Monday Housekeeping Note: With only two chapters of Blogging Heroes left, I’ll be revising the reading list this week. The new titles will be John Aubrey’s Brief Lives and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium.
Coming up: the Aeneid will be followed by Simon Armitage’s new translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Edith Grossman’s new translation of Don Quixote will follow the Decameron. These changes are weeks, if not months, away, so you’ve plenty of time, if you’re interested in following along, to arm yourself with either book.
On the horizon: James Merrill, Michel de Montaigne, Richard Burton, and the correspondence of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert.
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At Houston and Broadway
Last week, the third RoomGroove arrived. It took about two minutes to unwrap and plug in. Presto! Music in the living room. The same music that hitherto could only be heard in the bedroom and the blue room. As it was a weeknight, the Black Nano was playing the nearly six hundred “songs” that I’ve uploaded onto it. Although there’s still plenty of empty space on the Black Nano, it takes more than five days (barring the hours of sleep) for it to plow through the “Classics” playlist — which is the only playlist on that device.*
Meanwhile, I’ve uploaded nearly forty CDs onto the Grey Nano. There are two playlists, “Jazz” and “Standards,” the difference being that all the vocals have been shunted into the latter. Here’s the mystery: it’s as though the Black Nano and the Grey Nano were two completely different types of music source, instead of exactly the same. During the week, the pleasant round of Handel, Mozart, Schubert und so weiter creates one kind of apartment. Then, on the weekends, the place gets a paint job. When the Grey Nano shuffles its way through Keith Jarrett, Benny Goodman, Dexter Gordon and so on, we’re not in quite the same house.
Is it just the music? Of course not. It’s the flow of music, its endless, effortless unspooling. It’s as miraculous to me as water running from a tap must have been to the children of pioneers. And rather more atmospherically potent. Listen, I’d only just gotten used to not having to turn the record* over!
* You might then ask, “Why have a playlist at all?” Ah, so did I, at first.
* LP. We knew it was vaguely illiterate to call LPs (and 45s and — for those of us whose parents hadn’t thrown away theirs — 78s) “records.” But the usage did not die until the format did.
Here’s an idea: visit Times Square on a late Saturday afternoon in early spring. The weather is unlikely to be pleasant, but the chances are that the crowds will owe some of their effervescence to the joy of not being all bundled up.
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Who says there’s no honour among thieves? “You have to stick to your principles.” Pretty upstanding for a last line of dialogue, wouldn’t you say? Â
¶ In Bruges.
¶ Matins: This morning’s Friday Front, at Portico.
¶ Sext: Come Back, Little Sheba, for all its antiquity, was as fresh as paint and as strong as smelling salts. (Report on Tuesday) Now I’m off to the Angelika for In Bruges, and my first trip downtown since before the holidays. For the movies, at least.
¶ Vespers: After the movie, which was great, and lunch at Jacques Downtown, I screwed up my courage to Do Something New. Instead of heading home, I headed east — one block, to the new New Museum. It opened late last year, but was much too hot for the likes of me.
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Intimations of le printemps
¶ Matins: Finally, our tickets for Come Back, Little Sheba. Sooner or later, all the Off-Broadway supporting actors appear on Law & Order. In a twist, one of the Law & Order stars sppears on Broadway!
¶ Tierce: The lesson of 142,000 free parking passes: understanding the difference between a perquisite and a privilege.
¶ Sext: A new reader of Portico just wrote to me to comment on The Devils of Loudun, which is very nice indeed, but I mention it here because the writer happens to have a site that shares many of my ambitions, The Pequod.
¶ Vespers: At long last, a disgrace in the Bronx will be cleared up. The Bronx Borough Courthouse, a beaux-arts jewel that sits at the end of a long vista, will become a charter school in the fall. Read Timonthy Williams’s story in the Times, but be sure to click on the photo, the better to see the building and how it has been defaced over the years.Â
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¶ And so the Fifth Day comes to an end, in the Decameron — with a tale about a “cattivo marito.” How things have changed. Today, the misery endured by heterogeneric couples whose marriage would never have occurred had the homosexual partner been allowed to marry someone of the same sex is put forth as as a plank in the platform of gay marriage, and I’ve no bone to pick with that. For Boccaccio, things are different — and rather merrier. Read the rest of this entry »
¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review.
¶ Prime: Two stories show the superiority of Gothamist to The New York Times for local reporting — and one of them involves a Times writer!
— Building Collapse in Harlem Stops Metro North
— Ceiling Collapse in Broadway Dings Reporter’s Friend.
¶ Sext: Which would you rather have, a dollar or a dollar-fifty? Don’t be too sure!
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¶ In Decameron V, ix, we have an ancestor of O Henry’s most famous story, “The Gift of the Magi.” A lover, with nothing else to offer his “cruel” beloved, slaughters a prized falcon and serves it to her for lunch. Guess what! Her dying son had his heart set on playing with this very bird, and the lady is only visiting her hapless admirer in order to ask him to take pity on her boy — even though she knows that she has no right to ask. But first — before etiquette permits her to frame her request — a little fricassee.
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On 57th Street
¶ Matins: I’ve got my physical at 9:30 this morning. I remember when a “physical” was something that you got when you were drafted.
¶ Prime: This just in: The Earth is round, and, also, by the way, putting a television set in your child’s bedroom is not a great idea. (They might pick up the wrong values from Real Housewives of New York City.)Â
¶ Nones: Today, on Ew! Factor: Koran Flushing. What’s with the community service? They ought to throw the bum out of school!
¶ Vespers: A few words about Tom Meglioranza’s cabaret recital at Weill Recital Hall last week.
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Descending to Eli’s — many of Manhattan’s best food markets are in basements.
¶ Matins: JR has been writing bits and pieces about one of his favorite brasseries, the Nord-Sud in the 18ième; now he has posted a couple of photographs.
¶ Tierce: Morning Hash: In Bob Tedeschi’s story, “After Suicide, Blog Insults Are Debated,” the Times aims for excitement but winds up stripping the story of much-needed perspective.
¶ Vespers: “Ribaldry and lightheadedness” — what’s that in Hebrew? Yiddish? Somehow, these terms of art didn’t make it into the King James Version. But then Hasidism hadn’t been invented yet, had it.
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Within twenty or so pages of the end of this thrilling, gripping, hair-raising and utterly literary novel, I am so restless that I can barely keep my eyes on the page. SWAT teams are poised to descend upon a Unabomber-type character in the Idaho wilderness — did I mention that it’s snowing, and that the poor sacrificial lamb has to don snowshoes before hiking to the nut’s hut?
Although this is hardly a conventional “Books on Monday” filing, I may not have much more to say about A Person of Interest. I wouldn’t have said anything about Idaho and the snowshoes if it hadn’t been for the brief review in The New Yorker; I’ll have to make sure that any further beans have already been spilled elsewhere. At the same time, A Person of Interest is somewhat too good to be true, the first American novel that I’ve read in ages that could not indecently be discussed with Dostoevsky in the room. Or Nabokov. There must be ergot sewn into the binding.
Or perhaps it’s just spring fever. I sat by the balcony door, which was open to the damp, early spring freshness. Not the best idea for a cold remedy, certainly; but I felt suavely pampered.
When I get back from collecting the mail, I’ll brave the finale.
¶ Oy! You know how it is: you know you’ve read something somewhere before — but where?! Decameron V, viii lays a comic story on top of a very grim one, and I know that I’ve encountered the grim one within the past year or so. The setting was Kazakhstan or one of the other big former SSRs, and I thought I might find it by flipping through Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan. No joy.
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A display of Mozartkugeln at Schaller & Weber
At first, the table was set for eight. Then for seven. Finally, for five. Within the space of half an hour, Ms NOLA and Megan called to cancel lunch, Ms NOLA for herself and Megan for herself and Ryan, who was the ailing party in that household. Ms NOLA had sent me a note on Thursday saying that she was in bed with a very bad flu, so I wasn’t surprised by her call. After Megan called, I thought I’d better ask Kathleen: should we cancel? Or proceed? Kathleen voted for the latter course, and we ended up having a very jolly time of it. M le Neveu came down from Columbia, with some promising good news, and he and Kathleen had a chat while LXIV and I bored Fossil Darling silly with “reminiscences” of the ancien régime at Versailles.
Although it was too bad that the purpose of the luncheon — introducing Ryan to Ms NOLA and M le Neveu — didn’t happen, I was not consumed by disappointment. In fact, I shrugged it off almost at once. For once, I had planned for it. Not on it, but for it. For one thing, I hadn’t knocked myself out with an elaborate menu. Nor had I allowed preparation to supersede all regularly-scheduled activities.* Most important, I had reminded myself at every turn that the luncheon must be a pleasant event for all concerned, not a command performance at which the private feelings of those present were of no account.
We shall try again in a month of so, not long enough for me to forget all the little astuces that I picked up in the course of preparing yesterday’s meal.
* Just one or two — the Friday Front, for example.
Well, I liked it. But it will be weeks before I figure out why.
¶ The Other Boleyn Girl.
¶ Matins: Poème trouvé: “To the Uptight Guy on the 6 Train at 77th St. Station.”
¶ Tierce: An initial decision, against going to the movies today — I’ve got lots to do in preparation for tomorrow’s luncheon, after all, and I don’t want to be running around at the last minute — was overturned when I discovered that The Other Boleyn Girl is showing around the corner at 10:30.
¶ Compline: The most incredibly occupied day. Read all about it below.
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An abbreviated read, hastily summed-up; and more’s the pity, because two of the items (Boccaccio, James) would merit the whole day’s study.
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¶ Matins: William F Buckley dies, at 82.
¶ Nones:  And we’re back. Something about corrupted update code knocked out the server. While The Daily Blague was down, I went ahead and posted today’s Morning Read in the Vestibule at Portico. Think I’ll do that as a matter of course. Directive from the Department of Redundancy Department. Read the rest of this entry »
¶ Decameron, V, vi: I wonder if anyone has studied what it is about the Fifth Day’s stories that sets them apart from the tragic love stories that surround them. Today’s tale begins with the usual young lovers, but by the time it hiccups into melodrama, the reader might have missed something.
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¶ Matins: The Book Review review.
¶ Tierce: In Seventeen-Hundred-and-Fifty-Two, Columbus sailed the Ocean …. WTF??
¶ Nones: The menu for Saturday’s family luncheon is set: onion soup, boeuf bourguignonne, and Dacquoise — made to recipes from one or the other of Julia Child’s Mastering treatises.
¶ Compline: What to do with old Christmas cards? Ten ideas.
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