Over the weekend, I’m told, my grandson passed a developmental milestone of sorts. Seeing an iPad at a neighboring restaurant table on Saturday, he demonstrably reached for it. At some further milestone, Will will realize that not every iPad belongs to him. For the moment, though, he wants things that aren’t being dangled in front of him. He does love playing with the iPad — if “playing” is the word. He never looks so serious otherwise. He makes me think of Churchill scowling over maps in the Cabinet War Rooms.

On Sunday, Will’s mom enjoyed her first Mother’s Day. Now I feel really old.

What happened to The Aesthete — the author of The Aesthete’s Lament? Out of the blue, she bid a grateful sayonara to her readers on Thursday — and then proceeded to take her site down, so that there’s nothing to link to now for those who weren’t following The Aesthete’s Lament‘s feeds. People get tired of blogging all the time, but they don’t, as a rule, dismantle their sites right away.

Was The Aesthete a man or a woman? The real question, of course, is why anybody cared. The importance of The Aesthete’s Lament is, at least at the moment, best captured by the difficulty of summarizing its mission. To say that it was devoted to “traditional” interior design would be awfully wrong-footed, because one of the things that the site’s series of white-on-white interiors demonstrated was a yearning for the modern, but on terms of comfort that Modernism disdained. The Aesthete had a view of household decor that was every bit as personally seasoned as those of the famous designers whose work she covered.

But The Aesthete did not stop there. There were pictures of her home, of a dining room in progress, of prettily -laid tables in holiday candlelight. We thought that these entries, combined with The Aesthete’s anonymity, were a mistake. They excited a perhaps lamentable but utterly inevitable curiosity about the author’s gender. Word filtered down, from authoritative sources, that The Aesthete was a woman, but the intensity of interest in clarifying this matter was a itself sign of sensed instability. Certainly, The Aesthete’s references to her husband, and even those to her daughter, supported the leaked wisdom. On the other hand, there were confusing images, such as the following celebration of a birthday. It is possible that the child in the photograph is a girl, but it’s a possibility that demands a lot of explanation. It’s possible that The Aesthete was once upon a time the toddler on the floor alongside this little fellow (not shown). But the entry is a frigate of ambiguity.

What difference it makes, whether The Aesthete is a man or woman, is a matter for discussion some other time; for the moment, we’ll content ourselves with stating what seems to be obvious, which is that, for better or worse, human beings want to know whether they’re listening to men or women: it does make a difference. More particularly, readers interested in interior design, a subject that most men dismiss (to their detriment) as womanly, but also one that few women write about, understand that the observations that men make are seasoned by a struggle that simply doesn’t present itself to women. What a woman has to say about a white-on-white drawing room is not, in the end, equivalent to a man’s judgment of the matter. Neither opinion is inherently superior — superiority is not the point — but both have been shaped by very different pains and struggles. And that gives what The Aesthete has to say about, exempla gratia, the wit and wisdom of Van Day Truex a gender-specific point that is baffled rather than muffled by anonymity.

It’s impossible to dissociate this identity murk from the hunch that the sudden shutdown (more than a mere abandonment) of the site was somehow related to a short-circuit in the expectations that The Aesthete had allowed anonymous blogging to mourish.

¶ Matins: Bart Centre of New Hampshire is candid about his motivation in starting up the  service that he calls Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, which promises care for pets left behind by the Raptured. (Bloomberg; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Lauds: Our favorite baritone in the whole world, Thomas Meglioranza, is interviewed by Linda Richter, at Classical Singer. We can’t give you any music here, but we can call attention to Tom’s superb diction, which makes everything that he sings a story.

¶ Prime: Here’s hoping that Jon Meacham is cheered by Felix Salmon’s good reasons to buy Newsweek from the Post Co.

¶ Tierce: The fascinating thing about Jonah Lehrer’s piece on underdogs, and why we root for them, concerns referees, who quite conspicuously don’t! It appears that referees are stoked by cheering crowds.

¶ Sext: At The Awl, Graham Beck rather impudently compares his whiskey chocolate chili to Picasso’s most recently-sold painting.

¶ Nones: The Economist puts it very well, with a starkly unflattering picture of the Greek political system that joining the Euro zone may have put to an end. (via The Morning News)

¶ Vespers: John Self not only writes about but displays the ten volumes of Penguin’s Central European Classics series. What a delightful reading list to polish off all once, if only one were still in school. In particular, Mr Self has been reading Slawomir Mrozek’s The Elephant.

¶ Compline: Catherine Lutz talks about her book, Carjacked: The culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives, with Melissa Lafsky, at The Intrastructurist. One point that’s hammered home nicely: there’s really nothing you can do that’s anywhere near as dangerous as driving around in a car.

The old régime

Although I never tried to write anything today (except of course the Daily Office, and this), I am very happy with this day-to-myself. There were minor worries and annoyances — a credit card has been compromised (but not so badly that I can’t continue to use it until the replacement arrives), and the tower computer has shown a few troubling signs of systemic instability.

And I suppose I ought to note that nothing very amusing happened. I was delighted by the job that Morning Calm (our wonderful neighborhood framer) made of some old prints that Kathleen grew up with, and that badly needed refreshing, but in mitigation there was a complete lack of ideas about where to hang the things. I ran over to the gallery while Jason was here (see “instability,” above), and picked up the dinner menu on my way home. Am I pleased with the day in spite of these humble doings or because of them? It’s hard to say, because it’s a mixture of both.

I played a round of Dwindling Lump, the fascintating household storage game. A large shopping bag full of clean, empty bottles gave way to a decidedly less voluminous box-full 0f miscellaneous kitchen doodads. The doodads were evicted from a bin to make room for baking supplies (extracts, Karo, and other things that are not wanted in everyday cooking), so that the empty bottles could have the baking supplies’ (rather inappropriate) place in the kitchen. The point of the game of Dwindling Lump is that the detritus that remains unplaced at the end of each round takes up fewer cubic feet . I am approaching zero with a zest that laughs Zeno’s paradox to scorn.

What really happened today was the decision to mount a new site, www.dailyblaguereader.com, designed expressly to be read on an iPad. The content will be the same, but the look and feel will be vastly simpler than that of The Daily Blague proper. No blogroll, no “Categories.” No comments. In important ways, the new DB won’t be a blog at all. It will be the functional equivalent, really, of the pseudo-blog that I created toward the end of the summer of 2004, when I was wrestling with the question, “Do I need a blog?”  

The genesis of the new site condensed in the course of a conversation with Steve Laico, the man who makes my sites real. I’d scheduled the phone meeting because I felt that a talk was in order, but I had no idea of what I was going to say. I knew that I wanted to do something in the way of iPad-specific design, but the particulars didn’t emerge until the conversation was well underway.

So, in case anyone is interested down the road, today is “when it happened.” The actual launch of the new site won’t be what matters. It may be that, as has often happened before, I’m uselessly ahead of the times. Great idea, but no takers yet. I don’t think so, though. I write for readers, and, as a reader, I can see that the iPad nothing less than rescues the whole business of reading from the personal computer.

Not that I’ll ever write a single entry for any of my sites on an iPad. We will all continue to work at our computers. We just won’t use them for reading.

¶ Matins: At The Economist, a report on the social nature of television watching. The piece shows why “there is little to suggest that television is growing a long tail of niche interests.” The implication is that people watch television largely because other people watch television. This is heartening news, in its way — if people didn’t believe that they were participating in some sort of group pastime, they wouldn’t watch television. But it also contributes to the pile of explanations why really good television programming will always be vaninishingly rare. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Lauds: Peter Plagens offers a list of “ten things to think about regarding” the record-breaking sale of a 1964 Picasso painting the other day. (ARTicles)

¶ Prime: We were wondering when Felix Salmon would get round to dicing the Buffett/Deal Book piece to which we alluded yesterday in this space.

¶ Tierce: Philip Ball suggests that proponents of “Intelligent Design” familiarize themselves with the work of evolutionary geneticist John Avise. “What a shoddy piece of work is man.” (Nature; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Sext: At Sparksheet, an intereview with Blake Eskin, the Web editor of The New Yorker. As long-time subscribers, we feel that we’re in good hands. (via The Rumpus)

¶ Nones: Good grief! In the middle of everything that’s going on in the world today, the leaders of nations belonging to the Unasur bloc (a counter-US South American treaty organization) won’t play show up at the EU-Latin America summit if Honduran president Porfirio Lobo attends. It’s amazing that there’s still any life in this story. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: The Rumpus at its best: Kevin Evers writes about a drolly meta book, From Old Notebooks, in which Evan Lavender-Smith assembles a miscellany of thoughts about writing his first book. Which of course the miscellany becomes.

¶ Compline: Researcher Paul Bloom’s sketch of an investigation at Yale into the moral nature of very small children makes for fascinating reading, but it’s the conclusions drawn at the end that make this preview from the coming weekend’s issue of the Times Magazine a must-read.

For thirteen years, I have been taking taxis up First Avenue from the Lower East Side — Planet Megan. Imagine my surprise when, on a recent uptown lurch, the cab driver chose not to scoot through the stoplight-free tunnels in front of the United Nations complex. For the first time ever. I can’t say that the surface route was any slower, really, but the idea that we might be stopped made me fret. Not so much, though, that I didn’t catch a glimpse of the modernist monument that the United Nations has occupied for just about as long as I’ve been alive. Until now, that is; the organization has decamped so that the sixty year-old forum of international harmony can be given a new lease.

Driving by, instead of below, the front of the United Nations was this taxi ride’s second novelty. The first was a trip down East Fifth Street, which, west of Loisaida Avenue, is a cul de sac. A rather Jacobean-looking public school on Avenue B appears to have been  blocking Fifth Street since long before the United Nations was even dreamed of. Dead ends, common as dirt elsewhere in the United States, are quite unusual in Manhattan. Indeed, unless stopped, I am going to seek fame and fortune by researching a coffee-table book on the subject (lavishly illustrated). I’m going to call it Culs de Cons. I have never been able to fix the meaning of those two rather nasty French word in my mind, so it seems only sanitaire to repe them into the same title, where I can keep them out of trouble. 

Update: To the contrary notwithstanding, I heretofore nominate this entry as Most Desperate of 2010. It’s only May, I know, but, sometimes, you can just tell from the smell. 

¶ Matins: At the National Journal, Jonathan Rauch writes about a phenomenon that we highlight every time it comes up: Red state families make adults; blue state adults make families. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Lauds: Andrew Alpern has donated his collection of 700 works by Edward Gorey to Columbia University — which had better mount a show! (via NYT, Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Andrew Ross Sorkin wonders if Warren Buffett has it right about the SEC action against Goldman Sachs. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: Inevitably, “auties” argue that they are different, not damaged. Who wants to be a dumb old neurotypical, anyway? (New Scientist)

¶ Sext: Fashion marketers are slow to grasp the New iPad Order: their Web sites, dependent on Adobe Flash, don’t play on the Apple screen. We take this as proof positive that the iPad is indeed the device with which most people will connect to the Internet. (PSFK; via kottke.org, The Morning News)

¶ Nones: The polluted northern Chinese city of Datong, remembering that it was briefly the Ming capital, is rebuilding its city walls, complete with watchtowers every 200 meters. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: At The Millions, Colin Marshall explores the strange but magisterial fiction of Kobo Abe (1924-1993).

¶ Compline: Chris Lehmann skewers Nancy Hass for boo-hooing about the death of couture. Plus ça change, baby! (The Awl)

There’s a first for eveything: saying this is how we package experiences that we’d never imagined.

I went to Carnegie Hall this evening to hear an Orpheus Chamber Orchestra concert, the last of the season. The beautiful performances were not, as you can well imagine, the new experience. On the program were Stravinsky’s Octet for winds, Bruch’s First (and only famous) Violin Concerto, and Beethoven’s Second. If you have to ask, “Second what?”, send me an email.

There were two new experiences, although they were both of one kind. In the first, I listened to Stravinsky’s very playful chamber music as if my grandson Will were on my knee. Rationally, I understand that the music would not have appealed to any four month-old baby. Stravinsky did a good job of tempting me to think otherwise. Even Kathleen thought so.

Then, at beginning of the slow movement of the Bruch, Ryu Goto’s stroke of firm crescendo was as gentle as my grandson’s skin. That is really what I thought as I heard the sound — a first in my long history of responses to music. Skin!

If Orpheus’s performance of Beethoven’s Second failed to rouse any reminders of Will, that’s undoubtedly because I’d had a very early lunch, and nothing to eat since. Just at the time when I’d ordinarily be enjoying an afternoon snack, I was in a taxi bound for Will’s house in Alphabet City. His father was taking his first business trip qua pops, and his mother, I thought, could use a few moments of supporting staff. So I popped into a taxi, in tie and blazer, daring to be spit up upon (Will rose to the challenge!), and spent an hour with mother and child before heading uptown. I was so freaked about the uncertainty of snagging taxis that I arrived and departed early. I’m sure that I was of no real help to Megan at all. I’ll try to make up for that tomorrow.

But “they can’t take that away from me”: the memory of a smile that makes life not so much worth living as simply imperative.

¶ Matins: At Surprisingly Free, Jerry Ellig observes that taking procedural shortcuts (resorting to “fast tracks”) can lure regulatory rule-makers into carelessness. He urges the FTC, which may be given enforcement power over online firms, not to repeat the errors of the FCC’s recent “net neutrality” fiasco. 

¶ Lauds: Lauren Wissot loves Enron — the musical. In spite of itself. (The House Next Door)

¶ Prime: At the Times, Dan Bilefsky and Landon Thomas present a lucid explanation of why the proposed Greek bailout is unlikely to make anybody happy.

¶ Tierce: Hugo Mercier reports on a study showing that, to soccer players at least, there’s something more important than scoring points. (International Cognition and Culture Institute; via The Morning News)

¶ Sext: John Hargrave tests his VISA card’s concierge service. (Not surprisingly, this “service” helps cardholders spend more money.) It’ll be interesting to see how long this sort of thing is tolerated: (The Blog of Tim Ferriss; via The Morning News)

¶ Nones: How do you feel about Jonestown tourism? Good idea? Not so much? (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Maud Newton celebrates her blog’s eighth anniversary by offering a tour d’horizon of today’s better bookish blogs. She also notes a spot of fatigue.

¶ Compline: At The Bygone Bureau, staff members contribute to a collection of cooking-disaster stories that are not so much sidesplitting as illuminating: what does cooking look like to people who don’t really cook?

The apartment is irremediably hot. Warm, humid, still. Evaporated perspiration burns my skin. In the blue room, a window unit coughs out chilled air, but not enough of it, and without the Vornado fan at my feet I’d be wretched.

It is at least five degrees cooler out on the balcony, but because the air is as humid out there as it is in the apartment, we don’t cool off. If some sort of high front were to blot up the damp, I’d be instantly comfortable. Unseasonable warmth has besieged us before the building’s management can have been expected to shift the HVAC to air-conditioning.  It doesn’t help that I’m working my way through the long tail of a cold.

The good news is that tomorrow is another day.

Will had his four-month checkup at the pediatrician’s this morning, and shots were involved. The good news was a nap that lasted an unbelievable two-and-a-quarter hours; somewhat against his mother’s inclination, I insisted on waking him up, because putting it off — he wouldn’t be feeling well when he woke, he’d want a change, and he’d be hungry, all at once — would only intensify the fuss. Will is never more heartbreakingly adorable than when he tries to smile through his tears, as he did over and over again when roused from the long nap. The bottle provided some consolation, but between intakes what calmed his spirit was the view from the balcony.

For Will to have a view from the balcony, over my shoulder, meant that I spent a lot of time looking at the impatiens and geraniums that I potted up last week — not very interesting, really. I can’t say what Will was actually gazing at, but I expect that it was the moving traffic way down on 86th Street. I had the oddest memory of standing on the balcony with Megan, when we were still new to the apartment and she was visiting from Houston; odd because in this memory Megan was very taken by yellow cabs, by the color of them, which of course she never saw in Houston although she had some sort of taxi toy. What’s odd, of course, is that Megan was eleven years old when we moved into this apartment,  not seven or eight, which is how old she is in my memory of the taxi excitement. I’ve undoubtedly conflated two experiences. But I will never have to wonder how old Will was when he first peered down onto 86th Street, where the taxis are still slicker-yellow.

I did have this insufferably snobulesque fantasy the other night, sitting out on the balcony in the early evening. Looking off into Queens, I imagined reminding Will that Queens is Over There, but that he comes from Right Here, meaning Manhattan. Will and I are the only members of our immediate family to be able to make that claim. (Because Will’s parents actually lived on the island when he was born, his claim is even better than my more transient one.) But I feel it keenly. This hunk of deciduous granite is my true patrie, and I hope that Will will grow up to feel the same. We are both Sons of Otis — scions of the land of elevators.

Six or seven hours have passed since I posted this picture this morning. I downloaded it from the camera, cropped and resized it, and uploaded it to the blog server with Will perched on one shoulder. That was as much as I could do with one hand.

As you can see, Will is on the verge of mastering the art of holding his own bottle. Hand and eye are working in harness. It is no longer accurate to say of Will that he can’t do anything.

Meanwhile, I am on the verge of a time-out, and I’ve decided to give myself a spring break, at the end of the month and possibly into the first week of June. From the Daily Office, at least. I want to put some time into redesigining the site for the iPad. I don’t know what The Daily Blague will look like on conventional computer screens, but I don’t much care: at some not-to-distant point in time, anyone who wants to read this site will do so on an iPad or equivalent. A new look and feel is in order.

The other night, on my way home from Avenue C, I stopped in at the Village VII theatre for the 5:45 showing of  The Joneses, largely because the timing was right and there was nothing in the neighborhood that I particularly wanted to see. I was ready for a less-than-satisfying moviegoing experience, but The Jones turned out to be a very interesting disappointment — a disappointment to think about, perhaps, but not to watch. I was often reminded, in fact, of John Frankenheimer’s 1966 nightmare, Seconds. It took hours for the film’s affect to wear off — no surprise, I suppose, given that, as I understand, Derrick Borte, who co-wrote and directed The Joneses, is handy at shooting television commercials.

¶ The Joneses, at Portico.

¶ Matins: We really cannot speak of a “race to the bottom” in the vying of Party of No candidates for Iowa’s Third Congressional District. Each and every one of the candidates is already là-bas. The winner, in our view, is Mark Rees, not so much because he has any brilliant ideas about illegal immigration as because he knows that modern politicking is a kind of three-card monte. (GazetteOnline.com; via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds:  Music written for Prince Charles by Sir William Walton, never before recorded, has just come to light, having been forgotten in the hoopla of Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales forty years ago. (Telegraph; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Meet Oliver Budde! A former associate general counsel at Lehman Brothers, Mr Budde was outraged when Lehman capsizer Richard Fuld claimed, in Congressional hearings, to have made $310 million over three years and to have lost it all. Having very unhappily prepared Lehman’s compensation disclosure documents over a number of years, Mr Budde knew better, and he decided to blow a few whistles (one wasn’t enough). His story appeared at Bloomberg News yesterday. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: This will sound perfectly ridiculous at first, but apparently you really can teach yourself to see better. The effort won’t improve your eyes, but it will do wonders for your brain. (Wired Science)

¶ Sext: At Ivy Style, Christian interviews Lisa Birnbach, and if you have to ask who she is, save yourself the embarrassment and don’t; just stick around and find out for yourself.

¶ Nones: If the Liberal Democrats win the UK election next Thursday, then party leader Nicholas Clegg will be honour-bound to raise Gillian Duffy to the Lords. (The Daily Beast)

¶ Vespers: At Survival of the Book, Brian writes about a satire of the publishing biz, Steve Hely’s How I Became a Famous Novelist. (Clever young man writes bilge-worthy tripe that enjoys phenomenal sales.) He doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

¶ Compline: Make a point, over the weekend, of reading Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” currently behind the paywall at The New Yorker. (We strongly recommend begging subscriber friends for a discarded copy of the May 3 issue.) Ms Malcolm clearly believes that the trial was a miscarriage of justice, but the thrust of her piece is to show how likely such miscarriages are, given our still quite sexist way of doing the justice business. “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” will almost certainly hold forever a high place in this writer’s remarkably clear-sighted reportage.

This morning, I was Eve Harrington in New Haven: “I couldn’t possibly.” But if my day did not call forth the performance of a lifetime, it was not the discreditable heap that I dreaded in the runup to my trip downtown.  

We will all be happier, it is generally agreed, when Will learns how to crawl. He so clearly wants to get about on his own! At the moment, he is making great strides at the core competence of holding his own bottle. (It is very hard not to laugh at his misdirections, which showcase the complexity of organizing two limbs and one mouth in a common project.) Crawling will make our Will a free agent. I’m sure that we won’t miss the time when he more or less had to stay wherever we planted him.  

Until last week, I’d have said, Will was incapable of doing anything deliberately. That has changed only to the extent that what Will now does deliberately he does not do very well. We are in no hurry for him to develop; we know that he will get where he’s going in good time. But Will himself is in a terrible hurry. His good nature is all that protects him from crossly flailing tantrums. Such is life, at four months, for a curious little fellow.

Four months — is that all? Admit it: you thought he’d be off to college by now.

¶ Matins: When you’ve read Amanda Bensen’s review of a new paperback about the orange juice biz, you may agree with us that the only acceptable alternative to squeezing your own is doing without. (Smithsonian; via MetaFilter)

¶ Lauds: Writing about the William Eggleston exhibition, “Democratic Camera,” which has reached Chicago, Ken Tanaka has three good tips for visitors. We’re particularly drawn to the second, which emphasizes the role of Mr Eggleston’s body of work on the appreciation of individual photographs. (The Online Photographer)

¶ Prime: In an entry at his New Yorker blog, John Cassidy explains why we saw the subprime mortgage crisis coming even though the bankers didn’t: we didn’t (and don’t) understand the first thing about risk models. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Carl Zimmer reports on “deep homology,” the appearance of similar clusters of genes across widely different species that do the same sort of things. For example, one module enables yeast cells to fix cell walls, and human beings to create blood vessels. Mysteries remain! (NYT)

¶ Sext: Jimmy Chen explains the many different flavors of “editor,” at HTMLGIANT. (“It just seems like a bunch of people calling one another fancy names.”)(via The Rumpus)

¶ Nones: Tired of worrying about Greece? Consider Hungary, where an authoritarian administration is about to take office while the value of the forint plummets. Edward Hugh has seen this coming, but what’s the satisfaction of that?. (A Fistful of Euros)

¶ Vespers:  Vespers: In a short but poignant piece, Cindy Jane Cho, currently doing NGO work in Namibia, reads three books, two of them celebrated (The Catcher in the Rye and Middlemarch), one of them utterly unknown to us. The entry bears the unmistakable pong of yearning youth. (The Millions)

¶ Compline: As part of its valuable Backlist series, The Second Pass publishes Lila Garnett’s impressive review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s The Culture of Defeat: On Trauma, Mourning and Recovery, a book that is currently out of print. Never mind: Ms Garnett’s cogent paragraphs spell out an important message: defeat is bad for everyone, even winners. Is anything as toxic as the thirst for revenge?

Allegra Goodman’s “La Vita Nuova,” in the current issue of The New Yorker, is a palpably artful story, but not a very appealing one. At the beginning, an unnamed fiancé breaks up with Amanda, a girl from New York who has followed him to Cambridge. Her immediate response is to carry her wedding dress to the school where she teaches art, and to invite her first-graders to embellish it with paint and feathers. It is impossible not to imagine an operatic mad scene or two, involving deranged heroines and blood. Certainly the school’s principal is disturbed.

The principal told Amanda, that for an educator, bounderies were an issue. “Your personal life,” said the principal, “is not an appropriate art project for first grade. Your classroom,” said the principal, “is not an appropriate forum for your relationships. Let’s pack up the wedding dress.”

At the end of the school year, Amanda’s contract is not renewed. I couldn’t tell how the author wanted me to feel about this. But I knew that the fiancé had done a sane thing in walking away from Amanda.

The meat of the story describes the summer that Amanda spends with Nicholas, one of her first-graders and now her babysitting charge. Nicholas’s parents no longer live together, which makes it easier for Nicholas’s mother to express her dislike of Amanda, and for his father to express his desire to sleep with her. Amanda and Nicholas do neat things, like going to the zoo, and Amanda behaves very responsibly with the boy, but recurring references to things that the fiancé used to say suggest that Amanda is enjoying a protracted mad scene. She is as closed to us as any disturbed person. Instead of hearing her thoughts, we watch her paint several sets of nested Russian dolls.

As before, she coated each painted doll with clear gloss until the colors gleamed. As before, she made each doll a perfect jewel-like object, but she spent the most time on the biggest, oldest doll.

After that, she bought more blanks and painted more sets: people she knew, people she didn’t know. People she met. Portraits in series, five dolls each. She painted Patsy, blonder and blonder in each incarnation. She painted her fiancé as a boy, as an athlete, as a law student, as a paunchy bald guy, as a decrepit old man. She didn’t kill him, but she aged him.

She lined up the dolls and photographed them. She thought about fellowships. She imagined group shows, solo shows. Refusing interviews.

She took Nathaniel to swimming lessons. She went down to the harbor with him and they threw popcorn to seagulls that caught the kernels in midair.

The self-indulgence of Amanda’s obsessive painting is mirrored quite perfectly in the author’s self-indulgent stylishness. What else could possibly link the third and fourth paragraphs here?

At the end of the story, Amanda breaks up with Nicholas; she decides to go back to New York. Nicholas — an unusually likable child, especially for literary precincts of this temperature — is far more dramatically heartbroken by Amanda’s defection than Amanda was by the fiancé’s departure. His squirming pain is so real, in fact, that I wondered if it were not the very point of “La Vita Nuova” (I’m going to let the Dante angle, such as it is, slide): Amanda’s revenge.

I was walkiing along First Avenue this afternoon, with Quatorze, when BAM! my head struck something. It was the transverse pole of some scaffolding that a group of turbaned South Asians were assembling — almost certainly in non-compliance with code. Angry as always when my head is struck, I forged on a few steps and BAM! it happened again. “Don’t you people have any brains?” I shouted at the silent men, who had done nothing to warn me as I blundered in their midst. Then I continued walking, but not without an upward glance to rule out further hazards.

For twenty minutes or so, my eyes felt a bit odd — just a bit, as if focusing them were a problem. But I don’t think that a trip to the hospital (quite close by, as it happened) would have been helpful.

It astonishes me that most people aren’t as tall as I am — something of an understatement. It seems grotesquely unfair that they’re not. I never think of being tall as an advantage, and I shouldn’t care to be any taller. If everyone stood to about seventy-five inches, that would be the end of many tight corners, and I’d find the world somewhat more accommodating. There’s something very handy about my height. Everybody ought to have it.

My mother, who was five-eight, used to exhort me to “go out and find a nice tall queen and make her happy.” My suppressed inward jeer at her ignorance of the popular meaning of “queen” masked, but was also prompted by, the irritation that anyone would feel by such erotic dictation. Of course my mother didn’t mean anything erotic. She was much too sentimental to give much thought to the particularity of love. She expected me to be content with a gallant’s role — that is what men were for. It took forever to outgrow the rather unnatural oafishness that I assumed in self-protection.

In the event, my abiding bond has been with a rather short woman, someone over a foot shorter than I am. She would certainly like to be as tall as I am; she has said so many times. But I’m afraid that if my dear Kathleen were as tall as I am, then I’d be expecting her to bring me tea and toast in the morning, instead of the other way round.  

¶ Matins: The “culture” at Goldman Sachs gets the gimlet treatment from Choire Sicha and John Lanchester. Choire laughs at the “horn-blowers” whose self-reviews were aired in the Senate, while John compares the testifying executives to the hooligans who cheer for the Millwall FC. (“No one likes us/We don’t care!”)

¶ Lauds: Ann  Midgette continues her campaign to improve classical audiences by urging President Obama to set an example by not worrying about “when to clap.” She has some really good ideas about how to proceed, the excellence of which we’ll discuss some other time.

¶ Prime: Leave it to Luxury Bob to explain the libertarian nature of progressive income tax. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: Did we say “culture” in connection with Goldman? Jonah Lehrer writes about the enculturation problem: we see what we’re taught to see.

¶ Sext: Every now and then, somebody distills a drop of the true oddness of Manhattan Island in a New York Times story. “Too Fancy? Too Long? How to Name a Co-op,” by Christine Haughney, is merely the latest instance of Gothamdipity. We do wish that Ms Haughney had a clearer understanding of the rule that names are all very well for buildings on the West Side of Central Park.

¶ Nones: What’s going to happen to Greece? A short piece about geopolitical destiny to open your sinuses from A Fistful of Euros, followed by Felix Salmon’s discouraged report of poolside talk at an LA bond conference.

¶ Vespers: Brooks Peters looks into Patrick Hamilton as only Brooks Peters can. Proving my point, by the way, that only intelligent gay critics can be bothered to doubt the homosexuality of fellow-travelers. What if Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope were all about incest?

¶ Compline: “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Power Point.” Elisabeth Bumiller’s latest chapter in the story about the nonsense of wartime bureaucracy (and, in particularly, the preposterous unintelligibility of the flow-chart shown below) must bring joy to a self-published Yale man. (Identity disclosed upon request.)