¶ In the Decameron, we come to the end of the Eighth Day, with the tale of Salabaetto, the gulled Florentine, and Jancofiore, the scheming Sicilian. Dioneo sexes up his tale with some very gratuitous lewdness involving slave girls and bathtubs, but in the end the wicked lady rues her misjudgment: Chi ha a far con tosco, non vuole esser losco, which McWilliam renders nicely as “Honesty’s the better line, when dealing with a Florentine.” (Note: tell Édouard about the Tuscan’s name.) Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Matins: Five movies in one afternoon and evening — I tacked on Rushmore at the end. Even though I still haven’t got to the bottom of the NuLytely literbox, I’m ready for bed, and no longer hungry. The munchies passed at around nine o’clock, long before I started in on the Sauvignon Blanc.

¶ Nones: Well, that’s over — and LXIV and I celebrated with a lovely lunch afterward. Just when I was getting good at remembering Versed, they changed the anaesthetic to something called Propothal, about which I can find nothing very official on the Internet.

¶ Compline: Somehow, I managed to squeak through on the Book Review front. This week’s look, at Portico. Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Matins: On Saturday night, we heard the third and final concert given by Itzhak Perlman with Members of the Perlman Music Program. It was even superer than the first two.

¶ Nones: The first glass of Pineapple NuLyteley, she go down so smooth. Very faint aftertaste,  not unpleasant at all. As for the D-Minus-One Film Festival: one down, three to go. Read the rest of this entry »

Just for the hell of it, I’m going with pineapple. Update: Film Festival Details below. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a beautiful face. The moustache, snaking from nostril to lip, looks more like makeup than something a grown man would wear, and it completes Don Ameche’s American boyishness — so vital in a movie about decadent Europeans on the eve of World War II.

Tibor Czerny — that’s Ameche’s name in this movie — has just learned that the girl he didn’t know he was crazy about until just this minute (Claudette Colbert’s Eve Peabody) is traveling around Paris using his name — prefacing it with “Baroness.” As an eighth cousin of the real Baron Czerny of Budapest, this taxidriver that Ameche’s pretending to be is “more a baron than you are a baroness,” as he will tell Eve when he tries to rain on her parade at the [John Barrymores’] weekend place at Versailles — his very next scene.

And, hey: what a smile!

Crocodiles on the Nile are green!

¶ Matins: A week to look forward to! Close encounters with fiber-optics! The worst will be over tomorrow, when I drain the dregs of a certain four-litre container.

¶ Tierce: “I’m With Stupid”? A Times/CBS poll brings forth my inner Dick Cheney:

While just 24 percent of voters said they thought the Wright issue would matter a lot or some to them in the fall, 44 percent said it would matter a lot or some to “most people you know.” And while just 9 percent of Democrats said the issue would matter a lot to them should Mr. Obama be their party’s nominee, even that small a slice of the electorate could be a problem for Mr. Obama if he won the nomination and the contest against Mr. McCain was close.

“So what?”

¶ Vespers: Working my way through the book pile, I read something that has been sitting around for about year, Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony.

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¶ Decameron VIII, ix shrieks more loudly for operatic treatment than any story so far. How can there not be a comic masterpiece called Bruno e Buffamalco? Then I remember the finale of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, which sanitizes and perfumes Dr Simone’s “induction” by the “contessa di Civillari.” Still, I can hear the echoes of a rousing final chorus:

Così adunque, come udito avete, senno s’insegna a chi tanto non s’apparò a Bologna.

So now you have heard how wisdom is imparted to anyone who has not acquired much of it in Bologna.

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This lovely Sunday afternoon finds me, I’m sad to say, neither comfortable nor stretched, but stressed. Which is to say, overstretched. I couldn’t get out of bed this morning. Kathleen insists that I must have been tired, because I slept through most of the morning. But when I was awake, I was anxious. I’d pull up the blankets and hide.

Hide from what?  Read the rest of this entry »

Looking toward Midtown on a slightly hazy afternoon.

It is inconceivable to me that a better movie will appear in 2008.

As a rule, I am quite happy to see movies by myself and to think about them afterward in solitude. Today’s moviegoing was an exception. It was only after I left the theatre that its impact seriously flooded my eyes, and I wished to hell that I could talk about it with someone.

¶ Matins: This may be the best dog video ever, probably because it captures, to perfection, the pleasure of being out alone with one’s pooch.

¶ Tierce: What’s this? A war-protest strike by Pacific dockworkers? Yesterday? You tell me why William Yardley’s story isn’t on the front page of the Times — instead of not one but two “stories” about the Obama-Wright rift.

¶ Compline: Although I was tolerably entertained by James Wolcott’s overview of the primary scene in the current Vanity Fair, I had to wonder if it merits all the commentary.

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¶ Matins: Today, I ascend to N! Will I regret it?

¶ Tierce: … And they don’t advertise. That’s part of how Steve & Barry’s, retailers with a price cap of $10 $8.98 per item, has become a billion-dollar company. What a chilling prospect for the Mad Men.

¶ Sext: Migs test-drives the latest in Philippine highways, and takes notes.

¶ Vespers: Where’s my hankie? Exxon Mobil’s first-quarter profits are so disappointing! (Other, more interesting news below the jump.)

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¶ In the Decameron, a short story between two much longer tales: the improbable, wife-swapping account of Zeppa’s “revenge,” upon discovering that his best friend, Spinelloccio, has been dandling his wife.

Zeppa having consented to this proposal, all four breakfasted together in perfect amity. And from that day forth, each of the ladies had two husbands, and each of the men had two wives, nor did this arrangement give rise to any argument or dispute between them.

What a totally adolescent fantasy.

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¶ Matins: On her train ride to Albany, Kathleen missed Sing-Sing. I told her to keep her eyes peeled, but the windows were so dirty that she was glad that she hadn’t brought a camera.

¶ Tierce: RACE STILL A PROBLEM IN US, according to American Presidential Campaign. Barack Obama dissociates himself from Rev Jeremiah Wright. (The New York Times, Front Page.)

¶ Vespers: Alone for dinner tonight, I’m tempted to make a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Here’s a recipe, in case anyone should need such a thing.

¶ Compline: If I’ve got an excuse for not writing (much less posting) this week’s Book Review review until the tail end of Wednesday, I don’t know what it is.

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Last Friday, I had about the best excuse going for not seeing a movie in the morning. Scroll down if you doubt me.

Here’s the movie that I might have seen if I’d had no better plans. It’s hard to say: the calculus for choosing a film on Friday is not, as you might expect, movie-based. Location has a lot to do with selection, with my desire to leave the neighborhood as the leading factor.

In case you’re too harried/hurried to click through, let me say that Roman de Gare seemed a lot more like the French movies of old than other recent offerings. It was, in short, more French — if I may risk coming off rather like Stendhal’s Prince Korasoff, French to his fingertips, but in the style of fifty years ago.

¶ Matins: Kathleen is off to Albany this evening, for an overnight trip. Shame about the awful weather; if it were nice, she could pretend that she was in North By Northwest. As, er, one of the extras — not Eva Marie Saint.

¶ Tierce: Today’s Metro Section (The New York Times’s regional coverage) is full of complicated stories: it’s hard to decide, not so much right from wrong, as who ought to prevail.

¶ Sext: The delightfully inimitable George Snyder writes a bit about the people in one of my very favorite pictures, which is mine, all mine — or, at least, in the neighborhood.

¶ Vespers: God, I’m complicated. Do I go to the movies tonight, and, if so, where; but, if I go tomorrow, then to which one? And what about Friday? Yikes! But here’s the deal: Roman de Gare tomorrow, at the Angelika. Then She Found Me on Friday morning, at the Sunshine.

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If I’m tardy today — too tardy to sip at Merrill — it’s because I wound up reading Boccaccio’s story of Rinieri the scholar aloud to Kathleen. Sleeping in and rousing late, she was nursing a cup of Kenya when I sat down to the Morning Read, and it seemed churlish not to read aloud, which entertained her so much that she didn’t start packing for Albany until long after she ought to have been out of the house. Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Matins: This afternoon, I’ll be spending tea-time at Ruptured and Crippled: it’s time for an infusion of Remicade.

¶ Tierce: A very strong story, by Andrea Elliott in the Times, about the demonization of Debbie Almontaser, founder of the Khalil Gibran school in Brooklyn.

¶ Nones: Even without the April showers, we’ve got plenty of flowers. But we’ve got plenty of April showers, too — today, anyway.

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A tad late today, perhaps. I lavished the morning on bits and pieces of household paperwork.  

¶ In the Decameron, VIII, vi, we have another Calandrino story. You remember the “simpleminded” painter, who thought he’d become invisible? He’s back, and so are his friends, who set him up to fail one of those religious oath tests that the medievals were so fond of. The whole tale has a good-ole-boy, Lone-Star quality that makes me wonder if “Tuscan” and “Texan” derive from the same root. Not. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking out the window yesterday morning, we couldn’t believe our luck — Megan’s luck and Ryan’s luck, particularly, of course, but really everybody’s luck. The sky lowered grey and bleak, taking us from early May to late March. Today is rather worse. If the wedding had  been a day later — or the weather a day earlier!

But the bad weather, in its way, is just as well, since my pleasure receptors are shot. I couldn’t be happier that yesterday was my day to tidy up the apartment: little or no thought required. Meanwhile, recollections of the wedding steep. Read the rest of this entry »