¶ Matins: Joe Bagent considers the growth of the white underclass. Anecdotally.

¶ Lauds: How about a very plausible mash-up of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Let You Down”? (via MetaFilter)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon disagrees (violently) with Robert Shiller’s reconsideration  of sub-prime mortgages.

¶ Tierce: What’s the difference between $700 million and $50 billion — aside from the number of victims and the size of their losses? Who was the bigger spender — Bernie Madoff or Mark Dreier?

¶ Sext: Lately, I’ve tugged by an existential anxiety: why, week after week, can’t I bring myself to open — not even to open — the Sunday Times Magazine? Happily (and hilariously), Tom Scocca and Choire Sicha have the answer: “Memoirs! Leer At Yer Crazy Memoirs! From A Circus of ‘Times’ Employees, A Thousand Magazine Excerpts Bloom“.

¶ Nones: Just say ‘No’: “Georgians Hope U.S. Will Join Boundary Monitors.” I propose Chinese troops for this job. The Chinese and the Russians have a long history of border disputes.

¶ Vespers: Ann Leary proposes some “Good Books for Hard Times.”

¶ Compline: Although we strongly disapprove of performance-enchancing drugs of any kind (we just read Methland!), we think that it would be a mistake to dismiss Jamais Cascio’s Atlantic essay, “Get Smarter,” as just another piece of futurism.

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Reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s autopsy (as if!) of a civilization in which the preferred euphemism for “discount” is “value,” takes me back  to my childhood, to the shame of buying underwear at Korvettes. This game of my mother’s involved a double shame. We didn’t, all too obviously, belong at Korvettes. At the same time, we weren’t where we did belong, which would have been, in those days, Best & Co, and, later, B Altman.

Ms Shell’s book takes me back to a football weekend at Notre Dame. My father must certainly have had legitimate business somewhere that involved flight on a company jet (my father was not an idiot), but in those days a slight diversion to a town not directly on the way back home was not frowned upon, provided that one were discreet (my father was discretion itself). (Plus, he provided the crew with tickets to the game.) Mother and Dad were staying at the Morris Inn, where, making do, my mother glanced an ad in the South Bend Tribune and saw that Kresge was selling cases of Planters Dry-Roasted Peanuts at some fantastic low price — one case per customer. Wow! I was asked to round up a few friends for a trip to the store, which lay to the east of campus. My shame was pretty bottomless, but I did it. Having loaded up Dad’s rented sedan, these forgotten friends and I drove straight to the west side of town, where the discounted cases of dry-roasted peanuts were stowed aboard N227T.

Saving money wasn’t the point. Driving forty miles to save a nickel was the point. “Jewing” a merchant “down” was the point. Shame on top of shame! My mother would use this ghastly phrase to summarize her bargaining technique, and I would remember that she was not really my mother. Paying bottom dollar was her idea of dry-roasted fun. More than once — I can say this proudly — I blurted out, “You’re the Jew!”

You might say that I emerged from childhood traumatized by the idea of “cheap.”

The death of famous people is something that a lot of bloggers feel obliged to report, perhaps because it is the last word in news. Walter Cronkite’s death last week was very widely mentioned, even though he must have been, for most bloggers, an historical figure whose most important work, between the Fifties and the Seventies, preceded their birth — or at least their post-toddler sentience. (As I noted at Twitter, broadcast news ought to have ceased when Cronkite retired; the man who defined the genre proved to be irreplaceable.) Frank McCourt’s more recent celebrity (his best-known book, Angela’s Ashes, was published thirteen years ago) is a different matter altogether — in terms of fame, McCourt was a contemporary of the late David Foster Wallace.

But the big story, the one with plenty of wrinkles still to be ironed out, concerns Amazon’s blunderously peremptory removal of digital copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of people who had bought the book. The purchase price was refunded, but all the legal arguments in the world are not going to restore faith in Amazon’s probity unless it makes clear that it will never do any such thing in future. M Ryan Calo rounds up some of the better write-ups of the Orwell fiasco at The Millions.

Also, not to be confused with the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Humboldt squid, at the Guardian, and at Outside.

When I was in college, I took a heroic view of Tristan und Isolde. Musing over a remark that I’d heard, according to which German musicologists regarded  Tristan  as the perfect opera — a view that made sense to me, even if I wasn’t always in the mood to listen to the alleged perfection — I saw Tristan and Isolde as Olympian lovers who were willing and able to go a lot further to gratify their passion than anybody I knew. Wagner’s great achievement was to do the lovers justice by composing music that captured — a significant choice of words, I now think — a transcending, self-immolating love that could find resolution only in death.

When I say that this was an adolescent understanding of the opera, I don’t mean to condescend. I recognized that I knew nothing about love (nothing at all); and I was on the lookout for pointers. I did not long for love; on the contrary, I wanted to watch out for it. An opera that never shut up about the connection between love, on the one hand, and night, oblivion, and death, on the other, seemed very wise to me, and possibly full of prophylactic hints. At the same time, I wanted to be swallowed alive and completely roasted by Love — which is very much the same thing as not longing for love. Like any teenager, I wanted excitement without consequences.

In my middle years, I thought a lot about the love potion that Isolde slips Tristan — or, rather, that Brangäne slips Isolde. Isolde has asked her companion to prepare a lethal cordial that she will share with the man she hates most in the world — Tristan, the foreign murderer of her fiancé, Morold. Whether Brangäne makes a mistake and chooses the wrong bottle, or quietly overrules her mistress’s suicidal command, the result of drinking the philtre is undying love. The enemies become lovers, just like that.

Wagner may have been innocent of Freudian insight, but he knew his Shakespeare, and a huge chunk of Act I of his opera is taken up by Isolde’s protesting too much. Counting the ways how she hates Tristan, Isolde makes it clear that no other person on earth appears on her radar. If Tristan were dead — her fondest wish — she’d be lost, which is why she decides to kill herself along with him.

In a word, there is abundant evidence, at least for modern eyes to see, that Tristan and Isolde are in love before they drink the potion. When the potion doesn’t kill them (and certainly Tristan also expects it to), it allows them to acknowledge their mutual longing.

Listening to the opera this afternoon, I saw that a great shift in my understanding of the opera had taken place. The story of Tristan and Isolde themselves was no longer very important; it was but an armature on which Wagner could hang music that I used to think represented passion. Now, however, I knew that the music was the passion. Even though I was calmly — to all outward appearances — dusting the mantelpiece and vacuuming the carpet, the entire passion of Tristan und Isolde coursed through me. I was not leading a secret life of banked passion, sundering, on an imaginary plane, my connection with the banal quotidian world, permitting myself an internal escapade, clothed in the drag of grand amour, while applying a damp cloth to the marble top of a commode. There was no discontinuity at all between giving the phalaenopsis its weekly sip of water and crying out the praises of Frau Minne, as Isolde does when Brangäne tries to take ‘credit” for the very inconvenient love of Tristan for his uncle’s wife. “O tör’ge Magd!” ripostes Isolde — “you foolish inexperienced woman!” Every time I hear that line, I feel the true lover’s incinerating contempt for the world, and/but there is no need for me to set any fires myself. On the contrary; I wipe the glass on Kathleen’s wedding portrait and set it back on the table. Unlike the ancient Celtic lovers, but thanks no end to Wagner’s music, I know what I’m doing.

last Week at Portico: Last weekend’s Book Review was one of the worst issues I’ve ever worked my way through, and it was bad in many different ways, as you’ll find if you have a look at my review of the Review. My displeasure was enhanced by the unhelpful placement, two years ago, of a review of Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You among the Children’s Books, which may have accorded with somebody’s marketing plans but which made then and makes no no literary sense. Writing about William Styron’s “Rat Beach,” this week’s New Yorker story, I assumed that it had not been published before; forgive me if I’m wrong. Finally, last week’s Friday movie was Woody Allen’s Whatever Works.

What a lot of eating opportunities presented themselves today, largely because other people hadn’t eaten earlier. I never ate a great deal at any one time, but I seemed always to be at table. When I wasn’t eating, I was working here. I did see a movie — Humpday — but of course I was munching on a bag of popcorn all the way through that intense indie, which more than any other recent film I can think of reminded me of the talkily confrontrational French films that we were expected to admire in the Sixties. I did, honestly, admire Humpday, though.

When I came back uptown after lunch with LXIV, I did a bit of housework and then settled down to work. Work on Friday afternoon means taking all the drafts that I have scribbled during the week and turning them into handsome Portico pages, with correct spelling and navigation. While I was working on the Book Review review, Kathleen called to say that one of her best friends from Smith was in town and wanted her to take somebody’s ticket for Billy Elliot. I was fine with that, and, besides, I had alternative plans of my own. Nom de Plume was in town, and said that she might stop by. Stop by she did. When it turned out that she hadn’t eaten all day, I proposed running across the street to Tokubei, the Japanese pub. Like Kathleen’s brother, Kevin, another aficionado, Nom de Plume loves to order off-menu sushi at Tokubei; she says it’s some of the best that she’s ever eaten. (Perhaps she will post a comment itemizing all of her treats!) It was a great pleasure to talk in person.

Back at the apartment, there was a message from Ms NOLA. Ms NOLA and friend JA had called earlier as well, to invite me see Whatever Works with them. They knew that I’d seen it already, but they knew that I liked it enough to see it a second time. I had to decline, though; I’m saving that second time for Kathleen, and in any case I had my Friday publishing to see to (although that didn’t keep me from taking Nom de Plume to dinner). Ms NOLA and JA agreed to drop in after the movie, which was now.

They weren’t hungry, but they hadn’t eaten since lunch, so I handed Ms NOLA a menu from Wu Liang Ye, the Shanghainese restaurant down the street, and phoned in her selections. (The ribs that I also asked for were not delivered, but I wasn’t charged for them, either.) We enjoyed the food out on the balcony, sitting through one of the summer’s more violent thunderstorms. When the rain let up, my guests said that they had to go. How did it get to be 10:15?

Kathleen just now got home from the theatre, minutes after I finished my Friday jobs. She hasn’t eaten, either. This time, I’ll fix her something myself, in the kitchen.

***

Walking from the Angelika to the Chinatown Brasserie, LXIV and I talked about the friendship between Ben and Andrew, the reunited college chums in Humpday. I remarked, somewhat wistfully but mostly with relief, that I had never had such a “relationship.” LXIV all but sputtered. “What about Fossil?”

Fossil! Ha! I told LXIV, hardly believing that he didn’t already know this, that Fossil and had “hated each other” when we were prep school roommates. “Hatred” is too simple a word. We were more like Taiwan and the PRC, if you can imagine a rough parity between those entities. Officially hostile, we were actually too tired and distracted to remain on a footing of open war. Although neither of us had ever heard the term “passive-aggressive,” we both got very good at driving the other crazy while seeming to mind our own business.

We became friends later, when Blair was behind us. Perhaps “became friends” is an overstatement. At no point was there the backslapping, high-fiving, Sons of the Desert-type bonhomie that gets Ben and Andrew into so much trouble. Our tracks, though close, have remained rigorously parallel, which has made it easier to proffer the occasional friendly wave — as the other chugs in the opposite direction. Something that, on our comfy and now rather tidy little model railroad, happens all the time.

¶ Matins: Congressional Republicans, continuing their fascist makeover by seeking to win votes by stoking fears if they can’t inspire ideals, have launched a spectacularly disinformative infographic about the Democratic health-care reform plan.

¶ Lauds: It’s official: The New York Times is going to raise much-needed cash by selling its flagship classical-music station, WQXR. This may be the most foregone story of 2009. 2008, even. Interestingly, nobody on the Internet seems to care.

¶ Prime: At the Washington Post, Harold Myerson sees a Robert McNamara for our times, and his name is Richard Rubin. And his pupils are Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. We hope that, well before forty years from now, they will not only have repented but recanted. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Oops! No Astor news. Happily, there’s Chris Christie. As in Ruth’s Chris Steak House. No business connection, just the fact that Mr Christie wiggles his head between two positions, sort of like a twitchy, too-rare entrée. (God bless Google Reader!)

¶ Sext: Thanks, Joe, for the tip to You Suck at Craigslist, a site that collects ill-conceived postings at the Want-U-Adds.

¶ Nones: Mexican authorities refuse to negotiate a cease fire with La Familia, a leading drug cartel. Rightly so! But why does this story make us think of Las Vegas?

¶ Vespers: FYI: UK thriller writer Jeffrey Deavers lists ten top novels with computers and/or Internet connections. What’s this? E M Forster is on the list? With a tale from 1909? Now, that’s prescience!

¶ Compline: About The New York Review of Ideas: it’s an NYU J-school class project!

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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What I was going to write about this evening was Leave Her to Heaven, John Stahl’s 1945 “classic.” My Facebook friend Brooks Peters mentioned it today, saying that his vacation aerie in the Thousand Islands reminded him of Behind the Moon, the rustic Maine camp beloved by brothers Dick and Dan Harland before the poisonous Ellen Berent enters Dick’s life. (Cornel Wilde, Darryl Hickman, and Gene Tierney, respectively). The film, shot in a hyper-super-duper Technicolor so saturated that, by today’s more naturalistic standards, the actors appear to be dying of makeup, is so astonishingly dated that you wait for Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving, or perhaps even Louis XIV to show up. Alfred Newman’s music makes you long for the wit and wisdom of All About Eve, which he would score a few years later.  

So I thought I’d watch Leave Her to Heaven, even though I wasn’t really in the mood for one of Darryl Zanuck’s attempts to capture the glories of the great outdoors in a sound stage, while killing his actors with makeup. I got as far as the chilling scene with the doctor at Warm Springs, where Dan is recovering, if that is the word, from polio. “But he’s a cripple,” Ellen blurts out. The doctor is appalled, and hastily accepts Ellen’s assurance that she didn’t mean it. You have to see the movie to know why all of this is so dramatic, but even then it’s not clear whether Ellen is a damaged innocent or an unscrupulous narcissist. On the page, she’s clearly the latter, but the camera prefers her to be a minor force of nature — sweet, but dangerous when crossed. The whole grandeur of Leave Her to Heaven comes from the unresolved tension, if you ask me, between these readings. Speaking of reading, I haven’t read Ben Ames Williams’s novel, but I expect that the movie is faithful to certain big scenes but completely out of tune with the book’s tone. But maybe not. Ben Ames Williams, after all, has not come down to us as a writer to be read.

And then there is Vincent Price.

But it’s late, too late to be clipping stills from the DVD and then writing them up. That will have to wait. For the moment, it’s amusing as well as refreshing to imagine that Brooks Peters is enjoying the crystalline conditions that his photos at Facebook suggest while we suffer the first bad summer day of the year. It is not particularly warm in New York, but the air is close and dead. Even Ms NOLA was praying for rain earlier today.

I am reading two wonderful books, although it’s hard to tell which one of them is the bigger downer, story-wise: Methland, by Nick Reding, and A Meaningful Life, by L J Davis. The latter is, all things considered, amazingly funny — the novel that James Thurber never wrote, and couldn’t have written, for obvious reasons, in 1971. Methland gives rise to feelings of the wildest indignation, but without fixing a target (so far). The descriptions of melting skin and decaying brains that litter Mr Reding’s account of bad times in Iowa do seem, however, to have a lot in common with death by makeup.  

¶ Matins: “20 Bold Schemes” — that’s putting it mildly — for reversing climate change, the acidulation of seawater, and even for making bigger, puffier, whiter clouds! (Who can be against that?)

¶ Lauds: LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich objects to next year’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. (via  Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: For an “ownership society,” we have a tax code that inordinately favors indebtedness. Felix Salmon protests.

¶ Tierce: Today’s testimony by Astor nurse Pearline Noble generated two stories in the Post.

¶ Sext: Christoph Niemann is a Master of the Universe!

¶ Nones: In retrospect, it wasn’t such a good idea to bring Uighur workers to Guangdong.

¶ Vespers: John Self, intrigued by the kerfuffle surrounding Alain de Botton’s public unhappiness with Caleb Crain’s review of his new book, sat down and read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and he finds himself “coming down on de Botton’s side.”

¶ Compline: Having sold the initial print run of 200 copies, the good people at Snarkmarket released the text of New Liberal Arts on line. Welcome to the new Maecenate? 

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It was a glorious day to be out and about on the Upper East Side. The air was sunny and warm, but very clear; and all the rain that we’ve had so far this summer has laundered the city to pressed-napkin freshness. In colder weather, I’d have walked to the ophthalmologist’s office at 70th and Park. Taking a cab, though, gave me the thrill of turning left onto Park Avenue and — voilà! what a view! The Helmsley Building (is it still called that? It used to be the Grand Central Building, not, obviously, to be confused with the Terminal, but erected as part of the ensemble) is under wraps for some kind of renovation, but the pyramidal copper roof is unobstructed.

From the distance of 86th Street (roughly forty blocks), the Helmsley Building, and the Met Life (né Pan Am) Building behind it seem to stand at the end of a fantastic canyon, and to my eye Mother Nature has nothing remotely as formidable. But don’t listen to me. I’ve seen every famous spot in the United States (or at least that’s what it feels like) except the Grand Canyon, which I’ve avoided because I’m as certain as I can be without actual experience that I would find it wanting.

The canyon effect is the doing of the Met Life building, which is why I’ve always loved it. Fossil Darling hates it for having occluded the “profile” of the Helmsley Building, which, truth be told, I’d find rather dinky, now that I’ve gotten used to the massive building behind it.

The sad truth about Park Avenue is that the majesty of the view cannot be apprehended from the sidewalks. Originally, a path twisted through the median, which was quite a bit wider than it is today. I hope that the old configuration is revived at some point, whether I live to see it or not. It will put the High Line back where it belongs, especially if, as one must imagine, the walkway is wide enough to accommodate pedestrian traffic in both directions. I have not yet been to the new High Line park thingy, and I have no plans to see it anytime soon, but, like the Grand Canyon, it will certainly be found wanting if, as I’ve been informed, everyone must walk in the same direction. What is the point of that? Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller could count on being seen by photographers, but I should prefer to see and be seen by other folks like myself. The designers, doubtless single young people without children to show off, have proved themselves to be astonishingly ignorant of the European promenade — or, if not ignorant, then wonderfully perverse.

I had a very jolly time at the ophthalmologist’s — I’m not kidding! — but I’ll save that for some other time. Bref, the waiting room is freshened by the sounds of WQXR, the classical music station that has just been sold by its owner, The New York Times. What, I wonder, will replace it? At the ophthalmologist’s, I mean. I’m plotting.

Because of the warmth (“heat” would be too strong a word; although, when I got home, I was dripping like a squeezing sponge), I took a taxi up to 82nd Street, where I paid a visit to Crawford Doyle. I wanted to order Methland. I asked for it last Friday and was told that I could order it, and that’s what I wanted to do today. But today there was a copy in the shop. I also bought the book about the Romantics and science that is going to appear on the cover of the Book Review this weekend (so I’m told). It was recommended to me by a staff member on Friday, but I got distracted and didn’t pick it up. Later, I felt rather awful, because I make a point of taking up plausible recommendations; I’m the rare person who will actually read the book that you’re crazy about, unless I’ve some reason to think that I’ll hate it, which I sometimes do but usually don’t.

Then I had a nice lunch, at Demarchelier on 86th. I read the posthumous Styron story in The New Yorker. At one point — long before the wrenching end — it had me in tears, and not just because my pupils were still dilated. (I look forward to writing the story up tomorrow.) Before lunch arrived, I read a bit of A Meaningful Life, which had had me laughing at the doctor’s. When I came upon the following line at the restaurant, I had to put the book down, overwhelmed by the fertile thing that can attain no more:

Once every month or so, his wife would smile apologetically and a little defensively, put on her longest skirt, and pack herself over to see her mother in Flatbush like some kind of installment-plan Eurydice.

Jonathan Lethem’s forward to the NYRB reprint of this 1971 novel tells us that L J Davis still lives on Dean Street in Brooklyn. Mr Lethem used to play with Mr Davis’s sons.

Walking up Madison to Feldman’s Housewares, between 92nd and 93rd, I wished that I’d brought along a Nano. Then I more or less stopped thinking; my brain was keeping summer hours. So much so that, at Feldman’s, I wound up with two Yodeling Pickles instead of just one, and I forgot all about the pants hanger that Kathleen asked me to pick up. I thought about taking a third taxi home, but the prospect of squeezing into a back seat and then out again made walking looking easier.

And it was a good thing, that walk, because — my brain’s having rebooted for some reason — I made up my mind about something. As an unusual person, and a very tall one, I have always oscillated between two public modes: simple weirdness and pained self-consciousness. I decided today to jettison the pained self-consciousness. The elegant Latin for “Just Deal” will be most welcome.

¶ Matins: At Chron Higher Ed, Peter Dougherty argues for more pro-active university presses, as a way of overhauling scholarship.

¶ Lauds: The Prince of Wales has resigned from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (founded in 1877 by Williams Morris), of which he was also the patron. The issue appears to be his rigorous (rigid?) antiquarianism.

¶ Prime: While the major labels (such as still exist) fret about plunging CD sales, a cottage industry of new music recordings is re-inventing the business model.. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Tierce: Four years’ jail time for stealing 91 lobsters from the kitchen at Balley’s? I say sell Anthony Jones’s story to Hollywood and give the proceeds to a soup kitchen. The 38 year-0ld Jersey man created value.

¶ Sext: Ivy Style digs up an article from Time (November 11, 1966) about a once-thrilling trend: going sockless.

¶ Nones: Charles Taylor, former Liberian president/tyrant, takes the stand in his own defense, as the first African leader to be tried at The Hague.

¶ Vespers: At The Rumpus, an excerpt from Jonathan Ames’s new collection of essays and short fiction, The Double Life is Twice as Good.

¶ Compline: Choire Sicha takes another look at Brüno, and, partly inspired by Anthony Lane, comes away with a troubling take on America.

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Here it is, nearly midnight, but instead of writing my Dear Diary entry, I’m reading an interview with Michael Musto at The New York Review of Ideas. (No, I didn’t know about it either [the NYRI], not until yesterday.) It’s nice to know that Michael Musto is a nice person. Actually, I learned this recently from another interview, with the Times I think but perhaps Vanity Fair, a short piece in which it was established that Mr Musto (a) doesn’t drink alcohol and (b) visits his mother every Saturday. Or was it Sunday? Anyway, he goes out to the boroughs and spends an entire weekend day with his mother. His mother is one lucky woman, let me tell you. I used to see things from what we’ll call the Michael Musto point of view. Now I see them from the Mom point of view.

Meanwhile, did I tell you that I’m dying? Well, I’d be dying if it weren’t for — what is this crap called? — Flourouracil. See? Nobody gets that stuff unless death is around the corner. How do you say it, anyway? At first, it made me think of “toura loura lay,” but now I think it’s “floura you’re a sil[ly],” with “flour” pronounced as in “flourish.” Anyhoo, it’s supposed to kill cancer before it starts — a delicious conundrum, don’t you think? My scalp is basically radioactive with cancers — an abandoned nuclear testing ground, Chernobyl goes to Yorkville — planted by insenstive guardians during my youth, imbeciles who made me stand out in left field for hours at a time, despite the fact that I have never liked being in the sun. Some people find the sun warm and pleasant, but I find it hot and unpleasant. And I always have. Left to my own devices, I would not be in need of You’re A Silly.

I put off the goop for about a month, or perhaps it was more like six weeks. I played dumb and said, “Oh, was I supposed to put this on my head? I thought I was supposed to put it here [indicating clavicle] once you’d told me that the wound had healed.” About thirty years ago, I realized that doctors will not wish you dead if you do not follow their instructions. There is no penalty — coming from the doctor, that is — if you don’t take the pills or refuse to give up French fries (“You’ll live forever if you give up the things that make you want to”). What’s curious is my way of resisting some treatments while accepting others without demur. Nobody likes colonoscopies, for example — but I used to, back in the day when a good doctor would plug you full of Demerol before plying the fiber optics. I was flying so high the first time (and this is not only twenty years ago but over twenty colonoscopies ago) that I practically choked on my tongue in an ultimately successful attempt to resist asking the doctor if he liked what he did. I can’t tell you how funny the question seemed at the time, but then you probably can’t imagine how much less nice than Michael Musto I am. 

¶ Matins: It’s  Bastille Day — but not in France. In France, it’s “La fête nationale.” What do you say to friends on le quatorze juillet?

You say, “Bonjour, madame,” comme d’habitude.

¶ Lauds: You know, before you even start reading, that Anthony Tommassini is not going to give Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna top marks. But if you read between the lines, his review begins to look like a rave.

¶ Prime: Robert X Cringely writes about the MADD strategies of Google and Microsoft, and how, if either of them suffers a mortal blow, it won’t have been aimed by the other.

¶ Tierce: Pardon me, but I’m no longer interested in the Marshall trial’s verdict, whatever it may be. I’m already casting the movie. Who wants to play Brooke Astor, banging her cane as she is “dragged” into the library? Or saying, “I feel like throwing food in someone’s face”?

¶ Sext: It’s very easy to make fun of Town & Country — if you’re not throwing up into an air-sickness bag — but Choire Sicha can be counted upon to do it well.

¶ Nones: We throw up our hands: both sides in the Honduras dispute request American intervention. What a sterling opportunity to make enemies and influence people to hate the United States.

¶ Vespers: At The Millions, novelist Sonya Chung tells us what it was like to meet her new book’s dust jacket.

¶ Compline: Meet the Schweeb. An amusement-park ride for the time being, it may become tomorrow’s urban transport. (Via Infrastructurist)

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In today’s Metropolitan Diary — how long has the Times been running that feature? I can remember that it didn’t exist, but not when — there was a sweet piece about a miraculously retrieved bookmark.

The other day I was cleaning out my bookshelves a bit. I always place unwanted books near the curb but away from the garbage so that people can have an opportunity to take a free book.

My wife finds it difficult to throw things out, so when she came home from work, seeing the books, she brought one back into the house. It was a book from her college days. Inside the book, as a place marker, she discovered an unopened letter from a friend. The postage was an 8-cent airmail stamp. The postmark was from 1966.

I slit open the letter and read it to her. It was fairly ordinary stuff, but the last line read, “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.” That blind date was me, 43 years ago. I guess it worked out; we’ve been married 41 years.

Instead of responding to this story with a warm purr, as I was supposed to do, I was busy writing, in my head, the Diary entry that would have been generated if Mrs Alexander had not gotten home in time to save her book.

The other day, I was delivering a bundle of hand-me-downs to my sister’s apartment in Kip’s Bay. Walking along the street, I spotted a box of books lying by the kerb. My eye was immediately drawn to a paperback copy of Jacques Barzun’s Teacher In America, because my favorite uncle was one of Barzun’s last students and he always spoke so reverently of the Columbia professor. I decided to help myself.

When I got home, I noticed an envelopoe tucked into the book, as a kind of bookmark. There was a postmark, dated 1966 — nine years before I was born! I slipped the letter out of the envelope and read the cheerful note from one female undergraduate to another. The writer, whose name was Michelle, mentioned that her boyfriend had taught himself how to play a new Beatles song on the guitar, and that he had serenaded her with it. Ah, the old days!

I was about to fold the letter back into the envelope when I read the PS. “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.” All at once, I wished that I’d never opened the letter. Whoever put the box of books out on East 22nd Street had had a blind date over forty years ago, but I’d never know how it worked out.

Here is something that you ought to know about New York City: every other regular reader of the Metropolitan Diary had the same idea.

A triumph of form over substance, this entry is supposed to be about stories that brewed on the Internet over the weekend. Stories that I considered beneath my notice. It was an unfortunately-timed concept, because you can’t expect a Michael Jackson to die every Thursday.

Better luck next week, eh?

Notwithstanding Kathleen’s convalescence, we had a good weekend, which I rather think we were owed. I had a wonderful sense of being ahead of schedule, whatever that means. What difference does it make whether I finish reading The Economist before 2 PM or before 3 PM? I don’t know why, but it makes a big difference. I’m learning that the passage from 2 until 4 is the tricky part of my day; the morning ends at around 2 (finally!), and the evening begins at 4 (already?). With only two hours of afternoon, it’s no wonder that I get edgy. It would be nicer, though, if I had a clearer idea of this Platonic ideal that my schedule is pinned to — and where it came from.

***

What if I gave away all but three or four cookbooks, and stopped reading Saveur? What if I threw away all the food catalogues? I think I’d be happier — I do! — but I’m not willing to risk having to buy new copies of all those cookbooks. Perhaps I ought to experiment with the catalogues and the magazines, though. Talking with Ms NOLA the other day, I realized (or said out loud for the first time) that I already know everything about cooking that I’m ever going to need or use.

This certainly doesn’t mean that I plan to rely on the same old recipes for the rest of my life. Quite the reverse, in fact — and that’s the point. I have a sound culinary technique, I know the foods and the flavors that I like, and I’m far more likely to turn out a good dish by relying on my own imagination than by following somebody else’s ideas.

This afternoon, for example, I was casting about for a sauce for cold salmon. Kathleen couldn’t eat mayonnaise (just to be safe), and dairy was out as well. But the doctor had excepted yogurt from the dairy ban, and I decided to except avocado from the raw-vegetable ban. I happened to have a tub of plain Greek yogurt in the fridge, and a perfectly ripe avocado in the vegetable basket. I had already run downstairs for a bunch of dill: preparing to poach the slice of Scotch salmon, I’d sniffed the jar of dried dillweed and smelled only dust. And, for that prized frugal touch, I had a quietly aging half-lemon lying on the counter. Into the food processor with all of it!

The result was not perfect. The taste of (one) avocado was muted by the plain yogurt. And a teaspoon of curry would have added significant interest, if (a) Kathleen weren’t convalescing and (b) I’d whipped up the sauce about three hours earlier. To thin the sauce, which was thicker than mayonnaise, I added a few tablespoons of water — which felt very odd but which was just right, as I needed liquidity without (extra) flavor. The sauce, spooned over the chilled salmon, went delightfully with steamed zucchini slices as well. Capellini tossed with parmesan cheese completed the summer-luncheon plate.

I’m sure that the avocado-yogurt-dill-lemon sauce appears in a million cookbooks. It’s even possible that I followed a recipe for it once, long ago. It really doesn’t matter. Originality is not the name of the game.

When I asked Kathleen yesterday what she wanted for dinner, I could see her flesh crawl at the prospect of yet more chicken. But the more robust choices were out. How about veal, she asked. So I toddled down to Agata & Valentina and bought a nice rib chop. This I rubbed with a drop of oil and a tablespoon of crushed sage. Broiled for eight minutes on each side, the chop was done to perfection, retaining the faintest blush of pink at the center. I served it with haricots verts and Yukon fingerlings. The potatoes were steamed, and Kathleen had hers plain, without the butter that I swirled mine in. The beans were snipped, parboiled, and sautéed — in Benecol. The Benecol didn’t fool me into thinking that the beans were buttered, but it came close enough.

***

At Crawford Doyle on Friday afternoon, I remembered that Ms NOLA had strongly recommended reading Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. She also assured me that I’d “knock it off in a day.” Which indeed I did, even though I didn’t start reading it until late yesterday afternoon. I not only read it, I read most of it aloud to Kathleen, while she knitted receiving-blanket prototypes. I was hugely moved.

Well, as you know, I’m hugely moved all the time — I’m lucky that way. But yesterday’s movement was more of a scraping. The way that I’ve developed of remembering my adolescence was what got scraped away. So much of Mr Cameron’s book reminded me of what my teens were really like — which was somewhat surprising, since the novel’s narrator was born in 1985 or thereabouts, nearly forty years later than I was. You’d think that our experiences of adolescence, given everything that has changed, would be rather different, but no.

James Sveck is a very intelligent graduate of Stuyvesant High, class of ’03. He spends the ensuing summer scheming to avoid going to Brown in the Fall. He thinks that college will be a waste of time, and he is very articulate about why. Reason Number One: he hates people his own age, probably because they are adolescents. This displacement was extraordinarily familiar. Teenagers are supposed to suffer all sorts of existential doubts about themselves, but, like James, what I experienced instead was a conviction about others. Especially other adolescent males.

“What’s so bad about college students?”

“They’ll all be like Huck Dupont.”

“You’ve never met Huck Dupont.”

“I don’t need to meet him. The fact that his name is Huck and he got a full hockey scholarship to the University of Minnesota is enough for me.”

“What’s wrong with hockey?”

“Nothing,” I said, “if you like blood sport. But I don’t think people should get full scholarships to state universities because they’re psychopathic.”

I may have put it better myself at the time, but never mind. Forget Holden Caulfield; I knew how to piss people off big-time. As does James.

There’s one line in the book that screamed RJ! so loud that I felt slightly violated. Having “acted out” — a phrase that sadly didn’t exist in my day — on a school trip, James has been sent to a therapist. After weeks of sessions, the shrink finally confronts James about his meltdown. Typically (I’m speaking from experience), James parries her questions with further questions, as if he were the doctor. But he’s not the doctor. At a crucial point, she gets a rise out of him.

“So you assumed I was arrested?” 

“I suppose I did.”

“Well, I wasn’t arrested. And the so-called trouble with the police wasn’t my fault. It was my parents’. They got the police involved. They filed a missing persons resport. If they hadn’t done that, everything would have been fine. Or less bad.”

“Were you missing?”

I realized she had tricked me into talking about what had happened in Washington, and even though I felt okay about talking about it, I wanted to make it clear I was aware I had been tricked, so I didn’t answer.

I think you could say that I spent my youth — not just my adolescence, but my the years between the time when I was first commanded to play baseball (to which I responded with a passive ressistance that I did not need Gandhi to teach me, perhaps because even in fourth grade I was larger than Gandhi) and the time when I decided to buckle down and study for the law boards —  you could say that I spent my life “making it clear.”

A  very pet peeve. So pet, in fact, that I may have complained about it before, if not, I trust, in this column.

At The Awl, Dave Bry concludes one of his mortifying but compulsively-readable apologies by assuring the musician, Bob Mould,

I’m different than that now.

<Screech of grating chalk!>

“Different than” is the most ill-tutored solecism that I know of that does not involve the misuse of a personal pronoun.

This was what got Tim and I started.

I’m always astonished to hear this sort of thing from smart, presumably educated people. (In this case, Matt Thompson at Snarkmarket.)

Whereas the misuse of personal pronouns appears to be strongly linked to socio-economic background (yet another reason to shun it), different than has not been as strenuously weeded out in the better schools. It places speakers in the class not of rich or poor but of inattentive.

For an adverb, such as than, to have a function in this formulation, the adjective that it modifies must be a comparative, so that the adverb can point to a  difference in the degree to which the adjectival quality obtains.

He is smarter and better-looking than I am.

Not

He is smart and good-looking than I am.

Similarly, we might say,

You are more different than I am.

(If this sounds wrong, it’s only because we prefer to use unusual when making comparisons about personal singularity.)

Without the comparative, there is nothing for an adverb to do in Mr Bry’s sentence; at the same time, there is the need for a preposition — from — to mark the distance, literal or figurative, between two states or things.

The curious thing is that, to reflect his thought more clearly (if less modestly), the word that Mr Bry ought to change is not than but different.

I’m better than that now.

And perhaps his sense is betrayed by his mistake.

last Week at Portico: Even though five Daily Office entries appeared this week — more about why in a moment — I managed to write le minimum: pages on last Friday’s movie, Public Enemies, on this week’s novel, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (more of a novella, really), and of course the Book Review review.

Over the holiday weekend, I decided, rather quickly, to replace the Monday edition of the Daily Office with a Friday edition. This will allow me to enjoy the weekend more freely, or at least to have more time for reading. Some sort of brief news post will appear on Monday, but the nature of its contents may take the rest of the summer to settle.

Ms NOLA and I got together again this afternoon. I saw Whatever Works at eleven, at the Angelika — and, once again, there was sound trouble. (At least the sound never cut out entirely silent, as it did for Elegy, in the same auditorium.) But nothing could diminish the splashing summer fun of Patricia Clarkson’s astonishing performance — the most astonishing aspect of which was that an astonishing actress could astonish. (Come to think of it, Ms Clarkson appeared in Elegy as well. Maybe the sound gremlin is her doing.) After the movie, I walked over to Spring Street, between Crosby and Lafayette, to visit a shop that was written up in the Times the other day. What a ha-ha Kathleen had at my expense when I announced that I’d discovered it: she has been going to an uptown branch of Pylones for four years at least (sez she). I bought a bunch of stuff, but this was the pièce de résistance. At least Kathleen was kind enough to pronounce it cool.

Then I hopped on the train and rode up to 28th Street. Ms NOLA and I had a lunch date at La Petite Auberge, an ancient-looking French restaurant on Lex with an ancient-looking menu. There is nothing ancient-tasting about the food, however. Although it’s conservative, it is not preserved.

There was much to discuss. It was all utterly confidential and très hush-hush. Ms NOLA actually surveyed the restaurant at one point, to make sure that we were “alone.” By the time we left, there was no need to survey the restaurant, because everyone else had left.

After a little errand at a nearby print shop, we headed up to Yorkville and the Upper East Side, where we eventually found ourselves at the Museum’s Roof Garden. This year’s artist, Roxy Paine, has “planted” the terrace with what looks like a wildly out-of-control potato vine and an ice-bedecked bramble.

It was glorious, up on the roof. There was a fine breeze that moderated the beat of the sun. I had a couple of glasses of Prosecco. Ms NOLA soaked up the greenery of the clipped yews that border the garden (not to mention the grand carpet of treetops that separated us from Midtown). Life was good.

We went downstairs and sailed quickly through the Francis Bacon show.  I make a point of visiting the big painting or drawing shows whenever I’m at the Museum, even if it’s only for a few minutes’ visit. That is the luxury of living nearby: there is always time for a quick run-through — and for a few stop-and-stares along the way. I have begun to recognize the face of George Dyer even after his lover has rearranged it.

Stopping in at Crawford Doyle minutes before it closed, and loading up on great books that I may not live to read, we returned to the apartment and drank tea on the balcony. Eventually, we persuaded Kathleen to come home. Actually, she met us at the New Panorama Café, where she dared to dine on her usual dish, penne al pomodoro. A consultation with the internist lifted the prisoner-of-war diet. Kathleen is to avoid whole milk, butter, and cream for a week, but she can eat hard cheese, which of course  mean reggiano parmegiano. Last time I checked, she was sleeping comfortably. Ms NOLA hopped on a bus afterward, and I have been here at my desk ever since. It hardly feels like three hours!

¶ Matins: Tear down that highway! Four cases (two of them in San Francisco) where getting rid of a highway improved congestion, by taking the Braess Paradox seriously.

¶ Lauds: Fr-eye-day Candy: Vlad Artazov’s witty and beautiful sinkers.

¶ Prime: At The Corner Office, Jeffrey Pfeffer shows how a misguided belief in efficient markets enables laziness and perpetuates errors.

¶ Tierce: The poor jury — they haven’t been able to do a thing all week except show up and leave. Today, the lawyers argued about evidence again: the admissability of Pearline Noble’s diary. (Don’t ask.)

¶ Sext: We can’t tell you how wet we think this iPhone app is. What’s more infurtiating than some guy strolling through a subway station as if he actually knew where he was going — instead of following Exit Strategy.

¶ Nones: Russell Lee Moses counsels against reading too much into the Urumqi riots; that is, interpreting the unrest as a genuine threat to the Communist Party’s lock on power.

¶ Vespers: It has been so long now that we’ve misplaced the lead that took us to The Neglected Book Page, where, as you can imagine, one thing leads to another. Pretty soon, we were perusing a list of 100 unread novels.

¶ Compline: Villa Trianon was a dump in 1906, when Elsie de Wolfe and Elizabeth Marbury bought it for $16,000 and turned it into a showplace. After World War II, Elsie turned it into a showplace all over again. Now it’s a dump. My good friend, George Snyder, is looking for a willing millionaire to save it. Do you know one?

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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