I wish I were a better race horse. Pacing is everything, and my pacing is off. Long weekends throw me. Their promise of “three days off” rarely materializes. Perhaps that’s because I’m a self-employed worker who sets my own hours as a matter of course — what do I need with a day or two off, much less three. I could take every day off, if I wanted to. But that’s exactly what the problem comes down to. Because I could take the day off, I can’t.

The movie that we watched this evening was entirely Kathleen’s choice, but it’s my favorite Preston Sturges movie: The Palm Beach Story. Ordinarily, I wonder why this 1942 masterpiece doesn’t generally rate the top-ranking that I give it. But tonight I could see why it doesn’t. A movie about rich, entitled people being foolish and self-indulgent is unlikely to amuse the general public. Only people who have spent time with rich, entitled people being foolish are going to chuckle. Everyone else is going to be at least mildly offended.

I put it to you: how do you feel about the Ail & Quail Club scene? Bang bang!

¶ Matins: Frank Rich’s brief memoir of growing up in Washington as the child of parents who weren’t in government occasions thoughts about what the new President and a sympathetic Congress might do for the political orphans of the District of Columbia. “White Like Me.”

¶ Lauds: This morning’s arts link is not primarily motivated by a desire to scoop Joe Jervis. (JMG was my number-one source for news about Flight 1549.)

¶ Prime: I don’t know how long it would have taken me to find AllFacebook on my own — but then, does one find anything altogether on one’s own anymore? In this case, it was a matter of following a Facebook link posted by Jean Ruaud.

¶ Tierce: Haji Bismullah, “no longer deemed an enemy combatant,” is released from imprisonment at Guantánamo and sent home to Afghanistan, just like that!  We’re assured by the outgoing Vice President, however, that the prisoners who remain at the outpost are “hardcore” bad guys.

¶ Sext: Kathleen and I can’t decide if we’re up for Will Ferrell’s one-man Broadway show, You’re Welcome, America. A Final Night With George W Bush.

¶ Nones: In the famous fairy tale, it was enough for a small child to observe that the emperor was wearing no clothes. In today’s more jaded, news-saturated world, it took a pair of shoes to point out that the clothes were worn by no man. Muntadhar al-Zeidi is a hero, and his request for political asylum in Switzerland ought to be expedited.

¶ Vespers: From Hamburg to Montevideo, twenty years after the Great War’s end.

¶ Compline: Stanley Fish has a look at Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors. A Requiem for the Liberal Arts, in the key of Sharp Business.

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Whatever else you do today, don’t miss Katherine Ruppe’s doozie of  “Modern Love” column.

And then, as if he knew I needed a new plot twist for my screenplay, he mentioned that he had met his girlfriend’s husband before. And the husband’s girlfriend.

For a change, I’m going to the movies this afternoon, not this morning. Kathleen and I will be having dinner with Megan and Ryan at a restaurant on Houston Street, so I’ll head downtown at about three — running some errands on the way — for the later-afternoon show of Revolutionary Road at the Union Square Theatre. Then I’ll hang out at Barnes & Noble for a while, before deciding that it’s much too cold to walk fourteen blocks and taking the subway instead.

I thought that this would give me a nice long morning to spend on little stuff, like organizing my desk drawers, but I used up all my motivation yesterday.

Later the same day….

I did run the errand — to exchange the cable box that I poured a glass of wine into over the holidays for a new one, at TimeWarner on 23rd Street. Then I came home. I did not go to the movies, largely because Kathleen was talking about coming home early. She had a bit of a sore throat, which is why our dinner date got postponed to Sunday evening. So, as usual, nothing that I predicted happened. You really ought to read my stated plans as fantasies, at least when they involve other people.

The good news is that I patched together a few scraps of motivation.

¶ Matins: Among the phrases that we’re going to retire for at least a few years, alongside “personal responsibility,” let’s hope that “ownership society” finds a place. It was nothing but code for the enrichment of mortgagebaggers.

Who, like the viruses that they so closely resemble, have found a new line of weakness.

¶ Lauds: At dinner tonight, Kathleen asked me if I’d known about Peanuts and the Beethoven scores. Well, er, yes! But so what? I was never a Peanuts fan. Especially when I was a kid.

¶ Prime: Here is a blog — The Art of Manliness — that I came across during the recent Weblog beauty pageant. I agree with almost everything it says, until author Brett McKay assumes that I know what to do with duct tape. Which, in all fairness, I must confess that he doesn’t. (He might try to teach me, though.)

¶ Tierce: Here’s a story that took a while to appear, at least on my radar screen: How much did she know, when did she know it, and how much is hers? The Ruth Madoff Story. (Part 1/1000)

¶ Sext: Gail Collins says it all in a few words:

I think I speak for the entire nation when I say that the way this transition has been dragging on, even yesterday does not seem like yesterday. And the last time George W. Bush did not factor into our lives feels like around 1066.

¶ Nones: Can this really be happening (Good News Department!)? A clip from BBC World News: three-ton T-walls are coming down in Iraq, no longer needed.

¶ Vespers: No sooner do I begin to digest the news that a new Kate Christensen novel is on the way than I open Harper’s and find a story by Joseph O’Neill!

¶ Compline: Here’s hoping that the pilots and crew of US Air Flight 1549, captained by C B “Sully” Sullenberger, will be able to honor the city with a tickertape parade.

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This just in, from Fossil Darling:

One sunny day in January, 2009 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”

The Marine looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.” The old man said, “Okay”, and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.” The Marine again told the man, “Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here.” The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.

The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying “I would like to go in and meet with President Bush.”

The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I’ve told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?”

The old man looked at the Marine and said, “Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.”

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, “See you tomorrow, Sir.”

I’ve been meaning to write about my Nano, but I couldn’t settle on an image for Nano Notes. Everything is marketing these days; until you have the branding, you might as well just stay in bed. Once I gave the matter some thought, I realized that I did not want to take pictures of actual Nanos. Screenshots of my iTunes interface would be far more communicative.

By “my Nano,” of course, I mean: the way that my Nano(s), iTunes and a set of three Klipsch RoomGrooves have restored my Music Listening settings to about 1976, when there was always music playing. And the music was always different. In 1976, I was still in my twenties, and I thought nothing of getting off my duff to put a new LP on the turntable. (Not to mention getting off my duff to turn the LP over.)

I got older and lazier, but I kept on buying CDs. Many of them have been listened to only once, if at all. How often can anyone but a music professional be expected to be seized by the desire (and desire is very important with music, as everyone outside the world of classical music is well aware) to hear a string quartet by Ernst von Dohnanyi? It ain’t gonna happen! “My Nano” allows me to decide ahead of the time that, whether or not I’m in the mood, I’d better hear some Dohnanyi. Because music is like broccoli only when it’s unknown. Listen to something a few times, and you’ll either get to like it or you’ll hate it. Listen to things that you hate a few more times, and you’ll get fond of hating them.

The great cognitive tickle is that I’m actually surprised when the sound of Dohnanyi (or whomever) suddenly fills the room.* By the time I listen to one of my twelve-hour playliststs, a day or so may have gone by. I don’t think that senility has hit yet, but I’m enjoying finding uses for my “ability” to forget things. There is so much information in my life that I can’t remember what I did yesterday. (Well, there’s so much more important information.)

Bemused readers may wonder why, if I don’t really know the music of Dohnanyi (aside from the great “Nursery” Variations), I’m bothering to copy Dohnanyi CDs onto iTunes, as one must in order to play the recordings in one’s library on one’s Nano. The answer is that I recently went on a Dohnanyi spree at Amazon. That’s how my music collection grows, in spurts of blind enthusiasm. In 1976, I’d have listened over and over to the five or six new LPs that some little birdie told me to buy. Latterly, however, their CD successors been piling up unopened. But not any more! Now new acquisitions go straight to iTunes, where they find their way onto playlists.  

I am nothing less than breathtaken by the beauty of the system.

* So to speak. The RoomGrooves are not set to play loudly.

¶ Matins: Wei Jingsheng, twice-imprisoned Chinese dissident and winner of the Sakharov and Kennedy prizes, sees nothing less than collapse in his country’s future, if it does not offer ordinary Chinese a version of the New Deal.

¶ Lauds: Google Earth presents Fine Art: a dozen-odd masterpieces from the Prado in thread-count detail.

¶ Prime: To avoid the worst of post-holiday slump, I’ve been repairing to Café Muscato for refreshment. For witty ribaldry (glossing over-the-top images), Muscato can’t be beat.

¶ Tierce: Living in Manhattan means encountering neighborhood bulletins from Times to Times. This morning, in an article by Alex Tarquino that I almost skipped, “More Manhattan Shop Windows Are Expected to Be Empty This Year” — this is news? — I read that the Barnes & Noble branch that’s catercorner from my house is going to “move around the corner,” presumably into the new Brompton apartment building (the one designed by Robert A M Stern).

¶ Sext: As Alexander Pope demonstrated a while back (with Peri Bathos, or the Art of Sinking in Poetry), the quickest recipe for a fun read is to parody a how-to book by replacing the exemplary extracts with total trash. Jason Roeder revisits a much-loved usage manual with The Elements of Spam, at McSweeney’s.

¶ Nones: In Riga, a peaceful demonstration against the government’s economic policies got riotous, when a bunch of drunk young men attacked the parliament building.

¶ Vespers: For some time now, Jason Epstein has looked like the only book person out there who knows (a) what’s wrong with publishing and (b) how to fix it. His latest exhortation — elegant and brief as always — appears at The Daily Beast.

¶ Compline: From Joan Didion, an acerbic reminder to those who, in their excitement about an inauguration that is ripe with historical momentousness, have forgotten (as I am sure that Barack Obama himself has not) our absurd expectations of dancing in the streets in Baghdad, nearly six years ago…

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Is the Book Review getting shorter and shorter? I thought it was just the holidays… Three novels, three non-fiction titles, and two collections of letters (both Allen Ginsberg’s). I don’t mean to complain, but now that reviewing the Review is getting to be fun (déformation professionelle?), I’m no longer thrilled by the lighter workload.

¶ Matins: If you want to know why the Times may have to cease publication in May, you need read just this one story about the closing of Guantánamo, which makes sense on only a minimal level. Money aside, the newspaper is incapable of presenting a complex story in three paragraphs. And what else are newspapers for?

¶ Lauds: The stupidest prediction that I’ve read in the past ten minutes (I hate to exaggerate):

Initial predictions by some art investors last year that oil-rich Arab countries, Russia, India and China would continue to spend on art, even as the United States and much of Western Europe stumbled into a recession, proved too optimistic.

Once upon a time, one might have made a remark like this about Japan. Japan could be counted upon to go on buying paintings by Nattier and subscribing to the Neue Mozart Ausgabe no matter what was going on in the European economies.

¶ Prime: After a long absence, V X Sterne is back at Outer Life. Now that the economy is bound for hell in a handbasket, our favorite Californian capitalist is feeling much better.

¶ Tierce: Sarah Palin complains about a class divide in America, with self-proving assertions. There is an élite class in this country, identifiable by its ability to speak clear, articulate English. Ms Palin, on the other hand, speaks what can only be called Ramshackle.

¶ Sext: At last! We’ll be able to drive to Europe. (Via well-spaced aircraft carriers.)

¶ Nones: A “respected coalition” of British Jewish leaders has issued a letter calling for an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza.

¶ Vespers: Remember “writer’s block”? You’re right, I wonder what happened to it, too. Polly Frost waxes nostalgic — and she has a plan!

¶ Compline: Prince Harry is back in the news. Boy, this kid just doesn’t get it! Anybody who thinks that he’s really “third in line” for the English throne — or even nth — must be living in a tea cosy.

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Stephen Daldry’s The Reader really surprised me. I had found the book more of an object lesson than a novel. The movie is an admirable English-language addition to the shelf of recent films that take off on tangents from the Holocaust (or, as in the case of Das Leben des Andern, its aftermath).

Washing up after this evening’s dinner with Ms NOLA and M le Neveu, I seized on Witness For the Prosecution for quick entertainment, knowing that it would be sharp and clever from the start — so that I could turn it off when I needed to do so.

(Did I say “knowing”? I’ve just spent fifteen minutes trying to copy this clip from the latest version of Corel’s WinDVD. As usual, I might add.)

About two minutes after husband-and-wife team Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester made their first appearance, I realized that Fossil Darling and I have been playing these roles ever since 1963. Both of us, shifting back and forth between the barrister and his nurse. We’re always ready with Lanchester’s officious helpfulness; we know what’s best for Patient! Sometimes — quite often! — we are both Laughton: “Oh, shut up!”

[Someday] I’ll snatch her thermometer and plunge it through her shoulderblades.

That’s why Michael’s sainted mother, and now Kathleen, would/will say, “Oh, you two!”

¶ Matins: Of all the outgoing Administrations that I have known, none has excited the prosecutorial zeal of its opponents as keenly as the current one. Bringing the Bush Administration to justice was the main topic in yesterday’s Week in Review section of the Times, with pieces by three visiting commentators and a remonstrance by Frank Rich. Something must be done.

¶ Lauds: The Golden Globes… The Carpetbagger reports.

¶ Prime: Sic transit. Quite a few of the blogs indexed at nycbloggers.com for my subway stop have closed up, or not featured a new entry in a year or two.

¶ Tierce: In a nice gesture, Bernard Madoff apologized to his fellow co-op owners at 133 East 64th Street: Sorry about that scrum of reporters at the door!

¶ Sext: I’ll say one thing for Joe the Plumber, currently “reporting” from Israel: he’s walking proof that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing — in front of a microphone, anyway. If people must be entitled to their opinions, then at least they ought to have the decency to acknowledge that their opinions are uneducated. (via Joe.My.God)

¶ Nones: Good news from Thailand: voters seem inclined to heal the urban/rural rift. Even more, the now-more-powerful government  won’t let itself get carried away.

¶ Vespers: Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) has achieved official immortality, in the form of a Library of America volume. The book appeared in September, but William H Gass just got round to discussing it.

¶ Compline: Let’s hope the same can never be said of Barack Obama: “After Receiving Phone Call From Olmert, Bush Ordered Rice To Abstain On Gaza Ceasefire Resolution.” Secretary Rice had carefully negotiated the wording of the resolution, only to have the rug pulled out from under her because of an imperative call from Israel.

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Kathleen’s doctor has advised her to try to escape the winter climate once a month, if she can, so she’s staying in Boca Raton a bit longer than necessary. The conference that brought her there started today, but she arrived on Friday afternoon, and she won’t leave until Wednesday.

In other words, I’m home alone. Unsupervised.

I was very good yesterday. I got up early, fixed breakfast, and got to work on the usual round of Saturday chores. I did a load of towels in the laundry — the dry cleaner can’t be made to wash them without fabric softener of some kind — and took down the Christmas wreath over the mantel. When I was done, shortly after six, the apartment looked not only neat but so well-groomed that the formidable Park Avenue matron that Lena Olin plays in The Reader wouldn’t sniff before sitting down. Not that we get a lot of Park Avenue matrons this far east.

I had a glass of wine or two with my spaghetti alla carbonara, but after dinner I zapped a mug of Lapsang Souchang and was constructive for an hour or two. Then I poured another glass and went out.  

Went out in a manner of speaking, that is, to the Webcam Tavern. I had a great time with a law school chum. How we laughed! It was very jolly. But then, suddenly, it was very late, and there were two empty wine bottles at my feet. Uh-oh.

I didn’t have to drive home, and I didn’t spend any money, either on wine or on phone bills. I don’t think I said anything too stupid. But I might as well have driven into a tree, lost my wallet (and the wad of cash in it), and irreparably insulted my old friend, considering how I felt about it all this morning. The worst thing about overindulgence nowadays is the intense remorse that grips me the next day. It is a moral hangover that I rarely experienced in my hard-drinking days. “I didn’t do anything,” I tell myself, but it’s not convincing, even when it’s true.

That I was fit only for reading today wasn’t cause for regret, because that’s what I do on Sunday. When I’m through with the Times (three days’ worth, usually), I read The Economist. Ordinarily, The Economist confers a fine patina of virtuousness, but not today. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out the drift of a story about the record-low nominal yields of Treasury bonds.

The physical hangover wasn’t so great either, but at least it was not one of those interfering maladies that makes fatal disease seem preferable (very preferable). I was able to make breakfast once again — and to order in lunch and dinner, and to eat it all with relish. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m still a disappointing young man — at sixty-one!

And so we come to the first day of the weekend — Friday. That’s how we do things around here, anyway.

Four days of eight more or less significant links, each presented within the context of a given canonical hour — At Lauds, for example, I try to link to an interesting item about the Seven Lively Arts (books come in at Vespers) — is as much as I can do, and also, at least with my current astronomical equipment, about as far as I can see.

Now I’m off to the movies — to see The Reader.

Bon weekend à tous!

¶ Matins: It’s as though everyone decided to spend the holidays pretending that things were fine: now that we’re back in the real world, the disasters just pile up like planes over O’Hare. “China Losing Taste for Debt From the U.S.”

¶ Lauds: Once upon a time, the Germans copied the French: Imperial princelings replicated, to the extent that their incomes would allow, Louis XIV’s country house (and stealth capitol) at Versailles. Now the Germans have taken the initiative, and the French are just watching.

¶ Prime: The (only) good thing about Web log awards is the chance to discover sites that you haven’t heard about. I don’t remember the category in which I came across Dizzying Intellect — the categories are utterly spurious in any case — but it doesn’t matter, because I found it.

¶ Tierce: Too big to filch? Bernard Madoff has been making unauthorized distributions of assets, according to prosecutors. His attorneys claim that the Cartier watches are relatively inexpensive sentimental items that Mr Madoff would like his family to have. In the dictionary, under the word “chutzpah”…. Alex Berenson reports.

 ¶ Sext: The thing to note about developer Fred Milani — if you can get beyond the House — is that he is “not very political.” Exactly! No politically-minded person would erect a scaled-down adaptation — “replica” is not the word — of the “President’s House.” The politically-minded person would be interested only in the real thing. And that’s not all…

¶ Nones: Trying to find an update on the violence in Greece that the Times reported the other day — it’s coverage, dismayingly, is better than that of the English papers that I’ve checked, as well as the BBC’s — I discover that the Turkish government has rounded up a bunch of secularist critics and accused them of fomenting a plot. This story does come from the BBC.

¶ Vespers: I’ve done just about nothing today but read Brian Morton’s first novel, The Dylanist. Published in 1991, this is a novel to dust off and re-read in the Age of Obama, not so much for any specific political alignment as for its portraits of people who are too richly principled for cynicism.

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¶ Matins: Here’s hoping that no regular readers of The Daily Blague were under the illusion that the Cold War was “won” — and by US! Andrew Kramer reports on the cold Cold War.

¶ Lauds: The year in music: Steve Smith sums up 2008.

¶ Prime: The last thing you need is yet another blog to check out, but I’m afraid that you’ll have to make room on your list for Scouting New York — at least if you have any interest whatsoever in this burg of ours. The site is kept by a professional location scout — what a dream job! (There are no dream jobs, but we don’t have to know that.

¶ Tierce: A story that I’m afraid I was expecting to see: “State’s Unemployment System Buckles Under Surging Demand.” That the outage was repaired later the same day is not the point.

¶ Sext: Will nonbelievers spend eternity at the back of a bus? 800 London buses will begin bearing “atheist” messages, such as “There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Sarah Lyall reports.

¶ Nones: Oops! Another I-Lied accounting story, this one involving Satyam, the outsourcing firm that provides back-office services to “more than a third of the Fortune 500 companies.” Heather Timmons reports, with Bettina Wassner.

¶ Vespers: Don’t ask what has taken me so long, but I’ve gotten round at last to adding Koreanish to the blog roster. It is kept by novelist Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh. Yesterday, he posted an entry from this years MLA convention in San Francisco.

¶ Compline: Stanley Fish lists his favorite American movies of all time. Of the ten, only Vertigo makes my list. I don’t begin to understand the appeal of John Wayne, and I could never omit Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Cary Grant, or Fred Astaire, not to mention Preston Sturgis.

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Liesl Schillinger’s excellent review of Louise Erdrich’s new collection of stories, The Red Convertible, almost makes up for the snark and condescension scattered through the rest of this week’s issue.