Call me “Doodad” — that’s what my grandson will call me. It’s official: the name received the parental seal of approval at dinner this evening. Kathleen will continue a tradition, and go by the name of Darney, which is what I called my mother-in-law from shortly before my marriage to her death a few weeks ago. It is what she (Kathleen’s mother) called her mother, when, as a little girl, she couldn’t quite parrot her mother’s “Goonight, darling.” It is also — and this is the tradition that Kathleen intends to continue — what all of the first Darney’s grandchildren called their grandmother. This produced many double-takes whenever I spoke of my mother-in-law to Kathleen’s cousins. — But Darney (they wanted to say) is dead.

Long live Darney! And Doodad.

¶ Matins:  At The Millions, Sonya Chung writes with great thoughtfulness about “The Mommy Problem” for serious writers. In our view, this goes far beyond mothering young children, and might better be posed as “The Writer Problem” for friends and relations. Ms Chung quotes Lorrie Moore, from this interview with ELLE:

The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It’s kind of rude, and yet really it’s where art comes from. It’s not the same as courage. It’s closer to bad manners than to courage. Or it’s just some willingness to, you know, take a few rotten tomatoes flung your way. You’re going to offend somebody, and you have to be prepared for it. You have to be prepared to say, ‘Oh, no. I swear to God that wasn’t you. I’m sorry.’ Because it isn’t them. It can be a mess. But if you’re going to be a writer, you basically have to say, ‘This is just who I am, and this is what I am going to do.’ There’s a certain indefensibility about it. It’s not about loving your community and taking care of it—you’re not attached to the chamber of commerce. It’s a little unsafe.

While we’re talking about Lorrie Moore, I want to mention the most dispiriting passage that I’ve happened upon in her beautiful new novel, A Gate at the Stairs. I’m not going to quote from it here, but I will give a reference: It begins on page 154 and continues for almost five pages. It consists of snippets of rant that the narrator, Tassie Keltjin, overhears as she “supervises” the children of liberal people who attend her employer’s support group for (mostly) white parents of adopted children of diverse racial backgrounds. What’s dispiriting is the lack of discipline; as long as people espouse right-sounding opinions, it doesn’t matter how half-baked they are — not to them, at least. It wasn’t lost on me that the group never articulates a concrete objective.

¶ Lauds: A new entry at Amassblog. JP Williams shares some of his photographs of gloves found in the street. (With a bit of spiffy white shoe.) JP still uses a “film camera,” and, what’s more, insists on having his rolls developed in Paris! C’est la vie!

The irony was almost sickening. Conservatives, those believers in the theory of  independent initiative,  meld into anthills of absolutely socialist cohesion when opposing a policy that they don’t like; paradoxically and counter-productively, the need for concerted action acts as a kind of Miracle-Gro on liberal differences, blotting out the sunlight that might fall on concerted progressive action. Is every population as self-defeatingly screwed-up as ours?

¶ Prime: For a change: a good, old-fashioned insider trading ring. The six insiders include hedge fund Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam and IBM outsourcer Robert Moffatt. (Cringely on Moffatt.)

We had dinner with the impending parents at their favorite restaurant, Jane, on Houston Street. (It’s their favorite restaurant for dinner with antiquities of my vintage, anyway.) I was sluggish all day and in no mood to leave the apartment, so I did what I usually do now when I find myself in funky, mildly antisocial moods: I got dressed long before I had to and headed for The SoHo-Greenwhich Village border as soon as I was ready. My idea was to stop in at McNally Jackson, which, if not exactly en route, was not wildly out of the way.

¶ Tierce: A recently-established site, Letters of Note. Genuine epistles. Snail mail from the past. Compulsively readable. (via The Morning News)

As always, I thought of Maggie Gyllenhaal as I crossed the intersection of Prince and Lafayette. My sighting of the actress occured a block to the west (Prince and Crosby), but now, whenever I go to McNally Jackson, I’m stirred by the excited idea that anything can happen in New York. More observant people see celebrities as a matter of course, but for me such encounters are rare and startling.

¶ Sext: A bouquet of Crash Blossoms, at  Good. To lay upon the tomb of Lady Mondegreen.

I hadn’t been to McNally Jackson in a while, which made me feel guilty; and I felt even worse when I walked in on a reading. Victor Lodato was talking about his novel, Mathilda Savitch. I hadn’t heard of the writer, and I didn’t try to follow the discussion, as I looked for a book to buy in reparation for my long absence; but I came away curious all the same.

¶ Nones: China in Frankfurt: “We did not come to be instructed about democracy.”

Most of my time at McNally Jackson was spent, however, pawing the metaphorical ground outside the lower-level rest room, within which, I could very easily tell, a young lady was Taking Her Time. When I arrived on the scene, the toilet portion of the boudoir experience was drawing to a close. There was a flush, and the sound of running water, and the roar of the hot-air drier. Almost ten minutes passed between the suddent quiet that followed the drying of hands and the lady’s emergence from her new-found bower. Every now and then, she could be heard taking a step or two — it was audibly obvious that she was wearing high-heeled boots — and then there would be silence. Then another step — but never an approach to the door. I became quite not-quite polite about rattling the doorknob, and I considered actually knocking.

¶ Vespers: At The Second Pass, Emma German reports on a recently republished vampire novella by — are you sitting down? — George Eliot, The Lifted Veil.

(I bought The Lifted Veil, but that was after I’d had my minute in the rest room.)

¶ Compline: Are you reading this ventrally or dorsally? (Great put-down for clotted, poorly printed prose: “It’s awfully dorsal.”)

I expect that each of my importunements dilated her sense of entitlement, but by the time she fianlly emerged I hated her far too gustily to mind having encouraged her. A well-put together young woman (exactly as I’d expected), she turned out to be rather plain and potato-faced — which can only mean that her insolence has its roots in devastating brilliance. Although she didn’t have the courage to reproach me, with a basilisk glance, for my impatience at the doorknob, I myself had no difficulty staring lasers right through her curly coiffure. “Hot as any Hottentot and not the goods for me!”

The weather was awful yesterday, unseasonably cold and miserably wet — although not quite as miserable as the same weather will be in March or early April, when the novelty factor has been stripped away. I ought to have stayed home and done a thousand things that need doing, but I couldn’t stand another day of domesticity, so I went to the Museum.

¶ Matins: George Packer reminds us Why Vietnam Matters, and receives a sad letter from Rufus Phillips, the adviser who tried to shout down the groupthink about Vietnam in Kennedy’s White House.

At the Museum, I discovered that I really ought to have stayed home. The place was packed, and, as always, the more people there are in the Museum, the more slowly they move. Most of them, naturally, have no idea of where they are or of where they’re going. Every move is inflected with uncertainty, especially when maps aren’t consulted. The cafeteria was jammed; I wasn’t at all sure that I’d find a table of my own. When I did, I found myself next to a nursing mother, embowered in a chatty family. I did not linger over the book that I had just bought upstairs in the gift shop — having failed, rashly, to port along a magazine.

¶ Lauds: Critics agree — Damien Hirst can’t paint.

After lunch — which, to be brutally honest, was the whole point of the Museum visit — I teetered on the verge of going back home. Indeed, I didn’t stay long. I saw the two big shows that are up at the moment, and I didn’t go anywhere near Vermeer’s Milkmaid — a big show in some ways, but not in size. The Art of the Samurai is going to open soon, but at the moment the  big shows are American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915 and Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans.

¶ Prime: We’ve been waiting for this story for so long that we actually forgot all about it: Electronic stock trading, which can be located just about anywhere, has perhaps mortally dented the action on the New York Stock Exchange and its European counterparts.

The Frank show was too crowded to enjoy; I sashayed through the rooms in a getting-acquainted state of mind. I’d have taken in the show that way anyway, but I was extra express. Frank’s photographs have never moved me in the way that Walker Evans’s do, and a lot of the images seemed, glaringly, to miss William Eggleston’s color. That’s to say that, as the photographs are documents rather than compositions, there is something false about the black-and-white, which is not only arty and un-American but missing the riotous vulgarity of the American scene. There’s no gainsaying, however, that Political Rally — Chicago, 1956 is one super-duper photograph.

¶ Tierce: In case you didn’t have all day, yesterday, for the Scocca-Gessen bout, Christopher Shea not only summarizes it but evaluates Mark Greif’s underlying article.

I’ll have more, I hope, to say about American Stories. I’m trying to figure out a way to write about shows just like it — exhibitions that I visit five to ten times during their stay. What I want to convey is a sense of the temporary collection of pictures, and American Stories gets a boost from the recent Americans in Paris, in which at least one of the new show’s very best paintings was also shown. Mary Cassatt painted it as a thank-you gift, only to have it rejected by the giver. She ended up calling it Lady at the Tea Table, but it is in fact a portrait of Mary Dickinson Riddle. Riddle’s daughter, Anna Scott, who had given the Cassatts the gilt Canton service that litters the tea table, thought that her mother’s nose had been rendered too large, so the picture went back to the discouraged painter. Decades later, it was appreciated as a masterpiece, and it is one of the relatively few great paintings to have been given to the Museum by their creators.

¶ Sext: A profoundly un-green solution to a wintry problem:

Luzhkov is a long-time proponent of fighting clouds by spraying liquid nitrogen, silver, or cement particles into the cloud mass, which forces precipitation to fall before it can reach the capital and spoil holidays like Victory Day and City Day.

(via The Morning News)

I almost fell in love with Lady at the Tea Table at the Americans in Paris show, but there was a distraction. Standing in front of the Cassatt (where it hung in that show), I had only to turn to my left to gaze at my true love, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, the almost perfectly square Sargent that hung in the next gallery. (The difference between height and width is half an inch.) It seemed obvious that Daughters was the best painting in the world, period. Making do, I’m now inclined to find in Mrs Riddle — possessor of the clearest blue eyes that I have ever seen in a top-drawer painting — the subject of an extravagantly wonderful picture.

¶ Nones. In Monocle, Matthew Brunwesser urges Turkey to expunge the infamous and totally un-European Article 301 from its constitution; insulting a nation may sound like a bad thing, but the power to enforce sanctions against deprecation is more than most mortals can handle. More about the crippling Dogan Yayin fine  from Stephen Castle and Sebnem Arsu at the Times.

As I’ve said, Lady at the Tea Table belongs to the Museum. It hangs in the American Wing — currently closed for renovation and set to open in 2011. I’m sure that I stared at it in its native ground. But I never noticed it, not really. This is something else that I want to talk about. Every show has a greatest hit (not that everybody agrees what it is — I’m only talking about my view here). It has nothing to do with ranking; one doesn’t look for runners-up. The contest is nonetheless intensely relative: to win, the greatest hit doesn’t have to be the greatest painting in the world. It merely has to seem to be the greatest, in comparison with everything else on the walls.

¶ Vespers: “It may also be true that Michiko’s judgment works on the time-release principle of certain antacids…that hindsight makes the heart grow fonder.” Garth Risk Hallberg on Michiko Kakutani’s critical maneuvers, à propos of her very unfavorable review of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City.

In a related way, pictures gain attraction by being moved around the Museum. For a few months earlier this year, Sargent’s Madame X was thrillingly hung at the end of the André Meyer enfilade. You could see her (if you were as tall as I am) from the top of the rise in the prints and photographs gallery that runs from the grand staircase to the Chamber of Horrors (think “Cot“). That is where Madame X belonged — in so many ways. At least she was there for a while.

Compline: The staff at XXfactor give Mad Men-style office drinking a try. Result: they have a fun day but are not creative. There don’t appear to be any adults on hand to tell them that they’re not in training.

If anybody asked me, which variation on the same thing is more interesting, La Gioconde or Lady at the Tea Table — but enough silliness. If you do get to the show, try to spend some time with Mrs Riddle. She’s an American fascinator.

Bon weekend à tous!

The other day, before lunch, before heading off to the storage unit for a bit of pre-shuffle straightening out, I had a long telephone conversation with a friend that touched on this and that but eventually circled around my objection to being said to have a philosophy. A philosophy of any kind. Also: I reject the idea that I belong to any community — not because I’m sort of loner (although I am a bit of a rogue), but because I don’t believe that communities exist. That’s not my philosophy; it’s just my opinion. I have loads and loads of opinions; in fact you might say that I have an opinion about absolutely everything; for, if I haven’t got an opinion about something, that’s because, in my not-very-humble opinion, the something isn’t worth thinking about.  

¶  Matins: At Chron Higher Ed, W A Pannapacker writes warmly about the “middlebrow” nature of The Great Books (1952). When a fellow grad student made a crack about his shelf of leatherette volumes, he put them away.

Eventually all of those beloved volumes were boxed, hidden in a closet, and replaced by hundreds of university-press monographs on literary and cultural criticism—mostly secondhand—along with ever larger piles of mostly unreadable scholarly journals. Of course, such acquisitions only affirmed my middlebrow-status anxiety, since so many of them were motivated by what I thought other people thought, rather than by my own interests.

Reading that, we thought: that’s what middlebrow is — attending to interests other than your own.

Opinions, yes; but no philosophy. “Philosophy” is not just an aggregation of opinions. It’s an earnest attempt to understand the world in systematic terms. Logical deductions from general principles are taken seriously by philosophers because the principles are thought to have an existence outside of the mind of anyone who holds them. This I stoutly reject. As a materialist, I believe in nothing that can’t be dragged into a laboratory for measurement. And that includes love, by the way. The fact that I cannot prove, in any normal, scientific manner, that I love my wife means, for me, that “love” does not exist on the same plane as “gravity.”

¶ Lauds: The Aesthete interviews Scott McBee, a storyboard artist who moonlights as the painter of nine-foot-long elevations of the great old ocean liners. (He hates cruise ships!) Before you reach for your wallet: his prices range from two to three times nine thousand dollars.

Toward the end of the conversation that I was talking about, my friend asked why I hadn’t just said that I was a materialist in the first place. I replied that I had asserted this so many times in the past, and so completely assumed that my friend was aware of my materialism, that I thought it heavy-handed to allude to the fact. (Also, I was in no hurry to end such a lively conversation.) 

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon agrees with Calvin Trillin: it’s the smarty-pantses what did Wall Street in. Banking is best done by the bottom third of the class.

One might argue that “philosophy” and “community” are mere abstractions, convenient carryalls for multiple instances of more of less the same thing (opinions, neighbors), but I reject that. What is interesting about my neighbors is not what we have in common, but what we don’t; and my bundle of opinions is free to evade all if-then constructions. I am not especially wilful or capricious. I don’t set out to be unpredictable. If a measure of consistency helps friends and acquaintances (and neighbors) know in advance what to expect of me, I won’t feel (as many men do) found out and exposed. But my mind is not a puzzle to be solved.

¶ Tierce: Have you got all day? Owing to household uproars, we missed this when it was fresh, but the correspondence between Tom Scocca (of The Awl) and Keith Gessen (of n+1), about an article in the latter’s publication, is as close to boxing as we ever get in the world of letters. In our view, the argument is never truly joined; Mr Gessen defends one of his writers, while Mr Scocca defends his ideas. To the extent that the exchange amounts to a discussion of the history of marriage, we’re inclined to agree with Mr Scocca — not least because we quail at the thought of being on his bad side, ever — but we admire Mr Gessen for not picking up the popcorn.

“Know then thyself” — I take Pope’s advice very much to heart. You really ought to know what you think. You ought to get to the bottom of you, as best you can. You ought to change what you don’t like about yourself, but only for that reason, and not because you’ve got notions that don’t “belong in the sentence.”

(Racking my brain for an example of intellectual inconsistency has led nowhere, probably because my intelligence has been set up to sidestep discomfort, not because I have no inconsistent ideas. I know that I have them, but I can’t think of any at the moment — a besetting sin. From the high horse of generality, I find it difficult if not impossible to pluck the agreeable flowers that grow by the roadside.)

(My friends, on the other hand, may not be as blocked on the subject of me as I seem to be.)

¶ Sext: It’s easy to spot the non-readers at craigslist, what with their Plato Toys and their Candle Operas.

In the wake of the conversation, my myriad opinions took on the metaphoric charm of expensive cigars, and I became a positive Churchill, exuberantly smoking them no matter who minded. I was very happy with this picture — not least because thinking of yourself as Winston Churchill after a certain age (sixty) is quite uplifting. By sixty, one hopes, you have given up on giving up on being young, and the idea of flourishing in your eighties or nineties becomes the sexiest idea imaginable. It sounds creepy, I know; but just wait.

¶ Nones: China’s billionaires. We have to lie down now. While we recover, discuss: are Chinese billionaires more or less likely to wind up in prison than their American counterparts?

My friend Eric Patton just wrote a lovely piece about altruism in the age of Spencer. Eric didn’t mention Herbert Spencer, or Spencer’s coinage, “the survival of the fittest,” but the resonance was there. Perhaps it was overly enthusiastic of me to do so, but I read the passage that Eric quoted, about altruistic Neanderthals, as expressing an important human ideal that was severely dented by the license to be selfish that Darwinism (especially in Spencerian hands) seemed to authorize in the Nineteenth Century and that still operates as a widespread intellectual default. (Chris Hedges’s chapter, in Empire of Illusion, on reality TV shows how set in vulgar concrete Spencer’s idea has become).

¶ Vespers: Thinking of reading something by Nobel Prize-winner Herta Müller? Only 5 of her 20 books have been translated from the German into English. This may be regrettable, but it’s not surprising. While non-Anglophones read more widely in translation, I shouldn’t be surprised to find that Anglophones prefer to read books in the original language whenever they are able. There’s something about English that mangles other ways of thinking. (via Arts Journal)

But what I wanted to mention about Eric’s entry was something else, slightly. “Many of us in the so called coastal elites are barely in contact with persons outside of a narrow band around our age, apart from our relatives (who we don’t usually live with) so we don’t even have to witness natural aging and death until it’s our turn.”

¶ Compline: Many of today’s problems are the result of an inversion: something that used to be scarce is now plentiful, but we’re still primed to seek more of it. Food is an obvious member of this class.  Jonah Lehrer considers another: information.

I wanted to mention this because, in my opinion, I’m an older person worth knowing. Yes! I am plugging myself. When I was Eric’s age, I knew a few crustaceans, and they were not remotely interesting as I am, especially since they smoked nothing like the expansive range of cigars (opinions) that I stock.  And if I do have a “philosophy,” it’s a passionate commitment to stealing not candy but attention from babies.

Dateline: Last night.

¶ Matins. A very good (if slightly biased) introduction to Vaclav Klaus — in case you need one — the heroic Czech anti-Communist (and would-be neoliberal economist) who is currently driving everyone crazy with his anti-Lisbon, anti-EU maneuvers. (via The Morning News)

A red-letter day; no two ways about it. Quatorze’s phone number available upon request (kindly supply references). The beautifully re-upholstered love seat came home this morning. I spent the rest of the day trying to provide it with the environment that it deserves.

¶ Lauds. The arts in a time of retrenchment: Landlords engage artists to soften their empty storefronts. Meanwhile, China’s art market is losing heat.

I ought to be exhausted. I must, in fact, be exhausted. But that information hasn’t reached the prefrontal desk yet. At seven o’clock I seriously doubted that I’d be able to compose this entry, but I rebounded after a meal of macaroni & cheese, salad and crisps, enjoyed on our restored 54″ glass tabletop (no need for place mats!). I had thought that I’d want to curl up with a glass of wine and a book, and maybe have a good cry, because, sheesh, I worked myself to the bone today; but, instead, me voici.

¶ Prime. Are you lying down? We weren’t, and we wish that we had been! Saudi Arabia thinks that we ought to pay for the oil that we don’t use in the interests of avoiding global warming. It has been making this argument since 1992 at least. All we can think of is Anna Freud on Identification With the Aggressor, our favorite “defense mechanism.”

The moving maneuvers in a nutshell: two guys from Meyers (a Bekins affiliate) appeared shortly after nine, and carted off the top half of the breakfront. Fifteen minutes later, their truck pulled up outside the delivery bay at the storage unit, but they declined to back in. Quatorze and I were standing on the quai, having already brought downstairs the other one of Kathleen’s grandmother’s love seats. Also a clunky DIY coffee table that I’ll never have to see again. The movers took these pieces away, leaving us with the top half of the breakfront, which we carted upstairs and locked into the storage unit. Then, for good measure, we walked two blocks up First Avenue. Peering down 64th Street, we saw one of the movers, standing outside the upholsterer’s shop. Concluding that all was well, we taxied back to the apartment, which the movers reached about half an hour later. It was all over by eleven. The moving maneuvers, that is. Then Quatorze and I got to work.

¶ Tierce. Life is a video game for my friend Jean Ruaud;  no, but it really is. The problem is, nothing in video games prepares you for the dangers of bathroom breaks. Jean’s entry can also be read as nearly exact précis of Kathleen’s thinking this evening (substitute “client” for “card”). Since you’ll have to read French to follow my point, you’re already on the same page.

At some point between noon and one, I realized that we had done all that two men could do, and we broke for lunch, at Café d’Alsace. Over croque monsieur and quiche Lorraine we talked about nothing but the ancien régime, which is our trademarked version of rotisserie football. Quatorze opined that things would have gone much better for the Kingdom of France if Louis XV had died as an infant, along with everyone else in his family except his great-grandfather, instead of surviving the smallpox for sixty-odd years. I couldn’t quite agree. Quatorze suggested that, as king, Philippe d’Orléans would have handled the Mississippi Company bubble better. I suggested that Quatorze read Niall Ferguson on the subject.

¶ Sext. The Grey Lady peers through her lorgnette at Cake Wrecks noting that things have got pretty meta. “Everyone in the baking business follows Cake Wrecks almost daily, if only to make sure our cakes aren’t ending up on there.”  

The first thing that I had to take care of, once I resumed work on my own, was the stereo system. This was not fun. I considered the offer made by the dealer who sold me a nice and very straightforward new amplifier: he could set it up for me! I was quite able to set it up myself, but if I were to pretend to be helpless, I would arrange for all the hookups to be optimized while, at the same time, providing myself with someone (else) to yell at when things don’t work. Is this devious?

¶ Nones. Jonathan Kurlansky writes, refresherly, about “democracy” in Thailand.

Having begun in the stereo corner of the living room, so to speak, I worked my way outward, until I subdued the locality. By 7:30, the living room was fit to live in. The foyer, on the other hand… 

¶ Vespers. New editor John Freeman answers three questions about the future of Granta. Nothing new whatsoever (except perhaps about the Web site, sort of), but we’re aware that not all of you read Granta, and we want to change that. Because what’s old about Granta, as Mr Freeman points out, is still pretty lively.

Tomorrow is another day!

What I really need, though, is another space-time contiuum. The foyer has become a refugee camp, crammed to the rafters with objects that have become homeless, stateless, de-cabinetized.

¶ Compline. A light-rail proposal for 42nd Street fails to interest Mayor Bloomberg, just as an earlier version failed to charm Mayor Giuliani. Because we expect mayors of Greater New York to act in this manner, we believe that a root-and-branch approach is required: fire the Outer Boroughs.

Kathleen, when she got home, admired the re-upholstery as much as everyone else who’d seen it. We all agreed that her late mother would have been pleased. Even. The apartment has never looked so grown up.

When I got back from the storage unit yesterday afternoon, I thought about running another errand, a quickie over to Lexington Avenue. I thought about it for five minutes — no more. As my body became aware of having returned home, it sagged like an ancient sofa. I was almost sick with fatigue.

¶ Matins. Chris Lehman writes so deliciously about Times coverage of service cutbacks endured by Harvard undergrads that we are forced to quote. “One shudders to think of how these euphoria-deprived pashas of the nation’s bogus meritocracy will forge onward in their post-Harvard professional lives.” Mad fun.

I had walked to the storage unit — 24 blocks. I had carried a driftwood lamp that became heavier with each block. I couldn’t believe my puny strength, but then I remembered how much heavy lifting I’ve been doing in the past week, especially since learning that today, and not next Tuesday, the love seat with ball-and-claw feet will be coming home from the upholsterer. Not in itself a big deal, but I’m taking advantage of having a mover on call to do some other shifting about. That’s why I had to go to the storage unit yesterday. I’ll want to be in and out quickly later this morning, something that wouldn’t be possible without a bit of preliminary clearing.

¶ Lauds. What would Vasari say? From ArtCat — where we can spend hours drinking in the prose, when we’re in the right frame of mind:

The duplicate spaces will develop incrementally along the same trajectory, but as the artists work, inconsistencies of touch, skill, and reaction will cause the workshops to diverge as a set of mutations emerge. Approaching an increasingly disconcerting, imperfect effect, the artists will engage the practice of partnership while confronting the impossibility of creating in true parallel.

On my way to the storage unit, I stopped in at the Hi Life for lunch, a club sandwich, fries, and an iced tea. Before the food arrived, my cell phone rang. It was a call from the decorator reminding me that the upholsterer would want to be paid. I hadn’t forgotten this detail, but I saw no point in bringing it up. By happy chance, the upholsterer is two blocks north of the storage unit. So I stopped in and paid the bill. The love seat was in the window, looking pretty gorgeous.

¶ Prime. The US Chamber of Commerce takes a dim view of legislation designed to reduce global warming. James Surowiecki writes about some big-name defections from the Chamber in his weekly New Yorker column; he also writes about the column.

The less said about the storage unit, the better.

¶ Tierce. John Eligon looks back at the trial that kept him busy for so much of 2009 — and taught him a lot about life in New York. Meanwhile, the Marshall twins (Philip “started it”) acquiesce to the diminution of their inheritance from their father, lately convicted of larceny.

When I realized that I wouldn’t be running any errands after my visit, I sank into the wing chair in the blue room and read Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. If the gravamen of Mr Hedges’s jeremiad weren’t so well known to me, his book would be the most depressing read of recent times. His second chapter, “The Illusion of Love,” suggests a mortally serious rebuttal of David Foster Wallace’s far more jocular coverage of the AVN expo that appears in Consider the Lobster. Women are damaged, physically as well as mentally, in the making of pornography, and Mr Hedges will not rest until you understand that.

¶ Sext. The stories that Brooks Peters can spin from the humblest reading material! An old issue of Saga Magazine inspires a sketch of the short, racy life of Fon de Portago, which ended at 150 mph, as a bisected corpse.

Also very briefly, I considered making dinner. I rummaged through NoTakeOut‘s archives and found a lentil salad that I made a few months ago. I considered shopping for the one or two ingredients that I did not have on hand, and making that for dinner. Considering that I can barely walk across the room with complete confidence in my ability to reach the other side, there was a bone-deep stupidity about this home-cooking scheme, but I know whence it came. The apartment is about to become considerably more comfortable and smarter to boot. Of course I want to honor it with simple, thrifty fare! It’s a good thing that I also remembered that I don’t want to drop a lot of crockery in the kitchen, something that, in last night’s state, I should have been sure to do.  

¶ Nones. Kurdistan cuts off its oil, pending payment from Baghdad. If I weren’t taking the week off, we’d have something to say, but you can probably imagine every word of it.

When we came home from Panorama Café, we settled in the living room. I had thought about watching a movie, but it seemed wiser to potter, strategically shifting debris from sites of relocation to alcovial backwaters. Kathleen experimented with stitches for a blanket. Her experiment sessions bear an awful resemblance to the humiliating redactions that bigwig law-firm partners inflict on first-year memos.

¶ Vespers. John Self reads an erotic novel by the first director of the Louvre, No Tomorrow, now out in a dual-language edition from NYRB (it’s very short). John Williams tells us about The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, an anthology edited by J C Hallman. Robin Sloan explains the Reetz-Clancy continuum of scanned books.

What am I going to do with all that “debris”? I can’t remember how I handled it in the old days, but now I play a game of musical chairs that sounds more like triage. I let everything find a place, and then the leftovers are tossed. At the moment, two rather nice (but not nice-enough) tables are at risk of heading to HousingWorks.

¶ Compline. Ian Baldwin writes about the importance of showing the Thames on a Tube map. You may not need to know where the river is in order to navigate the Underground, but you need it to tell you where you are in London.

I’m trying to remember how long it has been since the furniture in the apartment was rearranged in any significant way; I should say that it has been at least five years, and possibly longer. Age! When I was young, four or five times a year was the norm. Kathleen used to say that it was a good thing that she wasn’t blind, because, coming home late, the crashing into unexpected items would have finished her off. Now, in contrast, I had begun to think that everything had found its place for all time. And perhaps it had done so. But the decision not to reupholster a long sofa — more of a bench, really — but to let it go instead set off a chain reaction of alterations that has only just begun.

¶ Matins: Christopher Kimball, of Cook’s Illustrated, weighs in on the demise of Gourmet. 

¶ Lauds: It doesn’t get more interesting than this: the Gershwin Estate has engaged Beach Boy Brian Wilson to complete fragments left unfinished at George Gershwin’s death in 1937 — just a few years before Mr Wilson, now 67, was born.

¶ Prime: We hate to sound overenthusiastic, but Robert Cringely’s thoughts about PAID CONTENT make a thrilling read.

¶ Tierce: After a long absence, we return to the Astor Trial for the final word: Guilty.

¶ Sext: Maggie Smith has a shaky conversation with Tim Teeman, at TimesOnline.

¶ Nones: A long but very enlightening read, at The Economist, about organized crime in  China — and how hard it can be to distinguish gangs from officials.

¶ Vespers: Lydia Kiesling, at The Millions, reads harried William Manchester’s The Death of a President, and decides that plus c’est la même chose.

¶ Compline: Thanks to Neiman Marcus, a mere $200K will buy you dinner with an illustrious round table —  certainly, even under the cirumstances, a more polite and less intoxicated group of wits.

Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

¶ Matins: Christopher Shea surveys the world of Letterman Apology Evaluations.

¶ Lauds: Soon to be arriving on your iPhone: an original picture by David Hockney.

¶ Prime: Versace will close its three outlets in Japan.

¶ Tierce: Linguist John McWhorter frolics and detours at  Good: The “For Themselves” Love Drug. (Did we say “linguist”?)

¶ Sext: “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, as long as both are covered with a sharp, original, Awly take.” The Awl turns five months, sixteen days old. Two days ago.

¶ Nones: And you thought Honduras was this boring provincial story. Ha! Bet you didn’t even know the word Chavista! (We didn’t.) As in “Chavista authoritarianism” and Cold War think tanks — in Washington.

¶ Vespers: Levi Stahl reviews the Man Booker winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, at The Second Pass.

¶ Compline: Amazing study about city people with guns — and how much more likely they are to be shot dead.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Confidence in the once-almighty dollar is eroding. This could be a very good thing, in many ways, if it weren’t for those pesky Treasury Bills.

¶ Lauds: On the strength of Ken Tanaka’s write-up, we’ve just ordered a copy of On City Streets: Chicago, 1964-2004, by “unknown” photographer Gary Stochl.

¶ Prime: The subprime movie crisis: surprise, surprise, easy money left Hollywood unprepared for a very dry season. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Tierce: Jason Dean’s very snazzy ABCs of Branding.

¶ Sext: Box wines: nothing to sniff at.  (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Nones: The Honduran attempt at a bloodless coup is getting bloody — thanks to the return of the coupé.

¶ Vespers: Patrick Kurp waits, along with Phyllis McGinley, for “The 5:32.”

¶ Compline: Coming soon to the Internet: FTC disclosure rules.

(more…)

¶ Matins: What can you do to save the Galápagos Islands’ ecosystem? Resolve to stay away, and to urge your friends to do likewise. Don’t count on Ecuador to manage the growing mess.

¶ Lauds: Stuff White People Like takes on Banksy, Thomas Kinkade.

¶ Prime: Scott Shane: “Do Friends Let Friends Open Restaurants?” The answer is obvious, of course, but the brief discussion is interesting.

¶ Tierce: Jenni Diski plays Auntie Family, faux-outraged about those gay penguins…

¶ Sext: Doodle away the afternoon with Vodkaster’s “subway map” of the 250 Best Films. (via reddit)

¶ Nones: Irish voters approve the (slightly revised) Lisbon Treaty.

¶ Vespers: Eric Banks writes about an uncomfortable truth in “Poe’s Fading Star.”

¶ Compline: A tale that seems to come out of Dickens or Trollope or perhaps even Cruikshank or Rowlandson: while Simmons Bedding faces bankruptcy, the private equity investors and the former CEO walk away will amply-filled pockets.

(more…)

¶ Matins: The real surprise yesterday was not John Perry’s call for a military coup but Gore Vidal’s expectation of one. (London Times)

¶ Lauds: The paradox of art: Shane McAdams on “The Importance of Being Unimportant.” (Brooklyn Rail; via kottke.org)

¶ Prime: A triple play from Felix Salmon: two Bank of America notes, Kenneth Lewis’s departure (with honorable mention of Vikram Pandit at Citigroup) and a word about his successor; and a surprisingly elegant expression of risk-taking.

¶ Tierce: The orginal Think pad, at A Continuous Lean.

¶ Sext: And you get to live in Denver, too!

¶ Nones: China’s National Day was a Party affair: in Beijing, 30,000 spectators were invited to watch, and everyone else was asked to stay home. (Slideshow at BBC News)

¶ Vespers: An extremely strong, almost gripping appreciation of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show, newly released by NYRB, at About Last Night.

¶ Compline: Welcome to the wonderful world of vooks — novels with little snippets of video. Yes, it sounds awful — but it’s what will probably save book publishing.

Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

¶ Matins: Jebediah Reed complains about some insidiously sexy energy ads, at The Infrastructurist.

¶ Lauds: Jon Henley considers the French tradition of treating artists as out-of-the-ordinary — à propos Roman Polanski’s arrest in Switzerland.

¶ Prime: Oops! Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand appears to have hidden the Prisoner’s Dilemma — from Alan Greenspan, at least. John Cassidy at The New Yorker.

¶ Tierce: A library/staircase, in London, at Apartment Therapy. (via kottke.org)

¶ Sext: How to make… (are you sitting down?)… Bacon Mayonnaise. And we don’t mean mayonnaise with bits of bacon broken up in it. We mean mayonnaise made with over a cup of bacon fat! (At How to Cook Like Your Grandmother.)

¶ Nones: Honduras’ Geneeral Romeo Vasquez thinks that it’s time  to come to terms. As the man who oversaw the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, he may be listened to.

¶ Vespers: Patrick Kurp connects two great Italian modernists, Giorgio Morandi and Eugenio Montale.

¶ Compline: Arthur Krystal’s essay, “When Writers Speak,” reminded us that, even though we can make no properly scientific claims in our support, everything that Steven Pinker says about language seems not so much wrong as tone-deaf.  

(more…)

¶ Matins: Jonah Lehrer meditates, briefly but beautifully, on a connection between the recent findings about social networks (the viral spread of obesity, &c) and free will.

¶ Lauds: Barbra Streisand sings some great songs  (for a change) at a great venue — how like “the good old days” is that? (via Speakeasy)

¶ Prime: A disturbing report finds that the profession of journalism is no longer open to the children of working-class families. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Tierce: In the ancient port of Muscat, a photograph stabs an expatriate with nostalgic longing.

¶ Sext: The McFarthest Map, at Strange Maps.

¶ Nones: The decision to shut down two media outlets, already regretted by the Micheletti government, makes the fairness of the 29 November elections even less likely.

¶ Vespers: James Wood aims his gimlet glance at the novels of Richard Powers. A bit of ouch, what?

¶ Compline: Arthur Krystal’s essay, “When Writers Speak,” reminded us of a Bloomsbury anecdote.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Truckers engage with communications devices — cell phones, on-baord computers — up to “90%” of their driving time. Efforts to curb that distraction are likely to meet with frustration.  

¶ Lauds: Textile designer Ilisha Helfman, in Portland, Oregon, fashions outfits for her antique paper dolls from the covers of the Sunday Times Magazine.

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon comments on the economics of the Urban Diet.

¶ Tierce: The cheeky devils at Improv Everywhere had some fun on the subway: the Class of ’09, Lexington Avenue Laughing Academy. (via kottke.org)

¶ Sext: This time, the descent into the Dark Ages will be recorded — at craigslist.

¶ Nones: President Obama will campaign on behalf of his wife’s hometown, seeking the 2016 Olympics for Chicago.

¶ Vespers: Richard Crary gets round to Civilization and Its Discontents, enjoying the read for the most part but pricking his ears at Freud’s anthropology.

¶ Compline: Don’t expect that famous writer sitting across the table to be a gifted conversationalist, critic Arthur Krystal warns.

(more…)

¶ Matins: David Kushner files a report from the future — where everyone drives a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle. (via The Morning News) 

¶ Lauds: Forget the Summer of Death: Blanche Moyse turns 100.

¶ Prime: Mistaking the complex for the profound — always a problem for us smartypants. David Hakes, an academic economist at Northern Iowa U, admits that he committed preference falsification.

¶ Tierce: The Aesthete notes an interesting sale at Christie’s: Ismail Merchant’s knick-knacks will go on the block in a few weeks.

¶ Sext: We like Balk’s take on the 19-pound baby.

¶ Nones: More on Manuel Zelaya:

He’s sleeping on chairs, and he claims his throat is sore from toxic gases and “Israeli mercenaries” are torturing him with high-frequency radiation.

We’re not making this up! (via The Awl)

¶ Vespers: Esquire executive editor Mark Warren writes about the surprise literary thrill of discovering Sartre’s Nausea in Baytown, Texas.

¶ Compline: Josh Bearman writes about automata, the fancy toys, such as Vaucanson’s Duck, that may bring the word “animatronic” to mind. But automata actually do things.

Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

¶ Matins: Michael Specter takes a good look at the potentially scary field of synthetic biology — and does not panic.

¶ Lauds: Booing at the Met: Luc Bondy’s Tosca. (Not to be confused with Puccini’s, no matter what they sang. Maybe Sardou’s, though.)

¶ Prime: Engineering in the Age of Fractals, or “Why Bankers Are Like Bacteria.” (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Abe Sauer’s quite informative Essay Touching Upon the Economics of Britney Spears’s Circus Tour Show in Grand Forks, North Dakota; or, Don’t Blame Ticketmaster.

¶ Sext: It’s a bit early for us, but our cousin Kurt Holm will be on the Early Show tomorrow morning, and CBS Studios at 59th and Fifth will be the place to hang out.  (Between 7:15 and 9, I’m told.) This week at notakeout: Mark Bittman guests!

¶ Nones: Yesterday, we were reminded of Il Trovatore. Today, it’s Rodelinda. How did Manuel Zelaya get back into Honduras? The sort of question that never comes up in genuine opera seria. Maybe this is opera buffa.

¶ Vespers: The book to read before it’s sold over here: The Queen Mother: The Official Biography, by William Shawcross. Why? Because she was “Past Caring.”

¶ Compline: Mash-ups considered as the model for creative intelligence, at The Frontal Cortex.

(more…)

¶ Matins: In an important editorial, the Times argues that corporations ought not to have the same set of constitutional rights as human beings.

¶ Lauds: At The Best Part, four terrific photographs that William Eggleston did not take — but clearly inspired John Johnston to take.

¶ Prime: The Netflix Prize — a million dollars to whomever improves the performance of its Cinematch engine by ten percent — is not really about the money.

¶ Tierce: Devin Friedman decides to have more black friends, runs ad in Craiglist… the beginning of quite the project. “Will you be my black friend?“, at GQ.

¶ Sext: Three things that V X Sterne would rather chat about than “So, What Do You Do?”

¶ Nones: In what seems like a turn from Il Trovatore, ousted Honduras president Manuel Zelaya steals back into Tegucigalpa, where he takes refuge at the Brazilian Embassy.

¶ Vespers: Alan Gopnik reviews Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol — but not in the back of the book. As the lead Talk piece instead. Ho-ho-ho.

¶ Compline: Nige takes the week off, bumps around Norfolk with an old friend, and visits a famous French cathedral. We are so living on the wrong continent.

(more…)

¶ Matins: The Economics Department at Notre Dame plans to dissolve its humanist, “heterodox” wing, and focus exclusively on “sophisticated training in quantitative methods in addition to a liberal-arts emphasis.” (via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Lauds: Michael Johnston ogles a book of “camera porn” from the George Eastman House. SFW!

¶ Prime: James Surowiecki calls for detaching the ratings agencies from official securities regulation.

¶ Tierce: Tom Scocca, Dad with a pen, goofs again: “It was a mistake to get on the Metro train with the kid riding on my shoulders.”

¶ Sext: Of the lower 48 states, 5 birds are 26 states’ official avian: Cardinal (7), Mockingbird (6), Meadowlark (6), Bluebird (4), and Goldfinch (3).

¶ Nones: Wake-up call from New Delhi to Indian state governments: “Leak reveals India Maoist threat.”

¶ Vespers: Emily Gould’s report on a panel discussion about the future of fiction is the sort of document that we don’t want to lose sight of: this is how published authors regarded the Internet/marketing/branding in September 2009: still in the old-fashioned way. (via The Rumpus)

¶ Compline: “Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres”: Project Gaydar at MIT. (via The Morning News)

(more…)

¶ Matins: An attempt to “urbanize” Tyson’s Corner, Virginia appears to have spooked the planners: they don’t want anything too urban!

¶ Lauds: With Julie & Julia about to open in France, a number of critics are echoing Mme Brassart.

¶ Prime: A word about arbitrage from Felix Salmon. Actually, two words:

• Picking up nickels in front of a steamroller
• Don’t try this at home.

¶ Tierce: As if it had been waiting for rifts within the Anglican Communion to threatens its future, Canterbury Cathedral has begun to fall down in earnest. (via The Morning News)

¶ Sext: Fast Food: The DeStyling.

¶ Nones: Has or has not fighting broken out between China and India? Officially, not. But the media on both sides pipe a different tune. Amit Baruah reports from the BBC.

¶ Vespers: A nice, long, faux-depressing, genuinely funny look at the publishing biz, by former Random House editor Daniel Menaker.

¶ Compline: Paul Graham on The List of N Things: sometimes a simple list fits the case exactly, but, too often, it’s “a degenerate case of essay.” (via  Mnémoglyphes)

Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

¶ Matins: Is there such a thing as good luck? Ayn Rand’s fans are certain that there is not: hard work is everything. Jonathan Chait assesses the Rand legacy in light of this conviction, at The New Republic. (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Our latest discovery: MetEveryday. (Thanks, Ms NOLA!)

¶ Prime: David Leonhardt profiles Robert Shiller — in the Yale Alumni Magazine, naturally. (via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: A violin repair shop in Morningside Hides has been told to cease and desist from violating antiquated zoning restrictions. No, noise is not the issue.

¶ Sext: Links to an assortment of Lost Symbol reviews, at Speakeasy.

¶ Nones: True-life ghost fleet — container ships and other freighters parked off of Singapore. (via  The Infrastructurist)

¶ Vespers: John Curran, author of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, lists then top ten titles in her ouevre. How many have you read? (Film adaptations don’t count!) (via Campaign for the American Reader)

¶ Compline: Jason Kottke asks (in a footnote, no less):

You’ve got to wonder when Apple is going to change the name of the iPhone. The phone part of the device increasingly seems like an afterthought, not the main attraction. The main benefit of the device is that it does everything. How do you choose a name for the device that has everything? Hell if I know.

(more…)

¶ Matins: Given the lunatic tone of national discourse these days, it’s refreshing to hear the “P” word spoken with such vigor and clarity:

Obama is sometimes faulted for conducting government by speech. But this speech was part of a patient strategy that, despite August’s rough weather, is looking increasingly sound.

Hendrick Hertzberg in The New Yorker.

¶ Lauds: Museum Director Thomas Campbell outlines his plans in an interview with The Art Newspaper’s Joshua Edward Kaufman.

¶ Prime: President Obama’s Federal Hall speech yesterday elicits interesting responses from Felix Salmon and James Surowiecki.

¶ Tierce: As deeply as our eidtor sympathises with Malcolm Gladwell, Sean Macauley’s totally high-school prank makes us laugh, even if it is a bit nasty. (What high school prank isn’t at least a bit nasty?)

¶ Sext: All of a sudden, everyone’s a racist. Well, simmer down. As Abe Sawyer suggests at The Awl, it’s probably anarchism. Racism is just one of the “tools currently available with which to ‘win’.”

¶ Nones: Mark Garlasco’s hobby — collecting Nazi military memorabilia — will probably cost him his job, now that it has “armed right-wing fanatics” critical of Human Rights Watch, the humanitarian organization which Mr Garlasco served as a military analyst.

¶ Vespers: On the anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s death, Jean Ruaud writes about the rewards of struggling with Infinite Jest all the way through to the end. [fr]

¶ Compline: An interesting, if not quite lucid, essay on the problem of giving unconditional love to a badly-behaving child, by Alfie Kohn. (more…)