Mr & Mrs Ryan O’Neill

¶ Matins: It’s a little late for research, but anyone who wants to follow along with this morning’s festive ceremony can read the manual. If you think I’m going to look at it, you’re crazy. I’d flip out over my own misinterpretation of a (to me) unexpected term, and I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the wedding breakfast.

¶ Vespers: What a lovely day! From breakfast at ten — meeting Ryan’s delightful parents was nicer than anything on Balthazar’s boffo menu — to getting married at, gee, I don’t know, about one in the afternoon? And then walking down Broadway on the most radiant spring afternoon and having a nice long lunch under umbrellas overlooking New York Harbor (Statue of Liberty included). Home just before seven!

Mr & Mrs Ryan O’Neill….

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A bit of cheating. I haven’t been reading this morning. I haven’t even been at home. My attempt to launch a truncated Morning Read yesterday came to nothing; having done the reading, I took a nap, and when I woke up there were too many pre-wedding matters to attend to to write anything up.

No Merrill and no Aubrey today. But I did finish the third quarter of the Decameron, and Book X of the Aeneid. Although I’ll be very proud of myself when I finish with Boccaccio (for the time being), I could go on reading his saucy tales forever. Virgil’s epic, on the contrary, can’t be done with soon enough. And although I’ll be glad to have done with the adventures, shambolically related, of Julien Sorel, I’ve ordered a copy of La chartreuse de Parme from Amazon in France. I bought my copy of Le rouge et le noir, which I’m finally reading for the first time in 2008, in 1973, but if I haven’t started with the other big Stendhal book within a fifth of that interval, I’ll give it the heave-ho. Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Matins: When Kathleen heard what I wrote for Compline last night, she paid me the highest compliment by asking to listen to Vaughan Williams’s Serenade to Music.

¶ Tierce: A little story on the Times’s Web site about losses at Motorola made me wonder what could have gone wrong at the company that gave us the RAZR phone. A little googling turned up this entry at Engadget, in which a former employee, who worked for the late Chief Marketing Officer, Geoffrey Frost (did they really work him to death?), gives an inside view.

¶ Compline: Good news! Everything fits. My glen plaid suit and my fancy new shirt, which was only half as costly as the suit. I was a bit nervous about the shirt; maybe I wouldn’t be able to close the top button. I decided not to wait until tomorrow to find out. I shall sleep better as a result.

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¶ Matins: At lunch yesterday, Édouard told me that, while he used to read the Book Review religiously, he never looks at it now, because it’s so clearly the inside job of a self-interested coterie. If it were really that precious, it would be far more interesting. In this whirlwind week, I have to ask myself why I read the Book Review, and the answer is clear. I wouldn’t read it at all, if it weren’t for this weekly feature of mine.

¶ Tierce: Good news on the goofball front: the late Virgilio Cintron’s buddies won’t be going to jail for wheeling his corpse to a Pay-O-Matic in order to cash his Social Security check.

¶ Sext: In today’s Morning Read, I came across the very pithy expression of a truth that I learned to the limit in the last presidential election: “There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into.”

¶ Vespers: A treat for anyone who bothers to click through.

¶ Compline: We had theatre tickets for this evening, but I was able to make a last-minute change, freeing the evening for — in a word — stargazing. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been difficult to focus the Morning Read books this week, because the sunny zephyrs of spring — bearing bird songs that I thought I’d only heard in the country — have lit up the imminent prospect of my daughter’s marriage, which would have been something of a happy distraction in any case but which, thanks to the weather, is an overpowering delight. The strain makes the two most congenial books on the list stand out in relief, and they are the oldest and the newest, Boccaccio and James. Read the rest of this entry »

It took a while, but I finally loaded a selection of pop favorites onto a Nano. It’s my first Nano, the one in the picture, actually — the one called “RJK Silver Nano” (these things have names whether you want them to or not, so they might as well have names that you want).  Since I acquired it, it has held every kind of music imaginable, at one time or another (except country; we don’t do country), but now it is my Silver Nano indeed, stocked with music to suit every mood while I’m out and about. The operas of the moment are Salome and Elektra; counterpoising their “decadence” is the St John Passion of JS Bach. There’s a loose collection of classics that I’ve copied from CDs onto iTunes but not transferred to any of the other Nanos yet. And then there’s pop.

What’s my idea of pop, you ask? I’m not sure that I ought to tell you. How about Thompson Twins’ “You Take Me Up”? I listened to that a couple of times in a row. Or Giorgio Moroder’s E=mc²? The most amazing ear candy ever. It was such a beautiful day! And I had such a great time out there in the sunshine with all the other folks going about their business.

I bopped into my mens’ clothing store near Rockefeller Center, not exactly on an impulse but nearly, and bought a suit to wear to Megan’s wedding on Friday. (It will be ready on Thursday afternoon. Imagine!) I have not bought a suit in well over twenty years, and I must have given away the last of them more than fifteen years ago. But now I have a new suit. Notwithstanding the fact that it has to cover All Of Me, it’s dreamy. A pearl-grey glen plaid three-button two-piece, with very black checks and faint stripes of pink. To go with it, I bought one of the shirts that the salesman recommended, pink with dark pink stripes. And a jet-black tie dotted with tiny pink eggs. The shirt was, all inadvertently, my first Turnbull & Asser. I’d have looked at the price tag if I hadn’t been paddling in a sunny bay of music sweet. I had those happy feet!

Hell, this Friday’s only going to happen once.

If Tom Meglioranza had only recorded Marc Blitzstein’s “The New Suit,” I’d have listened to that all the way home. Mine, too, has a zipper fly.

¶ Matins: Friday’s plans have firmed up: we’re to be at Balthazar at ten. (Yes, Fossil Darling, that means you. I didn’t want to wake you up with the news.) Then we’ll troop down Centre Street to the Municipal Building and get hitched, those of us what aren’t. (I hereby promise: the next time Megan refers to our destination as “City Hall,” I won’t correct her.)

¶ Prime: My reward for going through all the mail this afternoon was discovering that I’m two weeks late to ensure that, when I renew our Orpheus subscriptions, we’ll get the same seats. I almost broke down and wept. First thing tomorrow!

¶ Tierce: I was going to bore you to death with remarks about Bob Herbert’s column in th Times (Dept of Idiocracy), but LXIV sent me a very entertaining link.

¶ Compline: The server that stores this site was down for a few hours this afternoon. When I was assured that The Daily Blague was “intact,” I shuddered to think of my extremely underdeveloped backup procedures.

Regular readers may want to make a note of Portico in their browsers’ “favorites” folders, because Portico runs from an entirely different server. If the outage had lasted much longer, I’d have posted a message at Portico. These things happen from time to time, and it’s when they do that the virtues of redundancy shine. Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Matins: What a weekend! I was about to say that it left me in need of a rest cure, but then I did a little research.

¶ Tierce: How sweet it is: Robert Crandall, the daimon of American Airlines during the glory days of deregulation, declares that only government intervention can save the airlines.

¶ Sext: The lost art of diagramming sentences: Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, at Portico.

¶ Vespers: Now that the Wi-Fi is working fairly reliably in the living room, I’m running the household from the secretary desk and staying on top of the paperwork.

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¶ In the Decameron, VIII, iii, a story funny enough to film, perhaps as a silent movie. Duped by his chums, Calandrino thinks that he has discovered stones of invisibility-granting heliotrope. He’s lovably loopy until he gets home, where he blames his he thinks sudden visibility on his wife and beats her up. It would be amusing to know the facts behind this anecdote. Calandrino, as the painter Nozzo di Perino was nicknamed, appears in three forthcoming tales as well. Nozzo’s simple-mindedness is presented as a kind of dim egoism. Read the rest of this entry »

Surely one of the loveliest pictures of the year — and so quietly saturated with luxe that it took me eight or ten hours to realize that I was not taking the waters at a grand resort.

¶ Hors de Prix (Priceless) , at Portico.

At La Grenouille, for Kathleen’s 55th.

We were very extravagant. A bottle of Gevry-Chambertin followed by a bottle of Margaux. Dover sole for Kathleen, the filet mignon special for me. The chocolate soufflé for Kathleen; pour moi, le pistache. They actually asked Kathleen where we’d been. If they’d asked me, I’d have had my answer ready: on était basquais. But Kathleen simply told them how her mother went there for lunch, and my mother went there for lunch, and how good everything was.

And it was good.

¶ Matins: Oops!

¶ Tierce: We haven’t been very clear on the synagogue front. When I took the picture, above, I was under the impression that Benedict XVI would be visiting the Central Synagogue, on Lexington Avenue in Midtown. Then, rather less pardonably, I confused the Park East Synagogue (née Congregation Zichron Ephraim), on 67th Street (between Lex and Third), with the Park Avenue Synagogue (Congregation Agudat Yesharim), on 87th Street near Madison Avenue.

¶ Vespers: How time flies, when you’re standing on the roof waiting for the Pope to drive by. It’s really not an event for the camera, even if you’re standing up close. As remote as we are from the endless processions of the Middle Ages, even the very streamlined pomp of the modern motorcade imposes a certain intimacy upon onlookers.

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What a fleet of black, black cars swept down 87th Street this afternoon!

It’s a lovely day to be outside — really more like May or June than April — and while I can’t say that there were throngs of onlookers, there was enough of a crowd to make a big noise when the Papal stretch (not the Popemobile) drove by.

 

His Holiness had arrived at St Joseph’s by this point. First Avenue (a stretch of which can be seen between the crosswalks) was blocked for fifteen minutes or so, on a Friday afternoon. What a perishing jam that must have created.

I thought of that Italian movie, where Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni spend the afternoon on a Roman rooftop during some big event during the Mussolini period. I, however, was for all but five minutes alone on our vast roof. Tenants who could have come up for a spacious, big-sky kind of experience (not to mention a better view of the goings-on) craned over their balcony railings for a passing glimpse. It’s true that the management does not encourage people to go up on the roof. But there’s a crowd every Fourth of July.

Una giornata particolare.  

Ah, more crying and screaming and shouting. The Pope must be on his way to wherever he’s spending the evening. The official part of the day is over.

¶ In the Decameron VIII, ii, a priest tricks a married woman more or less as the German soldier did in the last story — with the judicious use of witnesses, obliging the tricked party to return property. As the trickster is a priest, however, the accent is anticlerical and the jokes tinged with blasphemy. When the padre beds the wife, for example, he makes her “a kinswoman of the Lord God.”

¶ Much to my own surprise, I was so gripped with the exploits of Arcadian Pallas that I went ahead and read a second hundred lines, right through to his death. Hercules’ “lament”:

stat sua cuique dies, breve et inreparabile tempus
omnibus est vitae; sed famam extendere factis,
hoc virtutis opus…

¶ In Aubrey: Fleetwood, Foster, Florio, Fuller, Gascoigne, Graunt, Gellibrand, and Gill. Impenetralia from the last of these, about a schoolmaster fond of whipping:

This Dr Gill whipped Duncombe, who was not long after a colonel of dragoons at Edgehill-fight, taken pissing against the wall. He had his sword by his side, but the boys surprised him: somebody had thrown a stone in at the window; and they seized the first man they lighted on. I think his name was Sir John Duncombe (Sir John Denham told me the story), and he would have cut the doctor, but he never went abroad except to church, and then his army went with him. He complained to the council, but it became ridicule and his revenge sank.

Oh, well, you get the idea…

¶ From Merrill’s “River Poem”:

For although the old man, by the time we all went home,
Had moved away he stayed there wandering
Like a river-flower, thinking rivery things.

¶ In Le rouge et le noir, Julien goes to work on his very insincere seduction of the Maréchale de Fervaques. I have no idea what Stendhal is up to.

¶ Clive James on Raymond Aron: four pieces, all saying the same thing, but in a style quite at odds with the message. Aron’s tricky political positions, we’re told, are expressed in lucid, nuanced prose; but James seems to be stumbling through the terrain, defending his man from attacks that begin to seem chimerical. It were better to make the case for Aron before working so sweatily at dismantling the case against him. Lots of pot-shots at Sartre, of course, such as:

… Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of student who actually read the books…

¶ Matins: Le jour de mariage va arriver! Here, a week from tomorrow.

¶ Sext: If I were not more than a little distracted by happy family matters (see above and below), I’d search my sites for mentions of “Democratic Party, Death of.” That would be the index heading, if I had an index. Nicholas Kristoff’s Op-Ed piece shows how this demise was brought about by more than the Democratic Party’s candidates’ warring blows. Their candidacies reveal an ever more clear-cut split between “working people” Democrats and “progressive” Democrats. When I think what the postponed recognition of this divide spells for American justice, I weep.

¶ Nones: Wow! A friend just sent me a link to moo, and within half an hour I placed an order for mini-business cards, exactly what I’ve wanted and have been putting off designing. For a tad over $25 net, I’ll be getting one hundred cards.

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What an orderly book Jane Austen’s last novel is! I had never noticed before that it is so neatly divided into two books of twelve chapters each. And almost as evenly divided between county (Somersetshire) and town (Bath).

Has Persuasion ever been so beloved? It seems, these days, to be second in popularity only to Pride & Prejudice. Toward the end, every other page sparkles with a well-quoted line. Perhaps this novel, like its heroine herself, has been rediscovered because Austen has so many more older readers. Austen has always been important to thoughtful and intelligent young women, but she is no longer their particular property — as, I suspect, the Brontës always will be. People go on re-reading Austen — and finding that a lot of what she has to say is lost to anyone under forty. And ageing boomers are far less likely to be vexed than girls might be by the matrimonial prospects of a woman of twenty-nine who has lost (only) her “bloom.”

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¶ Matins: If it’s as nice a day as predicted, I might just walk up Second Avenue to Dmitri’s.

¶ Prime: A look at this week’s Book Review, at Portico.

¶ Tierce: Maureen Dowd says that Americans don’t like elitists. I’ll tell you who dislikes elitists: journalists, among other entertainers.

¶ Sext: JR writes, with an anticipation of nostalgia for bygone days that are not, in fact, quite bygone yet, about the significance of hard copy: don’t bury the CD!

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¶ In the Decameron, a German soldier living in Milan is outraged when the lady he loves agrees to grant him her favors — for two hundred florins. “Quasi in odio trasmutò il fervente amore.” His scheme to beat her at her own game succeeds. The dishonor of the cuckholded husband is elided entirely, sunk in the “virtue” of the soldier’s trick, which gets him into the lady’s bed quite cost-free.

Is Boccaccio a pagan or a post-Augustinian? Stories such as this one (originally a French fabliau, and retold by Chaucer) make him seem nakedly pagan.

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¶ Matins: The book that I ordered was Garry Wills’s What Paul Meant. The book that I got was Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World. That’s how it is with QPBC sometimes. You print one shaky digit on your reply card* and you’re screwed. I ought to have put what I got out on the windowsill. Instead, I started to read it.

¶ Tierce: An ongoing sad story: the catastrophically depleted ranks of Roman Catholic seminarians. Here’s a story about Dunwoodie, the late-Gothic pile on a hill that, when I was a child, loomed over brash new highways, greatly intensifying the bogus feel of the image. Already the Church seemed not so much traditional as airlocked.

¶ Nones: The Papal Schedule (He’ll be up bei uns at six on Friday afternoon). The Papal Apology (same old, same old).

¶ Compline: This just in (Dept of ROTFLOL): John the Doorman has assured us that the Pope is going to make a little parenthesis on Friday, to Bless the Bratwurst at Schaller & Weber.

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¶ Matins: In a column in Saturday’s Times, Gail Collins ended a characteristically wry roundup of geriatric Senatorial candidates (“The Revenge of Lacey Davenport“) with the following bit of common sense:

My theory is that the age issue is not all that huge a deal when it comes to legislators. If you’re old and in good shape, the big problem is that it’s hard to think about things in new ways. You tend to get better and better at a narrower and narrower set of skills.

Yes, but does this mean me?

¶ Tierce: The publisher to watch: Philip M Parker, compiler of more than 200,000 titles. They’re all available through Amazon, not that you’d want to read any of them quite yet. There’s a method to his madness, though…

¶ Sext: I’m contemplating a trip to Sleeve City.

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