Last week’s Blidgets, meet this week’s Tweets. Thanks to Steve Laico, of Searchlight Consulting, for both developments, which make The Daily Blague’s sidebars truly dynamic. That’s to say that they change because other things change.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s implementation that matters — and, without Steve, you wouldn’t be reading my great ideas, and deciding that, well, maybe, they’re not that great. With all due &c.

In any case, I offer the ideas in the Aviary to anyone who wants to run with them. Don’t think I’m being generous; if you can’t copyright a recipe, you can’t protect a naked little undeveloped idea, either. But perhaps someone else can.

It was a good day, even though I woke up late and took a while to get started. The first thing that I did when I sat down at my desk was to put together a playlist for the day. I didn’t try to make it perfect; I aimed, rather, for a list that would lend itself to improvement — to substitution, really. Instead of Karl Böhm’s late Mozart, how about Karajan’s. Instead of Locatelli’s Opus 1 (a new addition to the collection), maybe some more Sammartini, if and when I can find it. And what would happen if I stuck Ein Heldenleben where Romeo & Juliet is now?

As for the end of the day, I spent it in the kitchen. It has been ages since I spent an evening in the kitchen. I used to, all the time; but that was before The Daily Blague was a twinkle in my eye. My kitchen is no longer a hobby; it’s a utility. Just as I have a plan for paying the bills every month, so I need a kitchen management system that, while not interesting in itself, is easily operated. It consists, for the most part, in taking down the contents of half of two cabinet shelves and checking out the stuff on the top shelf of the refrigerator door — the shelf that’s held up with duct tape. (The refrigerator is not three years old, but that’s modern plastic for you. Kathleen promises me a superdeluxe, freezer-at-the-bottom refrigerator, but I don’t hold her to it; I’m managing all right as it is.)

When I was through with my dinner (spaghetti alla carbonara — my default kitchen dinner), I decided to make a batch of madeleines. I do love to bake, and madeleines have been a specialty of mine ever since my mother brought back two madeleine tins from a trip to Paris in the early Seventies. (Of course I had begged her to do so.) In those days, the Proustian experience was a strictly literary, and not at all culinary, phenomenon. Also, there was no Pam: you had to butter and flour the grooved molds one by one, and it was a royal chienne.

The interesting thing, I find, is that even the modern Silpat, allegedly nonstick, madeleine molds require Pam. So I don’t much use the full-sized molds that I’ve collected. When I make a batch of madeleines ordinaires, I use the those tins from Paris to make two dozen regular madeleines, and two Silpat forms to make about three dozen mini-madeleines. I keep the big ones, and send the minis to the office with Kathleen.

Baking these shell-shaped treats — they’re neither cakes nor cookies, but something in between — used to be an affectation, I’ll admit. But, by now, I’ve been making them rather longer than anybody of my age, and probably as often as anybody on earth who isn’t either paid to make them or slightly mad. At an early age, baking madeleines became something that I do. Connecting them with Proust has lapsed into an afterthought. But I do wonder what his grandmother at Illiers would have thought of mine.  Woiuld she have detested the drop of lemon oil that, after wild experiment and variation, has become my only lasting interpolation to the recipe? It doesn’t much matter, because Kathleen adores it.

¶ Matins: At Snarkmarket, Robin rightly complains about the routine misanthropy of the “Earth is Hiring” Campaign.

¶ Lauds: Citing financial concerns, blah, blah, blah: no Gehry stadium for Atlantic Yards. Quelle surprise!

¶ Prime: Roger Lowenstein calls for democratizing corporate boards, and begins his plea with a parable that will help you see what’s wrong with the way we manage now.

¶ Tierce: We take this break from the Marshall trial to bring you some truly great photographs from a Flickr photostream that is — amazingly — official. For annotations, turn to my source, The Awl.

¶ Sext: Golly, clothes do make the man. Presumably, Thomas J Watson, one of the key figures behind the screen that you’re reading, did not wear a three-piece suit on his yacht, the Palawan (there were seven!). But it’s hard to imagine him without a tie.

¶ Nones: Who cares how the European Parliament elections turned out, given that the turnout was the lowest ever.

¶ Vespers: Alexander Chee observes that identity publishing (gay fiction, Asian fiction) has degenerated into a triage tool that perpetuates clichéd story lines.

¶ Compline: At The Rumpus, Claire Caplan considers the social costs of innumeracy. I wish that she had gone further.  

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We had a perfect weekend, but I am not thinking about that now. What I am thinking about is the WordPress updgrade that was installed over the weekend. That it should be as difficult to decipher as the latest Microsoft Word in, say, 1991 is not surprising. But it insults me by remembering nothing. No autofills, no recollections of image folders. I have to click through or type from scratch quite as though I had never been here before.

When we went out to sit on the balcony at about one, Kathleen proposed going to Mass at St Thomas More at 5:45, and my joining her afterward for a walk up to the Conservatory Gardens, where we might photograph roses in the dusk. That sounded appealing but unlikely. If we are going to do something on a Sunday afternoon, we must do it early, before we’ve settled into domestic pastimes. Sunday is always a rather anxious day for me, because it’s a holiday, and without the benefit of a schedule I’m pretty sure that I will waste the day. I did not, in fact, waste the day — except insofar as I worried abut dooing so more or less constantly, and that was certainly a waste. As for Mass and photography, Kathleen went to 7:30 at St Iggy’s, and I took my camera on its tripod down to Carl Schurz.

I had meant to leave when she did, but I couldn’t — because I couldn’t find my camera. Where was it? I blamed the WordPress upgrade. And why not? In fact, however, I had “misplaced’ the camera by leaving it screwed on to the tripod. Since the tripod spent the day standing in the blue room, where, coming and going, I never failed to notice it, you’d think &c. But there was a cognitive thing going on. The last time I used a tripod, as I said the other day, the camera that I screwed onto it was a Canon AE-1. My Nikon Coolpix, which is just a three-dimensional credit card, simply didn’t “read” as a camera.

I set out for the park, and it began to rain. Correction: it began to sprinkle: the water dots remained discrete on the sidewalk. The day had  been gloriously sunny and clear; but at some point toward five or six, I looked up from the novel that I was reading because the light had dimmed. The first clouds were crossing the sun, and erasing shadows of building on other buildings. These shadows are almost as material as the brick façades that they fall upon, and it is startling to watch them melt away so utterly that it is hard to believe that they ever existed. Then the sun flashes them back, in chiseled high definition.  

The novel that I am reading has not yet been published. I found a galley on the M86 bus — this is a very literary town! The principal draw of reading a galley does not (trust me!) consist in reading a book ahead of the general public. It’s a matter rather of not having to wait to read a book until long after all of one’s literary friends have read it (or have had the chance to do so). The delight of reading a galley lies, however, in the typos.

“Another thing that kills me,” she said with deceptive clamness…

Not a typo. If you knew the character who “commits” this solecism, you’d see how just it is. Deceptive clamness is so — her. My task now is to work the mistake into an appealing witticism that I can try out on the author when I ask her to sign my copy of the novel. When it’s published.

My favorite Gilbert & Sullivan Gilbert & Sullivan is now, officially, Patience. I have listened to it at least four times this spring, and loved it more each time. There’s a chorus toward the end of the first act that I’ve become very fond of, which is saying something, because Patience was the first G&S that I saw at the Jan Hus Playhouse forty years ago, and many, many of its numbers have been favorites for years. But this build-up finale chorus somehow escaped me until now. Here’s the line that I adore:

And never, oh never, our hearts will range
     From that old, old love again!

And then there’s Mary Sansom’s laugh (on the D’Oyly Carte CD) at the end of the reprise of “Twenty Love-Sick Maidens We.” It’s the most beautiful laugh that I have ever heard on a recording — a true silberklang. I burst into tears every time I hear it, just for the joy.

I’ve been devoting my Saturday afternoons to Gilbert & Sullivans, three at a pop, since the weekend after Easter (18-19 April). It’s late in the day to have figured out how to conduct the aural correlative of spring cleaning, but then everything about my lfie these days is of the better-late-than-never sort. I thought I might be at risk of finding Sullivan’s music a trifle outstayed this afternoon; after all, none of the great opera composers has ever occupied my house-tidying Saturdays on a remotely similar scale, even allowing for Ring cycles. But I had a merry time, listening to the line-up of Pinafore (which you’d think I’d know, but I don’t), Utopia, Ltd (’twas my misfortune to be at Bronxville High at the wrong time), and then, once again, Patience.

People often think that the subject of Patience‘s satire  is Oscar Wilde, but Wilde was hardly on the scene in 1881 (Except, as I just found out, to the extent that Richard D’Oyly Carte put him on it, as a publicist!). In fact, Reginald Bunthorne is a take-off on James McNeil Whistler, who, unlike Wilde, liked girls. (I doubt very much that Gilbert would have touched Oscar Wilde, in any sense of the word.) An important distinction, all in all. I mean, you wouldn’t have heard Wilde confessing to a catamite, “Well, between you and me, I don’t like poetry.” In any case, you wouldn’t have believed him.

Last Week at Portico: A few weeks ago, I began writing up my responses to the weekly short stories in The New Yorker, and publishing them at here. It didn’t take long for me to recognize that the pieces belong at Portico, but I couldn’t find the time to alter the one or two menus and to create the navigation page that would be indispensable to getting from here to there.  Meanwhile, I let a couple of stories go by without writing them up. If nothing else, working this vein of guilt kept complacency at bay.

On Wednesday, I think it was, I took The New Yorker to lunch and sat in the restaurant until I was finished with Jonathan Franzen’s “Good Neighbors”. (I laughed out loud quite often, but they’re used to that, where I have lunch on Wednesdays). I couldn’t wait to get home and start writing.

Until, that is, I started writing, yesterday morning. The story struck me as so rich and satisfying and classic that I was covered in inadequacy. The first draft was spastic. I took the the now-unusual step of printing it out and marking it up with a pencil. Then I revised it at the computer. This morning, I revised it again. If short fiction in The New Yorker regularly cost this much time and effort, I’d have to abandon the feature.  

Also difficult to write about was Kazuo Ishiguro’s new collection of short stories (written at one go), Nocturnes. The surface of each story eddies uncertainly, like the East River between tides, and seems to conceal a secret or a puzzle. After much nail biting, I concluded that the secret is that the stories are as would-be glamorous as the characters in them. Which is not much of a secret; but then would-be glamour doesn’t amount to much, either. As stories (not puzzles), the tales in Nocturnes are hard to put down.

Up, in contrast, was extremely easy to write up. The new Pixar movie made a direct and unambiguous connection with me. I wish that I had had grandchildren sitting next to me. 

And finally, this week’s Book Review review.

As planned, Ms NOLA came up to Yorkville when her office closed for summer hours at one. M le Neveu, who was to come as well, was feeling under the weather, so he stayed in bed. It was a good day for staying in bed here in New York, and we wanted the late graduate student to be in a good shape for dinner. He is here for the weekend, and Kathleen and I took advantage of his presence in town to insist on a celebration at BLT Steak. What with her acquisition of a book, and his graduation from Columbia, there were ample grounds for congratulation. He is a genuine PhD now, and she an equally genuine editor in New York publishing. Both of them worked very hard to pass these milestones, and Kathleen and I are hugely proud of them.

So Ms NOLA and I had lunch by ourselves, at Tokubei, the Japanese pub across the street that is now open for lunch. Then we packed up enough Spode Blue Italian to serve six people. Once upon a time, I had twenty place settings of the pattern; it was our everyday china in the country. Kathleen kept saying that she didn’t like it very much, but I would always answer that, because it has been in continuous production since the year after Jane Austen died (or thereabouts), replacements are never a problem — unlike every other pattern in our pantry. Ten years after selling the country house, however, all that Blue Italian has turned into something of a white elephant. I was going to take a stack of it to Housing Works, but Ms NOLA expressed an interest, so we stashed stacks of plates and bowls in plastic grocery bags and stashed the plastic bags in sturdy LL Bean totes and (most important) grabbed a taxi to Hamilton Heights.

It was my plan to take a look round and then head home. But the weather outside was frightful, and it was much more agreeable to sit in Ms NOLA’s flat and talk about Aquinas and Kant with my nephew (who, in English, is really my cousin). Because our dinner reservation was for 6:30, I looked at my watch at 4:20 and decided just to hang until it was time to head for Park and 57th.

It has been a very long time since I just passed the time of day, as the saying goes, at home, much less at someone else’s house. Given the company, I found the experience most enjoyable, and my friends, who don’t get to spend enough time together these days, were most gracious about sharing themselves with me.

Just before lunch, I told Ms NOLA that I’d discovered a site that gives pronunciations for the tricky names of certain New Yorkers, and I’d learned that Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker contributor and dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, pronounces his name to sound like a well-known citrus fruit. Ms NOLA nodded her head with slightly melancholy smile, looking on the bright side of my catching up, once again, with the rest of the class.

Another day of work — but as the clock ticked toward six, I could tell that I was running out of steam. So, what with one thing and another on the calendar, I ran out to the movies, just around the corner, to see Rudo y Cursi. This film unites director Carlos Cuarón with the two co-stars of his Y Tu Mamá También. This time, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna play half-brothers from the sticks who are lured into playing for opposing futbol teams. It’s such a great movie that even the soccer is great. Veruschka — or even Vanessa Redgrave herself — is not more present in Antonioni’s great Blow-Up that the two stars are here. Rudo y Cursi is also very funny. The actors seem to be competing (in a nice parallel to the story) to see who can create the more ridiculous brother.

When I came back from the movie, I was refreshed and ready to edit and publish three pages for Portico. By the light of midnight oil, I’m working on a fourth. But it’s about Jonathan Franzen’s story in The New Yorker this week, and if there’s one thing about Jonathan Franzen and me that you ought to know about it, it’s that my appreciations of his work seem to run to 5% of his word count. Many of the pages that I’ve written about whole books are shorter than my piece on “Good Neighbors”; it’s almost certainly to be longer by the time I publish it.

Thanks to a link at The Awl by Choire Sicha, I discovered a new blog today, Songs About Buildings And Food, and not only that: but a writer more thrillingly long-winded than I am. May the spirit of Maeve Brennan bring delight to the mind of Justin Wolfe (or is it Henry?) In fact, I’m going to have to leave you now, because the blog’s latest entry begins with a reference to “Good Neighbors.” Prudence dictates that I finish my own appreciation before reading anyone else’s, but, en un mot, screw that.

¶ Matins: Read the terrorist prototype composite storyline and then give us a call if it describes anybody you know. (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: While I agree with Anne Midgette and Jackie Fuchs about the Teen Spirit of grand opera, I’m afraid that they’re overlooking one important detail about teen life. 

¶ Prime: James Surowiecki takes a look at the Argentinian coin shortage (who knew?) and makes a connection with financial problems in the United States: it’s what puts the “con” in “economy.” 

¶ Tierce: Tony Marshall’s defense strategy continues to bewilder me. Unless, that is, a case is being built (without the defendant’s knowledge, to be sure) to cut Charlene loose.

¶ Sext: I couldn’t make up my mind about this story, until I mooted it by saying: Improv Everywhere got the right couple.

¶ Nones: In a very sensible first step toward restoring sanity after the Cold War (yes! it’s really over!), the Organization of American States voted today to re-admit Cuba.

¶ Vespers: For maximum effect, you must read Elizabeth Benedict’s review of Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mom and Pup all the way to the end:  The Not So Discreet Charm of the Haute Goyim.

¶ Compline: Although I have no idea of the provenance of this YouTube clip of retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong (incontournable!), I can vouch that it is indeed the bishop. Although this saint of liberal Christendom never mentions Augustine’s name, he drives stakes through core Augustinian inventions.

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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When I got back from lunchtime errands, I was hot and steaming. An hour later, having cleaned up and changed, I was freezing out on the balcony. It’s the usual seasonal disorder: because the weather is nice again, you’re determined to spend some time outdoors; only, now the weather isn’t so nice — in fact, it’s dismal. Raining and about 60º. On top of that, the grey glare made it very hard to read the laptop screen. But I did write finish a page that I’ve  been working on for weeks. When I came in, I began another.

Oops! Suddenly, it was too late to scramble over to Thomas Meglioranza’s recital at Mannes. Tom hasn’t sung in the city for a while, and I need a fix. I am heartily sorry. But this has been a week for staying at home and getting things done; having no plans to join anyone for the recital, it was easy to get lost in my work. Nevertheless, I am heartily sorry.

So far, the day has been nicely productive. The Daily Office didn’t eat up the hours, as it did on Monday and almost did yesterday (some canonicals are much easier to fill than others — I don’t yet know why). I took care of a long list of irregular housekeeping chores. For example: cable reception. The wrong button had evidently been pressed on one of the remotes. I figured out which one. Just to test the fix, I tuned into TV5. There was a broadcast of le tennis from Roland Garros. I almost sat down to watch Roger Federer play somebody, not because of a sudden interest in tennis but because I could actually understand the sportscasters.

Right now, I’m in the middle of Labelmania, having as much fun as a six year-old, typing in the names of movies (font: Gills Sans MT) and then pressing Ctrl-P. Whir, whine: voilà.

Just for the record: the building restored landscaping, this morning, to the long planters that stretch along the 86th Street sidewalk. Not the big one between the street and the driveway — that has to wait, one of the doormen told me, for the new canopy, which will actually stretch across the driveway, making a real porte-cochère. Nobody seems to know when the construction will be finished and the driveway re-opened, but the plantings are a welcome sight. I wonder if the Google Street View truck has already been by — I hope not.

¶ Matins: Robert B Reich: manufacturing is a thing of the past. Everywhere. “Blame new knowledge.”

¶ Lauds: Joanne McNeil writes about seeing movies alone — and her fondness for watching a video first thing on a weekend morning — slightly before the first thing, actually (5 AM!)

¶ Prime: Chris Lehmann explains why the bankruptcy of General Motors is almost as great for wingnut pundits as the UAW’s 17.5% stake.

¶ Tierce: “Well, do you want ALL of my money?” snapped an exasperated Brooke Astor,

[a]fter years of pressure from son Anthony Marshall for more, more – and even more – of her millions…

¶ Sext: “World’s Most Pointless Machine.” (No, it’s not a motorcycle.) I want one! (via reddit)

¶ Nones: The answer to the question: Gordon Brown is an Aspie. And Barack Obama is not. “The Prince of Wales is to attend the 65th anniversary celebrations of D-Day after the intervention of President Barack Obama, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.”

¶ Vespers: At the new-ish WSJ blog, Speakeasy, Lee Siegel writes cogently about film criticism — about criticism in general.

¶ Compline: Much as I love the infographics at GOOD, I’m not sure that “Conglomerate for Good” is one. I’d call it a very pretty list.

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In the current issue of Granta, Jhumpa Lahiri interviews Mavis Gallant. I’ve been reading Ms Gallant’s stories off and on ever since they began reappearing in NYRB editions — to the third of which Ms Lahiri will write the introduction. Along with a lot of interesting personal matter, the interview touches on three of Ms Gallant’s works (so to speak): an early novel, a lengthy short story from the Seventies, “The Remission,” and the four “Carette” short stories. I read “The Remission” this afternoon. It was rich, haunting, and extremely well done, but the reading experience was also fairly lowering.

I had hoped to be far more productive today. Last night at about this time, I was reading Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold, luxuriating in the sheer peace and quiet of reading, and thinking of an early night. But when Kathleen came home, at around midnight, she said that she needed to write a brief email to someone. I ought to have nodded and retired to the blue room. Instead, I sat in the bedroom while she tried to dispatch the note from the netbook, a machine with which she was unfamiliar. I’d recommended that she use the newest computer in the house because it was up and running. But it turned out that Kathleen’s idea of a “brief email” is highly relative. The note involved a lot of cutting and pasting (murder on a strange touch pad) and multiple addressees drawn from various documents. Beset by visions of a very late night, with Kathleen growing less and less capable as she grew more tired, I panicked and got upset.

Computers are about the only thing that Kathleen and I squabble about. We approach the machines in very different ways, but what really marks us apart is Kathleen’s comfort level with setbacks and technological snafus. I have no comfort level with these matters, and I’m inclined to think that tolerating them is the slippery slope to Idiocracy.

So we were up for an extra hour. An extra hour at least. And then I had to read — and raid the icebox — just to calm down.

In the afternoon, I planned to do a bit of writing, and I did do a bit of writing — just a page. I wrote up Up. I was going to do a little housework and then write some more, but Kathleen had some prescriptions to pick up at the drugstore, so (not least to atone for my sharpness last night) I offered to run the errand for her. The prescriptions weren’t ready; I was told to come back in an hour. That is when I read “The Remission.” After picking up the filled prescriptions, I went to the Food Emporium and bought a few things, so that I’d have a choice between burgers on a baguette or a Caesar salad for dinner. By the time the shopping was delivered, it was too late (and my brain was too scrambled) to start writing, so I took on a project that I expected to be daunting. It wasn’t.

The ongoing project is to create labels for the paper sleeves in which I now store DVDs. I bought the dual-feed Dymo label printer a few weeks ago. It was installed immediately, but along with a lot of other stuff, so that I didn’t remember how to operate the thing. There turned out to be nothing to it. I plugged it in and got right to work.

Being me, I did not begin by lugging one of the drawers of discs to the table and beginning at the beginning (with All About Eve). Oh, no. I made labels for DVDs that came to mind. Casablanca; Unforgiven; Merci, Docteur Rey. And wouldn’t you know it? Four of the titles that “came to mind”— three starring Cary Grant, as it happened — weren’t in the drawer at all (as I found when I finally did drag it out), but in original, special-edition cases that I had decided to keep. In the end, I pasted the labels for The Awful Truth, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, and The Lady Eve on empty sleeves and tucked them in front of All About Eve. This is how I keep my life simple.

(I’d still be printing labels, but I saw that I was about to run out of blanks. I’ll have to run up to Staples tomorrow for more.)

For dinner, I broiled three mini burgers — on offer at Gristede’s last week; I’d never seen them before — and then melted chunks of blue cheese over bacon bits on top of them. The burgers were spatula’d onto a halved demi-baguette, slathered with mustard and mayonnaise. I cut the baguette on either side of the burger in the middle, making three pieces. The result was even better than I’d hoped it would be. The crust of the baguette closed down around the burgers like a clamshell, while the interior soaked up all the juices. Imagine: a medium-rare burger that didn’t drip! Speaking of Barbara Stanwyck, the DVD that’s playing in the kitchen whenever I’m in there for more than five minutes is Ball of Fire. Drum boogie!

It’s not yet midnight, and/but Kathleen is home. She is absolutely finished working for the day, and if she turns on her computer at all, it will be to loiter at eBay.

¶ Matins: At Infrastructurist, a top-ten count-down of the nation’s road-building contractors. These organizations can be counted upon to thwart rail initiatives — unless, that is, their crystal balls advise them to make tracks.

¶ Lauds: Yesterday, we noted Holland Cotter’s demand for history lessons. Today, Philip Kennicott complains about the fall-off in shock. What’s a museum to do?

¶ Prime: Now that the TimeWarner/AOL breakup is official, we challenge anyone to find a sound reason for the merger nine years ago.

¶ Tierce: In his fourth day of testimony, Henry Christensen tells us just why Tony was after his mother’s money.

¶ Sext: Tom Scocca is rapidly becoming my favorite curmudgeon. Like curmudgeons everywhere, he has a special gimlet stare for the idea of “progress.”

¶ Nones: Having been a less-than-fastidious reader of The Economist of late, I missed the début of Banyan, the newspaper’s Asian columnist. (There, I’m honest.) This week’s piece about the (improbable?) survival of the Communist Party in China is excellent.

¶ Vespers: Jason Kottke lifts a very appealing idea from the introduction to The Black Swan: the concept of the “antilibrary,” made up of the books that one owns but hasn’t read.

¶ Compline: When will finance (and its ancillaries) be reformed by women who insist — as they’ve done in the field of obstetrics — on livable hours?

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The list of the objects in the little photo this evening will give you an idea of my general condition this morning. Not unduly grave, but not very promising, either.

In the old days (until about three weeks ago), I’d have “taken the day off,” sitting in my reading chair with a compulsively readable book — feeling guilty, but not guilty enough to put the book down and get to work. This is the moral hazard of self-employment.

Today, however, I was too terrified by my hopper at Google Reader. Over 500 feeds! There could be no thought of leaving that avalanche on course.

And then there was Outlook — acting up on three computers! JM to the rescue — but remotely, requiring me to pay at least nominal attention. Chatting in three separate Team Viewer boxes, plus Gmail exchanges: a thoroughly modern dilly.

After I had finished working for the day, and consumed a late-night bowl of elbows al burro (Kathleen will be working late this week, I’ve been advised), and after the Nano playlist to which I’d listened all day came to an end, I had the sublime pleasure of sinking into the reading chair at last, and feeling, instead of guilty, utterly virtuous. The book, which arrived this afternoon, was Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold, an account of derivatives trading on Wall Street and how it metastasized into the tumor that nearly killed us all last year. Three little words: buy this book. Lucid, smart, and engaging, it will bring you up to speed despite your worst misgivings.

I even sat outside for a while. (That was before I went to collect the mail.) I was reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s Mavis Gallant interview in the new Granta. It was so involving that I pulled down one of the NYRB Gallant editions and re-read her nonpareil story, “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street.”

As I expected, working hard (if not very efficiently) left me feeling much, much better at the end of the day than at the beginning.

¶ Matins: Read it and weep: the Pakistani government (and military) is not as committed as you might like it to be to getting rid of Taliban invaders.

¶ Lauds: Holland Cotter faults The Pictures Generation, a new show at the Museum, as bad history. All right, iffy history. But since when were museums in the business of history lectures?

¶ Prime: Julie Cresswell’s obituary for the Archway/Mother’s Cookie business ought to be read, at a minimum, by every still-solvent tycoon who’s thinking of establishing a chair at a “business school” (such as the one at Harvard).

¶ Tierce: I myself think that Terry Christensen was just doing his job, but if he’s not disbarred after the Marshall trial, it will mean that nobody is paying attention.

¶ Sext: Has the world really turned? Or is Jon Peters in fact the pipsqueak that this story suggests  he is?

¶ Nones: Every time I read about the European Union, I think about this map — except that I didn’t even know it existed until just the other day.

¶ Vespers: “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, They Ride Hogs Over It“ — what is reviewer Dwight Garner trying to prove?

¶ Compline: Manhattanhenge Primo. Secondo comes in July. Between now and then, the sun will set to the north of the island’s east-west grid.

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