Daily Office Friday
¶ Matins: Good News! 81% of Americans think that We Have a Problem, Houston. Bad News: 100% of my new computer is dead.
¶ Vespers: As I thought, it was the power supply — and I didn’t break it. (Not that I’m going to put the waste-paper basket next to the CPU a second time.) Now maybe I should try to get into Momofuku Ko.
¶ Compline: A nice photo to look at, late on a Friday night — another one of JR’s super black-and-white shots of New York, taken on his visit here last fall (je crois). Kathleen used to work across the street, at 599 Lex.
Oremus…§ Matins. That didn’t take long. I was minding my own business, downloading iTunes on to the new computer, when, pfft!, it died. Sayonara! No “shutting down automatically due to overheating.” But definitely a power-supply problem.
In early reports, I am cool as a cucumber. I expect that, by the end of the afternoon, the cable and the peripherals hub will both be reconnected to the old desktop, while eager scientists diagnose the collapse of the new one. Did I cause it to overheat by placing a waste-basket too close to its long side? Or was it just a limón?
Kathleen says that she is proud of me, because I am not a basket case, which of course once upon a time &c. Believe me, it’s none of my doing. It’s the guys down the street at 2EPC, who keep telling me that I am not the client from hell. “Well,” says Kathleen, “you investigated them.” By which she means that I ran them through three rings of hell trying to get WiFi to work in this blasted apartment.
Amazingly, they did. As you can see just by reading this. Today’s likely movie: Stop-Loss.
§ Vespers. Actually, I’ll pass on the hot restaurants. Too ephemeral, really — and when you look to see who else is there, you begin to be ashamed of yourself. Give me the old hotel dining rooms, full of well-toned elderly gents (my age!) and their “nieces.”
After trying to jumpstart the new machine with a paper clip, Jason, the tech genius from just down the road, couldn’t tell at first whether the power supply or the motherboard, was on the blink. I voted for replacing the power supply and seeing what happened; and that is as far as we needed to go. Jason’s trip down the block and back took minutes; the installation of the new power supply hardly more. When I resumed downloading iTunes (which I’d been in the middle of doing when the screen went black last night), the machine picked up right where it had been, and the installation was complete in about twenty seconds.
Confident that Jason, or someone else from his shop, would be able to patch me up today to some extent — I was willing to hook the cable back up to the old machine while the new one was repaired — I did not let mechanical difficulty ruin my morning and afternoon. Too see Stop Loss, I walked down to the Clearview cineplex at First Avenue and 62nd Street, right next door to Westphalia, which I went to first. I threw a few more shopping bags full of historical gradu into my big Beans totes and locked up. More about Stop Loss tomorrow. (It’s very good, and very political, or at least “fuck the President.”) Then I had a burger at Baker Street Pub, came home, and wrote a letter — calm as you please.
In answer to Max: the new machine is just an ordinary HP. My first Vista machine. How they’ve tarted up FreeCell!
§ Compline. It’s as though the spirits of Bill Paley, Jacob Javits, and Nelson Rockefeller were enjoying particularly good cigars in their celestial ringside seats.
I’m enjoying things a lot more now that I’ve gotten round to imposing a “Classic Windows” theme on the new computer. Give me lots of hard-edged straight lines. I can’t stand puffy, balloony shapes on a computer; they make me feel that I’ve wandered into a kindergarten.
We had suprêmes de volaille for dinner. Kathleen got home at nine and wanted to take a nap. So I did not hurry in the kitchen. I did one thing at a time — or, rather, two things, one of which (the constant) was watching Molière, a movie that I adored when it came out and love even more now. The same people who were crazy about Shakespeare in Love ought to have taken to Molière, but they didn’t — proof, perhaps, that the respective geniuses of French and English comedy are on non-speakers. Romain Duris is one of the handful of male actors whom I’m crazy about. Crazy enough to own Arsène Lupin, a video that will probably never, despite a truly bouleversantilizing cast, be released in Anglophone formats.
I’m back to Colm TóibÃn’s The South, having interrupted it to read The Sun Also Rises, a book that Mr T would appear to have internalized to rare degree. When I told a friend that I was reading Hemingway, she said exactly what I’d have said if I hadn’t been: I read it in high school, thought it was awfully macho, and much prefer Fitzgerald. Well, fooey on that. The Great Gatsby may be a Great American Novel, but The Sun Also Rises is just Great, indisputably. And Hemingway’s writing is — to use a word that’s in vogue right now although I don’t much care for it — far more ensorcelling. I will leave you with this amazing passage, set in the Cathedral of Pamplona.
At the end of the streeet I saw the cathedral and walked up toward it. The first time I ever saw it I thought the facade was ugly but I liked it now. I went inside. It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows. I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bull-fighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bull-fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing. I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time; and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun. The sunlight was hot and hard, and I crossed over beside some buildings, and walked back along the side-streets to the hotel. Â
A good weekend to you!