Elizabeth and Catherine Yow, Megan’s cousins and very unabashed flower girls. Kathleen is convinced that they’ll both grow up to be lawyers, like their parents.

This weekend’s lovely wedding party, at which Megan and Ryan reaffirmed their vows before a reasonably full complement of family and friends, finished me off. There wasn’t much left. Providentially, I’m about to escape to a patio overlooking the Caribbean.

The good news, I suppose, is that I’m not going to shut down The Daily Blague. That I should even think of doing so may give you some idea  of how extensively the ground has shifted beneath my writing life. Every idea that I’ve got needs a fresh screen test.

There have been a few clarifying surprises. A month or so of fun at Facebook has convinced me I’ll being doing my conventional blogging, the how-I’m-feeling-right-now thing, either there or at some other social site. I have a lot to learn about social sites, but I now know what they’re for, and, correspondingly, what my own sites are not for. I hope that The Daily Blague will become even more reflective as I go on; but it will certainly be even less newsy. Such news as appears will be presented in the focus of bourgeois humanism.

What’s “bourgeois humanism”? (I can hear your groan. You want to hear about the wedding!) That’s what we’re going to find out.

It is not “secular humanism” because it does not propose alternatives to the various strands of religious humanism that have sprouted in the West. It concerns itself with religion only to the extent that different faiths — including the belief that there is nothing to believe in — must learn to get along. I was tempted by the concept of “public humanism” for a while, but that sounds too politically-centered. Bourgeois humanism is a highly centrist outlook that finds, on the one hand, the puritanical calls to environmental austerity to be misanthropic, and, on the other, unthinking consumerism to be inexcusably stupid. Even if I tend to leave the lights on when I go out, I have always been interested in the idea of frugal comfort. I’m honest enough about being bourgeois to admit — no, to insist — that comfort is a human priority. In my ideal world, everyone would be good at making other people comfortable, and yet nobody would be expected to act like a servant.

But enough about abstractions. It’s time for a break. Kathleen and I are taking off for ten days in St Croix, and now I’m looking forward to it. What seemed the other day to be an annoying break in carefully-constructed routine now looks like an extremely well-timed pause. I won’t stop blogging; I intend to post at least one entry every day. But the Daily Office will be suspended, not just because I want to reconsider its purpose but because filling it out requires me to pay attention to everyday chatter. Being a primate, I like everyday chatter as much as anybody, but right now I need a rest.

And this is a pretty good time for that, no? One of the two major news stories, about the election of the next President, has been achieved. The other, about mounting economic disaster, has clouded over with complication, as “related stories” multiply, ramify, and terrify. The meaning of specific developments, none of them isolated, will emerge only over the long term — unless and until some overwhelming cataclysm sweeps away life as we know it, in which case “news” itself will be massively redefined. I don’t expect anything terribly exciting to happen in the next two weeks — not that I don’t hope I’m right!

Aside from putting myself at the mercy of aeronautics — a matter of four flights — I have no reason not to be sanguine about the next two weeks. For the moment, though, I’m too pooped.

This afternoon, I received a letter in the mail — the real mail — that immediately became my favorite letter of all the ones that I’ve ever received (barring the life-determining ones: “I love you”; “enclosed find my check…”). The writer is a brilliant boy, five going on six, whom I met last summer, when he was four not-so-quite going on five. He and his parents and his little sister and I had a glorious summer afternoon together, mostly in Central Park, but also back here at the apartment, to which we all repaired, eager to cool off. It was in that last hour that my fondness for the young man settled, amidst negotiations about jumping and/or crawling on the sofa, into lifelong affection.

Which was easy for me to imagine: I knew that I’d never forget our afternoon. But what about him? It didn’t seem possible that one so young could possibly remember the day, much less me, brains (even brilliant ones) being brains. As someone whose memories of childhood are still haunted by fragmentary recollections of interesting but nameless adults (interesting, undoubtedly, because they didn’t stick around), I knew how transitory I must be for my new friend, and how unlikely it was that his teeming brain would or could remember our day together.

How to make a more lasting impression! I asked his parents if I might send postcards from the Museum’s collection of “Thirty Treasures” — artworks both august and execrable. Permission granted, I meant to send a postcard a week, but it took well over a year to go through the booklet. I didn’t have to be too careful about what I wrote, because I could count on parental censorship. I did feel obliged to apologize, however, for the last message, which expressed a wish that the recipient would grow up to possess, some day, a Hockney of his own. I didn’t, as I explained to his father, mean that I hoped that he would grow up to manage a hedge fund.

Eventually, the thirtieth card dropped into the mailbox, and I promised to find another set of postcards. The other day, I came home with two: a set of black-and-white Gotham photographs that dates from 2000 (the best of both worlds?) and a collection of pages from illuminated manuscripts. The New York pictures are obviously cool, but they’re not so cool that my friend may not already possess them. (He’s cool.) The illuminated manuscripts, on the other hand — what was I thinking? The Madonna is either singing a Magnificat or standing at the foot of the cross. I could get arrested!

The letter that I received today, a genuine young person’s letter — I could hear the voicing of parental suggestions, but I was sure that the writer had at no point been ghosted — did more to convince me that I know my place in the world than any letter that I’ve ever opened. To say that I felt extraordinarily lucky would be an understatement. And also a misstatement: there was nothing lucky about my writing thirty postcards. Nothing lucky, perhaps; but a great deal of pleasure.

It’s an open secret around here that I am keen to become a grandfather. Perhaps within the next year! I say this only to make it clear that my friend is not a surrogate. He is not a grandchild, or a nephew, or a long-lost godson. He is a friend. And right now, there’s no one with whom I’d rather stay in touch.

¶ Matins: Kathleen and I watched Senator McCain’s very gracious, very statesmanlike concession speech. We hugged. But we did not jump for joy. We are not breaking out the champagne. We ought to be very happy. Instead we feel deeply abused around the edges. By Reagan and the Bushes and the people who put them in the White House. That’s not going to change overnight.

Barack Obama’s victory is a great thing, and I shall never forget “November 4, 2008.” Kathleen and I are deeply thrilled that he and the Democratic Congress will fill impending Supreme Court vacancies with jurists capable of neutralizing Antonin Scalia. The great slogging job of repairing the Federal judiciary and the Civil Service can begin. The ideologues have been sent packing, and thinking may come back into fashion in our political discourse.

Imagine that!

¶ Tierce: The view from là-bas.

¶ Nones: Certainly no American president has looked as right for the part as Barack Obama, seen up close at The Big Picture. He makes JFK look rather like Bill Clinton — or perhaps that’s the benefit of hindsight, knowing what we know about what went on in Camelot’s swimming pool.

(more…)

Where did October go? It stole away beneath clouds of anxiety. Nothing personal, you understand. Just the usual, who’s driving this car? terror. Maybe it would help if I crouched down behind the front seat, bracing for the crash. Maybe it would help, if I were the sort of person who could do that. Instead, I’m the sort of person who is calmed down by reality, by seeing what’s actually going on in the world, and not in my head.

Even anxiety gets boring after a while, though, so I decided to do something about “things I’ve been meaning to do around the house.” We all have a little list of those. One thing that I’ve been meaning to do is to make some constructive use of the mini-studio that I bought from Hammacher Schlemmer a few months ago. The mini-studio allows you to take pictures like this: (more…)

When my aunt called, I said that Kathleen and I had just gotten back from One Day University. My aunt did not ask what One Day University was. She said, “Oh, I’d like to go to that so much!” — or enthusiastic words to that effect. It killed me (as if often does), that my aunt lives in New Hampshire, and not here in New York City. True, she lives in a deep pocket of high culture. Also, she is perfectly happy there, and has been for years. It’s entirely likely, by the way, that Il y a longtemps que je t’aime will show in a theatre nearby. Nearby her, in the middle of the Monadnock Mountains. She said as much when I told her how much I’d loved the movie, which I did in response to her faux question about Kristin Scott Thomas: “Have you seen your lover-girl yet?” My aunt knew that I had tickets to see The Seagull, but her eyes do not allow her to track my every burp on the Internet, so she could be excused for not knowing whether I’d seen the play. Like the hormonal teenager that, in fact, I never was at the time, I rushed right over the Broadway show to say that I’d seen the movie, “which opened yesterday!” As though my aunt might pin a medal on my chest for cultural diligence. Have I forgotten to tell you how crazy I am about my aunt? New York is the poorer for her absence. In my heart I am still about fourteen and she is in her early thirties. Octavian’s crush on the Marshallin was about half the size. But now I’m sixty — so I don’t stammer.

Ordinarily, when my aunt and I talk, we are both home alone, but today, having just got home from ODU, Kathleen was on the premises as well, so I put her on the phone. At some point, we asked if my aunt had heard a certain bit of news. She hadn’t. “But I’m completely desensitized,” she said, “to the communication skills of younger people” — by which she meant that younger people have no discernible communication skills. Kathleen said, “We were brought up very differently, weren’t we?” and for that instant my aunt and I belonged to the same generation. “We were indeed,” she said.

As usual, One Day University’s program consisted of four one-hour lectures. Three of the professors were very explicit about the pleasure of speaking to an audience familiar with such references as “Nixon,” “Glass-Steagall,” and the fact, that, once upon a time, there was only one phone company, and that you rented your telephone from this telephone company, which is why it always worked. Fear not: I am not going to launch into my “Prowst” lecture. That’s the one in which I indignantly demand that Dartmouth reimburse my aunt’s grandson (M le Neveu) for having failed to teach him how to pronounce a great French writer’s name. The anecdote on which this lecture is built never fails to shock the people to whom I tell it. They know that my cousin is brilliant, so it can’t be his fault. How did he get through one of the premier liberal arts colleges without so much as knowing that it’s “Proost”?

The last lecturer of the day — Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore — actually came out and said that he finds that today’s students don’t work as hard as their predecessors because they have so much more other stuff to figure out. The lecture began with a reminder of the world that most of the audience grew up in: When Mr Schwartz became an adult, the question wasn’t whether he’d get married, or whether he’d have children. The answers to those non-questions, both of them, was “As soon as possible.” The only genuine question was whom he’d marry — and he had the grace to point out that there was no question that this partner would be a woman. I suspect that Mr Schwartz and I would agree that, even if we were given all the options in the world, we’d still have been happy with the women who consented to marry us. But we were lucky. Lots of people were miserable when it came time to deal with the marriage question, and that’s why it’s a good thing that there are more choices today.

Which would mean that things are great if it weren’t for a slippage problem: undergraduates have to think about having sex. You could say, they’re allowed to have sex. Lord knows, we weren’t. “We were brought up very differently.” You might dream all the time about “scoring,” but it was just that, a dream. Meanwhile, you read your Shakespeare. And your Proust. You would not have known what to do with a hookup if the girl had knocked on your dormitory door. All right, you would have known. But only short-term: you’d have handled the matter like an Edwardian roué. The deeper connections would have been off-limits. And she, of course, would have been Germaine Greer. Rocket science.

When I was growing up, my aunt was the only adult I knew who had anything to say to me. She was beautiful, intelligent, romantic, and the mother of four children. (She is still all of these things.) I am sure that she had a great deal to do with my falling in love with Kathleen. By which I mean, not that I fell in love with Kathleen because she’s just like my aunt (although she sort of is), but because my aunt taught me what I might hope for in a partner. Without that example, I might have lived my life alone.

Instead of which, I haven’t lived the life of the prickly autodidact that I probably deserved.

¶ Matins: The other day, writing about The Seagull, I came across a commercial term paper site. I had forgotten that they’re out there. This morning, I see that Jason Kottke set up a poll yesterday about paying for term papers in high school — an option that didn’t exist in my day. What would I have done?

¶ Tierce: In honor of Joe Wurzelbacher and the American Dream, I think it’s best to take a break from the Blogosphere — lest I say anything that I’ll regret.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Head scarves for women — in Turkey! How transgressive! But, wait: Does this mean that Orhan Pamuk completely fabricated the head-scarf controversy that kicks off his last novel, Snow? It was translated into English, by the way, four years ago.

¶ Prime: Once again, Kathleen and I will be spending Thanksgiving at a pleasant old place on St Croix. But if it weren’t so far away, I’d prefer to do my beachcoming along the Gill Sands, on that remote and longed-for Indian Island jewel, San Serriffe.

¶ Tierce: I thought that it would be very clever to say that I’m having my head examined today, but I Googled the phrase first, and it led me to the creator of FeedDemon. I don’t know anything about this app, but it looks very useful. Unfortunately, as a head case, I can’t deal with technology today — I’m leaving that to the doctors.

¶ Vespers: Wow! Christopher Buckley has (a) endorsed Barack Obama and (b) resigned from The National Review. (Thanks, evilganome.)

(more…)

¶ Matins: “No sex please; we’re not finished with the story: Joe Jervis of Butterfield, New York, attributes his longevity to virginity. He’s 105 today.”

— What? Oh! Sorry!

¶ Tierce: Looking into my crystal ball, I foresee a wave of circumspect austerity sweeping the affluent areas of the world (or what’s left of them) in the coming years, as the costs of energy and food are moralized into a kind of green vegetarianism. Here’s how it starts: “Pint-Size Eco-Police, Making Parents Proud and Sometimes Crazy,” by Linda Foderaro.

Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

Two weeks ago, Paycheck got a rave review from Kathleen’s brother. When I finally got round to watching it, I was impressed, because the intelligence of the puzzle always rose above the cartoon violence. I ordered it from Amazon right away, and the DVD arrived this afternoon. Kathleen was dead tired, but Paycheck woke her up. When it was over, though, she went right back to sleep. I was unable to engage her in a double feature. The second film would have been Untraceable.

Both movies involve a lot of violence, but the violence is not the same kind of violence. Paycheck is a glorious comic book, perhaps the first one ever to be captured on film. Almost every settled frame is a bande dessiné image. There’s no doubt of the ultimate winner. You could almost say that Aaron Eckhart’s more chiseled features doom him from the moment you note the chiseled cleft in his chin.

Paycheck is an amazingly masculine movie because it combines cartoon violence with a genuinely arresting puzzle. Untraceable is a woman’s movie because women have been kicked around a lot. The violence in Untraceable — like that of Copycat, another woman’s picture — is horrific. Dreadful things not only happen but register as such. Both movies  not only involve but are built around kidnappings. Paycheck’s hero evades capture by means of tricks that the monsters in Untraceable and Copycat would have foreseen and forestalled. Aaron Eckhart has played a lot of nasty men, but to date his serial murders have been strictly metaphorical.

Would I sign over my brains in exchange for Ben Affleck’s looks? I ask the question only because I used to look something like him, when I was young, and what I envy most is his getting away with fleshy stupidity — God knows I didn’t. I don’t mean that Ben Affleck himself is stupid. I will always revere his performance in Hollywoodland. But this movie has the wit to change the question: would I trade my looks for  Michael Jennings’s brains?

Here we are with the priest who married us, Monsignor Wilders of St Thomas More. I don’t think that I’ve ever noticed that look in Kathleen’s eyes before; I am one lucky guy. I still have the cravat, although I’ve never worn it again. Gee I am tall, am’t I.

We celebrated, this year, at La Grenouille. Two years ago, we celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary at a bistro in the neighborhood, with twelve friends. Tonight was somewhat cheaper, but then there were only two of us. We were treated extremely well, and the evening was both magnificent and great fun: fancy but not formal, a mode that I wish more of my countrymen knew about. The waiters were only too happy to bring us extra baguette rolls so that we could sop up the sauce of the lobster ravioli that arrived, unordered, between the first course and the second. (I took away the receipt but not the bill, so I can’t tell if I was charged for the ravioli. I don’t think that I was.) Kathleen’s mother would have been horrified by the sopping up, but she would have had an absolute stroke when a woman at the next table asked to see the ring on Kathleen’s right hand — and Kathleen took it off to show it to her.

While I can remember: An excellent Gigondas to start with and a very nice Bordeaux after, a Haut something. For starters, I had the sweetbreads special. Because it tasted better with every bite, I wished that I could just have some more. Kathleen had a risotto, but I was too besotted with the sweetbreads to ask her how it was, and, anyway, she wouldn’t have told me, because she was already eavesdropping on the ladies at the next table (one of whom would ask to see the ring). For dinner, Kathleen had Dover sole. She would have had it anyway, but her father had asked her, on the phone that afternoon, to have it “for him.” I had the pheasant special.

Pheasant special: doesn’t that sound pretentious! Something under glass! In the event, the plate held three medallions of pheasant — I’d say it was thigh, but I’m not an experienced consumer of game — wrapped in thin sheaves of cabbage and topped with a sauce that made a little bit of foie gras go a very long way. Not a bone in sight. I didn’t have to ask for a baguette to sop of the sauce this time, because there were two quennelle-shaped blimps of puréed potato to do the job.

We were asked at the start, as one always in the best temples, if we wanted a dessert soufflé. Kathleen remembered that we wouldn’t. We would have so much wine left over after the main course that we’d need a good plate of cheese to finish us off. And indeed we did. The cheeses were wonderful, but they didn’t come with labels, so I can’t tell you exactly what they were; suffice it to say that the plate offered a high-end spread of the same range that you’ll get chez moi: from chèvre to brie via bleu. The star of the plate, however, was a honeycomb. Just one each.  Neither one of us had ever eaten a honeycomb.

In the course of the evening, I spoke a bit of French and talked a bit of French politics. It ought not to have been remarkable, but in any case it did not make me any enemies. Walking down 52st Street toward Madison afterward, our arms around each other, I asked Kathleen (who had so très très bien dîné that she couldn’t wait to get into a taxi), “Which do you think they liked better, my accent aigu or my accent grave?” “Your accent both!” she burst out (pronouncing the “th” as we do).

I’m a good enough cook to know that the meal was fantastic, but not good enough to tell you how and why. Which is how I like it. As I always say, my idea of “roughing it” is staying at home. But my idea of having a good time at a restaurant seems to be something that the good people at La Grenouille knew all about without my having had to ask.

¶ Matins: Mayor Bloomberg’s third term: an endlessly interesting question that won’t be answered until (a) Mr Bloomberg fails to win the term by one means or another, or (b) long after his third term. Michael Barbaro and David W Chen report.

¶ Tierce: A word about credit:

In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.

A year later, Mishkin was out of business: no workingmen customers. “It” served him wrong, and it’s likely that a similar credit crunch today would have the same impact on ordinary Americans who have never actively invested in anything except a house. (The story was told by Mishkin’s grandson, a former Federal Reserve Board member, to David Leonhardt.)

¶ Sext: Wanting to see what Le Figaro had to say about Belgium’s breakup (the latest on which I read about at Joe.My.God), I came across something far more amusing: Are American writers too ignorant for the Nobel Prize? Horace Lundgren, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel) seems to think so.

(Ha! Now that I read Joe’s update, I understand why there was nothing about Belgium at Figaro to keep from scrolling all the way down to Mr Lundgren.)

¶ Vespers: I have a new crush — and it’s very educational. Sarah Sherborne is the moderating voice on the latest crop of Teach Yourself language courses from Hodder & Stoughton. I felt the first flutter of attraction in Teach Yourself Arabic, but before Teach Yourself Turkish Conversation was halfway through, I was besotted. I’ve now added Chinese, Chinese Conversation, and Dutch to my collection, and I’m longing for Portuguese.

(more…)

As if nothing else were going on, last Friday afternoon, the phones at the apartment went dead. I found this out from an email that Kathleen sent, after failing to get through. I had a minor meltdown. When the power or the water or the cable don’t work, I know that it’s not just me. But our landline phone service is fragile for several reasons, almost all of them having to do with the age of the building. In 1963, you might have two phones in a house, one in the kitchen and one somewhere else. You might have a third phone on a bedside table. We have seven phones — three in the bedroom alone — on two lines, and those two lines are jury-rigged (by the phone company) out of one. Only two of phones, moreover, run without extra electric power. A problem with any one of the units can knock out service. So can a loose jack. And if the problem occurs within the apartment’s wiring, anywhere beyond the phone company’s junction box, then we’ll have to pay to fix it.

Kathleen was wonderful. She took a moment (a long moment) from helping out with some bits and pieces of the aftermath of the credit collapse to contact Verizon. They told her that the outage affected “the area.” That was the good news. The bad news is that it would be repaired by Tuesday evening. I was so relieved by the good news — it wasn’t us! there was nothing that I could do about it! — that the bad news didn’t register until shortly before it was mooted, and phone service was restored.

We never did find out what “the area” comprised. Some tenants in the building reported uninterrupted service. The liquor store, across the street, took the vino order that I placed for vino, using the cell phone. (Like most people in their sixties, I hate everything about cell phones except their convenience. They’re pretty unendurable products, as “utilities” go.)

The news about the phones came just as I was settling down to put the afternoon to use. I’d been to the movies, and I’d made myself a sandwich for lunch, actually measuring out one ounce of potato chips. (Saturdays and Sundays not included!) I am trying to make Fridays my menus plaisirs afternoon. That’s a joke; the more correct French term would be paperasse. This site defines paperasse as “papiers san valeur” — papers without value. That’s just what having paperasse means: turning receipts and notes into rubbish by entering information on a computer. You’ll have to agree that anything in French sugars the pill that would be hard to swallow as “data entry.”

But I was already too unsettled by the news. My feverish imagination, which is more or less permanently set on “wingnut putsch” alert, was quick to crochet dire prognostics from the financial meltdown, John McCain’s dithering about the debate, and a rather too party-linish comment by Barney Frank about House Republicans. Congressman Frank turned out to be speaking the truth, but in such a way that only made the House Republicans seem even more seditious than they already are. (Happily, they’re not sure of just whom they aim to subvert.) And, on top of that, I was giving a little dinner party.

Well, an old friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while was coming to dinner, because I’d asked him, on the spur of the moment, the night before — when it was still the night before, and it was still possible to think of “throwing something together” as a larky pastime. In the event, this repast saved my bacon. Shoving Big Ideas out of my way, I concentrated on the orderly production of a meal. Have I already mentioned that Friday is our night for home-made fried food? That’s because I dust and vacuum on Saturday, elimination most of the aerosols that linger whenever fat has been brought to three hundred seventy-five degrees. I was so well organized, however, that I managed to set up the deep fryer out on the balcony.

Our friend is a fan of my fried chicken, so there were no leftovers. He’s also a fan of my cornbread, which is curious, because I rarely use the second cornbread recipe twice, and, even when I do, I throw in little bits of tasty leftovers. On Friday, I threw two breakfast sausages that Kathleen had virtuously left on her plate after breakfast a few days earlier (okay, Saturday; but sausages age well once they’ve been cooked). Also a few gratings of Cabot’s Monterey Jack with Jalapeños. What we had a lot of afterward was Caesar salad; I’d forgotten that our friend doesn’t eat salad.

We did listen to a bit of the debate, while waiting for Kathleen to come home. I certainly hope that Mr Obama wins, but I want to report that, because I can listen to John McCain without wincing, the silliness of most of what he said didn’t bother me so much. When the angels ask me to recall the hardest thing of all, I’ll tell them it was watching Alfred E Bush run for President. I still can’t believe it happened. I can’t even be shocked that he won.

I’ll be having another dinner party this evening. I don’t really know who’s coming, though. Ms NOLA, for sure. Kathleen, if she can. The newlyweds if it fits in with their plans — they’ve got something musical to go to later in the evening. It is probably incorrect to speak of dinner parties here, since everyone who’ll have shown up is family or the next thing to it.

¶ Matins:The other day, someone said — and I  can’t remember who; someday, I’ll be just like Mr Peabody and have a boy who can write these things down — that it isn’t the stocks, stupid, it’s the credit market. The most basic, elemental player in that market is the money market fund, and talking about money market funds (which are really just specialized mutual funds) was all Kathleen did today. Primary Reserve Fund is the first to fall into the water she is hot.

¶ Tierce: Another Friday, another movie. I’m off to see Ghost Town, which is conveniently playing across the street. Meanwhile, Ken Layne reports on a real ghost town. One in the making, anyway.

Then, under cover of darkness, the family leaves. Sometimes they disguise this escape, coming by once a week to change the lights left on and blinds left open, maybe parking an old camper or beat-up car in the driveway. Other times, nobody bothers. The coyotes and vermin knock over the trash cans, a kid’s bike with training wheels is grown over with the invasive weeds that love dead bulldozed desert.

Have a good weekend, everyone — hold on tight!

(more…)

¶ Matins: John McCain has delivered himself over to the Republican Party handlers whose only objective is a victory for the Party. They’re not taking a chance on Senator McCain (whom they’ve never cared for anyway). No more Mr Nice Guy.

¶ Lauds: Crayons!

¶ Tierce: A while back — at Sext on 10 March, to be exact — I took one of my occasional fliers, and accused today’s right-leaning Federal judiciary of seeking to overturn progressive commercial-law decisions from the early Twentieth Century that underpin our consumer economy. I was teeny-tinily overstating, and if anybody had called me on it, I’d have been obliged to temporize.

No longer. Adam Liptak reports on the so-called “pre-emption doctrine,” a wildly pro-business, anti-consumer principle that is wholly consonant with what we know about Republican Party objectives.

¶ Sext: For seventeen years, Dan Hanna took two self-snaps a day, making one full turn every year. The Time of My Life is stop-action animation with a vengeance! From 31 to 48, Mr Hanna ages very well, but still….  (via kottke.org)

¶ Vespers: Hats off to Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, who is halfway to opening a bookstore in Fort Greene with strong support from the business community, from a $15,000 first prize in a Citibank competition to her business partner, a Random House sales rep.

(more…)

¶ Matins: At the surgeon’s this morning, I did not even think of asking about the consequences of doing nothing. First of all, it would have been grotesquely histrionic. If you’re dying, maybe it’s all right to say “Let me go.” But my cancer is still stuck on my scalp, from which it will probably be removed without incident.

¶ Lauds: Ben Brantley said something yesterday that threw me for a complete loop:

All artists steal from others. But if the resulting work holds your attention, you don’t consider its sources while you’re watching it.

Wow! Is that ever crazy wrong!

¶ Tierce: I am crazy about Gail Collins.

And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.

Dang, I wish I’d written that!

¶ Nones: There are a lot of things that I’d like to see parents jailed for permitting, but truancy is probably a good start.

¶ Compline: A recent British survey suggests that parents in only one family in three are reading to children. In my book, not reading to children isn’t just child abuse but antisocial behavior. (more…)

¶ Matins: It’s too bad that this somewhat meandering piece about depression and sadness and the persistent difficulty of deciding how to treat them appeared so soon after the suicide — a depression-related death, by all accounts — of David Foster Wallace and yet does not mention him.

¶ Lauds: When my globetrotting correspondent Gawain wrote to me from Lisbon, retailing the pleasures of that city, I remembered that I had wanted to read The Maias, by José Maria Eça de Queirós. So I ordered it from Amazon, and began reading it yesterday.

¶ Tierce: What percentage of American voters, do you think, is unaware that our diplomatic relations with Venezuela have been severely curtailed? What percentage is aware that Bolivia is falling apart — and that the United States supports (as it does in Venezuela) the losing side? Simon Romero’s brief report in today’s Times shows Bolivia breaking up on several fronts, from oil royalties to drugs.

¶ Nones: While I’m unwilling to waste my time attacking The Infernal Machine — Sarah Palin is doing a dandy job of living up to the nickname that I slapped on her the day she was nominated — but I would be happy to see billboards plastered with her extraordinarily degraded syntax. Has the woman ever finished a sentence? She makes Dubya sound — presidential.

In the current New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch registers an interesting dissonance in Ms Palin’s speech.

Trooper Wooten has admitted to Tasering the boy and shooting the moose, and he was disciplined for these things within the department, but, under the union contract, he could not be fired at the Governor’s whim. (He had been cleared of the threat to Palin’s father, but disciplined for drinking and driving, which he still denies.) It was obvious that this continued to frustrate Palin. She also seemed to forget that you should not talk about your affairs when they’re under investigation. Troopergate was the one subject about which she seemed keen to explicate the details. She wanted to persuade me that firing Walt Monegan had nothing to do with Trooper Wooten; that it was in no way a conflict of interest or an abuse of power. But, as she spoke, she seemed to be saying something else—that her vendetta against Wooten was wholly justified.

But for the true flavor of the Machine’s façon de parler, one turns a few pages back in the magazine, to George Saunders’s “My Gal.” (more…)

¶ Matins: Lucy Q Denett, former associate director of revenue management at the Minerals Management Service, the government’s second-best source of revenue after taxes, was frank with investigators — up to a point:

But the report quotes Ms. Denett repeatedly telling investigators such things as “obviously I did it and it doesn’t look proper” and that in retrospect she had made a “very poor” decision. She also told them that “she had been preoccupied with a very stressful personal issue at the time,” which the report did not spell out.

Justice (Dept of) has already decided not to prosecute. Charlie Savage reports.

¶ Lauds: What a concept: a clutch of readable novels is up for the Man Booker Prize. That would exclude Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence.

¶ Tierce: In the Times, this anniversary morning, a few then-and-now photographs of notable structures that are no longer backdropped by the Twin Towers.

What do you see first when looking at the old photographs on the left? Almost certainly not the intended subjects. One of the pictures is meant to show the Woolworth Building. Another is of the Brooklyn Bridge. The third is supposed to depict Division Street.

Well, the thing is, I do see the Woolworth Building. It is in every way a more meaningful building than the lost towers, which achieved significance only in destruction.

¶ Sext: Queens University Belfast will be offering a course called “Feel the Force: How to Train in the Jedi Way.” Won’t Mum and Dad be glad to hear about that! That old lunchbox will be great for lugging mobile, iPod and other kit to class.

¶ Compline: Jean Ruaud reports that his cousins in Houston are staying put. So is my sister, in Port Aransas. The other day, she wrote to say that she’d be evacuating the next morning at six. Carol, if you can read this, our prayers are working!

(more…)

¶ Matins: Oh, dear: an all-day lunch. The wonderful afternoon on the balcony has left me rather envying the Spanish gent in the photo. Or perhaps it was emptying all those bottles of wine that did me in.

It wasn’t as though we could have gone to the Oak Room. Not yet.

¶ Tierce: IRS agents are turning to YouTube for evidence of improper pastoral politicking.

¶ Sext: In a curious dispatch, the British Government has pronounced the Irish Republican Army’s ruling council “redundant.” This stops a shade short of official disbandment, and it may not satisfy the Unionists who are currently standing in the way of full devolution from Westminster to Stormont.

¶ Vespers: The charming short films of M Ward, at vimeo. In KUBM, Bennett Miller (Capote) co-directs a film with Judd Apatow (Knocked Up). Not in this lifetime.

¶ Compline: Devin Cecil-Wishing is the son of a friend from undergraduate days who has recently found me. Over the weekend, I received a link to the artist’s site, and I have to say: I want one. Be sure not to miss the lustrous works in the “Miscellaneous” category, one of them an album cover.

(more…)

The new Brie Cloister, at the Cloisters.

¶ Matins: Ah, the Chinese mists in this paragraph:

Although the McCain campaign said that Mr. McCain had known about Bristol Palin’s pregnancy before he asked her mother to join him on the ticket and that he did not consider it disqualifying, top aides were vague on Monday about how and when he had learned of the pregnancy, and from whom.

¶ Tierce: The long weekend continues chez moi. I’m hosting a luncheon at one. Not that you’d know it — I haven’t even done the shopping. Katie Zezima’s story about lobster makes me wish that I could change the menu (a breeze from Mrs Crum), but Fossil Darling hates the king of crustaceans.
(more…)

For the first time since the late Sixties, I went up to the Cloisters by myself this afternoon. Now that I’m in my early sixties, I guess I’m old enough.

I went on a mission. Monday is Labor Day, and summer hours end tomorrow. The prospect of reverting to Matins, Lauds, &c when posting everyday links in the Daily Office made me think that some monastic imagery might be appropriate — and what could be a better source of such imagery than the Cloisters?

I’d have gone tomorrow afternoon, had I been able to find someone willing to spend the final allotment of summer hours in my priceless company. But I wasn’t. And the weather promised to be rather nicer today; it’s supposed to warm up tomorrow. In any case, I was dying to get out of the house. So I decided to see this week’s Friday movie a day ahead of time, and to proceed from the theatre up to Fort Tryon Park.

No big deal. The movie, Elegy, was showing at the Angelika. When it was over, I hopped right back to the Broadway-Lafayette/Bleecker Street station and took the first uptown IND train. One stop away, at West 4th, I ascended an escalator and stood at the platform marked “A.” I didn’t have to wait long. Within half an hour, I was ascending an elevator, from the depths of Manhattan to the heights of Fort Washington Avenue.

(“Wow, I can do this! Go directly from Broadway and Houston to Upstate Manhattan!” You can tell that I grew up in the suburbs.)

At the Cloisters, I felt like a booster, because I’d been reading John Colapinto’s New Yorker article about shoplifters on the train (the piece is not online, sadly). I clipped through the galleries on my way to the Brie Cloister as though I were making a beeline for booty. As indeed I was: time for lunch! (It’s the “Trie” Cloister, of course, but now that they have a food stall that sells baguette sandwiches and wraps, fruit, snacks and drinks, I get confused.)  

Then I took a lot of pictures, in about fifteen minutes. I tried but failed to escape the gift shop without making any purchases (who knew that John Freely — the father, presumably, of Orhan Pamuk’s translator, Maureen Freely — wrote a book about Istanbul? Shelved right next to Orhan Pamuk’s book of the same name. Çok güzel!).

Passing by the New Leaf Café on my walk back to the subway, I made a note of their hours. I’m going to try to have lunch up there in a few weeks, as soon as I dream up another mission.