Oops! Did get round to posting this vital link until this morning.

Morning

¶ Arrivés: We’re here. Here in Santa Monica, that is; far from the Navy Terrace, from which I took the snap of the Bethesda Fountain the other day. Pictures to follow, probably much later today, if and when I can turn on the camera. Everything was “much later,” yesterday, and it will take a while to catch up.

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Morning

¶ Bananas: Any day now, I’m going to hear that some friend or other has given up bananas, and not because they’re green. Because they’re not green. And that’s just the beginning. Consider Dan Koeppel’s report.

Noon

¶ Departure: I’m off for California, Santa Monica to be exact. In the event of zero connectivity, I’ll be back on Saturday morning.
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¶ Decameron X, ix, the penultimate story in the collection, is the first to strike me as thoroughly appropriate reading material for children. Messer Torello of Pavia (a man of wealth but not an aristocrat) and Saladin (touring the West, disguised as a Cypriot merchant, in order to take the measure of his impending adversaries in the Third Crusade), indulge in an orgy of potlatch. The nature of the generosity that motivates their barrage of gift-giving strikes us as oddly impersonal at first, only to become oddly personal: the men become dear friends because they’ve given each other so many lovely presents.

So Saladin enfolded him tenderly in his arms, kissed him, and, weeping copiously, bid him God-speed and withdrew.

It’s almost creepy. Torello is transported back to his native Pavia on a wondrous bed, but instead of materializing in his town house it shows up in the cathedral!

The most interesting detail is Saladin’s recognition that Torello, although a “knight” (cavalier), is “no prince, but a private citizen” (cittadino e non signore). My Italian text glosses this distinction for modern readers as “un privato, non un feudatorio.” By Boccaccio’s day, the replacement by the bourgeoisie of the aristocracy was already well underway.

¶ Clive James is extremely interesting about Sigmund Freud: how Freud’s intensely secular outlook blinded him to the horrific potential of Nazism.

He never grasped that Nazi destructiveness was a complete mind in itself. Surely he was the victim of his own poetry, which was so vivid that he took it to be a map of reality. From the realm of the human spirit he had banished God and the Devil, and replaced them with a family of contending deities bearing proud Greek names. They were household gods: aided by judicious therapy, they would one way or another always reach an accommodation, in a world where people like his old sisters, even if they were not happy, would die in bed. But the Devil came back. The Devil had never been away.

James is almost scathing about “Thanatos,” the supposed death-wish.

Thanatos was no gentleman, and he came not to rescue minds from their torments, but to torment bodies until minds collapsed. Thanatos was a raving maniac, not a mental principle. How was it that Freud, of all people, could not foresee this?

James’s answer to that question is that Freud’s focus was too fixed upon the individual ego: “The real psychodrama was too big for him to see.”

Morning

¶ Transport: Joe Sharkey, who follows business travel for the Times, writes about the increasingly “upstairs-downstairs” nature of domestic air travel. The “commercial” airlines have lost nearly half of their “premium” customers to “business aviation” — smaller, upscale jets that used to be the preserve of jillionaires and corporations — since 2000.

Noon

¶ Panic: Within the past twenty minutes, I have drifted from a calm inattentiveness into a vortex of panic. How on earth am I going to be ready to leave New York by 1:30 tomorrow afternoon? And how did I manage to forget the Morning Read this morning? Must have been the McChouffe at lunch.

Night

¶ Bronx Cheer: Sex kitteness Dr Ruth Westheimer inducted into the Houston Bronx Walk of Fame, even though she has never lived on Westheimer Boulevard in the Bronx.

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Morning 

¶ Oregano: Having seen Melvin Frank’s A Touch of Class when it came out, in 1973, and liked it very much, I remembered two things about the film very clearly: the assignation that Steve Blackburn (George Segal) and Vicki Allessio (Glenda Jackson) achieve during a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh, a symphony that ever since has trailed a rather unwonted allure. The other was “oreGAHno.”

Noon

¶ Apron: There’s a movie, don’t you think, in Dan Barry’s story about the West Virginia Mason who was expelled because he advocated reforms that would put an end to archaic discriminatory practices.

¶ Gidget: George Snyder — whom I hope to spend Thursday with, in Los Angeles — sent me a link to Peter Lunenfeld’s delightfully polymathic look at Gidget, in The Believer. Who knew she was Jewish?

Night

¶ Tornado: If you haven’t seen the most amazing close-up of a tornado ever, be sure to check out Lori Mehmen‘s ticket to the photographers’ hall of fame. (via JMG)
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¶ In the Decameron, we’re served a Ciceronian oration on that dearest of antique topics, friedship. In other words, Boccaccio couches his story in terms of what ought to happen, and not of what usually does. Gisippus, an Athenian, is betrothed to Sophronia, but his college roommate (so to speak) and boon companion, the Roman Titus, conceives such a passionate longing for Sophronia that Gisippus simply hands the girl over to him after the wedding feast.*

I should perhaps not be so generous, if wives were so scarce and difficult to find as friends, but since I can find another wife, but not another friend, with the greatest of ease, I prefer, rather than to lose you, not to lose her exactly, but as it were to transfer her.

If this story (X, viii) were at all representative of the whole collection, none but scholars would read the Decameron. I expect that the original breathes the very best Italian going, but I’m not competent to judge.

¶ You never know where Clive James is going to go. His long piece about Fitzgerald is such an interesting meditation on style and influence** that it seemed perverse not to keep reading when I turned the page to the much shorter piece on Flaubert. This latter, however, turns out to have nothing to do with writing as such. Instead it focuses on another pet theme: the mad wickedness of totalitarian régimes. What’s Flaubert got to do with that, you may ask. Well, in one of his letters (not one of the ones addressed to George Sand), Flaubert posits an era of secular toleration that stretched “from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius.” This passage, in turn, has attracted the attention of Unamuno and Vidal, two gold-standard mistrusters of the religious impulse. Presently James is fretting about the extremism of “moderate” Islamic opinion. A whirlwind in two pages!

* Boccaccio is canonically correct — for his time, anyway — in placing the wedding ceremony in the bridal chamber, when Titus and Sophronia are alone, and they exchange vows. Later, when Sophronia is understandably sore about having been tricked on her wedding night, Titus rather scrupulously chides her for having failed to ask him who he was.

** James believes that Fitzgerald was born writing the way he did, that influence played little or no role in his development.

For reasons too complicated for explanation on a Saturday night, I found myself in Brooklyn this evening.

We all take incompetent photographs from time to time, but tonight I broke the records. Miffed that I couldn’t get hold of Kathleen on the phone, even more upset that I’d never, in the downpour, get a cab back to Manhattan, and more than a little jellied by two bottles of Chianti, I was not in the best shape to take pictures of the Pride parade that materialized this evening outside Sette, a very good restaurant on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, just as I was leaving.

These pictures do, however, convey, at least to my memory, a sense of the tremendous fun that everyone was having in the downpour.

I only just noticed, but this is a not-bad picture of my cousin, Bill. Bill lives in New Hampshire. The photograph completely fails to capture his delight at having dinner in the big city — and I must say that Park Slope more than qualified this evening. It was much bigger over there than it was in good old Yorkville when I finally got home, damp as a steam room.

Then the fun was over. As it happened, a young man in the subway station was just about to give me a reason to live. He needed to get to Grand Central, and I was able to say, “follow me.” And he did! I, of course, stayed on the train all the way to 86th Street.

A Pride parade in Park Slope! The world has turned a pretty turn since I lived out there!

Mongol isn’t my kind of movie at all, but it’s an impressive film, in a D W Griffith sort of way, and I’m glad that I saw it.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen a better representation of the miseries of hangover.

Morning

¶ Santa: After Top Girls at the Biltmore Theatre last night, we headed over to Restaurant Row for an after-theatre dinner at Le Rivage, only to find that they were closing.

Noon

¶ Walkabout: If I have ever walked across Central Park to do something on the West Side and then walked back through the Park on my way home, I’ve forgotten about it. Today’s back-and-forth felt like a first.

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Morning

¶ Cosmopolitan: It is difficult to know what to expect of people who genuinely lack cosmopolitan aspirations.

¶ Tracking: My very peachy son-in-law has let me in on a way of following my daughter’s flight from Amsterdam to New York. I must be the last guy on the block to know how to know about FlyteComm.com.

Noon

¶ Satrap: All morning, I’ve been thinking about James A Johnson, the Obama campaign aide who just resigned in mild disgrace. What is it with the Democrats? Republicans do the same thing, but that’s their religion…

Night

¶ Flippi: Does anyone have one of these Vornado Flippi fans yet? They are the  coolest! (more…)

The end is nigh — for this round of books. Three stories in the Decameron, six pieces in Cultural Amnesia (Edward Gibbon is where I came in, so Charles de Gaulle is my exit), and not much more of James Merrill’s A Scattering of Salts or John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.

To be so close to the close of the Decameron makes me feel rather like the Bold Lover on Keats’s Urn.

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Morning

¶ Little Black Dress: Fossil Darling is totally useless. I had to read about this in the newspaper!

Noon

¶ Oil Climbs Higher: Reading John Wilen’s report on the correlation between the rise in the price of oil and the fall of the dollar — not a matter of rocket science, since oil trades in dollars — I wonder just when Washington is going to develop some bipartisan political backbone.

Night 

¶ Free Speech: Food for thought: Adam Liptak’s survey of growing restrictions on freedom of speech in other advanced, liberal democracies.

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Consider the Boston Tea Party. 16 December 1773. Sam Adams and his “Mohawks” unload the Dartmouth, the Beaver, and the Eleanor into Boston Harbor. William J Bernstein, in A Splendid Exchange, makes me sit up in my chair when I read his account of this mythically well-known event. This is not what I was taught in school!

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¶ Decameron X, vi, which tells the story of Messer Neri and King Charles of Sicily, sounds a lascivious note.

On seeing that the fish had been cooked, the girls emerged from the pool, their fishing done, with their thin white dresses clinging to their flesh so as to conceal almost nothing of their dainty bodies. And having taken up each of the things they had brought with them, they walked shyly past the King and made their way back into the house. (more…)

Are there still people out there who believe that the best judge of something is someone who doesn’t like it? Aside from the folks at the Book Review, that is.

It has become a commonplace in New York to complain that the four ladies of Sex and the City — Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha — are gay men in drag. I didn’t watch the HBO show often enough to be able to discuss this proposition, but I can say with certainty that it is not true of the movie. The most one could say is that the girls represent beaux idéals of gay men — but ideals acting not quite as gay men behave. It’s possible that no women behave as the Fab Four do. But it is certain that no men do.

What the girls do look like, though, is a pack of survivors from fancy private school. While Carrie and Samantha might have run into each other in the course of a wild evening (or, more likely, a not-wild evening) and become bosom buddies, Charlotte and Miranda are cut out of such different cloths that the only way for Carrie to know how to wear them would be her never knowing a reason not to — and, as we all know, Samantha prefers to wear sushi. In short, forget the Pines context and replace it with Spence. While it might be difficult to imagine someone like Samantha attending an imaginatively demanding school such as Spence, the truly amazing (not) thing about schools like Spence is that, every now and then, they just have to take on girls like Samantha. Good for everybody.

My ongoing friendship with Fossil Darling is proof that this is how it works. There is no other earthly reason for us to be on speaking terms. We have both put off going to a Blair reunion for about twenty-five years, largely because of creeping largesse.  But if and when we do finally go (and, here, I’m going to switch movies), I do hope that there won’t be some roadside smackdown in which we fight about who was the Carrie. FD’s going to be the Samantha, no question. But if he thinks he’s going to diminuendo me into a Miranda, he’s got a very flat tire in his future.

Morning

¶ Brooks: As sermons go, David Brooks’s column on the evils of encouraging consumer debt is tidily effective: it’s both frightening and obviously correct.

¶ Kakutani: One might well ask why Janet Maslin didn’t review David Sedaris’s new book for “Books of the Times.” Ms Maslin writes very creditably about crowd-pleasers; she knows that prospective readers are looking for a good time. Michiko Kakutani’s idea of a good time, however…

Noon

¶ Sex and the Lightbulbs: I still can’t believe it! Yesterday, in view of the extreme heat and a consequent overloading of the power grid, Con Ed called Yorkvillians to ask us to turn off our “energy-intensive” appliances — everything except the refrigerator. Well, this afternoon, they called back! To say that, whatever the problem was, they’d fixed it! This takes us to an entirely new level of civic cooperation — and at least three bunny hops away from Idiocracy. If I’d known about the call sooner, I’d have stayed home and cranked up the a/c — and I wouldn’t have gone to see Sex and the City. But I’m sure glad I did!

Night

¶ Remains: Reading Cara Buckley’s story about the return of Native American remains from the American Museum of Natural History to the appropriate tribal area in British Columbia, it occurred to me (not for the first time) that, if I had to identify one collection from the omnium gatherum at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that does not, to my mind, belong there, it would be the immensely popular Egyptian art — most of which centers on human remains. (more…)

It’s too hot to read Aubrey. Ditto Merrill — or verse of any kind. So:

¶ Decameron X, v disappoints on two fronts. First, it depends on a magic act, which is very unusual in this collection. A magician causes a garden to bloom in Dolomitic Friuli in January. He’s hired to do this by a grandee who wants to win the affection of a married woman; she has proposed the stunt thinking it to be impossible. The moral, spelled out by her husband, is “don’t barter” with would-be lovers. If I were more industrious, I would enumerate the other stories in the Decameron that flaunt this precept. IX, i comes straight to mind.

Second, the orgy of liberality at the end of X, v is unpersuasively excessive. Why, the magician won’t even take his fee!

¶ Clive James on Duke Ellington: It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing. James shows that Ellington didn’t follow this advice himself, but kept trying to write earnest, “symphonic” jazz. About Coltrane, James is almost savage.

There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener’s impression that there was no reason for it to start.

James astutely notes that the Twentieth-Century’s general disapproval of pleasing art was intensified in the world of jazz, and given great political force, by the determination of black musicians not to be condescended to by grateful audiences.