Last Week at Portico: ¶ After months and months and months of not getting it right, I finally forced a final draft of Brian Morton’s The Dylanist to materialize. This makes Mr Morton the first author whose novelistic oeuvre I have written up in toto. All four are lovely books, not infused but positively tanned in a vision of New York as a place where no one ever really dies. ¶ If you know what Jim Jarmusch was up to in No Limits, No Control (a movie billed, at least on gigantic placards at the Angelika, as The Limits of Control), you know how to reach me. Not that I care, particularly; the movie’s really too beautiful for everyday “meaning.” ¶ Touré’s essay on post-blackness may not constitute the best book review imaginable (of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor), but it’s a must read. When you’re done, check out the Book Review review.

Just before we reached the Chinatown Brasserie on Lafayette Street, where we were going to have lunch after watching Tilda Swinton’s harrowing but really rather funny performance in Julia, Quatorze tapped my arm: someone famous was approaching. I looked up and saw Lauren Hutton. She looked at me and saw something as well. She gave me the strangest, most wonderfully complex look that I have ever received from someone I didn’t know. It said: “How sweet that you recognize me. Be the gent that I can tell that you are and don’t stare.” I dropped my eyes at once — to her interesting sneakers. Her look was equal parts smile and admonition. I’m sure that I remember her giving it to Richard Gere in American Gigolo.

It was no surprise that, even without makeup or dyed hair, Ms Hutton was a beautiful woman. What did surprise was her height, which IMDb gives as 5’6½”. “Shorter than me,” marveled Quatorze.

At lunch, I realized that I was going to be late for my appointment with JM, the computer wizard whom Kathleen, coming home early this afternoon, finally met, and thanked for “making it possible for me to live with my husband.” Quatorze and I didn’t dally, but the trains were against me, and the doormen, whom I called the moment I emerged from the subway, didn’t answer the phone. So there was JM in what passes for the lobby these days, as patient as a saint. I don’t think that I was as much as ten minutes late,  but I wasn’t best pleased with myself. He did venture that I might have called him. But no, I insisted, I have never made a record of his telephone number on the very rare occasions when we have communicated that way. I should have considered that a kind of theft. (JM has done everything imaginable to make my computing life easy. But he has never, ever said “Here’s my number; just give me a call.” He always responds to emailed SOSs with alacrity.) The thing was, if the machine that he had come uptown to configure — a netbook — had been operational, I’d have emailed him from the table at the restaurant. This thought had peppered my pleasure with a lunch of dim sum and cold sesame noodles — Chef Ng’s adaptation, by the way, is refreshingly underspiced. 

My resolution — what would Friday be without a resolution? — is to treat the Asus netbook as a toy for at least a month. I won’t expect it to work, in other words. I won’t count on it to connect me with the Internet when I’m running around town. I’ll just see what it does, and what it doesn’t do. “Getting to know all about you” — that sort of thing. On the seventeenth, Verizon will start selling MiFi wireless cellular routers, and we’re going to get one. That’s when the trial month will properly begin. It’s funny, but I haven’t been as excited by a new computer since my very first one, an IBM Peanut.

Eventually, of course, I will insist that the netbook work. That’s what computers are for — PCs, anyway. Apples are for play. It’s astonishing, how many Apple users think that play is better than work.

We went to a recital this evening, at Symphony Space. Jeremy Denk played the Goldberg Variations. It was extremely interesting — and wonderful to hear. But the “wonderful to hear” part was mine, and the “extremely interesting” part was ours.  

As I don’t mean to pre-empt a proper piece of music criticism, all I’ll say here is that Mr Denk’s performance took off — and it did take off — only after some initial uncertainties that, for my part, I found quite terrifying. How would I write about this event? It would have killed me to say that the evening was not a success. Happily, I don’t have to. But that’s just me. The applause had hardly died out when I learned that Kathleen Had Not Approved. On the contrary, she had channeled the force de frappe of at least three Reverend Mothers to compose her judgment.

(Tindley and Flather, I hope that you’re listening!)

Kathleen, who has never in her entire life lifted a cuticle to hear a recording of the Goldberg Variations, but who, like Cleopatra, has been involuntarily exposed to the best that there is in the world, à la Matthew Arnold, was stern when I remarked that Mr Denk had encountered “difficulties” in the first and the fifth variations. All Kathleen needed was a cigar to put on her best Churchill impersonation. “There were a lot of wrong notes at the beginning,” she intoned, not altogether froggily.

By Variation XIII, I was quite comfortable: Mr Denk was not just running through the score as best he could. He was giving us the Denk Version, and it was extraordinary. I was sure that Kathleen must be hearing this, too. Not, though. It was only when we got out of the taxi that I heard Kathleen’s Round II, which had to do with “emoting.”

Everyone who really knows Kathleen knows that she is supremely entertaining about music that she doesn’t like. Over the weekend, I am sure, I am going to be treated to schoolgirl imitations of Mr Denk’s “emoting,” even though I did my best to head this off at the pass. “That’s not ’emoting’,” I insisted. “It’s just the worry of trying to play the piece exactly right.” But Kathleen has locked on to the idea that Bach is “mathematical,” hence, “not emotional,” hence Mr Denk’s manner of playing is “hypocritical.” Total bosh, and I told her so. But before I convince her, we’ll be fooling around in a back hallway of the Brill Building.

Kathleen was shortsighted enough to dismiss her own review as “That’s who I am [darling]!” I hastened to remind her that she used to hear Mozart rather differently — before a stropping education!

¶ What Lord Chesterfield has to say about courts —

Courts are, unquestionably, the seats of politeness and good-breeding; were they not so, they would be the seats of slaughter and desolation. Those who now smile upon and embrace, would affront and stab each other, if manners did not interpose; but ambition and avarice, the two prevailing passions at courts, found dissimulation more effectual than violence; and dissimulation introduced the habit of politeness, which distinguishes the courtier from the country gentleman. In the former case the strongest body would prevail; in the latter, the strongest mind.

— ought to be said more often about executive suites.

¶ Melville devotes the entirety of a brief chapter to a gloss on Bracton, the Thirteenth-Century legist: De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam. Whether or not you can understand that sterling principle of English law doesn’t really matter. The mystery is how a book as awful as Moby-Dick attained a reputation for greatness. I can only think that some anxious literary gents, worried about the creeping feminization of culture at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, decided that the canon needed the pong of dirty socks.

¶ Don Quixote translator Edith Grossman tells us that what makes the sword fight between the licentiate and the bachelor (Chapter XIX) so funny is the latter’s adherence to the prescriptions of one of the many elaborate books about fencing that were current in Cervantes’s day. The curious thing is that the book-learner wins the match.

Sancho Panza, who has already wearied of whatever the Second Part has in store for him, upchucks a verbal salad of proverbs.

“God will find the cure,” said Sancho, “for God gives the malady and also the remedy; nobody knows the future: there’s a lot of hours until tomorrow, and in one of them, and even in a moment, the house can fall; I’ve seen it rain at the same time the sun is shining; a man goes to bed healthy and can’t move the next day. And tell me, is there anybody who can boast that he’s driven a nail into Fortune’s wheel? No, of course not, and I wouldn’t dare put the point of a pin between a woman’s yes and no, because it wouldn’t fit.”

¶ A new low is reached in Squillions, as a chapter about the travails of rehearsing and producing Quadrille passes without the slightest description of the plot. Barry Day, who often appears to be addressing his remarks to a tea-shop-ful of Coward queens, is far more interested in documenting the chill that developed between Coward and the Lunts (for whom he wrote Quadrille — I did learn that much). As Coward and the Lunts were far too intelligent and self-controlled to commit indiscretions to paper, the chill must be found between the lines. Since we don’t know anything about the play that they’re squabbling 0ver, the search hardly seems to be worth the effort.

¶ Matins: Same-sex marriage will soon be on the books in Maine — barring a wingnut referendum. The governor, previously opposed to the idea although he is a Democrat, had a change of heart. Meanwhile, it’s now up to the governor of New Hampshire to sign a similar bill that has just cleared the Concord legislature.

¶ Lauds: Hey, you’ve been to San Francisco. You love it! What a great city to walk around! Would it surprise you to learn that local architects deplore the lack of “singular iconic buildings”? Would it surprise you to learn that architects from everywhere else are just as fond of San Francisco as you are?

¶ Prime: Marc Fitten, an Atlantan from New York City, has a new book coming out this month, Valeria’s Last Stand. In the course of promoting it, the author will be touring 100 of the nation’s independent bookstores — and blogging about it. (via Maud Newton.)

¶ Tierce: The Marshall-Morrissey defense won two important motions today. As a result, prosecution may look a bit more gratuitously nasty than it have done if jurors had heard the excluded testimony.

¶ Sext: A neat WaPo video on robotic bike parking in Tokyo. Not a joke! (via Infrastructurist)

¶ Nones: Now hear this: foreign nationals will not be permitted to “live off their ill-gotten gains in the US.”

¶ Vespers: Maud Newton reprints “an open letter from a local librarian.”

We are here working for you, New York City. Come in and use the library, check out books, get on the computers, tell everyone how great it is and how much you love the institution, but make sure you tell your politicians that this is an important issue for you — and excuse us if our smiles are a little bit tight.  

¶ Compline: I didn’t even know that the concept had a name until today, but, boy, I’m all for it: Seasteading. You know, camping out on a big oil rig and declaring yourself to be the sovereign state of Wingnutzembourg.

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What shall I say about David Garrard Lowe’s Henry James lecture at the Museum this morning? I’ll say that it was entertaining. The audience — mostly ladies of a certain age, not that I’m in any position to talk — responded with attentive laughter to Mr Lowe’s many little jokes, and when he encapsulated Turgenev’s affecting story about the serf who has to drown his little pooch, Grace Rainey Rogers was carpeted in a collective sigh of heartfelt pity. I did learn that James’s Paris address was in the Rue Cambon (right above Chanel!). Did Mr Lowe really say that The Ambassadors was worked in that flat on the deuxième étage? I’m even keener, now, to hear what he has to say about Edith Wharton next Wednesday.

After a quick lunch in the cafeteria, I looked around for the Pictures Generation show, but it found me first. The whole interest of this show for me is the chance to see actual Cindy Sherman prints, but I have bought the catalogue and was actually reading it this afternoon, one of the reasons for my being totally behind schedule, so I hope to be able to take other interests in The Cutting Edge Melody of 1977. Eventually.

Pictures Generation shares the exhibition space that I call “the big Tisch” with The Model as Muse, and it’s a neat juxtaposition. Pictures is all about young people being rebarbative. Model as Muse is all about young people being alluring and desirable. Young women, I should say. I liked the first part best, the part in which the young women — Dovima, Dorian Leigh, and Lisa Fonssagrives — didn’t look young at all. They didn’t look old, certainly. But they radiated a maturity that attested to their having all the right equipment, fully loaded. The minute Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy came on the scene, all I could think of was neoteny. I can’t imagine Dorian Leigh in high school, but I’ve never pictured Cindy Crawford anywhere else.

For dinner, I printed out a menu from the neat new site run by Kathleen’s cousin’s husband, Kurt Holm. I’ll be writing about NoTakeOut next week, in the Daily Office. For now, I’ll just say that Kurt’s lentil and smoked turkey salad, with a side of asparagus, was not only one of the easiest dishes that I have ever prepared but also delicious, all the moreso for being quite unlike the Francophile fare that one usually gets in this joint. Kathleen ate every bite, despite protests that there was too much on her plate.

I’d tell you what we’re doing tomorrow night, but you know how it is: plans announced at The Daily Blague never pan out. What I can tell you is that Ms NOLA had extremely good news today. You might say that she crossed the Equator.

¶ Matins: The Justice Department has decided, provisionally, that the Bush Administration lawyers who okayed torture, while “serious lapses of judgment,” ought not to be prosecuted. Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens explores the unnecessary folly of those lapses. (via  The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: The first “Madoff” art sale? The co-founder of Nine West, Jerome Fisher, one of the fraudster’s investors, has consigned one of  Picasso’s “Mousquetaire” paintings to Christie’s. (via  Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: If you liked that article with the spaghetti on the back page of the Book Review, there’s more, at Psycho Gourmet.

¶ Tierce: Geriatrician Howard M Fillit testified yesterday that, without her ample support staff, Brooke Astor would have been tagged with Alzheimer’s at least three years earlier.

¶ Sext: First the good news: “China cigarette order up in smoke.” Now the good news:

The authorities in Gong’an county had told civil servants and teachers to smoke 230,000 packs of the locally-made Hubei brand each year.

Those who did not smoke enough or used brands from other provinces or overseas faced being fined or even fired.

¶ Nones: The truly interesting detail in Carlotta Gall’s Times story about the impending government assault on Taliban forces in the Swat valley of Pakistan is the absence of two words: “civil war.”

¶ Vespers: DG Myers has written up an Orthodox and (culturally) conservative reading of Zoë Heller’s The Believers that all serious readers of the novel, I expect, will have to consider.

¶ Compline: Making the New Yorker Summit rounds yesterday was Jason Kottke’s appreciation of Milton Glaser’s Rule #3 (“Some People Are Toxic Avoid Them“)

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Just for the record — this record of reading New Yorker stories, something that I’ve either done or not done over the past fifty years, but either way with great passion; something that I should like, belatedly, document — I have nothing to say about “The Autobiography of JGB,” JG Ballard’s posthumous contribution to the current issue.

Having nothing to say about it, I will say of it that it is not (even) written in a language that I do not understand; on the contrary, I fear that I understand it all too well. But it is written in a language that I do not find engaging. The only way to “square” it is to read it as a dream, and I find the discussion of dreams to be the last word in loathsome talk. All dreams become nightmares when they are shared: to be the only person who signifies (as one always is in dreams) is to be a passive monstrosity. And to be, as Ballard’s alter ego seems to be, content to find that one is the only person left alive on earth, and thereby quite actually to be the only signifier — that is simply contemptible. The want of outgoing interest evident in Ballard’s “autobiography” would have stopped me from keeping a diary, much less publishing fiction.

I may have been born alone, and I will probably die alone, but in between there has been and there will be no being alone.

I do love Jean-François Martin’s illustration, though. A lot. Has he worked his name into the hoardings, d’you think?

Life takes Playboy to Dartmouth. Or something like that. In a few days, I’ll figure out the name of this beautiful blonde — plenty beaucoup with her clothes on, even (as in other photos) in pearls.

She’s so beautiful that, even without looking particularly French, she introduces the possibility of France to the equation. She’s the headmistress of a lycée at Bordeaux, perhaps, that has just taken the undergraduate on, for a summer term of English-language instruction….

On the other hand, for sheer anatomical interest, it’s doubtful that the young lady’s gazumbas are more high-concept than the young man’s jaw. What insurance company did he wind up ruling? Can you believe how eager he looks, on his own home turf no less?

I hope that Ms Playboy married well — very well. If we had only stared into her fabulous face for a while, the Sixties might have been avoided (but for Civil Rights, of course).

I almost hope that she became a patron saint of the Dartmouth Review.  But I say that only to annoy (amiably!) my Dartmouth cousins. (via  Ivy Style)

At our very late dinner (we had the New Panorama to ourselves), I told Kathleen that I could have kept time sheets for the day. I could account for every half-hour segment of the day.

I got a lot done, all right, but it wasn’t what I would call a “productive” day. “Productive” means something else — there’s an element of surprise involved. Wow, look what I did! That was wholly lacking today. I had to make a list (mental time sheets) in order to remind myself of all that I’d accomplished.

It was the same thing yesterday. I don’t know myself anymore. I’ve become — gasp! — a steady worker!

I did make popcorn in the middle of the day. Well, it wasn’t the middle of the day really, but more like seven o’clock. I had just finished a long overdo book write-up, and I was about to pay bills. I made popcorn largely for the larder; I like to have it around for the occasional hunger pang, especially now that I’m making good popcorn again. I only ate a bit of it. Then I got back to work. Paying, as I say, the bills.

The bills were not fun to pay this month. Next month will be better! Even though I ordered an Asus netbook this morning.
What was it with the bad popcorn, anyway? I ask myself this a lot lately. One of the few specific things that my father taught me was how to make popcorn. To give you an idea of how exceptional this was, let me share with you his method for cooking bacon.

Three-Step Bacon

(1) Put a pound of bacon in a skillet.
(2) Over heat (turn on the stove).
(3) Rely on the rest of the family or the fire department to prevent fatal smoke inhalation, as you snooze in your easy chair, having completely forgotten the first two steps.

Dad made popcorn in an electric popper that couldn’t be washed very conveniently, but that was the least important angle. Peanut oil was the indispensable ingredient. Why did I forget this? For years I used canola and safflower oil, always regretting the results. And we’ll draw a veil over the various microwave techniques, one of which required a small treated cardboard patch that had to be thrown away after three or four uses. I have no idea why I ever strayed from the tried and true laetificat juventutum meum, but it’s good to have my head screwed on again.

I not only knew a would-be popper guy who thought that corn syrup was a substitute for corn oil, but I saw the pot that he tried it out in. Not pretty!

¶ Matins: The nightmare of peak oil is back, at least according to an analysis of global production by Raymond James, reported  at both WSJ Blogs and Infrastructurist. You haven’t forgotten what “peak oil” means, I trust.

¶ Lauds: “A book about beauty naturally must deal with its opposite, kitsch.” Really! I thought that ugliness was the opposite of beauty, not some uneducated person’s idea of beauty. Robert Fulford writes about Roger Scruton’s new book, Beauty.

¶ Prime: Michael Klein, who has certainly put in the hours at the track (and just around the livestock), waxes eloquent about Calvin Borel’s Derby win.

He’s won the race two years in a row (and in the same way, basically, finding an opening to shimmy his charge along the inside rail to the finish line)…

¶ Tierce: Mirth in court — not shared by everyone. As more prosecution witnesses testified to the wit and charm of Brooke Astor — and noted that it faded in the early years of this decade — jurors couldn’t help noticing that her son, Anthony Marshall, wasn’t smiling. Michael Daly reports.

¶ Sext: Does life really imitate art? Donald Trump will find out, if and when his plans for a golf resort ever materialize on the North Sea coast of Scotland. Anyone remember Bill Forsythe’s Local Hero, with Burt Lancaster in the the Donald role?

¶ Nones: Celebrate “Serf Liberation Day.” Okay, don’t. But be sure to read Stephen Asma’s extremely lucid account of recent-ish Tibetan history — and ask yourself how it would have worked out if the Cold War hadn’t been simmering. (via  The Morning News)

¶ Vespers: At Survival of the Book, Brian writes provocatively about Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor and “the YA trend.”

¶ Compline: Is anyone out there still seriously attempting to “multitask”? If so, John Tierney and Winifred Gallagher can explain why you find it so hard to concentrate.  

(more…)

I’m in dire need of big plans. Perhaps I ought to rob a bank tomorrow — that would make for interesting reading, assuming I made it back to the apartment for long enough to write it up. As it, I am decently content, and there couldn’t be less to report. I threw away a lot of stuff today — shoe boxes full of stereo leads, for the most part. I got rid of three gigantic Sony CD carousels. I’d planned to take them to Housing Works, but they were just too bulky to contemplate schlepping. So I left them by the service elevator, with their remotes and a note that read “All in working order.” The last word, if I do say so myself, was illegible.

I reheated last week’s meat loaf for dinner, and whipped up some mashed potatoes. My record with mashed potatoes is not good. I think about it all too much. For a long time, I was convinced that priceless nutrients would be wasted if I poured off the boiling water, so I would simply cook the potatoes down into a sort of soup — quite revolting. Even worse was the session with the KitchenAid stand mixer. Glue resulted — as you know if you’ve tried it. I asked my good friend JKM how she makes mashed potatoes, and her counsel was sage. No — no sage! Just butter and cream. She reminded me to use a ricer. I have a dandy ricer, but I never think to use it when I’m trying to mash potatoes, which, given my history, is not often. Or I haven’t until now. Tonight’s mashed potatoes were, quite simply, perfect. Nice ricer.

This is all too thrilling. I can’t even think about robbing a bank.

Maybe what I’ll do is run out to Los Angeles and rob my friend George Snyder. He never said anything about his “extensive collection of Made-In-Occupied-Japan figurines” until just the other day, and although I had never known that such things existed (oh, I’d known, all right; I just hadn’t known known), I’ve conceived a retrospective passion for them that we needn’t delve into here. How big, though, is “extensive”?

¶ Matins: Of the 1929 crash, veteran Al Gordon (who died the other day at 107) once said, “Young men thought they could do anything.” Things haven’t changed, as an autopsy of Lehman Bros’ real-estate operations shows.

¶ Lauds: RISD prof Anthony Acciavatti teaches an “advanced studio” that has spawned Friends of the Future, a traveling exhibition that, on the side, will distribute 36,000 postcards at popular stops: gas stations and McDonald’s. (via Art Fag City)

¶ Prime: Is Daily News gossip columnist Joanna Molloy writing the juiciest items about the Marshall trial? Or is the Post’s Andrea Peyser more your style (who knew that Louis Auchincloss grew up in Five Towns?)

¶ Tierce: On the front page of today’s Times, an old story — one that I’ve been reading since 9/11 at the latest: “Pakistan’s Islamic Schools Fill Void, but Fuel Militancy.” What the madrasas really fill is poor little boys’ stomachs. Instead of spending billions on ineffective warfare, why can’t we?

¶ Sext: Patricia Storms discovers Struwwelpeter. Here’s hoping that the Toronto artist will conceive an update.

¶ Nones: The more I think about NATO, the less sense it makes, and the more it looks like a club with which minutemen want to beat up Russia, while shouting, “You lost the Cold War! You lost the Cold War!” John Vinocur reports on Georgia (from Brussels).

¶ Vespers: Marie Mockett on girls, ghosts, Genji, and her own forthcoming novel, Picking Bones from Ash, at Maud Newton.

¶ Compline: Silvio Berlusconi not only refuses to reconcile with his wife, but he demands an apology as well! Now, that’s a spicy meatball!

(more…)

Al, I want to say; Al, you’re great, we all love you; now will you please get out of the picture? I had dreamed of one of those details from an old Skira art book, where a bit of Netherlandish cheek and a warty nose loom to the right of an exquisite pavilion of malachite and marble that you never would have noticed. The picture from which the detail has been cropped is called something like Adoration with Chancellor Rolin.

But this is New York, and romance is just a name on a language department.

Mr Gordon is shown at a north-facing window in his apartment, which, as I’ve known for decades, was at 10 Gracie Square — that last block of East 84th Street between East End Avenue and the East River. How did I know? Did my father tell me that? My father thought the world of Al Gordon. Everybody did. Anybody who didn’t must have thrown himself off a building in 1929.

The treetops are rooted in Carl Schurz Park. Regular readers will have seen them countless times.

To the left of Mr Gordon’s jesting head is 120 East End Avenue. This very handsome building, which I used to dream of living in someday, was built by Vincent Astor, who developed several blocks of luxury flats in the neighborhood back in the Twenties, when Germantown was becoming Yorkville. This is where Brooke Astor lived when Mr Astor was still alive. She had already lived nearby, at 1 Gracie Square, with her second husband, Mr Marshall. (The same Mr Marshall who was not-repeat-not the father of celebrity defendant Tony Marshall, né Kuser.) It seems positively bohemian of Mrs Astor to have strayed so far from Fifth and Park Avenues, but then it wasn’t her choice. She parked herself on Park when she finally had her druthers.

The building at the right-hand edge of the photograph is 170 East End Avenue, and it is no longer under construction. I don’t think that many people live there, but the external elevators were dismantled a while ago, not long before I saw a doorman-type person help a lady with two shopping bags get out of a taxi.

170 stands on the site of the former Doctors’ Hospital, which was famous, before its absorption into the Beth Israel galaxy, as a place to go and dry out. Or to recover from the vapors. In its Beth Israel days, Quintana Roo Dunne was hospitalized there with the dread infection that would later kill her. It was after a visit to her bedside that her father, John Gregory Dunne, collapsed and died in his apartment overlooking St James the Ugly. 

(This is nothing if not a small town.)

For about a year, round about the time that this photograph was taken of Al Gordon at home, construction at 170 East End Avenue stalled. Nothing happened for a very long time. I like to tell people now that the builders had “financing problems.” In fact I have no idea whatsoever of what it was that stopped the work. For all I know, a Viking burial mound was uncovered in the basement, requiring months of tedious dusting with the kind of brushes that used to be attached to those circular typewriter erasers. But when I say, “they had financing problems,” my interlocutors nod sagely, as if I’d just come from the very bank.  

One likes to think that Al Gordon knew.

Early this afternoon, Kathleen turned on her computer, planning to slog through a somewhat tedious work-related project while surrounded by the comforts of home. Bad weather seemed to compensate for the the inconvenience of drafting with just one monitor.

She ended up going to the office after all. Although her laptop instantly connected with the apartment’s wireless network, her browsers and whatnot remained strangely out of touch. We still don’t know why, but the damage was very gooey. A system-restore was eventually effected, remotely, by the local divinity to whom we turn in times of such distress, and that seemed to clear up the problem. Did some long-dormant and undetectable virus spring to life over the weekend? Possibly.

For the most part, I sat by the laptop, trying to read the Times but finding my attention sorely distracted by the wizardry of a darting cursor and the illusion of spontaneously-opening panes. Occasionally, I had to transmit a password — from another computer, of course.

So I didn’t have the day that I’d planned, either. Here’s what I did not do:

• Read The Economist.  
• Plant the geraniums and pansies that have been in flats for ten days now.
• Remove the three CD carousels from beneth the long sofa in the living room and replace them with bins full of letters and Christmas cards. If you just re-read the foregoing because you thought that you must have misread it, or I miswritten it, then you’ll have some idea of my enthusiasm for this project. It will, however, be a step forward.
• Bake madeleines.

When I sat down to compose tomorrow’s Daily Office, my head was just about as gooey as Kathleen’s Windows files. Trolling through the shoals of RSS feeds turned up a lot of same-old same-old news. I’d say that it is taking the mainstream media a long time to get with the Obama program: we’re in for a long, hard season of boring but elementary appraisals and fixes that won’t make for catchy copy. The president, it turns out, is no more  interested in being newsworthy than his predecessor was; but, unlike Mr Bush, he does not do crazy things and then wonder why the dogs of the press are nipping at his heels.

The current administration is so boringly sane that Frank Rich was reduced, in his column today, to comparing last week’s “photo-shoot” fiasco (the one involving Air Force One_N) to FDR’s second-term exercises in hubris (attempting to pack the Supreme Court, for one). Mr Rich writes excitingly about the collapse of the Republican Party —

Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”

— but the lack of passed gas emanating from the White Houses leaves him gasping.

Which is exactly why the mainstream media may never get used to the new regime. They can’t afford to. They’re fighting, as Mr Rich himself points out, for their lives. On Friday, Jason Kottke responded to a Morning News poll with the names of three publications that he reads in print. (The New Yorker, The New York Times on weekends, and, once in a while, Wired.)

If that’s the future, then I’m very much the past: the Times every day; The New Yorker, The Nation, L’Express International, and The Economist weekly, The Atlantic and Harper’s monthly, and now, the Columbia Journalism Review — I don’t know how often that comes out. Not to mention a list of literary magazines (books, really) running from Granta on down. And of course the three literary “tabloids”: The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the eccentrically-published Bookforum. (I also pay an extra twenty bucks a year for the digital edition of NYRB, largely so that I can quote it here, something that “I ought to do more often” — the motto of this entire litany.)

Periodicals that I no longer take: Foreign Affairs (grand, but semi-professional; information is one thing, and smoke-signals are another); TLS (all smoke-signals); and The New Republic (because I disagree apoplectically with its editorial staff’s position on Palestine). A magazine that I wouldn’t dream of having in the house: New York. I considered the alternative and stuck with it. The Observer evokes the most frightful memories of high school.

Oh! I forgot Vanity Fair and France-Amérique. Shame on me. Time was, I wouldn’t have Vanity Fair in the house, either. Now I consider it to be The New Yorker’s drolly wayward first cousin — Eloise to Harriet the Spy.

Of all these publications, it’s the Times that seems the most to be in trouble, not only financially but purposively. What, exactly, is it for? The Times appears to have nothing like the clarity about its readership that the Daily News (“left”) and the Post (reactionary) enjoy. Its friends carp almost as loudly as its foes. Right now, I’d say that the Times is engaged in a no-win joust. I don’t know what the Gray Lady is up against, exactly, but the horse that she’s riding is called Institutional Nostalgia.  

Would I trade my daily Times, delivered to the door, for unassailable Internet access — meaning a guarantee against ever having to spend an afternoon tethered to a computer damaged by malware? You bet I would.

So it took until now to upload some Gilbert & Sullivan onto the computer, and thither onto a Nano. Which is another way of saying that I haven’t listened to anything Savoyard in over eighteen months. There’s nothing abnormal in that; until recently, I was a creature of musical enthusiasms. Feverish passions would make it impossible to listen to anything but The Sleeping Beauty for a few weeks. When the fever passed, it would be a long time before I tuned in again. Just like pop music, really, except that I always would tune in again, eventually. Something inevitably sparks a renewal of interest. In the case of Gilbert & Sullivan, it was Eric Patton’s mentioning that he’d seen this year’s Blue Hill Troupe production of The Sorcerer.

Because my mother was the choreographer for a light opera repertory company in north-central Ohio when I was a child […] I have seen every single Gilbert & Sullivan light opera with the exception of their first, Thespis, but all the music from that light opera was lost except for one song, “Climbing Over Rocky Mountain”, which was inserted into a later light opera, The Pirates of Penzance. Consequently, Thespis is never performed.

I rarely have the chance to impress anyone with my exhaustive knowledge of Gilbert & Sullivan.

I warned Eric and Asaph that Gilbert & Sullivan light operas were not very relevant to our lives today, and that the entire plot is generally resolved in the last song, usually by finding out that characters had been switched at birth.

So that’s why I’ve never seen Thespis.

The problem with listening to Gilbert & Sullivan at my age is that it makes me bawl. A phrase rends my heart; all at once, my lips are pressed together and my eyes sprung wide open (this discourages tears) — but then I burst out in sobs like someone remembering a lost child. What rends my heart is not, needless to say, what Eric calls “the light operas.” Gilbert and Sullivan were Victorian collaborators who, despite a stout fund of mutual loathing, remained on the same artistic page long enough to produce a baker’s dozen of satires (musical and dramatic à la fois). Two or three of them are masterpieces by any standard. What tears me up is the fragile knowingness of what I’ve just said. I, too, rarely have occasion to impress anyone with my exhaustive knowledge of Gilbert & Sullivan.

If you asked me which collaborator I preferred, I’d be paralyzed, because I regard each of them as supreme, and in the same way. Both are players, tweakers of the familiar. For Gilbert, obviously, the raw material was English verse, the grand pretensions of which he carefully replaced with a finer gas, so that there was never any deflation. (It’s crazy, I know, but I rank Gilbert near Shakespeare for his sheer command of English wordplay.) Sullivan did much the same thing, only his raw material was Italian opera. I’m not suggesting that Sullivan made fun of Verdi. Certainly not! He learned, rather, how Verdi made fun of Italian opera. (It is my fond hope that Sullivan’s music will eventually teach us what a tremendous scamp Verdi was. How anyone can hear “Questa o quella” without laughing is beyond me.)

Listening to Iolanthe this afternoon, I marveled (as if for the first time, it felt) at Sullivan’s dexterity at juxtaposing good old English roast beef (“When Britain really ruled the waves”) with rollicking French naughtiness (“If you go in, you’re sure to win”) — all seasoned with trademark silliness (“In vain to us you plead”). Another thing that made me cry was the scoring of the famous nightmare song, “When you’re lying awake.” Beneath the verbal humor, the nightmare is given a rather terrifying musical reality by touches that seem learned from Tchaikovsky. Taught to?

Young people today can scarcely be expected to imagine that “breach of promise of marriage” was once upon a time a tort — an actionable civil wrong. But they would certainly understand the defendant’s argument, in Trial by Jury (the first surviving collaboration), in favor of minimal damages: 

Defendant (repelling her furiously).

I smoke like a furnace — I’m always in liquor,
  A ruffian — a bully — a sot;
I’m sure I should thrash her; perhaps I should kick her,
  I am such a very bad lot!
I’m not prepossessing, as you may be guessing,
  She couldn’t endure me a day;
Recall my professing, when you are assessing
  The damages Edwin must pay!

Plaintiff

Yes, he must pay!

Where’s the Kleenex?

I spent most of a soggy afternoon in Brooklyn — without leaving the blue room of my apartment. After the movie (The Limits of Control) and lunch (with Ms NOLA, at the Knickerbocker), Quatorze and I headed uptown to Yorkville. Q was nice enough to hang a couple of pictures, something that it has become very difficult for me to do, given my rigid neck. Even when my neck was as supple as anybody’s, though, I never hung pictures as quickly and neatly as Quatorze.

When the work was done and much admired, I ought to have thanked my friend and sent him on his way, because I had this page to write, among other sitely tasks, not to mention a concert to attend. But it was much more interesting to sink into my chair with a cup of tea and listen to Quatorze’s stories of boyhood in Sunset Park — in the parish of St Catherine of Alexandria, at any rate. One or two of the stories I had heard before, but from other angles, as it were, and other connections. It occurred to me that Quatorze really ought to be writing his stories down. They’re very funny, but they’re also very local. The Brooklyn that he remembers is long gone, and I hope that he’ll take steps to assure that it doesn’t vanish altogether.

When the conversation fell to details about the periphery of Prospect Park, there was only one thing to do: refer to Google Maps. I didn’t know that Quatorze had never spent any time with Google Maps — that he didn’t even know it existed. Hours later, he left the apartment somewhere between fandom and addiction.

Given the weather, and Kathleen’s exhaustion, I made the decision, at about seven, to skip tonight’s chamber recital at the Museum. I regret having to do so, I did have to do so. I might have gone by myself, but the work that hadn’t been done while Quatorze and I searched for the Palais de la Lanterne would have distracted me from the music.

Does anyone know of a blog that follows the Marshall Trial? Times coverage (by John Eligon and James Barron) has been pretty exciting. The opening arguments were spicy: the prosecution all but fingered Charlene Marshall, the defendant’s younger wife (and I am convinced that this case is all about cherchez la Charlene), while the defense proposed that the late Mrs Astor was niggardly about donating her own money to charity — not a tack that I’d have recommended taking. Now, novelist and attorney Louis Auchincloss, a good-enough friend of the late doyenne, takes the stand to make the following flabbergasting but correct assertion:

Mr. Auchincloss said Mrs. Astor could not have been capable of understanding details of a will “if she did not know me.”

The Week at Portico: Those few paragraphs about Waiting for Godot that I mentioned last night may be read here. And of course there’s the Book Review review.