¶ Matins: Paul Krugman addresses our most dangerous problem: the growing power of a right-wing rump without any interest in governing and with every intention of preventing others from governing: “the GOP has been taken over by the people it used to exploit. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: Duran Duran bassist John Taylor, who “became a teenager in 1972,” fears that the Internet has not been a positive force for popular culture. He seems troubled by the fact that it makes too much old stuff too easy to get, thus reducing the need for new stuff. (BBC News; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon disagrees with Wall Street Journal writers on the subject of Ken Lewis’s “mettle.”

¶ Tierce: Meryl Gordon’s discussions with some of the Marshall Trial jurors makes for fascinating reading at Vanity Fair.

¶ Sext: Choire Sicha remembers “vividly” where he was when The Wall Fell — although he didn’t know a thing about it at the time. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: George Packer reminds us why the Wall fell when it did, in a piece about the uniqueness of 1989 in Europe. (The New Yorker)

¶ Vespers: Tim Adams talks about Alan Bennett‘s new play, The Habit of Art — a little. Mostly he appreciates a writer who, against all the odds, has become a beloved fixture in Britain. (Guardian)

¶ Compline: Jonah Lehrer registers a new study about the “privileged” sense of smell. (Frontal Cortex)

What is going to happen in the world of business and commerce? You’ll note that I don’t ask what’s going to happen in the world of finance. There’s no need. Nothing good is going to happen in the world of finance — that’s what.

Will someone please research this “fact,” which has stuck with me like a barnacle since I read it decades ago? In 1976, the directors of US Steel found that they were making more money (profit, not revenue) by managing their liquid assets than they were by making steel. 1976 therefore seems as good a date as any to mark the beginning of the Age of Finance that — one hopes — has finally come crashing down. Don’t get me wrong: finance is an essential element of business and commerce. Without credit markets, you might as well be living in a cave and rubbing sticks together. But finance is, ahem, not the point.

Steve Forbes, I read, is still exploiting his family magazine to flog capitalist free enterprise — now, that’s a laugh. It’s as rich as a speech by Philippe d’Orléans (pick any one that you like) cautioning against “moral hazard.” What’s not so funny is this bit of History Not.

“Capitalism’s bad Rap”—a force so sinister and world-disfiguring that it must be capitalized—“has helped shape a lot of bad economic policy. People who believe it look to government to ‘create jobs,’ whereas the most powerful job-creating machine has always been the private sector. They believe the best way to raise revenues for government is to raise taxes on the so-called rich and on ‘profit-hungry’ corporations.”

This is true only if “Always” equals “Two Centuries.” The chapter on job creation comes late in the history of capitalism. I have said this before, and it’s a complicated thought that’s a tad beyond my powers of expression, but I don’t give up. The capitalist dream is to have no — zero — employees. That’s because the capitalist dream is to reduce overhead to zero. Are we in accord about that? If so, then we’re ready to tackle the anomalous phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution, during which capitalists hired jillions of workers to operate their new factories.

Why did capitalists become industrialists? Why, that is, did they forsake, for a time, the  no-overhead mantra of capitalism? Because a window of opportunity opened on what I have called an anomaly — a strange, one-time only exception to the rules. During much of the Nineteenth Century and most of the Twentieth, it made sense to overlook the no-overhead rule because the profits to be made even from high-overhead enterprises were, literally, fabulous, beyond imagining.

It’s all a matter of hydrostatics, really. Initially, after a technological breakthrough, a few people have tremendous advantages. These dwindle as know-how and its attendant benefits spread throughout society. By 1976, anybody could make steel. But only companies the size of US Steel had huge pots of cash to play with. Today, the hydrostatics are all about wages. Workers in China make less than worker in New Jersey. But workers in China have been making more and more money even so, and in some industries the Chinese advantage has been lost. Portugal, the poor man of Europe, still makes routine as well as artisanal pottery. When workers everywhere are paid about the same, globalization will come to a complete stop. It could not be simpler. (I wish I could say that imperialism will come to a complete stop, too, but imperialism is all about power, not economics.)

If I’ve made a few blunders in my history, at least I’ve been talking history. Capitalism and globalism and industrialization and full employment did not just pop out of a box, Big-Bang style, two hundred years ago. For centuries before the Industrial Revolution, the Earth subsisted on a peasant economy, with most people working the land for very meager returns, while small cadres of thug-like elites lived on cream. I don’t think that I am being tendentious. It was an awful arrangement, but it doesn’t seem to have been anybody’s particular doing. The main thing is to prevent its happening again.

It seems, lately, that I always want to begin this page with a short list of the pages that haven’t been written — the ones that I promise to get round to. Right now, there are three derelictions — their subjects being a chamber recital, a Broadway show, and a novel. But who, besides me, gives a damn? I’m flattering myself with a guilty conscience.

I have caught up on the Friday Movies front, though: three weeks ago, I saw La Nana, a genial film from Chile. Two weeks ago, I didn’t go to the movies at all, but last Friday I saw the unhappily titled but otherwise marvelous The Men Who Stare at Goats.

We read Stephen King’s story in The New Yorker, and recalled of reading Stephen King in The New Yorker the first time that that happened. Publishing an assertively non-literary writer is one thing; treating the magazine as an ongoing pre-publication event for forthcoming books is another. And that’s what fiction at The New Yorker seems to be, lately, no matter who writes it.

If it weren’t for Liesl Schillinger, I just might give up on the Book Review review.

Everything was amazing about the season finale, but the award for standout amazingness goes to Don’s three pitches. Or does it go to Jon Hamm for pulling them off?

Last season, Jon Hamm took some time off to do an evening of Saturday Night Live, the highlight of which was a spoof ad selling “Don Draper’s Guide To Picking Up Girls,” or somesuch. Tonight, Mr Hamm bested that performance with “Don Draper’s Guide to Looking Sharp on a Diet of Humble Pie.” There are Komodo dragons out there with a better lock on contrition. 

But then being sorry isn’t what sells, is it?

During the third plea — Don’s visit to Peggy’s flat — I was so overwhelmed that I had to reach out for Kathleen. It was as though an old school friend had been assassinated, or elected Holy Roman Emperor. I was shaken to the core of my vitals. The lighting helped. Elizabeth Moss, an alluring young woman in real life (at least as perceived from an aisle seat in the third row, last spring), was shot to look like a cross between the Bamian buddhas and Queen Victoria. If Don’s “please help me” speeches were arresting, that’s because his interlocutors — Roger Sterling, first; then Peter Campbell; and, finally, Peggy Olson — knew who was talking to them: a consummate adman. And yet each one of them acceded (“acceded” being the polite word for “fell for it”). Maybe that’s what they mean by “basilisk stare.”

Don is no basilisk, though. He rattled Betty in the middle of the night and called her a whore. This was an awful thing to say, but it was also Don’s way of saying “goodbye,” even if he didn’t know it. If we find, at the dawn of next season, that Betty and Don are still together, we’ll know that the relationship has been reconstituted from the ground up. I’m thinking of the end of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.

Rachel saw our reunion as a continuation. I felt differently: that she and I had gone our separate ways and subsequently had fallen for for third parties to whom, fortuitously, we were already married.

I’m not counting on that, though. I’m hoping that Don and Betty will have moved on from their profoundly ill-fitting and unsatisfying marriage. Kudos to Sally Draper for turning on her mother for the truth: “Did you make him leave?”

The only way to have made the episode even better would have been to play the David Rose recording of “The Stripper” when Joan Holloway rejoined her new colleagues and took charge as quartermaster. It would have been wholly wrong, that music, but it would have been gala fun.

What was gala fun was Don’s grin: “We’re negotiating.” All those white-white teeth, held in reserve for kills such as this. Spielberg can eat his heart out: the real McCoy didn’t need animatronics or DNA revival, but was trying, probably desperately, to find a script, a director, and a chance.

Here’s to next year!

This week’s report involves a very seedy offense — a policeman viewing child pornography while on duty, on the computer located in the station’s evidence room (and not just viewing it, apparently) — but what caught our attention was the news item’s failure to specify just how the infraction was discovered.

Although Ryan Hutton’s reporrting is full of damning evidence against Officer Alan Vigiard, it neglects to nail down the truly interesting details, which have nothing to do with pornography or distinctive scars and everything to do with — one imagines — carelessness, and perhaps even multitasking.

Police Chief Donald Poirot and the State Police Berkshire Detective Unit began investigating after a folder containing 153 images of child pornography was copied onto CDs with evidence for a larceny case and sent to the Berkshire County district attorney’s office, according to court documents.

One would like to know more about this apparent goof-up. Did Officer Vigiard copy the 153 images onto a CD? If so, why? And who recorded the video clip, presumably taken from the evidence room’s security monitor? Screenwriters will want to know!

¶ Matins: Ezra Klein (whom we only first heard about yesterday, has obtained a collection of charts that compare medical costs in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world. (Washington Post; via Marginal Revolution)

The health-care reform debate has done a good job avoiding the subject of prices.

¶ Lauds: Maria Popova writes about the strange mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. (Good)

¶ Prime: Jay Goltz considers his entrepreneurial constitution. (You’re The Boss)

¶ Tierce: In the summer of 1934, Wall Street lawyer Phelan Bouvier wrote to his wife, Edith, then summering as usual in East Hampton, to inform her of his dire economic situation. As an “Exchange Specialist,” Bouvier watched as his clients were mowed down, not by the Depression, but by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Thus was the stage set for Grey Gardens. (Letters of Note)

¶ Sext: Oy! Used caskets for sale, at craigslist. (You Suck at Craigslist)

¶ Nones: In a Milan court, 23 Americans have been convicted in absentia of kidnapping, and are considered fugitives in Italy. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: George Pelecanos’s introduction to the NYRB reprint of Don Carpenter’s 1966 Hard Rain Falling has been published at The Rumpus.

¶ Compline: We thought that women’s residences were a thing of the past. Not so! Hilary Stout writes about the Webster Apartments, the Brandon Residence. and even a place named after Joan of Arc. (NYT)

Bon weekend à tous!

Thursday night already! Why isn’t it, I ask, a greater satisfaction to know that the weeks pass so quickly because I’m engaged and busy? Perhaps because I was longing for disengagement all afternoon. I didn’t want to do anything. I certainly didn’t want to deal with the backlog of stuff that has piled up around my desk since the beginning of October. Just thinking about it filled me with despair. I wanted it to be fitted out with cement shoes, carted off to a dock on the Passaic River, and dumped in the water. Sayonara, paperasse!

That was one of several things that didn’t happen today. Here’s another: I never did figure out how to get out of going to the theatre this evening. Not that I tried very hard. It’s a very familiar tune. In the old days — up until ten years or so ago — I would mount mini-rebellions, and not go to concerts and plays for which we had tickets. I blush to confess it! And when I think of the shows that I missed, “blush” is not the word. If this site serves no other function, it gets me to the church on time. I didn’t try to wiggle out of going to the theatre because I couldn’t imagine how I would ever explain passing up the chance to see Rosemary Harris and Jan Maxwell in The Royal Family.

Which is something else that didn’t happen today: I don’t have to explain not going. I went because, in the end, it was the easier thing to do. Fifteen minutes ahead of time, I stopped fiddling around and got dressed. Then I dawdled a bit, so that I wouldn’t be too early —they don’t let you into the theatres until about 7:30. But the trains were great, and I walked into the old Biltmore at 7:40. Done. If they had canceled the performance, I’d have left not only with a clear conscience but a sense of mission accomplished. The idea wasn’t so much to see a play as to show up in time for it — an achievement completed twenty-five minutes before the curtain went up.

It was one of the great nights. Jan Maxwell, whom I adore more and more, delivered a boffo second-act finale. Rosemary Harris, who played Ms Maxwell’s role the last time the Kaufman-Ferber property was revived on Broadway, floated about with magisterial serenity, as though she were the embodiment of the title. (Indeed, her performance was a reminder that modern royal families are all functional thespians.) But more about that anon. I hope.

Right now, it’s time to get ready for Friday morning.

¶ Matins: Tim Carmody writes about Love in the Time of Twitter, a rebuttal of sorts of David Brooks’s much-discussed column about, well, how texting murdered romance. (Snarkmarket; NYT; Washington Post)

¶ Lauds: Why did the revival of Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs close a week after opening (and several weeks of previews)? Patrick Healy analyzes the changes in audience expectations that doomed the production. (NYT)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon encourages Lloyd Blankfein, and other future former heads of Goldman Sachs, to retire into quiet private life. Their predecessors’ post-Goldman careers have been anything but stellar — unless we’re talking asteroids that crash and burn. (Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Scout’s fantastic follow-up to his entry on the Owls of PS 110: the principal saw it and asked Scout if he’d like to take a closer look from up on the roof. Very cool. (Scouting New York)

¶ Sext: Muscato wishes “a happy 117th birthday to dizzy screen favorite Alice Brady,” and why not? (Café Muscato)

¶ Nones: BBC Commentator Paul Wood observes that the capture, by Israeli marines, of Iranian weapons bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon, heralds hostilities to come. (BBC)

¶ Vespers: Colm Tóibín is into villanelles lately, and he has taken inspiration from a champion hurler. (London Review Blog)

¶ Compline: Like it or not, neuroscience is going to rebuild ethics from scratch. Philosophy, moral codes — in the dumper. You only thought that you knew right from wrong; in fact, the difference between good and evil is highly contextual. (Frontal Cortex)

My mother would have been 91 today. The most curious bit of numerology in my life that I’m aware of is the curious harmony that vibrates between my mother’s birthday and my daughter’s. My mother was born on what became known as “False Armistice Day,” 4 November 1918. There was reason to believe that the War was over — but it wasn’t, quite. It would last for precisely another week, until 11 November, which is Megan’s birthday. An astrologer would seize up at the idea of bracketing a Capricorn between two Scorpios, but my more historical turn of mind relishes the finer, more improbable conjunction.

My appreciation of this accident of birth is entirely ornamental. I can’t work up the slightest interest in trying to read an occult meaning into the association of my mother with a day that wasn’t what it was thought to be, or my daughter’s with the anniversary of a true day of peace. What I should quickly point out to anyone who determined to find significance in this sheer accident of dates is that, while my mother was born on the actual “False Armistice Day,” my daughter was born on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the real one. As numbers go, 54 is among the less prepossessing, owing whatever éclat it carries to the the location of a television studio on a particular West Side block. There is not only no connection between my daughter and a once-infamous night club; there is an anti-connection. The only interesting thing about a picture that contains “Megan” and “Studio 54” is the insistence with which the two terms repel one another.

My mother’s birthday was a day of recognition. It didn’t matter what sort of present I gave her, but it was very, very important that I not forget the day. A card and a Whitman’s Sampler always did the trick, at least coming from me. I don’t know, now I think of it, what sort of gift my sister was supposed to come up with. As for my father’s birthday presents, they existed on a higher, radically more expensive plane, and did not always involve the opening of gift-wrapped boxes. The house on Sturbridge Drive in Houston, for example, was a birthday present, or said to be. I thought it was a joke — the house was a joke (albeit an extremely luxurious one, at least by standards familiar to me), and its being a birthday present was a joke. But that was my mother’s story, and she stuck to it. Looking back, I think that she liked it best of all her homes. It was very large, and it enabled her to give a lot of signature parties.

(Lest you start thinking of my mother as a hostess along the lines of Bette Davis or Tallulah Bankhead, let me assure you that she was a lot more like Celeste Holm. Every party was a carefully crafted plinth for the stages of my father’s corporate career, which more or less fell apart within a couple of years of her death. My mother’s parties were like very astute bridge bids, and having a big house in Tanglewood blessed her with a winning No Trump hand.)

Like so many darling daughters of the Twenties, my mother was something of a fetishist, dementedly sentimental about the pressing of certain buttons at certain times. The pleasure that she took in receiving a corny card and an even cornier box of vulgar chocolates (which she knew to be vulgar) on her birthday was, to my budding intellect, repulsive. I was very young when I lost all respect the idea that “it’s the thought that counts.” (The thought has never counted with me, that’s for sure.) Pleasing my mother was a kabuki sort of thing: if you made the correct gesture, it inspired the correct feeling. From time to time, I would ask clumsy questions that boiled down to this: don’t you want something really nice? And my mother’s answer, broken and almost loveless, was invariably a complaint about my negative outlook on life.

It took years for me to understand that the correct gesture is the only way in which to express respect, because my mother confused respect with love. If, indeed, she ever came to terms with my failure to become one of Notre Dame’s Irish Guard, I think that she would have been content to see me grow up to be a gay interior designer. She would have professed to be “disappointed,” but she would have known where she was, and she would have understood how to accept the commiseration of her friends. She never had the faintest idea how to deal with the actual me, and she never wanted to know, not for a moment.

But of course she was not my mother.

Beginning today, the full text of the Daily Office appears at Portico. To continue reading the entry for a given hour, simply click on it, or click here to see today’s entire Daily Office.

¶ Matins: Manisha Verma’s essay on Jon Stewart’s effectiveness as a de-fogger suggests that Comedy Central may have discovered the cure for television. (3 Quarks Daily; via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: The sale of the Lehman Brothers art collection, although it brought in twice the projected total, demonstrates the wishful thinking behind much art investing. Quite aside from the fact that Lehman was not in the business of purchasing artworks in order to profit from their resale (as indeed it was supposed to be doing with its other investments), the proceeds of the sale are but a drop in the bucket of Lehman’s bankruptcy — $1.35 million as against $250 billion. (Bloomberg; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Steve Tobak doesn’t buy the theory, advanced by The Daily News, that Galleon-Scandal insiders Hector Ruiz and Bob Moffit were lured to their doom by a comely lass called Danielle Chiesi — but that’s only because he doesn’t think that she’s much of a “cheerleader.” (The Corner Office)

¶ Tierce: Michael Williams looks back to the days when he delivered firewood on autumn weekends. (A Continuous Lean)

¶ Sext: Meanwhile, Choire Sicha takes his lorgnette (or is a loupe?) to a new line from Michael Bastian that Michael Williams probably won’t be covering: Homeless Chic. $525 just for long underwear! (The Awl)

¶ Nones: The man who helped to take “primitive people” off the map, Claude Lévi-Strauss, died on Friday. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: A long appreciation of Cheever’s Journals from Geoff Dyer — a writer of very similar lyrical gifts. Mr Dyer persuasively ties Cheever’s craftsmanship as a published writer to his repressed homosexuality, and sees both as prisons. (Guardian; via Critical Mass)

¶ Compline: Nick Paumgarten advises us to abandon our hopes for multitasking, which “doesn’t work. You just perform each task less efficiently.” (The New Yorker)

Until today, I thought that I had a reliably diplomatic matter. As a Capricorn, after all, I’m supposed to. But I made a remark this afternoon that left me wondering if I had any social sense at all.

Of course, if I’m really honest about the matter, it was yet another case of Abominable Conceit, my besetting sin. It’s not that I’m conceited, as we used to say (but one doesn’t, anymore, does one?). It’s that my conceit is truly abominable, a sort of conceit piled on top of conceit. I’m so conceited in, short, that I think that I’m allowed to be conceited.

What happened today illustrates the matter perfectly. I was walking up Lafayette Street, and then Fourth Avenue, with my friend T—. I probably ought to say that T— is an acquaintance, someone whom I met on the Internet, and then, three years ago, in person. We met today for the second time in life. But I like T— too much for “acquaintance,” and so I am prepared to presume, in a sort of flourish of desperation, when in fact I’ve every reason to suppose that T— despises me. 

We were walking up Fourth Avenue, as I say, and I was feeling very luxurious about living in Manhattan. This is something that happens whenever I am out and about with visitors from Europe (T— is one such) who not only love New York but who actually spend time here. To me (and this is the “luxury” part), New York just is. It’s the town outside my front door. Mind you, I don’t really think this on an everyday basis. Ordinarily, I can’t quite believe my good luck, living here as I do. Sure, it would be great if my luck could be buffed a bit, so that Paris or Amsterdam were the town outside my front door. But even if I occupied a gargantuan flat in the Seiziëme, on terms equivalent to fee simple absolute, there would be one way in which Paris (or Amsterdam) fell short: I shouldn’t have been born there.

I was born here, here in Manhattan — on West 65th Street, as a matter of fact, just a few blocks from where my grandson is going to be born in a few weeks. And when I feel luxurious about having been born in Manhattan — even though I grew up in Westchester, went to school in Indiana (“sounds like dancing”), and spent seven years of Babylonian exile in Houston, such that Manhattan was merely my birthplace until I was over thirty years old — I write myself, from time to time, a check with “Abominable Conceit” inscribed on the Memo line. Strivers from elsewhere are welcome to come to New York and get to to know the City, but I, you see, I was born here, so I don’t have to strive at all. What’s interesting about New York, in short, is the stuff that I already know. There’s a line in Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules that captures quite completely my fatuity here, but the last thing I want to do is magnify my conceit by quoting it. My conceit, in any case, is not so much Abominable as it is just plain Rancid.

Feeling luxurious, then, as I made my way up Fourth Avenue with a man who loved being on Fourth Avenue somewhat more than I did — but only somewhat; a good friend lives on Fourth Avenue, and I feel very comfortable walking what have become the familiar blocks just south of Union Square — I was reminded of the scene in The Good Shepherd in which an Italian-American gentleman wonders how WASPs celebrate being American in the way that the Italians and the Irish and the Germans and the Whatnots celebrate being American, and Matt Damon’s WASP character replies in words to the effect that WASPS own America, and that the Italians and the Irish and the Germans and the Whatnots are just visitors. “And that,” I said to my friend, on Fourth Avenue, “is how I feel about New York. Everyone else is just a visitor.”

What my friend said in response proved once and for all that I have no diplomatic cred whatsoever. What he said was, “Well, I’m very happy to be a visitor in New York.” I wanted, for a moment, to lose my lunch. I hadn’t meant him! I hadn’t meant visitor visitors. I’d meant — but never mind; I’ll only make it worse. That’s how Abominable Conceit works. Every attempt to prove that you’re not really so very abominable marks you out instead as even more abominable. Rancid, even.

I was feeling luxurious for a reason, though. I’d had a wonderful lunch with a terrifically interesting fellow. Stylish, sophisticated, world-traveled, and gifted with a friendliness that I have hardly ever encountered in such a thoughtful frame, T— made me feel grateful for my life at a level that’s not often sounded. Out of my depth, I made such a hash of gratitude that I forgot my diplomacy.

¶ Matins: The editors of The Awl analyze today’s NYC ballot, and render a nice distinction between “douchebaggery” and “dickslappery.” By Frank Rich’s account, things were much more exciting upstate — until just before his column went to press. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: Two sensationally (if unintentionally) amusing write-ups for coming art shows downtown: Avant-Guide to NYC: Discovering Absence and Crotalus Atrox (Or Fat Over Lean).  (ArtCat)

¶ Prime: The economics of Swedish meat balls — which we share for the woo-hoo fun of being in completely over our heads! (Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: Eric Patton sighs over the beauty of Italian, while collecting a nice armload of local street signs for you to puzzle out. (SORE AFRAID)

¶ Sext: In case David Drzal’s Book Review rave didn’t convince you that William Grimes’s Appetite City is an absolute must-read, we’re sure that Jonathan Taylor’s more expansive review at Emdashes will do the job.

¶ Nones: Did they settle that thing in Honduras? Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing is certain: the Micheletti coup did a number on Honduran business. (NYT)

(At first, we believed that ousted president Manuel Zelaya was an idiot. Over time, we came to appreciate the fact that Roberto Micheletti used to be his mentor.)

¶ Vespers: Daniel Menaker considers Tim Page’s Parallel Play, an expansion of the New Yorker piece in which Mr Page shared his relief at finally having been diagnosed as having Asperger’s Syndrome. (Barnes & Noble Review; via  The Second Pass)

¶ Compline: Being a terrible driver may mean that you’re not going to develop Parkinson’s! (Wired Science; via The Morning News)

Working on the Book Review review this weekend, I got stuck on a line from Adam Kirsch’s piece about Anna Heller’s book.

Even today, Rand’s books sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Heller reports that in a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Of course, I thought: the very idea of “the book that has most influenced my life” is one that only people who don’t read books would dream of entertaining. Young readers may be forgiven for enthusiastic replies — Brontë and Austen for the ladies, a fanlike arrangement of manly-men guides, running from Hemingway to Heinlein, for the gents — but no serious reader over the age of thirty can come up with a list of fewer than 100 “most influential” titles. That’s because literature is as interactive as the Internet.

Books not only answer books, they change as we age, so that, for me — for example — Jane Austen’s Emma is not one novel but six, a different book each time I’ve read it. I love Emma, and I’ve re-read it more often than any other novel, but to say that it’s “the most influential book”? What rubbish. Where would I put The Way We Live Now, or Harold Nicholson’s Kings, Courts, and Monarchy — not to mention the entire Mitford oeuvre. Not to mention the entire Lucia corpus! (Yes, I’m being a trifle silly.) Not to mention John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards!

The blockquote also suggests why Rand is highly regarded by the people who do read her: the only other book that they’ve read is the Bible. Even Atlas Shrugged is more entertaining than Kings and Chronicles.

Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that we’re behind schedule this week, and that only two new pages have been added to Portico as of this writing: this week’s Book Review review and a word about Javier Marias’s intensely engaging (almost shoulder-grappling) story in the issue of The New Yorker that bears today’s date, “While the Women Are Sleeping.”

All I could think of was the original Poseidon Adventure. Even against the backdrop of mortal disaster, people have their everyday gripes, as well as the determination to get on with their lives — unless, of course, disaster occasions a holiday.

The penultimate episode of this season’s Mad Men is unavoidably drenched in irony. Ordinarily, hindsight shows us depths of consequence and impact that contemporaries, hearing the news, couldn’t guess at the time. Here, the irony is inverted: for JFK’s assassination turned out to be utterly inconsequential. Aside from ushering Lyndon Baines Johnson into the White House, and, with him, a completely different brand of political savvy, the events of 22 November 1963 had nothing like the impact that Robert Kennedy’s murder, five years later, had on American politics. And even then, the effects were confined to politics. In the event, life went on, and with a vengeance.

In late 1963, however, the world seemed shattered to many Americans. We may smugly say, knowing what we know, that they overreacted: the end was not nigh. But of course they were simply reacting, as people do, and their reactions were real enough. Betty Draper seems to have been pushed by the congruence of her Junior League advocacy, her very recent discovery of Don’s forged identity, the Kennedy assassination, and an unexpected encounter with Henry Francis at Margaret Sterling’s severely under-attended wedding, into making the surprising declaration that she does not love her husband anymore. In a technical sense, this is true: children aside, the grounds of her marriage have been swept away completely. Whether the chances of re-growth have also been blighted is a different question, one that Betty may or may not linger long enough to find out. Her reaction to the assassination may be irrelevant and sentimental, but it’s very real.

I was surprised when Kathleen didn’t pop with vindication when Don responded to Peggy’s question, in the deserted office on the day of the funeral, “What are you doing here?” with a quick, almost unthinking, “The bars are closed.” Kathleen harbors the dream that Don and Peggy will go on to rule Madison Avenue together, in spite of but also because of their lack of romantic chemistry. Don’s frankness with Peggy — often raw and unhelpful — was halfway friendly for a change.

And the episode ended, not as it might have done, minutes earlier, in Don Draper’s bedroom (the usual fade), but at Sterling Cooper. A first? I leave that to the Mad Maniacs.

Although no one has asked, I know that you’re all dying for a look at the new rug. That’s the sort of intuition to which may brain has been reduced by this month of low-key, low-budget (but not, in the aggregate, inexpensive!) domestic upgrade.

As I wrote (in gratitude) to Quatorze last night, every time I walk into the bedroom, I want to drop to my knees and say a decade of the Rosary.

***

We began shortly after eleven, and finished at about two-fifteen. By the time Quatorze arrived, I had emptied the room of most small things — the desk chair, the hamper, the old tea table — leaving only the nightstands and the bed to contend with. I had warned Quatorze that we might have to empty the tall bookcase in which Kathleen keeps her collection of old children’s books and her accumulation of books on knitting, needlepoint, and beading; and I was glad that I did, because it would have been an unpleasant surprise indeed to find that this was so. In the event, foresight made the task bearable. By then, we had lifted the massive mattress off to one side, stood the box spring alongside it, and carefully tilted the bed frame — long ago bolted together — so as not to put too much torque on the two supporting legs. We had then rolled out the padding and then the rug (bear in mind, please, that Quatorze was a good 80% of “we”) and replaced the bed.

So now we had only to remove the books from the shelf (carefully, so that they’d be easy to re-shelve), carry the bookcase around the bed, finish rolling out the padding and the carpet, and replace the bookcase and finally the books. A lot of vacuuming and dusting was done along the way; we really ought to have been wearing surgical masks. Once the desk was back in place — it’s much heavier than it looks to be — I decided that we ought to break for lunch.

Afterward, Quatorze came back to the flat and re-hung some pictures in the living room. The paintings over the newly re-upholstered love seat, which has a somewhat higher back than the sofa that it replaced, were “driving me crazy,” he said. At about five o’clock, declaring that he would be burning his clothes, Quatorze left for home, and I went back to the bedroom for a few hours of Putting Things Back. When everything else was tidy, I made the bed.

And that was that! It was deliberate and methodical, if I may indulge in surplusage. “Deliberate and methodical” is Quatorze’s normal setting, but it isn’t mine; what came to my aid was an extended fatigue that has crushed my habitual impatience. I had neither the energy nor the snap to get cute. I plodded along tortugously. Eventually, it was all done. 

Big fish in small ponds are easily lulled into forgetting that they are not actually living in ponds. This week, in Stockton, Utah:

A traffic stop involving a young officer and the son of a small-town mayor has the whole town talking. The mayor of Stockton tried to fire the officer for issuing his son a ticket.

Inevitably, the story was picked up by Salt Lake TV. So that now we and you know about what was surely intended to remain a small-town affair.

Democracy would proceed in a far more orderly fashion if only the childless could hold elective office.

Quatorze is a god. You should be so lucky as to have him put your house in order.

¶ Matins: Happy Hallowe’en from Brooks Peters! (An Open Book)

Among many other virtues, he is a source of great and abiding courage. “Done,” he would say, meaning not only that there would be no more discussion about, say, the silver tray with the dented gallery, but that the object would no longer be on the premises by sundown.

¶ Lauds: A slideshow of Harlem-infused images by Ralph de Carava, who died the other day at the age of 89. (Los Angeles Times)  A video of Ingmar Bergman’s FÃ¥rö retreat, soon to be an artists’ colony. (W) (via Arts Journal)

The stuff that we took up to HousingWorks was the merest sidelight on the day’s activities. And yet it was my only exercise. The rest of the time, I watched Quatorze while he assembled the temporary bookshelf, or cleared the hall closet of document boxes, or hung pictures in improbable corners.

¶ Prime: Floyd Norris very reasonably argues that the solution to the high-pay stink on Wall Street is to curb its high revenues. He points to inflated charges, business concentration, reliance upon overly-complex instruments, tax evasion, and excessive risk-taking as unseemly practices that, if curtailed, might bring bonuses back down to earth. (NYT)

Best of all, I did not watch while Quatorze shepherded the document boxes to the storage unit. No! I stayed home. I stayed home, and piled the big art books onto the new temporary bookshelf. While he dealt with the boxes, and the driver of the moving van, and the Shining-like atmosphere at the Moribunda Beach Club.

¶ Tierce: The world’s tallest treehouse — complete with basketball court. Looking at the pictures makes us feel much better about our place. (inhabitat; via The Infrastructurist)

The temporary bookshelf is a colossal (and not very well-made) number from Home Depot that I bought when I learned that the bookshelf that I really want will take “months” for Scully & Scully to deliver. On or about the joyful day of its arrival, the steel shelving will go to the storage unit, where I’m sure it will be very helpful.

¶ Sext: Wagner’s Ring — in 45 seconds. (via OperaMagazine.nl; thanks, Fossil!)

While Quatorze was setting it up, though, I was appalled that I could not remember the name for the Eighties vogue for industrial fixtures in high-end home decorating. It came to me while he was at the storage unit, and when I told him what it was, he couldn’t believe that he’d forgotten, too: “High Tech.” The fact that more than 25 years have passed since then, together with the fact that the term was long ago appropriated by people (computer users and others) with a better claim to it, may explain our oblivion.

¶ Nones: Bans on stitched clothing and on alcohol will make the spread of swine flu at this year’s hajj a lot easier. (NYT)

And so the Great Domestic Reorientation of 2009 comes to an end — and, with it, these hybrid entries.

¶ Vespers: A very brisk but fully-packed  review of Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print,  at Survival of the Book.

Next week, the new, shorter Daily Office will continue on its own, while Dear Diary entries will no longer be interrupted by pesky blockquotes.

¶ Compline: A new book, The Other Side of Sadness, by George Bonanno, more or less tosses the idea of “working through grief” out the window. Most people mourn briefly, and then return to normal life. This is okay. (XXfactor; via The Morning News)

The longer Daily Office will reappear in January, but not here — at Portico, which will celebrate its tenth anniversary at some point early in the New Year. (If you can tell me the date, and back it up, there’s $50 in it for you. This offer does not apply to persons named Megan O’Neill.)

Bon weekend à tous!