Open Thread Sunday: Promenade

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Letter from Yvonne: The Goatherd's Son

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Dear R J and Daily Blague readers,

The first wave of the McCain campaign’s indecent Negative Surge has shaken me so badly that I can’t possibly write what I’d intended to write this week, which was a chatty post about eggplants (?), and comfort food. (!)  At a time when we are all so raw over the economy, McCain and Palin are actually inciting their supporters to a level of wild rage that the rest of us can’t help but fear.  Ratatouille Pie is not going to comfort anyone right now.

My only source of comfort in the news is Barack Obama himself.  Has anyone else noticed how he is handling this?  Has handled everything since we first became aware of him?

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Daily Office: Friday

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¶ Matins: “No sex please; we’re not finished with the story: Joe Jervis of Butterfield, New York, attributes his longevity to virginity. He’s 105 today.”

— What? Oh! Sorry!

¶ Tierce: Looking into my crystal ball, I foresee a wave of circumspect austerity sweeping the affluent areas of the world (or what’s left of them) in the coming years, as the costs of energy and food are moralized into a kind of green vegetarianism. Here’s how it starts: “Pint-Size Eco-Police, Making Parents Proud and Sometimes Crazy,” by Linda Foderaro.

Bon weekend à tous!

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Reading Note: The Maias

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I’m already looking forward to reading The Maias a second time. Of course, I shall have to read all of it a first time before that can happen. Read the rest of this entry »

Daily Office: Thursday

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¶ Matins: Regular readers will have learned to sigh when I mention the name of Alan Greenspan. I have certainly felt like something of a crank on the subject of this man’s failure to stanch the market’s foolishness. So I felt rather transfigured by the discovery that I was not alone: witness Peter S Goodman’s “Taking Hard New Look at a Greenspan Legacy.”  

¶ Prime: Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

¶ Tierce: Cook County Sheriff Thomas J Dart has called a halt to foreclosure evictions in Chicago. John Leland reports. In many cases, diligent renters are unaware of a property owner’s default until the marshalls would show up to evict them.

¶ Sext: Nom de Plume sent me the link to a curious video, of unexplained provenance (and 1999 vintage), concerning, straight-faced, the unlikely bond between a crow and a kitten. I watched it in wait for a surprise, but there was none.

¶ Compline: No sex please; we want to live forever: Clara Meadmore, of Perranporth, Cornwall, attributes her longevity to virginity. She’ll be 105 on Saturday.

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Morning Read: The Amadís Effect

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¶ In Moby-Dick, Stubb’s dream of Ahab’s kick — a lot of Shakespearean hoo-ha if you ask me. “But mum; he comes this way. Coming up: “Cetology,” which just may constitute the entirety of a Morning Read next week. Read the rest of this entry »

Daily Office: Wednesday

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¶ Matins: I wouldn’t have watched last evening’s presidential debate for less than a million dollars. A million dollars, invested in the right Madagascar Triple-A’s, would allow me to hold on to my rent-stabilized apartment for at least eighteen months. Happily, the Times assigned a dozen (!) journalists to the fun job of assessing the truthiness of the candidates’ claims. No need to submit one’s person to all that body English!

¶ Prime: I’ve just seen the instantly infamous “that one” clip, from last night’s debate. Ouch!

¶ Tierce: The press corps in Albany dwindles, with the closing of the Sun, to about forty reporters. That sounds like a lot, though, doesn’t it, to cover a climate notoriously afflicted with political lockjaw. The good old days in Byzantium seem more spontaneous by comparison.  

¶ Sext: Maybe what’s going to save us from the 1929 playbook will be the 1789 playbook! “After bailout, AIG sent executives to the spa.” (Thanks, George.)

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In the Book Review: Dying of the Light

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Reading, this afternoon, that Emily Gordon is stepping down as editor of Emdashes, the great New Yorker-centric Web log, I felt my toes curling in envy. How I’d love to give up this self-appointed weekly review of The New York Times Book Review. This week, especially. What a lackluster lot of books!

The Book Review is mired in a cesspit of publicists and chits. But it’s all we have. As soon as there’s an American version of Lire, I’ll quit. Gladly.

Morning Read: Golosina

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¶ Lord Chesterfield presses home the indispensability of good manners in the world — something that doltish, obstinate people perversely continue to regard as a failing of the world:

You may possibly ask me, whether a man has it always in his power to get into the best company? and how? I say, Yes, he has, by deserving it; provided he is but in circumstances which enable him to appear upon the footing of a gentleman. Merit and good-breeding will make their way everywhere. Knowledge will introduce him, and good-breeding will endear him to the best companies; for, as I have often told you, politeness and good-breeding are absolutely necessary to adorn any, or all other good qualities or talents. Without them, no knowledge, no perfection whatever, is seen in its best light. The scholar, without good-breeding, is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic; the soldier, a brute; and every man disagreeable. Read the rest of this entry »

Daily Office: Tuesday

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¶ Matins: Floyd Norris on our current adventure, “The Long Way Down”:

Will this fall be recovered within a week? That is not likely unless someone develops a financial system to replace the fallen one that was based on the fantasy that investors could finance very risky loans, via complicated securitizations, without taking risks.

¶ Tierce: Just my luck: having decided to steer The Daily Blague on a course of secular humanism, I confront a wave of financial disaster that, just to make things irritating as well as inopportune, I’ve been worried about for years. At some point, I knew, some event would act to pull the plug on the warm bath of Greenspansiveness.

I could spend my days writing links to old Portico pages and Daily Blague entries that illustrate my prescience (which was really just common sense), but I think it more sporting to let others demonstrate, if they can, that I was just as deluded, on occasion, as the tycos of Wall Street. I’m too busy, anyway, listening to foreign language lessons on my Nano. Can Teach Yourself Latin — as an audio course — be far off?

¶ Sext: It’s heartening to see Jason Kottke zero in on what’s most important about the coming election. Writing about The New Yorker’s endorsement of Barack Obama in the current issue, Mr Kottke writes,

The key part of the article concerns the candidates’ possible appointments to the Supreme Court and their consequences. A more conservative court scares the shit out of me.

¶ Compline: When I wrote the entry for Sext, I hadn’t read “The Talk of the Town” myself. When I did read it, just now, over dinner, my eyes welled over. As long as an organ of the MSM can turn out a Ciceronian oration of such efficient persuasion, the United States is not altogether broken.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant. In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a stroke, reverse our country’s image abroad and refresh its spirit at home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks. At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism, both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally, intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our troubled globe. That leader’s name is Barack Obama.

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Morning Read: Manly

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¶ In Moby-Dick, the two “Knights and Squires” chapters. There’s a lot of Whitman here; it’s fashionable nowadays to find such manly gushing about manliness “homoerotic,” but I can’t abide the anachronism of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday Movies: Rachel Getting Married

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I’m very glad that Rachel Getting Married came out when it did, because I learned a lot about weddings that I hope doesn’t happen at Megan and Ryan’s wedding party in November. (A) Potpourri of World Music. (B) Excessive toasting. I want to go to a party, not a spectacle.

Books on Monday: Universe of Stone

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Philip Ball’s Universe of Stone treats Chartres Cathedral as a doorway onto Gothic art and craft. The book is literate, instructive, and a great pleasure to read. It almost cannot help being a compact refresher course in the medieval worldview.

Daily Office: Monday

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¶ Matins: Sam Harris’s Newsweek piece, “When Atheists Attack“ gets to the heart of the Palin phenomenon — and why I call her “The Infernal Machine.” For a Democrat or a Progressive to notice her is to contribute to her magnetism.

¶ Tierce: From the editorial pages of the Times, today’s moving piece by Lawrence Downes on Vets 4 Vets, a network of veterans of the War on Terror (a/k/a Iraq) who get together to talk about what they can’t tell anyone else; and an  Op-Ed piece by Roger Cohen, “Kiplin vs Palin,” datelined yesterday but not to be found in “The Week in Review,” about what we might call Sarah Palin’s larger heedlessness (the lady appears to be rivetedly mindful of her own career).  

¶ Compline: Just what the world needs right about now: the authorized sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Authorized by his heir and great-grand-nephew, Dacre Stoker; he’s going to write it, too. (“Dacre”? What were his parents thinking. He can’t not have been “Dracu” all through school.)

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Weekend Update: Friends

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It seems almost new and different to return, this evening, to the care and feeding of the Daily Office — the daily Daily Blague entry in which I post provocative links, ie links that inspire me to bloviate. It’s different because I’ve just discovered the world beyond blogging. I won’t be abandoning The Daily Blague anytime soon, but I won’t be feeling guilty for not writing “bloggy” entries, whatever that means. Because, as I discovered today, the fun part of the Blogosphere has moved on, to Facebook.

I did not sign up for Facebook in an idle moment. I happened to notice, on my WordPress “dashboard,” that the DB had received an incoming link from “Jahsonic.” Really! Exploring a bit, I came across this post. If you scroll down, you’ll find that the author of Jahsonic, Jan Geerinck, a gentleman in Antwerp, cites the DB as authority for the proposition that the old tale about the lady who hides her lover in a tub, launched by Apuleius and picked up by Boccaccio, provides the basis for Ravel’s highly but dryly entertaining one-act opera, L’heure espagnole. Wow!

This is why I don’t try to edit Wikipedia entries. I send them $10 a month, not my emendations. I would lose faith in Wikipedia altogether if I thought that the reference I was checking out might have been written by me. My attribution of Ravel’s plot is just the sort of armchair scholarship that I’m trying to purge from my system. Nevertheless, I stand by the assertion, at least for the time being. The important thing was to thank Mr Geerinck.

The problem was that I could do so in one of only two ways. I could post a comment, or I could contact him at Facebook. Posting a comment seemed a little vainglorious, or, what I call Tooting Bec. A Facebook contact would require me to sign up.

I’d been meaning to create a Facebook account. I’d been advised to do so — buy an adviser whom I pay! But whenever I thought of it, I saw myself as a dirty old man showing up at a middle-school sock hop. What’s he doing here? Well, that’s not what happened.

What happened was that, in the space of a day, I went from 0 to 29 friends, almost all of whom I know, but many of whom I’ve been out of touch with. A few people, I knew of. Wow! They confirmed our friendship? I do have to write to my rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery. I did not mean to ask him to be my friend. I think the world of Dr Magid, but I insist on maintaining a few shreds of our professional relationship. He is the doctor, and I am the patient. On the other hand, he does always ask what I’ve been reading. Maybe I ought to send him to Goodreads.

It’s not that I regard every one of my Facebook friends as friends. I’m not going to be asking anybody to help me paint the apartment. I take a very serious, French view of friendship: it includes one or two people outside your family plus everybody in your lycée class.

Speaking of friendship, Fossil Darling was complaining that Wells Fargo had “stolen” the Wachovia takeover from Citigroup. I told him that he has obviously been Drinking the Kool-Aid; in a year or less, I assured him, he’ll be thanking his lucky stars that Citi’s deal fell through. Then, yesterday, up at his health club in Luxury Haven, he ran into a Citi broker who “used to work with a lot of people at Wachovia.” Libel laws being what they are, I shan’t repeat what Fossil repeated, but I can tell you that the broker’s comments were highly uncomplimentary as to character and fitness. What a good thing it was, he thought, that Citi wouldn’t be trying to swallow the Charlotte bank. “That is so amazing!” replied Fossil. “My dearest friend has been telling me the same thing, and he’s not even in the business!”

“So,” I asked, “who’s your dearest friend?”

Needless to say, Fossil Darling will be the very last man to sign up at Facebook before the rule against perpetuities expires.

Open Thread Sunday: Allée

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Movie Note: Paycheck

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Two weeks ago, Paycheck got a rave review from Kathleen’s brother. When I finally got round to watching it, I was impressed, because the intelligence of the puzzle always rose above the cartoon violence. I ordered it from Amazon right away, and the DVD arrived this afternoon. Kathleen was dead tired, but Paycheck woke her up. When it was over, though, she went right back to sleep. I was unable to engage her in a double feature. The second film would have been Untraceable.

Both movies involve a lot of violence, but the violence is not the same kind of violence. Paycheck is a glorious comic book, perhaps the first one ever to be captured on film. Almost every settled frame is a bande dessiné image. There’s no doubt of the ultimate winner. You could almost say that Aaron Eckhart’s more chiseled features doom him from the moment you note the chiseled cleft in his chin.

Paycheck is an amazingly masculine movie because it combines cartoon violence with a genuinely arresting puzzle. Untraceable is a woman’s movie because women have been kicked around a lot. The violence in Untraceable — like that of Copycat, another woman’s picture — is horrific. Dreadful things not only happen but register as such. Both movies  not only involve but are built around kidnappings. Paycheck’s hero evades capture by means of tricks that the monsters in Untraceable and Copycat would have foreseen and forestalled. Aaron Eckhart has played a lot of nasty men, but to date his serial murders have been strictly metaphorical.

Would I sign over my brains in exchange for Ben Affleck’s looks? I ask the question only because I used to look something like him, when I was young, and what I envy most is his getting away with fleshy stupidity — God knows I didn’t. I don’t mean that Ben Affleck himself is stupid. I will always revere his performance in Hollywoodland. But this movie has the wit to change the question: would I trade my looks for  Michael Jennings’s brains?

Daily Office: Friday

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¶ Matins: When I read yesterday’s Matins to Kathleen, she sighed and wondered if I wasn’t getting carried away about Alan Greenspan’s role in the credit crunch. For backup, I decided to search for a report of the disagreement that Mr Greenspan had with late Fed Governor Edward Gramlich. 

Gramlich, long worried about the fragility of the housing market, wanted an investigation that would close down predatory mortgage lenders. Here’s what — according to a Wall Street Journal article by Greg Ip, dated 9 June 2007 — Mr Greenspan had to say about that, last summer.

Mr. Greenspan, in an interview, says he doesn’t recall a specific discussion of the idea but confirmed his opposition to it.

There is “a very large number of small institutions, some on the margin of scrupulousness and very hard to detect when they are doing something wrong,” says Mr. Greenspan, who retired in February last year. “For us to go in and audit how they act on their mortgage applications would have been a huge effort, and it’s not clear to me we would have found anything that would have been worthwhile without undermining the desired availability of subprime credits.”

¶ Compline: How neat it would be to see this: “Paul Newman: Broadway to dim lights in actor’s honour”.

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Milestone Note: Happy Anniversary XXVII

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Here we are with the priest who married us, Monsignor Wilders of St Thomas More. I don’t think that I’ve ever noticed that look in Kathleen’s eyes before; I am one lucky guy. I still have the cravat, although I’ve never worn it again. Gee I am tall, am’t I.

We celebrated, this year, at La Grenouille. Two years ago, we celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary at a bistro in the neighborhood, with twelve friends. Tonight was somewhat cheaper, but then there were only two of us. We were treated extremely well, and the evening was both magnificent and great fun: fancy but not formal, a mode that I wish more of my countrymen knew about. The waiters were only too happy to bring us extra baguette rolls so that we could sop up the sauce of the lobster ravioli that arrived, unordered, between the first course and the second. (I took away the receipt but not the bill, so I can’t tell if I was charged for the ravioli. I don’t think that I was.) Kathleen’s mother would have been horrified by the sopping up, but she would have had an absolute stroke when a woman at the next table asked to see the ring on Kathleen’s right hand — and Kathleen took it off to show it to her.

While I can remember: An excellent Gigondas to start with and a very nice Bordeaux after, a Haut something. For starters, I had the sweetbreads special. Because it tasted better with every bite, I wished that I could just have some more. Kathleen had a risotto, but I was too besotted with the sweetbreads to ask her how it was, and, anyway, she wouldn’t have told me, because she was already eavesdropping on the ladies at the next table (one of whom would ask to see the ring). For dinner, Kathleen had Dover sole. She would have had it anyway, but her father had asked her, on the phone that afternoon, to have it “for him.” I had the pheasant special.

Pheasant special: doesn’t that sound pretentious! Something under glass! In the event, the plate held three medallions of pheasant — I’d say it was thigh, but I’m not an experienced consumer of game — wrapped in thin sheaves of cabbage and topped with a sauce that made a little bit of foie gras go a very long way. Not a bone in sight. I didn’t have to ask for a baguette to sop of the sauce this time, because there were two quennelle-shaped blimps of puréed potato to do the job.

We were asked at the start, as one always in the best temples, if we wanted a dessert soufflé. Kathleen remembered that we wouldn’t. We would have so much wine left over after the main course that we’d need a good plate of cheese to finish us off. And indeed we did. The cheeses were wonderful, but they didn’t come with labels, so I can’t tell you exactly what they were; suffice it to say that the plate offered a high-end spread of the same range that you’ll get chez moi: from chèvre to brie via bleu. The star of the plate, however, was a honeycomb. Just one each.  Neither one of us had ever eaten a honeycomb.

In the course of the evening, I spoke a bit of French and talked a bit of French politics. It ought not to have been remarkable, but in any case it did not make me any enemies. Walking down 52st Street toward Madison afterward, our arms around each other, I asked Kathleen (who had so très très bien dîné that she couldn’t wait to get into a taxi), “Which do you think they liked better, my accent aigu or my accent grave?” “Your accent both!” she burst out (pronouncing the “th” as we do).

I’m a good enough cook to know that the meal was fantastic, but not good enough to tell you how and why. Which is how I like it. As I always say, my idea of “roughing it” is staying at home. But my idea of having a good time at a restaurant seems to be something that the good people at La Grenouille knew all about without my having had to ask.

Daily Office: Thursday

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¶ Matins: “The athlete is on the floor”: listening to Warren Buffett discuss the credit crunch with Charlie Rose. The American economy is a great athlete, but it has suffered cardiac arrest. The only thing to do is to get it back up and running. That will involve convalescence in the form a two-year recession.

I piously wish that everyone in the country could listen to Mr Buffett’s remarks and, wherever necessary, have them explained just as clearly.

¶ Tierce: Brent Staples writes concisely about the flummery surrounding college-entrance exams. Schools aren’t the only institutions whose reliance on test scores is lazy.

¶ Sext: Except for brief and urgent messages, I refuse to have cell phone conversations with people who are driving. Here’s why.

¶ Vespers: David M Herszenhorn files an interesting report about senatorial dissent to the rescue package, “A Curious Coalition Opposed Bailout Bill.”  

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