Today was gloriously “meta.” Astonishingly!

Don’t you hate that word? “Meta” always sounds to me like one of those awful Midwestern women’s names from the last century. And did you know that all it means — “meta” — is “after” or “between”? All right, it’s more complicated than that; as a preposition, μετά means different things depending upon the case of the associated noun. But the one thing that μετά does not mean is “meta.” Here’s why:

They were arranging Aristotle’s books on a shelf one day. So to speak. Aristotle’s “books” were in most cases passels of notes taken by students and recensed after the philosopher’s demise. The book that begins, “All men by nature desire to know” somehow wound up shelved after the book that begins,

When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, causes, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge and understanding is attained. Are we dead yet?

This second/first book was called, for very clear reasons — it’s about the world that we perceive — Physics. The next book on the shelf, which is about some other world, some world that we can’t see, and that, therefore, in the eyes of many ancient Greeks and even more modern Americans, is better than the world described in Physics, came to be called Metaphysics — the book after Physics.

However: here’s why the day was “meta”: I was busy all day reading and writing stuff for The Daily Blague and Portico. That was it. The things that did not pertain to Internet sites belonged under the category of breathing: I made the bed. I ate lunch. I collected the mail and went to Food Emporium. I made shrimp risotto for one (Kathleen is still on her prisoner-of-war diet). I still have to wash half of the dishes. Fascinating stuff.

When I wasn’t being domestically fascinating, I was thinking thoughts that have already been copyrighted by other pages. If I were to write about them here, it would be the world’s most ludicrous episode of “Behind the Scenes!” Which, come to think of it, isn’t so far from “Between the Scenes!”

¶ Matins: Max Fisher calls it semitarianism, and Peter Smith likes it. Now, eat your vegetables.

¶ Lauds: The evolving aesthetic of public monuments finds interesting expression in a new 7/7 memorial, soon to be unveiled in Hyde Park.

¶ Prime: The death of Robert McNamara reminds Philip Delves Broughton, author of Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School, of what he calls “The McNamara Syndrome.” (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Ya gotta admit: the trial as eveything: Gurneys! Oxygen! A men’s room shut down for an hour, while Charlene comforts her traviato.

¶ Sext: Henry Alford files a report about leftovers: “chunks of some sort of appalling turgid brownish oozing cake.”

¶ Nones: In the bad old days, utter nincompoops could inherit thrones. Now, they get elected. But the problem is the same: how do you get rid of them? The kid-glove approach taken by the Honduran élite seems not to have worked.

¶ Vespers: Chalk another win up for NYRB Books: they’ve reissued L J Davis’s A Meaningful Life — now, 29 years after hardcover publication, in cloth. John Self enthuses.

¶ Compline: John Lancaster, a Washington-based journalist, did not finish out his term at Atchison College, Pakistan’s top prep school (boys only, natch), but he did gather enough material for a must-read report. (via  The Morning News) (more…)

This morning’s Read bored me quite to sobs. Lord Chesterfield’s letter, which I’ll get to in a moment, was the only good thing — but I’d read it before. Don Quixote and Sancho had a particularly silly and pointless quarrel that might have amused me if I had not been laid low by an excruciating chapter in Moby-Dick (the one about the history of the Enderbys and the Coffins — I can’t be bothered to touch the book twice in one day) and a lot of context-free chitchat in Squillions — than which it is impossible to imagine a worse-edited collection of letters. It might help if I understood — really understood — what Herman Melville and Barry Day set out to accomplish. All that I see is tedious inappropriateness.

Writing about the difficulty of determining the mainspring of a man’s character, Chesterfield seizes on the examples provided by those two eminent cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin — though he goes at them in reverse order.

I mean ambition and avarice: the latter is often the true cause of the former, and then is the predominant passion. It seems to have been so in Cardinal Mazarin, who did anything, submitted to anything, and forgave anything, for the sake of plunder. He loved and courted power, like an usurer, because it carried profit along with it. Whoever should have formed his opinion or taken his measure singly, from the ambitious part of Cardinal Mazarin’s character, would have found himself often mistaken. Some who had found this out, made their fortunes by letting him cheat them at play. On the contrary, Cardinal Richelieu’s prevailing passion seems to have been ambition, and his immense riches only the natural consequences of that ambition gratified; and yet I make no doubt but that the ambition had now and then its turn with the former, and avarice with the latter. Richelieu (by the way) is so strong a proof of the inconsistency of human nature, that I cannot help observring to you, that while he absolutely governed both his King and his country, and was, in a great degree, the arbiter of the fate of all Europe, he was more jealous of Corneille than of the power of Spain; and more flattered with being thought (what he was not) the best poet, than with being thought (which he certainly was) the greatest statesman in Europe; and affairs stood still while he was concerting his criticism upon the Cid.

For my part, I don’t see Richelieu’s literary ambition as an inconsistency.

The cadence “did anything, submitted to anything, and forgave anything, for the sake of plunder” is magnificently dishy. “Plunder” is exactly the mot juste. It sounds like dirty laundry.

After dinner, we watched Gambit, a favorite movie that never ceases to surprise us — the surprise being that Ronald Neame’s 1966 caper flick isn’t celebrated as a great Hollywood entertainment. Maybe the film is too good. For the first twenty minutes, we’re treated to the “perfectly planned” scenario that will bring Harry Dean (Michael Caine) into larcenous proximity with a fabulously valuable portrait bust; Nicole  Chang (Shirley MacLaine), an attractive Hong Kong taxi dancer, will run interference for him by mesmerizing the wealthiest man in the world (and the owner of the portrait bust), Ahmad Shahbandar (Herbert Lom), with recollections of his late wife. What you might miss the first time through is that, in the enactment of the plan, Nicole never utters a word. She is the perfect woman: mysterious and silent. By “too good,” I mean that things go hilariously downhill from there.

In fact, Nicole is something of a chatterbox. The movie ads teased viewers by giving them permission to tell their friends how the movie ends, as long as they didn’t tell how it begins. Because the beginning is a fantasy, a male pipe-dream in which careful forethought is mistaken for a guarantee of success. Harry Dean’s plan is a beaut. But it is just a plan, and it assumes that Harry knows all there is to know about his mark. In the end, of course, Harry is utterly dependent on Nicole’s ability to improvise escapes from potentially mortifying hot spots.

One of the film’s little jokes is that Harry Dean, a compleat Cockney (“What’s the matter wi’ you?”), pretends to be Sir Harold Dean, old Etonian (Thank you”). Harry thinks that he has done his homework, but he can’t tell Shahbandar the name of the headmaster back in the day. He hasn’t even taken the trouble to impersonate a baronet his own age. As Nicole discovers to her chagrin, Harry has concocted his plan in the friction-free laboratory of his own conceit.

***

In the Book Review this week, Dominique Browning reviews Frances Osborne’s book about her great-grandmother, The Bolter. In the review, Ms Browning refers to An Aesthete’s Lament, one of my blidgeted blogs and, indeed, the source of my awareness of the book, which, at the time, was not available here in the United States. So I did what Idina Sackville (the Bolter) would have done and ordered a copy from Amazon in England (“Amazuke.”) I’m not saying that Idina Sackville would have gone to any trouble about ordering a book — she doesn’t appear to have been much of a reader — but she tended to traverse with dispatch the shortest distance between herself and what she wanted.

Sadly, though, The Bolter has not turned out to be a book that I want to read. Much of the book is good enough or better, but much of it is quite regrettable, at least by my lights. Here is Paris, shortly after the beginning of the Great War:

Paris was a city of façades: brushed pavements, manicured parklets, rows of little shop fronts and grand colonnades. Its web of cobbled alleyways, passages and petites rues led from the damp, sweet air of bakeries to the rich aromas of cafés before tumbling out into long, wide boulevards. Here proud, pale-stoned bâtiments descended in classical lines to the ground, where suddenly the archways and wrought iron gates broke into curls and twisted vines — pure, shivering, Parisian elegance.

These comely and inviting phrases describe Paris to a T, as indeed I can attest from my last visit, in 2003. Ms Osborne’s flourish captures what we might call the Eternal Paris, but it lacks the frank decency to begin, “Paris, then as now…” The sheer padding-ness of her sweet little paragraph is so egregious that it’s funny. But The Bolter is not a funny book.

And, let’s face it: “Paris was a city of façades” is a statement that deserves to be chiseled on a marble slab at the Prep School Hall of Bull Shit Fame. The author sometimes appears determined to be as verbally depraved as her thrice-plus-twice divorced great-grandmother was sexually. Indeed, it was doubtful that I’d finish The Bolter, until Ms Browning’s reference to An Aesthete’s Lament. That pricked my sense of responsibility. One of the Aesthete’s readers would have to file a book report; it might as well be me. Which is abominable conceit for you, as Ms Browning, also quite clearly a reader, has not only done the job but been paid for it.

***

It’s not that I’m a pessimist, really, but I don’t go in for the kind of daydream that, in Gambit, leads Harry Dean down the garden path. Instead of foreseeing that a plan will proceed like clockwork, I anticipate elaborately contingent disasters. My attempt to withdraw money from a local ATM, for example, will be thwarted by an out-of -control, Taking of Pelham-type “police activity” in the subway station below the bank. The Harry Deans of the world would take up dishwashing if they had to run their schemes by me for approval.

That’s why, once the initial surprise mellowed into ongoing delight, I decided not to mention my grandchild’s existence until his or her graduation from high school. I was tempted, just now, to specify a college graduation, but that prediction seemed uncomfortably fraught. Perhaps college will be completely passé in 2031 — and how likely is it that I’ll be compos mentis at the age of 83? As it is, the child’s more immediate hurdle is birth itself, an event that will roughly coincide with my turning 62. Which I don’t dare to look forward to!

Kathleen, however, is knitting.

 

¶ Matins: Is the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound a template for health care reform?

¶ Lauds: My friend Ellen Moody writes about the strange success of Ronald Colman.

¶ Prime: According to Patrick Devedjian, the French stimulus minister, “The country that is behind is the U.S., not France.”

¶ Tierce: Defendant Anthony Marshall called in sick today, and the jurors were excused. Vanity Fair comes to the rescue, with a slideshow of sketches by Jane Rosenberg.

¶ Sext: It’s time for lunch: think I’ll cloud up my vital fluids.

¶ Nones: Coup or clean-out? The fact that the Obama Administration can’t seem to decide upon a characterization of recent events in Honduras suggests to me that we’re going to support the new regime.

¶ Vespers: Richard Crary writes about youthful reading and outgrowing writers.

¶ Compline: Remember the “Peter Principle”? Italian researchers have confirmed it. (via reddit)

(more…)

The quiet life that I have taken up this summer — I’m “away,” even though I haven’t gone anywhere — has created a vacuum of sorts, and my mind is filling it up with all sorts of miscellaneous reflections. Some of the things that pop into my head are “live” issues that I’m “thinking” about, with a captial “T.” Others are scraps of memory — but they’re not what you’d call “memories.” They’re the ashes, or ghosts, or whatever, of old longings. I used to abound in longings. Now I have only one longing, and that is to live until tomorrow. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Among the capital-T thoughts: Freud. For some time now, Freud has been regarded, by intelligent people, not as the radical sexologist who assured us that we all harbored unspeakable thoughts about our parents, but as a humanist who made it possible to talk about — sex. Look back at “the literature” (any literature!) before Freud, and you will find that sexuality pretty much equals bestiality, something that human beings, half-beast but also half-angel, ought to rise above. You will find that no responsible person prior to Freud had anything systematically positive to say about sex. (By “systematically positive,” I mean to exclude the occasional enthusiastic insight penned on a Greek-island junket.) Freud humanized sex — and the proof of his achievement is in the odd sound of that statement. How could sex be in need of humanizing? Trust me: it needed it, especially after Augustine was through with it.

Freud’s contribution, then, was to make talk about sex decent. It’s a staggering achievement. In a few short treatises on dreams and slips of the tongue and whatnot, Freud demolished three thousand years of patriarchal nonsense about carnality.

Almost everything that Freud had to say about sex, though, was wrong, at least as regards specifics. How many boys experience “the Oedipus complex”? I daresay that the lusts of small boys have no respectable Greek-myth correlative, and would look, if realized, a lot like Animal House.

Everybody knows that Freud is wrong about the particulars. But one problem remains. If, prior to Freud, only pathological misfits were obsessed by sex, after Freud, everybody was obsessed by sex. (As you can imagine, this universalization was vital, if Freud’s theories were to be decent.) But, just as only a handful of human beings prior to Freud were, fact, truly bestial, so, after Freud, only a handful of human beings were what Freud would have called “genital.” The rest of us having been spending fortunes on spas and vitamin supplements in hopes of becoming as fully sexualized as we “ought to be.”

Especially those of us who are not twenty years old.

What’s great about sex, when you get right down to it, is the very material evidence that you’re wanted, however briefly. Not only wanted, but permitted to want right back. Orgasm is nature’s way of putting this neediness away, at least for a while, while at the same time gratifying it.

So much for Thoughts. (I could have gone on about Freud all night!) As for Memory, I’m remembering the keen desire to Go Out.

The desire to Go Out, suffered to unspeakable degrees by almost everyone between the ages of 21 and 35, is strangely assymetrical. There is no corresponding desire to Go Home. If you actually want to go home, you are probably about to be arrested. You would rather go home than be detained by the police, which is almost certainly what you deserve — if you have reached the phase of wanting, truly, to Go Home.

Now that I no longer desire to Go Out (not at all), I’m surprised by the power of the view from the balcony (portion shown above) to remind me of the feeling without actually rekindling it. Why should the sight of a thousand windows, some of them lighted, slightly more of them not — and all of them signals of housebound domesticity — arouse a desire to freshen up, don an outfit, and venture forth in the cool summer evening?

Freud would have said it was sex. If only!

 

¶ Matins: Ross Douthat writes lucidly about the the problem posed by someone like Sarah Palin to American politics. It has a lot to do with that problem that Americans don’t like to admit that we have: class distinctions.  

¶ Lauds: Plans to house Gap founder Don Fisher’s modern art collection in San Francisco’s Presidio have been gored by a combination of  NIMBYism and very mistaken preservationism. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon argues very persuasively against subjecting credit default swaps to regulation by state insurance commissioners. Although slightly daunting at the start, Mr Salmon’s entry is definitely worth the effort.

¶ Tierce: They wanted to put Cecille Villacorta away for a long time. But her lawyer, Joe Tacopina (get his card, now!)  convinced the judge that the Saks saleslady had been trained to increase her commissions by sending kickbacks to favorite customers.

“Basically, Cecille’s saying, ‘You told me to do this. You trained me to do this. I made you $27 million. And I became a defendant,” Tacopina said after court yesterday.

¶ Sext: In case you’ve ever coveted one of those Gill Sans “Keep Calm and Carry On” T shirts (complete with crown), Megan Hustad’s write-up may cure you, at The Awl.

¶ Nones: The death of Robert McNamara occasions a great deal of reflection — if only we can find the time.

¶ Vespers: Hey! See action in war-torn quarters of the globe while engaging in serious literary discussions with brainy fellow warriors! Join the Junior Officers’ Reading Club today!

¶ Compline: According to Psychology Today [yes, we know that we ought to stop right there], parks occupy an astonishing 25.7% of New York City’s surface area! That’s what density makes possible. (more…)

¶ Lord Chesterfield invites his son to regard him as a censor.

I can now undertake this employment only upon hearsay, or at most, written evidence; and therefore shall exercise it with great lenity and some diffidence; but when we meet, and that I can form my judgment upon ocular and auricular evidence, I shall no more let the least impropriety, indecorum, or irregularity, pass uncensured, than my predecessor Cato did. I shall read you with the attention of a critic, not with the partiality of an author; different in this respect, indeed, from most critics, that I shall seek for faults, only to correct, and not to expose them.

Has anyone ever thought of writing another jolly musical on Pygmalian themes: My Fair Bastard?

¶ In Moby-Dick, Ahab colloquiates with a fellow whaling captain who has also lost a limb to the White Whale; unlike Ahab, Captain Boomer has learned his lesson.

No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?” — glancing at the ivory leg.

“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”

¶ In Don Quixote, our hero’s encounter with the villagers who feel insulted by their neighbors’ braying mockery, goes swimmingly, until Sancho decides to say a few words — followed by a few sounds.

I remember, when I was a boy, I used to bray whenever I felt like it, and nobody held me back, and I did it so well and so perfectly that when I brayed all the donkeys in the village brayed, but that didn’t stop me from being my parents’ son, and they were very honorable people and even though this talent of mine was envied by more than a few of the conceited boys in my village, I didn’t care at all. And so that you can see that I’m telling the truth, wait and listen, because if you know this, it’s like knowing how to swim: once you’ve learned you never forget.

“But one of the men who was near him, thinking he was mocking them, raised a long pole…”

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward writes, to Laurence Olivier, that Marilyn Monroe “is certainly no Madame de Staël, is she?” He’s not asking.

How to get to New Hampshire, that is the question.

Aside from the usual New England prettiness, New Hampshire has nothing to recommend it, and ought probably to be expelled from our enlightened republic. Most of the inhabitants would never notice.

There’s this one thing, though: my aunt and most of my cousins live there. They’re no more New Hampshire natives than I’m a Texan. We were all living happily in Westchester until a couple of late-Sixties catastrophes propelled my father and his brother in different professional directions. Even then, New York was more easily reached from Houston than it was from Hillsborough County.

A visit from me is somewhat overdue, and yet I find myself asking why I, who live in the center of the universe, am not welcoming my aunt and my cousins on visits to New York City. I suspect that the answer goes something like this. The move to the Monadnocks was so traumatic that the appeal of Gotham must evermore be denied. So much so that, until his death a few years ago, my uncle used to take my aunt on annual visits to London (Angleterre) to see the latest shows. There was a certain Bronx-cheering ostentation in this gesture that I never called. I guess I’m doing so now.

I used to visit my relations in Wilton, Lyndeborough Center, and Peterborough so often that they were afraid, as the bumper sticker has it, that I’d take over. But there came a point after which I could no longer drive responsibly. My rigid neck made unsignaled intersections difficult and dangerous to cross. (Wah Wah! Don’t Cry For Me, AAA!)

The very idea of Kathleen’s driving requires a separate entry, but as everyone who knows her knows, it is an absolute impossibility. In any case, she talks of flying to Manchester and hiring a car and driver for the weekend. This rather chichi option has its appeal, and no doubt I’d like to tour the North of Italy in such a conveyance. But I have no intention of pulling up at my aunt’s kerb in a limousine. The simple truth is that I’m unwilling to go anywhere in this sad strange country that I live in that doesn’t doesn’t give me NRA-level freedom of transportation. If I can’t walk out into the street, raise my hand, and stop a taxi, then I don’t want to go there.

As for people don’t want to come to New York City, then they’re not telling the truth when they claim to want to see me. He who is tired of Gotham is tired of RJK. C’est ça.  

 

¶ Matins: Another way of looking at Earthly inequality: 50% of the world’s population inhabits nations that, in sum, produce only 5% of the world’s GDP.

¶ Lauds: Elliot Goldenthal discusses his beautifully moody score for Public Enemies with Jim Fusilli, at Speakeasy.

¶ Prime: Matt Thompson, at Snarkmarket, writes about the long overdue concept of “too big to succeed.”

¶ Tierce: Just when we thought that the prosecution had exhausted its witnesses hostile to defendant Anthony Marshall, in walks the accountant.

¶ Sext: So, we’ll bet you thought that a 50-pound ball of Silly Putty, if dropped from a 10-storey building, would do some awesomly rampaging bouncing. Not so.

¶ Nones: Ethnic riots in Urumqi probably don’t threaten the stability of the Communist Party’s regime in China, but they do suggest that Uighur “aliens” don’t cotton to Shake-‘n’-Bake Han colonization.

¶ Vespers: At The Millions, C Max Magee looks forward to books forthcoming in the second half of 2009. It’s better than Christmas — even if all you want to read is the new Joshua Ferris and a genuine novel by Nicholson Baker.

¶ Compline: A phrase that’s altogether new to us: (to) gay marry. Friendship with (abstract?) benefits.

(more…)

This morning, implementing a diabolical plot, I poisoned Kathleen, subjecting her to a life of torment.

I confess!

The plot was diabolical because it was impatient. Kathleen’s tummy bug has been with us for several weeks now, and it has not responded to my stream of eviction notices. This morning, I persuaded Kathleen that she had recovered enough to have an almost-normal weekend breakfast. But the croissant and the scrambled eggs, while perhaps not deadly on their own, were catalyzed by coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice into a toxic fireball that kept Kathleen in bed all day — because the bed is to stay close to the bathrrom.

The glorious weather outside was simply an insult.

Kathleen sweetly begged me not to feel bad, but it was impossible. If I had deliberately slipped her a poison pill, my remorse could not have been greater. What ought to have been a pleasant day on the balcony, knitting and checking out eBay was instead a tableau vivant from the last days of a beloved cholera victim. It was some comfort that Kathleen didn’t run a fever at all; it seemed simply to be a matter of her body saying NO! A THOUSOUND TIMES, NO! to fresh-squeezed orange juice. And not kidding about the thousand times, either.

At five o’clock on Sundays, Kathleen calls her parents. I offered to call on her behalf, and the offer was accepted. I told Kathleen’s father what I’d done. He laughed. I resolved not to mention this unbelievable callousness to Kathleen, but when I recounted the verbal portion of our conversation, she smiled (wanly!) and said, “Daddy probably laughed.” The joke was that I’m as impatient as my father-in-law for rude good health to grace his partner. And indeed I am, only I haven’t his excuse. For in truth I’m the sick person in this household. The one who, before Remicade, used to spend days and weeks as Kathleen spent this afternoon.

In all seriousness, I was very angry with myself. Kathleen kept saying, “But I decided that I could handle the orange juice. You didn’t force-feed me!” Sweetest Kathleen! What Kathleen actually decided, though, was that it was easier to drink the orange juice than to bear the atmospheric pressure of my pouts and whistles.

They talk about people who are “bad patients,” who can’t let others nurse them through, say, a tummy bug. But I am a “bad nurse.” Get well soon, or it’s “bring out your dead.”

Or, from Kathleen’s viewpoint, it’s as Winston Churchill immortally put it: “If I were your husband, madam, I would drink that orange juice!”  

last Week at Portico: It was beneath us, of course, but we went to see Todd Phillips’s The Hangover  last week. We went alone, thinking it unwise to tell anyone that we were going, much less to ask anyone to join us. We told ourselves that the movie would be surprisingly different in unexpected ways, but at least we don’t have to take back saying that to anybody else. We also read Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi , and decided that it’s a first-rate piece of conceptual art. Fun to read, too. Rather more engaging, or at least more geared to our possibly vétuste sensibilities, was this week’s New Yorker story, Lorrie Moore’s “Childcare.”

As for this week’s Book Review, the one truly good review in the entire issue was written by Liesl Schillinger, who is a critic. I’m not saying that Ms Schillinger ought never to write a novel, as long as she learns who to write one better than any of the novelists appearing this week knows how to play critic. Caleb Crain, who clearly speaks for all of those young gents (as I’ve no doubt most of them are) who strongly dislike the work and whimsy of Alain de Botton, ought to have the courage of his animus, and express himself plainly instead of resorting to  condescending snark. Ha! Now there’s no need for you to click throught to this week’s Book Review review.

How about this: the world is divided into two groups. Photographers who like to include people in their compositions and photographers like me who wish that everyone would stay at home. Just staying out of the frame isn’t good enough; I see best when no one is around. When I’m trying to think, the presence of other people is cripplingly distracting.

Which certainly makes New York City an exciting place for taking pictures!

This picture would have been pretty good (allowing for its many technical imperfections, notably a slight blur due to palsy), if only the fourth finger of my left hand hadn’t been doing its thing, hovering over the lens (not shown). Here’s “what I saw”:

So, knowing how I could crop the shot, the obtrusion didn’t really matter. But if I’d wanted to use the whole image, I’d have been in for a long wait, because the emptiness proved to be totally momentary. Head bobbed up from below; worse, bodies coming in from the left blocked the view. It isn’t that I wanted to take a picture of a “deserted” subway station entrance. It’s just that the entrance interested me because, deserted, it was visible.

After Public Enemies, which Kathleen, LXIV, and I saw at the Union Square Thetre, and a nice long lunch at the Knickerbocker, I headed up to Union Square by myself, to take some snaps for next week’s Daily Offices. It was an assignment that I was prepared not to enjoy. There were a lot of people in the park, and they all looked alike: young. Given the location, what did I expect? People my age still regard Union Square as the ideal place in which to catch a disease, possibly death. It seems quite safe now, but the presence too many young people is as off-putting as that of too many old people. En masse, demographic groups always look their worst. All one can think of (vis-à-vis crowds of young people) is the flood of rude health and easy beauty, thrown away on minds that are either callow or naive. Young people of both types think that they know a thing or two about the world, and they’re right, but they don’t know very much about themselves. Such as, for example, the remorseless dispatch with which time is going to steal the unearned benefits of being twenty-one.

The upshot is that a park full of young people is almost as depressing as a mausoleum.

Almost but not quite. When my quiver of images was tolerably full, I contentely blocked that view with my very own self and was soon speeding homeward.

What do I find on page 6 of the latest from P D James, The Private Patient, but the following:

Her father’s periodic bouts of violence were unpredictable.

Oh dear. “Her father’s periodic bouts of violence were intolerable” would have been equally wrong — assuming that the father was, indeed, an unpredictable human being — but I might not have caught it. I’m amazed that no editor did. “Sporadic” would have been better; it’s at least correct. But surely way to fix this sentence is to join it with the first half of the following one:

Her father’s unpredictable bouts of violence meant that no school friends could safely be brought home, no birthday or Christmas parties arranged. And, since no invitations were ever given, none was received.

The Private Patient is really the most clever old thing. It involves (so far) a successful Harley Street plastic surgeon who runs a private clinic in the country. How’s that for up-to-date? I almost wish that Ian McEwan would bring back Henry Perowne to write a parody, because Private Patient is totally not up-to-date. It’s a wonderful old creaker. The clinic has been fitted into an old half-timbered manor house, with gates that close and mysterious rocks in the garden, where a witch was once burned. No crime has been committed — yet. A plastic surgeon in a remote country house — paging Dr Frankenstein?

update: In fact, however, the Gothic tease is soon thrown off, to reveal a ripping yarn about the consequences of plagiarism.

 

Clippings virumque cano.

What I want to know — but without lifting a finger to find out — is why I was so fascinated, way back in the Spring of 2001, with New Jersey’s Miranda Imbroglio. No, you’re right — I wouldn’t know what I was talking about, either, if I hadn’t unearthed a shoal of clippings about the matter this afternoon.

Let me take you back: Christie Whitman, then the Republican governor, resigned to take a cabinet position in the new Bush Administration (she wouldn’t last). This made Donald DiFrancesco, the President of the New Jersey State Senate, Acting Governor. The state constitution required that he remain president of the Senate. This meant that the powerful Mr DiFrancesco had a lot of enemies.

I can’t remember why Mr DiFrancesco wanted to appoint Isabel Miranda, a former Citibank executive, to serve as state treasurer. And I’m not going to try to find out now! David Halbfinger’s story in the Times (3-26-01) will have to do:

Isabel Miranda, who was named treasurer of New Jersey on March 19 and took over as acting treasurer on Friday, was director of trusts and estates for Citibank’s private banking unit until 1996, when, the co-workers say, she was forced to resign and immediately escorted from her office in the Citicorp tower in Midtown Manhattan.

The co-workers said Ms. Miranda was fired after auditors found evidence that she and Donald R. Browne Jr., an executive in Citibank’s San Francisco office who later transferred to New York, had charged the bank for frequent cross-country trips to visit each other and for trips together to places like Palm Beach, Fla.

There must have been a cherchez-la-femme aspect to this story that I found pungent at the time. But Ms Miranda’s misadventures have been buried by thick sediments of 9/11, James McGreevy, and Albany follies from Spitzer to Espada. (Here in the Tri-State area, we can deal with only one dysfunctional statehouse at a time.) The lights went out on this story in my brain a long time ago. I could remember, handling the clippings, that I’d been fascinated by it, but I hadn’t a clue as to why. Even now that I’ve glanced over Mr Halbfinger’s three-page story, I haven’t a clue as to why.

***

I still don’t know when exactly it was that I launched Portico, but I believe that it was during Y2K. So, when the DiFrancesco/Miranda story was in the news, my familiarity with Web publishing was still rudimentary. I mention this because I don’t think that it had occurred to me yet that a political story transpiring in New Jersey was something that I might ever write about. I was clipping the Times’s stories about it simply because they interested me, and I thought that, at some critical point in the future, it would be fun to haul out the old news and point to the details that, now, in this hypothetical future, would shimmer with iridescent significance. That critical moment never came. Other critical points supervened.

***

Getting rid of clippings has been on the agenda for a while now.  The deliberations have been complicated — if you don’t believe me, just remember “Times Select” — but the salient point here is that I don’t need the reminders that newspaper clippings can provide. I know this because they never provided me with any reminders, and that for the simple reason that I never consulted them. Once tucked away in their folders, the clippings entered the state of suspended existence experienced by all those knick-knacks on the Titanic. Unlike said knick-knacks, the clippings lacked any and all intrinsic interest.

There was one extrinsic interest that they might have developed, however, and this dire possibility made it imperative to get rid of the things. I’ve neglected to mention until right now that the two well-stuffed accordion folders that I finished purging this afternoon contained clippings from the Summer of 2o00 to the Summer of — 2002. I was certainly at the height of my newspaper-clipping powers back in those critical years!  But just think: what if I became famous (posthumously, of course), and scholars discovered those accordion files? You know what scholars are! The Clippings of RJ Keefe: 2000-2002. Once they’d dealt with my choice of 9/11/Terrorism articles, and my phonebook-thick sheaf of plush about The Producers (all tossed today, except for the one with the Hirschfeld drawing. Hirschfeld!), they’d speculate about my “unaccountable interest in New Jersey politics.” Couldn’t have that!

***

I did find one clipping that shimmered with iridescent significance. It was so shimmeringly significant that I almost broke down in tears. Among the many Paul Krugman columns that I cut out of the Times before finally realizing that (a) I agreed with Mr Krugman on all points and (b) it would more convenient to collect his thoughts in book form, even though (c) this turned out to be unnecessary, given the whizbang Times site, which nobody could have imagined back then, was the following, “Passing The Buck” (3 September 2002).

In his keynote speech at last week’s Jackson Hole conference, Mr. Greenspan offered two excuses. First, he claimed that it wasn’t absolutely clear, even during the manic market run-up of 1999, that something was amiss: “it was very difficult to definitively identify a bubble until after the fact — that is, when its bursting confirmed its existence.” Second, he claimed that the Fed couldn’t have done anything anyway. “Is there some policy that can at least limit the size of a bubble and, hence, its destructive fallout? . . . the answer appears to be no.”

I wasn’t alone in finding this speech disturbingly evasive. As The Financial Times noted, policy makers always have to act on limited information: “The burden of proof for a central bank should not be absolute certainty.” The editorial also reminded readers that while Mr. Greenspan may now portray himself as skeptical but powerless during the bubble years, at the time many saw him as a cheerleader. “The Fed chairman . . . may well have contributed to the explosion of exuberance in the late 1990’s with his increasingly bullish observations.”

Moreover, there is evidence that Mr. Greenspan actually knew better. In September 1996, at a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, he told his colleagues, “I recognize that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point.” And he had a solution: “We do have the possibility of . . . increasing margin requirements. I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.”

Yet he never did increase margin requirements, that is, require investors to put up more cash when buying stocks.

You’ll note that Mr Krugman (and, presumably, the Financial Times) uses the C word: cheerleader. If only Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve could be as murkily lost to the mists of time as the machinations of Donald DiFrancesco, what a much happier world this would be! I have no doubt of it. I had no doubt of it when I clipped Mr Krugman’s column.

¶ Matins: It appears that the Plain People have been going native, since the last time you saw Witness, anyway. A run on an Amish bank? (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds:  Things Magazine calls Triangle Triangle “one of those abstract sites that seems to distil whole swathes of contemporary cultural production down into just one or two images.”

¶ Prime: Jay Goltz writes about our idea of very cool wheels: the 2010 Ford Transit Connect.

¶ Tierce: More Madoff fallout: J Ezra Merkin will have to sell his $310 million worth of art.

¶ Sext: Hey! It’s just not true: Coca Cola + MSG ≠ aphrodisiac! The idea! And what about the story that metal objects dissolve in Coke? (via The Awl)

¶ Nones: Does the proposed withdrawal of all 27 EU ambassadors from Iran sound like a good idea to you? Not to us, it doesn’t.

¶ Vespers: Emma Garman writes irresistibly about Françoise Mallet-Joris’s The Illusionist (Le Rempart des Béguines, 1951), showing how it goes “one better’ than Françoise Sagan’s much better-known Bonjour, Tristesse.

¶ Compline: Flash from the Past: George Frazier’s truly astonishing liner notes to Miles Davis’s Greatest Hits (1965): forget the blues, man; how’s my suit?

¶ Bon weekend à tous! (more…)

Today was the day that the New York Times wasn’t delivered — anywhere. I exaggerate, certainly. But, still…

I thought it was just me, of course, when Kathleen reported the missingness of the Times at the door this morning. (The relevant credit card expired a few months ago, and I never bothered to provide a new expiration date; then again, I was never asked to do so.) When I called the newspaper’s 800 number, however, I was immediately informed of a “production delay.” I was also assured that the paper would be delivered by noon. That did not happen.

I thought it was just me “of course” because  I really did let my subscription to The New Yorker lapse. Now, how did that happen? I don’t remember throwing away any of the hundreds of the reminders notices that invariably precede such dire cut-offs. I used to be terribly about that sort of thing, but now that I am an old dodderer with nothing better to do, I open “renewal notices” right away. I can’t think what happened with the only really important magazine in the world that I take.

That’s pretty much it for today. The newspaper didn’t come. I had bought this week’s issue of The New Yorker at the newsstand across the street on Monday. I didn’t miss the Times, really. I read online most of what I would have read shuffling through the broadsheet; what I missed was the Opinion, which I never look at online unless I’m linking to something. It was not the end of the world, not getting the paper. I guess that that’s how the world ends; but then I don’t want to sound like a toad in warm water.

Oh, I did ask for some help with Corel’s WinDVD software. I had never figured out how to capture images with the latest version of the program. It turned out to be simpler than I dreamed. So often, that’s the problem.

¶ Matins: At last! Jason Epstein’s dream of books-on-demand will be getting a serious try-out, using the Espresso Book Machine (made by a company that Mr Epstein founded), in Manchester Center, Vermont. You must watch the video! (via Arts Journal)

¶ Lauds: Architect Michael Sorkin appraises Manhattan as a pedestrian town, and tries to think of buildings to suit.

¶ Prime: More about Chris Anderson’s Free: from Mr Anderson himself, at The Long Tail; and, in not so loyal opposition, from Choire Sicha, at The Awl and from Brian, at Survival of the Book. A new digital divide?

¶ Tierce: A star is born: Lisa Maria Falcone, formerly a person with money (and, more formerly, a person with no money), seeks a place in Gotham’s philanthropic firmament. A Cinderella story — adjusted for real time.

¶ Sext: We don’t know whether to laugh or to shudder at this Sixty Minutes segment about fMRI mind-reading.

¶ Nones: In futures trading on Iraqi stability, China gains access and standing in the petroleum business — aided by the American Senate.

¶ Vespers: Watch that Tweet! In case you don’t “follow” Alice Hoffman — provoked, over the weekend. by an unfavorable review of her new novel, The Story Sisters, into an authorial “meltdown” — you can real all about it at Salon. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: The always thoughtful Richard Crary considers Michael Jackson, at The Existence Machine.

So I find myself listening to songs I’ve known forever for really the first time, in my own time, paying attention to stuff I’ve taken for granted. And the main thing I’m struck by is the evident rage and pain in Michael’s vocals.

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