¶ Just in case Stanhope can’t speak for himself, his father composes a little dialogue, with which to fend off high-living compatriots abroad. Then, to finish off this parental gift, Chesterfield underlines the worldly sophistication of his dramaturgy.

You will observe, that I have not put into your mouth those good arguments, which upon such an occasion would, I am sure, occur to you; as piety and affection toward me; regard and friendship for Mr Harte; respect for your own moral character, and for all the relative duties of man, son, pupil, and citizen. Such solid arguments would be thrown away upon such shallow puppies. Leave them to their ignorance, and to their dirty, disgraceful vices.

It goes without saying that Lord Chesterfield would not have comprehended the modern-day etiquette of “boundaries.”

¶ In Moby-Dick, a virtual Wikipedia entry on the subject of ambergris. I had never thought much about ambergris, and I suppose that I always thought it was the same thing as whale oil. But no. It is not.

Of course, the Wikipedia entry is imcomparably clearer.

¶ In Don Quixote, the Cockaigne-like largesse of Camacho’s wedding feast brings out Sancho’s material guy.

You’re worth what you have, and what you have is what you’re worth. There are only two lineages in the world, as my grandmother used to say, and that’s the haves and have-nots, though she was on the side of having; nowadays, Señor Don Quixote, wealth is better than wisdom: an ass covered in gold seems better than saddled horse.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward turns down the lead in The King and I.

It would have made a lot of money for him; it would have have burnished his image, and been an undoubed hit with that combination of talents — but it would not have been his.

You know what they say: if you want something done, ask a busy man. It’s true! I keep asking myself to do things, and I keep doing them.

But enough about me. Too much about me, really, even if this is my diary.

I was terribly fâché at the Museum today. No, this paragraph is not about me. It’s about the imprisonment of the Museum’s American paintings and sculpture, including the Sargents, apparently, until 2011! I’ll bet that they didn’t tell that to Michelle Obama before she spoke at the re-opening of the American wing. If you want to see a lot of pots and side chairs and period upholstery and the world’s most space-wasting diorama, then the American Wing is open. If you’re interested in art, it’s not.

Anyway, I led pour Jean Ruaud on a merry chase through the maze of furniture displays, thwarted wherever a door to the sought-for galleries ought to have been open. Signs announcing the “delay” were posted at several points, but I didn’t read them, or couldn’t accept them, until I’d given up.

We did see the Francis Bacon show, which, for all the gory grimness of the painter’s subject matter, is very beautiful. There is something awfully grand about the triptychs that are framed in serious gold mouldings. Stupidly, I had not realized what a systematic appropriator Bacon was. I’ll be back.

In what was left of the afternoon, I finished the Book Review review that I began in the morning, did all the usual daily stuff for the DB, tidied the place up a bit, and then got dressed and went out to dinner. We were the guests of old friends, a couple of smart lawyers who, in the past, have, quite inadvertently, sometimes made me feel that I’m an underemployed slacker. Well, not anymore! All the reading that I do for the Daily Office means that I am never at a loss for topics of interest to thoughtful people. Even better, I understand (and can follow) almost anything that the thoughtful people want to talk about. (Can you tell that I’ve been reading Lord Chesterfield?) Our friends may still think that I ought to get a real job, but I had a very good time.

¶ Matins: GOOD announces the winner of its Livable Streets Contest. (All the contestants are here.)

¶ Lauds: The sketch blog of Jillian Tamaki, the artist whose work graced the cover of this week’s Book Review. (via The Best Part)

¶ Prime: Michael Lewis revisits Warren Buffett. (via The Awl)

¶ Tierce: No poop on the poop: testimony about dog droppings on Brooke Astor’s dining room floor was ruled inadmissable yesterday. Justice Bartley: “It would seem to me the transient conditions of the apartment – I would include in that dog feces – would be a problem of the staff.”

¶ Sext: This faux Wes Anderson trailer is an elegant little satire, more loving than harsh, of the filmmaker’s foibles.

¶ Nones: The digital universe, like the “real” one, is expanding at speed. Continue reading for a delicious factoid.

¶ Vespers: John Self writes about White Noise, a book that I’d always felt guilty about not reading until I finally gave it away unread.

¶ Compline: Caleb Cage writes about the future of warfare (“RMA“) at The Rumpus.

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Can you believe it? I forgot my camera this morning, and got all the way up the Cloisters before I realized that I’d left it at home. Happily, my companion, Jean Ruaud, one of the finest photographers in the world and certainly the best one that I know personally, chivalrously took a picture of my favorite Cloisters-area view, and sent it to me this evening for me to use here, which I shall do on Saturday morning. It’s certainly better than any picture that I’ve ever taken.

It was, as every New Yorker knows, the perfect day for a trip to the Cloisters. The cool, clear air and the sunny blue sky combined with Spring timing to make Fort Tryon Park look better than an opera set. For Jean, I think, the great pleasure of visiting the museum was the frisson of looking over a collection of richly medieval (and mostly French!) objects while standing solidly on Manhattan Island. I did not feel for a moment that politeness prevented him from dismissing the confection of 1938 that the Cloisters actually is as an enormous fraud. His pleasure in learning that a stained glass panel came from a town not far from his birthplace in Touraine seemed undimmed by any desire to repatriate it.

Jean and I met at Deluxe, the jolly college-town eatery near Columbia University, on Broadway at 113th Street. It was only on the subway that I’d had misgivings — wasn’t graduation due to take place about now? Indeed it was, and we should never have gotten a table if I hadn’t thought to meet at twelve-thirty instead of at one. Of course I saw the crowns on the blue robes, when they began showing up, but because the only graduates wearing them were women, I asked the waiter if Barnard were commencing. Columbia men must tear off their robes the minute the ceremony is over, because not a single male could be spotted in costume. As if to prove my point, all the likely-looking young men were carrying shopping bags.

At the table next to ours, a young woman sat with a middle-aged man, almost certainly her father. Their talk was desultory, and they seemed happy to eavesdrop on our bilingual-esque conversation. At one point, however, the young woman exhaled, with a throaty world-weariness worthy of the great Tallulah Bankhead, “Why can’t it be my graduation?” Her tone was pitched at a tone of perfect ambiguity, so that it was impossible to tell whether someone else’s graduating or her own not doing so was what bothered her. If I had to bet money, I’d say that an offstage sibling was involved.

The ride uptown was uneventful. The elevator at 168th Street (changing from the 1 to the A) was packed; the elevator to the street at 190th Street was almost empty, but for a few tourists and two spot waiters for a parks fundraiser (Bette Midler’s Restoration Project?) at the New Leaf Café. I took Jean on the scenic route to the Cloisters, with Hudson views and lots of flowers and lots of steps and the lookout beneath the flagstaff from which you can see the Throg’s Neck Bridge. As we were climbing down from the lookout, I noticed two young young men occupying the steps that it would have been most convenient to take. Well, one of them was huddling there. The other one couldn’t keep himself from gripping railings and hurdling over them like some sort of cowboy — or parkoureur, as I guess the word would be now. The huddler turned out to be a photographer. Worried about crossing his shot, I asked if we might pass. He seemed surprised by the question.

“Of course,” he said, his eyes opened wide. “We’re just teenagers.“

I shrugged. “You’re forgiven.”

¶ Matins: In the current New Yorker, Steve Coll summarizes the Adminstration’s options in Pakistan. They don’t make for fun reading.

¶ Lauds: Springtime for Hitler: The Producers opens in Berlin.

¶ Prime: Christopher Hitchens on funny women. It’s not only not funny, but it conjures the image of a tar pit for humorists: the harder the writer thrashes about in his bad ideas, the thicker the laugh-prevention fixative becomes.

¶ Tierce:  Wish I’d been there to hear about “this mistress business” myself: Vartan Gregorian testifies that Brooke Astor was already acting up when she was 97, speaking truth to Camilla P-B and dissing Catherine Z-J.

¶ Sext: Why, according to Beth Teitell, newspapers must be saved — even if nobody reads them. (via The Morning News)

¶ Nones: In what looks to be an embarrassing waste of time, Turkey’s “secular elites” have dreamed up an embezzling charge against President Abdullah Gul.

¶ Vespers:Caleb Crain publishes a collection of blog entries, The Wreck of the Henry Clay: Posts & Essays 2003-2009. You can order the book or download the pdf.

¶ Compline: Former Marine (and deputy Secretary of State) Steven Ganyard writes about emergency responsiveness and lays down its golden rule: “All Disasters Are Local”

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In the past, my approach to summer has been to cut back on the blogging, particularly in August, in the interest of “relaxing,” or “taking stock,” or doing whatever it is that magazine writers dream up for one’s summer. This year, I shall cut back on everything but blogging.

What with balladant with Jean Ruaud — we’re off to the Cloisters tomorrow — and a few pre-existing evening engagements, I won’t be sitting around the blue room very much this week. That’s why I buckled down this afternoon and got as far as choosing half the links for Thursday’s Daily Office. I discovered a few nice sites today, one of which, An Open Book, looks very agreeable, probably because its author, Brooks Peters, in a photo “taken ages ago,” looks both welcoming and smart — sadly, a rare combination. He writes that way, too.

I had a nice letter from George Snyder this morning. I sometimes wish that George lived in New York, instead of in Los Angeles, but if he did live in New York, we’d probably be less in touch. According to a Proustian law of iron — if Proust didn’t formulate it, he ought to have done — we see friends who live nearby rarely or never, precisely because we can, hypothetically, see them whenever we like. In fact, however, we’re much too busy doing other things. When a friend arrives from the other side of the earth, in contrast, we drop everything and make the most of the visit. I’m having a wonderful time doing exactly that with Jean; it’s as though I’m the one on vacation. I see that I must urge Fossil Darling to move to Australia.

Which is more tiring? Walking miles and miles or following links and links? No matter: the two together have wiped me out. We’re promised very good weather for tomorrow, which will make Fort Tryon Park pop with rustic beauty. Readers of Mnémoglyphes and Beware Wet Paint! can look forward to some beautiful pictures.

¶ Matins: The President speaks at my alma mater. (via JKM)

¶ Lauds: Mike Johnston writes about Andrea Land and quotes Bill Jay, at The Online Photographer . Mr Jay’s advice to young photographers palpably lends itself to wider application; ie to planning a life.

¶ Prime: The times they are Auto Tune.

¶ Tierce: It’s old news — it’s not news — but it would be remiss to omit a link to the Post’s photograph of “Rapunzel,” Brooke Astor’s last social secretary (Naomi Dunn Packard-Koot, who, it seems, has a nasty chewing-gum habit) striding along while Charlene Marshall dips into the Ladies’.

¶ Sext: Giles Turnbull, of The Morning News, has a blast with the British MP expenses scandal. Did you know —

¶ Nones: Oman, home of Café Muscato (very incidentally), is taxing smugglers. Well, at least the ones who deal in goods bound for Iran, across the Gulf of Oman. (You knew that.)

¶ Vespers: While you were busy following Kindle pricing, Amazon went into the business of publishing actual books. Re-publishing them, actually, under the imprint AmazonEncore.

¶ Compline: What makes us happy — over decades? Or, JFK, “no one’s idea of ‘normal’,” was a member of the sample.

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The gent in the photo is a newspaperman by the name of Arthur Brisbane. Kathleen and I are always struck by the resemblance that this particular likeness, standing on the edge of Central Park, bears to my father.

But enough about me. Jean Ruaud, of Mnémoglyphes, is in town, and he’s going to have to battle manfully to carve out some free time this week. Free time from me, that is. At dinner this evening, we planned trips to the must-see lunar craters that happen to be on loan to the city this month. Not to mention the ordinary stuff: the Staten Island Ferry, Prospect Park, the Isamu Noguchi thing in Queens “from which is gained [as Robert Benchley would have put it] an incomparable view of the Yorkville skyline.” Fort Tryon Park and the Brasserie have yet to be ruled out as beyond the strength of mere mortals. Happily for Jean, Kathleen and I have a long-planned dinner date with old friends on Wednesday night, and tickets to see Blithe Spirit for Thursday, so he’ll have some respite.

The wonderful thing about Jean is that Kathleen likes him as much as I do. It’s usual (and entirely natural, really) for me to like my friends just a little bit more than Kathleen does; but, in this case, I stand pre-empted.

Tomorrow will be Jean’s day off, relatively speaking. We’ll have lunch at one, and then I’ll conduct a walking tour of the quartier that won’t last more than two hours. Jean thought that he was visiting the Land of the Free, but in fact he has stumbled into the Gulag of Gotham. “And right over here, we have this interesting sculpture that resembles my father.“

Last Week at Portico: This week was crazy. I never even found the time to write up a Morning Read — that’s a first (and, I hope, a last). I still owe a few words on Salman Rushdie’s New Yorker story. And that’s just for here! For Portico, I managed to put up a few words on the gruesomely funny Julia, starring Tilda Swinton, cram recollections of three completely different musical events (Denk/Perlman/Graham) onto one page, and — I can’t really believe it — the Book Review review.

Although I cleared my day for rare productivity — I dreamt of writing a good deal while also taking care of lots of little things. But I blew it by going downtown for lunch with Fossil Darling and Quatorze. Quatorze got a break from my esoteric movie roster (you’ll see what I mean) by accompanying the Fossil to the first showing of Angels and Demons. Although I’ve never seen The Da Vinci code, I will probably sneak a look at Angels just to see Ewan McGregor. But certainly not in a theatre.

When I got back from lunch, I frittered away two hours on who-knows-what. Then, when I sat down to work, the RoadRunner connection died. It was out for fifteen minutes at the most — but what a fifteen minutes! I can’t wait for MiFi, which Verizon will be releasing in a few days.

Although I saw the official “Friday movie” last night, I went to the movies again this evening. Kathleen has been wanting to see The Soloist, and tonight we finally found the time and the energy to catch the last showing. As I expected, I had a bit of trouble with aspects of the picture, but tears were running every time that Jamie Foxx’s character put bow to cello string. And I couldn’t help but wish that the actor would assume his given name, Eric Bishop. Kathleen, I’m happy to report, loved The Soloist, even though she found much of it harrowing. As who wouldn’t.

What really ate up the clock today was Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn. Yes — I think that I’ll blame it all on that. It’s a mistake to give these wild Irish authors the time of day, because that’s exactly what they’ll cost. Taking the train down to Bleecker Street before lunch, I read the passage in which a priest assigns a penance of just one Hail Mary, and it was so kind and beautiful and humane (not to mention pre-William Donohue) that I felt myself on the verge of a sob. When I got home, I swallowed as fast as I could, staving off the direr symptoms of froth-in-mouth disease, the final section of the novel, which turned out to be one of the most astutely constructed cliffhangers in the history of literature. Would she or wouldn’t she?

I was so moved by the reading of Brooklyn that I thought that I had better start keeping a list of books that prompt swooning responses. Books that, as I read them, I cannot imagine having read, living without, moving on from. Like Eilis Lacey, however, I do finish them and move on to other books, which sometimes take their place in my heart so completely that I forget about them — hence the need for a list. I asked myself: what other books have made you feel this keenly? And I couldn’t answer it. I hope to be true to Brooklyn, but, as the novel itself teaches, I’ll need a little help from circumstances. We are where we are, not where we loved being.

Reading Tony Judt’s Postwar, I was surprised, given the excellence of the prose, to come across the solecism “to try and [infintive].” Such usage has no place in expository prose.

There is certainly a place for the phrase, but it is limited to informal speech. When we say, “I’m going to try and get to the museum this weekend,” we don’t mean that we’re going to try to get to the museum. We mean that we’re going to see what happens and to do our best. In a history text, the phrase is luridly shambolic. Tut!

This diary entry is being written at great personal cost: I could be reading the further adventures of Eilis in Brooklyn. Correction: Eilis in Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín’s magnificent new novel.

It was a disappointment to find that Sara O, the Irish nurse at the Hospital for Special Surgery’s Infusion Therapy Unit, where I get my (now quarterly) fix of Remicade, was off duty today, because I was hoping to talk about Brooklyn with her. I have no idea if she’s a reader, or interested in novels with Irish themes — God knows I used not to be — but I wanted nonetheless, almost desperately, to converse with someone about Ireland, especially the old Ireland of Mr Tóibín’s novel, which is set four years before his own birth. The Ireland that I suspect Sara fled.

Because it was my fourth day with out-of-the-house business, I very nearly canceled the infusion. Instead, I had the (much) better idea of seeing a movie this evening, thus leaving tomorrow entirely free for work. Glorious work — or at least the glory of getting things done.

I went to see Goodbye Solo. A good friend strongly recommended it to me at lunch the other day, and then repeated the recommendation on the telephone whilst thanking me for picking up the check. I had never heard  of the film, which is a bit strange given the weighage and considerage that goes into my Friday-movie choices. Little did I know what a critics’ darling it is, with a stratospheric Metacritic score of 88. I learned about that later, after scratching my head during the credits. Goodbye Solo is a very powerful film in its way, but it taught me how important production values are to this bourgeois soul of mine.

(The curious thing about the “production values” thing is that I’m just the opposite about opera. All I ask of an opera production is that the singers stand center stage, directly over the orchestra, and belt. I loathe complicated sets and crowds of extras. In fact I’ve come to prefer concert performances, simply because they avoid the production-values problem altogether. But if opera is about hearing, movies are about looking. If I don’t want visual clutter to interfere with the auditory pleasure of opera, I’m also unhappy with home-movie aesthetics that deprive my eyes of a feast.) 

(And who is Red West? A bit player who has been given an extraordinary break, that’s who. Vivat!)

Just for the record, I read Kathleen to sleep with the following passages from Brooklyn: the Bartocci “Famous Nylon Sale,” the visit to the law-book store on West Twenty-Third Street, and, at full length, the scene in which Eilis’ landlady pre-emptively awards her the best room in the house. “You are the only one of them with any manners.”

Blogging has taught me that old dogs can indeed learn new tricks. Arf! But it’s odd nonetheless to feel that I’m being made to feel proud, by these books of Colm Tóibín‘s, of being Irish.

¶ Matins: Here’s a story that stinks. Costco has been given permission to disturb East Harlem with tractor-trailers making wee-hour stock deliveries. But Costco won’t accept food stamps, which sustain thousands of neighboring households. Jim Dwyer reports.

¶ Lauds: Move over, origami masters: Look what Simon Schubert can do  by creasing paper gently. (via Snarkmarket)

¶ Prime: Criticism or curation? A misunderstanding between Tim Abrahams, of Blueprint (a print magazine with Web site) and Things Magazine (online only) yields a rich discussion, or at any rate a nice piece by Mr Abrahams and two just-as-nice responses by Things, with some good comments along the way.

¶ Tierce: Joanna Molloy, at the Daily News, takes a breath and asks, “When did the Brooke Astor trial become all about Charlene Marshall?”

¶ Sext: Movies you won’t have to think about seeing this weekend, or any weekend. (Did I just jinx it?) Romatic comedy pitches involving gay vampires and crossbows, at McSweeney’s.

¶ Nones: In 1975, Professor Karel Zlabek proposed linking Bohemia, via a tunnel, to the Adriatic. That’s over four hundred kilometers, maybe not so much in American terms (but), beneath the soil of two other sovereignties, one of which, Austria, was not a member of the Warsaw Pact.

¶ Vespers: What, we ask ourself, is the Derek Walcott kerfuffle really about? An inappropriate sexual advance? Or even more inappropriate revenge when the advance was rebuffed?

¶ Compline: Not to be confused with the foregoing: Vanity Fair gentleman curmudgeon James Wolcott looks back fondly on Manhattan in the Seventies.

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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The Edith Wharton lecture at the Museum this morning was not disappointing, because I’d learned from last week’s lecture about Henry James what sort of thing to expect. David Garrard Lowe did lob a bombshell, though; perhaps you’ve heard that Edith Jones might not have been her mother’s daughter, but I hadn’t. It was impossible not to mull over this possibility for the duration of the lecture — it explained so much about the famously bad relations between the writer and the ghastly old beast who left her nothing when she died.

I hated being at the lecture. I was one of ten or twenty men in an auditorium crammed with women. For all of my life, I have viscerally disliked gatherings dominated by men or women. Left to themselves, men and women alike seem determined upon one object only: to validate all the stupider stereotypes entertained by the opposite sex. This weakness is above all things what men and women truly share, and it’s perversely why I believe that the differences between the sexes are essentially insignificant. La différence becomes interesting only when men and women try to make contact in spite of it. If you are comfortable in a room full of people of your own gender, then you and I shall never be friends, whether you’re a woman or a man. Ditto if you have to be the only person of the opposite gender — a charge that, I’m afraid, must be laid at Edith Wharton’s feet. Other women usually bored her. Consider her behavior toward Mary Berenson (this did not come up in the lecture, but Hermione Lee covers it well enough): indefensible! It was rudeness tout court.

Enough tittle-tattle. I was going to write a word or two about spirituality (and why lacking it bothers me — but not enough to pretend that I don’t absolutely lack it). I was also thinking of saying something about a discovery that I made today, which is that we dislike people only (or mostly) when/because they make us feel bad about ourselves. Sometimes friendships must be ended for purely pragmatic reasons — a divorce, a fatal indiscretion, an unbridgeable political divide — but dislike doesn’t enter into it in those cases. My thoughts on this subject were triggered by the prospect of seeing some friends of Kathleen who have always made me feel like an aimless slacker. The fact that, until seven or eight years ago, I was an aimless slacker does not work in their favor. Turning the aperçu around, I remember how many times people have told me that I make them feel bad because they haven’t (for example) read Proust. Kathleen’s friends, I’m sure, haven’t wanted to make me feel bad, and I know that I haven’t wanted to make the a-Proustians feel bad. But that’s not how it works, is it? I’ve felt bad, and they’ve felt bad, and we’ve made up our minds that we’d rather spend time with people who don’t involve feeling bad. Once stated, the observation is ridiculously obvious.

And I think of an exchange at Crawford Doyle a few weeks ago. I went in with a purchase in mind — I usually do, these days; otherwise, my house would go Collyer — and I asked for it at the counter. While someone fetched the book of poems, I remarked to the other staff members that, even though I had come across the author’s name forty years ago or more, when I first read The Alexandria Quartet, I didn’t know how to pronounce “Cavafy.” That they didn’t, either, was only minutely disappointing. It would have been nice to find out, but I couldn’t fault anyone for ignorance on this point. (After all, I didn’t know!) But how much more intelligent it would have been of me to ask, simply, “Does anyone know how to pronounce this poet’s name?” That, sadly, never occurred to me.

It feels like a Midas touch: to the extent that I try to be friendly with people (as distinct from simply respectful and pleasant), I make them feel bad about themselves. But then, what else could “trying to be friendly” mean?

¶ Matins: A word from venture capitalist Peter Rip:

Corporate America, its public boards, and now, the United States government would be well served to take a few pages on governance from America’s venture capital-backed companies.

¶ Lauds: Queen Nefertiti’s bust a fake? What fun! I love fakes! (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Now I know what to get for my grandchildren (when & if): littleBits. “PLUS magnets are FUN.” (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: More excluded testimony at the Marshall Trial yesterday — and everybody but the jury heard proposed testimony by the late Mrs Astor’s social secretary. The Post, the Daily News.

¶ Sext: Last night, I asked about the “backlash” to Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece about the full-court press. Voilà! Tom Scocca buttonholes Choire Sicha at The Awl. (via Brainiac)

¶ Nones: Mark Landler reads the tea-leaves of Iran’s release of Roxana Saberi (who by the way is gawjus!): Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reverses course to improve his re-election bid.

¶ Vespers: Rebecca Dalzell bids adieu to the Times’s City section, soon to be cut from the Sunday paper.

¶ Compline: Built on a former French military base (hence its having been named after Louis XIV’s fortress engineer), the Freiburg suburb of Vauban could not have accommodated civilian auto traffic anyway. You are allowed to own a car if you live in the upscale development, but you can’t park it at your house.

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As the afternoon wore on, I wore down. Not getting enough sleep (for who knows how long) began to tell in irritating ways. I was clumsy, for one thing, or clumsier than usual. I chipped the spot of an everyday teapot. What was new about that setback was my immediate decision to toss the ruin. I did not even think of filling it with soil and using it as a planter out on the balcony.

I had lunch with a good friend who was shockingly ill-informed about Astor-Marshall family history. To begin with aboriginal issues, she didn’t know how Brooke came to be “Astor” while her son Tony was “Marshall.” Heavens! Filling her in was a treat even tastier than my croque monsieur. (I must have looked exactly like a hairdresser of a certain age.) It occurs to me that what one really wants in these times is Ruth Draper’s summary of the trial. “So often, that’s how trouble starts!” I’m so glad that this intriguing family imbroglio wasn’t wasted on the Bush Administration. One’s attention would have been so divided. Now that we have a president who reads Netherland for fun, we don’t have to worry about Washington — not in that dreadful, Bush-era way.

For dinner, I roasted a chicken. Rather later than I ought to have done, I tossed halved baby Yukon potatoes into the roasting pan. At the last minute, I steamed a bunch of asparagus spears on the stove. I have been steaming a lot of asparagus lately. It is available year-round, but I’ve been trying to treat it as a seasonal vegetable. As with popcorn, I have stopped worshiping false cooking methods and returned to the laws of my youth — when, it is true, I didn’t know that asparagus naturally snap at the frontier of tenderness. For years, I followed Barbara Kafka’s microwave technique (no water!), which was problematic because I rarely cooked the pound for which the method was timed. Then I took to standing unsnapped asparagus in boiling water. I can’t think where that dismal idea came from. Now I steam asaparagus for something between six and seven minutes. It may be exhausting me to death, but working harder at The Daily Blague than I have worked on anything before, and doing so day after day, week after week, has cleared my brain. I can distinguish between a potentially preferable alternative and an utter waste of time at fifty paces.

In order to dine at a reasonable hour, Kathleen came home on the early side, planning to do a bit of work after dinner. Unfortunately, she got sidetracked by a number of technical problems (her cell phone seemed to be missing; her camera needed downloading, and the battery was drained — should the charger’s indicator light blink or not?). The combination of late hour and advanced age made all of this nettlesome. The pictures are beautiful, however, the phone can be dealt with tomorrow, and we’ll hope that the battery charger doesn’t explode.

¶ Matins: In one of those hard cases that the vagaries of editorial wording can decide, an Army contractor, who in what I should certainly call the heat of passion “revenge-killed” a prisoner, was finally sentenced. The prisoner had doused the contrator’s partner, a woman, in flammable liquid and set her on fire. (She later died of burns.) Read the judgment below. (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Nicolai Ouroussoff decries the latest design for a transportation hub at the World Center site as a “monument to the creative ego that celebrates [Santiago] Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else.” 

¶ Prime: Act today? “The 99 Most Essential Pieces of Classical Music” are on sale, as a set of MP3 downloads, for $7.99. I’m not sure that I can recommend starting a classical library this way. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: For the first time in my life, I bought the New York Post yesterday. How could I not, given this screaming headline: “DISS ASTOR.” Never mind that what it refers to doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. What, though, can Charlene Marshall have been thinking, when she allowed a Post reporter into her apartment?

¶ Sext: Ian Frazier, longtime New Yorker humorist, must have started out in his playpen, seeing that he’s celebrating his fortieth birthday.

¶ Nones: Page A11 of yesterday’s Times was entirely taken up by a call to journalists to recognize the body of water that you probably know as the “Sea of Japan” as the “East Sea.”

¶ Vespers: Joseph O’Neill’s three boys didn’t understand why they couldn’t drop in on President Obama during a recent trip to Washington. Did they know that he was reading daddy’s book? Vintage Books certainly did. (via  Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: In the current issue of NYRB, Sue Halpern goes after a couple of the anecdotes upon which Malcolm Gladwell argues his case in Outliers.

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A friend from Paris will be visiting at the end of the week. Regular readers of both our sites know perfectly well whom I’m talking about, but I’m feeling a wave of discretion at the moment — there’s no need to name names. The great thing is that we’ll meet for dinner here at the flat on Sunday night. Just the three of us (Kathleen included!) — and my cooking. Our friend may wish that we’d met at a restaurant, because God knows what silliness will beset me as I prepare my first meal ever for a genuine French person!

Au beau milieu de l’hiver
Prenez l’âne et le cerf,
Et, tout en remuant,
Y jetez la bonne.
Qu’est-ce que ça donne?
Gracie et Lucy dans la cuisine!

(That rebus’s actual last line is, of course: “bonne—âne—hiver—cerf”: bon anniversaire, or Happy Birthday)

More interesting than dinner here, however, will be our treks through Parts Unknown — parts, that is, as yet unknown to me, such as Williamsburgh. I decided about fifteen years ago that I was already, even then, too old to discover Williamsburgh. I think that I had been at Pedro’s, the preppy bar that used to be next to the Post Office, the night before, and there, in a moment of inebriated epiphany, I had seen that nobody over the age of 35 ought to be caught dead in a preppy bar. You could get arrested for pedophilia! Williamsburgh, I hadn’t even been to, which made it all that much easier.

Megan and Ryan, my daughter and son-in-law, spent Sunday walking around Williamsburgh. Do you think I ought to ask them for tips? I’m inclined not to. Megan tells a wonderful story about an ill-advised visit to a Polish polka party in Williamsburgh. She knew that it was ill-advised (being my daughter and all), but her good friend, who was, at the time, the companion of a now-famous novelist, had boundary issues. Let’s just say that the girls never got to dance.

Red Hook has also been mentioned. Red Hook used to be terra incognita, but now Ikea has a store there, I think. Why does the mention of Red Hook fill my ears with the lorelei cry of City Island? (Which is not exactly next door.)

If nothing else, these great expectations are easing me over the body blow of bad news that I had today. Nothing material; nothing to worry about! My loved ones and I are all in place. The bad news was, so to speak, entirely optional: I could legitimately put it in a box and say that I didn’t care. But I do care, and I wish I understood. That’s probably all it is, when you get down to it: a knowledge worker’s need to know. If I knew why someone decided that I was not good friendship material, then I’d be fine — which may just be the someone’s point.

Meanwhile, Sunday’s soufflé (and don’t say that you didn’t see that coming)? Mushroom, corn, or tous les deux?

¶ Matins: Uh-oh. This weekend, both Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich sang what sounded like swan songs. Rehearsals for swan songs, anyway. An appeal to the SpOck in Obama; 2009 as the new 1500.

¶ Lauds: In Istanbul, a shiny new mosque has opened, the first to be designed by a woman, Zeynef FadıllıoÄŸlu. It’s a knockout. (via  Good)

¶ Prime: Here’s a New York story that has been widely retailed around the Blogosphere, from The Morning News to An Aesthete’s Lament: Drew University senior Maximilian Sinsteden is already an accomplished, sought-after interior designer.

¶ Tierce: We start off the week’s news (there’s only one story) with John Eligon’s wry portrait of Justice A Kirke Bartley Jr.

So, a lawyer, while questioning a witness, tells the judge, Justice A. Kirke Bartley Jr., that he has a request pertaining to a diamond-encrusted gold necklace worth tens of thousands of dollars that is in evidence.

Justice Bartley’s response (this is the punch line): “I won’t be wearing it, no.”

This is the lighter side of the trial of Brooke Astor’s son and one of Mrs. Astor’s lawyers.

¶ Sext: If you’re going to be serious about the l-a-t-e-s-t episode of Star Trek, it’s probably best to start at The House Next Door, where Matt Maul confesses (I can think of no other word) to having been a fan for “thirty-five years.”

¶ Nones: On opposite stories of the Atlantic, dueling Chinese heroines. Here, now living in Queens, it’s Geng He, the wife of an insistent dissident who made a daring escape. There, it’s Nina Wang, “Asia’s richest woman,” who has the comparative disadvantage of being dead.

¶ Vespers: John Self considers Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, at Asylum.

¶ Compline: Aside from being a brisk account of clinical depression that reads like one woman’s serious problem, and not the disease of the week, Daphne Merkin’s Times Magazine piece, “A Journey Through Darkness,” dwells on the bleakness of treatment facilities.

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When I look at the photograph, I think how skilled a photographer really has to be in order to make a picture that captures the beauty of a high spring afternoon beneath uncertain skies. On top of that, the few wisteria blossoms still drooping languorously from the pergola at the Conservatory Garden had faded to a dirty white. Kathleen was disappointed, and I felt guilty for having spied a beautiful display of wisteria two weeks ago, when Ms NOLA pointed it out to Quatorze and me as we left a restaurant. Now that I have seen the glorious flowerings of New York’s shrubs and fruit trees for almost thirty years, it is just about impossible to rouse myself to go to look at them on their schedule rather than my own. It’s partly that I’m simply not a naturalist.

When I look at the fountain in the picture, and the arches of the pergola, I see signs of intelligent design —intelligent human design that makes sense of the chaos in which some people inexplicably find the hand of a god. Perhaps they’re right. I should only hope that no human plan should be so psychotically disorganized as plant life tends to become only meters away from the Garden’s gardeners’ attentions. God, maybe; but intelligent god — inconceivable! Can a thoughtful mind really see intelligent design in life untended by human beings? As for the idea that human beings are the products of intelligent design — it absolutely beggars intelligence.

Wednesday last, the ladies of the Central Park Conservancy raised millions of dollars by showing up for lunch beneath a tent that stretched across the lawn. I don’t know how such fundraising works, but that comes of being too clever by half. Once upon a time, the ladies of the Park would have been godspouting moralists more concerned with rooting out fallen women than weeds. It’s to be prized that this is no longer so. I promise to become civil about God as soon as I’m sure that I won’t ever hear again about the intelligence of a divinity who would cover this vista with kudzu within a year or so of human neglect. Lock this god up in a church, where his ideas of regeneration won’t burden and wreck the vitality of the men and women around me.