The plan was to walk to the London Review Bookshop, have lunch, and walked back. We found the bookshop straightaway, although we nearly missed it at first. Outside the British Museum, I spotted a You Are Here map with a sigh of gratitude, for, having bluffed my way into the general vicinity of our destination, I now required finer details. It turned out, of course, that we had just passed Bury Place. The Bury Place entry was not good enough for me, however; I had to peer into the courtyard to find the side door, the one that figures in the film of Enduring Love. The fiction shelves are arrayed about that rear part of the shop, and within two minutes I had found two prizes: Alan Hollinghurst’s second novel, The Folding Star, which was what I’d had my heart set on finding; and a miracle, Joseph O’Neill’s second novel, The Breezes, which I’d all but given up on finding. All but given up on finding, that is, back when Netherland came out, four years ago.

Kathleen, on the other hand, demonstrated that it has been a long time since her last browse through a real bookshop. She’d still be there now, if I hadn’t pried her loose.

“Virginia Woolf lived here?” Kathleen queried in Tavistock Square. “But I thought that Bloomsbury was a slum.” It’s not hard to imagine where Kathleen got that idea. When Jessica Mitford moved to Rotherhithe with her husband, Esmond Romilly, her family thought that she was living in a slum, just as the Stephens girls’ relations must have thought of the orphans absconding eastward to Tavistock Square for lives both unmarried and unchaperoned. Kathleen was brought up to think the same sort of thing — which is more or less why she remains unfamiliar with the Upper West Side. On several occasions, she has stayed at fetching inns in the City, cosy hermit crabs in the husks of eighteenth-century buildings. And of course her parents lived in Belgravia during her father’s assignments to the British operation of his firm. But of London north of Oxford Street she knows only the Wallace Collection. Or did, until yesterday.

The You Are Here map in front of the British Museum was posted eccentrically, with west at the top and east at the bottom; it gave me quite a turn, I don’t mind telling you. Priding myself on my sense of orientation as I do, I was shocked and humiliated by the possibility that I had been walking along, ninety degrees off, for half an hour.

You’ll be wondering where my A-Z was. It would have been in my shoulder bag, of course, if it hadn’t been for Google Maps. Why pack a heavy book, I thought, when I can buy one when I’m there. I could rely on the Internet to give me an idea before setting out. Oh! Maybe you’ll be wondering where my phone was. I haven’t actually tried to use my phone. It has been turned off almost the entire time that we’ve been in Europe. I’m not sure that it works over here, but I’m not much tempted to find out one way or the other. I seem to have fallen into an uncanny valley in which small devices that do lots of amazing things are actually, essentially, and primarily tiresome.

***

The word “tiresome” fairly springs to my fingers, although not much else does. I’m tired. It’s tiring not to be at home. I feel as though we’ve been gone for months. Kathleen is not really feeling well (she has a sore throat, among other ailments), and although we went down to breakfast this morning I’m not sure that the rest of the day will bring her any further adventures. I myself should like to go to Chester Terrace, along Regent’s Park, where there’s an architectural folly that the American printmaker Joseph Pennell sketched a century or so ago; the print has long been one of our great treasures for more than twenty years. But how to get there? A taxi would be easiest, but I’m still trembling from the the cost of our ride in from Heathrow. The Tube is just beyond me, at least as a solitary traveler; with my immobile back downfixed head, I’m reluctant to try to find my way through Underground tunnels. (I knew my way around New York’s subways long before the ankylosing spondylitis set in.) As for walking, it’s not very far, not much farther, if farther, than Bury Place. But the Euston Road is no quaint promenade. And as if by perverse design, there are no quiet, adjacent parallels, either to the north or to the south.

In the event, we did not have lunch until we got back to the hotel. Nothing looked particularly inviting, and it was late (after three) to be looking for a meal. I was amazed to find that I could be out and about for so long without the need for a pit stop. I don’t count on the same good fortune two days’ running.

***

I didn’t count on it, but I had it anyway, a second successful outing. I went to Chester Terrace and took my photographs, caught a cab and asked to be taken to the British Museum, hard by Bury Place, paid another visit to the London Review Bookshop (to buy tote bags), and walked home through Brunswick Square. It was almost all very agreeable. There was a spell of disheartenment, when I wondered how far along the perimeter of Regent’s Park, in actual steps, I was going to have to go before coming upon the arches that interested me. But I found them sooner than I thought I would, and, after that, it was all a breeze.

Tomorrow, we fly back to New York, leaving in the late afternoon and arriving in the middle of the evening. There will be no posting here. If the weather isn’t terrible, I’d like us to go out for lunch — I spied lots of nice places today, simply by taking a turn at the Russell Hotel, to see if Alan Hollinghurst’s description of the back of the “Queensberry Hotel,” in The Swimming Pool Library, was a fit (it was, a perfect fit). There will be packing. And then there will come the moment when I have to pay for another 24 hours of Internet connection. At that point, the computer will have been shut down and stowed. Granted a safe voyage home, I’ll be back on Monday.

A room with a view it ain’t. If we were one floor higher, we would clear the western wall of the St Pancras Station shed wall — for a fine view of the shed roof, I don’t doubt. Why stay at home, alone in your room?

Until last night, I was a fairly good traveler, but a chain of confidence-draining events steadily reduced me to blubbering helplessness. I’ll skip straight to the last one, which was, in all my years of travel, a first: it took half an hour to get our bags up into the room, and two phone calls were required, including a request to identify them. As we had checked in at 11:10, and Reception was not exactly humming, this lapse was much worse than perplexing. Eventually the young night porter showed up at the door, and we were free to go downstairs for a glass of wine.

Knowing what I know of London topography (I’m cutting back to the penultimate nightmare), I expected a smooth trip along the M4 right onto the Marylebone/Euston Road: voilà! What I did not expect was a meter that climbed and climbed and climbed, soaring straight to a figure equalling the cash in pounds that we were carrying. I also did not expect a detour in the dark, and, knowing what I know of London topography, but no more, I was immediately suspicious of the genial driver — who indeed presently returned us to Westway. I felt foolish for not having taken a train, tired though I was; it’s certainly what I would have done if I’d been alone, somehow. But Kathleen would not have taken a train in any but emergency circumstances, so that cleared my conscience. But I still felt foolish for not having looked into typical taxi fares from Heathrow. This simply wasn’t the time to count on Kathleen to do so.

I’ll save for later any attempt at descriptions of this amazing old place (built as the Midland Grand Hotel, and opened for business c 1873). I’ve seen only two of the sparkling, refreshed halls. The part of the hotel in which we’re lodged is an annexe constructed at some later date, 30s or 40s I should say, although it’s conceivable that it’s altogetheer new. (It’s the deep but narrow lifts that suggests earlier times — to me.)

It’s odd to be doubly in London. I’m so deeply involved with The Swimming Pool Library that it’s shocking to look up and realize that I’m sitting in the city in which it is set. I am slowly learning that to re-read a novel while traveling is to open up its full store of wisdom, however great or small that might be. There are bits here and there in the novel about public-school hazing, and they led, de fil en anguille, to a ”realization” (which can’t be altogether as novel as that word suggests, although it certainly feels so) that my father had no interest in teaching me how the world worked. This disinclination did not reflect dislike, I don’t think, but there was a sense in which only “naturals” interested him; he was very helpful to young men who displayed aptitudes for his lines of life (work, golf, and so on). He would have been more personally helpful to me (he was always instrumentally helpful, certainly) had I shown some inclination to figure things out for myself. But that’s just what I wouldn’t and won’t do, if exposing myself as a rube be a risk. I won’t, in short, be hazed. I believe that I would have had to kill any clot of amiable young men who put me through some mild torture in order to make me one of them.

I never did board a tram in Amsterdam. If I’d stayed another day, I think that I’d have made an outing of doing so, and just climbed on board with a pocket full of euros, relying on the kindness of strangers. Where we were staying, it was not easy to connect to Line 2, as in Nescio’s “alles echt lijn 2, Museumkwartier.” That would be me. But I learned that the 24 will take you to the Muntplein, which is close enough (to the Spui, of course — the center of Amsterdam for me).  

Anyway, I obliged myself to get out of bed in the gloom this morning, even though Kathleen sighed “room service” as she turned over and cuddled deeper into the bedding. I had heard the clerk mention that “breakfast was included,” and this gave a finish of virtue to a stronger desire to be up and about and out of the room. A fine continental breakfast, offering ham and cheese and just about everything except eggs, was laid along the bar in the Booking Hall, where we sat last night with our glasses of wine and talked about Gothic Revivial.

Oh! I did learn one thing in Amsterdam that I had hoped to establish: it’s Nieuw, not Nieuwe, Amsterdam. Where I live, I mean. I don’t know how the server at the hotel restaurant knew this, but she was pretty certain. She was quite wistful about the idea of the city’s still being in Dutch hands. Stand in line, sweetheart! Ik woon in Nieuw Amsterdam.

***

It’s not immediately apparent that Nescio and Alan Hollinghurst share anything in the way of subject matter, but from the distance of my viewpoint they do seem to have something in common, an ostensible self-disgust that in reality masks a tragic disappointment with the fit, or lack of it, between erotic life and civil conventions. It is not, to use Nicholson Baker’s great phrase, part of my carnal circuitry. In Dichtertje (Little Poet), the title character reflects on the “knowing eyes” of modern young ladies (c 1914).

Because he knew perfectly well that they didn’t know a thing, that they burst out in stupid giggles whenever he doffed his hat to them, or just stared at him, stinking of bourgeois-young-lady conceitedness. And still he couldn’t leave them alone. Then he had to flee somewhere where there were no women, and he raged against God and the devil too, and he said that he’d end up as a lunatic at this rate and sit slobbering for years with his mouth hanging open wearing a leather bib without even realizing it. But the next day he would look again, and think: “Mon âme prend son élan vers l’infini.“

In the passage that I want to quote from The Swimming Pool Library, the erotico-bourgeois plexus might seem more obscure, but I’ll venture it anyway. The young Charles Nantwich has arrived in Port Said, in 1923, and is being kitted out for darker Africa.

I came to a sort of dead end, a tall, stuffy place like an airing cupboard, a store-room perhaps, with a young boy barefoot, climbing up & down the shelves, checking stock, a pressure-lamp in his raised hand, his black face concentrating, dazzling in the plane of light that he swung about him. I stayed & watched, mesmerised, feeling that nothing else mattered. Down he clambered, his supple child’s body comically bursting out of his khaki cotton uniform. When he saw me he smiled. I smiled back — though I was at the very edge of the field of light, & perhaps he cd not really see me. He kept on smiling — an immense, gentle, jolly smile — not yet a vendor’s smile, nothing calculating in it. He was a pure Negro, from far south evidently, like the people we we are going to, quite different from the crossbred scamps who haunt the quays. I turned & went back, & as I did so he called out, ‘Welcome Port Said, m’sieur’ — in a heartbreaking voice, its boy’s clarity just cracking into manhood.
I was inordinately, unaccountly moved by this — except that I knew it for what it was, a profound call of my nature, answered first at school by Webster, muffled, followed obscurely but inexorably since. Was it merely lust? Was it only baffled tdesire? I knew again, as I had known when a child myself, confronting a man for the first time, that paradox of admiration, or loss of self, of dedication … call it what you like.

When I was in my twenties and thirties, I used to wonder if there was something wrong with me, because I had never admired anyone, ever. The impulse to admire took long to develop in me, but I certainly never felt it as a child. I thought that some people were very lucky; I knew, in my scapegrace way, that I’d been very lucky. There were certainly many times when I’d have been happy to trade my good fortune for someone else’s. But admiration? When I read the Hollinghurst passage, I wondered for a moment if Nantwich were describing an emotion that only fledgling aristocrats feel. But only for a moment.

I remember long, long ago complaining about the pride that John Fowles’s characters seem to take in their disaffection from everyday life. My good manners are hardly invariable, but I’ve always thought that it was an act of rudeness in itself to disdain them, as if one were somehow too intelligent or sensitive or whatnot to observe them, or at least to try. It struck me, twenty-odd years ago, when The Swimming Pool Library was new and I read it the first time, that Will Beckwith, Hollinghurst’s hero, was uncivil in just this way (beneath the gloss of fine manners indeed), and I disliked him for it. Now I’m not so bothered. I suppose that that’s a sign that I’ve stopped growing up, stopped looking to other people to figure out to live — and fuming when the example set by the more attractive ones among them suggests that I’m heading in the wrong direction. With old age comes a certain calm.

As long as you don’t have to go through Heathrow.

The Rijksmuseum was on my list of things to see in Amsterdam, but I’m afraid that I’m going to miss it. We got going this morning rather too late for an outing of that kind, and, even if time were not an issue, my legs wouldn’t carry me through. As it was, I had just enough élan vital to walk up to the café in the Gerard Douplein (De Pfaardje) that Kathleen and I lunched at on Monday — not quite to the Singelgraacht, in other words — and my quads gave me a fair amount of pain on the stroll back. I was very glad to get back to the hotel.

***

At Scheltema yesterday, I cast about for something to read — something to re-read, really. I packed as little in the way of fiction as I could: the Amsterdam Stories of Nescio, which were such a pleasure to read; Paul Torday’s More Than You Can Say, a brisk homage to John Buchan; and Coral Glynn, just in case: I mean to re-read James Cameron’s new book at some point. I knew that I’d be visiting Amsterdam’s excellent bookshops, not to mention Hatchard’s, in London, and that there was no need to try to anticipate my mood while on the road — always difficult and usually vain. As it happened, yesterday found me in a mood for Henry James. Ideally, I’d have bought The Princess Casamassima, which I’m in the middle of re-reading at home, and then left the book behind me in London, but it wasn’t on offer. (Only two James titles were, The Portrait of a Lady, which feels too familiar at the moment, for some reason; and What Maisie Knew, which I am keen to re-read, but not while traveling, because the prose is perhaps James’s most demanding.) Similarly, I’d have picked up Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, but I wasn’t in the mood for The House of Mirth, much less Ethan Frome. I considered trying Jennifer Egan in Dutch, but that hasn’t happened yet; and when I looked at the lineup of Ian McEwans, I was poked by the reminder of Bootekleid (Atonement), which has sat undisturbed on my bookshelf for ten years. In the end, I settled on The Swimming Pool Library (in English), by Alan Hollinghurst.

I disliked The Swimming Pool Library when it came out. I found the “gay culture” aspect of the book irritating. Not the sex or the romance of the longing or the bad behavior — not any of that, but the queeny backchat of the cruisers in the club locker room and the fumbling around in the “cottages.” It doesn’t bother me so much now, because it’s vaguely historical; there is no longer any need, in the interesting parts of the world, for gay ghettos and their ways. Homosexuality may still be a vice in some eyes, but it is no secret, and the furtive appropriation of female pronouns, possibly the most perverted practice ever resorted to, has largely ceased. (I continue to find the word “darling” grating, but it really doesn’t matter who’s saying it; it’s the word’s breezy insincerity that I can’t stand.) This time, in any case, I’m enjoying the novel for the beautifully-written masterpiece that it is, and shouldering its sadness without grudging the occasional rough edge.

Nantwich proved to be a voracious eater with poor table manners. Half the time he ate with his mouth open, affording me a generous view of masticated pork and apple sauce, which he smeared around his wine glass when he drank without wiping his lips. I attended to my trout with a kind of surgical distaste. Its slightly open barbed mouth and its tiny round eye, which had half erupted while grilling, like the core of a pustule, were unusually recriminatory. I sliced the head off and put it on my side-plate and then proceeded to remove the pale flesh from the bones with the flat of my knife. It was quite flavourless, except that, where its innards had been imperfectly removed, silvery traces of roe gave it an unpleasant bitterness.

Aside from the apt comparison of the popped eye to a blemish, there’s not a metaphor in sight.  

***

Last night, I was graciously permitted to join Kathleen on a canal-boat excursion that filled, I think, four or five floating cocktail lounges. (The convention that brought Kathleen to Amsterdam gets bigger every year.) We were picked up and dropped at the hotel’s landing, on the Amstelkanaal, and a very nice little tour we had. Aside from a strange pause in the Kloveniersburgwal, it was smooth sailing in several directions, from the canals around the Artis/Zoo to the Herengracht — how grand the grand houses seem from water level! — the Leidsegracht, a bit of the Singelgracht, and home via a radial canal whose name I can’t determine. (It is bordered, not particularly charmingly, by the Hobbemakade and the Ruysdaelkade.) We had several pleasant chats, one of them with a young American from London who must have been a boy when the first Exchange Traded Fund, midwifed by Kathleen, came onto the market. Kathleen was sure that we’d never been able to get a table at the “affordable” restaurant in the lobby, what with hundreds of men debouching all at once, but my doubts proved correct: for it’s not the sort of place that average sensual financial services provider wants to spend money on unless there’s a lady involved. (And I was the only spouse.) When, for the second time, I said “Tot ziens!” to our server, I really meant it, although I have no idea of ever coming back.

Has anyone else out there ever worked on the Milton Bradley jigsaw puzzle that featured this view? That’s the Munttor (Mint Tower) in the center. Of course the puzzle provided no details about the location beyond the obvious, “Amsterdam Canal” or somesuch. I still remember the delicious surprise of turning a corner, ten years ago, and realizing that this must be the place. I was standing at the base of the Munttor at the time. If you work on a jigsaw puzzle as visually complicated as this one, the ornateness of the Hotel de l’Europe (on the right) and the angle of the tour boats (on the left) burn memories in the same part of the brain, so that I could see in a flash that if I stood on that bridge over there (the one from which the picture is taken), the puzzle scene would stand before me. As indeed it did.

I miss doing jigsaw puzzles. But who has the time, or the room? The time can’t be helped, but there’s a trick that really works when you’re doing the puzzle on a table that has to be cleared from time to time. If you lay out the pieces on a large piece of felt, you can roll the whole thing up without disturbing the pieces (very much), and then unroll the felt when you want to work on the puzzle again.

***

Itinerary: taxi to Leidesplein. Stroll up Leidestraat to Scheltema (at the Herengraacht). Onwards to the Kinderboekwinkel, just off the Spui. Lunch at Café Luxembourg. Stroll along the Binnen Amstel (see photo) and on past the Stopera to the Joodsmuseum. Then, home: stroll across the Amstel to the Rembrandtplein, then down the Reguliersgracht to Weteringschans and across the Singelgracht to Ferdinand Bolstraat. On the other side of the Heineken plant, I stopped for a black and tan at O’Donnell’s. I’d have had two, but they didn’t take plastic. In truth I was bleeding cash. I paid the taxi in cash, missing New York very much; the Kinderboekwinkel (where I bought Groene Eieren met Ham), they took plastic but only with PINs, and I’ve never used that feature of my credit card; ditto the Joodsmuseum; and then O’Donnell’s. I felt so leaky that I actually totted up my outlays when I got home, and then I subtracted the cash on hand (deceptive: the coins here really mean something), remembered tipping the hotel doorman for the taxi, and, what do you know, all but € 1.50 was accounted for. I would never do such an accounting at home.

I am going to have to read the Dutched Dr Seuss out loud a lot before I try it out on Will. (You try it, getting the rhythm right: “Niet als ik niet kan zien wat het zijn.”)

***

Walking down the Reguliersgraacht, a very quiet canal, just far enough to the east to be off the beaten track — I doubt that many people who aren’t actually neighbors tromp up and down it — it hit me: just as there are romantic people who cannot revisit a city in which they have lived in love with someone who is no longer part of their life, so I don’t much care to visit Amsterdam again until I can do so in the company of an inhabitant. There are certainly many more things to see; there always are. But the things that I want to do, I don’t want to do alone, or with other people who know the place even less well than I do. I want to have a friend who will suggest taking a tram to a movie theatre, and then maybe meeting up with (his or her) friends afterward. In short, I want to live here for a spell, but sociably. As tall orders go, it’s sky-high. But as it is, my familiarity with Amsterdam has carried me right up to a thick pane of glass that only someone who lives here can pass me through, and what I feel now, mostly, is excluded.

Or you could say that it’s payback for the gloat of possessiveness that descends upon me every time I walk into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is even closer to our apartment than our storage unit is. We keep our cast-offs at the storage unit, and our better things at the museum.

***

Oh! The other night, Kathleen was remembering that the only thing that she knew about the Netherlands as a little girl was the story of Hans Brinker. I knew it, too, sort of, but I’d forgotten it. What a nice idea it would be, I thought, to get an original Dutch edition! Ahem… I ought to have looked into this at home before puzzling the poor young salesclerk at the Children’s Book Shop. The echt-itude of Mary Mapes Dodge’s tale (published in 1865) is such that no one has ever seen fit to translate it into Nederlands. If I weren’t already an old duffer, I’d be mortified.

The world wasn’t ready for Nescio. I’m speaking of the writer who wasn’t well known even in the Netherlands until after his death, at the age of 79, in 1961. In 1961, the world was not even ready for the Beats, the idealistic young men whose future Nescio foretold in less than a handful of stories written before World War I. His predictions have been so completely established by experience that idealistic young men are now more likely to be seen as self-indulgent than as high-minded. This would have saddened him. He liked to think that the future would turn out endless generations of idealistic young men, sitting on the shore and dreaming about capturing the sun, or “blowing up all the offices,” even if he knew that the luckier among them would wind up prospering, as he did, in those very offices.

Gods tron is nog ongeschokt. Zijn wereld gaat haar gang maar. Af en toe glimlacht God even om de gewichtige heeren, di denken dat ze heel wat beteekenen. Nieuwe Titaantjes zijn al weer bezig kleine rotsblokjes op te stapelen om ‘m van z’n verhevenheid te storten en dan de wereld eens naar hun zin in te richten. Hij lacht maar en denkt: ‘Goed zoo jongers, zoo mal als je bent, ben je me toch liever dan die mooie wijze heeren. ‘t Spijt me dat je je nek moet breken en dat ik die heeren moet laten gedijen, maar ik ben ook God maar.’ En zoo gaat alles z’n gangetje en wee hem die vraagt: Waarom?

*

God’s throne is still unshaken. His world just takes its course. Now and then God smiles for a moment about the important gentlemen who think they’re really something. A new batch of little Titans are still busy piling up little boulders so that they can topple him down off his heights and arrange the world the way they think it should be. He only laughs, and thinks: “That’s good, boys. You may be crazy but I still like you better than the proper, sensible gentlemen. I’m sorry you have to break your necks and I have to let the gentlemen thrive, but I’m only God.”

And so everything takes its little course, and woe to those who who ask: Why?

That is the end of Titaantjes (Young Titans), the second of three (or four) early short stories upon which Nescio’s reputation largely rests. (The English rendering is by Damion Searls; it appears in NYRB’s collection, Amsterdam Stories.) If there are still any young titans piling up rocks anywhere, they probably have no higher view than storming the Internet and setting it to rights. Which they may in fact do. The Twentieth Century taught us that our ideals especially must be realistic. Otherwise we wind up in a sanitarium, like Bavink, the young titan who loses his grip just as his paintings begin to command high prices, or else collaborating enthusiastically with Nazis. (Fritz Grönloh, the man behind Nescio, spent the Occupation in retirement; he was almost sixty when it began.) We have to begin by taking people as they are.

Which is what makes these stories so endearing. Idealistic young men aren’t particularly well-behaved, and their habits tend toward the slovenly; their manners excite the impatience of everyone who has found a settled place in the world. But not Nescio’s. He may have put utopian dreams behind him, but he has not drawn a line beneath the innocent hope of young dreamers. Innocence makes them, like the lilies of the field, beloved of God, who, in Nescio’s view, prefers them to hardworking meritocrats. Just so long as they outgrow that innocence, and stop asking “Why?”

No: when Grönloh died, the youth of all the Western world was about to embark on a prolonged Titanic project that, happily, wore away in the tides of time, and never got high enough to collapse and cause damage. Nobody would have wanted to read Nescio then — nobody except the oldsters who smiled now and then.   

***

It is almost noon, and I shall shortly have to decide where the day is going. This evening, Kathleen has a dinner at the Hotel de l’Europe (where I’ve always wanted to stay), but until then, she is free to be as tired as she feels. I, however, am wondering about lunch. Our hotel has no simple in-and-out coffee shop; plain food is available only via room service. There is a McDonald’s just up the road, but after yesterday’s long outing I’m not feeling particularly adventurous. With luck, I’ll rouse Kathleen to take a walk over to the Sarphati Park, in the center of De Pijp, at some point in the afternoon. If she is too tired for that, I shall go by myself. Now that I’ve announced all these possible plans, I wonder what will actually happen.

***

We are not staying at the Hotel American, but we have a painting of it in our living room at home, so of course I had to try to get a better photograph of it than the one I took ten years ago.

On our first non-travel day in Amsterdam on this, my second trip to Amsterdam, I managed without really intending to do so to recapitulate everything that I liked about the first visit. Kathleen and I walked from our hotel, at the southern edge of De Pijp, to the Dam and back, and we never retraced our steps to any significant degree. (Strictly speaking, I believe, we did not retrace any steps at all aside from the Singel embankment between the Leidestraat and the Spui.) But I had been almost everywhere before, and almost everywhere that we went had a personal resonance. Take the Leidestraaat itself: how many times did I walk up and down that street ten years ago? Probably fewer than a dozen, but it felt more like a semester’s worth. With the Athenaeum, the American Book Center, and Waterstone’s, the Spui is something of a book district, and it is also the home of the Café Luxembourg, which I patronised often enough last time to regard it as a personal hang-out. On the way home, I realized that Van Baerlestraat, which Kathleen wanted to pass along in search of a stop that she liked, constituted close to a bee-line between the Leidesplein (where I’d thought about making a rest stop at the American) and our hotel. We had walked much of the street the last time I was here (this is Kathleen’s fifth visit) because I’d cajoled Kathleen into seeing an exhibition of maps of Amsterdam at the Municipal Archives — rather more of a walk than Kathleen, not quite as keen about cartography as I am, had in mind. (Van Baerlestraat is also the address of the Concertgebouw, which I have yet to get inside of; and it forms the southern edge of the big lawn behind the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum.) Since my goals for the day were modest — I wanted (a) to buy a copy of the writings of J H F Grönloh, formally known as “Nescio” (pronounced, I now know for sure, “Nessio”), and (b) to have lunch at the Luxembourg — my success left me without any further ideas, and the sheer favorable drift of the rest of the day was an unimagined gift.

There were a couple of new things. We walked into the Begijnhof, about which, for the moment, I am only going to say that it’s a good thing that there wasn’t one in New York City thirty years ago, because I don’t think that Kathleen would have married me if something like it had been an option. (“Hard to say,” was Kathleen’s opinion.) And we walked down the Kalverstraat, which, according to an article in the Times, is “Amsterdam’s busiest shopping street.” Yes, it probably is! But I had been mislead by the reporter’s conversation with a sales clerk specialising in Mont Blanc pens into the sloppy conclusion that “busiest” meant “most luxurious.” That, it definitely is not. It has been a long time since my last visit to an American shopping mall, but that’s what the emporia of the Kalverstraat brought to mind. I ought to have known better, because I walked along the Pieter Cornelisz Hoofstraat a few times in 2002 (it was right round the corner from our hotel at the time), and that’s where the Gucci shop is. Not anywhere near Kalverstraat, which is tat from end to end.

***

At the Athenaeum newsstand, which was open at 11:55, when we reached the Spui and found that the Athenaeum itself doesn’t open until noon on Sunday, I bought a copy of Het Parool, the newspaper that I adopted ten years ago, and read the following headline: “Amsterdam moet nog veel meer extra bezuinigen,” and I understood it well enough (with a little help from my grasp of current affairs) to know that the last word, which I didn’t recognize, must mean something like “to go on a diet.” Which it does, actually; it means “to economize.” (I was able to buy a handy dictionary right after lunch; knowing that I’d buy new ones anyway, I had left my collection at home.) I was amazed, all day, by how intelligible the local language was. Years of desultorily listening to Teach Yourself Dutch have apparently opened a crack in my brain through which something like familiarity has seeped. Asking myself why I study a language all the educated speakers of which make sure to speak English — and I’m not the only one asking — I have to answer, simply, that I find the language gezellig. That’s one of those untranslatable terms that means much more than its accepted equivalents in English, which in this case include “sociable” and “companionable.”

Amsterdam is certainly the most sociable and companionable city that I’ve ever been to. This isn’t to say that it’s friendly — that’s an American misunderstanding of the facts of life. We can all have only so many friends; the trick is to enjoy living among people who aren’t — and to make sure that they enjoy living with us. There is no contradiction, in this wonderful town, between “civil” and “comfortable,” no sense of constraint about the former that puts the latter off the menu.

Everyone has been very nice about my stabs at Dutch. (Most clerks and servers seem to think that I’m Dutch to begin with, for some reason.) I don’t think that I could say anything intrinsically interesting, but that’s not the point. I’m not called on to say interesting things to people whom I don’t know very well; how obnoxious I would be if I thought that I were. 

We’re exhausted, but we’re here, and this look out the hotel room made me wish that I could forget what a pill I was last week, about traveling. On the plane over the Atlantic, I filled more than half of a Field Notes Memo Book with a scrawled stream of consciousness in which I did propose some plausible explanations — plausible to me, anyway. If the plausibility doesn’t evaporate, I’ll share my thoughts. But not right now.

We were so famished when we arrived at the hotel that we went straight to one of the dining rooms for a late lunch. I struck up an accord with the server by pronouncing the soft-shell crab salad that I ordered “mooi.” She breezed by the table later and asked, simply, “Lekker?” I said “Yes!” (hopeless). I asked for “de rekening, altsublieft,” and said “Tot ziens” on my way out. At no point was I buried alive with Dutch that I couldn’t understand. So there’s some ice that got broken.

More anon. I can barely think straight; I’ve been awake for over twenty-four hours.

Here’s hoping that all readers have a pleasant time of it while I’m away. For myself, I’ll be sightseeing on the outside and stocktaking on the inside. Leaving my island home seems more brutal and unnatural than ever. The forward part of my mind is genuinely looking forward to visiting two favorite cities. The bulk of it, though, is so swamped by what feels like a simple prehistoric dread of travel that I wonder what pleasure I’ll be able to take.

***

Last night, at bedtime, I watched a few episodes of Kipper. It wasn’t ideal; ideal would be waking up to Kipper. But it was the first time that I got to enjoy the show on a normal television setup, with more picture and lots more sound than Will’s iPad cranks out. When I get back from Amsterdam, I’m going to find out more about this show, which is top-drawer in every way. The insouciant jazz is in the same key as the breezy animation. The design, while discreetly colorful, is plain, and it keeps the sugar content very low. Probably because I lead a quiet life physically, I don’t get much out of massages and other spa treatments. But my cerebral life is fairly active, and nothing, I find, calms me down like fifteen minutes of Kipper.

Every animated entertainment aimed at children has to have its rules, but I haven’t figured out Kipper‘s yet. There are four principal characters: Kipper, who is some sort of extraordinarily good-natured sheepdog; Tiger, a neurotic terrier; Pig, who talks, and his sibling, Arnold, who doesn’t. Silence is the key to Arnold’s charmed life; because he can’t tell the others what he has seen or heard, he is privy to all sorts of wonders. Sometimes, as in “Clouds,” Kipper can follow along, but it’s more often the case that, while Kipper and Tiger make their discoveries and get into scrapes, and Pig tries to stay out of trouble, Arnold is the one who really knows the score. Even though he likes to suck his thumb.

The scrapes that Kipper and Tiger get into, in most episodes, are sometimes fanciful and sometimes not. Kipper’s world is replete with marvels only some of which are available to human children. Everything seems sensible and realistic, but in the manner of dreams. A hose comes loose, and recoils, powered by the water streaming through it, against Kipper’s house. Suddenly it pops in through his window. By the time Kipper and Tiger find out what has happened (they can’t get any water pressure at their inflatable pool), Kipper’s house has flooded to windowsill height. The two doggies paddle around and come to rest on the stairs. “Don’t you wish it could always be like this?” says Kipper. Later, he calls out to Pig, “Don’t open the door!” But of course Pig does open the door and is knocked down by a tidal wave. No harm done! They were all meaning to go swimming anyway. Yes, I do wish it were always like that.

There are no authority figures in Kipper. Tiger is forever running into difficulties, having asked for it in most cases. (He will wear a red slicker when passing by a bull in a field.) But nobody gets into trouble. Nobody scolds Kipper for standing by while his house floods. Nobody scolds him for wasting water. Nor does anyone make the snacks that he and Tiger always seem to be picnicking on. (Come to think of it, Pig is a bit of a cook.) Everyday household problems are not unknown in this world, but they don’t arise with everyday regularity. I’m keenly aware of how different that is from a world in which everyday household problems are overlooked. I would find the latter extremely agitating. But Kipper persuades me, for minutes at a time, anyway, that there is no need to worry about providence.

There’s a cheeriness about Kipper that reminds me of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! — or rather, of John, Paul, George and Ringo. But I try to ignore that; it’s the sort of clever, sophisticated insight that clutters up a very simple pleasure.

***

What was a pleasure, waking up this morning, was realizing that I’ll be sleeping here tonight. Tomorrow night, I won’t be sleeping at all; I’ll be in a plane. (Although I may give Lunesta the supreme test; if it can lull me to sleep over the Atlantic, I’ll be knocked over with gratitude.) Tomorrow, I’ll pack. Perhaps I grew up a time when it took ten days to get to Europe and back, I have a hard time thinking that I can go to Amsterdam without abandoning the apartment for months. I will ask Ray Soleil to look in if he can, late next week, but it’s not vital.

Fire Island is completely different. Kathleen remains in town during two of the weeks, and in any case I’m only three hours away, door to door, at the most. I told my barber yesterday that I’ll have to find a good barbershop in Bay Shore, because I am not coming back into town for that kind of reason.

Kathleen will pack tonight — on the late side, as usual. She has just been asked to attend a testimonial dinner at the Waldorf that she thinks that it would impolitic to miss.

Having written quite a lot yesterday, I’m inclined to take it easy today. It is also the case that my mind is fairly blank. All I can think of is packing, connectivity in an Amsterdam hotel, and how easily a concierge’s instructions will get me aboard a streetcar.

I wore my new green pants to lunch yesterday, and I told my friend that I was thinking of taking them to Amsterdam. She recommended against it. “I want to be remembered,” I said. “Well, in that case…”

The other thing that I’m certain to do is to visit Scheltema, or whatever it’s called now (if it’s still there!) and ask for a copy of Nescio’s stories. I’ve had a very hard time with the Amsterdam Stories, because they fly me back so powerfully to my own feckless youth and I don’t want to revisit the period. Again, at lunch yesterday, a pearl of wisdom dropped onto my tongue. I told my friend that I didn’t mind being old, because for so long I was afraid that my youth would never end.

It doesn’t bother me that our Amsterdam hotel, on the Amstelkanaal, lies outside the purview of tourist maps of the city (the DK guide that I picked up stops a few blocks to the north, at Sarphati Park), but I’m somewhat disheartened to note that St Pancras Station Hotel, where we’ll be staying in London for a couple of nights, is always just out of sight, beyond the edge of most Central London maps. Euston Station, next door, usually makes it in. I should note that staying at St Pancras was all my own idea; I’ve wanted to stay there ever since the pile was restored to its Victorian splendor. A case of answered prayers…

***

At bedtime last night, still in the mood, after “The Turn of the Screw,” for something dark and rich, I couldn’t decide between James and Wharton. For a minute. I chose Wharton. I read the first section of “Bunner Sisters” before falling asleep. I read the rest of the story, which is just shy of novella length, this afternoon.

My usual response to reading something wonderful for the first time is dismay: how did it take me so long to get to this? I didn’t have that feeling about “Bunner Sisters,” though; I was grateful to have had it waiting for me. I was wholly engaged by the melodrama, which at first seemed not to be as bad as I feared, but then got much, much worse. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I won’t say anything about it — only a word about Eliza Ann Bunner, from whose point of view it is told (in the third person, happily.)

What’s thrilliing about this unassuming dress-maker is how extravagantly — how just short of extravagantly — Edith Wharton imagines her highly circumscribed life. To some degree, the woman’s life is narrow because she is superstitiously pious. “I always think if we ask for more what we have may be taken from us,” she says to Evelina, the prettier sister, whom she hopes to see married one day. But it’s not all timorousness. Eliza Ann is truly at home in the barely genteel back room that she shares with Evelina, and Wharton takes pains to cleanse her prose of any trailing pity that she might feel for someone so comparatively disadvantaged.

The infrequency of her walks made them the chief events of her life. The mere act of going out from the monastic quiet of the shop into the tumult of the streets filled her with a subdued excitement which great too intense for pleasure as she was swallowed by the engulfing roar of Broadway or Third Avenue, and began to do timid battle with their incessant cross-currents of humanity. After a glance or two into the great show-windows she usually allowed herself to be swept back into the shelter of a side-street, and finally regained her own roof in a state of breathless bewilderment and fatigue; but gradually, as her nerves were soothed by the familiar quiet of the little shop, and the click of Evelina’s pinking machine, certain sights and sounds would detach themselves from the torrent along which she had been swept, and she would devote the rest of the day to a mental reconstruction of the different episodes of her walk, till finally it took shape in her thought as a consecutive and highly-coloured experience, from which, for weeks afterwards, she would detach some fragmentary recollection in the course of her long dialogues with her sister.

The composure of this recollective habit is really enviable. When the story really gets going, Eliza Ann is as dear to you as any character you’ll ever know. This is the sort of bravura call for sympathy that Dickens used to trumpet by the hour, but either too sharp or too flat and in any case always too loud for pleasure. There is enormous sadness in “Bunner Sisters,” but the story resists dismissal as “pathetic” with all of Eliza Ann’s remarkable force of character.

¶ J Luis Martín interviews Daron Acemoglu, co-author of Why Nations Fail, and a convincing discussion of the primacy of political institutions ensues. (Truman Factor; via The Browser; 5/2)

In Greece, for example, people don’t work hard and evade taxes not because of their inherent values or some ethnic disposition to such behavior, but because the incentives that have been created. Politicians created a system in which work was not rewarded, tax evasion was easy, almost encouraged, and clientelistic transfer payments made entrepreneurship and innovation less attractive.

¶ JRParis’s kiss-off to Nicolas Sarkozy reminds us of an abbreviated Declaration of Independence in which the sins nevertheless do pile up. (“Ses rodomontades.”) We’re glad to see his coattails, too. (5/9)

¶ Alison Bechdel’s new book, Are You My Mother, has just come out, and it’s certainly going to be one of the most talked-about things this month. Maud Newton interviews the author at Barnes and Noble Review. As graphic writers go, Bechdel, without stinting on the drawing, is decidedly at the writerly end of the range. She begins with blank frames and dialogue boxes; amazingly, her editor can make sense of this. (via Maud Newton; 5/3)

¶ Ellen Moody writes about Colm Tóibín, and the similarities between her own background and that of Eilis Lacey (Brooklyn). When Ellen notes how her feelings about Eilis changed at the end, it’s almost as thrilling as reading the novel. ¶ At The Bygone Bureau, Kevin Nguyen and Julie Disparte confer about Fifty Shades of Grey. Upshot? Kevin liked it better than he thought he would, but will not, unlike Julie, read the next two. (5/3) ¶ Jonah Lehrer’s Rumpus interview left us wondering what Lehrer thinks a book is for. On the one hand, he finds a book project to be a great excuse to explore all sorts of interesting things. On the other hand, a great many of those explorations would end up on the cutting-room floor, if it weren’t for miscellaneous publication in magazines. Next up: love. (5/4) ¶ Bezalel Stern interviews Damion Searls, the translator of Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories. (The Rumpus; 5/9)

One of the things I like about Nescio is that our sense of the Dutch character is so split: there are all these stereotypical boring, badly dressed businessmen and then the occasional flamboyant utter genius: Van Gogh, Rembrandt. How could Dutch culture produce both? I feel like Nescio is the missing link—he shows us both the bohemian visionaries and plodding bourgeoisie, each turning into the other, each from the other one’s point of view.

¶ Alex Ross hails Andrew Ford for a valiant rebuttal to Steven Pinker’s claim that music is “auditory cheesecake.” But the column is important because it lays out the three simple steps to developing a musical intelligence. (Inside Story; via  The Rest Is Noise; 5/9)

¶ We heartily agree with Felix Salmon’s implication about Munch’s The Scream: it’s worth more money precisely because it’s not unique. Art in the Age of Branding.

And while the Scream is an extreme example of the phenomenon, it can be seen in every major modern and contemporary art auction. It explains pretty much all of Damien Hirst, for instance, not to mention Takashi Murakami, a man whose paintings go up in value proportionally with the number of Murakami Louis Vuitton handbags spotted in the wild.

All of which just softens you up for Felix’s amazing China kickler. (5/9)

¶ At AltScreen, Dan Callahan writes about Romy Schneider, whom he thinks has been forgotten. Not by us, for damn sure! How do we get our hands on all her French movies? (via The House Next Door; 5/3) ¶ At Café Muscato, a really good appreciation of Alice Faye. “Within her fach, as it were, there’s no one better, but there’s no denying it’s very narrow terrain.”

¶ As only he can, Tom Scocca excoriates the food writers for lying about how long it takes to caramelize onions. Onions cannot be caramelized in ten minutes. One senses the anxieties of food editors: anything too difficult-sounding will put off readers (so it’s better to lie?) When we prepare onions for a quiche, they’re stirred over the lowest heat for upwards of two hours. (Slate; via The Awl; 5/4)

Have a Look: ¶ Maria Popova shares Alice and Martin Provensen, noting that Alice is still at it. (Brain Pickings; 5/2) ¶ Geoff Manaugh stretches topography a bit in search of the “Lost Lakes of the Empire State Building.” (BLDGBLOG) ¶ Steerforth picks up a Ladybird book from the Fifties and wishes that he’d been born in 1946. As only someone who wasn’t would. (The Age of Uncertainty) ¶ People born long after 1946 may never have appreciated the impact that American Gigolo had on men’s fashion. Chris Laverty fixes that. (Clothes on Film; 5/9)

Noted: ¶ Reformed Broker Brown joshes all that dirty old M&A spring-fever sex. (5/2) ¶ The Branson cube, smiling up from your drink. (Telegraph; via Kathleen!; 5/3) ¶ Broccoli it’s not:? “Roman Emperors, Up to AD 476 And Not Including Usurpers, In Order of How Hardcore Their Deaths Were.” (The Awl; 5/4) ¶ The Full English Breakfast via MetaFilter. (5/6) ¶ Jonathan Franzen gets a friendly, favorable review! (The Millions) ¶ Wayne Koestenbaum on parataxis. (Bookforum; via 3 Quarks Daily; 5/9)

What a surprise it was, to read about Clayton Christensen in the new New Yorker yesterday afternoon. His ideas about business “disruptions” made immediate sense to me, and I could account for my ignorance of them only by thinking back to 1997, when Christensen published The Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know what I was doing in 1997 — reading a lot of Trollope, I suppose; I’d joined a Trollope listserv just the year before and was for the moment very engaged in discussions of his novels — but of course I know what I wasn’t doing. I wasn’t keeping a Web log, or even a Web site. I wasn’t scanning hundreds of feeds a week to keep a wetted finger in the breeze. I’m sure that many other tremendously interesting new ideas flew around me back then; I can only hope that writers as good as Larissa MacFarquhar will continue to unearth them for me.

The least surprising detail in MacFarquhar’s account of Christensen’s work is his discovery of the “Church of New Finance.”

After puzzling over this mystery for a long time, he finally came up with the answer: it was owing to the way the managers had learned to measure success. Success was now measured not in numbers of dollars but in ratios. Whether it was return on net assets, or gross-margin percentage, or internal rate of return, all these measures had, in the past forty years, been enshrined into a near-religion (he liked to call it the Church of New Finance) by partners in hedge funds and venture-capital firms and finance professors in business schools. People had come tot think that the most important thing was not how much profit you made in absolute terems but what percentage of profit you made on each dollar you put it. And the belief drove managers to shed high-volume but low-margined products from their balance sheets, even though nobody had ever come across a bank that accepted deposits in ratios. This was why he called it a church: it was an encompassing orthodoxy that made it impossible for believers to see that it might be wrong.

As of course it is: for all their mathematical aura, these “ratios” involve nothing but adolescent erotic calculus, projected onto a larger field. How much trouble does a guy have to take to get into some girl’s panties? That is the ratio; that is the “thinking.” That is the reaasons for New Finance’s immediate appeal and fire-like spread. Did you think that “how much bang for the buck” came out of nowhere?

Whether we’ll be able to stop using ratios faster than the Roman aristocracy stopped eating from leaden saucepans remains to be seen.

***

Something else new: Greta Keller. How did I live to be 64 without having heard her sing before?

By the time I was washing the dinner dishes last night, the playlist in the iPod had come to an end, and I was casting about for something to listen to while I was in the kitchen. In the stack on my writing table, I found a collection of songs recorded between 1932 and 1938 by the Viennese-born “Great Lady of Chanson,” opened it up, and stuck it into the DVD player in the kitchen. The sound was not optimal, even disturbing Kathleen, who can work through anything. A few minutes later, I was able to play the music on a Nano. That sounded better. I remembered choosing this disc from among the others available because one of the numbers is “Music, Maestro, Please,” a song that I didn’t really pay attention to until a few years ago, when I noticed that the weepy lyrics are bucked up by what can only be called a striptease march. It’s a fetching juxtaposition, so profoundly campy that it’s actually funny.

When you hear Greta Keller for the first time, you think of drag queens lip-synching to Marlene Dietrich, because Keller taught Dietrich how to perform. Keller has the better voice, and she sings where Dietrich would strike a pose. Amidst the standards on the album that I’ve got (“Blue Moon,” “Stormy Weather,” “These Foolish Things”) are some interesting Continental items, such as “A Little Ramble in the Springtime With You,” which is sung mostly in German, and “When I Learn French,” which climaxes with “Please teach me some more.” Something about these songs wants to pretend that the Great War didn’t happen, and that its sequel wouldn’t have to. They sing of a parallel world in which the Dual Monarchy has become a world empire dotted with Ruritanian capitals that look a lot like Paris. If you’d like to see the Hollywood version, permit me to recommend either Trouble in Paradise or Midnight. In the end, it took the laid-back, irreverent Sixties to put an end to the dream. Now Greta Keller’s charm seems sad not because her world was reduced by war or economic dislocation but because her kind of sex appeal was discontinued, and therefore became, qua sex appeal (as distinct from a manner of singing, which in her case is timeless), ludicrous. Even gay men are giving up on “darling.”

***

For several days, I’ve been mulling over Charles Rosen’s essay, “Hofmannsthal and Radical Modernism,” which appears in his formidable collection, Freedom and the Arts (Harvard). The center of the essay is a discussion of a work that I didn’t know of, Hofmannthal’s so-called “Chandos Letter.” The Letter is a manifesto of sorts, cloaked in the costume-drama allure of a late-Sixteenth Century date, but frankly modernist in substance. Having been one of the outstanding lyric prodigies of German letters, the still-young Hofmannsthal woke up, as it were, to an understanding of the world that made poetry impossible. Here is Rosen:

Lyric poetry is properly the expression of the most personal and individual thoughts and feelings. But Hofmannsthal would claim later: “The individual is inexpressible. What is expressed already slips into generality, and is no longer individual in the strictest sense. Language and individuality are opposed.” Language is social not personal; words must be understood by others, an idiolect is non-sense. There are no special words to convey what I alone have experienced. What is most individual, most deeply personal, is therefore perverted and ruined by being put into words.

“Perverted and ruined” — loaded words. Looking at this paragraph from the other side of the Cognitive Revolution, I see Hofmannsthal and, in a more muted way, Rosen himself, as shocked by preliminary tremors of the upset; and that inclines me to regard Modernism as something like an allergic reaction not so much to the world as it had been understood before (before the Enlightenment, before the Industrial Revolution, before Freud) as to the hope that springs eternal, the hope for a new world. A new world could, according to imaginations that had been damaged by the shock of the new, only be dystopian; there was no reason to look forward to it. (Although some Modernists did, they tended toward the totalitarian megalomania of Le Corbusier, making the backsliders like Eliot and Stravinsky and Matisse preferable companions.) I haven’t really perused the essays on literature that constitute that last part of Rosen’s collection, but I expect that it would take long to find mention of “alienation” as an attribute of Modernism.

I’ll be frank: I’m heartened by the idea of Modernism as a pathology. It has always, all might life, struck me as wrong, and as I’ve grown older I’ve seen it as inherently wrong, not, as I thought when I was young, wrong simply for dismissing everything that had gone before. The Modernist impulse (I don’t believe that it was ever crystalized into an idea) was a matter of repulsion and rejection.

In another essay, “Modernism and the Cold War,” Rosen writes of Modernism’s failure to win support in the United States.

The relative, or even absolute lack of success in America is not due to the absence of brainwashing propaganda, but to the fact that almost all modernist art is rebarbative at first encounter and requires several experiences of it to come to terms.

This acknowledgment is almost sweet. Certainly there are artworks cast in the Modernist idiom that take their places, once we’re familiar with them, alongside all the other artworks that we know. But there are many that don’t, that just go on remaining rebarbative, that are meant to be unpleasant, because that is what they record: the trauma of realizing that (just as Hume always insisted) there is no natural connection between the order of the universe and the order that we perceive. The order that we perceive is determined by the struture of our brains, not by actual perception. There is a rough congruence between the two orders — there would have to be, or we would have evolved into extinction. But the truths that we need lie hidden within ourselves. And, as Hofmannsthal vaguely grasped, they are not individual. We are none of us individuals. We are all of us variations.

***

It’s the middle of the evening, and I may clip this paragraph and recycle it tomorrow. I’ve just watched W./E. for the second time, and I feel as though I’ve been to the coronation of a pope. It’s not just the stories that the movie has to tell, but the movie itself, the presence, metamorphosed, of Madonna Ciccone, the director and co-writer of the film. There were two moments that took me back — took me back to the early Eighties, when music videos were the cool new thing and Madonna was not quite that cool. Never mind what they were — all right, the second was the absolutely immortal Twist just before the end — the point is that, with this movie, Madonna becomes the person she always, I think, wanted to be, and yet never can be, except perhaps through a movie (and not in it). It is as though she discovered that for us to find out who she really is, she has to be invisible, because, if we can see her, we’ll be distracted by everything that she tried to be instead. So she enlists Abbie Cornish and Andrea Riseborough to stand in for her, or to be her bridesmaids, perhaps. There is a way in which this movie, more than anything else the performer has ever done, is all about the girl from Bay City. Like a ghost in her own movie, Madonna presses against the screen from time to time, never moreso than in the long scene in which Wallis writes and Wally reads the letters that, quite miraculously actually, it seems, Mohammed el-Fayed has held on to all these years, letters that will eventually change the whole Abdication story.

As to the movie part of the movie, there were two delights about seeing it the second time. First, I knew where the Abbie Cornish plot line was going and I was be comfortable with it. It stands up well on its own (thanks in no small degree to Oscar Isaac, a genuine screen gem), and it supports the pointilliste re-telling of the older tale. Second, I marveled at Andrea Riseborough’s voice. Her voice and her accent. I can remember when ladies from the Upper South talked just like her, especially after a martini or two. I don’t know where the actress picked it up, but she nailed it. I adored the poise with which she and Ms Cornish stand up from the park bench at the end: ladies down to the ground.

The power of great fictions to change over time — to produce different effects, to revert into more than occaasional unfamiliarity, and to blot up the sense of alteration as thought it were not the case that it is we who have changed, not the texts that we’re re-reading for the third or fourth time over a period of many years — is a fact of life that can’t be taught. I’m in the middle of Henry James’s late novella, The Turn of the Screw, and it’s nothing like what it has been before. For one thing, it’s funny. The humor is altogether inadvertent; I don’t think that I’ve mined a vein of intended comedy. But I find that I’m “reading” The Turn of the Screw as if it had nothing really to do with governesses and remote mansions and wicked ghosts. What I’m seeing instead is the problem of in-laws.

I’m reading the novella because I chanced to watch The Innocents a few weeks ago. Jack Clayton’s production, with a script to which Truman Capote contributed, seemed to want to trace Gothic horror back to Freudian roots, and that was clearly something that James could not have compassed. So I thought I’d read the story again. I don’t recall which time it was, but I remember once re-reading The Turn of the Screw in a lather of frustration: it seemed imperative that Edward Gorey be commissioned to illustrate it, but I had no idea how to go about this. (Gorey was very much alive at the time.) That urge has palpably passed; the very idea of illustrating the story itself seems gauche. (And in any case many of Gorey’s little works could be said to “illustrate” Henry James, particularly on the points of children and innocence.) What I’m going for now is the character of the unnamed governess who narrates the tale. James knits character and tale together in such a way that a claim can be made that the governess is a deluded madwoman, so hysterically attached to her little charges that she manufactures devils from whom she cannot protect them. Her story altogether lacks corroborative detail. That she is able to prevail upon the housekeeper, illiterate Mrs Grose, to agree with her hypotheses is nothing remarkable; she, after all, is a lady. And she is a lady in contest with another lady, the only other kind of lady — a fallen lady. This would be Miss Jessel, her predecessor.

Miss Jessel, the new governess learns, abandoned herself to the attentions of Peter Quint, the valet of the rich man to whom the care of little Miles and Flora has devolved. On its face this is an unspeakable mésalliance, almost to the point of outright bestiality. Whether Quint died (in an accident, slipping on an icy patch while drunk) before or after Miss Jessel’s departure from Bly (the great house), I’m not sure; I’m not sure that it matters. Miss Jessel is believed to have died, too. The governess comes to believe that the ghosts of the man and the woman have come back to claim the children. Unless you’re very out of sympathy with James’s writing, his story will flow by without striking any rocky questions about why the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel haven’t better things to do; the governess’s belief in their malignancy is so convinced that it is somewhat beyond convincing: we don’t interrogate the governess — we let Mrs Grose do that, in her half-hearted way. Instead, we let the governess set our teeth chattering with her lurid anxieties.

The great problem in all of Henry James’s fiction is other people’s knowledge. What do other people know — about the things that we know, about us; what plans do they harbor? Writing in a somewhat simpler moral universe, James presented the problem in terms of candor and dishonesty; he appears to have believed that people know what they know, and can share it or not as they choose. (We are today quite sure that this is never the case.) The difference between what I know and what you know is a crack in which the flowers of evil can take root — when it is not a fatal abyss. 

What children know — children of any age, as Maggie Verver’s history reminds us — is an aspect of the larger problem that interested James throughout his career. What Maisie Knew is a tour de force of what we might call disimagination, as James cramps his point of view into the head of a little girl, allowing her no thoughts beyond her tender years. (Such thoughts are the abstractions from which we erect our “understanding.”) In The Awkward Age, knowledge takes on a hymeneal significance; the lack of it is a badge of virginity. Trying to figure out what other people know is hard enough. What children know is of a bafflement!

What distinguishes the governess from other James characters is her impetuous inference of what Miles and Flora “know.” No sooner has a possibility occurred to her than it becomes a sure thing. At the same time, she persists in a sentimental view of childish innocence that was one of the Victorian era’s most insistent daydreams. Mere possession of wicked knowledge does not taint Flora or Miles. In the early stages of being “on to” the children, the governess worries that her attentiveness will tip them off to her suspicions. But not her worry is calmed in the most interesting way.

It would have been easy to get into a sad wild tangle about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace I could still enjoy was that the immediate charm of my companions was a beguilement still effective even under the shadow of the possibility that it was studied. For if it occurred to me that I might occasionally excite suspicion by the little outbreaks of my sharper passion for them, so too I remember asking if I mightn’t see a queerness in the traceable increase of their own demonstrations.

Reading this, I was attacked by the most inconsequent image. I remembered holding my grandson in my arms, and he was studying my face with a view to playing with it, pulling my ears and whatnot. He likes to try to put my glasses on, but until recently it was always with the air of poking an eye out to see what might happen. What this recollection had to do with anything I’ve no idea, but I suddenly understood that the governess was in the position of a mother-in-law, or perhaps a grandmother, who has allowed herself to believe that the relations of her child’s spouse are something less than a good influence on the marriage, on the grandchildren. And the position of the children, Flora and Miles, is exactly that of any perspicacious grandchildren, careful to suppress any intimations of bad influence. In The Turn of the Screw, it is precisely the children’s model behavior that convicts not them but the dreadful Quint and his paramour, Miss Jessel.

These insights, if that’s what they are, don’t make The Turn of the Screw a funny book, but they do raise a smile, because James has so cleverly (whether he knew it or not; unintended masterstrokes are always a risk with cleverness) repackaged a family problem that is as common as dirt in glitteringly scary wrappings.  

***

Perhaps I misspoke about Henry James’s “apparent belief” that people can choose whether or not to say what’s on their mind. It might be better to propose that his characters labor under that hope. Whatever he himself thought, his prose is a manifestation of the difficulties of clear and complete expression. Ultimately, it is impossible; James ends up listing the things that he does not mean to say, and hedging them in with highly nuanced qualifications.

Friday

Kathleen has just left. She’s going to spend the weekend with her father in Durham. She’ll be back on Sunday. My own plans for the weekend are simple: I’ll see a movie this afternoon and then sit with Will while his parents go out to dinner; and, tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have a look at the pre-dynastic installation in the Egyptian galleries at the Museum. I think that I’ll be able to manage that. It’s hard to think very clearly this morning. We had a thunderstorm, about an hour ago. For the third day, the sky is leaden and the air is neither wintry nor warm, but uncomfortably indifferent.

It’s a good weekend for digesting the altera pars of Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? I’ve just pulled down Fun Home, the “family tragicomic” that came out, astonishingly, six years ago (that long!). It’s shorter, it’s more roughly drawn, and it’s a much simpler, more straightforward read — as would befit comparisons between a book about a father and a book about a mother. Most of yesterday afternoon went to Are You My Mother? I read it in about three sittings, almost breathlessly, trying to keep track of the constantly-shifting time frame and to absorb all the ideas of Donald Winnicott that serve as a kind of ground-bass to the story. Then I got to the last box. “She has given me the way out.” I felt a shocking discharge; the tears popped out of my eyes and I gasped for breath. There was nothing intrinsically surprising about this last line; it simply culminated everything that went before. Everything. It was the way out of the book, too, of course: “this way to the egress.”

The Bechdel family saga involves an openly homosexual daughter and a closeted homosexual father, but it doesn’t stop there. What, exactly, is the problem between Alison and her mother, Helen? Growing up, Alison found her mother to be distant, and as an adult she came to wish that her mother were more interested in her life — more prying, even. What wounds and dissatisfactions held Helen back? I don’t think that she will ever tell us; she’s on record in this book as holding memoir (as a literary form) in contempt. But perhaps there is no need for a memoir, if Helen can say, in one memorable outburst, “I regret that I wasn’t Helen Vendler.” What doesn’t that tell us?

I came away from the first reading persuaded that mother and daughter were literary rivals in much the same way that a father and a son might be, and that the mother quite beautifully managed her side of the rivalry by staying out of her daughter’s way. Bad mothering, perhaps (inadequate, certainly), but, as the book says at the end, “the way out.” The mother-daughter connection, qua female, was something of a red herring, particularly as the two women never competed sexually. There was a hole in Alison’s infancy — when she was about three months old, her mother became pregnant again, and Helen always made more of her two boys — and much of Are You My Mother? is an analysis — a psychoanalysis — of that gap and how the adult Bechdel dealt with it. The book is so good — The Pain Recaptured would have made a good title — that it is easy to overlook the obvious: mother and daughter were (are) both serious writers. Helen Bechdel isn’t Helen Vendler, and Alison Bechdel tells stories graphically, but they are still, both of them,  intellectual hunters after truth. I don’t know anything about the brothers, but the evidence suggests that Helen and Alison are the men in the family. 

***

Among my more egregious sins, lately, I’ve been failing to write up the movies that I see. The Five-Year Engagement is a marvelous picture that deserves nothing less than hosannas; perhaps I’ll get to it on Sunday. Perhaps I’ll see it again, in the theatres, with Kathleen (not very likely before our trip to Amsterdam, though). Today, I saw a film that elicited a very different response, but as it won’t take long to state it I’ll jump in even though it’s nearly ten and I’ve just had a good time with Will, if you know what I mean. (Which you don’t unless you’re my age. He was an angel, but he did order me around a bit.) I think that it’s better to write about Damsels in Distress late in the evening than early in the morning, when I have more energy.

I was disappointed, first by the production values and then by the story, such as it was. I’m all for making movies on the cheap, but I’m not a fan of cheap-looking movies, and there were moments in Damsels that reminded me of the educational filmstrips that we used to have sit through in Sixties auditoriums. The visuals were not crisp and the sound took some getting used to. It was a long, long way from Barcelona.

The story makes sense only as an undergraduate project. If Whit Stillman were to tell me that he’d pulled a scenario out of a college trunk, I’d have thought, exactly. The point of view was the kind of muddle that’s inevitable when you think (as some sophomores really do) that everything you do is très cool. It was almost, but not quite, a train wreck. Is Damsels a satire of upscale dimwits loitering in the Groves of Academe, or is it merely set there, like Too Many Girls and My Lucky Star? The entire dancing business, all of it, was strange at best and just wrong most of the time. (If only the Sambola had been a dance sensation!) And I was less and less sure about Greta Gerwig’s character as the movie progressed; by the end, I was thinking that Payne Whitney might be the place for her. There were lots of good things in the movie (Analeigh Tipton, Ryan Metcalf, and Megalyn Echikunwoke all deserved more time in the spotlight). But they didn’t cohere, so they couldn’t offset the terrible things in the movie (the Cathars! the Roman Holidays!). There were too many fizzled plotlines (it would have been better with no professors, and the whole Daily Complainer line was hardly more salvageable than the dancing), all of them more engaging than they would have been with a strong central plot.

The worst of it was this awful fear, that Whit Stillman never saw Mean Girls.

Nevertheless, I recommend Damsels in Distress, partly out of class loyalty (I’ll be honest) and partly out of class treason. I don’t know how I’m going to feel about it the second time around. There will be a second viewing; there almost always is. Question is: will there be a third?

Saturday

What a glorious evening I’ve just had. It’s my new model for a night out on the town. First of all: not a “night”; it’s not even ten, and here I am at the keyboard. The second thing is that I would have had an even better time if Kathleen had been with us, because then, of course, we could talk all night about everything that we learned.

At four o’clock, I met up with Marc LeBlanc, Ms NOLA’s brother, a very nice guy who also happens to be a credentialed Egyptologist (PhD Yale, 2011). He conducted me through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of pre-dynastic objects, at the bottom of the Lehman Wing. The fact that I had never given such objects much of a thought made the visit what we used to call “a trip.”

“Pre-dynastic,” it occurred to me on the walk home from dinner, is not the way to put it. “Ante-dynastic” is, as in “ante-bellum,” the phrase that used to denote life in the United States between Jackson and the Civil War. The culture of Egypt before unification under the pharoahs (Marc is rigorous about speaking of “kings”) was not erased by what came later; it was simply developed. Certain things were dropped, such as the “bird dance,” or whatever it was that was signified by the representation of a female profile (none too hippy or busty, by the bye) raising her arms over her head in a heart-shaped manner, fingers pointing down. Some scholars believe that the gesture is meant to suggest the horns of a heifer, but Marc is not persuaded by this theory; he thinks that a bird is the object of imitation. I was inclined to agree, but the uncertainty is not without its appeal. There is always much to be learned.

Other things, such as boats, became fixtures of Egyptness. Also, palm trees and chorus lines of ostriches. (Well, chorus lines.) The objects at the Museum begin by looking generically “archeological”; hippopotamuses (all of whom look pretty much like Tiger in Kipper) are the only Egyptian cue. Then human figures appear. A few cases on, and you get to the palettes. The palettes are ceremonial inkstones, as it were, for the preparation of ceremonial makeup; the working center of each palette is a perfectly rimmed circle in which the cosmetics were ground. I think that we’re talking about make-up for men here: men for whom the difference between hunting, religion, and warfare did not exist. I hope to write more about the palettes after further visits; I’ve never seen anything like them, and they are not only fascinating but brilliantly executed. Marc can’t have imagined how far I was from being bored by his explication. If I slowed down now and then, it was only because I was soaking everything up. I saw serekhs everywhere, especially before I knew how to spell them. (A serekh is the royal insignia, inscribed in a square and topped by a falcon. Literally, the square part of a serekh is the wall of a king’s palace.) I was more disappointed by the end of new things to look at than I have ever been in my life. I was just getting started!

So I asked Marc to take me through the Egyptian Wing itself, the part of the Museum that I know least well. I’m glad that I’d waited for this particular guided tour, because it was as though someone (namely Marc) were saying, “And all of this is just down the street from your house, too.” Here’s one great thing that I learned. By the time of Rameses II (I’m spelling it the old way, I think), the ancient Egypt that I’d discovered at the pre-dynastic show was already ancient Egypt! It was already thousands of years old, more or less, and ripe for rediscovery and retooling. Retooling? We’ll talk about Amenhotep III’s Colonial Williamsburg ball some other time. In the Great Hall of the Museum, right in front of the Membership desk, there stands a great granitic statue of Amenemhat II (1929-1895 BCE), from Berlin. Thing is, the cartouches — the rounded lozenges in which the king’s name is inscribed — say “Ramses II.” And why not, Rameses, or Ramesses, okay (watch out, or I’ll call him “Ramsay”), was a Very Great King (1303-1213) in whom I have always had a close interest, because, like me, he suffered from ankylosing spondylitis — even if Wikipedia says he didn’t. But forget about that; the point is that, even in Egypt, nothing was sacred. I joshed with Marc about it. I said that the reinscription may have been effected without royal directive. Maybe Ramesses was on a tour, and the good folks in Thebes wanted to welcome him warmly. “What have we got?” said the mayor to his minions. I realize that this is sounding more Preston Sturges than Dio Cassio. But I will tell you this. By the time we got to the statue in the Great Hall, I would have recognized Ramses’s cartouche anywhere. (And it is all over Amenemhat, the poor sod.)

We were on the point of leaving the Museum for dinner when I asked Marc if there was anything that he wanted to see. The upshot of that was that we went up to the Irving Galleries in the Asia Wing, which are more often closed than not. I wished that I could have told him more about the luohans, but we liked them well enough without my blather.

After that, we had a good dinner at Demarchelier — after which it was great to walk outside into the cool evening. Marc persuaded me (without trying) that I really have to see The Wire. Walking down 86th Street in the middle of the Saturday night, I felt that I was having as great a time as anybody. And I still do, except that now I’ve done the writing and must be prepared for the edits. Better edits than smitings!

Sunday

Last Saturday, when I headed downtown for Ray Soleil’s party, I left Kathleen in bed, weeding through her emails. I also left a playlist running. The next day, she told me what a pleasure it had been to listen the music through the afternoon and into the evening — it stopped only shortly before I came home. I could not have been more pleased. I had compiled the playlist for weekend lazing, which is to say with a firm awareness of what Kathleen would like to listen to and what she wouldn’t, and it was great to know that I had accomplished just that. She thanked me, which was the most unlooked-for pleasure. Not Kathleen’s thanking me, but thanking me for the music.

Compiling another playlist this afternoon (this one built around Handel’s two sets of keyboard suites) I’m remembering how awful it used to be —I used to be — when I’d play records for friends. “Oh, you must hear this.” “Wait, there’s something else that you’ve just got to hear!” “This will only take a second; it’s very short.” “I thought it was this cut; it must be the next one.” How good people were, on the whole, to put up with such torture. Now, I’m absolutely mystified by the need that I had to make other people hear the music that I happened to be crazy about. I have lost the urge to “share.” And I don’t “play records” anymore. I can’t underline sharply enough how the act of listening to music at home has been transformed by these vast iTunes playlists that I’ve been putting together for five years.

***

Having stayed up late last night — I watched the outstanding Charlize Theron in Young Adult, and would have perished of sympathetic mortification if I hadn’t been too tired for strong feelings — I slept in this morning, getting up at ten, breakfasting at half-past noon, and getting dressed quite indecently late. After spending a few hours with the Times, I picked up The Turn of the Screw and read as much as I could before the pot of rich, dark coffee that I’d drunk made it impossible to continue. Kathleen flies home this evening; she’ll have had an early dinner with her father and brother before boarding the plane. I’m thinking of watching a movie that I’ve never heard of.

***

And the question is, why haven’t, or hadn’t, I heard of Stephen Poliakoff’s Glorious 39? Or, for the matter of that, Stephen Poliakoff? He seems to be a one-man TV industry in Britain, and Glorious 39 is the sort of movie that you’d expect American Anglophiles to gobble right up. Imagine: Brideshead Revisited meets Remains of the Day, with a dash of Atonement. The cast includes Julie Christie and Bill Nighy, also Jeremy Northam, Eddie Redmayne, and Juno Temple. Romola Garai is the star. She plays the adopted daughter of a very grand family, from which she is cut apart by the discovery of its participation in an aristocratic attempt to steer the UK toward surrender to Hitler — a conspiracy that is not shy of murder. I forgot Notorious — there’s more of a dash of that in Glorious 39. Hitchcock is definitely in the air. (I also forgot to mention Hugh Bonneville, who, with Charlie Cox, is one of at least two Downton Abbey stars on hand.) Melodramatic and gorgeous at the same time, Glorious 39 is perhaps a tad sententious, but it kept me on the edge of my seat just the same. When I ordered it, from Amazuke, I prepared myself for something awful, because otherwise there’s no explaining why the picture wasn’t shown and isn’t known over here. Or perhaps I’ve just had another one of my senior moments, and everyone knows all about it.  

There isn’t anything particularly new in the “Ego Depletion” entry at You Are Not So Smart — not for anyone who knows how to spell “Tierney” — but these are early days in the Cognitive Revolution, and it’s going to take a while for the gyre of tests and studies to gel into a popular program, or at any rate a program popular among literate folk. And David McRaney wraps up the entry on a lyrical note that captures the affect as well as the effects of will-power exhaustion.

Modern life requires more self control than ever. Just knowing Reddit is out there beckoning your browser, or your iPad is waiting for your caress, or your smart phone is full of status updates, requires a level of impulse control unique to the human mind. Each abstained vagary strengthens the pull of the next. Remember too that you can dampen your executive functions in many ways, like by staying up all night for a few days, or downing a few alcoholic beverages, or holding your tongue at a family gathering, or resisting the pleas of a child for the umpteenth time. Having an important job can lead to decision fatigue which may lead to ego depletion simply because big decisions require lots of energy, literally, and when you slump you go passive. A long day of dealing with bullshit often leads to an evening of no-decision television in which you don’t even feel like switching the channel to get Kim Kardashian’s face out of your television, or sitting and watching a censored Jurassic Park between commercials even though you own a copy of the movie five feet away.

This passage is embedded in a paragraph that begins and ends with admonishments to plan ahead. I think that that’s what I’ve been trying to do since my time on Fire Island last summer, and that that’s why life has felt so different and, paradoxically (?), so fatiguing ever since. Planning ahead means understanding your life in very fine detail — your routines, your environment, and so on — so that you can manipulate your course through them. Acquiring this understanding demands an entirely new set of demands upon your attention, and a new range of decisions, all of which are depleting. (Is this why it’s so hard to make serious changes? Does this explain “force of habit”?) It’s only when you’ve made the set of correct decisions about reorganizing your life that you can proceed to live that reorganized life — if you still have any energy.

This came to me this morning when, before getting up, I mulled over the title of yesterday’s entry, which I never changed even though I also never got round to giving it a raison d’être in the entry. What was on my mind, early yesterday morning, was that it has been a very long time since I popped out of bed, eager for the new day. (For breakfast, at a minimum.) I’ve attributed this lack of zip to age, and to the fatigue that increases with age (for some people), and of course to drinking too much wine, even though I now go to bed, night after night, with a perfectly clear head. This morning, it occurred to me that there might be something else at work. Out on Fire Island last summer, I had a ”torso of Apollo” moment, in which I not only knew that I must change my life but saw the direction in which I must change it. And that is what I have been doing ever since, day after day — either changing my life or collapsing from the task. All the while, of course, I’ve been living my regular life — writing here, reading endless feeds, keeping house, washing up after dinner, and to some extent looking after Kathleen. You’ll say: well, what changed? All those things. I do almost everything a little bit differently, and the changes were all made with a view to conserving my will power. Whatever could be turned into an easy, unthinking habit, was. That’s probably not what Rilke had in mind, but he wasn’t living in the Cognitive Revolution. Changing your life nowadays is a matter of coding. 

***

When we were young, we Boomers, we were told that we could be anything, do anything. Our opportunities were said to be boundless. I suspect that the more affluent among us — those who grew up to assume an inordinate number of positions of power — heard the message incessantly. Of course, it was wrong; we were misinformed. We were brought up on bad information. It’s no wonder that we thought that we had all the time in the world, or that we would be allowed to slough off the consequences of our mistakes and start again. That we saw the error in this outlook is attested by the tendency that we and succeeding generations have followed toward overprogramming the lives of our children.   

Finished off by the Museum yesterday afternoon, I was good for nothing but watching movies at home. Happily, something new arrived in the (Royal) mail, a DVD of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. I didn’t know anything about this film until I read a snatch of what Wesley Morris had to say about it (in the Globe, I presume); Wesley Morris, the fourth film critic to win a Pulitzer ever, was hailed by Jim Emerson at Scanners; I’d never heard of Morris, either. When Weekend was over, I watched Runaway Jury. I’d been tempted to watch it whilst cleaning the refrigerator on Monday afternoon, but I hadn’t been up for the grim opening sequence, in which a disaffected day-trader (remember them?) goes haywire and takes a rifle to his brokerage office. I wasn’t up for that yesterday, either; I contrived to be in the kitchen making dinner for most of it.

Weekend is such a delicate picture that synopsis can only mislead. Wesley Morris writes,

Sometimes you don’t want to escape. You want to connect with a movie that’s really about something, to listen to a filmmaker talk things out, to watch him amp everyday life without calling attention to his turning up the sound.

And what Weekend is about is, again in Morris’s words, “the way intimacy compounds sex until it begins to sprout feelings.” It is not about this-happened-then-that. Of course things have to happen: on a Friday night, a lifeguard and an artist meet in a gay bar and go back to the lifeguard’s apartment; on the following Sunday afternoon, the artist leaves Nottingham for Portland, Oregon and a two-year course, and the two men, who are now lovers, are as heartbroken as if they’d known each other for years. Weekend is, indeed, about the sprouting of feelings, and Andrew Haigh is a magician, because the sprouting of anything is pretty slow watching, and yet Weekend is never boring. He knows how to keep his material fresh. He perches Russell, for example, in a fourteenth-floor flat in what seems to be a well-maintained council estate. This allows for several interesting variations on the theme of his new friend’s several departures, seen walking away along an angular path from the high distance of Russell’s window.

Then there is the brilliance of excising the entire one-night-stand experience that brings the men together. We realize, with the dawn of the morning-after, that the foregoing scenes have been by way of introduction, and that the movie is starting now, when Glen pulls out a voice recorder and solicits Russell’s assessment of the sex that they’ve had, “for an art project,” he says. Russell is immediately put off, and before you know it, he and Glen have had their first fight, without raising their voices. Glen, the artist, is a sharp-tongued connoisseur of the self-hatreds of gay life; Russell, more cautious in every way (he is a lifeguard), thinks that it’s right to want to be happy. As the two men realize that they really click, Glen becomes distraught: he grasps Russell’s arms and says, “I don’t do [being] boyfriends, and I don’t want us to fall out about it.” Which is to say, I want us to be friends about not being friends. It’s impossible of course, just as the prospect of maintaining any kind of relationship for two years across thousands of miles is impossible. But Weekend,  gloriously, is not about problem-solving. As for the sex, Haigh has a genius for highlighting surrender, which registers in heads and shoulders as well as it does in any other parts of the body. His discretion is never coy.

Tom Cullen (Russell) and Chris New (Glen), appearing in their first feature, have the look of indie amateur innocents that a movie like Weekend needs; I can’t imagine how the film will read when the actors’ faces become familiar, as I’ve no doubt that they will, from other projects. That alone is a great reason to get hold of Weekend now.     

Runaway Jury, which I watched quite a number of times when the DVD came out, feels older than it is, possibly because it was shot in New Orleans before Katrina. Like Fracture, which is the movie that I did watch whilst cleaning the refrigerator, it is a game of cat-and-mouse that uses the law for tokens in much the way that Monopoly uses battleships and steam irons. This would be objectionable if the movie weren’t so fast-paced that it can dispense with absolute coherence. At the very end, the characters played by John Cusack and Rachel Weisz are presented as the Good Guys, but their justice is a little rough and certainly not legal. You forgive this, because, good or not, they whip the dickens out of Gene Hackman, whose Bad Guy status is certified from the beginning. As a “jury consultant” who will stop at nothing, not even suborning jurors, to win a favorable verdict for his clients, his Rankin Fitch flies an enemy-of-democracy flag that must have been picked up at a Cold-War souvenir shop, and Mr Hackman invests him with all the gleeful malevolence of a Bond villain. Unlike a Bond villain, however, he does not perish invisibly in the explosion of his bunker. No, he is reduced to wobbling sobs at a rundown bar, his career (and life) in utter ruins — and he’s still alive!

It’s also fun to watch Jeremy Piven before.

***

“Nevertheless,” Kathleen said, “and in spite of everything, I still do love you.” Not forty seconds ago she said this, concluding a discussion of last night’s late hours. I argued that she was a wicked enchantress who would stop at nothing to raise topics of interest in the wee hours; never mind what she claimed. I do know that it was not I who began, at midnight, to tabulate the locations of all the Vermeers in the world. On the other hand, it was I who brought out the London A-Z to establish where, exactly, St Pancras Station stands in relation to everything else. (Far from, just as I thought.) Don’t be surprised when I confess that we slept through our flight to Heathrow.

I want to see The Mousetrap, with an unidentified cast. The show has been running since the year before Kathleen was born — how bad can it be? Kathleen wants to see Hay Fever, with Lindsay Duncan and Jeremy Northam. So do I, but not so much. The idea of seeing Hay Fever in the West End reminds me of seeing Deborah Carr as Candida in 1977, which I actually did. It is possible to be too authentic.

Now I am off to the Museum, for a Far Corners tour of the Wing That Used to be Islamic and the wing that is still American. First, my old law school classmate and I will have lunch — her treat. When she complained about my paying for brunch on Sunday, I laughed and allowed that I would let her take me to the cafeteria at the Museum. Upon reflection, I became more generous, and arranged to meet at the Petrie Court.  

***

Wherever the Vermeers are, they’re not where they belong. The Sleeping Maid is hanging more or less in the right place, but the other four are AWOL. Serves me right.

¶ At Gene Expression, Razib Khan comments on Jonathan Haidt, whose book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is just about the most interesting thing that we’ve read in the past year. (4/3)

Finally there’s the point about human flourishing, and Haidt’s contention that conservative political and social philosophy has a lot of insight in fostering human happiness. I agree with Haidt broadly on this. That’s why I’m a conservative. But a key point I want to inject here is that I personally am not the type of person who flourishes in a conservative society. I’m too individualistic, egotistic, and lacking in the depth of moral sentiments which are the human norm (I am a natural libertarian). This is why another important insight is that societies need internal structure and genuine diversity of niche, so that people with different lifestyles can flourish. There does need to be a Castro district in San Francisco, but there also needs to be conservative small towns which are relatively homogeneous in population and values.

¶ Maria Popova praises Stuart Firestein’s Ignorance: How It Drives Science, and does a dandy job of placing the book in the burgeoning field of wrongology. (Brain Pickings; 4/3) ¶ Jason Kottke considers Instagram and Facebook as “company towns.” (kottke.org) ¶ Why, Felix Salmon thinks, the $1 billion purchase of the former by the latter makes sense: “Think of it as a $1 billion way to make your parents’ status updates more interesting.” ¶ Why belle-époque Vienna still matters: Jonah Lehrer interviews Nobelist Eric Kandel, author of The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain: From Vienna 1900 to the Present. (Frontal Cortex; 4/13)

¶ ”What if Schools Weren’t Schools Anymore,” asks Liz Dwyer, reporting on an inquiry into education reform the reminds us of the Editor’s crackpot scheme. (GOOD) ¶ The poor design of the Retreat at Twin Lakes, the “gated community” in which George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, confused essentially public roads with private driveways, making a trespasser, Zach Youngerman writes, out of almost any pedestrian. (Boston Globe; via Things; 4/18)

¶ Timothy Garton Ash explains why the major powers’ preoccupations elsewhere are working to a resurgent Turkey’s advantage. Questions for Syrians: to be Arabs in an Ottoman world again? (Globe and Mail; via Real Clear World; 4/13) ¶ Kaya Genç tells us why conservative backbiters created the plagiarism scandal out of thin air when Elif Shafak’s new novel, Honour, proved to be a hit. (LRB; 4/18) ¶ The interesting takeaway from Nicholas Burns’s Turkey-as-superpower piece is the argument that President Obama is playing a very smart game. (Globe; via Real Clear World; 4/30)

¶ Tadas Viskanta joins Joshua Brown in calling for more financial blog entries about the problems faced by ordinary investors.He notes that “by and large the finance and investment blogosphere exists apart from the everyday needs of most savers.” (Abnormal Returns; 4/3) ¶ Matt Stoller lists three things that progressive Democrats will have to learn how to do in order to beat back the neoliberal juggernaut: Get the voters to turn out in primaries; deliver goods (information, mostly) along with the arguments; and remount the neglected “radical” issues. (Naked Capitalism; 4/13) ¶ Blake Masters’s notes on Peter Thiel’s Startup 101 lectures will teach you a great deal about good business thinking, but we cite the piece because we agree with Mr Thiel’s first principle: “A startup messed up at its foundation cannont be fixed.” His example? Regarding the US Senate’s unrepresentative constitution, he writes, “Some say that’s a feature, not a bug. Whatever it is, we’re likely to be stuck with it for as long as this country exists.” Can we please have a real American Revolution? (via The Browser; 4/30)

¶ Peter Dinklage built a career on never playing leprechauns. And he doesn’t like “lucky” (NYT; 4/3):

Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people.

¶ Something about Whit Stillman’s interview with David Coggins, at A Continuous Lean, suggests that Mr Stillman himself would have to be played by Colin Firth. ¶ Iris Veysey writes about the power of Edith Head’s costume designs for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We always feel that Judy Barton’s clothes embody Scottie Ferguson’s ache for Madeleine Elster: he has to get rid of them. (Clothes on Film) ¶ We already knew this, and so did you, but Ben Fritz reminds us that movie trailers are evolving under serious pressure from the Internet, and movies along with them. (LA Times; via Arts Journal; 4/11) ¶ Josh Lieberman does his best to dust off the reputation of Orson Welles, which, if Google is any indication, is in pretty bad shape. (Splitsider) ¶ Jim Emerson shouts out Wesley Morris, a writer at the Globe who is only the fourth film critic to receive a Pulitzer Price. The entry includes generous extracts. Morris has his own voice and looks to be well worth following. (Scanners; 4/24)

¶ Levi Stahl wonders what we’d like if we had, or were, servants. Without literature, who would even think of such a question? (Ivebeenreadinglately; 4/13) ¶ Janet Potter lays down the rules — and now that she’s done so, everybody ought to know them — about introducing authors at bookstore readings. Basic rule: “Any synopsis you do give of the current book should be one sentence long.” Rule Nº 2: Don’t synopsize anything else. (The Millions; 4/30)

The literary life is famously short on pleasure, but it does equip its acolytes with tools for amusing others. Three cases in point: ¶ Rob Roberge remembers a particularly unsuccessful writing class that he was saddled with teaching; there were some good women in the class, but they were driven away by the two men, who ranged from creepy to creepier. (The Rumpus) ¶ Jim Behrle, who claims to be writing “on a blue Selectric II typewriter in a meadow filled with ducks” (he has “a very long extension cord”), unfurls a list of pitfalls to be avoided by would-be Roths: Brooklyn, Starbucks, adultery, &c. (The Awl). ¶ And the always edgy Jimmy Chen defends, sort of, his excellent infographic on modern literature. (HTMLGiant; 4/3)

I will not apologize for my non-inclusive list. This website’s width is 600 pixels, and I wanted the font to be legible, so you can imagine my constraints.

¶ Books that we loved when we were young but that make us wince now: Nadia Chaudhury polls a number of people familiar in the Blogosphere, but see if you can guess which writer Edmund White has outgrown. (The Awl; 4/5) ¶ Russell Smith agrees with the suggestion that we ventured the other day: How is Damien Hirst different from Thomas Kinkade? (Globe and Mail; via Arts Journal; 4/13) ¶ Brian Dillon’s catalogue essay on Damien Hirst places the artist in the Wunderkammer tradition. (Ruins of the 20th Century; 4/18) ¶ Two really good Rumpus interviews, with John Jeremiah Sullivan (“Yes, my whole interest in the early eighteenth century is a sublimated interest in the present.”) and Elif Batuman (“In a way, the Mike Daisey story was perfect for This American Life – except that this time they were victims of the hoax, which maybe interfered with how they covered it.”) Fab stuff. (4/30)

¶ Checking in at Wuthering Expectations, we found a raft of great entries, a few of them about the great Portuguese novelist, Eça de Queirós. “Modeling the Canon,” however, caught our fancy, with its demonstration that we can never know who the great writers are, because the readers of the future make it an open question. As if that weren’t bad enough, everyone has his or her own canon, and we’red quite unequally persuasive. (4/5) ¶ John Self’s write-up of Greg Baxter’s novel, The Apartment, is very appetizing. (Asylum; 4/13) ¶ Alizah Salario’s review of Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan is also an autobiographical fragment. (The Rumpus) ¶ “Very quickly these poor young men are reaching that critical juncture in life that decides everything, though they are heedless to this fact.” Kevin Nolan reviews Nescio (The Rumpus) ¶ We’re in no hurry for Maria Bustillos to make up her mind about Tom Bissell — no sooner does she scribble “v true” in the margin, than she hurls the book across the room. She makes us laugh! (LARB; via 3 Quarks Daily; 4/24)

¶ Helen DeWitt goes to Meeting (in Berlin) and silently applauds standing in silence. (Paperpools; 4/4) ¶ There are few surprises (for anyone familiar with the school) in Janet Reitman’s Rolling Stone story about Andrew Lohse, the Dartmouth undergrad who blew the whistle on his fraternity’s hazing rituals, and who may wind up the only man punished. (via The Morning News; 4/5) ¶ At The Rumpus, a collection of reader contributions on the conundrum of having sex without having a relationship: Friends with Benefits. (4/11)

¶ At The Age of Uncertainty, Steerforth looks back with fond regret on his dealings with publishers’ sales reps, even though as a rule they had no use for books as such. “When I left high-street bookselling, one of the things I really missed was having a good gossip with a rep.” (4/3) ¶ Levi Stahl reviews Emily Cockayne’s Cheek  by Jowl: A History of Neighbors, which seems to collect a great many grumbles from ages past. He reasonably concludes that the best way to avoid problems with the neighbors is to know them no better than strictly necessary. (I’ve Been Reading Lately; 4/4) ¶ We cite this Discover piece about Driverless Cars not because it’s astute but because it points to one of the gaping holes in American jurisprudence, the other being corporate-executive criminal library. Sometimes, don’t you know, the law has to be fundamentally updated. A government that controlled the roads on which driverless cars operated would also be the government that provided healthcare to occasional accidental victims: end of story. (4/30)

Have a Look:  ¶ Move over, Monet. Another stunning picture of water lilies at JRParis’s country retreat in Touraine. (Mnémoglyphes; 3/3) ¶ New from Rufus (with Helena Bonham Carter) @ Joe.My.God. ¶ Got a minue? Rear Window compressed @ kottke.org. (4/4) ¶ Fragments of a Gerard Hoffnung spoof interview, guaranteed to make you laugh unto weeping. (@ Nigeness; 4/5) ¶ Scouting NY tracks the Titanic trail in Manhattan. (4/11) ¶ The Existential Housecat, who speaks absolutely murdered French. (Thanks, Susan!) ¶ David Olivier has a vision. (Slimbolala; 4/18) ¶ “Should I Check My Email?” Wendy MacNaughton thinks, probably not. (The Rumpus; 4/24) ¶ The Most Average Girl in the World, Florence Colgate. (Artifacting; via MetaFilter; 4/30)

Noted: ¶ Why you ought to have 3 children, or none. (New Yorker; 3/3) ¶ Shawn Cornally discovers the awful truth about American “schooling.” (GOOD; 4/4) ¶ Killer Book Club. (The Millions) ¶ Perez Hamilton. (via kottke.org; 4/5) ¶ The strangely breathtaking Ted Wilson writes about a movie that he hasn’t seen (involving a zoo) — natch. (The Rumpus; 4/11) James Surowiecki on “Club Med” and the globalization of hip surgery. (New Yorker; 4/13) ¶ Titanic fragment: How there came to be a Widener Library at Harvard. (Brainiac; 4/13) ¶ All about iceberg tracking. (MetaFilter) ¶ Terry Teachout discovers the jewel of his neighborhood, Fort Tryon Park. (About Last Night) ¶ George Frazier’s duende. (Ivy Style) ¶ Jason Diamond visits Chartwell Books. (Paris Review Daily; via The Morning News; 4/18) ¶ Gel, foam, or emulsion: Rishidev Chaudhuri knows from eggs. (3 Quarks Daily; 4/24) ¶ Coffee is a lot more expensive than you think. (GOOD; 4/30)

There is still a good chance that I’ll get to the job that I’d planned to start after lunch: straightening up the refrigerator. It’s truly a job that I would almost do anything else to postpone, but I really couldn’t not sit down first and say a word about A Game of Hide and Seek, which I continued reading after lunch, and soon actually finished. It’s the ninth of Taylor’s novels that I’ve read — all the ones that you can buy off the shelf in the United States. The three remaining titles have been ordered by Crawford Doyle, and I can’t decide whether I hope that they arrive before I leave for Amsterdam and London at the end of next week. Also ordered, Nicola Beauman’s biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor, which revealed the extramarital affair that Taylor had for many years with a painter whom she met at a Communist Party meeting.

I’ve read nine books, more or less in a row, by the same author, expecting, at the beginning of each one, to find my appetite sated by familiarity, but that has never happened, and in every case I’ve been sucked into the new story quite as compellingly as if I weren’t out to read everything by the author. Formally, the books are hugely different. None of the others, for example, has Hide and Seek‘s twenty-year narrative caesura; nor does any of the other books (that I’ve read) focus so intently upon a single attachment, which could be called the love story of Harriet and Vesey if that were not exactly what Hide and Seek Isn’t. The first half of the book takes place in the late Twenties; Harriet and Vesey have only just ceased to be children. Neither knows how to behave with the other. Harriet is painfully shy, and not only that: love seems to cause her real pain (which doesn’t make it any less desirable). Not the kind of agony that Derek Parfitt uses as the test for his propositions, assuming that we would do anything to avoid it and, if we were good, anything to spare others its misery, but pain nonetheless; you wouldn’t know to look at her that she’s in love. And Vesey is an impertinent, insistent autodidact, determined to learn nothing from anyone. The last days of their last childish summer together come to a Tennysonian sunset, and, after a spell of working in a dress shop, Harriet marries somebody else, a solicitor of substance whose mother used to be a star of the West End.

Then comes the break, and everything has changed when Vesey and Harriet meet at a dance as adults. For one thing, they know how to express the fact that they were in love and have never stopped loving the other — and they do so without talking. Tables have turned: Harriet is a proper provincial matron (High Wycombe?), while Vesey is an itinerant supporting actor (he plays Laertes when Hamlet comes to town). You wouldn’t think it possible, but the novel takes a turn towards Verdi territory when Harriet’s husband, Charles, decides not only to be jealous but to throw scenes. (“No woman,” Harriet reflects, “could have bided her time, as he had.”) There’s a sensational ensemble number with Charles and his dodgy law partner and the law partner’s dodgy wife (who thought that the “worse” in “for better or worse” would be her husband, nothing additional) standing about like aristocrats in Don Carlo or Otello, while Harriet drops a crystal glass, kneels to gather the fragments, cuts her self, and is swiftly joined by Vesey, who wraps her bleeing wound in a handkerchief, oblivious of the others. It’s the most exuberantly thrilling scene that I’ve ever read in any novel — any novel that wasn’t supposed to be thrilling, that is. You can’t believe that it’s happening in an English drawing room round about the time I was born.

Taylor follows this with the most extraordinary leap. Skipping over the lovers as if they weren’t there, she writes about Charles’ invigoration: having a grievance against his wife puts a spring in his step.

His attitude toward his mother was part of the change. Now he talked of her a great deal — as she had been as an actress, and strove to remember some of those successes which at the time he had resented. He seemed all of a sudden to know a great deal about the stage without everr having gone much to the theatre. A photograph of Julia as Cleopatra, with hair low on her brow, looped and strung about with pearls and looking bad-tempered, was discovered among some old letters and left propped on his desk. He often spoke of her precarious and arduous life, although she had been, as he said, at the very top of her profession.

Julia herself, the old ageing vamp, finds “a new lease on life” in her turn, as the direct result of Charles’s new affection. So does that of the granddaughter who takes after her, despite her fanciful dream that Vesey, and not Charles, is her father. (The truth is betrayed by an unconscious gesture right out of Julia’s playbook.) Only gradually do we come back to Harriet, or rather to what is now her Big Problem: how to remain respectable whilst being in love with another man. (And she is no longer pained by Vesey; he makes her happy now, as nothing else does.) I won’t go into any of this, except to say that Taylor assumes that the reader has read a few other novels and perhaps even seen a few movies (including one that rouses Julia’s indignation, involving “a middle-aged couple in raincoats, and it all took place on a railway-station”) and, in short, manages to convey Harriet’s first-time, I’ve-never-done-this-before panic without trying your patience. The end is quick and fine.

***

Now I’d better get Nescio under my belt, hadn’t I.

Where did April go?

I was about to go to the movies just now, but I’d have been a bit early, so I sat down and here I am. I’m going to see The Five-Year Engagement, largely because I adore Emily Blunt. She is always winsome — even in The Devil Wears Prada, there are moments of extreme winsomeness. What will become of this quality when the actress outgrows it? Or will she? Winsomeness is a special kind of dreamy hope about the future that makes young women beautiful and men of any age rather fatuous, unless they’re extremely frail-looking and marked for early death. (Who is marked for early death anymore? Tant pis pour la poésie.) Jason Segel, Ms NOLA told me, was asked to lose thirty pounds of avoirdupois for this movie. Which means that he may actually have a figure. His appearance in Jeff, Who Lives At Home was just this side of animated, and I don’t mean lively. I should note that I made up my mind to see the film on the strength of A O Scott’s really rather warm review in today’s Times.

Okay, now I can go.

***

The Five-Year Engagement is so good that I am STILL CRYING. All right, only when I think about it. But when I think about it, the waterworks start pumping! This wouldn’t be the case if the movie hadn’t ended happily, with possibly the ideal wedding, all things considered. (And all things were considered, which was the problem to begin with.)

The immediately foregoing is, I realize, evidence of my insuperable difficulties with Twitter. If I can’t have roughly 350 characters in which to say something, I won’t say anything.

***

Oh, the plans. I wanted to write about principles, as distinct from habits, and much less useful. I seem to have engaged in a project of discrediting the non-aesthetic legacy of the classical world, by which I mean, primarily, philosophy, a realm of thought that I don’t expect to survive the Cognitive Revolution. I believe that “acting on principle” is almost invariably childish; the phrase itself means nothing if it doesn’t mean acting against instinct and intuition. This isn’t to say that the objects of principles are unimportant, but rather to say that, if you’re refraining from murder as a matter of principle, then I hope that we’re not friends. I understand that principles help us to see over our immediate desires and short-sighted objectives. But they just as often make us do pigheaded things (the entire brain-dead scheme of “zero tolerance” comes to mind, as does “three strikes and you’re out”), and we ought to be able to be good without their aid. That would be adult.

Aristotle was right about habits, though; they’re tremendously important. When I was young, I thought that habitual acts were inauthentic. So I stopped saying “thank you.” We all go through such a phase; if we’re lucky, it lasts for only a few days. Flaubert had it right: you have to behave as regularly as possible so that your inner fire can burn as fiercely as possible. Without habits, we would live in chaos, and chaos is uninhabitable on the long term.

I also meant to deal with the refrigerator, but I couldn’t face it, so I spent the afternoon organizing my EMI CDs, of which there are of course many. The EMIs were the first discs to be “broken down” — the discs themselves inserted in labeled sleeves and tucked alongside their paperwork (booklets, back matter), and the jewel boxes thrown away — and I didn’t have a system for organizing the results; in fact, I hadn’t grasped the importance of the “tucked alongside” part. So two hours were devoted to re-uniting discs and booklets. It was just the kind of busy work I needed this afternoon, and I enjoyed listening to the Karajan Ring while I plowed through it.

You really really really couldn’t pay me to see the Ring at the Metropolitan Opera, something that a number of friends are doing this weekend and into next week. I love Wagner far too much to put up with Robert Lepage’s planks. The ideas people have!

Monday

Where to begin — that’s not the question. Where to end is the question. The weekend is technically over, but it left behind a bit of baggage that I’d like to dispose of before getting on with the week. I feel rather bad about not spending any time here. I was detained by a full array of excuses, ranging from hyper-efficient busyness on the housekeeping front to a sidewinding hangover that was stamped by the image, drawn from Friday’s movie (The Five-Year Engagement), of Jason Segel stumbling through a snowy woods, wearing socks, a muffler, a jacket, and a cap, and nothing else.

It was a different sort of hangover. It struck very early in the morning, at about five. I didn’t wake up still a little bit drunk (oh, that wasn’t so bad). I was gripped, at the metabolic level, by an existential anguish so intense that I had to get out of bed. I had a terrible headache, yes, and I felt vaguely poisoned throughout, yes; but I was wretchedly disappointed with myself. What had I been thinking, going out with a large group of men to dinner at the Knickerbocker. The situation ensured that all my manic buttons would be pushed at once, transforming me into a master bon viveur. And that, just as suddenly, the effect would be undone, and I would be sprawled in a gutter of senectitudinal shame. It had been so long since my last misbehavior that I’d quite forgotten how it might all work out. By the same token, it had been so long since that last time that it never occurred to me, even in my wildest exilharation, to drink anything stronger than sauvignon blanc. I drank a lot of wine. Then I got into a taxi and came home and went to bed. There was no public disgrace, no nakedness in the woods, no amputation of toes, no breaking-up of longstanding engagements. There was none of that. This hangover was confined entirely within my body.

For relief, I turned to Bruce Donaldson’s Colloquial Dutch (Routledge). In my chair by the window, I deployed the familiar but never-mastered points of Nederlands grammar in a scheme to jam the outgoing messages of bleak despair. It was imperative, it seemed, that I learn how to speak Dutch immediately. For I was going to Amsterdam after all. That had been settled the previous morning, after Kathleen, having read some fine print somewhere, conducted a ninety-minute transaction with a bookings agent and secured comfortable transatlantic passage for me (and for herself as well) on a flight leaving Newark for Heathrow (the coach ride from there to Schiphol was never a problem) in two weeks.

As the clerk in the electronics shop where I was buying a small radio said when I told him that I was trying to learn his language said: Why? With whom am I actually going to speak in the local language? And how far is this conversation going to proceed before it breaks down? Colloquial Dutch is about as well put-together a language course as you will find in one volume (Teach Yourself Dutch is also very good), but, perhaps because it’s designed for people who are actually going to live in the country for a while, its narrative premise, its cast of characters and representative dialogues, is that of family life. Piet and Pauline (she’s English) have two children, Marius and Charlotte. Marius is said to be seven years old (he celebrates a birthday — hij is jarig), but he behaves like a death star of adolescent self-absorption. His parents seem to get on one anothers’ nerves. It’s all usefully realistic — if you’re going to be living in a Nederlander household for a while. It really doesn’t sample the kind of things that I’d be likely to say.

Which would be?

On our way home, we’ll stop in London for a few days, so that Kathleen can check up on some clients. What will I say in London that requires advanced language training? To whom will I reveal my mastery of subordinate clauses? Come to think of it, when do such interactions occur here in New York? They don’t.

The hotel that we’ll be staying at is in De Pijp, a neighborhood southeast of the Museum Quarter, on the Jozef Israelskade. I believe that, in order to walk to the Spui (where the bookstores are), all I have to do is turn right at the hotel door, turn right again into Ferdinand Bolstraat, and keep walking (and walking), crossing the Singelgracht and proceeding to the Munt, where I’ll turn left along the Singel. I doubt that I’ll need to ask anyone for directions. The Rijksmuseum is almost on the way. All this I can see from Google Maps — what I didn’t already know, that is, from my last visit, when we stayed about a block away from the museum. If I feel very brave, I will ask for a taxi at the hotel and go to the Central Station, where I’ll catch a train for The Hague, where I can see Vermeer’s View of Delft and, of course, The Girl With the Pearl Earring. (Talk is cheap.)

I’ll certainly understand television broadcasts better than I did the last time, and I’ll be able to read more signs. But in Amsterdam, at least, it is not hard to find someone who speaks English. And in any case Bruce Donaldson’s exercises distracted me from the pain of detox until I was able to fall back into bed for a snooze. A late brunch with a law school classmate who’s in town for the Ring cycle was pleasant (Sancerre), but I took things very easy, ordering Chinese on the very early side and turning in not much later.

***

I hope to see The Five-Year Engagement again soon. I want to take Kathleen to see it, but, between our Amsterdam trip and an intervening visit to her father in North Carolina, Kathleen isn’t going to have a lot of free time in the next two weeks. Engagement is a wonderful picture, studded with beautifully-timed quirks and brought to life by a top-notch cast. Judd Apatow is going to wind up with his own studio one of these days. I jest, perhaps, but I do seriously begin to see parallels with a hiterto nonpareil: Preston Sturges. Qua moviemakers, that is; their movies themselves are not at all alike, beyond being funny. If I get hit by a bus before I have a chance to talk about The Five-Year Engagement at greater length, at least I’ll have noted the brilliant riff of taking Elmo and the Cookie Monster hostage as a way of “speaking French” in front of children.