You might say that this is a not very good picture of my grandson Will — because, you’d observe, he is always so much cuter than this. Even with the milk dribbling down.

Over and over and over again, however, the beautiful pictures of Will fail to be taken, because Will knows how to throw a banana into the lens.

Prophylactically, therefore, I propose to interpret Will’s many “off” photograths as the mug shots of serious bad guys: hypothecating accountants, defalcating lawyers, and so on. Here, for example, we have Junius Q Lawsby, just back from an amortization swindle at Atlantic City  — more amazed that you wanted to take his picture than he is shy about his wide-ranging peccadilloes.

Give the kid a cigar, somebody!

¶ Matins: At the risk of playing with paradoxes, we submit that, buried in plain sight in the following extract from Jill Lepore’s Letter from Boston, “Tea and Sympathy,” there is an indictment of the largely liberal academic class — an indictment not from the right or from the left, but from the point of view of engaged humanism. (The New Yorker)

¶ Lauds: Toni Bentley has her hip replaced, and comes to terms with the arthritis that ended her City Ballet career when she was still a young woman. She also learns what you do with bones to keep them from going rancid. (NYRBlog)

¶ Prime: For some reason, the idea of self-financing the Securities and Exchange Commission — funding staff and operations with fines and fees would double its budget — has just moved Tyler Cowen to consider the idea. He sees some pros, but more cons. (Marginal Revolution) The Epicurean Dealmaker made the case for self-financing in March.

¶ Tierce: Fight or flight: a guy thing? Looks like it. Ingrid Wickelgren reports at Scientific American.

¶ Sext: In case you’ve been hoping that the story would just go away, David Carr wrote a thoughtful piece about it over the weekend: “Monetizing an iPhone Spectacle.” Quaere: is a news story a commodity? Perhaps it’s better to ask if a news story is actually involved in this case. (NYT)

¶ Nones: Todd Cowell and Joshua Kurlantzick agree that intercession by Thailand’s King Bhumibol would probably not quell the Red Shirts’ insurgency. Mr Cowell traces chilling similarities between Thailand today and Spain in 1936. Interestingly, it’s difficult to assess the one difference that he locates — is it a good thing or a bad thing?

¶ Vespers: What Jill Lepore calls presentism (above), Patrick Kurp calls temporal parochialism. (Anecdotal Evidence)

¶ Compline: There’s a first time for everything, and this one is sweet to read about: Emily Guerin takes her first train ride along the Northeast Corridor, from Boston’s South Station to Washington’s Union Station. It’s a strange kind of sightseeing, to be sure. (The Bygone Bureau)

If I could only findAlexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons, I’d shelve Tad Friend’s Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor alongside it. Both books are heady blends of  eccentric family history, upper-middle-class anxiety, and painfully conditional love. Here is Mr Friend’s grandmother, trying to play testamentary tug-of-war with her son.

“Don’t you want my money?” she finally asked, plaintively. Jess seemed to understand that expectations of inheritance ratchet impossibly high because Wasps tend to express love not as a flow of feeling but as a trickle of side tables — leading their children to look to recoup in dead money what they lost in live affection. As Muriel Rogers once told her son Dickie, “I give you money because I love you at that particular time.”

Also: TMI alerts. Alexander Waugh doesn’t talk about himself very much, but his family can’t have been altogether pleased to read some of his stories about his father and grandfather. As for Mr Friend, one’s happiness at his apparently blessed marriage to Amanda Hesser is taxed somewhat by a polite discomfort occasioned his zesty retailing of previous romances. If nothing else, there is the racket of smashing taboos. Nothing could be less WASPy than the author’s accounts of his interactions with Giovanna, Melanie and Christine. Is this progress, or recklessness?

Considering that Mr Friend’s family background must, by any standard measure, be called privileged, it treads water in an ocean of disappointment. Take John Herman Groesbeck Pierson, the author’s maternal grandfather, whose graduation from Yale, in 1927, occasioned a local news item,

“YALE RECORDS SHATTERED BY J H G PIERSON.” The article noted that he had one nine academic prizes, been president of Phi Beta Kappa, and composed the class poem, while also being a member of the cross-country, rifle, and soccer teams, of the student council, and of the Whiffenpoofs — “prizes and recognitions for almost every form of worthy activity that Yale men admire.” 

But how could a newspaper take cognizance of the award that wasn’t bestowed, by Yale’s too-famous-to-mention club? “My mother, and her mother before her, liked to say that Grandpa John’s later frustrations flowed from a single headwaters: his rejection by Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society that ‘tapped’ fifteen juniors each year.” Grandpa John, who lived into his nineties, was saddled with the albatross of having reached his apogee fully seventy years earlier. And yet his career was burnished with real achievement, at least when contrasted with that of the author’s paternal grandfather, a feckless stockbroker who depended on the kindness of moneyed wives.

One  thing that’s for certain: this engagingly written book’s title is brilliant. It refers, specifically, to an emotionally stunted reward system that Mr Friend’s parents devised for reinforcing good behavior in their three children. But it also captures the material paradox at the center of late-WASP life.

So the money Amanda and I have now is almost all money we have made. Still she suggests that my real issue with ambition and money is my residual belief that I don’t have to do anyting I don’t feel like doing in order to establish our family’s financial security, becauase there will eventually be some sort of inheritance to tide us along. This charge is one of the things we sometimes fight about, all the more bitterly because I worry that she might have a point.

Let’s hope that she doesn’t!

Whether or not I caught a bad cold from Will, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t give it to him — he was congested long before I was. All this week, I woke with a scratchy throat and a cargo of coughables. This morning, it wasn’t so bad, but that’s only because the truly awful stage of the cold was about to hit. I’ve gone through boxes of tissue today. Boxes.

Under the circumstances, Tad Friend’s Cheerful Money was a very good companion. I wish that I could tell you why the book took my mind off the miserable state of my sinuses, but I seem to have sneezed away most of my brains, and I’ll be dimming what’s left with NyQuil in an hour or so. Tomorrow, I hope, I’ll be alert enough to write the two (two!) Book Review reviews that are now due, as well Tuesday’s Daily Office. If I don’t, you’ll know why.

Boxes!

It’s a sign of my age that I can remember when madness and breakdown were widely thought to be dramatic and interesting. In those far more discreet times, when few people had any actual contact with deranged and disturbed persons, mental illness was indeed quite exotic, and we were free to dwell on the presumed spiciness of bizarre states of mind. Decades of de-institutionalization, SSRI prescriptions, and celebrity rehab have put an end to all that. There is no romance in madness and breakdown anymore. They are simply varieties of self-destructive behavior. They are also — in most cases, we believe — treatable. As a result, we are probably less patient with troubled minds than people have ever been.

Kieran and Michelle Mulroney, the writers and directors of Paper Man, are certainly aware of this trend. They have created a strong part for Lisa Kudrow that is founded on impatience. As Claire Dunn, Ms Kudrow banks this prevailing emotion skillfully enough to hold our sympathy, but it’s clear at the very start of the film that Claire, a top surgeon, has been down a very long and winding road with her husband, Richard. As the titles roll, the Dunns drive out the Long Island Expressway all the way to Montauk, where Richard plans to work on his second book in weekday seclusion. When Richard moves to kiss Claire goodbye, she pulls back with a wary question, to which Richard responds with what we know to be a lie. Claire’s life, however privileged, isn’t easy.

I can’t think of an actor who could have made the boy-man Richard less dislikable than Jeff Daniels. Mr Daniels’s outsized goofiness (brilliantly highlighted by Richard’s dependence on a nine year-old’s bicycle for transportation) deflects our judgment. Criticism is also pre-empted by Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds), an “imaginary friend,” who reminds Richard of his tendency to make foolish choices. I won’t go so far as to say Ryan Reynolds makes Paper Man worth seeing all by himself, but those foolish choices would be pretty tiresome without Captain Excellent’s acerbic, slightly campy commentary. Despite having been Richard’s friend since the second grade, Captain Excellent is powerless to prevent Richard’s frequent inappropriatenesses. It’s a pity that he appears only when Richard is alone, because he might have saved the almost unwatchable scene in which Richard hosts a kegger for teenaged louts. Did I mention that Captain Excellent is dressed up like Superman, in primary-colored tights, with a cape? Mr Reynolds is to be commended for the ease and grace with which he inhabits this ridiculous costume.

Richard’s link to the teenagers is Abby (Emma Stone), a wounded, good-hearted beauty whose boyfriend is, in her own words, “chickenshit.” After an odd introductory encounter, Richard helplessly follows Abby through the back alleys of the village. If you think that his denying that this is what he’s doing is trouble, wait till you hear him hire Abby as a babysitter: a very inappropriate stab at appropriateness. When Abby accepts the engagement, we can only guess at the extent of the inevitable disaster, but, perhaps because she is wounded — she lost a twin sister in a dreadful pact when she was eight years old — Abby’s response to discovering that there is no baby to be sat for is to shrug and say that her job will be so much the easier. If Paper Man is evidence in support of the proposition that a terrific cast can save a movie from itself — and it is — Ms Stone’s performance is the sine qua non. She brings Abby’s confused teenager sharply and endearingly to life. (It helps that, never having seen her before, we forget that an actress is involved.) What might be cloyingly quirky comes across instead as painfully honest.

Just like the good people who are sure that they can save a loved one from some newly-discovered addiction, we used to believe (back in the Sixties) that gestures of wild imprudence could at least occasionally lead to happiness; but now we know that throwing your house open to underage drinkers can lead only to tears. (I was rather surprised that the local constabulary didn’t show up, but that particular development, as it turned out, would have ruined a big scene for Ms Kudrow.) Telling young women that they’re beautiful when you’re standing too close to them because you’re drunk is rarely redeemable. And scenes of writer’s block, repeated like flash cards — did I mention Richard’s determination to write his book on a portable electric typewriter? — are never funny anymore. The Mulroneys’ mistake, in writing Paper Man, lies in assuming that the audience will see the movie from Richard’s point of view. They save the film by making us wish that we could see it from Abby’s point of view. But the only thing that distinguishes our response from Claire’s point of view is that we get to see Captain Excellent.

¶ “My wife won’t let me!” goes the punch-line to the old music-hall song. Conan O’Brien politely declines an invitation to the prom. (Letters of Note)

¶ Michael Tyznik’s much-better dollars (The Best Part)

¶ Neat anamorphic illusion, employing 400 candles. (reddit)

¶ LOLCANO. (Let There Be Blogs)

¶ Life goes to Fairfield County – in the days of the Editor’s wee-dom. (A Continuous Lean)

¶ Matins: “Social scientists do counterinsurgency” — an important overview by Nicholas Lemann. Effective measures are very important, of course; and General Petraeus, among others, reminds us that thinking big is rarely effective. Beyond trying to decide how to respond to terrorism, however, there lies the problem of sovereign integrity: of the four Middle-East nations that are currently on the boil, the only one strong enough to suppress terrorism is Iran, perhaps our most mortal enemy.

¶ Lauds: A word on that fringe theatre in London that has sent two productions to Broadway — showing in theatres on opposite sides of West 48th Street. David Babani and the (Menier) Chocolate Factory. (LA Times; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Since it’s Friday, we’re only too happy to let Michael Lewis itemize, with his trademark clarity and coherence, three game-changing effects of the SEC’s Goldman Sachs case. His peroration will be widely cited:

Indeed, the social effects of the SEC’s action will almost certainly be greater than the narrow legal ones. Just as there was a time when people could smoke on airplanes, or drive drunk without guilt, there was a time when a Wall Street bond trader could work with a short seller to create a bond to fail, trick and bribe the ratings companies into blessing the bond, then sell the bond to a slow-witted German without having to worry if anyone would ever know, or care, what he’d just done.

The part that we especially like, though, is Mr Lewis’s clear-headed appraisal of the ACA problem, which amounts to recognizing that there is an ACA problem, sticking to Goldman’s coattails like a bad smell. (Bloomberg; via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Two economists at Emory, Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon, have developed a thesis that social tolerance of homosexuality correlates to low rates of HIV infection. If this is true, then the social price of religious opposition to homosexuality increases sharply. (via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Sext: Two of our friends, Patricia Storms and George Snyder, have recently blogged about books in their lives. In Patricia’s case, this is a matter of creating an inviting library in her Bloor West Village home (and framing some nifty Penguin-cover postcards). George writes about the well-timed appearance in his life of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey, which came out in 1967.

¶ Nones: How Toomas Ilves, the president of Estonia, grounded like everyone else, drove home from Istanbul. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Ken Auletta’s essay about Amazon, the big six book publishers, and the “agency model” — occasioned by the arrival of the iPad — would seem to quell any fears that the giants of Siliconia are ever going to do (or do without) the work of conventional publishers. (The New Yorker)

¶ Compline: Garrison Keillor argues that, notwithstanding the claims of sociobiology, young men really ought to text less and talk more. We can only add that the locked-up demeanor of many intelligent young people makes us worry that we’re living at the wrong end of the Matrix. (IHT)

When I came back into the apartment this afternoon, after having put Megan and Will in a taxi bound for their house, the place seemed abandoned, bereft. I’m not sure why this hasn’t happened before, on any of the other days that Megan has worked-from-home-from-my-house, but I’m not complaining, because it was really pretty painful for a minute or two.

My hunch is that Will has ceased to be an amazing, inexplicable miracle, and become a terrific little boy, and my grandson for real. But that can’t be all that there is to it, because I missed Megan as well. I suspect that if I have ever missed Megan in the past, I have surpressed the feeling, because one ought to want one’s child to go out into the world. Megan has certainly gone out into the world. But now she has come home — to her home. Her home is not in this apartment, certainly. But she carries a glow from her home wherever she goes, and it was that warmth that I missed when she took Will back down to the Lower East Side, and I was suddenly all by myself.

¶ Matins: Sabrina Tavernise writes about the microcosm of Pakistani confusion that threatens the University of the Punjab. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: Ann Midgette’s good time at a recent triple bill of Terrence McNally plays about opera ended, as good times so often do, with a hangover. (Washington Post; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: The Epicurean Dealmaker surfaces to pronounce rough justice on Goldman Sachs. As for the SEC lawsuit, “the criteria which ultimately determine the nature of Goldman’s alleged offense will be legalistic ones, akin to judging exactly how many mortgage CDO investors’ brains can be fitted onto the head of a pin.” But the firm’s reputation is toast.

¶ Tierce: Carl Zimmer brings us up to date on the zombification of cockroaches by Ampulex compressa. Come on, the zombification of cockroaches has to be a good thing, right? (Discover/The Loom; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Sext: “That was no critic; that was my wife!” Orlando Figes, a leading British academic specializing in Russian studies, announced that the author of some rather nasty online reviews of books by other specialists in Russian studies was none other than his wife, senior law lecturer (Cambridge) Stephanie Palmer. Professor Figes says that he “only just found out.” (Guardian; via Brainiac)

¶ Nones: Russia’s need to rent a Black Sea naval station from Ukraine is the result of bad imperialist map-making (the Soviet empire’s, in this case), but all is sweetness and light at the moment, because the new president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, is a good friend to Moscow. But wait — the Ukrainian opposition challenges his authority to make nice. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: John Self unearths yet another interesting-sounding novel that we had never heard of, Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959). (Asylum)

¶ Compline: New novelist Deanna Fei writes a drolly bittersweet memoir about how she found her book when she stopped worrying about herself — while discovering that “Chinese American” is a lot more alien in China than it is in the United States. They knew that she wasn’t Chinese (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding), and they didn’t believe that she was American. (The Millions)

Even though I’ve got a bit of sore throat, and could really use a day at home (writing writing writing), I got myself to the Morgan shortly before eleven this morning for an outing with Quatorze and Lady D. (Lady D, although new to these pages, has been resident in New York City for nearly fifty years, a stylish British secretary right up to her retirement from an eminent foundation — and still stylish.) It was all my idea: we would look at the two world-class illuminated manuscripts that (a) happen to be domiciled in our fair city and (b) have been unstitched for one reason or another, making it possible to mount all the interesting pages at once.

Of course, no one but specialists knew about the more recent of these manuscripts, the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, until the day before yesterday. The prayerbook, broken up into two books by an unscrupulous dealer in the 1850s, had only recently fallen completely into the Morgan’s possession. The sheer novelty of the book’s presence in New York harmonizes deliciously with the novelty of the book itself, which is not your father’s book of hours. Indeed, it seems designed to suit a post-modern agenda. Scurrilously humorous marginalia are a hallmark of medieval devotional manuscripts, but the trompe l’oeil jewelry (a rosary, a necklace, some gold coins) and the outsize naturalism (moths, shellfish, pretzels) completely up-end any idea that you might have of Fifteenth-Century miniatures, while the scenes in the margins often upstage the vignettes at the center of the page. The jokey quality of this book of hours is best characterized by the utterly immodest image of the donor/owner herself in the margin of a vignette featuring Mary and the infant Jesus. Mother and Child appear in timeless attire, but Catherine has the air of an ambitious hostess from Massapequa who has just tottered off the LIRR with only seconds to spare for her lipstick. It is not surprising to learn that Catherine spent the better part of her marriage waging war on her husband. Military war, that is, with battles and dead soldiers.

In other words, the Hours of Catherine of Cleves really does belong here in New York.

The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry, also belongs in New York, because it is best known for not being the Très Riches Heures of Jean d’&c, which belongs to the collection at Chantilly, outside Paris. Fantastic as the TRH is, I’m devoted to the Belles Heures, and have been ever since I first saw them, many long years ago (more than forty), at the Cloisters. I can say, I think, that this creation of the Limbourg brothers (natives of Nijmegen, it seems) is the first work of art that I loved on my own and just for itself. Of course, it is not just a work of art. It has a literary/liturgical quality that, as regular readers of this site will not have to be told, made a profound impression on my teen-aged mind; the “book of hours” is more than ever a construct with which I live in deep communion from day to day. I may not be a believer in the higher object of the book of hour’s devotions, but its varied regularity is sacred to me. And it is so taken for granted that I can see how beautiful the art of it all is.

The borders of the vignettes (illuminations) of the Belles Heures are relentlessly uniform, with only the smallest variations placed among the sprays of ivy that delicately frame quire after quire. The vignettes themselves, however, are magnificent final expressions of medieval narration, where space is temporal as well as physical. (See the illumination of Gethsemane, for example.) In contrast to the vignettes in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, which are earnest but rudimentary early-Renaissance scenes, the illumination of the Belles Heures is accented by Gothic arabesque. There are crowd scenes that might remind you of Giotto, until you remember that Giotto called a halt to that sort of medieval shimmying and swaying. The compositions of the Belles Heures are Giotto, if at all, before Giotto.

The parade of spot-on images exhausts any idea of comprehensiveness. The Office of the Blessed Virgin begins with the Visitation of St Elizabeth and ends with the Flight into Egypt. The Office of the Passion begins with the Agony in the Garden and ends with the soldiers asleep over an empty sarcophagus. Catherine of Alexandria is the subject of a virtual novella, and the stories of St Jerome, of Saints Paul and Anthony (with their red Red Sea), and of St Bruno and the Chartreuse all inspire mini-cycles of illumination. The suffrages — miscellaneous prayers to the saints — bring stirring dramatizations of the doings of Saints George, Nicholas, Ursula and Charlemagne (!), and of course St Michael the Archangel. Amidst all this colorful glitter, the somber grisaille of Passion’s Nones is almost lowering.

In between our museum visits, we had a jolly lunch at Demarchelier. Lady D told us about the appalling organist at her parish church, which is down in Turtle Bay. The woman is not so bad at the keyboard, but she can’t carry a tune to save her life. There came a moment when Lady D could stand now more, and she stopped her ears with her fingers. This was, unsurprisingly. noticed. After the service, the harpy asked Lady D if “she had a problem”! Indeed she did, our Lady D, and “since, after all, she did ask me, I told her what was wrong.” Whereupon the organist demanded Lady D’s name (she didn’t get it). Imagine such goings-on! At dinner, Lady D’s story was repletely corroborated by Kathleen, who, for reasons of her own, has sat through many services at the selfsame church. One thing’s for sure: neither Catherine of Cleves nor Jean de France would have put up with such incompetence. But that’s what the Church has come to, no? 

 

¶ Matins: What it means to be Jewish — to Tony Judt, a decidedly non-observant non-supporter of Israel. (NYRB)

¶ Lauds: From the Arts Journal, two pleasant bits of news about painters and paintings. First, the view from Edward Hopper’s Cape Cod studio will be preserved, undefiled by a McMansion. Second, Picasso’s The Actor is back on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The canvas was accidentally torn in January, and conservator Lucy Belloli talked to the Times about her remedial work.

¶ Prime: Although very complicated, Felix Salmon’s comparison of the Goldman Sachs Abacus deal (which prompted the SEC to launch criminal proceedings) and the Magnetar Auriga deal is well worth trying to grasp. It is very likely that a new — or newly clear — understanding of market fraud is going to emerge from the Goldman Sachs case.

¶ Tierce: It turns out that the ban on flying through the residue of volcanic activity is blunt and quite unscientific. (NewScientist)

¶ Sext: The Awl celebrates its first birthday!

¶ Nones: Arguing that Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg comes off as less posh than Conservative David Cameron, Sholto Byrnes makes disparaging remarks about Euro headquarters in Brussels (“deeply dull-sounding“). At A Fistful of Euros, Jamie Kenny rebuts. (“It was more fun that that.“)

¶ Vespers: Marion Maneker is quite unimpressed by the clout that independent booksellers claim to have brought to bear in advancing Paul Harding’s Tinkers to Pulitzer Prize-winning status. (Slate/Big Money; via The Millions)

¶ Compline: Listening to the radio in France, says Richard Goldstein, is a lot more interesting than it is here. To be sure, it wasn’t always. (NAJP ARTicles; via   Marginal Revolution)

Megan captured this beautiful souvenir of Ryan and Will at our house on Sunday. I was in the room at the time, but I was so busy talking about something or other that I didn’t register a memory of Megan’s snap. I am always talking, and will probably be boring folks stiff at my own funeral. “Close the lid already!” Happily, Will, like Kathleen, can sleep right through it.

I ask you: is there any sense memory that feels more sacred than the recollection of a child’s head upon your shoulder, brushing up now and then upon your ear? It’s no wonder that we’re tempted to think of them as angels (especially when they’re asleep): how else to account for their sudden appearance as utterly real and distinctive beings?

Kathleen and I were talking about the misery that an old friend has endured, upon discovering that her lover was unfaithful. The worst part of such betrayal is that you find yourself obliged to hold up every memory — especially the happy ones — to gimlet-eyed review. The past that you thought of as your own has been hijacked, discredited, evaporated.

The arrival of Will has had a complementary, but entirely positive effect. I simply can’t remember the reality of life without him. He’s not four months old, but he has entirely denatured the reality of my first sixty-one years. I believe that it is always that way with love.  

 

¶ Matins: Even though she was flying from Tokyo to New York, Melissa Lafsky encountered fallout from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption “every stretch of the trip.” (The Infrastructurist)

¶ Lauds: Sean Shepherd’s entry at NewMusicBox does not persuade us that the young composer will have a second career as a man of letters, but we applaud his spirited defense of the Philharmonic program that will launch one of his works. Not to mention this vivid snapshot of Gotham’s lyric fertility. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Our official position, as brokers of information, is to counsel all readers to familiarize themselves with the facts (such as they are) of the SEC suit against Goldman Sachs. It is a prototype of kind of “business as usual” case that can lead to the redefinition and restructuring of rights and responsibilities in a market that has been looking at fumes where the mirror ought to be. Felix Salmon has posted mightily on the topic, but we’ll follow his lead to a sharp entry by Brad De Long on the materiality of John Paulson’s role in the CDO’s formation.

¶ Tierce: The Climate Desk launches at Wired Science with a heartening essay on global warming by Clive Thompson. What’s to hearten? The simple fact that reality-based businesses are going to put doubts about the phenomenon to an end, as they struggle to adapt.

¶ Sext: Manisha Verma takes the trouble to analyze what anyone with a brain must suspect: “Internet advertising” is as insubstantial as the emperor’s new clothes. (3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Nones: Now that you’ve finally bothered to find out where Bishkek is, and where Kyrgyzstan stands in relation to the other Central Asia stans (there will be a quiz!), Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar puts the background to the ten day-old coup into ready perspective. If only they could put this thing in a box and call it “The Great Game”! (Asia Times)

¶ Vespers: A portrait of the wily Andrew Wylie, the literary agent widely credited with sulphurously Satanic powers, despite his low-key demeanor.

¶ Compline: Dave Bry apologizes yet again, this time to a former French teacher. Alas, Mr McCormack is unlikely to be altogether appeased. We have highlighted the offending passage in black. (The Awl)

“D’ou venez vous…”

“Je suis Nicoise,” you said, with a quizzical expression. “Je suis originaire de Nice.”

Immediately it was clear: the iPad is everything that I expected it to be. I worry about eating these words down the road not because I fear that the device will surprise me with disappointments — I’m oddly but definitely sure that it won’t — but because I know that I can’t yet grasp the unintended uses to which I’ll subject it. This is where dotage plays to my advantage. Happy as a clam that the iPad does precisely what I want it to do, I’m too old and lazy to ask it to do anything else. But we shall see.

Rather than extol the merits of the iPad, however, I’d like to tell you how I came to possess one this very day. And yet I’d also like to get to bed reasonably soon. Pesky!

As  noted earlier, we celebrated Kathleen’s birthday yesterday, and I was pretty useless this morning. This morning and well into the afternoon, I was an Ibsen monologue. Maybe Strindberg. Needing a boost, I checked out the tracking report on the iPad that I ordered last week. My God! It was already delivered, downstairs, to the package room. Better than sex!

What to say? Jason Mei, my tech god, and I have worked out a workable routine. When I need something — be it a flash drive or a new computer — Jason sends me a link to a vendor site. I buy what I’m supposed to buy, and, when it arrives, I let Jason know that it’s here, and he comes to hook it up. As soon as I brought up the box from the package room, this afternoon, I dashed off a note to Jason, telling him that the iPad had arrived a day early. No problem! He’d be up after five.

The horrible embarrassing part that we will pass over as quickly as possible has me going da-DA over what turned out to be the iPad dock. No, I didn’t open the shipping box until Jason got here. (I never do.) Yes, I’d bought a dock as well as the iPad, a keyboard dock. I’d agonized. The plain-vanilla dock cost $30, the keyboard dock fifty dollars more. I’d plumped. And now I had it: my wonderful iPad keyboard dock. Useless, utterly useless, without an actual iPad. Which according to the tracking info, hadn’t even been fabricated.

If you can imagine how stupid I felt, having asked Jason to come uptown to set up my idiot-friendly reading device, please put it into a 500-word essay. $50 to the most excruciated entry. Obligatory first sentence: “So there I was, with my fabulous iPad dock…” Feel free to work in the sequel: calls were made; Internet sites were scoped. The upshot was one of the more improbable shopping expeditions in Gotham lore, as Jason and I pegged up 86th Street to Best Buy, where, at a rather sordid little back-room counter, we found that only 32 and 64-GB iPads were for sale. Jason had assured me that 16-GB would be more than enough, so I felt like chump buying the 32. Better than 64, though. You do what you can.

But you never know. Maybe, this time next year, I’ll be in App Store rehab.

We celebrated Kathleen’s birthday, yesterday (today’s her birthday), with a small brunch. It was very simple — blanquette de veau, with rice and a simplified Caesar salad; two birthday cakes; and three very retro hors d’oeuvres that weren’t really hors d’oeuvres. Wine and champagne — quite a lot of champagne, delivered more or less on the spot, cold, by the liquor store, when I realized that I’d overlooked an important detail: toasting Kathleen upon the news of an honorable and deeply-appreciated appointment. Will, who was on hand, seemed to recognize Kathleen, but you can’t always be sure, because he is a very sociable child.

Between the setting up and the cleaning up, the serving and the toasting, the excitement and the champage, the party exhausted my resources, and all I could think of when I woke up this morning was that there’s probably going to be a doorman strike on Wednesday. If I could, I would leave town for the duration — that’s what I did twenty years ago, during the last one. A strike will entail a week or so of uneasy fluctuation between inconvenience and hardship, and I was in no mood for inconvenience. Not with that headache.

Nor was I in the right frame of mind for reading about the SEC suit against Goldman Sachs. The complaint alleges genuinely stinky behavior, and the firm’s successive statements highlight its moral vacuity. Wall Street seems more than ever to be populated exclusively by sociopaths and morons. Going to the dogs &c.

But enough of this gloominess. Kathleen decided to celebrate her birthday by taking the day off. And my iPad has just arrived. That’s a good as two birthdays.

¶ Matins: Regarding the future of children’s books (about which Boomers et seq tend to be a lot more sentimental than actual kiddies): Not to worry! Jason Kottke assures us that children’s books in print will be the very last to go, notwithstanding the blandishments of the iPad Alice. He tells us so in his response to Kevin Rose’s despairing tweet.

¶ Lauds: Here’s the finish of a (Murdoch Era!) Wall Street Journal story that Renée Fleming hopes that you won’t finish. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: On our first visit to EConned, we discover the Rahm Emanuel parallax. We forget what a parallax is, and Ms Smith’s entry reminds us of rubbing green twigs together in the rain, but it’s Friday, and we still feel that the Magnetar story needs to be Out There.

¶ Tierce:  Dweck’s Paradox: If you praise your child by telling her that she is smart, and she is smart, she will probably conclude that you are an idiot for saying such a thing. In New York Magazine, Po Bronson grasps how hard it is not to use the S word.

¶ Sext:  Sam Sifton has so much fun reviewing a fashionable foodery in the heart of Madison Avenue’s tenderloin that we must serve up a generous helping of extracts. The first three paragraphs are setup; go straight to the “crisp artichokes” for the truffles. But be aware that the Upper East Side is studded with places like Nello. For a reason! (NYT)

¶ Nones: As part of our Irresponsible Spring Break Friday reportage, we turn to Al Jazeera for news that some/many Poles are outraged that would-be flight director Lech Kaczynski will be buried in Krakow’s Wawel Castle. We did check the Times first, but it didn’t have a story on this vital follow-up. (via The Morning News)

¶ Vespers: It was inconceivable that Paul Harding’s Tinkers would win the Pulitzer Prize without Cinderella’s stepsisters trying to find out how it happened. Turns out to have been good, old-fashioned gatekeeping. (Globe; via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: The elusive VX Sterne hated the vacations that his parents put him through as a child, and he vowed to do things differently when he grew up. As indeed he has, given that his family never want for showers or other creature comforts. Nevertheless, our favorite anonymous executive is characteristically haunted.

Dianne Reeves has one of the biggest and best voices going, but it’s her authority over this powerful instrument that gives an evening spent in her company the musical equivalent of a Biblical directive. Thou shalt not flat! Open up thine upper registers and thine lower registers. Honor thy scat. (Even if you’ve brought it all home from Rio.)

We heard Ms Reeves at Grace Rainey Rogers this evening, a venue that Ms Reeves pointed out as being surrounded by the “Egyptian Situation.” We had just received some stupendous news — of vaguely Egyptian proportions — and the match between the good news and Dianne Reeeves’s recital could not have been bettered.

For the rest, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow. (We were burping.) All we can say right now is that Dianne Reeves reinvents every cubic centermeter of her show in the process of performing it. Somebody who knew her work only from recordings would never have understood this evening.

¶ Matins: The accidental death of a cyclist in Washington who was knocked down by a military vehicle attached to the nuclear security summit — has raised questions about the appropriateness of such vehicles on city streets. Matthew Yglesias is even more offended by the military’s immediate response. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Lauds:  Leipzig’s Bach Museum, far from being a dusty attic of dubious knickknacks, centers its collection upon information, not objects. (WSJ; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: The great promise of microfinance has attracted for-profit investors, saddling micro-borrowers with gigantic interest rates. In a Times report, Elizabeth Malkin writes of a very interesting wrinkle called “forced savings.

¶ Tierce: Tired of accumulating a lot of stuff that you lose interest in almost immediately after you’ve acquired it? A tip from the chipper folks at PsyBlog suggests that you treat your purchases as experiences rather than as things: Think experientially.

¶ Sext: A journalism student asked Felix Salmon some questions about business blogging. Naturally, the student wanted to know how it is that some business bloggers — Mr Salmon among them — acquire such a broad readership despite the lack of journalist credentials. The answer makes us wonder if journalism schools are still a good idea.

¶ Nones: Thai Foreign Minister Kasit Piromya, speaking at Johns Hopkins University, makes some remarks that might run afoul of his country’s severelèse-majesté laws. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Complaining about the extremely rudimentary classifications in place at the iBook Store prompts Laura Miller to make some interesting observations on the importance of codicological metadata — information about books that helps us to find them. (Salon; via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: Crowdsourcing the National Archives: that’s what AOTUS David Ferriero has in mind. But first, let’s crowdsource his idea. (Chron Higher Ed; via The Morning News)