I'm terribly sorry, but in North America it's still Thursday ii

 As we studied poor Mr Boehner

 on his throne the other night

 he seemed to summon to memory

 the awful diatribes of coach-

 es on how to play their game.

Their game, can you be-

lieve, when we're the

ones who have to suit

up for it, and take

those slings and arrows

of the limning class,

faulting us for defects

in our poise. Fellow

can't even propose his

own portrait, spiffy

as he is, without be-

ing tweaked for how he

heats the tipple in his

clasp. He's the one who

has to down it, after all.

What has Thursday not in

common with that predica-

ment?

Rex Whistler

Self Portrait

The New York Review

  of Books

January 9, 2014©

Rumble

Rumble is almost a neolo-gism again, in the way I would invoke it in criti-quing what one heard last evening from the Presi-dent. It refers to a pat-tern of audible fluctua-

tions between the sound being sampled and its playback. It is a feature of discontinuity, in a table we all know.

A precaution of Mr Cheney's, I believe

Even as we speak, in some undis-

closable but, we must suppose, 

secure location - probably har-

dened and buried unapproachably

deep - there is being prepared

this evening's stand-in for the

talking Head of State, imperfec-

tions in the resemblance being

touched up to a fare-thee-well,

for a pie in the face from some

junior Supreme Court justice ap-

pointed in the previous Adminis-

tration, for his resentments of

of diversity-seeking elites. How

compassionately these Bushes do

identify their men, one must re-

call, when one considers the long-

suffering Mr Thomas, victimised

by admission to another runway to

the stars. But I stray.

Yes, the innovation is probably

one of the decidedly un-late Mr

Cheney's inspirations from the

light side of the dark side, to

preserve the Presidential suc-

cession in permanent lockdown,

from the top down, by floating

surrogates for these silly pub-

lic facetimes of ancient custom.

Here, of course, Le Cid, himself,

must weep for the vitality of the

effigy under spiffing-up, so ob-

viously Chicagoan in aerodynamics

and of the Big Island in footwear,

that absolutely nobody is likely

to suspect an impostor. Even those

who may wish for one, could hardly

complain.

Pierre Corneille

Le Cid

1637

If only not to listen, could mean there were no statement

I assume, it's widely

understood, the Pres-

ident is not required

to speak his obligato-

ry report to Congress.

The "framers," as men

of more experience of

our world than we let

the children worry a-

bout, were of a prac-

tical bent. Rough mu-

sic can be expensive.

The sounds of certain

frailties are no fun.

But an honest school-
yard riposte is some-
thing to exonerate as
high spirits. Now who
will try a satin tie?

William Hogarth

Hudibras encounters the

  Skimmington

1726

Jenny Uglow

Hogarth

  A Life and a World

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997©

E.P. Thompson

Customs in Common

  Studies in Traditional

  Popular Culture

The New Press, 1993©


P.G. Wodehouse
Psmith in the City
1910
Overlook Press, 2003©

"Mr Speaker, the President of the evening's entertainment"

Readers and movie-goers recall
John Le Carré's definition of
a fanatic as a man who is con-
cealing a secret doubt. The
only problem with this allur-
ing formulation is its univer-
sal application. We need not
look, it seems to me, for the
links between meticulous tep-
idity in the most exposed pos-
ition of leadership in modern
life, and an excruciating dis-
dain for engagement in its ob-
ligations. We can recognise a
careful fellow as the connois-
seur of complication he would
like to seem; in another life,
a watchmaker. 

Ah, but when the world's most exalted practitioner of secret doubt - who knew, how little that he heralded so nobly of the faith of others, would imperil his manicure - keeps company with the media's most exalted connoisseur of it, in the re-luctances of Gorbachev, it is unseemly to speculate on who is courting whom, who enacts the fanatic to the other's admiring manipulation. Delectations wink their expedient ways between stories, all the time.
I read the wrong New Yorker, the one of Shawn's back pages in the writings of Herbert Warren Wind. Lad finds himself in a difficult bunker, of course he reaches for a wedge. But he follows through. He doesn't hustle a caddy to mourn the rules of the game.

John Le Carré
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
op. cit.

Herbert Warren Wind
Following Through
  Golf Writings from 
  The New Yorker
Ticknor & Fields, 1985©

David Remnick
Lenin's Tomb
  The Last Days of the
  Soviet Empire
Random House, 1993©

City of texture

     Like? When it's itself,

     it's not like anything.

     This means, good inten-

     tion might not prevail.

     It's built to be unmade

     and made again, and all

     the world plays a part.

There are two struggles being waged these days in one place, the Museum of Modern Art. The design community is split along lines not merely of judgment but of 'team spirit,' a recurring risk in any city. Complaints abound with its leadership, a recurring risk wherever there is an institution. But nothing about New York belongs only to New York; the texture of that city extrudes, you could say, the keenest prayers of all. We implore it to be good as well as great. One building's indignity dooms its neighbor to yield; while across town, a lovely park is uplifted as if by a phoenix.

Cathedral Photo Valéry Lorenzo©

Jasper Johns, 1961, Coll MoMA

Saturday commute ci: GPS got me lost

  I dreamed, I used 
  a landline to get 
  back.










In the mode of the show-and-tell
blog, we exploit today's entry to 
report on recent travels. It has
been so imponderably cold in our
part of the world lately that we
have come to suspect a fault in
GPS, itself, with landlines sud-
denly surpassing Hermès device
sleeves in cachet. But who's to
doubt the diligence of the Fau-
bourg St Honoré, to whip up a
dreamy connective cord in calf?

Suppose it were Friday xci: Surely, we have plug-ins

  

   Busy hands are max-

   imised, but we have

   plug-ins to satisfy

   almost any consumer.

Lately in The NY Times, Mr Charles Blow,
a columnist of high conscience and clear
vision, presented a considerably moving
testament on the virtues of print media,
an axe which it might be hypocritical to
grind here, but fewer than 1 percent of
this page's citations are not drawn from
print. I felt, however, that his argument
in favour of a magic in books is altogeth-
er too applicable to alternative devices,
even though here I probably betray a mal-
adaptation to these toys. I think what is
missing in his exuberant perspective is a
quality inherent in the presence of the
volume in one's world after the first ex-
perience. A relationship is not debris. 
The society of books is irreplaceable.