It makes the world go round...

...or stops it in its orbit (as now).

Money, money, money.

Money. And how it works (or doesn't), in the psyche, in the markets, in our lives, in New York and Nepal and Nairobi. It's the overriding object of our attention these days. (Odd, isn't it, to think that the Iraq war was our cohort's principal obsession during the years and years and years of the 2008 presidential election. How quaint.)

If the world is no longer spinning, at least our heads are.

During the day I read stuff online. From The Economist to Bloomberg to the inevitable Digby.

Too much of it is scary. (Follow Digby's links if you don't believe me.)

At night, when I settle my sorry self into bed, I read books for pleasure -- and think, pleasurably, that tomorrow I'll write here about things in those books that have captured my fancy. (Recent volumes include Christopher Plummer's memoir and Noël Coward's correspondence. Juicy, very very juicy.)

I've been thinking -- for quite some time now -- about writing my own memoir, working title Fringe Benefits. (I've actually had a pretty interesting life...and can drop a lot of names -- x degrees of separation, etc. -- including names of people who went to jail for investment fraud!) Those "pleasure" books I've been reading feed into that desire. Tonight I'll be revisiting William Goldman's terrific book about the way things work in Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade. We knew a bunch of the people he writes about when we lived in London in the late 60s and early 70s.

Then tomorrow will come, and in the clear light of day the Dow meter on CNN and a quick check of e-mail will bring me back to the fateful reality. Damn. I really want to say something about the great days of transatlantic liners. I really really do. I was lucky enough in this life to sail across the ocean six times, in various classes, on some really beautiful boats. I'd like to write about that.

But, before I can stop myself, I'll be in thrall again to the news of the day.

And so it goes.

(The illustration is of the Holland-America Line's Nieuw Amsterdam. My first crossing, the summer of 1955, when I was 16.)