Daily Office
Friday
¶ Matins: This week’s Friday Front, at Portico. It may be that the question is not: how important are newspapers? But rather: how else can their vital functions, if any, be performed?
¶ Nones: I wonder if we’ve gotten any better at forecasting. Here’s an amenity that New York surely ought to have boasted by now…
¶ Vespers: He came in wanting to be the new McKinley, but he’s going to go out as a second Hoover. Oh, let’s hope not — no matter how hard he doesn’t try.
Oremus…
§ Matins. I don’t think that the Internet has hurt print media at all — except, of course, with regard to classified advertising revenue, which the Internet offers at no cost to consumers. On the contrary: I think that the Internet has made the moribund, if not actually deceased state of the conventional press more readily apparent than it was. Newspapers have clearly provided important services to civil society. But they are also powerful vectors of a certain kind of computer-phobic sentimentality.
I happen to have an abiding interest in the court society of the three Bourbon monarchs who ruled France before 1789, not because that society was ornamental (although of course it was) but because it actually governed, or mis-governed, the country. My interest begins in vast relief that the ancien régime is no longer with us. I expect that it’s time for newspapers to be similarly appraised.
§ Nones. Here it is, the middle of Friday afternoon, and I’m in a perfect muddle. I’ve got to pack for my trip tomorrow — not that I won’t be traveling lightly. I’ve got a pair of tickets to a concert at Carnegie Hall this evening; they’re really LXIV’s, but he has come down with bronchitis; and, come to think of it, they were given to him. Do I want to go alone? Do I want to try to find someone to go with me (a waste of time, in my experience — New Yorkers have their pride, and also their devotion to the odd night off). What I ought to do right now, though, is take a walk. Then I’ve got to write up The Bank Job, which is really a very good movie. Saffron Burrows stays with me, if you know what I mean (and don’t).
The muddle has a background: I spent almost all of yesterday writing, churning out material for the coming days here. One, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to connect from deepest Connecticut. Two, I bloody well ought to do something about the shelf of books that I read last year but never wrote up. Some of them I wouldn’t be able to write about without rereading. Most, in fact.
In any case, I got very keyed up, writing until about ten, which is not a good idea for me if I plan to get to sleep in an orderly manner. Plan B involved relying on the disorderly: plonk. I got to sleep, all right, but I felt awful this morning. I still can’t think straight.
§ Vespers. I hope that the President has returned to Washington. He always brings — ex officio, not qua Bush — horrendous Midtown traffic snarls. While they waste all that money seeking a cure for cancer, and feeding the starving, they could be building a super underground network of VIP tunnels. Sort of like “downtown” Houston, only with limited access.
I have decided to go to the concert after all — bribed in part by Kathleen’s dangle of dinner at the Brasserie afterward. LXIV went to the trouble, at death’s door though he lay, to deposit the tickets at the Carnegie Box office. I don’t have to knock myself to get there on time, though; I’ll live if I miss the suite from The Miraculous Mandarin. The featured work in the second half of the program is The Planets. Charles Dutoit leads the Philadelphia Orchestra. Should be a wow.