My plan for this evening was to go to Greenpoint with Ms NOLA to a book event starring Maud Newton and Kate Christensen. Ms NOLA gave me her galley copy of Trouble, Kate Christensen’s new, fifth novel, two weeks ago; I got round to writing it up about an hour before it became clear that I would not be making it to Greenpoint. Had the event taken place in Manhattan somewhere, I’d probably have killed myself to get to it — I admire Kate Christensen’s work no end — but Greenpoint is still, for me, terra incognita. It wasn’t a question of directions; Ms NOLA would have got us there without ado. It was simply never having been to that part of Brooklyn. For a hit parade of reasons, today was not the day to acquaint myself with a new-to-me part of Gotham.

I had thought that writing up Trouble would be fairly straightforward. I had a reasonably clar idea of the aspect of the novel that I wanted to write about.  But I didn’t know the novel well enough to do the job; I’d only read it once. I wasn’t planning some in-depth Da Vinci Code reading of Trouble, which I had found very straightforward on the first reading. The trouble was that the book turned out not to be so straightforward upon the closer look that any write-up occasions. The meaty center of the book takes place in Mexico City, and I thought that I would write about that, but going over the first hundred pages, which take place right here in Rivers City, I wondered what I’d been thinking. Trouble is like a Hitchcock film: it’s written for the second reading.

Which is very nervy of Ms Christensen — if (as I can’t doubt) she’s aware of this aspect of her art. It’s one thing to ask a bloke to sit through a two hour movie a second time, or even a third, just so that he understands the voyeurist imagery of Rear Window (say). It’s quite another to ask even the most literate blighter to re-read a three-hundred page novel just to “get how it’s done.” It’s not that some mystery is revealed, not that at all. Any more than is the case with Hitchcock. It’s just that the richness of the production can’t be grasped the first time: you don’t know what you’re looking for. The second time, you don’t have to look: it falls on you like plaster in a catastrophe, and you wonder how you missed it.

Like Hitchcock, Kate Christensen is a mistress of the vernacular. She does not deal in the sharp artiness that for me constitutes the East Coast intellectual snob’s safe harbour. You can read Trouble without registering that Ms Christensen is a serious novelist — the first time, anyway. It’s the same with Hitchcock: the man presented himself as a popular entertainer, almost as a vaudevillian.  Hitchcock’s elegance is not apparent if you’re thinking of Henry James or Colm Tóibín. Kate Christensen is even more modest: she writes as if she were undertaking nothing more arduous than this entry. As the author of this entry, however, I’m uniquely placed to note the richness of composition in Ms Christensen’s everyday-sounding work.

So, what was going to be a simple bit of praise for the new novel alarmingly devolved into an ambitious think piece that I wasn’t prepared to write well. So I did the only thing that could be done: I watched a video with Kathleen.

¶ Matins: Andrew Sullivan wonders why the New York Times publishes an Op-Ed piece by a “hard-right neocon” whose views on Iraq were “so terribly wrong.” Mr Sullivan’s colleague at The Atlantic, Joshua Green, wonders pretty much the same thing — vis-à-vis Mr Sullivan himself! (via Brainiac)

¶ Lauds: When I was a kid, shirt cardboard was my all-purpose source of fun; what a drag it was, waiting for my father to wear the shirts when they came back from the laundry. It wouldn’t have made much sense, but if that stiff card stock had been corrugated, I might have grown up to be Chris Gilmour. (via The Best Part)

¶ Prime: The Times has started a new business blog, entitled You’re the Boss. you’re the boss. Because we believe in small businesses at The Daily Blague, we’re going to give it a trial.

¶ Tierce: Laura Italiano overdoes it a bit at the Post, but that’s what they their reporters to do.

¶ Sext: It’s official: dogs are brighter than cats. (Don’t tell our backer that we ran this story, though.)

¶ Nones: Was the United States meddling in the Iranian election dispute when it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown? (And Twitter famously complied.)

¶ Vespers: Now that Penguin is republishing classic thrillers by pioneer Eric Ambler, it’s good that John Self is here to appreciate them ably.

¶ Compline: A thoughtful and interesting piece about abortion? Surely we jest, right? Wrong. Richard Crary surprrises. (But don’t worry, you probably won’t be asked to change your mind.)

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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It was a nice out-and-about day. The out-and-about part lasted for about four hours. First, I had two neighborhood errands. Never mind about them. Then, the Museum. After the Museum, I stopped in at Crawford Doyle for a copy of The New Valley, Josh Weil’s triptych of novellas (lovely phrase; everyone’s using it; and especially resonant after a stroll through the Museum’s Netherlandish gallery), and then walked down 81st Street to Willy’s, my barbershop.

Since the wait wouldn’t be long, I sat down and started in on “Ridge Weather,” the first of the novellas. It was not possible to take the measure of the prose, though, because a radio was blaring “Baby Love” and bringing back memories of a Supremes dance party at an off-campus house in South Bend in 1969, um, forty years ago. Also there was a futbol game on the television. In the barber chair, I did not attempt to read; my spectacles get in the way.

There are two barbers at Willy’s, and the customer in the other chair was — what? Not fully grown but beginning to be full of it. Baby fat lasts longer in these precincts than it does elsewhere, for obvious reasons, but that is all that the kid was carrying: it was entirely in his face. He rather aggressively spoke Spanish with the barber, and if that made me wince a little it made me smile a lot. At the end of his trim — I could see everything thanks to mirrors in front of and behind me — I got to see the application of this mysterious mousse that I hear about, and that makes me wonder what the men who wear it are thinking. (Young ladies have informed me that it is a lot more like Brylcreem than anything I’d ever put in my hair — if I had any.) I wish you could have seen the kid puff up when he asked for “five dollars back”; among the many other things that he was new to was the swagger of tipping. Then there were the handshakes and the hasta lew-ego!

(I was so much worse at his age — but I don’t want to sound competitive here.)

Then to Agata & Valentina, for a chunk of reggiano parmegiano. Somehow, the bill came to $123.63. I guess I did buy a few other things, among them a hunk of salami — well, more like the stern of a salami — for (let’s see here) $36.40. Just an ounce or two shy of three and a half pounds — not bad! As Kathleen said, salami lasts forever, and, yes, it does. The end isn’t always as pleasant as the beginning, but it does last. I’ll let you know when it’s finished, but not my age and weight.

There were two shows to see at the Museum — two that I hadn’t seen, that is. And can you believe that I read about one of them in The Eonomist? That was strange. The Times must have written it up, and I must have missed the write-up. Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages. I won’t say much about this breathtaking show now, except this: while the drawings reproduce nicely in the catalogue, what does not reproduce is the ninth-centuryness of the drawings that are that old. The Museum may be full of items that are far older than c 840 CE, but, as books go, c 840 CE is old. Over a thousand years old, and there it is, under glass, looking as crisp as if it were bound up yesterday, and there I am, standing in a city that didn’t exist for most of the intervening millennium, and in a building that most of the people around me probably took for antique.   

And the drawings are amazing. Sure, you’ve seen stuff like it before — but not quite like it. There’s an Ascension in the margins of one book that’s really quite Baroque.

The other show was a modest collection of photographs from the Second Empire. It’s astonishing, what can happen in twenty years. I feel that nothing half so dramatic as the rise and fall of Napoleon III and the recreation of Paris has occurred since 1989. Allowing, that is, for their lack of telephones, light bulbs, central heating and (for all but a few early adopters) indoor plumbing. The Second Empire was definitely the Western World’s first caffeinated jolt of modern times.

When I got home, I cleaned up and wrote my head off. I do wish that Eric Patton would publish his fascinating and enviable posts on Thursdays and Fridays, because reading them (which can’t be helped) on Daily Office days cuts into the dutiful consumption of feeds.

 ¶ Matins: At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf brings the Twitter revolution back home: will an “information elite” shape political action even before most citizens are aware of events?

¶ Lauds: An interesting look, written in Varietese, at the “growth” — mostly prospective, if you ask me — of musical theatre in France. The French have hardly developed a real taste for grand opera yet, if you ask me.

¶ Prime: James Surowiecki winds up a column on the price of oil with a call for a gas tax. I’m all for it, too, but — well, read on.

¶ Tierce: The scene of the crime, described.

¶ Sext: Ralph Gamelli elaborates on that great New Yorker cartoon caption, “How about never? Is “never” good for you?: “Read My Body Language,” at TMN.

¶ Nones: More bitchery-at-sea in Asian waters: as the reddit post put it, “Chinese submarine collides with US Warship towing submarine-locating device. Irony surrenders.”

¶ Vespers: James Scott, at The Rumpus, writes so powerfully about Josh Weil’s triptych of novellas, The New Valley, that I’ve added an errand to my list: get this book.

¶ Compline: Eric Margolis discusses four persistent myths about World War II. Watch your toes!

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¶ Lord Chesterfield dispenses some advice that is violently at odds with the Sixties ethos in which I came of age.

The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, and friendships, require a degree of good-breeding, both to preserve and cement them. If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass night as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good-breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.

I have had to work my way toward understanding the truth of this the hard way. I’ve gone a little farther than the earl: I believe that there is not a moment in life, no matter how solitary, that does not require the attentiveness and respect that are the pillars of good breeding.

¶ Another homily in Moby-Dick: Melville concludes a brisk chapter on the sprucing-up of a whaler after the rendering of the beast into commercial commodities with another attempt, as it seems to me, to give contemporary life an Old-Testament look, a sort of spiritual Williamsburg-ing.

… when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, this is but man-killing!! Yet his is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when — There she blows! — thee ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.

Oh! the metempsychosis!

My word exactly.

¶ In the middle of the monkey-business in Chapter XXV of Don Quixote, I hit upon another passage that reminded me of the operatic sensibility that infuses so much of this book; not that Don Quixote is like comic opera, but rather the reverse: the book inspired the pace and the tone of comic opera.

What could be more Mozartean — or Verdian — than the reaction scene in which each member of the ensemble has a different response to the wonders just transpired:

Don Quixote was dumbfounded, Sancho astounded, the cousin baffled, the page stunned, the man who told about the braying stupefied, the innkeeper perplexed, and, in short, all who heard the words of the puppet master were amazed…

All these reactions are, in fact, the same, but Cervantes’ determination to come up with a different verb for each member of the company sets each slightly apart from the others, an individuation that lies at the heart of comic opera’s greatness.

¶ Squillions: In a letter from Beverly Hills dated 18 December 1955, Noël Coward retails some tittle-tattle about Clifton Webb (Waldo Lydecker in Laura):

He is leaving Clifton’s today and has taken an apartment in the same place as the boys [Charles Russell and Lance Hamilton] as we considered it unwise for him to stay here. This has caused a great fluttering in the colony and no-one knows where they’re at. He has handled the Clifton situation with consummate skill and every prospect pleases, except that it was getting near the point of no return. Poor Clifton is always on the verge of Umbrage about something or other and this this not helped by Harry Pissalatums which happens very very very often indeed indeedy.

If editor Barry Day had glossed this coy report of gay romance, and explained the meaning of “Harry Pissalatums,” he would only have been doing his job. Why he bothers to identify Russell and Hamilton but not do his job makes me throw up my hands — hardly for the first time in this inexplicably bad book.

I’m a bit agitated at this evening. That’s the word for it, too. I’m not anxious, really, or worried, or fretful; just stirred up. All right, I’m a litle bit fretful. WiFi connectivity issues again. Nothing like yesterday’s, but now that I have some perspective I can give you an idea of how screwed up things were yesterday morning.

• TimeWarner had a brief problem that shut down Internet access (although not “connectivity” for a little while — so far as I know, it lasted for no more than fifteen minutes. So that was one reason for the 404.
• Then there was the netbook’s power save/WiFi access problem that I didn’t even know about. Again, signals loud and strong, but no connection.
• Finally, the WiFi booster in the bedroom has been giving us both grief. I suspect that the cable connecting the router to the booster (without which the booster wouldn’t be worth the electiricity that it consumes) has been crimped by running, for a winter, beneath two sash windows. Must replace.

The hair it tears. How’s one to fix what’s on the fritz when everything is on the fritz?

For the rest of it, though, I was simply agitated, like clothes in a washing machine. I got a tremendous amount of writing done. That ought to leave one calm and glowing, but it rarely does, perhaps when nothing is actually finished. Not finishing things is fine; I’m trying to get into a rhythm of working on things, instead of trying to dash them off in one go. Call me ‘elated’ rather than ‘contented.’ Agitated.

At eleven at night, an old friend called, to announce a long-considered career change. And a long-expected one. I’d been worried about the posture of the decision, foreseeing one of those “You-can’t-fire-me-because-I-quit” scenarios that sound good for about a minute. As it is, nothing in our friend’s situation precludes an animacable parting of the ways. At our age, though, this sort of thing is serious, heart attack serious. Our friend almost had a heart attack just making the final steps toward the decision. Agitating.

During the day, my Web master and I exchanged several emails about automating the DVD project that I’ve been writing about this week in the Diary; we also came to terms on a plan that meets all requirements of masculine interest: it’s more ambitious, more expensive, and more exciting than anything that crossed my mind on Monday. It’s so serious, in fact, that, as I wrote to Steve, I don’t for once have ants in my pants. Hey, I’m still getting used to Blidgets, and feeling guilty about having so few fabulous insights for the Aviary of Ideas. Ambition + expense + excitement = Agitation.

Finally, there was the croaking woman. I had picked up supplies at the Food Emporium and collected the mail, and I was waiting for the elevator by myself when a shortish woman in a blonde bob that she was much too old for wheeled up on her cell phone. She was walking, but she seemed to glide; she was certainly oblivious. How stupid do you have to be to walk right up to an elevator door that is not unlikely to open on a crowd of exiting passengers. But she was on her phone, talking in a toneless baritone that so dramatically amplified the awfulness of her yakking that I could not board when the elevator arrived. I could not trust myself to share the space with her. Had I followed her into the elevator cab, I should have been obliged to set down my shopping bags and apply a garrotte to her neck. The woman was the most socially unacceptable creature that I have seen since the New Year. A package of heedlessly obnoxious unattractiveness, she needed to be tossed to the lions — but the lions are in the Bronx, and presumably too well-fed not to be as repulsed by her as I was. Che agita!

I’d love to say that I know of something that’s going to stop the agitation and quiet me down, but I don’t. Once again, I’m wondering how I got to be sixty  before I confronted the fact that I am, very simply, high strung.

¶ Matins: Not everybody likes the High Line Park. (via Infrastructurist) Make that “not everybody + one.”(via kottke.org) 

¶ Lauds: Smashingly handsome and intelligent design, from Jorge Chamorro (be sure to click through from The Best Part).

¶ Prime: At The Economist, Banyan worries about the recrudescence, this time in Asia, of the world-shattering, sea-power-obsessed ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan.

¶ Tierce: Warren Whitaker, the T & E attorney who drafted the doubtful 2004 codicil that, prosecutors maintain, Brooke Astor was incompetent to execute, took his instructions from F X Morrissey, co-defendant in the Marshall trial.

¶ Sext: Ha! They knew it was a hoax all along — so they say, at Bentham Science Publishers, a rather hucksterish-sounding organization that just accepted a paper submitted by scientists at the Center for Research on Applied Phrenology.

¶ Nones: How weird is this: Saudi princess runs up huge bills in Paris, then refuses to pay, claiming diplomatic immunity. Huh? (Then she pays — one of the bills, anyway.)

¶ Vespers: If you can stand to wait for the book to appear in shops, read the Rumpus interview with Kate Christensen, whose Trouble is a very thoughtful summer read.

¶ Compline: Alex Krupp defends KWL charts. I had absolutely no idea what KWL charts are. Wikipedia to the rescue. As for the charts…

(more…)

Kathleen stayed home today, of course, but she felt a little better as the day wore on; in fact, she began to be bored — always a good sign. I felt better, too, once I’d talked to the doctor, who reassured me by confiding that, three weeks ago, he was laid low with the same symptoms.

And that was all there was to today. Little jobs, bits of reading, work on the Daily Office. A very special and unlooked-for package in the mail; the moment I spied the return address, I began (rather entitledly, I confess) to hope that it contained something like what in fact turned out to be inside. On the drawbacks side of the ledger, the netbook had connectivity problems that seemed to have something to do with — but it turned out to be something else entirely, something that I should never have thought of, or known how to fix. My patron saint proxied the machine about an hour ago and determined that the cut-outs had something to do with the netbook’s power management protocols. It seems that I toggled into the wrong mode. There is much to be learned &c.

Meanwhile, my DVD/Portico project bumped along nicely. My other patron saint reminded me of — duh! — the <br> tag. It is totally typical that I have been able to conceive of this project, for which I have great ambitions — as a way not only of keeping track of my movies but of grouping them in “if you liked this you’ll like that” arrangements, and making Web pages out of it to boot — while forgetting all about the <br> tag in the middle of it all. That’s why I did not become a mathetmatician. It’s why I was great at trigonometry. In trigonometry, there are tables to remind you which particular version of <br> you needed.  

Meanwhile, Jean Ruaud published a third gallery of New York images at SmugMug over the weekend, and they’re all great, but I love the shots of the Cloisters more than I can say, especially the one of this feller.

¶ Matins: In the current issue of The Econimist, Lexington outlines some embarrassing figures about the hours that American children don’t put in at school.

¶ Lauds: Jazz since 1959 — the year of Kind of Blue, Giant Steps, and Time Out — recordings that I hope you have in your collection, whether you’re an aficionado or not! (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: A story about the rivalry between Comptroller of the Currency John C Dugan and FDIC chair Sheila Bair illustrates the biggest problem in regulation: updating/upgrading it in the middle of a turf war. (How medieval is “comptroller”?)

¶ Tierce: When I saw the headline of this story about Ruth Madoff, “The Loneliest Woman in New York,” I asked myself how she gets her hair colored these days. Not where she used to!

¶ Sext: Will the Fiat-ization of Chrysler deflate the American male’s libido? Gary Kamiya’s tongue-in-cheek reports ends with a truly dandy suggestion.

¶ Nones: How the United States ought to respond to the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: stay the course already set by President Obama.

¶ Vespers: Michael Dirda writes about Patricia Highsmith in The New York Review of Books: “This Woman Is Dangerous.”

¶ Compline: Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the plight of the genuinely poor in this country, and finds that, just as it is in most places, decent (and legitimate) shelter is the big problem.

(more…)

¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 9 October 1749 is magnificently typical. He begins with reference to his son’s route frm Venice to Rome, “which … I advised you to make along the coast of the Adriatic, through Rimini, Loretto, Ancona, etc, places that are all worth seeing, but not worth staying at.” About Rome itself, he writes powerfully about the papacy and even more trenchantly about the Jesuits

whose Society I look upon to be the most able and  best governed society in the world, Get acquainted, if you can, with their General, who always resides at Rome; and who, though he has no seeming power out of his own Society, has (it may be) more real influence over the whole world, than any temporal Prince in it. They have almost engrossed the education of youth, they are, in general, confessors to most of the Princes in Europe; and they are the principal missionaries out of it; which three articles give them a most excessive influence, and solid advantages … Converse with them, frequent them, court them; but know them.

¶ Chapter 96 of Moby-Dick, “The Try-Works,” is as overwritten as any in this monstrous book, but its tone is consistent, almost disciplined. The only false note is the ridiculous mathematical observation about “bodies gliding along the cycloid.” The description of the ship’s cutting through the sea at night, its try-pots blazing and smoking, the “barbaric brilliancy” of the sailors’ teeth against their matted, tawny faces, is remarkably free of Melville’s distracting irrelevancies. Soon enough, however, the prophet steps forth.

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet.

¶ Don Quixote admonishes the page whom the party encounters on the road:

… for what does it matter if you are killed in the first battle or skirmish, or are shot by artillery, or blown up by a mine? It is all dying, and the end of the story, and according to Terence, the soldier killed in battle looks better than the one who is safe and sound in flight, and the good soldier achieves as much fame as his obedience to his captains and to those who command him.

Really.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward debuts at Las Vegas and triumphs in his first television “special.” A passing phrase in a letter from Blue Harbour triggered a bit of gag reflex, so fiendishly did it capture the meretriciousness of television, a falsity that makes genuine theatre look as true as Euclid:

They seem to have done good preparatory work on the show and brought the plans for the set, which look very exciting. 68 feet in depth and with the series of curtains which will part and roll themselves up into pillars as Mary [Martin] and I advance for our entrance…

From time to time, I look back on the Fifties as a golden age of television. But what it was the golden age of was pretentious junk.

It wasn’t the most thrilling weekend in the world, but it did what a weekend ought to do: refresh and restore. It would have done the job a lot better if Kathleen hadn’t been struck by a nasty intestinal flu. Is anything more miserable? Being me, I hated my impotence. The only thing that I could do that was guaranteed to be effective was to leave Kathleen alone.

But I read all of Jeff in Venice, and really liked it; and I concocted another chicken salad, this one with avocados and corn, parsley and cilantro, in a curry mayonnaise. Of course, there was far too much for one.

Now: how boring can I be about my DVD collection? In one sentence: since I no longer have room to keep the DVDs in their plastic boxes, I’m storing them in paper sleeves, with round plastic windows on one side and Dymo labels on the other. It’s all very neat and efficient.

It’s all very neat and efficient, that is, if I know what I’m looking for. Most of the time, I don’t. I paw through the boxes just like anybody else. (I find that the first DVD that captures my interest is the one that I’ll end up watching, so now I just go with it.) In an intermediate phase of disc storage, I kept 250 movies on a bookshelf in the hallway; these were the pictures least likely to require a special frame of mind for viewing. (Consider, as an alternative, Eraserhead. You may be someone who would watch David Lynch’s amazing subcutaneous debut without any prior deliberation, but I’m not.) The rest of the collection — more than half — was kept in vinyl albums from Staples. Each album held 96 discs, variously grouped: Movies made before 1970. Foreign-language DVDs. TV series (I have almost all of the Inspector Morses. ) I would leaf through the albums in search of something to watch. Sometimes, the relevant information about a DVD is printed in maddeningly small letters around the inner rim, but, for the most part, each DVD is a kind of poster for itself.

For reasons that I’ll spare you right now, the prospect of flipping through the drawers of paper sleeves and uniform Dymo labels had to be rejected out of hand. If nothing else, it would subject the sleeves and the drawers to a lot of wear and tear.

I had a brainstorm. As your reward for wading through the preceding verbiage, a picture will tell the rest of the story. My very provisional “Top 20” list, at Portico.

Other “categories” to come:

• Top 100
• Screwball comedies
• Films noirs.
• Depressing movies
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Really scary!
• Corporate sci-fi
• “Why did I buy this?”

Conceivably, any one movie could appear in all of the categories — that’s the beauty part. For example, Mr and Mrs Smith would appear on both the Screwball Comedy and Alfred Hitchcock pages.

So, I got that going. There is much to be learned about the HTML of tables. I’ll try not to be the one who has to.

last Week at Portico: ¶ Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn gives us a character, Eilis Lacey, capable of replacing the hysterical women in Dostoevsky with a deadly quiet. ¶ Carlos Cuarón’s Rudo y Cursi re-unites the stars of his very popular Y Tu Mamá También, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, but it doesn’t seem to have been taken up by that film’s audience. I found the new picture tighter and more memorable; perhaps what I mean by that is that the story of Rudo y Cursi is itself somewhat more grown up. ¶ And, 0f course, the Book Review review (“Telling the Tale”).

Of all the side-effects of discovering my vocation at the age of sixtyish, the urge to have a distinct workplace is the most unexpected. For all of my life, I have been a dedicated home-worker. So far as I have worked at all, that is — and it didn’t amount to much until a few years (or a few months!) ago. I’m talking about work here, not “productivity.” I’m talking about meeting defined goals whether I’m in the mood to do so or not.

Although I still believe in the ideal of a harmonious (if hardly seamless) overlay of domestic life and personal industry — living above the shop, as it were — I recognize the impediments more honestly than I used to do. If I were a Victorian master of the house, I could close my study door and expect not to be disturbed; but in fact my position is much closer to that of the Victorian mistress of the house: I’m the one who has to see that the household hums. Don’t we all? Only the richest of the rich can afford to employ the kind of servant who is truly capable of housekeeping, and in fact such employees are not called servants anymore.

So: wouldn’t it be nice to “go to the office” for at least part of every day? Wouldn’t it be loverly to have a room, somewhere in the neighborhood — a studio apartment, say — to which I could move the contents of the blue room (books, mostly). I wouldn’t have a landline, and hardly anyone has my cellphone number. For a few hours every day, I wouldn’t see anything that didn’t pertain to site-related projects.

That’s the problem right there: I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace. I happen to be one of those creatures who is more disturbed by what he can’t see than by what’s in plain sight. I’d worry about a break-in at home. I’d remember that I’d forgotten to water the pots on the balcony. I’d obsess about dinner (what to make, which store to shop at, the possibilities of ordering in). I think far too much about dinner as it is, but I don’t obsess, because the kitchen is right here, and I can have a look in the freezer at any time. (Later, thanks!)

So I pigeonhole the dream of a separate workplace among my other fantasies — arrangements that cannot obtain in the universe as it is currently constituted. Then I get out the vacuum cleaner.  

Oops. I came home from an evening at the theatre determined to scribble a few notes about the play that we saw, Accent on Youth, at MTC — starring the fantastic David Hyde Pierce. Whilst taking little rests from that exercise, I checked in at Facebook, &c &c. Is there anybody at Facebook older than I am? If so, I don’t want to know it — that would be even more depressing. In any case, I forgot all about my dear diary.

Considering last night’s 3 AM lights-out, I was up fairly early (9:20). I can’t tell you what I did this morning, so let’s call it fractal. I had a fractal morning. Fractal is how I always feel after a few hours with Google Reader. Eventually, I had lunch, and then I wrote drafts for two Portico pages — the minimum.

And then the fun began, except I’m being ironic; the attempt to print three checks via Intuit reminded me that the desktop computer does not like to print checks — although it will print reports. Also two of the ink cartridges had to be replaced — or so the machine told me; how’m I supposed to know for certain? The whole printer/running  back and forth the length of the apartment business lasted for just about an hour. I did not have a tantrum, because I didn’t have time for a tantrum. I wanted to clear up the paperasse, and I succeeded. It worked out well, actually. Ordinarily, when I’ve had a productive day, I wish I could just stay home and be even more productive. The printer nonsense made going out seem a godsend.

When we came home, I saw that someone was waiting for me to confirm a Facebook friendship. I did so at once, and then I gave Kathleen five guesses at who it was. “You’ll never guess” got narrowed down in ways that I can no longer recapture. I wish I could, because Kathleen guessed right the first time.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, and this old man wants to snore.

¶ Matins: Zachary Wolfe believes (or, at least, hopes) that the future does not look good for a third Bloomberg term. But perhaps Mr Wolfe was writing before the ruckus broke out in Albany.

¶ Lauds: Errol Morris’s remarkable series, Bamboozling Ourselves, looks into art forgeries and other deceptions — although “looks” is putting it mildly.(Master link list here.)

¶ Prime: John Lanchester’s lengthy but extremely entertaining  essay on the banking bailout, “It’s Finished,” has been generating lots of buzz, at least at sites that I visit. Someone wrote somewhere that it ends “unhappily,” but I don’t agree.

¶ Tierce: Toward the end of John Eligon’s account of Astor butler Christopher Ely’s testimony, my heart went into a clutch. The most horrific thing about this trial so far is the damage that it has been done to the reputation of attorney Henry Christensen.

¶ Sext: It’s possible that Matt Blind has been in the bookstore biz too long. He wants to fire all the customers. Find out where you fit in his taxonomy (via kottke.org)

¶ Nones: Michael Sheen meets the Queen. The real one.

¶ Vespers: At The Morning News, Man in  Boston Robert Birnbaum rounds up some good books about Cuba. Sadly, he omits Tomorrow They Will Kiss.

¶ Compline: The Obamas and the Arts: a new model for the United States.

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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This will be brief. I have spent the day slowly, laboriously, and deliberately. The feeling that little was accomplished must yield (if only it would) to the realization that I worked all day, every minute of it, really; and, anyway, tomorrow’s Daily Office required a lot of reading. Writing the Daily Office takes no time at all, once I’ve decided on the links. Deciding on the links involves reading what’s at the other end of them.

Take a story that I decided not to write about: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s stay — very temporary, as it turned out — of the Chrysler bankruptcy case. I decided not to write about it because there was really nothing to write about. If the Court decided to hear the appeal from those Indiana people, then there would be something to say, although perhaps not by me. But Justice Ginsburg’s stay was an automatic sort of thing, pro forma.

The difficulty is that I read the story before deciding not to write about it. Of course I read it! It was the sort of story that one really ought to read. The sale of Chrysler to Fiat may not be the most wonderful bankruptcy outcome ever, but its happening quickly is of the essence, and the opposition, however principled, was wrong-headed (as, indeed, principled gestures too often are). I read the story in my capacity as a member of the general public, and also in my capacity as chief cook and bottle-washer here at The Daily Blague. I read a lot of stories that way every day. It’s the Big Noise of 2009: All of a sudden I’m a Walter Burns wannabe.

In the evening, just for fun and larks, I fought another skirmish in the video chat wars. Don’t. Ask. The upshot was a jolly conversation via Skype that lasted as long as my friend and I wanted it to do. On the right machine, too.

Something to look forward to: David Hyde Pierce, in Accent on Youth. We’ve got tickets for tomorrow night. I plan to be easily entertained.

¶ Matins: Will George Dangerfield’s 1935 classic, The Strange Death of Liberal England (one of the few history books that everybody ought to read, if only because everybody who has read it seems to love it) be echoed by a book called something like The Strange Death of Labour England? David Runciman foretells.

¶ Lauds: Scott Cantrell wonders if piano competitions ought to take place behind screens (as orchestral auditions are); he doesn’t think that a blind pianist would have won this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition had the jury been blind.

¶ Prime: Andrew Price notes the gender gap in unemployment, at GOOD.

¶ Tierce: After Mily de Gernier’s testimony, prosecutors will have to rethink the top count in their indictment of Anthony Marshall. That’s the one that describes Mr Marshall’s sale of the late philanthropist’s Childe Hassam as “grand larceny.”

¶ Sext: Choire Sicha: Which gender is superior, and why this means holding women to higher standards.

¶ Nones: Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë has awarded the Dalai Lama honorary Parisian citizenship. Not an act of state, stutters President Sarkozy!

¶ Vespers: Stephen Elliott interviews Dave Eggers, at The Rumpus. Once Mr Eggers’s forthcoming book (Zeitoun) has been dealt with, the conversation turns, very interestingly, to print and poor kids.

¶ Compline: Alex Krupp shows how the Industrial Revolution’s grudge against human nature leads to intellectual impoverishment — via Benjamin Spock! “How intellectual pollution has crippled American children,” at Sensemaking.

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¶ Lord Chesterfield can’t be charged with having invented “cool,” but his passionate dispassion and his anxious dislike of enthusiasm have a modern note. To his son, in Italy at the time:

… do not become a Virtuoso of small wares. Form a taste of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, if you please, by a careful examination of the works of the best ancient and modern artists; those are liberal arts, and a real taste and knowledge of them become a man of fashion very well. But beyond certain bounds, the Man of Taste ends, and the frivolous Virtuoso begins.

¶ Moby-Dick: Chapters 94 and 95. No, we are not there yet, not nearly.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affection, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, — Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come, let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

What repels me about this passage is the bedecking of frankly carnal pleasure in the high-flying abstractions of Scripture.

¶ In Don Quixote, our hero descends into the Cave of Montesinos, where he encounters the heroes of old legends, enchanted by Merlin. Sancho is distressed by his master’s account.

“Holy God!” shouted Sancho. “Is it possible that there are in the world enchanters and enchantments so strong that they have turned my master’s good sense into foolishness and madness? Oh, Señor, Señor, for God’s sake think about what you are doing, and take back your honor, and don’t believe this nonsense that has reduced and lessened your good sense!”

“Since you love me, Sancho, you speak in this fashion,” said Don Quixote, “and since you have little experience in the things of this world, all things that are in any way difficult seem impossible to you; but in the course of time, as I have already said, I shall recount to you some of what I have seen down there, which will make you believe what I have recounted here, whose truth admits neither argument nor dispute.”

Cognitive dissonance erupts when Cervantes describes the enchanted body of Durandarte stretched out on a marble selpuchre: I start hearing Titurel’s sonorous voice calling from his crypt, in Parsifal.

¶ Squillions takes us to Las Vegas, where Noël Coward was contracted to entertain in 1955. As a man of the theatre, Coward appreciated the place for what it was.

In the classier casinos beams of light shoot down from baroque ceilings on the masses of earnest morons flinging their money down the drain. The sound is fascinating, a steady hum of conversation against a background of rhumba music and the noise of the fruit machines, the clink of silver dollars, quarters and nickels, and the subdued shouts of the croupiers. There are lots of pretty women about but I think, on the whole, sex takes a comparatively back seat. Every instinct and desire is concentrated on money. I expected that this would exasperate me but oddly enough it didn’t. The whole fantasia in on such a colossal scale that it is almost stimulating. … The gangsters who run the place are all urbane and charming. I had a feeling that if I opened a rival casino I would be battered to death with the utmost efficiency, but if I remained on my own ground as a most highly paid entertainer, I could trust them all the way.

How much I would love this book if it only contained nothing but the letters of Noël Coward!

The day was, necessarily, a quiet one. Staying up last night and sitting outside during the storm — rather more wine than usual was consumed. This morning, I couldn’t face the prospect of paying bills in the afternoon. But I knew how much worse I’d feel if I went with Plan B, which was to watch Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) in the blue room, while usefully engaged in the folding of (two) T-shirts. I saved the video for after the bills.

Watching movies in the blue room is a new possibility — well, a recently restored one. When we moved into this apartment in 1983, the television was in the blue room, along with the dining table and the pull-out couch. the blue room was our dining-room/guest-room combo. And our first VCR. Yikes. I don’t remember when the small TV was removed from the breakfront bookshelf behind my desk. We went without cable reception for a few years in the late Nineties, but had it hooked back up in 2000, in order to watch the debates. I still want to cry, just thinking about those debates.

But in 2000, we watched television in the living room, on a TET LCD unit that could double as a computer monitor. It was always my plan to upgrade the living room, someday, to an orthodox flat screen, and to use the TET in the blue room, in both of its capacities. Watching movies in the blue room would be good if I wanted to watch something late at night, or if Kathleen were home sick, because the speakers in the living room are right on the other side of a thin wall from the bed’s headboard, and even moderate volumes of sound carry through.

The “upgrade someday” occurred in February, but it took until this past weekend to connect the TET to a DVD player and to reconnect the Tannoy speakers to the amplifier. Time was when not a year went by without my engaging in a major stereo rewiring project, or at least adding some vital new piece of equipment, such as the Sony Minidisc player that I had such hopes for (until flash memory pulled a pfffft! on that). In the past year, I’ve given a great deal of this equipment away, and there is still a tower of it in the living room, only three components of which are actually in use. I put off hooking up the blue room DVD player in part because I wasn’t sure that I’d remember how to do it.

And you would have thought that I’d never hooked up sound equipment before, given the huffing, puffing, and cursing that filled the blue room with blue streaks in the latter part of Saturday afternoon. I had stopped in at Radio Shack a few days earlier to buy cables and wires and stuff that I already had, squirreled away somewhere in the apartment, but was too lazy to look for. In the event, I used none of it; everything that I ended up needing came out of a drawer in a closet.

The DVD player that I was hooking up was the first one that I bought, way back when; made by Toshiba, it had a single tray but could hold two DVDs. Now, why, you ask, would anyone want a two-disc capability? Because I got more for my money, obviously. I didn’t care that it was unnecessary. I didn’t really know that it was unnecessary. More was always better.

Everthing was hooked up and working — wow! — when I ran into a slight snag. It didn’t surprise me that I hadn’t held onto the Toshiba’s remote-control, but it was deeply vexing to discover that, without it, there was no way to advance the disc beyond the Play/Scene Selection/Setup menu. Such frills did not exist when DVDs were introduced. The first ones played just like CDs: you dropped one onto the tray and closed it, and the feature started up without ado. But that was then, ha ha.

Astonishingly, I Gave Up. Quietly and without even the suggestion of a tirade, I Let Go.

I moved the furniture back into place, gathered up unneeded cables and debris, such as twisties and cellophane wrapping, and even ran the vacuum over the carpet. It seemed clear that I would have to buy a new DVD player, but it could be hooked up painlessly, without moving anything. I did not need to watch DVDs in the blue room — not right now. I could let it go. Like a recovered paralytic, I marveled at my ability to get on with my life even though every attempt to move hotel Rwanda beyond a head shot of Don Cheadle failed. At the same time, I suffered phantom-limb syndrome: where was my tantrum? Why wasn’t I tearing down 86th Street to buy a new player right now, instead of waiting to clean up and cool off?

It was while I was calmly drying off after a shower that I was rewarded. Abandoning the struggle to make something happen liberated my brain, which remembered something: at a time when I had a number of Sony components, I was frequently irritated when clicking the remote for one unit would set them all playing at once. This recollection came at the end of several thoughts. The second was that I would not run down the street to P C Richard or to Best Buy to by a new DVD player after all, but would wait for an all-region player to be delivered by Amazon (I have a lot of French movies that haven’t been released in North America). The Toshiba all-region player in the bedroom, after wall, was/is a dandy machine … and this is where my Sony memory kicked in.

Sure enough, the “Enter” button on the all-region’s remote control, which I bought about three years ago, got Hotel Rwanda to play on our prehistoric machine. I turned it right off, and felt extraordinarily pleased with myself.

Ne le dis à personne played without a hitch.

¶ Matins: From The Infrastructurist, a list of 36 ways in which streetcars trump buses. Despite some internal ambiguities — streetcars are both cool (#6) and nostalgic (#12) — and a bit of padding (#20), the list will make you wish that we were already there.

¶ Lauds: FROG schools may be as unlikely as fairy-tale princes, but these pre-fab classrooms do look good. Especially considering the nightmarish alternative…

¶ Prime: David Carr goes to two very different media parties, and his report makes me think of the last chapters of Proust, but run backwards.

¶ Tierce: Collateral damage from the Marshall trial: trusts and estates lawyer Henry Christensen’s nomination for membership at the Century Association has been tabled, pending the conclusion of the trial.

¶ Sext: Forget three meals a day. Americans consume a fourth: all day snacking. In other news, Choire Sicha sees Hangover, reviews audience.

¶ Nones: A cheering story at the Guardian, appended to an item noting that global arms spending has reached $1.47 trillian: “America a weapons supermarket for terrorists, inquiry finds.”

¶ Vespers: Alain de botton asks a good question: why don’t more writers write about work? Considering, you know, the importance of jobs and stuff. (via The Rumpus)

¶ Compline: At the Chronicle of Higher Education — the right place to begin asking — Joseph Marr Cronin and Howard E Horton wonder if undergraduate degrees are the new bubble. (via Arts Journal)

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