The grim redoubt of Château Gizmo.

¶ Matins: Reading The Sun Also Rises, I feel that I’m looking over Colm Tóibín’s shoulder. Compare Chapter X of the Hemingway with the Compostela pilgrimage chapter of Mr Tóibín’s very interesting “travel” book, The Sign of the Cross. Not that the latter chapter involves Pamplona.

¶ Sext: So, it turns out that willpower is a muscle, after all. You’ve got to work you’re way up to the heavy lifting. Another way of looking it would be that willpower is a habit.

¶ Vespers: A look at this week’s Book Review, at Portico.

(more…)

Gentrification beneath Bruckner Boulevard, in the Bronx.

¶ Matins: In the space of one page, Rachel Donadio manages to reduce Literature to Logo: “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books.” I may not know whether to laugh or to cry, but I do despair.

¶ Tierce: In the paper today, two stories about the the kind of mundane change that, without paying a lot of attention, we get used to in the blink of an eye. Both, not coincidentally, forecast emptier shelves at home. Susan Dominus on The Kindle (“Snoopers on Subway, Beware Digital Books“) and David Carr on the download (“We Want It, and Waiting Is No Option “)

¶ Sext: Kathleen calls from the office: do I want to go to London in May or June? Yes! But I hope that that fix the mess at Heathrow first! (Even though we Yanks go through Terminal 3.)

(more…)

My favorite restaurant for lunch, Café d’Alsace. To the extreme right, a sign for Elaine’s, which I’m told is a truly awful restaurant. I’ve never set foot inside. So much for Famous Writers’ School.

¶ Matins: I’m thinking of Die Fälscher for this morning. Writing the movie up may be the last bit of sustained writing that I do for a short spell. And no, I’m not taking a vacation. Rather the reverse.

¶ Nones: One of these days, businessmen are going to have to learn to regard “redundancy” as a form of insurance — a legitimate and necessary cost of doing business. This story about a shortage of favorite Passover treats, “It’s ‘Hide the Matzo’ for Real: Tam Tams Are Scarce,” may be cute, but it’s also an object lesson.  

¶ Vespers: This week’s Friday Front visits another part of the subject that I raised two weeks ago. This time, Eric Alterman asks, who’s going to pay for the news that we think we need?

(more…)

As they say in Texas: “All awning and no produce.”

¶ Matins: Pretty soon, Manhattan’s square footage will be too pricey for groceries. We shall be forced to subsist on caviar and foie gras. Bottled water? Forget it! Dom Perignon or die!

¶ Lauds: Kathleen and I were to check in, I thought, at about seven. By the time we actually connected, at about eight, I’d been through a full cycle of dread and despair. It turned out that Kathleen thought that we would talk when she got back from a cocktail party. The moment I heard her voice, of course, I forgot my worries.

¶ Tierce: Gail Collins predicts that Barack will lose interest in the fight before Hillary does: “I say her strategic desire to keep fighting trumps his strategic desire to put the lid on it.” Read her hilarious Op-Ed piece, in which “The Uncle Al Show” has nothing to do with a former vice-president.  

¶ Nones: Édouard visits Foxwoods in the universal language of photography, so you can see the nightmare for what it is. Scroll down a bit, through the sylvan pictures, until you find yourself asking, “What the hell is that?” It’s a casino, that’s what. In the middle of a forest. Una selva not nearly oscura enough.

¶ Compline: This isn’t news, I don’t suppose, but I just heard about it: all of Mad Magazine on two DVDs.

(more…)

¶ Matins: In this week’s Book Review, at Portico.

¶ Tierce: Whether it’s because I watched the 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch last weekend, or because I just finished one of the more acutely unromantic chapters of The Red and the Black, the tortured account of a school trustees’ meeting at Outer Life, this morning, made me laugh as only the finest English social comedy can.

¶ Sext: Luc Sante offers an understated justification for the oversized library, at Pinakothek. Even though, having just moved house, he’s glad to have unloaded twenty-five boxes of books.

¶ Nones: My friend Yvonne has just tipped me off to an interesting site that she describes as “a Scottish lady’s ‘domestic blog’,” Cornflower. Book talk seems to be the principal interest here — bravo! — but the lady (a sometime lawyer) is also a knitter, and she has just knitted a pair of socks in the Blue Willow Pattern. Is this another message from the cosmos — re-read The Egoist, now! — or what?

(more…)

¶ Matins: Kathleen’s off to Flah-dah in the morning. She’s staying at 100 Chopin Plaza.

¶ Prime: I was so busy over the weekend that I still haven’t read the paper. I had to come across a link to this at kottke.org. In the Times, the article is entitled “A Guide to the French. Handle With Care.” My own title: When Seven out of Eight of the Following Propositions Hold True Here, New York Will Finally Be More Civilized Than Anglophone.”

¶ Tierce: Didn’t you love The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini? No? Meg Wolitzer may be able to tell you why.

¶ Sext: Father Tony agonizes over apostrophes. Is the plural of “CD” CD’s or CDs? I’m resolutely for the latter, but it makes my friend uncomfortable. He has found a link to “the rule,” which is correct so far as it goes.

¶ Nones: The Hong Kong of the Hudson? You’re joking! This is Gotham City, surely! Be sure to click through Gothamist to the Big Apple list of no fewer than ninety-eight nicknames for Old Nieuw Amsterdam. What’s this? “The Frog and Toe“?

¶ Vespers: The reviews appeared side-by-side in the Arts section of yesterday’s Times; how curious it was to have been to both evenings of chamber music. To give some idea of how different they were, in their wonderful ways, I’ve written them up together.  

(more…)

¶ Matins: Now with 200% more 1929! Let’s live it up with Doubledown!

¶ Sext: Has anyone ever sent you a Jacquie Lawson card via an e-mail attachment?

¶ Nones: Once again, JR (mnémoglypes) shows that he really “gets” America.

¶ Compline: Books on Monday: The Learners, by Chip Kidd, at Portico.

(more…)

The same skyline, but with a bit more of Queens, and a lot closer to Penn Station.

¶ Matins: Last night, I went to a reading at The Drawing Center. I’d been invited, by one of the writers. Who could turn that down?

¶ Sext: No sooner do I finish slogging my way through Michael Banks’s semi-moronic Blogging Heroes (in the Morning Read) than the Times comes along with a half-page summary, “So You Want to Be a Blogging Star?”

¶ Vespers:  It’s hard to tell just where this Web site, VVork, is domiciled, but this bit of conceptual art suggests Further Fun. (Thanks, kottke.org.) (more…)

Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion (detail), by Nicolas Poussin (1648)

A few weeks ago, Édouard paid a visit to the Poussin and Nature show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he took a very good look at the picture from which I have extracted a detail, above, Poussin’s Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion. Who, Édouard asked, is that man in over on the right, holding on to a tree?

Pourquoi a-t-il une telle tête de fou ou de psychosé ? On ne sait pas.

(more…)

La grosse Pomme, vu du comté de la Reine. (Le nord à droite.)

¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review.

¶ Tierce: Within a little more than a week — Eliot Spitzer’s scandal erupted in public only last Monday — the complexion of American politics seems to have changed, and the change is marked by two speeches, delivered, respectively, by Barack Obama and David Paterson.

And don’t miss a Great American Car Story by the Ganome.

¶ Sext: Women of the world (not to be confused with Women of the World — although most of them probably are both) discuss Eliot Spitzer’s lapses. “Bad manners,” says Nancy Lee Andrews, at one point Ringo Starr’s fiancée.

¶ Nones: Confused about which way is up in FreeMarketLand? This report in the Times, which, for all I know, may be a daily feature, does a fine job of connected all the dots with a remarkably clear coherence.

(more…)

Within twenty or so pages of the end of this thrilling, gripping, hair-raising and utterly literary novel, I am so restless that I can barely keep my eyes on the page. SWAT teams are poised to descend upon a Unabomber-type character in the Idaho wilderness — did I mention that it’s snowing, and that the poor sacrificial lamb has to don snowshoes before hiking to the nut’s hut?

Although this is hardly a conventional “Books on Monday” filing, I may not have much more to say about A Person of Interest. I wouldn’t have said anything about Idaho and the snowshoes if it hadn’t been for the brief review in The New Yorker; I’ll have to make sure that any further beans have already been spilled elsewhere. At the same time, A Person of Interest is somewhat too good to be true, the first American novel that I’ve read in ages that could not indecently be discussed with Dostoevsky in the room. Or Nabokov. There must be ergot sewn into the binding.

Or perhaps it’s just spring fever. I sat by the balcony door, which was open to the damp, early spring freshness. Not the best idea for a cold remedy, certainly; but I felt suavely pampered.

When I get back from collecting the mail, I’ll brave the finale.

¶ Matins: The Book Review review.

¶ Tierce: In Seventeen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Two, Columbus sailed the Ocean …. WTF??

¶ Nones: The menu for Saturday’s family luncheon is set: onion soup, boeuf bourguignonne, and Dacquoise — made to recipes from one or the other of Julia Child’s Mastering treatises.

¶ Compline: What to do with old Christmas cards? Ten ideas.

(more…)

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

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

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

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

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

(more…)

Swanky New York townhouse? Not a bit of it. It’s Joe.My.God‘s post office.

When I was in law school — I turned thirty during first year — Louis Auchincloss was my model. A successful Wall Street attorney, he cranked out novels that were taken seriously, however grudgingly, by the literary establishment. In the event, I would not become a successful lawyer, and I would not crank out novels. But he remained my model just the same.

¶ Larissa MacFarquhar on Louis Auchincloss, in The New Yorker.

This could easily be one of those blog entries that are all about how the writer has nothing to say, &c.

An update on “What I’m Reading” used to occupy this space. Books and reading have so extensively pervaded The Daily Blague that it seems fatuous to devote an entry to what turns out, week after week, to be a list of books that I am not reading. I want to read them, I mean to read them — but I’m not reading them. I’m reading lots of other things, things which, for one reason or another, don’t seem to fall under the rubric “What I’m Reading.” All the books on the Morning Read list, for example. And all those magazines!

And now, there’s the Daily Office. This new variety of entry is still very much in the beta stage, so I’m not calling attention to it — I’m just writing it and seeing what happens. The Daily Office is a journal that I plan to spruce up with lots of links, something that The Daily Blague has been short of lately. These weekday journal entries can hold up to eight sub-entries, each one tagged with the name of a “Canonical Hour” — more about which some other time.  Because the meat of each entry lies below the jump, it ought to be very easy to see at a glance if the entry has been updated since one’s last visit to the site.

Meanwhile, our look at this week’s Book Review:

¶ Of Crime and the River.

In the past, I’ve made a point of not reading novels by the same writer in succession. A pair of reasons as stoutly interconnected as Scylla and Charybdis warn me against it. First, one wants to avoid the risk of burnout. Most writers, like most people, have little characteristics that, while they may be heartening to re-connect with after a spell of absence, may also become taxing and tiresome with prolonged exposure. The second reason is the opposite of the first: one wants to space out the goodies. If an author doesn’t cloy, he or she is much too rare a catch to squander all at once.

But I’m sailing through these perils at the moment, already embarked on Brian Morton’s most recent novel, Breakable You. Two weeks ago, I read Starting Out in the Evening. Last week, it was A Window Across the River. Although they share the writer’s scrupulously understated prose, lightly seasoned with very dry wit, the novels are tonally quite different, and far from having too much of a good thing, I was so curious to see what the latest novel was like that I don’t think I could have concentrated on anything else. (Mr Morton’s first novel, The Dylanist, is out of print. Copies are available through Alibris, but I’m holding out, at least for the moment, for a conforming reissue by Harvest Books.)

In any case A Window Across the River is one novel that all modern-day fiction writers and their readers really must read, because it addresses, squarely and intelligently, the problem of authorial appropriation: whose life is this, anyway?

¶ A Window Across the River.

This week’s article isn’t online yet, for which I apologize. Christopher Leinberger looks at the forecast for suburbia, particularly the more recent, far-flung areas of sprawl, which are typically remote from long-established lines of public transportation. If you’d asked me what I expected two years ago, I’d have pinned change on rising energy costs. It looks, though, as though what began as the “subprime” mortgage crisis has actually tilted the trends.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

¶ Christopher S Leinberger on the Future of Suburbia, in The Atlantic.

In desperation, I consider a novel method of shelving books.

Five books: Isabel of Burgundy, by Aline S Taylor; The Father of All Things, by Tom Bissell; How to Read Montaigne, by Terence Cave; David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death; and A Window Across the River, by Brian Morton. What I’m really reading — devouring — is the Morton. I am almost certain that anybody who enjoys reading this blog would get a kick out of Mr Morton’s novels about bookish New Yorkers. Just before Nora, the heroine, has “the Talk” with her boyfriend, Benjamin, he disappoints her by telling her that he neglected a favor that he promised to do for her ailing aunt. The reason? He was distracted by a call from a woman who is an important character in Mr Morton’s previous novel, Starting Out in the Evening.

“That was Heather Wolfe. She used to work for Tina Brown at Talk magazine. I asked her what she’s up to now, and she said she’s helping launch a new magazine. But she was very mysterious about it. She told me to send her some clips. Maybe Tina’s starting something new. Wouldn’t that be amazing — to be writing for Tina?”

He’d never met Tina Brown, but like everyone else in the publishing world, he referred to her by her first name. She was like Madonna for intellectuals.

Meanwhile, a not very intellectual “political” issue of the Book Review.

¶ Politics, Real and Imagined.

The Neue Galerie, seen from the edge of Central Park.

This Monday morning finds me feeling a bit less behind schedule than I’ve been for weeks. One of these days, I’ll be able to reclaim the portions of my brain that are currently stuck on (a) WiFi signals in my plastered apartment and (b) the sometimes puzzling interactions of my new 8-gig Nano and the Klipsch RoomGroove. It’s time for a new desktop, too; the current one is almost four years old, and it has recently begun a decline into decrepitude that, for once, I am not going to meet with denial.

The writer’s world so lovingly captured in Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening, in contrast, is sweetly innocent of computers, and of technical problems generally — at least those not involving an IV drip.

¶ Starting Out in the Evening.

On Fifth Avenue, literally.

It’s Friday morning, but there’s not a single tempting movie showing in New York City. That I haven’t already seen, that is. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I’ve been advised, is mushy and sentimental in a way that its true-life subject would have hated. As for 27 Dresses, which is showing, conveniently, right across the street, no one I know has actually seen it. This leaves No Country For Old Men, which I’m not sure I could sit through. Que faire? Meanwhile:

¶ James B Stewart on Stephen A Schwarzman, in The New Yorker.