Daily Office Wednesday
¶ Matins: In this week’s Book Review, at Portico.
¶ Tierce: Whether it’s because I watched the 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch last weekend, or because I just finished one of the more acutely unromantic chapters of The Red and the Black, the tortured account of a school trustees’ meeting at Outer Life, this morning, made me laugh as only the finest English social comedy can.
¶ Sext: Luc Sante offers an understated justification for the oversized library, at Pinakothek. Even though, having just moved house, he’s glad to have unloaded twenty-five boxes of books.
¶ Nones: My friend Yvonne has just tipped me off to an interesting site that she describes as “a Scottish lady’s ‘domestic blog’,” Cornflower. Book talk seems to be the principal interest here — bravo! — but the lady (a sometime lawyer) is also a knitter, and she has just knitted a pair of socks in the Blue Willow Pattern. Is this another message from the cosmos — re-read The Egoist, now! — or what?
Oremus…
§ Matins. Is anyone in American letters as provocative as Nicholson Baker? Not a chance. Mr Baker plants his incendiary devices with a deadly assurance that would make him culpable of the worst sort of terrorism if his targets weren’t inevitably tired, complacent ideas.
Colm TóibÃn’s review focuses on Mr Baker’s denunciation of strategic bombing as a defensible military strategy, but I’m not sure that this is the full thrust of the author’s pacifist outlook. In any case, I seem to recall that John Keegan debunked the effectiveness of strategic bombing a while back in one of his books. One of the very few heartening things about our Iraqi misadventure is that we seem to have steered clear of trying to blow civilians into friendliness. We certainly had every opportunity of learning the pointlessness of that undertaking in Viet Nam.
§ Tierce. V X Sterne, the author of Outer Life, may very well be as shy, retiring, and generally pusillanimous as he so fondly makes himself out to be, but as a fashioner of hair-raising but side-splitting social encounters, he is the peer of Thackeray and Meredith for sheer audacity.
I should have loved to be in the room when Jane Austen came across the African Pump Deflection.
§ Sext. I have always tried to make my books behave. I keep them in real bookcases, made to order and painted to match the décor. I try to keep them from piling up in nooks and crannies. Leaving a book or two lying about is all very well, but even a modest stack can quickly grow into an unstable pile, leading to an unruly mess.
While we’re at it, James M Cain’s novel is quite unlike the film adaptation of Mildred Pierce. It is steamier, but also less melodramatic. I may still have a copy. Far more perfectly useless, however, is my copy of the Wisconsin/Warner Bros Screenplay Series edition of the screenplay, with an introduction and notes — notes! — by Albert J LaValley. When all I really want is a DVD of Carol Burnett’s Mildred Fierce.
§ Nones. This does remind me that I’d like to mount a campaign to acquire one good piece of “Gaudy Willow.” I know of the pattern only from photographs, but it really does seem to be my idea of “transgressive.” The deviance is both simple and profound: the standard pattern is multi-colored. For example:
Truly deranged, no? My bids for this beauty, which is not only Gaudy Willow but obviously, obviously Mason’s, at eBay, proved unsuccessful, but there are four days to go.