¶ In Moby-Dick, “The Monkey-Rope,” another one of Melville’s joculo-Shakespearean entertainments.

“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,” he suddenly added, no approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. “Will you look at that kannakin sir: smell of it, if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added: “The steward, Mr Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bellows by which he blows back the breath into a half-drowned dman?”

Not to mention the flogged-to-death Siamese-twins image.

¶ In Don Quixote, Sancho continues to dream about governing ínsulas. The bachelor, Don Sansón, encourages Don Quixote to appear in the Zaragoza lists, where “he could win fame vanquishing all the Aragonese knights, which would be the same as vanquishing all the knights in the world.”

¶ In Squillions, a whispering campaign at the Admiralty aims to shut down Noël Coward’s production of In Which We Serve, the patriotic re-telling of, among other adventures, Lord Mountbatten’s misadventures in Crete; but the interference halts abruptly with a letter from “Bertie” to “Dickie.”

¶ Matins: Is President Obama going too far on the economy, or not far enough? Both, says The Economist, in a piece that explicitly opposes voters’ interests (“rage”) and “market confidence.”

¶ Lauds: Steve Martin will “produce” a high school performance of Picasso at the Lapin Agile. That is, he’ll contribute (mightily) toward the costs, after parents banned the play from the high school itself.

¶ Prime: What to do when a much-loved blogger dies? That’s what Robert Guskind’s executor will have to decide, vis-à-vis Gowanus Lounge.

¶ Tierce: Louis Uchitelle’s report on using the railway bailout of the 1970s as a template for saving Detroit reminds me of the importance of taxonomy.

¶ Sext: “How to Write Like an Architect,” Doug Patt’s brisk clip at YouTube, is more than a primer on stylish block printing. Like the most seductive advertising, it holds out the promise of a life well-lived. (via Kottke.org)

¶ Nones: You know things are bad if the best thing the Irish can think up at the moment is how to repatriate Irish-Americans.

¶ Vespers: Lance Mannion won’t be reading Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever.

¶ Compline: They’re looking for qualified workers in the Auvergne (“backwater” is a serious understatement) — and beginning to find them.

(more…)

In Zoë Heller’s new novel, The Believers, one of the characters, Rosa Litvinoff, walks into a synagogue out of pure curiosity but walks out engaged by her ancestral faith, even though it takes her a while to recognize this fact.

Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny. And there was a sense in which its unlikelihood, its horrible inconvenience, was precisely what made it so compelling.

Compelled by horrible inconvenience — this must be an update of quia absurdum est. To be drawn to something by a negative — a lack, a loss, a flaw, a defect— is incomprehensible to me. My mind scurries to transform the bad thing into a good thing. Rosa, for example, likes annoying her family; it’s a way of maintaining her integrity in a family of leftists while at the same time keeping the faith. She has recently lost her faith in socialism, however, so there’s plenty of room for something that will really annoy her determinedly unobservant parents: Orthodoxy. (Her mother, the inconveniently lovable Audrey, refers to Rosa’s newfound religiousness under the fantastically ugly adjectival rubric, “Jewy.”) So I have no trouble believing that Rosa is drawn to the synagogue by something very positive — which she only perversely labels “inconvenience.”

(One thinks not only of the mid-century Jews for whom religion was not optional, and a great deal worse than inconvenient; but one also remembers the early Christian martyrs, to whom the sedition of proscribed faith provided a fast track to glory. To speak of an inconvenient religion is to conjure Lady Bracknell.)

Intellectually, I oblige myself to presume my own imaginative limitation: it is circular to insist that the mere act of wanting something makes that something good, in however unlikely a way. I can’t go there, though. I want only good things — which I only wish made me a good person.

It was really too dreary today to venture forth in search of photographic subjects for this week’s “Daily Office” entries. On the verge of spring, or perhaps even a bit past the verge, the landscape is absolutely devoid of interest. Unlike summer, which colors rather brilliantly into autumn, winter does nothing but go on being bare. Until the Bradford pear trees that line the side-streets pop into confetti-white blossoms, the city will look a lot deader than it does in November, when looking dead has the virtue of novelty.

Having rejected the idea of using old photographs, I pulled out a sheaf of comic postcards.  (more…)

As we were getting going this morning, the phrase, “it’s never too late”  came up, and Kathleen began singing the song of that name from The Boyfriend. “Where does vodeo-do  come from?” she asked. I had no idea, but I really wanted to hear the song.

“If they say I’m too old for you — ”
” — Then I should answer, ‘Why, sir?
One never drinks the wine that’s new;
The old wine tastes much nicer!'”

I’ve always loved this song, but I’ve never really agreed with its premise. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with sexy sexagenarians. But quant à moi, I was a natural octogenarian when I was octeen. Which means that, for me, unfortunately, sex (as distinct, of course, from love) has always been naughty.

Where does “vodeo-do” come from? I tried Google; the results were frightening.

One of my favorite musicals is Happy Hunting. This Ethel Merman vehicle bombed-big time — so big, that Merman wouldn’t let Stephen Sondheim write the music for Gypsy, because he was as unknown as Matt Dubey and Harold Karr, the two first-timers who created Happy Hunting. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Of course, if it had been up to me, Happy Hunting would be as well known as My Fair Lady.

We belong to a mutual
Admiration society
My baby and me.

(How else to explain Fossil Darling?) The musical is a conceit built on the framework of the royal wedding of Princess Grace &c. It is possibly even preppier than Mame. Except for the parts with Fernando Lamas — but maybe even then, for, in the Fifties, Spanish was very preppy (think Franco!). Lamentation à l’Américaine:

We’re
Up to here
With the wedding
Of the year
Up to here
With the wedding
Of the year.

“Give me a nice juicy messy divorce!” Mind you, I was about ten years old when I got my paws on this LP, which one of my parents — I’ve never figured out which — bought after or perhaps even before seeing the show. Original Cast Recordings had a way of materializing in our sweet Bronxville home (16 miles north of Times Square!). And I would listen to anything. Even Gerald McBoing Boing. Just imagine what I made of the following:

Even during our honeymoon
He continued to be polite,
Just as proper as he could be —
Then a year from our wedding night,  
Came a little tap
Tiny rap
On the door of my bedroom
“Mr Linvingston, I presume.”

Imagine Ethel Merman not knowing who might be walking into her bridal suite.

Once again, I was up late last night — being, once again, very productive. Tossing piles of magazines isn’t ideal work for one in the morning, but better late than you-kn0w-when. I crawled into bed with Lizzie Eustace, shortly after two, and read a few chapters with great interest, almost as if I were discovering Trollope for the first time. Worried that I might be waking myself up, I closed the book and then my eyes.

When Kathleen got up this morning, therefore, I did not. So I didn’t notice her wandering around the bedroom, half-dressed, for nearly an hour, unable to decide on a blouse. I woke up only when she realized that what she needed was a day off. Indeed: she has worked for twenty-seven of the last thirty days. She could handle her one-o’clock conference call from home.

So I decided not to go to the movies. I’m not so keen to see a movie, while staying in the neighborhood, that I’m willing to sit through He’s Just Not That Into You. The stipulation about staying in the neighborhood was important: we have theatre tickets tonight — The 39 Steps, finally — and I have a long list of local errands to run.

The Week at Portico: No book this week, I’m afraid — but I have a very good excuse, really I do! I read a novel in manuscript last week, and on Monday I shared my thoughts with the writer. Believe me: writing book reports is easier. (Okay, okay; I don’t write book reports.)

Here are links to this week’s Book Review review, and to two new Lively Arts pages, Ruined (MTC) and Two Lovers (2929 Productions).

¶ Matins: “Unseemly” is the nicest word that I can come up with to characterize attempts by the Roman Catholic Church (and other religious organizations) to block a temporary repeal of the statute of limitations on child abuse.

¶ Lauds: Is there a movie here? As the UN prepares to evacuate its Turtle Bay headquarters for a four-year renovation, lots of valuable artworks seem to have been evacuated earlier, less officially.

¶ Prime: A new and very smart-looking literary blog, The Second Pass.

¶ Tierce: Muntader al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at our last president, was jailed immediately after the “insult, not an assault”; he has just been sentenced to three years in prison. Bernie Madoff will spend less time in jail prior to sentencing — presumably. I must say, prison looks more and more like the waste of a public good in cases involving the crimes (and “crimes”) with which these men have been charged.
 
¶ Sext: One great thing about the recession so far is the way it has replaced “because I can” with “because it’s smart” as a principle of style. Consider the chic $300 re-think.

¶ Nones: Soi-disant Prime Minister Vladimir Putin “forgives” Ukraine its penalty debts in the wake of winter’s gas crisis.

¶ Vespers: Nina McLaughlin re-reads Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, at Bookslut. It’s not the book she remembered!

¶ Compline: At the Infrastructurist, Barbara McCann writes about a bill in Congress that might make the economic stimulus/transportation vector a lot smarter. Also, a great pair of before-and-after photos.

(more…)

¶ The second part of Don Quixote is indeed a great deal more amusing than the first, largely because it redeems the one-damned-thing-after-another quality of what goes before. Quixote and Don Sansón, a student at Salamanca who has read the account of the knight errant’s adventures in the First Part — the publication of which, when “the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the  blade of his sword,” our hero has no difficulty attributing to enchanters — talk about the book’s reception among the reading public.

“Now I say,” said Don Quixote, “that the author of my history was no wise man but an ignorant gossip-monger who, without rhyme or reason, began to write, not caring how it turned out, just like Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, when asked what he was painting, replied ‘Whatever comes out.’

(This was indeed my judgment of the narrative of the First Part.)

Pderhaps he painted a rooster in such a fashion and so unrealistically that he had to write beside it, in capital letters, ‘This is a rooster.’ And that must be how my history is: a commentary will be necessary in order to understand it.”

“Not at all,” responded Sansón, “because it is so clear that there is nothing in it to cause difficulty: children look at it, youths read it, men understand it, the old celebrate it, and, in short, it is so popular and widely read and so well known by every kind of person that as soon as people see a skinny old nag they say: ‘There goes Rocinante.’ And those who have been fondest of reading it are the pages. There is no lord’s antechamber where one does not find a copy of Don Quixote: as soon as it is put down it is picked up again; some rush at it, and others ask for it. In short, this history is the most enjoyable and least harmful entertainment ever seen, because nowhere in it can one find even the semblance of an untruthful word or a less than Catholic thought.”

But what one could find it was a massive critique of aristocratical foolishness. Might this explain why the first translation into any language was Thomas Sheltons, of 1612, into English?

¶ Matins: Bernard Madoff is expected to plead guilty to 11 felony counts — enough to put him away for several lifetimes. How very dissatisfying!

¶ Lauds: Movie box office is up — so why are the studios laying people off? Because they’re part of ailing bigger conglomerates. Take GE, for example … (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Meet Kate McCully, Boston’s Grammar Vandal.

¶ Tierce: I try to avoid writing about stories that I don’t understand, but Stephen Labaton’s “Some Banks, Citing Strings, Want to Return Federal Aid” has me scratching a hole in my scalp.

¶ Sext: John Tierney focuses his skepticism on the meaning of dreams. (No surprise: he makes it sounds kinda like Ouija.)

¶ Nones: General de Gaulle’s withdrawal from the military command of NATO, in 1966, made great sense. So does President Sarkozy’s return.  

¶ Vespers: Alexander Chee’s “Portrait of My Father,” at Granta Online.

¶ Compline: Christopher Shea shares the outrage of the latest stretch of academic exploitation: not only do TAs have to do a full-time job, but they have to waive all the benefits that go with full-time work.

(more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, a flurry of short chapters about whale butchering, culminating in “The Sphynx,” in which Ahab addresses the head of the decapitated leviathan. His poetical and rather awful gush is interrupted by the sighting of another ship.

“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man — where away?”

The ship is another whaler, the Jeroboam. Although the captain and crew are healthy, the ship has been commandeered by a madman on board who calls himself Gabriel. Gabriel has convinced the “ignorant” crew that he is indeed archangelic, and the state of things aboard the Jeroboam might best be characterized as ongoing but non-violent mutiny. A boat from the Jeroboam pitches alongside the Pequod. Gabriel is among the oarsman; Stubb has heard his story from the Town-Ho. For the first time since beginning the book, I am thrilled and terrified by the scene that Melville conjures. Difficult as it is to shout over high seas, Captain Mayhew is continually interrupted by the lunatic.

“Think, think of thy whale-boat stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!”

“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that — ” But again the boat tore ahead as though borne by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional caprices of the sea were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to warrant.

The raving madman, the roiling sea, and the invocation of Moby-Dick left me queasy and ill at ease.  

Regular readers will have noted the scarcity of Morning Reads since the New Year. It is a matter of late nights, I’m afraid; it has never been so difficult to get to bed at a decent hour. Two o’clock in the morning menaces as the new eleven at night. One of these days, the “Morning” descriptor may become altogether notional.

¶ Matins: Now that health care reform is back in the news, an aspect of the much-maligned Canadian system ought not to be overlooked.

¶ Lauds: Call it Cats and Rats — or whatever! Just write the book about the buck that stopped with Cai Mingchao, the Chinese dealer who had “second thoughts.” Now he’s having thirds: tears.

¶ Prime: Jean Ruaud went to Hyères, and took a load of great pictures comme d’hab’; but did he see Mrs Wharton’s place?

¶ Tierce: China’s unlucky number: 6521. These are “interesting times.”

¶ Sext: They call this “counter-cultural”? Flash-mob pillow fights irk San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department. (via Morning News).

¶ Nones: President Obama’s first visit to a Muslim country will take him to Turkey. Great news indeed.

¶ Vespers: Michiko Kakutani’s review of William Cohan’s House of Cards — the Bear, Stearns post-mortem — makes compelling reading in its own right.

¶ Compline: Franchise Christianity? Robert Wright recasts early-Christian history in terms of business models and globalization.

(more…)

Very late last night, I was seized by a fit of giggles. I’d finally gotten round to Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair piece on Iceland.

The investigators produced a chart detailing a byzantine web of interlinked entities that boiled down to this: A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

What’s amazing is that so much of the piece could have been written last year, or even earlier. Tony Shearer resigned his post at a venerable City firm in 2005, when it was acquired by one of the Icelandic banks. He quit “out of fear of what might happen to his reputation if he stayed.” Last October, Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander (Mr Shearer’s old firm) collapsed — just as Mr Shearer feared, three years earlier.

Is it possible that kids are growing up so fast today that even they don’t see what the emperor’s new clothes are made of?

¶ Matins: As a big believer in the effectiveness of no-fly zones, I agree with this proposal for dealing with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

¶ Lauds: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest lady in the West End? The answer? A whole deck of baseball cards, leading with playwright Bola Agbaje as “The New Voice” but with plenty of room for “Queen Bee” and “Eternal Siren.”  (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Over the weekend I discovered a constellation of Web sites that seem to be keeping the preppie flame burning. The Trad, for example…

¶ Tierce: A caption from the print edition: “Similarities (and differences) exist in David Axelrod’s relationship with the current president and Karl Rove’s with the past.”

¶ Sext: Great news: Chuck Norris talks of running for President of Texas. (via Joe.My.God.)

¶ Nones: Good news (sort of): Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, insists that the collision that killed his wife, and sent him to the hospital, had to have been an accident.

¶ Vespers: At Emdashes, Martin Schneider has a go at cutting Ian McEwan’s reputation down to size. What might have been an irritating exercise is rather worth reading.

¶ Compline: Now that the “Consumer Society” is on its deathbed, it’s safe for critics to take hitherto unfashionable pokes at sacred cows, and Jonathan Jones, at the Guardian, has his needle out.   (more…)

If you had any idea how much stuff had to be moved to make it possible to put that lamp in the corner behind my desk, you would say, “RJ! You have too much junk!”

You’re probably saying it anyway.

I don’t know how I came into possession of the stegosaurus jigsaw puzzle. I mean, why; I’m sure that I bought it. When Ari Newell visited, a while back, I thought it might amuse him (“This is your idea of a puzzle, mon ami?” the young man, then aged four, would have quizzed), but I couldn’t find it. It was out in plain sight, but I couldn’t see it because I have too much junk.

I can’t let it go.

A simple mnemonic (I just made it up): Turandot loves Camelot; she’d never show in Tuckahoe. (more…)

The synergy between The Daily Blague and Portico fascinates me, I like to think, as much as it would if the sites belonged to someone else. So it’s a good thing that I don’t buy everything that I like! Still, there’s a deep satisfaction in watching the various parts click together — when they do.

The Week at Portico:  From now on, leads to new pages at Portico will appear in a roundup on Friday. This week’s Book Review review, for example. A book that I’ve written up myself: The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Last Friday’s movie, Entre les murs. And, finally, for the first time: Paul Taylor Dance Company. I’ve gathered these notices into one convenient entry so that you won’t have to bookmark them for weekend reading.

Housekeeping Note:    Oops! I don’t know when I did it, but I managed to fold the Images folder at Portico‘s server into another folder — and I have no idea how to undo the mistake. That’s why most images at Portico won’t show.

That’s “most” as in “older pages.” Recently, I’ve created Images subfolders for each of the site’s branches, and that is how I am going to “fix” this problem — by updating the site to conform with current standards and practices. “I was going to do it anyway.”

¶ Matins: Second only to Flint, MI as a GM-dependent town, Anderson, IN is piecing itself together with small businesses —

¶ Lauds: The Walker Evans postcard show at the Museum ought to be a permanent installation in the American Wing.

¶ Prime: George Snyder reports on the anxiety of celebrity — direct from Hollywood. (There’s a rapper called “Flo Rida”?)

¶ Tierce: Can anyone tell me what a report on the ideological intransigence of academic economists is doing buried in the Arts/Books section of the Times?

¶ Sext: Did you know that a chunk of asteroid as big as fifty metres missed hitting Sidney by only 60,000 miles the other day? (via Morning News.)

¶ Nones: In news that you probably thought can’t be news, the first rail link between Laos and Thailand (or anywhere) is inaugurated,  crossing the Mekong River.

¶ Vespers: Jeremy Denk hates Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, calling the author “one of the most gifted writers of boring sentences in the last decade.”

¶ Compline: The new railroad connecting Santa Fe and Albuquerque, unlike the Interstate Highway, will  cut through pueblo lands. Conductors have been asked to request passengers to refrain from drive-by photography.  

(more…)

¶ If there’s one thing that Lord Chesterfield and I disagree about, it’s laughter.

Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh, since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore only seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a horrible chapter, “Stubb’s Supper.” Between complaining about his overcooked slice of whale meat and ordering the black cook to “preach” to the sharks feeding on the capture’s carcass, Stubb lurches with deranged, operatic swagger.

“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear? away you sail, then — Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go. — Avast heaving, again! Whale-balls for breakfast — don’t forget!

¶ The second part of Don Quixote really is a second beginning. The priest and the barber visit Don Quixote in his chamber, where he is recovering from all the mishaps of the first part. The three men have an amiable and reasonable discussion, and all seems well until our hero firmly makes it quietly clear that he has not given up on being a knight errant or stopped believing in the historical existence of such figures of Felixmarte of Hyrcania. At no point, however, is he held up to ridicule. The barber’s tale of the mad canon of Seville is a far more engaging challenge to Don Quixote’s delusions than another tumble in the dust.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward is surprisingly disapproving of Margaret Rutherford’s highly popular performance as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit.

The great disappointment is Margaret Rutherford, whom the audience love, because the part is so good, but who is actually very, very bad indeed. She is indistinct, fussy and, beyond her personality, has no technical knowledge or resources at all. She merely fumbles and gasps and drops things and throws many of my best lines down the drain. She is despair to Fay, Cecil and Kay and mortification to me because I thought she would be marvellous. I need hardly say that she got a magnificent notice.

I doubt very much that I’ll be saying anything like this sort of thing of Angela Lansbury, when I see the revival in a few weeks.