¶ In the Decameron, a story worth waiting for: Dioneo, King of the Seventh Day, and clearly a young man who ought not to be allowed entry into respectable homes, is going to tell his tale, which ought to be a corker of marital trickery — ¶but wait! He begins with an apology, claiming that the tale he intended to tell has already been told. If it were anyone else, you just might believe him.
In a very sweet touch, the whole business is prefaced with a remark about the ladies’ “mourning” the “innocent pear tree” that was sacrificed in the previous story.) Read the rest of this entry »
Shortly before noon, while I was finishing up the weekend papers, the phone rang. It was Fossil Darling, calling from Midtown on his cell phone. Reluctantly shopping — the Fossil hates shopping — he would be having lunch at the Brasserie for lunch afterward. He’d talk to me again when he got home.
He called back two minutes later. Syms wasn’t open yet, so he and his party were heading straight for lunch. Fossil said that he was famished.
— Why don’t you jump in a taxi and join us.
— I thought you were never going to ask.
— Well, I didn’t know what time we’d get there.
— Here I was, asking myself what kind of friend, knowing that I’d been alone for the entire weekend, wouldn’t ask me to join him for lunch, but then I know the answer to that: the kind of friend I’ve been putting up with for over forty years!
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St Joseph’s Church, site of a Papal visit (not, one hopes, a visitation!) this coming Friday.
Months and months and months after getting my first Nano (November of last year), I spent an hour or perhaps a little less today uploading a clutch of CDs that, for the most part, would have to be classified as “rock.” Examples:
Mosaic (Wang Chung)
Arc of a Diver (Steve Winwood)
Bilingual (Pet Shop Boys)
Avalon (Roxy Music)
Shake It Up (The Cars)
Speaking In Tongues (Talking Heads)
But also:
Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell)
Studio (Julien Clerc)
And for the first hour or so I was infected with a virulent case of spring fever that, were I still drinking martinis, would certainly have led to another broken neck. When my Saturday-afternoon tidying was all done — the only word for it, week after week lately, is “brilliant”; it’s as though I’ve learned to read a hitherto impenetrable language — after I was showered and dressed in clean clothes, and I’d run an errand to Gristede’s across the street, and fixed myself my cocktail of choice, diet quinine with a wedge of lime, I sat on the balcony for the first time this season and looked out at all the jewel-like lights of buildings near and far — especially far, in Queens. The lights in Queens looked just like the lights in Queens as seen from a plane descending upon one of the airports, endless ribbons (not so particularly endless in my truncated view) of red, white, and green lights against a background of dark. I wish someone had been there to see it with me.
Jack Hues, of Wang Chung (née 黄钟), really stands up as a gifted singer. To think that I fell in love with “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” on MTV! As I recall, there a suitcase with legs, no? What a brief golden age that was.
How wrong-headed will this marketing campaign turn out to be? It promises a jaunty comedy — Ellen Page promises one all by herself — but Smart People both sweeter and sadder in tone than that.
A happy weekend to you all from Skytopia.
¶ Matins: JR continues to roll out his incredible pictures of Manhattan. I thought that this shot was some sort of “architect’s rendering,” but it’s really just the new Westin, on 42nd Street, there for anybody who will look.
¶ Tierce: Next Friday, the Pope outide my window.
¶ Sext: It’s only a movie — or is it? Set-designers re-create the 9/11 Tribute at St Paul’s.
¶ Vespers: Even though it didn’t start until 12:30 — an afternoon-denting time to go to the movies — I stayed uptown and went to see Smart People. I almost made a new friend at the concession stand…
¶ Compline: This week’s Friday Front, at Portico: Tony Judt on American Amnesia, in The New York Review of Books.
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¶ Decameron, VII, ix, is one of the nastier tales in Boccaccio’s dossier against aged husbands who take beautiful young wives. In this retelling of a Latin poem that Boccaccio had translated earlier, the action is shifted to Argos. The farther the setting from Florence, it seems, the more improbable the events. Lydia, the two-timing wife, plays Little Red Riding Hood to her old-wolf husband. “Goodness, what a rotten tooth you have, my dear! Let me extract it for you.” The tooth, perfectly healthy, is a trophy for the boyfriend. You’d think that that would be enough, but there follows some partridging-in-a-pear tree. I cast Isla Fisher as Lydia. Read the rest of this entry »
¶ Matins: Did you know that Forsythia is a kind of olive? No, I didn’t, either.
¶ Tierce: Three items in the morning news, about: Googlegänger, people who have the same name as yours whom you contact or at least find out about via Internet search engine; the Tee-Pee Motel, in Wharton, Texas, restored by a Quick Pick winner (using $1.6 of his $47 million in winnings); and “the administration’s relentless antipathy for effective government,” this time manifested in a Census fiasco.
¶ Sext: Because I was running early, and the place hadn’t started to fill up for lunch, I got a table for one at JG Melon’s.
¶ Vespers: Goofing off most of the afternoon — but for a good cause. (Here’s a bit of Nanentertainment.)
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Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman turns out to be the first of three projected books that, collectively, will propose new ways of managing human behavior for the better. I’m only a few pages into the first chapter, and already I’m overwhelmed by the force of Sennett’s ideas. Read the rest of this entry »
¶ Matins: Ms Cornflower is not as lucky with her new dishwasher as I have been with the new computer. Even if it didn’t work — and it does, just fine — the new computer would not flood the blue room with suds. My heart do go out.
¶ Sext: Kathleen, expects to fly on American Airlines to North Carolina this weekend, to visit her parents. I wonder if she’ll be able to get there.
¶ Vespers: After a quiet day of reading and minding the domestic front (isn’t that a nicer way of referring to “paperwork”?), I’m going to try to finish watching Ha-Buah (The Bubble), an Israeli movie that I rented the other day. Whose idea was it to print the subtitles in yellow?
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¶ In the Decameron, VII, viii, the unfaithful wife ties a string to her big toe. When her boyfriend tugs on the other end, below her window, she lets the string slip if she’s alone and the coast is clear. The husband discovers the string and sees instantly what it means, but because he’s a buffoonish merchant — un mercatantuzzo di feccia d’asino, according to his mother-in-law’s exuberant, Mamma-Mia stream of abuse — while his wife is an aristocratess, her clever duplicity wins the day, and Arrigruccio is left standing like a smemorato — like an idiot. Read the rest of this entry »
¶ Matins: The damned thing is: he’s right. “The offence seems to be not what I did but the fact that it became public.” Max Mosley on his forays into Sade-en lusts.
¶ Tierce: The state of play in neuroscience: we still learn most of what we know from brain failure. Frontotemporal dementia, for example, teaches art.
¶ Sext: I knew about the subway reefs, but not that they’d make such a big splash. (“Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars,” by Ian Urbina.)
By the way, we’re having a gorgeous day here.
¶ Compline: Jason Kottke actually got in to Momofuku Ko.
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The flagstaff at Carl Schurz Park, captured in an impromptu reflection pool.
¶ Matins: How about those bloggers, dropping off like flies? (“In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“) No reader of Michael A Banks’s Blogging Heroes, the Takli Makan of this year’s morning read, will be surprised by the news that technews bloggers live like unhappy hamsters.
¶ Tierce: Zose Mosleys vill neffer learn! Grand prix racing czar Max Mosley‘s grandmother, Lady Redesdale, was inured to reading about her daughters’ antics (especially his mother’s) in the newspaper, but this story would probably have given her a nasty turn.
¶ Sext: Surely the most interesting story in the works right now — far outclassing our presidential election — is the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. If you ask me, Liu Qi was out of his mind when it lobbied for the honor of hosting the games.
¶ Vespers: It’s over when the little man squeaks. Sheldon Silver nixes Congestion Pricing.
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James Merrill or Wallace Stevens? I recall some loose talk about adding the latter’s Harmonium to the list, but Merrill’s Collected Poems has yet to be shelved. Reading the first two poems of First Poems, however, I find myself distracted by low-grade problems relating to the new computer. I shall have another go in the morning.
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The poster for Stop-Loss portrays these principal characters as outlaws. They’re anything but, and the power of Kimberly Pierce’s film springs from deep roots in the patriot country of Central Texas. Read about Stop-Loss at Portico.
¶ Matins: Good News! 81% of Americans think that We Have a Problem, Houston. Bad News: 100% of my new computer is dead.
¶ Vespers: As I thought, it was the power supply — and I didn’t break it. (Not that I’m going to put the waste-paper basket next to the CPU a second time.) Now maybe I should try to get into Momofuku Ko.
¶ Compline: A nice photo to look at, late on a Friday night — another one of JR’s super black-and-white shots of New York, taken on his visit here last fall (je crois). Kathleen used to work across the street, at 599 Lex.
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¶ Matins: How much weight will I have to lose to slip into these fetching Milanese outfits?
¶ Tierce: How I wish I’d been blogging ten years ago! Then I’d be able to post a link to my prediction that Sanford Weill’s Citigroup agglomerations, unveiled with much trumpeting at the time, would turn out to be supercalifragilistic. It was obvious that the merger titan had no interest in the hard slog of expialidocious. Â
¶ Nones: Goodbye, solo computer, Hello, KVM!
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¶ Decameron VII, vi reminds me of a painfully smutty joke that, among numerous others, signaled the end to what Freud called “latency.” The punchline was, “GODDAM IT, DING DONG!!!” But the wife in this story has two men on the side. Read the rest of this entry »
