¶ Matins: May I say that I support President Obama’s decision not to prosecute CIA agents for torture perpetrated in reliance upon Bush Administration legal advice.

¶ Lauds: What a nice year it would be if Susan Boyle turned out to  be the woman of it. The very president of it. For her, that is. For the rest of us, a bit of a lesson is in order, as Colette Douglas Home reminds us. (via A Commonplace Blog)

¶ Prime: A psychopathological breakdown of royals stalkers. (Not to be confused with “royal stalkers,” eg Jack the Ripper.) It made me wonder: how many of Trollope’s bad girls suffer from de Clérambault’s Syndrome? (via  The Morning News)

¶ Tierce: Here’s a little story that, properly followed, will chart the health/malaise of the Italian state — which seems to have less and less to do with “Italy”: “Italy fears mafia quake fund grab.” 

¶ Sext: A sizzling story from the Telegraph: “Separate bedrooms keeps the romance alive.” [sic]

¶ Nones: Spain leads the way in new high-speed rail transport. Not everybody’s pleased. (via  The Morning News)

¶ Vespers: Geoff Dyer discusses his new book(s), Jeff in Venice/Death in Varanasi, with Asylum’s John Self.

¶ Compline: On the occasion of QE2’s eighty-third birthday (the real one, not the “official” one in June), we turn to royal.gov.uk for instructions on writing a letter to Her Majesty.

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¶ In Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 20 July 1749, two gems. “Moral virtues are the foundation of society in general, and of friendship in particular; but attentions, manners, and graces both adorn and strengthen them”; and — referring to time lost by his son to a recent illness — “At present you should be a good economist of your moments…”

I don’t think that Chesterfield has anything foppish in mind when he speaks of “attentions, manners, and graces.” I expect that they modulations toward understatement. Graces, for example, may be noted by an attentive observer, but they don’t attract attention from other objects.

¶ In Moby-Dick, “The Great Armada” left me feeling severely dyslexic, as I could not follow the action at all. There was a school of whales ahead of the Pequod, I think, and a fleet of Malacca pirates behind. Looking over the gunwhales of his skiff, Ishmael reports, with clubbing tact, that “When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute more hominum.” I think that this means that the males sport visible erections, but maybe that’s just my dirty mind.

¶ Chapter XIV of Don Quixote, however, is laugh-out-loud funny, at least if you haven’t forgotten that Quixote and Sancho meet the Knight of the Wood and his squire in the dark. I wish that my Spanish were up to assessing whether the original is as wonderfully fruity as Edith Grossman’s translation:

By this time a thousand different kinds of brightly colored birds began to warble in the trees, and with their varied and joyous songs they seemed to welcome and greet the new dawn, who, through the doors and balconies [las puertas y balcones] of the Orient, was revealing the beauty of her face and shaking from her hair an infinite number of liquid pearls whose gentle liquor bathed the plants that seemed, in turn, to send forth buds and rain down tiny white pearls; the willows dripped their sweet-tasting manna, the fountains laughed, the streams murmured, the woods rejoiced, and the meadows flourished with her arrival. But as soon as the light of day made it possible to see and distinguish one thing from another, the first thing that appeared before Sancho Panza’s eyes was the nose of the Squire of the Wood, which was so big it almost cast a shadow over the rest of his body. In fact, it is recounted that his nose was outlandishly large, hooked in the middle, covered with warts, and of a purplish color like an eggplant; it came down the width of two fingers past his mouth, and its size, color, warts, and curvature made his face so hideous that when Sancho saw him his feet and hands started to tremble, like a child having seizures, and he decided in his heart to let himself be slapped two hundred times before he would allow his anger to awaken and then fight with that monster.

The whole episode is gloriously fishy, because the Knight of the Wood — revealed by daylight to be the Knight of the Mirrors — seems to be even dottier than Don Quixote. Long as it is, this sentence ends adorably:

While Don Quixote stopped to help Sancho into the cork tree, the Knight of the Mirrors took as much of the field as he thought necessary, and believing that Don Quixote had done the same, and not waiting for the sound of a trumpet or any other warning, he turned the reins of his horse — who was in fact no faster or better looking than Rocinante — and at his full gallop, which was a medium trot, he rode to encounter his enemy, but seeing him occupied with Sancho’s climb, he checked the reins and stopped in the middle of the charge, for which his horse was extremely grateful, since he could no longer move [de lo que el caballo quedó agradecidísmo, a causa que ya no podía moverse].

¶ Chapter 21 of Squillions, “Sigh Once More…And a Storm in the Pacific,” is relatively brief, and almost wholly devoted to the ill-fated partnership that Noël Coward entered into with Mary Martin, of all people, for the premiere of his new operette, Pacific 1860. What had seemed like a good idea in New York did not cross the Atlantic. Letters were exchanged… including a rather long one from Coward that it seems surprising of Martin to have saved. Just one teeny-tiny paragraph:

Pacific 1860 is, according to these statistics which I think are correct, the fifth theatrical production with which you have been connectedc. It is the forty-seventh theatrical production with which I have been concerned since 1920. For your performance you are paid by the management the biggest star salary payable in this Country ie ten per cent of the gross and have been given full transport for yourself and party. You arrived in this country full of friendliness and enthusiasm with a completely wrong conception of the part of Elena Salvador. This you have frequently admitted to me yourself. You accuse me in your letter of being a dictator. What you are really accusing me of is being a director. I have tried, with the utmost gentleness and patience, to guide and help you into understanding and playing Elena. Not only am I the director but I am also the author and creator of the character, therefore, I am afraid my conception must logically supersede yours. You worked extremely hard, not only up to production but after production, to play the part as I wished it played. You were on the verge of succeeding when, on account of some highly irrational and quite inaccurate opinions of your own about period clothes, you proceeded to throw away all that our joint efforts had so nearly achieved.

The envoi is priceless, both dishy and, I’m sure, sincere.

I am writing to you as a man of the theatre of many years standing who is full of admiration of your personality, charm and talent and who also sees, perhaps more than you realise, how many years of hard work, possible disappointments and the humble acceptance of superior knowledge lie ahead of you before you achieve the true reward that your ambition demands.

Very timidly, without calling a lot of attention to what I’m doing (Tantara Tantara Zing Boom!), a new feature. I’d have introduced it two weeks ago, but I haven’t been able to find a banner image that suited.

¶ Chicken Thighs Normande. A recipe from Classic Home Cooking, one of my five or six everyday cookbooks. Disaster! (more…)

¶ Matins: In case you’re still opposed to Federal nationalization of troubled banks, let former IMF economist Simon Johnson explain the advice that his outfit would give.

¶ Lauds: It dates from March, but I just heard about it at Things Magazine: truly punchy graphic art commissioned by Swiss pharma giant Geigy (now part of Novartis).

¶ Prime: Jean Ruaud has retooled Mnémoglyphes — which has to be the most news-deprived statement that I can think of. Jean changes the look and feel of his sites all the time! This is more substantive, though: Mnémoglyphes has become a Daily Blogue.

¶ Tierce: David Carr considers the confected nature of last week’s “tea party” tax protests, which were not so much covered by the cable news networks as cultivated by them.

¶ Sext: Would you help out a robot? If you live in Greenwich Village, you might not give it a second thought: Of course you would help out a robot! (via  The Morning News)

¶ Nones: The Italian government has finally recognized its humanitarian responsibility and begun deboarding 140 migrants from a stranded tanker. To understand the kerfuffle with Malta, though, you may need to look at a map.

¶ Vespers: In the current Harper’s, Francine Prose reviews an odd but irresistible new book with a faux-catalogue title as long as your arm: the account of a fictional breakup as told in terms of pictures at an exhibition — pictures of lamps, postcards, and pictures.

¶ Compline: The post office as a profit center? What a concept! It works in Switzerland…

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I used to feel guilty about not having read any of George Orwell’s books. Surely it was virtually illiterate of me not to have read the famous nightmares, Animal Farm and 1984, whether I liked them or not. The three accounts of unlucky life in the Thirties — Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia — seemed always to be highly regarded. Not have to read Orwell was yet another sign of my frivolous dilletantism. I felt bad about it, as I say, but not bad enough to alter my reading pile.

In fact, of course, I’d read a great deal of Orwell, here and there, mostly but not exclusively in magazines, over forty-odd years — and that, I think, is what stanched any desire for more. I didn’t think much about it; if I didn’t much care for Orwell’s way of putting things, I didn’t regard it as harmful. Orwell fell into a zone that’s populated by many Twentieth-Century writers for whose work I don’t have much use: I call it Dorm Lit. Dorm Lit appeals to bright, adolescent Prince Valiants who don’t — can’t — yet know much of anything about the world beyond their own experience and who are therefore easily roused by tales of injustice. Lacking a knightly nature, I arranged the rights and wrongs of this world along a different pole. I couldn’t have told you what that was until I read James Woods’s appraisal of Orwell in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “A Fine Rage.” Here it is, in one sentence:

Modern life should be simpler and harder, he argues in this vein, not softer and more complex, and “in a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc, etc.” Note that “etc” — there speaks the puritan, reserving the right to stretch his prohibitions, at cranky whim.

There has not been a lot of oxygen, until fairly recently, for the idea that life is, unavoidably, “more complex,” and I was well into middle age before it was clear to me that people who mistrust complexity are usually rather stupid about it. What they are usually talking about, as is clear from Orwell’s little list of things that wouldn’t be missed, is the manifold. True complexity isn’t even reached. Orwell’s targets are, for the most part, modern appliances, and most of them are far more complex today than they were when Orwell took pot shots at them. Once upon a time, the home telephone had only one function: facilitating the two-party conversation. Now it has been merged with the “gramophone” and the daily newspaper, all because thousands of users made ever-more complex demands upon it. Orwell is very simply the dimwit who asks — or who used to ask — what on earth he would do with a personal computer: he would have been in no position to pass judgment upon it. By the same token, I am unable to come out for or against any item on his list, except perhaps machine guns. Even “tinned food” has its place in the best kitchens.

The simple life appeals to everyone now and then, but to some people it assumes the sanctity of a moral obligation. Occasionally, somebody writes powerfully about the beauty of doing without, and the simple life begins to look fashionable. But it can never actually be fashionable, because fashion of any kind is entirely a matter of sifting small differences in search of new ideas. It short it is inherently complex. (Without the stylistic or intellectual discipline that always informs fashion, it would be merely complicated.) Fashions may mean nothing to those who don’t care about them, but they tire out their exponents, who, at the end of the day, demand a soft — or at least a softly-lighted — environment, and who, after a certain age at least, are unlikely to seek out the “harder” just for its own sake.

Injustice itself is rarely, anymore, a matter of the brute violence that disgusts youthful minds. It stems more freely from simplifications, from failures to understand that what works in this situation does not work in that one. Our ideas of property rights have been almost hopelessly fouled by the refusal to admit kinds or degrees of such rights. We don’t even acknowledge the most obvious characteristic of ownership: the right to preserve or to destroy. What we own is the right to deal with certain things — things that belong to us — more or less violently. While the right to preserve is usually but not always a good thing, the right to destroy is certainly more difficult to assess. Treating them as the same kind of right is stupid — but what do you expect from idealists who disapprove of private property itself, or from those who are backed, by opposition, into holding that private property is as sacred as life itself.

Mr Wood’s summary of Orwell’s thinking turns out to be an uncannily accurate negative of my own, but there is one other aspect of it that I’d like to note.

So the question hangs over Orwell, as it does over so many well-heeled revolutionaries. Did he want to level up society or level it down? … A similarly telling moment appears in Orwell’s review of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944). There was much in the book to agree with, Orwell said. … But Hayek’s faith in capitalist competition was overzealous. “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them.” Not, you notice, that somebody loses them — which would mean raising those people up. Somebody wins them, and that cannot be allowed.

I am a passionate leveler-up. I would like everyone to have access to my softer, more complex way of life.

The weather turned colder today, but I was too sick with spring fever not to spend the morning reading the Times and The Economist by an open window, drinking cup after cup of Kona. (The Kona was in honor of Kathleen’s birthday, which we’ve been celebrating for a while but which actually did fall today.) Presently my distress could not be overlooked. The week’s fatigue seemed to have given way to some kind of genuine illness. There was, for example, a frightening burp that very nearly exploded into something much worse. By six o’clock I back in bed, so cold that only a flannel nightshirt would do.

By eight, I was back up again, reading in my chair — the window firmly closed. I wanted very badly to read The Song Is You, Arthur Phillips’s deeply etched new novel, but I couldn’t; I’d have risked a new but, I think, very practical rule. It is a bad idea to finish a novel before I’ve written up the one that I read just before it. The one just before it was The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li. The trick to writing about The Vagrants is to convey something of the enormous excitement of the book’s many narrative strands, a task that most readers would dismiss as bound to fail if told too much about the novel’s period and setting. The trick to writing The Vagrants itself seems to have been to capture the interest that people take in their own lives. Not to describe the interest, but to represent it, with all the force of a Renaissance illusion. By comparison, even a writer as discreet as Jane Austen seems to fill every page of her novels trumpeting her own ideas about her characters’ choices. Ms Li would seem to have learned a great deal from cinematic storytelling, but with the difference that the existential quality of five or six is completely realized, from an interior beyond the camera’s reach.

Since I couldn’t read fiction, then, I turned to Postwar, Tony Judt’s magnum opus, which has been out for nearly four years. Better late than never? Clearly: the book is indispensable. I don’t know when I began reading it; I’d like to say, “last year,” but I’m not so sure. I’m quite near the end, gratified to read views about European affairs that I almost always share.

And I read a lot of magazines: Atlantic, Harper’s, L’Express. I can’t claim to have read the French periodical, but the photographs are always great, and it was nice to recognize Bernadette Chirac without having to read the legend. There was also an amusing photograph of the Mayor of Paris, Bernard Delanoë looking, frankly, rather fishy. Perhaps he looked fishy because I was sitting beneath an ornate tapestry of the city’s armorials. You’ll remember that these center on a small boat on the wavy seas. The words “non mergitur” were strikingly legible. What I gleaned from the story is that M Delanoë has been AWOL, sulking about his failure to wrest the PS from the Royals. Don’t take my word for it, though; I didn’t really read anything.

Wouldn’t it be droll if Mr Delanoë switched jobs with Michael Bloomberg? Bloomberg in Paris — it’s worthy of Offenbach at least. Imagine Sarko’s nail-biting despair — I hear a choir of double-basses, right out of Otello. And then there would be the out-of-town picnic (“O Beau Pays de Touraine”) in which Carla Bruni (accompanied by Winterhaltrian bevies) approaches the New Yorker with rapprochemdent in mind — only to find that she has never known what love is, until now! “(“Mon beau Bonaparte, fais de moi ta Beauharnais!”)

I’ve been tempted to write about Mayor Bloomberg’s machinations vis-à-vis the MTA rescue plan, currently blocked by six troglodytic Dems from the boroughs whose constituents will eventually have to be persuaded of the necessity of tolling intra-city bridges. But that would violate another new rule: no writing about stories that haven’t come to conclusion (“Bridges to be Tolled!”)

Which also means staring down the temptation to write about my health.

Yesterday, the weekend’s legacy of fatigue finally materialized. I was writing about last Friday’s movie, Faubourg 36 (which I saw on Monday, actually), when I realized that the eighth or ninth paragraph was in fact my “lead,” and that the entire piece would have to be rearranged, if not rewritten. Lordy.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I try to deal with it manfully. That was beyond me yesterday. I felt the way you do when you’ve just lost a ten-page paper, and you’ve got to reconstruct all the fantastic lines that came so easily the first time around but that become teasing, evanescent ghosts when you’ve got to will them back into being.

So I took the rest of the day off. I know; I know: I said that I was going to take Monday off. I watched the BBC adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s great novel about the Eighties, The Line of Beauty. “Is that what you should be watching?” Kathleen asked, knowing how low I get when I’m exhausted. She had a point — I felt awful for about an hour after it was over. But by then I was deep into the novel on the cover of this week’s Book Review.

The Week at Portico: Although I drafted a few new pages this week, only one of them was beaten into presentable shape, this week’s Book Review review.

¶ Matins: At the risk of sounding impetuous: my response to the Times‘s account of Archbishop Dolan’s first news conference is a happy smile. His way of reminding reporters that the Church’s position on same-sex marriage is “clear” suggests that he doesn’t care what it is.

¶ Lauds: Go ahead, it’s Thursday: kill the morning by feasting your eyes on jacket art at the Book Cover Archive. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: A touch of White Mischief for the weekend: Lady Idina Sackville, subject of a forthcoming biography by one of her great-granddaughters: The Bolter.

¶ Tierce: The nation’s second-largest mall operator, General Growth Properties, has filed for bankruptcy. As usual, the culprit was good-times leverage that opened up an abyss.

¶ Sext: Pesky rodents driving you crazy? Do what the Spokane Parks and Recreation Department plans to do: blow the varmints to kingdom come by igniting a “calibrated mixture of oxygen and propane” in their burrows. It’s “humane,” they say. Watch for yourself!

¶ Nones: It’s very difficult not to have problems with the religion called “Islam” after the remarks of a Shiite madrasa leader in Kabul, commenting on protests by Afghan women against a repressive new “home life” law.

¶ Vespers: Patrick Kurp reflects on the difference between a public library and a university library.

¶ Compline: How George Snyder, one of the most inquisitively literate men I know, manages to get from day to day on Planet Arrakis in Los Angeles is quite beyond me. But he does; and, as Irene Dunne put it, “he’s pretty cute about it, too.”

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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¶ Lord Chesterfield sends a lot of sound financial advice to his son. The heartbreaking thing about it is that those capable of taking good advice about money rarely need it. Chesterfield’s underlying budgetary principle, however, is not without interest, because, as he himself says, it’s not easy to discern.

The sure characteristic of a sound and strong mind, is to find in everything, those certain bounds, quos ultra citrave nequit consistere rectum. These boundaries are marked out by a very find line, which only good sense and attention can discover; it is much too fine for vulgar eyes. In manners, this line is good-breeding; beyond it, is troublesome ceremony; short of it, is unbecoming negligence and inattention.

How often, when I was young, did I justify negligence and inattention as the avoidance of troublesome ceremony!

¶ Melville: “The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it.” Do admit.

¶ In Don Quixote, it appears that the Squire of the Wood has rather more experience at accompanying a knight errant than Sancho does. When he shares a hefty meat pie and a wine skin with the Squire of the Sorrowful Face, the latter laments,

“Your grace is a faithful and true, right and proper, magnificent and great squire, as this feast shows, and if you haven’t come here by the arts of enchantment, at least it seems that way to me, but I’m so poor and unlucky that all I have in my saddlebags is a little cheese, so hard you could break a giant’s skull with it, and to keep it company some four dozen carob beans and the same number of hazelnuts and other kinds of nuts, thanks to the poverty of my master and the idea he has and the rule he keeps that knights errant should not live and survive on anything but dried fruits and the plants of the field.”

“By my faith, brother,” replied the Squire of the Wood, “my stomach isn’t made for thistles or wild pears or forest roots. Let our masters have their knightly opinions and rules and eat what their laws command. I have my baskets of food, and this wineskin hanging from the saddlebow, just in case, and I’m so devoted to it and love it so much that I can’t let too much time pass without giving it a thousand kisses and a thousand embraces.”

¶ In Squillions, the War comes to an end at last, with some very inter-esting correspondence from a man called Ingram Fraser, with whom Coward claimed no more than a “casual acquaintanceship.” Fraser’s letters about the postwar state of Coward’s Paris flat suggest either monumental impertinence or a true meeting of the minds, so to speak.

Now for the immediate future, the next trimestre begins on 15th October, at which time Frs 6,450 are due. On your behalf I promised that would be paid.

A veritable Our Man in Paris, sounds like.

¶ Matins: And here we thought that Janet Napolitano had effected a crackdown on smuggling American-bought guns into Mexico. Seems not. Loopholes!

¶ Lauds: Handel meant Handel! Okay, Händel meant business — when it came to business. Everyone knows that he lost his shirt as an opera impresario. It seems that he had another shirt! (Via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Margaret Drabble will write no more novels, claiming that she’s too old to remember what she’s already written. This can mean only one thing, and it does —

¶ Tierce: The number of days — as in “days are numbered” — for totally free Internet access to most print publications continues to drop. Journalism Online LLC plans to be operational “by the fall.”

¶ Sext: Interior designers with newly-rich clients have long had ways of dealing with the problem of stocking beautifully paneled libraries with bulk purchases of snazzily-spined volumes, but I was unaware of an online service until yesterday. (via Brainiac)

¶ Nones: Moldovans who want their country, the poorest in Europe, to merge with Romania ought to have a confab with some Flemish Belgians, or some Catalonians, before getting too worked up.

¶ Vespers: At Asylum, John Self writes about Every Man Dies Alone, the newly-translated novel that Hans Fallada (the pseudonym of Rudolf Ditzen, 1893-1947) wrote in a month, right before killing himself. (via The Second Pass)

¶ Compline: From Waking Up, an elegant rebuttal of Wingnut claims that gay marriage is inimical to religious freedom. Step by step, and perfectly lucid. (Via Joe.My.God) (more…)

In “A Tiny Feast,” Chris Adrian’s story in this week’s New Yorker, Titania and Oberon are obliged to spend a great deal of time in the pediatric cancer ward of a San Francisco hospital when their latest changeling, whom they call, simply, “Boy,” develops leukemia. Or perhaps it’s something worse. In order to fit in, the fairies assume the mortal guises of Trudy, a hairdresser, and Bob, a plantsman.

“But you’ve made the room just lovely,” the woman said. Her name was Alice or Alexandra or Antonia. Titania had a hard time keeping trace of all the mortal names, except for Beadle and Blork, but those were distinctive names, and actually rather faerielike. Alice gestured expansively around the room, not seeing what was actually there. She saw paper stars hanging from the ceiling, and cards and posters on the wall, and a homey bedspread upon the mattress, but faeries had come to carpet the room with grass, to pave the walls with stone and set them with jewels, and to blow a cover of clouds to hide the horrible suspended ceiling. And the bedspread was no ordinary blanket but the boy’s own dear Beastie, a flat headless creature of soft fur that loved him like a dog and tried to follow him whenever they took him away for some new test or procedure.

To say that the grief of losing a child to cancer has deluded a hairdresser named Trudy into thinking that she is the lead fairy out of Midsummer Night’s Dream would be crushingly heavy-handed. “What’s really going on here?” is not the question that Mr Adrian, also a Fellow in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at UC San Francisco, wants us to be asking. I don’t believe that he wants us to be asking any questions. He has told us: a mother’s child is dying. And he tells us with all the grace of his story’s conceit.

There is one question that itches with fictions that rest on a kind of madness: is the story a puzzle, or is it a fantasia? Can it be deconstructed and “solved”? Is it, in other words, an allegory? Or has the author tracked his imagination through the underbrush of possibility? My approach is a muddle: if I like something well enough, I simply re-read it from time to time, on the understanding that the story will become more clearly itself, whatever that might be.

¶ Matins: China’s purchase of American debt has slowed down, according to a recent report. As long as it doesn’t simply stop altogether (gulp)….

¶ Lauds: Green Porno, with Isabella Rosselini. These birds-‘n’-bees audio-visuals are almost okay for kids. Except of course for Ms Rosselini’s delicious naughtiness.

¶ Prime: Geoffrey Pullum, a professor of English and linguistics at Edinburgh, doesn’t think much of The Elements of Style, and will not be celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Tierce: The Ford Foundation, our second largest, has streamlined its operations. This is not a cutback so much as a reconception of “lines of work” — an intellectual advance.

¶ Sext: Culinary professional Peter Hertzmann may convince you that you need an iPod Touch more than a new KitchenAid stand mixer. Wholly Apps!

¶ Nones: Jonathan Head’s BBC report, appraising the latest, and inevitable, wave of unrest in Thailand highlights the core problem for most sovereignties since 1789: nurturing an élite that has the common sense to avoid disenfranchising the lower strata of society.

¶ Vespers: What, exactly, is a novella? A short novel, or a long story? At hitheringandthithering waters, John Madera collects a number of reasonably learned opinions — or, at least (and what is better), reading lists. (via The Second Pass)

¶ Compline: Simon Blackburn argues (at some length, alas) that David Hume is very much the man for our times.

I suspect that many professional philosophers, including ones such as myself who have no religious beliefs at all, are slightly embarrassed, or even annoyed, by the voluble disputes between militant atheists and religious apologists. As Michael Frayn points out in his delightful book The Human Touch, the polite English are embarrassed when the subject of religion crops up at all. But we have more cause to be uncomfortable.

The annoyance comes partly because of the strong sense of deja vu. But it is not just that old tunes are being replayed, but that they are being replayed badly. The classic performance was given by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, written in the middle of the 18th century. Hume himself said that nothing could be more artful than the Dialogues, and it is the failure to appreciate that art that is annoying.

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¶ This morning, just a few chapters of Moby-Dick. In my effort to understand the fame of this dog’s-breakfast of a book, I flail about not unlike Melville’s leviathans, sure of only one thing: I can’t wait to put the remaining fifty-odd chapters behind me and be done with the thing. Today, though, I had a more interesting idea than the desperate need to escape. That it took so long to dawn is perhaps itself the best indication of how uncongenial Moby-Dick is.

Moby-Dick is essentially a boy’s own book about hunting, but with this difference: it’s hunting for democrats. No scions of ancient noble houses figure in its narrative, unless of course you count the noble savages who excel at harpooning. The hunt is open to anyone who can talk his way aboard a ship.

That is the only difference. Like any boy’s own book, Moby-Dick is liberally peppered with miscellanies, such as the two chapters that follow the excitement of the chase in which the Pequod’s men outmaneuver some Dutch whalers. “The Honor and Glory of Whaling,” followed by a pendant, “Jonah Historically Regarded,” is the sort of pep talk that “reminds” boys that they’re special:

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity, and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I msyelf belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

Note the keywords: “honorableness,” “antiquity,” “emblazoned.” “Fraternity” sounds a strong note, too, but all I can think of is: where’s Tinkerbell? Is Melville even halfway serious about the divine (or semi-divine) origins of whaling? It doesn’t really matter, because this “history” is entirely extraneous to the story of Ahab’s obsession with the White Whale — a story, I am beginning to see, almost as dwarfed by Melville’s “researches” as the whale’s brain is by the adjacent spermaceti.

It would be tolerable, and perhaps even amusing, if Melville’s language were not the excruciating mashup of jocular humor and King James poesy that it is. Blackboard screech!

Here’s hoping that you had a happy Easter, if Easter was on your calendar. For us, the holiday sometimes coincides, within a week or less, with Kathleen’s birthday — also the birthday of the terrific husband of a Brearley classmate, whose own birthday falls about a week earlier. The cluster of birthdays makes a springtime party look like a very good idea. And the end of Lent is a favorable development for menu planning.

And it was a lovely party, if I do say so myself. I kept things simple: two classic ragoûts (a navarin printanier and a blanquette de veau, the latter with the Upper West Side inflection of a dose of dill) and a cake from Greenberg’s. I also made a trio of hors d’oeuvres, which in the event nobody touched, knowing that dinner would probably not leave anybody hungry. Still, it was about time that I made tapenade again, and it was good to taste a more recent addition to the repertoire, salpicon de crevettes. As for the third, it had been so long since I made what Kathleen calls “ham roll-ups” that I might as well never have made them before. More about them some other time. As I say, nobody touched them, except for Kathleen and me.

Giving a party, though — it had been a while. I honestly can’t recall the last time that I prepared anything more ambitious than a dinner for four. (A steak dinner at that.) Not that I’d forgotten how; I got to the “riding a bicyle” stage in the kitchen about fifteen years ago. It was, rather, a question of how to fit the cooking in with my ramped-up ambitions here.

So I gave myself a day off. Today. I went to the movies with Quatorze. We saw Faubourg 36, a French Mrs Henderson Presents that exacted an additonal gallon of happy tears. We had lunch at the Chinatown Brasserie. Then we went to the Strand, so that I could buy a hard-to-get exhibition catalogue. That’s where I left my glen plaid cap. Quatorze, who lives nearby, went back later, to try to retrieve it, but it was too late. At home, I sat in front of an open window while I caught up with feeds. This added a sore throat to my worries.

Feeling tired now, at the age of sixty-one, is not what feeling tired used to be. Now, it’s frightening — physically. It comes with a vivid sensory image of being buried alive, not in a coffin, but in deep fatigue. Fatigue so chronic that it becomes invisible. I don’t feel tired in this mode; I just get very stupid. I absent-mindedly leave my cap at the Strand. A bit more tired, and I’d absent-mindedly walk in front of a bus.

There are no buses in the apartment, though, so fatality is unlikely. Amazingly, I haven’t dropped anything during cleanup. The apartment is almost back to normal. Tomorrow’s Daily Office is up. There’s a little bit of navarin left over. But I’ve saved the best news for last: now that Lent is over, Kathleen can eat as many of Greenberg’s chocolate cookies as she likes. She can even eat just one!

You hear a lot about “stewardship” these days — and you’re sure to hear more. Stewardship is an old mode of thought that is being refitted for unprecedented circumstances. In the past, stewards took care of things on behalf of powerful employers, better known as magnates; stewards constituted, in turn, a very small clutch of employees. Just as there weren’t many magnates, there weren’t many stewards. From now on, though, we’re all going to be stewards, and we’ll be taking care of things on behalf of unborn generations. We don’t really know how this works.

One thing that stands out in Mark Bowden’s Vanity Fair profile of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr, the current ruler of the grand duchy known as The New York Times, is that Mr Sulzberger is an honorable steward, a man who has done everything that he can think of to make sure that the newspaper that he inherited is passed on to readers of the future. As Mr Bowden’s parallel sketch of the parlous state of the newspaper industry in general and the Times in particular makes clear, however, this essentially conservative mission may well be wrong-headed, even disastrous, endangering the very thing that Mr Sulzberger wants to protect.

To their credit, the Sulzbergers have long treated the Times less as a business than as a public trust, and Arthur is steeped in that tradition, rooted in it, trained by it, captive to it. Ever the dutiful son, he has made it his life’s mission to maintain the excellence he inherited—to duplicate his father’s achievement. He is a careful steward, when what the Times needs today is some wild-eyed genius of an entrepreneur.

Glimmering beneath the sparkle of Mr Bowden’s stern but compassionate prose is the sorrow of a young man — nearing sixty, Mr Sulzberger still seems to be young, almost inappropriately so — who is neither a journalist nor a businessman, but only a well-intentioned citizen, trying to steer an institution through rapids that require a cracking expertise in one field or the other (probably business). At only one point does Mr Bowden advance a possible solution.

In fairness, no one has the answer for newspapers. Some, such as former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson, Alan D. Mutter, a former newspaperman and Silicon Valley C.E.O., and Peter Osnos, of PublicAffairs, all of whom have experience as executives, are pushing some form of micro-payment. If the Times, in partnership with the big search-engine companies, got paid a few pennies for every person who clicks on a link to its content, it might replace the old business model for advertising. The price of accessing a single item would be so small that it would hardly be worth the trouble to hunt up a pirated version. Some have suggested that all of the major news providers should band together and withhold their content from the Internet until such a pricing agreement can be put in place. It seems clear that drastic action is required. One top editor at another newspaper put it this way: “Ask yourself this—if the Internet existed and newspapers didn’t, would there be any reason to invent newspapers? No. That tells you all you need to know.”

Let us hope that people close to Mr Sulzberger make sure that the urgency of this paragraph is made clear to him, and that he finds the courage to delegate leadership to the best wild-eyed genius, not just to the one who hits it off best with him.

The Week at Portico: ¶ Kate Lindsey sang at the Museum last Friday, accompanied by Ken Noda. Kathleen was too tired to go — although not too tired to join me afterward at Caffè Grazie for dinner. She missed a good one! ¶ I wrestled with John Wray’s Lowboy for days before realizing that I’d been misled by the sheaf of careless reviews that this somewhat mixed book has generated, but James Wood came to the rescue, and helped me to clear away the common reading. It happens from time to time that I read a “hot” book and like it well enough, but come away thinking that it can’t be very good, because it doesn’t measure up to the run of reviews. Instead of feeling out-of-it and curmudgeonly, I must remember that most reviews are dashed off by harried Grub Streeters, and quite likely to mischaracterize unusual, but compelling, books such as Mr Wray’s. ¶ Somehow, I don’t fall into the trap where movies are concerned; I believe that I don’t expect very much from movie critics, with whom, in any case, I expect to disagree. I may be wildly wrong about Un baiser, s’il vous plaît, but I certainly enjoyed thinking (and writing) about it. ¶ Joseph O’Neill kicks off this week’s Book Review with an appreciation of Samuel Beckett’s youthful letters. It’s hard, though, to think of Beckett as ever having been youthful.

¶ Matins: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre take pictures of ruins. Remember when ruins were in Europe? No longer, mon cher. Below the fold, M&M’s photo of Detroit’s Central Station. “The Ruins of Detroit” — sans Beethoven. (via The Best Part)

¶ Lauds: Daniel Barenboim, one of the greatest musicians alive, seems determined to make a mark in a second career: normalizing Arab-Israeli relations. He’ll be conducting a concert in Cairo (Al Qahirah) next week. Bravo!

¶ Prime: Yesterday afternoon, I read at Facebook that my daughter “has gone mental for GoldFish.” I was pretty sure that she wasn’t talking Pepperidge Farm, but I pressed the proffered links anyway. Anybody remember “Captain of Her Heart,” by Blue? The lead has just about the same voice.

¶ Tierce: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, lists ten principles for a healthier economy. I hardly know which one I like best. (via  The Morning News)

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.

¶ Sext: Who is Susan Powter? The other day, Everything Is Terrible, a site that curates awful videos, spotted her “How to Shop at a Grocery Store.”

¶ Nones: With the viability of tax havens in doubt, Monaco upgrades its luxury haven operation.

¶ Vespers: Susan Sontag talks! “The elevator swished up like a gigolo’s hand on a silk stocking.” On her way, that is, to interview Philip Johnson, sometime back in the Sixties. (Via Tomorrow Museum)

¶ Compline: Richard Kalnins grew up in Connecticut, but he spent his childhood Saturdays in Yonkers — the whole day at Latvian school.

Inside, we were strictly forbidden to speak English. My classmates and I spent the day in small classrooms, decorated with framed portraits of presidents from the first Latvian republic, where we listened to white-haired octogenarians talk about their lives in Latvia before the war. We picked through the dense pages of nineteenth-century pastoral novels, recited the names of the country’s longest rivers and biggest lakes, chanted noun declensions in singular and plural, masculine and feminine, and sat on stiff metal chairs by the piano in the basement, crooning folk songs about mowing meadows of clover and watching the sun set into the sea. The rooms were stuffy and overheated and smelled of dusty radiators and chalky erasers. Across the street, old Puerto Rican men in shirtsleeves hung out the windows of what somebody’s brother called a welfare hotel. I couldn’t stand it. I hated Latvia.

Because of the holiday weekend, the next Daily Office will appear on Tuesday, 14 April. Bon weekend à tous!
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¶ Casting about for a metaphor with which to describe Lord Chesterfield’s Weltanschauung — an anachronistic inquiry, I know — I keep coming back to opera seria, although I’m quite sure that Chesterfield would have detested the insolence of my conceit. We have heard, in recent letters, of the earl’s contempt for trivialities, and yet he finds in “company,” the most exalted human activity.

I cannot help being anxious for your success, at this your first appearance upon the great stage of the world; for though the spectators are always candid enough to give great allowances, and show great indulgence to a new actor; yet, from the first impressions which he makes upon them, they are apt to decide, in their own minds at least, whether he will ever be a good one, or not…

There is also a touching exhortation to keep busy that’s worth noting.

Do what you will in Berlin, provided you do but do something all day long. … If I did not know by experience, that some men pass their whole time in doing nothing, I should not think it possible for any being, superior to M Descartes’s automatons, to squander away, in absolute idleness, one single minute of that small portion of time which is allotted us in this world.

If youth knew, and age could…

¶ In Moby-Dick, more phrenology.

It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature’s living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his true brain, you can then see no indication of it, nor feel any. The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common world.

Melville’s genius for spouting aphorisms to which one’s response is the very opposite of “So true!” is unparalleled.

¶ Don Quixote meets the Knight of the Wood, who is scandalized that Sancho dares to “speak when his master is speaking.” Is he as big a lunatic as our hero? I suspect that we’re in for a bit of aristo-pricking.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward discovers Jamaica, and it is love at first sight.

I really think that as a race we [English] must be dotty. Here is this divine place — one of the oldes British colonies and we none of us — thank God — know anything about it. That is except me and Nelson.

Little can Coward have foreseen that his divine place would be boycotted as an egregiously homophobic tourist destination. His was quite another world.

¶ Matins: Sometimes it seems that everything that has gone wrong in the United States since the first Reagan Administration can be described by the same sentence: “Let’s make conservatism sexy!” Consider this report about municipal bonds, which used to be safe as houses. (Little joke.)

¶ Lauds: Glenn Gould foresaw iPods, Audacity, Michael Hiltzik writes (so to speak) in the LA Times. The pianist was not, in other words, crazy when he stopped giving recitals.

This week marks 45 years since Glenn Gould made his last public performance. He preferred to offer recordings that someday, he wrote, could be altered by the listener in different ways.

¶ Prime: And now for something perfectly ridiculous: the PUMA, a joint project of General Motors (ha!) and Segway. (via  Good)

¶ Tierce: Tourists in Kyoto grab hair, pull sleeves, trip geisha. Also interfere with dialy fish auction. Walt Disney, what hast thou wrought?

¶ Sext: From the droll humor site, EnglishЯussia, a blast from the past: isn’t that Dave Thomas, of SCTV, hosting the spoof “What Fits Mother Russia?”

¶ Nones: The Grand Duke of Luxembourg may be reconstituted. New! With Fewer Absolute Powers!

¶ Vespers: Marina Warner writes about a new edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

¶ Compline: If you find yourself up late tonight with nothing that you’re in the mood, here’s just what you’re looking for: Jeremiah Kipp interviews film writer Glenn Kenny about working with David Foster Wallace.

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