What made me check out the Bergen County Record? I’ll never know. “Clifton Police arrest teen drug dealer.” A very thorough report.

In the juvenile’s room, police found 20 zip-lock bags of marijuana, empty bags, a bong — a device used to smoke marijuana — and $115 in cash that belonged to him, Berdnik said. The search also turned up 21 bags of marijuana in Maloney’s sneakers and $200 that belonged to him, Berdnik said.

Detectives determined that Maloney bought the marijuana from the teen, Berdnik said.

Defendant Maloney hails from Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, which rather reminds us of Eric Blore’s version of Who’s On First.

¶ Matins: Impressed by Apple’s emailed receipts — no paper! — Chadwick Matlin looks into the costs of “retrofitting” other retailers, and finds that they’re not inconsiderable. “So I begrudgingly and all-too-appropriately wave my white flag. You win, receipts.” (via Good)

¶ Lauds: Micahel Kimmelman writes about Tatort (Crime Scene), the German detective show that has been running since 1970 — with different versions for different cities!

¶ Prime: It’s when you succeed that running a business becomes truly tough. Jeffrey Pfeffer has one little word: Focus!

¶ Tierce: Tweeting, the old-fashioned way: Robert Keith posts commercially-printed “ads” in the window of his Brooklyn bed-and-breakfast: “Credit Default Swaps Should Be Prosecuted — Not Paid.”

¶ Sext: Well, what do you know! New York Governor David Paterson has hired The Awl’s Alex Balk to do a bit of “clarifying” speechwriting!

¶ Nones: Yesterday: Muammar el-Qaddafi at home. Tomorrow: New Jersey.

¶ Vespers: Beyond Orhan Pamuk (although not entirely): Selçuk Altun’s top-ten Turkish books. All are available in English translation (at least at Amazuk).

¶ Compline: Whether concerned about predatory old partiers or determined to wring more moolah from its base, MoMA defines “Junior” as “<40.”

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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This has not been a good week for Dear Diary entries. Either I’m so tired that I can’t see straight, or I’m preoccupied by very boring insights. Tonight, going in, I can assure you that I have nothing to say.

Which is to say that I kept my head down and worked hard all day. All day? Yes, all day.

And then I remember that I interrupted the Daily Office process to go out for a haircut. I got the haircut; I had a club sandwich at the Hi-Life, and I bought much more than I’d planned on at Agata & Valentina. Then I came home and got back to work. I’m still at work, even though I completed every project scheduled for today hours ago. But all I thought about while I was out was how I wanted to change this and that at the Daily Office.

I am Mr All-Work at the moment — which isn’t a problem. The problem is that I was brought up (by the literary lights whom I read when I was young) to look for a certain kind of story. There’s another kind of story lying around here somewhere — not that my pointing that out is at all interesting. But I’ll figure it out.

Speaking of optimism, do you think that Randolph Scott, in real life, said, “you’re swell!” anywhere near as often as he said it in the movies? He’s such a doofus that I suspect that he did. “You’re swell!” sounds like the limit of his brainpower. Gay men like to imagine that Scott and Cary Grant, when they lived together in the Thirties, had something physical going. “Don’t make me laugh,” as Grant said in about forty movies. I’m sure that Grant, who was seen trading currency futures during the making of Gunga Din, figured out a way to make Scott pay more than his share of the rent. The ideal roomate, no?  

In other news, I can’t decide whether to bore you with the story about boring Kathleen last night. We don’t call it boring, of course, even when Kathleen falls asleep at the dinner table; we just say that my voice is soporific. Kathleen asked a question about Mozart that led to a discussion — via the fact that Mozart’s father, Leopold, came from Augsburg, in Bavaria, on a sort of get-out-while-you-can basis (Leopold’s handling of his son’s very considerable child-prodigy earnings doesn’t make him the Bernie Madoff of the 1780s, but one suspects that that’s only from lack of suckers) — of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire. Even I had trouble keeping track. Kathleen would seek FDA approval, if she didn’t want me all for herself.

Ah! Kathleen just got home, and I want to read to her the funny piece in this week’s New Yorker, “For Immediate Release” by Paul Simms. I haven’t laughed so much at a New Yorker casual in — a long time.

 

¶ Matins: At Survival of the Book, Brian considers David Ulin’s widely-read LA Times piece, “The Lost Art of Reading.”

¶ Lauds: Prince Charles takes his (architectural) case to the public. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Robert Cringley poses the Emperor’s-New-Clothes question about American corporations that we’ve been asking for ages — only with greater élan: when did profits become more important than pensions and health benefits?

¶ Tierce: What happens in Oman at iftar, the call to evening prayer? One thing seems to be clear: the orgy is not traditional. (via  Café Muscato)

¶ Sext: Vacationing on Cape Cod, Scout looks at the hostelries along Route 6A between Truro and Provincetown, and finds a romantically abandoned motel.

¶ Nones: In the eyes of the developed world, Muammar el-Qaddafi hovers unstably between dictator and thug. Dictators, while not approved, are accepted; thugs, like terrorists, are not permitted to negotiate. Negotiating the release of the Lockerbie bomber, the colonel may have kicked himself away from the table.

¶ Vespers: While we’re getting all weepy about the end of The Book, maybe we ought to feel a little hopeful about the end of Books Like This, which never ought to be published in the first place.

¶ Compline: Edward Moore Kennedy: a princeling who had a U S Senate seat handed to him (repeatedly)? Or a little prince who had to overcome the allure of accidental advantages in order to find real strengths? We take the latter view, along with the Times, the Journal, and even the Post.  

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Morning Reads have all but fallen away entirely. There are two explanations. First, my mornings are now given over to combing the Internet and harvesting links. On the rare occasion when I’m done before lunch time, I’m far too agitated and muscid-eyed for straightforward reading. Second, I intensely dislike two of the books on this season’s list.

One of these is, of course, Moby-Dick. There the blame is all Melville’s. My objections to The Letters of Noël Coward are more complicated. I have enjoyed reading almost all of the letters of Noël Coward that appear in the book, edited (if that is the word) by Barry Day. Unfortunately, there are a lot of boring businessy letters from Coward’s colleagues. And because what Mr Day’s effort boils down to is a “life in letters,” the correspondence is a poor reflection of some of the important people in Coward’s life, such as Beatrice Lillie and Graham Payn. Ned Rorem has written about his relationship with Coward, but, perhaps because there were no surviving missives among the Englishman’s papers, the American’s name does not appear even in Mr Day’s index. Frustrating at first, this sense of off-stage life builds into a monstrous annoyance.

Also missing from the book is a sense of Coward’s sparkling presence. He writes cleverly but sincerely, but at the back of even the best letters there is a sense of duty discharged. Noël Coward was a very good writer, but his métier was performance. Looking at this clip, taken from his 1955 television special with Mary Martin (and oh, the letters to, fro, and about that collaboration — which began in 1946!), we can imagine what Coward must have been like at the height of his career, performing for a live audience: a magician. He may not have done tricks, but had a way of indicating that he was about to do something interesting — and then doing it, exactly right. In most of his movies, especially the late ones (Our Man in Havana, The Italian Job), Coward comes across as a distinctive character actor, one whom you might look forward to seeing in a movie, in the manner of Eric Blore or Edward Everett Horton. It takes a weird (and fairly unsatisfactory) film such as Bunny Lake Is Missing to elicit his facially acrobatic stagecraft.

¶ Last week, I sat down with the book that I’ve been calling Squillions and read through to the last page. So I’m done with it.

The moment that came closest to undoing him emotionally was the birthday lunch given in his honor by the queen. Would he consider accepting a knighthood, if offered? she asked. For once there was no ready Coward riposte, and his name was duly gazetted in the 1970 New Year’s Honours List. On February 3 came the investiture and, to the accompaniment of a military band appropriately playing “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” Sir Noël rose on painful knee with the recognition from his country he had deserved thirty years earlier.

There was an audible sigh of relief from the ranks of the other theatrical knights, and Sir Alec Guinness spoke for all of them when he said, “We have been like a row of teeth with the front tooth missing. Now we can smile again.”

Three books remain on the list (Rochefoucauld proved to be wholly unsuitable early on, but I never did take another picture of the books). I look forward to reading the rest of Don Quixote, and the collection of Lord Chesterfield’s letters, although perhaps not as “morning reads.” I dread the prospect of tackling Moby-Dick, indisputably the worst famous book that I have ever read, but that’s what’s next.

Something interesting happened to me today. Let’s see if I can make it interesting to you.

A few months ago — in late April or early May — I decided that I had better make a practice of reading the fiction in The New Yorker. I knew that I was getting old, and I didn’t want to get out of touch. I’d been reading The New Yorker for over forty-five years, but I’d stopped reading the stories — reading them as a matter of course, that is, simply because they were published in The New Yorker — decades ago. As you get older, that’s what happens. Every now and then, you take up something new, but for the most part you let go of things that used to be very important. When you give them up, you sigh a sigh of relief: you’re free. Your sense of well-being is no longer dependent on whether or not you have, say, read this week’s New Yorker story.

And it’s fine for a little while; but then you begin to wonder: what are those kids up to? Can you still even read the stories in The New Yorker? I found myself asking this every time a story by T Coraghessan Boyle appeared. I really cannot stand Mr Boyle’s work. It’s not that I think that he’s no good — not at all. I can tell that he’s very good. But I can’t stand his stories. (The real mystery man for me is Philip Roth. I can’t stand him, either — but I can’t begin to understand why he’s as highly regarded as he is. To me, the fiction of Philip Roth is nothing but a mound of slipshod vernacular.) Worried about the T Coraghessan Boyles out there, I thought that I had better start policing the perimeter, as one old dodger puts it in an old Miss Marple episode.

The only way to force myself to read the stories in The New Yorker — each and every one of them, whether or not I was in the mood to do so — was, I knew, to commit to writing them up as a weekly thing at Portico. And that’s what I did. Or it’s what I thought I did.

As I was publishing my write-up of this week’s New Yorker story today (Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fountain House“), I looked back at the other stories that I’ve written about. This is where the challenge of making the interesting thing that happened to me interesting to you gets tricky.

You probably couldn’t care less about the difference between a Web site and a blog, but, as you know, I operate one of each, and the work that I hope will last appears at the Web site, not here. One difference between a Web site and a blog is that Web sites require handwritten navigation. If you post a new page at a Web site, you have to update the associated menu page, or else nobody will be able to find what you’ve just written. (Blogs automate this business.)  So, after I wrote up Ms Petrushevskaya’s story, I added the title (as a link) to the list of New Yorker stories that I’ve written up. (The page has no permalink, but you can see it here.) Then I wondered why the oldest entry on the list dated to the issue of 8 June. Hadn’t I started writing up the stories in May? Or earlier?

Usually, when I dream up some new feature for my sites, I start out with blog entries. Both the Friday movies pieces and the Book Review reviews ran for ages on the old Daily Blague before I decided that they really belonged, permanently, at Portico. So I figured that there were a few Daily Blague entries that discussed New Yorker stories — written during May of this year — and I thought that I would simply transfer their contents to their proper destination. All I had to do was find them.

But the contents did not exist. I hadn’t lost the pages; I’d never written them. The first interesting thing that happened to me today was the shock of discovering that I had never written up a month’s worth of stories. I’d planned to write them up, hoped to write them up; but I’d never got round to writing them up. The second, much deeper, shock was realizing that I’d completely forgotten how different and difficult things were, three months ago.

It hit home when I found a draft appraising Jonathan Lethem’s story in the issue of 25 May, “Ava’s Apartment.” I’d written the story up, but I’d never edited it or formatted it or uploaded it or done any of the seven or eight things that have to be done to transform a raw piece of writing into a published Web page — at a Web site, without the help of a blogging platform. So I took care of that  today, this afternoon.

It’s a little thing. Today, I wouldn’t let a week go by without making sure that every new piece of prose got published. I have worksheets and tickler files to make sure that regular weekday projects (such as writing up the week’s Book Review, or the latest story in The New Yorker) are completed. In the spring, that competence was beyond me. Never mind why — just as long as you don’t think for a moment that I’m more disiciplined now than I was in May. Over the summer, by dint of concentrated effort, I’ve learned how to do a few things that I didn’t know how to do in April. It’s that simple. The surprise was that I’d completely forgotten what it was like not to know how to do the things that I can do now.

It’s the shock of reading history: we can’t believe that people used to be stupid enough to enslave other people. And so on. When we learn something, we forget what ignorance was like. We can’t quite believe that ignorance is the explanation. It’s hard to know that you didn’t know. But if you can manage the trick of it, nothing is more interesting.

Three months ago, there were all sorts of things that I wasn’t getting round to. That’s why I decided to take the summer off — from everything but work. The result is that I find it almost incomprehensible that I didn’t write up those stories and get the pages up onto Portico.

¶ Matins: Sorry! We missed this amazing news on Friday: “Mexico Legalizes Drug Possession.”

¶ Lauds: Christopher Hampton will adapt, Sam Mendes will direct, and Oprah Winfrey will produce a film version of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.

¶ Prime: Tyler Cowen asks if the bailouts were a good idea, and decides that they were.

¶ Tierce: Thirteen year-old Laura Dekker wants to sail around the world, alone. Her parents don’t object, but the Nederlander government does. A tough call?

¶ Sext: President Obama has lost all “creditability,” according to an anti-health-care-plan auto-faxer that somehow came to the attention of Choire Sicha. Sure, the wingnuts are scary. But, boy, can’t they write!

¶ Nones: Why special Sharia courts in secular nations pose a threat to sovereignty: “Malaysia Postpones Whipping of Woman Who Drank Beer.”

¶ Vespers: John Self behaves himself, and reads Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains. (He had owned a copy for a while.)

¶ Compline: The awful truth about asexuality: it’s not awful! (via  Joe.My.God)

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Here I was, thinking that I’d be spending the evening alone, when Ms NOLA wrote to ask if I’d like to go to a book party. The upshot of ensuing parlays was that Ms NOLA came to dinner after the book party. Over an impromptu series of small dishes, we spoke of cabbages and kings — stuff far too electrifiying to be discussed in these holy halls. Then Kathleen came home, from a dinner date with an old friend, and Ms NOLA told her the latest news.

I might have gone to the book party if I hadn’t ventured forth on a round of errands in the later afternoon. That a traingular walk — from 86th and Second to 92nd and Madison, down to 82nd and Madison, and hence home — should reduce me to geriatric biliousness is, sadly, no surprise. When I got home, I felt that strange sick feeling that overcomes me on very hot afternoons (but at no other time).

But I rallied, and dinner was interesting when it wasn’t simply tasty. I’ll report on the interesting part later. A lot of the food was purchased last Thursday, for the dinner with Irving’s parents. I’d overbought shamelessly. Among other things, we ate some delicious plums. Well, I did. There was only one of those, I realized ruefully. When I’d gotten over cooing about it, I had a plum of somewhat differerent provenance that Ms NOLA had already tasted. It did, as she said, have a “fermented” edge, quite unlike the utterly sweet and uncomplicated fruit that I’d begun with. If I were a very, very rich person, I would hire somebody just to buy fruit. Have I already told you the story about Lorenza de’ Medici (a famous Italian cook) and Lauren Bacall? The setting was a cooking promo at The Cellar, Macy’s basement kitchen shop. A propos of the dish, Ms Bacall asked, “But wherever do you get such good pears?” A true New Yorker — to which Ms de’ Medici’s truly Tuscan answer was, “Why, from your garden <where else?>.” There’s nothing like a good clash of cultures, is there.

And so to bed…

¶ Matins: Sounds like a great idea, but probably isn’t: “As Voter Disgust With Albany Rises, So Do Calls for a New Constitution.”

¶ Lauds: Sounds like a great idea, and probably is: “Scottish laser pioneers lead way in preserving world heritage treasures.”

¶ Prime: Robert Rubin, Citigroup, and Glass-Steagall: a brief entry by Felix Salmon (with help from Charlie Gasparino) snaps the pieces of the puzzle right where they belong.

¶ Tierce: Meg Hourihan administers First Aid/CPR without doing anything more than holding an elderly lady’s hand and keeping her talking. (via  Mr Hourihan)

¶ Sext: And here we thought of England as a green and pleasant land! “Pubs warn over plastic pints plan.” 5,500 customers are year are stabbed with broken pint glasses! (via The Awl)

¶ Nones: What happens when a sovereign power violates its own laws in the interest of self-defense? Barack Obama is willing to think twice.

¶ Vespers: Carlene Bauer reviews the reissue of Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me, at Second Pass.

¶ Compline: Matthew Fleischer writes provocatively about the death of a squirrel in Los Angeles. (via The Morning News)

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In the movie that I was watching in the kitchen this evening, Little Children, Jennifer Connelly’s character tries to tell her mother that her husband is not like her father: he’s different. “They’re all the same,” counters Mom.

Are they? Are we?

On the whole, I agree with Mom. I don’t think that men understand the value of relationships until they’ve been taken away. Men don’t have “relationships.” They have loyalties. The great thing about loyalty is that, once you’ve sworn it, you don’t have to think about it. In fact, you’re not supposed to think about it. “Reconsideration” and “loyalty” are two words that barely manage coexistence on the same page, and never in the same sentence. A relationship, in contrast, is an ongoing reconsideration.

Not to be flip, I was reconsidering my approach to making hamburgers. I had actually opened the latest issue of Saveur, which is all about burgers, and learned the most amazing trick: slipping butter into the middle of a patty works makes for a deliriously juicy (buttery) burger. This turns out to be quite true! I did not actually read the article to learn how to do it, though. I’m having very mixed feelings, lately, about books and magazines on the subject of cookery. Well, about reading them, I mean. There is so little time, and food is, after all, only food. At the same time, I’m an eager collector of handy tips, such as the idea of tucking a pat of butter inside a burger.

Here’s what I did, anyway: I took my sharpest knife to the newly-formed patty and sliced it equitorially. The resulting halves were only slightly deformed by this operation. Once they were made presentable, I sprinkled minced green onion on the slightly larger half and spread the other with a bit of butter (a good deal less than what I’d call a “pat,” though).

Maybe it wasn’t the butter that made the burgers so delicious. Maybe it was cooking them in a cast-iron frypan. It has taken me forty years to learn how to maintain a cast-iron pan, but I think I’ve finally got it. Oh, I always knew what you’re supposed to do, but I just couldn’t do it. I just had to clean the pan after each use, because, well, not to clean it would prove fatal, no? (There was a trick that I had to teach myself, though: use a straight-edged wooden spatula to dislodge sticky bits from the pan. This is as effective as conventional scrubbing, but nowhere near so damaging to the patina of ‘seasoning” (grease) that renders a well-kept cast-iron skillet frypan non-stick.)

Surprisingly delicious burgers were yet another example of how loyalty can get in the way of learning, if you let it — which of course you have to do if you are a loyal sort of guy.

I used to think that gay men were different. And why not? They were certainly thought to be different by the straight men who felt obliged to spit on them. The great discovery of my fifties, though, was that gay men are men, after all. I was very disappointed to find this out, because I had high hopes for gay men to be interesting. I didn’t think that it was being gay that made gay men more interesting; I just thought that it was the massive rejection from the bastions of masculinity that charactized life in the Fifties and Sixties and well into the Seventies that, well, opened up other lines of inquiry. But while gay men are sharp critical thinkers about masculinity, they don’t, as a rule, choose to  live outside it. The sad fact of the matter is that gay men like men, even if they do, like straight men, find them to be very irritating.

On the brighter side, there’s a lot less spitting.

Is there no hope? If Mom’s right, and all men are “the same,” then there’s clearly no percentage in attempting a more decent profile. Inevitably, you’ll let your lover down, and in the same old tawdry way as a million other guys.  The only way to save a shred of dignity is to be firm about one thing: don’t call Mom.

 New at Portico: It’s nothing short of miraculous, to us at least, that the week’s heat and humidity did not impair our productivity. But perhaps the dreadful climate explains why we can’t be bothered to put it any better than that.

¶ It took a while for us to warm to Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, and, when we did, the pleasure of reading the book was somewhat clouded by that sense that the author isn’t yet old enough to do justice to his adolescence. He does capture the black-hole solipsism of the fifteen year-old male — and that’s it. That’s it? A great deal of very rich material, including the struggles of a difficult but committed marriage, goes underdeveloped. Happily, there is no law against returning to harvested fields.

¶ Our initial response to Dave Eggers’s “Max at Sea,” in last week’s New Yorker, was straight agony. Trying to read what turned out to be a children’s story as fiction for adults tied us up in knots. That The New Yorker would ever publish a children’s story as “fiction” was a conclusion that we should never have trusted our own intelligence to reach. The experience prompted a good deal of thought about the importance of “getting it,” as though literature were primarily a puzzle to be decoded. This was a case of not “getting” something that wasn’t worth the effort.

¶ More in the spirit of a hot August week, we went to see The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, a joyously terrible movie. We  hope that the movie is not a really big hit, because that will only encourage a raft of miserably inferior imitations. On the home theatre front, we watched Fred and Ginger  in Follow the Fleet without interruption. We even took notes, but they turned out to be useless, at least as copy.

¶ As for this week’s Book Review review, are we the only one to find Geoffrey Grandfield’s witty drawing more than a little unpleasant, given the context? It’s nothing less than perverse of the Times to fuss over avoiding everyday demotic in print while publishing such unseemly illustrations.

Deny it if you can: when Don Draper orders his brother-in-law, William, to fall into line with his plan for taking care of Betty’s father, you’re thrilled. What gives Don such power? Like a good curry, Don’s authority is a compound of many ingredients. One of these is his manner: he believes in whistling happy tunes (so to speak). Another is his torpedo-esque acquisition of targets’ weaknesses. Way beyond Santa, Don knows how people have been naughty, and how they’ve been nice. In any case, Don’s display of primacy among his wife’s family (he has none of his own, of course) dilates the focus of a sorry, everyday elder-care problem to the scope of a ducal fiat. “The Private Life of the Medici” is what Kathleen and I were both thinking.

A friend writes,

Oh man, i just watched this for the first time tonight — what a weird show!  i’m so sorry you had to live through that time, if its anything close to what reality was.  So creepy!

Although I guess one day they’ll make a show about the 1980’s and i’ll say the same thing to someone 20 years younger than me.

Yes and no. Yes, a show about the 1980s will doubtless have to be explained to younger viewers. But it will probably not be “creepy.” What’s creepy about Mad Men is the vividly illustrated decay of conventional mores. Nobody believes in anything beyond appearances, because appearances are always the last thing to be abandoned. The meaning behind respectable life has been moribund since the show began, in 1960; it will die when the first oral contraceptive is consumed by a female character in the solitude of her own bathroom.

Why the old timber began visibly to fall during the Kennedy Administration is  a scholar’s problem. (I won’t bore you with my hypotheses.) It wasn’t that a way of life came to an end — not at all. What came to an end was a way of pretending to feel about a way of life that very few people actually followed. Why did women still wear gloves in 1963 — no matter what the weather? Impractical white gloves, at that. Who were they kidding? Not themselves.

But I hope that this show about the Early Sixties is explaining what happened in the Late Sixties. The world could stand only so much bogus. Find one character in Mad Men who is comfortable with “the way things are,” and I’ll be damned if you can find two.

This evening’s Madison Square Garden subplot was very hard for me to watch. I wanted to run out into the night and disinter the corpses of executives who dreamed up the destruction of a great civic building and its replacement by the sorriest sort of postwar “modernism.” Madison Square Garden serves as a reminder that, in the Sixties, many New Yorkers wanted their city to look more like the cereal-boxed towns to the west. Places like Omaha and Dallas never resorted to the ziggurat-happy zoning laws that became popular in New York City after the Equitable Building, at 120 Broadway, blotted out the sun for buildings all the way up to City Hall. (Think on’t, my chicks.) The idea that the erection that is Pennsylvania Station’s latest incarnation could ever have struck more than two sane people as an improvement on any level is a terribly sad comment on the fraily of human understanding. 

You might say that, if New Yorkers could be so mistaken about their own urban welfare, then the nation as a whole was bound to run off the rails.

Al Baker in the Times: “Brooklyn Man Killed at South Street Seaport”

The argument that preceded the killing erupted among people debarking the Atlantica, which had been chartered for a party but which never left Pier 17.

People yelled and hurled bottles as they walked off the boat and into an area of shops and restaurants — most of them closed for the night — near South and Fulton Streets.

Then shots were fired, the police said, and as the crowd scattered, Mr. Trent fell to the ground with a bullet wound to the head, the police said. Emergency medical technicians pronounced him dead at the scene.

The Atlantica’s captain, Dennis Miano, said in a telephone interview on Saturday that “a little over 500” people had arrived on Friday night for what was billed as a moonlight cruise. But he said the 150-foot boat “can only handle about 425 to sail with.”

“That’s why we did a dockside party,” said Mr. Miano, 60. “We didn’t sail the boat.”

¶ Matins: Edmund Andrews’s story about Ben Bernanke in this morning’s Times is strangely silent about the contribution of that self-made moron, Alan Greenspan, to the mess that Mr Bernanke has had to clean up.

¶ Lauds: These kids today: 91 year-old Arthur Laurents reads “the riot act” to the cast of West Side Story, which has been plagued with calling-in-sick-itis. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Why not call it the Goldstein Curve? Robin Goldstein culled data from Craigslist (and Felix Salmon turned it into a lovely scatterchart), revealing the inverse relationship between used car/bike prices in seven American cities.

¶ Tierce: Crazy or visionary? The developers of a building to be called 200 Eleventh Avenue (West 24th Street) plan to attach a garage to every apartment — just off the living room. (via Infrastructurist)

¶ Sext: Choire Siche discovers Hallenrad! And shares some of the best.

¶ Nones: Will the new face of Duchy Originals be HRH?

¶ Vespers: Garth Risk Hallberg reminds us of something that has been gently overlooked in the recent craze for All Things Julia: Mrs Child was not so much a great cookbook writer as she was a great writer period.

¶ Compline: Precisely because Reihan Salam’s Foreign Policy essay, “The Death of Macho,” made us uneasy, we think that everybody ought to read it.

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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So, it’s a boy. Megan and Ryan have narrowed the names down to a short list, but they’re “not sharing.” So we’re calling him “Irving.” The name was proposed by one of Ryan’s cousins, on Facebook, and swiftly rejected. But it’s too wonderfully improbable not to adopt pro tem, and, plus, what name could better suit the child of parents living in the Lower East Side?  On top of everything else, there won’t be any other Irvngs. We thought, my daughter’s mother and I, that in “Megan” we had found a name that would occur to no one else. If I’m just as wrong about “Irving,” well — how fantastic will that be.

It was not, at any rate, a very productive day. I was busy every minute, but with amazingly sparse results, at least when I was sitting at the computer. I had a cold supper all ready when the parents-to-be arrived, but I didn’t serve it right away, because I couldn’t sit down. I was simply too hot. Whatever my skin temperature was, the subcutaneous heat felt like 145º, and no amount of standing in front of fans would cool me off.

Megan handed round a sonogram — taken only this morning. (How wonderful it was to have them to dinner on the very day of their Finding Out.) It was a head shot. The tyke has a recognizable profile, complete with an itsy-bitsy nose; and he has a lot of rather Alienish teeth, still lodged in his gums. Ontogeny recapitulates cinematography.

I asked Megan, how was she sure? She replied that the technician made a point of asking her if she’d noticed “the little boy parts.” We take it that the technician knew what she was talking about, what with doing this every day. In any case, Megan had indeed noticed the little boy parts.

When I sigh, “A grandson!” — which I do quite often (even though it hasn’t been twenty-four hours since I heard the news) — it is all about me. I know that, and celebratory spirits are dampened accordingly. The responsible part of my cortex understands that the only important thing is that Ryan and Megan will have a healthy child who’s disposed to be happy. I am also of the opinion that they will be unusually thoughtful and energetic parents as well as loving ones.

But there is a lot of stuff about being a man that I have never come to terms with — I’ve worked around it. Maybe every man does, every thinking man, anyway. I’m speaking of everyday masculinity, which in everyday peacetime is almost entirely a matter of bluffing. From time to time, though, strange situations come up, and how we have dealt with them lingers. It lingers, and we are either proud or ashamed. We realize that the strange situations were defining, even if we didn’t know that at the time. Being men, we keep score, even the guys like me who don’t like games. And we wind up with questions like this: Do I “deserve” a grandson?

The answer to that is clearly “no.” Life, as I’ve been reading all over the place lately, owes us nothing. And the child’s gender doesn’t factor in the one thrill that I’m looking forward to the most: when Irving reaches out to pull my beard. If he’s healthy, he will pull my beard with a linebacker’s singlemindedness, genuinely hoping to pull the hair right off my face. Disappointment in this regard will only make him pull harder, and — this is the best part — he will smile at me in the most friendly way all through the torment. What fun he’ll be having!

No: I most certainly do not deserve a grandson, and here’s why: I’m plotting to have a false beard made, one that will tear off in his hands. Won’t he be surprised! And I will still have a beard! It’s time to endow an analyst fund.

¶ Matins: You laugh now: “The Inspector Clouseau of robot cops.” Wait till it comes back as Peter Weller.

¶ Lauds: A new blog to follow: The Footnotes of Mad Men. (via kottke.org)

¶ Prime: Are there really any such thing as “banking stars,” worth being hired away for that competitive edge? Jeffrey Pfeffer thinks not.

¶ Tierce: The irresistible Mr Wrong wonders why no one wants to shoot the breeze at Starbuck’s.

¶ Sext: Almost as good as “Rollo Tommasi”: When people ask where you’re vacationing next summer, just tell them, “Buss Island.” Tell ’em it’s the undiscovered Nantucket.

¶ Nones: North Korea will send a delegation to the funeral of former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung.

¶ Vespers: Alain de Botton will be writing from Heathhrow Airport.

¶ Compline: That really was a storm on Tuesday night! More than a hundred trees were felled in Central Park alone. (Thanks, Tom!) Read the rest of this entry »

For days, I’ve been stewing over how long it has been since my last visit to the storage unit, on 62nd Street. Something must be done! That’s really how I put it to myself — which explains why nothing happens. “Something must be done!” means just about nothing. “Go to the storage unit this week” is all too clear. I was avoiding clarity.

On Friday, however, I’m scheduled, as I mentioned the other day, to have a Remicade infusion. That rules out going to the movies, at least during the day. Nothing would be over in time. So I’d have to go sooner. Yesterday, surveying my worksheets — yes! it has come to that! worksheets! — I figured that I could spare the time for a movie this morning, and, what d’you know, but a movie that I’ve been wanting to see, In the Loop, is showing right next door to the storage unit. How dandy! I’d see the movie, have lunch at a nearby pub, and then spend an hour or two in storage — boxing books. The current plan is to pack books in boxes and then have Housing Works come pick them up. I’m told that they’ll do that. (We’ll see.)

We stayed up very late last night, and got up correspondingly late this morning. Kathleen got up very late. If I’d left when she did, in fact, I’d have been just a few minutes early for In the Loop. But I wasn’t feeling very well; there were gastro-intestinal issues (phantom, as it turned out), plus the malaise that follows a late night of drinking wine until Kathleen goes to bed. Did I say that Kathleen was obsessing over the knitting of bootees? So often, that’s how late nights happen. I saw Kathleen off to work, and went to the computer, where I sat most discontentedly. “I’ll go tomorrow,” I told myself. But this proved to be unacceptable. A part of me — the largely unfamiliar Sicilian part — had been assured that we’d be going to the storage unit today. The Sicilian part of me is not prone to violence, but it is very ascetic. It is most unhappy when suffering is on the menu, but only on the menu. The Sicilian part of me also wants to get things over with.

So I was running late when I got to the movies. Not late-late; if all had gone well, I’d have missed a couple of previews, no more. But all was not going well. The box office couldn’t take credit cards; it was a problem with the connection. I never pay cash for the movies (or for anything that will take plastic), but I’d have made an exception this morning if I hadn’t been quite late — because it took forever for the customer at the head of the line to decide how she wanted to handle the outage. Would she pay cash? Would she come back later? When I asked and found out that I’d have to pay cash at the refreshment counter, too, I turned on my heels and went next door to storage.

The reason for the “Something must be done!” mentality is that we are paying a fortune — in many parts of the United States, it would cover a nice one-bedroom apartment — for vastly more storage space than we need. We could have what’s left just packed up and moved to another, smaller storage unit uptown (in a facility operated by the same outfit). But I’m determined to shed the books that make up a large percentage of current contents. When the books are gone, we’ll have a better idea of how much storage space we really need. Or so I rationalize.

Having surveyed the dump, I went back downstairs and bought six “large” packing boxes. Even before I paid for them, I knew that they were too big for books; they’d be impossibly heavy if packed full. As indeed they were. On my way back to the elevator, I realized that I didn’t have any strapping tape. I decided not to buy any at this time. I would unfold a couple of boxes and fill them and see how it went. This was not the dumb idea that it may seem to be. The experience of putting books in a box, even knowing that they’d all have to be packed in some other box, was nothing short of inspiring. I can’t wait to go back and buy six “small” packing boxes. I’ve already got the tape; I picked  it up at Gristede’s when I was shopping for dinner.

Having filled two large boxes, I decided to quit. I stuffed some junk in a tote — a bunch of trays, as it happened — and went to the pub. Then I went home. The Sicilian part of me was still not satisfied. What about the movies? Now, for most people, going to the movies is fun. And it is for me, too! But it is also an assignment. If I’m supposed to see a movie on Friday, but know in advance that I won’t be able to see a movie on Friday, the Sicilian part of me takes a very dim and jaundiced view of proposals that involve going to the movies on the weekend. The Sicilian part of me knows that going to the movies on the weekend is almost certainly not going to happen. This is because I myself detest seeing movies on the weekend, when the theatres are relative full. I like empty theatres.

So I looked at what was showing in the neighborhood. The good news is that thirteen different movies are showing within two blocks of my house. The bad news is that more than half of them are always out of the question. Also bad news, on a day like today: I have usually seen the aceeptable movies already. Pretty quickly, this afternoon’s choices came down to two: The Hurt Locker, which I’d like to have seen (if you know what I mean), and The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, which (I checked) has a Metacritic rating of 41. Did I really want to see Jeremy Piven play a slobulesque hustler? No. But it was a less-sharp stick in the eye. A less-sharp stick in the Sicilian-part-of-me’s hand.

When I crossed 86th Street on my way home, I noticed that the sun was hot. It was as though a broiler-oven had been opened behind me, and waves of heat were pouring out. This heat thing has got to come to an end soon. I’m bearing up better than I’ve done in the past, but it’s like life in wartime: I’m doing without a lot of stuff “for the duration.” Maybe, though, the heat is making the Sicilian part of me feel more at home. How on earth else explain my trip to a purgatorial storage unit on a blazing day?

¶ Matins: (Note: this item is not about classical music.) In her WaPo piece about classical-music CDs, Anne Midgette labors under the impression that serious music recordings require the brokerage of a healthy “industry.” We agree with Henry Fogel: leaving industry behind is what’s healthy. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Lauds: Why is Britain’s National Trust spat taking us back to the 1640s? Surely not just the coincidence of princes called “Charles”?

¶ Prime: Robert Cringely thinks out loud about the ethics of technology. He used to think that Google’s motto was silly, but not anymore.

¶ Tierce: Is it possible? The Marshall Trial’s case for the prosecution was slated to end yesterday— two days into the trial’s 17th week. On Friday, the jury and the court will take a two-week vacation.

¶ Sext: At The Onion: “Film Adaptation Of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book.” And where is that? 

The 83-minute film, which is based on the first 142 or so pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s acclaimed work, has already garnered attention for its stunning climax, in which the end credits suddenly appear midway through Katerina’s tearful speech about an unpaid debt.

(via The Morning News)

¶ Nones: China is upset with Australia, about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer’s visit. When will China learn that foreign public opinion can be controlled no better by overt interference than by armed occupation?

¶ Vespers: Amazing news! Six million subscribers take Reader’s Digest. Still! So don’t over-interpret news of the publication’s bankruptcy filing.

¶ Compline: Natalie Angier writes lucidly about a murky subject: stress. Bottom line: it’s up to you to break out of the stress feedback loop.

Read the rest of this entry »

We had a super storm this evening. It was super for us because we were home — high and dry. I did think about the people who were just getting out of the theatre. The rain was coming down in curtains, like a blizzard, only much noisier — and that without factoring in the operatic thunder and lightning, for which, trust me, no expense was spared. Gigantic lighting bolts were thrust into Astoria as though Bette Davis were stubbing out cigarettes in a fit of pique. It suited my mood down to the ground.

It suited my mood down to the ground because I’d just found out the most incredible thing. I’ll be writing more about this incredible thing in a Portico page that I’ll link to next Monday, but for the moment it’s enough to say earlier in the evening, over dinner, before the storm, I was wondering what in hell I would write about this week’s New Yorker story. This week’s New Yorker story, “Max at Sea,” by Dave Eggers, turns out to be an extract from the novelization of Mr Eggers’s script, with Spike Jonze, of a film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, didn’t know that when I read the story. I didn’t find out until after dinner.

I was plenty pissed, I don’t mind saying. But that’s all I’m going to say for the time being.

***

We had one of our New Evenings, and it was a great success. As Kathleen left for work this morning (for the printer, actually), she said that she’d be home early, and she asked for a chicken salad. I don’t think that she really wanted a chicken salad, but that’s what does come to mind in a pinch if you have been brought up as Kathleen was. The idea of ordering dinner like a great lady, at the beginning of the day, does not come naturally to my wife. After nearly thirty years of marriage to the likes of me, she still has her Second Mrs de Winter moments.

In the event, Kathleen did make it home very early, and we did have a chicken salad. We had yet another chicken salad that I invented, this time to use up what was on hand, so that I wouldn’t have to go out to buy anything. Here’s how I did it:

I combined about a half cup of mayonnaise with a dash of curry powder, the juice of half a lemon, a quarter teaspoon (or less) of moutarde de Meaux, salt, and the top half of an avocado. Despite the ghastly summer weather that we’ve been having, the avocado was not quite ripe, so I had to process it into the dressing.

To this I added a left-over roast chicken breast — just the one. Cubed, as they say. Also the cubed other half of the avocado. About two dozen green grapes, halved. And a small handful of toasted walnuts.

This yielded just enough for two — such a relief. Frugality is my motto these days. It means making the most of everything, and that, in turn, means “no leftovers,” because Kathleen and I never eat leftovers. The leftover roast chicken breast doesn’t count, because it’s not really a leftover; we wouldn’t eat it at all, except in a salad.

***

Also over dinner, we talked about Mozart’s strep throat,* which soon enough led to (yet) another hearty denunciation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. I used to wish that Mozart would come back to life just to see how neat it is to listen to all his music on the phonograph/cassette player/8 track/CD/Nano. But now I wish that he would write THE opera about being a misunderstood artist. Instead of “Salieri kills Mozart,” we could have “Mozart kills Pushkin/Rimsky/Shaffer.”

* It is taking me a while to adjust to the new Greg Kinnear portrait of Mozart, but I’m working on it. Mozart on CNN, though — it’s weak of me, I know, but I think it’s cool.