The Daily Blague

Morning

¶ Crash: I could take a picture, but it wouldn’t be very informative: the crane rising among the buildings to the north is no longer there. According to images seen on NY1, the crane sheared away the walls of the apartment building to the south. Gothamist is already on the case.

Afternoon

¶ Jittery: All the commotion, though several blocks away, has been unsettling. I feel for the residents of the evacuated buildings — not your ordinary inconvenience. 

Night

¶ Children: What the latest updates on the crane collapse don’t show — and what I can’t photograph effectively; sorry! — is the crane-to-remove-the-crane that’s parked in the beau milieu of First Avenue, complete with son et lumière lighting. The son is provided by the helicopters that continue to hover overhead.

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Morning 

¶ Che bella giornata!: Another fine day. Good weather really gets better with age.

¶ Gérance dissausive: If you can’t read French, tant pis pour vous. JR’s crime analysis of the massacre of his sister’s chickens by a fox (or some other prédateur forestier),* would make a sort of sense in English, but the loss of  je ne sais quoi would be fatal.

Except that I know perfectly well what the quoi is: the French willingness to call a spatula a spatula. Just because a spatula is more or less a spade is no reason to be imprecise.

¶ Wings: When I grow up, I want to write just like Gail Collins.

Noon

¶ Art: My neighbor, Stash, went to an art show in the quartier. On the basis of his photos, better him than me is all I can say.

Night

¶ Cinderella: Far and away the most exciting object on exhibit at the Cooper-Hewitt’s “Rococo” Show is Jeroen Verhoeven’s Cinderella Table.

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As I glance over the last ten stories in the Decameron, I’m tempted to cover them in five days: the first four in one, then the next three, and a day for each of the last stories, which are on the long side. Within the end so near at hand, I want to run for it. And yet… I shall miss this daily companion. We shall see.

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Morning

¶ Cool: After a muggy, summery afternoon yesterday, rains cooled things off a  bit, but it’s almost chilly this morning. Which is just fine.

¶ Have It Your Way: A bit of chuckleheaded reporting in today’s Times, about Democratic Party shortfalls in the Convention account: Leslie Wayne’s “Democrats Miss Marks to Finance Convention.”

Noon

¶ Please, Mr Postman: Reading “the personals” for fun is something I stopped doing a while ago. In an idle moment this afternoon, however, I noticed that some advertisers are listing e-mail addresses. This can’t be wise.

Night

¶ Papaflessa: That’s the name of the street in New Erythrea (Ν Ερυθραια) that my old foreign-exchange student friend lives on — or lived on the last time anybody I know had an address for her.

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¶ In the Decameron, IX, ix, the taming of the shrew — an unseasonable tale. Queen-for-a-day Emilia prefaces her story with an exhortation to women to submit to their husbands that is but a prose version of the lyrics to the final song in Kiss Me, Kate. This philosophy would be significant if the women who spouted it were not speaking words written by men.

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¶ This week’s Book Review review…

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Morning

¶ Regime Change: For the rest of the week, at least, I’ll be feeling my way with the Summer Hours version of the Daily Office entry. Two changes already in place: the entry will be posted at 10:30 every morning (instead of at 1:30 AM), and the first sub-entry of the day will not include a link.

Noon

¶ Orthodoxy or Death. How about an opera set on Mount Athos? Chorus of monks; fleet of St Ursula’s virgins, bound for sex slavery rather than martyrdom, foundering upon the rocky coast; rainbow bridge at the end leading to the newly-built Convent of Mount Pathos. Harry de Quetteville reports.

Night

¶ Information Age: Robert Darnton, in The New York Review of Books, makes the plausible argument that the Internet has not really changed anything on the “information” front. There has always been too much of it, and it has never been as reliable as we’d like it to be.

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¶ In the Decameron, IX, viii, another anecdote that, more than most of Boccaccio’s occasional reports of everyday retaliation, smacks of “you had to be there.” Duped by the promise of a delicious meal, Ciacco the glutton avenges himself by setting up Biondello for a beating at the hands of an ill-tempered wine merchant, Messer Filippo. The anecdote hangs on an inappropriately familiar use of slang. Oddly, given the comprehensiveness of his notes overall, McWilliam nods here, and I had to turn to the notes in the Italian text for a little enlightenment. Like I knew what I was doing.

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Morning

¶ White. Here in the United States, it is now Summer. There’s nothing official about it, and it’s certainly not astronomically correct. But we Nice Folk have entered the time of White Shoes, and, in terms of blogging, that means Less is Easier.

¶ Lavish. The longer our misadventure in Iraq goes on, the greater the alignment between troops and opponents of the war. So far, it’s a lopsided alignment, to be sure, with opponents doing all the aligning.

Noon

¶ Long Weekend: The long Memorial Day weekend comes to an end, and we’ve had such a nice one, enjoying the fine weather out on the balcony, that Kathleen was surprised by an old nagging worry: all too soon, she would have to pack up and take the ferry back to the city. That’s how far away she felt — even though she was very much in the city. At home, in fact.

¶ Job Opp’ty: Looking for a career with a future? How about all those foreclosed houses, abandoned and falling into ruin? Plenty more where they came from! “Business Is Booming for Contractors of Foreclosed Homes.”

Night

¶ Indian Melon Salad: The official dish of summer in our house, an intensely American chicken salad, juxtaposing the flavors of table grapes, soy sauce, and curry.

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The most glorious reunion in film history — and a hell of a lot of fun, too!

Kathleen took yesterday off (no one has ever needed a four-day weekend more), and asked me to take her to the new blockbuster as my Friday movie. I didn’t even think of saying ‘no.’ We were warned by the ticket-seller that there were two groups of schoolkids in the theatre, but that sounded more like a draw than a detraction, and indeed they made the movie-going experience just about perfect. The low cricket of chitchat that accompanied the expository passages dropped to dead silence whenever the movie got quiet (ie menacing), while the more alarming narrative developments were met with giddy shrieks and squeals.

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¶ Matins: This week’s Friday Front is brevity itself. The article by George Packer to which it links has enough intelligence for two.

¶ Tierce: David Brooks gives kottke.org a nice nod in today’s Op-Ed piece, “The Alpha Geeks.”

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¶ Matins: Just my luck. Coming across an unattributed line of Latin in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherworld, I google it and discover that, not to my surprise, it comes from Virgil’s Georgics:

O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint,
agricolas.
It’s a typical bit of aristocratic sentimentality: how happy the peasants would be if they only knew how lucky they are to be peasants. Yes, well. It took a moment to track down the source, though, because the first return at Google took me to a discussion of Tacitus’s Dialogue on Oratory. It was only by checking out the next couple of links that I discovered Amerloque: A Long-Term American Expatriate Resident in France Shares His Views.

¶ Sext: I tip my hat to Guy Trebay, who says a number of things that I’ve been thinking about the Thom Browne look.

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The pallor of the so-called hours of darkness was remarkable. Directly to the north of the hotel, a succession of cross streets glowed as if each held a dawn. The tail-lights, the coarse blaze of deserted office buildings, the lit storefronts, the orange fuzz of the street lanterns: all this garbage of light had been refined into a radiant atmosphere that rested in a low silver heap over Midtown and introduced to my mind the the thought that the final twilight was upon New York.

Methinks I’m in for a good read. The foregoing passage, from pages 20-21 of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, induced such a mild rapture that I had to stop, to copy it out somewhere.

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¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review, which is just about as disappointing as last week’s was inspiring.

¶ Tierce: Is there anything as compulsively readable as oral history? Florent, the pioneering restaurant in the meatpacking district that has finally, some might say, reaped what it sowed, will be closing late next month, and a number of habitués, including Calvin Klein and Roy Lichtenstein’s widow, join Florent Morellet and members of his staff at Frank Bruni’s microphone.

¶ Sext: How about a $150 burger? (Price subject to market fluctuations.) Where but at the Wall Street Burger Shoppe would you expect to find ground Kobe-style beef?

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¶ In the Decameron (IX, vii), a shrewish wife ignores her husband’s foreboding dream, takes a walk in the woods, and is disfigured by an attacking wolf. The moral of the story, although coated with misogyny, is sound: don’t go out of your way not to take good advice. Although it can’t be easy to take advice that begins:

“Donna, ancora che la tua ritrosia non abbia mai sofferto che io abbia potuto avere un buon dì con teco…“

“Woman, your cussedness has been the bane of my life since the day we were married…”

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¶ Matins: The curious thing about seeing Reprise on Friday was having seen The Four of Us on Wednesday: peas in a pod, if you ask me. A great deal of what I said about either one of these pieces works as a description of the other.

¶ Tierce: Take it from me: because I am older, I am wiser. Don’t be deceived by the fact that I’m, er, slower. Sara Reistad-Long reports.

¶ Nones: If I were young, and had the ambition that I so conspicuously lacked when I was young, I’d want to take this course, coming soon to NYU. Just imagine — that voice coming to you several times a week from the other side of the lectern.

¶ Compline: RomanHans, at World Class Stupid, is almost always very funny, but today he really tickled my funny bone. “The Hipster’s Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business.”

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I did a bit of counting yesterday: I had fifteen more stories in the Decameron, and eighteen brief lives in Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia. In three to five weeks, then, only two of the six books in the photo will remain unread — and I have no intention of reading all of James Merrill at one go. The new lineup (which will probably take me until Spring ’09) will include Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, and The Anatomy of Melancholy. The “French novel” slot will be filled by Georges Bernanos’s Journal d’un curé de campagne.

“Are you crazy?” I asked myself, about the combination of Melville and Cervantes. But it’s not a combination so much as a juxtaposition. The two epics share the same basic story.

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¶ Matins: The latest Indiana Jones movie opened yesterday in Cannes, and here’s what BBC reviewer Mark Savage had to say:

It is a load of old nonsense, of course, but the journey is worth the price of admission.

¶ Tierce: The big story in this morning’s news is a Times study of the subway system’s elevators and escalators. If you live in New York, but don’t think that this is a big story, then you are part of the problem.

¶ Sext: It’s hardly a matter of general interest, but I’m tickled nonetheless that the Supreme Court has decided Kentucky v Davis in favor of the status quo. Municipal bonds retain tax-exempt status within issuing states.

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