If you know a singer who can take a bunch of songs by such diverse creative talents as Anton Webern, Charles Ives, Carrie Jacobs-Bond, and Irving Berlin, and fashion a program that makes them sound as though they were all written not only at the same time but in the same rooming house as well, I’ll be dutifully impressed. If you had a really good time listening to all of it, I can match you.

That sounds like a great opener for a Portico page about this evening’s cabaret at Café Sabarsky, so I’ll cool it. This is supposed to be a diary entry, not a review. Tom Meglioranza and Reiko Uchida gave an evening of cabaret at the Neue Galerie, just down the road — at the Fifth Avenue end. There was a nice prix-fixe dinner beforehand, with two choices for each of three courses; we drank an agreeably substantial Pannobile along with it. Every table was full; Kathleen estimated that there were about sixty people in the room — once upon a time the dining room over which Grace Vanderbilt’s presided.

We thought we’d miss the event; we were to have flown off to St Croix yesterday. As Kathleen said to Tom afterward, the evening was no small compensation for the bummer of postponing vacation. We laughed and we cried — mostly, we laughed. Tom has a beautiful voice — there’s no need to discuss that. He is also a great entertainer, with a knack for cabaret that makes you forget how few people have it anymore. He weaves an incredibly engaging texture from songs both obscure and overexposed. Carrie Jacobs-Bond, for example, wrote a lot of popular music, most notably “I Love You Truly,” but she also seems to have been the venerable ancestress of the advertising jingle, as evidenced by her Half-Minute Songs. Nothing could be droller, by the way, than Tom’s announcement that he is about to sing a set of “twelve songs” by this rather sentimental composer; he plays it straight, for the groans that his audience is too well-mannered to betray. Two minutes later, they’re laughing like delighted kids. I wish I had written down some of the lyrics to these extremely brief and moralistic deadpans, but one of them, entitled “When They Say the Unkind Things” — you already know half of the words — hinges on the sentiment that sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you — unless they’re true.

Show of hands: who knows “I Love You Truly”? This song could reduce my mother to tears, even though most women of her generation probably found it was pretty corny; it reduced their mothers to waterworks. Alfalfa sings it (satirically, I believe; but the performance is a poignant one) in an Our Gang episode. In my early teens, the household acquired a cheesy electric organ for some reason or other. More like an early synthesizer, really, it was nothing but a keyboard on four spindly legs. I used to love to accompany myself singing “I Love You Truly” with full tremolo. (“Used to love”? If I did this three times, I’d die of embarrassment.) The tremolo was mine, not the organ’s. The organ wasn’t up to tremolo.

When Tom finished his tremolo-free rendition of “I Love You Truly,” I detected a certain spouse in the act of eye-wiping. The song that broke me down was “Vienna, City of My Dreams,” the refrain to which stabs me in German (even if Tom sang it in English):

Wien, Wien, nur du allein
sollst stets die Stadt meiner Träume sein.

Tom prefaced the song with an interesting bit of tittle-tattle about the composer, Rudolf Sieczynsky (1879-1952): he was a one-hit wonder who wrote songs when he wasn’t running a POW camp. The song still kills me.

This is sounding a lot like a review. Am I hiding something? I am. Throughout the musical part of the evening, I was tormented by a nether organ that had been irritated, arguably, by my diet of round-the-clock tea. Repletion was very definitely not the problem. Knowing that, I was not in fear of a loss of control. But the burn was intense at times, and it wasn’t helped by the reflection that I’d be having a much better time if only… If only what? Far more soothing was the voice of experience, which reminded me that the eons that I seemed to be slogging through were only minutes (half-minutes, in some cases), and that I would soon be quite content. None of this cerebrofeedback was actually effective as pain control; it was the dandy, high-end fun that got me through. 

In a perfect world, Tom and Reiko would own the Café Sabarsky in the way that Bobby Short owned the Café Carlyle. The rest of the year, they could do Schubert.

¶ Matins: Driving while intoxicated, and with a child in the car, will be made a felony, according to a law that has passed the New York State Assembly. Interlock devices, which block ignition when the driver’s breath carries faint amounts of alcohol, will be required for drivers convicted of driving while intoxicated. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: Lucy Lu recently celebrated the first anniversary of Met Everyday, her online report of visits to the Museum. Her list of ten things that you must see (or wings that you must visit) is personable but not surprising — with the exception of the modern-art item.

¶ Prime: Tom Bajarin’s discussion, at PCMag Mobile, of the impact of Vooks on publishing suggests to us that the author of a plain old book could do as well as a Vook developer, delivering a formatted text as an “app,” and collecting 70% of the price. (via The Tomorrow Museum)

¶ Tierce: We’ve heard of the Ithaca Hours, an alternative local currency, but we can’t imagine how anything like it would work in Manhattan. But who cares: it would be gorgeous, if these bills designed by students at the School for Visual Arts were in circulation. (via The Best Part)

¶ Sext: Will Sam Sifton be the next editor of the New York Times? It’s a very interesting rumor, considering that the gent has just been assigned to reviewing restaurants for the newspaper. We’ll say this: he has certainly dusted off the genre.

¶ Nones: For a quick and snappy resume of Palestinian politics at the moment, you probably can’t beat the Beeb’s summary. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: V L Hartmann bumps into Joan Didion in the street — almost — and observes that in her carriage as in her prose, the author of The Year of Magical Thinking is not like “the old ladies you see up here on the East Side that are all stooped over.” (The Morning News)

¶ Compline: Conserving Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an earthwork at the edge, and sometimes beneath the surface, of The Great Salt Lake. (NYT)

For a few hours, in the middle of the day, I felt that I was on top of things. I knew that this feeling had to be a delusion, because you don’t go from twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea to high on the hog in one day. But I felt collected, for the first time in six or eight weeks. Delusion or not, it felt awfully good.

The delusion was not utter. I have indeed been catching up, and, what’s more, remembering from day to day what’s on. The delusive part came from a rearrangement of my schedule. Hitherto, I’ve begun the day in a panic about the next day’s Daily Office. On very good days, the entry would be taken care of by noon or one, but on bad days I’d still be slaving at three. I noticed, moreover, that I’d get pickier and pickier as the day wore on. This is not to say that my standards became more demanding. I’d simply get cranky about not having finished the entry already.

So I tried something new. I made choosing the eight Daily Office links the first business of the day, and the second business of the day anything else in the world except writing up the links. (Violating this still wobbly rule yesterday got me in what threatened to be big trouble.) Today, I chose the links before eleven, and came back to write them up at six.

In the mean time, I accomplished very little on the site front. I re-read Sam Shepherd’s story — that’s all I did. I didn’t even sketch a page of comment about it. To be sure, the second reading opened the story up so wide that I was afraid of falling in. There was a great deal (and I’m not talking about “detail”) that I had forgotten from reading the story for the first time, two days ago.

On the home front, though, I knocked off a bunch of jobs. Polishing the silver on the sideboard was a recurring job. Washing the Blue Italian china that had spent a month out on the balcony was not. Shortly before seven, a young colleague of Ms NOLA’s stopped by to wrap up most of it and take it away. Outwardly, I was very easygoing: “Don’t take a thing that you don’t think you can use.” Afterward, I stared hard at the items left behind, as if that would induce the beneficiary to change his mind and beg to take them away as well.

I looked everywhere for my MOO cards — the mini business cards that I’ve grown surprisingly fond of; I thought that I would tire of them. They have a portion of the Portico entry screen on the obverse, and a few lines of URL and whatnot on the reverse. They’re not tiny, but they are small: seven centimeters by just under three. Somewhere in the apartment there is a box that ought to hold about seventy of them, from my second order, last December. But I can’t find it in any of the usual places. So I ordered another two  hundred. If you’d like a few, send me your snail mail.

Ms NOLA’s colleague seemed to be very impressed when I showed him the site. (I was not surprised that Ms NOLA herself hadn’t shown it to him — they’re very busy at her publishing house.) He said that he knew a few people who might find it interesting. In my experience, The Daily Blague and, even more, Portico are sites that people like to discover for themselves. To people to whom the sites have been recommended, I’m afraid that they look like homework.

When you think about it, my daily life is all homework, and I love it. I just hate to fall too far behind the assignments.

¶ Matins: Monica Howe writes about a problem that appears to be on the increase: drive-by porn and its variants. You’re sitting in some sort of traffic, minding your own business, when the guy next to you…. (Washington Post; via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Yasmina Reza, in town to promote her directorial début, Chicas, with Emmanuelle Seignier — and to catch the first cast’s final performance of God of Carnage — talks to Speakeasy about all of that, and her friendship with Ms Seignier’s husband, Roman Polanski.

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon continues the debt-bias discussion, evaluating two reasons not to tax interest payments, and, not surprisingly, dismissing them even when he agrees with supporting arguments. (That’s what makes this discussion so interesting.)

¶ Tierce: The extraordinary Mandelbulb. We’ve been so hynotized by the latest in fractals that we’ve neglected to share.

¶ Sext: What to read next? Well, you could let your dreams determine the title — if you were Philip K Dick and strong enough to read “the dullest book in the world.” (Letters of Note)

¶ Nones: With a grim sort of relief, we note that intransigence is still the prevailing note in Honduran politics. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Terry Teachout encounters a stack of his new book(s), Pops, at the Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side. He registers his reaction as closer to Mencken than to Hindemith. (About Last Night)

¶ Compline: Two lawyers from the Genomics Law Report consider the “intriguing question” of how personal DNA data might be handled in the event (an event in Iceland) of a direct-to-consumer’s genomics company’s going bankrupt. (Genetic Future; via Short Sharp Science)

When I left the apartment for today’s Remicade infusion, I was very cross. I had spent too much time on the Daily Office, not only choosing links but writing them up, and by the time I regained track of the time and got dressed, it was too late for any kind of lunch. I was also very hungry. I called the doctor’s office and asked for a slight postponement, but to no avail; and the buffed, unthinking manner in which my request was denied opened the door that connects inconvenience and irritation to self-pitying anger. I gobbled a leftover piece of broiled chicken and decamped, imagining my soaring blood pressure.

That was the last of my troubles, though. I jumped in a taxi and, from the moment that I entered the Hospital for Special Surgery, things began to go well. Initially, my blood pressure was 164 over something, but ten or so minutes later, when the rheumatologist took it again, it was down to 134, and then (he took it again), to 129. When he asked how I was, I answered honestly: angry. But I didn’t say why. I simply said that I had more to do than there was time for doing it, and when he laughed good-naturedly (doctors will be doctors), my thought went black and murderous. He must have made a lightning guess, because he then asked if being busy were a good thing or a bad thing. (We’re in Manhattan, after all.) I said that it was a bad thing. Then he asked what I was reading, and Gail Collins — I’m reading her wonderful history of recent feminism, When Everything Changed — we talked about the huge changes in women’s lives since the 1960s. I was all for it, I said, but what depressed me was the “advance” that has made life a lot easier for stupidity and inattentiveness. The doctor asked me if I meant in men or women. No difference, I said: the problem is common to men and women.

It was Quatorze who had clarified the problem, the day before. Somehow, I had come into possession of a kind of razor, presumably for cutting through paint and the other semi-hard accretions that build up over time. To put it very simply, the tool was fixed in the position of an open straight razor, and there was no way to retract or close the blade. Quatorze said that it was a souvenir of another time, when no one worried that anyone but a child would pick it up without knowing how to use it. One of the reasons why modern life has become so inefficient and sclerotic — only one, mind you — is that we put so much effort and expense into protecting unskilled people from the consequences of entering environments for which they’re not equipped. It is one of the many ways in which we have lost the use of authority.

By the time my pre-infusion exam was over, however, I was in good spirits. It was not quite 1:45, and my infusion wasn’t scheduled to begin until 2:30, but I thought, if the good nurses in the Infusion Therapy Unit would indulge me, I’d drop off my bags and head out for a bite, at McDonald’s most likely (haven’t been in about a year), but it turned out to be slow day in room 709, and I was told to come on in and take a seat right then. As a result, I left the hospital by daylight, at 4:20, and not at dark-dyed 6.

I got a fair amount of reading done during the infusion, but for a good deal of the time I simply gave myself over to the mood of the place, which is only fundamentally that of a hospital. More superficial but also more salient is the atmosphere of a beauty parlor. Now, I have not spent any time in beauty parlors since I was a boy, and had to wait for my mother’s permanent to leave al dente cookery in the dust. I hated being there, not only because it was boring but because the ladies — customers and beauticians alike — didn’t like having me around. The space was very cramped, a quarter of the size of any beauty parlor that I’ve ever seen in the movies, but more than that there was my maleness. The beauty parlor of the 1950s was the one place to which women could escape from the opposite sex. Beneath that, there was the determination that I not be allowed to feel too comfortable, less unsounded twisted tendencies find encouragement. So, when I say that the Infusion Therapy Unit is something like a beauty parlor, I’m talking through my hat. But there was a moment when I was talking to two nurses about Pirate Radio, which both of them wanted to see. I can’t imagine talking about movies at the barber shop. As a rule, I don’t talk in the barber shop at all, not even now that I don’t read, either (because my reading glasses interfere).

Why was I carrying bags to the hospital? Because my next stop, after the infusion, was the storage unit. I was there for the twenty minutes that it took to wrap up half a shelf of glassware and china and stuff it into the two gigantic Bean’s totes. Then I was gone, and, back at my desk, I was soon back to work, writing up more links for the Daily Office. Not a model day by any means, but a good one, and impossible to complain about, no matter how cross I was this morning.

¶ Matins: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals is eaten alive by John Williams, at The Second Pass, in a piece that begins with the surprised observation that Mr Foer does not mention Peter Singer in his book.

¶ Lauds: Michael Williams writes about the amazing Zildjian family, and shares some terrific clips. (A Continuous Lean)

¶ Prime: James Surowiecki addresses the debt bias in this week’s New Yorker, and in a background piece at the magazine’s blog.

¶ Tierce: While Choire Sicha rails against the “Swiss Drug Pushers” who run the United States government (at The Awl), Jonah Lehrer (at The Frontal Cortex) reminds us how L-Dopa really works.

¶ Sext: Unknown to Downing Street or the Palace, Margaret Thatcher dies. Meanwhile, Thatcher scholar Claire Berlinksi writes an article for Penthouse.

¶ Nones: Joshua Kurlantzick discusses President Obama’s trip to Asia, regretting that Indonesia was left off the itinerary and noting the dispiriting realism of Asian diplomacy today. (London Review Blog)

¶ Vespers: Grant Risk Hallberg’s long piece on myth and backlash in Bolaño studies serves as a toolkit to bring you completely up-to-date on a writer who, from beyond the grave, has excited a pungent array of macho responses. (The Millions)

¶ Compline: A story that we never thought we’d see: “Money Trickles North as Mexicans Help Relatives.” (NYT)

When all the work was finished — the marble topper installed on the lower part of the breakfront; the pictures overhead re-hung (a business that necessitated the re-hanging of other pictures elsewhere) — I cast about for a new place for tools. I’m speaking of tools in the Daddy sense here, not in the virtual sense that comprises PhotoShop. Screwdrivers, hammers, the electric drill and its accoutrements, tape measures, pliers, wrenches (including sets of Allen wrenches both metric and inched). I settled on a drawer in what we call the pyramid. The pyramid is a chest of drawers, as tall as my chest, that tapers in width from a base of just under a yard to a top of just over a foot. There are lots of drawers in various sizes. The drawer that I chose for the tools that I wanted to keep handy (drill not included) was currently stuffed with linen towels. These, I decided at once, would be better stored somewhere else, and the sturdy drawer would itself serve as a handy toolbox.

All of a sudden, piles of linen towels were all over the dining table, in stacks of no particular coherence. I began to arrange them, starting with the Primrose Bordier tea towels for Le Jacquard Français. (I can’t find any images; Bordier died in 1996 and LJF has moved on.) I decided to unfold one or two for Quatorze — it was Quatorze, of course, who had done all the work. My favorite Bordier is a black and white image of the garden of the Palais Royal, but I also have a very strange towel that features the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, the Tour Eiffel, and the Louvre — all wildly out of scale, so that the towers of Notre Dame loom over the spire of the Tour Eiffel, and the Louvre looks so pathetically low-slung that Quatorze sighed with regret. He had mistaken it for the Tuileries, which, as you know, was burned to a hulk during the Events of 1871, and subsequently demolished. Oh, no, I said, that’s the Louvre, the front of the Sully wing. I do have a photograph of the Tuileries, I added, as I reached down Peter and Oriel Caine’s Paris Then and Now (Thunder Bay, 2003), a feast of views old and new, on facing pages, of the most beautiful city on earth. I still remember holding the book for the first time and losing my breath when, leafing through it, I came on the view looking west from the front of the Sully. Today, it’s of course dominated by I M Pei’s celebrated pyramid — the principal entrance to the museum. In the anonymous photograph from 1860 on the opposite page, however, the vista is blocked by the inner wall of the Tuileries Palace — which, by the way, is where monarchs have actually lived ever since Catherine de Médicis built it in the Sixteenth Century. (The Louvre, formerly a castle out of DisneyWorld, has always been a place of business.) Now, anyway, it was the turn of Quatorze’s jaw to drop.

And so the work portion of the afternoon folded into the show-and-tell part. I don’t know how long it will take for Quatorze and me to share everything that we have in the way of items of interest to anyone who likes Paris and the Eighteenth Century, but I do hope that we never altogether run out of fresh treasures. And who knows? Maybe we’ll live to see the old palace rebuilt. That would be great fun.

Is it still 2009? We’re afraid that we’re going to wake up one of these mornings and discover that it is 2011 and that we are seriously overdue. That’s not an entirely coherent thought, but it captures our mood of bubbling panic. Where do people find the time to watch 4.5 hours of television a day?

On the other hand, the Editor wants you to know that his apartment looks great, and that his knowledge of its contents’ whereabouts grows by leaps and bounds from week to week!

We hope that you’ve read “Alone,” last week’s New Yorker story, by Yiyun Li. We thought that it was a standout — even though the magazine has been running some very interesting stories lately. If you haven’t read “Alone,” though, don’t click on this link, because the page is one big spoiler. There is no meaningful way to discuss this piece of amazing fiction without focusing on the last line.

Thanks to a hatpin applied by an MTC researcher, we remedied one of our delinquencies and wrote up the revival of The Royal Family. It was one of those sheesh-we’re-lucky-to-live-here nights at the theatre.

Pirate Radio — as The Boat That Rocked is called here — was, in contrast, a thrill that could be had wherever major motion pictures are exhibited. We don’t have much to say about it now, just too much. For the time being, we’re going to spare you.

And, of course, this week’s Book Review review.

Kathleen and I just had a huge fight. She believes — if “belief” can be attached to a reed so slender that reason cannot support it — that The Angels’ hit tune, “My Boyfriend’s Back,” from August, 1963 —  is sung by an innocent childess who has been pestered all summer by a teenage molester in whom she takes no interest. How can Kathleen possibly not see that the singer is a minx who has had her fun with some shortsighted twerp whom she is now dumping à la royale? How is it possible that Kathleen thinks that the singer is innocent, when she is obviously the worst sort of demimondaine?

Kathleen said that I ought to take a poll at The Daily Blague, so here it is — not that anyone’s going to mind. Whose side are you on, when you hear “My Boyfriend’s Back?”

(Electrolysists needn’t reply.)

It’s dreary work, being married to twerps.

Next up: a song as to the sublimity of which Kathleen and I  are in complete accord: “Easier Said Than Done.” 

It’s hrd to tell who’s the dense one here: the Chinese police or Joshua Keating. Beijing vendors have been told to take T-shirts that show Barack Obama as a Red Guard off the shelves. Are they afraid that a fad will be kindled? Who knows. Chinese bureaucrats stay fresh by throwing their weight around. Mr Keating, in contrast, reads into the ban a tender concern for the feelings of our president.

Also, while I understand that the authorities are anxious not to offend Obama on his high-profile visit, I have a feeling that the president’s seen way more ridiculous images of himself if he’s ever looked out the window of his limo on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Surely the Chinese authorities know that, were Mr Obama to see kids wearing the shirt, he’d grin and perhaps even say, xing nan! (FP; via  The Morning News)

¶ Matins: In an over-and-above beautiful essay, Jonathan Raban recollects that he was taught to read, first, by his mother, and then, by William Empson. But Seven Types of Ambiguity opened his eyes to more than texts. (London Review of Books)

¶ Lauds: With trademark lucidity, Anne Midgette finds similarities between the troubles that newspapers are suffering these days and the woes of symphony orchestras. Not only that; she puts her finger on what’s wrong wrong with plans to “save” them. (Washington Post; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: At You’re the Boss, Barbara Taylor writes about her entrepreneurial brother-in-law’s search for “an Internet business.” What kind of business?

¶ Tierce: At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova directs our attention to a handsome new book about information design, The Visual Miscellaneum, by David McCandless.

¶ Sext: Scouting New York, which has just turned one year old, continues its exploration of the city’s out-of-the-way cemeteries. Moore-Jackson, in Woodside, looks like a destination park, but Scout tells us that it’s all locked up. (How did he get in, we don’t wonder?)

¶ Nones: Although Peter Galbraith doesn’t appear, at first glance, to have done anything wrong, he doesn’t seem to have been much concerned about the appearance of impropriety. While in some sort of complicated, conditional contractual relationship with a Norwegian drilling company, he participated in Iraqi constitutional negotiations (as an adviser, obviously) that resulted in Kurdish control over oil revenues. As a result of both factors, he stands to gain about $100 million.

¶ Vespers: In today’s Times, two good-sounding books received generous coverage in the form of news stories. That ought to do it so far as the Grey Lady is concerned. Neither book warrants coverage in the Book Review. (Janet Maslin gave Mr Agassi’s book a guarded rave in the daily paper.)

The first is Andre Agassi’s memoir, for which T J Moehringer, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Tender Bar served as “midwife.” Mr Moehringer insists that he did not ghostwriting, but only coaxed Mr Agassi into writing a good book.

 The other book is high-end furniture restorer Maryalice Huggins’s Aesop’s Mirror: A Love Story. Although we’re looking forward to reading this book, we don’t want to read any more about it.

¶ Compline:  Compline: Gene doping is already prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency, but fat lot of good that is going to do the inspectors, given the difficulties of detection. (Short Sharp Science)

Today was the day for a trim. I called the barber at about eleven, and was told that no one was in the shop. So I threw on some street clothes and marched down to 81st Street, encouraged by propulsive music from the Nano. When I got to Willy’s, the chair was indeed empty, so I was in and out in twenty minutes — or however long it took to play “I Am the Walrus” and three Steely Dan classics (including “Deacon Blue”), plus ads and talk. Willy calls me “Capitán,” because he thinks that I look like Captain Smith of the Titanic. (I’m sure that I’ve told you this before, but site searches turn up nothing.) Which is fine, as long as he understands that he is keeping my beard as spruce as Captain Smith’s. My beard is the customer.

I was wondering, as I sat in the chair, if I might have done a better job of ferrying the liner across the Atlantic. Certainly not, I thought: I wouldn’t have known the first thing to do about getting out of port. We think that all that Captain Smith had to know about sailing the Titanic was to avoid icebergs. But by the time of the deadly collision, he had already made countless correct decisions, I’m sure. Maybe not. But nobody tells me that I look like Kenneth More.

Is the Enlightenment at fault here? Is that the source of the idea that any intelligent person can take on any job, with a little bit of practice? How dearly we have paid for this misapprehension in recent times! The lumières were largely unaware, from what I can tell, of the role of conditioning, not just upon muscles (which they must have guessed at) but upon the brain as well. They seem to have had a resistance to the idea that repetition (which they saw as drudgery) was essential to mastery. I don’t know; I’ve never read anything about Enlightenment thinkers on that level. It’s easy to find out what they thought. But what about what they didn’t think about?

Had things worked out differently, for example, Aristotle would have been an intellectual  polestar of the Enlightenment. Instead, because of the abuse to which his scientific ideas had been subjected by medieval thinkers, Aristotle was a byword for passé. The substance of Aristotle’s scientific thought is, indeed, intrinsically useless, and of no more than historical interest. But Aristotle’s optimism about the benefits of learning about the world shares the Enlightenment’s watermark.

From Willy’s, I walked over to Crawford Doyle. I’ve been meaning to buy Gail Collins’s new book there for ages, and I shouldn’t have been surprised if they no longer had a copy ready to hand. But they did. I adore Gail Collins in the way that we all used to adore Russell Baker (and still do!); we all wish that we could be as funny at self-deprecation as they are. The new book is about feminism, a public issue now for almost forty years. I don’t think that the number of decades had anything to do with my also buying Peter Wilson’s new book, although “The Thirty Years War” will, I expect, turn out to be the perfect title for a book about gay marriage in America.  

I wish I knew whether Willy means “Capitán” as a compliment. I would say that he does, as a matter of professional prudence — that he sees in me a resemblance to great Edwardian personages. And yet, it might really be a resemblance to great Edwardian jackasses, to the clueless pooh-bahs who dragged the world into the Great War. It may be that, for Willy, there’s no difference between Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.

¶ Matins:  Matins: Darshak Sanghavi, a pediatric cardiologist and the health-care columnist at Slate, writes lucidly about medical-malpractice litigation. The tort-based system is broken, but it works, sort of. Dr Sanghavi likens it to a casino — terrifying doctors as a class while overcompensating a handful of plaintiffs — but he also attributes significant drops in patient injuries to lessons learned. (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Two public spaces that people will know better from photographs than from visits: The National September 11 Memorial & Museum (when and if) and the White House. The latter, which is indeed a house, requires periodic replacement therapy, in the form of “redecoration,” a word that, Martin Filler tells us, Jacqueline Kennedy didn’t like. (via Felix Salmon and The Morning News)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon reminds us that nothing is riskier than a market in which everyone shuns risk.

¶ Tierce: Muscato remembers his family’s observance of Veteran’s Day.

¶ Sext: Two pieces that were printed side-by-side in the Times, and ought to have appeared in the same fashion online. Food colleagues Kim Severson and Julia Moskin are Jack Sprat and his wife about Thanksgiving. For Ms Severson, it is all about turkey. For Ms Moskin, the turkey is a turkey. The bitchery is quite amiable.

¶ Nones: We’re not quite sure why the offer would help negotiations along, but the UK will return 45 square miles of sovereign territory on Cyprus to — to whom? We can remember when Cyprus was in the news every day. Remember Archbishop Makarios?  (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Dan Hill’s review of Alain de Botton’s Heathrow book, A Week at the Airport, is long and serious but hugely compelling, inspired to be challenging where the book under review leaves off. For example, after quoting the passage about an interview with an airline CEO that stressed the fact that neither the CEO nor Mr de Botton works in a profit-making industry, Mr Hill cocks an eyebrow. (City of Sound; via The Tomorrow Museum)

¶ Compline: David Dobbs argues for replacing the “vulnerability” model of genetic variation with an “orchid” model. The older thinking holds that variants increase their carriers’ vulnerability to disorder. The new idea acknowledges vulnerability but also inverts it, seeing heightened access to special skills. (The Atlantic)

In the middle of the afternoon, the telephone rang, and I could tell from Caller ID that the call came from the Manhattan Theatre Club. Thinking that it must be about membership renewal or somesuch, I didn’t pick up, and I was really glad that I hadn’t when I heard the message. A nice lady said that, since we’d been to see The Royal Family last Thursday (the miracles of ticket scanning!), she’d be interested to hear our opinion.

Well.

I could have said, “Gee, we really liked it.” Or, I could refer her to Portico. Problem was, I hadn’t yet got round to writing up Thursday’s performance. Suddenly, however, I was motivated to fix that. So I did. Then, after the usual technological fumblings, I printed the page and read it to Kathleen. She disagreed on one particular, and I caught a number of infelicities. At some point tomorrow, I expect to call MTC back and say, “Gee, we really liked it — and you can read more at this address! When I mentioned the call to Kathleen at dinner, she raced ahead to the possibility of a Portico link’s appearance in Playbill. Happily for me, my optimism stops well short of such visions.

The main thing is that I wrote the page.

Before that, I read a couple of short stories. One was by Yiyun Li, and it was this week’s New Yorker story. I liked it very much, but I wished that my mind could deal with its satisfactions without making reference to tried and true narrative techniques. The conservatism of the story-telling did serve to sustain a kind of mystical psychology, part gripping ghost story but (bigger) part melancholy, realistic nightmare.

The other story came from The Cost of Living, the new collection of Mavis Gallant’s unpublished stories. Called “Going Ashore,” it was a study in forlorn desolation. A twelve year-old girl, Emma Ellenger, finds herself on a cruise ship with her mother. Her mother is one of those women who don’t seem to exist anymore, but who were thick on the ground by the time Dawn Powell was in her prime. I even knew a few of them when I was young. They were single women — divorcées, usually, but sometimes maidens gone to seed — who drank a little too much, relied upon makeup even more, and who “needed a man,” although what on earth they’d do with one if they found him could not be imagined. Enjoy the comfort of strangers, I suppose. I attracted such woman (all unknowingly) because I was always tall for my age, well-mannered (at least in the presence of vaguely frightening ladies), and pretty flirtatious myself. Anyway, this woman is an awful mother, not least because she excites her daughter’s tender sympathy along with the usual impatience. The stories in The Cost of Living are all good, so far — hey, it’s Mavis Gallant — but “Going Ashore,” the fifth, is the first knockout.

Something else that I did today: I sent postcards to eleven friends, ten of them addressed with Dymo labels that I won’t ever have to type again. Here’s the deal: the Museum’s latest scheme — one that I applaud — is to tell sets of ten unique postcards of images from each exhibition. The last scheme was to bundle twelve postcards of six images (two of each, in other words), but that added a complicating wrinkle to the ingenuous project of sending “thinking of you” postcards to friends. What did it mean, I wondered, to send the same image to two different people? Did it suggest an occult affinity? Ten unique images are much easier to deal with. It turns out that there are eleven in the set, because what passes for the top, or “cover,” of the set is the exhibition’s poster, also with a postcard backing. I expect that a few of the recipients will be mystified to receive them. But there are two people on the mailing list who, ten years or so from now, may not remember a time when they did not receive postcards from me, however erratically.

As Mavis Gallant’s story tells it, you can’t take young people seriously enough — it’s the only thing that spares their taking themselves too seriously.

¶ Matins: “Terrifyingly cavalier” — we expect that Elizabeth Kolbert is right to respond to SuperFreakonomics with alarm. Shooting SO₂ aerosols into the atmosphere through an eighteen-mile hose does not sound like a promising solution to the problem of global warming. The Two Steves look to be in need of adult supervision! (The New Yorker)

¶ Lauds: In the future, will the great nudes of fine art sport fig leaves and other coverings that, as the spectator desires, may be made to fall away? Does Marcel Duchamp’s rather nasty peepshow, Étant Donnés, cap a Renaissance tradition? Blake Gopnik’s second blush. (Washington Post; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Steve Tobak addresses a home truth: “Don’t Make Your Customers Deal With Your Problems.” He’s talking to business people, of course, but we substitute “readers” for “customers” and go from there. (Corner Office)

¶ Tierce: Eric Patton writes about the trip to Rome that he took with his parents last month. (It was last month, wasn’t it?) (SORE AFRAID)

¶ Sext: Rudolph Delson has been making his way through the library of vice-presidential memoirs. Yesterday, he reached Tricky Dick. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: It isn’t very neighborly of Cambodia’s Hun Sen to welcome Thai renegade (and former prime minister) Thaksin Shinawatra into his cabinet, as an economic adviser — and on the eve of a regional summit, at that! Thailand has recalled its ambassador, and its government “has expressed anger and embarrassment over the deal.” (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Aleksandar Hemon fumes and steams about the posthumous publication of Nabokovian fragments. We can see why: the great writer intended for unfinished works to be destroyed at his death (in 1977). But the intentions were very naive, and possibly insincere: surely Nabokov was capable of destroying them himself after realizing that he would not live to finish his last project. (Slate; via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the elimination of a distinct Asperger syndrome diagnosis from the next edition of the standard psychiatric handbook (the DSM) — a move under consideration by the editors — would be premature at best. (NYT)

There was nothing unusual about the fact that nothing happened today. I worked on the sites in the morning, ordered in a late lunch (pork lo mein), and I was just about to start in on a basket of paperwork when Quatorze paid an impromptu visit. He had run over to the far end of Park Slope, in Brooklyn, and brought back a chunk of peach-colored stone for our approval. My approval wasn’t good enough; Q wanted to be sure that Kathleen liked the sample, too.

And she did, just as I told him she would. So that takes care of the last home-improvement item on the short list. A top for the rump of the decapitated breakfront will be fashioned from the peach-colored stone, and at a very good bargain, too, because, to make a long story short, Quatorze really knows what he’s doing. We should have paid three or four times as much as to have the topper made out of lesser material at, say, Home Depot. Instead, Quatorze found a fabricator of kitchen counters who happened to have a large-enough remnant. It seems that he had four remnants, in different kinds of stone. The other three wouldn’t have done at all, but the fourth, the one that Quatorze couldn’t wait to show me, was just rigbt.

And part of what made it just right was our not having had to choose it. It chose us. It happened to be available. It was what was on offer. On the scale of everyday purchases, I don’t at all care for serendipity. I’ve never been to Trader Joe’s, for example, precisely because people tell me that you never know what kind of bargains you’re going to run into. Once upon a time, I might have found that amusing, but now it’s only tedious: when I go to the market, I’m armed with a list of things that I expect to find on the shelves. Even pleasant surprises are only distracting at best. But when it comes to plunking down a few hundred dollars for a piece of custom-carved stone that will undoubtedly see me through my remaining days on this planet, I prefer to throw myself upon the mercy of what’s available. Analyze that.

Mindful of all the paperwork ahead of me, I asked Quatorze if he’d like a cup of tea, and, the next thing you know, two hours had flown by. I was to have taken a de-commissioned bookshelf — a simple but not especially lightweight number from Bean’s — up to Ms NOLA’s, but I asked for and was granted a postponement. Kathleen came home on the early side for once; having had a few wearying days at the office, she wanted to watch one of her favorite movies, Ruthless People. The scenes that drew the biggest laughs invariably showed Bette Midler manhandlling Judge Reinhold. Like the late Anita Morris’s character, I began to fear for my safety. So far, though, nothing has happened.

¶ Matins: Paul Krugman addresses our most dangerous problem: the growing power of a right-wing rump without any interest in governing and with every intention of preventing others from governing: “the GOP has been taken over by the people it used to exploit. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, who “became a teenager in 1972,” fears that the Internet has not been a positive force for popular culture. He seems troubled by the fact that it makes too much old stuff too easy to get, thus reducing the need for new stuff. (BBC News; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon disagrees with Wall Street Journal writers on the subject of Ken Lewis’s “mettle.”

¶ Tierce: Meryl Gordon’s discussions with some of the Marshall Trial jurors makes for fascinating reading at Vanity Fair.

¶ Sext: Choire Sicha remembers “vividly” where he was when The Wall Fell — although he didn’t know a thing about it at the time. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: George Packer reminds us why the Wall fell when it did, in a piece about the uniqueness of 1989 in Europe. (The New Yorker)

¶ Vespers: Tim Adams talks about Alan Bennett‘s new play, The Habit of Art — a little. Mostly he appreciates a writer who, against all the odds, has become a beloved fixture in Britain. (Guardian)

¶ Compline: Jonah Lehrer registers a new study about the “privileged” sense of smell. (Frontal Cortex)

What is going to happen in the world of business and commerce? You’ll note that I don’t ask what’s going to happen in the world of finance. There’s no need. Nothing good is going to happen in the world of finance — that’s what.

Will someone please research this “fact,” which has stuck with me like a barnacle since I read it decades ago? In 1976, the directors of US Steel found that they were making more money (profit, not revenue) by managing their liquid assets than they were by making steel. 1976 therefore seems as good a date as any to mark the beginning of the Age of Finance that — one hopes — has finally come crashing down. Don’t get me wrong: finance is an essential element of business and commerce. Without credit markets, you might as well be living in a cave and rubbing sticks together. But finance is, ahem, not the point.

Steve Forbes, I read, is still exploiting his family magazine to flog capitalist free enterprise — now, that’s a laugh. It’s as rich as a speech by Philippe d’Orléans (pick any one that you like) cautioning against “moral hazard.” What’s not so funny is this bit of History Not.

“Capitalism’s bad Rap”—a force so sinister and world-disfiguring that it must be capitalized—“has helped shape a lot of bad economic policy. People who believe it look to government to ‘create jobs,’ whereas the most powerful job-creating machine has always been the private sector. They believe the best way to raise revenues for government is to raise taxes on the so-called rich and on ‘profit-hungry’ corporations.”

This is true only if “Always” equals “Two Centuries.” The chapter on job creation comes late in the history of capitalism. I have said this before, and it’s a complicated thought that’s a tad beyond my powers of expression, but I don’t give up. The capitalist dream is to have no — zero — employees. That’s because the capitalist dream is to reduce overhead to zero. Are we in accord about that? If so, then we’re ready to tackle the anomalous phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution, during which capitalists hired jillions of workers to operate their new factories.

Why did capitalists become industrialists? Why, that is, did they forsake, for a time, the  no-overhead mantra of capitalism? Because a window of opportunity opened on what I have called an anomaly — a strange, one-time only exception to the rules. During much of the Nineteenth Century and most of the Twentieth, it made sense to overlook the no-overhead rule because the profits to be made even from high-overhead enterprises were, literally, fabulous, beyond imagining.

It’s all a matter of hydrostatics, really. Initially, after a technological breakthrough, a few people have tremendous advantages. These dwindle as know-how and its attendant benefits spread throughout society. By 1976, anybody could make steel. But only companies the size of US Steel had huge pots of cash to play with. Today, the hydrostatics are all about wages. Workers in China make less than worker in New Jersey. But workers in China have been making more and more money even so, and in some industries the Chinese advantage has been lost. Portugal, the poor man of Europe, still makes routine as well as artisanal pottery. When workers everywhere are paid about the same, globalization will come to a complete stop. It could not be simpler. (I wish I could say that imperialism will come to a complete stop, too, but imperialism is all about power, not economics.)

If I’ve made a few blunders in my history, at least I’ve been talking history. Capitalism and globalism and industrialization and full employment did not just pop out of a box, Big-Bang style, two hundred years ago. For centuries before the Industrial Revolution, the Earth subsisted on a peasant economy, with most people working the land for very meager returns, while small cadres of thug-like elites lived on cream. I don’t think that I am being tendentious. It was an awful arrangement, but it doesn’t seem to have been anybody’s particular doing. The main thing is to prevent its happening again.

It seems, lately, that I always want to begin this page with a short list of the pages that haven’t been written — the ones that I promise to get round to. Right now, there are three derelictions — their subjects being a chamber recital, a Broadway show, and a novel. But who, besides me, gives a damn? I’m flattering myself with a guilty conscience.

I have caught up on the Friday Movies front, though: three weeks ago, I saw La Nana, a genial film from Chile. Two weeks ago, I didn’t go to the movies at all, but last Friday I saw the unhappily titled but otherwise marvelous The Men Who Stare at Goats.

We read Stephen King’s story in The New Yorker, and recalled of reading Stephen King in The New Yorker the first time that that happened. Publishing an assertively non-literary writer is one thing; treating the magazine as an ongoing pre-publication event for forthcoming books is another. And that’s what fiction at The New Yorker seems to be, lately, no matter who writes it.

If it weren’t for Liesl Schillinger, I just might give up on the Book Review review.