Office/Diary: Tuesday
When I got back from the storage unit yesterday afternoon, I thought about running another errand, a quickie over to Lexington Avenue. I thought about it for five minutes — no more. As my body became aware of having returned home, it sagged like an ancient sofa. I was almost sick with fatigue.
¶ Matins. Chris Lehman writes so deliciously about Times coverage of service cutbacks endured by Harvard undergrads that we are forced to quote. “One shudders to think of how these euphoria-deprived pashas of the nation’s bogus meritocracy will forge onward in their post-Harvard professional lives.” Mad fun.
I had walked to the storage unit — 24 blocks. I had carried a driftwood lamp that became heavier with each block. I couldn’t believe my puny strength, but then I remembered how much heavy lifting I’ve been doing in the past week, especially since learning that today, and not next Tuesday, the love seat with ball-and-claw feet will be coming home from the upholsterer. Not in itself a big deal, but I’m taking advantage of having a mover on call to do some other shifting about. That’s why I had to go to the storage unit yesterday. I’ll want to be in and out quickly later this morning, something that wouldn’t be possible without a bit of preliminary clearing.
¶ Lauds. What would Vasari say? From ArtCat — where we can spend hours drinking in the prose, when we’re in the right frame of mind:
The duplicate spaces will develop incrementally along the same trajectory, but as the artists work, inconsistencies of touch, skill, and reaction will cause the workshops to diverge as a set of mutations emerge. Approaching an increasingly disconcerting, imperfect effect, the artists will engage the practice of partnership while confronting the impossibility of creating in true parallel.
On my way to the storage unit, I stopped in at the Hi Life for lunch, a club sandwich, fries, and an iced tea. Before the food arrived, my cell phone rang. It was a call from the decorator reminding me that the upholsterer would want to be paid. I hadn’t forgotten this detail, but I saw no point in bringing it up. By happy chance, the upholsterer is two blocks north of the storage unit. So I stopped in and paid the bill. The love seat was in the window, looking pretty gorgeous.
¶ Prime. The US Chamber of Commerce takes a dim view of legislation designed to reduce global warming. James Surowiecki writes about some big-name defections from the Chamber in his weekly New Yorker column; he also writes about the column.
The less said about the storage unit, the better.
¶ Tierce. John Eligon looks back at the trial that kept him busy for so much of 2009 — and taught him a lot about life in New York. Meanwhile, the Marshall twins (Philip “started it”) acquiesce to the diminution of their inheritance from their father, lately convicted of larceny.
When I realized that I wouldn’t be running any errands after my visit, I sank into the wing chair in the blue room and read Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. If the gravamen of Mr Hedges’s jeremiad weren’t so well known to me, his book would be the most depressing read of recent times. His second chapter, “The Illusion of Love,” suggests a mortally serious rebuttal of David Foster Wallace’s far more jocular coverage of the AVN expo that appears in Consider the Lobster. Women are damaged, physically as well as mentally, in the making of pornography, and Mr Hedges will not rest until you understand that.
¶ Sext. The stories that Brooks Peters can spin from the humblest reading material! An old issue of Saga Magazine inspires a sketch of the short, racy life of Fon de Portago, which ended at 150 mph, as a bisected corpse.
Also very briefly, I considered making dinner. I rummaged through NoTakeOut‘s archives and found a lentil salad that I made a few months ago. I considered shopping for the one or two ingredients that I did not have on hand, and making that for dinner. Considering that I can barely walk across the room with complete confidence in my ability to reach the other side, there was a bone-deep stupidity about this home-cooking scheme, but I know whence it came. The apartment is about to become considerably more comfortable and smarter to boot. Of course I want to honor it with simple, thrifty fare! It’s a good thing that I also remembered that I don’t want to drop a lot of crockery in the kitchen, something that, in last night’s state, I should have been sure to do. Â
¶ Nones. Kurdistan cuts off its oil, pending payment from Baghdad. If I weren’t taking the week off, we’d have something to say, but you can probably imagine every word of it.
When we came home from Panorama Café, we settled in the living room. I had thought about watching a movie, but it seemed wiser to potter, strategically shifting debris from sites of relocation to alcovial backwaters. Kathleen experimented with stitches for a blanket. Her experiment sessions bear an awful resemblance to the humiliating redactions that bigwig law-firm partners inflict on first-year memos.
¶ Vespers. John Self reads an erotic novel by the first director of the Louvre, No Tomorrow, now out in a dual-language edition from NYRB (it’s very short). John Williams tells us about The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, an anthology edited by J C Hallman. Robin Sloan explains the Reetz-Clancy continuum of scanned books.
What am I going to do with all that “debris”? I can’t remember how I handled it in the old days, but now I play a game of musical chairs that sounds more like triage. I let everything find a place, and then the leftovers are tossed. At the moment, two rather nice (but not nice-enough) tables are at risk of heading to HousingWorks.
¶ Compline. Ian Baldwin writes about the importance of showing the Thames on a Tube map. You may not need to know where the river is in order to navigate the Underground, but you need it to tell you where you are in London.
I’m trying to remember how long it has been since the furniture in the apartment was rearranged in any significant way; I should say that it has been at least five years, and possibly longer. Age! When I was young, four or five times a year was the norm. Kathleen used to say that it was a good thing that she wasn’t blind, because, coming home late, the crashing into unexpected items would have finished her off. Now, in contrast, I had begun to think that everything had found its place for all time. And perhaps it had done so. But the decision not to reupholster a long sofa — more of a bench, really — but to let it go instead set off a chain reaction of alterations that has only just begun.