¶ In the Decameron VIII, ii, a priest tricks a married woman more or less as the German soldier did in the last story — with the judicious use of witnesses, obliging the tricked party to return property. As the trickster is a priest, however, the accent is anticlerical and the jokes tinged with blasphemy. When the padre beds the wife, for example, he makes her “a kinswoman of the Lord God.”

¶ Much to my own surprise, I was so gripped with the exploits of Arcadian Pallas that I went ahead and read a second hundred lines, right through to his death. Hercules’ “lament”:

stat sua cuique dies, breve et inreparabile tempus
omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis,
hoc virtutis opus…

¶ In Aubrey: Fleetwood, Foster, Florio, Fuller, Gascoigne, Graunt, Gellibrand, and Gill. Impenetralia from the last of these, about a schoolmaster fond of whipping:

This Dr Gill whipped Duncombe, who was not long after a colonel of dragoons at Edgehill-fight, taken pissing against the wall. He had his sword by his side, but the boys surprised him: somebody had thrown a stone in at the window; and they seized the first man they lighted on. I think his name was Sir John Duncombe (Sir John Denham told me the story), and he would have cut the doctor, but he never went abroad except to church, and then his army went with him. He complained to the council, but it became ridicule and his revenge sank.

Oh, well, you get the idea…

¶ From Merrill’s “River Poem”:

For although the old man, by the time we all went home,
Had moved away he stayed there wandering
Like a river-flower, thinking rivery things.

¶ In Le rouge et le noir, Julien goes to work on his very insincere seduction of the Maréchale de Fervaques. I have no idea what Stendhal is up to.

¶ Clive James on Raymond Aron: four pieces, all saying the same thing, but in a style quite at odds with the message. Aron’s tricky political positions, we’re told, are expressed in lucid, nuanced prose; but James seems to be stumbling through the terrain, defending his man from attacks that begin to seem chimerical. It were better to make the case for Aron before working so sweatily at dismantling the case against him. Lots of pot-shots at Sartre, of course, such as:

… Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of student who actually read the books…

¶ Matins: Le jour de mariage va arriver! Here, a week from tomorrow.

¶ Sext: If I were not more than a little distracted by happy family matters (see above and below), I’d search my sites for mentions of “Democratic Party, Death of.” That would be the index heading, if I had an index. Nicholas Kristoff’s Op-Ed piece shows how this demise was brought about by more than the Democratic Party’s candidates’ warring blows. Their candidacies reveal an ever more clear-cut split between “working people” Democrats and “progressive” Democrats. When I think what the postponed recognition of this divide spells for American justice, I weep.

¶ Nones: Wow! A friend just sent me a link to moo, and within half an hour I placed an order for mini-business cards, exactly what I’ve wanted and have been putting off designing. For a tad over $25 net, I’ll be getting one hundred cards.

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What an orderly book Jane Austen’s last novel is! I had never noticed before that it is so neatly divided into two books of twelve chapters each. And almost as evenly divided between county (Somersetshire) and town (Bath).

Has Persuasion ever been so beloved? It seems, these days, to be second in popularity only to Pride & Prejudice. Toward the end, every other page sparkles with a well-quoted line. Perhaps this novel, like its heroine herself, has been rediscovered because Austen has so many more older readers. Austen has always been important to thoughtful and intelligent young women, but she is no longer their particular property — as, I suspect, the Brontës always will be. People go on re-reading Austen — and finding that a lot of what she has to say is lost to anyone under forty. And ageing boomers are far less likely to be vexed than girls might be by the matrimonial prospects of a woman of twenty-nine who has lost (only) her “bloom.”

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

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

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

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

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¶ In the Decameron, a German soldier living in Milan is outraged when the lady he loves agrees to grant him her favors — for two hundred florins. “Quasi in odio trasmutò il fervente amore.” His scheme to beat her at her own game succeeds. The dishonor of the cuckholded husband is elided entirely, sunk in the “virtue” of the soldier’s trick, which gets him into the lady’s bed quite cost-free.

Is Boccaccio a pagan or a post-Augustinian? Stories such as this one (originally a French fabliau, and retold by Chaucer) make him seem nakedly pagan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, but does this mean me?

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

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

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¶ In the Decameron, a story worth waiting for: Dioneo, King of the Seventh Day, and clearly a young man who ought not to be allowed entry into respectable homes, is going to tell his tale, which ought to be a corker of marital trickery — ¶but wait! He begins with an apology, claiming that the tale he intended to tell has already been told. If it were anyone else, you just might believe him.

In a very sweet touch, the whole business is prefaced with a remark about the ladies’ “mourning” the “innocent pear tree” that was sacrificed in the previous story.) (more…)

Shortly before noon, while I was finishing up the weekend papers, the phone rang. It was Fossil Darling, calling from Midtown on his cell phone. Reluctantly shopping — the Fossil hates shopping — he would be having lunch at the Brasserie for lunch afterward. He’d talk to me again when he got home.

He called back two minutes later. Syms wasn’t open yet, so he and his party were heading straight for lunch. Fossil said that he was famished.

— Why don’t you jump in a taxi and join us.
— I thought you were never going to ask.
— Well, I didn’t know what time we’d get there.
— Here I was, asking myself what kind of friend, knowing that I’d been alone for the entire weekend, wouldn’t ask me to join him for lunch, but then I know the answer to that: the kind of friend I’ve been putting up with for over forty years!

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St Joseph’s Church, site of a Papal visit (not, one hopes, a visitation!) this coming Friday.

Months and months and months after getting my first Nano (November of last year), I spent an hour or perhaps a little less today uploading a clutch of CDs that, for the most part, would have to be classified as “rock.” Examples:

Mosaic (Wang Chung)
Arc of a Diver (Steve Winwood)
Bilingual (Pet Shop Boys)
Avalon (Roxy Music)
Shake It Up (The Cars)
Speaking In Tongues (Talking Heads)

But also:

Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)
Studio (Julien Clerc)

And for the first hour or so I was infected with a virulent case of spring fever that, were I still drinking martinis, would certainly have led to another broken neck. When my Saturday-afternoon tidying was all done — the only word for it, week after week lately, is “brilliant”; it’s as though I’ve learned to read a hitherto impenetrable language — after I was showered and dressed in clean clothes, and I’d run an errand to Gristede’s across the street, and fixed myself my cocktail of choice, diet quinine with a wedge of lime, I sat on the  balcony for the first time this season and looked out at all the jewel-like lights of buildings near and far — especially far, in Queens. The lights in Queens looked just like the lights in Queens as seen from a plane descending upon one of the airports, endless ribbons (not so particularly endless in my truncated view) of red, white, and green lights against a background of dark. I wish someone had been there to see it with me.

Jack Hues, of Wang Chung (née 黄钟), really stands up as a gifted singer. To think that I fell in love with “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” on MTV! As I recall, there a suitcase with legs, no? What a brief golden age that was.

How wrong-headed will this marketing campaign turn out to be? It promises a jaunty comedy — Ellen Page promises one all by herself — but Smart People both sweeter and sadder in tone than that.

A happy weekend to you all from Skytopia.

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

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

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

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

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

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¶ Decameron, VII, ix, is one of the nastier tales in Boccaccio’s dossier against aged husbands who take beautiful young wives. In this retelling of a Latin poem that Boccaccio had translated earlier, the action is shifted to Argos. The farther the setting from Florence, it seems, the more improbable the events. Lydia, the two-timing wife, plays Little Red Riding Hood to her old-wolf husband. “Goodness, what a rotten tooth you have, my dear! Let me extract it for you.” The tooth, perfectly healthy, is a trophy for the boyfriend. You’d think that that would be enough, but there follows some partridging-in-a-pear tree. I cast Isla Fisher as Lydia. (more…)

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

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

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

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

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Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman turns out to be the first of three projected books that, collectively, will propose new ways of managing human behavior for the better. I’m only a few pages into the first chapter, and already I’m overwhelmed by the force of Sennett’s ideas. (more…)

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

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

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

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¶ In the Decameron, VII, viii, the unfaithful wife ties a string to her big toe. When her boyfriend tugs on the other end, below her window, she lets the string slip if she’s alone and the coast is clear. The husband discovers the string and sees instantly what it means, but because he’s a buffoonish merchant — un mercatantuzzo di feccia d’asino, according to his mother-in-law’s exuberant, Mamma-Mia stream of abuse — while his wife is an aristocratess, her clever duplicity wins the day, and Arrigruccio is left standing like a smemorato — like an idiot. (more…)

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

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

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

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

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

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