Instead of watching The Jazz Singer last night, we watched Citizen Kane. And when I say "we," I include only three of us; for James, I'm sorry to say, has next to no interest in black-and-white movies that don't feature the Marx brothers or Buster Keaton. Paul, however, frequently lingers in the living room to check out the evening's feature. And so, last night, at the age of 13, he had his first meeting with Kane.

Paul is a boy who can rarely be bothered to read a clock accurately but, over breakfast, can tell me several facts about the career of William Randolph Hearst. So while he couldn't say more about the movie than "it wasn't exactly my style," he nonetheless paid intense attention to it. Every time I glanced at him, curled up in his bathrobe in the corner of the couch, his eyes were open wide. So who knows what effect Citizen Kane will ultimately have on this child of the iPod era. As Tom kept noticing, lots of lines, and even a chorus-line rhythm, turn up in at least one White Stripes song; so it's a film that keeps speaking to people, and not always the people one might expect.

Back to editing today, and to Moby-Dick. I'm up to the chapter about the giant white squid. White, white, white: that Ahab has a one-track mind. And now I notice that I've just mentioned the White Stripes. Oh, these damn interfering metaphorical inferences. . . .