¶ Matins: If it’s as nice a day as predicted, I might just walk up Second Avenue to Dmitri’s.

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

¶ Tierce: Maureen Dowd says that Americans don’t like elitists. I’ll tell you who dislikes elitists: journalists, among other entertainers.

¶ Sext: JR writes, with an anticipation of nostalgia for bygone days that are not, in fact, quite bygone yet, about the significance of hard copy: don’t bury the CD!

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¶ Matins: The book that I ordered was Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant. The book that I got was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World. That’s how it is with QPBC sometimes. You print one shaky digit on your reply card* and you’re screwed. I ought to have put what I got out on the windowsill. Instead, I started to read it.

¶ Tierce: An ongoing sad story: the catastrophically depleted ranks of Roman Catholic seminarians. Here’s a story about Dunwoodie, the late-Gothic pile on a hill that, when I was a child, loomed over brash new highways, greatly intensifying the bogus feel of the image. Already the Church seemed not so much traditional as airlocked.

¶ Nones: The Papal Schedule (He’ll be up bei uns at six on Friday afternoon). The Papal Apology (same old, same old).

¶ Compline: This just in (Dept of ROTFLOL): John the Doorman has assured us that the Pope is going to make a little parenthesis on Friday, to Bless the Bratwurst at Schaller & Weber.

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¶ Matins: In a column in Saturday’s Times, Gail Collins ended a characteristically wry roundup of geriatric Senatorial candidates (“The Revenge of Lacey Davenport“) with the following bit of common sense:

My theory is that the age issue is not all that huge a deal when it comes to legislators. If you’re old and in good shape, the big problem is that it’s hard to think about things in new ways. You tend to get better and better at a narrower and narrower set of skills.

Yes, but does this mean me?

¶ Tierce: The publisher to watch: Philip M Parker, compiler of more than 200,000 titles. They’re all available through Amazon, not that you’d want to read any of them quite yet. There’s a method to his madness, though…

¶ Sext: I’m contemplating a trip to Sleeve City.

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¶ Matins: JR continues to roll out his incredible pictures of Manhattan. I thought that this shot was some sort of “architect’s rendering,” but it’s really just the new Westin, on 42nd Street, there for anybody who will look.

¶ Tierce: Next Friday, the Pope outide my window.

¶ Sext: It’s only a movie — or is it? Set-designers re-create the 9/11 Tribute at St Paul’s.

¶ Vespers: Even though it didn’t start until 12:30 — an afternoon-denting time to go to the movies — I stayed uptown and went to see Smart People. I almost made a new friend at the concession stand…

¶ Compline: This week’s Friday Front, at Portico: Tony Judt on American Amnesia, in The New York Review of Books.

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¶ Matins: Did you know that Forsythia is a kind of olive? No, I didn’t, either.

¶ Tierce: Three items in the morning news, about: Googlegänger, people who have the same name as yours whom you contact or at least find out about via Internet search engine; the Tee-Pee Motel, in Wharton, Texas, restored by a Quick Pick winner (using $1.6 of his $47 million in winnings); and “the administration’s relentless antipathy for effective government,” this time manifested in a Census fiasco.

¶ Sext: Because I was running early, and the place hadn’t started to fill up for lunch, I got a table for one at JG Melon’s.

¶ Vespers: Goofing off most of the afternoon — but for a good cause. (Here’s a bit of Nanentertainment.)

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¶ Matins: Ms Cornflower is not as lucky with her new dishwasher as I have been with the new computer. Even if it didn’t work — and it does, just fine — the new computer would not flood the blue room with suds. My heart do go out.

¶ Sext: Kathleen, expects to fly on American Airlines to North Carolina this weekend, to visit her parents. I wonder if she’ll be able to get there.

¶ Vespers: After a quiet day of reading and minding the domestic front (isn’t that a nicer way of referring to “paperwork”?), I’m going to try to finish watching Ha-Buah (The Bubble), an Israeli movie that I rented the other day. Whose idea was it to print the subtitles in yellow?

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¶ Matins: The damned thing is: he’s right. “The offence seems to be not what I did but the fact that it became public.” Max Mosley on his forays into Sade-en lusts.

¶ Tierce: The state of play in neuroscience: we still learn most of what we know from brain failure. Frontotemporal dementia, for example, teaches art.

¶ Sext: I knew about the subway reefs, but not that they’d make such a big splash. (“Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars,” by Ian Urbina.)

By the way, we’re having a gorgeous day here.

¶ Compline: Jason Kottke actually got in to Momofuku Ko.

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The flagstaff at Carl Schurz Park, captured in an impromptu reflection pool.

¶ Matins: How about those bloggers, dropping off like flies? (“In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“) No reader of Michael A Banks’s Blogging Heroes, the Takli Makan of this year’s morning read, will be surprised by the news that technews bloggers live like unhappy hamsters.

¶ Tierce: Zose Mosleys vill neffer learn! Grand prix racing czar Max Mosley‘s grandmother, Lady Redesdale, was inured to reading about her daughters’ antics (especially his mother’s) in the newspaper, but this story would probably have given her a nasty turn.

¶ Sext: Surely the most interesting story in the works right now — far outclassing our presidential election — is the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. If you ask me, Liu Qi was out of his mind when it lobbied for the honor of hosting the games.

¶ Vespers: It’s over when the little man squeaks. Sheldon Silver nixes Congestion Pricing.

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¶ Matins: Good News! 81% of Americans think that We Have a Problem, Houston. Bad News: 100% of my new computer is dead.

¶ Vespers: As I thought, it was the power supply — and I didn’t break it. (Not that I’m going to put the waste-paper basket next to the CPU a second time.) Now maybe I should try to get into Momofuku Ko.

¶ Compline: A nice photo to look at, late on a Friday night — another one of JR’s super black-and-white shots of New York, taken on his visit here last fall (je crois). Kathleen used to work across the street, at 599 Lex.
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¶ Matins: How much weight will I have to lose to slip into these fetching Milanese outfits?

¶ Tierce: How I wish I’d been blogging ten years ago! Then I’d be able to post a link to my prediction that Sanford Weill’s Citigroup agglomerations, unveiled with much trumpeting at the time, would turn out to be supercalifragilistic. It was obvious that the merger titan had no interest in the hard slog of expialidocious.  

¶ Nones: Goodbye, solo computer, Hello, KVM!

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The grim redoubt of Château Gizmo.

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

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

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

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¶ Matins: James Wolcott isn’t feeling well. First he describes the symptoms. Then he evokes them, with descriptions of the bad movies that he has been watching from his sickbed.

¶ Tierce: The luxury branding crisis continues at the Ivies: “Elite Colleges Reporting Record Lows in Admission.” Catchy title, what? What they meant to say was “Record Highs in Rejection.”

¶ Nones: Grand & Brilliant Entertainment, starring (who else?) Nathan Lane: November, at Portico.

¶ Vespers: Off to Carnegie Hall this evening for Orpheus, with Felicity Lott.

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Gentrification beneath Bruckner Boulevard, in the Bronx.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pot Cove, at Hell Gate.

¶ Matins: Today’s Friday Front: “Exposure.” The story behind the Abu Ghraib photographs.

¶ Tierce: Something completely different: all three Times editorials are sober must-reads: “Socialized Compensation” (CEO remuneration — say no more), “Turkey’s Democracy on Trial” (perhaps the most interesting cultural argument going on in the world today), and “Saving a National Treasure,” (the countenanced vandalization of the Palisades).

¶ Vespers: Oh, dear. Ashley Dupré. Girls Gone Wild. Been there, done that. Underage, too! (Thanks, Roman.)

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

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

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

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