¶ Matins: According to Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, an Indian IT services vendor, American college grads are “unemployable.” They don’t know anything (global history, languages) and they hate to be bored. (via  reddit)

¶ Lauds: Kodachrome comes to an end. Michael Johnston develops the picture.

¶ Prime: What email at Enron can tell us about predicting  big-company chaos/collapse.

¶ Tierce: In what one hopes will be the resolution of a ghastly situation, Anthony Marshall collapsed again (this time from the after-effects of a fall), and his wife, Charlene, attributed his last collapse, two weeks ago, to “a stroke that has resulted in a headache and blurred vision.”

¶ Sext: Department of Crossed Purposes: Philadelphia’s Parking Authority’s venture into reality television, Parking Wars, has complicated life for the city’s marketers.

¶ Nones: Hats off to Tony Judt for saying what needs to be said about the West Bank “settlements,” and for speaking as someone who can remember genuine Israeli settlements. 

¶ Vespers: Cristina Nehring rumbles the contemporary American essay, pronouncing it “middle-aged.” So that’s why you can’t be bothered to read through those worth Best American Essay anthologies!

¶ Compline: Hands on the table! When someone else is talking to you, it’s rude (at best) to check out smartphones, Blackberries, &c, even if “the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use.”

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Nothing happened today. It was grand — until now. Now, I wish that something had happened today.

In the late afternoon, I ran a few errands, involving multiple rides on the elevator. On each of these rides but the last one, the elevator stopped at the third floor. Nobody got on; nobody got off. The last time it happened — and I fancy that this is why it didn’t happen again — my eye was teased by the ghost of a darting wraith, while my ear was tickled by a shriek of glee. Although I didn’t want to get the little ones into trouble, I stopped at the doorman’s desk to report the evident infraction. If you’re going to play with the elevators in New York City, pushing buttons just for the fun of it, you need to know the consequences — before they involve lynching.

You probably think that kids love to play with elevators, but that’s not true. Elevators are pretty boring, really — that’s why we grown-ups like them. What kids are playing with when they play with elevators are the adult passengers. The kiddies on the third floor would have given up the game in two minutes if there hadn’t been hapless old folks (twenty and up) looking a little confused, wonderring if they ought to hold the doors for someone in a hurry. Those of us who can remember being eight years old endeavor to pretend that this sort of thing happens all the time. Otherwise, you’re playing right into the kids’ hands.

Older children, the ones who suddenly find themselves on the hither side of puberty, are fond of pushing all the buttons on the elevator. This always strikes victims as totally dumb as well as unspeakably malignant, but it’s a move worthy of Sartre. By making people who have somewhere to go stop pointlessly at floor after floor, a teenager imposes the tedium of his or her miserable existence on all the humbugs who are delusional enough to think that, just because they’re paying a mortgage and getting laid on a regular basis, they’ve got their act together. Ha!

This is why there is no elevator-game theme park in New York City. You’d never be able to sign up enough adult victims to keep the patrons interested.

¶ Matins: A trio of guest bloggers at Good write about the replacement of “conspicuous consumption” with “conspicuous expression.”

¶ Lauds: It’s as if Petrus Christus and Rogier van der Weyden had taken up photography — also, recycling. Hendrik Kertens photographs his daughter, Paula. (via Purest of Treats)

¶ Prime: Alan Blinder explains why (in his view) inflation — that bugaboo of the propertied classes — is not much of a risk right now. Find something besides inflation to worry about, he advises.

¶ Tierce: Did the prosecutors in the Marshall trial jump the shark? To compute the value of an estate, it is necessary to venture a date of death. This is not a legal correlative of sticking pins in a voodoo doll.

¶ Sext: Orthodox couple in Bournemouth claims false imprisonment, owing to motion-sensor lightswitch that obliges them not to leave their apartment on the Sabbath lest they turn on the lights.

¶ Nones: Why theocracy cannot work in the modern world: “In the Battle for Iran’s Streets, Both Sides Seek to Carry the Banner of Islam.”

¶ Vespers: It’s increasingly apparent that the book that we ought to be reading is the Bible. Americans think that they know it, but they don’t. (via reddit)

¶ Compline: Is Prince Charles cruising for a bruising?

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This afternoon’s junket to Coney Island, to see the Cyclones play at Keyspan Park, was scrubbed pretty early in the day, owing largely to uncertain weather. I shouldn’t have been able to go even on a good day, because I contracted a touch of Kathleen’s malady, and would have found the long subway ride — inconvenient. But plans were changed without regard for me, thank heaven, and most of the party got together at Jane, a restaurant on Houston Street that Megan and Ryan like. (Me, too — although waspish words may quite reasonably be anticipated from LXIV, seeing as how the kitchen goofed his order, so that his dinner was limited to strawberry shortcake.) In connection with the Solstice, both Megan and Ryan reminisced fondly about enjoying the long and late twilight in Amsterdam last summer — before venturing to Uganda, where there was no twilight at all.

Kathleen suffered a bit of a setback yesterday, but she rallied in the evening, and we went to the 7:15 show of The Proposal. If you’re a regular reader, you already know this, from my Aviary of Ideas tweet. Also, if you’re a regular reader, you can imagine that I wouldn’t shut up about the movie when we got home. While Kathleen experimented with various knitting stitches, I went over what increasingly seems to be an extraordinarily well-scripted show. Why the critics don’t share our enthusiasm (the Metacritic gives it a score of 48, which seems nothing less than cognitively dissonant. Conspiracy theories, anyone? Or is The Proposal one of those movies that appeals specially to New Yorkers? A great deal of the film’s narrative richness is implicit — maybe that’s what it is. Well, it will be a challenge to write up. I wasn’t taking notes last night, and many of my aperçus will have flown forgotten, as a dream dies &c.

What does “college” have to do with any of this, you ask. It is part of a family joke that will be explained in due course of time.

 

last Week at Portico: The subjects of this week’s four pages are: Accent on Youth, an MTC revival starring the inimitable David Hyde Pierce; “Idols,” Tim Gautreaux’s story in the current issue of The New Yorker; Tony Scott’s updating of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3; and, of course, the Book Review.

Comparing notes afterward, Ms NOLA said that she’d wondered why the marquee lights weren’t blazing, while I remarked that the emptiness of the sidewalk had struck me as very odd. When we all assembled in front of the Nederlander Theatre to see Guys and Dolls this evening, we were met by a closed production. Our money was promptly refunded (quite a sum), and we headed uptown for dinner at Cognac (also quite a sum).

Who was asleep at the wheel? How was it that none of us had noticed that the show closed last Sunday? Ahead of schedule, yes, but not without notice, I’m sure. A handful of other ticketholders showed up, just as confused and disappointed as we were, but most of the prospective audience, it was clear, knew to stay away. Unless, of course, those of us who showed up were the only people who had bought tickets for the evening’s performance.

It was the damnedest thing, and neither Kathleen nor I had ever heard of the like.

***

Although I doubt that we should ever be friends in real life, I wouldn’t want anybody to think that I don’t hold Times movie critic Manohla Dargis in high esteem. I disagree with her about everything, but I have schooled myself to allow no unpleasant feelings to poison my response to her reviews, which I find to be salutary. They remind me that not everyone sees the world as I do, and that people who see the world differently can be quite intelligent about it.

In her review of The Proposal, which appeared in this morning’s paper, ready for me to read before I actually went to see the movie, Ms Dargis wrote,

The director marshaling all these clichés and stereotypes is Anne Fletcher, whose last gig was the similarly obnoxious “27 Dresses.” Working from a script by Peter Chiarelli, Ms. Fletcher betrays no originality from behind the camera and not a hint of visual facility. The opening scenes, including shots of Andrew rushing through the streets while balancing coffee cups, are right out of “The Devil Wears Prada,” minus the snap. The scene in which Margaret runs around naked is borrowed from “Something’s Gotta Give,” though here the point isn’t that desirability transcends age but that at 44, Ms. Bullock still has an amazing body. The rest of the movie looks like many industrial entertainments of this type: it’s decently lighted and as lived in as a magazine advertisement.

I didn’t see 27 Dresses, but I may rent it now: The Proposal became one of my favorite pictures before it was halfway through. It may be the only genuine screwball comedy to have been made since 1945. (I may be daft.) I wasn’t reminded of either Prada or Something, despite Ms Dargis’s warning that I ought to be.

I watched the movie carefully just to see if I thought that there was any merit to the “visual facility” crack. I did not. I found The Proposal to be gorgeous, and never moreso than in its existentially simple close-ups of the principals, eerily lighted and with nothing more than the oceanic horizon behind them. There’s a lot of darkness in The Proposal, and if it is an “industrial entertainment,” then I beg for more, at least of the same caliber.

Here’s why I doubt that Ms Dargis and I could ever be friends:

(Mr. Reynolds is equally likable, though more decorative than anything else.)

I may have said this before, but Mr Reynolds has a knack for playing men whom I should like to grow up to be — even if he is only slightly older than half my age. In The Proposal, he seems decorative in the way that Henry Fonda, say, might seem decorative.

This is to announce a policy that I have already implemented. When stating names, I no longer recognize “middle initials,” as my countrymen rather thoughtlessly call them, when they follow a full given name. The usage is peculiar to the United States (and to Canada, I suppose), and it is very, very ugly.

So: no more Robert A M Stern, no more Michael J Fox — just to pick two names out of the air. Either Robert Stern, R A M Stern (a wonderful British custom),  or some permutation of Robert Arthur Morton Stern (“Robert Morton Stern” is pretty fantastic, don’t you think?). Either Michael Fox, M J Fox, or (his real name) Michael Andrew Fox. The only person allowed to go by one initial and a surname is R Crumb, and when he’s no longer with us, nobody has the privilege. You will see why in a minute.

You’ll also note another policy, one that has been in force at this site since its inception. If I dislike solitary letters (other, of course, than the indefinite pronoun and the very definite “I”), I execrate what, again rather thoughtlessly, are called “periods,” when they do not mark the ends of sentences.

Given the rule to which “R Crumb” is an exception, there ought to be no uncertainty about what the “M” in “M Poirot” stands for.

I don’t for a moment claim that any of these policies of mine are “correct.” I believe that they are readily comprehensible, and as integral to my prose style as my fondess for the kind of thought that requires semicolons. That is all that matters.

My plan for this evening was to go to Greenpoint with Ms NOLA to a book event starring Maud Newton and Kate Christensen. Ms NOLA gave me her galley copy of Trouble, Kate Christensen’s new, fifth novel, two weeks ago; I got round to writing it up about an hour before it became clear that I would not be making it to Greenpoint. Had the event taken place in Manhattan somewhere, I’d probably have killed myself to get to it — I admire Kate Christensen’s work no end — but Greenpoint is still, for me, terra incognita. It wasn’t a question of directions; Ms NOLA would have got us there without ado. It was simply never having been to that part of Brooklyn. For a hit parade of reasons, today was not the day to acquaint myself with a new-to-me part of Gotham.

I had thought that writing up Trouble would be fairly straightforward. I had a reasonably clar idea of the aspect of the novel that I wanted to write about.  But I didn’t know the novel well enough to do the job; I’d only read it once. I wasn’t planning some in-depth Da Vinci Code reading of Trouble, which I had found very straightforward on the first reading. The trouble was that the book turned out not to be so straightforward upon the closer look that any write-up occasions. The meaty center of the book takes place in Mexico City, and I thought that I would write about that, but going over the first hundred pages, which take place right here in Rivers City, I wondered what I’d been thinking. Trouble is like a Hitchcock film: it’s written for the second reading.

Which is very nervy of Ms Christensen — if (as I can’t doubt) she’s aware of this aspect of her art. It’s one thing to ask a bloke to sit through a two hour movie a second time, or even a third, just so that he understands the voyeurist imagery of Rear Window (say). It’s quite another to ask even the most literate blighter to re-read a three-hundred page novel just to “get how it’s done.” It’s not that some mystery is revealed, not that at all. Any more than is the case with Hitchcock. It’s just that the richness of the production can’t be grasped the first time: you don’t know what you’re looking for. The second time, you don’t have to look: it falls on you like plaster in a catastrophe, and you wonder how you missed it.

Like Hitchcock, Kate Christensen is a mistress of the vernacular. She does not deal in the sharp artiness that for me constitutes the East Coast intellectual snob’s safe harbour. You can read Trouble without registering that Ms Christensen is a serious novelist — the first time, anyway. It’s the same with Hitchcock: the man presented himself as a popular entertainer, almost as a vaudevillian.  Hitchcock’s elegance is not apparent if you’re thinking of Henry James or Colm Tóibín. Kate Christensen is even more modest: she writes as if she were undertaking nothing more arduous than this entry. As the author of this entry, however, I’m uniquely placed to note the richness of composition in Ms Christensen’s everyday-sounding work.

So, what was going to be a simple bit of praise for the new novel alarmingly devolved into an ambitious think piece that I wasn’t prepared to write well. So I did the only thing that could be done: I watched a video with Kathleen.

¶ Matins: Andrew Sullivan wonders why the New York Times publishes an Op-Ed piece by a “hard-right neocon” whose views on Iraq were “so terribly wrong.” Mr Sullivan’s colleague at The Atlantic, Joshua Green, wonders pretty much the same thing — vis-à-vis Mr Sullivan himself! (via Brainiac)

¶ Lauds: When I was a kid, shirt cardboard was my all-purpose source of fun; what a drag it was, waiting for my father to wear the shirts when they came back from the laundry. It wouldn’t have made much sense, but if that stiff card stock had been corrugated, I might have grown up to be Chris Gilmour. (via The Best Part)

¶ Prime: The Times has started a new business blog, entitled You’re the Boss. you’re the boss. Because we believe in small businesses at The Daily Blague, we’re going to give it a trial.

¶ Tierce: Laura Italiano overdoes it a bit at the Post, but that’s what they their reporters to do.

¶ Sext: It’s official: dogs are brighter than cats. (Don’t tell our backer that we ran this story, though.)

¶ Nones: Was the United States meddling in the Iranian election dispute when it asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance shutdown? (And Twitter famously complied.)

¶ Vespers: Now that Penguin is republishing classic thrillers by pioneer Eric Ambler, it’s good that John Self is here to appreciate them ably.

¶ Compline: A thoughtful and interesting piece about abortion? Surely we jest, right? Wrong. Richard Crary surprrises. (But don’t worry, you probably won’t be asked to change your mind.)

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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It was a nice out-and-about day. The out-and-about part lasted for about four hours. First, I had two neighborhood errands. Never mind about them. Then, the Museum. After the Museum, I stopped in at Crawford Doyle for a copy of The New Valley, Josh Weil’s triptych of novellas (lovely phrase; everyone’s using it; and especially resonant after a stroll through the Museum’s Netherlandish gallery), and then walked down 81st Street to Willy’s, my barbershop.

Since the wait wouldn’t be long, I sat down and started in on “Ridge Weather,” the first of the novellas. It was not possible to take the measure of the prose, though, because a radio was blaring “Baby Love” and bringing back memories of a Supremes dance party at an off-campus house in South Bend in 1969, um, forty years ago. Also there was a futbol game on the television. In the barber chair, I did not attempt to read; my spectacles get in the way.

There are two barbers at Willy’s, and the customer in the other chair was — what? Not fully grown but beginning to be full of it. Baby fat lasts longer in these precincts than it does elsewhere, for obvious reasons, but that is all that the kid was carrying: it was entirely in his face. He rather aggressively spoke Spanish with the barber, and if that made me wince a little it made me smile a lot. At the end of his trim — I could see everything thanks to mirrors in front of and behind me — I got to see the application of this mysterious mousse that I hear about, and that makes me wonder what the men who wear it are thinking. (Young ladies have informed me that it is a lot more like Brylcreem than anything I’d ever put in my hair — if I had any.) I wish you could have seen the kid puff up when he asked for “five dollars back”; among the many other things that he was new to was the swagger of tipping. Then there were the handshakes and the hasta lew-ego!

(I was so much worse at his age — but I don’t want to sound competitive here.)

Then to Agata & Valentina, for a chunk of reggiano parmegiano. Somehow, the bill came to $123.63. I guess I did buy a few other things, among them a hunk of salami — well, more like the stern of a salami — for (let’s see here) $36.40. Just an ounce or two shy of three and a half pounds — not bad! As Kathleen said, salami lasts forever, and, yes, it does. The end isn’t always as pleasant as the beginning, but it does last. I’ll let you know when it’s finished, but not my age and weight.

There were two shows to see at the Museum — two that I hadn’t seen, that is. And can you believe that I read about one of them in The Eonomist? That was strange. The Times must have written it up, and I must have missed the write-up. Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages. I won’t say much about this breathtaking show now, except this: while the drawings reproduce nicely in the catalogue, what does not reproduce is the ninth-centuryness of the drawings that are that old. The Museum may be full of items that are far older than c 840 CE, but, as books go, c 840 CE is old. Over a thousand years old, and there it is, under glass, looking as crisp as if it were bound up yesterday, and there I am, standing in a city that didn’t exist for most of the intervening millennium, and in a building that most of the people around me probably took for antique.   

And the drawings are amazing. Sure, you’ve seen stuff like it before — but not quite like it. There’s an Ascension in the margins of one book that’s really quite Baroque.

The other show was a modest collection of photographs from the Second Empire. It’s astonishing, what can happen in twenty years. I feel that nothing half so dramatic as the rise and fall of Napoleon III and the recreation of Paris has occurred since 1989. Allowing, that is, for their lack of telephones, light bulbs, central heating and (for all but a few early adopters) indoor plumbing. The Second Empire was definitely the Western World’s first caffeinated jolt of modern times.

When I got home, I cleaned up and wrote my head off. I do wish that Eric Patton would publish his fascinating and enviable posts on Thursdays and Fridays, because reading them (which can’t be helped) on Daily Office days cuts into the dutiful consumption of feeds.

 ¶ Matins: At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf brings the Twitter revolution back home: will an “information elite” shape political action even before most citizens are aware of events?

¶ Lauds: An interesting look, written in Varietese, at the “growth” — mostly prospective, if you ask me — of musical theatre in France. The French have hardly developed a real taste for grand opera yet, if you ask me.

¶ Prime: James Surowiecki winds up a column on the price of oil with a call for a gas tax. I’m all for it, too, but — well, read on.

¶ Tierce: The scene of the crime, described.

¶ Sext: Ralph Gamelli elaborates on that great New Yorker cartoon caption, “How about never? Is “never” good for you?: “Read My Body Language,” at TMN.

¶ Nones: More bitchery-at-sea in Asian waters: as the reddit post put it, “Chinese submarine collides with US Warship towing submarine-locating device. Irony surrenders.”

¶ Vespers: James Scott, at The Rumpus, writes so powerfully about Josh Weil’s triptych of novellas, The New Valley, that I’ve added an errand to my list: get this book.

¶ Compline: Eric Margolis discusses four persistent myths about World War II. Watch your toes!

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¶ Lord Chesterfield dispenses some advice that is violently at odds with the Sixties ethos in which I came of age.

The most familiar and intimate habitudes, connections, and friendships, require a degree of good-breeding, both to preserve and cement them. If ever a man and his wife, or a man and his mistress, who pass night as well as days together, absolutely lay aside all good-breeding, their intimacy will soon degenerate into a coarse familiarity, infallibly productive of contempt or disgust.

I have had to work my way toward understanding the truth of this the hard way. I’ve gone a little farther than the earl: I believe that there is not a moment in life, no matter how solitary, that does not require the attentiveness and respect that are the pillars of good breeding.

¶ Another homily in Moby-Dick: Melville concludes a brisk chapter on the sprucing-up of a whaler after the rendering of the beast into commercial commodities with another attempt, as it seems to me, to give contemporary life an Old-Testament look, a sort of spiritual Williamsburg-ing.

… when, on the heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of “There she blows!” and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, this is but man-killing!! Yet his is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world’s vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when — There she blows! — thee ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.

Oh! the metempsychosis!

My word exactly.

¶ In the middle of the monkey-business in Chapter XXV of Don Quixote, I hit upon another passage that reminded me of the operatic sensibility that infuses so much of this book; not that Don Quixote is like comic opera, but rather the reverse: the book inspired the pace and the tone of comic opera.

What could be more Mozartean — or Verdian — than the reaction scene in which each member of the ensemble has a different response to the wonders just transpired:

Don Quixote was dumbfounded, Sancho astounded, the cousin baffled, the page stunned, the man who told about the braying stupefied, the innkeeper perplexed, and, in short, all who heard the words of the puppet master were amazed…

All these reactions are, in fact, the same, but Cervantes’ determination to come up with a different verb for each member of the company sets each slightly apart from the others, an individuation that lies at the heart of comic opera’s greatness.

¶ Squillions: In a letter from Beverly Hills dated 18 December 1955, Noël Coward retails some tittle-tattle about Clifton Webb (Waldo Lydecker in Laura):

He is leaving Clifton’s today and has taken an apartment in the same place as the boys [Charles Russell and Lance Hamilton] as we considered it unwise for him to stay here. This has caused a great fluttering in the colony and no-one knows where they’re at. He has handled the Clifton situation with consummate skill and every prospect pleases, except that it was getting near the point of no return. Poor Clifton is always on the verge of Umbrage about something or other and this this not helped by Harry Pissalatums which happens very very very often indeed indeedy.

If editor Barry Day had glossed this coy report of gay romance, and explained the meaning of “Harry Pissalatums,” he would only have been doing his job. Why he bothers to identify Russell and Hamilton but not do his job makes me throw up my hands — hardly for the first time in this inexplicably bad book.

I’m a bit agitated at this evening. That’s the word for it, too. I’m not anxious, really, or worried, or fretful; just stirred up. All right, I’m a litle bit fretful. WiFi connectivity issues again. Nothing like yesterday’s, but now that I have some perspective I can give you an idea of how screwed up things were yesterday morning.

• TimeWarner had a brief problem that shut down Internet access (although not “connectivity” for a little while — so far as I know, it lasted for no more than fifteen minutes. So that was one reason for the 404.
• Then there was the netbook’s power save/WiFi access problem that I didn’t even know about. Again, signals loud and strong, but no connection.
• Finally, the WiFi booster in the bedroom has been giving us both grief. I suspect that the cable connecting the router to the booster (without which the booster wouldn’t be worth the electiricity that it consumes) has been crimped by running, for a winter, beneath two sash windows. Must replace.

The hair it tears. How’s one to fix what’s on the fritz when everything is on the fritz?

For the rest of it, though, I was simply agitated, like clothes in a washing machine. I got a tremendous amount of writing done. That ought to leave one calm and glowing, but it rarely does, perhaps when nothing is actually finished. Not finishing things is fine; I’m trying to get into a rhythm of working on things, instead of trying to dash them off in one go. Call me ‘elated’ rather than ‘contented.’ Agitated.

At eleven at night, an old friend called, to announce a long-considered career change. And a long-expected one. I’d been worried about the posture of the decision, foreseeing one of those “You-can’t-fire-me-because-I-quit” scenarios that sound good for about a minute. As it is, nothing in our friend’s situation precludes an animacable parting of the ways. At our age, though, this sort of thing is serious, heart attack serious. Our friend almost had a heart attack just making the final steps toward the decision. Agitating.

During the day, my Web master and I exchanged several emails about automating the DVD project that I’ve been writing about this week in the Diary; we also came to terms on a plan that meets all requirements of masculine interest: it’s more ambitious, more expensive, and more exciting than anything that crossed my mind on Monday. It’s so serious, in fact, that, as I wrote to Steve, I don’t for once have ants in my pants. Hey, I’m still getting used to Blidgets, and feeling guilty about having so few fabulous insights for the Aviary of Ideas. Ambition + expense + excitement = Agitation.

Finally, there was the croaking woman. I had picked up supplies at the Food Emporium and collected the mail, and I was waiting for the elevator by myself when a shortish woman in a blonde bob that she was much too old for wheeled up on her cell phone. She was walking, but she seemed to glide; she was certainly oblivious. How stupid do you have to be to walk right up to an elevator door that is not unlikely to open on a crowd of exiting passengers. But she was on her phone, talking in a toneless baritone that so dramatically amplified the awfulness of her yakking that I could not board when the elevator arrived. I could not trust myself to share the space with her. Had I followed her into the elevator cab, I should have been obliged to set down my shopping bags and apply a garrotte to her neck. The woman was the most socially unacceptable creature that I have seen since the New Year. A package of heedlessly obnoxious unattractiveness, she needed to be tossed to the lions — but the lions are in the Bronx, and presumably too well-fed not to be as repulsed by her as I was. Che agita!

I’d love to say that I know of something that’s going to stop the agitation and quiet me down, but I don’t. Once again, I’m wondering how I got to be sixty  before I confronted the fact that I am, very simply, high strung.

¶ Matins: Not everybody likes the High Line Park. (via Infrastructurist) Make that “not everybody + one.”(via kottke.org) 

¶ Lauds: Smashingly handsome and intelligent design, from Jorge Chamorro (be sure to click through from The Best Part).

¶ Prime: At The Economist, Banyan worries about the recrudescence, this time in Asia, of the world-shattering, sea-power-obsessed ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan.

¶ Tierce: Warren Whitaker, the T & E attorney who drafted the doubtful 2004 codicil that, prosecutors maintain, Brooke Astor was incompetent to execute, took his instructions from F X Morrissey, co-defendant in the Marshall trial.

¶ Sext: Ha! They knew it was a hoax all along — so they say, at Bentham Science Publishers, a rather hucksterish-sounding organization that just accepted a paper submitted by scientists at the Center for Research on Applied Phrenology.

¶ Nones: How weird is this: Saudi princess runs up huge bills in Paris, then refuses to pay, claiming diplomatic immunity. Huh? (Then she pays — one of the bills, anyway.)

¶ Vespers: If you can stand to wait for the book to appear in shops, read the Rumpus interview with Kate Christensen, whose Trouble is a very thoughtful summer read.

¶ Compline: Alex Krupp defends KWL charts. I had absolutely no idea what KWL charts are. Wikipedia to the rescue. As for the charts…

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Kathleen stayed home today, of course, but she felt a little better as the day wore on; in fact, she began to be bored — always a good sign. I felt better, too, once I’d talked to the doctor, who reassured me by confiding that, three weeks ago, he was laid low with the same symptoms.

And that was all there was to today. Little jobs, bits of reading, work on the Daily Office. A very special and unlooked-for package in the mail; the moment I spied the return address, I began (rather entitledly, I confess) to hope that it contained something like what in fact turned out to be inside. On the drawbacks side of the ledger, the netbook had connectivity problems that seemed to have something to do with — but it turned out to be something else entirely, something that I should never have thought of, or known how to fix. My patron saint proxied the machine about an hour ago and determined that the cut-outs had something to do with the netbook’s power management protocols. It seems that I toggled into the wrong mode. There is much to be learned &c.

Meanwhile, my DVD/Portico project bumped along nicely. My other patron saint reminded me of — duh! — the <br> tag. It is totally typical that I have been able to conceive of this project, for which I have great ambitions — as a way not only of keeping track of my movies but of grouping them in “if you liked this you’ll like that” arrangements, and making Web pages out of it to boot — while forgetting all about the <br> tag in the middle of it all. That’s why I did not become a mathetmatician. It’s why I was great at trigonometry. In trigonometry, there are tables to remind you which particular version of <br> you needed.  

Meanwhile, Jean Ruaud published a third gallery of New York images at SmugMug over the weekend, and they’re all great, but I love the shots of the Cloisters more than I can say, especially the one of this feller.

¶ Matins: In the current issue of The Econimist, Lexington outlines some embarrassing figures about the hours that American children don’t put in at school.

¶ Lauds: Jazz since 1959 — the year of Kind of Blue, Giant Steps, and Time Out — recordings that I hope you have in your collection, whether you’re an aficionado or not! (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: A story about the rivalry between Comptroller of the Currency John C Dugan and FDIC chair Sheila Bair illustrates the biggest problem in regulation: updating/upgrading it in the middle of a turf war. (How medieval is “comptroller”?)

¶ Tierce: When I saw the headline of this story about Ruth Madoff, “The Loneliest Woman in New York,” I asked myself how she gets her hair colored these days. Not where she used to!

¶ Sext: Will the Fiat-ization of Chrysler deflate the American male’s libido? Gary Kamiya’s tongue-in-cheek reports ends with a truly dandy suggestion.

¶ Nones: How the United States ought to respond to the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: stay the course already set by President Obama.

¶ Vespers: Michael Dirda writes about Patricia Highsmith in The New York Review of Books: “This Woman Is Dangerous.”

¶ Compline: Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the plight of the genuinely poor in this country, and finds that, just as it is in most places, decent (and legitimate) shelter is the big problem.

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¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 9 October 1749 is magnificently typical. He begins with reference to his son’s route frm Venice to Rome, “which … I advised you to make along the coast of the Adriatic, through Rimini, Loretto, Ancona, etc, places that are all worth seeing, but not worth staying at.” About Rome itself, he writes powerfully about the papacy and even more trenchantly about the Jesuits

whose Society I look upon to be the most able and  best governed society in the world, Get acquainted, if you can, with their General, who always resides at Rome; and who, though he has no seeming power out of his own Society, has (it may be) more real influence over the whole world, than any temporal Prince in it. They have almost engrossed the education of youth, they are, in general, confessors to most of the Princes in Europe; and they are the principal missionaries out of it; which three articles give them a most excessive influence, and solid advantages … Converse with them, frequent them, court them; but know them.

¶ Chapter 96 of Moby-Dick, “The Try-Works,” is as overwritten as any in this monstrous book, but its tone is consistent, almost disciplined. The only false note is the ridiculous mathematical observation about “bodies gliding along the cycloid.” The description of the ship’s cutting through the sea at night, its try-pots blazing and smoking, the “barbaric brilliancy” of the sailors’ teeth against their matted, tawny faces, is remarkably free of Melville’s distracting irrelevancies. Soon enough, however, the prophet steps forth.

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, nor Rome’s accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true — not true, or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. “All is vanity.” ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet.

¶ Don Quixote admonishes the page whom the party encounters on the road:

… for what does it matter if you are killed in the first battle or skirmish, or are shot by artillery, or blown up by a mine? It is all dying, and the end of the story, and according to Terence, the soldier killed in battle looks better than the one who is safe and sound in flight, and the good soldier achieves as much fame as his obedience to his captains and to those who command him.

Really.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward debuts at Las Vegas and triumphs in his first television “special.” A passing phrase in a letter from Blue Harbour triggered a bit of gag reflex, so fiendishly did it capture the meretriciousness of television, a falsity that makes genuine theatre look as true as Euclid:

They seem to have done good preparatory work on the show and brought the plans for the set, which look very exciting. 68 feet in depth and with the series of curtains which will part and roll themselves up into pillars as Mary [Martin] and I advance for our entrance…

From time to time, I look back on the Fifties as a golden age of television. But what it was the golden age of was pretentious junk.

It wasn’t the most thrilling weekend in the world, but it did what a weekend ought to do: refresh and restore. It would have done the job a lot better if Kathleen hadn’t been struck by a nasty intestinal flu. Is anything more miserable? Being me, I hated my impotence. The only thing that I could do that was guaranteed to be effective was to leave Kathleen alone.

But I read all of Jeff in Venice, and really liked it; and I concocted another chicken salad, this one with avocados and corn, parsley and cilantro, in a curry mayonnaise. Of course, there was far too much for one.

Now: how boring can I be about my DVD collection? In one sentence: since I no longer have room to keep the DVDs in their plastic boxes, I’m storing them in paper sleeves, with round plastic windows on one side and Dymo labels on the other. It’s all very neat and efficient.

It’s all very neat and efficient, that is, if I know what I’m looking for. Most of the time, I don’t. I paw through the boxes just like anybody else. (I find that the first DVD that captures my interest is the one that I’ll end up watching, so now I just go with it.) In an intermediate phase of disc storage, I kept 250 movies on a bookshelf in the hallway; these were the pictures least likely to require a special frame of mind for viewing. (Consider, as an alternative, Eraserhead. You may be someone who would watch David Lynch’s amazing subcutaneous debut without any prior deliberation, but I’m not.) The rest of the collection — more than half — was kept in vinyl albums from Staples. Each album held 96 discs, variously grouped: Movies made before 1970. Foreign-language DVDs. TV series (I have almost all of the Inspector Morses. ) I would leaf through the albums in search of something to watch. Sometimes, the relevant information about a DVD is printed in maddeningly small letters around the inner rim, but, for the most part, each DVD is a kind of poster for itself.

For reasons that I’ll spare you right now, the prospect of flipping through the drawers of paper sleeves and uniform Dymo labels had to be rejected out of hand. If nothing else, it would subject the sleeves and the drawers to a lot of wear and tear.

I had a brainstorm. As your reward for wading through the preceding verbiage, a picture will tell the rest of the story. My very provisional “Top 20” list, at Portico.

Other “categories” to come:

• Top 100
• Screwball comedies
• Films noirs.
• Depressing movies
• Alfred Hitchcock
• Really scary!
• Corporate sci-fi
• “Why did I buy this?”

Conceivably, any one movie could appear in all of the categories — that’s the beauty part. For example, Mr and Mrs Smith would appear on both the Screwball Comedy and Alfred Hitchcock pages.

So, I got that going. There is much to be learned about the HTML of tables. I’ll try not to be the one who has to.

last Week at Portico: ¶ Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn gives us a character, Eilis Lacey, capable of replacing the hysterical women in Dostoevsky with a deadly quiet. ¶ Carlos Cuarón’s Rudo y Cursi re-unites the stars of his very popular Y Tu Mamá También, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, but it doesn’t seem to have been taken up by that film’s audience. I found the new picture tighter and more memorable; perhaps what I mean by that is that the story of Rudo y Cursi is itself somewhat more grown up. ¶ And, 0f course, the Book Review review (“Telling the Tale”).

Of all the side-effects of discovering my vocation at the age of sixtyish, the urge to have a distinct workplace is the most unexpected. For all of my life, I have been a dedicated home-worker. So far as I have worked at all, that is — and it didn’t amount to much until a few years (or a few months!) ago. I’m talking about work here, not “productivity.” I’m talking about meeting defined goals whether I’m in the mood to do so or not.

Although I still believe in the ideal of a harmonious (if hardly seamless) overlay of domestic life and personal industry — living above the shop, as it were — I recognize the impediments more honestly than I used to do. If I were a Victorian master of the house, I could close my study door and expect not to be disturbed; but in fact my position is much closer to that of the Victorian mistress of the house: I’m the one who has to see that the household hums. Don’t we all? Only the richest of the rich can afford to employ the kind of servant who is truly capable of housekeeping, and in fact such employees are not called servants anymore.

So: wouldn’t it be nice to “go to the office” for at least part of every day? Wouldn’t it be loverly to have a room, somewhere in the neighborhood — a studio apartment, say — to which I could move the contents of the blue room (books, mostly). I wouldn’t have a landline, and hardly anyone has my cellphone number. For a few hours every day, I wouldn’t see anything that didn’t pertain to site-related projects.

That’s the problem right there: I wouldn’t have a moment’s peace. I happen to be one of those creatures who is more disturbed by what he can’t see than by what’s in plain sight. I’d worry about a break-in at home. I’d remember that I’d forgotten to water the pots on the balcony. I’d obsess about dinner (what to make, which store to shop at, the possibilities of ordering in). I think far too much about dinner as it is, but I don’t obsess, because the kitchen is right here, and I can have a look in the freezer at any time. (Later, thanks!)

So I pigeonhole the dream of a separate workplace among my other fantasies — arrangements that cannot obtain in the universe as it is currently constituted. Then I get out the vacuum cleaner.