Café, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

Dear DB’s readers —

The perception of time varies wildly from culture to culture, time is not an absolute, time is culturally variable. In France the perception of time is very different than in Northern European countries or America. Exhibit one: this morning I had a meeting at work at 9.30am. I arrived at the office around 9, said hi to everybody, fixed me coffee and began to check my e-mail. At 9.25 I proceeded to room 415 where the meeting was scheduled. At 9.30 we were two in the room. Another guy was already there and was checking his e-mail on his laptop. We talked leisurely, waiting for the others to show up. People began to come in at 9.35, some were carrying on a conversation begun several minutes before in the corridors or at the coffee machines. At 9.45 everybody was there and the meeting began slowly. Nothing unusual this morning and nobody was shocked. We are living on French time. The meeting was due to end at 12.00 but at 12.30 we were still chatting. I assume that the same situation in Germany, say, or in England or in the US would be unthinkable and considered very rude. Northern or Anglo-saxon cultures are monochronic, time is rigorously scheduled, punctuality is important. In France we are generally much more polychronic, time is more elastic and less strict. Lateness is not an insult (as long as it is not too much, and the notion of “too much” in this case varies in circumstances and contexts). Nevertheless, French people have the tendency to be more punctual than Southern European people (Spanish or Italian). I seldom saw a meeting at work beginning on scheduled time. When you are invited to dinner at a certain hour, to be 30 minutes late is nothing. It is frequent that the TV shows are 10 to 15 minutes out of schedules. But punctuality is sometimes suitable it all depends of a series of different factors, circumstances and personalities, very difficult to guess if you’re not used to the culture. Deadlines have the tendency to be flexible (but not in all circumstances). Generally speaking, French are a little less rigid on time and schedule than Northern Europeans. And things get done nonetheless but at a different pace!

Things are changing these days in France, I noticed. More punctuality is required, the deadlines are much more rigid. Consequence: more stress. We slowly are changing or Mediterranean culture for an Anglo-saxon one.

Later,

Jean

Hôtel Meurice, small car, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

A famous tower and clouds, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

Dear DB’S readers —

The next four months I’ll be on assignment on a big photographic project. A little French publishing house commissioned me for doing the illustrations of a book about Nestor Burma, the central character of a series of crime novels by French author Léo Malet. I have a long list of places and buildings in Paris to photography under the supervision of the book’s author. Each published picture will receive a quote from the mystery novels as caption. The pictures will in black & white. The book will be on sale next October.

Nestor Burma is a fictional character created by Léo Malet in 1942. There are 33 novels with Nestor Burma as the central character. All novels are set in Paris, each in a different arrondissement, each of a different atmosphere. Burma belongs to the tradition of the hard boiled detectives like Philip Marlowe. It’s a French Marlowe if you like, but less depressed and bitter than Chandler’s Marlowe. He is a private detective working on his own in the “Fiat Lux” detective agency in Paris with his secretary Hélène Chatelain, who is hopelessly in love with him. Each novel describes the Paris neighborhood where it is set in and the surroundings mood.

The book will be a fictional biography of Nestor Burma, with many chapters devoted to other topics related to Burma and Malet. It will be included in a series of books dedicated to fictional biographies of popular heroes. There are already Fantômas, Maigret, Sherlock Holmes, Arsène Lupin, Nero Wolfe, Dracula, Frankenstein, Miss Maple, Conan, James Bond etc.

I look forward to do this commission. It will bring me in all places in Paris and help me rediscover and re-visit the city I love. It’s a really challenging assignment and my first that I will be payed for!

Later,

Jean

“Monde festif”, Jardins des Tuileries, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

Red dress, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

Dear DB’s readers —

Yesterday night I went to the hairdresser. It was a futile attempt to clear my ideas, a kind of magic thinking. My hair was cut but my ideas were not cleared, magic thinking seldom works. I’d rather go to a traditional-style hairdresser, there are some in my neighborhood, but yesterday it was an emergency, suddenly at the end of the day I couldn’t bear my hair anymore, had to cut it. I was in Montparnasse, had to go to a hairdresser still welcoming customers at 7 pm, in the mall below the Montparnasse Tower. It was a fashion hairdresser close to the Galeries Lafayette. Now, these hairdressers would like to be considered as doctors, highly skilled professionals who execute their deeds in a thoroughly sterilized environment. There is an incredible division of labor, there, with a plethora of personnel, the hostess and cashier, the hair washing lady, the cutter, the dye and dry specialist… The lights are white and bright and almost like in a surgical unit. Unfortunately when I go to the hairdresser it is for having my hair cut, period. I don’t need any treatments for my hair, I don’t need any model photography to look at to choose my hairdo, I need my hair cut and that’s it. A non-nonsense cutting. No hair-spliting either. Hairdressers doesn’t like to cut hair, they want to do your hair. They make me look like an unsophisticated person, tacky, rustic. It’s depressing.

For excuse, wether I need it one or not, I’d say that I’m a nerd. Not the kind you see in the movies, acne-ridden and awkward, in which “nerd” is a derogatory characterization, no, my type of nerdiness is much more civilized. What are my characteristics as a nerd? Well, I don’t like change for instance – unless it’s a new application to test on a computer, in this case I’m eager to try it. In life I like habits, daily or weekly routines, I don’t like to travel – except to the US because my nerdery is very much US oriented – I don’t even like that much to go outside of Paris city limits. What I like is being at home, or at work, and be with my computers doing my things, writing things, reading, integrating information and knowledge, tinkering pictures endlessly in Photoshop… When I go outside it’s with a purpose, taking photos mostly, working on a photographic project. I’m a good walker and like it but I need to do something beyond walking, exploring, making pictures, looking at architecture or urban features. I have low social skills, I’m mostly unable to chit-chat but I can and like to have conversations, real conversations, with people – except when these people are anglophone, in this case I’m quite able to chit-chat because it is part of a larger project: learning the English language, be fluent in it. The thing is: I’m quite able and like to do things that otherwise I hate to do if it is part of a larger project that interests me at the time. I like to interact with people, but my preferred mode of interaction with them is by the way of a computer. I hate the telephone. I’m interested in nerdy, arcane things, that I focus on, explore thoroughly, and I move on suddenly to another thing. I postpone to go to the hairdresser, or to buy clothes, appliances or furnishing until I cannot bear it anymore, and then I go to the next hairdresser, clothes, appliances or furnishing shop, do a burst buy and get rid of these chores, move on to something really interesting.

It’s not easy to be a nerd. Very few people understand you, other nerds mostly.

Later,

Jean

My nephew Pol. By Jean Ruaud.

The Tour Montparnasse from Montmartre, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

Dear DB’s readers,

If I was going to the proverbial desert island and if I was allowed only one book to carry with me (God forbid!), it may well be “The Art Of Looking Sideways” by Alan Fletcher. Unfortunately the mere weight of this mammoth volume would certainly prevents its transportation on the “Lost” island, if one exists!

The late Alan Fletcher was a British graphic designer, the co-founder of Pentagram Design firm and the creator of many beautiful realizations among them the Victoria & Albert Museum’s logotype, the curious Reuters dotted logo and many more. And he is the author of “The Art Of Looking Sideways”, a huge book about… well, everything! The book is a work of art in itself, beautifully and meticulously crafted and designed. It is difficult to describe, a “wunderkammer”, a collection of ideas, images, thoughtful quotes from artists, philosophers, writers and scientists, memories, visions, stories, brainwaves, discoveries, found objects, a treasure of knowledge and curiosity, a manual of visual awareness… It’s a book that you’ll never read from beginning to end, but that you are happy to own and browse when things are a little bland and when your curiosity falters or when you’re in need of some inspiration (you can use it as a doorstop if you like, its size and weight are appropriate for!).

I can’t help but think of this book as a kind of “paper-blog”, a precursor of the quality and highly personnal blogs, the best and the brightest of all blogs perhaps and a huge one. Alan Fletcher’s visual curiosity and deeply original mind would have made a wonderful blogger. One wonders what Fletcher would have made with the Internet of today, perhaps one of the projects he was working on at the time of his death (2006) had something to do do with the web. Maybe we’ll know one day.

Later,

Jean

Montmartre in winter, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

Montmartre, Paris. By Jean Ruaud.

Dear DB’s readers —

Let’s talk about Paris. What a Parisian guestblogger is for if he doesn’t write about his city? I live in Paris intra-muros since twelve years and since my first visit here (I was ten and my uncle lived in the 16th arrondissement, close to the Trocadero gardens) I wished to live in Paris. So, it’s a dream made true, if you like. But I don’t live in posh 16th but in seedy 18th, in the north. My neighborhood, Barbès, is at the north end of Montmartre hill slopes, and is populous, multi-cultural, a bit dirty, with some traffics going on (drugs, cigarettes, mobile phones) and a lot of poverty. Why do I live here? Because the rents are low and, as I live in a somehow “gated community”, I don’t have to bother much with the neighborhood crowd.

Anyway, my neighborhood is not on the tourist tours schedules, but Montmartre, is very much. Montmartre is a tiny, quaint and beautiful neighborhood at the top of the eponym hill. From my home it’s a mere twenty minutes walk to go at the top, a steep walk with many stairs, but not a long one. From my windows I see the Sacré Coeur dome, illuminated at night. The Sacré Coeur is the most coveted tourist destination, from the esplanade in front of the basilica you have a wonderful view of the French capital. The sightseers crowd the esplanade and the Place du Tertre nearby but seldom spend the time to explore the narrow streets on the slopes. However this is my favorite place in Paris, these winding streets lined with beautiful houses, a very quiet place, not much cars, not much people, some old mills, many grand old houses, beautiful apartment buildings, little greens and a lot of little art shops and cafés, little groceries and pâtisseries. Montmartre is the place where I go when I want to take photos, and I have thousands of them in my collections.

So, if you visit Paris, even for a short time, I recommend you to walk those sometimes steep and winding little streets on the slopes of Montmartre. It really is Paris, a well preserved neighborhood, and my favorite.

Later,

Jean

A citizen of Montmartre. By Jean Ruaud.

We’ll follow sometimes during this week our respected editor’s tradition:

¶ The excellent urbanism and architecture blog: BLDGBLOG has a very strange story in “Tama-Re, or the Egypt of the West“.

¶ Owl in flight is an awesome photography.

¶ And Howling at the Moon: The Poetics of Amateur Product Reviews, is a very thoughtful analysis of a social phenomenon (I’m an amateur sociologist!).

Jean

In the little harbour of Le Conquet, in France. By Jean Ruaud

Dear DB’s readers —

Hello everybody, the boss gave me the keys, let’s not wreck the place while he’s vacationing in some dismal sunny tropical island!

I’m certain that you’re aware of the two greatest week events: the State of the Union and the State of the Apple. I, in not so sunny and downright frigid France, watched both the addresses. The Apple address first, and live. The SOTU address, second, and the following evening because of this time-lag problem between the US and Europe.

I should disclose immediately that I like very much President Obama, for many good reasons, among others: he’s not my president! It is very possible that, should I be a US citizen, I would be much less enthusiastic, anyway, I like the guy and I admire his speaking talents and his intellect. I watched with interest the SOTU address but I must say, a little ashamed, that the other address (the one in San Francisco) interested me more.

So it is of the Apple announcement that I would like to talk here, today. First, I’m an Apple devotee, I own an iMac 24′ dubbed “Gros Mac”, a MacBook dubbed “Petit Mac”, an iPod classic, an iPod Shuffle and an iPhone. And I love them all insofar as you can love an appliance. I love their simplicity, their confort of use and their design. That’s the three main points. I used PCs in the past and still use one at work and I’m not adverse to using them again but I feel them cranky, too much complicated to use and too much breakdown prone. At work there are tech-supports and this is not a big inconvenience, but at home I’m my own tech-support and it’s another story. I know my way with computers and I’m able to diagnose a breakdown and mend it, but I don’t like that and I don’t like to spend my time tinkering with my computers, I’m not so geeky after all. This is why I prefer to use Macs instead of PCs, even Linux machines. And the esthetics: the Apple computers and mobile machines are always beautiful and every details are thoughtfully made. Apple is the only computer firm to employ a reputable designer, Jonathan Ive, to design its machines, and it shows. And the design is always first in the development process, the engineers have to adapt the hardware to the design not the other way round.

So, the iPad was this week announcement. I’ll not make another review here, there are roughly one million of them on the web, just stating two or three things I think as a computer user.

– The iPad seems a beautiful object and if it is as well conceived as the iPod Touch or the iPhone it will be pleasant to hold it in your hands, smooth and the right weight, a bit like a well designed book.

– The apps are compelling, iWorks is wonderful, Safari is a very good browser. The speed seems awesome.

– The prices are not to heavy (for an Apple machine, that is).

– The iBooks, well, that is single-handedly great!

– The only shortcomings I see are two: no multitasking and no Flash player. Even if Flash means a lot of CPU resources, is heavy to download and has other failings, the absence of the Flash plugging means a severe limitation when you browse the web. No multitasking means the impossibility to read, for instance, while playing music on Spotify. Or to simultaneously write an e-mail while consulting the web.

It is certain that I will buy one as soon as it is shipped, for I’m a sucker both for technological novelties and Apple products but I don’t think I need one, just I want one, and it is there where the well thought marketing magic operates: making you buy with pleasure an object you don’t really need!

Later,

Jean (jrparis-at-gmail.com)

For over five years, I have never taken a real vacation from The Daily Blague. I don’t know what the longest break between entries is, but I had the idea from fairly early on that “daily” means “every day” — or at least every week day. I think that I’ve earned a rest.

Letting the site just sit without fresh copy for a week would be unthinkable, though. Very kindly, my good friend Jean Ruaud (Mnémoglyphes) has come to my aid, and agreed to guest-edit The Daily Blague while I take a break. Jean will open the windows wide and let in some fresh air. I want you all to breathe deeply. And whenever you feel moved to advise Jean of a typographical error or the like, I hope that you will observe the guidelines that I have set forth here. I will leave it to Jean to provide an email address; corrective comments will be expunged.

Let’s have a hand for Jean Ruaud!

¶ “Most Hated Building.” (via Things Magazine)

¶ Ampersands. (via The Best Part)

¶ Heavy Industry.

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

¶ Matins: Can we call this “gesture substitution”: Vijay Anand has discovered a way to fight corruption. Instead of resisting or cooperating with demands for bribes, people use his zero-rupee notes to “pay” crooked officials. (CommGAP; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Lauds: Here’s a good one: the directors of the art museums in the homes of the Super Bowl contenders have made a bet: either Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt will go to New Orleans, or Claude Lorrain’s Ideal View of Tivoli will go to Indianapolis, depending upon whether the Saints or the Colts win the Super Bowl. (Speakeasy)

¶ Prime: We’re hoping to see some hard-ball analysis of AT&T’s quarterly earnings report, which claimed a boost of 26%. Here in New York City, where new iPhones are not being sold at the moment, because AT&T’s network is inadequate to existing demand, the company’s good news strikes a dissonant note.

One wonders where the nation’s anti-trust watchdogs have been. It would appear that we’ve seen a classic case of the disadvantages (to consumers) of monopolies. Free-marketeers might argue that it would be in Apple’s interest to force AT&T to make improvements, but accordingly to anecdotal evidence, nobody close to Steve Jobs cares very much what happens on the East Coast. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: Habitats by the (cubic) foot: Maria Popova writes about One Cubic Foot. (Brain Pickings)

¶ Sext: Choire Sicha explains “mansplainin,” with the help of a few good women. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: Ketuanan Melayu: The LRB’s Asia correspondent, Joshua Kurlantzick, suggests that the Malaysian government, in an attempt to win back the support of ethnic Malays, may be playing with matches.

¶ Vespers: Bookmark this: Timothy Egan’s provides a handy snap of the state of play in bookland at the dawn of the iPad, particularly with regard to two currently roiling issues: bookstores and royalties. Prognostications are widely avoided, and Mr Egan concludes on the wisest of notes. (NYT)

Whether books flourish the future, textbooks are probably doomed. (VentureBeat; via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Compline: Louis Auchincloss’s death marks, as Henry James would say, an era; but Louis himself would be the first to pooh-pooh talk of nostalgic backward glances.

Is that my problem? I saw America first. Almost all of it, by the time I went to boarding school in 1963. Everything but the Old South and Arizona (and the two new states). Wasted, all of it was, on someone who responds to “natural wonders” in a decidedly pre-Romantic manner. Show me a majestic mountain range, and I’ll show you an obstruction. Show me Manhattan’s skyline, and I’ll show you a majestic mountain range.

“America the Beautiful”? Either I’m crazy or they’re crazy. I panted to go to Europe because I believed that there were beautiful things there. As indeed there are. Grosvenor Square (with your back to the Embassy). Wilton Crescent. Not every square inch of Paris is beautiful, certainly (the Champs-Elysées is rather a shock, if you’re not looking straight ahead), but most of it is either lovely or interesting. A lot of New York is interesting, but hardly any of it is genuinely beautiful. The Empire State Building, for example — it’s the perfect skyscraper, and I love it to pieces. But beautiful? It’s too big to be beautiful.

New York is better at jolie laide. The Plaza and the Dakota, both designed by Henry Janeway Hardenburgh. The central block of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is uglier every time I look at it. The scale is so off! Or, rather, there are two scales. The pillars and the portals belong to different designs. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t trade it in for the Sully Wing, but I wouldn’t tear it down, either.

Lake Louise, the most beautiful spot that I have ever visited on this side of the Atlantic (or the Pacific), is not in the United States. But even if it were, I have to tell you that I’ve no need to see it again: its beauties were perfectly captured in Springtime in the Rockies, probably because Daryl Zanuck made sure that they were. I’m content to watch the movie. When, by the way, will it come out on DVD? Probably never, now. Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Don’t you wonder, whenever you find yourself on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, why somebody decided to build a really big Cannes on the wrong side of the Arctic Circle? That’s the United States for you. Everyone says, brave new world. We left the Old World behind. To which I say, ha. Or, rather, Washington, DC.

As you can see, I can’t bring myself to talk about the natural wonders. Such as Mount Rushmore! I saw Mount Rushmore once. I had already seen North By Northwest, though. Actually standing by those dinky telescopes on a hot summer afternoon was a whole lot less interesting without Cary Grant and Leo G Carroll, let me tell you. I had a lot more fun the previous summer when I stayed, with my parents, at the Ambassador East in Really Big Cannes. It was a lot easier to imagine Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in the deeply piled corridors of the Ambassador East Hotel than it was at a scenic outlook below Mount Rushmore.

I would not by any means call myself a people person, but I have absolutely no interest in rocks or the plants that like to grow on them — excepting, of course, the granite outcrops that bind Manhattan to the Westchester of my childhood. Them I like. Come to think of it, they must have been Henry Janeway Hardenburgh’s principal inspiration, working at a deeper inspirational level than the language of equally metamorphic Beaux Arts ornament that clads his famous façades.

Anyway, I saw America first, and I don’t recommend it. Remember that Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?” I was singing it at fifteen. Happily, the answer was “no.”

¶ Never has Bill Clinton looked more like Elvis Presley.

¶ An idiot of the 33rd degree.

¶ We wonder what Louis would have made of this simple  tribute, although we think it’s peachy.

¶ Matins: We can’t decide if replacing “short-term” and “long-term” with “situational” and sustainable” is a substantial improvement, but we think that it’s worth floating for a while. Thomas Krugman recycles the counsels of ethcist Dov Seidman. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: We’re not quite sure that we understand the difference between form and content that Anne Midgette maintains in her complaint that classical-music lovers displace passionate response with too much information.

We think that the “content” of classical music here is what it means to you, the listener. Beyond “it’s pretty,” that is. We think. We’re interested, in any case. (Washington Post; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: As if on cue, Felix Salmon experiences cognitive dissonance at Davos. Also at Davos: Jonathan Harris.

¶ Tierce: The iPad is here, as expected, and — so what? How is there more to it than the next big whoop-di-doo? Well, if you follow the links in mpbx’s entry at MetaFilter, you may begin to get an idea of how.

Think: vook. It’s only a matter of time before the fun fumes burn off and the serious stuff begins to appear. So far as literature is concerned, we expect some exciting developments in graphic fiction (and graphic non-fiction as well) — and we don’t mean animation.

¶ Sext: Brooks Peters’s confessional entry at An Open Book is as compulsively readable as blogging gets.

¶ Nones: From the BBC News account, you might almost conclude that this is the end of the story for Manuel Zelaya’s truncated leadership in Honduras. But Radio France International’s report discloses the stinger that we knew had to be there somewhere.

¶ Vespers: Brooke Allen’s lively and penetrating review of Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness made its first appearance at Barnes and Noble Review.com. That site is not on our list — yet. Thanks to the NBCC’s Critical Mass, we didn’t miss it altogether. After Ms Allen’s engaging consideration of one story, “Some Women,” one doesn’t doubt the final paragraph in the slightest.

¶ Compline: Martin Amis likes nothing so much as a good poke at a hornet’s nest. Calling for public “euthenasia booths” where the decrepit can end their misery with an ice-cold (and lethal) martini. (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

Before Kathleen came home, I was going to write about my terrible mood. But Kathleen’s terrible mood was a lot more interesting. After talking about what’s bothering her for an hour , I can’t summon any interest in what was bothering me, which was, of course, the impending travel.

But I can’t talk about Kathleen’s terrible mood, because of attorney-client and spousal privileges. Which is another way of saying that, even though I’m unhappy about the impending travel (to put it mildly), Kathleen’s terrible mood doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with me.

So I have to talk about my terrible mood after all. As it happens, the terrible mood that I’m in right now isn’t so much a funk about the travel — about being obliged to leave Manhattan Island, which is really great and all but which really happens to be just the place where I live, for a week — as it is about all the nice things that friends say —

• You lucky guy! A week in the warm Caribbean sun &c.
• Oh, stop! You’ll have a great time!
• Soldier on, as you always do.

That last one breaks me up, possibly because it captures the entire preposterousness of the travel. Be a man — relax and enjoy yourself. As I always do.

The friends who really know me say, “Kathleen needs you to go on this trip with her.” Which isn’t true, really. Kathleen is counting on my presence because she didn’t arrange for anyone else’s. In future she will. She has lots of friends (all women, please note), who would love to go with her to sunny places in cold months. She says this matter-of-factly because it is true. Kathleen has had many fine times with friends in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, she likes to get away from it all with me. I like getting away from it all with her, too, but it looks as though the getaways will have to be decoupled from any thought of Caribbean islands, or, indeed, any island other than the one that we’re already on. That’s why God made the Plaza Hotel, after all.

I don’t share Kathleen’s interest in bright sunlight. When we get  back from the travel, in fact, I’m having a second chunk of my head removed, lest it metastasize into lung cancer. It’s true that the damage was done during childhood. But I didn’t like being out of doors in those days, either. In those days, it was my mother’s wacky and unwelcome idea that the basement was less healthy than a ball field. I would blame her for my basal-cell woes, but she has already perished of lymphoma. A lot she knew.

Where we’re going is very nice, and the minute we get there it feels as though we’ve never been anywhere else. It’s a lovely resort. But I’m learning that dolce far niente only made sense to me when I was powered by martinis. Now that, in the interests of living long enough to teach my grandson bad French, I am trying to cut back on white wine, the whole idea of a week at a resort feels like an irreparably mildewed Cole Porter lyric. It’s my idea of nothing to do.

Kathleen used to say, “This is the last time I’m traveling with you anywhere, R J Keefe!” This time, I’m saying it. This is the last time I’m traveling with R J Keefe. From now on, R J Keefe is staying home. It is his one and only regular-guy trait, and he is sticking with it.

My next trip will be to the next world.

¶ World’s largest book — an atlas from 1660. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Matins: Despite our inclination to hold up to a bright light everything that David Brooks writes in the Times, searching for telltale signs of inauthenticity, we have to admit that his analysis of “The Populist Addiction” is spot on, and nowhere more so than in the following observation.

The idea that the American “élite” is an undivided bloc is nothing but lazy demagoguery. Look high enough, and you find a million “teams” of one. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: Cleveland Plain Dealer critic Steven Litt exhorts the local Museum of Art to do a better job of mounting touring exhibitions. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: The $5.4 billion sale of Stuyvesant Town and adjacent Peter Cooper Village to a a consortium of investors three years ago was both stupid and wrong. Stupid because what has happened since was obviously going to happen, and wrong because the transformation of a large middle-class enclave into Manhattan into more exclusive housing would be altogether indefensible; it’s bad enough that not much is being done to work transformations in the opposite direction. We can only rejoice at this news. And we can only hope that Mayor Bloomberg will regard this fiasco as his biggest fumble. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: Yikes! Donald MacKenzie reports, at Short Sharp Science: “Introducing Botox, bioweapon of mass destruction.”

¶ Sext: This time, Dave Bry’s Public Apology seems, innocently enough, to be directed more at himself than at the latest alleged victim of his general reprehensibleness. We’re not sure that poor old Tubby was taken in. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: George Packer writes stirringly of the dodginess of Dresden’s restoration, from firebombed ruin to “Baroque fantasia.” (The New Yorker)

¶ Vespers: The enthusiasm in Adam Gallari’s write-up of Albanian writer Ornela Vorpsi’s The Country Where No One Ever Died is extremely infectious. (The Rumpus)

¶ Compline: Felix Salmon is at Davos, where he despairs of hearing any long-overdo ‘splainin‘. (Not to worry: Davos is irrelevant to non-attendees.)

Will’s parents needed a bit of help late this afternoon, owing to the attack of a nasty flu bug that laid Ryan low and put Megan in the impossible position of not being able to do anything for her husband. I was called in. Lucky, lucky me.

I popped in a taxi, sped downtown, and scaled Château Gizmo. I washed my hands at every turn, and nothing else that I did was more remarkable than that. I ran a couple of errands and washed a few dishes.

Mostly, though, I sat like this, in the grandfatherly position known as “Cat & Canary.” The cat in this case is not going eat the canary, however, because holding it is too delightful.

I complimented Megan on having studied the major points of grandfatherly gratification. When I arrived, she was stressed, Will was wailing, and Ryan was cramped on an extra bed that he was too beleaguered to clear off. Within half an hour — well, Ryan was still feverish and miserable; there are limits to my magic powers. But Megan was contentedly feeding her contented son, and — what’s always essential in these crises, necessary if insufficient — the kitchen sink was cleared.

Although Will’s mouth is open in the photograph, he is as silent as the you-know-what. As zonked out as a sophomore.

Megan asked if I saw anything of myself in Will’s little face. I had to confess, with lingering surprise, that I wasn’t looking. I had certainly thought that I would. When Megan was Will’s age, I peered at her with narcissistic abandon. But I don’t seem to need any supplementary assurance that Will is my grandson. And that is sweet.

¶ Lizbeth Mitty: Recent Paintings.

¶ Bryan Schutmaat: Recent Photographs. (via The Best Part)

¶ Dams Across America. (via Design Observer)

¶ Matins: Justin Fox kicks off his column at the Harvard Business Review blog by considering the very bad idea of treating business corporations as persons — something that we’ve been complaining about for a while, and that came to the fore with the rather unpopular (but wholly anticipated) Supreme Court decision in Citizens United. (via Felix Salmon)

(For some background on the foundational case on this issue, turn here.)

¶ Lauds: Molly Haskell’s short answer regarding Avatar: “No, you don’t have to see it.” An interesting comparison to Gone With the Wind does will probably not appeal to all readers. (Speakeasy)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon seems to be havng fun, thinking of Goldman’s London partners. Noting that Goldman Sachs isn’t going to share the pain of the British bonus tax, he reflects that a temporarily ill-compensated partner at that firm is still doing better than a richly-rewarded banker elsewhere.

¶ Tierce: Why the social isolation of the powerful is bad for any society, and particularly bad for a democratic society: it undermines the human inclination to benevolence. (The Frontal Cortex)

¶ Sext: Maybe you can help out an aspiring cosmetologist with better things to do than go to school. As a volunteer, of course! (You Suck at Craigslist) Maybe Ash wants to be a bedwarmer. (Marginal Revolution)

¶ Nones: In a further sign that Japan’s orientation is shifting toward China and away from the United States is manifest in Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama’s decision to “re-think” the presence of an American airbase on Okinawa. The trigger was a local election won by an ardent campaigner against the Futenma base, home to two thousand Marines. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers:  The always interesting John Self has read Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, admired it very much, and written about it, for all the world, as though he were unaware of Tom Ford’s movie. It’s clear from his précis that the book is rather more different from the film than one might have thought. (Asylum)

¶ Compline: How nice: on the eve of the Editor’s vacation in St Croix, we have to share this: “A Deadly Quake in a Seismic Hot Zone.” Fun! (NYT)