This will be brief. I have spent the day slowly, laboriously, and deliberately. The feeling that little was accomplished must yield (if only it would) to the realization that I worked all day, every minute of it, really; and, anyway, tomorrow’s Daily Office required a lot of reading. Writing the Daily Office takes no time at all, once I’ve decided on the links. Deciding on the links involves reading what’s at the other end of them.

Take a story that I decided not to write about: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stay — very temporary, as it turned out — of the Chrysler bankruptcy case. I decided not to write about it because there was really nothing to write about. If the Court decided to hear the appeal from those Indiana people, then there would be something to say, although perhaps not by me. But Justice Ginsburg’s stay was an automatic sort of thing, pro forma.

The difficulty is that I read the story before deciding not to write about it. Of course I read it! It was the sort of story that one really ought to read. The sale of Chrysler to Fiat may not be the most wonderful bankruptcy outcome ever, but its happening quickly is of the essence, and the opposition, however principled, was wrong-headed (as, indeed, principled gestures too often are). I read the story in my capacity as a member of the general public, and also in my capacity as chief cook and bottle-washer here at The Daily Blague. I read a lot of stories that way every day. It’s the Big Noise of 2009: All of a sudden I’m a Walter Burns wannabe.

In the evening, just for fun and larks, I fought another skirmish in the video chat wars. Don’t. Ask. The upshot was a jolly conversation via Skype that lasted as long as my friend and I wanted it to do. On the right machine, too.

Something to look forward to: David Hyde Pierce, in Accent on Youth. We’ve got tickets for tomorrow night. I plan to be easily entertained.

The day was, necessarily, a quiet one. Staying up last night and sitting outside during the storm — rather more wine than usual was consumed. This morning, I couldn’t face the prospect of paying bills in the afternoon. But I knew how much worse I’d feel if I went with Plan B, which was to watch Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) in the blue room, while usefully engaged in the folding of (two) T-shirts. I saved the video for after the bills.

Watching movies in the blue room is a new possibility — well, a recently restored one. When we moved into this apartment in 1983, the television was in the blue room, along with the dining table and the pull-out couch. the blue room was our dining-room/guest-room combo. And our first VCR. Yikes. I don’t remember when the small TV was removed from the breakfront bookshelf behind my desk. We went without cable reception for a few years in the late Nineties, but had it hooked back up in 2000, in order to watch the debates. I still want to cry, just thinking about those debates.

But in 2000, we watched television in the living room, on a TET LCD unit that could double as a computer monitor. It was always my plan to upgrade the living room, someday, to an orthodox flat screen, and to use the TET in the blue room, in both of its capacities. Watching movies in the blue room would be good if I wanted to watch something late at night, or if Kathleen were home sick, because the speakers in the living room are right on the other side of a thin wall from the bed’s headboard, and even moderate volumes of sound carry through.

The “upgrade someday” occurred in February, but it took until this past weekend to connect the TET to a DVD player and to reconnect the Tannoy speakers to the amplifier. Time was when not a year went by without my engaging in a major stereo rewiring project, or at least adding some vital new piece of equipment, such as the Sony Minidisc player that I had such hopes for (until flash memory pulled a pfffft! on that). In the past year, I’ve given a great deal of this equipment away, and there is still a tower of it in the living room, only three components of which are actually in use. I put off hooking up the blue room DVD player in part because I wasn’t sure that I’d remember how to do it.

And you would have thought that I’d never hooked up sound equipment before, given the huffing, puffing, and cursing that filled the blue room with blue streaks in the latter part of Saturday afternoon. I had stopped in at Radio Shack a few days earlier to buy cables and wires and stuff that I already had, squirreled away somewhere in the apartment, but was too lazy to look for. In the event, I used none of it; everything that I ended up needing came out of a drawer in a closet.

The DVD player that I was hooking up was the first one that I bought, way back when; made by Toshiba, it had a single tray but could hold two DVDs. Now, why, you ask, would anyone want a two-disc capability? Because I got more for my money, obviously. I didn’t care that it was unnecessary. I didn’t really know that it was unnecessary. More was always better.

Everthing was hooked up and working — wow! — when I ran into a slight snag. It didn’t surprise me that I hadn’t held onto the Toshiba’s remote-control, but it was deeply vexing to discover that, without it, there was no way to advance the disc beyond the Play/Scene Selection/Setup menu. Such frills did not exist when DVDs were introduced. The first ones played just like CDs: you dropped one onto the tray and closed it, and the feature started up without ado. But that was then, ha ha.

Astonishingly, I Gave Up. Quietly and without even the suggestion of a tirade, I Let Go.

I moved the furniture back into place, gathered up unneeded cables and debris, such as twisties and cellophane wrapping, and even ran the vacuum over the carpet. It seemed clear that I would have to buy a new DVD player, but it could be hooked up painlessly, without moving anything. I did not need to watch DVDs in the blue room — not right now. I could let it go. Like a recovered paralytic, I marveled at my ability to get on with my life even though every attempt to move hotel Rwanda beyond a head shot of Don Cheadle failed. At the same time, I suffered phantom-limb syndrome: where was my tantrum? Why wasn’t I tearing down 86th Street to buy a new player right now, instead of waiting to clean up and cool off?

It was while I was calmly drying off after a shower that I was rewarded. Abandoning the struggle to make something happen liberated my brain, which remembered something: at a time when I had a number of Sony components, I was frequently irritated when clicking the remote for one unit would set them all playing at once. This recollection came at the end of several thoughts. The second was that I would not run down the street to P C Richard or to Best Buy to by a new DVD player after all, but would wait for an all-region player to be delivered by Amazon (I have a lot of French movies that haven’t been released in North America). The Toshiba all-region player in the bedroom, after wall, was/is a dandy machine … and this is where my Sony memory kicked in.

Sure enough, the “Enter” button on the all-region’s remote control, which I bought about three years ago, got Hotel Rwanda to play on our prehistoric machine. I turned it right off, and felt extraordinarily pleased with myself.

Ne le dis à personne played without a hitch.

It was a good day, even though I woke up late and took a while to get started. The first thing that I did when I sat down at my desk was to put together a playlist for the day. I didn’t try to make it perfect; I aimed, rather, for a list that would lend itself to improvement — to substitution, really. Instead of Karl Böhm’s late Mozart, how about Karajan’s. Instead of Locatelli’s Opus 1 (a new addition to the collection), maybe some more Sammartini, if and when I can find it. And what would happen if I stuck Ein Heldenleben where Romeo & Juliet is now?

As for the end of the day, I spent it in the kitchen. It has been ages since I spent an evening in the kitchen. I used to, all the time; but that was before The Daily Blague was a twinkle in my eye. My kitchen is no longer a hobby; it’s a utility. Just as I have a plan for paying the bills every month, so I need a kitchen management system that, while not interesting in itself, is easily operated. It consists, for the most part, in taking down the contents of half of two cabinet shelves and checking out the stuff on the top shelf of the refrigerator door — the shelf that’s held up with duct tape. (The refrigerator is not three years old, but that’s modern plastic for you. Kathleen promises me a superdeluxe, freezer-at-the-bottom refrigerator, but I don’t hold her to it; I’m managing all right as it is.)

When I was through with my dinner (spaghetti alla carbonara — my default kitchen dinner), I decided to make a batch of madeleines. I do love to bake, and madeleines have been a specialty of mine ever since my mother brought back two madeleine tins from a trip to Paris in the early Seventies. (Of course I had begged her to do so.) In those days, the Proustian experience was a strictly literary, and not at all culinary, phenomenon. Also, there was no Pam: you had to butter and flour the grooved molds one by one, and it was a royal chienne.

The interesting thing, I find, is that even the modern Silpat, allegedly nonstick, madeleine molds require Pam. So I don’t much use the full-sized molds that I’ve collected. When I make a batch of madeleines ordinaires, I use the those tins from Paris to make two dozen regular madeleines, and two Silpat forms to make about three dozen mini-madeleines. I keep the big ones, and send the minis to the office with Kathleen.

Baking these shell-shaped treats — they’re neither cakes nor cookies, but something in between — used to be an affectation, I’ll admit. But, by now, I’ve been making them rather longer than anybody of my age, and probably as often as anybody on earth who isn’t either paid to make them or slightly mad. At an early age, baking madeleines became something that I do. Connecting them with Proust has lapsed into an afterthought. But I do wonder what his grandmother at Illiers would have thought of mine.  Woiuld she have detested the drop of lemon oil that, after wild experiment and variation, has become my only lasting interpolation to the recipe? It doesn’t much matter, because Kathleen adores it.

We had a perfect weekend, but I am not thinking about that now. What I am thinking about is the WordPress updgrade that was installed over the weekend. That it should be as difficult to decipher as the latest Microsoft Word in, say, 1991 is not surprising. But it insults me by remembering nothing. No autofills, no recollections of image folders. I have to click through or type from scratch quite as though I had never been here before.

When we went out to sit on the balcony at about one, Kathleen proposed going to Mass at St Thomas More at 5:45, and my joining her afterward for a walk up to the Conservatory Gardens, where we might photograph roses in the dusk. That sounded appealing but unlikely. If we are going to do something on a Sunday afternoon, we must do it early, before we’ve settled into domestic pastimes. Sunday is always a rather anxious day for me, because it’s a holiday, and without the benefit of a schedule I’m pretty sure that I will waste the day. I did not, in fact, waste the day — except insofar as I worried abut dooing so more or less constantly, and that was certainly a waste. As for Mass and photography, Kathleen went to 7:30 at St Iggy’s, and I took my camera on its tripod down to Carl Schurz.

I had meant to leave when she did, but I couldn’t — because I couldn’t find my camera. Where was it? I blamed the WordPress upgrade. And why not? In fact, however, I had “misplaced’ the camera by leaving it screwed on to the tripod. Since the tripod spent the day standing in the blue room, where, coming and going, I never failed to notice it, you’d think &c. But there was a cognitive thing going on. The last time I used a tripod, as I said the other day, the camera that I screwed onto it was a Canon AE-1. My Nikon Coolpix, which is just a three-dimensional credit card, simply didn’t “read” as a camera.

I set out for the park, and it began to rain. Correction: it began to sprinkle: the water dots remained discrete on the sidewalk. The day had  been gloriously sunny and clear; but at some point toward five or six, I looked up from the novel that I was reading because the light had dimmed. The first clouds were crossing the sun, and erasing shadows of building on other buildings. These shadows are almost as material as the brick façades that they fall upon, and it is startling to watch them melt away so utterly that it is hard to believe that they ever existed. Then the sun flashes them back, in chiseled high definition.  

The novel that I am reading has not yet been published. I found a galley on the M86 bus — this is a very literary town! The principal draw of reading a galley does not (trust me!) consist in reading a book ahead of the general public. It’s a matter rather of not having to wait to read a book until long after all of one’s literary friends have read it (or have had the chance to do so). The delight of reading a galley lies, however, in the typos.

“Another thing that kills me,” she said with deceptive clamness…

Not a typo. If you knew the character who “commits” this solecism, you’d see how just it is. Deceptive clamness is so — her. My task now is to work the mistake into an appealing witticism that I can try out on the author when I ask her to sign my copy of the novel. When it’s published.

Another day of work — but as the clock ticked toward six, I could tell that I was running out of steam. So, what with one thing and another on the calendar, I ran out to the movies, just around the corner, to see Rudo y Cursi. This film unites director Carlos Cuarón with the two co-stars of his Y Tu Mamá También. This time, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna play half-brothers from the sticks who are lured into playing for opposing futbol teams. It’s such a great movie that even the soccer is great. Veruschka — or even Vanessa Redgrave herself — is not more present in Antonioni’s great Blow-Up that the two stars are here. Rudo y Cursi is also very funny. The actors seem to be competing (in a nice parallel to the story) to see who can create the more ridiculous brother.

When I came back from the movie, I was refreshed and ready to edit and publish three pages for Portico. By the light of midnight oil, I’m working on a fourth. But it’s about Jonathan Franzen’s story in The New Yorker this week, and if there’s one thing about Jonathan Franzen and me that you ought to know about it, it’s that my appreciations of his work seem to run to 5% of his word count. Many of the pages that I’ve written about whole books are shorter than my piece on “Good Neighbors”; it’s almost certainly to be longer by the time I publish it.

Thanks to a link at The Awl by Choire Sicha, I discovered a new blog today, Songs About Buildings And Food, and not only that: but a writer more thrillingly long-winded than I am. May the spirit of Maeve Brennan bring delight to the mind of Justin Wolfe (or is it Henry?) In fact, I’m going to have to leave you now, because the blog’s latest entry begins with a reference to “Good Neighbors.” Prudence dictates that I finish my own appreciation before reading anyone else’s, but, en un mot, screw that.

When I got back from lunchtime errands, I was hot and steaming. An hour later, having cleaned up and changed, I was freezing out on the balcony. It’s the usual seasonal disorder: because the weather is nice again, you’re determined to spend some time outdoors; only, now the weather isn’t so nice — in fact, it’s dismal. Raining and about 60º. On top of that, the grey glare made it very hard to read the laptop screen. But I did write finish a page that I’ve  been working on for weeks. When I came in, I began another.

Oops! Suddenly, it was too late to scramble over to Thomas Meglioranza’s recital at Mannes. Tom hasn’t sung in the city for a while, and I need a fix. I am heartily sorry. But this has been a week for staying at home and getting things done; having no plans to join anyone for the recital, it was easy to get lost in my work. Nevertheless, I am heartily sorry.

So far, the day has been nicely productive. The Daily Office didn’t eat up the hours, as it did on Monday and almost did yesterday (some canonicals are much easier to fill than others — I don’t yet know why). I took care of a long list of irregular housekeeping chores. For example: cable reception. The wrong button had evidently been pressed on one of the remotes. I figured out which one. Just to test the fix, I tuned into TV5. There was a broadcast of le tennis from Roland Garros. I almost sat down to watch Roger Federer play somebody, not because of a sudden interest in tennis but because I could actually understand the sportscasters.

Right now, I’m in the middle of Labelmania, having as much fun as a six year-old, typing in the names of movies (font: Gills Sans MT) and then pressing Ctrl-P. Whir, whine: voilà.

Just for the record: the building restored landscaping, this morning, to the long planters that stretch along the 86th Street sidewalk. Not the big one between the street and the driveway — that has to wait, one of the doormen told me, for the new canopy, which will actually stretch across the driveway, making a real porte-cochère. Nobody seems to know when the construction will be finished and the driveway re-opened, but the plantings are a welcome sight. I wonder if the Google Street View truck has already been by — I hope not.

In the current issue of Granta, Jhumpa Lahiri interviews Mavis Gallant. I’ve been reading Ms Gallant’s stories off and on ever since they began reappearing in NYRB editions — to the third of which Ms Lahiri will write the introduction. Along with a lot of interesting personal matter, the interview touches on three of Ms Gallant’s works (so to speak): an early novel, a lengthy short story from the Seventies, “The Remission,” and the four “Carette” short stories. I read “The Remission” this afternoon. It was rich, haunting, and extremely well done, but the reading experience was also fairly lowering.

I had hoped to be far more productive today. Last night at about this time, I was reading Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold, luxuriating in the sheer peace and quiet of reading, and thinking of an early night. But when Kathleen came home, at around midnight, she said that she needed to write a brief email to someone. I ought to have nodded and retired to the blue room. Instead, I sat in the bedroom while she tried to dispatch the note from the netbook, a machine with which she was unfamiliar. I’d recommended that she use the newest computer in the house because it was up and running. But it turned out that Kathleen’s idea of a “brief email” is highly relative. The note involved a lot of cutting and pasting (murder on a strange touch pad) and multiple addressees drawn from various documents. Beset by visions of a very late night, with Kathleen growing less and less capable as she grew more tired, I panicked and got upset.

Computers are about the only thing that Kathleen and I squabble about. We approach the machines in very different ways, but what really marks us apart is Kathleen’s comfort level with setbacks and technological snafus. I have no comfort level with these matters, and I’m inclined to think that tolerating them is the slippery slope to Idiocracy.

So we were up for an extra hour. An extra hour at least. And then I had to read — and raid the icebox — just to calm down.

In the afternoon, I planned to do a bit of writing, and I did do a bit of writing — just a page. I wrote up Up. I was going to do a little housework and then write some more, but Kathleen had some prescriptions to pick up at the drugstore, so (not least to atone for my sharpness last night) I offered to run the errand for her. The prescriptions weren’t ready; I was told to come back in an hour. That is when I read “The Remission.” After picking up the filled prescriptions, I went to the Food Emporium and bought a few things, so that I’d have a choice between burgers on a baguette or a Caesar salad for dinner. By the time the shopping was delivered, it was too late (and my brain was too scrambled) to start writing, so I took on a project that I expected to be daunting. It wasn’t.

The ongoing project is to create labels for the paper sleeves in which I now store DVDs. I bought the dual-feed Dymo label printer a few weeks ago. It was installed immediately, but along with a lot of other stuff, so that I didn’t remember how to operate the thing. There turned out to be nothing to it. I plugged it in and got right to work.

Being me, I did not begin by lugging one of the drawers of discs to the table and beginning at the beginning (with All About Eve). Oh, no. I made labels for DVDs that came to mind. Casablanca; Unforgiven; Merci, Docteur Rey. And wouldn’t you know it? Four of the titles that “came to mind”— three starring Cary Grant, as it happened — weren’t in the drawer at all (as I found when I finally did drag it out), but in original, special-edition cases that I had decided to keep. In the end, I pasted the labels for The Awful Truth, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, and The Lady Eve on empty sleeves and tucked them in front of All About Eve. This is how I keep my life simple.

(I’d still be printing labels, but I saw that I was about to run out of blanks. I’ll have to run up to Staples tomorrow for more.)

For dinner, I broiled three mini burgers — on offer at Gristede’s last week; I’d never seen them before — and then melted chunks of blue cheese over bacon bits on top of them. The burgers were spatula’d onto a halved demi-baguette, slathered with mustard and mayonnaise. I cut the baguette on either side of the burger in the middle, making three pieces. The result was even better than I’d hoped it would be. The crust of the baguette closed down around the burgers like a clamshell, while the interior soaked up all the juices. Imagine: a medium-rare burger that didn’t drip! Speaking of Barbara Stanwyck, the DVD that’s playing in the kitchen whenever I’m in there for more than five minutes is Ball of Fire. Drum boogie!

It’s not yet midnight, and/but Kathleen is home. She is absolutely finished working for the day, and if she turns on her computer at all, it will be to loiter at eBay.

The list of the objects in the little photo this evening will give you an idea of my general condition this morning. Not unduly grave, but not very promising, either.

In the old days (until about three weeks ago), I’d have “taken the day off,” sitting in my reading chair with a compulsively readable book — feeling guilty, but not guilty enough to put the book down and get to work. This is the moral hazard of self-employment.

Today, however, I was too terrified by my hopper at Google Reader. Over 500 feeds! There could be no thought of leaving that avalanche on course.

And then there was Outlook — acting up on three computers! JM to the rescue — but remotely, requiring me to pay at least nominal attention. Chatting in three separate Team Viewer boxes, plus Gmail exchanges: a thoroughly modern dilly.

After I had finished working for the day, and consumed a late-night bowl of elbows al burro (Kathleen will be working late this week, I’ve been advised), and after the Nano playlist to which I’d listened all day came to an end, I had the sublime pleasure of sinking into the reading chair at last, and feeling, instead of guilty, utterly virtuous. The book, which arrived this afternoon, was Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold, an account of derivatives trading on Wall Street and how it metastasized into the tumor that nearly killed us all last year. Three little words: buy this book. Lucid, smart, and engaging, it will bring you up to speed despite your worst misgivings.

I even sat outside for a while. (That was before I went to collect the mail.) I was reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Mavis Gallant interview in the new Granta. It was so involving that I pulled down one of the NYRB Gallant editions and re-read her nonpareil story, “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street.”

As I expected, working hard (if not very efficiently) left me feeling much, much better at the end of the day than at the beginning.

Having seen a woolly mammoth in the mirror over the past couple of days, I was determined, this morning, to visit Willy’s for a haircut and a beard trim. I hustled down and back in time for my lunch appointment with Steve Laico, the man who keeps my sites looking great. (It helped, enormously, that Steve was running late. What he would have seen in the apartment had he walked in at the appointed hour!) I listened to the iPod Shuffle while in transit (ie, on foot) — Rufus Wainwright and the Pet Shop Boys. Also on the Shuffle: I Muvrini, a Corsican group that sings in French and Basque, too; and Madredeus, a great Portuguese band that Jean Ruaud turned me on to years ago. Go figure.

I mention all of this music because Willy was playing WCBS FM — a format targeted at people my age or a little younger. People my age or younger who still want to hear “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” that is. I almost asked Willy what happened to the Peruvian music. Willy comes from Peru, and once, when he was playing an album of palatially schlocky aubades and serenades by Juan Diego Florez, he announced to his customers that only Peruvian music would be played in his shop. I have been wanting to snitch on the relief men who ran the place when he went home for his annual vacation last month: the music that they played was distinctly Brazilian. Today, though, I wanted to ask for the Peruvian. Anything but a Memory Lane that I stayed far away from. But I kept quiet.

The next thing I knew, the radio was playing “The Boxer,” a song that everybody my age or a little younger knows, by Simon & Garfunkel. The interesting thing is, I didn’t know that the song was called “The Boxer” until today. I realized, sitting there listening, that I have never owned a Simon & Garfunkel album — not so much as a 45. I didn’t dislike Simon & Garfunkel; it wasn’t that. But something made me hold back from declaring allegiance to the duo — which is what buying an album amounted to back in the Sixties. The music was absolutely inescapable, which is how I came to know “The Boxer” so well without knowing that it was called “The Boxer.”

The announcer at WCBS FM reminisced about the night in 1975 when Paul Simon was the host of SNL, and the producers surprised him by producing Art Garfunkel, with whom he was not on the best of terms. They greeted one another awkwardly and sang — “The Boxer.” Paul Simon would go on to have a vibrant solo career: I have several of his CDs from the Eighties, and if I don’t listen to them very much now it’s because they remind me too strongly of the second biggest mistake in my life, which I made round about when they were new. I believe that Art Garfunkel had an afterglow career of sorts, but when I think of him alone I remember a heartbreaking story that was told to us by a friend.

The heartbreaking part is that our friend had no idea how heartbreaking her story was. Flying across the Pacific in first class, she struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to her. One thing led to another, and soon he was outlining the details of his comeback concert tour. He, too, was the less famous name in a very well-known duo — trust me; you’d recognize the name if you’re over forty — but what hit us, when our friend recounted the story, was that she had no idea who he was. Not a pop fan by any means whatsoever (I wash Cindi Lauper’s laundry by comparison), she had never heard of X & Y. So here is this once-famous name, desperate to make a comeback, full of hope and needing a bit of wind in his sails, and the passenger next whom he’s fated to pass the hours between here and Narita is the one person in his demographic (out of — what? — twenty five?) who has never even heard of him. Encouraging, eh?

Kathleen has a very funny story about Art Garfunkel, but we can’t tell it yet. We’d have to shoot you. The funny part isn’t the Art-Garfunkel part but the what-Kathleen-did-with-it part. In a word, she made everybody at Willy’s laugh. Not my Willy’s; her Willy’s. “If you know what I mean by that.”

A few mildly interesting things happened today, but either I’m obliged not to write about them or they’re about food. I improvised another dish for dinner, but had the devil of a time over lunch.

I finished Tony Judt’s Postwar, at last — and then I wondered what the dickens I’ll write about it, if anything. Oh, it’s a grand book, and essential reading for everyone with a brain. But/and it seems quite enough just to say that.

I was daunted by the number of pages that I have to write. I did write one, and when a friend asked me how I’d liked Easy Virtue, I rumbled it into presentability and published it without editing. If you know your way around Portico (and care), you’ll find it easily enough. I could have just answered the question by saying that I liked the film very much, and not least because of its defects — which perhaps will turn out not to be defects in the long run, when I’ve seen the film, as I undoubtedly shall see it, for the twenty-fifth time.

It bothered me that I did not write about Blithe Spirit or God of Carnage. For what it’s worth, I could not find my copy of Blithe Spirit, and I ordered a copy of Dieu du carnage from Amazon in France. Correction: I placed a copy in my shopping basket. If I do buy it, I know that, by the time it arrives, I won’t care anymore; I’ll have moved on to other curiosities. Writing about the film adaptation of Easy Virtue was made vastly more comfortable by the discovery of a synopsis of the Coward original at Wikipedia. God bless Wikipedia; in any case, I do, with a $10 monthly contribution, made automatically. I have only two principles about the online encyclopedia. The first, obviously, is that I must support it financially (if modestly). The second is that I must never, ever, participate in the writing of a page there. I’m troubled by a recurring dream that always ends with my realizing that the text that I’m straining to read is being written by me — but no longer faster than I can read it. I cannot describe the acrid smell of shorted circuits that accompanies my waking from this nightmare, so I’m going to take care never to risk encountering them at Wikipedia.

I execrated Melville, but there’s no need to repeat that.

Easy Virtue is the sort of movie that you have to see a second time, in order to decide whether it is better than you thought the first time — or worse. The only certainty is that you won’t remain undecided. I think that I’ll find Easy Virtue to be better. But I’m too jaded to believe that my adoration of Kristin Scott Thomas will blind me to the drawbacks of the other actress. I wish that I’d memorized some of KST’s great lines, but they were great only because she said them at the time. Out of context — pffft. She and Jennifer Biel do construst a scrumptious-looking, towering meringue of mutual insult. Whatever it is, they can top it.

I ate both of the day’s meals in old-line French restaurants: not temples of gastronomy of the kind that used to rule the earth (under Manhattan, anyway) but hole-in-corner places that were long ago designed to remind New Yorkers of the Left Bank of Paris, or perhaps of a star-crossed romance in Dijon or Angers. One of the restaurants — I shall name no names — defies the waning suitability of its location, in a Subcontinental district, with a convincing demonstration of culinary excellence. The other, stationed more or less like a baleen whale near schools of querulous diners, is rapidly approaching Williamsburg Restoration status with respect to cuisine in general, and to French cuisine even more generally. I enjoyed both meals, but not in the same way. I am very glad that my companion at one of them — no names! — was not the companion at the other. Although vice versa would have worked nicely.

At seven o’clock, Kathleen and I were sitting in the third row — Row A — of the Jacobs Theatre (formerly the Royale), hoping that we were ready for God of Carnage, Yasmin Reza’s play about two couples who are trying to work out the consequences of an altercation between their eleven year-old sons. The cast, like that of Waiting for Godot, is ne plus ultra: Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels, and James Gandolfini. What a privilege it is to sit before such a range of talents! Even if I was terrified that Mr Gandolfini and Mr Daniels would come to blows. Like every other married man in the house, I wondered if I and my marriage could or would fall apart so drastically (but inconsequentially) if I were put into the characters’ competitive predicament.

This afternoon, I invented a chicken salad. I probably did no such thing, but what I came up with was new to me. I tossed the white meat from a roast chicken (Kathleen and I eat only the dark when the bird comes out of the oven) in a dressing made up of mayonnaise, a half teaspoon of curry powder, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, two tablespoons of fresh orange juice (left over from breakfast), a splash of white wine vinegar, a few pinches of dried tarragon, and salt and pepper. How much mayonnaise? Enough to make a slightly runny dressing. I covered the dressed chicken and set it in the fridge for a few hours. (In winter, I should have left it on the counter, wrapped.) At the last minute, I added two avocados, chopped, and one small tomato, seeded and chopped. That was that.

While different from anything that I had ever had, the result was not at all strange. Like most tasty food, my chicken and avocado salad tasted like a secret that I’d just been let in on. The sweetness of the orange juice combined with that of the tarragon to brighten the roast chicken, and the hours of steeping in the fridge had moistened it nicely. As we enjoyed the salad, I thought of how often in the past I have ruined chicken and avocado combinations with the greedy but deadening addition of bacon and mushrooms.

As for the rest of my day….

Yesterday — was it yesterday? I think so — I was trying to select an RSS feed in Outlook when I noticed a problem: the reading pane was blank. Worse, Outlook was suddenly “not responding.” Rebooting, deleting the feed and replacing it with a new one under a different name — nothing worked. Presently I discovered that the laptop was similarly afflicted. The net result was that I gave up on Outlook for feeds, and started a page in Google Reader. I ought to have done this a long time ago, for when you’re working from two or three computers, it makes no sense to channel all news feeds to just one of them. Clouds, my dear, are all silver lining.

Unfortunately, I had by that time deleted whole folders of feeds. Of course I remembered the sites that I depend on the most, but I’m afraid that I lost many of the new possibilities that I’d begun following in the past two weeks. A few years ago, the loss would have put me in a tragic frame of mind for at least a week. Now, I’m too busy for that sort of thing. I say this not to show off my newfound stoicism but to thank heaven that I am too busy for tragic states of mind about… lost RSS feeds.

Thanks to one of the new blogs whose name was rescued from the debacle, I discovered the site of an artist who paints disturbing oils. You could say that the pictures are pornographic, or at least I can, because I responded to them, more or less, as one responds to dirty pictures, if you know what I mean by that. (I looked at every last one of them.) But the paintings are disturbing in a way that has nothing to do with bizarre couplings. The young people who are shown in various states of undress, smoking and drinking at a party held in a Eurotrashy-deluxe setting, look terribly lost, and anything but happy. They’ve clearly been drinking too much, or drugging too much; and the men especially seem to be wondering how they got to this swinging soirée. When, that is, they’re not in a state of leer. I also had the most peculiar sense that they were for the most part still living with their parents, whose servants had ironed the shirts that hung unbuttoned on their unbalanced chests, and pressed the jackets that, despite the décolletage, they had neglected to shuck. The women are rarely absolutely naked, but almost always elaborately nude. The air is rancid with the scent of privilege gone wrong. For what it’s worth, the artist appears to fancy Cartesian, geometric titles.

You’ll be waiting for a link about now, but I’m not ready to give it. There’s no need for you to risk feeling as complicit in unseemly doings as I did for hours this afternoon.

Tonight was Jean Ruaud’s last evening in Manhattan, this trip. We had booked tickets to see Blithe Spirit long  before we knew the dates of his visit, so arranging a farewell dinner was a bit tricky. Everybody closes at eleven these days! (And that’s not the recession.) Kathleen found a Web site that put the duration of the play at two hours and forty minutes, which would have made it impossible to get to the Brasserie (for example) before it stopped seating people. The last thing we wanted to do was to bother Jean with complications, so we decided to meet at PJ Clarke’s, a restaurant that Jean took a very good photograph of the other day, at about eleven.

And then the play got out at two hours and twenty minutes. “Let’s walk,” suggested Kathleen, enjoying the beautiful weather. We took a taxi, and got to the corner of 55th and Third about two minutes before Jean himself. I shudder to think what he would have had to put up with at the very noisy bar, on the eve of a holiday weekend and the commencement of Fleet Week, if we hadn’t been there even before he was.

Blithe Spirit was super, but both Kathleen and I remembered it differently. We both thought that Charles Condamine gets killed by his wives in the end. We kept waiting for Rupert Everett to die. When he didn’t, I was very relieved. Death would have conferred upon his character the most undeserved martyrdom. Jayne Atkinson and Christine Ebersole are nothing less than magnificent as Charles’s wives. But the show belongs to Angela Lansbury. I had wondered how she would differentiate Madame Arcati from Salome Otterbourne, her world-class ditz from Death on the Nile. In a word: Madame Arcati was on top of her booze. Kathleen and I will never forget her trance dance, which, if you ask me, had a lot of Nijinski going on. The homeless Nijinsky.

Since Jean decided to spend his last full day in the city on his own, and in Manhattan (not Brooklyn), I was able to devote myself to working hard at this and that at home. I completed a page about Lake Overturn and, within minutes, knew that the piece needed just one more paragraph, plus one more sentence at the end. Tomorrow is another day.

But, tomorrow and the next day, we will miss our friend from Paris.

You know what they say: if you want something done, ask a busy man. It’s true! I keep asking myself to do things, and I keep doing them.

But enough about me. Too much about me, really, even if this is my diary.

I was terribly fâché at the Museum today. No, this paragraph is not about me. It’s about the imprisonment of the Museum’s American paintings and sculpture, including the Sargents, apparently, until 2011! I’ll bet that they didn’t tell that to Michelle Obama before she spoke at the re-opening of the American wing. If you want to see a lot of pots and side chairs and period upholstery and the world’s most space-wasting diorama, then the American Wing is open. If you’re interested in art, it’s not.

Anyway, I led pour Jean Ruaud on a merry chase through the maze of furniture displays, thwarted wherever a door to the sought-for galleries ought to have been open. Signs announcing the “delay” were posted at several points, but I didn’t read them, or couldn’t accept them, until I’d given up.

We did see the Francis Bacon show, which, for all the gory grimness of the painter’s subject matter, is very beautiful. There is something awfully grand about the triptychs that are framed in serious gold mouldings. Stupidly, I had not realized what a systematic appropriator Bacon was. I’ll be back.

In what was left of the afternoon, I finished the Book Review review that I began in the morning, did all the usual daily stuff for the DB, tidied the place up a bit, and then got dressed and went out to dinner. We were the guests of old friends, a couple of smart lawyers who, in the past, have, quite inadvertently, sometimes made me feel that I’m an underemployed slacker. Well, not anymore! All the reading that I do for the Daily Office means that I am never at a loss for topics of interest to thoughtful people. Even better, I understand (and can follow) almost anything that the thoughtful people want to talk about. (Can you tell that I’ve been reading Lord Chesterfield?) Our friends may still think that I ought to get a real job, but I had a very good time.

Can you believe it? I forgot my camera this morning, and got all the way up the Cloisters before I realized that I’d left it at home. Happily, my companion, Jean Ruaud, one of the finest photographers in the world and certainly the best one that I know personally, chivalrously took a picture of my favorite Cloisters-area view, and sent it to me this evening for me to use here, which I shall do on Saturday morning. It’s certainly better than any picture that I’ve ever taken.

It was, as every New Yorker knows, the perfect day for a trip to the Cloisters. The cool, clear air and the sunny blue sky combined with Spring timing to make Fort Tryon Park look better than an opera set. For Jean, I think, the great pleasure of visiting the museum was the frisson of looking over a collection of richly medieval (and mostly French!) objects while standing solidly on Manhattan Island. I did not feel for a moment that politeness prevented him from dismissing the confection of 1938 that the Cloisters actually is as an enormous fraud. His pleasure in learning that a stained glass panel came from a town not far from his birthplace in Touraine seemed undimmed by any desire to repatriate it.

Jean and I met at Deluxe, the jolly college-town eatery near Columbia University, on Broadway at 113th Street. It was only on the subway that I’d had misgivings — wasn’t graduation due to take place about now? Indeed it was, and we should never have gotten a table if I hadn’t thought to meet at twelve-thirty instead of at one. Of course I saw the crowns on the blue robes, when they began showing up, but because the only graduates wearing them were women, I asked the waiter if Barnard were commencing. Columbia men must tear off their robes the minute the ceremony is over, because not a single male could be spotted in costume. As if to prove my point, all the likely-looking young men were carrying shopping bags.

At the table next to ours, a young woman sat with a middle-aged man, almost certainly her father. Their talk was desultory, and they seemed happy to eavesdrop on our bilingual-esque conversation. At one point, however, the young woman exhaled, with a throaty world-weariness worthy of the great Tallulah Bankhead, “Why can’t it be my graduation?” Her tone was pitched at a tone of perfect ambiguity, so that it was impossible to tell whether someone else’s graduating or her own not doing so was what bothered her. If I had to bet money, I’d say that an offstage sibling was involved.

The ride uptown was uneventful. The elevator at 168th Street (changing from the 1 to the A) was packed; the elevator to the street at 190th Street was almost empty, but for a few tourists and two spot waiters for a parks fundraiser (Bette Midler’s Restoration Project?) at the New Leaf Café. I took Jean on the scenic route to the Cloisters, with Hudson views and lots of flowers and lots of steps and the lookout beneath the flagstaff from which you can see the Throg’s Neck Bridge. As we were climbing down from the lookout, I noticed two young young men occupying the steps that it would have been most convenient to take. Well, one of them was huddling there. The other one couldn’t keep himself from gripping railings and hurdling over them like some sort of cowboy — or parkoureur, as I guess the word would be now. The huddler turned out to be a photographer. Worried about crossing his shot, I asked if we might pass. He seemed surprised by the question.

“Of course,” he said, his eyes opened wide. “We’re just teenagers.“

I shrugged. “You’re forgiven.”

In the past, my approach to summer has been to cut back on the blogging, particularly in August, in the interest of “relaxing,” or “taking stock,” or doing whatever it is that magazine writers dream up for one’s summer. This year, I shall cut back on everything but blogging.

What with balladant with Jean Ruaud — we’re off to the Cloisters tomorrow — and a few pre-existing evening engagements, I won’t be sitting around the blue room very much this week. That’s why I buckled down this afternoon and got as far as choosing half the links for Thursday’s Daily Office. I discovered a few nice sites today, one of which, An Open Book, looks very agreeable, probably because its author, Brooks Peters, in a photo “taken ages ago,” looks both welcoming and smart — sadly, a rare combination. He writes that way, too.

I had a nice letter from George Snyder this morning. I sometimes wish that George lived in New York, instead of in Los Angeles, but if he did live in New York, we’d probably be less in touch. According to a Proustian law of iron — if Proust didn’t formulate it, he ought to have done — we see friends who live nearby rarely or never, precisely because we can, hypothetically, see them whenever we like. In fact, however, we’re much too busy doing other things. When a friend arrives from the other side of the earth, in contrast, we drop everything and make the most of the visit. I’m having a wonderful time doing exactly that with Jean; it’s as though I’m the one on vacation. I see that I must urge Fossil Darling to move to Australia.

Which is more tiring? Walking miles and miles or following links and links? No matter: the two together have wiped me out. We’re promised very good weather for tomorrow, which will make Fort Tryon Park pop with rustic beauty. Readers of Mnémoglyphes and Beware Wet Paint! can look forward to some beautiful pictures.