Another housebound day. The sun came out between five and six, but by then it was too late to run errands. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow will be nice. But — (more…)

Very timidly, without calling a lot of attention to what I’m doing (Tantara Tantara Zing Boom!), a new feature. I’d have introduced it two weeks ago, but I haven’t been able to find a banner image that suited.

¶ Chicken Thighs Normande. A recipe from Classic Home Cooking, one of my five or six everyday cookbooks. Disaster! (more…)

I used to feel guilty about not having read any of George Orwell’s books. Surely it was virtually illiterate of me not to have read the famous nightmares, Animal Farm and 1984, whether I liked them or not. The three accounts of unlucky life in the Thirties — Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia — seemed always to be highly regarded. Not have to read Orwell was yet another sign of my frivolous dilletantism. I felt bad about it, as I say, but not bad enough to alter my reading pile.

In fact, of course, I’d read a great deal of Orwell, here and there, mostly but not exclusively in magazines, over forty-odd years — and that, I think, is what stanched any desire for more. I didn’t think much about it; if I didn’t much care for Orwell’s way of putting things, I didn’t regard it as harmful. Orwell fell into a zone that’s populated by many Twentieth-Century writers for whose work I don’t have much use: I call it Dorm Lit. Dorm Lit appeals to bright, adolescent Prince Valiants who don’t — can’t — yet know much of anything about the world beyond their own experience and who are therefore easily roused by tales of injustice. Lacking a knightly nature, I arranged the rights and wrongs of this world along a different pole. I couldn’t have told you what that was until I read James Woods’s appraisal of Orwell in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “A Fine Rage.” Here it is, in one sentence:

Modern life should be simpler and harder, he argues in this vein, not softer and more complex, and “in a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc, etc.” Note that “etc” — there speaks the puritan, reserving the right to stretch his prohibitions, at cranky whim.

There has not been a lot of oxygen, until fairly recently, for the idea that life is, unavoidably, “more complex,” and I was well into middle age before it was clear to me that people who mistrust complexity are usually rather stupid about it. What they are usually talking about, as is clear from Orwell’s little list of things that wouldn’t be missed, is the manifold. True complexity isn’t even reached. Orwell’s targets are, for the most part, modern appliances, and most of them are far more complex today than they were when Orwell took pot shots at them. Once upon a time, the home telephone had only one function: facilitating the two-party conversation. Now it has been merged with the “gramophone” and the daily newspaper, all because thousands of users made ever-more complex demands upon it. Orwell is very simply the dimwit who asks — or who used to ask — what on earth he would do with a personal computer: he would have been in no position to pass judgment upon it. By the same token, I am unable to come out for or against any item on his list, except perhaps machine guns. Even “tinned food” has its place in the best kitchens.

The simple life appeals to everyone now and then, but to some people it assumes the sanctity of a moral obligation. Occasionally, somebody writes powerfully about the beauty of doing without, and the simple life begins to look fashionable. But it can never actually be fashionable, because fashion of any kind is entirely a matter of sifting small differences in search of new ideas. It short it is inherently complex. (Without the stylistic or intellectual discipline that always informs fashion, it would be merely complicated.) Fashions may mean nothing to those who don’t care about them, but they tire out their exponents, who, at the end of the day, demand a soft — or at least a softly-lighted — environment, and who, after a certain age at least, are unlikely to seek out the “harder” just for its own sake.

Injustice itself is rarely, anymore, a matter of the brute violence that disgusts youthful minds. It stems more freely from simplifications, from failures to understand that what works in this situation does not work in that one. Our ideas of property rights have been almost hopelessly fouled by the refusal to admit kinds or degrees of such rights. We don’t even acknowledge the most obvious characteristic of ownership: the right to preserve or to destroy. What we own is the right to deal with certain things — things that belong to us — more or less violently. While the right to preserve is usually but not always a good thing, the right to destroy is certainly more difficult to assess. Treating them as the same kind of right is stupid — but what do you expect from idealists who disapprove of private property itself, or from those who are backed, by opposition, into holding that private property is as sacred as life itself.

Mr Wood’s summary of Orwell’s thinking turns out to be an uncannily accurate negative of my own, but there is one other aspect of it that I’d like to note.

So the question hangs over Orwell, as it does over so many well-heeled revolutionaries. Did he want to level up society or level it down? … A similarly telling moment appears in Orwell’s review of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). There was much in the book to agree with, Orwell said. … But Hayek’s faith in capitalist competition was overzealous. “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.” Not, you notice, that somebody loses them — which would mean raising those people up. Somebody wins them, and that cannot be allowed.

I am a passionate leveler-up. I would like everyone to have access to my softer, more complex way of life.

The weather turned colder today, but I was too sick with spring fever not to spend the morning reading the Times and The Economist by an open window, drinking cup after cup of Kona. (The Kona was in honor of Kathleen’s birthday, which we’ve been celebrating for a while but which actually did fall today.) Presently my distress could not be overlooked. The week’s fatigue seemed to have given way to some kind of genuine illness. There was, for example, a frightening burp that very nearly exploded into something much worse. By six o’clock I back in bed, so cold that only a flannel nightshirt would do.

By eight, I was back up again, reading in my chair — the window firmly closed. I wanted very badly to read The Song Is You, Arthur Phillips’s deeply etched new novel, but I couldn’t; I’d have risked a new but, I think, very practical rule. It is a bad idea to finish a novel before I’ve written up the one that I read just before it. The one just before it was The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li. The trick to writing about The Vagrants is to convey something of the enormous excitement of the book’s many narrative strands, a task that most readers would dismiss as bound to fail if told too much about the novel’s period and setting. The trick to writing The Vagrants itself seems to have been to capture the interest that people take in their own lives. Not to describe the interest, but to represent it, with all the force of a Renaissance illusion. By comparison, even a writer as discreet as Jane Austen seems to fill every page of her novels trumpeting her own ideas about her characters’ choices. Ms Li would seem to have learned a great deal from cinematic storytelling, but with the difference that the existential quality of five or six is completely realized, from an interior beyond the camera’s reach.

Since I couldn’t read fiction, then, I turned to Postwar, Tony Judt’s magnum opus, which has been out for nearly four years. Better late than never? Clearly: the book is indispensable. I don’t know when I began reading it; I’d like to say, “last year,” but I’m not so sure. I’m quite near the end, gratified to read views about European affairs that I almost always share.

And I read a lot of magazines: Atlantic, Harper’s, L’Express. I can’t claim to have read the French periodical, but the photographs are always great, and it was nice to recognize Bernadette Chirac without having to read the legend. There was also an amusing photograph of the Mayor of Paris, Bernard Delanoë looking, frankly, rather fishy. Perhaps he looked fishy because I was sitting beneath an ornate tapestry of the city’s armorials. You’ll remember that these center on a small boat on the wavy seas. The words “non mergitur” were strikingly legible. What I gleaned from the story is that M Delanoë has been AWOL, sulking about his failure to wrest the PS from the Royals. Don’t take my word for it, though; I didn’t really read anything.

Wouldn’t it be droll if Mr Delanoë switched jobs with Michael Bloomberg? Bloomberg in Paris — it’s worthy of Offenbach at least. Imagine Sarko’s nail-biting despair — I hear a choir of double-basses, right out of Otello. And then there would be the out-of-town picnic (“O Beau Pays de Touraine”) in which Carla Bruni (accompanied by Winterhaltrian bevies) approaches the New Yorker with rapprochemdent in mind — only to find that she has never known what love is, until now! “(“Mon beau Bonaparte, fais de moi ta Beauharnais!”)

I’ve been tempted to write about Mayor Bloomberg’s machinations vis-à-vis the MTA rescue plan, currently blocked by six troglodytic Dems from the boroughs whose constituents will eventually have to be persuaded of the necessity of tolling intra-city bridges. But that would violate another new rule: no writing about stories that haven’t come to conclusion (“Bridges to be Tolled!”)

Which also means staring down the temptation to write about my health.

Here’s hoping that you had a happy Easter, if Easter was on your calendar. For us, the holiday sometimes coincides, within a week or less, with Kathleen’s birthday — also the birthday of the terrific husband of a Brearley classmate, whose own birthday falls about a week earlier. The cluster of birthdays makes a springtime party look like a very good idea. And the end of Lent is a favorable development for menu planning.

And it was a lovely party, if I do say so myself. I kept things simple: two classic ragoûts (a navarin printanier and a blanquette de veau, the latter with the Upper West Side inflection of a dose of dill) and a cake from Greenberg’s. I also made a trio of hors d’oeuvres, which in the event nobody touched, knowing that dinner would probably not leave anybody hungry. Still, it was about time that I made tapenade again, and it was good to taste a more recent addition to the repertoire, salpicon de crevettes. As for the third, it had been so long since I made what Kathleen calls “ham roll-ups” that I might as well never have made them before. More about them some other time. As I say, nobody touched them, except for Kathleen and me.

Giving a party, though — it had been a while. I honestly can’t recall the last time that I prepared anything more ambitious than a dinner for four. (A steak dinner at that.) Not that I’d forgotten how; I got to the “riding a bicyle” stage in the kitchen about fifteen years ago. It was, rather, a question of how to fit the cooking in with my ramped-up ambitions here.

So I gave myself a day off. Today. I went to the movies with Quatorze. We saw Faubourg 36, a French Mrs Henderson Presents that exacted an additonal gallon of happy tears. We had lunch at the Chinatown Brasserie. Then we went to the Strand, so that I could buy a hard-to-get exhibition catalogue. That’s where I left my glen plaid cap. Quatorze, who lives nearby, went back later, to try to retrieve it, but it was too late. At home, I sat in front of an open window while I caught up with feeds. This added a sore throat to my worries.

Feeling tired now, at the age of sixty-one, is not what feeling tired used to be. Now, it’s frightening — physically. It comes with a vivid sensory image of being buried alive, not in a coffin, but in deep fatigue. Fatigue so chronic that it becomes invisible. I don’t feel tired in this mode; I just get very stupid. I absent-mindedly leave my cap at the Strand. A bit more tired, and I’d absent-mindedly walk in front of a bus.

There are no buses in the apartment, though, so fatality is unlikely. Amazingly, I haven’t dropped anything during cleanup. The apartment is almost back to normal. Tomorrow’s Daily Office is up. There’s a little bit of navarin left over. But I’ve saved the best news for last: now that Lent is over, Kathleen can eat as many of Greenberg’s chocolate cookies as she likes. She can even eat just one!

¶ Matins: Matt Richtel and Bob Tedeschi filed an interesting report at the Times on Sunday: people will pay for apps for their phone that they can download onto their computers for free. And guess what. The mobile services collect nickels and dimes without breaking a sweat. In other words: Micropayments are here.

¶ Lauds: Matt Trueman is looking for young critics — in the West End. Where are they?

Let us remember that Kenneth Tynan was 25 when he took up the post in 1952 that is to be vacated by de Jongh, before graduating to the Observer only two years later. And, it was a 26-year-old Michael Billington that first reviewed for the Times in 1965.

¶ Prime: “How Not to Photograph” — a series of drolly incisive blog entries by British photographer Colin Pantall. (via  kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Did Giampaolo Giuliani, a technician at an Italian nuclear physics lab, predict the catastrophic quake at L’Aquila, or was his announcement just a fluke? (Remember radon?) (via  The Morning News)

¶ Sext: For a few years in the mid-Eighties, I worked in an office at 1 Broadway. For me, it was the acme of workplaces. Photos from Scouting NYC — not surprisingly, Scout sees things that I missed.

¶ Nones: A lucid analysis by journalist Asli Aydintasbas of the knack that American leaders, up to but not including President Obama, have had for getting Turkey wrong. (Hint: talk of “moderate Islam” irritates everybody.)

¶ Vespers: It used to be that publishers printed books. Ancient history — except at the most ancient continually-operating publisher in the world, the Cambridge University Press, founded by Henry VIII in 1534. The lithographic CUP is losing £2,000,000 a year.

¶ Compline: It’s a first, all right, and I hope that it lasts. I wish it were the last. The Vermont legislature has overridden a gubernatorial veto to enact same-sex marriage. No judicial activism required this time!

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Looking through a catalogue this afternoon, in search of storage solutions to my CD/DVD situation, I was amused to espy, on the lower shelf of a bedside table, in a sunny, colorful, and quite unstudious room, a harmonious stack of seven pistachio-jacketed Loeb Classics. Greek, in other words; not Latin (which would be raspberry). 

The picture is funny and not funny at the same time. It’s not funny because only one customer in umpteen thousands will appreciate how preposterous it would be (the funny part) to keep seven Loeb classics in an insouciant pile at one’s bedside. Two might be impressive — the Iliad, or the Odyssey. Even four would not be entirely grotesque (Pausanias?). But seven — seven has got to be Plutarch. The rule for readers of Plutarch in the Twenty-First Century is that perusing more than one volume must take place at a library table, not in bed. You can just hear the lucky spouse: “Okay, they’re green! They’re effing lovely! Now turn out the light!”

It’s possible that even the photo shoot’s designer wasn’t in on the joke. “I found this gorgeous color on a shelf at the Union League Club, when a client took me to lunch. They’re so old!” Wonderfully eliding the books’ arguable age with the indisputable antiquity of their contents. They’re so old, they didn’t even have books back then!

My favorite catalogue these days is Levenger’s collection of “Tools For Serious Readers.” Readers’ porn, I call it. I do not exaggerate! Levenger promises, literally, to make writing into an erotic experience. A page of fancy pens is headed: “Sublime designs to spark your creativity.” How about this:

Prepare to be more productive. Know what scholars and scribes have known for two thousand years when you experience for yourself how inclined work surfaces can help you read, write and work more productively…

Scholars and scribes! Two thousand years! We all know what “know” means, especially in two thousand year-old contexts! Even better:

“And that has made all the difference.” This line, the denouement of Robert Frost’s celebrated poem “The Road Not Taken,” is an appropriate introduction to the Morgan Note Card Traveler. Its three lengthwise pockets offer room to tuck inside your to-dos, cards, schedules, photos and brainstorming notes. At back is a display stand, which folds flat via hidden magnets…

All the hidden magnets in the world are not going to inspire another poem as pithy and beloved as Frost’s.

But that’s not the gravamen of my complaint. I don’t want my money back because my “L-Tech writing instrument” — although it did indeed allow me to “carve words with precision” — didn’t inspire me to pen the long-awaited sequel to The Great Gatsby. No! I did pen the sequel to The Great Gatsby, and it’s terrific; I’ve got it right here! But, you know what? I didn’t even realize that I was writing with the L-Tech. I was completely unconscious of the reams of “top quality pads for professionals” that I covered with Scribner-worthy prose! I might just as well have used foolscap!

What’s the point of bundling my work in a Circa Master Folio if I don’t look out the window when I’m working, much less hope that I’ll “expand my horizons”? Where’s that tingle of writing masterpieces with edgy equipment? Here I went to all this trouble to do justice to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, and I never noticed that the wife had replaced my door-on-sawhorses arrangement with a Rumination Station!

I never knew!

Last weekend, it was books. This weekend, it was movies. But you don’t want to hear about my storage sagas. While Kathleen was packing for Coral Gables last night, we watched Laura, simply because, of the 220 DVDs that were taken down from shelves, removed from plastic boxes, and slipped into album sleeves, Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic was the one to hit a snag in my consciousness.

In the middle of Laura, Kathleen made the most astonishing remark. “I always confuse this with All About Eve.” She proceeded to offer a plausible explanation. You have to admit: it could have been called All About Laura. In any case, we had to watch Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1951 classic next — not that either one of us was awake for the ending.

Kathleen’s slight confusion must have thrown my antennae into overfeel, because one of Eve’s best-known scenes struck me in an entirely novel way. (Novel for me, I hasten to add.) It was the scene in which Margot Channing shows up very late for a reading with Miss Casswell, Addison DeWitt’s protégée. Having encountered Addison in the lobby, she enters the theatre perfectly well aware that Eve has stood in for her, giving a reading of the part of Cora that was full of “fire and music.” Her lover, Bill, and her playwright, Lloyd, behave as though it’s unreasonable (ie feminine) of her to be upset about her younger understudy’s encroachment.

What was new last night was that I saw the men’s response as a pretense, as a boys’ own club maneuver to wink away the bad faith of having let Eve read. They must have known that Margot would be furious when she found out, and they probably ought to have seen to it that there was nothing for Margot to find out. Instead, they indulged the pleasure of indulging a pretty young lady, and now they demonize their victim, framing her as an “hysterical woman.” When Bill “realizes” that Margot must have been wound up by Addison, the reptilian critic is saddled with the moral blame, but at the cost of Margot’s reputation for self-control.

Even more interesting was the aftertaste of grasping that, in order for the foregoing to be true, the two men must understand a thing or two about women, instead of being the clueless dudes that they pretend to be throughout the initial phase of Margot’s meltdown.

As for Laura, if I didn’t see anything altogether new, I was battered once again by the film’s modern raciness. Despite its thoroughgoing theatricality, Laura is every inch an adult feature — freakishly so, for the times.

¶ Matins: Regarding prisons in America: close ’em, but keep paying the guards and other workers as if the prison were operational. Count on attrition;  break the cycle of industrial corrections! (Oh, you’ve already started?)

¶ Lauds: Jaime Oliver has won a prize for inventing his Silent Drum — which is indeed silent itself but which triggers, if that’s the word, computer-generated sounds.

¶ Prime: Thought for the day: Why Twitter? I still haven’t a clue, but The Elegant Esthete thumbnails five attractors that, for many people, make Twitter irresistible. Only two of the five speak to me, so maybe that’s my answer.

¶ Tierce: Here’s hoping that a rather self-righteous AIGFG exec’s letter of resignation is duly scrutinized. Jake DeSantis claims that he had nothing to do with credit-default swaps. Is that possible?

¶ Sext: Kim Severson and Julia Moskin, colleagues at the Times’s Dining desk, find themselves thrown into competition*, to produce the better $50 dinner for six (wine not included). Ms Moskin’s entrée really appeals to me.

¶ Nones: The government of Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek has fallen — not because of the economy, but because two members of the Chamber of Deputies defected from his coalition “for ideological or personal reasons.”

¶ Vespers: Vestal McIntyre’s novel, Lake Overturn, is about to appear. Pre-order it now!

¶ Compline: David Pescovitz writes about authenticity at Good: DIY funerals are better, and it helps if you make the coffin yourself (it’s easy!).

(more…)

A few weeks ago, I retired the old black Nano, replacing it with an even sleeker new 16G model. All the playlists that were on the old unit were loaded onto the new one, and at that very moment the friend to whom I was thinking of giving the retired Nano — loaded with operas for her —  called me up and invited me to lunch.

Now, my friend happens to have completely sidestepped the age of the CD. She decided to stop her technological advance at cassette tapes. We all shook our heads, but there was nothing for it — she refused to take one of our extra CD players.

But she never had any time to work up a case against iPods or Nanos, so I was able to take her by surprise, with my old black number and a nice Klipsch iGroove to go with it.

We were having a glass of wine before lunch, I insisting that my friend would master the controls of the Nano in no time, she just as sure that she’d never figure it out — but quite pleased with the noise that Un Ballo in Maschera was making in the other room. Suddenly I found that I wasn’t paying attention to our conversation. “Amelia doesn’t appear in Act I, does she?” But we went on talking.

It was only when she left the room to put lunch on the table that I went to take a look at the Nano. OMG! I’d forgotten to disable the shuffle option!

That’s what both the old and new black Nanos were dedicated to: playlists of jazz, Broadway, fado, lieder, opera arias, you name it. The one thing all the lists had in common is that they were meant to be shuffled.

Not so good with, say, the Ring cycle — also on the reloaded unit.

Just trying to imagine how I would have solved this problem over the phone, hours later and still full of my good deeds, still brings a cold sweat to my brow.

Waiting to hear Just heard! that Kathleen has landed safely at Raleigh-Durham — her plane’s wings required de-icing at LaGuardia (!) — and I’m off to the movies (the new Paul Rudd thing) with a side-errand to the storage unit, a detour that I’d cut if it weren’t for Quatorze’s help. I’m on the edge of a cold, blah, blah, blah.

The Week at Portico: Still nothing in the way of a book page — although of course I had a look at the Book Review. And I wrote up a play, the hilarious 39 Steps, and a movie, the very non-hilarious Wrestler.

For a moment, I thought I’d thrown away my housekeys. Down the garbage chute, that is. I knew that I’d tossed my copy of the Zoë Heller novel that I am reading with the greatest avidity. In an abstracted moment, I was confused by a tumble of packing peanuts on my way out the door.

I suspected, too, that I’d thrown away today’s mail. The book could be replaced easily enough, and the keys turned out to be hanging in the lock. But I thought I’d better not just let the mail go without making an attempt to retrieve it. I had no idea whether this would be possible. There used to be a compactor — surely nothing could be withdrawn from that.

Down in the basement, whither I was directed by Dominic, the doorman, I found my refuse, lying in a hopper in plain view but out of reach. Pieces of the mail were there anyway. I asked one of the older porters, who happened to be standing around and who happens not to be Anglophone, for help. He enlisted a younger porter whom I see all the time. The younger porter wanted me to be helped, but not by himself. He directed a storm of Spanish at his colleague, who resisted with equal determination.

Eventually, though, the garbage was gone through. A few times, we had to stand back, as if an express were barreling through. We’d hear the rattling in the chute, and then the garbage, some of it not in bags, would come flying into the hopper. At one point, I covered my eyes, because bits of glass seemed to be flying everywhere.

When I felt that I’d recouped everything that hadn’t been rendered soggy by stray egg yolk, I tipped the men very generously and went straight to Barnes & Noble — for another copy of The Believers.

Once again, I was up late last night — being, once again, very productive. Tossing piles of magazines isn’t ideal work for one in the morning, but better late than you-kn0w-when. I crawled into bed with Lizzie Eustace, shortly after two, and read a few chapters with great interest, almost as if I were discovering Trollope for the first time. Worried that I might be waking myself up, I closed the book and then my eyes.

When Kathleen got up this morning, therefore, I did not. So I didn’t notice her wandering around the bedroom, half-dressed, for nearly an hour, unable to decide on a blouse. I woke up only when she realized that what she needed was a day off. Indeed: she has worked for twenty-seven of the last thirty days. She could handle her one-o’clock conference call from home.

So I decided not to go to the movies. I’m not so keen to see a movie, while staying in the neighborhood, that I’m willing to sit through He’s Just Not That Into You. The stipulation about staying in the neighborhood was important: we have theatre tickets tonight — The 39 Steps, finally — and I have a long list of local errands to run.

The Week at Portico: No book this week, I’m afraid — but I have a very good excuse, really I do! I read a novel in manuscript last week, and on Monday I shared my thoughts with the writer. Believe me: writing book reports is easier. (Okay, okay; I don’t write book reports.)

Here are links to this week’s Book Review review, and to two new Lively Arts pages, Ruined (MTC) and Two Lovers (2929 Productions).

¶ Matins: As a big believer in the effectiveness of no-fly zones, I agree with this proposal for dealing with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

¶ Lauds: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest lady in the West End? The answer? A whole deck of baseball cards, leading with playwright Bola Agbaje as “The New Voice” but with plenty of room for “Queen Bee” and “Eternal Siren.”  (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Over the weekend I discovered a constellation of Web sites that seem to be keeping the preppie flame burning. The Trad, for example…

¶ Tierce: A caption from the print edition: “Similarities (and differences) exist in David Axelrod’s relationship with the current president and Karl Rove’s with the past.”

¶ Sext: Great news: Chuck Norris talks of running for President of Texas. (via Joe.My.God.)

¶ Nones: Good news (sort of): Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, insists that the collision that killed his wife, and sent him to the hospital, had to have been an accident.

¶ Vespers: At Emdashes, Martin Schneider has a go at cutting Ian McEwan’s reputation down to size. What might have been an irritating exercise is rather worth reading.

¶ Compline: Now that the “Consumer Society” is on its deathbed, it’s safe for critics to take hitherto unfashionable pokes at sacred cows, and Jonathan Jones, at the Guardian, has his needle out.   (more…)

If you had any idea how much stuff had to be moved to make it possible to put that lamp in the corner behind my desk, you would say, “RJ! You have too much junk!”

You’re probably saying it anyway.

I don’t know how I came into possession of the stegosaurus jigsaw puzzle. I mean, why; I’m sure that I bought it. When Ari Newell visited, a while back, I thought it might amuse him (“This is your idea of a puzzle, mon ami?” the young man, then aged four, would have quizzed), but I couldn’t find it. It was out in plain sight, but I couldn’t see it because I have too much junk.

I can’t let it go.

The synergy between The Daily Blague and Portico fascinates me, I like to think, as much as it would if the sites belonged to someone else. So it’s a good thing that I don’t buy everything that I like! Still, there’s a deep satisfaction in watching the various parts click together — when they do.

The Week at Portico:  From now on, leads to new pages at Portico will appear in a roundup on Friday. This week’s Book Review review, for example. A book that I’ve written up myself: The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Last Friday’s movie, Entre les murs. And, finally, for the first time: Paul Taylor Dance Company. I’ve gathered these notices into one convenient entry so that you won’t have to bookmark them for weekend reading.

Housekeeping Note:    Oops! I don’t know when I did it, but I managed to fold the Images folder at Portico‘s server into another folder — and I have no idea how to undo the mistake. That’s why most images at Portico won’t show.

That’s “most” as in “older pages.” Recently, I’ve created Images subfolders for each of the site’s branches, and that is how I am going to “fix” this problem — by updating the site to conform with current standards and practices. “I was going to do it anyway.”

Quatorze (shown at right), alarmed by unexpected presence of gangster-level garden ornaments on pricey Upper East Side real estate (not to mention in such close proximity to Museum!), challenges Apollonian wannabe to pop apricot into his open mouth.

We broke the “Never on Sunday” rule to take in the Paul Taylor Dance Company this afternoon. Better to say that I broke the rule when I bought the tickets in January. All I knew when I bought the tickets was that I wanted to see “Arden Court.” I couldn’t have told you why. It may have been a snapshot of the dance that was printed in a brochure several years ago; it may have been something that somebody said. According to this year’s brochure, “Arden Court” would be given three times, and the other two dates were for one reason or another impossible. So I broke the rule against doing things on Sundays and bought tickets for this afternoon’s performance. The result was not repentance, but a new rule.

Once a quarter, more or less, we’ll break the “Never on Sunday” rule and go to some matinee or other. Sunday matinees are usually at three in the afternoon; that leaves plenty of time for a late lunch — and for box-office crawling. Here’s how box-office crawling works:

Kathleen fills a few dozen large Post-It notes with information about plays that we want to see. (There are lots at the moment, more than we can afford to see.) Then she organizes the notes. (more…)

There are people who would never have accumulated the stuff that has piled up in our apartment over the years. I envy them.

It’s not that there wouldn’t be fifty times as much stuff if it weren’t for regular culls. But culling has never meant keeping the increase to zero. Until now.

Guess what I found! (more…)

It’s late, and I ought to be in bed — I know it. But I can’t leave my desk! It’s like sitting in front of a Christmas tress on Christmas Eve! It’s also like sitting in the middle of Times Square. The light given off by the new 22″ monitor on the left is almost glaring.

What I can’t get over is the look of this Web log on the long monitor. It’s as though it finally looks like what I always had in mind. When I finally couldn’t stand not taking a picture, though, I was reading Tea, Lemon, Old Books, a terrific site that I discovered only today. I thought about taking another batch of pictures, but it’s late, and I ought to be in bed.