On Fifth Avenue, literally.

It’s Friday morning, but there’s not a single tempting movie showing in New York City. That I haven’t already seen, that is. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I’ve been advised, is mushy and sentimental in a way that its true-life subject would have hated. As for 27 Dresses, which is showing, conveniently, right across the street, no one I know has actually seen it. This leaves No Country For Old Men, which I’m not sure I could sit through. Que faire? Meanwhile:

¶ James B Stewart on Stephen A Schwarzman, in The New Yorker.

An old stairway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — an outcrop of the buried original.

This afternoon, not having been in a while, I walked over to the museum. It was agreeably underpopulated for some reason, although there were still plenty of small knots of people stopping in the middle of the traffic, unaware that New York pedestrians follow rules of the road. If you want to stop and get your bearings, you pull over. Oy.

As I was on my way to see my favorite picture, only to find that it’s out on loan for a while, I reflected that, much as I love to meet people at the museum, I prefer to go through the galleries by myself, because that’s the only way to rule out talking. If it were up to me, the museum would be as silent as a church in a pentitential season. I have overheard a lot of claptrap at the museum, some of it uttered by myself, but never anything worth attending to.

The great name of Andre Meyer has been retired, it seems, and the galleries of Nineteenth-Century European art that used to bear his name have been tweaked, expanded, and partially renamed. The change is a great improvement, if for no other reason than the sensible incorporation of a great deal of American and Twentieth-Century art that belongs alongside the impressionist, pre-, and post- pictures that were already there. For example, Sargent’s Madame X, formerly rather hard to find, tucked away in the American Wing, now commands the best spot in the house, and can be seen for miles, which is just as it should be, since everybody wants to see her. Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein is very much at home a room or two away. I am not entirely sure about the installation of an Art-Nouveau dining room from a house near the Place de l’Étoile; it’s very handsome, but surely it belongs among the exhibits of decorative arts on the ground floor. A quibble.

There’s a nice little show of drawings and etchings in the Johnson Gallery (that corridor that connects the top of the grand staircase with the lobby of the old Andre Meyer galleries), a pendant to the soon-to-open Poussin and Nature. My favorite is a drawing by Donato Creti — no, I hadn’t heard of him, either — “Bathers in a Woodland Landscape.” You’d miss the bathers if it weren’t for the title; they’re lost among the tree trunks in the background. The only clear figure is that of a gentlemanly rustic drying himself off on a rock. The whole scene is shot with the bright peace — and even the fragrance — of a summer afternoon in the woods.

Two other nice works: an etching by Joseph Rebell (d 1826) that, with its pale, distant bluff, roundly prefigures the Hudson River School (which isn’t saying as much as that might sound, since the HRS is mightily retrospective); and an anonymous Seventeenth-Century French drawing of some architectural ruins that strongly suggest the Met in a makeover for one of those apocalyptic movies going round these days. I’d have bought the catalogue, but of course there wasn’t one; there never is for this sort of show, drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection.

As Guy Trebay’s piece in today’s Times points out, these gents ought to be getting their suits in the boys’ department.

Forget skinny models. Forget theories about the appeal of the undernourished silhouette in an age of obesity. Boomers have been dressing like boys since they were boys.

I suppose I’m just lucky that, when I was a boy, coats and ties were required, pretty much all the way through.

¶ The Decameron, IV, v: The story of Isabella and her pot of basil. Well, that’s how Keats told it, inspired by Boccaccio. Boccaccio’s doomed heroine is called Lisabetta. There’s a picture at the MFA in Boston that was here for a show a few years ago, by John White Alexander, painter of the Met’s great Repose. My, what a big pot, you think — if you don’t know the story, which is that, long-story-short, Lisabetta put the head of her murdered lover, Lorenzo, in a pot, which she planted with basil that she watered with her tears. (The former gardener in me bristles: too much salt!).

So of course I had to read the Keats, which comes in sixty-three strophes. Two super lines for the tongue, the first a cool dismissal of mercantile wealth, the second a wild cry of grief.

Enriched from ancestral merchandize,

and

Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,

And one very arresting strophe.

Who hat not loiter’d in a green church-yeard,
  And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
  To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry death hath marr’d
  And filling it once more with human soul?
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.

¶ That’s enough verse for today, so we skip the Aeneid and C K Williams. Clive James writes a note — no more — about Edgar Quinet (1803-1875), a public intellectual who may have been the first to ask whether the excesses of the French Revolution were “worth it” — still a question the asking of which can land you in hot water with the Left, which, frankly, Clive James has had enough of. Insofar as Leftists rely on theories, I quite agree. There is really no need for theories when confronted with injustices all round. It seems to me that the Right is pretty dependent on theories, too, most notably tiresome myths about private property (which is protected by law in order to avoid violence, not to guarantee claims) and “personal responsibility.”

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: John Neff of Autoblog. It’s curious, but a blog about cars seems about as go-ahead as a blog about powdered wigs. Curious geographical slips: “We meet about every three months, either in New York City at AOL headquarters in Rockefeller Square, or in Dulles, Virginia, where the main office is.” Have they changed “Vienna” to “Dulles”? They certainly haven’t built Rockefeller Square yet, not in New York anyway. Plaza and Center, yes, but no Square.

¶ “Go-ahead” is a term used by Diana Mosley in a letter about one of her father’s ill-advised investments: “In those days wirelesses and plastic were both rather go-ahead.” The scheme in question envisioned “making millions” by encasing radios in plastic simulacra of fine old Chinese porcelains. Oh, dear; sounds straight out of Wodehouse.

Diana to Deborah, March 1998:

I’m not nearly as clever as you are & I terribly regret your one blind spot, you would LOVE not just Proust, but Flaubert, Henry James, George Eliot, Goethe’s novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, all these brilliant treasures & many more. I think possibly it comes from impatience, you want to be up & doing, well you are & think of the wonderful achievements! You have got the patience to plant trees, hedges,you know they take ages but once they’re in they grow & you can be doing again, something else. You don’t want to sit ruminating over a book, you want quick action. I do regret it, can’t help it, thinking how you would laugh at Proust’s jokes or be terrified by Conrad’s descrip of the slow fire in a cargo of coal ready to turn & drown them all if the wind changes. It’s true my world is peopled by characters in books, & it’s a mystery how you, so interested in human nature, can do without it seen through eyes of genius. But perhaps it’s clever nature at work which gave you a task far more important than just loving to read. Your fund of wonderful human sympathy is much more unselfish, in face reading is selfish & would probably waste your time which you spend making life bearable for one & all. So in the end I applaud your choice. It is much clever to do than just to think.

Deborah’s reply (excerpt):

Oh, Proust, shall I try it now or is it too late? I do hope it’s too late.

If I were to start up a school today, I’d have the sixth-graders spending their mornings doing morning reads just like mine — so many pages of this, so many lines of that, with brief commentary — and their afternoons memorizing poetry. Seventh-graders, in lieu of sex ed, would study Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, with the teachers required to Explain Everything.

Portrait of the author in despair, wondering what he will tell his wife about having watched further episodes of Lewis.

Over the weekend, George Snyder (1904) sent me the link to a video clip from Baisers Volés, François Truffaut’s 1968 continuation of the autobiography of Antoine Doinel. It’s a film that I hadn’t seen (oy). In the clip, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) opens a letter, concerning the difference between politeness and tact, left at his doorstep, and we hear the voice of his boss’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) read it. After hazarding a reply (cunningly shown being posted via pneumatique), Antoine gets into bed (shown). Seyrig was a gorgeous blonde with a well-deployed whisper of a voice, and George was quite right to be bowled over by it.

So I rented the movie. Stolen Kisses to you, bub. I rented it on Sunday, after dinner at an ordinarily-packed restaurant denuded by the Super Bowl. 

Which meant that I had to watch it yesterday afternoon or pay extra. This is always happening with rented foreign films. I can never interest Kathleen in watching them because, at least at home, she doesn’t want to read subtitles. (Given the amount of time that she spends poring over legal boilerplate, I don’t blame her.) The days go by — and I find myself watching a movie when I’d rather be writing. “Roger, pay the two dollars.” But I can’t. I’ve got to watch the damned movie and get it back to the Video Room.

All of which is meant to console George for not finding Baisers Volés at Netflix. Life is rough even when the rental place is two doors down, and you just walk in and ask, and okay okay.

That ought to have been enough video for one day. But Kathleen was working late, so I ordered in. I might have read while I ate. But I wanted to watch something. There were lots of things to watch, including the newly-acquired video of A Dance to the Music of Time. But no.

You see, I’d been on a Morse jag, watching one Inspector Morse episode after another.

Isn’t it a pity, I said the other night, that they only made a pilot of Lewis — a continuation of Morse, sort of, in which it was now the North Country former-sergeant Lewis who had a Morse-like gent working for him. Isn’t it a pity, I said.

Yes! affirmed Kathleen. I like Lewis!

But we were wrong about their not proceeding beyond the pilot, and the box from Amazuke arrived today. Could I wait? More anon.

I love my Coolpix. The pictures that it takes without a flash are astonishing. The view from our balcony, this seventh morning of February.

The most beautiful American woman, ever.

What am I reading? I seem to have passed into an alternative universe in which the question no longer means anything. I am reading from seven books most weekday mornings; on the weekends, lately, I’ve been finishing off novels. Am I ready to blame this blog for the fact that I read much less than I used to do? What I ought to blame is the Nano. I was up until two-thirty in the morning loading up a new device, in a vain attempt to get things just right. It is some sort of revenge for all my offhand dismissals of modish personal music systems, which I had “outgrown.” Ha. When I told my friend Nom de Plume how childish I was the other night (or early morning), she riposted, “I don’t know about ‘childish,’ but it seems very masculine to me.” A guy and his Nano — ouch!

Meanwhile, I’m listening to Michael Palin’s audiobook of his Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years, and learning all sorts of things while being hugely entertained on my daily walks. Names, for one thing: “Cleese” rhymes with “please,” not “geese,” and it’s “Palin” with a long “a.”  Every time I mention the audiobook to Kathleen, she says, “He’s the one I don’t like,” but this in fact always turns out to be Eric Idle, and of course it was Mr Idle’s characters whom Kathleen didn’t like.

I don’t know which Monty Python routine is my favorite, but the one that Kathleen and I quote most often is, by far, Ann Elk’s theory about the brontosaurus. “And that it is, too, Chris.”

¶ The Decameron, IV, iv: Love via hearsay, the story of Gerbino and the Tunisian princess, who fell in love by report, as it were, never seeing one another until the moment of death (as it turned out). Being slow, it was not until today that I reflected on the trouble that handsome young men must have gotten into by reading these tales aloud in mixed company. Just imagine the reaction of a cloistered fourteen year-old girl to Gerbino’s address to his pirate crew!

It is my conviction that no mortal being who is without experience of love can ever lay claim to true excellence. And if you are in love, or have ever been in love, it will not be difficult for you to understand what it is that I desire. For I am in love, gentlemen…

¶ In the Aeneid, the Cumaean sybil tells Aeneas to fetch the golden bough if he wants to visit the Underworld on a return ticket. This quest is rather overshadowed by the big funeral for Misenus, Aeneas’s trumpeter, who got in an ill-advised pissing match — blowing, actually — with Triton. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2003) rather useless on Misenus. Someone among Virgil’s patrons must have had a place at Misenum, the Neapolitan suburb named after the herald.

¶ C K Williams’s New Poems: shorter lines, for one thing. A reference to Iraq, in “Blackbird.”

I’d been thinking of Lincoln’s
“…You can’t fool all of the people
all of the time…,” how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.

Patience, my dear poet; patience.

¶ Clive James on Proust: Just a page or two, but James’s point is that Proust, “the greatest French writer,” infuses all of Cultural Amnesia.

This book you are reading now could easily have been ten times as long if it had contained nothing else but expansions on the notes I have made from reading Proust in several editions over the course of forty years.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Peter Rojas, of Engadget. This book has no place in such august company, but I don’t think that I could get through it otherwise. On the Simple Life:

When I decide I want to learn something about a field or an area, I just subscribe to blogs in that area, sometimes at random. For example, about a year ago I decided to learn about widgets. I literally Googled “widgets blog” and found a bunch of blogs. As I read and linked to more blogs, it became obvious what the best blogs in that field were.

I added those to my RSS feed, and deleted some of the other ones that weren’t so good. And that gave me a pretty good sense of what was going on in the widget blogosphere.

It’s a really good way to familiarize yourself with a field. Just start reading the blogs. You won’t need to really spend a lot of time sweating over what is the best, because it will become apparent in a few weeks.

Well, what are you waiting for?

¶ Jessica to Deborah, March 1995:

Enclosed: a killing article by Xopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, at least I loved it. Did you catch the telly programme about Mother Teresa? I always thought she was just a boring old saint, hadn’t realized she’s a disgusting old fascist.

Deborah to Diana, July 1996:

Reading the obits. of Decca, the Mitford Girls are described variously, as Famous Notorious Talented Glamorous Turbulent Unpredictable Celebrated Infamous Rebellious Colourful & Idiosyncratic. So, take your choice. The D Express has a long article about us called ‘Sex and Power.” I suppose anyone who is married, & most who aren’t, have what is now called Had Sex* at some point in their lives. As for Power I don’t quite see how that comes into it. So why are we different from anyone else.

                                                            Much love, Debo

* Look at the people walking down Oxford St, all products of Having Sex.

As The Mitfords draws to a close, far from wondering what made the sisters different, I’m convinced that Zeus or someone equally Parnassian was involved in their parentage.

Kathleen has been feeling a bit run down in these groundhog days, and her back gave out on Friday. So, when I began to dress for Saturday night’s concert at Carnegie Hall, and I gave her recumbency a pat and told her that she could stay home if she liked, I expected my reprieve to be met with a moan or two of gratitude.. Ordinarily, I am not so easygoing about ducking out of concert-going. Instead of which, the next thing I knew, Kathleen was up and dressed herself. Much as she wanted to stay in bed (a very, very great deal), she had no intention of missing Orpheus’ performance of one of her favorite works. (That would be Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.) For once, I didn’t have to remind Kathleen that she always likes, and not infrequently loves, Orpheus at Carnegie.

¶ Mozart and Tchaikovsky, with violinist Nikolaj Znaider.

Snow, finally. Living in the city, with no need for a car, I never look at weather reports, so I have no idea how much snow is expected — and don’t you go telling me! When I want to know if it’s raining, I glance at the cupola of St Joseph’s (shown above) to check for streaks of wet. As Akira Kurosawa observed, you can’t see real rain.

How about those Mets? Oh! right! It’s all good! My son-in-law-elect is a a big Giants fan, so I’m taking the victory as personally auspicious.

¶ There is an opera in there somewhere… The Decameron, IV, iii: the three sisters, their three lovers, and a miscellany of vengeance suggesting that it is early days, indeed, on the narrative front. Although one of the three sisters is tied up in a sack, the dramatic possibilities so adroitly exploited in the plot of Rigoletto remain entirely unexplored.

¶ The Aeneid, beginning of Book 5: The Cumaean sibyl’s cave. What I’m looking for — and may find tomorrow — is the prophecy explains what the Sybil is doing up on the Sistine ceiling.

¶ CK Williams: “Helen”:

His own body had long ago become a ruin, but beauty had never been a part of what he was.
What would happen to his lust, and to his love, when time came to savage and despoil her?

A Dream of Mind climaxes in a poem about the death of a lover that, without any explicit allusions, seems shot with classical mythology, most notably to the story of Orpheus and Euridice. My critic faculties busily protect me from this obviously powerful poem.

¶ Clive James, nominally on the subject of Jean Prévost, but really out to dish Sartre:

Unlike his fellow resistance hero Sartre, Prévost had been confident enough to follow his star in the direction of the German soldiers, but Sartre left that out. There was a lot, after the war, that everyone wanted to leave out. The spontaneous universalism that Prévost had so admirably represented in the Thirties was irrevocably passé. The division of labor once again became the rule in clerical work. What a man like Prévost had once integrated into a single joyous effort was now broken up into separate specialties, each with its resident panels of shamans and charlatans. The once very real prospect of a widely curious humanism had decayed and separated into literary theory, bogus philosophy and ideological special pleading on behalf of political systems which had, as their first enemy, the irreducible complexity of a living culture.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Robert Scoble, of the tech site Scobleizer. And today’s insight: “So thinking about the blog is part of the blogging process?” “Yeah.” I looked for this gem in vain among the Power Points. It appears that Mr Scoble is at Davos as we speak (or maybe not). I wonder if I’ll ever be invited to the humanist equivalent of Davos. Will there be an equivalent? Online, at best — humanism is very, very ill-paid.

¶ Le rouge et le noir: Sorel arrives in Besançon, and visits his first café — where he almost gets into a fight, little would-be Napoleon that he is. How understandably reluctant he is to toddle off to the seminary! If there were ever a young man without a “vocation,” it’s Julien Sorel.

¶ Over the weekend, I finished another section of The Mitfords, and now have only the last to read. We’re down to Diana, Decca, and Debo. It’s getting gowlish!

Today’s book was in my pile for about nine months before I realized that I was never going to sit down and read a book about the Lost Boys of Sudan. I was simply never going to begin. So I bought the unabridged BBC audiobook and listened to the seventeen CDs on my daily walks for much of the fall of 2007. What Is the What turned out to be almost as upsettingly unpleasant as I feared it would be, but not quite, and at times it was unexpectedly bright. If Valentino Achak Deng is not the decent man that he appears to be here, I’m afraid that I don’t want to know it.

Without judging Dion Graham’s performance in any detail, I can say that his talents always seem to be quite easily broad enough to encompass the wide range of speaking characters who figure in the book. More than that, though, he reads the story as if he had told it a thousand times already, never the same way twice.

¶ What Is the What.

My infidelities continue astound me; I have fallen so far that I can no longer bear the hollowness of my own resolutions. On Wednesday afternoon, I was seduced by a book lying on a table at Crawford Doyle: Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening. A friend had mentioned seeing the recent film adaptation, which, I was bemused to note, had required nearly ten years of gestation since the novel’s publication. And even then, what fudging: the overweight and blobular Schiller, a seventy-one year-old survivor of the New York Intellectual galaxy, is played by the very dashing Frank Langella. Vincent Gardenia would have been more like it. Now that I want to see it, I’m stuck in the limbo between theatrical and DVD release.

Although the jacket blurb calls the novel “comic,” none of the many testimonials printed at the beginning of the paperback mention how funny the book is. That’s perhaps because I’m the only reader who thinks so. Once I’d calmed down enough to read a passage that had had me coughing with laughter, Kathleen pronounced “clever” and “sweet,” but not “funny.” I was reminded that nobody else finds Verdi’s ballet music side-splitting, either.

I’ll come back to the humor later. For now, the following grave and beautiful passage from very near the end. It concerns Casey, the middle-aged, half-black, half-Jewish professor — this is a very New York novel — whose relationship with Schiller’s daughter, ended years ago because she wanted children but he didn’t, has been rekindled.

The last few months had beden very different from what he’d expected. He was finally ready to begin a project that he’d been thinking about for years, and he’d been hoping for a few distraction-free months in which to concentrate. But now he was getting dragged into the middle of life’s confusions. Worrying about having children with Ariel; worrying about Ariel’s father — it wasn’tg a good time to be dealing with these problems. A part of him wished that he could refuse all this, just close the door on it all and do his work. But of course you can’t refuse it; you mustn’t even try. You have to let it in.

I’m not quite sure why this strikes me as a related thought, but when I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, I saw a rack of inexpensive editions of classic novels. I had just picked up a copy of James Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which I fully intend, for what it’s worth (not much), not to open until I have finished Diary of a Bad Year, because George Snyder wrote that he was reading it and because there had been an interesting write-up in Bookforum, while Kathleen, whose idea this visit to B&N had been, looked at beading magazines. Looking at the rows of seriously great and deeply satisfying novels — Emma! Middlemarch! — I was overcome by the strangest sense of luxury. I had all of those books at home; what was more, I knew that I really liked reading them. I could just return to the apartment and curl up in a chair with one of them. Life could be that simple! If only…

He’s right: you mustn’t even try.

A small confession: I wrote an important part of today’s piece before I saw the movie. In fact, I woke myself very early morning, thinking that I would lull myself to sleep by thinking what I would say about Diane Lane but becoming so involved in the syntax that further snoozing was out of the question. As I was tucked under the covers, unequipped with writing materials, I forgot almost all of my finer points, but the spirit of my remarks stayed with me, and were only confirmed by Ms Lane’s latest film.

Once upon a time, telling you how much older I was than the actress in question would have made only me seem old. Now that I am sixty, those days are over. We shall draw a veil.

¶ Untraceable.

It was only a little over four years ago, in the fall of 2003, that M le Neveu began to insist that I start up a blog. My strenuous opposition to the idea was partly rooted in my fear that I’d become a slave to the project — a not unreasonable misgiving, if easily lifted when I recognized that the only difference between slavery and a vocation is the vocation — and ownership. Far more than that, though, I was put off by odor of sophomoric self-indulgence that blogs seemed — or were reported — to give off. One man I talked to dismissed blogs as “what I had for dinner last night.” The very term, Web log, suggested dear-diary entries, and the feedback element, the comments, seemed thoroughly questionable. Not for me!

Four years later, in any case, I have certainly changed my mind about blogging. Comments remain to be sorted out, I think, and I’ve been thinking hard about how to reconceive them (without requiring any changes in the code). I expect that I shall, though, and my belief in the virtues of the Web log as a literary form has never been more intense. It’s dispiriting, therefore, to see that The New York Review of Books is still publishing the kind of thinking that would have kept me away from reading blogs, much less writing one myself, if it had not been for a brilliant graduate student’s impassioned advocacy. (I refer to M le Neveu.)

As promised on Monday, a few words about the kind of coverage that Web logs are getting — almost as childish as the blog writing that it focuses on.*

¶ Sarah Boxer on Blogs, in The New York Review of Books.

* Once again, thanks to George Snyder for linking me to Ms Boxer’s piece a day before the hard copy arrived.

Suddenly, things are simpler. We’re down to four serious presidential candidates, two for each party. Once upon a time, their intramural competition for the two election spots would have taken place pretty much out of sight. Modern television news hadn’t discovered itself, hadn’t learned how different it was from print journalism. The process of self-discovery is still ongoing. Consider Fox News’s bundling of the Super Bowl on Super Sunday with the nationwide primaries on Super Tuesday. Super!

My aunt, like everyone I know, is very excited about Barack Obama. I would be, too, if it weren’t for Hillary Clinton. And if we weren’t seven or eight months away from the Democratic Party’s convention. Seven or eight months of fratricidal structure, conducted in full view of friend and foe alike! The prospect is so curdling that I take positive comfort in the “suspension” of John Edwards’s campaign. Perhaps, when the “black” candidate and the “woman” candidate have knocked each other out with their croquet mallets, Mr Edwards will return, to pose a serious threat to the Republican Party contender. Now that he is out of the race, however, the one thing that I am prolbablyh not going to do is follow my aunt’s advice and watch tonight’s debates.

Clearly I have become a deep-dyed cynic in my old age, like the Adolphe Menjou character in Frank Capra’s State of the Union — a film that I urge everyone to see every time a presidential election comes round. I really don’t care who’s in the White House so long aa it (a) is a Democrat but (b) is not Jimmy Carter. You would think that we don’t have to worry about the second part anymore, but Democrats have an alarming ability to bloom into Jimmy Carter hybrids. Mrs Clinton is just as tedious to listen to as the Georgia president, while Mr Obama has all of those outsider’s disadvantages.

If I were a normal person, I would find a candidate that I liked — at this point, with John Edwards out of the race, it would probably be Hillary Clinton (my mistrust of Barack Obama is as visceral as everyone else’s dislike of Hillary) — and content myself with hoping that she’d win in November. But I left that kindergarten behind a long time ago. I don’t allow myself to think how grand my favorite candidate would be in the White House any more than I waste my time plannint how I’d spend lottery winnings (it helps in the latter instance that I never buy tickets). I save that for the happy January day a little less than a year from now when, if things go well, a Democrat walks through the White House door.

Happily, I’ve got the victory party covered. My daugher has fixed the date for her wedding, a few days after the election. She may think that she’s just getting married, but if the right candidate wins, her nuptials will certainly be sailing a great wave of euphoria. And if not, I’ll still be happy as can be.

¶ In the Decameron (IV, ii): “He who is wicked and held to be good, can cheat because no one imagines he would.” This reads like a mash-up of two stories, the first a tale of one very silly woman, Mona Lisetta ( given many mocking nicknames — Lady Numbskull, Lady Birdbrain, &c), who believes that she’s so sexy that the Archangel Gabriel lusts after her, and the more slapstick account of comeuppance, in which the Archangel’s impersonator is tarred and feathered, only with honey instead of tar. Throughout, however, the tale is yet another attack on the hypocrisy of the religious orders.

¶ The end of the fifth book of the Aeneid, at last! The strange death of Palinurus — time to re-read Cyril Connolly?

¶ C. K. Williams: the end of “A Dream of Mind,” — again, at last. These poems seem to take place in the absence of gravity; I never know which way is up. Nor, for that matter of that, do I really know what the poet is talking about. This book (also called A Dream of Mind) concludes with a final long poem, “Helen.” I shall try to read it in one sitting, and then close this collection and move on to someone else.

¶ Clive James on Beatrix Potter. “Her stories attract tweeness toward them — the Peter Rabbit Ballet must be hard to take for anyone except a very tiny child — but are never winsome in themselves, mainly because of her tactile, yet quite tough, feeling for language.” Even better:

Written in a age when it was still assumed the children would not suffer brain damage from hearing a phrase they couldn’t immediately understand, the books are plentifully supplied with elevated verbal constructions. The bright child sees unfamiliar phrases going by just overhead and reaches up, while the parent is reminded of the historic privilege of being born into a civilization where the morality of children’s books, even at their worthily—meant worst, has evolved through supply and demand, and not been imposed by the state according to a plan.”

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mark Frauenfelder, of BoingBoing.net. Something to take up later today, when writing for tomorrow about blogs:

Q: What tips or advice would you like to hear with bloggers?

A: I think it’s really important to write a good headline. It’s better to be accurate than it is to be cute or clever. When you make a post, do a little summary of what it is in the headline, because a lot of people read blogs through RSS and go to the headline first to see what’s going on. It can make a difference in whether you get read.

As for the blog post itself, if you’re writing about something out on the Web, give a good short description of why it’s interesting. When I see something I want to talk about, I outline some of the questions that readers might ask, like “Why is this interesting?” or, “Why is this important?” I write down the answers, and then I post.

¶ Diana to Deborah, in September 1980, on the subject of Evelyn Waugh’s correspondence: “Isn’t it amazing who the person one’s writing to influences one.” Indeed.

Not so much fun:

But what happened with Jebb’s silly film shows the depth of seething hatred Decca feels for us. It is much more painful to hate than to be hated, & I am aware that her life is in many ways rather awful, but not quite awful enough to excuse her behaviour. As far as I go, I put her out of my mind.”

Greetings from the Learning Curve! I used the Dragon to dictate this morning’s read, and as a result the whole business took ages. I’ll get better at it, though. Dictation certainly beats trying to prop thick books open while typing from them. The thing is not to put the books away until they’ve been consulted for cleanup. I wonder: are there any conceptual artists out there who are “working with” unpasteurized dictation? Talk about absurdity on the cheap!

¶ The theme for stories on the Fourth Day of the Decameron is “those whose love ended unhappily.” The first tale, about Ghismonda, the daughter of a jealous prince, tells us that “she was youthful and vivacious, and she possessed rather more intelligence than a woman needs.” It’s curious that the story has never received operatic treatment. It has a climactic scene to rival Salome, followed by a kind of Liebestod. Before dying, however, Ghismonda rattles off the old medieval delusion about the wheel of fortune, so beloved perhaps because it offered the promise of respite from an increasingly stratified society.

Many kings, many great princes were once poor; many a ploughman or shepherd, not only in the past but in the present, was once exceedingly wealthy.

¶ The Aeneid: The Trojan fleet is set on fire, but most ships are saved in a providential thunderstorm. Aeneas is advised to leave the women and children behind while he sets out for Rome with just his fighting men. This seems to be the first appearance of women among the band of Trojan exiles; they’ve been introduced, not surprisingly, only to be got rid of.

¶ C K Williams, “To Listen”:

For the dead speak from affection, dream says, there’s kindness in the voices of the dead.
I listen again, but I still hear only fragments of the elaborate discourse the dead speak;
when I try to capture its gist more is effaced, there are only faded words strewn on the page
of my soul that won’t rest from its need to have what it thinks it can have from the dead.

Sometimes, I think that this is what poetry is for: memorizing lines that seem right even though they’re not understood; later, their sense becomes clear, enlightened by experiences that we would have missed without them.

¶ Clive James on Alfred Polgar:

Critics are always remembered best for how they sound when on the attack. Schadenfreude lies deep in the human soul, and to read a tough review seems a harmless way of indulging it. But the only critical attacks that really count are written in defense of value.

(In an interesting note: “Alfred Brendel put me onto Polgar.”)

¶ In September 1979, Diana writes Deborah to regret that she can’t come to Sophy’s wedding because her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, is too ill to be left in France. “I will get her present next week, there’s a list at PJ isn’t there.” PJ stands for the stylish emporium in Sloane Square. Last night, Kathleen and I had dinner with the banker who lives right behind Peter Jones. Her life is being made a perfect hell by adjacent construction (nothing to do with the shop). The runaround that she gets while trying to find someone responsible to talk to sounds perfectly universal.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mike Masnick, of Techdirt. Aha! Someone else who claims to have been a blogger before there was blogging. An interesting thing about this business site is that its legitimacy is thought, correctly, I’m sure, to be enhanced by the presence of advertising. Some of the advertisers are clients of the firm!”

¶ Speaking of business, while slogging through an impenetrable passage having to do with commercial leases in Le rouge et le noir, I accepted the fact that I am going to have to get a trot. I can’t go on wondering if Stendhal is addicted to non sequiturs.

While tidying up over the weekend, I got a bit drastic with the bedside pile. I am actually reading all of these books. What’s more: at the moment, I am not reading any other books. I regret having stalled on J M Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, because it’s a very interesting book. That’s part of the problem: because of its three interlocking story lines, reading the book requires greater than ordinary attentiveness. Nancy Mitford’s two best-known novels (one volume) are there for bedtime reading.

While nothing could be more trivial, or of less general interest, than the ups and downs of my reading piles, casting the glare of publicity on the matter from week to week has proved to be instructive and salutary. I can hardly bear to buy a book at this point — all the new ones in the house are Amazon orders made weeks ago. Happily, there’s nothing in this week’s Book Review that tempts me.

¶ Death’s Army.

¶ Decameron: The Fourth Day. The introduction, an authorial aside defending the burgeoning of vernacular literature — Boccaccio was writing in a world more or less without it (aside from, ahem, Dante) — has on at least once occasion served as a replacement for yesterday’s very saucy tale about putting the Devil in Hell. Not that today’s is without its capsicum: “Their bills are not where you think, and require a special sort of diet.” If you ask me, this is a jolly improvement on the original, which says only, “tu non sai donde elle s’imbeccano.” McWilliam’s little crack about the “special diet” is wonderfully “off-color”…. ¶ In the Aeneid, the funeral games come to an end at last with the boys’ mock battle, and we approach a scene that I have seen on a museum wall somewhere — at the Met? The burning of the Trojan ships. Goody! Something to look forward to for tomorrow. Not…. ¶ C K Williams, “The Knot.” I’ve no idea what this means, but it’s a pretty line: “knots of purpose we could touch into as surely as we touch the rippling lattice of a song.” I have no patience for the metaphysics of this verse, for the poet’s mad persistence in distinguishing between “spirit or flesh.” There is certainly flesh, and their may be spirt, but they are not elements in a dualism. That’s over!…. ¶ Clive James, nominally on Octavio Paz but actually, and with sweet infatuation, about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, of whom he writes, fetchingly: “Though her faith was real, it undoubtedly came in handy.” Sterling. At the end, he returns to the more recent Mexican poet:

The correspondence [of Sor Juana Inés was lost through sheer carelessness: the Spanish carelessness that Paz defines in scathing terms: “It is said that the passion that corrodes the Spanish peoples is envy, but worse and more weighty is carelessness: the creator of our deserts.” When he brings in a phrase like creador de nuestros desertos, Paz shows us the transatlantic cable that runs from Unamuno and Ortega to himself and Vargas Llosa: the charge of energy that brought Spanish civilization to life again, offshore in the Americas. Spanish expository prose in the twentieth century was a miracle that these men created, but they didn’t dream it up out of the air. There was already a long heritage of rhetorical strengtrh in the poetry, where the telling phrases lie separate that would later be strung together in a coruscating style.

¶ Diana to Debo, October 1978, oh, what a treat! (But I suppose I had better mention that “Colonel” is Gaston Palewski, Nancy’s BF who, after twenty years of fooling around, up and married somebody rich. Nancy’s horrible cancer commenced presently. You decide.)

It was so rich having a chat yesterday.

I don’t think I told you a very odd thing about Colonel. We were alone & he suddenly said he’d been terribly hurt because Naunce didn’t mention him in her testament. So I said ‘But her will was just one line leaving everything to Debo,’ & he said ‘Oui, je sais, mais elle aurait pu quand même dire un mot de moi.’

Well, can you imagine, isn’t that wanting everything all at once! He maried [somebody else], & yet he expects that! I feel certain he simply wants it for his biographers, if any. He was almost in tears. When I told him about the telly thing, he cheered up & wanted to know who is to act him in it. I’m afraid vanity is strong. He must be very put out by the Pop dying because he knew him from Venice & loved saying so.

“I’m afraid vanity is strong… and loved saying so” — English doesn’t get more delicious…. ¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Frank Warren, of Post Secret. Goodness! When did I last check it out? Perhaps I ought to link to it, under a new heading, “Divertissements” or “Sunday Morning” — how long, I wonder, are Internet weekends going to continue to be dead? The Post Secret postcards are titillating to read, of course, but it’s the sharp designs that carry the site. There is, it’s true, a nasty pong to it all: it’s one thing to hear somebody’s deep dark secrets, but quite another to know that somebody is doing some pretty awful things! Kathleen would take one look at Post Secret and, after that, never again…. ¶ Stendhal: “Le grand malheur des petites villes de France et des gouvernements par élections, comme celui de New York, c’est de ne pas pouvoir oublier qu’il existe au monde des êtres comme M de Rênal.” Yes, the great misfortune of elected governments such as New York’s is the occasional inescapability of beings such as M de Giuliani.