A bit truncated, today’s report. I did all the reading, but I’m dashing off to the Rue des Médecins, where I’ll undoubtedly be late.
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The recently-closed restaurant branch of one of my favorite food shops. I’m sorry that they didn’t make a go of it, but I never gave it a try, either. I’d say that it was in the wrong part of town. It would have been heaven in or near the theatre district. Or perhaps in Grand Central Terminal.

The weather today suits my indoorsy, stock-taking frame of mind. Without the slightest intention of cutting back on my posting, I’m considering changes. Metamorphoses, perhaps. It’s as though the sheer weight of the blog’s verbiage were altering the site’s nature, its composition.

Ordinarily, I don’t like to write about blogging — I’d rather just do it. But lately I’ve felt the need for some public throat-clearing. The fundamental nature of the enterprise hasn’t changed; The Daily Blague is still a combination diary and notice board, pointing on occasion to longer, less dated essays at Portico. If I’ve offering very few links to the rest of the Blogosphere, that’s because I haven’t really been visiting very much of it beyond the sites listed on the Blog Roster.

But the whole point of the blog seems about to tilt in some new direction. Literally — think of it as the vanishing point, the dot in the distance where all the sight lines converge. I’ve been looking for a new pole star. I haven’t found it yet, but of course I don’t have to, since I’ll be inventing it along with everything else.

This may surprise you, but assisting spring fever as a catalyst are the Diaries of Monty Python veteran Michael Palin, which I’m listening to on my daily walks (as read by the author). I can’t tell you how much I should like to shake this gentleman’s hand! Creator of many of my favorite Python routines (together with Terry Jones, whom I hadn’t properly appreciated), Mr Palin comes off as a charming but thoroughly decent man, with his feet on the ground, his heart in the right place, and his head stocked to bursting with articulate expression. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Diaries take one into his workroom, but they do give off the most invigorating fizz. (more…)

¶ As this is no more than a reader’s diary, I’m allowed to make mistakes, I suppose — as long as I catch them quickly. The story of the two Guillaumes the other day (Decameron, IV, ix) was told not by Dioneo but by Filostrato. Dioneo, the cutup, tells naughty stories at the end of each day. So: today’s story about the doctor’s wife and Ruggiero, who drinks an anaesthetic by mistake and wakes up in a chest, placed there by his lady love, the doctor’s wife, who can’t think what else to do with his apparently dead body. Sounds awful, but it’s played for farce. Trying to turn over inside the chest, Ruggiero causes it to fall somehow; it breaks open and he is free. Free for a moment, that is; with his bad reputation, Ruggiero is naturally arrested as a burglar. The commedia dell’arte conclusion involves the lady’s maid singing a pretty song to the magistrate.

The judge saw that she was a tasty-looking dish, and thought he would have just one nibble before listening to what she had to say. Knowing that she would obtain a better hearing, the girl did not object in the slightest, and when the snack was finished, she picked herself up and said:…

Cheeky! I cannot make out the Italian euphemism for the “snack,” but it seems to involve a hook and religious reference. Of course. And on to the Fifth Day!

¶ In the Aeneid, Aeneas finally tracks down the shade of his father, whose ghost prompted him to visit the Underworld in the first place. The river Lethe is explained to him.

¶ District and Circle: Oh, dear, I hadn’t turned the page! I thought that the first sonnet was all there was to the title poem. But no, it goes on. I keep turning the pages. “To George Seferis in the Underworld.” The Internet is a great help. It not only tells me about Seferis, a Greek poet and diplomat whose death in 1971 occurred almost immediately after the setting of this poem, but to the biography that inspired Heaney. I wind up in Liddell & Scott, but don’t learn very much. According to Heaney, aspalathoi are reeds sharp enough to serve as scourges. According to the dictionary, aspalathos is “a sweet-scented shrub.” I also come across an article in the Telegraph that scoffs at Heaney’s professed reference for Gaelic, but I don’t really read it.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Kristin Darguzas, of ParentDish. I feel not unlike Aeneas in the Underworld myself. Parenting blogs! What a universe that must be! I can only wonder what it would have been like to be at home with Megan when she was an infant, only instead of watching soap operas while I took care of her and did the housework (I worked at night, when Megan’s mother came home), I’d had the Internet to check into.

I was explaining the other day to a very doubtful forty-something that car seats had just been invented when Megan was born. They were very simple affairs: plastic baskets, really, given a seat shape and held up with a collapsible wire bracket. Really quite exactly like one of today’s two-handled deli baskets, but shaped a little differently. No upholstery. No straps or safety belts. No rules against using the things in the front seat. And just the day before yesterday, there had been nothing at all. Babies were ferried in a passenger’s arms.

¶ Clive James, nominally on Virginio Rognoni, the Italian minister of the interior who tamed the Red Brigades without resorting to counterterrorism. James’s real subject is the efficacy of terrorism, most notably in the creation of the State of Israel. Italy, he argues, was a functioning democracy when the Brigades began their attack. “But it isn’t hard to name countries, calling themselves democracies, in which injustice, to the idealistic young, seemed so deeply institutionalized that terrorism occurred to them as the only workable response.” Very sobering.

The Famille Verte was bothered last evening by two questions: (a) how to convince friends and relations to plow through George Meredith’s fabulous but unreadable novel, The Egoist, which really, really needs to be turned into a movie; and (b) if Mozart didn’t write K 297(b), who did? Stand up, man; take a bow! Let’s hear it for the greatest forger in music history.

And that, my friends, is what comes of Giving Up Television: one loses touch entirely. But we do have a very jolly time.

Later that night….

Listening to Berlioz (Les nuits d’été — Régine Crespin). Is it really possible to be this old?

I notice lately that, when I twist my arm a bit, the skin folds like rope, torquing from wrist to elbow. It’s not awful looking, but it is awful. Sixty!

My youth was so completely (and obviously) wasted on me that I resolved not to wail about it when I grew up/old. So I won’t. But to be sixty is truly arresting. To say that I don’t feel sixty is a very bad joke, especially as I did feel fifty-five, -six, -seven, &c more or less uninterruptedly. Sixty! How breathtakingly pénible!

Because I’ve never been a bigger flirt than I am now. It’s not that I expect my flirting to lead to anything – Dieu m’en garde! But I don’t want my flirting to be ridiculous, now that I know, finally, why one would flirt.

Sixty! Que mon sort est amer!

Connaissez-vous la blanche tombe? Good — meet me there at six for a drink.

In the past, I’ve made a point of not reading novels by the same writer in succession. A pair of reasons as stoutly interconnected as Scylla and Charybdis warn me against it. First, one wants to avoid the risk of burnout. Most writers, like most people, have little characteristics that, while they may be heartening to re-connect with after a spell of absence, may also become taxing and tiresome with prolonged exposure. The second reason is the opposite of the first: one wants to space out the goodies. If an author doesn’t cloy, he or she is much too rare a catch to squander all at once.

But I’m sailing through these perils at the moment, already embarked on Brian Morton’s most recent novel, Breakable You. Two weeks ago, I read Starting Out in the Evening. Last week, it was A Window Across the River. Although they share the writer’s scrupulously understated prose, lightly seasoned with very dry wit, the novels are tonally quite different, and far from having too much of a good thing, I was so curious to see what the latest novel was like that I don’t think I could have concentrated on anything else. (Mr Morton’s first novel, The Dylanist, is out of print. Copies are available through Alibris, but I’m holding out, at least for the moment, for a conforming reissue by Harvest Books.)

In any case A Window Across the River is one novel that all modern-day fiction writers and their readers really must read, because it addresses, squarely and intelligently, the problem of authorial appropriation: whose life is this, anyway?

¶ A Window Across the River.

Rob Bennett for the Times

While the rest of us are frazzled by spotty Internet connections, people too grand to know what a keyboard is have their own problems, too. For example, if you’re a top French businessman, your office is probably done in some sort of Louis XV style. (Luis Buñuel shared this information with everyone in the world in Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie.) How anxious-making, therefore, to learn that the “kingmaker” of Le Club des Cent (a roundtable of mercantile talons rouges) goes in for the seriously regal style of Louis XIV. Not only less comfortable but much, much more expensive.

¶ No Guillotines, Please; We’re Énarques.

And on this side of the pond, new neighbors at the Plaza are pining for the gilded backyard fence. Canasta, anyone? (You ought to have heard Kathleen snorting over this story, seen her roll her eyes. “Are these people mad?” she bellowed.)

¶ Condos at the Plaza.

To take my mind off an Internet muddle yesterday — it was the day for them, as both Édouard and George Snyder reported — I went to the movies on Thursday night instead of Friday morning. This not only cleared up Friday morning for dealing with the muddle, but it got me out of the house on Thursday night, when all I’d have done at home was stew.

It was Valentine’s Day, which is probably why Universal opened Definitely, Maybe, but the theatre was packed not with couples but with twosomes, threesomes, and foursomes of women. The laughter was unusually free of a bass line. There was plenty of it, though.

My early feeling is that Ryan Reynolds, the star of Definitely, Maybe, is going to follow in the footsteps of such film greats as Clint Eastwood, Nick Nolte, and Harrison Ford, pretty boys all when they were in their twenties. Someday Mr Reynolds’ contribution to Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle will be as forgotten about as Mr Ford’s to Apocalypse Now and The Conversation. 

¶ Definitely, Maybe.

This week’s article isn’t online yet, for which I apologize. Christopher Leinberger looks at the forecast for suburbia, particularly the more recent, far-flung areas of sprawl, which are typically remote from long-established lines of public transportation. If you’d asked me what I expected two years ago, I’d have pinned change on rising energy costs. It looks, though, as though what began as the “subprime” mortgage crisis has actually tilted the trends.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

¶ Christopher S Leinberger on the Future of Suburbia, in The Atlantic.

The view from the back surgeon’s waiting room would be far more agreeable if it were not disturbed by the sound of a television placed next to the window. The sight of a television in a doctor’s waiting room makes me wonder if this is really a world that I want to go on living in. Nobody looks good in a waiting room, but television is a further insult.

¶ Follow-Up Visit.

¶ IV, ix of the Decameron is a horror story, plain and simple. Two knights, boon companions, are in love with the same woman — and the one who is married to her descends into homicidal malignancy with what can only be called warp speed, in the space of a paragraph. His former chum rather colorlessly if brutally done away with, we can proceed to the interesting part of the story, which concerns the transformation of the dead man’s heart into a succulent dish fit for an errant lady to feed upon. Boccaccio’s dispatch is — for Boccaccio — absolutely artless, and this tale holds the “slam, bam, thank you, ma’am” honors, at least until something lower comes along. The tale is told, of course, by the dectet’s cutup, naughty Dioneo.

¶ As Aeneas continues through the Underworld, questioning the Fury Tisiphone about the crimes committed by the damned consigned to Tartarus, we reflect on how much sophistication has gone into explaining the afterlife since classical times. Working on the foundations of heroic Mediterranean myths about hell, Christian thinkers thought through every detail of the situation, which was of course not really imaginary to them. Changing everything is the idea that sprouts in Paul and blooms in Augustine: we are all sinners. That is clearly not the case for Virgil; in fact, very few souls are wicked enough to be damned. There is no conception of “venial sin,” and even the mortal offenses are all contingent upon an idea of honor that has nothing to do with the great Christian engine of love.

¶ Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle came out two years ago. It’s your standard slim volume of verse, although one does wonder why such books aren’t formatted for genuine pockets. Eight and a half inches by five and a quarter is absurdly broad. You ought to be able to carry these things around with you, for declamation on the moors.

The title poem’s title alludes to the District and Circle Lines of London’s Underground. On his daily rounds, the poet passes a beggar with a tin whistle — another poet, in other words. It’s for this reason that he keeps his “hot coin” to himself: “For was our traffic not in recognition?” The sonnet is unabashedly well-constructed, as if it were permissible for Heaney to lavish his grand prosodic gifts only upon a correlatively humble scene, one lacking any associations with “poetry.”

I come to this poem with enough knowledge of the world to decipher its not very opaque references, but the poem on the facing page, “Rilke: After the Fire,” is lost on me, perhaps because I don’t know my Rilke.

¶ Clive James knows his Rilke — the nominal subject of today’s essay. The real subject is the fame of those who have been compromised by association with corrupt regimes. Brecht, Richard Strauss, Shostakovich — Rilke himself was gloriously apolitical, and so has nothing to do with this piece, really — the usual suspects. And then an interesting swerve: Charles Lindbergh.

… behind all the personae determined by events there was a personality that remained constant. He valued self-reliance, and possibly valued it too much: it made him hate collectivism so blindly that he thought fascism was the opposite, instead of the same thing in a dark shirt. Yet there is something magnificent about a man who could make a success out of any task he tackled. To complete Rilke’s observation — and it is an observation, because it answers visible facts — we must accept this much: to measure the distortion of life we call fame it is not enough to weight the misunderstandings against the understandings. We have to see through to the actual man, and decide whether, like so many artists, he is mainly what he does, or whether he has an individual and perhaps even inexpressible self, like the lonely flyer.

This is exactly the sort of essay that makes one long to rush off to a café, for group discussion with thoughtful friends. But one is stranded in Yorkville, with only the Internet as one’s lifeline. 

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero is Brian Lam, of Gizmodo. The interview is so pervaded by references to rivalry with Engadget and the popularity of Lifehacker (a site run by a fair lady) that I very nearly conflated this paragraph with the one about the Decameron. From the bottomless trunk of riches contained in the Points to Review: “Providing up-to-the-minute news can contribute greatly to a blog’s success.” No shit, Sherlock.

¶ It’s Corpus Christi in Le rouge et le noir, and we have a moment that reminds one inescapably of Tosca. As a church swells full of gorgeously arrayed celebrants, our hero swoons to one side, his mind utterly elsewhere. On a woman, of course. Tosca herself in the case of Scarpia, at the end of Act I of the opera; as for Julien, he has just run into Mme de Rênal in a side-aisle. I wonder how many members of Puccini’s early audiences were reminded of Stendhal’s novel, which until only recently it seems was a must-read classic, known to all educated people.

A favorite bookshop — where all encounters are pleasant.

At some point yesterday, before I’d gone out, Kathleen complained that her cell phone battery wasn’t charging. I must have been in very good form, because I knew right away why. I remembered that she was using an ailing battery of mine that I’d replaced some time ago. I’d replaced mine, all right, but I’d forgotten to buy a second battery to replace hers, which was downright unusable.

Big deal, you say: why didn’t you just go back and buy the second battery? If you’re really asking this, you don’t own a cell phone. When I replaced my battery, I was careful to show up at exactly ten o’clock, when the AT & T Mobility (formerly Cingular) shop opened for business. All I can say about showing up later than ten o’clock is that it’s a pity that Dante didn’t live to exercise his taste for the lurid on waspish descriptions of cell phone stores. They’re all the same, their staffs grossly underpaid in order to maximize the compensation of officers and directors (so often the same people), and one fine day we shall round up the phone company executives en masse — they’ll be huddled together at the Masters in Augusta — and wheel them off to the guillotine. In the meantime, we must rely on our little grey cells — the ones in our head.

Here it was, the middle of the afternoon, and Kathleen was suggesting that I just “run in” and pick up a battery. In this weather, she opined, there would be no one there. Ha! I thought. I’ll go, I promised, at ten tomorrow morning.

But then another snafu altogether intervened. New York’s only surviving drug store — hey, free markets are great! — runs an automated telephone prescription refill system that, for the first time, pooped out on us. I okayed the the refills last week, but when I showed up at the counter I was told that no one had requested them. This might have been a nightmare, but it wasn’t; my clear and concise response to the pharmacist’s questions, edged perhaps with a touch of irritation but no more, convinced her that I was not a flake and that “the computer” had probably screwed things up. I was told that the pills would be ready in an hour. All of a sudden, I had time to kill.

Why not spend it at AT & T Mobility? Favorably buzzed by my red-tape-slashing experience with the Duane Reade pharmacist, I crossed the street and walked up the block. Contrary to Kathleen’s prediction, the AT & T Mobility store was not empty. But it wasn’t packed, either. A young woman with a clipboard, wishing to be far more pleasant than her stress levels permitted, asked how she could help me. It was not a genuine question. She was going to inscribe my name on her clipboard and ask me to take a seat. But I was ready for that. All I want to do, I said, is buy a couple of batteries for my Razr phone. My slightly too-bright smile implied a reminder that there was nothing to negotiate. I wasn’t going to mull over the pricing of plans, seek instructions about setting up my voice-messaging service, or claim that my phone had been stolen by brigands in Provence. I was going to pay for two batteries. Will there be a wait? I asked. I really shouldn’t have to wait, I said, because all I want to do is buy two batteries. If there’s going to be a wait, I’ll come back tomorrow at ten, I said. I was cheerful but very articulate. The very large gent in a dark suit whose aim was central-casting impassivity couldn’t help eyeing me with a warning frown, beneath which I detected a certain anxiety. He was dealing with a customer who was Prepared.

Impressed by the simplicity of my proposed transaction, and mad to get rid of me, the girl with the clipboard went overboard, and suggested that I might find the batteries that I wanted on the racks that lined the store’s walls. But I was ready for that, too. I knew that Razr phone batteries are not stocked on open racks, available to the public. They must be retrieved from the cabinets behind the racks — cabinets that a big guy like me would get in no end of trouble for trying to help himself to. Having expressed my doubt that the batteries were so readily available, I smiled brightly once again. This smile is a trick that I learned from matrons from both Westchester and Harris Counties, and it is even more effective when the smiler stands, even in his dotage, nearly two hundred centimeters tall, carries an Edwardian portliness, and dresses as well as the ladies who taught him. I was directed forthwith to a clerk behind the counter. My tactics were working. I had convinced the staff that there was an easy way to be done with me. Just sell me the batteries…

I wish you could have seen the clerk as he hunted and gathered for product. He found one battery soon enough, but he had to check two or three more cabinets before he located a second. I was ready for him to tell me that stock was running low at the moment and that I’d have to come back for a second battery. But no; after zigging and zagging across the floor, he returned to the desk with two batteries. You said “two,” right? he thought to ask. My reply involved sound, but no moving parts.

It was at this point that I realized that I had walked into the diorama of an early Twenty-First Century cell phone store. Nobody — aside from me, the girl with the clipboard, and the clerk who unearthed the batteries — had moved more than, say, the background figures in a cheap animated film. As I ran my credit card through the doodad with the screen that, in theory, requires your authorized signature, I noticed that the other clumps of people at the counter were still exactly as they had been before the clerk went hunting, while less engaged customers perused the goods that were available on the open racks with a bemused paralysis more typically brought on by the parade of wallpaper samples. The big guy in the suit, needless to say, merely breathed.

Back at Duane Reade, the new clerk, flustered, couldn’t find the refills. The dithering would have gone on indefinitely if the pharmacist hadn’t looked up from her break and intoned, “they’re ready,” in a voice that all but cast a spotlight on the elusive prescriptions. All it takes in this world, it seems, is sounding like someone who knows whereof he or she speaks.

Yesterday, snow. Today, meltage. I’ve got to run across the street to pick up some prescriptions for Kathleen, and I’m not bothering to change into trousers.

When I get back, there will be no excuse for further delay: it’s time to open the box from TigerDirect and see if the Wi-Fi booster accomplishes anything in my plastered pad.

In desperation, I consider a novel method of shelving books.

Five books: Isabel of Burgundy, by Aline S Taylor; The Father of All Things, by Tom Bissell; How to Read Montaigne, by Terence Cave; David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death; and A Window Across the River, by Brian Morton. What I’m really reading — devouring — is the Morton. I am almost certain that anybody who enjoys reading this blog would get a kick out of Mr Morton’s novels about bookish New Yorkers. Just before Nora, the heroine, has “the Talk” with her boyfriend, Benjamin, he disappoints her by telling her that he neglected a favor that he promised to do for her ailing aunt. The reason? He was distracted by a call from a woman who is an important character in Mr Morton’s previous novel, Starting Out in the Evening.

“That was Heather Wolfe. She used to work for Tina Brown at Talk magazine. I asked her what she’s up to now, and she said she’s helping launch a new magazine. But she was very mysterious about it. She told me to send her some clips. Maybe Tina’s starting something new. Wouldn’t that be amazing — to be writing for Tina?”

He’d never met Tina Brown, but like everyone else in the publishing world, he referred to her by her first name. She was like Madonna for intellectuals.

Meanwhile, a not very intellectual “political” issue of the Book Review.

¶ Politics, Real and Imagined.

¶ In the Decameron, IV, viii, we’re back to courtly love. Girolamo, sent out of town to get him away from an artisan’s daughter, is distraught to find, upon his return, that she has married someone else. So what does he do? He lies down in bed next to her and resolves to do. (He holds his breath, in fact. I believe that this is impossible.) And then, what does his former lady-love do? Although she’d forgotten all about him, and rather wished that he wouldn’t lie down next to her &c, all it takes is the sight of his corpse at the funeral to rekindle her passion. “What a wonderful thing Love is, and how difficult it is to fathom its deep and powerful currents.” Stendhal says somewhere (and I wish I could source this) that people wouldn’t think about falling in love on their own; they have to read about it first. Boccaccio seems to have been intent on making sure that everyone read about it, over and over and over.

But the best part of the tale is this dry bit of business, before Cupid’s arrow strikes the second time:

“Girolamo,” she whispered, “it’s time for you to be going.”

On receiving no answer, she assumed that he had fallen asleep. So she stretched out her hand to wake him up and began to prod him, but found to her great astonishment that he was cold as ice to the touch. She then prodded him more vigorously but it had no effect, and after trying once more she realized that he was dead. The discovery filled her with dismay and for some time she lay there without the slightest notion what to do.

In the end she decided to put the case to her husband without saying who was involved [remember, the married couple is in bed, with the husband on one side of the lady and Girolamo’s corpse on the other], and ask his opinion about what the people concerned ought to do about it; and having woken him up, she described her own recent experience as though it had happened to someone else, then asked him what advice he would give supposing it had happened to her.

To this, the worthy soul replied that in his view, the fellow who was dead would have to be taken quietly back to his own house and left there, and that no resentment should be harboured against the woman, who did not appear to him to have done any wrong.

“In that case,” said the girl, “we shall have to do likewise.”

¶ In the Aeneid, Aeneas bumps into the recent suicide, Dido, but, what do you know: she won’t hang around to listen to his explanations. (The gods made me do it.)

And at last she tears herself away, his enemy forever,
feeling back to the shadowed forests where Sychaeus,
her husband long ago, answers all her anguish,
meets her love with love. But Aeneas, no less
struck by her unjust fate, escorts her from afar
with streaming tears and pities her as she passes.

Now, just how does one pull off the neat trick of escorting from afar? The Latin is almost cute, as if saying makes it so.

nec minus Aeneas, casu concussus iniquo,
prosequitur lacrimis longe et miseratur euntem.

This gallant but utterly pointless and unlooked-for gesture that must have sent elegant minds of the Seventeenth Century into raptures.

¶ And so, farewell to C K Williams, at least for a time. The New Poems, angrier and more topical than his earlier verse, read like notes toward a lamentation. “Cassandra, Iraq” is a poem worth puzzling over.

She’s magnificent, as we imagine must be
who foresee and foretell and are right and disdained.

This is the difference between us who are like her
in having been right and disdained, and us as we are.

Because we, in our foreseeings, our having been right,
are repulsive to ourselves, fat and immobile, like toads,

Not toads in the garden, who after all are what they are,
but toads in the tale of death in the desert of sludge.

We’re toads, the poet says, because we can’t figure out what to do about the awfulness of, specifically, the American misadventure in Iraq. I myself am not shamed by this; I think that Williams overlooks, as many on the Left do, the awful potential for another civil war that the Christianist stab at ascendancy has exposed. Wishing that this country were not so prone to the religious convulsions that engendered it is not, in the end, good enough; and the convulsion that just now seems to be dying down of its own accord could only have been stilled by a fearfully greater one. What toads need to do is learn American history — really learn it. Be that as it may, Williams ends his poem with an irresistible but somewhat impenetrable suggestion. Having noting that Cassandra could not foretell the manner of her own death, he concludes,

Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net.
That we know; she foresaw that — in a gush of gore, in a net.

Gore’s Internet?

Tomorrow, a few poems from Seanus Heaney’s District and Circle.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero (Nº 15 — halfway through!): Joel Comm of JoelComm.com. More unexplained mysteries of SEO — I know, I could find out about it elsewhere, but the true theme of this book does seem to be Search Engine Optimization and Its Discontents — but also more than a little murk about what the site of the day is about. Finally: “I’m part of an unintentionally underground niche — the whole Internet info-product marketing niche. Marketing seminars, e-books, and so forth.” Ah! And so forth! Yesterday’s entry, for example: “Kindle Your Revenue Stream.” I just want someone to pay for my Kindle.

¶ In Chapter XXVII of Le rouge et le noir, Stendhal’s contempt for Julien’s fellow seminarians rises to excoriation, as he protrays a Church of such corrupted piety — its very priests honor the pope in exchange for good dinners and lots of casuel (perks) — that Julien’s almost helpless excellence earns him the nickname “Martin Luther.” The chapter portrays a gang of mediocrities enforcing their low standards out of sheer self-interest. How to prevent this sort of thing is one of the most vexatious of human problems. How to keep ten dim-witted thugs from trumping one first-class mind. Not to mention trouncing.

¶ Writing about Richard Rhodes — one of his few living subjects and the author of two very superior books about the invention, if that’s the word, of thermonuclear devices, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb — Clive James gets at one of the weaker habits of mind of those inclined toward the Left:

The left is always at its weakest when it argues for an alternative past [i e, the world would be a better place if the atomic bomb had not been developed], administered by better me. They can only mean men like them. (This assumption of personal superiority is where the perennial left comes closest to the classic right.) But the past was administered by men as clever as they were at the very least. The chief virtue of Rhodes’s book about Los Alamos is to give you the feeling of how a group of the cleverest men on Earth combined their best efforts in the belief that building a bomb to kill a hundred thousand people at a time was the only thing to do. There can be moral discussions of the modern world that don’t take that fact in, but they won’t be serious.

Here we are on our way to dinner at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, at the end of a long day. Because of the terrible weather (snow, slush, ice, all served up nice and cold), we progressed from the Museum of Modern Art, where Kathleen’s law firm hosted a fête this evening, to Grand Central via the subway, which took forever but was dry and comfortable. Consider the alternative:

At one point at the party, to get Kathleen’s attention from a balcony, I tossed a crumpled Kleenex in her general direction, and it worked. The gesture wasn’t as stylish as Cary Grant’s tossing of the matchbook in North By Northwest, but I felt that I’d pulled something off, and sometimes that’s all that it takes to plumb the heights of contentment. Please don’t think that I just got lucky! A lifetime of disrupting classrooms — or at least one of distracting them behind teachers’ backs — has left me with a distinctive skill set. I may not know much about art, but I know how to pitch a tissue.

Kathleen asked me what I was giving her for Valentine’s Day, and I thought, oh, that’s next week sometime, isn’t it? “A kiss,” I answered.

At the Oyster Bar: Kate, Headwaiter, Kathleen, Tank. Guastavino ceilings, natch.

English really is the most amazingly flexible language. You can take a word and, if you will only think hard enough, come up with an entirely new meaning for it that also makes sense! The Washington Post runs a contest, or at least so says this Web page. I’d be more scrupulous about getting to the bottom of it, but I am simply blown away by the perfection of:

Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.

That, mes amis, is a keeper. (Thanks, LXIV!)

Do not miss Roman’s floor plans for “1000 Fifth.”

The housing of the Temple of Dendur complex at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the crooked made straight.

This picture reminds me of an article that I clipped out of a New Yorker from last December, a piece by Malcolm Gladwell about IQs that I missed at the time.

To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.

Isn’t it astonishing that “IQ fundamentalism” is so tenacious, in the teeth of so much evidence and, even more, experience to the contrary? The IQ test itself seems like little more than yet another feeble attempt to rationalize the universe by adding epicycles to the epicycles.

Consider this: because the IQ test is keyed to a benchmark of 100 points for intelligence at the 50th percentile, and because — what’s this?! — test scores go up over time, the test has to be “re-normed” every ten years or so. That’s French for “made more difficult.” Why, if IQs are absolute — genetically hardwired and unvarying throughout a lifetime — do test scores go up? Do people really become smarter? Uh, no. What happens is very simple: the tests create a climate in which people do better at them. The assumptions underlying the test, which are, as Mr Gladwell points out, merely “cognitive preferences” that have nothing to do with intelligence — zero relevance — become the assumptions of everyday life. Making the test more difficult simply diffuses a more nuanced set of assumptions throughout the test-taking society — which would be everybody. To the extent that you are socialized and engaged in some kind of competitive activity (i e, work), you receive free tutoring in IQ test skills.

I loved the story about the Kpelle of Liberia. Asked to arrange things in a “smart” manner, they did so functionally, placing the knife with the potato, so that the potato could be peeled and sliced. Asked to arrange things in a “foolish” manner, they put the knife with the other tools. To the spluttering crypto-supremacist, no doubt, this thinking explains the backwardness of Africa.  

What’s more likely, I think, is that Western-style thinking strips people down to a relatively stupid phase in order to make them much, much smarter. Sadly, it’s the in the stupid phase that a lot of “educated” minds get stuck. Pope’s great lines, from the Essay on Criticism, are well worth repeating.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”

“Largely” there means “a lot,” as in “all one’s life long.”

¶ In the Decameron, a tale from the (Florentine) proletariat. Two young and comely workers in the wool trade meet in a garden that, for a change, belongs to neither of their families nor to the convent in which one of them is immured. The boy, Pasquino — already, the commedia dell’arte nomenclature — interrupts his love-making to brush his teeth with a sage-leaf. Unfortunately, it has been breathed upon by a great venomous toad, and Pasquino dies. Does Simona, the girlfriend, worry that she’ll be caught in flagrante? Not a bit of it. It’s for murder that she’s hauled in! As she is not a lady, she has no cause to worry about her honor. But she does prize her good name as a solid citizen, so she demonstrates to the podestà how Pasquino came to grief. This kills her, too.

This tale (IV, vii) is not only short but starkly denuded of the superlatives that garland all the earlier love-stories. Neither Simona nor Pasquino is the most handsome, the most beautiful, &c. McWilliam’s notes tell sus that the lovers “have special significance as the first working-class hero and heroine in the history of European tragic literature.” Well, they both die. I wouldn’t call the story tragic.

¶ In the Aeneid, the Sibyl persuades a reluctant Charon, who has gotten in trouble on previous occasions for ferrying (famous) mortals across the Styx and who is disinclined to allow Aeneas to embark, by brandishing the golden bough. In contrast to the dead souls, apparently, Aeneas is suddenly “a giant,” and his weight is almost more than the boat can bear. We’ve all been in something like it at one icky time or another:

                            gemuit sub pondere cumba
sutilis et multam accepit rimosa paludem.

¶ C K Williams: a poem from August 2005, “Rats.”

and the president

and his energy-company
cronies still insist
global warming
isn’t real. The rats

rove where they will
now, shiny and fat,
they’ve appropriated
the whole lawn.

Not the most poetic lines in the history of verse, but “rove” is worthy of the great Augustans.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Deborah Petersen, of Life in the Fast Lane. I’m probably not going to get this right, but Ms Petersen appears to be the dispatcher of her husband’s Canadian trucking company, Fast Lane. I guess it’s not a full-time job. Why is her blog so popular (and it is popular, apparently)? Because Ms Petersen has studied SEO — search engine optimization, the technique or set of techniques that floats through these pages like a miasma. Most of the bloggers so far seem disdainful of SEO, in much the same way that doctors are disdainful of vitamin supplements. If you’re doing a good job, you don’t need the boost. (One’s Inner Publicist: Are you CRAZY?) Editor Michael Banks treats SEO as a Masonic secret, too precious to be discussed in any detail. I guess I won’t be learning about that from Blogging Heroes.

¶ In Le rouge et le noir, our cynical hero, Julien, is out-cynicized by his fellow seminarians, who, mostly drawn from peasant backgrounds, believe in good meals, warm cassocks, and the power of not thinking. Again, I flip to the English translation and learn precisely nothing. Well, most of the time. Every now and then there’s an idiom the sense of which I’d never extract from a dictionary. The really tough ones all seem to involve en and être.

Les gens adroits parmi les séminaristes virent qu’ils avaient affair à un homme qui n’en était pas aux éléments du métier.

translates as

The sharper ones among the seminarians saw that they were dealing with someone who was not without some elements of their calling.

¶ Writing about Jean-François Revel, Clive James becomes almost intemperate. I think that I share James’s dislike and contempt for ideology, but it has been much less salient in my life than it doubtless was in his. One of the good things about the countercultural Sixties was that everyone was really too stoned for ideological rigor. How else could boomers have become the sterling investment bankers who mastered the universe in the Eighties?

Although I feel slightly left out of James’s side of the conversation, I get it in the end.

After the verbal battle of a lifetime, he had come to accept that the reason for the readiness of the intellectuals to connive at mass extermination was that their language was itself a totalitarian instrument. Hence the hollowness of what he called the eternal dream of the bien pensant left: un totalitarisme végétarien. The reluctance of ex-ideologists like Bernard-Henri Lévy to acknowledge their debt to Revel is quite understandable. He isn’t telling them that they were bad writers because they thought that way. He is telling them that they though that way because they were bad writers.

Zing!

The Neue Galerie, seen from the edge of Central Park.

This Monday morning finds me feeling a bit less behind schedule than I’ve been for weeks. One of these days, I’ll be able to reclaim the portions of my brain that are currently stuck on (a) WiFi signals in my plastered apartment and (b) the sometimes puzzling interactions of my new 8-gig Nano and the Klipsch RoomGroove. It’s time for a new desktop, too; the current one is almost four years old, and it has recently begun a decline into decrepitude that, for once, I am not going to meet with denial.

The writer’s world so lovingly captured in Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening, in contrast, is sweetly innocent of computers, and of technical problems generally — at least those not involving an IV drip.

¶ Starting Out in the Evening.