Right before the end of the opera that bears his name, Handel’s Xerxes — Serse, in Italian — sings an aria that I like a whole heck of a lot more than the very famous one with which he opens the so-called comedy. That would be “Ombra mai fu,” almost certainly the one number from Handel’s catalogue that’s up there with such Verdi hits as “La donna è mobile.” Everybody knows the tune, even if nobody has ever heard it sung. But, as I say, I like Xerxes’s last aria, “Crude furie degl’orridi abissi,” much better. The famous aria is wonderfully stately and all that, but “Crude furie” scores a perfect ten as a ridiculous temper tantrum. What could be more operatic than a comically-presented temper tantrum?

Mozart’s entry in this field, “Smanie implacabili,” from Così fan tutte, is the reigning masterpiece, and, as with Handel’s aria, the joke lies in the the orchestral commentary. Mozart scores Dorabella’s grandiotically despairing plea to the furies with a wallpaper of sweet Bronx cheers. Handel is a bit simpler: his violins mock Xerxes’s clueless tirade with cheekily swooping scales. Up and down they run, and they’d make you seasick if they didn’t have your eyes rolling. The eye-rolling is what I love about the aria; it gives me a clear and distinct idea of what Kathleen must be thinking while I storm about the apartment in search of a misplaced Book Review.

Although I know Così fan tutte as well as I know my own name, however, you mustn’t think that I’m a scholar of Handel operas. So not! But I came to listen to Serse and Rodelina a thousand years ago thanks to the Brian Priestman recordings on Westminster. As I recall, Canadian mezzo Maureen Forrester sang the title role in Serse, and I hope that I’ll be able to recapture her performance on CD (or MP3) one of these days. For the record, this marks the first time that I’ve ever thought that somebody did a better job than Anne-Sofie von Otter. But it’s early days; I only listened to the new recording for the first time yesterday.

I played “Crude furie” seven times in a row, steadily increasing the volume each time. There was nothing else in the world that I wanted to listen to while this state of play lasted.

Kathleen took yesterday off, so that she could see Julie & Julia with me. Determined to prevent my seeing the movie without her, she also knew that I would never agree to await her convenience. There’s more to it than that: I simply won’t go to the movies after 1 PM at the latest. I’m at my best, movie-goer-wise, before lunch and in an empty theatre.

We got the Orpheum — just around the corner — about forty minutes before show time. There was already a line (of one). When the movie finally got rolling, after yards of pathetic ads and mis-matched trailers (Roland Emmerich as a Nora Ephron appetizer?), the auditorium was at least half-full, a truly remarkable turnout. Trust me: I should know.

After the movie, we returned to the apartment so that I could change into clothes more appropriate for Midtown. We weren’t going to Midtown, but to a neighborhood widely known as Lenox Hill but that I increasingly think of as “Little Mad,” because so many stylish shops seem to have have abandoned Madison Avenue for the stretch of Third between 72nd and 79th. Because of the glorious weather, Kathleen wanted to have lunch outside; and, because of the movie, I knew that the only restaurant for me was Orsay, on Lex at 75th.

If you’ve already seen Julie & Julia, and you’ve been to Orsay, you’ll know why. It’s a matter of lace curtains, etched windows, and vaguely art-déco paneling. The food is very good, but the food is very good at a lot of places; and in any case, food wasn’t the point. After two hours of watching a movie about food and cooking, I was eating with my eyes.

Some movies are very seductive. Chinatown, for example. For days after the first time — the first couple of times — that I saw Chinatown, it was hard to know whether I was living in Los Angeles in the mid-Thirties or Houston in the mid-Seventies. It wasn’t that I had a preference for one or the other. At a deep, emotional level, I was confused. Eventually the confusion wore off: powerful as they were, Roman Polanski’s visions of California were no match for Houston’s weather. A more recent seduction was accomplished by the markedly unseductive De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat My Heart Skipped). For a few days after that introduction to the magic of Romain Duris, I didn’t really know French from English.

You would expect Julie & Julia to seduce me, and, once upon a time, I’m sure that it would have done. Instead, though, it posed a kind of reckoning. Pointing a finger right at me, the movie wanted to know what I had done with my life. As an ageing blogger beset by the conviction that he is on to something, if he could only figure out what it is, I hardly knew which woman’s predicament seemed more like my own. I may not have been seduced, but I was certainly confused, and, as usual, this meant that my eyes were in a state of spillover.

I will say this: happy and supportive marriages play the leading supporting role in Julie & Julia. So I was hugely grateful to Kathleen for taking the day off, and making sure that I did not discover the movie without her arm linked through mine.

¶ Matins: Food for thought this weekend: Alain de Botton proposes “A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success,” in a presentation at TED. The main point: make sure that your idea of success is your own idea.

¶ Lauds: Every time Jeremy Denk adds a new bit of music appreciation to his blog, the technical support gets better. Now, we think, it has caught up, in a piece about one of Brahms’s three sonatas for violin and piano (all beauties).

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon: “When Stretching the Accordion Makes Sense.” Makes sense! It sounds like the best idea ever. But it does pit one idea of growth against another.

¶ Tierce: Meet Judy Natkins — you can see her in court.

¶ Sext: For those of you who haven’t seen Elizabeth Moss off the Mad Men screen, there’s Amy Heckerling’s Intervention parody.

¶ Nones: We thought it might be Iran aiming to shut down Twitter, but it was more likely Russia and Georgia, trying to shut down one another — propaganda-wise, at least.

¶ Vespers: Some Friday fun from Tao Lin, at The Stranger. “The Levels of Greatness a Fiction Writer Can Achieve in America (From Lowest to Highest).”

¶ Compline: The weekend must-read: Jonah Lehrer’s “The Truth About Grit.” At last, a truly cogent demolition job on IQ testing (and testing in general).

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

It wasn’t the lack of access to Twitter that made me cross today — and I was very cross. Kathleen tried to talk me out of being cross at dinner, but I replied that she could make all the excuses that she liked, that I’d considered them all, and that I had rejected them. She, at least, recognized the fearful aspect of the denial-of-service attack (inadvertent though it may have been).

Boy, was I ever in the mood to see the Bacon show! I was cross enough to carve up a few carcasses myself. At least I wasn’t mumbling to myself. If I’d been mumbling to myself — given how cross I was — I’d have been given a police escort somewhere. At one point, I did wonder how I came to be at the Bacon show. I’d only gone out for a walk. To talk pictures for next week’s entries. Yes. I’d dipped into Central Park; and then, in need of a lav, right out again. Out of the Park and into the Museum.

The crowds at the Museum were not exactly mood-enhancing. And then to find that the escalator was out of service! I ought to have turned on my heels and gone home. Instead, I climbed the great staircase. Once at the top, I couldn’t think of anything better than to duck into the Bacon show, which I’ve already seen a few times. I looked carefully at a couple of the canvases, but mostly I just harmonized with them. Inside my head, there raged a sanguinary blizzard of intemperate thoughts about heedlessness, inattentiveness, and smugness. And wrongheadedness, while I was at it. I never imagined that I’d think of Malcolm Gladwell as wrongheaded. But in fact I did, this afternoon, and quite intemperately. He’s wrongheaded, that is; I’m the intemperate one.

But in cases where the status quo involves systematic injustice this is no more than a temporary strategy. Eventually, such injustice requires more than a change of heart.

And if the response is also systematic, then you can easily end up with a room full of Bacons — and no paint necessary! The only alternative to a change of heart is (literally) excoriation.

 

¶ Matins: The High Line may be cute, but we disapprove (an understatement) of elevated highways in urban areas. So does everybody with a brain. Jonah Freemark and Jebediah Reed contemplate the elimination of seven American monstrosities.

¶ Lauds: Matt Shepherd ruins Rashomon for everyone, forever. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Prime: Gracious! All of a sudden, defunct Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers owes New York City gazillions in back taxes! Was Mayor Bloomberg perhaps a bit too pally with Richard Fuld?

¶ Tierce: Four months in, and the prosecution is still at it. Not even the newspapers are paying much attention; what about the Marshall Trial jurors?

¶ Sext: Who will replace Frank Bruni as the Times’s restaurant critic? [Sam Sifton, that’s who.] This may be the last time that anybody cares. (via The Awl)

¶ Nones: And, just the other day, we watched The Hunt for Red October: “Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast of U.S.”

¶ Vespers: Aside from Pride and Prejudice, we haven’t read any of the books on Jason Kottke’s best-book list (why only six). That may change.

¶ Compline: James Bowman regrets the fading of the honor culture. We don’t, not a bit, but Mr Bowman’s very readable essay can’t be put down.

(more…)

Today was not quite so focused on work. I paid the bills, for example. In theory, paying the bills should require nothing more than slipping five or six sheets of checks into the printer and pressing a button. In theory, I open each bill when it arrives and type in the amount due, in Quicken. In practice — well, there is no practice, but we’re moving in the right direction. Last month, practice approximated theory very closely. This month, not so much. When I sat down with the stack of envelopes this afternoon, only two of them had been opened — the two that always arrive first. Excelsior!

(If you’re thinking of recommending something called “electronic payments,” don’t. Ghastly experience has taught me that I am too old a dog to remember to open virtual envelopes.)

Having paid the bills, and with dinner completely under control — once again, Kathleen named a time and a dish (and, once again, it came to pass) — I thought that I might work on some Portico pages, and this turned out to be interesting. That’s Chinese for “a bad idea.” Meaning to add one line — just one line! — to a draft that I wrote yesterday, I realized that I’d altogether missed the point of the story that I was writing about. Yikes! As for the other page, the one that I had to write from scratch, it was a dog’s breakfast. Happily, the virtue of having paid the bills cast a rosy glow over these disappointments. (Not to mention that hot rush of intaken breath, occasioned by grasping the wisdom of not adopting a contrarian position vis-à-vis the New Yorker‘s fiction editor.)

Before I paid the bills, I caught up with my online reading — which is to say that I read the latest entry at SORE AFRAID. Eric Patton writes about his recent (third) trip to Jerusalem. Among other things, he and his friend Asaph visited the Holocaust Museum.

We took an English tour, and the guide — a middle-aged woman with an oddly cheerful and eccentric manner about her — spoke into a microphone that transmitted a signal to headphones worn by everyone in our group.  As she led us through the exhibits, she didn’t really look at us as she spoke; she just talked into the air.  I understand that there is no universally accepted theory for why the Holocaust happened, but our guide kept throwing out odd bits of information that only made the terrible events even more baffling: “Hitler’s mother was very nice!”  “Hitler had barely ever met a Jew growing up!”  “The Nazis were not initially elected because of their anti-Jewish views!”  “There were almost no religious Jews in Germany!”  Do these things just suddenly happen, out of nowhere? I wondered.  That was the implication of our tour guide.  Everything can suddenly change and then the most horrifying atrocities will be committed by neighbors against their neighbors.  It is a frightening thought.

The genius of this paragraph is that the horrible uncertainty that’s explicitly stated at its end infuses it from the start, beginning with “oddly cheerful and eccentric manner,” and steeping thereafter. That the passage is also funny only tightens the screws. At the end of the entry, I was almost weeping. I felt that my day had changed somehow.

(And yet, as Eric himself certainly knows [he has been!], the suddenness of neighborly atrocity is a hallmark of what happened in the former Yugoslavia, over and over again, after the death of Marshal Tito and the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

My day had, specifically, changed with regard to my literary scruples: if I was less fastidious about the stories that I was writing about, I was much more fasticious about my own pronouncements. And it had become the sort of day when paying the bills is a lighthearted sort of pastime.

¶ Matins: Josh Levin consults “the world’s leading futurologists” to hear how the United States might come to an end within the next century. Not that it will; just, how it might. (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Anne Midgette considers the pros and cons of tweeting at classical-music concerts. An intriguing discussion that left us feeling somewhat frustrated.

¶ Prime: We’re very heartened by the news that one of two bidders for the Boston Globe contemplates running it as a not-for-profit operation.

¶ Tierce: Christopher Shea may be forgiven for wondering: “But how many pieces about Child’s cultural significance can media outlets run before it starts to look as though reporters and editors have a financial stake in the forthcoming Nora Ephron movie about her?

¶ Sext: We may have found the killer ap for the iPhone: Diaroogle. (via This That These & Those)

¶ Nones: The Miskito population of Eastern Nicaragua renews its bid for independence.

¶ Vespers: The protagonist of Ian McEwan’s next novel, likely to be called Solar, sounds familiar, but we’re not naming names.

¶ Compline: Brooks Peters engages in “battle royale” with pretentious but ignorant mispronunciations of French words.

(more…)

A good day is like natural gas: it burns without leaving a residue. A good day for me, that is. The following list, of things that will not show up, one way or another, at one of my sites, will show why.

• I took a walk. (yay!)
• I made a BLT for lunch (necessitating the walk).
• I ate leftovers for dinner.
• I saw to the minimum personal and housekeeping chores (ie, I got dressed, I made the bed).

Everything else that I did, from the moment that I bent down to pick up the Times at the front door until right this minute, had something to do with — let’s be grandiose — amplifying my presence on the Internet. When I wasn’t reading or writing, I was commenting at Facebook or looking at tweets.

And now that I look at the list, I’m reminded that I’ve never written up my method of making BLTs, which yields sandwiches as good as if not better than the best that the city has to offer; so that may not belong on the list.

And it’s more correct to say that I took the walk because I was feeling very antsy after lunch. A letter that I wrote to a friend documents this. (Ought the letter to a friend be on the list of things that won’t show up on one of my sites? All too evidently not!) The walk restored me completely.

***

I spent most of my life afraid of the kind of work-commitment that I’ve made to Portico and The Daily Blague. I feared that such a commitment would choke all the fun out of life. And it probably would have done. By waiting until the Internet and then the Blogosphere got themselves invented, I was enabled to professionalize all my amateur interests — by which I mean nothing more serious than dealing with them on a regular schedule. I’m as moody as ever, but my moods have a lot less to do with how I spend my time. And the worst mood of all has been downsized from cumulonimbus to cirrocumulus. That would be my fear of not writing well.

That’s my abominable conceit for you: what I mean, really, is, the fear of not writing well enough. It will never go away altogether. There will always be projects that pose peculiar, rather occult difficulties. (It’s usually a case of wanting to write about something that I haven’t properly digested.) But the determination to sit down and have a preliminary go at something meets with a lot less resistance than it used to do.

I suppose I always knew that “practice makes perfect” would prove to be true even for me. What I never guessed was that even I would come to prefer doing the hard and boring site-related stuff to doing anything else. Oh, I don’t always. Not yet I don’t. But that I should ever prefer the hard and boring to the diverting surprises me greatly. I thought that I was missing that mental component.

***

The secret, I think, is to resist the sense of look how far I’ve come! As if I had arrived, once and for all, at some desirable position of self-mastery. It’s the moments of self-mastery that come to me — when they do. Tomorrow could be a howlingly bad day. Last week amounted to no more than a stretch of dented fender, thanks to brief but dismaying server and cable outages.  Far from having found a safe harbor, I’ve exposed myself to a greater array of adverse contingencies; when I was a dilettante, far fewer things were crucial. And I do miss that. But I’d miss what I have instead a lot more.

As a reward of sorts, my Red Letter Day (yesterday) was concluded by an outage at this site’s server. I don’t mean to sound too ironic; I really did make the most of the setback.

Having revived the habit of copying all work to the clipboard before attempting to save it in cloudland, I did not lose the diary entry, and so was able to post it, complete with banner, at Portico, where a re-think of the opening page, previously headed “Vestibule,” had not made much progress. I’m going to try to make another habit of cross-posting diary entries at both places, with the hope that dear readers will make a note of the Portico address. Portico is housed at an entirely server, so it’s very unlikely that The Daily Blague and Portico will be unavailable at the same time.

You will find Portico at www. portifex.com.

¶ Matins: David Carr writes about The Party. You know the one! The Talk launch, which happened ten years ago last Sunday. Remember? When the Web was a “niche”?

¶ Lauds: Alex Ross’s New Yorker column on the wealth of interesting music available through Internet portals, “Infinite Playlist,” hits a lot of bases, but keeps running.

¶ Prime: Thinking of “investing in art”? Felix Salmon: Don’t be daft.

¶ Tierce: Compare and contrast these contemporary fines: $675,000 for file sharing in Massachusetts; $1300 for second DUI arrest. Get your dose of righteous anger at World Class Stupid — it’ll make you laugh before you can rant.

¶ Sext: Here’s something useful to fight about while we ponder Michael Pollan on cooking and couches: the (Scottish or English) origins of haggis.

¶ Nones: Sometimes, ceremony matters. A lot of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s former cronies stayed away from his “endorsement.”

¶ Vespers: Here’s a wonderful new literary game from LRB: take the title of a famous book and attach it to the name of an author who (a) couldn’t possibly have written it or (b) would have turned in a very different text.

¶ Compline: David Bromwich writes about “America’s Serial Warriors,” captured at Tomgram. (via The Morning News)

(more…)

As Kathleen was getting ready for work, she announced that she would try to be home at 9:30. That was amazing enough, but it didn’t stop me from saying that compleat happiness would be mine if she would only tell me what she’d like for dinner. Like most people who don’t cook, Kathleen has a difficult time conceiving of dinner when she has just brushed her teeth after tea and toast. But she struggled valiantly, and was able to ask for “grilled chicken and a salad.”

Everyone was talking about the Rorschach inkblots last week, after a Canadian psychologist posted a Wikipedia page that was something of a vent. Who knew there were only ten? That was the impression conveyed, anyway.

I was obliged to take the Rorschach test in elementary school, and it was all I could do to keep frpm giggling. “What this looks like, doctor, is that you’re an idiot to place any diagnostic reliance on a bit of fingerpaint.” Not in so many words, perhaps. I should have just come out and told the doctor that I was sure that my mother wanted to kill me, if only he’d asked nicely. (And I was!)

Clancy Martin’s Diary entry about his substance abuse got a lot of follow-up. Other long threads raveled Mad Men avatars, Chinese students’ identity theft, and Jamba Juice.

New at Portico:  Unprofessional as it may be to do so, I’m going to blame this nasty summer cold of mine for a slackening of page production. I have done the writing, I assure you — but not the editing, the formatting, the uploading, and so on. Stay tuned! At least I’ve taken care of the Book Review review. I also posted the first draft of a page about L J Davis’s A Meaningful Life, because I wanted to show off about having read it.

If I didn’t quite get to (500) Days of Summer on time, that’s because I wanted to tuck Adam into this entry along with it. Now I’m completely up to date on that front.