Office/Diary: Friday
My subject today is the Weekday Tragedy.
¶ Matins: In addition to the simple depletion of stocks, a new factor is contributing to the rise in the price of oil: the fall of the dollar, which dropped to $1.50 to the Euro yesterday. (Times)
Don’t worry; nobody dies. Nobody gets hurt. Money is very rarely lost! That’s what “weekday” means. It happens every day, and you get used to it, and then one day you wake up in a Tennessee Williams play.
¶ Lauds: This must have been fun: watching My Dinner with André with André in the room — and Wallace Shawn, too. (at Speakeasy)
An optimist says, “There is so much to do!” A pessimist says, “I’ll never work my way through all this crap.”
¶ Prime: More on Paul Volcker: according to the WSJ, he’s stage-managing a profound shift in the taxability of corporate debt, hitherto disastrously tax-free. Meanwhile, Harvard cleans up after Larry Summers. (via Felix Salmon)
The opportunist says, “I really want to finish Lorrie Moore’s amazing novel. How can I dash off a diary entry in a trice?
¶ Tierce: A slideshow of workspaces, many of them of the manly persuasion, photographed by Joseph Holmes. (via A Continuous Lean). Workophobes can hang out The Manhattan Street Corners. (via MetaFilter)
I’d be only to happy to lavish an hour or two on the entry that I planned this morning, when the day was still potential. “I’ll write about boxes,” I said to myself with a smile, as I got dressed. By “boxes,” I meant the rattan storage boxes that every housewares store on the Upper East Side used to stock.
¶ Sext: The Bronson Pinchot interview at Onion AVC. Something like Ali G, only for real. Will he work in that town again? (via everywhere, but we found it at The Awl)
Not that I can find any online! They’re square or rectangular (but oblong in either case), and they come in a solacing range of colors, from khaki to evergreen. Nothing primary; no pastels.
¶ Nones: Who knew that India has its own Article 301? The Indian Government won’t allow an adaptation of Indian Summer to be filmed (in India, anyway) unless sex scenes involving Edwina Mountbatten (Cate Blanchett) and Jawaharlal Nehru (Irrfan Khan) are removed — which effective quashes the project for now. (via Arts Journal)
The genius of the product is to make your bureau drawers presentable, sans bureau. A sort of exoskeletal dresser. Not that I use them for clothing, although of course you could. I already have real dressers for clothing. What I don’t have is a room filled with forty-five filing cabinets.
¶ Vespers: John Self encourages us to give a second thought to Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel. (Asylum)
Enough product placement. I was going to write about the things that I found in the boxes as I went through them today, with an emphasis on the stuff that I threw away. I looked forward to writing about this almost as much as I looked forward to having done it.
¶ Compline: Just in time for the collapse of mass aviation, the floating airport! (It’s very interesting to note that the Sierra Club has no opposition to this idea.) (The Infrastructurist)
Sadly, I never looked forward to the actual doing, and so other stuff happened instead. Productive stuff! I wrote two pages for Portico (both of them brevissimo, but it’s the thought that counts, these days). I cooked a lovely dinner. I did a lot of other useful stuff that would be toenails to talk about. And I did open one box. I opened the box, and I stuffed the contents of a shopping bag into it. This was not the operation that I’d had in mind in the buoyant morning. I’d had such hopes! &c &c!
If only tomorrow were another day. But it’s not tomorrow; it’s today. And I’m off to the movies at some point, with who knows what free-style frittering afterward. The richly fascinating stories that my boxes have to tell — who knows when they’ll be told?