This morning, I visited the Cathedral of St John the Divine for the first time, in the company of Sore Afraid blogger Eric Patton. We walked around and took a lot of pictures. Most of my pictures aren’t very good, sadly, and quite a few are dismally blurred, given the low light and my unsteady hand. It was a very pleasant outing, though, and I’d be perfectly happy to stay home tonight. But I’ve got tickets for Orpheus at Carnegie Hall.

 More anon…

Hello to everyone!

I began fretting over how to title this entry long before I finally launched into writing it. How to communicate that I’m going to write about Danish Cinema without stirring up hope that I may have brilliant and scholarly things to say about Danish Cinema? Oh, believe me, I would love to offer scholarly observations on…perhaps, the seminal work and international influence of Carl Theodor Dreyer, but I’ve only ever seen Vampyr, and that was forever ago, and I’m pretty sure I thought he was German. If you’re curious about how the French New Wave inspired the Dogme 95 Collective, I’ll have to beg off again, as I’ve not seen enough of the Dogme films to speak about them with any authority…and of the six I have rented, I kind of hated two of them.

So this post could only truthfully be titled “Here Are Some Post-Babette’s Feast Danish Films That I Have Found at Netflix, and Enjoyed, and Would Like to Recommend to You in the Hope That You Will Like Them Also”. (more…)

¶ Matins: Now that, for the first time, Thai King Bhumibol is unable to make an important regular appearance, the uncertainty of his country’s future greatly intensifies, over and above the chaos caused by last week’s occupation, by the pro-royalist (and thuggishly anti-democratic) PAD, of the major airports. The king is widely regarded as standing above the fray, and always inclining his support toward the cause of democracy. The Economist, long opposed to Thailand’s stringent lèse-majesté laws, challenges this “fairy-tale” view.

¶ Nones: And in Turkey, Leyla Zana, Kurdish politician and winner of the 1995 Sakharov human rights award, has been sentenced to ten (more) years in prison, for terrorist speech.

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¶ Matins: Musing on the Times’ ten best books of 2008 — of which I’ve read only one.

¶ Sext: Lance Arthur has decided to come out of the closet — as an atheist. This means more than just writing about his lack of faith in his (latest) blog, Just Write.

 ¶ Nones: And we thought it was just us… Every now and then, somebody writes about the fact that almost all advertised watches are set at (roughly) 10:10. The other day, it was Andrew Adam Newman, at the Times. (For Timex, it’s 10:09:36; at Rolex, it’s 10:10:31.) Now Kathleen and I scan the ads for watches that are set at odd times. (via kottke.org)

 ¶ Vespers: Two new biographies of Samuel Johnson occasion one of Adam Gopnik’s invaluable essays.

The worst of literary faults for him is, exactly, tediousness. “We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and over-burdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master and seek for companions.” (His firmest statement on art was that it should be “harmless pleasure.” He knew it would shock in its Philistinism, but he stood by it.) Johnson was certainly “serious” about literature, but he thought that writing was serious as conversation is serious, an occasion for wit and argument, not as sex and sermons are serious, a repository of fears and hungers.

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“Today, I want to do it on the table!”

Miss Frances. Frances Rappaport Horwich, star — if that’s the word — of Ding Dong School. A show that I watched with recollected docility in the early Fifties. Perhaps the best way to think of Miss Frances is as Mr Rogers’s fairy godmother,  by way of Joe Jervis — qua Ruth Draper’s Mrs Grimmer, of Doctors and Diets, a routine that Joe can recite by rote. (Cue it, Joe!)

A show from this popular series is included in the DVD set, Hiya, Kids!!, which takes its name from another old favorite, Andy’s Gang (“Plunk your magic twanger, Froggie.”). On the one hand, these shows are amazingly innocent of all TV allure. Production values are sub-nil. On the other hand, it is impossible to watch them without imagining their hosts being led away in chains, by federal marshals.

You think I’m joking? Consider this wholesome activity.

The ew factor of this image sent Kathleen into paroxyms of revulsion. I knew that she’d react unfavorably to Ding Dong School, but the extent to which she did so surprised even me.

The commercialization can only be called Nudist. It is that frank. There are two ads for Kix. Both of them feature serving suggestions of which this is the most naive:

There is, strangely, no mention whatsoever of milk, or cream, or water, or any liquid. I suppose that liquid would dampen the crunchiness, which is billed as lasting until “the last spoonful.” The last spoonful in the box, that is. (In those days, nobody worried about how that was managed.) Every time Miss Frances mentions the “crunchy corn” deliciousness of “Kix,” all I can think of is Mrs Grimmer’s trying to squeeze out “the juice of eleven lemons.”

In addition to blowing bubbles, Miss Frances recites poems (by Vachel Lindsay and Robert Louis Stevenson), folds handkerchiefs, and bounces a ball.

I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a child requiring instruction in bouncing a ball.

After all of this edification, Miss Frances summons the parents and/or guardians, bustles the kids out of the room, talks up the handkerchief trick, plugs Kix all over again, and then — this is why you have to buy the DVD — urges her listeners to teach their little ones to “evaluate plans.” Stalinist or anti-Communist? It’s hard to tell.

The good news is that Kathleen has all sorts of new nightmare material, what with Miss Frances and watching Toy Story right afterward.

As for the title of this entry: it refers to a prepubescent joke that I was telling within five or six years of watching Ding Dong School. In those days, five or six years made a completely different man of me; now it only means that I have lived to benefit from more effective medication. Sadly, I still think that this is one of the funniest jokes that I have ever heard. The fun is in the setup, not the punchline. (Actually, the fun is in the souvenir of boyishly imagining that a grown man might conceivably mistake X (Chinese bells) for Y (read on.) That darn keyhole: curse or blessing? If you’re up for some childishness, click on through.

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¶ Matins: Roger Ebert’s complaint about the “CelebCult” — the news about “divorces, addiction, disease, success, failure, death watches, tirades, arrests, hissy fits, scandals” that is killing contemporary journalism at the speed of liver cancer — is remarkable for the quality of comments that it has attracted, most of which are (dauntingly!) worth reading, especially the ones that Mr Ebert has answered.

But when I read Jason Kottke’s entry about the post — Mr Kottke shares Mr Ebert’s dismay — I thought: all very well, but what are we to do? This led me to wonder if a misguided interest in gossip is really the problem.

¶ Tierce: This morning’s Times brings a nice column by David Leonhardt, “Budgets Behaving Badly,” that extends the hope that Barack Obama will staff his administration with behavioral economists. He has already nominated one, Peter Orszag, for budget director.

¶ Compline: Now that the Episcopal Church is finally splitting, with the conservatives abandoning the mother ship for their shriveled-up future, one can only wonder how long it will take American Catholics of conscience to break with Rome in the name of true Christian values.

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When I started reviewing the reviews in the Book Review, in 2005, its contents did not appear online until the publication date. Unaware that this policy had changed, I read most of this week’s reviews thinking that they were leftovers from last week’s edition, which I missed in print, being on vacation.

Which is another way of saying that I wasn’t paying attention last weekend. That’s what vacations are for, isn’t it? And yet I feel curiously guilty. What about last week’s Book Review?

¶ Matins: Aren’t economists great? Now they tell us: “Recession Began Last December, Economists Say.”

¶ Tierce: Pankaj Mishra’s Op-Ed piece, “Fresh Blood From an Old Wound,” throws another log on the fire for resolving territorial disputes, some of which are older than most people alive today. Tibet, Palestine, Kashmir — these vexing contests between arrogant sovereignties and fierce patriots clearly require a unified focus. In their details, these problems differ greatly, but their consequences in the greater world are dismayingly similar. We need a permanent UN Commission to deal with territorial disputes (perhaps there already is one!), or at least to provide a forum for discussing them.

¶ Vespers: George was there: on the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Harvey Milk, George Snyder sat in a theatre in the Castro and watched Sean Penn impersonate the slain civil rights leader.

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Ever since I was in the sixth grade, I’ve seen psychotherapists on and off — mostly on. Two questions: what’s wrong with me? And: isn’t it late in the day for repairs?

Hopeless questions — and beside the point. These days, I want a therapist more than ever. Not a psychotherapist, though. What I want is a delotherapist. (I have just made up the term, using a handy Internet Greek dictionary that is undoubtedly a dangerous thing for ignorant minds like mine.) In English: a clear doctor. Someone who would help me to navigate my day.

I don’t mean one of those organizers who come in and tell you to throw everything out. I can do that on my own. Well, not entirely on my own. LXIV has been a great help at getting me to cart stuff that I can live without to Housing Works. We made a couple of trips yesterday, in fact. First we took about twenty books. Then we lugged in some inherited items: two large wooden urns and a pair of gilt candlesticks.

No, I mean an Information Therapist. Someone to whom I could pour out my troubles with email, RSS feeds, Flickr, Facebook and The New York Times (print and digital). The weedy tendencies of these utilities seems at times to choke off more valuable growths. By habit, I am not a procrastinator. But I have a hard time switching focus between the long and the short view of things. I think that almost everyone does. A lot of time gets wasted in the shift from mastering some new technological widget to placing the Mumbai massacre in an intelligent perspective.

On Sunday, in the middle of a massive and really very successful reorganization of our apartment’s closets — I can’t believe that I got so much done! — my vocabulary and reading-comprehension skills dropped below kindergarten levels. With my mind locked into solving spatial problems, I was reduced, in my infrequent and somewhat subhuman exchanges with Kathleen, to grunting and pointing.

A session on the couch would be so helpful! First I’d have to clear it off, though. It’s completely covered with piles of books and papers.

¶ Matins: The story of McGeorge Bundy’s career as a presidential adviser, told now by Gordon M Goldstein (who worked with Bundy during the last year of his life on a collaborative project that had to be shelved when Bundy’s widow withdrew her support), promises to be a powerful cautionary tale about the limits of early brilliance. Dean of faculty at Harvard at the age of 34, Bundy was all but doomed by his precocity (and his impeccably WASP bloodlines) to trust his innate intelligence more than anyone else’s experience. That such a man counseled two presidents to forge ahead violently in Vietnam would hardly be more horrifying if we learned that Bundy was in fact a vampire who fed on soldiers’ blood.

Richard Holbrooke, who was in the room at the height of Bundy’s influence, reviews Mr Goldstein’s book, saying, “On the long shelf of Vietnam books, I know of nothing quite like it.”

¶ Prime: Who’d a thunk it? According to Brian Stelter’s story, “A Generation of Local TV Anchors Is Signing Off,” just over half of Americans watch local TV news regularly, compared to the 34% who read newspapers and the (only!) 29% who watch network news.

¶ Tierce: Thanks to kottke.org, I’ve just discovered a very promising blog: A Historian’s Craft, kept by “fledgling historian” Rachel Leow. In “Only Collect,” she observes that the only way to become a good hunter of information is to begin voraciously and indiscriminately.

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