Who was happier? Each one of them would insist, “I was!” No: knowing them, they would both say, in unison practically, that each of them was as happy as she could be. So there.
How lucky I am, that the two most important women in my life are so fond of one another!
The O’Neill men: Mike, Ryan, and Brendon.
When Megan and Ryan got married in April, at City Hall, the day was strictly DIY. The happy couple snagged a breakfast reservation at Balthasar, and found out what they needed to know before going upstairs to the Department of Love (since relocated from the Municipal Building to the old DMV space on Worth Street). We winged the rest of it. The perfect spring day did the caterer’s job to perfection, arranging for a leisurely walk down to the Battery, where we spent the afternoon on a patio overlooking the harbor, and savored a few hours of la dolce vita.
At the start, however, Megan and Ryan planned to get married in November with all the traditional fixings: a white dress, bridesmaids and groomsmen, a caterer, a DJ, and plenty of family. (There were no friends who weren’t “family,” no adults who hadn’t watched the bride or the groom — the wife or the husband, technically — grow up.) They chose a venue in the Garment District, now an airy loft with huge, immaculate windows. Tuxedos were rented and a hair stylist retained. It was everything that a wedding ought to be — completely without any Bridezilla touches.
As a member of the wedding, zooted out in coral vest and tie, I felt that it would be somewhat déclassé to run around taking pictures. I also knew that the professional photographer would do a much, much better job. So we’ll wait to see what he’s got. Facebook friends can see the pictures that Ms NOLA posted yesterday.
In fact, Megan wants to see my picture of her husband and his father and brother, so I’d better wrap this up now.
How to kick off this feature? Alison Lurie to the rescue! With a fantastic omnibus review of several new books, entitled “The Message of the Schoolroom.” Humanism may not begin at school, but that is certainly where it begins to take its public form. That is where children learn to act independently of family alliances.
The only thing we know about earling schooling so far is that, while there have been brilliant schools here and there, nobody has ever developed a more than half-decent system for educating masses of children on the cheap. I wonder why? (more…)
Elizabeth and Catherine Yow, Megan’s cousins and very unabashed flower girls. Kathleen is convinced that they’ll both grow up to be lawyers, like their parents.
This weekend’s lovely wedding party, at which Megan and Ryan reaffirmed their vows before a reasonably full complement of family and friends, finished me off. There wasn’t much left. Providentially, I’m about to escape to a patio overlooking the Caribbean.
The good news, I suppose, is that I’m not going to shut down The Daily Blague. That I should even think of doing so may give you some idea of how extensively the ground has shifted beneath my writing life. Every idea that I’ve got needs a fresh screen test.
There have been a few clarifying surprises. A month or so of fun at Facebook has convinced me I’ll being doing my conventional blogging, the how-I’m-feeling-right-now thing, either there or at some other social site. I have a lot to learn about social sites, but I now know what they’re for, and, correspondingly, what my own sites are not for. I hope that The Daily Blague will become even more reflective as I go on; but it will certainly be even less newsy. Such news as appears will be presented in the focus of bourgeois humanism.
What’s “bourgeois humanism”? (I can hear your groan. You want to hear about the wedding!) That’s what we’re going to find out.
It is not “secular humanism” because it does not propose alternatives to the various strands of religious humanism that have sprouted in the West. It concerns itself with religion only to the extent that different faiths — including the belief that there is nothing to believe in — must learn to get along. I was tempted by the concept of “public humanism” for a while, but that sounds too politically-centered. Bourgeois humanism is a highly centrist outlook that finds, on the one hand, the puritanical calls to environmental austerity to be misanthropic, and, on the other, unthinking consumerism to be inexcusably stupid. Even if I tend to leave the lights on when I go out, I have always been interested in the idea of frugal comfort. I’m honest enough about being bourgeois to admit — no, to insist — that comfort is a human priority. In my ideal world, everyone would be good at making other people comfortable, and yet nobody would be expected to act like a servant.
But enough about abstractions. It’s time for a break. Kathleen and I are taking off for ten days in St Croix, and now I’m looking forward to it. What seemed the other day to be an annoying break in carefully-constructed routine now looks like an extremely well-timed pause. I won’t stop blogging; I intend to post at least one entry every day. But the Daily Office will be suspended, not just because I want to reconsider its purpose but because filling it out requires me to pay attention to everyday chatter. Being a primate, I like everyday chatter as much as anybody, but right now I need a rest.
And this is a pretty good time for that, no? One of the two major news stories, about the election of the next President, has been achieved. The other, about mounting economic disaster, has clouded over with complication, as “related stories” multiply, ramify, and terrify. The meaning of specific developments, none of them isolated, will emerge only over the long term — unless and until some overwhelming cataclysm sweeps away life as we know it, in which case “news” itself will be massively redefined. I don’t expect anything terribly exciting to happen in the next two weeks — not that I don’t hope I’m right!
Aside from putting myself at the mercy of aeronautics — a matter of four flights — I have no reason not to be sanguine about the next two weeks. For the moment, though, I’m too pooped.
¶ Matins: So often, reading stories in the business section is like watching fish dart in a rolling stream. Glints of brilliant suggestion disappear almost immediately. What does the following passage, taken from Michael de la Merced’s lengthy story about the bailout to date, actually mean?
“What hasn’t improved is the psychology,†said Max Bublitz, chief strategist at SCM Advisors, an investment firm based in San Francisco. “This thing has morphed from a credit market issue into a banking crisis into an economic crisis.â€
¶ Sext: Michael Kinsley writes about a new state of mind: not wanting to buy something cool.
But ultimately even the bargain didn’t seduce me. My mind followed an unfamiliar path. I thought of all the coffee makers we already have, and how each of them had let us down. I thought about another clock to reset twice a year or face its accusatory blinking in the kitchen dark. I asked myself whether attempting to master another set of instructions written in English as a Second Language was really the best use of a month of my time.
For possibly the first time ever, I considered the question of getting the thing home (the issue: juggle coffee maker and fare card on the Metro, or eat up my bargain with a $20 cab ride) before I owned it rather than after. I even remembered — as I had vowed to do the last time my consumer confidence boiled over like this — the trauma of disposing the corrugated cardboard box and all those infuriating blocks of Styrofoam. I went home empty-handed, and my consumer confidence was shot.
¶ Matins: I have not had the pleasure of meeting Andy Towle in person, but I understand that he is not a tall man. It now appears that everybody understands that he is not a tall man. So well that the little surprise at the end of this clip of Rick and Steve needs no explanation. If I were Andy, I’d slap me silly for laughing so hard. As I said in a recent entry, I’m pretty mixed up these days, but that’s no excuse. (Thanks, Joe.)
¶ Tierce: Something in Brent Bowers’s story about executive coaching, small businesses, and overcoming understandable anxiety caught my eye. It has to do with a state-change that, inevitably it seems, faces entrepreneurs as their enterprises grow.
¶ Nones: The brains of bullies appear to be wired differently, according to fMRI studies. Tara Parker-Pope reports.
While the study is small, the striking differences shown in the brain scans suggests that bullies may have major differences in how their brains process information compared to non-bullies. Dr. Decety said the aggressive adolescents showed a strong activation of the amygdala and ventral striatum, areas of the brain that respond to feeling rewarded. The finding “suggested that they enjoyed watching pain,†he said. Notably, the control group of youths who weren’t prone to aggressive behavior showed a response in the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction, areas of the brain involved in self regulation.
This comes as no surprise, and yet it seems to add some urgency to the question of how we deal with such information.
¶ Vespers: Amazingly, this doesn’t happen more often: “American Idol reject found dead near Paula Abdul’s home.” Although I would not outlaw it, I can’t see reality television as anything but debased, debasing, and utterly inhumane.
The big picture adorning Anthony Tommasini’s glowing review speaks more loudly than words: the Godly Gatekeepers have decided that Jeremy Denk is a hot-stuff pianist. May my favorite music blogger be deluged with concert dates! Because he’s also one of my favorite pianists. In fact, he is my favorite pianist.
(All right, I’m crazy about Angela Hewitt, too.)
Who else could conjure a brilliant yet engaging recital out of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata and Beethoven’s equally uncorsetted Hammerklavier?
On the right, the Azure, the luxury condominium whose crane fell, last summer, into the building on the left, scraping and denting a few evidently unrepaired balconies. I can see both buildings from my desk, but I have not drifted this far north on First Avenue since long before the accident.
Here we are in the middle of November: the year-end holidays will be upon us very shortly. More than ever, I wish that I lived in a shack in the Laurentian Mountains, far from everyone; once again autumn has fooled me. I expected to enjoy getting back into the social swim, going to concerts and plays and having dinner with friends at dusky but no longer smoky cabarets. And I’m doing my best. But my mind is elsewhere, because, once again, a summer’s reflections have resulted in what I’m afraid I’m going to have to call a paradigm shift.
Given everything that’s happening in the greater world — the glorious election, the terrifying market — I can’t expect anyone to take an interest in the jumble of ideas that, at some point in August, fell into a bold and clear intellectual pattern before my very eyes. Suddenly the world — my world, my little me-centered world, but nonetheless a world in which I think of myself only when I’m in some sort of physical pain — made sense in new terms. In retrospect, the terms weren’t so new, and the paradigm shift was preceded by plenty of warning. But the newness of things is still as sharp as that good old new-car smell, or the shot of green growth that intoxicates a woodland path on a dewy late-May morning.
I suppose I ought to be grateful that I didn’t have to schedule a fourth-anniversary re-think of The Daily Blague. It happened all by itself. So far at least, the brainstorm has nothing to do with design, format, or “features.” But enough of this repassage, which I’ve mentioned only because the world around me is changing, too.
The election, the market — &c &c! Reason to wonder how economic developments will affect everything from Kathleen’s law practice to our continued tenancy in the heart of Yorkville. The health of a few near and dear relatives. And of course the wedding party.
The wedding party! That’s what brought me to First Avenue and 92nd Street, and this view of the new, safer-looking crane at the Azure (which spent most the summer without so much as a new cinderblock). We’ve booked rooms for my cousin, Bill, and his family at the Marriott Courtyard hotel that neither of us knew existed until a very early morning in June. The driver taking us to the airport for our flight to Santa Monica chose 92nd Street to get to the FDR Drive. Not exactly crazy, but unusual. We can see the hotel out of the window, too, but we didn’t know that it wasn’t just another apartment building. Although, the moment we did know, we thought how obvious it was.
My cousin and his family don’t get to New York very often, so they’ll be striking out on their own when they arrive on Friday. Me they can see when I visit my aunt in New Hampshire. Not to mention on Saturday, at the wedding party. Kathleen, it appears, will be working late; she’s moving heaven and earth to clear her desk before we leave for St Croix next Wednesday. That leaves me fancy-free and unattached on the eve. A dangerous combination, especially as I have two invitations in my pocket, both to gatherings at bars on the west side of Midtown.
One is the crowd that Megan and Ryan are assembling in lieu of a rehearsal dinner. The other is the birthday party of a fellow blogger. That sounds like fun — or would have done until this summer, when being a little bit drunk became, for the first time in my life, genuinely disagreeable. Vis-à -vis alcohol, I’m very much in a limbo between habit and abstinence. Who knows how that’s going to turn out.
Church of the Holy Trinity, East 88th Street.
Between the new Weltanschauung and the seasonal bustle of family and friends, I’m pretty confused. Last night, I came home from a stirring recital at Zankel Hall, as eager to chat about the evening as a teen home from the prom. But the Internet had nothing to offer. I was all fired up to talk about Ives and the Alcotts, but no one was home.
Tonight, however, is a different story. An old friend has just signed up at Facebook, and is going through the same tumult that I found myself in a few weeks ago. We’re being very naughty. I just asked her if her niece (a new Facebook friend) is hot.
I can still do naughty.
A not-too-bad issue. Maybe it seems that way because I’m no longer classifying reviews. No more colors; no more Yeses and Maybes and Noes. Already I’m wondering why I went to the bother. Clearly there was something I had to work my way through on some sort of learning curve, but what?
¶ Matins: How quickly swings swing! Just the other day, we were America the Ugly; benighted, shortsighted, and all but indicted. Now, we’re the progressives, because we have the kind of president that Europeans, who have, er, racist problems of their own, know they could never elect.
¶ Lauds: Greetings from the East Side.
¶ Tierce: I’ll admit that my “solution” to the Detroit problem (dissolve the companies and pension off the workers) is drastic in every way. At least it has the advantage of making Thomas Friedman’s proposal look doable.
If the election had gone the other way, Role Models would be unwatchably pathetic, and this picture more or less shows why. As it is, the re-enactors lost, and Role Models is only mildly depressive.
“That’s not a motto. That’s just you saying a bunch of things.“Â Paul Rudd rules.
¶ Matins: Lord, how long: “Border Inspector Accused of Allowing 3,000 Pounds of Cocaine Into U.S. Over 5 Years.”
¶ Prime: Eric Patton posts an entry at Sore Afraid about once a week, and he makes that restraint work to his advantage — or at least to the advantage of the things that are on his mind, which tumble out in the most interesting ways. This week’s amble takes him from spirituality to narcissism — two sides of the same coin in more ways than one, if I may pile up the clichés. And there is usually a very funny cut-up segue.
This afternoon, I received a letter in the mail — the real mail — that immediately became my favorite letter of all the ones that I’ve ever received (barring the life-determining ones: “I love you”; “enclosed find my check…”). The writer is a brilliant boy, five going on six, whom I met last summer, when he was four not-so-quite going on five. He and his parents and his little sister and I had a glorious summer afternoon together, mostly in Central Park, but also back here at the apartment, to which we all repaired, eager to cool off. It was in that last hour that my fondness for the young man settled, amidst negotiations about jumping and/or crawling on the sofa, into lifelong affection.
Which was easy for me to imagine: I knew that I’d never forget our afternoon. But what about him? It didn’t seem possible that one so young could possibly remember the day, much less me, brains (even brilliant ones) being brains. As someone whose memories of childhood are still haunted by fragmentary recollections of interesting but nameless adults (interesting, undoubtedly, because they didn’t stick around), I knew how transitory I must be for my new friend, and how unlikely it was that his teeming brain would or could remember our day together.
How to make a more lasting impression! I asked his parents if I might send postcards from the Museum’s collection of “Thirty Treasures” — artworks both august and execrable. Permission granted, I meant to send a postcard a week, but it took well over a year to go through the booklet. I didn’t have to be too careful about what I wrote, because I could count on parental censorship. I did feel obliged to apologize, however, for the last message, which expressed a wish that the recipient would grow up to possess, some day, a Hockney of his own. I didn’t, as I explained to his father, mean that I hoped that he would grow up to manage a hedge fund.
Eventually, the thirtieth card dropped into the mailbox, and I promised to find another set of postcards. The other day, I came home with two: a set of black-and-white Gotham photographs that dates from 2000 (the best of both worlds?) and a collection of pages from illuminated manuscripts. The New York pictures are obviously cool, but they’re not so cool that my friend may not already possess them. (He’s cool.) The illuminated manuscripts, on the other hand — what was I thinking? The Madonna is either singing a Magnificat or standing at the foot of the cross. I could get arrested!
The letter that I received today, a genuine young person’s letter — I could hear the voicing of parental suggestions, but I was sure that the writer had at no point been ghosted — did more to convince me that I know my place in the world than any letter that I’ve ever opened. To say that I felt extraordinarily lucky would be an understatement. And also a misstatement: there was nothing lucky about my writing thirty postcards. Nothing lucky, perhaps; but a great deal of pleasure.
It’s an open secret around here that I am keen to become a grandfather. Perhaps within the next year! I say this only to make it clear that my friend is not a surrogate. He is not a grandchild, or a nephew, or a long-lost godson. He is a friend. And right now, there’s no one with whom I’d rather stay in touch.
¶ Matins: David Carr writes about a momentous meeting, a little over eighteen months ago, between Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen and a
junior member of a large and powerful organization with a thin, but impressive, résumé, he was about to take on far more powerful forces in a battle for leadership.
Guess who the other guy was.
¶ Tierce: Ailing GM can’t cut off its union workers — not quite yet — but white collar retirees can kiss their “gold-plated” health care goodbye. Nick Bunkley reports.
¶ Sext: Eric Pfanner’s somewhat breathless account of the state of play between Google and book publishers nonetheless conveys a good idea of where books are going. And it does indeed look like a good idea.
¶ Vespers: It’s not the potato-stuck-up-the-bum that’s funny. It’s the idea that anybody would believe the story of how it got there.
The clergyman, in his 50s, told nurses he had been hanging curtains when he fell backwards on to his kitchen table.
He happened to be nude at the time of the mishap, said the vicar, who insisted he had not been playing a sex game.
(Thanks, Joe.)
This book is about a year old, but it’s never too late for a good, fun read, and, besides, nobody recommended it to me. Random excerpt:
When I was growing up, Mother told me that in her day, Texas sororities lumped potential pledges into two categories: “Some girls are flowers,” Mother repeated, with a cruel, cold Darwinian shrug, “and others are pots.” She’d given this to me like a coat, so I could smugly wrap myself in the comfort of being a flower at Beckendorf Junior High, while my classmates perforated me for being a fairy.”
We confine our attention today to the “epistolary novel” that takes up two-and-then-some chapters of Don Quixote, also known as the “Novela del curioso inpertinente,” or tale of the recklessly curious man. Because I was sure that I had read the story before, I was mad to find an earlier version; I remain unpersuaded that it might be Decameron, X, viii. As I continued reading Cervantes’s novella, however, the story became quite unfamiliar, and decidedly operatic. But I did note one thing: the happy ending of Boccaccio’s tale of switched husbands would probably have been intolerable in Golden Age Spain.
Boccaccio tells of two friends, one Greek and one Roman, from the time of Octavian (later Augustus), who are so close that, when Gisippus is betrothed to Sophronia, and his friend Titus actually falls in love with her, Gisippus hands her over, under cover of night, while continuing to be her daytime husband. This arrangement persists, with Sophronia none the wiser, until Titus is summoned back to Rome, and wants to take Sophronia with him. McWilliam’s note suggests that Boccaccio is indulging in over-the-top parody of rhetorical paeans to friendship; Titus’s arguments in defense of what he and Gisippus have done sound equally strange to his listeners and to us.
In Cervantes, Anselmo and Lotario are the friends. Anselmo’s delight in his new wife, Camila, takes a toxic turn when he becomes obsessed with testing her fidelity. He begs Lotario to try to seduce her. This is already very different from Boccaccio’s story in several important ways. First, and most objectionably, Anselmo continues to enjoy his marital rights. Second, Lotario, unlike Titus, is not interested in Camila until Anselmo begs his bizarre favor — which brings to mind, by the way, the shenanigans in Così fan tutte. The bulk of the tale is given over to the scrapes that Camila narrowly avoids once she has capitulated to Lotario. There is a wonderful scene involving a tapestry, behind which Anselmo hides, and overhears a carefully-rehearsed scene that is designed to put him off the scent. Of course, it all comes to grief in the end. Anselmo dies of wretchedness; Lotario is killed in the wars; and Camila withers away in a convent. “Éste fue el fin que tuvieron todos, nacido de un tan desatinado principio.”
Cervantes does not simply drop this novella — ostensibly discovered among some papers at the inn to which Quixote and his friends repair on the way to slay the giant who menaces the kingdom of Micomicón — into his principal narrative. He interrupts the story right before what turns out to be the dénouement.
Only a little more of the novel remained to be read when a distraught Sancho Panza rushed out of the garret where Don Quixote slept, shouting:
“Come, Señores, come quickly and help my master, who’s involved in the fiercest, most awful battle my eyes have ever seen!”
Sleepwalking, it seems, Quixote has mistaken some hanging wineskins for his giant, and, slashing at them wildly, has all but flooded to the garret. Dorotea calms everyone down, and the licentiate priest finishes reading the novella. The juxtaposition of sordid adultery and grotesque buffoonery must be intended to warn readers against taking potential opera plots as seriously as Quixote takes his knightly romances.
As Yvonne wrote the other day, we can return to our wonderful lives now, and find that they are, indeed, wonderful. We all get a prize for surviving — what? the Dubya years, all eight of ’em? How about the last forty, ever since Tricky Dick’s success with the “Southern Strategy“? With all due respect to Messrs Carter and Clinton, it is great to have a Democrat from the North in the offing.
In the middle of what was for the most part a crisp and lovely Sunday — autumn with the scent of winter, always refreshing ahead of time — I spent a fair amount of time arguing about what to do about “Detroit.” Here’s the vulgar wisdom: now that we’ve “bailed out” the bankers, let’s “bail out” the Big Three. In fact, the auto makers have a much greater claim on our generosity, because they employ millions of workers.
It’s as if the Soviet bloc’s command economy never existed. Red-blooded Americans advocate keeping a hopelessly moribund industry alive for the sake of payroll: the Trabant option.
I say: pension off the workers, no matter what it costs; I leave the details to policy wonks. Call it a one-time-only fix, a shame-on-you-America for having treated automobiles like sexual surrogates for sixty years. You can be sure of one thing, though: every red cent of the handout will recirculate in the retail economy, benefiting butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers. Not a dime will go into Swiss banking accounts — nor will more than a million or two, probably, find its way into whatever takes the place of hedge funds.
A propos of these draconian ideas, I suggest traveling back in time, all the way to 2003. That’s when I wrote (from what I can tell) a page at Portico about what already seemed to be the shaky future of GM et al. I was considering a book by an eminent reporter who is still on the automotive beat, Micheline Maynard. What still amazes me is that Ms Maynard’s account of auto-making in America at the Millennium could be so richly detailed where foreign concerns, especially Honda, were concerned, and yet so opaque about “Detroit.” It was as though, aside from marketers, the town were run by robots. While foreign manufacturers made cars, Detroit was into 4×4 vibrators. This link will take you straight to the beginning of the discussion, which follows a look at the Enron mess. Yes: that long ago!
Hi, Everyone —
Did you know it was possible to feel so excited and happy and relieved that one could actually end up 180-ing directly to NUMB?
Perhaps watching the election coverage at home, alone, was a bad idea. This was a collective moment: too heavy with context and consequence to be experienced in solitude and while wearing jammies; too rich and sweet to be celebrated with a glass of lime-y Sauvignon blanc. My husband, Robert, a journalist (no, no, the good kind! — the kind you wish there were more of!), was off covering the local election scene. So I sat in front of the TV, anticipatory tissues balled up in my hand, watching all the emotional faces…and failing to cry. Even when the soul-stirring new First Family walked out onto that stage! Even at the most moving parts of Obama’s speech; even about the puppy. What is wrong with me?
I’m hoping I will bawl myself sick with joy on Inauguration Day.
Or that the frozen tears will suddenly well up and wash over me at some unexpected hour. Perhaps as I’m out shopping tomorrow…say, at Bed Bath & Beyond, where I might hurl myself onto one of those little gussied-up prop beds and weep into the careful-but-comically-excessive arrangement of decorative pillows. (more…)
