Morning

¶ Little Black Dress: Fossil Darling is totally useless. I had to read about this in the newspaper!

Noon

¶ Oil Climbs Higher: Reading John Wilen’s report on the correlation between the rise in the price of oil and the fall of the dollar — not a matter of rocket science, since oil trades in dollars — I wonder just when Washington is going to develop some bipartisan political backbone.

Night 

¶ Free Speech: Food for thought: Adam Liptak’s survey of growing restrictions on freedom of speech in other advanced, liberal democracies.

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Morning

¶ Permission: When Kathleen, home late last night from Washington, told me that she just wanted to forward a message from her new personal computer to the office, before going to bed, I almost begged her not to. Then I wished that I had. Finally, though, I sort of fixed the problem.

¶ Eric: One of the smartest bloggers to grace the Internet has returned, après une longue absence, as a French textbook about a fellow called John Hughes (Zhan Ãœg) put it when I was in school (it is possible that I remember this because I never read next, or any other, sentence in the book), to the Blogosphere. “And they were Sore Afraid.”

Afternoon

¶ Strange Maps: Wow! If there was ever a site for me, Strange Maps is it! (Thanks, kottke.org.)

Night

¶ Full Faith & Credit: Article IV of the US Constitution begins:

Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.

This will sound elitist, but I’d be amazed if one of this country’s three hundred million people knows what this clause means. What it means was just tested in one of our most conservative states, Virginia, and amazingly well. The justices of the Virginia Supreme Court (a state, not a federal, court) probably don’t like same-sex marriage any better than the lower judges who ruled the other, more popular way, but they do credit to their grand old man, Thomas Jefferson, a man who always seemed to know when to turn off his inbred inner bigot in favor of his outer enlightened idealist.

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Morning

¶ Suddenly, It’s Summer: The window unit in the blue room, necessary because the HVAC service is always sluggish there, is keeping the room with the most books cool and dry, which is good for them and good for me, too. But I’m sitting in the living room, with the balcony door open, keeping comfortable with a Vornado fan.

¶ Heather Does Not Have Two Mommies: RomanHans slays me with his parody of political correctness. Part I, Part II. We must all pester our favorite booksellers for the other titles in Roman’s “Heather” series, thus creating demand, and, perhaps, the books.

Noon

¶ Crackdown in Dujiangyan: A demonstration by grieving parents, protesting the shoddy construction that killed their children in classrooms, was more or less peaceably broken up by a swarm of intimidating policemen. Edward Wong reports.

¶ Under Construction: Ha ha ha, that’s what most of the pages say at the Web site of New York Crane and Equipment.

Night

¶ Clinch: You’ve got to love the headline: no Dewey Beats Truman! this time!

¶ Prima la musica: Listening to Mr Mozart (as Florence Foster Jenkins appropriatingly called him, making him one of us), K 516. Music one has known better (much better) than the back of one’s hand for over forty years. And tonight it sounds as though I’d never heard it before. The amazing Mr Mozart.
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This summer, I tell myself. This summer, I’m making some big changes!

In my mind, two completely distinct but not incompatible ideas of summer overlap, and yet the combination, if my track record is any indication, proves to be inert. When fall rolls around, I haven’t made any big changes. A few salutary fixes, perhaps. Perhaps even an entirely new blog platform: that’s what happened last August. But I didn’t do any of the work on that. In fact, I don’t know what I did last summer.

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Morning

¶ Regime Change: For the rest of the week, at least, I’ll be feeling my way with the Summer Hours version of the Daily Office entry. Two changes already in place: the entry will be posted at 10:30 every morning (instead of at 1:30 AM), and the first sub-entry of the day will not include a link.

Noon

¶ Orthodoxy or Death. How about an opera set on Mount Athos? Chorus of monks; fleet of St Ursula’s virgins, bound for sex slavery rather than martyrdom, foundering upon the rocky coast; rainbow bridge at the end leading to the newly-built Convent of Mount Pathos. Harry de Quetteville reports.

Night

¶ Information Age: Robert Darnton, in The New York Review of Books, makes the plausible argument that the Internet has not really changed anything on the “information” front. There has always been too much of it, and it has never been as reliable as we’d like it to be.

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¶ Matins: This week’s Friday Front is brevity itself. The article by George Packer to which it links has enough intelligence for two.

¶ Tierce: David Brooks gives kottke.org a nice nod in today’s Op-Ed piece, “The Alpha Geeks.”

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¶ Matins: Just my luck. Coming across an unattributed line of Latin in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherworld, I google it and discover that, not to my surprise, it comes from Virgil’s Georgics:O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
agricolas.
It’s a typical bit of aristocratic sentimentality: how happy the peasants would be if they only knew how lucky they are to be peasants. Yes, well. It took a moment to track down the source, though, because the first return at Google took me to a discussion of Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory. It was only by checking out the next couple of links that I discovered Amerloque: A Long-Term American Expatriate Resident in France Shares His Views.

¶ Sext: I tip my hat to Guy Trebay, who says a number of things that I’ve been thinking about the Thom Browne look.

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¶ Matins: After a marvelous evening of theatre — Itamar Moses’s The Four of Us, the very first play that I have ever felt captured by, as in, “it was about me”; it was really just about creative, brainiacky young men generally, if you can generalize about such a demographic, and the prickly, clandestinely competitive arrangements that take the place of friendship in their lives. (If they’re lucky, they outgrow this awkwardness, but I’ve met many who didn’t.) Hey, enough about me! — what do I come home to find but an email responding to an old blog entry from over three years ago:

If anybody out there knows a sixtyish Greek woman née Katerina Koini, tell her to give me a shout. Kathy (as we called her) was a vibrant exchange student at Bronxville High when I was in tenth grade, and I’m still profiting from the things she taught me, such as, for example, Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet.

¶ Sext: Every time the pundits predict that Mrs Clinton is hors de concours, I remember the words of M le Neveu: “These are people” — the Clintons — “who come back from the dead.”

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¶ Matins: Lately, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t known where to begin. The answer, I now discover, is nowhere. Do not begin. Take the brilliant time-saving tips of billionaires from all walks of filthitude in Gordon Bennett’s droll report at W. Who would know better than a billionaire what a colossal waste of time merely living can be!

¶ Lauds: Instead of going to bed like a good boy, I get down to working on the Words branch of Portico, something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time,  by inventing a new page: Workshop.

¶ Tierce: At the moment, it looks as though next week’s primary in West Virginia is actually going to mean something, possibly.

¶ Sext: Kathleen and I have been invited to a fiftieth-birthday party this evening, and we’ve decided that a nice bottle of port is what we’d like to give. So, I’m off to Sherry-Lehmann in a little while.

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¶ Matins: This may be the best dog video ever, probably because it captures, to perfection, the pleasure of being out alone with one’s pooch.

¶ Tierce: What’s this? A war-protest strike by Pacific dockworkers? Yesterday? You tell me why William Yardley’s story isn’t on the front page of the Times — instead of not one but two “stories” about the Obama-Wright rift.

¶ Compline: Although I was tolerably entertained by James Wolcott’s overview of the primary scene in the current Vanity Fair, I had to wonder if it merits all the commentary.

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¶ Matins: Friday’s plans have firmed up: we’re to be at Balthazar at ten. (Yes, Fossil Darling, that means you. I didn’t want to wake you up with the news.) Then we’ll troop down Centre Street to the Municipal Building and get hitched, those of us what aren’t. (I hereby promise: the next time Megan refers to our destination as “City Hall,” I won’t correct her.)

¶ Prime: My reward for going through all the mail this afternoon was discovering that I’m two weeks late to ensure that, when I renew our Orpheus subscriptions, we’ll get the same seats. I almost broke down and wept. First thing tomorrow!

¶ Tierce: I was going to bore you to death with remarks about Bob Herbert’s column in th Times (Dept of Idiocracy), but LXIV sent me a very entertaining link.

¶ Compline: The server that stores this site was down for a few hours this afternoon. When I was assured that The Daily Blague was “intact,” I shuddered to think of my extremely underdeveloped backup procedures.

Regular readers may want to make a note of Portico in their browsers’ “favorites” folders, because Portico runs from an entirely different server. If the outage had lasted much longer, I’d have posted a message at Portico. These things happen from time to time, and it’s when they do that the virtues of redundancy shine. (more…)

¶ Matins: In a column in Saturday’s Times, Gail Collins ended a characteristically wry roundup of geriatric Senatorial candidates (“The Revenge of Lacey Davenport“) with the following bit of common sense:

My theory is that the age issue is not all that huge a deal when it comes to legislators. If you’re old and in good shape, the big problem is that it’s hard to think about things in new ways. You tend to get better and better at a narrower and narrower set of skills.

Yes, but does this mean me?

¶ Tierce: The publisher to watch: Philip M Parker, compiler of more than 200,000 titles. They’re all available through Amazon, not that you’d want to read any of them quite yet. There’s a method to his madness, though…

¶ Sext: I’m contemplating a trip to Sleeve City.

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The flagstaff at Carl Schurz Park, captured in an impromptu reflection pool.

¶ Matins: How about those bloggers, dropping off like flies? (“In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“) No reader of Michael A Banks’s Blogging Heroes, the Takli Makan of this year’s morning read, will be surprised by the news that technews bloggers live like unhappy hamsters.

¶ Tierce: Zose Mosleys vill neffer learn! Grand prix racing czar Max Mosley‘s grandmother, Lady Redesdale, was inured to reading about her daughters’ antics (especially his mother’s) in the newspaper, but this story would probably have given her a nasty turn.

¶ Sext: Surely the most interesting story in the works right now — far outclassing our presidential election — is the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. If you ask me, Liu Qi was out of his mind when it lobbied for the honor of hosting the games.

¶ Vespers: It’s over when the little man squeaks. Sheldon Silver nixes Congestion Pricing.

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My favorite restaurant for lunch, Café d’Alsace. To the extreme right, a sign for Elaine’s, which I’m told is a truly awful restaurant. I’ve never set foot inside. So much for Famous Writers’ School.

¶ Matins: I’m thinking of Die Fälscher for this morning. Writing the movie up may be the last bit of sustained writing that I do for a short spell. And no, I’m not taking a vacation. Rather the reverse.

¶ Nones: One of these days, businessmen are going to have to learn to regard “redundancy” as a form of insurance — a legitimate and necessary cost of doing business. This story about a shortage of favorite Passover treats, “It’s ‘Hide the Matzo’ for Real: Tam Tams Are Scarce,” may be cute, but it’s also an object lesson.  

¶ Vespers: This week’s Friday Front visits another part of the subject that I raised two weeks ago. This time, Eric Alterman asks, who’s going to pay for the news that we think we need?

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¶ Matins: In this week’s Book Review, at Portico.

¶ Tierce: Whether it’s because I watched the 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch last weekend, or because I just finished one of the more acutely unromantic chapters of The Red and the Black, the tortured account of a school trustees’ meeting at Outer Life, this morning, made me laugh as only the finest English social comedy can.

¶ Sext: Luc Sante offers an understated justification for the oversized library, at Pinakothek. Even though, having just moved house, he’s glad to have unloaded twenty-five boxes of books.

¶ Nones: My friend Yvonne has just tipped me off to an interesting site that she describes as “a Scottish lady’s ‘domestic blog’,” Cornflower. Book talk seems to be the principal interest here — bravo! — but the lady (a sometime lawyer) is also a knitter, and she has just knitted a pair of socks in the Blue Willow Pattern. Is this another message from the cosmos — re-read The Egoist, now! — or what?

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¶ 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.

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The same skyline, but with a bit more of Queens, and a lot closer to Penn Station.

¶ Matins: Last night, I went to a reading at The Drawing Center. I’d been invited, by one of the writers. Who could turn that down?

¶ Sext: No sooner do I finish slogging my way through Michael Banks’s semi-moronic Blogging Heroes (in the Morning Read) than the Times comes along with a half-page summary, “So You Want to Be a Blogging Star?”

¶ Vespers:  It’s hard to tell just where this Web site, VVork, is domiciled, but this bit of conceptual art suggests Further Fun. (Thanks, kottke.org.) (more…)

As of today, I’ve been keeping the Daily Office — I think that that’s the right verb — for a month. It seems that I’ve been keeping it for a lot longer than that; and it also seems as though I just took it up last week. Although the entry’s broader outlines seem set, the internal feedback loops, by which I learn from doing something every day, have begun to pulse, and I’m ready to instigate a few external feedback loops as well, with a few Housekeeping Notes on various matters. (Today, Comments and Notifications.) Feel free to comment below or to write to me at the usual address. (more…)

Intimations of le printemps

¶ Matins: Finally, our tickets for Come Back, Little Sheba. Sooner or later, all the Off-Broadway supporting actors appear on Law & Order. In a twist, one of the Law & Order stars sppears on Broadway!

¶ Tierce: The lesson of 142,000 free parking passes: understanding the difference between a perquisite and a privilege.

¶ Sext: A new reader of Portico just wrote to me to comment on The Devils of Loudun, which is very nice indeed, but I mention it here because the writer happens to have a site that shares many of my ambitions, The Pequod.

¶ Vespers: At long last, a disgrace in the Bronx will be cleared up. The Bronx Borough Courthouse, a beaux-arts jewel that sits at the end of a long vista, will become a charter school in the fall. Read Timonthy Williams’s story in the Times, but be sure to click on the photo, the better to see the building and how it has been defaced over the years. 

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¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review.

¶ Prime: Two stories show the superiority of Gothamist to The New York Times for local reporting — and one of them involves a Times writer!

— Building Collapse in Harlem Stops Metro North

— Ceiling Collapse in Broadway Dings Reporter’s Friend.

¶ Sext: Which would you rather have, a dollar or a dollar-fifty? Don’t be too sure!

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