The Daily Blague

Although I do not yet own a Red Nano, I have already begun compiling an iTunes playlist entitled “Red Nano,” and when it gets big enough to fill 8 Gs, I’ll see to it that the name makes sense. The “Red Nano” playlist is comprised almost exclusively of instrumental works from the Baroque. I’m building it up by effectively dumping every Baroque-period CD that I own — and I own quite a few — into my new computer. In idle moments, I move things around, so that, when I’m done, I won’t be listening to two concerti grossi by Heinichen (a contemporary of Bach and Handel) in a row. Not to mention the dozens of Scarlatti sonatas that Scott Ross selected for his three-disc anthology, drawn from a colossal recording of all of them.

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This very beautiful movie, full of small brilliant moments, is so beautifully cast that you will be far too lost in the characters to resent any “messaging.”

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¶ Matins: Jason Kottke is attending The New Yorker Conference — not to be confused with the New Yorker Festival, which takes place in the Fall. The Conference is a pricey event — $1200 last year (meals included); $2000 this. Kathleen has encouraged me to go, but I’ve worried that I’d feel like a rich kid whom the big boys were tolerating even as they milked me. On the other hand, getting in on Davos-for-brainiacs while it’s still cheapish (and requires no serious travel) appeals mightily. So I am following Mr Kottke’s every word.

¶ Nones: I’ve seen a number of movies in the past five years that have made me ashamed to be an American, but The Visitor is the first film to make me ashamed of being a lawyer.

¶ Compline: What I really wanted to do late this afternoon was to start in on the weekend tidying. I’m on a roll in that department: every time the apartment is swept by my attentions, things are not only better-organized, but there are fewer of them. Instead, though, I dutifully digested Thomas Powers’s review of recent books about our Iraqi misadventure, for this week’s Friday Front.

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¶ The Ninth Day of the Decameron begins with a Laurel-and-Hardy prototype, as two Florentines, unknown to one another, are charged with a very unpleasant task by the lady from Pistoia whom they both admire but who wishes to be rid of their “importunities.” If the story is not Boccaccio’s most successful, that is because its blend of comedy and Gothic horror no longer emulsifies. It’s not that we can’t have fun with dead bodies anymore — just think what Boccaccio might have done with the recent tale of Virgilio Cintron. But, perhaps because romantic comedy has come to be our foremost celebration of life, we find the odor of death unpleasantly incongruous. By our lights, the lady from Pistoia’s plot is in very poor taste.

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¶ Matins: Lately, I’ve been so busy that I haven’t known where to begin. The answer, I now discover, is nowhere. Do not begin. Take the brilliant time-saving tips of billionaires from all walks of filthitude in Gordon Bennett’s droll report at W. Who would know better than a billionaire what a colossal waste of time merely living can be!

¶ Lauds: Instead of going to bed like a good boy, I get down to working on the Words branch of Portico, something that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time,  by inventing a new page: Workshop.

¶ Tierce: At the moment, it looks as though next week’s primary in West Virginia is actually going to mean something, possibly.

¶ Sext: Kathleen and I have been invited to a fiftieth-birthday party this evening, and we’ve decided that a nice bottle of port is what we’d like to give. So, I’m off to Sherry-Lehmann in a little while.

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¶ In the Decameron, we come to the end of the Eighth Day, with the tale of Salabaetto, the gulled Florentine, and Jancofiore, the scheming Sicilian. Dioneo sexes up his tale with some very gratuitous lewdness involving slave girls and bathtubs, but in the end the wicked lady rues her misjudgment: Chi ha a far con tosco, non vuole esser losco, which McWilliam renders nicely as “Honesty’s the better line, when dealing with a Florentine.” (Note: tell Édouard about the Tuscan’s name.)

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¶ Matins: Five movies in one afternoon and evening — I tacked on Rushmore at the end. Even though I still haven’t got to the bottom of the NuLytely literbox, I’m ready for bed, and no longer hungry. The munchies passed at around nine o’clock, long before I started in on the Sauvignon Blanc.

¶ Nones: Well, that’s over — and LXIV and I celebrated with a lovely lunch afterward. Just when I was getting good at remembering Versed, they changed the anaesthetic to something called Propothal, about which I can find nothing very official on the Internet.

¶ Compline: Somehow, I managed to squeak through on the Book Review front. This week’s look, at Portico.

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¶ Matins: On Saturday night, we heard the third and final concert given by Itzhak Perlman with Members of the Perlman Music Program. It was even superer than the first two.

¶ Nones: The first glass of Pineapple NuLyteley, she go down so smooth. Very faint aftertaste,  not unpleasant at all. As for the D-Minus-One Film Festival: one down, three to go.

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Just for the hell of it, I’m going with pineapple. Update: Film Festival Details below.

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It’s a beautiful face. The moustache, snaking from nostril to lip, looks more like makeup than something a grown man would wear, and it completes Don Ameche’s American boyishness — so vital in a movie about decadent Europeans on the eve of World War II.

Tibor Czerny — that’s Ameche’s name in this movie — has just learned that the girl he didn’t know he was crazy about until just this minute (Claudette Colbert’s Eve Peabody) is traveling around Paris using his name — prefacing it with “Baroness.” As an eighth cousin of the real Baron Czerny of Budapest, this taxidriver that Ameche’s pretending to be is “more a baron than you are a baroness,” as he will tell Eve when he tries to rain on her parade at the [John Barrymores’] weekend place at Versailles — his very next scene.

And, hey: what a smile!

Crocodiles on the Nile are green!

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¶ Matins: A week to look forward to! Close encounters with fiber-optics! The worst will be over tomorrow, when I drain the dregs of a certain four-litre container.

¶ Tierce: “I’m With Stupid”? A Times/CBS poll brings forth my inner Dick Cheney:

While just 24 percent of voters said they thought the Wright issue would matter a lot or some to them in the fall, 44 percent said it would matter a lot or some to “most people you know.” And while just 9 percent of Democrats said the issue would matter a lot to them should Mr. Obama be their party’s nominee, even that small a slice of the electorate could be a problem for Mr. Obama if he won the nomination and the contest against Mr. McCain was close.

“So what?”

¶ Vespers: Working my way through the book pile, I read something that has been sitting around for about year, Joshua Henkin’s Matrimony.

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¶ Decameron VIII, ix shrieks more loudly for operatic treatment than any story so far. How can there not be a comic masterpiece called Bruno e Buffamalco? Then I remember the finale of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, which sanitizes and perfumes Dr Simone’s “induction” by the “contessa di Civillari.” Still, I can hear the echoes of a rousing final chorus:

Così adunque, come udito avete, senno s’insegna a chi tanto non s’apparò a Bologna.

So now you have heard how wisdom is imparted to anyone who has not acquired much of it in Bologna.

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This lovely Sunday afternoon finds me, I’m sad to say, neither comfortable nor stretched, but stressed. Which is to say, overstretched. I couldn’t get out of bed this morning. Kathleen insists that I must have been tired, because I slept through most of the morning. But when I was awake, I was anxious. I’d pull up the blankets and hide.

Hide from what? 

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Looking toward Midtown on a slightly hazy afternoon.

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It is inconceivable to me that a better movie will appear in 2008.

As a rule, I am quite happy to see movies by myself and to think about them afterward in solitude. Today’s moviegoing was an exception. It was only after I left the theatre that its impact seriously flooded my eyes, and I wished to hell that I could talk about it with someone.

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¶ Matins: This may be the best dog video ever, probably because it captures, to perfection, the pleasure of being out alone with one’s pooch.

¶ Tierce: What’s this? A war-protest strike by Pacific dockworkers? Yesterday? You tell me why William Yardley’s story isn’t on the front page of the Times — instead of not one but two “stories” about the Obama-Wright rift.

¶ Compline: Although I was tolerably entertained by James Wolcott’s overview of the primary scene in the current Vanity Fair, I had to wonder if it merits all the commentary.

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¶ Matins: Today, I ascend to N! Will I regret it?

¶ Tierce: … And they don’t advertise. That’s part of how Steve & Barry’s, retailers with a price cap of $10 $8.98 per item, has become a billion-dollar company. What a chilling prospect for the Mad Men.

¶ Sext: Migs test-drives the latest in Philippine highways, and takes notes.

¶ Vespers: Where’s my hankie? Exxon Mobil’s first-quarter profits are so disappointing! (Other, more interesting news below the jump.)

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¶ In the Decameron, a short story between two much longer tales: the improbable, wife-swapping account of Zeppa’s “revenge,” upon discovering that his best friend, Spinelloccio, has been dandling his wife.

Zeppa having consented to this proposal, all four breakfasted together in perfect amity. And from that day forth, each of the ladies had two husbands, and each of the men had two wives, nor did this arrangement give rise to any argument or dispute between them.

What a totally adolescent fantasy.

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¶ Matins: On her train ride to Albany, Kathleen missed Sing-Sing. I told her to keep her eyes peeled, but the windows were so dirty that she was glad that she hadn’t brought a camera.

¶ Tierce: RACE STILL A PROBLEM IN US, according to American Presidential Campaign. Barack Obama dissociates himself from Rev Jeremiah Wright. (The New York Times, Front Page.)

¶ Vespers: Alone for dinner tonight, I’m tempted to make a peanut butter and bacon sandwich. Here’s a recipe, in case anyone should need such a thing.

¶ Compline: If I’ve got an excuse for not writing (much less posting) this week’s Book Review review until the tail end of Wednesday, I don’t know what it is.

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