last Week at Portico: Only three new pages this week. I was hard at work on a fourth when Ms NOLA and J— breezed by. Sitting on the balcony with them, enjoying the olives and the baguette that they brought, the Chablis and the cheese that I found in the fridge, and the berceuse of a blue evening was vastly more amusing than writing, so I ditched my responsibilities. No guilt was felt. It’s the end of July, the beginning of August (is that a movie title?), and while I won’t say that I deserve a break, I’ll admit to enjoying the hell out of one.

Last Friday’s movie was Humpday; despite its Jude Apatow title, it’s a serious and sophisticated comedy, written in a key with lots of sharps. In The New Yorker, Kirsten Valdez Quade’s story, “The Five Wounds,” marked a very impressive début. Et enfin, the Book Review review.

A couple of hours ago, while I was doodling at the computer in an intermezzo sort of way, there flashed a Facebook update from Andy Towle: “What are you doing tonight?” I’d tell you why I found this flabbergasting if I weren’t sick of talking about me, so we’ll just pass on to my replying comment. “I was asking myself what you are doing asking the question,” or words to that effect. I meant this to sound avuncular — what’s a nice kid like you doing polling your friends on a Friday night, when you ought to be out having fun. But I could see that my reply was open to many other constructions, so I deleted it and replaced it with the comment that’s still there: “I’m thinking that you’re too young to be asking such a question on a Friday night.” It’s still hopeless, but if I change it again I’ll look like a perfectionist.

If I were to change it again, I’d say that I was watching the last episode of Season Three of Lewis. Mad as I am for Mad Men, I’m madder for Lewis — the Oxford procedural that follows Inspector Morse. Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whately) used to be the sergeant attached to Inspector Morse (John Thaw), but now he’s an inspector himself, and his sergeant is James Hathaway (Laurence Fox). The great joke is that, having been bossed around by an Oxford-grad boss, Lewis is now bossed around by a Cambridge-grad underling (a theology student to boot!). As this series has progressed, however, Hathaway has become less prim and more assertive, principally in the swing of his shoulders. He is about a million times more buttoned-down than his father, James Fox, but only about ten times more repressed than his uncle, Edward. You almost dream of his remaking The Day of the Jackal. But you don’t really, because, self-controlled as he is, Laurence Fox projects no bitterness. Edward Fox couldn’t say “I love you” without sneering.

In the episode that we watched tonight, “Counter Culture Blues,” the magnificent Simon Callow, who was fished out of the Isis in the nude in the Morse episode, “The Wolvercote Tongue,” returns at the top of his game — perhaps even over the top. A delicious old queen who’s querulous about the wherabouts of the Randolph’s prettier bellhops, Vernon Oxe is determined to reconstitute a great Sixties band, the Midnight Addiction. Great fun! Much as I love Joanna Lumley, I knew that her Esme Ford was a fake.  (She was really the late Esme’s sister, Kathleen.) I also knew (as who did not) that someone would be thrown into the “macerator,” a toothy septic composter, but I assumed that the person would be dead, or too drugged to care. I certainly didn’t imagine that Hathaway would jump into it, or that Lewis would have an appalled moment of wondering if the man dragged out of it would require mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

As it has been a while since I have made this spiel, I’ll indulge: I’m very proud that Andy Towle is a Facebook friend. As chance would have it, his was the first blog to strike me as handsome, and worthy of emulation; if nothing else, it taught me that links needn’t be underlined. (Remind me to tell you why underlining is one of the ten things that I hate most about life on Earth.) Maybe it wasn’t chance after all — because I can’t think of any blogs that look better than Towleroad, and precious few that look half way as good. You wouldn’t be reading this — because there would be nothing here to read — if it weren’t for the inspiration of a very smart young man who, come to think of it, isn’t so young that he can’t appreciate the pleasures of a quiet night at home.

¶ Matins: Two related safety stories this week, at Infrastructurist: Rail/Road Safety; Cells and Speed.

¶ Lauds: Alexander Hemon’s playlist for writing.

¶ Prime: In “Too Small to Fail?“, Jay Goltz issues a call for better training for small business owners.

¶ Tierce: Even though the 13 week-old Marshall trial hasn’t even gotten to the defense, there seems to be a wilting factor, as if everyone from the judge on down were just too tired of all this nonsense. In any case, no reports have been filed this evening with any of the papers. Or hadn’t been, when we last looked an hour or so ago.

We were going to invent something, and tell you that the Marshalls, having followed our coverage of the coverage, took advantage of an early recess to drop by our apartment, and that, while Mr Marshall took a little nap, Mrs Marshall turned on her Southern charm (to which we’re so susceptible!), and we suddenly realized what a lovely woman she is. That we’d be posting soon from a guest room at North Cove, or Cove Point, or Cape Fear, or whatever they call the place up in Maine.

¶ Sext: Coming soon to Pi Mensae: Howdy Doody.

¶ Nones: Kudos to President Obama for weighing in on the “stupidity” of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in his own Cambridge home.

¶ Vespers: Mark Athitakis, at The Second Pass, writes about an out-of-print novel by Ward Just, a writer whose work we almost always find totally engaging.

¶ Compline: This weekend’s indispensable reading is Slavoj Žižek’s essay, in the London Review of Books, “Berlusconi in Tehran.” New meaning is given to the phrase, “constitutional democracy.”  

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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There was a story in today’s Home section that has bothered me all day. (I’m not the only one.) “After the Breakup, What About the Lake House?” is one of those optical illusions that shifts unstably before your eyes: is what you’re look at a vase, or is it a pair of profiles? Is it new and provocative, or is it garbage and a disgrace? The profiles in the Times story, as by now is legendary, were hung “facing” one another in the early days of the relationship, but at the eponymous lake house, they were hung the other way, as can be seen in an accompanying photograph. How symbolic is that? One feels that even Jerry Bruckheimer would blush at the obviousness.

So these guys were going to get married but by the time the party date rolled around they’d broken up, so that Bradford Shellenhammer paid his first visit to the house in ages. They had the party anyway, you see. The former lovers are working on being future friends. Meanwhile, they’re stuck with this house, which they decorated within an inch of its footprint — apparently exhausting their mutual attraction in the process.

Their tale of lost love has a familiar arc — love sparks, then blooms; lives intertwine; moments are lost and misunderstandings creep in; eventually the two begin to live as strangers — and an epilogue that has become increasingly familiar as well, as unwanted houses become prisons rather than cocoons.

This was supposed to be a story about the house, Mr Shellhammer’s blog informs us, but of course romance will always trump paint chips, especially when it’s the romance, and not the paint, that has faded. How could Timeswoman Julie Scelfo resist?

What has bothered me all day is the inability to explain my deep disapproval of this story, but, hapily, having been bothered about it all day, I have cleared up the confusion. You could say that the story is obnoxious — that the two gents are exploiting the end of their affair in the interest of dashing their story with a memorable piquancy. “Oh! Aren’t they the ones who did their house over in the style of the Brady Bunch‘s therapist’s trophy-wife sister?” According to this reading, Mr Shellheimer and Benjamin Dixon have pursued publicity.

That’s very bad, but in fact it’s so bad that it absolutely vaporizes any claim to one’s attention that these men might have had. Such a claim would rest on the theory that they allowed the publicity, in the interests of sharing their situation with Times readers, who might find the example helpful in some way. A public-spirited exercise, you might say. And in fact I do say. I believe that this is what the ex-lovers had in mind — to the extent that they had anything in mind, given the fact that their strange home near the Taconic has become a prison.

If this were the case, however, the men are transformed from reptilian publicity hounds into deeply shamed individuals. How could they let the world know who they were? Why wasn’t their story presented without names? I don’t mean “anonymously”; I mean “discreetly.” By all means, run the picture of those back-to-back profiles. Let those who are familiar with the silhouettes and their owners tell their friends. But I can’t not feel that Mr Dixon and Mr Shellhammer ought to have balked at identifying themselves with their painful loss of love. I can’t not suspect that the lack of pudeur now is the consequence of a lack of genuine affection back then.

 

¶ Matins: A counter-intuitive HIV-prevention strategy that is gaining traction. (via Good)

¶ Lauds: At The New Republic, Antoni Cimolino argues against “adapting” Shakespeare for modern ears. (via The Morning News)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon (who happened to see the eclipse in China) is not convinced that the advent of 401(k) plans was a positive financial innovation.

¶ Tierce: Nothing really happened in the Marshall trial today, but I sense a sea change in the case.

¶ Sext: Tom Scocca sings of time and the bed — and a kid who’s discovered “testing.”

¶ Nones: Sudan takes an important step toward partition (between North and South) — at The Hague.

¶ Vespers: Anglophone literature in India takes a new turn: with more Indian readers, writers can focus on local life to an extent that makes their work difficult to follow outside of India. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: The story following this headline actually lives up to it: “Laptop? Check. Student Playlist? Check. Classroom of the Future? Check,” by Jennifer Medina.

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As someone in the second half of his 62nd year, I’m appalled by the fact that the Internet has disinterred and revived a dreadful adolescent folly of my youth: the convinction that some people — a lucky few — are preternaturally interesting. Their slightest word is very manna. An email from B— or E— makes my day — even though very, very few days are thus made. In frequent fits of Stalinist self-denunciation, I convince myself that, in this way or in that way, I have gravely offended these Olympians. It’s entirely likely.

What makes it all so much worse is knowing that, if Facebook (and the Internet, &c &c) had existed when I was a teenager, I’d just about rule the world by now. I’d have insulted so many people in so many unforgettable, zingily toxic ways that money would be all that I could hold on to. This is why I spend hours wondering if I have offended B— and E—. When I was twenty, I was capable of amazing offensiveness, calmly and deliberately reminding victims (and informing bystanders) of disadvantageous revelations made in unguarded moments, twisting them for maximal linguistic éclat. Forty years have slowed me down, but I am still capable of the occasional appalling “observation.”

My mother (who was not my mother) used to say that I liked to tear the wings off of flies. For years, I kidded myself by dismissing this as her dimwitted resentment of my intellectual dispassion. But she was right: I do like something that I’m not supposed to like. Although I feel sincere when I say that I hate to see people suffer, this is the case only when I myself haven’t caused the suffering with the mocking troll that lives beneath my tongue, and that surprises and shocks me no less than it does everyone else.  

You’d probably like to hear an example of my “wit.” Almost immediately, though, you’d wish that you hadn’t. It isn’t so much a matter of bons mots as it is one of completely unscrupulous license: it isn’t what I’ve said, it’s that I even thought it, much less said it. All that you need to know now is that my way of honoring the remarkable people whom I meet is, all too often, to mortify them with my Mortemart wit.

¶ Matins: At Coming Anarchy, the entry “Microstate Madness” describes potential breakaway statelets across Europe, from Sardegna to Scotland. (via Joe.My.God)

¶ Lauds: Now that the bubbling (not to say gaseous) wake of the Venice Biennale has subsided into the barcarolle of the canals, Barry Schwabsky’s lucid report, “Hubbub and Stillness,” in The Nation, is an even greater pleasure to read.

¶ Prime: Variation on an old Chinese curse: business narratives have become (Titanically) interesting.

¶ Tierce: What if the Marshall case veers from incompetence to duress? It’s just as bad.

¶ Sext: How TV news would cover a first moon landing today.

¶ Nones: Honduran would-be president (the only kind, these days) Manuel Zelaya might well take a look at what his opponents are afraid of, as it plays out in Venezuela’s Barinas State.

¶ Vespers: At Intelligent Life, Tom Shone inquires:  Is sobriety good for literary types? (via The Morning News)

¶ Compline: Boudicca Downes discusses her parents’ decision — somewhat more controversial in the case of her conductor father, Sir Edward — to take their lives at Dignitas, a clinic in Switzerland.

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¶ Lord Chesterfield writes very pragmatically about religion and honesty.

Depend upon this truth, That every man is the worse looked upon, and the less trusted for being thought to have no religion; in spite of all the pompous and specious epithets he may assume, of esprit fort, freethinker, or moral philosopher; and a wise atheist (if such a thing there is) would, for his own interest and character in this world, pretend to some religion.

As for lying, Chesterfield distinguishes between the naked untruth that a diplomat might proffer and the self-puffing misrepresentations made by vain people. He is opposed to both. In between there is a rather murky, or at least underdeveloped, passage about Bacon’s distinction between simulation and dissimulation. Chesterfield seems to be marking this just for the sake of comprehensiveness, but also to be withholding any conclusions that his son might misuse, for want of a more worldly understanding.

It is most certain, that the reputation of chastity is not so necessary for a woman, as that of veracity is for a man.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a geeky chapter entitled “A Bower in the Arsacides.” At some point in the past (having nothing to do with the present tale), Ishmael took it upon himself to measure the skeleton of a whale that had been mounted, so to speak, as a pagan chapel.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tatooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistic. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing — at least, what untatooed parts might remain — I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.

Make that, literary geek.

¶ In Don Quixote, the windmills of the first part give way to watermills — by which our hero and Sancho are almost pulverized, as Don Quixote drifts to the rescue of (imaginary) ladies and knights. There is a small business of lice that is not terribly nice, but Cervantes makes up for that with this droll scene:

And saying this, he put his hand on his sword and began to flourish it in the air against the millers, who, hearing but not understanding this nonsense, began to use their poles to stop the boat, which by now was entering the millrace rapids.

Sancho was on his knees, devoutly praying to heaven to save him from so clear a danger, which it did through the efforts and speed of the millers, who pushed against the boat with their poles and stopped it but could not keep it from capsizing and throwing Don Quixote and Sancho into the water; it was fortunate for Don Quixote that he knew how to swim like a goose, although the weight of his armor made him sink twice, and if it had not been for the millers, who jumped into the water and pulled them out, it would have been the end of them both.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward buys a house outside of Montreux, and decides to divide his time between Switzerland and Jamaica. A letter “to an unnamed friend” is quoted. 

When the public is no longer interested in what I have to write, then it will be brought home to me that I am out of touch; not before. Nowadays, though I find that I rather enjoy my downfalls; to me it’s acridly funny when something flops that has taken me months to write and compose.

Not bloody likely, I should think. This sounds like a draft that Coward sent to nobody, because nobody would believe it. 

Here’s what happened:

¶ Saturday: I forgot to turn off the window unit in the blue room before running the electronic broom (not even a vacuum cleaner!) over the carpet. This threw the  circuit breaker — largely because, I’m reminded, I’ve got a thousand peripherals plugged in in here. Not to mention the two monitors: it used to blow out when I had only one.

No big deal, but, with the power back on, the modem wouldn’t work. Big deal. Much sweating and agonizing between recognizing modem problem and, realizing that I ought to unplug the power supply as well as the modem, fixing it.

¶ Sunday: Uneventful, until —

¶ First thing Monday morning: Kathleen said, “By the way, the browsers on my laptop keep clicking through to some malware site.” The Malware Abyssal opened up beneath me!

¶ Last thing Monday night, the cable connection disappeared. If it hadn’t been for previous events, I’d have understood what was happening — a neighborhood-wide outage — but, instead, I was sure that I’d Done Something. I hadn’t, though; very late, I went to bed relieved to have a restored connection. (Meanwhile, thank heaven for Mi-Fi!)

¶ Tuesday: Done Nothing? Ha! Realized at about 11 AM that, in the course of rooting around behind the CPU last night, trying to figure out how I had caused the connection outage, so that I could fix it, I had unplugged the speaker jack.

¶ Hooking up the speaker jack wasn’t enough. Rebooting required. Upon rebooting: no monitor connection!

¶ Tightened monitor plugs. Rebooted. Happiness.

I have omitted the part about updated wi-fi drivers, which really did improve conditions, when, at least, there were conditions (an Internet connection) to improve upon. Also, Kathleen’s browser problem was fixed — for the time being. These good things were not of my doing.

When all of this started, all I wanted to do was to watch Coma (a fave). Long before it was over, I just wanted to be in it. Paging Dr Harris!

¶ Matins: Joe Bagent considers the growth of the white underclass. Anecdotally.

¶ Lauds: How about a very plausible mash-up of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Let You Down”? (via MetaFilter)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon disagrees (violently) with Robert Shiller’s reconsideration  of sub-prime mortgages.

¶ Tierce: What’s the difference between $700 million and $50 billion — aside from the number of victims and the size of their losses? Who was the bigger spender — Bernie Madoff or Mark Dreier?

¶ Sext: Lately, I’ve tugged by an existential anxiety: why, week after week, can’t I bring myself to open — not even to open — the Sunday Times Magazine? Happily (and hilariously), Tom Scocca and Choire Sicha have the answer: “Memoirs! Leer At Yer Crazy Memoirs! From A Circus of ‘Times’ Employees, A Thousand Magazine Excerpts Bloom“.

¶ Nones: Just say ‘No’: “Georgians Hope U.S. Will Join Boundary Monitors.” I propose Chinese troops for this job. The Chinese and the Russians have a long history of border disputes.

¶ Vespers: Ann Leary proposes some “Good Books for Hard Times.”

¶ Compline: Although we strongly disapprove of performance-enchancing drugs of any kind (we just read Methland!), we think that it would be a mistake to dismiss Jamais Cascio’s Atlantic essay, “Get Smarter,” as just another piece of futurism.

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Reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s autopsy (as if!) of a civilization in which the preferred euphemism for “discount” is “value,” takes me back  to my childhood, to the shame of buying underwear at Korvettes. This game of my mother’s involved a double shame. We didn’t, all too obviously, belong at Korvettes. At the same time, we weren’t where we did belong, which would have been, in those days, Best & Co, and, later, B Altman.

Ms Shell’s book takes me back to a football weekend at Notre Dame. My father must certainly have had legitimate business somewhere that involved flight on a company jet (my father was not an idiot), but in those days a slight diversion to a town not directly on the way back home was not frowned upon, provided that one were discreet (my father was discretion itself). (Plus, he provided the crew with tickets to the game.) Mother and Dad were staying at the Morris Inn, where, making do, my mother glanced an ad in the South Bend Tribune and saw that Kresge was selling cases of Planters Dry-Roasted Peanuts at some fantastic low price — one case per customer. Wow! I was asked to round up a few friends for a trip to the store, which lay to the east of campus. My shame was pretty bottomless, but I did it. Having loaded up Dad’s rented sedan, these forgotten friends and I drove straight to the west side of town, where the discounted cases of dry-roasted peanuts were stowed aboard N227T.

Saving money wasn’t the point. Driving forty miles to save a nickel was the point. “Jewing” a merchant “down” was the point. Shame on top of shame! My mother would use this ghastly phrase to summarize her bargaining technique, and I would remember that she was not really my mother. Paying bottom dollar was her idea of dry-roasted fun. More than once — I can say this proudly — I blurted out, “You’re the Jew!”

You might say that I emerged from childhood traumatized by the idea of “cheap.”

The death of famous people is something that a lot of bloggers feel obliged to report, perhaps because it is the last word in news. Walter Cronkite’s death last week was very widely mentioned, even though he must have been, for most bloggers, an historical figure whose most important work, between the Fifties and the Seventies, preceded their birth — or at least their post-toddler sentience. (As I noted at Twitter, broadcast news ought to have ceased when Cronkite retired; the man who defined the genre proved to be irreplaceable.) Frank McCourt’s more recent celebrity (his best-known book, Angela’s Ashes, was published thirteen years ago) is a different matter altogether — in terms of fame, McCourt was a contemporary of the late David Foster Wallace.

But the big story, the one with plenty of wrinkles still to be ironed out, concerns Amazon’s blunderously peremptory removal of digital copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of people who had bought the book. The purchase price was refunded, but all the legal arguments in the world are not going to restore faith in Amazon’s probity unless it makes clear that it will never do any such thing in future. M Ryan Calo rounds up some of the better write-ups of the Orwell fiasco at The Millions.

Also, not to be confused with the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Humboldt squid, at the Guardian, and at Outside.

When I was in college, I took a heroic view of Tristan und Isolde. Musing over a remark that I’d heard, according to which German musicologists regarded  Tristan  as the perfect opera — a view that made sense to me, even if I wasn’t always in the mood to listen to the alleged perfection — I saw Tristan and Isolde as Olympian lovers who were willing and able to go a lot further to gratify their passion than anybody I knew. Wagner’s great achievement was to do the lovers justice by composing music that captured — a significant choice of words, I now think — a transcending, self-immolating love that could find resolution only in death.

When I say that this was an adolescent understanding of the opera, I don’t mean to condescend. I recognized that I knew nothing about love (nothing at all); and I was on the lookout for pointers. I did not long for love; on the contrary, I wanted to watch out for it. An opera that never shut up about the connection between love, on the one hand, and night, oblivion, and death, on the other, seemed very wise to me, and possibly full of prophylactic hints. At the same time, I wanted to be swallowed alive and completely roasted by Love — which is very much the same thing as not longing for love. Like any teenager, I wanted excitement without consequences.

In my middle years, I thought a lot about the love potion that Isolde slips Tristan — or, rather, that Brangäne slips Isolde. Isolde has asked her companion to prepare a lethal cordial that she will share with the man she hates most in the world — Tristan, the foreign murderer of her fiancé, Morold. Whether Brangäne makes a mistake and chooses the wrong bottle, or quietly overrules her mistress’s suicidal command, the result of drinking the philtre is undying love. The enemies become lovers, just like that.

Wagner may have been innocent of Freudian insight, but he knew his Shakespeare, and a huge chunk of Act I of his opera is taken up by Isolde’s protesting too much. Counting the ways how she hates Tristan, Isolde makes it clear that no other person on earth appears on her radar. If Tristan were dead — her fondest wish — she’d be lost, which is why she decides to kill herself along with him.

In a word, there is abundant evidence, at least for modern eyes to see, that Tristan and Isolde are in love before they drink the potion. When the potion doesn’t kill them (and certainly Tristan also expects it to), it allows them to acknowledge their mutual longing.

Listening to the opera this afternoon, I saw that a great shift in my understanding of the opera had taken place. The story of Tristan and Isolde themselves was no longer very important; it was but an armature on which Wagner could hang music that I used to think represented passion. Now, however, I knew that the music was the passion. Even though I was calmly — to all outward appearances — dusting the mantelpiece and vacuuming the carpet, the entire passion of Tristan und Isolde coursed through me. I was not leading a secret life of banked passion, sundering, on an imaginary plane, my connection with the banal quotidian world, permitting myself an internal escapade, clothed in the drag of grand amour, while applying a damp cloth to the marble top of a commode. There was no discontinuity at all between giving the phalaenopsis its weekly sip of water and crying out the praises of Frau Minne, as Isolde does when Brangäne tries to take ‘credit” for the very inconvenient love of Tristan for his uncle’s wife. “O tör’ge Magd!” ripostes Isolde — “you foolish inexperienced woman!” Every time I hear that line, I feel the true lover’s incinerating contempt for the world, and/but there is no need for me to set any fires myself. On the contrary; I wipe the glass on Kathleen’s wedding portrait and set it back on the table. Unlike the ancient Celtic lovers, but thanks no end to Wagner’s music, I know what I’m doing.

last Week at Portico: Last weekend’s Book Review was one of the worst issues I’ve ever worked my way through, and it was bad in many different ways, as you’ll find if you have a look at my review of the Review. My displeasure was enhanced by the unhelpful placement, two years ago, of a review of Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You among the Children’s Books, which may have accorded with somebody’s marketing plans but which made then and makes no no literary sense. Writing about William Styron’s “Rat Beach,” this week’s New Yorker story, I assumed that it had not been published before; forgive me if I’m wrong. Finally, last week’s Friday movie was Woody Allen’s Whatever Works.

What a lot of eating opportunities presented themselves today, largely because other people hadn’t eaten earlier. I never ate a great deal at any one time, but I seemed always to be at table. When I wasn’t eating, I was working here. I did see a movie — Humpday — but of course I was munching on a bag of popcorn all the way through that intense indie, which more than any other recent film I can think of reminded me of the talkily confrontrational French films that we were expected to admire in the Sixties. I did, honestly, admire Humpday, though.

When I came back uptown after lunch with LXIV, I did a bit of housework and then settled down to work. Work on Friday afternoon means taking all the drafts that I have scribbled during the week and turning them into handsome Portico pages, with correct spelling and navigation. While I was working on the Book Review review, Kathleen called to say that one of her best friends from Smith was in town and wanted her to take somebody’s ticket for Billy Elliot. I was fine with that, and, besides, I had alternative plans of my own. Nom de Plume was in town, and said that she might stop by. Stop by she did. When it turned out that she hadn’t eaten all day, I proposed running across the street to Tokubei, the Japanese pub. Like Kathleen’s brother, Kevin, another aficionado, Nom de Plume loves to order off-menu sushi at Tokubei; she says it’s some of the best that she’s ever eaten. (Perhaps she will post a comment itemizing all of her treats!) It was a great pleasure to talk in person.

Back at the apartment, there was a message from Ms NOLA. Ms NOLA and friend JA had called earlier as well, to invite me see Whatever Works with them. They knew that I’d seen it already, but they knew that I liked it enough to see it a second time. I had to decline, though; I’m saving that second time for Kathleen, and in any case I had my Friday publishing to see to (although that didn’t keep me from taking Nom de Plume to dinner). Ms NOLA and JA agreed to drop in after the movie, which was now.

They weren’t hungry, but they hadn’t eaten since lunch, so I handed Ms NOLA a menu from Wu Liang Ye, the Shanghainese restaurant down the street, and phoned in her selections. (The ribs that I also asked for were not delivered, but I wasn’t charged for them, either.) We enjoyed the food out on the balcony, sitting through one of the summer’s more violent thunderstorms. When the rain let up, my guests said that they had to go. How did it get to be 10:15?

Kathleen just now got home from the theatre, minutes after I finished my Friday jobs. She hasn’t eaten, either. This time, I’ll fix her something myself, in the kitchen.

***

Walking from the Angelika to the Chinatown Brasserie, LXIV and I talked about the friendship between Ben and Andrew, the reunited college chums in Humpday. I remarked, somewhat wistfully but mostly with relief, that I had never had such a “relationship.” LXIV all but sputtered. “What about Fossil?”

Fossil! Ha! I told LXIV, hardly believing that he didn’t already know this, that Fossil and had “hated each other” when we were prep school roommates. “Hatred” is too simple a word. We were more like Taiwan and the PRC, if you can imagine a rough parity between those entities. Officially hostile, we were actually too tired and distracted to remain on a footing of open war. Although neither of us had ever heard the term “passive-aggressive,” we both got very good at driving the other crazy while seeming to mind our own business.

We became friends later, when Blair was behind us. Perhaps “became friends” is an overstatement. At no point was there the backslapping, high-fiving, Sons of the Desert-type bonhomie that gets Ben and Andrew into so much trouble. Our tracks, though close, have remained rigorously parallel, which has made it easier to proffer the occasional friendly wave — as the other chugs in the opposite direction. Something that, on our comfy and now rather tidy little model railroad, happens all the time.

¶ Matins: Congressional Republicans, continuing their fascist makeover by seeking to win votes by stoking fears if they can’t inspire ideals, have launched a spectacularly disinformative infographic about the Democratic health-care reform plan.

¶ Lauds: It’s official: The New York Times is going to raise much-needed cash by selling its flagship classical-music station, WQXR. This may be the most foregone story of 2009. 2008, even. Interestingly, nobody on the Internet seems to care.

¶ Prime: At the Washington Post, Harold Myerson sees a Robert McNamara for our times, and his name is Richard Rubin. And his pupils are Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. We hope that, well before forty years from now, they will not only have repented but recanted. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Oops! No Astor news. Happily, there’s Chris Christie. As in Ruth’s Chris Steak House. No business connection, just the fact that Mr Christie wiggles his head between two positions, sort of like a twitchy, too-rare entrée. (God bless Google Reader!)

¶ Sext: Thanks, Joe, for the tip to You Suck at Craigslist, a site that collects ill-conceived postings at the Want-U-Adds.

¶ Nones: Mexican authorities refuse to negotiate a cease fire with La Familia, a leading drug cartel. Rightly so! But why does this story make us think of Las Vegas?

¶ Vespers: FYI: UK thriller writer Jeffrey Deavers lists ten top novels with computers and/or Internet connections. What’s this? E M Forster is on the list? With a tale from 1909? Now, that’s prescience!

¶ Compline: About The New York Review of Ideas: it’s an NYU J-school class project!

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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What I was going to write about this evening was Leave Her to Heaven, John Stahl’s 1945 “classic.” My Facebook friend Brooks Peters mentioned it today, saying that his vacation aerie in the Thousand Islands reminded him of Behind the Moon, the rustic Maine camp beloved by brothers Dick and Dan Harland before the poisonous Ellen Berent enters Dick’s life. (Cornel Wilde, Darryl Hickman, and Gene Tierney, respectively). The film, shot in a hyper-super-duper Technicolor so saturated that, by today’s more naturalistic standards, the actors appear to be dying of makeup, is so astonishingly dated that you wait for Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving, or perhaps even Louis XIV to show up. Alfred Newman’s music makes you long for the wit and wisdom of All About Eve, which he would score a few years later.  

So I thought I’d watch Leave Her to Heaven, even though I wasn’t really in the mood for one of Darryl Zanuck’s attempts to capture the glories of the great outdoors in a sound stage, while killing his actors with makeup. I got as far as the chilling scene with the doctor at Warm Springs, where Dan is recovering, if that is the word, from polio. “But he’s a cripple,” Ellen blurts out. The doctor is appalled, and hastily accepts Ellen’s assurance that she didn’t mean it. You have to see the movie to know why all of this is so dramatic, but even then it’s not clear whether Ellen is a damaged innocent or an unscrupulous narcissist. On the page, she’s clearly the latter, but the camera prefers her to be a minor force of nature — sweet, but dangerous when crossed. The whole grandeur of Leave Her to Heaven comes from the unresolved tension, if you ask me, between these readings. Speaking of reading, I haven’t read Ben Ames Williams’s novel, but I expect that the movie is faithful to certain big scenes but completely out of tune with the book’s tone. But maybe not. Ben Ames Williams, after all, has not come down to us as a writer to be read.

And then there is Vincent Price.

But it’s late, too late to be clipping stills from the DVD and then writing them up. That will have to wait. For the moment, it’s amusing as well as refreshing to imagine that Brooks Peters is enjoying the crystalline conditions that his photos at Facebook suggest while we suffer the first bad summer day of the year. It is not particularly warm in New York, but the air is close and dead. Even Ms NOLA was praying for rain earlier today.

I am reading two wonderful books, although it’s hard to tell which one of them is the bigger downer, story-wise: Methland, by Nick Reding, and A Meaningful Life, by L J Davis. The latter is, all things considered, amazingly funny — the novel that James Thurber never wrote, and couldn’t have written, for obvious reasons, in 1971. Methland gives rise to feelings of the wildest indignation, but without fixing a target (so far). The descriptions of melting skin and decaying brains that litter Mr Reding’s account of bad times in Iowa do seem, however, to have a lot in common with death by makeup.  

¶ Matins: “20 Bold Schemes” — that’s putting it mildly — for reversing climate change, the acidulation of seawater, and even for making bigger, puffier, whiter clouds! (Who can be against that?)

¶ Lauds: LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich objects to next year’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. (via  Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: For an “ownership society,” we have a tax code that inordinately favors indebtedness. Felix Salmon protests.

¶ Tierce: Today’s testimony by Astor nurse Pearline Noble generated two stories in the Post.

¶ Sext: Christoph Niemann is a Master of the Universe!

¶ Nones: In retrospect, it wasn’t such a good idea to bring Uighur workers to Guangdong.

¶ Vespers: John Self, intrigued by the kerfuffle surrounding Alain de Botton’s public unhappiness with Caleb Crain’s review of his new book, sat down and read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and he finds himself “coming down on de Botton’s side.”

¶ Compline: Having sold the initial print run of 200 copies, the good people at Snarkmarket released the text of New Liberal Arts on line. Welcome to the new Maecenate? 

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It was a glorious day to be out and about on the Upper East Side. The air was sunny and warm, but very clear; and all the rain that we’ve had so far this summer has laundered the city to pressed-napkin freshness. In colder weather, I’d have walked to the ophthalmologist’s office at 70th and Park. Taking a cab, though, gave me the thrill of turning left onto Park Avenue and — voilà! what a view! The Helmsley Building (is it still called that? It used to be the Grand Central Building, not, obviously, to be confused with the Terminal, but erected as part of the ensemble) is under wraps for some kind of renovation, but the pyramidal copper roof is unobstructed.

From the distance of 86th Street (roughly forty blocks), the Helmsley Building, and the Met Life (né Pan Am) Building behind it seem to stand at the end of a fantastic canyon, and to my eye Mother Nature has nothing remotely as formidable. But don’t listen to me. I’ve seen every famous spot in the United States (or at least that’s what it feels like) except the Grand Canyon, which I’ve avoided because I’m as certain as I can be without actual experience that I would find it wanting.

The canyon effect is the doing of the Met Life building, which is why I’ve always loved it. Fossil Darling hates it for having occluded the “profile” of the Helmsley Building, which, truth be told, I’d find rather dinky, now that I’ve gotten used to the massive building behind it.

The sad truth about Park Avenue is that the majesty of the view cannot be apprehended from the sidewalks. Originally, a path twisted through the median, which was quite a bit wider than it is today. I hope that the old configuration is revived at some point, whether I live to see it or not. It will put the High Line back where it belongs, especially if, as one must imagine, the walkway is wide enough to accommodate pedestrian traffic in both directions. I have not yet been to the new High Line park thingy, and I have no plans to see it anytime soon, but, like the Grand Canyon, it will certainly be found wanting if, as I’ve been informed, everyone must walk in the same direction. What is the point of that? Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller could count on being seen by photographers, but I should prefer to see and be seen by other folks like myself. The designers, doubtless single young people without children to show off, have proved themselves to be astonishingly ignorant of the European promenade — or, if not ignorant, then wonderfully perverse.

I had a very jolly time at the ophthalmologist’s — I’m not kidding! — but I’ll save that for some other time. Bref, the waiting room is freshened by the sounds of WQXR, the classical music station that has just been sold by its owner, The New York Times. What, I wonder, will replace it? At the ophthalmologist’s, I mean. I’m plotting.

Because of the warmth (“heat” would be too strong a word; although, when I got home, I was dripping like a squeezing sponge), I took a taxi up to 82nd Street, where I paid a visit to Crawford Doyle. I wanted to order Methland. I asked for it last Friday and was told that I could order it, and that’s what I wanted to do today. But today there was a copy in the shop. I also bought the book about the Romantics and science that is going to appear on the cover of the Book Review this weekend (so I’m told). It was recommended to me by a staff member on Friday, but I got distracted and didn’t pick it up. Later, I felt rather awful, because I make a point of taking up plausible recommendations; I’m the rare person who will actually read the book that you’re crazy about, unless I’ve some reason to think that I’ll hate it, which I sometimes do but usually don’t.

Then I had a nice lunch, at Demarchelier on 86th. I read the posthumous Styron story in The New Yorker. At one point — long before the wrenching end — it had me in tears, and not just because my pupils were still dilated. (I look forward to writing the story up tomorrow.) Before lunch arrived, I read a bit of A Meaningful Life, which had had me laughing at the doctor’s. When I came upon the following line at the restaurant, I had to put the book down, overwhelmed by the fertile thing that can attain no more:

Once every month or so, his wife would smile apologetically and a little defensively, put on her longest skirt, and pack herself over to see her mother in Flatbush like some kind of installment-plan Eurydice.

Jonathan Lethem’s forward to the NYRB reprint of this 1971 novel tells us that L J Davis still lives on Dean Street in Brooklyn. Mr Lethem used to play with Mr Davis’s sons.

Walking up Madison to Feldman’s Housewares, between 92nd and 93rd, I wished that I’d brought along a Nano. Then I more or less stopped thinking; my brain was keeping summer hours. So much so that, at Feldman’s, I wound up with two Yodeling Pickles instead of just one, and I forgot all about the pants hanger that Kathleen asked me to pick up. I thought about taking a third taxi home, but the prospect of squeezing into a back seat and then out again made walking looking easier.

And it was a good thing, that walk, because — my brain’s having rebooted for some reason — I made up my mind about something. As an unusual person, and a very tall one, I have always oscillated between two public modes: simple weirdness and pained self-consciousness. I decided today to jettison the pained self-consciousness. The elegant Latin for “Just Deal” will be most welcome.

¶ Matins: At Chron Higher Ed, Peter Dougherty argues for more pro-active university presses, as a way of overhauling scholarship.

¶ Lauds: The Prince of Wales has resigned from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (founded in 1877 by Williams Morris), of which he was also the patron. The issue appears to be his rigorous (rigid?) antiquarianism.

¶ Prime: While the major labels (such as still exist) fret about plunging CD sales, a cottage industry of new music recordings is re-inventing the business model.. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Tierce: Four years’ jail time for stealing 91 lobsters from the kitchen at Balley’s? I say sell Anthony Jones’s story to Hollywood and give the proceeds to a soup kitchen. The 38 year-0ld Jersey man created value.

¶ Sext: Ivy Style digs up an article from Time (November 11, 1966) about a once-thrilling trend: going sockless.

¶ Nones: Charles Taylor, former Liberian president/tyrant, takes the stand in his own defense, as the first African leader to be tried at The Hague.

¶ Vespers: At The Rumpus, an excerpt from Jonathan Ames’s new collection of essays and short fiction, The Double Life is Twice as Good.

¶ Compline: Choire Sicha takes another look at Brüno, and, partly inspired by Anthony Lane, comes away with a troubling take on America.

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