A few weeks ago, I retired the old black Nano, replacing it with an even sleeker new 16G model. All the playlists that were on the old unit were loaded onto the new one, and at that very moment the friend to whom I was thinking of giving the retired Nano — loaded with operas for her —  called me up and invited me to lunch.

Now, my friend happens to have completely sidestepped the age of the CD. She decided to stop her technological advance at cassette tapes. We all shook our heads, but there was nothing for it — she refused to take one of our extra CD players.

But she never had any time to work up a case against iPods or Nanos, so I was able to take her by surprise, with my old black number and a nice Klipsch iGroove to go with it.

We were having a glass of wine before lunch, I insisting that my friend would master the controls of the Nano in no time, she just as sure that she’d never figure it out — but quite pleased with the noise that Un Ballo in Maschera was making in the other room. Suddenly I found that I wasn’t paying attention to our conversation. “Amelia doesn’t appear in Act I, does she?” But we went on talking.

It was only when she left the room to put lunch on the table that I went to take a look at the Nano. OMG! I’d forgotten to disable the shuffle option!

That’s what both the old and new black Nanos were dedicated to: playlists of jazz, Broadway, fado, lieder, opera arias, you name it. The one thing all the lists had in common is that they were meant to be shuffled.

Not so good with, say, the Ring cycle — also on the reloaded unit.

Just trying to imagine how I would have solved this problem over the phone, hours later and still full of my good deeds, still brings a cold sweat to my brow.

¶ Matins: Matt Taibbi lays it all out for you, in no uncertain terms. “It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock…” (via Mike O’Neill)

¶ Lauds: Listen, it’s disgusting that female actors “age” so much faster than their male colleagues that they find themselves playing the mothers of characters played by men hardly any younger than themselves. But maybe there’s a good reason that has nothing whatever to do with crow’s feet.

¶ Prime: Confucius say, a picture is worth a thousand words. (Citation, anyone?) RJ say, a thousand words is not too many. This week’s Economist cover gets a handy explication at Strange Maps.

¶ Tierce: GM’s goal of recapturing 29% of the American auto market, set at the beginning of this decade, probably contributed to the company’s distress. (And it’s not the “29.”) (via Morning News)

¶ Sext: “You’d better take the highway, because my way is for me only”: memos from Edward Mike Davis, proprietor of the Tiger Oil family of companies, make hilarious reading now. (Via Things Magazine)

¶ Nones: It’s hard to read the BBC’s story about increased surveillance on the Mexican border without feeling that received morality makes people really, really stupid.

¶ Vespers: Is the recession/depression stomping out ambition? Choire Sicha thinks so, and he’s going to write a book about it.

¶ Compline: What impresses me about President Obama’s press conference this evening is his ability to address issues substantively but in terms that almost everyone can understand.

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A paragraph in Tony Judt’s Postwar leaps out at me:

It is one of the paradoxes of the Socialist project that the absence of property tends to generate more corruption, not less. Power, position and privilege cannot be directly bought, but depend instead upon mutually-reinforcing relationships of patronage and clientelism. Legal rights are replaced by sycophancy, which is duly rewarded with job security or advancement. To achieve even modest and legitimate objectives — medical treatments, material necessities, educational opportunities — people are required to bed the law in a variety of minor but corrupting ways. (page 579)

With the exception of the last sentence, this looks like a perfect description of academia in America. Can Mr Judt, a doyen of our professoriat, have been directed to word this passage (doubtless correct) by an ivy-league planchette?

¶ Matins: It’s time for Larry Summers to be deported to Australia. Somewhere! Hiring him in any capacity is to date the president’s biggest boo-boo. As Frank Rich reminds us, “Summers worked for a secretive hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, after he was pushed out of Harvard’s presidency at the bubble’s height.”

¶ Lauds: Looking for an old house with new wiring, preferably something truly Palladian? Look no farther. (via Things Magazine)

¶ Prime: Dio mio! Thomas Meglioranza will be singing in New York in June — Beethoven at Mannes. Must I wait to buy tickets at the door?

¶ Tierce: Michael Cooper reports on the stimulus perplex from Houston:

But to ensure that the money is spent quickly, the law leaves decisions of how to spend some $27.5 billion in transportation money up to the states — and quite a few are using their shares to build new and wider roads that will spur development away from their most populous centers.

¶ Sext: Today, I want to share with you a masterpiece of sixth-grade humor. N!S!F!W!

¶ Nones: France rethinks its version of colorblindness.

¶ Vespers: And, in more news from France, Benjamin Ivry reports on the inevitable dustup concerning the publication of Roland Barthes’s diaries.

¶ Compline: The personal-responsibility folks won’t see a problem with this, but Pablo Torre reports, at Sports Illustrated Vault, that “within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke. (via Morning News)

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¶ For some reason, the egotism of Lord Chesterfield’s ambitions for his son hits me like a slap in the letter of 29 October 1748.

My anxiety for your success increases in proportion as the time approaches of your taking your part upon the great stage of the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though I was on my deathbed with an incipient cold, Kathleen absconded to sunny North Carolina for a weekend of carefree abandon with her parents. Da noive!

(As Fossil Darling likes to say, “If you believe that, I’ll tell you the one about the three bears.” In nearly thirty years of mystification, he has never once explained this wiseguy utterance. If he’d only offer to sell me a bridge, I could at least ask for a prospectus.)

That’s not all! Next weekend, when I’m sure to be seriously stuffed-up, Kathleen will be off to Coral Gables, a Floridian demesne notorious for its round-the-clock frolics.  Would that I had never figured out that “filing” — as in, dumping a hundredweight of paper on the SEC, which is what I thought Kathleen was doing all those late nights — is just an anagram for “I fling.”

(You know that ancient Chinese classic, the I Fling. All the hexagrams mean “No blame.”)

Da noive! (And, speaking of Da Noive, how about this?)

From the Times, 26 April 1895:

Mrs G H Benjamin’s reception — Mrs George Hillard Benjamin and Miss Benjamin of 46 East Seventy-Fourth Street sent out cards for a reception on April 30.

Now you know. Mrs and Miss had a party and they didn’t ask you.

Waiting to hear Just heard! that Kathleen has landed safely at Raleigh-Durham — her plane’s wings required de-icing at LaGuardia (!) — and I’m off to the movies (the new Paul Rudd thing) with a side-errand to the storage unit, a detour that I’d cut if it weren’t for Quatorze’s help. I’m on the edge of a cold, blah, blah, blah.

The Week at Portico: Still nothing in the way of a book page — although of course I had a look at the Book Review. And I wrote up a play, the hilarious 39 Steps, and a movie, the very non-hilarious Wrestler.

¶ Matins: Blood and Treasure. We were supposed to be the land of the free, but we’re really that land of the pirates.

¶ Lauds: The death of Nathasha Richardson — how?

¶ Prime: Not since David Owen’s New Yorker piece have I seen such a ringing endorsement of Green Gotham. Hey, you rubes in your country idylls — we’re the conservors.

¶ Tierce: Something else to drive the Wingnuts crazy: Attorney General Eric Holder has announced an end to raids on medical-marijuana dispensers.

¶ Sext: Bullfighting becomes exciting — out of the ring. When one torero wins the top arts medal (?), an earlier laureate returns his in disgust.

¶ Nones: Sukumar Muralidharan’s concise and lucid “Accountability in a time of excess” exhorts you to know what you’re talking about when you invoke Adam Smith.

¶ Vespers: Everybody knows that French workers love to walk out in protest. For the chattering classes, reading books that are unpopular with the grosse légumes is preferred. As a result, La princesse de Clèves, a historical novel published in 1678, is once again a sell-out. (via Alexander Chee)

¶ Compline: It’s a lengthy, small-type read, but Danielle Allen’s review of Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens in TNR may be the most important piece of political theory that you read this year. Yes,
you!

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¶ Matins: It seems that I had my eye on the wrong target. I expected the outgoing Bushies to act up. Instead, it’s the Wingnuts.

¶ Lauds: Sharon Butler writes about how Facebook works — for artists. “Go away Purity Police.” Amen — I guess. (via Art Fag City)

¶ Prime: Daniel Green is thinking of doing something like what I do, at The Reading Experience…

¶ Tierce: Three out of four of today’s Times Op-Ed pieces concern the AIG bonuses. Two are by regular columnists, but the third, by Lawrence Cunningham, is the one to read.

¶ Sext: Christoph Niemann’s sweet elegance imposes order on the most disorderly of all things: cords.

¶ Nones: A few weeks ago (at the beginning of last month), Angela Merkel of Germany protested the Pope’s handling of Bishop Williamson. Now the French government is attackinig the Pope’s stand on condoms in Africa.

¶ Vespers: Simon Creasey interviews topnotch graphic fictionist Adrian Tomine. (via Emdashes)

¶ Compline: New Hampshire: the “Peter Pan” state!

Terry Stewart, a member of the town budget committee in Gilford, N.H., and a seat-belt-law opponent, has had it with the new majority. “No matter what’s your pleasure in life, sooner or later they’re coming,” he says.

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For a moment, I thought I’d thrown away my housekeys. Down the garbage chute, that is. I knew that I’d tossed my copy of the Zoë Heller novel that I am reading with the greatest avidity. In an abstracted moment, I was confused by a tumble of packing peanuts on my way out the door.

I suspected, too, that I’d thrown away today’s mail. The book could be replaced easily enough, and the keys turned out to be hanging in the lock. But I thought I’d better not just let the mail go without making an attempt to retrieve it. I had no idea whether this would be possible. There used to be a compactor — surely nothing could be withdrawn from that.

Down in the basement, whither I was directed by Dominic, the doorman, I found my refuse, lying in a hopper in plain view but out of reach. Pieces of the mail were there anyway. I asked one of the older porters, who happened to be standing around and who happens not to be Anglophone, for help. He enlisted a younger porter whom I see all the time. The younger porter wanted me to be helped, but not by himself. He directed a storm of Spanish at his colleague, who resisted with equal determination.

Eventually, though, the garbage was gone through. A few times, we had to stand back, as if an express were barreling through. We’d hear the rattling in the chute, and then the garbage, some of it not in bags, would come flying into the hopper. At one point, I covered my eyes, because bits of glass seemed to be flying everywhere.

When I felt that I’d recouped everything that hadn’t been rendered soggy by stray egg yolk, I tipped the men very generously and went straight to Barnes & Noble — for another copy of The Believers.

¶ Matins: President Obama’s address to small business owners is good so far as it goes, but I’d like to see the Small Business Administration elevated to Cabinet status, with the bigger SBA overseeing tax policies for small employers.

¶ Lauds: Good for them: “Rose family denounces plan to close Brandeis museum.”

¶ Prime: How did I miss this story? “The city without a memory: treasures lost under collapsed Cologne archives.” What an inexcusable catastrophe.

¶ Tierce: David Brooks notes that we are, anomalously, in an “astonishingly non-commercial” moment. But we’ll snap out of it, he reassures us, because it’s in our DNA to do so. But is it?

¶ Sext: I’m beginning to understand that San Francisco writer (and computer geek) Lance Arthur has a magnificent curmudgeonly side. He suavely demonstrates that his hometown’s inferiority makes it a better place to live than New York.

¶ Nones: Sounds like something Evelyn Waugh might dream up: “Followers of Madagascar’s opposition leader have been carrying out an exorcism at a presidential palace in Antananarivo that was seized by troops overnight.”

¶ Vespers: Now that cabin fever is driving New Yorkers outdoors, regardless of whether spring has actually checked in for the day, here’s a handy independent bookstore walking tour from The Millions.

¶ Compline: Quaint old Amsterdam will be re-fitted with a smart electric grid by 2016. (via The Infrastructurist)

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¶ In Moby-Dick, “The Monkey-Rope,” another one of Melville’s joculo-Shakespearean entertainments.

“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,” he suddenly added, no approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. “Will you look at that kannakin sir: smell of it, if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added: “The steward, Mr Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bellows by which he blows back the breath into a half-drowned dman?”

Not to mention the flogged-to-death Siamese-twins image.

¶ In Don Quixote, Sancho continues to dream about governing ínsulas. The bachelor, Don Sansón, encourages Don Quixote to appear in the Zaragoza lists, where “he could win fame vanquishing all the Aragonese knights, which would be the same as vanquishing all the knights in the world.”

¶ In Squillions, a whispering campaign at the Admiralty aims to shut down Noël Coward’s production of In Which We Serve, the patriotic re-telling of, among other adventures, Lord Mountbatten’s misadventures in Crete; but the interference halts abruptly with a letter from “Bertie” to “Dickie.”

¶ Matins: Is President Obama going too far on the economy, or not far enough? Both, says The Economist, in a piece that explicitly opposes voters’ interests (“rage”) and “market confidence.”

¶ Lauds: Steve Martin will “produce” a high school performance of Picasso at the Lapin Agile. That is, he’ll contribute (mightily) toward the costs, after parents banned the play from the high school itself.

¶ Prime: What to do when a much-loved blogger dies? That’s what Robert Guskind’s executor will have to decide, vis-à-vis Gowanus Lounge.

¶ Tierce: Louis Uchitelle’s report on using the railway bailout of the 1970s as a template for saving Detroit reminds me of the importance of taxonomy.

¶ Sext: “How to Write Like an Architect,” Doug Patt’s brisk clip at YouTube, is more than a primer on stylish block printing. Like the most seductive advertising, it holds out the promise of a life well-lived. (via Kottke.org)

¶ Nones: You know things are bad if the best thing the Irish can think up at the moment is how to repatriate Irish-Americans.

¶ Vespers: Lance Mannion won’t be reading Blake Bailey’s new biography of John Cheever.

¶ Compline: They’re looking for qualified workers in the Auvergne (“backwater” is a serious understatement) — and beginning to find them.

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In Zoë Heller’s new novel, The Believers, one of the characters, Rosa Litvinoff, walks into a synagogue out of pure curiosity but walks out engaged by her ancestral faith, even though it takes her a while to recognize this fact.

Something had happened to her, something she could not ignore or deny. And there was a sense in which its unlikelihood, its horrible inconvenience, was precisely what made it so compelling.

Compelled by horrible inconvenience — this must be an update of quia absurdum est. To be drawn to something by a negative — a lack, a loss, a flaw, a defect— is incomprehensible to me. My mind scurries to transform the bad thing into a good thing. Rosa, for example, likes annoying her family; it’s a way of maintaining her integrity in a family of leftists while at the same time keeping the faith. She has recently lost her faith in socialism, however, so there’s plenty of room for something that will really annoy her determinedly unobservant parents: Orthodoxy. (Her mother, the inconveniently lovable Audrey, refers to Rosa’s newfound religiousness under the fantastically ugly adjectival rubric, “Jewy.”) So I have no trouble believing that Rosa is drawn to the synagogue by something very positive — which she only perversely labels “inconvenience.”

(One thinks not only of the mid-century Jews for whom religion was not optional, and a great deal worse than inconvenient; but one also remembers the early Christian martyrs, to whom the sedition of proscribed faith provided a fast track to glory. To speak of an inconvenient religion is to conjure Lady Bracknell.)

Intellectually, I oblige myself to presume my own imaginative limitation: it is circular to insist that the mere act of wanting something makes that something good, in however unlikely a way. I can’t go there, though. I want only good things — which I only wish made me a good person.

It was really too dreary today to venture forth in search of photographic subjects for this week’s “Daily Office” entries. On the verge of spring, or perhaps even a bit past the verge, the landscape is absolutely devoid of interest. Unlike summer, which colors rather brilliantly into autumn, winter does nothing but go on being bare. Until the Bradford pear trees that line the side-streets pop into confetti-white blossoms, the city will look a lot deader than it does in November, when looking dead has the virtue of novelty.

Having rejected the idea of using old photographs, I pulled out a sheaf of comic postcards.  Read the rest of this entry »

As we were getting going this morning, the phrase, “it’s never too late”  came up, and Kathleen began singing the song of that name from The Boyfriend. “Where does vodeo-do  come from?” she asked. I had no idea, but I really wanted to hear the song.

“If they say I’m too old for you — ”
” — Then I should answer, ‘Why, sir?
One never drinks the wine that’s new;
The old wine tastes much nicer!'”

I’ve always loved this song, but I’ve never really agreed with its premise. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with sexy sexagenarians. But quant à moi, I was a natural octogenarian when I was octeen. Which means that, for me, unfortunately, sex (as distinct, of course, from love) has always been naughty.

Where does “vodeo-do” come from? I tried Google; the results were frightening.

One of my favorite musicals is Happy Hunting. This Ethel Merman vehicle bombed-big time — so big, that Merman wouldn’t let Stephen Sondheim write the music for Gypsy, because he was as unknown as Matt Dubey and Harold Karr, the two first-timers who created Happy Hunting. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Of course, if it had been up to me, Happy Hunting would be as well known as My Fair Lady.

We belong to a mutual
Admiration society
My baby and me.

(How else to explain Fossil Darling?) The musical is a conceit built on the framework of the royal wedding of Princess Grace &c. It is possibly even preppier than Mame. Except for the parts with Fernando Lamas — but maybe even then, for, in the Fifties, Spanish was very preppy (think Franco!). Lamentation à l’Américaine:

We’re
Up to here
With the wedding
Of the year
Up to here
With the wedding
Of the year.

“Give me a nice juicy messy divorce!” Mind you, I was about ten years old when I got my paws on this LP, which one of my parents — I’ve never figured out which — bought after or perhaps even before seeing the show. Original Cast Recordings had a way of materializing in our sweet Bronxville home (16 miles north of Times Square!). And I would listen to anything. Even Gerald McBoing Boing. Just imagine what I made of the following:

Even during our honeymoon
He continued to be polite,
Just as proper as he could be —
Then a year from our wedding night,  
Came a little tap
Tiny rap
On the door of my bedroom
“Mr Linvingston, I presume.”

Imagine Ethel Merman not knowing who might be walking into her bridal suite.

Once again, I was up late last night — being, once again, very productive. Tossing piles of magazines isn’t ideal work for one in the morning, but better late than you-kn0w-when. I crawled into bed with Lizzie Eustace, shortly after two, and read a few chapters with great interest, almost as if I were discovering Trollope for the first time. Worried that I might be waking myself up, I closed the book and then my eyes.

When Kathleen got up this morning, therefore, I did not. So I didn’t notice her wandering around the bedroom, half-dressed, for nearly an hour, unable to decide on a blouse. I woke up only when she realized that what she needed was a day off. Indeed: she has worked for twenty-seven of the last thirty days. She could handle her one-o’clock conference call from home.

So I decided not to go to the movies. I’m not so keen to see a movie, while staying in the neighborhood, that I’m willing to sit through He’s Just Not That Into You. The stipulation about staying in the neighborhood was important: we have theatre tickets tonight — The 39 Steps, finally — and I have a long list of local errands to run.

The Week at Portico: No book this week, I’m afraid — but I have a very good excuse, really I do! I read a novel in manuscript last week, and on Monday I shared my thoughts with the writer. Believe me: writing book reports is easier. (Okay, okay; I don’t write book reports.)

Here are links to this week’s Book Review review, and to two new Lively Arts pages, Ruined (MTC) and Two Lovers (2929 Productions).

¶ Matins: “Unseemly” is the nicest word that I can come up with to characterize attempts by the Roman Catholic Church (and other religious organizations) to block a temporary repeal of the statute of limitations on child abuse.

¶ Lauds: Is there a movie here? As the UN prepares to evacuate its Turtle Bay headquarters for a four-year renovation, lots of valuable artworks seem to have been evacuated earlier, less officially.

¶ Prime: A new and very smart-looking literary blog, The Second Pass.

¶ Tierce: Muntader al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at our last president, was jailed immediately after the “insult, not an assault”; he has just been sentenced to three years in prison. Bernie Madoff will spend less time in jail prior to sentencing — presumably. I must say, prison looks more and more like the waste of a public good in cases involving the crimes (and “crimes”) with which these men have been charged.
 
¶ Sext: One great thing about the recession so far is the way it has replaced “because I can” with “because it’s smart” as a principle of style. Consider the chic $300 re-think.

¶ Nones: Soi-disant Prime Minister Vladimir Putin “forgives” Ukraine its penalty debts in the wake of winter’s gas crisis.

¶ Vespers: Nina McLaughlin re-reads Scott Spencer’s Endless Love, at Bookslut. It’s not the book she remembered!

¶ Compline: At the Infrastructurist, Barbara McCann writes about a bill in Congress that might make the economic stimulus/transportation vector a lot smarter. Also, a great pair of before-and-after photos.

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