LINCOLN
LEVITICUS 20:13
Traversing the Internet in response to the successful ballot initiatives in Colorado, Maryland, and elsewhere: “It all makes sense now. Gay marriage and marijuana being legalized the same day. Leviticus 20:13 — ‘If a man lays with another man he should be stoned.’ We’ve just been interpreting it wrong all these years.”
WHAT’S NEXT?
Secretary of Commerce? Oh, please. Even if I were qualified, which I am spectacularly not, why on earth would I want a . . . job? That entails breakfast meetings? I am not awake for breakfast and, in any event, try not to eat. (Saves time, saves money, good for health, good for the environment — have you any idea how much water and energy are required to serve a slice of bacon?) No, that job should either go to Fred Hochberg, who heads the Export-Import Bank (and would be the nation’s first openly gay Cabinet officer) or else to Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg, if one of them would accept it.
Next for me: jury duty. Thursday. Given my biological clock, I am hoping to be assigned to Night Court. I know they had a sitcom — do they also have juries?
Thursday is also the opening of the Charles Nolan Reading Room at the High School of Fashion Industries (so if they do empanel me, they’d better let me disempanel by 5pm: we have a lot of folks coming). The thing is, Charles loved books. He couldn’t spell (he once asked me how to spell FLORIDA; he once sent 200 invitations misspelling SURPRISE — getting the “S” right, oddly, but omitting the first “R”) and he lacked all sense of punctuation (I live for punctuation; if there were such a thing as Secretary of Punctuation I’d grab it) — but he was an amazing reader, fast and keen (I read 20 pages an hour; it is a curse) and he never failed to purchase a book that struck his eye. So, yes, his library included the works of Anthony Trollope. But it also included countless coffee table books on fashion, art, photography, design, architecture, jewelry, gardening, cooking, travel . . . you could fill a very large room with these, floor to ceiling (figure two a week for 30 years: 3,000 of them) — and we have.
Pictures to follow, possibly tomorrow.
A great way to enjoy my relief at the outcome of the election — and at not having to ask for money for a while — has been moving all those cartons these last few days and shelving the books and marveling at some of them, and at stacks of Italian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar dating back to 1939. And generally getting a sense of what it must be like to be a UPS man. I ache all over, and in the best possible way.
