As of today, I’ve been keeping the Daily Office — I think that that’s the right verb — for a month. It seems that I’ve been keeping it for a lot longer than that; and it also seems as though I just took it up last week. Although the entry’s broader outlines seem set, the internal feedback loops, by which I learn from doing something every day, have begun to pulse, and I’m ready to instigate a few external feedback loops as well, with a few Housekeeping Notes on various matters. (Today, Comments and Notifications.) Feel free to comment below or to write to me at the usual address. (more…)

La grosse Pomme, vu du comté de la Reine. (Le nord à droite.)

¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review.

¶ Tierce: Within a little more than a week — Eliot Spitzer’s scandal erupted in public only last Monday — the complexion of American politics seems to have changed, and the change is marked by two speeches, delivered, respectively, by Barack Obama and David Paterson.

And don’t miss a Great American Car Story by the Ganome.

¶ Sext: Women of the world (not to be confused with Women of the World — although most of them probably are both) discuss Eliot Spitzer’s lapses. “Bad manners,” says Nancy Lee Andrews, at one point Ringo Starr’s fiancée.

¶ Nones: Confused about which way is up in FreeMarketLand? This report in the Times, which, for all I know, may be a daily feature, does a fine job of connected all the dots with a remarkably clear coherence.

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¶ In the Decameron (VI, vi), the ultimate nobility of a Florentine family is established by its ugliness: the ancestors were formed so long ago that God hadn’t yet mastered the art of fashioning human features.
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In beautiful downtown Niantic, the splendid Morton Hotel.

¶ Matins: It was great to get out of town, and I really must get out more often — especially to New England. On Friday night, though, I was very glad to be in town. Listening to the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

¶ Tierce: So, there’s a Gold’s Gym in Haiti. It’s not for everyone, though. Why does this example of global free-market capitalism seem so totally unprogressive?

¶ Sext: Rah! Rah! Rah! My prep school’s latest claim to fame! Go Cecil! (Blair’s development office must be thrilled by this — development.)

¶ Vespers: How cool is that: your cell phone is your boarding pass! (The airline sends you a message containing a two-dimensional bar code that’s very hard to counterfeit.)

¶ Compline: Souvenir of the Weekend Past: a song that I had never heard in my life. I even thought that Riann was making it up. But Kathleen sang it lustily when I asked her about it last night. In her day, “boppin'” was replaced by “bashin’.”

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Happy Saint Paddy’s
 
¶ Matins: Today’s Book on Monday, Crazy For God, at Portico.

¶ Sext: Bailout or Smackdown? You decide. Meanwhile, I’m back in New York, sauntering down 86th Street minutes before the St Patrick’s Day Parade.

¶ Compline: One reason for not posting a bit more this afternoon was having to watch a rental before it was due back, to wit, Sexy Beast.

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Monday Housekeeping Note: Two new books join the list today. That’s probably not a very good idea, because I often have barely enough time to get through four books, and six will be quite a load; but it’s early days at this enterprise, and we’ll see how it goes. The two new books are John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and the anonymous medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in a new translation by Simon Armitage.

Brief Lives is a title that I recall running into all the time in my student days, but I don’t think I’d ever seen a copy until one arrived in the mail a few weeks ago. Richard Barber’s edition dates back to 1982, but my Boydell reprint appeared in 2004. It turns out to be a more curious book than I expected. Indeed, its contents are more “construct” than “book.”

It might seem imbalanced to introduce one epic poem in the middle of reading another, but Sir Gawain does not appear here qua epic poem, in any kind of competition with the Aeneid. It is rather the book of English verse du jour. It very nicely follows on Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle. Mr Heaney, of course, is the most recent notable translator of Beowulf, and Mr Armitage hails it as one of the “gateposts” on the way to his own work.

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Riann sends everyone a big, big “Hello!” She would like to perform her magic boxes trick for you, but The Daily Blague isn’t doing videoblogs yet. Which is really a shame, because her Queen of the Butterflies dance (artfully incorporating ribbons from the presents that Kathleen wrapped on Saturday morning) is a poem.

“That’s a poem?” asks Riann. Riann can read very well. (She nods.)

As for me, even though it turns out that the Wi-Fi here works just fine, I’m not blogging.

Well, just this once.

God knows, there’s no room in the kitchen. How about in here?

As many visitors have noticed, the paint is peeling from the ceiling in the foyer, and we’ve got to have it repainted. I keep asking myself, though: do we really need three chandeliers?

As my friend LXIV says, “What would Edith say?” Those fixtures are Just Not Her. What they are is Hermitage. Russia. The Amber Room. Wretched Excess. I don’t think that Miss Jones ever got as far north as Peterhof. She would have written the novel of old Petersburg, though, don’t you think? After all, that was the one city where a Rhinelander could really look down.

We arrivistes need to stick together.

The maddening thing is that I don’t have time to watch Sexy Beast just now. I’m almost convinced that, if not quite so flatly historical as The Bank Job, it drew on many of the same famous crime’s elements. It’ll have to wait for the weekend. Both movies are super, in their different ways. The Bank Job is certainly a lot easier on the gut.

The Bank Job, at Portico.

¶ Matins: This week’s Friday Front, at Portico. It may be that the question is not: how important are newspapers? But rather: how else can their vital functions, if any, be performed?

¶ Nones: I wonder if we’ve gotten any better at forecasting. Here’s an amenity that New York surely ought to have boasted by now…

¶ Vespers: He came in wanting to be the new McKinley, but he’s going to go out as a second Hoover. Oh, let’s hope not — no matter how hard he doesn’t try.

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¶ Matins: I’m going to the country this weekend….

¶ Sext: What a coinkydink! There I was, chatting with the ganome about Jane Austen, when an advance-fee scam letter, as crabbedly composed as if the writer had been sweating over Mansfield Park, popped into my mailbox.

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¶ Someone ought to publish a slim paperback edition of the Day Six of the Decameron — for the use of after-dinner speakers.

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

¶ Tierce: Spitzer still governor; Albany paralyzed. Aw, shucks. “Albany Paralyzed” is about the happiest headline that I’ve read since I moved back to New York in 1980. Can we think of something stronger and more permanent than “paralyzed”? “Nuked,” maybe? No; “nuked” is politically incorrect. How about “razed and salted,” like Carthage?

¶ Sext: Well, that’s that. All hail Governor Paterson…

¶ Vespers: Oy, the (no) pressure! Look for the Leisure Economy.

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The end of Blogging Heroes at last. I don’t think that I’ve ever read so boring a book about a subject that interested me. (Second place goes to the second volume of a Life of Harty-Tarty, written shortly after that gentleman’s demise in 1908, that was so deadly dull that I gave it away without making a note of its author.) As a conspectus of big-time blogging today (what I was naively hoping for), Blogging Heroes is so generally uninformative that only historians bother with it.  

Yippee.

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Jolly Bowery chef

¶ Matins: What a lot I’ve got to do today! Two pages to write, and at least five other significant items on the To Do list (kept in my head — and here, too, I guess), including making a recording of Mig’s text. I wonder if I still know how to use the equipment.

¶ Tierce: Mr Spitzer is still the governor; I may be losing friends faster than he is.

¶ Sext: A word or two about Lieutenant Governor David A Paterson, soon to be New York’s first African-American (and legally blind?) chief executive.

¶ Nones: Henrik Hertzberg leads off this week’s Talk with a surprising propostion.

¶ Vespers: William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, at MTC — with the amazing Ms Merkerson.

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¶ The Decameron, VI, ii: No wonder the “tales” are short Today (on Day Six, that is): they’re really just set-ups for snappy comebacks. To have two G-rated stories in a row is also a novelty.

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¶ Matins: Looking forward to getting my reading chair back from Mr Solo, refinisher and reupholsterer to stars like me. You can see his shop for yourself if you know where to look, on East 85th Street. Otherwise, content yourself with the fabric.

¶ Lauds: We watched Death at a Funeral. I was so pleased with myself for finding it at the Video Room. Ha.

¶ Sext: At the Huff Post, Jane Smileys says of the Clintons: “They are, indeed, now part of the ‘vast right wing conspiracy’.”

¶ Vespers: Here in New York, we are all waiting to see what Governor Spitzer, having been snared in a “prostitution ring,” does next.

¶ Compline: Books on Monday: J M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, at Portico.

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Monday Housekeeping Note: With only two chapters of Blogging Heroes left, I’ll be revising the reading list this week. The new titles will be John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium.

Coming up: the Aeneid will be followed by Simon Armitage’s new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote will follow the Decameron. These changes are weeks, if not months, away, so you’ve plenty of time, if you’re interested in following along, to arm yourself with either book.

On the horizon: James Merrill, Michel de Montaigne, Richard Burton, and the correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert.

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At Houston and Broadway

Last week, the third RoomGroove arrived. It took about two minutes to unwrap and plug in. Presto! Music in the living room. The same music that hitherto could only be heard in the bedroom and the blue room. As it was a weeknight, the Black Nano was playing the nearly six hundred “songs” that I’ve uploaded onto it. Although there’s still plenty of empty space on the Black Nano, it takes more than five days (barring the hours of sleep) for it to plow through the “Classics” playlist — which is the only playlist on that device.*

Meanwhile, I’ve uploaded nearly forty CDs onto the Grey Nano. There are two playlists, “Jazz” and “Standards,” the difference being that all the vocals have been shunted into the latter. Here’s the mystery: it’s as though the Black Nano and the Grey Nano were two completely different types of music source, instead of exactly the same. During the week, the pleasant round of Handel, Mozart, Schubert und so weiter creates one kind of apartment. Then, on the weekends, the place gets a paint job. When the Grey Nano shuffles its way through Keith Jarrett, Benny Goodman, Dexter Gordon and so on, we’re not in quite the same house.

Is it just the music? Of course not. It’s the flow of music, its endless, effortless unspooling. It’s as miraculous to me as water running from a tap must have been to the children of pioneers. And rather more atmospherically potent. Listen, I’d only just gotten used to not having to turn the record* over!

* You might then ask, “Why have a playlist at all?” Ah, so did I, at first.

* LP. We knew it was vaguely illiterate to call LPs (and 45s and — for those of us whose parents hadn’t thrown away theirs — 78s) “records.” But the usage did not die until the format did.

Here’s an idea: visit Times Square on a late Saturday afternoon in early spring. The weather is unlikely to be pleasant, but the chances are that the crowds will owe some of their effervescence to the joy of not being all bundled up.

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