¶ Matins: For my part, I’m willing to trust the president to keep his new helicopters reasonably simple and expensive-extras free. Either that, Mr Obama, or please just don’t fly in helicopters! “Roger, pay the two dollars!”

¶ Lauds: This story might appear to have more to do with business cycles than the arts, but it’s a spectacular — and spectacularly frightening — story about Level Zero of the arts, which is: the city. Dubai is just a lot of buildings.

¶ Prime: My good friend, Liz Tilsley Garcia, has climbed behind the wheel again. NOT REALLY! It’s just another sensational road trip story.

At the time, S. owned a very practical Honda to get back and forth to work. I had an equally practical Toyota and our commuting needs were well covered. However, the cars were a bit too practical. Thus, they were basically boring and totally unsexy. S. and I shared a love of driving too fast and somewhat recklessly. Our practical cars were just no fun for that sort of activity. But we didn’t have lots of money to throw around and our jobs weren’t particularly high paying. So practical it was.

Happily, someone says the magic word: “BMW.”

¶ Tierce: A word to avoid during the current economic breakdown is “recovery.” We don’t want to go back to the good old days. Richard Florida tackles home-ownership, once the centerpiece of American economic democracy.

The housing bubble was the ultimate expression, and perhaps the last gasp, of an economic system some 80 years in the making, and now well past its “sell-by” date. The bubble encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real-estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl, which is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy. And not least, it created a workforce too often stuck in place, anchored by houses that cannot be profitably sold, at a time when flexibility and mobility are of great importance.

¶ Sext: Phil T Rich complains to Clyde Haberman that the new president is making things tough for the Billionaires For Bush.

“He’s difficult to satirize,” Mr. Boyd said. “He’s very self-aware. He calls himself out on stuff. He’s able to leaven his own heaviness.” Self-awareness, Mr. Boyd said, was not a conspicuous trait of the previous president.

¶ Nones: With the onset of tough times, will Russian familiarity with same breed docility or protest? The smart money, according to The Independent, is on docility.

“However bad things get, ordinary people won’t become political,” says the editor of a newspaper based in Ekaterinburg, the nearest big city to Asbest. “The women will grow potatoes to see them through the hard times, and the men will drink more vodka, and that’s it.”

But there’s smarter money: Garry Kasparov.

“People have had a stable life and still think that things will get better again,” says Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion turned opposition politician. “I expect the first waves of protests to start in earnest in March or April.”

¶ Vespers: Mark Greif’s essay on Reborn, the first installment of Susan Sontag’s  notebooks to be published by her son, David Rieff, has startled me like a sudden ray of sun pouring across a dark vault. Sontag’s thought has always felt familiar, but for the first time I have the sense of seeing it. 

Sontag made you acknowledge that she was more intelligent than you. That cost little enough. She then compelled you to admit that she felt more than you did. Her inner life was richer, even if she didn’t fully disclose it. She responded to art more vividly and completely. Not only her sense, but her sensibility, was grander.

That’s the familiar part.

¶ Compline: What if the organization chart were turned upside-down — and the managers were charged with supporting the workers? That’s what good bosses have always done, or tried to do, but it flies in the face of the authoritarian bent of work. Aaron Swartz walks us through the well-run team. Approval plays a tiny, almost invisible role. In effect, you approve a worker when you hire him — subject to learning that you ought to fire him. There is no in-between. (via kottke.org)

(more…)

Having had a big day yesterday — by which regular readers will understand that I was out of the house for most of the sunlit hours, and a few of the dark ones as well — I was not in the mood for Valentine’s Day this morning. But I wanted to be. We needed a touch of fireworks. Kathleen has been working crazy hours; meanwhile, I’ve been clipping and pruning my life to the point at which, should I care to do so, I ought to be able to turn out a slightly gala dinner.

Lugging the onus of Valentine’s Day was entirely my idea. Kathleen, God love her, really does discharge the whole big-day thing with a morning kiss. “Happy birthday, dear!” (She doesn’t say “dear,” but never you mind what she does say.) Having grown up in a fautissimo comme-il-faut household, Kathleen is not big on observance. She also knows that there’s no danger of my forgetting birthdays. Having been born on the Epiphany, I never forget the names of all three kings, and what they gave baby Jesus. Kathleen long ago gave up trying to keep up with Balthazar et al.

Being Balthazar, I can tell you that the coolest thing on Valentine’s Day is coming up with a knockout dinner that isn’t really a whole lot of work to prepare. I’m always ready to lean on our fine library of porcelain, crystal, linen, and other accessories; without going to much trouble at all I can turn out a celebratory dinner even if it wasn’t a particularly memorable one. As Kathleen well knows: she kept asking for chicken pot pie (from Eli’s). She wanted to keep it simple — being married to the cook and all.

Notwithstanding, I settled on Escalopes de veau cauchoise pretty early. It’s an American dish, really: veal scallops in Granny Smith sauce. Okay, the sauce includes a bucket of cream and a flambé of Calvados. Not to mention the fact that I got the recipe from Elizabeth David, hardly a Yankophile. The asparagus that accompanied the veal behaved like well brought-up girls who, although they were expecting butter, were only too happy to fall into the apple cream that spilled off the veal.

That was the main course — the only one that I knew about when I left the house to do the shopping. It never occurred to me that I could count on Agata & Valentina for my first course and my dessert — both of them heart-shaped! Imagine! Tomato-pasta cheese-filled heart-shaped-ravioli! Who could resist? And a heart-shaped “chocolate silk cake.” As for the latter, all I know is that, having had a slice: major joltage.

As for the ravioli first course, I made a simple Alfredo cream, which turned out to be just the thing to point up its virtues. I had thought that the tomato was just for color, to make the ravioli red.  Not so! And the cheese filling jiggled nicely with my parmesan-laden cream.

It’s a terrible thing to find out that your wife is having an affair at a lovely dinner that you have prepared for her yourself, as I can only imagine from Kathleen’s distraction during dinner. While I was thinking Valentine’s Day and cooking and whatnot, Kathleen was thinking beading. She was, in fact, making a new chain for my Paul Smith reading glasses. Her mind was totally engaged on diameters — threads, needles, and perforations. She had no small talk at the table. Her politeness was exquisite, but it was clear that few eight-year-olds have been more eager to escape the table and get back to what they were doing.

As the cook in the family, I forget what it’s like to be called away from the important work that you’re involved with because it’s “supper time.” But no matter how distracted Kathleen is by the job in hand, she never forgets that, in order to make dinner, I put aside my own work hours earlier. That’s one of the reasons why she wanted pot pie.

There is not a happier husband in the world. I have reason to believe that the feeling is mutual.

This essay is dedicated to faithful aiders and abettors Flather and Tindley. Trust is not only the name of their bank.

How was your weekend? Ours was very, very warm and loverly. Aside from an hour or so yesterday, Kathleen was at home all weekend — and so was I.

Ordinarily, Kathleen has her hair washed on Saturday afternoon, and, while she’s out, I tidy up the bedroom. Friday night, on our way home from Speed-the-Plow, it was decided that she ought to stay home this weekend, because she has been running fairly hard lately and needs a bit of rest cure. But how to change the sheets whilst she was still in bed.

After breakfast — a simple repast, but brought to her on a tray while she rested against a bank of pillows, I told Kathleen that she would have to go and sit in the living room for a while. All at once, she was Lillian Gish, defenceless in a cruel world. “Where will I go?” she asked, vacantly, staring at me with a pre-Raphaelite weirdness that, some time ago, but not anytime recently, would have taken me in. She came and sat on my lap, but she called me “Simon Legree, ogre.” Then she laughed at herself. “No one would believe this! You’ve just brought me breakfast in bed, and now you want to change the sheets and make the bed, and I’m…” There was no need to finish the thought.

By the time the bedroom had been dusted and plumped, Kathleen, ensconced in a wing chair, was too involved in something to move at once. I had to throw her out of the living room as well. This time, though, I was spared the saucer eyes.

Phew! I’ve been running around since I got up (not particularly early, it’s true). And things have gone slightly wrong all day. I arrived at Glass Restorations, to pick up a repaired piece of crystal, punctually at ten, which was all very nice except that the shop doesn’t open until half past. So I went for a version of my daily walk. Then I realized that I’d forgotten the grocery list. At the hospital, where I had a Remicade infusion early this afternoon, I discovered that the pink (Barocco) Nano had run out of battery power (how, I can’t imagine — or can I?). Now I’m off to see a dopey new comedy. At the movies. This evening: Speed-the-Plow. Phew!

¶ Matins: Despite everything, Wall Street bonuses for 2008 totaled $18.4 billion — thank goodness!

¶ Lauds: Ian McDiarmid’s adaptation of Andrew O’Hagen’s novel, Be Near Me, opens at the Donmar Warehouse to warm if cautious praise from Charles Spencer.

¶ Prime: The site has a few strange navigational problems, but the Curated David Foster Wallace Dictionary might be just what you’re looking for in the Word-For-the-Day line. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Can anyone tell me the bottom line on the Blackwater story in today’s Times? The headline, “Iraq Won’t Grant Blackwater a License,” must mean that Blackwater will not be allowed to provide security services within Iraq, right? Not if you keep reading.

¶ Sext: Here’s a project for Google Maps: mowing the lawn.

¶ Nones: The best part of this story — “Putin’s Grasp of Energy Drives Russian Agenda“  — comes at the end.

As far back as 1997, while serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin earned a graduate degree in economics, writing his thesis on the economics of natural resources.

But —

¶ Vespers: Is Allen Bennett the new John Updike? He’s, er, two years younger. And quite as fluently prolific, if as a man of the theatre rather than as a novelist. Razia Iqbal talks about meeting him, but the interview is nowhere to be found.

¶ Compline: We were neither of us in the mood — at all. But we had to go, in that grown-up way that has nothing to do with obligation. So we got dressed and went. And of course the evening was unforgettable: Steve Ross at the Oak Room.

(more…)

One of the first playlists that I created was effectively a dump of all the baroque music that I had in my CD library. I avoided some of the greatest hits — the Water Music, the Brandenburg Concertos — and I excluded vocal music as well. Without scraping every corner of the apartment for miscellaneous discs, I was able to amass a list that would play for 2.8 days. That’s a lot of wallpaper.

Very carefully, I moved the music around. I didn’t want to listen to all twelve of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi in a row, followed by the three discs of Scott Ross’s Scarlatti Anthology. It took forever, and I didn’t do a very good job. But the result was — not tedious. Did I mention the six-CD set of Handel’s chamber music? There are only so many consecutive flute sonatas that I can listen to without going barkers.

Being the proselytizer for pleasure that I am, I persuaded LXIV to permit me to lend him the Nano with the baroque music on it, together with the Logitech dock/speaker set that I bought for travel. I have to upgrade it, because it conks out if the music is too quiet. The problem never arises with baroque music, all of which sounds just as loud as everything else, but Ravel’s Bolero stops it every time. Ten minutes go by, and I’m wondering why the music stopped. What now? Oh, that.

As I thought, LXIV was pleased to have the cornucopia of baroque music add a congenial note to the atmosphere of his flat. “It’s playing when I go to sleep,” he said, “and it’s still playing when I wake up.” (Now, for my part, I cannot fall asleep if music is playing.) So far so good. The thing was, the baroque music was loaded onto the one Nano that I’d bought directly from Apple. It was fire-engine red, and it had my initials stamped on the back. I thought I’d just load the playlist onto another Nano — the pink one, say — and exchange it with LXIV.

That’s when I discovered that I had done all my careful massaging of the baroque playlist on the red Nano itself. Guess what? You can’t download a playlist from a Nano. Not even if your hard drive contains all the same MP3 files! Are we stupid yet? (Why people extol Apple as they do, I’ll never understand.)

LXIV lived with the pink Nano for about a week. He never complained, but he didn’t have to. I was haunted by guilt. Having printed the playlist ( you can do that, at least), I exchanged the Nanos once again. And I am still, about a month later, reconstructing the baroque playlist, this time on a hard drive. Unfortunately, my standards have gone up dramatically, so the going is very slow. And of course there are the inevitable improvements…

It occurred to me that one of these improvements ought to be the overture, as it were; the first piece of music on the playlist. And what ought that to be? What else but Mouret’s famous Rondeau? Famous, that is, from years and years and years of use by Masterpiece Theatre.

As I don’t have a CD with the Mouret on it, I went to Amazon, where I was quickly seduced into downloading the item for the proverbial $0.99. There’s a first time for everything, and my first time with Amazon downloads included losing the Mouret somewhere in my computer. It certainly wasn’t appearing in iTunes! I was so exasperated that I had to do three other technical things before I could come back and thimk [sic!]about what to. Using ancient techniques learned in the days of Windows File Manager, I unearthed the file and put it where it belonged.

And, boy, does it sound cheesy! I couldn’t like it more.

That’s what this weekend was about: feeling  normal again. No more holidays, no more special events. And no more excuses, either.

“Excuses” isn’t the right word. “Priorities” is. I’ve had my hands full of priorities, ever since we got back from St Croix at Thanksgiving. As a result of prioritizing the priorities, I live in a much less cluttered apartment. Oh, the place still looks as cluttered as ever,  but then that’s just a look, a decorative tic. The kind of clutter that I’ve been working on lurked in closets and drawers and cabinets and under-the-bed  boxes.

I took a walk today, and it felt great. That was new. I’ve been limping home from recent walks, so completely out of shape am I. But after a big walk on Wednesday — almost four miles — and another mile or two on Friday and about a mile yesterday, I was my old self again today. I walked over to Central Park. It was very cold, but I think that that helped. I walked the oval that surrounds the Great Lawn. Then I came home. The word for the experience was “invigorating.” At my age, unfortunately, “invigorating” means “good for nothing but a nap in front of a roaring fire.” In the absence of a roaring fire, I merely dozed.

Before the walk, I ran errands. I had to buy a birthday card. It has been so long since I last bought a birthday card that Kathleen had to remind me, if that’s the word, that Barnes & Noble sells them. I had thought I had the perfect card: the William Eggleston photograph of what looks like a Manhattan on the rocks, bathing on a tray table in the sunlight pouring in from a jetliner’s porthole at 35,000 feet. When I opened the box, the card turned out to be a postcard: not suitable under the circumstances.

At least I finally got to the Eggleston show at the Whitney. It closed today. I was an idiot to put it off. But I did see it twice, first on Friday and then yesterday. I persuaded Kathleen to see it yesterday after breakfast, on her way to George Michael. “It’s not the sort of thing that I would go out of my way to see,” she said, “but I’m glad that you suggested it.” The amazing thing about Eggleston’s color is that it makes everything look clean, even the dirt. Take the two most humdrum kitchen photographs in the show: the freezer and the oven. Neither is what you’d call next to Godliness, really; but because all the colors seem right, the subjects appear to be pristine.

Paying for the birthday cards at Barnes & Noble — unsure of my choices, I covered the waterfront, hoping that Kathleen would choose the right one — I bought Transsiberian on an impulse. We were going to watch it after dinner, but, after dinner, we both felt more like reading. Or, in my case, writing.

Everyone I passed in the Park seemed to be much younger than I — about thirty-five, max. Many were not only not speaking English, but not speaking a language that I recognized. Of the Anglophones, the only one to make an impression was a guy who was walking with a woman in a red quilted coat. “I’ve heard the word before, but I’ve never heard anybody use it,” he said. How I wanted to know what the word was! But instead of repeating the word, he repeated himself. As if he hadn’t said it before, he said it again. “I’ve heard the word before, but I’ve never heard anybody use it.” This time, I heard the woman say, “Yeah.” I tried to remember which playwright employs such repetitions, as a tic to signify our failure to attend to one another. I doubt that my thought patterns would have been so grandiose if I hadn’t been walking along the river at Carl Schurz.

It was very cold in Manhattan today, but I spent a great deal of it out on the sidewalks. I won’t say that I was thrilled to be chilled, but it was good to be doing things that were refreshingly hard, even if nothing more demanding than putting one frozen foot in front of the other was called for.

My walks took me to interesting encounters. For the first time, my new barber asked  me my name. He worked for quite a while at my old barber shop, now shuttered, before setting up his own shop not too far away. He hails from Peru and I would trust him with my life. Knowing that he’s a big Obama fan, I asked him if he thought that the President will give up smoking. “Yes,” was his bitingly terse reply. “He has to: he’s got kids.” And that was that. Memo to the White House: This is how the people who love you feel.

My plan was to take the subway down to 51st Street, for lunch with my friend Diana. But Willy was done with clipping my beard shortly before eleven. The only way of filling the time between engagements would be on the hoof. That is, walking thirty blocks was the only way to salve my wine-girdled conscience. Without passing into insobriety, I have almost drunk myself out of my trousers. Exercise!

Walking down Second Avenue, I listened to Teach Yourself Dutch on the Nano. I have listened to Units Twelve through Sixteen so many times that I unthinkingly understand such phrases as “Dish ye frog ya partner” as Dus je vraag je partner — “So you ask your partner….” Such comprehension is totally remarkable, because I haven’t listened to my language courses, Nederlands or otherwise, in so long that the battery on the Nano had completely run out of juice.

I want you to know that I am not brushing up on my Nederlands because I think that it would enrich a conversation about Netherland with its Hague-raised author, Joseph O’Neill.

Over coffee, at the end of lunch, Diana pulled a book out of her bag. It was a first edition of A Question of Upbringing, the first volume of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. At the bottom of the dust jacket — slight tear at the top, otherwise very fine — a cartouche contained the notice, “By the author of Afternoon Men.” That’s like finding an edition of Du côté de chez Swann that identifies Proust as the author of Jean Santeuil. Or nearly. “I’m sure that you’ve read this, but I can never remember,” said Diana. I pointed to the cartouche in my best bandbox manner and told her that I’d even read Afternoon Men. In short, I was utterly undeserving of what came next: the offer of all twelve firsts — all, as I knew from earlier inspection, in v gd dust jackets — as a gift!

I ought to have said “Thank you!”, I know. But perhaps because I felt too much like a cat burglar who’s been offered the Hope Diamond by a blood relative, I had to deflect the offer. It’s one thing to sell what you steal! After much soul searching, back in the Eighties, I realized that I am not a bibliophile. I may be crazy about the contents of books, but books themselves don’t interest me that much — unless they’re inscribed with blushmaking generosity by the author. I’m one of those philistines whose first response to first editions, as to antiques, is “used.” So I insisted to Diana that we contact Baumann and the other book dealers, and find out what she might realize upon a sale of the set. (Early indications suggest that as much as $12,500 is not inconceivable.)

Walking home — I walked home as well! — all I could think of what was a brute I’d been not to thank Diana for the offer. Having mentally rejected it on the highest moral ground, I got lost in transactional mode. Now I must call her tomorrow to apologize.

I ventured forth in the evening, at about six, for an “event” at the Barnes & Noble branch on Warren Street in Tribeca. I had never been there before, but then neither had, by his own confession, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of The New York Times Book Review and the event’s panelist-in-chief. The published purpose of the panel, the constitution of which I’ll get to in a minute, was to discuss the Book Review’s choice of the ten best books of 2008. But that discussion never took place. 

This is not the time to retail Mr Tanenhaus’s remarks about the running of the Book Review, nor to delve into the many interesting things that he and colleagues Liesl Schillinger and Dwight Garner had to say about book reviews. (My disinclination to be discovered as the weekly author of generally disapproving reviews of the Book Review can be imagined.) Nor do I intend to transcribe the wit and wisdom of ringer panelist Joseph O’Neill, except to mention that, when asked by Mr Tanenhaus what he thought about James Wood’s warmly favorable review of Netherland, he replied, in a way that produced gratified laugher from the crowd, that he understood at last why Mr Wood is held in such high esteem by literary types. No; all of that will have to wait.

All I’m going to say right now is that when I thrust yet another copy of Netherland at Mr O’Neill for him to sign, he brightened, recognizing me —not a challenge — and told me that I was “incorrigible.” Little did he know that I’d thought about not going, lest he regard me as a weird if harmless literary stalker. I wanted to say, “I’m here for the Book Review, not for you” (true!), but instead I thanked him for recommending Richard Yates’s The Easter Parade, when we talked at the McNally Jackson affair last summer. I wanted to say that The Easter Parade had opened up my understanding of Revolutionary Road, now a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet, for whom there is probably not a part in any conceivable adaptation of Netherland. Instead, I withdrew the latest issue of Harper’s from my bag and asked him to autograph “The World of Cheese.” If he remembered, wearily, that I’d rewarded his Yates recommendation by asking him to sign his first novel, his family memoir, and his Granta piece about the Trinidadian environmentalist from whom he drew the inspiration for Chuck Ramkissoon, he didn’t show it. Instead, having obliged, he flashed the smile of a proud ten year-old for whom you can’t help hoping for the best possible future and said, “That’s my first short story.”

At dinner, afterward, Kathleen said, “See? I told you you’d be glad you went.”

When I wasn’t feeling guilty about not thanking Diana, on the walk home, I was remembering one of those “literary episodes” that aren’t literary at all, but just tangentially related to the world of books. This happened a few years ago. I was reading the one-volume reduction, as it were, of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, entitled To Keep the Ball Rolling. I was reading it, specifically, during an exam by my internist, who may be a reader but who is definitely a basketball player. “Who’s that?” he asked, upon espying the v gd dust jacket. I muttered the usual swallowed embarrassments, desperate not to be an instructing bore. “Huh!” said the good doctor, whom I do trust with my life. “He looks just like Joe Di Maggio!”

I took another look, and saw that it was quite true. Only this afternoon, though, did I wonder what Powell would have made of the perceived resemblance.

I wish I were a better race horse. Pacing is everything, and my pacing is off. Long weekends throw me. Their promise of “three days off” rarely materializes. Perhaps that’s because I’m a self-employed worker who sets my own hours as a matter of course — what do I need with a day or two off, much less three. I could take every day off, if I wanted to. But that’s exactly what the problem comes down to. Because I could take the day off, I can’t.

The movie that we watched this evening was entirely Kathleen’s choice, but it’s my favorite Preston Sturges movie: The Palm Beach Story. Ordinarily, I wonder why this 1942 masterpiece doesn’t generally rate the top-ranking that I give it. But tonight I could see why it doesn’t. A movie about rich, entitled people being foolish and self-indulgent is unlikely to amuse the general public. Only people who have spent time with rich, entitled people being foolish are going to chuckle. Everyone else is going to be at least mildly offended.

I put it to you: how do you feel about the Ail & Quail Club scene? Bang bang!

For a change, I’m going to the movies this afternoon, not this morning. Kathleen and I will be having dinner with Megan and Ryan at a restaurant on Houston Street, so I’ll head downtown at about three — running some errands on the way — for the later-afternoon show of Revolutionary Road at the Union Square Theatre. Then I’ll hang out at Barnes & Noble for a while, before deciding that it’s much too cold to walk fourteen blocks and taking the subway instead.

I thought that this would give me a nice long morning to spend on little stuff, like organizing my desk drawers, but I used up all my motivation yesterday.

Later the same day….

I did run the errand — to exchange the cable box that I poured a glass of wine into over the holidays for a new one, at TimeWarner on 23rd Street. Then I came home. I did not go to the movies, largely because Kathleen was talking about coming home early. She had a bit of a sore throat, which is why our dinner date got postponed to Sunday evening. So, as usual, nothing that I predicted happened. You really ought to read my stated plans as fantasies, at least when they involve other people.

The good news is that I patched together a few scraps of motivation.

¶ Matins: Among the phrases that we’re going to retire for at least a few years, alongside “personal responsibility,” let’s hope that “ownership society” finds a place. It was nothing but code for the enrichment of mortgagebaggers.

Who, like the viruses that they so closely resemble, have found a new line of weakness.

¶ Lauds: At dinner tonight, Kathleen asked me if I’d known about Peanuts and the Beethoven scores. Well, er, yes! But so what? I was never a Peanuts fan. Especially when I was a kid.

¶ Prime: Here is a blog — The Art of Manliness — that I came across during the recent Weblog beauty pageant. I agree with almost everything it says, until author Brett McKay assumes that I know what to do with duct tape. Which, in all fairness, I must confess that he doesn’t. (He might try to teach me, though.)

¶ Tierce: Here’s a story that took a while to appear, at least on my radar screen: How much did she know, when did she know it, and how much is hers? The Ruth Madoff Story. (Part 1/1000)

¶ Sext: Gail Collins says it all in a few words:

I think I speak for the entire nation when I say that the way this transition has been dragging on, even yesterday does not seem like yesterday. And the last time George W. Bush did not factor into our lives feels like around 1066.

¶ Nones: Can this really be happening (Good News Department!)? A clip from BBC World News: three-ton T-walls are coming down in Iraq, no longer needed.

¶ Vespers: No sooner do I begin to digest the news that a new Kate Christensen novel is on the way than I open Harper’s and find a story by Joseph O’Neill!

¶ Compline: Here’s hoping that the pilots and crew of US Air Flight 1549, captained by C B “Sully” Sullenberger, will be able to honor the city with a tickertape parade.

(more…)

Washing up after this evening’s dinner with Ms NOLA and M le Neveu, I seized on Witness For the Prosecution for quick entertainment, knowing that it would be sharp and clever from the start — so that I could turn it off when I needed to do so.

(Did I say “knowing”? I’ve just spent fifteen minutes trying to copy this clip from the latest version of Corel’s WinDVD. As usual, I might add.)

About two minutes after husband-and-wife team Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester made their first appearance, I realized that Fossil Darling and I have been playing these roles ever since 1963. Both of us, shifting back and forth between the barrister and his nurse. We’re always ready with Lanchester’s officious helpfulness; we know what’s best for Patient! Sometimes — quite often! — we are both Laughton: “Oh, shut up!”

[Someday] I’ll snatch her thermometer and plunge it through her shoulderblades.

That’s why Michael’s sainted mother, and now Kathleen, would/will say, “Oh, you two!”

And so we come to the first day of the weekend — Friday. That’s how we do things around here, anyway.

Four days of eight more or less significant links, each presented within the context of a given canonical hour — At Lauds, for example, I try to link to an interesting item about the Seven Lively Arts (books come in at Vespers) — is as much as I can do, and also, at least with my current astronomical equipment, about as far as I can see.

Now I’m off to the movies — to see The Reader.

Bon weekend à tous!

My thanks to everyone who dropped by at my Facebook page today to wish me a happy birthday. I was as delighted as shown here, over sixty years ago.

Confucius says: “Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?” Is it not, indeed!

Having rung in yet another New Year — on New Year’s Day, for a change, not the night before — I thought I’d better get back on track with a Friday movie. I made a date on Thursday night to see Last Chance Harvey with LXIV, at a theatre just round the corner from his house. After tea and dolce with Kathleen, I got myself onto the IRT in plenty of time. On the ride downtown, I read about half of a terrific essay on video games by the English man of letters, John Lanchester, in the London Review of Books. Mr Lanchester points out (not in the same sentence) that the popular games combine all the tedium and effort of the workaday world with fantasy violence. I endeavor to bear in mind that my remarkable inaptitude at games — I have barely enough hand-eye coordination to operate an iPod — is no excuse for taking a condescending attitude toward Grand Theft Auto IV, but it’s no use.

I climbed out of the subway fifteen minutes before the appointed time. What to do? I could cross Union Square and browse at Barnes & Noble. Or — what’s this? A big Virgin sign hung at a corner a block away. A record store! I couldn’t believe that such a thing still existed. In fifteen minutes I could check the place out.

Like most stores that I’ve been in since Christmas, Virgin was close to empty, which only made its spotlighted lampblack interior look like a horror movie that nobody wanted to see. There were the usual undistinguished beats and jags of crashingly tedious noise, presumably intended to signify a locus of Dionysiac release even at this midday hour. It didn’t take long to find the serious music, downstairs. Jazz and the classics are collected in a large space beneath the entrance. Unless there was a pop-music department hidden away somewhere, I’d have to say that the days when serious music was shoehorned into the odd corner appear to be over. If I’d had more time, I’d have tested my theory that serious music will keep the CD manufacturers in business. Once again, I might add. I picked up Renée Fleming’s new-looking album of Schubert lieder, actually over ten years old. And “The Best of Cal Tjader/Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-1980.” Why not.

The Virgin store happens to sit beneath the Regal Union Square Theatre, which is where LXIV and I were to see Last Chance Harvey. Twenty yards from door to door. But because LXIV would be waiting at his apartment for my buzz, my route A to B took me in a clockwise direction, round the other way, down Fourth Avenue, across Thirteenth Street and up Broadway. We New Yorkers love walking so much that we don’t mind strolling around the block just to get back into the same building.

I will have more to say about Last Chance Harvey presently, but I can report that LXIV and I liked it very much. There were some rather shattering moments of muted humiliation for Dustin Hoffman’s character, and at first it seemed that Emma Thompson’s character was going to find him as annoying as everyone else did. Instead, Ms Thompson turned Last Chance Harvey into the first true romantic adventure story, one that asks if two dented, middle-aged people who know even less about one another than we know about them (not much!) crazy to give love a try?

Kathleen had been asked to join us for the movie, but she would commit only to lunch at the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill. It was her first visit to this University Place landmark, which I didn’t even know about until late last summer. Kathleen put her finger on why I’m crazy about it: the Knickerbocker is “like Schrafft’s.”

After lunch, Kathleen and I caught a taxi, and, as we drove uptown, Kathleen asked about University Place. Where does it start and where does it end? I could have thought about this a minute and essayed an answer, but it would probably have been wrong, so I reached for Manhattan Block By Block, which I carry everywhere, and established that University Place runs from the northeast corner of Washington Square (continuing from Washington Square East) to the southwest corner of Union Square, where it runs into Broadway. Unfortunately, trying to read the map in the back of the cramped taxi not only made me carsick but unleashed the hangover that had, until now, hung fire. I was not to feel entirely well for the rest of the day.

In the evening, Ms NOLA and M le Neveu stopped by, on their way to see Milk, up in our part of town. Kathleen was napping, so they came back after the movie, and we all had a good chat. Our talk came round to Broadway shows. Kathleen proposed getting tickets for the four of us to see the revival of Guys and Dolls, starring, among others, Lauren Graham — as Miss Adelaide! How counterintuitive is that? And wasn’t the show revived just a few years ago? With Nathan Lane and Faith Prince?

How about 1992? No! We couldn’t believe it. Sixteen years ago? But Ms NOLA remembered: in Manhattan Murder Mystery, somebody goes to see Guys and Dolls, and a bit of Googling confirmed her recollection. It seems like only — well, not yesterday, exactly. But 2002, say. In 2002, however Mr Lane was enjoying the Broadway triumph of The Producers. Strangely, that seems to have happened longer ago. As Alan Rich wrote of Le Nozze di Figaro about a million years ago, in New York Magazine, Guys and Dolls, like the Catholic Mass, ought to be celebrated somewhere around the world at every moment.

(Speaking of Nathan Lane, we often say, of an actor whom we particularly like, “Oh, I’d go to see her in anything! I’d pay to see her read the phone book!” Our bluff is about to be called. Mr Lane, together with Bill Irwin, David Strathairn, and John Goodman, will be giving a revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in the spring.)

I may be back on track, but, as is the case every January, there is more of me to get up to speed.

The new year has begun brilliantly at this end, with the first piece of misdirected email since I don’t know when. To a very nice guy whom I see at parties on Claremont Avenue, and who was kind enough to write a proper note after we connected at Facebook, I wrote,

Blah blah blah. Tell me something I don’t know.

XOXO (short for “toxic gas”)

rjk

Ooops! As anybody can tell, my message was meant for Fossil Darling, who had just insulted me (instead of thanking me for providing his useless and unloved existence with a warm and loving home-like atmosphere on New Year’s Day) by calling me a “vile and miserable being.” (Not even human being!) I don’t know if all the ‘splainin’ in the world is going to get me out of this one.

After Fossil and LXIV headed home last night, Kathleen and I hunkered down to watch The King and I closely — very closely. No elephant prod!

I’ll explain later. Happy New Year!

¶ Matins: Bubbles beget bubbles: the housing-price bubble appears to have inspired some pipe dreams of easy divorce that burst along with the market, at least according to John Leland’s report, “In Housing Fall, Breaking Up Is Harder to Do.”

¶ Tierce: The other day, Fossil Darling urged us to read one of Bob Herbert’s columns in the Times last week, “Stop Being Stupid.” I’ll have more to say about that anon, but I thought of it this morning — and hopefully, too — when I read Joe Sharkey’s “In Flight” column this morning. It would appear that Kip Hawley, the outgoing director of the Transportation Security Administration, has actually been learning on the job. I like heaps of scorn as much as anybody, at least if I’m doing the heaping; but the TSA is an organization that I would almost desperately like to praise.

¶ Nones: Now it’s the red shirts who are trying to gum up the Thai government. The new Prime Minister managed to make his maiden speech today, in a different venue. But taking to the streets in the colors of your party is tantamount to suiting up for civil war.

¶ Compline: Bob Herbert’s column today, “Add Up The Damage,” argues for some sort of formal condemnation of the Bush Administration’s attack on the Republic. I especially agree with Mr Herbert that the president “would give the wealthy and the powerful virtually everything they wanted. He would throw sand into the regulatory apparatus and help foster the most extreme income disparities since the years leading up to the Great Depression.” But I would refer Mr Herbert to his last Op-Ed piece, referenced earlier today. It’s more important to stop being stupid Americans than to punish the officials who were empowered by that stupidity.   (more…)

¶ Matins: The sickest thing about the United States today is undoubtedly the fact that prisons are a growth industry. The processing, so to speak, of prisoners newly minted by the nation’s preposterously discriminatory penal codes, can’t be outsourced to China, so failing rural towns try to rally by competing for prison contracts. Central Falls, Rhode Island, a town that combines plenty of illegal immigrants with plenty of cells in which to incarcerate them, lives in the shadow of what sounds, from Nina Bernstein’s story, like a Stalinist terror.

¶ Sext: In this morning’s Times, Susan Dominus writes up Chelsea Technologies, hitherto “a small operation that specializes in providing information technology services to hedge funds and small investment funds around the city.” And, now, to their former employees who have “wrapped things up” and are “looking for alternatives.” Which is French for: they’re out of work and need high-quality Internet access at home. There is a slightly snarky smile behind the placid surface of Ms Dominus’s report, but you won’t hear any chuckling from me — oh, no!

¶ Compline: Here’s a story that’s getting a lot of attention in the Blogosphere: Elisabeth Rosenthal’s “No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’.”

(more…)

This evening, I found an hour, between an afternoon of reading and the preparation of dinner, for getting started on Christmas cards. The tardiness is not, I’m afraid, uncharacteristic. Although I like to send cards at the normal time (before Christmas), that’s just one of those good-behavior impulses that so often interfere with the spirit of things. Terrified of being tired of the Yuletide season before 25 December, I quite often don’t get into the Christmas spirit until the day itself. I take “the twelve days of Christmas” very seriously: they begin on the Nativity and end on my birthday, which is only as it should be.

There also seems to be a temporal chute that gets more greasedly accelerated every year. One minute, it’s Columbus Day (second Monday in October). The next, it’s Beethoven’s birthday (16 December), and I haven’t given a thought to Christmas. That is, I’ve given a lot of thought to not giving a thought to Christmas. On or around Beethoven’s birthday — the date on which, in my Radio Days, I allowed the announcers to start filling out the hours with Christmas carols — I start thinking about Christmas. In a ducking position, mostly.

Reading John Lukacs’s “autobiographical study” of George F Kennan a few weeks ago, I was keenly aware of something that Mr Lukacs wasn’t addressing. While he praised his subject for the untiring composition of position papers, speeches, essays, histories, and generally weighty (though digestibly well-written) texts, all I could think about was what Kennan didn’t have to think about, viz: the laundry, breakfast, shopping, dinner, the dusting, shopping, lunch, sending Christmas cards, and so on. Kennan was lucky enough — there really is no other word, from my vantage — to live in a time when men, especially thoughtful, intelligent men, were expected — expected — to stick to the important stuff. Mr Lukacs does not discuss Kennan’s hobbies, if any, but it’s clear that they were never allowed to interfere with the man’s self-prescribed duties, for the simple reason that he had no wish that would let them interfere. He liked to work. That’s commendable. That he never troubled himself with having the draperies dry-cleaned is not even worth mentioning. Mr Lukacs has undoubtedly been similarly lucky himself.

It’s important to stress that I feel no resentment about having to run a household. It is not work that I dislike. I thrill every time I watch Gosford Park, not because of the aristocratical shenanigans but because the housekeeper played by Helen Mirren knows how to manage the bedlinens. But I’m aware that such concerns cut into loftier pursuits. Now that I’ve come to a point in my life at which it seems that I have a lot to think about, and a lot to say about it (however interesting or not to others), I wouldn’t complain if Mrs Wilson were to materialize in our home. (Not that we could afford her!)

Kathleen, who has such tremendous powers of concentration that she can finish a piece of work only to discover that her body has been sounding fire alarms about hunger and whatnot that must “suddenly” be addressed with the utmost urgency, advises me to relax and focus on the things that I want to do. In modern psychological parlance, she’s trying to get me to give myself permission to put off washing the windows. Her powers of concentration being what they are, she could live in the murk of an abandoned fishtank without thinking about the difference that a bit of Windex and some elbow grease might make. And as for Christmas cards, let me just ask those of you on our mailing list if you’ve gotten one from her since the Seventies.

Surely there’s an nth law of thermodynamics that holds that there can be but one Kennan in any household.