Detail from Conrado Massaguer’s poster: I could look at this design all day. It’s both gorgeous and very, very clever.
A tolerable issue, at least by Book Review standards; no Noes. Walter Kirn’s piece on the new James Frey novel may not be his best review ever, but it’s extraordinarily amusing — in a non-LOL way.
Morning
¶ Posh: My good friend Yvonne just tipped me off to a fantastic send-up of cooking shows, starring Richard E Grant at his twitissime, “Posh Nosh.” The show is a hundred years old, so you’ve probably see it already…
Noon
¶ Mad Max: Poor Max Mosley — so to speak. For my part, I can’t imagine anything more in keeping with Formula 1 racing than recreational sado-masochism. One does wonder, though, what Lady Redesdale would have said. “Every time I see “Peer’s Daughter” in the newspaper…”
Night
¶ Cartographic: Is it or isn’t it? An optical illusion, that is. How big is England?
This really is the end. With the last two stories in Nam Le’s collection, The Boat, I close this season’s Morning Read. We’ll see when I begin the next one. I have already pulled out the Library of America volume that contains Moby-Dick, as well as Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote. Also in the pile is David Remnick’s selection of the writing of A J Liebling — another book that I’d never get through outside the Morning Read format. (more…)
This week’s rather shaky images were taken on the Fourth of July from the rooftop of a building in Chelsea where a good friend of ours lives. The weather was awful, and it didn’t take long for the fireworks to disappear into the clouds of their own smoke. My photographs, therefore, are to be viewed as studies in impressionist color. Â
Morning
¶ Lift: Now that Kathleen has her very own personal computer (her first, amazingly; until now, her laptops have always been the property of a law firm), and now that we have conquered the Wi-Fi problem (I didn’t say that!), my dear wife has been discovering all sorts of things online, among them a whimsical New Yorker cover that might have been, by Bob Staake.
Noon
¶ Clock: I’m a sucker for gizmos like the World Clock, which whir along fantastically if somewhat meaninglessly. What kind of triumph will it be if the number of items of email spam exceeds the number of dollars of US debt?
Night
¶ Mad ! Following a link from kottke.org, I came across a blog devoted to Mad Men. It’s called A Basket of Kisses, and it comes from “the highly creative, occasionally obsessive computers of Roberta and Deborah Lipp.” (more…)
One of the last things that I read during yesterday’s marathon of magazines was a piece by Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books (LV 10, p 54). A review of Richard Cook’s biography of Alfred Kazin, it began with a passage that felt like a glance in an unexpected mirror: (more…)
Although I went to the movies yesterday, and saw most of Trumbo, I’m not counting it as a Friday Movie; at any rate, I’m not writing it up. I wanted to see Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne), but was shut out both times, not factoring in the (by me unguessed-at) popularity of this recently-opened film, which happens to be showing only in two rather smallish New York theatres.
Trumbo is a good picture, and anyone unfamiliar with the blacklisted screenwriter’s story ought to see it. I did not much care for the extreme close-ups of very shaggy faces belonging to a few of the famous actors who gave dramatic readings of Trumbo’s letters — but Joan Allen quivering at the edge of tears broke me down as well, and Nathan Lane did a predictably dandy job with what’s got to be the best father-to-son letter on the subject of masturbation ever. Perhaps it’s just that I’m not crazy about seeing documentaries in theatres.
What I did in between attempts to see Tell No One can be seen here.
Morning
¶ Sixth: Why not ask about Sixth on the Fourth? Sixth Avenue, that is, known only to Idiocrats as the Avenue of the Americas, its streetlamps bedecked with dinky tinpot medallions honoring, if that’s the word, the nations of the Western Hemisphere (not to be confused with “the West”). Few medallions remain, and David Gonzalez asks why.
Morning
¶ Tower of Eiffel: Now, here’s something I didn’t know: Gustave Eiffel worked on the construction of the Statue of Liberty, thus, according to Edward Berenson’s Op-Ed piece in today’s Times, “allowing him to test certain techniques he would use for his great tower in 1889.
Noon
¶ Attention! Yikes! “Google told to hand over millions of YouTube user details to Viacom in $1 billion case.” From the Telegraph.
Night
¶ Oops! When everyone but you is looking at your screen. Because you’ve already left for the holiday weekend.
And so I come to the end of the first round of Morning Reads, or almost: I’m done with Aubrey. There are still two stories to read in Nam Le’s The Boat, so perhaps we’ll have one or two more entries headed by the image above, which I decided not to update when I tossed in The Boat a few days ago.
Then what? I know what I’ll be reading in the next round, but not when I’ll begin. I’m inclined to take a break, or to do something different for July and August. I’m also inclined not to think about it, because it is July and will soon be August. (more…)
Morning
¶ Mean Money: Leona’s money is going to the dogs — and so is Dicky Grasso’s.
Noon
¶ DIRL: What with following one link to another, I came across a nice, long comment thread (at Marginal Revolution) proposing books to take to Africa on a research project that will take a year, with only visit home. Somebody asked for advice.
Night
¶ Pectavensis: How’s your Latin? It doesn’t have to be very good, to read Gregory of Tours, a Sixth-Century bishop who wrote pretty good history, considering it was the Dark Ages and all. Plus, he writes about a scandal at a convent in Poitou (in monasterio Pectavense). Nudge, nudge!
Now, here’s an idea. Reviewing the new collection of Frank O’Hara’s poetry, William Logan writes,
He was always looking for some vivid stimulus, preferably one a little outlandish — not a bad thing for a curator of modern painting, perhaps, but not necessarily a good one for a poet (O’Hara treated contemporary art with far more deliberation than he treated poetry). He began to make poetry from whatever happened around him — today, he might have written a blog.
Morning
¶ Marble: What I’d really like is a cast-marble copy (whatever “cast marble” is) of Houdon’s Louvre bust of Voltaire — the one with the perruque. The new Scully bookshelf, with its rows of Library of America spines, seems to demand a completing cliché. But the one Web site that seems aware of a decent copy no longer offers it.
Meanwhile, I came across this site. which I would rename Glad I Don’t.
Noon
¶ A Little Learning: Hand-wringing in the UK about making school easy for kids.
Night
¶ Harris Pat: Spooky! Fossil Darling, on the phone with me but talking to LXIV as he often does, said to his companion, “I’ve always been true to you in my fashion.” About two beats later, I heard LXIV reciting the same Cole Porter lyrics that were coming out of my mouth:
¶ In The Boat, a near-novella, “Halflead Bay,” set somewhere in Australia that I couldn’t locate. (There is a Maroomba Air, but no Maroomba; not according to Google, anyway.) The story is hard to read because it works like a scenario: the characters have to be followed around an understated landscape. Being teenagers and/or Australians, the characters are understated themselves.
Held up to the right light, “Halflead Bay” looks to be a classic cusp-of-manhood story. Everything is about to change for Jamie anyway, when along comes the girl of his dreams, Alison — trailing in her wake the certainty of a dust-up with her brute of a boyfriend. Held up to the wrong light, however, it has a pre-shrunk quality, as if all the elements of a coming-of-age novel had been anaerobically concentrated so as to fit into a cut-down narrative frame. I had the odd feeling that Jamie would not be happy to know that other people could read his story.
¶ In Aubrey, hints of dyslexia, in the life of Edmund Waller.
He has a great memory, and remembers a history, etc, etc, best when read to him; he used to make his daughters read to him. Yet, notwithstanding his great wit and mastership in rhetoric, etc, he will oftentimes be guilty of misspelling in English. He writes a lamentably bad hand, as bad as the scratching of a hen.
We also learn that Sir Isaac Wake, a diplomat, had a “fine seat at Hampstead in Middlesex, which looks over London and Surrey.”
What a treat The James Boys, by Richard Liebmann-Smith, is turning out to be. Among many other publications, the author has written for The National Lampoon, which alone may explain his ability to invigorate his turgidity-risking mélange of neo-Victorian and contemporary academic prose by stirring in the occasional up-to-date vulgarity.