The panel discussion at McNally Jackson Books on Friday night marked a departure of sorts, but a dimly familiar departure. Eric Alterman, Susan Jacoby, David Samuels and Colm Tóibín (seated, left to right) talked about “How History Was Made: Books That Inspired a President.” (Laura Miller, also billed, did not appear.) The president in question was the current incumbent, and the book list was compiled by staff bookseller and moderator John McGregor. The event might have taken place in a more institutional setting, at a university or in a library, but as it took place at a bookstore I was reminded of the Gotham Book Mart, which I was unfortunately unable to visit when Edith Sitwell gave a reading, in November, 1948 — not having attained the age of one.

The mood in the packed bookshop was ebullient — so much so that it was easy to overlook the deflated undertones in much of what was said, particularly by Mr Alterman and Ms Jacoby. Perhaps it was simply a case of my agreeing with them: while it’s wonderful to have a president who reads books, it oughtn’t to be remarkable; and as for the end of the Bush era, this is nothing to celebrate, either, since the era ought never to have begun.

Mr Tóibín was quick to claim Barack Obama as an outsider, and I had no argument with that. The bracing but understandably unheralded leitmotif of the new administration seems to me to be that we are all outsiders. (The more I get to know about Mr Obama — something about which, I confess, I’m taking my time — the more struck I am by the challenges posed by such huge and intrusive question marks about identity as must have loomed for a bi-racial child of the Seventies.) Mr Tóibín drew interesting comparisons between the president and James Baldwin, finding almost startling parallels in their memoir writing. Something tells me that it will be Mr Obama himself who effectively eases the discomfort that some people might have to hear him compared to a gay black American writer; until he does, the gay Irish writer’s patient analysis is likely to provoke a fair amount of suppressed wincing and gritting of teeth.

David Samuels, author of The Runner: A True Account of the Amazing Lies and Fantastical Adventures of the Ivy League Impostor James Hogue, was also preoccupied by the question of identity, but his concern was somewhat more occult than Colm Tóibín’s, and it took longer for me to grasp — if, indeed, I did grasp it. Mr Tóibín’s reference to Barack Obama as a “self-invented man” who has found a mirror in books struck me as an interesting observation, but Mr Samuels’s comments along the same lines struck me as ominous; they seemed to suggest that the president is too adaptable. From the phrase “usable identity,” which Mr Samuels used several times, I was inclined to infer an unsavory opportunism, and I began by thinking that Mr Samuels is not a fan. Eventually, however, a thesis was advanced: Barack Obama has achieved a mastery of self-possession because he is a writer. This was an interesting idea, not because it might be correct, but because of the light it cast on Mr Samuels’ conception of writers and writing.

I don’t recall any opposition from Colm Tóibín, but Susan Jacoby and Eric Alterman would have nothing to do with Mr Samuels’ thesis. To them, the president is a man of parts who has written one good book (Dreams of My Father) and one piece of political hackery (The Audacity of Hope). They stoutly resisted the notion that all good books are written by writers. Mr Alterman went so far as to insist that one of the best books that he has ever read was not written by a “writer” — Katharine Graham’s Personal History. Without flogging his idea, Mr Samuels refused to let it go, and pretty soon what I sensed, despite the journalist’s persistent (and somewhat “archaic”) smile, was a gatekeeper’s anxiety. Rather than have a president out there who happened to have written a good book, Mr Samuels preferred to see Mr Obama as a writer out there who happens to be president.

It occurred to me, later, that a professional writer is a someone who writes well enough) who is also capable of meeting deadlines, showing up for appointments, and exhibiting other tokens of adult responsibility. When, talking with Kathleen about the panel, I ventured this point, she asked, “Where does that leave Proust?” The simple, professional answer would have been to remind Kathleen that she has never read Proust. Merely semi-pro myself, however, I didn’t think of that one until just now.

Update: For another account of the discussion, see what Rollo Romig has to say at The Book Bench.

¶ Matins: Alex Williams’ cheeky piece, “Bad Economy? Good Excuse,” seems to me to capture something about the Zeitgeist that is being overlooked. Isn’t it possible that a good deal of downsizing going on throughout the markets is motivated not by panic or uncertainty but by a desire to pass a lot of the gas that the economy has been building up for fifteen or twenty years (or more)?

¶ Lauds: Regular readers will know that Lauds is for the arts that are not literary — but even so, Laura Cahill’s “readable furniture” seems closer to the library than to the gallery. (via Survival of the Book)

¶ Prime: You know how people have their pictures taken by the Campanile in Pisa, so that it looks as if they’re holding it up, ha-ha. Pseudo Jeff at Ads Are Boring snapped photos of people while they were posing, but the posing is all that you see in his images, not the “joke.” Don’t they look silly!

¶ Tierce: I’ve kicked off yet another category of blog entries: Capital Sins. This will be the rubric for the various manifestations of American anti-humanism, much of which appears to be one kind of racism or another. With its bloated prisons, the United States is clearly going about crime & punishment in a very bad way. Illegal mmigration is another matter that, try as they might, critics can never persuasively sell as a merely economic problem. An editorial in yesterday’s Times shows why.

¶ Sext: The funniest thing that I’ve read in these unfunny times is Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s Letter from Frankfurt in the current issue of Harper’s, “The Last Book Party.” The piece is funny even before the reporter gets to the Messe.  

That is, contemporary late-corporate publishing is a fallen world in which Lauren Weisberger, author of The Devil Wears Prada, gets really rich, while Richard Ford, one of the indisputably important novelists of our time, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Independence Day and The Sportswriter, gets slightly less rich. None of the elegists say: What is coming to an end is the idea that Richard Ford is going to be richer than Lauren Weisberger. None of them say: What is coming to an end is the wishful insistence — for it is, ultimately, a wish, deeply felt, by a lot of people—that Richard Ford is going to be rich at all.

¶ Nones: The highest court in France has acknowledged the state’s responsibility in the deportation of 76,000 Jews to prison (and death) between 1942 and 1944.

¶ Vespers: At Emdashes, Martin Schneider writes about that singular anomaly, the smart person who “hates” The New Yorker. Matthew Yglesias, it turns out, is one such — although he has “caved.”

¶ Compline: You just know that a 4% sales tax is going to chill purchases of online porn. Mean old Governor Paterson! (Thanks, Joe.)

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Here’s an extremely exciting novel that came out just last week. I was asked if I wanted to read it in advance, and I’m very glad that I did, because — in light of what happens in the book — that really did make the reading even more exciting.

Even so, I should also have enjoyed knowing that thousands, if not millions, of other readers were loving it or had loved Kathryn Stockett’s The Help already. I certainly hope that that’s what happens, because the intertwined tales of Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter have the feel of an American classic. And the rogues gallery of horribly hateful anti-heroines needs a new niche, for Miss Hilly Holbrook.

¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 5 September 1748 is not only full of pithy adages — “Pleasing in company is the only way of being pleased in it yourself” — but adorned, if that is the word, with the finest, most choice misogyny, eloquently but concisely put. It is positively pattern:

As women are a considerable, or at least a pretty numerous part of company; and as their suffrages go a great way towards establishing a man’s character in the fashionable part of the world (which is of great importance to the forture and figure he proposes to make in it), it is necessary to please them. I will therefore, let you into certain Arcana, that will be very useful for you to know, but which you must, with the utmost care, conceal; and never seem to know. Women, then, are only children of a larger growth…

When someone incredulous young person wants to know what the world was like when the word “people” implied a company of men only, one need only recommend Chesterfield’s momentary treatise.

¶ In Moby-Dick, There is a lovely paragraph in Melville’s quietly spooked chapter on the sighting of a great squid.

But one transparent morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the mainmast-head.

¶ Chapter XLV of Don Quixote ends with a fantastic tirade from Quixote himself, as he demands to be unhanded by officers seeking to arrest him for having “liberated” the galley slaves. It is cheeky of Cervantes to put this catalogue of privileged, aristocratical exemptions in the mouth of a lunatic.

Ah, vile rabble, your low and base intelligence does not deserve to have heaven communicate to you the great truth of knight errantry, or allow you to understand the sin and ignorance into which you have fallen you when you do not reverence the shadow, let alone the actual presence, of any knight errant. Come, you brotherhood of thieves, you highway robbers sanctioned by the Holy Brotherhood, come and tell me who was the fool who signed an arrest warrant against such a knight as I? Who was the dolt who did not know that knights errant are exempt from all jurisdictional authority, or was unaware that their law is their sword, their edicts their courage, their statutes their will? Who was the imbecile, I say, who did not know that there is no patent of nobility with as many privileges and immunities as those acquired by a knight errant on the day he is dubbed a knight and dedicates himself to the rigorous practice of chivalry? What knight errant ever paid a tax, a duty, a queen’s levy, a tribute, a tariff, or a toll? What tailor ever received payment from him for the clothes he sewed? What castellan welcomed him to his castle and then asked him to pay the cost? What king has not sat him at his table? What damsel has not loved him and given herself over to his will and desire? And, finally, what kight errant ever was, or will be in the world who doe snot have the courage to single-handedly deliver four hundred blows to four hundred brotherhoods if they presume to oppose him?

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward goes to the movies, and then writes to Lornie about it.

I only spent one night in Hollywood but I utilized it by sitting in a projection room and seeing the film they have made of Bitter Sweet. No human tongue could ever describe what Mr Victor Saville, Miss Jeanette MacDonald and Mr Nelson Eddy have done to it between them. It is, on all counts, far and away the worst picture I have ever seen. MacDonald and Eddy sing relentlessly from beginning to end looking like a rawhide suit case and a rocking horse respectively. Sari never gets old or even middle aged. “Zigeuner” is a rip snorting production number with millions of Hungarian dancers. There is no Manon at all. Miss M elects to sing “Ladies of the Town” and both Manon’s songs, she also dances a Can-Can! There is a lot of delightful comedy and the dialogue is much improved, at one point, in old Vienna, she offers Carl a cocktail! Lord Shayne was wrong, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy are very definitely the worng age for Vienna. It is the vulgarest, dullest vilest muck up that I have ever seen in my life. It is in technicolour and Miss M’s hair gets redder and redder until you want to scream. Oh dear, money or no money, I wish we’d hung on to that veto.

¶ Even in the days of La Rochefoucauld (praised by Chesterfield in another important passage of today’s letter), it was true that you can’t get a job unless you already have a job.

Pour s’établir dans le monde, on fait tout ce que l’on peut pour y paraître établi.

Having had a big day yesterday — by which regular readers will understand that I was out of the house for most of the sunlit hours, and a few of the dark ones as well — I was not in the mood for Valentine’s Day this morning. But I wanted to be. We needed a touch of fireworks. Kathleen has been working crazy hours; meanwhile, I’ve been clipping and pruning my life to the point at which, should I care to do so, I ought to be able to turn out a slightly gala dinner.

Lugging the onus of Valentine’s Day was entirely my idea. Kathleen, God love her, really does discharge the whole big-day thing with a morning kiss. “Happy birthday, dear!” (She doesn’t say “dear,” but never you mind what she does say.) Having grown up in a fautissimo comme-il-faut household, Kathleen is not big on observance. She also knows that there’s no danger of my forgetting birthdays. Having been born on the Epiphany, I never forget the names of all three kings, and what they gave baby Jesus. Kathleen long ago gave up trying to keep up with Balthazar et al.

Being Balthazar, I can tell you that the coolest thing on Valentine’s Day is coming up with a knockout dinner that isn’t really a whole lot of work to prepare. I’m always ready to lean on our fine library of porcelain, crystal, linen, and other accessories; without going to much trouble at all I can turn out a celebratory dinner even if it wasn’t a particularly memorable one. As Kathleen well knows: she kept asking for chicken pot pie (from Eli’s). She wanted to keep it simple — being married to the cook and all.

Notwithstanding, I settled on Escalopes de veau cauchoise pretty early. It’s an American dish, really: veal scallops in Granny Smith sauce. Okay, the sauce includes a bucket of cream and a flambé of Calvados. Not to mention the fact that I got the recipe from Elizabeth David, hardly a Yankophile. The asparagus that accompanied the veal behaved like well brought-up girls who, although they were expecting butter, were only too happy to fall into the apple cream that spilled off the veal.

That was the main course — the only one that I knew about when I left the house to do the shopping. It never occurred to me that I could count on Agata & Valentina for my first course and my dessert — both of them heart-shaped! Imagine! Tomato-pasta cheese-filled heart-shaped-ravioli! Who could resist? And a heart-shaped “chocolate silk cake.” As for the latter, all I know is that, having had a slice: major joltage.

As for the ravioli first course, I made a simple Alfredo cream, which turned out to be just the thing to point up its virtues. I had thought that the tomato was just for color, to make the ravioli red.  Not so! And the cheese filling jiggled nicely with my parmesan-laden cream.

It’s a terrible thing to find out that your wife is having an affair at a lovely dinner that you have prepared for her yourself, as I can only imagine from Kathleen’s distraction during dinner. While I was thinking Valentine’s Day and cooking and whatnot, Kathleen was thinking beading. She was, in fact, making a new chain for my Paul Smith reading glasses. Her mind was totally engaged on diameters — threads, needles, and perforations. She had no small talk at the table. Her politeness was exquisite, but it was clear that few eight-year-olds have been more eager to escape the table and get back to what they were doing.

As the cook in the family, I forget what it’s like to be called away from the important work that you’re involved with because it’s “supper time.” But no matter how distracted Kathleen is by the job in hand, she never forgets that, in order to make dinner, I put aside my own work hours earlier. That’s one of the reasons why she wanted pot pie.

There is not a happier husband in the world. I have reason to believe that the feeling is mutual.

This essay is dedicated to faithful aiders and abettors Flather and Tindley. Trust is not only the name of their bank.

In the Times this morning, news that scientists may really have figured out how to defeat the common cold — but also that big pharma will be disinclined to make the necessary investment in a cure for a “minor nuisance.” (Nicholas Wade reports). Regular readers may recall that I have an idea for re-inclining the drug companies to do their jobs. Patent protection for valuable medicines ought to be coupled with the obligation to develop less remunerative remedies.

But then, I am the worst sort of elitist socialist.

Kathleen has been working late all week, rushing for a deadline that will fall early tonight. (She doesn’t have Monday off, but since neither her clients nor the SEC will be making or receiving phone calls, she is looking forward to a quiet day.) I’ve been devoting the long evenings to the ongoing game of I Am My Own Executor, in which I go through drawers, closets, manila folders, and whatnot in a terrifying Stalinist purge of Expendibilia. Great bags of old newspaper clippings, expired subscription offers, and such superseded essentials as Avery labels for floppy disks are hauled to the garbage chute.

As if honor my efforts, the building’s latest and rather sketchy stab at refurbishment has adorned the door to what used to be known as the “trash room” with a handsome brushed metal plaque that says just that, “Garbage Chute,” in Gill Sans Bold. It’s enough to make one look for the red circle crossed by a blue bar , saying something like “Tower Hamlets.”

¶ Matins: Good news on the international justice front:

Judges at the International Criminal Court have decided to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, brushing aside diplomatic requests to allow more time for peace negotiations in the conflict-riddled Darfur region of his country, according to court lawyers and diplomats.

¶ Lauds: What do you think? Does support from dodgy, possibly criminal corporations corrupt the arts that they subsidize? Tom Service, at the Guardian, certainly thinks so.

How can the art made at festivals sponsored by these bankrupt individuals and companies do the job that classical music should do, and have a necessary, critical voice in contemporary culture, if it continues to be supported by the dead hand of big banking?

¶ Prime: Eric Patton celebrates the Darwin bicentennial by turning to The Pillow Book — not Peter Greenaway’s film so much as Sei Shonagon’s book — at SORE AFRAID. What on earth has the one got to do with the other? Having scrolled through Eric’s photographic lists, one will find Darwin’s conclusion all the more immanently enlightened.

I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.

¶ Tierce: Personality clash or whistleblowing? “You decide.” Either way, Sir James Crosby, who fired an evident whistleblower when he ran the now-ailing HBOS, has had to resign as Britain’s deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority.

¶ Sext: We take you now from the buttoned-down elitism of The Daily Blague to Belfast, Maine, where a trust fund baby from California who collected Hitler’s silverware was found, after having been shot dead by his wife, Amber, to have been stockpiling the raw materials for a dirty nuclear bomb! (Thanks Alexander Chee!)

¶ Nones: Isn’t it amazing? In a mere half-century, we have cluttered inner space with tons and tons of junk. Two items crashed on Tuesday.

But experts now see another potential threat. Richard Crowther explained: “Unique to the Iridium system is that all the remaining 65 satellites in the constellation pass through the same region of space – at the poles.

“So the debris cloud that is forming as a result of the Iridium satellite breakup will present a debris torus of high (spatial) density at 90 degrees to the equator that all the surviving Iridium satellites will need to pass through.”

Intact satellites share Earth’s orbit with everything from spent rocket stages and spacecraft wreckage to paint flakes and dust.

The diffuse mist of junk around our planet is the legacy of 51 years of human activity in space.

¶ Vespers: Valerie Martin has a little list: six great novels about doomed marriages. Before peeking, make your own list. Okay, now you can look.

¶ Compline: An amusingly ambiguous map from newgeography: American states that people don’t leave? Or states that they don’t move to? (via Brainiac)

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¶ “Brit,” the title of Chapter 58 of Moby-Dick refers, as best I can make out, to the microscopic zooplankton called copepods. But never mind. The chapter is really interested in distinguishing the peaceable land masses of the earth from the hostile oceans, and it ends on an elegiac note.

Consider all this: consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off frfom that isle, thou canst never return!

Like everyone else, I was brought up to nod reverently as this sort of humane sagacity. Now it simply reeks of incense, clouding the view of clearer truths.

¶ In Don Quixote, the only distinguished personage who hasn’t shown up at the inn is Forrest Gump. We have yet another recognition scene, as the muletier with the beautiful voice turns out to be Doña Clara’s youthful admirer from across the road in Madrid. I’d love to find out how this romance will end up, but I have to put the book down, because, after two chapters instead of the usual ration of just one, I’m so sick of Quixote’s antics that I can’t continue.

Just then, one of the horses of the four men pounding at the door happened to smell Rocinante, who, melancholy and sad and with drooping ears, stood unmoving as he held his tightly drawn master; and since, after all, he was flesh and blood, though he seemed to be made of wood, he could not help a certain display of feeling as he, in turn, smelled the horse who had come to exchange caresses; as soon as he had moved slightly, Don Quixote’s feet, which were close together, slipped from the saddle, and he would have landed on the ground if he had not been hanging by his arm; this caused him so much pain that he believed his hand was being cut off at the wrist or that his arm was being pulled out of its socket; he was left dangling so close to the ground that the tips of his toes brushed the earth, and this made matters even worse, because…

I have no idea what Cervantes is thinking, when he interrupts the tale of Don Luis with the roughhousing that Quixote provokes at every turn, but the tale itself is reminiscent not of The Marriage of Figaro but of its “pre-quel,” The Barber of Seville. Although I can’t remember what “Lindoro” (the Count in disguise) is supposed to be. Not a muletier, I don’t think.

¶ In Squillions, at the end of interminable Chapter 17, we learn why Noël Coward took to bunking at Cary Grant’s when he paid wartime visits to Hollywood. No, they were not an affair. The two men were both agents of “Little” Bill Stephenson, sizing up the sentiment of the movie crowd. It’s no surprise to be reminded that Errol Flynn was pro-Nazi.

¶ Matins: So manypeople still don’t get it: the important thing right now is to do something, and then, maybe, something else. Waiting to get it right is the only guarantee of disaster. The Obama/Geithner plan faces a “brutally negative” response.

¶ Lauds: I read it at Classical Convert first: Muzak has declared bankruptcy.

¶ Prime: So, you’re going through the attic, convinced that it’s full of treasures. Sadly, you’re probably in the The Trough of No Value. Saving those “collectibles” always requires more patience than you think it will. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Now that the Obama Administration is re-directing American focus to Afghanistan, the sub-sovereign creation of British mapmakers is metastatsizing from a sorry mess to the new Vietnam. Uh-oh!

The attacks in the capital underlined the severity of the challenge facing American policy-makers who have declared the war in Afghanistan a high priority for the new administration in Washington and who plan to almost double American troop levels with the deployment of some 30,000 additional soldiers.

¶ Sext: What happened at The New School? Put it another way: why does Bob Kerrey stay on as President when he is so massively unpopular with the faculty? What is he thinking?

¶ Nones: Trouble in Paradise Azerbaijan. For the first time since 1994, a “high-ranking” Azerbaijani military officer, Air Force leader Lt-Gen Rail Rzayev has been shot dead.

¶ Vespers: Steven Moore reviews Tracy Daugherty’s new biography of Donald Barthelme, whose student Daugherty was in the Eighties: Hiding Man. (via Emdashes) 

¶ Compline: Something very interesting and beautiful to look at before you go to bed: Scintillation, a short film by Xavier Chassaing (at Snarkmarket).

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It kills me to say this, but this week’s cover piece, William Safire’s omnibus review of books about Abraham Lincoln, is not bad!

¶ Lord Chesterfield advises his son, “Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is.”

¶ In Moby-Dick, three didactic chapters on whales in art, sculpture, astronomy, &c, with vigorous protestation of their general inaccuracy. Chapter 57, the last of these, is redeemed by the use of the words “dentistical” and “amphitheatrical.” Not.

¶ In Don Quixote, the protracted scene at the inn, with its two interpolated “exemplary novels”, has been going on for about eleven chapters. Now, the long-lost narrator of the second novel, Ruy, is abashed by the arrival of his brother and niece at the inn. The niece, of course, is a great, one might say, heroic, beauty.

He held the hand of a maiden, approximately sixteen years old, who wore a traveling costume and was so elegant, beautiful, and charming that everyone marveled at the sight of her, and if they had not already seen Dorotea and Luscinda and Zoraida at the inn, they would would have thought that beauty comparable to hers would be difficult to find.

And then we have the recognition scene, with its streaming tears and incredulous embraces; it’s as though Cervantes were writing a manual on the composition of comic operas.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward is detached to Hollywood by Bill Stephenson, but for what purpose, I can’t begin to say. Barry Day’s cavalier manner with chronology makes the going impenetrable as well as dull. In letters, Coward keeps referring to a “shindig” in the House of Commons.

I want you to do the following: first of all, send me a copy of Hansard with a verbatim account of the debate in it, then check up through dear herrings on the histories of the gentlemen saying those unpleasant things about me. There will come a day when the pen will prove to be a great deal mightier than the sword.

Or the seat in the House, presumably. All too presumably.

Of all the movies about movie theatres — Cinema Paradiso most eminently — Serbis is the one that never let me forget that I was in a movie theatre. Although it’s a great film in many ways, it’s one that every regular moviegoer really must see.

¶ Matins: Much as I hate to anticipate good news that might not pan out, I can’t help being excited by the prospect of an end to the infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws.

¶ Lauds: Months before its scheduled opening, the Mandarin Oriental Beijing has been destroyed by fire — one of the Chinese capital’s Olympic-era trophies, designed by Rem Koolhaas.

¶ Prime: Brian Stephenson, at Five Branch Tree, writes about fell0w poet August Kleinzahler, whose work appears regularly in the London Review of Books.

His other techniques are quite American, such as the incorporation of both high and low culture, the symbolic use of pop figures, real and imaginary characters, travel, temporality, displacement and nostalgia. And despite being a native of New Jersey and a long time resident of San Francisco, these poems are particularly American with respect to the experience of the immigrant. Not ‘immigrant’ as a sociological study, but as one of the working myths in American arts and culture.

¶ Tierce: I was thinking that 2009 would be the Year of the Kindle for me, but now I’m not so sure. Amazon has just introduced Kindle 2, a great improvement over the original device in many ways, but also a harbinger of roiling format wars with Google and Apple. So I’ll probably sit out the wait for an emergent standard.

¶ Sext: What’s really cute about Kirk Johnson’s story about the “Hitch,” the souped-up motel in Cheyenne, Wyoming that has served as a kind of tree-house for state legislators is the non-appearance of “woman,” “women,” and “female.”

And the Hitch, as lawmakers came to call it, in turn became more than just a hotel. It insinuated itself into how the State Legislature worked by creating an informal space where lawmakers in their socks, sometimes with a highball in hand, could wander down the hall and knock on the door of a neighbor and talk through the day.

¶ Nones: Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan’s stalking out of a debate with Shimon Peres at Davos has the diplomats’ heads shaking: the man is “erratic.”

Mr Erdogan’s temper tantrums are not new. But they used to be reserved for his critics at home. The Davos affair, says another foreign diplomat, is further evidence of “Mr Erdogan’s conviction that the West needs Turkey more than Turkey needs it.” It is of a piece with Mr Erdogan’s threat to back out of the much-touted Nabucco pipeline to carry gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe via Turkey. In Brussels recently Mr Erdogan said that, if there were no progress on the energy chapter of Turkey’s EU accession talks then “we would of course review our position”. Meanwhile, Turkey sided with Saudi Arabia and the Vatican in opposing a UN statement suggested by the EU to call for the global decriminalisation of homosexuality.

¶ Vespers: Patrick Kurp writes about the only leading economic indicator that bibliophiles need to be acquainted with.

After completing my rounds, I checked back with Angel who made me an offer: $15.50. I was parting with the most books I had ever sold to Half-Price Books and was, in return, receiving the smallest amount of cash. I took it, silently. I didn’t feel like repacking two boxes, carrying them back to the car and explaining why to my wife. I would have felt like Jack telling his mother about the magic beans, which I did anyway. Angel said, “Everybody’s selling books. They need the money. We can’t afford to pay ’em as much.” The supply and demand of used books: my first economic indicator.

¶ Compline: Scout captures some great keystone demons, only to discover that they’re green men.

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¶ What to make of Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick? “The Town-Ho’s Story” (what an unfortunate title, given &c &c), while long enough to be a short story on its own, is hardly an independent episode; after all, it’s the title character’s first major appearance. Ishmael relates a backstory, as it were, to his adventure on the Pequod, and frames it doubly as a narrative. First, it was told to his shipmates on the Pequod during a “gam” with sailors from the Town-Ho, another whaler. Second, it is told to us as Ishmael claims to have told it to acquaintances in Lima, after the action recounted in the novel itself. The elaborate framing seems to be nothing more than just that — a bit of tarting-up.

What bores these sailors must have been on land! But the Dons of Lima give as good as they get, at least as rendered in Melville’s ridiculously starchy translated Spanish. In a “witty” gloss of Ishmael’s bracketing of the Erie Canal and Venice as equally corrupt, a Peruvian interrupts Ishmael with the following bolt of fustian:

“A moment! Pardon!” cried another of the company. “In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look surprised, you know the proverb all along this coast — ‘Corrupt as Lima.’ It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than billiard-tables, and forever open — and ‘Corrupt as Lima.’ So, too Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St Mark! — St Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill, now, you poor out again.”

It’s a bit rich.

¶ Matins: Is it taking Frank Rich longer than necessary to reset his outrage gauge, even though the new administrations failings and disappointments are barely venial by comparison to those of the old?

The tsunami of populist rage coursing through America is bigger than Daschle’s overdue tax bill, bigger than John Thain’s trash can, bigger than any bailed-out C.E.O.’s bonus. It’s even bigger than the Obama phenomenon itself. It could maim the president’s best-laid plans and what remains of our economy if he doesn’t get in front of the mounting public anger.

¶ Lauds: Chinese Tags, from the Kwan Yin Clan in Beijing. At first, you may not even seen the graffiti-inspired spray paintings; they blend right in with the traditional scroll art. (via Tomorrow Museum).

¶ Prime: Maud Newton contributes to the online extension of the Granta issue on fathers. Upbeat tone nothwithstanding, it’s one of the saddest things that I’ve ever read. But then, I’m a father.

¶ Tierce: Eluana Enlargo, in a coma since 1992, is about to be let go . . .  or is she?

¶ Sext: James Surowiecki talks. On Colbert. And now I have to stop referring to him as “James Soor-oh-vyetsky.”

¶ Nones: Slumdog Millionaire — but without the ‘millionaire’ part. Meet Rewa Ram, as Rupa Jha reports on the sewer cleaners of Delhi.

¶ Vespers: I can’t remember where I came across the recommendation in the Blogosphere, but somebody said that Maria Semple’s This One Is Mine is a smart novel, so I bought, and I’m reading it, and — I don’t know why, really — I’m finding it really, really depressing. It isn’t the novel, I don’t think. It’s Los Angeles.

Anyway, Maria Semple talks to Marshal Zeringue, of Campaign for the American Reader, about her work. She’s not depressing.

¶ Compline: Plenary indulgences . . . How is the Catholic Church like the Bourbon Dynasty? Paul Vitello reports.

Like the Latin Mass and meatless Fridays, the indulgence was one of the traditions decoupled from mainstream Catholic practice in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, the gathering of bishops that set a new tone of simplicity and informality for the church. Its revival has been viewed as part of a conservative resurgence that has brought some quiet changes and some highly controversial ones, like Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to lift the excommunications of four schismatic bishops who reject the council’s reforms.

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Tim Blanning’s The Triumph of Music is a history about music. No theory required — none on offer! Rather, a social history of music in the West. And a very readable history it is!

I learned almost nothing from this book in the way of facts, but the facts that I know where provocatively rearranged and presented from the other end, as it were, of the telescope.

By the way, Mr Blanning’s title is not, you will note, The Triumph of Good Music.

How was your weekend? Ours was very, very warm and loverly. Aside from an hour or so yesterday, Kathleen was at home all weekend — and so was I.

Ordinarily, Kathleen has her hair washed on Saturday afternoon, and, while she’s out, I tidy up the bedroom. Friday night, on our way home from Speed-the-Plow, it was decided that she ought to stay home this weekend, because she has been running fairly hard lately and needs a bit of rest cure. But how to change the sheets whilst she was still in bed.

After breakfast — a simple repast, but brought to her on a tray while she rested against a bank of pillows, I told Kathleen that she would have to go and sit in the living room for a while. All at once, she was Lillian Gish, defenceless in a cruel world. “Where will I go?” she asked, vacantly, staring at me with a pre-Raphaelite weirdness that, some time ago, but not anytime recently, would have taken me in. She came and sat on my lap, but she called me “Simon Legree, ogre.” Then she laughed at herself. “No one would believe this! You’ve just brought me breakfast in bed, and now you want to change the sheets and make the bed, and I’m…” There was no need to finish the thought.

By the time the bedroom had been dusted and plumped, Kathleen, ensconced in a wing chair, was too involved in something to move at once. I had to throw her out of the living room as well. This time, though, I was spared the saucer eyes.

Phew! I’ve been running around since I got up (not particularly early, it’s true). And things have gone slightly wrong all day. I arrived at Glass Restorations, to pick up a repaired piece of crystal, punctually at ten, which was all very nice except that the shop doesn’t open until half past. So I went for a version of my daily walk. Then I realized that I’d forgotten the grocery list. At the hospital, where I had a Remicade infusion early this afternoon, I discovered that the pink (Barocco) Nano had run out of battery power (how, I can’t imagine — or can I?). Now I’m off to see a dopey new comedy. At the movies. This evening: Speed-the-Plow. Phew!