¶ Matins: Now with 200% more 1929! Let’s live it up with Doubledown!

¶ Sext: Has anyone ever sent you a Jacquie Lawson card via an e-mail attachment?

¶ Nones: Once again, JR (mnémoglypes) shows that he really “gets” America.

¶ Compline: Books on Monday: The Learners, by Chip Kidd, at Portico.

Oremus…

§ Matins. As they say, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

The company, founded in 2004 and based in Manhattan, is hiring in anticipation of big growth in advertising revenue, and publishing a new magazine next month — The Players Club, which aims to help professional athletes manage their money.

It gets “better.”

Although Trader Monthly and a sister publication, Dealmaker, are sold on newsstands for $10 each, free subscriptions are available only to people who can prove that they work in the financial industry, and Mr. Lane says that thousands are turned away; subscriptions for others are $100 a year.

What a wonderful world…

§ Sext. Kathleen has just sent one out to announce the birth of a former associate’s baby daughter, Valerie Rose. Jacquie Lawson cards skate on some very thin ice, in the vicinity of Victorian sentiment and It’s A Wonderful Life heartstrings, but they always seem to glide right past the danger before it cracks. I observe that the cards are a little less interactive than they used to be — or it may just be that that’s true of what I’m seeing in my Inbox.

I wouldn’t mind someone’s sending me one of these cards today, much as I hate their knack for making my eyes swim. I’m having one of those post-party letdowns. It’s nothing serious, and I certainly know how to handle it. As soon as I finish with the Morning Read, I’m going to camp out in my favorite chair with Persuasion. Which novel I’d really meant to save until I closed the Decameron: how can Austen not have been thinking, more in this story even than in the more overtly melodramatic Mansfield Park, of Patient Griselda, Decameron X, x?

§ Nones. It sometimes seems to me that JR is more American than I am. He certainly writes about road trips with an eloquence that just might partake of the hallucinatory. I almost wish that I could make a gift to him of the long drives between Houston and South Bend that I made during my stints at Notre Dame. What I remember much better from the musical standpoint, however, are the drives from Houston to Austin, in the summer of 1968, to spend the odd weekend with Fossil Darling, who was studying at the University of Texas. I particularly remember loving Canned Heat’s “Going Up The Country,” and hating “Born to Be Wild,” by Steppenwolf.

My all-time favorite radio hit will always and forever be “Easier Said Than Done,” by The Essex (1963).   

§ Compline. I picked up The Learners at McNally Robinson largely because of the copyright notice: “… © 2008 by Charles Kidd. Yes, Charles…” Who could resist that? As an object, The Learners demands to be possessed. I managed to read the novel without spoiling the peekaboo wrapper, which manifestly stands for the proposition that Mr Kidd is too clever by half.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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