistic deadpans, but one of them, entitled “When They Say the Unkind Things” — you already know half of the words — hinges on the sentiment that sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you — unless they’re true.

Show of hands: who knows “I Love You Truly”? This song could reduce my mother to tears, even though most women of her generation probably found it was pretty corny; it reduced their mothers to waterworks. Alfalfa sings it (satirically, I believe; but the performance is a poignant one) in an Our Gang episode. In my early teens, the household acquired a cheesy electric organ for some reason or other. More like an early synthesizer, really, it was nothing but a keyboard on four spindly legs. I used to love to accompany myself singing “I Love You Truly” with full tremolo. (“Used to love”? If I did this three times, I’d die of embarrassment.) The tremolo was mine, not the organ’s. The organ wasn’t up to tremolo.

When Tom finished his tremolo-free rendition of “I Love You Truly,” I detected a certain spouse in the act of eye-wiping. The song that broke me down was “Vienna, City of My Dreams,” the refrain to which stabs me in German (even if Tom sang it in English):

Wien, Wien, nur du allein
sollst stets die Stadt meiner Träume sein.

Tom prefaced the song with an interesting bit of tittle-tattle about the composer, Rudolf Sieczynsky (1879-1952): he was a one-hit wonder who wrote songs when he wasn’t running a POW camp. The song still kills me.

This is sounding a lot like a review. Am I hiding something? I am. Throughout the musical part of the evening, I was tormented by a nether organ that had been irritated, arguably, by my diet of round-the-clock tea. Repletion was very definitely not the problem. Knowing that, I was not in fear of a loss of control. But the burn was intense at times, and it wasn’t helped by the reflection that I’d be having a much better time if only… If only what? Far more soothing was the voice of experience, which reminded me that the eons that I seemed to be slogging through were only minutes (half-minutes, in some cases), and that I would soon be quite content. None of this cerebrofeedback was actually effective as pain control; it was the dandy, high-end fun that got me through. 

In a perfect world, Tom and Reiko would own the Café Sabarsky in the way that Bobby Short owned the Café Carlyle. The rest of the year, they could do Schubert.

For a few hours, in the middle of the day, I felt that I was on top of things. I knew that this feeling had to be a delusion, because you don’t go from twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea to high on the hog in one day. But I felt collected, for the first time in six or eight weeks. Delusion or not, it felt awfully good.

The delusion was not utter. I have indeed been catching up, and, what’s more, remembering from day to day what’s on. The delusive part came from a rearrangement of my schedule. Hitherto, I’ve begun the day in a panic about the next day’s Daily Office. On very good days, the entry would be taken care of by noon or one, but on bad days I’d still be slaving at three. I noticed, moreover, that I’d get pickier and pickier as the day wore on. This is not to say that my standards became more demanding. I’d simply get cranky about not having finished the entry already.

So I tried something new. I made choosing the eight Daily Office links the first business of the day, and the second business of the day anything else in the world except writing up the links. (Violating this still wobbly rule yesterday got me in what threatened to be big trouble.) Today, I chose the links before eleven, and came back to write them up at six.

In the mean time, I accomplished very little on the site front. I re-read Sam Shepherd’s story — that’s all I did. I didn’t even sketch a page of comment about it. To be sure, the second reading opened the story up so wide that I was afraid of falling in. There was a great deal (and I’m not talking about “detail”) that I had forgotten from reading the story for the first time, two days ago.

On the home front, though, I knocked off a bunch of jobs. Polishing the silver on the sideboard was a recurring job. Washing the Blue Italian china that had spent a month out on the balcony was not. Shortly before seven, a young colleague of Ms NOLA’s stopped by to wrap up most of it and take it away. Outwardly, I was very easygoing: “Don’t take a thing that you don’t think you can use.” Afterward, I stared hard at the items left behind, as if that would induce the beneficiary to change his mind and beg to take them away as well.

I looked everywhere for my MOO cards — the mini business cards that I’ve grown surprisingly fond of; I thought that I would tire of them. They have a portion of the Portico entry screen on the obverse, and a few lines of URL and whatnot on the reverse. They’re not tiny, but they are small: seven centimeters by just under three. Somewhere in the apartment there is a box that ought to hold about seventy of them, from my second order, last December. But I can’t find it in any of the usual places. So I ordered another two  hundred. If you’d like a few, send me your snail mail.

Ms NOLA’s colleague seemed to be very impressed when I showed him the site. (I was not surprised that Ms NOLA herself hadn’t shown it to him — they’re very busy at her publishing house.) He said that he knew a few people who might find it interesting. In my experience, The Daily Blague and, even more, Portico are sites that people like to discover for themselves. To people to whom the sites have been recommended, I’m afraid that they look like homework.

When you think about it, my daily life is all homework, and I love it. I just hate to fall too far behind the assignments.

When I left the apartment for today’s Remicade infusion, I was very cross. I had spent too much time on the Daily Office, not only choosing links but writing them up, and by the time I regained track of the time and got dressed, it was too late for any kind of lunch. I was also very hungry. I called the doctor’s office and asked for a slight postponement, but to no avail; and the buffed, unthinking manner in which my request was denied opened the door that connects inconvenience and irritation to self-pitying anger. I gobbled a leftover piece of broiled chicken and decamped, imagining my soaring blood pressure.

That was the last of my troubles, though. I jumped in a taxi and, from the moment that I entered the Hospital for Special Surgery, things began to go well. Initially, my blood pressure was 164 over something, but ten or so minutes later, when the rheumatologist took it again, it was down to 134, and then (he took it again), to 129. When he asked how I was, I answered honestly: angry. But I didn’t say why. I simply said that I had more to do than there was time for doing it, and when he laughed good-naturedly (doctors will be doctors), my thought went black and murderous. He must have made a lightning guess, because he then asked if being busy were a good thing or a bad thing. (We’re in Manhattan, after all.) I said that it was a bad thing. Then he asked what I was reading, and Gail Collins — I’m reading her wonderful history of recent feminism, When Everything Changed — we talked about the huge changes in women’s lives since the 1960s. I was all for it, I said, but what depressed me was the “advance” that has made life a lot easier for stupidity and inattentiveness. The doctor asked me if I meant in men or women. No difference, I said: the problem is common to men and women.

It was Quatorze who had clarified the problem, the day before. Somehow, I had come into possession of a kind of razor, presumably for cutting through paint and the other semi-hard accretions that build up over time. To put it very simply, the tool was fixed in the position of an open straight razor, and there was no way to retract or close the blade. Quatorze said that it was a souvenir of another time, when no one worried that anyone but a child would pick it up without knowing how to use it. One of the reasons why modern life has become so inefficient and sclerotic — only one, mind you — is that we put so much effort and expense into protecting unskilled people from the consequences of entering environments for which they’re not equipped. It is one of the many ways in which we have lost the use of authority.

By the time my pre-infusion exam was over, however, I was in good spirits. It was not quite 1:45, and my infusion wasn’t scheduled to begin until 2:30, but I thought, if the good nurses in the Infusion Therapy Unit would indulge me, I’d drop off my bags and head out for a bite, at McDonald’s most likely (haven’t been in about a year), but it turned out to be slow day in room 709, and I was told to come on in and take a seat right then. As a result, I left the hospital by daylight, at 4:20, and not at dark-dyed 6.

I got a fair amount of reading done during the infusion, but for a good deal of the time I simply gave myself over to the mood of the place, which is only fundamentally that of a hospital. More superficial but also more salient is the atmosphere of a beauty parlor. Now, I have not spent any time in beauty parlors since I was a boy, and had to wait for my mother’s permanent to leave al dente cookery in the dust. I hated being there, not only because it was boring but because the ladies — customers and beauticians alike — didn’t like having me around. The space was very cramped, a quarter of the size of any beauty parlor that I’ve ever seen in the movies, but more than that there was my maleness. The beauty parlor of the 1950s was the one place to which women could escape from the opposite sex. Beneath that, there was the determination that I not be allowed to feel too comfortable, less unsounded twisted tendencies find encouragement. So, when I say that the Infusion Therapy Unit is something like a beauty parlor, I’m talking through my hat. But there was a moment when I was talking to two nurses about Pirate Radio, which both of them wanted to see. I can’t imagine talking about movies at the barber shop. As a rule, I don’t talk in the barber shop at all, not even now that I don’t read, either (because my reading glasses interfere).

Why was I carrying bags to the hospital? Because my next stop, after the infusion, was the storage unit. I was there for the twenty minutes that it took to wrap up half a shelf of glassware and china and stuff it into the two gigantic Bean’s totes. Then I was gone, and, back at my desk, I was soon back to work, writing up more links for the Daily Office. Not a model day by any means, but a good one, and impossible to complain about, no matter how cross I was this morning.

When all the work was finished — the marble topper installed on the lower part of the breakfront; the pictures overhead re-hung (a business that necessitated the re-hanging of other pictures elsewhere) — I cast about for a new place for tools. I’m speaking of tools in the Daddy sense here, not in the virtual sense that comprises PhotoShop. Screwdrivers, hammers, the electric drill and its accoutrements, tape measures, pliers, wrenches (including sets of Allen wrenches both metric and inched). I settled on a drawer in what we call the pyramid. The pyramid is a chest of drawers, as tall as my chest, that tapers in width from a base of just under a yard to a top of just over a foot. There are lots of drawers in various sizes. The drawer that I chose for the tools that I wanted to keep handy (drill not included) was currently stuffed with linen towels. These, I decided at once, would be better stored somewhere else, and the sturdy drawer would itself serve as a handy toolbox.

All of a sudden, piles of linen towels were all over the dining table, in stacks of no particular coherence. I began to arrange them, starting with the Primrose Bordier tea towels for Le Jacquard Français. (I can’t find any images; Bordier died in 1996 and LJF has moved on.) I decided to unfold one or two for Quatorze — it was Quatorze, of course, who had done all the work. My favorite Bordier is a black and white image of the garden of the Palais Royal, but I also have a very strange towel that features the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Tour Eiffel, and the Louvre — all wildly out of scale, so that the towers of Notre Dame loom over the spire of the Tour Eiffel, and the Louvre looks so pathetically low-slung that Quatorze sighed with regret. He had mistaken it for the Tuileries, which, as you know, was burned to a hulk during the Events of 1871, and subsequently demolished. Oh, no, I said, that’s the Louvre, the front of the Sully wing. I do have a photograph of the Tuileries, I added, as I reached down Peter and Oriel Caine’s Paris Then and Now (Thunder Bay, 2003), a feast of views old and new, on facing pages, of the most beautiful city on earth. I still remember holding the book for the first time and losing my breath when, leafing through it, I came on the view looking west from the front of the Sully. Today, it’s of course dominated by I M Pei’s celebrated pyramid — the principal entrance to the museum. In the anonymous photograph from 1860 on the opposite page, however, the vista is blocked by the inner wall of the Tuileries Palace — which, by the way, is where monarchs have actually lived ever since Catherine de Médicis built it in the Sixteenth Century. (The Louvre, formerly a castle out of DisneyWorld, has always been a place of business.) Now, anyway, it was the turn of Quatorze’s jaw to drop.

And so the work portion of the afternoon folded into the show-and-tell part. I don’t know how long it will take for Quatorze and me to share everything that we have in the way of items of interest to anyone who likes Paris and the Eighteenth Century, but I do hope that we never altogether run out of fresh treasures. And who knows? Maybe we’ll live to see the old palace rebuilt. That would be great fun.

Today was the day for a trim. I called the barber at about eleven, and was told that no one was in the shop. So I threw on some street clothes and marched down to 81st Street, encouraged by propulsive music from the Nano. When I got to Willy’s, the chair was indeed empty, so I was in and out in twenty minutes — or however long it took to play “I Am the Walrus” and three Steely Dan classics (including “Deacon Blue”), plus ads and talk. Willy calls me “Capitán,” because he thinks that I look like Captain Smith of the Titanic. (I’m sure that I’ve told you this before, but site searches turn up nothing.) Which is fine, as long as he understands that he is keeping my beard as spruce as Captain Smith’s. My beard is the customer.

I was wondering, as I sat in the chair, if I might have done a better job of ferrying the liner across the Atlantic. Certainly not, I thought: I wouldn’t have known the first thing to do about getting out of port. We think that all that Captain Smith had to know about sailing the Titanic was to avoid icebergs. But by the time of the deadly collision, he had already made countless correct decisions, I’m sure. Maybe not. But nobody tells me that I look like Kenneth More.

Is the Enlightenment at fault here? Is that the source of the idea that any intelligent person can take on any job, with a little bit of practice? How dearly we have paid for this misapprehension in recent times! The lumières were largely unaware, from what I can tell, of the role of conditioning, not just upon muscles (which they must have guessed at) but upon the brain as well. They seem to have had a resistance to the idea that repetition (which they saw as drudgery) was essential to mastery. I don’t know; I’ve never read anything about Enlightenment thinkers on that level. It’s easy to find out what they thought. But what about what they didn’t think about?

Had things worked out differently, for example, Aristotle would have been an intellectual  polestar of the Enlightenment. Instead, because of the abuse to which his scientific ideas had been subjected by medieval thinkers, Aristotle was a byword for passé. The substance of Aristotle’s scientific thought is, indeed, intrinsically useless, and of no more than historical interest. But Aristotle’s optimism about the benefits of learning about the world shares the Enlightenment’s watermark.

From Willy’s, I walked over to Crawford Doyle. I’ve been meaning to buy Gail Collins’s new book there for ages, and I shouldn’t have been surprised if they no longer had a copy ready to hand. But they did. I adore Gail Collins in the way that we all used to adore Russell Baker (and still do!); we all wish that we could be as funny at self-deprecation as they are. The new book is about feminism, a public issue now for almost forty years. I don’t think that the number of decades had anything to do with my also buying Peter Wilson’s new book, although “The Thirty Years War” will, I expect, turn out to be the perfect title for a book about gay marriage in America.  

I wish I knew whether Willy means “Capitán” as a compliment. I would say that he does, as a matter of professional prudence — that he sees in me a resemblance to great Edwardian personages. And yet, it might really be a resemblance to great Edwardian jackasses, to the clueless pooh-bahs who dragged the world into the Great War. It may be that, for Willy, there’s no difference between Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.

In the middle of the afternoon, the telephone rang, and I could tell from Caller ID that the call came from the Manhattan Theatre Club. Thinking that it must be about membership renewal or somesuch, I didn’t pick up, and I was really glad that I hadn’t when I heard the message. A nice lady said that, since we’d been to see The Royal Family last Thursday (the miracles of ticket scanning!), she’d be interested to hear our opinion.

Well.

I could have said, “Gee, we really liked it.” Or, I could refer her to Portico. Problem was, I hadn’t yet got round to writing up Thursday’s performance. Suddenly, however, I was motivated to fix that. So I did. Then, after the usual technological fumblings, I printed the page and read it to Kathleen. She disagreed on one particular, and I caught a number of infelicities. At some point tomorrow, I expect to call MTC back and say, “Gee, we really liked it — and you can read more at this address! When I mentioned the call to Kathleen at dinner, she raced ahead to the possibility of a Portico link’s appearance in Playbill. Happily for me, my optimism stops well short of such visions.

The main thing is that I wrote the page.

Before that, I read a couple of short stories. One was by Yiyun Li, and it was this week’s New Yorker story. I liked it very much, but I wished that my mind could deal with its satisfactions without making reference to tried and true narrative techniques. The conservatism of the story-telling did serve to sustain a kind of mystical psychology, part gripping ghost story but (bigger) part melancholy, realistic nightmare.

The other story came from The Cost of Living, the new collection of Mavis Gallant’s unpublished stories. Called “Going Ashore,” it was a study in forlorn desolation. A twelve year-old girl, Emma Ellenger, finds herself on a cruise ship with her mother. Her mother is one of those women who don’t seem to exist anymore, but who were thick on the ground by the time Dawn Powell was in her prime. I even knew a few of them when I was young. They were single women — divorcées, usually, but sometimes maidens gone to seed — who drank a little too much, relied upon makeup even more, and who “needed a man,” although what on earth they’d do with one if they found him could not be imagined. Enjoy the comfort of strangers, I suppose. I attracted such woman (all unknowingly) because I was always tall for my age, well-mannered (at least in the presence of vaguely frightening ladies), and pretty flirtatious myself. Anyway, this woman is an awful mother, not least because she excites her daughter’s tender sympathy along with the usual impatience. The stories in The Cost of Living are all good, so far — hey, it’s Mavis Gallant — but “Going Ashore,” the fifth, is the first knockout.

Something else that I did today: I sent postcards to eleven friends, ten of them addressed with Dymo labels that I won’t ever have to type again. Here’s the deal: the Museum’s latest scheme — one that I applaud — is to tell sets of ten unique postcards of images from each exhibition. The last scheme was to bundle twelve postcards of six images (two of each, in other words), but that added a complicating wrinkle to the ingenuous project of sending “thinking of you” postcards to friends. What did it mean, I wondered, to send the same image to two different people? Did it suggest an occult affinity? Ten unique images are much easier to deal with. It turns out that there are eleven in the set, because what passes for the top, or “cover,” of the set is the exhibition’s poster, also with a postcard backing. I expect that a few of the recipients will be mystified to receive them. But there are two people on the mailing list who, ten years or so from now, may not remember a time when they did not receive postcards from me, however erratically.

As Mavis Gallant’s story tells it, you can’t take young people seriously enough — it’s the only thing that spares their taking themselves too seriously.

There was nothing unusual about the fact that nothing happened today. I worked on the sites in the morning, ordered in a late lunch (pork lo mein), and I was just about to start in on a basket of paperwork when Quatorze paid an impromptu visit. He had run over to the far end of Park Slope, in Brooklyn, and brought back a chunk of peach-colored stone for our approval. My approval wasn’t good enough; Q wanted to be sure that Kathleen liked the sample, too.

And she did, just as I told him she would. So that takes care of the last home-improvement item on the short list. A top for the rump of the decapitated breakfront will be fashioned from the peach-colored stone, and at a very good bargain, too, because, to make a long story short, Quatorze really knows what he’s doing. We should have paid three or four times as much as to have the topper made out of lesser material at, say, Home Depot. Instead, Quatorze found a fabricator of kitchen counters who happened to have a large-enough remnant. It seems that he had four remnants, in different kinds of stone. The other three wouldn’t have done at all, but the fourth, the one that Quatorze couldn’t wait to show me, was just rigbt.

And part of what made it just right was our not having had to choose it. It chose us. It happened to be available. It was what was on offer. On the scale of everyday purchases, I don’t at all care for serendipity. I’ve never been to Trader Joe’s, for example, precisely because people tell me that you never know what kind of bargains you’re going to run into. Once upon a time, I might have found that amusing, but now it’s only tedious: when I go to the market, I’m armed with a list of things that I expect to find on the shelves. Even pleasant surprises are only distracting at best. But when it comes to plunking down a few hundred dollars for a piece of custom-carved stone that will undoubtedly see me through my remaining days on this planet, I prefer to throw myself upon the mercy of what’s available. Analyze that.

Mindful of all the paperwork ahead of me, I asked Quatorze if he’d like a cup of tea, and, the next thing you know, two hours had flown by. I was to have taken a de-commissioned bookshelf — a simple but not especially lightweight number from Bean’s — up to Ms NOLA’s, but I asked for and was granted a postponement. Kathleen came home on the early side for once; having had a few wearying days at the office, she wanted to watch one of her favorite movies, Ruthless People. The scenes that drew the biggest laughs invariably showed Bette Midler manhandlling Judge Reinhold. Like the late Anita Morris’s character, I began to fear for my safety. So far, though, nothing has happened.

What is going to happen in the world of business and commerce? You’ll note that I don’t ask what’s going to happen in the world of finance. There’s no need. Nothing good is going to happen in the world of finance — that’s what.

Will someone please research this “fact,” which has stuck with me like a barnacle since I read it decades ago? In 1976, the directors of US Steel found that they were making more money (profit, not revenue) by managing their liquid assets than they were by making steel. 1976 therefore seems as good a date as any to mark the beginning of the Age of Finance that — one hopes — has finally come crashing down. Don’t get me wrong: finance is an essential element of business and commerce. Without credit markets, you might as well be living in a cave and rubbing sticks together. But finance is, ahem, not the point.

Steve Forbes, I read, is still exploiting his family magazine to flog capitalist free enterprise — now, that’s a laugh. It’s as rich as a speech by Philippe d’Orléans (pick any one that you like) cautioning against “moral hazard.” What’s not so funny is this bit of History Not.

“Capitalism’s bad Rap”—a force so sinister and world-disfiguring that it must be capitalized—“has helped shape a lot of bad economic policy. People who believe it look to government to ‘create jobs,’ whereas the most powerful job-creating machine has always been the private sector. They believe the best way to raise revenues for government is to raise taxes on the so-called rich and on ‘profit-hungry’ corporations.”

This is true only if “Always” equals “Two Centuries.” The chapter on job creation comes late in the history of capitalism. I have said this before, and it’s a complicated thought that’s a tad beyond my powers of expression, but I don’t give up. The capitalist dream is to have no — zero — employees. That’s because the capitalist dream is to reduce overhead to zero. Are we in accord about that? If so, then we’re ready to tackle the anomalous phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution, during which capitalists hired jillions of workers to operate their new factories.

Why did capitalists become industrialists? Why, that is, did they forsake, for a time, the  no-overhead mantra of capitalism? Because a window of opportunity opened on what I have called an anomaly — a strange, one-time only exception to the rules. During much of the Nineteenth Century and most of the Twentieth, it made sense to overlook the no-overhead rule because the profits to be made even from high-overhead enterprises were, literally, fabulous, beyond imagining.

It’s all a matter of hydrostatics, really. Initially, after a technological breakthrough, a few people have tremendous advantages. These dwindle as know-how and its attendant benefits spread throughout society. By 1976, anybody could make steel. But only companies the size of US Steel had huge pots of cash to play with. Today, the hydrostatics are all about wages. Workers in China make less than worker in New Jersey. But workers in China have been making more and more money even so, and in some industries the Chinese advantage has been lost. Portugal, the poor man of Europe, still makes routine as well as artisanal pottery. When workers everywhere are paid about the same, globalization will come to a complete stop. It could not be simpler. (I wish I could say that imperialism will come to a complete stop, too, but imperialism is all about power, not economics.)

If I’ve made a few blunders in my history, at least I’ve been talking history. Capitalism and globalism and industrialization and full employment did not just pop out of a box, Big-Bang style, two hundred years ago. For centuries before the Industrial Revolution, the Earth subsisted on a peasant economy, with most people working the land for very meager returns, while small cadres of thug-like elites lived on cream. I don’t think that I am being tendentious. It was an awful arrangement, but it doesn’t seem to have been anybody’s particular doing. The main thing is to prevent its happening again.

Thursday night already! Why isn’t it, I ask, a greater satisfaction to know that the weeks pass so quickly because I’m engaged and busy? Perhaps because I was longing for disengagement all afternoon. I didn’t want to do anything. I certainly didn’t want to deal with the backlog of stuff that has piled up around my desk since the beginning of October. Just thinking about it filled me with despair. I wanted it to be fitted out with cement shoes, carted off to a dock on the Passaic River, and dumped in the water. Sayonara, paperasse!

That was one of several things that didn’t happen today. Here’s another: I never did figure out how to get out of going to the theatre this evening. Not that I tried very hard. It’s a very familiar tune. In the old days — up until ten years or so ago — I would mount mini-rebellions, and not go to concerts and plays for which we had tickets. I blush to confess it! And when I think of the shows that I missed, “blush” is not the word. If this site serves no other function, it gets me to the church on time. I didn’t try to wiggle out of going to the theatre because I couldn’t imagine how I would ever explain passing up the chance to see Rosemary Harris and Jan Maxwell in The Royal Family.

Which is something else that didn’t happen today: I don’t have to explain not going. I went because, in the end, it was the easier thing to do. Fifteen minutes ahead of time, I stopped fiddling around and got dressed. Then I dawdled a bit, so that I wouldn’t be too early —they don’t let you into the theatres until about 7:30. But the trains were great, and I walked into the old Biltmore at 7:40. Done. If they had canceled the performance, I’d have left not only with a clear conscience but a sense of mission accomplished. The idea wasn’t so much to see a play as to show up in time for it — an achievement completed twenty-five minutes before the curtain went up.

It was one of the great nights. Jan Maxwell, whom I adore more and more, delivered a boffo second-act finale. Rosemary Harris, who played Ms Maxwell’s role the last time the Kaufman-Ferber property was revived on Broadway, floated about with magisterial serenity, as though she were the embodiment of the title. (Indeed, her performance was a reminder that modern royal families are all functional thespians.) But more about that anon. I hope.

Right now, it’s time to get ready for Friday morning.

My mother would have been 91 today. The most curious bit of numerology in my life that I’m aware of is the curious harmony that vibrates between my mother’s birthday and my daughter’s. My mother was born on what became known as “False Armistice Day,” 4 November 1918. There was reason to believe that the War was over — but it wasn’t, quite. It would last for precisely another week, until 11 November, which is Megan’s birthday. An astrologer would seize up at the idea of bracketing a Capricorn between two Scorpios, but my more historical turn of mind relishes the finer, more improbable conjunction.

My appreciation of this accident of birth is entirely ornamental. I can’t work up the slightest interest in trying to read an occult meaning into the association of my mother with a day that wasn’t what it was thought to be, or my daughter’s with the anniversary of a true day of peace. What I should quickly point out to anyone who determined to find significance in this sheer accident of dates is that, while my mother was born on the actual “False Armistice Day,” my daughter was born on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the real one. As numbers go, 54 is among the less prepossessing, owing whatever éclat it carries to the the location of a television studio on a particular West Side block. There is not only no connection between my daughter and a once-infamous night club; there is an anti-connection. The only interesting thing about a picture that contains “Megan” and “Studio 54” is the insistence with which the two terms repel one another.

My mother’s birthday was a day of recognition. It didn’t matter what sort of present I gave her, but it was very, very important that I not forget the day. A card and a Whitman’s Sampler always did the trick, at least coming from me. I don’t know, now I think of it, what sort of gift my sister was supposed to come up with. As for my father’s birthday presents, they existed on a higher, radically more expensive plane, and did not always involve the opening of gift-wrapped boxes. The house on Sturbridge Drive in Houston, for example, was a birthday present, or said to be. I thought it was a joke — the house was a joke (albeit an extremely luxurious one, at least by standards familiar to me), and its being a birthday present was a joke. But that was my mother’s story, and she stuck to it. Looking back, I think that she liked it best of all her homes. It was very large, and it enabled her to give a lot of signature parties.

(Lest you start thinking of my mother as a hostess along the lines of Bette Davis or Tallulah Bankhead, let me assure you that she was a lot more like Celeste Holm. Every party was a carefully crafted plinth for the stages of my father’s corporate career, which more or less fell apart within a couple of years of her death. My mother’s parties were like very astute bridge bids, and having a big house in Tanglewood blessed her with a winning No Trump hand.)

Like so many darling daughters of the Twenties, my mother was something of a fetishist, dementedly sentimental about the pressing of certain buttons at certain times. The pleasure that she took in receiving a corny card and an even cornier box of vulgar chocolates (which she knew to be vulgar) on her birthday was, to my budding intellect, repulsive. I was very young when I lost all respect the idea that “it’s the thought that counts.” (The thought has never counted with me, that’s for sure.) Pleasing my mother was a kabuki sort of thing: if you made the correct gesture, it inspired the correct feeling. From time to time, I would ask clumsy questions that boiled down to this: don’t you want something really nice? And my mother’s answer, broken and almost loveless, was invariably a complaint about my negative outlook on life.

It took years for me to understand that the correct gesture is the only way in which to express respect, because my mother confused respect with love. If, indeed, she ever came to terms with my failure to become one of Notre Dame’s Irish Guard, I think that she would have been content to see me grow up to be a gay interior designer. She would have professed to be “disappointed,” but she would have known where she was, and she would have understood how to accept the commiseration of her friends. She never had the faintest idea how to deal with the actual me, and she never wanted to know, not for a moment.

But of course she was not my mother.

Until today, I thought that I had a reliably diplomatic matter. As a Capricorn, after all, I’m supposed to. But I made a remark this afternoon that left me wondering if I had any social sense at all.

Of course, if I’m really honest about the matter, it was yet another case of Abominable Conceit, my besetting sin. It’s not that I’m conceited, as we used to say (but one doesn’t, anymore, does one?). It’s that my conceit is truly abominable, a sort of conceit piled on top of conceit. I’m so conceited in, short, that I think that I’m allowed to be conceited.

What happened today illustrates the matter perfectly. I was walking up Lafayette Street, and then Fourth Avenue, with my friend T—. I probably ought to say that T— is an acquaintance, someone whom I met on the Internet, and then, three years ago, in person. We met today for the second time in life. But I like T— too much for “acquaintance,” and so I am prepared to presume, in a sort of flourish of desperation, when in fact I’ve every reason to suppose that T— despises me. 

We were walking up Fourth Avenue, as I say, and I was feeling very luxurious about living in Manhattan. This is something that happens whenever I am out and about with visitors from Europe (T— is one such) who not only love New York but who actually spend time here. To me (and this is the “luxury” part), New York just is. It’s the town outside my front door. Mind you, I don’t really think this on an everyday basis. Ordinarily, I can’t quite believe my good luck, living here as I do. Sure, it would be great if my luck could be buffed a bit, so that Paris or Amsterdam were the town outside my front door. But even if I occupied a gargantuan flat in the Seiziëme, on terms equivalent to fee simple absolute, there would be one way in which Paris (or Amsterdam) fell short: I shouldn’t have been born there.

I was born here, here in Manhattan — on West 65th Street, as a matter of fact, just a few blocks from where my grandson is going to be born in a few weeks. And when I feel luxurious about having been born in Manhattan — even though I grew up in Westchester, went to school in Indiana (“sounds like dancing”), and spent seven years of Babylonian exile in Houston, such that Manhattan was merely my birthplace until I was over thirty years old — I write myself, from time to time, a check with “Abominable Conceit” inscribed on the Memo line. Strivers from elsewhere are welcome to come to New York and get to to know the City, but I, you see, I was born here, so I don’t have to strive at all. What’s interesting about New York, in short, is the stuff that I already know. There’s a line in Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules that captures quite completely my fatuity here, but the last thing I want to do is magnify my conceit by quoting it. My conceit, in any case, is not so much Abominable as it is just plain Rancid.

Feeling luxurious, then, as I made my way up Fourth Avenue with a man who loved being on Fourth Avenue somewhat more than I did — but only somewhat; a good friend lives on Fourth Avenue, and I feel very comfortable walking what have become the familiar blocks just south of Union Square — I was reminded of the scene in The Good Shepherd in which an Italian-American gentleman wonders how WASPs celebrate being American in the way that the Italians and the Irish and the Germans and the Whatnots celebrate being American, and Matt Damon’s WASP character replies in words to the effect that WASPS own America, and that the Italians and the Irish and the Germans and the Whatnots are just visitors. “And that,” I said to my friend, on Fourth Avenue, “is how I feel about New York. Everyone else is just a visitor.”

What my friend said in response proved once and for all that I have no diplomatic cred whatsoever. What he said was, “Well, I’m very happy to be a visitor in New York.” I wanted, for a moment, to lose my lunch. I hadn’t meant him! I hadn’t meant visitor visitors. I’d meant — but never mind; I’ll only make it worse. That’s how Abominable Conceit works. Every attempt to prove that you’re not really so very abominable marks you out instead as even more abominable. Rancid, even.

I was feeling luxurious for a reason, though. I’d had a wonderful lunch with a terrifically interesting fellow. Stylish, sophisticated, world-traveled, and gifted with a friendliness that I have hardly ever encountered in such a thoughtful frame, T— made me feel grateful for my life at a level that’s not often sounded. Out of my depth, I made such a hash of gratitude that I forgot my diplomacy.

Working on the Book Review review this weekend, I got stuck on a line from Adam Kirsch’s piece about Anna Heller’s book.

Even today, Rand’s books sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Heller reports that in a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Of course, I thought: the very idea of “the book that has most influenced my life” is one that only people who don’t read books would dream of entertaining. Young readers may be forgiven for enthusiastic replies — Brontë and Austen for the ladies, a fanlike arrangement of manly-men guides, running from Hemingway to Heinlein, for the gents — but no serious reader over the age of thirty can come up with a list of fewer than 100 “most influential” titles. That’s because literature is as interactive as the Internet.

Books not only answer books, they change as we age, so that, for me — for example — Jane Austen’s Emma is not one novel but six, a different book each time I’ve read it. I love Emma, and I’ve re-read it more often than any other novel, but to say that it’s “the most influential book”? What rubbish. Where would I put The Way We Live Now, or Harold Nicholson’s Kings, Courts, and Monarchy — not to mention the entire Mitford oeuvre. Not to mention the entire Lucia corpus! (Yes, I’m being a trifle silly.) Not to mention John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards!

The blockquote also suggests why Rand is highly regarded by the people who do read her: the only other book that they’ve read is the Bible. Even Atlas Shrugged is more entertaining than Kings and Chronicles.

Quatorze is a god. You should be so lucky as to have him put your house in order.

¶ Matins: Happy Hallowe’en from Brooks Peters! (An Open Book)

Among many other virtues, he is a source of great and abiding courage. “Done,” he would say, meaning not only that there would be no more discussion about, say, the silver tray with the dented gallery, but that the object would no longer be on the premises by sundown.

¶ Lauds: A slideshow of Harlem-infused images by Ralph de Carava, who died the other day at the age of 89. (Los Angeles Times)  A video of Ingmar Bergman’s FÃ¥rö retreat, soon to be an artists’ colony. (W) (via Arts Journal)

The stuff that we took up to HousingWorks was the merest sidelight on the day’s activities. And yet it was my only exercise. The rest of the time, I watched Quatorze while he assembled the temporary bookshelf, or cleared the hall closet of document boxes, or hung pictures in improbable corners.

¶ Prime: Floyd Norris very reasonably argues that the solution to the high-pay stink on Wall Street is to curb its high revenues. He points to inflated charges, business concentration, reliance upon overly-complex instruments, tax evasion, and excessive risk-taking as unseemly practices that, if curtailed, might bring bonuses back down to earth. (NYT)

Best of all, I did not watch while Quatorze shepherded the document boxes to the storage unit. No! I stayed home. I stayed home, and piled the big art books onto the new temporary bookshelf. While he dealt with the boxes, and the driver of the moving van, and the Shining-like atmosphere at the Moribunda Beach Club.

¶ Tierce: The world’s tallest treehouse — complete with basketball court. Looking at the pictures makes us feel much better about our place. (inhabitat; via The Infrastructurist)

The temporary bookshelf is a colossal (and not very well-made) number from Home Depot that I bought when I learned that the bookshelf that I really want will take “months” for Scully & Scully to deliver. On or about the joyful day of its arrival, the steel shelving will go to the storage unit, where I’m sure it will be very helpful.

¶ Sext: Wagner’s Ring — in 45 seconds. (via OperaMagazine.nl; thanks, Fossil!)

While Quatorze was setting it up, though, I was appalled that I could not remember the name for the Eighties vogue for industrial fixtures in high-end home decorating. It came to me while he was at the storage unit, and when I told him what it was, he couldn’t believe that he’d forgotten, too: “High Tech.” The fact that more than 25 years have passed since then, together with the fact that the term was long ago appropriated by people (computer users and others) with a better claim to it, may explain our oblivion.

¶ Nones: Bans on stitched clothing and on alcohol will make the spread of swine flu at this year’s hajj a lot easier. (NYT)

And so the Great Domestic Reorientation of 2009 comes to an end — and, with it, these hybrid entries.

¶ Vespers: A very brisk but fully-packed  review of Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print,  at Survival of the Book.

Next week, the new, shorter Daily Office will continue on its own, while Dear Diary entries will no longer be interrupted by pesky blockquotes.

¶ Compline: A new book, The Other Side of Sadness, by George Bonanno, more or less tosses the idea of “working through grief” out the window. Most people mourn briefly, and then return to normal life. This is okay. (XXfactor; via The Morning News)

The longer Daily Office will reappear in January, but not here — at Portico, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary at some point early in the New Year. (If you can tell me the date, and back it up, there’s $50 in it for you. This offer does not apply to persons named Megan O’Neill.)

Bon weekend à tous!

Nothing of interest happened today. My brain felt a bit more like cottage cheese, and worked almost as badly. Happily, it was not called upon to do much of anything.

¶ Matins: Forget taking someone out to dinner and spending a few hours across a white tablecloth, making conversation. Don’t even bother dressing up. Foraging is the new dating game, and you may have to eat something strange and new. (NYT)

The greater part of the afternoon was spent printing Dymo labels, pasting them onto CD sleeves, breaking down jewel boxes (slipping CDs into sleeves and removing all the “art”), and throwing the plastic away. It doesn’t sound like much, but in the time that it took me to process about 150 CDs, I listened to all of Weinberger’s Schwanda, all of Don Giovanni, and the finale of Tannhäuser. And then I listened to nothing. I listened to nothing for almost long enough to play yet another opera. Laziness had little to do with my not playing yet another opera.

¶ Lauds: Lawrence Pollard reviews some of the more outrageous cases of vandalizing artworks, and ponders Pierre Pinoncelli’s claim that sometimes it’s the destruction of a work of art that’s the work of art. (BBC)

The idea, of course, is to save room; at least three CDs (and their attendant paperwork) will fit in the space occupied by one jewel box.

¶ Prime: Why does the Windows 7 upgrade cost so much? (And take forever to install?) Because, Bob Cringely says, Microsoft doesn’t want you to buy it. (I, Cringely)

In the morning, I had an insight about the future of the Daily Office. It was more of a vision, really; I could see how things would be. Will be, when I return to regular programming after my birthday. I may ease into it in the mean time. Watch for sneak previews.

¶ Tierce: Choire Sicha swoons over samurai. “Hello, Volcano Coat!” Those who forget history may be doomed to wearing it. (The Awl)

In the afternoon, I made the mistake of answering the phone. I was in no shape for a phone call, and my friend, not surprisingly, thought that I was angry and short. I didn’t think that I was either, but I knew that I was very impatient, and I was impatient not with my friend but with the very idea of talking. I could not support conversation in my current state of fatigue.

¶ Sext: Nell Boeschenstein rewrites “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” for the Teens: it’s real-estate listings that fire her dreams, not diamonds. Beneath the humor, a poignant piece about the heartbreaking unattainability of truly desirable housing. (The Morning News)

My friend asked me why I was so tired, and how was I tired. Was it mental, physical? I’d say (although this didn’t occur to me on the phone) that it’s existential. As I said the other day, I’m often sick of life these days; I’ve had a surfeit. I can only take so much existence. Especially when existence involves moving shopping bags from one side of the room to the other, in order to make space for boxes. Oh, and I am no longer 30.

¶ Nones: Michael Clemens disputes the “brain drain” scenarios that developing countries often complain about. More Philippine nurse in the United States, for example, means that are more nurses in the Philippines than there are in Britain. (Foreign Policy, via  Marginal Revolution)

What I’m engaged in is not your ordinary household project. I’m cleaning out the place for the rest of my life, acknowledging that many of my possessions are no longer necessary. Which possessions? If only it were a matter of drawing up a list. I don’t really know why it isn’t a matter of drawing up a list, but I know that it isn’t. 

¶ Vespers: Tom Nissley interviews NYRB Books editor Edwin Frank, and notes that his sponsor, Amazon, will sell you a full set of the imprint’s offerings at a thousand dollars off! (Omnivoracious; via Maud Newton)

Never mind what tomorrow may bring. Nay, will almost certainly bring. Friday, neither. Kathleen will be away for the weekend, so she’ll be spared the convalescence, which, as everyone knows, can be uglier than what brought it on.

¶ Compline: In a surprisingly brief entry, Jonah Lehrer cogently explains pleasure, beauty, attentiveness, idealism, and appetite in terms of a common denominator: dopamine. (Frontal Cortex)

The day would have ended a lot more pleasantly if the clown who works relief on Wednesdays in the package room hadn’t decided to close up shop on the early side, without letting anybody know. I went downstairs at 7:30 — the package room closes at 8 — clutching three package slips and the agreeable anticipation of reclaiming a piece of dry cleaning. Upon encountering the locked door, my blood ran toxic with frustration. I was too far gone for anger.

Thank heaven for Quatorze!

One of those deeply satisfying day-in-the-life novellas could have been written about my morning, afternoon, and evening, thanks to a note that I found in my inbox when I got round to looking at it in the late afternoon. Even without the note, it would have been a rich day, from a narrative standpoint. How could it not be? The very idea of lugging myself down to ABC Carpet at eleven-something in the morning, and on a rainy day, too. In the early stages of responding to a flu shot!

¶ Matins: Elizabeth Kolbert considers Cass Sunstein’s latest book, On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, and, in general, agrees that the Internet has helped to make this a Misinformation Age. She points out that being fair and balanced about people like the “birthers” can be self-defeating. 

The most plausible explanation for this dark, post-Enlightenment turn is unavailable to Sunstein; so hard is he trying to be nonpartisan that he can’t see the nuts for the trees. Several decades ago, a detachment of the American right cut itself loose from reason, and it has been drifting along happily ever since. 

(The New Yorker) 

Quatorze had found a very inexpensive rug for our bedroom. When it was unfolded on the floor, my first thought was that Kathleen wouldn’t look twice at this rug. My second thought was that the background, a muted grey-blue, was really rather dingy, and that Kathleen would actively dislike it. Apprised of these reservations, Kathleen nevertheless plumped for purchase. So we looked at another rug, one that was nearly twice as expensive. Curiously, the second rug, which had a lot of hanger appeal, made Quatorze’s choice look quite a bit more appealing. (This was not a trick engineered by my friend, I’m pretty sure; although, if it was, I’m tremendously impressed, so not to worry!) By now, I had written a story for the rug, a story that I would tell myself every day when I walked on it: This rug was left to me by someone in my father’s family who spent her entire life in Clinton, Iowa.

¶ Lauds: Joanne McNeil doesn’t think much of Lars von Trier. “He’s just clever enough to come up with an idea that could be a great art film, but too thick to follow through with it.” In case you’re thinking of sitting through Antichrist. (Tomorrow Museum)

You wait, though: on Friday, after Quatorze and I have completed the ordeal of laying the rug in the bedroom (which needn’t be described in advance), I’ll be in love with its Victorian marigolds and chrysanthemums.

¶ Prime: Jeffrey Pfeffer writes about the difficulty of identifying core competence. “The question of what businesses to be in and what to stay away from is one of the fundamental questions of business strategy, and it’s important for both individuals and companies.” (The Corner Office)

There was a fracas when we tried to leave the store. It turned out that I hadn’t paid for the pad that will underlie the rug. (I hadn’t been asked to.) Quatorze cleared it all up, but for at least seven and a half minutes — at least, mind you; no need to specify exactly! — I was the client from hell.

¶ Tierce: The top-ten rediscovered photographs. Among others, Helen Keller, Edward VII, and Anne Frank’s one true love, Peter Schiff. (listverse, via The Online Photographer)

The ABC staff who do all the work (and who don’t wear suit jackets) hailed a taxi for us, and we took Park Avenue all the way up to Yorkville. The ride was not egregiously slow, but when we finally drove through Grand Central Terminal (as one does, on the futuristic flyways of 1912), I felt as one does after an hour in the dentist’s chair.

¶ Sext: The top-ten rules of the Internet. The 35 rules of the Internet. The many, many rules of 4chan. (via /b/).

We dumped the rug and the underlying pad at the apartment and headed to the Café d’Alsace for lunch. Then we walked uphill to the 92nd Street Y, for two hours of Schubert.

¶ Nones: A French court determines that Scientology is fraudulent. But the sect has not been barred from operation. (NYT)

When I was a young man in Houston, Sharon Robinson was a rising cello soloist whose parents both played with the Houston Symphony Orchestra. She was tall and blonde and very much not one’s idea of a concert musician. Although she is a year younger than I am, she is still beautiful. And a great cellist, too — especially at the bottom, where, looks to the contrary notwithstanding, she likes to growl. She was playing with her husband, Jaime Laredo, and her chamber trio partner, Joseph Kalichstein, a program of  both of Schubert’s big piano trios.

¶ Vespers: Orhan Pamuk reads “My Russian Education,” an excerpt from Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that was published as fiction in 1948. (The New Yorker)

I can’t remember the last time that I listened to serious music in the middle of the afternoon. Yes, I can: it was at Tanglewood, and Sylvia McNair sang a cycle of songs written by André Previn to texts by Toni Morrison — who was there. More recently, now I think of it, there was an hilarious misadventure on 57th Street, featuring a very red piano.

¶ Compline: Admit it: you’ve always wondered if one of your ancestors screwed around with a Neanderthal. Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute, is sure of it. (Short Sharp Science)

Quatorze and I repaired to the apartment for a pot of tea. While we sipped, he asked where the temporary bookshelf was. (You’ll find out what that means soon enough.) I said that I hadn’t heard, but I reminded the both of us that it had been ordered not even two weeks ago. Shortly after he left, I received a note from Home Depot saying that it is on its way. Eventually, a handsome hardwood case from England will take its place, but that won’t be for months.

Eventually, I found myself at my desk again, and there it was, this note that I’m not going to talk about. I’ll say two things: (1) It concerned my writing and (2) there was not only no offer of any kind but no promise of an offer. Nevertheless, it was a gratifying note, and it made me very happy that I do what I do, writing thousands of words every day. (Oh, dear, did I say thousand-s?)

Chatting on Google with Nom de Plume, shortly after lunch, I blurted that I was “sick of life.” I knew that I did not mean this in its operatic sense. I did not want to “end it all” &c &c. It took a moment, though, to realize that I meant it quite literally. Like a little boy who has eaten too many pieces of birthday cake, I was sick of too much.  

¶ Matins: Do you want to settle in one of the “best” cities in the United States — or is it just a city of whites that draws you? Aaron Renn at newgeography

The answer, obviously, was to let nature take her course &c &c. I must rest.

¶ Lauds: Ann Temkin likes to move the furniture around. This means that that the art of which she is the MoMA curator moves comes and goes. Starry Night stays put, though. (NYT)

By the way, when I write, “I must rest,” do you understand that I am speaking in the past tense? “The answer was to let nature take her course; I must rest.” Meaning: I would have to rest. I’m not sure that even English readers hear it properly anymore. But in fact the past tense of “must” is “must,” not — you’ll be happy to learn this — “musted.” Or “merst.”

(That’s all the fun with “must” that we’re going to have tonight.)

¶ Prime: No more McDonald’s in Iceland — a casualty of the country’s economic  collapse. (via Marginal Revolution) It’s not much consolation to know that Icelandic tourists can pick up a Royal Deluxe at the chain’s new outpost at the Louvre. (NYT)

If I took things easy — to get back to the “me” part of this entry — I’d feel better; much better; and not at all “sick of life.”  Sure enough, as the day wore on, I felt less and less doomed. As it happened, I had a physical exam scheduled for this afternoon. That can’t have contributed to any well-rested feelings. The doctor let me know what he thought about my health by saying that he didn’t see anything wrong with me but/and declining to weigh me. Having survived the exam, though (pending blood and urine tests, of course), I walked back up Second Avenue with a springier step.

¶ Tierce: “Do Exactly What It Says.” Instructions for burning Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid in effigy on Hallowe’en, in case you’re interested. “The demon adds a nice touch.” Or, bring a fire hose. ( The Awl)

If I hadn’t been genuinely tired, I might have laughed, because even during the morning of sickness of life, I’d known that my state of mind was fleetingly likely to disappear quite soon, and I’d refused to indulge in any operatic decision-making. I did not make any pacts with myself to take rash action of some kind or other. I did not promise my patron saint that I would live on ramen for a month, or stop speaking, once and for all, to someone I don’t like (“why pretend?”).

¶ Sext: Peter Jon Lindberg complains about “Bad Music in Public Places.” Read through to the end; he has a sound-designer friend who puts together playlists that you can buy at iTunes. (via The Morning News)

On the contrary: I knew that I’d feel better if I just held out and managed not to make things worse with one of those operatic coups that would probably not come to mind so readily if I did not know anything about opera. (See Stendhal on “love.”)

¶ Nones: Will Hugo Chávez change international relations? Or will his head end up on a pole? Either way, here’s something for your Chávez scrapbook. (BBC) If your scrapbook is devoted, rather, to memories of lost grandeur, here’s a map of what Turkey ought to look like, to some, anyway. (Strange Maps)

What was even funnier, except not really, was wondering how many of my inky black moods and states of rage would have occurred if I’d been well-rested. Over the years, I mean. How many therapists would not have required talking to.

¶ Vespers: R Crumb discusses his Gnosticism and the making of his graphic Genesis. (Vanity Fair)

This revisionist history of my mental health was checked, to some degree, by the recollection that hormones fall off as one gets older. This makes many people sad, but for me it has brought nothing but relief. My version of Augustine’s famous “not yet” prayer would have been, “Lord, please calm my endocrine system — right now!”

¶ Compline: Steve Toback has been worried about multasking-induced intelligence sinkholes for over ten years, and he sees no reason to change his mind.

At the moment, my mood is bright again, but I can tell that I’m still very tired. I fixed a nice-enough dinner, Elizabeth David’s Veal cauchoise. For some reason, I was watching Syriana in the kitchen when Kathleen got home. She hadn’t seen it, so I was explaining that now and then there’s a big explosion, while, all unthinking, I ignited the Calvados on the stove. I had bought a gigantic measuring cup — it must hold a quart — for this purpose, thinking that the small quantity of spirits that is usually called for to make a flambée would quickly give up its alcohol in a broad vessel that kept it shallow. This turned out to be correct.

It never occurred to me to foresee a culinary explosion, and in that I was correct as well. Indeed, one of the things that I love about igniting brandy and the other eaux fortes is that the flame is all bluff, a cool blue that just might burn a sheet of paper if you could dangle on in it with your third hand. (The real danger of igniting alcohol, I believe, is that the flame will go on to ignite a grease fire.) Kathleen, however, jumped, and had to walk away. She said that dinner was delicious, though, and she ate every bite.

My subject today is the Weekday Tragedy.

¶ Matins: In addition to the simple depletion of stocks, a new factor is contributing to the rise in the price of oil: the fall of the dollar, which dropped to $1.50 to the Euro yesterday. (Times)

Don’t worry; nobody dies. Nobody gets hurt. Money is very rarely lost! That’s what “weekday” means. It happens every day, and you get used to it, and then one day you wake up in a Tennessee Williams play.

¶ Lauds: This must have been fun: watching My Dinner with André with André in the room — and Wallace Shawn, too. (at Speakeasy)

An optimist says, “There is so much to do!” A pessimist says, “I’ll never work my way through all this crap.”

¶ Prime: More on Paul Volcker: according to the WSJ, he’s stage-managing a profound shift in the taxability of corporate debt, hitherto disastrously tax-free. Meanwhile, Harvard cleans up after Larry Summers. (via Felix Salmon)

The opportunist says, “I really want to finish Lorrie Moore’s amazing novel. How can I dash off a diary entry in a trice?

¶ Tierce: A slideshow of workspaces, many of them of the manly persuasion, photographed by Joseph Holmes. (via A Continuous Lean). Workophobes can hang out The Manhattan Street Corners. (via MetaFilter)

I’d be only to happy to lavish an hour or two on the entry that I planned this morning, when the day was still potential. “I’ll write about boxes,” I said to myself with a smile, as I got dressed. By “boxes,” I meant the rattan storage boxes that every housewares store on the Upper East Side used to stock.

¶ Sext: The Bronson Pinchot interview at Onion AVC. Something like Ali G, only for real. Will he work in that town again? (via everywhere, but we found it at The Awl)

Not that I can find any online! They’re square or rectangular (but oblong in either case), and they come in a solacing range of  colors, from khaki to evergreen. Nothing primary; no pastels.

¶ Nones: Who knew that India has its own Article 301? The Indian Government won’t allow an adaptation of Indian Summer to be filmed (in India, anyway) unless sex scenes involving Edwina Mountbatten (Cate Blanchett) and Jawaharlal Nehru (Irrfan Khan) are removed — which effective quashes the project for now. (via Arts Journal)

The genius of the product is to make your bureau drawers presentable, sans bureau. A sort of exoskeletal dresser. Not that I use them for clothing, although of course you could. I already have real dressers for clothing. What I don’t have is a room filled with forty-five filing cabinets.

¶ Vespers: John Self encourages us to give a second thought to Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel. (Asylum)

Enough product placement. I was going to write about the things that I found in the boxes as I went through them today, with an emphasis on the stuff that I threw away. I looked forward to writing about this almost as much as I looked forward to having done it.

¶ Compline: Just in time for the collapse of mass aviation, the floating airport! (It’s very interesting to note that the Sierra Club has no opposition to this idea.) (The Infrastructurist)

Sadly, I never looked forward to the actual doing, and so other stuff happened instead. Productive stuff! I wrote two pages for Portico (both of them brevissimo, but it’s the thought that counts, these days). I cooked a lovely dinner. I did a lot of other useful stuff that would be toenails to talk about. And I did open one box. I opened the box, and I stuffed the contents of a shopping bag into it. This was not the operation that I’d had in mind in the buoyant morning. I’d had such hopes! &c &c!

If only tomorrow were another day. But it’s not tomorrow; it’s today. And I’m off to the movies at some point, with who knows what free-style frittering afterward. The richly fascinating stories that my boxes have to tell — who knows when they’ll be told?

Bon weekend à tous!

If I had my druther’s, I’d still be in the living room, listening to Mahler’s Third and reading from the Book of Cake, where the story has finally passed the moment at which Lady E accepts the Duke of York. Not that a shred of evidence of romantic feelings on the lady’s part is presented. Although it’s true that any display of a future queen’s falling in love must be smothered by propriety, William Shawcross does nothing to preclude cynical conclusions. One has to remember that no one could have imagined that the groom was the brother of an abdicator. I hope that my attempt at discretion has rendered this paragraph intriguingly opaque.

¶ Matins: Why Paul Volcker wants to restore some form of Glass-Steagall separation between retail and merchant banking. (Over Larry Summers’s dead body, we suspect.) Why Arianna Huffington wants to curb our enthusiasm for “small-bore, high-drama stories” of the “balloon boy” variety.

Probably just “opaque,” though. “Irritatingly opaque,” very likely.

¶ Lauds: Every once in a while, along comes an illustrator who outdoes photography for documentary punch, by incorporating moods that no shutter can capture. Matthew Cook is one such. (via The Best Part)

Quatorze spent the afternoon with me, helping out with this and that on the home improvement front. Nothing could induce me to enumerate our projects (dreamed up by me and executed by him), but drills, safety pins, and twisties were involved. A lot of CDs were pulled down from the tops of shelving, and stacked neatly on the outgoing dining table. For dessert, so to speak, we gathered up three bits of furnishing for which there is no room at the moment and taxied them down to the storage unit.

¶ Prime: An Andrew Ross Sorkin moment (to whet your appetite for (a) his book (b) antacid tablets), presented by Felix Salmon: “We’ve wasted our crisis.” “How on earth did Paulson think this was okay?” Clicking through today’s Counterparties entry: “Need I name the source of the quote?” 

At the storage unit, Quatorze asked if it was true that some of the units were used by prostitutes to turn tricks. Mon Dieu — as if I would know! Like everyone else in the world, I read the article in New York magazine (or somesuch) from a thousand years ago, in which it was alleged that some ladies of the evening keep their frocks in storage, and repair to their units for quick changes between Johns, but it is clear to me that having sex in a storage unit is a stunt — nobody does it (regularly) on a faute de mieux basis. Regular readers will remember that I used to call the storage unit “Westphalia” (“because that’s where detritus are”), but these days I call it the Moribundo Beach Club, because it combines the exiguity of a sand-plagued cabana with the charm of a morgue.

¶ Tierce: Book proposal for Scout: The Castles of Westchester am Rhein. Today: Castle Rock, in Garrison, with, among other things, a rather startlingly comprehensive view of West Point.

The home improvement is having a calming effect overall. I think that it is teaching me that anything really is possible.

¶ Sext: Cant words that (a) British office-workers and (b) Esquire’s editors dislike. When you’re through clucking at malatinisms and nursery-talk, have a gander at print ads that would fail to effectivate today’s markets. (via The Morning News) Department of Phew!: the FTC isn’t after us!

While Quatorze made a template of the top of the bottom half of the breakfront — there really is no top, so we have to have one made to measure — I fiddled with a caladium that I’ve been growing fond of for a couple of months. Although I have had caladiums before, they have never thrived as this plant is thriving, and I never had to tend one, beyond watering it. From time to time, I could say, you have to rope in the new leaves, which require the support of rudimentary treillage.

¶ Nones: Testing a conciliatory, pro-Kurdish law in Turkey, a judge ordered the release of PKK rebels who have not renounced their membership in the separatist organization.

(The last paragraph of this BBC story switched on a lightfbulb in the Editor’s brain: a terrorist is simply a nationalist who is out of power, speaking a language that flag-wavers understand but that cosmopolitans have either renounced or forgotten.)

There was much to learn about gathering the stems behind a cordon of string — two cordons, really. I saw that notching the poles would be a good idea, and it was. By the time I was through, an utterly ill-trained retriever had become a well-mannered Airedale.

¶ Vespers: Alexander Chee mixes up character flaws, Tarot Decks, and a brilliantly concise appreciation of Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings. Exemplary blogging!

He [Tomine’s protagonist, Ben] lacks that famous other creative writing hobgoblin, character consistency, in one way–he is absolutely inconsistent in his views–and yet that ends up being what the book is about: he has no core, except a shame at who he is that destroys all his relationships. THAT is his consistency, that is his ‘flaw’. And what’s more, this gap is precisely what creates the dramatic irony that moves the whole book along.

I asked Quatorze about finding a cachepot for the caladium. The first rule of cachepots is that they are never, ever large enough. To conceal the base of any robust house-plant, you have to grit your teeth and settle for nothing less than a bathtub. Quatorze’s rather depressing suggestion was eBay. I say that only because I find eBay depressing. Quatorze and Kathleen do not; for them, I’ve come to think, eBay is a delicious mix of The Wizard of Oz and Mystery Science Theatre.

¶ Compline: The coolness of this post-industrial transformation (in Vienna, no less) induces word failure. (via The Infrastructurist)

Now I am going to climb into bed with Lorrie Moore’s beautiful book, which is every bit as unreverencingly fresh as the Queen Mother was.

Stroking my beard, I realize with a moue that the barber took too much of it off at today’s trim. I thought that he was being a bit enthusiastic, but by the time this occurred to me there was no going back. I shall have to mention it to him next time. The barber who took care of me for years, until his retirement last year, never touched my beard with an electric razor — at my request. I don’t think that I can get away with that now; Willy is much younger and more determined to do things his own way. Even though I tip him even more. Absurdly more. Moue. 

¶ Matins: In an eminently sane reversal of Bushwah, the Justice Department will no longer harass medical marijuana networks in the fourteen states that permit them. Although the new position is unenthusiastic about marijuana use (to say the least), its rationale is noteworthy: the government has more important things to do.

Before Willy, I stopped in at Perry Process, where I also had to have, as nicely as possible, a few words. A few weeks ago, I asked about summer storage. Every spring, Kathleen sends her winter clothes off to be stored and then cleaned. And then delivered. I was told that the stuff would be ready at the end of my month. Imagine my displeasure when the doorbell rang on Saturday afternoon, as I was getting ready to welcome guests for brunch, in an apartment that was still at sixes and sevens — divided by two.

¶ Lauds: We are profoundly amused by the discomfort that R Crumb’s extremely literal illustration of the Book of Genesis is causing the fundies. Now they’ll understand why the Vatican forbade — forbade! — the independent reading of Scripture.

The real inconvenience was that Kathleen was in North Carolina, going through her late mother’s clothes, ironically enough. Having busted my major parts trying to impose a level of order on the apartment, the arrival of a heap of dry cleaning, poofed with tissue paper, came as a body blow. This afternoon, we agreed that a call beforehand — and, by the way, the 17th of October is not the “end of the month” — would be in order.

¶ Prime: There’s a movie in there somewhere — Iowa’s generous tax incentive to Hollywood may have been (gasp!) abused by filmmakers, and the program is on hold. Meanwhile (GASP!), right in our own backyard, stagehands at Carnegie Hall average almost $500K a year. (via Arts Journal)

I am telling you all of this to tickle you, because of course you cannot feel very sorry for me, beset as I am by such tribulations. Now, just imagine how self-righteously clueless the bailed-out investment bankers sound!

¶ Tierce: Must we? At his new New Yorker blog, Unquiet Thoughts, Alex Ross reminds us that “Für Elise” exists — not without a whiff of mystery. (But only a whiff.)

My friend Nom de Plume came in to town, and we had lunch. Then she went to her appointments and I made the aforementioned rounds, which I wrapped up with a visit to Eli’s, for to buy the makings of yet another quiche. When Nom was through with her schedule, she came to the apartment for tea, cake, and grilling — I don’t know how she puts up with my curmudgeonliness (and I’m not inquiring, either, by the way.)

¶ Sext: We’re sorry about not passing on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity yesterday — win a Norwegian Sweater from Ivy Style/LL Bean. Only a few hours remain to enter! If you miss that contest, there’s always the Critterati.

The best thing about the day, though, was sitting down at the laptop in the living room and writing a page for Portico. Yes, it was very nice — a massive relief, really — just to get it done. But it was awfully pleasant to do, and that was an even more massive relief, because what with all this apartment brouhaha I was wondering if I’d lost my taste for the fine tedium of writing a thousand words of connected text.

¶ Nones: The stalemate in Tegucigalpa (Zelaya: “insulting”; Micheletti: “agenda of insurrection’) is sending Hondurans in search of miracles, preferably one worked by Our Lady of Suyapa.

There was a little more to it than that. I’d been shying away from the laptop, owing to old WiFi connection problems that I really don’t have anymore, thanks to J—. Not that it matters much if I’ve got an Internet connection when what I’m doing is the equivalent of typing something on a few sheets of paper. Eventually, yes, I have to transfer those sheets to a server somewhere, but even if the laptop had no connectivity, I could always make use of a flash drive thumb.

¶ Vespers: Garth Risk Hallberg reads Updike’s Maples stories backwards, to thrilling effect. (The short-story equivalent of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal?)

It’s possible that I’m beginning to relax from a very ambitious summer. Also, the date for our Christmas party is set, and clouds of mental fog lifted with that clarification.

¶ Compline: Simon Roberts dips into Marc Girouard and fetches up a pearl of insight about the transformation of suburbs in the Eighteenth Century — everywhere: “The suburbs became the inverse of the hub – sites of inactivity, lack of productivity.”

In short, I’m feeling immensely, comfortably bourgeois. Exciting problems with the dry cleaner and the barber promise to be brought under control. The piles of crap on the old dining table, currently marooned in the foyer, dwindle visibly. It’s true that I forgot the cheese again, and made a quiche Lorraine by mistake. Texture aside, though, it was pretty good!

Tomorrow is a longer beard!

Call me “Doodad” — that’s what my grandson will call me. It’s official: the name received the parental seal of approval at dinner this evening. Kathleen will continue a tradition, and go by the name of Darney, which is what I called my mother-in-law from shortly before my marriage to her death a few weeks ago. It is what she (Kathleen’s mother) called her mother, when, as a little girl, she couldn’t quite parrot her mother’s “Goonight, darling.” It is also — and this is the tradition that Kathleen intends to continue — what all of the first Darney’s grandchildren called their grandmother. This produced many double-takes whenever I spoke of my mother-in-law to Kathleen’s cousins. — But Darney (they wanted to say) is dead.

Long live Darney! And Doodad.

¶ Matins:  At The Millions, Sonya Chung writes with great thoughtfulness about “The Mommy Problem” for serious writers. In our view, this goes far beyond mothering young children, and might better be posed as “The Writer Problem” for friends and relations. Ms Chung quotes Lorrie Moore, from this interview with ELLE:

The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It’s kind of rude, and yet really it’s where art comes from. It’s not the same as courage. It’s closer to bad manners than to courage. Or it’s just some willingness to, you know, take a few rotten tomatoes flung your way. You’re going to offend somebody, and you have to be prepared for it. You have to be prepared to say, ‘Oh, no. I swear to God that wasn’t you. I’m sorry.’ Because it isn’t them. It can be a mess. But if you’re going to be a writer, you basically have to say, ‘This is just who I am, and this is what I am going to do.’ There’s a certain indefensibility about it. It’s not about loving your community and taking care of it—you’re not attached to the chamber of commerce. It’s a little unsafe.

While we’re talking about Lorrie Moore, I want to mention the most dispiriting passage that I’ve happened upon in her beautiful new novel, A Gate at the Stairs. I’m not going to quote from it here, but I will give a reference: It begins on page 154 and continues for almost five pages. It consists of snippets of rant that the narrator, Tassie Keltjin, overhears as she “supervises” the children of liberal people who attend her employer’s support group for (mostly) white parents of adopted children of diverse racial backgrounds. What’s dispiriting is the lack of discipline; as long as people espouse right-sounding opinions, it doesn’t matter how half-baked they are — not to them, at least. It wasn’t lost on me that the group never articulates a concrete objective.

¶ Lauds: A new entry at Amassblog. JP Williams shares some of his photographs of gloves found in the street. (With a bit of spiffy white shoe.) JP still uses a “film camera,” and, what’s more, insists on having his rolls developed in Paris! C’est la vie!

The irony was almost sickening. Conservatives, those believers in the theory of  independent initiative,  meld into anthills of absolutely socialist cohesion when opposing a policy that they don’t like; paradoxically and counter-productively, the need for concerted action acts as a kind of Miracle-Gro on liberal differences, blotting out the sunlight that might fall on concerted progressive action. Is every population as self-defeatingly screwed-up as ours?

¶ Prime: For a change: a good, old-fashioned insider trading ring. The six insiders include hedge fund Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam and IBM outsourcer Robert Moffatt. (Cringely on Moffatt.)

We had dinner with the impending parents at their favorite restaurant, Jane, on Houston Street. (It’s their favorite restaurant for dinner with antiquities of my vintage, anyway.) I was sluggish all day and in no mood to leave the apartment, so I did what I usually do now when I find myself in funky, mildly antisocial moods: I got dressed long before I had to and headed for The SoHo-Greenwhich Village border as soon as I was ready. My idea was to stop in at McNally Jackson, which, if not exactly en route, was not wildly out of the way.

¶ Tierce: A recently-established site, Letters of Note. Genuine epistles. Snail mail from the past. Compulsively readable. (via The Morning News)

As always, I thought of Maggie Gyllenhaal as I crossed the intersection of Prince and Lafayette. My sighting of the actress occured a block to the west (Prince and Crosby), but now, whenever I go to McNally Jackson, I’m stirred by the excited idea that anything can happen in New York. More observant people see celebrities as a matter of course, but for me such encounters are rare and startling.

¶ Sext: A bouquet of Crash Blossoms, at  Good. To lay upon the tomb of Lady Mondegreen.

I hadn’t been to McNally Jackson in a while, which made me feel guilty; and I felt even worse when I walked in on a reading. Victor Lodato was talking about his novel, Mathilda Savitch. I hadn’t heard of the writer, and I didn’t try to follow the discussion, as I looked for a book to buy in reparation for my long absence; but I came away curious all the same.

¶ Nones: China in Frankfurt: “We did not come to be instructed about democracy.”

Most of my time at McNally Jackson was spent, however, pawing the metaphorical ground outside the lower-level rest room, within which, I could very easily tell, a young lady was Taking Her Time. When I arrived on the scene, the toilet portion of the boudoir experience was drawing to a close. There was a flush, and the sound of running water, and the roar of the hot-air drier. Almost ten minutes passed between the suddent quiet that followed the drying of hands and the lady’s emergence from her new-found bower. Every now and then, she could be heard taking a step or two — it was audibly obvious that she was wearing high-heeled boots — and then there would be silence. Then another step — but never an approach to the door. I became quite not-quite polite about rattling the doorknob, and I considered actually knocking.

¶ Vespers: At The Second Pass, Emma German reports on a recently republished vampire novella by — are you sitting down? — George Eliot, The Lifted Veil.

(I bought The Lifted Veil, but that was after I’d had my minute in the rest room.)

¶ Compline: Are you reading this ventrally or dorsally? (Great put-down for clotted, poorly printed prose: “It’s awfully dorsal.”)

I expect that each of my importunements dilated her sense of entitlement, but by the time she fianlly emerged I hated her far too gustily to mind having encouraged her. A well-put together young woman (exactly as I’d expected), she turned out to be rather plain and potato-faced — which can only mean that her insolence has its roots in devastating brilliance. Although she didn’t have the courage to reproach me, with a basilisk glance, for my impatience at the doorknob, I myself had no difficulty staring lasers right through her curly coiffure. “Hot as any Hottentot and not the goods for me!”