I love Tuesday. Tuesday is my favorite day of the week, and there is really nothing finer than a productive Tuesday. Monday is a hinge day, daunting no matter how I arrange it — there’s no getting around the need to look at Google Reader again, for one thing. Friday used to be transitional as well, but I shifted going to the movies to Monday so that I could do the Saturday housekeeping one day in advance. This leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for writing. Since I have never had more than two good writing days a week, and because the norm is just one day, Wednesday and (even more) Thursday are either days off or days of desperation and disappointment.

I did not have a particularly productive Tuesday; certainly I wrote nothing for Portico (that’s what I mean by “writing”). I went to the movies — I saw Greenberg — because yesterday was gross, weather-wise, and because I was still broken-down exhausted from last week. Especially from the Great Pots and Pans Raid at Chateau Gizmo on Friday, followed by a Lenten Outing on Saturday with Eric Patton. (We went to the Morgan to look at the incredible illuminationed pages of Catherine of Cleves’s Book of Hours, something that became possible only a few years ago and that will resume impossibility (for at least fifty years) when the show closes at the beginning of May — so SEE IT!) Even though I took it easy on Sunday and Monday (yesterday), I found walking to be arduous in new and painful ways this morning. I would feel bad about being in such bad shape if I weren’t amazed at having actually lived this long.

But I did, for once, get to the Angelika before Quatorze.

I have no idea what I’m going to say about Greenberg. Right now, I can only say that I can’t imagine buying the DVD. And yet I probably will. Greta Gerwig is very interesting in the soubrette lead; I detected intimations of Kate Winslet. I’d have liked to see more of Chris Messina — I’m ready to see him in a leading role — but he did benefit from leaving the action early in the film, because almost everyone in the story proper exhaled a cloud of unpleasantness. Jennifer Jason Lee, the director’s wife and co-writer, looked lovelier than ever, rested and relaxed and not at all strung out. A nice change. Ben Stiller and Rhys Ifans were super, of course (how could they not be?), but their characters were walking arguments for the overall hopelessness of testosterone. Do we really need so many undersocialized men? Weren’t they supposed to gravitate toward Australia? To Australia?

On my way home, I stopped in at Shakespeare & Co, the very prosperous, utterly un-Parisian branch at Hunter College, and bought three books. The new Michael Lewis, which I will swallow like a plump oyster now that I’ve been appetized by the Vanity Fair excerpt. Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide — I cite Jonah Lehrer at least once and usually twice a week in the Daily Office, so the Long Form Commitment is overdue. And the thin Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land. I mean, how can I not, given the man’s tribulations? Tony Judt is the very model of the man I would never forgive myself for not growing up to be. I knew this when we were both about fourteen.

But I have had the satisfaction of growing up to be the man whom I could reasonably hope to be.

 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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