¶ Matins: We remind you that it is your civic responsibility to stay abreast of national affairs, even at the risk of being supremely depressed by Elizabeth Drew’s brief history of Congressional health care bills since the Massachusetts by-election. There don’t seem to be any good guys in this story, only less-bad ones. And it’s difficult to avoid holding the electorate itself responsible. Which, in a democracy, means that everything is just fine.  (NYRB)

¶ Lauds: Mary Louise Schumacher writes about the artist-in-residence program at Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel. The public is invited to vote for the finalists. (JSOnline; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Tara Siegel Bernard reports with a reasonable degree of lucidity (for the Times) on the push to impose fiduciary liability on stockbrokers and insurance agents.

¶ Tierce: On the unlikelihood of attaining warp speed anytime soon: Johns Hopkins researcher William Edelstein describes the obstacles to NewScientist.

¶ Sext: Jonathan Harris needs a diagnosis.

¶ Nones: Reading Edward Hugh’s detailed account of the troubled Greek economy, at A Fistful of Euros, we wonder if being better-informed wouldn’t intensify popular German opposition to Eurogroup bailouts. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: A long but rich interview at Prospect: Tom Chatfield talks to Martin Amis. Be the first on your block to read what Mr Amis thinks of J M Coetzee!

¶ Compline:  William Pannapacker, writing as “Thomas H Benton,” issues a warning, at Chron Higher Ed, reminiscent of Dante: Abandon all hope, ye who enter graduate school programs in the Humanities!

Between five and six o’clock, I dragged myself around the apartment in despair, hoping that my neighbor and former French prof would have forgotten our date. “Hoping” is too strong a word; I knew perfectly well that he wouldn’t forget. But how could I receive him? I looked a mess, and so did much of the living room. I hadn’t finished tomorrow’s Daily Office, but what I had done had depressed me completely. Not that I wasn’t already depressed. Feeling tired and fragile, I could not imagine simulating the bare minimum of sociability. Also, I was very cold. The heat hadn’t worked since lunch time.

Despite this funk, I threw myself into the shower and, having hosed down, put on a lot more clothing than I’d taken off. So that was two problems taken care of. I was clean and I was comfortable. I sat down and knocked off two more hours. It would have been nice to finish the page, but the doorbell rang promptly at six. There was nothing for it but to plunge headlong into the murk of Bad French. 

Regular readers will not have forgotten my friend Jean Ruaud, recently the guest-editor of The Daily Blague. As a native of Touraine, Jean speaks just about the best sort of French that there is — but not to me. With me, Jean is eager to speak English, and since his English is a lot better than my French (among many other reasons), I oblige. But I don’t learn any French. Happily, I did not become Jean’s friend because I hoped to practice French with him, so I am not disappointed. In Jean, that is. My French, however, is un bordel.

Plunge I did, though, and pretty soon I was thrashing about like an enthusiastic but not very bright retriever, describing the problems of modern Greece in a language somewhat closer to Greek than English, but not necessarily français. La Grèce — I had to ask my prof for the gender, but not before I’d referred to in the masculin for several paragraphs. I looked back nostalgically on la Guerre froide, which, it must be acknowledged, imposed a certain discipline and a measure of organisation upon world affairs. I confessed that, President Obama’s appeal, things have gotten worse in this country than they were pendant les années Bush. (Don’t miss tomorrow’s Matins!)

Then we talked about the eighteen-month cauchemar, involving a leaking oil tank, at the prof’s weekend house (the tank belonged to a voisine mécreante). I am always glad that I don’t own a car, but the prof’s tale of woe reminded me that I am also glad that I don’t own a house. Come to think of it, though, not owning a house did not make the loss of heat for six hours more bearable than it would have been if I’d been in contact with the repairman. I wouldn’t have had to listen to bland and meaningless assurances that “they’re working it.”  

But the heat did come back on while the prof was here. He asked me to check it even as I was headed for the HVAC. Most of my problems had been taken care of by this time, and now this: j’étais content.

J’ai descendu avec le prof shortly before eight — in time to pick up a collis at the package room. When I got back upstairs, I felt quite well for the first time all day. I even ordered a historical novel that the prof spoke of reading, Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt.

¶ Matins: Paul Krugman’s column on the “Euromess” is well-worth thinking about, especially if you’ve read Jane Jacobs’s Cities and the Wealth of Nations. The real thrust of the piece, however, is Mr Krugman’s warning against elitist prematurity.

 (It has never been satisfactorily explained to us why the Euro could not have been floated as a supplementary currency.)

Mr Krugman believes that Spain and Greece would be better off as states in a federal republic, but we don’t believe that arrangement is working so well on this side of the Atlantic as it is. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: At The Millions, Buzz Poole writes about a photography show in Milwaukee, Street Seen: The Psychological Gesture in American Photography, 1940-1959, that marks the era in which we learned that the camera is not doomed to truth-telling.

¶ Prime: Was Ruth Simmons taking Felix Salmon’s advice when she resigned from the Goldman Sachs board? It would be very pretty to think so!

¶ Tierce: It was very pretty to think that Rom Houben, the “locked-in” accident victim, had been let out of his mental prison, but last fall’s announcement sparked some reservations that now turn out to have been justified. Andy Coghlan writes in Short Sharp Science.

¶ Sext: At Boston.com, Chris Clarke provides a universal template for writing incendiary blog posts.

¶ Nones: The attempt to divide the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, creating a new state called Telangana, continues to rouse partisan violence.

The Telangana partition ought to be of the first interest to all students of democracy. Authoritarian states can redraw administrative and political maps as needed (whether or not in self-interest), but democratic governments must pull off the trick of persuading interest groups who have no interest in being persuaded. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers:  Tom McCarthy discusses the post-nouveau aesthetic of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, a writer “bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian. (LRB)

¶ Compline: Writing about the rather unsurprising perils facing housemaids in early modern England, in History Today, R C Richardson discusses the amazing case of Anne Greene, whose vindication was thought to be nothing less than miraculous.

I’m on a Morse jag. I’ve got all the Inspector Morse episodes, and I know at least half of them by heart. For that reason, I don’t watch them very often. But, once a year, I succumb to the charms of John Thaw and Kevin Whately and the galaxy of Names that people the thirty-three episodes. What happens is your basic faute de mieux: there isn’t a feature film that appeals (or there is one, but I’ve watched it five times in four days), so I go through the Hickson Marples. When they’re done, I turn to Morse. When I’m through with Morse, it’s Jane Tennyson’s turn. The only rule is that I have to watch all of each before moving on.

This year, I’m doing Morse blind. I insert each DVD into the kitchen screen after taking scrupulous care not to know which episode it is. This is better, let me tell you, than watching the shows in alphabetical order — how wet was that? Next time, I hope, I’ll know enough to watch them in the order in which they were aired. The episode in the machine right now is the one about the competition for the mastership of some college or other, and the woman who is shot in her own townhome — by mistake, as I recall. Although “as I recall” is never very comprehensive. For which thank heaven! The killer is a hoity-toity lady who bosses her husband around. She is not apprehended outside the Bath hotel where Morse confronts her, but soon after. As I recall.

I watch these shows in the kitchen, which is to say that I don’t watch them at all — I’m cooking, washing dishes, exploring the refrigerator. With my rigid spine, I don’t have the option of turning a casual glance in the screen’s direction; I have to stop and reposition myself to see what is going on. That’s not necessary most of the time, and when it is necessary, failing to do so simply makes the episode all the more richly interesting, because my little brain secretes implications and complications to make sense of what I haven’t seen. This kind of misinformation can take years to uproot. I can never remember what happened to the Wolvercote Tongue.

What I love most about these shows — Morse, Marple and Tennyson — is that they are presented in English, a language that is all but unknown in my country.

¶ The Litwit is in Paris.

¶ This is why nobody writes to authors. Harlan Ellison has  a LOT to answer for. (Letters of Note)

¶ The Persophone Post.  (via ? — Sorry!)

It’s like mortality: sometimes, you are intensely, unbearably oppressed by the knowledge that you are never going to catch up on your to-do lists. Not even close. And, as with mortality, a benign oblivion is the only balm.

This Valentine’s Day, I was somatically challenged. I was clumsy making breakfast, dropping little things and misjudging the timing. (The croissants nearly burned, right before my eyes, in the new, glass-fronted Waring convection oven; I was not ready to take them out.) It took forever to get through the Times, and I was far from comfortable in my patchily irritated skin.

We did take a walk to Carnegie Hill, for a nice brunch at Island and a shop at Feldman’s, but I had to ask Kathleen to slow down a bit on the sidewalks, because I couldn’t keep up with her stride (and she over a foot shorter than I!). Back at the apartment, I found that it was all that I could do to make a pot of tea. I collapsed onto a sofa and began a hopeful project: getting through yet another slab of magazines, particularly issues of L’Express. I also wanted to start in on Cathleen’s Schine’s new novel, The Three Weissmans of Westport, and to continue with Lytton Strachey’s biography of Queen Victoria.

What I didn’t do was to make dinner. It wasn’t that I wasn’t up to cooking. It was that the refrigerator is in sore need of what let’s call an update. It won’t take long, really; almost everything in the refrigerator is either in a bin or on a tray. But I haven’t been able to bring myself to see to it, and I wasn’t about to interrupt a reading day the shrewd calculations of quartermastering.

A reading day: I need more reading days. Not to mention days when reading leads straight to writing. “Straight to writing”? Have I deluded myself that the act of sitting down to write for Portico is ever accomplished without the violent slam of breaking the sound barrier?

¶ Matins: Remember when we didn’t know much of anything about autism, not really? Now, it seems, we know less. Michelle Dawson shoots off ten “off the cuff thoughts” about the criteria for a diagnosis of autism prescribed by the DSM-V. (The Autism Crisis; via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Lauds: The late-June date is set for the Sotheby’s auction of Polaroid’s corporate photography collection, which is expected to bring $9 million (plus or minus 2). Critics would prefer to keep the collection both intact and in the hands of a known entity. Few of the photographs were purchases; many were exchanged, for free cameras, with famous photographers. Ansel Adams was the original de facto curator. (NYT)

The liquidation of the collection is required by bankruptcy proceedings involving Polaroid’s corporate parent. (Bloomberg)

¶ Prime: If George Cloutier is right about how to run a business, then we might as well nuke the planet, because his outlook is so profoundly antisocial that no social benefit can compensate for its utter inhumanity. “Fire Your Relatives. Scare Your Employees. And Stop Whining.”

Our bet is that a businessman such as George Cloutier has only his unattractive personal difficulty to work with. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: Linda Geddes exploited her very own wedding as a science project: before and after the ceremony, blood was drawn from the the bride, the groom, and other members of the wedding party so that levels of oxytocin and several other hormones (including testosterone) could be measured. (New Scientist)

¶ Sext: George Snyder takes us on a visit to Warter Priory, a horrible old pile that, sadly nonetheless, was torn down nearly forty years ago. The tinted postcard is worthy of Edward Gorey. George’s dish is even tastier.

¶ Nones: Who’s going to succeed Lybian leader Moammar al-Gaddafi? As Hugh Miles notes, this is a question not only of who but of how as well, because the Colonel is not a conventional head of state. Rather, he is the revolutionary leader. His second son (a likely contender, according to Mr Miles) would like to come to power “under the provisions of a constitution.” (LRB)

¶ Vespers: At Survival of the Book, Brian writes about Scott Brown’s impending contribution to the shelf of “polibrity books.”

¶ Compline:  Compline: Lauro Martines reviews a book about the burgeoning field of public health, during an outbreak of plague in late-Sixteenth-Century Italy. We can only hope that Mr Martines will write his own book about these developments, even though (or precisely because) the 1570s are outside his established specialty, which is the Early Renaissance in Italy. (TimesOnline)

Unlike yesterday’s, this evening’s visit was planned. It was Nana Penny’s wonderful idea, conceived long before she arrived in New York: she would bring Will up to our apartment so that his parents could have a few hours alone together, after six weeks of Not.

If I weren’t so tired, I’d think up a slew of State Dinner jokes. The three grown-ups had an Upper East Side classic: lamb chops (from Holland Court), steamed baby Yukon potatoes, and Lesueur peas. It was wildly out of harmony with the spirit of the evening, which called for sandwiches on tray tables. We did not dine together, for example; Kathleen played with Will while Penny and I dug in. Adding injury to idiocy, the lamb chops were overcooked by about a minute.

On the nursery front there were many interesting issues. I don’t think that I ever drank a martini,  back in my martini days, as fast as Will put away his bottle. The downside of this healthy imbibition was an apparently painful intake of air: the boy was botherated by gassy cramps. Kathleen and Penny managed to elicit relieving burps, but when I bounced Will, I simply made him uncomfortable.

That, on top of the overcooked lamb chops, would have convinced me that life is no longer worth living, if it weren’t for pictures like the one above. Nana Penny will be back this summer, thank heaven. What an angel she has been!

As for Will, there was a stretch just before dinner when he was looking up at me from Penny’s lap, and really taking me in — but enough about me. The thing is that, for the first time, I thought that I was seeing his face to come. And it was super, because it seemed that Will is going to take after his handsome father.

¶ Matins:  Where have all the busybodies gone? Whitney Carpenter, writing at The Bygone Bureau, suggests that you answer this question with a glance in the mirror.

Consider: the news about Niall; Pete Warden’s geographical analysis of Facebook networks; and the fact that the Paterson story has been denied by the Times, which was expected to drop a bombshell. Who would notice busybodies in this environment?

¶ Lauds: Dan Callahan writes about one of our favorite actresses, Mary Astor, at Bright Lights. His analysis of Astor’s performance in The Maltese Falcon — looking for the “real” Brigid O’Shaughnessy — is not to be missed.

¶ Prime: The idea of the celebrity director, invited to join a corporate board in order to confer cultural tone or, worse actually, diversity, gets sent to the cleaners by Felix Salmon.

¶ Tierce: Sharon Begley explains why so many affluent women of a certain age look like dolls: “Hello Botox, Bye-Bye Sadness — But Not for the Reasons You Think.” (Newsweek; via Arts Journal)

¶ Sext: We always knew that Joe Jervis was a prince; now he turns out to be a prince from Wales. A good friend is an avid genealogist.

¶ Nones: Greece has been hobbled by massive strikes and rallies, protesting austerity measures that the government must undertake in order to restore the nation’s credit-worthiness. Guess who helped Greece get into this pickle? Our friends at Goldman Sachs, of course! Beat Balzli reports in Spiegel Online. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Vespers: Eric Puchner’s buzzed-up novel, Model Home, appears today. A brief but riveting bit of memoir at Speakeasy is said to overlap some of the novel’s material.

¶ Compline: Lisa Levy isn’t crazy about Brian Dillon’s The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives, but her discussion of hypochondria is engaging, and, like Whitney Carpenter’s discussion of busybodies, it suggests why a certain stock figure is on the wane. (The Second Pass)

Here we were, snowbound. I had canceled an outpatient skin surgery, and Kathleen had decided to work from home. So we were both here even though, according to the calendar, neither one of us ought to have been. When I learned that Megan and Will were, against all the weather odds, out and about, I asked my daughter to make our house her next stop, and she did. Thus did Will O’Neill pay his first visit to his maternal grandparents, at the ripe old age of not-quite-six weeks.

Nana Penny made it all possible. Of all of us on Megan’s side of the family, Penny is the only one whose experience with infants is better than theoretical. (Given that Megan is not far from forty, I hope that I’ll be excused for having forgotten what little experience of babies I have that hasn’t been superseded by no-smoking regulations.) She burped him into contentment after his second feeding, which was not preceded by sleep of any kind.

As I say, he’s an intellectual. Megan says, “We’ll see.” I say that I’m not talking about the future. He’s an intellectual now. Which is not at all inconsistent with his loving his Texas boots.

¶ Some dust jackets and book covers for Philip K Dick. (Spine Out; via The Second Pass)

¶ Europe’s “alcohol belts” — where wine, beer, or spirits are preferred (and why Hungary may be more Mediterranean than you think). (Strange Maps)

¶ Haiti, by Peter Turnley (The Online Photographer)

¶ Matins:  Poverty comes to the suburbs, on the coattails of “the free market.” (Fast Company; via The Infrastructurist)

¶ Lauds: Here’s something for the cockles of everyone who believes that the world in general and Western Civilization is Going To Hell in a Handbasket: “Dante’s Inferno: Do Classic Poems Make Great Video Games.” We don’t mean just the concept; Jamin Brophy-Warren’s interview with game designer Jonathan Knight is a Must Read. Oh, yeah. (Speakeasy)

¶ Prime: Cringely plants his fist on exactly what is wrong with “productivity” in his column about the nation’s hunger for start-ups.

¶ Tierce: Were we wondering why we hadn’t given ChatRoulette a try? Not quite. But Jonah Lehrer has the answer: we can enjoy its attractions without enduring its drawbacks.

¶ Sext: The extremely touching story of Timothy McSweeney.

¶ Nones: Even as schools all over the country are abandoning foreign-language instruction overall, an interest in learning Mandarin seems to be picking up. Will it last? Probably not. We agree with Norman Matloff (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Maud Newton writes about being intimidated by other writers’ work, noting that Joan Didion had to stop reading Henry James because he was so overpowering. But we like Jack Pendarvis’s comment best.

¶ Compline: To while away the snow-bound after-dinner hours, follow Mike Deri Smith on an edifying tour of corruption around the world, from Russia to the Jersey Shore. Well, the conclusion is edifying, anyway. (The Morning News)

Watching DVDs in the middle of the day is usually a bad idea, but I was dying to see Peter Richardson’s Churchill: The Hollywood Years, a movie that to the best of my knowledge has never been shown on this side of the Atlantic. The premise of the farce is that, far from being a portly, middle-aged gent with a plummy English voice, Winston Churchill was a studly American Marine. With the brave, romantic aid of Princess Lilibet, this swaggering action hero squelched the occupation of Buckingham Palace by Hitler, Goering, and Goebbels. Then he flew off into the Battle of Britain and died a hero’s death. (Not shown.)

Even with Christian Slater as Churchill, the romp is nowhere near as bad as you might think. Harry Enfield’s George VI is an atomic hoot, trust me. Antony Sher and Miranda Richardson completely refresh the look and feel of the funny-Adolf-and-Eva shtick. Jessica Oyelowo plays Princess Margaret as if she were Ava Gardner — let’s see more of her! The nicest performance, though is the one that points, inadvertently, to precisely what’s missing from Churchill. Every once in a while, Neve Campbell seems about to burst out of her Princess Elizabeth impersonation and into a fit of giggles. This makes you remember The Carol Burnett Show.

What made the sketches in Carol Burnett so much funnier than anything that anybody had ever seen before was the principal performers’ bold but somehow helpless flirtation with Losing It. The jokes were completely trumped by the agony crimped into the faces of Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Tim Conway, and Vicki Carr as they struggled not to break character and laugh their heads off.

The rule against spluttering laughter on stage is dictated by the quality of the comedy. If there’s no quality, there’s no rule. The Carol Burnett troupe turned this around. Their trembling jaws signaled their awareness that they were putting on tripe, but the signal itself transmuted “acting” into “improvisation” — even though, for all we know, the breakdowns were as rehearsed as the blocking.

Christian Slater’s problem, in Churchill: The Hollywood Years, is that he’s aware that his comic-book antics and shoot-em-up bravado are ridiculous. Aside from a few almost unwatchable “sincere” shots, he smirks his way through the entire picture. But it’s not the right smirk. It’s the smirk of the Big Man on Campus who’s being required by the Dean of Students to do something un-cool. Hey, his smirk says, I’m only going through the motions here. Think Eddie Haskell.

Carol Burnett never smirked. She threw herself into her preposterous roles with with the passion of an operatic diva. So did Harvey Korman. They vied for preposterousness. It was inevitable that one of them would sooner or later surprise the other with a stupendously preposterous bit, causing the predictable audience reaction right up close. (I seem to recall that Korman had a knack for strutting so strenuously that he would flub his lines — a doubly whammy for his colleagues.) Harold Bloom might say that our laughter is overdetermined.

Churchill: The Hollywood Years left a mystery in its wake: would it be best to watch it before Inglourious Basterds or after? See what Mr Teasy-Weasy does with the Führer’s hair before you answer that one.

¶ Matins: “Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.” Paul Krugman in the Times.

¶ Lauds: Morgan Mies is inspired by the Bronzino exhibit at the Museum to ask what, if anything, was “lost” when the “Renaissance” shaded into “Mannerism.” (The Smart Set; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon considers a strange development: did the exemplum of Giacometti’s Walking Man break auction records because it’s not unique?

¶ Tierce: DIY sperm count tests: a good idea? A “lab-on-a-chip” has been developed that would permit men to diagnose themselves at home. But that’s just the problem: It’s one thing to know what the device finds. It’s quite another to provide the interpretation that’s implicit in a diagnosis.

¶ Sext: With contributions from Seth Colter Walls and the inimitable Mr Wrong, The Awl outdoes itself in Super Bowl disdain. Mr Colter; Joe MacLeod (Mr Wrong).

¶ Nones: And the pendulum swings back: Viktor Yanukovych, thrown out by voters in 2004, has had the pleasure of seeing his successor, Yulia Tymoshenko, given the same treatment. (BBC News)

Be sure to have a look at the bottom of the page. The pink and red parts, which voted for Ms Tymoshenko, constitute, roughly, Ukraine proper, so to speak. The blue portions are regions conquered by Russia in the Eighteenth Century. Does this bifurcated polity make sense?

¶ Vespers: A young person of the Gen M^2 persuasion finds that he can break his compulsive reading habit by hanging out the Harvard COOP. What, read books? We do not despair. Young people have always done odd things. (The Millions)

¶ Compline: Charles Petersen’s meditation on Facebook — a very well informed meditation, to be sure, but, still, meditation is what it is — must be read by anyone, anyone, who is reading this. The thrust of the carefully-wrought piece is not so much about how Facebook has changed the world as it is about what the world has learned from living with — and shaping — Facebook. The final paragraph ought to be memorized, if only because that’s the easiest way of lodging a solid understanding of what it has to say in the mind. (NYRB)

Ah, to have Kathleen at home again. How nice is that.

We ate the stew for dinner. It was good, but the mushrooms had faded away, and the flavor was just perceptibly un peu fané . Of course Kathleen hadn’t eaten it before, and she didn’t miss the mushrooms. She even asked for a hunk of bread — which she used to sop up sauce with the help of a fork. If I knew better, it’s only because I’m older. We both grew up in households where bread never appeared on the table; it was for toast and children’s sandwiches, period. No wonder I taught myself to bake it!

I meant to add fresh peas (fresh frozen peas, that is) to the stew, but I forgot all about them.

We talked for an hour after dinner about Russia, China, and the American weakness for abstraction. By which we meant that most Americans see Russia and China as “former Communist nations.” Whereas they never were anything but Russia and China, really, and, now, that they’ve thrown off their ideological corsets, they’re reverting to type — always a strength. We talked about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and how the British have been able to break with the Anglophone hoo-ha about infectious homosexuality because they’re no longer ruling the globe in pink.

We talked about 1 Corinthians 7.9, which both of us had always understood thus: It is better to marry than to burn in hell. In fact, according to my Greek New Testament, what Paul actually wrote was this: It is better to marry than to burn with passion. Eric Patton, God love him, remarked that he couldn’t remember when he learned the correct reading. Burlington Bertie from Columbus, he is.

A good day.

This was the weekend of Chinese footbaths.

Chinese footbaths? How could footbaths be the solution to an interior design problem? I didn’t even know that Chinese footbaths existed.

That’s why there’s Quatorze. And once we had decided that footbaths would make excellent cache-pots for a table in the window, Quatorze got to work and discovered the right footbaths. They’re celadon. I’ll have more to say about celadon later. I’ve already said most of it, actually, but you don’t want to read about it just now.

Quaere: interior design and logistics — which is the subset of the which? I’m inclined to say that the question of what your place looks like doesn’t come up until you’ve found a way to live, so that organizing your stuff in order to make life convenient (logistics) comes before design. “Stuff,” here, extends far beyond material possessions. It includes such things as “an interest in cooking” and “a fondness for giving dinner parties.”  

The protocol:

• What do you want to do?
• What to you need to have in order to do it?
• Where do you put what you need?
• How do you make it look good?

Of course, you have to be a perfect genius to be able to follow this protocol before the age of forty.

***

Back on the job at The Daily Blague. Jean Ruaud’s contributions, I’m sure you’ll agree, can’t be allowed to stop altogether; I must petition him for a regular Letter from Paris. You must urge him to continue as well — you’ll find his address at the bottom of one or two of his entries. It may have been a long week for him, but it was a short and pleasant one for regular readers. We all had a break — everyone except Jean, that is. I’m forever in his debt. Thanks, Jean! 

This afternoon, I made a beef stew, from a recipe that I made up as I went along. I don’t know whether I’ll like it, because that wasn’t part of the plan. Of course, I hope that I won’t hate it; but the idea was to cook a simple beef stew out of stuff on hand — to recreate, along purely imaginary lines, the French pot au feu, of which I have no experience whatsoever but which I envision as a pot on the fire, as the name indicates, full of long-cooked odds and ends. I read once that somewhere in the Garonne there is a pot au feu that has been simmering since the 1620s — a preposterously amusing thing to say. My own concoction will probably taste heavy and monochromatic, only slightly brightened by the handful of minced parsley that I’ll toss onto it at dinnertime. But that’s okay, as along as I can bear to eat it. If I can eat it while overlooking it, so much the better. When I’m alone, I read my way through meals.  

I’ll be alone at dinner. Kathleen is on a plane, flying from St Croix to Miami. She’ll stay at an airport hotel and fly into New York early tomorrow. I can’t quite believe how much more flying time this itinerary involves — almost two hours more than connecting at San Juan. But one forgets how far west Miami is — Atlanta lies almost directly below Chicago. It was only when I looked at the globe and imagined drawing a circle with a compass centered on Miami that I could accept that St Croix and New York are roughly equidistant.

Kathleen had a wonderful time at the Buccaneer. Although she missed me, she wasn’t lonely, and she claims that she never talked to anyone but staff. This was the aftermath of fatigue, to be sure, but it also signaled Kathleen’s attention to take a rest from society. I had a bittersweet time listening to her daily accounts. Having been to the Buccaneer on three previous visits, I always knew what she was talking about, and I remembered what fun it wasv to walk this beach or to listen to that musician play after dinner. All week, I told myself that I really must get my affairs in order, so that by Thanksgiving-time I’ll have only the dreadfulness of flying and of being in airports to worry about.

I mustn’t fear, as I did quite viscerally ten days ago, that, if I left Manhattan Island, I would forget everything that I have learned about life in the past six months. I won’t elaborate; there’s no way that I could make sense of this anxiety in fewer than ten thousand words. The point is that, about six months ago, life began to make a lot of sense. Not life in general, but my life. I began to understand it, or feel that I understood it, for the first time. It has never been very important to me to understand my life — just one of the things about me that I didn’t really know until last fall — but now that I did, I found it very useful.

This week, while my friend Jean Ruaud piloted The Daily Blague, I thought seriously about taking a long break from blogging, so that I could devote myself exclusively to the pivotal project that I find myself in the middle of, the one that I jokingly call “I Am My Own Executor.” As I had no reason to believe that increased attention would actually speed things up — I’m very conscious of the way that insights have, these days, of falling down on me, like fruit that hasn’t been rushed to ripeness —I abandoned the idea of abandoning The Daily Blague. There’s no reason to doubt, in fact, that it was last year’s intensification of blogging effort (most notable in the Daily Office) that triggered the growth of this understanding that I’ve been talking about. There’s no question that the effort of reading thousands of Google Reader feeds a week, for months on end and with no prospect of ceasing, didn’t alter the quality of my life, at least for the first time since I stopped practicing law, over twenty years ago.

I just had a taste of the stew, and I think that it’s exactly what I had in mind.

In the Metro, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

Dear DB’s readers —

This is my last letter on The Daily Blague (for now), my week of guestblogging ends today. It’s time to give back the keys to our respected Editor and master of his domain. It was a good, motivating and interesting week and I have to thank RJ for the opportunity. Writing everyday in English was much more difficult than I thought and it needed something I lack: self-discipline. So it is a lesson: it’s tough to be interesting and entertaining in a foreign language everyday, even with the best of intentions. And even without having to write in a foreign language, writing a post everyday is difficult. And I call myself a blogger since 2001! I can tell you, blogging everyday, several posts and some with a bunch of interesting links in it, like RJ does, is hard work and need a lot of discipline. I can understand why RJ needed these vacations! I couldn’t do what he does here. So hats off for the Editor!

During this week I wrote these posts while listening to music and to my favorite kind: bands from the 70’s! I’m a baby boomer and the 70’s mark for me the apogee of pop and rock music! The 70’s were my adolescence years, and if I’m not very fond of my memories those were the years when I discovered that there was some nice bands to listen out there. When I discovered music. When I bought my first records to listen on my little record player. In my mind there is nothing more pleasing than the records of Steely Dan or Neil Young, Joni Mitchell or Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival or Fleetwood Mac, Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones or Jefferson Airplane and countless others, the 70’s bands. The 80’s were sterile musical years (with exceptions but nothing like the fertile 70’s and late 60’s). In the 70’s I was religiously reading every month the French rock-magazine Rock & Folk from the first page to the last. I listened to Bob Dylan and Patti Smith and was dreaming of CBGB in New York, (where I had the luck to go in 1996). Somehow I’m stuck musically in the 70’s. So, it was a week listening down memory lane!

Well, hoping that you weren’t too much bored, I now leave you and return to my own blog in French (and sometimes in English), may be I’ll see you there. Bon weekend!

Regards,

Jean (jrparis-at-gmail.com)

They needed the car, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.