As announced at the beginning of the month, we’ll be taking a break from the Daily Office for a few weeks.

At first, we’re just going to take a break. There will be daily entries during the week, and perhaps even the introduction of a new feature, to be called something like “Noteworthy,” in which we’ll mention items of interest that we may or may not follow in the Office itself. For example: Martin Gardner just died at the age of 95. We don’t really have anything to say about Mr Gardner (except that we enjoyed his “Mathematical Games” columns in Scientific American even though they were always over our heads), but we can’t leave his passing unmentioned.

Over the past year, we’ve learned that the Daily Office is not a news feature. It’s a collection of links to reflecions on current events. Nothing interests us quite so much as linking to a series of reflections on the same topic, one a day for several days. As we did, for example, with “denialism,” following Mark Lilla’s widely-read essay on libertarian populism. Or as we did when the iPad came out, and we saw early users discover, to their own surprise as well as to ours, what the device is really good for — what it allows that conventional computers do not. (Reading lengthy hyptexts in comfort.) We’d like to do more of that, but we think that it’s going to require a sift in mentality, and another step away from traditional blogging.

(That was fun: “traditional blogging.”)

Once we’re through taking a break, we’re going to pursue the new mentality that we think suits The Daily Blague. One thing seems almost certain: the entire four- (and eventually five-) day cycle of weekday Daily Office entries will be largely composed a week ahead of time.

And of course we’ll be working on the new, iPad-apecific version of The Daily Blague — where less will be plenty.

¶ Matins: A final word on “denialism,” this time from the New Humanist. Keith Kahn-Harris writes comprehensively about the matter, citing, among other things, the danger of mistaking diverging views from denials, and he enumerates five characteristics that make the difference. What we hope for is an essay that will address the other side of the problem, which critical thinkers are too apt to overlook: the problem of expertise without authority. Mr Kahn-Harris’s word is “sanctimony,” which speaks volumes.

¶ Lauds: Elise Nakhnikian makes a very compelling case for watching Bout de souffle this weekend. (The House Next Door)

¶ Prime: One nugget to carry away from the entry by Peter Boone and Simon Johnson at The Baseline Scenario, “The Very Bad Luck of the Irish,” is the alarming jump in the relative size of Ireland’s budget deficit when the Gross Domestic Product metric is replaced by the Gross National Product.

¶ Tierce: “Tell me why this wouldn’t work!” demands Tim Carmody, referring to his really rather brilliant idea, Showroulette. (Snarkmarket)

¶ Sext: At The Millions, Nell Boeschenstein writes with heartbreaking restraint about being fired at a job that, although she wasn’t cut out for it, she took because she couldn’t make a living as a writer: “Skills and Interests.”

¶ Nones: n case you’re just tuning in, Joshua Kurlantzick explains “What the Heck Is Going on in Thailand” — at Foreign Policy, for a change. Mr Kurlantzick’s sketch of a solution to Thailand’s impasse is elegantly stated and, even if, as he says, looks to be “very far away,” it is not by any means idealistic.

¶ Vespers: You don’t have to be particularly interested in poetry to be absorbed by “The Other Mother Tongue,” Michael Scharf’s review of a new anthology of Indian verse in English. (Boston Review; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Compline: Lest you regard denialism as an American problem only, here is Timothy Garton Ash’s cry from the wilderness for a second Churchill to lead Europe out of its doldrums. Almost every public figure named in the following paragraphs is an expert without any widespread authority. Churchill, famously, was an authority without expertise whom the experts tried ceaseless to sideline. (Guardian; via RealClearWorld)

Topic A, chez moi, is of course the angel of grace whom I get to hold in my arms once or twice a week. Never have I felt my incapacity as a writer so thoroughly proved as it is by Will, with his unbeatable smile (Kathleen claims that it will be more effective than her own, which is saying something) and the extraterrestrial curiosity about the world that gives him the air of a higher being on assignment who only seems to be a baby.

And then there are his sighs. Oh.

Topic B is this other thing that I’m interested in: expertise without authority. The developed nations are ubiquitously captained by bright men and women who nonetheless lack authority. No doubt they trained themselves as such! Nobody understands authority anymore, and rightly: it needs a complete reinvention, a re-think that will clearly distinguish between “authoritative” (good) and “authoritarian” (bad).

An authority, first of all, believes in itself, and, second of all, behaves in a manner that’s consistent with its programme. It’s very important for authorities not to be chargeable with hypocrisy, with saying one thing and doing another.

So much for the essential prelimiary. The essential superstructure is the authority’s belief in a vision of life as it might be lived. This is what today’s meritocrats lack altogether: they’re successes at living life as it is lived right now, a life to which most people have no attachment. Testing well breeds a horrible complacency, but most of today’s leaders never meet anybody who isn’t just like them — other successful testers.

We were right to reject the vagaries of hereditary aristocracy (of which heredity monarchy is essentially the pimple), but we have not come up with a good replacement. Let’s just meditate on that for a while, calmly ad quietly.

¶ Matins: Yesterday, in this space, we quoted Jenny Diski; last week, we began with Mark Lilla. Today, a piece in New Scientist links “denialism” with the urge — common among Tea Partiers — to push back against the wisdom of the elites.

¶ Lauds: Anthony Lane sweetens his review of the rather dreary-sounding Ridley Scott Robin Hood with a truly unforgettable crack.

¶ Prime: At Fortune, Daryl Jones sounds an alarm about inflation in China. (via Abnormal Returns)

¶ Tierce: Two notes on that very gloomy subject, dementia (whether Alzheimer’s or not). The failure of the mind strikes us as the worst possible personal tragedy, because it entails the premature death of the self (and not in a nice way, either). It’s not surprising to read, at Wired Science, that “Dementia Caregivers [are] More Likely to Also Get the Disease” — not that it’s necessarily catching: there might be a “tendency of people who are prone to distress or mental illness to find and marry one another. Second, and even less surprising, Simon Roberts catches mention in the Times of studies showing that, as was the case with Iris Murdoch, the mental decline of Agatha Christie was palpable in her work prior to diagnosis.

¶ Sext: The always-entertaining Dave Bry explains the attractions of Red Bank, New Jersey to its newest celebrity resident, Jon Stewart. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: At The Bygone Bureau, Peter Braden recounts his trip to Bosnia last year, and how a visit to Mostar left him feeling “a little bit Bosnian.”

¶ Vespers: We had not really registered the existence of The Nervous Breakdown, a site that we are not even going to attempt to categorize just yet, but we agree with J E Fishman that there’s something wrong with the way books are handled at The New York Times if 13 of the 29 book-related alerts that Mr Fishman has received from the Times since late April relate to the work of dead writers. (via The Millions)

¶ Compline: At The Second Pass, John Williams shares a snippet from a friend’s interview with New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore. Just when you think that our schools might as well be closed, a flash of eccentric brilliance glimmers in the rubble.

This week’s New Yorker story, Roddy Doyle’s “Ash,” reads more like the instructions accompanying a kit than a piece of fiction. Assemble its fragments of dialogue and its (for the most part) short paragraphs of the protagonist’s thoughts and actions as best you can — the proper order has been taken care of, but you must supply the voice and the affect. How better to write about an Irishman with affect issues? About feelings and self-awareness in a culture that (still?) contemns feelings and self-awareness, inducing everyone of the male persuasion to find the lowest livable emotional settings.

That such inhumane self-policing makes you stupid is established right away.

We’ll still be friends, she said.

— Grand, he answered, and then he was walking down a street by himself, before he understood what had happened.

That “what had happened” turns out not to have happened — that Ciara, Kevin’s wife, having assured him that they’ll still be friends after she abandons him (and their two daughters), gets cold feet and comes creeping home — is what happens in “Ash.” The wife does not, in the end, leave her husband. We have no idea why, and, because Ciara is not a particularly attractive person, we don’t much care. We’re happy at the end because little Erica and Wanda won’t be growing up without their Mammy — not yet, anyway.

Most of what intervenes between Ciara’s departure (strung out over several nights) and her return is telephonic communication between Kevin and his brother, Mick. “Kevin was starting to dislike his brother, but this wasn’t a new feeling.” There are no new feelings in this story, which bears a startlingly recent date-stamp: at the end, the volcano in Iceland explodes, grounding all the airplanes in Europe. One can only wonder who was expecting to see his or her own short story published in the May 24 issue, and how he or she has dealt with the rescheduling.

“Ash” is compulsively readable — there’s no denying that. But it is also tripe.

¶ Matins: In the current issue of the London Review of Books, Jenny Diski’s “Short Cuts” will have you wondering whether to laugh or to cry. Her breezy write-up of crazy wingnut Melanie Phillips’s The World Turned Upside Down makes you ask just whose world has  been turned upside down.

¶ Lauds: We don’t want to sit through Hank the Cinq, no matter how young and fresh the cast, but we can’t wait for the Laurent Cantet movie. (Boston.com; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Curiouser and curiouser: Goldman Sachs seems to have been left standing after a round of musical chairs. Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story (in the Times) and Felix Salmon note that Goldman is no longer the King of Cool.

¶ Tierce: At Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer discusses the psychology of the “near miss” — and how Las Vegas exploits it.

¶ Sext: The Editor went to a book event last evening; Slow Love author Dominique Browning was interviewed by a sometime protégée who is still very much an admirer, Grace Bonney of the elegant Design Sponge. Ms Browning, speaking about her new Web site, Slow Love Life, confessed that she felt “born to blog.” At the signing part of the evening, the Editor acknowledged that he had made the same discover, and the author was kind enough to ask for a card.

¶ Nones: As of last night, it seems that no major American newspaper was interested in a story carried by BBC News: “Bolivia’s Morales urges Pope Benedict to scrap celibacy.”

¶ Vespers: At Survival of the Book, Brian writes one of those dispirited entries that are so invigorating. If publishers are as demented as Gallery Books’s Louise Burke seems to be (if only to associate her name and reputation with Jersey Shore), then who needs ’em? But we do need Brians.

¶ Compline: Alex Balk lifts The Awl into the pundit zone with a relatively august piece about Richard Blumenthal, the Nixon White House alum and (improbable? but hitherto presumable) Democratic candidate to replace Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodds.

Will turned over. Onto his tummy. All by himself. He did it yesterday for the first time, but I saw it for the first time today, and, when I did, I spontaneously/unthinkingly applauded.

And then Will turned over again. And again. And again. He wasn’t interested in his bottle at all.

¶ Matins: We found Paul Girolamo’s contribution to this week’s Metropolitan Diary hard to believe — are Park Avenue doormen really such material guys? — but Quatorze insisted that it’s the way of the world. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: It’s a nasty job, but someone’s got to do it: the Chicago Trib‘s John von Rhein finds fault with Wunderkind Gustavo Dudamel’s leading of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (his own orchestra), on a visit to the Windy City. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: We had a very long day yesterday, helping the Editor out with his new bookcase, and perhaps that’s why we can’t, no matter how many times we re-read it, understand Felix Salmon’s commentary on James Surowiecki’s Financial Page.

¶ Tierce: At Wired Science, Owen Jones, a law professor at Vanderbilt, recounts his impressions of a hearing of arguments for and against fMRI evidence of credibility — the new lie detection.

¶ Sext: In “The Night Visitor,” Brooks Peters posts a candid but really rather delightful entry about the trauma that inevitably enfolds certain boys at summer camp. (Not Brooks himself, mind.)

¶ Nones: Over the weekend, Seth Mydans and Thomas Fuller collaborated on an important story about the long-last failure of royal authority to settle disputes in Thailand.

¶ Vespers: One of the deeper mysteries of literary achievement is our loyalty, helplessly divided, to prolific successes on the one hand and to one-off wonders on the other. Robert McCrum considers the latter at the Guardian. (via The Millions)

¶ Compline: Again, it was a long day. We thought long and hard about Ross Douthat’s critique of the meritocracy, but couldn’t decide if we agreed or disagreed. To the extent that meritocrats are people gifted at taking examinations, we agree. (NYT)

This entry is over twelve hours overdue, but for a very good reason. The bookshelf that I ordered from Scully & Scully last October arrived today, and for seven or eight hours Quatorze and I worked like drays. We joked that we would sleep well tonight, but we were too punchy to believe any such thing. The hulking industrial shelving that I’d ordered last fall to serve as a combination staging area and placeholder gave way to a far smaller, but also far more capacious, burl walnut book case, The metal unit was emptied, dismantled, and donated to Goodwill — all this afternoon. For most of the day, the dining table was a war zone of competing piles, each one screaming for attention by trying to be uglier and less orderly than the others. Quatorze did all the heavy lifting, as well as moving an inconvenient phone jack and carrying over a decade’s worth of Museum Bulletins from one room to the other. I was prepared to let the project drag on for a week. Quatorze was determined to see it through all in one day, and he was frighteningly persuasive. We had dinner with Kathleen round the corner, but I insisted that Q come back afterward so that Kathleen could thank him properly. Even so, I was disappointed, because the living room was so tidy! There was no evidence whatsoever of the day’s struggle. Kathleen assured us, however, that what she remembered of earlier such struggles was clear enough to impress her big time.

As you can guess from the spines on view above, the new bookshelf is consecrated to books to look at. They are not all fine arts monographs and exhibition catalogues, however. I’ve included a category of books that’s congenial both in content and in physical dimension to weighty thick art books: slender, but equally tall children’s books.

The new bookshelf is right next to the dining table, the stoutest in the apartment. I look forward to getting lost in a searching thread that has me pulling down books right and left, to compare and contrast (or, better, to let the artists do the comparing and the contrasting.) A long dream, developoed the better part of a year ago, has  come true. As the long day ebbs, I’m left feeling golden.

Oh, dear. This picture isn’t going to do at all, not, at least, unless I come right out and confess how bogus it is. The glasses are a giveway — where are the glasses? I don’t need them, of course, because I’m not actually reading my iPad, the screen of which is dark. (Maybe that explains my frown: I can’t make any sense of a black screen. ) The picture is a pose, taken to illustrate this very entry. Gee, I’m good at looking natural! The picture makes even me feel a little uncertain. It’s as though I’m reading my latest report card, and finding it wanting.

What the picture was supposed to convey was the pleasure of reading things on an iPad — which, as I say, it’s no surprise this isn’t, since I’m not actually reading the iPad, only pretending. At first, I was just going to write a note to my friend Jean Ruaud, the author of one of the first Web logs that I began following back in 2004, before I had my own. Jean just celebrated nine years of  blogging, an anniversary that puts him well ahead of the pack. By the time I tuned in, Jean was on his second blog, Douze lunes. He doesn’t say just how long Mnémoglyphes has been going, and I’m the last person in the world to ask. But it has been going for “many years.” Even if you can’t read a word of French, you ought to have a look at the stunning photograph that illustrates his anniversary entry, “Neuf ans.”

I was going to write to Jean, but I decided to write to you as well; isn’t that what blogs are for? This afternoon, for the first time, I caught up on Mnémoglyphes in the comfort of my favorite reading chair. Instead of craning my neck at a computer screen, I held Jean’s texts in my hands exactly as I would have done had they’d been published in a magazine. When I wanted to check a word in the dictionary — Jean is far too gifted a writer for me to settle on getting the general drift of what he is talking about — I set down the iPad exactly as I should have set down a book. It was all quite pleasant and civilized, and — I know I’m repeating myself but this point cannot be trumpeted too loudly in these early days — I was in no hurry to get to the end of the piece. The act of reading HTML has been humanized, at long last, by Apple’s invention. The only people to complain will be people who aren’t very serious readers — by which I mean, of course, readers for pleasure.

As the photograph above so beautifully illustrates.

Possibly because Michael Caine referred repeatedly to Gran Torino in a recent Talk of the Town item, I expected Harry Brown to be a very different picture from the one that I saw this afternoon. The actual movie is far more interesting, more engaging, and even more beautiful. It was vastly less noisy and explosive, and there was none of that “Make my day!” fury that Clint Eastwood gives off like the heat of a sun-baked sedan. The first third — perhaps the first half — of Harry Brown is extraordinarily quiet, right out there with the meditations of Ingmar Bergman for contained feelings.

Harry Brown becomes a widower early in the movie; a daughter died years ago, in childhood. Harry’s only companion is Len Attwell (David Bradley), another resident of the council estate that has seen better days and that has been terrorized by thugs and drugs. Lynn, whose flat overlooks the subway (underpass) entrance where the boys hang out, has evidently had more than a few rude encounters, culminating in a smoky blob of burning matter pushed through his letterbox. Len tries to enlicit Harry’s support in an unspecified bit of vigilantism, but Harry very calmly tells Len that, when he got married, he boxed up his memories of serving in the Royal Marines in Ulster, and is no longer a fighting man. Exasperated, Len assaults the gang with a bayonet. He does not survive the incident. Harry finds out when DI Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer) and DS Terry Hicock (Charlie Creed-Miles) pay a call.

The dreariness of these scenes is visually unrelieved, but it is redeemed by Harry’s palpable mindfulness, and by Alice’s not very hopeful conviction that the police ought to do a better job of protecting people like Len. (Alice’s personal gravity makes her almost unsuitable for police work — one can imagine Helen Mirren’s Jane Tennison losing her patience with this woman.) The camera shots are so beautifully composed that they transfigure the sepia-toned environment in which Harry spends his days and nights. Mr Caine is at times part of this decor; his eyes, once scornful pits in a smooth face, brim with a vitality that has nothing to do with “twinkling.”

The violence, once it starts, is both thrillingly imaginative and wholly unpredictable. Suffice it to say that Harry knows how to unbox what he learned in the marines with thorough dispatch.

¶ Matins: The plight of Cynthia Norton, 52, sometime star secretary, currently unable to find anything better than Wal-Mart, is ably captured in Catherine Rampell’s Times story, “In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind.”

¶ Lauds: At WSJ, Marc Myers writes about the model jazz widow, Laurie Pepper. She’s not alone; you can read about Dexter Gordon’s widow, Maxine, not to mention Sue Mingus. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Hilarious: Five “new action items” for Lloyd Blankfein to keep in mind, courtesy of “trader” Michael Lewis. (Bloomberg; via Zero Hedge)

¶ Tierce: Philips has unveiled the “World’s First LED Replacement for Most Common Bulb.” With luck, it will be in stores toward the end of this year. (Inhabitat; via Felix Salmon)

¶ Sext: A partial account of the production of “Issue Zero” of 48 Hour Magazine — partial because the author, Lois Beckett, one of the magazine’s editors, took time off to sleep, have a life. (SF Weekly; via Snarkmarket)

¶ Nones: Robert Parry’s exposé of the shell game that Rev Sun Myung Moon played so well for decades, but that’s falling apart now that he’s too old to play, is certifiably cranky, but fascinating withal. A very long read — perfect for your iPad. (consortiumnews.com; via MetaFilter, The Morning News)

¶ Vespers: We missed Kirsty Logan’s Millions droll piece on reasons for not reading books in her own library, so we’re grateful to Michael Berger, at The Rumpus, for tipping us off. 

¶ Compline: The super thing, in our view, about Frederic Filloux’s sketch of “Profitable Long Form Journalism” — inspired by his experience so far with the iPad — is that it doesn’t involve advertising. He has the idea of aggregating news stories into e-books. (Monday Note)

The more I watch An Education, the stronger my conviction becomes that, in a virtual galaxy of great performances — great performances — the most interesting thing about the movie, for me, is Rosamund Pike’s Helen. Nick Hornby’s script is always trying to get a laugh in at Helen’s expense, but Lone Scherfig’s direction propels the character along another line altogether, one that Ms Pike proves to be supremely gifted at realizing. The actress usually plays conventionally sharp girls, but, in Helen, Ms Pike triumphs as a bimbo who feels real pity for people with brains. What is the point of brains? she asks at every turn. And the people with brains don’t have an answer.

An Education is set in the early Sixties, since which time people of all kinds — those with surabundant brains as well as those with none — have been posing Helen’s challenge. What is the use of brains? Aside from a small patch of possibility that has been consecrated to the engineers who build airplanes and power plants, the ground has not been congenial to intellect. As if to prove the man-in-the-street’s skepticism about smart people, smart people spent a big chunk of the postwar period on something called Theory. Given a choice between Helen’s anti-intellectualism and Theory, I know which lesser evil I’d choose.

Let me be the first to confess that I don’t know how to talk to people who have no interest in brains. But let me also insist that I regard this as a terrible personal failing, and one that is perhaps fatally widespread among bright people. Why do I think that the Helens of the world are right to doubt the utlity of anything that I have to say? Simple: I’ve never made an effort to sympathise with their longing for straightforward certainty. It’s true that I don’t want “straightforward certainty” for myself, but to make a point of that difference is thick-headed. I’m certain — functionally — of a lot of things, and if I could hook that confidence up to my ability to speak with honest reassurance, I just might quell the anxieties of someone otherwise prone to mistake my curiosity for mercurial inconstancy.

The deep scandal of it all is that, although I’ve an imposing presence, I can squeak like a footnote, which only makes my size ridiculous. Like bright people everywhere since the end of World War II, I’m preoccupied by the need to say exactly what I think, no matter how many tedious qualifications this involves. The Helens of this world are not going to listen to me until I show myself to be more interested in talking to them than I am in getting the message just right. The minute I persuade them to listen to me, it won’t matter whether I’ve stated the message absolutely correctly. They’ll get what I’m driving at even if I can’t put it into words.

¶ Matins: From the introduction to Ian Buruma’s new book, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, a long view that’s a call for calm. (Princeton University Press; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Lauds: Nige writes about a show at the National Gallery (London) that’s the very best sort of treat: “compact, illuniating about an artist I barely knew, and full of remarkable paintings.” In this case, the painter is Christen Købke of Denmark (1810-1848). (Nigeness)

¶ Prime: In “Small Businesses Get a Little More Optimistic,” David Indiviglio checks out “the engine of the US economy” — responsible for 70% of American job creation.

¶ Tierce: Out of more than 12,000 medical articles on the subject of food allergies, published between 1988 and 2009, only 72 satisfied the rigorous criteria devised by a federally commissioned study. As a result, it’s likely that only about 8% of adults (and 5% of children) who are thought to have food allergies actually do. The authors of the study especially want to restore the difference between a food intolerance (which can lead to discomfort but not much more) and a genuine allergy. (NYT)

¶ Sext: At The Bygone Bureau, Alice Stanley reports on Zynga addiction in the heartland, and finds that it’s contagious. She caught it from her boss, the manager of a college pub who plays Café World.  

¶ Nones: Here’s a deal to keep your eyes on: Charlapally Central Jail, outside Hyderabad, has  been chosen for a pilot project in which prisoners will do back-office work (data entry and such) for outsourced businesses. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Laura Miller ventures an essay on the uses and pleasures of bad writing. (Salon; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Compline: The artistic vandal known as Poster Boy (Henry Matyjewics) has been sentenced to eleven months in jail, pretty much for just plain screwing up. Not for defacing subway advertisements! (WSJ; via Felix Salmon)

Allow me to apologize for failing to file a midnight entry yesterday. I was too tired up to write up anything of general interest, and everything that I had done during the day had involved a member of my immediate family on personal terms. While I don’t want to suggest any crises or deep disturbances, the day was fairly intense — which is why I was too tired to think my way around the problem of not being able to write a diary entry without violating the privacy of others.

Even Will. When Will was an infant, I felt free to project all sorts of meaning upon his expressions, knowing full well that I was indulging in sheer fantasy. But Will is not an infant anymore — even if he can’t sit up or crawl. He’s a little fellow with a rapidly expanding personality. He’s just going to have to keep his own blog.

This isn’t to say that everything he does is off-limits. But the ordinary stuff more or less is.

Happily, today was filled with fit-to-print events. If only they were interesting! The Aeron chair that I bought on Monday was delivered by Sam Flax at about three this afternoon. At first, sitting in it, here at the desk, simply felt different — almost disappointingly so. Even when the chair had been adjusted to suit my frame, it was more unusual than pleasant. Only later, when I sat down to write the Daily Office, did I realize how comfortable it is, and how uncomfortable all my working chairs have been up to now. In my late teens, I had a crush on eighteenth-century style that made electric lamps “impossible.” I got over that fairly quickly. But my devotion to Enlightenment seating was protracted to unenlightened lengths.

So far as capital-e Ease is concerned, the new chair is just about as welcoming as my bed, and for the first time ever I’m in no hurry to finish what I’m doing and escape the desk. Who knows what prose-style improvements the Herman Miller classic will wreak.

Quatorze had dropped by to help me with the chair, and we took care of a few other things. After the delivery, I made a pot of tea. Then Quatorze headed for the West Side while I turned north, on a round of shopping errands. The weather, cool and wet, didn’t bother me while I was out in it, but the moment I entered the building I felt damply soiled. Cleaned up and in fresh clothes, I was a new man.

At the moment (I’m writing a bit early this evening, just to be sure that I write at all), two chunks of veal shank are simmering in broth and mirepoix. I’ve had a bad record with jarrets de veau this winter, buying the meat with no particular meal in mind, freezing it, and then defrosting it on uncertain afternoons, only to shove the package into the refrigerator because I was too tired to cook the contents. Inevitably, spoilage would ensue. I was very tempted to repeat this sorry tale this evening; I was late getting into the kitchen, and we won’t be eating until the verge of eleven. If nothing else, however, the apartment is filled with an appetizing fragrance.

¶ Matins: The easy part: Tea Partiers take control of Colorado’s Republican Party nominating process and rewrite Maine’s GOP Platform. (Slate)

¶ Lauds: Joan Ackerman profiles John Williams, one of the giants of film-score composition — and father of some kids down the street when she was growing up in Westwood. (Boston.com; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Are you an Asker or a Guesser? According to Oliver Burkeman — “This Column Will Change Your Life” — It doesn’t really matter, so long as you know which sort of person you, and the people around you, are. Nobody likes to be denied, but Askers are a lot more comfortable with “no” than Guessers are. (Guardian; via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: What makes some people faithful spouses? Maybe it’s a “fidelity” gene. But we think that Arthur Aron, out at Stony Brook, has the right answer: “self-expansion.” Commitment is not a problem if you feel that you owe your happiness to your partner. (NYT)

¶ Sext: Julia Ioffe profiles Chatroulette inventor Andrey Ternovskiy. He’s a computer genius, of course, but he got his inspirational start from working at a gift shop, aimed at foreign tourists, called “Russian Souvenirs.” Even the fact that Andrey’s uncle owned the shop couldn’t save him as a salesman. (The New Yorker)

¶ Nones: From a BBC Q & A about the United Kingdom’s governing coalition, an outline of “key priorities.” (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: A very agreeable vision of the future of the book is on view at Three Percent, where Chad Post writes about the Cahiers Series, beautifully-made books that ring variations on the theme of translation, “understood in very broad terms.” But enough about the texts; these are books to show off.

¶ Compline: Reputation and Humiliation in the Age of Facebook: at WSJ, Jeffrey Zaslow quotes a consultant who predicts a massive case against an ISP, “for spreading malicious gossip.” Meanwhile, at Indiana University, Lanier Holt beings a course in “The Principles of Public Relations” with a surprise. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Matins: In our view, no one has better captured the nature of the new American populism better than Mark Lilla has just done in “Tea Party Jacobins.” We could not agree more, that the American elite, preoccupied with getting its message just right, has almost completely forgotten how to lead. (NYRB)

¶ Lauds: Ingrid Rowland writes about Luca Signorelli’s Apocalypse, in Orvieto cathedral. As Ms Rowland reminds us, this is an unusual theme in Italian art. Orvieto’s recent history (in 1499) may explain Signorelli’s assignment. “The city’s official governor was none other than Cesare Borgia.” The cycle’s anti-Semitism, however, reflected a newly heightened hostility. (NYRBlog)

¶ Prime: Why Not: Steve Tobak’s “5 Marketing Lessons From SNL’s Betty White Show.” Aside from the third item on the list (stressing the importance of strong content), Mr Tobak’s advice seems to boil down to “intelligent recycling.” Nothing wrong with that. (The Corner Office)

¶ Tierce: In an essay about the neurobiology of patience, Jonah Lehrer explains why transcranial magnetic stimulation is superior to functional magnetic resonance imaging. (But we still get a headache thinking about undergoing these experiments.)

¶ Sext: Chris Lehmann (who admits to trawling Forbes’s Web site for “Rich People Things” material) extends his eyeglass in the direction of “investment guru” and Friend-of-Bono  Roger McNamee, and shares one of the worst technological predictions since you yourself said, “Why would I need a computer/iPad?”

¶ Nones: A report on Belgium, currently without a government, in the Guardian. As we’ve noted before, the thorniest aspect of Belgian separatism is Brussels, an artificially (but none the less actually) francophone city in the middle of Flanders. Were Brussels in the south of Belgium (Wallonia), the country could peacefully go the way of Czechoslovakia. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Vespers: At The Millions, Sophie Chung  writes about how reading Chekhov will make you not only a better person but a better writer.

¶ Compline: Frank Rich is lustily indignant about MSNBC’s indecent non-coverage of last week’s Time Square bomb attempt. (NYT)

Has it really been twenty years (or more!) since Ken Ludwig’s farce, Lend Me A Tenor, premiered on Broadway? I saw it twice, back then, once with Kathleen, and once with Megan, who was still in high school at the time. Megan remembers going, but not much more than that; and, seeing it again, this past Saturday night, I wonder what I was thinking she would make of it. I couldn’t begin to answer that question.

I didn’t remember too much of the play myself. I’d forgotten, for example, that Philip Bosco played the impresario who, in Stanley Tucci’s revival, is played by the wonderful Tony Shalhoub. Nor did I recall that J Smith Cameron played the ingénue. All I remembered was that, due to this and that mishap, a retiring young doormat of a man steps in for an ailing Italian tenor and tastes triumph as Verdi’s Otello. I wasn’t entirely sure that the ailing Italian tenor ever showed up. So Lend Me A Tenor was pretty fresh for me on Saturday night.

I like to think that Kathleen and I would have seen the revival anyway, and for the very same reason that drew the attention of our friends Judy and Curt, who were visiting from Greater Tryon. They were here for the weekend because Judy had tickets for Lulu at the Met. That was strange enough; stranger still, Judy enjoyed it — which goes to show how more genuinely musical she is than I am. (The very idea of seeing Lulu again gives me a sharp ice-cream headache.) Curt wasn’t having any of the opera, certainly, but he was game for a show or two, and Judy settled on Lend Me A Tenor because she wanted to see Jan Maxwell on stage — the Broadway stage.

For Judy had seen Ms Maxwell in a couple of productions way back in college. Both ladies hail from Fargo, North Dakota; for the matter of that, so, technically does Curt, who, until he was three years old, lived across the street from the Maxwells. (That has a decidedly G&S vibe to it, don’t you think? Something about “a twelvemonth old”…) Years ago, Kathleen and I went to see My Old Lady, because Sian Philips was starring in it; it may have been then that Judy mentioned, long distance, that she’d heard that Jan Maxwell, also in that show, was doing well on and off Broadway. Indeed. We’ve seen Ms Maxwell in at least half a dozen things since then, including, most recently, To Be Or Not To Be and The Royal Family. Now, at least, Judy and Curt can say that they’ve seen their old neighbor once — an experience that is unlikely to be repeated in Greater Tryon.

Jan Maxwell had the role that Tovah Feldshuh originated, the Italian tenor’s Italian wife. One of the meta-jokes in the farce is that Tito and Maria fight hammer and tongs in heavily accented English, never uttering a word of Italian that a Broadway audience wouldn’t comprehend. “Come-a outta here so I can keel you!” cries Maria toward the end. Ms Maxwell has been nominated for a Tony, and the photograph that usually accompanies this news shows her jumping up and down on a bed. It’s a very funny scene, and it is no figure of speech to say that she throws herself into it. But you can still tell that Ms Maxwell is an actress capable of the richest Chekhovian implications.

The play’s biggest joke, of course, is that merely donning a costume and painting your face to look like the Moor of Venice can quell your fears of being a ninety-eight-pound weakling and instill a worldly swagger. Justin Bartha made the transformation seem miraculous. As the impresario’s fretful go-fer, he was the compleat angular geek, a sonata in suspenders. But when he suavely cooed “Sure” and “Why not?” to people who, instead of seeing through his deception, took him for Tito Morelli, his voice assumed a gigolo’s unction.

Anthony LaPaglia brought to Tito Morelli’s part the build and demeanor of a Chicago gangster — a wildly successful contribution. It is Tito’s misfortune to spend the second act in flight from the police — don’t ask — but Mr LaPaglia’s tenor was not the man to let anxieties about being captured interfere with the attractions of a bodaceous leading lady who, under the mistaken impression that she has just played Desdemona to his Otello, wants to know if she was “good.” The ensuing misunderstanding is taken directly from the archives of farce, but it’s in the nature of farce to shine brightest when utterly familiar, even predictable material is brought to life by fresh actors. Jennifer Laura Thompson made a boffo and very “professional” soprano.

Mary Catherine Garrison is well on the way to becoming Broadway’s go-to ingénue, which means that her sweet heart is innocent, doe-like, and unaware in a way that brings Jean Harlow to mind. (Not very.) As Maggie, momentarily concerned that she may have had intimate relations with a lunatic,  Ms Garrison let out the  most blood-curdling scream that has ever shot into the legitimate theatre’s ether without having been prompted by a serial killer. We encourage this very talented actress to fly her freak flag early and often.

The problem with Tony Shalhoub’s performance, predictably, was that it called Stanley Tucci to mind. In the earlier phases of my dotage, I’ll be certain to tell people that I loved seeing Mr Tucci in the role of Saunders, the impresario from Central Casting. Kathleen will gently remind me that Mr Tucci never appeared on stage in any role. Oh yes, I’ll remember; it was Tony Shalhoub — Stanley Tucci’s younger, straighter twin. Saunders, modeled on Oscar Jaffe, from Twentieth Century, is an egomaniac whose brush with disaster stirs our sympathy. If Lend Me A Tenor has a fault, it’s that our sympathy quickly runs to the two men in Otello costumes whom Saunders is trying to control. They barge around a Cleveland hotel suite, up against impossible challenges. We shouldn’t want Saunders just to get out of their way, but we do.

After the theatre, our party of six high-tailed it up Eighth Avenue to Pigalle, where we tucked into what I hope will turn out to be Fossil’s latest dinner of the year. It was 12:30 when we dispersed, and the days when that hour was the beginning of the evening for Fossil are long over. But he and Quatorze were indispensable ingredients in the evening’s fun, and they’ve become great pals with Judy and Curt. So much so that, while we had the Tryonesians to brunch the next morning, Fossil and Quatorze took them to Fairway for dinner. It doesn’t get more New York than eating in the doyen of Gotham grocery stores — seriously. After all, Fairway is a Broadway theatre.