This afternoon, LXIV and I paid a couple of visits to the pietre dure show at the Met. We saw it right after we met up, and then we saw it again after we’d had lunch and taken another look at the Master Photographers show — for which, by the way, there is most regrettably no catalogue.

Which all the more regrettable in light of the fact that the pietre dure show’s catalogue, Art of the Royal Court, is one of the worst that I’ve ever seen. Available in cloth only, it costs $65. I should dearly like to have it as a reference to this exciting show, but I’m not convinced that it would serve that purpose. As a souvenir of the lovely pieces on exhibit, it is wholly inadequate. Read the rest of this entry »

Morning

¶ Manners: Whether or not there is any truth to the story that Senator John Edwards has fathered a “love” child with documentarian Reille Hunter (thanks, Joe), I’m far more distraught by David W Chen’s report on the bad workplace conduct of Representative Anthony Weiner of New York (Brooklyn and Queens).

Noon

¶ Quilts: Ian Hundley designs quilts that look like World War I aerial photographs of the French countryside. Well, that’s what they look like to me.

Night

¶ Moses: Wow! Joe Lieberman, who addressed John Hagee’s Christians United For Israel Washington-Israel Summit yesterday, compared Rev Hagee to Moses! To think that Senator Lieberman might be our Vice President today! D’you think he’d be cuddling up to the man who blamed the devastation of New Orleans on the Big Easy’s having hosted a Pride parade?

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A lazy week at the Book Review….too lazy to inspire a complete sentence.

For a Tuesday, I had a big day. I got through all the important jobs — reviewing the Book Review, writing up the One Day University program for my second note on the subject, lunching alone at Café d’Al  — and most of the small ones as well. On top of all that, though, I took what I had read in Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy to heart, and purged the bulk of my email in my inbox.

It feels, shatteringly, like my own private Protestant Reformation. (But enough about Les Huguenots, which I’ve been watching in the furtherance of my understanding of Verdi’s immensely more important grand operas. The DVD of Joan Sutherland’s farewell performance at the Sydney Opera is a lot cheaper than the Decca CDs. It may be wildly off-topic to point out, in the middle of this discussion of computer hygiene, that Dame Joan drifts through Lotfi Mansouri’s staging as if she were Dame Edna’s older, dafter sister, but I write under the protection of the Geneva Convention’s Droit de la Parenthèse.) Piff Paff! No more nasty email!

Of course most of what I didn’t delete was simply transferred to folders that I set up on the spot. That’s okay with Mr Hurst. You may ask, what difference does it make where you stash your email? but I know better, or at least enough to commit to the Bit Literacy credo of the Daily Emptied Inbox. 

Tomorrow (or whenever), I’ll bone up on “todos.” No point in quibbling: the younger people are comfortable, for the time being, with this brutalist appropriation of the Spanish plural for “all.” Which, to them, means, “to-do lists.” If you’re going to hold out against “hopefully,” you really need to know how to pick your fights.

For two or three years, I’ve had a copy of David Allen’s Getting Things Done on my desk. Literally, right next to Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths. It would be difficult to say which book has impressed itself more palpably upon my daily life. It is true that I grasped Mr Allen’s “two-minute rule” right away (it’s recommended, without credit, by Mr Hurst), but the fate of King Pentheus has had a much greater impact upon my behavior both in public and at my sites. In other words, Getting Things Done has left my stables pretty much in their Augean originality.

Whereas one night alone with Mr Hurst was all it took for me to light virtual bonfires of the vanities — the vanities of thinking that I would ever progress in a leisurely way through the bilgy backup of my unclassified email. Not that the inbox is empty. I saved the headaches for tomorrow. I know that I wasn’t supposed to; I ought to have gotten rid of everything in one fell swoop. My consolation, which I hope is not fatal, is that I didn’t plan to do anything today.

Seriously, folks: Bit Literacy. May I live to hail the fifth edition!

Morning

¶ Verdigreen: Two stories in this morning’s Times sound a retro-green note. Kim Severson writes about locavores who want to grow their own produce but can’t — or oughtn’t to — do their own gardening.* And John Tagliabue reports on the windmill revival in the Netherlands.

Noon

¶ Communion: Communion is a good thing, generally, but in the case of the Anglican Communion, I think it’s time for a sundering. (Not that it’s any of my business.)

Night

¶ Disguise: War criminal Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade, after years of disguising himself as me. “For Bosnian Serb, a Life of Hiding in Plain Sight.”
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Times Center, One Day U’s New York City venue. Couldn’t be nicer.

The typical One Day University Program, I gather, consists of four lectures, each about an hour long, separated by breaks and, between the second and third, a box lunch provided by ODU. Last Saturday’s program began at nine-thirty and ended at around four o’clock.

The Times Center,* with its rear wall of glass, graced by the stand of birch trees in the atrium just beyond, makes an ideal venue for a midday of insightful talk. To the illusion of being on the campus of a major university, ODU and the Center add distinctly uncollegiate comfort and convenience. Coffee and rolls on arrival; Times Center personnel to watch over the auditorium during breaks; stout notebooks designed for writing on laps — it would probably be inappropriate for a genuine university to be so thoughtful. Steven Schragis, who runs One Day U with John Galvin, is quite frank about the fact that ODU is a “fake university.” The “students” don’t do any work and they don’t earn any degrees. It will not be the worst thing in the world if this new institution, once it establishes itself, finds a new name, because the idea of a “university” is something of a red herring here, even if the professors are indeed gifted teachers from the best schools. I shall enlarge on that statement in this and succeeding notes.  

Saturday’s program was as follows:

• Music: The Remarkable Genius of Mozart/Craig Wright, Yale
• Law: Criminal Justice in America — A 250 Year History/Stephanos Bibas, Penn
• Art History: Lies, Propaganda, and Truth in Photography/Robin Kelsey, Harvard
• Psychology: Understanding America’s Depression Epidemic/Shelley Carson, Harvard

Now, because I wanted to see what One Day University itself was like, I didn’t let the familiarity of these topics persuade me to wait for another lineup. Rather, I made a virtue of that familiarity.

• I have thought about Mozart for most of my life, for the simple reason that his music has been a source of unending and astonishing beauty. (How lucky I’ve been to live after him!)
• In law school, I learned that the study of criminal justice in this country involves very little black-letter law, but concerns itself chiefly with Constitutionally-sanctioned procedures.
• As for clinical depression, I have first-hand (family-member) familiarity with its unimaginable desolation.

The only one of the four lectures that promised to break new mental ground was the third, and even there I would be bringing the thoughts inspired by Susan Sontag’s On Photography. In other words, “familiarity” was something of an understatement. If ODU’s professors could make any of this material fresh for me, I’d be mightily impressed.

Reader, they all did. I said this yesterday, and I’ll say it again: the more you know about the world, the more you’re going to get out of One Day U.

Next up: Craig Wright’s remarkable thoughts about genius — and about why Mozart’s genius was remarkable.

The next round of Morning Reads will begin on Monday, 18 August 2008.  

Here’s the line-up of books. Indispensably at the core are Don Quixote and Moby-Dick. It may take a while to figure out how much to plow through ever morning, but I’ll always read at least a few pages. If I’m slightly pressed, I may read no more than a bit of AN Wilson’s After the Victorians (a collection of shortish pieces) and a few of Noël Coward’s Letters.

Chesterfield and Rochefoucauld are garnish, for truly energetic mornings.

Morning

¶ Polish Joke?: We begin the week with news of — drag racing in Łodz, Poland (pronounced “Woodge,” according to the Times). Now with legal status! Nicholas Kulish reports: “Where the Street Racing Is Fast And the Police Aren’t Furious.”

Noon

¶ No, Your Leader:  Below the jump, a picture of HM the Extraterrestrial, pointing to her spaceship, at the RAF Fairford flypast.

¶ Paradise Unpaved: From one little house in Toronto, may a great idea fly throughout the denser parts of suburbia. Franke James’s My Green Conscience.

Night

¶ Cake Wrecks: This just in, from my good friend Y—: Cake Wrecks. Celebrating disasters crafted by professional bakers and paid for with cash American! Blinded by tears of hilarity, I can hardly type. What was I saying about frivolous Mondays?

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One thing that I like very much to do is to find an unheard-of book that has just been turned into a movie. Latest example: Winifred Watson’s Mrs Pettigrew Lives For A Day. The differences are always intriguing, especially when, as in the case of Bharat Nalluri’s adaptation, they’re largely a matter of tone.

Times Center, One Day U’s New York City venue. Couldn’t be nicer.

Perhaps, in some dusty corner of your memory, there lurks the recollection of an institution, named — after the Lyceum, Aristotle’s school in Athens — that was popular in Nineteenth-Century America. The Lyceum was all about what we might be tempted to call “self-improvement,” except that Lyceum programs were more community-oriented. The idea, which I’d give anything to recapture for this country, was that by improving one’s own mind one improved the community’s.

In the wake of World War I, the Lyceum, like most betterment schemes, got swept into the dustbin. After World War II, knowledge was professionalized as never before — and, schizophrenically, popularized as never before, too, in the form of alluring television programs, such as Nova, that created the mirage of learning without pain. Contact between university professors and laymen was mediated, during this benighted period, by bursars.

When I signed up for One Day U a couple of months ago (well in advance, that is), I wondered where the experience of sitting through four lectures on significant topics would stand in relation both to the Lyceums and the Novas. Would it be lite & trite? Would I already know it all?

In its own little way, the prospect of attending One Day U was terrifying. It was very much like wondering how a first date would pan out. First dates? How about first days at school?

You can put me down among the kids who didn’t want to go home when the first day of school was over. I came away convinced that, the more you know about the world, the more you’re going to get out of One Day U. So, although I did, rather, “know it all,” the program was the very opposite of lite & trite.

More anon…

I got to the theatre before almost everybody else, including the box office clerk. Standing there would have been insufferably hot without the scaffolding mounted to protect us from the adjacent building site (the Brompton), not to mention the deeply cool draft that seeped through the cracks from the foundations.

Mamma Mia! is impudent, but likeable, rubbish.

Morning

¶ Mamma: I’m off to the movies — to see Mamma Mia!, if the winds are propitious (if the line, if any, isn’t too long, if the projectionist got a good night’s sleep, &c &c).

A great summer summer weekend to all — stay as cool as you can!

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Morning

¶ Waste: The story is so depressing that I can barely bring myself to read it, much less post about it; but there’s no getting round its importance: In what I hope will turn out to have been the grossest civic failure of this decade, Seattle has scrapped its pay-toilet system.

Noon

¶ Yeastless: Catch up on all the new slang from Sloane Square.

¶ Rope: Jon Stewart’s montage of Talking Heads denouncing The New Yorker cover (you know which one) as tasteless, offensive, &c &c, ought to be enough, my friends, to convince you that watching any news program other than his own is bad for your brain.

¶ Department of Ahem: Just the other day, Perry Falwell of Booksaga, the Internet’s favorite bookselling blogger, solicited guest entries. It seems that “solicited” was the key word, as the last word in the entry’s first paragraph makes clear.

Night

¶ Tacet: What’s interesting about Rachel Cathcart’s story in the Times, “Donation to Same-Sex Marriage Foes Brings Boycott Calls” — aside from the story itself, which is, in the end, depressingly not-so-interesting — is the newspaper’s colossal discretion: the hotels that would be the object of the boycott are not named. Nor is a link provided. Anyone who wants to act on this story is going to have to do a little Googling.

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Years and years ago, I learned from one of the Silver Palate cookbooks that there’s a very convenient way to make lots of bacon. Simply lay the slices on a rack over a pan and roast them in a 400º oven for twenty minutes. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner, but it’s an excellent* way to make any amount of bacon, even just enough for a  BLT. Oven times differ notoriously, so I wasn’t surprised that mine took half an hour to do the job. It’s also true that, instead of a rack and a roasting pan, I used the more massive, cast iron Victor grill pan. Turning the bacon over after twenty minutes (when I discovered that twenty minutes wasn’t enough time) turned out to be a good idea.

Store any extra bacon in a wrapping of paper towel, tucked into a sealable plastic bag.

* Cooking bacon in the microwave is almost always not only not excellent, but downright disappointing.

Morning

¶ Poll: Behind the brouhaha about The New Yorker‘s Barack and Michelle Obama spoof cover, entitled “The Politics of Fear,” there’s the deepening impression that “race” (skin color) is still a matter about which black and white Americans don’t share a perspective.

Noon

¶ Turner: I took another look at the Turner show at the Met this afternoon. It’s growing on me!

Night

¶ Stone: Incidental to the Museum visit, there as a bit of book-buying, both at the Museum itself and at Crawford-Doyle, the favorite-bookstore that happens to be right around the corner on Madison, between 81st and 82nd. I could have bought this at C-D, but I’d already fallen for it at the Museum.

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As the weeks go by, I wonder when, if ever, the editors are going to get round to William J Bernstein’s A Splendid Exchange, a more important book than any covered in this week’s Book Review.

Morning

¶ Deck Chairs?: Something in Joshua Rosner’s tone, in “Goodbye capitalism,” his piece in the Financial Times,  makes me think of a cranky gent on one of the Titanic‘s lifeboats, complaining that passengers are no longer dressing for dinner.

Noon

¶ CrocEatDog: Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand giggles. All right, ten giggles. Okay, a chuckle.

Night

¶ Lawn: This internal-exile/vacation thing is working so well that, after I dealt with the Book Review, I sat outside on the balcony and read. And read. And read. And then I decided to watch a movie…. But you know that prayer that Jewish men are said to begin the day with? My version goes like this: “Thank God I don’t own a car.” If I’m being really thoughtful, I add, “or a lawn.”
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This morning, I finished the few pages of Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba that I didn’t read last night. I was sorry to say goodbye to K C Stites and Everly Lederer, the first a narrator, the second a viewer*, both of them American adolescents living in a Cuban-American version of the imperial Raj on the eve of Fidel Castro’s seizure of power. I wasn’t nearly as sorry to see the last of Christian de la Mazière, the decayed aristocrat and unsavory arms dealer whose swampy amorality oozes in rich counterpoint to the crispy oddness of the young Americans’ experience.

The Hollywood version: Ms Kushner has imported Scout Finch (of To Kill A Mockingbird) into a novel by Alan Furst.

A few weeks ago, I read one of the most beautiful novels in the world, possibly the most beautiful, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. Although not a lengthy read, it struck me as too immense for a casual write-up. Novels often do — and I end up writing nothing about them. (Last summer’s read-agog, Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games, is still waiting for a few words from yours truly.) As a rule, I’m quite comfortable dashing off some quick impressions of a book that I’ve liked — in this age of information overload, a sketch seems more than enough. But deeply impressive novels demand more thoughtful, more “worthy” responses. The danger of sounding like an intolerable gasbag is sharply increased.

So here’s my idea: reading Telex From Cuba, I was struck by how I wasn’t struck by the beauty of the prose — and yet there was no denying that Ms Kushner’s prose is extraordinarily effective. I soon saw that the it strengths were the opposite of Netherland‘s. Whereas Mr O’Neill demonstrates an uncanny gift for wrapping up an intense and complex impression in the lace of a few brilliantly chosen words, Ms Kushner creates corners that her characters can’t see around, although we can. Dramatic irony and understatement dictate her language no less rigorously than a fine but very masculine sensuousness dictates Mr O’Neill’s. 

Compare and contrast. When I get around to it.

* as in, “owner of one of the novel’s points of view.”

This week’s images were taken one afternoon not too long ago; they show the storefronts and other edifices on the south side of 86th Street between Second and Third Avenues.

Morning

¶ Rental: From Sam Roberts’s story in the Times, this morning, about the dodginess of “1625” as the founding date of our fair city (Nieuw Amsterdam):

The first settlers apparently arrived in 1624 (or 1623) and encamped on Governors Island. In 1625, they shipped their cattle to Lower Manhattan, where more land and water were available, and a fort was planned there. In 1626, Peter Minuit made his famous purchase of Manhattan (except that he bought it from Indians who did not own it and that in their view, he was, like many subsequent residents of Manhattan, merely a renter, not an owner).

You gotta love it.

Noon

¶ Supreme: Try to make some time — this evening, perhaps, or first thing tomorrow morning — to read the envoi of Times Supreme Court commentator, Linda Greenhouse. After nearly thirty years on the beat, she is retiring (to Yale).  

Night

¶ Warrant: Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, has submitted a warrant for the arrest of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan, charging him with genocide. It’s a first.
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