Daily OfficeMonday
The windows are open today! Even though it’s still February, spring is undeniably in the air. No doubt my cold will get even worse. Â
¶ Tierce: Josh Marshall wins the Polk; TPM ineligible for the Pulitzer.
¶ Sext: Another reason for taking an interest in the Oscars this year: reading Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution.
¶ Nones: Books on Monday: Breakable You, a third and, for the time being, final, novel by Brian Morton.
¶ Vespers: What to do with Swimming in a Sea of Death, by David Rieff?
Oremus….
§ Tierce. There was a time when I read Talking Points Memo, and a handful of other political blogs, every day. Now I never do. I get all of my political news from Édouard, at Sale Bête. The slight struggle of keeping up with current events in a foreign language makes it interesting.
I read the Times every morning, but, more and more, that doesn’t count. At the risk of sounding both pretentious and precious, I have to say that I read the Times because it is the local paper. I’d be happier with greatly increased city coverage, even if it meant less national and international reporting. Again, I get my international news elsewhere, from L’Express International and France-Amérique.
But it’s difficult to get worked up about what’s happening on the national scene when, in my heart of hearts, I regard the very idea of “nation” as a transitory fluke, a stage between tribal despotism and whatever’s next. As for “homeland,” I put it somewhere between suspect and odious. The very idea of having to spend more than a few hours in Bronxville makes me parched and anxious.
§ Sext. Fossil Darling writes, with reference to my entry celebrating Marion Cotillard’s Oscar,
You watched the Academy Awards?!!!!!!??!!!! Hrumph is all I have to say.
Kathleen said pretty much the same thing last night. My long-standing dislike of the award show still causes me to overlook the tremendous interest that the presentation has for me now that I go to the movies every week. I’ve seen enough of the movies nominated for the major awards to have opinions about who deserves the prizes. I was quite sulphurous about the palms that There Will Be Blood garnered, as I thought the movie was so bad that I didn’t even write it up (meaning that I regarded it as meaner than Transformers, which I did). Curiously, the one good thing about Blood, Jonny Greenwood’s obsessive score, was not nominated.
Listen, I think Daniel Day-Lewis is a great actor. But his performance in this movie is closer to grand guignol than to acting.
§ Nones. Another small step toward Tomorrow’s Blog: I’ve tucked the leader, or pointer, or whatever you want to call it, to my Portico page on Brian Morton’s Breakable You into this everyday omnibus. I expect to do the same with the other three notifiers, on Wednesday (the Book Review review), Friday (the Friday Front), and Saturday (Friday Movies).
§ Vespers. I read the book last week, and came away with a mess of impressions that clearly indicated the necessity of a second reading. But when? Perhaps when Sontag’s diaries are published, as I hope they will be soon — the excerpts published a while back in, I think, The New Yorker were as vital as anything Sontag wrote. And that’s what Mr Rieff’s meditation on his mother’s dying is really about: her vitality. Also, though, her commonness. Oh, not that she was “common.” But she was an American.
Contemptuous of the false optimism of the age — something she associated with the deep America she came from and which she both feared and despised — my mother nonetheless shared it, if only unconsciously, where the question of illness was concerned.
It’s curious. Reading Sontag when I was young (famously, Against Interpretation), I felt that she was the European. After reading Swimming, I felt that I was.